In which I use Physics, and possess Insanity.

I am slightly insane.

I like being insane, so it's okay, but let me tell you all about my insanity.

I mentioned at the beginning of the month that I was thinking about making a hammock for sleepage. Well, I did it.
It went through a couple iterations, but I did end up sleeping in it last night.

I had to create a stand, because I didn't want to put holes in my walls (yay renting!), and I wanted a simple stand that didn't take too much work and could be dismantled without too much effort. I decided that the stand variously known as the TurtleDog or Tripod stand was the most practical. The second iteration regressed to the vanilla Turtlelady stand, because the Olddog variation collapsed on top of me (ow...).

Let me explain that last paragraph...
A contributor on hammockforums.net, known as Turtlelady, came up with a dual-tripod+suspended-crossbar stand made of bamboo.
The physics of this is that a tripod is very sturdy, and if one were to suspend something from the centre joint of a tripod, between the legs, this is a very stable place to hang. If you had one tripod and a bat-hammock (all corners hang from a single point, and yes, this is a thing), you'd be good to go.
However, an ordinary hammock (especially a loaded one) pulls inwards towards itself from either end, so even if you were to hang both ends of the hammock from two tripods, they would collapse because it's not a direct downward pull.
Hence the suspended crossbar.
Hang each end of the crossbar from the centre joints of the two tripods, and each end of the hammock from the ends of the crossbar. The crossbar takes the horizontal inward force from the loaded hammock, and the tripods take the vertical force. At that point it becomes very sturdy indeed.
Turtlelady's stand was based on the three poles in each tripod being lashed together with rope, and another rope farther down the legs to keep them from splaying out and collapsing downwards.
Another contributor known as Olddog made a variation on the Turtlelady stand, where the inside two legs of each tripod are screwed onto one half of a gate hinge, and the outside leg is on the other half of the hinge. Hence why it got called the TurtleDog stand - a little bit from each contributor. The Olddog version is little more industrial-looking, and (I thought) a little more sturdy.

It seems I didn't get strong enough hinges, is the short version; I set it up for the first time last night, and everything went well for several hours, until the legs twisted around and bent the hinges and the whole lot came down, at about 9.15pm last night. I'm just glad nothing broke.

Of course I had already adjusted my bedroom to make room for this thing, including standing my mattress/boxspring up against the wall, and I, being the stubborn, do-it-all-by-my-own-fucking-self, pigheaded chick that I am, was determined that I would not put my bed back down for love nor money. No, the hammock and stand would do what I wanted, even if I was up til 11.00 to do it.

Happily, I had picked up a package of 100m or so of poly cord from Canadian Tire just in case (in case of what? I wasn't sure, but now I know!), so I dismantled the tripods and hinges and used the cord to lash the hell out of those poles. I also took the screws from the hinges and screwed down another piece of poly cord to keep the legs from splaying out too far.
I even tried to put my small knowledge of physics to use, and set up the two tripods to twist in opposite directions (because when you use lashing, the legs have to twist past each other in order to open up) so that both tripods won't overtwist in one direction and collapse, which is partially what happened with the hinges - I looked at them after they came down, and they'd both twisted the same way. It works in my head, I'm not sure if it's real physics or just Lizzi-brain-physics, but I'll go with it. Any real physicists want to chime in on this? For science!?

Anyways, after that, I got it set up with no more issues, all was well, and I slept in the damn thing, and I was even in bed a little early.

The only thing I didn't like was that it was a little colder than usual, so I didn't sleep as well as I could have, but I have an idea to fix that too. I'll see how it goes tonight.

So that's it. Toodles all.

tl;dr: skunking, mondayism, talk geeky to me, haggis, and reddit.

Well. Stuff happened.

Sunday I had a picnic in the park with all my dear family. It was picnicky - and much too warm. I skunked my uncle and my dad at cribbage - almost didn't cos my dad was one point away from getting across the line, but then I pegged out. Made me feel good, cos I've never skunked anyone before, and they've been playing much longer than I have - but I got a whole string of double-runs one after another, and most of them had fifteens too, so that's why. Plus my uncle had a series of really terrible hands. Sorry, Uncle.

Monday was mondayish; I actually fell asleep on my desk partway through the day and I'm really glad no-one noticed. It was only for a few minutes anyways. But then after work I got to hang out with my good friend Jessi and another friend, Jazzy - I made paleo apple fritters (I keep getting asked for the recipe. One of these days I'll publish it here, all formatted and with pretty pictures to go with it) and Jazzy made Earl Grey Tea and Lavender cookies. OH MY GOSH those were amazing. Then we sat on the floor and did crafty stuff for a while. I got some chain-mail done, as well as part of my "uniform" for the dodgeball team I'm in...
And I laughed at us because for a full half hour none of us said anything to anyone else. Introverts, much?

