I grew up with Steve Martin, but I can honestly say, that I never did get him as a child. It was only when I was older did I begin to appreciate his humor and style. I much preferred his screen movies that he wrote and directed.
On the other hand, after reading his autobiography, I did begin to appreciate what he was trying to do as well as the hard work used to perfect his craft. For any good artist, it begins with a long road of hard work, failure, practice, and more hard work as the craft is honed and perfected.
A great read if you have the time.
I recently rediscovered Pandora Radio, an application that streams music over the web based on a specific artist of interest. It uses feedback from other uses plus their own algorithm to decide which other artists to play along side the one selected. Classical, Jazz, Rock, Electronic – you name it.
For $36/year you can subscribe to the service and gain access to a commercial free stream as well as a better sound quality. For me, it was a no brainer. This morning, while up north, I was streaming classical music for Kay and I to listen to. Later on, the Gorillaz.
I also recommend Airfoil if you have additional iTunes express boxes in your house. We have one hooked up to a Bose radio, so I can stream Pandora directly to those speakers. Very convenient.
After the idiotic Supreme Court declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals, this small company has decided to take the next logical step: run for office. It is a bit of a joke, but it does send the message home.
Read more here.
Don’t trust the critics: Four Apple products they thought would fail.
My favorite part of this article
For the first half of 2007, before the iPhone actually hit stores, people either thought it was the greatest innovation of the past ten years (at least) or an overpriced, overhyped device that lacked features common to many other phones. Of course, there was no lack of punditry from those who thought the iPhone was doomed, and Apple right along with it. Tech critic John Dvorak said of the iPhone, “I’d advise people to cover their eyes. You are not going to like what you’ll see.” A former CEO of Palm said, “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” And who could forget Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, perhaps the best-remembered critic of the iPhone: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” Ballmer claimed Apple would be lucky to get 2-3% cellphone marketshare.
This evening I attempted to make another small bowl. I am finding that with each attempt, even if unsuccessful, yields more experience and insight into the entire process. I am certainly no natural in that projects I attempt are mostly successful. I tend to have to learn the hard way with the majority of my early projects ending in failure.
The funny thing is that I do not mind this. I found as I did with startups, it is okay to fail, just do not repeat the same mistake over and over. At TripAdvisor, that was our mantra. Fail early, fail often, but do not repeat your failures. It made for a very successful environment when running a web startup. I find it also applies to turning.
It is interesting that I find myself humored when things go wrong in the shop. This manual work and thinking is very different from my experiences as a software developer and head of software engineering teams. Tonight, when I broke through the bottom of the bowl, my initial reaction was pretty straight forward: where did I go wrong? Learn from the mistake and move on.
The mistake I made was pretty simple – I did not measure the depth of my cuts corrects and ended up too close to the bottom of the bowl. When I went to separate I tore out the bottom of the bowl. Bummer, yes! End of the world? Nah. Lesson learned.
This morning I had some small blocks of poplar that I used to create top-like pieces. The whole point was to practice using a skew chisel after spending some time sharpening them. I ended up creating some very interesting shavings as I formed the bottom portion of the top. I was holding the skew in such a way to create single piece shavings that held their definition. Very cool.
I had seen this done elsewhere, but I have never been able to do so myself. It is interesting when the shavings created are far more interesting than the end-product.
Apple finally supports the Panasonic Lumix GF-1 with their latest raw update. The list of cameras added with this update include:
- Hasselblad H3DII-50
- Leica M9
- Leica X1
- Olympus E-P1
- Olympus E-P2
- Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1
- Pentax K-7
- Pentax K-x
- Sony Alpha DSLR-A500
- Sony Alpha DSLR-A550
- Sony Alpha DSLR-A850
I will now update my version of Aperture to 3.0. More information can be found on the Apple’s support site.
Tonight I continued working on my round blank attempting to remove the tear outs. My father suggested I use a round nose scraper or a skew as a scraper. I tried the round nose scraper and it worked like a charm. Nice gentle kisses against the wood and eventually the blank was round. Very nice suggestion.
I then decided to turn this hunk of maple into a very simple bowl. I turned the outside and the bottom. I then cut a small hole in the bottom to allow the bowl to be held by a chuck. Flipping it around I secured the bowl to the chuck and started to hollow out the inside.
It was fun hollowing out the bowl as I have turned some boxes before. Different grain pattern, but the concept is the same. I used a small gouge and then utilized a scraper, both round and square. I was spending most of my time experimenting not really expecting to end up with a finished piece.
Near the end I went back to smooth the edge of the bowl and ended up catching on the side with a skew. I know immediately what I had done wrong, but the damage was done. A piece of the side cracked off and went flying across the room. Oh well, lesson learned and I will attempt another one tomorrow. More scraps for the fireplace.
Sorry about the poor photo, but I was using my iPhone under some poor light.
Man, what will they think of next? It appears that the US Copyright Lobby is asking the US government to consider open source software as the equivalent of piracy. This is seriously wrong. I do hope our representatives tell this lobby to just piss off. Imagine what would happen to all that has been built in this country using open source software. What would happen to Google, Facebook, Flickr, Ebay, to name a few? Are we just trying to crush our ability to innovate?
Read the full article here.
Last night I spent some time turning a square blank into a round blank in order to make a paper towel holder. The wood in use was maple with dimensions around 5.5 inches square. I was turning at a relatively slow speed using a 1″ roughing gouge. My problem was the persistent tearing out along one of the sides. Other sides behaved just fine so I am guessing that I ran into a grain issue.
I am going to spend time tonight looking at the blank and attempting to diagnose the issue. Was it the way I held the chisel, the wrong chisel, a bad piece of wood? I will post some pictures later this evening and continue on with this dilemma. I am sure searching the web will also enlighten me.
BTW: I turned a poplar blank of a smaller dimension without an issue.
Update: I spoke with my father and he suggested that I use a round nose scrape just kissing the wood. It worked like a charm.
A picture of the original problem
