poor squinky

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:47:02 GMT

Update: I lied about posting again.

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:26:25 GMT

I still have a livejournal.

Haven't posted anything in ages.

I keep thinking about posting something again, but meh.

A very brief open message to the President-Elect

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:53:01 GMT

You've given back something a lot of very cynical people thought they had lost. I happen to be one of them.

I can't speak for everyone else, but I promise to try and be realistic with my expectations.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that one of the most villainous acts a person can commit is to squander the hope of so many. Please don't screw this up.

It's not just "Yes, we can," but "Yes, we must."

I think I might have enough music

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 05:39:54 GMT

... but I'm SO CLOSE to the two-year mark!

just a little slice

Thu, 08 May 2008 05:51:42 GMT

We bought a pack of Listerine dissolving tooth whitener strips at Costco for thirty bucks.

They worked very well. My teeth are whiter than they have been in years.

They also gave me VIOLENT AND PAINFUL DIARRHEA.

Sometimes I guess that's the price we pay for beautiful shiny white teeth.

here is how one thing is going for me

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:41:29 GMT

Week 1: zero pounds. That's to be expected.

Week 2: zero pounds. Frustrating. I started to wonder if I'm doing it wrong.

Week 3: six pounds. Damn skippy. Had a rough go sticking to it. Might try even harder next week.

54 left to go. Seriously. I've done this before and can do it again.

Somebody cheer my fat ass on!

Quick post from Ashland

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 03:05:43 GMT

A few hours ago, I saw the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Holy crap. It was just amazing. A surreal kind of modern-disco production that I swear has to be at least a little bit Burner-influenced.

I'd hate to give away why it seems that way, because I think everyone should get out here and see it (it runs until November!).

Just... wow.

answer me this

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:43:46 GMT

Why are you people not reading Dresden Codak? WHY?

The weekend so far

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:00:57 GMT

After a little drama earlier in the week, it's nice to have the kind of night we had last night.

As I write this, it's 7:43 PM and we just got home about two hours ago from Lucent L'amour, which was the previous night. I brought back a couple of important lessons from the night:

1. You can never be too dressed up for something like this.
2. If it's too far away for a cab ride, a hotel room is a must, so some poor sucker doesn't get stuck having to be sober.
3. Always get a print-at-home ticket

The venue completely sold out with 100% more people standing outside waiting, who eventually (1am) had to disperse.

The generators cut out at some point, leaving it painfully obvious how much less interesting an event like this can be without music.

Bathroom lines were insane.

Bassnectar rocked my face.

I've had bad experiences going to LA Burner events and not knowing anybody, and was thrilled that so many wonderful friends of mine showed up to this. I think we should try to bring the same network of folks around to more events like this.

I can't believe how unbelievably great a time I had.

Excerpt from "Things I'm Fairly Glad I Don't Own"

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:38:02 GMT

Yesterday, it sounded like a great idea to get a Gargamel tattoo. Today, I'm really glad I'm not that impulsive.

Kind of.

dad

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 03:01:42 GMT

I talked to Dad this morning. He sounds like he has much of his strength back. Getting up out of bed is still tough if not impossible, but he's getting back to normal. They're going to let him out of the hospital as early as tomorrow.

Lara says the minute he's released, she's going to take him out for a steak and a beer

one bucketful please

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 01:15:50 GMT

You know what's really cool? Bose-Einstein condensate, that's what. And not just because it has a temperature approaching absolute zero.

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:00:53 GMT

Dad's in intensive care. Apparently his potassium levels were very high, and he was so weak he couldn't get out of his chair. The doctors said that the ambulance ride saved his life. Now he's on some kind of dialysis. I just got off the phone with him, and he sounds physically weak but mentally fine.

meh

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 02:41:11 GMT

[ insert bitchy rant here ]

Suddenly my first choice of language seems less sensible...

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 22:10:01 GMT

Here's a graph of the CPU usage on my linode:

You can see where I moved poorsquinky.com over, then how the feed cache slowly built up, and finally sometime yesterday when I converted the pagination script from bash to perl.

