On firmware update

As usual I was super stressed over the weekend over firmware upgrade issues. I was never IT savvy, let alone acquainted with computer terms. Firmware? Driver? Option pack? IP address?

On a happy note, my job breezed through today! Thanks to my readings and preparations over the weekend.

Plus the help of 2 crucial people, Mr C and Mr H.

And some luck. :)

Maintenance #1: Column care and storage condition

I chanced upon some notes I got from a seminar from a long time ago, some column care procedure for sharing.

1. On backpressure
Always pump mobile phase from low flow, say 0.1ml/min then increase to normal flow rate.
Back pressure must typically be kept at <3500 psi (conventional HPLC columns and systems)
UPLC columns have higher pressure limits (more than or equal to 9000 psi)
In the event of high backpressure, reverse flush column.

2. On equilibrating column
Equilibrate column with mobile phase for 10-30 column volumes.
(Ion-pair containing mobile phase may require long to equilibrate.)

3. On sample preparation
Filter samples, 0.2um or 0.45 syringe filters, guard column
Sample cleanup, SPE, protein precipitation and so on.

3. On column storage
Never store columns with buffers, in long term.

Flush with 10 column volumes of mobile phase without buffer to remove buffer and salts.
Flush with 10 column volumes of mutually miscible solvent such as Methanol and ACN.
Flush with 20 column volumes of strong solvent, THF or IPA to remove strongly adsorbed sample components.
Reverse the process and equilibrate with mobile phase.
(Who has the time to do that?!)

Typical solvent storage conditions for silica-based columns:
Reverse phase: ACN/Water (65:35)
Normal phase: IPA or hexane
Ion-exchange: Methanol
SEC or Diol: 0.05% NaN3 in Water or 10% Methanol

With good column care maintenance, you can
- extend column lifetimes
- ensure optimal column performance
- minimizes downtime!

Till next time.

Stress is an understatement

I came to a realization.

As a field service engineer, you basically have to say goodbye to life.

Tons of readings after work to handle odd complaints.

What seemed perfectly normal to me is deemed as instrument failure to user.

Too paranoid.

How can I better convince customers otherwise?

그냥...

How long more do I need, to become the person I want to be?

It's an endless marathon.

Troubleshooting #1: Plunger homing fault (1)

I performed a PM today and an error pops out when I attempted to reboot the instrument. And I saw "Plunger homing fault (1)".

The instrument worked fine before I started the PM. Checked the history and darn. Some related errors reported before... Basically the instrument could not restart, and hanged during initialization. Can't even do a dry/wet prime or anything.

I was reluctant to replace the torpedo because we had a really tight timeline this week. The torpedo needs a few hours to replace, together with some diagnostic tests. Error suggests the motor drive may have some internal problem. Could also have been other problems like the cable (shorting), encoder or PCB, or the fuse blown. Anyway... After rebooting the instrument a few times, I was losing hope.

I decided to give it one last try. To the solvent delivery system, please 'see' the home position of the plunger! Shook the torpedo a little. Maybe it helps. Maybe something was stuck or dislodged, and needed a little knock. Maybe...

"Initializing needle and syringe..."
"Initializing carousel..."
.
.
"Idle" (!) It worked!

Let's do a wet prime and run a flow. ...Plungers working fine!
Couldn't believe it. Let's try restarting the system, again. No more plunger homing error.

Amazed that problem was fixed by just shaking it. Sounds stupid, but it worked. Plausible that something was out of alignment, and shaking it brought it back to its rightful position.

Moral of the story: Don't be too quick to jump into conclusion. I almost wasted 4-5 hours. It's a lucky day.


Update March 2017.
Since I've been getting a lot more views on this topic, I will add more information to it.

What users do:
Loosen the inline filter before restarting the instrument
Inline filter of the pump is where all the particles are accumulated at, there could have been too much particles that it is blocking the movement of the plungers, from returning to its home position.

Hard truths

Like any other employees, what we value most in a job are, job satisfaction, environment, people, learning curve.

But from industry's point of view, nobody gives a damn about your learning process.

As long as you can't produce result, you're in for deep trouble.

And nobody cares about how overwhelmed you are.

The tears and sweat you put in.

Everyone is just jumping into meaningless conclusions, I wonder if there is anyone who is truly neutral about this situation.

The last thing we need is to put people down, we really should help each other to drive this issue forward.

I don't know what's gonna happen to this person. But I foresee the same thing might happen to me in the next few years or so.

Thought of the day

There is always something to learn from everyone (okay, not always but most of the time). If you think it is not worth doing it, then you're missing on a great chance to learn.

Little sacrifices in life

Looking at my piano hands, they are now chapped and bruised...

Feeling a little sad.

Because I need a rice bowl, house, and living.

But such is the life of an engineer.

On difficult people at work

Some people blamed you for a mistake that you shouldn't have made.
Because they were unwilling to share their knowledge and teach you in the first place.
Then they even tried ways to take advantage of your skills.
Isn't it frustrating?

Signs of insecurity and selfishness.
It is the need to hold on to power.
Spitefully throwing people off who are perceived as threats.
Politics or immaturity?

I was more disgusted when this person had a 180 degree change in attitude,
after I submitted my resignation.
Pretty amazed at how immediate she changed her stance.
Suddenly those past events never seemed to have happened.

Talking to an ex-colleague the other day,
I felt comforted that I wasn't alone in this.
Now, there will always be a tinge of abhorrence whenever I think about it.
I just want to look forward to my new life.



Why do I feel so poetic.

我毕业了。

结束了一段旅程。这不是句点，而是新未知的开始。坚持到最后，总会看见一道曙光。

On part-time studies

Because no employer will support you when you need some time off for your Masters exams and whatever crap. 

But you will grow to be a greater person after passing through this difficult time. 

화이팅.

My views on Pink Dot

I was rather disturbed by the recent slew of events.
Pink dot --- Championing for the 'freedom to love'.
Okay choose whoever you love, that's none of my business.

But Lawrence Khong and followers were pitting against pink dot. They were perturbing, insulting and defaming. These are their main (and weak) arguments:

1) They have no renewal, and we have serious issues of declining births.

It is a fact that homosexuals will never have offsprings.

How about heterosexual couples who are married, but choose not to have children? Or singles who choose not to get married? Why don't you oppose these childless couples and singles instead?


Look at the root cause. High cost of living and lack of work life balance are real reasons for the lack of offspring. How many percentage do homosexuals contribute to? Why don't you champion for lower cost of living? And champion for arranged marriage like how it works in India, so everyone sets up a happy family?


2) Statistics show that they are causes of HIV and STDs 
It is more correct to say premarital sex, multiple sex partners and needles sharing are the root causes. Please get this clear.


3) Being homosexual is against nature
There are, and always have been outliers existing in nature. That's nature. How about eradicating autistic children, the down syndromes, or the albino lion?


My point
Love is a feeling, you can't dictate your feelings, who you want or don't want to love. Common sense. So why restrict who people love? Can you stop loving your mother? Your father? Your husband / wife / boyfriend / girlfriend / teacher / dog?  

I'm totally turned off by how Lawrence Khong try to spread homophobia messages. Our society has come so far, building tolerance and acceptance within the community.

Wear white and you will take many steps backwards.

There are more urgent issues at hand, so stop making a mountain out of a molehill.

Public servants may not openly comment on Government policies

Source: The Real Singapore

On one hand, a staff of RP received an email (19 November 2013) regarding proper code of conduct, most strikingly not being able to openly comment on government policies.

On the other hand we have Ms Pushparani Nadarajah criticizing the Government statement in a 200 crowd at the Asia Education Expo (21 November 2013). "How many of our leaders and top officers who say that every school is a good school put their children in ordinary schools near their home? (Only) until they actually do so are parents going to buy (it)."

I was hoping to see a response by the government. But, duh, it's only natural that they keep silent on this.

Our education in a nutshell

Source: http://www.quickmeme.com/p/3vpax2

I know this is practically applicable to every other countries in the world.
This is flawed, but there is no better solution.
Baby steps are taken to change it - though drastic changes will not happen in near future.

Albert Einstein trivials

Did you know --- that Einstein... other than being best known for his E=mc2, he was a violin player too?

