Sooooo... work today. Evidently, threat of arrest is an occupational hazard around here. I heard a pounding on the door and some yelling, so I answered it. There was a uniformed private security officer. "Hello," I said to him. "SECURITY!! Put your hands up!" he yelled at me. "What?" "Get your hands where I can see them!" he barked. "Show me some identification!" I calmly handed him my driver's license. "What's going on here," I asked. "I'm kind of working right now." "Is this your real address?" "No, I moved recently. Is there a reason for this?"

Obviously, there was little that would be accomplished from this conversation. "This building is alarmed. What are you doing here?" "Working," I repeated. "I work here and I'm on the clock right now." "Can't you hear the alarm?" he grunted. "What alarm? I didn't know we had one. Do you mean that buzzing?" I asked him. Now that I was standing in the vestibule, there was a faint whine. Coming from next door. "The Urbandale police will be here in a minute," he threatened. "Okay," I responded.

Perhaps the police would make more sense than this unarmed, glorified mall cop. I was most definitely where I was supposed to be and had many logs and schedules that attested to this fact. Idle threats really weren't going to do much to me today. "You need to turn this alarm off. Enter the access code." I looked at the featureless card reader next to the door to the jeweler's in the next suite over. There was certainly no means of entering any 'code,' even if I knew how to get into the place. "Look, I'm actually supposed to be here. How about you talk to the engineer and maybe he can give you the 'access code,'" I offered.

I let the suspicious officer into the station and called the engineer. "Hi, this is Aaron. Sorry to bother you, but this guy says he'll have the police arrest me if I don't give him some sort of code to an alarm or something. Can you talk to him?" I asked the chief engineer. I have no idea what was said to make Chumpy McChuckles go away, but the engineer did something I'm thankful for. The clown wandered away to his official-looking car. I'm going to place a call to the building owners about their security tomorrow.

I bought a cheap-o Orchid from Target a month or so ago. It was in bloom with lovely lovely deep purple/black flowers on a long spike. The orchid is a Dendrobium Copter according to it's tag. These are ephipyte orchids (they live in trees and have aerial roots). They like to have small pots and grow big.

My plants bloomed for several weeks, and then died off. The older leaves started turning yellow and breaking off. I was frantic to figure out what exactly was wrong with my leaves so (being a librarian) I consulted many books about it. Each and every book seemed to have a different take on yellowing leaves. The plant is getting too much sun The plant is not getting enough sun The plant is over watered Wait. The plant is underwatered.

I became very frustrated and decided that overall the plant looked fine and so what. It is loosing old leaves, but I am still getting a lot of new growth. I am now starting to get a new stalk growing which hopefully will bloom. I have no idea if this is an annually blooming plant, or continuous blooming and have nothing to go on than a broad generalization what type of atmosphere it prefers. The room it is in gets Easterly sun, partially shaded. I keep it over a pebble tray with water to keep the humidity up around the plant. The room it is in changes slightly in temp during the day and night and summer/winter due to its poor insulation. So- nice and warm in the summer, cooler in the winter.

I am posting pics because I couldn't find a single picture on the web of Dendrobium Copters. Frustrating to no end so now I am attempting to learn and share my knowledge. Hope this helps someone out there!

Dendrobium Copter - 11/08/05 A complete view of the currently non-flowering

Dendrobium Copter - 11/08/05 an overhead shot of the orchid. You can sort of see the new stalk growing.

Chinese astronomers claim they've found strong evidence that there's a massive black hole in the center of our galaxy. I think this can finally lay to rest all those notions of a caring creator of our kind: ultimately, we are fucked. Perhaps the Buddhists have a more accurate view, that all are striving endlessly toward a future that consists of being crushed into oblivion by an enormous gravity well. Mankind's final destiny is now clearly defined as an insignificant contribution to the greedy pinpoint that is the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Have a nice, yet eventually ineffectual day.

I've been mulling over content organization again. The vast majority of new posts are Blog Entries; there simply isn't enough traffic to warrant Fora. Of course, I'd have to move content from the Fora to the Blogs, but that could damage my Google Page Rank.

Top 20 Search Strings:

1 29 21.17% ninja ping pong

2 22 16.06% windiz update

3 5 3.65% windiz

4 5 3.65% windiz updates

5 4 2.92% starcraft mods

6 4 2.92% stnnng

7 3 2.19% infiniti m35x

8 3 2.19% lego cd thrower

9 2 1.46% 2005 photos of mn ren fest

10 2 1.46% air quality towers implosion ames

11 2 1.46% cd thrower

12 2 1.46% nikki's breakfast iowa city iowa

13 2 1.46% ninja ping-pong

14 2 1.46% windiz review

15 2 1.46% windiz update review

16 1 0.73% arizona uses ikonos imagery in dispute with developer

17 1 0.73% best buy enployment application

18 1 0.73% cyrix kitchen

19 1 0.73% cyrix processors

20 1 0.73% des moines implosion

Ninja Ping-Pong Action accounts for a fifth of my search engine hits alone. Try a search for "ninja ping pong" on Google. Of course, other odd search strings give me Top 5 Status on Google: "Wizz3rd", "Boxy Foxy", "Old Cyrix Processors", "SpamGrish", "Hemionitis arifolia", and "Weed Pots" are good examples. Nevertheless, I have a burning need to round-up content, and the Fora are currently a wasteland. I'd also have to finally rebuild my Case Mod Work Logs as Articles, but those have been languishing in Hard Drive Purgatory for too long. Aside from some Fall Cleaning, I'd like reworking the the Site Template as well. I like lean and clean, but it's a bit bland right now.

