Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

You can tell I'm a cat owner just by looking at me.

But don't worry, I'm sure the bleeding will stop soon.

(It was an impressive, elegant, beautiful leap clear across the bed to the floor on the other side ... which she missed by maybe an inch and a half, catching my foot on the way down. This was just after I'd finally won a round of "steal the string from the cat" and Perrine had decided to switch the game to "try to steal the string from the human".)

( the preceeding not quite QotD-worthy joke that I liked, as long as I'm already transcribing from this video ... )

"Sometimes I don't know if it's really a mid-life crisis or just second wind. You hear of a guy, 'Yeah, he's having a terrible crisis; he's living in the Florida keys on a boat, he has a twenty year old girlfriend who's a yoga instructor, he's making such a fool of himself.' Yeah that's, uh, what a jerk. What a disaster for him, he must feel so foolish." -- Craig Ferguson in the opening monologue of the CBS television show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, episode that aired in the wee hours of 2007-03-03 -- dated 2007-03-02 by the network.

I often find myself reaching for a camera in low light situations where a flash is inappropriate or what I want to capture is the lighting itself. So I've shot a lot of what is customarily called "available light" photography, which a bandmate dubbed "available gloom".

I also favour longer lenses; often, what fascinates me is some small detail across the room, or just a candid moment -- a fascinating facial expression, for example -- that I'll interrupt if I move close enough to distract the subject.

The problem, of course, is that longer lenses don't usually open up to the wider apertures to let in enough light for "available gloom" shooting.

But thanks to someone on the Pentax-Discuss mailing list, I now know what lens I want.

No, no, do not tell me how much it costs, and especially do not tell me how much it weighs; you'll spoil my daydream. While you giggle, I'll be over here envisioning ways to make that thing less conspicuous at a medieval feast ...

So there's this thing I've wanted to make for a while that got back-burnered. I was planning to make it out of right-angle steel stock from a hardware store, and asking my brother or a friend to do the welding. Seeing almost the thing I wanted in a catalog reminded me of this project, and I thought of a way to do the corners that I don't think I'd considered earlier.

Does it make sense to cut a notch in one side of the stock, then bend the piece over a brake until the edges of the notch meet, and weld the cut edges together, as shown in the top set of figures below?

The other methods that I'd thought of were to make a miter cut and weld the edges, or (as suggested by my brother who has actually done some welding) to make straight cut, overlap the edges, and include enough slop in the other aspects of the design to account for the pieces on either side of the corner being offset by the thickness of the stock.

([Whoops -- there's an error in the last drawing -- an extra welded edge drawn where none would be. I'll put up a corrected drawing later.] The green marks in the diagram represent welds (assuming welding works the way I imagine).)

Most of the corners I want to make will be right angles. Two will be obtuse (probably either 135° or 150°).

The thing I want to make is a custom portable desktop rack for musical electronics, with a vertical section for effects and a sloped upper portion for a mixer, similar to the configuration in one of those pop-up mixer+other-stuff rack/case combos, but open-frame instead of built into a case, and hopefully much cheaper. I saw a similar open rack with only a sloped face in a catalog for a lot less than I expected, but it's too steep for what I want -- it'd be fine for just a bunch of racked guitar effects on stage, but not so comfortable to use for a mixer.