The spring semester is over, and with it I’ve hit a milestone in my graduate career, or at least I’m supposed to have. This was to be my last semester of classes (and I’m 3 overdue for the end as it is), but I missed completing my requirements by getting 1 ‘B’. Officially, I’m overdue and might be kicked out of graduate school, but I’m also working on cleaning up an old, incomplete class. If I can still pull an ‘A’ out of that class, I move on to the second phase of my graduate study (exclusively research oriented); otherwise it’s the boot for me. In either case, I’m done taking courses! (Unless I choose to get a M.A. in journalism ;-))
Leaky roof
So the roof of my house has been leaking for the last couple of months; luckily, it’s only bad if it rains pretty hard. Anyway, I’ve had two contractors out to look at it. The first pointed out that that flashing and about 30% of my roof was installed improperly, and quoted me $700-$1750 to replace varying amounts of my roof. Based on the half-assed job the previous owner did on various other projects in the house, I’m not surprised to hear that the roof is shoddy work. The second contractor wanted $170 to re-seal the chimney flashing, and didn’t comment at all about the rest of the roof installation.
Normally I want a job done once, and done right, but on the other hand I’m a “poor graduate student”. I went with the $170 quick fix, it might fail really soon, but I’m just not in the mood to drop $1000+ on redoing a large part of my roof. Hopefully, I won’t be shelling out to have the rest of the roof fixed for at least a couple of years.
Barbecue
I went over to Geek Haus for memorial day, and made pulled pork as my contribution to the gluttony of the event. For those in the know real barbecue is always cooked very slowly over low heat; in this case, I spent 20 hours smoking a pork shoulder (boston butt) using hickory wood for smoke. Those from certain parts of the country will recognize this as the correct way to barbecue, and the rest of you are just plain wrong 🙂
I used a flower-pot smoker à la Alton Brown, and served it with my (not so) famous mustard sauce. Good Eats indeed!
(updated with link to recipe).
Under a car
I was just under a car.
I should elaborate. I just spent the last 4 hours (willingly?) under one of my cars.
For reasons that don’t bear explaining, I currently have 3 cars. I’ve been trying to get rid of at least one of them for the last 4 years, but it keeps having mechanical troubles, and I fix them slower than the new ones show up. It’s not really been an issue since I have a reliable daily car (2001 VW Passat), and my other hobby car (1995 VW Corrado) doesn’t really leave the garage much (ever).
But this week a friend was in an accident, and I’m loaning him a car while his is repaired. To keep his life simple, I’m loaning him the reliable Passat, and I’ll drive my “fun” car. Unfortunately, the problem car is blocking the driveway, so I need to move it to be able to get the Corrado out of the garage. To move the problem car, I had to connect the battery (disconnect to prevent draining it), and start it up for the first time in 4 months.
Problem 1. The hood cable broke the last time I moved it (hence the reason it’s been blocking the driveway). I had left the hood popped so that I could get in easily, but someone (roommate? neighbor?) must have seen it, and shut it, “as a favor”. So I jacked up the car, and cracked out the tools to try and pop the hood manually.
Problem 2. My floor jack died. It’s apparently an $80 piece of junk. I am told I was supposed to buy a “real” jack for > $200. Sigh. I just used the little portable jack that came with the car…
Problem 3. I still couldn’t pop the hood (even with instructions from the net). Off to borrow/buy tools. It took 3 trips to get the tools I needed. 18 hours, $40, and 1 headache later, the hood is popped, and I’ve left a screwdriver in the bracket to prevent it from being shut again.
Problem 4. I ended up getting the hood open because the headlight housing is broken. I hadn’t noticed this before, and it’s another thing I need to fix…
Problem 5. The engine is now tapping. ARGH!!! I hope this is just a simple problem, and not time for an engine rebuild….
Add to this the existing problems (thermostat, heater core, sunroof, general interior nastiness), and I’ll never get this thing sold.
Update: The tapping worked itself out during a test drive around the block. Yeah!
Motivation Level: zero.
No motivation today. Nothing, nada, nil… so sad.
Lots of work to do, many things I’d like to blog about. Still no motivation at all. I haven’t even managed a meal yet.
I wanna go back to sleep.
Setting up a small darkroom
Justin Ouellette from Chromogenic.net has very cool directions for setting up a minimal darkroom (negatives only) in your bathroom. I did this for a while in my old apartment, and it was a great way to save on black and white developing, as well as being a good segue into a full darkroom. I would add a couple of things to his article though.
First, a changing bag
Next, I like liquid concentrate developer since it lasts longer between uses. The problem with most dry chemicals is that you have to use them pretty soon after mixing (a month or two). Liquid concentrate developers tend to be more stable and they can sit for 6-18 months between uses. Right now I use, Edwal FG7 Developer, but it can be hard to measure for small amounts of use.
I would also argue that there is one meaningful difference between steel and plastic reels. If you need to do two or more batches in a row, steel reels are much easier to load while wet. I used plastic for years, and until I was told this, I never understood why I’d sometimes have problems with the plastic reels. Sure enough, when my (Paterson) plastic reels were wet, they were really hard to load. I switched to steel (also my steel tanks leak less, but thats not so important), and I can reliably load them wet or dry.
Judging books by their cover
In one of the comments on the previous post Seva notes that many books of the like Getting Things Done suck. I won’t argue that point, and I have to admit that while shopping for my copy I was appalled to find myself in the business management section of the bookstore. Since I view myself as an engineer, there has been little of interest to me in the self-help and business management sections of the store, and I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my mind — or at least my way.
