Turning some hardwood... Yesterday afternoon I just couldn't stand the idea of not trying out the lathe on some hardwood. I have a small pile of logs, some of which we inherited when we bought this house. Those logs are fairly dry, and the wood is fine-grained and hard. I think they might be box elder (a kind of maple), which we have a lot of on our property. I picked one of those logs, trimmed it up in my band saw, then sawed an 8 inch long piece of it off. After mounting it to the lathe's face plate, I started turning it at low RPM and roughed it into the beginnings of a goblet (first photo below).
For the next hour I experimented with the five carbide turning tools I have, and figured out how to cut the shape I was after. The only tool that gave me any trouble was a “hollower”, which has a large (about 1/4") circular carbide blade. That tool kept getting jammed up and spun out of my hands. The rest of them I had little trouble with. By the time I was almost done (second photo), something recognizable as a goblet was appearing on the spindle. I left the bottom inch or so of the goblet unfinished, as the screws that mount it to the face plate were in there. In the third photo you can see the goblet after sanding.
The only step left at that point was “parting”, wherein I used a very thin tool (the “parting tool”) to cut a groove all the way through the wood to separate the goblet from the wasted wood (with the screws) against the face plate. In the last photo, you can see that wasted wood still mounted to the lathe, and the large pile of shavings from the cup. I'm going to pick up some Watco finish today (assuming the local Home Depot carries it!), and then I'll post some photos of the finished goblet.
One thing I can tell already: I'm really going to enjoy turning wood. It's something I've wanted to do my entire life, and now I can finally do it...
Barn progress... The lathe is wired up to 240 volts, and it works beautifully. As a test of sorts, I turned a simple bowl out of a leftover chunk of Douglas fir 4 x 6 – that gave me a medium-sized bowl about 5 inches in diameter and 3 inches high. Softwoods in general don't turn very well, as chunks will break out when you're cutting across grain. That happened to me with this piece; there are lots of places where the surface is deeply gouged. But no matter – this piece worked great for trying out the lathe!
One feature of this lathe may interest those who are technically inclined: while it has a 3-phase 60 cycle 240V motor, it will run just fine on a single phase of anything between 105 and 250 volts, one or three phases, and 50 to 60 cycles. How? There is an inverter included as an integral part of the lathe. Despite handling up to 2,500 watts, the inverter is quite small – the size of a small book. As recently as 10 years ago, this was much harder problem than it is today. Back in the '70s, the standard way to deal with power conversion issue like this was a motor-generator set (known colloquially as an “MG set”). These were made from an electric motor on the same shaft as a generator. The ship I was stationed on in the U.S. Navy used several of these – each the size and weight of a small car – to convert the ship's standard 3-phase 60 cycle 240V to single phase 400 cycle 110V power. Our computers used 400 cycle mains to reduce the physical size of transformers and the size of filter capacitors for the linear power supplies. Switching power supplies didn't exist.
Geek: funnies...Fifty cartoons along the same lines as these three samples. I don't think I'd seen any of them before. Quite a few of them had me laughing out loud :)
Barn progress... The lathe is finished (at right)! Next steps: connect compressed air and electricity; those will be tomorrow's projects. Below are some closeups of (left to right) the tailstock, the drive shaft (with faceplate), and the headstock. It's a sweet machine!
I was only able to put it together by myself by using the engine crane (at left). The lathe's bed is one massive chunk of cast iron, and weighs something like 500 lbs. Using the crane I was able to (easily!) lift it, place it atop the cast iron legs, and then move the entire thing to the exact place I wanted it. I also used the crane to lift and move the headstock, which weighs almost 200 lbs. It's a handy gadget for an aging geek :)
Barn progress... The tile guys finished setting all the tile in my new office. I'm still amazed by how closely this tile resembles real wood. It's made by using a specialized ink jet printer to spray different colored glazes onto the blank tiles, “printing” a photograph of an actual piece of wood. The surface of the tile has wood grain texture on it as well. The tile guys will grout it on Monday, and later in the week a crew will show up to install baseboard and trim for the windows and door.
Yesterday my engine crane showed up, and I had it assembled within a couple of hours despite the lack of accurate directions. There were directions included, but they were for a (substantially) different model. Mostly I used the photo on the box as my guide :)
Once I had the crane assembled, I used it to move the components of my new lathe as I assembled them. By the time I knocked off last night, I had the legs attached to the base, it was positioned in its place, and I had the headstock, tailstock, and tool rest base all installed. I should easily finish assembling the lathe this weekend, including wiring it up. Then it's on to testing!
You're messing with the radio astronomers! Stop it!Researchers have discovered the source of the mysterious perytons that are plaguing radio astronomical research. It's your microwave oven, when you open the door before it has finished cooking. The oven emits a brief burst of 2.4 GHz microwave energy before the door interlock switch shuts it down. Incidentally, that burst is also cooking you, just a tiny bit.
The solution is simple: don't open your microwave door until the timer has completed, or you have manually shut it down. Now all we have to do is get 4 or 5 billion microwave owners to cooperate, and the peryton plague will be over...
Wil can fly... The Lawrence family is one of our neighbors here in Paradise. They have five kids. Their youngest son is Wil, and he has Down syndrome. Alan, the dad, is a photographer – and he's using his skills to create images of Wil doing something that he loves: flying.
The entire Lawrence family is hoping to raise awareness of Down syndrome, and they've got some great ideas on how to do it. They need a little funding, though – so this being the twenty first century, they have of course started a Kickstarter project to raise the money. We've signed up as backers. If you've got a few bucks to spare, consider doing so yourself.
Geek: random numbers are hard... I've discovered this the hard way (via subtle bugs) on a number of occasions over my career. The most recent time involved creating GUIDs. It wasn't my code, but it was my job to find the problem – and it was caused by a random number generator producing a (very) biased stream of (allegedly randomly distributed) numbers. Here's someone else discovering a similar problem, this time in C++.
Water in my ear... Tuesday evening, after I took a shower, I had water stuck in my right ear. No matter what I did that water would just not come out. Yesterday morning it was still there, and it was starting to hurt – just a little, but enough to make me worry about an infection. My hearing was affected, too. So around noon yesterday I headed for the Intermountain Instacare facility in downtown Logan, about 20 minutes from home.
This is the same place we went for Debbie's really bad cough about a week and a half ago. We got amazingly fast and good service then, so I was hopeful the same might happen for me this time. When I walked in, there were exactly zero people in the waiting room. Three clerks at the desk were busy with paperwork and phone calls, but as I walked up to the desk one of them greeted me cheerfully and instructed me to fill out a little sticker (with my name, address, and complaint) and to hand it to one particular clerk. I did that in about 30 seconds, and the clerk found me in their computer and had me all written up in about another 60 seconds. I had to electronically sign a couple of forms (a liability release form included, of course), and then she told me to sit down and wait for my name to be called. She said the wait would be no more than 15 minutes.
So I sat down, popped the top off my iPad, and tapped on “Kindle” to continue reading a book I'd started. Before the Kindle app could even start up, a nurse stuck her head out a door and hollered my name. Four minutes after I walked in the door, I was sitting down and having my vitals taken. Two more minutes and a doctor was examining me. It took him about 10 seconds to figure out what was wrong: a plug of ear wax had nestled deep within my ear canal, and it needed to be removed.
A pair of nurses went to work on me immediately. They had me lay on my side, bad ear up, and then filled it to the brim with a chemical solution designed to soften the ear wax. I had to lay there for about 15 minutes for the stuff to work. Then they sat me up and squirted warm water in my ear to flush out the junk. They had a gadget that was sort of like a water pistol with a short hose on it. It worked – in short order all the bits of ear wax they'd espied had been removed, and I could hear normally again – the water that had been plugged up was gone, and the pain was also gone.
The doctor came back in to double check the results, and I was able to have a good discussion with him about why this might have occurred. The entire experience was darned near optimal – fast, efficient, pleasant people at every step, and no problems at all getting all the information I wanted. Thirty two minutes after I walked in the door, I walked out. Back in San Diego, had I attempted the same thing, I'd still be at the filling-out-paperwork stage!
Mist on the field... I took the photo at right (click to embiggen) just a few minutes ago, standing under our pine trees and looking to the southwest, over our south field. We had a little bit of rain this morning (maybe a quarter inch), and it's 100% relative humidity. When the rain stopped, the water that had soaked into the top inch or so of relatively warm soil started to evaporate – but in the high humidity and colder air just above the soil, it quickly condensed back out to make this “fog” swirling above the field. We see this general thing quite often here...
“To infinity and beyond!” Diane and Bill Oblock have retired – great for them, tragic for us. Why? Because they owned our favorite local bakery (Crumb Brothers), and now they're closed. Here's the statement they left on their web site:
Dear Friends,
We have recently announced the closing of Crumb Brothers Artisan Bread and Cafe effective March 28.
With respect to the 13 wonderful years at Crumb Brothers, plus our great fortune to share our love of food and books with the community since 1988, we are ready to close our last chapter as business owners. We remain passionate about our love of good food, great books and fine company. But we are now committed to turning our passions toward a more private domain and relishing often-neglected relationships with friends and family.
We have bought the proverbial sailboat to set off on new adventures. Only our sailboat is a new (wonderful) SUV and our adventures largely land-based! Mostly we are retiring from business in order to: stay home, travel a bit, enjoy friends, relish this community and look for new ways to express our commitment to a sustainable lifestyle.
We cannot thank you all enough for supporting us in our business ventures. We love this community. Now onto the next chapter...
"To Infinity and Beyond."
Love,
Diane and Bill
We have no idea where we'll get our gluten fix from now on. No more wonderful bread, nor pear Danish, or Croque Monsieur. Pardon me while I resume my crying jag...
