Less Recent Projects

And Tools

31 December, 2009 Burn brush pile

30 December, 2009 Trim limb by clothes line

30 December, 2009 Wire rustic planter

30 December, 2009 Assemble rustic planter

29 December, 2009 Hang scissor holder

22-23 December, 2009 Catering box

12 December, 2009 Repair figurines

11 December, 2009 Burn brush pile

04 December, 2009 Cat Bed

07 November, 2009 TPS replacement, 1993 Oldsmobile Cierra

01 November, 2009 Rebuild Walbro carburetor for MacCulluch chain-saw

10 May, 2009 Rebuild Flower Flyer

26 April, 2009 Log Planter

18 April, Tree cutting

21 December, 2008 Rake leaves
20 December, 2008 Check all lights on 3 cars, inflate mini-spares to 60 PSI, repair license plate light on Cutlass Cruiser
13 December, 2008 Rake leaves (8 tarps), pick up leaves with mower in back and way-back (8 bags)
6 December, 2008 Rake leaves (9 tarps).
30 December, 2008 Rake leave (12 tarps).
26 November, 2008 Clean battery terminals on wife’s car.
24 November, 2008 License plate on daughter’s car
22 November, 2008 Mow with catcher to pick up leaves
21 November, 2008 Clean up computer files
20 November, 2008 Rake leaves way back
19 November, 2008 Clean drain traps
18 November, 2008 Repair cracked plate
17 November, 2008 Get Buick aligned
16 November, 2008 Rake leaves front and back
15 November, 2008 Fix Icemaker
14 November, 2008 Diagnose Olds overheating
===long gap===
April 27 – Trim trees, repair chair
April 26 – Repair ice maker, mow, recycle, mulch

April 24 – Weeds in back side yard.

April 20 – Mow

April 15 – Weeds in back yard

April 12 – mow

April 9 – Weeds in front yard (second time).

March 30 – repair 2 pairs of eyeglasses.

March 29 – Mow. Cut dead (and some live) branches out of trees.

March 23 X3NavalD – created une bateau nouveau. Before I have modified from the examples. I am working to add the ability to add profiles/bulkhead/frames and get them to print out. Eclipse is spiffy as an IDE if a bit pokey.

March 22 Mow. Laundry. Shopping.

March 21 Revive Hammond

March 19 Laundry.

March 16 House cleaning. Laundry.

March 15 Mow. Cut bench corner blocks with groove for reinforcing top and edge. Rip remaining chine log.

March 14. Check out heater/A/C in wife’s car.

March 13 Weed killer back yard

March 11 Cut and glue up the corner blocks for the bench. Cut and glue up strips to slice into planks for the next model.

March 10 Pick up about a bushel of sticks. Mow.

March 2 Put the stop sign backing back on the post at the entrance to the development. A truck had destroyed the old backing. I made a new one from plywood. Paint and stencil a logo on it.

March 1 Spray for weeds in the front yard.

February 23-24 Replace bulbs in all 3 cars. A couple of tail lights, high brake lights, and turn signal lights. The dashboard lights in my car are still not done as the store computer called out 194 as does the owners manual. They are actually a PC194 assembly which includes the twist lock base. This is a major pain-in-the-neck as the lamps are on the back of the instrument cluster which is accessed by removing all of the dashboard trim and then the cluster. The cluster contains the odometer and is tied to the car. About 15 screws. Mow with the grass catcher to pick up the leaves. Sand and oil the clothes line pole to avoid splinters. Repair broken vase. Work projects.

February 18 – Replace the smoke detectors.

February 16-17 Stencil the homeowners association logo on the sign. The stencil is too floppy and leaks. Hand paint the touchup on the logo. Glue the shelves on the shelf. Complete the finishing shelf. Shelf is done.

February 9-10 Paint the sign. Smooth a broken cup handle for reuse as a dip dish. Finish the back of the bench. Cut and sand the remaining parts of the shelf. Fertilize the lawn.

February 2-3 – Primer the sign. Worked overnight so not much on Sunday. Another coat of stain for the bench.

January 26-27 – Cut out, fill, and sand a replacement stop sign for the home owners association

January 19-20 – Stain the back of the bench.

January 12-13 – Mow mostly to pick up leaves. Spray apple tree with dormant season oil spray.

January 5-6 – Rake back yard. Fit slats for bench back.

December – began a bench/bookshelf for my wife.
November – completed peapod #2. Lots of raking.

10-11 November – watering, a toggle (ABoK 615). Cat flap. Web pages.

3-4 November, Fall garden cleanup, watering, mowing. Made a jamcleat to photograph. Finished two mats (ABoK 2269) one bight.

27-28 October, Fall yard cleanup, skyride, garage mini-blinds down for washing.

19 October, 2007 – Phil no school. Got up at 6, fed the cats and did Wikipedia until noon.

18 October, 2007 – Used the thermal paste to revive the computer. Also set up a Dimension 2400 that we had acquired and had repaired.

17 October, 2007 – Parts are here. Methodically put them back together. Cannot finish due to lack of thermal paste. Wait for Phil to get home from school to see if he wants to go to Best Buy. He does but has too much homework.

16 October, 2007 – Phil to school. Give Blood. Reseed back yard.

15 October, 2007 – Phil to school. Order computer parts. Some yard cleanup. Set up Java on work computer for X3NavalD.

14 October, 2007 – Diagnose computer. Want to discuss the results with Phillip. He comes home later than expected. Dell technicians now say it is the Power Supply AND the System Board.

13 October, 2007 – looked for pictures of Oselver on the web. Tried an alternate disk drive. No help.

12 October, 2007 – Phillip to school. He will not return until Sunday night. The Dell technician says that it is a bad drive.

11 October, 2007 – Phillip to school. Laundry etc around the house. Mess with the computer to see what helps.

10 October, 2007 – Reseeded the front yard. Taking care of the cats. Phillip drove himself to school because he has guitar after.

9 October, 2007 – Vacation day. Take my wife to the airport early, take my son to school. Clean up the cats. Find that the computer is dying.

17 June 2007 – Goof off for father’s day. Started re-reading Hofsteader’s Godel, Escher, Bach.

10 June 2007 – Weekend at the beach.

May 2007 – A dry month. Mowing and watering. The main project for the month was a grape arbor for my wife for Mother’s day. It is a pretty quick project but my muscles hurt for 2 weeks after.

28 April 2007 – Cut down a small tree that is too crowed by other larger trees. Split some of the cedar logs I cut up the other day. Sharpened the chain saw. Pulled up and put back down the oak tongue-and-groove flooring where the dishwasher is going back. Put some more wire bands around the planters that my wife built out of the logs. There are about 4 now.

25 April 2007 – Started the chain saw and cut up several fallen pine trees in to short lengths. My wife stands these logs on end and makes a planter out of it. I put a band of wire around to keep it together. Mowed the yard. This time of year it needs it twice a week. Repaired the pump on the dishwasher. Took the rib off the peapod as it is not going to be right.

22 April 2007 – Worked on the peapod. Added a rib.

21 April 2007 – Mowed, recycled, puttered around the yard all day. Built a cart to hold boxes of photographs. A fairly simple project but it took a while. It is basically a piece of plywood with a lip around it, reinforcement underneath and casters at the corners. A lot of sanding. Got a coat of varnish on it.
19 March 2007 – Fixed spelling error in link. Study java pr

18 March 2007 – Last night we got a production system up and running on z/OS 1.7. Today I have been trying to catch up on the website and documentation.

17 March 2007 – Working on printing for X3NavalD. Also mowed the yard. The grass is beginning to grow and fill in the bare spots. If it would just crowd out the weeds.

11 March 2007 – Mowed with the catcher to pick up the sweet gum balls and leaves. It has been so dry that the ground is like a brick. The only appreciable rand we had was a week ago when it poured 4 inches.

10 March 2007 – removed the dishwasher so that it can be worked on. The pump shaft has started to leak.

17 February 2007 – spread 10-10-10 fertilizer all over. Put some seed in selected spots and covered it with peat moss to try to keep it moist. It may still be too cold for planting grass.

3 February 2007 – My wife put the Christmas dishes away today. They go back in the attic and so I helped push the boxes in. Christmas started late this year and so is ending late too. I worked on X3Navald documentation and updated the site.

1 February 2007 – Snow and freezing rain this morning. The forecaster called it “wintery mix”. Schools were closed and I worked from home. Four meetings and some spreadsheet work. Loads of e-mails. Tonight I am trying to catch up with the web site and finish the document on X3NavalD

28 January 2007 For a number of months, I have been looking at a program, X3NavalD, with a couple of ideas. One. it does not work at all on my Linux system as downloaded. I have fixed that problem now. Two, it is written in French which is not a bad thing but it is difficult for me to debug where the comments are in a foreign language. Three, I do not know Java that well and it is written in Java. Today, I finally got X3NavalD to run on Debian Linux in the US. Here’s how.

Also repaired a gate on the backyard related to yesterday’s neighborhood help day.

27 January 2007 – Much of the neighborhood turned out to help clean the garage of a man who fell from a cell phone tower and was badly injured. He will be coming home on Tuesday and they will be building a ramp in his garage. We also cleaned up the the yard and bushes. Things he would have been doing if he had not been in the hospital.

14 January 2007 Today I raked the front yard with a garden rake to pick up the sticks and sweet gum balls, pull out the weeds, remove the thatch, and scratch the earth to catch the grass seed. I started about 11:00 and finished about 14:30 with an hour time out for lunch and a call to you. After that, I put down starter fertilizer (20-24-8 or something like that). Then I put down grass seed. I set up two sprinklers and ran them over various spots so that each spot got about an hour of watering. Tomorrow is a work day even though it is the MLK holiday.

13 January 2007 — After I did the recycling yesterday I mowed the front and back yards short with the mower about an inch lower than usual. Then we (Phillip, his friends, and I burned up the pile of brush that had accumulated since Phillip had burned it around the time of his birthday in August. I use the chain saw to slice through the pile reducing any large branches to short pieces and getting the small branches at the same time. It was all burned up in about 2 hours. The ashes were still hot the next day.

7 January 2007 – e-mail and update web pages.

6 January 2007 – Visited the new (year old) main downtown Des Moines Public Library. The “Does not Circulate” Iowa section is fascintating. I found a book by Dixie Willson, wife of Merideth Willson of Music man fame. And a 3 volume history of aviation in Iowa — Extremely detailed, places and names.

5 January 2007 – Attended the Iowa State University orientation with my daughter in the morning. Then headed for my Aunt and Uncle’s house in Des Moines.

3 January 2007 – Repaired the drivers side door handle on my daughter’s car. This car is a 1991 Oldsmobile Ciera. The handle had broken when the door was iced and she tugged too hard. I had to plan the job without seeing it and pack the right tools. I did not remember that it was a wind-up (non-electric) window car and did not take the hook to get the clip off the window crank. The other tool that I needed was a 7/16 deep socket as the door handle stud was too long for a standard socket. This job was about 2 hours including a trip accross town to get the deep socket. The biggest challenge is that the nuts do not line up with the access holes on the inside of the door. Go figure. You must reach inside with the ratchet rather than stick an extension through the door to remove and install the nuts on the door handle.

2 January 2007 – Cleaned the old apartment and moved the last of the things to the apartment. On the way we visited the MacNider Museum, saw the Charles Fritz Paintings, returned the key for kiln she had been using, returned the key to the apartment, dropped off a kitty that had been at the apartment, and left some excess items at the boyfriend’s mothers house.

1 January 2007 – With her boy friend and a van moved much of the rest of my daughters things.

30 December 2006 – With the aid of my wife’s Aunt and her pickup truck, my daughter moved the bulk of her things to a new apartment in Ames Iowa.

