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So far the main thing I've learned is that prior to this I knew nothing about carpentry. I've made some little things in the past, but it was always just the totally uneducated "hey I'll stick some wood together and nail and screw it semi-randomly".
In reality the way modern American carpentry works is very systematic; the 2x4 stud and the 1x2 furring strip are not like multi-purpose legos that you can just fit together however you want; you use them in specific ways (and in fact the "stud" is not just a piece of wood, it is specifically engineered to be very strong in compression to bear the loads of stick framing, and not necessarily strong in other ways). You use specific sizes of nails for each specific task.
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Some notes :
Garden beds are four 4x4 cedar with through bolts. I'm pretty happy with them in general but if I were to do it again I would not do the "high raised bed" style and instead just use two 4x4 posts (which gives you about a 7" raised bed, since a 4x4 is actually 3.5" , and you could use standard 8" carriage bolts in that case, I had to mail-order 15" bolts (actually better than carriage bolts are "timber bolts" which are just carriage bolts with special cutting flanges that hold the bolt better in softwoods like cedar)). Be careful when tightening bolts on wood, you do not want them to be really tight, just sort of lightly hand tight. To make the nut stick you may need two nuts that you tighten against each other.
Kitten loves the cat tower, and the fibrousy wallpaper stuff on it was pretty successful (she loves to climb straight up it, rather than jumping between the platforms usually), but it is breaking down; I'm not sure if there is any material that would be more resilient, perhaps some kind of woven bamboo mat? She can knock it over with her crazy stripper pole moves, we currently have it stabilized by leaning in a corner of the room; to really make it self-stable would require a really wide base or a lot of weight at the base, I think.
Potting table is standard apron-style table; it's 8 feet long so I used 2x6 apron rails. I pocket-holed the table top boards together, which I would not do again. If I made another table top I would probably just try to glue it (I don't have the clamps for that kind of glue-up at the moment); with an apron-style table the top is not really load-bearing anyway, the apron is the crucial structure, so the strength of the top joinery is not important. One thing you might not think of is the attachment of the top to the apron needs the ability to move side to side (but not up and down), so drill the screw shank holes oversize. (apron-style tables are super duper easy to make)
I only made the vertical trellis, the top part was already there, but with no way for a vine to reach it. One of my house pet peeves is when people have a trellis with nothing on it, so I had to do something about that. (one of the more retarded fads in house style was the "trellis top" fences that everyone was getting 5 years; hardly any of them actually have anything growing on them so there're all these stupid looking empty trelli in the fancy neighborhoods of Seattle). The only tricky thing about that trellis was trying to do the anchors to the house correctly. Piercing the skin of a house is almost always a bad idea and has to be done with care to avoid creating a water-incursion point. I used through-bolts to a block inside the sheathing. The bolts are angled down to reduce capillary action, and hopefully the caulk does the rest; the holes for the bolts must be over-size to avoid cracking the siding with seasonal flex. One mistake I made was running the bolts from the outside to the inside; I should have done it the opposite way, which would have let me install the block and bolts, and caulk and paint that assembly and let it fully dry before attaching the trellis.
Chicken coop - urr various things I would probably do differently here. It's over-engineered in some ways (more structurally sound than necessary for the weight of chickens), but also missing some important features, like a heat lamp (addendum : heat lamp was easily added via extention cord) and some easier access points. It currently has an egg retrieval door, a chicken ramp door, and a removeable wall and roof for cleaning access, but I think I have to add another door for human play time access. The run is also small compared to the coop, I may have to make a bigger run some day. Maybe the main annoyance at the moment is you have to get inside to open and close the chicken ramp door; when I made it I thought we would basically just leave that door open all the time, but we've been closing it to help them stay warm at night, and it's a pain to get in to open and close it.
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Most of my funky glazing experiments are failures, but notes on a few that I think worked okay :
Wacky layering of shino is great. You can also put it on super thick then scrape away some to create variation. An even more subtle way to get variation is to paint the bisque with irregular strokes of water before dipping in the glaze, because water changes the glaze adherance rate.
Rutile or iron-ox over glaze makes subtle/natural looking variations.
"Peacock eyes" on the outside of the red bowl was pretty successful. This was done by first doing the blue glaze, waxing over the eye shapes, then dipping all in red. You could use the same technique for things like clean-edge bowl rim bands.
Carved ridges on outside of small bowl does nice stuff for tenmoku.
