Moar Projects

More summer projects and progress reports:


This weekend I did two things that have been on the list for a long time, always seeming so easy to finish yet so hard to start.  I'm proud of me.


1.  Change the front break on my bike


This took a while for me to get to because I was afraid of having to do the first serious alteration to my mountain bike setup.  The backstory is pretty simple - my front brake pads kept rubbing my brake rotor (it's a disc brake setup) and it led to the most goddamn annoying sound that I've ever heard come from a bike.  It was like a banshee wail when I needed stopping power and would send shuddering spasms up my bike, like some sort of lever activated doomsday device.  Think Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber.


Anyways, I bought a new pair of Avid mechanical disc brakes and levers off of Chainlove for cheap and decided to replace the whole Hayes Stroker hydraulic assembly I had on before.  I probably could have just changed the rotor and seen if that helped, but I was curious about the whole process of installing the breaks so I went for it.  It was easy to mount everything, but a pain to align.  After a few tweaks and about an hour of messing around, I finally got it ready to go and took it for a spin.  No more Jim Carrey screaming in my ear, although I can really feel the reduction in stopping power from hydraulic to mechanical disc brakes.  At least theses are much more adjustable.


It's funny, all I had to do was start, and then it all went so smoothly.  Let this be a lesson to us all (me).

Like a boss.

2.  Make a planter


Bryce and I decided to go about this one the easy way.  I originally wanted to build it out of wood and make it look cool, but when confronted with the fact that money does not spontaneously generate in my wallet, it quickly became clear another solution was required.  We found that every goddamn planter in Home Depot is  either 30 bucks or higher for something that is basically just plastic, so we got a storage tub for 4 bucks and called it a day.  We have sweet basil, oregano, rosemary, cilantro, mint, and cinnamon basil in the storage tub and another plant of jalapeños in an old lychee jelly tub.  Ballin'.  Herbs ahoy.


Pictures forthcoming.


Mission accomplished.


Oh yeah, good job everyone on surviving the rapture.  I knew us heathens could do it.


Peas.
-Dt

Summer is upon us. Everyone, flee!

Summer starts June 21st.  I call bullshit, summer starts now.  It's hot, humid, and a healthy coating of Lacadaise (tm) has settled in, immune to cleansing/organizing efforts.  I can see it now - a huge list of summer projects swimming in my mind like fish, waiting to be fed with idea flakes or whole concept carcasses depending on their scale and ambition.  Time to sack up and swim in this bitch.

The summer project is an ancient form of torture, passed down from generation to generation with the best of intentions.  The problem is compound; there is the feeling of freedom associated with summer from childhood experience, mixed with the idea of the satisfaction from execution, sprinkled with the notion that a difficult path to success yields the most self-improvement.  The reality is simple; there isn't actually more time to complete anything than there was before, and the glory of a project's end is enough to obscure just how fucked up and difficult the project will actually be.  That being said, as humans we make these outlandish promises to ourselves and eventually have to pick up the pieces of our own shattered egos.  Bleak, but true.

This is my approach to the summer project - never commit.  It's defeatist, and without committing there's no assurance that progress will ever be made.  But the truth is that committing to a summer project and not finishing it is just as damaging as saying you will get around to it and watching your ambitions float away on the sea of time. In the end, your self-confidence is either unphased or scarred, but never boosted from the failed effort.

This does all assume you will fail.  While this is a reasonable assumption because of the over-exaggeration of one's abilities to which we are all prone, sometimes we really outshine ourselves.  In this case, there is another, more elegant path.  Aim low.  That way, failure costs nearly nothing, and success, for some strange reason, tends to be wildly more impactful than it's less fortunate counterpart.  Small successes lead to big gains, and you may even experience the sought-after snowball effect.  Stock market, why can't we all play by the same rules?

So now, honesty time.  Here is a list of my summer goals and the reasonableness of the effort.  Maybe even a few suggestions to myself thrown in for good measure.

1.  Learn the guitar

Evaluation: Hah.  To be fair, I've already started learning and I'm making progress.  I can even play songs.  But the scope of this project is just too great, and most people experience this one over a lifetime anyways.

Alternative: Focus on a few songs, a finger technique or two, and some smoothing out those chord transitions.  Baby steps.

2.  Build a bamboo bike

Evaluation:  Oh man, this one is waaay too lofty.  It also has the double whammy of being expensive.  That being said, of all the mad scientist projects I've ever promised myself I would do, this is the most likely because of its practicality.  Still, considering it's basically an eight week endeavor, it's probably not likely to finish.

Alternative: Design the frame and a jig in Solidworks and shelve it for a time when money is more available.  Trick out my current bike.  Both would provide distraction.

3.  Build new computer

Evaluation:  Easy, but the cost argument applies double here.  I would also be providing myself with a more powerful version of the major source of most of my distraction from project efforts.  Double edged sword.

Alternative:  Burn my computer.  Become productive.

There are more projects, but maybe I'll talk about them at a later date.  This post is long already.

Peas.

-Dt