| I needed to be told this... |
[Jun. 28th, 2007|09:51 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  bouncy bouncy bouncy | ] |
Apparently, only 1.7% of the male, caucasian population (of the world? the US only? They aren't very particular about it) know the answers to all 25 of their silly questions. Or perhaps, only 1.7% of the subject population live just enough in the past to get all the answers right, since the answer to one of their questions changed a few days ago, but they haven't noticed yet. As always, you have to be aware of whether the test is testing you, or if it is testing your ability to take the test. (I haven't seen a test that actually tests me yet, but then, how many tests are there out there which aim to quantify the abilities of an inventor, poly-instrumentalist musician, etc. etc. etc. I'd have to write it...and where'd the fun be in that?)
Anyway, we're back from visiting Ike and Bethany in Florida, my killer sunburn is peeling ("I'm not half the man I used to be..."), and my weight is (amazingly) exactly what it was when I left. Deb says the real affects of that week of indulging at restaurants won't reveal itself yet, though, so I'm being conservative about crowing (except here, but then.)
While in Florida, I ordered strings for the lute, which Deb's father repaired for me. I'm hoping that the extra length in the strings (it's Bad to keep lots of string on the peg for lutes) will suffice to re-fret it, and I still have to hand-shape a new nut, since the old nut went flying in the cubbyhole, back when the top split and the strings started breaking. Instead of gut, I'm trying Nylgut, a synthetic formulation by Aquila strings which apparently is laid up from ribbons like real gut, but is (quoted to be) impervious to moisture. The sound and suppleness is supposed to be nearly identical to gut (how many times have we heard that?) as well. We'll see.
I've also been collecting lute tab from online sources- There is so much more available now than there were five years ago. (duh.) Many of the facsimiles out of the humongous books at the UCONN music library that I xeroxed so many years ago are available, although most of the PDF's look pretty cheesy. Enough that I may dig out my xerox's, make sure the pages are all present, and make my own scans (in my copious spare time, of course.)
I've also sampled some slide rules from a company that makes them for promotional purpose, and evaluated them as a low-cost ($3.00) possibility for a (very) introductory class. Of course, any actual teaching of such a class will be in my copious spare time (see above), after I finish the transcription of Odhecaton, finish my batchelors degree, get into UCONN, and have a life with my family, in reverse order. (There are other things in that list, too, but I won't bore you.) |
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| Bienniel post... |
[May. 19th, 2007|10:44 pm] |
Deb says they got me to a "t". I can't disagree.
I checked my grades for my last semester in my dual major, Photonics Technology and Electrical Engineering Technology: all A's. My GPA is 3.97. So the flower test is right, I'm proud and I'm telling everyone about it.
Now I have to concentrate on making holograms and finishing the power point for a presentation I'm making at the SPIE (That's the other Optical Society in America, so don't even ask what SPIE stands for: They just redefined it as a word) conference called ETOP in Ottawa in June. This is because I submitted the paper and it was accepted, so it will show up in the Proceedings from the conference.
The best part of this so far is financing for the whole trip: both TRCC (my college) and the Acadamie have kicked in money to foot the $1600 bill for me to drive up there and stay in a hotel and for the registration costs. It's a geek's delight, ETOP is the Educational Topics In Optics and Photonics, and it takes place at the same time as Optics/NORTH, one of the premiere optics conferences. So I get to do both conferences!
I'm taking Deb and Hope, and they're going to have a blast while I'm in conference sessions, visiting museums, perhaps seeing the Musical Ride, and generally learning about Canada (which I will also be, but not for the first time, since I took a field trip to Ottawa when I was between fifth and sixth grades.)
At this moment, the future holds finishing up for the conference and applying to UCONN for Electrical Engineering. That'll probably entail working nights and weekends while attending during the days, since UCONN has little use for retreads, hence few night classes. I may not have so much trouble getting in because of my grades and being a transfer, but then again, I may not get in before spring...or later. So we'll see. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 28th, 2006|02:39 pm] |
Ok... I try for a title of nobility and I end up sidelined into the priesthood, the usual and expectable doom of younger brothers everywhere. I guess that's appropriate then.
@whee: I've completed all but one homework problem and all but one lab for my controls class incomplete, which means I've finished the final test! The lab will wait for next week, since I need the controls toolkit for MatLab, and I'm too cheap (impoverished, anyway) to get that out of scholarship funds.
On the other hand, we've swapped out the optics breadboards, so the NRC 2'x 2' that I borrowed from the college is in place. It's about 4x heavier than the TMC board Leo loaned me: this is good: it means less vibration, which is what messed up the first two attempts. All I need now is a day to equalize the temperature in the lab, new chemicals (a gift from the physics department!) and time.
Deb's grandmother died on tuesday, while Deb was sitting with her. It shook her up a bit, but there won't be long-term upset: Gramma Fisher was a solid Christian who knew where she was going, and went there. It will be a real pleasure to see her again, free of the infirmities of age! In the mean time, I'm taking off Friday, because our family have been asked to sing at the funeral service (which Pastor Sonny is going to perform).
And, for a very short time, I'm playing with the church band again. They asked Deb to do a cello part, which I wrote out. It turned out to be a cello duet, the upper part fitting the viola quite well. Since Deb is steadier on viola (and she really wanted to play the turns!) and I'm longer-term experienced on the 'cello, that's the way we're doing it. The keyboardist for the band is singing, and Chris is playing the guitar part. At rehearsal, it sounded very good indeed!
So the weekend is beginning to look like this: no mad dash to florida (which we considered last weekend!), but cleaning out the bowls and mixing new chemicals tonight, Funeral things tomorrow with some holograms in the evening, Ferrying Jesse around for something he's doing saturday morning, more holograms, then new years eve will be playing with the band in the middle Church service, more Ken Ham for sundayschool, and if I'm lucky and I've figured out the geometries for the project, write the abstract to submit to the SPIE sunday and monday, around watching the ball drop (or sleeping through it) or whatever mad New Years thing Deb has organized this year. If I actually get all that done, I can start writing the book/booklet to go with the holography pallette and get a head start on next semester!!!
Pray for progress! |
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| I still exist... |
[Dec. 23rd, 2006|09:13 am] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | living room | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | elated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Silence, except while Hope is bouncing a lobster on me. | ] |
Been a while. Why do so many of my posts start like that? well, probably because my average posting rate is about once a year. Maybe once a semester, with time off in the summer? I dunno. I'm rambling.
