NicholasYax.com

So, Ludington trip was pretty cool. Great Lakes casting is a foundry, so rather foundry like stuff. Making sand molds, filling them with steel, breaking them out, particle blasting, and then shipping. The tour guide kept stopping in front of operations so we could watch them, which would be cool, but he had a habit of stopping in front of crappy operations. Sure, it’s cool to stand and watch molten steel being poured, but we can’t watch that because there is ladles of hot steel all around and we were in the way, so instead we watch some guy filling molds for 10 minutes, not as cool. The machine that breaks apart the molds is fun to watch though.

Whitehall Industries was a bit more fun. They heat a log of Aluminum about 20 ft long and 8″ round to 900˚F, cut off a 4 ft length like it was butter (which aluminum pretty much is at that temp), and ram it through a little tiny die under a few hundred thousand pounds of pressure. That 4 ft of log comes out as a perfectly formed extrusion up to 175 ft long, amazing. They have one extruder that they change the dies out on every so often, and as pieces come out they cut them to length and send them to the various machining and punching operations through the plant. A good part of what they make is rails for sunroofs for pretty near every manufacturer, as well as splines for convertible tops, and some parts to the C5 corvette frame (which is almost all aluminum, unlike the standard corvette which is steel framed, but still fiberglass body, apparently). They said roughly 80% automotive parts. They just expanded, so had some open space, but were already talking about next expansion in a few years, sounds like they are doing rather well.

My Industrial Engineering test came back as a 63, which sucks. I could have done better, a 93 would have been more my style. Not sure what happened, but will need to make sure it doesn’t again.

Jill has become very big, and has spent the last few days chasing Sunny around. I am not sure if I should do something, or what I could do. I feel bad for Sunny, because she was chased by the first Chi Chi so much when we first got her. The problem is Jill is really big, and only going to get bigger. I don’t want to have to get rid of a fish, but I don’t want to loose one either.

Yesterday want well in the machine lab with the seniors. I had to be there at 8, but we were done by noon, so that wasn’t too bad. I was afraid would be there till 4 or 5 or something. They pretty much finished their machining, have to re-run a few parts, then do heat treat next Friday. I don’t know if I will be there for that or not, will talk to partner Monday and make a decision.

I still need to do tags on all the posts, but it is a scary thought, having done categories on all the posts once already. I know it will end up taking a month or so, and obviously don’t look forward to going through over 500 posts again.

I was looking through and found out my longest blog was not 1071 Words and No Point, but Back from Vacation about Jenn and I’s Mackinaw trip. I was surprised to find that out. My longest post are my two process planning assignments from MFG-111 at Delta.

Speaking of long posts, this one is about long enough. I will see you all later I suppose.

nick

It would have been cool to name it ! (500 times), but that would be really long and time consuming to count.

So, for the 500th I figures something good was in order. After much thinking, I came up with it, then put it off, then put it off more. But, now, I am here to do it. For the 500th, I will do something that was a fundamental part of the founding of this blog, and it’s first several posts. Sadly, I have not done it in a while, and that needs to be remedied. Yes, I am going to bitch.

For anyone who has ever lived in Big Rapids, a fundamental flaw in the area is the radio stations. Somehow, they all suck. Not like “ehh, there are 20 stations and I only like 1 a lot, but there are 5 I will listen too” like, no, no this is “there are 10, and I will listen to 2 sometimes, but end up flipping more than listening to any of them”. I hadn’t really noticed for 5 months because I had no radio in the neon, but it is now a major pain in the ass. Yes, I have a 6 disc cd changer, but I don’t want to listen to one artist for 12 straight songs, and I don’t want to burn 20 discs. I should be able to listen to decent radio. And, worse, Ferris has a radio station that I really like, but it isn’t actually a radio station, it is on a TV channel and online only, not over actual radio. WTF?

Of the stations that there are, the vast majority are country. There are also 2 top 40 and 2 oldies (I think). The top 40 stations literally only play 40 songs, if that. Maybe they are each top 20 stations and thought it would work out, I don’t know. The oldies stations had a chance, as I will listen to some oldies, but they just rather suck. Maybe I grew out of it, maybe Oldies 96 was just a better oldies station.

Either way, I wanted to bitch about that.

Also to bitch about, is the people who go 35 down Perry, which is a 55. Why did they even make it a 55? The right lane everyone goes 35, the left there are people going anywhere from 45 to 60. Yes, I am more pissed at the people that go 35 than the road engineers, but maybe it would be better if it was a 45? I doubt it will change though, and until it does, I am going to be cussing at people going 35 up the hill because their K-car can’t make it.

What else can I bitch about? If I can bitch for 9000 words or so, I can get the 150,000 word in the 500th post. That would take forever and be boring as hell though, for you to read and me to write.

OK, enough bitching I guess.

Jenn and I went to Mt. Pleasant yesterday and got ChiChii (notice 2 i’s at end, indicating 2, hahahahahahahah). She is really tiny compared to other fish, but getting along fine. I think is just right size of too small for others to worry about, but too big to be food. We also ate at the Italian Oven, which Jenn had never had and I haven’t had since they were on Euclid about 10 years ago. Thank got they don’t use the noodle straws anymore. They were kind of cool, but tasted funny.

I think that is all.

501, later this week.

nick

Jenn and I went to El Burrito for dinner tonight. I really wanted chicken burrito with green sauce, but it wasn’t on the menu, so I went for a chicken chimichanga, which was quite good. Jenn and I also split a 46 oz raspberry margarita, which was also quite good.

You may notice in the left sidebar a section labeled Tags. New to WordPress 2.3, they are similar to categories, but a little more detailed. I added tags to most posts for the last 3 months, so some are showing up now. I had a problem with going through, that I would use a tag then never use it again and a few other issues. I think I am going to write down 50 or so tags, and try and stick to those. The big problem, obviously, is there are now 496 untagged posts. This sounds way to much like my fun with categories, but I only had to do about 350 of those. The other issue I have, is the tags will be very similar to the abstracts I write for every post. This means for every new post I will need a title, the post, an abstract, categories, and tags. It almost sounds like work. I will figure something out I guess.

Yes, we are that far along. Post 500 will be sometime in October, probably about 3 weeks.

So, our weekend was eventful. Jenn and I visited the FSU Bookstore Friday and got some shirts for us and one for my dad. He had asked for one when he was here, and knowing we were going to Bay City over the weekend, decided to pick up.

My Mom and Sue stopped by on Friday. They were in Clare to shop at the Amish General Store, and since that put them already halfway, they continued over to here. We gave them the quick tour of town and enjoyed a DQ Pumpkin Pie Blizzard.

Saturday Jenn and I left for Bay City around noon, and made pretty good time. We began in Bay City at the mall, where Hagen, Dunlop, Labadie, Thelen, and Graff had brought all their used cars for some supersale. There were a few I kind of liked, but nothing great. Next we went to my house for root beer bottles and to visit, then out to Johnson’s Giant Pumpkins to watch their trebuchet and get some donuts and cider. At first I was all “aww, we saw 2x last year, going to be so-so”, but then I did see it, and I was “WOW, I FORGOT HOW COOL THIS IS!!!!”. Yeah. They also had the prototype of the air cannon he wants to build next.

Next up, was Heinz’ fruit market, for some tomatoes and peppers. Jenn really wanted pumpkins, but I made her wait. We then went back to the mall, to see if we could recheck on a car, that was no longer there. We went to Thelen to see if it was back at the dealership, and having finally found it, was informed it had been sold. Oh well.

Finally, we went to the River of Time. We made a quick walkthrough, bought some rootbeer, both independently considered buying an 1800s map of Michigan without knowing it, and left. I have been to like 15 consecutive years of the event, and it really never changes. Maybe we need some new history?

After that, we headed over to Grandpa Tony’s for dinner, then to the Mall again, this time to shop. I bought a $40 shirt for $9, and that was actually all. Next we went to see my dad and give him his shirt. Following visiting with him and my Grandma, we went to see Todd and Ashley at their new house for a quick tour of that. Around 9:30 by then I believe, we headed home.

Sunday, after all the excitement Saturday, we sat on our asses. Not totally, we watched a movie (“Wild Hogs”, good, but not great, I think we weren’t in a real movie mood), went to Meijer, pulled out my winter clothes, sorted through my side of the closet for things that I never wear, and watched the Sunday night Fox lineup.

So, that was the weekend.

A few little blog related posts:
This (as mentioned) is post 495.
Post 500 will be in October, even if I need to make 4 posts in one day.
The 150,000 word isn’t real far off (this post should put around 140,000).
For the first time, Firefox outranks Safari among my visitors.
I have plans for an overhaul of the themes, more info on the way.

That should be all.

nick

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.3. As with any upgrade, if you find errors, hickups, bugs, or other abnormalities, let me know.

The first SME meeting was today. It was a little disorganized, but we got a schedule for future meetings and a little discussion on what we will be doing over the upcoming year.

Other than that, mostly just been going to class. Had a test in 311 today, 341 tomorrow, 340 Tuesday.

Might go to River of Time Saturday. We were going to go Sunday to see Todd dressed as a Voyageur in his cousin’s wedding, but not sure. Maybe I will just find an apple orchard/corn maze type farm around here and call it good.

Jenn and I were actually talking yesterday, and decided we were going to buy a pumpkin farm and have a corn maze and pumpkin catapult and give cow-drawn carriage rides, and charge people $1 for a picture of them kissing our ass (our donkey that is). I have said before, Autumn is my favorite season, and pumpkin farms are the heart of this time of year. Besides, fresh hot pumpkin doughnuts in warm apple cider is just so damn good.

nick

I just did a little work on the blog. First, I finally figured out how to include old blog visitors in the new stats, so the visitor count magically jumped from 6850 to 12908 (Scott was 12908 actually). I have wanted to do this for a while but BBClone doesn’t make it easy.

Second, while editing the templates to get rid of the August date the new counter had started, I realized only one of the templates work. So, I did what any lazy webmaster would do, and just disabled all the non working ones. They will probably be up next weekend, depending on when I have free time. Until then, you will use what I give you. For now, Peppers works, I will work on Maple as it is very fall-ish out. That may actually be up within the hour.

Last night, Jenn and I watched Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters. Let me just say, that the TV show is only about 10 minutes long for a reason. An hour and 29 minutes is just about unbearable.

Other than that, we enjoyed the weekend off.

Will update again when something cool happens.

nick

Just in case anyone forgot, Feasting on Asphalt 2 begins tonight at 9 on Food Network, lasting 6 weeks. Tuesday at 9 on Discovery is the Mackinac Bridge episode on Dirty Jobs, and Friday at 9 on Discovery is SurvivorMan Season 2.

I just finished making my first batch of pickles of the year, we will see how they turn out in a day or 2.

Tour de France finished with Team Discovery taking 1st and 3rd. Alberto Contador took first, Cadel Evans was 23 seconds behind him, and Levi Leipheimer (my fav to win, the american on an american team) was another 2 seconds off. Fourth place, Carlos Sastra, was a full 7 minutes and 8 seconds off of first. It was a sad Tour, with Vinokourov stripped of his yellow 3/4 through by being fired by his team, doping scandals all around, and still no real answer as to who won last year.

We ate at Bob Evan’s tonight, which I think is the first time I have been there in about 4 or 5 years.

A new poll will be coming up soon, I just didn’t see the point over the summer, with people having different schedules.

I started reading World War Z. It is pretty good so far.

OK, I think that is good for now. More after the weekend.

nick

So, I upgraded WordPress from 2.2 to 2.2.1 last night, and all hell broke loose. I had my 7 themes set up so one had all the template files (the actual code that said where things go, what shows up, what is in the sidebar, etc…) and the rest just had stylesheets (that specify colors, fonts, sizes, etc…) and specified to use that one template also. It was a very nice setup, and I liked it, but for whatever reason it wouldn’t work, it claimed all 7 were dead.

So, I post to the WordPress support forum, and they tell me that feature was killed off back when 1.5 came out. This of course perplexed me, as I had used this system for almost a year, through 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, and a few of the higher 1.x releases. In fact, I hadn’t even implemented it until after 1.5 was out. So how the hell was it working?

Well, nobody really knows. I ended up having to duplicate the template files into all 7 themes to get everything back up.

