And it was great.

The mountains are beautiful this time of year.  Driving out of the city and into the foothills, the mountain peaks really stand out against the background, because the snow pack has crept down to cover everything above the tree line.  The tree line itself, mostly evergreens, provides a stark lower boundary.  It was slightly overcast today, so the white, craggy peaks stood out in relief against the roiling grey of the clouds.

Another benefit is that because it’s mid week, and off season, the crowds were low, and we got to stroll through the town in a way that just felt more leisurely.  I always feel more hurried in crowds, and I suspect many other people do as well.

Fall is about the only “off-season” in Banff.  Winter through early spring, it’s over-run with skiers.  Mid to late spring and all through the summer, it’s over-run with back-packers, tourists, day trippers (like me!).

Anyway, it was a nice day, and I’m glad we did it.

Post something, anything, at least once a day.  It doesn’t have to be long, or thoughtful, or important.  Just dump at least one idea a day in here.

Really, it shouldn’t be hard.  It should just take some discipline.

Realistically, I have at least one thought per day I wouldn’t mind sharing with the world.  Yes, that would be a thought that I’d be allowed to use my “outside voice” for.

And my thought for the day?  Well, you just saw it.

Fortunately, I was smart enough to backup the database on a regular basis, so nothing really lost.

I’ll get a new theme up and running to “celebrate” the upgrade to the newer, more secure backend.

Oh, and I’ll get the video plugin working again too.  There’s probably a pile of hacks and tweaks I’d forgotten I’d made, so it might take a bit to get things “up to snuff” so to speak.

Ok, I actually mounted the flag Saturday.  It’ll stay up until Labour Day.   Same drill every year: Flag goes up the weekend before Canada Day, and comes down on Labour Day.

Now, you might think that, given the order of posts, the following project was inspired by the Conan Night I held last weekend, but the two are fairly unrelated. Actually, the inspiration for the following project came during the winter when I started to set aside some heat sinks from old PII Slot 1 processors, just because I thought they were a neat and nasty looking piece of industrial design. See for yourself:

Pentium II Slot 1 Processor and Heatsink

Any rational human being is going to take one look at that hunk of metal and think to himself: “I can make a weapon out of that.” At least this human being thought that. And I’m pretty rational. Most of the time anyway.

So the idea emerged to wrap them around the head of a baseball bat and create a nice looking mace. Problem was my boss frowns on me making weapons on company time (go figure), and my shop at home isn’t heated, so I had to wait for spring to get a chance to work on it.

Stage one was basically gathering up the parts I’d need. I collected four heatsinks from the old slot 1 processors, and some neat memory heatsinks from some really old servers to attach as runners down the side of the bat. I ended up going out and buying the cheapest wooden bat I could find to complete the parts list. Here’s a pic of the assembled necessities should you decide to try and imitate the project.

The Collected Parts

Stage two was squaring off the top of the bat so I could attach the heatsinks. I cut the very top, bevelled part of the bat off with a chop saw so I had a nice smooth surface on the top to mark out. Basically, to mark square, determine the centre of the bat, draw an X at right angles through the centre, and then connect the points of the X to create a square. I took a pic of the bat with the bevelled top off, but forgot to take a pic of the markings, so I photoshopped in the X and square. Oddly, I was less accurate with Photoshop than I was on the actual bat, but you get the idea.

Topped and Marked

Next was to cut vertically down the bat along the square lines I had drawn, to an apropriate depth to accommodate the heatsinks. I used a carpenter’s saw for this, and made the cut by hand, because I have pretty good control with a carpenter’s saw and can make a nice accurate cut that way. A band saw or some other mechanized means would be just as good. Just use something you feel comfortable with. Once down to depth, I used the carpenter’s saw to cut across the grain and remove the wedge at base.

Cutting the Square

NB: You can see the line I drew to mark the depth of the cut I needed.

This created a square tipped bat, but the square was just a tad small for my purposes. To increase the size of the square, I cut some shims out of 3/8″ plywood to wrap around the tip. I then glued and clamped the shims onto the tip and let that dry.

