I've just finished up an assignment in good old Philadelphia, and I haven't been stabbed or had to ask one of the many many many police officers running around the city for help. Hip-hip-Hooray! In fact, I not only survived, but I managed to find a modern marvel, a little place called City View Pizza & Grill. I went to the one on 1545 Spring Garden street unknowingly, and I was greeting with a few signs of greatness even before I got my meal. The following is a list of items that hinted that I was in for a treat: 1) Cops were eating there. It's a sure fire sign that a place is good if their are cops or military eating there. I find this to be true because those two groups tend to eat out a lot, so they zero in on the good places pretty quick. Of course I'm currently in Philadelphia which has more cops than anywhere I've ever seen so maybe it's just a fact that a restaurant is going to have one or two at it, but I felt it was a good omen, nonetheless. 2) There were at least five people per job in the kitchen and each of them looked like Bald Bull from Super Punch-out. Nothing like giving your order to a thick necked guy with a five'o'clock shadow at 11:30 in the morning, meanwhile his four equally large buddies holler out at other customers taking their orders as well. All the while, a slew of cooks (again huge fellas) are fighting for grill space. Big people and lots of them is usually a good sign. It's sad going into some place with one or two people that multi-task as cashier, cook, order-taker, in fact that's almost un-American. If a place isn't doing well enough to have 9 guys doing the same job all at once, then it's probably not a good place to go eat (I'm just sayin'). 3) I'm looking on the menu for some extra ingredients and you finally notice that at the top they specify that everything comes with grilled onions, green peppers and marinara upon request, free of charge and happily given. Oh snap! I'll take grilled onions and peppers on my Belgian waffle to go please, and why not throw some 'wiz wit it too. 4) They had one size of fountain drink, and it was as big as my shoe. In fact, I probably could have slapped two of these cups on my feet and walk into one of those crazy overpriced open-houses in California and the realtor wouldn't even flinch. Lets be honest, if you're going to be eating a lip smacking meal you have to wash it down with something, and if you're handed a gigantic cup before you receive your eats, chances are you'll be eating well. 5) I politely order the SMALL stromboli, and the guy across the counter looks at me and asks if I was eating alone. Woah nelly! Sit down and brace yourself and take it easy on the pre-meal drinks 'cause you're going to need the room. 6) After I made a laughable attempt to finish what monstrous meal they'd given me, they refused to let me wrap it up for take-way without their assistance. My suspicion was because they're concerned I'd throw out my back. I could tell this place meant business when their promotion was that each take-out order came with a complimentary lifting belt. Kudos, City View... Kudos!
 I got this idea after one of my British friends, the cartoonist, Dan Archer of Archcomix, invited me to a July 4th party, which he and his wife were hosting. Now, they are both vegetarians, so already they will be missing out on some of the true great things of a July 4th celebration, i.e. BBQ goodness. And then they also sent out an ultimatum about needing to see what this holiday was all about. Well, if there is one pseudo-tangible thing that I love, it is the good old U.S.A. So, I got to thinking, and while I was on the phone with Sanity Scout discussing possible ideas, it came to me. And so the plan was hatched, to the British sponsored Independence day party, I was going to bring no less than three things American: A gigantic apple pie from Costco (even more enormous than a normal gigantic apple pie), a good supply of Samuel Adams beer (although beer technically is an Egyptian invention, Samuel Adams is from the good old U.S.A), and of perhaps one of my favorite American inventions of recent history, the Superhero. And so, I concocted the plan to bring apple pie, American Beers while wearing body paint, skin-tight pantaloons, and a cape. The first two were easy, and the third one was to turn out to be the most fun. Again I took to the global interweb looking for free patterns to help guide my design, and it turns out that there are a few cape/cloak patterns out there, but for the most part they are a semi/half/full circle with a hole cut out for the head. Which all in all is pretty simple to do. So, I headed to Jo-An's fabric store, who just happen to be having an awesome 4th of July sale, and picked myself up a few yards of those key American colors, Red/White/Blue.
 With a little bit of trigonometry and a few kick-starts of the brain I came up with the pattern pieces in the first picture above and to the left. 90 degrees of a circle, which I just flipped on the blue fabric to make a full half-circle cloak top. The diameter of that is about 36 inches, and 9 or so for the neck. The trig came in to optimize the space for cutting out the stripes in the cloak. With a little math I was able to get my 13 stripes (7red 6 white) including seam allowance out of the same size piece of cloth as the blue background 36"x18".
 Conveniently I had just taught myself how to use the sewing machine earlier this week, so this was a great project to get some OJT. A mere 8 hours and numerous experimentations, unstitching, untangling, re-threading, un-bobbining,and rebobbining, I had emerged with my greatest creation yet, the superhero cape.
