equipment is supposed to be fun...
So, last week I was sent on a mission to calibrate one of the conductivity meters. We need to make sure they work before going off to do field work at Lake Lacawac next week. This led to a several day process that involved making up salt solutions (Yay having to remember basic chemistry in a hurry!), known molar standards, and calibrating basically every conductivity meter in the lab. As of Friday afternoon we are now 1 for 5.
Though, 4 technically doesn't count as it's a cheepy lab conductivity meter and would never work for dragging across a lake bottom. However, we learned it needs calibration as it wouldn't zero back to 0. It read deionized water at 0.8 after being thoroughly cleaned and deionized. As for the rest. 2 (the one with a 50 foot cord) is dead. This is no surprise though as it's been in Laura's basement for at least the last 5 years. It's also a first generation from that company and so isn't terribly hearty. Basically the logging device is a couple of wires and an exposed computer circuit in a plastic tub. The newer ones have at least a second water proof casing for the circuitry.
3 is functional but reads on a scale much higher than we need. And since we are on the edge of it's detection limit it doesn't reliably pick up the ion count. At such low levels the meter doesn't log on a linear scale like it should. It's range is from 0 to 5000 and we are looking at no more than 100. (uS that is...). As Dr. Wu always said "Don't kill chicken with machine gun!". (which reminds me how not excited he was to see me when I went to visit him last semester. Most profs were like Yay or hey didn't you graduate yet? He was like Why you here? You not in my class! Such as strange man....but then to be 6 5 and chineese must be odd) 5 works. wonderfully in fact, though it doesn't record continuously. Oddly enough it's the first logger she ever bought and is at least 10 years old.
1 of course is the $2000 high end unit and it's the one that's busted. Well, it reads but after letting it sit in a stable jar of tap water all night in a room where the barometric pressure and temperature changes aren't radical; it produced a very spiky graph. In fact it did this 3 days in a row in first tap water, than a known molar concentration of KCl and then in a jar of very salty salt water. Several tests later with several more concentrations and we learned that it doesn't record linearly at the moment, and the temperature gauge isn't consistent. To calibrate it, it needs to be between 20 and 30º C. It kept reading the room temperature water at 34. So we stuck the jar in the fridge and measured it with a thermometer. The thermometer read about 17. The meter read about 27. The next day the difference was down to about 5 degrees but that's still pritty bad. Especially as Laura claims temp gauges aren't high tech and basically never go bad.
So, after this She called up the company. Now she had had trouble with the meter before and had to ship it back ( the company is German which made that process just so much more fun. International post isn't bad unless it's scientific equipment). At first she got several not helpful people on the phone but eventually moved up to someone who was knowledgeable. The guy found that they had a record of selling the thing to her but no records of actually producing that model. And in fact, no record of having sold any more of them. So, we are looking at the only one of it's kind - probably a custom job that someone didn't want that she just happened to buy - and it doesn't work quite right. The current suggestion has been to soak it in acid to see if this won't get any potential gunk off the electrodes. We left it for the weekend and I will probably be soaking it on thursday. whoohoo fun.
Otherwise... this week seems to be gearing up to the same kinds of fun.
Today Laura had G show her, Cat, and I how to use the new Dionex. It's a really cool piece of equipment that analyzes for ion type and concentration. Don't ask me how it actually works or what it actually does in detail as I haven't the foggiest. When I asked, both profs just sort of ducked the question. At some point I will attempt to look up how it works.
G never holds meetings on time, though, so we didn't get started for a good hour which was both good and bad. basically we had to track him down and chase him away from people he kept getting distracted by. I actually left late and so rushed in to get there by 930. We didn't leave to go meet him until 945 as Laura kept forgetting things. And then once we got up there found that he was entrenched into a meeting. So we told him to come find us. Laura and Cat took off for the 2nd floor and I went to go talk to Shela. After 10 minutes I went back down. Laura then went to go find him and reported back that he was now talking to a new group. So after another 10 minutes or so we went up and found him.
