Category Archives: Lite

Life without a Thumb

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Last night I had an accident. I was slicing radishes with a mandoline slicer and as I was working along I was going to fast and accidentally took an 1/4 inch slice from the blade on my right thumb. I wasn’t using the included safety chuck because I was in a hurry and didn’t care enough. So here I am with half a thumb that doesn’t work properly.

I started to notice just how many places a thumb is useful. Browsing an iPad? Yeah, a challenge. Try tying shoelaces or buttoning pants. It’s quite marvelous to see just how many places your thumb shows up as a key player. You never really think about it until it’s bleeding all over you and screaming in pain.

It was comic watching me cope last night after I had so savagely sliced myself for dinner. My consistent response is to get really quiet and run away. Specifically to the bathroom. Got pressure on the cut and then I was struggling with the instant bandage kit from Band-Aid. Usually that’s where I go to when I have a rather smooth slice from a knife or mandoline. Quietly cussing and swearing and getting more and more upset as I was fumbling with the little applicator and trying to unscrew the tiny tube of glue that serves as the instant bandage. In my minds eye I was entertaining images of hunting down the bright bulbs at Band-Aid who designed the package and the materials the way they did and after a good and healthy beating, throw them a kit and see how they cope. Difficult to manage huh? Yeah it is! Ye bastards! But I was able to find a butterfly (or whatever the hell you call it) bandage and that took care of my leaking issue for the night.

Damn thing fell off this morning though, but it wasn’t bleeding anymore, now it’s just nasty looking and tender to the touch. And before anyone gets all worked up about what “nasty looking” is, it isn’t infected and it’s not in pain, so put down your WebMD and back away slowly from crazy-town. I don’t need to see a doctor.

What amazes me is how important hands are and what a terrible joke played upon us by a creator (if he has the audacity to exist) that the most important things in life are the most prone to horrible terrible nasty damage. It’s almost as if, if there was a God, that it’s a very old joke that he smiles over when he’s sitting all alone.

iPad Apps – January 15th 2011

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Here’s a quick list of all the apps on my iPad. Enjoy!

  1. Front Page
    1. Calendar
    2. Contacts
    3. Evernote
    4. Wx
    5. Flipboard
    6. WordPress
    7. Reeder
    8. Instapaper
    9. Wikipanion+
    10. Twitter
    11. Facepad
    12. GetGlue
    13. QRANK
    14. Checkbook
    15. 1Password
    16. News
      1. NPR
      2. ABC News
      3. NASA
      4. Mashable
      5. NYTimes
      6. NewsRack
      7. MacLife
      8. Huff Post
      9. BBC News
      10. River of News
      11. 3D Sun
      12. USA TODAY
      13. Sandpit
      14. CNN
    17. Social
      1. foursquare
      2. Wikihood
      3. BirdEye
      4. FBF_Albums
      5. IM+
      6. VisibleVote
      7. Tumblr
      8. HootSuite
      9. Kik
      10. Tree To Go
      11. Twitteriffic
      12. Friendly
    18. Books
      1. nook
      2. Kindle
      3. Discover
      4. Dictionary
      5. GoodReader
      6. Google Translation
      7. Google Books
    19. iLife
      1. Pages
      2. Numbers
      3. Dictation
      4. Notes
      5. iThoughtsHD
      6. PlainText
    20. Settings
    21. Home Row
      1. Safari
      2. Mail
      3. Photos
      4. iBooks
      5. Toodledo
      6. ComicZeal4
  2. Second Page
    1. App Store
    2. Food
      1. Epicurious
      2. Lose It!
      3. ShopShop
      4. UrbanSpoon
      5. Cookbook
      6. Supercook
      7. Yelp
      8. GoMealsHD
      9. ConvertUnits
      10. Meijer Find-It
      11. AllRecipes
    3. Comics
      1. DC Comics
      2. Marvel
    4. Arcade
      1. Pinball HD
      2. Labyrinth 2 HD
      3. Sudoku Tablet
      4. Bubbles
      5. Pocket Pond
      6. Words HD
      7. Words
      8. Game Table
      9. Dice HD
      10. iMahjong
      11. Osmos HD
      12. JirboBreak
      13. uzu
      14. UNO
      15. Clinometer
      16. MagnetMeter
      17. WordSearch
      18. Planets
      19. Mixology
      20. Solitaire HD
    5. Streaming Media
      1. YouTube
      2. StreamToMe
      3. ZumoCast
      4. Pandora
      5. Boxee
      6. Netflix
      7. TuneIn Radio
    6. Time
      1. Night Stand
      2. ZazenLite
      3. WhiteNoisePro
      4. Chronology
      5. Observatory
      6. Clock Radio
    7. Cloud Services
      1. Box.net
      2. Dropbox
      3. Air Sharing
      4. VNC
      5. Offline Pages
      6. Speed Test
      7. Transfer
      8. Shazam
      9. Boxcar
      10. Google Earth
      11. Find iPhone
      12. Junos Pulse
      13. StumbleUpon
    8. Arts
      1. Brushes
      2. iDraft
      3. Comic-Con
      4. Voice Memos
      5. Eyewitness
      6. Galleries
    9. Entertainment
      1. iTunes
      2. ABC Player
      3. Flixster
      4. Phases
      5. VLC
      6. U-Verse
      7. Choices
      8. Compass
      9. Tally Counter
      10. Game Center
      11. iTranslate
      12. IMDb
      13. iPod
      14. Videos
      15. Brain Wave
      16. BinauralBeat
    10. Finance
      1. eBay
      2. PayPal
      3. Calculator
      4. Windowshop
      5. Bloomberg
      6. Deliveries
      7. Calculator XL
      8. PNC Mobile
      9. CheckPlease
      10. Alice
      11. VirtualWallet
    11. Telephone
      1. Gizmo
      2. GV Mobile +
    12. Education
      1. Michigan
      2. Purdue
      3. iNKU
      4. Laker Mobile
      5. CMU
      6. iRockets
      7. SouthCarolina
      8. iFullerton
      9. CSU Vikings
      10. Seton Hill
      11. MobileCSU
      12. UMUC
      13. iStanford
      14. DukeMobile
      15. Texas
    13. Weather
      1. TWC MAX+
      2. WeatherStation
    14. Navigation
      1. Maps
      2. Trapster
      3. Glympse

 

Literary Cupboard

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As I sit here contemplating how to properly murder and dispose of a hated literary character, Karrin Murphy in the Jim Butcher series “The Dresden Files” it struck me how comic it would be if there was a funky bedroom cupboard or closet that had an odd Poltergeist/Neverending Story spatial rift in it connecting the fantastical worlds the central character reads with the real space in his room. So when he’s reading a book and hates a particular character, he gets to read about all the ways he’s tried to attack her in the book series. “Oh Harry, every time I open that closet I get attacked! First it was knives, then what had to be the business end of a flamethrower. Just last week I narrowly missed a bucket of bleach followed by a bucket of ammonia – I had to evacuate the house for three days to let the Chlorine gas escape. Harry, I think someone is trying to kill me.”

Yes Karrin, someone is. Next I’ll move on to rusty farm implements that I’ve stolen from the local Cracker Barrel. Try to escape those bits of flair ye harridan!

It’s not all the time that I’m so suffused with the raw urge to root for the monster to eat what I’m sure was originally planned to be one of the protagonists. But Light, what I wouldn’t give to watch Godzilla pop up out of Lake Michigan (the book setting is Chicago) rampage through the city, tear the roof off Karrin Murphys home and eat her, then burn the house to the ground and then stomp on it until it was flat.

All I can hope for is she develops some sort of new thing that puts her back in a coma. She was a much more pleasant character when she was in a coma.

Harry Dresden Files: Grave Peril

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Yesterday I finished reading “Grave Peril” by Jim Butcher. For the entire book series so far I’ve expressed one central yearning, and that was for one of the characters, Karrin Murphy to die a slow and agonizing death. Everyone who I know who is further ahead in the series promises me that things will get better, and now that I’m reading Thea next book, Summer Knight my response to them is “We Shall See” 😉

The story so far is very formulaic and about 65% organized like a Stephen King story, with a beeping truckload of detail and action way at the end. Scott has promised me that stating with book 4, Butcher gets something he didn’t have before, and that is a Tor editor. I’m only in the first few pages, but it does look promising. I’m hoping that the subsequent books are quicker reads than the first three, but only time will tell.

