Eerie: Grand Central Station after the last trains have departed in the anticipation of Hurricane Irene. Hopefully Lex Luthor’s lair is waterproof!
Step One: I am powerless before lumens….
I have a co-worker who likes to poke fun at my addiction. Now, it’s not usually nice to make fun of someone’s addictions, but in this case, well, it’s part of my coping strategy. And at least I admit that I have this addiction, which I’m told is the first step toward dealing with it. My problem is…that aside from admitting the existence of this addiction, I have little intention of stopping it any time soon.
My addiction?
Flashlights and worklights.
I can’t get enough of ’em. I love ’em. Whenever I find myself in possession of a gift card to Lowe’s or Home Depot and I genuinely can’t think of a new tool that I really need to get, I default to a flashlight or a worklight. I can’t stop! And I’ve been this way virtually all of my life. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t excited by flashlights, all the way back to the first one I remember owning, when I was five or six, and one of my birthday (or Christmas, or Easter, or some point when my parents just wanted to shut me up) gifts was one of those red plastic Ever-ready flashlights.
How many flashlights do I own? Well, here’s a guided tour…and this isn’t even all of them!
OK, first up. I keep this fellow in my laptop bag, because it’s my belief that one should always have some kind of flashlight ready to hand, and in this way, I’m always prepared for a sudden need for light should such a need arise. It’s also a combination laser-pointer: you click the button once for light (it has 8 LEDs), twice for laser, and thrice for light and laser.
Next up is this old-school Maglite. This is in my toolbag at work. In truth, I rarely use it, because most times at work when I need light I reach to the one of two lights that I carry on me at all times. (More on those later.) In my experience, Maglite’s flashlights are of very high quality. Unless you actually set out to break them, they just don’t wear out. I have one of those black D-cell “billy club” Maglites — not pictured in this post — that I bought twenty years ago, and it still shines as brightly as ever. I’ve never even had to change the bulb.)
You can buy kits to retrofit Maglites so as to remove the incandescent bulbs and fit them with LEDs, but I’ve never bothered.
Then there’s this nifty light by Stanley:
Looks pretty cool, doesn’t it? It’s fairly big, actually — that thing fits a two-handed grip, which makes it feel like…yeah…a lightsaber handle! Yes! But that’s not why I bought this light. I got this one because of a nifty feature. See how it has two buttons? The one closest the lens turns on the light (a very bright LED). The lower button, though, springs open the legs, creating a tripod. And the head swivels, allowing you to do this:
Thus a hand-held flashlight becomes a free-standing worklight. This has proven highly useful to me over the last few years!
Also in the worklight department is this item, from Ryobi’s Tek4 line of products:
There are six bright LEDs in the clear cylinder on the left side of the light. The LEDs can be aimed by rotating the cylinder via the little knob where my fingers are. On the backside of this light is a magnet, so I can stick this light to something metal, turn it on, aim the LEDs, and there’s a worklight. This is useful where the Stanley tripod light isn’t practical. This light also comes with a little square of metal which you can temporarily attach to stuff, if there is no iron-based metal where you’re working.
Ryobi’s Tek4 line is a group of products used for measuring, calculating, illuminating, and other types of tasks that confront handymen on a regular basis. The products all use the same battery and charger, which is nice. I own one other Tek4 product, which is this handheld flashlight:
I haven’t had a whole lot of use for this light yet, although it did come in really handy during a power outage at work a few weeks back. This light produces a freakishly bright 220 lumens. (By comparison, my 2 D-cell Maglite billyclub light produces 36.5 lumens.) This light is so bright as to be almost intimidating. If I was ever stranded in a dark forest at night with a serial killer on the loose, this is the flashlight I want. Nobody’s sneaking up on me when I’m shining this light around. This light may actually be too bright for normal applications, but if Tom Hanks had had one of these with him, he wouldn’t have spent four years on that island talking to a volley ball, I can tell you that. He’d be signaling the hell out of freighters on the horizon.
This brings me to the lights I carry in my pockets at work. I reach for a flashlight more often than I reach for my screwdriver, so carrying two of them around isn’t as silly as it sounds. I carry this penlight, first of all:
This light is useful for shining into small areas, like inside pieces of equipment when I need to look for something that’s creating problems. It’s the Energizer brand, but I suspect that any penlight will do the task just fine. In my back pocket I carry this light, two pens, and a small notepad.
The other light that’s always on me — and the one I use the most often, by far — is this new model LED light by Maglite:
That’s the Maglite XL50, right there, and let me tell you, I’d by ten of these, if I could. I love this thing. It puts out a beam of 104 lumens, which is plenty powerful for lots of things, such as when I’m standing on the floor at The Store and I need to seek out something up in the rafters, which are more than twenty feet above me and obscured by giant lights of their own. It’s also one of those lights with multiple functions: click the tail once, and you get a full beam; click it twice and you get half-brightness; click it three times and you get a rapid pulse, that’s ideal for signaling rescue parties if you’re stranded on a mountain. I see that Maglite now has a XL200 model, that adds two light modes and runs the lumens up to 172. It will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine!
And no, that’s not all! Worklights, magnetic lights, penlights…what about keyring lights? Ah yes…I have two. On the same key ring. It’s a sickness, I tell you.
The top one — the red one — really doesn’t strike me as a terribly high-quality item, and I’m sure it will not be long-lived. It was only two bucks at Home Depot, so it’s not like it will break my heart when it stops working. But it has an LED light, a laser pointer, and — get this — a blacklight. Why would I need a black light? Maybe I’m looking for one of these substances. I have no idea. But hey, it was two bucks. Oh, and that light has a little ballpoint pen inside it. That other one, the lower one, is surprisingly bright for such a teeny light, and it’s got a signal mode, too.
