Gate Upgrade

One of the things you have to do when you have kids is danger proof your home as best you can.  We have a staircase in the center of our home that isn't the most baby friendly piece of architecture, so it needs a gate to keep the kid from making an ascent.

Most of the gates you can get now are based on an expansion concept.  The gate presses out against each end to provide resistance to pushing the gate out of the way.  This is great for a door opening or someplace along a hallway (we have a couple other gates installed in those situations) but are not so great for a staircase where one or the other end of the gate is relying on a freestanding newel post.  In that situation pushing out on the support just pushes the structure outward.  You probably can rig the thing with enough oomph to hold in place, but the fact of the matter is in doing so you are slowly but surely damaging the stair railing.

So for that scenario you need to find some other kind of gate.  In the Gib5on iteration of this solution I managed to find a kind of accordion type gate and MacGyver a mount for it.  You can kind of see what is going on here:

In order to mount this I cut two pieces of 1x2 and drilled them the long way to accept zipties (you can barely see one of those pretty much at the end of his nose).  The 1x2 was soft mounted to the structure so as not to damage it and then the included mounting hardware was hardmounted to the 1x2.

This worked reasonably enough and so now in the Sabian iteration of the project I went looking for the gate and the stupid hardware I'd made last time.  Search as I might I couldn't find it.  I eventually came to the conclusion that it must have been in the garage last spring when we had a little bit of a sewer backup and consequently must have gotten some ick on it - and therefore went into the dumpster.  So much for that.

We needed a replacement.  I went to the home center looking for the identical gate so as to repeat the earlier installation.  If you know anything about home centers you will not be surprised to know that I was unsuccessful.  They didn't have this gate (I bet I could have found one at Target or something.  It is a fairly common piece of gear).

They did have this:

This, lo and behold, is a gate designed exactly for the installation circumstances I was just explaining - bearing on the newel post of a staircase.  They have designed and manufactured the adapter hardware I had bush-fixed myself in the earlier round.  Instead of drilled out 1x2 there is a steel adapter piece that mounts to the newel post with adhesive and straps.  The straps are somewhat more formidable than the zipties I had used, and the fastener actually includes a ratchet mechanism; making it simpler to tension the belt (which was an annoying part of using zipties).

Here's the installation in place here:

The straps are also preferable over zipties because the buckle has a release capability, so when you install them backward such that the extra is in front you can take them off without damaging them and turn it around so the installation is cleaner.

I went back and forth over the adhesive.  It probably isn't necessary for proper function but I put it in anyway.  I'm hoping at the end I can get it removed without damaging the finish on the newel.  We'll see - in like three years.

The gate is oak.  The architecture is maple.  You can't have everything I guess.  It doesn't look too out of place, and even wrong it is way more spiffy than the raw pine of the Gib5on installation.

We'll see how it holds up.

Working From Home

We're into the third week of doing classes at a distance using Zoom.

As an unintended consequence of the venue change we have had to put our foot down on the gas on a basement renovation that has been meandering along for over a year now.

At the end of last winter, knowing that Sabian was on the way we had to shuffle some of the real estate in the house.  A new kid meant converting an existing office/tv room into a new bedroom.  The only space to create a new office space was the basement which at that point was unfinished.  So last year we hired a bunch of people and started a renovation of the basement.  We added drainage, put up walls and painted, redid all the HVAC and got a new waterheater.  Like most renovations it took a little longer than expected but eventually we had a pretty decent space.

We salvaged the custom desk and base cabinets we had from the existing office for the new space.  But that isn't nearly enough storage, and the upper cabinets won't work in the new space because the ceiling height is somewhat lower.  Enter the folks at Ikea and Target and a bounty of flat pack storage furniture.  We're really a little hazy on what we want the space to be and Mrs. T has been working at this desk for a while now without finishing it out.  That's mostly been enabled by my not using it much at all - so she had lots of space.

