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Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
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| Friday, November 20th, 2009 | |
xkcd_rss
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5:00a |
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| Thursday, November 19th, 2009 |
devilmiyu
|
9:17p |
Aaaah!!
Tonight's episode of FRINGE was awesome! Too bad there won't be another episode for the next two weeks. Decoded glyphs spelled out "BLIGHT". And now, time to watch the DVR'ed episode of SUPERNATURAL. |
thewronghands
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3:37a |
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| Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 |
love_boardgames
[ 20thlvl_rogue ]
|
10:31p |
Barnes & Noble has started carrying a lot of good board games.
About a month ago I went into a Barnes & Noble for the first time since April. Aside from the regular, common board games like Jenga, Scrabble, etc, back in April they only had two games that were ranked high at boardgamegeek.com. These were Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne New World. Still their selection was a lot better than Borders that didn't have any games like that whatsoever, and presumably still don't. So a month ago I went in B&N and they had Dominion. Then yesterday I went and they had gotten a lot more. Now they have two games by Fantasy Flight, the new Conan one and Red November. They also have a bunch of Catan expansions, such as Seafarers. What shocked me the most was that they actually had Puerto Rico, that was a game I thought would never be carried by a national chain store because the premise has the capability to offend so many people. The copies of Puerto Rico were stocked on a lower corner of the island of games and a copy of The Age of Conan had been put in front of them, but they still had several copies of it. I also saw Merchants of Venice and a few others. I'm not really into spending a bunch of money so I won't be buying any of these, but I just thought I'd make a post about it to revive the community. |
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pfsc
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1:19p |
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devilmiyu
|
12:39p |
My mothership has come to take me away! Hooray!!
Okay so last night, a little after midnight, I saw a sign. It told me that the end is near and that all my attempts of "phone home" has been answered. The cover up story is that it's a meteor flash. Yeah, that's it. That's what *THEY* want you to believe. When they released this story. Actually, it's just my mothership, signalling me to pack up my bags and that it's time to come home. Who am I going to take back home with me and conduct all sorts of experiments on? I have no idea. I just know that ..... RUN! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! OH-NOES!!!! THE SKY IS FALLING! Hehe. But seriously though, this was one hell of a scene. I thought someone or something lit up a flare right outside. It was so bright that it looked like daylight outside. I thought, "Hm, I didn't hear an explosion." And after checking the local news right at that time, I didn't see anything. Being so close to Hill Air Force Base (and working there) I know that these things are mostly kept hush-hush. Just like the incident in which the pilot of a F-16 dropped bombs before an emergency landing. I figured something like that would make national news. It didn't. It was kept hushed. I'm sure this one would be hushed too. Unrelatedly, I learned my lesson. I'm not going to fiddle with livejournal again. I changed my email address and passwords for both new email and lj and then I forgot what it was. After a moment of panic I recovered. All is good... sorta. Okay, lunch break's over. Back to school work and stuff. (maybe hehe) |
|
strawbalehouseb
|
2:18p |
Bales As Soundproofing
http://www.strawbale.com/bales-as-soundproofing http://www.strawbale.com/?p=1012 
Many of you have written to me in recent months asking about using straw bale walls for soundproofing against noisy streets and neighborhoods. I have responded to a lot of you individually, but figure it’s better to give everyone this information as well.
I have to start with a funny story. Last night, as I was trying to go to sleep, the outside gate was swinging and banging in the wind. The gate is attached directly to the side of the house we’re currently renting (no, it’s NOT straw bale, and thus the funny story). My wife was still awake and so I asked her if she could go outside and close the gate. She did and when she got there, I could hear she was having trouble getting it to latch. Without leaving my bed I said, “you have to lift the gate up and push it towards the house while you latch it.” She thanked me for the input, latched the gate and came inside. We both laughed when we realized we had just had a clear conversation, with no difficulty hearing each other, right through the wall of our house!
