Coda

I always hated seeing broken blogs, often with that post apologizing for not having posted for a while and then maybe one more half-hearted post, and . . . so here I am calling it quits.

I feel like I've said what I need to on the subjects of time management and achieving goals.  Now it's time to go out and keep achieving them.

When I write new things, I post them over at http://keithhuddleston.blogspot.com/

Spanish Challenge

665,000 of 1,000,000 words read

0 hours 15 min of 20 hours of conversation practice

Bootstrap Some Bar Clamps

I'm really starting to get happy with how my garage is coming together.  It makes me want to start working on projects other than the garage itself.

To do many of those projects I assumed I would need to buy a bunch of bar clamps.  While I inherited a good starter stash of c-clamps from my grandfather, he didn't have any big-'ol-bar-clamps.  And you can never have too many clamps.

Enter some bar clamps made out of scrap wood, from the Izzy Swan channel.




Looks good to me. I don't like spending money, and I'm really in this hobby to have things to work on and develop the fundamentals.

Cutting Straight with a Handsaw

I needed to cut some boards I had salvaged for shelving, but my deep and abiding cheapness prevented me from buying a circular saw.  Instead, inspired by the limited tools series, I made a jig to make my hand saw more accurate.  This video shows such a jig:




In searching for a video with this type of low-tech jig, I discovered guides that use magnets -- and, wowie! Look at this one:

Next Up: Self-Employed?

I now have a plan for what I will do after I teach.  Before I sat down to do focused research and thinking, I only had vague notions, and because the path was unknown it was causing a good deal of dread.  Most importantly, I have examined and rooted out these two assumptions, both of which I now find ridiculous: 1) I would only work part time the rest of my life and 2) I would be someone’s employee.

First off, I came to realize that don’t really mind working hard or working long hours; instead, I mind being exploited, especially when I was grieving the loss of so many family members. Last year there was a fog in my mind preventing me from executing ever the simplest tasks.  Yet In that environment, as a debate coach, I was working many 80 hour+ weeks in situations of sleep deprivation, around very competitive, pushy people.  They will too busy glorifying their egos to leave me be, let alone show real, lasting sympathy.  It was without a doubt the worst year of my life so far.

So even though I had quit coaching debate, I was left in a defensive crouch that lasted most of this year.  I had identified work as the problem, and have really expanded the scope of my believe in daoist inspired non-action. But when I started to think about other, happier times, I realized that in many of them I had put in a lot of work.  I like to challenge myself.  I like having things to do and think about.  Hoping to make sense of life and its trajectory, and with some combination of caffeine and walking through the woods, I had vision quests which made me give up the idea that I had to be some semi-retired guy.  I could go out and play the games of life, and even go for a big pile of the chips.  (But stay more focused on the game-play than the fruit of the action -- see Bhagavad Gita)

Also, I became reacquainted with the effective altruism movement, which I had only brushed up against when reading things from the rationality movement.  At this time, I still was still unconsciously holding on to idea #2 -- that I would be someone else’s employee.  So for a few days my plan was to go see how I could become some kind of Lumbergh somewhere, and even though I knew that would be wrong, again, it would all be a kind of game -- and I would make it all legitimate by giving a good deal of my income to an effective charity, following what 80,000 hours calls the “earn-to-give” model.  This idea gave me great joy because it seemed like a way to beat the absurd universe that allows the rat-race to continue.  As Peter Singer puts it “ “Becoming an effective altruist gives you that meaning and fulfillment.  It enables you to have a solid basis for self-esteem on which you can feel your life was really worth living.”  

For a few days, I was left buzzing with this as a life plan.  But then plan got even better when I realized I might be time to work for myself -- something that was already a life goal of mine.  I just didn’t think I was ready for it.  Again, I had no real reason, just examined believes. I thought I wasn’t good enough at anything, and would need a lot of time to learn some new, big skill to be ready/worthy.  

But if all the losses I have suffered have shown me anything, it is that there is no point in living some kind of deferred life plan.  One, life is too short.  But more importantly, when you die is unpredictable, so there is no guarantee that you will get to enjoy the fruits of your sacrifice. My pursuit of extreme frugality will give me a double buffer in going after this dream. First, my savings will last longer, and secondly, I will need to take home far less than most people to support myself.

So it is settled.  Next year I will go after my goal of working for myself as a freelance writer.

Mini Workbench

This is another good idea for a woodworking project.  It might be the best way to find a place for my grandpa's old vice -- which really was the feature of his old workshop that I remember most vividly as a kid.



Here is another take on the concept. It really shows how this kind of mini-workbench can save space in a small workshop and keep the table below in better shape.



It looks great for traditional woodworking.

Pantograph Router

Dude, this looks cool.



I think this would be a perfect project for gridbeam.  And in that way I could get into making traditional wood-working joints more quickly and at better quality.

Professional Knife Sharpening . . .

Ran across this video on making a super-efficient knife sharpener.  It's from a British sounding guy, so I'll say it's brilliant -- which I do mean from the heart (bonus points if you can name the Robert Frost poem this all makes me think of).



Looks like I'll be able to achieve my goal to be able to sharpen tools to a professional level yet.

The Gridbeam Chronicles #2

Though the eventual goal is drill my own gridbeam sticks in wood, I wanted to get started as soon as I could, so  I purchased 10 bars of 4 foot aluminium gridbeam from 8020 inc.  They call the product line “ready tube.”

The only concern I had was rather they would be able to form “tri-joints,” the real key to gridbeam. And so after I opened the box, I had my wife set up three into a basic tri-joint, and then I grabbed some pencils to make sure they really lined up.  Thankfully, they did.  So I knew I had gridbeam.  I, however, didn’t have any nuts or bolts to hold these joints together.

Though it was already become dark, I was eager to get started, so I headed out to the Ace Hardware, which is only 7 minutes walk from my house. I'm sure I looked like a crazy person by carrying two sticks of gridbeam with me.  I had never bought nuts and bolts before so I had to ask some stupid questions, but then
I went home and made my first tri-joint.

 After that I was left eager to make something that could have some kind of potential use, so I made a frame.

 I sit in it and imagined it as a study-cube  in the mode of work of Ken Issacs. Next, I tested to see how easy the frame was to tinker with.  I found that I could modify the frame while it was still up.

My first "invention" became a cat holder.

Then the same night I disassembled, and put in the garage to make what I thought would be temporary organizer.  And that was it for my first day with gridbeam.

Over a week passed, and as I spent more time working with make-shift structure, I came to like the set-up more and more.  I visited my grandparent's old house took down my grandpa’s old peg board that he used to organize his garden tools and used the hooks to make an organization system for myself.

It includes a bucket for cleaning.  I'm really happy with it.

An earlier version of this post was a tweet-storm

https://twitter.com/KeithHudd/status/832875741465440257

The Gridbeam Chronicles #1

The Gridbeam Chronicles will now stand in the place of abortive The Woodworking Chronicles.   When I wrote the goal of wanting to be at an "intermediate level" in woodworking, I really meant be able to build shelves, hutches, really anything useful.  I really didn't mean anything about the aesthetic side.  Also, I had heard someone describe gridbeam and its power to make nearly any piece of furniture out of a series of boxes, but I had forgotten the name, so I was left casting around until I found it.

As it stands, here is what I have done toward my mission to become a gridbeam master:

• I bought the book How to Build With Gridbeam
• I reached out to a former student and showed him the book.  

That's really it so far. But the former student is great.  He is good with woodworking and also I knew he would appreciate it as an extension of the open source philosophy, and its ability to serve to build resiliency and move beyond consumerism.   To future that kind of mental revolution, I asked him to look up Ken Isaacs (in particular his public domain book).  I am willing to pay him to build gridbeam sticks and to get me started in my own manufacture (I, for one, have virtually no shop skills at this moment).

Next up, I am going to try to source some pre-made gridbeam sticks.  I don't mind paying the Jergenson brothers for a starter kit.  

After that, I think I am going to try to stock up on steel gridbeam.  It's something the Jergensons' admit they don't manufacture on their own, and it seems like the ultimate good for resiliency in a possible post-industrial world.  In that scenario, it either wont be available any more, or will be absolutely prohibitively expensive, so I'll be glad to have some.