In one of my assignments, I had to write about the life story of a famous physicist. Initially I had picked Louis De Broglie, but after reading pages and pages, his life was too boring, or perhaps not very well-documented. Other than he had a brother who was working with X-rays helped him to think about the duality of particles and waves, there's nothing else much exciting enough to get me fill up 2 pages of words.

Why not pick someone who is more famously known? Perhaps Einstein?

And wow... I could not stop reading. There are so much about him that I am not sure if I am missing out any important stuff. I think his life... would make an interesting essay.

With some of my thoughts and interpretation, here it goes.

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid¹.” Famously quoted by Einstein, this was known to suggest each unique individual excels differently. True enough, the legendary physicist too had his fair share of struggles – he was a late developer in speech deliveries; he failed his entrance examinations at age of sixteen and his violin skills were debatably amateurish.²

From Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses – p. 98

Besides physics, his greatest passions were music and violin. Einstein picked up the violin since young, much to the influence by his pianist mother. But he did not relish it. His love for music was only ignited by Mozart’s sonatas much later, and in his lifetime he often socialised by performing chamber music to some private audience³. If only he could bestow similar faithfulness to his wife as he did to his violin ‘Lina’ ⁴ – his love life was however much promiscuous.

With his mediocre looks and his dishevelled hairstyle, it was surprisingly incredible that he was well-embraced by ladies. From having an illegitimate daughter, he married, re-married, cheated on his second wife with his secretary, and had recorded 6 other women he loved^5,6. He was nonetheless blessed to be born a German. If he were born a Chinese, historically he would have already been tied to a pig cage and thrown into the Yellow River for adultery in that period of time.

Like the women in his love affairs, his theory of relativity was likewise as alluring. In 1905, that was one of the most significant years in the field of physics. He brought apparently unrelated elements together and laid the foundations that energy (E) was directly proportional to mass (m), with speed of light (c) as a constant⁷. He became best known for his E=mc², although he was not awarded the Nobel Prize of this.

Fast forward to World War II, he facilitated the development of the atomic bomb. He endorsed a letter to the then President Franklin Roosevelt of United States, urging the development of Uranium bombs. With Adolf Hitler’s territorial ambitions a massive threat, they agreed that they could not let the Germans lead the construction of the atomic bomb. However afterwards he was excluded from bomb project as the research team could not trust him to keep the secret.

In the makings of the atomic bomb, we could relate how E=mc² was utilized in the Uranium chain reaction. The researchers knew the mass of Uranium before fission, and the mass of the elements that will result after splitting of the nucleus, with the latter being slightly less massive. The missing mass would be converted to the total energy of the explosion:

(E)  Energy of explosion = (m) Missing mass  x (c ²) speed of light ²  

That is a huge amount of energy for this little change in mass. The United States finally bombed Japan, 3 months after the surrender of Germany in 1945, killing 80,000 casualties, injuring more people with burns, radiation sickness, and other damages.

As a lifelong pacifist, Einstein regretted his role in signing the letter that recommended atomic bombs be made. Throughout his years, he published more than 300 papers, with over 150 political and humanitarian topics. He eventually died of heart failure, alone on his deathbed.

References:

[1] Matthew Kelly. Living Every Day with Passion and Purpose, The Rhythm of Life, 2004, p. 80.

[2] Eric Koch. Einstein the Violinist — Did He Really Play So Badly? Sketches. 2012, retrieved from http://erickoch.ca/

[3] Arthur L. Miller. A Genius Finds Inspiration in the Music of Another. The New York Times. 2006, retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com

[4] Josh Jones. The Musical Mind of Albert Einstein: Great Physicist, Amateur Violinist and Devotee of Mozart. Open Culture. 2013, retrieved from http://www.openculture.com

[5] Deborah Arthurs. Was Einstein the world’s worst husband? Wife ordered to keep room tidy, serve three meals a day – but expect NO affection… and she must stop talking when he demands it. Dailymail. 2012, retrieved from http://www.dailymail.co.uk

[6] NBC News. New letters shed light on Einstein’s love life. NBC News. 2006, retrieved from http://www.nbcews.com

[7] Albert Einstein. Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy-content? Annals of Physics. 1905, 18:639