- Good old Conan. You can always rely on him to slay the monster and finish his drink. http://amzn.com/k/38UVNUJS9YQGW #Kindle #
- My evil plan is coming to fruition like a fine, aged cheddar. Lured @TillamookCheese to town so I can take all their cheese for myself! #
- Wait a minute: Ace of Base has a Greatest Hits album? Did they even HAVE enough hits to make an album?? #
- Cashing in on the Tillamook cheese loaf love tour! http://yfrog.com/0rd4nuj #
- My wife just informed me her friends want me to put on a bread baking class... #
- My wife at the @TillamookCheese van yesterday: http://yfrog.com/n8gsqrj #
- Must get to configuring this Cisco 881W router... #
- Hello, cheese grater. Goodbye, knuckle. #
- Sharpened a chisel and my bookbinding plough blade. Both can shave hair now. Shaving=sharp. #
- The video from that RT I just sent out is completely crazy. You should watch it. #
- Mine. Not yours. Not even Lorien's. MINE. Tillamook 3 year extra sharp white cheddar. http://yfrog.com/ndfnabj #
- Tomorrow is going to be a busy day for a Saturday. #
- Heaven help me, new more complicated ideas for the new bathroom are in the brain... #
- Wow the house got down to 64 this morning after leaving the windows open most of the night. I'm finally...comfortable. #
I blew past my 7th blogiversary last Thursday. No celebratory post, no nothing. Seven years of blogging. So little to say, so few to listen…
- iPhone is still cripplingly slow. Seriously, it takes 30 seconds to open the text message app when I get a message in. And then it crashes. #
- New blog post: If I Owned a Gas Station http://bit.ly/b7cIth #
- Dear Dell: I'd have preordered a Dell Streak if it had an up-to-date OS. Releasing with 1.6 was not cool. #
- Never much cared for KISS, but I would probably buy tickets to Mini-KISS. #midgetsInMakeupFTW #
- FYI @thecapnslappy will be at the Portland Pirate Festival. A chance to rub shoulder-parrots with pirate royalty... #
- Hey Mr. Jerkypants that parked his truck boat and trailer in the employee lot: nice job getting out. I parked near you on purpose. Jerk. #
- It's about time someone's done something about this: RE: @w3c Contacts API Draft Published http://ow.ly/18C0NF #
- Force to pay a "standard price" for medical supplies that are half the price on the Internet-this is why our insurance system is doomed #
- Preliminary design for "Vera," a portable battery-powered water cannon http://yfrog.com/9fz0dxj #
- Just bought some Cisco equipment from Dell. They undercut the best price I found on the Internet! #
- STOP! Solder time! Nananananaa! #
- I'm pretty sure I just killed my wife's hair dryer. I plugged it in and it made an awful noise and terrible smell. Where can I hide it?
# - Self destruct mode activated: http://yfrog.com/n4b5hjxj #
- Here's a sneak peek of Vera http://yfrog.com/jp2remkj #
- Today's @WootShirt is awesome: http://shirt.woot.com/ #
- Vera's working great with an 18v DC power supply. Now I just need a bigger battery storage compartment. #
- Didn't sleep well last night. Reconsidering plans to use tools that are capable of removing fingers today. #
- Making an irrigation system for plants on our deck. #
A few weeks ago I had some work done on my plumbing. I ended up with an extra hot water expansion tank, a 2.2 gallon tank with a hose connection on one side and a valve like a tire's valve stem has on the other.
Of course, as soon as I saw it I thought SQUIRT GUN and started stewing over some ideas of how to implement it. In the end, I decided to use a sprinkler valve with a momentary switch connected to it, and a handful of PVC pipes, adapters, and couplers. Home sprinkler valves run on 24v AC power, but I found that for whatever reason a 9v DC battery seems to trigger it just fine. I have yet to do a full pressure test though.
I'll write up more of this later, after my final tests. I've already got some ideas for Vera Mark II (a switch to use a 555 timer generating a square wave with a rheostat or potentiometer as a frequency modulator—think variable machine gun pulses—and a power LED.
If I dress her up she'll get taken out somewhere nice…
Addendum One: The 9v power wasn't enough to trigger the solenoid when it was under pressure. I thought this might happen. Working on a higher power source to see how it goes.
Addendum Two: Switching to a 12v or 18v supply works just fine. Two 9v batteries in series is more compact than 8 AA batteries in a holder.
I would put short hoses at the pumps to punish the people that pull up on the wrong side just to get a quicker spot.
- Ah gout, why must you visit me so? #
- Typical Monday morning virus hunt. #
- Purchased early tickets for the @RiffTrax live show on 8/19. It's going to be a bacony-double-rainbow show! #
- Virus hunt was a red herring. The problem was Symantec Antivirus... #
- Had to take the iMac in to Spokane for repair. Nice guys there, though. ETA Friday. #
- Disappointed in the Internet. Whiteboard Jenny was a hoax
# - Found an old lying press online for $75. Best price I've seen, and only $13 to ship. #
- Haha. @axecop's latest "ask axecop" mixed up then/than. #ShamelessGrammarNazi #
- iMac has bad RAM. After 8 months. At least it's still under warranty. It will return to the office tomorrow. #
- More barbarian prose from Conan/Robert E. Howard... http://amzn.com/k/36P4J1R8SMFBW #Kindle #
- Need to change a blade on a Ryobi BT3000 table saw. Thank goodness for the Internet... #
- Blade change went well. It's amazing how much better the right blade cuts. Plywood ripped, bench seat all laid out. #
- Shower bench seat is all cut and ready to nail together. It will look nice once its tiled. Think I'll frame the linen closet on the same day #
- Going to a late movie with my wife (Salt) #
- Free small drink upgraded. Pretzel for Lorien, Twizzlers for me. Movie in 35 minutes. #
This short passage from Robert E. Howard's The Jewels of Gwahlur (one of his Conan short stories) continues to crack me up:
And, oh, by the way, they took off Zargheba's head and hung it up in a thicket." She shivered, yet at the same time breathed a sigh of relief. "He'll never whip me again." "Not this side of Hell," agreed Conan.
