March 30, 2007
Just sharing the end of a beautiful day with the computer. It was very warm, but it is cooling off now, so I'm sitting on the deck with the chimenea warming my side, and watching the colors change in the trees across the valley as the sun sets.
I took the day off except for answering phone calls and checking e-mails for emergency issues. I had a blast. Roughly translated that means I worked on my room. I finished casing the doors, and almost finished the baseboard. I have the final pieces cut, but I ran out of the finishing oil I was using. The streets of Boulder Creek pretty much roll up by six, so the finishing touches will have to wait until tomorrow. It was an interesting experience cutting all the funky angles. Anyone watching (Lilo in particular) would have found it very comical.
One area in particular reminded me of a story (probably fictional) that I heard about Thomas Edison: A new engineer was working at a lightbulb factory, and Edison asked the engineer what the volume of a particular lightbulb was. The engineer attacked the problem. He made precise measurements of the lightbulb given him. He drew them out on a paper. He formed an equation in two dimensions that described the curvature of the bulb. He rotated that around an axis and integrated across three dimensions to precisely give the volume of the bulb. He proudly gave the result to Mr. Edison. Edison took the bulb, removed the end cap, filled it with water and poured it into a measuring cup (actually a graduated cylinder). Edison looked at the cup, and exclaimed, "good work! You were very close!"
Well, I had the something similar happen today. Of course, always working alone, I was both Edison and the Engineer. I was fitting a piece of baseboard around a rounded corner, and decided to jog it over rather than meet at a 90 degree angle. It took no time to determine the angles involved, but I needed to figure out how long the transition piece should be. I spent about forty minutes solving a set of equations that I generated based on the geometry. Everything was right and accurate. I had equated the distance I needed to the radius of the corner curvature. Well, I didn't know what that radius was, but I knew how to measure it. As I placed the square on the corner, I realized yet again that my walls are anything but straight. The measurement was crap. I made a couple of test boards, and had the dimension I needed in five minutes. It doesn't look too bad, either.
As I indicated, the trim work in the room is almost installed. I will never get the knack of staining with consistent results. Each piece is a slightly different color with color variations all along the wood. Still, I like it. It is so much better than what it used to be. It looks like a room constructed on purpose. Well, it does if you ignore how everything slopes out of level, and nothing is square. Remodelling sucks. Insurance companies should have a clause in insurance that allows for a one-time mercy burning of a building, and fund the new construction.
While cutting the baseboard, I had another one of those instances that show how screwed up my head is. One of my gifts/curses is that my brain takes input from my senses and continues processing without my asking it to. As an example, I was coming home from work one day, and had just started into the mountains. I suddenly had an impulse to accelerate, and I did. A tree came crashing down over the road right behind me, missing me by only several feet, and bouncing off the vehicle that was coming down from the mountains. After that escape, I realized that I had noticed that the tree was hanging lower than it had been on previous trips, but I was not thinking about it at the time.
Well, my saw seemed to be dying on me. After every cut, it started giving a horrible whine as it spun down. Expecting the worst, I assumed in the front of my brain that the motor was giving out, and would probably try very hard to do it right before my final cut. Most things in the world seem to work very hard to piss me off, so that made sense. I made a few more cuts, and noticed that the wood seemed a bit frayed, as if the blade wasn't able to hit the intended RPM. I kept on going, hoping I could finish the last cut before it died. I wasn't really doubting that it was coughing out its last work. I finished another cut, and the saw started whining again. I was thinking about solving that problem. I was thinking about the dimensions of the board in my hand. Suddenly, my brain fired a message from the rear. Urgent. Please note the following: the apparent slower RPM, and the whining correlate to a loose blade. Well, not being one to dismiss information without looking into it, I looked at the blade. Sure enough, it was loose. I tightened it, and we were back to full utility. Sometimes it is like someone else is talking to me. The voice sounds a lot like mine, but he is much smarter.
