Top Secret Howies Project: Tinkering with the elevator, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

One project I’m doing that I haven’t written anything about yet is our Top Secret Howies Project, that isn’t a secret at all.
It’s going pretty well, and should be in the store very soon – just spent the afternoon with Henry and Russell, tinkering and discussing some of the niceties of the installation, in a kind of more genteel, smaller, slower version of “Scrapheap Challenge”.
With cake.
The pleasure of tinkering with a machine is something that I get quite a lot in software, especially in discussion with Boris, Tom, and Matt B., but to tinker in hardware and software (especially Meccano) is a rarer thing.
It seems to activate a way of thinking with the eye, the mind and the hand that is entirely natural, proving in practice some of the early chapters of Malcolm McCullough’s “Abstracting Craft”; and the playful problem-solving instincts of childhood come rushing back.
More of this in 2008 I think.