Silver Case

But now we’re starting to fear she’s becoming a Monkey Freak.

that monkeys are nasty little buggers

…who is ‘Larry from France‘?

we have reason to believe he may have a nom de guerre, “French Laurence”

Saw this demented crane along the CTE expressway last week.  They’re widening the expressway, and this location is right around a canal.  So I reckon they’re using this to set up a bridge portion of the extension.

I think I realized why this crane is so demented.  Not because the pieces it’s lifting are absurdly heavy (although they probably are), but because the crane has to massively cantilever out over the canal.

When I took Luke to school today, BBC was on the radio.  He asked if I could turn it off “and play music instead. Rock music.”

Sure, ok, so I switched to my iPod.

Just so happened that the first song up was Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused.”  Oh perfect, I though,  just what he asked for.

After a minute, “Dad, can you change this to rock music, not this?”  Led Zeppelin isn’t rock music anymore?

So I flipped ahead randomly, through Barry White (no),  McKoy Turner (definitely No), and others until I landed on Stevie Ray Vaughn song (“Tightrope”).

“Yes!” announced Luke.  That was proper rock music.

So what does this mean?  Led Zepplin is to Luke as Buddy Holly is to me???

I had more ties than losses or wins.  But the game is so boring that I don’t feel like playing more to make the results more statistically solid.  So maybe the computer has a 1-2-3-4% edge.  zzzzzz  We’re not playing for money, and the game isn’t entertaining, so not much for me to do here.

Piece of shit White Supremacist shot.

Eulogies included:

“He was the kind of guy who could and did get along with everyone,” said Bill Roper, head of Arkansas-based White Revolution.

I’m terrible with faces and, especially, names.  So I am very surprised that I scored slightly above average on the (slightly creepy) Cambridge Face Memory Test.

These are cool tools, but “operator” is  a bayesian wanker token.  It’s right up there with “tactical”  and “homeland.”

Watching the space shuttle from a commercial airliner gives an interesting sense of perspective of the height of the atmosphere.

Listen with audio off, unless you want to hear the typical tedious North American airline passenger commentary-drivel.

We added a new member to the growing menagerie of wild creatures that have visited our home.

Ten minutes from home, I got a call from Ling, “hey we have an owl in the bathroom.”

“huh?” I asked.

“Yeah, there’s an owl in the bathroom.”

“Well how the hell did it get in there?”   I asked, stupidly.  I’m sure it got in there the same way the bats and other creatures have before.

I told her to turn off the lights and close the door and I’d get home.

So I checked it out, sure enough, there’s a pretty decent sized owl sitting on my laundry basket in the bathroom!

So my idea was to catch it like a bird,  toss a sheet on it, or use sheets to corral it till its best option was to fly out the window (Our windows are those awkward push out windows that aren’t very big. I’ve no idea why it came in in the first place.

So as I was trying to carefully  stalk and corral it, while holding the sheet up, it landed on the bathroom sink.  Our maid, Emily (the country girl), simply walked over and picked he/she up!  It didn’t even put up any fight.  It just looked around a bit (it didn’t rotate its head 180d). We were all amazed.  We grabbed these photos, then Country Girl took it to the big bedroom window and it soared right out.  Everyone was impressed with the owl and Emily!

I must say, a damn cool bird.

My PhD biologist friend in Singapore thinks it was a barn owl.  Here are the owls found in Singapore.

PORTLAND — Safeway officials say they have proof that a local couple stole more than $5 million in merchandise from stores in the Portland Metro area over the past several years.

Ok, wow, that’s a lot of stuff to steal, isn’t it?

Evans told police that the couple stole mostly common items like shampoos, razors, Rogaine, teeth whiteners, conditioners to batteries, DVDs and CDs, according to the affidavit, which also said that Remington stole DVDs on 22 different dates since November.

Hmm. $5mn worth of shampoo?  Ummm, is this believable?  Normally the expensive stuff is behind a counter, or chained up, or something.

Safeway security officer Trent Drucker estimates that Remington stole $400,000 a year in merchandise over several years, totaling $5 million over the span of thefts.

“Trent Drucker” — sounds like a Simpson character.  But gee, there is a lot of extrapolation going on with these figures.  I am guessing Trent is pulling numbers out of his druck-hole.

Imagine they’re stealing expensive things only, so the average price is 50$.  That means they have to steal 100,000 items over several (3) years. That’s 33,000 items per year.  Imagine there are 10 stores on their looting circuit.  That’s 3,300 fifty-dollar items from ten stores for 3 years.  Imagine they’re very diligent, and steal 300 days per year, that’s: one hundred each of fifty-dollar items on 300 days a year at ten different stores for 3 years. And actually, it’s not, that would only net you $4,500,000.

Or go at it a different way, if anything like this volume of looting was going on for “several” years, why does “Security Officer Drucker” still have a job?!

Anyway, these remarks are clearly absurd.  And since they’re absurd, you figure they’re off by a order of magnitude anyway, so $500,000 over three years.  That still sounds astonishingly big.   Thus I bet the real figure is closer to half that:  $250,000.

Anyway, it probably doesn’t even matter, as a lawyer will get them acquitted.

On Nov. 19, Safeway security officials placed a tracking device on a van driven by the couple. Whenever the van was driven to a Safeway, surveillance videos were carefully scrutinized.

How the hell is that ever going to fly?  The signs in the parking lot onlys says that the store has no liability for damage.  If you get banged by a shopping cart, it’s your own problem.  I’ve not been to Safeway in a while, but I don’t think they also include, “parking here subjects you to warrantless, private,  wireless bug tracking.”

Anway, what a low story.  Morons chasing dirtballs. Neat.

I wonder if Security Officer Drucker held a boastful press conference where they showed all the booty they had recovered… $5mn dollars worth of purloined spam, rogaine, and energizer D-cells?

My orange pep pills didn’t work, so it’s another cowboy movie tonight:  3:10 to Yuma.    At least it’s started off a lot better — the 1870′s equivalent of the opening scene from Heat.  The fey cowboy has sure got some cool leather ensembles.

Chosun reports

Speculation is mounting over the identity of a woman who was spotted with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il’s second son Jong-chol at an Eric Clapton concert in Singapore on Monday.

She sat next to Jong-chol (30) during the concert, smiling and chatting with him, snapping photos and touching his arm in a way that suggests a close relationship.

Some believe the woman’s chubby features suggest she is his younger sister Yeo-jong (24).

Yeo-jong is the daughter of Ko Yong-hui, who died in 2004, Kim Jong-il’s third wife and also the mother of Jong-chol and Jong-un, the heir presumptive. But one South Korean intelligence official said the woman appeared to be Jong-chol’s wife.

A North Korean source said Yeo-jong was chubby as a child, but not any more.

“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.