Flutterby™! From 2008-01-01 to 2008-01-31

Pedalphilia: Abnormal attraction to cycling. Looks related to Merry Saddles erotic cycling supply.

[ related topics: Erotic Bicycling ]

Last night we wandered down to the Smithyman's party for a bit, and in the back a bunch of folks had their computers set up for gaming. I walked in and saw row upon row of Windows machine and one Mac, in posession of a nubile lass who was curled up on Sebastien's lap. I think that kind of summed up all of the computer differences in one glance.

[ related topics: Microsoft Macintosh ]

We took a risk. Yesterday evening, funding had happened, there was nothing else we could find that'd keep us from closing this morning, so we called the flooring contractor to say "go" today and went over to the new place and spent until late into the night tearing out floor boards and that faux paneling in the living room. This morning the red oak floors are being sanded down, Charlene's arranging the kitchen, and we got notice that it's closed. I don't know how long it'll continue to be up there, but the house depicted at http://10missiondr.com/ is officially the bank's in our name, and already radically not like those pictures.

Now we have to figure out how to put up new floor boards so that we can easily pull 'em out when we go to rework the walls. Bonus if that lets us do a wood grain finish without exposed nail heads.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Real Estate Woodworking ]

This one's for Dori: The GOP Primary Field in Buffy Villains (Via).

[ related topics: Humor Joss Whedon - Serenity / Firefly ]

One hell of a storm (3 systems coming through one after the other). Yeah, services (phone, electricity, etc) are out in Lagunitas, I'm up at the new place in Petaluma where I just retrieved a chimney cap as it came blowing by me from 2 houses up the street. I've torn out some of the "spruce it up to sell" landscaping to give better flow from the uphill side, and the sump pump is running full bore. Last night we were woken up by assorted appliances making interesting sounds and light shows as the power cycled in bizarre ways, we ran around unplugging a lot of stuff, but I'm anticipating there'll be some blown electronics.

It's going to be an interesting weekend in California, all of you here on the southern West Coast stay safe and as dry as you can, stay the hell away from trees (lots of falling limbs) and hillsides (ditto), and don't drive anywhere if you can help it.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Bay Area Real Estate ]

I'm hearing estimates as late as Thursday for restoring power in Lagunitas, the floors are still being refinished here in Petaluma and I haven't installed the network yet here, so I'm happy to get mooched wifi, which works fine on my HP but constantly cycles on my MacBook Pro. We had the bike shed blow over in the storm on Saturday, and I'm trying to figure out how to install the critical functionality of that here in Petaluma without building a towering monstrosity or taking up too much yard space here, and some leaks on a wall in the new house which we're trying to figure out how to fix.

Overall, though, we've survived intact and without major flooding damage. So far so good.

[ related topics: Dan's Life broadband Macintosh Real Estate ]

Supreme Court blocks lawyer's attempts to overturn "Dykes on Bikes" trademark:

McDermott said the trademark should have been denied because it was disparaging to men and was "scandalous and immoral." Without addressing those claims, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which rules on patent and trademark issues, dismissed his case in July, saying he could not show that he would be harmed by the designation.

Which is cool and all, but I'm wondering how my new organization "dickless lawyers with repressed sexuality issues" is going to fare?

[ related topics: moron Law Copyright/Trademark ]

Giggle: If you don't have a threesome, the terrorists win!

[ related topics: Humor Erotic ]

http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/Cr.../2008/01/0801DewarSchonberg.html

"The irresistible beauty of programming consists in the reduction of complex formal processes to a very small set of primitive operations. Java, instead of exposing this beauty, encourages the programmer to approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store: by rummaging through a multitude of drawers (i.e. packages) we will end up finding some gadget (i.e. class) that does roughly what we want."

I'm not even a "real" programmer, and I understand the issues he's talking about. Per the article:

"A Real Programmer Can Write in Any Language (C, Java, Lisp, Ada)"

But this one might be debatable:

"Ada is the language of software engineering par excellence."

I've known (biblically :) ADA coders working for the Gov. and they just aren't necessarily that bright or that much better. So far, people whom grasp C have impressed me the most.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

I hope I'm not abusing my posting privileges! If I am, slap me and take them away!

I just wanted to send some love my daughter's way - her website, a thrift/coupon site - LouShrugged - was one of 1200 accepted to blogher ads. It may not fit flutterby's demographics, but you never know. I think she's fun to read too, but I'm prejudiced.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Eric's Life Marketing ]

Network Solutions caught domain name tasting. Via.

