[ale] OT - Simple machines

[James P. Kinney III]

You've been talking with Jenn. Her life's goal is to install Linux on a
glass of water.

Rock tumblers are great. They can turn the most ordinary chunk road
gravel into a sparkling thing of beauty.  Check with any local college
that has a geology department. They will happily take you and your
little girl on a grand tour of their labs and the big rock toys. They
can also point you to one of several touring gem and mineral shows. They
are big fun! You can pick up everything from a nugget of South American
copper, to a meteorite and shale with fossils. Some of the single
crystal minerals like pyrite can be really large and impressive (think a
cube of fools gold 2+ inches on a side!). She will thank you later :)

Of course, moving after years of rock shows is a back breaking
experience ;)

On Mon, 2003-02-03 at 23:35, Joe wrote:
> I had a great experience today.
> 
> My little girl loves to collect rocks, and asked for a rock polisher
> for Christmas. I got her high quality Lortone rotary tumbler. Very
> simple to operate: you put the stones in the barrel, add some
> polishing compound and a bit of water, seal it up, turn it on, and a
> little 30-watt motor kicks in and just rotates the barrel for, like, a
> month - and then you open the barrel and take out your nice shiny
> rocks.
> 
> I love this thing. After XP crashes on my (employer-mandated)
> development box, I just go sit and watch the Lortone while the bugger
> reboots. Round and round and round... I imagine a room full of them,
> turning out hundreds of pounds of polished stones per month, which I
> could then hawk to tourists in front of the Jack In the Box downtown.
> 
> Today, a disater occurred. We run the Lortone on the front porch,
> because it makes enough noise to be a trifle annoying.  It's out of
> the weather, and El Paso doesn't actually *have* much weather anyway,
> so I don't worry about it. But today...  today the dudes with the
> black sunglasses came. They were dispatched by a sinister organization
> which takes my money and, in return, sends these guys around from time
> to time: the Apartment Management. They came with their weapons: the
> leaf-blowers. And they blew a buttload of dust and crap off of our
> driveway and ONTO MY FRONT PORCH, where it all got into the Lortone's
> housing. When I got home from the grocery store, the poor thing was
> sitting there with its motor frozen, trying in vain to push the barrel
> against the heinous friction induced by the crud blown up by the MIBs.
> 
> I nearly wept. My one remaining link to sanity in a world of hideously
> complex electronics and software seemed on its way to Machine Heaven.
> But I decided it couldn't hurt to open the thing up and see if I could
> give it a little TLC. And the most amazing thing happened.
> 
> A total of four screws held the entire unit together. When the case
> came apart, I looked in, and I actually understood the entire machine
> in a single glance. Everything was completely clear and obvious. No
> bad RAM, no security holes, no weird network problems... It was a
> moment of almost seraphic joy.
> 
> Hmm, I wonder if I can port Linux to this thing?
> 
> I cleaned the moving parts, blew the dust out of the motor armature,
> put it back together, and it's chugging away again right now. Life is
> good.
> 
> Sorry, I just had to share that.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- Joe
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 

 This is a digitally signed message part