The switch to home working has made it impossible for me to eschew the new office space any longer and that meant cohabitating with the Mrs. and that meant that the finishing out of the space had to move forward.  So I got to work on the upper cabinets.  We'd selected some modular shelves from Target.  They aren't intended for horizontal mounting on the wall but theatre people are accustomed to using things in a manner in which they aren't intended.

We wound up with a little bit of an ugly spot in the corner.  With one unit starting in the corner the other unit would have blocked out the access to the end cubbie.  There also was a space between the two units because we didn't size the room based on the size of the available cabinets.  As a wrok around we bought an extra small unit which i cannibalized to create an extension to one unit to fill up the space.  This was extra fun as I was able to use not only my table saw, but also a hole saw kit and my pocket screw kit.  I only regret I wasn't able to work in the purchase of a new tool in order to finish things off.

Next up I'll have to do under cabinet lighting - also salvaged from upstairs.  In order to do that I have to track down a jumper cable for lighting units we bought almost a decade ago.  Fingers crossed.  More pictures to come.

Plugging Away

Got moving on the attic project a little today.  The weather was good and it just seemed like too good a chance to miss.  Pretty much all along I've thought the most difficult part of the job was going to be moving materials.  There's a flight and a half of stairs from the garage to the front door.  There's two flights of stairs from the first floor to the second.  After that there's another flight and a half's worth of attic ladder.

That's a lot of up.

To ease into it I started with insulation.  The moving equivalent would be boxes of pillows - leave the books for later.  Even with very little weight, eight times up and down like 40 steps I did start to feel it.

The first step in the actual work was to install the insulation on the existing wall.

It doesn't look like much but it's a start.  I have to take a half a second out to give a plug for the plastic encapsulated JM ComfortTherm insulation.  I'd been dreading the insulation part of this job (if you're keeping track that's the second dread) and this stuff is awesome.  Through all the work you basically don't ever touch the batting and the cover serves as a vapor barrier so you can skip that step.  Also, the casing has flanges on the side that ride over the studs for staples.  It was a little more expensive but for me it was 100% worth it.

Since the ball was rolling and the weather was odd (mid 50's the first week of January) I decided to move to another step.  I could have moved 2x4's up to the attic or I could go buy drywall.  I opted for drywall.

I'd been dreading moving the drywall (#3).  Partly it was because I wasn't sure how it would fit on my roof rack.  I'd danced around the job for a week trying to decide if I was going to buy a new roof rack for drywall.  Obviously I opted for a DIY solution over purchasing what I found would have been about a $300 commercial rack (although I think it might still fit inside the number the contractor quoted me).

Somewhere along the way I'd forgotten how heavy this stuff was.  I really should have brought a helper to the home center.  I think I'd talked myself into thinking it wouldn't be difficult because I'd found 1/4" drywall as opposed to 1/2".  Unfortunately the 1/4" was a dollar more per sheet than 3/8" and even after I'd talked myself into the cost I determined that the stuff was so brittle that I'd never get it moved.

So 7 @ 4x8 3/8" dual drywall sheets - 90# per pack.  I loaded it onto a dolly myself as packs.  When I got to the car I split them into individual sheets.  When I got to the very last sheet a Home Depot guy showed up to help - thanks.

Unloading at home was easier than loading at the store.  I have not one clue as to how I am going to get these things up all those stairs.  Certainly have to do some pre-cutting (I don't think a 4x8 will pass the attic access anyway).

Wish me luck.

And Another Project

Keeping a list?  You can add "build room in the attic."

We bought a new furnace a little while back.  When we did the buy the march of progress took us from a 75% efficient unit to a 90+% efficient unit.  That was swell.  But there's a wrinkle.  The new, more efficient units have a water line and a drain.  In many installations this wouldn't matter even a little bit, but in this particular case it does because the furnace is in the attic.  The attic of our house is insulated on the floor such that air can come in through the eaves to cool the roof in the summer.  This arrangement means the roofing lasts longer, but the attic is vulnerable to freezing in the winter.