I just finished (almost) my third semester. I took an incomplete in Controls, a nice matched set with my incomplete in Optics from last semester. Oddly, I'll probably finish them both up in the next week. I got an A- in Intro To Public Speaking. My bad: it took me 2 speeches to realize that the prof wasn't interested in interesting speeches, he wanted speeches that met criteria which were clearly presented, but not stipulated. I.E., yeah, I knew what "goes into a speech" after his lectures, but not that he expected the speeches to "toe the line". Once I figured that out, it was cool. The last speech was on how to learn to sing part music via singing rounds, and I brought the whole family (minus Isaac, who is, like, hanging in Florida with his wife, y'know). We started by singing the Macaronic part of the Psallite arrangement, then I introduced the idea of part-songs and polyphony/harmony, what rounds are, how you can sing parts in a round by just singing the melody, and that this independence leads directly to the ability to sing independent parts in part-music. I gave a step-by-step description of how to do it (that's what made it an informative, process speech: first, get enough people to sing the parts, etc.) We, as a family, sang a round, first just the melody together, then like a round. I closed up with how, after singing, I pointed out how we doubled Melody with Hope (the youngest) and that not everyone can sing even rounds alone to start with, so doubling parts like that is a way to get them through it and grow them to where they can do it themselves. Bingo: that won me the A for the speech, because I had "considered possible impediments and proffered possible solutions". It was like that. We ended by singing the English translation of Psallite, to remind 'em what a part song was like. The prof said he'd never had a speech like that, and that he'd not only appreciated that it was done "to form", but he enjoyed it. Cool.
I took the controls class as a replacement. In actual fact, I should have taken it anyway, because I really needed it to complete the double major (photonics and Electrical Engineering Technologies), but I'd had trouble learning the chain and quotient rules in calculus (lowdeelow minus heighdeeheigh over heighheigh doesn't work for me: I'm not sure even now if that's right!) and I haven't had any college level physics, so I took "Calc-based Physics". CBP was a night class, and I'm still working full-time.
CBP was a disaster. The prof is a charletan (the nicest phrasing of his abilities): a lawyer who just 'acquired' his PhD in physics, apparently because he comprehended the form of the PhD process so well, and not for his vast knowledge or specialized knowledge in any field of physics. His method of teaching CbP was to inform us that we wouldn't not be memorizing stupid rules (like the power rule and the chain rule) with stupid names, instead, we'd learn to think like geniuses (because geniuses don't think like _you_!) There ensued six weeks of the stupidest stories and incomprehensible labs, in which we were required to use formulae we hadn't been presented in class. The weekly quizzes were a farce, with more teaching in the pages of prolog to the quiz than given in the classes, followed by marking them (a strange approach to marking, where everyone gets an A, but then appended with a number of plusses which seem to be related to nothing: my first quiz was marked A++++++++++++, even though I answered based on my previous knowledge and not on what was taught in class the previous week, etc.) Anyway, after weeks of not learning anything, I asked the EET dept head if it were possible to ghost the Controls class (he taught it) and he said sure, so I did. Then I got Pneumonia, and wasn't able to think for a week, wasn't able to connect with him for the week after that, and just missed him this last week (all consecutive weeks at the end of the semester). So we got together last night, and he gave me a 20-minute mini-lecture on Laplace Transforms as relates to derivitives (I was trying to make it more complicated than it is)filled out the incomplete form, saw to it I had the stuff he wanted completed in hand, and that was that.
I didn't have to take the final in Intro to Lasers, instead, I had to help write the test. I offered one of my lasers for it, too, but I haven't got the fiber thing beat yet (tech-y-er than the rest of this overly verbose post: it's a 656nm (blood red) diode laser, about 17mw output, with a 9nm fiber pigtail, which has a lot of 9nm fiber spliced onto it. I'm using it for the holography breadboard project, but all but 3" of the pigtail will be replaced by 6nm fiber, which is single-mode at 650nm. Until then, though, one arm of the splitter is fairly stable, and the other is more multimodal than the MellesGriot yellow HeNe which is so modally unstable it's being kept as an exhibition piece for classes!) Ahem. Anyway. I helped to write the test and proofed the matching section, so when my classmates complained about having to match 15 terms, Mrs. Donnelly could say, "Ray checked this, so I _know_ you guys can do it." hee. My last other act in the class (in the first part of my second week of recovering from Pneumonia) was to present a report and Powerpoint on Fiber lasers. Requirement: three pages of body text, double spaced. My report: 25 pages of body text doublespaced. Everyone got 10 minutes for their power point. I asked for an hour, used 45 minutes. I was threatened with sleeping and leaving mid-presentation by some of the classmates. Everyone stayed, no one slept. I tied all the other lasers together (that's why I wanted to go last) and showed how fiber lasers will replace them all in the next decade! It was fun.
I get to ghost three classes next semester: they're all needed to graduate, and they're only given during the day. Fiber optics and Integrated Optics is one class. It won't be a problem, I make fiber lasers. Advanced Topics is another, and we've decided to make that a project, one I'm already working on, a breadboard and book for community-college-level experimentation in Holography. Controls will be more interesting; it's being taught by my very long-term friend Jim Rhoades, and he's all about controls theory (which is good!) And I'm sitting for Calc 2, taught by a prof that Mel had and says is exemplary, who is teaching it at night because one of the other retreads promised to get her at least 5 students. If _he_ hadn't done that, I wouldn't be able to take Calc 2! Yea, Keith!
So the executive summary is, I'm about 3/4ths of the way to my AS in PHOT/EET, still managing a 4.0 GPA (the - on the speech course disappears under the weight of the other A's). And now, I'm being encouraged by the scientist I work for to go on to UCONN and take a real BS in Engineering. That'll be slow, because of the number of daytime courses I can fit into a working schedule. But it's what I'm applying for. @whee! |
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| Just a shortish post... |
[Mar. 21st, 2006|02:53 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  The stress dot is green | ] |
| [ | music |
| | silence. | ] |
OK, it's spring break of my second semester. First semester was good, 4.0 average, 15.5 credits earned, plus I just got another 27 credits from the Assessment of Prior Learning class (you make a portfolio of the courses you want credit for, and it's adjudicated and credits awarded within 2 months or so after the semester is over. I'd asked for 28.5 credits, they didn't award three of the courses I'd requested (Public Speech and its lab and Digital Circuits) because 3 of my documentors didn't respond. Instead, they gave me three other classes (CAD/CAM and its lab, basically a duplicate of the Laser Machining course I'm taking, and Laser Electronics, which I actually had wanted to take and may still audit just for fun.)
