Clean Up

This Picture was taken from Ashrita Furman's Blog - a very interesting guy- an amazing multiple Guiness World Record holder who I have added to my "must read" blog list.

I want to get back to re-building the Skid Steer. Fix the seat, add a three point harness, some lights for those times when snow if falling in the dark. I want to do it in the comfort of the shop. Thus the concept of "shaving the yak". Joi Ito's Blog has a great explanation. Basically it's getting caught up in the sub-routines of life. One thing leading to another. Some times I can get so deep that I forget what the original goal was- the ( to badly mangle a couple of metaphors) "I Can't see the forest cause I'm so busy counting the moss on the bark of the trees", kind of thing. Or: "The draining the swamp endeavor has given way to the alligator sweater franchise." Wictionary has a concise definition.

Back to the Skid Steer 2.0 problem. In order to get the machine back in the shop I need to clean up the repair debris of the last work session. In order to do that I need to make some more room. Re-arrange the tools, consolidate the old nail and screw containers, make a swinging shelf for the unused space in front of the garage doors, finish the microwave shelf to house the standby microwave while I attempt a repair of the old one, get the re-built table saw running so I can move the old one out, move the stove rebuild project out to storage until I'm read to get it under way, move the cut off saw back in the shop from the garden shed...yak, yak, yak.

I am going to do a post on why disorder happens in the first place. And I won't use the word, entropy, once.

Back to my point.

Helping to get the mechanical tools part of the Yak better organised ( easily at hand, metric with metric, SAE with SAE) I refurbished an old rusted, beat up, frozen wheeled tool box that had been languishing in the dirt and mud of the old garage. Here's a sort of before;
most of the rust has been ground off, the wheels freed from their rust frozen confinement and a coat of stop rust and Rustoleum silver applied.

And the after:

Ready for shelf liner, loaded with tools and finding a place for it. That means the drill press will have to move...

In the mean time..back at the office..

We're switching all our financial information ( or non information) over to an open source application that runs on our Linux machines.

It's KMyMoney, it's free, which fits our budget. It's simple, which fits my accounting abilities. It's powerful, I can electronically transfer my banks records to KMyMoney. It's Open Source, a term I would like a lot of us to be more familiar with. Simplistically, it's the concept of software that isn't owned in the traditional sense by a corporation. It's supported by a community of developers - yes people just like you-and it's free to use. It's altruistic - giving back is a great way to heal a lot of what's not working with our economic systems.

I now know why there is more days in the month left than there is money in the budget!

Ah well, we have snow - and the snow shoes are paid for!

If your not having fun today odds are your probably doing it the wrong way..

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