May 13:   Mother's Day.  Call your mother.

Final Grades have been submitted.

They should be available to you online by Monday, May 14.  Lab notebooks can be picked up from the stockroom starting on Monday.  Ethan is no longer working there -- he has left UT to go to graduate school in music at Rice -- but his replacement Tiffany can get your notebook for you.

I enjoyed this semester, and I hope you did too.  Have a safe and happy summer!

April 24:  I will not be in on Thursday or Friday of this week, but I will have office hours as usual on Monday morning. The TA's will also hold regular office hours until Thursday, May 3.  Be sure to turn in all make-up labs within one week from the time you did them.  No late make-up lab reports will be accepted!

April 20:  The make-up lab schedules are now posted on the End of Semester FAQ page.  Everybody will be working in rooms 4.124 and 4.116.  The TA's will open drawers for you to work from.  Make sure you're there on time -- the TA's are not required to stay late for someone who showed up late, and there are no make-ups after this.

April 14:  I'm back in town following two days at the Texas Library Association's annual conference in San Antonio. If you have never partied with librarians, you don't know what partying is.   Lecture 10, the last in the series (¡Que lástima! as they say in Spanish) is now online.  Experiment 10 is a fairly short lab, and everyone will probably be done after two hours or so.  You will also do TA evaluations and check out of your lab drawer lab this week.

The End of Semester FAQ page is now up.  If you've got questions about anything coming up and you can't find the answer in the syllabus, please check out the End of Semester FAQ page before e-mailing me.

Easter Sunday:  Lecture 9 is finally online.  Experiment 9 is another one of our longer labs, and you'll be collecting a lot of data in lab.  You'll be working in pairs again, so make sure you have a copy of the data before you leave.  There is a cheat sheet on the Freebies page to help you with the write-up for parts 3 and 4 this experiment.

March 30:  The lecture slides for Experiment 8 are now online.  This is one of the longest experiments of the course, and may take you the full four hours.  Most of that time is spent recording temperatures. Bring a watch to lab, or a phone or some other timer device that measures seconds.  I have also posted a hint sheet for the Experiment 8 post-lab on the Freebies page.

March 24:  We're in for another short experiment this week.  In Experiment 7b (parts 1 and 4), we'll be preparing our crystal sample from Experiment 5 for the spectrophotometry portion of the lab by oxidizing away the oxalate, then reducing the iron to Fe(II), and then forming the orange complex ion the same way we did with the Fe(II) stock solution last week.   If all goes well, you'll be out of there in 90 minutes or 2 hours.  There is a cheat sheet for this lab write-up on the Freebies page, and the lecture slides are online on the Lectures page.

BONUS:  Are you wondering how CH204 fits into your career goals?  Here's a list of ten exciting careers from CareerBuilder.com that CH204 helps prepare you for.

March 17:  And a Happy St. Patty's Day to one and all!  Spring Break ended a little too soon for me, but this week's lab is a short one, and fairly painless, too.  Best of all, since we're only doing half of the experiment, there's no lab report to do this week!  We're doing parts 2 and 3 of Experiment 7, and as long as you mix your solutions carefully, you should end up with an absorbance plot so magnificent it's worthy of being showcased in the Louve (or at least hung by magnets on your mom's refrigerator).  The lecture notes for this part of Experiment 7 are online.

3 Marzo:  Experiment 6 is now online.  This week we'll isolate our green crystals and then do three titrations in order to determine how much oxalate is in the crystals. Do it right the first time and you're out of there in 90 minutes easy.

February 24:  The Experiment 5 lecture slides are up.  In this week's lab you will collect one lonely data point (the mass of your starting material).  Make sure you record your observations as you carry out the reaction, and include these in your report, and give complete answers to the Discussion Questions.

February 18: The lecture slides for Experiment 4 are now online.  I have also posted a grade calculator spreadsheet on the Freebies page.  It's one way you can keep track of your grade throughout the semester.  I'll talk about it in class this week.  I have also posted a pdf file of a cheat sheet on the Freebies page that will help you with the calculations for the Experiment 4 report.  I will hand out a hardcopy in class; it's posted online in case you lose the paper copy.