New semester, new classes. Calc 1, which I seem to be understanding. Computer Controlled Laser Machining (the real title was longer, dontchaknow, but this is enough to put up with), which is mostly CNC and materials science/engineering, although the prof keeps claiming it isn't. It is a lot of work, though, since we've been tasked with four projects, two of which are major ones (make a poster about an aspect of laser machining or, in our case, how they're using lasers in place of scalpels in medicine, and making a systematic investigation of the effects of different powers and speeds and DPI settings in the college's new Epilog Laser Engraver on lauan, acrylic and some third material (teflon in our case)). The project thing has been made worse by the fact that for one week, just when the engraver became available, the last group using it locked the door and left without telling anyone (ie, no one else got to use it that week) and this last weekend, the network was down, so it wasn't usable then either.
Optics class has also taken an interesting turn, since it is again an independent study. I can't attend day classes because of my job. So the prof offered that I could do a project: Make portrait holograms, developing a process that "even" she can follow. (ie, that she can use for future labs for da kiddies, I suspect.) I've acquired T-max film and the developer kit that makes black-and-white slides from it, I'm designing a tripod-top unit to handle positioning of the camera for the 6-or-8 photos, and this week I'll be ordering the stuff to make my computer lab downstairs into a holography lab, so I can make the striped master hologram and create white-light viewable transfer holo's from it. All fun, I'm sure!
Aside from this, I've been on the trail of the Theremin and slide rules.
Oh yeah, the http://www.innergeek.us/geek-test.html 3.2 english version says I'm 74.75345% - Geek God. Bet you weren't expecting that, were you? |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 19th, 2005|11:16 am] |
Harry Potter Personality Quiz by Pirate Monkeys Inc.
ok, that's new. I've _always_ been INTP or ENTP. Today I'm ENTJ. Of course, this is by no means a normal Kiersey, nor would I classify Minerva McGonnegal as being an extrovert, so it's likely that things are a bit skewed there.
Then again, I'm starting college week-after-next, and I'm in a whole newmind set, so who knows?
Got my books, got my calculator, got 4 chapters of my independent-study Intro To Photonics course done already...
All I gotta do is actually start attending!
The class schedule will be interesting. As noted, Intro to Photonics is independent study, since the only classes available are daytime. Monday and wednesday nights are APL (Assessment of Prior Learning), which is 4cr and could add another 30Cr to the collection. Tuesday is Precalc, thursday is Composition. I'm not sure which of them scares me more: PreCalc is all rigor and repitious work, and based on things I understand but have never done the heavy ground work in (ie, rigor and repetition). The Comp class book is subtitled something like "Writing about Current Events", ie, liberal perspectives of current events. This is one of the driving forces for me to have dropped out of english course (well, I took an incomplete, but that's what it really meant)at Ithaca: the TA who was teaching it invariably missed any actual grammatical/construction/logic faults in my writing, and threw fits about my interpretations of, you guessed it, current events.
Well, maybe it won't be so bad, since current events then aren't current anymore.
By about 33 years. |
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| aw awone... |
[Jul. 30th, 2005|10:37 am] |
The family (well, more than half of it) just left to vist Ike and Bethany. They packed the car until it bulged, stuffed themselves in around it all, and departed armed with a AAA trip-tik, mapquest and maps-on-us illustrated directions, and orders for Mel to mutiny and take over the ship if she even sees a sign pointing to Vancouver...
It's about 20 hours raw travel time, so I haven't even begun to start checking to see if they've arrived yet...
well, I did install Trillian, because Ike only does AIM now and I normally only do msn.
On other fronts: I'm now a full-time student at the same local community college that has seen my mother-in-law and her mother, my wife and three of my kids acquire their associates' degrees. My major is Photonics Technology, with a possible double including electrical engineering. Since there are none of my degree-related courses offered at night (I'm still working full-time) I've contacted the head-of-photonics and asked to take their intro to optics class as an independent study, and gotten permission. I attended the APL (assessment of Prior Learning) intro, and signed up for that course as well. It has the potential for acquiring 39 credits, of which only 30 can be applied at TRCC as a maximum. I doubt that I'll get all 30 becuase most of photonics tech is degree related and they insist that you can't place out of your degree major. Add to that the composition and precalc courses which you can't bypass (darn!), and I'll probably get to apply no more than 16 or 17 APL credits. But that's a whole semester, and the rest of them may stand as good elective credits when I go to Central for my BS!
Of course, carrying 15.5 credits in my first semester is grounds for charges of lunacy, and I've requested to have my I-Love-Me!! jacket fitted early on.
I have my course book and assignment sheets (all in pdf) already from photonics. I've taken a few math books out from the trcc library (along with a few optics books) so I can bone up on trig and learn, once and for final, how to manipulate matrices. Yeah, I'm doing most of the hard work before even going into the classes! how's that for obsessive-compulsive?
I'm keeping notebooks. I usually do at work anyway, have since I was at UTRC, where I found a lab notebook very useful for organizing my head. After 5 years, it's nice to actually be able to find an answer I'd worked out five years ago, instead of just wandering about with a head-scratching suspicion that the problem is solveable...
Anyway, my optics notebook already has all my reflect/refract around normal notes and equations, prism constructions and equations and Snell equations. I just finished putting in the numerical values for trig functions at 0, 30, 45, 69 and 90 degrees, and today I'm going to do a section on small lenses. Spherical abberation will wait for tomorrow.
It'll be interesting, also, since I have an open invitation from Joy and Bernie and Bernie to hang there, be fed, and take part in an eternal Halo/UnrealTourney netparty, and back episodes of Good Eats...
So if I get anything done, it'll be a good omen for the coming semester!! |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 11th, 2005|04:19 pm] |
I guess Joy wants me to try to answer this meme....
1. Total number of films I own on DVD/video:
Uh. I have no idea. As I look at the DVD rack and remember the last time I looked at the VCR rack, they're both full, but most of those belong to someone else. People, including my kids, loan us a lot of movies. Some of them sit around here for years without being actually looked at, too. I believe I own, actually >own< about four: Nemesis, Spiderman II, Batman, and... uh...oh, The Sixth Day. They were given to me for birthdays in the last decade or two.
2. The last film I bought:
Well, the last film I watched was Revenge of the Sith, and Joy was there. Frankly, I didn't feel that I'd bought it at just $6 a person, but I'll admit that any time I see a movie these days, I feel like I've bought it. I used to be given 50 cents to go watch the matinee on saturday afternoon, as a 'vacation' for my mother (she could pack us four kids off for 2 bucks, and we'd get some candy at the concession as well as see one or two 'short subject' installations of such series as Batman and Robin, Flash Gordon, The Lone Ranger, etc., one or two cartoons of the Warner Brother's Buggs Bunny variety, previews you only averted your eyes because Polly was surely going to die this time!!!! and the actual movie. Without advertisements for Viagra...by comparison, today's movies are horribly expensive and not worth the price).
