![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
May. 4th, 2005 08:53 amThe Evil Genius Components Kit arrived yesterday for real, and was delivered by a very nice UPS guy who knows me already since I've let him into our building for delivery runs several times. It's rather smaller than I had anticipated, but then I didn't know very much about the size of the components involved anyway, so that's not a real surprise. I'll be cracking it open in earnest tonight, probably after knitting group, and getting familiar with the basic parts and techniques before doing anything serious. Might have to stop at the mall and go to Radio Shack for some solder wick or a solder sucker, since there's no way I can solder everything perfectly every time- besides, as long as I'm there I can pick up a craptacular, inexpensive card table to use as my soldering platform instead of risking my nice dining table under a layer of newspapers. At least I can fold up the card table and stash it somewhere.
I realise this is probably a case of character bleed from playing![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gone_byebye, but I'm not really sure I care. Electronics is a field that lies close to the heart of geekery, and I really should've gotten into it a long time ago. I mean, when I was six years old my mother enrolled me in a summer school program at Columbia University- it was two weeks of 'day camp' at the hands of the University's education department, under the care of people who were either studying to be teachers or were on their way to being professors. (I don't know which. I was six.) Among quite a lot of other things that we did, we learned the basics of electrical circuitry- partly by seeing and partly by doing, and when I say 'by doing' I mean by building a map of Manhattan on a table about twice the size of your average dining room table and rigging it so that if you pushed one of the buttons on the side of the table, it would cause a specific building (all of which were pieced together from paper and glue or tape) on the map to light up. Some of us did imaginary buildings, including one kid who built a building for ... I think it might've been Volkswagen... that was taller than the Twin Towers. I know I only rigged the Guggenheim to light up, and yes, it was at its real-world location on the map. Built a couple of imaginary buildings myself, though. We learned circuitry and the basics of how to draw a circuit accurately, since we weren't allowed to work on the wiring unless we could render our stuff properly on paper for the teachers to check over. There was other fun stuff at that summer school, too, including a round of what one of my freshling year anthro teachers many years later said was an almost textbook example of guided trance work or hypnosis, several close encounters with the Bronx Zoo's or the Uni entomology professor's (I forget which) collection of exotic creepythings incl. a giant white roach and a tarantula, quite a lot of chess playing, study of the basic history of immigration to the US including a re-enactment of what it was like for non-English speakers to try and get through Ellis Island... it was a lovely thing for a six-year-old, really, even more so than enrolling at Columbia the next year when they started teaching LOGO to little kids on the computers.
... look, that part isn't character bleed, okay? That particular bout of Columbia University geekery happened before the sodding movie even existed.
Anyway. Going to Radio Shack tonight and getting solder wick along with anything else the Evil Genius book suggests I might need, then stopping at Penney's for a card table. I may also need a poster frame since 24 x 36 doesn't fit my Grand Canyon poster- I think that needs 28 x 34 or something. I'll call it an early birthday present, since I turn 31 on Monday.
I realise this is probably a case of character bleed from playing
gone_byebye, but I'm not really sure I care. Electronics is a field that lies close to the heart of geekery, and I really should've gotten into it a long time ago. I mean, when I was six years old my mother enrolled me in a summer school program at Columbia University- it was two weeks of 'day camp' at the hands of the University's education department, under the care of people who were either studying to be teachers or were on their way to being professors. (I don't know which. I was six.) Among quite a lot of other things that we did, we learned the basics of electrical circuitry- partly by seeing and partly by doing, and when I say 'by doing' I mean by building a map of Manhattan on a table about twice the size of your average dining room table and rigging it so that if you pushed one of the buttons on the side of the table, it would cause a specific building (all of which were pieced together from paper and glue or tape) on the map to light up. Some of us did imaginary buildings, including one kid who built a building for ... I think it might've been Volkswagen... that was taller than the Twin Towers. I know I only rigged the Guggenheim to light up, and yes, it was at its real-world location on the map. Built a couple of imaginary buildings myself, though. We learned circuitry and the basics of how to draw a circuit accurately, since we weren't allowed to work on the wiring unless we could render our stuff properly on paper for the teachers to check over. There was other fun stuff at that summer school, too, including a round of what one of my freshling year anthro teachers many years later said was an almost textbook example of guided trance work or hypnosis, several close encounters with the Bronx Zoo's or the Uni entomology professor's (I forget which) collection of exotic creepythings incl. a giant white roach and a tarantula, quite a lot of chess playing, study of the basic history of immigration to the US including a re-enactment of what it was like for non-English speakers to try and get through Ellis Island... it was a lovely thing for a six-year-old, really, even more so than enrolling at Columbia the next year when they started teaching LOGO to little kids on the computers.... look, that part isn't character bleed, okay? That particular bout of Columbia University geekery happened before the sodding movie even existed.
Anyway. Going to Radio Shack tonight and getting solder wick along with anything else the Evil Genius book suggests I might need, then stopping at Penney's for a card table. I may also need a poster frame since 24 x 36 doesn't fit my Grand Canyon poster- I think that needs 28 x 34 or something. I'll call it an early birthday present, since I turn 31 on Monday.
