Of Light and Binders

Today, working with the Doctoral student, we turned on the Fluorescent microscope and viewed several polymer-modified binders to see if we could identify them interacting with the binder. We were using the RT camera system which was wired into the computer last week, and things seemed to function quite well. As the doctoral student put it, "Our tools are typically shovels and hammers, we aren't used to microscopes." It will take a few more tries to get good images, and verify what we are viewing. But our preliminary tests today indicated that we could see what we wanted and with depth we hadn't anticipated.

Another breakthrough today on the mysql front with data analysis- I am able to filter my queries to eliminate duplicate data, I had to verify the mysql release number and download the right manual- I was using 5.1 previously and getting errors when I attempted to query using commands like select * distinct. Now I know to use a group by and specify the table and column afterwards. Much of the evening was spent studying for my F.E. /EIT exam... its coming up this Saturday.