I suppose Star Trek 5, Thumb Your Nose At God was the last movie I felt I'd bought. 9 bucks a seat, and the movie was so bad I almost threw up. The one bright spot in that thing is that, having read Shatner's own comments about the film and screenplay (recorded, supposedly, by his daughter, who had a cameo role in it), I realized that, if Shatner had been allowed to have his own way, he'd have had Kirk and Spock _destroy_ God. The REAL one. I'm glad his producer stepped on that one!
3. The last film I watched...
Well, lessee. I haven't seen Reign of Fire yet, because Jesse hasn't gotten his math done. I saw Revenge of the Sith in the theatre... last DVD was The Two Towers, which we all watched just for fun a saturday or so ago. Last movie I watched on DVD that I hadn't seen before was Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, possibly the most depressing thing I've seen in 30 years.
4. Five (six) films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me:
Well. Indeed. I don't watch movies a lot. And not a lot of them mean much to me. And I can't do this one with TV shows, because they don't mean squat most of the time...
If I go through my entire life, the shows and movies that I can even remember, which you might claim affected me or meant a lot to me, are:
1) Thunderbirds. The original series, seen in the BBC original form on Canadian television out of Toronto. I'd seen Fireball XL-5, and would later see bits of Captain Scarlet (which really rotted, IMHO) and Stingray, which was really cool, but kinda cheesy in a hawaii-ish sort of way. But Thunderbirds...These guys selflessly saved lives, tried to hide their identities, played with the most up-to-date (or better) technologies... Just the sort of thing a 10-year-old lives for! And, of course, being SuperMarionette, it had a kind of technology that was as fascinating as 4-gigahertz computers and bubble memories (does anyone remember bubble memories?), but in a steam-technological level society! Fascinating on more than one level!
2) Thierrie La Fronde
I prolly spelled his first name wrong. Sorry. This was a french show that appeared with english dubbing (or else an english made one, but the credits rolled in french, so I suspect the former.) Theirrie (I guess I'll spread the sin out by trying every possible combination of spelling 8^) was a french Robin Hood type character, whose favorite weapon was La Fronde, the sling. This was David vs. Goliath's sling, and he was great with it! I waited days for the show to come on, I made myself slings (none of which worked terribly well, and a few of the odd bumps left on my head might be the outcome of trying too hard with it). He was good, righteous, and his theme music still sticks in the back of my head, even today. I wish I could find a recording of it, it was that good! (even if it is available, it'll take help, because you can't find something like that in the internet if you can't spell thierei...theirrie...forget it.)
3) Star Trek, taken as a whole.
That'd be the old series (original series for die-hards), Next Generation, Voyager and Enterprise, not DS9, and movies I (for camp), II, III, IV, VI, VII and maybe VIII. Best movie was Shave the Wales (sorry, that's Jesse's fault) Save the Whales, the name we assigned to Movie IV, and best episode was The Trouble with Tribbles! The show was epoch-making, I've been in on it from the beginning, never actually saw a whole episode of DS9 (which none the less struck me as No Loss) and have seen all the movies, largely to my enjoyment. I've watched cell phones come to more-and-more resemble communicators, medical beds to more-and-more resemble BioBeds, and mass storage come to beat the small disks that McCoy used to juggle while doing his reports and research! (Don't forget tricorders, which are a few sensors away from my hx4700!)
4)Doctor Who.
Again, seen first in the BBC original as shown on CBC (the _other_ canadian station) out of Montreal. I saw the first episodes, including many of the ones that no longer exist (because of overzealous cleaning of the BBC vaults, sad to say). Deb and I found it being replayed on PBS in Virginia when we were first married, and have watched it on and off, probably seeing everything done by the first six doctors, some of the seventh, and one or two episodes out of the latter guys, who seem like a loss, to me. None the less, it's been about 35 years I've been watching it, and even though I can't really see the point anymore, I'd probably sit down and watch another one.
5)TRON.
This one is odd:
I've often said I have a TRON complex. I did again recently when discussing the motives of two members of a mailing list I'm on, who decided to self-destruct against each other, much to the annoyance, disgust and horror of the other list members. Both of them feel that they're protecting the world from the other, which is sad, unwarranted, and wrong. But that's their problem, and I hope they get over it, with minimal interference (mommying) from the list moderators.
Anyway, Tron's intro line is, "I'm Tron. I play for the User." He is metaphysically the eternal hero, playing for the User he believes in, even though most around him don't believe in Users at all. He's an imaginary computer construct, bears the exact likeness of his Real World User (although he doesn't even know that!) and is so strong in his faith that he can defeat the Master Control Program (MCP), returning use of the Mainframe to the Users, and not incidentally rescuing the real-life user who originally wrote the MCP and defeating the evil manager (played by Alan Rickman, who later showed up in many of my other more-favorite movies, not limited to Robin HOod, Prince of Thieves and Galaxy Quest, both of whom mean nothing (real) to anyone) who stole MCP from its creator.
Oddly, other than the phrase "I play for the User", no other memory of TRON stuck. I found out (again) later that W. Carlos (of Moog and Switched On Bach fame) wrote the score, that the movie mirrored the electronic game arcade culture of its time pretty well (or badly if you didn't live near to one), and that I really didn't actually _like_ it all that much. Such is life.
Anyway, my zeal for the other players in various RP games I've been involved in as moderator, GM, and player has often set me in opposition to other people, occasionally making things better for the User, and occasionally making things worse for everyone. I've even had a 2-3 year stint as an infamous rat who preyed on a major sci-fi author, only I hadn't been, and she eventually apologized for calling me names. So Tron gets to be #5 in the list!
I think I'd like to tag
Potterswheel
Ikefriday
Kimana83
and
Kyrelle,
since I think everyone else I know closely enough to know anything about the movies they've prolly seen has been tagged already. |
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| Now this is weird. |
[May. 4th, 2005|07:22 pm] |
Very few things are this odd. I'd hide this under a cut, but I can't remember how to do it, and I'm doing it raw. OK: Normally, I'm INTP. Occasionally, especially, when I'm conducting (like the church cantatas) or even performing (like when I was Satan in the church cantata a few years back) I come off ENTP. In 15 years of taking the kiersey, it's been I/ENTP. Nothing else. Note: I've edited the entry to include all five results, since I went back and resubmitted to get them all. They fit together very well...
