Throw the Mind [dot] Com

It was a Friday afternoon, and I was sitting at work wondering what my night was going to bring.  Was Jason going to come out and try to kill me since it was Friday the 13th?  Or was I going to go to the shop and hang out all night.  Turns out neither happen.  What did happen was Tandy giving me a call and asking me to go see The Expendables.  I convinced her after seeing The Expendables we would go see Scott Pilgram. This is exactly what we did, well with a visit to Waffle House baked in the middle.

The Expendables looked ridiculous from the first time I saw a preview.  But also from the preview I knew it was a movie I had to see.  With Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Steve Austin, and Terry Crews how could I not see the movie.  Yep all those action stars in one movie.  Can you believe it?  So many action starts how could this movie be bad?

The movie wasn’t so far as bad, as it was just ridiculous.  It was a mid 90′s action film.  You know the ones with tons of killing, helicopters exploding and a plot that came from the back of a cereal box.  That was exactly what this movie was.  There were some great comedic lines, don’t get me wrong, but really the movie was kill kill kill, take short  break, kill kill kill.  I still liked the movie, but only because I love Mid 90′s action films.

Rating:

P.S. Sadly no Steven Seagal

A couple of nights ago, Bob and I started playing with a Maker Bot one of the Makers Local 256 members left at the shop.  I asked the member who owns it if I could try to get it working while he was gone on work travel.  Of course he said “Yes”.  He had been trying to get it to make a shot glass for a while.  Bob and I started playing around.  We installed the latest version of ReplicatorG and some new firmware.  Bob then determined that the head needed to be about .6mm off the printing service.  After he tagged me in, and I started playing with laying down a raft.  After a few failed attempts where the head didn’t seem like it was moving up the Z-axis enough, I learned to set the Flow Rate of the plastic to 230 instead of 250 in skeinforge.  Along with Bob’s findings we seemed to have found a very nice solution.  I was able to make a coin, most of a shot glass (something happen 3/4 the way through), and a companion cube.

This movie was awesome.  One of my top favorite movies of all time.  The story was perfect, the visuals were perfect, and my lack of knowledge about the movie was perfect.  I knew nothing about the movie before seeing it and I’m glad.  I was surprised by everything including Ellen Page.  I don’t want to spoil anything about the movie, so I’m not going into detail here.  I just wanted to give it my star rating and tell everyone to watch it.

Rating: +1 for being that awesome.

When at The Next HOPE I bought The Brian Machine electronic kit for $20.  It’s a product I have heard lots about and really wanted one.  I figured I would spend the money and actually make it myself rather than buying a pre-made one.

The kit went together fairly easily once I figured out how to do it with a little help from other Makers Local 256 members.  It took me a couple of hours to complete the project.  I had a ton of fun making it and think I’m going to make more kits.

Seventh grade was when we all moved out of elementary school into junior high.  Junior High had lockers.  With lockers came the annoying feature of having to be unlocked multiple times a day.  Some kids figured out jamming paper at the bottom kept the lock from locking.  The problem with this solution was that you could tell from the outside who used this trick.  For them security went from “locked” to “Look at me I’m an unlocked locker”.  I decided the better solution was to just remove the back side of the lock.  Thus keeping the locker looking like it was locked, but in reality just as unsafe as others.  Security through obscurity.

This worked out great for a few weeks, I even removed the lock for my girlfriend at the time.  Then one day she had her locker searched.  Gig was up, “destroying school property”.  Luckily only she got busted and didn’t rat me out.  To be safe I put the lock back on my locker.  Only problem was at some point the combo lock had fallen off and I had put it on upside down.  So now my locker was locked but the combo was upside down.  I tried a few time to unlock it with no success.

With my head hanging low I had to turn myself in.  I didn’t have a choice.  I was locked out of my locker.  I was told to go back to class and it would be taken care of.  About half way though the class I hear a drill start-up in about the same location as my locker.  After class I notice some dents on my locker and a new lock.  I head down to the office and am presented with a $27 bill to pay for the new lock.

I still say my locker security was better than anyone else in that school.

tl;dr – Locked locker to the point it had to be drilled open in the middle of school day.