HPLC

today i have a date with an HPLC... as a matter of fact, i have to leave in like 10 minutes. for those who don't know, HPLC stands for high performance liquid chromatography, and the machines that do this type of analysis tend to be bitchy. yeah, i said it - HPLC's are bitchy. i spent two months getting things right on the one i used for my undergraduate research, and now i have about a week to get the new one figured out so i can get some results for my directed study project. yay. the problem is that the "new" machine is actually really freakin' old, and it hasn't been used in three years. to make things even better, no one who is currently at USA has ever used this particular piece of equipment. i had a guy from pennsylvania come down and help me with the one i was using two years ago (which was borrowed from the chemistry department), but it looks like i'll be pretty much on my own with this one. anne (my undergraduate advisor, current committee member, and user of HPLC in her grad school days) is going to try to help, but i'm still thinking that this is going to be a pain in the ass. this is a really useful technique for identifying phenolic acids in my seagrass samples, and the new machine allows me to use a better solvent system that should allow me to identify even more components of my samples than i already have, but i think that the next couple of weeks are going to be a headache.