Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in jamey1138's LiveJournal:

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Monday, July 20th, 2009
9:42 am	Oh noes! My wife and I had a great time at the SCA event on Saturday. Today, she woke up to find big red itchy hives all over her legs. Looks like poison ivy to me. Boo! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
9:11 pm	Dude. Sweet. So, I've been a fan of the film Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension since, oh, 1989 or so (whenever it was that I first saw it, almost certainly thanks to the Elberts). And, I've always longed for the sequel that's promised at the end of the closing credits: Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League. Because, dude, Buckaroo Banzai! As it turns out, the director, W. D. Richter, sold the studio on the sequel, which he had in his head already. That's why it was promo'd in the credits of the first movie. Unfortunately, the studio folded shortly after BB was released (probably not entirely a coincidence...) Anyway, I recently discovered that Richter later resurrected the same idea-in-his-head, which he sold to director John Carpenter, and it became the immortally great/cheesy film: Big Trouble in Little China! No WONDER I've always loved that movie... (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
12:03 pm	I love Chicago in the summer Last night, I picked up my wife from the Art Institute, where she was attending an author's reading as part of the ALA convention (Mo Willems, an award-winning picture book author, giving a premier reading of his upcoming, unpublished book). We ate a picnic of home-made dolmas and jicama salad in the garden, and then walked across the street to Millennium Park, for a free concert of highlights from Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, featuring a few world-famous opera stars. This morning, I went stag to the farmer's market, and picked up a ton of fresh fruit, plus several vegetables, came home and put up the cherries and currants for later use, while listening to a random shuffle of everything The Innocence Mission has ever recorded. Now, I'm waiting for my lunch (a scramble of eggs, carrot greens, spring onion greens, shelled sugar snap peas and aged raw milk cheddar-- all from the farmer's market) to cool. At the same time, I'm sampling the first bottle of my friend Cecil's first-ever home brew (an American Pale Ale, and very good!) while my small batch of hopless arugula beer (arugula from my back yard) cooks up. I've already done a bit of playing with the dog in the yard, and I plan to do a bit more after lunch. Then I'll bike over to the beach, and take a swim, before getting ready for Cecil's cocktail party tonight. Yes, this is a really, really good life. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 6th, 2009
7:18 am	Comics imitate life I have a list of about 10 webcomics I read every day. Today, both XKCD and Sluggy Freelance nailed me, to a tee. I actually *am* planning on playing a bit more Half Life 2 today! (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
11:10 am	Ahhh, cattle dog. So, Perkin (as we've come to name him) is a Australian cattle dog (with a bit of the blue heeler sub-breed: his feet have the brindled color characteristic of that variety). So, he's a herding dog. I grew up with hunting dogs (a lab who was a few years older than I was, and then a pointer/lab mix), so I have a somewhat harder time getting inside the head of a herding dog... but I'm game to grow, and I'm really enjoying getting to know this dog. That said, there's this funny thing about cattle dogs... See, like dogs that are bred to herd sheep, cattle dogs have been selected for herding behaviors: Perkin hates it if he isn't involved with the group (though he doesn't seem to freak out if one person leaves the room), and he has certain things he does that are obviously useful for herding... in sheep-herding dogs, these involve things like nudging the legs, and even biting at the ankles. With a cattle dog, though, there's different herding behaviors. See, cattle are made of meat, but covered in leather. Untanned leather, sure, but leather all the same. They don't so much care, or even notice, being bumped in the leg, or even bitten on the ankle. So, what cattle dogs do, is they jump. Straight up in the air, so that they get right up, face to face, staring their subject right straight in the eye. Perkin's done this to me a couple of times, when he gets really excited about something. Since I don't want him doing it as a habit, to people who aren't expecting it, I'm generally working to discourage this behavior-- but it's hard to do, because it's absolutely hilarious, and I'm usually too busy laughing to really scold him properly... :) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
