Lee.org

It’s always fun when you’re getting into a new sport. This time, it’s TIG welding. Darn it if I don’t know what every item on this shopping list is :-)

Prt Num	Prt Name	Price	Quantity	Extended
45V26	Gas Lens Collet Bdy 3/32, 2.4mm (WP-17, 18, 26)	$4.67	1	$4.67
54N01	Insulator (WP-17, 17V, 18, 18V, 26, 26V Gas Lens)	$2.13	1	$2.13
10N24	Collet 3/32, 2.4mm (WP-17, 18, 26)	$1.38	1	$1.38
CHEM-SHARP	5 oz. Chemical Tungsten Sharpener Only	$8.89	1	$8.89
362-1423	1.5% Lanthanated Gr 3/32 x 7 10Pcs	$17.66	1	$17.66
10N47	Alumina Nozzle (1-27/32 WP-17, 18, 26) #7, 7/16, 11mm	$1.02	4	$4.08
30214	Stainless Toothbrush Scratch w/Plastic Handle	$2.00	1	$2.00
54N15	Alumina Gas Lens (1-5/8 WP-17, 18, 26) #7, 7/16, 11mm	$1.03	6	$6.18
24CM	24C Sz Md Tillman Glove	$9.45	1	$9.45
3M2091	FILTERS: P100 (2 Per Pk)	$5.05	1	$5.05
362-1295	Pure Gr 1/16 x 7 10Pcs	$8.41	1	$8.41
362-1305	Zirconated Gr 1/16 x 7 10Pcs	$16.00	1	$16.00
362-1145	2% Thoriated Gr 040 x 7 10Pcs	$10.15	1	$10.15
10N23	Collet 1/16, 1.6mm (WP-17, 18, 26)	$1.28	1	$1.28
10N31	Collet Body 1/16, 1.6mm (WP-17, 18, 26)	$2.17	1	$2.17
10N22	Collet 040, 1.05mm (WP-17, 18, 26)	$1.38	1	$1.38
10N30	Collet Body 040, 1.05mm (WP-17, 18, 26)	$2.17	1	$2.17
56-116-36	ER5356 Alum 1/16 x 36 1Lb	$4.55	1	$4.55
56-18-36	ER5356 Alum 1/8 x 36 1Lb	$3.97	1	$3.97
S2-045-36	EWS ER70S2 .045 x 36	$2.95	1	$2.95
S2-18-36	EWS ER70S2 1/8 x 36	$2.65	1	$2.65
308LHS116	ER308LHS 1/16 x 36	$6.95	1	$6.95
#82-1/16	Nickel 82 1/16	$19.95	1	$19.95
3000713	Model 425-50-510P Propane	$95.55	1	$95.55
TH-1731	Grade T Twin Hose 1/4 In x 25 Ft FB/FB Fittings	$24.50	1	$24.50
73580	4-1/2 7/8 80G ZH Flp Dsc	$12.40	1	$12.40
SubTotal				$276.52
Sales Tax				$0.00
Std Delivery (Shipping FAQs)				$18.17
Total				$294.69

Lanthanated tungsten, stainless steel toothbrushes, gas lens collet bodies. These are a few of my favorite things!

The Serpent Mother just made it on BoingBoing.net. Groovy.

The article links to: Link, Flickr set (Thanks, Stef!)

In the July 2007 (volume 8, Number 6) issue of Business 2.0 there is an interesting article about Burning Man. It’s cool that there is a photo of the Serpent Mother at the top of one of the pages.

Trav found mention of how incredibly dangerous Action Park was.

Man, I loved that place. I worked there for 3 weeks at the Alpine Slide. I’ve got a couple cute stories about it. My fondest memory is of going to a party at the home of one of my supervisors. There was drinking so I asked my host if I could stay the night so that I might drink safely. The party was going pretty well. Then at about 2 am, the host told me in my stupor that the party was over and I had to go home. I very clearly remember arguing with him, “But I’m drunk, I can’t drive… But you said I could spend the night…” He argued the counter-case, that I had to get out because the party was over.

I drove 1/4 mile to a spot on the road where I could pull over. I spent the next hour and a half walking around, doing jumping jacks and push-ups in a dirt pull-out on the side of a rural-residential road near Vernon NJ. Nice host, eh? I finally felt well enough to drive and proceeded home.

About 2/3 mile from the north entrance of Smoke Rise on 23 South, there is a short straight-away. I was going a steady 50 mph. My window was open just a bit to let in fresh air, the car’s heat was turned on comfortably, the pop music was playing softly on the radio. At that point, I fell asleep. I held the wheel straight while the road curved gently to the left. I opened my eyes with a start, seeing a green mile-marker sign at an odd angle leaning toward me about 4 feet in front of my face. I saw the tips of a tree branch coming at me from the right so I swerved to the left. One frame later, the green sign was out of my field of view. I made it the 5 minutes to home with 1 quart of adrenaline in my blood. Even with that, I was astounded that I almost fall asleep on the road again.

