Geography Quiz

This is a list or random geography facts that were run into by the travel writers at sfgate.com.
A lot of them are quite obscure, which makes it even more interesting. And inevitably I get drawn in and do even more research on things I run across.

I really enjoy these kinds of random questions that get you thinking about geography.

Here's a list of 50 geography questions and their answers.

Weird Architecture

My step-mother sent me this interesting website with lots of pictures of strange architecture. There's some really cool buildings out there.

Here's more if you liked what you saw.

And here's a website dedicated to unusual architecture.

Flight of the Conchords, Season 2 Episode 1 available now!

http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/?p=7538

I haven't had a chance to watch it yet.

The Flip of a Coin Might Decide MN Senate Race, Seriously

I just finished reading this great article about the obscenely close Senate race in Minnesota. How close of a race is it? Well, a "few thousandths of a percent separate" the candidates. To those non-math types out there, that's the difference of 200 votes with almost 3 million votes cast. It's really freakin close.

The most interesting part of this is that according to MN electoral law, if the vote is still statistically tied after finishing their recounts, they'll decide the race with the flip of a coin. This is totally serious. It sure doesn't sound very sophisticated.

In other news, this is why you don't post embarrassing pictures of people you like on facebook or any other social networking sites. The worst part is that sometimes you can't control what your friends do. In case you don't want to click through, it was a picture of Obama's Directory of Speech Writing groping a cardboard cut out of the new Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton at a party. I think it's actually sort of funny.

Election Maps

I find it really interesting to look at the election maps that are split down by county (zoom in to get the county results). The locations of pockets of blue in seas of red and vice versa are fascinating.
What makes a town primarily blue or red? Does it have to do with the industry that was originally there? Or maybe it's the landscape?
I like finding states like Idaho, where the entire state is fairly red (~72% McCain to ~26% Obama), but there's one county smack dab in the middle of the state that's pretty blue (~66% to ~32%). None of the major cities in the state are nearby, and I think the highway might be outside or on the border of this county, Blaine County. So what's the story with this place? I read a bit in wiki and the only thing of interest was the fact that the median cost of a home was about twice the state's. Why so costly?
Or how about Park County, Wyoming? Oh, this is where Jackson Hole is, and Grand Teton National Park, almost half of Yellowstone. And it has the second highest per capita income in the US at, not quite $100K a year; beaten only by Manhattan. I thought rich people loved republicans? Or is this year an exception? And why is their income so much higher?
This next one was totally unexpected. In a sea of rather hard red (65% McCain to 30% Obama) there's one hard blue county. Sioux County, North Dakota. It's 100% an Indian reservation, and it only has a population of 4,000.
If I ever decided to move randomly, this is probably partly how I'd do it. I think I like my pockets of liberalism, and I'm not quite sure I would want to give that up.

Here's another interesting map tool with tons of data to visually explore with. The interface isn't as a bit clunky though.

Worlds Craziest Data Center

Looks fake, doesn't it. It's real though.

"This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb."

Here's the deets and more pictures.

The Sound of Harddrives Failing

I couldn't help myself. I really think this is cool.

I ran across this page that is the various sounds of hard drive's failing, and the description of what's happening. Pretty cool!

http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

As a side, apparently Google can predict flu outbreaks about two weeks before the Centers For Diesese Control can because they get a spike in people seaching for "flu symptoms" and other search phrases. They've made a website so you can know when the flu makes an outbreak near you!

My Bubble has Finally Burst

I suppose I should be thankful for the over two solid months of pure and unwavering love I've experienced for my iPhone. Well, those days are over. I will probably soon be hesitantly in love/like with my iPhone for the foreseeable future, assuming we can repair our broken relationship.

Today I left work and as I was walking towards the bart I was planning on entering that cookie purchase I bought in the afternoon. (I've been tracking where I spend my money using Quickbank.) I quickly discovered that I had lost 4 pages of apps and all their data at some point during the day. I walked back to work to take a look at the iTunes there and it was empty, which was expected. I've always had the sync turned off there and only used it to recharge my battery. I didn't reconnect my phone on the off chance that somehow Apple support could help me.

I came home and went down to the Apple store only to be told that they had no appointment's open for their genius bar and instead I now have one for tomorrow. The guy I was able to talk to suggested there really wasn't anything I, or they, could do besides sync it. So I came home and reconnected it to my computer here to resync it. It has thrown a total of 7 red exclamation errors, one of which complaining about not being able to find the disk (!!). This is not a good sign. The extra odd part is that the phone works fine, and my contacts are fine too. So it is actually working, in some ways.