[ related topics: broadband moron ]

it FLY'S (sic): Radio control blimps that look like cars or heavy equipment or that sort of thing.

[ related topics: Toys Model Building ]

As we move into the new place, we're becoming acutely aware of how many hundreds of dollars per square foot the roof over our heads is costing us. This is making us reconsider certain objects that take up unreasonable amounts of space.

The two that immediately come to mind are the 26" TV that I bought in 1990, and the component stereo stack with full-sized speakers.

I'm noticing that LCD monitors seem to be quite a bit cheaper than HD TVs of equivalent size, and given that we don't watch broadcast TV, I may see what options I can get to get a DVD signal on to one of those. I also know that speaker technology has come a long way in making small speakers that sound good, especially since I'm no longer a "listen to Pink Floyd so loud I can feel it in my stomach" sort of person, so I'm sure we could go from 19" wide and 2' deep to something small and unobtrusive.

Anyone got suggestions on either?

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Movies Television ]

An interesting piece by Virginia Postrel in in Atlantic on the incredible changes in the type font business brought on by the digital age. Read it fast, however, because it goes behind the firewall in about 2.5 days.

[ related topics: Graphics Typography Graphic Design ]

Interesting: Parents put GPS based speed tracking device in teen's car. Teen gets speeding ticket based on radar. Tracking device indicates teen was following speed limit. Both sides fighting hard.

But others, including Petaluma police, question whether the time and expense is worth it for what amounts to an infraction.

If this is the police attitude in the town we're moving to, it sounds like I'm going to have to get involved in politics. "Who cares about the truth, just pay the fine" is not an acceptable attitude from law enforcement.

The parents have a web site in which they're pimping the device they installed, the cynic in me wonders if this isn't just a good way to make teens want the tracking device, on the other hand with some of the abuses I've heard local teens describe about the police in various Marin towns, if I were a teen I think I'd jump all over the availability of another authority tracking my driving.

[ related topics: Politics Bay Area Current Events Law Enforcement Automobiles Maps and Mapping ]

From the Festool Owner's Group thread on trying to debug why a dust collector isn't starting automatically:

Can't resist. Many eons ago I did tech support for a computer company. We called ourselves easy to use because you could abbreviate commands to the first three characters, which usually meant the subsequent characters were ignored. If you were typing in data and wanting to start fresh with a clean slate, you typed the command SCRATCH or just SCR. The computer responded with "Ready for input".

Well, one day my phone rang and a very distraught customer said "I was having trouble with the computer and got really mad. I typed in "Screw you" and it came back with "Ready for input." So what do I do now?"

[ related topics: Humor Woodworking Festool ]

This last weekend we were stopped some place to refuel, and there was a poor guy with a monster PG&E cherry picker running up against the "$100 per credit card transaction" issue at the pumps. We laughed about the silliness about that, but I guess when you're responding to wherever the trouble is, you can't do the "I know I'll need X gallons at this location, so the company can just set up an account...".

And then Saturday afternoon, as we were dealing with the blown over bike shed, the Comcast guys came by to check the cable connections, we started up a conversation after an amusing call from the guy in the cherry picker to the guy in the other truck, both of which were parked next to the huge drop-off above the Lagunitas house, asking to make sure that the parking brake was set...

They were talking smack about the PG&E guys, "don't worry about it, we saw PG&E coming. Of course it was one truck. A small one.". Power was still out for a few days.

Anyway, today's pictures of a 22 year old who hasn't yet grasped his mortality, in the process of attempting to make our lives more comfortable, accompanies this article on PG&E crews still trying to bring power back on after last week's storm.

Addendum: Holy crap, watch the video of the limb breaking under that guy. Bet he needed to do laundry.

[ related topics: Photography Movies Bay Area Machinery Video ]

Sir Edmund Hillary, dead at 88. Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first two people to summit Chomolungma, aka Mount Everest.

And here's a few photos and a travelogue of hiking on the slopes of Chomolungma, and deciding against summiting.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment Current Events ]

From Leo: How to make fire balls. These would be awesome to for juggling.

[ related topics: Movies Pyrotechnics Clowns ]

Newport News, VA cyclist gets $1050 traffic ticket. Thanks, Shadow.