Although these pictures are pretty good, the cape in person is tons better. All in all, total cost of the cape, was 10.00 for cloth, 6.00 for thread, 3.00 for some Fray-Check for a grand total of 20.00 and the hard work that makes this final project all the more gratifying.
 Last night between at least three other projects I started constructing a Steampunk patch. I was initially inspired by something that Sanity Scout linked to me regarding a survey of what you think are the most influential inventions of recent history. You can see the original survey at the British Science Museum website. If you go there, you'll see the icons that inspired me to make a patch of my own in their survey of which item from their museum was the most influential. Regardless of how you vote, there's a lot to think about there. It's amazing how far we've come in such a little while. And seeing as we'll run out of gas soon and the apocalypse will be upon us, we'll have a lot more inventing to do soon enough :P. Well, after looking through that site, I started sketching out what I'd like to see for an icon/patch. Since I've been wanting to make one for a while, I came up with the drawing to the left in about 20 minutes. I happen to use my colored pencils because they were already out, but normally I tend to shy away from color. All in all it was a good start, but I figured I could do better, and if I was ever going to have someone embroider it for me, I'd have to move it to a digital version...
Well, to Corel Painter IX I went, and started hacking away. After cursing through a few crashes, I followed the advice I give almost every client, and that is to maintain my programs at the latest patch level. Well, it turns out the Patch for Corel Painter IX, was awesome, it stopped the random memory leak/crash, and saved me tons of frustration. Even without that little set back however, this beauty to the right took probably several hours to do, but I finally got to dust off the ol' Wacom tablet and put it to good use. I'm pretty satisfied with it overall. I contemplated added some text, but at the moment I like it how it is.
I even went as far as to get a quote from an embrodiery shop, although it would be really awesome to do, the quote was a bit painful:
4" with 100% embroidery coverage:
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10 pieces at $18.23 per piece, for a total of $182.30
20 pieces at $9.48 per piece, for a total of $189.60
50 pieces at $4.22 per piece, for a total of $211.00
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Pretty painful overall, but if Sanity Scout and I ever decide to pick up the Steampunk train and sell some of our creations, I would definitely order a bundle. Heck, if you're reading this and you'd buy one for 5 bucks let me know, maybe I'll put in an order.
 Although this is officially the second Steampunk project that I finished, it was the first that I started, and it has been a bit of a labor of love. I'm most proud of it, due to the fact that it was made almost entirely of found items. I admit I had been reading Jake Von Slatt's Steampunk Workshop recently, and I came across someone who had modified some old steel headsets to make this stylish Steampunk headset. It wasn't too far in the future when that I found myself in my favorite area thrift store, Salvation Army, and I came across an old aluminum muffin tin. And well, in my mind a muffin tin an those stylish headphones have quite a bit in common.
 It wasn't but a few steps later down the bric-a-brac section that I came across a centerpiece which my brain told me was not a centerpiece at all, but rather the bridge of a headset... and that was that. The two hardest parts of the puzzle essentially fell right into my lap. And so began the process of discovery, creation and delight.
Now I'm pretty fond of my Dremel, as a more or less universal tool of creation/destruction, but I have to admit the antique hacksaw I picked up at a garage sale for .50 really came through big-time on this project. The first picture above is the pile of pieces that eventually came together to form the picture to the left of this paragraph.
This is a close up of one of the earcups. I ended up using a leather hole puncher and a eyelet-rivet setter to make holes to thread the leather strips through in order to fasten the earcup to the muffin tin. I stitched the leather inside out whenever possible, however, once sewing the actual speaker into the cup, I could not keep it up the entire circumference, and I had to make a final loop around, and tuck the not under one of the less taut pieces of leather.
 The brackets for fastening the bridge to the muffin tins I made out of the bottom of an aluminum can (which I found to be the thickets part). Hole punched, machined down (using the Dremel) to my desired shape, and then used a pull-through rivet to affix the whole contraption to the cup, for a more permanent and sturdy structure. I then capped the ends of the rivets with filler, and painted usins some bronze spraypaint to keep it looking nice. In the final version I'll paint over the rivet heads with some clear nail polish to keep them looking good.
 Total cost of materials ended up being about 20.00, which isn't too bad from scratch, but I did buy a lot of tools in the process, which I will be putting to good use in the future.
Stay tuned for a tutorial and time lapse video of the creation process. I'll be putting it together once I start the second set, or if anyone shows interest in how it was done. This gruesome visage to the right is the $20 Steampunk headset in action, and a nuclear sunrise beckoning in the Armageddon.
Until the steam runs out or the zombies overrun us all, goodnight!
