Hot wax, rope, pain, blow job

In your dreams, FNH. In your dreams.

After the preparations, I started making the candle itself. First of all, I applied some silicon spray inside the mould in the hope it would ease separation when finished, which it did. Then the melting of the tealights began; for this I used a little saucepan we hardly use anymore.
The candle wax (it was actually paraffin) melted quite easily. When the first batch of tealights were liquid, the mess began for good. I cut off a piece of cotton rope, to be used as wick, and put it in the molten paraffin, in order for it to suck up as much paraffin as possible. This to prevent the wick from burning up before the wax melts in the final product, which would make the candle unusable. Having a paraffinated wick also helps keeping the piece of rope straight, which makes for easier handling. However, to get a straight wick, it has to dry in straight form; which means gripping it with both hands and pulling it straight. One side was cold and clean (I was smart enough not to drop the entire length in the paraffin), the other hot and messy. This was the most painful stage in the entire candle making process.

When the wick had dried, I poured some wax in the mould and it ran right out of it, through the openings between mould and pot. However, when this first layer solidified, the mould was closed. Before this layer was entirely solid, I put in the wick.
Then the routine began: adding some coins, adding some more wax, waiting until the wax solidified, adding another layer of coins, and so on. I did enverything to get the wax cooled down as quickly as possible: I put the coins in the fridge, I added water in the pot so that the mould was surrounded by water, I added ice cubes to the water, and of course I blowed on the wax to cool it down.
The level of wax gradually increased, until it reached the edge of the surrounding pot, at which point I couldn't add more water to cool it down. This lack of cooling was very apparent: subsequent layers set remarkably slower.



I finally had enough of it (I had also gone slightly over budget, those large denomination coins add up faster than you'd think) and concluded with a bunch of 1 and 2 cent coins and the remainder of the wax. I then put the entire pot in the cellar where it could cool down completely.



Cleaning up was surprisingly easy: I rinsed the melting pot with cold water until it was entirely cooled. Since wax and paraffin have a larger density (and thus smaller volume) when in solid form than in liquid form, the solidified paraffin remains could be taken out from the pot in one piece.

The next day, I removed the candle from its mould, cut off the brittle edges at the top and the bottom, trimmed the wick to size, and wrapped it in as a gift.



Part of the message is a joke on the recepient's function with the W3C, as they are notorious for filling their specifications with lots of requirement level phrases.

Candle making

Last saturday one of my collegues got married. At work we had been all very agreeing for weeks on end to do something, but it wasn't until thursday that we finally woke up and realized that it was actually too late to organise anything. So we decided to give money (a commodity always in short supply whenever people marry or build a house or both).
Now that we had decided what to give, we had to find some original way of presenting it. One of the ideas was to put the money in a wheel of Gouda, a joke on the fact he recently moved to the Netherlands (physically that is, mentally he had dropped out of Belgium long before). But obtaining a cheese would probably have been too difficult, especially considering the short timeframe. So we adopted Litrik's idea: put the money as coins in a candle.
As I have some experience with candles (and with just about anything else as well, provided it burns like hell), I volunteered to make that candle.

The idea was to melt tealights and cast a candle of about 10cm diameter and 20cm tall. We estimated that a tealight had a diametre of approximately 3cm and a hight of 1cm. That makes 1.5²*3.14 = 7cm³. To reach the dimensions we wanted, we would need 5²*3.14*20/7 = 224 tealights. So I went to the nearest Ikea to buy three packs of 100 tealights. I also made a visit to AsterX to buy a cotton wick.
This is what it all looked like:


My idea was to use a leftover piece of plastic pipe as mould; however, the piece I had in mind had apparently disappeared. I had no time to drive around looking for pipes, so I had to improvise a bit (I'm usually quite a good at that) and make the mould myself.
I did have some heavy cardboard pipes (each over 2m long and filled with approximately 35m of aluminium profiles left over from a previous project). I couldn't use those of course, they were still in use; however, I could use one as mould for my mould (please bear with me). I wrapped some cling film around it, followed by a layer of paper (for sturdyness), followed by a layer of cling film again. I then cut it off off the pipe and taped the ends together again.
In theory this should have provided me with a nice round tube of 10cm diameter. In reality though, I ended up with a sagging, all but round piece of stuff held together with duct tape. Anyway, I had no time to try anything else, so I took al old cast iron cooking pot and taped the poor tube-aspiring thing to the bottom.


