Square Planar

Graduation

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 03:23:39 GMT

I graduated on the 6th of October 2009 with my PhD in Chemistry. It was a great day, bringing finality to the whole PhD experience, and what an experience it has been.

I finally got to wear the floppy hat! Here's a photo of me and my supervisor. Last time I wore the gold tie with the atoms on it to a Chemistry event I got told off because they are an outdated Bohrian representation...

Ok, so that's it! I am so pleased that I am not a student any more - in three days I will have been working for a year! Work, to me, is so much more fulfilling than study ever was. I love having a purpose and feeling like the chemistry I am doing, while much simpler and more established than my research was, is so much more practical and useful.

I have found that the skills that I developed during my PhD - mainly a broad-based knowledge of chemistry, techniques and knowing how to think abstractly to solve problems - are incredibly useful in my day-to-day working life. I intend to keep up the links with universities, I have a student now in the factory doing an energy and emissions audit, and I am planning on getting a summer student or a BE or BSc(Hons) student in to do some research on some neat little projects that I have around the factory.

So life goes on, and it keeps getting better. For those of you struggling through study - know that it can be done! All it takes is a whole lot of perseverance, faith, and the love and support of those around you. You will get there in the end - and one day you'll be proud of what you have accomplished. Never give up.

Atomsmith out.

Completion

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:28:58 GMT

I've been meaning to blog about this for ages, but for one reason or another I haven't found my way to LJ.

On Wednesday the 12th of August 2009 I finally submitted The Brick! I had to print and hard-bind five copies (2 for library, 1 for supervisor, 1 for me and 1 for Mum & Dad to be proud of) in the end. It was 501 pages long and done in full colour. The cost of printing was 25c per page but fortunately a few years ago the university changed its print quota system and (inadvertently) gave me $1000 of print credit. I had to leaf through every copy by hand to make sure all the pages were there and that I hadn't printed anything twice. It took bloody ages (about 5 hours) but it was a good thing that I did it because I found a few ink smears and some double-ups. It looks beautiful.

I got it all hard-bound, with my personal copy bound in leather . My supervisor has put a 2 year embargo on it, which means that the photo below is the closest anyone will get to it until August 2011! He thinks that there is a small, but very real chance that we will get some cool IP from some of my work which is absolutely fantastic. Now that I have finished up I am going to spend some time writing a paper for publication in an international journal about the macrocyclic work that I did.

With the exception of a photo from graduation (October 6th), I think that this probably brings this blog to its natural conclusion. Thanks for reading folks. There may be other words another day, but they will be on different topics. Just remember that good things take time, if you set your mind to it, nearly anything is possible and as Peter Blake said - "If it's not hard, it's not worth doing".

Finally, as I put in my acknowledgements page;

“To him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy – to the only God our Saviour be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.” – Jude 1 v 24-25 (NIV)

Dr Atomsmith out.

Is there a doctor in the house? Hell yeah.

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 07:00:36 GMT

I passed!

I have to admit that it was a pretty nerve-wracking experience, I was quite on edge the whole time. I got a few questions that I didn't know but on the whole it went well and the examiner was very complimentary about my work. There were a few flaws, mainly in regard to some of my crystal structures, but nothing that was deemed serious. I have a few corrections to make to the thesis and then I hand the final copy in at the end of the month.

There were four of us in the exam - the national examiner, my supervisor, a neutral observer and myself. The exam took three and a quarter hours, which was quite long (it was a very long thesis though!). About two and a half hours in my supervisor pointed out that we were only halfway through the thesis and that the examiner had a plane to catch, so could we please move it along. The international examiner sat on the thesis for six months, then had no questions so reading between the lines he probably didn't even bother to read it. Fine by me - less questions to answer. The New Zealand examiner was extremely thorough however, even going over my experimental data (tables of numbers) with a fine-tooth comb!

