Soothing Jah

I edited the links section to have a permanent "today is not a good day" on it. Just as a reminder, don't be fooled by my tone.

As i write this I am listening to Negus Nagast a what appears to be Venezuelan roots reggae band. I found about it because my friend Lamar from Jamaica told me about it, and it's delicious reggae. I think everybody should buy their cds and listen to them. Perhaps the music will make the world a more relaxed place.

Today I was told by chemistry guy that the colorimeters were not functional. I proved that they were, but found 2 that were not working properly, so touche chemistry guy and touche myself. Thing is that when you plug in the vernier colorimeters on the go!links or the labpros onto the computer and start logger pro (the logging software that took all the fun out of data collection, i say *pfew*), the probe becomes active and it works.

Now if you're testing probes, logger pro only lets you have one set of probes (up to 4 on the labpro, 1 on the go!link) at one time for a given experiment. If you are to test the probes and need to change them, you need to restart logger pro every time you want to test a new one. Neither chemistry guy nor I knew this, but it took me about 20 seconds to figure out once i tested it, it was the first options of what might be wrong.

But since we only have 2 new colorimeters and 5 of the older ones (the ones made for the TI CBL2, which we used before the purchase of the laptop carts).

The 2 brand spaking new ones worked really well and have this thing that the older ones didn't have, a calibration button which calibrates the colorimeter with the blank by just pressing it. On the older ones you have to go onto the experimental menu on logger pro and do all this crapload of stuff to calibrate the damn thing.

But anyway, i digress.

I tested and found 2 old ones that were not working. The first turned on but didn't show voltage values for transmittance, thus i concluded the bulbs are busted. Then there's the other one that read fine on water at 0 transmittance but when testing a dilute crystal violet which is supposed to have an absorbance of about .360 at 595nm, read nothing. So i concluded the 595nm diode is busted. Not sure how they are structured, but assuming they use diodes, it's probably that. Or, it just ocurred to me, the lens is dirty/foggy.

I'll open both and see what's wrong.

Short day today, let's see what's in store later.