perial

Today was the big day!

( Details of cider pressing )
Result: About 5 liters of very, very yummy cider.

Did some more work on my cider press this weekend. The car jack is mounted, a bottom plate with appropriate brackets is made, rails for controlling sideways slide (my mother had some left over) are mounted on the side, a collecting tray, some plexiglass plates and a piece of tube are acquired, bottles are cleaned, and appropriate pieces of cheesecloth are cut, overlocked and washed. Ran out of energy before I got to the actual pressing, though, mainly because once the apple processing starts, a lot of it needs to be done, and done all the way, lest it oxygenate and get icky-brown.

Lessons learned:

The rails need to be much further in to work, far enough to be well over the collector. My rails don't go far enough in. I'll do the first trial without sideways support and see how critical it is. In the long term, something self-adjusting would be nice.

Extra pieces of 2x4 are necessary for adjusting height. Acquired and ready.

Collectors aren't all that cheap. I got a plastic serving tray for DKK 125, a simple metal one would have been twice that.

I'm starting to build an apple press from scratch, based loosely on some Instructables. The first one is going to be a small one done with soft wood, due to money and availability restraints. If the principle works, I will scale it up with some harder wood.

( Notes to self )

I now have a sturdy frame on less-than-sturdy feet. Need to affix the feet a little better, get a jack, some solid plates, and some cheese cloth. Then there will be cider.

I wonder who has cheese cloth available around here.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that when you add the potatoes to the water when boiling them makes a significant difference for how them come out. You can either add them to the cold water or the boiling water. One of the ways leads to solid boiled potatoes like you'd eat straight, the other makes them fall apart for easy use in mashed potatoes. But I haven't been able to find out which is which, and I boil potatoes rarely enough that I don't have my own data set. Anyone have a rule of thumb/explanation for which is which?

From 'jQuery in Action':

Remember those days (not all that long ago) when fledgling page authors would try
to add pizzazz to their pages with counterproductive abominations such as mar-
quees; blinking text; loud background patterns that interfered with the readability
of page text; annoying animated GIFs; and, perhaps worst of all, unsolicited back-
ground sounds that would play upon page load (and served to test how fast a user
could close down the browser)?

When I checked out the pages for the local political parties for today's election (which I should probably get around to getting to soon), several of the pages started playing video immediately, including one of the serious parties' pages. I now know how quickly I can close a page.

That's about how far we've come:(

Other than that, jQuery is perty damn cool.

but I really like this thing from their winter '08 collection: .

Having three egg whites left over, I decided to make waffles this morning. However, all the standard recipes I found called for all of the egg, so I looked online for a bit (through CookThing, which is a fabulous recipe search engine that handles wanted and unwanted ingredients) and found an appropriate recipe. Between Mickey and me, the recipe mutated enough that I have to re-write it here.

( Whole-wheat Belgian Waffles )

While I've done some talks and informal explanations of things at various points in the past, I have never really done any teaching per se. I somehow managed to get through Ph.D. without even doing a TAship. But now I've taught, and apparently taught well. After some interest from my co-students on the photography class in the spring, I signed up with FOF (the biggest of the local adult education organizations) to run a Lightroom class. Rather than having a lot of small evening classes (I don't like having all my evenings taken), I ran it as a two-day weekend class, with 7 1/2 hours each day. Nine people signed up, 8 turned up (not including any of the ones from the previous class who said they'd sign up), and 6 stuck through both days.

So I taught how to import pictures, how to rate them and keyword them, how to adjust them, export them, move them, accidentally lose them, make them look really funny and generally get to know Lightroom as a primary photo tool. From the comments I gather several of them will buy Lightroom and use it as their main tool, even if it's a somewhat different way of working than they've been used to.

Also, we're going to meet up in about a month to discuss how everybody's been doing and see what we've learned in the meanwhile. My second try at getting a little group of locals to meet up occasionally to just talk photos.

So how do I like teaching? I find it exhausting, for one thing, especially 7 hours in a row (with breaks, though). Not surprising for a natural introvert. But I also find it very satisfying to see my students learn. One student was over 70, and the first day very slow to do anything, but had shown definite improvements on the second day. Everybody seemed to "get" what LR does and mostly how it does it. There were only a very few times I had to say "I don't know" and they were always followed by "but let's find out".

I got through all the stuff I had planned for a 4-hour session in a different context, but only barely. Obviously, I'll need to trim a bit for that. Certainly a good experience that I'd like to do again, plus it gives me some moneez (DKK 250 per hour).

Not a bad thing to get really good at one area and then start teaching. At the same time, it has inspired me to take more photos again (kinda in a slump right now) and to do something about keywording my photos.