Shims and Glue

Leave the glue to set at least overnight. In this case, it got set aside for a week, just because I ran out of time that weekend, and didn’t get a chance to get pack to it until today.

The rest was pretty straightforward. On the squared end I created, I lined up the first heatsink, and drilled pilot holes for the screws to match the existing mounting holes in the heatsink, I made sure to line up the first heatsink well, because all the other heatsinks would be based on the placement of the first. The third pic in the following series is just me lining up the second heatsink. Make sure to drill a small pilot hole for every screw, so you don’t crack the wood, and also so the sink doesn’t move or slip as you drive in the screws. Also, use long enough screws so that it penetrates the shims you added and gets a good purchase in the wood of the bat. It’s a good idea to use a screwdriver to drive the screws, instead of a drill driver. With the torque of a drill driver, it can be a little easy to over drill the screw, and just bore out the hole.

Pre-Drilling Holes

Screwing on the Heatsink

Lining up the Second Heatsink

After I finished attaching all four heatsinks, I screwed the bevelled top back on to give it a bit cleaner look.

Side View of Finished Head

Top View of Finished Head

After that, it was merely a matter of lining up the runners, pre-drilling some holes to match up with the existing mounting points of the heatsinks, and screwing them down.

Runners Attached.

And Voila! I have my own customized medieval looking mace. Kinda steampunkish in mixing modern equipment with an old design aesthetic. Only much older design than steampunk. As far as being an actual weapon goes, I really don’t recommend it. While it’s pretty well bolted together to a solid chunk of good Ash bat, the heatsinks themselves are aluminum. If you hit anything substantial with it, the aluminum spikes will just bend. Also, it has horrible balance, very tip heavy and unwieldy. Which could probably be said about real maces as well, which might be a good part of the reason they fell out of favour. Still, could you see a burglar (or door to door salesman, or JW or Mormon) arguing with me if I answered the door with that thing In my hands? I doubt it.

The Urban Viking

]]> http://grelmar.com/2008/05/25/weaponize-your-pentium-ii/feed/ 1 http://grelmar.com/2008/05/19/conan-night/ http://grelmar.com/2008/05/19/conan-night/#comments Tue, 20 May 2008 02:24:16 +0000 grelmar http://grelmar.com/2008/05/19/conan-night/ Subtitle: A Little Backyard Guerrilla Theatre

A few weeks back a friend and I got to talking about old movies we loved when we were kids. Eventually, the conversation turned to Conan the Barbarian, which I have in my video collection. One thing led to another, and I decided to do a bit of guerrilla theatre in my backyard. Here’s the email I sent to a couple of friends:

Subject: Exercising your inner barbarian…

Hi everyone:

Saturday night we’re going to be doing a Conan night at my place.
The plan:

Light up the fire pit and scorch some red meat, then as soon as it gets dark, watch Conan (the original) on the big screen in my back yard. What could possibly go wrong?

We’ll have the pit fired up by 5pm-ish, and the movie probably around 10. Bring your own slab of flesh for cooking.

I’ll be headed to the farmer’s market to pick up steaks early in the afternoon, so if you want to join, just let me know.

Thanks out to Pat for loaning the projector for the evening. I promise to have at least one computer working to hook up to it.

- John

It actually went off pretty smooth. I took some pics of the lead up to the showing, by which time it was too dark for the camera to be effective, so, sorry, no pics of the movie being shown.

First: The fire pit in full blaze. The computer in the background would later be hooked up to the projector, but at this point, it was just kickin’ out some MP3s.

Next: A sampling of some grilled flesh. Mostly steaks, and a chicken breast. All the meat was grilled over the fire pit.

A typical plate of food. That’s a fine looking hunk of steak.

Everyone getting down to business:

My wife laughing at a joke I missed while I fiddled with the camera:

The Projection Rig all hooked up. Someone commented it looked kinda white-trashy. Personally, I prefer to think of it as hackerific. The sawhorses with a tabletop are to give the projector enough height to shoot over the heads of the audience.

