Danger! Offensive comments ahead!
Archive for November, 2008
To give you an idea…
Nov 9th
just how much water came out of that freeze drying run, here’s the ice chunk from the condenser after several hours of melting
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- From the side
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- From the top
Yes, yes…I know I have webbed toes….shut the hell up.
Freeze drying run complete
Nov 8th
I ended up with just barely a small amount that didn’t get totally dried. All in all, it took 2 days.
How much I managed to do in this partial run
New computer hardware
Nov 8th
Work bought me a new kvm and two new LCD panels this week. The kvm is so I can take one of my old panels and put it on there, that way I have two distinct kvm setups, one a dual panel two machine kvm and the other a single panel four machine kvm. The nice part about the new panels though, and the reason I wanted them, is that I get more screen real estate out of the deal. The two new panels are 24″ 1920×1200 displays. I was able to set the font size on my dual terminal virtual screen back up to 10 point from 7 point without loosing any rows/columns of information. Talk about much easier to read! 
The web browser and the email programs are frikkin’ HUGE now too. That helps keep that long list of mail folders in view without having to scroll though, so that’s another awesomeness about it. I talked work into this upgrade because they had told me I was authorized to get a new laptop. Well, last weekend I took my old laptop, disassembled it, found the short on the motherboard, resoldered the connector that was shorting out, and basically fixed my laptop. Then I told work that given how rarely I travel, my old, newly working again laptop is good enough and that I would get relatively little benefit from a new laptop, but the same money spent on two larger panels for the increased screen real estate and the second kvm would allow me to see productivity gains on a daily basis, making it money much better spent. When I added in that the upgrade would allow me to have a spare lcd panel, which would prevent the same thing from happening to me again that happened earlier this year (which is that both of my lcd panels went out in the same week…I contacted the normal places at work to check on a loaner panel while I shipped these units off since they were still under warranty and no one had any, so I went out and bought two panels with my own money, shipped off the two broken ones, and once the two broken ones finally came back from repair I just gave them away to relatives and kept the two I bought as replacements), that was enough to put things over the top and they approved the purchase. All I can say is I feel like I have an entire wall of computer screens in front of my eyes 
The display wall…
No more itty bitty freeze drying runs…
Nov 6th
Freeze drying is actually an expensive process, energy wise. It consumes large amounts of energy to generate both the cold and the vacuum needed. However, once you’ve got the vacuum and the cold, neither of these items are strongly tied to the amount of stuff you are freeze drying. And the drying process proceeds at a specific speed in the stuff being dried regardless of how much is there. So, the more stuff you can get in your chamber, the less it costs on a per unit basis to do the drying. I’ve been doing very small runs of drying using a bench top freeze drier. It only had a roughly 5 1/2″ diameter tray that could only be piled up with about 1″ deep of stuff. Well, that’s no more. I still have the bench top unit, but I plan on getting rid of it. Instead, I bought and reconditioned a roughly 30 year old unit (that was in fabulous shape for its age…) that has 4 shelves, and each shelf has a 12″ x 17″ x 2″ deep tray for holding material. I fired it up for its first real run tonight. I expect it to take a day or two to complete the run, but instead of having a few tablespoons full of product when it’s done, I’ll literally have multiple cups of stuff.
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- Upper portion of unit with bench top freeze dryer sitting on top for comparison
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- Whole machine
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- Contents of a tray currently being dried
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- An unused tray in my freezer, shows how bif these trays actually are
Fucking malware bitches…
Nov 1st
If you get redirected by an add or some such to viruslivescan.com, it’s a malware site. And it will do this totally bogus virus scam and tell you that you are infected and won’t let you get out of their without installing their software. If you used tabbed browsing, closing the tab works. If not, you just need to close your browser window before it has a chance to install the .exe file. Fortunately, I run linux, I can’t process .exe files regardless so I’m safe. It also tries to do the same thing to Mac OS X computers. In mine and ryeth’s case, we were browsing a few lolcat and loldog pages this morning, and the fucking thing actually redirected us from the lol pages to their page without us clicking anything.
Saved whois information about the bastard that made the site