The computer has decided to not play nicely with the printer. I hate it when this happens. I need to print out some more business cards. I would really like to break away from this nasty habit and get some cards professionally printed, but I’m not settled enough on a design to commit to 1000+ cards just yet. Thus far, I’ve been printing on Avery’s smooth-edge business cards with an old HP LaserJet. The printer does a nice job, but it needs a good cleaning at the moment.

Things that I like about this printer are that it’s been incredibly simple to use, and it runs well. It was manufactured in February of 2002. It has logged 22,573 prints in its lifetime. Of those twenty-two and a half thousand pages printed, the errors are well under a hundred. The system only stores the fifty most recent errors, but it was under that number when we purchased it used, several years ago. I’d like to completely tear it down, clean it out, install new, HP-branded supplies, clean the duplexor, and upgrade the ram. Then, it would be like a new one again. We bought the printer at a garage sale for $100 after confirming that it did indeed function. The toner cartridges were each under 10% remaining, but we still got many hundreds of prints out of them before we had to order new cartridges. We went ahead with remanufactured cartridges from a third-party supplier (which I have regretted), and it has largely run well. The price was kind of ludicrous. We were planning on picking up a color laser printer, and had planned on spending a few hundred dollars for a new one. When we found the big HP for $100, we kind of had to do it.

Plug it into the network, and it works. Mostly. When we first set it up, we had to tell it which network it was on, and we had to override DHCP a couple of times to get it to IP correctly. There are reasons that most households don’t see a printer like this one. For one, you’ve got to have a decent working knowledge of networking to get full functionality out of this beast. Secondly, they are big and heavy. Lastly, you can’t usually get a working example for $100. It has been running smoothly and trouble-free for quite a while now. Well, up until now, actually.

Over the weekend, it became clear that this was going to be a busy week for me. I’ve got quite a bit of work lined up to get done, and I’ve got several deadlines to meet. I gave out the last of my business cards over the weekend, so I hopped on the computer last night to print out some new ones. That’s when the trouble started.

Open Office was very sluggish opening my business card files. In fact, it acted as if it was freezing up. So, I shut everything down, restarted and tried again. Similar results. Ran a full scan with Spybot S&D and tried again. Now, Open Office will open my files (slowly). Good enough. When I went to print, it told me that the printer was not present. I tried to print from Adobe reader instead with the same results. I also tried from Notepad.

I’m running M$ Windon’t XPee SP3 on a FrankenDell with a P4HT and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.25-Gb Ram. I opened up Printers & Faxes to see if I could diagnose the ‘missing’ printer from there. When I asked for properties on the printer in question, I was informed that the printer was missing.

I logged into the router via Opera and checked for DHCP clients. There, I can see the printer. I pinged the printer by IP just to make sure I wasn’t missing something obvious. Four sent, four received, nice fast connection, no problems. I shut off the printer and restarted it. I deleted the printer from the computer and attempted to reinstall it. In the printer installation wizard, I specified the printer by IP address, and the computer gave me an error, saying that it couldn’t find the printer there.

At this point, I’m at a loss. If I can ping the printer, why can’t I connect to it? I’m hoping that I haven’t screwed Windon’t up to the point that I’m due for a fresh install. I don’t have time to be monkeying on this crap. This week even more so than the last few, I need to be a designer, artist, and craftsman. Not a network sysadmin chasing ghosts in the ethernet.

It just figures, doesn’t it?

I shall tag Jenni who will write the next line and pass it on. I’ll do my best to keep up with the updates. Feel free to join in in the comments section. Okay, here we go!

Black and blocky
was the Glocky
that did slay
the Jabberwocky.

Next victim! Muhahahahha!!!

Update:

Original Line:

Black and blocky
was the Glocky
that did slay
the Jabberwocky.

Quoth Jennifer:

Asked did he
upon demise
What could be
the caliber size.

Sarah:

Jabberwockies, so hard to slay,
will go down if they are shot
with a round starting with “four”
and bearing the name Gold Dot.

