Gauntlet laid

If these wingnuts could do it back in the day I'm sure we can. Big dubs at Orton maybe?

the reason

...and THIS is why I bought a Caddy.

 Roll on the weekend.

Rust off

Something for the weekend. The 'Hack, the reason this blog exists, had also been hidden away, for much longer than the Standard, its criminal really but days turn to months and before you know it its next year.

While I was re-shoeing the red bike I thought I'd give the 'Hack a once over. It has been kept dry all through winter but I guess oxidation finds a way, the whole thing was ginger with rust but nothing a bit of wire wool cant sort out.

dust off

I took my sweet sweet mid school 20 out from the garage today, it was dusty and has been unridden for at least 4 months.

My Lady bought me some Holy Rollers for xmas, they were put on and the whole thing lubed and dusted for the weekend.

Look at that big ol cog.

Studio type shots

I took some pics of the RC car post build, all shiny and new, up to this point it had only run in test mode to see if the ESC and servo worked,
they did.
The next day I took it out and gave it a shakedown, the tie rod turnbuckles came loose and it stopped steering but not before I caked it in mud and somehow managed to steer it into the only tree in about a square mile.

RC Revival. Body n Building.

I didnt take many pics of the chassis build process nor the painting of the body. The chassis building while great to do seems pointless to show, its following a manual and the only thing I 'customised' was the replacement of nylon moulded 'bearings' to sealed metal bearings. hopefully the gearbox and running gear will now last for ages even if i hop up the motor at some point.

here's a couple of pics of the finished chassis.

Not much to see here but for those of you unfamiliar with building one of these they are a treat, the quality and engineering of Tamiya's stuff is excellent. I would much rather do this than buy one ready to run.

The body was black ABS plastic, the plan was to make it bare metal, well, look like bare metal, as if the car was once green like the wheels but had been rubbed down until all the green had gone and the surface had just started to oxidise. So first up I sprayed the inside green and matt black, if it were me and it was a real car I'd leave the inside as original paint.

As I said I didnt take many pics, mostly because I didnt really know if what I wanted to do would work having never done this before, I just assumed the same would apply for small scale as it did for large, so I sanded, primed, undercoated with Alclad primer filler, and top coated with Alclad dull aluminium, then over the top of that I dusted Tamiya aluminium over the top of which I dusted Tamiya matt black - but 50/50 thinned so it would sand off easily hopefully leaving dark patches in the dips and panel gaps.

It did, sweet!

Then I detailed with rust and various blacks and greys and made the door and sunroof appear to come from another car by painting them orange and distressing them in the same way.

A couple of waterslides, some paint pens for the window rubbers and chrome trim and it was done.

and here is the body, with nosecone and lights on the chassis.

Lookin good.

I'll shoot this properly tomorrow, see if I can get some nice detailed shots.

Winding back the clock for womankind

There's this girl in the office and a while back she got married, you must have heard she told EVERYONE who would listen, even people who wouldn't or didn't want to listen, in fact I'm pretty sure there was some sort of global broadcast, I'm surprised you hadn't heard...
Anyhoo, she fell pregnant inevitably, I don't think the fella had much choice in the matter but I'm sure he's happy - for now. She also had a global news bulletin for this event working the the fact into every conversation she had, even conversations other people were having. Pick a topic, talk about it within earshot and she would work in some pregnancy related interjection, that in itself isn't so bad of course, I know that, I am a father myself and when my son was still baking I wanted to tell everybody, but I knew if I spoke about it to the same people over and over AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN! it would become very boring and incredibly irritating for them, besides I had work to do, and the people I would be boring with baby facts ALSO HAVE WORK TO DO!
I suppose you cant blame her in some ways though  I mean even at 7 or 8 months now its hard to tell, what with all the pie eating an that if she is pregnant at all so maybe she has to keep reminding people its a baby she's carrying and not a belly full of steak and kidney.
I digress.
Recently an announcement was made at work that the disabled spots in the car park were now also 'pregnant women' parking spots. obviously there are a number of issues with this, some legal and some personal, let me touch on a couple of those issues. This came about because someone - I dunno who - is pregnant and apparently finds it hard to walk much further than across the road from the car to the door and due to her timekeeping - or perhaps flexible hours - arrives later than most and has nowhere (close) to park cos all the spots are full with cars who arrive on or before time.
Solution: arrive on time.
Strangely though her job requires her to walk 5 or six times that distance 3 or 4 times a day to which she doesn't complain, or maybe she has one of the postroom wheel her about on a trolley.
Also what happens if a person with an actual disability needs the space, would the pregnant person have to move their car thus making the whole arrangement pointless?

The biggest problem I have with this though and I'm amazed more women haven't spoken up about this is when did pregnancy become a disability? I totally understand the need for certain allowances when pregnant, its often a tiring uncomfortable time but most women are proud to be able to cope with the discomfort and tiredness, insisting it should make no difference to their working day, but suggesting women need a 'disabled' rating because they are carrying a child seems to me like a backward step for womankind.

I have already been to the doc's, I told him about my crushed vertebrae and how painful it is to walk for long periods, he's writing a note so I can get a disabled badge for my car, I arrive early everyday, I'm gonna proudly wear that badge and park in that spot before anyone else.

