Alkahest

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, haul water.  After enlightenment, chop wood, haul water,” is one of my favorite zen aphorisms.  Okay, so no hauling water for me – at least not unless the drought gets worse, but there’s going to be a lot of wood chopping in my future.
On Saturday, margaretc’s husband, ‘A’, came by and [...]

One of my projects at work involves information markets: tools to extract aggregate knowledge from groups of people.  For example, at Intrade, you can buy and sell contracts on questions like, “who will be the democratic nominee for president?” or “how likely is it that the US economy will slip into recession?”  The market price [...]

It’s been about a week and a half since the attempted break-in.
On Tuesday, I replaced the window they broke out.  I called around to a couple of different places and everyone said that they could send someone out to give an estimate, but it would take a few days and then the part would be [...]

I picked up a new kitchen faucet at Lowe’s today.  As usual with this sort of thing, removing the old faucet was the worst part.  The nuts holding the old faucet on to the sink were standard plastic nuts – attached to badly rusted screws.  After 30 minutes of trying: first by hand, then with [...]

Some weeks it just doesn’t pay to leave the house. As K and I were getting ready for bed last night she noticed that the bathroom window was broken. Being a wildlife rehabilitator, her first thought was that some bird (maybe a hawk) had smashed into the window. I went out to [...]

It’s been 7 months since we’ve done plumbing renovations, so we’re apparently due.  This time I have to replace the kitchen faucet.  It’s started leaking badly.  “But wait,” you say, “a leaking faucet doesn’t require replacement, you can just replace the gaskets.”  Unfortunately no.
I’ve mentioned before that our water is acidic with a pH of [...]

Okay, it’s only Monday, but it’s been about a week since wrote anything here.  In that time:

The non-profit I work with and on whose board I serve has gone bat-shit crazy.  They say that academic politics are so petty because the stakes are so small.  Trust me, academic politics haven’t got anything on non-profit politics
A [...]

Right before Thanksgiving my iPod went to that great electronics superstore in the sky.  More specifically, the cute little 1.8″ hard drive died.  Having looked around, I figured the best (or at least most interesting) fix was to replace the drive with a compact flash card.  The connector part finally came in today and we [...]

In response to the two comments on my last post about the calendar:
etselec: I’m not certain if you were kidding or not.  FWIW, I don’t usually think of the calendar as something people outside of my family would be interested in.  I think that’s a pretty usual INTP trait   If anyone is interested [...]

As I mentioned earlier, I’m printing the Yellowstone calendar using Lulu instead of Kodak.  I got back my sample and all in all, I’m happy with it.  I like that the image is the full size of the page (no border).  The print quality is pretty good – it’s not as good as Kodak’s but [...]