Peter's stuff.
The last few days:
To-do:
As I’m sure you guessed, no.
Btw, much of the before is based on imperfect memory and conjecture.
Being frugal, I usually take into account shipping price and speed when deciding on a purchase. Buying a thing online at ten percent off only counts when the shopping is less than elevenish percent of the discounted price. Then we get into the why of shipping prices. Is any Amazon Prime shipping ever free as I pay every year for that? Lord knows I’d love to pay for the Grand Tour (and The Tick when it comes out), but the streaming is still rocking 33% dependent on national holidays and urgency for the show. But back to shipping.
Last summer we purchased an exercise bike. We got it through Amazon which meant that we got free shipping. If I remember correctly, that was two day shipping. Ordered on Tuesday, ETA of Friday. Since it’s a few hundred dollars, and 150 pounds, I track it so I can make sure to get home in a timely fashion, and get it upstairs. With an ETA of Friday, figure I can assemble Saturday, perfect. Taking has it going going going all the way to Friday at 5pm, and now it’s out for delivery. At 6:45pm, it switches to delayed. Huh…
Saturday, same thing happens.
“Free” shipping, so no Sunday delivery.
Arives on Monday or Tuesday.
I assume this was a thing where the local delivery person said “nope, not going to lift that by myself”, which I’m totally fine with. It’s just that this discussion should have happened when the package entered the stream, not when it got (or didn’t get) to me.
Last Sunday (the 7th), I did an impulse (clearance) purchase at 10:45pm. As what I got was still over the free line, I went with that. Purchase is coming from Colorado, and I live in Seattle. Free shipping, should have it in hand Friday our Saturday. Perfect.
Well, FedEx doesn’t understand how snow works I guess. I’m now getting wildly fluctuating ETAs. It’s not the site’s fault. Despite my previous comment, I don’t even know if it’s FedEx’s fault. I’m just aggravated. I have projects I’m going to work on, and instead I’m tracking a package that left Troutdale at 1pm on Saturday, and served in Troutdale at 2pm on Sunday.
/endrant
Started at Chef John’s recipe. Changed it up.
And down the drain. I think it was the beer or the beer choice. Lessons were learned.
I was going to start by taking about how I think I have Imposter Syndrome. Reading over that article I don’t think I do. While I’m high functioning, I’m not exactly high achieving. I don’t think puerile will find me out. I don’t have to chive myself prep talks about my success.
I feel like I have a very wide skill set. The way that I’m confused though is the depth. In my youth I believed other people knew what they were doing. They had some knowledge I was lacking. With age, this disconnect has slowly improved, but only on that I don’t assume they know what they’re doing, just that they know things I don’t.
It’s the plumber situation. I could hire a plumber. If I do, they get paid a lot to do what that had been trained to do. If I do this, their prior (and probably flawed) knowledge is rewarded by me. Or, I could read up and do it myself. If I do it myself, I’m out the cost of research, a larger supply of tools, time, and materials. The first time will be a loss leader. The second time though, I’ll make back in spades. Every time I’ll get better and faster.
Right now I’m building an Excel file that will export a CSV file that program can use to merge a stack of PDFs. Everything is working good (with a liberal dose of Stackoverflow, pro tip: Google Excel VBA whatever you want to do), but the files aren’t popping. I think I finally figured it out, but this is after talking it through with sine knowledgeable people. I’d this a symptom of an incomplete education? Should I have routed this question to someone else entirely? Did I finally reach my Peter Principle Plateau?
I just don’t know the answer to this kind of stuff somedays. It’s not that I’m a fake. It’s more that I’m a mental Lenny from Off Mice and Men. I don’t know when I’m about to crush it.
Once I get back to trains, why but rail? I can get copper pipe and make rails from that. Please note that the corrosion will suck, but meh.
Couple of notes
I kinda got inspired by videos on the internets… and stuff. The stuff is more of an inspiration for the design. I need to figure out how to weld, solder or whatever tin.
But here’s a picture of what the basic design will be. It’s an arrow. Just saying.
We have two cats. They each like to terrorize each other. the simple solution is to bell them. While they can still pounce, sneaking is difficult of much slower. Insert a reference to Dune and something about a slow blade…
This becomes more complicated though, as the Wif sleeps much too light for the average cat proposing at 3am while jangling like a drunken reindeer. to sleep she’ll remove their collars, and then in the am we start our day to the traumatic wail of spooked kitteh’s.
So my initial thought would be a wireless collar with an accelerometer activated chime that we could turn on via a web interface. I don’t know if this would be a great idea though. In order to do this, I’d probably want to add a rechargeable battery, but a lot of those could be bad in a situation where a cat could try to chew off their collar. So I need to think about this. I could go with a watch battery. But then I need to look at cost efficiency when usage is taken into account, plus the added environmental cost.
Things to think about.
Could I use sufficiently stable and sensitive LEDs and (those things that measure light) respectively to act as a hobbyist rotary encoder using the gear itself? Just saying, especially with all the other feedback I could add there might be a lot of value.
Slow work because I suck at finding the right tool for the job. I took out the more difficult (whatever the hell these are)
…using the pliers on my SOG. Then I found a socket wrench that came close enough to a real size (pro-tip: copier designers love 3.5 and 5.5mm sockets) that I was able to pop off a fan. After that, it was just the search for a Phillips screw driver that wasn’t chipped to death.
Now… what to do.
So those cards are about a foot wide. I’m thinking turn them into drawers after desoldering the shit out of them. This would give me two units of fairly decent sized drawers. Add the one panel back on as a decorative face.
Huh, started looking at drawer slides. Well those get expensive fast. Looks like I’ll be making something custom. Probably be easier anyway.