Category Archives: supergeekery

Happy Halloween From Your Friendly Neighborhood Goggles Bunny

I am supposed to be the White Rabbit from the Wonderland books (which I adored as a kid), but I couldn’t resist tossing in a pair of goggles on the hat. C’mon, can you blame me?

I’m disappointed that you can’t see the shiny golden watch chain in the picture, but trust me, that’s the best part! *geeks out*

Really though, since I have no money the costume was made from thrift shop items and various other things that I already had laying around so overall I’m satisfied.

The Showdown to End All Showdowns.

So I was browsing this site of awesome fictional matchups and discovered something amazing.

Doc Brown and Sherlock Holmes vs. Carmen Sandiego.

So as I was thinking about how fantastically epic this would be, @kordwar decided to one up it:

Doc Brown and Sherlock Holmes vs. Carmen Sandiego and Professor Moriarty.

Doc Brown and Sherlock Holmes vs. Carmen Sandiego and Professor Moriarty.

…guys. I can’t hear your comments over the sound of the EPIC.

Geek Wars II: The Revenge of Geek Wars

I got some more questions in the comments for last time. Rather than just answer in the comments, I figured I’d make a new post.

Ahem!

Coke vs Pepsi: I actually don’t drink either, I’m a Dr Pepper/Mountain Dew kinda person.

iPhone vs Android phone: No real interest in either. My current phone is the cheapest one I could get at the phone store. I use it to make calls, check my e-mail when I’m bored at work, and, since I lack a digital camera for some reason, take crappy pictures. I don’t really need or want anything else. (Except possibly a twitter client.)

If I had to get one I’d probably go with Android if only because I am not a big Apple person. The one product of theirs I had was an (old) iPod, and my experiences with it were pretty iffy.

Edit: I have been informed that Android runs Linux; that’s another reason I’d go with that one. /fangirl

MS Office vs OpenOffice: Seeing as I am a Linux and F/OSS junkie I’m pretty sure this one is a given. Open Office for life!

Laptop vs Desktop: I have both. I use the desktop the most– better screen resolution and I can play more games on it. I used to use the laptop a lot more than I do now, but these days it’s mostly been relegated to the role of backup computer if something happens to my desktop and I need to Google the problem.

I have to give my laptop credit, though; it was the first thing I ever installed Linux on! It has run Kubuntu and only Kubuntu for three and a half years.

Yahoo Messenger vs. MSN Messenger: I use Pidgin. Back in the day I used to have AIM, MSN, and YIM all hooked up to it but I dropped YIM a couple years back when the last holdout on my buddy list who still used it switched to MSN.

Back when I was on Windows I actually liked the MSN interface. But yeah, haven’t seen it in years; I just use Pidgin now, so all the messengers look the same to me…

Gmail vs. Yahoo Mail vs. Hotmail: Gmail, obviously. I do have fond memories of Hotmail and my first e-mail address (this was back before they were owned by Microsoft), but I have since moved on. Yahoo Mail I never used.

Picasa vs Flickr: I don’t use either. =X

WordPress vs Blogspot: I actually have a pretty strong opinion on this. It goes WordPress Self Hosted > Blogspot > WordPress.com.

I honestly, truly, do not understand this trend where people switch from blogger.com to wordpress.com. WordPress.com has less customization, in my experience, and doesn’t let you use javascript (so you can forget your fancy WoWHead links or whatever.)

The only reason I can think of to pick wordpress.com over Blogspot is if you plan on switching to self-hosted later.

Anyways I know I’m going to get all the “But I love WordPress!” comments, and you know, I love WordPress too. Self-hosted WordPress. But yeah >.>

Facebook vs Twitter
: I signed up for Facebook five years ago or so. I lurked around for about a month, then got bored and quit using it.

I logged in again about two or three years later, looked around, still had no interest, and logged out again.

A couple of days ago I logged in for the first time in two-ish years, primarily because I’d had some 50 friends’ requests in that period of time and I felt bad about ignoring them. I logged in, added (most) everybody, left some sort of “I never log in” notice and tossed up a couple of pictures, and then disappeared again.

I guess I just figure: I’ve got LiveJournal (since 2004), DeviantArt, two blogs, and a Twitter… I don’t really see anything that Facebook has that I don’t already have elsewhere!

So yeah, my vote here goes to Twitter.

