Writer's Block...

            I’ve been suffering from pretty intense writer’s block for the last few days and as such I haven’t posted anything. Apologies for that, but life has been pretty hectic. I had a meeting with my two supervisors last week and was informed I am not a complete idiot, which was nice. My ideas were deemed to not be ridiculous and I was provided with a nice long list of others to be getting on with as well. While this is excellent for the project, it has meant a few long days in the lab since and will probably mean a day (albeit a leisurely one) in the lab on Saturday. Oh well, such is life.

            We’ve had a couple of entertaining moments recently in the lab. One fantastic long-term error came to light recently when a colleague informed us all she had been using the wrong starting material for one of her projects for the last three months. I can only say I wish I was there when she told my boss. It would have been a sight to behold for sure. The other mistake concerned our nice new lab microwave. It’s a pretty fancy piece of kit and is more intelligent than our somewhat antiquated NMR’s (although this is soon to change as we’ve just had a spanking new Bruker installed) and is definitely more intelligent than some of the undergrad project students I’ve come across. It will tell you if you’re about to do something wrong but one thing it will not do is notice if you don’t put enough solvent in the tubes that it uses. This was discovered by a guy in my lab who didn’t quite reach the minimum fill level line on his tube. The result is shown below:

The tubes are made of transparent glass and the starting material was colourless. Oh dear. Anyway, one new part and the microwave was back to work within the week. Turns out it's pretty robust as well as intelligent. Anyway, more from me later in the week hopefully. Ciao for now.