And finally, the screen set up in front of the garage. I used an old school “silver coat” screen. They stopped making them in the late 70s, but man, do they produce a nice imaging surface.

The screen looks white in that image, but that’s a result of the flash. In person, it looks opaque grey. The reflectivity on that thing is just amazing. Nowadays, you can get similar “High Contrast” screens, but I just don’t find they produce as good an image.

Everyone had a ball, and my neighbours from both sides even joined in for the movie portion. I learned a couple of things about outdoor theatre doing this, and there’s a few tweaks I have in mind for the next time I do this sort of thing. Probably sometime in the fall when it gets dark earlier (around 9 pm-ish). We actually didn’t get the movie going until 10:30, because we had to wait that long for it to get dark.

Hmmm… Looks like I completely skipped September, as far as posting here. Oh Well.

Anyway, some Ubergeeks in California have built a 21 Foot scale model of an X-Wing. Which wouldn’t be that big of a deal, really, because lots of geeks have built largish scale models of this venerable Rebel Fighter.

The big deal here is that they built it with the intent of actually flying it (unmanned). They’re going to cram four M-Class Rocket Engines into it, and plan on launching it on October 10th. The’ve even added an electrical motor and gearing system so they can change the position of the wings in mid flight. (I’m not sure if they’re planning on going from the closed “cruising position” to the open “attack position” or vice versa.)

Here’s a pic of the team beside their oh-so beautiful creation. Click on the pick to follow through to an article and interview on Gizmodo.

So, this weekend I finally got around to hooking up the old stereo and record player to one of my computers. Months and months ago, I’d acquired a very nice M Audio sound card, specifically with the purpose of hooking up the steroe to the computer so I could digitize my wife’s old LPs.

She has a number of old albums from her travels in her youth that simply aren”t available on CD, let alone available for download.

I’ve been home, sick, from work for the past couple of days, so I’ve been filling the hours (between naps) by recording and digitizing the albums, and cutting them up into individual tracks. Not including recording time, I’ve got the process down to about 1 hour per album.

I’m not spending any time “cleaning up” the recordings. I’m taking them as is, warts and all. Some of these albums, actually most of them, have been played and played, and are in pretty rough shape. But somehow, the scratches and pops sound right, because that’s the only way I’ve heard some of this music.

I just finished cutting a fairly noteworthy album, “Una Ramos: El Arte De La Quena,” an album she bought from the artist, Una Ramos, who was performing and schilling the album on the streets of Buenos Aires when she was passing through in December, 1978.

I can pretty much guarantee that none of you have ever heard it. So I thought I might as well upload it and give you a chance to hear some pretty obscure Argentinian folk music. Hisses, scratches, pops, slight skips, and all. If you listen and want a copy of the album, let me know in the comments. I’ll see what I can do.

Update:

I did some googling and found that there is a CD by Una Ramos called El Arte De La Quena. However, it lists the “Street Date” as March, 2007, and has a completely different track list. Not one single song matches up. I’m not sure if it’s the same artist. My Portugese being a little thin (rather, nonexistent), I really don’t have any way of finding out. If anyone knows the story, kindly share.

If you read this blog a lot (all 3 of you out there), you might get the sense that I’m a bit nostalgic for “old stuff.” My ’76 Impala wagon, the J2W2 Bus (which, I’m slowly bringing my wife around to thinking is a good idea), and some of the other random comments I’ve made in other posts. And if that’s the sense you get, then you’d be right. 3/4 of the shelves in my home office are packed with random old stuff. A turn of the century Underwood typewriter, some old box cameras and an even older accordian front Kodak, an original release 1979 Millenium Falcon , that I know is original because I got it for Christmas in 1979. An old hand crank Singer sewing machine, and my great-grandmother’s complete 8 setting fancy dinner china set. And on and on and on.

