SysManGo.com | The gears in my mind just keep on turning . . .

What am I doing?

ButchLebo: Serious thanks to Natalie for the heat wrap. My shoulder has been killing me all day.
ButchLebo: @ryo80 You still have 2 more days, unless you're going to be a STO-away.
ButchLebo: @dpogue But Doxy, you can, if you build the package yourself, port apt to Windows and host the repository. Oh, you meant by default.
ButchLebo: Watching speed dating on House and it's making me queasy.

Narcissistic Vanity

SysMango.com is the personal website of Butch Lebo.

The picture to the left here is a picture of me, taken almost daily, for my own amusement and as decoration of this exercise in being uninteresting.

Please feel free to contact me via this form, or by commenting on any of the posts.

This text is really a placeholder while I think of something better. Because I'm not really sure what I want to put here. Do you have a suggestion?

NF49T7T3TABV

The gears in my mind . . .

Weekend Wrap-up: Destination Imagination

Submitted by Butch on Sun, 2010-02-28 22:22

Family

Yesterday was the Tidewater area Destination ImagiNation (DI) tournament. If anyone was following my updates yesterday, they would have seen that Sam was part of a team participating in tournament.
We had first looked at DI a couple of years ago but neither Sam nor Jake was interested in participating. It wasn't until talking to some DI kids at an open house at the boys' school that Sam thought it might be interesting to join a team. And so he did.
Natalie and I thought this was a good thing for him to do. There's no doubt that Sam is a smart kid (straight A's in the 2nd marking period), but socially, he can sometimes be challenged. And working with other kids, even other kids as smart as he is, is always something that causes stress.
The main part of their contest was to build some kind of robot, and to perform a skit around how that robot changes someone's life.

My new espresso machine

Submitted by Butch on Fri, 2010-02-26 19:47

Coffee

About two weeks ago, my home espresso machine had a problem with my home espresso machine. While making myself some coffee, I noticed that while I was pulling a shot, there was a lot more water on the work surface than there was espresso in the cup.
The water on going from the bottom of the machine was cold. This made me think that I had either not put the water reservoir on correctly, or that I had maybe cracked it. I checked, and this was not the problem. The reservoir was fine, and I had it put on the machine correctly. Or maybe I just didn't catch that the drip tray needed to be emptied.
I wiped up the water. The work surface looked great from the water and wiping (I guess I should have cleaned that surface more often). I was still concerned about the machine.
I put the machine on a baking sheet with a lip, and ran the machine without the portafilter just to see if I could figure out where the water was coming from. To my surprise, water was coming from the back of the machine, and from the front of the machine, dripping into the drip tray from inside the machine. And the water was the cold water, from the reservoir Great, just great.

Sam makes a robot

Submitted by Butch on Thu, 2010-02-04 22:21

Family

This year, after talking to some other kids at his school, Sam wanted to join a Destination Imagination team. The team he joined was working on robotics. Sam wanted to get a little more experience with building things, so we followed Make Magazine's instructions for building a vibrobot out of the motor from a toothbrush and an Altoids tin.

The video ends with Natalie saying "that sounds bad." Right after that, I turned off the recording on my phone and right as I disconnected the battery, the weight that the motor was driving popped off and bounced across the floor. I wish I had kept the video running and had Sam turn off the bot. I could have caught it.