Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Drew's LiveJournal:

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Monday, May 12th, 2008
2:05 pm	I am now an Uncle Well, technically I already was through my wife's sister, but this one is on my side of the family. Paul William Lindsey (named for my deceased grandfather) was born today to my brother Scott and his wife Ana. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
9:31 am	Busy weekend. Thursday: Dropped Ellis off at the train station for her trip to Dauntcon. Met Hill for coffee after work. Invited her to the Monday Game. Friday: Household chores and working on the new robot. Stripped the battery, control board, and power wiring harness out of the old chassis and mounted them in the new one. Saturday: Shopping and more household chores. Made aluminum mounting blocks to attach robot's shell to new chassis. Went to Jon's birthday party, had excellent authentic Cuban food for dinner. Sunday: Went to Longwood Gardens with Baerana and bored2sleep. Much enjoyed it, even though I did suffer a severe allergy attack after the rose exhibit. Bae gave me a Benadryl which cleared it up. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
6:26 pm	Iron Man Saw Iron Man friday night. Wow. Won't spoil anything, but this was probably the best superhero movie adaption I've ever seen. Go see it. Now. Even if you've seen it before. See it again. And stay for the bit after the credits. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
7:57 pm	Weekend plans upcoming Ellis is going to be away next weekend, gone from Thursday till Monday to visit friends out in California. Other than some minor shopping and chores I've got the whole weekend free. Am working on plans to get together with people. Nothing solid yet. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
6:39 pm	Making and remaking Saturday: Welding at the old armor shop. Haven't been in there in over a year. All the tool and supplies were where I'd left them, although I needed to do a bit of tiding up and clearing of dust and cobwebs. Welded, ground, and polished the legs and bodywork for the new robot. Damn but copper takes beautifully to polish. Carbon steel not so much, but the steel skeletal parts are largely going to be buried internally. Sunday: Decided it was a good day to put the new router and UPSs in place. After putting everything back in place my computer's display was blacking out intermittently. The motherboard on that machine has been flaky and dying for years, so I took this as a good time to swap in the new motherboard and video card Jon gave us. It wasn't till I had everything swapped and put back together that I discovered the problem was in the monitor after all. Well, we had a spare monitor too. Replacing all the hardware was surprisingly easy, I didn't even have to reinstall Windows. Just needed to update all the drivers. CoH runs much better now - I should have done this months ago. The new router is making a huge difference. My laptop can reliably wireless connect from the bedroom now - no more stealing bandwith from the neighbors for me. The stop-motion lag Ellis and I used to see when in a heavy multi-person combat on CoH is nearly gone now, something in how the new router handles gaming packets. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
9:37 pm	Finally! After way too long playing Nethack, I finally Ascended a character today. Thelmata the Level 30 Valkyrie ascended to demigoddess, with the Amulet of Yendor and a whole lot of treasure. ( Read more... ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
8:52 pm	The kitten bites! The kitten bites! The kitten bites! The kitten bites! You die...--More-- Sigh. At least it wasn't a lichen. All this because that little blue e is hard to see against a black background. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
10:11 am	Heh Audiophiles can't tell the difference between Monster Cable and coat hangers (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 24th, 2008
2:01 pm	An excellent post on negotiating polyamory http://polyweekly.com/archives/340 While most of this stuff falls under common sense or simply being an emotionally mature adult, it's still a good checklist for anyone new to polyamory. Actually, a lot of this is good advice even for people in traditional monogamous relationships. It's kind of moot for my wife and I - although we are technically polyamorous it's more in theory than practice these days, and what few relationship problems we have are unrelated to polyamory anyway. (Comment on this)
Friday, February 15th, 2008
9:54 am	Valentine's day This Valentine's day I did everything wrong - at least according to what TV and movies have been telling me. I didn't buy my wife any jewelry. Not even after seeing that commercial for diamond necklaces which showed me their hypnotic power over women. Which was so incredibly creepy and misogynistic that I was sure it had to be a joke. Jewelry as an expensive gift is one thing, but jewelry as a mind-control pendant to force a woman into a relationship? Even if it worked, it's not the kind of relationship I want to be in. Besides which, my wife doesn't wear jewelry, and even if she did I'd rather buy gifts that don't support the criminal diamond cartels. I didn't buy her a pajamagram, custom-made teddy bear, or similar 'romantic' gift either, even though all the scantily-clad women on TV turn into squealing nymphos when they get those kind of gifts. Frankly someone shallow enough to love me because I bought her some cheap made-in-china junk isn't someone I'd want to be with. My wife gets more excited over computer parts than teddy bears anyway. I didn't get her any chocolate. Although I might pick some up this weekend. Chocolate goes on sale after Valentine's day. I didn't take her out to dinner. I brought takeout home instead. That way she could eat it while sitting at the computer and not miss her CoH guild meeting. Normally I'd cook, but at the time we didn't have much food in the house. I didn't even pick up flowers for her. She's allergic, not into flowers, and they'd just die and have to be thrown out in a week or two anyway. What a cheapskate husband I must be! The amazing sex we had at her request when I got home I simply can't explain. Other than her genuinely being in the mood, and the fact that for health reasons we hadn't been able to for weeks. If a woman has sex with me, it has to be in exchange for romantic gifts, right?Amazingly enough, real women don't all act like that. Some actually enjoy sex for its own sake. If I keep doing everything wrong, I'll never have a Hollywood fantasy romance. And a damn good thing, too. I'd much rather have a real relationship based on mutual trust and respect between two emotionally mature adults. (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 10th, 2008