I have to say that I felt very sorry for the observer, she was from the medical school and so most of what we were talking about would have been totally incomprehensible to her. She did her best to not look bored out of her brain but I could tell that it was killing her! I think that she was mainly there to make sure that we didn't fight and that I didn't try to bribe the examiner or something.

So anyway I am putting in the corrections and then I'll find out if all my university print credit still exists or not. At $125 per copy I am hoping like crazy that it is still there...

Doctor Mike signing off.

D-day

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:54:10 GMT

This is it! After 6 months of deliberation my examiners have finally gotten back with their reports and today I have my oral exam. I have had three days off work to study, which has been really helpful. I have been over my thesis several times, trying to poke holes in it (and subsequently fill them with plausibility). I've prepared a short presentation to start the session and I think I deserve a medal for managing to condense seven years of research into a ten minute Powerpoint slide show.

The exam's at 1pm. I feel nervous, but confident at the same time. I can't wait for it to be over so I can call myself Doctor!

Great band names

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:14:42 GMT

Because I haven't posted in ages, and because I want to immortalise this list I post the following. One of the strange things that I did when I was young and stupid was collect random bits and pieces. In my first year of uni I kept all sorts of notes and other such rubbish and put them in a folder, which I rediscovered when we moved back to St Johns on the weekend (yes we moved from Howick after 5 weeks, good riddance). One of the things in the folder was a list of names of some bands entered in the 1996 High School Rock Quest that I found quite amusing.

Behold the creativity of youth;

The Angry Young Men
Like I Cared
Not Quite Naked
Ambitious Kung-Fu Guy
Burn Its Ass
Melvyn's Stoney Neighbours
Liquid Biscuit
Einstein's Illiterate Great-Grandchildren
Peasants With Pitchforks
Big Man With a Stick
D.V.8
Chimpus
Rapid Bowel Movement
The Son of Spank
Inbred
Soupstick
The Elephant's Nightmare

And my personal favourite - Harrison Ford and the Whistling Monkeys.

I reckon it'd almost be worth forming a band for the express purpose of giving it one of these names.

land of the rising sun

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:38:39 GMT

I find myself wondering whether my blogging days are drawing to a close. Since I have started work, the number of posts that I have written has dropped off a cliff. I guess that this is probably because work is such a major part of life, and occupies such a large amount of my time. Taken in conjunction with the golden rule - Never Blog About Work, and there's not a lot left over to write about to be honest.

I have to say though, I absolutely love my job. I am so happy with how things are going, I'm never bored and it's a constant challenge. We had a farewell dinner for my boss Mark last night, I will really miss him - he's been a fabulous manager. He took a gamble on this academic and I'm going to make sure that it pays off.

In other news, we've moved to a bigger apartment in Howick. Jeremy and Merinda moved into out old apartment and took over the groundskeeping duties so last weekend we helped each other move. I think we were all completely exhausted on Sunday - moving two households in one day is not a job I'd rush to recommend. I'm a bit wary of one set of our new neighbours, I think they could be a bit White Trash because when we arrived they had couches out on the lawn, music going and there was a broken bottle on the path the next day. Still, it's been ok for the rest of the week - reasonably quiet and the reality is that we haven't bought this place, so if we don't like it we can just move! One of the hidden benefits of renting.

Howick has a pub-to-people ratio that is completely disproportionate. There are at least four pubs on the main street and last night there were so many teenies and drunks wandering around that it was shameful. I'm not sure if Howick's still the quiet little seaside town that Anna grew up in. Thus far it's been a bit like East meets West - you might be forgiven for thinking you were in Waitakere City...

Big fish

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:46:06 GMT

The highlight of my Christmas break was going out on a chartered fishing trip with Dad on the Arline, out of Paihia. We had a fabulous six hours out on the water for a very reasonable $80 per person. Murray and Terry were our hosts, and if you're looking for an excellent day's fishing in a beautiful location I would highly recommend giving them a call. Below is a photo of me with an 18 lb (8.2 kg) snapper that Dad and I caught simultaneously (it took both our baits at the same time) which actually was good because it made it easier to reel in! Dad had a really good day, catching an 11 lb, 9 lb and a couple of smaller pan-sized snapper.

This was the biggest fish I've ever caught in my life, I was so stoked. Dad just about passed out trying to fillet the thing. With the price of snapper at approximately $35-$37 / kg, I figure the fish we caught would have a black market value of over $500. The snapper got me street cred too, the number of comments I got walking back through Paihia was great. I couldn't stop grinning.

I'll be back on the Arline next summer without a doubt.

Finished!

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 03:38:26 GMT

Today, at 2:45 pm I handed in my PhD thesis entitled Metal Complexes of Acyclic and Macrocyclic Multifunctional Ligands. From start to finish, it has taken me 7 years and 9 months of full time research. My oral exam will probably be in around 6-10 weeks.

I'm so excited - tonight I'm going to party like it's 1999 (which would mean that I'm 20 again).

Little irony - I have a CD of crystallographic data appended to my thesis, the labels of which I had got printed at great expense (I got ripped off). To make them look nice and official and to match the cover page of my thesis I had put the university logo on them. However, when I handed it in I was informed that the logo shouldn't be on my thesis (and probably the CDs) because it's my work, not the university's! I'm going to find out if it's Ok to keep it on the CDs and take it off the thesis, but I get the feeling that's $100 I'll never see again... D'Oh!

Building a wall

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:30:55 GMT

I got four copies of it soft bound today and it looks beautiful. When I picked it up, the binder said, "that's quite the brick you have there". To which I replied, "Yes. Yes it is."

Surprise, another post on The Brick

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 21:06:25 GMT

I got the Ok to submit The Brick! My supervisor gave me the green light the other day, with only a few changes to my abstract. The body of the thesis survived intact. The abstract, technically, is supposed to be 350 words long, but there was absolutely no way I could reduce mine below 670 without it becoming completely meaningless.

So yesterday afternoon I went in to Uni with Anna and printed out three copies to get soft bound. After leafing through them page-by-page to make sure that they were all in the right order and that the colour pages have printed properly I discovered that there are a few changes that I need to make, so I'll head back in one night this week to print off the last little bits, and to make myself a copy (kind of important!). For these examination copies I have printed it in black & white, with colour pages printed separately on the expensive colour laser in the information commons and interleaved by hand. However, for some reason the colour printer prints the text slightly larger and the page numbers in a slightly different place, which is really annoying. Anyway, small things really.

I have arranged an appointment with the Graduate Centre on Friday to submit it. I'm really pleased that I'll be able to get it in this year! I only have until March 09 to submit (that'll be the end of 8 years). The only thing that concerns me a little is that once I submit, I get unenrolled and I'm scared that I will lose all the credit on my student printing account which I was planning on using to print the final copy after my oral exam. At 25c per page, 502 pages per copy and 5 final copies needed it comes to $625, which I am not so keen to pay for out of my own pocket. Then there's the hard binding costs on top of that (I'm hoping to get my personal copy done in leather).

Work's going well, keeping me very busy and tired, hence the lack of posting. Pretty much the only posting I do these days is to update the status line on my Facebook page. I have two weeks left before my predecessor retires and I am flying solo! I am a bit nervous about this but I think that I have a much better idea of things now. Thank goodness for the two month changeover period. I've been off on a couple of business trips recently to Christchurch and Mt Maunganui which has been cool. I'm starting to get a much bigger picture of where our business fits into the wider scheme of things.

Ok that's enough for now!

Final Draft done

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:56:57 GMT

Today, somewhere around 12 am in the bowels of the Chemistry Department I finished printing, interleaving and binding the final draft (colour copy) of The Brick for my supervisor. Very tired, but happy.

