I want to start with Ceramics. I bought a controller for my kiln to work with enamels. I even went so far as to get new enamels and enamel adhesive and . Haven’t done a thing with that. Instead I went to the Tacoma Clay Art Center and bought 04^ white clay and 9 small plastic bottles of underglaze. After I started playing with clay for the first time in 33 years making beads and a few bowls, I realized after firing beads on bike spokes that I needed better rods. Steel rods didn’t seem like they wanted to stay around. Now maybe with the next firing they wouldn’t have degraded any further, but the decay on the first firing was severe. So I had to buy Nichrome wire. Might as well get some for hanging pendants. The nichrome wire just turns a sort of green and hangs in there.

The Kilns element broke so I had to learn how to fix it. And this sort of  “struck the kiln building side of me”. I made my first kiln when I was 17 and fired it with wood felled on our property. We had trees and then we had a bunch of dead branches.  My mom had them cut down. Many of them. Just for the price of having them removed. My sister’s friend overheard some guy in a bar talking about how some idiot lady just handed him thousands of dollars in trees. This kiln, fired by dead beauty and I with a large vise/anvil produced a sword, a sword whose hilt was made with dust cloth and wire, it’s pummel, a drawer pull and it’s blade, from a steel pipe, beaten and filed to proximity. I made for it a scabbard of steel and terrycloth. Wire. The kiln was made of concrete block and red brick and was really a forge, but, related very closely like the wood stove or furnace. Kilns. I just bought 39 heavy hard firebricks and 60 or so halves for 20 American bucks. I see some sort of LP (propane) box in my back yard.

Meanwhile my Yard really wants to be pretty and it needs my artistic help. I have two trees that should be cut down and a few that need to be pulled as well. I really want to extensively use concrete with the rocks that are here and install some ponds. God and if I could I would brick out my neighbors. Thank you for the lovely little forest that blocks some of their screaming.

I have greenware to glaze. Etsy to populate.  Oracle VM VirtualBox to figure out so I can learn dos enough to use the DOS version of GemCad. Wedding bands to make and a wedding to get ready for (I’m officiating also). Copper Gemstone Rings to polish. Stones to facet and cabochons to be cut and pendants to fabricate. There is a lot to do. And, of, the new tablecloths.

I felt guilty for not making things today. All I did was buy bricks, transport them, and write this blog. I’m going to learn about Oracles VM Virtual box.

Now you need a 12 volt deep cycle marine battery which runs from $60 to $120. You should also have a 12 volt battery charger (about $45). You also need lights. Don’t choose a regular 12 volt car battery for this use. Car batteries are not designed to be discharged and recharged. In a short while they will cease to function. Deep Cycle batteries are designed to be recharged.

Since you will be running an inverter off of a 12 volt battery your goal is to maximize your lumens for amp hours. Now I’m not sure what this all means but what I do know is that wattage counts. If you try to run 500 watts of lighting through a deep cycle battery you are going to have a great amount of  light, but for only about 30 minutes. This just doesn’t seem practical. Less is more. Lower wattage means longer time. You can burn 100 watts for about 4 hours! This means 50 watts for 8 hours and two 13 watt compact fluorescent lights can run for about 15 hours. And those two compact fluorescent lights will outshine those two camp lanterns. The best part about this is you don’t need a power inverter rated at 1000 watts or even 500 watts to get the job done. You might be able to find a 400 watt inverter for around $20.

We use track lighting with three 13 watt bulbs and I’m so pleased with the setup that I’m thinking of using it all the time. We get some gloomy days here in The Pacific Northwest in which it becomes difficult to see gemstones and fine detail in jewelry. I’ve seen other vendors use incubator lights, those metal hooded utility lights. You can use just about any light fixture you want just make sure that the fixture is protected from water. Using the lighting in the booth is safe unless you have a leaky booth in which case you should be buying a new booth. You can use power strips but just remember most power strips do consume a bit of power.

For added “umpph” you can run more than one battery in a series. You can also get solar panels to recharge your battery (or batteries) during the day. One thing to consider is that batteries are heavy. Also they are not made to be lugged around. They usually are intended to stay in place. Our last deep cycle battery didn’t serve us for very long. The simple act of moving it about our utility room where we stored it caused it to leak. Not fun. So our new battery is housed in a heavy duty milk crate. An industrious type could build a housing upon which the inverter could be mounted.

One thing is for sure, in a night time vending situation you will outshine camping lanterns and rope lights.

I started making  jewelry as a child, but that was just exploration. Growing up I wanted to be a painter a writer and film director/actor. I submitted about eleven stories and nothing was published. I had two art shows but nothing sold. I started looking for gem material locally. By fate, my great uncle had given me a cutting machine when I was six years old (1970). I learned to use it in 1986 (B&I Gem Maker, a horizontal unit). I began my first attempts at metal work in 1992 in my apartment. My first creation was a copper pendant with a hand cut random faceted Ellensburg Blue Agate that I found out on Reecer Creek Road, Northwest of Ellensburg, Washington. I didn’t start making rings until 1993.

You can make rings without a mandrel but it’s more difficult and less precise. You can always use things for mandrels, like large bolts or hardwood dowels. My first mandrel was a stepped mandrel I purchased in 1995. I use it a lot. But I’ve now added a tapered mandrel and a grooved mandrel for working with some gemstone rings.

I like hammers, or I like swinging them. So far I haven’t shelled out the dough for a roller so I have to hand flatten all of my wire stock with a hammer if I can’t but it the way it should be or the way I want it. That’s fine. I develop a bit more control that way. I make my own stamping tools also so it’s only natural that my ring designs center around hand forged and stamped ring shanks. I also do all of my gemstone cutting. It was natural to put my gemstones with my hand stamped ring shanks.

After about twelve years I started faceting. My ability to cut stone then outstripped my ability to set them. After some practice I was able to create basket settings. I still hate making them.

Recently I took a few days and watched videos on the INTERNET to see how other goldsmiths work. Revelation! I had always worked on soldering pads but I watched people working on charcoal. It was a big development. You can embed wires into charcoal and solder pieces to them. You can learn a lot watching other people work. And when you do you might become inspired.

I like making rings. There are so many possibilities. Sometimes that’s all I want to do but then other things get in the way.

If you wish to launch this file from your desktop you can place the file on the desktop, but it might be better if you just created a shortcut. This way you can change the shortcut’s icon to whatever you like  as opposed to having it look like a simple system file. And if you are a fan of “quick launch” as I am, you can place it there.

If you just add URLs to your .bat or .cmd file, when you double click the file this will launch the pages in your preferred browser. If you use any if the modern browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome) these pages will open as tabs. I’m not sure you could ever get Internet Explorer or Firefox to open multiple instances for these pages. You can, however. achieve this in Chrome. The key is to make sure the program is evoked before the URL and that it gets an instruction.

start “page1” “C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” “http://your.page.com” –new-window

The next  entry would look like

start “page2” “C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” ” http://your.page.com” –new-window

This is a different syntax that that used to evoke Internex Explorer. In IE it would look like this

start iexplore http://your.page.com

So, to run an executable you just type in

start (and add the path to the executable)

Go to your desktop, right click a blank space. Select “New’ and then select “Shortcut”.  Cut and paste the following into the box:

C:\Windows\System32\DisplaySwitch.exe

and click “Next” and “Finish“. And there you go. Drag this shortcut to your Quick Launch bar and it will be right there when you need it. and for those times when you might not be able to see your quick launch bar, the keyboard command is Windows Key+p.

These methods bring up the display switch. If you wish to add specific shortcuts you can, ie, one for shutting the extra monitor off and one for tuning it back on. Add /internal to the command line to shut off the second monitor. Create a new Shortcut or copy the existing shortcut and add /extend to the command instead of /internal.

(And if you own a projector or wish to clone your monitors instead of running them independently, you can add /external to the shortcut or /clone instead of one of the other commands.)

I  started  installing at about 12:20 Tuesday Morning. There were hitches. The Sunday before I bought a new video card, an Nvidia GTX 560 1 gig gddr5. I’ve never spent that much money on a card before. $214.99 at Fry’s Electronics. I had immediately updated the drivers. Now there are two imortant new developements EA Games have introduced here. One: Origin, it takes the place of Steam, and second: It uses a website to access the game, battlelog.com. There are a few things you need to do to get the game going. And that update to my video card drivers was not update enough. So I had to update beta drivers.

With everything done, time to dive into multiplayer.

The Frostbite2 Engine is amazing. The sounds and sights are crisp. It’s a great improvement from BF2 and 2124. I immediately try my hand at sniping. I am initiated into the game by being pounded in a concrete build by a tank. The sound, and temporary deafness was perfect, not to mention the huge chunks of concrete missing from the building. The damage to the buildings is a great touch. Another great touch is the bullet drop while sniping. If firing over long ranges you better get to know your weapon.

It seems most servers are only running a few maps and some are not up for very long. I’m not sure if it’s because of who is operating the servers or if it’s the game. Some of these maps are very expansive and they are beautiful. In Caspian Border the distant forest is on fire. It’s very convincing. I think this game has the best illumination of any game I’ve seen. I’ve been to outdoor spaces that look like these spaces. When I first started playing COD Black Ops after MW2 I thought Black Ops was great. But now, I can’t even remember Black Ops and I just played it a few days ago. I had just fallen in love with the M14 and then Battlefield 3 came along.

I have been eagerly awaiting it for weeks, saying I thought it was going to be one of the best games of all time. I pre ordered it and then found out that an Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT with a gig of DDR3 was not enough spunk. I panicked. And hatched a scheme to sell some gold to pay for the card, and while it would have worked, I would have taken over a 50% loss of the value. I could have received 90% of the value if I went with my metal supplier (I make jewelry) but I would have had to have waited for a month. Not acceptable. Luckily enough I have a friend who needs wedding rings made so I was able to get a down payment on the rings allowing me to get the new card. Now my wife wasn’t too happy about this. I don’t blame her. Usually the money we make is our money and not mine to spend on frivolities such as computer parts. And it was rather selfish of me, I admit.

If effect, the game almost cost me $300. Is it worth it? I think so. Time will tell. What will make it worth it will be support, both from EA, Dice and the players. My friends have been having a bit of difficulty setting up. I’m not sure how long playing in public will interest them. It’s the only game I’m going to be able to get until Christmas.

The game has been out on the West coast of the US for 2 days and 4.5 hours and already I’ve played for 11 hours and 43 min and I am Rank 8, Lance Corporal 3 Star. I saw a Rank 27 this morning and can only imagine this person is on a major bender, playing in a disaster of a room with 5Hour Energy cans everywhere, headphones in the dark and no one to love. If I don’t watch out, his could be me.

We’ve been taking credit cards for over 13 years with the same merchant service account. They would catch us off guard every year with a $100 annual fee, at the time when we could least afford it: May. But recently, in the last two years, they have made us go to an outside company to certify as PCI DSS Compliant. This cost $175. If we failed to reach certification we would be charged $35 per month until we were. That is on top of our $40 per month and the % for each sale. This year I forgot about PCI DSS and was charged for it.

We attended our first event of the year. There a vendor friend of mine said “here, look at this”. He pulled out his android phone and a little white square that plugged into his headphone jack. He said it swipes credit cards and that there are no fees. It only costs 2.75% unless the phone is not connected to the 3G network, in which case it’s 3.5% plus $.15 per transaction. For more information goto https://squareup.com. So I realized that for a bit more money I could have a better phone, take credit cards, and enter into the modern age. So I researched cell carriers and Android phones, settled on a Certified Pre-Owned Samsung Fascinate. Got an even better deal because I had the Internet rep help me on chat the whole time. Gave me an extra $25 bucks off the phone. After the phone was ordered I killed our Merchant service account and signed up with Square. And I waited for our phone to get here.

FedEx delivered it Monday. I spent Monday and Tuesday getting it ready for life with us. And I say, I haven’t bothered to turn on WiFi access in our home because I prefer to be hard wired. Yet as I listen to Pacific.FM or Pandora over the phone while driving to the store I realize I have now fulfilled a dream. This Unlimited Data thing is awesome.

One small note, I would have loved to have rooted this phone but the TOS of Square does not allow it.