Star Wars: What order to watch the movies? IV – V – VI – I – II – III. Honestly when I have kids they’re not gonna see the prequels until they have the first three good and memorized. *cough*

Asimov vs. Heinlein vs. Clarke: I’m an Asimov junkie. “The Last Question” is the greatest short story that has ever been written. Ever.

Hmm, think I got everything there…

Geek Wars

I was thinking the other day about my positions on various Geek Holy Wars. Then I figured I’d might as well blog about them, since, well, I’ve been a bad blogger lately. It’ll be fun, right?

Star Wars vs. Star Trek: I HATE THIS QUESTION. When people ask me this, I usually tell them not to make me choose between my children. I grew up with both series and I love both series dearly. That said, if I was forced to pick, I’d have to go with Trek, just because it has more sentimental value to me. I’ve often said that Star Trek was a second set of parents to me– and I mean it.

Kirk vs. Picard: This one is interesting, because when I say “I grew up with Star Trek”, what you have to understand is that from, well… from as-early-as-I-can-remember up until I was about 13 or 14 years old or so, what that meant was “I grew up with The Original Series and the movies”. I didn’t really get into TNG until my teenage years. Kirk was my original captain, and the crew of the NCC-1701 was my original crew. I actually have a picture of myself with George Takei somewhere.

…BUT I’ve gotta give this one to Picard. Kirk is who we want to be but never will be, but Picard is who we want to be and can still aspire to. Plus he’s classy.

And drinks Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

DC vs. Marvel: I’m a Marvel fan, sorry all you Batman lovers. Spidey + XMen + Iron Man = No contest.

Now let’s move on to some Linux goodness:

KDE vs. Gnome: We all know by now that I’m a KDE fan, but what most people don’t realize is that this is largely by circumstance. Way back in the day when I was first discovering Linux, it was KDE-based distros that just happened to work with my wireless internet where Gnome-based distros did not. So it was KDE that I started with and became comfortable with.

As time went on I would attempt to use Gnome every so often but I inevitably found it to be very buggy and far from the stable desktop environment that everyone kept telling me it was. It wasn’t until earlier this year when Gnome finally became stable enough for me to use. I used it for about two months because KDE4 was being stupid, and enjoyed it, but switched back to KDE once they had their own bugs worked out.

Currently I use KDE for two big reasons: 1.) it’s familiar, and 2.) I like to customize my desktop to look like a Gnome/KDE hybrid, and it’s much easier to do that with KDE, which is designed to be endlessly customizable.

Ultimately I have no problems with Gnome anymore, as I said my experiences with it used to be pretty universally negative but they seem to have fixed all their problems so I’m okay with them now.

(As an aside I would love to like XFCE but it’s still buggy for me.)

Emacs vs. Vi: I don’t use either very often but when I do I use vi.

“Open Source” vs. “Free Software”: A quick backstory behind this for those who are not aware: “Open source” and “free software” are pretty much interchangeable terms when it comes to a technical definition– i.e., software with the code freely available to view and modify. Where they differ is the political ideologies behind the two: use of the term “free software” implies the belief that “software should be free” and that this is a moral issue, whereas “open source” implies that it is strictly a matter of business and getting good results.

What I have found in day-to-day geek life is that most geeks fall somewhere in the middle of this “belief” spectrum and choosing which term to use largely comes down to just how crazy you think Richard Stallman really is. (Spoiler: he’s pretty crazy.)

As for me, I see both sides of the issue. Yes, I’m a Freetard. Yes, I’d love to see all software be free to tinker with, as an extension of my deep-seated inkling that anything restricting creativity is Bad. But I’m also a realist and, let’s face it, a world based completely off of “Free Culture” is not gonna happen anytime soon. Plus, it’s easier to get this stuff into the hands of people if you can pass it off as a business decision.

Ultimately I use the two terms interchangeably or just call it “F/OSS”.

***

Okay, what’d I miss? I know I missed some epic Geek Holy Wars. Ask me stuff and I’ll toss it up here!

Pike’s Quick & Dirty Guide to Mechanical Watches

Mechanical watches are sort of a big deal these days, for a lot of reasons, including the emerging popularity of steampunk crafts and the like. Spiffy looking pocket watches are turning into an “in” thing, and skeletonized wristwatches are becoming more and more popular. I figured I would set up a guide that would function as an intro, of sorts, to people who are new to this world, especially since a lot of folks I know around the ‘nets are looking into it.

