INCOMING

Just over a year ago, I ordered an instrument from a maker in Sweden, who said he would start it in November, which he did. And now, a year later, as promised by his website, it's actually in the mail!

If you can believe it, this is just his standard model, even the mother-of-pearl inlay. When it comes to aesthetics in musical instruments, the answer is that, while you can most certainly overdo it, the most important thing is that it makes you want to pick it up and play it.

The only custom bit I ordered is the soundport there. I've really liked them when on guitars I've played in shops: it expands where the instrument is projecting, but more importantly it projects it to me, the player, so I can hear more like what an audience would hear. And I'm not performing, which means I'm always playing mostly or entirely for myself, so I should get to enjoy it fully.

It's called a "cittern," which I've written about before, and the fastest way to describe it is that it's

1. a big mandolin, 
2. the size of a regular guitar, 
3. with an extra pair of strings.

The particularly Swedish aspect is that in place of the heaviest metal strings, it uses classical guitar strings. This gives it a distinctive voice, and lowers the string tension, so the maker can build it more lightly. And, finally, this all lets the instrument resonate with a capo on, all the way up the neck. Fretted instruments like mandolins and guitars tend to feel sort of...pinched, or tight, if you try to capo past, say, the 7th fret. By all reports and observations, Swedish citterns just go ahead and keeping ringing out, more or less wherever you want to put the capo.

Anyway, that's exciting, since I've wanted one of these for half a decade now. Maybe Honor and I will sit down with my cittern and their gorgeous banjo and bring our full "this is not my primary instrument" energy. 😀

workin' it.

I'm interviewing a lot with early-stage companies, in search of a leadership role above that of line manager, even if temporary. The title bump always matters, much more even than an IC (Individual Contributor) role. Four years as an Engineering Manager (EM) at a well-known and successful company meant it was easy to get another EM job; they hired me directly as my first EM title, but that's far more rare, and in fact I'd spent the 3 years prior struggling to land one. I suspect that companies' reasons for not hiring EMs directly are not usually the right ones, but the end result is the same either way. They get more skittish as you go up the ladder, but now I have a neat confluence of (a) understanding why I enjoyed joining a 55-person company, and (b) having the freedom to join something even smaller.

My friend Alexa, although I'm older and helped her navigate her way into leadership, has been moving in executive circles for quite a while now, and gave me some immaculate advice about interviewing for things like Head/VP of Engineering jobs, and why that might be a better fit for me. When you're talking to a younger company, and especially at the executive level, they want to see who you are, and not just if you're comparable to another employee with the same title. Basically, I show them a Chris-shaped human, and the two sides together talk about whether they have a Chris-shaped space.

My whole life, I have been utterly unable to not be Chris-shaped, except for very short periods. I'm terrible at it. It has caused me a lot of trouble, but on the other hand I have needed to spend less time figuring out who I am. A Chris-shaped job at an earlier-stage company can save me a lot of stress, by not having to convince entrenched people they need a Chris-shaped person. Or, at least, I convince the founders and executives, and then back it up with competence.

(Or get removed, I suppose. Some of these can also turn out to be inherently time-limited, since I can most certainly pull off scaling an Engineering department to somewhere in the 30-60 range, it's rational enough for you and/or your investors to want someone more experienced in the 200+ size.)

I'm finding I learned a lot from this past job, which was not an earlier-stage startup, and it comes out in how I talk about the job, what's important to me, what I think should be important to them. I feel more rooted, and that I'm inhabiting my professional space more fully. No small part of this is that I took care of myself after Tim died, and took a placeholder job that wouldn't push me very hard.

And now I can choose what I want to do.

At Play In The Machine Shop Of The Lord

One consistent theme running through what I guess you might call "metalworkers YouTube" is the amount of time metalworkers spend on maintenance: restoring beat-up machines they bought because they have more elbow grease than cash, or fixing something that broke, or just the periodic (often frequent) cleanings and lubricatings these things require. I don't recall anyone doing that with woodworking machinery, but then woodworking machinery doesn't usually have the scale or complexity of, say, a power hammer, or the high-precision shenanigans of a lathe or milling machine.

I did finally get my lathe partly bolted to the bench: there are two feet, with two screws each, and they form a rectangle, and one diagonal pair of holes has bolts in them. I want to say that the other two holes are somehow not where they're supposed to be, but since I have flubbed both the "measurements" method and the "put sharp objects directly into the holes and mark up a target surface" method, I think it's just beyond what I can accomplish in the situation I've created for myself. I have many many ideas about how to move this heavy object around in an enclosed space. You know what would be useful for implementing said ideas? A lathe.

