I use image search engines a lot and thought it would be interesting to monitor what they did with my newly redesigned website over it’s first few months. It’s been very educational. If you’ve ever wondered why you couldn’t find an good picture of something on the internet, it’s not [...]
Me, to my not-quite-three year old daughter standing on the scale: “How much do you weigh?”
Her: I don’t know. Um, twenty-five pounds. (I don’t think she was reading the scale, I think she was remembering the last time mommy told her how much she weighed)
Me: It looks more like twenty-seven [...]
This is an original tune by this guy:
Same dude, singing Red River Valley:
How come you guys never told me about Julia Nunes?
And a new cover from Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn:
I’m really not sure what I think about this. Several years ago I made a video of me playing cowbell along to Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix. I was walking along, the song came in my head, and I immediately thought of adding this cowbell part. Here it is:
It’s [...]
So like, if you remember what you were going to comment about on something I wrote a few days ago, you can go comment now.
[...]First up: am I the only person in America who feels sorry for Kanye West? I don’t even think that what he did was that bad.
And I’m not sure how controversial this statement is in general but I suspect most of my friends disagree that Lady Gaga is on track [...]
Yes, I know. I upgraded the weblog software the other day but forgot about a bunch of custom hand-coded stuff I did to deter comment spamming. Sadly, half of that code is in the template (big wordpress no-no I guess but hey screw you wordpress) and half of that code [...]
The other day I was musing on meth production, how we’ve moved from meth labs (a horribly inefficient chemical production facility inside your neighbor’s house!;[1] you’d be better off with a prison or garbage dump next door) to shake-and-bake meth.
It occured to me that shake-and-bake meth doesn’t go far [...]
Today’s dream featured BoltTech(tm), a corporation which developed some software to scour the internet and all public discourse, to make sure that Usain Bolt gets paid every time someone mentions his name.
[...]At the state fair I did not see one single booth, sign, button or political t-shirt in favor of health care reform. Not even at the DFL (Democratic Farmer Labor party, which is how you say “Democratic party” in Minnesota) booth, although I didn’t scrutinize it. Nor did I walk [...]
Time to clear my browser tabs.
I like today’s bing.com homepage picture (yep, I’ve been using Bing for about half of my searches. It’s nice having a useful second opinion, especially on obscure topics)
Today’s Dilbert is amazing:
A less experienced cartoonist would stop at panel 2. “Ha, I got a gag, I can’t believe I thought of something funny. Let me draw this thing before I ruin it or forget it.”
This strip reminds me of one of my [...]
A couple of weeks ago, most of a darkroom fell into my lap. In fact, I got everything I needed except an enlarger. This got me thinking about a project I thought of a few years ago. What would happen if, instead of using an enlarger to expose the [...]
Giraffe is hungry! Giraffe says “Mmmm, NUM, food!” *pause* I want to watch a video on YOUTUBES!
[...]On stage with The Gaslight Anthem performing their song ‘59 Sound:
(via I AM FUEL YOU ARE FRIENDS (which also has an MP3 up) by way of @KathySierra)
[...]Writing weblog posts on the iPhone is boring frustrating and irritating all at the same time.
[...]BAM! Instant light table for viewing slides and negs!
[...]My wife has a laser level. It has little sharp retractable spikes to stick into a board or drywall to hold it in place. Every couple of years I pick it up and say “Oh cool, a laser level, I didn’t know we had one of those. What does that [...]
I finished my SoFoBoMo book. It’s done. It stands on it’s own and is complete. It’s all about do it yourself macro lenses, with examples.
Unfortunately since I am using Blurb I don’t know how to export a PDF copy of my book. I used Lightroom to [...]
Last night C woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep so I worked on my SoFoBoMo book. I’m done with most of the photography, so now I’m working on the text pages. There is rather a lot more text in this book. At least, that’s the current [...]
I’m editing a couple of books at once (I know I said I’d never do that again, just shoot me). I mean photo books, of course. At this point I’m still in the layout stage, just trying to pick the photos to go in the books and arrange the photos [...]
