A technological breakthrough...

I love books.

The poor saps dear friends who have helped me move my library can attest to this.

Much as I love books, I am perfectly happy with the idea of all my books being digitized, and readable on a device. If anyone want to buy my a iPad, Nook, or Kindle I will be more then happy to use them. I'm actually excited about the new android tablets on the horizon... and you'll soon read why...

I spent weeks converting books to .LIT format to read them on my old Dell PDA.

However, it died and there was much sadness.

Then came my iPod touch. I was excited. The app Stanza produced clear readable text, and I could store hundreds of books. All that I had to do was get them on.

Where I firmly got bitch-slapped by Apple. You see, Apple doesn't want you actually having access to the storage of the app*. So the only way to get my fairly massive e-book library on was to install Calibre on my desktop point it at the e-book library, share the folder holding the e-books without password protection on the network, connect the iPod touch to said network and instruct Stanza to go there and get them.

It never worked.

Months... nay years of me intermittently trying new things, new settings, new routers ended in failure. As someone who makes their living solving technological problems it was pretty disheartening. I was reduced to downloading books from a pirate Stanza server. This worked... but the site had a lot of things I carried nothing about and not enough of the books I wanted to read which I owned legitimate electronic copies of.

Then came the Droid.

Want to access the device? Not a problem, plug it in with a USB cable and you can copy to it to your hearts content. The Android OS is open. Access is allowed. It isn't a walled garden. This BTW also makes it stupidly easy to backup my photos and videos off the phone.

Sure Stanza isn't available on the Android OS (Amazon bought Stanza shortly after I discovered it...) and I don't like Aldiko as much... but you know what? I don't care.

I just converted (with Calibre) three books in the series I am reading to the format Aldiko wanted, and copied them over. In less then 20 minutes from when I thought... "I wonder if..."

It'd have taken even less time but I am a teensy bit OCD about proper meta-data so I cleaned up the files before conversion.

Is my phone the ideal platform? No. But if it was this easy to do... imagine what the crop of Android tablets coming out will be like...

The future it is a little brighter today.

*Yes I could Jailbreak my iTouch... and I tried... every time I tried it very nearly bricked... only hard rest to factory defaults and original firmware made it unbrick.

A day without rain...

Is apparently a day with snow.

Yes it snowed here this morning. Didn't stick... but still.

Nonetheless it had cleared up enough this afternoon that I snapped a pic of the front of the house.


I am also making progress, albeit slowly, with unpacking. I had planned on alphabetizing these as I put them up and realized is was better for my sanity to get the boxes out of my office and books on shelves then to have them organized...

Moving is no fun.

We (the roommates) opted not to rent a uhaul, and I think it was huge mistake.



Instead a day of crappy moving, it was stretched out over several days, with intermittant monsoons, with the order of things being determined by whose car it would fit in. (We had a small truck, my small suv and a Jetta.) The truck owning (now ex) roommate was ridiculously helpful. Like above and beyond the call of duty both in terms of availability and the amount of work he did. He was a roommate for 2 months and hauled more crap and cleaned more of the house then the rest of us.

*Edit* I forgot to mention that in this week, essentially doing noting but moving I put ~200 miles on my car. Which means I made about 20 trips back and forth, as it's 10 miles round trip.

But we are moved, the old house is immaculately clean, the new house looks like a furniture bomb went off in it and the garage is completely totally packed solid.

In other news, I have home inventory software on my Droid that uses a 3rd party barcode scanner software. Only after buying it did I discover that both of them didn't really work on the droid. Until this week. Both of them pushed out a patch and they are working wonderfully.

Which means I can inventory my books, and have that inventory with me... so I don't buy duplicates of books I already have. It's not a common occurrence, but irritating nonetheless.

And on that note I have been moving and cleaning for too long and I'm going to sleep now.

New House... same tripping hazards...

New House... now with pictures!

There are great advantages to having a excellent photographer as roommate. Like good panoramic photos.


Left to right: Pantry, Dot's room (or a Harry Potter cupboard for those of you not privy to the joke), stairs up, Kitchen, dining room, door to the back yard and living room.

This is the same room photographed from the fireplace. New stuff left to right: door to the garage, front door and the downstairs 1/2 bath. You can't really see the 1/2 bath, just the frame of the door edge on by the front door. It's the biggest 1/2 bath I've ever seen...


This is the kitchen. A family of four could live in the fridge. Furthermore the dishwasher has top and bottom spray arms!

Bedroom 1. Window faces the garage and obliquely the street.



Bedroom 2. Window faces the backyard.Master bedroom and bath. How sad is it my first thought was "Panoramas are slimming!" Random skinny person is J's friend who I wish was staying. He's a hoopty frood who knows where his towel is.

The back yard. All 20 feet deep of it.

I have no idea why J didn't shoot the front. We have lovely flowering tree out front. I'll try and get photo soon.

Migraines... fun for the whole family.

This morning round 5am ye migraine woke me up. I took a massive dose of ibu and went back to sleep. Slept through my alarm clock, but not the cold dog nose 15 minutes later.

Woke feeling fine, but after an hour at work it came back and brought friends. I was toughing it out, but apparently looked so bad my boss sent me home.

Somehow in the last 48 hours I have lost my sunglasses, and even with the heavily overcast sky I thought the sun was going to kill me.

Now I'm safe in the basement with all the lights turned off and blackout mask on ready for a nap...

...and the landlords are walking on the roof, apparently with a herd of rhinos.

Crash of rhinos I think is the correct term. Boy is it an appropriate term. Ye gods.

New house... roommate blues...

So we got the cool awesome place we had hoped for. It is closer to town, with better amenities and less rent.

The bad news... we are losing a roommate. Although he agrees the new place is superior in every way he has decided to go his own way, so our total rent bill actually ends up going up per person instead of down.

What makes this worse is the boy can cook. He just made an awesome taco salad. It is amazingly good, I can't even begin to describe.

To be fair the other roommate can cook too, but it seems like he mostly cooks cooks either italian or burgers.

Actually now thatI think about the soon-to-be-ex roommate cooks vegetarian a lot of the time... maybe it's good that he's leaving.

I need my bacon.

*edit* Pictures of the new house soon.

Dog pictures...

Cleaning out the camera and I ran across these two which I haven't shared before.

This why it is dangerous going down the stairs in the dark round these parts.



Cinnamon says, safety third!

A little bit of housekeeping around here...

So I decided to enable labels on the blog to make easier to find metal-smithing and kenpo posts... and discovered I had been a bad bad geek. I had forgotten to put a comma between labels so instead of two labels like "School" and "kenpo" I had one label "School Kenpo"

So... yeah. Fixed it, but I had to go edit the labels on about a hundred posts.

Now if you just want to look at pretty metal-smithing picture all you have to do is click on the link on the right. Just here for the Dog? Same thing.

My first monolith.

My roommate's senior thesis show is this weekend. He built a touch-screen driven interface for the art building and asked me to build an installation to hold a computer and support the touch screen.

For less then $200.

And it needed to look tech/slick.

I think I did okay...

From Furniture pics

From Furniture pics

Rockabilly wonder...

I may have just been introduced to a new love.

Imelda May. Irish born Rockabilly crooner extraordinaire.

Now... to find a local copy of her almbum...

Quick post update...

Oh how the time has flown. 5 months since my last post.

The less said about the last 5 months the better. I survived it.

Onto the updates.

Our lease is up (has it been a year already?) and busy looking for new digs.

So that is (not) fun.

Got some summer projects lined up, which has me excited.

I was regifted a small enamel kiln, which after I finish refurbishing I will doing more plique-a-jour pieces.

Also I have been inspired by the cool little blog called Knock-off Wood. So after I get moved in I am going build this.

From Furniture pics

Lastly, a chance encounter with a lovely lady has put me on the trail of new tattoo artist. I'm terrifically impressed with his portfolio, now I just need to finalize my design (and finish my green belt.)