As Yahtzee once put it, if you beat a dead horse vigorously enough, its constant twitching will at least give a semblance of activity. He may have been talking about Nintendo's attitude towards Mario, but it can be easily applied to many things.
My previous incarnation of a blog died over a year ago. So considering this as a rebirth, it would be the fifth incarnation. My first three stalled after about two entries, the last one i kept going for at least 15 months.
So, here we go again. Not much has changed in the last year or so. Still at University studying Chemistry. It seemed like a good idea at the time, not so sure any more. The film and tv industry has Chemistry portrayed as a mysterious witchcraft pursued by mad scientists with wild hair, surrounded by stacks of bubbling glassware filled with multicoloured gently steaming elixir, or as brisk whitecoated laboratory dwellers who are a little too good looking to be entirely credible, feeding samples into huge machines with big screens and neon lighting that beep and print out the correct answer first time after about three seconds.
The reality, as one discovers with crushing disappointment, is far from either scenario. On the few occasions we're allowed into the lab (the course is mainly theoretical, thanks to a combination of Health & Safety and chronic underfunding) you spend grinding hours feeding endless quantities of clear solution into a funnel, and sometime between the Second Coming and Judgement Day later, are left with half a teaspoon of anonymous white powder in the bottom of a test tube.
As for the machines; no fancy lighting, no brushed aluminium, no stacks of cables or glowing control panels. Its a box, and to make it worse, they're all beige! Why do equipment manufacturers do this? Plastic is available in every colour under the sun, and many more besides, yet they all use beige making their machines look less fun than a weekend with John Sage. And rather than a neat yay or nay on an inbuilt screen, possibly accompanied by a beep or even a klaxon, they trigger a printout of numbers and lines which in the fourteenth century would have got you burned at the stake but now mean you have to spend another hour shut in a room with a calculator and a supply of Prozac to decipher.
I guess what i'm ultimately saying is, its not as much fun as i thought it would be.
Link to my previous (2008's) Blog