Site Update

A couple of things:

I need a way to dispose of my Tassimo coffee maker (see my Tassimo post for details).  There is a new poll in the sidebar.  If you choose "Something Else" as an answer, feel free to make a comment here to let everyone know what your idea is.

The sharp-eyed (or bored) among you may have noticed a new link in the sidebar to a Secret Puzzle Page.  I have been incorporating puzzles into certain things I have built and I plan on doing that for as long as I do woodworking.  As the puzzles are discovered I will post them here. 

By the way, these are seperate from the Puzzle for Charity puzzles - I just do these just for fun.  There is no Prize other than "Braggin' Rights". Here is the one my brother found burned into the bottom of the Pallet Table.

Click on the Secret Puzzle Page link in the sidebar for details and to submit a guess. Good Luck.

Book Review

A couple of weeks ago my wife bought me "In the Courts of the Sun" by Brian D'Amato.  Just out of the blue - I didn't ask for it or anything... She's so awesome...

I guess she was in a Border's and walked past a display and this book caught her eye.  She say that it had something to do with time travel and, knowing that I like books and movies of that genre, decided to pick it up for me.

When I looked at the cover I was, like, "Oh, how original.  Yet another 2012 doomsday book.  Well, only a couple more years to crank out this stuff so everyone on board the Mayan train..."  I probably snorted derisively, too.  I mean, any geek my age worth his/her salt has known that "the world is due to end December 21, 2012" for decades, and now all of a sudden it's "trendy".  Note to self: see if Agmorion still has that "Doomsday 2000" VHS tape I bought him as a joke Christmas gift ten years ago.

Here is my spoiler-free review:

I started reading it and was immediately hooked by the in-your-face, try-to-keep-up writing style.  The method of sending a person "back in time" is excitingly original and disturbing and depressing and frightening all at the same time.  The fact that the hero even considers doing this for a second is a monument to his bravery or stupidity.  The fact he is clearly a genius and highly adept at numbers games and pattern recognition seems to indicate "brave"... Maybe he just doesn't care...

There are a couple of scenes in the book (one during a disaster near the beginning and one describing a choice the hero has to make near the end) that are so soul-crushingly sad that you would have to be made of stone not to feel anything.

There is a lot of excitement in the book right from the start regarding "prophesies" in a newly discovered Mayan codex and a pattern-finding ritual called "The Game".  Unfortunately, the author's highly-descriptive style becomes a huge burden right in the middle of the book and lasts for tens of chapters for seemingly no reason.   I figure this 700-page book could have been edited down to 300 or so pages if a lot of the overwhelming detail describing ancient Mayan greeting rituals, jungle wildlife, and just plain old walking around  just went away.  I found myself skimming a lot.  Even chase scenes and battle scenes dragged on way too long.

Also, it will help if you speak Spanish, German, and know the basics to Greek and Latin.  Even then, keep a dictionary handy.  A big one.

The book started off as an A+ and ended as a B-.  Amazon gives it 3 1/2 stars.  I agree with a couple of the one-star reviews, but not with their anger.  Will I get Book Two?  I don't know.  We will see.

No, Really, They Are!

Wait... You are telling me they are great and edible?  Surely I have died and gone to limbo. 

Why Didn't I Think of That?

When I think of all the time I wasted thumbing through the yellow pages as the grease fire was consuming my kitchen, I just feel so stupid...

Don't Let the Door Hit You...

Hello, Tassimo. Come in. Take a seat.

There is really no easy way of saying this so we are just going to come out and say it. We are going to have to let you go.

You showed such promise when you first joined our organization but, frankly, we feel you grossly misrepresented yourself on your resume and our disappointment with your performance has only grown with time.

What are we talking about? Well, your 5-star reviews notwithstanding, you only deliver a drinkable cup of coffee about 10% of the time. As for the other 90% you start out well and then just when we all think everything is going great, you blow up the coffee disk spewing grounds and hot water all over the mug, the countertop, and yourself.

