Movies

Lucidicus Project saw a sneak preview of Atlas Shrugged and liked it:

The opening sequence features a racing locomotive and television news flashes describing the dire state of the world—a world in which rail transportation has reemerged as the only efficient way to move people and goods due to high oil prices. The introduction is gripping and ought to be enough to get anyone excited for the story. I, for one, fully support the decision to set this adaptation in the year 2016, rather than to attempt to recreate the original era of the novel.

I confess: it is always a struggle to know whether to update a story for modern sensibilities, or to leave it in its original context.  I was disappointed to see Starship Troopers updated into modern sensibilities, because part of what made Heinlein's novel so charming was how it captured the 1950s sentiments--and was shocking change we have experienced since then.

I also saw The Book of Eli yesterday--and I was utterly startled by it.  For a film that opens as a violent action film, it is about as bluntly Christian as mainstream Hollywood can produce.  The latter 1/3 of this film is the type of film that Hollywood used to make: The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, Miracle in the Rain.  At the same time, the violent action film that is the first 1/2 or 2/3 of the film will attract a lot of people who are unlikely to be otherwise exposed to the Christian message in even a diluted form in post-Christian America.

I am watching a fascinating documentary,  Azorian: The Raising of the K-129, about the CIA's Glomar Explorer project to raise the Soviet nuclear submarine K-129 from 16,000 feet of ocean in the 1970s--one of the most impressive engineering projects ever attempted, and which was largely a success.  I knew quite a bit about the project--but the more I learn from watching this, the more impressed I am. 

Remember that the reason we won the Cold War was not that we had more courageous spies and military: the Soviets were never short of these, either.  We won the Cold War because we outengineered and outproduced the Soviet Union.  When Reagan bluffed with the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Soviet Union did not know that it was a bluff (or at least, was largely a bluff).  Knowing that we stuck a claw through three miles of ocean to lift 2/3 of a nuclear submarine to the surface in the 1970s must have made the Soviet leadership realize that they were confronting the most capable engineers the world has ever seen.

Doing Taxes Gets Less and Less "Fun" Every Year

For the second year in a row, my mortgage interest does me no good.  I don't pay enough mortgage interest to exceed the standard deduction anymore.  (Or another way of looking at it, I don't make enough money anymore.)  It may be time to pay off the mortgage instead.

My part-time employers (teaching) calculate the amount of federal and state income tax to withhold as though the pitiful wages they pay me is a full-time position--so they withheld nothing at all for the IRS.

This is going to be a very painful check to write.  The temptation to stop doing any work except my daytime job is getting very strong.  At least it would simplify my taxes.

Drive Cloning

The replacement hard disk for the Linux/Windows dual boot PC has arrived.  I will be putting the new drive on through a USB connector so that I transfer the old drive's contents to the new one, then install the new one.  There are a variety of freeware programs out there for doing the transfer from the old disk to the new one (a process known as cloning, because you have to get the boot sectors right).  CloneMaxx looks attractive because it supposedly works with multiple partitions, not all of them Windows.  Does anyone have experience (good or bad) with any of the freeware cloners?

These Are The Days That I Get So Discouraged...

I am exhausted from teaching three sections and working full-time--and I see no realistic end in sight.  There are gobs of private sector jobs here in Boise for software engineers now--but I am apparently too old for an interview.  (I am told that I should drop the first 10-12 years of experience off my resume, so that I do not seem to know as much.)  I really can't imagine doing this 1 3/4 time employment year after year, and it is not really practical to live just on a state government job.

UPDATE: I should probably stop whining and get used to it.  This problem is not going away soon--maybe not in my life time.  One of these days, the left is going to lose control of the government, and the temptation will be very strong to take some sort of revenge--you know, like the sequence in Dr. Zhivago where the proletariat take over the Zhivago home in Moscow, and the Zhivagos have to live in one large room.  I suppose the equivalent after the Revolution (assuming that we are not too depraved of a society for that to work) would be requiring the leftists to give up their private jets, oceanfront homes, and penthouses and fly commercial, live away from the coasts, and live in ranch homes.

Another Strategy for Tapping With a Drill Press

I mentioned a few days ago a technique for getting exactly square tapped holes using a drill press.  One downside of that approach is that a tap wrench and tap are often substantially longer than the drill bit used to drill the hole.  In many cases, this means that you have to move the table down to have enough room for the tap wrench and tap.  Now you may have to move the workpiece a little so that the tap is exactly aligned with the hole.

I came up with an even simpler method, at least when tapping relatively soft materials such as acetal.  After you drill the hole, replace the drill bit with the tap and turn the chuck by hand while turning the press downward.  (You can use the chuck key to hold the chuck while turning it without the risk that you might loosen the chuck.)  This works well, and solves the problem of the tap and wrench being much longer than the drill.  This gives you the precise squared threads of that other technique, and only requires two hands.  The other technique is a bit clumsy for those of us who, unfortunately, lack three hands.

Machining Nuisances

I needed to cut a diagonal slot in a piece of acetal, so I put in the Sherline vise, mounted that on the tilting table at 30 degrees, and started cutting.  The Sherline vise under the best of conditions just does not have a lot of clamping force.  The head on the 10-32 machine screw that provides the clamping force, unfortunately, is now pretty chewed up, so I need to replace it--limiting the clamping force even more.  The next result was that I could not do what I needed.

I have a drill press vise that I squared pretty decently last year that I use for larger workpieces--but it is way too large to fit inside the Sherline tilting table.  I am thinking of removing the front and rear of the tilting table from the two pieces of very flat aluminum, and installing them on two much larger sheets (which I will also have to make as flat as I can using the vertical mill).  I could make a tilting table big enough to handle this larger drill press vise.  Of course, how do you hold a piece of aluminum larger than the drill press vise, when you are going to mount the drill press vise on those pieces of aluminum later?  The answer is not the Escher device, but to mount the aluminum plates on something that fits inside the vise.  This may require several passes of approximate squaring.

If I had to pick a single aspect to the Sherline vertical mill that drives me utterly crazy, it would have to be the Sherline mill vise.  It simply does not have enough grip to handle anything large enough to be worth my while to machine.  There are other mill vise makers out there, but I suspect that retrofitting the tilting table to handle my larger drill press vise is probably the right solution.

A Bad Sign

When you receive a paper that seems to be so much a parody of Bill and Ted from Bill & Ted's Most Excellent Adventure that you are actually laughing.