kareina

Sigh. When we ordered the equipment for this lab the purchase was made through ThermoScientific for a "complete laser ablation ICP-MS system". Thermo made the ICP-MS part themselves, and the Laser ablation attachment was made by ESI. Since we purchased through Thermo we have the service contract through them, and if anything goes wrong with the laser they make contact with the other company and send out someone to service it. Almost two years ago now ESI (or at least the laser part) was bought out by Elemental, which made for delays in arranging the next annual laser service, as there appeared to be both issues in communication between them and Thermo, and issues with being understaffed as some employees transitioned to the new company, some stayed with ESI (and others jumped ship?). When I got home last week it was to find out that the laser has broken down (the tubes that carry helium to the laser sample chamber had become disconnected, and when we reconnected them helium no longer flows through the line. When I figure out how to repair it myself I sent messages to Thermo and cc'd Elemental

That was Friday. It took until today Thermo to reply saying that they will put me in contact with a technician, right after which I was cc's on an email exchange between someone who stayed with ESI (whose name I recognize) telling the Thermo person that she needs to contact Elemental (and providing the official letter from 2017 announcing the change). I laughed that she had contacted the wrong company, waited another couple of hours, and heard nothing. At which point I replied to her with the names and contact info for the people I had dealt with at Elemental, and she replied with thanks as she hadn't gotten that information!

Of course all this means that the technician from Elemental didn't write to me with questions in preparation for further troubleshooting till after I had put in five hours today (I work half time) and went home for a nap (I am not yet completely current in this time zone after the trip), so I didn't see his message for three hours. Clearly I should have written to her sooner. But seriously, didn't they notice that I had cc'd Elemental and not ESI on my first message?

I have recently switched to using a really lovely computer program that specializes in taking geochemical data and turning it into easy to make graphs and diagrams. The program comes pre-loaded with a variety of diagrams from the geological literature--if you tell the program when you import your dataset if you compositions are measured in weight percent, or ppm, or ppb, or whatever units were used for each element or oxide, it will happily do whatever calculations are needed to transform your data into the correct units to plot it on a graph just like the ones in the often-cited papers in the literature, so you can easily see how your rock composition compares with others.

It will let you set up colour coordination, symbol shapes, and symbol size based on any scheme you want. If your data has a column for rock type you can tell it to make all basalt blue and all sandstone red, if you want, and if you do it will change all the graphs you have open to show the same colour scheme. Or you can look at one graph, notice that this bunch of samples is unusually high in iron, and wonder if they are also different in other ways--in that case you select those points on the graph, tell the program "make these pink" (or whatever colour you think shows up easily compared to everything else), and with the push of that one button those same samples suddenly show up as pink on all the other graphs, making it the work of seconds to glance and see if they are also different on the other graphs.

Needless to say, I have been very happy with all of the many, many ways this program makes my work easier. However, there is one feature, which, if it is there, I haven't yet found. Therefore I have just sent the below note to their support people:

I have tried searching the help menus, but if what I am looking for is in there I don't know what to call it, so I thought I would ask you guys if it is possible.

I want a quick easy way to compare my diagrams with those that have been published elsewhere. I have the other author's graphs in pdf, and I would like to superimpose mine over them to see if the samples are plotting in the same region, a similar region, or a different region.

One option is, of course, to open a drawing program, import the published graph on one layer, then put my diagram or graph from ioGas on another layer, delete, or change to no fill, the white rectangle at the back of the graph or diagram, re-size the objects in one or both layers till they are on the same scale, then look through the graph of my data to see the underlying published graph and how the two data sets compare.

However, this is a tedious process, and, having had so many other processes made ever so much simpler since switching to ioGas, I am hoping that there is a simpler way to do this, too. Perhaps an option to import an image into ioGas, tell it coordinates for three points (like one does in Leapfrog or GoCad when one imports a map, but in this case the coordinates might be X = 0, Y = 0, and X =0, Y =5, and Y = 0, X = 5), then tell the program which graph or diagram it should be associated with, and have it as another layer that can be turned on or off and re-sized with the diagram, making it easy to compare one's own data with that of another.

Please tell me this is possible, and how to do it (+ what it is called), or, failing that, please tell me you like the idea, and it is a feature that is coming soon. :-)