Sunday, October 01, 2006

Mock-tober


Henry started pre-school last week. He enjoys it. Tempus Fugit, blah, blah.

Max says "I can wear a soup bowl as a hat!"

"See! I don't care that it has soup in it, it still works!"

"I am one stylish dude in my soup hat!"

Henry shows a collage he made in pre-school

"I was cleverly hiding this stick behind my collage"

So life continues.

Felice started a much better blog last month, she writes more and is much funnier than I am.
It's part of her "build a buzz about me on Etsy" campaign and has paid off in two pairs of earrings being sold...

I finally spent some of the money lavished on my for my birthday. I bought the Lego Mindstorms NXT. I could lie and say I bought it for Henry and Max, but you would see right through that gossamer excuse.

The plan for today is to build the "Start Here" robot, so called because there is a box labelled "Start Here" that contains the parts for the fist simple robot. We'll see whether Henry can focus enough on it to withstand the boredom of a complex assembly.
Here is the boring Mindstorms official blog and here is another robot blog.

I spent some time last week perusing Corvallis blogs, here's one with lovely nature pictures from around the area.

Here are "Gary's Clocks", PDF downloads of wooden clock plans. Looks like another fun to build project to add to my list.

Lest you think the Continostat is no longer on my mind, I was sent a link to an Ebay auction of a Nupubest, which is a similar contraivance from the same era. I may bid on it...but not too much.

The previous week has been spent milling parts of the secret device, let's just say that 100 arrayed 1.25mm holes would be difficult to drill without a CNC mill. I have again learned a lot through practice. I'm getting closer to being happy with a "Nick will model parts in Rhino for you" page, but I plan on changing many things before I put a link from my main site. Any comments about this first draft of a site would be appreciated. I think the whisk model is terrible. I'm working on an animation of the steam engine model that will be posted as well, if I ever finish it.

Finally, has anyone visited an Ikea store and checked out this chair? It looks good, but I am loath to buy a chair without some sort of review/feedback, and our local Ikea is about 300 miles away.

That's all for now...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have not tried the chair, but if you can wait, oh, about 10 months your local Ikea will be a lot closer. As in at the Portland Airport. As in I will go there and pick up the chair and bring it to you. As in, woohoo! Portland is getting an Ikea of its very own! No more driving to Seattle for the experience!!

Felice Luftschein said...

Of course Portland may as well be on the moon, given how difficult it is to go 10 minutes away to the supermarket...(although we'll eventually have to go to get Max's citizenship papers)
But let me know when you go to the new Ikea - find a 6 foot tall, 180-190lb guy in the crowd of customers and ask him to sit in the chair.

Da Man said...

Boy, LEGOs have certainly changed from when I was a kid.

Felice Luftschein said...

Yes James, and let me say that getting used to "studless" contruction is going to take a while.
This is the coolest toy ever though, next blog entry should have more details. I think if you can get the kids interested, they'll end up at Stanford or MIT.
(then again, the universe being what it is, my kids will be modern dance majors, not that there's anything wrong with that)