He sort of showed us - in a non informative kind of way, how to operate the machinery and we set it up to run 9 of Cat's samples. Basically there was a lot of well you open it, and click here and so yeah...kind of instructions. Things went well until we hit the start button. Then it didn't want to analyze the first the standard. You load in 3 standard solutions, a chaser of distilled water to clean out the tubing and then the samples. it sucked up the first standard but didn't mange to process it. The characteristic spike wasn't there. So G became perplexed and stayed to figure it out. He eventually figured out that we had a button pressed that shouldn't have been about 2 hours later and so I had to set up the first 2 samples again as the abort button apparently doesn't work instantaneously as everyone expected. After hitting cancel it still ran through the 2 samples which is odd but whatever. I don't think I learned much other than how to load the samples and how to put in the sample ID. Nooooo idea why it works, what it does, how to keep it from going wrong, or what settings are the normal settings. I have a sinking feeling I might break it if I don't get more thurough instructions.
The last thing that didn't quite go right today was the acquisition of the GIS data for Mirror Lake and Lake Lacawac from Natasha. Laura has really wanted me to get this data so I can get used to what we have and work on a diagram or two she wants fixed. She liked several lake diagrams Matt had of which Natasha inherited the data but doesn't like the color scheme and wants me to tweak them. Which is fine but it's getting to the point where everything I need to do or use I have to go ask someone else for. Now this isn't bad or really anoying it just always feels like I'm a winey person who needs to ask for things. This isn't actually the case but I do an awful lot of going and getting or going and asking. We don't seem to be equipt with much of what I need to be doing. Which all plays apart into how I'm doing geophysics but not working with Nyquist. I've often wondered how he feels about this. He seems not to mind but I get hints that I am clearly not his student and as such I don't get the privaleges of his. This could be paranoia and nothing but I keep getting just the slightest feeling of a cold sholder. Not to say that he hasn't always been civil. But he is married to her, and I can't help but think that there's more to all this. Then again I've been feeling that way since I started really working with either of them. I do really expect the worse case senerio of the possible subtle undertones becomeing out in the open as blatant hostility. (Pesimistic I know but what can I say, I always see both sides including the ways that somthing could possibly go wrong. It makes watching tv and movies not so fun sometimes.)
Anyway... Laura is also highly paranoid that Natasha will leave never to pass on the data. Given that Natasha really doesn't like her I can see this possiblility (aka loathing). but then Natasha is more reasonable than this on most given occasions so I doubt it will happen. She's angry but not to the point of screwing over any unfortunate sole who ends up working with them.
So, Tasha was finally bugged into letting me play with the data even though she'd been in the process of organizing it all so that people can follow the rather random organization system. This is when we both learned that the main computer lab, graphics lab, and main computer in my office don't have updated cite licenses for GIS. We have the software, and are paying for the site licensing, it's just that noone's updated the computers to accept it yet. So Laura talked to Jim Ladd to see what he can do. In the mean time we learned that both of
Laura's laptops also don't have it. So...to work on any of this I have to use Natasha's personal computer. Which is ok, she doesn't mind but it is rather awkward. So that's what I might do tomorrow. Even though I have no interest in going in. I sort of feel guilty though and might just give in to Laura's arm twisting. She does the disapointed guilt trip really well....not that that's any thing new...
I swear the department is falling apart. This is not helped by the continued construction. They have now moved to the 4th floor and are working on the upper chem labs. This means that the fume hoods in the entire building don't function properly, that noise and rattling emanates the entire building such that one expects it to collapse, the elevator (which I don't use) is in constant peril of getting stuck (if you turn the key while it's in use it shuts down wherever it happens to be), and the main doors might get blocked off due to the use of a crane to lift big things in through a window they broke out onto the 4th floor. Also due to the fume hood fun there is a distinct smell of organicy fumes near some of the 2nd floor chem labs and the ones on the 1st floor incessantly beep due to the fail safe flickering in and out of failure. Most of this isn't continual but it does leave one with an unsettling feeling that impending doom isn't as far away as we'd like to think it is.