Most of the time one wouldn't care if the attic froze as long as the house underneath it remains toasty warm.  That was true of our house right up until we installed a furnace in the attic that had a water line.  FWIW we complicated it a little too by adding a humidifier - I mean as long as water was going to be a problem we might as well go all in, right?

So I have to build a room in the attic.

My thought was to get a guy.  The job is mostly within my skillset, but I figured it would be nice to have someone else to blame when something comes out less than.  I had a number in my head - well a couple numbers: what I thought the materials cost would be, what I thought the bid would be, what I wanted to pay, and what I thought I'd get away with.  When the bid came in it was about 100% over the number I thought the initial bid would be.

So I have to build a room in the attic.

A couple of days ago I made a start...

When I started the job I started a spreadsheet.  Gonna be interesting to see where I come in against the number I got from the contractor.  On the first day I learned something new about my car: the roof rack on my car (having traded my truck in after the boy was born) will hold 16 2x4's on a single layer.

The loading thing has been bugging me for a while.  Somewhere along the way I am going to have to bring in some sheet-rock and the roof rack really won't accommodate it.  Suddenly I'm cruising the internet looking for rack bars that are sized to accommodate sheet goods.  Kind of a bummer.  Most of the time when I do a home project I manage to find a way to buy a new tool along the way.  This job felt right for a cordless mitre saw, but now it looks like I might have to do a roof rack.

Or I guess I could just rent a truck for the day.

Watch this space for project updates.

Upgrades, and the Before and After Photo

We've been doing some incremental upgrades at the house, some decorating here, a new furniture piece there, couple of shelves someplace else...  As much as I am trying to keep a running record of projects for myself I just can't seem to remember to take the "before" picture.  Truth be told, the "after picture by itself just doesn't have the same impact.

Case in point: we're putting in a new deck/porch/we don't really know what to call it in front of the house.  As part of the prep for this project I took on the task of clearing away some bushes that have been there since we moved into the house.  A couple of weekends ago I hit the yard with a cordless reciprocating saw and two pairs of hand trimmers and presto chango:

Poof, where once there was an out of control bush now there is none.  Except, without the before you have no idea what I did.  Also, the bush went into no less than 10 yard refuse bags which looked REALLY formidable on the curb waiting for the trash guys - if only I had remembered to photograph them.

You'd think that walking around with a digital camera in my pocket would be enough to make me remember to take pictures.  But I guess I should have learned this lesson from my students total lack of posting on the tumblr: having access to a camera and subject matter doesn't create photos.

You have to remember to take the picture.

Or at least you have to remember that maybe you already took the picture several months ago...

Halloween.  You get the idea.

Even without the new addition I think pulling the bush is an improvement to the house.  I can finally see something out of the living room window.  Also, neither of the photos show it, but this space is pretty much the only level space in the whole front yard, nice to pick up some room for a couple of chairs should we want it.

So now that we have the way before and the before pictures I'll be sure to keep the site up to date on the project progress.  Actually, the whole thing was supposed to be done by now.  But we're having a fairly typical contractor experience... the start date got pushed back 30 days because... because contractors don't sell opening night tickets.

Airport Expansion

The airport expansion continues.  This time mostly with support vehicles.  My playdate was very motivated to keep working as he's off to camp soon and won't be able to contribute for a while as a result.

So here's the current overview:

One of the first adds was a fuel truck.  I'd done one before, but I am happier with this one.  It looks less like a cement truck than its predecessor.  It's minifig scale - has doors, which is unusual for me, and hoses that can be manipulated.

Next up is a passenger staircase.  I keep running into this problem where to accommodate the minifigs takes only two spaces, but that representation isn't really something that would work.  So this time I went two wide but worked in some handrails out to the side.  If I'd built out the handrails with bricks I think the passenger aisle would have had to be four wide and then the thing becomes six wide and starts to look out of proportion.

Upon further consideration I decided that this unit was too tall in relationship to the plane (which admittedly is in a completely different scale - although more and more to me is believable as an executive jet - but that would mean the control tower is way too short).  So I dropped it down one course.  That necessitated re-jiggering the diagonal rails, fwiw I like this better.  I also added a safety chain to the front.

