(no subject)

[randomdreams]

Today has kind of been start-stop. Japanese class was challenging. We learned the vocabulary and structure for telling time: not just the numbers, but the numeric counters (hours, minutes) and the places where they're not regular. Imagine if we said four o'clock, five o'clock, six a'clock because that sounded better. Of course, english does exactly that foxes, boxes, oxe...n. But it's easy to learn stuff like that when you're two years old.
Anyhoo, now I can say "today the department store is open from 9 to 6."
N is off at a show, so I decided to work on stuff I've been putting off. I have a heatsink with a broken-off tap in it from work and I need to acid-etch the tap out, so now that's soaking in a crockpot full of jeweler's pickling compound, which eats steel but not aluminum.
The Spitfire is mildly overheating in traffic, so I'm replacing its shoddy single cooling fan with two newer ones, side-by-side, that come complete with ducting and finger guards. It'll be awesome. Too bad I'm out of steel stock to weld up the lower bracket for mounting it to the radiator.
Similarly, I 3d printed a thing. When cast in aluminum, it'll be an adapter to mount a Proper British SU Carburettor onto the Datsun engine that's in the little British car, so it won't need a big hood scoop anymore. (We may keep it because hood scoop but then it will be a CHOICE.)
So here's the thing.
Printing:

and finished printing, with the top adapter plate snapped on

and the inside view


So it'll be really great! except the foundry lid is all cracked from having been outside for years, and I never got around to actually making a controller for the burnout oven so it'll just incinerate things. I ordered an oven controller from ebay, which will show up some day. I spent two months designing an oven controller interface for a PC back when I built the burnout oven in the first place, before LJ or Dreamwidth were a thing, but never got it working quite right. Now I can buy one for $18.

Yesterday I picked up a powermeter hub for my racing bike, intent being so I can see how much power I'm producing while riding, which maybe will do something amazing for my training or maybe will be just more numbers.
I got it home and tried to turn it on, and nothing happened, so I took off the battery door and the battery board has clearly home-made additional wiring on it, which makes me suspect I'm not going to get this thing working.
Oh well.

Tonight I went out on an Ingress mission called field over my frenemy's house. It's a great mission. It worked out quite nicely, although I feel a bit badly about part of it. Members of each team get together and build up a bunch of portals, in concert, from which they can get much nicer stuff than when people do it solo, which is referred to as farming. The other team had a farm scheduled this evening south of where I was fielding, that one of our alert members saw online and pointed out, meaning a destruction team of ours headed that way, and just after blowing it all up, sending the people that had been relying on that to get gear for their next week of battling, I smashed down their backup farm, leaving them fairly stranded. For other people that's the high point of the game. For me, I don't actually like doing that. It hurts to be on the receiving end.
Anyway, there were a bunch of cirrus clouds just at sunset that I liked.

Comments

[danjite]

Dang I hate the DW interface. You got this figured out yet?

Just picked up a 1997 Isuzu Bighorn (Trooper, in the US), the last year with the storied 4JG2 diesel engine, to replace our 1992 4JG2 which is getting long in the tooth.

The reason I mention this is it was set up to tow a camper- not a big one, a 1967 single axle. The guy I bought it from was a fanatic- which is why I bought it from him. In addition to oil changes every 8k km, he added a transmission cooler, a secondary fan controlled by a manual dash switch and- get this- added a second windshield washer fluid reservoir with just water in it which would, again- via dash board control, emit mist in front of the radiator for additional evaporative cooling.

I knew you'd get it.

[amaebi]

Holy mumblety-peg.

[darkoshi]

> Dang I hate the DW interface. You got this figured out yet?

I've been using DW for a long time, and I scratch my head when reading comments like that, wondering what difficulties people can be having*. Especially as in recent years, I've had more trouble myself with the LJ interface. So I'm sure you'll figure it out and get used to it, but if anything is giving you (or anyone else who reads this) particular trouble, feel free to send me queries, and I'll try to help.

*although there's at least one thing I can think of that seems counter-intuitive, so I'm sure there's more that I've simply gotten used to and don't even notice any more.

This is going to sound crazy, but...

[rebeccmeister]

It is taking a bit of time for me to figure out navigation among various hyperlink vs. icon menu systems here, and there are places where there's a dizzying array of options here that are all hidden/nonexistent/obscured on LJ. Probably vice-versa, too.

For instance, I wanted to subscribe to my own journal, but couldn't find a way to do that among the nav bar options. Then I FINALLY discovered the little clickable icon below my user image on my new DW blog's page, and, *foreheadslap*. Hiding in plain sight. I think LJ used to use those, but they disappeared at some point.

It's going to take a little while for me to memorize the DW-specific HTML tag syntax, too, but these are all surmountable problems, and seem worth the time-cost.

And now I feel like an old curmudgeon. (-:

[randomdreams]

Whoah. Sometimes I dream of supercharging the Spitfire and water injection would be interesting to play with for added cooling. I'd never considered full-loss evaporative cooling of the radiator.
(Was reading about a pre-War Morgan three-wheeler the other day and someone mentioned that the valve train was full-loss lubrication. No wonder they don't rust...)

[amaebi]

Little kids aren't that great or quick at picking up language irregularities-- they just don't mind being wrong before they're right! Free your toddler brain. :D

My beloved friend smart_ted says that in Japanese, men grunt out one word and everyone else is supposed to understand what they mean by it. Is that your learning?

Sheeyun's bike feet are itching despite his allergies. He is hoping to do rides with Chun Woo. Chun Woo has previously elected not to learn to ride a bike. We'll see how this works out.

[altamira16]

My son is pretty strongly anti-bike too. I feel like we have grown away from friends who like to ride bikes.

[randomdreams]

Maybe this would be a chance for all of us to get together and ride?

[altamira16]

Where are you taking a Japanese class?

[randomdreams]

There's a church just down the street, about five blocks away, that has a very long history of Japanese membership: most of their pastors have been Japanese and they still have a very strong community.

[altamira16]

Interesting.

[secretagentmoof]

Have you heard of the term "rendaku"? It's the phenomenon where consonants become voiced, according to usually-pretty-consistent rules. It's somewhat related to the plosivization* of the numbers (e.g. for 800 はひゃく　⇒　はっぴゃく) and why it's pronounced "Jimbouchou" rather than "Jinbouchou".

* Don't know if this is a real word or not.

[randomdreams]

I am, and our teacher kind of tried to explain that, but she said mostly "just memorize it."
It's 'roppyaku' that's going to be hardest for me, I suspect.

[secretagentmoof]

If you pronounce it as "robbyaku", I suspect nobody will notice.

I *think* that the reason it's sounded as p in some words is because of old/middle japanese where it was originally pronounced as p, and that different numbers had different levels of gemination/voicing/etc.

[randomdreams]

Oooooh, I didn't/don't know anything about older versions of Japanese.

[armiphlage]

I recommend you get some plexiglas and make a box around your 3D printer, and hook in an exhaust. Our health and safety team panicked when they saw the array of printers we set up in an old office.

[randomdreams]

I'm only printing PLA, specifically because of concerns about the offgassing from ABS and some of the others. If I end up needing something from ABS or PETG, I'll do it in the workshop.