Posts That Never Were

            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:

There are actually more trucks out of frame too

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.

Pre-flipout

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?

This is a Panamint Alligator Lizard

How could you not fall in love with a face like that?