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


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Like my brownhouse:
   highly-affordable nostalgia.
Friday, April 21 2017
Despite occasional moments of drizzle from grey April skies, I drove out to the Wall Street house this morning, set up my ladder, and proceeded to reinstall the aluminum soffit that had fallen at some point over the winter. This chore ended up being a little harder than initially expected because the ladder was blocked from an ideal position against the house by the small roof over the front porch. Still, I was able to get the soffit installed reasonably well even without being able to nail its southmost end. The new French tenant and her family had been inside most of the time I'd been working but left while I was up on the ladder. I said "hi" but didn't say anything else in English, choosing to run my drill in universal declaration of landlord industry.
Naturally I found a reason to swing by the Tibetan Center thrift store on the way home. They'd just reorganized the electronics section, moving the bigger audio/video components to a more tasteful display on shelving on the other side of the room. I managed to make two purchases: a tiny camera tripod and a semi-programmable TI-68 calculator. That latter item was almost pure (and highly-affordable) nostalgia. I would've sacrificed a couple fingers if not whole a hand for such a device in the early 1980s. It has an alphanumeric display and a gorgeous black keyboard groaning with the weight of too much functionality. True, it had been produced in 1989, a good six years after I'd moved on to an interest in computers. But I'm never going to stop loving programmable calculators. Unfortunately, this unit had a problem with its LCD preventing it from displaying the top half of characters, and later I was unable to fix it using the heatgun & pencil eraser technique.

The Friday in my remote workplace was unusually heavy in meetings today, though the upshot of it all was that I got a great project to work on next week: building a system to crawl through the contact database looking for problematic addresses, contacts that should probably be merged, and other anomalies to be presented to a human employee or intern for further analysis and correction.
This evening I painted a scene onto an old credit card that I'd orginally photographed in the Galapagos. The photo was of a common scene: a baby sea lion on a lava flow at the edge of the ocean. Unusually for my paintings, it's fairly complete depiction not just of the animate creature but also the landscape around it.



Today's painting.
The original photo (cropped to this scene).

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