Drill press and table saw ... now with photos! At right is my drill press, all assembled, placed, aligned, calibrated, and tested. It's a variable speed machine (250 - 3,000 RPM) that uses a variable diameter pulley for speed adjustment. On low speeds that means more torque, which is exactly what I'll need for large holes in hardwood.
The table saw (at left) is also a very nice piece of machinery. It's a long, long way from the 10" Craftsman saw that a friend and I owned back in the '70s. Note the very wide table (55" on the right) that lets me cut the full width of a sheet of plywood or MDF, the solid steel tubing to connect the dust collection vacuum hose to the blade guard, and the outfeed table to hold longer pieces of work cut lengthwise. I've only made a few test cuts so far, but it's easy to tell that I'm going to enjoy using this thing. It's got a 3 HP motor, which is quite large for such a relatively small saw – it's hard to imagine what I could do to stall the blade.
There are a couple of features that really stood out to me, aside from the generally good build and finish. One is the fence (far right). It moves smooth as silk when you raise the red handle, then locks solidly in place when you push the handle down – without moving at all. None of that takes much force. Then note the two magnified cursors (one for work to the left of the fence, one for work on the right). The fence can be used on either side of the blade, thanks to the very long fence rails. Then (at near right) there's the blade guard. It's made from several pieces of molded polycarbonate (shatter resistant) all cleverly hinged to keep the blade area enclosed as much as possible – no matter what the thickness of the work or the height of the blade is. It's ever so much better than the cheap single piece of soft plastic used on that old Craftsman...
Developer survey... Doug S. (friend, former colleague, and Idaho mogul-of-everything) sent me a pointer to an interesting survey by StackOverflow. It's full of interesting tidbits. The one shown at right was the biggest surprise for me: 42% of all developers responding said they were self-taught! I've known quite a few developer who were, like myself, self-taught – but it's certainly not two fifths of them. It's probably more like a tenth. This makes me wonder what's going on here. Is my personal experience at odds with norms? Or is the StackOverflow site more used by self-educated developers?
Something I found amusing: the most dreaded language or technology was Salesforce.com...
Barn progress... Lot of stuff happening yesterday – I was busy all day, and very tired by the end of the day :) The remaining parts for my table saw showed up, and I finished assembling it. It's now all ready to go to work! My drill press also was delivered yesterday, and I assembled that as well. It came as a kit, but the head (the big part on top with the motor on it) was mostly assembled. That thing weighs about 250 lbs, and was way too heavy for me to lift by myself – so I used the forklift on my tractor again. I lashing it up to the forks with ropes, then just hoisted it up and dropped it onto the column. I'm really starting to like hydraulics :)
When you need to bang on something, it's really hard to beat an old-fashioned anvil. I got a 165 pound steel anvil (Ridgid) with a machined flat top, much like the one shown at left. It came by truck on the smallest pallet I've ever seen – so small that I couldn't get both forks under it at the same time, even when they were adjusted to be touching each other! I got it into the shop by balancing it delicately on one forklift fork.
Shortly after I set it down, some of my neighbor's kids came over, wanting to look at the barn. They're fascinated by the machinery, and stop by two or three times a week to see how things are coming along. Yesterday, though, it was the anvil that captured their attention. I showed them how you can flatten a piece of copper wire on the anvil, and for the next two hours, three of them took turns flattening every piece of scrap copper wire they could find lying on my barn floor (this is all left over from the still-in-progress wiring work). None of them could wield even my smallest hammer in one hand, even though the oldest boy looks plenty strong enough. I think they just don't have much experience with hand tools...
This is exactly the sort of thing ... that led to the NSA abuses that Snowden revealed. This time it's in the area of computer security, and may well lead to less secure computers for all of us.
Alcohol or marijuana?A pediatrician considers which he'd rather his children used. A worthwhile read, especially for anyone who still thinks marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol.
A few years ago a friend asked me what provoked my advocacy for decriminalizing drugs. He was puzzled by it, as he knew that I wasn't a user of any illegal drugs. I had to think about it for a while, but realized it was the conjunction of these things:
My increasing awareness over time of the irrationality of many political decisions, resulting in policies that were indefensible on any rational basis. The U.S. drug policy fits quite nicely into that category.
My reading of history, which led to the (then surprising to me) discovery that for most of U.S. history there were no illegal drugs. We survived anyway.
My growing circle of friends and colleagues, many of whom I discovered were regular users of illegal drugs (most commonly marijuana, but also including LSD, peyote, cocaine, etc.). My own experiences with these people showed me that the drugs didn't destroy their intellect or their ambition, nor were they addicted any more than I am to Cabernet. On the other hand, I've known several people whose lives were utterly destroyed by their alcoholism.
My solidifying libertarian position on personal freedom. I take the simple position that personal behavior that does not harm others should not be outlawed. Personal use of so-called “recreational drugs” (including alcohol) usually doesn't harm others – but even when it does, the harmful behavior should be outlawed, not the drug use. For the most part, that is exactly how we regulate alcohol use today.
