Tee Hee

Good ol' fun at ManBabies....

GET MORE AT ManBabies.com!

Quiet Week at work...

Over the past year or so, I have been concocting an idea in my head for a trebuchet using old broken computer parts.  This week, with most people away at a conference, it was pretty quiet, so I put it together in the time I had between work. 

Here's some pics... the projectiles I used were some spacers from old 4gig hard drives, one with a paper clip to attach to the arm, the other with a more plyable strand of cat 5e wire.  

Side view of trebuchet, loaded and ready for action.  The counterweight is a collection of magnets from those 4gig hard drives, nice and easy to add/remove weight, stuck to a screw in the end of the pencil.  The base is a hard drive caddy with an old 40gig hard drive, with 2 56k modems as the uprights.  
As can be seen here, I have used a wooden stem cotton swab as the axle, replacing the screw driver I initially used.  I needed the screw driver elsewhere.  I rigged a firing pin using a paper clip and a strand of cat5e ethernet wire attached to the modems. 

Video clip of trebuchet in action... not very clear.  The distance between the 2 benches is about 8 ft, and I consistently hit the same target area in the corner in my test firing.

Serious Business

I would love to have the patience to build one of these contraptions... imagine taking one to work and having a ruber band fight... step it up to the next level... Found this site which prompted me to work on some weaponry of my own. I've been concocting an office trebuchet made of old computer parts for a while now, and got a model working last week... a little lack-luster compared to this.

It's a Windows world, baby!

So, I was at the gas station (Esso - stanley park) the other day to fill up. THE GAS WAS JUST SO CHEAP!!!! I still find it tough to think that 93.5 per litre is CHEAP. Anyways, I wonder to myself: "self, why does it seem so quiet here"... usually I'm being blasted in the ear by the ESSO news screen above the pump. Then I look up to find this wonderful screen!
Apparently, like many things, the screens are computer controlled and this particular one had contracted the lovely BSOD! The imfamous Windows Blue Screen of Death! Gotta Love Windows. Oddly enough, this was Thursday, the same day that Ubuntu Linux released it's newest version. Not that linux is without bugs, but there is no blue screen...
The sad thing is that this is not the first crashed esso pump I have seen... I noticed one in milton back in the summer...