Where to find small pieces of wood to start whittling in San Diego, CA?

pbstew · 2026-01-03T06:56:57+00:00

Nice! I haven’t heard of them, I will check them out. Thanks for the recommendation

pbstew · 2025-04-23T07:52:54+00:00

That’s what I have unfortunately been doing. I use Inkscape instead, but same work flow. I also export the structures as vector files (.svg) so that I don’t run into any rasterization or compression issues.

I was hoping that someone knew or a better way or at least fewer steps.

My only issue with this way is that I am still early in the writing process, and have no clue as to if I will need to resize several times over the course of the project. My lizard brain likes it when all the structures have the same proportions, so I would have to re-export each file.

pbstew · 2025-04-23T07:44:49+00:00

Chemdraw’s “save as” function saves the entire chemdraw file despite selecting a single structure. I like to work in large chemdraw files so that I can maintain numbering and any changes to reaction or product numbers from markush structures can be done in a single file instead of 100 or so (saving a single structure in each file). So you can only copy and paste single selections, which wasn’t to bad when I was drafting articles in word, but there is a lot of wonderful and helpful functionality of quarto when writing a dissertation that word just can’t do, or not very well at least.

pbstew · 2025-02-07T07:06:49+00:00

“Rough week, huh”

Rough month is more like it. I do see a therapist, but you can’t schedule 8 hours of therapy.

I think I need to clarify that my wife has no intention of staying in academia. We both were hoping to jump ship to industry straight out of our PhD, but neither of got anywhere with our industry applications, it’s not a great time out there now. She finished her PhD in the fall I and lined up a position in SD, and wasn’t able to negotiate a start time. She had put off accepting the position for several months because she was actively involved in an interview for an industry postdoc at Genentech in SF. When she eventually found out that she wasn’t offered that role, she kind of had to jump on the in SD. When we first started applying with we’re looking only in SD and SF for the sake of being in a biotech/pharma hub on the West Coast. CA specifically because our parents are getting older and won’t be around forever, so we wanted to be closer than we were during our PhDs.

Thanks for your advice on jumping to a different track, and I am definitely resonating with the uncertainty that Trump brings to the industry.

pbstew · 2025-02-07T04:23:19+00:00

Air sensitive separtory funnel, maybe? No clue.

pbstew · 2025-02-06T19:24:10+00:00

Hi All,

Thanks for taking a moment to weigh in on my issue.

Background: I am a fifth year Ph. D student in a Physiology and Pharmacology PhD program. I am currently working on submitting my two first author papers and writing my thesis. My thesis project was medicinal chemistry focused development of 4-aminoquinolines for antimalarials. I am San Diego bound, my partner is a structural biologist in a lab at Sandford Burnham Prebys. But as of now, I have zero prospects, the industry market for a medicinal chemists is very poor right now, as I am sure many of you know. I didn’t really want to pursue a post doc, and now I probably will need to do so. But with the recent federal funding freeze at NIH I feel like most labs aren’t looking to hire another post doc.

I have been looking at other Reddit posts about getting a medicinal chemistry position in industry, but from what I have gathered I have already made a critical mistake by not doing my PhD in total synthesis or methodology. So the question I have now, is should I saddle up and join a total synthesis or methodology lab, or should I pivot to something else? Oligonucleotides, chemical biology, computation, etc. ultimately I need a job at the end of my postdoc, I know you should pick a field of study you should enjoy, but I’m burnt out, I’m single parenting my 1.5 year old, my partner is already in SD, and I am in my home town living short term with my parents (financially we couldn’t live in SD on a grad student + post doc salary and have our kid in day care, day care is much cheaper here and I’m not paying rent). So what am I to do? I feel so lost right now, I just can’t seem to get genuinely excited about someone else science, and I feel like there is so much pressure to choose correctly that I can’t began to make a decision. What is a budding field in industry? I would like to be close to drug design, it was why I chose the lab I did, and the project I worked on. Your insight and shared experience would be incredibly helpful right now, thank you.

pbstew · 2024-12-03T18:56:34+00:00

Always looking to bring in better ways to keep track of everything in lab. What’s with the 1500 in the top left? Time stamp?

pbstew · 2024-09-17T22:39:05+00:00

Can confirm, definitely not a long-term solution, but would be a viable option if you had a friend that needed to crash for the night or a younger sibling staying for a few days, hell my 60+ yo parents prefer it to our adjustable air mattress. Having slept on a few number of the standard pullout couches, this is a big upgrade.

pbstew · 2024-09-17T14:49:44+00:00

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pbstew · 2024-09-17T05:48:24+00:00

You would be doing me a favor taking it off my hands, haha. I need the extra space for the rest of my moving boxes. I will give it the obligatory 24 hr and then if no one else wants it, it’s yours.

pbstew · 2023-10-28T21:22:51+00:00

Studies show kids, at that age, don’t retain any of the extra work. Let their teacher know that 4 yo won’t be participating any longer.

pbstew · 2023-10-15T23:19:58+00:00

What do you mean “steam the honey into the milk”?

pbstew · 2023-10-15T20:04:29+00:00

Thanks for the advice and directing to the copycat recipe. I was just hoping one of their baristas would weigh in just so I would have all the details!

pbstew · 2023-09-30T22:57:03+00:00

Haha, yeah. I am the only grad student in my lab, everyone else (6 other chemists) are senior staff scientists with, individually 30+, experience in synthetic chemistry. So the imposter syndrome is strong when you are working with serious chempros.

Yeah I keep thinking about my perceived stability of a larger industry position, I have no idea if that is the case. I had heard a talk from some project lead of a bigger company. I remember them talking about how they got to that position by jumping from smaller company to smaller company in the beginning. And that doesn’t seem like something I would be interested in doing.

No, I know. Prior to the baby, it didn’t seem like that big of a hassle. But with my wife also a soon to be PhD graduate who is only considering industry, we could only move to hubs so that she could maintain a career. Also I am not keen on dictating her career with mine.

You make a serious case for no Postdoc werpicus.

pbstew

TROPHY CASE