Monthly Archives: September 2012

Satuday night – Let go or be dragged

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First day of Fall !.. Satisfying day so far.. i am in great need of hands on productive work.. and I got it today.. Early (9 AM.. so.. early for me) .. I headed over to Homers to make progress on a project we really need to move forward. I love hanging out in Homer’s shop.. every tool and every material imaginable… I feel that he and I can make anything there ,. I can spend hours just reading the stuff on the walls. I was really taken by this poster on his fridge.

Homer showed me the progress he’s made on a very visible project.. these are destined to call out the name of high brow entertainment for years to come on the Flynn Theater marquis These replace the old cast aluminum letters that have all broken over the many years the theatre has been there. Think of all the acts.. all the words.. .. all the shows these new letters will call out.


Here’s a batch fresh out of the oven.. just like cookies.

Our new (.. well actually now middle aged) project is more musical. Like all thing we do.. Homer’s part is the mechanicals.. mine is the electronics.. this has lots goign on.. arduinos, Ethernet shield and touch sensors..

all in a pretty complex stack. I’m goign to do a custom PC board on this eventually


We got lots done today.. hopefully on the last run to completion.  As i was leaving Homer hit me wiht one of his.. ‘Hey John, i found this in a dump, what can we use it for.” questions.. I am posting it here so I can find this picture of the oils stained docs on the ‘type M and MQ’ transformer on Google later on. (Google indexing your blog is pretty cool !)

After Homer’s.. I spent a very satisfying several hours working with Gabe on a school project. I really enjoy working with him. .. There too.. we made very good progress.

in a n hour or so, I’m going to go meet my buddy Jared at a concert while I wait for Diane to get home from a show today. ..

I’m going to try and get an hour or so of work in now.. More tomorrow..

-nite all, nite sam

-me

Friday night – Yes what ?!

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Crazy busy week at work. Trying hard to finish a project that is actually growing more interesting the linger i work on it.. Thankful for that at least. That kept me so busy today that i barely stood up from my chair..In fact that was the case for the last 4 days.

One funny thing happened  yesterday.. I’m working with a new assistant  , U, at work. Great guy.. though I’ve never met him. He sits down in Raleigh. Hope to get to meet him some day. We’ve been working together on some coming business travel. he’s whip smart and very organized which must make it hard for him to talk to me 🙂   The one thing that trips me up is hat he sometimes slips and  calls me ‘Sir’.. Every time he does that I feel a little bit older..Same thing happens when someone calls me sir in a restaurant or something.. Unless I look in a mirror. I certainly don’t feel like a ‘sir’.  I finally asked U about it and asked him to call me ‘John’ .  He apologized and pointed out that he grew up in the South.. (as did I).. where we had to call men Sir and women Ma’am. ..  That explained it and we laughed about it..

But it reminded me..   I remember so well in school as a little kid that we had to call our teachers  “Ma’am” .. (pronounced may-yem.. .. more like mayhem !).. If they asked you a question and you said “Yes”.. they’d snap back.. “Yes-what ?!”.. you had to say “Yes-May’am””.. Or “Yes-sir”.. or actually “Yes suh”, Many of my friends had to do that to answer their parents. I was thinking about that tonight when we saw our friend E, a southern Belle form Virginia.. we laughed about “Yes what ?!!”  she reminded me of another great Southernism I grew up with .. “Well bless your heart”.. or “bless her ( or his) heart” .. It was a euphemism for ‘I can’t  believe what a (crazy, stupid, pitiful,  ridiculous, lamentable, idiotic) thing you  (or he/she)  did..

I’ve long lost these patterns of speech .. and kind of miss them.. that was untill I asked  folks on a phone call today ‘how are all y’all doin; ?”.. Now  “all y’all”… ?! i could go off on that for hours…  but not today

nite all ya’ll, nite sam

-me

Thursday night – Vermont Fablab at Essex Tech

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Busy work day with a fun, geeky finish . This afternoon I was invited over to the Essex Tech Center to watch my friends Joe C. and Jim D. On the Vermont Fab Lab at Essex Tech. This has been a long time in the making. They got a grant last year that helped them buy the tools and renovate the space. Today was the ribbon curring. It was so cool and exciting.

