Good lord, a post about something theatre related... I was wondering myself if I'd ever get back to this...
So all my wallpaper came in now after much beating and screaming over shipping issues... Since I personally have never put wallpaper up, I was thinking the application phase of this was going to suck... Then it occured to me, there is a wallpaper guy in the same industrial complex I'm in... So we talked to him, and he got here this morning at around 9:00 to start in on the nightmare that is this show... It's now noon, and this guy is 80% done... He ploughed through units that I was figureing on half a day for in 20 or 30 minutes... The lesson to be learned here?... Duhhh.... If you have to do wallpaper under some kind of time constraint, get a professional... Yes, I will pay him slightly more than I'd pay one of my normal carps per day, but he's going to be done in one day, where my regular crew would take atleast 2 - 3 days to kill this project...
Next aspect will be covering the rest of the units with fake grass... We're all cut already for the units, but the actual application doesn't look to be pleasant... We shall see...
Ok, who came up with that name?... Who the hell decided these things were so common?... If they're so common, why aren't we either immune, or have figured out a damn cure yet?... I want answers people!... I swear this cold is feasting on my soul... I have zero motivation at this point, and I'm actually feeling much better than I did a few days ago...
I had stopped buying games for my X-Box and PS2 a couple months ago so I wouldn't end up with duplicates as a result of Christmas... As such, I've been eyeing a few games since then, and when I didn't end up with any under the tree a few days ago, I picked up a game on my way home from work yesterday... (I'm doing a half day every day rather than full days to try to get over this damn cold...) At any rate, I was hoping for Halo 2 for the X-Box, but they were sold out, and all that was left was a new controler packaged with a non-playable demo in a Halo 2 box... (talk about sleezy marketing... you really had to look to find out there was just a demo inside... I was ready to shell out the extra bucks for the new controller too, but just caught that fine print...) I ended up going with my second choice, which was Medal of Honor, Rising Sun... I throughly enjoyed the first Medal of Honor game I got (for the PS 2) and was hoping for the same experience... So I jumpped right in, and in a matter of 6 hours playing time between today and yesterday, I beat the game... That's not all that odd really, as I can usually go through any first person shooter type game in under 10 hours on the easy level... The issue here, is that I wasn't on the easy level, I was on the "normal" level... So I started in on the "hard" level, and so far, I'm not finding it much more challengeing... Given how its going, I'll have it kicked again in under 15 hours playing time... I am not happy!... I expect to get a good 30 or more hours out of a game when I go to the hardest level, if I can beat it at all... For the challenge this game presented, it should be priced in the $20-$30 range, not $50... EA Games, shame on you!
So I've been working on an opera of late... My shop isn't set up with a great scenic paint department since we seldomly need that aspect of the business for our corperate accounts... As a result, the designer of this show decided to specify wallpaper treatments for the units that might normally get painted... Personally I think that's a great idea, since I really hate paint, but it leads to other problems... I went ahead and ordered all my wall paper online, which made my life quite easy actually... It has been trickeling in since then... (4 different patterns) Well, as I should have expected, one of the patterens was on backorder, and was not scheduled to be printed untill after the scenery will be rotting in some landfill someplace... So I called the distributer, explained my situation, and they called the manufacturer to see if they had 6 rolls of this paper someplace to sell to their crazy client... The answer came back as, sure, no problem, they'd ship it right out... I then proceeded to go about my life... Well all the other paper came in, and this one still hadn't, so I figured, hey, I should call and check on this stuff... To chop several paragraphs off this rant, I'll just say that after no less than 8 phone calls, and fighting my way through various voice-mail systems, I finally got them to admit that they hadn't shipped anything, and weren't planning on doing so untill Febuary... Naturally, at that point, I was somewhat less than polite, bringing into question the heritage of several people at that company...
End result, the designer had to pick out a different paper while she is on vacation across the country, and I had to chase that down, and get it Fed-Ex'd to me...
The moral here?... Mail order is often convienient, but going to a store, and haveing the material in your hands is far more reliable... The second moral, and possibly more usefull, is that if you keep hitting 0 on voice mail menus, you will eventually piss off the computer, and it will almost always connect you to a human...
As suggested in an earlier comment, I'm going to ramble a bit on the accessories that you can get for your drill... Yea, I know... Kinda dry... I promise I'll write something about theatre again soon...
