Things I've been doing lately

Jul 29, 2008 19:09


Battling fruit flies: These horrible beasts invaded while I was out of town, leaving my roommate to defend the apartment alone. They are everywhere (even stuck in the window decals! We threw those away) and very hard to catch. Aside from the normal steps (taking out the trash, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning) we've also set out vinegar in hopes they'll drown in it. Apparently they like vinegar. We've had only middling success.

Breaking glass with lasers: I cracked two 3x3 inch panes, each an eight of an inch thick. They split right down the middle with a loud crack followed by shattering as they fell out of their holders. Behold the power of a fast axis collimated 100W diode laser. I was running tests on it and consequently didn't even have it up at full power and it was on for less than five minutes (instead of the usual 24 hour runs we do when we're actually using the lasers). I also had a lens in front of laser to spread the beam out so it wasn't concentrated on as small an area as it could have been. Hopefully I'll refrain from exposing any part of myself to the beam. My eye, for example.

Freezing paper: The printer in the lab is having fits and my boss has decided that the solution is to freeze the paper. The reasoning behind this is the printer is cheap and the feeding mechanism can't handle paper that is sticking together (a hot summer with 80% humidity anyone?) so we put the paper in the freezer to keep it nice and dry. My boss has a history of finding unconventional yet highly effective solutions to problems, so I'm just going to go along with this one. In my personal opinion, though, we're going to need a new printer soon.

Pulling handles off doors: I went to open the door into our hallway this morning and was left with the handle in my hand. Unfortunately it wasn't a matter of a pin coming loose and letting half the handle slip off in my hand (on some doors, the handle on each side is held on to a metal bar inside the door by a pin). Instead the metal bar itself had snapped, so the door was shut, the door handle cavity was filled with the remaining part of the handle and I was left behind a closed door on the side that requires you to pull the door towards you to open it. This is difficult to do on a surface that you can't get a purchase on.

work

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