What's everyone up to right now?

[ignoramus]

Where's AlexK. I need him to translate this German witchcraft for me!
This is uber uber cool!

A very high end magnetically levitating turn table …
This must eliminate so many types of distortions but I don't imagine "wow and flutter" is one of them! lol

[Rev. Rye]

In Business Law today, we did “The Marshmallow Challenge.” If you’ve taken a business course, you’ve probably heard of it, and odds are, it was accompanied with this TED talk:





The instructions are in the first minute or so, and the only differences made were that we got 20 minutes instead of 18 and it was Scotch tape instead of masking. This time, it went pretty smoothly, except for the execution stage. I quickly came up with a simple, but effective design, inspired by, a bunch of things, really, from a MOSFET transistor to a radio tower or an oil derrick to those Fighting Machines from The War of the Worlds. It involved four legs of five pieces of spaghetti taped end to end, and the marshmallow keeping them together. I called it the Tetrapod. It wound up winning over the group, because it seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, there was one problem: the tape was shit and it was easy enough for sticks to disassemble at the slightest provocation. Of the three groups of four, one actually got it to stay up. And it was in a bacteriophage shape. Designs sketched below (not to scale, and I freely admit the perspective is wonky because draughtsmanship is not one of the arts I excel in):



Marshmallow on top, lines are spaghetti sticks (and double lines mean two sticks), and the little globs below the marshamallow are tape. I don’t think anyone used the string that I noticed (because raw spaghetti is brittle as fuck and nobody wanted to find the medium of “knot is tight enough to blind these spaghetti sticks” and “knot is tight enough to break them.”)

[Gwaithmir]

Having a second cup of coffee and taking my meds. 

[Peebothuhlu]

At work.

Is HOT! 30' C ( 85' F ) with 60% humidity......

Am melting...... (-_-)

[Fireball]

It was nice here today, but it was hot when I was running the arc-welder to make the steel frame for one of the new gates that I'm building. It is a cheap arc-welder from Harbor Freight that really throws slag and doesn't have a lot of penetration. It took a lot of grinding to get it all evened out. I'll use my oxy-acetylene rig for the welds on the other gate. That'll be hotter (for me), but I can make much better welds with that oxy-acetylene rig.

[onlinebiker]

It was nice here today, but it was hot when I was running the arc-welder to make the steel frame for one of the new gates that I'm building. It is a cheap arc-welder from Harbor Freight that really throws slag and doesn't have a lot of penetration. It took a lot of grinding to get it all evened out. I'll use my oxy-acetylene rig for the welds on the other gate. That'll be hotter (for me), but I can make much better welds with that oxy-acetylene rig.

What rod are you using? New steel? Coated with anything?

[Fireball]

It was nice here today, but it was hot when I was running the arc-welder to make the steel frame for one of the new gates that I'm building. It is a cheap arc-welder from Harbor Freight that really throws slag and doesn't have a lot of penetration. It took a lot of grinding to get it all evened out. I'll use my oxy-acetylene rig for the welds on the other gate. That'll be hotter (for me), but I can make much better welds with that oxy-acetylene rig.

What rod are you using? New steel? Coated with anything?

It's flux core wire. The steel is new with pre-cleaned (ground) weld regions. I guess I shouldn't have said "throws slag", what is really happening is there are small gobbets of melted wire.

[Rev. Rye]

Today was not a good day for me.

Well, this is going to be another point where the Reverend gets pissy about an app he likes deciding to go haywire: It's Pixel Art again. Normally, when I finish an artwork they send me, they do a little animation of the colours being added in quick motion with a finishing screen. When I finished the last piece around 2 yesterday, it didn't do that. It didn't do the animation, it didn't let me go to the main screen, and when I crashed it, it wound up stuck on the title screen and didn't turn on. I tried the standard IT Crowd strategy, and it did nothing.



When I emailed them, they suggested I delete and reinstall it. It froze on the terms and conditions screen the same way it did on the title screen. Before deleting the app, Dad and I made a backup of the entire iPad and it still froze on the title screen. There was brief respite, however. When a new batch of images was uploaded to the app, it started to work normally, and when I finished the last image of the batch, the same thing that happened yesterday happened again. They claim to be at work trying to fix it. If they can't fix it, I'm seriously considering giving up on this app I've given two to three years of my life.

In addition:

• I was even more sleep deprived than usual today: I felt a worrying feeling in my colon earlier in the day that kept me up, and later in the night, after I woke up, two problem patches on my face that I've been neglecting in my daily Proactiv Routine felt like they were on fire.
  
• I had to do more scanning of reciepts like I did last week. Though, at least I can see some light at the end of the tunnel this time around, and all I'd need to do are some IDES stuff, some IRS documents, and about a hundred Ace Hardware receipts.
  
• Due to a mistake from the payroll company, I'm going to be paid $100 a month less from my stipend.
  
• It took 20 minutes to drive home, due in no small part to a huge traffic jam meaning it took 10 minutes for me to get out of the parking lot. 
  
• Bojack Horseman spoilers are kinda more depressing than usual. I won't give it away here, but, suffice it to say, my preferred ending to the series (a homage to the last sequence in O Lucky Man with Bojack and Diane in the place of Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren) did not come to pass.
  
• I accidentally deleted the first version of this post, and almost did it a second time.
  It wasn't a total loss, though. In addition to watching the second half of There Will Be Blood and making myself chicken and waffles for dinner, I got this:
  
  It's a Build Your Own Clone pre-assembled MOSFET booster, based on the Z. Vex Super Hard On Boost (with master volume modification). The original circuit is "styled after classic 60's recording console inputs," kinda like the ones John Lennon overdrive when he made this song:
  
  The version I bought was barer bones, with simpler knobs and no labeling whatsoever. I bought it just before the 15% off sale ended, so it set me back $68 (admittedly, with shipping from Canada and taxes, it's closer to $85.) As I type this, it's reverted back to $80.

[Rev. Rye]

Okay, three things:

1. 1917 is a hell of a movie. I'll probably find some time to write an article on it for Anglotopia this week.
2. Pixel Art is still not working properly, and I'm growing less and less confident that EasyBrain is going to fix it somehow. Last I checked, they asked me to try and contact them via the app. This is after I explained (a couple times, actually) that, once I finish each day's batch, the app completely crashes, and, when I restart it, WILL NOT GO PAST THE TITLE/LOADING SCREEN.
3. This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser: the sequel nobody asked for. Yes, I know the original has a cult following, but a movie where the protagonist goes back in time via tornado somehow, has even worse comedy, and UNDOES THE FUCKING CHARACTER ARC AND LESSON THE FIRST FILM SPENT 90 MINUTES SETTING UP?

[arewethereyet]

Just finished bathing all three dogs. Now I need to wash towels, the bathroom, and myself.