But let’s face, the old adage about not judging a book by it’s cover (or it’s classification in the bookstore) is true, and while 99% of the books with “morons smiling on the cover”” might suck, I don’t think Getting Things Done is one of them. While reflecting on that comment, I was reminded of another good book that has another person smiling from the cover, the Wealthy Barber.
At college graduation several years ago, a physics professor recommended the the Wealthy Barber to many of us as good guide to learning about managing the money we would all soon start earning. Since I had always felt that I didn’t have the first clue about investing or managing money. I dutifully went to the store and picked up a copy. In the intervening decade, the insights in the Wealthy Barber have helped me: begin saving to retirement, buy a house, and make crucial decisions about things like cars and life insurance.
These are not sexy topics, but they’re all important, and many people could really use the help. the Wealthy Barber explains personal finance in plain language and an approachable format; I highly recommend it!
starting Getting Things Done
Recently I’ve seen a lot of posts about “Getting Things Done”, by David Allen. Designed as a program for increasing productivity (mostly for business professionals), that many geeks seem to be turning on to. I’ve been feeling stretched increasingly thin with commitments at home, grad school, and with friends and colleagues, so anything that makes it easier to get things acoomplished would be wonderful. After seeing four or five different technical people mention the book (at Slashdot and O’Reilley among other places), and since I’ve felt like my commitments were getting out of control, I decided it would be worth a read.
So far I’ve only read a couple of chapters, but I decided to start implementing some of the techniques mentioned so far. The net result is that I’m feeling more relaxed, and that my commitments are being better tracked. Only time will tell if I get more from the book and I become more productive as a result. The tactics in the book seem to be well thought out, and pretty simple to put into use, but I’ve only really started using the project/next-action lists so far.
I’ve decided to use OmniOutliner3 for tracking my “projects”, multi-step tasks that I need to finish, since I’ve always found outliners to be a good way for me to work, and I only had to upgrade an existing license that came with my computer. If people are interested, drop me a comment, and I’ll elaborate on how I’m using OmniOutliner within the structure of “Getting Things Done”, since it differs somewhat from what other people seem to be doing.
review: Sin City
I just got back from the 12:01AM showing of Sin City, and it was well worth the effort. In a sentence, this was the Pulp Fiction of comic book movies, and I imagine many knock-off films will follow this flick as well. Don’t be mistaken, if you’re not into gratuitous violence and scantily clad women, this movie is not for you.
First, the visual style of the film captures the much of the impact of Frank Miller’s original graphic novels, and the effect is lush and compelling. Viewers who are drawn in by the visuals will not be disappointed, as the effect plays well throughout the movies 100 minute runtime. Much like Pulp Fiction, Sin City is presented as a series of related story vignettes, oddly the resulting narrative seems to move somewhat more slowly than that 100 minutes would imply. Perhaps contributing to the leisurely pace is the voiceover narration presented by the main characters; the effect plays very much like the narrative side text of comic books, and keeps the viewer firmly sided with the “good guy”. (Note: the concept of a good guy in Sin City is a decidedly subjective judgement). Fans of the comic book will There’s a lot to like in Sin City, hard-bitten actors, lovely ladies, casual violence, but there’s more things keeping this movie from being a hit with mainstream moviegoers.
The first few minutes are peppered with needless topless shots of (admittedly beautiful) women, but this seems to be used to . And while the action eventually gets fast and furious, there’s a gradual build to a crescendo of guns and mayhem that may put off some viewers. When the violence does peak, it keeps itself firmly rooted in comic book stylized gore that is more humorous than appalling, which may appease some and frustrate others. If there’s one thing going for Sin City is Frank Miller’s plots twist and turn and keep the proceedings interesting as well as entertaining. Unfortunatly, the dialog is typical comic book fare, and suffers from hackneyed turns of phrase and over the top melodrama — resulting in the occasional unintended laugh from the spectators. Along with the clichéd dialog, we have the traditional two-dimensional comic book characterizations — with only a few notable exceptions. Clive Owen and Micky Roukre do more than one might imagine with their respective parts, and Bruce Willis soldiers bravely with his somewhat one-dimensional character. Of the bevy of beautiful actresses gracing this movie, stand-out performances are somewhat harder to come by with Rosario Dawson and Alexis Bledel both doing wonderful jobs.
To paraphrase my friend Kevin, who once commented about my movie going habits, “He is as likely to come home with teenage-romantic-comedy-nonsense as German Expessionism, and relish both (on the same night)!” Living up to my billing, I really enjoyed Sin City, flaws and all. Fans of the books will have no problems shelling out for the experience, but those with young children, an aversion to comic book conversions, or not interested in Tarantino-esqe — not only do his films influence Sin City, but he guest directs — movies are best advised to stir clear.
Do donation requests make sense?
The last few of blogs I visited in Blog Explosion have all had “make a donation” buttons; do these things make any sense?
One of the pages was so poorly designed that I can’t imagine that the content was any good. I couldn’t check because after scrolling 9-10 screens I hadn’t hit the content yet — the sidebar links had pushed the content all the way to the bottom of the page. Other sites are just the person going on and on about their kids, day, or Terry Shiavo, and while I respect your right to blog about whatever you want (I know I do), I wouldn’t expect donations based on the quality of content alone.
I know some bloggers (kotte) are doing well with donations, but at least they put serious effort into blogging as a vocation. If it’s just your hobby, I wouldn’t expect much. Maybe I’m wrong, if you’ve got a donation link on your site, and it’s making you money, leave me a comment and let me know. Who knows, if your content is good, I might just pony up a couple of bucks.
Note: I do use Amazon Associates for all of the stuff I talk about here, but at least people clicking on the links get something for their money.