Peter "Sci" Turpin

I’m currently on something of a mood upswing right now. I’m hardly back to peak though and I think this most recent extreme of low has left a mark. Something’s changed. I don’t want to talk about that though.

My happiness has been eroding away, and a large portion of it is my own fault. I have many friends, but none of them close. I flit between people, forming bonds of association and trying to help whenever someone has a problem. That in itself is the problem for me. I’ve spread myself too thin, been too open to sacrifice my own mental wellbeing, attention, time and even resources to try and help many people in basically trivial ways. Because I’ve wanted to feel I was helping people.

The things I’ve done for people aren’t really anything of signifigant or lasting value; just brief pick-me-ups for them. But collectively they’ve taxed me beyond my limits. I empathise with each situation I get involved in, and it weighs on me. Every time someone rants and raves and gets something off their chest at me, it’s in my heart at that face value, and I can’t take that.

I know people aren’t that open normally. Maybe most people don’t have those childhood hangovers where somewhere subconciously you just want people to like you. And I guess it’s worked that far. I have a lot of people who are basically amiable to me, but few if any I can count on to allways be there.

I’ve reached out to people I’ve helped before, and some of them have listened but nothing ever comes of it. I need support, not just someone to vent to, which is where this imbalance has stemmed from. I throw a lot at people when I’m able, even if it’s just mentally; spending a few hours researching something or digging out the best info on a subject for them. The ear I get in return isn’t enough though. I need assistance, and while the it’s a nice gesture for people to listen it now makes me sick.

Every time someone asks “What’s wrong?” I have to repeat the whole situation, all my fear, ebarassment, anger and desperation. And in doing so I remind myself of how tenuous that connection with them is, because I’ve said it all in bits publically but they haven’t acknowledged. “Hi, well here’s the bloody recap of everything you’ve not been noticing for the last year or so..”

And that reminds me, reinforces how stuck I am in this situation that’s causing the initial pain.

And it makes it worse, reminding me how desperate I must be for help to be reciting all that personal mental sputem to someone who by asking may as well have marked themselves a stranger to me.

It seems the only conversations I have now are hollow, forced and joyless. (That or with people who only contact me when they want to buy something. Not that I should complain, but..) Desperatly clawing for something to talk about just so I’m talking. Conversations online. Phonecalls cost too much, since everyone has mobiles. Everyone’s busy on Skype or imbued with emotions I can’t cope with.

In person it’s so much easier to talk, but getting to where you can talk to people you have something in common with is too costly on my meager finances.

My social network is horrifically unbalanced with so many ghosts, to the point I might almost be better trying to form bonds totally fresh with people I don’t yet know. But I’m not the sort of person now who is going to be pleasent enough to make deep connections to people. Damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Thought into a corner like every other issue right now. Another person clawing for something or someone to hold onto and finding nothing while the world circles the drain. No one will have the time to deal with someone like that when they are unable to cope themselves.

Now back to trying to get something done. But distracting myself feels so much better, even if doing so is just making things worse.

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..procrastinated.

Got some laundry done. Opened post. Got reminded how low a threshold of help is willing to be given to me. Spent too long looking up pinion shims for a low-priority project.

Found some drivers for a large obsolete graphics tablet. Cleared up the pile of uneeded receipts. Despaired at bank balance.

Put off replying to some messages. Hid from world.

Soon, midnight snack and change bedding. Maybe.

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My friend Andy had told me about this a couple of weeks back and came round on wednesday to make me a deal. His girlfriend had her old bike in a lock-up they were going to have to stop renting soon, and since it wouldn’t start, likely due to a carb problem, they’d let me have it dirt cheap and on a “pay whenever” basis.

Checked with mum since it’d have to be stored on the property and she lept at the chance to help me out, so bought it herself. That way it can go on her insurance. Very handy, though admittedly this has put me in a position I never wanted to be in again; with a non-running vehicle project and no licence to drive it. But hey, I’ve been assured it should be a simple fix and I wouldn’t be going for the CBT until summer anyway most likely.

Now the bike itself is a 1999 Piaggio Vespa ET4, 125cc.

I know a few of you are bikers and at least one is a former ET4 owner. So you may be able to skip ahead if I say “ET4, turns over, no spark after battery’s ran down”.

The bike’s cosmetically a bit messy. Couple of panels are missing and the rear box mount is snapped. But the brakes were serviced before storage and it got new tires and coil.

Here’s a picture of it after a couple of days fishing for the problem;

Mechanically everything’s sound. The model however turns out to have an immobiliser, which has reset after the battery being discharged so long. And it does not have the infamous Red Key, since it was bough as an ex-trade-in from a dealership. No Red Key means the immobiliser stays locked down. The other keys need to get the “OK” from that key once it’s in.

A new immobiliser means a new set of keys and lock barrels too.

As far as I can gather this situation is the biggest of the big red warning flags for buying a 2nd hand Vespa. It may be cheap, but getting it running will cost you £150 upward on top of it.

It’s annoying that it works aside from what is basically a software problem.

There’s two choices now, since buying the new immobiliser set is well out of my price range atm (the “pay whenever” scheme was much needed).

1. Change the CDI unit for one from another model without an immobiliser. There are several options, and aftermarket ones seem about £20-30. Looses immobiliser use entirely.
2. Find someone with a working ET4, connect laptop to serial data line and copy the “OK to go” code to a microcontroller.

