Category: FWIW

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In Answer to Overwhelming Demand…

(Well, Nicole did ask *heh*)

The back splash and countertop are essentially finished. The things left on that part of a long list of kitchen projects are minuscule tiny lil nanobits (redundancy> I can do that!).

Note lil things left (not back splash or countertop) in the pic below. The former “coffee shrine” (new one being built off camera) next to dishwasher is undergoing rehab. Reworked the shelves, which now need only more sanding and then treatment like the countertop, while the rest simply needs painting… which is awaiting the purchase of new paint. The color on the wall above the former “coffee shrine” is almost right, just not quite, and the new color will carry throughout the kitchen. Yeh, I know I just5 repainted the cabinets, but so? *heh*

Other things like finishing the window treatment and suchlike will also get a touch of my hand as things progress–and they are.

I do like the massive “trivets” made from marble left over from the backsplash. They total 1′ X 3′ area when slid together. Will make for nice holiday buffet serving and other hot stuff placement.

Of course, I ought to have cleaned up the messy sink, shut the “sponge drawer” and at least cleared out the mess in the former “coffee shrine” area, but, eh, had the camera handy, hot iron, striking and all that.

*sigh* Had the table saw in use yesterday and forgot to cut some trim. It’s cold out there where the saw is today, and time? Notsomuch. Oh, well. Lots still to do in the kitchen… before I can finish some projects in the living room, the master bedroom area and other things, so I’ll have my downtime hours pretty well full for the next bit and a piece.

Better to wear out than to rust out, right? 😉

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Wallpapering My Season

*whew* Really late start to my Monday. I know! I’ll waste some more time fooling with meaningless crap on my computer!

OK, so it’s not winter yet, but it’s getting there, so my desktop now reflects the changing season with a snowy Norwegian country lane.

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Was It Good for You, Too?

Supposedly felt in Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri, as well as in OK, where it occurred, yeh, well, I slept through the thing. What can I say? It was almost 11:00 at night, and I’d gotten to bed at a reasonable time, tired from “Chores Saturday”–mostly working on deck maintenance.

So, here in America’s Third World County, a wee tad off the beaten path in the SWMO Ozarks, what may well be the largest earthquake in the State of my birth went unnoticed by me.

Can’t really say I missed it all that much. *heh* Still, I know folks who live in the area, so I’ll probably get an earful as time goes on.

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Gotta Love the Sharp Stuff

“A man who doesn’t have a sharp knife handy when he needs it just ain’t very sharp.”–anonymous sage

I quite literally have no idea how many knives I own. I probably ought to do an exhaustive inventory of them, but I also have a lot of other chores on my plate, so that’s not likely to happen any time soon. Still, every now and then I drag an old fav out of some pile sitting around and clean it up, sharpen the blade and just generally work it to make certain it’s still usable… then after a few weeks’ use it’ll drift on back into some stack and I’ll fall back on my three or four most-used knives.

I dug this one out today and did a tuneup on it. (These aren’t pictures of MY knife but some of the exact same model kyped off an ebay display.)

That’s supposedly high carbon steel (though it “takes” an edge more like stainless steel and “stains” like high carbon–the worst of both worlds *heh*) and the “ivory” handle is Delrin. (See here.) It take a LOT of work to get a decent edge on this blade, and it doesn’t really hold an edge all that well. But. It fits my hand very, very well and has a nicely designed shape and is well balanced for skinning and general knife work, so I used to carry it in my right boot almost all the time, for quite a few years, back in the day when ropers were daily wear for me. Daily attention to the blade was enough to maintain the edge, once it HAD an edge of any decency. Heck, if it already ad a fair edge, the bottom of a coffee cup would do some fair daily maintenance.

Have to keep the blade oiled (I’m still going on a very small bottle of an IBM synthetic oil that was used on some of their old tape drive technology), but if I do that (I hadn’t in a couple of years so that needed attention), the blade stays pretty clean.

It’s a handy knife when it’s been maintained. I gave a like knife to my brother who has reported that he found it quite useful in deer season.

Imperial Frontier Model 432. Pretty cheap. The ebay listing had it around $20, IIRC. Imperial, of course, is history as a knife maker. (Yeh, yeh, I’m sure the brand name has been acquired by some company that’s now making knives in Bangalore or somewhere, but they’re bound to be not as good as even this mediocre knife. AND they’re really, REALLY not “Imperials”.)

I have some other Imnperials–pocket knives–from the early 1900s that are really nice knives for their intended uses: hold a good edge, nice “hand” etc. This one, though… if I carried a boot knife on a regular basis again, this would probably be it.

Continue reading “Gotta Love the Sharp Stuff”

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Stuff From the Voices In My Head

Usually, several years go by before someone brings up the “family group” of nudists that lives [in an undisclosed location here in America’s Third World County]. For some reason, [a person who shall not be named] brought the group up in conversation this a.m…. about 9 years early. *heh* Not relaying the context, but the comment had to do with imagining living next door to the group for 20 or 30 years…

Madge: Henry, I just can’t enjoy my morning coffee on the front porch anymore. I mean, when [unnamed nudist] was in his 20s, it wasn’t all that disturbing when he came out to get his paper *wink-wink-nudge-nudge*, but now… OK, his beard covers the worst parts, so that’s not so bad; it’s just the ugly crack he always makes now as he turns to go back inside…

*pa-dump-bump*

(TYVM. I’ll be here all week. Be sure to try the buffet.)

