Site Update

A couple of things:

I need a way to dispose of my Tassimo coffee maker (see my Tassimo post for details).  There is a new poll in the sidebar.  If you choose "Something Else" as an answer, feel free to make a comment here to let everyone know what your idea is.

The sharp-eyed (or bored) among you may have noticed a new link in the sidebar to a Secret Puzzle Page.  I have been incorporating puzzles into certain things I have built and I plan on doing that for as long as I do woodworking.  As the puzzles are discovered I will post them here. 

By the way, these are seperate from the Puzzle for Charity puzzles - I just do these just for fun.  There is no Prize other than "Braggin' Rights". Here is the one my brother found burned into the bottom of the Pallet Table.

Click on the Secret Puzzle Page link in the sidebar for details and to submit a guess. Good Luck.

Book Review

A couple of weeks ago my wife bought me "In the Courts of the Sun" by Brian D'Amato.  Just out of the blue - I didn't ask for it or anything... She's so awesome...

I guess she was in a Border's and walked past a display and this book caught her eye.  She say that it had something to do with time travel and, knowing that I like books and movies of that genre, decided to pick it up for me.

When I looked at the cover I was, like, "Oh, how original.  Yet another 2012 doomsday book.  Well, only a couple more years to crank out this stuff so everyone on board the Mayan train..."  I probably snorted derisively, too.  I mean, any geek my age worth his/her salt has known that "the world is due to end December 21, 2012" for decades, and now all of a sudden it's "trendy".  Note to self: see if Agmorion still has that "Doomsday 2000" VHS tape I bought him as a joke Christmas gift ten years ago.

Here is my spoiler-free review:

I started reading it and was immediately hooked by the in-your-face, try-to-keep-up writing style.  The method of sending a person "back in time" is excitingly original and disturbing and depressing and frightening all at the same time.  The fact that the hero even considers doing this for a second is a monument to his bravery or stupidity.  The fact he is clearly a genius and highly adept at numbers games and pattern recognition seems to indicate "brave"... Maybe he just doesn't care...

There are a couple of scenes in the book (one during a disaster near the beginning and one describing a choice the hero has to make near the end) that are so soul-crushingly sad that you would have to be made of stone not to feel anything.

There is a lot of excitement in the book right from the start regarding "prophesies" in a newly discovered Mayan codex and a pattern-finding ritual called "The Game".  Unfortunately, the author's highly-descriptive style becomes a huge burden right in the middle of the book and lasts for tens of chapters for seemingly no reason.   I figure this 700-page book could have been edited down to 300 or so pages if a lot of the overwhelming detail describing ancient Mayan greeting rituals, jungle wildlife, and just plain old walking around  just went away.  I found myself skimming a lot.  Even chase scenes and battle scenes dragged on way too long.

Also, it will help if you speak Spanish, German, and know the basics to Greek and Latin.  Even then, keep a dictionary handy.  A big one.

The book started off as an A+ and ended as a B-.  Amazon gives it 3 1/2 stars.  I agree with a couple of the one-star reviews, but not with their anger.  Will I get Book Two?  I don't know.  We will see.

No, Really, They Are!

Wait... You are telling me they are great and edible?  Surely I have died and gone to limbo. 

Why Didn't I Think of That?

When I think of all the time I wasted thumbing through the yellow pages as the grease fire was consuming my kitchen, I just feel so stupid...

Don't Let the Door Hit You...

Hello, Tassimo. Come in. Take a seat.

There is really no easy way of saying this so we are just going to come out and say it. We are going to have to let you go.

You showed such promise when you first joined our organization but, frankly, we feel you grossly misrepresented yourself on your resume and our disappointment with your performance has only grown with time.

What are we talking about? Well, your 5-star reviews notwithstanding, you only deliver a drinkable cup of coffee about 10% of the time. As for the other 90% you start out well and then just when we all think everything is going great, you blow up the coffee disk spewing grounds and hot water all over the mug, the countertop, and yourself.

Don't give me that. We tried filtered, bottled, and tap water with you. Nothing seems to make you happy. As a matter of fact, the very first cup you tried to make was a huge failure. You have no excuse.

Remember when you had that complete meltdown last year and it took 6 weeks for a brand-new replacement unit to come back from "somewhere out there"? No? You had just finished making your typical one-thirds-filled cup of hot water and coffee grounds then 5 minutes later, for no reason whatsoever, you started shooting steam out of every seam in your body. You were just sitting there, for crying out loud! You went from an annoyance to a legitimate safety hazard. Your customer service rep seemed to find that funny until I explained to her that it was lucky I was there to unplug you or else who knows what might have happened.

You are badly designed and it's difficult to even find coffee disks that will work with you. I have even gone as far as to cut and paste a barcode from a known good disk (Henry's Breakfast Blend, say) onto one that blows up routinely (everything else, say) to trick you into not making a colossal mess of my countertop. Its just not worth the effort anymore.

