I am sitting in the basement of the D wing of the engineering building at the University of Saskatchewan, trying to make a laser-driven scanning particle size analyzer stop being a useless piece of crap. Oh, don't get me wrong, when it works, it's a wonderful piece of mid-nineties technology, in all of its retro, "install my software with twenty floppy disks," glory. At least it's not beige. Remember when everything that plugged into a computer was beige? Imagine a beige iPod. A beige flat-screen monitor. A beige printer/fax/scanner (that one shouldn't actually be too hard, they actually used to be beige, and enormous). God, now I'm picturing modern Apple products with a beige finish. A beige iMac. Ew.
Align, you art deco, science artifact, oblong hunk of ostrich feces!
Grr.
I could be done testing these samples by now. Instead, the Mastersizer (actual product name) is hemming and hawing, and will, perhaps, deign to function after some unspecified time interval. When it's DAMN WELL GOOD AND READY AND YOU'RE JUST GOING TO HAVE TO WAIT.
Le sigh.
Not a bad way to spend my first day back after taking some time off to attend my Grandmother's funeral. She was 85, fiercely independent, and a tiny, little, perma-tanned, old-lady-raisin. The tan was from years and years farming and gardening, not from a fondness for tanning beds. The funeral service was Ukranian Catholic, of the Byzantine bent. What that means is that the priest was from the Old Country, everything was lavish and ornate, there was a butt-ass load of incense, and the prayers were long, mumbly, tonal, repetitive and had very little to do with the person who had actually passed away, and a lot more to do with praising the Lord. That has always seemed odd to me, and really self-centered of the church. The priest was ever-so-slightly derp, as well. Derp, in this context, referring to the pupils of the eyes having a slight tendency to skew outwards from centre. I shall Google you up an image:
Religion, hooray!
The important things, though, are that we buried Granny in accordance with her beliefs, and that loads of family and friends were there to say goodbye. It wasn't all bad.
While I was away from the lab, sexual harassment happened! Well, technically, it crossed the border into assault, because there was a solid and distinct boob honk. I hope it was the best boob honk ever, because the culprit was a post-doctoral researcher, and a professor back in India, and he just flushed his career down la toilette. That's French, for, "the toilet." Just in case you weren't sure. Also, note the emphasis on, "was," as he no longer is. Can you say, "fired"? I thought you could.
[Update: I finally got the thing to align properly, and have written a new operational procedure, accordingly. All who follow in my footsteps to use this machine shall find that I have eased their burdens significantly. Mooching pricks. Also, it takes a while to scan things, and I have used this time to regain my mastery of Freecell.]