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Life Goes On

Son&Heir has a pair of finches that now reside in our family room, since their constant twittering became too much to endure during his switch to a night shift job. Last week, I noticed that the girl had somehow managed to stick her leg in a crack between the door and the frame of the cage and gotten caught. The leg was severely mangled and hanging on by a thread because of her frantic struggles to get free. No saving it.

She’s learned to manage quite well on one leg in the week since and her annoying twittering continues unabated.

Life goes on.

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Is This Proof?

Or is this just one more data point in support of The Relativity Weight Control Plan?

Oh, wait, you want to know what he Relativity Weight Control Plan is, eh? That’s simple. General relativity holds, among other things, that the faster a particle travels the greater its mass, as observed by an unaccelerated frame of reference until its quasi-local apparent mass is infinite.

Reason would suggest, then, that the slower an object, the less its apparent mass. So…

The fact that, when I took a two-hour nap I lost three pounds would tend to offer evidence of The Relativity Weight Control Plan’s efficacy, eh? Continue reading “Is This Proof?”

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A Little Give, A Little Take

Overall, the Amazon Kindle Fire announced today (available November 15) is net positive on the give/take from what was leaked and speculated about before the release announcement.

Minuses:

Amazon Prime membership is just the one month trial, instead of the rumored year. Add $80 to make it stay (for a year).

Rumored to possibly be available next month. Nuh-uh. November, as stated above, IF one gets in line now.

Pluses:

$200, not $250

Dual core, not the rumored single core

Email app (designed to import email from Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.); was thought that would be missing.

Also, net pluses (with a couple of privacy cavils) for the Amazon Silk Browser. Overall, probably a Very Good Thing for what the Kindle Fire will be asked to do by most users.

All the rest as rumored/leaked pretty much spot on. Tempting, very tempting.

Real cost for optimal use:

$200 for Kindle Fire
$80 for a year’s “membership” in Amazon Prime (something I have already been seriously considering anyway)
$30 for a zip sleeve (why pay $200 for a techie toy and transport it w/o some sort of protection? Yeh, I know people do dumb things like that all the time, but I expect my equipment to last until I tire of it. *heh*)

So, about $310 real up front costs. Back end costs for apps are an unknown at this point. Some will be free, of course; others? No real idea at this point. Books and other Amazon product orders are more than likely just stuff I’d be buying anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUtmOApIslE

Mini-update: While reading a Kindle edition of a David Weber book referenced in a later post, it came upon me again just how handy reading ebooks can be. While I prefer reading books in my web browser, the Kindle app for PCs is Good Enough, and does have the added advantage of slightly easier referencing (and syncing across devices), which I imagine would also hold true for any physical Kindle. For example, just now I ran across a word whose root I knew and which, from context and root, I was sure I understood; even so since I had never actually read this particular word before, I I CLICKed on it and immediately had the definition verifying my understanding. That’s slightly more convenient than my old practice of keeping a dictionary handy for similar use, although it doesn’t afford the enjoyment I frequently had from continuing to read on down the page in the dictionary (sometimes for pages and pages… ), etc. *heh*

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Micro-Mini-Life Hack

A case of “Two Very Minor Irritants Solve Each Other”.

Or,

“The Voices In My Head Make Me Do the Strangest Things, Sometimes”.

Irritant #1

I use a nice lil lapdesk with my lil Asus notebook. Moreover, I normally use a nice Logitech M305 wireless mouse with the notebook, and the laptop desk surface makes a nice, smooth, slick surface for mousing. Great little mouse. It’s not as comfy in my hand as the mouse that comes in the Logitech MK320 bundle, but it does have a “nano-receiver” that makes it a good fit for notebook use (dongles hanging off notebook ports=BAD :-)).

But, moving the laptop desk from laptop to coffee table or to the couch beside me, with the notebook and mouse still on it, frequently led to the mouse sliding off that slick surface. Sure, take the mouse off and put it elsewhere. BTDT, don’t like having the notebook/mouse in separate places. Be really careful when taking the laptop desk off my lap and placing it elsewhere (or picking it up, etc.). Right. Not me.

So, pick mouse up off floor every now and then, whatever. *grumble-grumble-gripe-complain*

Irritant #2

Picked up a cheap notebook bag–$7 cheap–for carrying other things (techie tools, etc.). I already have a nice bag for the Asus and another–a Targus hand-me-down from someone who “diminuted” her computer use to a netbook/smart phone combo–for my primary techie tools (now two bags to carry what used to fit in a padded aluminum case. Oh, well), but this seemed a nice enough way to carry most of the rest.

Except for the really tacky “designer’s” logo patch sewn onto the large outer flap. Made of some of that silicone-rubber-plastic stuff that is kind of “grippy”.

!

Removed patch from cheapo bag.

Applied contact cement to ugly, tacky “designer” logo and

Glued face down on upper right-hand corner of laptop desk.

Now, I can place the mouse on this small, 2″ patch of silicone-plastic-rubber whatchamacallit and the weight of the mouse and the “takiness” *heh* of the patch material holds the mouse in place at up to 30-degree tilts.

Using one irritation to solve another: life-hacking.