Just a few hours left until this horrible year is over. Will it actually happen? Will 2020 actually end? Or will some other black swan event occur to send us into a thirteenth month of it? Perhaps an alien civilization will open up a time warp on our world just for kicks and giggles, sending us back to January 2020 to relive it all.
I hop you all have a Happy New Year, or at least as happy as can be reasonably expected due to the circumstances. Take care, y'all.
What's the best thing about the internet? In my opinion, it's the fact that you can learn about anything. Not only can you learn any subject, but you can learn it from top-notch experts.
YouTube, for example, is full of tutorials for every subject. Yesterday, I watched some of Paul Seller's stuff. He's a British woodworker, and he does fantastic work. Early today, I watched a video of a guitar teacher breaking down one of Billy Strings's songs and really diving into the music theory. I played sax for many years and learned a good bit of technical stuff about music, but I never knew half the stuff this guy knows.
This is the real value of the internet. Knowledge is freely shared, and that accelerates learning on the part of those who are interested. No tuition or apprenticeships necessary. Only patience, practice, and determination.
It's never too late to master a new subject. Go for it! :D
Whatever your plans, I hope they go off without a hitch. If you're getting together with family, then I hope you and your loved ones are all doing well. And wherever you go, please drive safely, because lots of accidents happen on holidays.
Take care, folks, and have a Merry Christmas!
Saturn and Jupiter are going to put on a show today. They'll only be six minutes of arc apart, so they'll almost look like a single star. This is the "great conjunction" of 2020.
If the weather permits in your area, be sure to check it out.
On YouTube, whenever you see someone making a wooden mallet, it's always from pieces of lumber--like a 1x6, for example--that are sandwiched together to make the head of the mallet. I now know why they all go this route instead of trying to make the mallet head from a single piece of wood.
First, it's easier to make the hole for the handle. A lot easier.
Second, with the laminated style, you reduce the chance of the wood splitting when you pound the handle into the head. And I'm guessing you don't have to pound as hard since most of the straight cuts were already made at the sawmill.
Third, all the cuts and measurements have been standardized before you even get started, so everything fits snugly together without even trying.
If I ever try to make a wooden mallet again, I'm doing it the easy way, not the hard way.
On the plus side, I'm using wood from a tree I felled myself, so I should get bonus points for recycling, right?
I've said before that I'm not a woodworker. And I'll say it again: I'm a total novice at this stuff. I can hack up pieces of wood and join them together in a rough sort of way, but it ain't pretty. It's more like Frankenstein's monster.
I recently bought a chisel set. Today I did some chiseling as part of my current project. I learned three things from today's work:
1.) Make a chisel cut across the grain first. Only make parallel-grain cuts between your cross-grain cuts. The problem with parallel-grain cuts is that they split the wood.
2.) Start in the middle of your planned hole and work outward. It's a lot easier to chip way at an edge that it is to drive down into a place far from a hole.
3.) If you're chiseling all the way through, make some cuts or drill some holes or something on the other side. If you go in from one direction and try to go all the way, you'll split the wood on the back side.
Those are my newb-learns-the-hard-way lessons for today.
Adobe is phasing out Flash. This means no more Flash games, which means no more Bloons TD 5. There's still a mobile version, but I won't be able to just go to the website on my computer and crank up a free game.
It's a shame, because I really liked that game.
At least I still have Sudoku.
A giant in the history of aviation has passed away. General Chuck Yeager, the man who broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 rocket plane, was 97.
When I was a boy, I did a book report on his autobiography. It was recently published--the same year of my report, I think--and I was utterly fascinated by it. Yeager's wartime experiences read like bad fiction. I say "bad" because, if it had been fiction, no one would have believed it. Readers would have rolled their eyes at the unlikeliness of it all. Professional critics would have derided the main character as a Mary Sue and made snide jabs about "author wish fulfillment."
But it wasn't fiction. It all actually happened. And that makes the man's life all the more remarkable.
I'd encourage everyone to check out the book, assuming you can find a copy. This is the one I'm talking about, though it seems to be a used copy (i.e., it's out of print). Hopefully his heirs will put together an ebook version some day.
In recent years, General Yeager took to posting on Twitter. I don't have a Twitter account, so I don't "follow" anyone, but I'd read some of Yeager's posts from time to time. He revealed some fascinating behind-the-scenes stuff about the things he had been involved in, not just as a pilot, but also civil service things like diagnosing the Challenger disaster.
He lived a long, action-packed, amazing life. The world is a little duller now, a little less bold and brave and forthright.
Rest in peace, General.
...my head is hot and my feet are cold.
That's what happens when you have HVAC vents in the ceiling. The warm air gets pushed down until it reaches the thermostat. Then it shuts off. Everything below the thermostat, though--which is me when I'm sitting down, which is most of the time--remains cold. Except my head which is close enough to the thermal boundary to get hot.
If those vents were near the bottom of the walls where they belong, the house would warm from the bottom up. Hot air rises, so the air would mix better, too.
The moral of this story is that if you ever design your own home, don't put those vents in the ceiling. You live in the lower half of the room, not the upper half.
Good news: my toe seems fine. I think I must have just rubbed it the wrong way while doing yard work or something. In any event, it's not infected, it doesn't hurt, and I'm back to my normal routine.
Friday night, I felt a little sick. Fatigue and chills, the usual stuff. I suspected I had picked up a bug from my relatives at Thanksgiving. However, I felt fine the next day, and I've felt fine since. So it was a false alarm. Probably just still tired from all of Thursday's activity.
I've been getting some exercise in. I'm not anywhere near where I'd like to be as far as physical fitness goes, but I'm making progress. I'm pleased to be moving in the right direction.
Fun fact: Accept's Blood of the Nations album makes for good workout music. :)