Harry Dresden Files: Grave Peril

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Yesterday I finished reading “Grave Peril” by Jim Butcher. For the entire book series so far I’ve expressed one central yearning, and that was for one of the characters, Karrin Murphy to die a slow and agonizing death. Everyone who I know who is further ahead in the series promises me that things will get better, and now that I’m reading Thea next book, Summer Knight my response to them is “We Shall See” 😉

The story so far is very formulaic and about 65% organized like a Stephen King story, with a beeping truckload of detail and action way at the end. Scott has promised me that stating with book 4, Butcher gets something he didn’t have before, and that is a Tor editor. I’m only in the first few pages, but it does look promising. I’m hoping that the subsequent books are quicker reads than the first three, but only time will tell.

Garlic Bread…

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Making your own food and not buying it pre-made often times works out for the best. You save money, you control every aspect of the food and you can avoid many of the chemicals in commercial food processing. To which I have discovered my new favorite Garlic Bread Recipe:

  1. Buy a day-old Vienna loaf, price cut in half because it’s not fresh. You don’t need fresh, not for this.
  2. 1 stick of unsalted (or salted, who the !@#$ cares) warmed in the microwave until it is mashable with a fork, not melted into a bubbling buttery moat.
  3. 2 to 3 heaping tablespoons of minced garlic. I bought my garlic in a pre-minced form, it’s a giant 32oz jar. It’ll last me a little while. People who don’t like Garlic often times don’t like me because I absolutely LOVE Garlic.
  4. A few shakes of Garlic Salt on top of the butter-stick-garlic-pile.
  5. Mash with a fork until you make a paste.
  6. Cut the bread loaf in half, then that half longitudinally. Spread the butter mixture onto each side and put in the oven at 400 degrees until it pleases you.
  7. Cut and serve. Watch as you identify every Vampire in the city, they’ll know what you’ve made and they will flee.

This dish isn’t heart healthy, really, but life is so short anyways – to deny yourself the pleasure of what amounts to being a carbohydrate and fat Garlic Bomb is reprehensible. You aren’t meant to have a long life, just a full one.

Om Nom !@#$ NOM. 🙂

Happy Damage

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Several years ago my stepfather came to visit and helped us gut and refit the main bathroom in my home. We replaced many of the fixtures including the tub, which was a cast-iron built-in affair that weighed 300+ pounds. After ripping it out, we replaced it with a better and much more well-insulated Vikrell tub. When we installed it I made a rather bad decision when it came to the tub drain. I selected a drain that had a cantilevered plug. If you pushed it down on one side where CLOSE was embossed the drain lid would plug the drain and you could take a bath. By pressing OPEN on the opposite side you would break the seal and the drain would pop open and the water would empty from the tub.

I do not like to take sit-in-a-puddle-of-water baths, I 100% prefer simple military-style showers: In, Wet, Wash, Rinse, Dry. No fuss, no muss, no dillydallying. Scott however depends on hot baths to help him sleep and help his asthma. This tub-plug has been a definite source of irritation as of late as it’s been getting more and more difficult to operate the drain assembly. Over time I started to see this fancy drain assembly as a problem and not as a convenience. Last night Scott took another bath, and when he exited he pushed the OPEN side of the drain lid and deep down the drain lids carriage snapped off. This morning I noticed the lid was at an odd angle and I decided to investigate before my after-workout-before-work shower and the entire lid and it’s support assembly came right up and out of the drain. The drain itself was not damaged so it leaks, but you can see where the carriage snapped off. Now I have a simple tub drain hole where the lid used to be.

My initial response and my reaction to discovering this was to thank my stars that this drain assembly failed. I’ve been quietly rooting for this exact thing to happen and now that it has I can replace the overwrought cantilevered-lid bullshit with a nice, old-fashioned rubber drain stopper. In this regard I see it as a kind of natural evolution, something stupid broke and made room for what should have been there all along, something from the past, something simple and convenient and RIGHT.

