Thing-a-day.com

Apparently, I can’t embed animoto here, but:

 http://animoto.com/play/UawQdyqLUsyV3FV1vVtJog

will take you there. It’s a short photo-collage of the most photogenic things I made during thing-a-day 2008.

Cheers!

Folks liked this last graph, so I updated it with the latest stats:

Farewell until next year — this was a blast!

I got a new (used) camera (Olympus C-5050 Zoom)! To celebrate, I took some photos of ecchi my cat playing baseball:

Ugh. That dreaded time has arrived:

I hope I got them right.

Simplest meal ever. (Sadly this also gave me an allergic reaction)

Fry up some bacon, cut into 1/2 inch strips. Add some chopped garlic and onion. Separately mix 2 raw eggs, 1/2 cup grated parmesan, parsley, oregano, salt and a touch of olive oil. Add bacon/garlic/onion to cheese/egg mix.

Cook some pasta. Drain pasta. Immediately mix in the cheese/egg with the pasta. The heat of the pasta cooks the egg enough (unless you’re like me and have a death-inducing raw egg allergy…oops! Epipens are good.)

the thing I made, is a remake (tuning) of a very classic, very old, very amazing machine: my Yamaha CS-80. The tuning process requires finding a lot of tuning points buried deep inside a bunch of circuit boards…and my CS-80 has needed it for a while. (It’s one reason why it hasn’t been in my latest tracks…it just sounds way off-key!)here’s a photo of my friend’s, as I’m busy still with DMM, probes, flashlights and plastic adjustment screwdrivers…truly a thing of wonder (each half of the pic will take you to a 1600×1200 closeup):

Tomorrow, I hope: sounds from this thing. 

Today I got a link to a great article at the National Geographic Magazine about the Large Hadron Collider.
There is this queer little paragraph in the write-up:

“Theoretical physicist John Ellis is one of the CERN scientists searching for the Higgs. He works amid totemic stacks of scientific papers that seem to defy the normal laws of gravity. He has long, gray hair and a long, white beard and, with all due respect, looks as if he belongs on a mountaintop in Tibet. Ellis explains that the Higgs field, in theory, is what gives fundamental particles mass. He offers an analogy: Different fundamental particles, he says, are like a crowd of people running through mud. Some particles, like quarks, have big boots that get covered with lots of mud; others, like electrons, have little shoes that barely gather any mud at all. Photons don’t wear shoes—they just glide over the top of the mud without picking any up. And the Higgs field is the mud.”

So I made a pictorial representation, in my best drawn hand:

Yeah, I don’t draw well. But it was fun. That’s Dr. John Ellis there in the Buddhist civara (robe). His left hand instructs the particles to go around the Higgs field track. His right hand is demonstrating the right-hand rule. The Higgs “mud” slows down the heavy Top Quark the most, but barely impacts the electron…and the photon just zips by above. That quantum duck on the right-hand side better give way for the race!

I also claim that if photons don’t have shoes, and float above the Higgs-mudded ground, then they must be the gayest particles ever. Electrons are merely metrosexual.

here it is, doozers with leg. a lightroom-ed cleanup of a photo from the summer.

In honour of mrthotep’s many twisted jokes, I present the pictorial image I always see whenever I hear the phrase:

(click for full size)

Now I feel really ashamed.

My cast iron skillets are awesome, but the handles get very hot. So I borrowed a page from my memories of growing up in the US South, and made up some skillet handle condoms.

These are made from an Ikea potholder that is just too big to be practical:

I cut one of them into four pieces, then sewed around the outside with my new-found sewing skill. Slipping them back on gives a rough, but functional effect:

Though it’s not 100% attractive, I think this counts for a “level up” in sewing ability. +1!

I’ve been fearing my studio for far too long - with no good reason. It’s a nice studio. And I like making music.

So here it is - unpolished so I could finish within the time allotment for a “thing-a-day”: Urban Myths (4:16). It’s indirectly inspired by The Wire, an HBO series I’ve been watching on and off the past few weeks.

 Be gentle.

I love Indian food, yet I’m so surprised that I’ve cooked so little of it. I get stuck on a few favourite dishes (mainly dhals) that I overlook all of the other recipes.

Here’s a favourite when I order out that turned out fantastic: palak paneer. I made the recipe as listed, except where it says “cottage cheese” I substituted real paneer - gotten from a delicious little Indian food market on Gerrard in Toronto.

Here’s a photo just before final assembly:

Remember: recipes from the ‘net that claim dates before about 2000 are usually excellent, especially anything from a mailing list (this one is from EAT-L) or SOAR.

It happens to the best of us: forgotten passwords. In my case, it’s a forgotten passphrase for TrueCrypt, a virtual-encrypted-drive programme.

I think I know most of the phrase, but there’s 1 or 2 missing words I can’t recall. So with doozer’s help I now have 11 processors iterating over what I think the phrase is.

The source for the missing words? Not your average wordlist, but a wordlist compiled from nearly 1GB of personal chat logs. See, my guess is that I used a word that might not be in the usual wordlists and lexicons, but would probably be something I’ve mumbled online at some point. We’ll soon see! (And by soon, I mean “probably before the end of 2008,” given the number of permutations the code has to run through.

Some of the more interesting entries in my wordlist:

かわいいな顔よ、それ
A++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
affrication
garontee
hawwwwt
I_Eat_Plastic
mexican’t
OLEDs
propylene
pygmys
sexurity
tardbucket
ThhEEEeEEeeEEeEEeEEEEE
ubergesprungengen
want-to-scream-cry-pound-fists-into-brick-wall-but-won’t-even-swear

No, the word list will not be made available for download. Sorry!

love nethack. love pets. therefore:

CC attributions: Original dog picture by Johnny Jet. Original cat picture by Michael_CH.

B&W photography today, of some icicles hanging inside of the catwalk we constructed last year:

I have this huge collection of random change from multiple countries in the change tray at the door. (It’s from me and my mate’s frequent travel overseas.) It was always getting mixed up with my local change. So:

It’s a pretty simple fold from Makoto Yamaguchi’s Joyful Life with Origami (ISBN 4-7916-0085-1, sorry for the German link, only one I could find). I made these from oversized (~27cm square) plain paper and they are still fairly sturdy. The folded dimension is about 5.5-6cm square/cubed.

Each colour represents a different country: Argentina (light blue), Brasil (yellow), Singapore (green, ran out of red paper), Hong Kong (pink, ditto), Malaysia (purple - why not?)

I have too much US and Canadian change to use one of these unless I were to use a 1m-wide piece of paper

Today’s thing is a cocktail:

Ingredients

2 oz. Crown Royal
1/2 oz. Punt e Mes (or other quinquina or sweet red vermouth)
6 dashes Fee’s bitters (or other orange bitters)
100% black cherry juice (Knudsen’s Just Black Cherry or similar)
soda water

Preparation

Mix Crown Royal, Punt e Mes and Fee’s bitters in a lowball glass. Fill with equal parts black cherry juice and soda water. Stir and enjoy.

No photo - but imagine a nice dark red, slightly fizzy beverage in a lowball glass.

Only 200 or so of us are sticking with this. Don’t give up folks!

I’ll update this graph again on the 29th.

It’s been about 11 years since I had plenty of America On-Line CDROMs lying about with which to make coasters — literally, they graced my coffee table for years.

So today, when a dual-layer DVD+R went bad on me (substrate problem right out of the box), I decided to revisit that old trick. I also have a crappy microwave that I don’t care if it dies.

The results were gorgeous. The disc separated into two layers, each with a distinctive pattern.

I love how the corporate motto above looks like “is it evil or is it.”

One more photo and a video of the dual-layer coaster in the making are offsite.

In honour of tonight’s election returns:

If you don’t get it, visit the BBC.

P.S. I don’t endorse Obama or any other presidential candidate. I just think this numbers game in the States feels a bit like Mitchell and Webb’s Numberwang…