Updateyness and inadvertant high explosives (avoided)

[luckytroll]

A mixed day today. Started off sleepy, then a day of dread working for customer - not a dread in the sense of something horrid happening, just a strange sense of professional ouch. I have been working for over a week - and it has finally yielded a spreadsheet that shows performance for a bunch of computers. It seems sad - all that work for a single table of figures. I dont really know how its going to help the general situation of things. Ill just have to see.

Later on, went to the boat and worked on varnishing most everything we could get our brushes on. I also put a coat of glass reinforced polyester resin on the fridge lid. Then we went and watched a presentation on boat chartering in the BVIs - and had a nice dinner at the clubhouse. 

Internet is now blazingly fast at the boat. The only downside is that i spilled some catalyst for the fibreglass resin in the cockpit floor , and it smells terrible. Well, to me it does - mon_chou cant smell it at all. I guess Im just lucky with my super-smell senses. Lucky for me I have internet though - my first thought was to clean it up with some acetone - but turns out that MEK and acetone combine to form a high explosive - just what I need soaking into the teak, thanks. So Ill let it evaporate.

In other news, looks like In in town all weel, but travelling to Beantown weekend after next. Looks like we will go to the cottage with milk_an_honey this weekend coming, if all works out.

Oh, and Ive signed up for more university courses - this time a CS course, because its a pre-requisite for some other CS stuff Im actually interested in. A lot of the OS CS stuff, Ill likely be obliged to challenge for - No sense in taking a Unix sysadmin or OS course or data management course, when I designed the backup infrastructure for McGill, or got offered a job managing the CS network at NorthEastern, or led a team of DR experts during 911.  Chou thinks those things alone might be worth a few credits, but I often feel like those prior learning credit schemes are some kind of cheat - analogous with the internet university scams out there - and am leery of getting credits like that, even if awarded by an accredited canadian university.

Im still not sure why Im still puttering along with U courses. I think it has something to do with keeping my brain fit. Or something to do with needing a degree these days to have any kind of working-geographic mobility.

Comments

[chief1ic.livejournal.com]

I think of courses as government subsidized entertainment. For less than the amount of money I spend on beer over four months, I get to meet and hang out with new people and talk about stuff that I'm interested in and learn things. And then I get to claim it as a deduction next year on income tax.

[iambic-cub.livejournal.com]

I have to keep reminding myself I'm taking classes for fun, because I keep getting too serious about it. And don't fret too much about PLAR credits. I've taken Unix courses from a University, and they were barely an appetizer for the Unix feast that is my work-life these days. There are probably things you could teach the professor.

[canuckotter.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm definitely with iambic_cub on this... Having taken university courses and now doing real-life work on some of the same topics... The university courses are kind of a joke. Trust me, the challenge option is there for a very good reason.

[kiwano.livejournal.com]

but turns out that MEK and acetone combine to form a high explosive - just what I need soaking into the teak, thanks. So Ill let it evaporate.

That'd be MEK-P which combines with acetone to make the shock sensitive expolsive. Plain old MEK gets along just fine with acetone; in fact, they're often found together.

The key things to remember about MEK-P are that if you touch it, you go blind, and if acetone touches it, it can explode. So just wear your goggles and nitrile gloves, and always use MEK (the solvent, not the catalyst) instead of acetone for cleanup when working with polyester.

I usually just don't bother with acetone at all, since MEK can do anything that acetone can (and evaporates a little more slowly, and is safe for use with polyester resin). You can get MEK at pretty much any paint store, just like acetone, and I don't think it's much (if any) more expensive.