Dayton or Lottery Tickets

Today I was asked if I would like to move to Dayton for at least 5 years. I had 20 minutes to make the decision.

More and more I have been thinking about getting out of dodge. A part of this is self-preservation because in about a year and a half I really may have no choice on the matter due to some changes that will be occurring with my work. There are several unknowns that may or may not happen, but very few of them look promising. As a result I've taken on a similar mindset to the one I had during my last years in school both undergrad and grad. At those time I had to consider what was next in life and make all of those big decisions like where to live and what to do.

Moving away from here wouldn't be all that bad, in fact I'd probably welcome the idea because I don't care much to be here. I like my job, the Church I go to, and where I live, that's about it. And all of those are things I can find elsewhere. I suppose what's really holding me back is that I still had a few things I had really hoped to do here. The difficulty would not lie with moving away but with moving on. So until I really feel the pressure that things are coming to an end, moving to Dayton for 5 years on a whim just isn't going to happen.

Nevertheless, at some point I need to realize that those things that keep me here may never come to fruit, and I should start making decisions now while I have plenty of time rather than later.

Right now I have a few ideas in mind. One is a radically different career path. I'm not the brightest crayon in the box so sticking with my current occupation probably won't lead me very far. I'll reach a peak, if I'm not there already, but will still be able to see way up the mountain where I won't be able to reach. So maybe I can explore elsewhere. One idea would be opening a store of some sort. That requires a lot of work though for uncertain payoffs. Both of those don't fit well with my decadent lazy lifestyle where I get paid insane wages to sit and think, sometimes even to think about what I want to do. Or maybe I could go get an MBA and work my way up the corporate ladder. But I have misgivings about that too. Pretty much all of the white collars I know are miserable, over-worked, and have bad family lives. Maybe it's the economy but in reality it's probably that it's just awful unrewarding work that pays a lot. Therefore I think my best option may be to play the lottery and get rich off a multimillion dollar jackpot. That by definition would be rewarding, pays a lot, and allows me to continue to sit around and daydream.

Grains of Canada's Banner

In the shower this morning I was thinking about this post. The topic and the points of discussion came quickly, so I moved on to what the title should be. Titles are sometime tricky for me to come up with, but this morning it came right away. 'Soft and Hard Woods'. A few seconds later I realized my title would not do. And hence the title you currently see headlining this article.

Continuing from yesterday I wanted to talk about the differences between soft and hard maple woods. Hard maple, as the name suggests, is much denser than soft maple. The grain is packed very close together and has little variation. As a result if you start walking away from the wood, it will start to appear to be of one solid color very quickly. Everything starts blending together and it looks like a smooth solid colored surface. There will likely be some variation and spirals present but not much.

Soft maple on the other hand has a great deal of variation. In fact, to my eye it looks like a light cherry wood. When you start walking away from it, you can still see all the swirls and patterns in the grain.

And there you have it, the differences in the grain between soft and hard maple woods.

A Place for Books

Furnishing my apartment has been a very slow process, and today I finally purchased a book shelf which is the last major piece I wanted for my living area. Next up I have to get working on the bedroom, but today I thought I'd speak on the book shelf and all the considerations that went into it. Now I do not want this to sound too braggy, like 'hey look at me and new bookshelf'. These things I share are meant to be beneficial. For example, a lot of things I'm going to talk about were new to me and a lot of learning resulted from it. Besides if you think I'm getting too high and mighty, pretty much flip to any page here and find at least one article for a change of perspective.

First I had to decide where to put the bookshelf so that I knew what size to start looking for. The location was fairly straightforward but the size was not. 48 inches wide is a standard size, but my chosen spot is 58 inches wide. While 48 inches would fit great in that location, in the future if I move that might look too small. Instead I decided to try and fill up that area as much as I could, and went with 54 inches wide and 80 inches tall. 80 inches was chosen because at barely over 80 inches I have a giant fire alarm jutting out of my wall that I can't do anything about. I'm hoping the bookshelf will sit into the carpet a bit and give me an extra centimeter or so of wiggle room.