I can't express how sad this makes me because I really loved my iPhone, but it sure is a different thing when you know at any moment you can lose all your notes and other data you use every single day.

I hadn't been able to get my backup onto the phone or my apps that I could see in iTunes yet. But I shutdown iTunes and rebooted my phone again. Then I restarted iTunes and turned on my phone and there have been no red exclamation points yet and it's still syncing. Wish me luck.

My honeypot wanted me to mention his $300 ipod from several years ago (that's currently sitting on his desk) that lasted about a year before it died. Needless to say, he's not a fan of Apple. Or as he says he's "disappointed in their product robustness."

In other news, last night I randomly searched on "stella the cat" and this blog came up about a cat named Stella that looks startingly like my Stella. Coincidence? I think not. She must come from a long line of Stella's. Meow.

Cough, Cough

I might be patting myself on the back a little but..
I'm pretty excited about how far I've made it in the updates, rebuilds and overhauls of our computer systems. The first step was getting a much faster pc, and I did back in mid Sept. It can handle so much more than my old machine. It's great. Then there was moving everything over from the old machine to the new Vista machine, getting all the backups working and tested again, and finally moving my scripts for BASH. I also took this opportunity to tidy up some of my data too which always takes time.

A perk in all this is that I figured out one of the hard drives was very loud. And all this time I though it was the power fan. I got rid of that and now I can actually sleep with the office door open. It's really nice to not have the office sounds potentially affect my sleep anymore.

In the past couple weeks I've rebuilt the old machine with Ubuntu - which I'm pretty happy with. I'm such a noob. I know how to do stuff, and I just have to look up the correct commands, but doing anything is soo freakin slow sometimes.

I got our home network switched over to a new 802.11n router. This things is freakin fast. 160Mbps+. We can stream video through it to our living room. It's awesome. No more network cable in our living room!

My last step is to put OS X on the second harddrive of the ubuntu machine so I can start playing with iPhone development. I'm pretty interested in that and I have some ideas with it. Wouldn't it be cool to make an app that everybody's willing to pay a couple dollars for and tons of people use it? That would be pretty cool.

I did get Grub installed tonight so this weekend I'll work on OSX on the second harddrive. Wish me luck.

The picture above is one my honey took in the past couple of months. I like it, so I'm sharing it.

Right-Wing Slippery Slope Fantasies

I don't remember where I found this link, but it's pretty hilarious:

http://focusfamaction.edgeboss.net/download/focusfamaction/pdfs/10-22-08_2012letter.pdf

Basically, Dobson pretends that he's reporting on the state of the country in 2012 if Obama wins the election. 

Where do you Stand Politically?

This is something I've always wondered about. I know generally that I'm left leaning, but I also have some right leaning views on certain subjects.
A friend just sent me this great test that will put you on a chart according to your answers.

Those are my results on the left.

Go here if you'd like to take the test yourself, or just read more about it.

Hmmm Interesting...

Click for a Readable Copy.

Too Close To Call

Click this link to see which countries in the world support which Presidential candidate.

What the heck is Cous Cous?

Well, here in the good 'ole US of A it's basically chopped up pasta. So says my food expert friend. However, in other countries it's not quite that. Wikipedia says that in other countries it's actually more like:

rolling and shaping moistened semolina wheat and then coating them with finely ground wheat flour

Oh, wait. That's pretty close to chopped up pasta, minus the labor.
I'm glad I had the opportunity to eat "authentic" couscous on my travels to Morocco (in Sept 2003). That was a fun trip. When's my next one? I'm starting to feel like I need to get another trip in while I can.

In other news, and speaking of travel. Guess where I'm flying to for $162 including all service charges, fees, and taxes? Round trip direct to NYC in mid-January!! How can they cover their costs flying a plane with fares that low cross country? I'm so excited to go and hang out with an old friend, and explore Manhattan some more.

The first picture is of my friend and I on a 3 day trip in the Sahara desert in mid Sept 2003. Actually, it may have been longer. I don't remember exactly anymore. There was nothing except sand, sun, friends, a couple camels, and what felt like endless time. The second picture is something we saw from the road at one point.