What other flashlights do I have around? Well, I keep another old-school Maglite on my desk at Casa Jaquandor. There’s my headlamp, which I keep on my hardhat at work. And there are a bunch of other small flashlights floating around the apartment, but more than a few of those have disappeared into the trainwreck-on-top-of-a-tire-fire that is The Daughter’s room. That’s OK, though, because the Holidays are fast approaching, which means…cheap multipacks of cheap flashlights at all the hardware stores! Huzzah!!
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Saturday Centus
I’m going to do an experiment with this week’s prompt: I’m going to write it right here, without editing it at all. Usually I write my entry in OpenOffice and then tweak and and choose my words to squeeze it down, but this week, I’m going to work without a net.
(Oh, and apologies to Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg for this.)
Dr. Schwarzenstein staggered across the lawn, bleeding profusely, as he thought once again that maybe, just maybe, re-creating velociraptors from frog DNA and the contents of fossilized mosquito stomachs had been a bad idea, and that maybe, just maybe, genetically enhancing the raptor for super-intelligence had been a really bad idea.
And then there she was, the Queen Raptor, in front of him. He wasn’t going to make it to the jeep. This was it. She bared her fangs, bristled her claws. “Surprise, I’m pregnant!” she said.
“I’ve created talking raptors?” he thought — a scientist to the end — as she leaped toward his abdomen.
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Seven
Something for Thursday
A two-word food review
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
How to respond to failure
One of the writers of the just-released — and just-flopped — Conan the Barbarian movie answers the question, What’s it like to be the writer of a movie that fails? This part spoke to me, for a lot of reasons:
My father is a retired trumpet player. I remember, when I was a boy, watching him spend months preparing for an audition with a famous philharmonic. Trumpet positions in major orchestras only become available once every few years. Hundreds of world class players will fly in to try out for these positions from all over the world. I remember my dad coming home from this competition, one that he desperately wanted to win, one that he desperately needed to win because work was so hard to come by. Out of hundreds of candidates and days of auditions and callbacks, my father came in….second.
It was devastating for him. He looked completely numb. To come that close and lose tore out his heart. But the next morning, at 6:00 AM, the same way he had done every morning since the age of 12, he did his mouthpiece drills. He did his warm ups. He practiced his usual routines, the same ones he tells his students they need to play every single day. He didn’t take the morning off. He just went on. He was and is a trumpet player and that’s what trumpet players do, come success or failure.
Less than a year later, he went on to win a position with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he played for three decades. Good thing he kept practicing.
Sometimes — most times, even — the only thing to do is keep going.
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Yes, well, aside from THAT, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
Answers, the third!
Continuing to answer queries from Ask Me Anything! August 2011!
LCScotty asks: When are we going to have another WNY blogger meetup?
I have no idea. Next!
OK, fleshing that out a bit…I’m not sure why it is, but it seems to me that the WNY blogging community doesn’t really exist anymore as such. Which isn’t to say that it’s completely disappeared, but it’s changed in a lot of ways, some of which I don’t mind, some of which bug me a little. But it’s the way things are.
Five or six years ago, blogging was pretty much it in terms of “social networking” online, and community formed in ways encouraged by the nature of blogging: with bloggers linking one another. At one time, bloggers in the Buffalo-Niagara region started discovering each other’s existence, and links started flying back and forth, along with discussions of stuff — politics, issues, Buffalo sports teams, Buffalo restaurants, life in this area, and other items of general interest. And in time, there were a few events where bloggers actually came together and shared drinks, food, and talked about stuff. I attended a couple of these, and they were terrific times. (Before the first one I attended, I asked in all seriousness what I should wear to such an event, and was told by one terrific person, “If you don’t wear overalls, I’m gonna cry.” How could I turn that down!)
Blogging, however, subsided a lot over the next few years after that, for a number of reasons. Some bloggers lost interest in blogging; others still blogged, but a lot less frequently. And some, for whom blogging was a social outlet, moved on to other outlets that were more to their liking: MySpace, then Facebook, then Twitter. There are occasional Twitter meet-ups, that I know of, but nothing that’s as wide-ranging as the old ‘Bloggercons’ we used to have. But then, how could they be? There is so much online Buffalo population nowadays, and it’s all pretty segmented. There are people I interact with on Twitter whom I am fairly confident never ever ever look at my blog, and vice versa.
And within the “Buffalo Blogosphere” itself (or, as I used to call it, “the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan”), things are pretty segmented, too. Links don’t get shared much at all anymore. The WNYMedia.net blogs — quite a few of which I read regularly, because they’re really good over there — seem to mainly link either each other or larger blogs elsewhere online, and those blogs tend to remain focused fairly narrowly on a few specific topics at a time.
Coincidentally enough, I’m writing this on the heels of Christopher Smith’s departure from WNYMedia.net and — one hopes temporarily — the Buffalo blogging community. I’ve been reading him just about all the time he’s been blogging, and I’ve (almost) always enjoyed his voice. His departure came out of the blue, and after he’s been active in launching new ideas like the Buffalo Cash Mob and trying to brainstorm some way of jumpstarting Buffalo as an area of innovation and entrepreneurship. I can’t shake the feeling that there is some kind of “Inside Baseball” involved with his exit from WNYM, but that’s none of my business, really.
So, when the next Bloggercon? I have no idea. I’d be game, but who knows?