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.

Two years later

I wasn't sure if I'd ever come back to this blog, I'm still frustrated at Google for tearing off the little badge of anonymity that made it so freeing to be on the blogger platform. I'm reasonably sure that that choice propelled the growth of several micro-blogging sites like tumblr and squarespace. Places where you could easily post without having to reveal your identity. It's not that this was ever a terribly personal site, but it was a nice place to unpack things, to consider them and keep track of them. I'm considering coming back here for a personal and public face that isn't Facebook. We'll see how that goes.

Distracted, but there's more to it

I've really been using a different platform for the last few years, but the nail in the coffin here was Google's real name policy. I could have kept anonymous, but wouldn't have been able to keep posting at the time I made the choice I couldn't imagine not having this place to come and vomit up the contents of my mind.

It was an illusion of privacy, but I did feel comfortable in that veil. I felt it was enough that you would have to put a lot together to tie it all to me in a meaningful manner. I didn't name any names and never posted anything terribly intimate or embarrassing or even professionally damaging. This was largely random bits of stuff almost a journal, but with all the personal bits held back.

In the time I've been here I've posted a shy of 900 times in 5 years, on another platform that I use that offers anonymity I've posted over 1200 times in less than 3 years. I know for a fact that the anonymity has always been a part of that. I know no one there, I'm not trying to make money on that platform so it's not attached to anything that can be traced back to me. Why is that important? I don't know, but it I think the post counts speak volumes about my engagement.

Meritocracy again, but with the rich and poor

Listen I know I ride on this meritocracy thing a lot, but once you read the book your whole world gets shaped by it. Michael Young was a damn visionary and I cannot understand why his work doesn't get more coverage. Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World offered similar warnings about propaganda, group think and genetic screening for your place in life, but Youngs warning about how they will come for us and swallow us under with education and testing is the warning that has actually manifested to a real threat to our freedom to live our lives.

This video is about experiments that observe the attitudes and behaviors of rich and poor people. These same behaviors are described and manifest in The Rise of the Meritocracy, towards the end where the meritorious assign more and more of the rewards to themselves and less and less to the dullards until they rise up violently. If you haven't read the book do yourself a favor and do, it's short possible a day or two worth of reading and it's amazingly informative.

nothing gets done before midnight

Nothing gets done before midnight.

This phrase has been rattling around in my head for the last week or so, and seems to be the pace of things in  my life and household any more. I needed to bottle a beer to get it out of the damn heat, got to bed just before 1 AM. Needed to make a new round of protein bars, got upstairs at 12:01. If I plan on getting in a workout tonight, I'll wager you I don't get a wink more than 5 hours so I can get up and go to spin class. I don't have anyone but myself to blame I suppose, but it takes until almost 8 to get dinner cooked and eaten and some order in the kitchen restored. Then round about an hour to get the boy to bed, so I can work on something not family related. You'd be surprised how little you can get done in 3 hours.

Last night it was getting rhubarb chopped and into bags to freeze. I'm planning on making rhubarb wine, and my family sent me about 30lbs of it to get me started, I didn't even get that delivery until just before 9 PM, and didn't start working until 10:30.

In any event the summer is getting started in earnest after dragging it's feet all through May and I've got strawberries that look to be coming in nicely and tomatoes that I hope aren't in the pot too late to deliver some fruit before August. I've made a bit of a fence on one side of the back patio to try and contain a very mobile toddler, and am working on plans to make him something like this digger out in the back. I've got wine to make, a sprint triathlon in the middle of the month and more ideas for things to write rattling around inside of my head. In truth I've had the blogger page open in a browser tab for the last week trying to get around to posting something. It's pretty amazing to me that I used to post at least once a day here.

Sometimes I guess you just run out of things to say.

Blackberry Wheat and Hopville goes down

A few weeks ago I finally managed to get back on the brewing horse and get a beer done. It's in the barrel soaking up some oak, and that sadly means I need to start dreaming about the next batch to put in the damn thing. For the curious until May 6th you can see the recipe here on Hopville.

I'm starting to think I need a bigger primary fermenter as the nearly 6.5 gallon barrel requires just a tad bit more beer than I can fit in the space my bucket provides. So far I've been managing that by using my 3 gallon glass fermenter to hold the excess needed to top up the barrel, but it's introduced lots of racking to my process. For normal beers that's probably fine, but when you brew weird beers with fruit and other crap that plug up racking lines it's less fine. When you do have all that crap and want to filter some of it out...it's a lot less fine. I have an idea for how to do a great job filtering out stuff, but it would mean putting everything into a second vessel before transferring it into the barrel; racking is stressful enough without introducing an extra resting stop. I'm pretty sure I managed to get way too much oxygen into it the way I went about it this time so I'm probably going to revisit the intermediary filter vessel.

Shit like this makes me want a conical fermenter, even though it wouldn't take care of the the floating fruit conundrum. Maybe a conical with a false bottom? It would catch the largest particulate, but the meshing would have to be pretty fine to make the whole thing work. Oh equipment, you are a never ending conundrum.

To my next point, Hopville. So recently Hopville got purchased by another company, which makes me a bit sad as I've been using it as my recipe storage and brew process assistant. It looks like the new company BrewToad is going to be a good steward, and I have hope that their recipe manager will be an improvement over the buggy beta limbo Hopville has been trapped in for the 8 months or so. It did inspire me to checkout other pieces of software again. Hopville had been a relatively painless way of managing stuff, and my short trial of beersmith was around the same time I started brewing so I found the process cloying as a novice brewer. It asked for a lot of information to even get started, and on the whole wasn't how I wanted to spend my limited amount of hobby hours. I'm tempted to give the Beersmith 2 android app a try though. It looked kind of slick for brew day, as each step had a timer you could hit start on to help keep track of time.

Everything for sale?

This page turner of an article came to me by way of a social network, so you could say that it is likely that my friends are quite a bit more highbrow then yours. You could say that, but in that same breath I would have to qualify that I believe this person also runs a Medical Marijuana dispensary so... we'll call it a draw.

The article come from The Times Literary supplement and is a sort of crituqe/book review of two books.
One is WHAT MONEY CAN’T BUY The moral limits of markets by Michael J. Sandel, the second is HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? The love of money and the case for the good life by the father son duo Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky.  It's long and wordy and would be greatly aided by you having read either book I think, but in the case of What Money Can't buy may well have saved you the effort.

In any event it's a pretty interesting bit of reading about the morality of markets and probably gives Ayn Rand and all of her adherents heart burn, which is reason enough on it's own to read it.

Make space that wasn't there.

If you've never heard of Ikea hackers you should really do yourself a favor and check it out. They have an assortment of projects people submit that takes parts from Ikea and use them differently than intended.  Sometimes it's a pretty radical transformation other times it just mixing and matching various families to get an end result that is different than how the package is marked. It can range from really easy when the families are cut with uniform dimensions and holes, to really hard when people completely free form structures using pieces from the box.

This particular post from Ikea hackers was about a built-in closet with sliding doors that transformed a fairly useless space into a closet. The end result is really polished, and what got me interested in it in the first place.

Via ikeahackers

Out of sequence

So I listen to Slacker for my steaming music fix and the thing that I love the most about Slacker is that they play all of the songs, regardless of if they are filler or interludes ect.  This is strange sometimes (think any Offspring album) and amazing others.  For some reason songs disconnected from the album can strike you differently.  For example Bankrupt on Selling by Modest Mouse on Lonesome Crowded West.  I own this album and have listened to it dozens of times, but I have never noticed that song before.  It was lovely on it's own.

----Listen to it in sequence how did it strike you?

