Come on, how hard can it be?

Shining Shoes

23 Jan 2012
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A week ago I was watching an episode of "James May's Man Lab", a show by one of the TopGear hosts about rediscovering Man-skills. Exactly something that I would and do like. The show had a part about how to properly shine your shoes, they brought in a young sergeant who explained the simple task of shining shoes..

At that point I realized that I always use those cheap easy shine things, and never actually learned how to shine shoes the proper way. So I rewinded, watched it again, collected all the shoe shine things I had... mostly junk. But one proper brush, and a bit of proper wax and cream.

Now a week later, after I've been practicing on all my shoes. I had to start practicing on my girlfriends shoes, and finally I got some real results. Its all about the right amount of colorless cream, properly brushing it in, and then steadily polishing the wax. First I put on too much wax, then when I ran out of wax I had to continue on the cream, also put on too much. When I realized the brush was saturated with cream and wax, I decided just to brush the shoes with no extra cream. Next up was polishing it, this time I also used a slightly damp piece of cloth instead of a slightly dripping wet one.. and the result is a shiny set of women's boots size 38.

Trivial as it may seem, re-learning this skill is just as satisfying as the first piece of working software, the first bow that doesn't break, or the first tomatoes from the garden!

f@(king fixed it!

28 Dec 2011
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Lately my car was starting badly. After standing for a while it needed 3 to 6 seconds to start, and that time was increasing by the day. It appeared to have started after I had it serviced, the tire shop had a nice deal so I let them change my winter tires and service it at the same time... they appear to have messed up my car..

It's a diesel so that rules out some issues. Battery was fine, starter-engine sounds fine too. Temperature is still around 10 degrees Celsius so temperature can't be the issue... which leaves only one other option.. fuel line. Now this is really messed up, because that is really hard to mess up.. that is one garage I will never play with my engine any more.. Fixing and changing tires is what their good at.. but not engines clearly.

So I opened up the the space around the fuel filter, the car is old enough that you can still do some things yourself and new enough that every inch is jammed with engine parts. So in order to get to the fuel filter you have to remove some other hoses. First thing I do is check if all the fuel lines are connected properly.... somebody did not notice that one of the clamps is broken and will not tighten enough to enable an airtight-seal.

So changed the clamp, tried starting it the next day.. W00t! it starts perfectly!

Control

23 Nov 2011
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Just arrived at city hall to renew my drivers license. Not an experience I want to remember. The first thing that happens is a huge list of options to choose from, in order to get a number. And it is not just one menu, a couple of submenus after that. I can't imagine having an actual question, and being unable to decide which topic it goes to.

When I look for a place to sit down, I realize all the benches are placed so to minimize the view on the screen with numbers. Now I'm sitting very uncomfortably in order to be able to view that damn screen.

The benches are positioned in a star like shape, sometimes they seat people on two sides, sometimes just one. They're completely unpredictable, forcing people to walk around looking for a spot. Only to realize most spots have no view upon the screen of despair.

This screen is a matrix of numbers that beeps loudly on any change. The numbers don't appear sequentially, and I think it misses a beep if it is to close to the previous beep. Every beep means I have to bend my complete body to see if my numbers is up. Every beep means I lose my concentration, thus voiding any possibility of reading a book.

It is not just me, every person that walks into city hall has a moment of despair. They look upon their number, the screen, again the number, the screen again, then the benches. Most of them immediately leave their hopes and dreams two steps after the number machine.

It feels as if city hall is designed to take any illusions that we can control our own lives. By the time your number is up, they have broken your spirit. All that is remaining is a docile pawn in the game of the bureaucrats… <Beep>… never mind I'll just wait.

my sugru

14 Sep 2011
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Today I got my package of Sugru, let's see what I can accomplish with that :-)

quick & dirty hazel bow

12 Sep 2011
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DIY archery bowyer

Last week I was on holiday in France, it was just a short week of relaxing. While on one of our many forest walks I noticed all the big and straight hazel trees, and decided to take one with me for my first original forest bow. So far all my wood consisted of store-bought boards. This piece of hazel was of course fresh, but I recently read about an interesting research project to make a bow of a fresh piece of wood in a single day.

