[Coco] George's CNC Machine (WAS: Something else)

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 24 September 2008, Chuck Youse wrote:
>I gotta ask, Gene, what do/did you do for a living?
>
>C.
>
Chuckle, haven't read the archives I guess, NBD.

I am 99% self taught, officially with an 8th grade education back when they 
actually taught kids to read.  I quite school at 15 to go see if I could fix 
a few radios & tv's for a living, back in about '49.  And I did that, 
learning all the time, till about '59 when I took my new wife & packed up our 
old Chrysler and went to So Cal to make a million dollars,  Welfare sent me 
home just under a year later.  Got a job in an iron foundry for the summer, 
and then went to Rapid City for Norair to be a field checkout tech while 
building some titan's around EAFB.  When that was over, we had fallen in love 
with the Black Hills and stayed, doing tv & hifi service for a year or so, 
during which time I picked up a 1st Phone & eventually was hired at the local 
tv station, KOTA.  It was all up the ladder from there, with a missing rung 
or 3, like my first wife having a stroke at 34, dying and leaving me with 3 
kids.  So I grabbed the glasshopper at Casey's T&T & took her home for 17 
years, then I came to WV as the CE at WDTV in '84, split with the glasshopper 
in '85, married a local old maid music teacher in '89, and am now partially 
retired from there, still doing some transmitter work, and bailing out my 
successor when he gets in over his head.  Most recently this past week.  He 
didn't know where Polaris was, and was trying to align a satellite dish he 
had moved to another pole from 17 miles away.

Various times & places I managed to be in the right place at the right time, 
like helping build the tv cameras that we on the Trieste when it went down 
into the mohole in Feb '61, and probably ran the test station that certified 
the fuel pressure regulators that gave John Glenn his first high ride.  I 
heard they were doing a C.E.T. test at the local community college in Norfolk 
NE one morning while I was the tx supervisor at KXNE-TV, so I ran down and 
took it, missing 2 of the 125 questions, so I'm a Certified Electronics 
Technician, registered in NE as #118.  This was in '72.  And like the 1st 
Phone, all spur of the moment, never cracked a book just because there was a 
test, no chance to.

I have actively raced C Super go-karts, and probably have over a half million 
miles in the saddle of a motorcycle.  Knowing my reflexes were gonna get me 
killed, I sold the last bike about 6 years ago.

So all in all, I have 'been there, and done that' quite a few times, and I 
could bore this list by repeating some of the stories they've mostly heard 
already.

And if truth be known, the coco taught me more about computers than all the 
other machines combined, all because it was so open with the info to write 
stuff all in the os9 manuals in very fine, concise writing.  I have not, and 
probably never will, reached that level of expertise on linux, its simply too 
big and complex for one mind to grok.

Its been a heck of a ride & I hope I'm not done yet.  I still have a garage to 
finish, an entertainment center out of solid cherry about half built, and 
$600 worth of stuff I picked up yesterday to build me a new linux box with, 
an AMD Phenom 4, 4 GB of ram, a new ASUS motherboard, a decent video card I'm 
hoping will run google's sketchup with, and a pata_sil ATA raid card so I can 
continue to use the rest of the drives in this box with the new setup.  And 
it should do it on less power than this XP-2800 uses.

Theoretically, I should be able to swap the mobo's and such, hit the bios and 
tell it to boot from the onboard ATAPI/IDE interface, reconfigure (maybe, 
probably not) the xorg.conf and be up and running with only the usual new box 
gotcha's.  Theoretically...  But I'll need to rebuild the kernel to take 
advantage of the pata_sil card as I'm not building that particular module by 
default in my current builds.  I like to bleed, so I'm running 2.6.27-rc7 
ATM.

The garage and the milling machine can be seen at
<http://gene.homelinux.net:85/gene>
If anyone is interested.  I'm on dsl, so the upload speed up is slower, but it 
should work.  The :85 in the address is because verizon blocks port 80 to 
keep us from running home servers.  Jerks...  The milling machine movie is 
way too big for anyone on dialup, sorry.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
		-- Voltaire