Bad phrases

There are a number of phrases that, at least to me, say "I know I'm being annoying, but..." Here's the short list:
Actually...
Just FYI...
Just letting you know.
I'm not trying to be rude but...
Just sayin'.

"Actually" bugs me because it's the natural crutch of the socially stunted know it all, which I resemble way too much myself. It's hard not to imagine the little derisive dork chuckle before hearing, "Actually, the atomic weight of oxygen is 14." (That's a plant to see which of my buddies can resist correcting me.)
The top three give us a peek at the inner child screaming "I know more than you do! Ha, ha!" with a slightly more mature gloss on it. "Just" isn't an inherently bad word, but here it distances the speaker from their own message. It's a little confession that they don't want to be associated with the message, and they expect to get some flack for delivering it- either the listener won't care at all, or they won't like what they're hearing.

Sure, I love having more information about how things actually are, and I don't want folks to be rude, but these are so over used in irritating contexts that they themselves are tainted. They raise my hackles all on their own. If someone were simply to say, "Just FYI, not trying to be rude or anything, but you're actually the most handsome man on the planet. Just to let you know." I'd probably punch them.

Zoe on the white board

I had some stuff to fix at work, and Zoe and I were in the neighborhood because we'd just finished up a belly dancing class, so we wandered into the office. Here's what she drew on the white board:

Dragon Age: Origins

Tonight I finished the game Dragon Age: Origins. It was an epic scale and engaging to play. According to the game's tally I spent over 70 hours playing it, though it counts time left paused, which doesn't quite seem right to me. The combat style pretty much requires you to pause it a lot, and that time should count, but if I paused it to go have dinner, it still might rack up an hour. It's a minor quibble. Anyway, it's weird to think of how many hours I've spent playing one game, and I'm sure this one doesn't hold the record.

Games have progressed so far since the era of 8 bit graphics it's unreal. What Bioware was able to do with Dragon Age combined some of the best aspects of books- character depth and development, and an immersion into a complex and detailed world- with the drama and visual impact of a movie. Honestly (and I'm sure this is blasphemy to some folks) the style of back story Tolkien did in Lord of the Rings bored me to tears. Bioware managed to flesh out a world which was just as rich without it getting so dry and irrelevant. They did a great job creating styles for the different cultures in the game, and different environments to explore- the woods the elves lived in, the tunnels of the dwarven kingdom, the dream-like plane of the fade- it was all pretty neat. I would say a lot of the load times were pretty extreme, though a faster computer would have helped some. A lot of it was hard drive access time which is unavoidable with all the data they're trying to stream at you. Hopefully they leaned heavily on SIMD.

Over all, it was a pretty cool game.

Christmas pictures

Family door hanging

My dad and brother are both engineers too, and they seem happiest when their hands are busy. So I put them to work while they were here for Christmas turning around one of our doors. The door leads into one of the smallest laundry rooms I've ever seen, which is also home to the illustrious Beer Fridge. With the door swinging into the laundry room it hits the door of the washing machines, which is a roaring pain, and there's not enough room for a laundry basket. In short, it was a poor design decision that I've just been slow to rectify. So we did.

Here you can see my brother ironing something out with the bottom hinge while dad holds the door in place. I helped more than just taking pictures, honest. I mortised out patches for the new hinges and spackled over the old holes.

So now the door swings out! Thanks again for the help, guys!
I didn't grab any pictures of the deed, but part of our fence blew down while they were down here. The posts had rotted off at the bases. Ryan was a whiz with getting the old concrete plugs, and it gave me an excuse to buy a giant wrecking bar. We got the holes dug, the concrete poured, the poles set up and the dirt tamped down pretty quickly. All that is left is to screw the bits of fence back onto them.

Attic progress

I got the flooring you see below nailed in. It's never going to be gorgeous- this is just a quiet space to store some junk. This is only about half the space in this attic area, and there's still more flooring to fill in, but it's gotten pretty cozy already.
The flooring boards ended up being too big to fit though the hole for the stairs after the stair frame was in place, so I had to cut them up. They ended up being much easier to manage that way.

The flooring boards ended up being too big to fit though the hole for the stairs after the stair frame was in place, so I had to cut them up. They ended up being much easier to manage that way.

Science!

We signed Zoe up to do a project for the science fair, and since I'm the science-y guy in the family, it's my job to help out with it. We played around today trying to figure out what our experiment would be. We poked around in a book Stef picked up, talked about a few things, and decided to try making our own battery.
Cleaning pennies to make into the battery:

We pasted some old pennies together with some nickles with paper towels soaked in an electrolyte to make a series of cells. It made a voltage we could measure, but I don't think this really grabbed Zoe's imagination, so we moved on to other ideas.

We banged together some quartz crystals in the dark to show the piezoelectric effect. It turned out that her geodes made the brightest flashes of light. It was fun, but hard to document.

Then we played with a pile of iron filings and some magnets for a while. I was thinking maybe we could map out the magnetic fields, but it was a little too abstract for Zoe. She did manage to make the iron filings walk end over end over the card stock which was pretty cool.

We settled back on the idea of making little things dance with static electricity. The experiment uses a plexi-glass sheet on little feet, rubbed with wool.

Zoe sawing wooden feet for out experiment:


Zoe drilling holes in the plexi-glass sheet and the feet we made:


Zoe took this picture while we were washing up after the garage portion of our work. No idea where she gets her hammish nature...


Zoe charging up the plexi-glass plate with one of my wool socks:


Watching bits of paper dance in the static electricity. They really move around on their own more than I expected they would.