Ages

Well its been ages since I wrote on here, not much has happened I just got a little distracted.
The usual things have irked me of course, like for instance a couple of things at work...
We have a survey every year, it asks - in a very non specific way if we, as employees, are having a nice time. Generally the answer is no it would seem. However due to the non specific way the questions are asked and the nature of the submission of the survey - anonymously - the solutions to make us 'happier' in our work are equally non specific, very general and consequently pointless. This was followed up with a Team building exercise where we were asked to solve puzzles (designed for children) and put stickers on a wall to show how we were feeling - my 7 year old has a similar system in his class at school only we are 1 better cos we got free sweets at our tables!

Following our fun packed, team building, problem solving, free sweets session we had a 2 hour meeting where we were talked at about the company's profits and losses for the year, where we are going, where we have been etc. by the end of which I was ready to quit - I mean quit my job not just leave the room - and this was even after I was praised for some of my work, so what does one do when the very processes to help improve your working day actually de-motivate you to the point of quitting?
Is it time to move on?

Profile Piece

S'up.
I was recently asked to write a profile piece for another blog describing my work history, a 'how I got here' type of thing. Its been a long road, my memory is hazy but I think my facts are fairly accurate.
The following is the the piece I submitted...

Born in Bavaria, January 1971 to Hungarian and Nepalese parents, I am the youngest of 10 children – and the only male. My summers were spent chasing mountain goats for their skin, we would make hats and shoes to sell to the villagers. My father was a cat farrier, he made the finest feline saddlery north of Nordendorf but had to retire early due to the tin shortage, shoeing cats in anything else proved near fatal and the business suffered. My mother drank.

Aged 8 I was sent away to board at the Sorbonne due to my natural multi-linguistic abilities, the acquisition of which to this day have yet to be explained. My academic study suffered though, due to the confusion surrounding my attire. Having 9 sisters coupled with the family’s poor income, hand me down clothes were all that was on offer, it took two years before I was fully accepted in Boys Jousting class and Chauvinistic Studies were a no-go. It was here however, during many solitary moments hiding in the bell tower, that my artistic flair took hold and design of all things started to appeal. I decided to run away and join a traveling art show. We would caravan from town to town pitching up on village greens offering art and design of all kinds, from simple business cards and flyers to magazines and brochures, marker pen caricatures on cereal boxes to sliced sharks in aspic - we covered it all and upon completion of my 4 year apprenticeship I headed out to make my way on my own terms.

My first paid job was as a black and white scanner operator, which is not the operator of a scanner that has been painted in black and white as I originally thought but a scanner which would only scan objects that were either black or white – oddly the scanner itself was painted a myriad of colours. This soon became quite tedious and I became quite jealous of the colour scanner operators who operated black and white painted machines, they were capable of scanning every colour known to man! I took a job there. This lead me on to platemaking – again not what you might expect, no ceramics involved at all - and from there on to manual planning, a process so time consuming, expensive and painstakingly precise it would take 9 weeks to produce a monthly magazine, just impractical. The trade needed a revolution and it came in the form of an oatmeal coloured plastic box called a Quadra – I assume it was called such because it could do 4 things, I only discovered one, DTP. This was a new form of etheral witchcraft whereby magazine pages could be created, edited and styled so quickly inside the Quadra it seemed impossible yet completely obvious. Some of my weaker souled contemporaries refused to accept this new God and held onto their Swann Morton handles and rubylith so tight the only safe thing to do was put them in the darkroom, seal the door and hope they would eventually see the light (unlikely given the nature of the room but I never went back to check).

DTP truly was a beam of Godly light to my frustrated braintank, which while revelatory and welcome, burned the hair from my skull in a circular pattern. Suddenly, the creativity in my head that I had been struggling to realise was possible and very soon magazine page production became jaded, I craved the adoration and adulation the older members of the traveling art show received, I buried myself in books, even reading some. I studied fine art taking cues from the greats, Ditko, Shultz and both Hannah & Barbera. I also became obsessed with packaging design and logos so much so that at one point I decorated my entire house with the wrapper from every item in the Happy Shopper ‘basics’ range.

I have been a journeyman in design for over 20 years now and still learn new things daily – for instance, today I learned there are fonts other than Helvetica. Amazing! I love my job, I do what comes easily to me and get to create things all day long. I imagine, plan, attempt, plan again and produce. The final pay off is to see the thing that was once only visible in my mind's eye realised in physical form.

A long way from chasing goats up mountains.

Blog mobile

Yesterday I signed over my soul to apple once again, well apple and O2. After a few moments in the O2 shop with a keen but genuine salesperson I strolled out with a shiny new iPhone 4s. Sa-weeeeet!
It's nice of course, does the usual shiz it's supposed to, really fast, wicked download speeds and the camera is really good, like REALLY good but the USP of this one is Siri, right?
Thing is he's a bit of a dick. Don't get me wrong, it's is an incredible app/feature to have on a phone, and he's very good at doing the 'set an alarm/make a note' type stuff, in fact I'd go as far as saying its the beginning of true voice recognition, but he is a bit of a dick when it come to the more casual queries. Turns out he is unable to make business searches for you in the uk! So you can't actually ask where the nearest KFC is for instance. personally I was gutted, lucky I knew where it was.
When you get to more personal questions like 'where are you from, how old are you etc. he's deliberately vague or obtuse and sometimes condescending making you feel like you are somehow wasting his time. Dick.
I tried switching the voice to US English but she would only do stuff accurately if I spoke with an American accent, an' thats just retarded, while the Australian one would only respond if I said 'cobber' at the end of each sentence.
Anyhoo...
With my new blogger app on my new phone I am writing this from the comfort of the sofa with one eye on the TV, - Hellboy is on. See, truly mobile blogging, the studio where I normally write is miles away, I'd have to leave this room, and go all the way through the next to get there.
Behold the future!