That's fuel and people, next we did luggage.  First was the baggage loader.  It has a ramp that raises and lowers.  It also has a data screen and a control lever.  I went to old school wheels here.  For some reason I thought it mattered.  Maybe I was concerned about the height of the deck using the standard wheels.  Anyway, I think it's a nice piece for what it is.

Then as you can already see we did a baggage tram.  It's a tractor and then three, two level carts with all flexible connections between them.  I think this was really successful.  It even rolls around like an actual tram when cornering.  If anything here I found myself wishing there was a two wheel axle component that was only two studs wide instead of four.  I've since discovered there actually are those pieces but I didn't have them at the time (and probably have IBI now).

What's next you say?  There's still catering and maybe de-icing vehicles to do (and if my playdate has anything to say about it probably police and fire).  Also I am starting to see a terminal building and jetway in my head.  Just have to wait for the next visit I guess.

It's BAAAAAAACK!

Sometimes things work out well.  Sometimes.

As one of my four readers you may be aware that I run another blog: News From the Real World.  That blog aggregates articles I think are relevant for my students.  This is the source material for the "Worth a Look" and "Vote for Comment of the Week" posts on this page.

There are two main streams for the content on that page.  One of the is the "ToDo/Alerts" folder in my email.  Through a bunch of Outlook rules that folder gathers a bunch of industry content and I winnow that for Greenpage (my shorthand for News From the Real World) content.  The other stream are articles I tag "Greenpage" in my RSS feed.  I have lost track of how many feeds I am subscribed to and which of them are pretty much exclusively for Greenpage content generation.  Anyway, articles pile up under that tag and then I winnow those into Greenpage articles.

In my present operation of 12 posts per day, 6 days per week I generally post 6 articles sourced from my RSS tag.  A quick scan of the tag shows 26 articles tagged today.  That means 20 articles that I initially thought were relevant don't make the final cut.  Often it's editorial balance that makes the difference - I just don't like the way the 12 daily posts are forming up.  Sometimes it is just volume.  If I posted everything it would be overwhelming for the students.  Sometimes I think even the 60 posts per week is overwhelming.

Back in the golden days of Google Reader (may it rest in peace) the software gave me an interesting sideline.  Tagged articles in Reader could themselves get RSS feeds.  That allowed me to have a link on the Greenpage to what I called the "Greenpage Feeder Page."  If people were so interested and wanted to see the remaining tagged articles that didn't make the 6 that got to the Greenpage each day they could check out the Feeder Page and see all of the articles.

Unfortunately that functionality was lost with the loss of that specific RSS reader.  I switched over to Feedly Reader and my process didn't change at all.  I still tag articles "Greenpage" and then select a couple of articles each day to promote to the Greenpage proper.  I could see the full list but the opportunity for readers to get access to the full tag volume wasn't available.

Until I got around to fixing that today.  Introducing the "Greenpage Source Page."

While I have been griping about this loss of functionality I have been peripherally aware of a service called If This Then That: IFTTT.  In broad terms this is a service that lets you link other internet services.  Looking through the available "recipes" I found one already written to generate a blogger post each time a Feedly article was tagged with a specific tag.  So I started a new blog, set up the IFTTT recipe and presto: new outside "Greenpage" tag access.

I need to work on some formatting issues.  Part of me thinks it will never look polished, but that is sort of in the "backstage" spirit of the thing anyway.  If you have the time and inclination you should check it out.

Substitute Project

I didn't do the table from yesterday.  I'm still not happy with the solution to the undercarriage and I thought I probably didn't have the time I needed.  Maybe I'll get into it next week.  Did you see the problem on the drawing?  In order for the parallel to fold flat the end hinges must be in the same position.  With the telescoping sides the ends would be offset by 3/4" on each side and that offset would mean an interference that wouldn't let the part fold.  I'll have to percolate on that one for a while.

The reason to do the table was because we were having Friday night dinner at our house.  Instead we made due with our regular solution.