So I roughed out the branch while only floor-tillering it and heated/dried it over a fire. I didn't bring many tools, and I forget my tillering-device... so I had to wing it. When I was back home, I realized my just-wing-it-tillering had left a nasty hinge in the top arm. It wasn't too hard to correct it, but I had to take of more wood than I wanted. After it was done, I didn't take a lot of time to remove all the rasp scratches, but simply sanded the bow until it was smooth enough for a lacquer finish.

Total construction time, including the barbecue (to dry-heat the bow) was about 8 hours.

Today I took it to the archery club....(drum rolls)... and it shot pretty nice, the bow feels like about 20 pounds. Sadly after about 20 to 30 arrows the bow started to go bad as the limbs weren't bending back any more (sorry, I forgot the english term for that phenomenon). Also a hinge started to appear that wasn't there through all the tillering... a bit weird.

All in all this was a great experience; I will definitively try this again...

But next time I will try a much thicker hazel, and I will have to harden the belly by heating it more than the back. I already spotted a yew in a publicly accessible garden on my bicycle route home from work today.

build your own webserver

1 Sep 2011
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DIY m2httpd scala webserver

Still busy on my bow, also still busy on the SaaS startup, however I decided it is time to start building my own webserver. A while ago I read this article on a thing called M2HTTPD, and I liked it. It is a simple webserver, much like Node.js. But it is in Scala which I like more than JavaScript or CoffeeScript.

So I've started work on MSquareHttpd, a scala webserver based on the M2HTTPD by Matt.

good deed for the day

17 Aug 2011
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karma

I'm late for work, my hands are dirty, but nothing can beat the feeling I have after fixing the bike of a non-Dutch speaking Chinese girl. Back when I was a student, I remember having enough time to take long walks through the city, and while walking had more time to relax and stop to help people if necessary. Too bad those moments are rare if you sit in an office 40+ hours a week.

left-over oak + beech board bow

14 Aug 2011
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archery bows bowyer

In a couple of weeks I will have a week long holiday in a deserted forest in France. Today I realized that I should bring along some hobby project to work on, so today I quickly fixed a red-oak, beech board bow stave. These were two boards that I selected a long time ago when I was just randomly trying to make a bow based on stuff I read on the internet. After a couple of broken bows and one slight success, I decided to buy "the Traditional Bowyer's Bible, volume 1" and later Volume 2. Which really enlightened me about what I was actually doing. The days of "winging it" were over... but the next bow I made also broke in the place I was expecting it to break. I call that progress. I tried to fix that bow up with a carbon-fibre backing, but my epoxy glue wasn't mixed properly (I knew I shouldn't try to mix that stuff in the winter in the shed at minus 5 degrees Celsius) so the backing didn't stick. After that I didn't work on any bows for about 6 months.

Well today I realized I bought some thin red-oak and beech strips/boards. They're not exactly boards, as they're pretty wide and thin, so the word strip best describes them I think. The year-rings are pretty straight, but their definitely no winners. I think I bought them because they're pretty seriously bend, a trait which I must have mistaken for a natural reflex. Looking closer now (after actually reading the books), I realize these aren't the boards I'm looking for. Nonetheless, its a good training to see if I can make a reasonable bow from them anyway.

My plan is to let the glue dry for a while now, and then bring only the most basic of handtools to tiller it and make it look good. The red-oak board is the back, and the beech is the belly. In theory the red-oak should be the strongest in tension and the beech in compression. I've added another left-over piece of unidentified wood as a riser, and put the whole thing in water-proof-extra-strong-wood-glue. The whole thing is wrapped in plastic foil, clamps and some rope. After plus 24 hours it will be ready to unwrap. I'll will remove the glue left overs, and roughly cut the general shape in it. Cutting the nocks, tillering it, and shaping the handle I will do during my vacation in France. I'm not sure what I'm going to finish it with, so I'll leave that part for when it's done.

