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.)