Friday, August 8, 2008

Yak Shaving

So what is Yak Shaving?

Its when you say, decide to wash some clothes. You sort out the clothes you want to wash and head to the washing machine and find its full of wet clean teenagers clothes. You need to put them in the dryer, but the same teenager has also left it full of clean dry clothes. So you empty the dryer, fold up the clothes and take them to the teenager's room which is full of dirty crockery. So you grab the crockery and take it to the dishwasher which is full of clean dishes. So you empty the dishwasher, fill it with crockery and set it running.

Now where was I? That's right I wanted to wash some clothes.

Note this isn't a rant at my teenagers as they also wash and fold my clothes and empty and fill the dishwasher. Yak shaving is how before you can do a task you often end up doing a dozen other tasks first. This is a simple example - especially for the Olliver household.

The Olliver family isn't normal and wouldn't want to be. We have a RepRap for example sitting on top of the dryer. In pieces as we are repairing it as somewhere between us saying goodbye to it in LA and collecting it in Auckland, the lid for the case was removed by someone who couldn't read well enough to see the instructions how to open the crate correctly. As the lid was never meant to be removed it wouldn't go back on again so they sent it on open. Baggage handling did the rest.

The child RepRap (on right) before being trashed.


And now in pieces in the laundry, sorry Vik's workshop.

We have a second RepRap sitting in the same room which is currently running making replacement parts for the broken one. Once complete I get to take RepRap assembly 101.

I've had to get pretty involved in the RepRap project as its got to big for one person to manage. I'm also getting involved in the electric racing car project and with the clippings.

Yesterday I created a blog for the clippings as they haven't really moved on since Vik started doing them in 2001. I've set up a RSS feed and stuck a Google Ads thingy on it. If you read the small print for the Ads you will see that you are totally forbidden to promote your ad in any manner at all. You just kinda have to stick it there and pretend it doesn't exist. I'm not even sure that I'm not breaking the rule by mentioing this (If I am, Google, let me know and I'll edit this post).

We will keep on with the email distribution list for the existing users for the indefinite but we get a lot of people who keep saying "I mean to join the list" and I'm sure there are other's who don't like joining distribution lists so sticking them in a blog makes sense.

Today we took for family time and went to see the new Batman movie. We heard all the reviews about how terrific Heath Ledger was in it and we all thought "yeah they are all being nice to him because he died" but the truth is that his performance was truly stunning and he gave life, death and total horror to the character and saying this with total respect, I can see why he might well have had trouble sleeping afterwards.

No comments: