Month: May 2008

Construction project, Day 3

[table]Come to the table, for all is ready.

Today was a short day, but an expensive one. It started with a trip to Home Depot to pick up some strapping to make cross braces. Somehow I ended up buying a DeWalt 12V cordless drill. Then I came home and installed the cross braces, and put the tops on the tables, and plus I ordered the kit. Here are today’s interesting (to me) discoveries:

  • Walking through the tool corral in Home Depot is scary – tools keep leaping towards your shopping cart, and you have to keep fending them off or you’re going to end up spending thousands of dollars. There was a particularly aggressive mitre saw that kept stalking us.
  • Forget quick release drill chucks – the real secret to productivity is to have two drills, one with the drill bit and one with the screw driver bit. After the DeWalt cordless drill had charged for a little while (half an hour or so), I was able to do it that way.
  • You ever noticed when two contractors are talking about things with dimensions, they’ll often pull out a tape measure and look at that dimension to help visualize it? Well, it turns out there is a reason for that. I made a mental calculation, and thought I could hack 1 foot off the width of my table tops, based on the fact that it was 4×8 and my cross pieces were 3 feet. I forgot that I’d put the other pieces outside the cross pieces, so the under-structure is actually 3 feet 4 or so. Which I discovered when I was cutting the particle board and I thought “hmm, why did the saw just get slow and then speed up again”. I cut 3 or 4 feet into the board before I realized the mistake, so I went back and cut only 8 inches off, and put screws on both sides of the partial saw cut.
  • There is no room to walk around one end of my table. I hope that doesn’t cause any problems.

Anyway, more about the kit I ordered. After exchanging a few emails with somebody at Pygmy Boats, I ordered the Arctic Tern Hi Volume. I don’t really need a high volume boat because I’m not carrying overnight gear, but the deck is an inch higher and I figured it would help get my size 11+ feet in. The boat is pretty similar to my existing Skerry RMX in size, and it has a hard chine. I’ve already started experimenting with leaned turns, so I’m looking forward to doing that with a hard chine boat. I did not opt for the Silver Tip epoxy, because I am not clear that the hundred dollars extra would really be worth it. I also didn’t opt for overnight shipping, since it would add another $300 to the cost. I did buy the optional bulkhead and hatch kit – I had considered skipping those and just buying some inflatable floatation bags for the bow and stern, again because I don’t use it for overnight travel, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to have them. I also went for the foot brace studs that you cement to the inside, instead of the standard ones that you drill through the sides. And considering how I like the built in thigh braces on my Skerry, I also ordered the “key hole” braces for this one. For some strange reason, I only ordered one hand toggle. I’ll have to email them to see if they’ll throw in a second one.

I can’t wait for the kit to arrive!

Construction project, Day 2

Another day of interesting discoveries:

  • Our drill SUCKs. It’s a not incredibly old Skil 4.1 Amp corded drill, and it doesn’t have enough power consistently to drill 3 inches into the end of a 2×4. It also has a standard old chuck instead of one of those new quick ones – I must have spend 80% of my time switching between drill bit and nut driver bit.
  • In spite of having a degree in structural engineering, I forgot that a parallelepiped with non-rigid joints needs cross bracing or it will collapse. I guess I’ll go get some strapping or something tomorrow.
  • This is probably going to end up being a fair weather project. After finishing the two parallelepiped, I put the particle board sheet on one (and attempted to put on the second one, but that one collapsed), and there is almost no room to move around the garage. I might rip a foot off the edge of the sheets to give me some room.

Anyway, the work surface is nearly done, and I can probably safely go ahead and order the kit.

Attention Democrats and swing voters

The Democratic Party has had a rarity, two highly qualified and good candidates this time, and consequently it’s taking a bit of time to decide which of them should be our candidate. People have invested time and money and their personal feelings on one or the other of the two candidates. But if you get peeved that your candidate didn’t win and sit out the election in protest, vote for a third party candidate, or even worse, vote for McCain, you’re condemning the country to at least 4 more years of the same rampant incompetence, cronyism, pandering to the crazy Christian Right, preemptive wars against the wrong enemies, and hatred of anybody different from them as we had under Bush. Only as well as all that, McCain has a violent temper and is borderline senile. And don’t forget, some of the remaining left-leaning Supreme Court judges are getting up there in years. How safe do you think our civil liberties would be if we had another Rhenquist or Alito on the bench?

The media has decided that McCain is a tough maverick and a renegade. But the truth is, he is a Bush neocon through and through, and toes the party line. Take
The Bush-McCain Challenge and see.

Why don’t companies get the message about password changing?

I’ve seen dozens if not hundreds of articles stating the completely obvious: If you make people change their passwords every 90 days, put in place complexity rules and checks to stop them reusing passwords, and make them change the password on 4 different systems, the end result will be that people will need to write down their passwords somewhere near their computer. So why hasn’t the company I work at gotten that message yet?

It’s bad enough that I have to use the password recovery feature on 2 of those systems because it’s evidently not the one I wrote down, but the wonderful little system I use for generating passwords I can remember doesn’t work if I have to keep changing it.