Following tradition, I learned a whole bunch about how the lathe is made by removing a part (to see if I could lubricate something to make it move easier), having an unexpected piece of metal fall out, and having to figure out how to put it back and have it work again. It's not magic, but it is extremely clever: basically there's a slide that moves on a dovetail channel, and the piece of metal has depressions for three set screws, and it's basically a 6-inch long wedge to make the dovetail fit tightly. How irritatingly difficult that slide's crank handle is depends on those set screws, but also on how tightly the handle is screwed on, and also if the slide fits too loosely in the dovetail, the whole system loses so much precision as to be useless.

I find this whole thing particularly engaging because historically, while I'm very good at taking physical objects apart, I have not been very good at fixing them, or indeed of just putting them back together so they still work.

I'm very good at fixing software sorts of problems, but there's no physical distinction between the act of fixing software, and the act of breaking it in the first place. Arguably software is broken by default, but that's a different discussion.

every time a door closes, you better notice before you try to walk into a closed door.

There's a lot going on behind my eyes these days. Sadness, loss, integration. I still can't read the news, really. One thing at a time, or, at least, as few things at a time as possible.

Through a complex sequence of events outside my control, I find myself between jobs again. It's not the worst thing: I have much more energy for doing errands or projects when I'm not spending my days being diplomatic to people who are making bad decisions. I'm not worried about finding another job, this time with an earlier-stage company where I can have an impact on the culture as it's ramping up. I've been able to pick up some tasks around the place, since it's Anna's turn to be working a lot.

Something I never really appreciated about machine tools is that they can just be their own project. I tried some test cuts on the lathe, and of course it was uselessly rough, but that was because the lathe bounced a little on its rubber feet, and the trailer bounced on its suspension and tires, and machine tools have to be as rigid as possible. So I go to take off the rubber feet—which I had put on when I unpacked the thing, and that sucked—and there's this whole challenge of lifting something on the bench, and it's 100 pounds, but focused in a small area, and it comes with a sheet metal tray to catch chips (the metal bits removed by machining) and cutting fluid and such. The tray isn't rigid enough to lever the machine up with. What you can lever it with are the feet of the cast-iron frame, but you have to lever the lathe up just to get to the Allen-key mounting screws holding the rubber feet on, then get the tray out of the way, the lathe on blocks and moved down the bench, then drilling mount holes through the bench, then...

I am famously terrible at this particular task of drilling holes using only measured distances. Anna is amazing at it, but even she couldn't make progress on this. I'm resorting to a brute-force tool called "transfer screws," which are literally sharp points that you screw into all the holes you want to transfer from a source workpiece to a matching workpiece. It's me saying "yes, I understand that I have the exact measurements for the mount holes, but I'm giving up and I'm going to stab my way to success."

As a DIY project, this has already held my interest more than any other DIY project ever has, and I haven't actually been able to make any parts yet. Once it's mounted to the bench, and the shed is installed, and the trailer is jacked up off the suspension, then I'll be aligning the lathe properly, and then...I can make more tools. For the lathe. You see? It's very satisfying. I could use a machinist's hammer. And some clamps. Maybe some keychains or beads or something. I dunno. I don't normally learn stuff to accomplish something; my primary hobby is learning stuff.

all in the preparation.

So I've been learning about machining, that strange process where we take our world full of bumps and flaws and irregular forms, and turn out a million identical parts with almost arbitrary precision: 0.0005", half the thickness of a human hair, is achievable on amateur home equipment. And the hobby budget has opened up somewhat, paving the way for me to be cursing at different things than I curse in my day job. With the dog, and no garage, there hasn't been a place to set up any tools, let alone tools that create piles of razor-sharp shards of metal...until now.

With the garage gone, we had a dense pile of crap sitting out under tarps, and a different, sparser pile of crap inside a U-Haul storage trailer (which, for the record, is every bit as shitty as U-Haul). Our new, well-built shed was still a month away, and the shed people need the whole backyard to work in, and we don't want a permanent building anyway...

I watched some YouTube of a master carpenter who carefully built a full wood shop into a utility trailer that he drove out to job sites. Other examples came to mind, like folks who make the rounds doing repairs and tweaks at race tracks. Or the main repair service for old Linotype machines.

(Linotype aimed to speed up typesetting for newspapers, back when everything had to be printed on paper. Picking out individual letters and spacers is exactly the pain in the ass you'd imagine, so Linotype and its peers built a machine that looks like a small church organ, slightly larger than my car. The operator types out a line and hits the equivalent of Enter. That typing has created a mold for that entire line, and hitting Enter fills the molds with molten lead from the reservoir in the machine, casting the Line-O-Type (get it?). The lead castings were placed into a frame and used to print. When finished, the casting was melted down again.

I once wandered into a museum in Palo Alto, located in a mansion downtown, and out back, in a building that might have been stables, then was definitely a garage, there was an older guy, somewhere in his early/mid 70s, restoring a giant printing press. I love the history of technology, so I got a tour of the Linotype, and a description of his career in newspapers, and how he was the only person they could find to fix the things.)

