Notched for pads and band

The bands

Test fitting the bands

At this point I decide I stained the pieces and gave them a quick clear coat of polyurethane, polished up the copper, glued and trimmed the leather pads, and put the thing together:

Mostly finished

I’m working out a sweet copper knob to replace the wing nut, and I need to add a hinge to the bottom, but I can use this as it is.

[Please forgive the grammar, punctuation, and capitalization in the following... These are chat logs, and we were very excited]

Mike: http://www.union.wisc.edu/wud/event.asp?event_id=23620
Wanna go?

me: I definitely do
hang on [checked my calendar]
ok… I have a meeting that goes until 1, but I should be able to go after that
hope it doesn’t rain

Mike: sweet – I have a meeting that shouldn’t go past noon, and I’m taking off the afternoon

me: checking w/ my boss now

Mike: no rain forecast for Thursday in Madison

I hit Molly up on the IMs and get the okay with absolutely no hesitation, of course… Molly’s awesome. At this point I check my list of contacts to see if Jemiah is logged into Google Talk. He is…

me: http://www.union.wisc.edu/wud/event.asp?event_id=23620

Jemiah: DUDE.

me: yup

Jemiah: I’m seriously considering driving to Madsion.

me: trying to get off of work
Mike’s already got a 1/2 day

Jemiah: Really? If you’re going I’m going.

me: waiting to hear back from the boss

Jemiah: What are the chances Molly will let you go?

me: excellent

Jemiah: I’m checking if Anne needs the car. If I leave by 10 I’ll make it in time. It’s about 4 hrs.

 

Switching back to Mike’s tab…

me: Jemiah’s trying to hook it up, too

Mike: nice. Think J-love would be interested?

me: could be!

 

Here I get something like 5 minutes of work done before…

Mike: Jared’s checking

me: cool

Mike: He thinks he can make it and is suggesting we carpool
and is wondering if he should drag Ben along

me: i’m thinking I’ll bring Dillon
he can drive the minivan

Mike: definitely bring D along – even if he doesn’t appreciate it now, he’ll be able to say years later that he was there

me: yup

 

Again, about 5 minutes of actual work before I get the ok from my boss…

me: I’m in!

Mike: sweet!

me: very
we’ll have to sort out the specifics, but this is going to be awesome!

Mike: indeed

me: well spotted, man!

Mike: only way it could be more better is if he was signing books, but with the number of people that will probably be showing up, I’m guessing that ain’t gonna happen

me: we should find out where he’s staying

Mike: astrophysics groupies

me: “I TOUCHED HIS SLIDE RULE!”
dude, that’s what you should get signed

Mike: no kidding
holy crap, he is doing a book signing after!

me: Sweet!!!

Mike: Imagine the line for that

me: huge

Mike: should we?

me: I think we should try

Mike: agreed
opportunities like that come around rarely

me: yup

Mike: J-love says his accountant has not authorized book purchases
I said we’d chip in for one that he can get signed

me: hell yes
pretty sure we failed on his birthday, anyway

Mike: yeah

 

Switching back to Jemiah…

me: ok… everyone is in… me, jared, mike, ben, dillon
and he’s doing a book signing after

Jemiah: MAN. We need to find our thug hats!

me: ha! rolling DEEP!

Jemiah: What!? I know you not lookn at us. We got more nerds in this posse than you can handle. Back up.

me: Man! I’l slap an integral out yo’ ass!

Jemiah: Extrapolate dat ass!
Straight from Mortal Kombat!

 

And Back to mike again…

Mike: Heard back from the event director – she recommends bringing a book with instead of buying one there:

The UW Bookstore will be selling books at the reception, but we cannot guarantee that everyone will have time to make it through both the store line and the signing line. You may want to have your book with you already.

me: good plan

Mike: I’ve got Amazon Prime, so I can get copies on Wed. for only $17.79 ea – you want me to snag you one?
or two?
one for D?

me: one is good… It’ll be something special for D.

Mike: cool, I’ll order a total of 3 then to cover J-Love.

me: sweet… I’ll pay you back thursday

Mike: cool, they’re on the way.

 

So, that all took place over the course on an hour, and really with a combined total of about 30 minutes of discussion, at most. The whole thing reminded me of another trip that started with a short conversation (“Hey, you going to around later?” “Yeah.” “Cool, I’ll be there in a few hours…” followed by a 6-hour drive from Milwaukee to Minneapolis).

A quick email, 11:30 that night…

 So Anne needs the car on Thursday so I’m riding my bike down to Madison. I leave Tue after work. I should make it by Noon on Thurs.

Srsly, I’m just renting a car. What time are you all planning on getting there? How long are you all staying? I’m flippn’ pumped. I haven’t been back to MadTown in like 8 years.

And Mike’s response 30 minutes later…

I’m ditching work at noon, figured I’d drop by Versant, as Charles has
a meeting until 1.  Jared is leaving work early as well.

We’re staying until we get our books signed (have 3 copies of ‘Space
Chronicles‘ on the way from Amazon for me, Charles and Jared).  The
event coordinator says books will be available at the bookstore, but
she recommends being prepared and bringing your own book to be sure
that you get in the book signing line right away (“Mr. Tyson is
expecting a galactic shit-ton of you science loving motherf—ers”,
she said.  Well, perhaps not in those exact words, but that was the
impression.)

