Minor Win thread - Life is good!

In reply to Toyman! :

I love catching people off guard.

What I don't get is why more people refuse to turn their smartphones into a weapon of knowledge...

Called my buddy the MtB king of all my circles of friends, looking for advice on a new bike. Mid-level, nice but not poser nice. Ended up buying his 2019 Trek Top Fuel Project One. It's berkeleying bad ass, way more bike than I need, for less than a new mid-level bike. Remote lockouts on both shocks, dropper post, carbon all the things, hydraulic discs, electronic 1x12. He's gonna throw new tires on it and I'll pick it up next week.

In reply to AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) :

The new bike replaces my 2004 Specialized FSR-XC Pro, which I bought in the spring of 2005. Tale of the tape:

And here they are together. I just took the new bike for a spin around the sub and oh man is it nice. If the weather is dry on Wednesday I'm gonna head up to Maybury State Park for our first trail ride.

AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) said:

Called my buddy the MtB king of all my circles of friends, looking for advice on a new bike. Mid-level, nice but not poser nice. Ended up buying his 2019 Trek Top Fuel Project One. It's berkeleying bad ass, way more bike than I need, for less than a new mid-level bike. Remote lockouts on both shocks, dropper post, carbon all the things, hydraulic discs, electronic 1x12. He's gonna throw new tires on it and I'll pick it up next week.

All of that reminds me of some fever dream that Captain Dondo had in the 90s, downhilling his daughter's bike in the far distant future.  (His daughter was an infant at the time)

All I remember was that there were levers on the handlebars to keep the suspension locked down until he left the starting gate, then flip the levers and enjoy 8" of travel.  No dropper post but he described the saddle as a very long kind of couch, kind of like a banana bike saddle but gel.

Edit: Captain Dondo is still writing!

Two weeks ago, I started learning to play bass.

One week ago, my wife got inspired to literally dust off her old electric guitar and start practicing again.

Last night, we played our first song together. We're starting with "Fade Into You" by Mazzy Star. It was very rough with a fair amount of stop-start, but we got through it.

300 pages of good. Nice job everyone.

been agonizing over getting my truck tinted, but today one of my coworkers was getting his car tinted at work, so I'm just getting the guy to do mine too. Always nice to have the decision mostly made for you. going for Ceramic with the max legal tint

Yesterday, I got to fly on an MC-130J. I spent nearly 16 years in the Air Force and never flew on ANY military aircraft. But I was a comm nerd. I was usually locked away in a SCIF somewhere so I never had the opportunity to fly.

It was a short 2 hour hop between installations but I thought it was cool. It was loud, buzzy, warm, uncomfortable and stunk like Jet-A and hydro but I loved every minute of it.

In reply to stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) :

I remember when we had more junior engineers who thought they were being rewarded with an offer to go on a 20 minute "concurrent" flight test that was part of a 14 hour fuel mileage verification flight test.

stanger_mussle (Supported by GRM undergarments) said:

Yesterday, I got to fly on an MC-130J. I spent nearly 16 years in the Air Force and never flew on ANY military aircraft. But I was a comm nerd. I was usually locked away in a SCIF somewhere so I never had the opportunity to fly.

It was a short 2 hour hop between installations but I thought it was cool. It was loud, buzzy, warm, uncomfortable and stunk like Jet-A and hydro but I loved every minute of it.

Herkybirds forever !

One of the rear power sliding doors on our minvan stopped opening via the switch on the b-pillar about a month ago.  I was all set to replace the switch, but I did a quick search on the forum and it said to check the child lock setting on the door. Sure enough, that was the problem! No idea how someone flipped the child lock on, but I'm thankful for a quick (and free!) fix.

In reply to Appleseed :

Indeed

I signed on to free wifi at the ballpark on Saturday. On a whim, since I get the service in a bundle, I signed in using one of those "hide my email address" throwaway addresses. First spam arrived this morning - and I just nuked the address. Done and dusted.

First it was this nerve pain keeping me up at night and then it was the Prednisone.  Monday night I was able to sleep without waking up, but my alarm went off at 0500 because we had to drive the middlest to her college orientation 3+ hours away.

