The Big Think

Think your traffic is bad? Think again. How about a nine day traffic jam (and still going)?

Get Smarter by Realizing You’re Not That Great: “”

(Via .)

Names that match professions? This one takes the cake.

Today: splashes for a certain water-scene. Wolf calls!

Happy ANZAC day.

I’m sitting here on the couch reading with the window open while I listen to the rain. About a dozen seagulls did a low altitude formation flyby of the backyard while they made their distinctive seagull sound. We’re 200 miles inland!

A typeface choice flowchart for all of the typeface bigots out there. You know, the kind that think typeface choice is actually a decision that Matters (also, the kind that will scoff and mock behind your back if you admit to liking Comic Sans)

Had an early morning today (3:30) thanks to insomnia. The upside was that I got to see the extreme fog outside. It’s a few minutes past sunrise and I can barely see the houses across the street! It’s not whiteout conditions, but it does put a neat blanket on things.

Just got a robocall offering us a “free funeral, burial, or cremation”. Is there something they’re not telling us?

But I’m starting to begrudge being a blogger because people don’t talk to me anymore. They read my blog and feel as though they’ve conversed with me. But I don’t know about their days or their feelings. I don’t get to talk WITH them. I merely talk AT them. Or, more accurately, they overhear the conversations I have outloud with myself.

via Kat.

I agree. And while I can’t say I begrudge blogging, I have noticed that if I go into length on a topic of concern to me on my blog, I will often meet people who’s eyes glaze over when I try to bring it up in person. When pressed, their eyes will glaze and they’ll say “oh, I read that last week on your blog” in a very been there, done that kind of way. It’s a bummer because I sometimes feel like I’m giving half of a relationship (the me-to-them part) without getting the reciprocal. I doesn’t happen often, but when it does it makes me think twice about the time and effort that go into those long posts. I wonder if this is how professional writers feel?

The flip side of this is pouring myself into a post that I really care about and getting absolutely NO response. This happens all the time, most notably a couple of years ago with this post, the one I’m probably the proudest of in all my writing. Different strokes, I guess.

It’s not like there are thousands of people reading this, though- for some reason my blog has never caught fire, even after almost seven years. When I don’t get any responses, I remind myself that I’m really just doing this to keep a record of my thoughts and not to entertain. I guess we’re all busy, and the zeitgeist is that blogs are sooo early 90′s. It is neat, though, that the big Internet machine will still have a copy of all my posts in a thousand years.

Besides, I suspect that if I suddenly got a huge readership I would feel a lot more pressure to write. On the whole I’m very happy with the balance.

Mr Burns, Untooned.

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”

-Benjamin Franklin

7-11 Double Big Gulp is Twice as Large as the Average Human’s Stomach. Eww.

Interesting 7-Eleven facts here.

Watching the first sunrise of the new year. Welcome 2010! Also Spracht Redux. Where’s my monolith?

The next time you feel like things are hard and you’re not capable of doing something, remember that almost anything is possible.

At the beginning of the year I decided that I would try to add a couple of interesting Maker skills to my repertoire. My current one is fiberglassing. I’ve been working the past few weeks on a model ship build from scratch using just a few drawings and diagrams from the internet. I’ve got the hull built and covered in Bondo to get the shape I want. It looks great. Tonight I began the very scary step of taking my hull, which I’ve spent about 30 hours on, and covering it in a mass of messy, goopy, fiberglass resin and fabric. So far so good, though I’m a little uncertain how this is going to turn into anything but a Frankenstein looking hull. The fiberglass patches are sticking up over each other and the resin gooped up in the worst possible places. I sincerely hope that the reason it’s not drying is that it’s cool outside, and not that I didn’t put enough hardener into the resin (I think I did, but you never know…).

It’s stressful to subject something that you’ve labored over for hours to a potentially devastating and ruinous process. If the glass can’t be sanded smooth with the bumpy parts removed I am truly hosed. It’s probably a good thing that I began this project more to learn new skills (bondo and fiberglass) than to actually build a useful object.

If it works, the fiberglassing skills will come in handy during an upcoming prop build. I’m working with three groups for the show this year, and one of them has a very cool, very daunting, organic shape that will have to be built using glassing techniques. Pics will follow some time in March when it’s not all a secret.

In the mean time, I’ll post pics of the ship next time I remember to take the camera out into the shop.

*UPDATE* Well, it turned into a Frankenstein hull, with overlapping panels and huge globs of rock hard fiberglass resin. Hopefully I will be able to sand it down to perfect smoothness (I’m pretty confident of this). Lesson learned: don’t overlap the glass as much! I should have taken the time to cut one or two large pieces to lay over the hull instead of a bunch of smaller pieces, but I didn’t know how long the resin would take to harden and I didn’t want to be left with sections I hadn’t finished when it set up. It turns out the 65 degree temperature greatly extended the pot life of the resin. It was workable for 20 minutes or so. Plenty of time.

I’ll sand it all down later today and then see if I need a second coat, or if this one will be enough. One coat by itself added a fair amount of weight.