I don't know why I insist on doing so much text parsing in bash. I think it's fun because it's so wrong. Apparently forking out several hundred instances of grep and sed isn't exactly efficient, though. Go fig.

the last month+ in as brief as I can manage

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:21:45 GMT

It looks like I'm just not going to make a proper post, so I'll write this as quickly as I can to get it out of the way.

The buildup to Burning Man was very stressful. It always is. I want that to stop being the case.

On the way up, 30 miles North of Bishop, CA, two young wild ruminants (elk or deer... I'm not an expert) wandered out into the road. I slowly changed lanes to miss, but when one stepped ten feet in front of me, I swerved to miss, skidded off the pavement and rolled my car. I was doing 80 miles per hour. The CHP officer said that under the circumstances I should have been seriously injured or killed, but I didn't have so much as a bruise or scratch. My car is totalled.

People keep telling me I should have hit the animals, without realizing I drove a compact car, and the physics involved in striking a 500 pound animal at 80 MPH.

Burning Man was wonderful. C had the time of her life, and I had mine. I would really like to cut back on how much work it is for me to have my vacation, though.

Colleen, Mike, Kay, Keith, Jason, and Alla have all been a big help in making sure I could get out of Bishop (I was stuck there for 15 hours) and that this transitional time while I first catch my breath, and then get my affairs straightened out, goes well.

I put a memorial for Mom at the Temple of Forgiveness:

Lydia Karpov Stambaugh
1938-2007
Beloved mother and grandmother
Stolen from us by cancer

Underneath, it read "She wanted to be here." Mom and I talked often about me taking her to Burning Man.

I cried very openly at the Temple, and several other times when I had a private moment to reflect.

I feel closer to my friends now than ever, and it's wonderful.

Work has been rough. My recovery period from Burning Man lasted longer than usual, and at the end I had a terrible fever that further incapacitated my tiny little brain. It's only this week that I've felt up to working efficiently. Ugh.

Email

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 06:30:18 GMT

If anyone has been trying to contact me by email in the last couple of days, the dasbistro.com email server has gone insane, and I'm trying to dig it out of the pit it's in. Right now it's sporadic at best. Hopefully tomorrow it'll work.

If you really need to contact me, either call me on the telephone or send me an instant message (check my livejournal profile for details), or wait till September when I get back from Burning Man.

burn prep update

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 06:13:20 GMT

As a lifelong procrastinator, I get a certain kind of rush by shirking my duties. It feels like danger, like leaning over the railing on the roof of a tall building. Tonight I still have two big projects only half completed, and they're giving me the calm stare of a predator restrained by a glass wall.

But here I am on Livejournal. Hooray.

Hey, but there's a lot of work that's been done since my last update. All of my brewing is finished, thanks to Colleen. The fabric for most of what I still need to sew together is also all cut out because of her help.

I get ahead of myself, though. There are a few new flavors of beer this year, plus one of my experiments from last year that turned out well, as well as a couple of my old weird standards. If you want to see the full manifest, come to Bad Idea Theater in the 3:00 plaza the week after next. I have a couple of really weird ones I made this year. I'm heartbroken that I couldn't find blood oranges in time. Guess I missed the season by a week or two.

One yurt roof is finished, and the other sits on my floor at about 50% complete. I've made two new sets of Thai fisherman's pants, and have about three more I could make. One half-finished pair of Colleen's boot covers sits on the table as well. Those things are harder to make than they look! Probably about two more beyond that to finish.

More than one project has already been put off for this burn, and there are tons more work to do. I'll have to promise myself not to be stressed out by all of this. The burn's going to be great no matter how much of this stuff I get finished (as long as the yurt roof is ready in time), and I just need to accept that.

Sleep schmeep.

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 16:36:29 GMT

I typically have a rough time getting to sleep and staying there. After making a good faith effort to go to bed at a reasonable time before I have to get up in the morning, my first dream came almost immediately. It lasted a second or less and showed a very detailed view of the esplanade at night. There might have been music.

I woke up with my heart racing. Part of it was excitement, but much of it was fear of the fewer than three weeks I have to get all the rest of my work done before I leave.

For those of you playing along at home, that's:

* Two 20-foot-diameter conical canvas roofs
* 45 gallons of beer
* Lots more clothing
* Cooking and freezing some food
* The touch screen

I really felt like this year I'd get an earlier jump on my projects, but it feels to me like I have a good excuse considering how the holidays went for me. I wonder if every year has those kinds of excuses. Still, I plan to take care of my major projects earlier next time.

Tonight I'll have the same dream. It's all panic from here out.

Yurt report

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 07:30:33 GMT

New yurt roof #1 is coming together. I devised a pattern using what little math I absorbed in school (augmented by wikipedia, of course) and the measurements for the constants in the yurt's roof: circle diameter, rafter length, and center ring diameter. Took me about an afternoon to figure out the overall shape with measurements, producing a page full of gratuitous uses of 'cos', tiny drawings of what appear to be pac-men, and my thrice-recycled variable "r" (I need to learn to be more creative).

It took another afternoon to puzzle together how to build it out of 46-inch-wide strips, then cut those strips out using only rulers, markers, and scissors (hint: it's sort of like graphing a function, but borrows techniques from finger painting).

C did about 75% of the cutting, and she did it marvelously, with me barking out incomprehensible measurements like some kind of jerk. A jerk with an incomprehensible plan. In incomprehensibly brilliant plan.

Hopefully I can figure out how to do all of the sewing correctly before Burning Man starts, and after it's over, I want to write a HOWTO (maybe) on sewing big giant chunks of canvas together. I should wait until at least a month after the event, of course, otherwise the doc will consist of references to time travel and self-transforming machine elves, punctuated by the occasional "Sorry, I guess I fell asleep again."

The trick so far appears to be folding the seam flat and sewing it down. It's kind of like serging but it's quicker and won't actually stop anything from unraveling. Normally this wouldn't count as a well-thought-through plan, but for a tent that I only spend two weeks out of the year in, I'm going to pretend it's adequate.

So far I have sewn five seams on this first roof, and it feels like it's mostly done already. That's five quick seams out of (counting, counting) um... forty. That's for one of the two roofs. Oh, and the other seams are a lot longer. Yeah, I'm making a lot of progress. Someone should put me out of my misery.

And I have nine more batches of beer to make too!

In other news, this year: best burn ever. I'm calling it now. See if I'm wrong.

Beer report

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 05:21:31 GMT

I finally started making my beer for Burning Man. This is a perfectly adequate lead time, as half the batches last year were finished and kegged the day before I set foot on the playa. For these first three batches, I thought I'd try a couple of new things.

I have my mythTV machine set to record Good Eats, and after finally seeing his homebrewing episode, the thought of adding bagged ice to the hot wort sounded appealing. As I usually let the beer sit overnight to cool, the thought of cooling it quickly enough to add another eight hours of fermentation is quite appealing.

It might make more sense if I mention that the yeast I use the most (Fermentis Safale S-04) has as its best quality that it completes a full fermentation in under a week, often a mere three days. Eight hours off of a three day ferment is quite a bit.

The worst quality of the S-04 is that it contributes next to nothing to the beer's character compared to the more premium yeasts, if not sometimes a little teensy bit too much diacetyl. Most folks just go "Wow, this beer tastes a little buttery! I like it!", so as long as I'm not exposing it to experienced beer critics, I feel safe.

I picked up a bag of ice for each batch, along with several bottles of distilled water. In among my ingredients and tools, I also got some very-fine-mesh strainers, a nice super-long-handled metal spoon, and a packet of breakbright. Breakbright is a kind of coagulant consisting of powdered irish moss and sodium bicarbonate.

