Viridian Dreams Forum

Well, time to start up another Random thread.

Another new insanity thread?!

I feel old.

A little early, but that shouldn't matter:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Out of confusion, I must ask. I thought the old thread was going to go to two hundred pages?

Indeed TK it doesn't matter.
Rest in Peace Veterans..

The blood on the modhammer was almost dry? ;)

URGH! I can't even believe this. I have my new laptop for less than a week and the thing craps out on me. Faulty junk. Ah well, thats what the warrenty is for, and I'm busy this weekend anyway.

Only one modhammer? With us, you know he needed many, considering how often we came back for more.

You have my sympathies, Darkandus.
Cookies to usher in the new thread, anyone?

So, the Government Secretary (at the risk of falling into a gross oversimplification, he is the closest thing we have to a Vice-President) just died in a helicopter crash... Like one of his predecessors did. The two of them died just in this presidential term by the way...

Yeah, Mexico is pretty much screwed, but what else is new?

And, on a less depressing note, I managed to see some old action movies during the weekend (Commando, Universal Soldier).

It's astonishing how cheesy they can be, yet still strangely entertaining.

I am on a bit of a cartoon kick atm and am trying to see episodes of an old Cartoon Network original by the name of Kids Next Door. Google has failed me. My searches for online streaming videos have been unsuccesful. Before I resort to putting my computer through what I'm sure is going to be a 48 hour downloading crucible, does anyone have any idea where I can see these things online?

Torrent if that is an option. Or buy official DVDs, but I had little luck finding them when I searched amazon. Maybe they're around somewhere. I didn't look super hard.

I remember universal soldier, still have it on dvd, lol.

I loved that show.

Frak it, the crucible it is.

A crucible exploded at work today.
God I hate it when things explode in the lab. I mean, normally loud noises are something boiling over and making a mess of the hotplate or the odd beaker breaking for no reason (also on hotplates). But this time the crucible just randomly shattered and coated everything with the oily gunk, made way too big a mess, burned onto the hotplate, and then when I plugged the it back in after hosing out the fume cupboard and scrubbing everything out, it shorted the cupboard out.



It was just one of those days.

Something CHEMISTRY! related, right? 'Cause it's not CHEMISTRY! (a branch of SCIENCE!) unless something explodes.

On a more serious noted, what could lead to such explosions anyways?

Yes, CHEMISTRY is involved, but in this case I think there must have been a crack in the crucible and it was sitting at, ahh, I dunno, those hotplates get up to like 350-400C but it wasn't that hot... 100-200C maybe? And then it decided "You know what would be great? Shattering!" And so it broke and the oily watery crap got dumped in the hot plate and does what oily watery crap is wont to do when dumped on a slab of metal at several hundred degrees.

The general cause of most mishaps in my lab is overheating, the chemistry itself is reasonably straight forward.

Jeez, that's pretty sucky, at least you don't have to work on the volatile "if I explode at the wrong time you're so dead it isn't even funny" chemicals.

At least, I hope you don't.

I find it funny that I mention a crucible and then one explodes. Life, huh?

Even more interesting, considering what our Australian friend works with on a regular basis.

So, Serbii, how many Sv was the mess? Or was this one of the friendlier things you often play with?

I don't use much in the way of death explosion chemicals. Well, 18M/98% pure sulphuric acid, 70% nitric acid, can't remember what the HCl is and 30% ammonia. Also I make aqua regia. But that's just working with really strong acids rather than working with 'going to explode and kill us all' chemicals. Plus that's reagent grade, the sulphuric acid we actually use is 9M (heh, only). It's a bugger to make up the stock though >_>

So, Serbii, how many Sv was the mess? Or was this one of the friendlier things you often play with?

It was just from a storage tank, I couldn't tell you how much a litre (could find out Monday if I really wanted) but not enough to cause contamination issues. Most of the stuff I deal with is environmental samples, and from what I've found I'd have a bigger exposure just working in the desert than I do working in a testing lab. O_o

So far I've only seen one implosion and one explosion in the lab (both small), although one guy did manage to blow up a gas chromatograph a few years back (I wasn't there). I've worked with proteins most of my lab time, not much potential for mayhem there...

Computer's broke, but my dad let me have his old notebook laptop.