indiboi.com

Ear Gauge & How to Gauge Ears:

Mine are no longer gauged, as I’ve moved beyond that system. They’re 7/16ths of an inch, though I mostly wear 1cm jewelry. I took approximately eight months to get to 00 gauge from standard piercing gun size, using tapered acrylic “claws” for every step, about a size a month. Going slowly and allowing for healing between sizes has allowed me to have a fairly nice looking stretch, versus some that I’ve seen on others, eww. I had both of my ears pierced with the gun when I was twelve, that’s fourteen years ago. Do not use a gun these days, go to a professional, it will cost more, but trust me, a piercing gun is BAD, BAD, BAD.

Bacardi Ciclone:

That stuff is just okay, it’s basically a premixed drink, but think about it: rum and tequila mixed together? …does that really seem appealing to you? Take my advice, pass on that, even if you think the bottle is cool.

Hedgren Urban Bag:

I had one of these, bought it at the Samsonite store at the outlets in Hagerstown. It really is a nice bag, except the magnetic snap closure would pull out through the ultra thin (another bad thing) nylon. I replaced it with a wonderful Tom Bihn small cafe bag, while much more simple, I like it a lot better.

Sculpy for Ears Plugs:

I tried this, worked out okay, but it’s very difficult to get two that match, and even more difficult is getting them to be the proper size. Screw it, just buy good ones, they’re worth it.

MI-5 on A&E:

Yes, I think they cancelled it. If not it is on some horribly long hiatus. I really enjoyed that program too, the bastards.

Shaving Soap Recipe:

Any soap recipe will work, basically, just add some bentonite clay for added slip, about 2 tablespoons per pound of oils. Mix it up with ‘raw’ oil when you go to mix it into the soup mixture, otherwise you’ll have a clump-o-rama from hell.

Djarum Bali Hai Naturales Cloves:

These are a very tropical clove cigarette. I do like them, but tend to associate them distinctly with spiced rum & cokes, this dumb boy I fell in love with, and hanging out in this deadend town to the southeast of here. As you might have guessed, I tend to avoid purchasing them these days.

20 Gauge Ears:

This is basically what you get when you pierce with a gun, approximately the size of all standard earrings.

Hyundai Tiburon:

I owned a 1998 model, it was deep purple, nearly black. I loved that car, it had massive power. Sadly, I had to give it up when I started my company… I needed the capital for that instead.

“how to be a good boyfriend what are the steps” & “ideal boyfriend” & “steps to being a good boyfriend”

These gave me a chuckle, I think I’ll just leave it at that. I’m fairly tempted to write an entry just on that subject in the future though.

Ikea Lack Shelf Hardware Screws:

Use the biggest ones that’ll fit, with the strongest wall anchors you can find. Otherwise you’ll find the shelves tilting horrifyingly south if you put anything of substantial weight on them. Also, remember, they’re only designed to hold 7 pounds… not 400 cds. ;)

Ikea Brigad:

Lovely hard anodized aluminium cookware. It’s quasi-nonstick, cleans up easily, is quite hefty, and highly recommended by me for cost-effective fabulous kitchen goals. A complete set of two saucepans, two pots, and a frying pan will cost you just $125. This is as close as you’re going to get to the best cookware without jumping into the $100 per piece range, in my humble opinion.

Man Purse:

Go ahead and get one, once you do you’ll fully realize how ‘women had it right’ in carrying their purses around everywhere. I recommend Tom Bihn, since that’s the one I have, heh.

“emachine won’t turn on after being unplugged”

Did you plug it back in? I’m sorry you own an emachine though. As sucky as having a computer die is, you’re probably better off. Save up your money and buy a quality computer, meaning, get yourself an Apple.

“ever tried cheer dark”

Yep, Matthew & I recommend it for dark clothing. However; you’ll want to get some woolite dark for more quality items like your fancy black trousers; reserve the Cheer Dark for things like jeans or cotton sweaters, underwear, etc. I don’t trust it for dressier clothing because it is still a relatively general purpose fabric detergent.

Queer Ravers:

So cute, really… so brainless, really. The phrase “retard boy” comes to mind here, the first letter can easily be dropped for full effect too.

“how much wax needed per 6oz candle”

Your ratio is 16oz of wax by weight will equal 20 oz of wax by volume.

“hanes no-fly trunks price”

$10 per package of four at walmart. They’re cut HUGE, just to warn you. ;)

“kitchenaid and hechts”

I bought mine there, a 5 quart Artisan. Hecht’s sale price is everyone else’s regular price. They inflate the ‘regular’ price by about $100 per model for sales.

Copper Cookware:

Probably the best stuff you can get, in a sense. Thin and highly heat conductive, you have great control over the cooking process. If you’re not what I’d consider an excellent cook though, you’d probably hate it.

“cure for dracaena root rot”

What did you do? Overwatered. Draceana family plants like things to dry out completely and then be drenched with water, repeat. If your roots are rotting you have a definite problem that needs to be corrected in terms of culture, your watering habits. You could cut off the rotted roots, sprinkle them with some growth hormone, but I’ve never tried that. You can also “dust” the cut ends with cinnamon, as it does have antifungal/bacterial qualities. I did that with my phal orchid that I inadvertantly purchased with rotted roots… it died nearly instantly; it would have died anyway.

“mdf versus wood and baseboard”

I love mdf, and with its excellent machinability (meaning it can be routed very easily), it’d be great stuff for any sort of accent trim — just as long as you plan to prime & paint the surfaces.

“purchase djarum blacks”

Esmokes.com is a great place, but I tend to buy mine up the hill at the Choice Cig Outlet.

“frederick md gay bars”

Well, there’s the Deerpark Lodge in between Frederick & Hagerstown… it is awful of course. If you’re in Frederick do yourself a favor and go on down to DC.

“the leaves on my dracaena are going yellow margarita”

If it’s just the bottom leaves nothing is wrong, the plant will yellow and drop the bottom leaves as it grows and this completely normal. However; if it is all over your plant is sick. You’re probably overwatering it, the roots are rotting. Sorry, but it is probably done for at this point.

“gay davey”

Yes, he is. ;)

“whoreboi”

That’d be Cole.

Kiwi Preserves:

I made this on a whim, it’s really good, but incredibly sweet, perhaps overly so. The recipe was in a booklet that came with my “Jelly Making Kit” by Ball. If I recall correctly I used liquid pectin, thus the recipe is probably in that package too.

“fix imac keyboard spilled”

Buy a new one, sorry; next time be more careful… I should talk, hah, I’ve ruined quite a few keyboards that way.

“pennsylvania liquer stores discount”

Could you get me one? Other than the monthly sales, which usually doesn’t correspond to what I want to buy, lol.

“ipod dock solder”

My ipod dock broke at the solder connection for the line out. I popped it open, soldered it back together and works as good as new; saving me forty dollars.

“i hate comcast”

Me too, but they do have a pretty good stranglehold on broadband internet and television services here; which is probably why I hate them so much. I’d much rather have satellite tv and keep my cable internet, but of course I’d still have to pay for TV, either directly or indirectly through a cute little non-subscriber fee they have; bastards.

“i want to shag”

Me too, someone in particular though, lol…

“what kind of math is used in making soap?”

Unless you want to get super technical, there isn’t much math involved anymore. You just plug your oil amounts into an internet lye calculator, like the one at thesage.com, and it’ll do all the hard work for you, with brilliant computer precision.

Pier 1 Pampas Chair:

I convinced the woman to buy one of these a while back, I absolutely love its understated modern simplicity. It’s also very comfortable.

“communication patterns in when harry met sally”

Oh dear… I’m dying of laughter here… but for reasons explained elsewhere.

Hanging Stemware Rack:

Make one, I did.

“buzzing lights dimmer switch ikea”

With Halogen lighting you will have a somewhat noticible buzz when using any ordinary dimmer. If you at least have a quality dimmer, say for example a Lutron that costs about $30, this hum/buzz shouldn’t be too annoying. Halogen lighting technically requires a special dimmer, and these cost between $100 and $200 depending on if the fixture is magnetic or electronic. If it’s magnetic it’ll be very heavy. ;)

Panasonic HT-05:

A very nice (affordable) surround sound system. I recommend it.

