We need to get a little bit more tile and then remove the layer of plywood with the glue on it. There’s another layer of plywood under that. Then we need to get a thinner layer of plywood for under the new floor so it’s all the same height, put that in, and the flooring arrives this week, so there is a possibility that it will all be done next weekend.

This is the latest addition to the estate, and accounts for a lot of my time over the past couple of months. We subcontracted out the building, but there was still a lot of set-up with the painting, caulking holes to make it weather tight, adding hardware, etc.

And then they pull this crap. Splitting up the services so they don’t integrate anymore, loses their “try it on streaming and if you can’t find it fall back to physical media” value proposition. Further, it opens up the new streaming-only Netflix to increased competition from streaming-only services. The value the unified Netflix brought was the one-stop shopping. With this split, I could see myself quite easily keeping Qwikster and dropping Netflix in favor of Amazon video or similar – or possibly dropping both.

Of course, I would have commented on their blog, except you can’t, because it’s not a real blog – it’s Facebook, and you can’t comment without a Facebook account, which I don’t have, because Facebook sucks.

The wind is blowing, but as of right now there is nothing tremendously interesting going on – just rain and wind and we still have power. It’s flickered a bit, but is otherwise stable.

The garden has been going well so far. The pea crop was bad – largely my fault, as I underplanted. Plus, that batch of seed seemed to have a pretty poor germination.

The rest of it has been fine – squash and corn were fine, the pumpkins are looking good, as are the onions and potatoes.

Beer is good, carboys are full, and phase 2 of the beer system is complete (phase 1 was 4 kegs with ability to tap 1. Phase 2 was 4 more kegs, with the ability to tap 4. Phase 3 is bringing the taps out of the refrigerator so that they’re proper bar taps).

We’ve decided to keep chickens, starting next year. MyPetChicken.com has a pile of interesting breeds. Liz found a fairly over the top chicken coop, which we’ll be hiring our neighbor to build. He builds houses, and this coop is more “small house” than “shed” or “coop”. That and the economy is pretty down, so he’s available, and building it ourselves will end up taking a couple of months of weekends.

I also picked up a new video card to add to the computer my brother gave me for my birthday. Right now, we’re playing a lot of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and I’m planning on gearing up for Battlefield 3. This requires an upgrade to Windows 7, which I’, not particularly looking forward to, as I fear it will break a good portion of my existing games. My brother, for example, claims that he’s not been able to get Mechwarrior 4 to work.

I think that I’m going to preemptively partition the drive to multi-boot, likely using xosl as the boot loader. That way I can still play games on XP (even after it goes unsupported) if need be. The working theory is that XP will be a fallback if I can’t get it to work in Windows 7.

Anyway, pictures behind the cut. ASUS card with ATI Radeon 6870 w/ 1GB of RAM. It’s a little absurd.

http://thehealthyskeptic.org/cholesterol-doesnt-cause-heart-disease

This article cites a lot of sources, but is not tremendously lengthy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/the-cholesterol-myth-that_b_676817.html

This article cites few sources, but quotes a lot of people. This one is especially poignant:

Sally Fallon, the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and Mary Enig, Ph.D, an expert in lipid biochemistry, have gone so far as to call high cholesterol “an invented disease, a ‘problem’ that emerged when health professionals learned how to measure cholesterol levels in the blood.”

Further down in the article, he suggests that any level under 150 is LOW cholesterol, and that 200-250 would be optimal. One should note that modern medical convention says that 200-240 is “Borderline High”.

Even further, he goes on to criticize the medicines. At best, they do very little. At worst, they do active harm.

Finally, he criticizes the methodology of Ancel Keys, who first linked dietary fat to heart disease – namely discarding data which didn’t fit his conclusion.

I think what has happened is that there was some (flawed) studies linking fatty diets with heart disease, then 30 years of analysis isolated it to a link between heart disease and cholesterol. So, logically, if we lower the cholesterol, the heart disease will go down, right? Except, it isn’t happening. So, there’s a bit of a WTF, and cue 25 years more research, which brings us to today, and the above.

To be honest, I’m a bit skeptical about medicine in general. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of what they do is fabulous and amazing, but no one bats a thousand, and medicine has quite a history of getting things wrong, and having “conventional medical wisdom” be wrong for a really long time. Remember leeches and bleedings? How about the ebb and flow model of blood circulation, or using mercury to treat VD.

There were massive quantities of beer consumed (homebrew Noisy Wingnut Steam Hefeweizen, and Cream Ale), good food, good friends, lots of gaming.

One of the things which consistently impresses me about my friends are the fact that they actually read real books (not many people do these days), and they are interesting. Present and being read were:

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• Some random thriller called Excaliber
• Kitchen Confidential (Bourdain’s book)
• The Cuckoo’s Egg (this one was mine).

The game table also got used, though I didn’t get a lot of action shots, we got a few. Games played were:

• Munchkin Cthulu
• Munchkin Quest
• Lord of the Fries
• Shadowrun

Socks inspects the game board by shoulder surfing Erich

Aftermath

Aftermath

Eclipse Phase is an interesting roleplaying game which deals with conspiracy and horror (always good things for fiction), and far future science fiction concepts of post-scarcity economies (Star Trek style replicators) and transhumanism (consciousness transfer, cybernetics, etc.). It is also noteworthy as the first game (at least, of which I’m aware) released under a Creative Commons license. This is not an OGL thing like D20, where some of the text is okay, and other stuff isn’t, etc. This is the whole deal. You can redistribute the PDF, create derivative works, etc. I think the only restriction is on commercial use (which makes sense – if you want to do that, get a license).

I wish more publishers would do that.

Anyway, to the point.

I was browsing around and found this blog page by Rob Boyle. All the PDFs, for download, for free.

If you like it, please support the artists by buying the print books.

Take:

• An old swingset
• A reciprocating saw with a metal blade
• A couple cans of Rust-Oleum
• Misc hardware

Cutting it down:

Construction complete

Painted:

Painted up

Know what it is yet?

Here’s the burner (which I had already)

With burner

And a pot and pulley:

Pot and pulley

Anyone still not sure?

Turkey fryer pulley rig:

For the first cut, we used Alton’s Recipe for the brine, and the directions from the manufacturer for the cookery (350 degress for 3.5 minutes per pound, which ended up being 45 minutes). I felt it was a bit overdone. Alton’s recipe starts it at 250, waits for it to get up to 350, and then cooks it for 35 minutes. I think we’ll try that one next.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/all-about-skimmers/

Be paranoid.