All posts by keith

General, home repair, Tech

today

I spent most of my day replacing the heater/vent/light in the bathroom. What a pain in the butt. this one seems to be slightly better made than the previous two, so I’m hoping that the heater lasts longer (which is why I had to replace it). Last time I just replaced the heater, but this time, the insides are totally different, and actually the dimensions are slightly different also, so I had to do some cutting in the ceiling. Two things that suck about the unit:

  1. 1. The wiring box needs to be bigger, so that you can actually close it when you get all the wires in.
  2. 2. The way the light reflector is held in is engineered stupidly–you screw a cap nut onto a bolt until it’s tight and then keep going until the bolt unscrews itself out of the cross bar it’s in until the cap nut pulls the reflector against the bar. Why not just use a short sheet metal screw like they always have? Why make it difficult, and non-obvious? Jeez!

For those who wonder the unit is a Nutone 665RP.

SF

Kiosk by Bruce Sterling

A new piece of fiction from Bruce Sterling at F&Sf. Although I enjoy his non-fiction work, I love his fiction, and it’s good to see something new from him. It’s about technology, the internet, and revolution. Good stuff. Here’s an excerpt:

Ace lifted and splayed his fingers. “Look, tell me something I can get my hands on. You know. Something that a man can steal.”
“Say you type two words at random: any two words. Type those two words into an Internet search engine. What happens?”
Ace twirled his shot glass. “Well, a search engine always hits on something, that’s for sure. Something stupid, maybe, but always something.”
“That’s right. Now imagine you put two products into a search engine for things. So let’s say it tries to sort and mix together…a parachute and a pair of shoes. What do you get from that kind of search?”
Ace thought it over. “I get it. You get a shoe that blows up a plane.”
Borislav shook his head. “No, no. See, that is your problem right there. You’re in the racket, you’re a fixer. So you just don’t think commercially.”
“How can I outthink a machine like that?”
“You’re doing it right now, Ace. Search engines have no ideas, no philosophy. They never think at all. Only people think and create ideas. Search engines are just programmed to search through what people want. Then they just mix, and match, and spit up some results. Endless results. Those results don’t matter, though, unless the people want them. And here, the people want them!”

General

Punk

Punk penguin

So the wife’s doing a game of blog tag over at her blog. You have to go to photobucket.com, and type in the answers to various questions, in the search form. Since I’m lazy, and not really into this kind of stuff, I just took the answer to my favorite kind of music, and you can see the result right here (it’s also cool, because the penguin is the mascot of my favorite OS–Linux). Check out Jen’s answers on her blog, there’s quite a few.

Health

Does Weight Lifting Make a Better Athlete?

It seems that not everyone thinks so, and it may not help so much in certain sports like the marathon.

Several pithy quotes from the article:

And don’t worry about becoming too muscular, Dr. Kraemer said. “The
fear of getting really big is not plausible for most people,” he said.
Competitive distance runners and cyclists, who are naturally slender
and light, “don’t have the muscle fiber number to get really big,” Dr.
Kraemer said. “I can train them until the cows come home and they are
not going to have big muscles.”

The main problem with weight lifting is that many people do it all
wrong, said Kent Adams, the director of the exercise physiology
laboratory at California State University
at Monterey Bay. They don’t have a program or a goal. Technique may be
sloppy. Or, Dr. Adams said, they use weights that are too light.
Muscles need to be stressed if they are to respond, he said. Dr.
Kraemer is on the same page. One study, he said, found that women tend
to lift half or less of what they could lift. And this happened even
when women were working with personal trainers, he said. “There
is so much misinformation,” Dr. Kraemer said. “It’s a quagmire out
there.” He recommends trainers certified by the National Strength and
Conditioning Association, which also supplies educational information.
Dr. Kraemer is a past president of the organization.

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Health, Politics

Health Spending to Double by 2017

from webmd.com comes this article.
The headline really bugs me, because it’s such a misnomer. “Healthcare” and “health spending” is so untrue, it’s illness, or medical care, and spending.
Health spending would be on stuff like good, clean foods, exercise equipment, gym memberships, etc–stuff that keeps you healthy in other words, not spending on things to help us when we become unhealthy/sick.
I just wish that otherwise great sites, like webmd, would realize this, and stop using these euphemisms, so that people might realize that except for checkups, going to a doctor isn’t about health, but rather about sickness.

Politics

WikiLeaks

Article on WikiLeaks

Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right.

Martin Luther King Jr.

http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks
http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Wikileaks
http://wikileaks.in/wiki/Wikileaks
Check it out, decide for yourself.

Art

Used Wood, passion materialized in vintage reclaimed wood…

Oud Hout

Diederick Kraaijeveld (Oudhout/Oldwood, The Netherlands, 1963) builds classic and modern icons in vintage reclaimed wood; an Airstream trailer, a Porsche 911 or a pair of Chuck Taylors (All Star sneakers)…With sometimes century-old painted planks, salvaged during intensive trips along dumpsters, old Amsterdam canal mansions, run down farms and faraway coasts, Kraaijeveld “paints” photo-realistic images… His palette is not filled with paint in all its different colors: a huge warehouse full of old wooden planks forms the base of each work of art.

This is the ultimate in recycling/collage. Check out his gallery.

Here’s his Red All Stars:
Red All Stars–Diederick Kraaijeveld
Over a meter wide. He, also has done a blue version and is planning a black version.

Via Juxtapoz