What better way to start this holiday weekend than with… kittens!!!111oneone
My friend breeds Maine Coon cats. One of her prize-winning kittehs had kittens. Now at seven weeks, this litter of six is now at their peak of cuteness.
Seriously. They has a cute.
ohai!
ADD kitty has a ooo shiny
kitten armeh, FOWARDS!
searchin for noms
If you’re not dead yet from teh cuteness, enjoy your Fourth of July weekend. America, fuck yeah!
Let’s preface this with an admission: I’m an incoming first year, and while I’m not switching fields (carbon-based electronics FTW!), I am working on a totally different aspect of the research. There’s a lot of adjustment involved in making that switch, and a lot of room for messing things up horribly. This is to be expected, though–comes with learning new things. In the first few labs I worked in, I was a little upset at not being able to do things perfectly the first try. This is lab #7 for me, though: by now I expect to fuck things up, and am generally unfazed by it in the beginning.[1]
Most of what I’m fucking up these days involves my new arch nemesis: GLOVEBOX. I was a perfectly content and fairly dexterous glovebox virgin until a little over two weeks ago. Then I became the clumsiest person I know! In my defense, I wear an XS glove. I dare you to try doing delicate work with normal gloves that are a few sizes too large. You will contaminate, drop or destroy maybe half of what you touch, and you will be extremely frustrated at having a bunch of extra useless glove hanging off the end of your fingers.[2] I am well acquainted with this frustration because many stockrooms don’t carry XS sizes (tip for my tiny-handed brethren: check the bio stockrooms, they are often nice to us). Nothing I do will make the evil glovebox gloves come even close to fitting my hands. I dislike them greatly, but they are a necessary evil.
If that weren’t enough, it’s also been quite a while since I used tweezers.[3] There are quite a few steps in solar cell fabrication & testing, so–as you may imagine–many opportunities to screw up. Drop a film, or scratch it, or get it dusty, and it shorts out. I thought I had already explored most of the multitude of ways to screw up during the fabrication process, but yesterday I surprised myself.[4] It turns out that the nitrogen gun we use to blow away dust is more powerful than I thought:
See where it’s reddish…and then it isn’t in one patch? Yup! That’s a giant hole in the film. I managed to blow it off the substrate. Didn’t even know that was possible! Some mistakes are hard not to laugh at.
[1] #7 if you only count paying labs. Otherwise, #8. Gotta start somewhere 
[2] Actually, even XS gloves have a bit more fingertip than I need. Hold your hand up to mine sometime: you will feel like a GIANT.
[3] Wasp dissection FTW! Well, FTL is more like it. I mangled quite a few flea-sized braconids before the entomologists decided it was easier if they just pulled the legs off for me.
[4] My least favorite way to screw up is to drop the device holder mask thingie into the evaporator. It’s heartbreaking because then all your films fall out and get mangled and you have to somehow find them and get them out.
I’m on the left coast now, and starting my graduate research! Expect to see a lot more on solar cells from here on out, and a lot more expensive lab toys, and a lot less synthesis…but hopefully still lots of crystals.[1] I find instrumental work much easier to learn, so hopefully I’ll be able to pick things up quickly as opposed to being more or less clueless for the first six months to year as I was in (the most important of) my undergrad research lab(s). I could post pics of my surroundings or the amazing national parks I saw along the moving journey, but I know most of our readers are probably stuck in the lab 24/7, so I’ll refrain from inducing too much jealousy.
Instead, I give you:
AFM tips, for the uninitiated. If you look very closely on the dime, there is an eyelash on the piece of paper. If you look VERY very closely at the end of the shiny metal bits, you might see an even shinier bit that is the cantilever. Now look back at my eyelash. Carefully note which is smaller, and write it down in your copybooks.[2] The tip is at the end of the cantilever. You can’t see it, but an SEM can:
Needless to say, the tip itself is very very small. The shiny bit that holds the cantilever must be very carefully picked up with good tweezers and placed very carefully in the tip holder. If it gets dropped, it generally breaks. This, of course, requires some very steady hands.
[1] Excimer may still rightfully call himself a synthetic chemist. I’m transitioning to the device world!
[2] I should really leave the witty references to my coblogger, shouldn’t I?
* Bonus points to anyone who gets the song reference. Anyone? Anyone at all?
I’m guest-blogging for Nature’s Skeptical Chymist blog; my first post went live today. My posts there will focus on my experiences as a lecturer for a lab course last semester, and the lessons learned. The things I learned teaching the class was substantial. I probably learned more than my students did. In fact, I’m 150% sure I did.
You might be wondering, “but you don’t even blog here anymore! WTF?” [1] And you’re right. My bad. But I do have a post forthcoming. I still need an outlet to be ridiculous, and the good folks at Nature are not keen on presenting my particular brand of crude molecule-based humor. Can’t say I blame them.
Anyway, for the text-phobic, here’s a lolcat from today’s ICHC:
[1] By “you,” I mean Ψ*Ψ, cause she actually said that.
Not that any of you care, but I’m finished driving from one end of the country to the other.[1] It’ll be a few days before I settle in and start in the lab (yaaaaaay!), so in lieu of chemistry I present you with this:
Yes, my former labmates are THAT AWESOME. I miss them–sending back data won’t be nearly as fun as being in the lab with them. :,(
[1] By the way, the drive was free of car trouble…except for the ant colony. Yes. I drove 3891.9 miles with a hitchhiking ant colony. I think they’re dead now…
Ψ*Ψ is currently moving cross-country, and I am so busy I can barely think about anything else aside form work and my upcoming (and well-deserved, dammit!) vacation.
The blog will return to its former glory[1] next week or so. In the meantime, watch some food porn. mmmm.
[1] for certain values of “glory.”
ETA:
Kyle’s chemistry wiki is officially underway! I’m pretty sure all CBC readers also read The Chem Blog, so chances are I didn’t need to make that announcement. Go contribute, though! What I would especially like to see–and perhaps it doesn’t matter, because I’m not in charge of this–is a section on reagent-specific hazards, written by chemists for chemists. MSDSes have limited value in this regard because they all sound paranoid (OMGZ salt and sand and water will all definitely kill you and you should never touch them). A plain-English warning from an experienced synthetic god/dess would be much preferable–such people have stories, which are more memorable than MSDS safety risk listings.
My badass guide to getting shiny things out of crud is up on the wiki, by the way. I’ll add photos and nicer formatting as time allows…[1]
[1] That may not be anytime soon, though. This is my last week in the lab (sad face) and I’ll be moving cross-country over the course of about a week (scenic route, hells yeah!). But then I’ll start in a totally new lab and will resume posting things with actual content, like info on awesome new techniques and cool stuff about device fab.
Um, I got nothing chemistry-related. So here’s some cat-yodeling tips instead.
Has anyone else seen this in the little sidebar with the ads?
I do love the seals on Acros bottles. I’ve started ordering BuLi specifically from them because their seals are fucking awesome. So large and so thick![1] Easy to needle through, though. We got in a few bottles of Aldrich BuLi that had these impossible SureSeals–they were super hard to pierce.[2] I went through several 20G needles on one of them before switching to 18G (eek!). Has anyone else run across these?
The question, though, is…why is this on facebook? Isn’t it supposed to be a distraction from chemistry? And where are the ads from Aldrich?
In any case, I’d much rather see this than lame ads telling me I need to lose weight and get engaged.
[1] That’s what SHE said! XD
[2] “If we get tBuLi with one of these seals, I’m sending it back!” –anonymous labmate