Freesteel Blog » Machining excellent adventures

Machining excellent adventures

Friday, October 23rd, 2015 at 4:20 pm Written by:

A day of pain on the proxxon mini machine produced this terrible result:
brassproxxon

In the evening I was able to work with the big machine in the closet while another meeting was going on in the Dinky main room. My got it’s such a pleasure to use. And so quiet, without these buzzing stepper motors and noisy spindles. Here’s the raw code that made the toolpaths.
brassarcitype

I’ve been pushing so hard on this I’ve not updated anything else. Back on weekend of 10th October I had a couple of flights off Mam Tor.
hgmam
I stayed the night with Becka in the TSG hut and flew with 25 other hang-gliders on Sunday. No crashes happened and I didn’t talk to many of them in the field on packing up. It’s not like being with cavers. There’s not so much use we can be to each other, other than getting in one another’s way.

And finally I spent most of the fortnight cycling down to the allotment after receiving an official warning that we’ve not been weeding it enough. This takes me past the new Kings Leadership Academy which is not in Warrington, but on the site of the out of date website of University Academy Liverpool as you can see from the signage facts on the ground:

excellencehabit

This is just half measures. They should go for the full Bill & Ted experience and use the original sayings:

Be Excellent to Each Another

Party on, Dudes

These, in fact, have a lot more meaning and application, in the way that “Excellence is a habit” is self-centred and ultimately empty.

On the other hand “Be excellent to each other” is the motto of Noisebridge hacker space founded by Mitch Altman who explained that this is their one and only rule. It’s something that has meaning, you can act on it, and hold yourself up to it.

Furthermore, “Party on, Dudes” does make clear that we are here having a party. Life is a party. There’s enough food and toys in the room with sociable people and we’re all here to share and enjoy it. And we intend to continue this party on. Nothing could be clearer than that.

It would be nice if the students got it together to sort out that sign, and the other one, which says: “Making Great Leaders”, because someone’s got to do the goddamn work at some point, and it would be nice if such people were valued instead of ground into the ground by all these self-appointed “leaders”.

You could start with the pathologies of meaningless mottos and the deterioration in direction outlined by a interviewee on This Is Hell who began:

I recently spent a semester teaching writing at an elite liberal-arts college. At strategic points around the campus, in shades of yellow and green, banners displayed the following pair of texts. The first was attributed to the college’s founder, which dates it to the 1920s. The second was extracted from the latest version of the institution’s mission statement:

The paramount obligation of a college is to develop in its students the ability to think clearly and independently, and the ability to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.

    leadership
    service
    integrity
    creativity

Let us take a moment to compare these texts. The first thing to observe about the older one is that it is a sentence. It expresses an idea by placing concepts in relation to one another within the kind of structure that we call a syntax. It is, moreover, highly wrought: a parallel structure underscored by repetition, five adverbs balanced two against three…

The second text is not a sentence. It is four words floating in space, unconnected to one another or to any other concept. Four words — four slogans, really — whose meaning and function are left undefined, open to whatever interpretation the reader cares to project on them.

Think of it as an intelligence test. Nail up a bunch of ridiculous signs around the school building and if nobody pulls them down (metaphorically and/or physically) then that school’s education has failed.

For more, there’s on-going entertainment at the FOI Website for the LDL report.

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