I am an individual!

A few days ago, I noticed the characteristic smell of popped capacitors. I took the side off my case and noticed a couple of the caps were bulging. Because I am leaving in a couple months anyway, I thought “meh” as it should survive till I leave. I took the side off to keep an eye on the caps to see if more will pop.

Yesterday I came into the office and noticed the computer was off. Confused, I turned it on and walked away to hang up me fleece turned around to find blooms of smoke spewing from the machine. I ran over to find flames inside the machine. Panicking, I unplugged it and started blowing out the flames. Luckily that worked and I didn’t have to email the emergency services.

It all seems to be concentrated around an inductor, although I suspect one of the caps popped its bottom cover and started spewing hydrogen.

So the first task of the day was to do through the purchase order process to get a replacement motherboard, although the case is also somewhat smoke damaged too. The office also smells really bad of caustic fumes.

What has been happening in the office for the last few weeks:

I decided to do a massive clean out of my home store (first time since 2001)

The biscuit tin has not been cleaned for a while and when we run out these crumbs were looking mightily tempting.

Andrew confiscated my bounty of floppy cables I have been collecting over the years.

Will found someone else with a HTC Desire. So he can now flash someone else’s phone. I have never seen will this happy (and I was there at his wedding).

While ceiling cat watches over us all.

Ever wondered what happens when engineers go to the pub? We get uncontrollable bridge building urges. We tried to build a bridge between two tables using the fewest beer mats. Before reading on, take a guess what we got it down to.

Here is our original bridge, which was a corbel arch design. It consumed about thirty beer mats.

The green mats are shaped like a capital B, so they can be locked together. So we were down to twenty-ish.

If you form the bridge into my “snake” design, you can get rid of the weights at the ends and reduce the mats used down to ten.

That seemed like a good design, but actually having a weights works better as the bridge is straight and even. So we are now down to nine mats (it stayed up without my hand there).

If you let the bridge sag a little and allow the ends to twist you can cut form it using eight.

Martin then suggests flipping the direction of the B links half way across the bridge and we were down to seven.

Some careful balancing and you can get it to be stable with just six mats.

If you push the B links into each-other the mats will tear a little and lock together. This way you can alternate the links and make a bridge with five mats. Also in the photo is Andrew’s zipper double bridge.

If tearing is allowed, I take it to the natural conclusion of locking the mats together with small cuts. Sudden leap forward as we have a three mat bridge.

Tear each mat in two and link the parts to make a bridge with two mats.

You can rip a single mat into a continuous strip which makes you rope bridge.

Now that it is so lightweight, you can span the distance with half a mat. Martin is declared the winner.

So that was our final design. Once you go into fractional beer mats, it gets a little hard to measure. We also created made a bit of a mess.

Thanks go to the Ducie Arms who supplied us with the mats and tidied up after we left.

We are working very hard at the ACSD converence in Braga.

But because Doug and Will are involved, beer is never far away.

This is Will’s attempt of reproducing the Isle of Man symbol

Several acts of sillyness including Doug attempting to destroy the pool.

I will try and upload the video as soon as I can over this awful connection.

Yes accidents will happen.

Following the success of the Indian night. I am hosting a TexMex party.As the party invitation points out “I have never been to Mexico, but I have been to Texico and I have watched a lot of Speedy Gonzales, so I imagine it is a bit like that”. So apparently one thing people have at Mexican parties is a piñata. I have never seen a piñata in real life so this is completely guess work as to how to make it.

The body is make of papier-mâché. I was hoping to a baloon the exact right shape, but instead I had to go for a large balloon for the body, and a second balloon for the head. I covered the body balloon from all sides but the base, then turned it upside down and placed the smaller balloon on top and started placing more and more paper strips to stick the two baloons together. You really need three hands for this task.

After the first layer, I let it dry in front of a fan for a couple hours before adding the second layer including a beak make of card. There were 3 layers all together. I used the flour water glue mixture, of which the second batch worked a lot better as it was a bit thicker. This is the end of day one, as it then takes about 24 hours to dry completely.

Then it is onto the crate paper. I found the easiest way was to get a full folded roll of the paper, cut it lengthwise into two and add cuts to make the loops. Then draw a line of liquid paper glue and stick the strip to it.

Work from the bottom up, otherwise each strip gets in the way of the last. Also I kept some areas fur free, in the bottom and the face. Here I glued a single layer of black crate paper. For the beak, that needed about three layers to not show the text under it.

At this point, I did the surgery to add fill the penguin and attach the rope. I was worried that the rope would just rip the head apart, so I tied it to a pencil and fed it though a hole in a CD. That distributed the force around a ring in the head. At one point the back caved in a little, but with the weight of the sweets inside, it was possible to push it back out.

Then finally, attach the wings and feet. I punched two holes in the body and the wing/foot and used coloured cable ties. These work very well as you can trim them off.

Add a decorated hitting stick, and there you go, a Tux piñata. I’ll shall see tomorrow if it works.

UPDATE: Pictures and video of the party including Tux.