And that was that. We had a plan and had only to wait, as you will for the next part of this story.

My boy

It’s been really fun working with him on his science fair project. One of the highlights was the day came down to the shop and worked on building the reflector for the light.

Aquaponics!

He particularly liked using the pop riveter. That, and hammering the folded over edges… and using the drill… and wearing the goggles…

Getting started

Mostly done

Up close

It still needs some cleanup, and to be sealed, but I think it’s pretty dang cool.

For those who do not know, I am Chief Technologist (formerly Senior Interactive Developer; formerly Web Developer) for a smallish communications firm in my home town, Milwaukee, WI. Basically, that means that if the company, or any of our clients, wants to do something cool with “technology,” I’m involved. Technology is in quotes here because it doesn’t really mean much by itself… a sharpened stick is “technology.” Here, we’ll say that technology refers to computers, electronics, the Internet, and makin’ stuff. I’m also involved in tactics and strategy for the company and several clients. It’s all very interesting work, and I can’t actually talk about all of it, but here are a few pieces I find notable:

Milwaukee County Transit System website

http://ridemcts.com

I’ll make no claims on the design or content, but there are a few elements of this site that I think are sort of brilliant. First, if you saw the old site, you would be suitably impressed. Second, the main navigation, where we decided to include more than just links to pages in this element; We included a full list of all the routes in the Routes & Schedules menu, and we included the standard fare costs in the Fares & Passes menu. We knew from the analytics that these were key site elements and made the (still somewhat risky) choice to get them right into the menu. Both of these choices, especially including the Routes links, were huge successes, and are very well used site features. We also added the Trip Planner to the home page; This is really useful and well-used, but not that interesting. It’s basically a gateway to Google Maps/Transit.

The individual route pages are fun, too. I AJAXed them up so that only the required information changes when you use the on-page navigation (Weekday, Saturday, etc). The route tables come to us in a pretty ugly format, but through the magic of CSS and some sweet, sweet JavaScript, they come out looking pretty dang good. These pages have a few other cool things that people may not notice:

1. There is a notification near the top of the content that tells you when a route was last changed, when it will be changing, and/or provides a link to the upcoming changes.
2. If there are service alerts on a particular route, a service alerts box is displayed with all the relevant information
3. These pages are automatically imported from data and assets that MCTS provides. The actual content chain is as automated as is possible, and moves along very smoothly (nice work, Tom and Dale).

This site even has a site-wide alert system that the client can use if something huge is going on. They used this last winter when we had all that snow and all routes were running 20-30 minutes behind. It was awesome. This site is also setup such that we can add in more server resources when we see traffic spikes (as would be the case if all the busses were running 20-30 minutes behind).

On top of all of that the site in nearly 100% compliant with all accessibility guidelines… I believe the only things out of compliance are a few of the client-generated PDFs. This was a fun site to work on, and it’s full of little things that make a big impact.

Moore Oil

http://mooreoil.com

This site is not particularly notable on its own, but we got to do a bunch of new things with this one. This was one of the first sites we built on Telerik‘s Sitefinity CMS after switching from the Worst Content Management System Ever, Ektron CMS 400.Net… blech… terrible…

Sitefinity, even in version 3.7, which we used for this site, was a dream compared to the pile of poorly implemented garbage that Ektron provides (I’m still a bit angry at the amount of time I spent working on Ektron’s CMS, if you hadn’t guessed… sorry). Additionally, this was the first site we built with HTML 5 and it included support for video on mobile devices (including iPad and iPhone… nice work Ben). This site also saw the first version of our History module. This module is part of our new approach to development, and has continued to be developed over 3 later sites.

Working on this site also meant we got to tour these guys’ facility, and to meet with all of their senior people. I refered to these guys as The Uncles, as being in a room with them was just like being in a room with all of my mom’s brothers… a bunch of gruff, stocky, German and Polish men with dirt under their fingernails. It was one of those situations where I got to be the “garage guy” at work, instead of just the “technology guy.” A good client, and the start of a number of new things for the company.

Ok, one more…

Thomson Reuters Research and Development

http://labs.thomsonreuters.com

This is the other of our early Sitefinity sites, and its development overlapped the Moore Oil site. From the development side there is not much to talk about here. From the business and process side, though, there are a few items of interest. This was the first time I flew out to a client’s offices to pitch a project. I’d travelled for working sessions, and project kick-offs, but never for the pitch (unless you count driving to Madison). This time, I flew out to somewhere on the east coast to pitch this website development project… and we won it!

In the design and implementation, this was the first time I deferred to our user interface designer on user interaction decisions, My general approach is the same as with pretty much everything: If you can convince me that your way is better, I’ll stop arguing for my way (or, as I like to think of it, “Let’s do it the best way we can”). Apparently, this make me an ass, but I figure that if you can’t explain why another way/idea/tool/approach is better, then it’s not better. Either way, the designer was new, and I didn’t want to scare her away, so I didn’t argue too much.

