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- December 28, 2015
Happy Holidays and Coming Calendar Updates
December 28, 2015Read moreA belated holiday greeting! I had a pretty good Christmas with family and friends, and in the days between now and the New Year I’ve got quite a few calendar updates to get out of the way, most notably the Compact Calendar, the Word Counting Calendar, and the ETP Almanac. These are all fairly involved updates that I try to get out of the way earlier in the year…oh well! I’ve let quite a lot of the stationery side of Dave Seah Enterprises coast this year because of the contract work, but I think 2016 I will have to make that more the focus. (more…)
- December 16, 2015
Bowler Hats and Bingo Balls
December 16, 2015Read more
A few days ago I was talking to some people in the video game community, and was complaining about making choices about what to do in the morning when there were sooo many things clamboring for my attention. Since each task is about equally important/exciting, much decision-making energy is frittered away. One of the people I was chatting with, H, writes down stuff on scraps of paper that she rolls-up and picks at random. She also has a collection of hats, which got me started on how I could never find a hat that fit my round melon of a head. Cowboy hats, baseball hats, fedora hats…nope!
The combination frustrations, picking a task and finding a hat, then fused into a mission to get a hat for wearing AND picking tasks from. I stumbled upon these 0.75 inch diameter wooden bingo balls and found a tall bowler hat; my sister warned me not to get a super-cheap hat because it would be guaranteed to make me sad.
While I haven’t figured out exactly how to use the bingo balls (they’re numbered from 1 to 75) in a task selection system, the hat I’ve already got big plans for in two ways.
First, the bowler hat is worn by the henchman Odd Job in the 007 film Goldfinger. Japanese-American actor Harold Sakata has a similar build (i.e. large and puffy-faced), so I figured this hat might work with me as well.
Second, I’ve been thinking of participating some day in cowboy action shooting, a kind of “Wild West Cosplay with Real Guns” sport that’s pretty neat. You get to pick a nickname/persona when you join up, complete with a backstory if you are so inclined. I’ve got an idea for what my persona would be, though I have yet to (1) buy hundreds of dollars worth of replica firearms and (2) find a local SASS chapter to join in New Hampshire assuming (3) I have the time to participate. These are all pretty big prerequisites. However, I can start buying the clothes; the bowler hat would be a good fit for the persona, as it was quite a popular hat in the Old West, and it would be a handy second costume to have available for…well, I’ll think of a reason later.
When the hat came in, I tried it on and liked it a lot. There’s something pretty neat about wearing a hat, and this one made me feel pretty good. Hats sort of feel like a “cat for your head”, I realized, sitting comfortably atop your dome to keep you company as you do your business. Still, I wasn’t sure if it looked stupid, even after getting affirmations from some friends. So I went down to my friend Sid’s portrait photography studio to get some pictures of the hat, ostensibly to make sure it didn’t look really dumb. Sid himself is quite a connoisseur of hats, himself a wearer of flat caps, so we had a good time looking at them as well as vintage eyeglass frames that might fit well. Here’s one of the photos:
Apparently I was very tired when this picture was taken :-) The next photo session I think I will need to do a smile calibration!
- December 15, 2015
MOD-t 3D Printer First Impressions
December 15, 2015Read more
Way back in June 2014 I backed the MOD-t on indiegogo. Billed as a “3D printer for everyone” and priced at $149+shipping for the first 500 backers, what put me at ease despite the cheap price was the association with well-regarded industrial design firm Frog. I jumped on it, and ironically I received my printer just last week after everyone else due to a snafu with their backer list (I am having the worse luck with shipping this year). This was a blessing in disguise, though, given the number of problems New Matter has had with the hardware’s firmware and flaky wireless support. I’m just getting my hardware after some of the early issues have been solved, and with luck they’ll all be cleared up by next year. When one crowdfunds a product, you really are buying into an early investment, so one should expect problems and have the patience to work through them. This review will go over some of that experience. (more…)
- December 13, 2015
Resolution Review #10: Finding Certainty
December 13, 2015Read more
Happy Holidays! Today is the last monthly review for 2015 as part of my Groundhog Day Resolutions. I conclude that this has actually been a successful year, thanks to two huge insights about accepting my work as the job and recognizing the need for intense, creative connections. I think these are the missing pieces, and with the confidence that comes from having them I know what I need to do next year. (more…)
- November 28, 2015
Thanksgiving 2015 Reflections
November 28, 2015Read more
This year’s Thanksgiving snuck-up fast on my sister and I, but we got it done. Of note was the first test of megatable (all four of my new 32×32″ cafe tables pushed together). This is the table that will comfortable sit 8 people with a ton of food, and I see it coming handy in the future for a Chinese-style banquet. I’m planning on making a 30″ lazy susan by going to the nearby restaurant supply store and purchasing a round table top for the rotating bearing base I bought years ago from Lee Valley Tools (a great catalog, by the way).
I also made a new kind of dinner planning spreadsheet which runs time vertically rather than horizontally as I had in the past. This is much more compact, and is designed to help me visualize cooking times and oven resources. We had planned on having dinner at 7PM, so turkey cooking time established when things should happen. I’ve gotten a lot better at making a turkey dinner since my sophomore year in college; by the time everything was ready, it was midnight and we ended up eating a turkey so dry it had turned into actual jerky! This year we made enough food for 20 people for the three of us, and we ate on time. Progress! I was particularly pleased with the way the turkey itself came out, not overcooked at all and very moist without even resorting to brine. The secret was preparing the stuffed turkey upside down for an hour at 325F, flipping it and cooking it for another hour uncovered, then covered for the remaining 2 hours at 250F until the internal stuffing temperature reached 155F and the outside lower breast reached 160F. While these temperatures may seem a bit low compared to the official USDA recommended temperature of 165F, some have argued that this temperature is merely a point on a curve of acceptable time/temperature pairings; 165 degrees is the temperature at which food pathogens in poultry are killed in a few seconds. Lower temperatures take longer, but apparently still do the job. There are various tables and debatable points within the modernist cuisine and food safety circles that are worth reading if you care about juicier meat preparation.
