| Stripping wallpaper is SO easy ... |
[05 Jul 2009|07:18pm] |
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http://slashdot.org/~tomhudson/journal/232697?from=rss The fabric softener trick works even better on ordinary wallpaper than it does on vinyl. For those who missed it - use fabric softener (either spray it on or use a sponge) to remove wallpaper. For non-vinyl wallpaper: Spray or blot on (no need to pre-score or otherwise prepare the wallpaper) Wait a few minutes Scrape off in big sheets with the aid of a putty knife For vinyl wallpaper: Peel off the vinyl. To remove the backing and glue: spray or blot on Wait a few minutes Again, scrape off in big sheets with the aid of a putty knife Don't bother removing the fabric softener residue - just let it dry and paint over it. At least, that's what I did with a latex-based paint, and the results were great. No steaming, no paper tiger, no mounds of wet glop to clean up (just peel the paper off and throw it into the garbage). So, if you were putting off repainting because removing wallpaper makes you want to go *&@$#~!{-#@#KKKKAAAAHHHHNNNNN! - now's your chance.
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| Finished Pillow |
[04 Jul 2009|08:55pm] |
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I dunno if I wrote about this before, but I found a unicorn pillow on craigslist, (the seller was trying to get rid of her couch and said she'd throw in the pillow. -I just asked for the pillow.)
Anyway
I couldn't tell from the picture, but the pillow was in pretty bad shape. I was reluctant to touch the thing. I swear it had cat litter on it or something, and big holes torn in it. Not to mention all the nasty little cobwebby things on it. I promptly threw away the inside, turned the pillow inside-out, and tossed it in the washer.
After that, I unpicked the outside to get rid of the frayed, ratty rope that bordered the outside, got some cross-stitching yarn, held bits of fabric on the back in the thin spots, and re-did the holes with the best matching colours I could find.
Finally, I ordered the new trim on ebay, got a generic fleece pillow from the thrift store that was in better condition and washed it for the stuffing (actually cheaper than buying new fluff from the fabric store). And today I sewed it all together. Yay!
We had lots of family over today and yesterday, and last night we played a game called Whoonu. It's a little like Apples to Apples, in that you have to play to whoever is judge of that round.
Anyway, Oliver looked at his cards, turned to me, and said "I win." I just raised my eyebrow at him.
But when it was my turn, and I ranked the cards handed to me based on which I liked best, Oliver had given me "unicorns." He totally won. Which surprizes me, because one of the other cards was "stuffed animals" and if I didn't know which one I'd choose of the two, how did Oliver?
The next round, he did it again, and when it was my turn and everyone handed me cards that they thought I wouldn't like, I was torn between "beef" and "airports" and ended up choosing airports.
Oliver won again!
How did he do that?
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| Mixed Gags |
[04 Jul 2009|05:26pm] |
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Nobody could have predicted the Spanish Inquisition.
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| Pulling Themselves Together |
[04 Jul 2009|12:36pm] |
It IS a bipartisan bill; it appeals to Democrats - and conservative Democrats!
Don't let plutocratic capitalists stop it because they're afraid to compete with "socialism".
Granted, I still have no idea if I would be able to afford anything the bill offers yet. But I'm getting the idea that if public health insurance is actually allowed to compete in the "marketplace", it will indeed be "unfair" how popular it will become.
Of course, the health insurance lobby could be about as wrong as the copyright cartel. I mean, market fundamentalists like these are always the ones saying that government is incompetent. So what are they afraid of?
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| Top 10 Reasons Sarah Palin Resigned |
[04 Jul 2009|04:08pm] |
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http://slashdot.org/~tomhudson/journal/232667?from=rss Top 10 Reasons for Sarah Palin's Resignation "I swore that if I heard 'Mom, I'm pregnant' one more time ..." When asked to comment, David Letterman said "What can I say that I haven't already been accused of saying?" "When the going gets, tough the tough get going. People are starting to look at my record - so I'm going!" "This constant dieting thing is getting on my nerves. Anne Coulter wins. I just want to sit down with my daily half-gallon of Hagen-Daz after supper and just chunk out, same as any other American hockey mom." "I have A.D.D." "If Arnie can be the Governator, why can't I be the Self-Terminator"? "I don't want my upcoming facelift splashed all over the news." "I've got enough money now that I don't have to stay in this frozen hell-hole with the rest of the losers any more." "Why stay? The polar bears are going to be extinct soon. I can go down south and take care of the homeless problem .... and the illegal immigrants problem ..." "I'm resigning strictly for tax and health reasons ... I've screwed up Alaska so bad I'd have to raise my taxes ... and the voters would kill me." Leaked emails reveal that if Sarah Palin wins election as the President in 2012, she plans to resign and run for becoming the next Pope. When another staffer pointed out that she's not Catholic, she replied "What does that have to do with it? Not all the popes were Cath'lik. One was Polish. Does a bear shit in the woods? You betcha! Besides, I can see the Vatican from my back porch." Bonus round: "I'm going to challenge Obama in 2012 ... it's going to take me 2 years to do the 'Michael Jackson' thing and become black. Think of it, first black woman president of the United States. Todd's on board already - he got all excited when I told him, without going into the details, that he's going to be getting some black booty in the future." Footnote: After the Letterman kerfuffle, #1 would be particularly ironic ... and actually makes sense . Any bets?
