If you remember to get your loyalty card punched, the 12th balloon shoots itself down for free!

Heads-up - little or no waiting tonight at restaurants that don't feature big-screen TVs! I see Thai take-out in my future. 😃

Deleted my tdotrob and deepqueue accounts off the birdsite today. I was a bit of an evangelist for the site back in the day so it took a while to come to terms with dropping it entirely.

Thing is, moderation and an anchor in reality are essential ingredients at this scale. Elmo has discarded both. There's a good argument that an API is at least a strong force multiplier or even essential, and that's now gone as well.

So I'm done. Burned the boats and committed to the Fediverse.

BTW - I said a while back that I don't sell stuff I make & someone pointed out this last piece was commissioned.

Actually, I take commissions all the time - most often in trade for fresh cut wood but sometimes for a fee. I don't want the hassle of maintaining a storefront & competing with commodity items, but I love collaborating with people who appreciate hand-crafted items that will get lots of use. Usually that's pens, bowls or platters, but I have no issue making toys.

Today's #woodworking project is either a serving board for 12-inch subs or a "Greek paddle," that name owing to it's traditional use for fraternity hazing. This is a commissioned work and I don't know anyone in college at the moment so you do the math.

I was given rough dimensions and told to "make it heavy duty". Purple heart is quite dense and at 1 lb 4 oz, I think this qualifies as both heavy and sturdy.

If my patron is happy there's a possible matching furniture build. Fingers crossed.

A beloved local clown died. The obituary said whoever replaces him will have some big shoes to fill.

I always tell prospective consulting clients a few jokes during the interview to test company culture.

Example: When a certain cable company asked what time I would be on-site that Monday, I told them "Between 8am and noon, or between noon and 5pm."

They were not amused.
Predictably, it didn't work out.

Going forward I'm giving prospects a list of code comments I've written and ask if they object to any of them.

OK, now I'm being lectured on the purpose of comments in code.

Thing is, above a certain level of fluency, all code is self-documenting. Bottom line is that comments are to help people who haven't reached that level of fluency in that language.

But there's a fluency floor below which unsupervised work is an operational risk. Someone who doesn't get that 1-line of basic code and for whom the function name 'tolower' isn't a big enough clue shouldn't be mucking about in code the team uses daily.

Long time ago I wrote...

# If you require a comment for this function you should not be updating this code

...followed by a simple 1-line function

Took 5 years but today someone finally called me out on my snark. My defense was "But it's true. Anyone who doesn't understand that on sight shouldn't be updating that code unsupervised."

Can't wait for this person to find the comment "# This next part is pure, 100% security theater but mandatory per policy"

We had a visitor today. Pretty sure the one last week was a Cooper's Hawk and this one looks like a Red Shouldered Hawk. Our neighborhood has a lot of tree cover and seeing 2 or 3 hawks hunting is a daily occurrence. Having them sit long enough to pose for pix is a treasured rarity.

Wife claims to love the bowl, and the choice of glossy finish improved it some, but I can't bring myself to like it. Filling in the carvings with putty renders them flat and 2-dimensional. And even if I'd painted like the cedar bowl, I see now the pores are so large they would have retained the paint. Next time I might carve or texture the bowl and leave it at that.

I try to reuse vinyl gloves so between coats of poly today I hung them on my lathe tool rest.

Right next to the dust pickup.

When I turned on the dust collector, the nearest glove was sucked in. Somehow it got past the cyclone separator and proceeded to wrap itself around the impeller. Took about 1/2 hour to pick the pieces out.

Grandpa always said if I played around with power tools long enough I'd get my mitt caught in the wringer. I'm paraphrasing here but he said something like that.

Breaking: US breathes collective sigh of relief when China explains that spy balloons will result in more relevant ads and issues "sunbathe naked" TikTok challenge

I wasn't planning to get wood today but one look at this fine piece of ash and my brain was no longer the boss.

The most boring part of #woodturning is waiting for finishes to dry. I'm up to 3 coats of sanding sealer and 1 coat of wipe-on poly. It's 4 hours between coats of poly and there's 2 more to go.

(As an aside, to me the name "wipe-on poly" sounds like the method by which parrot foie gras is applied to a cracker.)

(OK, technically, boring holes is the most boring part of the art and waiting on finish to dry is the second most boring part.)

A total stranger posted a while back about adding 3D printing to their art studio and I offered to donate a piece of equipment to the cause. I forgot to ask first where in the world they live and was worried I'd have to reneg over cost of international shipping.

Turns out they are less than an hour away from me and I was able to deliver in person. The internet may be a series of tubes but they have a way of turning back on themselves when you least expect it.

I thought black Milliput would give too much contrast on this carved black limba bowl, but now I'm having serious regrets about the brick color. Wife says it looks great but I think she's trying to make me feel better about it. Going to reserve judgement until final finish but I suspect this one gets chalked up to #woodturning mistakes in the end. Too bad. It was otherwise a very nice piece with a pleasing shape.

My #woodturning inspiration porn these days is Mayuko's channel. It's all segmented turning. His process allows for large hollow forms with completely finished interiors. Every piece is a work of art.

Watching his channel makes me want to do work like that so I made a wedgie sled and a precision miter stop. As soon as I clear my backlog of commissioned work, it's segmenting time!

https://youtu.be/Qs6UO4i8OeU

A hunter bags a few rabbits, field dresses them, and brings them to the butcher on the way home.

Butcher says "By the way, these aren't actually rabbits."

Hunter responds "Now you are just splitting hares."

#cosohumor