My LiveJournal Trick-or-Treat Haul
perial goes trick-or-treating, dressed up as Pirate.
amoryl gives you 18 softly glowing raspberry-flavoured wafers.
beltoft gives you 1 green mint-flavoured gummy worms.
cassiopeja tricks you! You lose 9 pieces of candy!
fairgoldberry tricks you! You lose 5 pieces of candy!
gg_fangirl gives you 12 purple orange-flavoured gummy bats.
glad_laks gives you 18 purple raspberry-flavoured wafers.
ladyofthemasque gives you 5 purple blueberry-flavoured jawbreakers.
qnonimous gives you 1 light blue grapefruit-flavoured pieces of chewing gum.
quaryn_dk tricks you! You lose 33 pieces of candy!
supersniffles gives you 5 white banana-flavoured jawbreakers.
perial ends up with 13 pieces of candy.
Go trick-or-treating! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern.

Fortunately, she will share the candy with me.

It has been a busy weekend in the Blake-Clausen household. Yesterday I took a look at the weather forecast and decided that it'd be the perfect time to refinish the dining table. I took it all apart (I hug and kiss takeapartable furniture), sanded down the middle part (which can be used without the foldouts, thus getting the table back up as soon as possible), and gave them the first coat. A good belt sander is a godsend in this case.

Having worked hard all through the day, I sat down with a Dark Horse and promptly and stupidly killed my NetHack character (for those who follow my Twitter account for the same purpose, the silence there has been due to the near-death of our wireless card).

Today, I gave the table another coat and sanded one of the wings and gave it its first coat, just in time to get off to line dance (which we came in 10 minutes or so late for due to trouble finding the room). Line dancing was fun - once again, I find myself the only male in a class - I seemed to be able to understand it intellectually very rapidly, though my feet have a bit of catching up to do. It was especially funny that the jazz-box quarter turn that everybody else had trouble with was very easy for me since I used the same kind of move in fighting. Dancing and fighting actually have a fair amount in common.

Right outside the school was a big ol' trap - a giant flea market that's apparently there every third Sunday of the month or so. We went all the way through, picking up a few odds and ends, until at the very end, at the exit, there's a huge armoire standing around, the only piece of furniture of its kind on the entire market. Not just big, but also old, probably from around the turn of the century (yes, there's only one turn of the century in my mind), and hauntingly familiar. In fact, very familiar- the beautiful decorations struck us as very similar to the ones on our existing cabinet. For 1500 kr out of savings, we got it (delivered) and a few books. Moments later, a rain shower broke out that would have severely damaged it had it not already gone into the van - we ran around helping the dealers pack away books (including a few antique ones that it would have been a real shame to have been destroyed).

Home again through the rain, the armoire got inside without any rain damage. Now anyone who's been to our apartment know that it's stuffed already with furniture and boxen and fabric and things, so how on earth do we fit this beastie in? Easy - move the games cabinet under the cookbook box, and the armoire can cover up the ugly backside of the projects cabinet, even giving us about 10 cm more space in front of the piano.

Another set of layers of lacquer, much moving around of stuff, and the weekend is done for all practical purposes. It has been vera busee.

Ganked/yanked/yoinked from ladyofthemasque:

Tired of all of those surveys made up by high school kids? Have you ever kissed someone? Missed someone? Told someone you loved them? Drank alcohol? Here you have 40 questions for the people who are a little older...


( Just the facts, ma'm )

My coworker just got a Hero smartphone. We tried a few things, like taking pictures (which turned off his music) and taking video (which didn't get sound on it). Momentarily, his phone locked up and had to be restarted - again.

Sure, his can be customized in ways that mine can, but I don't really need that. I've spent my time reconfiguring window manager configurations to get my setup *just right*. By now, I just want stuff to work, and that's what the iPhone does for me.

(Granted, I have managed to get mine to hang by going directly to sleep from camera mode, so it's not perfect. But it's very smooth).

Here's a related quote from my current favorite programmer site.

( Happiness and GUIs )

The tax man lurves us! We just got 6000 kr ($1200) back in taxes from last year. Woohoo! Two-thirds of them go towards paying down the credit card debt from last fall (!), and the rest we take and use for whatever. I'm going for some bits for my RepStrap (which I just got to move for the first time today), possibly some new black slacks and probably something for my leather work.

I've been reading Joel on Software blog recently, finding it extremely interesting both at a technical level and for thinking about careers and companies in general. In particular, I want to share this entry, called Hitting the High Notes which very nicely nails some of what makes programming different from engineering and more similar to design. The blog in general is very much worth reading for anyone in IT, and parts are also quite interesting for everybody else. Also, he has a great writing style.

When did I become such a worry-wart? And why? And, most importantly, how do I stop it?

Using fresh low-quality batteries, my flash drew 2 amps initially, down to 1 amp after about 14 seconds. With a voltage of 5.5, this means the total energy draw for getting ready to fire is about 5.5V * (1.5A * 14s) Ws = 115 Ws.

Now all I need to know is what size capacitor to emulate this with. I suppose I can just test some, I have lots by now.

This is not exactly fast, but I don't have some high-power batteries around to compare with. And I guess it's just a cheap flash, too, a brand name one with LiIon batteries would recharge a lot faster.