Joe & Co hung the sheetrock.
He’s grungy, but he’s a good guy and does good work.
Whoever said extra weight in the back of a pickup gives it traction wasn’t thinking about disposing of drywall in a snowstorm.
The 2×4 posts in the living room had to be replaced, so I jacked it up, crossed my fingers and, working swiftly, slid the new posts in.
Usually the posts would have gone up before the beam, but that’s what they say about the chicken and the egg too.
thu feb 9
I’ve always said that, while arithmetic is about numbers, math is about concepts.
If you plunk a robot down in front of a ping pong table and tell it to play, you can’t just assume that everything is square and level and parallel, because they’re not, and you need calibration routines. This is what I’ve worked on for the last week or so and, while the concepts are simple, the devil is in the details. I made a mess of the matrix math and had a hard time getting the numbers to come out right. Part of the problem was that linuxcnc, opencv, openGL, and Craig all use slightly different conventions but, honestly, mostly the problem was Me. In the end, I think I nailed it, but I feel like I made an awfully lot of ‘eyebrows’ pounding it in.
At my age, I’m giving myself a resounding ‘attaboy’ and moving on to the next problem.
R3TR: It was harder than it looks.
fri feb 10
We don’t know where the cat goes poop.
He doesn’t use the litter box in the mud room. (Especially when the washer’s running)
He doesn’t use the litter box in the shop. (Especially when the tools are running.)
He used to poop in stray piles of sawdust downstairs, but he stopped.
We can’t find any stray piles or smells anywhere. I’ve looked.
And he won’t go out the door when he sees it’s cold out.
And yet he’s fat and happy. Something ain’t right, and I better figure this out.
We never clean the litter box because he never uses it. But, since we’re thinking about getting another cat, I “cleaned it whether it needed it or not” (for the first time in months, now that I think about it) and I noticed that even though the top of the pile is pristine, there’s a crusty layer of sticky litter on the bottom of the box. It suddenly dawned on me that maybe he used the litter box until it stank too bad (to him) to use, even though I can’t smell a thing. If you google the problem, ‘dirty litter’ is at the top of every cat-whisperer’s blog, but I always figured “that can’t be it,” because it smelled good to me!
I consider myself a pretty smart guy, but I feel pretty dumb.
If there’s one thing Mary’s good at, it’s embarrassing the birthday boy at a bar.
My lunch landed ‘buttered side down’ on the floor, but I ate it anyway, because it’s good for the immune system.
tue feb 14
One of Devin’s hobbies is making homeopathic concoctions, and we recently received a jar of “fermented garlic honey,” said to boost the immune system and ward off colds and flu. He swears by it, Mary believes him, and I was instructed to take 2 teaspoons a day, if I should ever feel a cold coming on. Last week, after everyone else had already been sick, I felt the telltale sore throat coming on, and I started taking teaspoons, and my virus disappeared immediately, so who knows? Maybe it works!
It sure didn’t hurt, though, and I kind of liked it, so I took some more every day. But after half a dozen teaspoons, you can’t get a full spoon of honey unless you take a whole fermented garlic clove with it. So I did and – let me tell you – the honey goes down a lot easier than the garlic. I didn’t want to chew it up and ruin my breath, so I swallowed it whole, and the sensation of a 3/4″ ball going down your gullet is something you don’t want to miss.
The cure for the common cold.
Mary ‘gave me a cat’ for Christmas. Really, she gave me permission to get a cat, but it’s sort of the same thing. Today I got a cat.
We got BZ and Luci together 6 years ago, and they were good together until Luci got eaten one night. BZ got over it pretty quick, but I thought he needed another cat to play with. So I went down to the animal shelter, looked at the cats, picked 2, and played with them. They needed 4 personal references, and you could tell that they were looking me over to convince themselves that I was a responsible, animal-friendly kind of guy, but in the end, I “got approved.”
I wanted to call her Crabcake, but Mary thought that sounded grouchy.
Mary wanted to call her Cupcake, but I thought that sounded sissy.
I wanted to call her Quatro, but Mary didn’t like it and -really- what’s not to like about it?
In the end, we decided Carbon is a good name.
I’m hoping that ‘black cats’ and ‘bad luck’ are two totally different things.
Carbon the Cat
thu feb 16
It’s Day 3 of the NewCatInTheHousehold routine. Time to let her explore the house.
Yesterday, I locked BZ up in the bedroom and let Carbon explore the house. She was doing pretty good when Mary came home from work and Carbon ran back to her room.
Today, I locked BZ up in the bedroom again and let Carbon explore the house. The last I saw of her, she was heading down into the basement and, 2 hours later, I couldn’t find her. (There are a lot of hiding places down there, and a black cat in a shadow doesn’t exactly stand out) So I let BZ out of the bedroom and took him downstairs to help sniff her out. He was more interested in sniffing the litter box. I eventually found her between the wall and a piece of plywood and had a hard time getting her to come out. She’s doing fine.
The plan was to sand and re-finish the old cork floor, but that’s not what I ended up doing.
wed feb 22
Thirty five years ago, I used to get catalogs in the mail from surplus supply houses. Motors! Power supplies! Cheap! Big, heavy stuff that was already out-dated in the 80’s but, for some reason, I just had to have one of each. I’ve been carting them around in cardboard boxes ever since and, about once every ten years, I hook one up.
It has to be karma, because for c3pr, I seem to finally have my Mesa FPGA board doing what I want it to, but to prove it, I need to hook up a motor and see if it spins. So I dusted off a 40 year old L&R power supply, shunted the main outputs with a 10 ohm resistor, and then stacked the 2 12V terminals to give me 24VDC. I dug out a couple of gecko drives mounted on a 2×4, left over from when I cracked the Mosler safe, and hooked them up to a spare servo motor, using leftover thermostat wire from the heating system next door, and debugged it all using the cheapest DVM money can buy. All of this, mind you, without a single trip to the hardware store.
I fired up c3pr, plugged it all in, cleared the watchdog timer and …. It worked!
WooHoo! Nice job! Have yourself a bowl of ice cream!
If power supplies could only talk, think of the stories they’d tell.
The Frankenstein monster wiggled his little toe, and the world shook.
Looking for an attractive washer to hold up your window trim?
It’s cheaper to just drill holes in money.
tue feb 28
That fucking cat.
Now that Carbon is acclimated into the household, she thinks she owns the place. She steals BZ’s food, licks his plate, and shits in his litter box (not that he’s using it anyway).
Yesterday, there was a quick cat fight under the couch and, Carbon’s claws being sharper, BZ limped away.
I showed her who’s boss and helped BZ lick his wounds.
So you think climate change is a hoax? Wooly brown caterpillars in February?
That ain’t right.
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