Keeping quite to achieve goals

According to this article on Lifehacker, you should keep quiet about your plans to ensure you complete them. It's an interesting theory about symbolic self-completion, basically by getting the praise for trying something you don't feel the need to actually do something. I don't have a large body of contradictory evidence, but I've told this blog and others that I was working on my mash tun false bottom, even shown it to some people and still worked on it this weekend.  I've talked about my skull carving and CNC projects, and am still working (very slowly) on those. I don't know that it's a pure 1 to 1 comparison given that all of those projects where underway before I started talking about them, but I feel like I have several personal examples that contradict these findings.

I've also followed several project build logs of others that documented their process from concept to completion with feedback, adjustments and still went onto completion. It may be that there is a specific type of person that feels like symbolic self-completion is enough feedback for them to not finish a project. One might even go so far as to call those people posers, people that want to be something, but might not have the will to actually be those people.  My lack of progress is time bankruptcy at home more so then praise being enough to sate my need to build something.

What do you think? Is there weight to this or is it more nuanced then they make it?

Stupid Draft folder

I have around 200 posts in it all the time.  I try to clear them out, and get down to around 150 either by deleting them or publishing them and then get distracted or bored and do something else so it just creeps back up to 200.

If I published them all I would hit an interesting milestone for this blog, almost a goal I guess but most of them are just a link to an article that I wanted to read, or a recipe or links to weight lifting forums or even just a project idea.  All of that will take work to flesh out and finish into an something even remotely interesting, and this platform is starting to show it's age next to the ease of use of products like Tumblr that really get's the platform out of the way so you can just focus on creating.  It makes it hard to come and queue up several posts because I cannot just say publish one a day at such and such time and be on my way I have to pick a date and time for each post. Add to that the cognitive burden of feeling somewhat attached to the stuff I've already written, so I check to make sure links aren't dead from time to time and repost video's that have fallen off the internet ect, and this becomes a major time suck.

Speaking of updating posts, the video that I transcribed of a talk John Cleese did fell off the net so I updated the embed link on this post.

That is all, just useless venting over drafts and a link.

The witch is dead

It's only taking prodding, and death threats to various factions of my company but last week I finally turned off our legacy Windows NT domain. This may sound like a small feat, but our payroll system was still running on an NT machine, and I was not under any circumstance going to bring that into the current domain. So there floated a PDC, BDC and application server running that I couldn't get rid of. Anyone with experience with payroll will know the cost and complexity of payroll systems, particularly when multiple unions are involved. We have accruals and seniority rules that we have keep careful track of for scheduling and some individuals can work multiple job codes sometimes all in the same shift. It was a mess, and migrating our legacy data to a new platform was going to be a costly endeavor.

In the end the threats of bodily harm did the trick, as they did bite the bullet and migrate their data (otherwise I might have had to operate that server in perpetuity). I was a little nervous about shutting down WINS, as a few other admins that had migrated off NT said that they ended up standing up WINS servers later on. My understanding of Active directory was that it could run on just DNS.  I guess I'm out of excuses, and will have to start working on migrating our Exchange 2003 server to Exchange 2010.

This years to do projects are Exchange 2010, Active directory 2008 or 2012 (need to see if all of our clients will work on 2012), the second half of our desktop deployment and the final death of XP in our organization, a completely overhauled Backup System (new software, tape hardware and a disk2disk with deduplication), expanding the coverage of our wireless network, and working on to get our preventative maintenance/asset tracking system integrated into a different software package so I can retire that creaky piece of shit.

How's that for some IT nerd?

Sad, not all that pathetic

I had a strong urge to get something accomplished on Sunday, the wife took the boy to do church things so I had the house all to myself. I was so excited about it that I was up late on Saturday trying to map out a strategy for what to work on. For those keeping score at home I have a never ending project list, but the current list goes a little something like this.

