These are all the posts:

Being the first post, ever

It has become increasingly apparent to me over the past few years that, for this web site to survive as a continuing concern, it will need to include a blog. As loathe and as late as I am to conform to societal norms, here it is. To perpetuate the proud tradition of outmoded 1995 technology exemplified by the rest of this web site however, this blog (and its RSS feed!) will continue to be coded by hand in a text editor. Welcome.

2007.09.24 at 5:00pm EDT

I love it when the web treats me bad

A few months ago, I jumped into the "Cat Macro"/"LOLcat" trend with both feet and LOL'ed the entire Rocky Horror Picture Show to create the LOLcky Horror Picture Show. This project didn't go unnoticed by the world, and I have the traffic stats to prove it. I was very, very disappointed when the Wall Street Journal article about the trend didn't mention my page, but I'm always delighted when virtually anybody else does.

Today I got the bright idea of replacing the 404 page for my site with an appropriate LOL image. I understand I'm not the first to think of this, as when I started doing searches I found several mentions of other sites and the ones they use.

This is a long prologue to me being delighted that this page about LOLcats links to me using the word "craze".

2007.09.25 at 10:00am EDT

Book Crates now for sale

The big stack of book storage crates I made earlier this year to hold books during our recent home renovations are taking up space in the attic, so I've decided to put them up for sale. Let me know how many you want!

2007.09.26 at 5:00pm EDT

It's like 2003 meets 1993 meets 1983

I repent of my rash pronouncement that this blog would be all done by hand. I've decided that's silly when there are shell scripts I could be writing. After a bit of research and asking around, I've found that instead of doing everything by hand I can do much of what I want with SSI and shell scripting.

Every time I start researching PHP or one of the other common ways of implementing a blog, I find out there at least a dozen files to install and learn how to modify, and maybe even some database to configure. Here's me with a directory full of entries, a few index files, and couple of shell scripts.

Yeah, that's right, I'm old school. In case you're interested, here's a link to the script that returns the ten most recent posts, and the script that returns the items for the rss. There are probably better ways to write these scripts. The two scripts just get called in the middle of wrapper HTML. Each post contains all its own meta information.

2007.09.27 at 5:00pm EDT

Friday Catblogging

Mischa (blue point) and Ethel (white)

2007.09.28 at 12:00am EDT

Udon for Lunch

My default lunch lately is a big steaming bowl of soup with udon noodles. Mmm. I have a whole set of supplies for preparing lunch at the office in the microwave.

Basically, I keep packages of noodles in the fridge or freezer. You can buy them frozen or even supposedly fresh at any good oriental grocer. If they're frozen I have to remember to take them out when I get to work in the morning so they'll be usable by lunch time. These are loads better than dried noodles you have to boil. Jumbo udon are thick (like 1/4 inch) and chewy.

The noodles almost always come with little packets of instant broth, that I typically never use. I have a bottle of concentrated soup base in the fridge. This can be difficult to find.

To turn this into a meal I keep dried or canned things in my desk or fresh ingredients in the fridge. Dried shiitake mushrooms, freeze-dried tofu, and dried wakame seaweed are a good kit. In the fridge I've had fish sausage, pickled daikon, and sansai mountain vegetables. I tried some frozen, fried fish patties last week and they were interesting. yesterday I opened a can of mixed "oriental vegetables" and that was good, though a bit heavy on the bamboo shoots.

Anyway, at lunch time I pour a couple of tablespoons of soup base into a bowl, add whatever dried or fresh ingredients I want, put the noodles in on top, and then fill with water from the tap. The bowl goes into the microwave and six to seven minutes later I have a yummy lunch.

Last time I was in Young's grocery on Forward, I saw that in the aisle where they have mostly packaged, dried ramen, they also had instant udon. These weren't dried, I guess they're just packed aseptically because they seemed soft in there. Some time I'll have to try a pack (79 cents) and see if they're wretched.

2007.10.01 at 12:00am EDT

I am freaked out

I started working on this blog last week, more because I was finally getting around to something than because I really wanted a blog. Sometimes when I put something up on my web site, I have to figure out where to announce it, that is, if I even want to announce it at all. Much of what goes on my web site is just documenting a project so I can refer people to it, and not to publicize anything. I figure if I have a blog then people can subscribe one central palce, and if they care that much about my web site then I can bother them when I care to publicize a new release.

Some of my friends have started blogs, updated them pretty regularly for a while, and then stopped. I usually stop looking at their blog after a month of inactivity, and they go back to posting to mailing lists or whatever it was they did before they started their blog. When I started this, I made the decision that I'd try posting to it at least daily for at least a month before I announced it anywhere. I added a link to this blog from my front page, and figured I'd leave it at that so at least when I finally give in to temptation and announce this blog somewhere there will be a backlog of posts for people to read through and not just a single post titled... well, you can see the title in the archives.

I am very curious about my site's web traffic, however, so I go grepping through my logs every once in a while to see where people are coming from and such. Today I noticed that this blog's rss file is getting pinged every few hours by some process at LiveJournal. Following referrer URLs, I see that someone found this blog, and subscribed to it using LiveJournal's aggregator. I have a reader.

Thank you, my one mysterious reader, you have freaked me out. Don't worry, I enjoy being freaked out. Tell your friends. If I can get one reader in less than a week, I can have 52 by this time next year!

2007.10.01 at 4:07pm EDT

Tuesday Tublogging

Liberty Tubes, Pittsburgh

2007.10.02 at 12:00am EDT

Travel

When I was younger, I always though it would be cool to be one of those people who travel a lot. You know, maybe some kind of business person with meetings and vacations all over the world.

When I actually had a job where I had to travel, I changed my mind. Even though I was only travelling once a month, and then for only a couple of days each month, it was too much. The planning, the logistics, the disruption, &c. were just too much for my apparently fragile state of mind. Maybe it's easier if you're an executive with some kind of assistant or something to at least arrange all your itineraries, but just thinking about it was a full time job.

Right now, I'm planning some personal travel for the next few months. These are mostly weekend things like weddings and conventions, and again it's just one thing a month for a couple of days at a time, but what a pain in the neck. Hotel reservations with three different chains, airline tickets, driving directions, JKMN.

2007.10.03 at 12:00am EDT

Pittsburgh's geekiest networking night

So, I'm thinking it's been about nine years that I've been going to Geek Night. A reporter called me earlier this week to interview me about the event, so I thought I'd write a few words about it here.

Geek Night is a social event, first and foremost. There are no dues, nobody takes attendance, and the closest thing to a membership list is a mailing list to receive reminders. There are no officers, no hierarchy, and nobody is technically "in charge". There are a few people who handle making the arrangements for the event and providing a personal front end, but the don't make speeches and I bet most attendees would be hard pressed to pick them out of the crowd. Geek Night is not a meeting, it is a bunch of geeks taking over a large percentage of a large bar. We eat, we drink, and we socialize.

Secondarily, it's a professional networking night. Some food is provided, and this is typically paid for by a local company that is looking to hire some geeks. Most people use it to keep track of former co-workers, and it's not unusual to chat with friends who are looking for new opportunities, or who are looking to help fill an opening at the company where they work.

Thirdly, Geek night is an excuse to go to the Church Brew Works for a few beers and some food. The beer is brewed on the premises, and is pretty good. The food is also good, and pairs well with the beer. The ambiance is unparalleled in Pittsburgh. The CBW is a converted church with high ceilings, good acoustics, and an altar to the spirits of zymurgy.

You should come.

2007.10.04 at 10:30am EDT

Aha!

I've discovered your identity, oh my first reader. Oh yes, I have. This explains much. Come to my site looking for my email address, see the blog link right near the mail link, and follow it…

Now, I wonder who LJ reader #2 is. Hi!

2007.10.04 at 2:30pm EDT

Friday Catblogging

Dodger and his fantastic whiskers

2007.10.05 at 12:00am EDT

Fitting In

So over the weekend, I went to a kind of convention I'd never attended before. I went to a Furry convention. Here's the part where I'm supposed to deny actually attending the convention and claim I was only there as some kind of observer or ambassador (I'd been asked by some friends on the committee to run game demos), but you know what? I had a good time.

This particular subculture is much maligned and often misunderstood. While much of what you've probably heard is true to some extent, you're probably overestimating the extent, and there's probably a lot more "normal stuff" going on than you know. Most of all, these people know how to have fun.

Now, I was definitely an outsider. Most of the people there (there were about 100) already knew each other from other conventions and Internet communication, and only a few of them knew me. Everybody was very friendly, though. Everybody I smiled at smiled back, and everybody I said hello to greeted me back. They weren't all hitting on me, either. (There was one guy, but he was cute and didn't try too hard. He just didn't seem to notice my ring.)

I didn't see anything happen that I would have considered "family unsafe". I'm sure plenty went on back in people's hotel rooms, but like most adults, intimate acts were kept private. I've been to family reunions with more inappropriate behavior. There was considerably less swearing than I would have expected from a large group of primarily men in their 20's to 40's. I'd say there were probably about ten women there total, giving this group a higher percentage than the groups I used to hang around with in college.

Primarily, people were there to have fun, and hang out with people they shared an interest with. We watched movies. I played a bunch of games of course. There was an outdoor barbeque. People played frisbee and lasertag. People swung on the swings and lay around in the sun chatting. They put on a show.

One thing I'd never known (and was delighted to discover) is that most of the fur suiters are really good at it. They have characters and routines. Most can't really talk, so they have these elaborate pantomimes that are hilarious to watch. Over time I got to know which of the people were in some of the costumes (they rarely appear "headless", so it takes a bit of detective work) and the two personalities were often very different. Somebody who seemed sullen without their suit would reappear as a mischievious hyena or something. It really is like slipping in and out of a cartoon.

Sometimes when I go to conventions where I don't know a lot of people, I wind up feeling isolated. I didn't feel that here. Most people were ready to make new friends, and the people who weren't were just distant, not mean. I did see some people there who didn't seem as able to jump in and start talking to people, but hopefully they'll feel more open next year.

You know what? I hope I see them there.

2007.10.08 at 11:30pm EDT

Tuesday Tublogging

Exiting the Fort Pitt Tubes, Pittsburgh

2007.10.09 at 12:00am EDT

21st Century Chain Letter

Web 2.0 personal networking web site communities, I say. LinkedIn, that is. Following my spectacular blog debut, I figured I could only top that by following the crowd over to the trough of schmooze juice. I only denigrate because I love.

Man, I remember when SixDegrees.com got people to rat out all their friends and contacts back in the nineties. It was a rough time to be around. Nobody saw the point to these things besides giving out your information to people who wanted to make money off of you. Now, they're big business.

LinkedIn is probably the most professionally oriented, and in some professions/geographies it's become necessary for finding a new job. I'm not looking right now, but browsing its listings for technical writer positions found me better job leads than I've had in some time.

While it seems that joining a site like this decreases your privacy (Your relationship information is now known and you are cross-indexed to others. The site actually makes shockingly accurate guesses about who else you might know in its database.), its features actually seek to protect your privacy (at least from other individuals). You can restrict your contact information and force people to contact you through the site. Further, you an restrict the kinds of contact you want to receive.

If you're looking for a way to promote your professional services online without exposing yourself to marketing and other solicitations, I don't know of a better way. Furthermore, if you need to contact somebody you don't know, and you don't want your email to send up in that person's spam bucket, you can use LinkedIn to maybe discover a common contact who can vouch for you.

We'll see how I feel about it in the long run. Right now I wish I'd joined it six months ago.

2007.10.10 at 12:00am EDT

I need more icons

Look to the left of this sentence. Eek! It's the same generic icon from the very first post, used on a majority of the 16 posts to this blog. I've used that icon more times than this blog has actual readers. One post had a specially created "projects" icon, four were cop-out photo-posts, and one post had a picture of udon. All the rest had this icon. If a bowl of udon is as exciting as this blog gets, I don't see this blog being very exciting.

I was thinking, when I started this blog, that I'd come up with a bunch of icons, maybe one a week to add to the library so that eventually I'd have a nice collection of topical icons like Slashdot. So far, I have two, and I'm really at a loss regarding what more icons would be. I want to use photo icons, but it turns out that most things don't look like things any more if you reduce them to a 64 pixel wide icon. Although, if you do "View Image" on the udon picture, you can see a bit more detail.

A good icon for this post might be a picture of my navel.

2007.10.11 at 12:00am EDT

Friday Catblogging

Natasha (Tashi) inverted

2007.12.05 at 12:00am EDT

Doris Lessing

I'm absolutely euphoric that Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature last week. Years ago, I saw the Canopus in Argos series in the Science Fiction section of what I refer to as "the library I grew up in", and I read the first couple of books. The first book, Re: Colonised Planet 5; Shikasta is fantastic. I don't know if I've ever read any other fiction book like it, let alone another science fiction book like it. The second book, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five was somewhat over my head, in that it was told from the viewpoint of an adult woman and I was a teenaged boy, but even I could see its point.

Years passed before I decided to hunt down the other three books and add the series to my personal library. Each book in the series is markedly different from the others in tone, style, and message, but they all fit together and present a picture of the world that is encouraging and hopeful. Her books are patient with the reader, and more demonstrative than instructive. It's all allegory of course, but it's too easy to get caught up in trying to figure out what is supposed to be what, and lose track of what is happening. Getting to the end of the last book is to reach an epiphany. It all falls into place, though you may have to think about it for a while.

If I had to sum it all up, I'd say the point is this: "Those who would consider themselves our enemies, if treated with patience and compassion instead of enmity, will realize they are our equals and partners." To be more succint about it: "Don't fight, live." Yet, these books I have been praising are not even considered her most important works! That she has received one of the planet's premier accolades for writing and thinking presents a view of humanity that is as encouraging and hopeful as her books themselves.

(While doing some quick research, I discovered that Ms. Lessing had collaborated in the past with Philip Glass to create operas of two of these books. How beautiful they must be!)

2007.10.15 at 12:00am EDT

Tuesday Tublogging

Inside the Squirrell Hill Tubes, Pittsburgh

When I say "Tublogging", you all know I mean "Tube Blogging", right? Here in Pittsburgh, locals (known as "yinzers") refer to tunnels as "tubes." Just recently, I heard people using the word "tubes" to mean "Internet connection," as in "the hotel's tubes are down." Last year, we would have said "intarwebs". I suppose in the future, people hereabouts will refer to tunnels as "Internets", assuring that nobody has any idea what we're talking about.

2007.10.16 at 12:00am EDT

Truly, you have a dizzying intellect

The other day, I was having a literary/philosophical discussion with a couple of friends, and while listening to one of them speak I realized that I was just barely able to understand what he was saying. The conversation had reached that point where the words and concepts had become so thoroughly larded with advanced and previously introduced ideas that each word coming out of his mouth was a summary of a paragraph. I was so amazed and distracted by this state of affairs, by the grinding of the gears in my head that were processing this rich stream of thought, that of course I lost the thread and could only smile vacantly.

Let's go shopping!

2007.10.17 at 12:00am EDT

I appear to have peaked

After growing exponentially for three weeks in a row, my number of LiveJournal subscribers has stopped increasing. There are four of you, same as last week. Cleary, this blog is not going to continue its phenomenal growth without significant marketing.

As a first step, I have created a new icon that is wholy unrelated to this post.

2007.10.18 at 12:00am EDT

"Stripehouse" page updated

I finally added some explanatory text to the project page for my "Stripehouse" decorated Treehouse set. This was a fun little pieceniking project to squeeze in as a break during a longer-term project, and it approximates the look of a dream set I designed long ago.

The dream stash is mostly made of solid colorless crystal, with the edges and corners all in ¹/₈ inch solid gold. Obviously, the likelyhood of that ever happening is slim, but these plastic pieces with their edges painted gold are a close approximation.

2007.10.18 at 3:00pm EDT

Friday Catblogging

Natasha, Mischa, Ethel, and Dodger

2007.10.19 at 12:00am EDT

Lore

I've been a fan of Lore since the Brunching Shuttlecocks days, but now his output rate is a little erratic so I tend to ignore him for a few months and then see a link somewhere and spend some time catching up.

Dude wrote an article for Wired back in August that pretty much describes exactly the kind of PB&J sandwich I make:

Healthy bread needs to be the color of dust and have visible chunks of what may or may not be chaff. Healthy bread should suck the joy and life from a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, assuming you haven't already sucked the joy and life from it by using the sort of peanut butter where the oil rises to the top, and the sort of jelly that's essentially just fruit that someone stepped on.

…except I use three slices of bread. No, not to keep the peanut butter completely separated from the jelly until you start chewing (although that is an added bonus), but because without that extra slice of bread a PB&J sandwich just isn't enough food. I mean, typically I only make and eat PB&J sanwiches when I am too hungry to think, so two slices of bread just isn't going to fill me up. You got the jelly to boost short-term blood sugar levels, the bread for complex carbohydrates to fuel the next two or three hours (depending on the number of slices), and the peanuts to add protein and fat for long term needs.

That's the kind of thing I can only think of after I've eaten the sandwich.

2007.10.22 at 12:00am EDT

Tuesday Tublogging

Tiles of the Fort Pitt tubes

When a 1/2 hour drive to work is taking more than an hour, you have to amuse yourself somehow.

2007.10.23 at 12:00am EDT

Truly, you have a dizzying intellect

The other day, I was having a literary/philosophical discussion with a couple of friends, and while listening to one of them speak I realized that I was just barely able to understand what he was saying. The conversation had reached that point where the words and concepts had become so thoroughly larded with advanced and previously introduced ideas that each word coming out of his mouth was a summary of a paragraph. I was so amazed and distracted by this state of affairs, by the grinding of the gears in my head that were processing this rich stream of thought, that of course I lost the thread and could only smile vacantly.

Let's go shopping!

2007.10.17 at 12:00am EDT

Being the first month of posting, ever

In honor of my having completed the first month of this blog, posting every weekday for the entire month, I have created this posting icon.

You may not have seen this image before, but trust me, a very influential web comic says it's next year's new hotness.

2007.10.24 at 12:01am EDT

The Beatles

Ok, can we all agree that The Beatles are the band most representative of the middle of the 20th century? Expecially given the experimentation they brought to their music as they became more successful which enabled them to explore styles and subjects, the Beatles catalog stands (in my opinion) as the primary textbook for creating 20th century music. Can I possibly hold them with more reverence? Probably not.

However, this is now the 21st century. As much as I understand conservative forces that would like to keep change from getting out of hand and preserve things in an understandable form, I also recognize the inevitability of change and the necessity of adapting to that change. Here's an interesting quote from a review of the video for Gnarls Barkely's Crazy by Andrew Olson.

Imagine the Beatles music catalog like this great endangered bird living in a cage. We all get to walk up and look at it, but never get to touch it. The bird also sits in a cage and never is free to explore what is out there. The best music ever made needs to be freed from its cage and mixed into new forms.

Olson was referring specifically to DJ Dangermouse's Grey Album, but I think it covers how I feel about the (non-unique) situation occupied by The Beatles in our culture and music. Copyright exists to assure that the original artists receive due compensation for their works, and I certainly support that, however I feel that once created and released into the world, a work of art has its own independant existence. Although I don't consider inanimate works to be creatures, I do think that this existence can be modelled as if the work were a kind of organism. The environment such an organism occupies is our culture.

I hope you'll forgive the extended metaphor, but eventually such an organism becomes bigger and more important than the one that created it. An organism like that cannot be killed, but it can die of neglect. The only way to assure the organism's immortality is to allow it to breed with others and create hybrids and descendants. It has to be let out of the cage, or it will die.

Secretly, under cover of darkness, it already is out of the cage. The children have been bred and are thriving. All that remains is for the owners of the parent to acknowledge it, and rather than fighting to kill these progeny, promote them as the heirs they are.

2007.10.25 at 12:00am EDT

Friday Catblogging

Ethel curled into a tiny ball

2007.10.26 at 12:00am EDT

"Subwoofer Platform Stand" project added

Added a new project page recently for this project to create a little plaftorm stand to keep the left subwoofer speaker of Sharon's stereo off the livingroom floor. This subwoofer stand was necessary because the corner where we wanted to put the subwoofer already has a radiator in it, and we needed to boost the speaker ten inches off the floor or it was going to have to rest on the shut-off valve of the radiator.

These little projects are a lot of fun when I get to do them. The larger projects are great for making nice things and learning advanced techniques, then when you get to apply those practiced techniques and make a small project look nicer it really adds quality to life.

2007.10.29 at 12:00am EDT

Tuesday Tublogging

Talk to anybody who commutes into, past, or through downtown from the suburbs and you'll hear the same complaint: "Every day there's a big back-up for the tunnels, but once you get through the tunnels the coast is clear. Why can't we just cruise through the tunnels at speed? Why does traffic slow down?"

Everybody I've ever talked to asks the same question, which leaves the question: "If nobody you know is slowing down for the tunnel, then who is slowing down for the tunnel?" Is it just that the kind of people who slow down for tunnels are also liars? Is it that none of them realizes they are slowing down?

One of these days I am going to stay up until the early morning, and I am going to stake out the entrance to the Squirrel Hill Tunnels with a video camera. I'm going to tape people entering the tunnel until I can identify who's slowing down and beginning the traffic jam. Then, I'm going to find those people and ask them, "What exactly is going on here?" I won't hurt you when I find you. Please do not be afraid.

2007.10.23 at 12:00am EDT

"Cherry Silk Pyjamas" project added

Last week, I made a pair of Cherry Silk Pyjamas out of a "raw" silk fabric similar to some I've used for Japanese garb. It was the Japanese garb that convined me I needed to get some more fabric and make some jammies. It's soft and warm and comfy, like a silk flannel.

Sharon was amazed that I got this project done so quickly, especially when I don't really need them for a couple of weeks. Personally, I don't understand how people can procrastinate on hobby projects. I mean, it's your hobby, if you don't want to do it, don't do it. If it was work or something, I could totally understand putting it off.

This doesn't really have anything to do with Halloween, but it is mildly related to costuming. I usually spend Friday night at a convention bumming around the con in my jammies, and Philcon is coming up in a few weeks.

2007.10.31 at 12:00am EDT

"Minimice 2" project page expanded

I've had a picture of these Minimice 2 minimal pyramids up for a while, but I only got around to typing up some text recently. Along with the decorated pyramids I posted about a couple of weeks ago, this year saw the first Pieceniking projects I'd done in a while. It was fun to get back into it.

2007.11.01 at 12:00am EDT

Friday Catblogging

Mischa basking in the sun

2007.11.02 at 8:00am EDT

"Brass Strike Plate" project page expanded

I made a brass strike plate to avoid having to buy one, and I just finished up the text explanation for the project.

I find it particularly handy to be able to fabricate small items like this in my home rather than have to search all over for them or spend great gobs of money buying them. I wish I was better at some of the fine points, but my rough approximations are often good enough to substiture for the right thing until the perfect instance comes along.

2007.11.05 at 12:00am EDT

"bLOLd runner" page released

Back in May, I answered the question, "What would it be like if Rocky Horror fans had to start over from scratch using only the captions from LOLcats?" Now, I've answered the question, "What would it be like if cat LOLers had to start over from scratch using only the screenplay from Blade Runner?"

2007.11.05 at 12:01am EDT

One year until Election '08

It's the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, and I'm sure there are plenty of elections in this country today, but most people's eyes are on the day roughly one year from today when many of us will vote to choose the next President of the USA. It is on this day that I throw my political weight behind the candidacy of Barak Obama, if and only if he chooses Hillary Clinton to be his Vice Presidential candidate.

Look at what the Republican Party did in 2000. They took an inexperienced candidate with serious deficiencies, paired him with a strong, ruthless, experienced political player, and they won. They changed the paradigm. No longer is the Vice Presidency where you put somebody safe and innoffensive who has a chance of surviving your meltdown if it happens. Now it's where you put your strongest fighter, so that the administration can fight hard while the President's hands remain clean(ish).

I like Barak Obama. He's inspiring and motivating, and what this country really needs right now. I like Hillary. I think she' can do things with this country that I'd like to see happen. I just don't think she's electable as the first name on the ticket. She has too much baggage that will drive away voters. Some people still won't like her being on the ticket at all, but who liked Cheney? I know this will look to some other people like I'm asking Hillary Clinton to again take a back seat to a man, but I'm afraid it may be the only way for her to get into the White House where, I dare say, she belongs.

The nineties were a wonderful time for this country. It's been a long time since this country had good times like we had when Hillary Clinton was helping a President guide the United States. Obama/Clinton '08!

2007.11.06 at 12:01am EDT

A quote for today

"[…]I stopped at a tobacconist's and bought myself a sixpenny cigar of a kind I'm rather partial to. They're eight inches long and guaranteed pure Havana leaf all through. I suppose cabbages grow in Havana the same as anywhere else."
-- George Bowling in Coming Up For Air by George Orwell (1939)

2007.11.07 at 10:00am EDT

Speaking of the Beatles

In this other post I talked about the Beatles and the beauty of remixing. I'd heard about the movie Across the Universe, but only just saw this film last night. It's pretty good. Not as good as I'd hoped it would be and wanted it to be, but pretty durn good. It has some difficult to follow parts, and some parts that don't really make much sense, but also it has some parts that are downright brilliant. The army induction sequence is so amazing it almost killed me. It takes a lot of guts to produce a movie these days with so much singing and dancing. While it's not perfect, I give them serious points for trying and succeeding as much as they did.

Anyway, back to my point about remixes. Why should this type of thing be the sole provenance of big-budget movies? I suggested to some friends that the director be granted a degree in literary and cultural studies based on this movie as a thesis, but could an average LCS grad student have legally made this work? I don't think so. Certainly, the grad student would not have been able to present it at conferences or sold it to a publisher without paying millions in royalties, millions that almost definitely don't exist.

That's a shame, really. Information may not want to be Free, but Art certainly wants to be experienced.

2007.11.07 at 10:00am EDT

Signs of Pittsburgh

Left & Left ONLY at the corner of Murray & Forward

2007.11.08 at 10:00am EDT

Friday Catblogging

Clan of the Cave Cats

2007.11.09 at 12:00am EDT

"Suzuribako" project page expanded

I've had a picture of this Japanese "suzuribako" (ink stone box) up for a while, and I've finally completed the page with text and another picture. This project seemed to take forever with all the sanding and finishing and waiting and sanding and refinishing and painting and waiting and finishing and sanding and finishing. It's only fitting that the project page itself would be delayed waiting for a little polishing.

2007.11.12 at 12:00am EDT

Apologies

Sorry for the messed up RSS feed over the weekend. I noticed on Friday that things weren't working, but I couldn't figure out what was wrong until I looked at the xml using an older version of Firefox. This older version didn't know what correct RSS was supposed to look like, but it knew what XML was supposed to look like. Modern browsers just choke if the RSS XML is malformed, but this one was able to show me that I'd (like a moron from 1994) used an actual ampersand ("&") in a post's title instead of an HTML "&" element.

As previously noted, I do all this blog coding by hand and the pages are constructed with Shell scripts and SSI (band aids and string, essentially), so it was hard to tell exactly where I'd messed up. Firefox is just too generally helpful to be actually helpful in this case, I guess.

Anyway, I was using this old version of Firefox (Firebird) on an old Win98 laptop that normally just controls X10 plugs in the house because I was replacing the hard drive in my WinXP laptop. At last, having some mostly useless olf hardware around saved my bacon in this case.

Presumably, the problem would have gone away when the offending post fell off the bottom of the feed, and I would have never known what was wrong.

By the way, SATA hard drives apparently have some weirdness that makes it difficult to set one up from scratch as the main boot drive. This is all over the internet if you search for "SATA bootable", but nobody I talked to had any idea what was going wrong for me other than knowing it must have been some MBR problem.

The answer was to install the new drive, restore the system and re-install Windows using the CD supplied by the laptop manufacturer, then clobber everything by cloning the old drive onto the new one. Now we know.

At least the whole fiasco gave me the incentive to finally get the Win98 net connection working properly. It turns out that if you want to be able to access hosts by name instead of only by IP address, the "Enable DNS" checkbox has to be checked. who knew?"

2007.11.13 at 12:00am EDT

Palm Depression

At left is my new icon, a picture of my current PDA. PDA's were never super popular, and they're even less popular now that most people use their phones for the purpose PDAs were intended. For many reasons, I like having my information separate from my phone. I also like having my entertainment separate from my information, which I know makes me about the only person who still carries a phone, PDA, and MP3 player as separate devices. (Not to mention a stand-alone digital camera.)

Anyway, that's a whole spearate discussion I'm not sure I want to get into right now, mostly involving things like battery life. Right now I want to talk about depression.

I've upgraded my PDA about every three years for the past nine. First, I bought a Palm III in 1998. I acquired a Handera 330 PalmOS device in 2001. I bought a Palm Tungsten T3 in 2004 just after the T5 was released. Now it's 2007, and the most likely candidate for upgrade is the TX, which was actually released like two years ago. Palm, like the rest of the market, has mostly been focusing on "smart phones". Right now, I think only Palm and HP are even still in the market.

The main problem is that I use my PDA for all kinds of things. I now have calendar entries going back almost a decade, including all the major family milestones like births. I have thousands of items documented in a database, including all my books and CDs. I have notes, reference materials, pictures, etecetera and I don't see a good way of moving them off the Palm.

So the Palm Tungsten TX is probably the best choice for me, but let's get real, a lot has happened in the world of technology in the past two years. There are capabilities that weren't even considered in 2005 that are now viewed as necessary for a handheld device. For instance, high speed input for communication is now a must, and Graffiti 2 or the Treo keyboard just don't cut it.

Just today I found out something very exciting, though. Nokia has been releasing "internet tablets" for a few years now, and the next one slated for release (the N810) can emulate PalmOS Garnet in a virtual machine. Sweet! I can buy a piece of cutting edge hardware and not have to migrate off PalmOS? Great!

Hardware has advanced to the point that it can run the device I want as an application internal to its own device? Now I'm depressed.

2007.11.14 at 12:00am EDT

Zombie Fluxx Cardbox

This game does not come in this box.

2007.11.14 at 12:01am EDT

Driving to Work

One of the things I don't like about my current workstyle, that is, working as a contract technical writer, is that I get very little say in where (physically) I work. I pretty much take whatever good work is available at the time I need work, whether the work is close to home or some distance away. Currently, I'm working about 15 miles from home, which should only take about 25 minutes, but can often take 45 minutes to an hour. It's my firm belief that every minute you spend on the highway carries with it a certain percentage risk of accident, and so the more time you spend driving the greater the likelyhood you will be involved in an accident.

Earlier this year I was working very close to home. We live on the very Eastern edge of the city, and I was working a bit further East. It took me about ten minutes driving to work, and could sometimes take 20 coming home if there was traffic heading West into the city for some event. (Not that I'd be in the traffic, but the back ways just don't move at highway speed.) I was spoiled then, and I knew it.

Highway speed is part of the problem. Nearly everyone on the highway during rush hour (who isn't stuck in congestion) wants to go at least 60 miles per hour. Typically on highways headed out of the city, traffic flies along at about 70+ miles per hour. (Speed limits on these roads are usually 55.) Now, I am not now, nor have I ever considered myself, a particularly slow or cautious driver, but this is insane. I try to be as observant as possible, as well as considerate to other drivers, but I drive fast and I take chances. Still, having people flying around me, trying to get ahead, squeezing into gaps, treating their progress as paramount to the smooth flow of traffic, etcetera, really makes me think I'm about to die.

In the past few years I have witnessed the near aftermath of several accidents, witnessed a couple accidents as they happened, and been in a couple of minor bumps and near misses. Every single one of these freaks me out. Nothing drive it further into my mind that it's just a matter of time. The more time you spend on the highway, the closer you get to your inevitable smash-up.

This is of course by way of apology to the poor person I nearly merged into on the way to work this morning. Sorry. Good use of horn there. Hope I see you tomorrow.

2007.11.15 at 11:00am EST

Hee hee hee

So I realized that right now, since I'm contracting for a network hardware company, it's the perfect time to bring in this old project to hang on my cube wall. They're just hanging there, waiting for somebody to notice. Waiting …waiting.

2007.11.15 at 12:00pm EST

They Still Might Be Giants

Sorry, no felines today, just some text about those cool cats They Might Be Giants.

Now, I've been listening to TMBG for a long time, and I've seen them in concert maybe six or seven times. They're a big favorite at CMU where I went to college, and have headlined Spring Carnival maybe three times. They tend to play somewhere in Pittsburgh every time they're on tour, though I don't always make it to the show. I own all their albums on CD, and buy each new one as it comes out, even the kids albums.

Even before the kids albums, TMBG had quite the following with the younger set. I suppose it's because their music is often erudite, always fun, and in any case non-offensive. It's the kind of music somebody can discover in college, bring home at the holidays, and play for their younger siblings without freaking out the parents. Also, the people who were already in college when TMBG first started getting popular probably started having kids pretty soon after that, so starting in 1997 or so second-generation fans started going to shows.

It was soon after that that I basically stopped going to TMBG shows. I was in my late 20's at the time, and really didn't want to hang out at shows with 12-year-olds. I suppose there was an element of jealousy, in that these kids were way cooler than I was at that age. Once TMBG started putting out kids albums, I realized their audience was only going to get younger and younger, and that I was going to get less and less comfortable attending.

They (and I) appear to have passed through this phase unharmed, though. A friend of mine was in town on business, and when I mentioned TMBG was playing here she totally wanted to go, having not seen them in concert for maybe 12 years. The concert last night was great. The audience is back to being mostly college age with a long tail of older folks. We were not the oldest people there. I assume the oldest people were the ones whose kids have already gone off to college, allows their pre-parental personalities to resurface.

I've actually seens a quote on the internet to the effect of, "Yeah, TMBG is the band I don't listen to any more because they're the band Ilistened to a lot when I was nine." Now that TMBG has hit their 25^th anniversary, I think a lot of their fans of all ages are doing pretty well. Last night at the show they played a smattering of tunes from their entire history, including a couple that went out "to the god damn kids".

Anyway, if you stopped going to their shows for the same reason I did, I'd say it's safe for you to give it another try. It's better if you pick a club that has an over-21 area with a bar, just to be sure. Also, pick up their latest album, "The Else". It's pretty good.

2007.11.16 at 11:00am EST

Friday Giantblogging

They Might Be Giants at Mr. Small's Funhouse, 2007.11.15

This is the best picture I took at the concert, which isn't saying much, I know. Hey, I was nearly all the way in the back by the sound board, because that's where the bar is.

2007.11.16 at 11:30am EST

Philcon

I went to Philcon, the Philadelphia area science fiction convention, this past weekend. I've attended this convention nearly every year since 1990. I missed the Millenium Philcon (which was a WorldCon), and maybe one or two more, but that leaves more than a dozen times I've been there. I've been through three hotels, and several different weekends (before, just before, and after Thanksgiving).

It's strange. You know, every annual event has its ups and downs. Great years, bad years, average years, etecetera, and sometimes the difference is in attendee and not the event. This year was pretty average conventionwise, and it was pretty average me-wise.

I had some good times. Some years I don't go to any panels, some years I do panels full time. Some years I don't play any games, some years I play games all day and night. Some years I hang out with friends, and some year I party hop. This year I did a fair number of panels, gamed a bunch, and did zero party hopping. Saturday I did my drinking in the hotel bar, starting an extemporaneous discussion that was better than most of the panels I'd been to, or maybe it only seemed better after two of the hotel's $9.60 martinis.

Next year the convention is moving to a new hotel, although they don't know which hotel, what weekend, or who their guests will be. It should be a fascinating study in weekend-long train wrecking, and if history is any indication, well worth attending.

2007.11.19 at 4:00pm EST

Tuesday Tublogging

Kittatiny Tunnel, PA Turnpike

2007.11.20 at 12:00am EST

Palm Depression 2|X

A week ago, I lamented the sad state of the Palm OS PDA. This week, Palm announced that they are discounting the two-year-old Palm T|X by $100 for the next week.

It used to be that when a new Palm PDA model would be released, the price of the previous model would drop by $50. I supose that since this discount is so large, and since there's still no new model to replace it, Palm is tacitly announcing a clearance sale on their PDAs. I'm buying one, not be cause I'm happy about it, but because it keeps me from having to worry about this issue for another three years.

2007.11.21 at 10:00am EST

XII IIT Finals

The three games in the finals round of the 12th International Icehouse Tournament, held in Columbus, Ohio at the Origins game convention in July of 2001. The finalists are Jacob "Shotgun" Davenport (Yellow), Liam Bryan (Green), Elliott "Eeyore" Evans (Red), and Dan Isaac (Blue).

I shot these videos back in 2001 during the tournament, but only now decided to put them up on YouTube. The camera was mounted on the Skypod camera boom. These videos have been resampled to 150% of original speed to enable a 15 minute game to be presented in under 10 minutes to meet YouTube's restrictions.

Game 1

Jacob wins this game with a near-perfect score of 29 points, Liam scores 25, Eeyore is Icehoused and scores 0, and Dan scores 19.

Game 2

Liam wins this game with a score of 27 points, Jacob scores 25, Eeyore scores 16, and Dan scores 20.

Game 3

Eeyore wins this game with a near-perfect score of 29 points, Liam scores 14, Dan scores 24, and Jacob scores 19. Combined with his previous scores and first game win, this game is enough to clinch the championship for Jacob.

2007.11.26 at 12:00am EST

For the Record

Sorry to be morbid, but just so you all know my final wishes, when it is time for me to go, I plan to dive my space ship into the Sun.

2007.11.28 at 11:45am EST

Pain in T(he)|X

As recounted previously, after much hemming and hawing I bought a discounted Palm T|X PDA. When I upgraded from my priginal Palm III to a Handera 330, the move was almost completely painless. When I upgraded from the 330 to a Palm Tungsten T3, there was extended wailing and gnashing of teeth. Now that I am upgrading from the T3 to the TX, I am reliving the pain I relived three years ago.

This is where I believe that Palm really fell down on the job. If somebody is going to put their entire life in a device, they should have some assurance they will be able to get their life out of the device if necessary. I recognize that it is necessary for a company like Palm to move constantly forward, but each time they have done so it seems like they have done it to attract new people to their fold, and not to retain the people they already have.

This has always been visible in the way they forced users to purchase all new accessories (down to the type of stylus nearly every time they upgraded hardware. The constant shift in form factors and connectors meant that you couldn't just buy a new machine, you had to rebuild your entire environment. There was also a constant shift in operating system and database structure, forcing users to upgrade their software applications. Application developers mimicked this, making it difficult to transfer applications you had purchased from one device to another.

It took me months to repair the damage to my databases that was caused by my 330 to T3 move. I expect the time frame to be similar for this latest move. The only upside to the apparent death of Palm is that theoretically the next time I move, it will be away from Palm OS entirely.

2007.11.29 at 10:30am EST

Friday Cublogging

My Cube Name Tag

In case you can't tell what they did here, they took a cube sign that had only one T in my first name, and fixed it by applying a T peeled from another sign. I have been here three months. The delivered the incorrect sign a week or two ago, and this version just appeared this morning.

2007.11.30 at 10:00am EST

Deaths in the family

I didn't post this sooner because, well, it seems weird to be posting such stuff to a blog that is normally pretty frivolous. Last week my sweetie's father passed away. We were there when he died, and it was peaceful, for which we are thankful. He knew a lot of people, both through his life and his internet correspondence, so the amount of support that has been coming in for his family has been tremendous. Many thanks to you all who have expressed sympathy.

After his obituary was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the news staff decided to write a longer article about him and his life. If you weren't privileged to know him well, I hope those two things help you realize what a great character is now missing from the world.

Then, as if that weren't enough, Marshall's fiancee Linda also lost her son, who had also been ill for some time. Will was another great character, and another good friend. Sharon refers to him as her step-brother, and he certainly treated us like family.

Last week was very sad for us, so I hope you're all wearing your seatbelts and eating healthy foods.

2007.11.03 at 12:00am EST

T|Xation Without Representation

I suppose I owe you all an update on this very important issue. What I wound up doing was hard-resetting the T|X, then moving databases over one by one from the T3. This was accomplished by beaming when possible (using the Applications Launcher, FileZ, and T'Catalog), or restoring individual databases from an SD card backup of the T3. I needed to use a small utility called "ChangeName" on the T|X to set the Hotsync name without Hotsyncing, but other than that things went smoothly if slowly.

Pictures in the Palm photo app were the biggest pain, since the database format appears to have changed. The desktop software probably would have handled that better, but I still don't have the desktop software working right. Last night, I tried to fix it by setting all my conduits to "handheld overwrites desktop" (a cumbersome process that has been cumbersome since 1998 at least), but that hung up in my calendar and I killed it in the morning.

What I'll probably wind up doing is uninstalling the desktop application, and reinstalling it from scratch. Bleargh.

Anyway, the T|X is an OK machine. I'm really missing the vibrating alert, and hated having to buy another charge/sync cable. I don't like how the status bar doesn't have a home button on it any more, and don't like how it's been moved to a hard button. I don't need a hard button for the web browser, either, since the WiFi has trouble connecting to encrypted networks (most of the networks I use).

It seems that some WiFi routers simply take too long to assign IP addresses, and the Palm is timing out, but I can't find a timeout value anywhere. I can connect quickly to open networks, and almost as quickly to lightly encrypted networks, but networks with full 104/128 bit encryption most often don't work. I can connect at home about half the time. When it works, it's nice to be able to browse web stuff and fetch new email on the go, though.

Over the weekend I was hanging out with a bunch of people who all had iPhones, and their connectivity wasn't much better than mine, all told. They could use Google maps, but the network was so slow it wasn't very useful. I did better by taking screen captures at home before the trip and putting them on a memory card. It was also pretty funny watching people copy down each other's information between iPhones. No ability to beam information? Even to email you have to get the person's address somehow. Maybe somebody will write a quick Bluetooth beamer application once Apple allows you to put your own programs on your device.

Ok, so I've managed to get pretty far afield. Anyway, I've been annoyed with my PDA upgrade, but I'm managing to get it worked out and it's been better than the last time. Also, I'm glad I still have a Palm and not an iPhone.

2007.12.05 at 4:30pm EST

Let It Snow

It's time for my annual rant on the topic of snow.

Please, out of consideration for everyone else on the road, clean as much snow and ice as possible off your vehicle before driving it anywhere.

First of all, it doesn't blow off as well as you think it does, particularly if it's two inches thick. Second, it does blow off some, into the windshields of everybody behind you, decreasing visibility on an already problematic day. Third, you look like a freaking idiot and I hate you.

Funniest I ever saw was after we'd had a snow storm followed by an ice storm, so three inches of snow all had a hard crust. Guy was driving a car down the highway when enough wind got under the sheet of ice on his hood to lift it off the snow in one complete sheet and send it flying up into the air. Idiot must have thought his hood flew off and he was about to get somebody killed. Luckily for all of us the ice sliced offf onto the shoulder. I pulled up next to him to look over and his face was gray like death. I laughed and laughed. This could be you.

If your SUV is too tall for you clean off the roof, consider that you have bought a vehicle too freaking large for human scale living. that means that either you should get rid of it, or admit you are an inhuman monster of some kind.

2007.12.06 at 12:00pm EST

Boring Weekend

For once, a boring weekend. Some weekends, I'm travelling. Some weekends, I have events to attend. Some weekends, I have piles of stuff to do at home. Some weekends, thankfully, are boring, and I jealously guard them and enforce their dreariness.

Things got off to a good start on Friday with another snow storm that inspired me to work from home. Not leaving the house at all on Friday made Saturday extra special, so I didn't get out of bed until noon on Saturday. We did some babysitting for the nephews on Saturday night, which inspired some rushing around, but that was OK. On Sunday, the biggest news was that I got some shredding done to loosen things up in my filing cabinet. Shredding! Yippee.

Another thing I did to empty some space was to clean up my tax records. My standard operating procedure when I finish filing my taxes is to gather everything up that I used to prepare them, put it all in a folder, and put that folder in my files. This sounds like a good plan except it includes all kinds of stuff I will never ever need, like envelopes, instructions books, extra copies of forms, etcetera. Just pulling all the old instruction books saved me about four inches of drawer space.

If me posting in pride about three inches of drawer space doesn't impress upon you the ponderous nature of my weekend, I don't know what will.

2007.12.10 at 10:00am EST

"Wolf Who Rules" Q's

I finished reading this book over the weekend, and I have a couple of questions from the very end.

1. What happened to Esme?
2. The rim intersects the Squirrell Hill Tunnels?

If any of you, my readers, can answer, please send me email.

2007.12.10 at 1:00pm EST

Sick

Ugh.

2007.12.11 at 9:00am EST

Still Sick

I definitely feel better today than I did at this time yesterday, but I also felt worse waking up this morning than I did waking up yesterday.

2007.12.12 at 10:00am EST

Rosemary Chicken with Potatoes

Ingredients

• 1 boneless, skinned chicken breast per person
• 1 potato per person, plus an extra potato
• 2 lemon slices per chicken breast
• 1 sprig of fresh rosemary per chicken breast
• 1/2 cup chicken broth
• 1/2 cup lemon juice
• 1/2 cup white wine
• 1 teaspoon arrowroot or other starch mixed with water

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees Farenheit.
2. Slice the potatoes into 1/4 inch slices and brown them (both sides) in oil. It's fastest if you use multiple frying pans for this step. Make sure at least one of them is oven-safe with a cover. remove slices to paper towel to drain when done.
3. Pound chicken breasts to 1/2 inch thickness, and roll each around a spring of rosemary. You can also add a sprinkle of sage inside before rolling, if you have it. Sear the breasts in oil to lock them into their rolled shape.
4. Drain almost all the oil from the oven-safe pan and cover the bottom with potato slices. Place the browned chicken breasts on top of the potatoes and top each with a couple of slices of lemon.
5. Mix liquids and pour into bottom of pan. Cover, and bake in oven for 45 minutes to an hour, or until the chicken is fully cooked.
6. Pour the starch liquid into the remaining pan liquid and swirl the pan around to mix it. Allow to stand 5 to 10 minutes while the food cools a little bit.
7. Serve each chicken breast on a plate next to 8 to 10 slices of potato. Spoon thickened sauce from pan over chicken and potatoes. Opinions vary on whether eating the rosemary is a good idea, but watch out for the twig at the center.

Enjoy! I make this recipe at home three or four times a year. It's kind of a pain with all the frying, but it's tasty.

2007.12.13 at 12:00am EST

Friday Assblogging

Rudely Parked 'Patriot'

The ass who owns and drives this Jeep Patriot parks like this quite often in the lot at work. It's a pet peeve of mine, so here's some public shame. After I took this picture, somebody wrote "BAD PARKER" in the dust on the back window and it was like that for days.

2007.12.14 at 3:00pm EST

More Politics

It's fashionable among some groups of people to view the US government as a wolf at the throat of the American people. Those people want to rule the US as a republic like Rome, but the US is supposed to be a democracy. The government is supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people. It is not the government; it is our government. Our government is more like a dog than a wolf, and you don't make friends with a dog by starving the beast.

2007.12.17 at 5:00am EST

Dear Eeyore

A friend of mine once told me that when most women talk to others about their problems what they want is sympathy, and that when most men talk about their problems what they want is advice. This leads to complications as women talk to men hoping for sympathy and and receive what they perceive as "being told what to do." I don't know how true or untrue this is in general, but with me specifically I know that I compuslively respond with advice, and have to remember to voice my sympathy. I'm not sure if that comes off any better.

"Gosh, that really sucks. (How do you actually communicate sympathy?) I remember when this vaguely similar thing happened to me how much that sucked, so I know what it's like to have something suck, and that sucks. (Too much information? Trying to even the emotional field here? This isn't some kind of competition. More honest sympathy needed.) I'm really sorry to hear this sucky thing is happened to you. (Not exactly sympathetic, but indicates I'm trying.) [Pause for one breath or drink.] (Whew, interpersonal obligations fulfilled, now for the advice.) Here's the first thing I can think of to solve the situation. (Gosh you should have figured that out for yourself.)"

See what I mean? The heart wants to help heal, but the brain wants to help solve and sometimes it sounds like the asshole. Life is hard.

2007.12.18 at 11:00am EST

Contracting

Right now I'm working as an independant contractor. This has pluses and minuses. One of the minuses is that I only get paid for hours I spend actually working. That means that if my uberboss takes the group out for a holiday lunch, and the lunch takes two hours, and I don't feel like working late to make up for it, this lunch costs me an hour's pay. I hate to seem ungrateful for a free lunch, but this lunch was very expensive, realistically speaking. Nice chatting with my coworkers, though.

2007.12.19 at 3:00pm EST

Disturbing Dream

In the dream, I'm standing outside, in front of what is vaguely my parents house. Across the street, standing on the porch of a house (which is not the actual house across the street from my parents) were a bunch of kids. There were about six kids, plus one of them was holding a baby. Suddenly, the kid with the baby dashes across the street. Speeding cars whiz in front of and behind the kid, but he makes it across just fine. The kid stops, turns around, and runs back across the street. Faster than I can gasp my dismay, he makes it back through traffic, and I am relieved, but then as he climbs the steps onto the porch, he drops the baby.

The baby starts screaming, of course. One of the girls picks up the baby and runs back to my side of the street. At this point I'm starting to wonder what's going on here, but at least they got the baby away from that reckless boy. Then, the girl holding the baby also drops it. She's short so it doesn't fall far, but it lands on its head and then rolls over onto its back. I rush over to see if it's OK.

The baby has stopped screaming, but it's lying there on its back looking up at me. I see now that the baby is battered and misshapen. I'm disgusted by the crimes, but repulsed by the victim. One of the kids says, "You should try this." He reaches out with two fingers and presses on the baby's head, which makes a nauseating squishing sound.

I grab the kid's hand and pull it away from the baby. "No, you shouldn't do that. Leave it alone." The kid tries to do something else, and I wrestle him back from the baby. I turn to Sharon and begin to walk towards the house. "We should call someone. I'm going to call the police." That's all I remember of the dream.

2007.12.20 at 3:00pm EST

Friday Barblogging

The Afterparty

2007.12.21 at 11:00am EST

Kim Stanley Robinson's "Sixty Days and Counting"

One of these days, I'm going to figure out why I keep reading books by Kim Stanley Robinson. Okay, I enjoy reading his books. They're not very good novels though, in that the plot (if it exists) is not central to the book. The situations and characters of all his books are well constructed and described, but then the course of each book is more or less just a chain of things that happen. This book is the third 500 page volume of a trilogy, and I can't even tell which character delivers the last line of dialog. Yet, I will probably buy "The Galileans" (his work in progress) when it comes out.

His books, I guess, are like real life. Things happen, you can't tell what's good or bad, but you just make guesses and listen to what other people say. The plots (if they exist) are so much larger than the characters that you can only infer their existence from where they intersect the lives of the characters, and not directly observe them.

I guess I keep reading because I so desperately want to know if he's a bad writer who just rants and rambles, or a good writer who is simply too nuanced for me to understand. I find it difficult to recommend him to others, though.

2007.12.26 at 4:00pm EST

Santa Surprise

I am a horrible gift shopper, so for Sharon's holiday gifts I try to start as early as possible. Hopefully, I'm mostly done by the end of November. Then, I wrap everything up so that if she goes into my supply closet for something she won't accidentally glimpse her presents.

Over the course of the next month, I forget the content of about half of these wrapped presents. Sometimes Sharon will say to me in December, "Well, if you didn't get me such-and-such, I'll buy it after Newyears. I can only smile sweetly and mysteriously, because even I don't know if I bought that or not.

When she opens her preents, it's as much for my benefit as for hers. "Yipee, I did get you that."

2007.12.28 at 1:00pm EST

Friday Catblogging

Three in a Bowl

2007.12.28 at 6:30pm EST

New Year Wrap-Up

Welcome to a brand new year here at "Nothing In It". I can't say I am sorry to see 2007 go. I have some worries about 2008, but let's take it one day at a time.

My first few months of posting here have been interesting. I've made a real effort to put up something every business day, even if it's a cheap cop-out of some kind. After watching webcomics and other blogs for years, I knew it wouldn't be easy. My record so far has been fairly successful, well into the B-grade.

In 2008, you can hopefully look forward to more project posting. I just completed a polar fleece hoodie for Sharon (new pattern!) and a set of curtains for my home office. I also still have some projects from last year that still need complete documentation, so that's a few more posts right there. I've also watched a few good movie lately, and I can't stop reading books, so expect more discussion along those lines.

Anyway, I hope you had a good holiday. Mine was relaxing. I hope you'll keep reading. Thanks.

2008.01.02 at 12:00pm EST

Review of "World War Z" by Max Brooks

I didn't buy this author's first zombie-related book, "The Zombie Survival Guide", as it was one of a spate of books attempting to follow the success of "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook", which I enjoyed too immensely. This book, subtitled, "An Oral History of the Zombie War", is a totally different beast, and definitely worth a read.

Taking the form of a series of interviews, the book builds an overall story through brief snippets of information. You get to see the history of the overall war and its phases from so many different angles that it's difficult to get bored. Brooks wants you to see the story of the outbreak as a world event, and through his disjoint storytelling I think he succeeds. The overall story itself is also involving, drawing you into the minute details of a zombie invasion as incidental mentions and unusual experiences.

It's clear that Brooks really thought his idea through, exploring aspects and implications of a zombie event that I'd never seen discussed elsewhere. Beyond the first few days of a zombie invasion as covered by most work, Brooks covers years of effects, both personal and socio-political. The scale he's discussing goes from one person's story, to one nation's story, to a global story. It's convincing and I found it engrossing.

2008.01.00 at 12:00am EST

Shocking Experience

I really hate being cold, so I tend to wear a lot of clothing in the winter. all these layers generate a lot of static electricity, so I'm used to receiving shocks from just about everything I touch. The other day I went to pour out the remains of yesterday's soft drink, and when the stream of liquid joined the metal can in my hand to the metal sink, pow! That's a new one on me.

2008.01.04 at 12:00am EST

Three Good Things About Going to the Movies This Weekend

The Movie: Sweeney Todd

Tim Burton continues to make gutsy movies that entertain while engendering a definite uneasiness. This movie is way gorier than I even expected, but somehow still watchable. Many people will hold up Johnny Depp, but Todd's character in this is perhaps the least interesting. Helena Boham Carter's meat pie lady has many more layers; she's the real star here. The film is not too long, and the pacing drives inexorably to the horrific end. This film will be a favorite of the Gothic crowd for decades, but everybody should see this wonderful rendition of a Sondheim classic.

The Amenities: This Theatre Has a Bar

What more can I say? It's a serviceable bar. In the same building. If you pay extra, you can walk right from the bar into the upper seats of the theatres holding your drink, but even a general admission ticket lets you upstairs before the show. It sure beats trying to meet up with your companions inside the dark theatre, and it's suprisingly free of advertising in there, which I cannot say about the lobby.

The Pre-Show: Not Boring

When did studios start producing the "no smoking, no talking, no phones, etc." announcements before the film as advertisements for their upcoming films? Since I'm sitting there expecting film advertising, this doesn't bother me, and it's prefereable to the service announcements theaters used to buy from stock houses or have produced once and use for the next twenty years. Now, can we stop with the truck commercials and TV promos?

2008.01.00 at 12:00am EST

New Windshield

The man from Safelite replacing my windshield

Normally, any kind of car service is a dreadful pain. When the windshield of my car sprouted a crack several weeks ago, I put off doing anything about it because I anticipated having to drop off my car at a body shop and leave it there for two or three days. Eventually, enough people told me to call my insurance company about it that that's what I did.

I knew it was the right choice when the automated system said, "Press 1 if your claim is related to the glass in your automobile." From there, I basically answered a bunch of questions from a customer service representative and set up an appointment for a person to drive out to my workplace and replace the windshield in the parking lot.

Read that again! Why isn't more auto service like this? It really was sweet. When the guy arrived at my workplace, he called me on my phone and I went outside to show him to my car. I unlocked it, and he did the rest. When he was finished, he called me again, I went back outside, signed some paperwork, paid my deductible, and I was done. Done!

Does anybody do oil changes this way? Maybe in the middle of the night while dressed as a ninja? Ninjiffy lube?

2008.01.08 at 10:00am EST

"A Pair of Eboshi" project added

Back in September, I made a pair of Japanese eboshi caps. Medieval Japanese of middle and upper classes rarely went about with their heads uncovered. In modern times, it's often inconvenient to wear a helmet or formal hat of some kind, so most people I know wear eboshi. These even make good "liners" for actual hats or helmets (not that I wear a kabuto).

I've needed these for a while to complete my outfits, so it's good to finally have them, although they make my ears stick out.

2007.10.31 at 12:00am EDT

Garage Translation

I have to admit that in my own professional life, I suck at estimating how long something will take. When observing other people's failures in this area (always easier than analyzing your own failures) a frequent source of data is the garage I take my car to for service.

To be honest, I love this place. They do good work, they're conveniently located, and stuff they fix stays fixed. They're maybe a little expensive, but they're honest (as far as I can tell) and the rest is worth it to me. They even go a little out of their way for you (squeezing you in the schedule, doing disgnostics for free sometimes, etc.) if they know and like you.

That said, they suck at estimating time.

Now I realize that sometimes the schedule gets changed due to unforeseen accidents, squeezing in people they like, and such, but it's so consistent that it seems like they should catch on. If they have caught on and they still underestimate, well that's pretty much lying. It's the only thing I've caught them being dishonest about, so it sticks out, you know?

On other things, they're super honest. Like, if I call up and ask if they could do something change for me or something on a day they're busy, they tell me "no." Usually that means I wait a day or two and try again, but some people would just go someplace else, and I respect the garage for taking that risk by being honest. Anyway, this bit me today so I'm posting about it.

2007.01.10 at 4:00pm EST

Friday Assblogging

Rudely Parked 'H3'

This is the first time I've seen this H3 parked like an ass, but something about the H3 screams "ass" to begin with, so even minor violations are like hanging an ASS billboard off your vehicle. Why do people even buy these imitation Humvees anyway? I mean, at least a real "Hummer" has a certain "Up yours" vibe to it that demand respect. The H3 just has that "poser" vibe like people in the midwest who dress like surfers.

2008.01.11 at 12:00am EST

Parentheses

Why do people still use parentheses in phone numbers? You know, like "(412) 555-1212"? Does anybody still live in a region where area codes are optional? Haven't ten digit numbers been mandatory in most areas for something like ten years? It's an obsolete, archaic usage! It makes you seem like an old person, like that guy who used to write editorials for The Onion who would hyphen-ate words like "auto-mobile" to make himself seem olde-timey.

Stop. If you want, we can argue about whether phone numbers should be broken into sections by hyphens or by dots, but this is non-negotiable.

2008.01.14 at 12:00am EST

"Suito" project page updated

After cleaning and finishing a bottle gourd for use as a "Suito" Japanese drinking gourd at Pennsic, I couldn't even make it the whole time without breaking the thing. Scroll down to the bottom for a few pictures of the wreckage.

2008.01.15 at 12:00am EST

AFAIKIATFTS

As far as I know, I am the first to say "MacBook Err".

Just trying to raise the blood pressure of all the Apple fans.

2008.01.15 at 5:00pm EST

"Batik Drapes" project page added

I made some new drapes for the room I use as an office. After searching in vain for some nice drapes it's nice to just be able to find some fabirc and make some and have done with it. I'm not thrilled with these, but they're nice.

To paraphrase a friend of mine, "I don't know how people who can't sew manage to get through life."

2008.01.16 at 12:00am EST

"Hoodies" project page added

I wanted to be able to make hoodies, so I got a pattern for making hoodies, and now I can make hoodies, until the end of time, or when the supply of hoodie, fabric runs out.

2008.01.17 at 12:00am EST

I Have Returned

Spent a week on vacation, during which I decided not to post here at all. We were in a hotel with wireless, so I probably could have, but if I'd even started up my computer I would have gotten distracted ripping CDs and burning DVDs, so it's unclear I would have gotten around to posting. Was that mysterious?

Most of the week was spent at Arisia. It's been a while since I've been to Boston, so we made time for socializing and visiting family. At Arisia, I spent a bunch of time helping my friend Eric with his 'Fan performance Guest of Honor' duties, but I found some time for doing regular Con stuff and relaxing at parties.

(Private to MC: Chaya says hello. Full conversation included obligatory "Do you know", "Of course I know" sequence familiar to Pittsburghers on vacation but always so surprising to outsiders.)

Anyway, rent a copy of "Jadesoturi" (aka: Jade Warrior) if you're looking for a good Finnish kung-fu film. I'm not kidding. This film is more "thinking person's wuxia" that some people can't stand, but of course I thought it was great.

I shot about five hours of video for Eric to edit, so fans of his "Eric in the Elevator" talk show have quite a bit to look forward to.

2008.01.24 at 12:00pm EST

Friday Ericblogging

Eric interviews Art GoH Marrus

The elevators at the Hyatt where Arisia is held are too narrow and fragile for extended filming, so the convention built Eric an "Elevator" set in the lobby just behind the elevators themselves. In this picture, Eric finally gets to interview the real Marrus following a practical joke. The cue card chick requests applause.

2008.01.25 at 10:30am EST

Best Laid Plans

Pittsburgh's curbside recycling program employs a "blue bag" system. Supermarkets bag your groceries with blue plastic bags, and you put your recyclables in these bags and leave them out at the curb every other trash day to be picked up by a separate recycling crew.

This January, the recycling program was greatly expanded in our part of the city. Instead of just accepting newspaper, cans, and plastics 1-5; we can recycle cardboard, office paper, catalogs, and paperboard. This is all "single stream" and doesn't have to be separated (which is convenient), and can just all be shoved together in the same blue bags.

