Mid-Morning Adventure

So today was an eventful day.

By eventful I, of course, mean boring and sleep deprived... and by day I, of course, mean period of semi-conciousness...

Such is my life...

I neded up studying for my exam after I wrote my last entry... Followed by breakfast, and the writing of the exam...

That was fun...

To top it all off, I borrowed a calculator from one of the dormies, and he had it set in some weird physics setting... That didnt allow me to get decimal answers... Which I need when the question says something along the lines of "what is this answer to five decimal places?"

I spent the majourity of the exam time trying to figure out how to get the stupid thing to work properly...

If you've ever used a TI 89 titanium, you know what sort of situation I was in...

For those of you who dont know...

Take the TI 83+ (the standard calculator when I was in high school). Take all of the buttons, move them from their current location to a, more or less, random configuration across a larger button pad. Take all of the settings and arrange them under headings and sub-headings in a difficult to manuver menu screen. Arbitrarily abb. ran. wor. so you ca. under. wha. the. su. to be [abbreviate random words so you cant understand what theyre supposed to mean]...

Now- on zero sleep and in the stressful situation of sitting at a desk with a 10 page chemistry exam that requires a heck of a lot of complicated mathematic calculations knowing full well there is a large chance you may not get your calculator to pump out anything resembling what your professor would be willing to give you marks for- try to fix the calculator...

I should get a bonus of 10% for not breaking down into tears...

But, alas, I figured it out (I changed every setting one by one, and back until I found the one that turned things to the way I wanted)

Turns out I needed to put it to approximate answers (in hind sight, quite logical, I suppose, as decimals do tend to be approximate... I'll explain further in private if you dont understand)

Lab today went really well... I couldnt figure out why some numbers werent working... Turns out I was reading the buret wrong...

Stupid girl didn't fail me today...

Her question de jour "Do I have to weigh all of these?"

These, referres to the eight settings of KI (Potassium Iodide for you non-science people) which explicitly said in the instruction book said needed to be 2 grams...

I dont know about you, but I don't think I could freehand 2 grams of KI... Especially knowing that it's part of a larger reaction that allows you to get the results that need to be acurate to withing 5ppm in order to pass the lab...

Btw ppm is quite narrow window...

eg. Metro Vancouver has a population of 2 059 499... If you were to count them and come to the conclusion there were, in fact 2 059 512 people in Vancouver, you would fail... as that would be 6ppm (or so)

Again, would you want to be the one to eye the sample?

Well... I need to get to bed... I'm planning an adventure in the morning... I can't tell you, I might get in trouble (I don't need to make the same mistake Regan did)