Also, your alleged “hot chocolate” is downright vile.

We are sorry, but we are going in a different direction. We are now working with your replacement to get him up to speed but he seems to have hit the ground running. No spitting activated carbon beads into the water hopper from him, I tell ya.

What is going to happen to you now, you ask? Well, for now you will be cleaned then sequestered in the pantry. We will confer with our friends to see what is the best course of action, but, frankly, it does not look good for you. To give you an idea of what your future holds, phrases that include words such as "M-80s", "gasoline", "baseball bat", and even "hollow point" have been floated by those that know you best.

The best you can hope for is that we just get sick of looking at you and chuck you in the Dumpster.

Poster-paint-a-licious!

Remember how I said in my Five Projects post that one of the projects in my queue was to make use of a little oak end table that has been sitting in my garage for over a year?

No? Didn't you read the post? Figures. Well, at least I am getting a lot of practice typing with my thumbs. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog! Wheee!

"Anyway," he says passive-aggressively to apparently no one...

It looked like I was going to have a little paint left over from the Desk Restoration project so I figured I might as well use it on the little end table. The idea was to turn it from a dust-collecting, space-consuming monument to my laziness into a usable play table for my now one-and-a-half year old.

Not really too much to it. The table was a little tall so I sawed the bottom four inches from the legs. The flat surfaces were painted the same antique white from the Desk project. The idea here was to give my son a blank canvas on which he could get his first exposure to poster paints.

In my head, I pictured a delighted nineteen-month-old toddling up to the table, being given a paintbrush, and having him go to town on the top of it resulting in a brightly colored near random collage of smears, brushstrokes, and handprints. He would be so excited he would not want to quit and mommy and I would have to drag him away giggling for a bath. Maybe some upbeat montage music would be playing in the background. Adorable!

Yeah.

I got some poster and finger paints and foam brushes from an area craft store and set up the table, an old bedsheet, and bunch of little Tupperware dishes on the kitchen floor. After the rainbow selection of fun-time-happiness was set up we let him into the room.

Even as I type this I really have to worry that I am completely unfit to watch over a little human. I mean, I have been around him literally every single day for nearly 600 days and I still saw no problem with my grand plan?!

Cripes...

I think it's worthwhile to describe the scene again. A table in the room where he eats dinner is surrounded by little plastic dishes of attractively colored goo. In each of the dishes is a wooden-handled foam thing that looks like a cross between a toothbrush and a spoon. In walks the nineteen month old who has never been exposed to the concept of "painting"...

Once we demonstrated what to do he did, in fact, show interest in blopping colors on the table and smearing them around with the brushes. And his hands. And his shirtsleeves. And his shirtfront.

Ok, at this point it had gone from cute to gross in less than 5 minutes. Did you know that if you mix every color of the rainbow it turns into a hue pretty close to that of mashed sweet potatoes, my son's favorite food?

Although it took me only about one tenth of a second to think "Ick, that looks like sweet potatoes" after I saw his paint-coated hands, it took him that same exact amount of time to realize the same thing (without the "ick") and suddenly jam all his fingers into his mouth.

We yanked his hands out and wiped them off and wiped his face, tongue and teeth the best we could. He then blopped his hands in the paint and crammed them into his mouth again.

Ok. Done. Time for a bath, little dude.

I plunked him into the tub and mommy took over while I went to clean up the kitchen. I blotted the not-so-great-as-I-pictured-it looking table dry with a towel and placed it in the garage. All the paints were mixed together so no sense in saving those...

Wait.

Hmm... "Non-Toxic". Well, good, that's what I remember reading before we started this process. But, you know... Still, yuck, right? What must have that been like? Here he is thinking he is licking a tasty Gerber's concoction off his fingers...

Look, I don't know how to get from the last paragraph to my current thought so I'll just come out and say it: I drank some paint.

Yep. I, a nearly 40-year-old man well in charge of my faculties, took a big ol' swig of black poster paint on purpose to see how bad the experience was for my son, taste-wise.

For anyone out there who cares to know "Non-Toxic" does not equal "Delicious". After a quick emergency gargle with Coke, I brushed my teeth and tongue until it was time to get him out of the tub.

While we were getting him dressed for bed I sheepishly told my wife what I had just done and why.

Although sometimes I just think I am giving her more and more ammunition for a hearing (either "sanity" or "divorce") sometime in the not-so-distant future, this time she just looked at me, smiled, and said "You are a good daddy."

Cool...

Desk Restoration Project (Part II)

(Continued from Part I)

W.C. Fields once said "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no sense being a damn fool about it." Wise words, to be sure, and very appropriate to the Desk Restoration project.

As you can see from the photo and like I mentioned in my last Project post, the desk staining did not go well at all. After all the time I spent sanding the damaged areas it was pretty heartbreaking to end up with a blotchy mess.

Fast-forwarding a bit through the giving-up process I finally settled on painting the damn thing. Now instead of an "elegant-but-well-used" piece of furniture, I am going to end up with something extremely country-fied. So be it.