But last night...  I fell asleep around 2300 and didn't wake up until about 0700.  It was the first good night's sleep I've had in two weeks and it was glorious.

This past weekend we finally won B class in our Mazda at Lemons.  We had a really well executed race with three drivers and lots of seat time, the car with its new engine was perfect all weekend, and were 7th overall of 95.  

In reply to Sonic :

Hell yes!!!

For the last month or so I've been working on a surprise for The Dancer for the 10th Anniversary Show her non-profit is putting on this Saturday. I wanted to do something uniquely from me to celebrate the milestone, and what I settled on was making a LEGO diorama of the show itself, showing a scene from each of the 13 pieces that are part of the show (which are all from the 10 years' of shows that the company has put on). 

It turned out to be quite an undertaking, made far more difficult by the fact that it is supposed to be surprise and thus I had to make sure The Dancer didn't see it or figure out what I was doing. And as I imagine anyone else who has been married for over a decade knows, it can be a challenge keeping your spouse from finding out about surprises- I could essentially only work on it when she wasn't in the house since if she heard me rattling LEGO around she'd be curious what I was working on, and I didn't really have the time to try and have (and be building) a decoy project to explain it.

There were other challenges. I needed to make 3 different BrickLink orders to get all of the pieces in the right color that I needed for it (I initially built it with just what color elements I had on hand and then ordered things in the right colors once I knew exactly what I needed- which I also had to keep her from figuring out what they were. She changed the show order a few times, which mean I needed to re-arrange things to keep the diorama matching up with the show. It was a real challenge coming up with what 'scene' from each piece in the show to use as well- primarily because LEGO MiniFigures have a very limited range of motion so there are a whole lot of poses that you simply cannot re-create with Minifigs without literally cutting them apart and gluing things where you want them (other places do make 'super articulated' LEGO-compatible figures, but with needing nearly 50 Minifigs for this project that would have been way too expensive since they're like $2.50 apiece). And I had grand plans to have custom fairly-lighting for the diorama as well, controlled by a RPi Pico so I could have a flickering fire-type effect and the alternating 'spotlights' that are the signature of one of the pieces- but at this point I'll be lucky if I'm able to simply wire up any lighting for it at all.

But- the one thing that has worried me from the beginning has been the Minifigs themselves. At first, I looked into whether I could find the parts to re-create the dancers in their costumes for the show for each piece- and very quickly came to the conclusion that a) most of the outfits had nothing close to a corresponding Minifig part and b) those that did were very uncommon and thus expensive. There was also the issue that several of these pieces have been performed like 5 times now, with like 3 different sets of dancers and occasionally differing outfits as well (the show this weekend has considerably different costuming simply to make it so the dancers aren't having to try and quick-change 12 times over the course of like 2 hours)- so even choosing what costume or the 'skin color' of the figures would be difficult. What I eventually settled on was that I would use what the LEGO community refers to as 'monofigs'- Minifigures that are all one color. I decided that using monofigs in the teal color that has been the core of the non-profit's logo from the beginning would work well on a number of levels- it would eliminate the problem of the costumes & difference dancers, and keep the focus more on the (dance) pieces themselves. Also since inclusion (the non-profit's whole mission is bringing dance to people of all abilities and backgrounds, especially those with special needs) is such a core part of the company, my idea was that- like LEGO's initial reason for going with yellow for their standard Minifigs- the teal monofigs would represent all people and not be singling out any ethnicity, gender, etc.

So- grandiose ideas for the teal monofigs... with only one problem: LEGO (nor, really, anyone else that I can find) doesn't make teal (or in LEGO colors, 'Bright Bluish Green') monofigs. LEGO's 'pick a brick' carries only legs in that color, and while it's possible to find some other minifig parts in that color, you cannot get that I could find the parts to make a complete minifig. So, I realized I was going to have to make my own. I ordered 50 white off-brand minifigs with the intent of spray-painting them, and last weekend finally had the time to test paint one- with very unfavorable results. The paint wasn't anywhere near as even as it needed to be, and it was clear that I would need to either a) paint the pieces of each minifig individually before assembling them or b) pose them as they'd be in the diorama and paint them that way- because it just wasn't possible to paint them completely when assembled and then pose them. And even painting them unassembled and putting them together wouldn't necessary work because moving some things (like the arms) would scrape off the paint.