So now I have a job working in a place where it's my responsibility to invent solutions to other people's problems. Although I haven't been allowed to actually do one yet, I'm building all the ones other people made, helping to clear the backlog, but in the process, I overheard someone mention an intractible problem, invented a solution, and I'm documenting it to present it. So I'm doing something different than just making other people's ideas become. I'm getting to become my own...
My kids and kid-in-law have taken this test. Now I have. I'm surprised by the result:
Your #1 Match: ISFP
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The Artist
You are a gifted artist or musician (though your talents may be dormant right now).
You enjoy spending your free time in nature, and you are good with animals and children.
Simply put, you enjoy beauty in all its forms and live for the simple pleasures in life.
Gentle, sensitive, and compassionate - you are good at recognizing people's unspoken needs.
You would make a good veterinarian, pediatrician, or composer. |
Your #2 Match: ISTP
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The Mechanic
You are calm and collected, even in the most difficult of situations.
A person of action and self-direction, you love being independent.
To outsiders yous seem impulsive, surprising, and unpredictable.
You are good at understanding how all things work, except for people.
You would make an excellent pilot, forensic pathologist, or athlete. |
Your #3 Match: INFP
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The Idealist
You are creative with a great imagination, living in your own inner world.
Open minded and accepting, you strive for harmony in your important relationships.
It takes a long time for people to get to know you. You are hesitant to let people get close.
But once you care for someone, you do everything you can to help them grow and develop.
You would make an excellent writer, psychologist, or artist. |
Your #4 Match: INTP
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The Thinker
You are analytical and logical - and on a quest to learn everything you can.
Smart and complex, you always love a new intellectual challenge.
Your biggest pet peeve is people who slow you down with trivial chit chat.
A quiet maverick, you tend to ignore rules and authority whenever you feel like it.
You would make an excellent mathematician, programmer, or professor. |
Your #5 Match: ESFP
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The Performer
You are a natural performer and happiest when you're entertaining others.
A great friend, you are generous, fun-loving and optimistic.
You love to laugh - and you like almost all people equally.
You accept life as it is, and you do your best to make each day fantastic.
You would make a good actor, designer, or counselor. |
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| Software patents, Sony, and sense |
[Apr. 10th, 2005|12:56 pm] |
ok, now. I'm not quite as prepared to use the (low) level of verbiage that Gizmodo applied to the idea, but lets face it. Software patents, a questionable practice as the US Patent Office has applied it for the last 20 years, is clearly out of hand.
I had enough difficulty with the idea that the OSPO would grant a software patent 20 years after it was applied for. The fact that the case resulted in a patent on the 'byte-swap algorithm' was just insurmountable. Now, we have the epitome of useless patents, a patent on beaming sensory input directly into the brain.
( OK, why is this bad? )
( And why is it useless? )
And what does a patent like the byte-swap or the psycho-tele-advertising one do for us? To start with, such patents make it impossible to function when the patent covers a real, working process which is so obvious that everyone will see it as the solution to the problem in any possible form. The byte-swap algorithm is so obvious that it will be the first thing that occurs to anyone who wants to swap two objects--it is equivalent to picking up food and eating it as the solution to being hungry. Expect to see a patent on that soon.
The psycho-tele-feely-smelly patent does two things: it fallaciously occupies the time of the Patent office, allowing their already useless officers to draw pay under the pretense of work. It also lays the groundwork so that if someone actually ever does work and discovers a process that stinks of similarity to the (invariably oververbose and all-encompassing) wording of Sony's patent, that honest discovery will either become the property of Sony, who has done little more than exercise the legal channel, or the discoverer will have to pay Sony royalties for an idea they had and failed to do anything with.
Now the patent system requires that you actually work to develop the idea/process/invention within a year of getting the patent. It'll be interesting to see what kind of bogus wheel-spinning Sony does to maintain ownership of this patent, but I bet it won't cost them much energy, and won't see any realistic developments.
Why does this irk me? Patents were established to get people with trade secrets and secret processes to share them, so that others could bring to bear on those ideas and processes their own creativity, thus making likely the improvement of our country's production and industry. Failing the patent system, all ideas and inventions would be as jealously guarded as the guild system did with every aspect of business in Europe, guaranteeing a very slow development of that technology we all love to carry in our pockets, plug into our ears, drive around in, bathe in, eat the results of, and generally bask in.
But patents which have no actual purpose, or which provide ownership for ideas and processes that are as obvious as blowing a stuffy nose, do nothing good for anyone. I suspect I couldn't actually get an answer from the owners of the byte-swap patent because they were acutely embarassed. After seeing two decades of development in computer science, and seeing how obvious and unimpressive their patented process was, they probably wished the patent office had shown some sense, and they didn't have to have their names associated with such nonsense.
Sony should know better. |
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| Where I bin? |
[Mar. 31st, 2005|03:04 pm] |
This is a meme that's been going around, but I like the graphicality of it:
create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.
It may seem odd to have most of the east and central parts be contiguous, but the western parts be disconnected. Airplains are wonnerful things. This also doesn't show the European and Asian countries, but that's OK, because it doesn't show canadian provinces either, and I've been in two or four of them too.
Oddly, most of this travel has been for 'business'. CA was duplicated both for business and pleasure (Seeing Dave Specht and his Girlfriend become Married!); most of the rest has been Navy, contracting to the Navy, or...welll. I did get to maine and mass-ah-choo-sitz for making music, but also was there for...well...business. Amazing where a life of CNC programming will take you.
The most interesting has to be Wisconsin, though. I went to Wisconsin because I got on the wrong train in North Chicago. I thought I was going into Chicago. I began to wonder when the motifs changed from bustle and mafia to cheese and general dairy...
This also leaves out poking around the North Atlantic in a submarine. |
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| post op ocelot |
[Mar. 28th, 2005|10:16 pm] |
Well, it's been 3 days, and I just took off the packings and bandages. I'm in mere bandaids. Six stitches (I counted). I'm amazed at the bruising: both palms are blue to nearly black with it. But I can move both thumbs without either locking or popping, and the pain is from the incisions, not the tendons. So this is an unqualified success.
I will say, the bathroom has been an experience. One which I will not go far out of my way to repeat, I might add. 'nuff said.
I found, to my surprise, that my White Mensural Notation web pages haven't dissappeared from the internet, as I'd thought they had. They're still out there, and apparently can be found by searching the web for notation and music. I hadn't authorized the copying and all, but frankly, since I haven't gotten updated ones (or even those old ones) back on the web under my own power, I was actually grateful to find them.
