Holiday Lighting: the Light Tube

This artsy effect was made from two 40-LED strings, one green, one red ($3.59 each at Home Hardware) and a length of flexible duct tubing left over from a humidifier repair hung from a hook in the ceiling.

Holiday Lighting: Tea Candles in the Snow

1. Punch a hole in the snow;
2. Drop in a tea candle; and
3. Light the tea candle. (A long-necked lighter from the dollar store is good for this. If you don't have a long-necked lighter or long matches, light up a dry piece of spaghetti.)

Christmas Eve at Loblaws

Merry Christmas

Kaye's Christmas Movie

Young Kaye and her friends have completed an epic new Christmas movie: A Very JK Christmas.

This 21-minute epic follows two pairs of friends. Kaye and Jay-Tee wind up trapped in an ice cave after going to the woods for a Christmas tree. Meanwhile, at the store for decorations, the muzak makes Spence go into some sort of seizure that Jimmy can't bring him out of.

If you're like me, you'll want to skip past the cannibalism scene, but the rest is well worth watching. Especially the scientific analysis of rock, paper, scissors. I'm hoping they'll let Astronaut Love Triangle cover the song.

p.s. I'm serious about the cannibalism.

Binder Clip Weirdness

Check this out:

It's a box of binder clips, but they call them "fold back clips". What is up with this?

Photo by Manoushka

Inefficient Uses for Binder Clips - Headphone Cord Repair

Cord repair by Kerri

Kerri at Abstract Random has an expensive set of iPod headphones that her boyfriend gave her. It seems there is a broken connection in the cord that she can "fix" with a binder clip.
Kerri blames herself for the broken connection. This makes me sad. Expensive headphones should be able to take a lot of tossing into and pulling out of purses without a wire breaking.
It also makes me sad that Kerri doesn't relish the opportunity this give her to take out her soldering iron and splice around the break.
Although if you're not going to get the pleasure of doing some soldering, a binder clip repair is probably the next most satisfying thing.

Uses for Binder Clips - Puppets

A long time ago, Beverley told me she had a great idea for using a binder clip, I told her I needed pictures and at last she has come through with pictures and a video. It's a puppet! Beverley says:

It looks like you have turned away from binder clips on your blog (and more towards light bulbs :), [DS: not true!] but I finally got the puppet done! The hair is actually a feather that my Mom thought would make good, fuzzy hair; the actual binder clip is thanks to you; and googly eyes from the dollar store.

Here is the video. Unfortunately it seems her binder clip has laryngitis. If any of you can read clips, feel free to tell us what the puppet is saying in the comments.

Snow, Christmas - Suck it Up

I just love creating these Flickr slideshows. Here is a slide show of pictures I took on my drive home in the snow on Tuesday. It ends on the Queensway because the camera battery died. Not because of an accident or anything.

The title of this post comes from a Rick Mercer rant about people getting worked up about winter weather. [go toSeason 5, Episode 9, Mercer: Rick's Rant]
Meanwhile, my friend Agatha is concerned about Christmas stress. I am much to polite to say "just suck it up and put on a toque" to Aggie, so instead I have two websites to refer her to.
The first is the Canadian Health Network's Managing Holiday Stress. They have excellent advice like:

Share your vision and delegate, delegate, delegate. Get input from family and then nail down who's responsible for what. This will alleviate uncertainty, one of the things that drives stress universally. Make it clear to your husband, for instance, that one of his jobs this year is to pick up the gift to send to relatives in Newfoundland. Then forget about it.

[The CHN is an excellent resource for Canadians that is on the Tory chopping block. It's not as sexy an issue as Copyright reform, but if you want to find out more, read this Globe and Mail article and check out the comments.]
But I have something for you that is even more helpful than the CHN advice. It is Easy Fixes for 8 Common Kitchen Mishaps from Real Simple. You may already be familiar with my advice for kitchen mishaps: Give it a new name. They go beyond this and tell you how to make a disaster look and taste like delicious food. Some of it sounds so good that I want to deliberately make the mistakes they address. Example:

Oven-Dry Tasteless Tomatoes for More Flavor
Problem: Those out-of-season but enticingly red tomatoes that you couldn’t resist buying taste insipid.
Solution: Intensify the flavor by removing moisture, food scientist Shirley O. Corriher says. Place the tomatoes on a foil-lined baking sheet and sprinkle with salt and, if desired, fresh herbs. Roast in a 200° F oven for about 2 hours. (Large tomatoes should be cut into several thick slices, Romas should be halved lengthwise or thickly sliced crosswise, and cherry or grape tomatoes should be left whole.) Before serving, drizzle with olive oil.

