So I haven’t updated in forever. No excuses really, I just haven’t felt like it.

Things are going well overall. The business has shifted recently from primarily graphics, to primarily computer work. Which is fine. It all pays decent and work is work. I’ve recently completed a logo package and a website for a professional society in Scottsdale, and I’m hoping to have screen shots and samples up on the business website soon. I’ve also done some other small custom projects here and there, but several of them are still not public, so I cant really add them to the site. I did recently redesign the business website template. I just need to get in there and do some more updating. One of these days.

I ended up working at a couple of Haunted Houses on and off throughout October, which was a good time. We rigged up lights inside the ambulance and installed a body bag on the stretcher and then freaked people out pretty effectively all month long. The main Haunted House we worked with was a charity deal, and the bulk of the proceeds went to various charities around town, so it was for a good cause, and they were a great group of people to work with. We plan on being back next year to help out as well. If you are interested in Haunted stuff in October and you are local, you should really check them out in 2011. The Slaughterhouse.

November was its usual blur. Took the Ambulance to Good-guys in Scottsdale and had a good time. (Although there were some quirks this year that I think they really need to work out.) The People and the cars were great though. We really had a good time up there. Spent some time hanging out with Amber and Mike in the GM performance Division display in the vendor area.  And they were kind enough to let us park the ambulance at their display on Sunday which was pretty cool.

From there we dropped right into Thanksgiving and the entire herd of family. Smoked the birds again this year, and tried a couple of new things in the process. We did a dry rub on one Turkey, which came out fantastic. And there were some new sides tried this year as well. Honey Glazed Carrots = Excellent! In the middle of Good-guys and Thanksgiving, we both decided to do NaNoWriMo again. And while it was an effort do to some outside things, we both managed to make the 50K target to win this year.

And that brings us to December 1. I’m thinking about decorating the ambulance for the holidays this year, but I’m not sure what I’d do with it if I did. I’m not very active with the club that does the holiday parade of lights anymore. While I’m sure they’d be happy to have me there, I Haven’t been active for a while, and it just doesn’t seem right to just show up for the fun stuff and then bail again. That’s one of the reasons I’ve stepped back from the club. I ended up being one of the only people in the club that did anything. Everyone else showed up for the fun stuff and then bailed right after. Beyond that, its the same stuff on a different day. Lots of things going this month. And then a new year.

I’d say that I’ll try to update more, but I probably wont. So I’ll see you when I see you, and if you need me, hit the contact button or just call or E-mail.

Have a good holiday!

Just a brief rant this morning.

I was up and about early this morning and I decided to run down and check the Business Mailbox early before it got busy since I haven’t checked it in a few days.  So I head out, hop in the car and as I’m backing out of the garage my gas light comes on.  Its early still, so I figure I’ll hit the gas station and fill up the car before it gets too busy there as well.  So I head off on my merry way.  As I’m standing at the pump at the gas station filling the car, I notice a truck come roaring in off the main street.  It pulls to a stop at the pump next to me and the passenger door flies open.  I figured it was someone that needed coffee or the restroom or something.

Imagine my surprise when the woman comes straight for me with paperwork in her hands.  She approaches the car and starts to give me the Pitch about a free message from God and offers me a copy of the “Watchtower”

Really?

In the middle of the gas station?

And you pulled off the street specifically to annoy me with this?

I told her I wasn’t interested, and she immediately turned and accosted the woman on the other side of the pumps who was filling her car. After getting a “Not interested” from the other woman, the fanatic returned to her truck, climbed back into the passenger side and the vehicle pulled out of the gas station and merged back into traffic.

THIS is why some religions have negative reputations.  Aside from the arrogance of thinking that everyone wants to share your religious beliefs, pulling off the street and into a gas station for the EXPRESS purpose of trying to give me your paperwork is absolutely out of bounds.  Are you people nuts?  I have a No Solicitors sign up at the house that keeps most folks out, so now you figure its OK to accost me when I’m out?  Do you people have no shame?  And before people tell me that this was an isolated incident, let me remind you that this ONE person is the one I came in contact with.  And this person just represented your entire religion to me this morning.  Great Job there!

