The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Oddities

Who’d’a thunk it?

  • Helicopter Flyover

    Helicopter formation
    Helicopter formation

    While I was puttering around outside (an admittedly rare occurrence), a deep thuttering over the northern horizon eventually resolved into a formation of four helicopters. Hard to tell at this range, but they looked like Black Hawks southbound for the Stewart Air National Guard field.

    Our Larval Engineer reports that the college ROTC contingent includes some pilots-in-training who regularly land Black Hawks on the campus outfields.

    We are, fortunately, not in a part of the world where Bruce Cockburn’s commentary applies…

  • Not a Hand Hole

    Abraham Lincoln once observed that calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg, which seems to apply perfectly to this situation:

    Not a Hand Hole
    Not a Hand Hole

    Surely, the real reason boils down to:

    • A warehouse full of boxes with pre-cut hand holes
    • A stack of returns due to guys poking their hands too far into the boxes
    • A desire to disallow said returns

    I bet they pick up the box that way, too.

  • Yellow Iron: Puzzling Placards

    The local construction equipment supplier deploys otherwise-idle yellow iron in all the parking lots in preparation for snow season. They haven’t gotten much use this year, which is OK by me.

    A Komatsu excavator behind a bank sports some puzzling warning placards:

    Komatsu excavator waiting for snow
    Komatsu excavator waiting for snow

    This one seems to mean you should stay out from underneath the bucket, which makes sense:

    Komatsu warning placard 2
    Komatsu warning placard 2

    But what’s this one mean? You may be crushed, so keep your distance from doors?

    Komatsu warning placard 1
    Komatsu warning placard 1

    Maybe read the manual before / while being backed over?

    Komatsu warning placard 3
    Komatsu warning placard 3

    Even though this stuff has become entirely too abstract for me, it’s just another day in the life for Stickman!

  • Red Oaks Mill Dam: Fading Fast

    A combination of neglect and last year’s storms demolished much of the Red Oaks Mill dam:

    Red Oaks Mill dam - after collapse
    Red Oaks Mill dam – after collapse

    The linear “rocks” just downstream of the dam are sections of the concrete cap:

    Red Oaks Mill dam - displaced concrete
    Red Oaks Mill dam – displaced concrete

    With the cap gone, the concrete-and-rock fill should disintegrate in short order:

    Red Oaks Mill dam - crumbled section
    Red Oaks Mill dam – crumbled section

    Upstream of the rubble, the Wappingers Creek dropped about three feet, exposing bedrock and undercutting the old shoreline:

    Red Oaks Mill dam - exposed creek bed
    Red Oaks Mill dam – exposed creek bed

    Downstream, not much changed. This wasn’t a catastrophic dam break that wiped entire towns off the map.

    In February 2005, the fishing must have been pretty good:

    Red Oaks Mill Dam - 27 Feb 2005
    Red Oaks Mill Dam – 27 Feb 2005

    It’s endured quite a few floods like this one in February 2008:

    Flood Stage in Red Oaks Mill
    Flood Stage in Red Oaks Mill

    But in June 2008, after the waters receded, you could tell things weren’t right:

    Red Oaks Mill Dam - 2008
    Red Oaks Mill Dam – 2008

    Looks like a shovel-ready project to me…

  • Driving Course

    The on-line driver safety review course that gets us a 10% premium reduction has a few glitches:

    Driving Quiz
    Driving Quiz

    They evidently randomize the answer choices without considering spatial constraints. One question had “All of the above” as the first choice, with all of the other choices being valid.

    The helpful tech support voice said they’re looking into fixing that…

    OK, time for a Pop Quiz: Is it possible for a human being to write perfect straight lines diagonally across a ruled pad?

    Answer: Evidently so. Consider this screen grab…

    Driving Plan Image
    Driving Plan Image

    Taking the course online has the advantage of not requiring a trip or two to a classroom, but kills an hour a day for a week. It’s still a win, although it’d be much better if they didn’t use Adobe Flash.