Many years ago John decided that it would be cool to watch every James Bond movie. I’m not sure what he was thinking, but I went along with it. We only made it about halfway through them. I’m something of a finisher, so I felt I needed to finish the [...]
I decided that with a new kid on the scene, I wasn’t going to do SoFoBoMo this year. But then I came up with a pretty cool idea that I liked… yeah, I’m doing it again.
This year I’m only taking pictures with my homemade macro lens. Oh yeah, it’s even [...]
I’m working on a new book of my photography. I want it to be a collection of most of the best stuff I’ve done in recent years (some of the best stuff I’ve done is on film, which I’m setting aside for the moment and will tackle in a future [...]
A friend of mine just got back from Phoenix and posted a bunch of photos on Flickr, including this picture of a hummingbird:
The caption of the hummingbird says “We spent hours practicing taking pictures of hummingbirds. How did we do?”
My first thought is, wow, that’s [...]
I got up with the baby and haven’t gotten back to sleep yet. Stupid internet, heck, stupid electric light bulbs. I should only light candles when I get up at 3:00 in the morning with the baby so that I’m encouraged to blow them out again when I calm the [...]
Last night I had a weird dream about Hannah Arendt, only in my dream she was Hanna Ardent and instead of a humanist philosopher political theorist, she was an NPR/classical music vocalist rock star.
I’ve got to lay off the Miroslav Volf before bed!
[...]Apparently Smarties have taken the place of Pixie Sticks
[...]Heavy metal music turns plus or minus 40 years old this year depending on how you define it. In honor of this, I’ve collected together a few Youtube videos from heavy metal’s early years. Enjoy!
Lucifer’s Friend - Ride in the Sky
Uriah Heep - Sunrise
Deep Purple [...]
My daughter, age 2 1/2:
“Kitty is broken. I fix kitty with hammer!” *whack whack whack*
Note: hammer was percussion instrument. No kitties were, um, permanently harmed by the unlicensed veterinarian we have in our house.
[...]
I took this photo and immediately knew it was a good one1 (I recommend you click to embiggen):
“What a great illustration of how I need a wide angle lens!” I thought to myself.
It wasn’t until I [...]
My take in a nutshell: when we (or, more accurately, our elected representatives) decided to purchase a majority stake in AIG, we were taking on all of the contracts that AIG signed. Which includes all of the employment contracts which paid out bonuses to AIG staff. On top of this, [...]
… do I have to even finish the story? You know this isn’t going to turn out well. (Don’t click on that link if you can’t stand the sight of blood…)
So she picks it up and starts munching on it. Why? Because she thinks the piece of glass is [...]
I’ve had this idea kicking around in my head for a while: little boxes in the sidebar that are links for “things I’m thinking about” and “things I’m watching on the youtubes”.
I tried to implement it using wordpress links and I already don’t like it: it orders everything alphabetically, [...]
I had one of these today:
The McGangBang has to be one of the more American things I’ve ever seen. It’s a McDonald’s Double Cheeseburger with a McChicken sandwich crammed into it.
It was FABULOUS. Here’s why.
Recently (within the past year or so) I started noticing what my brain tells [...]
1 part Krakow Nights
1 part Bouquet Garni
Mix. Use 1/2 - 1 tsp. of the mixture per pound of ground beef for hamburgers. Want breakfast sausage? Add a dash of cayenne pepper to the spice mixture, fire up the meat grinder (you do have a meat grinder, right?) [...]
Well, I made a ton of progress today. Mostly I got the AVR chip reading in an analog voltage and outputting it to my bank of test LEDs. I discovered that my tiny error in resistor values for my R2R dac is a systematic error which magnifies itself and I [...]
Man, have we ever been sick. Even my computer got a virus, no joke, as I was googling pedialyte and various symptoms that Caroline was having, I suddenly got redirected to a rap video. I mean, honestly, I’m trying to figure out if I have to take my daughter [...]
A man was climbing a hill on his bicycle when he veered too close to the edge of the path and tumbled several hundred feet down the side of the hill. Dazed, he was just starting to assess the damage when President Obama walked past with a tandem bicycle. “Hop [...]
Music singles! Now that iTunes offers DRM free tracks, I’m building up my music library 99 cents (or 1.29) at a time. I have plenty of CDs but have purchased very little music in the past several years. This is your chance for you to give me a list of [...]
Tycho on today’s Penny Arcade:
Making something that is bad on purpose - and not bad inadvertently, which is my usual process - is a whole-body thrill. It goes hard against every natural instinct to write this way. It has the delicious and irresistible texture of sin.
It reminds me [...]
A new effects box from Electro-Harmonix works more like I expected a talkbox to work: you plug in an instrument and a microphone and it mooshes your vocals to be in tune with the instrument. But that’s not all it does, it also can create vocal harmonies that follow what [...]
If you’ve been following my photolog, you know that I just posted two versions of the same photo (click for a larger version):
Quincy smelter (original edit)
A few years ago [...]
For the first time. I think the key is in the past I would use a spoon to “stir constantly” and it would never work. This time I used a whisk and it came together okay.
I think I need to get a book on sauces.
[...]How did Clementines get their name?
The traditional story is that it was “originally an accidental hybrid said to have been discovered by Father Clément Rodier in the garden of his orphanage in Misserghin, Algeria.”
Father Clément. Clementines. Of course!
[...]Living in an apartment, we have assigned parking for our car, in an enclosed parking garage. Last weekend someone broke into the car next to ours, and stole the stereo system. So, you know, there’s a pile of broken glass on the ground. And it’s a big bummer for him, [...]
I just purchased a couple of songs on iTunes: I Like to Live the Love by B.B. King and Bobby “Blue” Band, and Through the Fire and Flames by DragonForce. Both songs were marked with a “plus” icon in the iTunes music store. But when I downloaded them, the DragonForce [...]
When my daughter wants something in the other room, but doesn’t know what it is called, she will say “I need this!” even though there is no “this” at hand. The “this” refers to whatever she is thinking of, and it’s not nearby so she can’t point at it. It’s [...]
I built an app today that generates Voronoi diagrams [wiki] [mathworld] (although I forgot to add code that lets me save them so I can’t upload one here.)
My app is quite slow because I worked out an algorithm for coloring the diagram [...]
This is a very short list and it doesn’t usually take long for albums to fall off it. Saying that I “only” listen to them as complete albums from start to finish is a slight exaggeration — what I mean is I hardly ever approach these albums for a single [...]
Today we were in Wal-Mart (spending gift cards!) and as we walked past the goldfish Caroline liked looking at them so much I was inspired to get one.* The lady who netted the fish was super good (”Which one do you want… how about that one?” *bloop* “Here you go!”). [...]
A while back I read Fruitless Fall, a book about the collapse of the honeybee industry. I decided to do something about the problems bees are having, so I’m going to start keeping bees.
Peggy said I could keep them on the balcony of our apartment, and I checked our [...]
As she goes throughout the house cleaning and tossing, my creative space gets more and more clogged with things that I don’t want her to throw away but she refuses to have in the house.
[...]So, wondering how the puzzle came out?
Of course it was the first present she opened. She ripped off the paper, opened the box, looked in for about three seconds, got a look on her face like “eh, blocks” and [...]
So, with one thing and another I haven’t been able to get out and go Christmas shopping for my 2 year old until this evening — don’t get me wrong, she’s got lots of presents from family and from mommy and daddy, but I was going to get her a [...]
When I first heard about Guitar Hero, my reaction was “why spend all that effort getting good at Guitar Hero when I could spend it getting good at the actual guitar?” Of course, to date I have done neither. So I’m not a big Guitar Hero guy; I’ve never played [...]
Highly recommended P.J. O’Rourke on Disneyland’s new House of the Future:
“It’s beige,” she said. Beige it is—upholstered, carpeted, and painted in brownish, grayish, yellowish hues. And beige metaphorically, too. Any random dull normal person (we have one in our family) could come up with snappier ideas for the future [...]