So tonight after work I will go to Lowes and look into buying a 19th and 20th century drain plug. It is going to make Scott’s baths and anyone else who would like to take a bath in our house so much happier. This event has also taught me that some things are unnecessary and some things have been over-designed so they beg failure. So something that Scott initially felt bad about was actually a cause for celebration!

Cheap & Excellent Laundry Update

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The homemade laundry detergent that I made from Michael Nolan’s blog post has been working exceptionally well! Here’s my experience so far:

  • General Laundry: The lack of perfumes and fragrances are rather shocking. You lean in to sniff and there isn’t anything there. Not having overdone fragrances nearly brings on a reflexive search, very much in the vein of “I must not have a good grip on this sock…” and to be honest, it feels cleaner now than it did before, no odd someone-else-thought-this-smelled-nice fragrance just malingering after a wash. I appreciate it.
  • Extreme Laundry: Doubling what I normally use and using HOT water, this preparation actually outperformed Liquid Tide and removed not only fresh oil stains but older really set-in oil stains. There are two runners in our kitchen that are for comfort and to hide a oopsy-daisy burn-mark on our kitchen carpeting. Yes, I said it. Kitchen Carpeting. The previous owners were lazy and old. There is hardwood floors underneath but we’re too terrified to actually look for the fear that once we pull up the carpet, we’ll have a $5000 rehab job on the flooring that will need to be done.
  • Big-Batch Laundry: That is coming today, as soon as I get home and strip the slipcovers off of our white Living Room couch. There is a LOT of fabric in that deal and I’m going to take it down to the laundromat where they have the fancy 50 pound front-loading industry-sized washing machines and use half-a-cup of the cleaning solution on it with HOT water. That should fix it’s wagon. I’ll write an update to see if the fancy-powder-of-happiness can power out some of the odd stains and marks on the slipcover.

Between Michael Nolan and Lifehacker’s Blog I find so many neat ideas and clever tips that it makes me dizzy! It’s so wonderful when things like this go so very well, to say nothing about the frugality of it all! Bravo!

My Clever Laundrette

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This weeks theme is “Clean or Die” and as a wonderful spot of serendipity I ran over this blog post by a fellow I’ve been following for quite some time. I went to my local Meijers market and while there to stock up on some needful food items I thought I would walk down to the laundry aisle and see if Meijers carried any of the items listed in the post. The items specifically are:

  • Borax (sodium tetraborate)
  • Washing Soda (sodium carbonate)
  • Ivory Soap

As it turns out, I only have a very faint and foggy understanding of what Borax is and not a single clue as to what Washing Soda might be, at least I know what Ivory Soap is, oddly enough, that was the most common and most annoying item to buy. The Borax and the Washing Soda were the first big surprises, they were nestled up against each other at the end of the laundry aisle, far away from the big expensive detergents, hanging out in the “laundry additives ghetto”. At the other end of the ghetto were the bar soaps. Meijers doesn’t sell Ivory in single or even double-packs, instead, you have to buy a 10-pack. The price, $4, of course is insanely cheap, but the fact that I couldn’t acquire just a few bars at once irked me. My snark would have been fully realized if Meijers had put all three next to each other, but alas, that was not to be.

I had the earlier referenced blog page printed out and after I had whipped together dinner I got out some non-food-use implements and started to assemble the recipe for the laundry soap. With three ingredients, it was embarrassingly easy to assemble. Pour this, pour that, but when it came to the Ivory soap, I was blown away. The instructions say to microwave the ivory soap in a container. Huh? You don’t cook soap! Well, yes, that’s actually the entire point! I got a plastic tub, put the Ivory in it, and closed the door and turned on my Microwave. At first I was full-o-doubt, but then the damn thing started to foam and extrude big white fluffy cloud-shapes out of the side. I realized that I needed at least 2 minutes, not 90 seconds, but that may be due to a difference in microwave wattage. Once I was done decimating the Ivory soap, I grabbed the giant puffy white mass and knocked it down and then mixed everything together with my handy-dandy potato masher. I suppose I could have used my KitchenAid Mixer, but on something this exploratory, I didn’t want to make a mess of my entire kitchen.

