Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").

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decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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Like my brownhouse:
   familiar from such places as National Park signs
Friday, June 4 2004
The head painter and one of his guys came out to paint the south deck, a freebie job thrown in when the head painter realized how much more quickly the job was going than he'd anticipated. Gretchen thought that while the painters were already here with all their whiz-bang tools, we should borrow them and prepare the east deck for painting, something we'll be doing ourselves. So Gretchen and I spent about an hour this morning out there ripping off loose paint with a tungsten-blade scraper and sanding with a DeWalt power sander. Interestingly, the paint actually came off faster with the scraper than it did with a power sander. That old paint should have never been put on in the first place; it was a kind of latex that had never formed an adequate bond with the treated decking material.
When the head painter was leaving for the day and entrusting the job to his employee to finish, he was worried about the possibility that he might fall off the ladder. He asked me to check in on the guy periodically to make sure he was okay.
By evening our deck had gone from patchy McMansion grey to solid Oxford brown, a "handsome color" familiar from such places as National Park signs.

Out on a housecall today I encountered a Macinosh with an evidently dead internal modem. In the past I would have tried to find a replacement internal modem, but I've gotten smarter with experience and know that with one-piece Macs it's best not to take them apart. Luckily, there are relatively inexpensive external USB modems for Macs, ones that are probably cheaper than exact replacements for the internal modem.


Me and my, um, though processes.


Me.


My laboratory's main workstation, viewed in part in a mirror. Note the Lego American flag and the postcard of the veteran with only one limb. The most visible computer is Woodchuck, my main machine. It sports an AMD Athlon 1700XP+ processor, 768 Megs of RAM, and 240 Gigs of hard drive space (a configuration, that, aside from the hard drive space, has been constant for over two years). It is housed in an old PII Gateway box, one with an annoyingly rounded roof that tends to shed the things I like to place on top of it (note to designers: the rectangular box is the most useful shape for an appliance to have). One of the drive bays is empty and contains an air scoop for the processor that I made out of an old vodka bottle.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?040604

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