Check out the monstropedia, an encyclopedia of monsters, for a little fun. Personally I think my sister should get on there and add Spongo the merciless, her deadly little cat.
Category: General
There are monsters in my backyard
Well….maybe there are. A brief scary story. I have about 30 acres of farmland behind my house. At various times I have seen fox and coyote traversing the property. Last night it was pitch black out, so when I took Soolin out for her 10PM constitutional I put my LED camping head lamp on so I could see. We got about 100 yards or so out into the farmland and she began doing her business. While she was, I was sort of aimlessly looking about when what do I see but two bright peepers, about 15 yards away and creeping up on us. As soon as I had them in the light, they stopped moving and just stared at me. They were roughly canine height.
I panicked, not out of fear, but out of concern that Soolin would rush over to attack. I discovered that nothing puts fear in a man like tackling a pooping dog though, and imagining the possible outcomes.
Anyway nothing much came of it beyond that – I got ahold of Soolin and dragged her back towards the house. The eyes never moved, they just followed us as we walked away. After I stashed Soolin in the house I went back to see if I could spot whatever it was, but I couldn’t see it.
Velomobile: I want one
My friend Nick turned me onto Velomobiles a while ago and now I’m mildly obsessed with them. If you’re unfamiliar with them, check out the velomobile wikipedia entry. They’re basically enclosed recumbent bicycles, and they’re often equipped with a small electric engine to help you climb hilly terrain. I could easily commute to work with one of these and would love to be able to – though I might need the assist on one hill, it would combine a great workout, the ability to get grocery shopping done, and an environmentally sound way to commute all in one package. There’s just one downside – the cost. You basically can’t touch one for under $10k. They’re also very hard to get in the US.
The concept seems brilliant though, especially if you buy into the peak oil/ever increasing fuel costs theory of where we are right now. I’m mulling over buying a recumbent, which can be had starting at around $2k, as a way to work my way up to a full velomobile. There’s a dealer in Greenfield, MA that carries stock on a lot of the main recumbent brands. As soon as it gets warm I’m going to take a few for a test drive, and possibly sell my kayak off and use the funds to buy a commuter bike.
One shelving system collapse later, I am pissed
I have a fairly extensive collection of boardgames, many of them from the 1970’s and some, especially the ones published by Avalon Hill, are somewhat valuable (Titan, for example, regularly sells for over $100 on ebay and I’ve seen it go for over $200). It’s an impractical hobby in that boardgames take up quite a lot of space, and in fact until last weekend it had been over two years since I had seen most of them, because ever since I moved to Saratoga they had been sitting in boxes, first in the attic of a barn in Greenfield and then more recently in a spare room in my current house.
When I visited family over Thanksgiving holiday we went to Ikea and I bought dressers, which allowed me to disassemble the ramshackle milk crate and board shelving system I had been using for my clothes. I transferred this to the spare room, unpacked all the games, fawning over some of them as one might fawn over long absent treasures, then closed up the spare room. I’m not heating it this winter to save on the heating bill.
Yesterday I went into the spare room to retrieve one of the games and discovered the whole assemblage had collapsed for reasons unknown. Things could have been much much worse than they ended up being but still, games and parts of games were scattered everywhere. Most of the 1970’s era games, with their hundreds of cardboard chits, survived intact and boxes closed, but some of them vomited forth a stream of cardboard bits it will take me a month to sort. At first I thought to take a picture of the carnage but the whole thing was so depressing I couldn’t bring myself to do it – in fact, after gathering together the still closed games and stacking them together I fled the room and left the mess intact, to be dealt with another day.
The best thing I can say about it all is that most of the really valuable games seem to have survived, boxes uncrushed. The whole episode has tempted me to sell off the majority of the collection. It’s a bit of a burden to keep around and though I do get to drag out some of the games several times a year for play, the vast majority are neither valuable nor ones I would play. They are individually notable for their rule system, or the designer, or their heritage, or their theme, but in aggregate they’re a great bulk of relatively delicate historical gamestuff that would be better stored in a collector more inclined to make use of them than I am.
Debt free at last – now what do I do
The one downside to my recent move and career change was that I put myself in a hole financially. Part of this was due to switching jobs and having no income for almost 2 months, part was the expense of moving, establishing myself in a new area, and furnishing a 3 bedroom house, part of this was due to my having rewarded myself for my new position with a relatively expensive HDTV, and part was due to my less careful control over my spending. I’m making more, after all, and a little ….excess seemed in order.
Still, I plugged away at the debt. When I first moved in March, I gave myself 6 months to clear it off my credit card. It took me 8 months instead, which all things considered is not too bad. Now the question enters: after Christmas (which for the first time in my adult life will not put me in a serious financial hole: my family agreed to move to a secret santa model), how should I best spend my monthly budget surplus? I could continue with ridiculous excess: buying an xbox 360, a PS3, a Nintendo Wii, a Velomobile or at least a recumbent bicycle, additional home theater equipment upgrades, and more broadly expensive consumer electronics and gadgets, of which I’m inordinately fond. I could start saving aggressively, with an eye towards buying a house or at least recharging a savings account that’s sadly depleted after several years of career changes. I could try to quickly pay off my car loan, which right now sits at about $8.5k and is just a little higher than the overall debt I incurred in the move to MA, meaning with a little discipline and a nice tax return I could have it paid off by next fall. Or, the most likely scenario, I could find a balance of the above.
We’ll see how this plays. I’ll be making the first decisions in January. I’m tempted to flat out focus on paying off the car, but some reading of financial advice columns has left me with this sense that conventional wisdom says ‘debt is not bad, especially when it’s low interest,’ which my car loan is, and that I might be better off simply dumping money into savings where it will draw a higher interest rate. I have to balance that against the fact that there is some sentiment that the dollar is about to collapse (after the housing market does) which could leave me with a pile of savings worth nothing, in turn leading me to wonder if I should focus on tangible assets like, for example, my toys 🙂
Why I wanted the democrats back in power
It’s all right here folks – legislation from Christopher Dodd that seeks to overturn some of the most egregious excesses of the Bush administration’s ‘we don’t need no steenking Geneva convention!’ take on how to conduct anti-terrorist policy. Cross your fingers that this passes and that it is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of new legislation.
Need knots? Everything you could ever want to know…
…can be found at the Animated Knots site. It sounds silly, I know, but this is actually useful to someone like me who barely knows anything beyond the square knot. It has tons of animated examples of different knots, and the interface allows you to step through the process one frame at a time.
[via Kevin Kelly’s wonderful Cool Tools]
$10 off anything if you buy with google checkout
Just a head’s up in case you didn’t get this as vendor spam from one of the participating merchants – if you use google checkout to buy anything worth $30 or more, you’ll get $10 off your purchase. Details and a list of participating merchants here. Some folks are reporting it works for more than one purchase. I’m going to buy a game, of course.
Friday fun – free, legal movie for your friday enjoyment
This has made the rounds on the net, but in case you missed it, spend your friday watching the original Dawn of the Dead, the George Romero zombie classic that spawned a genre of films. You’ll need to be capable of playing google videos, which is a short install if you’re not already equipped to do so.
Imagine his surprise…
I’ll share an amusing story from my youth to make up for the lack of posting here of late.
I worked in a Ground Round restaurant off and on between the ages of 16 and 19 or so, first as a busboy and ultimately as one of the line cooks. Cooking on a line in a busy restaurant can actually be great adrenaline fueled fun fun, especially if you’re young and irresponsible.
One weekend night I was one of the two closing cooks, meaning I had to work until ~1 AM and was responsible for some of the most onerous of the cleaning responsibilities. The worst cleaning job in the kitchen was having to mop behind the line of cooking equipment. You had to pull the equipment away from the wall and sweep then mop up a stretch of tiled floor about 20 feet long and maybe 4 feet deep that was super saturated with kitchen gunk. Sometimes the oil would be a quarter inch thick on that stretch of floor and extremely difficult to sop up. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that since we all hated doing it, we all found schemes to escape having to do it, meaning if you were unlucky you would end up mopping a stretch of floor that hadn’t been cleaned in several days.
On this particular weekend the regional manager had chosen to visit our restaurant. This was a dreaded event as he was wise to our various schemes to avoid cleaning things and he had a volatile temper, often flying off the handle and screaming at us when he caught us not doing our jobs efficiently.
One of the largest pieces of equipment, the broiler where the steaks, burgers, chicken and so on were cooked, had recently been serviced and we had noted that the emergency valve that would cut off the gas supply in the event of a problem had been installed backwards. We were all aware of this and were used to being careful when moving it because of this valve. The gas line it protected was almost wide enough to swallow a baseball.
As soon as the kitchen closed, the district manager came in the back and proceeded to pull the equipment away from the wall to expose our shoddy cleaning, shouting at us as he did so. When he yanked the broiler away from the wall he pulled hard enough that it caused the gas line to disconnect. Normally the safety valve would block the gas from leaking but since it was installed backwards it did not. The district manager was unaware of this fact, while we were.
You never saw two line cooks run so fast. Steve, my partner that night, had the presence of mind to run towards the back door where the emergency gas cutoff valve was – me, being concerned only with self preservation, ran to the bathroom, thinking the thick wooden door would protect me from the inevitable explosion.
Inevitable it was. I heard a muted ‘whooomph!’ and then shouting. When folks started calling my name I poked my head out and there, his bowtie singed, his face lobster red, and his eyebrows and hair singed and smoking, was the district manager, stunned into silence. I lost it, falling into peals of laughter. Steve, who had meanwhile shut the main gas supply off, came to see what had happened and followed my lead, and after a few seconds the two of us ran out the back door of the restaurant, still laughing our heads off.
Amazingly, neither of us lost our jobs. We had filed a repair ticket on the improperly installed safety valve several weeks prior and this plus the fact that Steve’s quick thinking protected against a worse disaster probably saved our jobs. The district manager was taken to the hospital and ended up being only minorly injured, with some serious but not permanently damaging burns on his face and hands. To my surprise this didn’t really alter his behavior towards us or the line – the next time he came in he went through his same procedure, yanking out the equipment and berating us for our inadequate cleaning skills.
I still chuckle every time I remember this incident.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 