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Things I've learned about myself: When the fully loaded moving truck has had the brakes lock up and gone into an uncontrolled slide towards the house and/or a rollover inducing drop-off, and pumping the brakes frantically won't unlock the wheels, what's the first thing to go through my mind? "Huh, I should have gotten the full damage waiver."

But we survived with only minimal damage to the basil box, and got a different truck for subsequent trips that worked fine.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Machinery Real Estate ]

How to make "Instant" Hot Ice - with a little Sodium Acetate and water (Di-Hydrogen Oxide). Way kewl.

[ related topics: Movies California Culture ]

At some point I thought it'd be a good idea to give Mercola.com my email address, so I get regular "new article" updates that I haven't yet bothered to filter out. Most of them are of the "tinfoil hat" variety, but I don't mind using those arguments when they support my preconceived notions: Recreational Drugs FAR Less Likely to Kill You than Prescribed Drugs!

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

It's Macworld (Did I capitalize that right?) week, which means it's time for the obligatory link to Dori's Stevenote Buzzword Bingo.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Macintosh ]

Piaw Naw and D. Pardo's workshop on building bicycle wheels, in online form.

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Bullet Continuous Collision Detection and Physics Library "...is a 3D Collision Detection and Rigid Body Dynamics Library for games and animation" that's free for commercial use, and looks like it has a kick-ass integration into Blender.

[ related topics: Games Animation Graphics ]

What do cell phone reception bars mean? Not much, they're a measure of absolute signal strength, but it turns out what matters is the signal to noise ratio.

[ related topics: Wireless ]

Cheatneutral - Helping you because you can't help yourself:

Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.

[ related topics: Humor Sexual Culture ]

Part, perhaps most, of the joy of drinking coffee for me are the rituals that spring up around it. Coffee is as much about the mythology we create around it, any schmuck can throw a tea bag in hot water, but when we break out the instant read thermometer on the french press, there's something that elevates a simple drink to the level of obsession that can surround single malt scotch, or wine.

When I'm drinking coffee by myself I use the aforementioned french press, it seems like a good way to make an on-demand cup without lots of excess kitchen gadgetry, but the Handpresso hand pumped espresso device could catch my attention. It uses pods, which limits the available beans and roasts, but I also like the site for looking at the marketing language they're using, there's a big acknowledgement that the ritual of the preparation is important.

Now if I could just figure a way to do this with paper filters so that all of the health benefits showed up too...

[ related topics: Health Wines and Spirits Consumerism and advertising Beer Marketing ]

Yeesh, what is it about Republicans. I mean, I can overlook the rampant pedophilia and the closeted homosexuality and the inability to come up with a good excuse when caught ("wide stance", indeed), but how about stealing money from USAID to give direct material support to Al Qaeda?

[ related topics: moron ]

Why capitalism is good for the soul:

The problem for those of us who believe that capitalism offers the best chance we have for leading meaningful and worthwhile lives is that in this debate, the devil has always had the best tunes to play. Capitalism lacks romantic appeal. It does not set the pulse racing in the way that opposing ideologies like socialism, fascism, or environmentalism can. It does not stir the blood, for it identifies no dragons to slay. It offers no grand vision for the future, for in an open market system the future is shaped not by the imposition of utopian blueprints, but by billions of individuals pursuing their own preferences. Capitalism can justifiably boast that it is excellent at delivering the goods, but this fails to impress in countries like Australia that have come to take affluence for granted.

[ related topics: Sociology Economics ]

Lumberjocks currently has a "what can you make out of a single 2x4" competition going on. The Welsh Stick Chair by YorkshireStewart is my current favorite, and if you're into woodworking it's worth reading his build notes.

And there's a lot about this little table with drawer made from scraps that I'm not too keen on, but a number of things there that I want to be reminded of as we start to build a few cabinets.

[ related topics: Furniture Woodworking ]

Richard Knerr, Wham-O co-founder, behind the success of the Hula Hoop, Frisbee, SuperBall, and much more, dead at 82. (Via Tom)

And Jeff pointed out that chess legend Bobby Fischer has died.

[ related topics: Games Current Events ]

From the website of The Astrological Magazine: "Due to unforseen circumstances, the Astrological Magazine will cease publication..."