Burned by the Highway

For some reason people I usually drive with prefer to use the highway to get across town, rather then using city streets. For me, I prefer the variety of scenery and the usually less aggression required to drive city streets. But every once in a while I'll think that maybe they're right. Maybe it would be faster to take the highway across town. And rarely does it turn out that way. And yet I still try. Today I took the highway from my house to here and I don't think I went over 15 mph until right at the end. The worst part of driving that slow on the highway is the view. It's other cars, random people, and concrete. Yuck.

Last night some friends mentioned these services where you have to do a math puzzle in order to send an email at certain times, or not be able to drive or call certain people if you're too drunk. I think these are great services. They should take it a step further and make you blow a breathalizer to drive a car.

Stained Glass

Last week my stained glass window class ended. It was super fun and it gave me a new understanding and respect for how amazing the stained glass is that my father-in-law gave us for our wedding. You can see a picture of it in this post. The lines are super thin which means his glass pieces perfectly fit together. And I can tell you how hard that is. Very hard and very tedious.

Anyway, here's a picture of my piece from the class. I like doing stained glass, but it's filled with tedious, time consuming steps. I may do it again, but I'm not sure. Another thing to consider is the expense.

Give and Give and Give

In the past couple of days I've picked almost 5 gallons of tomatoes from our plants. It had apparently been too long since the last time I picked some because there were a bunch of tomatoes that had split and fallen off the vines to become one with the ground. It's impressive to me how much food you can get from just a single plant!

I'm making more sauce to can. And this time I'm going to make some Tikka Masala that doesnt' have dairy or garlic so my honeypot can eat some too.

I really like that photo up there. It looks so country with the wood floor and bowl.

Letting it Slip

My dad always used to respond to my comments about time passing faster and faster with this: "You wait until you're my age."

Several weeks ago I reconnected with an old high school friend using facebook. Yeah, I used to steer away from those social networking type of websites, but I'm starting to understand their appeal. Anyway, next thing I know, several weeks have passed and I still haven't responded.

This weekend my honey and I went to Tahoe with some friends and stayed with my mother-in-law in her new house. It's got a great view and even better decks. I like that house. The boys went mountain biking and I stayed home and read with the yummy mountain air. Pix here. I might actually get to ski on a semi-regular basis now that we can combine visiting her with skiing.

In other news, I finally bottled my experimental Ginger Beer. I was quite rushed though because I was getting picked up for the previously mentioned trip to Tahoe.

The plant starts that I started a couple weeks ago are doing great! I'm so excited to get my garden going for the next round of food.

I bought a violin a couple days ago too. My honey recently purchased a guitar and has been playing it tons. He plays in a band called Macaroni and the Cheese and wants me to join the band too. So I went out and got one. We'll see how it goes.

This past weekend we had breakfast at this new place. It's only a couple blocks from our house and it's another new breakfast spot! I love this! Our neighborhood is changing so much. It's getting better and better. If only we could afford to live there one one income..

Soldering

I'm so lucky to have my honey to fix my electronics. He's soldering the sound out of my laptop right now. It's a very exciting moment.

I'm also excited about all the plants I'm starting right now. Some fava beans, spinach, asian greens, and some others. I'm working towards growing more edibles around here. I think there's something to eating food grown nearby.

Warning, the following is horribly not PC, but it's really freakin funny. Massively entertaining. http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

Busy Day

Today was an active day. Here's what I did.
-had breakfast with my honey
-clear out the walkway of overgrown plants
-swept the sidewalk on both sides of our house
-replaced my office desk with a table and got everything set up again
-made chocolate chip cookies
-cooked dinner
I also canned some red sauce last night, and canned some tikka masala as well.

My honey put our new toilet in the upstairs bathroom, played his guitar, and other things too.

My Honey Shaved Off All His Hair!

I had some before pictures, but they're all blurry. I guess you'll have to wait until you see him.

He has a cute head!

My Honeypot got a guitar

He's been playing and fiddling with it for days now. I think he's a fan.

I had a crafty weekend. I attempted to strip the dye out of two pairs of pants worthy of "reworking." This is the first time that I've ever not been successful. It's almost like no dye came out at all, even though the bath it was in turned dark grey, like normal. Something went wrong, but it's unclear what went wrong.

I also dyed this skirt that I love. It's purple with some tie-dye flair. (I had stripped the dye out of it several months ago.)

I also made another batch of beer. This time it's a ginger beer. I added some tea and saaz finishing hops. It's my first time making anything quite like this.

Sometimes yar comes over and we have a limited number of games that the three of us can play. We added another one to the collection. It's called Citadel.

