PROJECTS UPON PROJECTS

It's fair to say that I've been optimistic, to say the least, about 
projects this year. I've accumulated a fairly silly number of them, 
and spent a lot of money on some of them too (in my terms anyway). 
Unsurprisingly the bigger ones are those I haven't finished, or 
sometimes even started. In a way it's not bad because I like to 
jump from one thing to another, and I've been getting increasingly 
fed up with doing computer-based projects so it's good to have 
physical things to work on. On the other hand often the only way a 
difficult project gets done is by ignoring everything else in the 
world and just focusing on it alone. Dropping in and out of things 
just creates a mess.

Product development for my business has also been an absolute mess 
this year. I really can't make things work, and am struggling to 
identify new ideas that are approachable for me in terms of scale, 
investment, and embedded programming skill. Electronics (or really 
the software running on it) has become so complicated and I've 
become so detached from how people use it, that I do seem to be 
running into roadblocks everywhere now. I'm learning lessons, but 
they're all adding up to the lesson that I'm wasting my time one 
way or other whatever I do. Perhaps that's something I have learnt 
but just won't accept, mainly because I dare not contemplate 
needing to work with other people in a normal job.

Besides banging my head against a brick wall with that mess, lately 
I've been fully occupied on the Jag as far as spare-time projects 
go. I almost have everything done, and ready to go get new tyres 
(another big expense for the year, grumble grumble). Except I 
realised I should change the rubber boots over the steering rack 
first because that requires disconnecting the steering and then 
getting a professional wheel alignment done, which I was needing to 
get at the same time as the new tyres anyway. However I missed that 
I needed a special tool for diconnecting the tie-rod ends, or at 
least that my list of alternative methods would all fail miserably, 
so now I'm waiting for that in the post. Hopefully it arrives 
before next weekend, but I couldn't find a seller with the correct 
model and a sub-one-week postage service to me, so I'll have to 
hope I'm lucky (not that things ought to take more than one week to 
be delivered from Sydney!).

Turning that stuck cross-threaded nut by kicking the spanner around 
with my leg also turns out to have upset my knee so I've been 
limping around this week. It's very slowly improving, I can now 
bend it without pain if it's not under load, but if I try to use it 
normally for standing up it bites me as badly as ever. So lesson 
learnt - next time I don't have the arm strength to turn a spanner 
in the available space... umm... go buy an impact driver I guess. 
Hell I'll probably still end up trying my leg and buggering my knee 
up again anyway.

Also my father's old ute that I'm borrowing is a manual, and I need 
that knee to press the clutch, so I'm going everywhere making the 
sound "vroom, argh!, vroom... vroom, oof!, vroom...".

Knee nasties aside, in many ways I prefer doing the work myself, 
even aside from the unreasonable quote that the mechanic gave me. 
That quote also included replacing the front shock absorbers, and 
that definitely wasn't required - they just needed new bushings. 
But it's meant that all my other spare-time projects are on hold 
and there's a good argument that fixing up the Jag on weekends is 
the only productive thing I've actually managed to achieve 
successfully in the last couple of months. But even that still 
isn't finished.

 - The Free Thinker