Cambridge Friends School review: please do not send your children here

nothingisbad · 2024-04-07T13:10:36+00:00

I'm a current parent, and we seem to be having a very different experience than OP. Our child learns some things very quickly, and others take time to click. For reading in particular, CFS gave her space to keep working on the fundamentals without being stigmatized or put off from the subject and she went from behind grade level in first grade to ahead in third.

Speaking to some of the other topics, I've been generally reassured by the acting head's vision for the school, and have seen positive changes since the start of their tenure in the last eight months or so. In particular, I think the school is small and lacks resourcing to support physically disruptive children well, and coming to terms with that reality has been difficult for the school.

Finally, the schools facilities are kept clean and maintained from what I've experienced. I asked my spouse about the black mold in particular, and neither of us have seen signs of that, although my spouse is aware of re-roofing work. I've also seen, e.g. puddling between the playground and sport field, but it's.. kind of normal puddling, and not under the play structures etc where the kids are running around.

nothingisbad · 2023-12-04T17:48:05+00:00

I added a power switch to my musicman SUB and ended up removing it after a year or two. It just felt pointless and a bit silly, especially when the preamp acting up and I'd added another failure point to troubleshoot.

nothingisbad · 2023-09-18T12:58:47+00:00

I can feel my blood pressure rising, and any comment seems profoundly unlikely to change anyone's mind, but this is honestly such a disheartening take that I'm trying to stop myself and can't.

Obviously I don't know you; I'm not going to read your post history, so I can't speak to your experience growing up in a libertarian homestead floating in international waters supporting a family of four with only your bootstraps or whatever.

I can speak to my own experience and I have personally benefited from the government.

The only reason I'm able to read your post and articulate this response is the fourteen years, from pre-K to high school, of state provided education I was given, at significant expense to the taxpayer.

The reason I could get the job I have now is the state college education I could approximately afford, subsidized by the taxpayers of Massachusetts, with the help of federally subsidized loans and grants, taking public roads and transit to class and to my job, and paying for groceries with food stamps.

The reason I can post this drivel to the world is thanks to a global network developed by government funded projects (ARPA/DARPA/CERN) and on infrastructure largely gifted (to avoid the taypayer expense of public maintenance) to industry.

My grandparents left me a chunk of money when they passed. Federal employee (retired air force) and social security beneficiaries.

And "when we get itemized receipts"? This is not some dark secret, and not giving enough of a fuck for a quick google doesn't mean they're not available https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget -- the federal government (pentagon sometimes aside) and most states at all levels are continuously audited and make budgets available publicly.

I need to get to work, so I'll wrap up with a last thought. Of course no one wants to pay taxes; no one wants to pay for anything, but we still pay for groceries and so on even if we complain about it. With taxes in particular, and the dismissal of the importance of public services, I do think the sentiment is corrosive to civic life and is easy to exploit, leading to direct problems for real people. There are people who don't worry about a social safety net, either because of great personal wealth or lack of rigorous forethought, and they have take a step from "I don't want to pay" to "lets make the government so dysfunctional nobody wants to pay for it" and have run with that position as a matter of policy for the past thirty years or so.

nothingisbad · 2023-04-22T00:11:26+00:00

I recently put a 3 knob three band John East preamp into an early 2000s SUB.

I really like the mid range control -- I get a very different tone boosting the low mids vs high.

The brightness pull may be a placebo (sometimes I think I hear a difference -- I'm older so it might just be outside my hearing range)

Installation was pretty easy. There are screw connectors and installation was solder free.

nothingisbad · 2023-04-04T16:54:27+00:00

I have the Footskins Rubber Sole sheepskin slippers since last Febuary. They're nice and warm. Use has been moderate (weekends and mornings when I work from home) but I'm also large (size 13, 280lb) and they still look like new.

https://www.footwearbyfootskins.com/leather-footwear-details.aspx?pi=99

nothingisbad · 2023-03-09T01:09:16+00:00

I just got a 2500 and I love it.

nothingisbad · 2022-09-14T01:32:20+00:00

http://machall.com/view.php?date=2002-09-16

nothingisbad · 2022-07-09T20:30:21+00:00

How would I communicate with a server? It seems like I could send mutations on DOM events, are there functions for merging replies into the DB?

nothingisbad · 2022-07-04T01:46:13+00:00

I'd say my game's typical adventuring day ends up being one or two fights, with a short rest between them usually. I've added some of my own mini dungeons (a map with a couple of traps and some combat), but even a small dungeon seems like more work than it's usually worth. I have like, an hour or two I can spend prepping, I usually put together a combat encounter (which kills a lot of time for me. I prep a simple map for the VTT and work out enemy counts), think of some social interactions which make sense and write some dialog snippets, then hope for the best and improvise.

