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Offline Phoenix

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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6330 on: October 09, 2017, 09:59:01 AM »
Ghost tour?
They walk around town at night by lantern and they talk about the history of the town, odd deaths, ghost sightings and hauntings etc. It was a fun night out.

I want to do an overnight at the asylum.

http://trans-alleghenylunaticasylum.com/main/hauntings.html

Unfortunately everyone is chickenshit here, it's not real cheap, and you need a min of ten people.

A few of the counselors at the boy's school go every year. They said it's pretty creepy.

I wanna go. :roar:
Would definitely go with you. A few years ago, got completely tied up for months looking at photos of abandoned places. Bodaccea started it, by posting a website from a small group of urban explorers who traveled internationally. It was a huge site with lots of location, but maybe they got in trouble because it's gone now. Looked at every image on that website and also read every word because they were very interesting, then after that it spun off into my searching for images elsewhere. It took a while to get over being fixated, but still look every now and then. Plus, architecture has been a life-long interest and the outside of that building alone is worth a day's worth of staring, even if never allowed to enter.

Been fixated for years myself on that.

http://opacity.us/

https://www.abandonedamerica.us/

http://picssr.com/photos/equinox27/interesting?nsid=50788895@N00

*feeds your fixation...
Same! Here's another one. This one is local to me: https://www.ontarioabandonedplaces.com/ They have a good FB page as well.

After the ghost tour they brought in a local Paranormal group to do a reading in the basement of the old town hall which in the 1800's was the jail. That was cool too.

The only super freaky thing for me was when we were walking by this building that engraves tombstones. Since it was built in the early 1800's it's only ever been that exact business. So he was talking of some sightings and whatnot and I got nosy and wandered to the side of the building to look in the back shop window and there was a tombstone with monkeygirls first and middle name engraved on it. It was a stone for a little girl who had died in 1993 at the age of 5. That definitely freaked me out. :laugh: You don't look in a window expecting to see most of your child's name on a gravestone.  :hide:

I love love love exploring abandoned buildings.
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Offline Lestat

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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6331 on: October 09, 2017, 12:21:21 PM »
Thats funky.

Although I don't see the point of  an organized tour that forbids actual entry to the buildings.

I prefer to go in alone, or with one, maybe two others. Abandoned buildings only of course, I'm no burglar. But derelict properties and abandoned ones, then in I go. Ideally its just me, although I'll work with a partner to serve as assistant, and have their fair share of course, in the loot; if there is way too much to carry.

Although I'm not above a solo run and making several trips, such as if I find the likes of what was in that old place I found the old floppy disk horde and cigarette cards. There, they had an entire undamaged copper boiler, place obviously abandoned for some time, as they had a central water tank that was made of lead, along with a fair bit of the pipework being lead. Some copper, some of it Pb so with it having Pb pipes at all, that was not a modern building at all.

For me, essential  equipment for such urban exploration is a bergen, some long coils of rope, a hacksaw, pliers w/ wirecutters a crowbar and a dead-blow hammer. Set of screwdrivers and a sturdy folding knife don't go amiss either. And REALLY handy, is one of those circular pipe-cutters, I've got two actually, one that flips open and then clamps round larger pipes, and one sized for smaller pipes that screws the circular blades of the cutter together until they meet, then just twist and slice straight through, each of them weighing very little, and the smallest of the two only a few grams, and either slices through the copper pipes in a few twists round. Screwdrivers and a Glass cutter.

(an old tungsten carbide cutting tool unusable for its original purpose as it has a chip in the carbide tip, but perfectly servicable as a glass cutter, although meant for use in the lathe [we've quite the machine shop for the contents of a garden shed here, a capstan turret metal lathe, old, pre-WWII but perfectly functional and accurate to fractions of a millimeter, perfectly capable of drilling a hole, tapping a thread, and cutting a matching external thread with a die-head in a piece of steel or other metal, a drill-press, bench-mounted router cutters, a couple of double-wheeled bench grinders, tank-fed gas torche and all manner of other bits and pieces. That isn't my lab, thats just the garden shed, plus my old man has his own hobby-room, for electronics stuff, electrically isolated benchtop, a couple of shelves loaded with oscilloscopes, plus another oscilloscope on a pedestal and stacks of containers of electrical components, stuff for making PCBs etc.)