With any luck the 4th floor faculty are more organized and cleanly with their chemicals than G or Dr. Ulmer. Because if they have unknown chemicals in ancient filing cabinets there may be a good chance of impending disaster. I swear some of the stuff in G's office was not only 30 years old but the labels were so old you couldn't read them. And many filing cabinets full (of mostly rocks thank God) were moved out of Dr. Ulmer's office when he retired. I hate to think what's in Meyer's office. And I know G still has caustic stuff. He has a uranium ore rock in the corner on a plate. Its radio active. Not badly but enough that the gyger counter he held next to it and then over the plate started beeping. That and the geochem lab which I've spent more time in than I care to think about is the scariest room in the building. It makes the dangers of the microprobe, XRD, lasers used by the chemists, and rock lab look harmless. There are hundreds of bottles of stuff all over. Chemicals in cabinets, canisters of nitrogen, oxygen and such stuff. Beakers, flasks, stains, pipets, carts, boxes, and the like just pell mell. And this is where Holly has been working with the hydrofluoric acid. HF is one of the really strong ones. Such that the splashes that got on the glass of the fume hood have actually etched the hood. So yeah... you don't want to knock anything over or have open towed shoes.
That's about it for the news though Alena managed to smash her finger with a sledge hammer on monday in an attempt to break some of her rock samples. She managed to kill the nail, incur a nasty bruise, and ended up with at least 1 fracture and stitches. She seems to be taking it well. Though her advisor apparently thinks she's crazy (This is accident number 3-4 if I remember correctly. The last one she managed to slice her finger while cutting veggies. Which was traumatic as I was on the phone with her at the time. It wasn't bad but did bleed all over the place). I find it both disconserting and flattering that she called me over josh as he apparently wanted her to go to the hospital. Instead she just went to the health services to get an xray. I am starting to wonder though if she will make it back to Jersey in relatively 1 piece...
well, back to emailing/calling all the people that need to be contacted. I swear one of these days I'm not going to leave the staying in touch with people emails all till the same time....
Arg and I just got bit by a misquito inside....grrrrr...
Though, 4 technically doesn't count as it's a cheepy lab conductivity meter and would never work for dragging across a lake bottom. However, we learned it needs calibration as it wouldn't zero back to 0. It read deionized water at 0.8 after being thoroughly cleaned and deionized. As for the rest. 2 (the one with a 50 foot cord) is dead. This is no surprise though as it's been in Laura's basement for at least the last 5 years. It's also a first generation from that company and so isn't terribly hearty. Basically the logging device is a couple of wires and an exposed computer circuit in a plastic tub. The newer ones have at least a second water proof casing for the circuitry.
3 is functional but reads on a scale much higher than we need. And since we are on the edge of it's detection limit it doesn't reliably pick up the ion count. At such low levels the meter doesn't log on a linear scale like it should. It's range is from 0 to 5000 and we are looking at no more than 100. (uS that is...). As Dr. Wu always said "Don't kill chicken with machine gun!". (which reminds me how not excited he was to see me when I went to visit him last semester. Most profs were like Yay or hey didn't you graduate yet? He was like Why you here? You not in my class! Such as strange man....but then to be 6 5 and chineese must be odd) 5 works. wonderfully in fact, though it doesn't record continuously. Oddly enough it's the first logger she ever bought and is at least 10 years old.
1 of course is the $2000 high end unit and it's the one that's busted. Well, it reads but after letting it sit in a stable jar of tap water all night in a room where the barometric pressure and temperature changes aren't radical; it produced a very spiky graph. In fact it did this 3 days in a row in first tap water, than a known molar concentration of KCl and then in a jar of very salty salt water. Several tests later with several more concentrations and we learned that it doesn't record linearly at the moment, and the temperature gauge isn't consistent. To calibrate it, it needs to be between 20 and 30º C. It kept reading the room temperature water at 34. So we stuck the jar in the fridge and measured it with a thermometer. The thermometer read about 17. The meter read about 27. The next day the difference was down to about 5 degrees but that's still pritty bad. Especially as Laura claims temp gauges aren't high tech and basically never go bad.
