Dave Ambrose

Finished one of my summer projects. The lathe was an impulse buy while we were on vacation. With all the camping and telescope gear we were carrying, we almost had to fold space to get lathe on board. Picked up a top, and the tool chest after we got back home. I have enough tooling to do useful stuff now, and this is likely to become a well-used tool in my shop.

We sent the information to you.

We identified a problem with the database and fixed it. Things are running a lot better now. Hopefully, this was the root problem, and we won't have any more problems for a while. Let me know if we get sluggish again.

That should fix itself within 48 hours or so. There are database updates that happen in the background, and sometimes they take a while to catch up.

Today, we had a different problem that was unrelated to the sluggishness. It's been solved.

Nice list. Gotta try some of those. There was a good radio station in Madison, WI whose call sign I can't remember except it somewhat obviously started with W. Give Radio Paradise a try. (Quite) a while back, I learned that my best music category was eclectic. RP does a pretty good job at that. I'm also a fan of KEXP's YouTube channel.

Yup. Still having problems. I'll be working on it.

Boar's Head is family-owned. I was wondering if they'd been acquired by some private equity firm, but that isn't the case. According to Wikipedia, they had major sanitation issues at one of their packaging plants. They were basically cited monthly for a while, but a shut-down order was never issued. Ineffective enforcement should be cause for a major investigation.

What a treat! Those things are monsters.

The problems are intermittent. Looks like my first attempt partially remediated the problem. I've refined it a bit. Let me know if it gets slow again.

I just noticed that slowness. Gonna take a look.

It is, Mt. Laguna area.

The Milky Way was readily seen. The moon hadn't risen by the time we left so don't know what it would be like with the moon up. There was a lot of moisture in the air that evening, so transparency wasn't great, but still good.

My wife and I wet out to some dark skies with our telescope. Checked out a new (to us) spot, and we think it's going to work out great. We've been looking for a nice, relatively close in spot for years. Nice to have this quality of life improvement checked off.

What he said. ?

Beginning of last month, I impulse purchased a metal lathe. Yesterday I finished getting it situated, getting the necessary tooling, and did my first project on it. It will get used mostly for telescope projects, but making some wheels comes to mind as well. It's going to be a nice addition to my shop.

I'll give the boat a good home. ?

I piggybacked these on one of my son's orders. The ornithopter is going to be spectacular when done, and the Paul Atredes figure looks very good too.

Issue 225 has hit the mail, and may start delivering as early as this week. We hope you enjoy the content. As always, if you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to PM them to me.

I'm still seeing some intermittent slowing. It seems to be from something resembling a denial of service attack. The offending request is originating within our hosting company, and we've opened a ticket.

It will be mailing out from the printet in a day or two.

Yes, there's a new magazine. Scott, the publisher, is a former staffer for MCM.

Interesting. I think I can explain your case. I was downloading a backup set from the server at the time you posted this. I've seen high network traffic slow things down, and will be more careful about when I retrieve those backup sets.

We can learn a lot from other modeling genres. My son and daughter build Gundams and other closely allied subjects. They've turned me on to all kinds of cool tools. We have a large Gundam model contest here in SoCal, and it's one of the nicer contests to attend. First off, I'm THE old guy in the room. But people are friendly and having fun with their builds. I've built a few, but I'm not big into the genre. There are lots of opportunities for cross fertilization that we should be using more than we are.

Maybe it's a nod to MCM? ? Galactic headquarters for the magazine are in Honolulu.