[ related topics: Astronomy Art & Culture Heinlein ]

I just bought 225 board feet of 13/16" maple (5' foot lengths, random widths) and 64 board feet of similar birch (8' lengths) for $2/bf for delivery Tuesday. Now I have to figure out where to store it 'til I can turn it into baseboards and cabinet frames.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Woodworking ]

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell wants to read all information crossing the internet in the United States:

Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect America's cyberspace that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like "a walk in the park," McConnell tells The New Yorker in the issue set to hit newsstands Monday. "This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we're going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens."

I got there via Wendy McElroy who linked to The Raw Story on McConnell's over-reaching and Ars Technica's look at the issue.

Right now, go figure out what it takes to run GPG on your email client, and find a secure channel by which to give me your key. When organizations that have been so profoundly wrong so many times are justifying themselves with

In the past six years, McConnell says, U.S. intelligence agencies have stopped "many, many" terrorist attacks.

something horrendous has already happened, and a good start at correcting that is making sure that twits like this would-be J. Edgar Hoover don't get their chance to play out their stupid power trips, even if they can get our congressweasels to roll over for this sort of idiotic scare-mongering.

[ related topics: Privacy History moron Current Events Civil Liberties ]

Out of context quote of the moment: I was coming out of the bathroom, and Charlene asked "while you were there, did you notice if it was 12 inches?"

(Lest any of you size queens get too excited, we'd just been out looking at toilet replacement options and were looking at the distance from the wall to the drain center...)

[ related topics: Quotes Dan's Life ]

"m" posted this in the "Dan buys nearly 300 board feet of scraps" thread: a functional bicycle made only of wood and glue. Includes the chain and a ratcheting sprocket.

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling Woodworking ]

This post over at MetaFilter, which pointed to New England's Lost Ski Areas, sent me to track down the Mount Greylock Ski Club, which is where our family went when I was a kid. Some nominal membership fee (the web page, which looks like it hasn't been updated since 2003-2004 says it's currently $120/year for a family), work a few days (either watching the tows, or doing trail maintenance or mechanical stuff), learn how to use a Bousquet Tow Gripper, ski on natural powder!

Pulled a ligament in my knee in the powder over on the western side of the west slope, many fond memories of the rest of the area.

[ related topics: Nostalgia Sociology Sports Community ]

A friend of mine got a device to run VHS to DVD, and is running into the copy protection problem. Without having looked at the issue in years, I figured that a surplus Time Base Corrector (TBC) should be cheap in these days of everyone scrambling to digital video, but in looking around they're still pretty damned pricey. And I gave my old Targa card to Jay some number of years ago, not that I'd even have a machine with an ISA bus any more to use it on.

So imagining a bookcase full of old Macrovisioned VHS from times gone by, anyone got an idea for a cheap way to get 'em on DVD or to a solid NTSC signal, either one?

[ related topics: Video ]

Wired's Jason Tanz has a little piece about Ron Paul's success using the Internet for fund raising. Great quote:

There's just one problem with the Ron Paul story: Ron Paul. Sure he seems like a decent guy, forthright and honest. Unfortunately, his paleo-libertarian policies make Ayn Rand look like Mother Teresa.

[ related topics: Politics Objectivism Libertarian Net Culture ]

This weekend while off looking at various cabinet styles so we'd have a basis for discussion (still trying to figure out how I'm going to cut elliptical profiles on the door faces...), we ran across the Metlund D'Mand hot water pump. It's a pump and a thermostat, put it across the hot and cold lines in the furthest fixture from the hot water heater, press a button, it pumps hot into cold 'til it detects hot water. $350 (8GPM, 10 feet of head) and up.

My dad pointed out the Watts Premier pump that uses a pump at the water heater and a mechanical valve at the furthest fixture, $255 (3.4GPM, 3.5 feet of head, but I'm not sure I can compare 'em across the board that way). Anyone used these toys and have an opinion? I suppose a start would be to fill a bucket at the bathtub, measure how much water it takes to get hot water, and compare based on that...

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

No Pets

And she does NOT cook!

[ related topics: Food Theater & Plays Current Events ]

An Empirical Analysis of Street-Level Prostitution, by Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh (ie: the Freakonomics guy and the street gangs economist). The footnote to the title page warns "Extremely preliminary and incomplete. Please don't cite without prior permission of the authors", but the abstract is gripping:

Combining transaction-level data on street prostitutes with demographic observation and official police force data, we analyze the economics of prostition in Chicago. Prostition, because it is a market, is much more geographically concentrated than other criminal activity. Street prostitutes earn roughly $25-$30 per hour, roughly four times their hourly wage in other activities, but this higher wage represents relatively meager compensation for the significant risk they bear. Prostitution activities are organized very differently across neighborhoods. Where pimps are active, prostitutes appear to do better, with pimps both providing protection and paying efficiency wages. Condoms are used only one-fourth of the time and the price premium for unprotected sex is small. The supply of prostitutes is relatively elastic, as evidenced by the supply response to a 4^th of July demand shock. Although technically illegal, punishments are minimal for prostitutes and johns. A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one. We estimate that there are 4,400 street prostitutes active in Chicago in an average week.

