Today we are, in theory at least, doing some free-form testing.
Now, every person needs to know their strengths and weaknesses. In the realm of programming, my greatest weakness is in testing -- especially "free-form" testing.
White-box coverage testing, not so bad. But give me a device or feature category and say "test it" and I'm nearly useless.
So today may not be much fun.
Tonight I need to declare the topic for my big speech in speech class. I was originally thinking about doing "The Private Life of the Electron", but I think instead I'll be doing an informational speech on "Halloween". Focusing on the halloween haunt, I suppose, but also giving historical background.
I'm itching to put the mother molds on my rubber in the garage -- but I've been editing my book instead. The "editor" who laid it out didn't do a good job of editing -- about every ten pages there is some fundamental lexical error. Grrr.
It will all be over soon, though. And the first 147 pages actually read pretty good, too! I'm sure it degenerates to incoherent babbling by the end, though...
Yup, that's going to be my epitaph.
This weekend went well, though I didn't get QUITE as much done as desired -- but then, when do I?
Saturday I ran around in the morning and got wood and stuff for the build. In the afternoon I supervised a slim pair of work parties. The one, two very enthusiastic girls, painted stuff (boring, but necessary work).
Then three of the guys went off and cut wood and screwed it... er, fastened it together. So now we have examples of some of the structures we need to make.
Oh, and Michelle went and designed the door flat, of which we need to build three.
So that's cool.
Sunday I spent most of the day working on editing my manuscript and painting polyurethane mold material on a heart, brain, two faces, and an arm. Soon I'll be putting on the plaster mother mold and cutting the rubber off. Hope it turns out good!
Today, work. And the news that the offsite location that we were DEPENDING ON THOSE BASTARDS is looking to back out of the agreement where we use their parking lot and some of their empty space in return for thousands of people streaming through their complex.
If they don't WANT three thousand people, each of who spent $35 on a ticket, to learn more about their stinking little complex, well, then, who am I to force popularity on them.
Bastards.
And then my head exploded.
Ahh, stayed at work for lunch. So now I have to leave early, go home, work up the list, etc and so forth.
Hope it works!
At lunch I need to develop a hardware/lumber shopping list, and then after work I do the shopping so I have enough supplies for my crew tomorrow. An actual build day, with actual building! Woo!
I haven't been able to start the mold on the arm, because each layer of rubber needs to be applied about 45 minutes after the previous layer... and there are four or five layers to apply. So I haven't had the time.
My speech class looks like it will be pretty easy, so that's a good thing. One week down, seven to go.
Saturday I'll be lost at the Basin, wandering the wilderness overseeing the labors of somewhere between two and twenty volunteers. With uncertainty like that, no wonder directors lose their minds!
Sunday I will be working on the arm, the alien pins, making more organs, and in the afternoon, out capturing sounds with my sound guy.
That, and I hope to shake this cough that's been bugging me for a couple of weeks.
Maybe if I slept more...
Yesterday's test of a poly mold material on the poly arm worked pretty good -- the stuff released, no problem!
There was a sticky patch, though. I didn't take enough care in mixing the goo; it was just a quicky test. But it's an object lesson in the necessity of EXCELLENT mixing technique. Any slack gives you poor results.
Though... it would be another interesting effect, for "skin rot". Heh.
Now I have to decide whether to paint the poly mold on in two sections, or do a one-piece mold I later cut in half. Decisions! Argh!
I'm leaning towards one-piece with cutting... I think I'll get a cleaner edge, and a better overall fit in the mother mold that way.
The fingers have me a bit worried, though. I'm thinking they will be tricky to split.
At lunch today I did three things.
First, I slapped a quick patch of polyurethane mold-making material on one of my lesser-quality polyurethane arm lifecasts. With a layer of mold release in between, of course.
We'll see how badly it sticks soon.
Second, I downloaded the proofs for Robotics Demysitified and printed them out. 327 pages is a fair chunk of printing!
This is the first time I've had to print my own proofs. Usually they Fedex them to me. But then, it's expensive to Fedex from England.
Tonight I go to the first installation of my Speech class. It should be interesting. It looks like there are only 7 people signed up for it.
Oooh, almost time to go home! See ya!
Okay, so apparently PVA mold release doesn't WORK for HYDROSTONE. Sure, it worked for Ultracal (I think I used PVA)... but I had to beat my three-part mold into little bits with a hammer to get my arm out.
Okay, not quite. Lots of little bits and a few big ones.
And the arm isn't out yet.
I had about a 30% "stick" rate, it seems...
!@@#$%@##@ plaster.
I'm going to either try again with (a) a different mold release, (b) a different plaster, or (c) screw the hard stuff entirely and use a firm polyurethane rubber mold.
Dammit.
I cast the third section of my three-part mold yesterday.
It's all sitting in the living room now...waiting.
I fear trying to pry the pieces apart. I sealed the ever-loving crap out of the plaster facing pieces, and then sprayed 'em heavily with a release agent. It should be fine.
But I'm always breaking the danged plaster.
I guess I can live with extra seams...heck, I could incorporate them as surgical scars.
And I can use my nifty new airbrush to paint the arms (from the outside) to help camouflage stuff. I will also be using it on the INSIDE to make the subtle tones and discolorations that look so awesome in silicon.
I figure that a properly thinned (I bought a silicon thinning agent, which also retards the setting) silicon will both flow through my gravity feed airbrush, and have a long enough gelling time to do useful painting with.
I would be excited about this, if I weren't nervous about screwing it up.
As director, I also have to figure out what we need to do next, and where to store the damned projects once they are in play. We don't have any room to put ANYTHING right now. I'm going to have to harass the Basin and work something out.
Wow, it's been a long time since my last update. Sorry!
Most of last week was all about NI Week, a big conference/sales show that National does in the middle of August.
Outside of that, I had all the usual stuff to do... you know the drill. Though at work I've been making a pest of myself and am now being funneled into starting some difficult (and necessary) work towards improving the design environment there. But that's a long, proprietary story.
Saturday was the first build day at Haunted Trails. And by "build" I mean "moving shit around". We did, however, stack (mostly neatly) about fifty "flats" (which are just flimsy walls).
I've been putting together the plaster mold for Marla's arm too. I poured the first half on... umm... Saturday? I forget. It all blends together these days.
I decided to make it a three-part mold (which I've never done before), even though it gives me an extra seam that I don't want. Because I don't think a two-part mold would come apart. There appears to be a structural undercut that I just can't avoid, due to the curvature of her fingers.
So I just poured the third part about an hour ago.
I've been making these nifty little plastic pins, in the shape of the alien logo, for use by the aliens in the show. I got my shipment of cool casting supplies on Friday (woot!) so I tried to make a bronze pin. It's pretty nice.
The humidity is killer, though. I tried a second pin yesterday and it swelled up all nasty like. I cast one indoors, and it swelled up more than I like. I then made a third one, outside, and it FOAMED.
Extreme humidity, which has been hovering at around 112% these days (supersaturated, hot, wet... more wet than standing in a shower), is really really bad for polyurethane I think.
I'll try again later, when water droplets stop condensing out of the air into my plastics.
Likewise, I'm going to hold off on making more polyurethane rubber molds, too.
Finally, Marla is back in work and getting paid again! Much better. She bought me some dance sneakers today. They are nice.
A couple of days ago I poured over a half-gallon of polyurethane rubber into the silicon mold of Marla's arm.
Last night, we removed it from the mold.
Getting the silicon off was HARD! Once I got the mold inverted off of the upper arm, Marla got a firm grip with both hands on the arm. I grabbed the edge of the mold, put my feet on Marla's legs, and pulled. And pulled. Pulled some more.
Eventually, we got the wrist to stretch around the palm and the arm came out.
There was one bubble in one finger. I poured the rubber with the mold at a sub-opt angle, and my efforts at de-bubbling were not sufficient. The surface finish around the hand is a bit off, too -- I think there was still some moisture there from when I measured the volume of the arm.
Despite the extreme effort involved in removing the mold, the silicon survived! I was planning on doing a second pour with the mother mold in place, to get a "bloated" arm and hand.
I think I'm going to do another regular pour instead, with a different angle to avoid the bubble problem. It will be a tricky pour angle, but I should be able to make it work.
I don't think I'll have enough poly left after this to do the bloated arm... but if I do, and the mold survives this second pull, I'll do the bloated one next.
I'm expecting stacks of stuff from UPS this week, too. Next week will be an orgy of SFX development! Wheee!
I dropped my brain!
Ouch!
Actually, I dropped my PDA... on a soft floor! No damage done.
But it jarred the battery. And lost *everything* on the device. Thank the fates that I had sync'ed it to my PC just minutes before hand!
Of course, I didn't notice that it had reset until I had an idea I wanted to jot down at a stoplight. Argh!
I'm down to my backup brain! And it's all squishy...
I don't think that the iPaq is supposed to reset with momentary power loss. In fact, you should be able to remove the primary battery for up to ten minutes and still keep the RAM alive. You know, with the internal backup battery thing.
Apparently, that doesn't work.
I'll have to smack around HP now, I guess. I left the device in the truck (in the shade! And I left a bowl of water for it in the back, too, so it wouldn't overheat), so I can't go to customer support RIGHT NOW and harass them.
My poor brain.
I'm so ready for the weekend. Work continues to be boring and frustrating by turns... I'm about ready to bring in my 2x4 clue-stick and give some lessons in how to organized design and development around here.
Classes start in a couple of weeks (less!)... I'm taking Speech for this term, because I figure it will be easy. When I say that out loud, however, people give me the oddest looks. I suspect it's because MOST people don't like talking up in front of a group. I could care less; it's easy anymore. As long as there isn't too much boring homework to read, I'll be fine.
Boredom is the one thing that will drive me crazy. Though I'm not keen on frustration either.
Argh.
Well, yesterday I got the rest of the advance for Robotics DeMystified. Woot! My biz account was down to $3.
Now I can upgrade a couple of tools and get some supplies.
I still need to modify the LLC charter... I've been avoiding addressing the business details for years now.
Speaking of $3, Marla found me a credit union that actually takes BUSINESS accounts! I can stop being raped by Chase now. Double Woot!
You want to make a difference? You want to help get rid of Bush? Politics takes money... and you have money, if only a little bit.
Put your money where your idealism is and go to:
http://www.democrats.org
Okay, so I have a mild case of Tourette's disorder and it's been with me since I don't know when. The worst of it was during my school years... it got a bit better after High School.
My case currently involves mostly just simple motor tics, though an occasional vocal tic. It's worse when I'm stressed, better when I'm relaxed.
Back when it was bad, though, I had additional related symptoms, such as OCD.
I've also always had a case of "ooh, shiny!" -- which is probably ADD.
It's interesting stuff. You can find out more at http://www.tourettes.com/.
What's weird is being inside of it. My study of neurons and neural networks gives me some models to represent it.
A neuron collects stimulous and, once the inputs exceed a threshold level, the neuron fires. The tics feel like there is a background noise that is saturating a neuron... it's slowly charging and and I can feel it getting ready to fire. When it does, I twitch.
If I decide I'm not going to let it go, I can consciously inhibit it... but that's temporary. If I'm relaxed, the background noise goes down. If I'm focused on another task, that also seems to focus the noise into that task and everything calms down.
That's not what is happening, of course -- it's just a model.
I think that my mood swings are related. Emotions, muscles, whatever -- tics. I don't know, though.
They say that Tourette's people are not only jumpy, but have faster reflexes and and mentally pretty sharp. Maybe it's because our nerves are always pre-charged
Like I say, I have a minor case. You wouldn't hardly even notice it. I can't imagine having one of the extreme forms.
I'm exporting some changes from my development branch, through the trunk (the One True Source), and out into the actual release area... where it will be seen and used by the rest of the copmany.
Fortunately, I am only responsible for export a tiny bit of what is in there. But it's still pretty intimidating.
After a few of these, I'll be a pro, but it's unfortunate that I have to go through the scary bits first.
Bleh. Started getting a cold about last Wednesday... which got progressively more annoying through Friday and then faded a bit before going into a holding pattern over the weekend.
Today, though, I woke up too dizy to get up... when I finally did, it wasn't much fun showering. An hour nap later, though, I was suitable for driving, so in to work I go!
