Took a walk over to the local electronics supply store at lunch, and there was a crowd outside, which is a bit unusual. Sure, it’s Queen St. West, but even during the peak of the dot com thing discrete logic components never got that “cool” factor. It turned out there was a PETA truck with “Meet Your Meat” playing on an exposed TV and people were handing out flyers. Outside the parts shop. I felt really weird inside. What was I buying that was made of animals? Why would a transistor and resistor emporium be targeted by animal rights activists? I finally went outside and asked them. It turns out it was the first parking place they saw. Huh.
Anyway, the store was fun. I went there originally to find out about acid disposal techniques and almost ended up leaving with a power supply and a bunch of microcontroller kits. I still think that would be cool, if for no other reason than to work on my keyboard pants, but I’ve got way too many things on the go right now. Back to the acid question, after a bit of a struggle with a language barrier, it would appear that I’m supposed to dump ferric chloride in a field somewhere when I’m done with it. The correct answer, in case you’re wondering, seems to be to add baking soda to neutralize the acid and then mix in concrete or plaster or something to solidify the stuff and then throw it out. Either way seems weird, and there’s some stuff called cupric chloride that seems to be reusable and thus less wasteful, so if I ever do start yet another project, that might be the way to go.
One project for today was this site’s redesign. It’s mostly done, but I haven’t checked it out in more than one browser and I’d like to make it a little more frightening first, what with Halloween and all. I’ll probably give up and implement it in a few days so I can go on to the long overdue Thrust Labs page plus the VP redesign. to say nothing of actual content on AngelA’s site…
I also tried some non-HTML layout stuff with some artsy-fartsy markers that I collect like weird Japanese trading cards. I had a “marker pad” that I hadn’t tried out. It said it was “bleedproof”. It “wasn’t”. Of course, I can’t really get upset about 4 pages under the one I was working on getting wrecked, since they all presumably suck as much as the top page. I ended up working with red markers a lot, ’cause hey, if there’s gonna be bleeding…