February 11:  The Experiment 3 lecture slides are now online.  Experiment 3 is a short lab -- some of you will be packing up after only an hour, and most of you will be gone in less than 90 minutes.  But the write-up is fairly detailed and will take longer than you expect based on how short the lab itself is.  So get started early on the report!  Did you hear me?  Start early!  Make sure you understand what the post-lab questions are asking.

We will have a lot of make-up students in lab this week, especially on Monday night. This week only, we can have two students working in one spot, so if there's a visitor in your lab this week, please share the bench space.

IF YOU HAVE EVENING EXAMS THAT CONFLICT WITH LABS, you should already have told me about them. The longer you wait, the lower you fall on the make-up priority list, and you may find yourself with three make-up labs during the last week of the semester (and that means three lab write-ups in one week!).  You're not screwing me over by waiting until the last minute to tell me about an exam, you're screwing yourself.

February 4:  SUPER BOWL SUNDAY  The Power Point slides for Experiment 2 are posted on the Lectures page.  And remember, 85% of your grade in this class depends on the Bears winning the Super Bowl, so make sure you cheer for the appropriate team today.

Update:  Da Bears lost, but the way they played they deserved to.  Congrats to Tony Dungy and Peyton Manning, both of them classy guys, and the rest of the Colts on a deserved Super Bowl victory.  Oh, and I just added links to the Lectures page, so now you can actually get to the Experiment 2 lecture slides that I uploaded before the game.  Sorry 'bout that!

February 3:  NEW TA OFFICE HOURS:  The Wednesday morning session that Yu-shan shared with Ashley is now gone, and has been replaced by a Wednesday afternoon session from 3:30 to 4:30.  Ashley will be working that office hour every week.  The online syllabus (pdf file) has been updated to reflect this change.

January 27:  Yu-shan has left the building!  If you are in one of Yu-shan Yeh's labs, you will have a new TA starting this week.  Yu-shan has been asked by the department to take over one of the physical chemistry labs, and she will no longer be helping out with CH 204.  We hate having to pull the old switcheroo on her unsuspecting students, and we will also miss Yu-shan's knowledge and experience!  If Yu-shan was your TA, your new TA will be Ashley Garcia.  This came up rather suddenly on Friday afternoon.

The lecture notes for experiment 1 are now online.

January 25: Note to Wednesday night students:  My sore throat has gotten worse, much worse.  I have done more Internet research, and I believe I am in the early stages of Bowden's Malady.  If I don't make it to the end of the semester, I want all of you to carry on without me. Oh, and you all better go get yourselves checked out right quick, just to be safe.  It's highly contagious from what I hear.

January 24:  Some CH204 students are reporting that the Co-op is sold out of lab manuals already.  If you didn't get one, check with the Co-op and ask them to order more.  In the meantime, Experiment 1 is posted on the Freebies page as a 2.5MB pdf file.

January 19:  All right, we're getting off to a later start with this web site than I expected, thanks in large part to my strict adherence to the law.  Murphy's Law, that is. But it's up and running at last, so poke around, see what's here, and make yourself at home.  And for crying out loud, if you don't already have a lab notebook, lab manual, and combination lock GET ONE NOW.

January 1:  Our first class meeting will be the week of January 22.  There will be no class and no lab until then, so during that first week when we don't meet go ahead and sleep late or clean your room or call your mom or do whatever else it is you should be doing but don't have time for.  Make sure you've got the lab manual and lab notebook, and have a combination lock for the first day.  The Co-op always runs out of CH 204 lab manuals.  Always.  So get down there quick and snatch one up if you haven't already.  I will show no sympathy, none I say, to anyone who disregards my warning and then shows up without a lab manual.  None.  Try me.  You'd get more sympathy from a Cretaceous caprolite.  Get a lab manual before they run out!   And that's all I've got to say about that.