May 2006 Archives

On Wednesday I spent five hours cutting up pieces of construction paper and arranging them on larger pieces of paper. This was not silliness, it was mockups of my board layouts for our final project, which is due at 2pm next Wednesday. I was delighted to discover that not only do I have plenty of drawings to fill the boards, but in fact I have too many, and I can jettison some of the weaker ones.

It's surprising how many iterations you can go through in search of a good layout. We have restriction: two or three 30"x40" boards. And there's a list of required drawings and scales that basically account for 2/3 of the real estate on those boards (there was no way my building was fitting on two boards). So there's not a lot of flexibility to begin with. How did I manage to spend an entire studio period working on it?

Technorati Tags: design, drawings, school

I spent my day today detailing the structure for this ceiling:

Which was a lot harder than it looks; it took me six hours to get it right. (The sun pattern is for midday at the winter solstice. Pretty, huh?) Amazing how something as simple as a ceiling like that can take so long to draw out and explain. Also, please note that this ceiling has some bodaciously large beams going across it, because the room is fifty feet wide. So there was a bit of engineering work to do to calculate how big the beams needed to be and if it was possible to make them the way I wanted that took half my studio time on Friday.

Technorati Tags: design, design software, engineering, model building, school

So I finally broke down and went to see the school doctor today because my back is still hurting.

He says it looks like just a really bad muscle pull (yay, no nerve damage) and recommended I increase my ibuprofen use, then gave me a giant box of muscle relaxants. If that doesn't work, then it's physical therapy.

Also, he recommended I stop gardening through the pain, because apparently that is not such a brilliant idea. Silly doctor.

Technorati Tags: injuries, stupid

I'd seen other people mention the phenomenon, but it wasn't until the last few months that I noticed it in my own site stats: people on other sites hotlinking my photos then, oddly enough, claiming that they were their own.

(Hotlinking, for the non-geeks in the audience, is the practise of putting an image on a web page that refers to the copy on my server, so I have to serve it up for them. The other option is for the offender to copy the photo and put it on their own server, which I must assume happens often enough, but it doesn't show up in my web stats, so whatever.)

This confuses me because a) it's patently obvious to anybody that those images don't belong to those people because I don't serve images to other sites, so they get a broken image on their page, b) my life is far too lame to be imitated.

I mean, seriously. Monday through Friday I am in school all day and into the night. Saturday and Sunday I race home and basically spend the entire weekend working on the house. My pictures are really not that interesting, except for the occasional weekend trip to the beach. But those are not the photos people link to. I could totally get it if people were all over my starfish photos or some of the plant stuff or even the cuter piccies of the dogs. But what gets linked to are photos of: some dirty dishes after a dinner party, Noel's car stuffed with insulation, and Rosie with peanut butter on her nose (inexplicably popular in Belgium).

I could understand people pilfering the better pictures (maybe they do it by copying and I never know), and I know at least one person has been caught passing one of my drawings off as his because his teacher e-mailed me about it (to verify that my drawing was mine, actually; fortunately I was able to send him a photo of myself holding the original drawing). I understand why people cheat. Every one of these people must be living a life more interesting -- or at least interesting to 15-year-olds -- than I do. So why are they pretending my stuff is theirs?

I really do not understand people.

My irrigation lab got out early this morning, and I was left with an unplanned three hour gap in my schedule. So I walked up to the arboretum for some exercise (past the baby horsies). Rain and meetings and other things have conspired to keep me from getting to walk up there recently, so it was a nice treat.

And I met this nice kitty, who came trotting up the path and insisted that I sit down and scritch her. She was the colour of dark coffee, with nice chartreuse eyes.

After a bit of petting and socializing, she stretched, sat up, and headed off for a busy day of hunting lizards.

Technorati Tags: cats

"Try it; you'll like it," Noel said to me.

And I agreed that I probably would, but didn't do anything about it, so the next time I was home he slipped a bottle of it into my backpack. The next morning, I tried it, and, well: he was right.

Metamucil. Amazing how a little extra fiber every morning makes you feel so much better. And it tastes like Tang, so I get that little guilty feeling ("I'm drinking something entirely synthetic") and the pleasure of knowing my insides will feel better at the same time.

Technorati Tags: dieting

I was sitting around this evening feeling unwell because my head was hurting because, frankly, I had many pounds of hair hanging off it. My hair had only recently passed my butt and started for the floor, clearly in a desperate bid for freedom. For the last several weeks I have been complaining to Noel about the weight of my hair, and he keeps saying I should just go get it cut.

So I cut fourteen inches of it off. And two minutes later, the headache was gone. I left enough to make a couple of pigtails, which is all I need to keep my hair out of my eyes.

I'm sure it was not nearly the most even and professional job (two quick slices with sewing shears are simply unlikely to yield a quality coiffure), but it worked like a charm and I am well satisfied.

Edited to add:

So what did it look like before? You can see me in late January with my hair up in this post; when my hair is long I usually wear it up in a bun to keep it out of my way.

There's also this from a little later this winter (the hair sticks are so very nice for dealing with extra-long slippery hair):

It was a lot of hair.

Technorati Tags: hair