helen-louise's journal

Also, in case anyone cares, whenever I'm sitting here bored with lj in front of me, I've been tagging my old entries. There is way too much crap in my journal for me to sort it all out in one day, but I'll get there eventually...

It will probably not surprise you that the most-used tag is my evil gall bladder, followed by video games and wuzzie (for strange, mad things the Richard has said or done). Other tags of interest to people outside my head include writing, cognitive therapy and links. I might get round to editing my journal style to include a list of all tags, or I might not. Like everything in my life, it's dependent on motivation ;)

...but I kinda like it now. Got into pharmacology when I was desperately researching antidepressants, and I've stayed interested. (Should really look into those again - been reminded by Netdoctor that Efexor can cause raised blood cholesterol levels, and that's also a reason why people develop gallstones. Getting my blood cholesterol level checked is on my list for the week.)

I now know the official difference between an opiate and opioid. Opiates occur naturally (the medicinally useful ones are codeine and morphine), and opioids are synthesised from a starting opiate. So dihydrocodeine, Tramadol and pethidine are opioids.

I am stupidly amused. if you open the structure of codeine and dihydrocodeine as two tabs in the same window, you can rapidly click between them to make your own animated gif. Who'd've thought it - dihydrocodeine is just codeine with its double bond saturated. Huh. btw, those links are from a site calling itself Just For Chemists, which leads to deceptively simple structures for things like pethidine unless you know that Me is a methyl group (-CH₃), Et is an ethyl group (-CH₂CH₃) and Ph is a benzene ring. When I post my List of Interesting Drugs I've Taken Recently, I'll modify the structures to be complete.

omg, I've just found a link to The Synthesis of Tramadol. That rocks. Sadly, it seems to be the only one on there. I'm just... amazed... that the highly toxic-to-me salicylic acid can be reduced & Grignarded and turned into something that doesn't kill me.

And I'm even more stupidly amused to discover that I have now Officially taken a Class A Drug. Does it still count as a Class A Drug if I took it for medicinal purposes under prescription? I want to know! ( Find out below. )

The Optimus keyboard - a keyboard with an lcd display in each key. Scroll down for the Photoshop and Quake layouts.

It is apparently real and will be available in 2006.

We have connected my mum's old Windows 3.1 machine to the slightly newer one we've been putting together for her, and files are transferring. Richard got ever so excited. He said "It's like I've built my own steam engine and it's chuffing and chundling along".

The old machine is an Archimedes A440/1 with a PC card in, with the really quite powerful 10 years ago spec 486 processor running at 25 MHz, clock-doubled to 50 MHz. The newer one is a Pentium (1) running at 166 MHz, but that's still powerful enough for her to browse the web and read email. Richard's new mobile phone has an ARM processor running at 100 MHz, and he can play "Doom" on it. I feel old.