I am deeply saddened over the whole Schiavo case in Florida. We can't get a liberal judge to actually allow the execution of a self-admitted multiple rapist/murderer here in CT, but in florida, liberal judges will knock each other over to line up to murder an innocent woman. In the process, apparently, they'll ignore legally sworn affadavits that the woman's husband made it clear when he was suing for a million bucks that she wanted to live, but suddenly claims (nearly a decade later) that all along she wanted to die; that he has repeatedly bragged about what he's going to do with the million when she's dead, and that he may even have tried to help her along by injecting her with insulin. Not to mention that he ordered that she not be given any of the therapy that he sued to afford for her, and that in general, he is clearly not her advocate. In the process, they will gleefully use police to prevent her parents from trying to help her.
We used to fear that the government was going to use well-intentioned legislation (meant to prevent evil people from harming their children) to take children away from Christians and parents who wish to take responsibility for their own children. Now, we have to worry about the government murdering our children 'for their own good'. I don't know about you, but I have never believed that the government knows better than a parent what is good for their child.
I think I have more than enough evidence to back that up in this one case.
I cannot imagine a worse example of nosey-busy-body interference than the lawyer who claimed after the first day that replacing Terry Schiavo's feeding tube would be cruel and inhuman. Maybe Mike Savage is right, and liberalism is a dangerous mental disorder. |
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| I'm bilaterally symmetric... |
[Mar. 13th, 2005|08:25 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | artistically cranky? | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Mahler's 6th Symphony, MVT 1 | ] |
...with a thumb brace on each hand. They're a nuisance, and I can see now what some of my greater issues will be after the operations.
The band at Church did Long Black Train this morning, and except for a rather large empty spot at the beginning where I usually do a slidey flourish, it was fine. Probably noone even noticed the empty spot but me, for that matter.
Of course, no semi-skilled hand (or index finger in this case) goes idle, so while I was trying to listen, I got assigned the job of indexing the overhead display. It's all computerized now, with powerpoint(less) screens blasted behind the band with an XVGA projector which is suspended from the ceiling. All I had to do was hit the arrow key in time to bring up the words for the next section, but without having any actual experience with it (normally my back is to the words!) I managed to miscue more than once. Ah well. That's what you get when you want to use amatuers, right?
As for the thumbs, a lot of people who hadn't noticed the great rolls of brown or white latex bandage that I was using for a mild brace _did_ notice the thumb braces, so I spent a lot of time explaining what was wrong, what was being done about it, and whether it hurts. Yes, it hurts. Lots. Even more because most of yesterday was spent hooking my thumbnails on things and twisting the last joint of one thumb or the other. I've cut the thumbnails down to less than a milimeter now, but I still get to enjoy the continuing reminder that growing thumbnails because I can isn't always wise.
Tonight was Teen Service night. At CFC, periodically, the teen group takes over an evening service, and fills it with skits, music, and a sermon crafted by the Pastor but read tagteam style by brave young men. Isaac used to do it (and look where he is now!), and now Jesse is doing it. All the sermon team did well, making it clear that they aren't just reading someone else's words, but have learned and listened and speak from the heart. The songs also were impressively presented by (mostly girls, one boy) teens who really know first hand what the songs are about. And the skits were, as always, incisive, fun, and a little bit embarassing. Sometimes, it's good to get to see yourself through young eyes: they don't miss much!
I'm not going to do the cantata this year, first time in 13 years. I have reasons and excuses: I can barely hold a book, let alone turn pages; I haven't been to a rehersal (because of having to work sunday afternoons) for four weeks; I'm going to be fresh out of an operation the first night and still in the packing on Easter. I have to admit, though, that at least a small reason comes from the fact that this is a retread, a cantata we've done before (recently, too) and one I have little affinity for. It's called 'Eyes of Faith', and it is, in its essence, praise songs dressed up to be sung by a choir. The arrangements are harsh and 2-voiced in most places, often with the basses doubling the sopranos, which grates on my ear something awful. The drama and acting that go with it are far better than the music and lyrics. And the drama dilutes the message a bit too much. So I'll admit that I'm still glad that I'm getting both hands operated on at the same time on Good Friday, and sotto-voce, I'll add that I'm glad it has disabled me for this cantata.
Which brings up a major gripe of mine, after some 25 years of Church choir and cantata choir directing, on and off: There is precious little good work going into cantatas these days. I could rail for hours, but won't. And I'll admit that the yearly output of John W. Peterson back in the 80's was largely redundant. But I would rather dig one of them out and do it than touch one out of twenty of the 'modern' cantatas. Is it because the cantata is passe'? If so, what is to replace it? What will do a better job to present the story of Christ's Birth and Resurrection at Christmas and Easter to a public which believes that there is more value in easter eggs and candy and presents and a fat guy in a red suit than in a saving relationship with the God who made us? I don't know. If you have thoughts on the matter, please feel free to comment!
Anyway, I'm probably in more of a mood over it because my hands hurt so much. |
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| RE-zults |
[Mar. 10th, 2005|01:36 pm] |
OK, here's the latest word:
I saw Dr. Chung this morning. He's a hand specialist, he repaired my lil finger when I fell up the stairs and broke it.
I do definitely have trigger finger in both hands, and they both need to be operated on. Mere shots of cortesone isn't going to do it. I suspected it wouldn't. I'm scheduled for surgery for both hands on Good Friday.
This is good, because it means that I'll have one recouperation period, mostly over easter holiday weekend, and since it's clearly medical, it won't be a hassle to get easter weekend pay...oh, wait. I think that's a day off with pay already!
Anyway, until then, I'm in a pair of thumb braces, which make typing hard. They also will make playing guitar impossible, which Ken isn't going to like at all. He's scheduled Long Black Train for sunday, rehersal tomorrow night, and Heart of Worship for the following sunday. The first one I have some five different things I did on the recording, from the Johnny Cash dump-du-du dump-du-du muted bits to the guitar lead in the middle, and I can't do any of 'em. On the other, it's a classical-guitar Clapton-esque part while Deb plays Viola. Even harder, if that's possible. Ah well.
As for work, the only part that I will have big trouble with is putting the connectors on the boards for the tests, and the new addition to the project (from the other, more cutting-edge project) has already said he doesn't mind doing that for me. And taking them off, which can hurt even more. So I should be ok there.
Unlike the pictures I found online, the dressing is going to be thumb only, so anything an orang-utang can do, I should be able to. Except for ripping people's faces off for calling me a monkey.
We'll see. |
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| up! Up! UP!date |
[Mar. 9th, 2005|04:54 pm] |
Tomorrow, I see Dr. Chung about my thumbs. I don't know how prepared he is to do what with them, but I have hopes.
