Twenty years ago, in the early days of the internet, a physics teacher with an interest in aviation history started building a list of U.S. aircraft serial numbers, matching them to the aircraft type, and researching the history and distribution of each individual plane. His list—and his name—became famous in the online aviation community as the go-to reference for what a plane was, where it was sent, and what happened to it. The list was always bare-bones: a tabbed HTML file with the barest of formatting, but he updated it frequently. I went looking for a serial number the other day and my decades-old bookmark led to a broken link; some further searching revealed Joe Baugher had passed away from cancer in 2023, and a new historian took over the list at a new URL.
- When someone pronounces et cetera (/et ˈsedərə/) as “eggseddera”. We are not making salad with mayonnaise; we are denoting the fact that there are more things in a list we aren’t mentioning. There’s a T in there, friends, let’s use it.
- The word trainings, e.g., “we’re having some trainings on proper use of company credit cards.” I know we talk about meetings, but trainings was never pluralized until I entered the NGO space. Now I’m going to go have a walkings with my dog.
- Corollary: Learnings. E.g.: What learnings have you taken away from this event?
- When someone talks about being orientated towards something. Especially when it’s a BBC reporter. I suppose this is a British English thing, but it still hits me like nails on a chalkboard. You’re oriented towards something. You attend an orientation.
What bastardizations of the English language have you heard lately?
Here’s the latest YouTube video from the last two and a half weeks. It’s a bit overdue because of the weather, but it covers a bunch of different projects.
I walked out of the UPS store this afternoon with a paper slip in my hand and a feeling of melancholy. It didn’t help that the sky was gray and the wind was blowing. a few moments before, I walked in the store with a neatly taped box to mail off to a guy in Miami: inside a protective cocoon of Kraft paper lay my Steinberger bass guitar, something I’ve owned since college and carried with me since then. It’s been sitting in the corner for years, and every year I would take it out and play it, but after I bought the bargain Jazz bass and compared the two, I realized how much more I enjoyed playing the Fender. I’ve shopped it around to several stores in this area and gotten lowball cash offers for it, so I put it up on Reverb at a price that seemed to be reasonable for the market and waited. That was four years ago.
Last Thursday an offer popped up from this guy in Florida, and after some back and forth we settled on a price that I felt OK with. It’s lower than I was asking (after having reduced my initial price once) but still much more than I paid for it, and at this point in history I feel better about having cash in hand than a bass collecting dust in the corner. Strangely though, I’m not as bummed out as I thought I would be; I think I came to terms with selling it a few years ago, and was just waiting for circumstance to catch up with me.
So the bass will make its way to Florida, and when the buyer takes possession, I’ll get my payment from Reverb. I feel better about rolling the dice this way—eBay was never an option—and I’m hoping it all goes smoothly.
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Happy to have this completed. My team was awesome; I couldn’t be prouder of all of them.
Every six months or so, I look at the bins of antique computing hardware stored in the basement, and wonder whether I should continue to keep them, or pull the pin and recycle everything after wiping the drives. Then I stumble on an article like this one from the Harvard Law Library, and I feel better about having kept everything.
With digital storage there will always be two separate but equal battlefields of maintenance to consider: maintenance of the digital holdings and software environments in which they live, and the simple physical maintenance of the hardware and architecture that contain them.
It’s a really well-written and well-designed article, and worth reading if you nerd out on stuff like this. Now, to think about a secondary data backup for the server in the basement.
My Instagram feed has been suggesting videos of parts being turned on lathes for a couple of months now. They must know it’s the ASMR my brain needs to soothe itself. I’ve always been curious about how they work and fascinated by the engineering behind them; there’s so much to learn about tolerances and the math behind how to cut threads in bolts. One of the YouTube channels I follow just posted a video where he saved a professional lathe from being scrapped, got it back to his shop, and modified it to run on regular 120V house power vs. the three-phase it was built for. Along the way he shows how it works, explains some of the basic math behind its electrical requirements, rigs up a 120V motor and a three-way switch to make it work.
Once again, I am super jealous. I would LOVE to have a shop big enough to hold this and the time to learn how to use it properly.
In 2004, Jen and I had a choice to make. We were planning out our new kitchen, and we had to make the most of the space we had, as well as our money. I’d taken out a home equity loan to front the cash, so we were on a fixed budget, and that prevented us from doing the obvious thing, which was to blow out the wall between our dining room and the kitchen to open the space up. We worked with a kitchen planner and they helped us fit a set of cabinets into the space we’d inherited, but the critical choice we had to make was this: whether or not to sacrifice a cabinet for the radiator that was shoehorned under the existing rental-grade countertop. We decided, correctly, that storage was more important, and removed the radiator. But we’ve been living with the fallout of that decision ever since, and it’s never been more apparent than this past week of single-digit temperatures.
It sucks to be out there when it’s cold outside. To the point where Jen has turned the oven on just to stay warm while making food. Even when the radiator was there, it was never any great shakes; the kitchen is at the very end of the closed-circuit loop in our steam heating system, which means that it and the bedroom above get the least amount of heat last. But walking in there after just having gotten out of bed to get some coffee started is like walking through a snowbank; it sucks.
Contrast that with the Schluter radiant floor heat system we put in the master bath, which is like walking on a warm hug. In the morning, when the cats are freed from their prison (they sleep in the basement, otherwise they rattle the bedroom door and keep Jen up all night) they make a beeline for the bathroom and lay around up there all day. I can’t say I blame them; there have been days when I’ve wanted to shove them aside to take a nap.
Looking around the interwebs, I found a radiant floor retrofit kit for houses like ours, where the entire thing is essentially a roll-out mat sold in various lengths that are attached to a central 120V controller. You staple them to the joists under the floor with about 2″ of void space, and then tuck insulation up underneath. Something like this would go a long way to making things more livable out there, and we could move the big, bulky Edenpure heater my Mom gave us out of there for good.
Given that interest rates aren’t going down anytime again in my lifetime, and we’re going to need to make this dump more livable for the future, $2K in materials + electrician visit to hook it up wouldn’t be disagreeable.
I finally finished playing the library’s copy of Star Wars: Fallen Order and returned it after having renewed it twice; I liked it enough to find a cheap copy of its sequel, Jedi Survivor, on sale at Amazon, and bought it. These games are a fun challenge, and much different than the shooters like The Division and the shooter/loot grab titles like Fallout I’ve been playing. Truthfully, I’m pretty tired of the Bethesda engine. Nuclear apocalypse, sword-and-fantasy, or outer space: it’s all the same mechanics, and there’s very little that’s new to the formula. The Jedi games are 50% skill based puzzle-solving and 50% kool lightsaber fights, all set in a sprawling, richly detailed environment. They don’t go super dweeb-heavy on the lore, and there’s just enough of a music cue to let me know I’m in a galaxy far, far away without beating me over the head with it. (See: Battlefront, which was fun but forced me to shut off the music entirely).
Speaking of the library, I had to drive Finn out to a different branch to pick up a book for school, and found it to be much larger, and much better stocked, than our local. I walked out with a stack of 10 CDs, two new games to try, and an interesting history book. Their wall of multimedia is huge compared to the branch down the street—so I believe this will be my new go-to for the immediate future.