DISCLAIMER: While I probably know more about this subject than most people in my typical friends’ circle, I’m still kind of a nub. Horology is a BIG topic. That said, let’s begin:

First off: how is a mechanical watch different from any other?

The vast majority of watches these days are “Quartz Watches”. They are powered by means of a battery and electrical pulses that are sent through a quartz crystal tuning fork, which resonates at a very steady frequency. This is then counted and “translated” into seconds– this is how the watch works. Because of their accuracy and low cost, Quartz watches became a big deal in the 70s and now that is most of what you see.

Mechanical watches are made the way they made them before the idea of Quartz watches existed. SUPER QUICK PHYSICS LESSON: A pendulum, if it does not lose any energy, will always swing at the exact same rate. This is where pendulum clocks came from. A watch does this by way of a spinning wheel called a balance wheel, which spins back and forth at a constant rate thanks to energy provided by way of the mainspring (and various other interesting mechanisms). A mechanical watch does not need a battery, although the mainspring will always need to be fed power by being wound up.

If you are unsure which your watch is: If it uses a battery and the second hand ticks exactly once a second: it’s probably a quartz. Mechanical watches (with few interesting exceptions) do not use battery power and most of them tick several times each second.

We good so far?

Okay. Moving on!

Some World History:

Lots of people all over the place made watches throughout the 18th century, but during the 19th century the British watchmaking industry all but died out for various reasons. Watchmaking continued in Switzerland (cause that is totally their thing), and in America. The United States produced a LOT of really high quality pocket watches throughout the 1800s and very early 1900s, as any vintage pocket watch collector would love to tell you all about.

Then the 20th century rolled around, and suddenly the United States was too busy dealing with various World Wars to continue much in the way of watchmaking. Leave it to good ol’ Switzerland, though, with their blissful neutrality, to pick up the slack. This is why today Swiss watches are a Big Deal (we’ll talk about this more in a bit).

When Quartz watches started showing up– cheaper and more accurate than traditional watches– the Swiss watchmaking industry, reluctant to let go of hundreds of years of tradition, was dealt a near-lethal blow. They were saved by Swatch and a guy named Nicolas Hayek, who died a few days ago, by the way *bows head*

ANYWAYS, they managed to float on that for a little while and then the “luxury” market for super expensive, super technical watches appeared and now you have mechanical watches making a comeback because we humans tend to be a nostalgic race. Spiffy, huh?

Now that I’ve told you all of this, we’ll move on to the real “meat” of the watch…

The Movement:

The movement is the name for the whole inside mechanism of a mechanical watch. Basically, if you take the case away, the movement is what is left.

Also it is gorgeous!

Movements are exceptionally complicated pieces of engineering, largely because they are so very small. Most watchmakers have to go to school for a few years before they can even think about building their own. The reason I am telling you this is because if you see a watch being sold on Etsy or some other craft site, I can guarantee that the movement itself was not made by the crafter. Rather, the crafter ordered the movement from somewhere else, and then modded up a spiffy case for it.

Independent watchmakers, who build their own watches from the ground up, do exist, but they invariably spend about a year on each watch and then sell them for tens of thousands of dollars. (You would, too, if you were building one thing a year as your profession.)

This is why it is important to be aware of the various types of movements and their quality when you are buying a mechanical watch. For example:

Swiss Movements: These guys have been doing this for centuries. They know what they’re doing. For the most part you are going to get solid and reliable performance. The downside is that they tend to be expensive, and the more complications you add to your watch or the more reliability you want, the pricier it’s gonna get.

Swiss movements are considered by most watch aficionados to be “the real deal” and watches that have them will say they do, right on the dial. It’s like having a super expensive brand name car or something.

Japanese Movements: Lack the “prestige” factor of Swiss but are also pretty solid.

Chinese Movements: China is the other big producer of watch movements right now. They’re still kind of learning but they’ve got some really good stuff if you know where to look. The main thing to look out for is the cheaper and super-mass-produced Chinese Movements. If your mechanical watch was dirt cheap (i.e. one of those $1 ones on eBay), it’s probably got one of these. In that case it’s sort of a grab bag box-of-chocolates… you never know what you’re gonna get. You might get something good or you might get something that breaks in a few weeks. You never know.

That is just the super condensed version of it. The whole movements story and what it means is pretty multi-layered. The main thing to get out of this is that, for the most part, you get what you pay for.

The Care and Feeding of Your New Mechanical Watch:

Because nobody likes a sad timepiece!