Don't give me that. We tried filtered, bottled, and tap water with you. Nothing seems to make you happy. As a matter of fact, the very first cup you tried to make was a huge failure. You have no excuse.

Remember when you had that complete meltdown last year and it took 6 weeks for a brand-new replacement unit to come back from "somewhere out there"? No? You had just finished making your typical one-thirds-filled cup of hot water and coffee grounds then 5 minutes later, for no reason whatsoever, you started shooting steam out of every seam in your body. You were just sitting there, for crying out loud! You went from an annoyance to a legitimate safety hazard. Your customer service rep seemed to find that funny until I explained to her that it was lucky I was there to unplug you or else who knows what might have happened.

You are badly designed and it's difficult to even find coffee disks that will work with you. I have even gone as far as to cut and paste a barcode from a known good disk (Henry's Breakfast Blend, say) onto one that blows up routinely (everything else, say) to trick you into not making a colossal mess of my countertop. Its just not worth the effort anymore.

Also, your alleged “hot chocolate” is downright vile.

We are sorry, but we are going in a different direction. We are now working with your replacement to get him up to speed but he seems to have hit the ground running. No spitting activated carbon beads into the water hopper from him, I tell ya.

What is going to happen to you now, you ask? Well, for now you will be cleaned then sequestered in the pantry. We will confer with our friends to see what is the best course of action, but, frankly, it does not look good for you. To give you an idea of what your future holds, phrases that include words such as "M-80s", "gasoline", "baseball bat", and even "hollow point" have been floated by those that know you best.

The best you can hope for is that we just get sick of looking at you and chuck you in the Dumpster.

Poster-paint-a-licious!

Remember how I said in my Five Projects post that one of the projects in my queue was to make use of a little oak end table that has been sitting in my garage for over a year?

No? Didn't you read the post? Figures. Well, at least I am getting a lot of practice typing with my thumbs. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog! Wheee!

"Anyway," he says passive-aggressively to apparently no one...

It looked like I was going to have a little paint left over from the Desk Restoration project so I figured I might as well use it on the little end table. The idea was to turn it from a dust-collecting, space-consuming monument to my laziness into a usable play table for my now one-and-a-half year old.

Not really too much to it. The table was a little tall so I sawed the bottom four inches from the legs. The flat surfaces were painted the same antique white from the Desk project. The idea here was to give my son a blank canvas on which he could get his first exposure to poster paints.

In my head, I pictured a delighted nineteen-month-old toddling up to the table, being given a paintbrush, and having him go to town on the top of it resulting in a brightly colored near random collage of smears, brushstrokes, and handprints. He would be so excited he would not want to quit and mommy and I would have to drag him away giggling for a bath. Maybe some upbeat montage music would be playing in the background. Adorable!

Yeah.

I got some poster and finger paints and foam brushes from an area craft store and set up the table, an old bedsheet, and bunch of little Tupperware dishes on the kitchen floor. After the rainbow selection of fun-time-happiness was set up we let him into the room.

Even as I type this I really have to worry that I am completely unfit to watch over a little human. I mean, I have been around him literally every single day for nearly 600 days and I still saw no problem with my grand plan?!

Cripes...

I think it's worthwhile to describe the scene again. A table in the room where he eats dinner is surrounded by little plastic dishes of attractively colored goo. In each of the dishes is a wooden-handled foam thing that looks like a cross between a toothbrush and a spoon. In walks the nineteen month old who has never been exposed to the concept of "painting"...

Once we demonstrated what to do he did, in fact, show interest in blopping colors on the table and smearing them around with the brushes. And his hands. And his shirtsleeves. And his shirtfront.

Ok, at this point it had gone from cute to gross in less than 5 minutes. Did you know that if you mix every color of the rainbow it turns into a hue pretty close to that of mashed sweet potatoes, my son's favorite food?

Although it took me only about one tenth of a second to think "Ick, that looks like sweet potatoes" after I saw his paint-coated hands, it took him that same exact amount of time to realize the same thing (without the "ick") and suddenly jam all his fingers into his mouth.

We yanked his hands out and wiped them off and wiped his face, tongue and teeth the best we could. He then blopped his hands in the paint and crammed them into his mouth again.

Ok. Done. Time for a bath, little dude.

I plunked him into the tub and mommy took over while I went to clean up the kitchen. I blotted the not-so-great-as-I-pictured-it looking table dry with a towel and placed it in the garage. All the paints were mixed together so no sense in saving those...

Wait.

Hmm... "Non-Toxic". Well, good, that's what I remember reading before we started this process. But, you know... Still, yuck, right? What must have that been like? Here he is thinking he is licking a tasty Gerber's concoction off his fingers...

Look, I don't know how to get from the last paragraph to my current thought so I'll just come out and say it: I drank some paint.

Yep. I, a nearly 40-year-old man well in charge of my faculties, took a big ol' swig of black poster paint on purpose to see how bad the experience was for my son, taste-wise.

For anyone out there who cares to know "Non-Toxic" does not equal "Delicious". After a quick emergency gargle with Coke, I brushed my teeth and tongue until it was time to get him out of the tub.

While we were getting him dressed for bed I sheepishly told my wife what I had just done and why.

Although sometimes I just think I am giving her more and more ammunition for a hearing (either "sanity" or "divorce") sometime in the not-so-distant future, this time she just looked at me, smiled, and said "You are a good daddy."

Cool...

Desk Restoration Project (Part II)

(Continued from Part I)

W.C. Fields once said "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no sense being a damn fool about it." Wise words, to be sure, and very appropriate to the Desk Restoration project.

As you can see from the photo and like I mentioned in my last Project post, the desk staining did not go well at all. After all the time I spent sanding the damaged areas it was pretty heartbreaking to end up with a blotchy mess.

Fast-forwarding a bit through the giving-up process I finally settled on painting the damn thing. Now instead of an "elegant-but-well-used" piece of furniture, I am going to end up with something extremely country-fied. So be it.

I was going to crackle-coat the desk but just decided to straight-up paint it instead. I want this thing out of my garage now - I am tired of looking at it. Do I sound angry? I feel like I sound angry...

I chose two Valspar semi-gloss paints one antique white and one sort of antique teal. The bulk of the desk will be white and the trim and desk drawer will be teal, you see.

I was gonna go with a royal blue for the trimwork and a brighter white for the bulk, but when I put the color cards side by side it didn't look right. It sort of gave off an over-the-top "Ahoy, matey! Welcome to our Bed and Breakfast, where every square inch of usable surface area has a model lighthouse on it!" vibe to it. I think toning down the contrast will make it a little more pleasing to the eye.

I am about 80% done with this... So far so good. I should be done with this project this week which should make Mrs. Snowurchin very happy.

We will see.

(To be continued... )

Single Point Failure (Part III)

Continued from Part II

So, what creates a “Learned Helplessness Bubble”?

• Rewarding Over-Specialization
• Outsourcing of Critical Skills
• Relying on Non-Existent things
• Embracing the Illusion of Powerlessness 

We have already touched a little on the first two in the list. Let's talk a little about the third item – Relying on Non-Existent Things.

 More and more we are moving away from a solid, real world to something that is a spooky ghost-like after-image of itself.

 As a grossly oversimplified but still useful example, the economy used to be based on gold. Nothing more than an arbitrary (albeit pretty) rock but at least it is finite and rare and real. Then the gold standard went away and was replaced with paper. Then the paper “went away” and is currently just ones and zeroes. As ethereal as a happy thought and just as easy to wipe out.

 The loss of a hard drive could now be as devastating as a massive house fire. A nearby lightning strike could wipe out everything you hold dear – all photos, all your music, all your books – gone. All your work documentation, that novel you have been writing, with the added drawback of being practically uninsurable.

 It's hard to imagine how things get more unstable than reducing things to hunks of field/no-field, but we are happily headed in that direction.

 Entire worlds exist now that use a fake currency, like in Second Life or WoW. Property used to be something that you could touch and taste. Now you can buy things like houses and clothes that, in no real way, exist (Second Life, WoW, etc.). Real money and time are traded for ever-increasingly unreal things.

 Also, we have just started the primary push to taking all the ones and zeroes out of the local computers and putting them in a “cloud” run by someone else, somewhere else. Now you don’t have to pay for your IT infrastructure or even very fast computers. Everything is taken care of for us “out there, somewhere”. No fuss, no muss.

 Nothing is actually owned – just rented. That paperback on your e-reader isn't “yours”... not really. You probably can't give it to a friend, and you certainly won't be able to leave it to your children when you pass on or press a flower between its pages. Music and movies are no more real. Your private photos are probably all electronic and you don't even own the IP to the professional ones you have had taken.

 These are all intentionally negative examples, or at least examples where I have suppressed their positive aspects. Don't get me wrong – I'm no Luddite. I think using the virtual world to augment the real one is a great idea. It is convenient, educational, entertaining, and often just plain cool. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite apps is one that labels things in the night sky merely by holding your smartphone up to the object in question. But because I have the Night Sky app, should I get rid of my embarrassingly outdated Burnham's Celestial Handbook collecting dust on in my bookcase? No. What it lacks in downloadable updates and interactive content it more than makes up for (to me) with it's comforting solidity and it's historical value.

 The danger is that as we make these subtle improvements to the way we perceive the world around us we lose sight of the things that allowed us to get there in the first place. We are willfully knocking out the underpinnings of the real world because we convince ourselves that the virtual shorings that we have put in place are just as good or better than the now “unnecessary” or “redundant” old ones.

 Fine. Should we all go and learn every damn skill our ancestors knew? No. It's the appreciation of the path of progress that is critical, not the individual skills themselves necessarily. We didn't magically arrive here. We weren't dragged kicking and screaming. We strolled into the year 2010 willingly if not excitedly.

 But we need some (not all, granted) of those stodgy old-fashioned ways to stay put – just in case.

 I believe a conservative estimate of people in the U.S. that have vocations directly or indirectly tied to producing things that do not actually exist (or will probably never exist) is about 5% of the total US workforce. Designing moon bases or starships or writing books or CGI info-tainment on how to terraform Mars requires editors, producers, programmers, TV and newspaper reporters, academic professionals, scientists, conventioneers, etc, etc. How many people are “employed” by trying to figure out the “secrets” to Mona Lisa's smile, the Shroud of Turin, Area 51, the Tunguska blast, or the Zapruder film or do any of the countless “jobs” out there? What would be lost, other than jobs in an already shaky economy, if the self-generated demand for simply went away?

 We rely on non-existent things for our pleasure and convenience, but also turn to them in times of hardship and panic.

 Look at the things that people blame when things go wrong: society, the “culture” of an organization, the government, the public school system, big business. The list goes on and on. When something big and bad happens, the blame gets spread around so thinly that, magically, it turns out that no one is actually at fault for any given disaster.

 It is so easy to pin fault on them that no one seems to realize (or care) that none of these amorphous concepts actually exist. When “society” is blamed for a miscreant's horrific crimes, does it rise to defend itself? What actually changes when public schools are called out as causing America's slipping scientific leadership? “The government” is routinely called out as being the cause of everyone's personal woes in one from or another. They cannot and do not defend themselves and it makes us feel better for having them around to offload our anger to.

 

To be continued...

Random Post

Not really enough to talk about for a big post today, so I guess I will just sum up some stuff I have done over the last few days:


Resumed working on Puzzle 05 - The Chalice. For those of you who don't remember, it is a wooden chalice carved from a single hunk of maple taken from my father-in-law's woodpile. I don't have a wood lathe and I am trying to not purchase any special tools to do this, so it will continue to be a challenge.

That reminds me... We still need a charity to go with the Puzzle for Charity. If anyone has any ideas for a small 501c charity that we can tie to the most recent puzzle leave a comment. Don't forget, the Prize Pool will remain at $0.00 ("Braggin Rights") until one is selected.

Prepped the flat surfaces of a small table for my son's room. The plan is to get some non-toxic kids paints and let him "help" me paint the top. I am really looking forward to that. :)

Mailed the Pallet Table to my brother yesterday. I needed to build a shipping crate for it - luckily, I had enough scrap plyboard to knock one together. The table and crate combo ended up weighing 50 pounds and cost me about $30 to ship. Not bad, I guess. Thanks goes out to the people at the local FedEx place and the USPS office for helping me figure out how to send something like this. Not so much thanks goes out to the non-helpful people at Office Depot or to the borderline-openly-hostile people at the UPS Store.

Finally saw "Avatar". If you have the means, and you are one of the 6 or 7 people in America that has not seen it, I highly recommend seeing the IMAX 3-D version.

Found out Radio Shack no longer carries thermal paste at the local store. Bummer. I need to unseat, clean, and reseat a cranky CPU to see if that fixes my black screen of death problem so I can continue on with some video editing work I was doing before the computer died...

Started reading a new book (In the Courts of the Sun by Brian D'Amato) my wife got me for Valentine's Day (thanks, Sweetie!). It looks pretty promising so far.

Talk to you later.

Cartoons (Part I)

My son is eighteen months old and his tastes in his morning feeding viewing material have evolved significantly. Here is a list of his favorite shows since the time he was born, in approximate order.

Anything He Was Pointed At – Before three months or so, he was most interested in the human feeding him, the ceiling, the door, or what have you. Same thing anyone with 20/800 vision and no attention span would look at, I guess.

DirecTV Screen Saver – Yep. Just happily riveted by the corporate logo lazily caroming off the sides of the TV set. Pretty advanced for his age, I'd say. You would expect that behavior more from college kids doing chemical experimentation...

Third Rock From the Sun Opening Credits – I put these shows on my Netflix list. Shut up. Whenever he would hear the intro, he would whip his head around from whatever he was doing (usually eating) and watch the spheres bounce around to the heavy guitar music until the very last note of the opening faded away (baroooowww-owwww!) and then resume whatever it was he was doing. He had no interest in the show whatsoever.

Star Trek Voyager Opening Credits – Again, shut up. He actually enjoys the music for this and called some toy rockets “bah-bum-bums” for a while (listen to the music and you will hear why), and would say “Bye-Bye spaceship” when it zipped away at the end of the credits. That was pretty neat. On the down side he calls all photos of fire (like a firetruck battling a blaze) “spaceship”. Again, you would have to watch the first few seconds of the opening to see why that makes sense.

Shaun the Sheep – He (and I) love this show, although for some reason he was terrified of one episode that had a stuffed bear in it. Also he did not like the episode where the sheep dress up like a person and go out for pizza. That stunk, because that is my favorite one, and I couldn't watch it without him getting visibly upset. BTW, he no longer fears those episodes.

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse – Dear Disney. Congratulations on putting out a terrific program. It is colorful and well done and I highly recommend it for its teaching capacity. Please put out more of them. Dear Everyone Else: You will watch these episodes scores of times. To maintain your sanity, you might want to try these approaches 1) Treat the shows like MST3K audience members would or 2) Treat the shows like Rocky Horror Picture Show audience members would (messier and crazier).

Go Diego Go – This used to get my vote for “Least Hangover Friendly Cartoon”. “Hey, Diego, how about taking it down 6 or 7 notches, woudja? It's 5:30 in the morning, dude... Maybe Rescue Pack could turn into some aspirin and a cup of coffee and just go away for a while...”

Phineas and Ferb – He likes the music the most, especially the opening credits and the two songs “I Ain't Got Rhythm” and “Gitchie-Gitchie-Goo”. I like the Christmas special, myself.

Spongebob Squarepants – I am not sure what he likes about the show other than the opening credits. I think he just like saying “Shunpop Skeerpans”. FWIW, I don't like the current season very much.

(To Be Continued...)