Yesterday I got to hang out with a friend whom I didn't really know very well beforehand - she's been more my sister's friend up til now - and it was nice to get to know her a bit better.

Yesterday I also got a new laptop and a monitor, YAY! And just in time, too - my old lappy was becoming more and more decrepit. For the last few weeks, if it ever tried to do anything, it had to access the harddrive fifty bajillion times first, during, AND after. I thought maybe it was using the swap space too much - which says bad RAM to me - but dad thinks maybe it's just retries because it has bad sectors on the harddrive as it is, so maybe the harddrive is finally giving up the ghost. I'm hoping for the latter; as long as the RAM is still good, I'm happy, cos my old one has 3 gigs (a stick of 1, and a stick of 2), so if the new one also comes with 3 (cos I haven't checked yet - I'll do that tonight probably), I'll swap out the 1 for the old one's 2, making 4 in the new one. Mmmm hardware. And the RAM should be compatible - they're both Lenovos, one's the T61 and the other's the T61p - so I see no reason why it shouldn't work. *Crosses fingers*
Which brings me to the question of what OS I should put on it. I was considering Linux Mint for a while, cos Ubuntu's pissing me off, just a little; but I may just bite the bullet and give it Ubuntu 13.04 Raring. I stuck with 11.04 (Natty) for quite a long time, and now they've "stopped supporting it", of course - but on the other hand, 12 and up are Steam-compatible. I mean... I'm not interested in starting gaming... at all... no... um. All I know for sure is that I refuse to have Windows anywhere near it.

Anyways, my plan for today is to go to the butcher's and buy a haggis (because I want haggis for no apparent reason, and I know it's not paleo, but I refuse to make an excuse for this; haggis is its own excuse, in my opinion) and have that for dinner while cleaning my house and possibly putting some OS or other (meaning probably Ubuntu Raring) on my new laptop... and I may even make this Goth-Upkeep Day and recolour my hair. Maybe. I could probably last a couple weeks more if I wanted to, so it's not imperative that I recolour it this week, I just feel like it's almost that time again.

Final thoughts: you know you're on Reddit too much when you find that people ask the same questions and make the same comments over and over - and you know you've been on Reddit too long when people start nostalgically referencing stuff that you saw when it was first posted. Yeah.

So. Back to work.
Toodles, all.

Thoughts on the OUYA.

This weekend I catsat for a friend. This friend was generous enough to let me bring my OUYA over and use her tv to try it out - because she does have a nice big tv. As a result, I got several hours to mess around and figure out how it worked and all, and these are my initial thoughts.
_________________

Pairing the controller: fairly easy, though not particularly intuitive, because the button you use isn't obviously a button. It usually reconnects without problem at successive bootups.

Attaching to wifi: not too bad. But the UI for switching from the keyboard to wifi popup is less intuitive than pairing the controller was. Also, it got confused after I logged in as myself, and decided it was no longer attached to the wifi, and wouldn't scan properly. Fortunately, it's Android. All I had to do was turn wifi off and back on again in the settings, and voila. Wifi restored.

The UI in general takes some getting used to, and there's a funny little touchpad in the controller itself, between the left analog stick and the four buttons which, when you put your finger on it, shows up as a mouse on the screen. The GUI is not the greatest - not a fan of the colour scheme, mostly - but the labels and menus are not too hard to understand, though some of the game categories aren't clearly indicative of what they mean. I do wish there was an option in the games menu for "Newest games".

Indeed, most of any beef I have with the OUYA is with the games themselves. Not even with the quality (which, I have to admit, isn't the most amazing ever, but it's definitely tolerable) but with the button mapping and the fact that it's near impossible to properly exit a handful of them.
The button mapping is the biggest problem - in most cases they make sense, but one or two games use the buttons completely differently than any other game, or even the OUYA menu itself. In an OUYA context, usually the A button means "go back". In a few of the games I tried, it does no such thing. If you want to go back you have to press some other button. It's frustrating, but that's just one example.
As far as exiting games, sometimes the only thing you can do is press the center button (the same semi-hidden one I mentioned, for pairing controllers) - similarly to the Home button on an Android phone. As far as I'm aware, that is just like minimising the game, and it's still in the background. I could be wrong. But if that is the case, that's really impractical and simply takes up memory.
I did have a fun time messing around with Final Fantasy III - first time I've played FF of any kind. Yes, I was a sheltered child. But now I have joined the ranks of gamers everywhere. Or something like that, I think.
I also found a puzzle game vaguely reminiscent of Portal, called Polarity; I'm quite looking forward to playing that one through, it looks promising.
Overall game quality was not quite up to playstation/xbox standards, particularly in the graphics department, but I don't find that particularly offputting. I rather found it endearing more than anything. Although some of the games available were in a highly unfinished state, which I found frustrating. The other frustrating thing is the low number of currently available games, but I'm sure more will come.

