The metal shaper man’s blog

Ok…. So I’ve been sort of busy lately…. Last week we took part in the neighborhood garage sale and the house is pretty disorganized.    The wife managed to do a little shopping in the hood a managed to score a vary nice aluminum framed third wheel to take our daughter on.

I had gotten a third wheel from an acquaintance at work a while back and machined a adaptor bushing out of Delrin to fit my wife’s bicycle.   That steel framed third wheel was a bit of a lead sled, plus it did fit my daughter correctly.   At the time, I machined the bushing in my lathe and used a sawzall to cut the slot.  Anyway, the new third wheel need to have the bushing od machined slightly smaller and the wife wanted the slot a bit bigger.  Nothing is finer than a wife asking you to go down to the basement to machine something for her.

I originally tried to put install the seat post in the bushing and tried to chuck over the shoulder.  Should have worked in theory, but I had to move the seat post way back to clear the toolpost and my chuck jaws would have been in the way if I would have butted the bushing against the chuck face.  Long and short… very dangerous setup…

Since my original slot was pretty thin.  I just clamped down hard and took light cuts. (I only flung out of the chuck once….. Yikess.  Once I got the od machined down, I clamped it in my shaper and used a lathe cut off tool to widen the slot.  For delrin, it worked just fine.

Hard to believe but this is the first project with the new shaper and it only took 6 or so years….

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It seems like Gtd has felll into my life just at the right time. I was reading a book called “Dreaming in Code” which talked about it.  I’ve had a bunch of project related activities assigned to be at work and I’ve had a real need to get things straightened out and prioritized at home.

A few years back, I had made a todo list’s and religiously followed them for a couple months. Yes, I did get things accomplished but basically I got myself so stressed and frustrated by the things not done I stopped.

I remember reading someone about that in his book.  As I recall one of his points was that when your’re creating a “todo”, you need consider three things.

• What is it that your trying to accomplish?
• What constitutes being done with the project?
• What is the next step?

While these steps are pretty obvious, his contention is that when most people write down items on a todo without considering those three points.

Anyway wasn’t my intent to write about that today, what I wanted to do, was to rationalize my project coding that I’m using for D3.
Suppose, I need to save that for another day.

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I just finished reading David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” this weekend.  I have to say that’s it had a very profound effect on me.   I’d not sure I can recall any book that I’ve read that has made so much sense.
A friend I work with calls me Born Again.  I guess I have become a bit of my zealot.  I gaze upon my office and look at what I need to sort into reference, trash and actionable items….. Yikes what a pile.

One of the things that I’ve been looking at is trying create a cross-platform database on a thumb drive that I could use either at home (ubuntu) or at work (xp).  Yah know you’d think this would be easy… but its not.  My weapon of choice would be MSaccess, since I use that all the time at work and am very familiar wiith this.  Unfortunately, from my research so far, it seems open source drivers/software etc.. are basically available to suck information out access but not put it back in.

I had also got the suggestion to try sqlite.  Basic research there is that it would work fine on Linux sight but would need to get drivers installed at work, which lets just say might be bit of a challenge.

Then someone suggested this tiddlywiki technology. This is very interesting stuff, that I’m not that familiar with.  This is stuff  cool stuff.   You can have your own personal wiki on a stick.
The main issue that I had with this is what are the security implications with this stuff.
From the wikipedia link they talk about how tiddlywiki is a combination of html, css and javascript.

So..  javascript security page talks about how in theory, scripts are run in a sandbox and have same orgin policy.   I theory I guess it’s secure.  You keep reading and you here about all these exceptions to it.  Oh… joy… So.. I’m not sure..  Need to get some second opinions from people I trust.  Man this is a headache.

So… At the moment I’m looking at two Gtd tiddlywiki based organizers.

http://nathanbowers.com/gtdtw/

http://www.dcubed.ca/Welcome_to_d-cubed.html

http://monkeygtd.tiddlyspot.com/#MonkeyGTD

At first tries d3 seems to be the way to go.  But…. mGtd seems sort of advanced.
This is interesting an comment

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