What a sorry state of affairs it is when we can actually talk through our walls. The walls are insulated, by the way, but even still, they are easy to talk through. That would never happen in a straw bale house, I guarantee it! In fact, when my crew would work on straighten walls, after they were all stacked, they would often use walkie talkies to communicate with the person on the other side of the wall. Without those, they would have to walk over to a window opening and reach their heads out to communicate with each other.
So the answer to the question is yes. Yes, straw bale buildings are incredible insulators from sound. If you live on a very loud street or perhaps you back to an interstate, these walls will eliminate almost all of the noise that you currently live with. You can build a straw bale house or consider building a straw bale landscape wall. Although not as good as an entire house of straw, they still work really well to eliminate sound.
The science is in the density. Sound travels as waves. When it moves through hard material, it travels in fast, short waves. When it travels in soft material, the wavelength increases and slows down. Now look at a straw bale wall. The outer plaster skin is hard and dense and so the sound waves move through it at high speeds; however, when they hit the bales, the sound waves slow down. The key here is the interior plaster. In order for the sound waves to escape the soft bales, they would have to accelerate to get into the hard plaster skin. They can't do that and so end up absorbed in the bales. Voila, sound proofing 101. |
dancinglights
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4:01a |
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xkcd_rss
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5:00a |
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scribblette
|
3:10p |
Updates. Moving, Dragon Age, etc.
Okay, updates, lessee... Birthday:Had a nice time with friends. Picked up a new processor. Ended up overclocking my videocard & processor and can now play Dragon Age at full settings at 1920*1080. Happily surprised. I've had a pretty good year and achieved a bunch of the goals I set out for myself. Moving house:We'll be heading to the north-eastern suburbs (Bayswater North) in a couple of weeks because of Sue's work. Apparently we made a good impression. New place seems quite wonderful, and is near a couple of great friends who we're planning on getting in some regular tennis & swimming with. Get us extra fit. Plus it's near a lake so I might get to go rowing more! :D Meanwhile much cleaning is ensuing. I'm being sure to be organized this time around. Finished weeding & gardening today. Still picking between phone/internet/electricity/gas companies. I'm fairly sure we'll stay with Telstra & TPG but don't know about electricity/gas. There should be an extra special house-warming not long after we move. ^_^ Cooking:I finally figured out the obvious: that the only way I'll get a clue as to whether a meal has the right amount of something is if I taste it on every single stage along the way. Bugs:Random interesting little creature outside today. The Australian Green Grocer cicada, google tells me. Some bird had started at it and it was making a loud, loud fuss. Had these two incredible little sparkling red gems in the middle of its forehead. I'd never seen anything like that before. Dragon Age:So far the overall story has been a tad predictable (if it sounds like a bad guy, it is a bad guy), the gameplay mediocre, the companion AI moronic (courtesy the idea that you can only have four abilities in mind, as remembering how to do more than four things requires training), the textures bland, the areas rather unexciting, the performance poor (especially if you're going to put people in little zones like that), and the talents for warrior/rogue more uninspiring than anything I've seen before. All that would rate the game a 3 out of 10, maybe. World of Warcraft looks better. And runs better. That said, Dragon Age is a lot of fun to play. The voice acting is perfect. The characters are believable and you can't help but love them - and be surprised by their actions. That's about all it has going for it, but it's enough to push the score up to 9/10 and make you forget everything you had an issue with, as is evidenced by all the rave reviews. It really is quite mind-boggling. A lot of the gameplay seems uninspired. Sure, mages have a bunch of nice spells to choose between and combining spells with each other or with traps is funky, but do rogues and warriors really have to share the vast majority of their talents? Diablo had much more exciting choices when it came to choosing your new abilities, as do WoW, Neverwinter Nights, Torchlight, etc. You were actually excited about what your new abilities would be. Really excited. It was something Different. Not just more of the same. Here, we've got twelve talents devoted to sword & shield, of which three are near identical, providing increased defense & protection to ranged attacks. They don't really combine, one making the other two near redundant - yet you need to get all three to get to a better talent. The effective problem is that mages are a lot more fun to play than the other classes, as they provide a lot more variety. Almost every talent is a new spell for them. That's a LOT more variety. Dual wielding talents for a warrior could have been different than dual wielding for a rogue, providing more replay options, etc. Anyway. I'll still play it when Sue's busy on Assassin's Creed. I just occasionally get an eyeful of lost potential. :| |
| Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 | |
strawbalehouseb
|
7:15p |
Baling in Wet Weather
http://www.strawbale.com/baling-in-wet-weather http://www.strawbale.com/?p=1008 
I don’t know what the weather is like where you are while you read this, but it’s pretty rainy here today! It’s always a concern for bale builders that the rains will come at just the wrong time. In fact, I’ve said it before that as soon as your bales arrive on site, you can expect rain, even if you live in the Sahara! It’s Murphy’s Law I guess. Anyway, I’ve got some simple and cool tips for you to implement when building your house and the storm clouds start to roll in.
Tarps. Yup, that’s the most obvious tip of all. The key is, how do you use them effectively.
1. Most people want to wrap their bales up tight with tarps so that there’s no way for water to get in. I prefer to wrap my bales with a top tarp that is pulled away from the bales with ropes at the bottom. This keeps the water off but allows wind to blow through and keep the bales dry from condensation.
2. Be sure to stack your bales in a pyramid of sorts so that there are no flat spots on the top of the stack. Those flat spots will collect water in the tarps which will eventually fail and the water will enter your stack. By keeping the pyramid shape, the water will always flow off and away from the stack.
3. Build a breezeway. I use tarps from the main stack attached to the house as a breezeway for transporting bales into the home. Be sure to angle the tarp so that it drains, usually to the side is best for simplicity. This keeps the bales dry from the well covered stack to their placement in the house.
4. If you can’t shape and cut the bales inside, use 10′x10′ portable tents with optional walls. This gives you a dry workspace in which to manage the bales.
5. Hang tarps from the house eaves to protect the bales as you install them. If the rain is unusual for the time of year in which you’re building, you don’t have to worry much about the sides of the bales getting wet once they’re stacked in the wall; however, keep the tops of the bales dry the entire time. If it is indeed the rainy season, keep the bale sides dry as well. You’ll be spraying them with water right before you plaster, I know, but if they get really saturated, you can end up with some rot before the dry season comes around again. It won’t likely be much rot, but none is better than any. |
dancinglights
|
12:05p |
the time is gone / the song is over / thought I'd something more to say
Right. Home Safe. I hit the ground running once I got into work yesterday. I am in a maze of twisty deadlines, all alike. I may be eaten by a grue. Or an AAS demo. I expected to come back and be able to take a few half-days from my travel overtime and ease back into things. Instead, I am crunching, finishing up ceramics class, taking a scheduled rock climbing class without having gotten enough practice beforehand, and running the usual errands. Next week I help my dad pack up and move into a stairs-less lawn-less senior community and drive eight hours for a long Thanksgiving and panic some more that I'm not getting work done. I'm trying to save the fretting about my dad for later. In a way, it's kind of a good thing Pod is crunching for school at the same time, but it does mean we don't see one another and we don't have any food in the house. I own a wristwatch again; I bought it on my way to the airport upon remembering my cell phone wouldn't even serve as a pocket watch in Europe. This is relevant insomuch as I've avoided owning a wristwatch for eight or nine years because the constant semiconscious reminder of the passage of time contributes greatly to my anxious neuroses. I was very proud of myself for getting through a week of travel and business as only the Germans can schedule without breaking down into a sobbing mess over something as small as missing an every-ten-minutes train with half an hour to spare. I am beginning to doubt the very short weekend was not enough unscheduled quiet time in which to recover. There will be a trip report of the very few hours I didn't spend working. Eventually. |
| Monday, November 16th, 2009 | |
xkcd_rss
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5:00a |
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| Saturday, November 14th, 2009 |
dancinglights
|
1:46p |
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several_bees
|
11:37p |
Things I had forgotten about Adelaide
- Fences made, for some reason, from dry twigs.