17 December – Mowed to pick up remaining leave. Watered the new grass in the fron. Dry as a bone. Patched the sand through. Study Calculus “Limits”. Update development environment for GLUT, gcc, glade, etc. Update knotsim program to current development environment. Eliminate errors. Try it out. Make additional changes to knotsim to improve documentation. Since there are no functional changes is this worth an update to the distribution? I can imagine some enhancments. One is to be able to draw-up a knot as in in tighten it until it is compact. 16 December – Recycle – Sand exterior of boat. *Sanded through*. Time for repair. Download knotsim.

15 December – Took a vacation day and raked leaves. Continued sanding the interior of the boat.

11 December – I took a vacation day and tied a couple of knots. Here is one.

10 December – A concert in the afternoon. The Carolina Youth Symphony, the Repertory Orchestra, and the Mauldin Middle School Mustang Corral Choir. A very nice program of Christmas music. An excellent version of Sleigh Ride, The Nutcracker Suite, and many other favorites. Great concert. These kids were very well prepared.

9 December – The usual recycling and stuff. It seems that I spent the whole day driving though. I have been to downtown Greenville more this month than in 10 years (except for church). This is the first Saturday that I have not mowed in since Spring, I think.

2 December – Recycle and mow with the catcher in the front. The back had hardly any leaves. The weather has been unusually warm with a bit of rain. I expected the grass to be longer. The sun is 3 weeks away from Solstice. Probably just not enough light.

One of the oaks in the front (south side) still has a bunch of leaves. While it is not unusual for oaks to lose their leaves late, this one still has GREEN leaves on the south side. The north side is pretty much down.

Did a bit of sanding on the peapod.

A boy from up the street asked for some help with an airplane. This is a foam battery powered Radio Control model called Air Hog. (I will omit the link to their web site since it requires Flash 8.0 and I do not have it.) His airplane had gotten away from him and gotten into a yard where the dogs bit it up. I glued the bits on but the nose had been bitten off and long with it the wires to the batteries. My son had figured out where to connect them back but I was not able to reproduce his results, hence, did not re-solder the connections. May be on Sunday.

26 December – Sprayed for weeds. With the warm weather, they continue to grow.

14 November – Update web page

13 November – Raked leaves. In 5 hours I got 9 1/2 tarps of leaves from the front and 2 1/2 tarps from the back. The tarp is about 5 by 8.

12 November – clean up shop a bit

11 November – house cleaning

9 November – mowed with the catcher to pick up the leaves. Got about 5 bushels.

8 November – Worked on the bottom of the boat.

7 November – voted. Ordered parts for the washing machine.

4 November – looked at washing machine.

3 November – made beds for cats with high sides.

29 October – Still another beautiful October day. My wife noted that it was like a Connecticut October day. The difference is that in Connecticut, it would have been the first week in October. In SC these days occur a month later.

Did the mowing/leaf pick-up today. After things had had a chance to dry out. Put a couple of pairs of planks on the boat. One more pair and the closer should do it. Also sawed off a couple of branches that were too close to the house. Some are dead and some are living, but they are all on the burn pile now.

I also finished an knot item today that I had been struggling with for over a month. Pictures will be on the

knot page when I get to them.Lunch was interesting. Peanut butter sandwiches and home-made apple sauce on the front steps on a beautiful day. At first there were two yellow jackets. As I was eating the apple sauce, one hung on to the side of the bowl and ate from the liquid that is between the apple-y parts of the sauce. The other stomped right into the sauce and was eating away. Since I saw them, I just used the spoon to eat around them. No sense in upsetting them. When they were full, the flew away. I finished eating and took the dishes to the kitchen. Within two minutes, there were a dozen yellow jackets flying around and landing everywhere. After a couple of minutes more, they left again, disappointed, I am sure, that they had made the trip for nothing.28 October – Bright and clear today. After yesterday and last nights rain, it is surprisingly clear. The air is dry. It is pleasantly warm for the cold wave that turns the air clear after a rain. We went to a halloween party last night and got up a little later this morning.Worked with my wife to get the gardens ready for Winter. The last of the flowering shrubs had been done in by the frost and then by last nights rain. No bees to be seen. She cut them back and I took the branches to the pile.23 October – Another beautiful October day. Tried to patch a spot in the front yard under the water oaks where it did not get enough rain. After I trimmed the branches back 2 weeks ago, it at least seems to be getting some light. Did the usual stuff. First I areated again. That will make three times for this area of the yard. It does help to mix the soil up. But even so, and even with the rain we had last week, the soil is like a brick in most places. And there are lots of roots here. Using the areator should cut them off.Rake to break up the surface, starter fertilizer, seed, and cover with peat moss. Water. Now to just remember to keep the peat moss moist all week.22 October – Helped my wife continue with the fall garden clean up.21 October – Did the usual Saturday mowing. I used the catcher to pick up the leaves. After that was done, I helped my wife with the fall garden clean up. Mostly just hauling stuff to the pile in the woods.<20 October – vacation day – Start on the fall garden clean up. My wife asked me to use the weed trimmer on the lariope. That works good to get it cut back but it leaves a mess in the yard. Some of it I raked up into piles which I12 August – Recycling.
Doing a couple more pairs of strips on the peapod in progress.
Raining so no mowing.
Updated web pages to use css, consistant style and navigation.From the Now It Can Be Told Department, the didjeridoo that I made for my son for his birthday.
I began the didj in late May and finished it over several weekends in June.I thought about making an Alphorn. But I was sure that there were challenges there that I was not ready for. So I decided to make a didjeridoo for my son. Now the real way to make a didjeridoo is to let the termites hollow out the inside of a eucalyptus, find the hollow tube, and cut it and finish it. We have a eucalyptus but hopefully, there are no termites that close to the house.
Instead, I decided that I would make an 8 sided tube from fir strips. Ripping the strips was no problem but I am glad that I made a few extras. Cutting a 3/8″ wide strip, 6 feet long with no saw-marks is a bit of a challenge.
I cut the strips so the rings of the tree were parallel with the surface. The alternative would be to set the rings perpendicular to the surface. I wanted the grain rather than the stripes that you would get with the latter, although that would be attractive as a pattern too.
The other trick was that they needed to be tapered with a 22 1/2 degree bevel on each side. I worked my brain trying to come up with some clever geometrical construction that would yield the setting for the saw that I needed. In the end, I just cut the bevels on pieces of wood 8 times and assembled the pieces. If the figure was open, I set the blade a little closer. If the figure was too closed, I set the blade a little farther. When it closed, I ripped the pieces.
The next trick was to glue them. I decided that the strips were thick enough that they would stay together if I just glued them and bound them with string. I used Gorilla glue for this. Gorilla glue swells a bit and I wanted to fill any gaps. But that also meant that I would need to bind the tube firmly at a number of locations. I ended up making a wrapping every 8 inches with 4 to 6 turns, pulling it tight, making an overhand knot, snugging, and tieing a square knot.
When I applied the glue, I only glued 3 edges of two sets of strips. This way I had two halves that I could finish the inside before gluing the halves together.
After the glue was dry, I sanded the inside of each half with sandpaper wrapped around a dowel to get the ugly glue out. This left the glue in the joints between the strips. When I was happy with the smoothness of the inside, I glued the to halves together with Gorilla glue. Again I bound the halves with string.
Now I had a tube. I could actually blow (pursed lips) into the tube and get a sound. I wanted the tube to be fairly airtight so I put masking tape on the end and blew into the the other. It was pretty leaky. A friend, Doug Bauman suggested gas tank sealant. Since I did not know that material, I decided to try varnish. I used regular polyurathane varnish. I poured a couple of tablespoons (5 ml) into the tube, rotated and held the tube nearly level to get it to flow into all the cracks. When the inside was covered, blew into to the open end to force the varnish into the cracks. The varnish comes out all over so do this outside, over the grass. (Grass is best for this as it grows out and gets cut off.) I let that dry.
Repeat the sealing process twice. The tube is now fairly tight.
Sand the outside with 60, 80, 100, 150, 200 grit sand paper.
Stain – this is a story in itself. I had decided that I wanted to give the didj a blue stain. Lowe’s has colored stains in a variety of colors but the smallest quantity that you can buy is a quart (1/2 liter). I needed about 4 ounces. I decided to make my own. My wife had some oil paints from various art projects. I selected a cobalt blue. I squeezed a couple of inches of oil paint into an 8 oz (1/10 liter) paint can. I filled it 1/4 full with linseed oil and filled it nearly to the top with paint thinner. Stir throughly. Rub it on with a cloth let it set a minute and wipe off the excess. Repeat. The result was that the redish fir grain contrasted with the blue softwood that took the stain giving a “blue flame effect”. Just what I wanted.9 August – Glue the strip at the stern. Taper and glue the next bow plank. Fourth plank.I may not have mentioned that I am reading the Holy Qu’ran. Especially at this time when the Israeli’s are still at war with Hezbollah, I am hoping that it will help me to understand what this is about. My initial conclusion is that few alive today read the Holy Qu’ran as a whole, preferring to break it into little pieces, the better to rearrange them to mean what you selfishly want them to mean. The Bible thumpers do the same. The One God is watching. He sees what you do.8 August – Glued the middle when I got home from work. Glued the bow before suppler. Glue the middle before bedtime.7 August – Glue the stern and the next bow.`6 August – The bow popped off. Not enough glue and it sprung when I flexed it. I put it back on and did another project for a while.The other project was a repeat of the necklace rack. I made two because it does not take much longer than making one. It is the set up that takes the time even for a simple piece like this. Nothing but a piece of molding with some drilled holes. Sand, finish with Watco finish. Stick an escutcheon pin in each hole and done. Mount on the wall.The bow popped off again. This time I am going to leave it until after supper. After supper, I glued the middle. Then the stern. Now the next bow and then a before bed, the middle. The second course is half-done.5 August – set the first plank in place. It seems like everything moved as it was way off the mold. Re-wedge the stem and stern. Break the piece off. Clean it up. Reglue, re-cut, re-glue. The first plank is in place on both sides.30 July – Mow. Fertilize. It may be too dry but the lawn needs feeding. Run the sprinklers. It has been raining a bit more lately, but still not enough. My wife has been away seeing visiting family in the mid-west. Now to clean the house before her return.29 July – Doing flight simulator. I re-did the Spirit of Saint Louis flights. And created a section for them. It has been too hot to work on the boat.19 July – The pictures came back today so I have updated Our Cats.09 July – Cut out the bow stem and stern stem. This is done by tracing the full size pattern from the plan in the book. Note the grain direction on the plan and put a double ended arrow on the pattern piece. Mark each of the three pieces for bow with a B and each of the three pieces for the stern with an S. Cut the pattern pieces out. Spray glue a 1/4″ slice and stick the pattern pieces on the slice, taking care to observe the grain direction.While you are at it, retrace the 6 pieces in the orientation they will have when they are assembled and lay this paper aside. This will be the gluing pattern.Band saw the pieces along the lines on the glued-on pattern. Get the straight pieces as as straight as possible.Assemble the pieces on wax paper over the gluing pattern created above. Do this on a board that you will be able to spring clamp to. Apply glue to the joints, assemble and clamp over the pattern. Allow these pieces to dryWhen dry, fit the posts to the building mold. Measure the keel and cut a piece fo 1/4″ inch stock. Since I am going to build a sailing version, I cut t deep keel using scrap wood and checked it for fit and appearance. I then used this as a pattern for the real keel. I cut this out of some of the 1/4″ slice that the stem and stern pieces were cut from.Assemble and glue the stem, stern, and keel over the mold and allow to dry.The other thing that I did today was work on a toy chain saw. This had been damaged a while back. I had looked at it and it had cracked internally where the blade joined the internal plastic part that holds the windup motor. Trying to repair these things has never been very successful for me so I had put it off after I looked at it.I ended up making a reinforcing plate of 1/16″ sheet styrene. I built it up to three layers as the pocket where the plate needed to lie had very little area on oneside of the crack at the flush level. There was more gluing area available but it was stepped up 1/8″ from the flush level where the cracking occured. I cut one piece, making allowance for the screen tunnels and od shapes. Traced two more pieces. Did a little shaping. glued, clamped, and allowed to dry.When the stack was dry, I checked if for fit. Did some more shaping. Put the cracked plastic back in its original configuration or nearly so. Plastic cement in the crack and finish closing. Glue on the flat surface. Put the reinforcing plate on and clamp until dry.I cleaned and lubed the windup motor and made a pull handle out of a scrap of oak.That and a little bit of watering was a fine day.04 July – With the slices that I cut on Sunday. I will cut the strips that I will need for building on the holiday.Sort the slices. The slices that are on a joint just set aside. They may be good for something. Starting fires maybe. The rest check for cracks, saw marks, and other flaws. If they are too bad, put them in the discard pile.Sand selected slabs lightly with 80 grit on the belt sander. The surface of these slices will be the edges of the planks. You do not want a saw mark in the middle of the slice to be letting daylight into the bottom of your model. Get these things fairly smooth.You will need a zero-clearance slot for your saw. I make mine out of a piece of 1/2″ plywood. I have drilled some holes in one end to use a through bolt, washers, and a wing nut to hold the board to the saw table. Trim the end and check to make sure that the screw holes will work for this run.Set the fence. I set it for 5/64ths today. This may not be as thick as the last time I did this. But I have improved my technique. I guess time will tell. Using the remainder of the stack, cut off a couple of slices. These will be used for the “starter plank” which finishes off the bottom.Run plywood into the blade and past it into the splitter. Hold it securely while you TURN OFF the saw. When the blade has stopped, clamp the plywood using whatever works for your situation. Double check security. Turn on the saw to test. Nothing should move. You should have support on fence side of the blade for the thin pieces you are about to make.Run one of the slices through. The back side of the blade my have a tendencey to grab the cut piece. If it does, stop and set up again. A little more open this time. Otherwise, catch the piece and pull/push the slice through. Put the cut off mini-plank in your stock and repeat until the slice is too narrow to hold against the fence. Repeat until all slices are sliced.02 July – Running the sprinklers on the gardens today. It is amazing how quickly the leaves perk up when they get a little water. At least the heat is not as wilting as it has been in past years. Perhaps I am just getting used to this South Caronlina weather.In addition to running the sprinklers, I ripped the stack into slices. I needed at least two slices about 1/4″ thick to make the stem, stern, and keel. The rest I was going to slice into planking. Since I started with 2 1x6x8, I probably have enough for 2 boats.This is pretty routine but you need to be really careful. My saw has a ratchet-toothed thingy at the back of the blade guard to prevent kickback from sending the work flying if the blade grabs. The problem is that the highest that it gets is not nearly as high as the highest I can raise the blade. And not has high as the thickest cut I can take. The situation can be improved slightly be raising the guard slightly which I do.