9:42 am	Success! So, I have a dog. We're not 100% on the name, yet-- probably Perkin (nickname: Mr. Perky), but there's a slim chance that we'll go with last night's first-pick, Percival (nickname: Percy). The former is a medieval English variant of Peter, the latter is inspired by the Scarlet Pimpernel. But, whatever the name, he's a black Australian cattle dog mix, probably 35-40 pounds, and just under 3 years old. He's very sweet, and an avid fetcher. He's taking some time adjusting to the new environment-- last night, at about 1 am, he squeaked and yipped quite a lot, so I got up and sat with him for a while, eventually sleeping out on the couch (by about 2, he fell asleep on the floor). So, yeah, I'll be wanting a nap later... :) Chloe (the cat) is going to need some time to adjust, too. Anyway, I threw together a rudimentary site with pictures and movies at my website. And in related niftiness, the photos AND videos were all taken on my 3GS iPhone! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
9:04 pm	Obsessing over a new dog! My wife and I will be heading back from Austin TX tomorrow. My hope is that we'll go meet some dogs on Sunday, with the hope of finding one we like enough to adopt! We've been looking at some of the pictures online, and there are some good candidates-- wish us luck! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
12:40 am	"Think you're so damned clever!" Yesterday, I started reading The Graveyard Book. My sweetie had given it me for my birthday, April past. Tonight, I finished it. Neil Gaiman, suffice to say, has still got it. Actually, I think it's one of his best. Oddly, I don't know how to hide things behind cuts, so I won't go into spoilery detail on just what it is that makes me so damned clever-- I emailed my wife, when I was on about page 230 (of 305), to boast that I had it all figured out (and I had pretty strong ideas about how the final battle would unfold, too-- about 100 pages earlier). Maybe I shouldn't feel too clever, outwitting a Newbery winner (which sort of suggests that the target audience is something between 1/4 - 1/3 my age) but, as Mr. Croup says-- "Think you're so damned *clever*!" (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
9:58 am	Next steps I go this idea on Friday afternoon, while biking back from the first meeting for my summer fellowship at Northwestern: Open Source Teaching. The work I'm doing with Northwestern is intended to be a resource, available for teachers and students around the world to use. Part of what we talked about is how we can develop a model for teachers to write their own modifications to the basic laboratory experiment that we're supporting-- so, if I'm a teacher out in the cloud somewhere, and I use this lab for a remedial algebra class, or for an AP biology class, or for a middle school "general science" class, then I can do a little write-up of what I did, and add that write-up to the library of "curriculum guides" that exist for how to use this experiment to support a particular set of learning objectives (like a lot of good science experiments, there's lots of different things that COULD be learned by doing this one). As I was riding home, that got me thinking that what I really want, in the long term, is to develop an "Open Source" model for sharing curricula, teaching materials, etc. Include text-based and multimedia presentations all under creative commons, empower teachers and students alike to add features to the materials-base, etc. I've already been thinking, along with another AP Calc teacher, about building a site to host videos of AP Calc lessons-- and this would fit right in, but with those videos being just one small corner of the whole Open Source Teaching project. Because, part of what I've been thinking is wrong with education is that the textbook publishers convince teachers that the book is the expert in the room. But really, the textbooks kind of suck, and don't know anything about this particular batch of students. Bluntly, I really hate textbooks. And at the same time, I want to develop a deep and rich, multi-year interdisciplinary curriculum, teaching science and math together-- so that math is always developed in order to empower a deeper understanding of the science phenomena. I was talking about this just last week, and said my old bit about the how the textbook should not be the expert in the room-- the teacher should be. "So, I guess I'm going to try to write a textbook that makes that clear..." It sounds like an okay answer, but I think, actually, that developing that interdisciplinary curriculum as an Open Source project makes even more sense... See, I'd already been thinking about who would publish my curriculum-- Hank Howe, my old grad advisor at UIC, was always good at keeping that sort of pragmatism in mind: If you don't know whose going to publish this, then you probably should figure that out before you write it. I was thinking maybe Key Curriculum could be interested in it, or possibly Wiley. And now, I'm thinking it's an Open Source project. Maybe I'll put it into bound books and publish it (either through an existing publisher, or with some sort of books-on-demand publisher), just as some distributions of Linux sell their "value-added" distros of free software.... But the point is, it should be just one more tiny corner of the broader Open Source Teaching movement... Right-- I'm off to register a domain name, I guess.... :) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
