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.

Just say "No"

It is a truism of politics that even if there isn't a candidate that you want to vote for, there's surely someone that you would vote against.

The problem with this is that it presumes that the 'other' candidate is at least acceptable; what isn't usually taken into consideration with that saying is what to do when one is less than impressed with EITHER of the mainstream candidates.

The most obvious solution is to simply continue to apply the principle by voting for neither of them. The value of this option becomes even more significant when the two main political parties have become so polarized, so entrenched, so dominant that they skew and bias the political scene so thoroughly that alternative candidates are marginalized and excluded -- effectively denying the voting public the free exercise of the franchise.

I would suggest that it is well past the time for the voting public to make it known that they do not appreciate what the election process has devolved to, that they do not like being limited to just one or two candidates from the two main political parties, and that they do NOT want the current process to limit them to just a couple of 'mainstream' parties.

Personally, I'm more than a little disgusted with the way political campaigns have become a blood sport, the general malaise most people have about the process, the political pandering, and being obliged to vote for what I consider the lesser of two evils. I, like most people, am disgusted with the whole process and resulting jackassery. What used to be sarcastic comments on the state of politics have become entirely too true: "The opposite of 'pro' is 'con', so the opposite of Progress is Congress", "Politicks comes from the Latin 'poly', meaning many; and 'ticks', a species of blood-sucking parasites", "No one's life, liberty, or property are safe while the Legislature is in session", "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys", and so on. Think about the other, similar, sayings that you know -- and whether or not you think they're more true now than they were in years past.

If you are less than impressed with the political process, or you aren't entirely committed to voting for one of the main candidates, then I would encourage you to join me in sending a message to those that are supposed to be our public servants: that it's nigh time they cleaned up their act, started working WITH each other instead of at cross purposes, and started making it possible for us to have the kind of government that we want, DOING what we want: vote for anybody but either of the two mainstream candidates -- hell, vote for Ralph Nader, or Ron Paul, if that's what it takes. Hell, write in Adolf Hitler, if that's what it takes to make it painfully clear that you're not voting for either of the other two. If you don't have a 3rd-party alternive in a particular race, then vote for whoever the challenger is for an office. Voting for Nader or someone else might sound risky ("But what if he actually gets elected!"), but it isn't, really: there are undoubtedly enough people still going to vote Republicrat or Demolican that Nader (or whoever) getting into office is unlikely in the extreme. What voting for him WILL do, however, is let the other parties know that there is a significant portion of the voting public that is less than pleased with them -- and that's the point that needs to be made.

Modern Medicine

I had the "pleasure" of a physical at the doctors office today.

Blood pressure - OK
Pulse - OK
Temperature - OK
Heart - OK
Lungs - OK (even for me being a smoker)
Cholesterol - OK
Weight - OK (even lost a few pounds since last time)
General health - OK

I did manage to cause mild hysterics with the nurse when she took my temperature: instead of a regular thermometer (or even one of the sexy digital under-the-tongue jobs), she used one that took my temperature via an ear -- which prompted me to comment "Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase 'stick it in your ear', doesn't it?". Once she'd settled down again, she said she'd be using that for the rest of the day...

All in all, it has been determined -- to some degree of certainty -- that I am not, in fact, dead.

w00t.

Disenfranchisement

One of the cornerstones of American democracy is that pretty much everyone is allowed to exercise their voting franchise.

Of course, there are those of us that wonder about the sense and rationality of some of the folks on the 'other side' of an issue, but we generally don't limit the right to vote except for the insane, mentally impaired, or felony criminals.

I would suggest that we, as a nation, consider changing that policy for the simple reason that there are (unfortunately) those that do not exercise their voting rights in a reasoned, thoughtful manner: those that latch onto a particular issue (to the exclusion of everything else) to decide how their vote should be cast, and the folks that don't bother to keep up with the assorted issues brought up by the candidates and thus enter the polling booth ignorant as newborn babes.

Then there are those people that see only one aspect of a particular candidate to the exclusion of everything else. Finally, there are those individuals such as the author of this disjointed, rambling gibberish.

Consider that the missive in question was a letter to the editor: the author had ample time to think through what he wanted to say and how to say it -- and yet still produced and submitted that kind of drivel. While it is possible to make out what the individual was trying to say, does anyone really think that it benefits our political process to allow someone like that to actually cast a ballot?Are we to believe that the kind of mind (and I do use the term loosely in this case) that produced that is going to be capable of distinguishing the subtleties and implications of political discourse?

No, I think our nations founders were being wildly optimistic to make the voting franchise as easily exercised as they did -- and that it's time we correct that oversight.