And just to make sure I’m equal opportunity today, I decided to stop at the grocery store to pick up a few small things I forgot last night while we were there.  As I’m walking to the door I notice a brand new Mercedes that is parked ACROSS 2 handicapped spots right in front of the store.  Like 90 degrees across them.  Blocking the closest 2 out of the 3 handicapped spots.  No handicapped plate, no handicapped tag, nothing.  And as I get up parallel with the car, this woman comes walking out the front doors of the store with a Starbucks cup in her hand.  She disarms the car, gets in and pulls out.

Remind me why I cannot have an RPG or some C4 charges?  If anyone deserved to come back from her coffee run to a smoking crater it was this woman.  There were probably 6 cars in the ENTIRE parking lot.  Yet it was apparently too hard, and too complicated to actually park her car properly before she went in to get her coffee.  And I totally understand.  She drives a brand new Mercedes with personalized plates, and she is obviously a busy person and MUCH more IMPORTANT than the rest of us.

And she is still an inconsiderate person.  Some days I really wonder about the state of humanity.  Apparently we are just doomed.

Its the start of another new year, and its the time of the year where everyone makes all manner of resolutions that they will have forgotten by the first of February. I’ve never been fond of resolutions as they always end too lofty and vague to actually keep going. Not to mention that my needs and goals tend to shift throughout the year anyways. Rather than making resolutions for things I’d “like” to do this year, I decided to sit down and restructure some things and actually make some changes right now. I look at this as an evolutionary process. This will probably change as the year progresses, so I’ll make every effort to update this as things change. For now, this is how I’ve structured things.

1. My desk for the last few years has been a wasteland of junk, randomness, and various stuff. About 3 months ago, I realized that it was just not working for me and I cleaned. I mean, really cleaned. Blew it up and started over would not be too strong a description actually. I moved shelving around. Organized paperwork, cleaned out filing cabinets, and generally finally got around to throwing out items that I’ve been saving “just in case”. I realized that I do not need computer parts from 10 years ago. Technology has changed and those parts are truly obsolete so they were dumpstered. I also realized that piling paperwork up on the desktop was not actually accomplishing anything. Things just got stacked up higher and higher and I never actually looked at them once they went into the pile. So I changed all that. Paperwork got filed. filing cabinets were cleaned out and organized. And while I still have one cabinet to go through and tidy up, I ended up with huge amounts of space. I have a desktop I can use for actual work now. And anything that is not currently “in process” is put away. Is it perfect? Not by a long shot. But I have discovered that I *feel* like I’m more efficient. (Which may just be a placebo effect to justify the effort cleaning.) Either way, It seemed to help.

2. I figured if a little neatness helped the physical desktop, maybe it would help the computer desktop as well. I’m not sure I’m ready or willing to dive into re-skinning the desktop or any of the really exotic things that can be done with programs like Rainmeter or Samurize. I figured it would be best to start small and work figure out what I needed. So I decluttered my desktop. I moved all of the common applications that I use to a RocketDock application launcher bar. Again, its only anecdotal at this point, but it *seems* to make a difference. I seem to be less tempted to wander off and tinker with other things in the middle of a project. And I’ve discovered that it seems to be faster to actually get to where I want to go. I’m either using the application bar, or the built in search in Win7. And more surprising, I’ve discovered that I don’t really need all of the random text files laying around on the desktop that I used to have. I’m currently playing with OneNote and trying to keep all of my work related notes there so I don’t have to go looking when I need some information.

I’m sure that I’ll end up making some adjustments moving forward, but so far, restructuring has helped me feel like I’m accomplishing more. And even if my productive has not actually change, at the very least I have more room to work, which is always a plus.

Just another reason I like living with a little space around the house.

“Or how little I like working with reflective material.”

