Melopia Rss Feed

O tempus, O homines! Oh, the happy summer break is coming to an end, tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, I’ll go back to the university for registration.

The blog has been left out here for almost 2 months, there were many times that i wanted to write, but the laziness won at last. But now, no more time for lying in bed or watching Prison Break all afternoon, it’s time to get busy again. Before that, I want to sum-up my summer break.

Well, firstly, I was very happy and lucky to know this italian girl on msn right before the holiday. Aja, non parla bene l’inglese, ma si capiamo benissimo. After chatting every evening and telling each other everything, we become best friends now… and it’s so good to have a great friend like her. Grazie ~~, Lei la luna dentro me~~ , aja. She’s going to study Japanese in Rome soon, so I wish her best luck. Fortuna ottima! prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr~

And then…, in the middle of August, I went to the Jiangxi Province with my teacher and another 3 birders for a bird survey in Sanqing Moutain. I’ve learnt so much from them, and found myself to be very ignorant, ajajajaja. Nevertheless, I’ve seen many new personal bird species during the trip, for example, Passer rutilans, Merops viridis and the very cute White-legged Pigmy-Falcon!!! Happy trip!! Oh, check out the photos on my flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/melop.

And then…, birder Agava brought me and Nick for a birding in Guangzhou on 25 Aug. Though we didn’t have much luck for the day that we just saw about 15 spp., we had a great time together, so…, not bad.

Then what…, then…, oh, I went out with my high school friend Sarah to buy plants. Ohhhh, it was my fault, I coundn’t resist the temptation of those cute fishes and bought 20 of them. When I came home, most of them were dead. Bad memory for that day.

We had a high school class reunion in late August, it was happy to see the old faces. It impressed me so much that a guy, who used to be cynical and bolshy, called his mum to tell that he would come home later! I could hardly believe that he has grown up, maybe all of us have, just we didn’t notice. O tempus, O homines!

And then…, for the goby project, it sucks. Helen Larson examined our misterious “Gobiopsis” and decided that it should be Tridentiger barbatus. My project partner was upset, but she refused to accept it before a further examination by ourselves. So, I’ll see…

So…, oh oh, my cousin is going to university this semester, her major is chinese medicine, wowo, interesting subject. Also wish her the best of luck!!

What else…, can’t come up with any more at the moment, before I go to registration, let me watch another episode of Prison Break. Dunno why I like singing now…

ylala ylala ylala, che bella gente capisce tutto~~~

Technorati Tags: bird, Birding, Chinese, study, summary

Today, on 17th July 2006, the Swedish ship Gotheborg III arrived at its destination Canton of China, following the same route of its ancester, and carrying the dreams and friendship of the people of both countries. As a Cantonese, I feel so happy and glad, and want to express my warmest welcome to the people of sweden.

I saw the live broadcasting on tv this morning, showing the ship travelled through her last mile to the Nansha port of Guangzhou. The ship , a true beauty, with the old fashioned look and 3 huge masts pointing at the blue sky above the pearl river, just like traveling through the time machine from 260 years ago, sails back to her ultimate dock.

I’ll go to visit her with my friends, haha, and take a lot of pictures of her!!

Technorati Tags: Cantonese, friend, Gotheborg, travel, visit

It’s been 2 years since I came to the Zhuhai campus, how time flies! And now, I must say good bye to the dormitory I’ve stayed for 2 years, and everything that’s familiar…

I could remember the first day so well, my parents helped me dragged my luggages into the room, it was empty, nothing was there. I was so unaddapted to the new environment. New people, new room, new buildings, new playground, everything was new. Not long after we moved in, a pair of sparrows (Passer montanus) made a nest and rear their youngs in front of our door. In the past two years, I guess they already have 16 kids. lol. And lately, their family come to my room often, they’re so cute!! Can’t forget them!

There’re so many memories there, the laboratory we worked in, the classrooms we “slept in”, and the roads we walked, the plants we seen. I just can’t forget them…

I will miss this beautiful place so much!!

Oh, and when I got home, I found my Dell Dimension 500m stop working, harddisk problem I guess. X(

Technorati Tags: leaving, Zhuhai

I’ve been always interested in evolutional and phynogenic studies, I read some ABCs before I went to bed on that last night, and woke up this morning thinking, “why not try it out myself”?

Well, you know, a cladogram is something you see on a biology text book that shows how human evolves from ancient apes, and how we’re related to modern ones. Watching a well and carefully constructed cladogram is a great pleasure, because it reveals the evolutionary events happend millions of years ago. However, constructing it is another story, it appears to be very simple and actually the basic principle is simple. But there’re still many problem to be solved before we can make a reasonable tree, and conclude something base on it. The biggest headache may be choosing the gene. Luckily, many scientists have done lots of experiments to prove that using mitochonrion genes for phylogenetic purpose usually works because they change fast enough to see the difference between species from a genus, and conserved enough to see their common ancester. Plus it is mainly materinherited.

Forget about the aboves, I just wanna try out some softwares that I may be using in the future. So, I visited GenBank, and fetched some published mtDNA sequences. The gene I chose was the one encodes cytochrome b, it’s totally random, I don’t know which to use actually. I collected sequence information for 10 species, 9 of which are gobies(Gobiidae) and one Perciform Aspasma minima was chosen as outgroup. Again, I don’t have tons of theory to choose this one, I just want to see how things would turn out.

Next, I need a program to align the sequences and compute the tree. After trying out some of the many, I find phyloWIN easy to use and also powerful. The data file is attached in this blog, you can download it here. With just several clicks, a tree is drawn. The result turns out satisfying, which reflects the some main groups in Gobiidae.

Technorati Tags: genbank, Goby, phylogeny

Came across this blog about this Latin song, the Chinese lyric seemed not right, so I did it myself. Full of mistakes I guess:

The song can be downloaded here.

Technorati Tags: Chinese, Latin, lyric, translate

Today I received the invitation code from Google Analytics, and have it set up for Melopia. Before google analytics I had used the Weblog Expert to analyze the weblog of Melopia. It has been working very well, until I came back to campus, and dissapointedly found that the ftp could not be accessed from our network( blaming the network center), thus I stuck there for some time until I found Web2ftp, a web-based tool that let poor users like me to logon to their ftp from intranet.

Though the download speed is extremely slow using web2ftp, but it’s better than nothing, so I just let it be. And it’s always a joy to see visitors from all over the world, though there’re only less than 15 visitors per day on average. And Phonetica Latinae seems to attract most audiences. Unfortunately, our network seems to have more serious problems lately and I can’t even open web2ftp!

It’s often said that “A door is closed, a window is opened”. That is, google analytics save the day. with some simple steps, including placing a small piece of code before </body> tag, I had no problem during installation. Hopefully I can see some statistics tomorrow.

Another interesting analysing code I placed in Melopia is the visitor map service provided by clustrmaps.com, in the map we can see where are visitors from.

At last, I know, no matter what method or service I use to analyze the visitor data cannot change the interestingness(word created by flickr) of Melopia. Only more useful contents can increase my visitors.

Technorati Tags: google analytics, Web