On the road

This test, of course, presupposes that the person answering is actually honest about their driving -- and aware of their own actions. I only scored 93%; I think because I (honestly) answered that I sometimes drive faster than the speed limit -- the test didn't ask if I drove faster than the folks around me (I don't), and most places I've been, it's pretty common for the Thundering Herd to do 5-10 miles over the posted limit as a matter of routine. Oh, well...

Created by The Car Connection

Deart Santa:

My wish list for Christmas this year is very short and simple:

Any 2 of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show models and

a case of Body Butter.

Thank you.

Catching up

Kind of had my hands full the last week, which is why I haven't posted anything. Not much of an excuse, I suppose, but there you go...

* Got more information on doing my own CNC system. My laser idea won't work for doing printed circuit boards -- not only is copper difficult to cut with a laser, anyway, but the way a laser cuts metal precludes using on a PCB. My emergency fallback position is to go ahead and build a 'regular' CNC that uses a rotating cutting bit to create my boards. An additional benefit is that I can also use it to drill the holes in the board, as well as engrave any panels and such that I might need.

* Watching McNeil/Lehrer last night, I saw a bunch of Congressweasels giving one of the big Financial weenies in Gummit a hard time -- seems the Congressweasels didn't understand that the $750B funding they voted for was not for bailing out people with bad mortgages, but simply to stabilize the financial system. The guy they were dishing shit to tried to explain to them (repeatedly) that there had been no mention of mortgage bailouts or anything else; that he (and others) had EXPLICITLY said that the money was for the financial system. Congressweasels simply couldn't get that concept to stick in their tiny little minds, and were all upset and offended that people were still losing their homes -- and wanted Something To Be Done about it, and right now. Morons. Pretty much all of the folks that have lost their homes did so because there was a "mismatch" between what they claimed their income was, and what they were really earning -- essentially, they lied to get themselves into a house they couldn't afford, and calmly proceeded to spend 101% of their income via MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and all the rest. My thought is: fuck 'em. Yeah, it's gonna hurt the economy for a while -- but when it's over, the financial system (and no, I don't mean just the banks and such) will be a hell of a lot more stable, and stronger.

* The U.S. automakers are now begging and grovelling for a handout, too, and there's no small controversy over whether or not they should get anything. On one side, if the automakers go tits-up, that throws a metric buttload (which is roughly 10% larger than a regular buttload) of people out of jobs, which seriously fucks economies all over the country. Opposing that is the fact that it's the automakers (and all the demands from the unions) dumbassery that got them to this point: there's no reason not to think that they'll just end up pissing the money away and cratering, anyway. Me, I don't think they should get anything until and unless the Autoworkers union is obliged to give up a goodly chunk of the assorted crap that they've demanded over the years, and the automakers trim a bunch out of their bloated administration and management (so they can respond to the market in a timely manner). Then give the bastards a ONE-TIME loan of about half what they're asking for before letting them sink or swim on their own.

* The news media has caught wind of the fact that people that already own guns are buying more of them -- but can't seem to figure out why. Dumbshits.

* The Obamessiah is promising to dismantle a lot of the "protection" bullshit (i.e. warrantless wiretaps, anti-terrorism measures, etc) that the Bush administration hosed us with. That only makes me worry that he's going to try to do even worse shit.

Piling on

I've been having trouble getting the accuracy and resolution needed for the circuit boards for my bot; neither of the two fabrication techniques I had available (laying the circuits out by hand, using a combination of rub-on patterns and hand-drawn lines, and thermal-transfer paper) was getting me the kind of results I wanted (and will need).

Searching for an alternative, I somehow ran across a reference to a DIY laser cutter; reading that article ultimately led me to CNC technology. From there, it was pretty fast and direct to a free Linux-based CNC controller. It didn't take me long to put the two together: using a slightly higher-powered laser to 'cut' the thin copper film on a circuit board to fabricate my circuits.

So, as a result, I've got a couple more projects pushed onto the stack: fabricating a computer-controllable CNC machine (actually surprisingly simple), and setting up a computer to drive it (I've already downloaded the Linux CNC software). Being a cheapskate scrounge, I've already got a bunch of parts that I've salvaged out of old/dead hardware -- including a couple dozen stepper motors (and gears, and sensors, and...) that will greatly simplify things. Conceptually, it isn't that big of a deal; even the reality of it isn't going to be all that tough -- a few dollars in parts that I don't already have, a bit of skull sweat, and a little labor, and I should be good to go.

Oh, if you're interested in getting into the laser hair removal gig, have a look at this eBay search! For point of reference, my research tells me that a laser of "just" a couple of watts (U.S. laser pointers are limited to 5 mW [.005 watts] or less) would be sufficient to (slowly) cut 1/16th-inch aluminum; 10 watts would do for steel.

All ahead whoa

I've been keeping myself pretty well occupied with the various projects that I've got going.

I've had to order a few parts so that I can continue with my 'bot, so while I wait for those, I'm fiddling with the programming for it. I also had the chance to do a little honest-to-goodness basic electronics by troubleshooting and repairing an older electronic device for a friend of mine.

I've been "push-polled" a couple of times in the last week, and am getting a mailbox full of political bullshit pretty much every day. Has anyone ever been swayed by the mailings sent out by either of the political parties? Or is it just a waste of time, resources, and money on both sides? And more to the point, is there any way of getting OFF their fucking mailing lists?

Words to live by...

Let your dog or cat know what's on your mind, and don't forget to spay or neuter your Congressperson.

Holding my nose

While milling about aimlessly today, I stopped by the Billings voter registration office to cast my ballot early -- I'm anticipating that there's going to be a lot of folks busying up the polling places come November 4th, and I'm not real big on standing in long-ass lines; I did enough of that shit in the Navy.

