randomdreams

We went to a place called Extras!, which is a surplus building supplies warehouse, so I could get a door for the mad scientist hut.
They had a lot of doors. They even had a weird corridor down between stacks of doors.


They had the kitchen sink.


And cool signage.


I installed the door, meaning the old door, with the Tyra Banks 1998 calendar on the back, now goes in the trash.

Then I did something I should have done years ago and added a deadbolt so I can lock it without just padlocking a junky eyebolt.


Columbine are hiding under the canopy of carrots in the front yard.


I'm remachining a friend's mountain bike pedals, adding a bunch more cleats to them. The first step is a fixture to hold the pedals in place while I drill and tap them.

If all goes as planned, I'm meeting up tomorrow with a friend so I can stick a geiger counter in his crotch.

Due to stress I ache all over, particularly my back, in the vicinity of one of the discs I damaged in the big car crash, and the adjacent bit where ligaments attach to a vertebral process that got broken off the vertebra. It's my stress meter.
Usually I deal with this by stretching and bike riding.
So at lunch today I went cycling with my coworker.
I had TWO heart rate monitors on. Sometimes they fight, but today they appeared to work well together. (One is recording for the cardiologist, the other is recording for my geek love of instrumentation, so I can post my pulse histogram online.)
The sky was vaguely threatening as we were starting, and got crabbier as we rode. As we were about halfway down a long twisting dirt path, it started drizzling, and just as we got to an intersection where we'd been planning on going straight and doing a long climb, lightning struck quite near us, so we bailed and rode home. Shortly thereafter the clouds dabbled briefly in hail, but then gave up as we outpaced them. We returned covered in mud and glory, only not very much glory.

A lot of stuff has happened.
I remain wired up to a heart monitor, and its sympathetic magic is working perfectly: I have not had a single dizzy episode and only one possible missed heartbeat since I started wearing it.

threemeninaboat's car was declared officially totaled and irreparable because of water getting into the electronics and hybrid batteries. She feels that most or all modern cars are enormous unwieldy beached whales and was angry at everything so we went out and found her a ten year old Subaru STI, basically a road-legal racecar, and that, she's happy with.

My company, specifically my department, won a contract to develop an extremely complex custom chip for another company, that'll keep us very busy and very profitable for at least six years, so I'm less worried about my job vanishing for quite a while.

I've fallen behind on most of my fun projects because there's so much stuff that Just Has To Be Done. I'm going to work on the life/fun balance thing. But the hailstorm and following mid-May freeze meant some issues keeping the garden viable.

Since threemeninaboat's car is on indefinite hiatus, what with its bashed-in windows and smashed-up exterior, she drove the Spitfire to work today. Hooray! I texted her to find out how it was going, and she said it was great. I came home and was out walking the dog when she called: she couldn't get the seatbelt to come out. It was retracted and refused to extend.
I forced Monty into actual rapid walking, got home, and drove over, by which time she had half the seatbelt assembly out. (On this car, it's pretty exposed, since I replaced the original circa 1975 seatbelts, that were half rotted and only lap belts, with three-point shoulder belts that hook into the roll bar mounting points with massive bolts.) The point was to trade the seat belts side-to-side, since the passenger one worked. I helped her finish that up... and the passenger one, that has always worked perfectly, didn't work either. ARRRGH. I took it back out and played with it until it did work, we stretched it all the way out, installed it, she sat down, and we stuck the other end in the receptacle and she drove home.
While I was sitting at home playing with the one that failed, it started working again.
These are set up very carefully so that the latching mechanism that engages in a crash cancels out gravity: if it's tilted (like the car's in the process of turning over) it automatically engages fully to prevent the person falling out.
She was parked on a steep angle.
The seatbelts were just doing what they were designed to do. Turns out if you park on an angle that is the sort you regularly encounter, they decide you're crashing and lock up.
GAH.
I think I'm getting non-retractable three-point seatbelts to replace them.

Doc says my heart appears to be fine and he has no idea why I fainted, so I'm going to a cardiologist and in the meantime am under instructions to drink even more water.

I've been driving through a place called Lake Arbor Park to blow up my frenemies' Ingress portals, and ran across cormorants.

And herons.

But today I came home and walked Monty around the block and while I was down by the church to the south of our house I heard an utterly familiar (to me) "breet!" sound that is unlike any native bird. I managed a passable "breet!" response and got an extremely enthusiastic response, so we played Marco Polo until this old grey lady tried to fly towards me.

Her wings are clipped so it didn't work very well, but she's quite well-trained and civilized, so I got her to step up on my hand and walk up to my shoulder while monty had a complete emotional breakdown about not being allowed to eat the little bird, and brought her home. She's now sitting in the downstairs bathroom.

We went to the Ingress cross-faction awards ceremony for the Colorado area on Saturday. They hold it in a kind of divey artist gallery on Santa Fe, but there are usually at least a couple of good sculptures.
Both these were basically 2 meters tall.



Two of my coworkers have bought the same model of 3d printer that I have. One printed a tiny crossbow, that is almost entirely a single print: all the moving parts (and there are several) were printed in one go, assembled, relying on flex to enable it to work.


I think it's funny that so far he has printed a fidgeter (a weighted spinny thing) and the plastic equivalent of brass knuckles and a crossbow and a skull. I have printed a testbed for one of my circuit boards, an enclosure for another circuit board, an intake manifold, and motor hold-down brackets. The other guy has printed a klein bottle and another mathematical oddity, related to a moebius strip. We all seem to be quite consistent in our choices, although they are all quite different.

I bought a pipe nipple and cap, intending to weld them together to make a small heavy-duty crucible for melting and casting brass, insofar as my aluminum one is intended for much larger volumes and much lower temperatures. The nipple and cap both claimed to be galvanized steel. I sat them in hydrochloric acid for about 20 minutes and then went to weld them. The HCl did not sufficiently strip off the zinc in 20 minutes: I should have left it in there for an hour.
This is what it looks like when you try to weld something galvanized.

Zinc fumes are bad for you. Avoid doing this.
As it turns out, even though they both claimed to be galvanized steel, the cap was in fact cast iron. I should have tested it before trying to weld it.
This is what happens when you use standard welding rod to try to attach steel to cast iron.

See that big old crack horizontally right down the center of the weld? The cast iron has melted and run up to that point, but because it is brittle, when it cools it contracts and cracks. (Steel is ductile enough to stretch just a little as it cools.)
This is definitely not going to hold liquid brass without leaking everywhere.
I'll fabricate another one later.

Apparently my style of decapsulating integrated circuits is so different we don't know how to take pictures of the results that show what we want to see. We have damaged chips. When we etch the top off with nitric acid there are spots that won't etch because they're a mixture of metals, epoxy, and silicon. The way I remove the top doesn't leave those spots, so we have to compare the pictures to pictures of a good chip and even then the evidence for damage is subtle: lines that aren't quite straight, for instance. I may have to come up with some way of producing contrast. But, generally, it's extremely successful save for our lack of ability to electrically connect to the die anymore, and we can even manage that with our probe station.

Two police officers showed up at our front door at 2200 tonight, and said they wanted to look in my back yard for a guy who might be wandering around through it. I think there was more to the story, because a plainclothes policeman showed up a minute later and two other cars a minute after that, and there were a fairly large number of people out looking through my back yard and my neighbor Ray's back yard (which are largely conterminous, though separated by a rather tall retaining wall.) That shot my interest in doing a bunch of work in the workshop.