Posts Tagged ‘personal’
Latch repair
June 27th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
A few weeks ago, a latch on our computer desk stopped working. It’s the spring-loaded latch on the keyboard drawer that keeps the drawer front in a vertical position, hiding the keyboard, when the drawer is pushed in.
The spring in the latch broke, so the hook on the left side of the latch would no longer catch on the slot of the drawer front. Since I don’t use the computer desk myself, the broken latch didn’t bother me, and I didn’t get around to fixing it until today.
I had assumed the broken spring was a helical torsion spring wound around the pivot of the lever, and my plan was to fashion a new torsion spring to replace it. When I took the latch off the drawer, I found that
- the springiness actually came from a brass leaf spring soldered or brazed to the lever;
- the pivot was a rivet that I’d have to break and replace if I wanted to install a torsion spring.
So the idea of a new torsion spring had to be abandoned.
My fix was quick and simple, although it may not be long-lasting. I bent a staple into a dogleg with a hook on one end. I slipped the hook into a convenient slot in the lever1 and superglued the staple alongside the remnant of the leaf spring.
The bottom tip of the staple bears against the body of the latch—just as the leaf spring did before it broke off—and pushes the hook down into the slot.
I suspect this will be a temporary repair because the staple is made of a low carbon steel with a relatively low yield strength. This made it easy to bend into the final shape but will probably also give it a short fatigue life. Had I had any high strength wire with a small enough diameter to fit into the slot I would have used it instead.
Maybe I’ll be lucky and the staple will last several years. Even if it doesn’t, at least I have a working latch again, and I know how to make a more permanent repair next time with a piece of spring wire.
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The presence of which leads me to believe that there was a torsion spring in an earlier iteration of this latch’s design. The slot serves no purpose with the leaf spring, but would be a perfect anchoring point for one end of a torsion spring. ↩
Lipoproteins and Simplenote
June 6th, 2010 at 7:22 am
Has this ever happened to you? You’re at a party and head into the kitchen for a snack. The room is filled with hot babes who surround you and…ask you about your cholesterol numbers. If it hasn’t, that’s probably because you haven’t reached middle age.
Cholesterol is slowly turning into a standard topic of conversation in my social group. The husbands are reaching the age where their doctors are telling them to alter their diets or take medication, and the wives are acting as enforcers. It’s common knowledge among this group that I’m using a statin drug (Simvastatin, which is the generic version of Zocor), so I often get asked about its effects and side effects.
Until recently, my cholesterol numbers were on a page in my daily planner, scribbled down while a nurse dictated them to me over the phone after my last test. This was not a very convenient place, so I typed them up in Simplenote. Now that they’re on my iPhone—and backed up on the web—I can whip out my numbers any time, anywhere. Impresses the hell out of the chicks.
At the end of the note with my test results, I added these tables with the current American Heart Association cholesterol guidelines1 and formatted them to fit nicely on a Simplenote page.
Here’s the text of the guidelines.
Total Category
< 200 Desirable
200 - 239 Borderline high
≥ 240 High
Triglycerides Category
< 150 Normal
150 - 199 Borderline high
200 - 499 High
≥ 500 Very high
HDL Category
≥ 60 High; Optimal;
helps to lower
risk of heart
disease
< 40 in men and Low; considered
< 50 in women a risk factor
for heart disease
LDL Category
< 100 Optimal
100 - 129 Near optimal
130 - 159 Borderline high
160 - 189 High
≥ 190 Very high
It looks crappy in a monospaced font, but lines up pretty well in Helvetica on the iPhone.
As you see, it includes the guidelines for total cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL, and LDL. Nobody seems to care about VLDL; it’s the Zeppo Marx of cholesterol.
Feel free to copy this info and take it with you to your next party. You’ll be a big hit with the MILFs.
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I used the tables at WebMD because their formatting made them easy to cut and paste into Simplenote. The numbers at the American Heart Association are the same. ↩
And how did you waste your evening?
April 20th, 2010 at 9:47 pm
I wasted mine trying to install this hanging ladder for my ten-year-old in one of the finished rooms in our basement. The hardware that the ladder hangs from is supposed to be lagged into ceiling joists. The room has a drywall ceiling, but I know which way the joists run, and the various ducts and recessed light cans give a good indication of where the joists are. It should be easy to locate and drill the pilot holes for the lag screws, right?
