Saturday - not much got done,
chores-wise. I went to yard sales in the morning, then a late lunch
with R&S, then a nap and some small chores around the house.
Then back over to R&S's for movie night and delicious pizza. Th movies were entertaining, and Indian film The Lunchbox which was an interesting peek into modern India, and The King of Kong:A Fistful of Quarters, a look into competitive arcade gaming. Beta and gamma nerds fighting it out...
Book #45 was The World Swappers, by John Brunner. Eh. This is the 1959 paperback re-released in 1973 after Brunner won a Hugo for Stand On Zanzibar in 1968. It was an early effort and not particularly good.
Friday
7
November2014
Friday
- S called, and asked if I wanted to go over to the college for more
lab hours. Since it opens late on Fridays we took the time to do some
shopping first. I needed a "couple of things", which actually turned
into quite a bit of buying, between WinCo and the 99-cent
store. I talked for a while to R, who was home, and had taken advantage
of after-Halloween sales to stock up on various things for next year.
He was particularly pleased with an animated Zombie coming out of a
commode...
Then off to the college where I think we've now
gotten our 24 hours. I've been working my way through an old CS2 manual
for illustrator. It's a bit dated and I don't have the tutorial project
materials, but it's still very useful. My home version is CS6, and the
college runs v-2014.
Then I worked on the app in the afternoon. It's been a week of half days, but my hands feel better for it.
I
did pick up a new flapper assembly from Lowe's. The commode will be a
weekend project, as well as front and backyard maintenance, and house
vacuuming, if I've time. I didn't do stuff last week and it's building
up.
I was looking at
the old analog VOM I used for checking out the crystal radio set, and
smiling. It was a present from my parents back in the 1970's. I'd asked
for it, and they were surprised, but it showed up at a Christmas.
Other
old gifts that I still have - a bench grinder, a pair of Birkenstocks,
a Mossberg 22, a copy of Mary Stewart's Arthurian romance The Crystal Cave, my grandfather's Coast Guard sword.
Thursday 6 November2014
Thursday
- Another nice day. I
had a minor errand to run in the morning, and discovered that my
battery was dead in the Explorer. I wasn't terribly surprised because
the alarm had gone off earlier, and had that "dying walrus" sound that
electronics make on a low battery. What I think happened was that the
rear hatch was blocking the hatch slightly ajar - not enough to set off
the dash lights or alarm but enough to make the rear dome light come on.
So
I added some distilled water and charged it for an hour. Then it
started fine and I let it idle for a bit. Whereupon it started running
rough because the gas was low. So, I added some of that too, from the
lawn mower can.
After all that I had other things to do, and
never got around to the errand - plumbing parts for the downstairs
commode, which is running again, after being repaired just a couple of
years ago. Bah,
Wednesday 5 November2014
Wednesday - About 4 hours of lab in the morning, then a few hours on the app in the afternoon.
Not much to say really.
I
did spend a couple of hours futzing about with a crystal radio set. A
friend bought it for a child and couldn't get it to work. It;s an
Elenco 901C, and it uses a diode in place of the crystal, unlike the
set I built in circa 1965. And I couldn't get any sound out of it
either. My only tool was my 1970's era AVO meter, but I was able to
verify that the diode worked, that the coil wasn't open, that the
ground and antenna leads were unbroken, and that the capacitor was
open. The earplug made a definite click when attached, so I think it
works, though the impedance is different enough from a standard earbud
that I dasn't attach it to anything else. I even took it outside and
attached it to another 25' of antenna lead. No luck, though the "click"
when attaching or detaching the earplug was much louder.
So. I guess I'll look online for other plans.
Tuesday 4 November2014
Tuesday
- Not quite as cold.
Election Day! In
the mid morning I walked over and voted. Nationwide things seemed
to turn out OK, but California approved a 7.5 Billion dollar bond
measure, supposedly to help with droughts. The state is broke, but no
one seems to realize it...
After
lunch I wasn't feeling well, so after a few hours I just took the late
afternoon off. It might be the somewhat older lunch meats that I used
at lunch.
Monday 3 November 2014
Monday
- Cold overnight, our first frost of the season. It's interesting - you
can tell sometimes, by where there is and isn't frost on houses roof's,
where people heat (and probably spend their mornings).
Class
was average, nothing special. We received another project and spent
about half our time in the lab. As S pointed out, the instructor is
getting paid for 4 hours of lectures a week, he's probably averaged
one, over the semester so far...
Worked
on the app in the afternoon, creating feedback sounds and coding them
up. I think I mentioned that you can create quick sound clips with
Quicktime. You can even trim them, but not, I discovered, adjust their
volume... Garageband will, in theory, allow you to do so, but the
exported clip sounds the same in the iOS simulator. Finally, after an
hour of screwing around I just re-recorded the simple sounds at a
lesser volume with Quicktime. Life is too short to spend eff'in with
Apple's incompetence/malice.
Sunday2 November2014
Sunday
- Cold and a bit windy.
Daylight savings time started, so I went around the house resetting
clocks.
I did a bit of shopping, picked up some wrist braces to keep the pain
from typing down.
I also picked up some caster wheels for the radial arm saw. My big
project this weekend was to get the Explorer into the garage,
and the saw was in the way. I dragged it out from its storage location
weeks ago, and I could certainly drag all 100lbs. back, but I've a
couple of other projects coming up that would need it and wanted to make life easy on
myself. Casters are just a couple of bucks so I bought them, put the
heavy saw on its back, drilled out the feet flange holes to 5.16",
attached the casters and levered it up. Whereupon it started to fall
over! The sheet metal flanges were bending under the weight! So I put
it back on the ground, unbolted everything, and scrounged up a piece of
plywood. I cut that to shape - a square base beneath the foot flanges,
hammered the flanges flat again, marked the drill locations in the
wood, drilled that, then reassembled everything, and put the saw
upright. Where it stayed, and the rolling is nice and smooth.
After a couple more hours of picking up and putting stuff away I was
able to get the Explorer in, Yay Me!
I did laundry, linens, and dish washing.
So, a lot more working with my sore hands than I'd planned but it all needed
doing.
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: A deathly landscape.