Good, dimensions were set. Next I had to figure out a style. That too was fairly simple. I have a sofa table that was made by the Amish, and I could just get my bookshelf made in the same style and wood type and stain. But again I started thinking about the future. If I move, my bookshelf may be no where near my sofa table and the style may not look right. My sofa table is in soft maple which I really like, but I also adore cherry. And the price for both happened to be the same. In the end I decided cherry was going to be a bit too dark for a book shelf. I think I will do my bedroom in cherry, making it look formal. But the bookshelf will be in soft maple with a lighter stain on it. When it comes to wood the main type I don't like is oak. For me the problem with oak is the grain which is too heavy and doesn't make pretty patterns. Cherry has an amazing grain but it's dark and the wood itself tends to be expensive. Maple is a pretty good in between with a very nice grain, lighter color and is typically a little less in price than cherry. I decided to go with the soft maple in the same style as my sofa table. I like the style, and saw no reason to change it and try to predict what new style I may prefer if I were to move.

Next up I had to deal with the construction. Nowadays furniture tends to be made with veneers. Veneers are when they take plywood and tack on a very thin sheet of solid wood on top. Good furniture uses a special furniture grade plywood, and it's used for two main reasons. First it's cheaper and lighter. Second, and more practically, it tends not to warp. Solid wood can warp and completely ruin a piece of furniture. However storing the piece in a well controlled humidity free environment will prevent warping from occurring. I also was not happy about paying so much for a bunch of nice looking plywood. I wanted solid wood. I found my bookshelf was going to have a veneer back and veneer shelves. The shelves were veneer because if they warp they can get stuck. I asked them to make the shelves out of solid wood anyway, but let them keep the back veneer. No one sees it, would add a ton of weight, probably significantly increase my cost, and a veneer back is pretty typical even on high end furniture.

Dimensions, wood and stain, wood construction check. Now the tricky part. The style I chose has room for three doors which are about 2 feet tall at the bottom. My main concern is that I felt three wood doors might look a bit hokey for two reasons. First, I thought the bookshelf would look a bit closed off, and make the piece more imposing than open. Second, I was concerned about the handles which would have two on the right and one on the left or vice versa. I could go with the magnetic style where you push it in and it pops out, but I think that lacks class. Another option would be to have a glass door in the middle. That option intrigued me because the glass would open the book shelf up a bit. Of course I could just remove the door entirely and have three open shelves in the middle. That would extend the book case a bit and be a very similar style to my sofa table which also has two doors and shelves in the middle. But the option I went with is two doors on the sides and three drawers in the middle. The drawers are going to be constructed with the smart-glide technology. It is so cool, you can't slam them shut. Instead no matter how hard who push it in, at a certain point the technology takes over and gently closes it the rest of the way. I think the only way the drawers could be better is if they had the small liners in between. In really old furniture the makers would put in small sheets of wood in between the drawers, like miniature shelves that aren't used. I'm not sure what the purpose of them was. Mom said it was to keep things from falling from one drawer into another, but I've never in my life had such a scenario occur. Anyway, I'm going with the drawer option.

Finally I had to decide what to do about the knobs and handles. My sofa table has the same handles on the drawers (three drawers above the doors and open shelf) and doors, but I wanted to do something different. I wanted the doors on the side to have handles (the kind were you put your fingers underneath) going up and down and then have knobs of the same family as the handles on the three drawers. I think that will give a good variation.

The piece will be done in about 7 weeks, and I'm excited for it. I have too many books right now scattered all over my apartment, on the floor and stacked on my furniture. The cool thing about the Amish, who are going to be making it, is that the constructor will sign it like a piece of art.