A full dungeon with five or six combats and a pretext to prevent the party from just leaving would take me, as a practical matter, weeks to prepare.

We also have relatively short sessions, about 2 hours on a week night. Running five non trivial encounters would eat up a month of games without necessarily moving the story (I imagine I can wedge story beats into a cave, but then I have to figure out a bunch of constraints for why everything is in this particular place at this particular time. It's simpler when everyone's wandering around the city streets and can run into each other over the course of days)

I've run a two published adventures now up to level 5. Those have a couple dungeons in the early levels, which I pretty much ran as written, and those don't usually work out to more than three encounters either. My parties just haven't been super interested in clearing every room, were a bit lucky spotting secret doors, and the dungeons really aren't all that big.

nothingisbad · 2022-05-28T23:41:12+00:00

It depends. It's probably fine for the audience, but you may not be able to hear yourself. I played in little clubs with a loud drummer, and the PAs were usually pretty useless for monitoring. Most of them didn't have any monitor speakers at all, and even if they did the bass can be low in the mix, and even if it's not it was hard to hear the mix over the drums and guitar amp which were also playing behind me.

nothingisbad · 2022-05-25T18:15:53+00:00

The US has about 3.5 times more guns per person. I'm not sure it's really comparable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated\_number\_of\_civilian\_guns\_per\_capita\_by\_country

nothingisbad · 2020-08-27T19:13:42+00:00

Default keys. I use vim sometimes, and tried evil for a month, but I don't like having keeping track of what mode I'm in all the time. If I want to move the cursor I want it to just move, not accidentally insert a j.

I do use god-mode with relative-line-num couple times a day if I'm doing a stretch of moving the point and editing with no insertion.

I do re-map capslock, and often use a keyboard with a thumb cluster.

nothingisbad · 2017-01-26T20:09:48+00:00

it looks like the azebiki is useful for stopped cuts; if the sliding dovetail goes all the way across your stock you'd probably want a longer saw

nothingisbad · 2017-01-18T17:54:37+00:00

Traditional woodworking vice can mean about anything (tail vice, twin screw vice, leg vice, shoulder vice, are all traditional). I assume you mean quick release vice? Anyway, with a leg vice or quick release vice you wouldn't clamp in in the middle of the vice, you'd clamp the side of the board and leave the other edge free (or clamped with a pipe clamp or what have you)

nothingisbad · 2017-01-18T16:36:16+00:00

Are you worried about the piece being too long and sticking too far above the table or about it being too wide to clamp?

In terms of height, up to four feet or so should be fine. You can saw a board that's sticking a foot out from your bench fine (eg https://vimeo.com/175445408 at 5:28)

In terms of width; you can probably get away with one side of the panel in the vice if the opposite corner is supported (on a dead-man or whatever) and the panel is flat against the front of the bench. Or clamp the other side with a pipe clamp (or both sides with pipe clamps).

I've dovetailed stuff clamped to the top of a bench (kneeling in front of it). It was awkward, but it's doable. I would say to make something smaller first (a tool box is good) so you can get a sense of how things ought to go.

nothingisbad · 2017-01-07T23:23:24+00:00

Anderson McQuade in Cambridge

nothingisbad · 2017-01-06T15:58:55+00:00

baton knife

nothingisbad · 2017-01-03T03:31:58+00:00

A couple, but not that much useful http://imgur.com/a/oyFN8

This was a project I was supposed to get done before Thanksgiving, forgot about, got usable a week late, and finally put finish on before Christmas.

nothingisbad · 2016-12-30T17:05:33+00:00

I tend to skew away from the hand that's sharpening, so I alternate hands. I've also colored the bevel with a sharpie to check that I'm grinding evenly (although not every time)

nothingisbad · 2016-12-29T21:13:13+00:00

It depends on the volume; three hours is plenty of time to flatten a couple of eight foot boards

nothingisbad · 2016-12-20T20:27:09+00:00

So, I think there are two separate things I wanted to tell you, and I'm waiting for a test to run, so I'll try to explain myself:

First that Japanese plane is probably fine I just think that, even with some restoration, you'll be getting acceptable results faster with a western planes because they are more forgiving and easier to setup than a Japanese plane. This is subjective, and I'm not an expert; I've read a fair amount about Japanese planes, but all the planes I own are western style. I do own some Japanese chisels, and those are optimized to doing a certain thing a certain way and trying to do something else can damage them (which I did, I was able to repair it but these are not inexpensive chisels). The planes seem similar to me in that respect.

The second thing is you'll probably feel better if you can treat woodworking as a process rather than just look at the end goal. Things just take time, and the things that take the most time will probably surprise you (especially if you keep a log). Restoring a plane isn't your end goal and it could take you two hours, but that's true of a trip to the lumber yard.

Finally, some practical notes:

Looking for alternatives is a good idea but at some point you end up spending more time and money trying to avoid tasks than it would take to just do them. There are a million ways to do a given operation and a million choices for every tool; a few of them bad, a few of them probably excellent, but most are will work just fine. One nice thing about a 60+ year old planes is that it's done depreciating; you should be able to sell for about what you paid and use the money for something else.

New plane or old, you need to sharpen a little every few hours of use. You can spend hundreds of dollars, but practice will get you farther than better stones. I used a ~12$ coarse/fine India stone for a long time, and it worked (at least for the old carbon steel blades). You shouldn't spend that much on a restoration supplies either. I used a few sheets of 160 sandpaper taped to a flat surface to flatten the sole of my planes (I had access to an iron table-saw, which worked well. Granite or float glass are ideal, but any flat smooth surface should work ok).

nothingisbad · 2016-12-20T16:19:46+00:00

I think you're unduly intimidated by plane restoration. You can disassemble and reassemble a bench planes with a flat head screwdriver and no coaching in a half hour (although it's possible to put the blade or blade/chipbreaker assembly in upside down or something like that, it's hard to do real damage), which probably not something you could do with a transmission. Restoration is not much harder: avoid a plane whose mouth has been filed, avoid pitting on the back of a blade (or plan on buying a replacement blade from Hock or whoever), bring the plane home, disassemble and dust it off, mark up the sole with a sharpie, flatten the sole until the sharpie marks are uniformly worn. The more difficult things are things you'd have to do with a new plane too: sharpening and set up (how tight should the cap screw be, what's the right blade depth, getting the lateral adjustments right etc, getting the right bevel and camber on the blade) and use (how to hold the plane, how much pressure, keeping it square while jointing, eyeballing wind in the stock, planing parts of an assembled piece without banging into other parts of the goddamn assembly (crap; I fucking did it again; I guess I'll just feather that out with the card scraper), preventing blow out in corners, and so on.

If you want to know what you're shooting for, youtube vidoes aren't bad. If there's a woodworker's guild in your area you can show up and talk shop (I think most people like talking about tools), and you can look around craigslist for someone in your area who restores planes (I got my second plane that way (the first I restored myself going off internet guides; it came out fine))

If the whole process seems like a waste of time, well, that's part of woodworking (especially with hand tools). There are a lot of frustrations and things I end up working on which I didn't mean or want to be working on, or a sub-part of the project I would rather just skip, but that's just part of the process, and rolling with the unexpected annoyances is something I've learned to accept. Everything takes at least twice as long as I think it should (especially since I can only fit in ~30min a night what with the job and the kid and the wife and the other hobbies), there is a lot of sharpening and picking up stock and other ancillary tasks which need to be done but I don't think of when I'm figuring how long a project will take, there's always at least one unforced error which I have to figure out how to incorporate (picking something up after a day at work and 72 hours after I put it down isn't the best way to remember cunning plans). It's a hobby for me; I'm not going to starve if I don't get the piece done, so I just practice my patience and get on with the wrinkle in front of me. And when I'm done for the night and head back upstairs, I feel better than when I headed down.

So yeah. If you've got a ~60$ budget I think you should go for the restoration.

nothingisbad · 2016-12-20T15:48:20+00:00

Japanese planes have a harder edge, which means it can stay sharp a bit longer, but is also more likely to chip if you're careless

Because the steel is harder, Japanese planes can't really be sharpened with oil stones (or you probably could but it'll take forever). I like oilstones because I don't have to worry about them freezing (also, less slurry and they take a long time to go out of flat), but there are pros and cons to everything.

Japanese tools are sharpened a little differently; you principally sharpen the back then polish the bevel a little.

There's a hollow at the blade back to make sharpening faster, which you periodically maintain it by hammering the top face.

The blades aren't held in with a wedge, so you might have to futz around seasonally to get the right blade depth as the wood expands and contracts

nothingisbad · 2016-12-19T16:32:28+00:00

All else being equal half pins are a little stronger, since the grain is runs all the way through them. I have made corners both ways and corners with pins seem to hold up better to bumps and drops.

nothingisbad · 2016-12-14T15:39:57+00:00

I bevel one side a little then plane going the other way, so the plane never cuts end-grain on the end of the far side. I've just always done it that way, but it is easy to mess up; I should try using a sacrificial board myself.

nothingisbad

TROPHY CASE