The Friday night cohort includes my Lego Playdate and the instant he came in the door he was angling to do a control tower to go with the airplane we did last time.  So instead of doing a table I got a start on a minifig scale control tower...

It is interesting to me the amount of composition that is dictated by the number of boxes we take out.  Tonight I wanted to keep the thing contained a little, so besides the people and the "specials" I only took out the box of black pieces.  Therefore the control tower will be black.  In hindsight this seems like a poor choice for a control tower as night time visibility will be an issue.  Good thing it's just a model.

Ran out of a lot of pieces here: yellow fences, black 1x1x1's, gray hinges, yellow flats, yellow windows, gray computers.  It's a wonder anything ever gets built in less than a hodgepodge.  I kept thinking during the project - and now is where we get to the unfortunate compromise portion of the project.  FWIW my playdate doesn't seem to understand what my fixation with matching is all about.  Maybe I'm trying too hard.

So I guess we're set up for the next session: build the tower.  I'll get right on that.

This Is Tomorrow's Project

Wish me luck...

Now gotta go find a doweling jig.

Heavy Duty Airport Fire Truck

So every now and then I get the chance to spend some time with one of my friends sons - sometimes more than one son.  The kids developed a fairly instant attachment to my Lego collection.  It's been kind of a long game holding on to the pieces through to use for the next generation.  Seems like I'm gonna make it now and that the boy will get to inherit the lot of it.  But in the mean time it's nice to see someone getting some use out of them.

Lego playdates take one of four forms so far.  Sometimes the kid or kids just play with pieces and any of the models we left together last time.  Sometimes we try to build an old set. I have a lot of the original instructions, but it's hard to make a set with all the pieces jumbled up.  Sometimes we build a new set.  This occasion has given me an excuse to buy a bunch of new kits.  I'm doing my best not to spend all my money I swear.  The fourth variation is where I build something new for them.

This is the latest iteration of the latter.  I present the "Heavy Duty Airport Fire Truck":

The truck is sort of minifig scale - sort of.  I'm still wrapping my head around the proportions there.  The idea here was just to build something based on these wheels.  So once I had the wheels and the fenders the rest of the truck came into scale.  From the side you can see the tanks for fire foam, the side entrance, side mounted ladders, and roof mounted mars lights.

Yes, I did pull out our P-Touch for some additional detailing.

The truck also has a hinged ladder.  It's really more of an arm than a ladder, with a hose and an operator position at the end.  The original version didn't have the flip up roof, but on the second look at the truck I added the top ladder extension, a flip roof and second layer of bricks to make the cab minifig scale, and the step bumper on the back for equipment and firefighters.

I have to say I think this is one of my more successful builds.  But regardless of what I think, my apprentice seemed to enjoy it and that really matters more than anything else.

We even got a chance to see if it really worked:

Home Repair and Improvement

Some lousy pictures to try to keep up the posting tempo.

Home entry area before:

That's a painting from my parent's house and a table from the old house.  It's never really been right, but the fit was ok and it did most of the job.

Home entry area after:

New items purchased through Amazon.  They came flat pack and I only screwed up one piece (you can't see the goof in the picture), suffice it to say that those post anchors don't want to be pulled, not even with a hammer.

We're going to have to figure out something for keys, and it would be nice to find someplace out of the way for the Old City painting.  Overall though I think this is a decent improvement.

We Can Rebuild Him

So I finished a small home project this week.

Years ago, I must have been 13 or 14 my father and I collaborated on a series of Plexiglass sculptures.  It was a way to meld his hand skills and my developing math and coding skills.  The project came about as a BASIC programming exercise utilizing the then amazing high resolution graphics (Wikipedia says it had a 256 pixel display - I don't even recall it being that high).  Anyway, we would start with a shape - in this case it looks like a triangle - and then a series of FOR/NEXT loops would increment one or both of the coordinates of the points causing them to shift.  In some cases the incrementing value was also incremented causing the point not only to move, but to accelerate.  Dad would then take the image, copy it into one page per piece, blow it up to actual size (there was no real scale or calibration here, just made it bigger), and then proceed to cut the pieces out of acrylic.  The assembly laid out the pieces in a circle, doubling all but the ends of the sequence to give it a sort of periodic flow.  I think we did about 8.  I used to have one of the simpler patterns in my apartment, simpler plastic but a more complex assembly involving a lamp to try to cause the pieces to edge light.  Bee had one, Lois had one, but my all time favorite was this one.  I called it "The Samurai."