TED Talks and Data Visualization

I ran across some fantastic websites tonight. The first is TED talks. It's a collection of lectures by various intellectuals on a pretty wide variety of topics. This one was about some generalizations that we as "first world" dwellers make about "third world" dwellers. He goes through and visualizes data from the 1970s on infant mortality, life lengths and income, among others. It's pretty fascinationg. Here's the actual visualization tool for some of the data sets he references. Here's another one.

The other thing I ran into tonight is another website that offers various interactive visualizations of a variety of data sets and also appears to have some interesting data driven lectures. I only played with the data sets. And that was also very cool.

Here's another one.

Rolling on the Floor Laughing

You might only get this if you're a techie, or have techie inklings, but this movie is so freakin funny. Oh My God.

My office mate just pointed out this very interesting (and informative) website about the election. Complete with various scenarios and lots of statistics.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

Get out and vote - and help others get out and vote too!

Craft Time!

I've recently been interested in working with knits in some sewing projects. I have some vague memories of having lots of problems sewing with knits. But that was a long time ago, and my skill is probably higher than it was at that time.

I purchased a couple colors of knits last week and today I finally made something.

I can see how it would be hard to work with this fabric. It doesn't really have any memory of what shape it was when it was flat and square. Also, it's stretchy in one direction but not in the other. So it's even more important to be careful how you build items.

I understand the use of starch and sizing a whole lot more.

House bound

My honeypot put the toilet into our new bathroom. It's pretty exciting. He also cleaned a ton. This is also pretty exciting.

I just finished reading the book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" I really like reading the book but it wasn't nearly as great as the other sci fi I've been reading lately. The next one for me is "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny.

Our tomatoes have grown so much. I really didn't think they would grow like this. We've eaten a bunch and it looks like we're going to get a bunch more.

I recently built a new computer for myself. I've been spending lots of time trying to get everything moved over. It's a long process. My new computer is so fast. I can't believe how slow my old one was. It's better that I didn't know. I wasted most of yesterday fighting with apache php5 and mysql. At the end of last night, I had gotten it all to play nice.

How many weeks old are you?

I noticed a friends IM message that commented on how many weeks old he was. And it got me thinking about my age in weeks.
Months:393.5
Weeks:1,710.9
Days:11,976

Hello Kitty Laptop

Only 3 grand! What a deal!

I'm all for creating a unique laptop to make yourself stand out. But this is just a little pink for me. How about a tan one - for choco cat? Then I'd be sold!

Nintendo Love

I've been thinking about Mario Bros and Nintendo for weeks now. Today I finally got a hold of the ROMs and the emulator. My honeypot also found his usb controller, (and it works) so I'm in business! There really is nothing like projecting super mario bros and using an authentic anti ergonomic conroller with surround sound. Nothing.

I suppose it's nostalgia, though I don't remember being an especially happy kid. But boy were the video games fun!

In other news I just finished reading "Snow Crash". This is a great book! I reminds me a bit of the "Da Vinci Code" for all the religious history. I'm now reading "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
I don't really know - but I'll let you know when I figure it out.

Last, I finally moved my number over to the iPhone. I've been really happy with it and have only crashed it once. I finally bought some protection for it, instead of keep wrapping it up in a wash cloth and stuffing it into a zip lock. And no, I haven't experienced any dropped calls. (Yet - hopefully never.)

Burning Man 2008 - iPhone

Our theme camp was a complete success and we couldn't have gotten a better placement! This year we were a registered theme camp (for link - search for Circus Boot Camp) with classes teaching various circus arts and we got placed on a corner lot! We offered training for slack line walking, unicycle riding, juggling, trapeze performance and hoola hooping. I'm pretty amazed at how many people showed up for these classes. We were darned busy. People really love to learn this stuff! (I'll put more pictures up when my campmates come out and I get ahold of their pictures; this was another year where I didn't take a single picture.)

The especially cool part of it all is that many people who already had some skills would often help out those who were trying to learn. So we ended up having a really good trapeze arts teacher, even though nobody in our camp had much experience with it.

My honeypot and I arrived on Saturday, Aug 23rd around 6pm or so. We were so lucky to get the placement we got because we were pretty close to the action, but not so close for it to be annoying. The weather was so perfect, except for a couple serious storms. The storm on Monday started around noon and lasted well past 8 hours or so. It was the worst storm I've ever seen in my 7 years of Burning Man. The only other storm I saw this year was also relatively bad. It started yesterday afternoon, Saturday. I left during that so I have no idea what the weather was like today. I hope it was perfectly clear for everybody that was still there.