The difficulty comes in that we already have a small problem with recyclables piling up in our home. Recycling collection is still every two weeks, so with this expansion of the program our storage requirements have also increased. Typically, by the end of a two week period our recycling bin was already overflowing w with bottles and cans.

We worried about this for a bit until we noticed that the brochure for the program [PDF] said, "Place in blue bags only (or Place in bright blue containers clearly marked 'Recycling')." We could get a blue recycling can, and store recyclables in the garage instead of the kitchen, then just wheel the bin outside on recycling day.

So of course the regular trash guys, who go through the neighborhood before the recycling crew, just dumped our big bin of recyclables into the garbage truck. Yay environmentalism! I called the recycling Division of the Bureau of Environmental Services to ask about this, and was told the blue container mention in the brochure was a red herring. All recyclables should be placed outside in blue bags, except for cardboard which can be simply flattened and tied with string (not simple, by the way). We could use a blue container to store full blue bags, and could possibly put a blue container full of blue bags out for the recycling crew to empty, but the person on the phone wouldn't recommend it.

So yay. Yay for people who don't mean what they write, and yay for people who don't tell anybody what they mean. Yay for people who don't know what they're supposed to do, and yay for people who don't do what they're supposed to. Yay for people who clearly mean well but have a hard time figuring out how to actually accomplish things. Yay.

2008.01.28 at 11:00am EST

Inquiring Minds

According to my http access logs, 7% of the visitors who are directed to my web site by search engines only want to know one thing: How to play Sorry.

2008.01.29 at 11:59pm EST

Power

So I woke up this morning at about 5am to a loud clunk outside, and I noticed the power was out. High winds here in Pittsburgh today. (It was supposed to be snowy, so I'll take it.)

Anyway, luckily we have a gas-powered hot water heater, a gas stove, a stove-top coffee maker, and battery-powered alarm clocks. I also liked having a battery powered radio for my morning news and liked having the big flashlight so she could see. (I can see in very dim light.)

2008.01.30 at 10:00am EST

Amazed

I'm always amazed when I say something that I think is mildly amusing, and the people I'm talking to erupt with wild laughter.

2008.01.31 at 12:00am EST

Shredding

Over the weekend, I turned another pile of old documents into confetti as part of my continuing efforts to pare down my files from eight drawers to four. The question that ran through my mind most often was not, "Why do I still have this stuff?" but, "Why did I ever keep this stuff?"

I actually shredded a stack of statements from a checking account that I not only closed more than a dozen years ago, but was at a bank that no longer exists. Good riddance!

My new method for storing files has a two step approach. Step one is scan all bills and statements into my computer. Step two is place scanned documents into yearly folders. If I need to look something up, the scans are named for searchability. When it's time to destroy old documents I can pull a single folder for shredding instead of having to dig through a dozen account-specific folders.

My biggest problem now is going through the 10 inches or so of stuff that has stacked up in my desktop letter tray. Most of it is packed into a big box at this point, but I really need to sit down and go through it to figure out what needs to stay and what needs to go.

Finally, if you're looking for a good shredder, I'm liking my Fellowes DS-1. It's shredded everything I've run through it, and has some style to it. A big bonus is that the output bin can be emptied without having to lift the shredding unit off the top of it like my old shredder. That old one's dead by the way. The moral of that story is that even if the envelope says "blessings of Jesus on whoever opens this envelope" on the outside, feeding the entire envelope (unopened) through the shredder is probably an overreaction.

2008.02.04 at 11:00am EST

Neologism

Syllotape - A notional adhesive tape, used for joining two or more apparently separate arguments or lines of logical thinking, or for patching a flawed argument.

This joke (like "Spellotape" in Harry Potter) is funnier if you know that "Sellotape" is the most popular brand of transparent adhesive tape in the United Kingdom.

2008.02.04 at 1:30pm EST

Yesterday's Lesson

Just because your fully loaded trailer slid into the loading bay no problem (when it was fully loaded) doesn't mean that (after unloading) it won't break the head off a fire sprinkler on the way out.

Those who know me well know that this is the second time I've had to evacuate a building due to somebody breaking the head off a fire sprinkler. At least this time I was dressed.

2008.02.05 at 1:00pm EST

More Politics

Look, I already voted for Hillary Clinton once, and I wasn't happy with the way it turned out. I remember saying to somebody in 1992, "If the only way to get a smart woman into the White House is to vote for her slimy husband, I'm all for it." The next eight years were pretty good economically, and very exciting technologically, but politically they kinda sucked. Bill Clinton signed more crappy laws (DMCA, NAFTA, CDA) than I like to think about, and I remember him specifically declining to veto them, regardless of the fact he disagreed with them. Political mishandling set back progressive causes (like health care and workers rights) for more than a decade instead of moving them forward.

This is not to say I would vote for any of the people the Republicans are proposing to run, but I really would prefer to not vote for Hillary again.

2008.02.00 at 12:00am EST

TEH AWSUM!

I don't do a lot of linking on this blog, but this image is teh awsum!

A candidate both LOLpublicicans and LOLocrats can be proud of.

2008.02.07 at 10:00am EST

Video List

Winter. Bleh. Can't do large scale woodworking without filling the house with sawdust or finishing fumes. Can't do sewing because the sewing room has stuff in it. Too cold to do stuff outside. Time to sit in front of a screen and do some catching up.

• Science of Sleep, The (2006)
• Bourne Identity, The (2002)
• Bourne Supremacy, The (2004)
• Bourne Ultimatum, The (2007)
• Casino Royale (2006)
• Goonies, The (1985)
• Equilibium (2002)
• Ultraviolet (2006)
• eXistenZ (1999)
• Thirteenth Floor, The (1999)
• Battle Royale (2000)
• Serial Experiments: Lain (TV, 1998)
• 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)
• Strange Days (1995)
• Kagemusha (1980)
• Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005)
• Incredibles, The (2004)

I don't own any of these, I had to borrow them from friend.

2008.02.11 at 12:00am EST

New Key

Over the weekend, we were in the hardware store looking for some stuff, and when we passed the key counter I saw that there are now keys painted with various Disney characters. Oh no, it looks like I need a new house key.

Yesterday, I noticed that my key ring sounds different. I never noticed that I'd gotten used to the way my key ring sounds, but it makes sense, I guess. I makes me wonder how many key ring "signatures" my brain has memorized, and how many I could identify just from the sound.

2008.02.12 at 12:00am EST

100

This is the 100th post to this blog. Not much of a milestone I admit, but it's my milestone and I like it.

Retrospection:

• I have not been taking anough pictures of the cats lately.
• I have not been working on projects enough lately.
• Some days I just don't feel like blogging.
• Last I checked, I am up to 6 LJ subscribers.
• I almost never post about work.

2008.02.12 at 12:01am EST

Samuel Delany's "Dhalgren"

After a couple of years of staring at this book on my "to read" stack, I finally read it. For those of you not familiar with this work, Dhalgren is one of those famously difficult pieces of fiction loosely labelled as SF, and often called a masterpiece. It seems like very few people have the patience to work their way through the 890 pages of writing to form an opinion. I've gotten pretty good at grinding my way through difficult works (loved Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle"), so I thought I'd give it a shot. I don't yet have an opinion. Usually, it takes me a few weeks to completely digest a work of this type, read some criticism and commentary, and formulate a conclusion. Right now I don't know if it's a masterpiece, and can't say for sure it's fiction let alone SF.

It is, I am confident in saying, a remarkably effective book. By this, I mean it affects the reader. It stimulates moods and thought patterns in a way most fiction does not, at least not in me. Fear, confusion, lust, horror, anger, fondness, sorrow, were all clearly communicated to me and caused to form in me. This can be good and exciting, or troubling. Regardless, it is impressive. What's lacking right now is understanding.

What is Delany trying to say with this work? Is it fiction, or an extensive riff on the theme of identity? If it's fiction, what is the story "about"? For that matter, what is "the story"?

A friend of mine who's had his literary abilities all-but-documented by the academy referred to Delany as "apparently the real thing", so I'm willing to trust the both of them far enough to say Dleany is clearly doing something deliberate here. I guess it's my job to figure out what. Difficult works demand more from the reader. It's one of the reasons I enjoy reading them. Sure is hard work, though.

2008.02.13 at 12:00am EST

Snow Rant #2

It's time for my other annual rant on the topic of snow. Once again, it's all about being considerate to other people.

Parking between the lines is one of the things that separates us from the animals. Even during the LA riots in 1992, when people would drive to a store in order to loot it, they parked between the lines in the parking lot. Why you feel a little snow should give you just cause to park like a barbarian is totally beyond me.

Here's what I do: before I pull into a spot, I put my car in park and get out. Then, I use the heel of my shoe to scrape a trench in the snow until I find two lines that define a parking spot. Then, I park between those lines. Thus, even during an extreme weather event, I maintain my humanity.

Again, this is about consideration to other people who have to use the same parking lot. People who know me know that (in general) I am not a "law and order" type, so this insistence on rigidly following the imposed grid system might seem contradictory, but it is not about obeying commands, but observing the social contract and being efficient in the use of resources.

In a civil society, we try to be fair to our fellows. Parking in more than one spot signifies that your convenience (parking quickly and without having to spend extra time in the cold) is worth more to you than mine (I have to park farther away because all the closer spots are occupied by randomly parked cars).

In a rational society, we try to make efficient use of our resources. If there are 100 convenient parking spaces, filling them with fewer than 100 cars is a waste. If everybody parked randomly we'd need bigger parking lots, and have fewer grassy meadows.

Please, think of others and think of the world when it's snowing and you pull into a parking lot. I know it's probably taken you twice as long to get there in the first place, but spend a little more time and be kind. thanks.

2008.02.14 at 12:00am EST

"Atonement" & "No Country for Old Men"

Did some catching up on the movies-in-theatres front this week as well, seeing two very interesting and disquieting movies.

The first was Atonement, a film set just before and during World War II that details the disruption of life caused by a girl misunderstanding everal things at once. It is essentially a disquisition on the subject of storytelling. The purpose of storytelling is being explored, and how this purpose can be revealed or obscured by the style the storyteller uses. Sometimes, a film will be criticised with the instruction, "Show me, don't tell me." People who don't understand that criticism should be forced to watch this film. It is at once stark and lush. It is sparse and economical in its dialog and exposition, but lavish in its use of symbolism, visuals, and editing. I can see myself watching this movie at least three more times, trying to dig further into it, not because it is confusing (the story is simple and told clearly) but because it is told so well I want to be sure I'm seeing every aspect of it I'm supposed to see.

The second was No Country for Old Men, a Coen brothers film set (inexplicably and unexplainedly) in 1980. Again, there's plenty of symbolism here I just don't understand, but it's almost incidental. The chief trick the Coens pull on the viewer is that despite who the story begins and ends with, and despite who it mostly follows, the story is about the man in the middle. I have to admire Tommy Lee Jones for his work on this role. His job here was to portray a man who is starting to feel "too old", and he allows the filmmakers to show his face in such close ups and with so little concealement that he looks "too old". The film treats the landscape and other settings with the same uncompromising glare as it treats that face. Age, dirt, wear, and clutter are shown in sharp lines and colors. Really, the story here is not as pointed. There's a short voice-over at one point that explains it, but you won't remember what he said by the time the end comes. Look it up on the IMDB quotes page.

2008.02.15 at 11:00am EST

Quote from "Dhalgren"

"[…]You know the world is round, and that the moon is a small world circling it. But you live in a world of up and down, where the land is a surface. But for me, just the visual continuity from that flat surface to a height where the edge of the earth develops a curve, to where that curve is a complete circle, to where the little soap-colored circle hanging in front of you enlarges to the size the Earth was, and then you come down. And suddenly that circle is a surface -- but up and down is already not quite the same thing. We danced when we got out on the moon. What else could we do with that lightness? You know, seeing a film backward isn't the same experience as seeing it forward in reverse. It's a new experience, still happening forward in time. What falls out is all its own. Returning from the moon was not the same as going, played backward. We Arrived at a place where no one had walked; we left a place where we had danced. The earth we left was peopled by a race that had never sent emissaries to another cosmological body. We returned to a people who had. I really feel that what we did was important--folks starving in India not withstanding; and if there's a real threat of world starvation, technology will have to be used to avoid it; and I can't think of a better way to let people know just how far technology can take us.[…]"
-- Captain Kamp in Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany (1974)

2008.02.00 at 12:00am EST

FrameMaker Tip

FrameMaker, in case you don't know, is the premier software package used by technical writers to produce large, complex printed documents. It's a professional level package for document production the way Photoshop is the professional level package for imageediting. There are others, but this one is still the best. It has its problems, but it is still the best.

One of it's problems (in my opinion) is that it saves the zoom level you've selected in the file. This is handy if you're the sole person working on the file, but since FrameMaker actually facilitates group work it's more common that somebody else will have to see this file at some point. Saving it at 120% zoom so you can read it while leaving back in your chair or saving it at 75% so you can see the whole page are both pains for the next person if their favored zoom is different.

So here's my tip. FrameMaker has a setting for "Monitor Size" in its General Preferences. This preference is used to scale the document so that when documents are viewed on the screen at 100%, one inch on the screen is actually one inch long. This is nice, but essentially useless for most people since if you really care about dimensions you'll be looking at the numbers for those dimensions, and not measuring with a ruler. This preference is saved for the user, not in the file. What I recommend is that you always work and save at 100% zoom, then set the Monitor Size preference so that documents zoomed to 100% display at the size at which you like to work. In this case, smaller monitor size settings yield higher zoom levels.

This method has its problems too, but it should resolve the "zoom wars" issue some work groups have when using FrameMaker.

2008.02.19 at 12:00am EST

Stephen Brust's "My Own Kind of Freedom"

Stephen Brust, author of two dozen novels or so, including the long running Dragaera series that includes the Vlad Taltos novels, has written a novel that's a Firefly fanfic. If you're a Brust fan and a Firefly fan you must read this. If you're a Brust fan but not a Firefly fan you should probably skip this. If you're a Firefly fan but have no idea who Brust is, you should pretend it says Joss Whedon or Keith DeCandido (who did a good job on the Serenity novelization, I thought) and read this.

The story occurs after the series as it appears on DVD, but before the events of the film. Inara and Book have already left the ship. Whedon had envisioned several seasons worth of stories like this one occuring, so there's plenty of room. Brust manages to capture the rhythm of dialog, and the internal motivations of the characters. Maybe I'm just bringing that with me, but he manages not to jar my expectations.

Many of the episodes were quality TV in that you could evaluate them not as individual works, but in their importance to the series. This novel isn't a 10.0 on that scale, but it establishes some good material for Mal, and deepens his character considerably. It also also establishes that the crew trust and follow Mal, but they do no idolize him and will disobey when they think he's wrong.

Also, Brust provides plenty of geek-out fodder, throwing in details and trivia as dialog.

What the heck, it's free. Download and enjoy.

2008.02.20 at 12:00am EST

Can't Say I Never Win Anything

The little cafe down on the ground floor of the building in which I'm currently working on contract has a monthly drawing for a covered parking spot in the garage under the building. Every time you receipt totals $4 or more you can drop it in the bin, then every two weeks the previous winner draws a new receipt.

After being here nearly six months and having lunch down in the cafe an average of about three times a week, my name was finally drawn. Starting Monday I get to park in a super-convenient covered spot for two weeks, which is just in time because starting Monday I only have two weeks left on my contract. (Employers in the Pittsburgh area please take note.)

2008.02.21 at 12:00am EST

Friday Catblogging

Mischa the Bandit

Mischa Bandito, the bandit cat
He thinks that chicken is where it's at
He says he wants some, and that is that
Mischa the bandit cat

(A week or so ago, Mischa got into a tussle with one of the other cats (most probably Tashi) and wound up with a big chunk of fur missing from his neck. Of course, he can't leave it alone and he scratches it bloody. Sharon tied this bandanna around his neck to keep him from doing so. It seems to be working. The bandanna is actually loose enough that he could pull it off if he really wanted to, but he's left it on for days. His neck is finally healing nicely.)

2008.02.22 at 12:00am EST

Rudest Parker Ever

Over the weekend, I saw the rudest parking job ever. Somebody at the Monroeville Office Depot (the one where the Sears Homelife used to be, next to the Gabe's where the Food4Less used to be) parked

• an H2
• crooked
• 3/4 of the way into
• a handicap spot.

The only thing that kept me from having the store call the police was the extremely off chance that it was just somebody who had forgotten to put up their placard. I couldn't even take a picture of it because I didn't even want to have a reminder.

2008.02.25 at 10:30am EST

PoliTuesday: Senator Clinton

I admire Senator Hillary Clinton greatly. I believe she's made some mistakes in the political process of attempting to effect progressive change in this country, but it's a difficult and expensive process, and plenty of people have made worse mistakes along it. I admire her dedication to pursuing the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, regardless of my voting plans. I believe that voting is about choice. I want to be forced to make a choice when I enter the voting booth, and too often all the candidates but one have dropped out by the time Pennsylvania gets to vote. Thank you, Senator Clinton for staying in the race and providing us all with a choice.

If Senator Clinton wants me to vote for her in April however, she is going to have to give me reasons to vote for her, not reasons why I should not vote for another. In my opinion, candidates should spend their time building up their own candidacy, not knocking down the candidacies of others. Senator Clinton has a lot to be proud of, and I have no problem with her reminding me of those things and telling me about the things she's like to accomplish in the future. However, I don't like seeing her belittling the accomplishments of others, and denigrating their expressions of hope.

My vote is something a politician must win from me, not drag away from another.

2008.02.26 at 12:00am EST

Sick

Again.

2008.02.27 at 9:00am EST

Consolation

My Consolation

Still sick, but being able to park under cover right next to the door into the ground floor lobby of the building is sure a consolation.

2008.02.28 at 12:00pm EST

Friday Catblogging

Dodger and Ethel

The truth is, Ethel is not Sharon's cat. Ethel is Dodger's cat.

2008.02.29 at 12:00am EST

PoliTuesMonday: More silly graphics

2008.03.03 at 12:00am EST

Ascension

Most days, climbing the stairs is all the exercise I get. We have stairs at home, and I skip the elevator at work as a matter of principle. On the theory that repetition ("reps") promotes tone and endurance while exertion promotes strength, when I'm climbing I tend to go two steps at a time.

In addition to making the work harder, this produces a more normal walking pace, instead of the "fast march" of single step climbing. It's more of a glide up the stairs instead of a staccato dance. After a while, maybe ten years, double-stepping during ascension becomes natural and easy. (Double stepping while descending is dangerous, so I don't recommend it.)

So, if it feels so natural, how do you build strength? The answer is tripple-stepping. Yes, now when I want to exert myself I climb staircases three steps at a time. This is pretty hard. You have to not only lift your body mass a significant amount, there's a balance aspect to it that takes some getting used to. You have to get your your whole body moving upward and forward, or you'll be stuck lifting your center of mass one step behind your front foot.

Usually, I wind up mixing styles during an extended climb, partially because few staircases have a number of steps in each flight that is divisible by three. I'll start out single-stepping on the first flight, move into doubles on the second flight, then tripple-step the last stretch. If the flights are split so the staircase can double back, I have more leeway to alternate styles.

Hey, like I said, it's the only exercise I get, most days, so I try to put as much thought into it as I can.

2008.03.04 at 10:00am EST

R.I.P. Gary Gygax

It's all over the web's blogs and other news sites today. I love what other people are saying about Mr. Gygax, and how he helped change the gaming industry and our modern culture. I'd like to add something about how he changed literature. He was an extraordinarily sucessful publisher and author, who helped design an entirely new genre of writing. It's a participatory genre, where the author provides the landscape, props, antagonists, secondary characters, and general plot; and the "readers" provide the main characters, the dialog, and the specifics of the plot.

Many people have commented on D&D's obvious connection to The Lord of the Rings. Somebody has even gone to the trouble of portraying the film trilogy entirely as the results of a roleplaying campaign. LotR set the fantasy world on fire, with a rich setting and detailed plot that really engaged readers. It was an adult fantasy that invited readers to question their own morality and their own determination. "Could I, as weak as Frodo, have made it to Mordor?" "Could I, as strong as Boromir, have resisted the ring's song?"

D&D provides an opportunity for average people, from a people who seldom have adventures, to experience adventure on a personal level. Now the game still controls a lot of elements of the story, but that's why it's a game. Later roleplaying games remove much of the luck and place the story firmly in the hands of the GM and players, but D&D was the first game to immerse players in story to even the level it did.

Dungeon modules are plot outlines. D&D rules are storytelling conventions. Mr. Gygax helped define this genre. He helped found a publishing company for this genre, and he produced dozens of works within it. That these works affected gaming and culture is interesting, but that is not the full extent of his work. He was a successful author by almost any measure. Literature has been changed.

2008.03.05 at 12:30pm EST

Restroom Weirdness

The men's restroom here at work has a couple of design flaws that stick out in my mind.

First, when you're standing at the urinals, if you look over your shoulder, you can see right out the door into the hallway. This means that passers-by in the hallway can see you standing there at the urinal. Not that polite passers-by really want to see who's standing at the urinals, but that they should be protected from such views.

Second, the sinks form an L, and the only trashbin in the place is at the corner of the L. You have to step away from the sinks to get a towel (towel dispensers are over by the door), then walk back to discard it. if the sinks are crowded, there may also be people between you and the trashbin, so no basketball shots.

Third, there are an even number (4) of urinals. This means that if you have your choice of urinal (that is, all are unoccupied when you enter), you can force the next arrival to choose between using the "shorty" urinal and committing a minor breach of etiquette.

2008.03.06 at 12:00am EST

Secret Talent

My predilection for instrumental music and interest in movie soundtracks have given me the ability to recognize approximatley 85% of the incidental music on public radio.

Sometimes it's scary. Sometimes it's annoying, as when they're using a piece I really like as a lead-in for the station ID and have no intention of playing the whole thing.

2008.03.07 at 7:00am EST

Daylight Savings Time

Well, we're back on the DST, and isn't it time we gave up this sillyness? Is anybody's rising and setting ruled by the sun anymore? Our lighting, our heating, our transportation, our business, none of these things is tied to the cycles of the sun, and even if it were, wouldn't it be simpler to adapt our behavior to the sun rather than keeping our behavior tied to the clock and adapting the clock? Isn't it saner to base our schedules on on nature than on the vagaries of a machine? The clock was invented to measure nature, not constrin it.

Which sounds healthier: "I work every day, from sun-up to sundown", or "I work every day, from nine to five"? Viewing the human animal as a robotic machine is horribly unashinable these days, so isn't it time to ditch the DST shackle?

2008.03.10 at 7:30am EDT

Morning Commute

I was halfway across the Ft. Pitt bridge today when all the lights for the tunnel lanes suddenly turned red. Luckily, the driver stopped his truck before smashing into the tunnel entrance, but he was only a few yards away and was going to have to wait for the police to block traffic in the right lane so he could back up and take the off-ramp for the West End Circle. Until then, right lane was stopped. Luckily, I was in the left lane. I tried to wait to let the first car behind the truck change lanes, but I don't think she understood yet what was going on.

For those of you not familiar with this bit of roadway ingenuity, the outbound (lower) deck of the Fort Pitt Bridge is four lanes wide. There are three on-ramps at the downtown (North) end, two from I376 (which ends here, currently), one from downtown, and one from I279. The South end has a two-lane off-ramp and an entrance to a two-lane tunnel. Ever been in the middle of bridge which is also a three-way merge and a two-way split? It's always entertaining.

2008.03.11 at 12:30pm EDT

House of Annoyances

After years of responding to questions about it with "No, but I love the album," I am finally reading Mark Z. Danielzewski's "House of Leaves".

I've been enjoying its complexity and multi-layered structure quite a bit actually, but when he stoops to directly ripping off Jorge Luis Borges on page 42 I begin to suspect that I won't respect him in the morning. I'd chalk it up to homage, but this book is literally thick with footnotes, and not using one of them to cite the source of your device is academic dishonesty. It's quite possible that the book is constructed of such blocks lifted from other authors, and this is simply the first one I actually recognized, but if the whole point of the book is to impress upon me that I did not pay enough attention in college you're not about to see a lot of counterargument here.

2008.03.12 at 8:00am EDT

Friday Catblogging

Firebums: Ethel & Mischa by the Pellet Stove

2008.03.14 at 12:00am EST

Rubbing 'n Buffing

Over the weekend, I got started on a fun little project that involves making something that's plastic look like it's made of metal. My favorite material for this kind of craft is called "Rub 'n Buff". It's a mixture of metal power, pigment, and wax finish. It works really well, especially on plastic, which sometimes doesn't take well to paint. Plus, after my experiences this summer using gold leaf paint, I wanted to try something different. I'd been introduced to Rub 'n Buff years ago, but never needed to go buy any.

One of the benefits of this finish is that you don't need brushes. It's designed for rubbing on with a finger, and in fact nothing else works as well as that. I've tried brushes, swabs, tissues, and paper towels, but nothing works as well as a finger. Of course, this means having metallic fingertips and getting metallic prints all over eveything while you're working, but the results are great.

Once it's dry, you can buff it with a cloth and it shines like it's actually metal. You can suprise people with this stuff because it doesn't show brush strokes like paint, it's just as smooth as the plastic underneath. I can't wait to show off this project once it's done, but that won't be fore some time. It takes forever to work it into all the nooks and crannies on a detailed piece. I hope to have it finished by next month, though.

2008.03.17 at 12:00pm EDT

New Glasses

Got some new eyeglasses over the weekend. It turns out that I've had the previous pair since 2002. My prescription has only changed a little, but after six years it's quite noticeable. Due to my astigmatism, the change makes me feel really short. Anyway, here's a snapshot:

The new frames are much darker than the old, and smaller in area. The old frames were a bit more "aviator" shaped, and gold metallic with a "tortoise shell" front on them. These new ones are closer to rectangular, and a dark brown metallic. I also got sunglasses in exactly the same shape, but a charcoal metallic with the darkest lenses they were willing to make.

2008.03.18 at 12:00am EDT

Video List

Time to update the list. This time, with links to the Internet Movie Database.

• Yojimbo (1961)
• Harrison Bergeron (1995)(TV)
• Breakfast of Champions (1999)
• Mulholland Drive (2001)
• THX 1138 (1971/2004)
• Blue Velvet (1986)
• Magnolia (1999)
• Ice Pirates, The (1984)
• Punch Drunk Love (2002)
• Trainspotting (1996)
• Léon - The Professional (1994)
• Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
• Hellboy (2004)
• Illusionist, The (2006)
• Prestige, The (2006)

Hmm. Slipped a bit on my pace, I think.

2008.03.19 at 12:00am EDT

My New Million Dollar Idea

Caffeinated Salad Dressing

Remember, you saw it here first, folks.

2008.03.20 at 12:00am EDT

It's Called Rhetoric

A listener letter on NPR's "Day to Day" program just said of Barack Obama, that he "sounds like somebody who has studied how to manipulate people with words." As somebody who has studied how to manipulate people with words I take umbrage at the tone of that comment. It's called rhetoric, and it's about communicating information to people in the way that they will accept most readily. It's frequently misused with a negative connotation, as shorthand for "empty rhetoric". It's often used for persuasion, but it's also used for education.

Politicians use it all the time, of course, in the course of their work. It's a politician's job to attempt to convince people to vote the way that politician wants them to, whether that vote is in the voting booth, or in their behavior. If we were never manipulated by words we'd never learn anything from teachers, believe in any relgions or philosophies, or understand what was going on in from the news.

Dear NPR Listener, I think criticising Obama because he's pretty good at it is missing the forest for the trees. The fact that you resist manipulation is good, don't get me wrong, but though you think your your negative reaction is to the method, it is really to the message. Disagreeing with his message is your business, and you're welcome to share your opinion, but attacking his method avoids admitting that you disagree.

Yes, Senator Obama was trying to manipulate you; he was trying to make you understand something. You don't have to believe it, but try to understand it. At least he's trying to help you understand, not forcing you to accept without understanding, the way too many politicians do these days.

2008.03.21 at 2:00pm EDT

Obama's Speech on Race

Senator Barack Obama gave a speech last week that I thought was one of the finest political speeches I've ever heard. George W. Bush is a horrible speaker. Bill Clinton was better, but not great. Most of the candidates for President since I started voting have been poor to middling. I admire good speakers. I admire them more if I wind up agreeing with them, but I appreciate skill regardless of message.

A couple of people I know and otherwise respect have said to me that they weren't going to bother listening to the speech because politicians never say anything new or groundbreaking, and anyway can't be trusted.

Okay, here's where I go out on a limb. I trust Obama. At the very least, I trust him to think before acting, and not just pick the politically expedient action. One of the reasons for this trust is last week's speech.

The speech was on the topic of race, but it indicates a thought process that can be applied to all polical topics. Senator Obama explains that while he may disagree with the opinions and statements of crazy people around him, he can't throw them from the tent for two reasons. One is that if you start throwing crazy people out of the tent, you really can't stop because everybody is crazy and that's part of the problem. The other is that there quite simply is no tent.

You can't sweep these opinions under the rug because there is no rug. Firing people doesn't make their opinions go away. Condemn a statement and the situation that gave rise to it does not disappear. The issue is still there whether you allow people to mention it or not. If we want to *attempt* to resolve these issues, we are going to have to talk about them even if the words that come out of our mouths sound hateful and inflammatory.

His point: He'd rather (at least) try to resolve the problems than deny they exist. These problems are not with individuals, but with our American society. You can't reject individuals and expect that to fix society. It's time to talk about fixing our society.

It's a thinking person's political position. Wow. It's different from the way politicians tend to speak and act these days. If he approaches everything with the commitment to reason he demonstrates here, then he's the person I want as the next President.

2008.03.25 at 12:00am EDT

Video Table with Ratings

I've gotten some questions about the recent video lists, and which movies from them I'd recommend. Here's a post of the whole list so far for 2008, with short ratings for each. Of course these are completely subjective, and you'll only agree with these if you have the same taste as I do. The list is arranged by release year and IMDb index number within year. The table is also sortable if you have JavaScript turned on, just click on a column heading to sort.

Please keep in mind that these are just some movies I've watched in the past few months If it seems like my reactions to most of these are somewhat tepid, remember that these are mostly movies I didn't bother to see in theaters when they came out, and have borrowed from a friend rather than even renting them.

2008.03.26 at 12:15am EDT

Now You Know the Difference

Grits

Granola

2008.03.27 at 12:00am EDT

Self-Serve

I grew up in New Jersey, where, to this day, self service fuel stations are illegal. Living here in Pennsylvania now where self service fuel is pretty much the rule, I've grown used to it, but as long as I can still get a cashier at the store, I'll wait in line to egt one. I hate the self-serve check-ou lines at stores these days, and refuse to use them.

