If I push my updates “up to the cloud,” can god see my e-mail?
Category: nerd
Coop Floor
The biggest reason I caved to Michelle’s desire to have chickens was the part where I got to design and build the coop. There was never any formal agreement, and I’m pretty sure the design has spiraled beyond what Michelle had anticipated. We’ve tried to use scrap and rebuilding center materials where we can, and new items only where it makes the most sense.
One aspect of the coop that I picked to include recycled material was the floor. The floor has to have spaces to allow feces (poop) to fall through. our neighbor’s coop had a a wooden grill similar to a cold air return from a 1940’s house. I liked the idea of using wood with ample space between the slats, so I picked up a bunch of old trim and laminate edges from Rebuilding Center, then cut them to the width of the coop. To seat them, I took some studs over to my dad’s shop and used his dado blade to cut notches for the slats. I was still uncertain as to how it would work until I finally assembled it last night. Looks like it should work, though the chickens will be the final test.
Next – the green roof!
Chaucer’s secret clues about the new world
You can view Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales online via Google. Since it has been googlized, you can also see how Google Maps picks out geographic places from the text and puts them on the map:
“For out of doute I veraily suppose, That he that wrote the Romant of the Rose, Ne coude of it the beautee wel devise..”
See that? It’s combining olde English and punctuation to get a place name: Rose, Nebraska. I’d say that Google is being geographically hyper-aware.
Cook’s Illustrated podcast
Cook’s Illustrated now has a podcast available from the iTunes store. It’s free, and it’s really great. Five minute video clips at a rapid speed, but oh so illuminating.
Bruce Lee lives
I finally found my first sidewalk decoration of interest in the new neighborhood. I’ve been looking, but haven’t been able to find any misspellings, and judging from how few concrete stamps there are, most of the neighborhood must have been done by the same contractor. Anyway, this gem is a few blocks my my place, and I took it back when it was light in the morning. The age of the cement suggests that was drawn in at the master’s height, if not shortly thereafter.
I can almost picture the scenerio in my head. Some kid just finished watching Enter the Dragon and was outside playing with his nun-chucks and saw wet cement. The clouds probably even parted and a ray of sunlight lit up the sidewalk, calling out to young Billy. Luckily, Billy knew who to immortalize. Good choice, Billy.
Camera phone shots
I don’t think I’ve posted any photos on this site since using Flickr, so I’ve posted a bunch that I’ve taken with my K750i’s camera. It’s a decent camera for a phone, and while I would have scoffed at the idea a while back, it has been nice to have the camera with me.
Most of the shots are of Ella, of course. Like this one when she could finally touch the underside of the table with her head at Concordia Ale House. Yes… important milestone…
Shoo Fly
A house fly just landed on my screen. The light from the screen shines through his abdomen revealing a seemingly hollow chamber with a spine down the middle. The fly seemed content just cleaning himself as I chatted with Matt, but then I got kind of annoyed at his bathing on my screen. I didn’t want to touch him, so I decided to pester him with the mouse cursor, which at the time was a link-rollover hand. Sure enough, it made the little bugger nervous and he started to move to avoid the pointing finger. Being a boy, and this being virtual-poking, I kept at it, and the fly flew off. Solving problems with technology.
gCensus
Imran Hague has put together a set of libraries that work with US Census data and make it available to view in Google Earth. The project, gCensus, looks like a great start and will hopefully lead to greater use of the Census’ already excellent resource.
I couldn’t agree with Imran more about improving access to this data. Now, about displaying raw data with choropleth maps….
Your e-mail will be… back?
Myrealbox, my mail host for the last 5 years has been down for the last week. It appears that they’ve just placed an announcement about the problem notifying us that service should be back soon. Really confidence inspiring. Hopefully they really are saving all incoming e-mail with plans to deliver it once service returns. Looks like I didn’t bail soon enough.
Now, if only Gmail supported IMAP.
Eyes bleed chroma
I had a dream that my eyes were bleeding chroma, the gray value associated with the Munsell color system. It made finishing my maps impossible because the colors were all too bright. Weird, for many reasons, but mainly because I don’t like the Munsell system. I much prefer to work with HEX codes. RGB is ok, but harder to remember when you have to type in a lot of values. Time to use some eye drops.