8:55 pm	Joulery Had plans to go shopping this weekend, take a trip down to a metal scrapyard in south Jersey, and maybe even stop by the Wicked Winter Reniassance Faire. Instead, I felt like crap and decided to stay inside and rest, and solder some interesting trinkets together. Using a batch of ultrabright LEDs in assorted colors we got off Ebay, some copper and brass rod and a handful of other parts from the scrap bin I built a handful of little glowing LED pendants. I used a derivative of the "Joule Thief" circuit to power a LED requiring up to 4V off a 1.5V button cell, and tried to package the components in as small a size as I could. I also tried to make the result somewhat artistic looking, although my artistic sensibilities are limited. You can see the result here. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, February 1st, 2008
11:37 am	Top Ten Things Environmentalists Need to Learn This Article and the responses to it illustrate much that is wrong with the environmentalist movement today. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
1:50 pm	I probably shouldn't be looking at this website... even though they've got the coolest stuff for sale. There's some really fun tricks I could try with some of this (well, fun to physics/chemistry geeks anyway), some of which could also get me blown up or irradiated. Eh, my wife probably would say no to having any of this in the house anyway. She didn't even like it when I built a titanium anodizing rig, and that was just baking soda, water, and some batteries. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
2:12 pm	HX12K servos For Christmas I picked up half a dozen new HX12K servos as possible replacements for the HS-5645MG servos I'm using now. Pros: Dirt cheap ($8 versus the $55 HS-5645) Comparable speed and torque to HS-5645 Can run at 8.4V lithium battery voltage Final stage output gears are thicker (and hopefully more robust) than HS-5645MG gears Cons: Dirt cheap (ill-fitting plastic parts, PCB loose in housing, no ground wire to motor case, ribbon cable lead rather than braided cable.) Basic communication only, no feedback or programmability (which I wasn't using anyway) Poorly tuned servo amp, prone to overshoot and jitter. Output spline incompatible with Hitec servo horns. The last point is the biggest hangup. I can't use the compact aluminum servo arms in my current robot with these servos. Instead the HX12K servos come with big goony plastic output horns which are too large to fit in the leg joints in the current robot. Switching to these new servos will mean redesigning the legs, and since I'd been planning to redesign the central body chassis and feet eventually we're looking at a completely new robot. Which isn't such a big deal, since I can buy an entire robot's worth of servos for not much more than the cost of a single Hitec servo. But if I am going to build something from scratch, do I want to remake the same design again, or make something entirely new? I'll have to ponder this. It will need to be something with comparable crowd-appeal and durability to the current machine, yet not expensive to build. Or I could just put the HX12K servos aside and bring the current robot back for one more year, but I've only got one spare gear set left. I'd want to get a few more spares if I want the bot to last for the whole GenCon weekend, and they're not cheap. (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
10:16 pm	Maybe it's just seasonal depression It's the new year, and I should be getting a start on several projects. I'm just having trouble finding the motivation to get up and work. There's GenCon '08 coming up in August. Last year's robot was quite successful, although being sick all weekend did reduce the amount of time I could spend demoing it. This year, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. I've decided to drop any plans of building multiple bots and selling them. There's really no way I can hand-make robot toys with anything like the fun-per-dollar ratio of some mass-produced toy (like the $300 i-SOBOT, for example). And while I'm still pretty sure I could sell a few as exotic art, I wouldn't be comfortable making something that would still be over $1000 yet with limited functionality and reliability. So anything I make and bring is going to be a unique art piece for demo purposes only. I could just fix up the existing one a bit and being it back. I think I've found all the weak points in the design. The new antenna I built before taking it to show off at Christmas has solved the problem of radio reception while inverted. The structural joints are holding now that I've switched to cyanoacrylic glue. It still strips a gearbox every now and then, but at an acceptable rate of about once per hour of movement. I can live with the existing design as far as reliability, even though I've spotted half a dozen improvements I'd make if I rebuilt it from scratch. But if this is an art project, part of me doesn't like bringing the exact same thing back again. I should bring something new to show off this year. And a recent discovery of some off-brand servos from an overseas distributer that cost a fraction of the ones I've been using previously ($8 versus $55) make it possible for me to build something completely new on a reasonable budget. I'm stuck for inspiration for what, however. Got a few designs loosely sketched out, but none of them strike me as being both buildable on budget and time and suitably crowd-pleasing. Maybe a six-legged version of the existing walker with etched and waterjet structural parts, if I can work out an interesting way to do it. I'm just feeling uninspired and depressed somehow about the project, not sure what the point is at the moment. I've also got to put together an Olympus Island module to run at GenCon. No inspiration yet. I'll probably hack something together last-minute like I did last year. On similar lines I've been considering starting up something to run at the