So we each have our little private hideaways really. (although admittedly now I need far more space than can be hosted in the lab, I now have to store a lot of my equipment in crates in the lounge, three hotplates in the kitchen, another two upstairs (those two need some alterations, voltage input adjustments to allow it to use UK rather than US power supplies) and a fridge in what used to be my mothers bedroom when she was still alive. Now it serves to host the hazat fridge for storing things that I can't afford to have leak, and for storing volatiles with low boiling points.

And then theres the microscope in my bedroom and a microwave I found a while back in a supermarket car-park that had obviously been forgotten [I DID wait, and for quite some time, nobody came for it, and I waited long enough to make sure that nobody was going to either, nobody else either noticed, or if they did, have the brass neck enough to walk over, pick it up and walk off with it on their shoulder :p that now serves as my lab microwave]
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Offline Queen Victoria

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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6332 on: October 11, 2017, 04:23:32 PM »
The PR has reminded me that I neglected to inform the membership that she bowled

a turkey (3 strikes in a row)
and 2 doubles

yesterday in four games.  Average score was 154.
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Offline Lestat

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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6333 on: October 11, 2017, 04:45:54 PM »
Well done hun! *applause*

As for me, although its expensive, I just found a VERY unusual and nice couple of element samples that'd be real hard to get otherwise.

A site that has a block of nice, shiny clean and unoxidized uranium, sometimes have thorium in stock, and the real rare one, they have a strip of gold, plated in technetium metal (as 99Tc) Uranium compounds and thorium compounds are sometimes available online, but I have NEVER seen technetium offered for sale. Its plated as a layer onto gold, for display purposes, in a hermetically sealed glass ampoule. Technetium being the first of any of the elements in the periodic table which was produced synthetically by man rather than occuring naturally.  All isotopes are radioactive, alpha-emitters mainly. And technetium as the form of the nuclear isomer 99mTc is used in radiological medicine, being prepared using continually productive 'technetium cows' which contain a quantity of a radioactive molybdenum isotope that steadily decays, leaving 99mTc as the daughter isotope, with specialized kits for rapid in-situ extraction, preparation and conjugation to suitable delivery vehicles.

Thats another thing to add to my list, Tc being one of the few elements I'll buy for the element collection, since making it would be impractical, and a lot LOT safer to buy a readymade sample. And that, plated onto a strip of gold so it can be viewed properly, sealed into the glass vial is absolutely perfect for an element collection display. Same goes for the nice samples of uranium metal they have. And one other I'll buy rather than make, is the display ampoules containing a sample of elemental fluorine gas, I could make it, but it is both EXTREMELY dangerous, being both very toxic, forming the also highly, highly unpleasant HF, sets things on fire on contact, reacts with glass unless scrupulously anhydrous and dilute, in which form samples are offered through a site  I got tipped off about. And I'd sooner not refine the uranium from the likes of uranyl acetate or uranium nitrate myself for safety reasons, so those few, and especially the perfect sample of technetium 99, those I'm willing to buy rather than obtain some compound of the elements and isolate them myself, which is a large part of the fun in getting a collection together of that sort.

Finding 99Tc like that is like finding a fucking unicorn its so rare as to be near unheard of!
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Offline renaeden

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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6334 on: October 11, 2017, 09:46:11 PM »
^ I have been injected with technetium, when I had a SPECT scan.
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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6335 on: October 11, 2017, 10:39:04 PM »
Why did you have the scan done? viewing blood flow to the lungs  due to your asthma ren?

