29 June - A day of camping out

I'm glad it is the 29th. Not just because it is my last day of formal employment, but also since today (hopefully) the Apple iPhone pre-hype will be over. I really like Apple. Yes, I'll probably buy an iPhone when they finally arrive over here. But I've had enough of all the hype in the on-line technology publications and all types of media outlets - what is good, what is bad, pricing plans, etc. etc. etc.

So today I'm just glad that it is finally being launched - I suspect that over the next couple of days there will still be (too much) media reports on the thing and then things will start to quiet down. Hype is one thing, but the way the online publications have treated this one has become just too much for me. Here is to some peace and quiet. (Hopefully...)

Almost there

My 2nd-last day of actually being fully employed before I'm taking a break. Joining the lines of the willfully unemployed as one of my co-workers would like to put it. As I walked in this morning, I thought of a couple of groups of people I would miss when I leave:

The co-workers: It is always a challenge when you leave something where you've been for some time. You get attached to the people, more so than the actual job. Since I don't have a new position lined-up, I'm not anxious about all the new faces, but it is always kind of sad leaving familiar faces behind. You always promise to keep in touch, but never do.

The cafeteria staff: I walk into the building in the morning towards the cafeteria. The staff sees me and without a word being exchanged they take a Coke from the fridge. I just pay. No waiting in line.

The cleaning staff: Ever efficient. Like cleaning out my drawers - there is really no need for me to find that half a box of cigarettes or loose change for the vending machine when I come into work the next day. Like the bin and the desk, everything needs to be cleaned. Which other group of people take their jobs as seriously?

Spit... swallow...

Well, this little news article made my morning. Autobahn + truck + apple + false teeth = crash. The truck driver was eating his apple, choked on it, coughed to get the piece loose and as a result swallowed his false teeth. Needless to say he lost control of the vehicle and crashed into another car.

Some countries have banned eating, drinking and smoking while driving, I suppose this is an example of why it is not such a bad idea.

More stuff to keep me occupied

Just when I thought I may not have enough to do while I'm stuck at home, I ran across these two sites:

31 Shoelacing methods: Well, figuring out a new way to tie my shoes should keep me busy for at least 15 minutes over a 31 day period. The fact that July (the first month of unemployment) has 31 days is just purely a coincidence.

Top 20 Magic Trick Video Tutorials: I considered myself an amateur magician while I was around 10. It is really not like I can actually remember any tricks, but these little videos may just see me on the road to stardom in a short period of time. Not quite 31, but 20 (learning one a day) should keep me busy for the better part of a month.

Things are looking up indeed :)

Nicotine the wonder drug

Just when I'm starting to seriously considering quitting (I need to save every penny possible), out comes some new research about the wonders of nicotine. However the part that had me worried was the following extract:

"There will be a variety of nicotine-based drugs coming out," agrees Ed Levin, a nicotine researcher at Duke University, who's done groundbreaking research on improving mental function in schizophrenia, Alzheimer's patients and people with ADHA. Levin believes the drugs are something to look forward to.

"There will be great progress when the nicotine sister drugs come to market," he says. "About half the cigarettes in this country are bought by people with psychiatric problems -- high percentages of people with depression and schizophrenia smoke, for example.

Which made me think - what if I'm in the 50% highlighted above with some deep-seated problems? Let's not think about it, I'm sure I'll have more than enough excuses as to why I cannot/shouldn't/wouldn't quit when the time arrives. Almost there, the last (???) remaining carton is getting close to being empty.

Proto to model - the easy and hard way

I used the weekend to update some toys. First up Eric Wolff's Silk. The brief was simple - we need about 2g more rim weight (per halve). The interesting this about the Silk (apart from the fact that is was the first mass-produced CNC Delrin yo-yo) is that is really is quite an organic design - unlike other yo-yos out there lately, this one was initially hand-turned to perfection and then adapted for CNC lathe manufacturing. In short, where other yo-yos are designed using CAD programs, Eric turns his models and when they feel right, they get considered for actually mass-producing.

In the case of the Silk, mass production means cutting the right prototype in half, taking very accurate laser measurements and converting it into something a CNC machine can understand. Finally out of this process you can have a DXF of the actual yo-yo model. So, I received a DXF in the mail and set out to change it. This means importing the DXF into SolidWorks, re-tracing the lines, converting to a 3D model and then making the required changes. A simple 30 minute exercise turns into a much longer exercise to get it right. Overall I'm quite pleased with the results, I may like the next run of Silks even more than I currently do.