The other day, I had to stand in line for maybe ten minutes to spend less than $20, because the IKEA only had one actual cashier on duty. They had two more people on duty to help people use the four self-serve machines that were open, but those people wouldn't stoop to open another line.

Once I was all checked out, I said something to the cashier like, "All these people here tonight and you're the only human cashier?"

"I guess they're trying to encourage people to use the self-checkout," she said.

"Yeah, but all those people over there don't care whether or not you have a job."

"I guess not."

"I've been a cashier, and it's not an easy job."

"No, it's not."

"When I do it, I prefer to be paid for it."

On the up side, IKEA has completely stopped giving out bags for merchandise? Wow, I sure do approve of that. They'll sell you one of their big blue bags for 59 cents, but they also don't object if you just walk out of there with your hands full of stuff. I have a few reusable shopping bags I keep in my car, but I almost always forget to bring them into the store when I go grocery shopping. If I knew there was no good alternative, I might try harder to remember.

2008.03.00 at 12:00am EDT

Actually Did Some Sewing

The group we camp with at Pennsic had a get-together over the weekend to get some sewing done. I worked some on group projects: hemming a windscreen, sewing on some side ties, and attaching hang tabs at the top. As a group, we managed to finish off two screens, though a few more are started, and the whole project got started at the last sewing circle.

In addition to that, I assembled a pair of hakama from pieces I cut at the last circle. It's been three or four months since the last circle, so it's a good thing I labelled the parts. It took a bit of thinking to decipher my markings, though. ("Is that a G, a six, or what?") I still have to assemble the kataginu that I am making from the same fabric so I'll have a new outfit for this Pennsic. All together, I'll have a new kataginu kamishimo (matching hakama & kataginu) in brown linen, a light yelllow linen kosode, and matching linen kyahan.

2008.03.31 at 10:00am EDT

Polituesday: Senator Hillary Clinton

No joke, people, I'm proud of Senator Clinton's courage and dedication to her campaign. She and the members of her campaign have worked hard to get to this point, and it's tough to keep going, but I have no problem with her staying in until all the primaries are concluded. Elections are supposed to be about choice, and I want a choice when I go to the polls here in Pennsylvania three weeks from now. I've had some problems with the way she has been campaigning, but if she can stick to discussing issues I don't see how that can possibly "hurt the party" as some people seem to fear. The Republican party may have a "party line" that's already set by it's presumptive leader, but over here in the Democratic party we're still talking things over to try to find the best solution.

2008.04.01 at 12:00am EDT

Counting M&M's

The contents of a single 1.69 ounce vending machine package of m&m's® chocolate candies.

2008.04.02 at 12:00am EDT

A Bird in the Bush

A Bird in the Bush

2008.04.03 at 12:00am EST

Friday Catblogging

The Girls: Tashi & Ethel

2008.04.04 at 12:00am EST

My Newer Million Dollar Idea

Styling Product Hand Lotion

When the air is dry, the skin on my hands dries out, sometimes to the point of pain. Static also builds up in my hair. Since it's short, my hair sticks up goofily. I used to use a bit of styling product to keep it down, but I don't any more, partially becuase I hate getting that stuff on my hands right after I've finished getting clean. This product would enable me to wait until mid-day, when I finally get sick of my frizzy hair and dry hands, then tend to both at once!

2008.04.07 at 12:00am EDT

Kevin Smith Film Festival

Over the past couple of weeks, I borrowed the entire Kevin Smith film library from a friend and watched them in order. Overall, it was a highly entertaining time. Here's a breakdown by movie.

Clerks. (1994)

I saw this in a theater when it came out (on a date, no less) and didn't actually re-watch it this time because I pretty much memorized it the first time I saw it. This film is not just a perfect portrayal of what it's like to be a retail clerk in a small business, but what it's like to have grown up in central New Jersey. At first, it may seem this film is about nothing, but it's really about how even small things can become big events in your life.

Mallrats (1995)

At first, I wasn't sure what to think about this movie, but then I realized it's essentially a Marx Brothers film. Jay and Silent Bob are Chico and Harpo. Brodie is the "too smart for his own good" Groucho. T. S. Quint is the romantic lead underdog Zeppo. It's silly, and manic, but making a movie like this is mostly a lost art, so it's good to see Smith understands.

Chasing Amy (1997)

A little bit more serious than Mallrats, but it's hard to graduate directly to modern romance from slapstick comedy without some rough patches when people are expecting more of the same. Exploring romance and heartbreak is no new vista for cinema, but in 1997, who else tried tackling the complexities of modern sexuality with such sensitivity and with so little actual prurience? It's not a perfect film, but it's a journeyman piece of high quality.

Dogma (1999)

With this film, Smith graduates. It's a master piece, in my opinion. It's little bit of everything, very dark around the edges, but full of introspection at the center and peppered with humor. Just like life. People throw around the word "Vonnegutian" too much lately, but it's reasonably apt here, except for this film's devout religion. Make no mistake, this film is devoutly religious.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

Now let's break free of serious issue like romance and religion, and return to the freewheeling slapstick of yesteryear! Anyway, this movie is about entertainment, and it contains a whole lot of chuckles and some genuine laugh out loud moments. Everybody needs a break sometimes. When you're watching these in a marathon like I did, this is a great seventh inning stretch.

Jersey Girl (2004)

Leading into another serious film. This is a totally serious drama. That's not to say there are no laughs in it, but sometimes they have a certain desperation derived from the tragedy behind them. It's full of great writing, with realisitic dialog. It's full of great performances, from actors who don't always get the chance. If this was the only Kevin Smith movie you ever saw, you wouldn't understand anything about the fan appeal of his other films. First and foremost, Kevin Smith is a great storyteller. This film is straightforward and endearing, and should prove to anyone that Smith is capable of making any kind of movie he wants to, with any cast he desires.

Clerks II (2006)

This film is a payoff in a couple of different senses. The first sense is, of course, a direct payoff to Jason Mewes for getting his life back into order. I'm happy to hear about it. The second sense is that of a punchline, a conclusion, a fitting together of everything into a coherent whole. Here, Smith combines his comedic sensibilities with his dramatic abilties, and produces a well-rounded film. Not as manic as Mallrats. Not as emotional as Jersey Girl. It's built of everything Smith has learned in 15 years, but it's the sum of its parts (at least), and not just a collage.

2008.04.08 at 8:00am EDT

Who Would Do Such a Thing?

A sticker I saw on a gas pump

The typography match is poor, the joke is unoriginal, but is it funny anyway?

2008.04.09 at 12:00am EST

Neat Salt Crystals

Dehydrated Brine

2008.04.10 at 12:00am EST

Friday Catblogging

The Dodger at the Top of the Stairs

2008.04.11 at 12:00am EST

"Suito" Project Updated

I finished up a second suito to replace the one I made last year but broke at Pennsic. I like the way this one came out, and actually like the shape of this gourd a little better. There's more wax in it this time, so I think it's sealed up better. I left water in it for several days and it didn't taste like gourd at all when I drank from it.

In other project news I finished up some Japanese garb sewing, basically the new outfit for Pennsic this year. I'll blog it again when I get the project page up with some pictures.

2008.04.14 at 12:00am EDT

PoliTuesday: Bitterness

It's not insulting to say many Pennsylvanians are bitter, it's just acknowledging the truth and confronting it honestly instead of bathing it in denial. As a Pennsylvania voter, I can say that I am bitter about a lot of things in our government. As somebody who talks to other Pennsylvanians daily, often about politics, I can say without fear of contradiction that many of them are bitter. As somebody who has gone door to door through a variety of neighborhoods talking to Pennsylvanians about political issues, I can say with great conviction that you bet your sweet bippy many Pennsylvanians are bitter about politics, in exactly the way Senator Obama said, and for exactly the reasons Senator Obama said. Anybody who says any different is either ignorant, or a liar.

Progressives are bitter about Bush and Cheney. Conservatives are bitter about Clinton. Progressives are bitter about declining labor laws and increases in corporate power. Conservatives are bitter about moral relativism and a bad job market. Lots of people are still bitter about the Clean Air Act, if you can believe it. (I swear that guy would have punched me if I'd kept talking.) Everybody's angry about something, and no matter who we vote for (that is, when we get a vote) the majority of us seems to get screwed somehow. Everybody wants better jobs, better schools, and better roads, and no matter who we vote for things just keep getting worse.

When they things you trust seem to abandon you, you cling even harder to what you have left. You cling to the things that still make you feel good about yourself: your self-reliance, your family, and your beliefs. That doesn't make you a bad person, that makes you a strong person. That doesn't make you hopeless, that makes you determined. Pennsylvanian bitterness is not a negative trait to be denied, it is a foundational trait that needs to be addressed.

Now, I don't know if Senator Obama could solve any of the above problems from the White House, and even I wouldn't trust him if he said he definitely could. The first step to solving a problem, however, is admitting that a problem exists. Denying the problem then going out for a beer and a bump may be a good way to get through the next 24 hours, but it's not the best way to get through the next 4 years.

2008.04.15 at 12:00pm EDT

Mailing List Software

Can anyone recommend a piece of mailing list software that actually unsubscribes people who post polite queries to the list? I don't know of any.

Most mailing list software just adds a link to the bottom of every message that encourages you to visit a web page to change your subscription setting, but I think it's too much to expect from my audience.

(Subscribers to the "STC_ON" mailing list will know why this is being posted today. anyone who's ever been on any mailing list will understand why it's being posted at all, but it's particularly embarassing when people who write instructions for a living can't follow them.)

2008.04.16 at 9:30am EDT

Cleaning Out My Desk

Tomorrow is the last day of my contract here, and I'm mostly cleaning out my desk today so that I'm not carrying out piles of stuff tomorrow. Over the past 15 years I've been in the workplace, I've had enough jobs that I always get flashbacks on cleanout days. It bothers me that I'm so good at this part. I'm pretty glad to have switched to mostly contracting, so the short-term-ed-ness of my last few gigs has been expected, and no acrimony on the way out, but every ending is a little sad, still.

2008.04.17 at 1:30pm EDT

Friday Catblogging

Mischa glaring at me over the top of a chair because he knows I'm about to close the door and take away his sunshine

2008.04.18 at 9:30am EST

Kurt Vonnegut's "Armageddon in Retrospect"

Just finished reading this volume, issued (I guess) as a kind of memorial to Kurt Vonnegut, who died a year ago. Most of Vonnegut's writing near the end of his life took the form of political essays, so it's perhaps the presence of short stories that makes this book so poignant. The familiar names of some of the characters make us feel like we finally know the fates of some of the people he was writing about decades earlier, and show that even though Vonnegut had stopped publishing fiction he was still capable of writing it as he always had.

To me, the most interesting inclusion is a facsimile (not a transcription, but an actual photographic facsimile) of a letter sent by Vonnegut in 1945 to his parents upon the occasion of his being recovered from Germany at the end of the war. Any fan of Vonnegut know that he's told this story in print a dozen times, but fictionalized and factually, in the 60+ years since, but this document represents the very first time.

I have updated my Kurt Vonnegut Booklist to include this book, with flags for compilation, stories, misc writings, SF, and pictures.

2008.04.22 at 8:00am EDT

Of Course

So last week was CMU Spring Carnival, which is the event for which most alumni come back and visit. This year was especially alumnitastic given the CMU KGB's 20th Anniverary Reunion Party. Of course I told more people about this blog during tht event, and of course I bragged about my good record of frequent posting, and then of course I didn't do much posting the following week.

I'll use this opportunity to mention two suggestions I make to webcomic artists, bloggers, and others who seek to update their web presence of a regular basis. When you fail, and you will fail now and then, do not apologize. Why should you? It's your thing and you update it or don't as often as you wish. Also, don't make promises. It just increases disppointment when you fail, and reminds people of tearful scenes in TV dramas about spousal abuse.

2008.04.25 at 8:40am EDT

Truckpeller

I've seen those little propellers you plug into the trailer hitch, and those are cute, but this is just ridiculous.

2008.04.28 at 12:00am EDT

"Strike Plate" Project Page Updated

I made another strike plate, this time for the big closet upstairs. I'd post the picture here, but then you wouldn't really have much reason to click through.

2008.04.29 at 12:00am EDT

"Hoodies" Project Page Updated

I was feeling a bit under the weather on Monday, so I made another hoodie. This time, using some left over fabric from the project.

Sharon has a pair of funky overalls made of a floral print that most people associate with the draperies at Grandma's house. The fabric's lightweight and it's a good casual outfit that always gets attention. She refers to these overalls as "Grandma's Drapes".

This batik hoodie, made with the same fabric as the batik drapes I made for my study, is similarly casual, lightweight, and ridiculous.

"Waste not, want not," I always say.

2008.04.30 at 12:00am EDT

White Forsythia

Hooray, hooray, the first of May!

2008.05.01 at 12:00am EST

Friday Catblogging

Mischa & Tashi share the sunshine chair

2008.05.02 at 12:00am EST

Types of Interviews I Hate

I'm job searching, and I thought I'd post some types of interviews I'd rather not waste my time on.

• Recruiters who don't have any jobs for me, but have to look busy and choose to do so by interviewing people whose resumes are out on the Internet.
• Companies who can't afford to hire a consultant, so they interview people and ask them lots of leading questions about what they'd do if they were supposed to solve the problem.
• Companies who know their current employees are overloaded and will quit if told they can't hire additional help, so they allow interviews to happen and just find reasons not to hire any of the applicants.
• Companies who require their employees to submit to degrading rituals before they can be employed, but who keep such bizarre requirements secret until after an offer is made.

If you'd like me to be involved in any of these types of interviews, please at least make an effort to make it worth my while. A nice lunch is helpful.

2008.05.06 at 8:40pm EDT

I Found a Watch

I took a two hour hike in Frick Park this morning, and while I was passing through the lower park I found a wristwatch. Since this is the only public forum I really have, I'm posting about it here.

I found the watch on the trail that runs along the side of the rebuilt wetland, but close to the picnic shelter ends of that trail. I posted a note on the bulletin board there with my phone number. Call me, or email me if this is your watch and you want it back. Please be ready to describe the watch.

2008.05.08 at 12:00pm EDT

Friday Catblogging

Cat Alphabet: B
presented by Dodger, Ethel, and Mischa

2008.05.09 at 12:00am EST

An Open Letter

Dear Weather Control for the City of Pittsburgh and County of Allegheny;

It's April showers and May flowers. Thanks.

2008.05.12 at 9:00am EDT

Tips from the Nearsighted

Every marketing and packaging team should really have at least one nearsighted member who reviews all materials without corrective eyewear. This realization is brought to you by me noticing that if I see the word "Terrific!" on a DVD cover while not wearing my glasses, it looks like it might say "Terrible!", which is not the message you want to transmit, I think.

2008.05.15 at 10:00am EDT

The New Cult Canon

I have to say that I'm really enjoying a recent addition to the Onion AV Club's Features section, The New Cult Canon. I don't always agree exactly with their reviews, but the movies they've been inluding are all worth watching.

What I disagree with mostly are details about the point of the story; you know, interpretation kinda stuff. Their picks are terriffic, and of the ones I haven't seen, and I haven't been disappointed hunting down a copy and watching it as soon as possible.

2008.05.16 at 12:00pm EDT

Dino Run

One of the reasons I haven't been posting as much lately is that I've become addicted to an online Flash game called Dino Run. I'm "ee0r" (of course) if you ever catch me in multiplayer. I've even started puting together a page of Dino Run tips and other info, which means I'm totally hooked.

2008.05.20 at 8:00pm EDT

I Take Responsibility

Those of you in Pittsburgh who are enjoying the nice weather today that marks the end of more than a week of daily rain have me to thank for it. How did I effect this drastic change? I went out and bought a new rain jacket, that's how. It's pretty nice. Now, I will put it in the closet.

2008.05.21 at 8:00am EDT

New Phone

When was the last time I went to the store to buy a phone? When did it become such a high-tech venture? Why do all phones look and act like mobile phones now? What ever happened to decorative phones? Does anybody still make corded phones? Why do 75% of all phones have answering machines built into the base? Why are 90% of all phones multi-handset 'systems'? When did all this stuff get so inexpensive? Am I an old man now?

2008.05.23 at 9:00am EDT

Dollar Coins

I used to get dollar coins from the bank fairly regularly. They're great to leave as part of a tip, because people never expect to see them. I haven't done it in a while, though. I got two rolls of dollars the other day, just to stock up. Nowadays, this is actually exciting. You never know what you're going to get. Presidents, native guides, suffragettes… there's a variety. Sometimes, this country is fun.

2008.05.26 at 12:00am EDT

A Creamy Riddle

Question: Why is grinding peanuts like whipping cream?

Answer: If you go too far, you wind up with butter.

2008.05.17 at 12:00am EDT

Christian Bale

Recently I've watched a bunch of movies with actor Christian Bale in them, and I've grown to be rather impressed by his abilities and his selections. He takes some tricky parts, and does good jobs with all of them. We went to see the new Indiana Jones movie over the weekend, and after watching the trailer for the next Batman film I decided to do a little more research on Mr. Bale on the old IMDb. Holy cow, I find out he played the kid in "Empire of the Sun". I'm probably the last to know. Anyway, now I'm even more impressed. Rock on, Christian Bale.

2008.05.28 at 12:00am EDT

Traffic

I started a new contract this past Tuesday, and instead of 16 miles West of home, this new company is 17 miles East of home. For those of you not familiar with Pittsburgh geography, 17 miles East of where we live on the Eastern edge of the city is basically "out in the country". I'm working just off one of those country highways you can see from the Turnpike that makes you wonder, "How do you even get on that road?"

I drive about 9 miles on the parkway, then about 3 miles on a highway with traffic lights, then five more miles on this back road. I go past a couple of farms, some exurb development, a landfill, and numerous wooded stretches. All in all, this beats the heck out of the 16 miles of mostly parkway driving I was doing for the previous contract, at least now in the nice weather.

April's version of traffic: stop-and-go driving for five miles and twenty extra minutes of road time. May's version of traffic: today, me and four other vehicles were stuck behind a garbage truck for 3 minutes until we got to a spot we could pass.

2008.05.29 at 11:00am EDT

Favicon

The "favicon.ico" file on a web server is the small image used by most web browsers to represent the site in your bookmarks listings. This is a "standard" begun by Microsoft with Internet Explorer and adopted by others because it's easier and saner than coming up with yet another standard as Apple has done with the iPhone.

Anyway, when did Google's icon change from an uppercase blue G in a multicolored square to this lowercase blue g all by itself: ? I just noticed today.

2008.05.30 at 5:00pm EDT

On The Road

Don't you hate it when you get stuck behind some jalopy?

2008.06.03 at 10:00am EDT

Take Me Out To The Ball Game

Sharon got some cheap tickets from a co-worker, and we hadn't been to see a Pirates game in some time, so we went to the baseball game last night. It rained nearly the entire time, and the Pirates wound up losing, but we did stay until the bitter end.

I'll admit that I hate being wet and cold, so I expected to finish up the evening very unhappy, but we did pretty well. I'd just bought that new rain jacket, so it kept everything above my waist perfectly dry except for my hands. I usually don't spend a lot of time sitting down while out in the rain, so my legs and knees might have gotten very wet, but I have some rain leggings I keep folded up in the pockets of my rain jacket, and we each took one leg and laid it across our laps. My knees got a little wet, but I was almost completely dry despite sitting still in the rain for a few hours.

The seats were great, row J in the lower level, so we were just a few yards away from the field. No foul balls or catapulted T-shirts came our way, but some kids in other sections got some, so that's cool.

2008.06.04 at 3:00pm EDT

Constituencies

John McCain Yard Sign: $20

Barack Obama Yard Sign: $8

(It's interesting to note that both candidates use the same shopping cart software for their stores, but John McCain's store hides the text link to Volusion that is mandated by the license agreement.)

2008.06.05 at 1:30pm EDT

Synchronicity

Last night, I was chatting online with some friends in one window, and watching a movie in another window. One of my friends used a particular phrase in the chat, and two minutes later a character used the same phrase in the movie. I mentioned this in the chat, and my friend identified the movie immediately. Turns out he'd been making a reference to it, but it's still weird he made a reference to exactly the movie I was watching with such close synchronicity.

2008.06.06 at 10:30am EDT

What The Phone?

So the second-generation iPhone is called the "iPhone 3G"? I know why it's called that, but it is still teh gooPhiness.

2008.06.10 at 7:00am EDT

Just Deserts

I have just been informed by mail that I should order a satellite television service, not because I want it, not because I need it, but because my TV "deserves" it. I'm sorry to inform them (OK, that's a lie, I'm not sorry.) that I consider my TV to be furniture. It is not sentient. It deserves nothing. I admit that sometimes I sit and stare at my furniture for hours at a time, but this particular piece of furniture can be used to display pictures, and I find these pictures entertaining. This does not mean that I consider the TV to be a member of the household in the same way as a person, or even in the same way as one of Sharon's cats. If the TV deserves anything, it deservesto be considered, period. That is, think about your TV sometimes. Why do you have it? What do you use it for? What function does it serve in your life? Do you like it? Does it take up too large a space in your life? Does it take up too large a space in your living room? Now, I'm not one of those people who discounts how entertaining (and even enlightening or educational) a TV can be, but don't take it for granted. Think about it. Does your TV "deserve" anything?

2008.06.13 at 9:00am EDT

It's the Constitution, Stupid

Writing in dissent to a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that ruled that "enemy combatant" prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay cannot be denied the right to challenege their detention, Justice Scalia wrote the following:

"America is at war with radical Islamists," Scalia wrote, adding that the decision "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed." [NY Newsday]

Do we need any more proof that Scalia values his own opinions and viewpoints more than he values the Constitution of the United States of America? The supreme law of the land is full of all kinds of stuff that causes more Americans to be killed on a regular basis. Exhibit A: How many people are killed each year as a direct result of our guaranteed right to keep and bear arms?

Now, I'm not arguing we should take away that right even though it might save thousands of lives every year. It's a right granted to the people by the Constitution! So why does Scalia want to allow the President to suspend the right of habeas corpus?

We are quick to lionize our country's soldiers who dedicate their lives and often lose their lives, ostensibly in service to our freedom. This is fitting and just. Shouldn't we all have that kind of dedication? Shouldn't we all be willing to risk our lives in defense of freedom? Not all of us have the skills, abilities, and motivation necessary to join the armed forces, but can't we at least serve freedom by supporting the Constitution and not taking rights away from others? What kind of cowardice is it to ask others to take actions for freedom that may risk their lives, when you are unwilling to support freedom by doing nothing?

2008.06.16 at 12:00am EDT

Demand the Truth!!!

Crashed Saucer and Agent at the Three Rivers Arts Festival

This outdoor installation at the Three Rivers Arts Festival (a terrific reason to visit Pittsburgh in June) is apparently a promotional event for a show that (performance art group and Pittsburgh treasure) Squonk Opera will be performing in October. Polite photographer that I am, I acually backed off when she held up her hand like this, and she had to wave me back. They also had an irate guy handing out cryptic flyers and demanding we demand the truth. He was so convincingly irate that Sharon instinctively would not accept his flyer.

2008.06.17 at 8:00am EDT

Kaleidotainer

Shipping Container Art at the Three Rivers Arts Festival

This year's Three Rivers Arts Festival (a terrific reason to visit Pittsburgh in June) has a collection of shipping containers in Market Square, each of which holds a unique art installation. This kaleidoscopic object is about seven feet across and rotates at the back of a dark container like a stargate.

2008.06.18 at 12:00am EDT

Sharon at the Point

Sharon on the Point State Park Fountain at the Three Rivers Arts Festival

In case you don't think we get nice weather in Pittsburgh, we spent a beautiful sunny summer Sunday at the Festival. It was about 85 degrees in the sun, but it was cool in the shade and very breezy. Totally great to go down to the point and get cooled off by the spray blowing off of the fountain. (In the bottom left corner is Pickle Park (Heinz Field) where the Steelers play.)

2008.06.19 at 12:00am EDT

The Next Big Thing

Podcasting is waning in popularity. What's next?

I say it's "pulpcasting". Just like podcasting, pulpcasting involves an RSS feed, only instead of syncing to your personal media player, each burst of content is sent directly to your printer. So many people say they still like reading things on paper, whether on the bus or in the bathtub, I think pulpcasting has real appeal. Plus, it has speace for ads.

2008.06.23 at 7:30am EDT

Non-Stop Laugh Riot

I would have been at work sooner yesterday, but I got stuck in traffic. First, I was behind a slow poke. Then, the slow poke got stuck behind a full garbage truck. Then the garbage truck got stuck behind tractor that was mowing the verge. It was like the PA Department of Slapstick was engineering my commute.

It would be a bit self-centered of me to imagine I was the star of that particular routine, however. Behind me for this whole shebang was the person I cut off earlier at a tricky merge point. I'd hate to have been that Chaplinesque figure. Maybe her hat was to blame.

2008.06.24 at 12:00am EDT

Elliott Evans Stamps

No, I haven't had stamps made with my image. I don't have that big an ego. I do, however, have a big enough ego that I've configured a Google New Alert to inform me if my name ever appears in the news. Usually this means I get updates about people named Evans playing highschool sports in Elliott township, but recently my name hit the big time.

The U.S. Marshal's Service placed a "cracked-out maniac" named "Elliott Evans Stamps" on its "Top 15 Most Wanted" list. I've been getting periodic updates from Google regarding his flight. To preclude any confusion between us, I present this handy guide:

• "Elliott Evan[s] Stamps is a black male, 5'7" tall, and weighs 210-250 pounds. He has scars on his nose, both arms, and scars from a gunshot wound on his abdomen. He has a tattoo on his right arm, and scars from stitches on his right elbow."
• Elliott C. "Eeyore" Evans is a caucasian (Really! I'm 1/4 Russian.) male, 5'9" tall, and weighs 140-150 pounds. He has a scar at the base of his his right thumb, and an appendectomy scar on his abdomen. He has no tattoos, unless you count that spot on his left index finger where he accidentally stuck himself with a sharp pencil.

I hope this comparison is helpful.

2008.06.25 at 12:00am EDT

Origins

I'm at the Origins game fair this week, helping out Looney Labs as one of their Mad Lab Rabbits. The other day, somebody interviewed me and some others to write an article for the "io9" blog, which is a professional SF blog that I read. Those boards you see in the picture? I designed them.

2008.06.28 at 7:00am EDT

Chuck Palahniuk's "Rant"

With Rant, Palahniuk continues to build cred as a master of stylish modern fiction. This book is presented as an "oral history". That is, each chapter is a thematic selection of snippets from apparently longer interviews. The book contains over forty chapters, and over sixty people are interviewed. On top of a top notch story, this style enables Palahniuk to build mystery and show multiple viewpoints on the story and interpretations of the facts as they are known. Like a good documentary, it ends with you having to decide what you believe. In my opinion, it's a Science Fiction novel, but you might feel differently.

Anyway, as I read through the book, I wrote down all the people. When I started, I didn't realize there is actually a list in the book; it is essentially the final chapter. Didn't feel silly about all the extra effort when, comparing the two lists, I discovered which characters are not in the final chapter. Also, in a nice touch, one (possibly two) of the characters are not interviewed at all in the book, and this has meaning.

This book is less unpleasant to read than some of Palahniuk's other work. More along the lines of Survivor or Invisible Monsters than the highly icky Haunted or twisted Fight Club. Stylistically and storywise, it's right behind my favorite Palahniuk novel, Diary.

2008.07.01 at 12:00pm EDT

Project Weekend

I spent the long holiday weekend working on some projects, one longer term, the other something I've been planning but which only took a couple of hours.

The first is a toy chest for Sharon's nephews. I'll post pics when it's done, because it won't look like much until I get it all assembled. It's made of 1/2 plywood stained a nice cherry color and pretty big. Finishing a box like this takes days given three coats of finish and sanding between coats. Having several days in a row to work on it makes it easier.

The second is a replica of Iron Man's "arc reactor". This project was pretty easy because I already had several feet of electroluminescent wire soldered to a connector. All I have to do now is figure out how to wear it without electrocuting myself. Check it out:

2008.07.07 at 12:00am EDT

PoliTuesday: Why Does McCain Hate America?

Speaking last night in Denver, Colorado, presumptive Republican Nominee for President of the United States of America, Senator John McCain said, "I have a plan to grow this economy, create more and better jobs, and get America moving again." Do we really need to "get moving" again? Are we completely stalled? Are we suffering from a national malaise?

Now I'm not very happy with the state of the USA today, but even I don't think we've completely stagnated. Do we need to get moving, or do we just need to move in a different direction? Are we stalled, or just on the wrong track? Have we lost confidence in ourselves, or have we simply lost confidence in our leaders?

I find John McCain to be an astoundingly negative candidate. From him, I only hear reasons not to vote for others, and no strong argument why he should be leading this country.

2008.07.08 at 10:00am EDT

Project Toychest Complete

I finished up that other project, the Toy Chest I was talking about on Monday. Final assembly was just about re-attaching the hardware. Three hinges in back, two knobs in front, one handle at each end, and two lid suports inside. Here's a picture of it, before it even left the basement:

The outer dimensions are about 40"W x 20"D x 20"H, though the bottom of the interior is about four inches above the floor so the volume is somewhat less than that size would indicate. It's still rather capacious, though.

2008.07.09 at 12:00am EDT

Lumpy Lunch

Today, I had lunch at a place with the amazing name of Lumpy's Country Deli & Pie Shop. My apologies to my fans on chat who have already seen most of this, but I need to talk about it or I will explode. I mean, really, I may explode. Lumpy's is the kind of place that gives you so much food that you may explode if you eat it all.

Lumpy's is the kind of place that you pass while driving on the three-digit state highway that goes from one rural industrial town to another. You know, the place with the gravel parking lot full of phone company trucks.

Lumpy's is the kind of place that serves fish sandwiches on Friday every week of the year. Lumpy's is the kind of place w hose fish sandwiches are accelerating the desertification of our world's oceans. I mean seriously, Lumpy, if I may address you directly, I know Pittsburgh area restaurants try to serve as large a GIANT FISH SANDWICH as they can, but I'd probably pay the same price for a cute little fish sandwich.

Lumpy's is the kind of place that thinks mac&cheese is a vegetable. At least it's the good kind of mac&cheese, the kind that's been baked. At least, that's the only explanantion for the brown crusty bits that my brain is willing to consider.

Lumpy's is the kind of place that thinks cole slaw is a salad.

Lumpy's is the kind of place that makes all their own baked goods, which I guess is the only way they can find sandwich rolls with a high enough fat content.

Pittsburgh has a lot of good places to eat, many of them in what's called the Strip District. Lumpy's is nowhere near the Strip District.

2008.07.11 at 1:30pm EDT

Project Genkan Bench

I worked really hard this weekend, so that this project might be done by Pennsic. It's a bench for visitors to our Japanese-themed camp to sit upon while they remove their shoes, and also a place to store shoes once they have been removed. I cut all the lumber up on Saturday, then sanded the pieces and assembled the bench on Sunday.

