dustinfluke.com

So I broke down the kirby motor a couple of weeks ago in an effort to clean that puppy up. You can imagine the grossness that is wanting to roast coffee with a device that used to pick up dirt. I’m glad to say that it was relatively easy to tear this vacuum down  and disassemble the parts that handle the air flow.

Here is the vacuum cleaner base before I began removing parts.

There were 5 screws holding on the front cover. Once removed, we can see the entire front area and propeller. I also had to remove the safety lever on the front from the housing to have some wiggle room.

Here is the back part of the motor as viewed with the switch to the right. The outer housing was held on with 4 screws.

And a view of the left side.

Here is a close up view of the propeller and shaft. Youc an see the dirt that is caked on.

The main shaft will separate by rotating it clockwise. The propeller slides right off. At this point I cleaned the propeller and housing. I still have a little bit of work to do on the metal housing with a wire brush. The plastic propeller cleaned up nicely in the kitchen sink with some soaking and muscle put into it.

Next, I’ll put all the parts back together and start the air flow testing.

As soon as I get all this media stuff figured/fixed/worked out I’ll have some pics and a new post about the roaster project, as well as a book/manual type thing I’m thinking about writing.

I did it.

I finally decided to ditch the django blog for now and really get something going on the easier WordPress. There’s a few reasons for this:

1. I don’t have a job right now, and I feel that I need to re-establish some form of communication with a lot of people, but primarily former co-workers, whom I miss talking with. This blog (and rss feeds) is a way to keep tabs on each other without hanging out in an IRC channel all day not using my time to the full capacity.
2. I want to use my time more wisely, and when I write, I tend to remember more. I’ll likely blog about things going on at a given point in time if nothing more than to remember more clearly what it is I intend to do.
3. I have some upcoming projects I’ve previously announced, but never had the time to work on. I’ve established some unwritten goals for these things, and getting the blog up is the first step to the completion of those projects. (Then blog about those goals to get them written down) I want to be able to communicate progress, and I feel this is a good way to do that.
4. Twitter is only 140 characters, and so with that and Facebook, I hope to gain a following of sorts for reinforcement, ideas, networking, etc. A blog is a great platform for sharing lenghthier items.
5. It’s about time. I’ve let this site stagnate and go stale for the last 3 years or so, letting indecision get in my way of getting any real progress done. (WP or Django) Doing some self analysis in this “time between opportunities” has allowed me to see that I developed some pretty crippling habits. If you really want to know what they are, Laura can tell you. All of the self realization I’ve talked with her about she’s reinforced with a kind “Yep!” and smile. I’m glad she listens to me, even when she wants to get back to reading her vampire books she’s hooked on at the moment.
6. I already had a ton of contnet on wordpress and didn’t feel like converting it. Sure, I could start writing everything in reStructured text to be fully mobile across various platforms, but the fact is I know wordpress pretty well, and don’t feel now is the time to dive into python or django.
7. Lastly, whether it helps or not, maybe someday someone will go through a time in their life where they question thier purpose in life, the direction they want to go, where they feel they should be, etc. as I feel I am right now. If I blog a bit about it, perhaps that will inspire that person to look deeper at things. It’s a journey, and one I’m not sure of the destination of. I just know I have a unique purpose, for God intended it, and I plan to discover what that is. It might happen in two minutes, two hours, two days, or two decades. I have no idea, but it’s an area of focus for me now. I hope that by sharing, I can help someone else. It’s really that simple.

What you’ll notice is I’m using a stock theme. I have some other ideas on paper that I’ll implement over time, but I feel that since I have the content from archive, I only wrote 6 entries last year on the django blog, and I’d rather focus on writing content and doing some planning for other things and finding a job, I’ll worry about look and feel at a later point in time. I realized it just wansn’t all super important to me right now.

I’ll also be adding other features like my flickr stream, tweets, project pages, and other things as time allows. I just know if I try to do everything at once, I’ll fail.

Time to do some site changing and get this back on the proper dustinfluke.com domain.