Gessel On…

Fuzzball

Interesting bit of trivia, @phragments, how one can drive through the three capitals: but one only takes 90 seconds…

– Sent from my mobile device

It was a fun weekend with the Westtown gang.

The debate was entertaining. Sarah was not the trainwreck we’d all hoped for after the Couric intervierws, but it had its moments.

I thought most remarkable was that she occasionally went off script and got lost.  The prep worked, but I guess they couldn’t cover every possible question.  There were moments where the Sarah we came to know and love from Couric came out.

Otherwise she filled the time trying to be cute and mugging for the camera, rolling her eyes and making cutsy expressions and spouting folksy aphorisms.

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I got a pair of Seth Thomas WBL-714-FS-SETH clocks out of a factory salvage; no instructions of course. They seemed simple enough, but I couldn’t get them to sync. There are the typical (for a radio sync clock) time zone buttons which make the hands move to the appropriate relative position by time zone. There is a big button that makes the hands move and a small button that seems to do nothing. They were not synced. I let them sit for a few days and they still were not synced.

I looked up the company’s web site and wrote a little note on their form, expecting nothing:
"I have two WBL-714-FS-SETH clocks. They do not seem to set themselves to the time signal. After a couple of days, they are not synchronized. Any hints?"

A day later I got this from Donna at the company:
"Dear David: It sounds like they are not receiving the signal. Have you tried moving them to a different location and see if they receive the signal? If not, try that. If you have tried different locations, then try taking the battery out for about 5 min, then put it back in, hit your time zone and if should advance to 4, 8 or 12. It will stay there till it receives the signal. You may just have to move them. Let me know how you make out."

It worked perfectly and now both clocks are synced. It was such a pleasant, prompt, and above all accurate response that it made me wonder if I’d ever received such good service before and as far as I can remember only McMaster Carr compares.

This is a really cool post about some vestiges of a highway that was almost built through Boston and Cambridge. When I was in school I heard a rumor of this 695 project and that MIT, for obvious reasons opposed to having a freeway run through the middle of campus, did a few things along the way to deter construction:

• Building 20 was declared a national historic landmark (where radar was invented during world war II) though it was originally intended as a temporary structure and in the time it took MIT to undo that declaration it became increasingly rickety. It is now the site of the new Stata center.
• Parking structures (W45) were built along the path (it was said for the difficulty in demolishing them, thought that makes less sense now than it did as an undergrad)
• The MIT nuclear reactor was built right in the path. My favorite lab experiment ever was testing neutron wave/particle duality in 8.13
• A couple of fusion reactors were built along the same path, though these came later I think. I remember that test firings, especially of the tandem mirror confinement, caused some cool effects even in the control rooms.

Over the holidays I visited the blacksmith I was apprenticed to as a child (roughly 1978-1986, though we couldn’t quite figure out the exact years). This is the welder I learned to TIG weld on and the smaller anvil was what I learned to forge steel against.

Greg Leavitt was a great inspiration to me and set me on the path of making things from an early age. It was also a great lesson in the value of hard work swinging a hammer all day in front of a coal forge. In August. In Philadelphia. 100% humidity, 95 degrees outside, 120-140 in front of the forge. Black boogers.

I have my own anvil and TIG now. Just because you can’t ever really get the coal dust out of your nose.

This cat showed up in the yard yesterday. Pregnant. Eeew.. But very friendly, though terrified of Stella, so perhaps the missing flesh was consumed by a dog…