So you decided to buy one. Awesome! Doesn’t it make a lovely ticking noise? <3 Here are a few things to be aware of if this is your first: 1.) At first, it is probably going to run fast. It might run very fast. You might be worried because two days after getting your new watch you already have to reset the time. Don’t panic. New watches tend to run fast because the lubrication has yet to spread throughout the springs. Give it a bit of time.

2.) Store your watch in different positions. This will help a lot in the beginning, especially, with helping to get that oil going. Take your watch off when you go to bed and let it sit overnight upside down, right side up, crown up, crown down… just in a different position every night. This does wonders for the accuracy of the watch. (At least, it did with mine, which went down from +15 seconds a day to probably +5. Which is pretty dang good for an entry-level mechanical.)

3.) Get it serviced every 3-5 years. Your watch is a machine that is constantly working 24/7. It has lubricants that are going to dry up and these need to be reapplied every so often.

4.) Be careful – mechanicals are tough but they can’t take a ton of abuse. You might want to take it off if you’re doing some extreme sport or something. (Unless you have one of those watches that they made specifically for said purpose.)

Pike, I didn’t need that whole entire ramble. I just want something pretty!

Search Etsy or eBay for mechanical “steampunk” style pocket watches. A really big selection is going to turn up. These watches will do very nicely for a costume or to simply look gorgeous. They may not have staggering accuracy and they may not last for decades, but they will work decently enough and will certainly fill the bill that you want!

Pike, I didn’t need that whole entire ramble. I just want something accurate that tells the time!

Get a quartz watch; they are cheaper and very, very accurate. They make quartz pocket watches now, too. I even have one! *nod*

Or, you know, just check your cell phone for the time… but that’s not as fun, now, is it? Is it??

Pike, I want something that is pretty, is going to last a while, and is memorizing to watch (no pun intended).

Then, my friend, you have come to the right place. It’s hard to explain all the charming little idiosyncrasies of a mechanical watch without actually owning one, so you’ll just have to try it out. I don’t know, but to me there is something delightful about the noises it makes when I turn my wrist, or the shifting weight of the spinning rotor when I move my arm, or the way you can sometimes unexpectedly hear the ticking noise if you’ve got the watch tilted and your ear tilted juuuust right. Throughout the day, the watch gives you little reminders like that– that it is still there– and as dorky as it sounds, you don’t feel quite so alone. :3

YES I AM A NERD, SHUT UP.

*coughs*

Pike’s New Shiny

Ten days ago or so, the battery on my wristwatch died. Rather than buy a new one, I decided it was time to do something I’d wanted to do for a long time: namely, I decided it was time to graduate from a cheapy Wal-Mart watch to a nice real one.

For the uninitiated (aka sane people who aren’t watch geeks like me yet), most watches these days are battery-powered by way of electrical pulses sent through a quartz crystal. This makes for a watch that is very highly accurate, but the downside is that opening up the back to look inside is pretty disappointing because it is made of so few parts. Clearly this would not do for someone like me who is enamored with the beauty of real mechanical action. So it was that I went online, discovered a very nice watch for a very nice price, and ordered it.

And waited…

and waited…

and waited…

And finally the UPS Truck arrived today when I was in the middle of eating lunch. I had the biggest ever smile on my face when I was opening the box and was met with the most beautiful object I’ve ever laid eyes on:

This is a real mechanical watch– it was painstakingly made the same way they’ve made ’em for hundreds of years. It will never require batteries, and it winds itself via a rotor that spins when I move my arm. It is not quite as accurate as a modern quartz watch, and I’ll probably have to adjust the time when it ends up a few minutes slow each week, but to me that is a small price to pay for the Epic Factor.

And for being able to gaze lovingly at little tiny moving pieces anytime I check the time ^_^

It is also gigantic. Here it is compared to the Wal-Mart watch that served me well for the past few years:

Size matters.

It’s heavy and sits a bit awkwardly on my scrawny wrists (which are already small to begin with because I’m a girl) and it’s a good half an inch thick– at the least. But holy cogs, it’s beautiful. No matter how much respect I have for your utilitarian quartz watch for being accurate and being a pretty awesome technical achievement in its own right– you really can’t beat having the whirring heartbeat of a real mechanical wonder on your arm.

(And the back is see-through. How cool is that?)

Now You’re Thinking With Closets!: AKA The Furry Post

So, the title of my last post. While I was amused by the number of comments on here/Twitter who thought I was actually coming out as gay, I was even more amused by the number of comments on here/Twitter who thought I was coming out as a furry.