And Christina:

The Jabberwock, not known for wit
is easy to be stalked.
You merely find a place to sit
and leave him to be Glocked.

He comes galumphing, trailing drool
and doesn’t glance my way.
Oh, shit! No Vorpal-ammo, Fool!
He lives to die another day.

Then Lissa:

And as in uffish thought she stood,
The Goblin-wock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the front-door wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! NOT through-and-through
My lil’ Siguette went snicker-snack!
The four nine-mil’s quite turned its head
And put him on his back.

To both my readers – I’m sorry. I haven’t been a very good blogger lately. If you have been following my rants, you both probably know that I haven’t been very good at keeping up with my online presence. You probably also know that I’ve been working – A LOT!!!!! If you haven’t, you can pretty much catch up on the antics here or here. If you haven’t already, GO, READ!

As you can already tell from the preceding, I’ve been worked really hard over the course of the last month’s time. I’ve been on my feet on a shop floor for a good ten hours a day. This is no excuse for my absence in my blogging, but I hope that you will forgive me and understand that there has been some other pressure.

I learned a lot at Appleseed when we went, but it was a real disaster to me in the present state of things. It was a real lifter to Jenni, and you can read about it here. Once again, I learned A LOT. If I skip the part about my failure (or my lack of mastery) can I skip on to the part about bad equipment without guilt? Frankly, I feel like the equipment challenges forced me to learn a whole lot more than the other students of the workshop. This won’t be my last Appleseed, as I WANT THAT PATCH!!!!!!!!

Jenni and I are still in the one-income mindset for some reason. This means that we’ve been living on the cheap (a.k.a. like poor people), and I’ve been working a lot of hours, and dragging the cash home. So, we found ourselves with a household export deficiency.

When Christmas was coming around, we had this grand idea that we were going to have a gunny Christmas. The fat man was going to come down our non-existent chimney with a bag full of shooty goodness, and he was going to leave a precision air rifle for the kiddo, a DAO Beretta PX4 Storm .45 for Jenni, and a Saiga 12 for Your’s Truly. But, that didn’t happen. Life got in the way, and we took care of life instead. We made it right for the kiddo, but we vowed that we’d take care of each other later.

Valentine’s Day came and went. I was unemployed. This weekend, we found ourselves together with a little excess cash. So, we took care of each other. We found a great Nikon camera that Jenni couldn’t go on without, and we made our way to the range to return some loaner gear to my friend, Will.

While we were at the range, I looked over that 12-gauge AK that I’ve been imagining owning. They didn’t have the exact model that I’d like to own, the price was a little higher than I remembered, and I was thinking of all the mods I’d have to do to it before I loved it. So, after much deliberation I didn’t go that route. Instead, I bought a brand new Smith & Wesson M&P45c.

“Why that particular gun?” you might ask. Well, I’ve been a fan of Smith & Wesson since I’ve been even fascinated by guns. They haven’t let me down yet. Jenni has the 9mm equivalent of this gun, and although I was thinking about getting a nine, it made more sense for me to get a different caliber if I was getting the same model – and I don’t believe in .40 or .357 Sig. Bang for the buck, it’s really hard to argue with S&W’s M&P guns. They’re really fantastic firearms for the green they command.

While at the range, I rented a S&W M&P45 full-sized model, just to get the feel for the thing. The rental gun was well-abused, with many thousands of careless rounds put through it. And, its countenance showed it. The sucker was visibly mal-handled as a lifestyle. The polymer frame was warped away from the muzzle, and everything in it that could rattle was. And yet, it returned fuzzy hole after fuzzy hole in the way of groups. The gun felt remarkably solid in the hand and all actions were consistent – safety, slide, trigger, etc.

Smith & Wesson is currently offering a $50 or two-free mags mail-in rebate on this line of guns, so the economics made perfect sense. I went to the young man who had showed me the Saiga and broke the news that I would not be buying that shotgun – but asked him if he would sell me a pistol instead.