(aside : I believe the proper way to build a Hawaii house (especially a vacation house that you aren't living in all year) is pretty much a roof with no walls. The weather is so good year round that you basically never need protection at all. I think the correct construction method is Japanese style, that is posts & beams that support the roof, and then any walls you may have (perhaps wood louvers) are not structural. The vast majority of houses in Hawaii are American style "stick framing" where the walls carry the roof, and they have windows that seal and air conditioning and all that vulgar tacky suburban shit that you don't need).
The pictures :
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I wrote a little program to make randomized two-column image layouts. Spring is just starting; we've got lots of bulbs coming up, a few blooming, and the flowering trees are just starting. I think in a few weeks the real spring bloom will kick off and Seattle will be at its most beautiful.
Anyhoo, here's a tour of early spring around our house (featuring special guest star : the crazed kitten) :
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Are you just sitting there trying to let gravity pull the poop out? You know you have to squeeze, right?
There are these very simple acts of daily life that we never get taught, and sometimes people somehow fail to grasp how to get them right. For example, up until quite late in my life, maybe high school or so, I didn't know how to drink liquid correctly. I would just pour the liquid into my mouth as if my mouth was a glass, and then I would close my lips and swallow; the result was that I frequently swallowed air with liquid and drinking anything would give me burps. Some time in high school it finally clicked that you have to actually suck as you drink and form a vacuum so that a stream runs down your throat, you don't just swallow a parcel of it. So maybe you long-sitters just don't know how to poop.
Whenever I go to someone's house and see a bunch of magazines and books in the bathroom I'm a bit freaked out and then take extra care not to touch anything in their bathroom. There should not be paper or any other non-waterproof product in a bathroom; ideally a toilet room should have a drain on the floor and tile walls so you can just hose the whole thing down.
The only time I've felt the desire to hang out in the bathroom for longer than the bare minimum of time was once when I had house guests staying over, and I was getting quite fed up with them (not that there was anything wrong with them per se, but after a few hours of entertaining people I'm ready to lobotomize myself). I randomly needed a poo and had a sit down and was going to do my usual one minute express, but I suddenly realized, whoah this is nice, I'm alone, nobody is trying to talk to me, I can just chill, and I sat there a few minutes and relaxed. So maybe you toilet campers are doing this all the time, hiding out?
I do think I have seen that behavior in married men. You can see in certain married men (especially with kids) a desperation to get some alone time. If you mention some group activity that their wife wouldn't want to do they instantly are like "oh yes please I'd like to do that". I see them at our local neighborhood pizza place waiting for take out; the desperate married men always show up early and just hang out in the bar for a while.
In other random bathroom ranting, I think that America has the worst designed bathrooms, perhaps in the whole world, certainly in the civilized world. The bathroom is not an appropriate place for carpet. The toilet should not be in the same room as your shower/bathtub and makeup/medicine cabinet, the toilet should be in a little closet all by itself. Almost every other country in the world gets this, but for some reason Americans just love to hang out in a room full of shit and piss.
I think the 80's were probably the pinnacle of terrible bathroom ideas in America, when people were actually putting plush covers on toilet seats (not even just the top part, but the actual horseshoe sitting part). Here's an example of the retarded type of bathroom you see in America :
Actually that one is not that bad because it actually has tile on the walls, a lot (probably a majority) of american baths have drywall walls which is super fucking retarded. I know, let's put some porous, absorbed, non-waterproof material in the bathroom! good idea!
Even aside from the specific horrible design choices, the whole trend of spending a bunch of money to make your bathroom fancy is so fucking retarded. Of course most home improvement that the suburban wives do is not actually connected to functionality or even their own taste in any way, it's entirely based on what is popular at the time, and a kind of competition. Everyone is just so fucking disgustingly mindless, nobody has their own ideas, they don't think for themselves and do what they actually want; you can watch the builders around town and they all wind up doing the same thing, and then the fad changes and they all do the new thing; like for a while recently the big fad is chef's kitchens; it doesn't matter that the family basically never cooks and has no idea how to use a knife, yeah we need the fanciest chef kitchen; right now around Seattle I'm watching horizontal board fences go up at a blistering pace, it's suddenly become a mass fad and everybody needs a fucking horizontal plank fence, which will look tacky and dated in a few years (and actually usually already looks bad, because it looks fucking awful to put one modern-style feature on an old house that doesn't match it at all).
This hard work for someone else principle is huge in domestic bliss, from the smallest level to the overall. On the small scale, even tiny things like doing dishes are so much better if you feel like the family appreciates it, if they acknowledge and are kind about your contribution to the group. Of course children and husbands are consistently dickish about this, they don't want to give the respect and status elevation associated with gratitude.