The end product is quite plain. It’s a white powder with very teeny puffy bits interspersed throughout. It has a very feeble scent of Ivory soap and it made me sneeze a few times. Once I was done and ready to process a extra-large load of laundry I went downstairs with my powder in hand and utterly geeked at the novelty of it all. As I stood stooping over my plain-jane Whirlpool washing machine (not HE, of course) it struck me. I have no idea what an appropriate load measurement might be for this powder. The blog post goes on about two tablespoons of powder in an HE machine, which does me no good with my old-skool standard washing machine. I thought about the powder, what each one does and pulled a 1/4 cup per XL load out of thin air. I started my machine, waited for a inch-deep puddle in the bottom of the basin to collect and tossed in my powder. Once it was in, I added the clothes.

When the cycle was done I pulled out a shirt and gave it a sniff. Absolutely nothing. No fragrance, no scent at all. It was honestly clean, nothing left behind. I sampled other items and they all were the same way, no scent at all. Everything being equal, I still have a 64-load jug of Tide Liquid Detergent to use up but this powder is really quite good.

How about the economics? By my calculations, buying everything either in a market or off of Amazon (I used Amazon because they display prices) the per-ounce price of this laundry cleanser is 43 cents. I guess a quarter cup per XL load, so that’s two ounces so my per-load cost is 87 cents! If I had a HE machine, it’d be half that price!

So if this home-crafted laundry detergent costs 87 cents for a XL load, leaves no perfumes behind, cleans soiled clothing adequately and is non-toxic to the environment how can you go wrong?

Chainfire

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It all started with a comic exchange about the fetish that some southerners have to mowing their lawn. That they do so in conditions that make sitting on a rain-soaked lump of steel during an electrical storm appear to be exclamations to evolution to come and weed them out of the gene pool. It struck me that these people could be riding along, get hit by lightning and then the tractor they are sitting on could explode and shoot a gout of flaming gasoline onto their house setting that on fire.

That started the idea that I’ve had for a long time. That there exists situations where the worst possible thing could actually ignite a chain of comically bad consequences. One of my favorites starts with a teeny Earthquake and then proceeds to lead to one path for the Apocalypse. It all starts with a 9.5 Earthquake under New Madrid, Missouri. That of course annihilates New Madrid (see ya) and the energy released causes the San Andreas to finally let go, which would of course need to be more than a 10 on the Richter scale. That pushes the western ridge of California into the Pacific, and pretty much all of California is annihilated (oops, bye bye) and of course the lateral shift would push a huge mass of water out and that would initiate a real Tsunami, so Midway and Hawaii would see maybe a little rise in water level, but Japan… oh… bye bye. The energy released for both faults going off so close together causes Mt. Hood to erupt (bye Oregon) and the differential in magma + the earth ringing like a bell from both events sets off the Yellowstone supervolcano. It’s 600,000 year store of pressure is released, perhaps 15 on the Richter scale opens up something fantastic right under Yellowstone. So immediately we’ve lost California, Missouri, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Hawaii might be under seawater, and Japan would definitely also be lost. The supervolcano rages for maybe a month, shooting millions of tons of ash and pyroclastic material high into the atmosphere. The Jet Stream takes all this fine particulate material and pushes it all the way out to Newfoundland. The dimming of sunlight causes an epic crop failure, the pyroclastic grit causes all dwellings in the precipitation path to collapse from the weight and then as people drive around with the grit in the air they destroy all the mechanical modes of conveyance through abrasion and failure leaving us in scattered communities only bridged by people willing to walk outside. Without a rebreather-kit the grit would likely lead to widespread development of Mesothelioma in anything that breathed the air. The United States practically starves to death, the US Economy collapses, which then sets off China as their currency collapses (debt based on the full faith of  a place that no longer exists, really) and that would affect every other world economy, leading to an extinction-level event. Practically the only really safe people would be aboard the ISS. As of today, that would be six people left.

Dear Dr. Hawking, it’s a damn shame nobody is listening to you. I hope the people up in the ISS have a woman and a way back down, up there. 🙂