I wonder did this ever happen to Indie...

Myself and Brian arrived in Zurich without ado. In short order, we were settled into our seats on the train, gazing out the window at sun-kissed locals frolicking in Zurich lake.

To pass the time, I opened my laptop to work on my hitherto incomplete presentation ["very little left to do," he promised].

I plug in my portable hard-drive. Said hard-drive whined like the little buzz-saw that couldn't, ultimately rattling to a halt. My Mac kindly supplied that the drive could not be mounted... even after turning it off and back on again.

In college, I heard many, many, many people emphasise the importance of back-ups of back-ups of back-ups. I am certain, I have pontificated about it too. For reasons unknown,* I neglected to create even the first back-up in the redundancy chain.

I took stock of what I had to work with, since I imagine myself a "cool customer" not given to panic.

Problem Statement

1. I had no presentation or presentation content on my person
   
2. It was Sunday, my presentation due 10am on Wednesday

Solution

1. Mark had a week-old draft
   
2. Unprocessed data were in Ireland and Barbara was a call away
3. The software I needed for processing the data was available at the conference
   

I gave Mark a text to check if he still had it. I called Barbara to apprise her of the situation and her impending role in it. Bless their cotton socks, they came through for me. Particularly Barbara since she had to follow my directions to find files scattered across 4 computers in various folders.

In my free time I was able to complete the presentation. The nicest nuts-and-bolts thing I learned was that Quicktime Pro. can convert a set of images to a movie. I finished the presentation with about 6 hours to spare.** I grabbed some shut-eye. Before going down to breakfast, I did a bit of meditation to ravel my frayed mind.



All in all, I was very pleased with my performance. I consider it my best work since the end of the Fas Science Challenge.

In the past few years, I did not give enough thought to presenting my work, it suffered for my dalliance, I think. But Brian said this one was the first time he understood what was going on in a crystallization slideshow. Boo Yeah!

In summary

1. It is good practice to make back-ups of back-ups of back-ups
2. It is good practice to check if a external hard-drive works after being dropped
3. It is good practice to solve problems instead of worrying about them
   

_______________________________________________________________

*I have no idea whatsoever as to why I did not have copies scattered all over the place. I would idly think,"I better copy that onto my laptop since I will be using it to present" - "yeah, you really should do that." Without result. If the incident were a film, there would have been a dramatic flashback to Saturday night. To the moment the hard-drive fumbled from my grasp after I unplugged it from my computer with the latest slides. At the time I stared at it for a moment, prehaps to allow the audience of the Mairtin Show to appreciate its significance. - Admittedly my cognitive biase weighs heavily on the recollection, and it always sounds good to say,"Deep-down-inside, some part of me knew things were going to get hairy."

**My memory of anything beyond the slides is very fuzzy for closing moments of completing the presentation

beige alert - 1

A question long asked....

I'm off the Switzerland tomorrow. Maybe I will be able to answer it.

Seeing as I won't know where I stand with them the trip could be as eventful as the Moroccan Saga... or not.

Stay tuned, same chem time, same chem channel [maybe]...

- I think it is safe to say that there is no new content up there, so much for production values.

How do I sleep at night? ["on top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies"]

There I go again... I wonder can I blame the recession.

Even better: I can claim that it is a challenge to find the quotes and whatnot.

[originally the few lines above were laden, overloaded even, with links: Soundbites and video clips.]

Racemates and Robots

Some quick points:

• Stereochemistry is about pairs of molecules that are almost identical, but the molecules cannot be interposed on each other and the mirror image of one is identical to the other. This is essentially analogous to one's left and right hands. Stereochemistry is immensely important in biological systems, see: Thalidomide debacle.
  

• 1849 Louis Pasteur painstakingly isolated a racemic mixture using a tweezers

Recent work done by a Dutch crystallization group discovered something rather shocking. If a crystal racemic mixture was left in a liquid with glass beads to mix for long enough [days to weeks] only one form of the molecule would be left as a crystal, i.e. the left handed ones were converted to the right handed ones or vice-versa (Noorduin, Crystal Growth & Design 2008, Vol 8, No 5, pp 1675).
It may sound like I have stolen a moment of your life telling you this stuff but it is significant: Firstly our man Pastuer needn't have picked out crystals by hand he could have left it alone and it would have sorted itself out.
Secondly in nature almost only one enantiomer of many naturally produced molecules exist. Using normal synthesis chemistry both enantiomers form. Since all it takes is time for a mixture to become enantiopure, it takes time. So start off at year dot with a primordial soup. [Times passes]. We get a enantiopure set of molecules, ripe for life... At least that is where the idea goes.

Another thing I saw at the conference was a paper on the process control of a crystallization using a neural network. When I heard this I immediately thought this. But of course, Skynet it isn't...

Conferences and Calamaties

Got to the airport 100 minutes before the scheduled departure time. A forlorn looking Barbara greets me with "Mairtin, you are going to kill me...".
It turned out she had forgotten her passport.
The wayward article was in the engineering building. We took a shockingly slow taxi trip to UCD.
Barbara's mother does not use a mobile phone. She had to collect Barbara's office key from her [Barbara's] boyfriend, Daniel. Daniel was supposed to be in work- he wasn't.
She rushed in to a nearby Starbucks roaring: "someone please help me! My daughter is going to Holland this morning and has forgotten her passport. I need to use a phone!" Someone was kind enough to provide one and the twain met successfully, and all was well.
Got the passport [and a camera] and made it back to the airport in 20 minutes from UCD, there was a shakey moment when Barbara's mother drove down the wrong way on a road, I calmly told her this was the case and once more all was well.
5 hours later...
We got to the conference centre to register. Last week I was asked if I had sorted out the accommodation for the ISIC conference, I glibly retorted that it was included in the registration fees. The closer we got to that desk, the more I doubted that this was so. Nonetheless I hoped that the receptionist would finish her piece with "...and here are your accommodation details". [Hands us keys to suites].Despite staring at her expectantly after she had given us our bags and coupons, she did not say the magic words.
"Bugger..."
[Time passed]
We were in the StayOkay Hostel by the river, and all was well.

Had a waffle and whipped ice-cream in town. Maastricht is a pretty buildinged, old and institutionally sedate town- very reminiscent of Bruges, of In Bruges fame.

The Middlethon and the Conference

For Dinner:

Made Chicken noodle soup

1. Boiled water
2. Put shredded chicken carcass into soup to boil
3. Added some garlic, broccoli pieces, shredded carrots, salt and two chilli peppers
   
4. Left to boil for about 2 hours
5. Took out the chicken carcass and pulled the meat from the bones

Next day

1. Brought the broth to boil
2. Added the noodles, spring onions, monge touts and nice chunky carrots

Chicken and sweet pepper halves

1. Half lots of red peppers, put them into the grill
2. Boiled shredded chicken in chop suey with some ginger and spring onions
3. Mix chicken and sauce with some crunchy vegetables
4. Pour into the pepper halves and leave in oven at gas mark 5 for 30 minutes

[The mistake at this point was adding so many noodles, it turned into porridge :( ]

The dinner took about two hours to prepare and eat. So we only got to watch 4 episodes of the Middleman. Ali and Eva brought dessert (cookies and fruit salad) [and Kevin brought some too...].

Got 2 hours sleep and went to the airport for my flight to east midlands.
Conference was interesting- my PhD needs a lot of work. There was a guy that gave a presentation about crystals in food. He explained how stupid it was to "Ban trans fats" from products because trans fats allow crystallizations in butter, our jelly bellies, ice cream, etc. On top of that he had the actions and the appearance of Bill Nighy in Love Actually.
I chatted to a guy at dinner that uses light tweezers. The future is now :)

Got back to college- my RAM finally arrived. They have monster aluminium radiators sticking out of the chips.

Looking forward to building it. Going with 64Bit XP and Ubuntu.