Of course if you are a good person you should gladly let the other person have the pleasure of doing something for you. The tricky thing is knowing when they want to do it, and when they are just offering because they think you want it. When someone offers to do something for you, and you don't really particularly care, it's super dicky to just say so. One of the great social disfunctions of the nerdy computer guy is being too literal in conversation. You may think you are being clear by listening and responding to the content of the words, but in fact you are being a huge dick by not picking up what they really mean.
(in fact, often people use this as a way of intentionally being a dick; for example when someone is clearly trying to tell you something but they just can't say it directly, and you respond with "what are you saying" or "if you want something just tell me" or whatever, it's not their fault for failing to spit it out, it's your fault for failing to pick up the very obvious message that they aren't saying.)
Back to the case in point, when someone asks you "hey I was thinking of doing this thing for you which is quite a lot of work for me, would you like me to do it?" you are now faced with a puzzle (assuming you don't really care about the actual work product very much). Are they just offering for your sake (and would be happy if you said no, don't do it), or are they offering because they want to do it, and they want to do it for someone. eg. when your auntie offers to bake you cookies it's actually because she wants to bake cookies for you, it's not about what you want. In some cases it's tricky because it's hard to tell what's actually going on with their intention. You also can't just ask, of course, like "are you offering for my benefit, or do you just want to do that?" because people are not so self-aware, nor are they so open in their admissions.
Even once you are sophisticated enough to navigate that minefield, the next step is equally treacherous, when you get to the details of the act. Depending on whether you think the person was offering for your benefit or their benefit, you have to tailor your requests to what *they* want to do, even though they will ask you what *you* want to do. eg. when auntie offers to make you cookies, she will ask what kind; this case is easy because you know it's for her benefit, so you should choose a type of cookie that she likes to make; in some cases she has a "famous" variety (it's pretty fucking hillarious how many American secret family recipes are actually just the Betty Crocker recipe or some shit like that).
As another example, if I offer to throw a pot for someone, it's not because I think they really want me to, it's because I want to throw a pot, and it's nice to do it with someone in mind. Your only task in the job is to act grateful. You have about 30 seconds of work to do, if you aren't actually grateful you have to put on a smile and say thanks; it's just outrageously dickish if you fail to do that 30 seconds of work for me. (the same is true of most present receiving of course). Furthermore, if I offer to throw you a pot and you know I make sort of rustic ceramics don't say "what I really like are the cast art deco ceramics" ; you fucking asshole, if the conversation was entirely literal that would be a fine response, but of course it's not; the subtextual conversation went something like "I want to make a pot, can I pretend it's for you?" and you responded with "you can make it, but I won't let you pretend that I'm happy about it, and I'm going to belittle your work first". That example may be overly obvious, but a lot of the time people tell themselves they are being constructive or helpful by trying to push you with weird requests, or by pointing out ways your stuff could be better; that in fact is not helpful and is probably even more dicky (and in fact I believe they subconsciously know they are being dicky and it's sort of intentional as some sort of dominance bullshit).
Okay. So in real life you can never be completely sure what the subtext is. You can only make a probability
estimate; you aren't entirely sure what the other person's intentions were. Then you have to do an analysis
like a poker player. Human conversation is a game of imperfect information. Let's outline the game in this case :
Player 1 has a hand which contains either the "I do it for you" card or the "I do it for myself" card
Player 1 makes the offer which reveals some information in subtext
Player 2 has to make an estimate of 1's holdings; eg. based on the limited information I got, I
esimated they have "for you" 20% of the time and "for me" 80% of the time
Player 2 says yes or no
Player 1 asks about the details ; this reveals a little bit more information
and player 2 revises their estimates.
Player 2 must now consider their various possible responses;
fold = "forget it"
call = "do it your way"
raise = "actually please do it this specific way"
What you have to do is a weighted EV analysis; that is,
for each possible action I can take, what is the outcome in each of the hidden cases ("for you" or "for myself")
then weight the value by my current estimate of what the underlying truth is
People with very sophisticated social intelligence are actually doing this kind of analysis all the time, though I
think they don't realize it. (I've written a rant very similar to this before).
Anyhoo, aside from the sort of micro, conversational cases like this, this principle of "doing it for myself but pretending to do it for you" is one of the primary macro forces in relationships.
