07:55 – Barbara left yesterday morning to run some errands and then head over to her parents’ apartment to pick up a few items for her dad before visiting him in the hospital. While she was gone, I got a call from a young woman at the hospital, whom I assumed to be one of the nurses caring for Dutch. She was calling to give Barbara an update on her dad’s condition, so I gave her Barbara’s cell phone number. She said I wasn’t on Dutch’s HIPAA list, so she wasn’t allowed to tell me anything, but asked since she already had me on the phone if I’d mind her asking a few questions about Dutch. I answered as best I could based on what Barbara has been telling me. She thanked me before she hung up. It wasn’t until I talked to Barbara later that I found out she wasn’t a nurse. She was one of Dutch’s doctors. At first, I wondered if I’d been unconsciously sexist/agist, but that wasn’t it at all. I assumed that she was a nurse because she wasn’t at all hurried or arrogant. She took her time and didn’t seem to be at all in a hurry to finish the conversation and move on to the next item on her to-do list. She talked to me as though I were an intelligent person who might have useful information rather than just someone she had to talk to to complete a checklist. I suspect that Dutch is lucky to be her patient.
The replacement hard drive for my new system arrived several days ago, but I hadn’t had a spare moment to do anything with it. While Barbara was away yesterday afternoon, I took the time to install the drive and get Linux Mint 13 LTS up and running. The system is still sitting on the kitchen table, but it’ll shortly move into my office, where it will sit, along with its new monitor, keyboard, and mouse, alongside my current system. I’ll run them side-by-side until I’m satisfied that everything I care about on the current system–apps and data and configurations–has been migrated successfully to the new system. Then and only then I’ll do a cut-over.
I’d originally planned to install the system to the 128 GB SSD, but I changed my mind. I installed Linux to the hard drive, and will use the SSD as a second drive devoted exclusively to data. When I leave the house for anything more than walking Colin, I’ll unmount the SSD, slide it out of its bay, and take it along.
09:33 – I just boxed up another forensic science kit and set it out to ship tomorrow. That’s the third one in the last week, which is about two more than I’d expect to sell in a week this time of year. (The biology kits and chemistry kits both ordinarily outsell the forensic science kits by a factor of four or five.) We’re down to only six forensic science kits in stock, so we’d better get another 30 built soon. Or at least get the small parts bags made up and the chemicals bottled and bagged. Given those, we can build kits as needed on the fly.
Going through the list of chemicals and reagents we’ll need for the new batch of forensic kits I noticed glycerol, which is one of my least favorite chemicals to fill bottles with. The stuff is viscous, which makes it very difficult to fill bottles manually because it wants to form a bubble at the bottle’s mouth and then blurp over and run down the side of the bottle. Using the automatic dispenser is easier, but the viscosity of glycerol makes it almost a gym workout to use the pump. Then I realized that the viscosity of glycerol is strongly affected by temperature. At room temperature, the stuff is gloppy. At around body temperature (37 C) to hot tap water temperature (50 C), the stuff is much, much less viscous. So, the next time I fill glycerol bottles, I’m going to run a bucket of hot tap water and put the 3.8 liter stock bottle of glycerol in it to warm up before I dispense it.
“It wasn’t until I talked to Barbara later that I found out she wasn’t a nurse. She was one of Dutch’s doctors. At first, I wondered if I’d been unconsciously sexist/agist, but that wasn’t it at all. I assumed that she was a nurse because she wasn’t at all hurried or arrogant.”
Doctors like that are more valuable than diamonds. My last three GPs at the ANU Health Service were like that – I avoided the others as soon as they annoyed me enough. My endocrinologist is like that. I thought he was 10 years younger than me but I see from his CV that he’s almost exactly the same age. He looks really young for his mid 50s, like me. 🙂 Mum’s gerontologist was a really nice woman who also took her time with mum and the family. Mum disliked the nursing home’s “official” GP and did her best to avoid him.
Are SSDs worth it? I was singulalry unimpressed with the only SSD I’ve ever owned. It was about 56 GB and had Windows 7 Pro installed on it. It also had my major MMORPG, City of Heroes, on it to get the supposed performance boost. Not that I noticed. It died after a year, trim problems. If people think they’re faster I’ll believe them, I just haven’t noticed myself.
Yeah, they’re immensely faster. Back when I built my first system with an SSD, I did a comparison of load times for a very large data set. It took maybe 10 seconds to load from the (very fast) hard drive. From the SSD, it came up almost instantly.
I suspect your system was misconfigured
So I am wondering if I should get an SSD and put the Windows 8 on it and use the existing 1TB platter drive for the data (I don’t have any really critical data and movies and tee-vee shows and financial stuff are backed up to external drives, currently). I also am about to jack this machine up to 32GB RAM.
Supposed to hit the low 80s up here today and next few days and no rain in sight yet; NWS has issued fire hazard warnings for Vermont and the Vampire State to our west. Won’t be using our firepit this week.
RBT, would it be worthwhile making a book or two of your experiences in starting and running your business and in operating a chem lab? The former might not have all that much new material, when you look at the bazillion business books out there, but you’re a good writer and I could easily see a short but inexpensive book on tips and hazards that you’ve encountered.
The latter book would likely be new material because there aren’t many “Tips for Working in a Chemistry Laboratory” books, but the audience would be smaller. Nevertheless, it could be gold for chemistry students and new guys in a lab. I’m thinking of today’s tip about warming the glop before dispensing, contrasted with powdered something-else which dissolves in cold water but makes glop in hot. As I said, gold for the student or flunkie who’s told to mix up a liter of X and put it in these 30ml bottles.
In your copious free time, of course.
“I suspect your system was misconfigured”
That’s quite possible: they were fairly new when I got mine in about 2010 and the builder might not have had much experience with them. It’s about time I got a new system, so when I move to Adelaide I might build one from scratch for the first time. One of my nephews did it without your book, he just figured it out (he’s an engineer). I’ve always got cold feet in the past, but now that I have time on my hands…
You’re a gamer, Miles-Teg; build a screamer; shit-loads of RAM, SSD, top-shelf vid cahd, huge screen, and broadband jacked up as fast as you can make it. Keep a journal of the project and post it here. Look at the Extreme Tech site and Tom’s Hardware.
Speaking of games, I got Unreal and Quake 4 but they won’t install here on Win8. Not a priority so haven’t spent much time on it yet; the error mss. was something about not being able to connect to a server (for the install???) but I forget the exact wording.
Well, you’ve always got Minesweeper to fall back on… 🙂
Yeah, and Klondike Solitaire. Which apparently connects me to some Xbox account. Strange days have found us.
Yes, that’s always going to be the problem.
You know what they say, Bob; don’t get caught looking around in your 80s and thinking, ‘gee, I wish I’d spent more time at the office.’
I’d say youse guys down there deserve a break and soon.
I live to work. If I have regrets when I’m old, they’ll be that I had only seven days a week to work.
Nah, unlike me he’s a workaholic.
I should point out that I long ago decided that the only kinds of work I would do were things that I’d do for recreation anyway.
So, for recreation I sit and read and listen to the radio. Can I get paid for that?
Are SSDs worth it? I was singulalry unimpressed with the only SSD I’ve ever owned.
Check these two articles out about SSDs:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/11/a-ssd-in-your-pocket.html
“… I feel ethically and morally obligated to let you in on a dirty little secret I’ve discovered in the last two years of full time SSD ownership. Solid state hard drives fail. A lot. And not just any fail. I’m talking about catastrophic, oh-my-God-what-just-happened-to-all-my-data instant gigafail. It’s not pretty. ”
“Thing is, SSDs are so scorching hot that I’m willing to put up with their craziness. Consider that just in the last two years, their performance has doubled. Doubled! And the latest, fastest SSDs can even saturate existing SATA interfaces; they need brand new 6 Gbps interfaces to fully strut their stuff. No CPU or memory upgrade can come close to touching that kind of real world performance increase.”
“Just make sure you have a good backup plan if you’re running on a SSD. I do hope they iron out the reliability kinks in the next 2 generations … but I’ve spent the last two months checking out the hot/crazy solid state drive scale in excruciating detail, and trust me, you want one of these new Vertex 3 SSDs right now. “
My favorite SSD is the Intel 520 series:
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Series-Solid-State-Drive-2-5-Inch/dp/B006VCP9G6/
We own five of them at the office now and I would love to put that 480 GB monster on my CRM server.
And my Amazon review on the 180 GB drive is the number 3 review:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1VXBQH23GMCTH/
“All I need to say is that my new 180 GB Intel 520 boots Windows 7 x64 in 11 seconds. All disk operations are speeded up significantly. “
“code to live, live to code”
“will code for food”
One of the earliest books that I remember was one of the “Golden Books” about a man who carved duck decoys for a living. His motto was, “I have never worked and I never will”, implying that if you enjoyed what you did it wasn’t work. I made that my guiding principle and have been successful for the most part.
I have been a darkroom tech., photographer (industrial), geophysical draftsman, flightpath recover tech, electronics draftsman, pcb designer (in the days of red and cyan tape), embedded computer system designer and programmer. I have always enjoyed my work. Hated my job sometimes but enjoyed my work. I hated my last job so much that the only worse than losing it would have been keeping it.
Unfortunately I was too busy working to acquire credentials to show that I was competent to to do all work that I had been doing. When I found myself unemployed in my late 50s I also found myself unemployable. But looking back I have to say that I have been an very lucky man. I am content with what I have done.
Look at the Extreme Tech site and Tom’s Hardware.
Actually, I am partial to http://www.maximumpc.com/ nowadays.
Went and saw “Iron Man 3” with the wife tonight. Highly recommended. As usual, do not leave the theatre until after the credits are finished due to the final scene.
A lot of people had trouble with SSDs in the early days. It’s not clear how many of these problems had to do with hardware problems, and how many with early-release drivers. In any case, we have had SSDs in all of our important systems for a couple of years now, with zero problems.
Heretical: I gave up on building systems myself some time ago. Systems are so cheap now that it’s just not worth it. On top of that, a good PC-shop ought to know better than I do which components play nice together. We’ve had good results with Dell, and there’s also big local company that does good work. The only bad experience I’ve had was with the local PC shop – I’m a fan of buy local, but they built us a real piece of crap.
I’d recommend a different approach to building a new PC–make something that can be used as a server down the line (compute node in virtualization-speak) and add to it what you need for gaming, etc. For a good example of this, see,
Build a BONKERS test lab Look at the “Eris 3” test lab node
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For today’s SSD needs,
The Crucial/Micron M500 Review (960GB, 480GB, 240GB, 120GB) The M500 is a game-changer
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Glycerol! Probably the first experiment for which I made a “full” (i.e. school) write-up was one in which we measured drag on ball-bearings in glycerol in order to find how its viscosity varied with temperature. Lovely chemical…
Yes, and it’s also great with potassium permanganate for producing a flame that’s hot enough to reliably ignite thermite.
That’s good to know. I had trouble with magnesium strips lighting the homemade thermite. I’ll concede that more experimentation with thicker or thinner or wider strips, or using shavings, or something might have worked better. Or maybe the homemade thermite was too low quality. There was also the nuisance of lighting the magnesium strips. Kitchen matches wouldn’t do it, even with the end shredded, which was supposed to work. I think the technique-with-household-stuff that finally worked was to light a propane torch, then light the magnesium, which might then light the thermite. It’s been almost three decades and I have almost no caffeine in my bloodstream, so cut my poor, decrepit memory some slack.
OFD made little bombs from model airplane paint bottles with screw-on caps; fill it about halfway with the chlorine crystals used for swimming pools, easily found in my ‘hood back then, dump in some glycerol that we could buy at the local photo shop, supposedly for our photography hobby, screw that cap on real fast and throw it. Blew up like an M-80 with a brilliant green flash.
A few years later OFD would be standing by, covering for EOD guys dismantling Charlie’s little surprises outside the wire. Smoking a ciggie, cool as a cucumber. When you’re 18 you’re never gonna die, ya know.
I never knew that about the thermite. That’s cool. I never had a problem with magnesium strips, though I saw them fail for a few other people.
Yeah, depending on the type and specific makeup of the thermite, it can be almost impossible to get it started burning. Back when I was 12 or so, I’d made up a batch and simply couldn’t get it started. I hit it with my dad’s BernzOmatic propane torch. Nothing. So I stuck a length of magnesium ribbon in the pile and lit the magnesium with the propane torch. The magnesium burned brilliantly, but when it got down to the thermite it just fizzled out.
So I made a small well in the top of the thermite, filled it with potassium permanganate crystals, and added a little glycerol. Nothing happened. Fortunately, I kept watching it, because after a few seconds it started to smoke and then suddenly burst into a brilliant flame. The thermite caught immediately.
And, yeah, in retrospect 12 years old was probably a bit young for me to be messing with something in the +5 oxidation state.