This project also let me meet a really interesting guy named Peter Jackson (not that Peter Jackson, but someone much more interesting). I only got to work with him for a short time on this project, but he did some really cool work before he died this past August.

That’s the day job… at least part of it. We’re also doing some mobile site and app development, and designing and building a new, top-secret, hardware installation. I’ll post about those things another time, though.

Just remember, if you take the time to read this, you will never, ever get these three minutes of your life back.

We do Meatless Monday for dinner at our house.  Since we’re Catholic, meatless can include Fish.

Most of my family (everyone except for me) hates fish, unless it has been boxed up and frozen by Van de Kamps.  I have heard that eating very fresh fish can be the difference between liking it and hating it.  I decided to try feeding my family very fresh fish, and seeing how it went.

Near our house is an urban farm that uses Aquaponics to grow organic vegetables and fish.  I called them just before I left work, and asked them to have 6 freshly caught perch waiting for me as I picked up my kids from daycare and went home.  I asked them if they would fillet the fish for me, but they told me that they would not.  They offered to sell me frozen fillets, but I felt that this would defeat the purpose of the exercise.

We stopped in, and paid for the fish.  They handed me a bag filled with ice and perch.  I asked the clerk for tips on filleting them, and she directed me to the following YouTube video:

A fun fact: the girl in the video is the one who sold us the fish.  I’ll never forgive her.

Also: She’s right about wanting a fillet knife.  In fact, if you’re going to ever try this yourself, make sure that you have a knife that Quentin Tarantino would describe as “sharp as the devil himself“.

We got home, I watched the video, and then I mixed together my breading for the fish.  I opened up the bag, dumped out the ice, took out a very, very slippery fish, and put it on the cutting board.  I got my fillet knife, and started sawing at the fishie’s side, just beneath the pectoral fin, and the thing started flopping around.

I said a naughty word, and took two steps back.  This was not going according to plan.  I had really hoped that these fish would have been humanely killed to death before I got anywhere near them.

I decided that the kind thing to do would be to put an end to their fishy suffering as quickly and painlessly as I could manage.  I went to our knife drawer, and got my wife’s beautiful, and wickedly sharp Wüsthof paring knife.  I put its point to the fishie’s little fishy skull, said a short prayer, and lobotomized the shit out of him.

A job well done.  Now, on to dinner.

I took the knife out, and he started flopping around like an angry beaver’s tail.

I said another naughty word.  It turns out that perch are tough bastards.

At this point, the other five fish have begun to understand what’s going on, and have begun flopping around inside the bag.  I had to act quick before they formed a plan and made good their escape.

I had no interest in cutting all of the muscle off of a live animal.  I needed to find a way to very quickly and painlessly, and very permanently put an end to these slimy and hyperactive food items before they went all Stalag Luft 3 on me.

Those of you who have known me for a long time, know that in my youth I had a borderline unhealthy interest in knives and swords, and other sharp blades.  A few of these relics have followed me through the years, stowed at the bottom of my closet.  I ran to my room, and came back with this:

Even with this knife, chopping with all of the strength that my queasy stomach could muster, it took quite a bit of work to cut through the scales, the fins, the bones and gills.  There was fish blood, and other less easily identifiable substances all over the counter.  It quickly turned into a fishy blood-bath.

At this point, it was 30 minutes past our usual dinner time, and I decided to fillet these stupid, twitching headless fish corpses later.  I bagged them up again, hoping that they would be less active in an hour or two.   I used the breading that I had made on some chicken breasts that were in the refrigerator.

I wasn’t very hungry for dinner tonight.

No fish is safe from these guys, though.  They’re way more manly than me:

Important lessons, there. Thanks, J-Love.

Injection molder frame w/ piston

That’s the arm and piston mounted (clamped) in place, and the center cross member bolted in. This thing is pretty solid, and pretty heavy, but I’ll still need to bolt it down eventually.

Alas, it was not to be… Somehow, nobody heard me jumping up and down, saying that I wanted them, and so they ended up going to the Goodwill. That was the bad news… the good news was that there was another set of them in storage, and those are the ones that are now living in my shop:

Man, it was blurry in there when I took this picture...

These are actually better than the ones I’d originally wanted, as these are from the ’80s, when office furniture was made to last… It took me three trips to get these things home, and I did some damage to my back, but when I dropped one right on its corner while moving it, the floor came away dented rather than the cabinet. A drop like that would twisted a newer cabinet beyond repair, but this bad boy just shrugged it off. I also snagged an old cutting mat (shown on top of the cabinets above) and a weird old work desk/rack thing:

Seriously, super blurry that day

This is another extremely solid piece that is definitely going to see some use. The work surface is in great condition, so this guy might get brought inside, rather than staying in the garage. Not too bad, for stuff that was headed to the heap.

Wired up, and powered on.

Yup, all wired up and working. I’ve got it heating the chamber and have had it all the way up to 400 degrees. I’ve got a good part of the frame built, as well, but I still have the welding to do. I also have to figure out how I’m going to mount the heating chamber to the frame:

The frame, so far

I’m getting there, if a bit slowly.

Made by Hand / No 2 The Knife Maker from Made by Hand