It's really quite large, about four feet long, two feet high, and about 20 inches wide. Should seat about six people at once, if necessary.

2008.07.14 at 12:00am EDT

Poignancy

WAS

This used to be a car wash, but now it just… was.

2008.07.15 at 12:00am EDT

Positive Thinking

The up side to the whole New Yorker cover thing is that if the cover had been printed on The New Republic instead, and had been greeted with the same outrage, you just know that some conservative commentator would say, "If this cover had been printed on the New Yorker, you hypocrites would be greeting it as a masterpiece satirizing these views as held by some conservatives." As it is, we get to see how false that would be. The kind of thing printed on the cover of the New Yorker just isn't acceptable, not even as a joke, no matter who prints it.

2008.07.16 at 12:00am EDT

Lumpy's Revisited

On the other hand, Lumpy's serves a respectable Steak Salad. Those of you not familiar with the Pittsburgh Steak Salad (which can also be a Chicken Salad if made with chicken, but is not the chicken salad you're thinking of) are missing out. How to make a respectable Steak Salad:

1. Take two respectable side or garden salads and put them in one large bowl.
2. Add one hard boiled egg that has been cut into quarters.
3. Add a serving of hot french fries.
4. Add a handful of shredded cheese if you're into that kind of thing.
5. Top with a quarter pound of grilled steak or grilled chicken breast, cut into strips.
6. Serve with dressing on the side.

It's the fries that really make this a Pittsburgh masterpiece. For Pittsburgh fare, it's almost healthy, really. There's all those vegetables under the fries, meat, and possibly cheese. You might ingest some that stick to the end of the fork. Dress this with Ranch or Thousand Island dressing, and it's probably the least healthy salad you will ever order.

The one Lumpy's made for me was very good. The salad was much more than just lettuce. It included green pepper, tomato, onion, and radish for Pete's sake. The fries weren't perfect, but were hot and more crispy than soggy, which is hard to achieve in a salad. The steak was hot, grilled, and actual steak, not minute steak. The dressing came in packets, but I don't know what the alternative would be for a place like Lumpy's.

Lumpy's is the kind of place that you insult offhandedly one day, and have a decent meal at the next.

2008.07.17 at 12:00am EDT

Nabokov on Humbert Humbert

Writing of Lolita's narrator, Mr. Humbert Humbert, in the foreword to Despair, Nabokov says, "[T]here is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year".

2008.07.18 at 8:00am EDT

Monday Assblogging

Rudely Parked 'Caliber'

I've enlarged the sign in case you're having trouble figuring out what's wrong with this picture. The store behind the vehicle is a "Sherwin Williams" paint store. It must be some kind of wall coloring related emergency, I guess. I was visiting the record store next to this paint store, and the cashier says people park there all the time for the paint store. Actual parking spaces are only about 25 feet away, by the way.

2008.07.21 at 12:00am EST

The Haul

Fresh Wild Blackberries

We went hiking down to Duck Hollow on Saturday, and passed a big blackberry bramble on the way. These here were the haul. Fresh wild blackberries with Sunday's yogurt. Mmmm.

2008.07.22 at 12:00am EDT

Project Genkan Bench Completed

After a week of polyurethaning every day after work, this project is now complete.

2008.07.23 at 12:00am EDT

OM NOM NOM NOM

John McCain in the cheese aisle

If you haven't yet seen http://www.omnomnomnom.com/, you are missing out.

2008.07.24 at 10:40am EDT

Big Little Idea

So we're totally used to still photographs being in either landscape (horizontal) or portrait (vertical) orientation, but all of our moving images are presented in landscape format. It's not that our video cameras are incapable of capturing portrait format, just turn one on its side, it's that most people's tvs can't be rotated. Now that we watch a lot of video on our computer screens, why can't I produce video that's in portrait format? Why does my software stick to landscape with a small number of aspect ratios? I think we're really stifling creativity here. It's time to free our video from the artificial constratints of the horizontal rectangle. Portrait video, square video, round video, shaped video: it should all be available to us.

2008.07.25 at 7:15am EDT

"Genkan Bench" Project Page Complete

Milking this project for yet another blog post, I hereby announce that the full project page for the "Genkan Bench" project is now complete and available. This includes a link to the plans for the bench, in ase you want to make one for yourself. It costs about $100 in materials, which felt like a lot to me until I started looking in catalogs at the prices for fully finished solid wood benches. If there's anything you think I should clarify in the page, please let me know. I tried to go step-by-step, but given the number of steps it's imaginable that I glossed over something or missed something entirely.

2008.07.28 at 10:00am EDT

FAIL

One of ten $100,000 Tesla electric sports cars

If you haven't yet seen The Fail Blog, you are missing out.

2008.07.29 at 10:00am EDT

The Bee of the Bird of the Moth

A "hawk moth" aka "hummingbird moth"

Saw one of these in the garden on Sharon's 'Butterfly Bush' a while ago, but failed to get a picture. That's when I found out about this odd moth that acts like a hummingbird. Those wings aren't translucent, they're moving faster than my camera's shutter. See the antennae? That's how you know it's not a bird.

2008.07.30 at 2:00pm EDT

I LIVE

No posts last week, as we were away at the annual Pennsic War, a medieval event run by the Society for Creative Anachronism. Went my first war entirely in Japanese garb this year. I think I have callouses between my toes from wearing zori and geta nearly constantly. Either that, or nerve damage. Anyway, I have some pictures to share, and I get to reveal a secret project that was a gift for somebody, so I couldn't talk about it before.

We had a fun war, but it's always kind of weird the first few days because we work so hard getting ready and finishing projects in the run up to war, then we spend most of our time there relaxing with our friends. The first few days of nearly idle hands is always troubling. I need to spend some thought coming up with hobby projects that are bit more portable. Probably Japanese brush calligraphy, but I'm waiting for my name to be approved.

2008.08.11 at 8:00am EDT

PoliTuesday: Discount Politics

Way back in this post, I noted that it cost 2.5 times as much for a John McCain yard sign as it did for a Barack Obama yard sign. I was implying that Senator McCain was the candidate for people with more money.

Today, NPR informed me that McCain yard signs are now only $7 each, which is $1 less than Obama signs. What does it say when a campaign has to discount their yard signs by 65%? Should I now be implying that Senator McCain is the candidate for people who only buy from "going out of business" sales?

I also note that despite the fact that the Volusion terms of service require that a link to the Volusion web site appear in the footer of the web site, the McCain site still hides the link. Maybe that's why the Volusion site lists the Obama campaign as a "featured client" doesn't mention the McCain campaign at all?

2008.08.12 at 10:30am EDT

PoliTuesday: Celebrity

Is Senator John McCain's campaign really trying make fun of Barack Obama by calling him a celebrity? McCain's party is the one that ran a movie star for President, right? The same one that has a movie star as Governor of California, right? Would you like some Windex to clarify that glass house?

2008.08.12 at 12:00pm EDT

More Japanese Garb

I made a new outfit for this year's Pennsic, and although it was ready months ago I finally got a picture of it during the war and wrote a project page for it. Sorry about the night-time picture, but I didn't put the outfit on until dinner time.

2008.08.13 at 12:00pm EDT

Genkan Bench in Situ

I added this action shot from Pennsic 37 to the project page for the Genkan Bench. The bench is in the lower left corner, with a goblet sitting on it. Click through for a larger version, along with some post-Pennsic comments.

2008.08.14 at 1:00pm EDT

Life On Mars

Every few years, the Carnegie Museum of Art here in Pittsburgh hosts the Carnegie International exhibition. This year's exhibition lasts until January. It's one of thes best times to visit the museum, if you like contemporary art at all. Sharon and I visited over the weekend, and here are some of my favorites.

(The images on the CI08 web site are awful, so I won't bother including them here.)

Just a bit more

This work elicits the most immediate "wow" comments from viewers, including me. It's lovely, elegant, and obsessively detailed.

Friedrich Kunath

A collection of Mr. Kunath's works is displayed on a large wall, and he wins the prize for "artist I would most like to purchase a work by to hang in my home." His painting are quiet and thoughtful. They inspire creativity and interest. If I'm ever rich, there are a couple in this collection I'd love to see daily.

Fibonacci 1202

This assemblage of neon and photographs is the most clever and amusing work in the show. It made me smile. The photos show a restaurant filling up over the course of an evening, and the neon numbers above, which follow the Fibonacci sequence, count the number of people in each photo.

Cavemanman

This installation is hands down the most amazing work in the show. I won't give you my interpretation here, so as not to spoil your experience, but I'm really tempted. It's a brilliant and expressive work. The program talks about it as being difficult to interpret, but I found it to be one of the most intellectually accessible installations, fo all its physical inaccessibility. This piece alone is worth the price of admission to the whole show.

2008.08.18 at 8:30am EDT

I Am Officially A Geek

So when I finished reading Steven Brust's new Vlad novel, Jhegaala, there was one thing I had to do. I had to scan in, OCR, and put in order all the quotes from Six Parts Water that appear at the beginning of each chapter. (No, I won't send this file to you.) In so doing, I discovered what I thought was an error. I was pretty sure that one of the quotes had been mis-labeled as to its location in the play. So, what did I do? I posted to the author's blog asking about it.

Eeyore // Aug 18, 2008 at 8:07 pm

Great book, Mr. Brust, but I'm the kind to get caught up in trivialities. I was trying to put all the "Six Parts Water" excerpts in order, and though the one from Day Two, Act IV, Scene 6 ends with "[Curtain]" there is another from Day Two, Act VI, Scene 5. Is that an error? (Sitting here in my "Songs from the Gypsy" T-Shirt being the annoying obsessive fanboy.)

I really was wearing that T-shirt, and I swear I was wearing pants below the T-shirt. Shorts, but those count, right? Even if they're twenty year old official Boy Scout uniform shorts I've had since I was a teenager, right? Anyway, an hour later, the author himself responds.

skzb // Aug 18, 2008 at 9:06 pm

Yes, it's an error.

So yay, I was completely right. Also, I'm a geek.

2008.08.19 at 7:30am EDT

Pumping Iron

The biggest downside to wearing costume that's appropriate for a medieval Japanese persona is all the ironing. Not only did Japanese wear a lot of wrinkly fabrics like linen and silk, most of these were intended to be worn either completely smooth, or sharply pleated.

Ironing a kosode is fairly simple, since it's one of the flat items, but it must also be folded in a prescribed manner. Hakama must be ironed flat to remove all the wrinkles, then ironed again to set the pleats, then folded carefully to preserves the pleats without introducing new wrinkles. All told, it takes about 45 minutes to prepare hakama for storage. This could be sped up if we had a clothes press that was about two feet wide, but we don't.

This means that laundering, ironing, and folding all of my wafuku (Japanese garb) takes hours and hours. With the time I usually have after Pennsic that can be alotted to this task, it normally takes about a week and a half, which is lonbger than it took to wear all that clothing, of course.

2008.08.21 at 11:30am EDT

Friday Catblogging

Ethel Sunbathing

2008.08.22 at 12:00am EST

Old is the New Young

This article, reporting on a new spokesperson contract signed, starts out:

Microsoft Corp., weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.'s advertising, is turning for help to Jerry Seinfeld.

Hello? Jerry Seinfeld is 54 years old! He's actually older than Bill Gates himself. Now I don't want to say 54 is very old, but it's certainly not young. John Hodgman, who plays "a PC" in Apple's advertising, is only 37 years old. (37 is my own age. Hodgman is actually about three months younger than I am.) That may not be young either, but Jerry Seinfeld is old enough to be Hodgman's father (physically, speaking, anyway). Hodgman's counterpart in Apple's advertising, Justin Long, is 30 years old. Thirty is widely regarded as the "starting to get old" age for most people. At least he's not young enough to be Hodgman's kid.

To give you an idea of how a 54 year old fits into the worldview of a 37 year old, when Wilford Brimley was doing Quaker Oats commercials in 1988, he was 54. Brimley had just finished up working on a TV show where he played a grandfather. A grandfatherly man will not help Microsoft win over the youth market.

2008.08.25 at 12:00am EDT

Stamps Captured

As detailed in this post, there was a fugitive sought by the U.S. Marshal's Service who is named Elliott Evans Stamps. Google News alerts informs me that Mr. Stamps has been captured. My best wishes for a speedy trial and a just verdict.

2008.08.25 at 10:15pm EDT

The Luggage Pendulum

Back in the nineties, common travel wisdom was that you should try hard to never check any baggage when flying. Baggage check systems were unreliable, stuff got lost, and you always had to wait an extra half hour after your flight to retrieve your bags from the carousel. As a consequence, overhead bins on airplanes were always stuffed to capacity. People would get on planes stuff their first big bag in the first space they could find, then stuff their second big bag in the second space. If you were sitting up closer to the front, by the time you were even allowed on the plane, all the ins would be full. Of course, people who paid no attention to the boarding order not only slowed the boarding process down by blocking the aisle, but contributed to the luggage problem.

After September 11, 2001, the pendulum swung. Increased security meant that taking your bags on the plane was a hassle, as they would all have to be x-rayed and possible searched. As a consequence, people started checking heir bags more. I noted just last year that there was always plenty of overhead bin space, enabling passengers to stow their coats and briefcases overhead instead of under seats. This made people more comfortable while flying. If there was something you needed out of your bag, it was probably just overhead. Boarding a plane was faster, since people didn't need to hunt for space.

However, since passengers didn't have to carry those bags through the airport any more, luggage got larger and people would take multiple bags. This increased baggage handling costs for the airlines, so they instituted charges for multiple bags at first, then charges for even the first bag. Faced with higher fares anyway, and increased surcharges besides, the pendulum has once again swung back towards carrying everything on the plane, overstuffed bins, and slow boarding.

What's next, I can't say. Eventually I'm sure that something will happen to urge people to start checking baggage again, but I have no idea what that will be. I will say that I hate flying right now. "Fellow travellers" are often rude, tickets are more expensive, flights are always delayed, crews can't cope with conditions, planes are decaying, and the TSA is a bunch of bureaucratic petty tyrants. Where's my flying car?

2008.08.26 at 12:00am EDT

Pennsic 37 Photo Gallery

I picked out my best dozen pictures from the two or three dozen I took at Pennsic, and put up a new photo album in my gallery section. Here are the thumbnails:

More than half of them were taken at a single event, but sometimes that's just thje way it goes.

2008.08.27 at 12:00am EDT

New Template

In honor of my having made more than 200 posts to this blog in the first 11 months of operation (this is post #214), I have created the new template that you see here. Functionally, the blog is the same; it just has a little more visual interest. What I'll change it to after I get the takedown notice from Disney, I have no idea.

For my font-geek friends, the font used in the header graphic is Bernhard Modern. I love the relatively small x-height, the giant ascender on the lowercase "h", and the crazy twisted "g". The font just screams "oddly stilted", which I think makes it perfect for this blog.

2008.08.27 at 12:00am EDT

Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs

Every time I catch some online video of the DNC convention, the audience is always a sea of signs. Every major speaker had a sign associated with them ("Hillary", "BIDEN", etc.) and everybody in the audience had the same sign. Sometimes, the signs would change in the middle of a speech. The convention must have huge teams of people runnning through the hall handing out signs and taking signs back. This looks great on video, but it must be a logistical pain in the neck. Apparently, the sign team members are called "visibility whips". Do some searching around, and you'll find them blogging about how hard it is to distribute four waves of 10,000 signs each throughout the convention hall.

I'm also reminded of a GOP convention in 1988 or 1992 where the delegates started holding up hand made signs. It was clearly part of somebody's plan, but it made the whole party seem more personable. This DNC convention was all about party unity, so presenting unified signage to the cameras was important, but I wonder if it's going too far.

2008.08.28 at 12:30pm EDT

Fruity Oaty Code

Fruity Oaty Code from 'Serenity'

For erink, not because I think she doubted me, but because I couldn't think of anything else to post today, and saw the JPEG still on my desktop. This frame clearly shows the hidden "military code" behind the Fruity Oaty Bars commercial.

2008.09.01 at 8:30pm EDT

Thanks, But No Thanks

When Republican Vice Presidential nominee Governor Sarah Palin states that she said "Thanks, but no thanks" to the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" earmark funding secured by indicted Republican Senator and Palin endorser Ted Stevens, what she measn is that first she said "Thanks," and then (later) she said "No thanks." Of course, she may have said "No thanks", but the state of Alaska got all the money it had been allotted.

When Republican Vice Presidential nominee Governor Sarah Palin disses community organizers, how does she intend to ever win another election? Maybe Republicans don't go out into communities and organize people to campaign and vote for their candidates, but it's actually the foundation of Democratic politics. Working as a community organizer is part of paying your dues in the party, and proving that you are dedicated to the hard work of serving in politics. Maybe when you only have to convince 616 people to vote for you, you don't need anybody's help, but in most cities you need organizers.

Lastly, one of the major criticisms of Governor Palin is that as recently as a few months ago she admitted that she had no idea what the Vice President of the United States actually does. Last night at the Republican National Convention, she gave no indication that she has been told, or that she has even asked. She made a pile of promises to her party's convention delegates, with no indication of how she would help fulfill those promises.

2008.09.04 at 8:30am EDT

MOOSE HUNTER

MOOSE HUNTER Sarah Palin

Last night, the RNC played a video that was intended to introduce us to Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin. The video was originally supposed to play Wednesday night just before her speech, but the decided to go straight from former Mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani's speech into Sarah Palin's. To introduce her, the video starts with six simple declaratives: "Mother. Moose hunter. Maverick. Mayor. Governor. Maverick."

First off, two of those are the same. I always thought James Garner was the original Maverick, but apparently Sarah Palin is twice the Maverick he ever was. Frankly, I'm not sure it's appropriate to refer to a woman using a word that can mean "an unbranded head of cattle", but what the heck, it's her campaign.

Next off, while "Governor" is an important part of her resume, it really throws off the alliteration. It doesn't even have an M in it. I guess there wasn't much they could do about that, although they could have pronounced it "governmor" just to get the phoneme in there. "Mayor" is a big win all around.

"Mother", I refuse to address.

Lastly, "Moose Hunter". I'm not quite sure what that has to do with leading the country, but I love it. Moose hunter. Moose hunter. MOOSE HUNTER..

2008.09.05 at 8:30am EDT

Lumpy Fish Special

My Lunch from Friday

This is probably a half pound of fish, plus mac-n-cheese and cole slaw. This is probably about 2800 calories. Enjoy.

2008.09.08 at 12:30pm EDT

Metaphors

I know, metaphors are difficult and slippery things, and most of us don't pay enough attention in Senior English to even bother trying to decipher them, so here's my interpretation of a couple of metaphors that were used recently by the next President of the United States of America, Barack Obama:

• "Lipstick" respresents Sarah Palin
• "A pig" represents Dick Cheney
• "Old fish" represents George W. Bush
• "A piece of paper called change" represents John S. McCain

Frankly, the last part of that is a little clumsy. Myself, I would have used "yesterday's newspaper" to represent John McCain and "rotten fish" to represent George Bush. He also could have clarified the whole thing, avoiding any deliberate misinterpretation by his opponents. I would have gone with:

You can put Sarah Palin's lipstick on the political pig of the Bush/Cheney administration, but it's still a pig. You can wrap the rotten fish of the neoconservative Republicans in yesterday's newspaper and label it "change," but after eight years it still stinks.

Anyway, the McCain campaign's supposed outrage over this epigram is a tempest in a teapot.

2008.09.10 at 10:00am EDT

More Metaphor

A friend of mine recently characterized Democratic Party Nominee for President Senator Barack Obama's proposed income tax plan as, "Two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner." I think he meant that it was like predators holding a mock vote with obvious results over who was going to get eaten. It's funny, I guess, but it's a distortion. It means to portray those with money as the undeserved victims of consumption by the average citizen. I have two main problems with it.

It's backwards.

It characterizes average citizens as wolves, out to devour the poor defenseless rich sheep. Does anybody really believe that? The truth is that every dollar earned comes from somewhere. "Somewhere" in most cases means "someone else's pocket." People with money are closer to the top of the economic food chain, not closer to the bottom. While I would hesitate to portray all rich people as "wolves," given the two choices it's the more logical one. Most people characterize the masses as sheep, right?

The proportions are wrong.

In Senator Obama's plan, taxes will be raised on the top 1.1% of earners. View the Washinton Post analysis:

So, characterizing the situation as a 2-to-1 "vote" is wildly inaccurate. It's more like 99-to-1, and that's a pretty clear choice in a society that's supposed to be a democracy, isn't it?

Those rightward bars in Obama's plan look pretty extreme, but when you keep in mind that people at the top of the pile have been receiving substantial tax cuts for years, those increases really represent a return toward normalcy.

Also note that the tax cuts for the top 0.1% of earners in McCain's plan are nearly ten times the average cut for the bottom 60% of taxpayers. "But those people pay more taxes to begin with," I've had some people argue. True, but does that justify a monetary change that's nearly 1800 times the size that will be enjoyed by the majority? Eighteen hundred?

In Conclusion

A more accurate metaphor would be, in my opinion: "Like 99 sheep and 1 wolf deciding what not to have for dinner." That's how I feel about it, anyway. "You can eat whatever you want, as long as it's not us. Got it?"

2008.09.15 at 9:00am EDT

Books & Films

So I just finished reading Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel American Psycho, which was made into a movie in 2000, which I watched earlier this year.

In the film, it's unclear whether Patrick Bateman, the main character (played brilliantly by Batman's Christian Bale), is actually performing the crimes shown in the film, or if he is simply fantasizing about them. There is little difference in terms of Bateman's mental health of course, but the doubt turns Bateman from a dangerous psycho desrving of justice into a fascinating patient ripe for analysis.

In the book, it is quite clear that Bateman kills people. He is a sick puppy immersed in a sick world where nobody is as shallow as they want everybody to think they are, and too many people are hiding too many awful secrets. Bateman is too rich and too good looking to be thought a murderer, even when he is brutally frank honest with the people who are supposedly his friends. Even his dry cleaners and his maid simply clean up the blood because it is their function in life. It's awful and dark and bloody and disgusting and depressing. It made me long for the innocence of mere insanity.

Anyway, after that I started reading Christopher Priest's novel The Prestige, which was made into a movie in 2006, which I watched earlier this year.

The film is very mysterious about what is happening, but everything you see makes sense, it just makes more sense if you watch it again. The book (which I have not yet finished reading) has passages that don't even make sense unless you know what is happening. Of course, having seen the movie I don't get the experience of being confused by them. It's disappointing, really. On the up side, if I'd read the book first I would not have enjoyed the film as much, I think.

2008.09.16 at 11:00pm EDT

Building Software

A conversation I had recently with my dad:

Him: I don't understand why programs are written like that.

Me: Programmers are carpenters.

Him: They're building a house with an axe!

Me: Exactly, because the programmer shows up for work and an accountant hands him an axe and tells him to build a house. Where is the architect? Where is the foreman? Where is the inspector? But the carpenter has to get the house built on time because people are waiting to move in. Me, I'm the guy who has to explain to you how to use your new house without using the word "axe."

2008.09.17 at 12:00am EDT

Why Lying Doesn't Matter

There's been a lot of press over this past week about how one of the presidential campaigns has been lying repeatedly, about things it doesn't even have to lie about, even though these lies have been debunked over and over again. You may have noticed that this hasn't really harmed that campaign's poll numbers very much. This is confusing some opponents of the campaign.

From having spoken to a lot of people who seem likely to vote for that campaign, I can tell you why the lying doesn't seem to matter. See, these people believe that all politicians lie. These people believe that all politicians are dirty, and have scandals hidden in their background. It doesn't matter if they can't point to any specific lies or to any specific scandals, because it just means that we haven't uncovered the lies or the scandals yet. Their faith in the fallibility of politicians overrides any evidence or lack of evidence. Being a politician in the first place is enough evidence to prove that a person is slime.

Who can blame these people, really? Time after time we have been lied to by politicians. Even politicians who have fought hard for real reform and achieved it have sometimes fallen eventually. Even politicians who do good have been shown to have been doing bad things to put them in a position to do that good. Even politicians who have professional lives full of success have been shown to have personal lives full of failure. The problem with being a cynic is that you're too often right. If you think all politicians are lying all the time, you just make your choices based on whether you think they're lying in the direction that sounds good to you.

Is it naive to think that one candidate might be for real? Possibly. You must admit that it's possible. Are voters who choose the honest-seeming candidate simply abused spouses choosing to believe the lie that, "this time, baby, it will be different"? That could be. Our national black eye still hasn't healed, and the pain makes it hard to think straight.

So anyway, that's why the lying doesn't matter to most people. Myself, I choose to vote for the candidate who is, at least, the more convincing liar, the one who can keep all the lies straight and present a coherent position, or at least a coherent sentence. I choose to vote for the candidate who apparently doesn't need to lie about his past, even if he might be lying about the future. The more times lies for the future are repeated, the greater the likelihood the liar will be stuck trying to make them true. The more assiduously somebody asserts something, the more they must anticipate facing consequences if that thing turns out to be a lie. The stronger a case somebody makes that something should be true, the more we might come to agree, and the more likely we are to try to make it true, regardless of the messenger.

2008.09.18 at 12:00am EDT

Robin Hood

Back on Monday I posted about tax policy, and how Obama plans to lower taxes for the vast majority of taxpayers, while paying for it by restoring higher taxes on a tiny minority we could call the very rich.

One response to this plan that I have seen is, "Just like Robin Hood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor!" I think these people are trying to ridicule Obama. I've even seen caricatures showing Obama in tights and a leather doublet. Maybe that's funny; I don't know. Having worn tights and a leather doublet I can tell you it's not such a big deal.

Anyway, I think these people are missing two major ideas. The first is that in most presentations of the Robin Hood story, Robin is the hero; we admire him; we hold his actions up for praise; we rejoice when his enemies are humiliated.

The second is that in most presentations, Robin Hood is fighting against a usurper and the nobles who support him. The king is away at the Crusades, and the government is oppressing the people while the rich continue to live in comfort. Robin Hood is seeking to rectify the situation as the King would wish. He is a faithful servant of the King, and in many presentations is rewarded handsomely when the King returns.

Why is this important? Because in America, as Thomas Paine said in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, the law is king. Our country, and our country's constitution have always stood for the idea that all people are equal. Faithful service to the rule of law, to the spirit of the law even if actual law is absent, will be rewarded. That's part of the American dream.

Obama portrayed as Robin Hood? He should thank them for the compliment.

2008.09.19 at 12:00am EDT

Being the first year of posting, ever

This post marks the one year anniversary of this blog. Of course, leading up to today, I've missed two days in a row. Anyway, I haven't really been promoting this blog because, as I said near the beginning, I didn't want it to be the kind of blog that was announced with great fanfare which then peters out in a couple of months. Now that I have a great big archive and don't seem to have petered out, I guess I should get going with that promotion thing. Anyway, happy birthday blog.

2008.09.24 at 1:15pm EDT

Tree Sign

The World Famous Murrysville Tree Sign

That's what it looks like from ground level, anyway. You can really only see it if you know what' you're looking for. To see what it looks like from space, see the Google Maps satellite view.

2008.09.25 at 12:00am EDT

Lawyers who will argue for you

She married into this

I was momentarily unsure about posting this picture without obscuring the names and phone number, but hey, they're the ones who posted the sign. If they don't like it, they can sue me. (Kidding! Please don't sue me.)

2008.09.26 at 12:00am EDT

Not a typo

BreadWorks is a bakery, naturally

At first, it looks like an unfortunate typo, but maybe you can make out the bakery logo on second glance. BreadWorks makes good bread, by the way.

Saturday post! How special is that? Does it make up for missing two days earlier this week?

2008.09.27 at 12:00am EDT

I Wanna Rock

ROCK FOR SALE

If I was smart, I would save up for a piece of string, then buy this rock to wind the string around.

2008.09.29 at 12:00am EDT

Speaking of String

Kumihimo Braid #1

I recently built a Japanese braiding loom called a marudai, and used it to make a six-foot long braid out of 12 strands of cotton embroidery floss. This type of braiding is called kumihimo. For my first braid on the loom I'm pretty happy with it, even though the sharp-eyed among you will note the pattern changes along the length of the braid.

2008.09.30 at 12:00am EDT

Software Idea

Flipping a coin is so old school. Instead, why not let a random collection of people on the Internet make your decisions for you?

This idea requires an interactive web site and messaging platform for the decision making, and at least one Internet terminal of some kind for submitting decision requests. For mobile goodness, terminal or terminals could be PDAs or phones or whatever, as long as they have the ability to upload an image from memory. Best would be the ability to take pictures with a camera and upload those.

So here's how it works: If we're trying to decide where to go for dinner, and I suggest pizza while you suggest burgers, instead of flipping a coin we pull out our cellphones. We both take pictures with our phones or choose pictures from memory. Then, we log into the web site and initiate a request somehow, such that we both log into a single request. I upload my picture and the word "Pizza." You upload your picture and the word "Burgers." These pictures can be of anything, though I predict pictures of heads and tail will be popular. The web site picks a random selection of registered users, and sends them a link to web page on the site via email or text message. This page displays just the pictures, and no information about the decision being made. Users pick one picture of the other, based on whatever criteria they want. Voting lasts for thrity seconds or so; only those paying attention get to participate. The web site tallies the results, then sends back "Pizza" or "Burgers" to us as appropriate.

Decision made! I hope it's pizza.

2008.10.01 at 12:00am EDT

Kumihimo Video

Turn down your computer's volume before playing this video.

Just some video of one cycle (four iterations) of the "Edo Yatsu" kumihimo patern. It may look like two cycles, but if I were using four colors you'd be able to see clearly that half way through, the thread positions are reversed from start. Starting with the threads in this position creates a very nice spiral pattern in the resulting braid.

I apologize for the stereotypical "Oriental" music, but the music I had playing on the stereo while I shot this video was unsuitable, and I decided to experiment with YouTube's background music feature.

2008.10.02 at 8:00am EDT

VP Debate

I don't actually want to talk about politics in this post, but I do want to say something about last night's debate. As the debate last night progressed, a lock of hair from Governor Palin's bangs drooped under the hot stage lights and wound up sticking in her left eye. Now, because she's on TV and people are always noticing her appearance, she could not just reach up and fix her hair, and besides that there was probably significant styling product in that lock that would have made it resistant to simply tucking it back.

You can watch as she gets increasingly twitchy over time, trying to blink it away and eventually resorting to dramatic winks of that eye in an attempt to clear her vision. This must have been absolute torture, and in the middle of a debate where people were just waiting for her to make a mistake it must have been a nightmare.

I hope that as soon as she got back stage she cut the end off that lock and shoved it up her hairdresser's nose.

2008.10.03 at 11:00am EDT

Pittsburgh 250 Fireworks

Fireworks fireworks kaboom kaboom

This year, Pittsburgh is celebrating the 250th anniversary of its founding. This past weekend, the city staged a huge fireworks display, launching from 17 different points surrounding downtown. We got a good spot on the Roberto Clemente Bridge, facing down towards the point.

