Excimer will not be thrilled...

but there is no carbon in this post. I've been trying in vain to come up with a topic for the past few days. See, nothing I'm doing in the lab will suffice, because it hasn't been published.[1] I read through a few papers that seemed like they might have been blogging material, but ultimately decided against writing anything about them. The classes I'm taking are interesting and occasionally throw a nifty tangent my way, though. So today's class is brought to you by my spectroscopy class.[2]

We're all familiar with Gaussian to some degree, right? I mean, we've at least heard of it? In case I am wrong in making this assumption, Gaussian is a pretty sweet little computational program. It's painfully easy to use. The downside is that it can take a while to run some things. Reportedly, the majority of my university's supercomputer time is eaten by Gaussian.[3] Hearing this surprised me, because there aren't any strictly computational chemists here. I can think of a few groups who would find it useful, but our department is not large in the first place.

Well, other people apparently noticed the timing issues too, and they set out to write their own code that would handle a few things more efficiently.[4] Aaaaand you can find them here.

The counter to Banned by Gaussian can be found at this page on Gaussian.com.

Of course, I don't mean to insinuate by posting about it that I have a position on the issue, just that I've had writer's block.[5] It's probably been at least mentioned on some blog or other at some point, but since it's new to me and I thought it was a little amusing, I decided to share anyway.

Gaussian people, please do not ban me!

[1] Never mind that it's very exciting. One thing is nearing completion and another is still gaining momentum and new directions. I wish I could say something about this, but it wouldn't be a good idea.
[2] The class itself is downright terrifying. It's a little like a freezing cold shower first thing in the morning, except with numbers. Still fun, though.
[3] I wonder how much of this is lost to a particular error message I used to see rather frequently that required restarting of the computer. (Just the computer I was using for GaussView, and thankfully not the supercomputer.)
[4] I have heard that symmetry is among these things. Confirm? Deny?

[5] Not to mention a case of too-many-things-going-on-in-the-lab as well...