The name is special to me.. when we created our center at UVM we decided to partner with Essex (and anyoen else who’d like to join us) to create a set of networked facilities. Our hope is to have facilities like this eventually accessible to folke living anywhere in the state.. wouldn’t that be cool ?

The setup at Essex is really nice. The rapid prototyping tools are all in a glassed in clean space. here’s their 50 W laser cutter

A cnc lathe

a very nice electronics bench with some nice arduinos on display

a tool chest

a vinyl cutter

Armando V. , the state Sec’y of Education did the honors of ‘cutting the ribbon’  .. though the ribbon was a piece of acrylic and the cutting was done by laser.. at least he hit the button.

Doug the shop teacher gave us a VERY cool demo of his new Safe Cut saw. it has sensors in the blade that detect if it ever accidentally touches skin. If it doe it fires a chunk of aluminum into the saw blade and stops it instantly.. it destroys the blade, but saves your fingers !

Megahn from 7 days checks out the workings of the saw

 

My buddy seth was there.. he had his middle finger cut off in a door accident when he was 3.. but it was reattached.  looks good now !

 

we then mosseyed over to the 3D printer. .. we heard how a student made a 10cent plastic part that prevented the need to replace a 300 dollar part for one of the school’s big mixers.. Nice !

here are the parts.  This technology is going to change the world.. mark my words !

One of the kids, Abdul gave me a very cool money clip that he designed and printed.. (now if i just had the money to put in it 🙂

the party ended with a demo .. we all went back to the main room

and doug used a hot dog to simulate his finger and tried to cut with the saw. The thing made a loud bang and the blade dropped out of sight. There wasn’t even a nick in the hot dog. AMAZING !

 

After the Essex event, Seth and I went down town to meet some of the other folks from Vermont Makers. We were having our final org meeting before the Champlain Makerfaire on Sat Sept 29th at Shelboune farms,,

We’ll all be there.. will you be ?

nite all, nite sam

-me

Wednesday night – blog for blog sake

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My friend Dale did a brave thing at work today.. she blogged about blogging.. She was blogging on our company’s internal blogosphere.. which is alike a tiny copy of the outside world.. a kind of cool fish bowl. Actually, she wasn’t talking about blogging per sec.. She was actually talking about not blogging.. or the things that kept people from blogging. she identified three main things: Fear of the unknown, Perception of being uncool and Under developed capabilities. It was interesting to see how much resonance this got with folks in the few hours I watched after its posting. Quite a few folks dropped in to comment that they were afraid of blogging.. which is interesting to me.. because commenting isn’t all that different from blogging.. is it ?  The most common thread was that folks were self conscious about their writing..whether it was content or form. . .. again.. a very interesting concept to me.. I’m certainly self conscious about my writing when I’m doing a technical paper.. but. for some reason.. I’ve found it very easy to write here.. .. .. her’s what I said:

 

8 John M. Cohn commented Today 6:23 PM Permalink Recommendations 0

Dale,
LOL.. this is great that you’ve put yourself out there and blogged about blogging. 🙂 I think you’ve nailed some of the major things that stop people from writing. .. No one likes to be judged.. For that reason, putting yourself on record online is … well… scary !
For me the big secret that got me beyond that fear was to write for one person.. .. ..and that one person was me ! That helped me get past the worry about what folks would think about my poor grammar and dyslexic spelling (Dale.. you’re laughing now, I’ll bet 🙂 . I found that there’s no better way to figure out what i was thinking about than to write it down. .. and I have blogged every night for the past nearly 6 years in that spirit. (http://johncohn.org)
I submit the same is true here at work.. write for yourself about what you’re passionate about. Don’t worry so much about what others will think.. Don’t worry about your style .. People will be happy to learn from your thinking if not your punctuation .. 🙂
-jc

reading that now, i wonder if i was too flippant.. I’m not saying that I don’ care about my readers.. its’ that I don’t think you’re there.. . if i did, I’d never write another line.

 

nite all , nite sam

-me