At any rate, progress is being made in the room. The finished product is right around the corner.
Has anyone seen my camera memory card?
I took the day off except for answering phone calls and checking e-mails for emergency issues. I had a blast. Roughly translated that means I worked on my room. I finished casing the doors, and almost finished the baseboard. I have the final pieces cut, but I ran out of the finishing oil I was using. The streets of Boulder Creek pretty much roll up by six, so the finishing touches will have to wait until tomorrow. It was an interesting experience cutting all the funky angles. Anyone watching (Lilo in particular) would have found it very comical.
One area in particular reminded me of a story (probably fictional) that I heard about Thomas Edison: A new engineer was working at a lightbulb factory, and Edison asked the engineer what the volume of a particular lightbulb was. The engineer attacked the problem. He made precise measurements of the lightbulb given him. He drew them out on a paper. He formed an equation in two dimensions that described the curvature of the bulb. He rotated that around an axis and integrated across three dimensions to precisely give the volume of the bulb. He proudly gave the result to Mr. Edison. Edison took the bulb, removed the end cap, filled it with water and poured it into a measuring cup (actually a graduated cylinder). Edison looked at the cup, and exclaimed, "good work! You were very close!"
Well, I had the something similar happen today. Of course, always working alone, I was both Edison and the Engineer. I was fitting a piece of baseboard around a rounded corner, and decided to jog it over rather than meet at a 90 degree angle. It took no time to determine the angles involved, but I needed to figure out how long the transition piece should be. I spent about forty minutes solving a set of equations that I generated based on the geometry. Everything was right and accurate. I had equated the distance I needed to the radius of the corner curvature. Well, I didn't know what that radius was, but I knew how to measure it. As I placed the square on the corner, I realized yet again that my walls are anything but straight. The measurement was crap. I made a couple of test boards, and had the dimension I needed in five minutes. It doesn't look too bad, either.
As I indicated, the trim work in the room is almost installed. I will never get the knack of staining with consistent results. Each piece is a slightly different color with color variations all along the wood. Still, I like it. It is so much better than what it used to be. It looks like a room constructed on purpose. Well, it does if you ignore how everything slopes out of level, and nothing is square. Remodelling sucks. Insurance companies should have a clause in insurance that allows for a one-time mercy burning of a building, and fund the new construction.
While cutting the baseboard, I had another one of those instances that show how screwed up my head is. One of my gifts/curses is that my brain takes input from my senses and continues processing without my asking it to. As an example, I was coming home from work one day, and had just started into the mountains. I suddenly had an impulse to accelerate, and I did. A tree came crashing down over the road right behind me, missing me by only several feet, and bouncing off the vehicle that was coming down from the mountains. After that escape, I realized that I had noticed that the tree was hanging lower than it had been on previous trips, but I was not thinking about it at the time.
Well, my saw seemed to be dying on me. After every cut, it started giving a horrible whine as it spun down. Expecting the worst, I assumed in the front of my brain that the motor was giving out, and would probably try very hard to do it right before my final cut. Most things in the world seem to work very hard to piss me off, so that made sense. I made a few more cuts, and noticed that the wood seemed a bit frayed, as if the blade wasn't able to hit the intended RPM. I kept on going, hoping I could finish the last cut before it died. I wasn't really doubting that it was coughing out its last work. I finished another cut, and the saw started whining again. I was thinking about solving that problem. I was thinking about the dimensions of the board in my hand. Suddenly, my brain fired a message from the rear. Urgent. Please note the following: the apparent slower RPM, and the whining correlate to a loose blade. Well, not being one to dismiss information without looking into it, I looked at the blade. Sure enough, it was loose. I tightened it, and we were back to full utility. Sometimes it is like someone else is talking to me. The voice sounds a lot like mine, but he is much smarter.
At any rate, progress is being made in the room. The finished product is right around the corner.
Has anyone seen my camera memory card?