The latter seems too simplistic, but the immobiliser connects to the CDI via a single 5v serial wire. Using chassis as ground, 1-wire communications seem unlikely due to noise potential, so it looks like it’s a one-way operation. The CDI just sits and waits for the go-code. And since the CDI is interchangeable independent from the immobiliser (it’s not changed as part of the immobiliser kits) it must be waiting for a series-standard code. All it should need is a copy of that code and it’ll assume the immobiliser is present.

And of course doing so would mean I could build an immobiliser system of my own later on (keypad in the glove box maybe?)

But it does mean finding someone else with an ET4 who I can plug into. Should just mean lifting out the bucket under the seat and unplugging one cable.

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Been up for two days working. Pushing to get things ready for Expo, which has meant urgent fixes to a bunch of stuff.

Hope I’m done with fibreglass now. Think breathing mask filters are past it. Can taste styrenes when I cough.

Almost fell asleep in the bath. Hitting the sack at last now.

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There’s been some very bad news in the last few days here. It’s not my place to go into detail, but it’s a family thing and it’s 8 or 9 out of 10 on the severity scale.

I wonder if it’s actually made things here more active or if it just seems that way because we’re all concentrating on other things more to avoid dwelling on it.

Today I made banana bread, took my old large degass chamber to the hackspace, collected a gas fire to use in getting the brazing hearth there working, fixed their room fan, tidied up a little and collected a couple of bits.

In the evening went to Nile’s bday do and socialised a bit more. Was a good time, and got things out of my head for a bit.

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The Sony centre that got torched during the night is about 5.1mile due north of me. Dawn’s breaking now.

Hard to see in the dawn light, another day I might think it was a bonfire or something, but it’s actually a massive warehouse on fire over five miles away. That smoke plume’s gotta be a thousand feet high.

EDIT: YouTubed about 40seconds of video. Doesn’t need to be more. It’s just there.

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WARNING: This post is NSFW (not safe for work). Click through the cut only on this proviso.

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While passing by Shorditch High Street station today, I saw something unusual. A sort of street market had popped up under the rail bridge, with rough looking people peddling meagre wares. If I was going to go by looks alone, I’d have said the sellers were a mix of homeless and more wily opportunistic folk. There were t-shirts, trousers, jackets, scarves hung all over the fences and a wide range old electronics and bric-a-brac spread over the pavement. It looked like the leftovers of a car-boot sale or the contents of donation bags usually left outside charity shops. Notably there were also a large portion of old mobile phones and bicycle parts. The sort of bike parts that are conspicuously absent from those abandoned bike frames still chained to lamp-posts across the city.

There seemed to be some sort of more official market going on up the street, so I wonder if this was some form of illegal spill-over, trying to grab people on their way to or from the official market and get them to pay for what I would have called scavengings.

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Going through the workshop, making small improvements and sorting some things out.

For one, after several months of it bothering me, I knocked together a better mount for the angle-poise webcam.

Doesn’t look like much, but now the tilt is on top of the pan pivot rather than the other way around. The previous one was smaller but meant the image was only level when looking directly forward (along the line of the arm). Turning to show what I was doing to the left or right meant the image turned on it’s side. This way the image should remain level and I’ll be able to manuver the camera closer to the action.

In my sorting, I also scrapped some broken battery drills that either had dead batteries, broken chargers or damaged electronics. So I have four sets of low-voltage motors with reduction gearboxes and torque-limiters, and one electric screwdriver with just the motor & gearbox.

I haven’t checked yet, but Wikipedia suggests about the maximum torque you can expect from a battery drill is around 30Nm.

I’d been considering using them to make a large track-mounted robot arm, but at only 30Nm it’s unlikely they’d be able to make the arm move under it’s own power, let alone do anything useful.

If I packed out the torque control spring I could have them continue to run at higher levels, but I’ll still need more powerful motors I suspect. I’ll be looking into what’s cheaply available. Initial enquiries suggest radio-control vehicle motors won’t have enough torque. Steppers may be another option.

I’m envisioning something of a comparable reach to that of a human arm, so about 30cm between joints.

And finally, we still have some kittens looking for good homes.

Awwwww

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I have vague memories of a movie I watched late at night a long time ago. Maybe 15 years or more. It’s bugging me because I have no idea what it was called, or what it was supposed to be about.

I remember it was set in a hospital or lab of some sort, and was essentially a horror movie. It might even have been a 1970s british horror movie. I remember there was an obsession with brains in it.

Early on in it a doctor is slicing up a brain, talking about it, then puts the bits in a blender, makes a milkshake from it and drinks it, explaining only a brain has all the bits in it to fuel another brain.

Later on the “good guy” gets killed, only one of the doctors projects is to build a human being, frankenstein style, so uses the good guys head. The operation works, the creation rises, the doctor leans in.. and the guy bites him. Much flailing until they can pull the freshly sewn-on head off the body.

The closing scene of the movie had them wheeling out their prize project to an audience of important folks.. a huge artificial brain. Pulsating with internal light and the size of a beach-ball, the disembodied brain had it’s own monologue explaining how the next generation of it would be smaller and smarter, over and over until a brain would fit on a silicon chip.

And that’s all I remember.

There was another movie I can only recall from it being set, I think, in Veitnam. Troops smoking drugs in someones house, one suddenly getting the helment of an Imperial Stormtrooper from Star Wars, then getting the female character to strip and keep going until she takes a knife to herself and goes to start peeling her skin off too. But I turned that one off at that point because it was a bit much for early-teen me.

Anyone recognise them from that?

Anyway, now it’s out of my head I can go to sleep.

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