Many of the offices had candidates from the Libertarian party, and a few even included Independent/Unaffiliated -- and those are what I went for, for the most part. The few cases where it was Republicrat or Demolican, I simply cast my vote in favor of the challenger, regardless of party. I still maintain that the whole gott-damn system needs to be reworked and cleaned up, and I'm hoping that trying to vote out every incumbent I can helps send a message to the Big Two. Otherwise, I think it isn't going to be too long until all of us are pretty much fucked, regardless of WHICH party wins.

I hope to hell I'm wrong

I just woke up from the gott-DAMNEDest dream. It quite frankly scared the hell out of me, and I'm going to try and get it written down while it's still fresh in my mind -- and hope and pray that I can get the full sense of it across, because it was just that damn scary to me.

It started out with me just kind of floating up in the air - not like a balloon or anything, but just hanging there in one place - and I was watching what was going on below me. Every so often, my vision would zoom in on a newspaper headline, or I'd be able to hear as people talked to each other, but other than that, I wasn't actively DOING anything.

I'm not entirely sure what the hell was going on, but it was like I could watch as history unfolded beneath me -- at least, in broad terms. I didn't have any sense of exact time or anything like that; all I recall is that I could just tell what the big events were, not the little ones... kind of like when you're high up over the ocean and can see the big waves, but not the ripples, only this was history, okay?

Anyway, it started from shortly after Obama got elected President. He started pushing for a lot of the things that he's been campaigning for, and wasn't getting a lot of traction - at least, at first. But then a hellacious lot of the people that voted for him started kicking up a fuss that Congress should start doing what he wanted -- they elected him President, after all. It took a little while, but making laws for the stuff that Obama has been saying, most of them driven by poor people. Some of the poor were White, but most of them were Black, and a lot of the talk was about how it was time Black folk got their 'share'. There were some people (Black AND White) that tried to explain that the country couldn't afford all the social programs and such, and tried to point out the bad side of some of the policies and programs that were being called for, but they kept being shouted down; too many people wanted Obama to keep his campaign promises, and they were giving him the power to actually do it. The other part was that he didn't get rid of all the negative Bush bullshit. Stuff like USA PATRIOT, warrantless wiretaps, and all the DHS/TSA crap stayed because Obama thought he might be able to use it.

I don't know exactly, but I got the impression that Obama lasted two terms; by the time he was leaving office, pretty much everybody was starting to realize that doing all the crap he wanted was actually hurting everyone, so the next President to get elected was a conservative that campaigned on the promise that he'd 'fix' all the shit Obama broke. He got elected by a landslide, and once he was sworn in, started trying to do what he said. Thing was, he got carried away, and another liberal got voted in to replace him. The two sides went back and forth like that for a long time - each of them trying to undo what the one before them did.

Even though the two sides were trying to undo each others shit, they never quite managed to get it done - there would always be little bits and pieces of legislation, rules, laws, policies, and other crap that didn't get erased. That meant that no matter what else happened, each side was building ON TOP OF the little bits of stuff left over from whoever came before them - so that each time one side or the other tried to build something new, they were starting with more than they really knew - and so that no matter WHAT the hell the voters thought was going to happen, the bottom line was that we ended up with a few more rules and regulations and such than we had before.

I got the sense that what was happening was like politics was a big pendulum, making little swings to either side of the middle - except that from Obama on, the swings kept getting bigger and bigger: we'd go from a conservative to a liberal to a bigger conservative to a bigger liberal to an even bigger conservative, and so on and so on. And no matter WHO got into the Presidency, the Congress kept farting around: taking campaign "contributions", trying like hell to stay in office, doing whatever they could get away with, and generally being a bunch of worthless fucks.

Along the way, different government offices (on their own) started issuing "directives" under the guise of security, stability, or whatever: all email and phone calls monitored; had to have a permit to own a computer and/or get on the Internet; no new guns sold, old ones confiscated at owners death; people relocated against their will in the name of 'energy conservation'; travel restricted; library usage monitored; and other crap like that.

The whole thing ended when some hyper-conservative asshole got into office, got the rest of the government actively backing him, and declared martial law until he could get his own "security forces" (think Nazi Gestapo, with similar uniforms) in place. When I woke up, it was right after I watched a couple of random, completely innocent (somehow, I knew) people get stopped for their 'papers' and get hauled off. The rest of the folks on the street didn't even look at them after they got stopped, never mind when they were being taken away.

The sense I got was that the idea of "Law" got watered down by unenforceable 'feel-good' laws (the kind of things that politicians try to pass after some tragedy) so that it stopped having any tangible meaning; the Constitution and Bill of Rights gradually started to mean what the Government wanted them to, and less any kind of protection, because nobody insisted; damn near everybody was poor as they could be because they'd all agreed to letting the government do for them what they should have done for themselves, and got left hanging when those in power weren't so nice.

Looking back on it, I guess the dream was about people being played off against each other until someone decided to play for keeps; as all that was happening, more and more people were demanding special priveleges while abdicating responsibility for themselves, and demanding "someone" protect them from everyone else.

Please, god, let it just be a dream and never actually happen.

The political landscape

While looking through some of the captioned photos over at ROFLrazzi, I found a few that amused me greatly, and I thought I'd share them...


see more celeb pics


see more celeb pics

No, you're not hallucinating

Yes, I switched to a different theme for my humble little abode here on Blogger.

I selected the previous one when I had a regular CRT-type monitor, and it worked fine -- right up until I got a widescreen LCD display, at which point it sucked. Still, I didn't bother trying to 'fix' it until today, when I decided that enough squinting to read my own damn blog was enough.

Consider yourself suitably advised that I may still change things: a different theme, or adjusting the colors, or god-knows-what.