if it ain't documented, it ain't permanent

On the matter of README files... (caution: it's a long one)

shaker furniture

After I got back home, I made a quick to the library and ended up picking up way too many books.  One of them was How to Build Shaker Furniture by Thos. Moser.  The book has turned out to be a pretty good catalog of different joinery types, how to use fasteners, a good reference on stuff like types of wood, tools, etc.  Although I'm probably not patient or skilled enough to start in on some of the designs he's got, there are some pretty good inspirations in there.  I'm thinking this book needs to be on the bookshelf more permanently.

I also snagged Making Elegant Custom Tables by Doug Stowe.  While this book didn't have much in the way of plans and it was meant to be more of a pictorial survey of some of the author's work, it did have some nice explanations of the techniques he used (like how to build pedestals) and some of the tools he crafted (like a cylinder lathe).

weight loss update

Bottom line is that I'm down around 40lbs since I started the I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Atkins diet.

update on 08/29/11: make that 41.2lbs officially.  \o/

experimenting with lap joins

So, for the shed project I'm working on, we've gotten to the point where we need some doors on this sucker. I tried making a couple by simply screwing some 2x4's together like they were studs, but we quickly discovered that without a diagonal brace it's not stable. So unstable, in fact, that simply sinking a second screw at a corner could pull it out of shape. The diagonal worked, but it was a major pain to make adjustments to the door: finding out you need to shave off 1/8" means having to basically take the door apart to do the cut. There's also the problem that it's kind of hard to find threshhold flashing that's 3 3/4" wide.

So, I decided to finally try out a lap join and just turning the 2x4's so their faces were to the front. It's a heck of a lot more work and takes longer, but holy cow was it worth it. I basically ended up with a much thinner door (1 1/2") that fits the flashing perfectly, is much lighter, doesn't need another brace, and is dead simple to get to 90 degrees in the corners.

but i know what you want me to do

Been a while, but here we go. The Heavy - No Time:

the lost month

So, not quite a month since my post about weight loss, but figured that I'd go ahead and update anyway.

As we pushed on into June, I had managed to drop to 355 (lost around 30lbs in 2 months) and was feeling kind of cocky. On the 10th, I took a 3 day trip to the beach and induldged in carbs. When I got back home, I found I was at 370 and got pretty disheartened about the whole deal. It wasn't until earlier this week that I started getting back on the low carb regimen, and I'm now down to 362.

maybe that's why it's called spooky

So, I've been reading this quantum mechanics for idiots book recently, mainly because I'm a nerd but also because everyone time I've tried to talk with someone In the Know(tm) about QM I get a "don't worry about it" in response. The book I'm reading is Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed by Jim Al-Khalili and it does a pretty good job of both not descending too far into the mathematics and acknowledging that basically everything is counterintuitive and the natural response is to say "no wai! lies!".

Any rate, my big epiphany was that everything at the atomic level appears to be indeterministic. Which is highly unsettling because all that stuff we learned in high school is based on the assumption that we live in a deterministic universe: that you can know everything about anything and make predictions accordingly. We've used these tools to split the atom, go to the moon, approximate how long ago dinosaurs roamed the earth, hurl data around the globe, and create machines that can peer inside your head and let a doctor see if blood vessels in your brain are healthy or not.

And it's basically all been an approximation.