This piece lived at my folk's house in Chicago and so it was part of the big move back in 2010.  It turned out I packed it poorly and when we finally opened the box in the fall of 2011 the piece has been severely damaged with at least half of the profile pieces having broken off.  I've been looking for a picture of it out of the box, but truth be told since it was my own fault and I was a little upset I think I decided not to take pictures.  The upside, if there was an upside was that all of the breaks looked clean, no shattered bits, and many of the breaks actually were at the joint.  So instead of throwing the thing away I just put it in a box hoping some time down the line I would get to fix it.

Some time down the line turned out to be 2 years later in the summer of 2013.

One of the things that had been keeping me from proceeding was that I never learned from my dad what the cement was.  Finally one night I just balls it and typed "acrylic cement" into Amazon and picked the one that looked the most likely.  We were underway.  Next I needed a jig, or actually more of a story stick.  off to the scene shop.

You can sort of see the state of things here in the photo at the shop.  What I needed was a gauge I could clamp to a piece that was there in order to place one of the pieces that had snapped off.  Looking at the spacing and doing some math I came up with a wedge that was 1/4" wide at the root and then opened up at 7 degrees on both sides.  The last step was to rip a groove in the face of the gauge to make a spot for the clamps to grab on without having to grab the next piece.

Back home to the garage.

Here's the starting point of the refurbishment.

This is setting in the first piece.  You can see on the base that when the parts snapped off they left some marks (sometimes some shards) where they had been.  I was able to use those along with the gauge stick to place things properly.  Mostly it worked pretty well.

As a side note, the brown handled spring clamp in that photo was my dad's, probably one he obtained from Plastics Incorporated in Rosemont where he learned to work with Plex at a company owned by a college buddy.  Something about sitting in my basement working on acrylic with some of the original tools just like my father had was almost a spiritual experience.  In particular, the smell of the cement brought back many, many memories.

I learned a little bit along the way.  First up was that the original jig used to make the piece had some drift in it.  If I remember correctly, dad set up to mount all the pieces simultaneously using a piece of plywood with a bunch of radiating fins on it.  This eliminated the possibility of iterated error, but also meant the placement was only as accurate as the jig.  Suffice it to say the jig wasn't exactly accurate.

As I moved around the piece it became clear that a little shimming would be necessary.  Also, after one or two pieces I learned that I couldn't sit my gauge on the base.  Although it made the pieces easier to clamp it also made the gauge harder to remove after the piece had set.  And as if that wasn't enough, if placed on the base, the capillary action that makes the cement penetrate the joint also caused it to creep up the gauge and leave a mark on the adjacent piece.

Here you can see some of the snapping action from above.  You can also see the gauge clamping process, and if you look at the piece on the left (that was the first piece I replaced) you can see the creeping cement where the gauge block was.

I managed to do two pieces a day for about two weeks.  I would do one going out the door in the morning and then another coming in the door in the evening.  The cement would set within minutes, but would need several hours to reliably hold the weight of each piece.  Even then I could sometimes correct a little bit of a lean with a strategic shim.  The can says the cement cures over 48 hours and continues to strengthen even after that.

All in all fairly successful.  Now after two years of sitting broken in a closet I have one of the cooler things I ever did back on display.

We Can Rebuild Him

Right now, if you pick him up (and the part you're pulling on doesn't come off) his legs and tail will drop off. Not quite "display ready." Still, salvageable I think. Guess we'll see.