Usually I don’t post too terribly much about work related things here, but this has been consuming a good chunk of my time, and its turning out pretty nice if I do say so myself.  This is my latest client project. We are creating a “replica” AZ Department of Public Safety Car for a collector overseas.  All of the logos and striping are completely custom to avoid issues with the “real” cars. (Which are still in service) Although all of the graphics are similar enough to confuse everyone that has seen the car in person.  Almost every part of the car has something on it.  From small striping above the windows and on A-pillars and bumper ends, to the gigantic stripes and logos, roof lettering, trunk panels, and a million little parts here and there.  It should look pretty good when it goes home though.  And after dark, it lights up like a Christmas tree.  I am looking forward to sending this on its way and getting back to some basic projects with regular material that is easier to work with.   Its been an interesting project though.

Been away from the blog for while working on other projects here and there.  so I figured I’d just recap the last few weeks for anyone that cared.

Thrashed for several days in a row to get the Ambulance put back together and managed to get it done just in time for the Super Chevy Show at the beginning of April here locally.  Had a blast out at the drag strip for 2 days.  Spent most of Saturday wandering around and watching the various racing going on.  (a 1/4 mile run that is done on 2 wheels at over 130mph is INSANE BTW.  The guy the drives the wheel-stander does not make enough money doing that sort of thing.)  Sadly it was windy and fairly cold most of the day.  Still enjoyed myself though.  Little bit of drama near the end of the day when one of the jet powered dragster drivers crashed near the end of the track.  Found out later that he was “OK” and after some surgery and therapy they expect him to drive again.  Pretty amazing when you consider he was moving at more than 230mph when he crashed.   Ended up coming home Saturday night slightly congested from the wind and the dust.

Went back on Sunday and spent some time talking with Hayden Proffitt.  Absolutely could not have been nicer.  Scotty and I spent over an hour chatting with him and we enjoyed every second.  And while I never had the opportunity to see him race like Scotty did, talking to him was amazing.  He was warm and friendly and really amusing.  The man is hysterical to talk to.  Talk about a living legend in the drag racing world.  Absolutely the highlight of the weekend.

Ended up with a nasty cold after the weekend at the track.  So I spent the following week doing absolutely nothing but sleeping and sucking down soup and hot tea.

Ran a cut only job for one of my regular clients, which is fantastic right up until the cutter is finished and I have to weed all of those little stickers.  Just not excited about weeding these days.  Apparently I need to work on convincing clients that they want full color prints instead.

Designed and printed a prop validation sticker for my Bluesmobile.  And if I do say so myself, it came out fantastic.  Printed on reflective, it just looks like its supposed to.  I have to be careful to make sure they are plainly marked as props as they could easily be confused for the real thing.  They are that accurate looking.

This week is trying to get back in touch with some clients that I have proposals out with to see if we can get things firmed up and moving again.  Beyond that, I’ve been putting more time into some of the websites that I run to tighten up operations and streamline them.  Once I get the bugs worked out, I’m hoping to roll out regular content on some of those sites and see about building up the “brands” more than we have done in the past.

So its been busy, but nothing really exceptionally blogworthy.  Aside from meeting Mr. Proffitt, its been business and usual.  (With a bonus cold thrown in there for good measure.)

Hopefully more entertaining things are on the horizon.  Only time will tell.

After some additional engineering… and some more welding.. and a little more painting.. And a little muttering under my breath. The trellis is up and complete. Its freestanding, and actually pretty stable, and ready for the rose to be trimmed back and trained up the front panels. It took significantly longer than I had hoped, but it turned out really nice considering it was my first real welding project. (I kinda went into this with the theory that if you Aim low, you can avoid disappointment.) You can see in the photos that the roses have sort of exploded. Which is why we needed the trellis to begin with. The roses are too big to just let grow wild. They need some structure or we risk losing a good chunk of the end of the porch. Hopefully this will provide a decent base for them to grow on. And it turned out pretty cool looking as well.

On to the photos:

My musical tastes tend to run to the eclectic.  Anything from Devo and PSB to Glenn Miller and Yello.  Of late though, I’ve been wandering about the musical shores of other continents.  I’ve been through French Pop, some harder Euro Trance, and ended up most recently with Electronic Tango.  Which I will admit tends to sound a little odd at first read.  Think of some of the Tango inspired Yello tracks with a slightly more traditional flair and you are close.  All in all, quite a nice musical diversion.  From what I can gather, these folks are on the cutting edge of the movement.  Quite catchy, it sticks in your head and you find yourself humming along with it.

