Crazy But Able

A quote from a friend to whom I recently sent some real, printed-on-paper photos:

1) I say this with all love and admiration and foofiness: Right now, somewhere in the world is a schizophrenic serial killer who has just gone off his meds, gotten himself heavily drunk, and at this moment is attempting to write a warning on his bathroom wall about a mind control device implanted in his teeth by CIA-funded aliens. This man has better handwriting than you. :)

2) following from the above, the best I can deduce from the caption of one photo is that you think C. would make an excellent custard.

It’s true. My “absolute best behavior” handwriting is atrocious.

Scott Adams recently moved into a new house, and has a list of house ideas that worked:

Home Theater Location

We put our home theater in the same general area as the kitchen and family room. It seats ten, which makes it cozy enough for general TV viewing. Now that most TV shows are HD, the big screen gets used every night. If the theater were in the basement or the far end of the home, as is often the case, it would feel lonely, and only get used for movies.

The theater has a double door with a large glass oval in the center. It doesn’t let much light in, and you always feel visually connected to people in the kitchen when you’re in the theater.

Being near the kitchen gives you convenient access to the microwave and refrigerator. The theater is soundproofed with acoustic wall panels, so you can be blasting a movie without interrupting conversation in the kitchen. It works in reverse too. If you want to escape the noise in the rest of the house you can leave the theater sound off and be in complete silence.

TV for Parties

The living room has its own largish standard TV. That allows us to entertain around special broadcasts such as the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards. The hardcore viewers use the theater while the chit-chatters mingle in the living room, near enough to each other that there’s a flow back and forth to make you feel connected. And both rooms open to the kitchen where people inevitably congregate, so the three spaces act as one for entertaining. (There’s a small TV in the kitchen too.)

Far be it for me to disagree with my lovely wife, but I would like to offer up a slight clarification.

I don’t think I’m “right”, I think I made the right decision for me. She didn’t tell me that she was intentionally not eating salad; I’ve been feeling guilty for the past two months for eating it all up before she got a chance.

I don’t think her choice was “wrong”, it was more of a decision on my part to try to get as many different salad recipes under my belt so I could bang one out when I needed to. And yes, it was difficult to get used to eating so many greens.

I had a theory. My theory was that before, during previous attempts at eating our way through the CSA “greens” marathon, we would only buy salad dressing one bottle at a time. So by the third day of peppercorn ranch, my stomach revolted at the thought.

But what if we had lots of different kinds of salad dressings? And salad dressing toppings? How many different kinds of recipes could I make? Hey, that sounds less like “work” and more like “fun”!

The experiment worked for me! Now I’m a little cranky if I don’t get my breakfast salad. It helps that this first salad mix from our new CSA was AMAZING. It had all kinds of crazy-weird plants, and, strangely enough, didn’t taste like lawn clippings.

Update: From the newsletter, this is what was in the salad mix:

One Bag of Salad Mix: Mizuna, Mustard Greens, Tatsoi, Red Russian Kale, Red Amaranth, Baby Lettuces, Bulls Blood Beets, and Pea Shoots.

Original:

Lens vignetting (-100):

Convert to greyscale:

Brightness (+14):

Black clipping (+18):

Contrast (+21):

Clarity (+13) (subtle, probably only visible at larger sizes):

All edits using Lightroom 1.4. Picture taken with a 20D using a 35-80 f/4-5.6 I, f/5.0, 1/30th of a second, ISO 1600.

[Extremely brief SoFoBoMo update: It's too much work to do a film based SoFoBoMo book with my current set up. Currently I'm re-thinking my SoFoBoMo book and trying to figure out a good theme.]

Molly Lewis wants to get an iPad. But iPads are expensive. So she took the cost of an iPad and made some infographics:

I’ve been itching to get an iPad for weeks, and so to put that amount of money into perspective I went through my ThinkGeek / Amazon / Del.icio.us wishlists, and made these infographics to show myself how much an iPad is worth in terms of all the other stuff on the internet that I consider too expensive to impulse-buy.

Each picture in this series adds up to roughly the same total, $1167 (an iPad+Apple Care+a case+1 year of data).

I love this! I should do this with some of the things I want.

Hey, it’s time for me to bore you with SoFoBoMo photos again! (At least it means semi-regular updates).

I like constraints with my SoFoBoMo books. My first book was taken using only my old digital point and shoot. My second was a book based on photos taken with a homemade macro lens. I’ve long wanted to do a film based SoFoBoMo book, so this year the constraint is that all photos have to be taken with my Olympus XA.

It’s proving to be an expensive constraint, sadly. I’m economizing by not getting the film scanned, and scanning the prints at home with my scanner. I’ve been getting wildly divergent film scans vs. prints from Costco recently anyway. Alas, scanning takes a tremendous amount of time, especially since I had to re-install the HP drivers, only to find that the old ones were far better. Now it takes me much, much longer to get a good scan.

One advantage: Costco gives these free index prints, so I don’t have to make contact sheets by hand. Here’s roll 1 and 2: (click to embiggen):

Rolls 3 and 4 are being developed and roll 5 is awaiting being sent over to Costco. Please note that the pictures of the kids playing in the mud in Roll 1 is actually from Memorial Day and does not count towards SoFoBoMo. Those won’t be in the book, so I posted one to the photolog instead.

Ferret Legging: a contest to see how long you can keep ferrets in your trousers:

Loyal to nothing that lives, the ferret has only one characteristic that might be deemed positive — a tenacious, single-minded belief in finishing whatever it starts. That usually entails biting off whatever it bites. The rules of ferret legging do allow the leggers to try to knock the ferret off a spot it’s biting (from outside the trousers only), but that is no small matter, as ferrets never let go. No less a source than the Encyclopaedia Britannica suggests that you can get a ferret to let go by pressing a certain spot over its eye, but Reg Mellor and the other ferret specialists I talked to all say that is absurd. Reg favors a large screwdriver to get a ferret off his finger. Another ferret legger told me that a ferret that had almost dislodged his left thumb let go only after the ferret and the man’s thumb were held under scalding tap water — for ten minutes.

Mr. Graham Wellstead, the head of the British Ferret and Ferreting Society, says that little is known of the diseases carried by the ferret because veterinarians are afraid to touch them.

Lady Gaga Poker Face rock cover:

Gnarls Barkley Crazy cover by Nelly Furtado:

Lady Gaga Bad Romance cover:

Love it:

[via Neven Mrgan]

(there is a gulf between a right-wing American and a right-wing Canadian that reaches from wing tip to wing tip of the Republican Party)

That’s from this profile on hockey in America, written from the perspective of a Canadian. The whole article is very good; you can feel the despair when he rattles off the brand names.

I have three opinions, no, four opinions on hockey. 1. Go Wings! 2. Any game is better in real life. Bring a good book for the breaks between periods. 3. U.S. TV coverage of hockey is worse than a bucket of week old goat piss. In college we got CBC and it was great. 4. The Minnesota Wild? Really? What kind of craptastic team name is that?