Sutton Who?

Sigh. Worked a half-day Saturday, had a much-needed sleep-in on Sunday. Result is only a few hours to work on anything.

I put a coat of primer on the first attempt at an Imperial Highway part and the grooves between the stones look horrible. So I've coated the whole thing in Bondo Spot Putty and will sand and "point" from there. I was thinking about Spot Putty anyhow to add some texture. Hammered finish spray might also provide a little texture, but I've discovered those finishes are a lot more visual than they are textural.

If this works the way I hope I might have the model ready for casting by the weekend. At which point I'm off work and won't be able to do all that smelly pouring of silicone et al at work instead of in my tiny kitchen. Oh, and TechShop managed to fix their vacuum-former, apparently. Well, at the worst-case deliverable I can cast during the week I return to work.



Not enough concentration for electronics, sigh. Or the vastly overdue Holocron project I promised (related, as I still want to work up a custom LED board for that).

Reading the second Samantha Sutton novel now, but I'm a little worried. The third came out just last month, but I've yet to find a single online bookstore that has it in stock, or has any information about when it may be available, or even makes it possible to set a "back in stock" alert or pre-sale or anything. I'm talking every store -- I've hit over a dozen now, and each has the same uninformative blank of "No, don't have it, don't know when we'll have it, can't tell you anything else." Makes me wonder if there's something going on.



While I'm ranting, two annoying "improvements" to the Mac OS I'm using now. The nag box that shows up if you remove a thumb drive doesn't auto-select anymore, forcing you to scroll over to it, highlight it, then hit the very small checkbox to close it. Someone obviously had done their reading on Fitt's Law; the entire operation is carefully tailored for maximum inefficiency in aid of punishing the user for not waiting whatever arbitrary interval the Mac might desire to properly unmount a hot-swappable device. (One thing I have to give Windows; it at least gives you a pop-up for "It is now safe to remove your device." Mac does not give any such clear indication.)

The other is oddly similar but appears in the bundled Mail client; it now is necessary to both select and to fully expose in the window each and every message before the "unread" flag will clear. So if you are sent a typical work-related email with a dozen independent replies and forwards from different people, instead of scrolling swiftly through the stack of replies you have to pretend to read every damn one if you want to be able to use the "unread" flag as a signal that you have new messages waiting.

Mostly, though, I live in fear of when I'll be forced to make the next upgrade. Because from everything I've read the next one breaks practically everything. And Mac OS doesn't exactly have a reputation for giving either enhanced performance or increased efficiency with each upgrade. All they offer, really, is more glossy, the latest fad that they insist you adapt to (which even if it might save a keystroke or two -- which it rarely does -- that saving is easily lost in the time spent re-learning), and some trivial bit of code functionality the lazy designer of some ap it turns out I really need decided was better than writing their own algorithms for, and thus...forces me to upgrade.

And that last sentence needs to be burnt to the ground. Good thing I'm also stalled out on writing my fanfic, then!