• Finish the Mantis Micro CNC machine
• Finish cutting the bottom of the keg off to make a false bottom for my mash tun
• Finish Ripping Seasons of Shows for wife
• Design, and machine or order a commemorative plaque (see finish CNC above)
• Lacquer a painting I did on a piece of oak mount said plaque and hang somewhere in the house

Well I finished none of that.  In the process of pulling out the box that has the CNC machine in it, I came to the grim realization that I needed to clean the basement before I could even consider working on anything.  There where no surfaces to even begin working on.  In cleaning up the living room most of the mess had found it's way down to the basement, so it was time to face facts and start sorting for discard and recycle.  I have more than a passing fancy for electronics, but for some reason just keep never getting started working on it. This doesn't stop me from reading electronic's magazines, and accumulating said magazines. I have 3 years worth of Servo Magazine and have subscribed to Makezine since it launched.  I recycled the servo magazines without a second thought because I over my fleeting interest in robotics, but I wasn't quite ready to just bin the Make magazines.  I spent a little while trying to figure out if my local library would be interested in receiving them as a donation, and was somewhat thwarted in that they only accepted substantial donations (10 years or more ect) based on their website.  I reached out to a local hackerspace to see if they wanted them, and they agreed to put them in their library so I'm feeling pretty good about that.

Basically all I accomplished was to toss out some magazines, do some laundry and wipe down a large section counter top.

Impending close of Google Reader

The collateral damage of me overreacting to the impeding close of Google reader has been somewhat staggering.  Both in the amount of time I've wasted preparing for it and in me trying to get a handle on my overflowing digital data.  For the time suck I've tried several feed readers, and decided to go with feedly because they are saying that we won't have to do anything if you sign in with feedly they'll import your feeds. I've been using the mobile app for a while now, and the chrome extension is acceptable. I was using a skin on Google reader called Reeder for Chrome that fixed all the white space Google introduced a few revisions ago and Feedly's Chrome extension is pretty close in appearance to that.  So bloggy friends you should give it a try.  In the event that doesn't work out I used Google Takeout to export my data so that I have all the feeds in .json format in the event I want to try a different reader later (Several readers have setup .json imports to get your feeds imported and ready to go.)  You might take some time to download all your bits before the shutdown if you really want to cya should feedly drop the ball.  All of that was really a wind up for what really has consumed the most of my time, dealing with my Starred and tagged posts from Reader.

I've been keeping track of many different things that I'm interested in, with the tag functionality of Reader, and this post on Hackaday.com gave me the keys to get some of the functionality back out of that data.  The original post was a python script to email article to your Evernote account, but the output was rather ugly.  Since then other people have added to that git hub scripts to dump to html files or directly import to Evernote.  Evernote is an okay note taking application (I prefer OneNote from Microsoft), so I've worked through my 707 Starred items from Reader somewhat sorted into notebooks so I can keep my track of my starred items.  Now I need to do the same for my various tags, but I'm finding some sites have gone dark so outside of the giant caching machine known as Google images and even whole articles are missing on the import process, particularly on sites that have changed some portion of their back end in the last several years.

For some reason working on my Reader data also prompted me to start reviewing my terrifying array of accumulated downloads, programs and such.  I have about 80gb of junk on my work computer I've been sorting though.

On Monetizing

This really came about because I was ruminating on ways for creative blogs like web comics, and web series, to monetize their product and how the limited ways that they can or do monetize ultimately limit and shape the edges of what those creative endeavors can or do become.  The first sentence that I managed to write down on this thought stream was about living in the cracks of fame, being known and loved by a small audience but not able to create broader appeal to take whatever creative project they are working on to the next level.  For reference much of this was in regard to Watch the Guild, SMBC Theater, various web comics and comedy blogs.

Shows like watch the guild and smbc theater don't make it on the large screen, even with their reasonably good production quality they won't draw mass appeal outside their niche for various reasons that are outside the scope of this little rumination.  This shortcoming  limits their ability to explore their craft and sharpen their story telling because at the end of the day they have day jobs and outside activities that will draw them away.  Various methods of democratizing payment have been floated and are being experimented with, but they rely on 3rd party infrastructure and require you to establish your base before you pitch your idea.  Indiegogo and kickstarter are clearly ways for established niche players to capitalize on their success and build bigger/better futures for those involved with longer running creative adventures they don't help sustain "micro level" production.  Blind ferret bundles comics together to form volumes on Looking For Group and SMBC Theater releases DVD's of each "season's" worth of sketch's, but a high percentage of that value is not going directly to the projects themselves but rather to pay for the physical goods, and also represents a real risk for those producers as most of the time they have to assume some risk to get the product made before they can sell it.  These avenues do pose risk for them loosing money.

