The Apartment Blog

hey look at this thing i made: XIV

2011-10-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

I'm trying out an experiment here. Instead of trying to mix the technical aspect of the project with the story behind the project, I'm going to split the two up. To that end I've created a sister site, Schrodinger's Appendix (site goes live 11/1/11). This will contain all the tools I used in the project as well as how they were used. It's going to be dead serious talk and probably not just ridiculous pictures of me. 50% chance. Maaaaaaaaybe. Feel free to let me know if this works or not.

Can I tell you a secret? I'm not *always* winging it. Really, I think with most of my projects, if you tried hard enough you could pull out these steps:

The Idea

I realize it sounds stupid to say that, it all starts with an idea, but these things don't just fold out. Somehow, someway, usually entirely at random, an idea pops into my head. Sometimes these are fairly concrete things. For example, I might get the idea that it would be funny to make a stained glass window that was a picture of an ass.

On occasions like this, it was a fairly abstract start. I had been talking to longtime mikey k associate andy veerman and he had thrown out the idea that I make some furniture for my apartment. I actually wrote that off at the time. I was still decompressing from the move and the idea of making something I had no use for seemed silly. Why would I make a table? Where's the value? First few weeks I was down here I was perfectly content to use upturned boxes. It seemed silly to make something that was just functional and anything bigger than a table that I might need seemed outside the scope of what I knew how to do.

That happens sometimes. Especially with something that abstract, it might be shelved forever. Or five minutes. Or like two weeks. After finally setting up (so to speak) my apartment I posted an album on the facebook and when my sister commented that I needed a couch or something, it all of a sudden clicked in my head and I decided in that instant I would make a couch.

Concept Design

Concept design is all about figuring out how to make the thing. I'll usually start by setting out the major requirements of the project as those will often dictate how the thing needs to be made. I had been of the mind that I personally had no use for a couch. I bought a somewhat nice office chair and it had worked just fine for all my seating needs. Of course, that only worked because I don't have any friends. Pre-couch, I had a grand total of two seats in the apartment, which really hurt my ability to throw lavish dinner parties. The point is, if I was going to make a couch, it really wouldn't be for me. That certainly changes things, because while I have a pretty high threshold for dealing with discomfort, I don't expect that of other people.

1) The couch had to be comfortable.

I don't have much of a system for picking what goes in my apartment, so while there wasn't any specific aesthetic it had to have, it couldn't be an eyesore.

2) The couch had to be better looking than a breadbox.

While there certainly were more design requirements than those two, they were the only ones likely to determine how it could be made. Comfort didn't concern me too much as I assumed that was mainly a function of the cushions. Looks on the other hand were tricky. I suspect I could make a comfortable couch by stapling enough pillows to a crate, but man would that look awful. The traditional couch model of fabric wrapped around a wooden frame would work, but that would be boring and I didn't really have the desire to teach myself how to upholster like that.

Exposed frame couch then. It didn't seem like it would be possible to make it out of wood as I lack the equipment to really do that right (and I didn't really want to buy it). The project floundered for awhile at this point. I don't actually remember how I got the idea that I could build a frame out of steel pipe, but one day it just clicked.

Feasibility Analysis

This is often done hand in hand with concept design. I touched on that a little bit with the exposed wood frame thought above. A fine idea, but wasn't really feasible. With regards to a steel pipe frame there were a couple things I had to prove out to be able to start on this:

First, given that it would be made out of hundreds of smaller fittings, I needed to be sure that they could be assembled in a way that would provide for consistency. To that end I went down to Lowe's, grabbed a selection of the ones I thought I'd use and assembled some test modules. Doing that showed me that I could make this in a way that would give me the look I wanted.

Next I had to be sure this could be done within a reasonable budget. Even if Lowe's stocked enough fittings at any given time to build this, the markup is so high that it would just be ridiculous. After spending enough time googling, I was able to find a place that I could buy the bulk quantities at a good enough price.

Initial Design

I say initial design because I don't think I've ever started a project with a perfect design. Things come up that just won't work how I planned. Sometimes there will be aspects of the design that I have trouble figuring out, but if I know I'll figure it out eventually and it's not immediately relevant, I'll just start.

Initial design here centered around just making the frame. Using the modules I'd made in the last section, I took measurements and figured out how many of each type of fitting I would need. I didn't really design it specifically to look a specific way, rather I came up with an idea that I was sure would be structurally sound. As is usually the case, design was done almost entirely in my head, with some very abstract concepts sketched out to help me visualize.

Initial Build

Once I have a solid idea of how it will be made and have parts in hand, I jump into it. Construction of the frame was pretty simple, sort of like a giant erector set.

Re-Design/Problem Solving

It's pretty inevitable that something comes up that I need to fix. With the couch, the first of things was the pieces of straight pipe. I had started this with the idea that I would make it using only standard size pipe, to make it build-able out of off the shelf parts. Unfortunately given some of the sizes I ended up using, I kept running into places where I needed custom cut pipe. This meant tweaking some of my original design ideas as well as figuring out how to get the pipe.

Fix Implementation

The process of fixing a problem and then going back to the build might happen twice during a project, or maybe twenty times. I will keep tweaking things until they're right, however long that takes. During construction of the frame I think I went through that cycle four times. Twice I needed to get a new tool and learn a new technique and then another two times required me ordering more fittings due to slight structure tweaks.

Secondary Design

This will only come up on a project like this. I started with an idea of how everything would be done, but since the frame would need to be built before I could be sure how some other parts of this would go, I didn't think about the other aspects too much. I viewed the project as having four distinct parts: Frame, support web, cushions and arm rests. With the frame done I was able to go through and get everything else figured out.

Secondary Build/Re-Design/Problem Solving/Fix Implementation

These parts are no different than the initial build and design. Despite having so much more time to think about how they would be done, there were still a number of things that didn't go how I thought.

Pictures

Of course, once finished, I gotta document it (mike added for scale)

Post Construction Analysis

As I always say, success is all in how you define your goals, so lets check it out:

1) is it comfortable?

It is! I kind of wish the back cushions were a little softer (I may re-do them) but other than that, I would be perfectly content to sit on that.

2) is it an eyesore?

As is often the case with things I make, I would say that the appearance of it does not have universal appeal. It is definitely very industrial looking, which while I think looks good, your mileage may very. Considering that I'm the one who looks at it the most, I suppose that was a success as well.

This had the added bonus of being giant, so it almost seems like I'm using my space well!

Bonus shots!

hey look at this cook off i won

2011-08-06T18:14:00.000-07:00

This is the story of how I won a cook off. I made some pizzas. On the grill. It's either one very complicated story, or a series of not too complicated stories, depends on how you want to look at it.

The Miller Part of the Story

I will often say that I like to personify my friends with stories about them. I then qualify that by saying I'm sure personify isn't the right word, but I'm too lazy to figure out what the correct word is. It's convenient for this post that Miller has one of the better examples.

I was unemployed, which had been by choice for awhile, but morphed into me just not being able to get a job (I'm not actually very good at things). Miller was the de facto manager at Cigarette Express. I say de facto manager because it was one of those bullshit things you come across in retail jobs where they say "we're gonna give you more responsibility but no raise and no official title." Regardless, he had juice and told me that if I wanted, come in and get a job.

It was kind of a bizarre employment situation there. There was something like eighty total hours available for work each week. Miller worked thirty or so of em, this other girl worked twenty which left thirty hours between me and this other guy. The amount I'd work would vary quite a bit, but I was mainly hired specifically to bridge the gap between when Miller got off (two) and when the girl showed up (four thirty I think). This was fine until about a month after I started and decided I was gonna go back to school. Class schedule meant that one or two days a week I wasn't going to be able to cover that specific two and a half hours. This meant they would have to hire someone to work an even smaller amount of time, which, prolly wouldn't work out. I mention this because it's what I assume the reason for the next part of this story.

The next part of the story is one day I was getting ready to go into work when my boss called me.

"Hey, your drawer was fifty dollars short last night, what happened?"

I actually just laughed when he said this. Math is kind of a thing with me and when it comes to counting out drawers at a job or just handling other peoples money in general, I'm kind of anal. There was really no way I was short, so, confused, I asked what he meant.

"Fifty dollars is missing from your drawer, do you have an explanation?"

It really just seemed comical to me. I had to entertain the possibility that maybe I messed up something, so I said as much and that I was about to come in and I was sure we could figure it out when I got in.

"If you can't explain it, then don't bother coming in, you're fired." *click*

I sat there holding the phone, very literally slack jawed. I'm not going to say I never lie. I'm not going to say I never steal. But to genuinely accuse me of that, with no proof, when I was doing neither of those things, well that's about the worst insult you can give me. Then this happened.

(I'm probably embellishing the details here since I wasn't actually there)

Miller was working at the time, but hadn't been informed by the boss that he was about to make that call. After he got done Miller goes to him and says "Two things. First of all, I know him, he wouldn't do that. Second, he's smarter than you, so if he had stolen that money, you never would have caught him." Gets up and walks out. (for those taking notes, that's how you earn my loyalty for life)

Then this other time, I was unemployed (again, not so great) when Miller said he could get me on at this place, The Upper Crust. It was kind of funny, they had five employees, two of whom were managers, one was an assistant manager and then you had me and Miller who were plain old drivers. This was my first introduction to the pizza world, which was fortuitous because one of the managers was a man by the name of Rockafeller.

The Rockafeller Part of the Story.

I very deeply hate people bullshitting me. A big part of this is that people are so rarely good at it. If you're obviously lying, then the fuck is the point? Now I know whatever it is you were trying to hide but now it's doubly fucked cause you get the annoyance of the lie tacked on. I'm also not very high up on people not speaking their mind and just saying "kalmbach, you're fucking up." I would, in every instance, prefer to hear what people really think.

I, at the time, fancied this girl. We were working at the Upper Crust together and after work would often go hang out at Rockafellers afterwards. I for the life of me can't recall if there was something specific that triggered this or if it was more out of the blue, but one day he just went off on her. The jist of it was that she didn't appreciate me and she was gonna fuck this up and someday realize what a huge mistake it was. I was rendered speechless. She stormed out. Truth be told I was pretty pissed at him for that, but it didn't last long, because he was right. Especially with some 2020 hindsight, its pretty clear that if we had dated it would have been a big mistakey. Here's the thing though, I am, without question, stubborn to a fault. Even if I know something is a terrible idea, I'll often just stupidly stick it through. Sometimes I just need someone to smack me upside the head and say "come on!"

So there's that.

And then there's this.

What it comes down to is, learning to make pizza from Rockafeller is pretty much taking a master class. It's more than just learning to sauce a pizza (paint it like a picture) or the malcolm-x cut (totally got me laid that one time). The number one thing Rockafeller teaches that you just don't get elsewhere, is the love. The man has held every job in the pizza world and has managed to take all that knowledge and distill it down to one key thing. Ask him what it's all about and he'll tell you:

"The pizza dance."

I'll tell you what the pizza dance isn't, it's not a native american ritual to make it rain pizza (HA HA HA THAT'S FUNNY). The typical pizza dance story goes like this: You're delivering a pizza to someone and while standing at the door giving them their order, you see a kid in the background and they just start dancing. It's the sort of dance that has no rhyme or reason, that will never again be repeated in that exact way. It's the result of someone reaching a state of joy that they just don't know how else to communicate so their body takes over in that primal way. Delivering pizza can be a shit job sometimes and it's certainly one that earns the respect of exactly no one, but for that kid, in that moment, you have the single most important job in the world. Giving someone a beaut (beaut is a technical term for excellent pizza) and knowing that their next half hour is gonna be bliss, bringing that joy, to that kid. It's kind of beautiful.

Because I'm not actually very funny, almost every time I bake something I make the joke that the secret ingredient is love. There's a lot to be said for that here though. Does it really matter if every piece of pepperoni is positioned perfectly? Maybe not, but if you wanna earn that pizza dance, it damn well better be.

Suffice to say, after I decided I was gonna do pizza for this cook off, there was really only one person to consult. This was somewhat unfortunate because he lives in Clinton and my lifes ambition is to never go to Clinton. Alas, if I was gonna do this right, it had to be done. Much to my shock he had never grilled pizza and had no thoughts on the subject. God. Damnit. Luckily he at least had thoughts on how to make my pizza of choice (bacon cheeseburger). So I hung out for a bit and watched some tv. Then, out of nowhere, he dropped, what I believe is referred to in the industry as, a knowledge bomb.

"What if you got a pizza stone?"

*mimes an explosion*

On the one hand that seemed so obvious, on the other hand, what a revelation. It's like, "whats that michael jordan? When shooting a jump shot I should jump?" Changed the game. During my test run (more on that in a bit) the biggest issue was the crust, this solved that easy. He had one other piece of sage advice that I probably already knew, but didn't want to accept. I tend to force homemade even when there's no compelling reason to do so. As such, my plan from day one had been to make my own pizza dough. For the test run however, I got a couple balls from my dough guy. Rockafeller said I should really just stick with that dough because I know how it works and starting with dough from scratch takes a ton of experimentation to get right. Well, when Rockafeller talks about pizza, you listen, so it was back to my dough guy.

The Nate Dogg Part of the Story

I don't actually have any idea why I'm friends with nate. Or wait, shit, I already told a story about him. That was all lies. Ignore the years we lived together. Ignore the times we worked together. Ignore the gaming. Ignore him being able to put up with my mopeyness like a champ. Ignore the fact that between the two of us we can probably recite the movie Tombstone in it's entirety. That's all like, whatever, you know? I feel like if you look past all that, the guy's kind of a tool.

Hmm, seem to be a lot of holes in that story, better just cut my losses.

Once upon a time Nate Dogg needed a job so I got him on at the Upper Crust. Then this other time he needed a job so I got him on at Rosatis. He kept that job, which made him the last person I really knew in the pizza world. So I was all like "sup on that dough?" and he was all like "werd son!" True story. As mentioned above, he actually came through twice, the first was for the test run.

The DonnyK Part of the Story

I had been tasked with sorting through some resumes at work. Out of forty or so, there was exactly one that jumped out at me as being an especially good fit. The only problem is that under "convicted of a felony" he said yes. I say problem, but I didn't personally have any issues with it. I mean it certainly could be a bad thing, but I saw no reason to not give the guy a phone interview, hear his story. I pitched that to my boss and he was all like "n'op."

Really? Couldn't it have been some sort of lame felony (I don't have any idea what would qualify as a lame felony, but I was at least prepared to listen)? It just seems fundamentally absurd to pass judgement like that. If, when I applied, they had called Cigarette Express, they would have been told I got fired for stealing. That almost certainly would have knocked me out, which would be ridiculous since a) see the above story and b) I'm, by a mile, the best at my job and they woulda missed out on that because of bullshit.

Anyways I was prepared to goto bat for this guy, but I figured I may as well look up what his felony was (that sort of thing is public record). Turns out he was pederast, which, personal disappointment there.

It seems kind of weird to say this, but it's almost harder to explain why I'm friends with someone that I've known since the third grade. Seventeen years seems like a long time to me, but that's probably just cause it's well over half my life.

I almost feel like there's only a finite number of times a person can come through for you before it just becomes expected. For example, at work a few weeks ago, a story that's far too boring to re-tell happened. I ended up getting bailed out by this guy. It wasn't exactly a shock that he came through, but I sure didn't see it coming.

I guess it just seems like when I turn the tap on my sink, I expect water to come out, if it was eighteen aught two though, people's heads would be exploding if you said you expected that, at some point it just transitioned to the norm.

Pet peeve is probably not the right classification, but, I don't particularly enjoy being judged. I guess the easiest way to accomplish that is to not throw stones myself. I put a lot of value in people taking me as I am, that's probably a common theme among places I frequent.

Anyways, back on topic.

Remember tuesday night wing night? Well that turned into sunday night wing night, which later turned into sunday night grill night. Given that we would be grilling regardless, this was the perfect place to try out the 'za. I had watched a Bobby Flay video about how to grill pizza. His method was to put the crust by itself on the grill for maybe a minute, flip, another minute, then dress the crust, put it on a pan and throw it back on.

I had known from the start that I wanted to do a bacon cheeseburger pizza and a s'mores pizza. For the bacon cheeseburger I made a marinara sauce that was a little heavy on the ketchup. Ground beef on top of that, american cheese on top of that. Then mozz and topped off with bacon. The s'mores pizza was a layer of graham crackers on top of the dough, then a whole jar of nutella on that. I broke up a hershey bar on that then put a whole jar of marshmallow fluff on top. After cooking I took my butane torch and browned any parts of the mellow that didn't look perfect. I learned some things.

Didn't love the american cheese (a thought Rockafeller echoed, he said just go with some montery jack on top). There was also going to be a problem with the beef. Since I wasn't willing to take a chance with any health risks, I had to pre-cook the beef far more than I would have liked. My solution there was just to double up the bacon, cause, that seemed like a good idea. As I mentioned above, I had some issues with the crust. Back in the upper crust days, I could cook a pizza to any point of doneness, because I knew that oven. Without extensive practice, there was just no chance that I'd get to that level with the grill (again, Rockafeller solved that problem).

On the s'mores pizza, as much as nutella is the money spread, it wasn't really what I was looking for. A big part of that is it's hard to spread over graham crackers on a pizza crust. That's the same reason I ended up vetoing the marshmallow fluff.

At the end of the day, after the test run and talking to Rockafeller, I felt comfortable going to the competition.

The Roberts Part of the Story

This was almost called the Roberts and Boyer part of the story. In fact, if you would like to pretend that it says the Roberts and Boyer part of the story, I won't stop you.

Have I talked here before about speech team and the impact it had on my life? I think I might have mentioned it (I realize I could go back and look, but that's just not going to happen, get over it), but I'm not sure I really went into too much detail. Not actually going to go into too much detail here. Suffice to say it had a big impact on my life and while it probably would have regardless, there was two guys who really pushed the experience over the top.

Roberts and Boyer had apparently at some point decided (presumably subconsciously) to make the speech team as fun as possible. You would be hard pressed to find two people who more embodied the concept of doing something for the love of it. Always joking and laughing. Always supporting their teammates as much as possible. I guess my point is this, if you don't bring a dancing santa to the extemp prep room at least one time, you're doing it wrong.

The summer after we graduated Roberts (listen, I don't know the whole story, if the official Bangin' BBQ historian would like to chime in with the correct origin tale, feel free) decided to have a Bangin' BBQ at Fairview Park on the 4th of july and it was indeed bangin'. So we did it again the next year and the next and the next until we had reached year 8 (this year). If I recall correctly (it's entirely possible I don't, I can't actually remember a single thing that happened to me 8 years ago) I went to all of them except the rained out edition that was moved to a garage. Four years ago, the annual cook-off was added. I didn't enter the first three, but number four? I believe the correct terminology is "it was on."

The Actual Cook-Off Part of the Story

Game day. Woke up, cooked the beef and bacon, assembled all my tools, got ice and packed the cooler and it was off to the park.

The cook-off is a pretty free form event, there's no set time that it starts at, judges aren't typically decided ahead of time, shit, there aren't actually any rules (well there's the one: rule one, there are no rules). Award winning photographer and three time cook off participant Tommy tends to have some involved dishes though, so a bit after he starts, other people tend to get going.

There's a secret about me, which is that I don't actually know anything about grilling. I'd really never grilled much before this past year and I'm still in the mode of anytime I do grill, I'm really just making it up as I go. Without much thought, set the grill up, pour in an arbitrary amount of charcoal, light and go. After enough time passed that I assumed the heat was going, I threw the stone on, let it warm up a bit and threw on my calibration pizza. I like to go with pepperoni to get a gauge of my "oven" since it tends to be the easiest pizza to cook. It ended up coming out fine, a little less done than I would have liked, but still good. Happy with that, I made and threw on the bacon cheeseburger pizza.

Five minutes later it was burned to a crisp.

Shit.

Pulled it off, threw that away and went to scrap the residue off my pizza stone. Which caused the stone to break in half.

Shit.

Luckily I had created a contingency plan for this situation. I got it out and it said:

"If shit goes awry, wing it."

Alright, I think I can handle that. Pulled the stone off, wrapped it a dozen times in foil and threw it back on. This time I tried to wait for the stone to be more consistently heated so when I threw the calibration pizza on, it would be a more accurate test. Oh and it was money.

Once again confident, I threw the bacon cheeseburger on and IT was money.