Pleather Headboard:

I made one about a year and a half ago, basically take a piece of plywood, wrap it in fabric batting, wrap with the vinyl, staple into place on the back. Hang it on the wall or affix it to the bedframe, good luck.

“is grinding with other guys disrespectful?”

If you’re doing it in front of your boyfriend, but otherwise have at it. ;)

“creme brulee didn’t set”

I had this problem recently, but I haven’t written about it yet. Okay, first problem is the recipe… but realistically that shouldn’t be a problem… a few eggs and some heavy cream, when heated and mixed together will turn into custard, it’s a chemical reaction fact. The real problem is temperature and time. Get an oven thermometer, when in doubt, just keep baking it, baking it, and baking it… It took 1.5 hours at least in my oven, when it should have only taken 40 minutes. Keep in mind that your ramekins might be a different size than the ones the recipe author used, bigger ones will take more time, smaller will take less.

“split box spring cost”

The difference in cost for a split box spring and a regular box spring is usually horrifying. Part of me really wishes I had bought the split box spring for my queen bed, but yikes… I’d go without and get a nice platform bed frame, and I’d still be saving money!

Geez, I could keep doing this forever, lol… I’m going to stop for now, my boredom has successfully been squished.

Quite long time ago I realized to my horror that this persistent green spot on my Nikon’s images happened to be a hot pixel… and upon ‘testing’ for them (by taking a solid black photo) I found several more. This was when my camera was under warranty, but I couldn’t risk not having it for when davey was here, so I never sent it in for ‘remapping’ …and basically just forgot about the problem because they’re easy enough to fix in The Gimp or Photoshop if necessary. I also planned on ‘upgrading’ to a more professional Nikon Digital anyway.

The hot pixel problem became apparent again when photographing Patrick in January, and really annoyed me enough yesterday when looking at the photos of Jon that I’d taken on Monday.

While doing some research into using Image Magick to create a ‘one step’ shell script to resize, rotate, border, & watermark my images I stumbled upon this fab little app/script, Jpegpixi. I didn’t realize that it came with a ‘tool’ to map out the hot pixels automatically, so I spent a seriously pathetic amount of time doing it manually… whoops.

Geeez! My little Nikon has such a fucked up CCD! I really think I damaged it when I was doing “bulb” exposures one night outside… if that’s actually possible, I just don’t know. According to the automatic mapping tool I have nine (9!!!) hot/stuck pixels. Of course I’ve only visibly noticed about three, so the other six are (and according to the coordinates) pretty insignificant. I think I want to run the test on my brother’s Nikon and see if it has an equally bad CCD… might do Patrick’s Canon too, just for the sake of comparision.

The good news is that jpegpixi seems to perfectly interpolate around the bad pixels, with no apparent loss of image quality, the weird splurts of neon just vanish. Of course once a ‘full’ sized photograph is reduced down from 300dpi to 72dpi the hot pixels vanish anyway, it’s only a major issue when printing or viewing at full resolution.

Writing of Printing… I need/want to print some photos, of course my general idea was to just upload them to either Apple or Shutterfly, etc, and order them that way, because it’s considerably more cost-effective than replacing my ink cartridges, but definitely cuts down on the ever important instant gratification factor. Considering that decent-quality printers (like my Epson Stylus Photo 820) are practically disposable these days (actually, my laser printer, hah, it’s CHEAPER to buy a new one than it is to replace the toner cartridge!!). Anyway, I don’t know what I’m going to do… I don’t like the idea of tossing a printer just because the ink has run out, but it’s not that much more to just buy a new one, lol. Example being, the two cartridges for my Epson cost $50, a new Epson C84 (though I don’t know about its quality) is $80 after a $20 rebate. Maybe I should have splurged when I bought my new inkjet and bought one where it’d be ridiculous to replace when the ink ran out? ;) There are also printers that cost the same as replacing the ink… mostly HP stuff, don’t know about them though.

