Ian's Blog

Extraction of ibuprofen from Advil tablets

2010-02-02 05:02 by Ian

After cleaning out a medicine cabinet in my house, I found a bottle of Advil tablets that was expired in 2007. As long as I was going to discard them, I decided to satisfy a curiosity about how they were constructed. This is my first attempt at isolation of ibuprofen from Advil gel-tabs.

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Take the Time

2010-01-08 21:21 by Ian

Lyrics to an amazing Dream Theater song.

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An accessible introduction to PHP optimization

2009-09-08 02:09 by Ian

This was a ticket that I had from a customer who wanted us to increase the upper-limit on PHP script execution because his crappy script wouldn’t finish in time before our server-wide limit shut down his PHP process.

I’m posting it with the hope that it will be of help to someone new to PHP trying to write a cleaner script.

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One of my better arguments from August

2009-08-29 07:07 by Ian

An argument from the Google Finance boards. I have omitted irrelevant posts, cleaned up the ordering, and saved the image posted locally; all with the intent of increasing the readability. If you don’t trust my edits, you can find the original discussion at this location for as long as Google decides to keep it.

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Mercury distillation

2009-08-27 00:30 by Ian

These are my lab notes and photos for the mercury distillation.

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Salvinorin Extraction

2009-08-23 03:06 by Ian

This is an online notebook entry. Here I use a soxhlet extractor to pull salvinorins from Salvia divinorum. The workup is performed on the extracting solvent to remove chlorophyll and oils from the product.

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Liquid metal

2009-08-20 14:44 by Ian

Picked up about 11.5kg of mercury yesterday and cleaned it up. This was my procedure and pictures of the results.

Cross-filed under photography because I took lots of photos of the mercury while I was cleaning it. The pictures can’t do it justice. The stuff is beautiful.

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