6:20 pm	Well, okay then. It's a bit short on detail, but I appreciate the gesture: I applied to DePaul University a month ago, didn't hear anything for three weeks, contacted them and was told that my application was in committee, and I should hear soon. In today's post was a DePaul T-Shirt, wrapped up tight inside a bit of cardboard reading simply "The Faculty and Staf of DePaul congratulate you on your admission to the University!" On the back, there's 3 more paragraphs, waxing rhapsodic about how great this will be. Oh, and a phone number, to call if I have further questions. Like, say, when I start. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 8th, 2009
12:03 pm	An important indicator? I'm at a grant reading today, helping decide which school improvement projects will be funding, and which won't. The grant proposals are, as one might assume, pretty dry. Back when I was in grad school for ecology, most academic papers wouldpit me to sleep. Today, even the really bad proposals are energizing, as I think "ooh-- here's how to do that idea even better!". Guess that means I really have found my calling... (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
8:23 pm	Quite the busy evening In the past five hours, since leaving work, I have: Been to the butcher Been to a store the sells wine Been to the garden shop Been to the hardware store Re-potted three plants (two tomato, one strawberry) Installed a, uh, thingy to hang a hanging pot from the garage Installed a bike hanger inside the garage, and hung my sweetie's bike from it (saves floor space) Re-planted five plants into the ground behind the garage Kegged six gallons of nettle beer (including cleaning and sterilizing two kegs, and cleaning up after) Put away the clean dishes from the dishwasher Cooked and eaten dinner (rotini in a homemade hot italian sausage tomato sauce) Now, at last, I'm off to blow up GlaDOS. I have a bit less than an hour before bedtime-- should be plenty of time for it! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
9:29 pm	Zombies on the brain Been reading the Zombie Apocalypse blog lately. It's seriously messing with my vibe. Listening to the traffic report on the radio tonight, I kept thinking "They shut down a freeway-- they say it's because of a bank robbery, but maybe its actually ZOMBIES!!" Anyway, I'm considering a radio drama-as-podcast. "Voice actors" interested in joining in, send me an email. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 11th, 2009
8:57 pm	Finally planning a lager Bought ingredients today for a Märzen. Have a fridge ready for fermenting in. Probably will start it on Wednesday. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 7th, 2009
9:28 pm	The next big project Now that I'm done with my sweetie's schaube, and the garden plans are starting to come together, I'm finally beginning to give serious thought to building a new (totally steampunk) case for my old (early-model Intel) Macbook. It's got a cracked screen, anyway, so I figure it's a good candidate for a rebuild; the basic idea is inspired by this beautiful thing. In my case, of course, it'll be running OS X, and the screen will be an external 17" widescreen LCD that I'll build into the top. I'll want to rip apart the case of that LCD, to save weight, and I figure that there'll be some amount of engineering to figure out how to handle all the power inside the wooden outer-casing (my vision, at the moment, is to have a standard 120V power cord coming out of it, with the monitor and the AC adapter both plugged into that circuit on the inside-- I'll probably just use a 3-head extension cord, but that isn't as efficient on space, so I might build my own spliced cable...) Putting the AC adapter inside the box won't be very efficient on space (or weight), but this will end up being not really portable (what with the video requiring AC, and anyway, the logic board on that laptop is damaged, so it dies after 10-30 minutes on battery power, anyway). The main goal is to make something beautiful that'll live on the coffee table... I'm figuring on building a wooden cover over the existing laptop keyboard, with antique typewriter keys on stems that poke up above that. The bit I haven't figured out, yet, is the touchpad (or whatever I use instead of a touchpad)... Possibly I'll find an external USB touchpad that can be mounted on that wooden cover, or possibly I'll find a way of detaching the existing touchpad, extending the cables, and re-mounting it. Not trivial, that bit... Not to mention venting and cooling... Should be a fun project. Of course, fitting it all in during a reasonable time-frame for my sweetie to be left completely without a computer will be a trick, too... :) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 13th, 2009