Lesson on Cam

Yesterday started like most weekend days, with Dad annoying me. I was sound asleep when I heard my phone beeping with a text message. For some reason I thought it might be an out of towner wanting to meet up, so I bounded out of my cozy to bed to see the message. The day before, my family had a bit of a fiasco over in Cincinnati involving faulty plumbing construction work. My Dad was not a happy camper. So yesterday morning I get a text from him saying, "I slept like a rock, how about you?" I responded "not anymore." It was 7:00 and I decided to stay up and get the day going. It was a productive day for me. I got a lot done, but the big thing was that I fixed two problems with my car. First I fixed the antenna that was no longer going up and down when I turned on the radio on and off. That wasn’t too bad, it just needed some WD-40 and a bit of twisting. It’s not perfect yet, but things are better.

The second project was fixing my car door. Recently, I had the weather strip on the driver’s side door replaced. But when I got the car back I found the driver’s door to be very tight. By tight I mean that when I pulled the handle the door didn’t want to open. It was too tight on the latch that connects the door to the car. Now they said that for a couple days it would be tight, because the rubber that makes up the weather strip had to get a bit worn in. I drove the car for about two weeks and the problem didn’t go away. In fact there were three times that I couldn’t open the door from the inside, and I had to crawl out the passenger side. This was fairly embarrassing, but thankfully I think I was able to get out undetected. Anyway, I took the car back to the body shop and told them that I thought the current tightness I was experiencing was a bit exaggerated from their description. The owner of the shop looked at it, agreed with me, and had a worker fix it up. A few minutes later the staff member pulled the car around to the front of the shop and showed me how the door was all fixed up. Fantastic, the door open and closed just fine.

But the next day I noticed that the door was now not fully shut. Before it was too shut, and now it wasn’t shut enough. The result was that there was an air gap between the door and the car. So much so that if I was standing outside, I could look directly into the car. This worried me, because that meant rain could get inside. Also when I was driving there was a constant draft noise. Before I left the shop the staff member showed me what he had done to fix the problem. There is a part on the car that the door latches onto. All cars have some variation of this part. Supposedly when they put the new weather strip on, this part got moved back, more inwards to the car, and it caused the car door to latch with a much tighter seal that usual, and that was what was causing my difficulties with opening the door. I do not know why they had to move this part, it is connected to the car, not the door. It shouldn’t have had anything to do with the weather strip. But they moved it and apparently it had been moved too much.

With that in mind, I decided that instead of taking the car back a second time, that I would try to fix the problem myself. The part that is connected to the car is fastened on by two screws. The problem with the screws is that they are star shaped. A Phillips head screw has four grooves, these screws had 6. These types of screws are called torx screws, and I had no idea where to get the right type of screw driver for them.

Today is not tutorial Tuesday but I think now is a fine time for a lesson on screws. Phillip head screws are purposely made to cam out when they are screwed in all the way. Cam out is that frustration you experience when you're sitting their nicely screwing in the screw and all of a sudden your screwdriver pops out. Apparently that is meant to happen. This was because way back when automatic torque sensing instruments did not exist. If you were using an automatic screwdriver it was possible that you'd screw in the screw too tight and potentially damage the piece the screw was being twisted into. Phillip's heads were developed to purposely cause the screwdriver to get dislodged from the screw once it was twisted in to a particularly set tightness. The fancy language is torque. At a certain amount of torque the screw cams out. Torque = force * distance, and relates to rotational force. Torque explains why it's much harder to screw in a screw with a regular screwdriver (just a long metal stick with a pointy end), than a ratchet (which is beant and has a long arm). In the first case you have to apply almost all the force to screw the screw in because you don't have any distance. You're hand is only a few inches from the screw and your arm has to do all the turning. With a ratchet, the arm is nice and long and it does all the turning. So you only have to generate just a little bit of force to get the same effect as a straight screw driver.