Obligatory post

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 04:23:24 GMT

I figure that it's about time that I posted something, I have been a bit slack. However, I'm scratching my head a little to think of something that is worth posting about. It seems that I haven't really been up to anything interesting at all recently, life now seems to mainly consist of working, eating, sleeping - and watching the occasional episode of Prison Break.

However, I can't really complain, it's fabulous to be employed. I still have loads to learn about the new job, and I figure that it is going to take me a while before I'm really firing on all four cylinders. There I go, using engineering analogies already - what am I becoming?! I went to a climate change breakfast seminar today, which was semi-useful for me. At least I got free croissants (you can tell that I am still officially a student, I'm all about the free food) although there are some really pompous prats out there in the business world. I met this lawyer today who I swear was the biggest full of himself numbnuts I have ever met. Not doing the lawyer image any favours, mate.

The Brick is pretty much done now, I just need to go in to uni and print out a final draft for my supervisor before I submit it. I am intending to do that one night this week. It's absolutely incredible how it has receded from consuming my life completely to becoming a memory in the span of a month. I know that this is why I need to get it in, and get it in quickly before it falls any further behind. One of the other guys in my research group started a job in June, and still hasn't submitted his thesis yet. Due to the long time it's taken me, I actually only have until next February to submit, not that I intend to push that deadline!!

For some reason I've had Billy Joel's The Downeaster Alexa (the greatest sea shanty you've never heard) going through my head constantly for the last week. It's driving me nuts!

Ok, Atomsmith out.

Poetic email

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:20:40 GMT

One of the things I have been noticing about my new job are the various emails that fill up my inbox. I came across one today which made me crack a smile, but not because of its content. Rather, the way it was phrased made it appear to be some cryptic form of Haiku;

Hi All
sprinkler system
Is off
Please no smoking, welding, burning
Fire wardens please be vigilante
Thanks

See what I mean? I'm off to prune my bonsai and contemplate fire safety in the workplace.

Modern string quartet music

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:39:27 GMT

Good news on the quartet front - my friend Jo (cellist extraordinaire) has indicated interest in getting a chamber music group together once her exams are finished, which just means that we'll need a viola player and another violinist. This has really spurred my interest in finding some music, and because I have a thing for rock/classical crossovers I've been poking around the internet looking for some unconventional string quartet music.

I came across an interesting quartet called the Hampton Rock String Quartet, who arrange and perform covers of all sorts of classic rock groups including Led Zepplin, Cream, the Beatles, Queen, Jimi Hendrix etc. What is especially cool though is that you can actually buy all of their sheet music online. I definitely think that I'll get a couple of these to fill out my repertoire, (their arrangement of Aqualung by Jethro Tull sounds great and looks like a lot of fun to play).

The HSQ are in quite a similar vein to the unbelievably prolific Vitamin String Quartet, who seem to release string arrangements of pretty much everything under the sun including (but not limited to) Disturbed, Slayer, AC/DC, Dream Theater, Enya, Coldplay, Panic at the Disco and Kanye West. I haven't listened to all of these in longer than the 30 second clips available on the iTunes Music Store but from what I've heard there seems to be a varying degree of how well the artist translates into chamber music. To the best of my knowledge, the sheet music is unavailable, but I've emailed the record company to find out (who knows, I might have some success like I did at getting the Arcanum score).

Catchup on Life

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 02:33:51 GMT

Man it's been ages since I posted last. I don't really have much of an excuse to be honest, I have been at home for the last month, but now that I have pretty much finished off The Brick I am left with lots of time on my hands. I've had last week and this week off, which has been quite nice.

We went out and bought me some new clothes for work the other night so I am rearing to go now. Because I'll be working in a factory the work dress is quite casual, but I figure that it's probably better to overdress rather than underdress so we bought a selection of shirts and chinos that can look good casual, but can also be dressed up if needed. Part of me wonders how long they'll look nice once I get down to work... Still, I'll finally have money coming in and I can always get more as I need them!