In summary, I feel like the OUYA is for adult gamers what the Wii is for kids; a fun toy. I don't mean that in a condescending way, what I mean is that it doesn't look like it'll have big shiny expensive games, but it doesn't need those either. It has its share of darker games already, but it still feels much more light-hearted and relaxed. If that even makes sense. It doesn't have any delusions of grandeur - it's got a swingset and hopscotch to play with, and it's happy there.
Also, as someone who hasn't really played video games til now, it was fairly easy to get the hang of, which says they did something right.
And I enjoyed it, too.

So that's my initial impression. I can't wait til I have a proper screen to attach it to, so I can play through Polarity properly.

Toodles!

SQUEEEEEE!!

... as you can see, i am all full of fangirl squeals and geeking-out grins.

because *I* got to take some photos of the *EUREKA* series finale which they are filming in my town today - and not only photos OF, but photos WITH.

oh happy day :)

house, job, money....

so. many changes for the new year.

first. one you should know about already if you read my blog. new apartment, new roomie with two cats, own kitchen. OWHN KITCHING. [side note: i've decided that the first thing i'm going to do, when we're all moved in and my pantry is all PROPERLY STOCKED, is i'm going to make bread. homemade bread. none of this machine business for me. mmmmm...] and actually, speaking of new place, i'm going to need to buy a bed.

second. again, you should know about this one. i'm on graveyards. which is completely oddball. and i come home from work at about the hour that i used to START. so weird.

third. there comes a time in every girl's life when she makes a very important step. and that is getting a credit card. no, i will NOT go spending crazy. it's just for building credit with. because if i make purchases on it and then pay it off IMMEDIATELY, it's all good. no interest. and i plan to always make sure i have the money in my regular bank account before i use the credit card. i'm thinking ahead here. also, set up a savings account today that automatically takes a certain amount of money out of my account on payday and saves it. so that's cool.

aaaanyways. life with me. again.

diana lens, you're awesome.

remember that new lens from a couple posts back? the diana lens that i got for christmas? well, it arrived :) 

[and for the peeps reading this from facebook - you'll have to click through to my blog to see the photo resulting from awesome new lens, cos it won't show on the preview.]

it was christmas?

and so another christmas has come and gone - which means that my blog is approaching two years old now, come march. and it also means that i got christmas presents. the most exciting of which include:

and...

 ... the Dreamy Diana Lens at the Photojojo Store

as well as...

... and various other pieces, including, but not limited to, a burt's bees lip balm, two necklaces, a book about U2, various chocolates, two christmas activity books (mom's idea of a joke?), and a book about good decisions from one of my grandmothers.

altogether, it was a good christmas. lots of time with the family and stuff.

oh yeah and i have another wisdom tooth coming in. ugh.

a tasty thing i made

because i have now found a practical way to post blogs without a computer :)

... i can email blogs to you lot on my phone! win!

so. guess what i did last night?
went to see the new harry potter movie - in the new galaxy theatre in chilliwack, the one that's next to the superwalmart. and was it good?
Oh. My. Gosh. it was freaking fantastically Epic Win. i've been annoyed with some of the previous movies and their so-called adaptations - but this one was the closest to the book of any of the other ones, AND it was a good movie. everyone laughed at all the right parts, and clapped after dobby's speech, and so on. and it was generally just brilliant. the end.

also - snow in the fraser valley in november? unheard of.

working at tim hortons

... has been interesting. i've learned a lot of stuff very quickly. for instance, they stuck a drive-through headset on me today - and it's only my fifth shift there. however - i simply must tell you about the best customers i've had yet in my five shifts working there. they came to my till this afternoon. i would say they were about in their late 40s/early 50s. they told me it was the first time they had ever been in a tim horton's. when i expressed surprise, they explained that they were from south of the border, and were here on a visit from florence, oregon, and just could not leave canada without visiting a tim horton's - so as to have the full canadian experience, of course. so we had a great time. she had a small ice capp, he had a small coffee with cream, and they took a box of ten assorted timbits as well. and they paid with american money - he thought it would just go $1-$1, but i explained there was a button for USD, that did the exchange for us, and he thought that was pretty neat. so yeah. i enjoyed serving them. and i hope i made their first tim horton's experience a good one. and yes, i know that sounds dreadfully cheesy. but i mean it. so there.