My growing understanding of the systemic damage caused by the war on drugs, which I've written about many times before.
Add all that up, and you've got the source of my advocacy...
A stunning measure of change... The graph at right shows the result of a relatively simple calculation: for each plotted year, it shows the percentage of market capitalization represented by intangible assets, for all the companies on the S&P 500 list. To make this calculation, the authors simply subtracted the companies' tangible assets from their market caps; these are both readily available numbers straight from the companies' quarterly reports.
In the thirty years since 1975, those intangible assets have gone from around 17% of market cap to over 80% of market cap. What does this mean? Well, let's make up an example. Suppose that in 1975, the market cap of an S&P 500 component company was $1B. If it was an average company, about $830m of that value would be in the form of tangible assets: cash, buildings, equipment, etc. But the same company in 2015, with the same $1B market cap, would have only about $160m in tangible assets. What's the rest of the value? It's those intangible things, mainly an expectation of growth because of the intellectual property value held by the company.
This reflects the enormous shift in American (and worldwide) industry in the information age. Much of the value of a company is now in the designs that it has made, code that it has written, patents that it owns, and expertise that it possesses – intangible assets that are the drivers for future growth. Some of the value is simply in market expectations – Amazon and Apple are two good examples of this phenomenon.
The more I think about the changes documented in this graph, the more it sinks in just how profoundly our world has been changed by IT...
You'd be well-advised ... to stay far away from me today. Especially if you're a politician, or anything even remotely close to that. Why? Today I start on my tax return. That's guaranteed to get me thinking about things like politicians, waterboarding, high velocity lead, rope, branding irons, and so forth, in various pleasing combinations.
It will wear off in a month or two, but I'll resurrect this emotional state on election day...
The SETI folks are excited...Radio astronomers are observing fast radio bursts with discrete steps in their dispersion function that are hard to explain by natural mechanisms. In other words, they look like something produced by an intelligent being. There's some definite suspicion that the signals are man-made, though: the discrete steps are awfully close to round numbers of seconds. Since seconds are an entirely arbitrary measure of time used by humans on Earth, it seems unlikely that an alien source would come up with the same thing...
We missed this ... though he must have passed right by our home (it's pretty hard to get out of Paradise without passing by our home!). We don't know David Smith...
Moonlight in Paradise... I woke up around 3 am this morning, and took our old field spaniel (Mo'i) outside for a walk. We didn't need any lights this morning – the full moon was very bright. Subjectively it was amongst the brightest moonlit nights I've ever experienced. I could easily see the color of virtually all objects within my sight when the moon was at my back. Certain colors (like orange) were vivid. Others (green, blue) were unsaturated but clearly visible. I could see, easily, Mo'i's brown fur against the green grass.
We walked an extra couple of passes around the yard just to enjoy it...
Barn progress... Yesterday was a day of drudgery – I installed lights in Debbie's agility arena all day long. Nine lights down, six to go – I should finish easily today...
Senator Feinstein happens to be from California, and happens to be a Democrat – but this sort of ignorance crosses party lines and state lines. Senator Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican, comes right to mind as an example.
In this case, we have a Senator – a person in a position of considerable political power and influence – who is demonstrating a profound ignorance of a technology area that she regulates. It's a bit like asking a carpenter to land a modern jet airliner. It seems like there must be a better way, though I don't know what that way might be.
Progressive hypocrisy on display... This is like shooting fish in a barrel, to be sure, but this video documents an unusually clear example of it. Unless you've been sealed into a catacomb over the past week or so, you've heard about the Indiana pizzeria forced out of business by the progressive outrage over the owner's declaration that if she were asked to cater pizza to a same-sex wedding, she'd refuse. Cue the outrage: crazy homophobic Christians are on the rampage! The press was filled with a bazillion breathless stories, all featuring OUTRAGE! Never mind that it was all a hypothetical, that the owners had never actually refused to cater a gay wedding (because nobody ever asked them to). All the usual suspects chimed in, and right on cue the usual brain-dead celebrities started promoting a boycott of Indiana.
Crowder (the video maker) wondered what would happen if he were to ask a Muslim-owned bakery to make a wedding cake for a gay wedding – and, presuming that he'd be refused, how the progressives and their press lapdogs would respond. Now you can almost certainly guess what those responses would be – but its still a great illustration of the hypocrisy that pervades the progressive, multi-culti world. The hypocrisy is strongest when two or more of their cherished beliefs collide, as here, where gay rights and Muslim rights are in strict opposition.
I revel in the display of progressive hypocrisy, but ... that doesn't necessarily mean that I disagree with their position on the Indiana pizzeria (though I most certainly do disagree with some of their methods, and I believe the outrage is entirely misplaced). I think these are genuinely challenging issues that really don't have clear answers. Take the Indiana pizzeria case, and modify it slightly. Suppose the owners had been asked instead if they would cater to a hypothetical marriage of two black people, and they refused. Would we react differently to that? I think that today virtually everybody would agree that was inappropriate behavior, and would condemn them – but that wasn't true even as recently as my own childhood.
