The normal process is to heat the block with the torch, rub wax around the plug, then strip the hole out with the tool of your choice. Then you drill a hole through the plug, drive a cape chisel in to get a bite, turn it with a wrench, and remove the mangled remains of the plug. Then you run a pipe tap through the hole to clean up the mangulated threads.
Put the impact bit in the impact hammer. BAP! Plug is out. I did three blocks in about thirty seconds, as opposed to half a day of labor.
Wow. Productivity gains like this, and I might even get caught up...
>> They don't have a clue how to use a typewriter. > Uh....right.... > > As if they couldn't figure out something that looks just like the > keyboard they've come to know and love....For an electric, you still have to figure out which lever unloads the carriage so you can adjust the paper, which control handles the impact pressure, how to set the left and right stops, how to set the end-of-form indicator, how to set tab stops... none of these were marked on my old Smith-Corona electric.
For a manual, keyboarding is utterly different from a PC. Not only is it longer travel, but you have to maintain correct pressures on the keys to make even imprints. For some machines, pressures had to be different on different keys.
No backspacing over mistakes with a typewriter, either. Even if you use paint or transfer film, your error was always visible to anyone who looked.
(I know how to use a slide rule, too!)
Ivanova: "Sleeping is not the problem. Waking up -- that is a problem. I've always had hard time getting up when it's dark outside."
Sinclair: "But in space it's always dark."
Ivanova: "I know, I know."
- "Signs and Portents," Babylon 5
> > I feel your pain. I'd like to think the lunar landing was cool, but > > it did little to establish our cultural superiority.We did it, the Russians gave up, and nobody else has tried. Looks like a slam-dunk to me.
On the other hand, NASA snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and their voracious and sprawling bureaucracy sucked up all the funding for the permanent colony and manned Mars journeys. Thirty years later, they're not even on the schedule yet.
America is a nation on wheels; we've left our tire tracks on the freakin' MOON! (and Mars, though I don't count unmanned probes) A hundred thousand years from now, when all current civiliations aren't even dust, the LEMs and rovers will still be sitting there. Not even Ozymandias could ask for more.
Nothing in the forecast for last night. Nothing all week, in fact. At 0400 the wind came up, freight train noises, continuous lightning, rain. Had a whole string of tornados cruising by. Then the electricity went off.
We got out of bed and put our clothes on. I went to the shelf where we keep the emergency gear. Bag with clothing and toiletries, check. Spare CPAP machine in its fitted bag, check. Motorcycle tailbag (contains maps, some medical supplies, maps, etc.) - check. Equipment bag... full of programming manuals.
The bag's original use was to carry reference material between work and home; it's the perfect shape to hold large-format books. I'd needed to shuttle some material back and forth between home and a programming gig, and I'd dumped the equipment out and used it to carry books. Of course, the stuff has wandered off on its own, as such stuff inevitably does, so I spent a while with the flashlight hunting down the invertor, the spare cellphone charger, and other odds and ends that normally go in the bag, like spare credit cards, cash, and the .45.
Lesson learned: the bag does you no good if it doesn't have the proper stuff in it.
I'll buy another bag to use as an equipment bag, and return this one to its former use as a book bag.
I'd also bought some canned food and bottled water. That stuff was still in the spare bedroom, where I'd failed to even get it in a bag, much less in the bag's proper place. FAIL.
Well, it was a learning experience, and at least I had *some* of the stuff I needed ready to go. It's only been six months or so since I decided it would be a good idea to be prepared, and already I was ready to toss everything in the car, which beats the hell out of the original plan, which was "hide out in the hall closet until it blows over."
- Dave "suddenly found a secret cache of round tuits" W.
- Jeff Duntemann
-> I used to work with some composite materials engineers, and we -> occasionally had trouble with exotic resins going exothermic. The -> heat from the reaction becomes adequate to drive the reaction, and -> things burn up in a hurry. No fire, but *lots* of smoke, stink and -> ruined materials.I used to work at a company that made steel doors and frames. We had been stuffing insulated doors with glass wool and changed over to Styrofoam cores glued to the steel panels. Had a hell of a time finding adhesives that didn't attack the foam, take too long to set up, or whatever.
After playing with coffee-table sized scraps for a while we thought we had it, so we made a run of ten doors late in the afternoon. The next morning we came in and found the fire alarms wailing and the shop filled with smoke. The pallet of doors was spread all over the floor, as the doors had swelled into giant steel dumplings and fallen over. Smoke was jetting out of hinge and lockset holes, the paint had burned off, and it was a general mess.