I still want a new digital camera though, but I’ve decided to go the Canon EOS digital route, as a Digital Rebel is approximately $1000 now, not including a lense, but I already have two EOS system lenses from my film Rebel. The photographer at my brother’s wedding was using a digital rebel… of course I don’t think he did a very good job, lol — his metering was WAY OFF in pretty much most of the photos. I need to look at the EXIF data to see if he was on automatic though. Granted the ambient lighting would have made for very difficult metering… lots of backlight situations, so if one wasn’t specifically choosing where to meter, by way of metering on the manually chosen focus area, well, it’d mean bad results. It’s still a swank camera though. :) My main thing, I suppose, is that I want a camera that is able to take quality images in very low light situations without adding a lot of noise.

My little ‘make ready for the web’ script is still a bit lacking, as I’m having a very difficult time trying to figure out how to use Image Magick’s border functions… though I do have it doing pretty much everything else. I need to tweak it a bit so that it will still work if the image isn’t at the preset resolution, etc. I think my main annoyance is that The Gimp doesn’t preserve EXIF data, and since both my gallery on ALP and deviantart can read the EXIF data, it kind of sucks that it is missing after resize and watermarking.

I’ve been wanting to create some sort of sculture or mobile for a while now and naturally making it out of acrylic and lighting it with LEDs would be the way to go.

I had two pieces of the 1/4″ acrylic left over, not quite big enough to really do much with. I also ordered, along with the original acrylic, some 1/4″ rod and 1/4″ ID tube… so, well, using an old sony discman power adapter (it’s rated at 4.5v, but provides more like 6.6v), some resistors, more of that lovely ribbon cable (IDE Cable), I put this together.

I’m not entirely done, the lamp (rod) sections aren’t glued into the base and the base hasn’t been sanded. If you weren’t aware by now, cutting 1/4″ acrylic is NOT an easy task, especially if trying to cut it into a circular shape… heh. I need to smooth out the edges of the base quite badly… I also need to come up with some way to elevate the base so that the wiring will work. Putting some heatshrink (once I get more of it) around the ugly gray ribbon cable wires wouldn’t be too bad of an idea either. The whole device, with the three LEDs, draws no more than 60mA so it can be lit continuously without really costing anything in terms of electricity billing.

My brother David says that it looks more like a waste of time than anything else, but… I think it’s cool. :-)

The other day I had made another of the LED display units, making two in total. I’d connected it to this computer, my workstation, and found it to work as well as it should. I did realize that the cables weren’t long enough to reach from the back of the file server to the front though after it was fully together, d’oh!

I got a little ahead of myself and decided to just go ahead and splice in more cabling so that it would be long enough and after that time consuming endeavor I connected it to the fileserver. Much to my surprise it didn’t work properly! Three of the eight LEDs were lit constantly and wouldn’t ever go out… then I noticed that whenever there was drive activity the other LEDs would light up. There’s definitely something weird going on, perhaps some sort of lack of isolation/insulation on the board. Many years ago I had a motherboard that would disconnect the printer port stuff whenever USB was used (or was it the other way around?).. either way it was because of bad capacitor placement. I figured at first though that it was probably something kernel related, but alas creating a new one didn’t solve the problem either. I also realized that the BIOS would beep insanely whenever the LED display stuff was attached on bootup. GAH!!! Oh well, screw that idea. There’s definitely something ‘wrong’ with the printer port on that motherboard.

Anyway, I attached it to the piece of acrylic that I’d created for this purpose (I also bent a piece to use as a base) and you can see it in this poor quality image.

MMMMM!!! Glowing Acrylic Goodness! GAG! :D hahaha…

I totally love it and have so many ideas on how to improve it. I tried to get the mouse to brighten up the red LED so that you can see how the glow looks a bit purple when the mouse is in use.

There are a couple of tracking problems with the optical mouse still, but I think a little more sanding should solve that… you can see some streaking in the sanding… Maybe I should have gone in circles? Regardless, it looks so amazing that I don’t really mind the occasional mouse glitch at this point (though I’ll still try to get it working perfectly if that’s possible). I’ll write more about it later, of course, but I just wanted to show this baby off. :) I lurve my glowpad!