Alioth's Journal: Too many projects are moving forward...

Why is it when you take a motorcycle apart to remove a specific component (say, for instance, removing the rear shock absorber) you end up thinking of all the other things you'd now like to take apart and clean up/replace/recondition? What was going to be a 15 minute job this morning has now taken over two hours, but at least I've got stuff done.

The new rear sprocket I got turns out to be several teeth larger than the old one. I do have a new chain too. I'll have to ask my Dad who has experience of these sorts of things whether it's going to be geared to tall with a bigger rear sprocket. (Actually, it might not hurt with today's fuel prices to have it geared tall, but the acceleration will suffer).

My RC heli is driving me nuts. It keeps losing power (completely) and this lead to a pretty bad crash last time it happened. I changed nothing at all on it so I don't know why it should intermittently lose power. I will have to take it apart and put it on the bench and hook the ESC up to the oscilloscope, then the radio outputs, to try and find out whether it's the radio or ESC. But before that I'm going to have to almost completely disassemble it because the crash this caused bent the tail boom and broke part of the frame.

I'm also still tinkering with my Sinclair Spectrum ethernet board. It's nearly finished now, so I'm going to soon try and see if any other retrocomputing hobbyists want to try and write some software that uses it. I wish the z88dk's assembler had #ifdef directives, it would have saved me a lot of time... still, nothing a perl script couldn't solve!

Probably my biggest time sink project right now is... learning Spanish. I have become totally addicted to it. I do at least an hour of the Rosetta Stone every day, read BBC Mundo in my breaks at work, and often at home. But it's still hard, and the Rosetta Stone stuff is getting quite tough now, I'm halfway through it and it's getting into more complex bits of the language. I've also found a good grammar site here - http://www.webworkbooks.com/spanish/grammar/ which serves as a good companion to the Rosetta Stone stuff. The amazing thing I think is that since mid May, I have learned *far* more Spanish than I did French in around 5 years of compulsory French at school. I think there are two keys to language learning - 1. the motivation to do it (without that, I don't think you'll get anywhere) and 2. doing plenty of the language in a way that doesn't use translations from your own language. I have found Rosetta Stone by far the most effective way of learning *and retaining* what I've learned.

I also bought a Spanish keyboard (an Apple one, even though it's mainly for my PC rather than my PowerBook) so I can practise writing. I got the Apple one as it looks nice, and is no more expensive than any other comparable USB keyboard (it's pretty cheap actually) - and Apple made it easy to buy a foreign keyboard from my own country's online Apple store.

Actually, the funny thing about reading the news from BBC Mundo (the BBC World Service in Spanish) is that it covers much different stories than the normal domestic press does - understandably with a much bigger focus on Latin America. I wouldn't have known anything about Hugo Chavez's blatant attempts to provoke the United States (did you know he's even invited the Russian military to Venezuela - a couple of long-range bombers were there a couple of weeks ago and they have a naval exercise planned), and the also the goings-on in Bolivia (they have been doing America-baiting too, and having trouble with separatists). I've learned some interesting new words from Hugo Chavez like how to curse at someone (yes, he really did say "Yanquis de mierda, váyanse al carajo cien veces!" on live TV - mierda meaning 'shit', I understood this sentence to approximately mean 'shitty yankees go to hell 100 times'). Chavez speaks quite slowly and clearly, well, except when he starts ranting then he becomes rather hard to understand! It's a pity he's such an asshat though - he obviously has desires to become a dictator - he's been passing laws left right and centre to clamp down on freedom of speech (you can go to jail for over 3 years just for saying 'Chavez is a crank' now in Venezuela), and has ejected the Human Rights Watch guy from the country for daring to criticise his increasingly dictatorial government... It's interesting that he's backpedalled a bit too since making the 'shitty yankees' speech, I think someone brought it to his attention that the USA just happens to be his country's biggest customer *and* biggest supplier.

Chavez

[stoolpigeon]

I really had high hopes - unfortunately he is apparently no different than so many others before him. I was naive to think that he really cared about the people.

Not a lot of news from South America gets reported here in the U.S. - but Chavez does tend to get coverage - probably in part due to the colorful content he provides. I did see and hear coverage of the Russian bomber visit and the big diplomat expulsions.

NPR (National Public Radio) gives him a lot of press - I think they were reall