Turned out the glue was exothermic as it cured, and though Styrofoam is "self-extinguishing", there was no place for the heat to go in the middle of a stack of foam and steel laminates, so they burned. We're not talking about a whole lot of glue here, either.
I see lots of one-off and prototype cars built by gluing slabs of foam together. I've always wondered why none of them have ever run into the same trouble.
> Google has a planned initiative to do that by downloading the data > from the power company and giving you an online tool to look at it. > You'll have to have a smart meter and your power company will have > to partner with Google.What a time-saver! Instead of driving around nice neighborhoods and looking for newspapers piled up in the yard, you can just watch electric consumption from your desktop to tell when a family might be on vacation. Two-three days of low consumption, cruise by and relieve them of any surplus property that might be valuable...
In the future, perhaps petty criminals will just reprogram your household cleaning robots to mail your stuff to them, and they won't have to leave their chairs at all...
- Ambassador Kosh, "Believers", Babylon 5
> > This has gotten to be pretty typical practice, places where English is > > spoken and labor is cheap get lots of support centers. For a while Ireland > > was popular, but even they're expensive by Phillipines or India standards.We seem to get a lot of telemarketing calls from non-English-speakers...
I've also become very leery of any product that's imported and resold through a captive distributor. The distributors usually can't handle anything more complex than "all the stuff on the invoice wasn't in the box." Actual technical questions get referred to Europe or Australia where the things were made, which means any answer takes two days, and questions and answers get filtered through at least two levels, usually losing relevance each time.
We had a bunch of terminals on some *very* expensive external multiport boxes. The name of the company was "Stallion", and their firmware was flaky. When one port quit, as they did with painful regularity, you had to power down the entire chain of port boxes and bring them back up in sequence, bouncing every user on the chain offline, which lit the support lines solid. It cost us money in downtime several times a day. The boxes were made in Australia and the maker wouldn't talk to us, just the US distributor, who was clueless.
>> http://news.com.com/Be+my+friend+Only+on+my+turf/2010-1023_3-5269558.html?tag=st.rn >> >> Be my friend? Only on my turf >> July 14, 2004, 1:30 PM PT >> By Esther DysonI'd seen vague mention of "social networks" before. The following article is much longer than necessary, but it describes what they are and how they work.
Smoke, mirrors, and marketing.
It's just another variation of the "web forum." Just like "web logs" are single-user web forums, the "social network" is just a private web forum.
I suspect a lot of these weirdball messaging methods come about because so many people don't know how to use email. They don't know how to use mail filters, and they've entered their primary address everywhere, so every spammer in the universe has their address and demographics. I suspect that's why so many people embraced "instant messaging" as the wave of the future, and now that IM has been invaded by spammers, they're moving to social networks. In this case, I'm more than half tempted to root for the spammers. These people are sitting ducks.
Odd, that people will spend more effort to jump to the latest thing than they will to learn how to use the tools they already have.
Dyson's concept of specialized social networking software is odd in that it seeks to make permanent things that are of only temporary importance. Why would you care who introduced who to whom? And even if you did have a use for that information, how long is it really going to be relevant? What she's describing almost sounds like a CRM system where the user would log contacts against future commissions.
The device was interesting. It had no manufacturer name on the outside. It also had no power switch, which was surprising. The root directory (it was a new drive) had some .inf and .exe files, probably for kind of annoyware for Windows users, and it was preformatted with ntfs... and, of course, the "bad shutdown" flag was set, so I had to manually clear it with the --force option of "mount."
I don't like the lack of a power switch. Even with the computer off, the drive box will just sit there sucking electricity all the time. At 23 cents per kilowatt-hour, I declared war on the infestation of "wall wart" transformers years ago, but this is even worse, like those televisions (and some computers!) that go blank, but never really shut off.
Electrical types tell me the typical wall-wart only pulls a few milliamps at idle, but all the ones here run from warm to hot to the touch, all the time. And I not only have to pay for that, but it makes the house even hotter in the summer.
- Ivanova, "Eyes," Babylon 5
As charities go, that's a trivial amount. And almost all charities absorb the majority of their donation money into their own operations. If 10% of donated funds get down to some recipient, they'll brag about it in their press releases. There are a few charities that run entirely by volunteer effort, but they're a small percentage.
If you had half a million bucks and wanted to help some people out, you might consider leasing a step van or small motorhome, renting some optician's or dentist's equipment, and hiring someone to drive from place to place and operate the equipment. Getting a DDs costs money, but opening your own clinic costs a big chunk more; same thing with opticians. A dentist could do simple extractions and cavity filling; an optician would have to make up a prescription and mail it to one of the big lens supply houses, who actually make up the lenses. They could be mailed straight to the recipient when they were ready. Half a million bucks would finance a couple of trucks and doctors for quite a while.