Over the weekend, Jenni and I took the little big bore to the range. She performed perfectly over the course of 200-rounds. I resisted the urge to be horribly stingy, and let Jenni shoot her a few times. Although the users weren’t perfect, the equipment itself performed flawlessly. There were fuzzy groups returned when we shot our wellest, and adequate-to-kill-teh-BG for our worstest of shooting.

This evening, when Jenni was out to church choir, I walked down to the range at the corner and picked up some defensive .45. It’s the Bonded PDX – or whatever bullet, as loaded by Winchester. Now, I need to work myself into my holster-making schedule. My real customers come first, but this girl will have a name and be riding in good leather in no time flat!

Jenni has taken some very impressive pictures with her new camera, and the new pistol shoots wonderfully. So, for a VERY late Christmas present, Jenni took some nice shots at my new pistol. I very wisely did not reciprocate. There are pics of the new gun which will come out shortly, but you aren’t missing anything as it looks like a very generic, polymer, striker-fired auto-chucker.

So, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Happy St. Patrick’s Day and Merry Christmas to both my readers!

At work, I’ve been getting spam from what appears to be some kind of Russian dating site. I obviously have not followed the link, for fear of contracting some kind of digital disease. But, I’ve been giggling at the messages in the emails as I peruse my “Junk E-mail” folder. Here are a couple of gems:

Subject line:

If you are disappointed in its second half, bold, come in!

..and the body text:

I can do for you is – what can not no girl! Step to enter [web link redacted]

It cracks me up when spambot girls speak engrish! She sounds like a LOLcat!

Here’s another:

Subject line:

You feel lonely? “I’m too lonely, a friend of the other company?

(I love the superlative quotation mark!)

And, the body text:

Hey, why do not you write? You forgot about me? “I am very unhappy without you, remember me?” It’s me, Olga from Russia, Moscow, remember? I’m waiting for you on his page on the Internet, and miss you terribly!

Um… Olga *shuddering at the mental image of the woman that this name evokes* – srsly NOT interested!!! Whose page are you waiting on again? Maybe you should hit ‘him’ up. I prefer my women less digital and more familiar to me. In fact, I prefer my women in the singular, and I’m really quite happy actually. Thanks anyway.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve got two new links on my blogroll!

Falinfenix, who has commented on my blog on several occasions (and whose comments are always welcome) writes a pretty darned good blog herself – even if not frequently. She still writes more often than some of the others on my blogroll. And, you know who you are!

I have no idea why Lorimor has not been on my blogroll. That’s weird, actually. Welcome aboard, anyway!

To my two readers: Go. Read. Enjoy.

p. s. – OrangeNeck in NY still needs to write his own blog. We should put pressure on him at every opportunity!

By now, anybody who has been been reading my blog is aware of my watch experiments. For anybody else who doesn’t feel like following that link, here’s a quick update: My Seiko and my Tag Heuer were both significantly losing time, after relatively fresh overhauls. The reason I’m wearing mechanical movements is that something about my body’s chemistry quickly kills quartz watches. Since both automatics were losing time, I decided to demagnetize them and see if that fixed the problem. With the Seiko, it very much did fix the problem.

I’ve been wearing my Tag for six weeks now since the demagnetization. I set it to the time on my phone, which as you probably have assumed is set by the atomic clock in Colorado. At this point, the Tag is eight minutes fast, according to the same reference. So, it appears to be gaining 1:20 per week, which although not perfect, is a significant improvement over what it was doing prior to the demagnetization. Until this writing, I have not attempted to start the timer on the watch. But, I will now start the timer and run it for a minute as a preliminary test.

…

The one minute test functioned correctly, except the reset seems to be jammed on the minute hand of the timer. I’m going to reset the time, turn on the timer and run it for a couple of hours see if that corrects the problem. I’ll let you know what happens!

…

UPDATE *cheesey telegraph beeping sound*

The Tag’s movement got completely jammed when the timer had hit about half an hour. The minute hand still doesn’t reset. I’m really annoyed. I’m going to call the jeweler who rebuilt it and give them a piece of my mind!

I am vaguely aware that my son often watches this show on Cartoon Network or maybe Nick (I believe) called Avatar. I’m not one of those disconnected parents that sees the T. V. as the babysitter, and have watched this show with him on multiple occasions. It seems like an innocent enough fantasy story with nothing that I find terribly objectionable in it, but I find it so mind-numbingly boring that I couldn’t tell you who the characters are or anything that they’ve ever done. What I’m watching for is to make sure that some stranger isn’t filling my kid’s head with crap that he doesn’t need. I heard somewhere that they were making a live-action, silver-screen, feature-length version of this show, and I know that he’s going to want to see it. Then, I started hearing these rumors about Avatar hitting the theaters this weekend. “Great,” I thought, “Let’s take kiddo to a matinee on Saturday and check out this little flick. So, I looked into it a little.

So, what’s with the blue people? I don’t remember much about the show, but I don’t remember blue people. the chick looks pretty hot, if you can get over the weird eyes. Actually, that’s kind of… Wait a minute! Marines? I don’t remember Marines being in the cartoon, much less the central characters. Where’s the munchkin with the arrow tat on his gourd? I’m not sure this is the same movie that I’m thinking of at all!

My lovely wife then explained to me that I was confused. It’s James Cameron’s political propaganda picture Avatar that’s coming out on 12/18/09, which has absolutely noting to do with the cartoon that I don’t really remember. She explained that the movie that I was thinking of is The Last Airbender coming out this Summer.

Airbender? Really? I thought the show was called “Avatar.” I had pizza last night and have been bending air all morning. Does that count? Still, that looks a whole lot more like I think it should. Apparently, I’m not the only one that thinks this is a little confusing.

This is just too weird. When they come out with the live action version of Ghost in the Shell, will they name it “Innocence” due to a copyright technicality? Will there be some random pile of special effects and heavily-weighted agenda message coming out half a year earlier that steals the title by legal technicalities? What about Cowboy Bebop? Is there nothing sacred in Hollyweird anymore?

Huh. I guess I just answered my own question.

On that note, let’s watch a Cowboy Bebop teaser!

I REALLY hope they don’t F this one up.

On October 27, I wrote about attempting to demagnetize my watch to see if that would make it keep better time. On Saturday, October 24, I used my Elimag on both my Seiko and my Tag Heuer. The Tag has been in my underwear drawer since then, but I’ve been wearing the Seiko constantly. I reported that my Seiko had been losing approximately six minutes a month, and that I wondered if this problem was due to magnetism. On November 1, I forgot that I was conducting this experiment, and went to reset it, as I have the habit of doing at the beginning of each month. So, I lost my results for that week. However – today, December 1, I am happy to report that my Seiko has actually gained a minute in the last month! I would consider that a huge success! When I get home this evening, I’ll stash my Seiko in my underwear drawer and switch over to the Tag again (that is – if I don’t forget). We shall see whether I experience similar results with it. I wonder if other people have trouble with their mechanical watches and magnetism…

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how I’m probably going to need to get a sewing machine for my holster work. If I can simplify my stitching setup, I’ll be able to speed production for a couple of reasons: Hand stitching holsters is time-consuming and it’s very hard work. Even if I could speed production in hand stitching, I’d get one heck of a case of tendinitis, which would halt production altogether. I need a machine. So, I set out to do some homework, and have come to several, unfortunate truths.

A lot of people doing the kind of work that I’m doing are using vintage machines. Some of the old industrials are unparalleled beasts. The biggest problem is that they are very expensive, and will probably need work and parts to be right. Plus, they are huge and heavy. I simply don’t have the space or money for such a thing, and I need to purchase something that I can immediately put into service, not something that I’d have to tinker with or find somebody else to work on. I’m not into the idea of picking up a project that will eventually lead to production after much investment and much more, subsequent investment.