It will be interesting to see how this paper evolves. I find a couple of things fascinating about this summary, but once again we come up against the notion that much of the criminal activity and violence associated with the business is there not just because it's an illegal activity, but because commerce needs enforcement mechanisms, and where the police and law enforcement structure can't be used to make sure that transactions are protected, criminal elements step up to the task. This is much like the theories that the Mafia managed to get a good foothold in the New York City area because they were protecting the Italian neighborhoods from the Irish cops. In fact, as I read further this is exactly that situation, the cops are raping the prostitutes, and the pimps are protecting them.

Via Marginal Revolution, which I got to via Kottke, with more from Kerry Howley, Matthew Yglesias and Radley Balko

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Law Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Marketing Economics ]

Eric Rescorla, on a roll:

Steve Burnett is giving an intro to crypto talk in which he explains that "cryptography is about turning sensitive data into gibberish in such a way that you can get the sensitive data back from the gibberish".

My observation: "This differs from standardization, where you can't get the sensitive data back from the gibberish."

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

The Bike Snob NYC 2008 Dream Bike Shootout or, trying to write an article that's a shoe-in for Bicycling magazine. Giggle.

[ related topics: Humor Journalism and Media Sports Bicycling ]

In the context of Susie Bright's note on the end of the Best American Erotica series, Columbine had a little essay about the decline of the independent:

I think that small writers and small publishers and small editors desperately need to find a new way. It's not a question of whether we ever got screwed by the old way or whether we have contempt for the old way; these personal prejudices are no longer germane. What I'm saying, what Susie is saying, is that the old way is about to cease to exist.

Yeah. In the process of this last move I ditched a lot of books. Every new purchase nowadays is thought of in the context of $500 something per square foot (yeah, I know, that's not strictly true, but it's a good back of the envelope), which means that a good case can be made that the space to store a book starts at roughly twelve bucks (and goes up), The vast majority of what I've read for quite a while has been online. Frankly, right now there's such a glut of free (and in many cases not even advertiser supported, but truly free) content that I have trouble spending money on things like, for instance, Susie Bright's podcast.

The only reasons to buy the physical object rather than download it are user interface and something I can pass on to friends (thereby depriving the author of royalties). And even if you're not like me, willing to read on a laptop screen, the user interface problem is in the process of being solved.

I don't know what the answer to Susie's conundrum is, I'm just another person looking for ways to adapt to the changing landscape with my own skill set, but the net is changing our lives as profoundly as the automobile, the telephone and the television changed the lives of our grandparents and great grandparents. Physical objects as proxies for the actual content being purchased are going to go away. The struggle between exposure and revenue stream (that the "'sharing' music is good crowd" are willing to push all the way to the former) is only going to get rougher.

[ related topics: Books Music User Interface Sexual Culture Technology and Culture Invention and Design Writing Law Consumerism and advertising Television Automobiles ]

Okay, because you asked for it, here's a place to continue the assorted theories about September 11, 2001. I leave you all to it, for me this topic has been rehashed far beyond my attention span.

[ related topics: WTC/Pentagon attacks ]

Anti-Pac Man. Via, in which jontyjago proposes:

Maybe an anti-GTA should be next, The Revenge of the Pedestrian...

[ related topics: Games ]

Two fun geoweb items:

• Too Much Google Maps?
• The chip that always knows where it is...

The first is a farce. The second may become fact: GPS receiver on a chip with extremely low power draw designed for things like automatically geotagging all the pictures in your camera (by basically having the camera constantly track its location).

