lungofish

Observation 1: Stress makes me gain weight, despite consuming (slightly) fewer calories than when I was losing weight, all other things being equal.

Of course, right now my stress levels are off of normal charts and have entered a realm that is best described as non-euclidean. It's entirely possible that I don't actually have any more mass, but that my stress levels have created a vortex from beyond space and time that have locally increased the gravitational constant of all things around me. I'm not fat, I'm just more attracted to the earth than you are.

Observation 2: Either way, the 5 or so pounds I've picked up in the past couple of weeks have a massive effect on my skating.

Ice skating is a complex interaction of forces, and tiny adjustments or defects can radically alter how it all works. One of the most major changes you can make is the radius of the hollow in your blade (some interesting information about skate sharpening here ), basically the radius of the cut made into the bottom of the blade. Too deep and you dig too much into the ice. Turning becomes difficult and it's easy to catch an edge on the ice, abruptly changing direction usually leading to a fall. Too shallow and your blade slides around on the surface in any direction, which is equally bad. I think right now I'm right at the edge of the envelope of control of my current skate cut, and my slight mass increase means that it's gone from tracking nicely to too deep. Dropping the extra mass seems to be a better idea all around than getting a slightly shallower skate cut.

Now, if only I could find the proper elder sign to tattoo onto my forehead in order to lose the extra weight, without the unfortunate side effect of drawing horrifying, shambling extradimensional creatures into this world.

Ooh, I think I just invented the next fad diet.

This weekend I built a building, played with electronics, and went to a techno-space-hippie rave.
( musings... )
The last thing we did in this busy weekend was go to Yuri's Night. It was cool, but I think next year I'd like to go while it's still light out. I'm at the point where I'm much more interested in the projects on display than the oontz-oontz jumping about dancing thing. Still, I did enjoy grooving to Amon Tobin.

and I'm stoned.

Well, not so much in the stoned department, but a combination of work stress, which at the moment is considerable, family stress, which thanks to a car accident is right up there with my work stress, and other various sources of stress both real and imagined, I've become this really horribly negative monster and I hate it.

If you write some sort of automated or semi-automated software updater utility for any platform or program, I would like you to add one thing to your product.

A checkbox that says "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

It shouldn't be too hard. Most programs now have some automatic reporting when they crash or otherwise run into problems. In that case, I would love to have the opportunity to download and install your fantastic new update.

However, if the program has been running for, say, 138 days straight with nary a hiccup, I really don't want to be bothered with bouncing icons, throbbing buttons, pulsing balloons, or (god forbid) motherfucking anthropomorphic office supplies telling me that there's a new version with less features and more bugs just waiting to take up even more space on my hard drive.

Thank you.

Death's Door Spirits

I'm curious about how it is. Could be good, could be swill. I'll need to get some next time I go back.

Who invented the car alarm song?

Someone, somewhere, has to have decided that just a single siren noise was inadequate and said to someone else:
"....and then it'll go 'blart blart blart' then 'dooooweeee dooooweeee' then 'dweeeoooweeeoo' and then start all over again."

Then the other person failed to kill this person on the spot. Thus, the car alarm song was born.

Who was that person? And who do we blame more, the inventor or the second person?

Is it a new year's resolution if it's done in February?

Anyway, I resolve to not assemble any more Ikea furniture for the entire year of 2008. I'm way over my quota.

Hey, lookit me! I'm posting to mah LJ from Caltrain!

I feel so early 2007!

That's a big leap for me, normally I'm quite a bit further back from the curve.

I got an evdo modem for the laptop, mostly because, well, I've wanted one for a while. That and the fact that I now have so much work to do that the only way to get it all done and still remember what my home looks like from the inside is to use the 2 hours a day I usually spend on the train staring into space for something a bit more productive. No more daydreaming about how cool it would be to have a prehensile tail, there's serious business to be done!

so I ought to post to lj.

The "I'm not even interested in sleep" state is thanks to two late hockey games, 9:30 and 10:45. A loss and a tie, but very fun games.

