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").



links

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:
   finishing two big tasks
Friday, January 27 2017
The dog named Coach Eric Taylor came over this morning for a walk with his two human parents, which came as a particular delight to Neville, who is always excited to hang out with other dogs. There was an appreciable accumulation of sleet on Tuesday morning, and it has melted and refrozen to form a hard crust that is difficult to walk on. It's also apparently been responsible for a nasty claw breakage on her left paw (on the digit homologous to my ring finger). Eleanor used to experience bad breakages like this on a regular basis. One time I found a broken off claw with a bit of bone attached to it, yet Eleanor managed to grow a replacement without difficulty.
To Gretchen's delight, I finished the last of the library floor early in my workday. She'd thought it would be more work than it actually was after I'd told her I'd have to redo all the old floor on the east side of the room. But since those pieces had already been cut, it wasn't all that different from reassembling a couple dozen Lego blocks. I should mention that our purchase of five boxes of tiles to supplement the two we already had for the measured space of 160 square feet was so accurate that we only had scraps at the end of the project (and none of those was consisted of as much as half of a tile). It's a good thing I'd mastered machining compatible grooves on cut ends or we would've had to buy one or two more boxes and been left with a lot of big useless scraps.

In the remote workplace today, me and Dan, the newish backend developer tasked mostly with the email system, worked to get two new Postfix instances running on the server. I'd done most of the necessary code changes for queuing and sending email, and Dan had written some startup scripts for the mailers. The instances themselves seemed to be working when we tested them. All that needed to happen was putting the startup scripts on the server and starting them. Everything went as expected, except something about the startup script seemed to cause multiple simultaneous sendmail scripts run simultaneously for an instance, a situation that resulted in multiple identical emails being sent to recipients. Once we'd fixed that, though, the whole system seemed to work correctly. Now all that's left is to "warm up" the new instances. This means gradually ramping up traffic so as not to draw the attention of the internet's substantial spam-blocking infrastructure. I would've been content to begin sending a couple hundred emails per day from the two new instances (and still-cold IP addresses), since that would be a good start to the warming procedure. But Dan (who is still new on the job) wanted to proceed with more caution. So for now we're only sending a trickle of traffic through just one of the IP addresses. In terms of my participation in this project, my work is basically done now, and I'm relieved that I was able to implement the necessary changes without a test server and yet not produce enough craziness (either too many or too few emails) to draw much attention to myself.

One of the several changes Gretchen is implementing her library is four identical new bookshelves to replace the ad hoc mix of mostly homemade (by me) shelves she'd been using. She'd bought all the bookcases last week at Ikea, which meant they were all collapsed down into flat boxes she could fit in the Subaru. Tonight we decided to put one together. I don't have much experience with assembling Ikea furniture, though there was that desk Gretchen and I put together in this same library back in November of 2002. It was Ikea-style but actually from Staples, and it had come without any instructions. Today's bookshelf assembly went more smoothly than that, partly because we had instructions. But quality control at Ikea is evidently pretty poor, because the first set of instructions we tried to use had two copies of page three and four and no copies at all of pages six and seven. Luckily, there was an intact set of instructions in one of the other bookshelf units. Our biggest "Ikea moment" (as Gretchen termed it) was when we tried to snap a thin panel into the back of the shelf and found there simply wasn't enough room for it. After some confusion (and even my suggestion that I throw the panel on the table saw, my new all-purpose tool), I realized that I'd installed one of the crossmembers backwards, and that if I flipped it around, there was little groove in it to accommodate the panel. [There was also some other piece I'd installed backwards, though ultimately this only meant that I would have to drill a couple holes and spackle away two others.]

[REDACTED]

Tonight's late-night YouTube adventure started with Bob Mould but ended with Helmet, a band I'd sort of forgotten about. I remember first encountering them in the early 90s and digging how the tightness and heaviness of their music contrasted with their clean-cut appearance. You have to figure that anyone who looks normal in an alternative scene is the hardest core of them all, since they feel no need to signal their membership. At least in the months when I don't have long hair, I fancy myself to be that sort of person, though I have to say it's also useful to be able to take advantage of "normal privilege"


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?170127

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