7:10 pm	Paperless society woo hoo! This year, I did my taxes myself, by hand, as is my usual practice (except when I have something particularly interesting happen that might have unknown-to-me tax benefits). Last year, I gave up trying to figure out how to file electronically (since I wasn't using a third-party piece of tax-calculation software, it wasn't just "click here to file"). This year, I did it all pencil-and-paper again, but then I entered it all in through freefile (which appears to be a third-party webapp that was presumably designed for IRS by a contractor?) It was a bit of a nuisance re-entering the W2s, but the whole data-entry process took about 30 minutes. I did all this entry last week. Now, the IRS website tells me that my refund will post to my checking account by direct deposit on Wednesday-- 8 days after I filed. I know that Patrissimo will tell me that I should never rejoice in how easy it is to get back money that ought to be mine anyway, but I actually don't have a personal problem with taxation, so I'm pretty pleased. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 6th, 2009
12:30 pm	A fine day Good birthday yesterday-- my wife made eight loaves of exceptionally good bread, with homemade black olive tapanade, buckwheat honey butter and cheddar/walnut spread, plus a really excellent cake (yellow cake with raspberry jam filling, and chocolate mascarpone/whipped cream frosting). Somewhere between a dozen and a score of friends dropped by. We drank beer, cider and mead, noshed the bread and spreads, gave tours of the newly-refinished attic and Rick and Libby's apartment. A few kind souls brought presents (a funny T-shirt, two excellent steam-punk interplanetary travel posters, two very nice bottles of scotch, and a couple of gift certificates to a new, local game store). It was a very fine day, indeed! And today starts Spring Break in earnest. *whew* I am relaxed. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
11:12 am	I have to admit, it's getting better I have the morning off, because we're working noon-6:30, giving out report cards today. Not bad. I spent my morning mostly sewing up my wife's new schaube (German-style long woolen cloak). It's pretty awesome. Just have to attach the (purely decorative) collar now, which should be easily do-able on Friday night, in time for Saturday's event. Woo hoo! The builders finished in the kitchen on Tuesday, but for a couple of minor things (the electrician had to come back yesterday, to fix a botch on the fuse box). I like the built-in dishwasher already, and we haven't even used it yet. The hot water heater is a bit of a nuisance, and a definite eyesore, but I'll build a screen for it, which should also help with the noise from it (it's not super noisy, but noisy enough, anyway...) I had to do a minor fix on the shower, myself, since the builders didn't figure out what was needed (the shower diverter valve wasn't working; fortunately, rather than buying a new spout, I was able to just replace the O-ring in it!) Last night, we moved back downstairs. This involved a couple hours of painting walls, and a couple hours of moving and unpacking boxes. I'm looking forward to reclaiming the attic as a game room. And, I just made a fabulous lunch: Hook's award-winning blue cheese, melted in olive oil and garlic, and served on thin spaghetti. Yum! Also, full now! Today, during report card pick-up, I've cleared it with my principal so that I'll leave a radio at my table, and be in the back room working on making computers better. This is a much more pleasing use of my time than sitting at the table for 6 hours, to talk to a dozen parents. I'll still do the talking to a dozen parents part, but I won't have to sit in the noisy room, waiting for the next parent to come along... So, yeah, good stuff. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
5:25 pm	Annnnd, nothing. So, the nice men came on Monday, and removed one wall from the kitchen, placing the cabinetry onto the front porch (sadly, we'll be re-using the same cabinetry, at least for now). Since then, nothing has happened. Literally, nobody who doesn't live here has set foot in the house for 72 hours. I'm flipping between being pissed off and depressed. I mean, living in the attic is okay, but it's really not very comfortable, and I really don't want to be up here in two more weeks, when I start Spring Break. But, the project was projected for two weeks, and since they've gotten jack-all done in this first week... Apparently, their plumber got stuck on another job, because the inspector changed some things. I have to ask, at what point does my contractor go get another damned plumber?? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, March 16th, 2009
4:43 pm	So, it begins. The kitchen is missing a wall. This is a feature, not a bug. Soon, the pipes will be missing, as well. Both will shortly be replaced with new and improved versions of the same. The builders put up a plastic sheet, to protect the rest of the house from dust. Funny thing none of us thought of, the thermostat is on the kitchen-side of that sheet, so when I got home today, the rest of the house was VERY warm. Poor cat! Sarah and I will be staying in the attic until it's all done. (Comment on this)