So you know what? Let’s do this. I’m Pike, and I’m a furry.

Most anyone who has been on the internet for more than a few hours knows what a furry is: someone who likes cartoon or anthropomorphic animals.

I can hear a few of you now. “Ewww, Pike! This is seriously your weird fetish?”

Actually, (for me anyway), fetish has nothing to do with it. And I’m not just saying that because I’m trying to dodge admitting weird fetishes. Heck, I am basically one of the most open people ever when it comes to my weird fetishes (c wut i did thar?) But furry isn’t one of them. No, it’s simply an art and storytelling style that I have always been fond of.

It has its seeds in the Disney cartoons I grew up with, I’m sure, and the way I’m pretty sure the Comics page of the newspaper is largely responsible for teaching me to read. The “Redwall” series of books and “Watership Down” cemented it. When I was about 8 or 9 years old I was drawing my own “comic strips” starring talking cat characters that I’d invented. And by the time I was about 15 years old and decided it was time to finally sit down and “learn how to draw”, it’s… a pretty obvious guess what said drawings involved.

You can do a lot with a cartoon animal that it’s difficult to do with people. Ears and tails are immensely expressive, which is perfect for the pantomime and exaggeration based medium that is cartooning. Master artists use this to much advantage (Fact: I would sell my soul to be able to draw half as well as Tracy Butler).

And you know what? Cartoon animals are just plain fun to draw:

Goggles Bear tanks with magical eyewear.

There is a lot you can do with anthro characters from a storytelling perspective, as well. How does the character’s “animal-ness” effect their… “human-ness”? Do these conflict with each other? Does the character or species struggle with it? Or perhaps you are trying to make a point, like an Aesop’s Fable. There is a lot to work with.

Now that all of that is out of the way, though, comes the next side of the confession, which is that I really never became a part of the “Furry Community”. I mean, I dunno if you’ve noticed, but there is a huge network of furries on Twitter/Livejournal/etc. and I swear they all follow each other. I never really fell into that group. Not so much because I don’t want to, but because there are other things that rank higher than furry on the Pike Self-Identity Chart. I’m a F/OSS geek, I’m a member of the WoW blogging community, I’m a steampunk, and I’m a sci-fi nerd/Trekkie… and I’m a furry, too, but that’s farther down the list, see. I’d probably go to a Fur Con if one happened to be in the area (not happening), but not before I went to a Linux Con or BlizzCon or a Steampunk Con or a Star Trek Con. Get what I’m saying?

Still, I don’t beat around the bush regarding my furriness. I used to sort of call myself a “closet furry” but then I realized how many people figured it out without me telling them (apparently I make it obvious?) so trying to hide it is pretty pointless. I like drawing (and writing about) cartoon animals– so there.

Also I wear goggles and am made of brass. Everything Pike loves, in a nutshell...

In Which Pike Fangirls Like A… Rabid Fangirl

I have been informed that today is unofficially Ada Lovelace Day. Clearly I have to blog about my fangirling for Lovelace.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (for that is her proper name), child of the rather infamous poet Lord Byron, was born in 1815 and is widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer.

In the 1800s. Yes, you heard that right.

Cause around this time a brilliant guy named Charles Babbage (who I also fangirl over– his autobiography? Read it. Yeah. He had a hilarious childhood. But I digress) took a pile of draft paper and whipped up a bunch of sketches for mechanical computers. He had one called a Difference Engine, which was designed to calculate polynomial functions, and one called an Analytical Engine, which was much more complex and designed to be programmable via punch cards. Babbage’s ultimate plans called for it to be, essentially, a modern computer, except powered by gears and steam. Thus sayeth the Wikipedia:

There was to be a store (that is, a memory) capable of holding 1,000 numbers of 50 decimal digits each (ca. 20.7kB). An arithmetical unit (the “mill”) would be able to perform all four arithmetic operations, plus comparisons and optionally square roots. Initially it was conceived as a difference engine curved back upon itself, in a generally circular layout, with the long store exiting off to one side. (Later drawings depict a regularized grid layout.) Like the central processing unit (CPU) in a modern computer, the mill would rely upon its own internal procedures, to be stored in the form of pegs inserted into rotating drums called “barrels,” to carry out some of the more complex instructions the user’s program might specify. (See microcode for the modern equivalent.)