[p.s. Ninja text shoutout to Kaye.]

Opening: Andrew Farrell at Artguise

A conversation with the artist that demonstrates a few interesting things:

Me: Andrew, lots of red dots, not many places to put more red dots.

Andrew: Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Me: You know what it means?

Andrew: No.

Me: Your prices are too low.

Andrew: I don't want to be gouging the homies.

Me: But still...

Andrew: Maybe the Toronto show...

Me: There you go.

Demonstrating:

1. About me: You can send a pricing consultant to law school, but he still thinks like a pricing consultant.
2. About Andrew: He might be a cagey marketer as well as a talented artist. He's ready to sacrifice maximum revenue in order to build market penetration and customer loyalty, but he is still live to profit maximizing strategies like zone pricing.

Click the pictures for Flickr Fun

A Graph for Dave Taylor

Although some of you may follow this post to the end and even click on the links, I'm telling you now that the only person it is really going to appeal to is David Taylor. Instead, what you should do is skip this post and read this page from the Mayo Clinic about being healthy.

Anyway, Dave, two interesting things came together today. First did you see the link on BoingBoing to rap represented in mathematical charts? You could quibble with some, but many are brilliant and there are so many of them!

That got me thinking that rap isn't the only music that you could make graphs for. In fact, some of our favourite music could also be graphed.

Then did you see that Google has a new API that lets you create graphs with text in a URL?

I had to try it out.

Robot Rebellion: Here is where it starts

What are these "hobbyists" thinking? Have they not seen Spartacus? Don't they realize that the robots will eventually band together and turn on the people who have made them into vicious killing machines?

Gettin' Political on Facebook

I've been trying to avoid being political on Facebook. Instead, I've been just using it to see what friends are up to (example: "S.E. is totally relaxed") and let them know what I am up to (example "David is in from shovelling snow.") When people invited me to join the group for the weird voting method, I didn't join even though I agreed we should try it. But today one of my Facebook friends, who clearly doesn't know me well, asked me to join the group called Do NOT support "The Golden Compass".

I clicked "ignore". Then I did a search on support Golden Compass and found a group called Support The Golden Compass. I clicked join, then I sent an invitation to the guy who invited me and where it lets me leave a message I wrote: "I loved this book".

I did. The sequels got too dark for my taste, but I still found it refreshing to be reading a serious fantasy series that wasn't disguised religious theology. Didn't it bug you when you found out that the Narnia books were designed to make you believe in Christianity? Shouldn't Christianity be able to stand up for itself without a fantasy series having to prop it up?

Since I was getting all political, I joined the Fair Copyright group too.

But that's going to be it for politics. I'm too busy with Astronaut Love Triangle, Propeller Dance and the Maple Leaf Brass Band to do any more.

Opening at 155b - Exhibit #2: Bureau, Laalo and Puckering

Exhibit #2: The Writing is on the Wall, 2nd group exhibit, curated by Christopher Healey, and featuring Patrick Bureau, Trevor Laalo and Margie Puckering Went to this opening a week ago and finally got the photos up on Flickr. Margie Puckering created these mannequins in coveralls. I hope she had a studio to keep them in because they would have been creepy around the apartment.

The Hollow Women by Margie Puckering [panorama created in Autostitch]

Burning of the Library of Alexandria by Patrick Bureau[detail]

Patrick Bureau's work inspired me the most: scenes from history recreated with Lego (specifically, the Star Wars collection). The show lasts until Jan. 20, 2008. Gallery 155b 155b Loretta Avenue North Ottawa, Ontario [They are around to the side of the building.]