Hidden cubby on Ikea bed

A while ago we bought an ikea bed. It's kinda huge and has drawers which was pretty important for our old house as the closet space is very limited. When I finished assembling the thing I was really struck by the huge dead space left between the drawer and the head board.

I thought to myself what a perfect place to install a hidden chubby for those things you hope the children never find. I'm a huge fan of Make magazine and various Hackaday kind of sites that have projects of hidden storage and rooms in everyday objects. It's from reading about these projects that I was aware of hidden/invisible hinge setups. I carefully measured the board that I was going to replace and ordered a hinge that would fit into the that space. I was going for a completely hidden finished product, and since the Fjell was a pine bed finding stock that would match wasn't hard, nor was the painting of it.  I installed it on the side of the bed that is closer to a wall so you cannot see it from far away, and used a magnetic child latch to keep it from swinging open. 





Score one for the hidden sex toy storage cabinet.

Stuff and junk

An odd assortment of tidbits that have nowhere else to go. At nearly 1000 posts I'm loath to let this place wither on the vine, but at the same time Google's real name policy makes me loathe to participate any longer? Where does that leave me, something like facebook? A highly postured subsection of myself where I post PR approved sunshine to keep from endangering my future? There's plenty of places still online not owned by Google, and not being slowly killed by their aborted/failed/stalled crap social network. I cannot believe that they mortgaged their sub-properties to try and buoy up a new one. Look what it got you Google, no one wants to manage two social networks for the purpose of connecting and sharing. It's too tedious, people are happy to maintain different profiles for different purposes. This blog was some spleen venting, some part nerding out about various technology things, other parts being a book nerd. It was a place to put things to remember for later, a place a few friends knew about so I could just be me.

Our past defines us, moving to somewhere new gives us a chance to change that and our corporate overlords don't care for that. It's  hard to sell to a multi-headed hydra of a person. They need to be one monolithic person a collection of all there pieces so we know exactly how they'll move when we push them. To that extent it's no wonder that the NSA was tapping into Google's vast store of information about us. They already did the hard work aggregating data on us.

But enough about my complaining what about Me?

Well, I've been busy. Oldest boy is working his way towards being 3 and we just had another son that's 3 weeks old. Otherwise I've been spending way, way too much time in the hospital for <cough>swollen testicle<cough> for my own good. Now as much fun as it is to have repeated ultrasounds on your nuts, the blood work and peeing in the cup hardly makes it worth the effort. Also I got my favorite and most often response from the many days there. "Huh, don't know what that was about. Looks fine now."

Thanks Doc, glad to see those years of med school are working out for you.

In the months since my wife got pregnant, I've not managed to brew a damn thing (though I did do a run on my still) and only have made one batch of hard cider in the last year. My brewing skills are in serious disrepair, and I want to get a lead test kit before I run the still again (better safe than sorry)

Small updates and thankfulness

Well it was an uneventful thanksgiving (minus one parent having a meltdown and generally pissing everyone off) and it was amazing to spend so much time with my son over the long weekend.  He's just over a year old now, and I cannot believe how little "baby" I see in him.  He communicates somewhat with sign language, has clearly defined likes and dislikes, and is such a sweetheart.  Last night when my wife laid him down for bed he rolled over and blew her a kiss.

Lady Killer.  For real.  It's a good thing we not competing for the woman in our life, because I would loose daily.  For all that he's a boy, pushes boundaries at every turn, and has so little fear of anything.  I had two cell phones in my hands (kid loves the technology) and he wanted them, so I handed him one while I was trying to get directions on the other.  He kept reaching for the other one (it's screen was on so he wanted that one) and when I told him he hand one and pointed at the one in his hand, he looked at the phone and then looked me dead in the eye and chucked the phone out of his car seat!  He's barely mastered walking and he moved on to climbing.  Couches, chairs, stairs, baby gates, beds.  Yeah, I have smart and destructive monkey that runs around my house all day long.  He walks like a drunk circus clown, but he doesn't miss a thing.  You leave it in his arm reach he's going to find it, and chew on it.

Nothing is safe, but I like the evolving challenge of it all.

On the beer front, the american strong went into the barrel on Friday and that whiskey smells so amazing.  I need to get something brewing this weekend, but that seems like so much work to me right now.