This is the item itself: http://onyxmet.com/?route=product/product&filter_name=technetium&product_id=2497

Not going to buy it right yet. But given the great scarcity of such top-quality samples of radioactive elements and how hard they can be to obtain for hobby chemists, I do think as soon as I've got me the rotavap and the IR or UV-VIS (IR preferably, of some sort) spectrophotometer, then I'll pounce on one of those, just incase it isn't available for long, because I'm very unlikely to be able to find a sample  of technetium from anywhere else like that, I've never seen anything of that sort sold before, only the likes of needle-sources for cloud chambers, tipped with things like Tc or polonium (usually as 210Po), never samples intended for display pieces like that before prepared so as to give a good view, typically that sort of thing if available at all consists of a metal needle with a tip that has been given a plating of a metal doped with a tiny amount, a few microcuries typically, of something like 99Tc or 210Po for use in experiments like building cloud chambers as particle detectors for ionizing radiation, and for use as known-activity sources for calibrating/testing geiger counters. To see a display piece like this is really, really rare. In fact, at least in the case of technetium I've never seen the like before.

So I'd quite like to get one while they are around, lest regulations change etc. and they become unobtainable later on.

And for a pic:

[img]http://onyxmet.com/image/cache/data/2017%202/Technetium-cr-800x800.JPG[/img[

Pretty obvious why I want to get something like that, no? items of that sort just don't turn up often, if they ever do so at all, visible samples are pretty much nonexistent, aside from uranium perhaps, and maybe thorium. Th and U compounds are available quite easily, but for a display piece, its the elements themselves I'm after. Like a piece of depleted uranium (238U) and of thorium metal, each sealed in glass vials like will be used for all the samples once I've  gotten the materials to build a really nice periodic table wall-mounted case for them all, something I can make as a real sweet work of art in and of  itself :)



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Offline Arya Quinn

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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6336 on: October 12, 2017, 09:28:39 AM »
Saw some cute dogs today.

Also, didn't die.  :asthing:

Offline "couldbecousin"

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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6337 on: October 12, 2017, 10:41:38 AM »
Saw some cute dogs today.

Also, didn't die.  :asthing:

  What kind of dogs?  :doggie:
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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6338 on: October 12, 2017, 11:22:51 AM »
Got one of those good 'Community Chest' cards in real life yesterday it was rather unexpected :headbang2:
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Offline Lestat

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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6339 on: October 12, 2017, 04:37:53 PM »
One of those whatnow?
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Offline Phoenix

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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6340 on: October 12, 2017, 06:47:37 PM »
Thats funky.

Although I don't see the point of  an organized tour that forbids actual entry to the buildings.

I prefer to go in alone, or with one, maybe two others. Abandoned buildings only of course, I'm no burglar. But derelict properties and abandoned ones, then in I go. Ideally its just me, although I'll work with a partner to serve as assistant, and have their fair share of course, in the loot; if there is way too much to carry.

Although I'm not above a solo run and making several trips, such as if I find the likes of what was in that old place I found the old floppy disk horde and cigarette cards. There, they had an entire undamaged copper boiler, place obviously abandoned for some time, as they had a central water tank that was made of lead, along with a fair bit of the pipework being lead. Some copper, some of it Pb so with it having Pb pipes at all, that was not a modern building at all.

For me, essential  equipment for such urban exploration is a bergen, some long coils of rope, a hacksaw, pliers w/ wirecutters a crowbar and a dead-blow hammer. Set of screwdrivers and a sturdy folding knife don't go amiss either. And REALLY handy, is one of those circular pipe-cutters, I've got two actually, one that flips open and then clamps round larger pipes, and one sized for smaller pipes that screws the circular blades of the cutter together until they meet, then just twist and slice straight through, each of them weighing very little, and the smallest of the two only a few grams, and either slices through the copper pipes in a few twists round. Screwdrivers and a Glass cutter.