There's a delicate balancing act here, with at least three competing elements: personal beliefs (religious or otherwise), the rights of individuals, and societal mores. The Indiana pizzeria owners have a belief that gay marriage is wrong – do we force them to do something in violation of their own beliefs? The hypothetical gay groom and groom want pizzas for their wedding – do we force them to go to a different pizzeria? On gay marriage, American society is moving from outraged rejection toward at least grudging acceptance, but there's certainly no consensus on this yet – do we shove the notion down everyone's throat?
No easy answers here. The only thing I feel sure of is that change is in the air...
Chained libraries... I'd seen individual books with chains on them before, in museums, but I hadn't realized that there were entire libraries filled with books on chains – and I certainly didn't know that some of those libraries survived to this day. Why were the books chained? Because before the invention of the printing press and moveable type, books were made by hand-copying from the original. It took thousands of hours of tedious skilled work to make a single book, so they were very valuable. It wasn't the calligraphy that was the rare (and expensive) skill back then: it was the ability to read and write – not that many people could!
More than a quarter of U.S. Presidents owned slaves... It's shocking to see that statistic. The list of slave-owning presidents had some surprises for me...
Barn progress... All the junction boxes are installed for the fifteen lamps going into Debbie's agility arena. Now I just have to wire them up. I probably have a couple days more work on those.
The big excitement for the day yesterday was the surprise arrival of my new lathe. According to the tracking information, it was expected about a week from now. I'm not complaining about it coming early, though :) The lathe arrived on a single long pallet weighing 980 pounds (according to the packing label). That's just barely within the specs for my tractor's loader capacity, but fortunately I was able to get it off the truck with no problems. It loaded the engine down a bit, and there was a little groaning from the tractor's frame ... but I picked it right up off the truck's floor and drove it into the barn.
On unpacking the pallet, I discovered (naturally) that this is one quite massive kit. One thing that's a little unusual: the weight of this kit is such that I will either need three helpers to move the parts with me, or I'll have to figure out how to use the tractor to do the lifting. Once I get the thing assembled I don't think I'll be moving it – so I definitely need to get it in the right place the first time :)
Update: I just discovered the existence of something called an “engine crane”, designed to allow mechanics to lift an engine out of a car and move it around the shop. They're not all that expensive, and they can easily lift any of the tools in my shop – so I can move things around, and assemble the lathe, all by myself. I have one on order now...
Geek: 7 bits of mantissa are not enough for two (decimal) digit accuracy...Excellent discussion of this little-understood problem, with a (for me, at least) new perspective of the underlying issue as one of interleaving. Browsing around the site led to all sorts of interesting posts...
Wood shop photos... After being chastised by friend and former colleague Doug S., I'm posting some photos of what I've been doing. Below, left to right: scroll saw, band saw, and planer. All of them are now fully assembled, aligned, calibrated, tested, and (in the case of the last two) wired to power.
Barn progress... The photo at right is from Monday, when the tile guys were putting down the Durorock underlayment in the room that will become my office in the barn. This cement board comes in 2' x 4' sheets, stuck to the floor with thinset and then screwed down with screws at about 8" intervals. The seams are leveled with some more thin set. The end result is a very level and rigid substrate for the tile to be installed on top of. The fellow spreading the thinset in the photo is the master installer who can cut amazingly straight lines with a handheld saw.
Yesterday I started installing the lighting in Debbie's agility room. I quickly ran out of something quite important to the process: 1/2" PVC conduit. This meant another run to Home Depot, where I picked up the conduit and a couple of tools to make my installation go a bit quicker. I'll be continuing that today, but first I'm going to assemble a scroll saw stand that arrived late yesterday afternoon. Today I should get the stand for the miter saw, and the last of my power tools will finally be off the floor...
Joni Mitchell hospitalized...She's ok so far. Somehow it has escaped my attention that Joni Mitchell is 71 years old. I still think of her as the freckle-faced folk singer whose lyrics entranced me in the late '60s – and forever since then. Her early albums have always been on my “Favorites” playlist...
Barn progress... I got the upstairs subpanel installed and tested yesterday. Now it will be quite straightforward to wire up my office, some lights in the storage area, and the electric hoist for hauling heavy stuff up through the “hatch” in my woodshop.
The tile guys showed up with the wrong tile (dang it!), and getting the right tile is going to add a week onto the project. They did get the underlayment (a kind of concrete board) in place, doing a very nice job. The guy in charge was particularly skilled at cutting perfectly straight edges in the concrete board with a small, hand-held, battery-powered saw that used a 3" diameter diamond blade. If I tried that the result would be ... not good. He made it look ridiculously easy, but in a conversation with his sidekick I discovered that though he (the sidekick) has been trying to do it for a year, he still can't make a straight line. It reminds me of watching the masons at work, doing things that they made look easy, but when I tried it I got nowhere at all.