But despite the benefit of developing a screw that cannot be turned too tight, many of us have experienced the drawback of cam out. When the screw gets tight enough and cams out the screw driver, frequently we'll either strip the screw, ruin the screw driver, or slip and jam the screw driver into ourselves or the piece we're working on. With the advent of torque sensing screw drivers, a new type of screw was developed to prevent cam out. This was the torx screw. Like any screw, torx screws can be twisted too tightly, potentially damaging the piece, but they are typically used with automatic screw drivers that automatically shut off once the torque meets a certain threshold. Since distance remains the same, these screw drivers will shut off once the amount of force required to further screw in the screw gets too great.

In the end I went to Auto Zone picked up a socket ratchet and a T40 torx screw head, and adjusted the screws just fine. I was able to get my door to shut more tightly but not nearly so hard as before, and that air gap which would have let in the rain is now sealed off.

Keep on Running

Growing up it was always difficult for me to throw away old pairs of shoes. After having worn them nearly everyday for a couple years it was like they had become a part of who I was. It's a completely inappropriate sense of attachment. And even still today, I find it hard to throw away shoes even long after their usefulness has past.

This morning I woke up nice and early, and went out for a jog. I did this last weekend too. Around 8:00 I grag myself outside and run a lap around the complex. Well this morning I jogged two laps. I'm not exactly sure why I do this. It certainly is not for the enjoyment, or good burn everyone seems to adore. I don't feel any sort of sense of accomplishment, and wind up hot with a fast beating heart, and incredibly sore legs. And when I finish the first thing I want to do is sit around and do nothing for about an hour. I think the reason I did this the past two weeks is out of guilt, so that I can say at the end of the day I did at least one thing to improve my physical health. That lasts a week, and justifies all the ice-cream and other junk food I eat.

After about the first 10 seconds I noticed my shoes were hurting me. The shoes I was wearing I got sometime in my undergrad years, so they are probably about 5 - 8 years old. The padding has long been rubbed off, and I don't untie them anymore for fear they'd fall to pieces in my hands. But they're clean and the soles are in decent condition so I stick with them. Also I'm stubborn. I don't want to spend money on new running shoes, if I only will use them about 10 times a year at most. So I make do with the ones I have.

Now as I mentioned right away they started hurting me. But I had just started and didn't want to go making excuses to myself for stopping just as soon as I had started, so I sort of changed the way I picked up and put down my feet and kept going. After the first lap I was a bit tired but thought I could pull off another. By the end of the 2nd lap I was definitely ready to quit. Actually about half way through the 2nd lap I was done, but I pushed myself on. Again I have no idea why, probably just sheer stubborness. By this time I was just tired. My feet weren't hurting anymore, although my legs were legitmately tired.

When I made it back up to my apartment I went to take a shower and noticed my socks were stained red in sections. Apparently I had rubbed the skin down to open sores. And both feet had blisters forming on the bottom. These were added to my sores from earlier in the week when I had walked around for too long in my flip flops.

Running is the worst. Maybe all the ice-cream I eat tonight will help me feel better.

HGTV Taught Me Everything I Know About Business

My salsa lesson was incredible last night. We had it on the roof of the building the class is held in, which is right in the heart of downtown campus. The view was great, enhanced by the sunset, and the weather was amazing.

What's not so incredible is how finicky some people are with money. I know a particular set of people who have 2.65 million dollars to spend in 6 months. Currently they've spent .25 million of that. And it took them 6 months to just do that. Because they have so much and I have so little I try to get them to share some of that wealth with me. And because they are so generous they are willing to give some to me.

Here is the process I need to follow to get them to share it with me. I come up with an idea, go and tell them all about it and why they can't live without it, and how much I want to make their dreams come true. They take my fantastic ideas, chew on them for a bit and then hopefully say "alright go ahead, we'll pay for that". In short I pitch them an idea, and they decide whether or not to fund it.

