It's actually really satisfying to put together something that functions as intended, when it's something that I'm doing for the first time...

I put a network together at work, see, and it's working as intended. In a whole freaking bunch of places. I WIN.

(now, granted, it's not elegant, but if they want elegant, they gotta pay someone who knows what the hell they're doing. I have some slight idea, but am by no means an expert.)

((and I'm still not cool with getting up on rafters and walking around. I could NOT be an insulation installer...))

---

The more I read about geocaching, the more I think it looks like a good excuse to go outside and go someplace with a purpose...

---

Y'all doing good?

It's Star Wars day!

(May the 4th be with you!)

so. I have a respirator for work. if "respirator" is too scary of a word, think "gung-ho dust mask", since this is only for "fine particulate matter", effectively. Since we work with powder (plastic, some metals, some amorphous silica, but mostly plastic), airborne dust is a necessary evil. Aaanyway.

So. you can put different filters on it for different hazards. The ones I have are basically just for "non-hazardous, annoying dust".

I'm scanning the warning label, and this is what I read:

only for particulate matter. if you become lightheaded, notice it is hard to breathe, or a delectable odor...

AT WHICH POINT I STOP. Because... seriously?

*facepalm*

Upon review...

detectable odor. Delectable? Was I hungry when I read that?

when I manage to determine that a ballpoint pen barrel (the main plastic housing) is the same size and approximate length as a machine part I was gonna build in the laser sintering machine, thus saving a decent amount of time and effort, it occurs to me:

I become a little more like MacGyver every day.

(but don't we all?)

so. Geek cred increase today. made an ethernet cable. wheee.

(not that I haven't known how, but up to now I've always had enough laying around that I've accumulated. We're putting in a network at work (hah alliteration/assonance/a-word-repeated) and so I wanna know how to terminate both ends of cabling.)

honestly, being able to make my own crossover cables excites (yeah, my first impulse was to write "excites", there. shoot me.) me far more than "whee, I can make ethernet cables", since we have lab equipment that needs crossover cables, too, and so that's good.

(wo, i could just embed a crossover in the wall and do it that way... Is it bad when you make singular-purpose cable runs?)

yeah.

Anyway. how're y'all?

So. I'm sitting in my office, and for the last couple of hours, there's been this 3/4" or 1" diameter spider randomly crawling around on my window. And I understand that overall, spiders perform a valuable biological service, eating bugs and all, but any spider you can hit successfully with a tennis racket is too damn large. Anyway.

Right now, the sun is low enough now that I have a spot where the sun is shining on the wall. My peripheral vision notices this blurry shadow moving in the sun on the wall-- and I look up to see the spider still on the window, but hauling ass in one direction. And just in front of the spider, there's a moth, flapping for all his might, right against the glass.

And the spider is HASSLING THE SHIT out of this moth. Chasing it around the window, and all. On-the-offensive-spider is offensive.

And then the spider gets a bit too close to the moth, who is still flying as HARD AS HE CAN. And the moth's wing grazes the spider, and it falls off the window, and the moth flies away.

I am amused.

if anyone will get this, faith47 and xerophreak will, and maybe a couple others of you...

So. i'm doing calculations at work (density on some tiny little parts, whee) and I come up with .5591 as an answer.

And immediately think of Justin Furstenfeld's "alter ego", or whatever you'd call it.

(for explanation, read this concert summary.)

The geekery, it abounds.

Everyone doing good today? I've been having a pretty good day, and didn't catch hell from boss-person visiting today like I thought I might, earlier. Whoop.

OK, so. Alaska is apparently about to have a volcanic eruption of "Mount redoubt", or something.

And in this story in the Houston Chronicle the writer mentions that there'll likely be ash and dust fromt he eruption.

Which is, technically perfectly normal for a volcano, right.

And then down in the comments, someone says...

Burned2times wrote:
Another sign from above we are heading toward Saddam and Gamera...
1/30/2009 6:25:02 AM

a couple comments down, someone says:

Adler wrote:
Burned, Gamera is a large, flying, sea turtle that lives in poorly dubbed, Japanese, monster movies.

Anything seem wrong with that?

Saddam and Gamera. Wow. it'd be just like if the end of the world was a GODZILLA: DESERT STORM video game... instead off fire and brimstone like in the bible.

Cepheids! does this remind you of Pat, at all?

Since I had a project at work today (cut things in half with a coping saw, soak the halves in chemical stuff, cure those and see how far the chemicals penetrated the material) I went to Harbor Freight Tools today. And I got my 4-dollar-hey-it's-cheap-and-the-blades-are-included coping saw. And as I'm checking out, I see a watch case wrench. Looks like this:



If you look at the back of some watches, there are visible screw heads. These are usually digital watches. Lots of analog watches (except Rolexes, and if you EVEN CONSIDER opening your own Rolex, you're either a SERIOUS watch person, or a moron, depending on experience level) have screw-off casebacks-- where the edge of the caseback is threaded, and the whole thing screws off as a unit, exposing the innards of the watch.

All I wanted to do was replace some batteries in several watches that I own. I have always been meaning to get one of these wrenches, and today was the day. I'm pretty pleased-- my titanium Fossil is ticking happily away on my wrist, and the lookalike Army Field Watch is ticking away on the desk.

If you get one, DON'T USE IT ON A GOOD WATCH unless you seriously know what you're doing.

I've replaced these batteries with the full understanding that these watches were destined for the trashcan if I can't make them run, so if I kill 'em, no biggie.

To give you an idea on the markup on watch related stuff-- this is the same exact wrench I bought. List price in the store was either 8.99 or 7.29, depending on which sign you saw. I made a mental note to argue for the 7.29 price, and then it rang up as 3.00. Holy crap.

So. Productive evening.

So-- in the last few days, I've had more than a couple geeky moments at work. This said, there are a couple of highlights.

Today, when I was on the phone trying to work something out, and the person I was talking about mentioned referring me to a guy named Tom Cerbo, I heard Tom Servo. Yeah, this guy:



isn't what they meant.

Anyway.

And yesterday we fired up the super-gung-ho microscope and looked at stuff. It's pretty cool to be able to see the reflection on little metal spheres so small they look like dust, viewed through a microscope.

(told you, it's geeky. I love my job, though.)

---

How's everything going, y'all?

For those (this includes me) who make wishes at 11:11 whenever a clock shows it, dude, this is your lucky day. (in three years it'll really be neat, being 11/11/11, and all...)

Do you like engineering and that sort of thing? Me too... I found this in a
random web search today...

http://www.uh.edu/engines/keywords.htm

It's a series of short podcasts (with transcripts, which that link
sends you to) on engineering and ingenuity. It's short blurbs on all
sorts of engineering-oriented things, but it's the same sort of "heh,
so _that's_ what spurred that invention" stuff that I really like
reading.

There's one on Fahrenheit (and why his development of the
thermometer-- and consistent degree measurements) was useful. There's
one about steelmaking in ancient Africa (the Haya culture, they made
carbon steel 2000 years ago, wow), and literally hundreds of others.
Sea-coal is the one that I found this search on-- apparently undersea
coal seams in Scotland allow coal to wash up on the beach, and they've
been using it for a fuel source for a long time.

Very cool, and all of them make me want to learn more about the things
they talk about. It's just enough to spur interest in things.

So I see this AAA truck today, right. For those of y'all in other countries, AAA (the logo looks like this: ( ) is an auto-repair service-- but nationwide, where you can call and they'll send someone to your location, rather than you having to find someone locally, yourself.

But it says "AAA batteries delivered and installed" (all in the same font, punctuated like that"

my brain parses this as:

delivered and installed? how hard can it be?

"ONOZ, I GOT A DEAD FLASHLIGHT, WHAT CAN I DO?"

Only after looking at too many lists of stuff does something like this happen.

