msisk6

5 ms·

1.
by msisk6 11d ago
I've never been that interested in gemstones of any sort, but my understanding (from geology classes decades ago) is that natural diamonds on the surface of the earth result from some rather exotic processes. First, they form deep down
2.
by msisk6 13d ago
Years ago I gifted a bunch of computers and stuff to the Orion Society and they gave me some Wendell Berry books in kind. Sort of ironic I first read his books because of my donation of technology.
3.
by msisk6 17d ago
Funny you should mention this. Just yesterday my wife and I went to the local Ikea to pick up some bookcases. I was originally just going to buy a bunch of the Billy bookcases; we have a few and know their limitations. But then I noticed th
4.
by msisk6 29d ago
Ward Cunningham and I did something similar back in 2008. We were both at a startup in Portland and our office was along the railroad tracks east of the Willamette. We were up on the 4th or 5th floor right above a lot of train traffic inclu
5.
by msisk6 1mo ago
The ship can operate for a bit on decay heat. And they have battery banks to run major systems until conditions allow running at snorkel depth on the diesel engine. And rumor has it some of the nuclear subs may work with a Stirling engine w
6.
by msisk6 2mo ago
Whenever I see these sorts of stories I think about the civic life we're missing out on by not socially gathering with our neighbors to hunt down woolly mammoths with sharp sticks so we don't all collectively starve to death. The
7.
by msisk6 2mo ago
Looks and readability matter in writing. I always uses spaces on either side of the em-dash; looks too crowded otherwise to my eye. I've been doing doing it that way for so long I still often use the "--" construct from way b
8.
by msisk6 2mo ago
I grew up behind the bowling machines. My dad was a bowling machine mechanic and worked on machines all around the midwest. He often moon-lite as the on-duty mechanic during league nights and I'd go with him. Mostly he worked at the lo
9.
by msisk6 2mo ago
There used to be a big chat pile called Snowball on the north side of Joplin near the old Eagle-Picher smelter. I once saw someone fly off the top of that in a hang glider. My grandfather on my mom's side was a miner in the lead mines.
10.
by msisk6 2mo ago
Same here; grew up in Joplin before escaping to move to California in 1988. It was wild growing up in that area with the chat piles hundreds of feet tall towering over these little towns. When I was in high school the drinking age across th
11.
by msisk6 2mo ago
There are lots of things to test besides basic aerodynamics. And even for that sometimes you want real data to validate models before building the full size thing. Things that are tested/validated in wind tunnels nowadays: effect of di
12.
by msisk6 2mo ago
I don't know fireworks that well, but these appeared to be the commercial type, with a large lift-charge that lights the sky up with a lightning style flash followed by a sky burst and the house-shaking boom of the sort I usually assoc
13.
by msisk6 2mo ago
It'll be fine; the house is insured. ;) Luckily it's so wet here at the moment the fire risk is minimal.
14.
by msisk6 2mo ago
Yeah, it really happened. But to be fair the little dog in question is prone to seizures and all the booming certainly set this one off. She was fine after things calmed down around midnight.
15.
by msisk6 2mo ago
I recently moved to the St. Louis area for a software job at Boeing. I'm actually in a nice quiet neighborhood in St. Charles right under the flight path for planes landing at Lambert Field. The fireworks last night were insane. All ar
16.
by msisk6 3mo ago
These aluminum extrusions are called T-Slot, or as McMaster-Carr calls it, "T-Slotted Framing". Very common in industry; we have it everywhere on the Boeing factory floors. Not cheap, but very durable and reusable. Highly recommen
17.
by msisk6 3mo ago
Perhaps not. I'm certainly not an expert in Texas property law. Be interesting to see what happens. Quite a deal for the city if it sticks; get land for $10, hold it for awhile, sell for $10M, get taxes from a $1B data center build.
18.
by msisk6 3mo ago
Huh. I lived in Taylor about 6 years ago. It's your typical small Texas town about 30-minutes east of Austin. Very Texas. It's not the sort of thing I'd think would happen here. Small town folks talk. But with the huge new Sa
19.
by msisk6 3mo ago
A month or so back I was hanging out at the IT center waiting for my laptop to be re-imaged (my Windows bootloader went "missing or invalid") when an engineer brought his laptop in to be upgraded from 16GB to 32GB. The IT tech too
20.
by msisk6 3mo ago
Literally next door. Maybe one other building between Autodesk and the Bay Model. When I started in 1990, most of engineering at Autodesk was in 2320 and 2330 Marinship Way in Sausalito. Later I moved down the street across from Mollie Ston
21.
by msisk6 3mo ago
I haven't been there in awhile. Back in the 90's the Autodesk tech office was next door to the Bay Model and we'd occasionally pop over for lunch and tour the place. Great to see it still around and open to the public.
22.
by msisk6 4mo ago
I work for a little company called Boeing and all our PCs (desktops and laptops) are Dell and our IT center will upgrade SSD, memory, and even do repairs like swapping out motherboards. Probably helps the IT center folks are actually employ
23.
by msisk6 6mo ago
Normally I wouldn't think the American public would be so shallow. But just tonight, while getting gas just outside St. Louis, a young woman was having an absolute meltdown outside her car about the price of gas being $3.65 a gallon. W
24.
by msisk6 6mo ago
Yeah, on the Cummins the ECU is mounted on the intake side of the engine away from the exhaust and turbo and toward the front right under the fuel injection pump so it gets lots of cooling air. This thread is interesting to me 'cause I
25.
by msisk6 6mo ago
My RAM truck with the Cummins diesel engine has the engine computer mounted on the engine block. You'd think the heat and exposure to the elements would make that a bad idea, but I suppose Cummins knows what they're doing.
26.
by msisk6 7mo ago
Just use plain text files. Anything backed by a service is going to hurt over a long enough time frame. And it seems that time frame gets shorter every year. I still use email drafts for a lot of notes. Looking at my email draft folder the
27.
by msisk6 9mo ago
I wrote a ton of AutoLISP back in the day to do similar things to generate well logs for environmental and geotechnical reports. Fun stuff. In 1990 I went to work at Autodesk and got to work on all kinds of stuff over the next decade -- Aut
28.
by msisk6 9mo ago
Well, yeah. Both crypto and AI require places with cheap power to rack and stack compute and GPUs. It remains to be seen if AI will end up being about as useful as crypto in the long run.
29.
by msisk6 9mo ago
Oh, I agree. I lived nearby (working for ERCOT; the Texas Power Grid operator) when Alcoa was still there and was planning the shutdown. It seems about half the people in Rockdale worked for either Alcoa, the nearby coal power plant, or the
30.
by msisk6 9mo ago
This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical capacity to the site. Folks should be happy since the c

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