Silver Case

I was wiped out Friday evening, not sleepy, but absolutely energy-less.  Ling was not in the room so I went to the drawer where I keep my ‘special’ DVDs, the ones she doesn’t like to watch — Cowboy Westerns.   I found one I haven’t watched yet:  Fistful of Dollars.

I cannot recall watching this movie, which seems odd, as I’ve seen most Clint Eastwood westerns. Perhaps I couldn’t recall watching it because this movie was so mediocre.

First I thought the DVD tracking was broken, then I realized, “well, tracking works for Clint Eastwood, but for the guy who looks like Ricardo Montalban playing Khan the Klingon, it doesn’t.”  I found out that these really were made for Italian audiences, so the dubbing is after the fact. Their audio engineer should be shot — it was impossibly muddy to hear and I had to blast the volume and it still seemed muddy.

I guess the story and styling was ok, but the audio killed it for me.  I know for a fact that I enjoyed The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.  So I don’t know why this one let me down so much.

I still have that HBO Western Series left to watch.  And some other movie, “5:10 to Yuma”. Last night we watched a (terrible) annex to Death Note… “L: 23 Days” or something like that.  Movie made no sense to me as the plot seemed to be totally orthogonal to what happened in Death Note.  The story was more like bad X-Files Fanfic than manga.

“coked” and “goofed” are straight out 4Chan… I don’t know what these guys are talking about.

Russian scientists are set to pierce through Antarctica’s frozen surface to reveal the secrets of an icebound lake that has been sealed deep there for the past 15 million years.

Alexei Turkeyev, head of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone that scientists have “only a bit left to go.” His team has been drilling for weeks in a race to reach the lake — buried 12,000 feet beneath the polar ice cap — before the end of the brief Antarctic summer.

With the quickly returning onset of winter, scientists will be forced to leave on the last flight out on February 6. “It’s minus 40 (Celsius/Fahrenheit) outside,” said Turkeyev. “But whatever, we’re working. We’re feeling good. There’s only 5 meters left until we get to the lake so it’ll all be very soon.”

Sitting shotgun as Ling hauls us back five hours from Klang to Singapore. To kill time I downloaded Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X.

Oh boy it’s a bit excruciating. People jammed into terrible circumstances, with awful choices, and methodically grinding along. It’s basically like a nightmare during consciousness.

And I have 8 more hours of listening for what I can only hope is a happy conclusion.

———–

Update. Quit listening to this last night. WTF realized that was a quicker solution to resolving than listening through to the (uncertain) end. If I want a nightmare I can just ear a sandwich before bed tonight.

I’ve passed my third and final ATI Machinist exam.  ”General Workshop.”

I must confess, though, this was by-far the weakest module.  There were a few things I picked up which were useful (surface grinding for example) but there was mass amounts of chaff.

In particular I utterly skipped the section conducted by random guy on turning brake rotors!  I haven’t the slightest interest in working for Meineke Mufflers or wearing a mullet.

Anyway, that’s all my training for the time being.  I have many projects to get working on. First being an adapter plate to fit my new China-made 4-jaw chuck onto my lathe.  And I bought a woodruff cutter so that I can make tool-holders for my lathe.

Don’t know whether this qualifies as a ‘need’ or a ‘want”.  It is a one-off machine made for NASA to sew 3-inch thick insulation panels with glass thread.  Manufactured by Fernco, a leather-sewing specialist.  It includes a video camera to inspect the underside of the stitch.

Coincidentally, the same day I was reading  Just My Type, I see this amazing auction on Boing Boing of City of Boston’s entire print shop.  This collection could give five creative people a life time of projects to work on.

I have a 120kg+ steel plate approximately 1.14m X 0.75m.  I’m filling it with a 304 holes threaded through for M8 bolts, separated in a 5cm square grid. I’m going to use this as my fit-up and welding table, resting on top of my antique printer’s type cabinet.  That should take a +250lb load and giggle.

It’s proving to be a pain in the ass to do.  The bed and ways of the mill are just not big enough.  So I cannot lock down the plate and simply walk around from start to finish.  I have to slide the plate around.  And now that I’m getting close to the edges, I have to angle the plate to fit, which means I cannot use the numerical read-out to tell where I am located from XY (0,0).  Instead I have layout fluid painted down (stuff is amazing — displaces oil and dries in seconds) and 5cm grid lines scribed. Ugh.

And I haven’t even started tapping these things yet, merely drilling and counter-sinking them.

Inside-out

During the afternoon, I made further progress on my prototype messenger bag.  I finished building the pocket for the orange lining and am almost done the major surgery to seal up the bag on the sides.  Another couple hours of work in it for sure.  Then time to do Ling’s bag.

Almost have finished up the shell of the bag. Next will be to sew in the heavy lining.  My Juki is running hard, here it is trivially sewing through 4 layers of waxed canvas + leather.

Shame about the sewing machine oil on the lid.  Doubtful I can wash it out.  Oh well, it’s a machinist-themed bag anyway.  Narrowly averted another hook-timing incident today.  I’m getting better at clearing up the problem before it goes toxic.

First Half of the Day: T-fillets

Middle Part of the Day: Luke, Lee, Woei, Ling, Nini, Ling’s mom, Australian Cherries.

