Pic of the Day: Weeping Liberty

Screenshot from tonight's "Doctor Who."

Badass--especially in the way this shot is set up, just before the Big Reveal.

Yeah, about that...

It seems like only two days ago that I wrote, "I'm gonna try one Motivational a day till the elections."

Hasn't happened--but I'll just do what a Republican would do, and blame someone else.

Goddammit, Romney, this is your fault!

(so now I'm only one behind.)

Song of the Day: "Oh...Sweet Jesus" (Joe Scarborough)

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!

Warms my cold, black atheist heart, like a litter of newborn kittens, seeing Joe's reaction. Michael Tomasky's got a well-written gloat of his own at The Daily Beast.

Couldn't rMoney dredge up some of his old mad cheerleadin' skilz to whip the crowd up into a frenz...er...yeah *yawn*

I'm gonna try one Motivational a day till the elections. Mitt has become my muse. He'd better not wreck it like a company or his campaign.

Pic of the Day: The Mittenberg

Gotta say, I'm loving the explosive decompression that's hit the Romney campaign since he brought Ryan aboard, especially with Ryan getting all the cheers from the audience even as Mittens tries to get the focus back on himself.

On the one hand, DAYUM but that's harsh, happening at your own rally.

On the other, I can't find any sympathy in storage for the Vulture Capitalist who's made his millions wrecking peoples' lives and selling American jobs overseas. I'd love to see him and his fellow scumbags reduced to living in refrigerator boxes--and then see them evicted.

Pretty awesome watching them torching their own.

The Mitt, the Mitt, the Mitt is on fire...

Pic of the Day: Romney says...er...oh forget it

Yeah, something stupid, what the hell is his problem, good news for Obama, and like that.

Took me too long in GIMP getting the text tool to work properly, so this better be as funny as I thought it'd be an hour ago. Dammit.

His techs really need to dump MittOS (an obvious resource hog, and unstable as hell) and hack some kind of Linux into him. He'd have to lose his proprietary Priveleged Asshole scripting environment--but he'd have Mah Jongg, which would make him more fun to be around.

They could load him with the Android OS, but that'd be kind of meta--and he'd have to pay George Luca$ royalties every time he said "DROID" at startup. Besides, the App Store really utterly SUCKS now that you have to set up a GMail account.

Pic of the Day: For Pedro's Sake!

So the MittBot went on Univision to impress the Hispanic community and to let them know he has acquired empathy for them, and that he is the superior unit for installation in el Casa Blanca come January 20, 2013.

One of his aides claims he was just "sunburned," but it could have been a make-up artist going dark on his face, or the Bot really needs to change his desktop, or he was trying to blend in with the brown folks to show that empathy he's acquired.

I made this to help him. He can thank me by shuffling a stack of $20's my way.

Bonus--made this one because of the "suntanned Mitt":

(...ermahgerd explained here...)

Pic of the Day: Bwahahaha!

This is getting to be a daily occurrence as the MittBot's programming proves ever less capable of parsing the real world for him.

Best quote of the day: Lawrence O'Donnell opened his "The Last Word" with "Mitt Romney is drowning in stupid people..."

De Niro nails it:

CAD Projects: X-11 Decals

In a fit of boredom, I decided to work up a set of decals for a guy in the X-11 Group. Didn't take very long before I'd reproduced the door and spoiler "X-11" and hood "Alta Potencia V6" emblems for his '85 X-11 project:

I'd never seen the Spanish version of the X-11 "High Output V6" emblem before.

It took about an hour to hash out the basics, but I had to go back a few times to fix some things and get the solid color fill worked out in QCAD. I was originally going to export the drawings as Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG) files and color them in a freebie vector illustration program called InkScape, but I didn't like the results. Did the coloring in QCAD instead.

I was still bored, so I drew up the "X-11" door and spoiler logos for '81-84 models:

Not bad for a weeks' worth of work. I still need to do the English "High Output" drawing and a "Chevrolet" to round out the '85 decal set. Anyone who's subscribed to the X-11 Group can find copies of the drawings there (under Files in the Members Only section). At this point, the sets are in CAD .DXF and .SVG formats; no idea what formats an actual print shop would want, but they should be able to work with what's there.

Gear Review: The Tux, pt. 2

So I've had the FirstAct Overload BB391--or simply "The Tux" because it's fat and black and white like a penguin--for more than a year (see first review here). Plenty of time for the honeymoon phase of Guitar Acquisition Syndrome to fade away and a more analytical frame of mind to set in.

It's still a reasonably comfortable guitar, but the same things that annoyed me about it in May of 2011 are annoying today.

With its very light poplar body and maple neck, the worst issue--balance--probably can't be fixed without adding a lot of weight to the bridge end of the body. With a strap on the stock strap pins, the Tux hangs from its upper horn and wants to stay dead level. The other end of the strap has little effect. You can't shift the guitar around on your shoulder like a Strat or Les Paul to make the neck angle upward, either--all that does is move the whole guitar up.

I tried adding a strap pin to the lower side of the neck heel. While that took care of the balance issue, now the guitar wants to lean out at the top, forcing me to use my forearm to keep it in line. It's not bad enough for me to hate it (yet--but I can see it getting there), but it takes getting used to if I haven't played it in a while.

The other annoyance was much easier to fix. When I first got this guitar, the bridge saddles were set insanely high. Each saddle has a pair of Allen-head screws for setting string height. Turning them out to bring the strings down enough for playability left almost 1/4" of each screw sticking out of the saddle tops. Sharp edges. I popped them out one at a time and cut them down. Problem solved!

All in all, the Overload BB391 isn't a high-end (or even mid-level) instrument, but for sixty bucks you'll get sixty bucks of fun. Based on my sample, it's not a ready-to-play guitar right out of the box, but anyone with a little knowledge of setting one up can get it into playable shape without much effort, assuming they can live with the crappy balance.

Adding (9-11-12): to give experienced players an idea of where the upper strap pin originally sat, it's straight up from the 22nd fret. On a Les Paul Jr., it's above the 16th fret; on the Strat-like Peavey T-15 it's above the 13th (on a 20-fret neck); and on my Lotus Stratocopy it's right around the 12th. The pin I added to the Tux is below the 20th fret, which is still several inches back and down from a good balance point--and there's nowhere else to go, unless I start screwing around with the neck, or add some sort of "outrigger" to the body to extend the pin location forward a few inches. Not really worth all that much effort.