Other experiments people are proposing call for direct contribution via Flattr (a kind of tip jar), but assumes people will remember or even consider giving money for things the creatives are just putting up on the web for anyone to consume. The urge to pay for things on the internet is not a strong one, and it represents another thing/service consumers have to sign up for and care about. The final approach I've seen is a hybrid subscription model with various twists.  They give some percentage and then charge for "deeper access".  In specific Me In My Place (MIMP NSFW) is pursuing this type of a model with their photography app.  They offer a mobile browser app that is supposed to give you additional pictures not shown on the MIMP tumblr (NSFW duh) blog.  On problem with this model is the push to move more subscriptions inevitably causes the creatives to show images that are supposed to be "subscription exclusives".  Since moving to the paid model I've found the pictoral quality is exceptionally repetitive, and the site appears to be having a harder time recruiting women to participate as models.  Whether this is a problem germane to erotic/semi-erotic work remains to be seen.  As a side note I've also seen a slight permutation of this model taken by a writer "retiring" work from her blog/site as it is compiled into books of stories for sale. For people just discovering her work the site's content can appear a bit thin, but she offers several books for sale.  You're left with an odd delemia as both a new and old reader.  New, you have to choose to buy her work based on a thin selection of current work which may or may not represent past work or as a long time reader your favorite stories have to be purchased to be enjoyed again. The site in question is Remittance Girl, a NSFW erotic story site, I'm not trying to be mysterious here, I just needed to get the warning in before I linked to it.  This may be an excellent model for the specific content being generated in this context, but I'm not sure how well it translates to other genera's.

I posit that hybrid "all of the above" approaches are needed to drive the continued creation of so called "micro content" single comics, stories and webisodes.  The compilation/tangible goods model via DVD, comic books, or real books, or other items for sale is one way for supporting the creation of independent creative material that has real draw backs for the creatives, where the flatr/tip jar has real draw backs for the consumers and Indie Gogo/Kickstarter success or failure could be an albatross for the artist in the future.  In the longest foreseeable future ad revenue and or sponsorship may be the lowest hanging and traditional route to cling to, but has a relatively low pay rate and places limitations to the type of content you can created.  For instance few advertisers want to be associated with profane, or pornographic material.

So sorry for serious adult face here to the people that actually read this silly blog from time to time, it was a though in my head and really the only place I had to plunk it.

Kitbashed

If you are a fan of the Star Wars universe, or thought that you where be prepared to find that you are only passingly interested in the franchise. The author of the blog Kitbashed has more motivation and interest in the origins and mythos of Star Wars than you ever imagined you had interest in the movies.  He and several others are meticulously tearing apart the Lucas "I created everything ever ever ever" myth layer by layer, with primary sources, side by side comparisons of artwork and plot comparisons to everything that was going on during the time Star Wars, Empire and Return of the Jedi came out.

I don't know if I posted about them here or not, but The author of Kitbashed Michael Heilemann is the reason that I found out about the fan documentaries Star Wars Begins, Building Empire and Returning to Jedi.  I do genuinely apologize for those links and the 7ish hours of your life you may choose to spend on them.  I cannot recommend them enough, the production quality is really amazing.  In any event I've been following Michael on his blog Binary Bonsai for quite sometime now, with what started as an interest in some design project he had done, it was either a template for a website or web browser (it really was a long ass time ago I don't remember how I found him) but I think he's one of the feeds that came with me from Bloglines back when it was my RSS reader de jour.