A nice new challenge is to make my own arrows. A while ago we were at the lake with a lot of geese, so I gathered a handfull of big feathers. Secondly as I was reading my bowyer's bible vol. two, I realized that we have pretty big hazelnut bush in our garden with some pretty straight branches of the right thickness. Combine that with some string and I should be able to make me some arrows. I think that I will try to finds some nice stones and thin stone tips, broad-heads are not allowed in the Netherlands so I must be careful with that. Might be better to do only one or two stone tipped and the rest I can add iron store-bought tips.

Anyway, construction bow number 5 has commenced. Let's hope I can get the failure-succes score to 5-2 instead of the current 4-1.

Starting Up

2 Aug 2011
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entrepeneuring startup

A bit over a week ago, we've began work on our startup. We are making a webapp that will take the pain out of scrum, I can't go into details at this moment, but all will be revealed in due time. We're doing it all in CoffeeScript, and from now on I will do all my JS stuff in CoffeeScript. That language is awesome.

I took us more time then expected to get our infrastructure (unit testing, etc.) going, but in the end we accomplished a lot already. We're using a private github, which at this point has more features than we need. Git takes some getting used to however, I've been reading up on my read-later-Hacker_news articles about Git to get my mind into the right mode. But my gut feeling says it rocks.

Most important result is that I've noticed a kind of camaraderie growing between the three of us. I guess that taking control of an idea, and really starting to work on it does that to a team. This is our baby now, every time we work on it, it grows a bit. All I can say about starting up at this point is that, to me, it doesn't matter if we fail, because this already feels like an adventure now.

ps. I'm not actually on this picture, but my mates are and it's the only one I got of the event.

Why?

21 Jul 2011
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DIY challenge woodworking

For my first post the "Why?" seems pretty important; Why do things yourself? Why start a blog about my own arrogance? Look, I'm not the ultimate DIY dude, I'm only just getting started with this, but I think we lose a part of our freedom with every action we must outsource. It's very tempting to start a rant about this here, but since I have no followers at this point I better get to the rest of the introduction.

My father used to involve me in all DIY chores in and around the house, even when I didn't want to, and with hindsight I'm glad to say that "I don't feel like it" wasn't an valid excuse. As a result he taught me that by understanding how things work you're able to make an educated guess about how to fix it. He made it look simple, and if he could do it so can I. So when my girlfriend and me moved into our own place, I started fixing things up just like I learned. Of course some things appeared to be too complicated, so I outsourced them to mechanics, craftsmen, etc. When I later discussed this with a my colleagues I realized that I will never be able to afford outsourcing all those chores to other people unless I go into banking or start working 50 hours a week. Both of which are things that I would rather not do. So I started to realize that the most economically optimum choice is to learn how to do things myself. Yes I know that my hours cost money too, but that reasoning would lead to 50 hour work weeks. DIY is a hobby that saves money and builds confidence, I've only recently started on my journey so my greatest achievements are yet to come.

Right now I have three tasks on my plate, one is a big cupboard I'm going to build, the other is servicing my own car, and the third is finishing another attempt to build a bow. For the first one I have an actual client, she knows what she wants and is able to summarize it in a three of words "robust yet elegant". You've guessed it, she's my girlfriend. She has two hobbies that are relevant for to this cupboard, reading books at a speed that can only be described as rainman-like, and collecting second-hand-dirt-cheap-bone-china-tea-cups. For the second one I will get help from a good friend, whom I recently helped to service his car. The third I might need to explain a bit first.

The third one is long story. A while ago I was kinda challenged to building my own bow. Basically I googled the topic, found http://poorfolkbows.com and decided it was very much possible to build one yourself. So I build one, it broke, a second one... it broke, the third one kinda worked. That third bow was an encouragement, so I tried it again, and it broke. Later I realized I might be able to fix it, but it broke again. So now I am challenged to build one that works properly. I've already ordered another book about the topic, the Bowyers Bible part 2 because I've already read part one. I have to admit, building a bow is not as easy as it seems.

However my bowbuilding adventures, gave me some experience with woodworking. Since then I've constructed a basic but very solid workbench, and big dining table. So the cupboard shouldn't be that hard to make...