My Soured Vanilla Bourbon Robust Porter needs to go into bottles, the Soured Oatmeal Stout needs to be bottled, and finally the small beer from the American Strong (3 gallons worth) needs to be bottled.  That's a lot of beer work that I'm talking about doing this week, so brewing again lands fairly low on the todo list for some reason.  I'm assuming that the American strong will only be able to last about 2 maybe 3 weeks in the barrel before the oak overwhelms it so if I do another beer this weekend it will be ready to go in the barrel in 8-14 days.  Hopefully  the second beer can sit on the oak a little longer than the first one so I can slow down a bit, otherwise I'm going to have to start recruiting the local bums to come drink my beer!  I mean friends, local friends.  I'm not sure I have enough bottles for almost 11 gallons of beer, I may have to keg some just for lack of space.  I made a gallon of the supper weak runnings of my American strong that I threw the lee's of New Belgium's Brett Beer onto.  If that took I could blend the 3 gallons and that one gallon in the keg for a lightly soured blended beer on tap.  I'm probably the only one I know that likes this stuff so, who cares what the haters think.

Cardboard robotic arm

This was a pretty neat Kickstarter that ran over the summer, at the end of the day it's about a $200 computer controlled robotic arm made of cardboard.  The usefulness is somewhat limited, but the materials and relatively low cost ($200 for a 4 axis control board and 3 stepper motors is pretty decent) would make it a fun electronics project for learning with children.  Best part is that you could turn them loose with it when they are done, I don't see them killing themselves with cardboard.





Via engadget

Raising boys

Since the birth of my son, I've been in a curious spot trying to think long term about the things that I find important and want for him to learn.  One constant theme that I'm running into even before my son turned one is the gender stereotyping, and "norming" on those lines.  My parents, and In-laws both are projecting a good deal of boy roles onto him already with the toys they buy but the worst usurper is in my own household, my wife.  We lost a daughter at full term, and thus had a house full of pink things for baby girls.  Most of the items where functional, clothes bedding, ect.  When we found out that it was going to be a boy overnight most of that stuff was sold, or donated and a flood of blue came into our house.  I argued (and still argue) that the pink things, especially the things like bedding, and clothes that they only really wear for a short period of time and are just going to spit up on can be any color in the damn rainbow.  I think she needed the validation that it was a boy, I'm pretty sure my son was wholly unaware of both the color of his clothes and how people reacted to him in those clothes.  By casting colors as gender specific we are limiting him, and ourselves, and that seems ludicrous.  In a related sense, I also am trying to be mindful of what types of toys I buy him so as to not force the type of play that we allow him to engage in.  I think this article addresses the issue fairly well.

Another issue is respecting women, both their autonomy and their intelligence.  I suppose you can gather that I have some feminist leanings, and in that vein I wanted to raise a boy and hopefully a young man that has some appreciation for the amount of projection that women are subjected to, but also how marginalized they can be.  It wasn't until really the last few years that I've had my eyes opened to how pervasively American society has sexualized and marginalized women, but anyone that has been watching this years political cycle no doubt is aware of how politicized women's health and autonomy has become.  It's appalling that politicians think that they should be in charge of choices that a woman and her health care provider should be making.

And finally there is his own sexuality.  I don't remember how I found Goodmenproject, but this article on sex education is one of the guiding lights I have for conversations that are inevitable as he grows up.  Like the author of that article I was also left on my own, to guess and talk with other boys my own age.  I had a sex education class around grade 6, but even then I would not have been comfortable asking questions in that kind of group setting so aside from some of the biology they taught, not many questions where answered.  I was fortunate to live with a nurse so I was able to get some questions answered, but really how much do you want to talk to your parents about sex?  As such I had the typical boy vocabulary that marginalized any body that wasn't a cisgendered male, and that makes it hard to explore what your sexuality even is.  In essence it's dictated to you by gender roles you absorbed from society or your peer group.  I still have a hard time not saying fag (online gamer, it happens from time to time), but taunts based on sexuality are exactly where it starts, and I'm hoping to at least educate him on how harmful it is to.

Small chainsaw art project

So I apparently am the guy that stops and picks up the tree cuttings you see on the side of the road with a sign saying "Free wood".  We went to the park with my son over the weekend and I saw this little beauty of a log that I just had to make mine.  What you see here is about 6 batteries worth of 10inch bar battery powered ryobi chainsawing action.  I have 3 batteries and 1 charger so that amounts to give or take all day.

I've worked on it through two more batteries so far, and have the seat level and am working on trying to square up the sides and back.

For some reason I decided that this would make an awesome little man chair, and have been steadily working towards making this thing into a chair.  When I started it weighed between 80-100lbs and was the upper limit of what I could carry around the side of the house up a hill and into the back yard.  For those of you that have browsed deep into my archive of posts you may realize I've kind of wanted to do a chainsaw project since 2006 or so.

M is for Meritocracy

The Rise of the Meritocracy is a sociological satire written in post WWII England it pokes holes in the notion that IQ+Effort=Merit and was supposed to be a general take down of the notion that aptitude could be tested for.  This work forms the basis of the following Article on Measurement Myths from the New Inquiry.  I would really encourage you to read the article it is one of the best reasoned examinations of the current drill, kill, test regime we have adopted in the US in the wake of the well intentioned No Child Left Behind act signed into law by our good friend and former President Dubya Bush.

I'll try to summarize some of the main take aways from the article, but the article is quite long and it's case built well; I fear thumbnail sketches don't really do justice to the original content.  The first criticism of the current power structure is it fundamentally overlooks the cumulative bonuses of already being elite, the children of the elite are no more meritous than those of those currently on the bottom of the power structure.  They are however afforded more stable home lives that give them the opportunities to excel, but more over they have hands guiding them to success with positive reinforcement and active support.  This makes the children of the less powerful effectively running a race against teams rather than other individuals.  Without this support network (and the cumulative bonuses associated with it) the elites children would likely perform similarly to other unsupported children.

There is also a myopia in the elite class that fails to recognize these cumulative benefits that causes them to perceive that they have earned the benefits they currently receive, and assume that if others applied themselves the benefits would be available to them as well.  By discounting the value of the assistance they have revived and the cumulative advantages afforded them the elite effectively feel justified in not advancing or assisting the disenfranchised and retreat to intellectual enclaves that assure them they are correct in their assumptions (Ayn Rand's Fountainhead is mentioned as an example and to satirize their position of authority).  My personl feeling is that examples of this abound, but the general fall of charity and near complete dissolution of service organizations is truly indicative of this myopia and a danger of the entitlement mindset.

Another and more troubling outgrowth of the test for merit is the testing inherently undervalues that which it doesn't measure.  How do you test for artistic intelligence, or the ability to render the profound into prose?  There are few tests to measure creativity (an inherently unstructured way of thinking) and the focus on testing, and the passing along the standard knowledge is a destructive force on free thinking and ultimately dangerous.  I'll leave you with my favorite line from the last paragraph of that article.

More and better testing, regardless of how it is conducted, won’t make for better people, despite what educational reformers seem to believe, because tests always impose reductive goals that invalidate some ineffable amount of real aptitude among those tested.

For a completely different take on education here's the New Turks Discussion on Education in Finland.  This is the world I want my son to have access to, learn and pursue what you want.

Kids are a huge time sink

By the time we get ourselves and the boy fed and into jammies I'm always amazed that its 8:30 and he's due for the last night feeding.  All I accomplish is get dinner cooked, and sometimes dishes cleaned.

Granted there is lots of time spent hanging out, and keeping him entertained but if your mind focuses on what you accomplished (like mine) the answer is all too often nothing.  I checked on the status of the 46,600ish files I recovered and am transferring to my MIL's new computer via Windows Live Mesh and got Mad Men premier converted and ready for the wife to watch and took the trash out but seriously that is it.

How bout you?  Been getting much done lately?

Pregnant life

Not to gripe, but man it's hard living with a Preggo.  Between the feeding schedule and the overall tiredness they are experiencing, is damn hard to see them suffering from the baby growing and not being able to do anything about it.  You can rub their feet and keep them fed, you can try to help do chores and rub their feet some more but you cannot make their body stop feeling sore.  You cannot make the baby stop waking them up in the middle of the night, and you cannot talk them down from whatever crazy they have worked up in their head.  In a lot of ways it is just like living with a woman on a normal day, but with the crazy dial turned up to 11.

This time around several of our friends are also going to be having children in the same time frame as us, one just delivered a baby girl on the 4th of July, and two others are due a few weeks after us.  We are excited that our kids will have people that we know with kids the same age that live nearby, and I am generally excited about the parent thing, but mostly I'm about ready for the pregnancy thing to be done.

Childhood dev

image via WSJ

The article was sparse, but the info graphic was interesting.  Basically compares the Mothers of children born in May and January. The WSJ article linked conjectured it wasn't just the babies born during different times of the year, rather it may be the means of the mothers giving birth in that time frame.

childhood development

The thought of children has had me interested interested in childhood developement and child rearing theory. We aren't pregnant again or anything, its just on my mind.

These are some books that Emily inspired me to take and interest in. I hope to get around to reading at least a few of them. These are amazon links just because it was the best I could come up with for links to the actual books.