Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   before the demise of the laugh track
Wednesday, February 18 2009
By this morning the clean clear floodwater flowing through the greenhouse had ceased, leaving the dark layers of slate looking like enlarged alligator skin. This was because of a regular pattern of cracks isolating hand-sized pieces of rock at the surface. These pieces tended to remain moist along the cracks, becoming darker there while staying dry and lighter in color in their centers.
Snow fell throughout the day, though it left only a little more than an inch of accumulation on the ground. This afternoon I drove into Kingston to get a tuberculosis test as part of my continued involvement with the Bard Prison Initiative (I still occasionally do computer work in the prison, and to be able to enter the prison, one must get a yearly tuberculosis test). The place I went was the private quasi-hospital called Emergency One, conveniently located on Hurley Avenue. I only waited about a half hour for my test, which, while fast for medical attention, seemed like an eternity. As I sat there, a dull kid-friendly African-American-targeting situation comedy called Sister, Sister played on the television, reminding me how bad television comedy used to be back before, say, the Simpsons and the demise of the laugh track (Sister, Sister dates from the 1990s). It was the sort of programming I would only watch if it were playing in a waiting room.
While in town, I went out to Home Depot and bought a kickspace heater and sixty feet of three quarter inch copper pipe to allow me to add another zone to the household heating system. Gretchen wants to be able to use her basement library in the winter without having to heat the rest of the basement, all of which is otherwise heated only by the slab. It's important to note that last year copper pipe became a luxury item when its price spiked to over twice what it costs today. But now with the world in deep recession and building construction at a standstill, copper has become as affordable as, well, gasoline.

This evening I took a bubble bath with a new book that arrived in the mail today: Learn Objective-C on the Mac, which is surprisingly-readable for an instructional guide to a programming language. Still, the book assumed knowledge of C and there are things about C itself that I hadn't yet learned, such as the convention of passing the arguments int argc, const char *argv[] to the main function. What the hell did that mean? Later in the book, these were explained. argc is the number of arguments, argv is the array of arguments, starting with the name of the function itself as argv[0].

This evening Gretchen and I wanted to watch American Idol, but snowfall was ruining our satellite reception. So I went outside to try to do something about it. At first I tried squirting water at the dish in hopes of dislodging the cup (or so) of accumulated snow, but my squirter couldn't reach far enough. I also tried using a piece of fish tape to poke the dish, but it was far too floppy to be pushed that far. Eventually I resorted to throwing snowballs, but my accuracy from 40 feet away was poor and I quickly grew discouraged. At that point Gretchen, who was more desperate for American Idol than I was, came out and helped by making the snowballs for me to throw. I was able to hit the dish five or six times (with a hit-to-miss ratio of about one in twelve) and knocked out most of the snow. Unfortunately, though, it turned out that the problem with reception was mostly a function of the thick cloud cover snuffing out the satellite signal, and our American Idol viewing pleasure proved essentially nonexistent. But it was a good American Idol to miss; from the little we could see of it, we knew that the amount of fresh content to be presented was only the names of three contestants, the vote-winners who would be moving on to the next round. A sign of the meagerness of the content was a long retrospective of the things that had happened (I kid you not) in yesterday's show. In the end, Gretchen called Jenny in Willow (who is also watching the show and has Time Warner Cable) to find out what had happened.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090218

feedback
previous | next