(no subject)

From the pages of a couple of other people's journals comes that rarest of all mythical beasts; a meme which I will actually repost in my own journal.

So:

Ask me to take a picture of any aspect of my life that you're interested in/curious about - it can be anything from the house I live in to my favorite shoes. Leave your choice here as a comment, and I will reciprocate by taking the pictures and posting them as an LJ entry. That way you get to know a little bit about my life.

I whole-heartedly welcome abstract requests.

(no subject)

I've spent tonight clearing off a spot on my workbench, using that spot to photograph cruft, editing said photos, and writing Ebay copy. I'm selling a big lot including two 500Mhz Dell laptops and a bunch of floppy drives, batteries, and other stuff for them. There's an 11Mb Symbol access point. There's a 1.6Ghz HP NC6000 with a cracked screen. There's a Dialogic full length ISA telephony card that plugs into a breakout box (that I don't have) to provide like 24 phone ports. If you have any interest in any of this, speak up now.

Now that I'm feeling somewhat accomplished, I'm listening to the Cranberries, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and a bunch of other stuff while I clean up the computer room. All the Ebay stuff is in it's own little corner. All the stuff that people have claims on is sitting in the living room waiting to leave.

Ok, I'll admit to being distracted from cleaing up right now too. As well as setting up Andrea's laptop, I'm disassembling a full height 5 and a quarter form factor Seagate hard drive. These things were built like a Sherman tank! Big solid copper bar heatsink bolted to some mosfets, heavy gauge metal on the entire frame, and cylindrical rubber shock absorbers holding the frame to the drive assembly. These things were beefy! I can't wait to get to the magnets!

The large platters are going to be the top part of the spine on my suit of armor with progressively smaller platters layered down the spine to the waist. I can't wait to get started on that thing! As soon as I have most of the rest of this stuff out of here....

(no subject)

I said I was taking apart a drive. This is the read/write head assembly, arranged so that you can see the way that the copper coils on each side of the heads would slide back and forth in suspension within the semi-circular magnetics. You can see the tiny little wheels on the top and bottom of the unit that rode mirror-finished cylindrical rails as the assembly moved the heads themselves in and out across the platters, traversing the drive cylinders like a draftsman's pencil sweeping across a piece of velum.

God/dess, it's beautiful. Some days I wish I could design things like this. Sitting at a drafting board and scribing line after perfect, magnificent line until I had this device sitting on a page in front of me would be like a form of worship. It inspires the same awe and wonder that I felt when I watched my instructor plug in a cable and saw the spanning tree protocol embedded in a stack of five Cisco Catalyst switches automatically configure their ports, creating paths that connected every port on each of them to the rest, yet eliminating loops and redundancy. It was just... beautiful. Like this. So many hours of work are represented by this little copper and ceramic widget here in my hands....