Shovelglove: Functional Sledgehammer Exercise

This has to be the geekiest excercise routine I've seen. Well, maybe my table tennis robot is up there. Anyway, Cybil's personal trainer (who like Cybil is intellectually engaged in a field where few are) says that this would indeed be good excercise, but warns that the motions involved could easily strain the body. If you've ever put in a long day with a shovel or axe I'm sure you'll agree that she has a point.

Dionysea Green by Tomasz Rut

I remembered that she was in a tube in the closet and suggested to Cybil that we get her framed for Cybil's new studio. So we brought her to the Frame Store in Encino and had a really classy frame designed by Luben Romanov. I never realized before what an art it is to design the right frame for a painting. We agreed upon this pair of interlocking hand-finished Italian frames, with a lush skin-toned matting, and a thin gold-painted bamboo inner frame. With the frame she's a little over 4 feet tall 3 feet wide, and so very very naked. The framing really just makes her skin tones pop.

One last thing: the glass. We have five paintings in our one bedroom apartment, but they're all behind mediocre glass. It's UV coated, but the coating has long since worn off, and the glare is pretty bad. This new frame was done with museum quality conservation glass. It's amazing. Unless you catch it at the exact wrong angle – there's a fluorescent bulb at a sharp angle, and you're standing at the opposite sharp angle – you can't even tell there's any glass.

Political bias affects brain activity, study finds

I coulda tould you that. Back when we had cable TV, if George W. Cunthair came on I couldn't bear to listen to him speak for more than a minute, regardless of what he was stammering.

Sex before stressful events keeps you calm

I gotta line me up some stressful events. No, scratch that. I gotta line her up some stressful events. That's better.

Kevlar Work Utility Pants - Duluth Trading Company

If I wore jeans, these'd be it. Look to be nearly the same cut (gusseted, etc.) as my Fire Hose Pants, which are comfortable enough to lounge around the house in all weekend.

Spice Cookies

Makes 48.

Ingredients

• 1 ³/₄ cups all-purpose flour
• ¹/₂ cup cornstarch
• 2 seaspoons baking powder
• ¹/₂ teaspoon ground cloves
• ¹/₂ teaspoon ground cardamon
• ¹/₂ teaspoon ground cinnamon
• ¹/₂ teaspoon ground nutmeg
• ¹/₂ teaspoon ground ginger
• ¹/₂ teaspoon ground allspice
• pinch of salt
• ¹/₂ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 cup buttor
• 1 ¹/₃ cups light brown sugar
• ¹/₂ teasoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon finely grated lemon rind
• ¹/₄ cup whipping cream
• ³/₄ finely ground almonds
• 2 tablespoons confectioners' sugar

Baking Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F
2. Sift the flour, cornstarch, baking powder, spices, salt and pepper into a bowl. Set aside.
3. With an electric mixer, cream the butter and brown sugar together until light and fluffy. beat in the vanilla extract and grated lemon rind.
4. With the mixer on low speed, add the flour mixture alternately with the whipping cream, beginning and ending with flour. Stir in the ground almonds.
5. Shape the dough into ³/₄-inch balls. Place them on ungreased baking sheets about 1 inch apart. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until golder brown underneath.
6. Allow to cool on the baking sheets for bout 1 minute before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. Before serving, sprinkle lightly with confectioners' sugar.

gristlestick update

My brother's hitting the road with his band in June. They've posted 3 more songs to their page. Nice music with nasty lyrics. Good stuff.

CUZZI Computer Desk STS 5801A

Cybil ordered this desk for her new studio. We almost went with one that was 18" by 24" (this one is 4 inches deeper), but we settled on the CUZZI because it looks a lot more stable. Also, the dark cherry matches her other furniture. We'll be hiding it under a curtain (draped over the top shelf) but clients will still have to look at the thing when she's doing their paperwork, so not looking like crappy dorm furniture (relative to other compact desks) is a plus.