The other problem is that we are talking about fairly tight pieces here. If the splitter is not exactly aligned with the blade, it binds, stops, or otherwise messes up the smooth cut. Check it. Make sure that it is lined up. And that it clears the height of the blocks thickness.

Take those thick pieces off first. Start on the clear side. Check the stack for rocking. If it rocks, plane it with a bench plane until it is flat. Check to make sure that it is not just a coincidence. After you take a couple of slices away, you do not want that slab to start rocking.

Set the fence to 1/4″ fence to fence side of the blade. Use a scale with a clear marking. I use a 6″ metal scale with inked markings. I use the 1/64th scale because it makes me think precisely. Be sure to measure front and rear clearance. They should be the same or a little bit (not much) open to the exit side of the blade. Securely lock the fence.

Rehearse the cut. Check the blade height. The blade should extend slightly above the height of the slab. Check the clearance or the anti-kickback. Check the guard. Check the fence to make sure that it is securely locked.

Put the slab on the table and securely against the fence, clear of the blade. Turn on the saw and move the work through the blade slowly. There is a lot of cutting going on. The forces are huge. Keep the work firmly against the fence (Did I mention securly locking the fence above?). Continuous firm pressure tho make the cut. Catch the wood on the exit side and continue to push the stack through. At the other side, you should have a nice, neat, 1/4″ thick piece of wood. Set it aside and do this again.

As you go to do this again, you will note a couple of things. One, the next cut is probably going to get a piece of the joint. This is expected and is part of the game. The other thing is that it may be going to get more at one end than at the other. This is also expected but not desirable. This means tha your fence setting may be too open. If it is not too bad, try turning the stack over for the next “n” passes. The flip it again. This only works if your stack has truly flat edgess.

When the required number of thick slices are done, stop the saw and reset the fence. Set the rip fence to the width of the scale planks, say, 12/64″. We will take off a number of additional slices whic will turn into planks. The slice thickness becomes the width of the blank. The second rip thickness becomes the carvel plank thickness.

01 July – Incredibly dry here. In addition to mowing and re-cycling, I moved the sprinklers all day. Got all of the grass done at about an hour per patch with two sprinklers running. I have begun to mow with earplugs. Phillip, my son, persuaded me to get some earplugs the last time that we had chain sawing to do. They did help with that. It seemed to be less stressful. Without the engine noise, you can concentrate on the blade noise and the feel of the cut. In any case, we have some dogs next door. One of them charges the fence when I am mowing. It could probably jump or climb over if it wanted to. The fact that it charges and barks just as I turn my back was really unerving. I started to wear the earplugs. The barking no longer bothers me. Not only that my body language has changed. Since I do not hear the dogs, I can more effectively ignore them. And an ignored dog is a bored dog. The soon give up and go off to discuss dog philosophy or whatever dogs do when the are not being a nuisense.

The earplugs help with sawing. Since the noise is less intense, you can listen for the subtlety of the noise of the cut. You can tell when the blade is binding, when it is making a sawmark. Earplugs are great. Not expensive either. I use the disposable kind several times. I keep them clean in a Altoids tin.

25 June – Time to build a boat. I am going to build another peapod. The one in the picture has gone to my brother-in-law for his birthday. I am going to build another. I got 2 1″x6″x8′ pieces. First I cut them into thirds. 96/3 is 32 inches give or take an 1/8th for the blade thickness. Then I rip them in half. I select the pieces; those pieces with central knots are the lowest in the priority. Edge knots are ok, better if they are on an end. All clear wood is the best. Arrange the pieces so that the edge knots are all on the same side. Arrange the other knots so that they are at the same end.

Arrange the pieces so that they are ready for gluing. Yow will want to be able to spread the glue and build the stack and get if flat before the glue gets set up too much. It the stack rocks, it will be hard to get flat slices out of it. Use a piece of 3/4″ plywood (varnished or shellacced) or some other flat surface as the assembly surface.

Take the top piece and spread glue. I use Titebond original wood glue. Use a flat piece of scrape or cardboard to spread the glue evenly. Your want to make sure that you have glue from end-to-end and from edge-to-edge. This stack is going to be sawed and you do not want any surprises Do this job right. Do not use too much glue either. This is not a case of more is better. A thin, wet coat is what you want. Grab the next piece. Lay it on. Get it edge-even. Coat it with glue. Repeat until you have a stack all the pieces. Lay it with the edges on your flat surface and press the pieces so that the edges are in contact and really flat.

Put on the clamps . I clamp lightly at one end, then the middle, then the other end. Check for flat. Adjust as necessary. Then tighten, really tight. Let the stack dry.

11 June – Already. I have not had a chance to update as there has been some weekend work at work. All of the usual mowing and stuff each weekend. With the addition of watering. We have not had significant rain here for weeks. There was an inch about 10 days ago. It filled up the ponds. But that is all. The grass is crispy. Yesterday I mowed. I also sanded on a project and varnished the inside of it. I watered all of the lawn. The front as 4 zones (including the front garden), the back as three zones, and the way back as 5 zones. I tried to get an hour of water on each zone. That really is only about a half an inch of water. Last night the windows were shut for the first time since about March. The A/C is on for the summer I presume. This seems to be the end of the cool weather.

Today I watered the rest of what did not get done yesterday. That would be the bank where the flowers are planted and the plantings in the woods. I flew the MS FS 2K4 – CoF but just did a cross country from Mason City, IA to Albert Lea, MN to Forest City, IA, and back. About a 1 hour flight in an Cessna 182S

20 May – It has been forever since I have had a chance to update. I hope that I can remember all the things that have happened. 12 – Mowed the front and back. 13 – Mowed the way back. Did some watering. Made some shelves for Donita for Mother’s day. They will eventually hold pictures. She just wanted them primed. I believe that she will apply some special artistic treatment. 16 – Primed the other side of the shelves. 19 – Mowed the whole yard and watered the back and part of the west side. All this after work. 20 – A craft project.

22 April – Recycled. Put down fertilizer in the east and west gardens. The rain will take care of the watering. A series of hard rain thunderstorms in the early morning. Harry the cat hid under the bed. Washed the cat boxes. Worked on the web pages.

14 April – I have gotten behind on my reporting and so I am catching up tonight. I mowed when I got home from work I turned on the sprinkler as I am trying to water to make sure that the fertilizer and week killer have maximum effectiveness. The grass is dense and tall. I may have to got to two mowings a week if I keep up this feeding and watering. I am trying to get the bare spots to fill in and they seem to be doing that with the extra water.

9 April – Go to Home Depot to get 21 bags of pine bark mini-nugget mulch. Three times. A total of 63 bags. It takes 42 of them to do the 150 feet of garden from the street to the backyard on the east side. The rest will be used soon and probably more trips besides. A very nice lady named Cathy helped us load the car.

8 April – recycle.

6 April – with the fertilizer and watering, the grass is growing faster. I mow in the middle of the week. The weeds are suffering but perhaps not enough.

1 April – mowed and recycled.

26 March – Trouble with the car. That overheating problem that preceded the thermostat apparently has caused a leak of coolant into the combustion chamber. I will need to take in to somebody.

The good news is that the weed killer is killing the weeds. They have definitely suffered from the poison. It appears that even though the granuals were washed off the leaves, the chemical is being absorbed and the weeds are definitely dieing.

25 March – Mowed and recycled.

19 March – Put down powder/pellet weed killer. This was the Preen brand. It needs to go down after the weeds are actively growing and needs to stay on for a couple of days. Of course, it rained hard later that night.

18 March – mowed, recycled.

12 March – picked up sticks in the gardens. And with the sticks a number of sweet gum tree seed pods. For a few of you who may not be from around here, the sweet gum is a pretty shade tree. It grows upright without much spread. The one in my yard may be 60 feet (20m) high and 20 feet across (7m) at the maximum. They flower in the spring and produce a messy male part which falls down. The blossoms mature into a seed pod which looks like a brown tesselated golfball by fall. These begin to fall when the leaves change color and continue to fall until the following spring. When I told my friends at work about how I spent my Sunday, one said “I thought you had a chain saw. Why are you still picking up those things?”. I joked to another, “Say Rhett, do you think that I could use sweet gum seeds as a mulch? He replied “Those things are truly useless. You can’t rake ’em up, you can’t blow ’em,. They aren’t good for anything.

I was able to fill 4 wheel barrows full from just this one tree. This is the kind of yield that would get the midwest farmers all a’talkin’ down at the elevator. Of course you could never put sweet gum seeds in an elevator because according to Rhett, you can’t blow ’em, and heaven knows what they would do if you tried to pick them up with a grain auger. I picked them up one or two at a time and tossed them into a paper shopping bag. When they started to tumble out, I would turn the bag upright and try to shake them down. They don’t shake down either.

Now the neighbor’s mom and dad pass through here as they migrate from Michigan to Florida and back as the season dictates. They are really nice people. But the lady asked my wife if she could get some more sweet gum seeds. It seems the spray paint them and put glitter on them and make them into Christmas ornaments. I am probably missing out on a fortune just by not recognizing an important market.