she's going to take my pawn...

a small child of my acquaintance sat down this evening to play chess with a 30-year-old doll of her acquaintance named Albertina. it was an amusing sight.

laptop piano? no.

so i've been wondering how to follow up on my last post.
but this'll do...
... dad fixed my laptop!! woot!
my dear brother sat on it one day about a year ago and cracked the screen right across. i used it for a while after, cos the crack only impeded me a very little - but then the black area started to grow somehow. so it became a big problem. so i tucked the laptop away somewhere in the hope that i'd either manage to buy a new screen, or buy a new and better laptop.
but recently, i found a new screen for about 30 bucks, i think, including shipping, off ebay.
and today, dad put it on the laptop for me. so i'm pretty excited. the silly thing is as slow as you please, and the screen resolution is frustratingly small - but heck, at least it works, right?
and then i spent a bit of the evening trying to put a piano together - i put in a whole bunch of ... bridle straps? ... i think that's what they're called. anyway, i have long skinny fingers, so i can do fiddly bridle strap stuff really easily. so that's why i was helping.
and it'll be brilliant to finally have a piano again.
but i should head for bed, i'm yawning my face off. so goodnight, all.
♥

a test post to see if the slideshow really works

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the result of the translation a few posts back:

coming up....

so v-day is coming up soon. as in tomorrow.
ah, valentine's. the day of red and pink, roses and hearts and chocolate, little sweet sayings and tiny cards given out by elementary school kids to all their classmates, the day of couples everywhere. and, up til now, the day which i had a kind of dread for - because no one ever gave me a little tiny card (except for my best friend jessi, who gave me a little tiny v-card most years until i was about 12), or chocolates, or roses, or ... you name it, i didn't get it, cos i was always single. it was kind of depressing.
but this year - well, i'm not so depressed this year.
this year i get to share v-day with my jeff. i can't wait. :)

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

thoughts.

i learned two things today.

first - despite the tastiness of homemade bread, it doesn't do grilled cheese sandwiches too well. too soft.

second - trying to dry your clothes with an iron because you're in a hurry - while it looks cool to see the steam coming off the clothes - doesn't work as well as you'd think.

job interview ... (a.k.a. part II)

... is over, and went pretty well, on the whole, i hope....
of course, like anyone else, now that it's over i'm worried that i might have said the wrong thing, answered questions wrong, talked too much, or some other problem happened, whereby i would not get the job after all .... and to some extent i'm not sure if i want the job, cos it's all cash all the time, and i never liked cash when i was at winners. but it is what it is, and if i'm meant to have it, i'll get it. so there.
deep breath.
they said they'd get in touch with me pretty quick, cos they're short-staffed at present. and i might even get full-time. which would be awesome. i think. if i don't burn out first. but at least i'd never be there past 6.30 in the evening. which would be sweet! especially after winners, when i'd get out at 10 at night. argh. that was not fun. anyways. that's my life and update for the day.
toodles, all.
♥

job interview.

yes.

cover letter...

Hello
I am currently searching for a job, and my mother spotted your job posting and suggested that I email you.
At my last job I was frequently a cashier, and received several compliments on my quick and cheerful service. I have great people skills, am very flexible, and learn quickly. I ... really hate writing cover letters, because it means I'm blowing my own horn very loudly, and I hate that, but there it is. I don't know what else to say.
I have attached my resume as a PDF file.
I look forward to hearing back from you.

civilised? shoes?

so at work today i was in the fitting room again, and there was this guy with a pair of shoes. here's how the conversation went:

GUY: i found these shoes in my size and i want to buy this pair of shoes sometime. i probably shouldn't try them on, because i won't be buying them right away. is that the way to do it? because every couple of months i buy shoes. but i don't know if it's okay to try on shoes if you're not going to be buying them.

ME: it's okay to try on shoes, that's how you make sure they'll be comfortable for you.

GUY: are you sure? because i don't know if it's civilised to try on shoes. i just don't want to be uncivilised.

ME: everyone tries on shoes. it's okay.

GUY: oh, okay. i just hope it's not uncivilised...

and then he goes INTO the fitting room to try on SHOES. that's right. he doesn't use the handy benches at the ends of the shoe gondolas, he goes INTO the fitting room. and then comes out with them on, looking for a mirror, so i direct him back in there, cos that's where the mirrors are. LOL. good times.