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| Obviously Sarah Palin inhaled ... and Happy July 4th |
[04 Jul 2009|02:54pm] |
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http://slashdot.org/~tomhudson/journal/232663?from=rss If you watched Sarah Palin's melt-down yesterday, it was obvious that her announcement was done with particular haste, without much in the way of polish and lacking in coherency. My first thought was "what new scandal | revelations of stupidity are we about to hear?" Seriously, she came off as someone who had a buzz on, trying to look straight at a police roadblock. Maybe she shared a few doobies with some of the self-proclaimed pundits who said this was her way of preparing to run for the White House in 2012, yeah, right, you betcha, wink wink ... Maybe it also explains how she can see Russia from her porch :-) My bet -it's all about the money. She can make more money doing book tours than she can as governor of Alaska ... and we know how she likes to shop for clothes when on tour.
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| Robert D. Steele gave 5 stars to: First Do No Harm |
[04 Jul 2009|12:27pm] |
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http://www.amazon.com/review/discussions/start-thread.html/ref=cm_rss_rev_link0?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0826516440&authorID=A1S8AJIUIO6M9K&store=yourstore&reviewID=R2T57R232F69VZ&displayType=ReviewDetail Robert D. Steele reviewed: 
| |  Superb Re-Discovery of Core Knowledge, Presents New Insights, July 4, 2009 At the age of 56, having been educated in the 1970's when political science created "comparative studies" as a ruse for avoiding field world and foreign language mastery in favor of statistical comparisons from afar, I am now quite accustomed to seeing each generation rediscover core knowledge.
Even more distressing for one who loves books as artifacts of human wisdom, is to see each generation re-discover knowledge known to earlier generations, without citation. Scholarship seems to be on a wheel making little forward progress, at least in the humanities.
This is a fine book. It is exceptional for both its clear-eyed understanding of the combination of evil and banal ignorance that characterizes those in power, whether of one party or another. In the 1970's, for the US Institute of Peace, I wrote that the greatest threat to peace was the cataclysmic separation of those with power from those with knowledge. This book manifests all of that brilliantly.
It is also esceptional in this era for being a clear-eyes appraisal of the evil of military intervention. This again is not new knowledge, but it is helpful to have this generation be reminded.
Great evil has been done "in our name," for the basest of reasons. I pray that our rising generation of digital literati will not be as ignorant in power as those who now surround world leaders--sychophants, dilitants, and craven opportunists.
See also:
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict
Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
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| Stress again?? |
[03 Jul 2009|07:24pm] |
Seriously, this week has been far too busy! I don't feel like I've accomplished much, but I've had my days packed full, nontheless!
Can't wait to have people over on the weekend and get some down time.
Oh, and RIP Michael Jackson.
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| *blargle* |
[03 Jul 2009|11:53am] |
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I think you all know that for me, dance is like prayer and meditation. It keeps me grounded and healthy. I do it pretty much ever day, or I suffer for it.
Today, i was dancing in the living room. Matt was reading. I had no idea he was paying any attention to me at all, when he got up and handed me the following:
My love dances with a freedom like no other, like a child, happy and
free, unfettered by humanity's efforts to lock up, analyze, & ship out
for storage. She dances in spite of other's desires to imprison that
which they don't understand. Light on her feet, airy and smooth with
passionate rhythm for life. Life, love, and living in the face of
humanity. She lives to be free. She shares that freedom with me, with
her love and adoration for me. I am so grateful to be free with her.
In love. Forever.
Rough. Unedited. Possibly grammatically unwieldy. Perfect. From an amazing heart. He gets it, you see. He gets me. I am so grateful.
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| DJ Software Update |
[02 Jul 2009|07:13pm] |
I hit a brick wall today when I discovered I couldn't mix mplayer's output across two outputs (one for fronts, one for monitoring).
So instead, I went back to review some old DJ software. Mixxx is starting to look much better. It was not hanging and crashing as much as the last time I tried it, and it's under active development. Apparently they are grabbing the attention of hardware controller vendors, who are releasing open source drivers. The beta version even has a scripting environment that looks fun.
