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Saturday, May third, 2003
Well I let the moment slip last weekend and did not finish the shoe rack... So I was all set to do it this morning. Brought the rack out to the driveway, with brushes, thinner, alcohol, everything I needed, except varnish -- the varnish I was confident was in a box in the garage, where I had packed it away when we moved. But when I looked there I was sorely disappointed. I started the search; combed the garage, the basement, nothing -- did some other yard work, then went over the search again -- still nothing. I was getting kind of upset; Ellen offered to look and she had a little better luck, discovering a bottle of Behlen's master-gel; this was not what I had planned to use but it should work. So I started trying to open it and discovered it was welded fast by old dried finish. After a lot of fretting, I hit on drilling it open; over to the drill press and I took a nice ½" circle out of the lid. Great! But alas, I went to use it and found the entire contents of the bottle had dried solid. Not actually too surprising as it's been open for a year and a half or more. But I was back to square one. The day went by, and eventually I found an opening to drive over to the hardware store and get new varnish. I went to Main Street Hardware in West Orange, a place I've had my eye on for a couple of weeks, and was glad I did -- it is all I want a hardware store to be. Home Depot will play less of a role in my life now. Got some Minwax Spar Urethane and after dinner I put it on the rack! Tomorrow morning I will do a second coat and that will be the end of that project. And meantime, this morning I started to draw up plans for my next project, a breakfast nook. More on that later...
posted evening of May third, 2003: Respond
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My hobbies of reading and woodworking have intersected in a nascent new collection, of old (Victorian era) books about carpentry and house-building. So far I have George Ellis' Modern Practical Joinery (1902, by coincidence the year our house was built) and Modern Practical Stairbuilding (1913?), plus Steven Sloan's Victorian Buildings (1850's) and one or two others. Today I found out my friend Janice has passed down from her father two books by Fred Hodgson, one of which, Practical Uses of the Steel Square (1903) I have heard recommended several times on woodworking web sites. She loaned it to me so I will be finding out more about squares in the coming days.
posted evening of May third, 2003: 1 response
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Friday, May second, 2003
It's been Spring for a couple of weeks now in South Orange, the flowering trees massively in bloom; but I've been waiting for leaves on the larger trees to come. This morning it looks like they are finally here! Almost all the trees have foliage coming in. In our yard, the little tree that may or may not be dogwood has buds; and the bush in our front yard sprouted hundreds of crimson flowers all at once a few days ago. I de-ivied that little tree a week and a half ago; and last night I cut the last trunk of ivy off our big maple tree -- there are now about 8 feet of visible trunk before the ivy infestation starts. My dad thinks if I give it a couple of months, all that ivy above the cleared section -- which is no longer getting any nourishment from below -- will dry up and be relatively easy to remove. Update: Ellen informs me the crimson bush is an azalea; also there is one in our back yard, which I noticed this (Saturday) morning is coming out in buds the same way. I'm thinking it may have gotten buds a few days later because there is less sun; but that is pure speculation.
posted morning of May second, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, May first, 2003
Well tonight I was working in the yard and I noticed, the hose hook I installed last weekend was pulling the siding away from the wall. Oh no! I thought I had screwed through the siding into the stud -- come to find out, when I pulled that siding away, I had screwed through the siding into air -- there is a gap of about ½" between the siding and the stud. What to do, what to do? I ended up cutting a rabbet in the end of that piece of siding so it would fit over the end of the piece around the corner from it -- that seemed to work ok but now I need to seal it.
posted evening of May first, 2003: Respond
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I've got things pretty well back into shape. The links were all lost so I will have to rebuild them by hand, not too hard to do but a pain anyway.
posted afternoon of May first, 2003: Respond
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Well I came up with a cool idea for how the site data should be physically organized -- a script to put that organization into effect -- ran it and bang, it deleted all my posts! So I'm trying to get them back, meanwhile the links are not going to be there, sorry.
posted afternoon of May first, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, April 29th, 2003
With regards to my previous post, I want to flesh out the idea of limiting information content in order to increase bandwidth. Actually -- well I guess its accurate to say "I want to flesh out" this concept -- but not sure it is currently within my ability to do so. This must be an existing meme though -- if you have any recommendations for reading on this subject, please contact me.
posted afternoon of April 29th, 2003: Respond
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So why did I create this journal? The reasons are severalfold. I've been pretty fascinated by the blogging phenomenon since last summer, when I discovered a couple of the sites I've been reading regularly since -- Calpundit, Talking Points Memo, and Body and Soul are perhaps the "big three" for me -- and have been wondering if I could sustain such a steady level of posting and keep it interesting, and how it would sound if I did. I started my first "web log" before I knew that term, back in 1999 with the READIN book diary; but page generation was manual, not automated, and maintaining the site was a hassle, and I never really got far with it. Although, take a look at the page for Faulkner's The Hamlet to get an idea of where I wanted to go with it. Once I found out about ASP it seemed like the perfect fit -- I just had to learn how to code automatically generated journal pages and good things would come of it. Two things I wanted to learn to do formatting-wise; expressing dates and times in human terms, and displaying links in a hierarchical format. All the m/d/yyyy dates and hh:mm:ss times you see on web pages don't do it for me. They are over-determined and difficult to read. I wanted to express recent dates as "Yesterday", "Last Sunday", and posting times as just "morning", "evening", etc. I think I have come up with a pretty coherent way of doing this! And the hierarchical links, well, take a look at the left hand side of this page, I think they are good. Update: Thinking about the two formatting goals above, I realize they are both concerned with limiting the amount of information presented in order to maximize the amound of information communicated. Funny... And the archiving system I have vaguely in mind could be thought of along the same lines too.
posted morning of April 29th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, April 28th, 2003
I put up a hook for the garden hose in our front yard today, and Sylvia helped out, assiduously. [? I wasn't sure what that meant but it somehow suggested itself as the appropriate adverb. Looked it up just now in the dictionary and whaddya know, it fits pretty well. I'll let it stand.] Her description of the activity was, "We're doing shoe rack!" It is up and looks good, though I made a bit of a mistake in the positioning of it. It has two screw holes that are on a vertical axis, and two more that are on a horizontal axis collinear with the lower of the first two; when I was positioning it I was only looking at the lower three holes, didn't realize there was another one, and I put it in a place where that top hole is not near any wood. Oh well -- the three screws should do a fine job of holding it up.
posted evening of April 28th, 2003: Respond
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This morning I put in date formatting -- it still needs more testing but all in all seems to work pretty well. Places I want to go in the near future: Archives, subject filter, view by date. Long-term goals: comments!
posted afternoon of April 28th, 2003: Respond
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