If you need some, I know where you can get some.

11 March – Recycled.

Fixed a street sign that had been sheered off in the development. It was made of plastic foam with a metal sign glued to it after it was bolted to the post. Glued the plastic board back together, put it back on the post, and but the sign back up with two bolts.

Mowed front and back.

6 March – A project at work ran over due to a lack of understanding of the process (again) As a result, I had a 12 hour day overnight. Little business impact but still I wish that I were able to avoid these things. Maybe more training

3 March – I got the computer today. Hooked it up according to the directions and sure enough, it is still the EGR solenoid. Reset.

27 February – On the lunch break, I called Pep Boys. They knew exactly what I was talking about. – Actron 9140 or 9150, “we can get it in about a week”.

Autozone – a couple of days.

NAPA – a couple of days – but very helpful.

– Let me check. The computer. Oh it needs the CP9140 in it. We can get those in a couple of days.26 February – checked the web for scanners and it looks like Actron will do the job, or maybe AutoXray. Also tried to see which of the Autozone, NAPA, Pep Boys, Action Auto Parts, might have the right ones.

I ended up ordering the Actron CP9150 through Amazon. It comes with cables for a bunch of things but costs only a bit more than the CP9140 and ALDL cable.

25 February – Changed the thermostat in my car. This is a royal pain. The thermostat is located on the engine end of the upper radiator hose connection. The upper bolt is reachable with an extension. It acts like a 13mm but is really a 1/2″. The lower bolt is behind the exhaust pipe and requires a box wrench. Since it is in aluminum and has not been touched since the day it was made in 1994, and there is no room to grab the wrench, and no room to swing it, it is hard to get out. My neighbor, John, helped. He works on Austin Healeys and Triumphs for fun. Oh did I mention, in order to get room to work we ended up removing the bracket that leads the throttle connections to the throttle body.

When we were done, started it up and the check engine light came on. Since I do not have a code reader, I decide buy a reader or scanner on Monday. Of course my Oldsmobile is a 1995. It uses the old style plug. Scanners and readers for OBDC2 are getting pretty reasonable, but if you want one that reads the old cars, they cost money. And you need to make sure you get the right cable too.

23 February – I was looking out of the window while waiting for a meeting to begin and noted that the grass outside the building across the street from where I work was just as narly looking as the grass in my yard. I will blame it on the drought and the winter.

19 February – We have a section of the yard we call the back 40. It really is almost half the neighbors land. The owner before the previous owner put a fence around for the dog but did not bring it to the property line because of the drain right-of-way. As a result, the fence runs from 20 feet away from the midpoint of the property line to the corner leaving a big chunk that they can’t see because of the fence and I can. So I just take care of the whole thing. We have some Austrees just our side of the line but after the ice storm only 2 are left. I rake up the leaves on this section and put down pelletized limestone and 10-10-10.

12 February – Put down 10-10-10 fertilizer on the lawn. Also put down pelletized limestone. It has been a while since I put down limestone and it seems like the fertilizer is gone from the lawn too. The soil here is clay. Last spring, the lawn was looking good. It was really thick and nice. But by the end of the summer, the drough had gotten too it. The fertilizer that I put down in July was still undisolved in September. In fact in most places it is still undisolved even though we have had quite a bit of rain this winter. So I put some down. Now the weeds will probably thrive.

I also have a tree that got bent over in the ice storm. I thought that if I had a pole saw, I could trim the branches, lighten it up, and it might spring back to a more vertical shape. And that would help take it away from the house. The pole saws at Lowe’s go to 14 feet length. This branch is at least 20 feet up. So I thought that I could make a pole saw out of pruning saw blade and a couple of 10 foot sections of plastic pipe. Great concept but the PVC pipe is way too flexible for its own weight much less the weight of the blade. I did manage to make a cut into the branch about 1/2 inch. Maybe it will be weak enough there that the branch will drop off when it leafs out.

11 February – Worked on web pages.

5 February – mowed with the catcher to pick up leaves.

22 January – Work on web pages. Raked the leaves and blown down sticks out of the yard with Phillip.

My wife had some heart shaped candle holders that she got last year at Valentine’s Day. She used them once last year. And she put them out this year. But when she washed them the red coating started to flake off. She thought they were red clear through. I put the rest of the acetone in a glass jar with a metal lid and soaked them. Good thing that I did too. The acetone vapor had eaten the plastic cap of the can so that it cracked when I opened it. That can was probably 5 years old.

21 January – A card table with an oil cloth center needs recovering. The center is plywood, nailed from the top. The oil cloth is stretched and held in with cord. The replacement cover is green vinyl with interfacing bonded to the back. Lay it out and put on similar to doing a screen door. The slot was too narrow for the screen door tool. I smoothed the tip of an old and very large screwdriver to push the cord back in. Getting the edges smooth is a real challenge and I think I did every edge twice. Finish by trimming the excess with an X-acto knife. Be careful not to knick the edge of the center piece.

15 January – work on my web pages.

14 January – I had intended to take pictures but it is too windy outside. I clean off my work bench. The only project on the bench is a cutting board. My wife’s Aunt Julie makes these out of pieces from her other wood projects. Mostly oak they have thin strips of other woods running through them for decoration. After years of wetting and drying, they evenutually come apart. I glue them back together. Gorilla glue is the best for this but the last bottle I got set up before I used it up. Keeping the humidity out is a real challenge. I used Tite-bond this time. The advantages of Gorilla Glue in this application are that it expands while setting and it is waterproof. The expansion can be a problem. I use ratchet style bar clamps instead of the kind with hand screws. When the glue expands, it presses apart and actually bends the plastic parts of the clamps. All metal clamps would be a plus here. See below for my comments in building stacks of wood for re-sawing.

11 January – Final assembly. Glue the seats and seat brackets in place. Drill for oar pegs. I used round toothpicks for the pegs as I could not find suitable dowel (3/32″). They seem OK. I saw the excess length off the stems. A dab of varnish on the sawn end. The Peapod is complete.

8 January – varnish all the pieces and the outside of the hull.

2 January – A cloudy day, no good for varnishing.

1 January, 2006 – Make seat rail, seats, and finish interior. Apply a coat of varnish to everything.

31 December – finish the ribs on the boat. Recycle. Cut out, shape, and sand oars.

30 December – a little work on the boat. Nearly done with the ribs.

29 December – work on web page

27 December – burned branches and yard stuff about 9 hours.

26 December – more ribbands. The strips take overnight to dry. Make them in advance so you will not be waiting.

The afternoon was spent raking the leaves which are finally down after the ice storm a week ago.

25 December – Christmas evening before dinner, I got this idea to put a folding boat in a bottle. The boat will be huge relative to the neck. I found a plan for a folding boat in a 1995 issue of Wooden Boat magazine. Phillip scanned the drawing in the magazine and printed it out the size I needed. Actually, I had him print 3 sizes. One where the the largest width of plan was smaller than the neck in question, one exactly the size, and one 25% larger. By folding the printed page to 4 thicknesses, I was able to cut the 2 sides and 2 bottoms at once. Then taking the 2 bottoms away, I was able to make the gunwale cut on the sides. A quick straight strip for the keel. Some bits of tape to stick it together. Voila, a folding boat. It will need some work. Do I make if from card stock, my original idea, or maybe from real wood. Something to work out.

Oh…and Santa brought some new goggles along with some other tools.

24 December – Put the drawer front back on the drawer. Another project off the bench.

Began putting in the ribs (or are they ribbands) inside the peapod. After I got the first one in, I decided that my previous decision about doing the gunwale later was wrong. I pulled out the riband and put on gunwales on the inside of the hull. After the glue was dry, I put the ribs back in and continued on. Obviously I should have used my free time earlier in the project to make these things. There are a fair number and a few have splinters, creases or other spoiled spots that I did not see before. A similar amount of shorter strips will be needed for the floor board strips in between each full rib.

23 December – I see that I smudged the varnish on that drawer front. A little more 220 and some dilute varnish from the thinned varnish I put inside the model.

Worked on the molds from the patterns for stations 3,4, and 5. The piece that was band sawed out of the hollow needs to be a bit smaller. I scribed the edge of each piece with an edge guage about 1/16 in on both sides. Then I belt sanded each one, taking care to keep the edges parallel I screwed the three outer pieces to a piece of plywood to keep them steady.

The next step is to wrap some strips which have soaked in ammonia overnight over the inside piece and press it into the the matching outside piece. When the strips are dry, they will have the shape of the hull at that point. They are a little flexible so they should glue down ok.

Delivered Christmas gifts to a family in need for the church.

22 December – repaired the clothes drier. It apparently went bad when the power failed during the ice storm. It turns but provides no heat. The heating coil had failed a couple of years ago and as a result shorted to the “flue” that holds the coil and connects the blower to the drum. I unplugged it and took the back off. Heating coil checks good at about 10 ohms. The lower thermostat checks closed (good) but the upper fusible protector (“non-resetable”) checks open. I called the store where I normally buy appliance parts, G&E Appliance Parts on Laurens Road in Greenville. We had some conversation which confirmed by diagnosis, he looked up the part on the computer, said it was in stock. I said I would be there soon. It is about a 25 minute drive. When I got there, he was about to ring up the sail. Cash or check? They weren’t taking charge cards because their line was down and the did not know when it would be back. I checked my wallet. No check blank and not enough cash even if he gave me a discount. He suggested that I go up the road to Banks Appliance which I did. They had the part (which is actually a kit of both the fuse and the thermostat) and they were able to take the plasitc. The counterman at Banks helpfully pointed out that the replacement part had a hook instead of one of the screws on the original part. And since a failing thermostat would cause the thermal protector to blow, just replace both parts while you are in there.

Back at home, I completed the repair. Works good

Sanded the sewing cabinette drawer front with 220 and put another coat of varnish on it.

More sanding on the peapod with 60 grit getting all of the gnarly looking spots flattened out. Then 100 grit, then 150 grit, then 220 grit.

Cut out forms to shape the ribs. The forms are hollows in a pieces of 2×6 cut from the patterns for stations 3, 4, and 5.

Put a coat of thinned varnish on the inside of the peapod. Dynamite Payson says that this will help keep the glue neat as the ribs go in.

21 December – Sanded the rocking chair and applied Watco finish to it. Sanded the peapod with 60 grit finishing the inside and starting on the outside.

18 December – Sanded the inside of the peapod. Worked on stripping the rocking chair.

17 December – Put on the “starter planks”. Normally, a peapod boat is built from the keel down (upside down). The first two planks next to the keel provide a flat bottom and a shape to the first regular planks. Together they have an elongated “(American)football shape”. Since this model is built from the gunwalls up, these are the last to pieces. I taped two pieces of 8 1/2 x 11 paper together to get sufficient length. Then traced the hole for each one on an edge of the lengthened paper. I cut out the tracing and using spray rubber cement, stuck the tracing on a piece of 2 inch wide stock the same thickness as the planks. I then cut the pieces out a tad outside the line. Then using coarse (60 grit) sandpaper, I carefully fit the the planks in the gap in the bottom. When the pieces just fit, I glued them in place.

16 December – Took some pictures of the ice still in the trees as the sun got higher in the clear blue sky

I got Phillip up and started to saw up the two big trees that were there. The Austree(r)(other thoughts on Austrees) just keeled over and the root ball was there standing vertical. I was just getting going when Phillip said that he was ready to help. But he had strained his back and could not lift. So I gave him the saw and let him do most of the sawing. I never did find the goggles for him that I had bought to replace the worn out, scratched goggles that I have had for years. Fortunately he was careful and not chips went in his eyes. I tried to show him how to clean off the top side of the trunk to get room to work. And to be careful of what you take off the bottom as if it is resting on the ground, then the work is going to shift and ,worse, bind the saw.