One other thing I have been meaning to comment on is how well behaved the NZ public are being (around our area at least) with regard to the election advertising billboards etc. It seems to me that triennial defacement of political effigies is an ingrained part of Kiwi culture, how shameful. What is it about the election that brings out the worst in people? Anyway, it seems that this year the disaffected are more apathetic than usual, or maybe there are less of them this time around. There have been only a few token billboards smashed up, and only a few isolated cases of cock'n'balls addenda (Rodney Hide seems to have drawn the most ire).

I took a trip with my brother-in-law Dave to the Onehunga Hard To Find bookstore this afternoon, it'd been ages since I was there last. It's always such a pleasure to go and browse, I could spend days in there. They have the largest second hand Sci Fi selection that I have found in Auckland. Like the name suggests, it really is hard to find stuff in there as it is only semi-alphabetised. In my experience, most of the best finds are misplaced books, as the popular authors get snapped up pretty quickly. Today's find was no exception, as Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds was found hiding in the "Z"s. Now I just have to find time to read (ironic, as I have a week off). Reynolds is a Hard Sci Fi/Space Opera author, who did a PhD in Astrophysics which makes the science in his books much more feasible (well, as feasible as space opera gets) than a lot of other authors. I've only read one of his other books (Revelation Space) so I can't really comment too much further on his work. I'm looking forward to getting in to this one. I'm also looking forward to the release of The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton which is coming out here in NZ on the 11th of November. I've been waiting for this one for over a year now so I am really slavering with anticipation.

In other news, I feel like a real man because I managed to change the headlamp bulb on our car all by myself. Yeah! Feel the power. Maybe as my powers increase I'll give the car an oil change (except I probably won't because the sump's in a funny place).

The other thing that I am looking forward to once The Brick is disposed of, is getting back into playing some classical music. I haven't touched my violin for months now, and my skills are stagnating. I promised myself that I would get into a quartet or chamber music group of some description once I was finished, and I fully intend to do this. I need to be involved in something that will be musically challenging, and a quartet seems to have met with the approval of Mrs. Atomsmith because the likelihood of my getting gigs in pubs playing Bach or Beethoven is somewhat remote. That said, the Celtic group I went and jammed with at Murphy's Irish Bar a couple of years ago was a whole lot of fun. I could definitely get back into some of that.

Hmmm... Probably the other only thing that I have been up to is getting back into playing arcade games using the emulator Mame on my laptop, now that I am not so pressed for hard drive space. Side-scrolling beat-em-ups are videogame perfection. If anyone tells you otherwise, they are lying and are bad people. It's great being able to clock all the old classics without it costing you $10 in 20c pieces like it did in the old days!

Ok love and ether to everyone.

Nearly... there...

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 22:41:31 GMT

Another milestone yesterday. I handed in the first full draft of The Brick to my supervisor, 506 pages long. I had to spiral bind it in two volumes with the largest binding combs I could find (46 mm). It's turned out to be quite a tome. So anyway, he said that he should be able to get it back to me in a week, so it looks like I'll probably be able to submit it before I start work.

I seem to be entering a period of celebration at the moment, with some upcoming causes including;

Getting first job
Handing in The Brick
Passing oral exam
30th birthday
Graduation

Bring it on I say! I turned up to home group the other night and everyone had dressed in pink, and we had a pink coconut cake (courtesy of page_one ) and sparkling pink wine (this is all of great relevance if you know where I'll be working). It was such a nice surprise. My good friends Jeremy and Merinda gave me a bottle of cognac too, which is fabulous!

Whew!

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:22:30 GMT

You know how you hear those stories about the grad student who is mere weeks away from submitting their thesis and then suddenly their computer crashes and they lose their thesis? Well, but for the grace of God, that guy is me.

One of the things that you should always do if you purchase a laptop is to get an extended warranty for at least three years. This is because around the three year mark, (probably in direct proportion to the mass of dead skin accumulating in the keyboard) things just start breaking down. Unfortunately for me, I bought my computer about three years ago and up until now, it'd been fine... Until the hard drive got bad sectors.