Today, the "Cthulhu ftaghn, ia! ia!" thing pops in my head. (why, I got no reason-- I've never even read the books...)

Why? looking at a huge list of stuff. With postal abbreviations. For Iowa.

Yeah, Cthulhu, destroyer of worlds, all that... gonna be kinda bored, eating Iowa.

nom nom nom
"Corn?"
nom nom nom
"more corn?"
*gets pissed off, eats Oklahoma instead*

</cthulhu mode>

other day I was pumping gas, right, and it runs its thing, and auto-stops on: $42.00

heh.

I was amused that the universe apparently thinks I need a reminder of the meaning of life, the universe and everything, again.

(and the gallon amount was 14.42, for the Cepheids...) stupid 14, everywhere...

(and yesterday it stopped on $33.33. I have weird numerological gas-pump powers, I think...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.Rex_%28band%29

A late-60s to mid 70s band named T. Rex.
That sang stuff about Tolkien.
Glam-rock.

And apparently that "Get it On (Bang a Gong)" song is theirs. Heh.

I love Natasha Bedingfield's CD. Love it. Some vocoder, a touch of gravel in the voice... love it. The lyrics are good, too. I mean, seriously, anything that has

Read some Byron, Shelley and Keats
Recited it over a hip-hop beat
I'm having trouble saying what I mean
With dead poets and drum machines

in it... Seriously, you gotta love that.

a question on another friend's page about Gardasil (-disil? I have no idea of the actual spelling) which is some drug-- it jogged my memory. And the only reason in rang a bell is because it's reasonably orthographically close to Yggdrasil-- the tree at the center the universe in Norse mythology.

(I think the only reason I really remember that is House of Leaves. Whups.)

And I guess it's a good idea they chose to not use the Y, in the sort-of-an-anagram word they came up with, since any drug name that ended with "silly" might not sell so well.

---

OH MAN I AM SO TIRED OF BEING HERE. Can you tell? I found out today that I'm basically halfway done with this. the other half is in another building. GAH.

I looked at a three-dimensional picture of my own brain today. I got my shunt checked out, in College Station, by the neurosurgeon who... installed(?) it about eleven years ago.

So they took a computerized CT scan (cranial tomography-- it means they IRRADIATE THE FK OUT OF MY BRAIN and catch the waves to make an x-ray) and a set of regular x-rays, right. The new CT scan machine is AWESOME. Old CT scan machines made me nauseous-- I think I got mildly claustrophobic in them. This machine only went about a foot over my body, and it was much larger inside. Whew.

So the CT scan they took, right. The scan represented as a full 3D document, so the doctor was able to move this slider, and it would go up and down, in layers, in my brain, and show the cross-section on the screen. (not real-time, this is through the computer data they collected)

And the weirdest thing was watching the inside-my-brain-shunt-tube RISE UP OUT OF THE PLANE of my brain, like a plane out of clouds. (yes, yes, the plane in brain falls mainly in the Sp-- (what the fk am i saying? Damn you, 'Enry 'Iggins)) The in-the-brain-cavity portion of new shunts appears quite small. Mine? LOOKS FKING MASSIVE in diameter. Like WOSHIT WOW three-times-the-O.D. massive, by scale. AND it has concentric nubs on the end that sits closest to the center of my head. I got no idea WHY, but i saw it today. Looks markedly, massively different than the ones I've seen of the current tech level. So I hope it never malfunctions-- seems to me it will be even more invasive than the current tech level.. Not only is my shunt PONG-level technology, it's Pong in large-print-Reader's-Digest.

Anyway. So there's nothing wrong with my shunt. And I do have a brain. I saw the sulci (the wrinkles, but that's the real term) and everything. Pretty damn impressive, to me, that three bucks worth of plastic (raw material cost, tops) does that much. Seems like if the thing had to be made out of platinum it'd be worth every dime.

Anyway. Humbled by the medical profession, and impressed by the skill of them. With that, I'm off to bed.

and ze geekery continues:

I see an example at work, using "JLA" as placeholder initials, and my brain parses it as "Justice League of America".