The stud finder couldn’t find the joists, so I started doing some exploratory drilling. The first hole missed, so I move dan inch to the right and tried again. Another miss and another shift to the right.
After the third miss, I realized something was seriously wrong; I couldn’t be that far off in my estimate of where the joist is. Since spackle and paint was inevitable, I decided to just keep drilling that line of holes, to the left and the right. Never hit a joist, even though the line of holes was more than 16 inches long.
At this point, I began questioning my sanity. I knew the line of holes was perpendicular to the joists because I knew the direction of the joists. And I knew the direction of the joists, not just because there was only one direction that made sense structurally, but because I could see them from one of the unfinished rooms in the basement. I knew the joists were 16 inches apart, not just because that’s the standard spacing, but because I could measure the spacing in the unfinished room. How, then, could such a long line of holes fail to hit at least one joist?
I needed to probe up into the holes. I pulled the bit out of the drill and poked it up into the first hole. It hit wood about two inches in—just a little farther than I’d pushed the bit when it was in the chuck. The same thing happened in one of the adjacent holes. I didn’t hit wood in any of the other holes.
I’ve never seen a ceiling shimmed so far away the joists. I assume the contractor built it that way to have a consistent ceiling height throughout the finished portion of the basement. Or maybe he was just crazy and sadistic.
The line of holes across the ceiling mystified me, because I couldn’t imagine that the ceiling was shimmed out so far. I should have remembered what Sherlock Holmes told Watson:
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
Did I finish hanging the ladder? No. I found a long bit and finished drilling the pilot holes. I also spackled the many, many worthless holes and will repaint that area when it’s dry. But I didn’t have lag screws long enough to both span the inch-and-a-half of air and drive far enough into the joist to be secure.
So there’s more fun in store tomorrow.
Word up
April 12th, 2010 at 10:24 pm
My wife and I are taking over some local volunteer work from another couple, and last week I had to send out some information sheets on the program, a program description and a registration form. The previous volunteers emailed me their versions of the sheets, so it should have been a simple matter of replacing last year’s dates and contact info with this year’s. But I turned it into a bigger job than necessary.
The sheets came to me as .doc files. This didn’t surprise or even dismay me; .doc files are assumed, by people who have never worked on anything but Windows, to be the lingua franca of the computer world. Pages did a fine job of opening/converting the files.
It was after I opened the files that the desire to overdo started creeping over me. The registration sheet was basically a series of fill-in-the-blank lines:
Name: _______________________________________
Address: ______________________________________
Home phone: _____________ Cell phone: _____________
Age: _____________ Birth date: _____________
Like the mess above, items in the form were sort of aligned, but not really. A little poking around confirmed that “alignment” had been done with spaces, not tabs.
Should I fix it? The rational part of my brain said no. This is being sent to people who haven’t noticed the misalignment in the past and won’t notice proper alignment now. It’s a waste of time, I told myself. But I just couldn’t send something out so sloppy when I knew perfectly well how to fix it. Twenty minutes later—twenty minutes I’ll never get back—the document had left and right tabs and underscore tab leaders. Oh, and it had the new contact and date info, too. I generated a PDF of it and attached it to my outgoing email.
The program description sheet was more of a narrative and didn’t have any significant alignment problems. OK, it had some misaligned lists, and I did spend the time aligning them, but that wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that it was set in—cue ominous music—Comic Sans.
Once again, the rational part of my brain told me to just update the text and send it off. Most people think Comic Sans is just fine; it’s the universal “fun” font. And as with the alignment, the audience for this flyer will not think any less of me for sending out a document set in Comic Sans. But I just couldn’t do it.
I kept the flyer fun and gave it kind of a Marvel look by using comic book fonts from Comicraft (if you follow that link, watch for the Kirby krackle). I changed the body text to Face Front and the headings to Battle Cry. I bought them, on a tip from Andy Ihnatko, during one of ComicCraft’s recent New Year’s Day sales and just love the way they look. The generated PDF includes the fonts, so the recipients (who won’t appreciate the authentic typography, the Philistines) will see the flyer just as I do.