The most obvious example is the stereotypical male/female family roles. The man goes off to work and puts in lots of hours and grinds himself down "for her", and the woman stays home and cleans and raises the kids and dreams up home improvements "for him". Of course in reality, the other person typically doesn't actually want that. eg. she would be happier if he didn't work so hard and come home so tired and grumpy, and she would be just fine if they made a bit less money. He in fact is not doing it for her, but because he wants the challenge, or wants the good job, or thinks he's supposed to for some reason or whatever. But he can be much happier if he is allowed to pretend that it is "for her". In a healthy relationship, she would allow him to have that illusion and support him to some extent (though in a truly healthy relationship you should also be able to have the conversation about "hey you're working too hard and it's not actually for the family's benefit" if it gets out of hand).
(there's an obvious sort of "Gift of the Magi" in the old 50's stereotype family roles; the man works his ass off "for the family" (not really), which just alienates him from his wife, she wishes he would come home with more energy for her, while the wife cooks and cleans and pretties up the house, which just annoys the man, he wishes she would just relax and leave well enough alone).
This macro feeling that what you're doing is "for the family" shouldn't really be in your mind every day (if it is, you might be one of those narcissistic psychopaths who constantly talks about how they would do anything for their family, including fucking over anyone outside their family, etc. (I recall reading about the Costa Concordia accident where some douchebag was proud to say that he had punched his way to a lifeboat to secure a seat for his child; it's sort of weird that these dangerous psychopaths are admired by a decent chunk of society (sort of like the surreal psychological dissonance I feel when I see admiration for someone who is just so obviously overtly evil like Dick Cheney or Rupert Murdoch))) - but it is a nice undertone to your whole life. Once a week you have a moment where you think "fuck, why am I doing all this? I'm so tired, maybe I should just run away to Asia" and in that moment you can think "it's for my family" and it makes you feel better. It's incredibly dickish (and a failed relationship) if the other person doesn't allow you to feel like you are making a contribution to the unit.
(it would be nice if there was syntax coloring for deeply parenthesized writing, I might do it more)
When one party complains about their workload in the partnership, often what it really means is that they aren't getting enough gratitude. In our stereotypical sexist couple, when the man comes home and complains about how hard work is, the correct response is not "well maybe you should work less, I don't want you to do this, don't pretend it's for me". When the stereotypical woman says "I'm sick of doing the dishes all the time" or whatever, there is some aspect of literalness in that, but the more important subtext is "I'm not receiving sufficient gratitude (or sufficient cohesion) to have the pleasure of feeling like I'm doing this work for our family unit".
Semi-related topic : a lot of the work that people consider "hard" is not actually. eg. things like being in the Army, or raising a child. They may be difficult, they may be grueling, they may be exhausting; but if you feel like your work is for a reason, if it's very clear to you what you are supposed to do, and you just go do it, and then you feel like it was for good - that's easy. That's the easiest fucking thing in the world. It doesn't matter how tiring the actual work activity is. When someone hands you a todo list and says do this then this then this, that's so peaceful and relaxing and easy. When you wake up in the morning and you know your todo list for the day (feed the kids, take em to school), that's easy.
The truly difficult thing is doing work that is only for yourself, that you're not really sure if it's a good idea or not, and you're not really sure if you're doing it the right way. That is fucking horrible and exhausting. Every few minutes you have to stop and think "wait, why am I doing this? maybe I should stop".
A lot of people get themselves through life by making up goals that they "have to" do. I'm not really sure how self-aware the average person is (for example, do bird watchers know that bird watching is fucking retarded? it is nice to get outside, and it's nice to have a reason to get outside, and it's nice to make up an excuse about why you "have to" go to the jungles of New Guinea, but doing it to see some bird is fucking ridiculous, right? do bird watchers actually realize why they are doing? and how arrogant am I that I think I know more about other people's real motivations than they do?) - but clearly people do this to themselves. Like I "have to" lose weight for my bikini vacation, or I have to do this kitchen remodel; it's like they create this task for themselves, and then for a while they act like it was an order given from on high that they cannot question, and that makes life easier because you just do that task and stop facing the cripling void of self-determination.
(another aside on bird-watching : in general I think the people who get obsessed with something minor which obviously is not deserving of that obsession are very silly; like triathletes, or hikers around here who try to "bag all the peaks", or people who travel around the world for one specific weird thing like birding or whatever. But in the end it seems to work for them in terms of quality of life. That is, I think it would be more reasonable if instead of training for your triathlon (which will often be miserable exercise and is not particularly good for your body), you instead just did some pleasant exercise that was actually more useful. The problem is that if you are not a wacko over-committed person who has this invented "has to", you just won't do it. Like I'm sure I would be happier if I went on a hike every week, but since it's just up to me, and I'm doing it only because I choose to, I wind up not doing it very often; on the other hand the goof-ball who decided he "has to" bag every peak in one year does do the hikes, and while that specific goal is retarded, it does force him to get out there. Obviously the standard "everything in moderation" is sound in theory, but in practice it just doesn't work, because if you are reasonable and moderate, it's hard to get out there).
