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I spend a few hours this weekend putting together a ping pong ball cannon. No real reason to do this other than I thought it would be fun.

Here is the outcome:

With a few sprays of hairspray into the breach (the cardboard tube) it will shoot a ping pong ball about 75 feet and make a very satisfying boom. I put this together with materials I had laying around:

• 1 ½ inch PVC pipe – Used to hold the ping pong ball
• Mailing tube – Used as the breach (holds the hairspray and houses igniter)
• Gas BBQ igniter (piezoelectric igniter) used to set the whole thing off
• Duct tape – Used to hold it together
• A few screws – I wrapped wire around them and mounted them inside the breach, I then connected the other ends of the wire to the gas BBQ igniter, this will cause a spark to jump between the 2 screws inside the mailing tube which will then setoff the explosion.
• Hairspray

I plan on building a better version of this using all PVC pipe so I can shoot something bigger out of it (like a potato). This build was structurally weak since it used cardboard so be careful if you decide to do this yourself..

Our water heater quit working on Monday, the water was getting warm but nowhere near hot enough to take a shower (Andrea found out the hard way, sorry babe!). Rather than calling a plumber I decided to give this fix a shot myself, it was a learning experience but in the end I got it working for only $30.00 in parts.

What I learned:

• There is a racket for the “tool” used to remove the heating element from a water heater, the “tool” is nothing more than a pipe that has one end bent into the shape of a hex nut and it cost $8, there is a picture below

• Water heaters are very simple, there are less than 10 parts to check and the ones that break most often are very easy to access. In my case the lower heating element had shorted out so I replaced that and the lower thermostat as well

• I have hard water. Since I had the water heater take apart my uncle recommended that I try to remove the calcium deposits that had built up in the bottom. After building the right tool for the job using duck tape a shop vac and water hose I removed 10 pounds of calcium sediment from the water heater (gross).

Pictures are posted below click one to see the full set on Flickr

Burned up heating element and thermostat:

Thermostat after removal (Scary, looks like a small fire took place):

The $8.00 “tool” required to remove the old heating element (These are universal to most water heaters):

Old heating element, covered in mineral deposits:

Don’t forget to drain the water heater before working on it:

Shot of the inside of the water heater before I cleaned it:

The same shot after being cleaned:

The hose from my shop vac would not fit into the water heater opening so I used duck tape to attach a water hose to the shop vac (the water hose fit inside the water heater):

I ended up pulling over 10 pounds of mineral deposits out of the bottom of our water heater:

The old and new heating elements side by side:

I am in Six Sigma training this week and one of the tools we are using is a Pareto chart. Here is one that I made out of M&Ms

I came across a glitched free for all match on Xbox Live (It appeared to be a private game that somehow became public) that allowed 18 people into a free for all match and had unlimited ammo and increased fire rate on ALL weapons (including kill streak rewards). As you can imagine, the matches are total chaos most people use a grenade launcher to spam the whole map with grenades causing the whole map to shake due to the explosions. Someone will inevitably end up with an AC130 and because the glitch causes a major increase in your fire rate they will spam the 105mm shell across the whole map (watch the kill cam for this video for an idea).

Here is a video of the action (You will want to watch it at full size):

P9190050, originally uploaded by immense.

I put our San Fran pics up on Flickr a few weeks ago and forgot to update my blog =)

Click the image above to see the full set of pictures.

I am pretty big fan of Starbucks, Andrea and I stop there almost every morning before work to get our daily caffeine fix. Starbucks recently released their new Via instant coffee. In their words, Via is made by “microgrinding the [coffee] beans in a way that preserves all of their essential oils and flavors. No other coffee company takes this step, and it makes all the difference”. You may wonder what microgrinding is (I did) according to the barista at the Starbucks I frequent microgrninding is just another way of saying that they grind the coffee bean into a very fine “dust”. So when you make a cup of Via instant coffee you are only using ground coffee beans and this is where the exceptional flavor comes from.

I picked up a three pack of Via the first day it was on sale and have since gone through my original three along with about three more. The coffee is very good. So good in fact I cannot tell the difference between Via and the brewed coffee offered by Starbucks. Starbucks is so confident that Via is just as good as their brewed coffee they held a taste test challenge to prove it. I did not have a chance to take the challenge but Jason did and he could not tell the difference.

If you like Starbucks coffee and don’t mind paying about $0.85 for a cup of it (that is the average cost of a packet of Via) I highly recommend trying it out.

Choe and I headed over to Choke last weekend, a great day on the lake (9 hours!!). Visit his site for pics:

Fishing Pics