Second exercise for this weekend is something that will still have a revision or two before it is ready for the big-time. Isaac Kanarek's metal yo-yo. Once again this is a hand-turned aluminum model that needs to make the step up to CNC manufacturing. In this case however, we have no nice DXF to work with - what we have are some prototypes, with one even cut-in-half and scanned for accurate measurements and profile. So no accurate laser measurements, rather dozens of printouts scatterred around the room with various little notes and measurements on them. In the first revision I've sent out, I came quite close to capturing the actual profile 100% and in the very least capturing the spirit of the model. There should be one or two more iterations before everybody is 100% happy and then we should have little protos floating around for testing.

So much for social networking

So you come home at 2:00am and find your wife on myspace, chatting to other guys. So what do you do? You shoot the PC of course. And after you've done that, you put a hole in the floor for good measure. (What the actual PC and floor did wrong nobody will ever know.)

I suppose I can understand the rage, but if you come home at 2:00am (no doubt after hanging out with some blokes in a seedy bar), you shouldn't be too surprised when your wife starts looking elsewhere for attention.

While we are on the topic of social networking... A little boy actually delivered on the promise every toddler makes at one point or another: I'll never speak again. 10 years as an elective mute - I actually wish more people will take that step.

From hero to (l)user

I've just read (rather belatedly, I might add), Charl's post about installing Ubuntu on his laptop. Compared to him, I have not been running Loonix for that long. I started around 1994 with a login account to a box named Belin at varsity. In 1996, I switched-over full-time.

The strange thing was that I never planned to become a Loonix-zealot, rather it was a matter of economics. I had a dual Pentium-Pro desktop machine (I needed the extra power for the stuff I was doing as part of my M.Eng), we had cheap OS/2 licences. The problem was that for the dual-processor version I needed to pay full price for OS/2. Money better spent on booze. So I installed NT 4.0 (enterprise-wide license, no cost), just to come to realise I needed to re-install the bugger when I added the second processor. (I didn't quite know when this will arrive.) At this point Linux was in the 1.3.xx development kernel phase and they just started to add dual-processor support. What the hell, it doesn't cost me anything...

So I started with Slackware and got kernel 1.3.12 (I think) compiled and installed. It became a morning ritual - downloading the latest development kernel (things were changing very quickly), compiling, installing, rebooting - and more often than not, rolling back to the previous working kernel. Baptism by fire you might say.

That was 1996. Over the next 9 years, I always had Linux on my desktop. As I moved jobs, it became the first thing to do - install Linux, configure, off I go. There were always some little issues, driver support, enterprise support (Outlook calendar, Word documents) and as roles changed I started using things like CrossOver more and more. I even became a beta tester for them. At the start of 2005 I came to realise that actually all the applications I use are via Wine. I could get by with OpenOffice, but things like Visio (the joys of being a paper architect) and Outlook (Calendar) kept on tripping me up.

Since I haven't really used an XP machine before, I've decided to give it a go. Hey, seeing how the other half lives is alway good, isn't it? So I resized partitions and installed the beast. Initially it was a week on the one, a week on the other, but since mid-2005 I haven't booted into Linux. For home I bought a Mac Mini (BSD under the covers) in 2005 and at the start of this year a MacBook Pro. The initial idea was to actually install Ubuntu on the G5 Mac Mini, but it never materialised.

The point for me is this - as I've got older I became less of a tinkerer (although I miss LFS a lot) and just wanted to use the applications I'm want or am forced to use. At home I don't do much - browse, play music, you know, all the stuff mom and dad would do. Eclipse and NetBeans work equally well. CAD I use via Parallels emulation on the MacBook Pro. I've just become a user. I don't need to change my OS, OS X does fine for me. It came pre-installed, is quite pretty and does the job I expect it to do. But who knows, if I start doing CAD for 18 hours a day, or use Parallels too often, I may just go for the bootcamp XP/Vista option and the whole cycle may start all over again...

Exercise that thumb

I truly believe we have become a lazy society. Most things we have are powered by some little button and when it doesn't work, it makes us quite anxious. My gate is such an example of a technological marvel. Well, it is supposed to be.

Motorised gates are a gift - when it rains you don't need to get out of your car. When it is cold, you don't have to get out of your car, instead you can have the little heater blowing full-stream while navigating the driveway. When it is hot, you don't need to get out of your car, instead you can have the aircon (reserved for top-of the range cars a decade ago) at full blast while navigating the driveway. When it works, that is. When we bought our house the gate motor was broken, so it was the first thing we replaced. Shortly afterwards the rainy season hit us and the motor stopped working in the rain. Quite a nightmare to get fixed - obviously every time the gate mechanics arrived, it worked fine. After the third try they decided to try and fix it anyway, without seeing the symptoms. And everything was well.

