Blog of Josh Hall

I love it when my bill comes to something like $8.01 and the cashier either takes a penny from the change cup or just tells me not to worry about it.  The latter is the more impressive and impacting of the two.  To think that they’re more driven make the transaction a nice and simple one, than to make a penny off of me, is a great achievement in customer satisfaction.

Do your best to avoid creating problems for yourself and your offspring.  IE: if you chose a name for them that is in any way entertaining, that’s setting them up to be taunted.  They’re name should be easy to pronounce correctly (phonetics works).  I knew someone named Parker Brothers, Chris Cross, and Secretia.  Those are not good names.

You were odd, and I was awed
by the scene that I’ve seen
one thousand times in TIME’s
big story I read in big bold red
capital letters, capitol letters
to the Prince of Persia, prints of
presents to be bestowed in his presence
by a maid who made the room
appear like a pier you’d see by the sea
blue sky ceiling blew white wall clouds
and I could see with one eye in the telescope
a ship, too far from here to hear
the rock I threw breaking through the glass
breaking the peace with every piece shattering and falling
on your clean floor and you’re looking at me
with a look no one would know just how to respond

Kallie and I went to see “The Social Network” yesterday, and I was surprised to see a lack of emotional tensity or even having the story being “Hollywood-ized”.  The story was fairly believable and down to earth.  I can’t comment on the accuracy of any of it, but from what I was already familiar with, it seemed like they got it as best as anyone could without breaking some non-disclosures.

I came home and did a little research.  On the drive home, I wondered, what ever happened to Tom?  Seems like he’s pretty much out of the limelight at this point.  The reason I thought about him though, was that Myspace turned out to be exactly what Eduardo Saverin seemed to be envisioning with facebook.  Ads.  Who gives a flying crap about Myspace now?  The corporation that owns it, that’s about it.

The movie puts emphasis on Mark Zuckerberg‘s stance on how things “should be” and not what will make him the most money.  To this day, Mark’s been offered upwards of 1 billion dollars by Yahoo! for facebook, but he has turned down every offer.  Why?  Because it’s his baby, he says.  He takes pride in it.  He’s not your typical money hungry entrepreneur.  He’s different, and that is why I respect him, despite any poor tactics.  In this New Yorker article (I highly recommend/require you read it), it’s not hard to deduce Zuck knew his actions were unethical from a legal standpoint, but I don’t question his motives.  To this day, he is showing that he did it because he was going to pour his heart and soul into it, making it his life’s work, and for that, there is nothing that can hold you back.

The movie also reminded me of one of my ideas back in Jan 2005.  Thinking about it more today, one of the latest crazes is to “check in” at bars and cool spots you go.  What if that data was tracked and indexed, especially large events like concerts, parties, sports games, etc.  You would be able to find out if you and someone else were ever at the same place at the same time.  Practically speaking, Kallie’s been to Pittsburgh before, I wonder if we “checked in” while we were here, how close we ever were to each other.

Anyway, this turned out to be not much of a review.  If you’re interested in the story of facebook at all, I’d say go see it.  Even though it’s really based of a book and the characters are stories are just augmented to fit, it’s a good depiction of what probably transpired in the creation of one of the most successful websites ever.  I’d label it inspirational to see someone be passionate about something they believe in, despite having extreme costs of losing best friends, girls, and a lot of freedom.

Although you have the right and freedom to express your ideas and ideals as you wish, you also need to respect the interpretation and misinterpretation of that from others.  IE:  You can name your kid after objects like “Blanket”, “Apple“, or even “Ocean”, but you’re going to seem a bit odd by social standards.

Related: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2010/09/29/am.spurlock.freakonomics.cnn?hpt=C2

So this is a MOC (My Own Creation) that I did a year or so ago in a similar design, but never documented it. I’m a lot happier with the lower profile of this incarnation over the boxier first version I did.

My initial intent was just to test my abilities with gears and the technics set. I was going to set out making some sort of car, I knew, but I wanted to use my battery pack to make it either be remote controlled or at least self propelled. As it turns out, my LEGO motor no longer works, and I have no idea why, and it seems most battery sticks from the early 90’s, like mine, no longer work. So that already discouraged me from doing what I wanted to do. The next obstacle was having enough “sticks” that were long enough. I wanted to create something like a racecar framework, but I didn’t have the joints and pieces for that. Lastly, I have a ton of gears, but i have no more rubber-bands that would look awesome in a car, so I had to use gears instead of the pulley wheel designs.

All told, I like how the tractor turned out. The mower deck is a little lame, I know, but it was something simple to throw together and use the trailer hitch. The front loader functionality worked better in my original iteration, because the bucket doesn’t quite tilt back all the way, but it would just need a little more tweaking to fix, and I figured I spend enough time on this already.

and a video to show you all the movable parts (hood, steering wheel, engine piston, mower deck, and front loader):