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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   simple deliciousness of uncomplicated pizza
Tuesday, July 3 2007

At some point today I drove out to the grocery store to get provisions exclusively for my particular eating habits, the grim kind I revert to when Gretchen is gone (as she will be for the next three weeks). Staples include Raisin Bran, Crispy Hexagons, cheap saltine crackers (those three all Hannaford brand), cheddar or Swiss cheese, cheap whole wheat bread, expensive mustard, expensive peanut butter, beans, expensive corn chips, expensive salsa, Mint/Chocolate Cookie Ben and Jerry's ice cream, gin, tonic water, cheap beer in cans or malt liquor in 40s, Hurricane Kitty, and white wine. I can survive indefinitely on those staples, particularly if I supplement them with fresh vegetables from the garden or occasionally graze on pizza by the slice. I had a meeting near Woodstock this evening so of course I bought myself a couple slices at Catskill Mountain Pizza. They didn't have any of my favorite kind of pizza, a bizarre vegetarian union of broccoli, eggplant, and cheese. So instead I just got two slices of plain cheese. It's easy to forget the simple deliciousness of uncomplicated pizza, but this experience forced me to remember. Plain slices are always much bigger than boutique slices, and (with regard to not-entirely-empty calories) are one of the best bangs for the buck you can get in restaurant food (a consideration that will always cross my mind, no matter how much disposable income I have). Somehow I even managed to avoid dripping grease on myself as I both ate and drove at the same time.


To get a tiny surface-mounted integrated circuit off the main board of my tiny Sony Vaio laptop, I'm going to need two kinds of air flow. One will blow super-heated air to melt the solder holding the chip to its pin pads. The other will create suction through a tiny nozzle, allowing me to lift the chip off the board once it is sufficiently hot. Today I decided to make a device to generate both sorts of air flow on demand. The device would consist of a little wooden framework holding two powerful fans designed to cool 80s-era minicomputers. One of these fans would point up and the other would point down, and on top would be two pieces of PVC pipe to which I could connect other equipment, depending on whether my needs required a suck or a blow.


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