This is a blog post I never thought I’d have to write…… It’s a sad tale of failed charity. Here we go……
Continue reading “I’m so sad. A failed Crowdfunding effort.”Share This:Climate Strips – Thinking Global, Acting Local
After the last State of the Union address (for truth in advertising, I don’t listen to POTUS. He seems to be a random policy generation machine that suffers from fictional free-association rants when he speaks, all tied together with cheer-leading for his own greatness. I just get upset.) I saw this little note that some Democrats had these lapel pins that had all these blue and white, a bit of orange and some red strips on them. They were to say that the wearers care about global warming mitigation and climate policy, something the Republican party seems to think is a liberal hoax. I got curious and started reading more.
Continue reading “Climate Strips – Thinking Global, Acting Local”Share This:How To Fix A Broken Heart, a book review
We all have them. Those special people from our past that have touched us, helped shape us into the people whom we have become. Continue reading “How To Fix A Broken Heart, a book review”Share This:
Hapkido and Headlights
My daughter Alison (and occasionally Jenny) has been learning Karate for years from Mike Agoff and his daughter Sarah at Bay Area Martial Arts Academy. They are based in Burlingame, CA but give classes in two places in Portola Valley near where I live (Alpine Hills and the Town Center). The kids think that they are learning to fight and defend themselves (and they are) and us parents like that they are learning respect, perseverance and follow-through to commitment (that they are too. Don’t tell the kids though….)
Alison is now an advanced blue-belt, and it’s taken her years to achieve this honor. And over that time, I’ve gotten to know the Agoffs pretty well. Mike, the dad and head of the family business, is a fairly strict and very conservative individual (with me being a tree-hugging liberal, you can guess that this has lead to friction from time to time, like when I let my girls dye their hair bright colors) and his daughter Sarah is is a total dream. She’s in her twenties, and is just as dedicated as her dad but without many of his harder edges. Anyway, when I’ve been around people I like for a considerable amount of time, like I have the Agoffs, I do things for them from time to time. I guess one would call these “acts of service”. If you don’t know what that means, read this post I wrote a while ago. This is Ali getting her latest belt from Mike.
The Agoff family is very active. Mike is a bee-keeper, they have horses and are very outdoorsy. Mike and Sarah both drive trucks a lot of the time. I’m a fairly automotive guy, and it’s always bothered me that both of their trucks headlights are pretty badly fogged. Every time I see them, I tell myself I’m going to do something about it. Well, I finally have, at least for Sarah. She has a 2003, Chevy Silverado 2500 HD 4×4. One day at Karate Camp this summer, I showed up with a headlight restoration kit and went from this:
to this:
This is a pretty easy job for anyone with hand-tools and initiative. This is what it takes: First buy a kit. They are available at any auto parts store and go for about $20. The Meguiar’s kit I bought was $21, I think. But in hindsight, I should have bought a different one that came with it’s own microfiber towel. If I’d done the work in my own driveway, it wouldn’t have mattered as I have a drawer full of rags and the like for detailing cars, but doing the work at the Karate studio, I wish I’d spent the extra $5 to get the kit with the microfiber.
You MUST have some blue tape to protect the paint around the headlights, and a cordless drill for buffing the headlight. This kit contained the following:
The tan and red discs are 3000 and 1000 grit sand paper. Sarah’s lower headlights were so bad I wish I’d had some 600 grit as well. The Plastix is a plastic polish, and the little bottle is something you put on at the end to coat the headlight and fill the last of the little cracks. The yellow buffing wheel is used with the Plastix to polish the lenses. Anyway, start by cleaning the dirt and dead bugs off the headlights and mask the paint to protect it. He’s a close up of how bad her headlights were:
Haze and fog for sure. Polishing anything is a process of making finer and finer scratches. The big scratches remove material faster, but leave, well, smaller scratches. This action of material removal is called “cutting” and doing it fast is good, but leaves a more uniform damage behind. Then you use a finer grit (going from the 1000 grit to the 3000 grit). Eventually the polish leaves tiny scratches so fine that they aren’t optically active. That is they don’t scatter the light and it looks smooth to the eye. The coating one puts on at the end fills the last of the scratches, and the liquid forms a very smooth surface as it dries to really polish off the job.
