Happy Father's Day, Dad

So, it is Father's Day in Taiwan, and I would like to wish my dad a Happy Father's Day even though my dad probably does not know the existance of this web-blog. My dad is spending this Father's Day in Japan with my brother An-Chou (who sometimes called himself Peter,?? Peter, why Peter? weird)

I somehow managed to leave my lab early today, after loitering around for most of the morning. I think this early is fully justified, after all, I was working until 11:00pm last night trying to get some radical reactions to go. Much to my dismay, the reaction did not go AT ALL after 8 hours of intensive irradiation. My early prognosis is the glassware, without digging into the scientific nidy gridy basically the glassware I use "pyrex" has a certain wavelength cut off due to the grade of the glass it is made out of and my radical initiator just so happened to need wavelength of the cut-off range to be "excited" enough to form a radical. In Leyman's term, NO REACTION due to technical difficulties. While it is nice to learn that my glasswares are totally useless in running this large scale photo-reaction, I can't help but feeling cheated. No one in the lab told me this is not gonna work, granted most people do not work with photo initiators (I wonder why?), but the girl who worked on this project before me also failed to cautioned me of this technical difficulty. In fact she failed to mention jack to me, while now she is on her danddy way out of the school with her premature Master's degree, I am left hacking away the crappy project she had left half done and half-assedly recorded. There are many times late in the night I just want to strangle her. Her notebook is as good as a third grader's science class notebook, with no useful information what-so-ever, no TLC, no NMR data, no nothing, just a simple line "sample checked by GC...pure". What the hell is that? what does "pure" mean? and how did she find out it is "pure". Her experimental procedure consisted lines like "mixing solution A and B and "stir for a while"..." how long is "a while" damn it. The good thing is I am at the near end of this project and I have had a good hack at it with some meaningful results. The bad thing is, all the freaking exploring without a proper guide probably left me looking like an idiot to my advisor and my fellow lab mates... oh well who cares.

Ok, that's enough of my diatribe, just venting some frustration from work. Horshit!!