Last Half of the Day: Cordura Applique on waxed canvas

Telstar Logistics Reviews Restaurant Trucks.

Join us for a trip to Los Angeles, where we tour AA Cater Truck, which built San Francsico’s popular Chairman Bao food truck. We also explore Armenco, which built the innovative Le Truc “bustaurant.” It’s an interesting business that combines custom fabrication with killer cuisine — and the results are delicious.

I’m pretty smitten with Intaglio and Intaglio for iPhone.   It’s a (very) lightweight alternative to the almost-Microsoft-bloated Adobe Illustrator.  I often dash out simple wireframes on my iPhone when the muse strikes and then later flesh them out on the full pc client.

Facebook says, “suggest a profile picture.”

Hmmmm

I guess I have a few things in my files.

Perhaps  this one.  Oh but that’s a video.

Well, there’s one of her enjoying a fish’ eyeball.

But then maybe we should just go with the classic.

There is a rapidly accumulating body of evidence which suggests that prolonged sitting is very bad for our health, even for lean and otherwise physically active individuals. The good news? Animal research suggests that simply walking at a leisurely pace may be enough to rapidly undo the metabolic damage associated with prolonged sitting, a finding which is supported by epidemiological work in humans. So, while there are a lot of questions that remain unanswered (e.g. Is there a “safe” amount of daily sedentary time?), the evidence seems clear that we should strive to limit the amount of time we spend sitting. And when we do have to sit for extended periods of time (which, let’s face it, is pretty much every single day for many of us) we should take short breaks whenever possible.

Finally, if you take only one thing from this post, let it be this—sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little.

By any measure I sit too long each day.  Maybe this is enough reason for me to make a bicycle-saddle chair.

Since finishing Darrell Holland’s lathe course, I started the Vertical Mill course. We have quite a large vertical mill in the shop which I currently only use as a massively over-built drill press.    It might look dated or corny, but I tell you, these videos are good. Why?

• He has no annoying vocal ticks, accents, or distracting behaviors. I’ve watched some MIT online lectures and they’re absolutely painful to endure even though the underlying material is world-class.  Don’t underestimate how much a weirdo can get on your nerves when you’re trying to concentrate on something hard and difficult.
• His topic coverage gives a thorough base. I feel well-bootstrapped on the lathe following his instruction. There is acres I don’t know yet, but I have the base to figure it out or find the answer somewhere without seeming an idiot.
• He doesn’t teach to the stupidest common denominator. He explains things. Important things he’ll cover multiple times, but there are no painfully long stretches where i wish there was a fast forward because it’s all tautology or embarrassingly stupid explanations for dumb people.  Ok, there was a two minute section on the decimal system, but it was only two minutes….
• He’s efficient.  We hustle along, theory demonstration, refined demonstration, project. Rinse, repeat.

• Thorough. He explains e
• Clear and articulate.
• No annoying ticks or accent
• No condescendingly pedantic, not even pedantic
• Gives a good base to work from

http://fukung.net/v/36100/0e135c51da687ef29aeefd5b52e1754c.gif

I went cycling to celebrate 1/1/11 yesterday.  The route includes Lim Chu Kang road.  This road runs around Tengah Airbase, a tank training camp, the UAV command, and other military areas.  At one point the road becomes extremely wide and extremely flat and extremely straight.  That’s where Lim Chu Kang road is designated as an emergency alternate runway.  At night, particularly, I’ve seen all sorts of weird things on this road, included tracked armoured personnel carriers.

So yesterday I could see far off in the distance (the road is kilometers long and straight — you can see a long way ahead) some shimmering lights on the shoulder of the road. It was hard to judge what owned them.  They seemed to be shimmering a lot, so at first I thought they were emergency lights.  Then I realized they were just ugly-colored incandescent lights. So I figured they must be headlights of a jeep bouncing down the road.

Finally I got close enough to comprehend what it was — some amazingly awful looking three-wheeled motorcycle designed with two wheels in front.  It’s called a Can-Am Spyder.  Apparently it’s an approved ride in Singapore.  Whatever goober was driving it, though, should forget it.  The thing already looks dorky, and when this guy is driving it at 40kmh down a, literally, runway, looking gripped, he makes it look even dorkier.  TT — Total Turd.

…I still have two more modules to complete.

I subscribed to an online machinist course.  I’ve heard from enough people that the videos are very good.  Currently I’m going through the lathe series.  The era looks dated, but we’re talking about manual machining. Its glory days were in the 1950′s. So a 1980′s video is cutting edge.

So tonight I’m eating my dinner and drinking Carlsberg watching more installments.  Dave(?) Holland is discussing proper use of precision measuring instruments. (micrometers to 1/10,000 inch). He makes the (shown below) remark about his depth micrometer and I immediately started snort-laughing like I was back in 7th grade woodshop with Mr. Berreta the molester/shop teacher.  So I figure this is a very authentic shop-class video.

And I am not making this up. Watch the series yourself if you don’t believe me.

This mess of shit is the picture you see when you look up “dangerous”, “dead”, or “electrocution” in the dictionary. No isolation from the A.C. line = DEAD

As per our traditional alpine Christmas practices,  Krampus has been tormenting Luke for the previous two weeks.  Tonight, of course, St Nicholas tracks Luke down to Sydney to give him his goodies.