Wicked Worn + Bulletproof Liquid

As a follow up to my latest re-design (which I still haven't gone back and made the final revisions to) I offer this article and demonstration of a technique that I developed in the process of coding this site: Wicked Worn + Bulletproof Liquid

12 Habits in 2006

There's been a whole lot of new years resolution crap kicking around the web this month. It is as easily ignored as all the "best of 2005" crap. New Years resolutions are bogus. Good intent, zero execution. But this article stands out in that it sounds like it could actually work. There's a system behind it, a form. Things get written down. And if there's one thing I've learned it's that the only way to get anything done is to put it in a list.

Gristle Stick

My brother's band. He's the one in the middle, on the bass.

NOTEPAD v3.4: Auto-detect the UTF-8 files without BOM

The day job requires two things of an editor, and historically UltraEdit was the only editor to achieve them. First, it needs to save UTF-8 files without leaving a BOM. Second, it needs to open UTF-8 files without any effort on my part. It appears that Notepadd++ has just added this second feature less than ten days ago.

I've really never been satisfied with the current alternative to UltraEdit that I've been using at work. Enough so that I still use HomeSite most of the time at home, a long dead program but the best front-end dev environment. The editor I've been using is PSPad. It's got multi-language color highlighting, but it is really flakey. It also has custom key commands for tags, etc., but you have to write them yourself in a raw text file, they don't always work, and they like to eat text. I keep hoping I'll find a program that fixes these problems, this might be it.

Jon, I'll run this through your UTF-8 encoding test files and let you know how it goes.

Grid Paper Generators

If you've ever wanted some kind of specialized graph paper, for note taking, gaming, or game design this website's got what you're looking for. It's got everything from hex grids to calligraphy guides. You can adjust paper size, grid size, line weight, and color.

This time around working on Wizard's Duel I'm trying to spend less time on production and get to playtesting faster. I'll figure out what works and what doesn't work more quickly, that way I can toss it and try something different without throwing out much time or energy.

Impulse Based Movement

A description of the movement system that could finally* make Wizard's Duel a reality. What I'm going to change from this system is the very last sentence, "The impulses on which a piece moves are typically spread over the turn as evenly as possible." I will differentiate the distribution of moves between predators (mostly sprinters) and prey (distance runners). I also hope to come up with a clear visualization of the impulse system, since I will have the luxury of a custom board which is unavailable to piecepack games.

I came very close to this movement system almost two years ago when I last worked on this game. I had the idea of splitting movement into two phases: Sprint and Endurance in my blog post: Wizard's Duel Turn Sequence. The impulse system will allow for much more fine-grained control of movement, and let me present it in a visual format on the cards.

*I only have documentation of having been working on it since at least 2001 when I wrote the little javascript game at wizardsduel.com, although in reality I think it was conceived about 5 years earlier around the same time as Dragon Duel.

The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism

æand here we have evidence, in the form of a reality telivision show: Derren Brown: The Heist. I'll have to tie this with my human behaviour theory that attempts to explain why rich brats steal. But not now. More important things to think about. (games, of course)

jonplummer.com

He's back! To launch something, just to launch it, plain HTML, no frills, no forever fussing over the design and growing tired of it after a week (even if it's better than what any of the rest of us could do), is a good step. Now if he'll just acknowledge that he hasn't the time to build something himself and just sign up for a Flickr account, then we'll see something. I guess it's a question of whether the project is the project, or the content is the project. If a project never reaches completion, does content stand a better chance? And if so, can an imperfect medium be tolerated? Looks like he may have finally said yes.

Bundles Of . . . Misery

what i've been saying all along.

Edge Question 2006: "What is your dangerous idea?"

Jaron Lanier: Homuncular Flexibility

Once you've read it, imagine this concept in the hands of the people at Nintendo. Now how's that for a dangerous idea?

Not that far fetched actually, from what I've read about Nintendo's future plans, moving out of the television and into the 3D space of your living room is the next frontier.