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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   ways to walk to a distant point
Friday, February 24 2012
A wet snow had fallen during the night, but by this morning it looked to be melting, and, as with all the other snows this winter, there was not enough on the ground to justify shoveling.

Yesterday I'd harvested my chick pea tempeh, which had been incubated in perforated plastic bags and turned out nearly perfect. Last night I'd decided to use it as a faux meat in chili. The chili had been great, but unfortunately its flavor had been so complicated that the tempeh's flavor had been overwhelmed. Still, I knew the tempeh had been excellent, as I'd been tasting morsels of it raw as I'd cooked. If were to improve anything, I would allow the tempeh to incubate a bit longer (this batch had gone for 48 hours) so as to increase its funkiness. I'd made a lot of chili, and so it ended up being mostly what I ate throughout the day today, usually in the form of a burrito. Beans tend to give me heartburn when combined with corn (and this batch of chili contained corn-based hominy), though the effect is lessened if I eat it in a gluten-rich whole wheat tortilla.
In the late afternoon a nasty sort of rain was falling as I drove out to Route 28 to get an emergency reup of cat litter. While I was out, I went into Uptown to get two more of those lamps with the magnetic bases on them. They seem like the ultimate devices for quickly establishing a precise beam of light from some particular place. This could come in handy in one application I have in mind.
I want to put a passive WiFi repeater somewhere on a hillside having line-of-sight both to my solar deck and to Ray and Nancy's place down in the Esopus Valley (there is a low ridge blocking our view of each other) so I can use their Time Warner cable internet, which is superior to our existing Verizon DSL crapola. But it's very hard (in a topologically rough, forested region) to see a distant tree on the horizon and then to actually walk to that tree on foot and know for certain that you have gone to the right tree. One idea I have is to use an AC-powered laser pointer to put a dot on that tree, but I don't have a laser pointer that can throw a dot quite that far. Another idea is to line up two bright lights (perhaps using color-changing bulbs) at a distant point and then walk to that point and look for the distant lights from my laboratory deck to converge.


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