(an old tungsten carbide cutting tool unusable for its original purpose as it has a chip in the carbide tip, but perfectly servicable as a glass cutter, although meant for use in the lathe [we've quite the machine shop for the contents of a garden shed here, a capstan turret metal lathe, old, pre-WWII but perfectly functional and accurate to fractions of a millimeter, perfectly capable of drilling a hole, tapping a thread, and cutting a matching external thread with a die-head in a piece of steel or other metal, a drill-press, bench-mounted router cutters, a couple of double-wheeled bench grinders, tank-fed gas torche and all manner of other bits and pieces. That isn't my lab, thats just the garden shed, plus my old man has his own hobby-room, for electronics stuff, electrically isolated benchtop, a couple of shelves loaded with oscilloscopes, plus another oscilloscope on a pedestal and stacks of containers of electrical components, stuff for making PCBs etc.)

So we each have our little private hideaways really. (although admittedly now I need far more space than can be hosted in the lab, I now have to store a lot of my equipment in crates in the lounge, three hotplates in the kitchen, another two upstairs (those two need some alterations, voltage input adjustments to allow it to use UK rather than US power supplies) and a fridge in what used to be my mothers bedroom when she was still alive. Now it serves to host the hazat fridge for storing things that I can't afford to have leak, and for storing volatiles with low boiling points.

And then theres the microscope in my bedroom and a microwave I found a while back in a supermarket car-park that had obviously been forgotten [I DID wait, and for quite some time, nobody came for it, and I waited long enough to make sure that nobody was going to either, nobody else either noticed, or if they did, have the brass neck enough to walk over, pick it up and walk off with it on their shoulder :p that now serves as my lab microwave]
I take nothing but pictures if I'm exploring abandoned houses. I like leaving everything exactly as it was found.
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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6341 on: October 12, 2017, 07:57:47 PM »
Here its typically abandoned places in run-down areas, and if I didn't, somebody else certainly would. I figure it may as well be me, if somebody is (and trust me on it, they will and all too often already have done). If there are treasures to be had, especially, plenty of the folk that'd go in to strip the wiring, the pipes and such would probably not recognize the value in antiques, like the cigarette card collection. Scrap metal, yes but not in things like those.)

And finding that collection of vintage videogames on floppy disks was neat. Although I can't help but wonder how on earth something like a huge heap of old videogame disks, of all things, comes to be stashed under the floorboards of an abandoned building. That was pretty weird. Some titles I had played demos etc. of and wanted too, and some old, old old stuff but still top-notch, like the original system-shock. (early-mid '90s). That game still kicks arse. And hey if I'm taking those with me, why leave behind many kilos of copper and lead? Just a very few kg of copper (spot prices last time I traded any in) brought me £20-25 for a handful of kilos, lead isn't worth as much but its still a good earner. An entire copper house main boiler and thick lead water tank, plus the pipes under the floorboards, the wiring out of the walls etc.? thats a small fortune, a couple of hundred at least, for a few hours work with a hacksaw and some pipe cutters (although given the low MP of lead, iand how soft it is, it fouls sawblades and lead is easier to dissect into portions that could be put into as little space in the bergen worn to carry out the goodies using a nice, quiet propane torch. Couple of hundred quid for just a few hours work, most of it being going back and forth ferrying out your finds in portions, as its  a lot of weight, especially if you happen to have discovered a big stash of lead, since its so dense and heavy. Half an hour to cut it up if your fast, maybe 3/4 hour taking more time on it, and you've just paid a month's rent, and quite possibly had 100-150 quid left over in change for yourself. I was even luckier that time I found the place with the disks, the cigarette cards, the lead water tank and plumbing and copper pipes and master boiler, since I was in my mid teens at the time and I didn't have any costs save the overheads due to the running costs of my lab.

So the entire pile of loot was all mine, that is, the payment for it was, to go out and stock up on tubs of potassium permanganate, sodium chlorate, concentrated hydrochloric/phosphoric/sulfuric/formic acids, sulfur, solvents and all manner of other good things :)

Place wasn't a tourist attraction, it was a medieval-looking shite hole on an estate that was probably worse than the derelict property. It was resources to somebody, and that somebody, I decided, ought to be me. I found the place, so I get to loot it. Fair is fair, no? nobody was  coming back for their run down shithole, it wasn't burgling somebody's home (which I wouldn't do of course) and sure as shit stinks it was no pretty little tourist attraction. Only people touring places like that aren't ghost hunters, they're scrap metal hunters, and they don't do it in groups (I've they have any choice in the matter) or hang round snapping pretty pictures.