Today I'm mostly going to concentrate on getting lights up in Debbie's indoor agility arena, though I have a few other little things to do as well...
A few years ago, when another of the Doolittle Raid survivors had died, I was shocked to learn that many of my colleagues at work had never heard of the Doolittle Raid. It's not as though it was ancient history – it happened in 1942, just ten years before I was born. It was one of the most memorable stories to emerge from the American side of WWII, and was the subject of a wildly popular book and movie, both titled “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”. How could any American not know about it?
Worse, those few colleagues of mine who did know the story were all immigrants. Several Estonian colleagues knew about it in considerable detail, having been educated in primary school about this bit of American history – in the Soviet Union. A colleague who hails from Australian knew about it, as did another who immigrated from Israel. It seems that everybody except Americans knows about it!
Barn progress... The band saw is now powered, and I've tested it (works great!) and done all the alignments and calibrations. The wood shop is starting to look like a wood shop!
I've been ordering a major power tool roughly every ten days, trying to space out the arrivals a bit so I have time to unpack, assemble, clean, align, and test each one. Generally they take a week to ten days to arrive. However, my careful plans have been waylaid by shipper errors, missing parts, and so on – and now this coming Friday three of them are scheduled to arrive on the same day. On three different trucks, naturally. It's going to be a bit of a zoo around here on that day!
I had to make a Home Depot run yesterday, and while there I picked up the parts I need for a handrail for the stairs up to the second floor of the barn, and also the parts for a second floor electrical sub-panel. I'm going to put a 50 amp sub-panel up there more for convenience than anything else. I doubt I'll need even 15 amps, but wiring the office and second floor lights will be easier when the circuits are all pulled from a (closer) second floor panel rather than the main panel on the first floor. This has an interesting consequence: the main panel on the first floor is a big one (20 positions/40 breakers), but I'm only going to be using about 7 or 8 of those positions. The vast majority of the circuits in the barn will be pulled from either the sub-panel in the wood shop or the second floor sub-panel. Looks like I over-bought that main panel :)
Dancing to the music... Via my mom, who gave me a great belly laugh as I ate my lunch of tlapeno made by my lovely bride...
She walked up and tied her old mule to the hitching post. As she stood there, brushing some of the dust from her face and clothes, a young gunslinger stepped out of the saloon with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.
The young gunslinger looked at the old woman and laughed, "Hey old woman, have you ever danced?"
The old woman looked up at the gunslinger and said, "No, I never did dance. Never really wanted to."
A crowd had gathered as the gunslinger grinned and said, "Well, you old bag, you're gonna dance now," and started shooting at the old woman's feet.
The old woman prospector – not wanting to get her toe blown off – started hopping around. Everybody was laughing. When his last bullet had been fired, the young gunslinger, still laughing, holstered his gun and turned around to go back into the saloon.
The old woman turned to her pack mule, pulled out a double-barreled shotgun, and cocked both hammers. The loud clicks carried clearly through the desert air. The crowd stopped laughing immediately.
The young gunslinger heard the sounds, too, and he turned around very slowly. The silence was almost deafening.
The crowd watched as the young gunman stared at the old woman and the large gaping holes of those twin barrels. The barrels of the shotgun never wavered in the old woman's hands, as she quietly said, "Son, have you ever kissed a mule's ass?"
The gunslinger swallowed hard and said, "No ma'am. But ... I've always wanted to."
Now that's what I call a measured and well-considered answer!
He excelled at attempting home improvement projects, outsmarting
rabbits, annoying the women in his life and reading every book he could
get his hands on.
He thought everyone could, and should, live on a strict diet of
salmon, canned peas and rice pilaf, and took extreme pride in the fact
that he had a freezer stocked full of wild game and seafood.
His life goal was to beat his wife at Scrabble, and although he never
succeeded, his dream lives on in the family he left behind.
Comet 67P... As seen by Rosetta on March 21st, from a distance of 83 km (about 50 miles). The outgassing is much more visible than it was just a few weeks ago, because the comet is getting closer to the sun and is warming up...
Meanwhile, over on the other side of Mars ... the Curiosity rover is doing a tire self-examination. You may recall that the mission planners were getting worried about the unexpectedly high rate of tire damage – and photos like this one show why, graphically. Those aluminum tires look like the losers in a rough fight. In the photo at right (click to embiggen) you can see several badly damaged parts on one of the rover's six tires. The mission planners are driving carefully these days, most especially to avoid any particularly sharp or jagged rocks. Let's hope this caution keeps Curiosity mobile long enough to explore Mt. Sharp!
The shadow knows... The Mars rover Opportunity is sitting on the edge of Endurance Crater, and happened to be in the right position to snap a nice photo of its own shadow. Opportunity is now almost finished with the 11th year of its planned 90 day mission – you just gotta love that little robot! Via APOD, of course...