Background: During the Christmas vacation (if you can call it a vacation when they call you in and say, "Hey, I know we told you that we needed you to work through the whole period, but we don't, and since you're a temp, you don't get paid vacation either"), I started to have some difficulty with my left thumb. It was crackling more than it ever had before. Or, I was noticing it more. I do a lot with my hands: I operate hand tools, I tune pianos, I assemble flight electronics and put on and take off the connectors a lot...and I play musical instruments. I don't like losing the use of a single finger.
Then, charging up the stairs to get my headlight to use on a tuning job, I tripped and rebroke my little finger by end-jamming it against the wall. The first time I broke it was falling up the stairs, too. At least I'm consistant. I didn't say bad things only because I couldn't talk from the pain, I'm sorry to say. If I could have, I'd have said many things I don't want my kids to hear me say.
Anyway, I'd done it before so I knew how to splint it. After a few weeks, it started to work again, and when the pain went away, there was this nagging pain in my left thumb. So I figured I probably smashed that too.
Then it started in my right thumb. I thought maybe I hadn't exercised my hands enough, since I hadn't really played any instruments through the Christmas season, so I borrowed a squish ball from Bernie and started to use it. It made things worse.
Eventually, my left thumb started to lock up, either straight, so it hurt badly to bend it, or bent, so I couldn't unbend it (pain or no) without using my other hand. So I wrapped it in latex-stick-to-itself tape, and started to look into joint ailments. I was pretty convinced it was 'gamekeeper's thumb' (which you can lookup on the internet, I did). I was wrong.
Last week, I saw a real live doctor (not a clinic doctor) and she knew immediately what was wrong. Trigger Thumb! You can look that up, too, but I'll warn you now, some of the sites have pictures of the operation that fixes it, and they're hard on the stomach.
She got me an appointment tomorrow morning with Dr. Chung (who not only repaired my lil'finger the first time I broke it, but also has operated on both CFC's music director's hands and his wife's (She's had 8 trigger fingers!). The treatments of choice are: an injection of corticosteroids mixed with lidocaine (usually not effective if the finger/thumb has actually locked, which now both of mine have at least once) or an operation to remove part of the bone sheathing. Kind of like Carpal TUnnel, but not in the wrist.
If I get the shots, I'll probably be able to play the lead guitar lines for Long Black Train in church sunday, and maybe even for the rehersal friday night.
If he operates on either hand (left one needs it more) then it'll be a minimum of four days before I can do anything with it, and probably longer before I can play again.
I'm honestly hoping about halfway that he'll just operate on both of them. I haven't practiced guitar since this started, and I'm really not ready to play LBT. It'd take a miracle... |
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| Someday, I'm gonna stop taking these things... |
[Mar. 3rd, 2005|07:05 pm] |
You Are 45% Left Brained, 55% Right Brained |
The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning.
Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others.
If you're left brained, you are likely good at math and logic.
Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet.
The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility.
Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way.
If you're right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art.
Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.
|
Of course, they're totally wrong. I use the middle of my brain, that thin crevice between the two sides. It's the only logical explanation.
Homeschoolery of the day: Jesse is telling me that he's taken the Disney char test... "I said things often go ow-ree". "I think that's 'Awry'. "Yeah, that." Then, as I was entering this, I had to correct my typing, and I hit "end" to get to the end of the line. He's looking over my shoulder, and he says, "Wow! What'd you press to do that?" "Do what?" "Get to the end of the line so fast?" "Uh...'end'."
Hmmmmm.
Anyway, at work, things have gotten stranger (which I wasn't sure was possible.) We've had some 8 CPU boards in to production rework to be worked on since sunday. They haven't done anything with them. Monday, it looked like snow, so _none of them came in!_ Tuesday, the one who does laiason between us (engineering) and them (production) wasn't in, for whatever reason, and still nothing got done. Wednesday, I don't know what happened, but this morning, we had, suddenly, all the boards back. (Some of them were even fixed.) Of course, one of our suppliers sent their startup bid for this lot in the form of the first 7 boards, our other supplier, out of the blue, sent another one, and four came back from conformal coat. That means that, after a week of nothing (because the last batch of three boards from the supplier which sent one board all failed) we suddenly had some 20 boards that Had To Be Done Now!!!!!!
Of course, the killer was that Production, after being the Big Bottleneck, suddenly decided they aren't going to do any more rework for this project. On the one hand, that's a bummer for engineering rework, two very overworked ladies. On the other paw, it's a great win for me, because the engineering rework ladies can a) read english and understand directions b) work without pictures, c) actually do the rework they're directed to do and d) if they actually break something (rarely) they can identify it and fix it without eating up the time of an engineer and a technician for half-a-day.
That last bit probably seems odd. It's predicated on this: I can't send rework to production unless I include an 11" x 17" two-sided drawing of the board with each component to be reworked hilited. I.e., they can't work from written descriptions of work in standard terms, they have to have pictures. Further, one of the suppliers was burying all the components around one of the connectors in a thick clear adhesive, which is very hard to get a probe through. But it is also very easy to heat up to make it brittle, and pick it away from an individual component. I sent one board to have one component replaced, and got it back with a) all the adhesive removed from the area of the connector (about 20x the area more than what was called for), b) a list of 10 parts that she acknowledged she had damaged (none of which were replaced) and a c) nasty note and a verbal scolding for making her do my work. In addition to this, she tore the tracking and log sheets off the folder and stapled them onto other random surfaces on the folder, because 'they confused me'. Top this off with the fact that she decided to have the inspection person throw away the 11" x 14" pictures after she was done inspecting the reworks, because having more than one picture 'confuses me'.
Anyone who knows me knows that this frustrates me terribly. I expect people to use at least 10% of their brains at least 10% of the time. I figure that someone who has replaced a resistor properly from a written description once is probably going to be able to handle doing it twice without having to suddenly have to have pictures drawn for every resistor replacement. And, because I bust my butt to get things done and done well, I kinda hope others will at least do their jobs to a level that is slightly better than totally mediocre or worse. It's not a terribly high standard, really. But production has been working hard at not doing their jobs, and it apparently boils down to the fact that they're union, and if they aren't happy about something, they can file a grievance against it (or them), but no one can have any complaint against them. (This I really don't understand, honest. If a union worker's supervisor hasn't 1) instructed them individually and completely in an operation and 2) documented that they've instructed them in it and 3) kept clear, concise, complete and copious documentation of the fact that they've been instructed, the union person can do whatever they please, and no one can object. But if anyone (apparently not in the union) does _anything_, the union person can file a grievance and they (the nonunion person)will have the devil to pay.