Recently went into a Xtian supply store. For some reason, those crazy zombie cultists need suppliers, like heroin junkies. It seems that most of the "supplies" they need are books and cheap trinkets. I found a book called "Wicca: Satan's Little White Lie" and another that claimed Pokemon steals the souls of children. I guess Nintendo is cutting into the church racket. I find this rather odd, since I played through Pokemon: Sapphire and I don't recall it asking for my worship and devotion once. Cockfighting, yes; slavish servitude, no. At least, it never demanded anything outright.

I've long since been a purveyor of unconvincing religious pamplets and was surprised to find a revolving retail sales rack of Chick tracts. They had them for sale singly and in wrapped bulk packs, just in case you need exactly 25 copies of 'Good Old Boys,' the pamplet that explains how Freemasons worship the Devil. According to 'Party Girl,' Satan himself tends bar in New Orleans, horns, Anton LaVey goatee and all, spiking drinks with quick-acting fatal poisons. It seems he does it to get revenge on aging Xtians and killing their vacationing kids is the best possible way to go about it.

By the way, Satan is personally in charge of India, where his demons gleefully order poor people to slaughter anyone who uses the word "Jesus" in a sentence. I guess he does it when it's not Happy Hour in Louisiana. The milf behind the counter seemed pretty out of it and I could sense a certain air of subjugated desperation to her. It was tempting to hit on her, but she was also obviously homeschooling her kid and was far too busy to suck cock over by the parenting videos with titles like "Assuring Your Child's Virginity." Oddly enough, the saint to protect against death by artillery(Barbara) that Bruce42 mentioned is also one of the many saints that watch over brewers.

So I was browsing the local Wal-Mart for an interesting plant to put in a new hanging pot... and I found a really neat looking fern. Unfortuneately, the only thing printed on the plastic pot was" "FERN 4" " So... fern. Pretty vague... by chance I caught some forum post about a "heart fern", and after some searching it is in fact Hemionitis arifolia. Unfortuneately, all I can find are pictures of the plant, I can't find a lick of information about proper care of the poor thing. I'm hoping it kicks back, but it's been losing a few leaves every day now. Though, I'm pretty sure the leaves that are shriveling were already pretty sickly looking... It does have one nice new leaf (frond?) growing, and none of the major leaves are giving up. I'm crossing my fingers, as it's really pretty.

CSS Support IE 7.0's Weakest Link - dilbertspace writes "Anyone who has ever developed a website knows that cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility is a nightmare, mainly due to Microsoft's willful non-compliance with the CSS2 standard. As this eWeek article points out, it seems Microsoft will continue their poor support for CSS2 even in the IE 7.0 release. This may have worked when IE was the only game in town, but now that Firefox is a serious player, it won't help them keep market share as they think it will." SlashDot.org

One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a "flawed" standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it. When asked about its plans for supporting CSS2 in IE 7.0, a Microsoft spokeswoman said, "Unfortunately we can't disclose anything about IE 7 right now, so we won't be able to comment on standards and CSS2."

Spectacular. Not surprising, but definitely disappointing. I really don't understand Microsoft's position on CSS support at all. So what if CSS 2.0 isn't exactly right? They would have a much more credible postion if they simply made IE compliant and provided support for new CSS standards. I mean, if CSS 2.0 is "flawed", why not take an active role in the development of new standards now, while you have comanding share of the browser market? They definitely aren't winning any friends in the web community. Stupid. So stupid.

The chuck from Tool America arrived on Thursday. I couldn't wait to try it out, so I cut a small flat square from an orphaned walnut board, and turned a shallow dish. It worked really well; so much so that I crafted five more bowl/plates the next day. These were a great warm-up for bowl turning. I haven't seriously turned in a few years, so it felt good to flex the lathe skills. Sushi Plate 1 Sushi Plate 2

Of course, my current goal is turing bowls, so I've been researching food-safe finishes and finishing techniques. I've found that the best bang for the buck is buffing & polishing combined with a wax finish- beeswax, carnuba, or a blend. The carnuba is harder and produces a glossy finish, while the beeswax is soft and satiny. I made a buffing wheel attachment for the chuck and tried out polishing; it worked out better than I expected. The rig performed flawlessly, and the plates are smooth and shiny. Buffing Wheel 1 Buffing Wheel 2

Salvaged lumber is my favorite woodworking material source. Dead trees, pruned limbs, demolition leftovers- all are free game. Perhaps 'free' is the key word. Admittedly, I am a firm believer in 'free is always the best price', but there is something more to it than the impact of a project's cost on my pocketbook. There is simply something deeply satisfying about turning trash into treasure. I am consistently amazed at the wonderfully useful stuff that people toss into dumpsters or onto junk piles.

For example, I pulled two logs from the neighbor's brush pile. Both are the remains of 'weed' trees culled to make room for a rather shoddy housing development in the next-door lot. One is walnut, 10cm in diameter and 2 meters long; the other is red mulberry, it's three trunks twisted together and slowly fusing. I estimate that from those trees I will be able to salvage a total of twenty useable blanks. As I am selling the resulting turnings (mainly weed pots ) for $10-$20 apiece, that 'worthless' brush is obviously quite the opposite. Here's a shot of the few I've turned so far. Mel and I are selling them on Ultra Art.

Weed Pots

Granted, I don't expect construction workers to be knowledgable in the finer aspects of woodworking, but it is still frustrating to know that my fellow Americans are so stupidly wasteful and inefficient. What happened to "Yankee ingenuity"? Does no one believe in the power of dumpster diving any more? This is Iowa! Where are our practical farmers? Are people so spoiled with overflowing abundance that simple frugality and keen observation have gone completely out the window? Shop class? As for myself, I refuse to accept the programming of our modern consumer society. new != good; lab notes: