forgot to blog this

I was filtering through my stuff and found this blog that I forgot to put up.  Enjoy:

01 June 2007

Holy moly it is June! I did not even realize that it was so late in the year already. Well, today was my first full day in the laboratory at the chemical engineering department. I started off poorly by waking up late at 0900. I guess I did not hear my 0730 watch alarm. I started quickly, skipped breakfast and walked briskly to the department and arrived at 0930. Everybody was there already but nobody noticed that I was gone since I am new and few people actually know who I am.

Admittedly I don’t remember today’s events in order but here goes. I first looked around for the girl that I was to follow. Her name is Florise or something. She’s Asian and apparently the French have a hard time pronouncing her actual name so Florise is her nickname. Anyway, I had no luck finding her so I continued to read articles about membrane diffusion experiments and who has done what. It turns out there are a lot of scientists who have done very similar experiments to the one that I am attempting. They have successful results. In all honesty, I do not know what is unique about our experiment, but Professor Lape is well versed in the membrane-diffusion world so she knows that we are unique in some way…I just can recall it immediately. Hopefully we are still pursuing something new that others have yet to explore.

At 1000, I took my laptop to the computer guy in the department so that he could set me up for internet access. He said it would be ready at 1400. I could not read more articles since all were electronic. I headed over to the library to see if I could use their computers. A couple of them were wired for the internet so I started searching for articles, but typing http://www.google.com lead to http://www.google.fr!!! It was really frustrating because all of my searches turned up French pages! Grrr!!! In the UK I could get out of the default www.google.co.uk search page and head to the American one, but for some reason France will have none of it.

Crap, my computer froze and now I have to retype about half of what I was writing…

Eventually I got tired of the French keyboard and went to read some journal articles that the library had. They did not have any of the membrane journals that I was used to but they did have some interesting ones on fuel cells, oil, and renewable energy resources. I tried to read some of them but they were too technically advanced for me. So it was 1130 and about time to check if Florise was in again.

I went to the troisieme etage laborataire (third floor laboratory) and voila! She was there! Sure enough she was a French-born Vietnamese girl and her name is Func Tien (pronounced foon tsien). She showed me her PTMSP cast membranes. Her experiments are related to mine however she is doing a full characterization of the membrane and not just a separation property like I. The problem is that PTMSP is very expensive and she will not be making any more membranes anytime soon. That leaves me hanging because I really have nothing to do. She is now testing mechanical properties of the membrane and we (HMC) are not interested in that. The diffusion apparatus is broken so I cannot do any experiments on my own. I really have no clue what I am doing here. Professor Favre is so busy that he cannot spend any time with me and same is true of Professor Rosaird. I am beginning to think that my coming here is unfounded and academically backward.

I started talking to Jacques, Wen, and (?) in the work room about their PhD research. They all sound pretty interesting: ion exchange membranes, diffusion experiments, and polymer synthesis. They are confused that I am hanging around yet am not doing a PhD. The undergraduate equivalent in France is a license. I asked for places to go hiking in the area and found that there are none for quite some ways. Jacques recommended Gerardmer which is about two hours away. I saw some pictures on GoogleEarth and it does look amazing.

I will go hiking on Sunday since the weather forecast looks promising then. I sent an email invitation to Professor Favre and his family, we’ll see if he is busy or not.

I finished up the day sending emails and reading articles online. I decided that Saturday would be a rest and relaxation day in Nancy. Sunday is faire le marche (hiking). Tonight I went out to dinner. I walked through the city looking for a place to eat. Nothing looked really appealing. I found a Chinese restaurant where I ordered fried rice and shrimp. I asked the employee how much it cost and she said 13 euros! Whoa! It wasn’t even that much either! I already knew that the food would not taste great and immediately regretted going to the restaurant. Oh well. I picked up some Hoegaarden beer and salami at a grocery store. The food was indeed not great but edible. The salami was terrible compared to those sold in Borough market. The beer is great! They leave the yeast in the beer after fermentation and it creates a clouded white color. It tastes fruity and light.

Tonight I simply watched television, did sudokus, and wrote this journal. Bonsoir toute les personnes!