Hand me the Sledge

I suffered a crushing defeat today. I had to give up on my useless DVD burner.

I have an NEC 3550A burner in my desktop. Which sits on the floor. Making it a floortop. The burner worked fine when I first got it, but it eventually went nuts and refused to burn anything. I have upgraded the firmware, even taking a chance on a shady souped-up version written by kooks. I have upgraded my burning software. I have sent logs to the people at Alcohol-Soft. Nothing has worked.

I threw in the towel. I have a new Samsung on the way. Had to order it, unless I wanted to shop locally and get the wrong thing and pay way too much. Maybe next week I’ll be able to burn disks without turning on my creaky laptop (which fails about half the time).

I was using the PC to burn machining disks from Smartflix. There is no way I can take notes on DVDs fast enough to get them back to Smartflix before a late fee kicks in, so I make copies, send the originals home, take notes while watching the copies, and then discard the copies. Because I was having so many burn failures, I was still having late-fee issues.

My new solution is to copy them to my hard drive. I don’t want to sit in my sweaty office watching machining videos, but if I have the copies on my drive, I can burn them later, when the new burner gets here. After that, I can watch them in comfort. Either on the couch, or in the new Multimedia Garage.

The guys who sell videos are smart. Or maybe they’re just lame. They use ordinary purple recordable disks. These things are harder for DVD players to read, and they’re harder to copy. And they seem to get damaged easily. I’ve had several Smartflix disks refuse to play all the way. This makes life easier on the video guys, because it makes it tough to rent and copy the disks. If they upgraded to real equipment, their disks would be just like the ones you get when you buy movies. They’d last forever, and every machine in the universe would read them with ease.

I am tempted to take the old burner out and crush it with a sledgehammer. My dad has a 13-pounder on his boat, for removing props. I think it would be perfect for this job. I remember the joy the guys in Office Space got from destroying the Evil Printer. Or was it a fax machine?

The mill’s status is unknown. The last communication I had indicated an arrival date of around…yesterday. But it was not a firm date, and I have no mill, so I’m assuming the machine is still being twiddled with. When people are slow to ship you something expensive, they always want to let you know as soon as it leaves their facilities, so you won’t post nasty things about them on the web or try to back out of the deal. I have not received any authoritative shipping notices, so my best guess, based on being old and knowing how the world works, is that the folks who are drop-shipping the mill have not received the DRO yet. The mill is probably sitting in California right now, while irate Asian guys fume about the time it’s taking for the DRO to arrive from China.

The company is run by an Asian. That’s how I know the hypothetical angry guys are Asian.

It’s funny how we’re not allowed to say “Oriental” any more, even though it’s a completely harmless term (means “eastern”) and it’s more accurate than “Asian.” Benjamin Netanyahu is Asian. So is George Michael. But they’re not Oriental.

Wikipedia says “Oriental” is offensive in America, but not in England. That’s proof that it’s a legitimate term. Man, what is it with liberals? You can’t say “stewardess.” They tried to take “black” away from us, and blacks wouldn’t let them. American Indians got mad when they tried to make us stop saying “Indian.” What is the point of manufacturing a controversy where none should exist?

We can still say “hippie,” “moonbat,” “tree hugger,” and “feminazi.” I’m not letting those go.

I read something interesting today about milling machines. Evidently, if you really want to do good woodworking, you’re better off with metalworking machines than woodworking machines. You get more control.

I’m sure there are drawbacks. You have to watch out for oil and grease and swarf, and the tools turn slowly by woodworking standards. But imagine how much easier it would be to rout, using a milling machine instead of a router. You clamp the piece down. You use your DROs to make sure the measurements are right. Then you stand back in complete safety while the power feed does the work. No feeding your fingers into the bit. No eighth-of-an-inch errors because you couldn’t keep something from moving around. I guess if you really wanted to be a good woodworker, you’d buy an old mill and rig it so the spindle turned at 12,000 RPM. If the machine was worn-out and you screwed every cut up by ten thousandths, no one would ever know, because you’d still be super-accurate by woodworking standards.

The guy who was writing about it is an extremely proficient and experienced machinist. He pointed out a few pitfalls, such as using metal cutters on wood. But it sounded like a great idea, regardless.

Using a router is a giant pain. The work tries to jump, and sometimes it succeeds. It’s very hard to measure accurately. If you hold the router in your hands instead of using a table, it will do its best to tilt and cut big gouges in your wood, just when you think you’re about to finish your project without a hitch.

I wonder if there’s any reason I can’t put a 3-phase motor in my table saw and get a dry-cut blade for it to cut metal.

The mill will get here eventually, and then we’ll see what it will let me do.