So, after this She called up the company. Now she had had trouble with the meter before and had to ship it back ( the company is German which made that process just so much more fun. International post isn't bad unless it's scientific equipment). At first she got several not helpful people on the phone but eventually moved up to someone who was knowledgeable. The guy found that they had a record of selling the thing to her but no records of actually producing that model. And in fact, no record of having sold any more of them. So, we are looking at the only one of it's kind - probably a custom job that someone didn't want that she just happened to buy - and it doesn't work quite right. The current suggestion has been to soak it in acid to see if this won't get any potential gunk off the electrodes. We left it for the weekend and I will probably be soaking it on thursday. whoohoo fun.
Otherwise... this week seems to be gearing up to the same kinds of fun.
Today Laura had G show her, Cat, and I how to use the new Dionex. It's a really cool piece of equipment that analyzes for ion type and concentration. Don't ask me how it actually works or what it actually does in detail as I haven't the foggiest. When I asked, both profs just sort of ducked the question. At some point I will attempt to look up how it works.
G never holds meetings on time, though, so we didn't get started for a good hour which was both good and bad. basically we had to track him down and chase him away from people he kept getting distracted by. I actually left late and so rushed in to get there by 930. We didn't leave to go meet him until 945 as Laura kept forgetting things. And then once we got up there found that he was entrenched into a meeting. So we told him to come find us. Laura and Cat took off for the 2nd floor and I went to go talk to Shela. After 10 minutes I went back down. Laura then went to go find him and reported back that he was now talking to a new group. So after another 10 minutes or so we went up and found him.
He sort of showed us - in a non informative kind of way, how to operate the machinery and we set it up to run 9 of Cat's samples. Basically there was a lot of well you open it, and click here and so yeah...kind of instructions. Things went well until we hit the start button. Then it didn't want to analyze the first the standard. You load in 3 standard solutions, a chaser of distilled water to clean out the tubing and then the samples. it sucked up the first standard but didn't mange to process it. The characteristic spike wasn't there. So G became perplexed and stayed to figure it out. He eventually figured out that we had a button pressed that shouldn't have been about 2 hours later and so I had to set up the first 2 samples again as the abort button apparently doesn't work instantaneously as everyone expected. After hitting cancel it still ran through the 2 samples which is odd but whatever. I don't think I learned much other than how to load the samples and how to put in the sample ID. Nooooo idea why it works, what it does, how to keep it from going wrong, or what settings are the normal settings. I have a sinking feeling I might break it if I don't get more thurough instructions.
The last thing that didn't quite go right today was the acquisition of the GIS data for Mirror Lake and Lake Lacawac from Natasha. Laura has really wanted me to get this data so I can get used to what we have and work on a diagram or two she wants fixed. She liked several lake diagrams Matt had of which Natasha inherited the data but doesn't like the color scheme and wants me to tweak them. Which is fine but it's getting to the point where everything I need to do or use I have to go ask someone else for. Now this isn't bad or really anoying it just always feels like I'm a winey person who needs to ask for things. This isn't actually the case but I do an awful lot of going and getting or going and asking. We don't seem to be equipt with much of what I need to be doing. Which all plays apart into how I'm doing geophysics but not working with Nyquist. I've often wondered how he feels about this. He seems not to mind but I get hints that I am clearly not his student and as such I don't get the privaleges of his. This could be paranoia and nothing but I keep getting just the slightest feeling of a cold sholder. Not to say that he hasn't always been civil. But he is married to her, and I can't help but think that there's more to all this. Then again I've been feeling that way since I started really working with either of them. I do really expect the worse case senerio of the possible subtle undertones becomeing out in the open as blatant hostility. (Pesimistic I know but what can I say, I always see both sides including the ways that somthing could possibly go wrong. It makes watching tv and movies not so fun sometimes.)
