How are you feeling right now? (Pt 2)

[renaeden]

Apprehensive. Third week of college and I haven't handed anything in because it's too hard.

[Lestat]

*hugs*

Don't let it drag you down. Fear is an enemy to be overcome and if you cannot squash it down into nothingness, then bull around it. Do not let it take you, for it is when you allow yourself to be grabbed by, and to then sink into fear that such inaction takes root, and once it does it can spread like an infection. Courage, ren. You CAN do it.

I know this feeling. I've had it with calibrating a nightmare bastard of a hotplate with only partial instructions, and only those in poorly translated chinese. I've had it starting chemical reactions too, where I felt 'shit, I just can't DO this..I can't, its too hard, too complex or just too difficult'

And the answer is to get down to it. Read what you need to, and then dive in once you know what to do. DO, don't sit there allowing despondency to overtake you in thought.

I once found the very idea of the simplest vacuum distillation so challenging, without ever having done it, that I did not even try for a long, long time. A year or two. Yet eventually, with a first baby-step of rigging up and using a vacuum chamber with the pump, as a vacuum dessicator, then I got up the guts to try true vacuum distillation. Now I not only do it regularly, but know what sorts of pumps have what kinds of benefits vs downfalls, and own a water aspirator spare, with no moving parts, knowing that the vacuum is lower, but in some cases this can also be useful, especially when vac-distilling low-boiling compounds, the gentler, less powerful vaccuum is often useful. It has its drawbacks in not being so capable of distilling higher-boiling compounds that need purification via distillation in vacuo, but for that, there are conventional, electrically powered vac pumps of the various different kinds. The aspirator, short of the glass shattering if dropped, etc, will never break down, will never overheat, will never jam, need oiling or much maintainence bar conventional cleaning crap off it and not letting it get filthy. Its always going to be there for me when I need it, and it'll always serve me well in things like vacuum-assisted filtrations for example.

Take that as an example ren. Once you get into whatever it is, you gain confidence much better by DOING once or twice than you ever could by reading charts and principles. Courage, renster, you've got it in you and you CAN succeed.

[renaeden]

I'm just stuck translating written instructions into Java code. Managed a bit today but I don't know what my teacher will say tomorrow.

[Lestat]

I'm no programmer myself, so I can't help in a direct way. Encouragement and examples of knowing what your going through and how I got over them are as best I can do. Unless you've other ideas?

Maybe stick some music on?  I find that music helps me hugely in concentrating when I am applying effort to a task. It helps me 'get into the zone' if that makes sense. In my case its a calm, yet hyperfocused and extremely vigilant, concentrated state, but without the stress that would typically accompany a state of hypervigilance. Almost...best I can describe it is to take an extremely accomplished zen buddhist in meditation techniques and give them a dose of hypomania. And perhaps a blotter of acid or a light dose of mushrooms at the same time just maybe, (although this state is reached, in my case, without the use of psychedelics, I would not wish to do any potentially dangerous chemistry when under the influence of anything that can alter my perceptions in a way such as to distort my reference frame. Things like light doses of stimulants, or nootropics like the 'racetams are fine,  in my book, for me, personally. But I'd definitely not trip and start up chemistry procedures at the same time. PLANNING OUT the procedures, writing things down, to get into a creative and inspired state sure, but I would always, always leave the actual practical to a state of sobriety, excluding the consciousness and intellect-enhancing nootropics, the assistance in concentration of non-interfering doses of classical psychostimulants, and my usual, daily meds, to which I am of course adjusted in such a manner as for those I take on a daily basis not to interfere, my pain meds, clonidine to stop me overloading, tizanidine for the fucked up neuropathy-spawned hell-forged spasm in my calf muscle etc, antiseizure meds, whilst that lot would both seriously, and drastically interfere with my doing any chem work on their own, if I wasn't, since I do need them daily then I'm alright to proceed, use power-tools on them etc. although were I unused to even a couple of them put together, as I was at first, just the tizanidine and even a light dose of oxy FLOORED my ass, to the extent I found myself passing in and out of nodding micro-sleeps and waking up when I felt face hit computer keyboard (some of the time anyway, some of the rest of the time it was more a matter of waiting until the nod turned to wakefulness, albeit heavily sedated until another one came along. And that was with just 80mg oxycodone.  (albeit a fair dose, even XR for somebody opioid-naiive. Quite surprisingly given the stinginess of most doctors here, I got quickly put on OC80s from dihydrocodeine, when I had the issue that DHC was too short acting, in addition to far too weak, but mostly, the worst of the problem I had with DHC was that its short action, coupled with being mostly a pro-drug and requiring a recuperation period for further biosynthesis of the hepatic CYP-P450 enzymes which metabolize it to more active products, kind of puts a big damper on redosing more reguarly as the answer, and taking a larger dose at once is partially successful, but there is again a metabolic rate-limiting and quantity-limiting cap. Although less of a problem with DHC than it is with codeine, the latter being much more of an absolute, while DHC has some effect itself. But after trying XR-DHC, straight from that fairly weak opiate, and only on the higher XR dose for a very short time before requesting something better and actually, shockingly, getting it....to OC80s, I was so surprised I almost said something stupid like 'are you actually DOING that?' to the dr. Although I caught myself and shut my face in time so they didn't on my account get any temptations towards saying something like 'actually, you are right, no, bad idea' and my going and so to speak shooting myself in the foot

But now they don't distract me, although I'm on an IR type of oxy now, and morphine for my main workaday pain med. They don't interfere as long as I don't push the dose (which even in the case of the oxy alone, is now higher than it was when I was on OCs, didn't use to be, but I got the dose upped after that awful, awful and shockingly painful utter cunt of an incident where I suffered the corrosive alkali burn to the eyeball. Took a fair long time to recover and stop being in so much pain, and for it to fade to just extra-sensitivity to light, the brighter it is the worse it is, but not painful like after the burn and during healing. They increased the oxy dose IIRC twice, and now its double, as IR what it used to be in XR/oxycontin, they just never remembered to, or never bothered or thought to decrease it again afterwards. Pretty much forgot about it and left me with the increase, and I too...well I forgot to remember, and remembered to forget to remember quite on purpose. Because I wasn't getting nearly enough pain relief as it was. Shouldn't have to rely on an accident to compensate for a failure on the part of a doctor to calculate an adjustment in dose when one drug is of different potency to another sharing the same general mode of action and purpose. They were too thick, and too stingy to go by anything but absolute mg-for-mg difference transferring me from purely XR oxy, to morphine and IR oxy, the latter at first from a lower dose.

And I had to plead for ANY oxy after. This despite the fact that morphine is, if delivered by a parenteral route with equal as possible bioavailabiity, at least half as potent as oxy is. And by mouth the BA decreases from about 100% via intravenous injection, to oral morphine being of little actual practical use in reality, because all but about 20-25% of it is destroyed in the liver before it can act in the brain to do its job! and they refused outright to even compensate for the 100% equal BA-basis potency factor.

I want doctors that can program people as well as I can. Or at least UNDERSTAND instructions on how to go about it effectively. I've got one of them who isn't a tool, and who will listen, accept evidence-based-medicine as best practice, and as such is willing to receive journal articles supporting a position if I have one, on something, or going against one he is firmly for, and I against, whatever either may be. Although he does tell me that most of what I show him at first goes right way over his level and flies on overhead. It would be funny, the patient teaching the doctor, if it wasn't for it having practical consequences of making things harder to get done when I need something particular to BE done. But he will at least both receive a paper willingly, and acknowledge that evidence based medicine as backed by peer-reviewed science is the appropriate best way to go ideally speaking. But at the same time that means any appointment takes ages, with my having to explain all manner of things from receptor-G-protein coupling, biased agonism as a result (in the case of GPCRs), moduation of ion channel flux in the case of drugs affecting ligand-gated ion channels, things like receptor sensitivity/density modulatory effects, even the basics like that. Its kind of a bit frustrating, I just wish I had a doctor, even one, who is both humane and kind like this guy, has his sensibiity and generlly being good at practicing medicine, but who I coud talk with rather than to, on an equal level and have things be understood at the speed of conversation rather than needing to take the time to break things down into little bite-sized kiddie-servings of neurology and neuropsychopharmacology and pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamic effects and interactions between drugs, between drugs and enzymes and drug-enzyme-other drug type interactions when it gets anything more complicated than things like 'drinking lots of grapefruit juice inhibits hepatic cytochrome P450-3A4 and prolongs the duration of effect, as well as heightening plasma levels of morphine and benzodiazepine sedative-hypnotics, as does the antacid I take, cimetidine. (a trick I taught him actually, in the case of cimetidine being used as a booster agent for morphine. Was originally on ranitidine, which does not share this enzyme inhibitor effect, being a second-generation derivative of cimetidine specifically intended not to do so, and when I asked him to change from one to the other he was like 'but these are for all intents and purposes drugs you can consider identically'

And me having to tell him 'ahem....actually, doctor, there are some major differences in their enzyme kinetics and interactions, specificallly with cytochrome P450 pathway enzymes in the liver, and this can be in fact, exploited in these circumstances......'