Well, having all my rework removed from union hands by their demand is just fine with me. Maybe I won't have to wait weeks for a 5-minute job to be done (not to mention not having to draw pictures!) |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 3rd, 2005|06:15 am] |
I probably shouldn't be happy about this...
 | You scored as Sleeping Beauty. Your alter ego is Princess Aurora, a.k.a. Sleeping Beauty! You are beautiful and enchanting, and as sweet as ever.
Pinocchio | | 75% | Sleeping Beauty | | 75% | Ariel | | 69% | Goofy | | 69% | Donald Duck | | 69% | Cinderella | | 69% | Peter Pan | | 69% | The Beast | | 69% | Cruella De Ville | | 44% | Snow White | | 31% | </td>
Which Disney Character is your Alter Ego?
created with QuizFarm.com |
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| I envy people who can come up with ten... |
[Feb. 26th, 2005|10:36 pm] |
OK, I'm not doing so hot on the 10 things I've done you haven't meme. Here's my list so far:
1) Played 'Cello with the Julliard String Quartet
2) Bought two classical guitars in Spain. (I only got to keep one)
3) Sat down with my new classical guitar in a public park near the Guitar store in Torremolinos, Spain, to see if I really liked it as much as I thought I did... and had people start throwing money onto my case!
4) Was politely asked by the Guardia Civil (famed for shoot first and let God ask the questions later) to cease and desist from unliscensed Busking!
5) Played in a master class before Janos Starker
6) Took lessons from the Principal Bass for the Boston Philharmonic.
7) Designed, built, programmed and made to work an invention (Video Holographic Interferometry) for which I understood about 10% of the math that defined it.
8) Still have my name referenced in new books on Holographic Interferometry (from papers Karl Stetson kindly allowed me to work on with him in the '80's)
9) Ride a submarine for a month as a civilian, in the North Atlantic, and get certified a Blue Nose. (Not a lot of civilians get Blue Nose on a submarine.)
And that's where I run out. I'm sure other things will come back. I could make 10) forgotten all the really unique things I've done, but I'm sure I'm not the only bad memory in memeland.
Some explanation is in order.
1) The Julliard was quartet-in-residence to the NY school system, sort of thing, when I was in 3rd Grade. I had been fitted for a 'cello, and was going to start taking lessons when the new one came in, since all the ones they had to rent were already rented...which ended up being may of the next year. We had an assembly (there's a word that will bring back memories to some) where this string quartet came... it was the Julliard. One of their bits to get kids interested in music was to get one of their number to come and draw the bow across random strings on the 'cello as a drone while the first violinist played "The Campbells are coming". They were a bit surprised that I could hit the two strings I was told to play, and do it evenly. I remember this (despite forgetting many other things prior to my back operation) because when it was over, instead of walking down the stairs, I chose to step off the stage...which was in the high school, not our elementary stage, and was about 4' higher over the pit than I expected. My legs folded under me and I landed rather heavilly on the end of my spine, which really jolted. But I hardly noticed, 'cause I'd gotten to play the 'cello!
5) There are probably 5 names that ring down the halls of Violoncello fame within the last half-century. Mistislov Rostropovich. Lynn Harrell. Jacquelin DuPres. Yoyo Ma. And Janos Starker. When I was inbetween 11th and 12th grade, I had a chance to go to a music camp on the west shore of Lake Placid called Camp Solitude. And during that summer, some of us from the camp had a chance to earn some college credits by attending a 2-week string seminar, which took the form of lecture-demonstrations and master classes. I played a Sigmond Romberg 'cello duet, playing the upper part on string bass. One of the other 'cellists volunteered to play the second part on the spot, and (thank goodness) the 'cello teacher for the camp (Lois Posta! A name I haven't forgotten!) took notes for me. It was wonderful, I learned things I've applied in all facets of music making, and Bethany, it just about qualifies as college-full-time before I graduated from high school!
6) This one is almost a total red-herring: The person I took lessons from was Edwin Barker, who was just about my age, when I was in highschool. I had only a few lessons from him before he moved to Albany to live with the Principal Bassist of the Albany Symphony. He was, last time I checked, Principal of the Boston Symphony bass section, and still is, unless he's retired. He's appeared (sounded?) on WGBH's afternoon live broadcasts. He's great! But he wasn't actually principal of the BoSym when I had lessons with him 8^)
That's probably enough excuse-making for an incomplete list. |
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| Like...does this guy ever post? |
[Feb. 21st, 2005|05:41 pm] |
OK, After months of silence (last post is pre-election!) I tried to make a post today, and it got eaten by the database update. Go figger.
In short, I've been on a 73-hour-a-week schedule, trying to get airplanes into the hands of paying customers. Our FADEC is kinda behind, due to a whole batch of computer boards being bad (it's called black pad syndrome, and it makes your parts fall off!) and scheduling snafu's, lead times, and general bad workmanship at the board-populating houses. Such is life. The pay is good (better with 33 hours of overtime!), and so far I haven't burnt out, which seems to be everyone (else's) worry. Part of this might be because I was snowed in today, sick last thursday (only worked 5 hours before it drove me home) and yesterday there wasn't anything to do, so we went home after 3 hours.
This has left almost no time for piano work. Which is sad, becuase I have a few jobs backed up that I can't get to until march or april.
On the other hand (or both of them) I rebroke my little finger in December, just before going to a repair/tuning job, and Jesse came to help me do it (which was nice), and apparently also did both thumbs without noticing because of the pain in the lil' finger. Now I notice. Either I have gamekeeper's thumb (the capsules in the joints get messed up due to end-on strikes) or I've got bad arthritis starting up and focused on both thumbs. I've had the left one mildly splinted for two weeks, and it's just beginning to be bendable without loud cracking noise and big pain. They're both worthless for strength, though, so most of my piano work is out of the question anyway. Ow! The left one just straightened (I have the bandages off to let blood flow while I'm typing) and oi! It still hurts!
One good byproduct, of a sort: the 8-year-old, Hope, has asked me to teach her to repair piano actions!
lesse, what else? God is ever so good: While my thumbs are out of commission, he's answered a long-time desire of mine to learn to play Dobro, by providing me demands to play for people. I can't play guitar with my fingers messed up like this, but both songs can be played with a slide! After the first rehersal of "Feet on the Rock", the e-guitarist told me he was on the edge of going out and buying a National Guitar (the most famous brand of metal-bodied dobro) for me to play! That's kind words indeed.
Well, otherwise, not much is happening. I took a nerd test that my kids were taking, and aced 'em all. But no one will be surprised to hear that. And there isn't much time with 73-hour weeks to do much else but have a cold. So I'm doing that, still. Probably because I haven't found the time to get over it.
Sometimes it is nice to be snowed in. |
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