6 feet for 23, uninterruptible, don’t bend, rioting is never the answer

Last week Jeremy turned me onto a sweet deal for custom 3′ x 6′ vinyl signs.  I had no signage for GMT yet so I saw it as a good opportunity.  For the rock bottom price of $23 shipped to my door I had this sign made.  It appears to be very high quality and will look good hanging from a timing table.

Another package yesterday contained a small UPS for the chicken coop, yes the chicken coop.  Now your gut reaction might be “What the f do you need a battery back up for in a chicken coop??” Well there actually is a very legitimate reason for doing so.  The automatic chicken door motor is triggered by a power cycle, each time power goes off and then on the door either raises or closes thanks to the timer it is connected to.

Out in my neck of the woods, especially during the summer months, brief power hits are very common.  It is normal to come home to a bunch of blinking clocks.  Well if this happened now the end result would be the chicken coop door going up or down at an unintended time which would not be a good thing.  The small UPS will ensure the door stays in it’s intended position regardless of how many power burps occur during a day.

I also had three more boxes show up at my door yesterday from Ipico, the company whose hardware I use to time races.  It was 3000 race timing bibs.  When I opened the boxes to randomly test a few of the bibs I was not very happy at the condition of the brand new bibs.  A bunch of them were packed in such a way that the timing ring was bent, something that it says in big letters to NOT do on the timing device.

In addition the packs of 50 bibs felt like they were glued together.  You literally had to peel each bib off the pile.  The adhesion was so bad on many of them that it ripped off the print from the bib beneath it which looked like shit.

Considering these bibs were the replacements for the original order I placed which had the wrong type of timing device just added to the annoyance.  I did a spot check of about 50 bibs to make sure they still were functional, which they were, but the quality control at Ipico still is lacking obviously.

DJI recently announced the Phantom 3 quadcopter.  It has a TON of upgrades from my Phantom, including built in FPV system and an INCREDIBLE range of around 1.25 MILES.  Yes, I will be getting one at some point.

So surely you have read about the Baltimore riots, yet another shameful example of human beings turning into two legged lemmings, lighting fires, stealing, and destroying property for a reason that most of them likely know very little, if anything about.   This scenario has played out repeatedly over the years and I have yet to hear one person deliver a logical explanation of how violence, theft, and destruction of property accomplishes anything except more violence, theft, and destruction of property.