Sadly, the font change is not a permanent improvement. When I hand over my files to next year’s volunteers, I’ll have to turn the font back to Comic Sans, because whoever takes over will certainly not have Face Front or Battle Cry on their computers. But the files I give them will have the improved alignment—my lasting legacy.
I wasn’t surprised at the poor formatting of the files I received. I helped my wife put together a grade school newsletter for a couple of years, and I saw the article submissions she got. Twenty years since The Mac is Not a Typewriter and fifteen since The PC is Not a Typewriter, most people still don’t know how to use a word processor.
And I don’t know how to stop making “improvements” that don’t matter.
Vacation mode
March 30th, 2010 at 12:38 am
The blogging experts all say you’re not supposed to post about your lack of posting, but a week of silence seems too long, especially since the last entry was just a bunch of Twitter clippings.
It’s spring break time for the Drangs in Arizona and Nevada. I’ve uploaded lots of photos to my Flickr stream, but most are still hidden behind my default privacy setting—those shown in the sidebar being the notable exceptions. I do have a few posts in the planning stages, and they’ll probably appear near the end of the week.
In a nutshell, then, I haven’t said anything for a week, and I didn’t really have anything to say here, either. So maybe the experts are right.
Simplenote, TextExpander, and the scale
January 4th, 2010 at 12:22 am
Losing weight was not going to be one of my New Year’s resolutions. I just wanted to keep myself from gaining weight over the winter when I can’t ride my bike to and from work. But when I got on the scale a few weeks ago and found myself grazing the 200-pound mark, I knew that I’d already failed at keeping my weight steady and needed to start losing.
There are as many weight loss strategies as there are dieters. My plan is to simply think more carefully about what and how much I eat, and let the scale tell me how well I’m doing. I know that many people are dead set against weighing themselves every day; their theory being that your day-to-day weight fluctuation is too noisy to be a good measure of your progress. But for me, going a few days between weighings is just a license to lie to myself about my intake. I’m going to weigh myself every day and record it to keep myself honest.
I will not, as a general rule, be making the results public. I won’t be putting my weight up in the sidebar of the blog, nor will I set up a Twitter account for my weight as Leo Laporte has.1 This is not about shaming myself into losing; it’s about me keeping score for myself.
I’ll be using my iPhone to keep track of my weight. This is not just some nerdy love of technology, the phone is my most practical recording device. I keep my phone in the bathroom overnight to have it ready when I get dressed in the morning, so it’s already right where the scale is. And, like my car keys, my phone is something I have to pick up and pocket every morning. If I’m going to establish a habit of recording my weight, doing it on the iPhone seems like the easiest way to do it.
I’m sure there are dozens of iPhone apps that will help me track my weight. They’ll probably also graph it, calculate my BMI, and generate an autoregressive integrated moving average model. But I don’t want a new app, I just want to enter the date and weight as efficiently as I can. So I’ve decided to record my daily weight in Simplenote, an app that
- launches quickly,
- I’m familiar with, and
- can be streamlined with TextExpander.
Here’s what my note looks like so far.
I have to put three spaces between the date and the weight, otherwise the iPhone will interpret each line as a phone number and will turn it into a link—underlined and in blue.
I’m typing in the weight exactly as it’s displayed on my scale. It weighs to the nearest half pound, so eventually I’ll have some values that end with “.5” instead of “.0.”
I enter the date quickly via this TextExpander snippet:
The abbreviation is meant to indicate “date stamp”—I put a “z” at the end because “ds” is a combination that can appear in real words. I have TextExpander set to ignore the case of the abbreviation, so “Dsz” (which is what I’ll get at the beginning of the line because of the iPhone’s auto-capitalization) works the same as “dsz.”
The content uses the standard strftime format. Using two digits for the months, days, and years ensures vertical alignment.
There will, no doubt, come a time when I’ll want to graph my weight or do some sort of regression analysis. That’s when Simplenote’s automatic syncing will come in handy. I’ll copy the data from my Simplenote web page, paste it into a local text file or spreadsheet, and analyze to my heart’s content. For now I’m happy just to get into the daily routine of recording my weight.
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I know he’s an internet celebrity and all, but doesn’t it strike you as odd that Leo’s scale has almost 1500 followers? ↩