A Meandering Post

This post has a lot of subjects to cover so it may seem like the literary equivalent of a one-man ping-pong match.

First things first, I had some kind of gunk in my eyebrows when I took my shower this morning. I don’t know what it was, but it was itchy and took several tries to get it out of the eyebrows. I’m blaming allergies because pollen was deadly high this morning and it wasn’t there when I washed my face before bed this morning. And that’s not a typo, I usually hit the hay between 0300 and 0500.

Sprint-T: The pullrod suspension will lower the C of G very slightly while it also improves shock cooling. It lowers the C of G by letting me lie the shocks down at the bottom of the car instead of standing them up on top of the axle, and it improves shock cooling by collecting a larger mass of air and forcing it around the shocks than they would get just up in the airstream. It seems paradoxical, but you can actually get more cooling by putting something inside a duct than by leaving it in free air. And I was looking at the available springs, I do believe there will be a problem in getting a soft enough spring if I let the motion ratio for the rocker get too large.

My employment situation has gotten worse again. The company I have been getting gigs through has been having problems getting customers to pay for completed projects after delivery, and the standard agreement with us working drones has been payment on delivery to the customer. This has left the company covering for the customers between delivery and payment, but the customers had been paying on time so everybody was good. But lately us drones have delivered on time while customers have been paying late or not at all. Because we drones are technically contractors, or even guns for hire for some of us, we don’t have much recourse when the customer doesn’t pay except to sue the company in the middle that also did not get paid. We can’t sue the customer directly, and the guy we can sue doesn’t have much money to sue for. How this directly affects me is I ordered an expensive comic book (a $20 trade edition) that I was expecting to pay for with my share of a completed project that as of the first of the month hasn’t been paid for, and had to ask Mrs. the Poet for the money so I could keep my account at the comic book store current so I could keep getting my pulls. I only get one pull but there are one-shots and trades I want to get and I have to keep my account out of the red to order them. And yes I do like this particular comic Unbeatable Squirrel Girl enough to actually buy it every month. But with income getting dicey again I’m going to have to change my pre-order to pre-pay when ordering to ensure I get my books.

And I need to pu this to bed and take care of e-mails.

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Not much time at home today, Wreck-Free Sunday

I haven’t had much time actually at the house today. I had morning services of course, then I had to go scope out a gig to see if I could do it and wanted to do it (yes to both), then transportation back from the interview/job description, then writing the blog post and eating lunch, than evening services and finally dinner. And the riding the bike part was encased in several layers because it turned freaking cold out there in The Beautiful Suburbs of Hell again. And since I shaved my head 2 weeks ago my ears are really feeling the cold.

There’s a Cup race going on but I don’t even have the TV on. Actually there is a plethora of choices in motorsport today, the Cup race in Fontana CA, there’s the Indycar race in St. Petersburg FL, and the F1 race in Malaysia, and that’s just off the top of my head. There are multiple motorcycle races and I’m sure I could find an off-road race today also, I just have other things to do today and can’t afford the distraction or I’ll never get the blog post done.

Getting back to the gig, it’s in two parts. One is supervising a move out of more than 40K books, plus comic books CDs DVDs, and video tapes. Roughly 4 tons or so of paper and stuff that has to be removed from a house and placed in storage, plus other things that have to be moved once the books etc. are out of the way. It looks like a job that will run several days, complicated by the fact that the workers can only get together for maybe 4 hours a day, one or two days a week, so maybe a month or two until completion.

Second part of the gig is refurbing some abandoned bikes, mostly new tubes and a tire or two, plus lubrication or replacing of chains and adjusting brakes, so that the person upon whom the bikes had been abandoned can get some money out of them, except for one that she will keep as a camp bike for riding to and from the showers that are a quarter of a mile from the camp site we have. Now this gig is going to be paid for by the exchange of another abandoned bike, an old Nishiki Sport from the ’80s that have been going for anywhere from $200 for a ratty one to $2k for a perfect restoration on the local markets. Ridable refurbishments have been running $400 and up, which is what I’m going to price this one at because aside from the rubber parts and the chain it’s in pretty good shape with the original bits intact.

Also there may be an additional long-term gig, as there is a data-entry job that is about to lose a worker who had an accident (not at work) and won’t be able to continue working at data entry any more. That one may cause problems in getting this blog posted on a regular basis as it will be 5 days a week, 4 or so hours a day with transportation to and from the job eating a bit of time. I might be able to do part to most of the job with the new laptop that’s coming in next week, if I can figure out a way to get the links downloaded to the computer and then filter and post them off-line and upload the post to this WordPress site when I get back to a Wi Fi connection.

Speaking of the new laptop, I’m getting really hyper about it while I’m waiting for it to show up at the store. This will be the first new computer I have bought from a computer store since the LinSpire desktop I bought in 2005, with the previous new computer being the one that replaced my 486dx2 when it turned out to not be Y2K compliant. The Y2K replacement had more system memory than the 486 had storage, and the 2005 computer was a similar jump up, again with almost as much system memory as the previous box’s storage, and now the new laptop will have 2GB of system memory with 320GB of storage and cost less than the 2005 LinSpire desktop box without a display. I have checked the display on the new laptop and it was freaking awesome on the demo model, at least an order of magnitude better than the CRT I’m using with this box, the CRT I bought back in 2000 to go with the Y2K replacement. Given that this is now more than 12 years of frequent use, with daily 8-12 hour sessions doing this blog (counting reading links, filtering, reading web comics to not go insane from the horrors in the links I was reading, and the actual couple of hours I spent writing and editing the post) since 2006, I would say I got my money’s worth from this CRT. But now I get an easy-on-the-eyes flat screen display with scads more pixels than this CRT can display and much sharper focus to boot. So, yeah, I’m happy about this purchase and I haven’t even gotten the carton with the new computer home yet.

Also, a programming alert. I’m going on a camping trip next month where there ain’t no such thing as Internets. Remember I was saying there was a quarter of a mile to the showers which is why the lady wanted a camp bike? That’s where I’m going camping for four days next month. I will be leaving on a Thursday, and not getting back until late Sunday evening with mad scrambles to get things packed on the Wednesday before departure. The computer and maybe the cell phone are staying in the Beautiful Suburbs of Hell while I go commune with nature and dance naked around a fire doing the Happy Naked Pagan Dance… The last time I went to this campout I rode the Stratus for 2 days, causing great pain as I wore the skin off over my tailbone where I broke it in college and it grew back “funny”. I discovered that the seat on a 1983 Stratus was not built for riding 250 miles in 2 days in 90°F heat, particularly if the longest ride you had made that season was less than 50 miles (but not by much!). I made it there under my own power, I did not leave that way. And I never was able to get the blood stains out of those shorts. 😛 I know TMI again.

And that’s all I got for you today, fun eh?

PSA, Opus