Well, it was bound to happen, I start enough projects at once, and eventually I got one done. Ironically this one I started today and finished today and it really is just another thing that I'm using to aid me in another project, but it's a project nonetheless.
I've been wanting to get a book holder to help me hold up some of the books I'm using for references in my drawing practice. Or rather, my would be drawing practice. Anyhow, I looked at what the world of Amazon had
 and they came up with this thing that they call "Wire Study Stand Holder -chrome" Which, to me just looks like a bunch of wire wrapped around itself with some rubber nibs on the end. So I asked myself, would I pay 10 bucks for a bunch of wire with rubber nibs? You guessed it. No. I wouldn't. In fact, my house is brimming with metal bits and pieces as of late, and numerous tools quite capable of bending them. So, I kindly bowed to the power of Amazon and said no thank you. This one I'm going to take care of myself. And so started project #3, the self engineered and made book holder.
 And so to my closet I went, where I found no less than a dozen clothes hangers that were in poor repair, bent, deteriorated and just asking to be re-utilized in a much greater capacity. So I took three good volunteers unraveled the first and got to work. At first, I bent and twisted an exact replica 0f the Amazon one, however, I found that the gauge of the hanger wire was much smaller than that of Amazons, and so the initial version was prone to buckling while under the eight of a book. To rectify that, I added a few extra bends, doubled back the wire a few places, and added some struts to the construction, adjusted for proper orientation, added an extra bend for the spine of the book, and to my amazement, success. It could stand not only it's own weight, but that of a fairly sizable book, more importantly a book that I had intended to use on this very stand.
 After I had the structural test complete and was pretty confident it would not require additional engineering, I took my Dremel to the surface to buff away all the deteriorating flakes and rusty bits from the wires, and then gave it a nice coat of bronze spray paint to give it an antique look, and I'm done. I may use some heat shrink tubing around the ends if I find they are too abrasive to books or the table that they are resting on, but for the most part, all of the contact points are bent back on themselves so there aren't any sharp wire ends touching a surface. And here it is to the left with the book, as you can see, no hands holding up the book, and yet there it is, propped up at a nice angle, easily viewable and still possible to turn the pages without removing from the rack. And at actually cost me nothing to make. Even if I had to buy the hangers and the spray paint, it would have been less than 10 bucks. Go re-purposing, go you cheap bastard, go Steampunk!
And so ends my very first Steampunk project, no deaths, punctures, amputations or non-recoverable mutilations thus far!
As promised, I have found a solution for our massive collection of books and movies and CD woes, and that champion is known as MediaMan! I have been planning this as a little surprise for SanityScout (SS) for a while. The biggest hang up was going to be the cost of a barcode scanner, which the cheapest I saw was on eBay and sold for something like 60 bucks. What's 60 bucks for someone you love, well not a lot, but when you take into account that I am a cheap bastard, and I'm going to have to buy the software as well, things started to add up, and I wanted to make sure I put my money the most effectively to the problem.
Speaking of economics, this is one of the rare occasions where the software would have been cheaper (i.e. free) if I had been using a Mac, as there are a whole slew of interesting alternatives to MediaMan on Mac that are freely or cheaply available. But, I'm not one to spend an extra $1000 bucks on a computer that for the most part has the same or less capabilities as its cheaper counterpart. Granted that one-large comes along with the right to stand slightly taller than the mere mortals that walk the earth with you AND be fully authorized to snicker and point at us common folk, but that's just not for me. As for you people that own Macs, if you don't feel like you're on some kind of crusade of hipness, you're probably alright, probably...
As it turns out the MediaMan creator also published a free to use program that converts your everyday webcam into a barcode reader. Nothing magical here, it doesn't involve pixie dust or soldering a trigger onto a web-cam. It just takes the input and continuously scans for a barcode. Neat stuff, and the MediaMan program is nice enough to even give you that tell-tale beep when it receives a barcode from the webcam. So, here I am my most expensive hurdle solved for the price of a webcam off of craigslist ($10). And I'm ready to rock and roll!
I'm two days into the project at the moment, and I've got one whole room of the house pretty much scanned in. That equates to a whopping 398 books! Sadly for me this is probably only about 20% of our total collection, but I'm trying not to get weighed down by the daunting task ahead of me.
During these initial days of scanning, I did learn a few valuable things about cataloging. First, you might not believe this, but books say 20+ years old (or thereabout) don't actually have barcodes. And regardless of how much I wave them in front of my webcam, it turns out they don't automatically populate my catalog. <insert sadface> Now couple this with the fact that thanks to my Pop (who does not have a blog, otherwise I'd link to it), SS and I have a massive collection of wonderful books from he days when academic books cost 1.00 new, and fun ones cost 25 cents, and you could send off for more with order forms int the back. Some of these even predate that handy International Standard Book Number (ISBN) which kicks soo much ass when looking up book info. So, this slows down the process a little bit, and depending on the mix of books, I've found that on average it takes about 1 minute per book, given that sometimes I have to remove stickers and clean off stickiness, identify and manually type in publisher, author, date, etc., and take out the pup now and again.