[ related topics: Photography Maps and Mapping ]

A few days ago my dad sent me the lat & lon of the aforementioned Mount Greylock Ski Club, and I went on a "virtual tour of the Berkshires" kick. I grew up, first through seventh grade, in the house with the red back side, we called it "Willowbog", for obvious reasons (though the willow is less obvious). The outhouse is still there. The house across the street is much bigger. We used to swim and sail a sunfish in the larger pond to the north (there's a barely visible trail through that field), and my grandfather built me a little rowboat in which we used to row around the bog behind the house, and in winters we'd skate there, when it had been cold for a while we could go south through that area that's been kept clear by the flowing water. The house to the south wasn't there yet, the rough but mostly cleared area south of the outhouse was all garden, and our largest tree fort was built with construction scraps in an old oak tree, the remains of which you can see along the road.

That I can pick a random place and see it again with that much detail on a whim is completely amazing. That it hasn't changed much in two and a half decades amazes me more.

Where'd you grow up?

[ related topics: Dan's Life Nature and environment Boats Skating Maps and Mapping Real Estate Gardening ]

British academic accreditation authority grants training courses from McDonald's, Flybe and National Rail "A-level-equivalent qualifications", which I think is what we Murricans would call "high school credit". Another version of the story.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Web development Content Management Current Events Trains McDonald's ]

This MarinIJ article lead me to the official site for 9½ Years Behind The Green Door, a memoir by Simone Corday about stripping at the Mitchell Brothers theater, the scene in San Francisco in the early '80s, and being "Party Artie"'s lover. And a podcast interview that I plan to listen to in a little bit.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Bay Area ]

The true cost of SMS messages:

If you divide 140 (the total number of bytes available to you) by 20 (the cost per message), you find that you are paying 1 cent for every 7 bytes of data. This leaves you with a cost of $1,497.97 for the 1024Kbytes contained in a single megabyte. iPod users: It would cost you $5,991.88 to transfer - not even to buy - a single song via SMS.

And yet somehow they have it in their bandwidth to try to convince me that I need to be listening to music over this channel, while charging rates like this for me to communicate with friends. When people wonder why an otherwise mostly free market type like me rails on the need for "network neutrality" legislation and full openness about what sort of internet connection I'm actually being sold, this is why. (Source)

[ related topics: Music broadband Net Culture Pop Culture Economics ]

A new variation on the Nigerian internet scam: this time they send the money to you! According to this, unwitting dupes agree to accept PayPal payments and then withdraw and wire the money to their principal. Then they find out that the guy is using your address to obtain cash for false EBay auctions. Guess who has to pay? Be careful out there.

[ related topics: moron Net Culture Currency fraud ]

Okay, anyone got preferences for long distance providers? We thought we weren't going to be using our land line, but Charlene doesn't like the cell phone all the time, so we're going to have to set it to something reasonable. I just called Sprint over a billing issue with the old phone number, it looks like AT&T's screw-up, and when I asked about moving my old service to the new number they said "we're not doing any new sign-ups".

Charlene had Working Assets, but we've decided we'd rather take the savings and donate it directly rather than pushing it through their overhead. Places to start on this would be good.

[ related topics: Wireless Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Real Estate ]

Smaller than Dan's house and more expensive (per square foot). Coming in around 300 square feet for $173K, The Little House in Toronto makes Dan's new digs look like a deal - especially when you consider Dan's location!

[ related topics: Invention and Design Real Estate ]

I haven't had much time to go exploring, I'm out in Provo and Orem for the rest of this week, doing some interesting stuff that I'm not going to talk about here much yet, but I did get out to Sundance yesterday evening for dinner at the Foundry Grill, and I left my credit card there, so I'm going to have to drive through Provo Canyon in the twilight again. Damn [giggle]. It's absurd to have a salad of field greens and fresh berries in the middle of freakin' winter in Utah, but the pork chop was divine (so was the salad, just absurd).

So, a couple of links from readers:

• Shadow forwarded along Three of the Finest Bike Wheels Money Can Buy. Total Wired consumer porn, and a little bit wrong on the details of spoke tension, but I bet a pair of those Lew Racing wheels would throw my bike way under the legal racing limit, even with the Ultegra chain ring.
• Chris fowarded along the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, which I thought I'd linked to before but don't find.

[ related topics: Religion Humor Erotic Sexual Culture tolkien Law Current Events Consumerism and advertising Sports Currency Bicycling Real Estate ]

I mentioned the LumberJocks "what can you make out of a 2x4 contest. It ends tonight, with a spate of new entries. I thought this table with steam bent legs was notable, this breadbox was pretty straight-ahead, but still notable, the evolution of this rustic rocking chair was rather cool, and this legged cabinet has some nice details.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Furniture ]