Site Navigation:
Craig's twitter feed:
Tweets by @gevmage
First of all, I'd like to wecome anyone who is here because they crossed via my mirroring of Wil Wheaton's radio free burrito episode 1. I very much hope you find something here that you enjoy.
If you have ever written computer software, then I think that an absolute must-read is The Mythical Man-Month by Fredrick Brooks. Apparently he was a high-level managing engineer at IBM when they were building some of their mainframe systems, and the insights are really quite stunning. I come from a background of writing software from the bottom up; that is, I start writing little components and build the superstructure as I go along. I fairly good at that; going the other way; designing the whole product and then starting to build small pieces I am much less apt to do and much less skilled at. This book is aimed directly at someone like me; who knows how to program but less so knows how to engineer a software system. A collegue at work kept quoting from it, so I checked it out of the campus engineering library. Wow.
I would like to put in a quick plug here for the new smaller PlayStation 2 console. It's almost mini-laptop sized. It has all the same connectors, two memory card slots, two controller slots, same IO port. It also has an infared remote receiver and ethernet gaming port built-in. This version lacks the hard drive bay and the expansion connector of the original PlayStation 2 console, of course.
I found a really great airplane web site written by a guy building a Cozy Mark IV composite aircraft. I think I'd like to build a composite bird one day, once I determine that I can build an airplane at all first. I have taken seminars which go over the layup process, and I think I have a reasonable handle on how that works and what's involved. But from everything I've read, finishing the surface of the composite takes the vast majority of the time of building a composite, and I have found no way of getting training in that process. I have read various kit building books, but they tend to give the finishing process a brief overview.
Rick's page above has a couple of very illuminating sections for me. First, he has a fairly detailed sequential log page of the time he's spent building his aircraft. It's a very illuminating example of the time stretches involved in building something of that magnitude.
Hmm...hold on. There seems to be two web sites embedded in each other. The page on composite finishing was built by someone else at the same domain, Wayne Hicks. Wayne's finishing chapter has a sufficiently detailed explanation (although mostly without photos, unfortunately) that I think I now have a reasonable idea of the steps involved. No photos, as I said, but excellent diagrams that actually show what he's talking about when he describes the sanding patterns and the filling techniques.
Snow has come to the midwest. Everyone travel safely. When I next write, I will probably have been in the presence of the Voyager again.