Two weeks. Twwwwwooooo weeeeeeeeeeeks.

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

Two weeks from the time I am typing this, Lisa and I will be on an airplane to Tokyo! Here's what happened since I last posted:

Want to hear something crazy? I got CHINESE X-Acto blades. F'ing cheap-ass non-US blades. Are these bootlegs? Are these legit, for poor unsuspecting people overseas? I had noticed my new batch of blades (a box of 100) were oiled, which was an irritant, as I have to now wipe them down with alcohol before using them. More importantly (and irritatingly), they BEND very easily, making them pretty much useless as fine-model-work tools. See the difference? See that USA on the blade with the straight tip? See the lack of "USA" on the blade with the slighly bent tip? And that's the way it looked after a LIGHT cut. I can literally bend the tip into a small "U" as if it was made of solder wire. The packaging is almost identical too, with the same UPC code. BEWARE - make sure your X-Acto #11 100 count blades say "made in USA" if you want them to be strong and useful. eBay Fuckers.

Let us take a moment to calm down. Ahhhhh.

Time Machine hell-on-earth build is done. Both of them, even.

Zooom! Whir! Blink!

Time Key!

END TRANSMISSION!

Two DAYS!

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

We leave for Tokyo in less than 48 hours. Oh man, so... excited....

We had dinner with Tom and Jane on Sunday - fresh back from California!

Lisa taking photos of her food!

Jason taking pictures of himself!

And the planning for this Sunday at Tokyo Big Sight continues...

Six HOURS!

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

So the house is finally clean, I am packed, Lisa is packed, and we are ready to go... in six hours or so, I need to take a shower and catch the plane!

Simon is stuck to me like glue - he keeps laying on my chest every time I sprawl out on the couch. Poor fella. I cleaned - really cleaned - the litterbox. Between that, and the sudden appearance of luggage in the staging area we call a front room, he's figured out that we're going away for a while.

So I got a package from Elmers yesterday, with 100 replacement Xacto blades. Pretty nice of them to stand by the quality I expect from X-acto, even though they seem to be duping us with the new packaging scheme.

Beware any X-Acto box that says made in China on the back.

It looks almost IDENTICAL to the way they have looked for years.

This is what you want to get now - X-ACTO "X-LIFE" blades. They are more expensive, but they are what you expect.

I bought a box of these before Elmers sent the replacement blades, and oddly enough, the Elmers blades came in a puddle of oil, wrapped in waxy paper. Just like the Chinese blades, which immediately made me suspicious.

However, the backs of both the store-bought X-Lifes and the Elmer's-provided X-Lifes were the same, and both made in the US. Note the new UPC code.

Shitty Chinese-made X-Acto blade - THIS IS THE NEW STANDARD FOR BASE MODEL #11 BLADES! That is the damage from ONE cut you see - moderate pressure, cutting paper on a self-healing cutting mat. It's a joke.

So weirdly, the oily new X-Life Elmers-provided blades are missing the "11" in the blade's stamped information. No idea wny, but both X-Life blades seem to have a blue-ish almost anodized coating. The bottom bade in the X-Life I bought at Art Things in Annapolis.

What's the difference between the oily X-Life with no "11" stamp and the ones I bought? No freakin' idea.

But I hope it helps you - and thanks to Elmers for sending me a pack of 100 to replace the 200 Chinese blades. It may only be half a replacement, but I wil get more than 200% out of them, in use.

So there you go. I have better blades and we are packed. I hope I can get some sleep tonight!