currently injured.

keyboard magnets September 2, 2010

i’ll say this again: I AM NOT A FREAKIN’ STALKER!

quite some time ago i was browsing instructables.com for random ideas, and came across some stuff you can do with old keyboards. one of them was turning keys into pushpins/thumbtacks. so after surveying teome as to the nature of the staff room’s cubicle walls, i discovered they were magnetic. so i decided to make magnets that spell out his name instead or pushpins/thumbtacks. (i made magnets of a very different nature last year. see this.)

so according to instructables, the first step was to clean out the keys.

this here be keys in black and white, because his name has two ‘n’s and i don’t have two identical keyboards. so i decided to use one black set and one white set, and alternate the letter colours.

using a pair of pliers and my nifty skills, i successfully plucked off the annoying stumps. they were very difficult D:

and then i had to break magnets into shape using pliers again. it was not a pleasant experience, with magnet shards flying everywhere, and one particularly sharp one cutting my thumb. that’s the original circular magnet on the right (i had a lot of extras from last year), and the reshaped one on the top left.

pop the magnet in. i glued mine in with glue gun. would have used silicon gel but didn’t have any…

that’s my prototype up there. it’s the escape key because at that point i wanted to escape from temporal space-time realities. come to think of it, i still do.

and this is the final (:

title: (i don’t know what to put?)

size: 1.8×1.8×0.9 cm approx.

materials: keyboard keys, magnets

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right now i’m really worried that the glue gun won’t hold. i’ve had a few incidences where the magnets drop out…but i guess i’ll have to stick them somewhere for a few days and see how it works out. if they fall out i’ll use super glue. because the glue gun would have provided some filling to elevate the magnet.

not much to comment on aesthetically. except that i’ve now acquired the skill of breaking circular magnets into squares. not very handy actually.

as usual, i take care to make stuff i give practical /:< i mean, even if he doesn’t use it to hold paper or whatnot, it’s always fun to make anagrams of your name…neon, none, send, nose, node, does, done…(to take 4-letter words for instance).

as to why i only spelled his name, it’s because if i were to add the surname as well, it’d seem…impertinent? rude? and i’d have to add a “mr” as well. which would mean an extra 4 more keys = more time, but i don’t have so much time so i decided not to.

and now packaging! i got a boiling tube and a cork stopper and put them in like this.

if i had tried to put them all facing the same way, the magnets would attract each other and end up clumping, which is a bother and annoyance. partially because i put them with the same polarity facing out.

i had intended to magnet the whole boiling tube with magnets inside to the walls of his cubicle very early in the morning and then run away before he arrives, but then realised the glass was too thick. so now i guess i’ll have to do it the normal way and place it on the desk. i have yet to find out what time he comes to school, so i can avoid the awkwardness of actually trying to sneak around and failing. terribly i predict.

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and the same thing goes with the other post. i’m typing this on the afternoon of the 8th of august and will only publish this after i give it out. with a message that i won’t be giving anything next year (because i’ll be studying).

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[28-8-10 UPDATE]

however, i realised the glass didn’t really go with the plastic /: so i changed the packaging to this;

it’s a little plastic pocket with a piece of grey felt stapled over the opening. i wish it’d look a bit…classier. sigh.

so there! i spent less than $5 (my initial budget). i don’t really know the exact cost because the magnets were already in my box of stuffs. and computer keys are…recycled? all i hope now is that he won’t think it’s xinhui’s pw project leftovers…BECAUSE I OBVIOUSLY DID IT A LONG TIME BEFORE THEIR MINI-TRIAL D:

okay not good karma to end a happy post with a sad emoticon. but i can’t help feeling invariably sad whenever i think about the festering situation…and i know it can never be reversed…i just hope that all will go relatively well on tuesday. or else i think i’d have another breakdown in the art room again. sigh.

[31-08-10 UPDATE]

last night i changed the packaging again. the final one looks like this.

i used a A5 sheet of tracing paper and tape. so okay it looks plain but i couldn’t think of anything else at that late an hour. i hope he doesn’t misunderstand and think spelling his name is too personal or something like that. i guess the problem with transparent packaging is that the contents are visible. and that more often than not works out to be bad for me. hmm…i shall try to lie to myself that great things come in small packages and be satisfied with it. or that i’m aiming to be minimalistic.

i realise the packaging ideas got increasingly cheapo D: says something about my level of self-esteem huh.

anyway successfully gave it with a message written on the back of a re-printed piece of prep. i don’t know whether the response was positive or negative, and i don’t think i ever will? [i will diverge slightly from the art aspect from here onwards so just ignore the rest of the post if you're uninterested.] unless by some warped shred of luck that i’m allowed even remotely near his desk and see them stuck there or something. and i was asked who wrote the MCTA nomination write-up. i never expected the school to actually show teachers the nominations. i remember i was thinking of all the seemingly insignificant little quirks (i think i even used the word “quirks”) that he does, like changing marker ink every few lines to deprive us of the boredom and monotony of a monochromed-text-filled board and printing worksheets in georgia instead of default fonts so it looks more interesting etcetc. can’t really remember the exact amount of amusing observations i wrote down and probably exposed my keen sense of observation for the unorthodox and inrrelevant, which probably made me seem even weirder than i already am. at any rate, i think it was a rhetorical question since he would have seen the hard copy and recognised the handwriting? sometimes i don’t understand how the minds of people work…and i half wish i did and half wish i didn’t /:

this is rapidly degenerating into a complaining-about-the-world’s-unfairness-and-how-my-life-is-so-sad post.

[17-09-10 EDIT]

(the following content is no longer available as it has been removed.)