Anyway... Laura is also highly paranoid that Natasha will leave never to pass on the data. Given that Natasha really doesn't like her I can see this possiblility (aka loathing). but then Natasha is more reasonable than this on most given occasions so I doubt it will happen. She's angry but not to the point of screwing over any unfortunate sole who ends up working with them.
So, Tasha was finally bugged into letting me play with the data even though she'd been in the process of organizing it all so that people can follow the rather random organization system. This is when we both learned that the main computer lab, graphics lab, and main computer in my office don't have updated cite licenses for GIS. We have the software, and are paying for the site licensing, it's just that noone's updated the computers to accept it yet. So Laura talked to Jim Ladd to see what he can do. In the mean time we learned that both of
Laura's laptops also don't have it. So...to work on any of this I have to use Natasha's personal computer. Which is ok, she doesn't mind but it is rather awkward. So that's what I might do tomorrow. Even though I have no interest in going in. I sort of feel guilty though and might just give in to Laura's arm twisting. She does the disapointed guilt trip really well....not that that's any thing new...
I swear the department is falling apart. This is not helped by the continued construction. They have now moved to the 4th floor and are working on the upper chem labs. This means that the fume hoods in the entire building don't function properly, that noise and rattling emanates the entire building such that one expects it to collapse, the elevator (which I don't use) is in constant peril of getting stuck (if you turn the key while it's in use it shuts down wherever it happens to be), and the main doors might get blocked off due to the use of a crane to lift big things in through a window they broke out onto the 4th floor. Also due to the fume hood fun there is a distinct smell of organicy fumes near some of the 2nd floor chem labs and the ones on the 1st floor incessantly beep due to the fail safe flickering in and out of failure. Most of this isn't continual but it does leave one with an unsettling feeling that impending doom isn't as far away as we'd like to think it is.
With any luck the 4th floor faculty are more organized and cleanly with their chemicals than G or Dr. Ulmer. Because if they have unknown chemicals in ancient filing cabinets there may be a good chance of impending disaster. I swear some of the stuff in G's office was not only 30 years old but the labels were so old you couldn't read them. And many filing cabinets full (of mostly rocks thank God) were moved out of Dr. Ulmer's office when he retired. I hate to think what's in Meyer's office. And I know G still has caustic stuff. He has a uranium ore rock in the corner on a plate. Its radio active. Not badly but enough that the gyger counter he held next to it and then over the plate started beeping. That and the geochem lab which I've spent more time in than I care to think about is the scariest room in the building. It makes the dangers of the microprobe, XRD, lasers used by the chemists, and rock lab look harmless. There are hundreds of bottles of stuff all over. Chemicals in cabinets, canisters of nitrogen, oxygen and such stuff. Beakers, flasks, stains, pipets, carts, boxes, and the like just pell mell. And this is where Holly has been working with the hydrofluoric acid. HF is one of the really strong ones. Such that the splashes that got on the glass of the fume hood have actually etched the hood. So yeah... you don't want to knock anything over or have open towed shoes.
That's about it for the news though Alena managed to smash her finger with a sledge hammer on monday in an attempt to break some of her rock samples. She managed to kill the nail, incur a nasty bruise, and ended up with at least 1 fracture and stitches. She seems to be taking it well. Though her advisor apparently thinks she's crazy (This is accident number 3-4 if I remember correctly. The last one she managed to slice her finger while cutting veggies. Which was traumatic as I was on the phone with her at the time. It wasn't bad but did bleed all over the place). I find it both disconserting and flattering that she called me over josh as he apparently wanted her to go to the hospital. Instead she just went to the health services to get an xray. I am starting to wonder though if she will make it back to Jersey in relatively 1 piece...
well, back to emailing/calling all the people that need to be contacted. I swear one of these days I'm not going to leave the staying in touch with people emails all till the same time....
Arg and I just got bit by a misquito inside....grrrrr...