2008.10.06 at 3:15pm EDT

Project Twofer

Altoids Inro with Black'n'Gold Braid

A new Inro made to hold an Altoids tin (an Internet standard for volume), using a new method that only uses two pieces of wood. The front and back are cut and routed separately, then glued together to make a hollow center. The outside is then shaped and smoothed. The inro was cut open, and then finished with 13 coats of tinted polyurethane. It is appointed with an 8 strand braid with 4 black stands and 4 yellow strands. It make look a a standard twisted string, but the two colors are actually braided to create the spiral.

If I learn enough carving technique to make my own netsuke, I'll be able to replace this plastic reproduction and have a nice accessory that's 100% my own work. Well, except for the Altoids tin.

2008.10.07 at 12:00am EDT

White Linen Tabi

White Linen Tabi

Tabi are Japanese footwear. They are sort of "shoe mittens" in that they have split toes to permit the wearing of zori, geta, and other footwear that need this access. Mine are 100% linen, with unbleached linen linings and soles, and white linen uppers and ties. There is also a layer of heavy interfacing between the two layers of the sole.

Just finished these recently after refining my pattern over a couple of draft constructions. I started from the pattern in John Marshall's great book, "Make Your Own Japanese Clothes".

2008.10.08 at 12:00am EDT

Mystery Cutlery

Somebody bought me a shirt? The other day, I received in the mail this shirt of the alien half-breed, "Mr. Spork". I'd love to thank my benefactor, but the shirt arrived with absolutely no indication of who might have sent it. Was it one of you, oh my readers? I've already questioned the usual suspects, but they deny it. It is only logical that you take credit for your generosity.

2008.10.09 at 12:00am EDT

Marudai Project Page Added

I finished up a project page for the Kumihimo Marudai. I had to make the marudai before I could begin braiding seriously. The page describes the marudai and its usage, and contains pictures of all my braids to date including my most recent braid, a 16-strand braid in blues and purples.

I'm about a dozen project pages behind, so adding this one is a positive step towards getting caught up. As a sort of preview, I've added thumbnails for most of them to project index, lets see how long it takes me to do the rest of the work.

2008.10.13 at 12:00am EDT

My New Business Idea

Gyros are available in every U.S. city I've ever been to, but there is no national chain of gyro places. It's all local! How insane is that? This is supposed to be the 21st century! Gyro places would be about like Taco Bell. Flat thing, pile some stuff on it, squirt some sauce, wrap, and serve!

The only problem is figuring out how to make gyros that don't taste anything like real gyros.

2008.10.13 at 1:30pm EDT

Project Toychest Finally Documented

I first posted about this toychest project back in July when I completed it, but I didn't finish the write-up until today when I was waiting to have my car repaired (window mechanism busted).

Big Wooden Box

This was one of the largest items I've made, and it was a lot of fun. It was nice to apply my efforts towards a gift, too. Usually I'm just making stuff for myself.

2008.10.15 at 3:45pm EDT

Zero?

Zero?

2008.10.16 at 00:00am EDT

Arc Reactor Project Page

The Arc Reactor Equipment

Here's another project I completed in July and finally wrote up just recently, an Arc Reactor prop replica based on the "Iron Man" movie. This is an example of me seeing something in a movie and thinking, "Hey, I bet I could put that together myself." I started geting this feeling a few years back, and it appears to be part of what I call "the costuming disease".

2008.10.16 at 12:00pm EDT

Tabi Project Page Added

Finally, a more recent project documented! I posted about these white linen tabi about a week ago, but finally, wrote the project up. The write up doesn't supply a whole lot more information, but it adds a picture.

I expect I'll probably make a pair of tabi every year or so until I decide I have enough. Future tabi will be added to this project page, so it was important to get this written up.

2008.10.17 at 4:00pm EDT

Weekend of Braiding

I spent way to much time on kumihimo this weekend. I got a bunch of other stuff done, too, though some of that can be tallied in the braiding column as well, like buying supplies for a third marudai. Anyway, here are the three braids I completed:

Four strand, two color braid of silk yarn

Eight strand, eight color braid of embroidery floss

Eight strand, two color braid of silk yarn

I'm really enamored of the 100% silk yarn I bought on Saturday at a local Pittsburgh knitting store that specializes in natural fibers. Expect to see a lot of that stuff in the future, especially since I bought entire hanks of the stuff.

2008.10.20 at 8:40am EDT

Porch Footrest Project Added

This little porch footrest project was not only finished a few months ago, but it was started more than a year ago. Sometimes, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

A footrest that matches two chairs

It's some fun and useful furniture hacking. The footrest was made from parts I removed from an extra chairs that we don't use.

2008.10.22 at 8:20am EDT

Breakfast

When a bowl of Captain Crunch with Crunchberries dreams, it dreams of being a bowl of French vanilla yogurt with fresh strawberries and granola.

I'm just sayin'.

2008.10.24 at 10:30am EDT

PoliTuesday: One Teeny Weeny Week

Just one week to go until election day, and I am so tired. Here in Pennsylvania we don't have any early voting, and we need a good excuse to get an absentee ballot, so we're stuck waiting to vote until the last possible day. Even though it look like Obama has 14 times the likelihood of winning in a landslide than McCain has of winning at all, we still have to wait a week to watch the drama play out.

Almost a year ago I announced my support for Barack Obama, contingent on his adding Senator Clinton to the ticket. Over the course of he next few months, she lost my support due to her awful campaigning. I thought John McCain would be a good opponent, but he's run an even worse campaign than Sneator Clinton did. He's given in to the most vile parts of the Republican party, and I'm glad he's losing.

I'm confident Barack Obama is going to win this election. Not just because I want him to win and like his position more, but because he is already winning. He's winning in opinion polls, in tracking polls, and in actual polls where early voting is allowed.

I have certain fears that Obama's win won't be accepted by some, and will be unacceptable to others, but I know he's the better candidate.

2008.10.28 at 3:45pm EDT

PoliPolyday: Bitter?

I really was going to try to avoid the temptation to make every post between yesterday and election day a politics post, but then the Pennsylvania Republicans sent a flyer to our home asking if I'm "bitter".

Damn straight, I am bitter. I'm bitter that despite the fact that the voters of Pennsylvania voted to support Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, we've still had to put up with the policies and actions of George W. Bush for the past eight years. Now, there are those who believe that either Gore or Kerry would have been a worse President than Bush. Believe me, they exist and I have talked to them. Myself, I do not see how it is even possible they would have been worse. Bush's policies and actions have been awful for the people of Pennsylvania, and I am certainly bitter that we've been forced to put up with them. The rest of the country does not seem to have PA's best interests in mind when they make decisions, and I am bitter that they want us to say, "Thank you sir, may I have another."

I definitely think John McCain would have made a better President than George W. Bush has been. I think McCain rolled over and showed the Bush administration his belly in return for their help in 2008. I think they managed to convince him they were going to be great in office and he'd be unstoppable in 2008 with them behind him.

Unfortunately for him, and unfortunately for us, they were wrong in almost every possible way. Despite this, McCain has not turned his back on their policies and their help, but has embraced the viewpoints, ideas, strategies, and staff of the Bush/Cheney campaign as his own.

I'm so bitter that the Republicans are still acting like they're right all the time when they so clearly are not. I'm so bitter that they act like Pennsylvanians ever wanted them in charge of the country.

Bitter? Yes. Bitter Pennsylvanians for Obama.

2008.10.29 at 11:30am EDT

Not Politics

So, what else has been going on in my life?

Well, braiding of course. I have five braids in my Edo Yatsu collection now, though I haven't posted about most of them. Each uses the same two colors with different start positions that yield different plaits even though they all use the same braiding pattern. I'm also in the middle of making a third marudai; this one comes apart to make it easier to transport.

Did a bit of travelling. Had to go to Boston to do family stuff. Sorry to most of my Boston friends, since we barely did any socializing at all, mostly just family stuff. Took a quick tour through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Their small Japanese collection is interesting. (I spent an embarassing amount of time trying to examine the braided cords from which the scrolls hang.) Their temporary exhibit of Yousuf Karsh photographs is amazing. Their book store is great, though I didn't buy anything. If you stay at the Sheraton in Newton, don't let them give you room 606; it smells bad.

Finishing up my current contract. For months this project has been bumping along with little guidance and no deadline, then suddenly this past Thursday the client asked if they could have the document. I managed to communicate to them that I needed a few days to finish it up, but I'm gone after that.

Been a little sick. Basically the same cold I had last December, but I destroyed my voice talking too much at the family thing. Maybe I'll only cough for a couple of weeks this time, instead of for about a month.

See how easy it was to get through an entire post without mentioning politics?
Vote Obama.

2008.10.30 at 11:00am EDT

NaNoWriNoMo

Welcome to "National Not Writing a Novel Month". I, and many others like me, will be doing our darndest to avoid writing a novel for the entire month of November. You can chart my progress by watching this blog and making sure I don't post a number of pages I've written each day. With your encouragement, I know I can get through this entire month without writing a novel.

2008.11.00 at 12:00am EDT

Election Day

I Voted

2008.11.04 at 8:23am EDT

Bunch of New Braids

I finished up braiding all of that blue and grey silk yarn last week, and so this week I'm posting pictures!

Don't you worry, though, I've already gone back to the store and bought more yarn.

2008.11.05 at 1:30pm EDT

Not Novel Not Update

Friend EZ asks (via text message), "How's your not novel not coming along?" Answer: It's not coming along not great! I've been so totally not busy not writing my not novel I've been not posting to my blog (it's an actual blog) not nearly daily.

Anyway, I'm not upset or anything, but anybody who sends text messages should be aware that they are not included in my payment plan. I leave them activated because some times they come in handy and it's totally worth the dime or whatever they charge me, but just be aware that I judge every text message I receive as to its dimeworthiness.

2008.11.15 at 12:00am EDT

So What Have I Been Doing?

OK, since I haven't been working on a novel, and I obviously haven't done much posting to my blog, what have I been doing with my time? Considering I'm 'between contracts' right now, that's a pretty fair question.

Well, I've been braiding of course, completing a very long braid that took me most of a week of braiding, some useful braiding to actually use for something, and a bunch of screwing around experimenting. In braiding-related project work, I made a third marudai, this one constructed with nuts and bolts so it can be disassembled for travel.

I also read Neal Stephenson's latest book, Anathem. It's 890 pages of theory and practice, plus a glossary and some appendices. I liked it a lot, but then I'm a big fan of his writing. I know that quite a few people find his books insufferable, and this one probably won't change their opinions, but it's a good book and a I enjoyed it. It's a constant surprise, which is difficult to maintain for ~900 pages, but Stephenson is a master.

I've also been doing a bit of woodworking, on a project that I don't want to talk much about right now, but has needed a fair amount of precision work, so it's taking a bit of time. I'm really happy with it so far.

Lastly, I've been taking care of some things from the "Dumb Things I Gotta Do" category in my To Do list. Examples of things still on the list include putting new planks on the tops of my sawhorses (3/4 complete, but the last one has some stuff sitting on it) and repainting my license plate frame. Excitement!

2008.11.17 at 12:00am EDT

Repo: The Generic Opera

The movie "Repo: The Genetic Opera" has been receiving piles of hype from all kinds of sources, so when I found out it was being screened at this year's Three Rivers Film Festival, I decided that we had to go see it. We had dinner down the block from the theatre and showed up an hour before the show to get tickets.

When we arrived, we found two lines in front of the theatre. It turned out that one of the lines was for people who already had tickets. Let me just say here that advanced ticket sales for movies is one of the evils of modern society. The other line was for people waiting to buy one of the 50 tickets that had been "reserved" for at the door ticket sales. "Reserving" tickets for people who show up an hour early for a movie? Craziness. Anyway, we would up getting numbers 43 and 44 when numbers were finally handed out, which means we had to hunt for some of the last empty seats in the theater. Somehow, we found two seats together.

Anyway, the question becomes, "Was it worth it?" The answer is yes. I can't think of a better crowd to have seen this movie with. It's a big show, so seeing it with an enthusiastic crowd is important. People will be talking about this movie for years, so seeing it as early as possible is vital. You want to form your own opinion before reading innumerable blog posts. (Hey, so if that's true for you, you should stop reading now before I get into my opinions.)

"So is the movie worth it?" Almost. So much about this movie is dead on perfect. The acting is good; the actors were clearly into their roles, no matter how campy and over-the-top. The sets were terrific. The costumes were wonderful. The lighting and camera work were top-notch. The story was great; it's twisted and involved, with multiple operatic layers. However, the songs really bite. If you're going to make a musical, you need good songs. Not one of them is memorable, some of them aren't even coherent, and many of them aren't even sung. If you're going to hire people like Sarah Brightman (the former Mrs. Andrew Llloyd Webber) to sing for you, you should hire real songwriters. If you're going to call your musical and opera, all this speak-singing just won't do.

In short, see this movie when it appears and before it disappears. It won't be nearly as cool to watch at home on video. You will have to put up with the costumes for decades, but hopefully you'll never hear the music again.

2008.11.18 at 12:00am EDT

New Suzuribako in Progress

This project ate up a bunch of my time last week, and here's a picture of what I have so far.

My old suzuribako was just a simple small box. This one is larger (the interior is 8.5"x11") and the inside has holders for the ink stone, ink stick, and water dropper, as well as curved rests for one or two full-size brushes.

It's actually sitting on the actual workbench! I got sick of not being able to work on my workbench, and cleaned it off. Unbelievable, I know. I also sanded the surface a bit and worked in a bit of sanding sealer to make a nicer work surface. The next step will be removing all the tools from the pegboard and re-arranging the whole layout of tool storage.

2008.11.19 at 12:00am EDT

Last Rosebud of the Year

Sharon's roses bloom until they freeze

2008.11.20 at 12:00am EDT

Friday Catblogging

Gray Kitty

This cat is not one of Sharon's cats. It's a feral cat that lives under the neighbors' porch. It was born there in the spring. We haven't seen the mother or its siblings in months, but this one keeps coming back. The funny part is that this cat is good friends with the groundhog that lives a few houses in the other direction. The two of them hang out in our yard all the time. The groundhog eats birdseed, parsley, and tomatoes, while the kitty suns and watches the bird feeders.

2008.11.21 at 12:00am EDT

Bible Mobile

Ask Now, Not Later

"Don't tailgate the Jesus," I warned her.

2008.11.26 at 12:00pm EDT

Typography

Most people don't understand that using HeIvetica or AriaI for body text can cause significant problems.

2008.12.02 at 11:15am EST

Prisoner Sequence

Because I couldn't find this image sequence anywhere, and I wanted to show it to some people. This is a sequence of images from a memorable scene in a forgettable episode of an unforgettable series, the pub scene in "The Girl Who Was Death" episode of "The Prisoner" series from 1968.

2008.12.03 at 4:00pm EST

Langridge Genius

The One Eyed Man

A one-frame digression from the comic book, The Louche and Insalubrious Escapades of Art d'Ecco by Andrew & Roger Langridge.

2008.12.04 at 12:00am EST

Twin Peaks 2015

I didn't see "Wild Palms" when it first aired 1993, but I caught it a few years later on video, and liked it a bunch. The story of the miniseries takes place in 2007, and I was very disappointed last year when the producers didn't make a bigger deal out of this. They could have at least put together a new DVD with some commentaries comparing its world to the one in which we live. Instead, nothing.

I recently rewatched another series that some regard as similar to "Wild Palms", David Lynch & Mark Frost's "Twin Peaks". I don't think they're super similar, except in the way they bewilder people who can't pay a lot of attention. I liked Twin Peaks a lot when it aired in 1990, and I've liked it every time I've watched it since. It is, first and foremost, a soap opera. People who try to look too much deeper into it wind up being somewhat disappointed, but if you just take it for that it's entertaining.

Anyway, in the final episode Laura Palmer's shade tells Special Agent Dale Cooper that she will see him again in 25 years. This is confirmed in the "Fire Walk With Me" film where is a scene is labelled "25 years later". This marks the year 2015 as the year to revisit Twin Peaks. I won't go so far as to say Lynch should resolve Twin Peaks (I don't think much of Twin Peaks was ever meant to resolve), but revisiting is definitely in order.

Do you hear me Mr. Lynch? You have seven years to work on this.

2008.12.08 at 12:00am EST

Favorite Album of 2008

I started hearing singles from Elbow's "The Seldom Seen Kid" on a local radio station and was eventually earwigged by track number two, "The Bones of You". This is not a new band, but this is their first album that's entirely self-produced, and it's been winning them praises and prizes from all corners. I just thought I'd throw my hat in.

The music on this album is strong, and the lead singer's voice is wonderful, with a timbre that really catches me. The lyrics are as amazingly poetic as any I've heard in recent years, and are really what sucked me into this album.

I mostly enjoy instrumental music, becuase most lyrics are just noises being made by the singer to go along with the music. These lyrics really dug into me, though. Lyrics like: "Straight to my head like the first cigarette of the day", "We kissed like we invented it", and "We'll buy him the patch in the Tuscany hills, and the vino de vici will flow like a river in spring."

I'm hooked. Hooked, I tell you. Time to start searching for their previous albums.

2008.12.09 at 12:00am EST

Off the Hook

I'm reading a book set in the early 1980's, and one of the characters, who doesn't want to speak to her ex-husband, leaves her phone off the hook. Even in my youth, this phrase was archaic; phones no longer had actual hooks to hang the handpiece on. Do people even have phones they can leave off the hook? One of my phones can't even be unplugged, as it connects wirelessly. Even if I turn it off, the voice mail will pick up, creating the possibly false impression that I want you to leave me a message, and that I will listen to that message. How do we communicate to the world that we don't want to speak to anybody? I guess we don't.

2008.12.10 at 8:30pm EST

Sears Receipts

If any of you shop at Sears, as I still do occasionally, you've received a Sears receipt with feedback solicitation and a satisfaction guarantee, plus maybe a charge slip, and a coupon for treadmills, and a coupon for tools, and a coupon for lawn and garden. Just use that last one on a purchase of $100 or more. The register prints, and prints, and keeps printing. Those cashiers must have to replace the tape five or more times a day. Craziness. I guess somepeople use those things, but I normally throw them away.

2008.12.11 at 12:00am EST

Friday Catblogging

Shammy on the Stairs

Sharon's sister's cat, Shammy. He's about eleven years old, and he was starting to have health problems, but he's much healthier and happier down in Arizona.

2008.12.12 at 12:00am EST

The Last Stationer

Today I needed to go dahntahn to pick up some paperwork, so I stopped off at the last real stationers in Pittsburgh, Weldin's. It's the only place I can find where you can walk in and buy a single medium ball point red ink pen. This store has been in business for over 150 years, and their web site looks like it. (That's a joke.) Anyway, they have a cat who lives in the store, which is cool. They used to have a huge selection of globes and maps upstairs, but now that's mostly gift items. I just needed a single single medium ball point red ink pen, and they sold me one. Try that in your city. Let me know how it goes.

2008.12.15 at 8:55pm EST

Other Music of 2008

So what other music have I been buying besides last week's favorite?

• Joe Satriani, "Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock"
• Moby, "Last Night"
• Sigur Ros - "Meth suth i eyrum vith spilum endalaust"
• Zero 7 - "The Garden"
• Violent Femmes - "Add It Up (1981 - 1993)"
• Portishead - "Third"
• Thrice - "The Alchemy Index"
• Godspeed You Black Emperor - "Slow Riot for a New Zero Kanada"
• Mogwai - EP+6
• Godspeed You Black Emperor - "Yanqui U.X.O."
• Moog Cookbook - "Plays the Classic Rock Hits"
• They Might Be Giants - "Here Come the 123s">

You can see a fair amount of variation in there. Some of those are the latest albums from groups I collect. Others are me catching up on stuff I wish I'd found years ago. All that stuff from Thrice is based on a recommendation; it's worth a listen, but it's not something I'd normally buy. (It's actually four mini-albums based on the four classical elements.) The Violent Femmes collection is just something I should have bought years ago. The Moog Cookbook is something I've been searching for; I loved their first album. Godspeed You Black Emperor is probably one of the most interesting groups I've gotten interested in in the past year.

2008.12.16 at 12:00am EST

Meltdown

"Meltdown", by Elliott C. Evans (2008)

2008.12.17 at 12:00am EST

Friday Catblogging

Lucy on the Table

Sharon's sister's cat Lucy, usually called Lulu.

2008.12.19 at 12:00am EST

Genius

A few years ago, somebody opened a good candy store in what's known as Pittsburgh's Strip District. The strip is where you go when you want to buy good food, and while a smattering of other kinds of shops has moved in (and out) over the years, it's still mostly food. Opening a good candy shop there was genius. The place is called "Mon Aimee Chocolat". They have a certain amount of sweets they prepare there, but the bulk of their stock is international candy, specializing in premier chocolate brands. If you need gourmet, 70% cocoa, dark chocolate, from Madagsacar... this is where you go. Needless to say, they know Sharon by sight there.

A few months ago, somebody opened a wine bar and restaurant in a building that used to house one of Pittsburgh's great "little places". Baum Vivant was a great restaurant in a tiny house, next to the train tracks, along a busy street, between a hospital and a strip club. The new place is called "Toast!". The dinner we had there was very good, the wine selection is very good, and the dessert menu has a touch of genius on it.

They've teamed up with Mon Aimee to serve a selection of fine chocolate. This is absolute genius. Often when we're dining out, choosing dessert comes down to determining which selection on the menu is the most chocolaty. Toast has distilled this down to utter simplicity by offering a dessert that can be described as "chocolate on a plate". It doesn't get much more chocolaty than that, and with Mon Aimee providing the chocolate it's always going to be good. Placing that next to a wine menu makes it even better. Genius.

2008.12.22 at 8:00am EST

"Fancy Suzuribako" Project Completed

So last year, I made a small Suzuribako to store my Japanese ink stone. It was too small, however, to store nicer brushes or be generally useful, so I decided to make one that was larger, fancier, and more useful.

Fancy Suzuribako

It's large enough to store the nicer brushes, and has built in "organizers" to keep supplies in place. At some point I hope to give it a nicer finish, but for now I'm glad it's complete. It also has a secret, but I'll avoid talking about that. Not because it's really important that it be kept secret, but because the last time I brought it up it started a huge argument between me and somebody else.

The blue thing is a water dropper. The smaller black thing with gold writing on it is an ink stick. The larger black thing with a sloping well in it is the ink stone. What you do is drip a bit of water in the stone, then rub the ink stick up and down the stone through the water to make ink. Then you use the brushes to to write with the ink. Having everything in one box is convenient.

The lid is a simple lift-off lid, and the closed box is about 9 inches wide, 11.5 inches long, and 2 inches tall. It's all held together with glue and pegs, and the joinery at the corners is traditional overlap joinery.

2008.12.23 at 12:00am EST

Braiding Argh

I really want to be able to make some flat braids that are a bit wider than the 8 strand Yatsu Rai pattern I've been using. Most of the wider braids use a different kind of braiding loom, so I was really enthusiastic when I found a 16 strand Hira Kara pattern. I started briading with it, and it turns out it makes braids that are almost the same width as the 8 strand pattern, just twice as thick. In addition, the instructions note that, "How you cross the threads in steps 1 and 2 is quite important. If done correctly, both faces will be the same width. If done incorrectly, the N side will be narrower."

This was exactly my experience; the "South" side of the flat braid was four stitches wide, and the "North" side was three stitches wide. I tried crossing the threads several different ways in steps one and two, but couldn't fix the problem. Then, I got the bright idea of switching steps three and four! This evened up the braid so it's rectangular in cross section, not trapezoidal. Unfortunately, now both sides are the narrower of the two widths. This makes a solid, and presumably very strong braid, but not as wide as I was hoping. Argh.

2008.12.24 at 12:00am EST

The Meaning of Today

I think it's time to take a break from the hustle and bustle of this hectic season and contemplate the meaning of today.

Thursday, as we're all taught, is named after the Norse god Thor. Thor wears a magic belt for strength and magic gauntlets of steel that enable him to hold a mighty magic hammer. The hammer throws lightning bolts, and (if thrown itself) returns to the thrower. He drives a chariot drawn by magic goats that he can eat when hungry then revive with a touch. He uses his powers to kill giants who fear and seek to destroy him. As part of a trick, he dressed up as a woman once and married the king of the giants.

Before the Christianization of Europe, Thursday was a holy day of the week.

2008.12.25 at 12:00am EST

Friday Catblogging

Leo the Invisible

Sharon's sister's cat Leo, being invisible on the stairs.

2008.12.26 at 12:00am EST

Strange Dream

A couple of years ago, I had an interview for a training contract that included a sort of "audition". I was asked to prepare a one hour training course on anything I wanted, and deliver it to a room full of people who would later be interviewing me individually. One of the "students" in the class was audibly bored, vocally belligerent, and actively disruptive. This didn't bother me because I'd taught classes full of such types before.

It was later revealed to me that this person's purpose in the class was to try to rattle me. I suspected that, but I figured it was her personal purpose, and not her assigned task. Like I said, she didn't rattle me and I got through my class as planned. This practice struck me as being mildly dishonest, but it didn't bother me too much, and although I didn't get that contract (I don't think anybody did, actually.) it did lead to me getting another contract at that company, so whatever.

Last week I had a dream about another strange job interview. When I arrived at the job interview, I was led into a classroom where, although I had arrived on time for my interview, a seminar of some kind was already in progress. The subject matter was very boring, the chairs were too soft, and the room was too hot, making it difficult to keep my eyes open. Some of the slides in the presentation were odd, with strange layout, and sections that throbbed in and out of focus. We were given a sort of newspaper, that contained reference articles for the talk. It had printing on the front and back. The presenter pointed out that one of the articles in the paper covered three major points. I didn't see that article, so I flipped the paper over. I found the article, but it only had two points. I flipped back, to see if the article was continued, but now the other side was completely blank. Upon closer inspection, I discovered the mechanism by which this trick was achieved. Waving my paper, I strode up to the presenter and asked, "What's the deal with the trick papers? What do you hope to discover?"

The presenter smiled broadly and shrugged. "Oh, anything," the presenter chuckled.

"I think you'll find that some people don't react well to this kind of dishonesty," I said. I put my newspaper on the presenter's work table, noticed I wasn't wearing any pants, and woke up. I couldn't get back to sleep for 30 minutes.

2008.12.29 at 12:00am EST

Playlisting

Maybe ten years ago, I saw a statistic that the average CD was only listened to two or three times. When I started buying CDs, I'd typically listen to them a few times right away to get above-average use out of them, then try to keep them in rotation over time.

I wonder how this statistic is now that many people don't even buy CDs, and many more people now own portable audio devices. It's a lot easier to listen to your purchased media now than it used to be. With the shuffle feature of most digital media players, you even wind up listening more to stuff you don't even remember that you have.

So anyway, one thing I do on my MP3 player (not an iPod) is when I add a new album (almost always bought on CD and ripped to MP3 by yours truly), I add it to a playlist for the calendar year. That is, everything I bought in 2008 is listed in the file "2008.m3u". This makes end-of-year retrospective lists easier, but it typically gets ignored until the last few days of the year, when I listen to this playlist over and over. It sears the music I was interested in that year into my brain so I can remember the times and my personality a little better.

How many times does a single song bring back a memory of a time or a place? I have a playlist for each year.

2008.12.30 at 12:00am EST

Last Braids of the Year

On the last possible day of the year, I managed to fully documented the rest of the braids I did this November and December, as well as my second and third marudai. The third is something special in itself.

There's quite a variety of braiding represented here.

Silk and cotton, useful and decorative, for me and for others, I feel like I'm in my stride now as far as braiding is concerned. In 2009, I hope to try some more challenging braids, or at least finish up the 16-strand Hira Kara Gumi that's on the marudai right now.

Have a good New Year's eve, everybody!

2008.12.31 at 12:00am EST

Happy New Year

So here's our big news for the new year:

Yes, we meant this to be a suprise to as many people as possible.

2009.01.01 at 1:50pm EST

Recipe: Chicken Molé for Parties

A favorite at our parties. With everything else you might serve at a party, this is enough for about 50 people. As a stand-alone dinner, this is probably enough for 8-10 people. This recipe is based on one I got from "The Epicentre", though this version is about half as hot. The original version is painfully spicy. This version is just hot.

Ingredients

• 6 tablespoons oil
• 5 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 6 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 medium-size yellow onions, minced
• 1 quart chicken broth
• 2 cups tomato puree
• 1 tablespoon epazote
• 2 tablespoons Mexican oregano
• 3 tablespoons ancho chili powder
• 3 tablespoons chipotle powder
• 1 teaspoon ground cloves
• 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 cup shelled almonds, ground

Process

1. Add oil to an 8 quart pan and place over high heat
2. Cut chicken into 3/4 inch cubes
3. Brown chicken cubes in oil
4. Add onions and garlic to chicken and heat until fragrant
5. Add dry ingredients and stir until chicken is coated
6. Add broth and puree
7. Stir thoroughly, sraping sides and bottom of pan
8. Bring to boil
9. Turn down heat and simmer for 3 hours

Serve with rice (about 6 cups cooked should do) and beans (probably about two cans).

2009.01.03 at 17:00am EST

Dear Software Authors

While I acknowledge that it is true that your application deals directly with disc media in some way, either reading from or writing data to compact discs or digital versatile discs, putting a graphical representation of a shiny disc in your program's icon does not help me find it when it is alongside several other shockingly similar icons with shiny discs in them. Adding such other items as muscial notes, Saturnian rings, film strips, paper documents, and laser beams is not enough. Please find more inventive icon designs. My Launcher is not being as helpful as it could be, with a row of shiny discs sitting in it where helpful icons should be. Thank you.

2009.01.05 at 11:30pm EST

Bret Easton Ellis' "Glamorama"

So I'm reading this novel and thinking, "Wow, it's a pity "Zoolander" was so wacky and entertaining, because this novel about a nitwit male model who gets into a situation that's way over his head would make a great movie." Glamorama came out in 1999, two years before Zoolander, so then I start thinkning that maybe the movie is loosely based on the novel, like 2005's "The Island" was loosely (very loosely) based on the 1996 novel "Spares" by Michael Marshall Smith. Unlike Smith, Ellis actually sued the people behind the movie that was similar to his book. There must have been some merit there, because the suit was settled out of court. As a condition of the settlement, Ellis is not allowed to discuss the similarities or how they might have occurred. I find that pretty disappointing personally, but the settlement is as good as an admission of fault in my book, so I'm happy for Ellis. I hope they paid him a bunch of money.