But, he was good enough to go with me on it, and switch me over, just saying if I was wrong, then tell him, and we can switch back if you want'. I wasn't and didn't. And he learned a good trick in the process.

I just want a damn people-programmer of a doctor. Or at least somebody who can keep up.

['andersom']

 Alive and kicking.

[Lestat]

Quite delighted. For today, I placed my order for a rotavap (a rotary evaporator),  a part heater, part vacuum still with a beefy condenser, and some vacuum flasks for the rotavap come with it too, plus the heater, all the ductwork, and it spins the flask round under vacuum (the flask serving as the still-pot) is rapidly spun around by a rotary ducting mechanism that allows continual communication with condenser, vacuum takeoff port and receiver flask, and the still-pot is placed in the heating bath part which is filled with a suitable working fluid for thermal transfer and rapidly rotated by the rotavap, forcing the contents to, by centrifugal force be flung outwards against the walls of the flask in a thin layer and spun to keep it as such, whilst this gives the resultant thinner film of contents to evaporate much faster than conventional vacuum-distillation even, rapidly enabling such tedious processes as stripping large volumes of solvent under vacuum, only faster than conventional vacuum distillation.

Was a significant investment, 1,150,00 USD although I got free shipping. But it will make things SO much faster, so much nicer to do and take out a massive portion of the 'watching paint dry' bits where your just standing there for hours and hours taking fraction cuts drop by drop but can't leave it unsupervized in case it overheat and burn a product or distill your desired cut away into the solvent you just stripped off and put your desired fraction cut straight back into what you were trying to take it out of if you left it to 'run itself', unless via a set temperature, sometimes it can be done, but only sometimes, and generally you only want it to run whilst supervized, and that can take a long time.

Many, many hours with a high-boiling solvent.  Could take days with a solvent boiling high enough by conventional vacuum distillation to completely strip a large volume of high-boiling solvent  from a solid solute dissolved in it, without using extreme temperatures.  The rotavap is going to be worth every penny                                      

[Phoenix]

Relieved. I had something big on my to do list that I hadn't gotten around to for months and I finally got it done today.

[DirtDawg]

I have heard that this occurs from time to time.
 
Mystery to me.

[DirtDawg]

Kind of felt like a rented whipping mule at times today.

Really was glad to get home from work.

[Lestat]

I know that feeling DD. Only in my case my getting home from work, I never LEFT home to begin with. So I'm clocking off, and just going from the lab fridge to the fridge with a chilly bottle of beer in it and putting my feet up on the sofa.

[Phoenix]

I have heard that this occurs from time to time.
 
Mystery to me.

I had no idea how much stress it was causing me until I finally got it taken care of. Now the company will stop blowing up my phone (I had to return equipment which was supposed to be returned on moving day but movers accidentally packed it in the moving van and I had to wait until we stumbled across it in the unpacking post move).

[Lestat]

Blowing up your phone miss K?  dare I even ask?

(and as for the earlier mercury-free reference, for comparison, this and processes much alike to it are the alternative: https://www.scribd.com/doc/29100750/Amphetamine-Sulphate-Synthesis )

AKA the 'Al-Hg', in this 'P2NP' stands for 1-phenyl-2-beta-nitropropene, which one would make by means of a knoevanagel condensation performed using benzaldehyde and nitroethane, using a catalytic base, ideally an organic amine base, and preferably as its acetate salt, isopropylamine acetate ought to be usable although I've never used it, people  have been known to employ butylamine and its acetate, as well as methylamine acetate so isopropylamine acetate should work well enough, and glyphosate weedkiller is often formulated as glyphosate isopropylamine salt, in roundup, etc., the liquid concentrates could simply be basified with caustic soda solution and distilled, either condensing the freebase isopropylamine, or else passing the vapors into glacial acetic acid, or even spirit vinegar, boiled down to concentrate it, so one hasn't to evaporate a ton of water from an isopropylamine acetate dilute solution. Easier to concentrate the vinegar first, if one can't buy glacial acetic acid (99-100% acetic acid) on say, ebay. And its cheap.

The nitroethane is the most difficult bit, but even that can be had on ebay (ideally use a go-through, and don't buy benzaldehyde at the same time, it'd be better to have separate people buy those and then sell them on to you if you weren't going to make the nitroethane (if anyone wants, I could give people a guide to that too) and making benzaldehyde isn't extremely hard either.)

I didn't write the above guide to the Al-Hg though, and the way the author treats it, they don't warn enough of how exothermic it is, it runs hot and fast. And a cooling bath of salted ice/water needs to be available, or an ice bath, with a mix of methylated spirits and water/salt ready mixed, as a two-part set, so the ice stays unmelted, mostly, until needed, if needed, so the flask can be immersed in a cryo bath rapidly if  the temperature starts to spike too much, and I heartily reccomend that attention bee paid to scale-up if people think of doing so, that the flask size needed increases dramatically, as does the requirement for efficient condensers running very cold fluid through them, and stacking multiple condensers on top of each other, ideally with a tube leading from the very topmost end into a tank and connected with a wide-bore section of hose, to avert the catastrophic potential for a blast-off of material from the flask up and out of the condensers, because at larger scale the sheer exothermia of the reaction is quite capable of causing the solvent to rapidly boil and shoot up and out, which would launch mercury-containing acidic toxic wastes everywhere)

As for the P2NP, there is a rather nifty improvement on the traditional methods of conducting the knoevanagel condensation, that rather than using heating on the steam-bath or hot water/oil bath, uses a microwave. Doesn't need to be anything special, but a bowl to contain the flask, and a cotton wool or tissue paper plug to gently insert, with the thermometer into the neck of the flask, which prevents the P2NP vapors from exiting the flask and rendering the air rather irritating and acrid. One could also perhaps use a heat-sink consisting of containers of H2O in with it, and one must pay close attention to the heating, as it is rapid, and one wants to keep it at about 75 'C) and irradiate it in pulses, in-between, cooling down to RT in a water bath of cold water)

It seems to improve the cleanliness of the product, as well as the yield. Quite impressed by all accounts too by the speed with which the reaction takes place. The microwave irradiation can shortcut a half-molar (based upon either nitroethane or benzaldehyde, a half mole of each reactant) synthesis from taking 7 hours down to thirty minutes (and that was..some experimental data I came across, comparing time courses of microwave irradiation methods at different scales, even 20 minutes, perhaps less may be possible even at this scale. Maybe as low as a quarter hour total irradiation time.

Not that I'd do such a thing myself, of course, as to reduce the P2NP to anything illegal. I'm curious enough to compare times myself, though in its simple formation..

And of course, it is not valueless in and of itself.

Done on a steam-bath, even at smaller scales it still takes about 5-6 hours, same goes for a hot water bath. Microscale, 10 minutes in the MW. (10/11ml/1g of benzaldehyde/nitroethane/amine catalyst acetate salt respectively) (note-microwave heating is nonlinear, what may take a given item being heated from room temperature [say, take 20 'C as RT for example] to 40 'C would take less time to go from 40 to 80 'C by a considerable period of time) so it does need to be watched and supervised closely. However the MW reaction IS far faster, and all in all, superior.

And benzaldehyde can be prepared from toluene, the solvent, or else from benzyl alcohol, available pure and cheaply online, or if going as OTC as possible then by distilling certain types of paint-stripper which are based on benzyl alcohol.

But ACS-grade benz is available on ebay easily enough. Somewhat watched, so better buying outside the US or UK, and having somebody receive the goods and then transfer them by hand, using separate couriers is advisable, and this goes manyfold so if buying nitroethane (this IS really, really watched) although it can be made, I never have, owing to, well, as they say, where there is a will, there is a way. And one has one's ways:)

[odeon]

A bit down.

[Walkie]

glad i didn't come here sooner.

been having one heckova week , what with son moving out on Saturday, as planned  ( but not to say all plans were smoothly executed *chuckle*. It's been a mammoth p[roject ) whilst concurrently suffering one huge emotional crisis ( The love of his life having dumped him the previous weekend) .

Pleased with both son and myself. we found time for long heart-to-hearts, and he's coped admirably.  Also , as he left, he gave  me a great big, long hug and   told me how glad he is to have a Mum like me, and how much he will miss me.

Now I turn my attention back to I2, I think to myself: ye gods! How right was I  to suspect  that this woul;d not be the best way to relax for a few odd moments 

['andersom']

  for you and your son.

It's hard to see kid getting dumped.

And it's weird to notice how you can miss the ex of a kid yourself after a while, when they were nice and warm people.

Did son move away far?