He seemed to catch on to this and seemed to be work with the chainsaw pretty weill

With the pine tree, it had uprooted from the top of a small rise, over a 2 foot retaining wall and into the driveway. The trick here was to lift the part closest to the roots while working from the top of the tree down. I used a 2×4 to lever up the trunk and hold it while Phillip made the cuts to take of pieces that were not to heavy but not too short.

While I had the saw out, I decided to take down a cedar tree that had died this year (or maybe last). I really liked that tree but it is gone now. In cutting it down, I did the regular wedge but probably did not go deep enough. When I did the finish cut the tree did not really get going before it snagged up above. I got a piece of rope and Phillip and I wrestled it out and it fell, not quite where I wanted it too but at least it did no damage.

About the time we finished the cedar tree, my nephew and a friend of his came by to help. They loaded up the wheel barrows and moved about 2 tons of brush and logs to the burn pile. It may be more than I can burn at one time. After the rain though, I do not need to worry as much about the woods catching fire.

We had a nice lunch of home made vegetable soup and hot turkey, ham, and cheese sandwiches. Then moved brush the rest of the afternoon.

They had to leave at three or so. I basically kept on picking up until I got too cold at 4:30 and went in and took a hot shower.

15 December – There was an ice storm last night. My wife called me at work and told me that one of the trees in side yard had keeled over and now occupied the place where my car had been. Later in the day a 50 foot pine tree came down and nearly hit her car. When I got home from work I tired to get at it with the chain saw but it got dark too soon. This will have to wait until tomorrow. At least the power was back on before bed time. There are a lot of folks who are not as lucky.

14 December – Tapered the bow end and glued them to the stem.

12 December – Put down the stearn end of the last pair of planks.

11 December – Put on a pair of planks. Stripped or at least started to strip the old varnish off a rocking chair. The chair is a nice piece. A little on the delicate side. It could be old as the back and seat fabric have been replaced enough times that the tack boards look like “The revenge of the termites”. I say started to strip as I was using Formby’s and steel wool pads. It just seemed to be moving the old varnish around without taking it off. Using Formby’s and clothes did a better job but I will need more solvent.

Put on another pair of planks. One more pair and it will be ready for the “starter plank”.

10 December – Curtain rod (LR) The first project of the day was fixing the curtain-rod holders in the living room. The screw-expansion thingy’s had pulled out of the wall on both sides. I remember this problem from when I put them up. I think that it was a “soft” piece of plaster board. Anyway, undisturbed for 10 years, they held. But when the rod was taken down for refurbishing, the brackets came loose.

I used the type of wallboard expansion bolt that you tighten once and remove the screw. Then put up the brackets. This works pretty good and is a near sure bet when the previous ones have pulled out. The hole that remains is just the right size and you know that you need more “umph” behind the wall.

While I was doing this, I noticed that the brackets were reversed with the left bracket on the right and vice-versa. The left-handednes and right-handedness come from the slot which support the smaller rod for the sheer (which we do not use). When I mentioned this, my wife said it might have been her doing.

When I had finished that project, I thought it would be a good time to finish putting down the planks which were half glued on my model. So that is done. I also put the pair of planks which were soaking to bend.

My wife’s aunt is a serious woodworker as well as a college professor at Waldorf College. She had given us a nativity set with profile figures of the Holy Family and all. Somehow in storage, it had gotten some silvery stuff (glitter) on it. I sanded it off and refinished it with Watco.

An almost new hairdryer was on the fritz. Made a special tool to look at the plug which contains a GFI (Ground Fault Interrupter). The problem was not there. But a hairdryer should be almost a short circuit across the line. This one was reading 3megaohms. Checked the handle, the switch. Finally looked and saw there is a thermal protect switch at the outlet of the blower tube. I flicked at that with the tip of screw driver. Plugging in and testing it works good. Must have got a piece of hair or something in it.

Replaced the wiper blades on my wifes car.

Recycled paper, glass, and cans.

Went to Lowes and bougth stuff to fix the curtain rod and mini-table

Curtain rod (DR)

The American Girl dolls which belong to my daughter have always had a little decorated table with miniature food and drink at Christmas time. Even though my daughter lives in Iowa now, the AG’s still need a table. Somehow the board that had been their table got used to hold some plants so they need a new one. The original is oak but the new one is just a 4 foot – 1 inch by 8 inch select pine board. I sanded it and finished it with Watco. It will have a table cloth on it so it need not be all that great looking.

Hung a decorative screen for storage under the deck.

Swept the leaves off the deck and trimmed away some of the ivy and vinca around the bottom.

Put on another pair of planks before I went to bed.

8 December – No time for projects during the week this week. The car was acting funny. One day while driving Phillip to school it looked like overheating so I turned around and came home. Took the car to Thomas. Even though the radiator looked full, it was full of air. Thomas filled it and bled the air out. Now it seems ok.

I called my brother-in-law. He said that the thermostat is probably bad. This is probably a regional difference. Thomas sees a car when the thermostat won’t open and over heats. Barry sees those but also sees the ones that are stuck open and never warm up.

5 December – that warped drawer front is still just as warped. I am afraid to get it too wet as it may cause the veneer to separate. Put on another pair of planks.

4 December – repaired a wire potato masher by tapering a wedge of wood in a piece of 1/4″ x 1/” piece of wood and jamming it into the handle with the parallel wires. This gives a good tight wedge. My wife loves this ancient potato masher.

Fixed a die-cut wooden petal from a Christmas candle holder. The candel socket is surrounded by die-cut wooden petals. Just a tiny dab of Tite-bond white glue does the trick.

Put on another pair of planks.

3 December – begin to repair a drawer from Donita’s sewing table. This is a “modern” 1940’s cabinet. The drawer front is warped and binds. The finish keeps the front “dry” while the inside of the drawer-front is “wet” which causes it to warp out. The warp is strong enough to have broken the nails out of the wood. I pulled the nails and stripped the finish. I will proably bind it with wet paper towels and see if I can get it to reverse direction, then finish it inside and out.

There is another drawer from the remains of a treadle sewing-machine cabinet. The front had pulled off. This is just a matter of putting it back on with a little glue.

1 December – bend a pair.

30 November – glue the pair.

29 November – bend a pair. Went to Tractor Supply and got syringes from the veternary section to use as glue spreaders.

28 November – glue the pair.

27 November – bend a pair.

26 November – Acouple of pairs today.

25 November – made a soaker to soak the planks in ammonia to soften them to bend. The soaker is 1/2 inch plastic pipe with a cap glued on the bottom and a loose cap on the top. It is supported by a board with a hole in it clamped to the bench. The bottom end is in a plastic Tupperware lid to catch the overflow. I put a pot-pie-tin lid over it to keep the cats out of it. A couple of pairs of planks today.

24 November – Glued on the first two pairs of planks.

23 November – Rake leaves with Dad and Phillip. It seems that there are more leaves this year and that they started sooner and took longer to finish. Even the pile in the woods seems taller than ever. Must be the the dry weather. Sawed the stack and the remains of another stack into planks about 5/32×1/4x2feet. These will be the planks for the Peapod. Much thicker than in the past. Hopefully this will accomodate the differences and allow for smooth sanding without sand-through.

22 November – getting ready for Thanksgiving. Recycling. Sliced up a 1x8x10foot into 1x3x2foot and glued them up into a stack. Dad is here

21 November – getting ready for Thanksgiving.

20 November – fixing stuff around the house. My Dad is coming for Thanksgiving.

19 November – the shop is cleaned up enough that I can begin the Peapod again. The mold is made up. I fitted the strern post and stem to the building board.

16 November – my company has outsourced my job. It has been a long time in coming but it happened today for me. I am signed up. Another page in the book of life. A chapter is over, a chapter begins. I wonder if a sequential document is the right way to do this. My life is like a star or spider web. Perhaps I should go to a single starting page with links to various topics like boats, ropes, yard, chores, job, etc. I

13 November – sorted small bits, screws and nails in the shop. Tied a tripled 3 loop flat knot in 5 feet of twisted nylon. 5 feet is not enough. 7 is probably right.

12 November – raked leaves.

10 November – debugging linpro.c – COBOL has a test condition. A USAGE IS DISPLAY field can be tested as IF field-name IS NUMERIC. I had created a function to perform that job but never exhaustively tested it. When I came to a part of my program where it was necessary to correctly return “FALSE”, the function failed. CODING ERROR! I had coded && where I needed ||. When I fixed that, the rest of the input routines seemed to be fairly close to correct.

06 November – Washed the mildew off the garage door. Re-filled the ponds. It has not rained in 3 weeks. Put treatment in the fish pond.

Work all day on linpro.c. Got a clean compile/link and begin debugging. Got bit by the = vs == bug.

Looks like it is going to be a slog.

05 November – After messing up the patterns for the forms by using a Linux print driver that does not carefully control ths size (my son says that it is CUPS that does it), I just copied the full size plans from the book and made the mold again. So that is done except for the slot that holds the keel and stems. Fortunately, the stem and stern-stem are right-sized and do not have to be re-made.

Made the mat knot (1 hitche and 2 crossings) out of copper wire. It takes about 5 feet for a 5 cm knot doubled very open. Overheated it while annealing it. It is a little melted. I need to get a pin for the back. Pretty but a little too open. Wire is hard to tighten. Better to get it the right size on the first pass.

Worked on linpro.c. At this point, I have determined that it was probably a mistake to try to preserve the input routine. I will chuck it when I have made the first pass a debugging and go with a more text-stream oriented approach ala Unix native. COBOL, of course is fixed postion record oriented and works well with that. But structs and unions only partially replace the data structures, group items, elementary items, redefines, and conditional items in COBOL. Duplicating all of that functionality takes a lot of code.

29 October – Got set to mow with the catcher. The mower starts hard. Ten pulls do not do it. Then the rope breaks. It has been short because it was repaired once before. It took an hour fix before. This time only half an hour. But it will need to be done again because it is really too short now. I will get a replacement this after noon and fix it right.

28 October – Linpro.c

27 October – Linpro.c

24 October – Wash glassware and plates that got dusty from sanding. Cut down grapevine from arbor. Repair defective duplex outlet. The hot connection is not being passed through from the outlet to the rest of the outlets and lights on the circuit. It may have something to do with the cats or maybe the vibration from the nailing of the floor. Or maybe the dust and the overload from the sander. Anyway the hot side does not pass down the line affecting the other outlets in the dining room and the front entry light and front porch light. Phillip helps out be acting as safety man and advisor. Replace the chintzy push-in style duplex outlet with a more expensive but screw down style. The other outlets work again and so do the lights. Work on linpro.c but I have decided that it is hopeless and needs to start over from scratch.

On linpro.c completely re-did the data division.

23 October – Finish large section and sand. Blow the breaker with sander and vacuum both running. Pick up shop a bit.

22 October – Replace small section. Then begin work on large section. Work from 1100 until 2000 with lunch break. Three more boards to finish.

21 October – Tear up another small section. Have termite man in to inspect before beginning to close.

20 October – Plant grass seed. 1 bale of peat moss on top of 2 bags of leaf mulch on top of 6 bags of soil conditioner over the turned soil. Seed at recommended rate. Tear up dining room floor. Drill to break up board, then pry up the boards where the cats have pee-ed through the rug.

16 October – Yard work – prepare for grass planting – turn over about 120 square feet of the back yard 6 inches deep. This has never had anything done to it other than routine fertilizer for 10 years. It gets a lot of wash through the back yard from the rain run off. It should probably be getting a double dose of fertilizer. It is also dry this year due to lack of rain and hence has gone to weeds and crabgrass that thrive in the dry weather.

