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").



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decay & ruin
Biosphere II
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dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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Like my brownhouse:
   shitcan IV
Thursday, January 27 2011
There was an inch or two of snow, but today ended up being the kind of balmy, with temperatures high enough into the 30s for my frozen urinal system to thaw open and resume operation. (I'd been pissing into a container for the past couple days.)
It was also a good day to swap out the 30 gallon shit collector can in the brownhouse, which had been in use since late August and had filled nearly to the top. In warm weather shit collection can go on indefinitely in a 30 gallon container, but in cold weather I fill it in four or five months. I'd managed to get a couple more weeks out of this particular can by redistributing the fecal mound with a disposable stick (which I added to its contents). Before I could install the new can, I had to install the latest shitcan upgrade: a plastic tap a couple inches from the bottom for draining off accumulated fluid. (In winter, low-levels of decomposition keeps this fluid from being generated, but in summer its accumulation probably keeps the lower third of the pile in a completely anærobic state.)

I spent much of the day continuing with the project for which I am being microprojectmanaged. The development environment started working, so I buckled down with my various tools: lines logging debugging info to a database, global searches through the codebase, and a logging proxy called Charles. After initial frustration, I started circling in on what might have been the problem. I was making progress, but I was a long way from finished before the evening's social obligations began.

This even Gretchen invited Ray and Nancy over and prepared one of her lavish multi-course meals (based on a delicious tomato soup and a vegan lasagna whose whole wheat noodles were perhaps a bit too tough). We ended up hanging out together for something like four hours. We had a nice fire in the woodstove, which kept on chugging through not one but two power outages, one of which lasted over an hour. Among the topics discussed was the great new reality show Storage Wars (which Ray and Nancy just started watching) and the ups and downs of having an imperfectly-communicative on-again-off-again semi-permanent houseguest (Eric).


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110127

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