I left on Saturday afternoon before the man burned. For me, being there for 7 days was long enough. I had an opportunity for a ride out, and I took it. My honeypot is still out there and if the temple burn hasn't started yet; it will in minutes. Even though I missed the burning of the man and the temple burn by leaving early, I don't really mind. I enjoy the earlier days of the week more, as it's more mellow and there are less "lollipop raver kids". I like the "old school" crowd a bit more. Also, the playa was very loose with deep dust, so riding a bike was very challenging out in the open playa. You'd be riding along on a bike and then hit one of these loose places and come to a screeching halt while fish tailing and struggling not to fall over. It wasn't very conducive to exploring via bike. And the distances are really large to be walking everywhere all the time.

In other news, I finally went and got my iPhone. I've wanted one for a while and agreed to wait until the second version came out so the hardware and software was a little more stable before dropping so much money. I dropped by the store today and walked out about 10 minutes later with my new iPhone. It was easy as pie. So far, I'm pretty impressed with it. Of course, I haven't really gotten deep into the software yet. I'll let you know what I think in a couple weeks or so.

17h 20 mins until we leave

Last night I got my v2 prototype LED hoop done. It's a harder plastic so it was much harder to get the electronics in side.

The hooping action is much better because it's stiffer.

The downside is that because it was so much harder to split open the tube, I wasn't able to hot glue the leds inside. So basically if it has any force on the leds, they're going to pop into the tube.

Oh, well. It's what I can manage given the time left.

4 days and 13 hours

Until we're on our way out to the playa. (For some reason blogger has a config issue and is failing on image uploads..)

This past weekend was a whirlwind of activity. There was the birthday dinner for Marc. And friends hanging out crafting until 3:30am in the morning. There was breakfast with Rose and her Mom and sister at the new restaurant down the street. And then so many things to prepare for Burning Man.

This is the first year that I will not have a day off before leaving for the playa. It makes it quite a bit more hectic getting everything together because I have to squeeze it in around work. Add to that the fact that I can no longer go to stores that have short open hours - like fabric stores. It's a little more planning ahead than I'm used to.

The picture is of a hat and cape I made for this year. I'm really excited about the hat (and all the other flair pieces I'll soon get to wear.) I think having the shoulder protection will really help me get out during the day. It can be so sunny out.

Erika's a human backpack!

Whirl Wind Weeks

It's been a really busy couple of weeks, and it will probably continue to be until we are out on the playa. No time to blog!

My friends Mari, Nathan, Dora and Amelia arrived on Thursday the 7th and stayed through Wed the 13th. They are a really cool family! They were making the rounds visiting friends and family. They arrived early because they were passing around sickness and didn't want to infect some of the older folks at one of retirement communities that was their previous stop. It's tough being a kid and being sick, but they seemed to handle it pretty well. They're really sweet girls!

Yesterday I went to our new Colo and helped rack a bunch of our new servers. It was lots of fun. I really enjoy hands on stuff besides the programming that I do. It was also really cool and interesting to see all the parts of the Colo on the tour that I did. They have 9 generators that each generate 2.2 Mega Watts each. And there's a 50,000 gallon tank of diesel underneath the building. It's pretty crazy, indeed. I think that place could power a small city. I'll try to get some pictures up when I get them. They're trapped on a co-workers iPhone currently. Here's a tour of a Colo I found online - they're probably all the same.

Next up is trying frantically to finish up all the projects I want to do for Burning Man. We're leaving in 8 days and I'm going to be working for 5 of them. Tick Tock.

I finally got to start drinking my last brew batch last week. It's good. I'm happy with it.

sir cuss boot camp

We had a casual craft night tonight and I sewed the "backdrop" of our bm theme camp. I think it came out good. The picture doesn't really do it justice, but you can tell how wide it is. And it goes up into two points, but those parts were folded back.

I'm really excited about this year's burn. I think it's going to be fun and good.

I've had these really weird ridges in both of my thumb nails and they would grow out over time. They seemed to appear in the same frequency, every couple months or so. I think I figured out what they were. I was about to push my cuticles back a couple weeks ago and it occurred to me that this would be about the time that the ridge would start. So I didn't push my cuticles back at all at that time. And the last ridges are about to grow out. It's pretty weird and shocking to me that I was hurting myself so much and not noticing.