I tend to gather up random old stuff without even paying attention, and this has lead to some interesting conversations with my ever so patient wife. I’m not being sarcastic when I say that she’s patient, either. How many women do you know out there who can take the sudden acquisition of a camperized ’67 Cardinal Coach school bus, complete with shag carpet, and not have an aneurysm?

Anyway, one of the things I’ve been acquiring over the past few years, is a collection of old pop-out storm windows with wood frames. They represent, to me, an era of construction that went away about 50 years ago. Essentially, I think they look kinda neat. I had no clear idea what I was going to do with them, just knew that I wanted to have a half dozen or so kicking around.

A couple of weeks ago, I actually got an idea of what to do with them. Being busy with other things, it took me until this evening to finish testing out the idea with a little “knick-knack” gift for my Aunt, who has a fairly substantial greenhouse she uses to supply herself, and her extended family, with bedding out plants every year. To return her kindness, I etched out a sign on one with a 16″ x 20″ glass pane. I first printed out a template on a couple sheets of paper, taped the template to the back of the glass, then spent about 4 hours etching out the pattern with a tapered tip grinding attachment on my Dremel. I added some sky blue construction paper as a backing to increase the contrast, and here’s the end result:

Not the best photo, but you get the idea. I thought it looked pretty “passable” – ie: not great, but not crappy. Somewhere comfortably in the middle. My neighbour saw the result and immediately asked for me to make her one for her garden, which made me feel proud enough of the results to post a pic of it here and tell a rambling story to go along with it.

Normally, I don’t get nightmares. Well, at least not very often. And when I do, they’re usually about zombies. Yeah, I know. I watch too many zombie movies.

Thing about the zombie nightmares is that if they wake me up, it’s not one of those “cold sweat” kind of things. It’s more like “That was weird – maybe I should turn it into a short story. Nah… There’s already enough zombie stories in the world…” and about that quick I fall back to sleep.

Actually, is it really a nightmare if you find it kinda weirdly fun? Not that zombies are fun. Well, maybe they are. Which is why I watch so many zombie movies.

But I digress.

This nightmare wasn’t about zombies. It was about my sister.

I dreamt that she died suddenly, from anaphylactic shock (really bad alergic reaction), that she got from some bad sushi. My mom and the whole family were devastated. In one of those dream time warp things, we went from finding out to going to the funeral in a few minutes. The funeral itself was a disaster. First off, only about a dozen people showed up, and they were mostly down and outers looking for a chance at some free snacks. This really upset me, because we have a HUGE Scottish type family, very clannish, and family funerals tend towards large attendance.

Once the few of us who showed up got seated, the Church organist fired up “Here comes the bride…” and wouldn’t change the tune even after the Padre told her to cut it out. To make it doubly annoying, the organist had obscenely long fingernails, and you could here them click-clacking against the keys as she played.

She finally did stop when one of the down and outers fell to the floor in a massive, really violent seizure. The organist, along with just about everyone (including the Padre), ran screaming from the church. I went to put a cushion under the head of the guy seizing out (again, in dreamscape a cushion just magically appeared in my hands), and started trying to “comfort talk” to him. My mom got up behind me and started yelling “You’re doing it wrong! That’s not how you do it!”

As I was “comfort talking” to the guy, his eyes opened up, he looked straight at me, and said “It’s Ok. I’m going to be Ok.”

At this point I realized he wasn’t seizing, but going through delirium tremens. For some reason it bothered me that at my sister’s funeral I would have the presence of mind to be able to a) Calmly deal with someone having a seizure, and b) Be able to recognize the difference between a seizure and someone going through the DDTs.

And then I woke up. That was about 3 hours ago, and I haven’t been able to get back to sleep. The main, overriding thing is, I can’t shake this sense of dread that something has happened to my sister, and I won’t be able to get over that sense of dread until I call her, talk to her, and know that she’s Ok.

It’s irrational, I know. And I’m not normally a superstitious person. But this is one time when I’m really annoyed that she lives a time zone west of me and I’ll have to wait an extra hour before I know she’ll be up and it will be Ok to call her.