So, I've been watching a good bit of TV of late, and as usual, I'm being innundated by an unbeleaveable number of commercials from Sears, featureing Bob Villa... My, how far has this guy fallen in my opinion... But that's not important right now... Lets look at a few of the things he's pushing right now, and I'll expand to some other ideas beyond that too...
The first thing I got assailed with this season was the "screw-out" things... The theory here is that, once you've gone and ruined the drive feature of a given screw, you just pop one of these things in your drill, and it bites into the screw head and it comes right out... Now, here's a little info beyond that... These things have three flutes, or cutters that do the "gripping"... They're made of hardened, and I mean really hardened, steel, and the cutters are sharp, and have something like a 90 degree or slightly larger point angle... Now, if you stop and think about it for a moment, the fastener head is stripped for a reason, right?... That screw is stuck hard... What you are going to do with the "screw-out" is to simply continue drilling out the head... What you are not going to do, is remove the screw from its well lodged position... Your next option is to actually have the flutes catch in the head somehow... Following that catch, you will most likely snap the screw out, leaveing you with a shattered bit, lodged in the head of the screw, made from hardened steel, that you will not be able to drill out with out a super hard drill bit, and no, you are not going to find one of those at your local hardeware store/home center... Simply accept that you stripped the screw, and use a regular drill bit to drill out the head and move on by putting another screw in someplace else... Now, as an extension of this idea, or more propperly as the origin of this idea is the "bolt-ease"... These things have been around for years... They're designed for when you snap the head off a bolt... You supposedly drill a hole in the remaining bolt, then drive in the removal tool, which has a tapered reverse thread, and it pulls the old bolt out... These things work, but you have to be ultra carefull with them, as they really tend to snap off a lot, and drilling them out is near impossible... I almost always just drill out the offending bolt, and tap the hole the next size bigger...
Next on the hit list for me is the hex bit accessories they sell for drills... The screw driver aspects are so common, that most people don't really think much about them... There are important differences though... The single best one you should have, and should not try driveing screws without, is the screw guide... Its a hex drive bit holder that is 3 or 5 inches long (3 being the more usefull size most of the time) and surrounding the holder is a metal sleeve you can slide down over the screw to prevent you from slipping off the screw... Most folks I know call these things "finger savers"... There is very little that is as painfull as slipping off the screw head, and driveing the screwdriver into your fingers... I took a chunk out of a finger, almost down to the bone back in the late 90's... Since then, I always use these things... Try to avoid the ones with a plastic sleeve... You do not need to see the screw as they claim, and plastic breaks...
That's only one of the hex drive widgets... There are bit holders that lock the bits in... There are hex base drills... There are units that have a pilot drill on one side, and then you flip it over to drive the screw... Nut drivers... You name it, they make it in a hex base drive... The locking units market themselves as being nice for a quick change of bits... They do work ok, however, they make your drill longer, which can be a problem in tight places... You also need to consider that as you stack more hex adapters on the end of the drill, you introduce more slop into the system... Slop makes it hard to control what you're doing... The drill/driver two sided units are ok as well for limited use... The drill bit in the unit often is quite cheap, and will be dull quickly, or will break, so make sure you get a unit you can replace the actual drill bit involved... You will not have the guide sleeve aspect when you are useing the flip around units either, so be carefull while useing the driver aspect... Nut/socket drivers are quite nice... I have two styles... One lets you snap a regular socket onto the bit, so you have the complete range available to you... Problem is here, you usually end up with too much torque for the 1/4" hex shank, and you may break off the driver... The other style is a single forged unit for each size of nut from 1/2" down to 1/4"... They're forged around a hollow barrel, so you can drive the nut down over a longer bolt... These seem to hold up much longer than the socket drivers...
What it boils down to is that I stick with the finger savers, almost exclusively... Brand doesn't matter much with them, as I've had Makita, Dewalt, Ryobi, and Vermont American units, and they're all identical... They all chuck into the drill firmly, and hold the bit well, plus they're magnetic so they hold most screws by them selves, and they're prevent you from doing in a finger.