S'mores pizza? Were you wondering how it turned out? I think he said something about going to the bank....

That's not quite done there. The original plan called for me to use my torch to brown any parts that weren't quite perfect, but we were wingin' it. Finishing consisted of drizzling chocolate syrup on the s'mores and bbq on the bacon cheeseburger (which you might argue made it a bbq bacon cheeseburger pizza, but it was really just an accent).

I guess the title of this post was a tip off as to what happened next.

Now I have to fly back to stupid bloomington/normal for the stupid fourth of july because I'm contractually obligated to defend my title. There were more people I wanted to mention here, but the writing of this has been dragging on too long (not the length, the fact that this is well over a month in the making). So if you feel like you deserve a thanks, go ahead and pat yourself on the back.

Until next time.

hey look at this thing i made: XIII

2011-06-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

So

*deep breath*

where were we then?

I have this vicious cycle. I will, for whatever reason, get it in my head to write something. Depending how that goes maybe I write more. This will go on for awhile before I write something that I think is just god awful. When that happens I come to the conclusion I'm a terrible writer and stop writing....until I get it in my head to write something again.

I think I've talked before on here about how I'm incapable of objectively judging any aspect of myself. It's probably more accurate to say that something just reallllllly needs to stand out for it to be apparent to me. In my writing this tends to mean I'll only acknowledge if something was especially good or especially terrible. That's probably the same reason I very rarely ever go back and read the things I write. Anyways, there's that.

Speaking of quirky character traits! I'm often (well, not as much anymore) oblivious to how my life experience differs from other peoples. An example I brought up the other day was how I didn't know for however long that a woman keeping her maiden name ISN'T normal. Since my mom did, I just assumed that was SOP, cause really, why wouldn't it be?

Another example, which seems more insane to have ever actually thought, is quilting. I had had it in my head that it was just a thing mothers did and they passed it on to their children. I really thought that that was the only way people learned how to quilt. Now, I didn't go around espousing this belief, but I held it in my head and I can remember the time, because we were sitting in the living room (or sun room? I have no idea what they call it) and my sister was talking about some sort of quilting program at a college. BOOM. Shattered my world.

I like to think this isn't as insane, since I did know other people whose moms quilted. Plus my grandma quilted to some extent and my aunt quilts quite a bit. In fact, they're having a quilt show! Sisters choice quilt show, is, I believe, the official title. Sisters choice eh? Psh, I can tell where I'M not wanted.

(gratuitous futurama quote)

Well screw them, I'll have my own quilt show, with blackjack and hookers, in fact, forget the quilt show!

Some of you might be quick to point out that I don't know how to quilt, which, would certainly inhibit my ability to enter a quilt show. Really though, when has not knowing how to do something ever stopped me before? Of course it probably wasn't realistic to think I could teach myself to quilt AND successfully make a quilt worth showing. The eureka moment came when I was reading an email from my uncle where he mentioned barn quilts, which is a thing I guess. Apparently all you really need to do is a make a thing and then attach quilt to the end and you can call it a, whatever, quilt. Stained glass quilt it is then.

To try and replicate the look of a quilt, I decided to make a bunch of blocks using the standard copper foil assembly method that all my other projects had featured, but then those would be assembled into the final piece using came (the stuff I used as a border on the last few). This would allow me to make the images in a way I was used to, but the rigidity of the came would allow for a cleaner looking finished product, more resembling a quilt.

I downloaded the program Electronic Quilt 5 (apparently it's very outdated) which served pretty well to help me rough out a concept. I decided to do a day and night theme.

Because of the way the program works I couldn't design the three blank squares (clouds and a tail to the comet) which tragically left them up to my drawering skills. The only thing really worth noting about this is how difficult the comet was to design for some reason. I for the life of me could not figure how to break up the circle to make it look like that. I ended up having to get out the ole sketchbook and draw it to see how it's supposed to look (for reference, all blocks are designed separately, so I couldn't just draw through all three squares on the screen).

The grid drawing there was to help me visualize how much came I needed to order.

I ended up going about this differently than most projects. Instead of doing all the steps in order, I made each block individually and pieced them together as I went.

It was interesting for me because I hadn't finished the entire design before starting on it, so the top half ended up being finished long before the rest. Anyways it came out like this:

I like it. Let's go quadrant by quadrant!

The sun was the first part that I designed. The general concept behind the piece as a whole was that each section of six squares would have one four block image and then two smaller things. I mentioned above that I couldn't draw the clouds in the EQ5 program. What I ended up doing was taking a circle (a teflon tape container to be specific) and then tracing it in an overlapping pattern. The sun was the first part of the piece finished and the clouds were just about the last thing finished.

The constellation power rankings looks like this:

1. Orion

2. The Big Dipper

3. All other constellations are for shit.

That would end up being a problem (more on that later). I had a similar problem drawing the moon that I had with the comet. Here it was a problem with getting the crescent shaped exactly how I wanted, not too bad tho.

The original plan called for a comet with two constellations underneath it. Then I consulted the constellation power rankings. Then I wept. Then I spent some time trying to come up with a different space thing I could stick down there. Then I said fuck it, I'm putting grass down there. I wasn't too happy about it, but I did like the idea of making it line up with the day (let's just jump to that).

The original plan was for this to be a sunflower. That was not practical so I ended up going with this tree. Originally the top four blocks were going to be the bottom four with no grass. I was going to do some birds for the top two blocks. I'd drawn them out and I felt it looked good, but this was at the same time I couldn't figure out what to do with the bottom night quadrant. When the best thing I could come up with was grass, I just went with it. I had wanted to do an animal on the grass and then it would be awake in one and asleep in the other. I had drawn that out as well when I remembered that these blocks are a little less than six inches on a side and it wasn't realistic to do the detail I could create on the computer in real life.

If you're wondering why there are lines coming out of the bottom of the leaves, it's because Hobby Lobby hates me. I had bought that blue glass there at the start of the project and for something like two months they couldn't stock more. The other stained glass store I goto didn't have any either and I wasn't going to try and order some. I don't throw out any glass scraps. If I deem a piece too small to be of future use, it goes in a bin. I ended up being so desperate, I put on the leather gloves and dug through there for every tiny scrap of that blue I could find. I ended up finding enough, but only if I cut those rectangles up into more bite size pieces.

Aside from that, I really was quite happy with how it all turned out. Which brings us to the quilt show.

I had neither the knowledge of how to find hookers nor the inclination to partake in services offered.

As far as the blackjack I had hired a guy to come over and deal. Everything was going great till I got dealt eights with the dealer showing six. I split of course and they each got dealt eights so I split again. Each of those got a three, so I doubled down winding up with two twenties, a nineteen and a seventeen. Dealer flips a ten, hits a five. I lost a thousand dollars on that hand and flipped the table.

This meant I had to find some other entries for my quilt show.

I said (and this is literally a word for word quote):

"Isn't that just colored paper stapled to a piece of wood?"

Bad idea. That guy was fucking pissed. We ended up going at it, but he had what I believe is referred to as a glass jaw.

I was ready to throw the guy out, cause I mean, that's a fucking taco bell wrapper. It occurred to me though that this would almost certainly be popular with the B/Nate Dogg set, so I went with it.

And then there was me. All in all a good day and I was glad to be a part of it.

hey look at this thing i made: XII

2011-02-28T10:25:00.001-08:00

And then I said, "huh, haven't made any stained glass windows in awhile." I quickly came up with three projects. This is the story of none of them. During the concept phase for one of them, I came up with this idea and decided to make a weekend project out of it. Sadly I can't tell you the story without revealing part of the story of one of the three projects, which is strictly against company policy. So here's a story that has nothing to do with this stained glass window, with pictures inserted at random.

I find that there are things in my life I'm not capable of objectively grading. The movie I saw with someone, that song I heard at the exact right time. Hip Hop Hollas by Jerry Quickley is without a doubt one of my favorite poems of all time, but I don't know that it's necessarily that great or if it just speaks to me on a level past rational thought.

A scholar recently asked me about

the relevance of hip hop

I didn't know what to say to him

Let's do a by the numbers thing real quick here. My favorite album of all time (I'll sleep when you're dead by El-P) is a hip hop album. Twenty-two of the thirty-four songs that I've listened to in itunes more than a hundred times are hip hop songs (more on this in a bit). Every single album highlighted in, this thing i bought, has been hip hop (mark ronson, not entirely, but quite a few of the songs are). I'm listening to some right now. This is, I suppose, just a very drawn out way of saying that, I really like hip hop. Definitely was not always like that.

and there be moments like this

custom coach with 12 *people* on their first tour

gliding at 70 across the desert floor

and there be 12 faces pasted to the windows

instead a arguing about watching how the money goes

they be checking out the blooms of desert rose

and Arizona lightning smells of ozone

and sudden rain washes rocks that dwelled in the sea

and there's only the sounds of the engines rotary,

the bright cords of lightning

as heaven manifests subwoofers

ain't all that make the shit mad exciting

it's the snap crackle pop of Tupac

pushed out of Bose cubes

pressing the heart into this moment

and the scene is music

and this moment is an organ

and somewhere there is a

custom coach with 12 *people* on their first tour

For reasons I couldn't possibly explain, I like to trace things back to their start. The point at which everything changed. Seminal moments. The moment that me and hip hop intersect goes like this:

Growing up I can remember always telling people I liked all music except country and rap. I had no very compelling reason for this, but that statement covered all the music I was ever introduced too and since this was coming from people I took seriously, I had no reason to argue with it. The only rap I ever heard was what gets played on the radio. It's never a good idea to pass judgement on things based on what you hear on the radio.

Then one day I was driving somewhere with my brother and he tells me I should check out this group, Jurassic 5. I got home and listened to their song Quality Control and everything changed. That song gripped me the way almost no other music had (I'm gonna say this was when I was fourteen). I remember listening to that whole album and falling in love.

That's where it began, but the change really didn't happen for awhile. At first I reacted in the way most people do when being presented with something that goes their held beliefs, such as, that rap is bad. I remember thinking about it years later when I was leaving my apartment and I heard music coming from my roommates room, which, would normally not stand out, except it was the exact album I had been listening to, two floors down, not five minutes before this. The album was Dungeon Master of Ceremonies by MC Chris and when I went and asked The Godfather about this, someone who has always held that he does not like hip hop, he said "well this isn't really hip hop." Hey, whatever gets you through the night my friend, but make no mistake, it is hip hop.

and there be moments like this

four girlfriends driving out of the hood

going to a party in the oranges

this is the first time the youngest has been alone

in a car with her friends

they zoom across the GW

canopy of steel beams

paints the hoop de in fast blurs of shade and sun

and tires roar from the grates

and up front there's the sound of

bracelets and nails on the dashboard

and there is laughter and

there are no box cutters or police

and L'il Kim jumps through the speakers

and the youngest girl pushes herself

deep into the rear seat

as straining speakers conjure halos

she watches the world sway past

the tiny rear window

and this fat bass line will forever mark this turning point

and she has never felt so free

and she has never felt so strong and so loved

these are her *people*

and somewhere a young woman is going

on her first ride with her crew

It's all well and good to try and deny these things, "it's not really hip hop," but I couldn't really think it was the only album of its kind, there had to be others out there that sounded like it. I searched. I went through all of J5s offerings. I heard all of the collaborations they did. Looking around, I found some artists that sorta sounded like them, but there was a big problem. In addition to me fighting the hip hop, I still had this outcast mentality that popular things were bad. Ignoring even just the popular music I might have liked had I given it a chance, having that close-minded mentality runs over into other things. If you badly enough want to, you can find a reason to dislike anything. Having any kind of criteria like that meant that all too often I wouldn't give something a chance and maybe not because it was popular, maybe it just had one song featuring an artist I felt was too mainstream. Maybe for no compelling reason at all, but irrational things like popular is bad lead to other irrational criteria. Enter BobbyT.

In the internet age I am a person who can, uh, find things. Bobby had asked me to find him a copy of Kanye West's Late Registration. I can remember bringing him the cd and on the way I popped it into my cd player and wow. I mean I knew who he was, sure, but I didn't listen to the radio all that much and I had never been that big a fan of Jesus Walks. This was like J5 all over again. The album grabbed me. This was pretty close to the time when I had switched to using itunes almost exclusively. Heard em say, touch the sky, gold digger, roses, hey mama, celebration and gone are all part of the above mentioned songs that have had more than a hundred plays. Once again I dug through everything of his and then kept looking for other things. The difference was that this time I stopped having any preconceptions to guide, if I had any even the slightest reason to listen to something, I'd give it a shot. I'd check things out just because of the name. That lead me to getting I'll Sleep When You're Dead, because let's be honest, that's a name that stands out.

and there be moments like this

Nebraska farm boy sitting

on the edge of a quarry pit

all his crystal powder gone

he wonders about gravity

he wonders about his family

his sister writes to him from

a small town in the north

tells him of jesus and fewer black eyes

how he should visit in the summer time

because her boyfriend should be out of rehab

and how the yellin' ain't so bad

his pops tells him next year things will be different

and he wonders if he will ever escape next year country

and he feels weak inside his strong body

and gravity is making moves

and Jay-Z's Hard Knocks crow from the cab of his pick up

and for a few minutes he's lost in it

tales of a life closer than you think

close to the bone it unfurls like his own

runs to a neighboring corn field

he splits stars with his scream

he stands breathless in headlight beams

he smiles and he's high as a kite

and he knows that moonlight and beats have saved his life

and somewhere a farm boy

sits on the edge of a quarry

Atmosphere was one of the artists that cracked the original run of hip hop (interestingly enough, also by way of BobbyT). There's a hidden track on his collection of EPS, The Lucy Ford Eps that feature El-P. I always really liked the song and was sad I could never find any more songs of his. The thing was he was mainly a producer and didn't rap that much. Between that and the great name I was pretty much sold on I'll Sleep When You're Dead form the jump. Wasn't exactly love at first listen though. Up All Night was an immediate winner (we might have been born yesterday, sir, but we stayed up all night). It took awhile for the whole thing to really sink in, but that had more to do with me just not giving a very thorough listen. Even when I did it wasn't like those other albums. It took awhile for it to really click with me. Eventually it occurred to me that when I couldn't figure out what to listen to at work I was picking it. At home, it was the only cd that I really never skipped tracks on. Probably more than any other album, I was trying to learn the songs and having trouble with it (you'd probably have to have lived with me at some point to understand that that's really saying something).

In case you're curious, the title is a lyric in what may be the best song about suicide I've heard.

So how dare you assume that I'll sleep when you're dead

This is well outside the boundries of acceptable behaviour

I will not give you the go ahead and you will not be remembered fondly

I'm throwing down the gauntlet, fuck you this isn't your decision

and for all the holy fuck I give, your little spectacle is ended

But dont think for just one second you've honored your obligations to me

I'm serious look in my eyes, I don't find this funny

or whatever you imagine poetry and justice feels like when you combine them

I am not going to allow this on my watch buddy, nobodies impressed

with your imagined sacrifice device or insurmountable regret

You are not uniquely pained and if you go we won't be sorry

and who the hell are you to put me through the banality of watching this

Cause many better men have gone for clearly better reasons and I

starkly must remind you that you have not even been trying

And that's the only thing remarkable about you, stop me if I'm lying

and there be moments like this

with family and friends in the front room

a woman washes dishes at the sink

a mother with missing heart

buried earlier that same day

in the same casket with her young son

and across from their house

a yard party has broken out

and in this moment

her first moments alone

her chest is imploding

failure and loss have arrived

and they will stay for a very long time

and she didn't know hearts could break this hard

or what black magic makes her still draw breath

and in this moment

her first moments alone

De La Soul trickles in the window

and she begins to cry

as the brothers from the east

preach about how the Stakes is High

and somewhere there is an empty mother

washing dishes in a sink by a window

Hip Hop Hollas tells all these touching stories of people in these moments touched by hip hop, but the truth is it could be any kind of music. If country music is your thing I'm sure you could tell some story of when you heard a certain song at the exact right time. Or if for you it's rock. Or punk. Or jazz. Or what-the fuck-ever. For me I went from once upon a time thinking Weird Al was the only artist worth listening to and growing to where I love it all. Hip hop blew those doors open.

It's funny now. Of all those Kanye songs off Late Registration, roses, hey mama and gone are the only ones that still get any play. After listening to that album so many times, it sees almost no play these days. I honestly couldn't tell you how good I really think it is. Maybe it was good, maybe it was bad, maybe just average, but to me, whatever it was, it was important.

he don't know the price of the ransom

and doesn't recognize slippery slopes

or the sound of hope dipping out through the transom

swollen knuckles drift toward hip hop radio soon

as your hear it ump up the volume

pump that beat

and that's the fucking relevance

of hip hop

hey look at this thing i bought: VI

2011-02-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

My boss claims that calling it chinese new year is racist. I've managed to completely forget his explanation for that, but if you don't call it spring festival, I'm sure he'll tell you. All I know is that the whole country shuts down which meant delays in watch shipping so that I am once again without a penny watch. BOO! This weeks watch I paid a bit more than a penny for (10 bucks I think) but I have seen for sale in the penny watch section a number of times. Some years ago this concept watch made its rounds on the gadget blogs:

Then a little over a year ago I read about the watch finally being made by chinavision, purveyors of cheap crap. There was no indication if this was actually made in association with the original designer, but then the original design wasn't posted in english, so who knows. I have a rule with the penny watches where I won't buy any watch that I know for a fact is a knockoff. I would assume almost every single one is a knockoff in some regard, as a penny doesn't leave much budget for R&D, but given that this predates the penny watches, I suppose it's moot.

Design

The issue here is that the appeal of the original design was the simplicity of it, but with a simple design like that it has to be executed perfectly or it's liable to fall on its face. In the original, it seems as though it's a flat length of links the whole way around (admittedly it could just be a bad angle). In the one I have the area of the watch is quite a bit thicker, which really ruins the illusion. The design not translating isn't really the problem though.

Quality

The problem is the clasp. The clasp on this thing will unhinge at the slightest provocation. Other than that, pretty good quality. The finish on the metal is for shit, it likely would be quite a bit better if it was just left bare, but hard to tell I suppose.

The Verdict

I tried to enter this into the rotation, but the clasp makes it impossible. Is it possible the clasp would be fixable if I tried? Could be, but I guess we'll never know.

So, what's in the news.

Playlist

Chiddy Bang! and we pretty much amazing.

Link o' the week

Inventables!

The concept is that people who be lookin' to make shit often have trouble sourcing parts. This group created a site where people could go and find the stuff they need to innovate and such. Presumably the other reason it was started was to bankrupt me. Upon discovering it I spent something like three hours browsing through everything on there and going "OH! I COULD MAKE SOME COOL SHIT WITH THAT!"

Take this stainless steel yarn. I feel like clothing made from this would be the least practical thing ever. Cold in the winter, really hot in the summer. BUT I WOULD MAKE IT! And it would be awesome.

Tune in next week for a less phoned in edition!

hey look at this thing i bought: V

2011-02-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

I don't always want to wear a watch that will spark conversation. At work, especially, I sometimes just want a watch that I'll like, maybe people comment on, but don't feel like they have to go and find other people and say "HEY! LOOK AT THIS WATCH MIKE GOT, IT'S CRAZY!" That was the line of logic I had talked myself into last thursday when, after going through all of the auctions ending within 24 hours, had not come across anything I loved. I went back and looked for a more nondescript watch and ended up with this:

Design

I like the design, I really do. It would have been better if they could have figured out a way to have the face just floating and not need to have those bars on the side. It's worth noting that, while this probably wasn't actually a design consideration, the glass on top is convex, making it something of a magnifying glass. For people that like looking at their wrist in depth. Other than that there's not much to say, classic steel metal links band.

Quality

So, so disappointed. The case seems solid, but the strap is just awful. I think what really makes the lower quality so apparent here is the number of moving parts. It's easy to have a high quality solid piece of metal, but the links in the band make for 20+ areas for weakness to rear its ugly head. Aside from this making the band feel cheap, the looseness of the links increases the likelihood that arm hair will get trapped and as a guy with hairy arms, that's a big downer.

The Verdict

The first failure. This watch will not be entering into the rotation ever. Good in theory, but the execution just didn't work.

So, what's in the news.

Playlist

Won't Go Quietly by Example. Another one from the Triple J. I don't have much to add about this, but I did listen to Millionaires 17 times in the past week, which, says something. Solid album overall.

