Not every
post that I want to write comes together in the end. Sometimes they are
prevented by a simple accident, sometimes my opinions change, and other times I
am failed by humanity as a whole. What follows are descriptions of three posts
that could have been, but weren’t.
Occasionally
my job sends me to work on projects far from home. It adds a nice feeling of
adventure and a sense of living on the road to my job that I enjoy. This
adventurous spirit, and the limited number of things to do with my free time,
makes for ideal writing conditions (my
Dating History, and
Norse
posts were written while working out of town). Last year I spent some time in
North Dakota building a road in the middle of oil country. The incredibly
profuse nature of the work going on was amazing, and since I carry a camera for
work I was taking plenty of personal pictures to document the situation. These
pictures varied from lines of semi-trucks, gas flares, wildlife photos, and
plenty of sunrises and sunsets. When I got back I wanted to take the best of
these photos and use them in a blog post that chronicled my trip. Sadly, when
my boss was uploading the pictures off of my camera to get the ones that were
actually work related; he deleted everything on the camera when he was done. I
had already moved the pictures from the first week of my trip onto my own
laptop, but all of the pictures I took specifically for the post were lost. Due
to the hectic work schedule in the summer, when I asked for copies of the
pictures to be sent to me it took over a month, and then I still didn’t actually
get the pictures due to technical problems. At this point I was no longer
feeling the spirit of the post, so I gave up on the enterprise. Here are some
of the pictures that I was able to keep:
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| There are actually more trucks out of frame too |
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| I'm glad that I kept this one |
I don’t
like Apple products. It comes from an appreciation of open source technology,
and my feelings on this subject are probably detailed enough for their own
post, but I bring it up for a reason. I desired an MP3 player as I occasionally
enjoy listening to music while on the go. Buying an iPod was completely out of
the question and the other brands on the market just seemed like inferior
copies and weren’t very appealing either. After a Google search for open source
MP3 players I found the
Daisy. The only catch was that I would need to
build it myself. I saw this as a challenge, and a good excuse to learn to
solder. I bought myself a soldering iron and related paraphernalia, and started
out with a multi-meter kit to learn the skills I would need for my Daisy. The
multi-meter went together nicely (other than the fact that it isn’t calibrated,
since who would guess that you need a working multi-meter to build one; but I
don’t have any need of reading precise amperages anyway so no matter), and it
appeared that soldering was an enjoyable and rewarding new skill. Then it came
time to build my MP3 player. I would like to take this moment to say that all
surface mounted components can burn in hell. Needless to say, things did not go
well. One chip in the build needed to be surface mounted onto the board, and it
was the first thing that I attempted as I knew it was going to be the hardest
part. The first problem was that I needed a finer tip for my soldering iron,
but I couldn’t find a way to buy one that would fit. I eventually just used
some copper wire wrapped around the tip as a jury-rigged solution, but now I
had some solder baked onto my board that I couldn’t get off. I bought some flux
(and some tip cleaner since keeping my copper wire tinned was a pain), and
tried again. This time I was able to get the chip onto the board, but I had a
few drops of solder that were bridging the contacts that I couldn’t remove. Yet
another trip to RadioShack, and now I had some desoldering braid. This just
completely failed to work at all, and I eventually got so frustrated by the
whole ordeal that I ended up stabbing the contumelious chip multiple times with
my soldering iron. As a bonus this broke my completely feckless helping hands,
which were an added source of annoyance. I ended up throwing away all my
soldering equipment and have sworn never to attempt soldering again. So much
for that post I was going to write about how sweet my new MP3 player was.
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| Pre-flipout |
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| I hate that chip so much |
I’m a fan
of science, and as I fan I feel compelled to support it. Luckily for me there
is such a thing as
RocketHub, where I can give money to support science
project at me leisure. I am also a big fan of reptiles, so it only made sense
to combine my two loves and held fund some project that involved studying these
wonderful creatures. As a bonus, two projects I was interested in offed to let
me name an animal and would send me updates about them as they were studied. I
figured telling people about my adopted reptiles would make for a truly stupendous
blog post. Neither project had attracted much funding yet, but they both still
had nearly a month left, and I was confident that people would follow my
shining example and fully fund both these project. NOT A SINGLE ADDITIONAL
PERSON GAVE MONEY TO EITHER OF THESE PROJECTS AFTER I DID. What the hell? Why
don’t people like supporting studies about reptiles, especially when they will
let you name one? People will give thousands of dollars for some black and
white movie about heroin addicts, but my two project only raise a combined $225
($200 of which was from me). Seriously, what the hell?
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| This is a Panamint Alligator Lizard |
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| How could you not fall in love with a face like that? |
