§ I’ve been doing a bunch of CNC milling at work since getting the machine out from storage late last year. I still love using our Shopbot but it isn’t without its flaws: it is annoyingly loud and produces an ungodly amount of sawdust. I’ve found that using a 3/8” bit at a slower RPM helps cut down on the noise a bit. To help with the sawdust I ordered a new dust collector but I must be doing something wrong because, as it is, I’m still getting significantly more sawdust around the bed than actually in the dust collection bag.
§ Over the past few weeks I’ve been digging through historical photographs of Cleveland for an upcoming project. The Library of Congress is such a great resource. Just look at this incredibly high quality scan of a dry plate negative panorama of The Flats from 1901. Download the original 160MB(!) TIFF and Zoom way in—so cool.
§ Speaking of Cleveland, did you know one of the world’s largest salt mines is 1,700 feet below Lake Erie, and spans for miles? I didn’t and it’s been right here, practically right under my feet this whole time!
§ Whenever I listen to Cortex’s annual time tracking episode I get the urge to start tracking my own time. I’ve always dismissed the idea pretty quickly though. It sounds like a giant pain for something that will probably end up just bumming me out when it confirms that I often don’t use my time as effectively as I should. Regardless, I already have enough little ongoing daily projects.
§ Speaking of little daily projects… an update on the dinner tracking experiment I started at the beginning of the year. Throughout the month of January 90% of dinners were home-cooked, two were out at family members houses, and one was at a restaurant. Out of those meals, Mexican food was the clear favorite, making up almost a third of all meals.
I, frankly, don’t know how interesting this particular data is to me, let alone you, dear reader. Nevertheless, I’m going to continue collecting it. Maybe interesting trends will emerge over time.
§ I throughly enjoyed reading Cabel’s roundup of the 150+ snacks he tried last year. I found “Campfire S’mores” flavored ramen the most viscerally unappealing but there was one new-to-me snack on the list that I made a special trip to the store to find. I’ll leave determining what that is as an exercise to the reader.
§ My first Phillips Hue bulb finally died. It is from a starter kit I got in 2018 (2017?) and have been using daily since. A respectable run, really.
§ On Friday I found out that what would have been my first trip to the Bay Area in April has been canceled due to the NSF grant freeze which is a pretty big bummer. The one silver lining is that I should still have a trip to San Francisco in September, barring further political chaos.
§ In between episodes of Severance I’ve been re-watching Sopranos for what must be the third time. I realize it isn’t particularly controversial to say that Sopranos is a good show but I’m honestly just shocked by how well it mostly holds up. “College”, in particular, is just sort of an unbelievably good episode.
