From a reader's desk

For a couple of months I had been struggling with this habit of piling up my monthly magazines at the corner of my table, thinking that I will read them some day at leisure. The only thing that happened was that the pile kept getting larger. My problem was that I would be engrossed with a book and would focus all my time and energies to finish it. Now, as I could not take the growing pile anymore, I finally resolved to suspend all other reading till I finished all the magazines for the month. So this time, I read my Runner's World from cover to cover and it makes me happy.

What I realize is that reading should be like a balanced diet. I have been stuck with fiction all along and it's time to add other stuff, current, happening and non fiction. But of course, I still have an eye on all my favorites out there.

That's clumsy me!

So what I did today that calls for this? I crashed one of my sample chips with the AFM tip and it looks awful under the microscope. This was not that bad, as I thought that I probably crushed the tip mount itself as I heard a distinct screeching sound. The good thing is that now since I have the bad sample chip I can ill-treat it as much as I want and try all different stuff!

These days I am sort of stuck with my work, like a phase where you are starting something new and its takes extra effort to get things into the inertia of motion. Well the good thing about this phase is that you get to meet a lot of new people and discuss issues with them while the bad thing is that it can get pretty boring and dull. Hopefully this phase won't last long and while it does, I will try and get the most out of it.

Jack of all trades?

As my advisor often tells me and I too believe that these days an engineer cannot be confined to his/her own "field of interest". An electrical engineer can't just be that and neither can a mechanical engineer be all about mechanics. The boundaries between electrical mechanical and computer engineering are totally blurred and now into this field are also merging biology and chemistry. So far being happily bonded to electrical engineering I gradually found a direction into MEMS for my PhD thesis topic which also involves a bit of biology and fundamentals from Physics. Things which I can recall having done in high school but no more recalling what they were.

This semester when I enrolled for the Biomacro molecular machines class I wasn't quite sure what it's gonna be like but I was excited but at the same time intimidated by it. First few lectures, I thought I am just gonna drop the class. Then I told myself "Come on, it's Science and nothing else and you are an engineer. You can do it". Result, I stuck to it and now things have started seeping in bit by bit. I am learning about DNA structure, sequencing and reactions. It's all science and its interesting :)

Also courtesy you tube I found some nice animation video's which make the stuff for learners like me easier. Here is another useful website that a classmate forwarded to me

http://www.dnalc.org/ddnalc/resources/animations.html

You may visit it to get some insight about DNA!

Let's talk work

For a long time I wanted to start my workspace out here where I could document facts, information, links, articles and sometimes cribbing related to my work. While reading references and then references to those references I forget from where I actually started, so may be this blog will help be find my way when I would wonder haywire and will find a need to look back. I would appreciate comments, suggestions and links directed to blogs and sites with similar aim.

I am pursuing my PhD in electrical engineering and these days working on simulating and characterizing nanowires, to be more specific, ZnO nanowires. Why ZnO? Because ZnO is a piezoelectric material and if I can use the piezoelectric property of ZnO at nanoscale and apply it for a bio sensor, I might be able to get very good sensitivity.