the world of cutting edge research is not pretty... some of the research that i do can be crude, and more often than not, seems hopeless. the technology that emerges from our lab will one day change the face of how we do clinical diagnostics and experimental research; there's no doubt about that. but man, i swear, sometimes i think we're in over our heads, as i look down at this crudely constructed box which runs our microfluidic devices, and an even cruder setup, with flammable materials and liquids oozing out from the sides. but hey! you got to start somewhere... i guess.
take the first transistor for example. right now, there are literally hundreds of millions of these things crammed into the size no larger than a quarter running that thing you call a computer. i'm sure this was seemingly unfathomable to the minds of bardeen, brattain, and the beloved shockley when they flipped on the power to see the first solid state switch. while our goals aren't so far away, the task seems just as daunting.
as i prepare for my move to korea, i've been working my ass off to jumpstart the user interface with our chips. in other words, programming. but you see, what nobody realises is that i'm not a programmer! i just happened to pick it up out of necessity, because i couldn't stand our DOS-based programs which, as much as i love old-school, was impractical. so now i've somehow managed to move everything to the lovely microsoft mfc's (mfc = makes things pretty). after that critical move, i've been dubbed our software programmer (among other things), which, in my book, is like a death sentence (at least for the social agenda). if you thought being an engineer was bad, try being an engineer AND a programmer. ugh!
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