(no subject)
Jul. 3rd, 2005 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI was thinking about doing more metalwork today, but I'm going to have to pass. My wrist is still sore and my fingers bruised from swinging a hammer. I even have a blister where the handle rubbed against the third knuckle of my index finger. Apparently this takes some getting used to. I loved it though.
I got up early yesterday and ran out to Chester's to price batteries on the two industrial UPSs I got from work (about $60 to $80 to get the bad batteries replaced in both of them), and the ran out to Ace to get my propane tank filled. It's a 40 pound tank, about twice as big as the ones you usually see on grills, and cost about $30 to fill up: not too bad.
I came home and set up my equipment, and then realized that I had no raw materials to work with. Did I go out and buy some bar stock from Menards? No, I'm a scrounger! I drove down to the railroad tracks and, in the space of 60 yards or so walking down the tracks, picked up five railroad spikes that will turn into perfectly serviceable plant hangers. I got home, lit up the forge (tossed a burning chunk of paper in and opened the propane valve: whooooshhhh!) and started whacking metal around.
I had a really fun time, and have two partially finished plant hangers that, having been started in different ways, ended up looking rather different, and I think I'm learning a lot. One thing I learned is that it's rather difficult to cut through a piece of metal without having a cut-off hardy. (Hardys are the little tools that fit into the square hole on the top of the anvil. One puts the workpiece on top of them and hammers it against them to do shaping or cutting.) So, I temporarily set aside one of the hangers I was working on and started trying to turn a third railroad spike into a cut-off hardy. I'm not sure how feasible that's going to be since the spikes are rather smaller then the hardy hole and I don't know if I can upset (Upset: to reduce in length to make larger in diameter) the metal that much, but I'll certainly give it a try. I look at all of this as a learning experience!
And that wasn't all I got done yesterday; Andrea and I did a bunch of stuff that I feel pretty accomplished about. We got eighty to ninety percent of the clothes on the floor of the library (see, we were in a hurry packing up and took the entire contents of our old walk in closet and dumped them there in a batch 'cause we had nowhere to hang them) down into the basement on the two eight foot poles I hung yesterday while Moira was out shopping. (Hmm, I almost wrote shipping there, but that's true too; she got a bunch of ebay out yesterday.) I felt really good about getting some cleaning done; I will feel so much better once I'm caught up with all of that sort of housework. The clothes have been my stumbling block in progressing on that over the last weeks, so I decided that would have to part of the work this weekend.
Finally, on the geek front, I decided to take all of the drives out of my Digital drive tower and mount them in the server so I could leave out the bad drives. I took a hard drive out of the sled it was in to fit into the tower, a process that took a good fifteen minutes. Then, I opened up my big server, mounted drive rails on the drive, and slotted it in. It was a perfect fit and I was pretty excited until I realized that there was no power connector on the drive and the data cable didn't fit. There was some stupid proprietary connector on the drive. *sigh* Back into the sled, back into the tower.
I tried pulling all of the drives except one known good one out of the tower and installing Windows that way, but no doing. It wouldn't format the drive. I'm guessing, though I don't know for sure, that all the drives have to be in the tower or there are termination problems. So I rearranged things so the two bad drives are toward the bottom of the stack and went through the Win2K Advanced Server install process. (I decided against using my actual legit copy of Server 2003 Enterprise because I haven't passed my last 2K exam yet and I want to work on it further.) It's been grueling; every step of the way takes upwards of 20 minutes. I think it has to continually wait for the bad drives to time out. But at least it's progressing. It's running through plug-n-pray detection behind me as I type this, so I'm hoping it will finish successfully. Hopefully, in a few hours, we'll see...
On the agenda for today: more cleaning up. I'm trying to decide whether I want to drive all the way over to Microcenter in Chicago for a console cable for my router, or whether I want to just buy one from Ebay. I really don't feel like driving that far, but it's kind of hard to configure a router when you can't open a terminal session with it...
On a final note, I seem to be accumulating more and more rack-mount equipment. I have to figure out either where to get a rack, or where else to put this stuff. Hmm...
I got up early yesterday and ran out to Chester's to price batteries on the two industrial UPSs I got from work (about $60 to $80 to get the bad batteries replaced in both of them), and the ran out to Ace to get my propane tank filled. It's a 40 pound tank, about twice as big as the ones you usually see on grills, and cost about $30 to fill up: not too bad.
I came home and set up my equipment, and then realized that I had no raw materials to work with. Did I go out and buy some bar stock from Menards? No, I'm a scrounger! I drove down to the railroad tracks and, in the space of 60 yards or so walking down the tracks, picked up five railroad spikes that will turn into perfectly serviceable plant hangers. I got home, lit up the forge (tossed a burning chunk of paper in and opened the propane valve: whooooshhhh!) and started whacking metal around.
I had a really fun time, and have two partially finished plant hangers that, having been started in different ways, ended up looking rather different, and I think I'm learning a lot. One thing I learned is that it's rather difficult to cut through a piece of metal without having a cut-off hardy. (Hardys are the little tools that fit into the square hole on the top of the anvil. One puts the workpiece on top of them and hammers it against them to do shaping or cutting.) So, I temporarily set aside one of the hangers I was working on and started trying to turn a third railroad spike into a cut-off hardy. I'm not sure how feasible that's going to be since the spikes are rather smaller then the hardy hole and I don't know if I can upset (Upset: to reduce in length to make larger in diameter) the metal that much, but I'll certainly give it a try. I look at all of this as a learning experience!
And that wasn't all I got done yesterday; Andrea and I did a bunch of stuff that I feel pretty accomplished about. We got eighty to ninety percent of the clothes on the floor of the library (see, we were in a hurry packing up and took the entire contents of our old walk in closet and dumped them there in a batch 'cause we had nowhere to hang them) down into the basement on the two eight foot poles I hung yesterday while Moira was out shopping. (Hmm, I almost wrote shipping there, but that's true too; she got a bunch of ebay out yesterday.) I felt really good about getting some cleaning done; I will feel so much better once I'm caught up with all of that sort of housework. The clothes have been my stumbling block in progressing on that over the last weeks, so I decided that would have to part of the work this weekend.
Finally, on the geek front, I decided to take all of the drives out of my Digital drive tower and mount them in the server so I could leave out the bad drives. I took a hard drive out of the sled it was in to fit into the tower, a process that took a good fifteen minutes. Then, I opened up my big server, mounted drive rails on the drive, and slotted it in. It was a perfect fit and I was pretty excited until I realized that there was no power connector on the drive and the data cable didn't fit. There was some stupid proprietary connector on the drive. *sigh* Back into the sled, back into the tower.
I tried pulling all of the drives except one known good one out of the tower and installing Windows that way, but no doing. It wouldn't format the drive. I'm guessing, though I don't know for sure, that all the drives have to be in the tower or there are termination problems. So I rearranged things so the two bad drives are toward the bottom of the stack and went through the Win2K Advanced Server install process. (I decided against using my actual legit copy of Server 2003 Enterprise because I haven't passed my last 2K exam yet and I want to work on it further.) It's been grueling; every step of the way takes upwards of 20 minutes. I think it has to continually wait for the bad drives to time out. But at least it's progressing. It's running through plug-n-pray detection behind me as I type this, so I'm hoping it will finish successfully. Hopefully, in a few hours, we'll see...
On the agenda for today: more cleaning up. I'm trying to decide whether I want to drive all the way over to Microcenter in Chicago for a console cable for my router, or whether I want to just buy one from Ebay. I really don't feel like driving that far, but it's kind of hard to configure a router when you can't open a terminal session with it...
On a final note, I seem to be accumulating more and more rack-mount equipment. I have to figure out either where to get a rack, or where else to put this stuff. Hmm...
