Short, yet action packed

This is going to be a short post because I'm tired and my hands are sore. My group at work is being beaten down by an impending release date so I'm working a lot. My wife got a job last month as an activity coordinator for an assisted living facility, which is good for us financially but she now spends a colossal amount of time on the computer researching activities for the old folks.

I did block out a bunch of time to work on the Doctor Who Dalek Wobble Head kit. It arrived about a week after I paid for it, then it sat around for a few days. Since I don't have a lot of free time, I started doing micro bursts of work on it -- removing stuff one day, fitting it the next, drilling holes the day after, etc. This put me in a pretty good position when my wife's dad and brother showed up for a 2 day visit, which kept her occupied so I could devote some large chunks of time to the process.

Installation was generally pretty easy. I liked the shunts they had to attach new wires to the boards... you plug in their plug to the appropriate location, then plug the real plug into that. Very slick. Of course, since my wiring is different from a standard game I had to do a little fiddling about, but nothing more complicated than before.

Of course, it wouldn't be my Doctor Who if something didn't go wrong, but I did get it to the point where the head would run in test mode. Here is (I think) my first ever blog video:

I'll go into the mighty saga of what went wrong, what went wrong with the going wrong, and what happened when things just fell off a cliff in a later post. It stopped short of the game being left a smoking ruin, but just barely.

But I'll go out on a high note. The state is building a new highway near my house which they've been planning on doing it for almost 50 years now (literally -- it was first proposed in the 1960's). One of the houses we looked at before buying this one was demolished as part of the construction. So a few months ago the dog and I decide to take a walk down the cleared path of destruction where it will be built, and it was kind of fun. So a few weeks ago we wanted to take another walk and see how things are progressing... but this time, we did so when there were a couple of workers doing things on the site. We stayed well out of their way and looked around some more, but it was hot so we turned back after a short trip. So, about three days later, signs such as the one pictured showed up around the entrances to the job sites. I am 100% confident that the signs appeared because the workers saw me walking around and figured I was there to deliberately hurt myself and sue the state or to steal a couple of the 50 foot concrete and steel beams they're using to make the bridges. There are also a group of security guys driving between the job sites on weekends. Regardless, I am partly bummed that we can't walk there any more and partly elated that my actions appeared to have caused such a kerfuffle.

Joe Entropy: Making a difference in the community.