Almost there...

So I'm finally done with my poster design... barring any mistakes or changes that my mentor wants... and pending changes from my dad and my sis (like i asked them to give comments on the color scheme and stuff, the science and the actual content they don't understand ><)
well my sis is way better than art then i am (actually, my dad too), so i asked her to give some comments on my poster yesterday... i was telling her that i tried to make my poster as less wordy as possible... but she was like 'huh? u call this not wordy?' gah! It can't be helped that the intro, methods, objectives, and conclusions all HAVE to be in words right? tch! Already i've put like huge pictures and graphs to make things as pleasing as possible - while still retaining its 'scientific-ness'...

I decided to do things differently this time round... following in part my experience at SSEF when i was in junior college. I cut out whole portions of the report from the poster, and didn’t present a lot of the obtained data. I don't want my poster to be a case of too cramped, too much info, and too confusing... i felt that last time i didn’t win at the SSEF cos apart from that fact that I'm not THAT good a presenter (I'm not the very lively, talkative kind), there was also too much info in the poster/report. If I'd cut out the last part of the results entirely and focused on something else instead, the results could have been very different. Regrets regrets sighz... you live and you learn... what else can we do?

So yeah, i cut out the entire lab work part (which wasn’t much to begin with anyway) and only focused on the bioinformatics. I also didn’t attempt to squeeze results for everything for both genes in... either or, not both of them. No tables of long lists of numbers either - i changed it into a graph instead. BLAH that stupid graph took me SOOOO LONG to get done! The new office layout was really confusing for me - cos the last time i work extensively with excel was... like... 5 years ago or something... using the older version of excel. (plus i wasn’t on mac yet). Than direct copying and pasting the graph to powerpoint didn’t work. I was really really pissed with MSoffice then... like WTF on earth are you doing! The graph copies over alright, but it changes the freaking style and everything that I'd painstakenly arranged in excel! and i can't change the style back in powerpoint! Then after googling i found out that i could use the paste special thing or some sort, but it only worked in another ppt doc, not the one with my poster... in the end i took the nice looking copy pasted in the other ppt, saved it as a picture, than imported the picture to my poster. zzzzzzz! so troublesome! The resolution should turn out alright... i hope ><

ah my mentor wanted pictures of bleached corals too... i took like over 5 hours to search for copyright free etcetc images that i can safely use on my poster... finally found several on flickr (i don't use flickr so it too me a while to remember which site it was that had the creative commons license thing, at 1st i went to gettyimages but like nothing is free?) and picked two out of the lot. Next problem was that i didn’t know what species of corals they were... searched around for a bit but only managed to identify one of the two... gave up in the end ><

and than there was the stupid guide tree. oh gosh how many DAYS have i spend on the phylogenetic trees in total? i really lost count! From that time when writing the report to now the poster...! At the beginning i skimmed around for something that can open/plot dnd files... didn’t find anything that worked, so i skimped on the work by screencapping from the clustalw2 website. Than my mentor suggested that we put in bootstrap values... (that was like, a few days before the report was due). So i started google to find out what ARE bootstrap values... (very last minute, i know). Turns out that i had to use clustalx to generate those so... thankfully i downloaded that a while back. So it took me a while to tinker around with that program... and hohoho! It generates the raw files, but you have to use something else to open the raw files. BRAVO! After a lot of fail attempts (some required you to compile the program yourself, but somehow when i try to compile the files it just WONT WORK!, others were like powerpc programs or something which apple withdrew support for in Lion...) i finally got njplot to work. BUT that stupid program could only generate trees that were A4 sized. So things ended up being really cramped...! I ended up having to draw a sub tree for one of my genes zzzzzzz. And that's the big problem too... for my poster i needed the tree to be more like in a landscape kind of orientation (otherwise no space!) which the program can't get me. I ended up resizing the window and screencapping AGAIN. But that's bad because you end up with the tree on a white background. I want the background to be transparent.... -.-''' So i took a million years with photoshop and stuff, in the end i had to trace out the tree in photoshop and type out all the species names separately in powerpoint.... sighz.

So yeah... hopefully everything is alright with the poster now!

Poster

Blah... it just started raining HEAVILY. like real heavily. i guess i'll go home late again today.

So next tuesdays n wedn is poster day... discussed with my mentor just now abt the poster and i have quite a bit of work to do. been spending the entire afternoon looking for a nice, copyright free (or watever u call it) pic of bleached corals to use in my poster. Found two nice pics to use in flickr... which I'm free to use as long as i credit the photogs.. hopefully i understood that creative commons thing right that is ><

blah........ that's how I'm feeling right now ><

 

Really the last last bit left of school to go… report was handed up already last week (after a long struggle) so all that's left is this poster thing.