Barn progress... I got my new band saw unpacked, cleaned up (the table was covered with grease for storage), and mostly aligned. There were some challenges here, as that thing was very heavy. The biggest challenge was getting it onto the mobile base I got for it. Working by myself, how do I get almost 500 pounds of band saw off its shipping pallet and onto the mobile base? The answer involves the tractor, of course – and also the very convenient eye bolt that comes on top of the band saw for lifting it. I wrapped a chain around my forklift's tines, cranked the forklift high enough to clear the band saw, hooked up the chain to the eye bolt, and hoisted away. Tractors sure are handy things to have around!
I haven't tested the band saw yet, or done the final alignment, as I haven't connected it to power yet. I'll have to run to Home Depot today for a few components, and then I'll do those last things...
21 ways that English is the worst language ever... Via friend and former colleague Aleck L. (for whom English is his second language). My favorite is #17:
Do you ever gaze downward? Don't do it in the airport security line, because the TSA is trained to think that's an indication that you might be a terrorist.
Reminder: the TSA's vast, expensive, intrusive, obnoxious security apparatus has caught exactly zero terrorists trying to get on planes.
Zero.
Does anyone other than me think there might be a cost/benefit problem here?
Shareholder's meeting... When we bought our new home here in Paradise, we also bought some shares in the irrigation water company that provides our pressurized irrigation water. A few weeks ago the fellow that runs alfalfa on our south field stopped by and let me know that he was running for a seat on the Board of the irrigation company, and that he'd really appreciate my attending the upcoming shareholder's meeting and voting for him. I listened to why he wanted to get that Board seat, and I liked what I heard – so I agreed to show up and vote for him.
Last night (way past my bedtime!) was the shareholder's meeting. It was a much more interesting experience than I expected it to be. About 50 people showed up. These are all people who live in or around Paradise, so that's actually a substantial fraction of the total population! Most of them have known each other for many years, and of course most of them attend church together in one of the (four) local LDS wards. This made for a lively and congenial meeting.
The meeting's process was recognizable to anyone familiar with formal shareholder or Board meetings – but really just barely recognizable. The President struggled mightily to stay on track and make sure the right stuff got into the minutes, but it wasn't easy for him. The audience of shareholders was, I think, largely ignorant of the formalities beyond making and seconding a motion. Much of the business was approved by acclamation (a show of hands, absence of opposition) instead of by actual vote. The only actual votes came toward the end of the meeting, when new Board members were being selected. There were four openings, but only two of them had multiple nominees. To vote, the Board handed out blank Post-It notes, and we scribbled our name, the number of shares we were voting, and the name of the candidate we were voting for. Then they retired to another room to tote up the vote and check the share count. It wasn't exactly the procedure you'd see in even a small public company :) But it worked. The four new Board members were duly elected and welcomed on board. The fellow I came to vote for won his seat, much to his delight.
On my short drive home, I reflected on how this Board meeting illustrated the differences between the culture here in Paradise and where we used to live in Southern California. I can't imagine this short, cheerful meeting with it's loose attention to formality ever working in California – not even in the relatively small community of Jamul that we were part of. The closest experience I have to compare it with was a couple of meetings held in Jamul to discuss the (then proposed) Jamul Indian Casino. That was a much larger room full of people who were mainly strangers to one another. There was much mistrust and suspicion, and little shyness about openly voicing it. Absolutely nothing was accomplished, other than a couple of local politicians being able to get their statements in the paper. We left much unhappier than we arrived. Here, by contrast, several contentious issues were discussed in a friendly manner, solutions proposed, courses of action agreed upon, and everyone left with smiles on their faces (and, most of them, with a donut in their hands). It was part social event, part business, and 100% effective.
Barn and house progress... Painters arrived yesterday to start painting my new office on the second floor of the barn. They're planning to finish today, and the tile installers will be here next Monday and Tuesday to put the floor down (wood-look tile). With any luck at all, the construction guys will show up later next week to put in the baseboard and trim (windows and door). After that, it's all up to me: I need to put up an electrical subpanel for the second floor, then wire power and lights in the office (and some lighting in the upstairs storage as well). I also need to install some ducting and a fan so that I can use the heated air from the first floor to keep the office temperatures from dipping below freezing. In two or three weeks, I may be able to start moving my computer, etc. into the new office. Woo hoo!
Yesterday I took delivery of my band saw – a 17" monster from Grizzly. It came in a wooden crate on a pallet, which I was able to drive right to it's location in the woodshop with the tractor. Very convenient, that was.
Yesterday we also got a big furniture delivery, one we've been waiting for with bated breath. The shipment included our dining room table and chairs, a dresser and chest for our bedroom, and a dresser and end table for the guest bedroom. They're all beautiful pieces. I'll post some photos after it gets light enough to take them...
We can all be angels now... Angel investors, that is. If I'm reading this correctly (and you'd be totally fair to doubt that!), the SEC just decided that crowdfunding companies can peddle equity to the masses. In other words, companies sites like Kickstarter can now offer stock (or, presumably, instruments like options or warrants) to anyone who signs up to help fund them. Previously they've been limited to offering product, swag, or smiley faces.
