Stupid gadgets

Spent most of the day in cafe and lab trying to get through the bundles of paper I have lying around, ranging from music theory to synthetic biology. I guess I'm teetering towards fulfilling my dream of becoming a renaissance man/mad scientist.
 
I tried to keep away from the web for better portion of the day, except for occasional tweeting. I wasn't alone the whole time though. I was with a chemist friend of mine who's also working on an artificial life related personal projects. So it was rather easy for me to stay away from the normal distractions. It's difficult to fool around when you're around someone in such a deep concentration, and I'm sure I had similar effect on my friend as well (besides we were constantly throwing ideas back and forth so there really wasn't much room for real distraction).
 
So I'm reading and typing away on my trusty thinkpad, when my friend pulls out a brand new macbook from backpack. Considering how much time and agony I've pulled myself through when choosing my new laptop (being a hopeless gadget geek that I am) I couldn't help but to admire the laptop. I've seen and touched it many times in the Apple store on broadway, but there's something about looking at it under the light of a new strange place. I've got to give it to Apple, for better or worse they really know how to design their products, so that anyone who sees them are overcome with sudden urge to get one for their own. It's not that I subscribe to minimalist design philosophy. It's only that someone put a lot of time and effort to designing that machine, and it shows. It's a mark of craftsmanship rarely seen in today's world of mass manufactured goods that surpasses simple division of style.
 
I don't know. I really think I will be getting a macbook once I am through with my current machine, though I'm half hoping that the legendary durability and reliability of thinkpads would kick in and the purchase would be put off for a long time.
 
I didn't spend the whole day admiring my friend's computer of course. I did get a lot of work done, both for school and personal projects. What riles me though, is how I can't seem to be able to come up with a decent project idea utilizing synthetic biology yet stays within the realm of possibility with the kind of limited equipments and resources at the group's disposal. I guess the first project would have to be a practice in introduction of foreign genes into a bacterial chassis for production of noble proteins. The problem is, what kind of genes to what kind of chassis? E.Coli chassis is easier to manipulate due to the characteristics of the prokaryotes host. Yet it's a nightmare to obtain due to lot of legal and financial hurdles. The yeast chassis would be easier to obtain but it would be complex to handle in the kind of garage biolab our hackerspace can provide. The genes themselves provide a nasty problem as well. Should we introduce prebuilt genes for established protein production network or should it be a synthesized gene designed and built from scratch? Or built from one of the many gene repo blueprints on the web? Doing something that's epigenetic in nature (morphology mutations etc) are completely out of the question at the moment.
 
I need to be able to come up with ingenius idea for creating something new, crazy, and possibly even useful using chassis and collection of plasmids, either prebuilt or synthesized... Perhaps something related to light sensitivity?
 
This is with me not even getting into how to figure out funding for such experiments. Sigh. The path to madscience is long and harsh.
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