First stroke of luck - I am so paranoid about my data that I have it backed up in about seven places at any one time (hard drive, memory stick, ipod, phone, NMR server at uni, AFS backup at uni, allocated server space at uni) which means that in the unlikely event of global thermonuclear war, I should still be able to submit my PhD thesis for examination.

Second stroke of luck - my laptop still has two months remaining on the extended warranty! Yes! This means that I was able to get a new hard drive for free, the additional bonus being that the smallest that you can get these days is about 80 GB - twice the size of my old one. Schweet!! My experience with Visual Group was much better this time than the last one...

So anyway it's ended up taking another chunk of my time, and delayed my work yet again. Still, everything is back up and running and I am on track to be finished before you know it, dear invisible blog friends...

Bus Buddies

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 07:54:27 GMT

I've been riding the Auckland bus system now for about 10 years, and loving it. The public transport system in this city gets so much crap from people yet I've had far more positive experience with it than negative. Our bus is invariably on time every morning, and riding in listening to my iPod whilst cruising down the bus lanes along Tamaki Drive is actually a very real pleasure. I would hate having to drive to work! What a hassle having to pay megabucks for petrol, sitting around in gridlock traffic and then paying exorbitant fees for parking at the other end. It's so much sweeter on the bus

People's reasons for disliking public transport are varied, but what really makes me mad is the prevailing attitude insisting that we desperately need more buses and trains - so that other people can use them, and I can keep driving to work. That makes my blood boil.

One of the funny things that I've found on the bus over the years (and I'm sure I'm not alone with this) is that Anna and I have all these made up names for the regulars who catch the same bus as us every morning.

For example there's Cate Blanchett, the well-dressed spitting-image of the movie star who spends the entire trip carefully doing her makeup and hair. There's the Loves - Daniel and Foxy. Daniel looks like he wants to be an aviator, with his fleece-lined leather jacket, tightly wrapped scarf and his goggle-like glasses. Foxy, his twig-thin wife, hails from the eastern bloc, if one is to judge by her accent. Maybe Daniel met her there whilst flying an undercover mission?

Dave is a tall businessman with spiky grey hair and a trenchcoat who has an endearing habit of folding his newspaper pages in half lengthways as he reads it on the trip in. Paul is a balding family man, never seen without his trusty polar fleece. His wife and toddler stand on the pavement and wave him goodbye as he catches the bus every morning. Blondie and Londie are the best of friends, and chat incessantly all the way in. Courtney Love catches our bus too, at the same stop as the lady who times her morning routine so that she gets everything done except her hair, which she brushes on the way in.

What's quite funny is that it turns out that one of our Bus Buddies works at Anna's new workplace, and so we ended up learning her real name. It feels a bit weird actually knowing what she is actually called after knowing her as "Sherid" for about a year.

I'd love to know what our Bus Buddies do, and what they are like. I reckon that the imaginary versus the real would make a great short story, a la Love Actually. Know what I mean?

Ankle update

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:05:13 GMT

I thought I'd provide photographic evidence of my injured ankle, for any skeptics out there.

Mmmmm ugly foot.

It's bruised really badly, but the swelling has gone down a lot and I can walk on it ok now, thanks largely to the donation of a bandage by Dr McB at home group and a good dose of prayer. It's good to have friends who are medical professionals. Still, it looks like I'll be off for the rest of the season (boohoo) so I'll have to go along and cheer loudly for the rest of the team. Silver lining - I'm just grateful that I injured myself at the end of the season, rather than at the beginning.

Actually I forgot to say that on the night one of the opposition players must have been a keen med student because he was very quick to help me elevate it, ran and got me some ice and offered helpful medical advice, all under the quiet smile of our team captain Ben - a registrar who is doing a PhD in surgery.