Next time on Blogspot: HOT DRIPPING WAX!

Comité P heeft weer werk

This (first) post in Dutch is about a complaint filed against the Belgian Police for not following the rules that allow them to drive through a red traffic light.

De vorige keer heeft het indienen van een klacht voor een soortgelijke situatie bij het Vast Comité van Toezicht op de politiediensten (beter bekend als Comité P) weinig opgeleverd omdat de betrokkenen niet geïdentificeerd konden worden. Deze keer heb ik de nummerplaat onthouden.

De klacht (verbatim tekst + linkificatie):


Geachte,

Vandaag, dinsdag 27 maart 2007, omstreeks 18 uur 53 is er een politiecombi met nummerplaat SMB-565, komende van de richting Hove en rijdende in de richting van Edegem over de Hovestraat, door het rode licht gereden op het kruispunt van de Hovestraat met de N171 (Boniverlei), zonder evenwel te stoppen zoals nochtans voorgeschreven door Artikel 37.4 van het AR op de politie van het wegverkeer en van het gebruik van de openbare weg. Het prioritaire voertuig maakte op het ogenblik van de feiten wel gebruik van de blauwe knipperlichten zoals voorgeschreven door AR 37.2 en van het speciaal geluidstoestel zoals voorgeschreven door AR 37.3.

Een bijkomende, en mijns inziens verzwarende, omstandigheid in verband met deze overtreding van AR 37.4 is dat het speciale geluidstoestel slechts werd ingeschakeld op een vijftal meter voor het kruispunt en weer werd uitgeschakeld op enkele meters voorbij het kruispunt. Het eerste feit maakte dat aanwezige bestuurders te laat opmerkzaam werden gemaakt op het aanrijdende prioritaire voertuig dat, door ook niet te stoppen, te weinig tijd liet om weggebruikers het kruispunt te laten vrijmaken zoals hen verplicht wordt door AR 38.
Het tweede feit maakte dat het betrokken prioritaire voertuig bij de eerstvolgende oversteekplaats voor voetgangers en bij het volgende kruispunt met voorrang van rechts, beide even voorbij de plaats van de overtreding, geen voorrang kon afdwingen.

Hoewel er 'slechts' sprake is van één flagrante overtreding van de wegcode, blijkt uit het algemene gedrag van de bestuurder van het prioritaire voertuig een minachting voor zowel het verkeersreglement als voor de veiligheid van alle andere weggebruikers.

Met beleefde groet,



Als alles gaat zoals vorige keer verwacht ik deze week nog een schriftelijke bevestiging van ontvangst van mijn klacht en over een maand of drie, vier een verdere opvolging.
Het belangrijkste van dit soort klachtenprocedures is niet het behalen van enig direct voordeel of het veroordeeld krijgen van bepaalde politieambtenaren, maar het geven van een signaal naar de politiediensten toe dat burgers het niet langer pikken dat politieambtenaren zich als cowboys in het verkeer gedragen. Voor het Comité P is dit een beetje extra werk (werk dat ze geacht worden te doen en waarvoor ze betaald worden met mijn belastinggeld), maar het brengt op zijn minst een hoop irritant gevraag en mogelijk een berisping of (hopelijk) zelfs een straf met zich mee voor de politieambtenaar in overtreding. Alles bij elkaar een stevige incentive om het niet meer te doen.

Ik kan iedereen aanraden om hetzelfde te doen (het moet uiteraard wel om een echte overtreding gaan). Een klacht indienen kan online.

Team building

Today (technically yesterday), we had a team building day with the entire company (well, almost entire anyway) at Brasserie Kwadraat in Ekeren. The day started with tea/coffee and croissants, followed by an introduction of the team building people and the obligatory speech/presentation by the Big Boss.

The first activity of the day was a getting-to-know-you session; the group was divided in two manageable parts of 13 people each and the goal was for each person in the subgroup to have a short face-to-face with all the others in the group, with 5 minutes per conversation. It wasn't just a conversation to have, but to determine one nontrivial common trait; tell each other something special about oneself; and set an expectation for the day.
This was a good opportunity to learn something new from each other. Apparently, I'm no the only biker in the team, there are some former-bikers and wannabe-bikers as well. There are also a number of people who share my passion for DIY and tinkering with stuff. And there are some who can appreciate classical music as well.