So, I looked at some new machines. There are several sewing machine shops in town. The heaviest machine that Bernina makes is the 950 Industrial. This is not a leather machine. From what I can tell, it is a really heavy-duty dressmaker. I believe that it would do leather garments quite beautifully, and it shouldn’t have much trouble doing upholstery grade leather. The Bernina reps seemed to believe that it would work for me, until I brought some of my material to demo at the store. Then, they told me that it would not work for that. I visited the Pfaff store, and was pointed to the Grand Quilter. Once again, when I produced sample leather, the story changed. I’m sure that it really is a grand quilter, but it is not a leather machine.

Then, I visited a less-retail store called Huey’s. The people there are friendly and knowledgeable. The first machine they pointed me to was the Juki DNU-1541. This was by far, the most promising machine I had looked at. They had a demo machine that they allowed me to play with. It is tough, and it is smooth. It will sew through about 3/8-inch of leather, which is honestly fine for most of what I do. Then, they broke the machine sewing through my leather. With much tinkering and tuning, they were able to get it to reliably stitch through two layers of my leather, but it was working too hard on it. Sadly, this machine will not work, either. The next machine they pointed me at is about three times as much money. I just can’t justify that right now.

One oddball machine that I stumbled across early in this search is the Tippmann Boss. This is a manually-operated stitcher that operates by a hand-lever like a casino machine. I kind of wrote off this machine early on, thinking that I could get a powered unit for the same price. After everything that I’ve looked at, this is starting to look like a far more valid option. I might ask Huey’s about some of the heavier Jukis, but this is currently on my mind:

I could work with that. At a svelt 23-lbs, and with its compact nature, it would fit my current lifestyle better than a powered machine. It would achieve what I’m currently needing, and for far less money. With the way it would accelerate production, it shouldn’t take long to pay for itself, and possibly a more serious machine later on! Perhaps I’ll wind up buying something like the Bernina or Juki for lighter work, and dedicate the Boss to the heavier insanity that I like to tackle from time to time… I’d still have to figure out some way to come up with the scratch in the first place…

Bbbbbblllllllaaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!

This really sucks! I’ve got some upcoming material, but nothing that I can really write about right now. On top of that, I’ve been a little preoccupied lately. That certainly hasn’t done well for my blogging motivation! Needles to say, Jen has been working through some issues (at a startling rate, I might add), and I’ve been facing my own demons since they tend to be intertwined with hers. Perhaps one day I’ll feel brave enough for full disclosure on such things. That might be good…

Anyway, I’m looking forward to writing up my post on this wacky, new holster that I’m making for my sister-in-law! I finished the structural forming and did some structural testing last night. The good news is that it works! It holds the gun very stable and the draw and reholster are quite quick and easy. The scheme is pink and purple, so she’ll love wearing it, and it shows off a lot of gun! The bad news is that the belt-loops are TIGHT!!!! My brother will probably have to help her get dressed when she wears the thing, at least until the leather softens up enough that it isn’t a fight to put on a belt. Also, it’s no CCW holster. It doesn’t retain well enough to keep it away from a BG, but I don’t know how much value there is in that anyway. It very decisively does not pull the gun in, so the butt prints in anything short of a very heavy coat. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post pics of the finished product soon.

Jen recently suggested that I write up a review on S&W’s 586 L-Comp, as I carry two of the suckers every day. Of course, I blinked at her and asked her why I hadn’t thought of that. I am looking forward to writing said post, but I’m going to need some fresh pics to do that. It’s been rainy and nasty, and I haven’t had a chance to clean and oil them, and any other excuse that I can think of to cover my laziness… I’ll get on that before too terribly long. I’d like to get some good range pics for that post. If all goes well, I should be able to get some this weekend.

Anyway, I know it’s been a little dry. Anybody care to loan me another gun to review on here?

p. s. – Oh, I almost forgot! I’m still looking for a sewing machine. Juki makes one that I need to spend some more demo time on, but I think it will do what I want it to. I’ll let you know how that comes out. If/when I do buy a machine, I’m going to have to get rid of some crap and do some rearranging. (I hate housework!)