randomdreams: riding up mini slickrock (Default)
randomdreams ([personal profile] randomdreams) wrote2017-04-08 10:22 pm

(no subject)

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:
20170407_135517
and finished printing, with the top adapter plate snapped on
20170407_153402
and the inside view
20170407_153420

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.
2017-04-08_10-25-11
amaebi: black fox (Default)

[personal profile] amaebi 2017-04-09 11:29 am (UTC)(link)
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 [personal profile] 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.
Edited 2017-04-09 11:30 (UTC)
altamira16: A sailboat on the water at dawn or dusk (Default)

[personal profile] altamira16 2017-04-09 02:21 pm (UTC)(link)
My son is pretty strongly anti-bike too. I feel like we have grown away from friends who like to ride bikes.