Gotan Project – Santa Maria (Del Buen Ayre)

This is a little late, but it figures into some things that I’m going to be doing here on the site, so I’m going to go ahead and pop back in time a little and delve into my welder and how it came to be.

I had been wanting to add a welder to the tool collection in the garage for a while.  I had projects piling up that I was not working on because they needed welding here and there and I couldn’t do it myself.  It was easier to just put them off and not work on them.   It ended up being much easier to do something else than coordinate with someone else to come weld the various projects up for me.  Last year I figured I might want to go ahead and seriously look into getting a welder so I could tackle some of those projects on my own.  I figured I was expanding the capabilities of the garage, as well as expanding my skills.  Maybe welding was a logical next step.

So I started looking around for info.  When I started doing research around the web in early 2007 to try to figure out which welding machine I wanted to add to the tools in the garage,  I was confronted with a massive amount of information.  Some relevant, some not.  And as I expected, everyone had their own opinions on brands and models and most of those folks are pretty strong in their opinions.  Those pages got tossed right away, I can form my own opinions.  And brand isn’t really critical to me as long as the tool will do the job I wanted it to do.  I tried to then sort through all of the rest of the info out there to distill it down to facts that were useful to me, rather than deal with all the marketing hype and opinions.  Now during all of that looking I noticed ONE constant thing.  It seems that all of the guys on the welding boards and the car boards all had the same basic bias.  Small 110V welders stink.  Period.  End of discussion.  Don’t even bother.  To hear these people tell it, anything that plugs into a normal house plug is totally worthless and a waste of space and money.  This I just couldn’t understand as that market segment reaches from a $79.00 unit at Harbor Freight, to big name machines that are almost $1000.  If they sucked so bad, and they didn’t really work, why did everyone (Including the major players) waste their time making them?  I’ve worked with professional companies that had high end gear that just did not make anything for the entry level.  I wondered why that the big boys would waste their time with a product that wasn’t apparently worth the effort.  With that in the back of my mind, I figured I needed to define what I was going to use the machine for.  Figuring that may help me narrow down the options a little.

So I sat down and tried to make a list of what I was going to use the welder for.  I came up with a really short list.  I realized quickly that while there were a lot of options, I didn’t have a lot of specifics in mind yet.  AllI could come up with was:

• Car stuff
• Random household repairs
• “Hobby” projects.

That was about all I could come up with that I wanted to do with it initially.  I quickly realized that whatever I planned to do with it now, that plan would more than likely evolve over time as I figured out more stuff I could use it for.   Realizing that trying to determine intended usage was less than helpful for me right now, I figured I’d go the other way.  Eliminate the stuff I would NOT be doing with it, and see if that helped narrow things down.

I determined really early that I had no desire to tackle any heavy duty welding.  (Car Frames, anything structural where someones safety depended on the welds, etc.)  I figured I have several friends that have big scary expensive welders that have been doing it a lot longer than I have.  If I have a need for anything like that, I’ll call them.  Maybe several years down the road, I’ll be more comfortable with that sort of thing, but not right now.  So I don’t need a really huge machine.  I’m learning on my own so I need something that’s pretty reliable and easy for a beginner to work with.   And I want something that’s not too huge that I have to move a car to get it in and out of the garage.

I looked and researched and did my homework and generally put off making a decision because I really didn’t have any clearer an idea what I needed than when I started looking.  And then I went to a GoodGuys show with one of my cars.  Wandering around the manufacturers area outside the tent, I came upon displays from both Miller and Lincoln.  I figured since I was going to be at the show for 3 days, I might as well talk to the reps there and see if that helped.

I talked to the Lincoln guys first.  (Mainly cause I ran across their booth first).  I explained that I was a clueless beginner, told them a little about what I was looking to do with the machine, told them what I was not planning to do with the machine, and finished up with my concerns about everyone saying that a 110 machine was a waste of money.  I then asked for recommendations for an entry level 220 machine.   To their credit, they listened attentively, and then took some time to address some of my concerns before getting into machines.  I was told initially that while they had some smaller 220 machines, for what I was talking about doing, a 110 Machine would actually be better.  They were less expensive than the 220 machines, and I was told that they were totally capable of doing what I was planning on using them for.  Part of the problem it seems that that all of the 110 machines get lumped together.  And its just not fair to compare a $100 unit with a $700 unit.  One is made in china to be cheap, and will perform like a $100 unit.  The more expensive units have the same engineering and components as the 220 units with the exception of the power supply hardware.   Aside from all of that, they put the gun from their 110 machine in my hands and let me play with it a little.  Then we moved to the entry level 220 machine.  (Both of which were inside my budget.  The 220 machine being JUST barely inside the budget).  I was pleasantly surprised by how well the little 110 machine worked.  For the brief testing I did there was not a noticeable difference between machines.

I then made my way down the row to the Miller Booth and went over all the same things with them.  Oddly enough, I got a lot of the same answers.  They too asked about projects and budgets and how often I thought I’d be welding, and came to pretty much the same conclusion as the Lincoln Guys.  A 110 machine would be fine for what I wanted, and it wouldn’t break the bank.  I tested several Miller machines and took a ton of paperwork and headed back to the car to do some thinking.  With the budget that I had, I could get either a 110 or a 220 from either vendor.  They were all capable machines.  And they would all do what I wanted them to do.  So what did I end up with?

I bought a Miller 140 with AutoSet.

Now to be fair, the Lincoln machine was very capable and every bit as nice as the Miller.  There were a couple factors that swayed me to the Miller.

• Their “Show Special” pricing was good for the entire month at my local dealer.
• The local store reps were at the show in the Miller booth and were every bit as knowledgeable as the Factory guys.  The Lincoln guys were great, but there were no local shops represented in the booth.  It was just corporate guys.
• With the Miller, I was able to get the AutoSet feature which Lincoln didn’t offer.  (which has proven to be VERY handy when I want to just fire it up and run a quick bead.)
• With the show special, I was able to get the machine, a tank of gas, some accessories and supplies, and gloves and a helmet. The local vendor also put together a package price for everything I wanted that included the show special on the machine and discounts on all the other gear.   With either vendor, had I gone with a 220 Machine, I would have gotten just the machine.  Anything else would have put me over budget.

Had the show special been better for the Lincoln, I would probably have one of those in the garage right now.  And I would not hesitate to recommend a Lincoln machine to anyone.  The Miller was just a better deal for me at that time.  The local dealer has been fantastic, and every time I’m in there, I’m treated excellent.  These guys work hard to keep customers happy, and that’s huge in this day and age.  They are happy to sell me stuff, but equally happy to answer questions and talk welding.  They have earned my business, and I have no desire to go anywhere else at this time.

As for the machine itself?  Fantastic!  Its been a great investment.  I’ve used it for automotive projects ranging from repairing exhaust systems, to repairing suspension mounts, to some small panel repairs.  And the welds have all been fantastic.   I haven’t found anything that I want to do that it can’t handle yet.  As shown in the last few posts, I’ve also been using it to build a trellis for some gigantic rosebushes that we have in the back yard.  And the machine has worked flawlessly.  Some folks told me that the duty cycle was not enough on the 110 machines to support a days worth of welding.  And while there maybe truth to that, I can tell you that I’ve spent the better part of a couple of Saturdays out there welding and the machine is always ready when I want to lay a bead down.  So apparently its duty cycle is better than mine. 

So if you are looking for a small welder for hobby use and tinkering around the house and don’t have a 220 outlet handy, the 110 machines from the major players are well worth the money.  Don’t let the people out there on the internet that like to slam these machines get you down.  These are very capable machines, and well worth the money in my opinion.  If I was depending on a welding machine to put food on my table, I’d get a bigger machine obviously.  But I’m not.  For hobby and homeowner and general use these are excellent machines.  It does what I want it to do, it does it well, and its fun to do.  All pluses in my book.  For my needs, I’m very happy with my “little” Miller 140.   If I was buying it today for the first time, would I still get the 140?  Absolutely!   Its a great little machine.  As your needs may be different than mine, Your mileage may vary.  But get out there and test machines until you find one that works for you.

Happy welding!