My experience with clarifying beer has been inconclusive at best, and disastrous at worst. It always comes out murky, and sometimes the addition of irish moss causes proteins in the fermenter to froth as the yeast acts on it, bubbling several inches off the surface, clogging the air lock, increasing the pressure to the point where the lid blows off the fermenter and the kitchen ceiling looks like Jackson Pollock exploded on my counter.

This time I decided to take things seriously. The fine mesh strainers caught the solid hop particles, the breakbright coagulated beautifully, during the boil I did the whole whirl-and-skim technique (solids collect in the nadir of a whirlpool) and dumping the ice into the hot wort appeared to trigger a sudden cold crash, making the cloudy proteins sink to the bottom right away.

The most important thing to me first is that the beer didn't taste wrong coming out. Also, it looked good. In fact, it looked better than I've ever seen. What's new is that this beer was watery clear and refreshing. I've never actually had it go into the keg in this clear of a state, and I can't wait to taste it ice cold (not until August, as it's been shipped to Reno already). The closest I had was a sip of each out of the cylinder when I took a hydrometer reading. Best breakfast ever.

So the filtration went spectacularly. However, since previous filtration techniques have been inconsequential for so long, I never really expected the new methods to result in anything serious. The comedy comes in where I chose to make a hefeweizen, which is supposed to be unfiltered. Whoops. Well, it came out crystal clear, so I guess I made krystallweizen. It tastes good, so anyone with complaints can bring their own damn beer.

...

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 07:02:21 GMT

I have to be up at 5:30. What am I doing here?

Some bleary midnight stuff

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 08:03:02 GMT

1. A really good corn tortilla is so much better than any corn or flour tortilla I've ever eaten before that they really deserve to have some other name, to keep them from being confused with their lesser kin.

1a. I now know of two places to get the really good ones.

2. Someone with a petition accosted me trying to enter the supermarket today. He was talking about term limits and I said it was such a complicated issue that I'm not ready to just sign on a dotted line for it, besides I was in a big hurry (not a lie this time). He got angry and called me a coward for not signing his petition. I found the idea that I'm supposed to jump in line on a political issue (one reduced to two words, no less!) because someone pressured me into it to be greatly offensive, especially coming from an otherwise nice-looking pseudo-hippy. No one should bully other people into following their opinions. I almost punched him out to get my point across.

3. Alton Brown showed how to chill and add water to a newly brewed beer by dumping bagged ice into it. I tried it twice tonight, and one went well while the other stratified into a near-boiling section below and a frozen section above, with a strong taste like malta and all the fermentable properties of a bucket of gasoline with a chunk of radium floating in it. I still think it went well.

4. I cannot believe how frequently I say stupid and foolish things that I don't even mean, just to get a laugh that fails, makes me look really amazingly creepy, and when I explain that I was joking it sounds like a desperate lie.

4a. The very idea of embarrassment terrifies me. That I might have permanently given an amazingly bad impression to someone I care about, with no way out, makes me want to pack up all my things and leave town forever.

4b. I think if some of you knew how strong my impulse to be a total recluse is, you'd really be impressed by my willpower. Not to brag or anything.

...aaand breeeeeeathe....

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 07:40:22 GMT

I finally feel like I have my plans for Burning Man under control. Two pants and two shirts arrived from Thailand. I made a new semi-warm robe for myself, dressed out fully hippy (though it's clear the sneakers weren't appropriate-- it was a 2-mile walk and I wanted comfy), and hit the beach burn.

Arriving on-scene made me finally feel like I was ready. Sure, I have at least 45 more gallons of beer to brew, displays and software to put together, and two full yurt roofs to sew up, but it really feels like if Burning Man happened tomorrow, I'll be ready for it.

Funny, I didn't feel at all like that last year.

early morning browser love

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:01:39 GMT

Apparently there's a rendering bug in some of the more recent Firefox releases, like the one that ships with Feisty Fawn, that causes SVG objects to not redraw correctly if they have a transform attribute that specifies rotation. This is really frustrating. I may even decide to find out if it's worth bothering to consider filing a bug report.

I really ought to be sleeping, though.