Ugh.
Saturday we had our last planning meeting for the Haunted Trails. It went well enough, and I think we are all primed and ready to go.
Sunday we made a beautiful silicon mold of Marla's a right arm. It is darn near perfect, as best I can tell. Probably a few bubbles in the web of her fingers, but it's hard to say.
Maybe Tuesday I'll start the next step towards making the arm prop.
I have pictures, too. This will make a nice to-do document, eventually.
Here are two websites that I pray are fake, but fear might be real:
http://www.gunthernet.com/
http://objective.jesussave.us/
Scary scary stuff... though the objective site is thought to be "one of the longest-running and best parody sites on the web." I certainly hope so...
My book is done with the initial editing. Those English dudes are quick; just about a week. I hope it's actually EDITED; that they made a positive contribution to the work. Now it's off to typesetting, or whatever. I get my editable copy end of August.
I'm trying to move my mailing lists and random websites off of the computers at home. I figure I'll just make subdomains on simreal.com -- it's bigger, faster, and more reliable. I just have to make sure Wittlock is off the server, first.
Oh, and I have to get the double-damned mailman server to work off of simreal; in theory it's there, in practice it's puking.
I have a service ticket, though. We'll fix it.
That's the nice part about having a real ISP. They do the work I don't want to. I figured it would be easier to move my mailman list than to fix it on my home server... which hasn't proven to be the case yet.
Yesterday my brain borg device showed up, you'll recall.
It's neat! Nifty! An iPaq 2210 -- which is actually bad. It's a Compaq-designed device, and it runs Windows. But then again, the price was right and it had the software I wanted. PhatWare CalliGrapher (and PhatNotes and PhatPad). Nice stuff.
I've been getting used to it today, putting a few notes in. Nothing to heavy duty yet.
Woo-hoo!
My spare brain came in today! I was driving to work after lunchy and Marla cell phoned me to let me know. I darn near turned around to pick it up!
Work continues to drag, but I'm sure I'll get fun stuff to do again soon. In fact, Michael Watson thinks I'll get a nice nifty project with Daniel (who is a neat guy himself) after this current one releases.
During lunch, I cast a couple of plastic pieces for haunted trails... if these work out, I'll be making plasic pins for some of the characters. Fun stuff!
This weekend, I hope to cast Marla's arm, in preparation for the big arm prop. I also hope to start sculpting the leg for the big leg prop. I doubt I'll do BOTH, but heck, gotta set big goals.
The poster for the recruiting party is done and should get printed up this week. Soon, the HT advertising machine will be under way.
Looks like I have a full day of sitting around with my thumb up my butt, compiling. Whee.
Not only did we do a massive integration into the "trunk" with our new work, in parallel to this we are upgrading to a different compiler version. Which means instability, which means lots and lots of compiling and re-compiling. Yay.
Slashdot is down, too, so I can't kill time there. Oh, no, wait! It's back up! Okay, so that's good now.
Orkut, however, continues to be so slow as to be unusable.
It's just gonna be one of those tedious Mondays, I guess.
On a more exciting front, we are finalizing the recruiting posters for Haunted Trails, and those will be going up soon. Exciting!
Howdy again! I'm back from Dallas (er, Arlington... as if there is a difference).
I scored a silver medal at the Tai Chi thang -- which sounds good, until you know there were only three fogies in my division (Executive Men Intermediate). However, my numeric score of 8.03 is very respectable, and BETTER than all other intermediate scores from my school... believe me, I was paying attention to that.
So I feel good about it. And, since I was very nervous, I was stiff and more awkward than I should have been. If I can do it *relaxed* next year, I'll rock!
It will still be a couple years before I qualify for advanced competition (need to be doing it 4 years or more).
I got some good feedback on the faces in the last post. Thanks!
Be sure, I'll be putting up how-to information for these and other projects. But not until the season passes. I have an accumulation of project information from the last year and a half that I need to collate and post.
I actually want to write another animatronics book, too -- not sure when -- with some advanced techniques. So I've been LEARNING the advanced techniques.
It's both time consuming and expensive, but it's moving along.