Inorganic flowers
2010-06-29 07:00 by Ian
I cleaned out my waste beakers last week. There was one in particular that had evaporated to dryness and left some interesting crystals.
Mercury (II) Chloride
2010-05-22 21:35 by Ian
In an endeavor to make higher-purity mercury, I decided to reduce it from one of its salts. But first, I have to make and purify the salt.
Good day to be alive
2010-04-23 03:31 by Ian
I had been awake all night programming. I went to sleep and rose at about 16:30 to handle my “morning” routine. I left the house to get coffee and I saw this fantastic rainbow.
Salesman in livechat
2010-03-15 18:35 by Ian
Every so often, some salesman or wise-guy decides to abuse the chat system. I have developed a subtle defense. An un-edited chat transcript follows….
Preparation of bromoethane
2010-03-06 17:37 by Ian
This is an attempt to brominate a primary alcohol.
Comment [2]
Concentrating sulfuric acid (chiller test)
2010-03-06 14:34 by Ian
In my area, sulfuric acid can be purchased at automotive supply stores as battery electrolyte. This acid is useful as it stands, but higher concentrations are frequently required. This is the operation that was used to test the thermal load capacity of the coolant chiller.
Extraction of ibuprofen from Advil tablets
2010-02-02 03:02 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.
Take the Time
2010-01-08 19:21 by Ian
Lyrics to an amazing Dream Theater song.
An accessible introduction to PHP optimization
2009-09-07 22:09 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.
Mercury distillation
2009-08-26 20:30 by Ian
These are my lab notes and photos for the mercury distillation.
Comment [4]