Folks, as part of my ongoing effort to learn about everything internet-based, I’ve gone ahead and shifted my site over to Expression Engine. I was inspired by a combination of recent WordPress security breaches on various sites I manage as well as a strong article of support from Dan Benjamin of Hivelogic. Bear with us as it gets worked out, but YOU can enjoy the new look, and I’LL enjoy the new backend.
I assigned myself a project recently: Make Sparklines out of local weather data. Well, the result is up at the projects page, along with a description/semi-tutorial. Go have a look!
A well-intentioned house mate from last Summer bought us a 500 pack of Rite Aid cotton swabs. As avid users of inter-aural cleaning devices we gratefully accepted the gesture. 6 months later, we are finally free from that unexpected circle of cotton-deprived hell. Q-Tips here we come.
“Unemployment” infers furious job searching, scraping by on pennies from the State, and lots of sitting in your PJs. Incorrectly, as it turns out.
$5 each got us some new markers, a sketch pad, and a 2 hour blitz of exercises from Drawing 101. Challenges included “30 seconds, GO”, “7 lines only to represent ____”, or “Horse”. The results were mostly pleasing and are made public for the betterment of mankind: Flickr Set
As part of an on-going series of art projects, I have been in need of large format sprites ripped from classic video games. Source material has included photographs of my TV while playing the games, screenshots from Nestopia, and the various fan sites such as The ShyGuy Kingdom, and Spriters Resource.
The inital workflow was screwy:
OR
The biggest issue is that pixel identification was difficult. Blowing up a rasterized image originally produced as a sort of vector art means squiggly lines, bleeding colors, and generally makes a hard pattern to follow. My solution was to use Google Docs!
After seeing their neat collaborative video of making a snowflake, I decided to copy the sprites into Docs. The art I have currently used is all publicly available via the following links:
The resultant pages are viewable on my iPod (an important determinant of success, because creating this art ought to be mobile and (kind of) platform-independent) and also resizeable with great fidelity:
Easy to work from!
As I continue to make patterns, I’ll post links to the updated files. I imagine you could also find them via a search as I’ve publicly shared them all.
UPDATE: Here is one of the finished projects: 
The other escaped before photography could occur. That one is titled “Only the Best” and features the best powerups from NES. Can you identify them all?
The challenge was too good to pass up: 2000 Mussel shells in less than 24 hours.
The reward ($X00) was secondary. Why did she want them? And why so quickly? I’ll be able to answer those questions after the handoff tonight. All I know is that I had some interested dogs sniffing at my bags on the T, but at least I had an excuse this time.
UPDATE: The buyer was making a “sea grotto” in hew new Beacon Hill condo, and didn’t want to get her hands dirty. I’ve requested pictures, I’ll let you all know if she complies. Not as compelling as it could have been, but the money has been well spent so no worries. Until next time, here’s to random jobs and fun stories.
When Mariah and I moved into our new apartment last November (2007), the temperatures were just starting to change from “crispy fall” into “soul-sucking winter”. One of our first priorities was to seal up our apartment, because someone back in the 60’s decided that a clunky, poorly-tuned oil furnace was the best thing to install in our basement. At roughly $800 a tank, we were hoping to fill it only once during our 8 month lease.
We did a quick audit, and found the following low-cost/no-cost areas for improvement:
So after assessing our needs, we went off to Home Depot (we don’t know of any neighborhood alternatives yet. Help us find one!) and collected the following items:
For a total of $15.95 we came home armed with the tools to help seal up our house. The rope caulk was applied liberally to all the visible cracks, sealing us both from the outside and our un-insulated basement. The window-sealing plastic creates a dead-air space between the window and the room, so airflow is stopped and the leaching of heat slows down. This was the type that you apply with a hair-dryer, which took some practice but seems worth the effort. The aerators simply screwed on to the faucets, taking our measured flow from ~8 gallons per minute to 1.5 gpm. Excellent.
We ventured to the basement and adjusted our hot water heater. This took several luke-warm showers to dial in perfectly, but now our water is no hotter than it needs to be; before we were basically cutting the hot water (which we had paid to heat) with cold water to make it more comfortable. What a waste!
Our spare rooms were partially sealed off by closing the register vents and then covering them with a laundry basket and a large piece of cardboard. With the doors shut, these rooms end up much cooler than the rest of the house, saving us energy.
UPDATE: The results of this test were hard to quantify, but we only used 7/8ths of the tank, and had lower hot-water bills for the remainder of our stay. It was complicated by having a new room mate move in for July and August, but we’re still concinved it was worth the minimal effort and a few bucks.
He’s the kind of guy who has too much information, and no place to share it. Plus, I wanted to get on the URL train before it was totally out of the station (in 2007? Nice one…).
Ideally this will be a place to try experiments, document achievements, and be useful to someone, somewhere.