I was going to crackle-coat the desk but just decided to straight-up paint it instead. I want this thing out of my garage now - I am tired of looking at it. Do I sound angry? I feel like I sound angry...

I chose two Valspar semi-gloss paints one antique white and one sort of antique teal. The bulk of the desk will be white and the trim and desk drawer will be teal, you see.

I was gonna go with a royal blue for the trimwork and a brighter white for the bulk, but when I put the color cards side by side it didn't look right. It sort of gave off an over-the-top "Ahoy, matey! Welcome to our Bed and Breakfast, where every square inch of usable surface area has a model lighthouse on it!" vibe to it. I think toning down the contrast will make it a little more pleasing to the eye.

I am about 80% done with this... So far so good. I should be done with this project this week which should make Mrs. Snowurchin very happy.

We will see.

(To be continued... )

Single Point Failure (Part III)

Continued from Part II

So, what creates a “Learned Helplessness Bubble”?

• Rewarding Over-Specialization
• Outsourcing of Critical Skills
• Relying on Non-Existent things
• Embracing the Illusion of Powerlessness 

We have already touched a little on the first two in the list. Let's talk a little about the third item – Relying on Non-Existent Things.

 More and more we are moving away from a solid, real world to something that is a spooky ghost-like after-image of itself.

 As a grossly oversimplified but still useful example, the economy used to be based on gold. Nothing more than an arbitrary (albeit pretty) rock but at least it is finite and rare and real. Then the gold standard went away and was replaced with paper. Then the paper “went away” and is currently just ones and zeroes. As ethereal as a happy thought and just as easy to wipe out.

 The loss of a hard drive could now be as devastating as a massive house fire. A nearby lightning strike could wipe out everything you hold dear – all photos, all your music, all your books – gone. All your work documentation, that novel you have been writing, with the added drawback of being practically uninsurable.

 It's hard to imagine how things get more unstable than reducing things to hunks of field/no-field, but we are happily headed in that direction.

 Entire worlds exist now that use a fake currency, like in Second Life or WoW. Property used to be something that you could touch and taste. Now you can buy things like houses and clothes that, in no real way, exist (Second Life, WoW, etc.). Real money and time are traded for ever-increasingly unreal things.

 Also, we have just started the primary push to taking all the ones and zeroes out of the local computers and putting them in a “cloud” run by someone else, somewhere else. Now you don’t have to pay for your IT infrastructure or even very fast computers. Everything is taken care of for us “out there, somewhere”. No fuss, no muss.

 Nothing is actually owned – just rented. That paperback on your e-reader isn't “yours”... not really. You probably can't give it to a friend, and you certainly won't be able to leave it to your children when you pass on or press a flower between its pages. Music and movies are no more real. Your private photos are probably all electronic and you don't even own the IP to the professional ones you have had taken.

 These are all intentionally negative examples, or at least examples where I have suppressed their positive aspects. Don't get me wrong – I'm no Luddite. I think using the virtual world to augment the real one is a great idea. It is convenient, educational, entertaining, and often just plain cool. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite apps is one that labels things in the night sky merely by holding your smartphone up to the object in question. But because I have the Night Sky app, should I get rid of my embarrassingly outdated Burnham's Celestial Handbook collecting dust on in my bookcase? No. What it lacks in downloadable updates and interactive content it more than makes up for (to me) with it's comforting solidity and it's historical value.

 The danger is that as we make these subtle improvements to the way we perceive the world around us we lose sight of the things that allowed us to get there in the first place. We are willfully knocking out the underpinnings of the real world because we convince ourselves that the virtual shorings that we have put in place are just as good or better than the now “unnecessary” or “redundant” old ones.

 Fine. Should we all go and learn every damn skill our ancestors knew? No. It's the appreciation of the path of progress that is critical, not the individual skills themselves necessarily. We didn't magically arrive here. We weren't dragged kicking and screaming. We strolled into the year 2010 willingly if not excitedly.

 But we need some (not all, granted) of those stodgy old-fashioned ways to stay put – just in case.

 I believe a conservative estimate of people in the U.S. that have vocations directly or indirectly tied to producing things that do not actually exist (or will probably never exist) is about 5% of the total US workforce. Designing moon bases or starships or writing books or CGI info-tainment on how to terraform Mars requires editors, producers, programmers, TV and newspaper reporters, academic professionals, scientists, conventioneers, etc, etc. How many people are “employed” by trying to figure out the “secrets” to Mona Lisa's smile, the Shroud of Turin, Area 51, the Tunguska blast, or the Zapruder film or do any of the countless “jobs” out there? What would be lost, other than jobs in an already shaky economy, if the self-generated demand for simply went away?

 We rely on non-existent things for our pleasure and convenience, but also turn to them in times of hardship and panic.

 Look at the things that people blame when things go wrong: society, the “culture” of an organization, the government, the public school system, big business. The list goes on and on. When something big and bad happens, the blame gets spread around so thinly that, magically, it turns out that no one is actually at fault for any given disaster.