This is a close up of one of the finished headlights. I did pretty well at on the top, but the lower lights needed more help than I could give with the tools and the time available. Really, if I’d had a power disc to do the sanding with the drill, I think I could have made them look like new, but that wasn’t part of the kit.
Sarah said that she really noticed a difference driving at night. I’m not bothered by seeing her fogged headlights when I see her truck. And she thinks that they look so good that she’s been shamed into maybe getting the truck washed and waxed (the paint needs a lot of help. Job for another day!) Anyway, check out your headlights. If they are fogged, $25 and an hour or two of time can really help a lot. This isn’t just about looking good, but functioning headlights are much safer when driving at night. Go for it!
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Physics Helps Stop Terrorism
The American Physical Society has a newspaper call the APS News. Each issue, there is a one page opinion piece at the end written by different authors titled “The Back Page”. It covers various items, but this last one, written by Neil Johnson titled “New Terrorism Reveals New Physics” contains a lot to think about. Continue reading “Physics Helps Stop Terrorism”Share This:
Amazing Math
So, sometimes when I want to really scare my kids, I let them know that I was in 25th grade when I received my PhD. (Yes, I took a while for my doctorate….) But despite the fact that I’ve taken more math classes than most of humanity, there are some pretty basic proofs that I’d never seen before. And now I have, thanks to the book “The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity” by Steven Strogratz. Continue reading “Amazing Math”Share This:
Review: The 5 Love Languages: The Secret of Love that Lasts
A couple days ago, Amazon launched Prime Reading. This is another perk for Prime members: we get to read books for free! My family was recently travelling to Seattle for a wedding, weather wasn’t cooperating and we had a three hour delay going north, and a three and a half hour delay heading home. So I had tons and tons of time at the airport to read, I fired up my Kindle app, and decided to check out what Prime Reading had to offer. I saw this title and thought “What the heck! It’s probably the emotional equivalent of the latest Paleo diet book, designed to make money more than inform, but I’ve got time, so why don’t I check it out?” So I downloaded it and started reading…. (By the way, I also downloaded “The Man in the High Castle” by Philip K. Dick. It’s a scifi story about what if the Axis powers had won WWII. It was made into a Amazon series that’s pretty good…. So it wasn’t just touchy-feely stuff that drew me in.) Continue reading “Review: The 5 Love Languages: The Secret of Love that Lasts”Share This:
I can feel it coming…
When friends visit California for the first time, they always have some preconceived notion about what it will be like: everything is like Baywatch, or we’re all running around in fear that today will be the Big One, or every street looks like 90210 or the Castro during Gay Pride Week. Whatever it is, they never know that they have no idea about the breadth and variety of what our state has to offer. They are always surprised at how wrong they were, and if they spend enough time, they learn what us long-term residents already know: California is beautiful in too many ways to count, and that the diversity defies easy categorization. After all, we created Nixon, Reagan, the Grateful Dead and the Summer of Love! Not exactly peas in a pod. Continue reading “I can feel it coming…”Share This:
Crowdfunding, part II – What I’ve Learned
In my last post, I wrote about what I’d learned about fee structures as I set up a Crowdfunding campaign to help a buddy in need. In this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned now that I’ve run a full campaign. This is stuff I wish I’d known before I started. This can also be used as a How-To for those that will be setting up campaigns of their own. Let’s press on…. Continue reading “Crowdfunding, part II – What I’ve Learned”Share This:
Crowdsource Fundraising. Fees and fees and fees!
So, a buddy of mine had a bad motorcycle accident. He was riding in Sunnyvale and a driver took him out. Two broken legs, and pins in both hips. Life is very challenging for him now. Anyway, he’s the Jack-Of-All-Trades at my kids’ schools (Portola Valley School District). As we live in a wealthy area, I thought I’d set up a crowdfunding site to help him with the financial challenges that face him. Turns out that being nice costs….. And if you’re not careful, it’s much more than you’d expect. Continue reading “Crowdsource Fundraising. Fees and fees and fees!”Share This: