Year: 2008

Nerdbots

I love these things. The couple that builds these uses items found at antique stores and bits and pieces from the hardware store. I'd love to make one of these myself. They're cute and charming. I showed Sean the website, and he loved looking at the pictures of all the robots.

Special Rocks

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but last summer we started collecting rocks from the places we visited with the kids. I was hoping that it would give them a trigger to help them remember things we had done as a family. It seems to be working. The rocks are on the windowsill above our kitchen sink. Sometimes Sean catches sight of them while helping me cook or wash dishes, and tells me about them and where they come from. We've got a "special rock from the beach", a "special rock from Maudslay park", a couple of "special rocks from the Saco River", and a "special rock from the mountain". I'm hoping to keep this up next year. Who knows, maybe it will eventually lead to an interest in rock-hunting or geology. At the very least, though, it gives him a way to remember special moments we had, which is enough for me.

Batman’s Roadtrip

This is the last of the things I found on those old backup CDs. When I took a roadtrip a few years ago, I took a Batman action figure along with me, figuring I could pose him in funny places, and put a "Batman's Roadtrip" section on my old website. I forgot to snag a picture of him in half the places I visited, but I did manage to get a few - as you can see below. In the first shot, Batman is expressing his ire at the rain that thwarted his planned hike. The second shot was taken at a lake in Arkansas whose name escapes me. The third shot is Batman just chilling at the hotel, and the final two shots were taken atop Mount Carrigain in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Happy Head Horde

Yet another discovery made while digging through old backup CDs. This was a little project I had started, but it never really got off of the ground. The plan was to start a webcomic using these action figures. I was going to take photos of them, and then add in speech bubbles and Batman-style action messages and put it all on the web. The good guys you see below were going to be called "The Happy Head Horde". The guy with the red fists was called "Atomic Willy", the guy in the brown trenchcoat was "Handsome Dan", and the bird guy didn't have a name yet. The aliens you see in the last photo were going to be one of their adversaries. They didn't have a name yet, but they were going to be a boy-band from outer space, as you can tell from their juvenile posturing.

Rocket Cam

Another thing I found while digging through those backup CDs was this image. Back when I was working at CATSAT, a group of guys I worked with used to get together on weekends to launch model rockets. At one point, I took apart an old digital camera I had, and got a friend to help we work out a circuit for triggering the shutter automatically. I tried putting this camera in a rocket several times - I think I must have built a half-dozen rockets in the course of this experiment, and all of them crashed into the earth shortly after launch. But on one launch, I managed to get a single picture before the rocket's inevitable plunge to its dirt destiny. The resolution is low, but the pic is still pretty darn cool, isn't it?

Chopstick Assassin Productions

I was digging through some old backup CDs, looking for old episodes of a podcast I used to listen to. In the process of looking through all of those CDs, I found the image you see below. Some of you may remember this image from the old website I used to run, back when I was in college at RIT. That page existed from then until just a couple of years ago, when the hosting contract finally expired. At one point, I had a stack of these made up as stickers. I put one on my old Escort, and then promptly lost the other 499 stickers. I've gone looking for them several times, but have never managed to find them again.

Sean’s Drawings – Little Guy

Check out Sean's latest drawing. It's an evolution of the guy he used to draw a few months ago. But now he's got a lot more detail in his face, and he's gone from 4 simple limbs to legs complete with shoes and arms with hands. Amazing!

Costumes

Lori and I had been talking about buying some extra costumes after Halloween this year, to give the kids some extra dress-up clothes. Since last Halloween, Sean and Carter have both been wearing Sean's pirate costume all the time. So this year, we grabbed a few costumes off of the clearance rack, and they've been loving them ever since. Carter still has another couple of costumes that aren't in these pictures - maybe we can get pics of those soon.

42 Words of Wisdom: #10

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."

- Douglas Adams

I know, I know - it's been a long time since I posted one of these. But lately I've taken a renewed interest in increasing my posting frequency. So here's to the resurection of "42 Words of Wisdom"! This one hits especially close to home. As some of you may know, I recently discovered that the previous owner of our house had built the front porch himself, and had botched it. When he attached the ledger to the house, he didn't bother using any flashing. So due to the lack of $10 worth of flashing, water has been seeping behind the ledger for years. Once I tore down the porch and pulled off the siding, I found that a significant amount of the house's framing that was behind the porch had rotted out. At this point I've got all of the rotted wood replaced, and that section resided. But now I've still got to build a new porch - hopefully before the winter sets in. This going to end up costing us hundreds of dollar, and costing me hours and hours of time, just because someone couldn't be bothered to spend $10 and 5 minutes to install flashing - which is not exactly a closely-guarded secret of professional contractors. On the plus side, I was never really happy with the original porch and don't mind the chance to rebuild it the way I'd like to. I just would have preferred to hold off until next year to do it.

Anagrams

I recently came across an anagram generator online, and played around with it a bit. Unfortunately, if the words you put in contain enough letters, you get tens of thousands of potential anagrams - which makes finding the good ones a bit difficult. But after only looking through the first page of results, I did find a few interesting ones.

The Salad Days => A Deadly Stash

I like this one. It makes it sound like the things I am posting here are somehow dangerous to you, my loyal reader. Beware! Pictures of cute children within! Enter at your own risk!

The Salad Days => Dad Steals Hay

This one just struck me as funny. I swear, I have never stolen any hay. I may have "borrowed" hay and forgotten to return it, but that was forgetfulness, not malice.

Sean Lord => Also Nerd

This one resonates with me. I would love for Sean to grow up and be a geek like his Daddy. I need somebody to play videogames with. So here's to our future nerd!