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My vacation was fraught with problems, the biggest one being the sudden and massive coolant leak in my truck. That’s fixed, but now I (probably) have a blown head gasket. I wasted days of my vacation on it, and ultimately I had to coax it home despite chronic misfiring. I will end up spending weeks […]
As a single guy in the real world, I am surrounded by couples, married and unmarried. Among my friends, I can’t name anyone who doesn’t have a significant other. It’s obviously a factor in why I’m alone. In fiction, it’s never like that. I have long been aware of this problem, the laughable improbability of […]
The last few days have been uncomfortable for me after social media has reacted to the motivation of the perpetrator of the Toronto van attack, who is an incel. The topic is uncomfortable for me because, though I hadn’t previously heard of the incel subculture, I see right away that I identify with some of […]
I am building a workbench using mortise & tenon joints. Somehow, this is the first time I’ve attempted to do so, despite owning a mortiser and a tenonning jig for two decades. I’m finding that they are both well suited to fairly flat tenons, one width of the chisel, or up to two if the […]
For years, I had no home theater system at all. I had a television, with its pathetic built-in speakers, and I connected a DVD player and a VCR directly to it. When I finally built a system, I chose a Definitive Technology ProCinema speaker system. It was a staff pick at Crutchfield, and it reviewed […]
I’m already having second thoughts about buying the Canon C200. For one thing, I’ve been reading the manual and doing online research, and there are tons of exceptions and weird things the camera won’t do. For example, it records 4K, but it won’t output 4K on the SDI port. It supports free run time code, […]
When I chose a table saw, I considered getting one with a 48″ fence – a fence that could accommodate a 48″ wide work piece. Thus I’d be able to do just about anything with 48″ wide sheet stock on my table saw. There were practical reasons I decided to get a smaller table saw, […]
Having just completed two long nights working as a boom operator on a film, I am astonished to discover that my calves, rather than my arms, are complaining. I guess I haven’t been hiking enough. I do need to build up the endurance in my arms, though. There was one long scene for which I […]
I have a gig to record sound for a short film. This one is unusual in that all of the actors will be speaking into visible microphones (a PA system in an auditorium). I’ve been asked to supply microphones that will be used simultaneously as props and to record the dialog. I had a few […]
I have driven the highway through Great Smoky Mountains National Park again. This last time, the trees on the mountains were frosted white, and there was a smoky cloud hanging over the mountains. This has reaffirmed my goal of backpacking this park, which I plan to do during the summer of 2019. That means this […]
