Winter Weekend

Last week the temperature varied between 19 and 35 degrees.  It was 75 degrees outside today.  Tomorrow at this time it will be in the upper 30s.

I no longer think that the local weather “patterns” are determined by the jet stream and solar cycles, by deforestation and urban sprawl, or even by chaos theory and butterfly’s wings.  I am now pretty sure the weather here is determined solely by some celestial being absentmindedly rolling a twenty-sided die.

Regardless of how often the local weather folks give us their typical “Computer models predict anywhere from a light dusting to 7 feet of snow tomorrow.  Remember - only we know for sure, so stay tuned for the next eighteen hours in case we decide to dribble out some actionable info”, seeing the white stuff here is pretty rare.  This time, though, they got it right and we did get the two inches of accumulation they called for.  They were probably as surprised as anyone.

There was no way, though, that they were even a tiny fraction as delighted as the neighborhood kids were.

It was a little pathetic (at first) watching them attempt to “sled” down a short, shallow grade in the circle out front using foam-based Boogie Boards on what was then one-quarter of an inch of snow.  They would take a running leap at the thing, flop belly-down, skid about 18 inches, and stop.  And then they would do it again.  

What they lacked in common sense, though, they more than made up for in ambition, hard work, and a can-do attitude.  They went and got their shovels and brooms and buckets and started gathering snow from the street and piling it here and there in the circle.  The purpose of doing so was obvious to all there but it was waaayyy out of my ken.  Our son immediately joined them to offer to help out in whatever way he could to forward their project.

Anyone who claims that modern Americans lack the drive and focus of their great-grandparents would retract those ill-chosen words in a heartbeat after seeing the level of effort these kids displayed Friday afternoon.  This horde of snowmasons managed to gather hundreds of snowballs in a wheelbarrow, make countless (shapeless) snow-castles, and even 80% of a snowman.  They were well on their way to scraping the road clean before the snow began to fall faster than they could gather it.

Backing up a bit.

After it was determined that it was definitely going to snow, many places began sending their folks home for safety reasons. It might sound like overkill for just a few inches but it’s a really good call.  See, the infrastructure here does not support massive snow cleanups and, although you might be the world’s greatest wintertime driver, the other folks out there are too busy talking to mee-maw on their cell phone, telling her how gosh-durn pretty everything is, and spinning out of control to notice you even exist.  Traffic is dicey here at the best of times, never mind rush hour on a Friday, and with snow and ice... forget it. You might as well just drive your car into the nearest ditch right away and save yourself a lot of effort.

I took advantage of the time off to head to Target and buy a cheap sled... just in case the weather people underestimated (Hey, you never know.  Literally.)  I hid the sled in the garage in case the snow missed us altogether.

After about an inch and a half fell the grass was no longer visible, the street was a sheet of powder-covered ice and people with old-timey Flexible Flyers were being pulled down the road by smiling family and friends in a scene so heartwarming that Normal Rockwell would have rolled his eyes in disgust.  It was awesome.

Time to try out the new sled.

We sat the boy on the piece of red plastic and told him where to hold on (it wasn’t his first time in the snow but it was his first time sledding).  We gave him a gentle push down a shallower part of the yard just as an experiment.  He reached a top speed of 3 mph and slid for about 25 feet, propelled partially by gravity but primarily through his own delighted giggles.

“Want to go faster?” I asked.  “YEAH!!!!!” was the reply.

The next hour was spent with me launching the kid from running starts at the top of the “hill” and watching him rocket down to the bottom of the dip in the property and start the climb up the other side while mommy filmed and snapped pics.  I would go and haul him back to the top of the five-degree slope (trust me, after 60 minutes of this it feels like Everest) and do it again.

We got out early the next morning right after breakfast to play in it one last time since it was going to be in the mid 40s.  After going up and down the hill a few times we hauled him and the sled to the park about a mile away.  We watched him slide down the slide on the playset (not on the sled... even though it fit perfectly, btw... next time...) while we talked with a dog-walking friend of ours who just happened to be there.  Something must happen to the material on a playground slide in the winter because he was coming in so hot a few times I was shocked to see his jacket didn’t sport re-entry burns.  He was very proud of learning the knack of landing on his feet and sliding gracefully to a stop, so it was tough to drag him away from there when it was time to go.

Good times...

