I’m building a new box kite following the basic design of my first kite — three cross braces, two at the ends, one at the middle.  I’m going to use junk mail circulars for the… sail?  whatever the paper part is called.  Recycling FTW!

Rdio.com is the best ten dollars a month I’ve ever spent.  Currently listening to the hell out of Blood Orange.

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I’m still pretty lost at sea when it comes to these blogs and whatnot.  I mean look at my categories list.  “culture”, “architecture”, “earth sciences”?!??!?!?  What the F is wrong with me, could I be more pretentious.

could I?

I mean, what do I think I’m doing here, writing a textbook?

anyway.  I might not use this WP site as much if Google+ keeps improving.  The current state of the site makes it possible to write semi-bloggy updates, and that might be sufficient for what I meant to use Wibv for, without all the extra accoutrements of WordPress.

I have been much the same these past ten months.  Perhaps a bit fatter, and a bit balder.  I have not revisited the kite this year, all of a sudden the summer was a bit too uncomfortable for me to think about being outside.

I started reading A Song of Ice and Fire, currently halfway through A Clash of Kings.  It’s all very engrossing but it’s a bit frustrating if you want moral justice in your fantasy fiction, because Martin gives you none.  At least thus far.

My wife decided to decoupage the coffee table, and I accidentally helped her too much, i.e. did a lot of it.  I had fun.  I had a number of National Geographic magazines lying around which I felt no guilt about cutting up because I have them in digital form.

I’m going to cut this short before I hit 200 words, because whooa, doggie, ease yourself back into things.

It appears that the rigidity of the structure is an important component of its ability to fly. I used balsa struts that were half as thick as the ones used in Kite 1.0, the idea being to try to shave off weight wherever I could since I was going for a double-box concept. I also made two cross struts instead of three – meaning there was no structural support at the very ends of the box. The three strut design had rigidity and support from the cross braces which were attached at the ends and at the middle of the longitudinal struts.

I know this would benefit from some illustrations but I’m typing this on my phone.

Anyway, the two cross braces were attached to the longitudinal struts a few inches away from the ends. This meant that the thin struts – which were very flexible – were free to bend and flap violently when placed in an air current and so, I imagine, causing excessive turbulence which made flying the double box design pretty difficult.

There is a need for additional experimentation regarding the attachment points for the string. Improper setup of the bridle (the string that attaches to the kite, which is in turn attached to the long flying string) can make the kite meet the wind at less than ideal angles for flight.

Side note: I should really learn some of the proper terminology for kite parts.

Finally, the thin struts meant that upon the first or second hard landing there was irreparable damage to the structure – in other words, the struts snapped like the thin little twigs they were.

I had no such structural issues with Kite 1.0 which leads me to believe the added strength of a thicker balsa wood may be worth the trade-of of the added weight (which on a single box kite may be negligible, but as I enlarge the design may become an issue? Kite 3.0 will have the answers).

not this love bug

But these guys, Plecia neartica :

Click me for a larger version

Click me for a larger version

I was recently in Florida for a week and apparently it was lovebug season.  I’ve been there a few times over the past few years and somehow I have always missed this because I didn’t even know about it until this trip.  We arrived at my in-laws’ and the air was thick with copulating insects.  By the end of the week the front of our rental car was black with plastered bugs.

While googling to find out their scientific name, I came across the myth that they are a genetic experiment gone wrong.

Things I’m thinking about:

I think that’s it. Wait wait one more

In the morning I took a small bag of frozen strawberries that I had vacuum-packed maybe a year ago.  I have some things in the freezer that are probably still good due to the vacuum packing and I should really start going through it.  I cooked the strawberries with a few tablespoons of sugar over low heat until it became a nice strawberry sauce to pour over my pancakes.  I could have used more sugar I guess because the sauce was still pretty tart.

Too late did I realize I was out of cornstarch and thus didn’t know what to thicken the sauce with, and then I found some large pearl tapioca in the cupboard.  I wasn’t sure if it was cool to just throw tapioca in with the strawberries so what I did instead was to put the tapioca in a glass measuring jar and added a cup of water and microwaved it for a minute.  Then I strained out the pearls and poured the thickened goo into the strawberry sauce, hoping that the proteins and polysaccharides or whatever the hell causes the thickening action in tapioca would be present in the liquid at that point, independently of the pearls.  It seemed to work.

Two days ago we bought a rotisserie chicken for dinner and we ate most of it, except the legs — we’re not really dark meat people.  (For Thanksgiving/Christmas, if I’m cooking I’ll buy a turkey breast rather than a whole one).  I saved the rest because I figured I should make stock and not waste it.  I wanted to make it pretty simple since my goal was to try to approximate the chicken soup my grandmother used to make.  I haven’t tasted it in well over 25 years so it’s unlikely that even if I got it right I’d be able to recognize it as such, but I figured I could get close to it.

I cooked down a whole chopped onion in some butter and a bit of olive oil, then tore up the remains of the chicken and put that in there.  Then I sprinkled some salt and added a bunch of water, and brought it to a boil, and then let it simmer for about 5 hours or so.  While that happened I defrosted some chicken cutlets (continuing the task of using up things from the freezer).

I chopped up the cutlets and browned them in another big pot with a wee bit more olive oil, then threw in some chopped up baby potatoes and about four handfuls of rice.  Then I ladled in the stock through a sieve and added an equal amount of water.  Brought to a boil, then simmered for about an hour.  I sprinkled a tiny amount (about half a teaspoon) of a commercial herbes de provence mix because it seemed appropriate.