BPMDJ also released a new version recently. I guess I'm not real excited about how the interface is put together, but the tempo analysis is top-notch, and using the "beatgraph" visualization to set cue points is a nice tool I've not seen elsewhere.
So after an email exchange with the author, I was able to decipher the binary format used by its index files, and wrote a php script (meh. it was fast, and I knew it) to parse the beat period, calculate the tempo, and use eyeD3 to insert it into the mp3 file's id3 tags. Mixxx, once it loads the file, will then pick the bpm out of that tag, and synchronize track playback based on that.
The beta version of Mixxx also saves cue points in it's library. I wonder if I could translate that to the id3 Event Timing Codes tag? That way all that data is stored in the file.
I suppose I'm about to find out whether the existing tools are useful enough that I won't be reinventing any wheels after all.
Also interesting in the Linux audio front is a recent review of Linux sound drivers, which speaks very highly of OSSv4. There's a widespread impression that OSSv3 was left behind for ALSA back in the day when the the original developer decided to close the source (a more than adequate reason). But since that time, 4front has re-released OSS version 4 under the GPL, giving it an opportunity for a second look. And it's very, very good-looking indeed, with latencies well below ALSA in most cases, backward-compatibility with all ancient applications that never switched to ALSA (indeed, often the problem is that apps don't support OSS), and non-blocking behavior now the default.
I will need to check this out soon.
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| Money is Bad for Me |
[02 Jul 2009|02:08pm] |
I found out last night exactly how little money I make. Over the past few months, I'd had the feeling my own cyclic poverty was something I actually had in common with my friends. Now i feel... unique.
I actually take something of a minor sense of pride in how poor I get away with being. My consumptive participation in this rapacious industrialized economy is squeezed to its limit, and I am still trying to reduce it. It gets more difficult, the lower one goes, but I expect that, and don't mind. I aspire to a kind of timeless, amaterialist vow of poverty with a long tradition, but my inspiration is not religious in nature.
The more efficient I can make my lifestyle, the less precaritized I am, because filling my consumption needs becomes that much more effortless.
I have felt for some time, however, that as my efforts to reduce have steadily paid off (so to speak), that I feel like an alien in a world that isn't with me. As I walk everywhere (I can seldom even afford to take the bus), I am passed by countless cars I don't drive, flirted with by countless advertisements for things I don't buy, greeted by countless people whose jobs I can't work. Even my friends, who know how I think and how little I earn, often invite me to buy goods and services "for cheap", even though I still can't afford even that price, because it either means substituting basic food or rent, or I really, actually, truly don't have five bucks on me. In a culture so fixated on earning and spending their way out of every problem, I feel like I don't belong here. I don't want to live here, but I have no idea where to go, except into an open source Internet that, unfortunately, doesn't accept atoms. Though I am no stranger to isolation (pun intended), I am curious where people with thoughts along these lines might be found - and where we might live. It is almost certainly somewhere else.
I don't want to give the impression that I'm complaining. I have a roof over my head, and few, small debts. I live this way partially by choice, which is more than you can say for most people in my situation.
I have become accustomed to not missing things I can't have. I have learned not to want things that cost too much. I am beginning to measure the value of things, not by their price tag, but by how they rank on my personal budget priority lists. If a thing can't bubble up to the top before other more important recurring expenses re-assert themselves, I stop caring about them - they don't exist. A affordable price becomes, ironically, the most valuable thing of all. Nothing will change the world if people poorer than I am can't get it. Your iPhone is worthless.
I measure the prices of things in hours. How much of my life is it worth losing to own this thing?
Expense is also partially driving changes in my diet, although food prices pale in comparison to rent (notably, the opposite was the case during the great depression. Food is cheap today, compared to housing and health care). I have been noticing that, when I come across more petty cash, I spend it on unhealthy, extravagant, convenient foods. Money is bad for me.
I feel good about what I am doing (It must be because I paid the rent on time this month. Can you tell? This isn't another panic post!). My sense of disenfranchisement and displacement is not blossoming into malaise or depression. It is a puzzle, a mystery, an enigma, a challenge. I'm getting the love I need to stay well. But I'm still wondering how love might be used to flourish, thrive, and become more than well. I don't know.
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| Questions |
[02 Jul 2009|10:56am] |
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Looking for the questions people are asking about love, sex, intimacy, related subjects...
Not necessarily your questions, but if you've heard anything interesting at a party, or there's something you wish was taught in school... whatever.
( sample questions )
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| Product placement |
[02 Jul 2009|06:03am] |
This one's for you, Sean. 
"Imagine," Tyler said, "stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you'll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you'll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles." ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 16
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