That said, fizzygeek and I were hanging around in an airport waiting for a flight, and I was browsing Dan's facebook feed when I saw an announcement: he was having a charity meet-and-greet to support St. Jude's Hospital. Dan had asked the casts of both iCarly and Victorious to participate, and they all agreed!

Hoo boy, I wanted to go to this shindig! I asked fizzygeek if I could go, and she said I should probably think about it first, see if it would be feasible. I considered it for a while, and decided that this would be a popular event and would sell out quickly. I could either pounce on it immediately, and take the chance of paying for it and not being able to go, or think about it on the plane ride and take a chance of wanting to go, but all the slots being gone. Additionally, Andrea couldn't go anyway. I pounced on it anyway, to her vague surprise.

When I got home, I started making arrangements. I booked a room at the Peabody, the hotel where the event would be held, and found an affordable flight to Memphis, connecting through Charlotte.

Then I got another notification - NASA had freed up some additional VIP tickets for the (then) final space shuttle launch. I had tried to buy tickets earlier, but they were sold out, so I got on the bus company's mailing list. This mailing included a URL to buy the tickets, but the URL was mangled in transmission. I reverse-engineered what it should have been and bought the tickets pronto. I remember Spider Robinson writing in one of his books that seeing a shuttle launch from the VIP area was an incredible experience, and it was worth going to a large amount of effort do do so. I had seen the Apollo moon shots go up from across the river, those were awesome, and I'd seen a shuttle launch from on top of the bridge, which was wonderful, but not like a Saturn V. However, a shuttle launch from close up was something I wanted to experience, and chances were running out.

Then I realized it was the same weekend! Now what am I going to do? Okay, calm down, they're not the same day. I can fly to Memphis, meet Dan and his TV show casts, then fly to Florida and catch the space shuttle launch with Andrea. So I went to the USAir web site and tried to modify my flight. Unfortunately, USAir's reservation system isn't too bright - I have to work with the complete flight between Memphis and Dulles, I can't just delete the Charlotte-Dulles segment. And I can't convert Memphis-Dulles into Memphis-Orlando, because there are no more seats on the Memphis-Charlotte segment! Even though I'd be on that plane either way, the computer simply can't accept that I'd be vacating a seat that I'd then occupy. Okay, I'll just call the airline directly and deal with a human instead. No dice - the human uses the same broken reservation system, and can't accomplish it either.

Fine, I'm not going to miss out on the shuttle launch. I went to another airline and bought a ticket from Charlotte to Orlando, and one from Orlando to Dulles. I'll just get off the USAir plane in Charlotte and board a plane to Orlando, abandoning the Charlotte-Dulles segment.

I'm not sure what I'm going to wear - I'm tempted to wear a Gibby's Ice Cream T-shirt, as one of the characters on iCarly is called Gibby. But it might be a fancy shindig, so I also pack a really nice but somewhat outrageous striped shirt that had once listed for $200, but we found on a clearance rack for $20 or so. I emailed the event coordinator asking if there's a dress code, but hadn't heard back.

I get to the hotel and unpack, and find that I have a reply to the dress code - it's supposed to be reasonably fancy, no jeans. And I somehow neglected to pack nice pants. Time to go shopping! I call a cab to the mall. The cab driver takes a phone call on the way, and speaks a language that sounds faintly familiar, but I can't place it. When he gets off the phone, I ask him about it. He explains that he's speaking Ethiopian. No wonder it sounded familiar, I love Ethiopian food, and have learned several of the terms for the dishes. He and I have a great time discussing Ethiopian food.

I get to the mall and do some power shopping, picking up a nice pair of slacks, a belt, and some cufflinks. I'm going to look good. I also scarfed down some food, as I didn't know when I'd have another opportunity to eat, as I'd be getting back to the hotel not long before the event began, and I still had to change.

I have a nice chat with another cab driver on the way back - he's curious as to why I'm in town, and I explain that I'm attending a fundraiser for St. Jude's Hospital. He says they're a wonderfully deserving place, and tells me a tale. There was a boy who'd gone to a conventional hosptial with cancer, and they told him he had maybe two months to live. His parents took him to St. Jude's instead, where he had done quite well. After a year, he was well enough for a trip to the zoo - and that cab driver had driven him and his parents to the zoo.