(another example to beat this point to a pulp : it's easy to make fun of the "freds" on bicycles who track their heart rate and buy the fanciest bike shit, and generally over-obsess and make up goals for no reason; it would be nice if you could be more reasonable, you get just as much exercise on a slower bike, you don't need to fucking test your blood sugar if you are a recreational rider. It's very easy and trite for people like Bike Snob or Grant Peterson or Me to make fun of the freds and say that you should just "go ride". (as another example, obviously doing something like "bike to work month" is silly; if you want to bike to work, you can make that decision for yourself each day of the year, there's no reason to follow some organization's choice of month). However, if you are just reasonable and moderate and make your own decisions, you simply won't do it. It's too hard to make the right decision all the time, you won't have the motivation, you'll get lazy. In the end when you see the people who are out there riding at 6 AM in the rain, it's the nut-jobs, it's the people who invented some silly "have to", and in the end they are happier for it)
(of course the best form of made of "have to" is one that's at least semi-useful; like I "have to study hard and get into a good grad school"; having that goal can make the work fun and rewarding for a while; of course you eventually get disillusioned with that goal and realize it was perhaps all pointless; but the correct response is not to just give up on goals, but rather to invent a new one. (sometimes I try to get myself excited about some kind of made up goal, like I "have to" learn to fly an airplane, or I have to take a lot of artistic photographs, or I have to write some music, but it's hard for me to sustain the mental illusion).
Anyhoo, the relation is that some people use "do it for the family" as one of these made up goals to make their life easier. Like I "have to" get an SUV so I can drive all these kids around to their soccer and piano lessons and so on. Well, no you actually don't have to, but if it makes your life easier to pretend that you have to, then okay. This form of "do it for the family" is NOT what I was talking about in the main part of the post, but it is semi-related.
01-18-11 - Hadamard
01-17-11 - ImDiff Release
01-12-11 - ImDiff Sample Run and JXR test
01-10-11 - Perceptual Results - PDI
01-10-11 - Perceptual Results - mysoup
01-10-11 - Perceptual Results - Moses
01-10-11 - Perceptual Metrics
01-10-11 - Perceptual Metrics Warmup - x264 Settin...
01-10-11 - Perceptual Metrics Warmup - JPEG Settin...
12-11-10 - Perceptual Notes of the Day
12-09-10 - Rank Lookup Error
12-09-10 - Perceptual vs TID
12-06-10 - More Perceptual Notes
12-02-10 - Perceptual Metric Rambles of the Day
11-18-10 - Bleh and TID2008
11-16-10 - A review of some perceptual metrics
11-08-10 - 709 vs 601
11-05-10 - Brief note on Perceptual Metric Mistakes
10-30-10 - Detail Preservation in Images
10-27-10 - Image Comparison - JPEG-XR
10-26-10 - Image Comparison - Hipix vs PDI
10-22-10 - Some notes on Chroma Sampling
10-18-10 - How to make a Perceptual Database
10-16-10 - Image Comparison Part 9 - Kakadu JPEG2000
10-16-10 - Image Comparison Part 11 - Some Notes on the Tests
10-16-10 - Image Comparison Part 10 - x264 Retry
10-15-10 - Image Comparison Part 8 - Hipix
10-15-10 - Image Comparison Part 7 - WebP
10-15-10 - Image Comparison Part 6 - cbwave
10-14-10 - Image Comparison Part 5 - RAD VideoTest
10-14-10 - Image Comparison Part 4 - JPEG vs NewDCT
10-14-10 - Image Comparison Part 3 - JPEG vs AIC
10-14-10 - Image Comparison Part 2
10-12-10 - Image Comparison Part 1
06/2011 to 04/2012
01/2011 to 06/2011
10/2010 to 01/2011
01/2010 to 10/2010
01/2009 to 12/2009
10/2008 to 01/2009
08/2008 to 10/2008
03/2008 to 08/2008
11/2007 to 03/2008
07/2006 to 11/2007
12/2005 to 07/2006
06/2005 to 12/2005
01/1999 to 06/2005