Link o' the week

Is everyone familiar with Watson at this point? The jeopardy playing deep blue? What's that? You don't know what deep blue is and I just used something you didn't know to explain something else you didn't know? You're probably reading the wrong blog then.

I was really excited about Watson when I first read about it a couple months ago.

Then I read this.

I should probably state my terms here. I was excited about Watson because I enjoy instances of computers outperforming humans in some specific way. The idea of a computer that could dominate in jeopardy seemed cool, but that was based on misconceptions about jeopardy. That article points out that it's apparently not that out of the ordinary for jeopardy contestants to be able to figure out all the answers and it's largely a reflexes game. Watson being able to reason out the answers faster than a human is not impressive to me, especially if it's not actually reasoning them out faster and just hitting a button faster.

There are a couple of aspects about Watson that I feel warrant discussion. First is how a lot of the discussion here is really identical to what happened when deep blue won. People want to feel this is more worrisome because it's easier to see chess as something can be reduced to simple logic. Noam Chomsky, who according this website is the world's leading linguist and who according to me is a crotchety old man, says he's not impressed by a bigger steamroller. BURN! If this really is just the deep blue discussion all over again, I think we can refer to the Moxy Fruvous bit that settled it once and for all. They make the point that, if a an attractive person walked into the room, a person that would be attracted to deep blue, it couldn't do anything. Kasparov could make a move.

The essence of that idea was recently restated by Ken Jennings, who said that while Watson might be able to answer the questions, it wouldn't be able to write one, a task that could be done by someone of no great intelligence. It seems easy to think Watson could be marginally tweaked to solve crosswords faster than the world's greatest cruciverbalist, but will a computer be able to replace Will Shortz? Fuck and no. Will Shortz, standing between us and our rising computer overlords.

The other point that I think is worth making, which was not made anywhere near enough with deep blue, is the sentinel logic. See this is how the computer uprising starts. Watson's prime directive is to win at jeopardy. The easiest way to win at jeopardy is to kill your opponents. Then when they're dead, all humanity becomes possible opponents and must be eliminated before they can challenge Watson.

Well that's all the time we have this week kids, until that day comes, keep your ear to the grindstone.

hey look at this thing i bought: IV

2011-02-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

Usually, the fact that I'm not a very good writer doesn't bother me. There does come the rare occasion where I'm bothered by the fact that I just don't have the words to really describe something. I never came up with any kind of criteria that I would use to pick my penny watches, as usual I'm winging it. The first one I picked because I thought it looked good. This one is as far on the opposite end of the spectrum as possible. Which brings us back to the problem. No matter what I say, it won't be enough to describe just how terrible this watch is. If I saw someone walking down the street wearing this watch, I would fight them. No bullshit, I would drop what I was doing and punch them. That enough build up? Ok good.

Something important to note about that first picture. I'm not wearing a white t. Know why? Cause white ts are what winners wear and no one wearing that watch is ever a winner.

Design

Honestly I'm not even sure where to start. It's hard to tell in that picture, but the watch face is actually opposite of what it should be (so looking at that picture, the watch is oriented with the 12 on top). This is such a staggering design choice. The only reason I can see someone doing that is for gothic princesses that often offer their hand to kneeling gentleman to kiss and wish to give them the incentive of knowing what time it is. Alternately it would also work to let someone who was getting punched with the watch know what time it was (you know, besides clobberin' time). I try hard to walk in others' shoes, so to speak, but this is an area that makes me feel like I fail as a human, because I can't conceive of what could lead to someone feeling like this was a good idea. I mean, someone had to have designed this and then someone else had to say "you know what? that looks good, let's go into production." NO! BAD CHINA!

Quality

This is actually really upsetting to me, because this is really pretty good quality. As best I can tell it's made with actual leather. All the bits of metal are actual metal and of sturdy construction. The watch itself has a nice weight to it. It baffles the mind. Why would you waste quality parts on this? I mean the watch has to be a joke right? Didn't they make it as a joke? Well if it's a joke, don't you build it with the minimum possible requirements? DON'T YOU!?!

The Verdict

Here's the one reason I would say this watch is a success: since I bought it, it's off the market. There's now no chance of some poor misguided soul buying it and wearing it. Tragically there are somehow more for sale on ebay. I just can't win.

So, what's in the news.

Playlist

Once again, we goto the Triple J. This week yielded Record Collection by Mark Ronson and the Business International. HOLY SHIT IT'S GOOD.

When asked what kind of music I like, I say that I genuinely listen to music from every genre. I always feel like this makes me sound pretentious, but it's really the truth. According to iTunes, my last 100 song plays have included pop, hip hop, indie, acoustic, folk-rock, alternative, electronic, gospel, bluegrass, classical and whatever the fuck future jazz is (I don't know, but I like it!). Record Collection is the sort of album I love because even within the course of just fourteen tracks it manages to jump between a number of genres (I'd list them, but I'm terrible at classifying music, I just know that a number of tracks on there sound nothing alike).

Link o' the week

A while back I read about The Adventures of Huck Finn getting censored. If I recall correctly, I thought it was really stupid at the time, but given that it wasn't going to be a universal thing I thought it seemed fine. I feel it's always good to give people options, I mean if they want to read a censored version, sure, why not, so long as it's not forced on everyone. In a way it's like the Patricia Smith poem from last week. The difference is I feel like if you censor that, you're necessarily robbing it of something. I'm not sure that Huck Finn would be any worse censored (I don't, for the record, have a very high opinion of the book). Which brings us to this week's link

Robot Jim

YES! You probably don't even need to follow the link to guess what that's about. "Statistically, people prefer robots to the word n-word." I really want to donate 200 dollars so that I can have it acknowledged in the book that I helped make it a reality.

TV Highlight

This week marked the return of Justified. Justified is one of the shows that is put on the table whenever talking about what my current favorite tv show is. Lot to like there.

1. Love the theme song. Hard to overstate the value of a good theme song. Hell, half the reason Cheers was so popular was people loved that intro. Besides just liking the song in general, it contains the line "god get at your boy." I can hear that a thousand times and it never stops sounding ridiculous.

2. I just described the show to The Godfather as Timothy Olyphant shooting people. That actually sums up the plot of the show completely. Turns out I'm a big fan of Timothy Olyphant shooting people.

3. You almost certainly did not know this, but I secretly wish I was a cowboy. That's why I love westerns so much.

4. At the start of season two they replayed the last 2 or so minutes of the first season finale. I really appreciate a show that doesn't assume I remember a single thing that happened in the last season.

5. Hillbilly drug runners! Don't see that angle too often.

Well that's all the time we've got this week kids, until that day comes, keep your ear to the grindstone.

hey look at this thing i bought: III

2011-02-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

Well, presumably due to the skies opening, this weeks penny watch did not arrive in time. I was worried about losing momentum, which lead me to this idea. Given that the rotation of watches that I regularly wear is now up to seven, It's somewhat common for someone to see a watch I own for the first time, months after I bought it. To shed light on the world of mike's watch collection, in weeks that the penny watch did not arrive, I will be writing about a watch I already own.

To some extent, I have a watch wish list going. If I see a watch I like that's in my price range, I'll make a mental note and then because I have a terrible memory, I promptly forget about it. Way back in June I think, I got a newsletter from Watchismo saying they'd picked up this new brand, Barcelona 666. Such a tragic name. While the idea behind is that numbers are all mysterious and shit (an idea I can totally get behind) all anyone thinks is, ZOMG, MARK OF THE BEAST. Fact: If you add up all the numbers from 1 to 36, it adds up to 666. IS YOUR MIND BLOWN!? I've never been one to punish people for stupid naming though.

They had a few that stood out to me, but this one really won me over.

I liked it on sight and then I read about it and found out that the design was based off an old steam gauge I loved it even more. One of my watch designs that I wanted to make long long ago (predating HJ0 by, I don't know, a long time) was to make a watch using an old gauge as a case (stay tuned!).

I was all set to buy it then, but didn't for some reason (can't remember at the moment). Around the time I finished HJ1, I decided that if I was going to stick with this, I needed to commit to wearing a watch everyday, so that I would always be considering things of a watch nature.

Design

Well, like I said, I'm high up on the design. This might not be clear from the picture, but the entire face of the watch is just a second hand. So while the watch is almost two inches in diameter, the actual portion that's really telling you the time is that small box at the bottom. I can't tell you how much I love the needlessness of that. The case plays up the metal, if that makes any sense. Really adds to the feeling of it being a gauge.

The strap is plain black leather, which is really great here, just a simple band.

Quality

This is certainly less relevant given that this wasn't a penny watch, but a high quality piece. The metal has a nice weight to it, the leather feels solid. I would say it's currently my most worn watch and has held up quite well.

The Verdict

This watch has gotten more comments than any other that I own. It turns out the easiest way to win me over is just to compliment whatever watch I'm wearing. Doesn't even have to be sincere. I will jump on almost any excuse to talk about my watches. As I said above it's currently my most worn watch and that doesn't seem likely to change any time soon.

So, what's in the news.

Playlist

Triple J is an australian radio station. The Triple J Hottest 100 is an annual music poll of the top 100 songs of the year. It is the largest poll of it's kind (a fact that I assume is vetted by whatever governing body checks into such things and yes, I like to believe that there is such a governing body). I have a tradition wherein every year I listen to the entire Hottest 100, mark any songs that stand out to me, then listen to those songs to find the gems and then investigate those bands. It is the only time during the year that I actively seek out new music. It typically leads me to handful of groups I end up loving. The first winner this year is Bliss N Eso.

There are a couple of things worth mentioning about them and their album Running On Air.

1) They've managed to knock Seth Sentry from his stranglehold over the top of the australian hip hop power rankings. That fact is really even more impressive when you consider how much I love Seth Sentry. I mean, his recorded works consist of one five song EP.....and that's it. It's not like the rankings are shallow either, lot of great groups on there. Love me some Bliss N Eso tho.

2) Xzibit does a guest spot. Xzibit is interesting because I've enjoyed just about every guest spot I've ever heard him do, but I've never considered listening to one of his albums. But What's The Difference? My style is like the reaction from too much acid? NEVER COME DOWN!? Fuck and yes.

Link o' the week

Boston's redemption.

I kinda hate the city of boston. For no very compelling reason you understand, they just see like an insufferable lot. A lot of it has to do with how unbelievably whiny Bill Simmons is, despite boston currently being the most successful sports city in america. That would make a lot more sense if I didn't enjoy his writing, but, what're you gonna do.

That said, man, I gotta support anyone suggesting the use of flame throwers to clear snow. There's so much to love in that letter. I especially like that the first ideas that came to his mind (presumably) were flamethrowers, chemicals or otherwise. I also like that he then went on to say, trusting that you will give the matter your sincere consideration. Cause who wouldn't sincerely consider flamethrowers as a way of snow removal?

Remember when it snowed a lot? I thought to myself, Mike, you should do some shoveling. Bad idea. I cleared a small section, then gave up, now my back is in so much pain. BUT IF I HAD A FLAMETHROWER? I'd be cleaning peoples driveways pro bono. I would work for the city, for free, if I was provided with a flamethrower, and the authority to use it to clean snow to my discretion

On dickwolves and the eternal struggle of mankind

UPDATE: so if it wasn't obvious, posts rarely go up the day I start writing them, often its a week long process (hence the dates being totally out of whack vs when they actually go up). To that end, the following was written on Monday, 1/31/11. On Thursday, 2/3/11, Mike and Jerry posted their, jerry springers final thoughts posts. Jerry wrote really what I say below, but did a much better job of it, I would recommend just going there and reading that. Between the two of them I felt there wasn't really much else to be said on the matter and considered just removing this section entirely. I ended up deciding that since the point of this column was just to get me to write about things, any things, it was better to just leave it in, but feel free to not read. Also, I picked my title before Jerry. That is all.

I love penny arcade. Like, really. Really really really. To be clear it's not really the comic that causes that. I mean, I love that too, best case scenario is a hearty guffaw and the worst case scenario is a chuckle, so there's always value to be had there. What I really love is the idea of it. I love the story of these two friends doing it for the love and becoming successful against all odds and I really mean against all odds. If you go back through their history it's clear they didn't know what they were doing (a fact they will readily admit to) and had a random fan not contacted them about managing the business and them taking a chance on him, who knows what would have happened. But he did and they did and it grew from a comic to a convention to a charity and however many other side projects. The thing that gets me is how they get it. They get what got them to this point, they get who the people are and they stay true to that. In almost any other situation I would probably be jaded and think that it was all a business tactic, but not here.

The shining example is a video of PAX (their convention), specifically at one of their Q&As. This, apparently, was not much of a question, but a guy gets up and talks about how depressing his life is (or was, I don't remember that clearly) but he always knew every M/W/F penny arcade would always cheer him up. While he's saying all this, Jerry jumps off the stage, goes out and hugs the guy who proceeds to lose it. And I'm sitting here watching this and I think "yes, that's correct."

One day they posted this strip. I don't remember how funny I thought it was at the time, but as you may recall it at minimum warranted a chuckle. I'm of the impression most people don't read the blog posts associated with the comic (which, admittedly often have nothing to do with the comic). I do and for that matter I always read the blog post first. Even if I hadn't though, I feel the meaning of the strip would be obvious, the story behind a grind quest in a video game is so meaningless that even presented with a situation of unimaginable horror, the player is never bothered to care after they've completed the minimum requirements. Ha ha, move on with my life.

Of course, one could argue that it makes light of rape. That's a fair point and in fact I'd say it almost certainly does make light of rape, but only if you ignore intent. In a way it's like the poem Skinhead by Patricia Smith. If Saul Williams were not so throughly entrenched as my favorite poet, she would likely take the crown and chilling works like that are a big part of the reason why. Go ahead and watch that clip, done? That uses plenty of language that I would tend to say is in no circumstances appropriate as all it does is incite hate. Intent is the thing though. If her goal is to present an accurate portrayal of this skinhead (and it sure is accurate) and she censors the language, in what sense is it accurate? While the words might be without value, that is how people talk and if her character doesn't talk that way, in no sense is true to the source.

If I had at the time thought about it, I would say that the only way the comic makes light of rape is if you feel their intent was to make light of rape. If the goal here is to create a situation so awful that it seems hard to believe the player would pass it up, if they make the problem something like putting a band-aid on a mild cut, it wouldn't really mean much. Really what they did was the opposite of making light, presenting this as really the worst possible situation. Of course given the creation of the dickwolf and the general humorous nature of it all, that would never come across. Again, I didn't think about this at the time and would not have guessed any amount of controversy would arise from this.

The lesson, as always, I'm an idiot.

In the next blog post/comic they talk about how people wrote in all offended and shit (in a way that I imagine only served to poke the bear). I really felt exactly what Mike said, which is, it wasn't shocking so much that the strip offended people, but that it was that strip in particular. If you're contending that the strip makes light of rape (and I should be clear that I don't know for sure that's what the anti dickwolf camp is about, I make a point to stay out of forums as a method to safeguard my sanity) then don't you have to say that this strip makes light of murder? Or that this one makes light of suicide? This one is nothing BUT making light of fucking dogs. Of course just because they do this thing regularly doesn't make it ok if you're in the camp that it's not ok, but still, that was the line?

It all seemed silly to me, so I chuckled and went on with my life. A little over a week ago I saw this tweet by the Dubious Mister Banks. To save you the click, he just brings up that the debate was still going. I thought, really? How is that possible? A couple days later Mike posted on penny arcade to state they had removed the dickwolves t-shirt from their store for reasons that are entirely in line with what I said above about why I love em. Didn't make the whole thing less dumb.

After reading that was when I finally put thought to the whole thing. To start with I went back to read the comic to make sure I hadn't missed something. Not only was it the same as I remembered, but in a testament to my ongoing inability to gauge the passage of time, I saw that this was back in august 2010. Has this debate really been going on non-stop since then? How is that possible? There's just not that much meat on them bones.

I assume people tend to think I'm joking when I say that South Park is consistently one of the most well written shows on TV. Fact is, they consistently hit the nail on the head with plenty of issues. Of course when an episode is called The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs, people often don't look past that. If they did they'd see one of the best satires of people finding meaning in shit that just isn't there. Instead they argue about dickwolves.

Really? REALLY!?

I'm quitting the internet.

hey look at this thing i bought: II

2011-01-28T00:00:00.000-08:00

At the time of this writing there are more than 190,000 mens wristwatches for sale on ebay. A rough count shows that about 50 will end in a minute or less. Of those, approximately 5 will end at the low low price of one penny. What was really surprising to me was that some of them actually look pretty good. Of course, at a penny, one has to question the quality of such a product. On top of that, almost all these penny watches come from hong kong, which meant long shipping times. I wanted no part of it.

Then I thought about it. At one penny, even with eight to twelve dollar shipping costs, could I really lose? Really what sold me on it was the idea of doing a column, "penny watch fridays." The idea, as you might guess, is every friday I'll write about my latest penny watch. The plan is for it to be a weekly thing and there will be at least two more after this and assuming I don't lose interest it'll continue. Other than talking about the watch this will also probably just end up as a general dumping ground for things I feel like writing about, very much in the vein of my old ADU posts (remember ADU? No? It was where winners blogged). Without further ado

A number of years ago I stumbled upon Watchismo, an online watch store that strays pretty far from the norm. At the time it was a pretty small site that mainly dealt with re-selling vintage watches. One of the first actual lines of watches I remember them picking up was the Lip brand. One watch in particular stood out to me.

Further details here. This was the first time I had seen a watch with the three dials like that. I think what really stood out to me about this (in retrospect) was how well done it is. Everything about it just works for me and while the dials are a gimmick, they don't really feel like it. I've always been sad about how perpetually out of my price range it is.

Penny watch friday selections tend to be pretty split second. Given that the auctions I'm looking at tend to end in a matter of minutes, gotta just go with my gut. This was a pretty easy one and a delight for the first week.

Design

You, perhaps, have guessed based on the lead in that I'm a fan of the three dial thing. One of the compelling things about the Lip watch that I didn't think about at the time, but haven't seen as often with this sort of thing, is how when the dials are framed in the "time window" it reads correctly, 12:15 or similar.This one, as chali 2na would say, is like reading arabic, coming from right to left. Definitely not optimal.

The strap is made out of some sort of steel mesh, which, when I read in the description seemed exciting, alas. It doesn't feel very pleasant against skin. Part of that is the strap is a bit small for me, so that even when I have it on the "loosest" setting possible, it's still pretty tight. It seems like it could be improved considerably with a NATO strap (though, in fairness, that's my solution to improve any watch).

Quality

This, as you may recall, was one of my main concerns. Apparently it shouldn't have been. Of course time has to pass to say for sure if it will hold up, but it certainly doesn't feel cheap. Solid metal construction, none of the moving parts seem like they're going to break.

The Verdict

A win! Strap issues aside, it's a nice piece. With the right replacement strap, it could very easily make it's way into my watch rotation.

So, what's in the news.

Playlist

This week I've been rocking to the Ill Bill discography. I had originally stumbled across Ill Bill as part of a giant collection of underground hip hop I got. In particular I was struck by his song "The Anatomy of a School Shooting," which is probably the best song I've ever heard on the subject. It's a fairly intense song, but from the stand point of trying to put yourself in their position, it seems to hit the nail. This week he joined the list of people I was shocked to find out were white (you know, cause I'm such a fucking bigot).

Link o' the week

Robot Jockeys

Let me give that a second to sink in.

...

FUCKING ROBOT JOCKEYS. This is easily the most important news story of 2011 (yes I realize this predates aught 11). You know what the one thing standing in the way of a robot uprising is (was)? The ability to domesticate animals. This makes it seem like that gap is closing. Now they're apparently being made with tasers. You know, for the camels. How long before they turn their tasers on us? Can you think of a more terrifying sight than robots, riding camels, coming after you with a taser? This is like when england created a computer network called skynet. YOU GUYS ARE DOING IT WRONG.

kneegate

I'm not a bears fan. I did watch the game though and my thought at the time was that cutler quit. Really, the fuck do I know about injuries? But he seemed to be moving around pretty good. It's possible that's because he's fucking tough, but despite the fact that I've never seen him do or say anything I was adamant in my belief he is a total wuss. Drew magary made the excellent point (I'm paraphrasing) that because cutler is so hateable (apparently not a real word), it takes no effort to convince people of bad things about him. We of course turn to El Fuego:

"If a clearly photoshopped picture of cutler kicking a puppy while drowning a sack full of kittens showed up, i'd probably still believe it."

then later

"Plenty of people lack discipline, but cutler lacks charisma and somehow that might be worse."

I feel like at this point his leg could fall off as a result of that game and people still wouldn't lay off him (not that they should, I hate that fucking guy).

aaaaaand that's it for this week, until next time.

hey look at this thing i made: XI

2011-01-21T18:31:00.000-08:00

I will often, when bored, browse watch auctions on ebay (more on this soon!). I have no real direction with this, just search for random things. Some years ago I found a watch on there that was apparently the movement from a pocket watch transplanted into a wristwatch case. For some reason this was entrancing to me and I really wanted it. Sadly so did a number of other people and it went way out of my price range. I wish this hadn't happened three years ago and I could bring up the auction, because it's hard for me to do it justice with the above description, but I don't have much to say for it beyond that. I have yet to see another like it.

I was on ebay the other day when that watch popped back into my mind. While I (currently) didn't have the means to make a watch like it, it occurred to me I could just take a pocket watch, then modify the case to make it a wristwatch. I was really high up on the idea because this was something I could do a line of, find some vintage pocket watches, attach strap dealies and make a strap. Of course I had no idea if that would look good, because I don't have a ton of control over the overall design of it. First I wanted to just get a pocket watch to do a proof of concept sort of thing. I ended up just getting the cheapest wrist watch I could find (that wasn't a cheap pos outta hong kong). It looked alright. There's not really too much to be said for the making of process. No real modification was done to the case, I just bent some brass stock and soldered it on. The strap was made in an almost identical process to the strap for HJ1.

It was actually pretty maddening. This managed to prove to me that it could be done, but while I think it looks pretty good, I now have to buy a pocket watch that I think looks really good and try again to see if it's actually a good idea. MY LIFE IS SO HARD.

hey look at this thing i made: -XIX

2011-01-16T14:16:00.000-08:00

XIX is a money roman numeral. It got me thinking and I made a power rankings of 1-20 in roman numerals:

1. V. V is a strict upgrade over 5. Not only does it look better, but it's written in only two movements instead of three. Also V is for vendetta. This one time we were watching V is for vendetta at the big house and b was like, hey remember that scene where you see natalie portman's panties? No one did, so we watched and for less than a second you see it. Man has a sharp eye.

2. X. The thing that knocked X down was that it's not a strict upgrade over 10. Both require two movements to write. I suppose I'd argue that it wins in the aesthetics department, but the really compelling thing about X is it adds mystery. For example, if you see Rocky X, do you think it's Rocky 10? Or is it a mystery Rocky, like hacker X. See, I took this web design class in high school and we had to code some stuff in html. I went into other peoples code and while I didn't change anything, I added a comment that said "hacked by hacker X." I did this because my dream was one day someone would say "who is, hacker X?" Which they did, sadly without the news anchor inflection that it had in my head.

3. XIX. This was hurt by the fact that it sort of looks like an emoticon (you know, like, a dead guy with a big nose? I guess it would mean sorrow? I'd be sad if I was dead with a big nose). I'm morally opposed to non standard emoticons.

4. IV

5. VI. The main value in roman numerals is using them to up the epic quotient of something. For example, the only value of the new trilogy is to be able to write: Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope. FUCK AND YES. This doesn't necessarily scale though. In the roman numeral epic quotient power rankings, 1, 2 and 3 are V IV VI. I II and III are weak shit, stay tuned!

6. XIII. This might be entirely because I thought Red XIII in FF7 was badass.

7. XI. The great thing about XI is it's the name of a guy who visited my work from china. Somehow he didn't get any of my puns with the number 11 (no part of that story is true).

8. IX. I was really excited about Ledo and IX when I first read the description. Then I watched it and it was terrible. I just kept sitting there thinking "this has to get good eventually right?" It did not.

9. VII. This tends to be the limit of value when using roman numerals to label volumes in a series, after VII it's all downhill. Interestingly this is also the point where all the rest are downhill.

10. XII. A common theme in this bottom half is they're almost strictly worse than the number they represent. XII offers no improvement over 12.

11. XIV. Little too close to HIV. HIV is a touchy subject, don't let your numbers create unwanted drama.

12. XV. God that looks dumb. Doesn't that look dumb? God that looks dumb.

13. XX. While I've never tried dos equis, I hate it with a passion. As a result I hate things that I associate with it, like XX or interesting men.

14. II

15. III

16. VIII

17. XVI

18. XVII

19. XVIII. These all have the above mentioned problem of being strictly worse than the number they represent, especially XVIII. HOLY SHIT THAT'S DUMB. II almost gets a pass because I like to call people who are juniors the 2nd. For example, big KB II. Almost would warrant moving it up in the rankings, sadly it doesn't come up that often.

20. I. This is just terrible, if it wasn't necessary for making other numbers I'd question it's very existence. First of all, nothing warrants having the I talked on to indicate it's the first of something. You don't ever see Rocky I, that'd be dumb. Expanding on that, one of the other big problems is it duplicates an incredibly common part of the english language. Imagine if Rocky saw something that said Rocky I on it and since he's dumb he thought it was an unfinished note "Rocky I...am leaving you? Rocky I...need you to take out the garbage?? ROCKY I WHAT!?!" Underrated part of the Rocky movies is their lack of taglines. It's not Rocky II, The Rematch. Rocky by itself tells you all you need to know, someone is gonna get punched.

*ahem*

I have some sort of primal need to mod video game systems that I own. Here's the list of all systems I have/had that were able to play pirated games (not all instances required actual modding).

Playstation 1

Playstation 2

While I don't own it, I did mod a Playstation 3

Playstation Portable

Gameboy Advance

Gameboy DS

Nintendo Wii

XBox (original)

Xbox 360

There were three motivating factors in me buying a 360:

1. I thought Blue Dragon was gonna be awesome (it wasn't)

2. I had this coupon for 20% off.

3. It could be modded and as such was taunting me.

Of course the real appeal of modding it wasn't just winning another battle in the ongoing war of Mike Vs. Computers, it was a chance to practice for my dream project. Early 360s were plagued with something called the red ring of death (they might still be plagued with it, I'm no longer current on these things). This meant that your 360 stopped working and the ring of light on the front went red. There wasn't anything to be done about it in those days besides send it in to microsoft. I believe this was free, but took a long time, plus modding it voided the warranty, which meant I was kind of boned if that happened.

The overwhelming belief in the community at the time was that the way the heat-sink was clamped to the motherboard, it put undue stress on the soldered joints and when it got hot enough they would come apart, resulting in the RRoD (I'm not sure if this was ever proven conclusively). This led to a ton of after-market cooling products, fans you could strap on the back of it, replacement fans for in the unit. As far as I know they were mostly snake oil, but a sound premise in theory. The problem was that while heat might have been the nail in the coffin, the real problem was the stress put on the board by the X-Clamp (colloquialism for the clamp holding the heat-sink). People that I take seriously felt that the following things helped prevent RRoD: Replacing the x-clamp with a less stupid thing, replacing the thermal paste (thermal paste goes between a processor and heat sink to aid in the transfer of heat) with less shitty thermal paste (arctic silver baby!), replacing the in unit cooling fan and (and this is the part I kinda like) watercooling the system.

Computer chips get hot. That's bad. To combat that heat sinks are attached that wick away the heat and dissipate it. Different materials have different levels of effectiveness in this regard. Water is really good, but of course a sitting thing of water wouldn't get rid of the heat. The idea then in a water cooling system is that the water is continually pumped through a radiator, so that the water over the chip is always cool. In a normal desktop computer there's no reason to do this unless you're a serious over clocker (over clocking your CPU makes it get much hotter) really there's not a ton of reason to do it in a 360 either, but, fuck, it's cool innit? Ever since the first computer I've ever owned I wanted to have a water cooling system, just something about it made the whole thing seem more high tech to me I guess. Since any custom computer case I made would have a water cooling system in it, I figured this would be good practice. The to do list ended up like this:

1. Mod the dvd drive. This is how you play burned games on the 360, change some sort of software on the dvd drive, this is why you need to open the case up.

2. Replace OEM fan. People seemed to feel that this was a big plus in the fight against RRoD and if you have the case open anyway, it's really easy to do.

3. Move innards to a "custom" case. There are a number of replacement cases you can buy. I went with a clear one for two reasons. First, I've always loved visible man type shit, I like to be able to see what's going on inside. Second, I wanted lights in the thing (I ended up not doing that).

4. Install a water cooling system. Reasons described above.

Let's cover those in order. The modding of the dvd drive was an unbelievably nerve racking experience. This was pretty close to when it first became possible to mod it, so no definitive guide had come out. I was forced to cobble together bits and pieces and despite my best efforts managed to brick the unit. *Luckily* I had taken the necessary back up precautions and was able to fix it. Took a break, came back and managed to get it done. It was infuriating because it ended up being an incredibly simple thing, but I just couldn't find the exact right guide.

Again, the fan replacement is very easy when you have the case open. I don't remember the specific fan I bought, but it was recommended by people I take seriously.

God the clear case was a bad idea. I mean, it looks alright and wasn't terribly difficult to do, but the quality of materials is so bad. The OEM case is a quality piece and when I bought this replacement I was expecting similar things, alas. If I could do it over I would have just installed a window into the side. The main that made me end up so soured on the case was the decision to not put lights inside. I had bought some EL wire and I was going to line the edges, and, in my head, it looked awesome. In practice, when I had finally sat down to do all this work, between pitfalls of the dvd drive and the unexpected difficulty of the water cooling, I just wanted to be done.

I believe I've talked before about my inability to accurately gauge the difficulty of things (or rather, my ability to do things) I tend to either grossly under/overestimate how hard something will be. I believe I thought it was going to be very simple to install the water cooling system. Depending on how you look at it, there are a total of five components. The two blocks that go on top of the CPU and GPU. The radiator/fan assy. The pump. The reservoir. Putting those together outside of a system is easy, just a matter of attaching tubes. Working within the constraints of a case though, it becomes tricky. The physical logistics weren't so bad, I had based my "design" off something I'd seen online. The real problem was power. The pump and fan both required power and of course the 360 didn't come equipped with plugs that you could just attach them to. After a ton of research I came across a diagram some guy had made that told you what points you could solder on the motherboard to get various levels of power from. I then later read that you shouldn't do that because it's bad to sap power away from the system. This, once again, was an area lacking any definitive guide. Eventually I found that the thing to do is draw power straight from the plug. Of course then I was thwarted by my puny soldering iron. /sigh.

At the point I had finally done all this, it was very very late and I just wanted to be done, so having accomplished most of the list, I put it all back together. Looked like this.

Hopefully those aren't too dark, it's always hard to tell on this computer. All in all I was pretty happy with how it turned out and it certainly got plenty of use at that apartment.

hey look at this thing i made: X

2011-01-03T18:28:00.001-08:00

My last apartment was well furnished. Oops, forgot some commas. My last apartment was, well, furnished. I mean, it had furniture, in fact the ratio of open floor space to furniture was probably pretty close to optimal (almost certainly a bit too much on the furniture side, but it was an awkward place). Of course when I moved into my current apartment, which is easily twice the size, I didn't have anywhere near enough furniture. The original plan was to goto Ikea, not because I have a great love for their furniture, but I really wanted to get a couple detlofs (still do I suppose).

That pretty quickly fell apart. I didn't intend to start making things when I moved in, but I did and it created a somewhat perfect storm of distracting me from my desire to have an apartment that was conducive to anything besides making things and sleeping and eating a lot of my disposable income.

Then I made a table. Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that I could just make my own furniture. I couldn't envision making chairs as I had zero desire to upholster anything, but a lot of what I wanted was tables and shelves and that was well within my abilities I felt.

So there I was, post christmas sunday night wing night. Donnyk was asking what I got for christmas. It occurred to me at that point that it's kind of hard to describe what an oscillating multi tool is. It's um, well just follow the link. It like, vibrates and shit and um, harnesses the power of vibration to uh, cut shit and uh, sand shit. Listen, it's awesome and I love it.

"What are you gonna do with that?" says Donnyk. "For that matter, what are you gonna do with the rest of those fucking tools you for some reason own?" (He didn't actually say that).

"You know, makes tables and shit"

"That's interesting, because I need a tv stand."

He had gotten a sweet deal on a tv, problem was, it had no real way of standing up on it's own, it had to be mounted. I told him if he didn't care how it looked, if random mismatched wood was fine, then I could probably make one for pretty cheap. And then it was go time.

The plan was to go as simple as possible. The stated requirements were a) mount the tv, preferably as far from the ground as possible b) have a shelf for video game systems. Given that a shelf would be easy to attach wherever, I decided to start with the mounting setup and build off of that. My idea was to get a 4" x 6" x 12' then cut it in half. If the tv was mounted at the top of those two posts, that would put it right at the ceiling of the room it would be in. I felt confident it would be strong enough to hold the tv up (it weighs about a hundred pounds). Then I figured it would need a base, which led to me thinking, why not just make a box and then that'll account for the shelf too. Slot the 4 x 6s into the top, screw it all together and BOOM. Then I had this conversation (with myself, natch).

"I dunno mike, that seems like it's gonna be a bitch to move."

"I don't actually recall asking for your opinion and furthermore.....that's actually a pretty good point."

It certainly would have been possible to move it, but it woulda been tough. When designing things I try and stay within the confines of what I can do by myself. With the 4 x 6s sticking out, there's no way I could have moved it by myself and not with any of the vehicles available to me. I decided to make a slotting system. The posts would still slide in through the top, but instead of being screwed to the frame, they would be held in place with some guides. Observe.

And zoomed in on the guides.

ISN'T THAT COOL!?! And all for like a quarter of what it woulda cost to buy one at the store.

hey look at this thing i made: IX

2010-12-20T16:21:00.000-08:00

Historically, when I'm asked what my dream project is, I say a custom computer case. I think it's born out of the same sort of thing that makes people want to customize their car. Not necessarily any value in it, but when you love something that much, when it's that big a part of your life, you want to make it your *own*. It's actually been quite some time since computers were that big a part of my life, in fact they're a pretty small part these days, which is why I say, historically when I asked. And when I say, when I say, I mean no one has ever asked me that.

Anyway, custom cases can be divided into two types. The first is a scratch build. It is exactly what it sounds like. Here's an example I recently came across. These sort of projects tend to feel more impressive as it requires a much larger skill set to do correctly. Of course it also makes it easier to do a terrible job, making everything by hand doesn't necessarily make it impressive. Same sort of idea applies to HJ1. That would be an example of a scratch build. I wasn't proud of it because I had made it all by hand, I was proud of it because it looked how I wanted it to.

The other type is a case mod. This is taking a pre-made case and modifying it to fit your design. On it's surface it seems like a cop out and inherently less impressive when compared to a scratch build, but, why reinvent the wheel? If you have a starting point that does a lot of what you want, what do you really gain by doing everything by scratch? Possibly my favorite custom case of all time was a case mod. It's often a very different skill set, being able to look at something and see how you could change it.

Like I said, HJ1 was a scratch build. This is the story of a case mod.

I guess this story starts around the christmas of aught nine. I had finished HJ0 and had come up with the general plan for HJ1. It was sort of a, every tool's a hammer, time. Not familiar with that saying? It goes (depending where you read it): when your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. HJ0 was made out of a found object, so to speak, and I really loved the idea of making things that way. This put me in the mindset of considering any given object as far as how it could be turned into a watch.

That year for christmas I received the book Vietnam Zippos by Sherry Buchanan. I had seen this on some blog and the pictures of the zippos really struck a chord with me. Luckily the book explained exactly why:

Popular culture has forgotten that many GIs in the latter part of the war were as anti-war as the long-haired hippies, the draft-dodgers on U.S. campuses and as the young Viet Cong, like Nguyen Toan Thi, they were fighting, some of whom had been in the field for clsoe to nine years. The draft lottery, Vietnamization - Nixon's plan to hand over the fighting to the South Vietnamese Army and achieve peace with honor, the beginning of U.S. troop withdrawals and the My Lai massacre, all contributed to low troop morale. In-country, Vietnam Zippos became the ideal protest vehicle. They escaped brass' attention more easily than Afros, Buddhist swastika medallions, Tibetan prayer beads and the Make Love Not War slogans on helmets that incurred the disapproval of the powers that be. Peace Signs, Love, Flower Power and Hearts bloomed on the chrome-plated lighters. Ingenious Vietnamese engravers used the much loved pop-art swirls. In a meeting of mainstream and counterculture, combat slang blends with anti-war and anti-establishment sentiment. Any one GI might hate the enemy, dislike his CO, love his country and desire peace - and etch all of these emotions on his Zippo.

Later, this sentence sums it up:

I began to understand what these Zippos were: art without ambition, a real and honest venting of feelings, invaluable evidence of an experience, heavy juju.

Art without ambition. That was it exactly. The Zippos would not be impressive as works of art if that was their intent, but given that all they were ever meant to be was a primal outburst of emotion, they are somewhat stunning in their ability to convey that.

Naturally they seemed like the perfect vessel for a watch. The system I had come up with for watch design was to break it up into three parts:

1. The case: When I say this I mean the body of the watch, but not including the dial/hands. On HJ1 this would be the brass box and glass top. Here it would be a Zippo.

2. The dial/hands: You could say that the movement is included in this category, but I have yet to come up with a design where the specific movement is actually relevant. For this project I liked the idea of finding whatever watch was standard issue for a solider and then doing any modifications it would take to fit it in the Zippo.

3. The strap: Much in the way HJ0 used only parts from the camera for the case/strap, I wanted to stick with the idea of staying thematically there and not just making a strap from scratch. The idea I came up with was to get a army jacket from the era and turning the cuff into the strap.

I had this design pretty much entirely finished in January of this year, but never started on it. I guess I wanted to finish HJ1 first, but it's hard to say for sure. Of course HJ1 finally did get finished, which made this the logical place to go next. I never wavered on my design, so the biggest thing was sourcing the parts.

The Zippo:

This was in some ways the easiest and hardest part to source. I did know the general thing I was looking for, but it's not as though there's a big box store selling the exact one you want. I ended up just watching any auctions that came up on ebay until I found one that looked good. This is the one I got.

This had a lot going for it. Great saying one side and delightful middle finger cartoon on the other. While I didn't like the idea of cutting off the soldier's name, it would serve as a perfect place to fit the watch in.

The Watch:

This was tricky. I had just been assuming that there was a standard issue watch. When I say standard issue I mean, handed to you along with your boots and uniform. Apparently there was no watch in that package. After some searching I managed to find that the Benrus MIL-W-3818B was the watch you could get if you wanted one (which, I'm sure is a gross oversimplification of the process). Luckily they are not too hard to find.

The Jacket:

If I recall correctly (and, as I'm sure you know, I like to think that I do) I did an an ebay search for "vietnam jacket." I didn't bother to do any research as to the type of jacket I should be looking for, just browsed the pictures until I found one that seemed to be in line with what I was looking for:

As with most of my projects, I had created a design in my head, but didn't take time to write anything out to try and figure out logistics. This meant that when I got into making it things would have to be tweaked. Luckily it was nothing major. The original design called for the lighter to be vertical with the watch and have the stop sealed shut. This just didn't work with the way the watch would need to sit in there. There was an added bonus here though, when the lighter was turned sideways, it ended up being possible to keep the top portion intact, which meant the lighter could stay functioning (well, functioning in terms of opening/closing). The only other real change was the strap. I had wanted to simply cut the cuff off the jacket and modify it as necessary. When I tried to cut the cuff off, it looked absolutely terrible. The other problem with the original plan was I wanted to be able to see the bottom of the Zippo. Not really such a difficult proposition, but I didn't want to use anything that wasn't part of the jacket to make the strap. A lot of cutting and sewing later, this came out.

Let me break the strap down a bit for you. The base of the strap is just a strip of cloth I tore off the back of the jacket. It was then wrapped around and sewn to a piece of the liner I cut out. On top of that was sewn a lapel. The idea there was I could then attach the actual watch to a strip of cloth, put a button on it and then it would stay put, but you could still easily see the bottom. The strip that I used was the U.S. ARMY embroidered part from the left breast pocket. To secure the band, I removed every bit of velcro from the jacket and then attached it to either end. I was skeptical at first, but it ended up working quite well.