The programming language to be employed by users was akin to modern day assembly languages. Loops and conditional branching were possible, and so the language as conceived would have been Turing-complete long before Alan Turing’s concept.

First of all, does that not blow your mind? This guy was a century ahead of his time. Completed versions of these machines were never actually built in Babbage’s lifetime, due to a lack of funding, but some one hundred years later a group of people built one of his machines according to his plans. It worked. And to make things better, it was absolutely, breathtakingly gorgeous in action. Look at this thing move.

So anyways, Ada Lovelace, who happened to be an amazing mathematician, was doing documentation for Babbage’s machines and just started coming up with examples for how one might “program” the analytical engine. You know what else she said? She wrote about the possibility that “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”. She foresaw electronic music. In the mid 19th century. Ever sat down and dinked around with FruityLoops or a similar program? Yeah. Ada Lovelace totally called it 170 years ago. Just sayin’.

Now from what I can gather, the point of Ada Lovelace Day is to talk about women (or a specific woman) in computing/science/etc. Which is a pretty great idea, because I know from experience that contrary to the video-game-osphere (and WoW-o-sphere especially), where there are a lot of women involved, something like, say, the open source movement is considerably more guy-centric, and the idea of how one should approach this topic is actually something I’ve thought about a lot. So, I fully support the Ada Lovelace Day idea.

But honestly if you told me to pick a woman in computing/science to admire, I would’ve picked Ada Lovelace to begin with, anyway, because I am just That Much of a A Fangirl.

Plus, bonus points for anything involving Difference Engines/Analytical Engines.

P.S. Somebody built one out of Legos. It’s official. We will never be as cool as that guy.

Rock Around The Clock

I know I’ve offhandedly mentioned my Obsessive-Compulsive tendencies before on Aspect of the Hare. And because I’ve no shame, I’ll delve into the specifics out in the open for possibly the first time… ever.

OCD manifests itself in a variety of different compulsions. Some people wash their hands, some people check their door locks, some people have to arrange items in just the right way. For me… it was (scratch that… is…) numbers. Everything has to be counted. Steps on a staircase, magnets on a fridge, circles in a pattern. Especially if they are lined up in a row. Objects that are lined up in a row are just begging to be counted.

Sometimes random numbers pop into my head. If I do not know where said numbers are from, they must be written down, or Google’d, in case they are important and I just don’t know it yet. “Pike, that’s silly,” you say. “Yes, I know,” I reply. But that’s how it works with obsessions like that. There are some things that you just do. No matter how silly they seem.

Numbers are special. They’re “safe”. They don’t change. It’s funny, because growing up, I was always the writing kid. The English student kid. But numbers had an unchanging beauty to them that appealed to me somehow, and they sort of became my sanctuary.

You might be wondering where I’m going with this or if I’m trying to make some sort of serious blog post about mental disorders. I’m not, actually. This is just the merely-tangentially-related intro for the meat of the post.

The meat of the post is this: Timepieces are one of my favorite things in the entire world.

See, numbers are special. And you know what’s really special? When the clock says 9:00. Or 10:00. Basically any time with at least two zeroes at the end. I have no idea why I find this so appealing. I just always have. 9:30 is slightly less special, and 9:15 and 9:45 even less so, but those four numbers are considerably more special than any of the other 56 found in an hour.

So what is a clock? It’s my numbers obsession. On my wall. Or on my desk. Or on my wrist. Or in my pocket. As the case may be. (Because I carry two watches with me. And have at least one clock in each room in my apartment.)

It gets better, though. A clock is also

beautiful

mechanical

perfection.

A clock or watch is form and function in one elegant package. The ultimate junction of art and engineering. And I love it.

Okay, okay, one more thing, and then I’ll shut up.

Mechanical clocks, specifically, are an elegant timepiece from a more civilized age. An age when things weren’t cheaply made. When things were designed to be fixed if broken, rather than just tossed and replaced.

…yeah I’m one of those weirdos that takes apart clocks and things. I took apart my last one. It wasn’t designed to be put back together so I had to “break it” in order to do so. The ticking remains are sitting on my desk. I’m sure a lot of people would think I’m absolutely nuts. Well, maybe I am. The whole OCD thing, after all…

Anyways. That, in a nutshell, is why I am a clock geek.

We here at Clockwork Hare Enterprises hope you have enjoyed your foray into the Potentially Too Much Info Camp this Friday, and hope you have a pleasant weekend!