Burn, Baby Burn

My life "theme" has recently changed. It used to be "If it doesn't burn, it's not food." My current theme is "Food is a vehicle for hot sauce."

I love hot, spicy things. I eat some form of very hot spice around twice a day. I've gotten to the point where I use hot sauce like other people use oil and vinegar on salads or ketchup on eggs. Most of it's just not that hot any more.

We were in the city last weekend and we walked by a local grocery store. Why not buy some groceries here? (as opposed to getting back to the east bay and doing it.) So we did. And they had new hot sauces! So I bought four new bottles, and two of them are very hot! I love that.

I'm really enjoying learning about the various spicy peppers. Each one affects your mouth in a different way. Some will slowly ramp up to their peak of hotness, others will be very very hot quickly and fade away just as quick, others will only affect the tip of your tongue, while others still will only affect the back of your mouth. Yum.

Yesterday I finally got around to bottling my new beer. I'm very excited to drink it. I realized that I get so excited when I brew beer that I have historically felt the need to use hops in all the phases of brewing. And I think for my beer tastes now, it's not such a good fit. This might explain my lack of home brewing recently. But this beer only has finishing hops and has lots of blueberries. I'm guessing it's going to have only a slightly more complicated taste that bud, or something along those lines. And that might just be perfect for me now.

Oh, and as a side (for those of you who may be following this blog) I've lost 15 lbs since starting these CRON angled food changes during tax season. It's very exciting. (And I really haven't had a headache in many, many months too - thankfully.) 8 more to go and I'm done.

If only I'd known..

We recently discovered that there is, in fact, a pretty easy way to get across the bay after bart stops running. We tried it on Saturday night, and it was an astounding success.

There's a bus that runs around every hour, on the hour. It sweeps through the downtown market street corridor and heads across the bridge. Conveniently for us, it goes down telegraph and has a stop one block from our house. It's beautiful.

In other news, I finally got to meet Molly (and catch up with Kirsta and Bill). Molly is still "minus 2 weeks old." She was born almost 2 months early. Whoa. She's so cute and she looks great!

This weekend was busy, busy in a good way. I'm starting to notice the pressure for burning man preparations. I have lots of projects that I want to complete before then, but not so much time to really work on them. In the end, the most important will get finished and I won't even care that the rest got dropped. 34 days until the man burns, and about 27 before I pack and leave. Yikes.

Crafty Weekend

This past weekend I brewed a blueberry IPA with only a finishing hops. I realized during the Anchor Brewery tour that when I homebrew, I use too many hops for my tastes. That's pretty silly. So this time I refrained from using hops much and used a blueberry extract instead. I love the smell of hops, especially when I'm brewing. I don't much like to drink hoppy beer though. Perhaps the Moss Street Brewery is being resurrected?

I also started making costumes for our Circus Cafe Burning Man theme camp. I have this really fun tutu made out of a variety of colors. And I have so many more ideas of things to make.

I've had a really hard time motivating to work this week. I wonder why that is. I still love my co-workers, but I just don't really want to work much. I suppose to be more specific, you could say that I'm no longer "obsessed" with work. I'm enjoying my summer.

Oh, yeah, Yar - I have appropriated your sweatshirt. It's very warm! You better come over and visit soon if you expect to get it back.

Summer of Crafts

This past weekend I went up north to the Oregon Country Fair. If you haven't heard about it, it's probably not what you're thinking. Basically it's the best and most creative artists that you've ever seen together in one place. Everything there had to be hand made in the USA. Most people camp out for the weekend and there was tons of music and good food. Like my favorite, vegan cupcakes. Many people wear costumes and paint their faces and bodies. The vast majority of food was whole food - not deep fried or processed in any way. And there was 20 some odd stages with music. There are around 40 thousand folks that come through there during the three day weekend and most everything you buy is in corn cups, or compostable plates. They even give you metal silverware that you drop back in a bucket that gets washed and given out the next day. It's like a mellower Burning Man in the woods. Very cool.

A week or so before that we went up north to Methow Valley for a wedding. That area of the country is what I'm guessing Lake Tahoe was like 30 years ago. It was remote, beautiful and cheap. We went white water rafting with a little over 30 people the day before the wedding and stayed in this way cute place. Fantastic.
And now I'm getting ready for Burning Man. It's my next trip of the year. I have quite a bit of work to do on my LED hoola hoop. And I have a bunch of ideas for some costume components that I want to make for this year also.