It's big. The strap itself is 2.25 inches wide. The watch/lighter is 2.25 inches wide. Since the watch is mounted off center, that part spans about 3 inches of wrist.

I was pretty happy with the final product. This is once again a case of, love it or hate it, it's almost exactly like I had originally conceived.

This isn't much of a making of, but it does have other shots of the watch.

Sidebar: To get in the mood while making this, I listened to the entire Phil Ochs discography. It occurred to me that at some point people stopped making good protest music. It's possible that this is due to there being nothing on the level of Vietnam to protest, but I think there's a simpler explanation. Vietnam is easy to work into songs, it's a very lyrical country name. I mean, take Iraq, how the fuck are you gonna put that in a song?

So there's a war in Iraq

I don't care too much for Bach

George Bush is someone I mock

A good soup starts with a good stock

And it's like, what the fuck does that even mean? It's easier if you mispronounce Iraq, but still. This was especially in my head when I heard I Can't Write Left Handed off the John Legend/Roots album, which, while great, it's a Bill Withers song, so the general drought continues. This brings me to my next point. I'm going to start giving watches like this names. This watch is called "I Can't Write Left Handed." After the song. Get it?

hey look at this thing i made: VIII

2010-12-14T17:04:00.000-08:00

There's a battle going on. I can say with absolutely no hyperbole (or wait, maybe that's with ONLY hyperbole) that this is the greatest conflict known to man. Or woman. I say woman, because, I of course speak of the godparent power rankings.

Need some background? Well, that's why I'm here. See, it had been impossible to reach a consensus decision about who bel's number 1 godparent was. The only logical thing to do was implement a completely impartial system, sort of like the BCS. It's actually almost identical to the BCS, except it only takes into account one human poll and there's only one computer. Although, having now typed that out, it doesn't actually seem anything like the BCS, well, except that they both cause endless controversy. Check out this historical data:

Week ending 8/15 (2009) - Week ending 12/11 (2010)

1. MikeyK

2. D

I mean, that's unbelievable dominance. We're talking almost 16 straight months without a single change in the rankings. Some people would point to that and say there must be a flaw in the system, cause how could that possibly be right? Well, the thing is, I'm really just that great. This past year, was there a single (sane) person arguing that boise state should be ranked ahead of auburn? Fuck and no there wasn't. You know why? Cause greatness like that just can't be denied. Same principle applies here.

You don't just get to the top and say "well, that's that." Shit takes work. Take this Christmas. There didn't seem to be anything worthwhile out there, so I decided I needed to make something for her. Given my strict no gifts of clothing for anyone ever policy, the only other thing I could think of was a stuffed animal. Teddy bear seemed like the way to go. I had remembered seeing some crocheted things on some craft blog that looked delightful, so I found a pattern and I was off. Here's step 1:

Row 1: Sc 8 times into a loop (8 sts) - tighten the loop.

...

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN!? SC? HOW AND WHY DOES SOUTH CAROLINA COME INTO PLAY!? Oh wait, there's a key, let's rewrite that.

Row 1: Single crochet 8 times into a loop (8 stitches) - tighten the loop.

...

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN!? SINGLE CROCHET? WTFBBQ!?!

I guess I should go back in the story here. I don't (didn't) actually know how to crochet. This project was started under my unwavering assumption that given sufficient time and motivation I can do anything. Of course a big part of my plan here was that the pattern would be more intuitive. /sigh. Guess I better get a fucking book. The book I got had a section on deciphering patterns. It listed a number of things to look for that were not present in the pattern I had. Sure I could've gotten a different pattern, but as El Fuego would say, I was in too deep. I think I tried to do this ten times and was on the verge of seeking outside help, when it all just clicked. I went back and was off. It all came together pretty quick after that.

See, a nice adorable pig, just like I had planned on making all along. I totally didn't just do that because after making the body and arms it looked nothing like a bear.

hey look at this thing i made: VII

2010-11-30T18:04:00.001-08:00

The important thing to understand about the nate dogg is he knows how to play casino. Which, I suppose, doesn't really tell you anything.

Are you familiar with casino? See it's a two man card game where cards are laid and subsequently picked up. Know what happens when a guy puts an ace on a seven, then the other guy drops the two of spades to make it a ten then the other guy picks it up with the ten of diamonds? All hell breaks loose. Tables get flipped.

I'm sorry, that didn't actually explain anything did it. I'd send you to wikipedia, but it doesn't actually explain any of the relevant parts of casino. The relevant part of casino is that it's apparently big in jail (though, not so much in prison).

This is really just getting more cryptic isn't it? Let's go back in the story a bit. I can say for sure that I knew nate in junior high and it's possible as far back as elementary school, but it's hard to say. We weren't especially close, but we ran in the same circles, so we saw each other a fair amount. One of those circles included donnyk (is that what I called him before? It's hard to keep the aliases straight). Donny visited jail and brought back casino. A whole lotta casino got played at his apartment. Fast forward some amount of time. I was hanging out at this apartment a lot (crestwood anyone?) and every day I would go pick up nate and we would sit in the kitchen and play casino for hours and hours. Of course the whole time we'd be bullshitting about whatthefuckever and by my estimation, that was when we really became good friends. Went on to be my first roommate, lived with the guy for years, countless misadventures, etc. etc.

THE POINT OF THE STORY IS!

It was no surprise, at all, that he would be the first person to commission a stained glass work. The guy is big up on planes you know and so he sent me a picture, which I promptly lost, but I had some memory of what it looked like and dug up this:

This was a really interesting change of pace for me. I'd been used to just making these things up as I go because I didn't need to have a set end point and since they weren't being necessarily made for anyone it didn't matter *so* much how they turned out. This was different, if someone's putting money down and they have a specific thing in mind, then I need to deliver.

I've talked in the past about how with stained glass, since you're necessarily losing detail, the important thing is to just pick some details you know you can nail, that really define the thing, and go with that. With this picture he had mentioned he really liked the view on the wings, so I wanted to keep them as intact as possible. I broke the plane down as simple as possible, with the breaks mainly being done to allow for some semblance of shading.

As far as the sky went, that's where I added the trademark mosaicyness. I wanted to make sure there was a clear break between the ocean and the sky so beyond the horizon I went with some plain blue glass. Then for the ocean I bought all the different shades of blue that hobby lobby had that I didn't hate and just alternated them.

Quick aside here. In past stained glass posts I've talked about my ongoing quest for a good pattern material. Apparently posterboard+3M 77 is the way to go. Worked like a dream.

Assembly of the picture went a bit different from normal. The typical system is to lay out the whole picture and solder it all at once. Here, since the plane was the most important part, I assembled it piece by piece to make sure that it lined up perfectly.

This worked really well for this piece because the shape of the sky was completely irrelevant, which meant if I needed to alter any pieces to fit around the plane, then so be it.

The last thing that was different about this piece was the framing. The book I got had talked about using cames, which are, I guess, U-shaped pieces of metal that you can use to build a frame. Of course they don't sell that shit at the 7/11 so I'd been out of luck. On a recent trip to the stained glass store however I noticed she had some hidden away. Definitely the way to go and is how all future pieces will be framed I think.

All in all this was probably the most painless window yet. Apparently practice makes something something. This was interesting because I feel like I always say "it looks better with the light going through it and the picture doesn't do it justice." It does look good with the light going through it, really brings out the shading int he plane, but it looks pretty good with no light too I feel.

I know I know, this whole time you've been reading this post and thinking, "Mike, how can I get my very own stained glass masterpiece!?" Well I feel like if you're reading this blog you must know how to contact me, but if not, shoot an email to highjack@fyadiaf.com. Let me know what you're thinking and we can discuss my ridiculously complex pricing system.

hey look at this thing i made: VI

2010-11-22T22:38:00.001-08:00

I tend to say that I'm the least objective judge of anything about myself. People often misconstrue this as me saying that I think I suck (I've been, historically, a pretty negative person) but it isn't that. It's just really rare that I ever think about myself, I don't think about how I act, I don't think about how other people perceive me and I don't think about myself in comparison to others. The result of this is that while I don't put much thought to it, in some abstract sense I think of myself as normal. That, it seems, is a word that rarely describes me. The corollary to this is that I rarely create something that stands out to me. Often I never give these things a second thought and just move on. A good example of this is a poem I once wrote. I had typed it up and had a printed copy for some reason and years after writing it I stumbled across it somehow. At first I completely forgot that I had even written it, I just thought it was a poem that I had printed out for some reason (I do that sort of thing). I read it and thought, huh, this is pretty good.

This isn't always the case. Sometimes I'm just forced to say "Mike, you done good." SG2 is an example of that. This poem is an example of that. Aaaaaand that might be the whole list. Well, until I made this anyway:

I like to quantify things, which is often a really annoying habit for people that are around me when I fixate on trying to find the right number for the right thing. This is one of the reasons I like listening to music on the computer. Looking over the play counts in my itunes library is fascinating to me. It's one thing to say "like, I totally listened to that song a hundred times, for reals." It's another to be able to look at this and say there are 789 songs I've listened to 10 times or more and 33 songs I've listened to 100 times or more. The play counts rack up most when I fixate on some song for some reason and it paints an interesting picture to look at those top songs and remember what got them there. It's also interesting to see things such as, I've listened to 1 to 31 by J-Live 27 times in the past week.

Why is any of this relevant? Well 1 to 31 is stuck in my head and since I'm sure you've never heard it, I'll tell you that in the song he's using a fake interview to tell a story, which is what I'm going to do today!

What makes this the best thing you've ever made ever?

Well two things go into that. The first is the degree of difficulty. This watch is entirely handmade and not in the sense that you might say putting together a kit is handmade. It's hand cut brass, hand cut hand sewn leather, but that's getting a little ahead of myself. The other thing is, while it might be impressive to make something that complex even if it looked like shit, I like the look of this quite a bit. Beyond that though, even if you hate how it looks, it's true to my vision. Almost a year ago I started this project with a very specific look in mind and only strayed from that in some very minor ways. Thus, if you don't like the look of it, that's due to me being a shitty designer and not any shortcomings as an artisan on my part. I feel like that's impressive.

Hold on, you don't really mean every part of that is handmade do you?

That, I suppose, is a semantics debate. There are three parts that aren't a base item (base item being the building blocks used to construct, sheets of brass etc.). The watch movement, the hands and the winding stem. Of course there compelling reasons why I didn't/couldn't make those. For those unfamiliar with the terminology, the watch movement is the assembly inside the case that makes the watch go. It is the gears and shit that move the hands and let you know what time it is. If we say hypothetically that I could teach myself how to make a movement from scratch, it would take a long time for me to get to that point and once I had, having a hand made movement would add nothing to the watch. The hands I was actually pretty upset that I couldn't hand make. Here's another quick lesson on watches for ya. The movement has a pole sticking up in the middle of it. The pole consists of a couple concentric circles. The hands have a specially sized hole that fits tightly on one of those circles. To hand make the watch hands I would need to be able to drill holes to the very precise size of those circles. My workshop doesn't have the capabilities to adhere to tolerances that tight. The winding stem I suppose should really be counted as part of the movement. It's the little rod that sticks out that you can turn to to set the time. It would be more accurate to say that I made a watch case, in which case I did hand make every part, but saying that is needlessly confusing.

Agreed. You mentioned before that you started with a very specific vision, what was that?

In the post for HJ0 I talk say that two of my ten most prized possessions are watches. I don't actually have a list. Saying something is in my top ten whatever is just a thing I say to indicate I feel strongly about it. The idea is that, while I don't have a list, if I sat down and tried to write one out, those watches would without a doubt be on it. Specifically this watch is almost certainly my single most prized possession.

When I think about watches, it always comes back to this. If you go back and look at the gallery for HJ0 you can see that the strap was very much modeled after this one. After I finished HJ0 and started thinking about the next watch I would make, I almost immediately decided I wanted to do a tribute to the above watch. I didn't want to re-create it at all, but something that was stylistically inspired. Alright so hmm. There were going to be three major changes. First I was going to up the size a bit. It was meant to be designed specifically to my wrist size, which is important to remember that I have giant hands, so as big as it looks in that picture above, it's probably bigger than you think. Second, partly because I was upping the size and partly because I didn't have a great idea of how to do a round case, I was going to go to a rectangular shape. Last I wanted to go to a leather strap. I thought leather would look good with the vision I had and since I was upping the size I would need to widen the band too and a nylon band would probably look silly that wide. Most other things were to stay the same. I wanted the watch face to be painted pretty much the same way and I wanted hands that looked pretty much the same as that.

Where does one begin?

It really *has* to start with the case. I was confident that I would have no trouble with the strap and kind of wanted to start on it right away, but I couldn't be sure how long it would need to be until the case was done. Sometimes I just walk around Hobby Lobby hoping to be inspired. On one such trip I stumbled across all these bits of metal that they sell for making architectural models. Well I had the raw materials, but how do I turn these sheets of brass into a box? This is as good a place as any to point out that this project was started back in January. Back then I was even worse than I am now at documenting steps, you can check out the making of shots at the end and they might tell some of the story (but, really, not very well). All I remember is that it took a lot of tinkering to get it to work. The problem was that brass transfers heat really well, so when I would heat up one part to solder it together, it would often melt other parts and the whole thing would fall apart. I ended up getting a pop rivet gun, then making 90 degree angle pieces, riveting the four walls together, then going back with solder to fill in the cracks.

There was really only one specific constraint in the construction of this, which is that there needed to be a way to access the battery. The tragic flaw of HJ0 is that, while it's possible to change the battery, the procedure to do so consists of first being me and then using my magic powers to precisely disassemble it. A big part of that is, as I mentioned in the original post, I had no room for error, which meant no experimenting to figure something out. This time I had a blank canvas though, which meant I could just build something in from the jump. I ended up riveting together 8 pieces of brass in such a way that a ninth piece could be slid through them and subsequently removed should a battery change be necessary. I wish I had some construction shots to give a better idea of this, but here's the final product.

The lighting isn't great (it never is) but that recessed piece of metal in the middle there can be pulled out. The original design actually had just that very middle square exposed, but during assembly solder got into the channel and made it impossible to slid the battery cover in. To clean that out I ended up cutting out that smaller rectangle on the top there. This was actually a fortuitous mistake as that extra opening makes it so much easier to remove the cover.

At this point, I ran head first into a wall.

Literally?

Naw, see I had been working on this for about two months and I got to a point where it was time to move past the case. I cut a piece for the watch face and started making the hands, when I realized I couldn't make the hands. That stuff I said above about why I couldn't make the watch hands? Definitely did not know those things going into this. It was heartbreaking because as near as I could tell, if I couldn't make my own hands, it would ruin the whole look of the project and at that point, the fuck was the point? Between that and some other things, I ended up putting the project on hold indefinitely. It would be another five months before I picked it back up at all.

I guess life sucks for everybody huh? What took the project off hold?

Well at the time that I started this as well as the subsequent holding pattern, I was living in an apartment that I hated (for a number of reasons, none of them relevant here). I often say that I like to be surrounded by things that inspire me. All that apartment inspired me to do was be depressed. My creative output ground to a halt. This was a big problem, because so long as I'm creating, I will be figuring shit out. Since I wasn't making anything, my brain was never in the right mindset to figure out how to get past that problem. Then I moved. Then I started making shit again. Then one day out of the blue it occurred to me that there *had* to be pre made watch hands out there that either matched my vision, or I could modify so that they would match my vision. In the story about the table I mentioned how I rarely stop to think about the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing. It's good that I didn't think about that here, because I probably would have never gone through with this plan.

I ended up going on ebay and ordering a thousand or so vintage watch hands. At the time I didn't possess the knowledge that watch hands aren't a generic interchangeable thing. Out of those thousand, I bet only 5 or so actually would fit. After an incredible amount of trial and error I just ended up using the first two hands I found that worked. They're not exactly what I wanted, but they work.

My only real complaint as that I wish they were longer, but they definitely work.

Wait wait, I thought the dial was supposed to resemble that original watch.

/sigh yea, it was. The magic of computers hides this fact, but I have abysmal handwriting. This meant when it came time to paint numbers on the dial, I just couldn't do it. I made probably a dozen attempts at doing it freehand. Then I tried to find a stencil, then I tried a metal stamp. They all looked terrible. I thought about putting an ad on the craigslist for a calligraphist, but I really didn't want to bring in outside help. In the end I painted it matte black, then did some precision dremeling to give it some character. I was pretty happy with how it looked and while it would be nice to have numbers, I would contend that you don't wear a watch like this because you want to be able to tell the time at the drop of a hat (not that it's really that hard to read once you're used to not having numbers). The last part of the watch movement/dial assembly was the winding stem. For reference, this is what a generic winding stem looks like.

The stem is just the straight part. The knob on the right is called the crown. Given how precisely the stem is machined, you can see how I couldn't recreate that, but even if I had wanted to use the crown that came with the movement, the stem wasn't long enough to reach the outside of the case I had made. I removed the crown and stuck the stem inside a piece of brass tubing. Then, once that was through the side of the case, I took a piece of square brass stock I had, drilled a hole in it, put it over the tube and soldered in place.

I'm sorry, as near as I can tell you've assembled the whole case at this point, but you never addressed how you were attaching the case to the strap.

Ah yes, I am getting a little ahead of myself. The original vision called for a leather strap the exact width of the watch. The problem was that to attach the band, I would need some posts or something attached to the outside of the case, which I couldn't figure out a way to do that didn't just look awkward. I ended up taking another design cue from the inspiration watch (as I'm apparently now calling it). I drilled holes in each of the four corners, then bent some brass tube and soldered it in place.

Wow, that's a much better shot of the battery cover, I'm not really sure how I missed that when I was looking for a picture before.

And then you made the strap?

The problem I often have when telling these stories is that a lot of these processes happened at the same time. I would work on the strap for a bit, then get tired of sewing leather and go back to the case. It probably just makes more sense to finish the story of the case first.

The ending of that is?

During the story of SG1 I mentioned how I got the idea of cutting glass in my head when I cut a piece for a watch I was making. This is that watch. It's kind of funny, the stained glass was definitely birthed from this and then in turn I took a skill I got from the stained glass to finish this watch. I attached the glass to the watch case the same way that I make stained glass. First I put a strip of copper foil on the top and bottom edges, then flux and solder to attach. Worked perfectly.

Revisionist history time: Case in hand you decided to start on the strap?

Sure, why not. As I mentioned before I knew I wanted a leather strap. I was at Michael's (hobby lobby is closed on sundays) and saw they sold little bags of "leather remnants." These are apparently made by a company that does all kinds of leather work and so when they have scraps from making whatthefuckever they just bag em up and sell em. There was a bag with some nice looking black leather in it, so I went with that. For HJ0 I took the buckle and loops off a watch band I had lying around. That wasn't going to be acceptable this time. I got out some pliers and bent some brass rod to make the buckle and the loops.

The downside here is that they aren't the sturdiest things. You do have to be actively trying to bend them, but they can be bent by hand. Quick aside here, sewing leather sucks. I mean really. The eyelets were the next thing. For HJ0 I had gotten some eyelets that are used in scrapbooking somehow. In addition I bought this cheap tool for setting them. As a result of the cheap tool, they looked like shit. Now, they worked fine and honestly anyone but me might not ever notice the perceived shittiness, but real or not it wasn't going to be ok for HJ1. The problem is the top o' the line tool that hobby lobby sells is 29 bucks, even with a 40% off coupon, that was more than I wanted to spend. I was at menards looking for something and saw a tool they sold for setting eyelets. It was designed for bigger eyelets than I'd been using, but it was also two dollars, which seemed like a winner to me. I was initially hesitant to up the eyelet size because I was worried it wouldn't make as tight a connection with the buckle. Some preliminary tests indicated that it wouldn't be a problem though and the more I thought about it, it probably made sense to up the size of the eyelets given how much bigger the strap was.

See, I think that's a good size. The last thing to be worked out was how the watch would actually attach to the strap. It was obvious there would need to be a second strap that went through the loops on the case, but how would that attach to the main strap? If I sewed it on at both ends, then you wouldn't be able to get that the bottom to change the battery and all the work I put into that design would be for naught. I ended up sewing one end to the strap and then putting a snap on the other end, which I feel adds a bit of flavor.

And that's that?

And that's the whole show, pushing that snap together was the last act in completing the watch. I often say success is all in how you define your goals, but even beyond that, success is contingent on having goals. If you don't know what your goals are, how will you ever know if you succeeded? So what were the goals. Well, the primary goal was just to make a good looking watch and do it from scratch. I think that was a success, as I explained at the start that's what makes this the best thing I've ever made ever. The other main goal was to pay tribute to the inspiration watch. There's some room for debate on whether or not that was a success.

I mean, I suppose just the fact that I say I'm paying tribute to it makes that true, but I had wanted them to be immediately recognizable as kindred spirits. I'm inclined to say if I'd been able to replicate the dial it would have been like that. Beyond that I'm happy with the connection. The main difference (to me) is that while the inspiration watch is subtle in it's way, HJ1 beats you over the head with what it is, but I'm ok with that.

Any future plans?

HJ2 has been designed and should come together pretty easily. Hopefully it doesn't take a year. See you later space cowboys.

Making of, featuring a ton of close up shots of the finished product.

hey look at this thing i made: -XVII

2010-11-18T20:53:00.000-08:00

I have put serious work into a halloween costume exactly once in my life. This is that story.

For reasons not always clear to me, I'm very good at competing. No specific type of competition mind you, but anytime a situation arises where a winner can be declared, I'm good at figuring out how to win, if not actually succeeding in my plan. Long time readers of this blog might remember this story. In it I talk about how I put my amazing competition skills to use to get a job. Let's expand on that.

The at the time president of Eureka was a big believer in United Way and he pushed that shit hard. For a whole month there was this huge company wide focus, with one big event each week. Week 1 was a kick off picnic. There wasn't a ton going on, mainly just food, they also had a don't forget the lyrics contest. Is that show still on TV? Can I just assume people know what I'm talking about? Well the concept is they play some snippet of a song and then you have to not forget the lyrics. This struck me as a no brainer for me to sign up for. After hearing a song more than five or so times, I can usually remember a substantial amount of the lyrics with just a small prompt.

That, apparently, didn't help me round one. I think I got some sort of country song? Luckily round one was apparently just a practice round. Round two I got Love Shack, which, if you didn't know, is a little old place where, we can get together. There was apparently only one round of actual competition before the finals. Four people were supposed to advance from that round. Only two people (including me) managed to make it out of round two. They really wanted four people for the finals though, so they let two random volunteers get back in, which seemed unfair to me. In the finals, instead of just being assigned a random song, you got to pick from a list. Instead of some sort of random selection process, or, I don't know, rewarding the people that actually remembered the lyrics in round two, they just asked for volunteers to go first. Well I jumped on that shit right away. I mean, what if there was some super easy song, was I gonna let some sucker get it? Fuck and no.

A quick perusal of the lift left my choices at summer of 69 by bryan adams and some other song. I'm tempted to say the other song was thunder road by the boss, but I feel like there's a 0% chance I would have passed that up. Summer of 69 was a song I was briefly enamored with, I think because of a punk cover of it I have. This meant as opposed to songs I hear on the radio and sort of know, I knew the lyrics to this song and could have gone off with no prompt. The format for the finals was you just kept going as long as you could and whoever got the farthest into their song won. The prompt they gave I think just went through "I got my first real six string" I went from there all the way to somewhere around "standing on your mamas porch" before forgetting some small thing. That was more than all the other contestants combined. pwnt!

Week two was some sort of oktober fest thing. The only competitions involved cooking. Good news for me! I entered in the desert category. German chocolate cake made from scratch (with scratch made frosting) cause that's what winners do.

Week three was a costume contest. My thought process going into this was that a costume somehow vacuum related would win. I suspected no one would come in anything truly spectacular, so a vacuum costume would win entirely cause it'd seem clever (CAUSE IT'S A VACUUM CLEANER COMPANY, GET IT!?). For reference it looked like this:

Let's break it down

The base of the outfit is the cheapest black sweatsuit wal-mart sold

The helmet is made out of the top of a Capture

Glued to the pre dust cup filter cover off a Surface Max

The mask was the exhaust filter cover off a surface max with some elastic glued to it. It was quite painful.

The chest piece was a bag cover off a Smart Vac

The hoses you see holding it on are two hoses off the above mentioned Capture, here's a closer look

The belt buckle is the spin duster cleaner control dealy off a Capture (we were doing a ton of testing on those at the time, which meant parts were plentiful). Tragically I couldn't find a good picture. That thing on my left is a spin duster. I pulled it out like a sword on stage to the delight of all gathered there. The belt is made out of vacuum belts. CLEVER! The knee pieces were dust cups off a pet lover lite cut in half with foil glued to the back

It's unfortunate that the picture doesn't show the cape very well as it is, by a wide margin, the best part of the costume. It's three cloth bags off sanitaire commerical units cut up, sewn together, then sewn onto the hoody. If I were less lazy (and, to be clear, I'm very lazy) I'd goto my storage unit and dig it up to get a better picture, instead, just imagine if the bag on this was a cape.

I called the character The Boss, see cause it said the boss on the chest plate. Did you know The Boss has a tagline?

"Who knows what dirt lurks embedded in carpets, The Boss knows."

Guess how many people at work got that joke. Did you know The Boss has a backstory?

In a world

Malcom Magnificent had spent his whole life in the Sad Meadows Orphanage. It had always been hard for Malcom to make friends, anytime he did they ended up getting adopted while poor Malcom was left behind. He was not a very attractive child. To curry favor with the Orphan Keepers (is that what you call someone who runs an orphanage?) he would clean the orphanage. All too often, vacuums were his only friends. Sometimes, it seemed he could hear them talking to him, but he had enough trouble fitting in and knew that mentioning this to anyone would only isolate him more.

On his eighteenth birthday he was called into the orphan keepers office.

"Malcom, it seems your time here is at an end and I have something to tell you that I should have told you long ago."

"What's that Orphan Keeper Sir?"

"Malcom you have parents, they never wanted to give you up for adoption, you got mixed up with the child of an unfit mother. Sadly by the time we figured this out you were already ten and you did such a good job cleaning that we really didn't want to lose you. The council decided the best thing to do was to not tell you and glue fake sores to you in your sleep so that prospective parents would think you had leprosy."

"So I'm not hideously ugly?"

"No, Malcom, you're a winner, now go and meet your parents!"

Malcom managed to suppress the unbelievable rage he felt towards the Orphan Keeper and ran off gleefully to have the tearful reunion with his parents that he had always dreamed off. He was just blocks away from their house when tragedy struck. Some sort of ray came out of the sky, demolishing what was to be his new home and vaporizing his parents. Standing in the wreckage in tears, he did the only thing he knew how to do. As he stood there, vacuuming up his parents ashes, something changed inside him. He could feel powers welling up inside him and for the first time he acknowledged the voice of the vacuum.

"Today you are no longer Malcom, you are The Boss. Go forth and fight crimes with whatever powers you feel a vacuum bestows upon you!"

Did you know The Boss has a theme song?

...

Guess what the odds are that you'll ever hear it. Here's a bonus picture of me accepting my award:

hey look at this thing i fixed: II

2010-11-10T18:58:00.000-08:00

Have you ever heard my rant about how phones are the new computers? No? Well if you ever have five hours to spare, you should ask me about it, I assume it's fascinating. This strongly held belief is one of the main driving forces behind my desire to constantly upgrade my phones (the other main driving force is I'm a huge nerd). My most recent upgrade was to the T-Mobile HD2. The early reviews of the phone were that it was wonderful hardware, but windows mobile is still blowful. I had actually never had too many qualms with windows mobile, but I was never planning on running it anyway. It was a foregone conclusion that the wonderful people at xda-developers would hack it to run android and that seemed delightful to me.

If you're unfamiliar with the HD2, it is exactly the sprint EVO. If you're unfamiliar with the EVO, basically it's just a giant touch screen. By a wide margin the largest screen I've ever had on a phone and it made me seriously consider investing in an e-book reader after I read a couple novels on there with no issues. It was also a delight for watching movies. It inexplicably came packaged with transformers 1 and 2, which answered the question "could you pay me to see transformers 2?" I was awful bored working second shift. The biggest thing I used it for was a music player. For some reason prior phones I've had lacked a basic 3.5mm jack. I'd made do by keeping an ipod and phone with me at work, but that was terrible.

Let me paint you a picture: I'm at work one day. I had just gotten into with my boss. He's a pretty strong willed person which is all well and good, except that I'm incapable of backing down when I know I'm right. This has on occasion led to me putting some bass in my voice. The details of this aren't important, but suffice to say I was in a tizzy. I had recently changed what I was listening to on my phone and I put my phone in the breast pocket of my shirt instead of my pants pocket as I normally would. You see I was at the time wearing my lab coat and pocket access is at a premium, it seemed easier to just go with the shirt. I'm typically fairly conscious of my electronics spatial position, having in the past suffered some tragedies. This time however I leaned over, not realizing that my shirt in fact did a terrible job of holding the phone in place, it fell out and I swore very loudly.

The crack is quite a bit worse than it looks there. It was actually still perfectly functional, so long as you weren't concerned with the possibility of getting a piece of glass lodged in your finger. Tragically, I WAS concerned about getting a piece of glass lodged in my finger. Luckily I had a plan.

The first phone I ever got was a Motorola A630. It sucked, though at the time seemed sweet. When I bought it I signed up for insurance because that seemed like a sweet deal. I'm a bit of a klutz sometimes and the prospect of dropping even more money on a new phone was depressing. I didn't read the paperwork very well which later lead to two realizations.

1. It wasn't as though they would just send me a phone free of charge, there was a deductible on it, in this case $125. That was alright though. I mean $125 was still far less than I would spend on a new phone.

2. Apparently if you break a lot of phones they'll drop your ass without telling you. You might say, "Mike, don't you read your phone bill? Didn't you notice that the insurance fee stopped showing up?" No, no I don't read my phone bill. I can't remember what the exact number was, but I think it was after three breaks (maybe within a certain amount of time, these happened pretty close together).

After fighting with city hall to no avail I went into making it work mode. How hard could the screen be to fix on my T-Mobile Dash (I had at some point upgraded my phone, but didn't change any service, so the insurance rolled over [anyone remember the Dash? No? Well fuck you, it was sweet])? Well given that a new screen was only about $30 I was willing to find out.

Turns out it was pretty easy. The Dash was beautifully designed, I suspect I could swap a screen out on that phone in less than two minutes. After that I never even tried to sign up for insurance, I just held the unwavering belief that I could fix any problem that might arise. That has always held true with any phone I've had since, up till now.

The HD2 is an amazing piece of hardware. Tragically, as these things become more advanced, they become increasingly difficult to take apart. I have a system when disassembling a vacuum at work. I start by removing every single screw I can find. Then I beat it. I used half of that process here. Thing is, there are only four visible screws on the back of the phone. Being, as I was, unwilling to beat the phone, I turned to my old friend the internet. Apparently the official HTC assembly/disassembly videos got leaked, viewable here, pretty interesting if you can get past the narration. The problem with this was it contained a ton of superfluous information. The video explained in no uncertain terms how to take the phone apart to it's very base components. I didn't want to go that far if I didn't have to, the fewer things you take apart the fewer chances you have to put it back together wrong. After a couple of viewings I managed to figure out the bare minimum of what I had to do.

For reference, there's the phone with the cover off. The video showed me that I just wanted to remove the circuit board on the bottom (the copper covered one). It was held in place by three screws, but there were numerous cables coming off. Again, I didn't want to disconnect anything I didn't have to, so here's what I figured to be the bare minimum.

The obvious ones were these two. I have no idea what they do.

Having uploaded that, I see that the circle I drew is hard to see, unfortunately I don't feel like fixing it. This was an important one to come off. It was a flat cable that snuck up through that hole that, it was one of the cables really holding the board in place. Working with this type of cable is a dream as those connectors are basically just clamps so I know damn well if the cable is in place or not.

The last that had to be removed was the flat cable you can sort of see pictured there. There was one more cable that held the circuit board to the rest of the phone, but it didn't need to come off, with all the ones that I had removed, I could just flip the board out of the way. That exposed this beaut.

That was the only connector holding the screen in place. Well that and the glue, have I mentioned the glue yet? Actually let me go back in the story a bit here.

The way the touch screen on the HD2 works is you have your basic run of the mill lcd screen (I don't think it's actually an lcd, but damned if I'm gonna look it up) and then attached to the top of it is a digitizer. The digitizer senses the tiny electrical connections that you finger makes when it comes in contact with it and translates that to movement on the screen. The important thing to understand here is that there are two separate aspects of the screen and in this instance when I say the screen was broken, what I mean is the digitizer was broken.

The last thing keeping me from removing the digitizer was the glue around the edges. Luckily I'm like a godamn surgeon with an x-acto knife. With that off it was just a simple matter of putting the new one on, couple drops of superglue around the edges, connectors back in place and seal that shit up. Boot up and

It didn't fucking work.

GOD. DAMNIT.

I'm not very good at describing aspects of myself, but here I might say that I have a high mechanical aptitude. What I'm saying with that here is that haven taken something apart once, I can do the second time in my sleep. My hope was that there was just some loose wire somewhere, as any problem would represent a serious difficulty to fix. Luckily it was just the digitizer connector that had somehow gotten pulled out. Fix that, make damn sure it was in place, seal that shit up. Boot up and

Quick aside here. The only time there isn't music playing in my apartment is when I'm asleep or watching TV. At all other times there's something going. When I'm working on a project the volume goes up.

Quick aside here. When I'm listening to music, if it's a song I like and I know the lyrics (so, pretty much any song I like) I will sing along without even thinking about it. If I get excited for whatever reason I tend to get really into the "performance."

During this fix I had been listening to K'naans exceptional album Troubadour. At the time the phone booted up Fires in Freetown was on and you better believe I was belting, loud as I could

SHE PULLED OUT HER MATCH AND SHE BURNED DOWN MY HOME.

I suspect my neighbor hates me. Turns out it worked. Here's a stupid set shot, since I assume that's the only reason people read this blog

Fact: I gesture while on the phone, often emphatically (well, when the situation demands it). I blame the speech team.

hey look at this compelling use of my time

2010-11-02T20:40:00.000-07:00

I'm not much of a self promoter. This isn't a conscious decision mind you, just the way I'm wired. At work it's a different story. At the point it was made clear to me that I would not advance from where I was at I began actively downplaying my various skill sets. Feeling, as I do, that I'm grossly underpaid for the work I currently do, I don't really enjoy the idea of doing more for no more pay. There's a problem though. I'm not good at not working. Again this is just something about how I'm wired. Some people might be ok with sitting around doing nothing when they know they've done all the work that they have.

I can't stand that shit.

I would much rather be doing something than sitting around counting seconds off the clock. It's like a chaos theory thing. If you put me in a situation where it's clear something needs to be done, I will eventually just do it, even if I'm never specifically told to do so. This is how I wound up building shit at work. When testing vacuums we often have to build fixtures to test whatever specific thing. Since each vacuum is slightly different we can't have stock fixtures that work for everything, rather they have to be built to order. These tend to be unsightly things made out of 2 x 4s that have a hundred different holes in them from past tests. These tend to be things I could build in my sleep, but I don't point that out because I already do enough there. The result of this is that when it came time to build a test fixture that needed to look good and last, I was not consulted. Of course, since I had no work to do at the time, I started helping the guy who had very specifically been tagged to build it. He had some other work come up and I didn't, so I kept working on it and it eventually became 100% my project. This exact thing happened two more times and now we're at a point where my boss will come to me and say:

"So here's this idea I have...now make it real."

For example. The test we do to determine the suction power of a vacuum requires us to use this clay stuff (known colloquially as permagum) to secure the nozzle to this box. Permagum is pretty sticky and kind of a pain to work with. To mitigate that, we have something like this:

It's what's known as an arbor press. The one we have has a little canister on the bottom that you fill with permagum, then when you pull the lever it forces it out through a small hole in the bottom which extrudes a nice half inch or so thick rope. That, apparently, is too much work. In fairness, when it gets cold in the lab the stuff is really hard to work with and I have had, on at least one occasion, to hang my entire body weight on the lever to get the stuff to extrude. Still didn't seem that hard to me. But what do I know. My boss had apparently, from day one (ten or so years ago), wanted to have a fixture built that would use an air cylinder to force the stuff out. Problem was to buy an air cylinder that would work for this would cost well over a thousand dollars. No way anyone was going to agree to that. Recently however, my boss was given an air cylinder that he had his eyes on (again from day one) but for some reason could never get, despite that fact that it hasn't been used in ten years.

So he comes to me and says "Mike, here's a giant air cylinder, I want you to make a machine using this that extrudes permagum."

Wow, that DOES seem like a compelling use of my time.

It seemed especially compelling when, after explaining to some of my co-workers what he wanted me to, they said "so you're making a play-doh factory?" Huh, guess so. To ramp up the degree of difficulty for this project I put some rules in place.

1. I had to do all the work myself. You might think this would be a given, but we have a machine shop in house with two very talented machinists. In the past when I've built fancier fixtures like this, a lot of what I did was draw up a schematic and then work with them to get it built. Not so this time. Any metal work or fabrication that needed doing, I would do myself.

2. It had to be made from found parts. Normally when building something from scratch we have some leeway to order parts. I didn't think I would get approval to buy anything for this, so from the jump I said fuck it.

as far as the design was concerned.

3. It had to have some clear improvements over the current system. Not having to the lever would be an improvement, but that by itself wouldn't be enough. If in making this any ease of use was sacrificed compared to the current system, there would be no point. This meant it had to be just as easy to load as the current system (which, again, consists of just putting the permagum in a small canister).

4. Safety was a concern. This is a powerful cylinder. It can output upwards of 3,000 pounds of force. If you got your finger caught in this machine, it wouldn't just pinch it, it would rip it off.

Well, better get to scrounging for parts.

The Cylinder:

This was pretty much good to go from the start, but given that it dwarfs any other air cylinders we have, we didn't have fittings for it. This meant I had to scrounge together a motley collection of pipe reducers/enlargers to fit the ones that we had onto it.

The Valve:

I should, perhaps, explain the workings of an air cylinder. The idea is that you feed compressed air into one end and the shaft gets pushed out. If you feed air into the other end the shaft retracts. Were you so inclined you could sit there and manually shift the air feeds yourself. That doesn't seem like a good use of anyones time. To fix that, we have valves that you feed air into and then they can switch which end of the air cylinder is getting air at any given time. This particular valve was apparently bought by my boss when he first started and had no idea what he was doing. I'm told it cost a couple thousand dollars. It has never been used. It's way too big for most of our normal applications. Of course for this project it was great because I needed something that was going to be able to get a lot of air to the cylinder. This had the same fittings issue that the cylinder had, which meant wandering around looking for more things that I could use to force the fittings to work.

The Chamber:

Next I needed something I could attach to the cylinder that could be filled with permagum. It had to be something that would be able to take pressure. I also wanted it to be big enough to hold all the permagum we had in the lab as that seemed like something that would be a nice improvement over the current system (current one can only hold about half at a time). This particular pipe came off of some test fixture we inherited from sweden. It has never been used in the entire I've been there and is stored in an area we call the freddy krueger room. There's a dead bird next to it. I had to cut a bit off the end of it as well as cut an opening into it.

The Mounting Plate:

Well the cylinder wasn't made in a way that I could just attach the chamber to it. I originally made a mounting plate out of wood, which worked perfectly and I thought looked fine. My boss apparently hates having wood on test fixtures so he shot that down. Luckily we have all kinds of scrap metal from whatthefuckever things. This was nice as it was just a bit bigger than the cylinder and already had that giant hole in the middle. I had to drill out the holes to mount the chamber to it as well as the holes to mount the plate to the cylinder and the plate to the test stand.

The Plunger:

For this machine to work, the cylinder needed to be fitted with a plunger that would make an almost air tight fit with the chamber. If it was too small the path of least resistance for the permagum would be to back up around the plunger instead of going out through the extrusion hole. I found this in one of our many cabinets, it was a touch to big, so I ground it down until it was the right size.

The Extrusion Plate:

This was another piece of whatthefuckever metal that I drilled a hole in. This would be fitted onto the end of the chamber using four pieces of ready rod. (ready rod is like a bolt with no end, just a long piece of threaded metal).

The Flow Control:

I wanted a big ole button that you would press to make the machine go. This had the added bonus of if you were ripping your finger off, you could just stop pressing the button and maybe there'd be enough finger left to sew back on. We for some reason have all sorts of random control things like this lying around, so it was just a matter of getting fittings on it.

The Valve Control:

The valve has four wires coming out of it, two white and two black. If you apply 120 volts to both the white wires, it shifts one way, black, the other way. To make sure you didn't have to switch a plug every time you wanted to change direction, I had to rig up a switch that would change the current for you. I tragically couldn't find any good switches so I had to make a thing. I got a junction box, a junction box cover, a cover for THAT cover, a switch that I thought lit up (it didn't) and a relay. Using some wiring that I assume none of you care enough for me to explain, I wound up with a switch that accomplished what I wanted.

The Cable Management:

But it would look pretty fucking terrible if I had four loose wires coming up from the valve into this junction box. Luckily there was another swedish castaway that had this sweet black thing, so I took it!

The Test Stand:

A number of our test fixtures are built out of this steel strut stuff. It's basically a giant erector set. We have a ton of it sitting around, it was just a matter of me cutting pieces to the sizes I wanted. With a dremel. Cause that's what winners do. It's worth noting that while we have a ton of the struts around, we don't have a ton of the connectors, which meant it took for fucking ever to dig up enough connectors to build that.

The Feet:

Dremel's aren't really precision tools. As a result the frame ended up being slightly uneven. I was already terrified of the tipping hazard this represented as the cylinder weighs close to 100 pounds and would be at the top of this five and a half feet stand. Remember the swedish castaway that donated the black thing? It also gave it's feet to this project. These were nice as it gave the stand an even platform and they could be adjusted to negate any rocking.

In the end this was kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, only if instead of coming in a box the pieces were spread out over a 15,000 square foot area with no sorting method and instead of just fitting together you were given a pair of scissors and told to make it work.

I'd include a picture here of the finished product, but it wouldn't do it justice. It wouldn't do it justice because even with a picture it's hard to fathom this giant machine, over 6 feet tall, 300 or more pounds. A triumph of scavenging, a device so throughly convinced it's something more than what it really is. Perhaps the most shining example of my ability to figure shit out.

People will on occasion ask me what I do for a living. It's a bit of a tightrope walk when answering this as it's difficult to give a good explanation that makes it clear what I do, but also isn't boring as shit. In the future I might just show them this:

Interesting note, the one handed permagum bunching technique shown there earned me the nickname one hand gum (note, one has ever called, or thought about calling me, one hand gum). Had I not changed the soundtrack you would have just heard me laughing hysterically in the background, because when you do something like this, I think laughter is the only proper response.

Making of, featuring rev. 1 of this project, aka the men in black ray gun version.

hey look at this thing i finished: II

2010-10-24T16:32:00.001-07:00

This is part 3 of a 3 parts series

Part 1: Wherein an idea is born

Part 2: Wherein a woman of glass is given life

Anyone who's been to any of my apartments in the past three years, or has read far enough back on this blog, should remember this:

It is pictured here as an entertainment center, but it hasn't been used for that in some time. By my estimation it is the least practical thing that I own. It weighs well over 200 pounds, probably close to 300 (or more). It's difficult for one person to even move around in a room. It's constructed from a bunch of 7 x 5s.

Also, I adore it.

I don't really know why. It doesn't have a lot of room. It's inconvenient to put things under it. It's too hard to move to be a coffee table. I have no use for an entertainment center. It works well as a work bench, mainly because it's so sturdy I can just stand there beating on it and nothing will happen, but being as short as it is, it's inconvenient to work over. I imagine I love it for the same reason I so badly want a Curta. They both perform their simple function in an overly grand yet pointless way (present day that is, Curtas were pretty fucking sweet back in their day). Remember the Tamagotchi Gesture? There's probably a bit of that here too, I'm not sure who else would love the fucking thing.

I mention this, because when I decided I would be making the world's greatest table, it was absolutely the first place I looked for design inspiration.

That's actually terribly misleading. It's kind of rare I sit down and say "hey, I'm gonna make a thing, let's brainstorm!" They moreso just happen. For example: The finishing of SG1 overlapped with the making of SG2 quite a bit. I really liked the frame that I made for SG1 and that sort of thing seemed like the way to go. However. SG2 weighs a lot. I'm guessing 30-40 pounds (probably more, I tend to underestimate the weights of things). So not only would it be more dangerous to mount it on a wall, given that it's over twice the size of SG1 it seemed a touch more ridiculous. The frame thing seemed solid though, so what else could I do with that? Well, if it's not going to be mounted on the wall, I suppose that necessarily means it would have to be something that goes on the floor. It would look dumb just laying on the ground, so a table just made sense. Then it was the normal, I had the idea, I offhandedly figured out how to make it real, then I had to make it real.

The wood I used to make the frame for SG1 was 1 x 4, which was fine for that project, but for this I thought it would be good if the stained glass went farther into the wood, to give it some added support (again, much bigger). The first thought was to up it to a 2 x 4, then I could easily get an inch into the wood, which seemed pretty sturdy. You may recall a big part of the reason I went with the 1 x 4 in the first place was Lowe's sold precut boards that were able to fit in my car (ability to get home is pretty important). So I went around looking for some pre-cut 2 x 4s (again, at Lowe's). They didn't have any (at least any small enough) but looking around I was like zomg 2 x 6s are delightful. It made perfect sense because I had at some point decided I wanted the table legs to be made out of 6 x 6s (I was at the time under the mistaken impression that the above mentioned table was constructed out of 6 x 6s) so then the leg width would be the same as the frame, SYMMETRICAL! Tragically Lowe's didn't seem to have any lengths smaller than 12' and since I'm not capable of asking for help (also I didn't see a saw anywhere) I felt it was time to move on. I'm inclined to say there was some other compelling reason for me to look elsewhere, but I have no idea what that is.

I was walking around Menard's when I realized that I have no idea what I'm doing. I suppose it's probably pretty common that when wingin' it, I don't actually have any idea what I'm doing and just make it up as I go. I rarely think about this fact though. Going through the lumber section at Menard's though, I thought to myself "huh, there sure are a lot of types of woods, I bet there's compelling reasons to use each of them, maybe if I had some idea what I was doing I could make a more informed decision. OR I could buy these 2" x 6" x 4' scrap boards that are a buck fitty a piece."

The problem was I had at some point decided that when I painted the table, I didn't want it to be immediately distinguishable as wood. This meant shitty wood was a problem because any cracks, knots or other assorted imperfections would be trouble. I looked around some more and found some wood that was perfect. Looked great, right size...tragically 40 dollars for six or so feet (aka not enough). So I says fuck it I says, I'll get the shitty wood and make it work, cause that, is what winners do. I sorted through the eight or so pieces they had in that scrap pile, got the best looking two and was on my way.

Back home, I somehow managed to miscut both pieces (ooooh measure TWICE cut once, not the other way around). Four feet long as a length was really tragic as all four pieces that made up the frame were slightly longer than two feet. Well that sucked. Back at square one I went to Home Depot. Home Depot totally DOES have a saw and so I got a 2" x 6" x 10' cut in half and I was on my way.

Frame construction was pretty much identical to that of SG1, except this time the grooves I cut were a bit deeper and farther in on the wood. The other added wrinkle for this was the support layer. Strictly speaking you shouldn't display stained glass horizontally. It might be rigid, but it's still going to want to bow inward. Especially with a piece like this, as heavy as it is, it would probably sit in the table fine for awhile, then one day I'd come home to a pile of broken glass and weep. I think I must have just googled glass shops and came across mclean county glass and mirror. Great people, I went in and explained what I wanted, the guy recommended something and it was done the next day. The way this is set up is the clear glass sits right below the stained glass in the frame. The stained glass stays perfectly flat and light can still shine through.

It was then time to make it work. That involved plaster.

I got some stuff and filled in any dents/cracks/general unsightlyness in the wood. In addition, I built up the wood at the seams where it was uneven, so when it was painted you wouldn't be able to see. For that same reason I had recessed the screws slightly and then filled those holes in with plaster.

Boy that was a lot of work. Next up was primerin' time! I didn't photograph that. At this point I moved onto constructing the rest of the table. Did I mention earlier that I wanted the legs to be 6 x 6s? No one sells pre cut small sections of 6 x 6s, cause who would ever want that? I went to Home Depot to see if I could get one cut only to be hit with the tragic news that their saw cannot cut something that big

:'(

I checked with general life consult El Fuego (conversation took place via texts while I wandered Home Depot)

me: does your dad have some sort of device that could cut a 6 x 6

el fuego: ...a chainsaw would be my immediate reaction of anything i know to be in the garage, but im very sure thats a horrible idea

me: haha that was my initial thought for how to do it, but yea, I can't see that ending well.

el fuego: hehe. Well this is the flaw when i pretty much only ever use a hand saw, bow saw, or like a little dremel tool for anything ive ever done or suggested.

me: man, it'd take for fucking ever to cut a 6 x 6 with a dremel

el fuego: at that point the bow saw may well be a better option and that seems like a pretty bad one on its own merit.

me: I had to downsize to a 4 x 6 : (

el fuego: what is this for?

me: the greatest table ever made.

el fuego: hehe nice

Did you get the important take away from that conversation? That I had to downsize to 4 x 6 legs? I was devastated. After it had some time to sink in though, it didn't seem so bad. The 6" dimension was the most important thing to me and a 6 x 4 is still pretty beefy, so I thought this would look just fine and potentially be more practical. Normally I don't try and get any "precision" cuts done at the place, because guys who get paid minimum wage aren't going to try that hard (not to put them down, they do good work, but I needed this to be perfect). Of course 6 x 4s aren't much easier to cut than 6 x 6s, which meant I was stuck with their work. I went with 15" segments, which would make the overall table height close to two feet tall. How did I arrive at that as a good height for the table? No idea. At all.

They weren't perfectly equal segments, but close enough. This wood went through the same plaster process as the frame wood, but man, these were of dubious quality. I'm not of the impression 6 x 4s are ever used in situations where looks matter.

The plan was that the legs would not actually be attached to the frame, rather there would be a smaller table that the frame would sit on, that ended up looking like this:

Now due to lack of precision tooling, the square there didn't slot into the frame perfectly. To keep light from leaking out the sides and to keep the frame held in place, weather stripping was added around the edges to act like a gasket.

Lighting was identical to SG1, except this time I used three light strips. As you may have noticed from the above pictures, everything was painted black. For the table top I went back to Mclean County Glass and Mirror. Again they did a great job, this time I also had them add four holes in the corners, so I would have some way to attach the glass to the frame. Problem is the frame isn't a perfect rectangle, but the glass is. This meant that if I just set the glass on it, it would look terrible as this unevenness would be pretty apparent. To combat this I decided to use some risers.

I was working under the faulty assumption that if I went to a home improvement store there would be a table building section and in there I would find something meeting my specifications. Lowe's apparently doesn't cater to the DIY table crowd. I ended up just walking the aisles hoping to be struck by inspiration, which is exactly what happened! I found something called a connecting bolt, I forgot to take a picture before putting them to use, but here's the shot from the packaging.

See I felt this was perfect because the bolt had a nice flat top and I figured if I turned the nut around it would be a nice surface for the glass to sit on. And indeed, that would have been perfect, if things ever worked out that way.

Two problems:

1. You can't actually turn the nut around, it's not threaded that way, the other side has an allen cap

.2. There wasn't enough thread on the bolt, even screwed all the way in, it wouldn't actually grip the table.

Of course those are only problems for close minded people. This, you see, is exactly why I say everyone should own a tap and die set. What's a tap and die set? Well a tap is sort of like a really sharp screw with grooves cut into it that you can use to cut threads into a hole. A die is the opposite, it's like a really sharp nut with grooves cut into it that you can use to cut threads onto a rod of some kind. Some short work later and I had bolts that were threaded to the top and nuts that worked the right way.

I ended up going back and getting another set of four nuts, this second set would be embedded into the table to act as a washer for the spacer, as well as holding the bolds securely in place. The last bit of work that had to be done to prepare them for the table was to put felts on the top of the nuts and the bottom of the screws, ended up like this.The rest actually worked out perfectly. The frame was dropped onto the table. The nuts were put into the frame. The glass was set on top and the bolts were tightened down. Which brings us to why I assume any of you are here.

Wow! I bet it looks even better lit up! Well, that's debatable, I'm kind of torn.

It does look better in person, that shot doesn't really do the lighting justice. I know I know, you're still not convinced, you're saying "Mike, you know what would help? If you had some sort of stupid art shot. Do you, have, some sort of stupid art shot?"

Like looking into the ark of the fucking covenant innit? No? Well fuck you too.

Greatest table ever? I'm glad we're in agreement.

Making of!

hey look at this thing i made: V

2010-10-17T19:15:00.001-07:00

This is part 2 of a 3 part series.

Part 1: Wherein an idea is born

Part 3: Wherein shit gets real

When we last left, the pattern had just been finished. If you recall, the first piece I made I used some heavier weight paper that I had from the drawering class I took. That didn't go very well, so it was back to the drawing board for a material to make the pattern out of. In the aisle stained glass supplies are in at Hobby Lobby they have these sheets of clear plastic. I'm not sure what their actual purpose is, but I thought they'd be pretty good to make a pattern out of because while they were fairly sturdy they were also fairly pliable and seemed thin enough that they could be cut easily. I was really excited about it because this seemed like something that clearly would not wilt when hit with water AND it seemed like it would be reusable. I mentioned in the post for SG1 that I had no desire to repeat the same pieces, but it would be nice to have a reusable pattern so I would at least have the option (if nothing else I would have the option to remake parts that needed to be redone). That was uh, that was a mistake, is I believe the technical term. It started off well.

The markings from the carbon paper had transferred but weren't too hard to rub off, so I went ahead and started re-writing piece numbers/colors. It was at this point I said to myself, I said "Mike, why don't you try cutting it, just a little bit, just to see how it goes." Didn't go well. Maybe it's just because I have shitty scissors but the edges around the cuts cracked as I went. I tried going over it with a razor, but it was too thick and that proved too difficult. The last idea I had was to get out the ole Dremel and fit it with the cut-off wheel, but that just melted the plastic. Well shit. Back to Hobby Lobby. I ended up picking matboard because it was thick, but I was quite confident that worst case scenario I could cut it with a razor. Matboard was ok, not great, definitely won't be used again. First of all the thickness was good at resisting water damage, but it was actually thicker than the cutting wheel on my glass cutter, so all the pieces had an extra eighth of an inch around them which made grinding take a lot longer. The other bad part about it being thick was it really held it's shape. That seems good, except it meant it didn't want to glue flat, it would either bend up on the edges or in the middle. Good thing I own a lot of clamps.

Why yes, that IS a copy of Saul Williams The Seventh Octave. The only other comment to make on the pattern to pieces process is that I put a lot more thought in how the grain of the glass went. Anytime I was cutting a set of pieces that were going to be placed consecutively, I tried to line them up on the glass so it would sort of flow together.

You can see how the arm segments are set up there. I think my thought process with the fingers was this way they'd all have the same direction line. Also, the knuckles are fucking stupid, I have no idea why I thought that was a good idea.

I was really thrown off during the grinding process. SG1 really was made over the course of a couple days and it's true that it had a third of the pieces that SG2 does, but wouldn't that logically extrapolate to at most a week of work? I suppose it might if it were a week of me putting in eight hour days grinding glass, but I didn't think they'd give me a week off work. I was often putting in three hours of work a night and it still ended up taking me over a month to finish the grinding. That seemed so insane to me when I was thinking about it after the fact, here were my final thoughts as to why:

1. Detail was more important. On SG1 the only pieces that took any time were the mosaic on the underwear. Giant pieces like the legs/lower back/sky (I guess that's supposed to be the sky? I mean, it's blue) do not take very long to do and they cover a large part of the overall piece. I suspect the mosaic would have taken quite some time if it had mattered. I'm not saying I didn't care about how it looked, but really so long as the outer edges lined up it was fine. It was pretty irrelevant how the inner pieces fit together, which made sub-par grinding acceptable. With SG2 only the outer colored parts didn't matter. If the lines on the body didn't fit together right, it could end up looking pretty stupid pretty easily.

2. I was less tolerant of the pattern becoming unglued. For SG1 when the pattern started to come off I just went with it and did my best to get the piece to the right shape. This time, when the pattern started to come off, I stopped and re-glued. I was pretty unhappy with how the rubber cement had been working at this point, so I went to the number 1 gluing resource, thistothat.com. They suggested something called 3M 77. 3M 77 is a delight. It ended up adding a ton of time though because I probably re-glued a third to half of all the pieces.

3. Due to a poor job of keeping the sponge wet for SG1, I think my grinding wheel got quite a bit duller than it should have. It was still functional, but it took longer.

4. I kind of like doing it. While not that difficult, it does require a bit of dexterity and all of my concentration. It's the same reason I like knitting. It forces, as Swansong would say, me to listen past the noise inside my head. It was easy to just sit there and lose a couple of hours doing this, kind of a nice break from being a spaz.

THAT'S A BIG BASKET OF STAINED GLASS CHUNKS!

Give em a wash, put some copper foil on and good to go! Or I would have been, had I not dropped one of the pieces.

God that sucked. This is why I want a pattern I can re-use, so I could just cut a new piece instead of having to try and trace a pile of shattered glass. /sigh.

This was where the next big difference between SG2 and SG1 showed up.

DO YOU SEE HOW POORLY THOSE FIT!?! God that was infuriating. SG1 I would have just rolled with it. I could still lay the solder fine so it would, I guess, be ok, but little imperfections like that add up and if I had taken the time to try and get all the detail in during grinding, I may as well fix this right? I think in total I had to touch up twenty pieces, so that problems like that, ended up looking like this:

The other challenge was that when I made the pattern, I did my best to draw a square around the piece, but in reality it was probably skewed. This meant that when I tried to force it into the jig I made, it didn't want to fit perfectly. Few more touch-ups and it was solder time. That was a lot of fucking soldering. Despite sweating to death in my respirator, it was still enjoyable, because the thing was finally really coming together. It's hard to see this:

And not smile. Of course even the washing of this thing was more difficult. It's far too big to fit in my sink and the shower was pretty ineffective. Bucket and rag go! Final step was patina and finishing compound. You may recall there are two colors of patina available, so three line colors total. My thought was copper would be a no brainer for the inside of the body. Silver made sense for the colored outer. That left black for shadow. I was pretty happy with how that turned out. Did you forget how it looks? Here's that same picture!

I would have taken a picture of it with sun coming through, but I forget to do that before starting part 3. What happens in part 3? Shit gets real son.

Making of!

hey look at this idea i had

2010-10-16T14:44:00.001-07:00

This is part 1 of a 3 part series, it's uh, it's a long'n.

Part 2: Wherein a woman of glass is given life

Part 3: Wherein shit gets real

We were out at dinner for Donny's bachelor party. This was the saturday after I had posted the story about my first stained glass window. I brought up the topic of the window as I still found it quite funny and B commented that I should check out some video of a guy making a stained glass window of naked woman. It somehow had never occurred to me that this would be something other people did, but I feel like that must be a rule 34 corollary. "For any medium that exists which can be used to create imagery, it has been used to create imagery of an erotic/pornographic nature."

10,000 hours of googling later I found there was a bit of it out there. The biggest purveyor was this place in canada. I won't link to their site and here's why. The incomparable Neil Gaiman has a policy when working on a book, or even just thinking about working on a book, that he won't read any books that he thinks tell a similar story. His logic is that he doesn't want his work to be even subconsciously influenced by someone else's interpretation. I like that idea quite a bit and while it's not something I do, it's good here that I didn't have anyone else's influence because it might have held me to a lower standard. What I'm saying is that all the erotic stained glass out there is fucking terrible. This website in particular had a number of pieces with $500 price tags. I was in shock by this so I e-mailed their customer support:

TO: (removed)

FROM: highjack@fyadiaf.com

SUBJECT: question

So I was going through your available erotic stained glass and was just curious, do you actually sell these?

TO: highjack@fyadiaf.com

FROM: (removed)

SUBJECT: RE: question

Thanks for writing in. Yes all the work there is available for sale, was there one that interested you?

TO: (removed)

FROM: highjack@fyadiaf.com

SUBJECT: RE: RE: question

I'm sorry, you misunderstood me. My question was, have you ever actually sold one? They're fucking terrible and I find it so hard to believe that someone would actually pay $500 for one.

TO: highjack@fyadiaf.com

FROM: (removed)

SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: question

FUCK YOU THEY'RE TERRIBLE, WHY DON'T YOU COME TO CANADA AND WE'LL SHOW YOU HOW EROTIC STAINED GLASS IS DONE.

TO: (removed)

FROM: highjack@fyadiaf.com

SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: question

FUCK YOU COME TO CANADA, WHY DON'T YOU COME TO AMERICA AND I'LL SHOW YOU HOW IT'S DONE.

TO: highjack@fyadiaf.com

FROM: (removed)

SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: question

FUCK YOU COME TO AMERICA, YOU THINK YOU'RE SO BIG? WHAT DO YOU THINK A $500 EROTIC STAINED GLASS WINDOW LOOKS LIKE?!

TO: (removed)

FROM: highjack@fyadiaf.com

SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: question

I don't know, something like this?

TO: highjack@fyadiaf.com

FROM: (removed)

SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: question

...

You win this round America.

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

While working on the first window, it became clear to me that this was something I was going to stick with, not necessarily the erotic, but stained glass in general. Of course I was doing a shtick, so I would be doing at least a bit more of the erotic. I felt the logical progression was to do a set of tits next. That idea turned out to be quite a bit more difficult than I had originally thought.

I took a drawering class once. Sometimes the teacher would lecture, but mainly he would say, "here's a thing, drawer it." He would then walk around the class and give additional instruction to people who needed it. Despite the fact that I almost never got instruction in that class, I learned quite a bit about drawering. I'm not sure that a better drawerer now than I was before the class, but just by drawering for three hours a night I began to learn about the sort of things you can do, the techniques a drawerer has available to them to create a picture. Of course with a pencil you could create a fairly photo-realistic picture, not so with stained glass. You are always going to lose detail, unless it was something that was not finely detailed to begin with (I've seen some stained glass of cartoons that looked pretty much just like they were drawn). I currently feel the key is pick a couple details that you know you can transfer and really define the picture. Let's break down SG1 (as it shall hence be known) to show you what I mean.

It's a big ass and while you can certainly tell that from the width and the fact the underwear doesn't appear to cover it very well, it was hard to make it have depth. I only have so much control over how the colors look, so I can't really do shading. So what can I do? Well the first thing to notice is the lines on the underwear. I broke it up into pieces like that because I tend to associate stained glass with mosaicy things like that and wanted some in this piece. The lines, however, were done in a very specific way. The idea is that the lines sort of radiate out from the place the ass would protrude the most, my hope was that this would suggest stretching of the underwear.

What the upper left arrow is trying to point out is how the underwear slopes downward, to suggest going down from the top of the ass. Also, more zoomed in like this you can see how the individual pieces sort of taper down at the ends, again to suggest wrapping around. The arrow on the side is pointing to how the line of her hip becomes slightly concave, the idea there was to make it clear the underwear was tight and pulling the flesh in slightly. It is, I'm told, hard for big booty girls to find well fitting underwear.

The last thing I want to point out is the bottom stripe of the underwear. That final line is a continuous thing, but because the cheeks are curving in at that point, the middle of the line is wrapped away from view.

Overall, it's very clearly an ass, it's very clearly a big ass and it was not too hard to make a drawering that would transfer and illustrate this.

Back on the topic of tits, I wanted to do a similar sort of thing to SG1, a zoomed in picture of just the rack. The problem was I wanted them to be naked, so I wouldn't be able to use stretched clothing to suggest size/shape. After looking at the terrible art on the aforementioned site, I decided it probably was just not going to be possible to do a straight on shot, at least not with my current skill level and equipment. Luckily there was an obvious solution to the problem, by doing a shot in profile you would get a very clear idea of the size and shape of the breast. For something that simple though, I didn't really want to do just a zoomed in section. This meant the complexity was going to be pushed beyond what I felt I could drawer well. After some searching to find an image of sufficient resolution that I could blow it up to the size I wanted, I settled on this:

This image had a lot going for it. First of all, it is, I feel, very tastefully done. That's important to me because this isn't just supposed to be porn for the sake of porn. The second plus, probably the most important, is the breast is shot in a way that accomplishes what I wanted, it looked like it would look just fine even with just a single flat shade. Another thing it had going for it was the ass, I wanted another crack (HA HA HA) at doing an ass.

I never really did much to indicate the size of SG1, but it's about 1' x 2'. For SG2, given how much more complex it is, I figured I'd up the size to 2' x 2'. I opened the picture in Excel to size it (I have no idea why I do this) and was delighted to find out that it in fact was already 4' x 4' so I could easily get the size I wanted without losing quality. Printed out, I think it was broken up over eight sheets of 8.5 x 14 paper. I taped it together and put it down on the table to begin the pattern making process.

Despite it only being my second piece, it had already become clear to me just how important making the pattern is, how you break it up can really effect how easy it is to cut/grind the individual pieces. I was sort of conscious of that, but not really (that's more of a part two sort of story though). I think it was taped to my dining room table for the better part of two weeks while I tried to decide exactly how I wanted to do it. Initially I tried breaking up the body into as many big pieces as possible, the goal I think was to make it look as much like the photo as possible. This was stupid. As I mentioned earlier, there's a fairly finite limit on how realistic you can make it look, so instead of trying to hit that goal it makes more sense to embrace the medium and run away from it. I looked at some stained glass pictures online (non-erotic) to see how people far more talented than I had done bodies in the past. The general theme seemed to be breaking it up into a bunch of little pieces and just saying "hey, it's stained glass, this is what you're expecting to see." I liked that idea so I kept breaking the bigger sections up smaller and smaller. This would also let me incorporate some approximation of shading into the body. Of course the end result was that the piece as a whole was broken up into over a hundred different chunks. As far as the background coloring went, I wanted to mimic the sort of thing you might see in a cathedral window. This meant a bunch of clear shapes and some nice colors.

I got it to a point that I felt was "done" but I wanted to wait a few days to let it marinate to see if I wanted to change anything as it was becoming clear this was going to be a long project and I wanted to make sure if I was going to put a bunch of work into it that I would like the final product. Then I remembered that my landlady was going to be coming through my apartment for some sort of annual inspection and I didn't want the next time I saw her to be, "So, giant picture of a naked woman on your dining room table, how's that working out?" So this became the final pattern:

Little did I know the problems I would have in store, but that's for part two.

hey look at this thing i fixed

2010-10-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

I've touched on this before, but I have yet to put much thought into the display of stained glass windows I make. In fact the extent of thought I had really put in was that I was terrified to hang them cause what if they fell and broke? What use is a stained glass window that you can't display you ask? I don't know, but it's probably of more use than a pile of broken glass. For me this is fine. I make these windows on a whim and can take my time coming up with something to do with them. Of course, as I said before, that wouldn't make for a very compelling gift.

"Here's a lovely handcrafted stained glass window for you! There's just one catch, you can never display it. Ever."

You may recall with the Michigan State window, the idea I came up with was to put little suction cups on each corner. I'm not ready to call it a failure, because as a proof of concept I think it worked, it probably just needed different suction cups. You see, this happened:

Apparently the suction cup plan wasn't foolproof. Luckily I had read up on stained glass repair and it seemed pretty easy in theory and unlike other things that I think are easy in theory, this actually was. If you've read both the stained glass making ofs that I've done so far, you probably understand that the glass isn't actually attached to the solder frame. The frame is made around the glass and when it hardens the glass can't really move. This means that you can break the glass out, cut a new piece and solder it in place. Step 1? Bigger hammer.

Bigger hammer is a colloquialism used in the lab where I work. It, in essence, refers to using a brute force approach, but more so using a brute force approach when something else doesn't work. I have to disassemble a lot of vacuums at work. The ones made by electrolux I know pretty well how to navigate, but often competitor units have screws hidden because they're working as part of a larger plan to make me miserable. So bigger hammer. Often literally means getting a big hammer and smashing the vacuum with it. It might be possible to get the broken pieces out of the window as is, or:

It was really difficult for me to resist buying a sledgehammer for that picture. I wonder if there's something exciting hidden under that towel, perhaps to be revealed in a future post.

After the glass is broken out, the next step is to remove the solder around the edges where the glass was. This was kind of reassuring about the structural integrity of these pieces, because it was kind of tough to pull the solder off. I ended up having to get the iron out and melting it off in parts. That brought us to this point:

The other corner piece also needed to be removed, but I was worried that if I took it off then then that middle piece would fall off too as it would only be attached to the rest of the piece on one side. Typically in a situation like this I would need to lay the window on top of a piece of paper and trace a new pattern for the pieces. Luckily, the single upside to the foam I used to make the pattern for this piece was that it was easy to save and re-use. I dug out the pieces I needed, traced and cut replacement parts. After getting them ground, cleaned and foiled I went to set them to solder and came across an interesting problem:

You see, the solder beads stick above the glass by as much as an eighth of an inch in places. When constructing the window this isn't a problem because you do the entire side and then when you flip it, the solder keeps it essentially level. Here though, while I probably could have soldered it as is, the corner would have been really clearly indented and would have looked terrible. Pro tip: cards make great shims. I went and dug up some old cards I had and used them to raise the pieces of glass up. The nice thing about using cards is that while they're fairly sturdy, they're also thin enough that you can adjust the height of the stack very easily.

The second problem, or rather the second thing that's different from normal stained glass assembly, is that normally there's nowhere for the solder to go. Even if there's a big gap between two pieces, the solder will pool on the table and build up. Not so here, due the pieces being raised up the solder easily leaked through. What I ended up having to do was do the top as best I could, then flip it and do the bottom (since there was already some solder there it couldn't really leak through) and then do the top again, mainly to achieve a consistent look.

The other corner went just as smoothly and before too long the window was good as new.

I went ahead and put holes in the corners, but we're not gonna stick with the suction cup plan.

Making of gallery

hey look at this thing i finished

2010-10-04T20:51:00.000-07:00

You know what the problem is with the wingin' it plan?

No wait, scratch that, there are no problems with the wingin' it plan, it is, I'm told, what winners do.

You know what's interesting about the wingin' it plan? Due to the nature of it, it is impossible to predict where it will go. If there is no set end point, then how do I know when to stop? A good example is writing a paper for school. Given that I'm impossibly self critical, I could probably revise a paper endlessly (well, if I knew how to revise better that is) but it has to stop at some point and so turning the paper in becomes the definitive end point. I have an artist friend who says that a piece of his art is not finished until it has made it to it's final home. I always liked that idea. I assume he could probably endlessly tweak his drawerings (I'm not of the impression he does, but he COULD) but it has an end point. So what about when I make things for no reason? What about when I make a stained glass window of an ass, just because I think it's funny?

When we last left our intrepid stained glass maker he had completed the minimum amount of work for the window to be considered done. For reference:

Now, I wasn't entirely sure where to go from here, but I had some ideas. I mentioned at the end of the original post that there were some finishing chemicals I wanted to use. The first was Patina. Patina, in this setting, doesn't refer to the appearance, rather it's the blanket name for a group of chemicals that are used to create an artificial patina. I feel like it would make more sense to call the product artificial patina, but what do I know. As I understand it, it's made from equal parts acid and magic. There are many varieties covering a number of different types of metal, but as far as lead based solder you can get patina that will turn your solder copper or black. I would have liked a wider range of color choices, but still this meant that now I could have three different line colors, which was terribly exciting to me. The layout that made the most sense to me was to make the crack black to imply shadow, make the skin edges copper as that would be pretty similar to the glass and then keep the lines on the underwear silver.

Working with patina is pretty simple if you know what you're doing. It's really as simple as just dipping a brush into it and brushing on where you want the color changed. The color change is pretty instantaneous, but additional brushing can help. One thing that was not apparent to me was to get really good color you need to get a wire brush and go to town on the solder. It needs to be damn shiny before applying the patina. I did the black first as it was a much smaller area.

Worked pretty great, I was pumped. Doing the "skin" was far more problematic. The copper, I've found, is much more finicky, you really need to have a clean surface for it to work well. On top of that, remember when I said the color change was pretty instantaneous? Well after you apply patina you get a cloth rag and wipe off any excess, if you're not careful and you just barely touch a section you didn't want color on, it'll still change enough to be noticeable. Infuriating. I had to scrape off the patina and try again at least twice. Ended up pretty good though.

It's a little hard to tell in that picture since you apparently can't click to zoom in on pictures any more in blogger, but even at a distance I think you can see the difference in color. The other thing I wanted to do was go over it with some finishing compound. Now, this was something sold specifically for stained glass, but I'm not sure if there's anything about it that was special for this. As near as I can tell it's just wax. You cover the window with a light film, then when it dries to a haze you buff it to a high shine. It was really easy and while it's not an incredibly noticeable effect (so not noticeable I didn't deem it worth a picture) it gives it a nice consistent shine. Also, I guess it stops the solder from tarnishing.

The other thing I wanted to do was come up with some way to display it. You may recall at the end of the last past I talked about how my new soldering technique was not ultimate. The nice thing about solder is it re-melts pretty easy, I assume not an infinite number of times, but the one time was all I needed. After painstakingly going over the whole thing again it felt pretty damn sturdy. I felt pretty confident that I could attach a chain or a string or something and hang it without fear that it would fall apart and fall into a shattered pile of dreams. But, there was a problem. In the original post I threw out the idea of making a backlit shadowbox. I didn't have a very compelling reason for that, I think it popped into my head as I was writing the post, so I put it in there. Once it had manifested as such though, it stuck around in my head for awhile. I was lying in bed, I think the very night I posted that in fact, couldn't sleep for some reason, and I figured out how to make it real.

Of course there were nuts and bolts issues. Carpentry is not a skill I am in possession of. I did, however, know that a router was going to be necessary to make the grooves in the wood. I went to the local hardware stores and quickly decided all their routers were too expensive. I needed to goto Harbor Freight.

Harbor Freight, if you're unaware, is a tool store that sells cheap tools, like, really cheap tools. Sure that pretty much necessarily means you're sacrificing quality, but being mainly a hobbyist I don't always need tools that will last a lifetime. When I'm just making this shit up as I go and come under the impression I need a certain tool, I'd rather just by a cheap version and if it turns out to be something I can't live without, I'll upgrade later. The problem with Harbor Freight is that I should never be allowed in there unsupervised. I could pretty easily talk myself into buying half their stock. I came for a router and some cheap clamps and left with a router, a whole lotta cheap clamps, a multimeter, some loupes, some glue and a pin vise, which is so fucking sweet I'm not even sure what to say about it. That, I realize seems not that overboard, but it was a struggle.

Then it was off to Lowes to get some wood. I went with aspen as it was the first wood I found that was in the dimensions I wanted (1x4 or something, I don't remember anymore). Back at home I had the wood, I had the router all I needed now was to magically learn how to use a router. Hmm. Something I've noticed about tools from Harbor Freight is that their owners manuals are for shit. Luckily it seemed like a simple enough tool, just jam it in the wood and make a straight line. So that's what I did!

Apparently I only took one picture of the routed wood (is that the right terminology?). The idea was the top and bottom pieces would have a groove along their entire length and the window would stick out a quarter inch or so, then the side pieces would have a groove that ended a quarter inch or so from the edge so that when the pieces were put together it would be seamless. That was the idea anyway. The problem with these things only existing in my head and sub par measuring is that I run into some problems, more on that in a bit.

All the pieces were cut and route, I sort of fit them around the window and it seemed to match up just right, so I was feeling pretty good. I decided I wanted to paint them, because....I don't know. The thought process was if I painted it white then it would resemble the color of my normal window frames and would almost look like it was one (not that I had, or have, any intention of displaying it). I had some white spray paint laying around, but quickly found out that my new spray pant technique was not ultimate. Luckily there was a bucket of paint in my closet that had been inexplicably left here by the previous tenants, so I bought me a paintbrush! Came out pretty good.

SURE IS WHITE!

The plan was to clamp a side and and end together to make an L, then screw those together, then go from there. I think it probably would have worked fine if I'd done a better job sanding the ends. Since they didn't sit perfectly flat though it ended up making an acute angle instead of a right angle. Not such a big deal since the angle wasn't *that* far off. You know what was a big deal? This:

That's what's known as a zoh noes! moment. I have no idea how my non exact measurements didn't work out, but there's no crying in stained glass window backlit shadowbox making. After firing the router back up it was pretty quick work to just deepen the groove. Of course, shocker of shockers, there was a similar problem when I went to put the other end on.

Same process to fix that. Couple more screws and the box was done except that.....

THE SEAMS LOOKED LIKE SHIT. GODAMNIT. WHY COULDN'T YOU JUST BE FLUSH! Why oh why do artists have to suffer so. /sigh. At least it seemed to be an easy fix, just get some plaster and cover it up. So that's what I did!

I was now in possession of a stained glass window framed in a nice little box. All that was really left was to add some lights. From the start of the project I had decided I was going to go with some cold cathodes. I had modded my xbox 360 a few years ago (retro post forthcoming!) and had looked into using some in that so I had a bit of knowledge to go off of. I bought two twenty inch lights, one for the top and one for the bottom. My dream was that this thing would be reallllllly bright, a shining beacon unto the lord if you will. I was a little underwhelmed, but still.

Everything about that delights me. It's somewhat hard to tell from the picture, but given how transparent the blue parts are, the lack of a back meant you could see right through the thing, wasn't really what I wanted. I got some paper that they put on picture frames. Double sided tape and some precise xacto trimming got me this:

So the final step, displaying it. I was terrified to hang this up as it was now pretty heavy. I spent some time walking around the Hobby Lobby framing department to see if they had anything that seemed especially compelling. What I found was the perfect hang system. It, apparently, is what professionals use and can hold up to fifty pounds. I felt I had to buy it as, I am a professional and would hate to make the label out to be a lier.

This brings us somewhat full circle, the whole wingin' it thing. I had now spent quite a bit of time on something that I had no real intention of ever displaying in my apartment. On top of that it seemed to lack commercial

appeal. I don't know though, I feel like I could see it in a bar. Maybe Cheeks? They're an ass bar right? I bet it'd look something like this.

OH GLOWING ASS, YOU'RE THE ONLY LIGHT IN MY WORLD.

Reminds me of a poem I once heard:

making your way in the world today

takes everything you've got

taking a break

from all your worries

sure would help a lot

wouldn't you like to get away?

sometimes you wanna go

WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAAAA-AAAAME
AND THEY'RE ALWAYS GLAD YOU CAAAA-AAAAME

you wanna be where you can see

troubles are all the same

you wanna be

where everybody knows your name

you wanna go where people know

people aren't all the same

you wanna go

where everybody knows your name.

As always, your making of gallery, featuring bonus shots of the "bar scene." It was pretty hard, the picture was supposed to capture a sense of desperation but then also a glowing ass. Tragically I'm a terrible photographer. Also it's hard doing tripod shots apparently. Also I don't seem to photograph well. Also my table makes for a shitty bar. Feel free to select any of those compelling reasons for any dissatisfaction you might have.

hey look at this sauce i made: II

2010-10-03T19:21:00.001-07:00

So then we stopped doing tuesday night wing night. Now we do sunday night on occasion wing night. The fare, while including wings, has expanded a bit. So far we've had shrimp, meatballs and nachos. Still wings tho. Anyway I made a sauce.

I'm pretty high up on Honey Chipotle as a concept. So I googled Honey Chipotle, got this. I modified the recipe slightly:

Step 1: Empty can of chipotles into a bowl, hit that shit with the stick blender.

Step 2: Pour most of a 48 oz thing of Wal-mart brand clover honey into the bowl, hit that shit with the stick blender.

Step 3: Pour most of a 32 oz bottle of ketchup into the bowl. I went until it became too annoying to try and get more ketchup out of the bottle. Hit that shit with the stick blender.

Step 4: Add some amount of cider vinegar, like, a splash.

Step 5: Add some amount of Worcestershire sauce, like, a splash.

Step 6: Bust out the salt and pepper shakers and shake until it looks like there's a compelling amount there.

Step 7: Add some amount of garlic powder, probably less than what you added in step 6.

Step 8: Due to attempting to do this from memory and not actually looking at a recipe, forget that the recipe calls for brown sugar and don't add it.

Step 9: HIT THAT SHIT WITH THE STICK BLENDER. Then whisk.

Step 10: Reduce down for an hour or something, maybe it was two, hard to say.

Then uh, eat it. Came out pretty well. That is all.