Apparantly, a power cut at Warwick University has led to “multiple electrical failures” in the IT gear there, and users should expect “major disruption for the next week.”

This really isn’t acceptable. The supply of clean, reliable power for a machine room has been a fundamental priority for decades, and Warwick still can’t get it right. I’m sure that ITS will pass the blame for this catastrophe along to Estates, but that is really avoiding the problem. It is up to the customer ( i.e. ITS) to make sure that they get the services that they need, and that these services are trustworthy.

This post is not a dig at the ITS staff who I’m sure are at this very moment doing their best to restore a room full of smouldering piles of hardware into a shiny network. Rather, I feel that this event is yet another indication of management failure, either within ITS or within the university more generally.

Perhaps the decision was taken not to invest in adequate UPS/generator capacity. But if you add up the total lost productivity from a university having no network for a period of days, I think that the cost of a more substantial power supply becomes good value.

Deconvolute that. (Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggghhhhhhhhh)

My best photos at Max Hammond Photos.
More of my photography on Flickr.

I’m going to miss this.

Writing About:Max Hammond Photography » Blog Archive » Difficult Employment Decisions

And it’s looking good… should have a definite answer soon but I think it’s going to work out.

deep breath :-)

Once it all turns green, my experimental is written. (This won’t look right unless you’ve viewing it on my blog. Custom stylesheets n’all that jazz)

So. I’m still waiting to hear if I’m able to work for a small consultancy company that offered me a job last year (it’s an issue to do with nationality, working for the government and all that). I should hear fairly soon.

Now, the reason that this became stressful is that I also applied to work at BT One IT – BT’s technology group. This looks like a really good grad scheme, decent salary, nice company to work for etc. I’d be very happy to work there.

They offered me a job last week, I told them that I needed some time to sort out my other offer.

So. 2 job offers. Unfortunately, BT needed an answer today. So take the certain job at BT, or take the risk on a much smaller company who may not even be allowed to employ me?

I took the risk. Told BT that I was sorry but I had to turn them down. Apologized gratuitously for messing them aroud.

Very stressful. Only time will tell if this was a good call.

Now, at

Substituting into the Eyring equation, and assuming that κ=1, which is typically true for polyatomic molecules in adiabatic reactions.

Where a = 1.914 × 10^-2^ kJ mol^-1^ K^-1^
(Just because I can)

I’ve been listening to an old favourite again – the soundtrack from Lola Rennt (Run, Lola, Run). If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know that the music is an important part of the whole, and it really has the sense of driving the film forwards.

It’s a good old-fashioned techno/trance affair, with a few remixes of some of the tunes. I wouldn’t say that it’s an album that you’d sit down to listen to, but as music to turn up when you’re trying to focus on work it’s excellent, and there’s a real sense of urgency that helps me to focus on what I’m doing.

So, four stars. It’s no work of art but it got me through revising for my finals, and it’s helping me write my thesis, so it can’t be that bad ;-)

I’ve been offered a job! Kind of.

Small consultancy firm, friendly company, had an interview a couple of weeks ago, went well, spoke to the Big Boss today, who wants to offer me a job.

I’m really excited about this – it’s the first job that I’ve come across since the Fast Stream that has really excited me. I’ve been applying to others, which I’m sure would have been fine, but nothing that really made me excited, like this one did.

We shall see.

The purpose of my trip to Brussels was actually to evaluate the performance of some of my compounds under a range of conditions, using a high-throughput reactor that our collaborator at BP/Solvay (now Innovene) have, called an Argonaut Endeavour

The endeavour is a nice piece of engineering, designed for high pressure, high temperature work, specifically “hydrogenations, carbonylations and polymerizations”. It allows you to run 8 reactions in parallel, under differing conditions. We ran 2 catalysts in each run, with the same set of 4 conditions for each, testing temperature dependence and hexene incorporation. The protocol we used involved pre-activating the catalyst with MAO before injection into the reactor, so it’s important whatever reacting the catalyst with MAO forms is stable for as long as it takes you to inject it into the reactor.

It is probably not realistic to test more than 2 catalysts in any given run, given this activation procedure, it’ll become difficult to keep things moving.

The biggest problem with this reactor is the design of the injector ports. BP have developed a way of injecting under an inert atmosphere, which is nice, but the reactor is clearly not designed for this type of operation. The injector ports are fiddly, delicate parts, and whatever you inject must pass through an extremely fine (0.5mm?) tube into the reactor [I believe that the fine diameter tubing is necessary to make it possible to inject against the pressure of the reactor].

The problem here is that if you inject aluminum alkyls such as MAO, once the inert atmosphere is removed, alumina forms on all the surfaces of the injector ports, requiring a complete strip-down of the injection system after each run. Further, it is easy for the narrow tubing to become blocked, either with alumina, or with polymer formed during the run. To unblock these tubes is a serious hassle, without guaranteed success. More to the point, occasionally an injector will block after the reactor is assembled; the first one knows about it is one is trying to inject the catalyst or solvent to start the run – in this situation it is impossible to unblock, and the result is that that vessel cannot be run.

During the run, the conditions within each reactor are monitored, and usually controlled well. On one occasion, the system failed to control the pressure of ethylene in a vessel to the required 10 bar, and allowed it to rise to the supply pressure of 15 bar; it is possible that the inlet valve had become blocked. In some further cases, the measured uptake of ethylene became negative. This must be an instrumentation issue. Basically, the uptake charts generated are probably more use as qualitative measures rather than quantitative. The really interesting data from the week’s work will be the final productivity numbers under these conditions, and the analyses of hexene incorporation and branching characteristics.

In one week, we conducted 56 separate polymerisation reactions, testing 12 catalysts under varying conditions. To do this work using Schlenk tests would probably have taken in the order of 2 months of solid work. There was some time overhead involved in shipping the chemicals to Brussels, and of course in the travel and time spend arranging incidentals to the trip, but nonetheless we collected a significant amount of information regarding our catalysts.