Beware of the Train

I've put a selection of photos from my last-but-one hiking trip on moblog: part 1, part 2, part 3. We went to Glen Etive (south and a bit west of Glen Coe), and climbed Ben Starav and Beinn nan Aighenan - the plan had been to do more, but we underestimated the time it would take and overestimated our fitness levels. It was an absolutely stunning day, and the scenery was just great. A sample:





By the way, my thesis page-count has finally drawn level with my Munro-bagging count:

Wed Apr 30 04:06:10 BST 2008
4552 lines 22350 words 156883 characters
thesis.log:Output written on thesis.dvi (82 pages, 628596 bytes).
34 fixmes

Yay!

As part of my ceaseless quest to become one of those crazy internet dudes that builds cool stuff, I hereby announce my intention to build the following things:

• A theremin. dynix had a mate who built one of these, and it doesn't sound too hard apart from the signal generators. Or I could just nick one of the many circuit diagrams available on the magic interweb. Of course, it's been years since I used a soldering iron, but what the hell. Once I've built the thing, I intend to juggle in front of it and record the results.
• A set of telescopic juggling clubs. I've made some already, but the handles tend to wobble and come loose, so you can't juggle them for long. They're nicely balanced, though.
  
  
  
  
  
• A scanner camera. Get a box brownie, gaffer-tape it to a flatbed scanner, et voila! A 115 megapixel digital camera! Oh, and it BENDS TIME. Almost forgot to mention that bit.
• Longer term, but I want to make a transparent rucksack. One that won't tear apart too easily. I'm thinking the same construction methods as for the duct tape wallet, but using clear duct tape. No more furkling about for stuff when you're out on the hills and your hands are already cold!

With all this, you might think I've got enough on my plate already (particularly if you remember the ongoing projects to learn the Five Ball Cascade, and read Ulysses, and... hang on, I know there's something else... oh yeah, that doctorate thing). But then wormwood_pearl brought this home:



Dammit. Now I'm going to have to turn it into a USB keyboard...