15 October – Yard work – Routine mowing and recycling.

10 October – In file included from gdkdisplay-x11.c:46:

/usr/X11R6/include/X11/XKBlib.h:33:35: error: X11/extensions/XKBstr.h: No such file or directory

Now it will make. And it seems to do the trick. The tests are there in the installation directory. The ones that I try seem to work.

libxkbfile-dev is a prereq to gtk re-install at 2.6.7 for XKBstr.h and perhaps others.

Need to mow and pick up leaves which I have not done for a while.

Mowing took longer than usual. An Eastern Box Turtle which we have been seeing lately is in the yard. My wife first saw her about a week ago. It has been very dry and maybe food is scarce. Or she just could be on the move. There was a banana on the driveway waiting to go to the mulch pile. The turtle ate a large part of it. My wife has seen her under the arbor where we feed the birds several times. Yesterday, I offered another half of banana and some grapes. She only nibbled. Something ate them all overnight. We do have a lot of squirrels and at least one raccoon. This morning she was in the front yard so I tried to get some pictures. She would pull back if I got any closer than 5 feet. so the pictures will not be all that great. While I was watching, she ate a worm and a couple of nuts or seeds.

The mowing picked up a lot of leaves – about 6 trips to the mulch pile.

Made some mats out of rope following the directions in Ashley’s Book of Knots.

Chinese for supper. Pork fried rice.

9 October discovered that the printer had not used the same ratio for all of the molds so they are diffent heights. Need to do it again. Made a couple of mats out of rope.

5 October stalled on the re-install because of a missing XKBstr.h which is not picked up by .configure

4 October – working on the GTK tutorial It makes reference to gtk/tests/testgtk which does not seem to be present. I will download and set it up again.

3 October – Sent off a resume.

2 October – Putting the molds on the building board.

1 October – A little yard work – mostly watering. I made a trellis thing for the deck for dried grape vine to weave around. Then to store away. Started working on the Peapod boat again. Cut out the molds and stem and stern parts.

25 September – Cleaning up the notes

24 September – Done with 24 Hours – Now I just need to clean up my notes.

18 September –

17 September – More futile watering – On the home stretch for Learn C in 24 Hours.

11 September – Files.

10 September – Learning C Unions – More futile water of the lawn. The predicted hurricane seems to be delayed.

8 September – Burning a cd. Using xcdroaster. Must be SU to get the heat. Fairly interactive. Started to download a k3b which will upgrade the world it seems. I guess that I will know in a few minutes. In the mean time, I (with Phillip’s help) burned a CD as a copy of an existing CD. That had an error but it seems to read ok.

Still Learning C – Hour 20 – unions – How much time do I need to spend on what COBOL covers in REDEFINES?

Well that upgrade did a bit of damage. my son assures me that the unstable will fix itself if I upgrade again in a couple of days. There was a lot of stuff in that file. The main disappointment was that Noteedit may have been taken out of Debian. There seems to be some activity but maybe not enough to make it part of a mainstream distribution.

7 September – Learning C – unions.

6 September – Learning C – unions.

5 September – Labor Day – Summers gone. One of the cats (Adah) knocked over a splay-legged pedestal table that contained sewing thread in two dreawers. The legs were attached to the central spindle with two pegs each. When the table went over, two of the legs fractured where the top peg was nearly at the edge. The bottom peg just broke out of the glue joint fairly clean. Today was the day to repair that. Carefully take the pedestal off the top-box. Remove the nails from the broken legs and one leg that had a broken glue joint. I tried to remove the leg but it did not come off easily and rather than increase the damage, I just removed the nail so that I could inject glue down the hole. I put the piece that broke off each leg back together with Tite-Bond and use a needle-nose clamp to hold it while the glue dried. Talk about nothing to clamp to with the curve and angles. When it was dry, put glue on the pegs and pressed it together. Then I injected glue into the nail hole to fill the void. I pressed the nail back into each leg. Re-assembling the pedestal was just the reverse with a little glue. It is standing on its head drying overnight. Tomorrow we will see if it holds.

On top of the sewing pedestal, was a hardwood jewelry box. One of the fronts broke off of the drawer. My wife’s Aunt Julie (Julieanne C. Friday), woodwork par excellance had made this using small dark triangles to join the corners. Really a lovely piece. Julie love her cats and does things with wood. She teaches at Waldorf College.

4 September – Learning C

3 September – Mow. Recycle. Water. Talk about futile. Way dry, too long.

2 September – Do the trim in the closet. Just 4 pieces. 45 minutes.

1 September – Trim in the bathroom. 14 pieces. 4 Hours.

28 August

The toilet I put back together is leaking. I will just replace the tank-to-toilet seal, the tank bolts and their seals. It seems the original installer short cutted by leaving out a couple of nuts that help keep the bolts from leaking.

27 August Took apart the other bathroom. Toilet, molding, and flooring. The closet was laid as one piece but we will defer that part. Also gave my son a driving lesson. He did pretty well for the first one. We have been having static on the phone and it seems like it is in the house. We re-wired the wire from the NIC to the living room where we split off the DSL modem and filter to the rest of the house.

24 August

Home project continues. With the tile done, the shoe molding needs replaced. There were about 8 pieces to cut and cope and nail into place. This took about 6 hours as I had to cut it outside.

23 Autust

Home project: Redo the small bathroom floor. My wive re-did the floor with Armstrong self-sticking tile. I removed the toilet and then took up the old vinyl floor (which was poorly adhered), removed the shoe molding all around. The floor was vacuumed and preped with a latex sealer recommended by Lowes. A line was struck on the floor and the tiles put down. The middle goes pretty fast. The edge pieces all need to be cut. This floor was about 5×6 so there was a little 22 feet of tiles to cut plus the cut-out where the toilet pipe is. This part took about 2 1/2 hours.

19 August 2005

Vacation time

9 August 2005

Vacation time. The shuttle is back safe this morning. Chore of the day is to clean the gutters on the garage. I need to get out the high ladder and check the rest. The Garage gutter is cleaned out. Noted the amount of roofing granules. Also made a collar to correct the misalignment of the downspout and the underground pipe that distributes the water under the soil.

Going to work on Peapod project

Installed Gimp help system and printer support.

7 August 2005

Looked at Noteedit again for the first time in a long time. It seems to be functional and since we have a new printer, I may try to print something with it. The midi does not seem to be working but it is a configuration thing that needs looking at. I will get back to it later. I will do some C lessons. Phillip says that Python programming is much easier than C. I suspect it is just less obscure. Once I finish with this C, I will give it a shot.

31 July 2005

Scanned some images for a peapod style boat with the Gimp. Gimp needs to be run su to use the scanner. But it seems to work ok with our Epson.

23 July 2005

We did a big conversion at work and spun off a division and all of their mainframe work. We had absorbed a couple of divisions before but this was the first departure. It went pretty well. Mostly data movement. And the data that was supposed to be moved was. The problem was inadequate testing so the the data that was misnamed or otherwise weird needed to be moved later as a catchup.

16 July 2005

More C

9 July 2005

More C

2 July 2005

Stil trying to learn or re-learn C. I have been able to spend about 4 hours on it so far.

26 June 2005

My son had purchased SAMS Teach Yourself C in 24 Hours by Tony Zhang. It seems like it might be OK. And it’s here so I may as well go through it. I keep a separate set of notes for that project

19 June 2005

I guess I will have to start learning C. I know a bit about it and took a Java CBT at work. But I best get serious and knuckle down.

12 June 2005

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/glade/gtemppp$ autogen.sh

/usr/bin/gnome-autogen.sh

checking for autoconf >= 2.53…

testing autoconf2.50… not found.

testing autoconf… found 2.59

checking for automake >= 1.4… <===this is a bug

testing automake-1.4… not found.

***Error***: You must have automake >= 1.4 installed

to build the package.. Download the appropriate package for

from your distribution or get the source tarball at

http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/automake/automake-1.4.tar.gz

4 hours later it still ain’t right but I know a lot more. Glade really wants automake 1.4 etc. 1.4 and the like. This seems to be an old problem going back to 2001. The C++ support is still soggy. Maybe nobody uses glade and or C++.

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/glade/gtemppp$ ls /usr/bin/automake*

/usr/bin/automake /usr/bin/automake-1.4.save /usr/bin/automake-1.7 /usr/bin/automake-1.9 <==as you can see

6 June 2005

So today it is libgnomeui-2.0. Did make and make install with no problems.

Also did make for glade-2.10.0

5 June 2005

Finished flying Lindburgh plane from San Diego to St. Louis.

4 June 2005

I decided to upgrade Glade to the latest release which appears to be glade-2.10.0. The result of ./configure is

checking for libgnomeui-2.0 >= 2.9.0 libgnomecanvas-2.0 >= 2.0.0 libbonoboui-2.0 >= 2.0.0… configure: WARNING: GNOME support is disabled; GNOME DB support will not be built.

Configuration:

Source code location: .

Compiler: gcc

Gnome Support: no

Gnome DB Support: no

Checking the Synaptic Package Manager shows a libgnomeui at 2.8, libgnomecanvas2 at 2.8 and libbonoboui2 at 2.8

libgnomeui needs gnome-keyring 0.4.2 … now upgraded.

28 May 2005

Flying Lindburgh plane from San Diego to St. Louis.

27 May 2005

Still trying to use Glade for C++ development. It seems that I have upgraded everything as far as Debian “Sarge” goes but there must be more as I am still missing and include for bonobo/widgets/init.h

21 May 2005

Flying Lindburgh plane from San Diego to St. Louis.

20 May 2005

Trying to use Glade for C++ development. Works ok for C but C++ is missing a bunch of stuff.

14 May 2005

Flying Lindburgh plane from San Diego to St. Louis.

8 May 2005

Helped Donita paint the last of the trim on the house. Watered the bank garden. Worked a bit on the Bateau.java code. I still cannot figure out what to do to make it know about French characters.

Took the model pictures that I scanned a year ago in Windows and used Gimp to save them to Linux. I had scanned them 4-up. Now they are individual pictures and ready for webifying.

7 May 2005

Helped Donita prime the last of the trim on the house. Mowed. Recycled. I may go to Lowes to recycle from now on as Hipps road is always full after 10:00.

24 Apr 2005

Less busy today. Got up late, mowed the far back part of the yard. Put fertilizer on it. Got the hoses out and ran the sprinkler for an hour on each part. That watering started at 12:30 and lasted until 17:30 for the far back. Then there was a section of the west side yard that I put fertilizer on. I watered that until 18:30.

Donita asked me to get the chaise lounge from under the house. It had loads of mildew and dirt, so I tried to scrub it off with dish detergent and scrubbing. That was only partially successful.

While the lawn was getting watered, I read Mario Livio’s The Golden Ratio. At one point, Donita asked me to replace the hangers on four hanging pots. She helped me do this with some thick clear nylon cord.

Also, for the euchalyptus tree, or what is left of it, I made a wire support to hold it up straighter.

23 Apr 2005

A busy day today. I woke up early because I could not sleep. I messed with the default flight of the FGFS (Flight Gear Flight Simulator). I work OK on this Dell Diminsion 8100 but it could be smoother. And I do not really understand all of its controls and tweaks either. After about an hour I went off to Windows 2K to do MS FS 2K4 ACoF. I have tried many of the historical flights and thought that they would be better using contemporary airstrips. If your are going to the trouble of creating special weather and special airplanes, why not create special local scenary (and airports) that match the time of the historic flight. Taking off in the Ryan special from the modern San Diego airport just don’t seem right. On the otherhand taking off on another flight from Washington National (now Ronald Regan), even in a tail dragger with limited visability, I knew where I was as soon as I turned the airplane around. WOW!. But today I went to a bunch of airports that I have used just to check out the airports and the realism. Melbourne Florida was great until I turned east and saw that there were no causeways to the barrier island (Melbourne Beach). In MS FS 2K, at least all of the major roads were shown. And road tops water. I went to Forest City, IA. Where is the Winnebago River?. And still not railroads for cross-country VFR navigation even thought the extensive documentation of the history of flight makes many references to following the rail lines from city to city. The roads in MS FS 2K+4 CoF are also totally unrealisting. Other than the historic airplane models, and the improved bridges, I was disappointed with CoF.

Once I got going, it was a typical Saturday. With major thunderstorms yesterday afternoon and again last night around midnight, the world was soaked. The first thing I did was clean the trash screens on the pond pums. The oaks have been producing that stringy stuff that they do which seems to land every where. Cleaned the high pond. The low pond had a bunch too but was running clear and strong.

Next I did the recycling. If you get there early, before 10:00, neither paper nor bottles are a problem But after 10:00, it gets busy. And later than noon, find room to stuff a post-it note into the bin can be a problem on the paper side. Usually jugs and bottles are not a problem, but if you come at 17:00, that can be a problem too. They need to get with the program and use the symbols that are on the packages. What plasticw 1, 2, 3, etc. can you recycle. They all have the triangle-arrow thing. I thought this was supposed to make thing simple. If it were clearly labeled, I would even sort it for them. As it is, all of the plastic, glass, and cans go in one bin. Greenville County will enter the 21st Century in a few years.

I mowed tha backyard when I got back from the recycling. It was still plenty wet even though a steady 20knot wind had been blowind since 4:00. Just take narrow passes and went over it in two directions. Still very wet.

The street number on the mailbox had gotten bumped. I noticed it a few weeks ago so today I finally remembered to grab a screw and anchor it back straight again.

With all of the storms last night, one of the tin black cats scarecrow’s had fallen off its support. I put that back on. There were a lot of twigs blown out of trees that needed picking up. I trimmed the low hanging branches on the oaks at the street. They were sticking out over the mailbox which I know annoys the mail carrier. And they hang down low and catch me as I mow. So I cut off most of what I could reach.

While I was waiting for the grass to dry, I walked around and put down some Amdro where I noticed ant hills. With all of dry weather before the rain, there is not much to see. With the wet weather only last night, they may not have been fully active digging out.

We have some window box planters. The sit on the outside window sill, or actually, the brick sill outside the window and are retained by hooks. Donita needed some additional drain holes to in them. So I drilled 5 additional holes in the two that were there. Tonight she was busy filling them with flowers.

Donita had cleaned up the part of the garage. She discovered a hummingbird feeder and the sugar food mix for it. I mixed up a batch and hung it up. She really likes to watch the birds, as do I. I suppose the cats do too. Maybe we should sign Hillard Willis up for the Audobon society.

On Thursday night/Friday Morning, somebody caught a mole. Sadness in the mole family. Of course whoever it was left the mole on the walk. I saw it when I went out for the paper. I told Donita that they had left it lying in state She said that of course the mole family was not coming around because all of the cats were watching. When I was sweeping up after doing the front, I chucked the mole. No disrespect, but he was beginning to smell.

Whenever it rains, the bird seed in the bowls gets wet so I refilled the bird feeders and wash out and dried the ones that were wet. I put the tube one that is pretty squirrel proof back up. When Donita saw it, she said that she was going to put it away because the seed gets wet and then it needs to be washed.

I mowed the front yard parallel with the driveway. It was still too wet. It will look like rows tomorrow.

I washed the cat boxes out. Poor Hillard had some sort of diarrhea. When I was in the house he was singing a song about how he needed to go out. But of course Harry was out, and not interested in coming in on a nice day since the rain and thunder were over. So he used the cat box a couple of times in short order, both the mini-pine-bark mulch kind that he likes and the regular catbox ground clay kitty-litter that he tolerates. I washed both boxex and gave him a new one.

When I went down to see the frogs, one was out sitting on the moss on one of the rocks. Another was sticking his head of the water by the pond-plants. I have seen as many as 5 at one time.

I meantioned that Harry the cat did not want to come in. That is only partially true. While I was between jobs, he came up to me which he rarely does outside. He got some pats and some scratching. He is shedding his winter coat so he had lots of loose hair. And I think that the wind was bothering him too. Harry, hairy and scary.

As usual for a Saturday, there was a trip to Lowes. Some 10-10-10 fertilizer, mini-pine-bark mulch, a door latch, and some screw eyes to hold up the euchalyptus tree. And a couple of bags of sand for Donita to put in some more tiles where the water washes out of the gutter downspout into the garden.

While we were out, Phillip and I went to Fountain Inn and then to the abandoned cotton mill in Fountain in to take pictures. We took the film to Target before we came home for supper.

17 Apr 2005

One of the pieces of euchalyptus had a crook in it. I get out the hand saw and trim it about one-third-two-thirds to get a straigh piece about 24 inches long. I use finishing nails to attach a flat piece to the bottom, parallel with the line I want to cut from end to end. This will keep it from rolling as it passes across the blade. The cut takes a long time. The section is about 4 inches in diameter and very wet. The cutting is mostly slow going. The blade heats up in the cut and tries to twist. I seem to have worn out the guide block again. The inside of wood is really wet. It grows fast. This 4-5 inch piece has only 4 growth rings. That may be what is wrong in that it outran its roots.

Then I finished the lobster boats. I had been trying to make a jig to hold the cabin while I drilled the hole through the hull to hold them together. I finally figured out what the jig had to do. Clamp the cabin to a rail on the jig. Provide a center line to line up the boat. Clamp the hull to the jig. Drill. Apply glue. Assemble with dowel. So I mad e the jig with the rail and supports at each end to provide clearance for the hull clamp so it would set flat while I drilled. I set up the first hull, clamped the cabin, set the hull over the centerline. Then pinched the cabin and hull together removed from the clamp. No way this was lined up. I added a vertical as a guide. Check again. No way. This is not the going to work. I have wasted enough time. I will just assemble by eye, clamp, and drill. And that is what I did. 2 hours later with a half hour break for lunch the job is done. Then I worked on my belt sander. Sometime in the winter, the cat knocked it off the place where it is stored. It seemed to work ok but as I used it more, it began to make strange noises when I turned it off. So I took it apart and tightened everything back up. It seems to be ok.

16 Apr 2005

Mowed the backyard before the clothes got hung on the line. Then the recycling. Then the front, parallel with the street, then the side yard. Cut up large fallen branches that were in the woods into small logs for Donita to use to as border for the garden. Treated the ponds with Pond-zyme. Watched the frogs. I see two large ones. The euchalyptus tree seems to be dying. One whole branch, the most mature, about 4 years old, is dead. So chains saw off the top, then the lower part. Some more chainsaw trimming. Then some hand saw trimming. It looks kind of scrawny now but perhaps it will come back. I saved two pieces to see what kind of wood they make.

10 Apr 2005

Repaired the latch on the kitchen pantry door. It bumps the garage door handle when it opens and when the door to the garage opens. Last time I looked (over a year ago), there was now latch with the right backset. This time there was a “fits all sizes” of Quikset. Since it was metal and it was Lowe’s, I figured it was better than what I was taking out and if it did not fit I could take it back. It did in fact fit so that was one job that got done. Then I sprayed for weeds. I had used a weed spray from Bayer and it did ok but the weeds are back. This time I tried the Weed-be-gone brand. I carefully measured the 2 oz per gallon and put it on carefully 1 gallon per 500 square feet. That took almost the rest of the afternoon. Finally mowed the backyard at the end of the day. It was still wet, especially at the higher end where it is flat. I suspect that the water flows undeground and comes to the surface there. It flows off the sloping portion.

09 Apr 2005

Did things out of order, going to the recycling first. The grass was too wet from the rain that we had at the end of the week to mow early. Treated the ponds with Pond-zyme. Began in the front after lunch parallel to the west boundery. It was a cool and very windy day. The back was still too wet so I did the side yard next. It was still too wet so I skipped the back on Saturday.

5 Apr 2005

I guess it has been a while. Here is a link to the words of a song that I was listening to today. You can hear it on Rhino “Troubadors of the Folk Era” Volume 2 R270263 OPCD 1620.

http://getsome.org/guitar/olga/main/s/simon_lucy/wynken_blynken_and_nod.crd

I have been working in the yard. First mowing three weeks ago. Add 10-10-10 fertilizer. Tried some weed killer but it did not seem to take. Maybe too cold or rained to soon. Next weekend second mowing. Fertilizer for the back yard. This past weekend cleaned the fish pond. The fish is definitely departed. I think that he washed away in the big storm that flooded the high yard behind the berm, washed over, and took all of the bark mulch out of the gardens and what did not stick in the pond was sent on the way to the Atlantic.

Today it was the washing machine. Good machine from Sears. Made by Whirlpool. The agitator stopped moving when the clothes were heavy. Looked up the parts on the Sears online page. They have diagrams and parts lists. Tried to order online too but got no response. Good thing too because as I looked at the description, I did not need 4 of the part number because it came in a package of 4. There is a local parts store near where I work. I went there and the salesman looked up the part number, and walked to the rack on the wall and picked it off. They must sell a few.

I thought the take apart, replace, and re-assemble would take an hour. It took 10 minutes, a ratchet with extension and a screwdriver.

4 Mar 2005

Back to X3Navald. Everything is fine forward but aft of amidship, the curves are straight lines to the transom. I will try re-installing.

Now it returns…

After unzipping the installation file, you need to change the permissions to execute the scripts.

CHMOD +x *.sh

when you execute you get

$ X3NavalD.sh

— début de l’exécution de l’application X3NavalD

Unable to access jarfile jar/X3NavalD.jar

— fin de l’exécution de l’application X3NavalD

So maybe it is to build with the “all.sh”.

$ X3NavalD.sh

— début de l’exécution de l’application X3NavalD

Unable to access jarfile jar/X3NavalD.jar

— fin de l’exécution de l’application X3NavalD

So this is not working today either.

We can break this down.

The script specifies

./com.sh

./doc.sh

./arc.sh

./X3NavalD.sh

And actually it all happened last week. It was just intertwined with working and non-working versions of Java and RTE (it took me weeks in the Navy to figure out that that meant Ready To Eat (Perhaps because everything else was RTC (Recruit Training Command))) and SDK and install’s and …

but locally ./com.sh debut et fin ok.

./doc generates warnings:

Constructing Javadoc information…

java/bateau/Bateau.java:50: cannot resolve symbol

symbol : class Point2DPlan

location: package outils

import outils.Point2DPlan;

^

java/bateau/Bateau.java:52: cannot resolve symbol

symbol : class Vecteur3D

location: package outils

import outils.Vecteur3D;

^

java/bateau/Bateau.java:197: cannot resolve symbol

symbol : class Point2DPlan

location: class bateau.Bateau

private Point2DPlan movedPoint;

^

Generating docs/index-all.html…

java/bateau/Bateau.java:1436: warning – Tag @see: can’t find recalcul() in bateau.Bateau

java/bateau/Bateau.java:1809: warning – Tag @see: can’t find recalcul() in bateau.Bateau

Generating docs/bateau/Bateau.html…

java/bateau/Bateau.java:623: warning – @param argument “emplacement” is not a parameter name.

6 warnings

and

./arc debut et fin ok.

X3NavalD.sh debut ok

.

So let us investigate. I love a mystery.

I think that I see a problem with the case of the directories. I do not yet understand these dates.

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/x3navald/x3navaldv0.2.12$ ls -l ../x3navaldv0.2.12.old/jar

total 96

-rw-r–r– 1 cbcalvin cbcalvin 47475 Feb 26 12:13 X3NavalD.jar

-rw-r–r– 1 cbcalvin cbcalvin 47608 Jan 30 14:05 x3navald.jar

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/x3navald/x3navaldv0.2.12$ ls -l ./jar

total 96

-rw-r–r– 1 cbcalvin cbcalvin 47589 Mar 6 19:01 X3NavalD.jar

-rw-r–r– 1 cbcalvin cbcalvin 47608 Jan 26 22:38 x3navald.jar

Case problems?

Don’t know. Now the old version works ok too.

This is a headscratcher. Can I even reproduce the problem?

26 Feb 2005

Installed a Java program called X3Navald. It is a design program for boats. It is in French. I ended up installing Java SDK since the Sable VM did not seem to do the job. The doc for X3Navald calls for the real Sun 1.4 or better. It seems to work good. Then I went off to pursue some chimera related to RTML or some such and got lost in the O-zone.

05 Feb 2005

Have spent too much time trying to figure out BASIC for open office etc. Will work around with hand editting.

I used the save to CSV method of translating. It works good if you allow it to scan the strings. Remove the superflous quotes later.

Going back to the input stage. Maybe. I should have a complete list of measurement points for each of the views. Then the cells would have been consistant even if empty. This would allow comparison and checking of the inputs and

04 Feb 2005

Look at Basic for OOo. Not for the timid.

30 Jan 2005

For a little fun, I downloaded a Naval architecture package that is in Java. After I get the OOo macros working, I may try to look at that. I have put the text-to-columns in an OOo document.

The ice storm is over, the clouds are thinning. Phillip and I moved the ice off the driveway and it is beginning to dry in the partial sun and breeze. But it is still a good day to stay indoors.

29 Jan 2005

Disappointment. I found that there is no function in OO that is equivalent to the Excel text to columns. I sent a note to the developers and they pointed out the workaround that I had already discovered…Save to CSV. But that does not work for my data either due to the strict comma-space rule it imposes. I will probably continue my input and then write a function or move it to Excel to edit.

Continuing with the input

Finished Fore-and-aft. Starting Port Side

Finished Port Side. Starting Plan View

Doing Plan View Buttock to WL

Done.

Now to reformat. Need that text-to-columns function.

23 Jan 2005

Something with OpenOffice and boat building today. I will hand digitize a drawing into a spreadsheet. Then see if I can do something with it. It is too cold work in the garage.

The drawing is an enlargement of a small .bmp I found from Google.

http://www.ernestina.org/stats/line1.html

The drawing, when enlarged had large pixels. I would have measured the distances from the base lines and that probable would have been ok if I had had a metric rule. Measuring with a divider and trying to read from an architect scale was going to be a royal pain. The drawing was enlarged onto 3 sheets and placed on a board. I ended up only using it for reference.

Like most marine drawings, there were three views:

A a fore-and-aft view, looking along the center-line, forward from the stern on the right, aft from the bow on the left.

A side view.

A plan view (bird’s-eye).

The fore-and-aft view is cut with vertical lines, typically called “buttock lines”, and horizontal lines called waterlines. If and x-y-z coordinate systems assignes x to bow-to-stern, y to port-to-starboard, and z from keel or baseline, the buttock lines provide the y axis value and the waterlines the z axis.

The plan view is cut with buttock lines as fore-and-aft slices and station lines from the centerline to the edge. The station lines provide the x axis value.

The side view has station lines and waterlines.

There are a couple of other sets of lines. These are the curved lines which indicate the shape of hull.

Looking at the side view, there is a line which follows the upper edge or rail of the hull. Another line provides the deck. There are several other curves which show the intersection of the buttock line with the hull.

Looking at the plan view, the curved lines are the planes of the waterlines and where they intersect the hull at various elevations.

Looking at the fore-and-aft view, the lines are the profiles at the various stations.

Another set of lines may be present. These represent a diagonal slice or perhaps just a chalkline curve along hull. These are typically not shown on the side view and on the plan view, they are drawn as a mirror image to a base line opposite the centerline. I call these cheek lines.

I decided that since I had the original bit map, I could bring it up in Paint and use the cursor coordinates to read values directly off the screen.

I set up a spreadsheet in OpenOffice.org.calc.

I began with the for and aft view.

Table 1 – Fore-and-aft view

Station lines alone the top

Rail, Deck, Cheek 1, Cheek 2, and 8 waterlines.

I moved the cursor to each intersection and entered a pair of numbers as a string. ‘284,323. The second number acts a check and also allows averaging the digitization error. Each pixel in the original was about 4 pixels in the larger diagram.

Continued on the 29th Jan

17 Jan 2005

A GTK tutorial

http://www.gtk.org/tutorial/sec-compiling.html

Created basic window – base.c

17 Jan 2005

Began work on numpuzzle.

Phillip suggests that I put Gnome in front of the name as that, he says, is the standard.

17 Jan 2005

Let us try those again with the C++ versions.

C++ wants Glade– ??

Basic Steps

1. Define required functions

2. Use Glade to design GUI completely. If you change any GUI after you change the signals, you will probably want to re-do the signals.

2.1 Do the signals.

3. Save and Build

3.1 first time only ./autogen.sh && make

3.2 cd src

3.3 make

16 Jan 2005

Phillip suggested another tutorial

http://www.kplug.org/glade_tutorial/

and

http://www.kplug.org/glade_tutorial/glade2_tutorial/glade2_introduction.html

~/Projects/Glade/Second

16 Jan 2005

This is all beginning to make sense

http://www.writelinux.com/glade/

has a good tutorial on Glade development getting started.

The first glade project is

~/Projects/Glade/FirstGladeProject1

with some additional comments.

./autogen in project directory

make in project directory

make in project/src directory

after initial make, project make is only required for make dist etc.

28 Nov 2004

Debian installed. I will need to go through this again maybe.

———————————

14 Nov 2004

Created new files in hello for automake example

http://www.amath.washington.edu/~lf/tutorials/autoconf/toolsmanual.html#SEC4

create Makefile.am

bin_PROGRAMS = hello

hello_SOURCES = hello.c

create configure.in

AC_INIT(hello.c) /* required but arbitrary */

AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(hello,0.1) /* required for automake */

/* AM_CONFIG_HEADER(config.h) /* if available */

AC_PROG_CC /* check for which c comilers are here */

AC_PROG_INSTALL /* check for install or place install.sh */

AC_OUTPUT(Makefile) /* what to output */

/* AC_PROG_RANLIB /* needed for to build library */

/* AC_PROG_CXX /* needed when c++ */

/* AC_PROG_YACC /* needed for yacc */

/* AC_PROG_LEX /* needed for lex */

/* AC_PROG_FC /* needed for FORTRAN code */

/* more stuff needed mix Fortran and C */

/* AC_OUTPUT(Makefile */

/* dir1/Makefile */

/* dir2/Makefile

/* ) to name additional Makefiles */

Begin “autoconficate” with:

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> aclocal /*Generate `aclocal.m4′ by scanning `configure.ac’ or `configure.in’ */

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> ls

Makefile.am aclocal.m4 autom4te.cache configure configure.in hello.c hello.sh

Then:

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> autoconf

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> ls

Makefile.am aclocal.m4 autom4te.cache configure configure.in hello.c hello.sh

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello>

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> automake

configure.in: required file `./install-sh’ not found

configure.in: required file `./mkinstalldirs’ not found

configure.in: required file `./missing’ not found

Makefile.am: required file `./COPYING’ not found

Makefile.am: required file `./INSTALL’ not found

Makefile.am: required file `./NEWS’ not found

Makefile.am: required file `./README’ not found

Makefile.am: required file `./AUTHORS’ not found

Makefile.am: required file `./ChangeLog’ not found

Makefile.am: required file `./depcomp’ not found

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> touch NEWS README AUTHORS ChangeLog

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> ls

AUTHORS Makefile.am NEWS aclocal.m4 configure hello.c

ChangeLog Makefile.in README autom4te.cache configure.in hello.sh

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> automake -a

configure.in: installing `./install-sh’

configure.in: installing `./mkinstalldirs’

configure.in: installing `./missing’

Makefile.am: installing `./COPYING’

Makefile.am: installing `./INSTALL’

Makefile.am: installing `./depcomp’

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> ls

AUTHORS ChangeLog Makefile.am NEWS aclocal.m4 configure depcomp hello.sh missing

COPYING INSTALL Makefile.in README autom4te.cache configure.in hello.c install-sh mkinstalldirs

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello>ls

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> ./configure

checking for a BSD-compatible install… /usr/bin/install -c

checking whether build environment is sane… yes

checking for gawk… gawk

checking whether make sets $(MAKE)… yes

checking for gcc… gcc

checking for C compiler default output… a.out

checking whether the C compiler works… yes

checking whether we are cross compiling… no

checking for suffix of executables…

checking for suffix of object files… o

checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler… yes

checking whether gcc accepts -g… yes

checking for gcc option to accept ANSI C… none needed

checking for style of include used by make… GNU

checking dependency style of gcc… gcc3

checking for a BSD-compatible install… /usr/bin/install -c

configure: creating ./config.status

config.status: creating Makefile

config.status: executing depfiles commands

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> make

if gcc -DPACKAGE_NAME=”” -DPACKAGE_TARNAME=”” -DPACKAGE_VERSION=”” -DPACKAGE_STRING=”” -DPACKAGE_BUGREPORT=”” -DPACKAGE=”hello” -DVERSION=”0.1″ -I. -I. -g -O2 -MT hello.o -MD -MP -MF “.deps/hello.Tpo”

-c -o hello.o `test -f ‘hello.c’ || echo ‘./’`hello.c;

then mv “.deps/hello.Tpo” “.deps/hello.Po”;

else rm -f “.deps/hello.Tpo”; exit 1;

fi

gcc -g -O2 -o hello hello.o

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> ./hello

Howdy world!

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello> make install

make[1]: Entering directory `/home/cbcalvin/Projects/hello’

/bin/sh ./mkinstalldirs /usr/local/bin

/usr/bin/install -c hello /usr/local/bin/hello

/usr/bin/install: cannot create regular file `/usr/local/bin/hello’: Permission denied

make[1]: *** [install-binPROGRAMS] Error 1

make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/cbcalvin/Projects/hello’

make: *** [install-am] Error 2

cbcalvin@natalie:~/Projects/hello>

automake -a will generate needed files if Makefile.am is present

Makefile.am identifies

bin_PROGRAMS =

Make 24oct04

The Makefile in the ~/Projects/calc/dc/ directory is a good example of a skeleton makefile. It is derived from the QT qmake makefile with the QT elements removed. It is augmented by the makedepend detected dependencies so that it is complete.

Makedepend 24oct04

Makedepend can be used easily if a Makefile is created which has the form:

SRCS = dc.c

CFLAGS = -O -I /usr/include/g++ -I /usr/include/g++/i486-suse-linux/

depend:

makedepend — $(CFLAGS) — $(SRCS)

Then the command:

make depend

can be used to create the makefile with the complete list of dependencies.

For neatness:

cp Makefile Makefile.srt

edit and delete lines before and including #DO NOT DELETE. Save

sort -o Makefile.srt Makefile.srt

edit Makefile and replace after #DO NOT DELETE with contents of sorted dependencies.

17oct04

Use autoscan to scan the programs in the library for required information. Autoscan creates autoscan.log and configure.scan.

Check configure.scan and rename it to configure.ac

Use autoheader. Autoheader creates config.h.in

Use autoconf -v file.c to create a configuration cache.

Use configure to create config.h, and a config.log

Add AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE to configure.ac

Use aclocal to create aclocal.m4

Detailed notes on projects

2dlife

calc

calc.note contains info on this program

dc

A desk calculator program from the example in Stroustrup. See notes in Projects/calc/dc

gproj1

ncurses_tutorial

rd

tut14

tut8

FB

hello

nvidia

schooner

tut2

tut9

Metric

j

opengl

tut1

tut3

tutorial2

Peapod

java_sdk

password

tut10

tut4d

universe

life

plib

tut11

tut5

canvas

m-it.gz

prozilla

tut12

tut6

ctut

misc

ptd

tut13

tut7<

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