Exploding Whale

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 01:26:25 GMT

This vid has been floating around the internet for a while so you've probably seen it by now, but it's so awesome I just have to post it here. This is the 1970 footage of a dead sperm whale that had washed ashore in Oregon, USA being disposed of by local authorities using half a ton of dynamite. It's so awesomely awesome - the awesomest thing ever! Hug me!!

Check out the raining chunks of putrid whale flesh and blubber at 1:40.

Adding injury to insult

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:01:56 GMT

Time for what has become my customary Wednesday evening report on the drubbing-in-progress that is Fisherman's Friend. Tonight we went versus Ugly as Spin, and no surprises, lost 7-11. Once again it was just the faithful four - Merinda, Jeremy, Ben and myself, so we were playing without subs. I guess we're kind of used to it now. With six minutes remaining, I leapt for the Frisbee, landed on someone's foot and ended up spraining my ankle so I was out for the rest of the game. Graciously, one of the opposition switched sides and my team was able to play on, scoring four more points in the remaining time.

This made me feel stink for a couple of reasons - I was off the court when I wanted to be playing, but also because without my involvement the score seemed to rocket up. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive, but it kind of brought back bad memories of high school P.E. classes where I knew that I was the weakest team member. I want to be good at this sport, I really really do. I want to be a valuable team member - but I just know that my playing tonight was terrible, I just kept on giving the disc away, being in the wrong place, not keeping up with my mark, and doing stupid risky hammer throws which none of my team mates could catch.

Of course, it probably helped our team a bit that the guy who came and played for us was really good, and that they got a breather while I came off the court. Maybe the opposition got tired and/or slack. Still, I don't know. Ugly as Spin were a really nice bunch, they played very fairly (even when I accidentally knocked a guy's contact lens out) and all in all, it was a good game for us. We always get this close...

One more game next week against M&M's. They're at the bottom of the table like us so I reckon we're in with a shot.

What am I going to blog about once the Ultimate Frisbee season's finished? (Apologies if I'm boring you)

Of Frisbee and Pyramids

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:14:47 GMT

The blogosphere's quiet at the moment! Everyone must have the winter blues.

It's one of the little ironies of life that whenever I seem to have time off, I get a cold. Anna and I have been having this week off together and unfortunately I've been ill for most of it. As a result I missed last night's game of Ultimate against Corporate, Hell Yeah!, which Fisherman's Friend lost 7-11. However from the sounds of things it was a really good close match, Ben played the whole match with a torn thumbnail! Once again, the team played with no subs so they did quite heroically, all things considered! Big ups to Ben, Merinda, Jeremy and Heather.

I haven't done any work on my thesis this week, it's actually been a really nice break from it although I can't shake the feeling that perhaps I'm procrastinating a little. This is probably because the next (and final) chapter is my introduction. This is pretty much where I am supposed to pose the question that underpins my research and provide a context from the literature. I think that the reason that I've found this so difficult to approach is that trying to put my thumb on why we carried out this research topic is really quite nebulous. The nature of my research project was purely exploratory. This has had its pros and cons, which I'll try and spell out a little.

A typical organic synthetic PhD project will start with one or more target molecules, which the researcher will then attempt to build up from scratch in the lab. I think of this as being very much like molecular Lego! A classic example (borrowed from Tina) goes along the lines of;

Compound A was extracted from a fungus and turned out to have promising anti-ulcer activity. However, said fungus may be scarce, or extracting A from it may be tricky, so we want to try and make it in vitro. A then becomes the target molecule, and synthetic routes are designed and carried out to see if it can be made in the lab. This can be envisioned as being a bit like a pyramid, with the target molecule sitting at the apex, and all approaches leading to it.

My project (inorganic/organometallic) has been different to this, and is actually more along the lines of an inverted pyramid. We started by combining ideas, drawing inspiration from a number of different sources. Naturally, this means that the outcome of the research is less certain. We wanted to design organic scaffolds (ligands) to act as hosts for metal atoms and/or small molecules, deliberately incorporating certain features that we hoped would enhance their reactivity. Then we basically threw things at the resulting molecules and oberved the outcome! This approach is a lot more open-ended and while being very interesting and intellectually stimulating, has had the potential to turn into something of a chemical hydra - lots of avenues which all needed to be thoroughly investigated before the project could be deemed complete.