The next day, I took a look at the car in the driveway. It was a white LeBaron. There were a few green scratches on the hood and no other damage. I drove out to the spot and was amazed. I found the mile marker post and the sign a hundred feet down the road. I put the sign in my trunk. I followed my tire tracks off the road, into the dirt, over the sign post and then curving sharply to the left where I woke up. What gave me terrible shivers was how incredibly close my tire tracks were to the telephone pole. I actually couldn’t believe that the tire tracks could be so close without some side-damage to the car, or worse. The track came 1 inch away from the pole; the tires on the car are set in at least 2 inches from the outside contours of the bumper and body. I don’t know why it didn’t catch, ripping off a bumper or scraping the whole side of the car. And I thought how lucky I was that I hadn’t been 1 more inch to the right; the bumpers would have been torn off.  Or if I had been 1 more foot to the right. I was wearing a seat belt but that’s no guarantee that I’d be here writing this story.

Well, maybe my memory of Action Park isn’t so fond.

Trav’s been talking about this lawyer he’s been interacting with. It’s krazy.

He got BoingBoinged today, bringing down his server (darn it, I was -just- going to mention that he install WP-Cache). The server’s back up and the story is funny. Check it out.

When working with a group on a small but active wiki, it’s easy to forget to look at the Recent Changes list for timely updates. I would like an extension that sends a daily email with a digest of what changes have taken place on the wiki in the past day. By showing all recent changes in an email, users can’t accidentally miss out of developments on new pages. Additionally, people are reminded of the wiki’s existence so it doesn’t suffer bit-rot.

There are several ways the the email recipient group could be defined.

There is a hint of this behavior at Watchlist subscriptions and the PovWatch extension but the idea isn’t developed.

The MailNotification extension has the right idea but it doesn’t work.

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. Daylight Savings Time is stupid.

JWZ concurs.

Early U.S. Daylight Savings a bust in power savings

The move to turn the clocks forward by an hour on March 11 rather than the usual early April date was mandated by the U.S. government as an energy-saving effort. But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage. “We haven’t seen any measurable impact,” said Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co., one of the nation’s largest power companies, echoing comments from several large utilities.

The comments of his post go on to say…

Actually, it was passed with evidence that it would not work: http://www.ucei.berkeley.edu/PDF/csemwp163.pdf

The thought of politicians jumping up and down yelling “We’ve got to -do- something, gentlemen” reminds me of an exchange from Mel Brook’s Blazing Saddles:

Governor William J. Le Petomane: HOLY UNDERWEAR! People murdered? Innocent women and children blown to bits? We must do something to protect our phoney-baloney jobs people. Harumph! Harumph!
All of the governor’s lackeys but one chant along with him: Harumph! Harumph!
Governor: I didn’t get a harumph out of that guy.
Another lackey: Give the governer a harumph!
Lackey: Harumph!
Governor: You watch your ass.

I’m sure you noticed that there’s now some ads on my site. I’ve been playing with them since May 15th or so. Here’s where I’ve come to…

I put one ad at the bottom of each article page in (what I hope is) a relatively unobtrusive spot with unobtrusive colors. Very popular pages that I don’t care too much about (like this) get a few more ads sprinkled in them.

Google Adsense says that my blog site gets about 500 ad impressions per day. Wordpress stats agrees with that but Analog stats says I’m getting more like 2,000 page views/day in my blog folders… hmm. Maybe it’s that Analog is counting spam bots and web crawlers. On the ads, Google says I have a clickthrough rate of about 0.5%. The site makes $0.50/day…. about $180/year. So the site pays for itself and buys me a nice dinner every few months. You might be able to extrapolate your potential earnings from these numbers.

I suppose it’s worth it.

Originally from Jack Rabbit Speaks Volume 11, Issue 11 June 14, 2007

There are several good resources for buying art and other supplies here

(more…)

Seen on the back of a forklift at the Shipyard while I helped clean it out a few weeks ago.

DANGER! LAWYER OPPORTUNITY ZONE
Failure to have perfectly adequate warnings that anticipate every possible hazardous situation, no matter how remote, will result in litigation by hordes of lawyers who will make even the most innocent thing appear to be malicious willful intent by your company to cause a great harm to their client, and will leave you penniless and broken after wasting immense amounts of your time.

It’s put out as a (terrific) ad for safetylabel.com