Lab work is eating my soul. I miss free time.

Yesterday I partially gold plated a paperclip (by accident ( Read more... )

First and foremost, Stef had her phone interview w/ Mori No Ike (the Japanese equivalent to that French camp I worked at a few summers ago), and was hired.

Secondly, according to the satellite-watchers, the gov't will be shooting down that malfunctioning satellite at about 10:30pm EST on Thursday The forecast says snow that night though, damn it ( Read more... )

I got a grand total of one and a half hours last night; I had to pretty much spend the night in the lab. It sucked ( Read more... )

I'm currently in the cleanroom babysitting something called an "e-beam evaporator" while it takes an obscenely long time to get ready. I'm killing the time by playing on the internet and reading various news sites, like the New York Times ( Read more... )

On Thursday I have to give a presentation on micropumps (which is exactly what it sounds like). We found a review article that gives a broad overview of the current state of the field. You'll have to buy the article or be on a university network to get the full text, but I thought I would reproduce this one paragraph:

... Flow rates were ( Read more... )

( Their categorizing decisions leave me scratching my head sometimes. )

Warning: extremely geeky, and not in an totemicdruid+Heroes way. My apologies in advance ( Read more... )

I had a fun experience in the lab yesterday. I was cleaning samples with something called nanostrip in the fume hood, which is a mixture of sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide, and as I was putting samples into the acid, a single drop of acid fell from my tweezers onto the paper towel I had under it and burned a hole in the paper towel. Ain't ( Read more... )

At the gas station today I noticed something vaguely familiar about the music they were playing. I listened closer and it was a country cover of Buddy Holly's Everyday. Does anybody out there understand my pain ( Read more... )