Anyway, Glamorama starts out with Victor Ward's crazy Manhattan lifestyle spiralling out of control, and in this way it is very similar to Ellis' other novels. At the end of the first section the plot has gotten completely out of Victor's hands, but instead of charting Victor's decent into hell at home, the novel takes a turn ina completely new dimension. This begins the pattern of the book. Each section's chapters are numbered in reverse, counting down to the next point at which the plot will twist in a way that wrenches Victor's life off its tracks. I've yet to read the final section, so I can't even give away how the book ends, because I don't know where he can possibly head from where Ellis has ended section five.

What really makes this book is how internally important every little thing becomes. It's very Gene Wolfe, with its unreliable narrator who doesn't recognize the importance of something the first time he sees it, and maybe doesn't even recognize the importance of something the second or third time he sees it. At the same time, Victor is maybe mildly delusional, but this enables Ellis to add stylistic flourishes to the movel like the way scenes that are supposed to be glamorous have confetti in them, but as the novel progresses, Victor begins to notice a pervasive smell of feces and characters begin waving flies away from their faces. At the same time, it's not clear some of the things you believe are Victor's delusions are not actually there, like the way he keep talking about a "film crew" that starts following him around in section two, who you think are just a device by which the unstable Victor can disassociate himself from his life, but who later start interacting with the other characters.

I'm really glad I got started on this Brett Easton Ellis kick. I'm enjoying his books immensely. His earlier books are great stylistically, but somewhat lacking in substance. He's really growing as a writer though. I loved American Psycho, the plot of this one is even more engaging, and I still have one more to go. Please keep writing, Mr. Ellis!

2009.01.10 at 10:00am EST

More Marriage Pictures

Click for larger, though not necessarily higher quality, versions. These were taken with peoples' phones. We really should have handed out our cameras and asked people to take pictures. Those phone cameras can be OK, but not in dim lighting like this.

Talking About It

Toasting Over It

Smooching About It

Signing It

Witnessing It

Posing with the Venus de Milo

Don't blame me about that Venus de Milo thing, it's an old tradition with the group of friends that threw the New Year party where Sharon and I got together, so it had to be done.

2009.01.12 at 9:00am EST

Benjamin Button

We finally went to see this film last night. Wow, what a movie. It's quiet and subtle. It's funny and sad. It's about life. It may make you cry like a baby. The acting is great. The dialogue is only a small part of the communication. The clocks are everywhere. You should go see the movie.

Thirty years ago, people would be talking everywhere about the makeup effects used in this movie. Now, they are incidental to the movie. You won't think much about them.

I read one review of this movie, from a reviewer who was bored and compared it unfavorably to "Forest Gump". I should hunt that review down, so I know whose reviews to never read again.

2009.01.14 at 5:00pm EST

R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan

We learned today that actor Patrick McGoohan passed away yesterday at the age of 80. His 1968 TV show "The Prisoner" was (and is) hugely influential in my personality, and I mourn his passing.

The "point" of The Prisoner, as I see, it is to illuminate the role of the individual in society. We idolize the individual as a hero in so much of our society and its art works, but then so much of what we do as a society tries to break down lone wolves and force them to conform. In the final trap, a pure individual is tempted by the desire to show others "the way", and by leading the pack, join it.

I'll never forget him for bringing these thoughts to my attention. If you want to understand me, you have to understand The Prisoner (and Alan Mendelsohn the boy from Mars, but that is a story for another post).

I'm very sad that he won't be able to see the new version of The Prisoner that is being produced as a a miniseries for AMC. If you haven't seen any of the original episodes, AMC has all of them online for free, legal viewing.

2009.01.14 at 9:00pm EST

Two New Braids

Just finished up the second of two new braids. I started the first one back in December. It's a 16-strand braid using the "hira kara gumi" flat braid pattern. I was hoping for a wider braid, but instead I wound up with a braid that's twice as thick!

16-strand Hira Kara Gumi

There are actually four different kinds of brown in there, which confused the cashier in the craft store a bit, but that's just one of the many services I provide.

This braid took way too much time. The pattern is annoying to execute, and difficult to keep track of. I know I messed up at least a couple times, because eventually I noticed my threads were never getting back to their starting arrangement. After that torturous experience, I decided to do the 16-strand "kongo gumi" pattern again, which I remembered as being fun.

16-strand Kongo Gumi

I used the thick silk yarn for this braid, so it's about a half inch in diameter! I'm really happy with this braid. It's pretty and silky, and has a comfortable stretch to it.

2009.01.15 at 12:00am EST

Nice Marudai

Speaking of braids, I got tired of my plain looking marudai and their warped wood, so I bought some mildly nicer wood and gave it a nicer finish.

Swanky Marudai

It's made entirely of poplar wood (poplar 1x12 for the top and bottom and 23" poplar dowels for the legs), stained with a water-based rosewood stain, and finished with a glossy acrylic polyurethane.

Finally, a marudai that looks like furniture instead of equipment.

2009.01.16 at 12:00am EST

Jacqui Carey's "Beginner's Guide to Braiding"

Sorry, I now this blog has basically become the "braiding blog" lately, but it's sort of what my life has become at this point. I did fall asleep last night noodling on a carpentry poject, but it will be weeks or maybe months before that comes to pass, so here we go.

I finally went to the library last week to see what books they might have on kumihimo. I'd seen books from Jacqui Carey referenced on various web sites, so I was happy to find a copy of this one on the shelf. Carey is one of the luminaries in the modern braiding world. She has written several books on braiding and travels the world studying the braids of diferent cultures and giving classes. She is a mathematician, and has explored the theoretical side of braiding quite extensively, trying to determine how braiding works and developing new braids and braiding styles.

This book, Beginners Guide to Braiding: The Craft of Kumihimo is just what it says. It is a slim volume (64 pages), but it is packed with enough color photos to get anybody started with kumihimo. Carey covers all of the equipment you need, and gives instructions for six basic 8-strand braids. Each braid is diagrammed, photographed in a step by step fashion, detailed with more photographs of the "active site" of the braid, and explored with photos of color and material variations.

I went through the book, and made a sampler of all six patterns. I only did 16 or so iterations of each pattern, and I did it in a single braid to save set-up time.

Carey starts with this "square braid" that I'd never tried before. It's a good choice, I think, as the moves are simple and the braid has a nice structure.

Carey calls this "round braid". I've been calling it "kongo gumi". It's a fast, solid braid that adapts well to every even number of threads that I've tried.

This is another I haven't seen before, but this "flat braid" is a type of braid I've been looking for. Expect to see more of this braid from me in the future.

I'd made something like this "honeycomb braid" when I was playing around trying to use up yarn, so it's good to see that it's a recognized braid.

I've been calling this braid "Edo Yatsu", but Carey calls it "hollow braid". The color variations she explores show some of my favorite versions.

Everybody else seems to call this "Hira Kara Gumi", but Carey titles it "rounded flat braid". It's a classic, and a good braid for closing out the book.

This book isn't everything I might wish. For one, I can understand whe Carey wouldn't want to bog new braiders down in Japanese terminology, but I think it's a disservice to not even mention traditional names for the braids so that braiders can relate to information they find elsewhere.

Secondly, she only acknowledges traditional materials and equipment. She gives no help for braiders who might be working with floss or yarn. She gives no help for braiders who may be working with a foam disk instead of a marudai. Only brief mention is made of improvised marudai.

Anyway, I consider those to be nits to pick. This is a good introduction to kumihimo, and if my descriptions of braids have intrigued you rather than bored you, and you're uncomfortable gleaning instructions from the Internet, you should definitely hunt down this book.

2009.01.20 at 9:30am EST

Origins Nanofictionary Finals

Nanofictionary is the card game of telling tiny little stories. During the first phase of the game, you collect cards for characters, a setting, a problem, and a resolution. During the second phase, each player tells a story based on the cards they have collected. In the third phase, players and bystanders rate the stories that were told, choosing a winner.

At this past year's Origins game fair, Looney Labs ran their annual tournament for this, their game. These four players made it to the finals of the tournament. These are their stories.

Congratulations Mr. Hay on your championship!

2009.01.21 at 12:00am EST

Playing Card Awesomeness

Back in 2004 (when I was still doing non-braiding projects =^) I designed a custom deck of playing cards to be printed on PlainCards. I released a PDF to the net for free, thinking maybe somebody might want to print their own. The "face" cards were the lamest part of my design, I'll be the first to admit, since pictures are always the most difficult part of any card project for me.

Anyway, fast forward 3.5 years and the Internet has worked its magic on my lameness. A creative person with the handle of Dr. Ninjapants (who is apparently NOT Scott Bakula) took my design (which I'm totally cool with, BTW) added some sparkle and a ton of awesome to create Cher, "Dexter", Joker, Patrick Swayze, and more custom card decks to give as presents. You should totally go see Dr. Ninjapants' custom card designs right now, before he gets some kind of cease-and-desist letter from Paramount or something.

Personally, I'm horrified by the Swayze deck, but I've already written to him asking to see the WOSAT deck.

2009.01.22 at 12:00pm EST

Friday Catblogging

Twinkle Toes

Dodger lays like this sometimes, with his paws up in the air. We call this his "Twinkle Toes"pose.

2009.01.23 at 12:00am EST

Two New Braids

Two new braids this week. Actually, four, but one of them has to remain a secret as it's to be a present, and one of them was just me trying something out.

Peas and Carrots

Blue and Green Chevrons

These were both made using the "Falt Braid" pattern from Jacqui Carey's "Beginner's Guide to Braiding", but expanded to 12 and 16 strands respetively. This pattern should work with any multiple of 4, but 16 was starting to overwhelm my marudai. Each braid only used one skein of each color, so the 12-thread braid is about 3 feet long, and the 16-thread braid is only 2'3".

The "trying out" braid was an experiment to see if I could braid on my marudai using thick knitting yarn. I have volunteered to teach a class in kumihimo at a Japanese-themed SCA event at the end of next month. I'm hoping that if I use thick yarn that the students in the back will still be able to see what I'm doing. It's a bit of a challenge to deal with, but kinda fun. It works pretty well, though the braid is very loose.

2009.01.29 at 12:30pm EST

Second Pair of Tabi

I made my first pair of tabi a few months ago, but one pair just isn't going to be enough. Plus, the first didn't realy fit well. So, I made a second pair.

White Linen Tabi 2

I used a slightly modified version of the first pattern, trying to fix some of the fit problems. These are also split in front instead of in back. I'm told this is closer to historical tabi. Otherwsie, they're basically the same, right down to the same problems with missed layers during sewing. Sigh.

2009.01.30 at 12:00am EST

Pathetic and Sad, But Social

I have two woodworking projects I want to blog about, but can't. One has to be kept secret to prevent another argument about it, and the other isn't finished yet and also has no official existence. In lieu of that, here are two ridiculous experiemtns in braiding.

Shiny Square Braid

Wooly Hira Kara Gumi

The first is a Kusari Kaku Yatsu "square braid" that uses ridiculously expensive polyester "Rat Tail" cord of the type I used to use for stuff before I started braiding. This is the only braiding pattern that seemed to work well with this cord.

The second is a Hira Kara Gumi "rounded flat braid" that uses ridiculously thick yarn. I wanted to see how well this stuff braids, because I'm thinking of using it to make the braiding more visible in a teaching situation. This braid is about three quarters of an inch across!

Of course, if you take another look at the colors in those two braids, you'll realize this is just my little way of saying, "Go Steelers!"

2009.02.01 at 12:00am EST

Wooo!

Picksburgh!

I tend to watch, at most, one football game per season. That one last night was certainly worth watching. Plus, our team won. Take that, Arizona; two big defeats in four months. Yinz play hard, but that last minute really makes a difference.

2009.02.02 at 12:00am EST

Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire"

I believe this is Nabokov's commentary on literary criticism. It comprises a foreword, an epic poem, a commentary, and an index. The main problem is that the commentary is not really about the poem, but it is about what the commentator wishes the poem had been. This is, of course, all part of the game, so don't think I'm complaining.

Many people think this is one of Nabokov's masterpieces. I liked it, but can't agree. Nabokov's masterpieces are (of those I have read) Lolita, Ada, and Bend Sinister; in that order, in my opinion. This is good, and humorous, and engaging, and mysterious, and well written, but its cleverness of form interferes with its effectiveness. For instance, the editor, one Charles Kinbote, is so blinded by his own vision of the work as to miss obvious interpretations of the poem until compiling the index. Yes, you are expected to read the index. No, it doesn't tell you where the crown jewels are hidden.

"What?" you ask, "The crown jewels?"

Exactly.

Serious fans of Nabokov should probably read this, and anybody who thinks Nabokov's works are limited to tales of sexual obsessions should definitely read this (not that there isn't any sexual obsession in it (the king, it seems, to the despair of his queen, prefers men) but it isn't as central as in other works), and anybody who thinks their commentary can add to or extend a text should probably read this, but the rest of you should wait for the movie.

2009.02.04 at 12:00am EST

Now It Can Be Told

I actually finished this a couple of weeks ago, but for complex interpersonal reasons wasn't able to talk about it. You see, I knew that the probability was high that a person was going to ask me to make this object, but just had not done so, and I didn't want the request to come at an inconvenient time, so I just decided to make it first and then it would be done already.

Anyway, it's just another suzuribako. This one is a little closer to some historical examples. It's a little smaller than my second suzuribako, and a little more square. Instead of a commercial stain, I used a home made ebonizing agent which gave it this lovely charcoal gray color. It's still finished with a water-based acrylic finish, but that's for the best, I think.

Open and filled with stuff.

Closed.

It's made entirely of poplar wood, with peg fasteners. The "organizer" grid is removable.

2009.02.06 at 10:00am EST

Economic Stimulus

When times are good, conservatives (read, "Republicans") call for tax cuts. When times are bad, conservatives also call for tax cuts. Why do they bother trying to provide a rationale for this? Why don't they just admit that it's the only idea they have? Don't they realize that millions of Americans are already going to pay lower taxes this year because they don't have jobs?

2009.02.09 at 12:00am EST

Another Revelation

Here's another thing I made recently, in anticipation of somebody actually asking me to make it. It's a re-creation of a mid-16th century Japanese writing desk, called a fuzukue.

Fuzukue with my poor calligraphy upon it

It's a good thing I just finished with it, too, because it turns out there are two more things I need to make before the end of the month.

2009.02.10 at 12:00am EST

Neil Gaiman's "Coraline"

Sharon and I saw this film last night. "Coraline" is a stop-motion animated film of a short novel by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is a modern master of the fairy tale, so this film is wonderful. The story and dialog are spot on, and the animation is great. It's a real fairy tale, which means it's somewhat creepy and scary, but of course the ending is happy.

There's only one problem. Sharon and I often judges movies by how much discussion we have about them. The real purpose of art, after all, is to stimulate thought, right? So this movie is so straightforward that it leaves nothing to talk about. There's no interpretation to be done, no questions to ponder, no comparisons to make.

This movie makes an enjoyable couple of hours, but not the enjoyable few days of discussion that I really want to have. Am I just a grown-up?

2009.02.12 at 10:30pm EST

Desktop "Fuzukue"

I'm not really much for desktop images. My computer screens are normally cluttered with several large windows, and the desktop itself cluttered with icons. Usually, I stick with a simple repeating pattern. Other people, however, seem to really like using images on their desktops, so I thought I might start providing some of my more abstract photographs here, in sizes larger than I normally provide, for that purpose.

This is a photo of the wood grain of the fuzukue writing desk that I posted about the other day. You can see the join between the two poplar boards about half way down the screen. The poplar has been stained with iron acetate made by soaking steel wool in vinegar. When this soaks into the wood, the iron acetate reacts with the tannins in the wood and turns black. This darkens the wood and accentuates the grain. Some of the greens and yellows in the poplar show through the darkening in a way that they usually don't with pigment stains. It gives this piece an unusual look I really like, so here's a closer look. Click the thumbnail above for a 1600x1200 pixel version that you can use as a desktop.

2009.02.13 at 12:00am EST

The Last Good Hardware Store in Pittsburgh

When you're looking for something, and (in your opinion) any decent hardware store should have it, but you've been looking and you can't find it, then Rollier's hardware in Mount Lebanon (just South of Pittsburgh) is the place to go.

I first became aware of Rollier's when they still had a location in the city's Shadyside neighborhood. Shadyside is a mostly nice neighborhood between the Universities & Hospitals and the somewhat less nice neighboorhoods to the East. It has a lot of big old houses, but also a lot of apartments and student housing. At that time, Walnut Street was a cool shopping street in a hip neighborhood, and that location of Rollier's was the perfect hardware store for anything you might need on short notice. It had been there a while, and its stock was perectly tuned to meet the needs of the people who lived within walking distance.

That location has long since closed as Walnut Street slowly became an outdoor shopping mall and the hipness moved away to be replaced by bland affluent consumerism, but the location in Mount Lebanon is still there. This is somewhat ironic, because Mount Lebanon is it is basically one of the first places that would come to mind if you were making a list of the affluent suburbs of Pittsburgh. It's a very old-style place, though. Very insular, with their own movie theater and those little metal boxes for paying your parking fines when the meter inevitably expires before you can feed it. In most places, this kind of store is in trouble, but I have no doubt Mt. Lebanon locals support this store as much as possible.

Anyway, the Rollier there is big. It's about as big as supermarkets used to be before they went gigantic. The staff there is solicitous ("Anything I can help you find today?") but polite about leaving you alone if you don't need help. The store doesn't stock huge quantities of anything, but they stock a little bit of everything, and the staff knows where it all is.

For a while, we've been wanting a scoop of some kind for loading wood pellets into the pellet stove. Our best guess was a pet store, but apparently pets only eat food one cup at a time, so scoops are sized that way. Rollier's had four different sizes, and I think the one I bought holds about six cups.

I've also been looking for water based sanding sealer. I used to get it at Lowes and Home Despot, but they don't carry it any more and the staff doesn't know anything about it. They had it at Rollier's, and the guy at the paint counter knew enough to tell me that the manufacturer had just been bought out and if I really liked the stuff I should buy more than one can.

In the past, I've bought Rubbermaid items of the type nobody else carries and Dremel Accessories that aren't found on the standard retail rack. You'll also wind up buying stuff you didn't know you needed until you saw it, so shop carefully. The power of Rollier's should always be used for good, and never for evil.

2009.02.16 at 12:00am EST

Pittsburgh is Like This

When I made my pilgrimage out to Rolliers for yesterday's post, I had intended to stop on the way back at a hobby shop in Dormont that is to hobby shops what Rolliers is to hardware stores. To my dismay, it was gone. Of course, I don't even know what the store was called, I just knew where it was.

After making yesterday's post, I decided to do some more research on Rolliers, and I found out that after the hobby shop closed dues to a nearby car dealership buying their building, the A. B. Charles Hobby Shop has moved to a barn-shaped location that was... of course... the original location of Rolliers.

It's like when you have a party and you try to invite friends from several different circles to try to mix things up in your social life, and you find out that most of them know each other anyway. Pittsburgh is like this.

2009.02.17 at 12:00am EST

Blog Laziness to Which I Hope I Never Succumb

Here are three things some other blogs do that I hope I never do on this blog, because the exemplify laziness to me.

"Best Of" Posts

Some blogs only do this once a year, which is OK, I guess, but some blogs do it every week. I guess those posts are for people who only read blogs on the weekend, but all they do is sum up a week's worth of posting to that very same blog with links back to the original posts. It's like, "I can't think of anything to post today, so I'll just post a list of things I posted earlier this week." If people want to know what you posted this week, they can go back and look.

"Cross Blogging"

Sometimes, in order to refocus a blog, the blog author or authors will start up an additional blog into which they shunt posts that don't match the focus into the other blog. This is good. Bad is linking from the original blog over to the new blog every single day to keep people from forgetting its over there. Worse is making daily "best of" posts about the new blog and posting them to the original blog. What is the additional blog for again, exactly? Yes, to de-clutter the original blog. So why are you re-cluttering the original blog?

"Guest Blogging"

"We don't feel like updating our own blog as much any more, so one by one we're going to ask our friends to take over for us for short stretches of time." Hey, if your friends wanted to blog, they'd have their own blog, and when you didn't feel like posting, you could just post links to their blog with a short quote and a "yeah!" or "me, too!". That is valid (if boring) blogging, as far as I am concerned. If you want to offer up your blog as a guest pulpit to your friends, that does not absolve you from posting yourself.

2009.02.18 at 12:00am EST

Filled Pink Pyramids

Looney Labs recently released a new color of Treehouse/Icehouse pyramids, Pink. I have filled stashes of every other color, so it was time to break out the hot glue gun and fill some pieces.

Filled Pink Pyramids

It's been a while since I filled pyramids, and I'm shocked to discover that I've kind of lost my touch. I had big problems with getting a smooth fill, and with those strings of hot glue that get everywhere. Being off my stride certainly didn't help that I was using a mixture of fluorescent pink an fluorescent orange hot glue with a little white kicked in when thpse ran out, and a bit of green that was still in the gun when I started.

I keep most of my pyramids in one of those sets of little plastic utility drawers. I'm down to just three empty drawers in a set of 60. That's somewhat scary.

2009.02.19 at 9:30am EST

Project Slide-Top Boxes

Two more prizes for the Mi-no-Hi festival this coming Saturday. Well, actually, prize containers.

Big and Little Slide-Top Boxes

These wooden boxes have sliding tops, and are both about 16 inches long when closed. The larger one is made of 5.5" wood, and the smaller one is made of 3.5" wood. They both have overlap joinery at the corners, and are fastened with pegs. They're both solid poplar, including the pegs and the dowel piece lid pulls.

2009.02.23 at 9:00am EST

Mini-Project Tape Roll Rack

I've been spending so much time down in the basementworkshop these days that some of the little things about my project space that have been bothering me for years have finally annoyed me enough to find solutions.

Tape Roll Rack

This one's a little rack to hold rolls of tape. The plate is a scrap piece of 1x2. The dowel pieces are 2.25" lengths of scrap loset rod. The discs are 3"-diameter circles of 1/4" plywood, cut with a hole saw. The whole thing is attached to my workbench just over the drill press.

Before I had this rack, all my rolls of tape were on a single hook, which was slightly inconvenient when I needed to get to the one in back, which alwys turned out to be the one I wanted. Now, random access is a little better. You can buy these is stores, but building it out of scrap is cheaper.

2009.02.24 at 12:00am EST

Project Work Table

Another project born of my spending a bunch of time in the workshop recently. The table I was using for this saw was old an rickety, plus I accidentally broke it recently. Here is the new table:

Work Table

This is another project made entirely from stuff I had laying around. The brackets are left over from the Storage Shelves project from seven years ago. The 1/2" plywood top is left over from the Toy Chest project from seven months ago. The rest of the lumber is left over from at least two different projects.

This new table is sturdier than the old one, and it has more storage space underneath for workshop clutter. The plywood top overhangs the frame by 1.5" all the way around to enable clamping items to the table. Currently, that's the only clever feature I've added, though I'm considering adding apower strip and a kraft paper dispenser.

2009.02.25 at 12:00am EST

Braids Again

Just in case you thought that my life had become all about lumber and cutting and the joining thereof, you should know that I have been braiding as well. Here are the latest four braids I've braided, some of them being experiments in material to make interesting examples for a class in braiding I am teaching this Saturday at the Mi-no-Hi festival. (I did the web pages for that event, too.)

Black and Gold Silk

I started this braid just after the superbowl, and it took me a few weeks to get it completed. It's over eight feet long and done in the Hira Kara Gumi style, which is a slow-going braid for me. I've now completed two of the 37 possible HKG two-color patterns.

Extended Sampler in Combed Silk

I couldn't find my original sampler of the patterns in Jacqui Carey's Beginners Guide to Braiding, so I made a new, longer one to show during my class. The sections are about 12 inches long instead of about 4 inches long on the first one. I had enough yarn on the bobbins to add a section of Yatsu Rai and a section of a braid I came up with (I call it "Long Spiral") to the end of the sampler.

Rope and Yarn Together

I was wondering how well this 40-pound test nylon line would braid. It, like the rat-tail cord, only worked well in the Kusari Kaku Yatsu "square braid". You can see how it pushed the polyester yarn off to the sides, making it more like a flat braid instead of a square. It's reasonably attractive, but its main purpose is to have an approximate test weight capable of holding my weight, in case I ever need a braid to save my life. &smirk;

Yarn with a Rope Core

Slighly more decorative, this braid uses the Edo Yatsu eight-strand braid, which is hollow. I ran a length of nylon rope down the center, which makes this braid stronger than mere yarn, but the rope is completely hidden.

2009.02.26 at 7:30am EST

Zabuton

I even found some time to do some quick utility sewing recently. The organizer (Called "autocrat" in the SCA) of the Mi-no-Hi event tomorrow announced that royal court at the event will be held in traditional Japanese "sit on the floor" style, so I made a pair of zabuton floor cushions, one for myself and one for Sharon.

Beige Woolen Zabuton

Cream Cotton Zabuton

These are covered with extra fabric we had sitting around, and filled with some 3 inch thick foam rubber I had left over from a chair restoration. There's also a layer of carpet padding glued to the foam to keep the cushion from totally bottoming out.

Two of the three seams are sewn on the serger, and the final seam is blind-stitched by hand to close the cover. I also sewed on some fabric tags with my personal badge ("On a hexagon Or, a rabbit's head cabossed sable", which means "a black bunny head on a honey-gold hexagon") so they can be identified later.

2009.02.27 at 12:00am EST

Biggest News First

At this weekend's Mi-no-Hi festival event for the local SCA kingdom, both Sharon and I were called before the King and Queen of Aethelmearc to receive praise. Both she and I received our "Award of Arms", and I was made a companion of the Order of the Sycamore.

The Award of Arms (AoA) is a recognition, essentially, that you have been around a while, and seem to be taking this whole SCA thing seriously. It allows us to use the titles "Lord" and "Lady" before our names, and to refer to our heraldic devices (when and if approved by the College of Heralds) as "arms" (as in "coat of arms").

The Sycamore is the first level recognition of work in the Arts and Sciences (A&S). It signifies that a person has been working hard at things and promoting that ideal by teaching others. Most people translate it to words as, "You're doing good work; keep it up!" This encouragement comes from the King and Queen, however, so it's really ultra super cool. It comes with a medallion bearing the device of the order, and beautiful scroll which was worded by Sir Ogami Akira (The Daimyo of Clan Yama Kaminari) and penned by his squire (and our friend) Lady Minamoto no Taikawa Saiaiko.

We're totally psyched. Sharon and I have been referring to each other as Lady Wonderful and Lord Honey Bunny ever since.

2009.03.02 at 7:00am EST

One Last Pre-Festival Project: Shoji

As a last project made before the Mi-no-Hi festival, I constructed these Shoji screens from cedar and paper.

Shoji

They're actually much rougher in person than in the picture, given that the cedar lumber I used is intended for outdoor stuff like decking, and not interior furniture, but I'm pretty happy with how they came out. They're hinged together in pairs to allow them to be free-standing. The paper is real kozo paper. It's basically the lowest grade of calligraphy paper, but pretty high grade for this purpose.

At the event, they were used to help create a "tea house" area for Lady Solveig's tea ceremony demos, and as a backdrop for royal court. I received many compliments, and I'm about 3/4 of the way through writing up the project description. Here's a picure of them in use just before court.

Photo by Lynette Vybiral

2009.03.03 at 10:00am EST

Three "Class"y Braids

I taught a class in kumihimo over the weekend, and I used the big puffy wool/acrylic yarn to aid visibility during the class. I began these three braids in class to give the students a healthy introduction to kumihimo, but didn't finish them until a few days later at home.

Braid 35, 4 strand maru yotsu

Braid 36, 8 strand edo yatsu

Braid 37, 8 straid yatsu rai

I like to start with the simple 4 strand braid, just to show students the basic set up and moves. The 8 strand edo yatsu is a good introduction to 8 strand braiding after that. The 8 strand yatsu rai demonstrates the difference in shape that occurs just by changing movements. I also started an 16 strand kongou gumi in class, but Sharon finished that one up, so it's hers.

2009.03.05 at 11:00am EST

Assblogging Returns

Rudely Parked Kia

Almost perfectly centered between two spots, and only half way in. Some kind of office supply emergency, as this is out front of the Office Despot

2009.03.06 at 12:00am EST

Bill Maher Says It

That doesn't make it true, but I agree with him.

"How stupid is it when people say, 'Oh yeah, that's all we need, the federal government telling Detroit how to build cars or Wells Fargo how to run a bank. You want them to look like the post office?' Yeah. You mean the place that takes a note in my hand in Los Angeles on Monday and gives it to my sister in New Jersey on Wednesday for forty-two cents? Let me just be the first to say I would be thrilled if America's health care system was anywhere near as functional as the post office."

You can watch it on video here if you're the kind of person who prefers that kind of thing.

2009.03.09 at 12:00am EDT

Braid #38

Tried out a new kind of 16 strand braid. This one uses a braiding pattern similar to the 8 strand Edo Yatsu, but with twice as many strands.

16 Strands in Red & White

I started out with a nice houndstooth check pattern, but somewhere in the middle it devolved into a weird hybrid of the interlocking E pattern and the houndstooth. Apparently with the 16 strands you can acheive some interesting effects, but on my first full braid in this style it was flying blind.

I've grown inured to the truth that the first time you try a new plaiting pattern, you probably won't have the hang of it, and will probably mess it up. I used cheap acrylic yarn for this braid on purpose so I wouldn't be wasting good silk on my experimentation.

2009.03.11 at 12:00am EDT

I am a Booze Icon

Local TV station WTAE did a news feature on Pennsylvania's plan to give employees of the state's "Wines & Spirits" stores some customer service training. They shot the interviews at the newer, shiner, "East Side" store, but they were shooting B-roll content at the store in Monroeville where I was browsing the other day.

I appear briefly at about the one minute mark, shown from behind browsing the snooty wine section, while the announcer says "customers who frequent these stores" in voice over. Because I'm in the frame at 1:00, I also get to be in the reference image for the video and in the thumbnail icon.

My take on the story, by the way, is that interviewing people about their experiences in the Pittsburgh-area stores is useless. Pittsburgh is a nice town, and the employees here are always nice even when they don't know the answer to your question. Other areas of PA (Philadelphia, for instance) are not so nice. Did you note that it's a Pittsburgh firm that will be giving the training? Also, $175,000 is a lot of money, but it comes out to less than $300 per store. That's not a lot of money.

2009.03.11 at 10:00am EDT

Desktop "Cedar"

This is a scan of some of the cedar wood left over from the shoji project. I used it to practice building a rubbed oil finish. There are three coats of boiled linseed oil worked into this wood by hand, which really pops the grain and gives it a smooth natural-feeling finish.

2009.03.12 at 12:00am EDT

Bead Braid

Somebody I know asked me recently about braiding with strands of beads. I had never tried it, and other people have mentioned it to me in the past, and I was walking past a bead store yesterday, and...

Braid 39, a braid of beaded strands

This braid has eight strands of tiny seed beads, strong on "Fireline" beading cord. It's kind of a pain stringing the beads onto the line, and a constant pain keeping the line tension good while you're braiding, but it makes a very shiny and sinuous pieces of bling. The tension is off in a few places, but I'm very happy with the braid over all, especially for a first try.

2009.03.13 at 11:45am EDT

Useful Braid

No posts for ten days; gosh I suck. In my defense, my parents visited last week. Don't get me wrong, I love my parents, and I like spending time with them, but it takes energy I'm not used to expending. I think they had a good time. Anyway, the day before they arrived I finished this practical braid.

Braid 40, eyeglass cord

This is an "8 tama" braid, plaited using eight bobbins. The four white bobbins had two strands of whote silk yarn on them, and the four black bobbins had three strands of black silk on them. This was an attempt to balance out the white yarn being thicker than the black yarn. It worked, but the braid is fairly chunky.

One of these days, I should write up this plaiting pattern. I haven't seen it in any of my books, and I may have invented it. When I show people the sampler baird (#18), they often remark on it.

2009.03.23 at 12:00am EDT

Day Break

I hardly watch any broadcast TV at all, so shows tend to come and go without my notice, unless they're really popular in which case they simply come and go without me watching but with a cerain general awareness I'm missing something. I totally missed Firefly when it aired, and later enjoyed it on DVD. Somebody recently recommended last year's "Day Break" to me, so I borrowed it from a friend and watched the series over this past weekend.

It is great. Combine the mechanic of "Groundhog Day" with a taut crime thriller using Gene Wolfe's passion for detail, and you have this show. Everything, and I mean every last measly detail and every last person the main character meets ties into the story somehow, and it takes thirteen journeys through a single day to find out how.

I've been watching Joss Whedon's new show, Dollhouse on Hulu as new episodes air, and I find myself worrying that as virtuosic as it is so far, the series will only be "worth it" if the things I am seeing in each episode "pay off" in some fashion good or bad. The only way to know for sure is to keep watching or to wait until the end when people tell me. So far, it's doing very well, but it's not yet a sure bet. Let's say 85%.

Day Break is totally worth it. Watch it, take notes, indulge your geekery. It's an action/suspense show, but it is excellent speculative fiction and excellent fiction. Plus, it has Adam Baldwin in it.

I recently watched Drillbit Taylor specifically for the Adam Baldwin cameo. That totally wasn't worth it. Well, the cameo was worth it, just not the whole movie.

2009.03.24 at 12:00am EDT

Another Bead Braid

If something goes well the first time I try it, I usually try it a second time to demonstrate my success is repeatable.

Braid 41, bead braid 2

Once again, I made eight strands of seed beads on Fireline, then braided them together. I started with more beads, so this braid is about eight inches longer than the first bead braid. I need to get some findings for this to turn it into a necklace, as I did with the first one.

I'm also in the middle of a bigger braiding project, doing all six of Jacqui Carey's patterns from her "Beginners Guide to Braiding" in red and white. I'm on the last braid, but it's the most annoying, so who knows how long it will take me.

2009.03.25 at 12:00am EDT

This is Not Me

As I've mentioned before, I have a Google News Alert set up to send me email any time there's a news story that mentions my name. Most often, it's somebody named "Elliott" whose name is mentioned near somebody else's who is named "Evans". Here's a recent one that isn't like that, "Realtor and former North Myrtle Beach councilman Taylor dies".

I don't know any of those people, but a relative's passing is always sad, even if it completes a fortunate life. My sympathies to the Taylor and Evans families. We people named "Elliott Evans" have to stick together.

2009.03.30 at 12:00am EDT

Randall Monroe

Honestly, some days I suspect he's reading the minds of every geek in the world, and pleasing them one by one. Yesterday was apparently my day.

It's interesting though, that when Mr. Monroe has this fantasy he envisions wielding a blowtorch, and when I have this fantasy I envision wielding a laser.

2009.03.31 at 12:00am EDT

Beaded Braided Bracelet

Took a class, actually took a class in braiding with beads over the weekend at a local bead store. I knew what the standard technique was supposed to look like, but my attempts to recreate it were awful, so I wanted to have somebody show me what I was doing wrong. It turns out that the main thing I was doing "wrong" was using a marudai, as most of the techniques use a braiding disk. So, taking the class showed I just need different techniques or something. Anyway, here's what I made:

Braid 42, bracelet with fire polish beads.

The underlying braid is an 8-strand Kongo Gumi round braid. Four of the strands are unbeaded, two are strung with gold beads, and two are strung with black beads. The standard technique has you only adding a bead when the strand is moving from the "2" position down to the "5" position, but the tension on my strands was not as great even after I upped the weight on each strand to 1.75 ounces, and I was going through cord much faster than I was going through braids. So, I started over and added a bead every time a beaded strand was moving. This gives my braid a double helix instead of a single helix and inspires me to find beads in green, cyan, silver, and tan, and encode something.

I also saw that Jacqui Carey has an entire book out with 192 pages of braiding with beads. I'll have to pick that up at some point.

2009.04.01 at 7:30am EDT

Traditional Tama

For my birthday, my mother in law got me a set of 8 traditional kumihimo tama. "Tama" are the weighted bobbins/spools used by serious kumihimo braiders instead of the home-made things I was using.

Kumihimo Tama

They weigh about 3 ounces each, which is four times heavier than the weights I was using. This puts a lot more tension on the threads, resulting in a tighter braid. Most of the literature I've seen has this the opposite way, so I don't quite understand, but I'm sure I'll have plenty of experimentation. Here's the first experiment right here:

Braid 43, thick and thin and flat

Here's the first braid with the new tama. I used the Hira Nami flat braid pattern with two thick gold yarn strands and six thin black yarn strands. This yields a nice zig-zag pattern, and the braid is tight enough to be somewhat positionable.

2009.04.02 at 12:00am EDT

Friday Catblogging

Dodger on the window sill

2009.04.03 at 12:00am EST

More Example Beginner Braids

I really need to catch up on documenting stuff. I've been posting braids to the blog here, but I haven't updated the Marudai page in months. I'm going to hold off making new braids for a bit while I get caught up, but I still even have a backlog of braids to post here. Today's braid is actually a st of braids.

Six 8-strand braids

These are six 8-tama braids, each about three feet long. They use the six braiding patterns from Jacqui Carey's "Beginner's Guide to Braiding". They all use the "WW RR WW RR" color pattern, which makes some of the braids more interesting, and some of them not as interesting. All of them are braided using needlepoint silk, with two threads on each tama. These will probably, some day, be donated to the Kingdom for use as award cords, but for now they are going to be examples, and possible part of a kumihimo A&S display.

There's also the possibility that I might be teaching a class or two in kumihimo in the near future, if I can work out some technical issues. Stay tuned.

2009.04.07 at 11:00am EDT

Project Brass Bunny Tokens

In the SCA, my "arms" are described as, "Fieldless, on a hexagon Or a rabbit's head cabossed sable". That's a fancy way of saying "A black bunny's head on a gold hexagon". That's a cute way of creating a "Honey Bunny" image. It's suitably Japanese, yet it can be expressed in Western terms, so I think it should be a good SCA badge. So far it's passed the Kingdom Heralds, maybe by Pennsic I'll be able to use it without worrying.

Another tradition is for artists and craftspeople to put items on display at events so others can see what kinds of things people are doing. Sometimes, this display is part of a judged competition, but sometimes it is simply a non-competitive display. In most cases, viewers will often leave "tokens" at displays they particularly enjoy. This is just meant as a "tip o' the hat" to the artisan for a work well executed.

Brass Bunny Token

So these are my new tokens. I've painted black bunny heads on nine brass hexagons, and attached short lengths of braid to each. The braid is an 8-strand Edo Yatsu braid with a nice "interlocking E" pattern in black and yellow cotton. The bunny was simply stencilled onto 1 inch wide brass strip, which I then cut into hexagons and drilled for the cord.

If you're an artisan or craftsperson in the SCA, and if I leave one of these tokens at one of your displays, please consider it an invitation to hunt me out at some point and talk to me about your work.

2009.04.08 at 6:00am EDT

Project Four Marudai

I've been talking lately to an awfully large number of people about kumihimo. I know you're surprised about that. Anyway, the biggest barrier for most people is acquiring a marudai. Not everyone has a pile of tools and scrap wood in the basement. This is also an impediment to me teaching classes in kumihimo, as I can't ask people to all crowd around and just watch me braid. So, I decided to make a few more marudai.

Batch of 4 Marudai

I wound up making four. They're made of pine board and poplar dowels, finished in a satin polyurethane. They're about 16 inches tall and the "mirror" disk of each marudai is about 11 inches across with a 1.25" hole. All edges have been rounded. Two are nearly perfect, but two have minor problems. What I'm thinking now is that I'll make a few more, then teach classes on the imperfect ones and offer to sell the more perfect ones to my students.

Most marudai I've seen for sale on the net are $80 to $100, then you have to pay shipping. These are not as nice as some of the commercial ones I've seen, but they take quite a few hours worth of work anyway. I'll probably sell the best of them for $50 or $60. Contact me if you're really interested, so I can gauge how many more I need to make.

2009.04.09 at 12:00am EDT

Project Marudai Page Updated

I went to show somebody pictures of my braiding online, and I realized that I hadn't updated my marudai page for months. Asking people to sift through months of blog posts looking for braiding pictures is ridiculous, so I'm working on getting that up to date.

The Marudai project page has now been updated to the end of January, showing all of the marudai and kumihimo braids I made in that time. Soon I'll have it updated to the end of March at least, and that takes me into more impressive stuff.

This page is getting a little long now. It started with a single marudai and a few example braids, but now it's four marudai and 30 braids. I imagine it's quite a pain waiting for all the images to download. Soon it will show all the extra marudai, and 16 newer braids from February, March, and April. I haven't even started in on learning the patterns in the books Sharon got me for my birthday!

I have also updated the main project index to at least show a list of all the projects I've completed so far this year. I still need to document some projects from July of last year, so it will be a while before that is complete.

2009.04.10 at 12:00am EDT

Malaysian Marudai Manufactory

Our friends who do combat archery in the SCA have a phrase that describes what a room looks like when they all get together as a group to produce SCA-legal combat arrows. They call it, the "Guatemalan Arrow Factory." (This is not meant as a racial epithet, but as a tribute to the hard work in poor conditions of the third-world workers who usually get taken for granted.)

Right now, my basement is full of pieces to make Marudai. Here are some pictures of what it looks like:

Mirrors for eight marudai

Square bases for eight marudai

The bases and mirrors are up on blocks so that their wet edges don't rest on anything while they dry. By the time I'm done finishing one side of all 16 pieces, the first pieces are dry enough to be flipped and have their other sides done. I finish the bottom surfaces first, so the top (visible) surfaces have more time to dry in their final position. Sanding usually has to wait until the next day to let the finish cure completely.

Dowels for legs for eight marudai

Thankfully, I realized that I could do some preliminary finishing on the dowels before cutting them up into 15 inch pieces. Unfortunately, I'd already cut up one dowel; that's why there are three shorties in that picture.

So far, these are the steps I've completed on the build:

1. Cut squares for bases.
2. Cut squares for mirrors.
3. Cut mirrors into circles.
4. Drill holes for legs in bases   mirrors.
5. Drill big holes in center of mirrors.
6. Route all lower edges with 1/8" roundover bit.
7. Route all upper edges with 3/8" roundover bit.
8. Sand with 80 grit to remove saw marks and complete shaping.
9. Sand with 120 grit to smooth.
10. Finish with sanding sealer.

You'd think steps one and two could be the same, but it turns out that not all 1x12 lumber is the same width. One 8 foot 1x12 I bought was 11 inches wide, and the other was 11 ³/₈ inches wide. Craziness. I used the wider lumber for the circles, since I was cutting 11 inch circles out anyway, and it would be easier if I had a bit of margin while cutting.

Next is:

11. Sand with 220 grit to smooth.
12. Finish with polyurethane.
13. Cut dowels into legs.
14. Sand with 320 grit to smooth.
15. Assemble marudai.
16. Finish with polyurethane.
17. Sand top surfaces and edges of mirrors and bases with 440 grit to smooth.
18. Finish sanded surfaces with polyurethane.
19. Wet sand top surface of mirror using 1200 grit.
20. Finish sanded surfaces with polyurethane.

So, mostly the hard hard work is over, but assembly and finishing will take another week or two. Making four marudai at a time was fun, but eight at a time is somewhat grueling. The plan is to sell the nicer half dozen, and use the less nice half dozen to teach classes.

2009.04.13 at 12:00am EDT

Desktop "Poplar"

This is a scan of some of the poplar wood used for the fuzukue project.

2009.04.14 at 12:00am EDT

Second Batch of Marudai is Complete

Just put the last coat of finish on the top of each of these marudai, so I declare them complete!

Eight more marudai in the basement

Now I have a dozen marudai, and it's time to decide which six are going up for sale and which six are becoming "student marudai".

2009.04.15 at 4:30pm EDT

Warm Bead Braid

Looks like I'm going to wind up making a bunch of these, as I keep giving them away as presents. Here's one I finished last week but haven't yet posted about.

Red and Gold Braided Beads

Once again, these are eight strands of glass seed beads on Fireline, braided with the edo yatsu braiding pattern. This time I used the "Interlocking E" color pattern (XX XO OX OO), which makes it very difficult to see what the actual pattern is in this braid. I think that's kind of neat. These colors together make this braid very warm.

2009.04.16 at 12:00am EDT

Friday Catblogging

Mischa wrapped in Ethel's tail

This week's award for gratuitous feline cuteness goes to...

2009.04.17 at 12:00am EST

My Own Tama

Yesterday, I went over somebody else's house and used his router table to start shaping my own tama from 1.5" poplar dowel. Today, I bought some steel rod to make slugs to weight those tama and put the slugs inside the bobbins.

Poplar Tama with Steel Cores

Altogether, these weigh about 1.6 ounces, which is about half the weight of the commercial tama, but should be good. The heavy tama are nice for heavier yarn, but maybe a bit too heavy for embroidery floss, so these will be a good addition to my kit. They're tons cheaper, too, if you don't count the time I put in.

2009.04.21 at 9:15pm EDT

Silk Braid with Heavy Tama

Speaking of those heavy 3-ounce tama, here's a braid I made with those on one of the best of the second batch of marudai.

Blue and Gold Silk Yatsu Rai

This braid uses eight strands of combed silk yarn, 4 blue and four gold. As a little stylistic flourish, I braided the cords together in a 4-strand maru yotsu braid before doubling them over, so the rbaid has a braided loop at the starting end. The bulk of the braid uses the yatsu rai pattern, which I think is just a special name you use for yatsu sen when it makes this "S" pattern.

It's a pity we usually associate these colors so strongly with the Cub Scouts, since they go very well together.

2009.04.22 at 12:45am EDT

Blue and Green Bead Braid

So OK, I decided to make another one of these bead braids. They make great presents, OK?

Blue and Green Bead Braid

This one is braided using a "Houndstooth Check" color pattern on the edo yatsu. See what I'm saying about the great patches of color this produces? You can also really see the colors travelling back and forth through the braid.

I also figured out why the tension is a little uneven on these bead braids. The start of the braid is always very tight, but it loosens up over the course of the braid. The reason is that the beaded strands have significant weight, which shifts from the outside to the inside while the strands get shorter and the braid gets longer. I need to start changing the weights as I braid, maybe startig with 3/4 ounce weights on the strands and switching to 1 ounce weights later on.

2009.04.23 at 3:45am EDT

Completed Tama

Completed that project to make eight wooden tama bobbins. I'll probably never put these into mass production for sale, since they're such a pain I'd have to charge just as much as everybody else does for them, like $5 each.

Eight 1.7 ounce Tama

The orange dots on the ends are the wood filler I used to seal up the hole with the steel weight in it. Wow, is that ugly. A friend suggested using old copper pennies as weght instead of steel, if I make more. That's a good idea because I'll be able to use 3/4" poplar dowel to plug the holes insetad of filler.

As with everything else, this project isn't really done until I use it.

Tama in Use

2009.04.24 at 11:30am EDT

Workbench Re-Org

I've been spending quite a bit of time in front of the workbench lately, and my frustration with it has been growing. Tools have been mounted on it haphazardly on an ad-hoc basis, so almost nothing was placed logically. All that came to an end today, as I re-organized nearly the whole pegboard.

Workbench

I even got rid of some stuff that had been hanging, so there is significantly more room for expansion. I wish the Dremel accessory rack could be a bit closer to the Dremel holder, but moving either would be way too disruptive.

I pretty much expect to spend the next six months looking for tools in the places they've been for the past six years instead of their new locations, so if you never hear from me again you know I've driven myself insane.

2009.04.29 at 7:30pm EDT

Greenola

I have to say that adding pistachios to this batch of granola didn't really improve the taste enough to balance out the down side of having little crunchy green bits in something you're trying to eat.

2009.05.02 at 3:00pm EDT

More Tama

Eight is not enough!

I decided that eight hand made wooden tama were not enough, so to round out my collection I made 16 more. Actually, I made 18 more and declared two of them to be substandard, but anyway...

16 Kumihimo Bobbins

These are made from 1.5" poplar dowel just like the others, but I shaped them using a 3/4" sanding drum in my drill press instead of using somebody else's router table. This method was a little slower, but it used tools I have at home.

Another difference is that instead of using iron rod to add weight to the tama, I used old copper pennies. Copper pennies (pre-1982) are cheaper per ounce, and fit well in a 3/4" diameter cavity. This also meant I could use dowel to plug the hole instead of bright orange wood filler.

2009.05.04 at 12:00am EDT

Happy Star Wars Day

May the fourth be with you!

2009.05.04 at 12:01am EDT

Silk Braid with Home-Made Tama

Used the first set of home-made tama to braid some black and white silk yarn in the hira nami "flat waves" pattern.

Black and White Silk

My main goal was to make the 30" glasses cord you see in front, but I loaded so much silk on the tama that I wound up making more than four feet of additional braid.

2009.05.05 at 12:00am EDT

Chess Table

Chess Table, by Joseph Lamar

On sale at Pittsburgh's Construction Junction, for $250. Includes chess pieces made from household hardware!

2009.05.08 at 5:00pm EDT

Books for Girls

Books for Girls

Now, I know this isn't the case. I know these shelves are only empty because of some inventory thing, but I thought it was a funny image. What does that mean, anyway, "books for girls"? Do they smell nice? Do they have pink bows on them?

2009.05.09 at 12:00am EDT

Upcatching

Biggest news first, I have a new contract. That's part of why I didn't post at all last week. The new contract is with a large financial organization, through a local staffing firm. No names here only because I don't want search engines linking my blog to those venerable (and possibly vindictive) organizations, though you can find all the relevant info on my LinkedIn profile. Anyway, the contract only lasts until the end of the year, which is OK with me if that's all it turns out to be, though I did manage to get a promotion on my very first day, which bodes well for the future. Their expectations of contractors appear to be quite low.

The company, though based in two separate downtown areas (bank mergers were once quite popular) only has office space available out in the sticks. That is to say, my commute is long. Probably not very long compared to what some of you deal with, but quite long for Pittsburgh at about 30 miles. These 30 miles take 45 to 50 minutes to traverse, leaving me with over 90 fewer minutes per day when I cannot braid but during which I am not being paid to do something else. I do have a few braids completed that I haven't posted about, so that might get me through the rest of this week.

2009.05.18 at 7:00am EDT

Star Trek

Sharon and I saw the new "Star Trek" movie over the weekend, and we really liked it. I thought it managed to hit all the notes just right to convey to viewers that it is Star Trek, just not the Star Trek you're used to. It has the same great balance between action, adventure, humor, and drama that some of the best TV and cinematic trek adventures had. It has new actors, and their new interpretations of what their characters should be like are pretty different, but I liked them. If there are more movies with this team I think they will settle into their characters very well and gvie us some great performances. As usual, a lot of the responsibility will rest on the writers to give us a script that is worth watching.

Now, it definitey had some problems, but nothing so major that we won't mostly forget about if there are several better films afterwards. Most of the criticisms I've seen have more to do with not understanding Star Trek than than anything actually specifically about this film. Yes, its flavor is much like a Western. So was the original series! Yes, it shares similarity with Star Wars. They both share heroic tropes from the same classic sources! Yes, the characters themselves are more like caricatures. So is every character in every Star Trek ever!

Do you remember how awful the first few episodes of every new Star Trek show has been? This movie is not awful in any of those ways. I dont' think it's awful at all.
…except for the lens flares. Ugh.

2009.05.19 at 7:00am EDT

Twenty Years Ago

Well, not quite twenty years ago actually, but almost, I graduated from High School. This past weekend, I went to my 20 Year Reunion. I had fun! I recommend it to anybody. People have said to me, "I don't want to go see those people. I dont' care about those people. If I cared, I'd keep in touch." Myself, it's not that I don't care, it's that I don't care enough to keep up with the hard work of keeping in touch with all those people. Catching up with them once in a while when they happen to all be in the same place appeals to my laziness, though.

I don't know about you, but my High School experience was largely lacking in malevolence. There were plenty of people who didn't like me, but mostly they just didn't even bother to acknowledge me, so what did it matter to me? Many people with whom I went to HS were nice and even if they weren't motivated to be close friends, were nice enough to be friendly, and it's true to this day, actually. People I haven't really spoken to in 20 years are just as friendly as they were 20 years ago. Thanks, cool people I went to HS with!

I'm also amazed at how well my cohort has aged. We're all pushing 40 now, but I swear some people look exactlythe same as they did 20 years ago. Some of the faces have changed shape into more mature forms, but most everybody looks so amazingly the same. It's encouraging.

Anyway, if any of my EHS friends are reading this, HI! It was "totally boss" (nobody actually talked like this in the eighties) seeing you this weekend.

2009.06.01 at 9:00pm EDT

Desktop "Liberty Wall"

This is a photo of the wall of Pittsburgh's famous Liberty Tubes, These tunnels are about a mile long, and have traffic lights at either end, which mean syou're bound to spend at least a little bit of time each trip staring at the crumbling concrete that enables you to pass through Mount Washington.

2009.06.02 at 12:00am EDT

Traditional Silk Braid

Here's a silk braid I did in brown and dark brown, using the hira nami flat braiding pattern.

Brown and Brown Silk Braid

Instead of using yarn of multi-stranded floss for this braid, I actually did it more traditionally by buying a spool of silk thread and creating 8 strands of warp warp from 40 threads each of two different colors. Fun, but just as expensive as buying silk needlepoint thread, which is thicker to begin with and available in more colors..

2009.06.03 at 12:00am EDT

Black and Gold Bead Braid

I seem to have worked out most of the bugs in my bead braiding process. This braid is nearly perfect, if you ask me. It uses these great matte-finsih glass beads in black and metallic gold. Nearly everybody who sees this braid in person says , "Wow."

Black and Gold Edo Yatsu

I used the edo yatsu round braiding pattern, like I normally do for these bead braids, with a simple "XO XO XO XO" color pattern. Instead of metal end caps, I made short loops of beaded Fireline at endes to hold the toggle clasp.

2009.06.10 at 12:00am EDT

Proofreaders Anonymous

They shut off when your tank is full

You'd think a gas station in this neighborhood would be more careful about posting signs containing the word "ammo".

2009.06.12 at 7:00am EDT

Go Pens!

Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup ice hockey championship versus the Detroit Redwings, four games to three, two goals to one in the seventh game.

The Redwings kicked some serious butt in the series, and the Penguins squeaked out every win, but that's all it takes.

2009.06.13 at 12:00am EDT

AT+T plus iPhone

The iPhone may be killing AT&T.

AT&T thought they were getting exclusive rights to sell the hottest new phone, but it turns out more people are using it as a mobile data device than as phone. Data services are very expensive for mobile carriers, that's why they've typically been very expensive for consumers. Apple talked AT&T into selling a special unlimited iPhone data plan at a discounted rate. iPhone users access more data more often than other device owners, and pay less for the access!

Although iPhone subscribers make up the bulk of new customers for AT&T, I don't think AT&T is making much money at all off of them. AT&T subsidizes the phone as well as the service. I doubt AT&T has very high margin on the iPhone at all. Fully loaded with all the costs of handling wireless data, it's possible AT&T is losing money on many iPhone subscribers.

Many people are pushing Apple to end their exclusive contract with AT&T as soon as possible. I think when iPhone users try to jump ship to other carriers, they'll find their accounts will wind up more expensive or more limited. I think all carriers will raise their prices for supporting iPhone usage. Once they do, AT&T can follow suit.

Instead of Apple dumping AT&T, I think AT&T should dump Apple as soon as possible.

2009.06.15 at 6:00pm EDT

Google Still Rules

There's been a lot of news lately about new web search technologies to rival Google. Two sites in particular, Wolfram Alpha and Microsoft Bing seem to be trying to place themselves not as mere web search sites, but as knowledge aggregators. When you want to know about something, these tools will supposedly give you answers, not just point you to pages that might have the information.

I see the appeal from an a searcher's point of view, but as a content provider why would I want to participate in such a service? Why would I want Wolfram or Microsoft to present my information as its knowledge?

As a content creator and provider, I want other sites to point to mine. That's what Google does, and what it's done well for over ten years. It doesn't represent itself as the site that keeps you from having to visit my page; it's the site that makes it possible for you to visit my page. I want people to visit my pages and see my information the way I want to present it. That's why I have a web site in the first place.

Yay web searching. Boo knowledge engines.

2009.06.16 at 12:00am EDT

Rootbeer Float Braid

Braid number 52:

Brown and Beige Bead Braid

I wanted to make a bead braid that combined the colors of red wine and white wine, but when you're looking at the tubes of seed beads at the bead store, it's difficult to tell how the beads will actually look once they're strung and braided. I think I got the right color beads for the 'white wine' part of this, but the 'red wine' beads are a bit too orange/brown, so together the colors look less like a wine flight and more like a rootbeer float. It's still pretty, and I like rootbeer floats, it's just not what I was actually going for.

2009.06.17 at 12:00am EDT

More Braiding Madness

Back when I wasn't working, I hatched the idea of teaching kumihimo classes to earn some money. There was some interest, and a few places invited me to submit class proposals. This pointed out to me that I didn't have any paperwork, and that if I wanted to take this idea seriously I should really put some together. I was going to need some curricula, background materials, and definitely some handouts.

It didn't take me too long to put the handouts together, but something was missing from them. They really needed some pictures of exemplary braids to go along with each set of instructions. I had plenty of braids, but only a few designed to be good examples for photocopied handouts.

Luckily, I had plenty of black and white silk yarn, and a scanner. My last batch of braids was all about making good pictures for the handouts.

I'm not a big fan of this tsukushi braid, but it's in Jacqui Carey's book and has a braiding pattern that is very different from most other braids, so I can see why she included it.

None of my previous work with yatsu sen was designed to show the vertical streams with such high contrast, so even though I have plenty of this braid I had to do one more.

The maru yotsu braid only has four strands, so I used doubel the amount of yarn to beef it up for the pictures. It's as wide as the 16-strand braid below!

Again, despite much work with the braid, edo yatsu, none of them were made for photographic simplicity. I also had to match the diagrams, so again with the vertical stripes.

The 16-strand kongou isn't more difficult than the 8-strand that most people teach, but it's capable of my greater detail, so I wanted to include it. It also gave me a chance to use all 16 of my home made tama at once.

I haven't decided yet if I want to distribute thes handouts in PDF form or reserve them for people who take my classes. So far they still need material and setting up the marudai and finishing off a braid, so they're not ready anyway.

Then, I need to write up myself, and some proposals for classes. The best idea is actually for a weekly 2-hour class, doing one braid a week for six or eight weeks. That will enable people to leave each week with a useful braid. A single three or four hour class will enable people to experience several different braiding styles, but only create a few inches of each in a sampler.

2009.06.18 at 12:00am EDT

Loose Threads

Found myself browsing through the archives of this blog the other day, and I found a few loose threads I'd like to tie off.

Brett Easton Ellis

Since posting about Ellis in January, I've read his most recent novel, Lunar Park. WTF? I think I got a lot of what he was trying to do here, but just didn't enjoy the book as much as I did Glamorama. I guess I most enjoyed the parts of this book where he was talking about his other books, but considering the fictional nature of this book, it's hard to decide whether any of those parts actually describe the way Ellis really thinks. The overlap between delusion and reality I so enjoyed in Glamorama is mostly aggravating here.

I didn't see the movie they made of The Informers.

Kevin Smith

Since posting about Smith in April of 2008, we watched his most recent film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno. We enjoyed this movie immensely. This movie is not itself pornographic, though like most of Smith's work it is largely profane. It's also hilarious and romantic, and was shot in and around Pittsburgh. It is only the second movie to ever be shot inside the Monroeville Mall. It was only in theatres for a week or two, but it's been out on DVD since January.

Chuck Palahniuk

Since posting about Palahniuk last July, I read his most recent book, Snuff. This book is a little disappointing compared to his earlier works. It's fun and packed with bizarre information, but there's just not that much book there. It's too short, and too lightweight to stand up against some of his stronger and longer novels. I can only guess his publisher was in a hurry to release another novel. I also watched the movie they made of Choke which I also found to be sub-par. I don't think Choke is one of his best, so this is unsurprising.

2009.06.19 at 12:00am EDT

Twentieth International Icehouse Tournament

The first International Icehouse Tournament was held Memorial Day weekend in 1989. Today is the twentieth IIT, because we had year without a tournament. Ever since the the twelfth IIT, I've been designing commeorative statshpads for each tournament, and printing them for tournament participants. This year, you can download a PDF of the design and print it for your enjoyment. It's slightly different from the actual tournament pads, and here it is. (Follow the link to download.)

Commemorative XX IIT stashpad

If you turn and flip the paper, you can print this PDF four times on a single 8.5"x11" piece of cardstock to get four stashpads,

If you don't get the joke, pull out your copy of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".

2009.02.27 at 12:00am EDT

Unprintable

Today is a wonderful sunny day in Pittsburgh, so I opened up the living room windows to let in fresh air, but I didn't notice that the windows cleaners had left one of the screens up.

As if to teach me a lesson, one of the cats escaped and is now missing. Imagine unprintable words here.

Lost Cat: Dodger

I've put signs up around the neighborhood. He's easily spooked, even inside, so he probably bumped into one of the neighborhood cats, squabbled, and lit out in a random direction. I hope he finds his way home. I feel awful.

2009.07.04 at 12:45am EDT

Sunday Catblogging

WE HAZ DODGER

He was hiding two yards away in a pool supplies shed. He's now home safe and sound and singing us songs about his adventures. Thanks for all the good advice, Internet friends.

Also, to "Dave", the guy who took down one of our posters so he could remember the phone number to call and try to scam cash as "reimbursement" for "driving around" looking for our cat, shame on you.

2009.07.05 at 10:00pm EST

366

This is post number 366 to this blog. Since last year was a leap year, that means I've completed a year's worth of daily posting in just 1.8 years. I'm pretty proud of that.

I would never have made it this far without two things: