27jan2012

And today we have a rant to go with our (very) old-timey fridayfugly post (the stub dates from 2007!). Over at pandagon (for which I seem to be having no luck either accessing my old login or creating a new one, which is why you're being burdened with my rant here) Amanda Marcotte uses the lightbulb thing obsession to illustrate the sort of issue that has the wingnut brigrade up in arms.

Now, as it happens, I know some republican-identified folks reasonably well; at least a couple of them either attended or seriously considered attending a teaparty rally when it was first getting going, so I think it's safe to say they're ‘real’ republicans. As far as I can tell, they're perfectly happy to use fluorescents and save money (even if they do drive the SUVs). Here, on the dem side of the fence we do the same.

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26jan2012

Hey, today I've actually got something besides ‘look at meeeee’ for the intro: the Thread for Thought blog via this pandagon comment is pretty darned interesting, even if your requirements for clothes basically resolve to ‘comfortable natural fibers, warm in the winter and cool in the summer’.

Also in the category of making statements, Boingboing has a post on marking your tools. Never is this more important than when you all get together at a workshop (such as the one where I made today's featured item.) The most important bits, I would say (from experience): a) use a combo of two or more colors and b) make it loud. A little dab, even in lime green, really isn't as effective. And speaking of loud'n’ugly, we have today's post...

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25jan2012

I think we are finally to the last of the scrimshaw that's been lying around. Well, unless I start posting bad scans of some actually pretty cool stuff, but, I dunno. Resolution's pretty lousy.

So hurray, one little bit of this website properly tidied up;)

24jan2012

The first step for most posts is photographing (or scanning) the item. Today's post is kind of interesting because the pix to illustrate it were shot nearly two years apart. In a way, this underlines how patchy my efforts with this site have been: after being laid off, to sharpen his skills (and possibly have something to show off to potential employers) the wizard commenced a major upgrade for this site.

Its prior upgrade resulted in dynamically loading pages. This one, still somewhat incomplete (because he got a paying job on the other side of the state, and is now only home on weekends) now has images and posts in a database, which has allowed for very much easier indexing—now, I simply add a given tag, and the page is automatically indexed— provided, of course, I've created an indexing page! (Yesterday's page, frex, was one such that was sitting in the queue, waiting to go live, for two or three years. Le sigh.) Editing in a browser and clicking ‘update’ is pretty sweet too;)

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23jan2012

And with this post we should have a functioning scrimshaw index again—it's actually been queued up, ready to go, sometime since the end (or mebbe beginning) of 2009, sigh, so it's only taken me, um, a little over two years to tidy this up.

Ah well. You do what you can.

22jan2012

Ok, I'm on a roll here.

My darling wizard did indeed set up this website so's I can make a buncha posts ahead of time, postdate them, and they don't show up till the proper date. Yessss!!!!!

Anyway. I'm trying to clean up the indices of this place a bit (because I ought to be doing entries for taxes, blech) and some of them are actually created, but still privatized. So, here goes, I'm gonna try and throw some of that stuff in the queue up.

Today's post is about a piece I made about, um, about a quarter century ago. (Yikes...)

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