Yeah, nobody knows what the hell I’m talking about, and that’s fine, it just annoys me. How does a feature that was killed over a year ago continue working right up to a minor revision?

Anyway, Jenn and I went tubing again Wednesday. We actually bought out own tubes too. If we go one more time they will be pretty much paid for, so it works out well.

I think that’s about it. See you when I have more to say.

nick

So, WordPress 2.2 comes with Widgets, which are supposed to let me move the elements of my sidebar around easily, without messing with their individual code. The problem, is that the widgets included and that I can find don’t accurately replace what I have in the sidebar. I went through editing the code to work with widgets, I looked all over for widgets to use, and tried creating widgets to serve my purpose, then I turned off widgets because it’s just being a hassle. Besides, how often do I change the sidebar? Is it really that hard to copy-paste a section of code to move an element around?

Anyway, today is the 14th, meaning Jenn and I moved 1 month ago today. Tomorrow, the 15th, will be 1 year since I bought my car. Coming on the 19th, will be Jenn’s B-Day.

I have one more thing, but I am going to wait with it, since I have so few readers lately. It will come in a day or 2 maybe.

nick

I just finished the re-categorizing of all old posts. I could have been done with it a year ago, or more, but I am slow at such things and it become tiresome. Still, it gives a chance to read old posts. I will update the To-do list after this post.

Yesterday, I was sitting here online, and the cable box made the “power off” click. As I sat wondering why it went off for about a second, I heard a very loud buzz from behind me. Something like when you are connecting speakers while your stereo is on, but WAY louder. Then, after another second, another buzz. Next, I started to smell smoke. My first thought was the speakers next to the couch were acting up, but quickly remembered they aren’t hooked up yet. Next, was something was wrong with the wiring here and there was a fire in the wall. I looked around, quickly unplugged both laptops as they are the only things not on a surge strip (that will be fixed very soon), and stood in befuddlement (thats a real word, the spellcheck says so) for a moment. I went outside to see if there was anything going on, and holy crap. In the 20+ mph winds, a power line snapped and fell. Not the nice 220 line, but the 11200 volt lines, all three were on the ground arcing and starting the grass on fire. In the other direction, more lines were down, but no power was going to them as the other side was down. Next, I see even more some about a 1/4 mile away, what looked like a transformer fire or the like.

So, fire departments and Consumers Energy were all out here in a few minutes, and traffic on the road seemed oblivious to it all. After about an hour all the fires were out and the lines were back up, but no power for another hour or 2. Jenn was at work and missed most of the excitement, but we drove around a bit later to no avail, as I couldn’t find what the big smoke producer was toward the airport.

Next week, Monday morning, is Apple’s WWDC. It is well known that 10.5 Leopard will be shown in more detail (it was originally supposed to be released for sale about now), and the iPhone is supposed to be released near it as well (announced by Apple and AT&T as the 29th). Other than that, few rumors have circulated. Some said MacBook or MacBook Pro, but those were both out over the last few weeks. Finally, yesterday, the first decent rumor: Metal cased iMacs (brushed aluminum) and the discontinuation of the 17″ model (with price drops on the 20 and 24″). Also, minor upgrades to the Cinema Displays including the replacement of the 23″ with a 24″. There is also some small hope of a MacBook Thin, but that has been rather hushed recently, and may not happen. For the most part though, the keynote will be the “secret” features of 10.5.

Also next week, is the first episode of Man vs. Wild season 2, on Friday. Survivorman season 2 should come as MvsW ends in the fall.

One of the grants I got from Ferris was the Transfer Academic Excellence Scholarship, for transfer students with a 3.7 or higher GPA. I’m not sure how they figured me to have a 3.7, but I’m not going to complain or ask questions. I also received my letter from Delta letting me know I made Vice President’s list again for last semester.

Jenn mentioned maybe camping next weekend, that would be nice. Then again, living here is kind of like camping, with the weird bugs and abundant critters in the woods. I swear I only recognize 1 in 10 insects I see around here. Must be because Bay City sprays for mosquitos and kills off everything else in the process. I also noticed a near complete lack of squirrels around here, though have seen a few in town.

Ok, thats enough for now. More early next week probably.

Nick