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sprockets, sockets, grommets & gaskets
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[May. 22nd, 2013|10:16 pm]
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There's a bike race tomorrow night, within walking distance of work. But I rode so hard today, with a bunch of fast riders, that I'm having trouble standing up. This has always been my primary issue with racing -- and, let's face it, a whole bunch of other life goals. I'm focussed on the now, and don't think very much about tomorrow.
In some areas that's a catastrophe. But it occurred to me tonight, whilst thinking about the race I'm probably going to skip because I'm so tired that it'd be a waste of time and money, that I _like_ riding very competitively and it's also a waste of time to ride slowly, even if that interferes with future plans.
In other news I just bought the first round of parts for the Spitfire renovation. I've been chatting a bunch with Nameless, who has many years of vintage car racing experience, and have a much clearer plan for how to approach this intelligently, and make the car into something that's fun and useful with reasonable safety, rather than turning it into something that's a competitive deathtrap. Which relates to the above, hence part of why I was pondering my carpe diem quam minimum credula postero mindset. I'll be interested to see where this goes. |
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[May. 20th, 2013|11:28 pm]
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 maribou came up and we went over to the Larimer Lounge to see Half Run Moon play. It was a really good show. I was surprised and pleased to run into boxofdelights's husband and son, so we sat around talking about instruments and rock shows. |
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[May. 19th, 2013|06:42 pm]
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Lights (main and small spot) installed. Over-stove cabinet in, over-stove microwave in, wired and ducted. Enormous amounts of cleaning and tool sorting. Man that was a long weekend.
Add to that, mowing all the grass, most of the weeds, and weedwhacking the remainder, and rototilling the big garden space. I have to go back to work so I can recover.
The small spot lighting consists of three bars, each wielding four PAR20 lights. The design spec was for 50 watt bulbs, according to the install information with the lights. That's 600W. The kitchen would be an oven. (And that's about half that circuit's rated load.) Completely crazy. Hence the decision to go with LED, which was expensive, but also a little bit less of an operating-room-lighting appearance and one fifth the power usage.
The faucet turns out to have insufficient reach: it splashes onto the adjacent countertop. It's probably getting swapped with the downstairs one.
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[May. 16th, 2013|08:49 pm]
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We said we weren't going to do this.
skazat pointed out that this violates the cardinal rule of not sticking your dick in crazy.
But...
A: it runs. B: we can't make it worse than it already is. Regression to the mean implies it will improve.
As such:
1. ROLL BAR.
2. New seatbelts.
3. Pirate skull-and-crossbones spraypainted across rear end.
4. Speedometer fixed.
Then it'll be roadworthy and ready for experimentation.
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[May. 12th, 2013|10:04 pm]
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The kitchen is now marginally usable: dishwasher is wired and plumbed in, icemaker's halfway in, sink's in, garbage disposal is functional, drains work, faucet's functional. Man that was a long day. |
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[May. 10th, 2013|08:11 pm]
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I'm sitting in the San Jose terminal. Free wifi, power outlets at each seat.
I do like this place.
But for the last hour my ears have been clogging. I hope I didn't catch something. I've talked to the most astounding number of people in the last couple of days, so it might not be so surprising. Lots of networking going on, though -- contacts throughout the (old) company, which is the best reason for business travel, I think. I wish I'd had a weekend to hang out with my actual _friends_, though. |
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[May. 8th, 2013|10:59 pm]
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10 and 12 hour debug sessions are gruelling.
However, measured against that is almost 100 miles of bike riding in the last three days, sneaked in during breaks, and chicken cream masala, bibimbab, and salmon pineapple yellow curry for dinner, all within walking distance of the hotel.
This place is an unusual flavor of paradise. |
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[May. 7th, 2013|11:53 pm]
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Test system we're designing was working better than we could have expected, we were making gobs of progress, every time we hit a limitation we managed to bodge up some nifty workaround that worked better than it should have. We called in for the weekly meeting, committed to getting a bunch of stuff sent out this week, and immediately afterwards, for no reason we can find, some underlying piece of hardware sprung an electron leak and nothing we could do over the next hour plugged it. (Leakage current from one pin of the chip in question went from 30 microamps to 380 microamps, so it's not like it's a LOT of electrons... unless your datasheet says leakage current below 40 microamps.)
No amount of rebuilding seems to do a thing. I wish we had the ability to revert to previous known-good the way software design does. Gah.
So, we gave up at about 9:45 PM, I went out and had some Thai curry and reread Pride & Prejudice, and now I'm going to collapse. |
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[May. 6th, 2013|10:47 pm]
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In Santa Clara. Exhausted, overwhelmed by work. I feel like I know very little. |
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[May. 4th, 2013|08:55 pm]
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The newly plastered ceiling was supposed to dry for three days and then we could work on it. Today was three days. We put on two layers of paint today and a big long strip of the plaster delaminated from the drywall above. It's not horrible, but it's definitely a problem. Arrrgh. |
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