So I started Googling, and found some posts and videos from like a decade ago about using Rit fabric dye and acetone to dye the ABS LEGO bricks- so I grabbed some teal Rit from Michael's and gave that a try Sunday while The Dancer was at rehearsal... and had essentially zero luck with using the standard Rit dye. I had planned on trying again during Monday's rehearsal with the Rit DyeMore that was made for synthetic fibers- but as I was starting to get ready to do that had to take care of something that came up that she needed taken care of such that I didn't have the time. Which brought me to last night- the last rehearsal in the studio before rehearsals in the theater start today, and thus the last time I'd have several hours to do anything with her not around... if I wasn't able to make the dye work I'd have to scramble to try and paint all of the figures. My initial attempt with the dye for synthetic fabrics didn't work, but I decided to try a hail-mary modification of the process using the acetone- and it finally started working close to how I wanted. Some trial and error got me to about where I wanted it to be but I was running out of time, so I had to scramble to try and get all of the parts (it worked best by far to dye the figures completely disassembled) through the process before I had to leave to pick up the UHaul to pick up everything from the studio.

SOMEHOW, at almost literally the 11th hour, I managed to get all of the parts dyed (and almost as importantly, thoroughly rinsed off to ensure that there wasn't still acetone on them which would melt everything) and laid out to dry on a towel in the garage. 

Unfortunately I didn't have things set up such that I could dye all of the pieces at the same time, so there's a modest bit of variation in the shade of the dye- but on the whole it worked out very well. Here's one of the dyed figures on a white plate (which is the color the figure originally was):

That's one of the darker ones- it's not entirely too far off from the Bright Bluish Green that is the official LEGO color- here's the same figure holding a Bright Bluish Green tile:

Not perfect, but close enough (though some of the parts are a modest bit lighter in shade- not ideal, but far better than spray painting them).

So, for the first time in a week I can exhale a bit when it comes to this project- I'm not likely to be able to do the lighting nearly as fancy as I'd hoped, but it will at least be complete (and not have stark white minifigs which I did not want).

With the right combo of legal threats and hard evidence, I was able to get enough of my security deposit back to make it not worth it to go to court. Here's hoping I never have to rent again!

Hard to tell but the white blobs just above the fence are two FA-18s taking off with full afterburner. The ramp that our aircraft that we are supporting for this exercise is adjacent to the main runway. Everyday is full of jet flyovers and landings. It's mostly F16s and FA-18s but the first day we were here there were 4 F-35s doing touch and goes.

We are also a few hundred feet from where the Blackhawks park. The bright blobs in the pic above are two FA-18s in the pattern for landing.

I leave today but this has been a cool experience out here is Nevada.

2 exciting opportunities coming up next week while I wait to hear back on a first one. 
And next weekend will be the dream cruise!

My eyesight changed for the worse while I was in the hospital a couple months ago. I made an optometry appointment as soon as I got out and ordered new glasses. By the time the new glasses came in my eyes had improved quite a bit. I wound up having to have my eyes rechecked ( they improved by +.75 diopters) and reorder all of my glasses (readers, computer and sunglasses) yesterday. Normally this would be a rant, but I'm glad my eyesight recovered. It isn't quite as good as it was when I had it checked last year, but its pretty close.

Home made pesto made with fresh basil from the garden, bruschetta from tomatoes also from the garden.

Sweet corn, Zucchini, peppers, I love this time of year

Good news, I figured out that bog at WOT. 
 

Show is all done and behind us... still have to put things away from it, but we can now exhale and look forward to our cruise in 2 weeks. Diorama ended up being a big hit and a complete surprise to The Dancer and everyone else, which made me quite happy.

Underground music still lives on the radio!  Here in Albany right now, 102.7. As soon as I heard it yesterday, it sounded like a college station. Nice to hear over the airwaves!!!