[ale] OT - Simple machines

[Joe]

I had a great experience today.

My little girl loves to collect rocks, and asked for a rock polisher
for Christmas. I got her high quality Lortone rotary tumbler. Very
simple to operate: you put the stones in the barrel, add some
polishing compound and a bit of water, seal it up, turn it on, and a
little 30-watt motor kicks in and just rotates the barrel for, like, a
month - and then you open the barrel and take out your nice shiny
rocks.

I love this thing. After XP crashes on my (employer-mandated)
development box, I just go sit and watch the Lortone while the bugger
reboots. Round and round and round... I imagine a room full of them,
turning out hundreds of pounds of polished stones per month, which I
could then hawk to tourists in front of the Jack In the Box downtown.

Today, a disater occurred. We run the Lortone on the front porch,
because it makes enough noise to be a trifle annoying.  It's out of
the weather, and El Paso doesn't actually *have* much weather anyway,
so I don't worry about it. But today...  today the dudes with the
black sunglasses came. They were dispatched by a sinister organization
which takes my money and, in return, sends these guys around from time
to time: the Apartment Management. They came with their weapons: the
leaf-blowers. And they blew a buttload of dust and crap off of our
driveway and ONTO MY FRONT PORCH, where it all got into the Lortone's
housing. When I got home from the grocery store, the poor thing was
sitting there with its motor frozen, trying in vain to push the barrel
against the heinous friction induced by the crud blown up by the MIBs.

I nearly wept. My one remaining link to sanity in a world of hideously
complex electronics and software seemed on its way to Machine Heaven.
But I decided it couldn't hurt to open the thing up and see if I could
give it a little TLC. And the most amazing thing happened.

A total of four screws held the entire unit together. When the case
came apart, I looked in, and I actually understood the entire machine
in a single glance. Everything was completely clear and obvious. No
bad RAM, no security holes, no weird network problems... It was a
moment of almost seraphic joy.

Hmm, I wonder if I can port Linux to this thing?

I cleaned the moving parts, blew the dust out of the motor armature,
put it back together, and it's chugging away again right now. Life is
good.

Sorry, I just had to share that.

Cheers,

-- Joe
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