An update -- What is happening, projects, and stuff...

So, I discovered Monday that I'm no longer employed; that's always fun. On the bright side, it's an opportunity to find work closer to me, and possibly better pay.

I at one point started the design for a CPU, it's still in the back of my mind, and I'll get back to it.... eventually. And, I'm currently having a bit of fun trying to figure out how to separate copper sulfate from what appears to be a binder to keep it from crystallizing out of the solution. It's this that I want to talk about.

So, I picked up a bottle of algaecide at a store because it contained copper sulfate. I immediately knew something wasn't quite right, because the solution was green, rather than the characteristic blue that copper sulfate has. So, I looked on the ingredients, and most of the contents of the bottle are "stabilizers", polyacrylate, and another chemical that's escaping my memory at the moment. I went ahead and attempted to drive off the water, and see what happens. What I wound up with was essentially a useless green goo that smelled similar to something I had played around with as a kid, friendly plastic. I've given up on this being a useful form of copper sulfate to work with, the goo binds everything, I had a little luck with acetone, but the yield made it pointless.

There's a lesson here: If you're an amateur chemist looking for copper sulfate to grow blue crystals, buy the root killer stuff. It's already crystalline, and doesn't have the binders.

Mock Ramblings

Some shameless promotion of a friend's blog:

Mock Ramblings

He's a writer, and posts some rather clever series. If you haven't read any of his writing, you really should! It's good. Real good. One of my favorite (though they haven't made an appearance recently) is Reflections of a Deranged Cultist. Formatted as hijacked blog postings, the deranged cultist, and no sometimes his love interest make postings about the goings on in a secret Cthulhu worshiping cult. What could be more fun? A steel sphere filled with angry porcu-bats, that's what!  

Like a Phoenix, blah blah ...

So, after a long hiatus, I'm back to posting to the blog.

How things have changed: The economy is in the toilet, gas prices, although still somewhat high are reasonable, and a new president in office. And I now follow more blogs than ever


I'm going to make an effort to post stuff I find here, or stuff I think of. Whatever. Some posts will be short and twitter-like (but I refuse to twit), some will be lengthy diatribes, and mostly lots of links to different things found out there on the internet that I find strange or interesting.

Blog about Blogging

Lately, I've been trying to catch up on posts about my son, Christopher. Recalling the various trials and tribulations of raising baby has been quite a chore. I forget many things, then remember them long after I've made the monthly update post.

I've decided to take a new approach to blogging: Write ideas and events down as they occur. Later compile them into a new post. I need a process for keeping all of these memories somewhere before they fade away into oblivion. Another thing I need to do is find some way of relaying things with more frequency than just once per month. So, in between all of that there will be intermediate posts that will not necessarily be about him, but about life in general. Ideas and topics that come to me. And a means of putting those scraps into the blog, then fleshing them out when I have time.