There are outfits that do something similar with regular MDs or RNs, but they're mostly concerned with immunizations. Not getting cholera or diptheria is important, but if you want to improve someone's "quality of life", a pair of glasses or removing a festering tooth gives them an immediate improvement as opposed to protecting them from a disease they don't have in the first place.
> Seven of the world's largest oil and auto companies said Wednesday > that they will spend $10 million over the next five years on > reducing traffic deaths in developing countries. General Motors > Corp., Ford Motor Co., Honda Motor Co., Toyota Motor Co.p., > Michelin, Renault S.A. and Royal Dutch/Shell Group Cos. are > combining for the project. They will work with the International Red > Cross to determine what would help developing countries most.A little over a million each. They probably spend that much for decorative office plants in any given year.
As far as the Red Cross, ten million is peanuts to them. The best the consortium could hope for would be a position paper, which the Red Cross would schmooze someone else into doing for free.
The kind of problems "developing countries" have, is no laws, no enforcement, or both. It's kind of hard to make someone understand "car on right has right of way at an intersection" when the whole idea of "rule of law" is not part of their cultural background.
> But tolerance is allowing others to express their viewpoints. Saying that > the other ideas are right is "agreement".Obsolete. "Tolerance" now means "give us what we want." Agreement is now implicit.
I dunno... even as a tool junkie, I don't see much use for it. A flap failure is pretty obvious and easy to diagnose, and either way, you still have to pull the caliper loose to run the check. As for checking a proportioning valve... since GM got sued over "rear wheel lockup" in the Citation back in the '80s, few modern cars have functional rear brakes anyway. For a race car, you dial in bias at the track.
I just re-read the book a few weeks ago. I don't necessarily expect a movie to follow the book all that closely any more, but it started off by relocating the scene of events to a different state, added a bunch of stuff that didn't occur in the book... and changed the court battle from "cigarettes are evil" to "guns are evil." I didn't necessarily want to watch an anti-gun movie, but when they started editing-in a bunch of digital video stutter defects and yo-yo camera wobble, I gave up.
Next, I tried "Hard Boiled" with Chow Yun-Fat, by John Woo. Ordinarily a decent combination. Even AB was bored stiff after ten minutes. Off to the bit bucket.
Third, "Arrival," the first episode of "The Prisoner" TV series. Yes, it was reality filtered through paranoia, but at least it was watchable...
> > Too bad, you missed the most over-the-top freeway fight/death > > scene known to man.Oddly enough, I'm not all that impressed by "action sequences." Past some minimal level, I zone out and wait for the movie to start again.
Some modern movies remind me of a particular genre I used to loathe as a child. The "musical." You'd watching a movie, if not decent, at least not so bad you'd get up and change the channel, and then everything would stop, and everyone would sing, for no particular reason. Then they'd go back to the movie, and my usual response was "WTF?"
Nowadays it's much the same, except they'll blow up a few cars or helicopters (those must be getting cheap, it's very common now), expend a few thousand rounds or ammunition, or whatever, and then the movie will resume.
"Who is this? Identify yourself."
"Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova, Commander, daughter of Andrei and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance, and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth ... I am Death incarnate, and the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me."
[White Star flagship opens fire on Earthforce fleet]
- Ivanova to Earthforce Advanced Destroyer Captain James, Babylon 5, "Between the Darkness and the Light"
I wondered why the passenger seat was all ripped to hell, and why there were no good ones in the junkyards. That's because every asshole who gets into a convertible thinks they can step over the door and stand on the seat. Then they swing down using the windshield frame, which breaks the windshield. 3 out of 4 people would do this; maybe they saw it in a movie or something. I didn't bother to replace the cracked windshield; it wouldn't have lasted long.
If you took the car to the store, you'd almost always find some asshole had tossed their trash into it while you were gone. I lost count of how many McDonalds' bags I tossed out. Then there were the coke cups, usually about half full, it appeared, which turned the cockpit into a sticky mess.
The full Pamper in the driver's seat was the last straw. I figured I could set the car up as a decoy and blow the motherfuckers away as they approached, but I finally just sold the damned thing.
I've related the problems to other convertible owners who claimed they'd never had any problems like that, but it always turned out whatever they had wasn't a daily driver; it always turned out to be some one-trip-a-month garage queen which was never left out of sight when parked. Yeah, right. Welcome to the real world when you drive it every day...
