Vengeance was mine that day...
You can ask my wife... I'm a real laid back person, very slow to anger - but once you get me angry, I'm vindictive, cruel, and a fiendishly evil thinker.
So today I decided to post this story on a truck forum in a thread about people messing with your ride, and I figured I'd recall it here as well. It was in 1998 or so, I'd not long had my license, and the car my uncle left for me when he moved to the states wasn't much, and I treated it like hell, but damnit if anyone else was going to mistreat it.
Some friends and I were at a skate ramp when this kid named Jye shows up. Apparently some of my friends knew him, but I didn't know him, and I don't think he knew me. He sat on his really expensive mountain bike while we were jumping off the dirt pile someone had thoughtfully left right near the ramp for us, and the entire time he didn't do anything but talk crap (not just to me, to everyone). I didn't really do anything, and after a while boredom set in so he decides he'll have some fun throwing clumps of dirt around, and eventually one hit my car.
I told him to knock that off, not to be throwing dirt in my car... so he throws another, which knocks the face off my CD player in the dash. So I confront him and tell him to knock it the hell off. This continues on for a bit, until I get tired and decide to leave.
Fatboy decides to jump on his bike and put it right in front of me so I can't get out. His entire attitude was "what're you going to do about it", turning and looking back at me, pride filling his big fat cheeks like a delicious cupcake.
So I did what any normal, idiotic, testosterone-filled teenager would do when he's challenged by someone so aggravatingly inferior - I floored it. Just enough to send the bumper of my car up on top of that expensive 26" back rim with the disc brakes. My early-eighties Ford sat precariously atop that rim for what seemed like an eternity, while the reality of the situation sunk through the layers of celulite caked on this kid's brain.
Just as the realization hit him like a ton of cookies, that rim folded over. He drug what was left of a terribly expensive mountain bike off to the side, while I drove off - several other guys in an uproar of laughter at what had just taken place. Tears in his puffy eyes, he swore he'd have "his brother" talk to me about replacing his bike...
Well I saw him and some other sasquatch that I assumed to be his brother in the street a few weeks later and neither of them said a damn thing to me. Vengeance was mine that day.
Blogging sucks.
I don't think I'm going to put that much effort into this blog any more. I'll keep dropping Entrecards, but that's mostly because I find lots of interesting shit while I do it - not so much because I actually want the traffic (I could care less at this point). I'll post here when I have something to say.
Paid blogging, in general, sucks. I'm almost guaranteed I'll never achieve a page-rank on this website because of it - and I don't really have a problem with that, paid blogging is essentially cheating the pagerank system (otherwise, pagerank would be irrelevant and the higher paid opps would go to people with higher traffic, regardless of pagerank).
With a blog, you have to keep working at it. If you don't have anything new to say, people won't be bothered reading your website. I often go for periods where I don't have anything to say, and I don't want to feel compelled to make up some off-topic bullshit just to appease the types of visitors a blog attracts. I started this blog originally because my Hungry Hacker journal page was too difficult to update - and also to try and cash in a little bit with paid blogging. But these days it seems more work than anything else, so I'm going to cut back a little bit. I'll only post when I have something I actually want to say.
Contrast all this to my Hungry Hacker Industries website, which is monetized exclusively by affiliate marketing, chiefly through eBay. I really haven't updated that site in over a year, I only really log into it to delete the spam and reply to odd comments. The purpose of this website is providing long-term information that stays pertinent for several years, and then as an afterthought providing useful affiliate links that are on-topic and non-intrusive.
It works. I haven't done a damn thing with that website for over a year, and it still averages out to about $20USD a month income. If I actually worked at it and provided new content (I have a few things in the works, but nothing completed yet), I'm sure I could ramp that up to a reasonable income, but what's nice is knowing that if I take a break the site will keep plodding along. It'll keep generating it's own traffic, because my home grown content management system was built from the ground up for fair-play search engine optimization. And, obviously it'll keep generating an income regardless of the work I put into it.
So yeah, I think I'm going to get back into the tinkering and start documenting that stuff again, it's far less aggrevating than fighting for opps with paid blogging companies.
First welding task complete
Today I decided to put my new welder to it's first actual task - the first of two repairs to our garage-sale-purchased wood heater. The angle iron in the rear of the firebox, which is supposed to keep the firebricks in place on the back of the box, was all warped and allowed the middle bricks to come loose. So I cut it the welds carefully, and broke it out with a large pair of channel-lock pliers.
Next, I cut a length of heavy angle iron to the correct size, and used my grinder to scuff up the back wall of the firebox to make a contact. Tacked it in place, then proceeded to weld small sections at a time. The downside to my cheap welder becomes apparent when welding heavier metal - it's not particularly high amperage, and on the max amp setting, it's duty cycle is 10%. 1 minute on, 9 off doesn't sound terrible, but when you just want to get the job done it's aggrevating. Still though, it did do the job, even if my welding skills made a weld which while strong, was not the prettiest.
The end result is a weld that looks like metallic acne, but that's okay. It's structurally sound and the metal should be thick enough to withstand the heat of the firebox at least one winter and keep the bricks in place - and that's all that counts. I'm sure by the time I burn that piece of metal up, my welding skills will have improved.
As soon as I track down some heavy-gauge plate metal for the door repairs, I'm all set. I'm also considering welding in a crude baffle, because our wood heater didn't come equipped with one. Just something that forces the heat up and around prior to going out the flue, to hopefully improve efficiency a little bit. I don't suppose anyone reading this is an expert on wood heater design? 