The heart of the matter that I'm here for though, is that kitbashed didn't have a link on the site for RSS.  Now I'm an RSS whore, and will guess until I get it or roll my own feed with feedburner if a site doesn't offer one; I live and die by RSS.  On his about page he tells you the platform that he runs on (squarespace his current employer), and one handy Google search later this help page tells you the format for the generated RSS.  After a little educated guessing I got the RSS so if you want to subscribe to an awesome blog about Star Wars and it's origins here's the RSS Link.  Why go through all this work?  Well my choices to follow him where Facebook or Twitter. I barely use Facebook, and only have a Twitter for trolling so that was out.

Another Meritocracy Article

This one comes from the ever respectable Economist Magazine and boy son I am dissapoint.

The author grasped at one of the points Michal Young was making, and tripped over a different one.  The money conflating quote

As for the rich strivers, there is nothing that you can, or should, do to stop people investing in their children, but you can prevent them from unfairly adding to their already privileged position. For instance, standardised tests were supposed to favour the brainy, but the $4.5 billion test-prep industry, which disproportionately caters to the rich, indicates that this is being gamed. Intelligence tests should be more widely used.

Bold added to highlight the real whiff.  Young's dystopia was largely centered around standardized intelligence testing.  Intelligence testing as a means for determining ones worth was exactly the dystopia Young was rallying against. The author of this article may well be forgiven for not knowing what would be a perfect solution as Young doesn't offer one, rather gives warning that focusing on intelligence will only be tolerated in society for so long before outright rebellion.  No model for the future is offered here, but Young clearly believes that humans deserve to have the ability to pursue what makes them happy, even if it doesn't advance the nation as a whole.

So in closing, way to misunderstand the source material.

More Meritocracy

Why Google?

So the big G is going to murder my favorite product on the internet bar none, Google Reader.  What's next, you going to kill the blogger platform next?  I can barely imagine all the people that I've told to start using this product over the year.  How many times I've tried to convince people that RSS is the best thing on about the internet that they don't even use and here we are.  So Feedly, charge for it please.  I want this platform to be around for a while.  I'm happy to pay for this service, because I use it every day.  Seriously.

So in closing, I'm sad and come July probably going to have a lot more free time on my hands.

Silly things that fill the day up

This sounds silly, but I was on a blogger break.  I was feeling a little used up mentally so I decided to take some me time and ruminate on why it is that I even post here in the first place.  The beer posts make sense, that's the stuff I'm doing and what interests me so sure I'll probably keep posting about that.  I post music sometimes, and generally it's the stuff that I'm interested in, or that I find challenging so I'll probably keep posting that.  My "book" reports, the things I'm reading and why they're important to the world at large where interesting to me, so those will stay.  On of the things I was posting about a fair amount was electronics and toys, and while those things interest me a fair amount I've stopped following "gadget" blogs and feel like this has taken a fair amount of weight off my shoulders.  It was a crushing number of posts to get through, and half the time it was about apple products that I didn't care about, and the rest of the time about cameras or phones or some other shit.  With that not taking up space in my head, I've been left wondering what to do.

I'm working on some art related things and I've been trying to write creatively more frequently, but those things take time so any posts about them would be few and far between.  I've been in the gym quite frequently of late and have a few goals related to that, but not terribly interesting outside the purely empirical sense so I don't think I'll post about that.  Maybe some general stuff related to what I'm working on and any sports nutrition/science stuff I come across.  I've been flirting with the Flexitarian diet on and off for the past few years and may be looking to make it a more permanent feature of our diet this year so Vegetarian recipes that I really enjoyed may be a feature as well from time to time.

What about you why do you still come back to blogger?

Shut up and play the hits

LCD Soundsystem probably isn't for everyone, but I was surprised by how many of their songs I had heard and liked, but didn't know it was them.  I decided to try and watch their concert documentary Shut Up And Play The Hits[?] for some reason or another and just finished.  I don't know that I would have made it through 3 dvd's of it if I had gone through netflix or bought this, but the 1:48 minute avi I found floating about on the internet was pretty good.  I have a strange love of concert/music documentaries (see Under Great Northern Lights and It might get Loud[?]) so this spoke to my quirky love of music.

Anybody got some other good concert documentaries I should watch?