Flowers

Here's a picture of one of my favorite flowers in our garden right now. Check out those great reds and yellows.

Sunset Party

Today we went into the city for a fun day in the sun listening to beats and playing. We brought hoola hoops, juggling clubs and our bodies to dance and play with. It was a good time, albeit very windy. The fun part is that I got to see a new part of the city.

This is a pretty fun and educational geography game.

Just make sure you only use letters and numbers for your username/password. Otherwise it blows up.

http://www.geosense.net/

(Thanks Lance!)

Bathroom Window

We've always had this curtain on half our our bathroom window and I've not liked it for a while now. It was fabric salvaged a while ago when we needed a cover on this window that is part of the wall around our bathtub. So, yesterday I picked some paper that I like and flour pasted it to the window. I've decided that I don't really like the paper that much, so I'll probably change it out again soon. I think I would prefer a nice paisley instead of the squares.

It sure does put some nicer light into our hallway now, though.

Tomato Plants Planted

We've had this section of yard that's been laying fallow as I've been getting rid of all the residual vine in that section. We could have planted it a while ago, but I just haven't made the time.

A couple weeks ago Sarah's neighbor gave me 5 tomato starts that she's not going to use. And today I went to the farmer's market and picked up two more tomato starts, albeit different kinds.

Having those tomato starts sitting there all unhappy in their tiny little plastic containers motivated me to get them in the ground. So I dug out these holes and added good soil and these plants. I hope they do okay. I've never really grown tomatoes in clay soil before.

In this picture the tomato plants are on the bottom right side. You can see how crazy our non-food garden is doing too. All this, and we're not even watering this year due to the drought.

Enchilada Sauce

There's this restaurant that I really like to get huevos rancheros at on the weekends. They have really good super hot habanero salsa too. The thing is that quite often they really under cook the eggs. I really don't like that. And it doesn't seem to matter how you order them.

So today I made huevos rancheros at home. And as part of that I found a recipe for enchilada sauce online and tried it out. I ended up doctoring the recipe some and it came out really good.

Yum!

Rainbow's Enchilada Sauce

• 2 cups water
• 3 Tbs veggie broth powder (from bulk at Berkeley Bowl)
  
• 4 Tbs ancholi chili powder
• 1 tsp. ground cumin
• 2 Tbs of minced raw garlic
  
• 3/4 tsp. salt
• 1 pinch ground cinnamon (less than 1/16 tsp.)
• 1/3 tsp. sugar
• 5 Tbs. cold water
• 5 Tbs. white flour
• 1/4 cup white vinegar
  

Email Tidiness

I used to be that person that never moved any email out of my inbox. This was true for both my personal and business email accounts, but has only been true for the past couple of years. This also means that for my work email, every single message was still sitting in my inbox.

Before this period, I always kept me inbox empty. It was how I kept myself organized. There must have been a point when I just became so overwhelmed with the sheer volume of email that this purging habit slowly faded away.

Recently work asked us to reduce the storage we were using for our email accounts. So I basically emptied mine completely out, and haven't looked back. I had over 3,000 emails. I also cleared out my private email account too.

I feel so much more tidy and organized. The only messages that stay in my inbox are things that still need action. It works really well.

Prototype Done

I finished it. I only have a really sore thumb and small spot bleeding on the tip of my finger. A small sacrifice for an led hoop.

Top picture is a 2 second time lapse of me hooping. The bottom one is without time lapse.

Half Way There

So after much learning, and thinking it would work when I turned it on (and it didn't)....

It Works!! (Well, half of it, so far)
The wiring of one set of colors, the blue LEDs are working!
The other color is going to be yellow for this prototype and there will be a total of 30 LEDs.
It was probably better that it didn't work on the first try - or I would have gotten too much confidence and possibly been sloppy for the next set. The wiring was a simple swap of some leads on the chip, and presto! It worked.

I actually shouted will glee when they lit up!
On to the other set, and then putting them all in the hoop and securing them in place.

LED Hoola Hoop Prototype

111 posts is somehow lucky.

Tonight, after weeks of gathering together the supplies and thoughts on the LED hoola hoop, I started construction. I realized I was missing some things, so tomorrow I'll have to go to Lasher's or this place as a last resort. I think it's pretty much going to work the first time, but I have plans to make even better ones later. This is going to be a hoola hoop year for me.