tabletop games I attend. I've had some ideas for a campaign, and some of the players have mentioned that they liked the stuff I've run in the past and wouldn't mind me picking up when one of the existing campaigns ends. It's just a matter of finding time. And then there's the disassembled lightsaber on my workbench. I already fixed the power supply, but decided that while I was in there I'd rebuild the electronics and emitter. Really need to get back on that. I've started sketching, gotten a drawing pad and been practicing sketching random people off picture sites. I've always had an interest in drawing, but really never been very good at it. I'm still not, although I think I'm almost getting able to draw actual human faces and figures. It's something I worked on a lot in my final years of high school, but haven't pursued seriously since. I've been half-seriously sketching out ideas for a possible webcomic, although that would be years off in the future at this point. And then there's the impossible and behind-schedule coding for the online game we're making. While I do make progress weekly, everything I figure out how to do leads to the realization of ten more things that I didn't think of that will also need to get done. At least work's going well - the Huge Project that Needs to Get Done ASAP got done, so the pressure's down. For a while at least. (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
6:31 pm	Power plants and the environment This winter my parents have rented a vacation house on a manmade lake, where the family will be getting together to spend a week together for Christmas. While looking at maps and satellite camera views of the region the other day I noticed a sizeable industrial complex located on the lakefront. A little research revealed this to be a nuclear power station. I'm not bothered by such a thing, being aware of the actual risks involved. What I did find interesting was that the presence of the plant didn't seem to detract from the value of the surrounding area at all. The lake is surrounded by parks, marinas, expensive vacation homes, and is advertised as being good for fishing. The plant itself is surrounded by lush greenery. By comparison, land near coal-burning power plants are surrounded by brownfields, empty lots, and land too poisoned for anything to grow. Oh, and slums whose unfortunate inhabitants suffer from asthma, emphysema, and other effects of breathing toxic smoke all day. I know which one I'd rather live near. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
12:49 pm	Movie pet peeve: Suspension bridge physics Last night I watched most of "I, Robot", the movie which took its name but almost none of its ideas from Asimov's robot stories. For what it was - mindless action-movie fluff - it was enjoyable. I didn't really mind the gaping plot holes, improbable action sequences, or stereotypical characterization. I wouldn't have wanted to pay to see it, but for something to have on in the background while I was relaxing and working on stuff on my laptop it was acceptable. What bothered me was the ruined suspension bridge. A section of suspension bridge - one tower, some cabling, and a short length of roadway - are used as an important landmark in the film. And every time it was shown some part of my brain was screaming that suspension bridges don't work like that. This may seem like a petty complaint compared to all the other flaws in that movie. But it's something I've seen enough times that it's become a personal peeve of mine. Here's how suspension bridges work. The roadway - that flat bit you drive on - hangs from many vertical suspender cables. The roadway itself is only strong enough to support its own weight and the weight of the traffic passing over it over the span from one suspender cable to another, and is only rigid enough to keep from flexing under wind or traffic loads. The suspender cables, supporting the entire weight of the road deck, are themselves anchored to the main suspension cables that run from one end of the bridge to the other. These main cables are under tremendous tension, as they must carry the entire weight of the roadway. The cable transfers the tension load to massive cable anchors at each end of the bridge. The bridge towers hold the cable up and allow it to form a parabolic curve, but do not directly support the roadway. A suspension bridge will only remain standing if the suspension cables remain unbroken and solidly anchored at both ends. If the main suspension cables are severed anywhere along their length, the entire roadway will be unsupported and will fall. It doesn't matter where the cable was severed - at either end, or in the middle - a cut cable is a cut cable. You simply can't have part of a suspension bridge fail and leave the rest standing. If it was just a flaw of this one movie I wouldn't mind so much. But without exception every time I've seen a movie in which a suspension bridge was damaged, they get the physics completely wrong. Usually by having the road deck somehow remain floating in the air even after the suspending cables break or the vertical suspending cables are severed. X-Men 3 was a particularly glaring example. I think that terrible Godzilla in New York movie did this as well, and from the look of the previews "I am Legend" has some suspension bridge abuse going on as well. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 21st, 2007
5:15 pm	Not really suprising, when you think about it. Feminists have healthier relationships. Amazing, how treating women like people rather than like property leads to a better relationship. (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 15th, 2007
11:32 am	Career Cruising: Career Matchmaker test results 1.Mechanical Engineering Tech 2.Aerospace Engineer 3.Farm Equipment Mechanic 4.Automobile Mechanic 5.Motorcycle Mechanic 6.Engineering Tech 7.Heavy Equipment Mechanic 8.Diesel Mechanic 9.Aircraft Mechanic 10.Millwright 11.Stationary Engineer 12.Electrical Engineer 13.Industrial Machinery Mechanic 14.Explosives Specialist 15.Electronics Engineering Tech Seems about right, although there were a few surprises (Explosives Specialist?). Most of these are things I've done at one point or another in my life, although my actual current job only ranked #12. (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 9th, 2007
2:00 pm	More video! Thanks to Cynthia for this clip. (Comment on this)