I'll be paying for this tomorrow, I just know it.

First, a moment of silence for the brave crew and passengers of the Mary Celeste, lost all these many years to the depths of the sea, or perhaps abducted by time-traveling pirate Nazis riding dinosaurs. We may never know which. They were lost on the most noble of missions, transporting 1701 barrels of alcohol to Europe. 12/5*/1872 NEVER FORGET.

Secondly, a round of huzzahs and hurrays for the ratification of the 21st amendment. Perhaps a loud belch would also be in order.

*Possibly 12/4/1872, as time zones hadn't been standardized at that point.

Every few months Sunnyvale has a "big stuff" trash pickup, and I've always had to be very careful, since there's almost always something that someone else didn't want that catches my eye.

http://technabob.com/blog/2007/11/21/bandai-tachikoma-programmable-robot/

I want this so bad the bottoms of my feets burns and my eyes are twitching uncontrollably.

Mid-eclipse, baby.

It started out with me finally whipping AIX enough to get it to do what I've been trying to get it to do for nearly a month. Blood sweat and tears went into this thing, and it's now behaving as it should. I still get this feeling that there are entire huge swaths of this OS that haven't been looked at by mortals since before the current president's father was vice-president.

It ended with my hockey team winning the coveted Stanley Keg. We had 9 whole players show up - pretty much everyone on our roster. The other team were much better skaters than we were, but we had a strategy and we stuck to it. We were patient and only pressed our attack when we had a clear advantage. They did things the same way every other Thursday night game has ever been played - a whole bunch individuals with almost no awareness that there are teammates out there.

It was probably a pretty boring game to watch, one of our strategies was to intentionally ice the puck to keep interrupting their flow. But it paid off, and we pulled it out, 2-1.

With only 5 players to hold the line against the opposition's full bench, the Bandits are victorious!

Final score: 6 to 2
I think. The last few minutes are a little fuzzy.

Ok. Maybe the last period.

In conclusion:
Spartaaaaaaa!

• Remote control for micro helicopter.
• Nerf dart gun
• Old, broken coffee maker
• Hatchback on Beetle

Things I've fixed and have put back together:

• Hatchback on Beetle

Things that are now working again and need reassembly:

• Old, no longer broken coffee maker
• Nerf dart gun

Things that are very broken and will need some creative repair:

• Remote for micro helicopter, sadly.

As previously promised, here's my first TIG weld, incorporated into a piece of abstract sculpture that I call "MotherF#$*! Tungsten is Contaminated Again". Soon I will be making huge metal sculptures that will be proudly displayed outside of corporate office parks, inspiring their workers to work harder through their sheer awesomeness.

The hard part of TIG welding, I'm finding out, is getting the welder set up properly. You have to have your tungsten clean, sharpened to a perfect point, have the gas flowing properly, have the metal clean and properly connected to the ground.

My main problem seems to be the tungsten electrode. Getting it sharpened properly on a grinding wheel without accidentally overheating it is an art in and of itself. Looking around, there are machines to do this for you, rather than using the coarse grit grinding wheel they currently have set up.

Not that there's anything wrong with the ones at techshop, in fact, I think I might buy the same kind (they're cheapass auto-darkening ones from Harbor Fright). However, I think I need one that has more of a hood around it to protect my fishbelly white skin, and protect my eyes from backscatter. I only did about an hour's work but I could tell on the car ride home that I'd exposed my eyeballs to more UV than they were happy about.

There is water falling out of the sky.

In Sunnyvale, in July.

Mother Nature is pissed, and this time, it's personal.

Today's class was TIG (tungsten inert gas) welding.

Very cool, and a lot less frightening than the oxy-acetylene, since there's a much lower chance of blowing yourself up or setting yourself on fire. Plus, much cooler headgear: http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=46092

The downside - my melanin deficient irish skin and something that produces gigantic amounts of UV aren't the best combination. I was glad I brought a long sleeve shirt, but next time I need to bring gloves, I think my hands are going to be sunburned.