It will be fascinating to see what happens with this. It's sort of the next stage after the reforms starting in the '70s have made the stock market more accessible to ordinary people unsophisticated in the art of equity investing...
A startling statistic... While reading a largely unrelated article this morning, I came across this statistic:
Nearly half of black males and almost 40 percent of white males in the
U.S. are arrested by age 23...
Do you find that as startling as I did? I've only known a few people who have ever been arrested, and several of those are not even American. Are the arrest rates much higher today than when I was in my early 20s?
I couldn't find any authoritative data on that question, but I did find several sources that dramatically cited increased arrest rates (250% to 600%, depending on who you want to believe) starting in the late '60s and early '70s – right when I reached that age. That immediately led me to suspect the war on drugs, so I went looking for data on that, and I found it.
Of the over 11 million arrests last year, 13% were directly for drug abuse. Note that this data is for arrests, not people. Some people were arrested multiple times in the year. What's not uncovered by this data is how many of the other crimes related to drugs in some way (generally by users desperate to come up with the money for another high-priced dose of illegal drugs). The dramatic increases in other crimes coincident with the war on drugs suggests that the related crime rates are very high indeed.
That same report gives the overall arrest rate as 3.7% of inhabitants per year. Even if you figure a very high average number of arrests – say, 2 per arrested person per year – that works out to more than 1% of the population being arrested every year. That's really hard for me to wrap my brain around, given how few people I know with an arrest record.
No obligation whatsoever... Much of what passes for politics these days reminds me of the vacuity of celebrity culture (i.e., the dominant culture in the U.S.). A great example of this: the U.S. – Chinese “announcement” of CO2 reductions. Delingpole summarizes nicely...
The reason for our oil shortage... Via my brother Scott...
A lot of folks can't understand how we came to have an oil shortage here in our country.
Well, there's a very simple answer. Nobody bothered to check the oil. We just didn't know we were getting low. The reason for that is purely geographical. Our oil is located in:
Barn progress... Well, the planer is completely assembled, oiled, greased, cleaned up – and tested. The operation is smooth and solid, and not as noisy as I was expecting.
The model I have uses a four-row spiral carbide cutter head, which is new to me. All the planers I've ever used had tool steel cutter blades; this one uses lots of little square carbide “chips” like the one shown at right. These chips are just over 1/2" square, and can be rotated (“indexed”) to used any one of the four sides as the cutting edge. Wood run through this planer has a subtle pattern showing in the planed face, just barely visible but definitely “feelable”. A couple of passes with 400 grit sandpaper and it's gone, though. This seems a very small price to pay for all the advantages: no sharpening (yay!), easy (and inexpensive) “blade” replacement, and no subtle alignment or calibration issues.
The painters will be here today to paint my office and the baseboard for Debbie's agility court. Hopefully the tile floor will go into my office early next week...
JavaScript has won the browser... You may have thought it had already won, but there was still Google's Dart trying hard to supplant JavaScript as a native browser scripting, or at the very least to supplement it. But now Google has announced that it's giving up. As a language, Dart will live on – but only as a version that compiles to JavaScript. That's the end. There's no other credible effort to replace JavaScript.
There are probably not all that many old farts still around who remember the other half dozen or so scripting languages that have tried to take on JavaScript. The one that made the most traction was Microsoft's Visual Basic, unless you count their JavaScript variant (JScript) as a separate language.
I think having a standard browser scripting language – even if it's only a de facto standard – is a very good thing indeed. It feels a bit overdue, as if the railroads had just now agreed on a standard track gauge, or pipe manufacturers had just agreed on standard diameters and threads. Browser scripting language was already almost at that point – but there was this behemoth out there (Google) declaring their intention to upset that particular apple cart.
Barn progress... I did a bunch of wiring yesterday, mostly adding 110V outlets to the south side of the wood shop area. Now that I have lights (see them at right!), I can see well enough – even before dawn – to install the rest of the wiring. I'm using plastic junction boxes and conduit (at left),
which are ridiculously easy to install compared with the traditional galvanized steel boxes and conduit.
Early in the afternoon I had some excitement: my planer arrived! I spent the rest of the day removing it from its wooden crate, getting it onto the floor, and starting to assemble it. It's a kit, of course, just like all the other tools I've purchased. It's another beast of a machine – almost 700 pounds of steel and cast iron. The manual was packed inside a cardboard box, which in turn was inside the planer itself. I wrestled the planer off the pallet it was shipped on, onto the barn's concrete floor. That was challenging to do by myself, because of the weight, but I didn't see any safe place to lift it with the tractor. After I got it onto the floor (and rested for a bit), I unscrewed the side panel on the planer, pulled out the box, opened it, got the manual, and started reading about unpacking and assembly. First thing it says: lift the planer off the pallet with a fork lift, using the built in extensible lifting bars. Dang it! The manual is available online; I could have read it before I even uncrated the machine. Next time I get a heavy machine in here, that's exactly what I'm going to do...
