Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Did I really just do that?

I put a happy face emoticon in the comment line after stopping an acquisition run.

WTF?

Of course, this was a cell that I left in the middle to go to CVS and pick up some stuff. It was still happy when I got back, holding current not more than 1 pA different. By that point though, I start to get the willies using any results. Too long whole-cell and weird stuff happens.

Come to think of it though, I bet if you trawled through my lab notebook, you'd find some "WTF" in there as well. Probably some much worse language to.

So, how many of you out there do the same?

9 comments:

Comrade PhysioProf said...

Dude, my post-doc notebooks are filled with "WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT BAND, MOTHERFUCKER?????", "FUCKING SHIT! DIDN'T WORK AGAIN!", "FUCK< YEAH! GOT CLONE!".

Unknown said...

LOL. My lab notebooks look a lot like CPP's.

In grad school I actually gave my advisor a gel image which had "FUCK YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!" scrawled across it in big black Sharpie. It was a result I had been trying (and failing) to get for a bout 6 months. I'm not sure he was impressed (with the swearing, not the results).

Nat Blair said...

AHAHAHAHAHA that's so CPP! Does The Scientist still do their little bit on publishing images of lab notebooks from "important" findings. Cause they are missing out on some good shit.

@AA - sounds like your advisor had a stick up his ass. I woulda thought that was great.

DamnGoodTechnician said...

I swear a lot - in real life and in my notebooks. Once I started at a pharma, though... they have some pretty nit-picky restrictions on what you can and cannot say in your official legal records (otherwise known as notebooks).

Nat Blair said...

@DGT - What, patent examiners and lawyerly types don't like the f bomb?

Boring jerk offs.

Besides, the annoying language in that shit is ten times more offensive than even the most profanity laced diatribe.

But I'll have to ask my patent examiner buddy and get his take on it.

Unknown said...

Conincidentally, after reading and commenting on this post I went back to the lab to collect some data. The writeup in my lab notebook looks like this:

"Observe labeled loogly-flooglies through eyepiece but can't get any decent imaging of the fuckers because the signal detection on this fucking cheap-ass scope is insufficient to capture fluorescence at required magnification. I hate this motherfucking scope. It is fucking useless. Why did they hire me to do this thing, and not give me the tools to do it? I'm not a fucking magician.

Ms.PhD said...

Me too - like CPP. And smiley faces. And WTF. And exactly what AA said about the crappy microscopes.

Nat Blair said...

Awesome - everybody swears like a sailor in their notebooks. Love it.

@AA - is that a crappy camera problem or a crappy objective problem? Well, either way it sucks, but just curious.

I'll admit, I'm spoiled here in the land of Uncle Howard's Silver Spoon In Mouth. Sometimes I blush at the quality of objectives and whatnot on our typical recording scopes.

Then I proceed to let saline overflow the bath all over it

(ok, actually not - I'm anal as hell about my scope. But judging from the electrolyte fused filter cube holders I've had to extract from scopes around these parts, not everyone feels the same way)

Unknown said...

Nat - it's a crappy whole motherfucking setup problem. The camera's not great, but throwing a fancypantsier camera on this machine wouldn't really solve anything. It's an apotome. Somebody else once aptly called it "the poorman's confocal": a whole lot cheaper but you get what you pay for. The grid and algorithm for extracting the out-of-focus light are fine for things like EGFP, or alexa-conjugated fluorophores but anything with sub-ZOMGAMAZING!!! brightness gets filtered out with the background. Marginally better on other objectives, but of course they don't actually give me field of view that I need to see. !@)($@!#(&#&*#^&%!!!!