 It is so easy to pin fault on them that no one seems to realize (or care) that none of these amorphous concepts actually exist. When “society” is blamed for a miscreant's horrific crimes, does it rise to defend itself? What actually changes when public schools are called out as causing America's slipping scientific leadership? “The government” is routinely called out as being the cause of everyone's personal woes in one from or another. They cannot and do not defend themselves and it makes us feel better for having them around to offload our anger to.

 

To be continued...

Random Post

Not really enough to talk about for a big post today, so I guess I will just sum up some stuff I have done over the last few days:


Resumed working on Puzzle 05 - The Chalice. For those of you who don't remember, it is a wooden chalice carved from a single hunk of maple taken from my father-in-law's woodpile. I don't have a wood lathe and I am trying to not purchase any special tools to do this, so it will continue to be a challenge.

That reminds me... We still need a charity to go with the Puzzle for Charity. If anyone has any ideas for a small 501c charity that we can tie to the most recent puzzle leave a comment. Don't forget, the Prize Pool will remain at $0.00 ("Braggin Rights") until one is selected.

Prepped the flat surfaces of a small table for my son's room. The plan is to get some non-toxic kids paints and let him "help" me paint the top. I am really looking forward to that. :)

Mailed the Pallet Table to my brother yesterday. I needed to build a shipping crate for it - luckily, I had enough scrap plyboard to knock one together. The table and crate combo ended up weighing 50 pounds and cost me about $30 to ship. Not bad, I guess. Thanks goes out to the people at the local FedEx place and the USPS office for helping me figure out how to send something like this. Not so much thanks goes out to the non-helpful people at Office Depot or to the borderline-openly-hostile people at the UPS Store.

Finally saw "Avatar". If you have the means, and you are one of the 6 or 7 people in America that has not seen it, I highly recommend seeing the IMAX 3-D version.

Found out Radio Shack no longer carries thermal paste at the local store. Bummer. I need to unseat, clean, and reseat a cranky CPU to see if that fixes my black screen of death problem so I can continue on with some video editing work I was doing before the computer died...

Started reading a new book (In the Courts of the Sun by Brian D'Amato) my wife got me for Valentine's Day (thanks, Sweetie!). It looks pretty promising so far.

Talk to you later.

Cartoons (Part I)

My son is eighteen months old and his tastes in his morning feeding viewing material have evolved significantly. Here is a list of his favorite shows since the time he was born, in approximate order.

Anything He Was Pointed At – Before three months or so, he was most interested in the human feeding him, the ceiling, the door, or what have you. Same thing anyone with 20/800 vision and no attention span would look at, I guess.

DirecTV Screen Saver – Yep. Just happily riveted by the corporate logo lazily caroming off the sides of the TV set. Pretty advanced for his age, I'd say. You would expect that behavior more from college kids doing chemical experimentation...

Third Rock From the Sun Opening Credits – I put these shows on my Netflix list. Shut up. Whenever he would hear the intro, he would whip his head around from whatever he was doing (usually eating) and watch the spheres bounce around to the heavy guitar music until the very last note of the opening faded away (baroooowww-owwww!) and then resume whatever it was he was doing. He had no interest in the show whatsoever.

Star Trek Voyager Opening Credits – Again, shut up. He actually enjoys the music for this and called some toy rockets “bah-bum-bums” for a while (listen to the music and you will hear why), and would say “Bye-Bye spaceship” when it zipped away at the end of the credits. That was pretty neat. On the down side he calls all photos of fire (like a firetruck battling a blaze) “spaceship”. Again, you would have to watch the first few seconds of the opening to see why that makes sense.

Shaun the Sheep – He (and I) love this show, although for some reason he was terrified of one episode that had a stuffed bear in it. Also he did not like the episode where the sheep dress up like a person and go out for pizza. That stunk, because that is my favorite one, and I couldn't watch it without him getting visibly upset. BTW, he no longer fears those episodes.

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse – Dear Disney. Congratulations on putting out a terrific program. It is colorful and well done and I highly recommend it for its teaching capacity. Please put out more of them. Dear Everyone Else: You will watch these episodes scores of times. To maintain your sanity, you might want to try these approaches 1) Treat the shows like MST3K audience members would or 2) Treat the shows like Rocky Horror Picture Show audience members would (messier and crazier).

Go Diego Go – This used to get my vote for “Least Hangover Friendly Cartoon”. “Hey, Diego, how about taking it down 6 or 7 notches, woudja? It's 5:30 in the morning, dude... Maybe Rescue Pack could turn into some aspirin and a cup of coffee and just go away for a while...”

Phineas and Ferb – He likes the music the most, especially the opening credits and the two songs “I Ain't Got Rhythm” and “Gitchie-Gitchie-Goo”. I like the Christmas special, myself.

