No Open Blockers

I wasn’t too thrilled about starting on the painting. I used to paint miniatures, so my sense of scale is drastically different. It’s also a massive mentality shift. When painting miniatures, if I messed up I could just put another coat of paint on the error. RC cars, on the other hand, are painted on the inside to protect the paint, which means the first paint on a spot wins.

The first step was easy: clean the mold.

I started with the wheels so I could attach them and take it for a test drive (I’ll comment more on the test drive later, but suffice it to say there were lessons learned at the expense of my wife’s garden). After playing around with the fitting of the spokes, I figured I could do a two color approach if I offset the inner and outer pieces. The inner pieces were sprayed green:

One thing I didn’t expect was for the spray paint smell to be so strong. We have a two car garage, so I expected to be able to leave the garage door closed. I was woozy before I finished the first side. Once they dried, getting them into the tire was a challenge. Twenty minutes and a lot of cursing later, I had the wheels assembled and attached.

Now that the easy part was done, I had to wrap my head around the masking process. Thankfully, the model came with window masks, so I didn’t need to fit them myself to keep the windows transparent.

The flame masks weren’t quite as tricky as I expected. There were some little bubbles around the edges I couldn’t completely get out, but again I needed to get out of the miniatures mentality and start to think more in terms of the project at hand. Plus, I’ll inevitably drive the damn thing into a wall the first time I drive it and mess the body up anyway, so being anal retentive about barely visible paint blurs is a bit of a moot point.

The body spray was fun. And by fun, I mean there was enough in the air that I was tripping balls by the end of it.

A few coats later and a few braincells less, I removed the masks and got ready for the green.

After that, it wasn’t too much more to finish assembly:

At that point, it was time for a test drive, but I’ll post about that later.

“Did your kit come with a speed controller?”
“Um…”

I hadn’t actually looked at any of the electronics that came with my car, I just knew I needed a radio for it. Luckily, the guys at Hobbytown are patient. Equipped with the all important steering servo in hand, I was ready to get back to work.

I’m the kind of geek that buys computer cases with windows on the side and is compulsive about hiding all the wires, so when I took a look at the electrical system in the car I felt confident I was in an area I knew.

As much as I want to brag that the wiring was really simple, I haven’t yet actually put a battery on it and tried it out. So for all I know, this thing is gonna go up in flames the first time I try to drive it.

The other interesting components were the rear dampeners. There was a lot of room to play around here between spacers and choice of oil. I went with a softer oil figuring I’ll need it since our streets still haven’t been top coated and look like a damn mine field. I made note of how to unattach them if I ever decide to go back and change that.

For the most part, the body is done. I want to paint the hubcaps (I am from NJ afterall) before I put the tires on, so once that’s done I can take the naked car for a quick ride around my basement to make sure everything is wired correctly and there’s nothing grinding. The next big step is painting, which I’ll admit is intimidating. I’m pretty sure I’m set on a color scheme and the masks I want to use, so it’s just a matter of another trip to the hobby store to pick them up.

Only just over 2 weeks left until Red Hat Summit 2010. Be sure to check out my lab on Wednesday afternoon:

Cloud Computing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2
Cloud computing is fast becoming a core component of both Web and enterprise IT infrastructure architectures. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2, you are able to experience both the dynamic scalability of the Amazon EC2 cloud combined with the enterprise stability and security of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Presented by Red Hat and sponsored by Amazon Web Services, this lab tutorial will walk participants through a complete lifecycle process of setting up Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2, accessing running images, and terminating those instances using both Red Hat and Amazon tools.

Guaranteed to be 100% awesome.

For the last few weeks I have been looking around for a summer hobby. I wanted something non-computer, creative, and that would give me something to show for it at the end. Wired’s Geek Dad blog mentioned RC cars in a post and a few google searches later, I had found my muse. As fate would have it there is a Hobbytown about 30 minutes away, so a Memorial Day weekend trip later I was home with my first project.

Since I don’t know squat about neither RC cars nor real ones, my criteria was simply what I thought looked cool at the time. Like any good (read: compulsive) geek, I’ve been researching the hell out of the topic, so I’m sure my next purchase will be a bit more educated. That said, so far I’m not at all disappointed in my choice.

I actually expected to be more intimidated at the unboxing. It’s definitely not a 45 minute project, but it’s also not impossible. I took a spare table from the garage and set up my new “pit table” portion of my man cave.

The first assembly was the gearbox. My hands were covered in grease so I didn’t take any good pictures of the process, which sucks since it’s much cooler to see the inside than the finished product. So far, so good though; I’m able to turn the axel without hearing any grinding (just some kinda disturbing grease squishing as it settles in).

Once I got the gearbox and motor attached, I hit my first roadblock. I’m at the step where I attach the radio and steering to it. The problem? I don’t have them yet. This also happened on Memorial Day Monday which meant Hobbytown was closed, so this is where things stand for now.

I’m hoping to get the radio attached pretty soon so I can make sure everything is happy between the motor and gearbox. The programmer geek in me lamented the fact that I have to go pretty far before I can actually test to see if my earlier assemblies work, but I may just be taking an unreasonable approach. I’m also starting to think through painting ideas for the body, which will probably end up either really cool or a complete disaster. More pictures on that when I get to it.

Congrats to everyone involved.

http://fedoraproject.org/

I don’t know why this caused me so many problems, but I finally got my look and feel for emacs to a happy state. The default emacs font size is just too big for my tastes. I tried using the menu bar “Customize Emacs” option to change the font, but that caused emacs to flicker for a few seconds each time I opened it. Being the kind of person who navigates around a shell and opens files from there (as compared to using a single emacs instance to load multiple files and switch buffers), the flicker was driving me nuts.

The menu bar customization added all of the following flicker-inducing configuration to .emacs:

(custom-set-faces
  '(default ((t (:inherit nil :stipple nil :inverse-video nil :box nil :strike-through nil 
:overline nil :underline nil :slant normal :weight normal :height 98 :width normal
:foundry "unknown" :family "DejaVu Sans Mono")))))

I was able to replace that with the simpler, flicker-free:

(set-face-attribute 'default nil :height 92)

The other thing I wanted was a larger emacs window by default (yes, I’m that lazy that manually resizing them was driving me nuts):

(if (window-system) (set-frame-height (selected-frame) 66))
(if (window-system) (set-frame-width (selected-frame) 102))

That gives me a workable font and a window size that lets me comfortably fill my screen with two emacs windows working side by side. Now I just need to actually focus and get to work to take advantage of my new found editor goodness.

In a few weeks, we’re heading to Disney World for a much needed vacation. We’re bringing my parents to help with my 3 year old daughter (read: so grandma can buy her ice cream while we go on the good rides).

When we were young, my dad would bring a pager from work in case they needed to contact him. If they did, he’d look around for a public phone to call in and help fix whatever problem they stumbled into.

Never missing an opportunity to make him feel old, I felt obligated to point out to him how things have changed:

Me: ya know, in theory, i could SSH from my phone into a server while waiting on line for Pirates of the Caribbean
Me: actually, even without that i could blog/tweet/facebook status from my phone that I’m at Disney, waiting for Pirates of the Caribbean
Me: that’s after I text message my friends to brag that I’m about to go on Pirates of the Caribbean
Me: and if I want to go low tech, I could always email my team at work to piss them off by pointing out that I’m about to go on Pirates of the Caribbean
Dad: couldn’t you just call them to say that?
Me: oh ya, forgot about that
Dad: so will your job be using all those ways to get in touch with you on vacation?
Me: no, I lied and gave them the wrong number