The soup was thick and starchy, the potatoes were perfectly soft, the rice had that exploded look that rice gets when left in soup too long.

This is the part of this entry where I note that I failed to photograph any of this, and therefore as a food blog post it will be severely lacking.

Then I decided to make bread from scratch.  I’ve been thinking about buying a breadmaker but before I add another gadget to my tiny kitchen, I figured I should see if it’s really that onerous to just try to do it the old-school way.  It’s possible my oven is just not amenable to baking bread, we’ll find out.  As I write this the loaves are undergoing the second rise.  I didn’t have bread flour so I used half whole wheat and half all-purpose.  I was a little confused about the yeast instructions, because the packet said to add the active dry yeast to some warm water and then add that to the flour, but most recipes for basic bread that I’ve come across say to mix the dry ingredients (including the yeast) together first and only then add liquid.

I should add that I used to be really into cooking, many years ago.  I joined a book-of-the-month club for cookbooks and bought quite a few thick texts.  My goal was to make things from scratch as much as possible.

Tasty.

But over the years I lost track of things, stopped cooking at home for a while, or at least stopped doing it with the gusto and dedication I used to have.  So I’ve forgotten more than I ever knew of the basic tips and tricks that one picks up after being in a kitchen regularly.

This is all essentially saying, if I sound like a total idiot, it’s because I may be.

So:  bread is rising, I may edit this later to let you know how it went.  Here’s the basic recipe I followed (I was looking for something very basic).  There’s something very satisfying about working food with your hands.  I kneaded the dough for ~ 10 minutes like the recipe (and the back of the yeast packet) asked to.

*then* I decided to make yogurt.  I’ve been meaning to do this for a while but I always end up eating the yogurt I buy for the starter.  A while back I bought some pretty mason jars because I didn’t have any appropriate containers for yogurt storage, and I wanted to avoid plastics as I tend to do these days with anything in my kitchen.  Here’s a link, here’s another one.

I boiled water and poured it into two of my mason jars and the lids for sterilization purposes.  I heated some milk to ~ 190 – 200 degrees F, and then let it cool down to ~ 110 deg F.  Then I whisked two spoons of yogurt into the milk and poured it into my mason jars and wrapped a hot wet cloth around them and put them in the microwave to keep the warmth in.  I’ll let you know how that goes too.

But now I’m also thinking about using the rest of that tapioca to make pudding.

Today I figured out how to remap the keyboard so that the semi-colon key (which is where it should be) now maps to the apostrophe (which is located way down beside the left arrow key)

Seeing as the apostrophe gets used far more than the semi-colon, this should now enable me to type with a little more speed.

Speaking of semi-colons, I also installed the Eclipse Java KDE so I can teach myself Java.  Or something.

What’s really neat about Ubuntu on this little guy is just how fast and fluid it is.  WinXP was pretty sluggish, and applications took a while to run.  Everything is just silky smooth now.

I’ll probably write more later as I’ll be sitting in the airport waiting to see if Earl lets me take off.

(funny – I guess I got used to the crappy apostrophe positioning because I keep pausing to lift my right hand and look at the keyboard to find the key.)

I mean, with judicious use of tags I can probably keep that organized in whatever way I like. probably.

Last weekend I was traveling and I had the little Dell netbook with me. My wife hates it because the keyboard is not laid out properly — the apostrophe is set below where it should be, for one — but I enjoy traveling with it because it is so delightfully light. A bit slow, though.

Well, I decided I’d use some sketchy chinese website to watch The Empire Strikes Back, and it raped my little netbook. Windows XP was corrupted in some kind of spectacular way.

I decided then to finally do one of these things that I talk about for ages and never get around to, I decided to install Linux in it and learn about it that way.

It’s been pretty interesting so far, I don’t yet know what I’m doing, I’m just following instructions from the Ubuntu website and typing sudo this and sudo that. I have to admit one of the most enjoyable aspects of it has been the use of the command line. Back in the day I became somewhat proficient at messing around with DOS 5.0.  Also, when I was working in IT at a telemarketing company, I had to teach myself a number of UNIX commands and concepts in order to keep the dialer up and running. That was a finicky piece of equipment I tell you.

and there’s something so wonderfully computery about command lines.

I remember when DOS 6.22 came out, and with it, the Memmaker utility, and I scoffed “Pfft. Why would I use Memmaker when I can just reconfigure config.sys and autoexec.bat by myself. MEMMAKER IS FOR NOOBS.”

Come to think of it, I should make a t-shirt with that on it. MEMMAKER IS FOR NOOBS

Man, that sounds awesome.

In high school I was told I was a visual learner.  Still not quite sure exactly what that entails — note to self: look it up.  I could try to express thoughts via images but that seems a bit backwards.  Also, if I were to try to photograph what I’m up to today, only bad things could happen — it’s not good to be taking cells out of an incubator to photograph them…

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque, aka The Blue Mosque

It makes me wish I were a Muslim because then that building would have even more beauty and significance to me than it does now, merely architecturally and aesthetically. It would have the added connection of a cultural upbringing.

It’s kind of how I feel as a completely lapsed Catholic when I go inside a really, really pretty church. Religion captured a feeling and turned it to its own uses.  It’s interesting because I think it’s a feeling we’d have regardless of cultural indoctrination; because if I as a total non-Muslim (and non-believer in general) can look at the Blue Mosque and be filled with that feeling of awe and of being tiny, then I’d hazard that this is a feeling that can be elicited purely on a reptilian-part-of-the-brain level.  (What is that, the amygdala?  I forget)