- Despite this, a heightened awareness of fire hazards.
- So many front yards thick with oleanders. Hard matte leaves, pink and white flowers, and fretful warnings from parents. There was a boy who touched an oleander and didn't wash his hands before lunch, and he DIED. Oleanders are bright and hardy, which outweighs the fear of death.
- Drive-through alcohol shops.
- The sea, you can go in it and it's comfortable, warm patches and cool ones, take your pick. It's not "fine once you get used to it"; it's just wonderful, straight away.
- There is a shopping centre called Big Crow.
- There are licorice bullets. These are small, hard-chewy, bullet-shaped pieces of licorice coated in (usually dark) chocolate. Rest of the world, please sort out your failure to stock these.
- People do actually say "no worries", all the time.
- Sometimes it's really hot. When this happens, people with cars have to get up every couple of hours to move the car into a new patch of shade.
|
puzzlement
|
12:30a |
Friday 13th November 2009
I would really have to work up to living alone, it's clear. Andrew's been
away this week and although it has hardly been a reprise of the great May 2009
ordering-pizza-so-I-wouldn't-have-to-leave-the-house-for-days disaster (I was
pretty sick, OK?) the last couple of days have been fairly bad.
Mum was here Monday and Tuesday nights and that was companionable and
pleasant. On Wednesday around the time she left it was clear to me that I was
starting to get a cold of some kind, which quickly degraded into me losing a
yoga mat while doing errands in the Macquarie Centre — not something people
find unamusing the next day, have you found a yoga mat in here? , and
also, no they hadn't — then heading to the implied yoga class and getting so
dizzy that my hearing dropped away. (Andrew tells me he's had that sensation
before, I tend to have vision rather than auditory problems when dizzy,
normally.)
The trouble with exercise is that clearly you can lay off it if you know
prior to doing it that you're sick, but you don't always know beforehand, and
if you don't you find out with considerable drama. I didn't want to tell the
teacher about it either, because this class is very very careful about my
pregnancy already in a way that I find a bit annoying to deal with. I know that
it's a very weird time for my abdominal muscles, yes, and lying on my stomach
is really uncomfortable, but please let me be the judge of my own upper arm
strength. The weight gain is only about 10% over my starting weight.
Last night I pushed out a major task that, I am not kidding, has been a
couple of years in the making, although I did spend most of that time intending
to get around to it rather than doing things. I had no idea how stressful the
immediate leadup had been frankly until I spent half of last night having my
old style semi-hallucinations about it. (Possibly I had a mild fever.) The
hallucinations are really a particularly annoying unrestful sort of semi-dream
state, where time passes extremely slowly and dream people argue with each
other incoherently. I used to have a night of that with every new job I got. It
tends to stop if I have my eyes open. Keeping them open is a problem.
By the time this morning came around, I was bloody tired, and utterly
socially incoherent. Was that a joke you made there? Or a meta-joke? Would it
be better if I played along, or if I got cranky? I'm especially bad, when
tired, at geek social jokes, which tend to revolve around identifying something
vaguely ambiguous in someone's phrasing, choosing the obviously wrong
interpretation, and making them stand by it.
So, that was 48 hours of my life I could have lived without. Janus has been
making himself a bit scarce: I wouldn't kick my housing either, if it was in
that kind of mood. He has stuck with small rearrangements.
It's not that I get sick more, I think, when Andrew is away, it's that a
small change in my energy levels makes it such a pain to care for myself. And
pregnancy plus illness is not really small, not in the first or third
trimesters.
I was going to take myself to Sculptures By the Sea tomorrow, but with my
increasingly unpleasant reaction to walking around and actual sickness I don't
think I can, sensibly at any rate. It's two trains and a bus in each direction,
and then a slow and hilly walk. (Everyone else in the world who owns a car is
thinking uh huh, that car-free caper is still ludicrous , but actually,
here's a little known pregnancy symptom for you: extreme motion sickness. I get
sick when I drive now. Mum said to ask the obstetricians about it,
and they suggested that not being pregnant would be a good solution.)
I need to get some sun though. Luckily, stone fruits are coming into season,
so I am motivated to head for the shops. And if I sleep well, perhaps to go
into the city and have Spice I Am with Andrew on his way home. Time for a
goodly bit of fire.
Originally posted at http://puzzling.org/logs/diary/2009/November/13/20091113 |
| Friday, November 13th, 2009 |
devilmiyu
|
12:05a |
....still has 2 chapters to read in order to finish her homework. AAAAAHH!!!!! Need sleep! Need rest. Head hurts. Owwies! |
|
xkcd_rss
|
5:00a |
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| Thursday, November 12th, 2009 |
devilmiyu
|
9:35p |
Tonight's episode of FRINGE was fantastic. The glyphs in this episode spelled out "ARRIVE". I love decoding these things! |
novawulfen
|
4:58p |
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| Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 |
love_boardgames
[ esprix ]
|
5:12p |
Game question
Oh, since I'm here, anybody out there know where I can get a copy of Clue: Harry Potter for a reasonable price? I've seen it on clearance in my local Wal*Mart, which would be ideal, since all the places I've found online are, er, rather more than clearance priced. :) |
love_boardgames
[ esprix ]
|
5:08p |
A game review - "Soaps"
OK, not to be a gaming pimp or anything, but I wanted to send a shout-out to all those independent game designers out there by way of kudos to a new friend of mine. Recently a new gaming group has formed in my local area through Meetup.com (which, frankly, I thought was DOA a few years ago, but apparently still has a following). We've been meeting for a couple months now and they're great. We've been playing Apples to Apples, Carcassonne, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Kill Doctor Lucky, Guillotine, Management Material, Rummikub, and on and on. I love that some of these folks have never played any Eurogames before, but are eager to try new things. The organizer is also a game designer, and he's been testing the waters to see if we're a group willing enough to beta test a few of his games. One game he completed and we've played now quite a few times is called Soaps, and I have to say, it's AWESOME! ( Here's a bit about the gameplay and mechanics )Needless to say, I highly recommend it. Right now he's self-publishing through a print-on-demand site called The Game Crafter, but the quality is great and it's well worth it if you're looking for a new, fun card game: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/soaps(I promise I'm not getting anything out of this other than trying to help a friend and promote a game I really enjoy. If it's not appropriate, I'm happy to take this post down.) Current Mood:  amused |
devilmiyu
|
11:11a |
Hm..... I just wanted to post at this exact time of 11:11 on 11/11 of this year. Did the portal open up yet to take me away? Heee hee! |
|
strawbalehouseb
|
5:39p |
Announcing the First Dates of the 2010 Workshop Schedule!
http://www.strawbale.com/2010-straw-bale-workshop-schedule http://www.strawbale.com/?p=1000 
I’ve been trying to get all of my dates confirmed before making my schedule announcement, but it just hasn’t been possible. I’m still working to secure some dates in the UK and in Alaska, but I wanted to at least let you know about three confirmed dates to get the ball rolling.
I’ll be teaching a workshop in April in Missoula, Montana. This should be fun because of the more urban setting than most of my workshops are used to. I’ll then move East a bit to teach in Manchester, Michigan in May. You can learn more about the site on which I’ll be teaching by clicking here. From there, I move South to Hico, Texas to work on a round sacred chamber. This is a cool opportunity because we’ll be building round and that’s not something most workshops are able to offer.
Click here for the individual workshop dates and to sign up. I’ll have more dates and locations coming soon, so stayed tuned if the current dates and locations don’t work for you. |
| Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | |
pfsc
|
10:07p |
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