Right Brain Feed

  I’ve decided I’m retiring from IBM. Yes, it was my choice to do it, no one shoved me out the door.  I put in my notice, I’m outta here! There. I said it out loud. Exciting, but also scary. Big Life Transition.  Time to reflect on it all…. And also look forward. My plans for retirement include travel, pottery, swimming at the lake, photography, hiking, cooking and grilling up a storm, and even dusting off my raspberry pi and my python skillz, and geeking around a bit.  31 years at IBM packs a lotta memories, from getting seasick when working on 3D stereoscopic Quake2 game support to at least one clear IBM Business Conduct Guideline violation! I cherish the excellent teams I’ve been lucky enough to work on, the intersection of great people and a fun project is a very sweet spot. Find it whenever you can. I loved working with so many different bleeding edge technologies as they evolved. Seriously, name one other company where I could have worked on all these things i...

 I’m not always cooking fancy dishes with exotic spices (Sarah grinds our garam masala mix) , or grilling unusual things (last week it was enoki mushrooms). There are definitely times when Sarah and I seek out simple comfort food. Last night was a great example. Nachos with black beans and avocado, cheddar, queso fresco, and pickled jalapeño. 

 I’ve been playing around with an el cheap o glaze sprayer called ‘The Critter’, it hooks up to a normal air compressor, and attaches to standard Mason jars, so it’s pretty fast at switching between glazes. I frequently use a nice safe liner glaze on functional ware like bowls and mugs, which allows me to experiment more with glazes on the outside. Being the fussy uptight engineering geek that I am, I wanted an easier way to get a nice precise line between the liner and the glaze on the outside. Overspray was driving me (more) nuts. The solution I tried, which works pretty well, is placing a small ball at the top of the piece, it helps prevent overspray, and gives me a more precise line between glazes.

 Recently one of our front burners on the stove refused to light. I could see a spark, could smell natural gas, but could not get the friggin thing to light. Bizarre.  I ended up using my phone camera (Pixel 4a has an awesome camera) along with my little LED work light panel to debug the problem. While the burner looked reasonably clean-ish, there’s a tiny tiny little pinhole in the burner that apparently controls the burner lighting. It looked like it was clean, until I was able to get the phone camera closeup.    I used the LED panel and was able to see light thru the pinhole as I carefully fished around with a toothpick, and eventually cleared it up. The design of the burner is such that it requires a ratchet of a small small size that I don’t have, and the pinhole is tucked away well hidden. Translation: it’s like they wanted to generate service calls by designing it that way. I’ve found that my phone camera becomes a useful tool when doing household projects fai...

 Every year it gets warm in early Spring, as in short sleeve T-shirt warm, the draping cherry trees bloom, followed by daffodils everywhere, then non draping cherry trees and lovely purple Japanese magnolias, and on and on and on. Every year I get sucked into thinking winter is done. Yesterday was April Fools, and Mother Nature was pranking Asheville big time. I took this pic a few days back (while wearing short sleeves), and yesterday it was windy, below freezing,...... and.... SNOWING!!?! Snow didn’t last long, just long enough to be rude.