Tuesday, April 17, 2007

For Great Justice!




(Image shamelessly stolen from here)

Friday, April 13, 2007

More Fodder

I just realized in my last post I never actually mentioned Mark Melvin in the content of the post. I'm not sure how Google indexes blogs (will it pick up labels?) so I figured I had better mention Mark Melvin in the body of a post.
That Mark Melvin. Always forgetting something. What a Melvin, that Mark is.

Monday, April 9, 2007

Shooting For Number One

So, at work we are forced to use the God-forsaken groupware known as Lotus Notes. When I was new to the whole Lotus Notes thing, I didn't realize it would spam the entire world with my out of office notification email. I set up what I thought were proper filters, but it turns out they didn't work and my out of office agent spammed some fairly heavily-indexed Eclipse newsgroups I was subscribed to.

Anyway, I will forever be paying the price for that little snafu. If you do a Google search for Mark Melvin, my out of office spam is still coming up as the third match. My buddy Ken tried to help me out awhile back, and that blog post has made its way up the ranks, but alas - I'm still immortalized as a Lotus Notes spammer.

With all due respect to Jim Tonge's creation, and that other guy, let's see if we can take back that number one spot, shall we?

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Off To A Funeral

Well, after a long battle with heart problems and most recently lung cancer and the subsequent chemotherapy used to treat it, my "uncle Joe" has passed away. Today is his funeral and I'm off to Teeswater to attend.

I'm not good with funerals but I need to go. It has snowed quite a bit overnight and we are expecting more today. I hope the roads are clear.

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Alanis's Humps

A friend just sent me a link to this YouTube video:



Awesome.

(Non-embedded version: http://www.youtube.com/v/W91sqAs-_-g)

Damn You, Carnivale!

Argh! Well, it's official. I've been sucked into Carnivale on the History channel.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note: Lewis Black is hilarious...

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Robosaw Links

So, one of my projects has been "roboticizing" my table saw to cut hyper-accurate finger joints (fully automated, of course). I have completed it enough to actually make joints automatically, but it is a pain to adjust the spacing as the drives are programmed in a very limited assembly language, and I need to update the programs in both drives to tweak things. It is a pain because of the trial and error involved in getting the indexes to match the cut widths due to the tolerance of a blade cutting through wood (it's not at all like machining metal...).

Anyway, here is a Picasa album of the various stages in the process as well as a couple poorly-lit video clips.

http://picasaweb.google.com/mark.melvin/RoboSaw

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-5829562471987966238
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-3239961827766871169

The next step in the process is to write a PC-based interface to this. The drives will actually accept commands via a serial connection, so it will be much easier to send the commands in the order I want and tweak the numbers that way. I just need the time to do it...

Monday, April 2, 2007

Sigh...

Well, I finally caved. I am blo... - no wait! I refuse! I am not blogging! I am simply collecting my (mostly useless) thoughts on a web-based, journalling-type medium for people I do not know to review and comment on. Think of it as an online file-system for random thoughts and musings. In the spirit of Dr. Colbert, I will invent (and immediately TradeMark) my own word. So, I am not "blogging"; I am merely "com-muse-icating"™.
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