Whose dog is this?

So Sandy and I took Friday for a haircut on Monday. When we went in to pick up our Friday, the haircutter gave us this dog.

We're not really sure if he's ours. I mean, he responds to 'Friday' and he seems to like us well enough, but he certainly doesn't look like our dog...

I thin know would be a good time to do a brief 'Friday History' (since we're coming up to 4 months of having a dog)

Sit back and prepared to be bored--I mean, captivated--with some pics of our pup.

Only bought him an hour before

We purchased Friday way back on Jan 4. Look how small he was. He was only around 4 pounds back then. Now he's over 10 (and still growing)

In bed

He was so small, in fact, that if you weren't too careful, you could lose him easily.

Hey!! That's my shoe!!

Friday's getting a little bigger

Mommy and Friday having a nap

Our dog loves the snow

And on the couch

That's our little fluff-ball.

Then there's this--

Haircut!

He looks alot smaller

It's a very good haircut. We just have to get used to it. Next time we think we're going to leave the ears a little longer--he looks too poodle-ish right now

All Friday pics here--Friday Pictures

Back to the brick

It's an air powered LEGO engine. Sure it's been done before (and will probably be done again!)

My version was directly inspired by this one--

A LEGO Technic ``Steam'' Engine

I built that exact engine and had it displayed at our last Hobby Show, and was very impressed with the 'eclectic' building method, what, with the various angles and all. However, I'm more of a straight and square builder myself so I decided to have a go at it last night and this is what I came up with.

Back to the brick

Looks very similar to the inspiration, but a little less, well, funky. I like the funky--don't get me wrong. But for my builds, I gotta have parallel lines

So here's a walk thru on how the thing works.

First, you need to add air to the system via the manual air pumps

The air is stored in these air storage tanks

The air is transferred to this switch

The switch makes this pneumatic cylinder go up and down

Which makes this beam go up and down like a teeter-totter

The other end of the beam will also then go up and down

Which will pull this cam around, thus changing linear motion into rotational motion

Which then turns the wheels

Not much to it.

Here's a YouTube vid of the thing working--

So there you have it. A one cylinder LEGO pneumatic engine. It wasn't the first, definitley won't be the last, but it's the one I built (last night).

See all the bricky pics here--LEGO Pneumatic Engine

It's just that life's been a mite busy lately!

That's why there's an apparent lack of updates here on our little corner of the internets.

So going thru some random thoughts...

Here's somethign that our most recent fan, Phantom, would be interested in--turns out that there was an article in the local paper regarding the deer that frequent our back yard. We heard rumours that there were other people in our complex that were also taking care of the deer in the constantly diminishing forest behind our abodes. So having deer living in the city warranted a write-up. Whoda thunk it?

Turns out, much a surprise to no one (besides Phantom), that trying to take care of the furry woodland creatures is a good thing. Something about being Stewarts of the land... I dunno, I read that in a book somewhere.

Another note along the same lines--we haven't seen him, but the wild turkey has been spotted! Turns out the rumours of his demise were grossly exaggerated.

The gold finches are slowly starting to turn, well, gold again--the browny grey is molting into a very nice and vibrant yellow on the ones that frequent our yard.

Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal visit us daily towards dusk--that's a nice way to greet the evening.

That's about it from the view from our back yard.

Soon--hopefully Pretty Soon--we'll have the crocuses and the daffy-dills and the tulips poking thru the ground and we can move from the back yard talk to the front yard talk.

We'll take pics for ya!

Sheken up, but she's okay

Janey! Seriously!! Thank goodness you're (moderately) okay!!!

My heart stopped when I heard (even if it was 4 days ago...)!!!

How I spent my day - AKA Flipping my van over on the highway

Let us know what we can do.

So Linux is put on hold for a bit...

Playing around with Apache running on our server, I decided to modify a few things.

'Cause as some of my friends will attest, our little dusty corner of the information superhighway tends to run a mite slow sometimes.

I was looking to upgrade to a newer version of Apache, and the upgrade path required some configuration changes. One such change was a complete update to mod-security.

I added mod-security to our Apache years ago to try and thwart the spammers from spamming our blog.

It worked quite well. However, until now I didn't realize how system intensive mod-security was--it's a total resource hog and when I removed it, I noted how smooth Apache ran.

And since we updated our blogging software a while back, spam comments haven't happened anyway.

So mod-security gets placed on the back-burner (for now) and we'll continue to run as we are now--at least until I have the time to upgrade everything.

So there we are. Hope it's better for you, the reading masses.