Spongebob Squarepants – I am not sure what he likes about the show other than the opening credits. I think he just like saying “Shunpop Skeerpans”. FWIW, I don't like the current season very much.

(To Be Continued...)

Puzzle News

Here is the first hint for the Puzzle for Charity:

Hint #1 (Posted 2146 021210): The tacks are there for a reason.

Good Luck!

Customer Service

I wanted to write a little something on recent experiences with customer service but then I thought: "How do I make this post different than most of the millions of irate, badly spelled, and (frankly) whiny comments that are out there in cyberspace?"

I don't know. I probably can't. Maybe tempering my vitriol a little by talking about the nature of people, their high expectations, and their abuse of the "nuclear option" will help, though. We will see.

I used to dread going to Lowe's for my hardware needs, primarily because of the lousy customer service - employees were routinely rude, hard-to-find, and less than helpful when they were locatable. Since Home Depot was a 25 mile drive, though, I really did not have a choice.

Well, actually I could have split my needs between the local lumber yard and a nearby small hardware store, but there are problems with doing that: the lumberyard has banker's hours and the hardware store is very expensive and apparently run entirely by the owner's virtually knowledge-less teenage children and their friends.

About six months ago I noticed a dramatic change: Lowe's became super friendly and helpful! You now can't walk more than a couple of aisles without someone in a polyester vest saying "Hello" or "Welcome to Lowe's" or "Can I help you find something, sir?".

Sir, even?! Well, la-tee-da! The first couple of times I experienced that I felt like Steve Martin's character in My Blue Heaven when he first confronts "small town niceness" at the grocery store. My reaction was nearly the same as his (look it up) - I honestly thought I was being messed with.

Now let's flip that coin over to the "Home Depot" side. Whatever happy chemicals they put in the breakroom water coolers at Lowe's they must have dumped the antidote to it into the ones at Home Depot. A lot of it.

Let me explain:

I just happened to be in the area so I went to Home Depot, skipping and whistling a happy tune (as I am prone to do) knowing that these folks will help me with my Desk Restoration project problem. You know... The problem with the mis-stained wood. I told you about it a couple days ago... Fine, forget it, I knew you didn't read it.

In any case I looked through the paint/stain area for varnish or shellac or some other way to fix the desk that you couldn't care less about. I didn't see what I need. No big shock there since I was really not too sure what I was looking for. Time to ask the shopkeep for a little help.

After a while I located a grumpy looking orange-vest-wearing guy of a certain age and I asked him my opening question: "Where can I find varnish or shellac?" He looked at me, managed to slightly de-lean himself off of a kitchen countertop display, and sighed "I dunno... Over near the paint and stains, probably".

A lot of things went through my mind at that point. "Oh, thanks, Captain Helpful! I spent hours combing the parking lot and the little bins of bolts and screws and I was just headed over to rifle through the bags of mulch. Thank God you could direct me back into the aisle you just saw me walk out of empty-handed." is just one example of the many over-the-top things I did not say at that moment.

Instead, I decided a barely contained public temper tantrum was in order.

I shouted (yes, shouted) "That's it, huh? That's all you are gonna say. Somewhere near the paint and stains?" At this point he was clearly shocked and unslouched completely and started to say something that, if I let him finish, may have been helpful. He didn't get the chance because I ended up with (in an even louder voice) "No, no, no... Don't worry about it. Sorry to have bothered you there, pal!". I then stormed off. For about a half a second I considered going to the manager but decided it wasn't worth my time, so I just left.

Pal?! I have never called anyone "pal" in my life, let alone in the high-and-mighty tone I liberally doused it with in this instance. What the hell was wrong with me?

And then it hit me. I had fallen into the same world-view as the people I hate the most: the spoiled-rotten self-righteous jerks that seem to think that the world revolves around them.

I mean, what did I expect him to do? Snap to attention as I came near? Blow a trumpet and yell “The king approacheth”? Throw rose petals onto my path so my feet never need to be sullied by contact with the floor?

Let's look at it from his point of view.

The poor old guy may have just been taking a much-needed break after unloading a pallet of floor tiles. While he is there trying to figure out if his gas bill is due or if he can afford a $25 iTunes gift card for his 10-year-old niece's birthday this weekend, I come by with this dumb look on my face and ask him (probably) an even dumber question. He stops to think a bit, because this is not the section of the store he is most familiar with, and he gives the best answer he can muster on the spur of the moment. And, all of a sudden, I come completely unhinged and storm off. So now the poor guy had to spend the rest of the day worrying if I just ran off to get him fired. In this economy, too...

Millions of hissy-fits like mine happen every single day. People demand to be overly-compensated for small inconveniences constantly. Now, before you get all defensive, I will admit there are instances where "the nuclear option" is definitely the way to go. Are you really upset enough to try and get someone fired because you spent 2 minutes longer in the McDonald's drive-thru than you are accustomed to? Are you seriously that unstable? Are you “raging against the machine” to get a discount in your satellite TV bill (victimless, good) or are you trying hard to get the overworked single mom who “screwed up your coffee order TWICE if you can believe that” canned (not-victimless, bad)?

Sorry, Home Depot dude... Unless you are actually a jerk, of course. In that case, let's just call it even and never speak of this again.

H1N1 News Update

I think this will be my last H1N1 Epidemic Update. 

The ECDC seems to have stopped publishing daily updates in favor of weekly ones (unless I am missing it), and the news seems to have stopped reporting on it, I can only assume that the epidemic is over. 

BTW, I have no idea why the spikes in the graph are there, but I suspect it is a reporting issue. 

Nothing really too much more to say other than my condolences go out to those that have been effected. 

New Poll

Hey!  New poll!  It's in the sidebar on the right!

Desk Restoration Project

I mentioned in a previous post that friend and reader jimmydunes donated an old wooden desk to the website. My intent is to refinish it, sell it, and use the money to fund the Prize Pool of the Puzzle for Charity.

The desk is technically an antique, but, then again, so are a large fraction of man-made objects on the globe, so I have no qualms about making this piece of furniture pretty and useful. I mean, what am I supposed to do, collect every damn thing I run across and put them on Mylar bags in case their value skyrockets overnight? No. I'm not going to be one of those octogenarians you read about that "go missing" only to be discovered underneath a mountain of old newspapers and National Geographics a couple of weeks later by concerned neighbors investigating the smell from next door.

See, there is such a thing as an object having "negative net value". In the case of the donor of this desk, it went from a useful piece of furniture in his old apartment to a big heavy pain in the neck in his new house. There was no good space for it in his new place so it would have remained dismantled in his garage or his shed out back, where it would get in the way a tiny bit every so often until, years later, he threw it away or gave it to charity after it accrued sufficient "PITA points". I think its cool that he decided to donate this now as part of his "clean house policy". He is definitely not the type to slap antique license plates on a rusted-out 1985 Chevette and proudly display it in his front yard or to try and steer work conversations around to classic cars so he could brag on it, is the point I am trying to make here. Thanks again, jimmydunes.

The desk, purchased from a now-closed used furniture shop in Lockport, NY, is solid wood (mostly poplar with oak trim, drawer, and veneer). Although it bears no official date marks the construction seems to indicate that it is from the late 50s or early 60s. The brass-coated tin pull handle on the drawer has the stamp 63-X3107 N.L.CO which I think might come from a defunct furniture manufacturer in Illinois. It is a well-used but not abused piece that looked like it just needed some TLC to make it look really nice.

The years and years of use really showed on the desktop. A dark shadow marked the "high traffic area" of the wood and water damage (from a planter, say) was apparent near the upper right hand corner. The finish had been worn down in these regions.

I had no interest in painting it, because the look I was going to shoot for with the desk was "Bob Cratchit". Nothing ornate. Just the type of well-worn yet well-maintained piece of dark, shiny, classic furniture that Scrooge's underling might toil at.

So, the first step was to sand the surface to start as clean as possible. I did not want to use a belt sander for this step because I wanted to avoid accidentally gouging the surface. It turned out that the top alone required me to use every single piece of 60 grit sandpaper I owned to get the dirty and water-damaged areas even close to the same color as the rest of the desk. It took about 8 man-hours to go from start to "OK, screw it, good enough" on the desktop alone.

Fortunately the sides, drawer, and trimwork took a lot less effort to get to a uniform shade.

I initially chose a dark stain and sealant combination for this project mainly in an effort to save time. I really should have known better - I prefer to do these steps separately because it gives me a higher degree of control over the project. In this case, the inside of the drawer was the first area to be stained and it simply looked terrible. It seemed like the wood didn't take to the treatment very well and everything was blobby and streaky. Fortunately, the inside of the drawer will be covered in dark green felt so this won't be an issue.

Speaking of the drawer I wanted to see if I could get the handle looking like new, and the first step to that was to clean it. It quickly became apparent that the brass coating on the drawer pull could not be salvaged so I would have to strip it down to the bare tin somehow. Bummer.

I put the mini wire wheel tool on my Dremmel to work on the issue and almost immediately regretted it. You see, my Dremmel is the cheap-o full-speed-or-off kind and the little wire wheel is pretty old and was not up to the task. It disintegrated quickly and steadily while I worked - fine wires pinging into my goggles and face and whatnot - and after about one minute my pain/annoyance threshold had been reached. I looked down to see about a hundred tiny metal needles sticking out of my t-shirt, as though I was just attacked by a miniature metal porcupine. Great. I took off my shirt and about 50% of the needles came with it or fell to the floor. The other 50% remained lightly lodged in the skin of my chest! They came out easily enough but that stopped the cleaning process until I can get a new wire wheel or come up with a better solution for dealing with the handle. On the upside, thanks to the impromptu high-speed acupuncture I no longer crave cigarettes and feel I have achieved perfect balance throughout my zang-fu. Thanks, Dremmel!

Back to staining. I switched to a dark stain and began treating the underside of the desk. it didn't take too long but it had enough fiddly bits to make me impatient to see how the actual visible surfaces were going to turn out. The outside surfaces of the drawer looked pretty good so I was pretty confident the top and sides would look awesome.

Wrong.

I guess I was unable to do a very thorough job sanding the surfaces down because it was very obvious that the stain was taking to some places better than others. I continued on with all the pieces since I was well past the point of no return once the problem made itself known.

It looks terrible. I am not too sure what I am going to do at this point but I hope I don't need to actually paint it (or crackle coat it) to make it look nice. Maybe some sort of varnish or shellac will put me back on track... I just don't know for now.

(To be continued...)

Pallet End Table (Conclusion)

(Continued from Part III)


Like I mentioned in my house repair post I got a new and awesome table saw to replace the rickety and broken Craftsman I had been using. Unlike the Craftsman, this Hitachi is a pleasure to use and I am not terrified of it. Well, I treat it with due respect, of course, but I don't feel I have to approach it as though I were sneaking up on a spooked pony.

Where was I? Oh, yeah... I cut the tabletop boards to size. I cut the sides to create flat surfaces and laid them together on the shop floor as flush as possible to get an idea of the best length for the boards to use most of the wood while keeping the tabletop square. In the end, I ended up with a 28 1/4” square – fairly large for an end table but not overly so.

Christmas rolled around about the time I was trying to figure out how to join the boards together. I was going to ask for a biscuit joiner for a gift but I was told by a couple of my friends that they are are tricky to use and I should consider other options. I am glad I took their advice because as it turned out that one of my friends bought me a Kreg Tool.

For those of you that don't know, a Kreg Tool is a jig and special drill bit that creates what are called pocket joints. With a bit of glue, a couple of self-tapping screws, and virtually no skill (a definite plus for me) you can create flawless and super-strong side-to-side or face-to-side joints in under a minute.

This tool is by far the most enjoyable contraption I have in my shop. The ease of use and the number of things this tool can do makes me feel very conflicted. On one hand, it is so awesomely useful a huge number of potential-project doors have been not just opened but blown completely off their hinges. On the other hand I feel very, very stupid that this sort of solution never occurred to me before. Sure, I could hide behind the fact that I am 100% self-taught but, to steal a line from Douglas Adams I was “as stunned as a man might be who, having believed himself to be totally blind for five years suddenly discovers that he had merely been wearing too large a hat.”

I love this tool a dangerous amount. I am pretty sure that I am going to wind up on the street a burnt out Kreg Tool junkie, bumming change for “just a few more self-tapping screws, and then I'll quit, I swear”. I can almost hear people shouting “Quit rapidly making high-quality picture frames and get a job, hippy!” from their cars as they drive by. On the upside I would have the sweetest, sturdiest squatter's lean-to in whatever alley I chose to call home. So lose-win, there I guess.

The table top was assembled using pocket-holes and wood glue (see pic for how these joints look after they are plugged). That used up the most of the first pallet. The plan for the second pallet was to scavenge what I could to make the table skirt and the legs. The usable slats, although thinner than those of the first, were in much better shape so there was no need to plane them over and over – just a few passes did nicely and the hand sander did the rest.

The skirt is just a simple box assembled using the pocket joints I gushed on and on about earlier with some 45-degree angle pieces (cut with the miter saw) to serve as leg mounts. The entire box was firmly mounted to the underside of the tabletop using pocket joints and wood glue. Elapsed time for the skirt creation from wood recovery to final screw – about two hours. Awesome!

Only a couple of the center studs were usable and they were all very full of nails so there was no chance of running them through the planer. Instead, I cut the studs in half and used a Dremmel to cut the rusty metal bits as flush as I could. This was actually kind of fun and it gave the legs-to-be a sort of “industrial” look (see the cool but informationally bereft picture on the left). I sanded the legs using a hand sander and a sanding drum on my drill press.

I needed to make the table legs removable since I will be mailing this to my brother as a sort of belated Christmas present. This was done by countersinking T-nuts and running mating hardware (all left over from the Windsor II Playset project, btw) through the 45-degree leg mounts. The legs slide into place nicely and I think they will be tight enough to result in a sturdy end product. The table is 22 ½” high.

Since I am working with less-than-ideal materials, I labeled each of the legs and the leg mounts so my brother will know where to place each of the legs. I will be including some felt to act as a sort of compression gasket to ensure a tight fit if he needs a little more stability on one or more of the legs. I don't think he will, though, since the end product holds my weight when I sit on it. Sweet!

The “final” step was to stain and seal it. I thought I had screwed this part up since the wood turned so dark when I applied the lighted stain Lowe's carried. I forgot that very old wood turns very dark even when a light coating of stain.is applied. After many coats of gloss poly sealant, the project was done.

Everything actually turned out fine and the final piece is actually pretty elegant and something I would not mind having in my living room if there was room. Not too bad for 99% reclaimed materials, IMHO.

Now all that is left is to mail the thing, which is going to cost a fortune. I will try and make that happen this week.

Bummer Reading List II

Although I have not written anything in a while I have been busy reading. I got each of these as a gift for Christmas.

The Flash Archives (Vol. 5)

As a youngster I really enjoyed reading The Flash. Although I still get a thrill from envisioning myself as the world's fastest human it is sadly no longer enough to let me completely suspend disbelief and immerse myself in the stories (which are actually kind of stupid). That said, I will still buy these archives for as long as they are published and I one day hope to own a complete collection of the comics (on paper, DVD, or otherwise). I know how it sounds. Shut up.

Under the Dome – Stephen King

I told my wife (who is sweet and awesome, by the way) a while ago that I do not read Stephen King books any more so it was a surprise when I got this for Christmas. According to the inscription she wrote “I know that it has been years since you've enjoyed one of King's books, but I couldn't resist. I hope this will be one of those guilty pleasures – one of those books you can't help but love.” There was some other mushy stuff but also she told me that I needed to review it in my blog, even if I didn't like it.

Sigh. Fine. Here goes.

First, please note that I did not say that getting this book for Christmas was a “pleasant surprise” or a “nice surprise”. I guess I was surprised much in the same way you would be if you walked out to the driveway and discovered one of your tires had gone flat overnight. “Cell” was the last in a series of horrible King books I read a while back (a notable other being the last book of the Gunslinger series). I stopped reading them on purpose because, umm, my perception of their value has changed significantly over the years. Yeah. Let's go with that.

Anyway, what can I say about this book? Oh, yeah. I hated it.

No. Hate is not a strong enough word. After plowing through nearly 1,100 pages of the most ridiculous garbage imaginable there is no single word in English for how I feel. I guess “anger” comes close, but it doesn't really reflect how multi-level insulted/disappointed I feel after reading this. Apparently the only thing keeping sleepy small towns in Maine from self-destructing within a week is sheer luck and their bonding hatred of out-of-state tourists.

I'm not going to sum up the book – lots of other people have done that already. Just picture all of the bad or predicable parts of every other King book you have read cut and pasted together to create this massive tome. If that's your thing, though, and you don't mind being hit with a parade of in-your-face bad science, bad technology, bad sociology, extremely unlikely personal behavior, extremely unlikely personal background knowledge/abilities, unnecessary and useless psychic events, all culminating in the most eye-rolling ending to a book ever, then by all means go for it.

In conclusion a) this book should have been 800 pages shorter and b) sent to the shredder instead of the printer. Of course, that is just my opinion – Amazon shows it has a rating of 3.5 stars... Some of the 1-star reviews are pretty neat to read, though...

Great. Now my blood is all angried up. Next review:

The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World – A.J. Jacobs

Another Christmas gift (this time I was pleasantly surprised). I had read The Year of Living Biblically by the same and had loved it so I was looking forward to getting rid of the bad taste the King book left in my mouth. Unfortunately it did not.

The premise is that this guy decides to read/skim the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z and comment on what he finds interesting then pepper it with stories from his personal life - I guess much like a blog. As I wrack my brain trying to come up with distinct instances of things that made me mad or what have you, I can't. Well, actually, I can, but the reasons are all so petty that they simply don't stand on their own and they just seem bitter and unwarranted. Making a list would be time consuming and useless.

Why didn't I like it? Well, if I had to sum up the tone of book in two words I guess “smarmy over-privilege” is what I would be forced to use. It just rubbed me the wrong way for most of the book.

The Ultimate Book of Top Ten Lists – listverse.com

When I was young I had a 1977 printing of The People's Almanac Presents The Book of Lists that I read until the cover fell off and the pages were falling out. I don't know why I was so enamored with it- its just one of those things, I guess. I was overjoyed a few years ago when perusing a used book store in Norfolk, Virginia when I found a copy. I also found that there had been a re-print in 1993 so I picked that up, too. Both have honored places in my “library”.

Sadly, I can't say the same thing for the listverse book. I am sure it has some great stuff in it, but it has too many items in it that I feel are merely opinions or otherwise extremely debatable (such as the10 Things That are Surprisingly Good For You – the list includes ice cream and smoking). Meh. I did not finish the book and I don't really intend to.

So there you have it. Four grumpy book reviews for four distinct genres. I am looking forward to an enjoyable read sometime in the future. If anyone has any recommendations, leave a comment.

Back to Posting

Well, I apologize for the extended break in posting. I had some personal issues to deal with including some painful medical stuff. No real need to dwell. Water under the bridge. It suffices to say that I needed to take time off from 1) going to the gym and 2) unnecessary typing. I'm 95% fine now, and improving.


In any case its not like I have been laid up or anything like that – as a matter of fact gross motor movements were, for the most part, unaffected. I have been extremely productive and have completed several projects around the house including finishing the Pallet Table.

Stay tuned...