As Long As the House Doesn't Burn Down - Part 2

So today with a little help from a friend I finished up the appliance installation I started the other day. We went from this:


to this:


Except for the weight this was a little simpler than the first job. There is a little bit of a lingering levelness issue, but maybe I will forget - but probably not, non-parallel and non-perpendicular lines in homes (I mean ones that are supposed to be one or the other) drive me batty. We came into a bit of an issue getting all three of level, plum, and true to the cabinet. I think there's a better split the difference available, but it's a battle for another day.

The electrical was the same as the last, with all of the same caveats, and this time instead of having to open up the rough opening in both dimensions we actually wound up closing up some of the height. You can't see it in the photo, but there's a raw pine board at the bottom that needs to be finished. Little paint, should be fine.

So here's the whole thing:


I think it's a nice change. Now I think I will try to cook something.

oh, anyone in the market for a used double oven or electric range?

As Long As the House Doesn't Burn Down

So, as long as taking the old wiring away and doing exactly what was there again is a reasonable procedure, I may have made a staggering improvement to our kitchen in only a couple of hours.

Out with the old...


... and in with the new:


This is part of Mrs. TANBI and my holiday presents to each other. It got a little derailed by family events and we're only now catching up.

The project isn't that complicated. My only real difficulty was getting the tools on the work where they needed to go. It's hard to tuck a saw in close to the wall, and even harder getting my frame under the thing when its in place to do the wiring. I did remember to switch of the breaker, so I didn't jolt myself; but as a natural paranoid I think I will be wondering if my kitchen is on fire for a little while before I allow myself to be confident about the electrical connection.

Anyway, it's not like its an induction top or anything, just b-flat radiant glass, but still - 1000% better than before.

Now, there's an even larger box still unopened. I think I will take a shot at that this weekend.

Mrs. TANBI Does It Again

Anyone Know How To Make This Happen?

So I have a Facebook Friends Status Update RSS feed. I read this feed along with too many others in Google Reader. The reader allows me to tag posts of my choice however I want and as a bonus will generate a web page based on those tags - see The Greenpage or My Shared Items.

Lately I have become enamored with updates like these:

Shannon Nickerson is back at programming.

Dana Hesch - boeing boeing bags will be the death of me.

Lavina Jadhwani is rehearsing show #4, dry teching show #3, and is up 52 points on Holzfeind.

Celeste Santamassino overslept and is late for work now. Crap. I hate working this much.

Evan O'Brient is decoding cue sheets from 1972. At first it was fun like a crossword puzzle, now it's fun like a root canal.

So here's what I want. I want to tag these as a stream and then I want a wifi enabled device for my office that posts maybe the five most recent ones as a picture on the wall. I'd like it to automatically update and do all its business without my helping once it's set up. They don't have to be links or followable or anything - just text on a screen in a frame, on a wall.

The technology has to be there. Anyone know which bis to connect?

Cover Shots - updated

So I now live in fear of three "shorties" posts in a row, so much so that I posted images from this entry last night to keep that from happening knowing I would come back and and later. Sad.

As I posted earlier, I submitted my review binders a couple of days ago. They firmly live in the world of "never finished, only published" as when they went it there were still hundreds of little tweaks I could have done. I'd started out this time thinking I would make the whole thing into three .pdf files and then have them printed, two sided on glossy paper, full bleed and then book bound rather than do the binder thing again. I didn't.

Still, I try to wind up with something polished and professional. This time around there's only one entry in all of the binders that's a xerox, and I only did that because the xerox machine can automatically do 2 into 1 printing and I could not figure out how to do it faster with an original. Everything that has color in it gets printed in color, and all the photos and this time some of the simpler images went on photo paper. In my every day life I try to stick to one or two fonts and that helps these aggregations a lot. Last round I put out such a nice package that the next several people to come up got a "go see David" instruction from my boss. For a few weeks I thought maybe graphic design might be a good direction for me.

The covers. Last time I used photos, they seemed to properly indicate my involvement in the program and a certain lightheartedness. This time that didn't feel right. When I turned these in I saw that the other binders that were there already hadn't done much of anything coverwise. So I guess really I didn't have to do anything, but I do think that coming up with something interesting helps the case - as much as maybe it shouldn't - and every little bit helps.

