Technophobia

As mentioned in passing before, I am now, along with the lovely Ed, loosely responsible for the CoMPLEX computer network. In particular, that means the machines and technology used by those cannon fodder systems biology lab rats, the MRes students. You remember them -- I was one myself this time last year.

On the one hand, this means I can look forward to a certain amount of income over and above my research council pocket money for these next few years, though hardly enough to live on. On the other, Gordon fucking Bennett but computer support is a pain in the arse. It is an absolute dead cert stone cold guarantee, for a tech monkey, that merely walking into the computer room will see you besieged by unsolvable requests about the imbecilities of Microsoft Office or somesuch soul-destroying awfulness, requests that will expand to fill all the time you allow.

Abandon your afternoon, at least.

That said, and notwithstanding the fantastic levels of frustration and annoyance that go with this territory like a horse with marriage, it is also quite nice to spend a few hours a week working in an area of relative competence rather than trying to nag away at the limits of a scientific discipline one grasps dimly at best. Computers may be wayward and infuriating and vexatiously non-deterministic, but all that is nothing compared to the vagaries of the scanning ion conductance microscope, or electrophysiology in general, or the whole fucking voodoo world of tissue culture. That stuff really is black magic.

Actually, the SICM/fluorescence/ephys is looking tentatively promising, although there are big question marks over the visualisation just now. Partly this is because phase contrast illumination is pretty much impossible with the paraphernalia of SICM squatting in the illumination pathway, partly it's because of the limited interoperability of high-magnification, high-NA, almost context-free, oil-immersion optical microscopy with the more straightforward, but much lower resolution, air objective version. We're still looking for a workable compromise for both these difficulties.

With all that laid out, it was entertaining, in a distressing way, when two of my supervisors spent the day experimenting with us (ie, my postdoc colleague Simon and myself) and the more senior came away disappointed because we couldn't reliably patch presynaptic boutons just yet. Excuse me? Reliably patch boutons? Hello? If we could do that, we wouldn't be keeping it some kind of secret, we'd be writing the fucking Nature papers already. This whole gruesome goatfuck of techniques is in its infancy. Maybe one day it'll be routinely magical, but give us a chance to get there, please.

In the meantime, the iPhone 2.0 software is so close you can almost smell it, and yet still -- despite leaks -- not quite practical to install. Just a few more hours, or at least so we hope...
Posted by matt at July 11, 2008 11:13 PM