I also learned that MediaMan has very limited import capability, which saddens me a bit. But fortunately not horribly sad, as I only scanned in one box of books on a different computer before trying to merge it to my master list. There are also a few functionality bugs with Mediaman, such as shortcut buttons not working as they are labeled, occasional crashes, script errors. To be honest, I wouldn't pay the 40 bucks for a piece of software with this many problems, but I'm stuck. At least it looks pretty, does an awesome job of looking up data online and importing it, making a virtual bookshelf, listing, tagging, all kinds of good things for a catalog of books, games, CDs, DVDs, etc. If you want to see what the database looks like, I'll be posting our collection online on. You can check it out at SanityScouts & Smilinginsomniac's Dead Tree Collection!
Last night while helping SanityScout pack her things for her six week jaunt to Cornell I started to do a little thinking. Most of the time I provide her some kind of encouragement by just being their and helping out when I can. Last night, for example, I'd offer to help, and if nothing came to mind for her, I'd plop myself down on our outrageously comfortable LoveSac. I know this sounds incredibly lazy, but there are a couple of factors that come into play here. First, it was 4 in the morning, and a little LoveSac is always a good thing at 4 in the morning. Second and more important to this post, I think I'm a simpleton.
I say that I'm a simpleton because overall I operate on pretty simple principles. First, although I cannot say I believe it is true, I like to pretend that the world is fair, and so I try and operate in a manner that is justified by what I perceive to be fair. Contradictions to this make me unhappy because I believe they make the world unhappy. So next time you cut in line because you think your time is more important, or next time you don't make even the slightest effort to make way for another pedestrian on the sidewalk, you should think about why your are entitled and someone else is not. Chances are if you have to think about that one too hard, you're a jerk, and it will catch up to you someday.
Second, and the real reason for this post, is that I often find myself content with being SanityScout's passive tap of comfort, so to speak. She's been writing lots of papers, grading papers of much too coddled freshmen, and reading more books over the past two years than I will in my entire lifetime, and often times it helps her to remain vigilant if I am around providing an aura of good will. I say I'm a simpleton because in an immediate context, I've felt satisfied by simply providing my presence and the occasional glass of water or cold objective piece of advice when queried for help on her activity du'jour.
Well, I think that was a little short sited on my part, although at these times I've felt content with doing what I was doing, I think I neglected myself. Operating with standards too low. I need to remind myself to not settle for mere contentedness if I ever want to experience the fruition of what I'd like to think are potential permanent manifestations of my collected consciousness. Again, most likely falsely, but I like to believe that I imagine things that are of compelling nature and whose contributions to the enjoyment of someone(s') troubled life/lives would be non-insignificant. More simply, I need to not be a lazy couch stain and pull back the curtains on that which has whispered to me from the darkness since fifth grade.
To emphasize my laziness here, the above contemplation is how I had to motivate myself to clean up my mess. I've planned a huge number of projects while SanityScout (SS) will be away, and before I can begin any of them, I need to perform the always present pre-project project: cleaning. So, last night I began that process while SS was finishing her packing. I was moving slow being that it was 4 in the morning, but I got a good jump on it, and today there isn't a lot of stuff left. Now I just need to remind myself not to settle, and hopefully good things will come.
Although the next task on my list is cleaning, and nobody wants to hear about it, I'll give you a preview of my next project and next post:
When you have more books, movies, games, CDs than some libraries you've been in, it's hard to keep track of them all, and SanityScout and I have talked about this requirement for a while, in terms of how to organize, how to store things so we can find them again, and how to best shop for new things that we're 'pretty sure' we don't have yet. Well, a solution is nigh.
I don't believe in charters or mission statements for items of leisure. Life is unpleasant enough as it is. Why make something you do for fun restrictive and invasive of your happy space? As far as my happy space goes, it is transient, but is kind enough to occasionally send me letters. When was the last time you talked to your happy space? Maybe it's lonely. (Please don't confuse happy space with happy place, although often times they get together and have a party.)
Despite my disdain for charters, mission statements or other bureaucratic g-spot triggers, I do believe a good sense of purpose can do you a world of good. Thus, the purpose of this blog is to serve as a collection of ideas, projects, and erstwhile whimsies that my brain siphons out of the ether of the everyday. You're encouragement, comments and criticisms are welcome; although, there is no guarantee they will be paid any heed, but that's the risk you'll have to take.
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