Now, the only evidence we have that winter visited at all is a two-foot ball of mud and ice slowly disintegrating in the neighbor’s yard, looking like the saddest comet in the whole wide universe.

The only evidence, that is, besides the gigabytes and gigabytes of terrific photos and video I am going to look through yet again as soon as I finish this post.  

It is 2013, after all.

Suitable for Framing

Last year when I posted on giving a friend of mine a set of whiskey stones for his birthday, I had no idea that that simple act would (d)evolve into one of the most excellent Christmas traditions ever.  

Now that I look over an even older post, though, I am reminded that the actual starting point for all of this could have been making the mistake of telling him I bought an Apple product.  All of a sudden it was “sellout” this and “What’s the matter, too good for waiting for a 14-year-old Hungarian kid to finish writing driver revision 13.4.237 for your tablet made of an Etch-a-Sketch duct taped to 17 Arduino boards like the rest of us or something?” that.

For two years running, I have received a letter and a gift with the explicit instructions that the gift was not to be opened until the letter was read.  Aloud.  In front of the family.  

I, of course, do this.  This year’s letter followed the theme of last year’s.  Here it is:

Now that you are successfully climbing the ladder to the upper middle class and beyond, you will no doubt also begin the inevitable metamorphosis from a caring, thoughtful, conscientious and sincere human being full of complex character and nuances to the shallow, hollow and much maligned polar opposite that one must become in order to reach the upper class status you apparently crave.

To celebrate your embarkation on this Faustian endeavor, I present you with this gift.  Don’t look shocked.  You still have a few friends at this stage of your metamorphosis but this is most likely due to our own chronic abuse of alcohol and recreational synthetic drugs.

A classic signature of the non-creative, black-balling Freemason you are destined to become are pretentious symbols of one’s standing in society.  Nothing signifies this better than when people of your ilk take items of incredible cultural significance and reduce them to insignificant cultural bling.

The real over-achiever of narcissistic legerdemain will even find a way of incorporating a seemingly related, yet totally insulting function into this screaming symbol of your willingness to sell out everything you hold most dear for fun and profit.

With that in mind, I took the liberty of acquiring this item as a foundation of your collection.  Considering your already eroding moral compass and eroding creative skills, I assumed you were no longer capable of finding such an item yourself.

I also know that this is of no concern to you considering that you are devious enough to skillfully lie and say you purchased it yourself in that all-too-convincing manner that your wife has yet to learn to see through.

May Krankor abandon you to the Neptune Men.

Merry Christmas 

I see... Well played, sirrah. Well played.

The gift wasn’t something I wanted to chuck into a drawer someplace.  Even the bookcase seemed too out of the way for this gem... What to do...

One trip to the Dollar Store later I had a disposable plastic picture frame I could steal the glass out of (I hate keeping thin sheets of glass around the shop, so I rarely have any on hand).  I cut and dadoed a bunch of cedar to frame width since I always seem to have frames or borders or whatever to make and it’s just easier for me to do a boatload at once.  I attached a cedar shelf to the frame with pine dowels.

Skipping ahead, here is the final product, now hanging proudly in the media room:

Well, the media room off the conservatory next to the walk-in humidor...  Not the good media room, obviously.

Quail Eggs, Chicken Hearts, and Thou

A while back my wife went to a Brazilian restaurant in Philadelphia and she has been raving about it ever since.  I finally got a chance to go to one this week and I can totally see why she loved it so much.

It is what I imagine meals were like for royalty several hundred years ago... or last week, I guess.  Look, I don’t have the faintest idea how royals are served their food.  It doesn't matter.  Just picture a never-ending stream of waitstaff plying you with various types of meat (and the occasional grilled fruit or vegetable) every four minutes or so, throw in an extensive salad bar, and that’s pretty much the experience right there.  

Sort of like a more dignified “King Henry’s Feast” with fewer drunken morons yelling “Wassail!” and instead of shouting “Serving wench, come hither!” you have a token like the one in the pic.  If you turn it green side up they constantly swing on by with more food.  If it is red side up, they let you have a break.

Oh, when I say “extensive salad bar” I mean it.  You name it, it’s probably there.  They had fresh mozzarella, they had baby corn, they had hearts of palm, and they had quail eggs...  I had never tried a quail egg before - they were great - sort of like eating just the yellow part of a hard-boiled chicken egg but with more flavor.

I told a co-worker about the quail eggs and he asked me if they were cooked.  “What?”, I said.   I continued: “Well... yeah... I mean... Wait... are you serious?  Yeah, of course they were cooked.  What the hell, dude?  Do you think I said I ate raw, freshly squeezed, quail-temperature quail eggs or something?  They were hard-boiled and chilled.  They were good...  Jeebus...”

And the “various types of meat”?  They had beef of all kinds, sure, they had pork, they had bacon-wrapped turkey [insert Homer drooling sound here], they had terrific Buffalo wings, and they had grilled chicken hearts.

You heard me.

I probably wouldn’t have tried this last item if it weren’t for the waiter that came over with them and said, awesomely, with a perfectly straight face “Would you folks like to try some chicken hearts or would you like me to come back with something less... Well, less gruesome?”  They tasted like steak but had the texture of kidney beans.  Not only were they good, as a result of sampling this new food I now possess my own courage plus that of two chickens, so watch out, world!

You know, with the huge variety of stuff on the menu I’m a little shocked they didn’t offer otters’ noses or stork ankles... 

Le'ssee... What else?  Oh, yeah... 

I got two dozen of beef and cheese burritos in today from Mighty Taco.  The dry ice had all sublimed by the time I got them (darn) but the burritos and the sauce packets were still extremely well frozen.  They were terrific, of course, but I am not looking forward to facing my virtual Nike+ Kinect trainer tomorrow... I just know he is going to forgo the usual “Hey, buddy, you ready to get started being a totally awesome winner this morning and get mega pumped and ripped?” and just jump straight to shaking his head and muttering “Pitiful. I can see the deadly hamburger has done its evil work.”

I don’t care, though.  Totally worth it.  Thanks for the awesome food this week, Mrs. SnowUrchin!  You rock!

Paperclip Holder Project

My wife saw a plan for a paperclip holder in the March edition of “Wood” magazine and asked if I could make one for her desk at work.

“Really? A paperclip holder?” I thought.  Aren’t those just called “desk drawers” or “surplus coffee mugs” or “the little cardboard boxes that paperclips come in already”? Let’s see this plan here... 

Ahh... I see.  It’s magnetic. And absolutely gorgeous.  

Part of the project description reads “With a cleverly hidden and nearly invisible joint, friends and coworkers will wonder how you got the magnet in there.” Riiigghht... The author of the article clearly has no idea what my friends and coworkers are like.  Here’s how I picture part of that conversation going down:

Me: “Hey, friend or coworker, check this out!”
Them: “It’s beautiful.  What is it?”
Me: “It’s a paperclip holder.  Watch!” [sticks paperclips to the top of it] “Neat, huh? [winks] There’s a magnet in there.”
Them: “Sure.  But it just holds paperclips?”
Me: “Of course.  What else did you expect it to do?”
Them: “I don’t know... Something, I guess.  I mean, you have been working on this for sixteen months now.”
Me. “It was a labor of love... Aren’t you going to ask me how I got the magnet in there?”
Them: “No.”

Full sour-grapes disclosure, here: this thing is several light years out of my skill set even if I did have the $12,000 in tools this project seems to require... 

Well, time to improvise.  Usually when the wife asks if I can make something, I say “Why, yes! Yes I can!” This time I had to say “No... but I can make you something that does the job... would that be ok?”

She said yes and I got to work.  I took a piece of maybe-maple from my dwindling stock of salvaged 1940’s era tabletop and built a little offset pyramid with five ceramic magnets embedded in the top layer.  I was going to use my neodymiums but a) I am running short of those and b) the goal was to make a “desktop paperclip holder” not a “desktop hard drive eraser” or a “desktop pacemaker disrupter”.  

Four little wooden disks for feet, a diluted gel stain wash, and several coats of sealant later (old wood is enormously thirsty) and the project was done.   There it is there on the left.

Sure, it may not be as cool as my ongoing plasma rifle experiments (shhhhh... black helicopters... shhhh...) but it looks neat and gets the job done.  I hope she likes it.

Nike+ Kinect Training

I just bought an exercise game for the Xbox to augment my gym workouts and it's going great!  I don't mean to brag, but I earned the following Nike+ Kinect Training achievements in just the first day!

Clean-Up, Aisle Six - Earned when you completely obliterate your first ceiling fan doing jumping jacks or "starfish" exercises.

Return to the Womb - Earned the first time you decide to curl up on the ground in fetal position and whimper after completing one of of the aerobics exercises in lieu of taking your 30-second water break.  

Three Times a Nasty -  Earned after copiously vomiting at least three times during one exercise session.

Oh, No You Di'n't! - Earned after calling the virtual trainer something so horribly offensive that, if done in a real gym, would definitely result in the immediate revocation of your membership, your forcible ejection from the facility, and might even result in you getting shivved in the neck.

There Is No "Try" - Earned when you straight up quit in the middle of a set and firmly and clearly state “Screw This” regardless of how many times you are ordered "C'MON! FINISH STRONG!"

Shawl of Fame - Earned when you perform an exercise at a maximum of one-quarter the speed your trainer demands while you whine "Eennnngggghhh!" during the whole routine.

Tourette-y, Set , Go! - Earned after stringing together twenty-five consecutive potty words during a set. 

It's Not Yet My Time - Earned after resisting the temptation to "walk toward the light" at the beckoning of long-dead relatives and instead deciding to continue on with the next exercise in your routine.    

See, you cant touch this!  Man, I am totally smoking Jimmydunes on these!  I see from his profile, though, he got the “Clear!! Dammit...Gimme 275 Joules... 3...2...1...Clear!!” Achievement a few days ago but I haven’t been able to reach him for a while to congratulate him.  I’ll catch up with him later, I’m sure.

Well, enough writing.  Time to go get motivationally berated for another twenty-eight minutes assuming my hamstrings don’t go all cartoon-roll-up-window-shade once I finally gather the courage to stand up from this chair.

Talk to you later...

Geo-Junk Clock Project

Many years back I got an awesome gift from Agmorion and Siun-Kelan. That's it there in the pic on the left. It's a clock made primarily from a bunch of junk like old typewriter keys, a music box that plays "If I Only Had a Brain" while rotating a model of the Space Shuttle, parts of old TVs, etc. I think they said they picked it up at a big craft fair in Pennsylvania. I love it.

The artist's name is Richard Birkett.  Check him out - he’s got some great stuff.

Anyway, my boy recently noticed it in the media room (it was formerly out of his view in my office) said he thought it was cool and he asked if we could build one like it.  I said sure, so he went off happy and I began hashing out a strategy for how to make this happen. 

The clock in his room was a Cars II themed thing. Theoretically it was great for a kid's room but practically it was useless. The design of the clock face backing is waaaayyy too busy and it makes reading the thing at distances greater than four feet or so a challenge. It needed to be replaced so he can actually use it to, you know, tell time.  Right now all it does well is occupy space and drain a double-A battery very, very slowly.

For many months now I have been taking the stuff I have collected from my Geocaching trades, cleaning them, and shoving them in a junk drawer in the kitchen after showing them off to my boy.  BTW, when I do so, he is either a) genuinely excited to see the new stuff or b) he has learned to fake it well enough to fool me - either way I am taking that as a “win”.  

That was really the extent of my plan with those things...  Well, time to put them to good use.  

A dollar store clock and a piece of pine scrap from my workshop formed the basis for this project.  Removing the clock’s face, hands, and mechanism was a simple matter as was cutting and Kreg-tooling and band-sawing the wood into the size I wanted for his wall.  I added a top shelf, a bottom shelf, and a few “middle” shelves out of the leftovers.

I painted the wood with an antique white I still had from when I built my wife’s printer stand and her paper caddy, and fronted the shelves with the same blue his bedroom walls are.

I was planning to use the original clock face but it was firmly glued in place on the plastic housing. Instead, I used it as a template for determining the location of the numbers and dashes.  The mechanism was flush-mounted and covered with a circle cut from a manila folder painted to match the color of the clock.  The hands were replaced, a battery was put in, and there you go - all ready for the main event.

The four-year-old decided where each of the things went on the clock and my job was to hot glue them in place. We had a blast doing that this morning after breakfast. On the left is the “final” product.

Oh... I should mention I was careful to make sure the mounting hardware on the back of the clock was robust enough to handle the eventual addition of stuff I find in future caches.  You see, since one of the points of this clock is to continually add stuff I find while Geocaching it is going to get heavier and heavier until there is literally no room for stuff at all. He loves it, the wife loves it, and I love it.  For some reason it reminds me of a pic I saw when I was a kid in my father’s 1976 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, somehow...

I will (probably) post updated pics as time wears on and the clock gets more and more ornate.  Stay tuned.

Flavors of the Month

Over the past month I have had the pleasure of trying a few new foods, seasonings, and drinks. Here they are. 

Both the pear port and the coffee liqueur you see on the left were Christmas gifts from GeneSplicer and his wife. The Horton Vineyards pear port is heavy, sweet, and sits somewhere, palate-wise, between Sweet Mountain Laurel and St. Germain. Great ice cold.  Apparently these folks also make an acai wine which I am looking forward to trying soon.

The Sheridan’s Coffee Layered Liqueur is an Irish import my friend and his wife first tried on a cruise ship last year. They loved it and found a way to get a bunch for themselves and to give out as gifts (they don’t sell it in the USA, see). The picture's not great but the bottle is actually two bottles in one. One side contains the "cream" portion and the other contains the java/whiskey portion. 

If you pour it just right (there are instructions on the back) you end up with the proper ratio of each liquid in your glass. I had no trouble with this, although I did have to fight the temptation to crank Chumbawamba on the stereo, lay face up on the kitchen countertop, and have my wife pour shots into my open mouth while yelling "Woo hoo!!"  at the top of her lungs. 

It was delicious with apple pie. 

These next gifts came from the sister- and brother-in-law who picked them up in a shop outside of D.C. called Under the Olive Tree - they specialize in awesome olive oils, vinegars, and salts.  

The tall bottles are two different types of olive oil, one is a hot and smoky Harissa infused oil and the other is a traditional 18-year-old olive oil.  Both were incredible with fresh sourdough, although I did have to fight the temptation to crank Chumbawamba on the stereo, lay face up on... oh... wait...

Man, I should never start these review things with the booze...

The shorter bottles are two different types of flavored sea salt.  One is black truffle flavored (perfect on popcorn) and the other, Yakima Smoked Sea Salt, is like a barbecue in every tiny pinch.  I look forward to using it on rubs and marinades in the future.  

The last group of new-to-me stuff here might look strange but they totally work together.

I was turned on to the Sriracha (Thai Hot Sauce) by Jimmydunes, and to the plain Greek yoghurt by a work colleague.  I like spicy stuff, especially if it has a lot of flavor which the hot sauce has in spades.  Garlicky (wow, that’s a real word!) and zesty (shut up, that word was the thesaurus’s idea) without being overwhelming.  Nice.

Now, normally I avoid yoghurt (on a scale of one to ten, I usually give it a “meh”) but I recently discovered that the Greek plain yoghurt is zero fat, high in protein, and can be used as a base for almost anything.  

For example, I mix half a container of the yoghurt, a couple of squirts of the Sriacha, and a small spoon of natural peanut butter to make a terrific dip for sesame rice crackers (or probably anything).  I mixed half a container with a small squirt of maple syrup and served it with apple slices for my kid and some friends of his and I knew I was going to have to to cut up more apples before I even left the room. I look forward to trying it with honey next.

Thanks, everyone, for the new flavors!  I look forward to repaying you in kind.  Hmmm... I wonder if Mighty Taco still does anywhere-in-the-U.S. delivery... 

Caddy Project

Our four-year-old loves to draw. This is awesome but unfortunately lot of times this means he is savaging the printer looking for paper because he has run out of stock in his room.   Since his supply was in a cardboard box under his desk, out-of-sight-out-of-mind, he would have nothing left before we even knew he was getting low.

Well, that's an easy one - make him a paper caddy he could put on his desk. Actually, since the one his mom had was replaced by the new one I made her, it was just a matter of staining it the color and style of his desk.  

I applied the gel stain with a coarse brush to match the appearance of the surface of the desk and called it done. Elapsed time, twenty minutes. It took a couple of days to dry completely because of the low temps and high humidity in the garage and the thick coat required to match the desktop, but otherwise there were no problems. 

That's the way I like 'em : projects that just need me to put down the TV remote and beer for once, go out into the garage, slap a quick, almost care-free coat of paint on something and celebrate with a beer before staggering back into the house to finish that half a beer some dude left near the TV remote.    

Fine. Paper is taken care of. What about pens and markers and crayons and stuff, you ask?  "What about them?" I reply. He's got a cache of these things in pretty much every room of this place.  Heck, I wouldn't be surprised to discover a nearly new box of Crayolas in the crawl space under the house someday for crissakes!   Boy, when I was coming up I had half a Baggie of paperless crayon nubs, three-quarters of which were burnt sienna and the other 37% were so covered in burnt sienna chunks and smudges you couldn't tell what the hell they were!  Did I complain?  No!  Sure, the only things I could draw accurately were deserts, certain dogs, and the Baggie of nubs itself, but I was happy... And that's the story of how I invented sepia-toning. 

(Puts down beer. Gets cup of Earl Grey instead.)

Like the stone garden project I did a few years back, the real driver for building a lazy-Susan style desk caddy was the wife pointing to a photograph she saw and asking "Do you think you could build something like this?"

"Why, yes!  Yes I can!" is my usual response to these types of questions, based somewhat on using her misguided hope to leverage myself a new tool of some kind, but based primarily on the fact that every husband’s and dad’s job is pretty much “making it up as you go along”.

In this instance, though, I had all the tools I needed (darn), I had the wood and paint on hand, and I even had a lazy Susan mechanism sitting in the garage.

I was going to use this last item as part of a rotating benchtop vertical storage unit for my function generator, soldering station, and other electronics stuff but that effort kept getting pushed to the back burner for one reason or another. Since those mechanisms are surprisingly cheap (six bucks) I figure I could always pick up another one later if I choose to push forward with it. 

I made a jig (that's a churched-up way of saying a hammered a nail through a board into another board) and cut an 8 1/2" circle on the bandsaw for the top part of the base. The bottom part of the base is just a 6 1/2" square with rounded edges.

Since she wanted six storage compartments I cut the compartment dividers on the table saw with 30 degree bevels where those dividers came together. This lets three of the pieces meet in the exact center of the circular base spaced 120 degrees apart. The other three were cut to the same angle, but were made slightly shorter to take into account that I was not using wood of zero thickness.  Although if I did, I suppose that would save on wear and tear of the saw blades... Maybe I just need to work on my cutting technique...

The walls were sloped down from the center to two inches high and a slight curve was placed on each. The slope was so you could see shorter items like crayons from the front and the curve was just cuz I thought it would look cool. A 30 degree cut was dadoed into each side of all the walls so a short thin piece of scrap cedar paneling could be slotted into place for the front walls. 

After adding a couple of wooden disks and a wooden "button"  to the top it was pretty much done.  I painted it red.  

There are the finished products in the pic on the left.   Based on how much real estate they take up on his desk, though, I can picture the next question from the wife now: “Do you think you could build him a bigger desk?”

“Why, yes!  Yes I can.  Oh, but, you know, honey, the job would be ever so much easier if I just had an arc welder...”

Shhhhh... ;)

Cipher Disk Project

A few weeks ago I told you about the “next” set of Geocache swag I was in the process of making.  Well, I finally finished the first batch last week and started putting them in caches I found around the area.  

First, a little background.

The inspiration for this project was a certain puzzle at the puzzlemonster.com site called “Kahn’s Cons”.  I have been working on this thing on and off for many years and I think I am ready to throw in the towel.  Oh, and by “on and off” I mean that I believe that if I had put the level of effort into the fourth section of the CIA's Kryptos puzzle as I have with this one I would have solved that one long ago...

Because of this puzzle, I purchased a dozen books on cryptography, some awesome (Cryptanalysis by Helen F. Gaines), some only semi-awesome (The Codebreakers by David Kahn - full of good history but gets a bit bogged down in the personal lives of WWII code breakers), and some useless for what I was trying to do (Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier)...  I have even written an embarrassing amount of code to help with the solving process to "no" avail...

All for a lousy t-shirt.  And the glory, of course.  You... you can't put a price on that...

Oh, who am I kidding?  I’m not gonna throw in the towel (yet), but I sure would like to see someone solve it, if only to see how close I was. The problem is that, if I am right about the encoding mechanism, the cipher is mathematically intractable with the current amount of ciphertext available.  It is possible I am missing something - a hint in the storyline that goes with the code, maybe.   It is more possible I am just plain on the wrong track.  It is even more possible that my “mathematically intractable” comment is more “sour-grapes-based” than “fact-based”...

In my effort to solve that puzzle, a while back I built myself a “decoder ring” of sorts comprised of two stacked wooden wheels.  There are 26 spaces on each wheel that I can fill in with letters in any order I choose which is great for trying different combinations of letters but 100% useless if the author of the puzzle decided that base-26 was too easy and went for base-25  (combining ‘i’ and ‘j’, or using a particular letter as a “pointer”, say) or base-27 (including a “null” or “pointer” character, for instance).  

The things I currently believe about the Kahn’s Cons puzzle: 1) The first and last letters of each word are important 2) The lengths of the words are important - possibly an odd/even thing going on there 3) All of the seven encoded messages use the same “key” 4) The letter Q may have a special significance since it is not used whatsoever in any of the messages - it might be a pointer or it might be “invisibly paired” with single letters 5) If I am right about the encryption scheme it might take about three times as much ciphertext to solve enough of it through statistical means to get a foothold on the rest of the puzzle.  6) 25 or 26 ciphertext pairs can stand for any one plaintext letter.

Sigh... Anyway...

The geo-swag cipher disks I made (WIkipedia tells me they are officially called “Alberti Cipher Disks”, although I know them as “Civil War Cipher Disks”) are based on the “decoder ring” tool I used in one of the attempts to solve this puzzle.

My goal is to make 43 of these - each one encoding a quote from a different U.S. president.  As of the writing of this post, I have made five.  Another 11 are prepped and ready for the wood-burning stage and raw materials for the rest have been cut and are waiting further processing.

Sigh...   I feel this should go without saying but here it is anyway.  I don’t care what your political affiliation is. I really don’t.  If you are reading this  because you found one of the disks, decoded the message, and are offended because you think that Jimmy Carter is history’s greatest monster, I really can’t help you.  I chose - from brainyquote.com - a saying from each and every one of the presidents.  I tried to pick quotes that did not make any of them sound overly heroic or overly buffoonish.  I neither agree nor disagree with their viewpoints; the quotes were picked primarily for their ability to fit, encrypted, in a two-inch by two-inch square using a font that was easy enough to see.  That’s pretty much it.

Back to the construction.

Each of the two disks you see has 27 spaces - the 26 letters of the alphabet, all randomized, and a “pointer” (the copper nail-head).  Not only is the order of the letters random for each disk, no two of these have the same order - each one of these devices is different.

The message to be decoded (just a presidential quote, remember - no more, no less) is on the back.  Also on the back the finder will see the key to the puzzle - the words “HELLO WORLD” are given with how they would (well... could) be encoded with that particular set of disks.

Writing the software to automate the otherwise tedious encryption process was fairly straightforward. Harder was finding the centers of the circles so they could rotate around a common point.  Oh, finding the center of a circle is pretty easy - bisect a couple of lines and there you go - but actually making the transition from a paper sketch to the real world was a lot more difficult.  Drill bits like to wander, you see, especially small ones, so “center” might not be “center” any more...

Although I cut the two-and-an-eighth-inch bases and two-inch oak plyboard disks myself, I got the smaller one-and-a-half-inch disks are pre-fab units from Lowe’s.  I am not really sure what type of wood those disks are made from - Google, Lowe’s, and even the website of the company that makes them (The Hillman Group) seem to disavow their existence.  The letters were burned into the surface of the disks and the nail that centered the circles was permanently secured with a bit of solder in a countersink on the bottom. 

After adding a bit of wood putty to fill in the countersink the message to be decoded was pasted to the back, the final copper-coated nails were added, and the whole thing was shellacked to seal it and give it an aged look.  To be honest, I wasn’t really pleased with the initial look of the shellac - I thought it looked way too yellow.  Overnight, though, the yellow...uh... mellowed a bit and the units ended up looking pretty nice. 

I have lots of projects in the queue right now (paint is drying on one of them as I speak) so I am not sure how long it will take me to crank out and distribute all 43 of these things.  I am enjoying the process but I might stop in the middle, build different swag, then continue on with this work.  Who knows?

We will see.

A Catching-Up (and Cache-ing-Up) Post

Happy New Year, everyone!  

It looks like I am beginning my 2013 with a huge backlog of woodworking projects so it’s probably a good idea to write this little “catch-up” article showing a couple of the more recent ones before I forget about them.

First is the desk paper caddy I made for my wife for Christmas.  I posted on this before so I won’t go into construction details but here is the final product.

I decided to go with a combination painting and staining to finish up the piece.  This was so I could match the surface color of the desk while matching (well... coming close to matching, anyway) the faux-aged paint look of the desk fronts and sides.  I threw some felt feet to the bottom and called it done.

It is very solid and, as you can see, it is definitely going to get some use.  I am glad she likes it.

Events somewhat out of my control like baby-sitting for a friend after he and his kids were in a car accident (they’re fine), a water heater gas leak (it’s fine), and other deal-with-them-as-they-come stuff prevented me from moving beyond the prototype phase for my next planned set of Geocache swag, so I was forced to go with “Plan B”.

Ok, ok... “forced” is a strong word.  I mean, it’s my option to put stuff I actually made/built into Geocaches I find rather than stuff I bought - it’s not a rule or anything.  It’s just something I like to do... for now... Lots of squirrels to chase, you understand.

In any case, Plan B involved a hasty re-purposing of leftover barnwood pieces from a project Jimmydunes and I did many years ago.  I kept the scrap and shaped these 75-year-old pieces with a Dremmel which were then put into a little clear potpourri-like jar for one of the rooms of the old house.  The jar didn’t quite go with the new place so the contents lived in the garage until I could figure out what to do with them.

So I drilled a hole in the ones that could structurally handle it, ran a string through them, and voila: necklaces.  I used a woodburning kit to burn “S.U.” and a serial number (0050 through 0059) into each one.  Er... “Collect them all!”, I suppose.  

Actually, the serial numbers are there in response to a question from a Geocaching friend of mine.  Since people tend to take items out of the caches and place other items back in, he wondered how long it would take for you to unknowingly run into your own swag in a cache you had never visited before.

Interesting question.  

Obviously there are a huge number of unknowns, many of which involve trying to guess at the behavior of large (but unknowable) numbers of people.  How often are the caches found?  How far apart are they? How often do items from one cache wind up in another (assuming they are not “official trackables” like Travel Bugs)? When taken out of a cache will they ever wind up an another one or will they be kept forever or chucked into the woods or otherwise taken out of circulation?  Would that answer change if the items were all the same (I have noticed that some people’s “signature items” are constant - a bunch of little decorative stones, a laminated “business card”, etc.)? How often and in what areas do you, yourself, go Geocaching? Do you focus on park & grab city caching or do you hike for miles and miles between finds?  What is the distribution of caches that are large enough to contain the item?  How long do Geocaches themselves stay “in play” before they are archived?

The list goes on and on.

So, the best way to answer the question, I figure, is to throw out a bunch of stuff I could tag as my own and just wait and see - empirically test it, so to speak.  Since my attention span is short to the point that I am amazed I haven’t wandered off while in the middle of writing this very sentence, I didn’t want to commit to fabricating an endless supply of just one thing, so I make different items as the fancy strikes me.  I record the date, location, and serial number of the item I drop off in a little notebook as I go so I can keep track of what went where and when.

So, that’s the story of the serial numbers and the different kinds of geo-junk I make.  I have seen some swag-related comments posted at places I have dropped stuff off in the past, and I have gotten some emails regarding the Jefferson Ciphers I made.  However, I have not yet run into anything I have made myself so far.  For the record, my “order of magnitude” guess on the odds of this happening is about 1 in 10,000.

Speaking of emails...

This is something I did about a decade and a half ago.  My father-in-law got me a hunting knife for Christmas that year and I whittled this little rook out of a stick while we sat in his living room and talked. It sat on a desk in the various places the wife and I lived since that time until I decided to put it into a cache a few months back.  Before I took it with me, I took a picture of it then burned “SnowUrchin” into the bottom of it.  I dropped it off in a cache in Hampton, Virginia in late October, recorded it in my notebook, and promptly forgot about it.

About a month later I got an email about the rook.  Someone had found it and emailed me to ask if I was it’s creator and to let me know that they planned on attaching a Travel Bug to it.  The goal of that Travel Bug, they said, was to visit a series of castles in Europe, which I think is pretty cool.  They said that they will let me know once they register the tag so I can follow its travels online.  I will let you know if/when they do. [Editor's Note 01/11/14: You can check out the progress of this travel bug in the sidebar.]

Wow.  That was a lot longer of a post than I anticipated, and I still have more project-y stuff to go on and on about.  I guess am just going to cut this article “short”, update the sidebar, and start on a new post before I head out the garage to get some real work done.

Talk to you later.