Hmm. If I were to choose machinery carefully, keeping the weight down because a shop crane won't reach inside...if we had a shop trailer, we could solve our temporary storage and longer-ish term shop space problems all at once. In a sort of kismet moment, there was one for sale on Craigslist right there. The workbench and everything was fitted out by a master carpenter, but the trailer is made by, no joke, Wells Cargo.

So I bought a metal lathe. Don't confuse this with a wood lathe, which is also made of metal, because the most basic machinist lathe requires reams and piles of highly-specific bullshit that wood lathes don't need to bother with. Take, for example, ideas about "flat" or "level." These barely make any sense on a wood lathe, where you're cutting everything by hand anyway. If a wood lathe is twisted by 0.1", you probably won't notice, or you'll manually account for it. On a metal lathe, your parts won't be even or fit together. You need to align the lathe so it's all in a plane. How do you get a flat plane? Take 3 plates of granite or iron, mark them up and rub them each against each other, chisel or grind off the high spots, and then they'll be equally flat.

How do you transfer that plane to the machine? Take an adjustable level, make it match your flat plane, and then you have your shop's definition of "level" that you can use on the machines. It may not be "horizontal" in the sense of being at a right angle (90º) to the direction of Earth's gravity (down), but it doesn't need to be. Ships have machine shops, which obviously won't be horizontal much, so they just bolt everything to the floor, and it's fine.

The best answer to machine rigidity is always "bolt it to the heaviest thing you can find," but I have a tiny lathe, sitting on a not-really-flat workbench, in a trailer, tilted backwards so the rain runs away from the leaking part of the roof, still resting on its tires and shock absorbers. So there's some stuff to account for.

This is without having actually tried to cut a part, because I'm pretty sure it would just be a mess.

One of the things I am finding satisfying about this is that everything takes a lot of thought and planning. On any machine tool, it's not unusual to spend an hour or two of setup for an actual cut lasting several minutes. It's really cool to have tangible problems in front of me. This is all "manual" machining: most machining nowadays is by computer (CNC). But I find the same thing I've found about music, which is that there is software that really enhances the experience, but I spend my life on computers already, and I'm avoidant about adding more computer time by way of hobbies. My brain needs the break.

Fri Mar 671 23:14:06 PST 2020

It's almost a year since Tim died. The funeral wasn't until the end of July, with everybody staying home until the vaccines rolled out; the first stretch of grieving done, like most of the past two years, at home. Christmas was pretty rough, and I'm expecting to not be terribly useful next week, either.

Yeah. I just can't even.

that seems fine, then.

My previous employer started trading on the NASDAQ last week. I quietly converted most of my shares to cash earlier this year, which let me stop thinking about it and create a cushion for the household; I squinted and kept an amount that felt like it was still a stake in the outcome. More than anything, it's like being in a casino and deciding how much to take risks with. Mostly I want my friends there to be rewarded for their hard work. And there are a bunch of people who got royally fucked over, and will not be rewarded for their hard work. Shocker: they're not white or Asian males.

This fucking industry. Reflecting the inequities (and iniquities) of our society, garlanding itself with words like "meritocracy" and insisting that technology is neutral and apolitical, when it is neither.

This was really my first successful company: all the others have flailed into one ignominious merger or another, because VCs are really, really good at getting paid. But this is the first unqualified, high-value success. As a joint family project, we now have lots of options about what to do with ourselves; the funny thing is that, if you have to pick just one option, but you don't know what to do, then if you're suddenly able to pick three options...you still don't know what to do. Between the pandemic and the imminent end of high school, we're in a bit of a holding pattern.

(Just to keep me on my toes, though, the guys who bought my shares recently discovered that, being unaware of a stock split in 2020, they over-valued the company and paid me double what they intended to—both times. I've spotted them two phone calls where they desperately try to get me to give some of the money back, or hand them the rest of my shares, or anything. The overall valuation isn't in the contract, much to their horror; just the share price. This crosses the dichotomy of how different professions see companies: investors deal with big numbers like valuation, and employee-stockholders like me care only about the share price, because the valuation as such doesn't affect us at all.

The contract is uncomplicated, and filled with all kinds of juicy sections saying "We all totally understand what we're doing, we can afford to lose the investment, we understand the other party might have material information we don't, and we waive pretty much any right to sue each other," so I'm not worried, from that perspective. It's adrenalizing, and I feel bad for them, but Wealthy Guys Who Fuck Up Large Stock Deals is just not on my charity list this year.)

So the house is paid off, which turns to have been a considerable chunk of our monthly expenses; now we have more money to subsidize the booming business of running Dungeons & Dragons online for schoolkids, especially kids who are maybe wired a little differently. I'm trying to build up a little machine shop for...machining...things. Our musical instrument collection grows, in a measured, stately sort of way.

Just...trying to make it through, I think.