  • Credit Card Services: Loquacity In Full Effect

    The friendly, albeit almost unintelligibly accented rep from Credit Card Services had a ten minute conversation with me: 10:35 is a call duration record!

    The minimum balance has bounced back to $3500 and they’re touting a 6.9% rate. She was unwilling to discuss exactly how this works before I “qualified” myself, but I was unwilling to reveal my financial details before knowing more about Credit Card Services.

    So we went a few rounds…

    Somewhat surprisingly, she gave me plenty of contact information:

    • Credit Card Services (“We work with [list of big name credit card companies]”)
    • Orlando FL
    • Callback 888-311-2249 (don’t call it, it’s not a real number)
    • Anna Stakovic
    • Extension 292
    • ID 435

    All of it bogus, of course.

    Perhaps Anna married into her name, because she has a thick Indian subcontinent accent that wasn’t helped by boiler-room background noise and VOIP dropouts. Correspondingly, I was hampered by a soft voice that often required me to repeat myself, despite speaking slowly and, if I do say so myself, rather clearly.

    Anyhow, poor Anna became increasingly frustrated, accusing me of wasting her time and repeatedly telling me that if I was not interested in Lowering My Interest Rates I should just hang up. So I asked her if she worked for the same Credit Card Services that had called me several (dozen? hundred?) times previously; to my surprise, she said it was.

    She said that she would “do her best” to remove my number, but that, because she didn’t actually do the dialing, it might not have any effect. That agrees with what I’ve been told before: CCS is actually a demon-dialing front end for other scammers.

    She dodged my question about why CCS doesn’t obey the FTC No-Call Registry rules, claiming that she was just qualifying me for a credit reduction, not actually selling me anything. She was unwilling to discuss the relation between CCS and my various card issuers, which might have provided the “prior business relationship” required to work around the rules.

    Somewhat surprisingly, she simply wouldn’t hang up before I agreed that I had no interest whatsoever in Lowering My Interest Rates. I eventually agreed, she wished me a good rest of the day, and I suppose we parted as friends…

  • DIY Vanilla Extract: Batch 2

    So I picked up half a pound of Grade B Madagascar Vanilla Beans from the usual eBay supplier, a 1.75 liter slug of the next-to-the-cheapest 80 proof vodka (“carefully distilled, then filtered through selected charcoal”) from the neighborhood liquor store, and scavenged some bottles from the basement stash:

    Vanilla extract bottles
    Vanilla extract bottles

    The proper mix seems to be around 2 ounces of beans per 16 liquid ounces of 80-ish proof vodka, which nearly fill the two round half-liter (16.9 fluid ounce) bottles. The flat bottle on the right has the rest of that Devil’s Spring 160 proof rotgut, cut down to 90 proof, with enough beans to make the answer come out right for that volume. The leftmost round bottle has the remainder of the beans in the appropriate volume, which is why it’s half full. The little bottle is that one, minus doses for my hot chocolate & pancakes.

    One motivation for using 80 proof vodka is that a teaspoon of 160 proof hooch brings a cup of hot chocolate right up around 3 proof. That earlier batch really didn’t have enough vanilla to be effective, but increasing the total dosage would put a dent in my already meager afternoon productivity…

    Although the recipes recommend daily shaking for a month before the brew reaches equilibrium, I’m sure this is one of those exponential diffusion deals that’s mostly done after a day or three. These two bottles show the concentration on the next morning, after and before shaking:

    Vanilla extract - shaken and unshaken
    Vanilla extract – shaken and unshaken

    Chopping half a pound of vanilla beans on the kitchen cutting board produces an interesting side effect: everything you cut for the next day or so smells strongly of vanilla, as does the entire kitchen end of the house, as do your fingers. Mostly, that’s OK, but we decided vanilla-scented onions were just plain weird and there really isn’t any justification for vanilla-flavored green tea.