When I got back to the hotel, there was a huge crowd of people in the lobby. I figured the TV stars had showed up and I was missing things! Out by the elevators was mobbed, so it would be problematic to even get back to my room to change. It took a while for me to figure out what was really going on: the Peabody hotel has a tradition where a family of ducks lives in their fountain during the day, and the ducks march back to their home on the roof at night - via the elevator. Once the ducks had made their journey, the lobby cleared out and I was able to go back to my room and change into my fancy duds. Originally posted at Dreamwidth.org comments

[	Tags	|	dentistry	]
[	Current Location	|	Leesburg, VA	]
[	mood	|	impressed	]
[	music	|	Dentist! - Steve Martin - Little Shop of Horrors	]

But technology marches on, and things are much improved today! It only took a little while to remove the old crown and prepare the tooth for the new one. At that point, technology took over. They puffed some blue powder on the area and took a bunch of measurements with a miniature 3D scanner, both open jaw and closed jaw. Then the computer chewed on it for a while, and generated a 3D model of the new crown, designed to fit neatly between the existing teeth, provide a good match to the attachment point, and meet the opposing teeth properly. The dentist fine-tuned the model slightly (of course, I watched), and pressed the "go" button. At that point, a little precision CNC machine carved the new crown out of a "green" ceramic blank. The green ceramic was actually lavender, amusingly enough. Then the crown was test fit, and some very fine adjustments made, as it was nearly a perfect fit to start with. Then it went into a kiln for firing, and once it had cooled, they cemented it in place, cleaned up some stray cement, and sent me on my merry way.

Yay technology! Originally posted at Dreamwidth.org comments

I have a lot of good camera and lense tools, so I grabbed the lense spanner and the lense and peered at it for a while, realizing that the lens retaining ring didn't have spanner grooves. Some research on the internet revealed that some people simply saw grooves into the front ring and remove it that way, but I didn't want to, as it's really easy to ruin something in the process, and the front of the barrel had been dented at some point in the past, so the threads were in poor shape. However, the same research revealed a downloadable copy of the repair manual for it. It turns out this is a popular lense, and has been offered in a variety of versions and configurations over the span of a few decades. The one I had didn't match the repair manual, but it was close enough for me to realize the tiny dimples at the front were actually tiny setscrews covered over with (essentially) black nail polish. With the setscrews removed, the front lense element assembly should simply unscrew.

I rounded up my Wiha precision screwdriver set and selected a bit that would just fit in the setscrew opening. A few turns abraded away the black nail polish, exposing the head of the setscrew. Some careful digging cleared out the slot, and I was able to back out the setscrew nicely. It's a really small screw, about the size of a grain of pepper. There was one each in front of and behind the line delineating the front lense assembly. So I removed both of them. Then I tried to unscrew the front of the lense. It didn't budge. So I found one of those grippy pads used to remove stubborn jar lids, and cranked away at it with that. Success! The front unscrewed smoothly. Now that I had access to the back of the lense, it was simple enough to carefully remove all the fungus without damaging the antireflection coatings (as far as I could tell, anyway). Then I screwed it back on. Replacing the tiny setscrews was tricky, as they wanted to lie in their openings sideways. I finally ended up lightly magnetizing the screwdriver and using it to place the screws in position. That worked a treat, I replaced the screws, and the lense works properly!

With it, and the last sunshine before this afternoon's thunderstorm, I got some good shots of the character matrix, in acceptable focus from edge to edge (I have to photograph it edge-on due to the construction of the tube). Originally posted at Dreamwidth.org comments

[	Tags	|	entertainment	]
[	Current Location	|	Purcellville	]
[	mood	|	nostalgic	]
[	music	|	Crazy Train - Carbon Leaf	]

As before, several of you appear.

157MB of clippy goodness @ 960×540

Vimeo version. Originally posted at Dreamwidth.org comments

[	Tags	|	entertainment	]
[	Current Location	|	Purcellville	]
[	mood	|	pensive	]
[	music	|	World Shut Your Mouth - Trouble 22	]

Another time, I was watching The Sarah Conner Chronicles and one plot point was that cyborgs had been sent back to the past to stockpile "coltan", a material used in making said cyborgs, which was hard to obtain in the future. I hadn't heard of coltan, so I figured it was just a Mineral MacGuffin. Again, I was mistaken. While reading up on a company that sells metals internationally, I saw a disclaimer on their web page, explaining that their coltan was obtained in a humane, legal, free trade fashion. Reading further, I discovered that coltan was an industrial shorthand for "columbite-tantalite", an ore containing columbium (an earlier term for niobium) and tantalum. Further research revealed a large, nasty underground trade supplying high-tech industries. Somewhat disconcertingly, one paper on the subject actually contains links to a site hosted at a skynet.be domain.

More recently, I read about a new treatment that could theoretically eliminate any virus from the body, by causing those cells hosting viral genetic material to destroy themselves by triggering apoptosis. This is an intriguing approach, but it also sounded all too much like the opening scenes of a "science gone bad" disaster flick. And, thinking about it, I realized that prime targets for this treatment are viruses that are difficult to eradicate, such as herpes and HIV. And these, it turns out, like to hide out in nervous tissue. Which, given the horror movie frame of mind I was in, got me to thinking. The result would be the selective removal of parts of the human nervous system. And when you selectively delete parts of the human nervous system, you get ... zombies. Originally posted at Dreamwidth.org comments

That was maybe a year or two ago. Recently, it developed a new quirk, where it would leak water all over the counter. It wouldn't do this every time, and some of the water ended up in the pitcher where it belongs, but it was enough of a leak to make a thorough mess of things. When I had enough time to watch it closely in operation (the cycle time is a few hours, and it didn't always leak), I was able to tell it wasn't any of the external seals, it seemed to be leaking from within the mechanism. So I finally took it apart and carefully studied the steam/water path. I figured it was sealed all the way down and a seal had failed. Nope, it's not sealed. There's a riser tube, an L-shaped plastic connector tube, the spiral heat exchanger, which drains into a plastic assembly integrated with the pitcher-detector plunger/switch. At first, I suspected the connector tube, which felt as if it may have cracked along a seam. I snipped off the tie-wraps and had a close look, and realized two things. One was that it wasn't cracked. The other was that there's a neat hole drilled in the top of the heat exchanger. It isn't pressurized, and is designed not to be. A good idea – see the Mythbusters "exploding water heater" episode for a graphic depiction of why (the high speed footage of the water heater pretty much destroying a whole house really drives the point home). I opened up the plastic assembly and saw that the lower end of the heat exchanger is simply positioned above the top of the output assembly; it's open to the air and drains into it by gravity.

Hmm, not obvious what's going wrong. The design isn't what I expected, but everything seems to be in place. So reassembled it, except for the top cover, plugged it in, and watched it carefully while it was running. Eventually, I could see steam in the L-tube, and then water coming out of the heat exchanger, but there was a longish delay before it actually came out into the pitcher. Curious. But no obvious leaks. I carefully jiggled and poked things (mindful of both the hot steam and exposed mains voltage), to no avail. So I kept watching, and sure enough, I saw some water start to dribble out of the ring vents around the output assembly. That isn't supposed to happen. So I opened it back up (which deactivated the pitcher-detect switch), hot-wired the switch, and waited for it to heat back up.

The water started to dribble into the output cup, as expected, but started to pool up. Odd. Why would the water pool up? It should just go to the lowest point and run out.

Then I finally realized what was actually going on. There's a little gasket at the bottom of the output cup that the pitcher detect plunger engages to shut off the water if you remove the pitcher while the unit is running. What I had missed was that the gasket was supposed to stay with the plunger, not sit on the output opening! In that position, it blocked the output, and the pip on the plunger (that's supposed to hold the gasket) merely plugged the hole in the gasket (the plunger doesn't rise very far). To put it back to the original configuration, I'd attach the gasket back to the plunger. But it's made of one of those "low surface energy" plastics that's difficult to adhere to, which likely led to the problem in the first place. What if I just removed the gasket? The water would have a clear path to drain, the pitcher detection switch would still work, it would just leak water if I removed the picture while it was running. No problem, neither Andrea nor I do that anyway. So I left the gasket out, reassembled the thing, and fired it back up.

It shut down after maybe a third of a gallon. NOW what was wrong? Oh right, we had shut it down partway through because it was leaking, and emptied the picture. The boiler only had part of a gallon to start with. So I refilled it, set it running, and observed it until it started dispensing water into the pitcher like it's supposed to. Seems to be working again, yay! Originally posted at Dreamwidth.org comments

[	Tags	|	electronics, tools	]
[	Current Location	|	Purcellville, VA	]
[	mood	|	pleased	]

( I gave it a try todayCollapse )

I am quite satisfied with this little beast. It does a lovely job at melting whatever I point it at. Originally posted at Dreamwidth.org comments

( First, I had some shopping to doCollapse ) Since the new head will require a new mirror bracket, and another method to hold objects to be cut at the correct height, I haven't yet given the new air assist system a tryout. I'll need to realign the optics once the new mirror mount is fabricated and installed, then I can give the new air assist system a test drive. Originally posted at Dreamwidth.org comments

[	Tags	|	shop	]
[	Current Location	|	Purcellville, VA	]
[	mood	|	pleased	]
[	music	|	Good Golly Svengali-Don Dixon-Romantic Depressive	]

I considered buying the motors from Sherline, but they want $65 apiece for their stepper motors. I knew I wanted NEMA 23 size motors, with reasonable torque, voltage, and current ratings, and dual shafts (the mill handwheels attach to the other shaft). So I checked the usual suppliers, and ended up buying a set of three from a seller on eBay.

( they got here today (pictures)Collapse ) Originally posted at Dreamwidth.org comments