Utterly pointless day. Meant to be doing a tech for another show which I'm helping out on, but found myself to be useless so went home and worked instead. Not before admiring the huge amount of smoke and slightly strange design the show's going to have.
On a theatrical-releated note, I've put up more pictures in the LSOH section. :-)
On a slightly less theatrical note, I got rid of a lot of random crap on this site which was either just out of date, or I was bored with. All of the tutorials have gone, as they weren't relevent to much, and I'm mainly just going to use this space for my perl support, blog and pictures :)
I'm in the chemistry library. Slightly bored. I've got 4 and a half hours to finish one practical write-up, do another, and finish some more work. Should be fairly easy. Head hurts.
I wasted 3 hours today. When I say "wasted", I don't mean I sat around and didn't do any work, I mean I did lots of unnecessary work.
Basically, I did a reaction in one of my practicals. Seeing as what usually happens is that two things are reacted together, to give a product. However, there's always some of one starting material left over in the final stuff as well, seeing as one of them was bound to be in excess at the start. So I looked up what I did to find out which would be in excess, and then ran my product against that starting material (benzophenone if anyone's interested) on a TLC (don't ask) to see exactly where it came. Sure enough I got a blob in my product which matched the starting material blob, and then another blob which I assumed to be the product.
I then spent three hours doing a flash column (it's long and tedious) in order to separate these two blobs out from each other. After collecting what I thought was entirely pure product, I ran various spectra on it only to discover that it wasn't product at all, and just the other starting material (Ethyl acetoacetate). Basically, the reaction hadn't worked, and I just had both starting materials there.
I was distinctly pissed off at this point, not only because I had just wasted three hours, but also because today was the last lab day, and the only thing I can put in my write-up is how it didn't work.
Now that I've finished ranting on about that, I think it's also fair to exclaim that people in general are crap, and they're destroying my monopoly on being crap.
Just spent 2 and a half hours sat in the chemistry department whilst some complete idiot spent at least 30 mins per person doing practical marking. Fortunately I was 4th in a queue that was 24 people long, but despite marking beginning at 2pm, I didn't get finished until 4. That's 4 people in 2 hours, with another 20 to go in the remaining hour, on the last day of marking. Anyway, not only was the marker an idiot, he gave me a crap mark because one of my starting materials was dodgy and he didn't understand one of the spectra.
And people ask me why I'm losing complete faith in the department.
To be fair, not a lot has gone wrong. We were fine right up until check-in, when we were told we had missed the flight. After pointing out that the flight didn't leave for an hour and a half, they decided that it might have been a mistake on their part. Then, after the joys of having my bag searched and some scissors confiscated (which I never even knew existed), we landed in a slightly damp and noisy Dublin.
Picking the weekend before St. Patrick's Day to go to Dublin was possibly not a smart move, as finding somewhere to nosh and have a "quiet" drink was an almost impossible task. That said, things have been distinctly quieter, if wetter, today.
Odd place. Like England with different money and a strange language. Hmmmmm.......
Home now. Well, as close as "home" ever gets. Photos will be up soonish, there's some I like. Turns out going to Dublin was one of those things I can class as a "good idea".:)
Today I woke up at 8:15. I then put on a suit and went to see the bank manager.Walked away at 10:10 having secured (with the help of my "business associate") £10,000 at only 3% for the company I'm setting up. I'm still mildly shocked that the manager thought our idea was a good one, and was quite happy to give us what we needed.Not a bad day as things go.