As the previous post said, I used the Wordle web app to generate the cover images. The cool part though was determined by the text sources used to make the app go. The range and size of the words it picks are determined by the composition of the source text. All in all I think these came out real neat. The first binder is anchored by my personal statement, so I used the personal statement to make the image:


While I was procrastinating leading up to the project I kept thinking it would be necessary to go through the source documents and remove any word I didn't want to appear. It probably would have made sense to delete: needs, never, accusations, and insular from the document. Looking at the whole composition though I don't think it was fatal.

The second binder deals a lot with service, so for the source text there I used the PTM Option Briefing to the School of Drama Advisory Board - of which I was the author:


Turns out many of the same problem words are here, things like without, unable... Still I think it says something that my personal statement of teaching philosophy and the option report to the advisory board live in such a close world of language (alright, it says I wrote them both and have a limited vocabulary). To me that indicates a real positive relationship between myself and the program. I guess it's up to the various committees to decide if a positive correlation ultimately is a positive thing.

I think the third cover came out the best. Volume three is largely a portfolio, so I used my resume as the source text:


This one has some things that come out as cryptic, but nothing that really looks negative. I particularly like how "positively-engaged" shows up, having nothing in the source text to do with me as a person: "a positively-engaged tracking system" but yet still complimenting me in the new context.

If you haven't, you should click on the images to see them full size. They are really cool.

I went a little more conventional on the back cover:


I used the same image on all three volumes on the backs. I think it conveys a nice sense of the breadth of my career as a professor. I'd briefly thought about going back to photos here, but this seemed more professional.

Is it odd that in some ways composing this package seems like doing a brochure for myself?

I hope not. In the end I carried that theme all the way to its logical conclusion, composing a "but wait! there's more! kinda page for the inside from cover:


Would you tenure that person?

Last time in my personal statement I had done a "I'd like to draw the committee's attention to these specific items" thing. I didn't do that this time, so I thought this teaser page would do the job. Maybe I'll get lucky and they won't even look at anything after scanning that page. Only time will tell.

How much time? I am lead to believe the school decision will be made by the end of October, college by November, and then the University sometime in the early spring. Cross you fingers with me.

Welcome Back Party

So we went to the CMU School of Drama annual welcome back party tonight. That gave me an opportunity to give Dick his gag-gift:

He seemed to like it and take it in the spirit it was intended. He says the first faculty meeting is spoken for, he has a sweatshirt that says "The job that ate my brain" but this shirt will likely make an appearance at a faculty function soon after that.

Here's a close-up:
You can't see it in the photos, and not so much even in a dimly lit room, but the shirt is COVERED with gold glitter. Guess we'll have to wait until it's in the sunlight to get the full effect. The other people pictured are Liz Bradley, Peter Frisch, Liz Orion, and Mel Shapiro - that's where my memory gives out.

All the other suggestions are on the back which looks like this:
So thanks for those, they are all great and got many laughs. I was only sorry I forgot the one I thought of in the car the other day: "I had a dream I was Head of the School of Drama, and you were there, and you were there..."

Maybe if he does have to do a second year that can be on the next shirt.

Final Resting Place

Perhaps to be unearthed by archeologists many years into the future...

There's a trim issue and a level issue, and maybe even a little composition issue. We may need a notes call down the line, but for the time being it's out of the way and on display. Now if we can just manage to keep it out of the Christmas show and convo and outreach and, and, and...

We bolted on the cheater bar that was clamped, shot a few staples into all the joints, scabbed the two major joints - one with glued & screwed ply and the other with a bolted steel plate. Overall not much prep. The lifting turned out to be no big thing at all as we managed to employ the bull winch from the Chosky in my first non-counterweight system application. I'll have to remember that for the future because it worked real well. In the end we needed to modify the sling attachment up front to keep it from pitching over, sort of like side-arming a pipe to keep it from rolling. A nice project actually for rigging and carpentry.

I wonder if it will still be there tomorrow.