It seems as if every one of the bedsprings is against me. They cry out in unison at my incursion, and every shift of my weight brings more protests. As I slip beneath the sheets, I cringe at the screech of rough cotton being drug across the dry skin of my knees. Every twitch brings a cacophony, until at last, a reasonably comfortable position has been found.
But what is this tickle? It starts in the nostrils, but soon the whole nose is engulfed in a fire of anticipation. Never has the resistance to a bodily function been so important. No greater battle has been waged between man and himself. Until suddenly, and explosion. The sound rips through the night, destroying the last hour's work as the crying from across the room begins again in earnest. Wearily, the bed is abandoned and the mantle of parenthood is taken up again.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Friday, January 13, 2012
Step It Up
Okay, so I was looking back through my blog roll and I noticed I only had 72 posts for the last 3 years. I feel like I can do better than that. So here we go. What do I want to talk about? This is totally a stream of consciousness post. No telling what will come out. No telling if anything will come out. Okay, so nothing's coming out.
I'm getting pressure from a couple of sources to resume my short story writing. This is problematic for me as I have just taken up woodworking, as I mentioned in my last post. I enjoy both pastimes, but the workshop is new and exciting, whereas the writing is something I'm a little more experienced at. It's kind of like when you start playing an instrument. When you first learn where to put your fingers, how to make the notes on the page form a melody, it's very exciting. Once you're over that initial excitement however, it becomes a bit tedious. The amount of effort required to improve the quality of your performance is very daunting. Frequent practices, lessons, etc make it seem easier to simply accept your current proficiency.
It's this way with my writing. I know how good I am (eh), and I know to get better I'm going to have to spend a lot of time on a lot of really bad stories before I'm able to produce something anyone would actually want to read. So it's easier to focus on my new hobby, and develop those initial skills and enjoy the fruit of that easy labor. Maybe my writing here and my regurgitation of whatever pops into my head will aid me in developing my skills as an author. I apologize to any of you who are left to slog through the nonsense I produce between now and then.
I'm getting pressure from a couple of sources to resume my short story writing. This is problematic for me as I have just taken up woodworking, as I mentioned in my last post. I enjoy both pastimes, but the workshop is new and exciting, whereas the writing is something I'm a little more experienced at. It's kind of like when you start playing an instrument. When you first learn where to put your fingers, how to make the notes on the page form a melody, it's very exciting. Once you're over that initial excitement however, it becomes a bit tedious. The amount of effort required to improve the quality of your performance is very daunting. Frequent practices, lessons, etc make it seem easier to simply accept your current proficiency.
It's this way with my writing. I know how good I am (eh), and I know to get better I'm going to have to spend a lot of time on a lot of really bad stories before I'm able to produce something anyone would actually want to read. So it's easier to focus on my new hobby, and develop those initial skills and enjoy the fruit of that easy labor. Maybe my writing here and my regurgitation of whatever pops into my head will aid me in developing my skills as an author. I apologize to any of you who are left to slog through the nonsense I produce between now and then.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Woodwork
It was tough for me to settle on that title, what with it having wood in it. But after considering several other possibilities like Working With Wood (alliterative!) Or How to Start Being a Handyman, my sophomoric mind could no more accept such vague and poorly constructed entendres as the current title. And since "Carpentry" has far too much impetus for the infantile level of knowledge I am attempting to apply to my work, I shied away from it as well.
I've spent the last 6 months or so attempting to turn a portion of my garage into a workshop. The first step of course was clearing out all of the clutter that was constantly-present-and-ever-growing on the half of my garage that didn't contain a car. I had a very clear line of demarcation running down the middle that allowed enough room for entering and exiting the vehicle, but not much else.
So after many weeks of sorting and disposing of the massive amounts of detritus our lives had collected, I realized that I had far too much stuff that I couldn't in good conscience throw out, but had little or no immediate use for. That was the motivation for building "The Shed". Oh what a project that was. Through the intermittent assistance of a couple of associates (one in particular, you know who you are) I was able to construct a 6' tall shed that had a footprint of 4'x8' over the course of about 2 and a half months. Yes, it really took me that long. But I built the thing from 2'x4's and plywood, almost exclusively. And despite what some naysayers may think, I think it looks like a barn. There are those who think the red I chose to paint it in was too garish, since I went for more of the Playskool red barn versus the more traditional blood red.
Anywho, once it was finally finished, I moved all of the indispensable but unnecessary accoutrement out back to the shed and now have a viable space to begin building. The first thing I want to build is something like this, which I expect will take a significant amount of time and many tools I don't currently own. Maybe before starting that I'll work on one of these, if for no other reason than to appease the missus. Show a benefit for all the hours I'll be spending in the garage, that sort of thing. She also wants one of these, which shouldn't be too hard to put together.
I don't plan on this blog becoming a how-to for beginners such as myself, but I may post the occasional pat-on-the-back (kind of like this one) when I complete a project. I promise to minimize the pictures.
I've spent the last 6 months or so attempting to turn a portion of my garage into a workshop. The first step of course was clearing out all of the clutter that was constantly-present-and-ever-growing on the half of my garage that didn't contain a car. I had a very clear line of demarcation running down the middle that allowed enough room for entering and exiting the vehicle, but not much else.
So after many weeks of sorting and disposing of the massive amounts of detritus our lives had collected, I realized that I had far too much stuff that I couldn't in good conscience throw out, but had little or no immediate use for. That was the motivation for building "The Shed". Oh what a project that was. Through the intermittent assistance of a couple of associates (one in particular, you know who you are) I was able to construct a 6' tall shed that had a footprint of 4'x8' over the course of about 2 and a half months. Yes, it really took me that long. But I built the thing from 2'x4's and plywood, almost exclusively. And despite what some naysayers may think, I think it looks like a barn. There are those who think the red I chose to paint it in was too garish, since I went for more of the Playskool red barn versus the more traditional blood red.
Anywho, once it was finally finished, I moved all of the indispensable but unnecessary accoutrement out back to the shed and now have a viable space to begin building. The first thing I want to build is something like this, which I expect will take a significant amount of time and many tools I don't currently own. Maybe before starting that I'll work on one of these, if for no other reason than to appease the missus. Show a benefit for all the hours I'll be spending in the garage, that sort of thing. She also wants one of these, which shouldn't be too hard to put together.
I don't plan on this blog becoming a how-to for beginners such as myself, but I may post the occasional pat-on-the-back (kind of like this one) when I complete a project. I promise to minimize the pictures.
The dirt at the bottom is from a recent rain,
the poor paint job is just a poor paint job.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
What A Great Idea #15
Okay, so I know there are some tech-y types who read this blog, so please don't rip into me too hard when I lay this one out. I'm relatively certain it won't work based solely on the amount of knowledge I'm missing regarding it, but here goes.
So I use this software associated with Adobe Acrobat to recognize text in .pdf's and convert it to something I can manipulate. For those of you not familiar with .pdf's, they are essentially images of documents that can be sent around without a fear of them being altered too much or messed with. (if I got that wrong feel free to correct me)
So this OCR software is nice and all, but there are a bunch of situations where it doesn't work. If there's a picture in the pdf, or if there is renderable text, etc etc. But when I look at the screen, it's very obviously an "a" right there looking at me. At some point in the pdf-monitor process something in there recognized that certain pixels needed to be lit up so that my eye would recognize the shape of an "a".
So my great idea is more of a question. Would it be possible to access whatever part of the OS is determining what I see on the monitor and scan that data for certain arrangements of pixels? If they are sending out these couple hundred pixels, laid out just so, couldn't there be program that saw that as a letter and processed it as such for me?
I understand that there may need to be some kind of filtering system, or a determination of font color, or there's the high likelihood of getting every single letter of text on the entire screen, but is it possible? If so it would make my and a lot of other people's jobs a lot easier. I can't tell you the number of times I've had type page after page of stuff into a new word doc just because the OCR couldn't recognize it and when I tried to convert it it went all wonky (that's a technical term) and was essentially gibberish.
So I use this software associated with Adobe Acrobat to recognize text in .pdf's and convert it to something I can manipulate. For those of you not familiar with .pdf's, they are essentially images of documents that can be sent around without a fear of them being altered too much or messed with. (if I got that wrong feel free to correct me)
So this OCR software is nice and all, but there are a bunch of situations where it doesn't work. If there's a picture in the pdf, or if there is renderable text, etc etc. But when I look at the screen, it's very obviously an "a" right there looking at me. At some point in the pdf-monitor process something in there recognized that certain pixels needed to be lit up so that my eye would recognize the shape of an "a".
So my great idea is more of a question. Would it be possible to access whatever part of the OS is determining what I see on the monitor and scan that data for certain arrangements of pixels? If they are sending out these couple hundred pixels, laid out just so, couldn't there be program that saw that as a letter and processed it as such for me?
I understand that there may need to be some kind of filtering system, or a determination of font color, or there's the high likelihood of getting every single letter of text on the entire screen, but is it possible? If so it would make my and a lot of other people's jobs a lot easier. I can't tell you the number of times I've had type page after page of stuff into a new word doc just because the OCR couldn't recognize it and when I tried to convert it it went all wonky (that's a technical term) and was essentially gibberish.
Friday, September 9, 2011
What A Great Idea #14
Alright, so I don't really have all the technology worked out on this one. It's more like I have a problem that I have a vague solution to. The problem is cold drinks. I'm a fan of cold drinks, specifically Gatorade. I like one of those big 32 oz bottles of Gatorade after a hard day out in the sun. The problem is they take up a lot of floor space in the refrigerator, so I don't like putting more than one or two in there at a time. This means if I forget to put a drink in there to get cold, then I have to stick it in the freezer and keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't burst.
So my solution is kind of the anti-microwave. I think I'll call it the Coolwave. Of course that's kind of like cool whip, so it might not work. Anywho, the idea is to have a small chamber with a door, much like a microwave, but instead of a microwave emitter heating up your food I want to have a bottle of liquid nitrogen or something. Once the vessel was sealed, the valve on the liquid nitrogen would be opened minutely, just enough to rapidly lower the temperature in the vessel to whatever you wanted. Then once the temperature was low enough, a fan would start at the other end to suck all the nitrogen out and a pump of some kind could be employed to re-pressurize and perhaps condense the nitrogen back into liquid form.
Of course there would be some loss, combined with the fact that it would be contaminated with whatever air was already in the chamber. Maybe another exhaust system could be used prior to the cooling process to draw a vacuum on the chamber. The power consumption on something like this would probably be pretty high too.
But the uses are pretty far reaching. Not enough ice for the party? Coolwave a few trays. Want to make popsicles for all the kids in the neighborhood who showed up in your back yard? It will only take a moment. Jellos set in record time, mixes and baking recipes that call for something to cool overnight will now only have to cool for a few seconds. You could chill glasses for that frosty mug of root beer, or bowls so your ice cream will stay colder longer (Brandon). The possibilities go on and on.
Like I said, the technology is a bit beyond me. Storing liquid nitrogen is a probably dangerous, and ensuring it was all out of the chamber before you opened it would be important. But the same could be said for a microwave emitter, a very dangerous tool if used improperly. The real problem is the feasibility of returning the nitrogen to a liquid state. I don't know how that is done normally, but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes a pretty hefty cooling tower or something. But hey, they used to say a computer would never fit inside a home, and now one fits in my pocket, so who knows.
So my solution is kind of the anti-microwave. I think I'll call it the Coolwave. Of course that's kind of like cool whip, so it might not work. Anywho, the idea is to have a small chamber with a door, much like a microwave, but instead of a microwave emitter heating up your food I want to have a bottle of liquid nitrogen or something. Once the vessel was sealed, the valve on the liquid nitrogen would be opened minutely, just enough to rapidly lower the temperature in the vessel to whatever you wanted. Then once the temperature was low enough, a fan would start at the other end to suck all the nitrogen out and a pump of some kind could be employed to re-pressurize and perhaps condense the nitrogen back into liquid form.
Of course there would be some loss, combined with the fact that it would be contaminated with whatever air was already in the chamber. Maybe another exhaust system could be used prior to the cooling process to draw a vacuum on the chamber. The power consumption on something like this would probably be pretty high too.
But the uses are pretty far reaching. Not enough ice for the party? Coolwave a few trays. Want to make popsicles for all the kids in the neighborhood who showed up in your back yard? It will only take a moment. Jellos set in record time, mixes and baking recipes that call for something to cool overnight will now only have to cool for a few seconds. You could chill glasses for that frosty mug of root beer, or bowls so your ice cream will stay colder longer (Brandon). The possibilities go on and on.
Like I said, the technology is a bit beyond me. Storing liquid nitrogen is a probably dangerous, and ensuring it was all out of the chamber before you opened it would be important. But the same could be said for a microwave emitter, a very dangerous tool if used improperly. The real problem is the feasibility of returning the nitrogen to a liquid state. I don't know how that is done normally, but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes a pretty hefty cooling tower or something. But hey, they used to say a computer would never fit inside a home, and now one fits in my pocket, so who knows.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Coming Up On Level 3
Does anybody else get the feeling that raising a child is like playing an MMORPG? Not exactly like it, but you gotta admit there are some striking similarities. It seems like to level up at one of these role-playing games, first you have to get the gem from this place, but to get the gem first you have to get the map from this other place, but to get the map you have to go defeat the ogre in this other place. And on and on and on.
I feel like I'm just trying to level up my children until I reach the ultimate goal of producing a functioning member of society. But to get there I have to go through grueling hours of all the little details that have to be accomplished to get to a particular goal, like learning to walk, or speak, or use the bathroom. Of course to walk they first have to roll over. Then they have to start crawling. Then pulling up on furniture. And on and on and on.
I find that in the games I've played, I didn't necessarily want to beat the game, or be the best, or have the highest rating. I would set myself a slightly lower goal and try really hard to accomplish that, like getting in the top 10,000 on the leaderboard or something. The same is true of raising a child. Don't get me wrong, if I can manage to produce the first female president then woohoo, but at the moment I'm just interested in having a conversation with my toddler that actually makes sense.
I feel like I'm just trying to level up my children until I reach the ultimate goal of producing a functioning member of society. But to get there I have to go through grueling hours of all the little details that have to be accomplished to get to a particular goal, like learning to walk, or speak, or use the bathroom. Of course to walk they first have to roll over. Then they have to start crawling. Then pulling up on furniture. And on and on and on.
I find that in the games I've played, I didn't necessarily want to beat the game, or be the best, or have the highest rating. I would set myself a slightly lower goal and try really hard to accomplish that, like getting in the top 10,000 on the leaderboard or something. The same is true of raising a child. Don't get me wrong, if I can manage to produce the first female president then woohoo, but at the moment I'm just interested in having a conversation with my toddler that actually makes sense.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Misty Water-Colored Memories
I wouldn't classify this as a Great Idea, but it is a bit of a quandary that's been bouncing around my skull for a while now. We make assumptions about how everyone in the world perceives the world. Specifically we assume that everyone views color the same way we do. In other words the way I see the color we call red is the same way you see the color we call red.
There really is no basis for that belief. We already know that there are people in this world that have different interpretations of light waves than the norm. We label these people "colorblind". What if there was another subsection of people who could perceive all the colors, but for some reason their brain didn't process them the same?
They could potentially see the color red, but their brain perceives it as what I would call the color blue, were I to look through their eyes. They of course would be raised from infancy to identify that color by the title "red", thereby integrating them into society and no one being the wiser to the difference in their brain.
Now what if there was some truth to the belief that colors play an unconscious role in our moods, like red causing anger, yellow happiness, blue depression, etc. So if this person who is being shown red is actually seeing what the rest of us would call blue, would they get depressed by the color "red"? Would they get angry when shown yellow?
The point is if it's possible for the brain to be wired in such a way as to misinterpret colors, then isn't also possible that those misinterpretations can lead to unnatural aggression, if every time the sky is clear they are angry? Or perhaps someone could be depressed by sunshine. They may be imperceptible and only play a minor role in our overall makeup.
There really is no basis for that belief. We already know that there are people in this world that have different interpretations of light waves than the norm. We label these people "colorblind". What if there was another subsection of people who could perceive all the colors, but for some reason their brain didn't process them the same?
They could potentially see the color red, but their brain perceives it as what I would call the color blue, were I to look through their eyes. They of course would be raised from infancy to identify that color by the title "red", thereby integrating them into society and no one being the wiser to the difference in their brain.
Now what if there was some truth to the belief that colors play an unconscious role in our moods, like red causing anger, yellow happiness, blue depression, etc. So if this person who is being shown red is actually seeing what the rest of us would call blue, would they get depressed by the color "red"? Would they get angry when shown yellow?
The point is if it's possible for the brain to be wired in such a way as to misinterpret colors, then isn't also possible that those misinterpretations can lead to unnatural aggression, if every time the sky is clear they are angry? Or perhaps someone could be depressed by sunshine. They may be imperceptible and only play a minor role in our overall makeup.
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