The second activity was a practice for some quick on-the-spot team work: a small competition between two subgroups of 13 people. The assignment: get all 13 people on a 2x3m piece of polytarp, cut away as much as possible, and flip over the tarp. All this without anyone setting any foot outside the plastic. The winner of the two teams was the one with the smallest piece of plastic left.
It was oficially called an ex-aequo, but our team actually lost.

Lunch was good (smoked salmon).

The third activity was a larger and complicated project, requiring some planning: Mute and Blind. Again the group was divided in two teams of 13 each. Each team would have one mute person and twelve blind ones, all working together to reach an objective. The assignment was: divide the team of blind people into two subteams of 6, have each subteam find a piece of rope, have each subteam lay out the piece of rope in an equilateral triangle with one point touching one end of a narrow bridge, get each subteam inside their triangle, and finally get each subteam to cross the bridge to the other side.
The mute guy can see everything, but cannot move or touch anyone and thus has to steer all the blind people around on the field using non-verbal signs (clapping hands, whistling, etc). The blind people can talk (to each other and to the mute guy), but not see anything.
An operation of this magnitude needed some preparation of course. We were given given some time to agree on some sort of strategy to get the job done. Admittedly, the preparation of our team was complete and utter chaos, until somebody took the bull by the horns and started making some decisions. We finally ended up with a distributed control system and parallel triangle generation.
This means that the leader of each subteam asked simple yes/no questions to the mute and the mute had only three available instructions: two replies and one interrupt (1 clap for yes, two claps for no and multiple claps for full stop). The control system was distributed in that the mute did not send out instructions (central control), but rather relied on the intelligence of the subteam leaders to ask correct questions (this has one drawback: if something goes wrong in the communication, it requires tremendous imagination on the part of the questioner to realize that one or more of the previous answers of the mute were actually wrong). The subteams used a CSMA/CD protocol to communicate with the mute: basic Aloha. Just listen to the others and ask the question; if questions are asked at the same time, shut up and try again later.
The parallel triangle generation consisted of two methods of creating the triangle: one was simple to execute but needed interaction with the mute to position two of the corners; the other was slightly more complex, but needed only a final confirmation of the mute as a doublecheck for whether the triangle was correctly laid out. As such, both triangles could be laid out simultaneously.
Our team won this one.

The last assignment was to stage out each of the five Company Values in groups of five people: enterprising, urge for realisation, respectfulness, realism, and professionalism.
The day was concluded by having people compliment each other.

Dinner was good.

On the road again

Yes indeedy, my bike is finally repaired! It was originally promised for february 14 and later postponed to march 2, then march 6, then march 8, then march 10 at 1100, then march 10 at 1300, then march 10 at 1130 (after an angry phone call).
But all that is past now; today, 85 days and 5 traffic law changes after that fatal moment, I have made my first bike trip of the year. It is still a bit chilly outside, but the sun put in an effort and when driving not too fast, the temperature was comfortable enough.

After almost three months of pedestrianism, I had to get used to driving again. I took it slowly, driving from the garage straight towards an empty parking lot to practise some manoeuvring.
Afterwards I did a larger, completely random tour that also took me past the place where I crashed into the scenery. There was not much to see there, though; the road was in excellent condition (compared, at least, to the average Belgian road).

Defending my case

A certain commenter had apparently expected some monstrosity of a flightcase when he read my articles. I take this as a compliment on my photography skills; however, when you consider the profiles, corners, catches and the handle, they should give you some idea of the real size. If it were huge, all the components would be proportionally huge as well.

Some numbers for comparison (width x height x depth):
- single case: 42 x 34 x 24cm
- CD case: 41 x 35 x 16cm
- HD case: 44 x 25 x 18cm

Some comparative pictures (from left to right: CD case, single case, HD case):


(The glossy black does look better doesn't it).


And finally, it's not the size of your equipment that counts!

The finished article

My flightcase is finished (since last weekend, but I didn't have time yet to take pictures).


I assembled it and did some foam cutting for housing disks. I used a piece of blue insulation panel (polystyrene or polyurethane foam or something) and finished it with a kind of self-adhesive black velours.


There are three cutouts for disks in the tray, one of which is currently in use. Until all three are filled, I use the space below for other stuff.