-> to shut off that pager too. She began digging around behind the -> dresser and told me that sound was a horsefly!Those things can bite the hell out of you. And they can leave weird stuff behind. I got bitten back in '92; the area always itched, and by '97 there were a definite lump there. I finally went to the doc, who sharped up his scalpels and started carving on my back. He shot me full of something to deaden the area, carved until he got to the knot, and said "eeeew!" Then he's tugging and yanking at it, rolling me around on the table. Finally he gets it loose and says "That's gross. Here, look at this," (shows it to the nurse, who agrees it's gross), then holds it out for me to see. Looked like a little white peach pit. Yep, it was gross.
The lab work came back, showed it was some kind of fungus the horsefly had left behind. The doc said it wasn't all that unusual for fly bites.
Mother Natures *hates* humans.
- Dave "The Fly" Williams
-- The goddess with the nice earrings (Terry Pratchett, Maskerade)
- "Borland Pascal 6.0 User's Guide", page 93
I noticed that one last night. It's one of those truths that it's easy to lose track of, like "to ask a sufficiently precise question, you most already have part of the answer."
> > "If you can read this, thank a teacher;No thanks to the public school system, though. My parents taught me to "sound out the letters" as they called it; they call it "phonics" now. When I got to the first grade they were into "word recognition." Didn't do much good when your vocabulary isn't that big to start with, though.
We were permitted access to the school library in the second grade. I picked out a copy of Andre Norton's "Galactic Derelict" because I liked the cover. The teacher and librarian strongly discouraged me, then let me take it, certain I'd soon trade it in for a "suitable" book.
It took a while to bore through it, mostly from trying to figure out new words from context, but I made it through and enjoyed it immensely. In fact, still I re-read it every five or six years.
> > if you are reading it in English, thank a soldier."Whose soldier? The only serious attempts at invading the United States came from Britain. I hear they mostly speak English there, though they talk funny.
"A brain is only as strong as its weakest think."
>> Yep. Just like Freyburg and his Zeds. > Who? gotta link that will edu-macate me?Well, that shows the state of New Zealand's educational system. Any book printed in English that even mentions the African theater in WWII will tell you something about the Zeds; Churchill's history is as good as any.
Freyburg and his group of New Zealanders were among the first British troops in Africa. Due to the way the chain of command worked at the time, the Zeds worked more or less independently of the English, South Africans, Canadians, etc. Freyburg was the general in charge of the Zeds. His idea was, the sooner they kicked Nazi butt, the sooner they could go home. And with there not being much else to do in the desert anyway, he volunteered his men to work basically as shock troops; when Imperial forces met the Italians or Germans, it was usually Zeds in front. Freyburg's kill figures were very high.
Churchill's orders were to engage the enemy at every opportunity, not to wait for huge set-piece battles. That's why he eventually replaced the original theater commander, Wavell. Freyburg's troops usually carried small flags, or battle standards, to identify themselves. ULTRA intercepts and captured documents showed that Rommel's Africa Korps began to avoid combat unless they had better than a 3:1 advantage over the Zeds in the field. They never actually cut and ran, but at least several times they "declined to engage" in disorder.
Freyburg's Zeds saw the most combat days of any British soldiers. The more they fought, the more experienced they became, and the more effective.
Some New Zealanders there you can be proud of. Even we Americans have heard of them...
> Why did New Zealand send Freyburg and his men to Africa? Nobody was > invading New Zealand.The Japanese had already bitten off big chunks of the British Far East - Rabaul, Singapore, Malaya, Burma, etc. "Purple" intercepts indicated they had Australia, New Zealand, and India next on the list. Since IJN dive bombers had basically eliminated the British Navy in the Pacific, there was nothing to stop them.
The Australian PM and his party were shitting bricks; they wanted their troops back home *right now* to defend against the oncoming Japanese onslaught. Shipping to move that many men from Africa back to Australia simply did not exist. Churchill made a three-way deal with Roosevelt; if the Aussies would leave their troops in Africa, Roosevelt would send an equivalent number of Americans to garrison the Australian defenses.
> I backed it up 3 a8 days ago.Criminy, how much is that in decimal?
> > want to live in a foul polluted stinking hole. So lets start by addressing > > the problem thats waking me at 4am, pollen. It causes eye irritation, > > respiratory problems and makes a misery of many people's livesGreen is bad. Concrete is good.
I spend $200 per month on meds to give me a miserable "quality of life" due to allergies.
> > We need a less toxic world to live in as > > it will be a more plesant place to live,Not for the urbanites, who will live in each others' refuse no matter what. Akkad and Troy literally sank under their own waste - no sewers or running water, either.
> > now have Otters returning to natural habitats.Now we need to bring back the wolves, jackals, lions, and tigers, and populate the cities with them! "Think of it as evolution in action."
> > But concrete is Green. It is a 100% natural compound. Something that > > the Eco-Nazis tend to cover up.It's like the nuclear frenzoids. Where do they think uranium comes from, anyway? You dig it out of the (natural!) ground...
Apparently, like oil or guano, it's only when it's actually *useful* that it's unnatural.
"Don't sweat it. Just be that charming, effervescent commander we've all come to know and love. What's the worst that could happen? They fire you, ship you off to the Rim and I get promoted to Commander. I don't see a problem here."
- Sinclair and Garibaldi, "Infection", Babylon 5
Somehow I neglected to account for clearance from the distributor cap to the throttle lever to the #1 throttle body. Looks like I'll have to make a new set of levers and rethink the linkage.
You can't just use a single master rod and right slave levers like some race cars do. That sort of linkage tilts all the butterflies the same direction - no problem when you only run at idle and wide open, but for a street car that has to be tractable at low throttle settings it is a problem. The air flow will follow the trailing edge of the blade, so one cylinder bank will be fed a stream of air across the top of the port, the other side across the bottom. This affects the fuel distribution in the cylinder, which can result in one bank doing most of the work while the other side might be running lean and popping.
It's not unsolvable, of course, but I'm trying to come up with a neat solution that doesn't involve too much Rube-Goldbergery. Here's a shot of the general layout:
That was some time ago, but it shows the general layout. If the block looks unusual, it's because it's a super-rare 1972 400 "C4" block with dual bellhousing outlines. The 400 normally used the 429/460 big block bolt pattern and transmission, but a few oddballs had an extra small-block pattern and used the small C4 automatic. Ford, in its usual demented fashion, had a different bolt pattern for almost every engine series, sometimes more than one pattern! The "C4" block will bolt to an ordinary 302-5.0-351W transmission, or in this particular case, a 351C transmission, like the one in a DeTomaso Pantera...
Yes, I get a technoid woodie thinking about the gyroscopes, force sensors, and control software it takes to make one of those things stable. I think it would be a hoot to ride one. But the reality of the Segway turned out to be much as I expected - they're even funnier than watching a bear ride a bicycle at the circus. Though they would probably be highly effective pursuing fleeing criminals - all they'd have to do is take one look and they'd fall to the ground laughing.
Technically, the Segway is a masterpiece. I can't figure out why it's so amusing, but I've noticed I'm not the only one to think so. Apparently they piss some people off - a quick web search turned up stories of people being hooted at and verbally abused while riding them.
Hmm... perhaps a floppy-brimmed hat with a feather, and a dashing cape...
The movie had Albert Finney and Susan Dey, and a bad guy (I didn't record all the credits) who looked *amazingly* like porn star Ron Jeremy. Basically, it was about a company that had developed software for optimizing results for advertisements and political messages; they could put people in a trance just watching the stuff. After some failures at using cosmetic surgery to make "perfect" models, they threw more hardware at the problem and just generated all their actors via computer.
While we were watching, I pointed out to AB that the hardware was pure fiction when Michael Crichton wrote and directed "Looker" in 1980, but it was trivial now.
Just a moment ago, I saw a link for the other half of the movie's plot: http://www.beautyanalysis.com/index2_mba.htm
On the voiceover at the end of the movie, the voice says, "The average American spends 50 minutes per day watching commercials, every day of his life." In 1980, probably. In 2009, more. *Much* more...
Every now and then I come across something that's so bizarre I wonder if I slipped across into an alternate reality. The other night I followed a link to YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lNFRLrP014
Alternatively, hit YouTube and seach for "Leningrad Cowboys" and pick "Sweet Home Alabama." It will usually be the first link.
Helsinki, 1993. Seventy thousand people at the largest concert ever held in Finland, featuring the Finnish rock group "Leningrad Cowboys." Singing in English, in pompadours, striped suits, and pointy shoes. Backed by the full 160-member Red Army Choir from Russia, in uniform, also singing in English.
Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama."
They're not half bad, and you can see the Red Army guys are having an absolute blast, too.
This is wrong on so many levels I can't even express it. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The WTF-meter just broke.
I only watched the stupid video half a dozen times before checking some of the others out. There's a DVD of the event, called "Total Balalaika Show, but it appears to only be available in Euro PAL format.
"Sweet Home Aa-labama
where the skiiies are blue..."