I love how Conan oh-so-nonchalantly implies the girl is going to hell. And that she will be whipped by him again.
I ordered an old lying press today. Depending on where you search, it's also called a laying press. It looks like this. The bit on top is a plough, the last piece of my bindery puzzle. I'm tempted to just buy a few more tools so I can make my own press and plough. I got a good deal, and having one will make it easier to reproduce if I decide to start making them in the future. There aren't a lot of places to buy them…
- The Jelly Bean gnomes left me an offering on my desk. #
- RT @FakeAPStylebook there/their/they're - What, seriously? This confuses you? #
- Waiting for the refrigerator repair guy to show up. At the office. #
- Had to abandon a Starcraft 2 game to talk to bosses about Internet connections. #
- 6/10 trending topics are the same thing. This is why I don't like Twitter's TT.. #
- I may have counted wrong, it looks like 7/10. #
- I'm one pint of A- low now. Two pints shy of four gallons donated. #
- Belly full of Chinese food. Naptime imminent. #
- Squee! The @TillamookCheese Loaf Love tour is coming through Coeur d'Alene on August 23rd! I am SO there! #
- Taking Raisin Bran off my menu. It triggers my gout. #
You need a Garden Zombie!
I'm trying to track down a very strange issue that seems to be geographically related, but not completely so. Basically, certain routes to some servers have long connection delays, sometimes 30 seconds or more, before any data are transferred. I can reproduce it at home some of the time. Other times, the problem is just gone. Several other people at work see the same issue, but others with the same service don't. I told you it was strange&8230;
I'm going to cash in some chips with some business associates and get some help finding the issue, it's a bit over my head at this point, and that doesn't happen to me very often.
It's not latency, because ping times are nominal. Yet traceroute results may be delayed for 30+ seconds while I wait for the second hop (first is my home router) to return results, despite having 10ms or less latency. It's like the connection itself is being held up somewhere, and seems to be happening mostly on a hand-off from Time Warner to XO Communications' network.
I'll post updates when I get closer to finding the issue.
Every now and then I see how I chose the wrong line of work. Today at the office I had a refrigerator repairman come to fix an issue with the ice maker. The flap that the ice drops through the door was broken, and warm air was frosting up the chute and ice was melting and blocking things up.
Anyway, the job took him an hour or so, and the part was $115 (but that's a separate gripe). Labor was charged at around $120 per hour, plus the $65 "I showed up" fee. Almost $400 for an hour of work and a bag of cheap plastic parts…
- Glenlogie by @HeidiTalbot #musicmonday If you like Celtic folk, you really need to hear her. #
- 4.5 weeks of vacation time and no plans to use it... #
- Just saw this text: "Switching to non-async [method]..." Would that be, maybe, synchronous? #
- Costco has series 1-4 of Doctor Who for $39.99 each. It's $43.99 at Amazon plus shipping. #
- Fighting a Mac Pro that won't see a KVM. Apple products work great as long as you use them in the way Apple tells you. #
- Memo to myself: Do the dumb things I gotta do. Touch the puppet head. #
- Putting ends on Cat5. I can do TIA568B in my sleep... #
- So who else sees the irony that the Blizzard download servers are getting ZERGED today??? #starcraft2 #
- Just found out how to squelch someone's RT's if they RT too much. Cool. #
- RE my last tweet: Hover over their name, click the green RT button to toggle it off. #
- Starcraft 2 download client for the Mac has got to be the slowest I've ever seen. 1.57Gb out of 6.99 and I've been dl'ing for over 12 hours #
- If you're downloading Starcraft 2 for Mac and it's insanely slow (~6-8Kb), DISABLE peer-to-peer. Went from 6Kb to over 600Kb. #
- The Empire attempted to squelch whistleblowers by disseminating misinformation regarding the spelling of "Wookiee." #wookieeleaks #
- FTYI: Even George Lucas couldn't decide how to spell Wookiee.. #
- Mmmmm. Turkey on homemade bread with Tillamook black pepper cheddar. #
- Found a finished project put on hold until mgmt. okay'd it. Mgmt never okay'd it. Project was forgotten until now. #
- Really distracted today by the awesome #wookieeleaks hashtag and its brother, #wookieleaks #
- I'm done with work for today, so why am I still here? #
- I'm reading Red Mars, a real interesting book with a few gems like this. http://amzn.com/k/1QTC5NLT7L7RD #Kindle #
- History is short, and the sun is just a minor star... #
- Coworker is off to Oregon and parts South for vacation. Made sure he's stopping at the Tillamook Cheese Factory. #
- Ouch. My multivitamin just went down sideways! #
- No @woot podcast today? @wootlive Is it some kind of holiday of which I'm not aware? #
- Oh yeah, it's SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR DAY! (Last Friday in July, apparently). #
- "Heisenbug" is such a cool term for those difficult-to-pin-down software bugs.. #
- Preordered @HeidiTalbot's new album. If you like Irish and/or folk music, you should give her a chance, she's really great. #