So since nobody would suffer from my going in for it, nobody loses out other than by virtue solely of not being the first to find the building, no people are being stolen from, it is fair game. And especially considering I had very little by way of disposable income at that age, several hundred pounds was an awful lot of money at the time, still nowt to sniff at.

Piles of cash for very little effort are always good :D
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Offline renaeden

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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6342 on: October 12, 2017, 08:38:34 PM »
Why did you have the scan done? viewing blood flow to the lungs due to your asthma ren?
It was in 2004, long ago. I would say that the technology has changed and improved a lot since then. The SPECT scan was done on my brain, testing for ADHD. Beforehand, I had to do a concentration task on a computer while they injected the technetium. I had to press the spacebar on the keyboard every time a letter came up on the screen except for when an x would show up. Was supposed to press nothing then.

After the task finished, I (with technetium inside me) had the scan. It took ages but showed blood flow decreased below normal to the frontal lobes when they should have lit up like a beacon given that I was concentrating on something. There was other stuff besides but I can't recall that now. I would have to dig out my report.
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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6343 on: October 12, 2017, 09:26:13 PM »
I'd be interested to read them if you are fine with posting the inner workings of your squishy parts.

How long did it go on for? Interesting summary btw. I didn't know that they used 99mTc to test for AD(H)D. Actually I find it somewhat surprising that 'they' are willing to use radiopharmaceutical methods for a purpose of that kind (not belittling you for having AD(H):D btw ren, although you probably knew that already:)
I show some traits of ADD (no 'H') myself, and I'd be interested in getting it tested if there is a definitive assay. Although I do not see it actually happening; reason for that being that getting ANYTHING from doctors here is like pulling out teeth. Your own. Sideways out of your arsehole with a rusty pair of toenail clippers.
And no, I am not in the slightest about to try and build my own SPECT scanner and use some of that technetium to create a radioligand probe. Hell if I'm ending up like alexander litvinenko (alpha radiation isn't very penetrating, in any but the most energetic particles, but if it gets inside you then the effects are fucking ugly, and a powerful alpha emitter, like that technetium 99 source I linked to, would fry somebody extra crispy if delivered internally, the fact that its actually visible guarantees that much, and especially in a form that could distribute throughout the body. Wouldn't be pretty, and it wouldn't be quick either)

For a collection though, that is a real sweet find, and one I'm definitely going to be keeping my eyes on with a view to snagging it; and doing so as soon as I've gotten me the piece of labware I am currently scoping out; and have saved up enough money again to bag my prize, because a piece like that is NOT likely to come up very often on any market available to hobbyists. Might just grab myself a piece of uranium while I'm at it, although the Tc will have first priority, since uranium (and the thorium they sometimes have) do sometimes come up here and there for sale. Although I'd really like to see crop up would be some promethium, as the metal, such as a plating on a gold surface as with the Tc. Promethium-based phosphor-radioisotope mixture paints are sometimes around, used similarly to radium paint, but I've never found any of the metal to be had, yet. That I reckon will prove to be one of the most damn difficult of all the elements to obtain [it too, like Tc has no stable isotopes,  and its only produced in reactors in small quantities. So getting ahold of any will prove tricky. A framed collection wouldn't look right without it though, having a gaping hole smack bang in the middle of the lanthanide series]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
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Offline Queen Victoria

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Re: Post something good that happened today, Parts Two
« Reply #6344 on: October 13, 2017, 08:26:27 AM »
Announced today:  Parliament has granted The PR a 2% increase in her pension starting in January.
A good monarch is a treasure. A good politician is an oxymoron.

My brain is both uninhibited and uninhabited.

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