So, which approach is preferable? I'm not really one to make that call - I don't think that one is necessarily better than the other. The first approach is probably nicer in terms of getting a research project finished in a timely manner, and therefore probably more compatible with business and industrial funding. However, the second approach allows for more serendipity, and I have found from personal experience that serendipity, when seized upon, is a powerful thing. Some of the best things I discovered in my PhD have come about through examination of the unexpected.

Cruising for a bruising

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:10:17 GMT

So it looks like last week's win was an artefact. Last night Fisherman's Friend went down 9-20 to the aptly named Tossers. It was probably the most dissatisfying game we've played yet - there were loads of fouls against us from the opposition, all of us came away from the game with sore wrists from where they were knocking the Frisbee out of our hands (you're not supposed to make contact with the other players at all). There were a number of times that we called them out for things and they got bolshy about it, but equally there were lots of times that they fouled us and got away with it. Not impressed at all.

Again, we were hampered by the lack of subs, only five of us turned out and again we were all exhausted by the last third of the match. We'd been keeping up with them really well until the second half of the game. If only the rest of our team had turned out we would have stood a much better chance of winning.

Prior to last night's game we were tied at the bottom of the table with the M&M's, who we haven't played yet. I theorised to the team that F comes before M in the alphabet so technically they were the bottom of the league, rather than us, right?

We have three games left and we probably need to win all of them in order to avoid the wooden spoon.

Sudochem Part I

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:35:10 GMT

I've been spending far too much time on Facebook recently playing word games, which I really enjoy but are a complete waste of time really. I sort of have this vain hope that it'll serve to increase my vocab and therefore be of use to my thesis writing, but really I'm not sure how I can incorporate my little three-letter faves like VUG, FIE, BOT, LUG, AAL, ELL, ROE etc.

Anyway as much as I enjoy Scrabble and Boggle (and the FB ripoffs), until now I've never really been a fan of Sudoku. However, today I responded to an invite from Stu to join him for a game of Sudoku Challenge. I'm pretty crap at it really, but what struck me as I played was how similar the thought processes were to those I use for assigning the HSQC and HMBC two-dimensional NMR spectra for my compounds. Chem buddies - would you agree?

In a nutshell, these spectra are useful for unambiguous assignment of ¹³C and ¹H NMR resonances, i.e. you can link with full confidence a certain carbon or hydrogen atom in the structure of your compound to a signal in the ¹³C or ¹H NMR spectrum. I'd love to go into a little more detail on this, but I don't have any 2D NMR spectra handy of known compounds and as my stuff hasn't been published yet I'd better save further discussion until it is. On that point, my supervisor gets back from France in a couple of weeks and he's promised me that we'll finally get to publishing my stuff. I can't wait. :-D

So anyway I reckon that if you're really good at Sudoku, you'd probably be good at assigning NMR spectra. Woohoo! Good for you, man.

Un-normally short

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:43:53 GMT

I went for an interview with a recruitment agency this morning. I think it went quite well, and the consultant seemed to think that there were a couple of good opportunities for me. She's contacting one of the companies and said she'd get back to me next week. If all goes well I could possibly have a job before too long! Real world! Scary!

I had to dress up nicely for the interview with a shirt & tie, which is different to my usual attire, which is more along the lines of derelicte of Zoolander fame. I figured that it was time that I grew up and learned to tie a proper double windsor - thank goodness for Google eh? I embed this video for your edification, and for personal reference for the next interview that I have to go to;

I still think I feel more comfortable in a lab coat, but this knot did make me look smart, and as Anna says, so long as you look smart...

Anyway, who's to disagree with wisdom like this guy's "The fatter the knot, the bigger the balls"?