QuantumG's Blog

  The Three Amigos (Written at 3:33am) Three friends go to play in the Park.  Starting in The Matrix they spend most of their time talking about Red Dwarf and planning hijinks. One of the three has a way to communicate with a friend (the fourth Amigo) who works for the Park.  They run from agents, and plan to break into West World and rob a bank, until one day an Agent dies… for real. This Agent is controlled by the mother-in-law of the female CEO. She's old and demented but she loves to jack into The Matrix, and she's good at keeping thieves out of the Park. While chasing one of the Amigos down a spiral ramp she wraps herself in a cord and spills water on herself. It's a known flaw of that old deck. The Amigos learn about the tragedy on the subway. They discuss it in a hushed conversation. Two wants to leave - the game is over, he didn't want to kill anyone for real - but Four tells The One that they'll be arrested and charged as soon as they're out - and she ...

Ten years ago I got the welding bug. After doing a vocational training course I discovered my aptitude was essentially zero and on-the-job training was considered essential to improvement. Not actually having a welding job in order to be trained on, I did the best I could, assigning myself simple tasks and destructively testing my horrible creations. This involved buying my own welder, which was an education in itself. After about a month of ruining perfectly good scrap metal I got to the point where I was able to reliably produce all the welds I had learnt - without defects. My next purchase was a bucket pump so I could pressure test a range of creatively welded bits of steel. This a really cheap piece of kit that you can get just about anywhere, and it completely humbled me. My first attempt was two square bits of scrap welded over the ends of a very thick pipe. It was immediately obvious that all my previous welds had been of insufficient depth, spraying water everywhere at very...