Old-School Hackers
My mom's uncle Bob passed away last night. That's too bad, I never really spent a lot of time with him, and I didn't even know he existed until about a year ago, when I was traveling through southern Utah with my family and we decided to pop in and visit. He was awesome.
While I'm not really active in the DIY community, I always had that mentality- when I was a kid, I'd spend days playing with my Erector set or taking apart toasters and hard drives, eventually graduating to cars and motorcycles, and finally getting into the software side of computers. I consider breaking, fixing and building things an essential part of life, but anything I can do pales in comparison to Uncle Bob. He lived through the Great Depression, and spent most of his life in a farming community that never really made it out of the depression. He never threw anything away, and his back yard was a massive junk yard- the kind of place that car people fantasize about. Old tractors, vintage Fords, Chevys, Cadillacs, and a weather-beaten-but-mostly-intact International Harvester (remember Mater from the film Cars?). Most of them aren't salvageable, but there are some gems. He flew a Cessna until its hangar collapsed in a windstorm, at which point he bought a Corvette "so he could still fly." Like many of us, he was a serial career changer, doing what he thought was interesting, moving on when he found something else.
Uncle Bob had a perpetual motion machine (Except he didn't like people calling it that, because that's impossible. It was a "generator") that would lift a weight up an inclined plane, let it slide down, powering a generator that charged a battery that in turn would lift the weight up... I have no idea how it was supposed to work, because he never did figure out the friction issue. Maybe somebody here has ideas. It was a pretty cool bit of fabrication, at any rate.
No point to this post really, I've just been meaning to write about him since I met him. We could all learn a lot from the hot rodders, builders, mechanics, and DIY-enthusiasts-by-necessity of past generations.
If not, they still have great stories.
While I'm not really active in the DIY community, I always had that mentality- when I was a kid, I'd spend days playing with my Erector set or taking apart toasters and hard drives, eventually graduating to cars and motorcycles, and finally getting into the software side of computers. I consider breaking, fixing and building things an essential part of life, but anything I can do pales in comparison to Uncle Bob. He lived through the Great Depression, and spent most of his life in a farming community that never really made it out of the depression. He never threw anything away, and his back yard was a massive junk yard- the kind of place that car people fantasize about. Old tractors, vintage Fords, Chevys, Cadillacs, and a weather-beaten-but-mostly-intact International Harvester (remember Mater from the film Cars?). Most of them aren't salvageable, but there are some gems. He flew a Cessna until its hangar collapsed in a windstorm, at which point he bought a Corvette "so he could still fly." Like many of us, he was a serial career changer, doing what he thought was interesting, moving on when he found something else.
Uncle Bob had a perpetual motion machine (Except he didn't like people calling it that, because that's impossible. It was a "generator") that would lift a weight up an inclined plane, let it slide down, powering a generator that charged a battery that in turn would lift the weight up... I have no idea how it was supposed to work, because he never did figure out the friction issue. Maybe somebody here has ideas. It was a pretty cool bit of fabrication, at any rate.
No point to this post really, I've just been meaning to write about him since I met him. We could all learn a lot from the hot rodders, builders, mechanics, and DIY-enthusiasts-by-necessity of past generations.
If not, they still have great stories.