Recently I was trying to find some new music and thought that some best album lists might be a good resource. Needless to say, I was disappointed. The most prominent of these lists is The Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. While I own over 100 of [...]
I just got new tires for my car. How badly did I need new tires? When we got in the car after they put the new tires on, both Peggy and I said “Woah!” as the car was visibly higher.
[...]At the moment Norm Coleman is ahead of Al Franken by roughly 500 votes. What this doesn’t tell us is that 437,382 people voted for Dean Barkley who was very similar to Al Franken on most issues. Being one of those evil bastards who wasted my vote in 2000 by [...]
I’m calling the election for McCain.
Actually, I called it a couple of hours ago, but only to a couple friends on instant messenger. Then I thought, this is silly, I’m always making these predictions but keeping them to myself! So I posted it to twitter. But that’s only a [...]
When life gives you lemons…
LPs, CDs, MP3s (and read the next two or three in the series)
A peculiar, house-trained globalism
I’m not sure what this one is about but I’m still thinking about that first panel
Exceptionally successful people are weird (panel 4!!)
[...]
Important caveat: not all at the same time!
[...]Meh. Neither McCain or Obama made any serious mistakes. People who were going to vote for Obama before the debates are going to vote for Obama after the debates, and I think the McCain supporters remain McCain supporters.
I must admit my experience of the debate was very fractured. I kept [...]
A Modest Proposal for Training Future Presidents:
You’d think we’d have a very solid process for figuring out the best person to fill the position, but we have been completely clueless on this for more than two hundred and thirty years. And the Founding Fathers weren’t much help on the [...]
My daughter just grabbed my index finger and middle fingers, one in each hand, and without warning rammed her eyes into both of my fingertips, three stooges style, and started laughing hysterically. When I tried to pull my hand away in surprise (feeling someone else’s eyeballs rolling around underneath ones [...]
This morning I was rudely awakened at 4:00 a.m. by a terrible headache. I tried to get back to sleep but it just kept getting worse and worse. I crashed out on the futon in the living room, mewling helplessly to myself. When my daughter woke up, she came over [...]
I’m tackling the electronics hobby on two fronts: learning things, and doing things. As far as doing things goes I’ve been in a holding pattern and haven’t made much progress. I ordered some parts (female headers and a tricolor LED) from Sparkfun a while back but I guess so did [...]
Mostly bad, but the shiny effect keeps me coming back for more:
Interesting to me, anyway. Feel free to skip this post if you don’t care about politics. My definition of interesting is “I cannot predict what this person will say next, even though I’ve been reading their writings for the past several years.” This is also my talk radio strategy, which [...]
Today I was struck down by The Grippe. Don’t know what I got, all I know is that after laying around sleeping and feeling miserable all day I’m now almost at the point where I’m merely bone tired instead of clinically dead. Lots of hallucinations, mostly involving mountain lions, [...]
If I would have figured out my lookup table by hand I would be done by now. Instead I decided to write a program to help me build a lookup table. It started getting ridiculous with graphical buttons and custom controls, so I had to scale back some features and [...]
I was reading this Politico article and the first paragraph summarizes all of the dirt the Democrats have found on Sarah Palin:
Fishing permit violations. A blue-collar husband who racked up a DUI citation as a 22-year-old. An unmarried teenage daughter who is pregnant and a nasty child custody battle [...]
My AVR is still blinking my initials. I have a skeleton design for the rest of the code I need, but it’s very preliminary and needs to be fleshed out. At the moment I’m spending most of my time thinking about how I’m going to encode morse code into a [...]
I think the VP pick was great, and here’s why:
I got my AVR to blink my initials in morse code last night. It was a very exhausting battle that took hours. Here’s what I learned:
I’ve been a little worried that I’m losing most of my non-technical readers with the recent microcontroller postings. As far as my mental picture of my weblog audience goes, I think I have 5, maybe 6 regular readers who understand this electrical engineering / microcontrollers stuff, and maybe only two [...]