Something else, that may sound strange... When you are looking at the actual screw driver bits, there are a couple things to consider... You only really need a few to get you through most projects... You can add others if you run across an odd project... What you'll need are #1, #2, #3 phillips bits, 3/16", 1/4" slotted bits, and possibly a #2 square drive or Robertson bit... If you're building a lit of Ikea furniture, you'll want to pick up Torx (star drive) or hex (allen drive) bits in the sizes you'd need... (If you're outside the US, buy the whole array of Torx, and Robertson bits) The next thing to consider is the quality of the bit itself... This is hard to really tell, but here's a brief set of guides... Shiny bits are no good... You don't need/want chrome/zink plated bits... They're always soft and bend/wearout/break quickly... Most of the bits that are perfectly flat black suffer the same fate, though you can get a variety pack of these things pretty cheap that will give you just about every bit you'd ever come across... The "good" bits tend to all be a shade of gray, and have a surface that is just slightly rough (about as rough as a brown paper bag is the best I can describe it). Sometimes they even have a little bit of a glittery quality to them... That would come I suspect from how they are made, at the molecular level... They're hardened, and the crystal structure of the metal is what that glitter is...
Remember, the slotted screw was never designed to be a power driven fastener... The Phillips, Robertson, Torx, and Allen are all designed to be driven... If you can avoid useing a slotted screw, I suggest you do so when useing a drill...
Happy Holidays!
SWAG... What exactly is SWAG?... Is it all capitilized or is it Swag?... I don't really know, but what it is is freebies that you get or receive from employers/venders/clients... Stuff like coffee mugs, or t-shirts, or pens... Whatever it is, everyone loves getting swag if for no other reason than its free... The standard for a long time in the entertainment industy was the t-shirt... They still do it on some of the concert tours, but its less common as they try to squeeze more profit out of the show... It started with a great idea... They would give each department one color, so you could identify who was on what crew very quickly... Great idea!... Too bad they're getting cheap... You used to be able to stock your entire work wardrobe with these t-shirts, so you didn't keep ruining clothes at work...
Well now I'm out of the concert work business... I do mostly corperate events now, and the reason for the swag has changed for me... I now hand out company hats, and really nice black polo shirts with my company logo on them, so my crew looks neat and uniform in front of the high priced clients... We are doing very nice fleece jackets this year too... They're going to my best clients, and my staple employees... Sort of a thank you for the work, and hard work respectively... Not to mention that I wanted a new fleece jacket myself, so that was what made the decision as to what we got made... ( I swear half my wardrobe is going to have the company logo on it soon, since I can write it off now)
Other companies use different things... My lumber yard does really good chocolate chip cookies, pencils and pads... Some of my bigger clients give out PDA's, or even laptops... (damn am I hoping for one of them some day) Steel supplier did clock/calculator/desk alarm deal... My sister's company does coffee mugs (seems to be the thing to do in engineering firms, as I have a nice set from all the different firms she's worked for since she doesn't drink coffee or tea)
Most companies do some simple things all year (hats, shirts, and pens for me) and then in December, they dole out the higher priced stuff... Makes for a nice end of the year deal...
Happy Holidays!
Well they finally caught up with Sadam... Makes for some good news from over there... No need for me to prattle on about it myself... Jump to most blogs, and you'll find their opinions on it, or go read the news, or watch some TV news... Personally I'm glad they got him, and even more glad they got him alive... Hopefully he'll be tried by the Iraqis and eith offed, or put away forever in some hole he could never get out of... (my vote is for execution, as it removes any chance of his escape, and continueing of problems) So does that mean I'm looking for a kangaroo court? (no offence to the Aussies that may read this) Nope... He should have his trial, and I hope its fair... But hasn't he been responsible for an awefull lot of death and missery for them to let him off?... (really, I'd like to see his head on a nice tall pike someplace appropriate in Iraq, but then that could just be me being a little sick...)
Congrats go out the US military and the rest of the coalition partners! Outstanding work!
Hopefully this will lead to some increased stability there...
Now, hopefully, Osama will be next... (I want his head on a pike in the middle the former twin towers pit! Screw the part of me that hates being vindictive)
So, today was the day I headed out to buy my Christmas tree... As you may have read, I was supposed to take my yearly trip to Maine to take care of this, but a nor'easter precluded doing so... The trees in Maine cost me $25.00 each, regardless of height... Now, it has in fact been many years since I went to get a tree in NJ... Its 4 years to Maine, and before that, my parents bought theirs, and I had a fake... So I headed out to find my 8' tree... I'm thinking around $3.00/foot... Not bloody well likely apparently... I didn't find anything nice untill I hit the local YMCA, where they were doing some charity tree sale... End result... $42.00... If I drove straight to Maine, cut my tree and drove back immeadiatly, it would cost me just about that much between fuel and the tree... I suppose I mind less since it is going to a charity, but damn...
Said tree is standing in my living room currently, haveing a nice long drink... I have also found that somehow, my box of lights has disappeared, so its off to buy lights in the morning, and decorate tommorow...
On the plus side, my pack of stray cats seems to love the small pile of branches on my porch... Can't really imagine why since there are plenty of live trees a few feet away, and shrubs on either side, but hey, if they're happy that's all good... Mostly I think they're just happy the snow and ice have gome for now... I can't imagine walking around barefoot in that crap like they have to...
Happy Holidays folks!
Ok... Another mystery link showed up on my list over at TTLB... Supposedly, someplace on Discount Blogger, is a link to my little space in the blogosphere... Where, I don't know... I did a search for "backstage" on the page, and in the source for the page... How does this happen?... Anyone?... Anyone?... No?... Damn...
Well it has been two days now since the snow stopped... Most everyone is now dug out around here, and the roads are in good shape... I say most, because, the apartment complex I live in doesn't think it necessary to do much more than a cursory plow job... What they really need, is not only salt/calcium/potasium to do in the sheet of ice now facing the residents on the sloped parking areas, but they need a front end loader to actually get the piles of snow up on to the lawn areas, rather than in teh middle of the really tight parking areas...
I drive a big, long pickup... Now, I don't have four wheel drive, because I simply could not find that in a used truck with all the other options I needed... So that said, I have always had two wheel drive pickups... I know how to drive in snow and ice with that handicap... Mostly it involves good tires, lots of additional weight in the bed, and rideing the clutch to let some of that torque slip away... Has any of this helped me?... Nope... I swear the ice here looks like they used a zamboni on it to get it to a nice mirror smooth surface...
I'm just about ready to have my neighbors from where my shop is come down and salt the whole lot... (landscape/snow removel company are my neighbors)
Well, I see I should be reaching my 5000th visitor sometime tommorow... I am still in disbelief that anyone comes here, but thanks!
Ran over to the TTLB to see where I stood today. I have been pretty much dead stagnet since my blogging went to hell, so I only seem to check it once every couple days or so... To my shock, I've got 3 new inbounds... Wince and Nod has put up a list of Axis members, as has Captian's Quarters... Why, I'm not actually sure, but hey, that's all good... The least I can do is throw a link back untill I get around to overhauling my blogroll on the left... (and let me say, I know... its massively out of date on some things...) The one that really has me curious, is a link from the League of Liberals page... I glanced through it for the days that might contain the link to me, I looked at their blogroll thinking somehow someone had done a cut and paste error putting my address under someone else's listing... I'm lost folks... While more links are generally considered a good thing, I do like to be able to find them, and either thank the refering party, or refute the statement with the link... If someone from the League reads this, and you know where that link is, please let me know. (I freely admit that I would never expect to show up in a politically driven blog due to my personel hatred of all things political in nature...)
Nothing else to write about today... Still dealing with the damn snow/ice cleanup, or lack there of around my complex...
Well it is currently 7:42pm on Friday... I should at this very moment be sitting at a table digesting a very nice meal of salmon, and enjoying desert, and a cup of coffee. I should be doing this at a resteraunt in Maine. I should then shortly be headed out to do a little shopping at L.L.Bean... (they're open 24 hours a day, so time is never an issue there) I say I should be doing this because I am still sitting in my basement in central New Jersey... Now, never let it be said I didn't try to get up there... I picked up my sister at 10am sharp... I walked back in my door tonight at 6:32pm... During those eight and a half hours, we managed to cover 124 miles... According to a web based converter, that's about 200 kilometers incase anyone from the metric world reads this... That averages out at 14.5 miles per hour...
Now, of course, I knew this storm was coming... I've been following it on various weather pages... It wasn't really supposed to go very far north of NJ, so we decided we could tough it out untill we got into the clear... By the time I got 62 miles from my sister's place, we checked the weather, and all of a sudden, they were calling for it to snow all the way up to Maine now... That's when we called it off...
For those of you not from the north east US, let me explain what a nor'easter is... Without going into the ugly technical aspects of it, (which honestly I just don't recall completely anyhow...) its a big nasty storm... It results from a large dip forming in the jet stream, that allows a mass of cold air to come down from Canada, and mix it up with a warm (relitively) moist air mass from the south... Now, these things are not like hurricanes/typhons in that they aren't so concentrated, and don't have the wind speeds associated with them... They do however do as much damage around here simply because they are miserably persistant, and cover larger areas... Think of a storm dumping massive amounts of rain/snow/ice on you for a week... These suckers cover more than a 1000 miles quite often too, so that flooding is a real common result... They keep pounding the shoreline too, day after day, eating away at the beaches, and swamping/destroying beach area construction...
Generally, you can tough out these storms if its rain... They're dangerous due to flooding, but flood areas are pretty predictable here... When they hit with snow, it gets ugly... Sometimes the result in blizzard conditions, though more often it seems they just keep dumping it on hour after hour a little bit at a time... Naturally since they're persistant the totals get up there... They're calling for about a foot all told this time around... Now, I know, that's not a big deal to many folks, but consider this... We're the most densely populated state around... Our traffic in good conditions is nuts... There's also no place to put the damn snow really... It ends up in huge piles in parking lots, and berms along the roads that make the right lane impossible... In general terms, you're just better stocking up on chips, beer, and videos and just waiting one out in your house... Give the road crews a full day after it stops to really dig things out, and then still expect that the roads will be a mess...
Ugh... I didn't stock up on anything since I wasn't supposed to be here... Thankfully my bar is always well stocked, and I have lots of coffee... Its gonna be a long weekend...
Update: Both Tom and Mookie have put in their $.02 in on Nor'easters as well...
Update: Damn... they just issued a blizzard warning for tommorow... snow drifts of 3' - 5'... I can't wait untill spring...
Ah yes… I was right… It only took two days, and I’m highly irritated again… I swear, I do not think it is possible to work at this place for more than one day and not get royally annoyed at the very least… (I’m working for someone else at the moment, not my own company this time)
So they have, as usual, hired me to do their welding for them. This is a lovely deal, because I love welding, and we just don’t do very much for my company… So it gives me my outlet to butcher steel, and get a little money for my trouble… The main problem seems to be twofold… 1) Management doesn’t pay attention to the drawings, and/or does not do any drawings at all… 2) Management doesn’t know a thing about working with metals…
Now, know this is an issue should help right?... I should be able to see the problems coming and avoid them right?... Well hell, that’d be nice wouldn’t it… I can’t seem to avoid the problems for a couple reasons… 1) every time I think I have an idiot proof solution to their needs, the idiocy reaches a new level… 2) it isn’t my job to deal with design prints, I’m just there as a welder, I gave up the TD job at this place years ago since it’s a terrible job…
This weeks project is to build them a swimming pool to put on stage… Ok folks… This should set off a bunch of alarm bells… 1) water is very heavy… 2) water and the compressed fiber board (duron in this case) that stage floors are often covered with don’t get along well… 3) water goes stagnant pretty quick… Then there are other issues that come to mind as soon as I see the shape of the pool… 1) they want square corners in this pool… 2) they want lights in this pool…
Now, most of that doesn’t effect me as a welder… I just have to worry about building this thing butch enough to hold the pressure on the walls… The other things are issues for the theatre to deal with… So my solution is to build this pool in one unit… When finished it will be 15’ wide, 6’ front to back, and 1’6” deep… (more like a pond than a pool… but annoying none-the-less) Given any choice in the matter, I would have used 1” x 1” steel tube with a 16ga wall… That’s pretty light stuff, but when you weld it into a truss arrangement, it gets incredibly strong… Unfortunately, the TD said use the 1 ¼” x 1 ¼” steel tube that is 11ga… All I can say is ugh… I don’t have a reference to look it up here, but the 16ga tube is about 1/3 the thickness of the 11ga tube… That plus that extra ¼” on each side adds up when you start to get into the multiple hundreds of feet of tube… It adds up in weight… It adds up in time to cut it… It adds up in additional welding time… It doesn’t add a damn thing to the strength of the unit though really… (It does technically, but I’m not trying to hold the pressure from a pool full of Mercury… geesh…)
I roughed out the weights at the shop earlier… 200# for the 1x1… 500# for what I’m using…
I figured out how much steel I had to turn into dust while cutting angles on a very slow bandsaw… The tube I used required me to vaporize 14.625 cubic inches… the 16ga would have required around 5.4 cubic inches…
I am not going to figure out how much actual difference in weld there will be, but each weld takes about 8 seconds for the heavy tube, and 5 seconds for the small tube… There are roughly 900 welds on this unit…That’s an additional 45 minutes of actual welding time…
I’m not even going to get into the step units I had to fix today for a different show that they didn’t read the prints for…
What a waste of a day…