Some of you may think that is a great logical process. But some of you are also wrong. Here's the problem with this process. I'm sensational. Every idea I come up with is fantastic. An idealic dream that they never dared to hope could be a reality. As a result, I don't want to waste time explaining myself to them. Just give me the money and I'll do utterly amazing things with it.

If you think that's insane and no one would do it, I see it happen all the time. Just flip on HGTV. This is the premise for every show on that channel. Someone has a budget. An expert comes in, takes the money, throws the people giving them that money out of their house, and then completely changes everything about the place those people called home. At the end of the episode the people are invited back in, and then burst into joyful tears at the amazing transformation that has occurred. That is how I want to do business. Tell me how much you've got and I'll make you happy, and if I don't make you happy then just don't hire me again.

Not A Narrator Anytime Soon

Some people think I am obsessively clean. However you readers know this to be wrong, because I am sensational and therefore cannot be ‘too much’ of anything. Take the following example, my apartment has a bug problem. Every so many weeks or months I find bugs running all over my apartment. I call them water bugs, but really have no idea what they are. They have about a two centimeter long and thin body, with two long antennas, and a few feet. They don’t do anything other than run around. And I have no idea where these creatures come from. Typically I find them in my bathroom with a high percentage in the tub, hence the name water bug. I’ll get rid of them, and won’t see any for a stretch of time, and then out of the blue I’ll find a bunch. Such as last night, when I found two running around on the floor in different locations. So clearly I am not too clean.

But what really bugs me (like fingernails on a chalk board that transition is) are answering machines. The reason I don’t like them is because I hate the sound of my voice. In my head it is fine, when I hear it recorded, and apparently the way everyone else hears it, it sounds terrible. Fortunately we live in an age where there are all sorts of other ways to leave messages. For example, there are text messages, e-mail, and Facebook messages. I’m not a huge fan of text messages, because I’m very wordy and they take too long to type or simply don’t fit in the allotted space. So usually I resort to Facebook or e-mails if I find myself needing to get a message to someone that I can’t talk to over the phone. If those two avenues are not available then I hope the person checks their caller ID. Usually what I have to say is not worth the pain of leaving a voice message. I want no audio recording of my voice.

Whenever I need to make a call that seems worthy of leaving a voice message, without fail it will go to the message client. There are all sorts of reasons why I may feel a message is needed. Last night I was just checking up on a friend I thought might want a call. Whereas on Sunday I called Stacy to go out for ice-cream. In the first case a text message would have been too long. And in the second Stacy doesn’t seem to receive texts.

Both times I very begrudgingly I left a message. Now in the good ole days, you had one shot and that was it. But nowadays you’ve got the ability to play it back and re-record. And not only that you can send it urgently or regularly. It’s enough to make me have a heart attack. We’ll forget the message itself. I’m sure you’re imaginative enough to understand why I hate it. But just think of the two ways to send the message. For example, suppose I was trying to call a girl to go out for dinner. If I send it urgently then I might come off as desperate. But if I send it regularly I have no idea when it will get over there and maybe we’ll have missed out on the opening. Now mix that with the message. Maybe I think the message sounds desperate. Then in that case maybe I should send it regularly to offset the desperate nature of the message. But maybe the girl I’m calling sees it’s me calling and doesn’t pick up because my charms make her all a flutter and she can’t ready herself in the 30 seconds she has before it goes to the message client. Well if I take forever re-recording my message, even if it doesn’t sound desperate and only nasally and mumbly (stupid voice of mine) and send it urgently then maybe she’ll be able to tell that I must have re-recorded it a bunch because it took too long to send it urgently if only 1 message had been recorded, but not long enough for it to have been delivered regularly. And in doing so, my attempts at hiding my anxiousness will have been foiled. Of course all of this could probably be determined by comparing the time-stamp on the caller ID to the time the voice message was received.

This is why I like writing things down. When I read it back to myself I get to use the voice I hear in my head which is cool, calm, and collected, not nasally, whiney, and mumbly.