This morning the bugger started acting up again. No it wasn't raining. I managed to open it and get the car outside. It didn't want to close. So I mumbled something in a foreign language and switched it to manual. Unlock the theft-protector. Unlocked the motor casing. Try to switch it to manual, the gate didn't want to budge. Tried again, no-go. I stepped on the remote and the gate started closing. Ummm, car outside, me inside, make a dash for it. Gate closed. Let's try to open it. No-go.

At this point the gardener arrived and since he has a key to our little front gate, I asked him to let me in to allow me to close the little motor enclosure. Switched to automatic again. Closed everything up. Got outside again - the gate still doesn't respond to my commands. So I came to work. I think I'll leave a touch earlier to still catch the gardener there, at least he will be able to let me in. After I'm in I'll bond with our motor - come hell or high water, I'm not leaving the comforts of my car again tomorrow morning.

Keeping busy (the hippie way)

In a previous post I eluded to the fact that I'll be keeping myself (sort-of) busy while playing hippie. The fact is that nobody can just sit and not do anything - well, some people can, but there is just so much browsing I can do before gnawing through my wrists to get to the juicy parts.

This whole (un)employment thing is quite new to me, so I've set a target of around 3 months just to take a break before I'll (probably, probably not) start looking outside my little cramped study. While locked-up with two small dogs, my (current) plan is to spend some time on the profitable (and not-so-profitable) hobbies. At this point:

• Sports Trading & Gambling - This is a nice little adrenaline flowing pastime. Some you win, some you lose, keeping it in the green is where we need to be at. Lately I've been taking it a bit slower on this front, but will ramp up soon enough.
  
• Some toy design - I'm a bit behind with at least 3 models that I need to finish in a very short period of time. (And that is not even thinking about the one that we already have prototypes for or the one that we will have prototypes for soon enough or the one that we are very close to getting to the prototype stage.)
  
• A tiny bit of development just to keep the IT part of the brain ticking over.

Since I'm at home with a bit less of a dress-code, I'll also do my best to fully breaking in my $400 denims. (I really love my pair of Iron Heart 21oz 641's.)

Water into wine

Often simple ideas can be money spinners: this example is straight out of the now why didn't I think of that category. The fact that I suck at chemistry has nothing to do with it - I never could understand the whole point behind this + this gives you that. (And don't even get me started on a chemistry professor's fascination with colours...)

Back on topic. A couple of students invented a powder, when added to water, turns it into a bubbly 3% lime coloured/flavoured alcohol drink. Apparently this powder can be sold (legally) to minors - in the case of the Netherlands this is to those younger than 16 years of age. That last bit of info I'll just leave to you to digest.

Update: As expected, this topic has shown up in google trends as well. Seems like a lot of people are interested in Booze2Go.

Slacker

At the end of June I will be leaving my current job. Unlike most people taking this step, I don't have a firm brand new shiny position lined-up. Since I'm an INTP (The Architect or Thinker) according to my personality profile profile, I've decided to play the role of "slacker" - how is that for a career change?

So instead of getting up at the crack of dawn, I'll be lounging away at home. Instead of doing something that doesn't quite get the adrenaline flowing, I'll be playing with the dogs. Or something like that. Truth be told, over the last couple of years I have not quite found the exact job that keeps me going at it. Time for a break and re-evaluating priorities. This is a big step - there are questions around cash-flow, making ends meet and just generally surviving. But as my wife puts it - rather a bit of stress than being unhappy the whole damn time.

There is a real chance of boredom here, so I'll try to keep myself busy and hopefully try and make some sort of a second income to buy the dogs some food. The target is not that high, rather the idea is to try and find myself (damn hippie) and do things I like. Re-evaluation will come and who knows, in a couple of months things may just be looking up and I'll be doing the morning slog again. Maybe not.

New Kid(s) On The Block

I haven't blogged in about 3 years now. Do I miss it? I don't think so. Do other people miss it? I don't think so either. So why the hell am I starting one again? Truth be told, I don't really know. It seemed like a fun thing at the time. There is actually a very good reason I'm starting again - unfortunately it is one that I cannot remember at this point.

But, most importantly, I'm back. So yes, this blog will be updated every now and again, more for my enjoyment than yours. (And I know this is a promise every new blogger makes and rarely keeps...) Yawn.