---

Watched Stranger Than Fiction last night with Nicole. Damn good movie. I normally hate Will Ferrell movies, since the man is a pretty good actor, and resorts to stupid humor, most of the time.

And Maggie Gyllenhaal, whoop. Emma Thompson always looks... graceful, somehow.

---

I keep getting weird cuts and scratches on my hands. I have no idea how, but they keep showing up. Strange.

---

Anything cool going on with y'all today? I'm... trying to figure out an automated camera setup, and the previous setup results in absolute SHIT for pictures. I think they've not thought this setup all the way through, but it's only just now becoming apparent the degree of "wtf".

---

I've been trying, for a while, to figure out what I want in a job. This one isn't cutting it. I want something that allows me to use the mechanical aptitude I have, definitely. And the thing I think I dislike about the plant-based maintenance engineering thing (the "keep all the pumps working and upgrade things as we absolutely have to" setup) is that it's always an ongoing project. It's never finished, because shit keeps breaking, and shit keeps needing to be upgraded. The upgrade process is too expensive and time-consuming to allow a blanket "fuck this, we'll fix EVERYTHING right now" deal, like it should be. Many of these plants run on 1940s technology, in a lot of places. And the thought of being able to work at this for fifteen years, doing (effectively) the same thing... that drives me nuts.

I want a job with finite completion points. Like "We've finished this project; Y'all did a badass job. Next!" *close folder, file it* sort of stuff.

This job, it occurred to me, is like digging a hole on the beach, at the waterline. You can dig the hole, but without constant, sometimes frenzied maintenance, it fills right back in. I want a job where the hole stays dug, if you do it right. And I want a job where there is some opportunity to advance, or move around within the company, with relative ease. This job, there are pretty clearly-defined levels, and to move up, you gotta pack up and move, and there aren't but a couple levels to move up TO. I don't want to get pigeonholed into a job that I can settle into and do for the next ten years. I want to be doing... hell, something different and that shows something for the work, sometime in the future.

In high school, i used to work at this random little dial-up internet provider, right. And there were, as techie people can tend to be, some pissed-at-the-users people working there. I'm chilling one day, and I hear this:

"Okay, you're at the prompt, right? Just type in this:

format, space, C colon, and hit enter. Good. Now press 'Y', and hit enter. Yeah, it's going to take a little while to run. Give me a call back if it gives you any problems."

And he hung up.

I jump up, with that what the fuck, you just told her what look on my face, right. And I ask "You did tell her to back all her files up and that it was gonna erase all her files, right?"

This guy-- his name was Pat, right. Pat looks at me and just goes "She's been bugging the shit out of me all day with random stupid questions. Her internet wasn't working like she'd like. She called and asked me, specifically, how to format her C: drive. I completely answered her question."

---

Moral of the story, kids-- just because you call Tech Support and they answer the phone doesn't mean they're always there to help.

meant to post this yesterday. (yes, this is turning into the regular "funny picture of the day" thing. eh.)

Last night, Adrienne and I went to the Houston rodeo, and we parked on row 37. and she was repeating "37" to herself a couple times, to remember the row.

And every time, my brain went "...in a row?"
</Clerks>

(for those of you who've never heard the sketch, a sound clip:click here(not really work safe, and there's sound))

And if you've never seen Clerks by Kevin Smith... you should. And Mallrats, at least.

gah. so there's this job at work, job # 10921337.

and my brain reads it to me, every single time, as ten-ninety-two-LEET.

</geeky>

this guy apparently remixed all the themes to Super Mario World, using new instruments. banjos, guitars, synth... weird shit. but strangely addictive.

http://www.archive.org/details/xoc_SMW

you know, i think my brain is overly used to using Google to access information.

i just looked at a little thing in my room and thought that it would be a shame to misplace it.

and then my brain piped up "no big deal you could just search for it on Goog..."

*facepalm*