Mindsigh

Book a Minute

Posted by Jerry on May 11th, 2004 — Posted in Journal, Writing

As the blurb says – who has the time to read a whole book these days? The bods at Book-A-Minute have ultra condensed a whole bunch of classics, sci fis, even movies down to a bare sentence or two – it’s a great hoot!

Cheers

Jerry

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Canberra – signs of winter

Posted by Jerry on May 10th, 2004 — Posted in Journal, Travel, Writing

Yup, Winter is on the way – you can tell, because the road signs start to show how the wildlife has adapted to the weather conditions…

But it’s also interesting to see how people interact with signs and in the process add layers of meaning.

cheers
Jerry

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Cuneiform – the birth of an interface standard?

Posted by Jerry on May 9th, 2004 — Posted in Journal, New media, Technology, Writing

There seems to have been something of a debate regarding a shift in assumptions about how cuneiform scripts were to be read, whether left-to-right or top-to-bottom in columns. Some argue that top-to-bottom makes more sense given certain assumptions about the way the stylus would have been held.

According to Madelaine Fitzgerald of UCLA (see the short paper in the link above) there does appear to have been a protocol to allow readers to identify the direction of reading. This involved the use of holes in the clay tablets to allow them to be held on a string – and if the tablet were raised on the string it would fall in a way that would indicated the reading direction, thus distinguishing between the earlier cuneiform scrpts of the Old period Babylonians (which ran in vertical columns) to those of the later period which ran horizontally.

And then there remains the question of why the Babylonians changed direction of their script from columns to lines. Fitzgerald gives a tantalising hint that it may have been because of the international climate of the time – ie to bring Babylonians in line with contemporary practices in other (more economically powerful) neighbours. What this seems to indicate is the application of an internationally agreed interface standard to facilitate ease of communication.

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Recipe: Chocolate crunch slice

Posted by Jerry on May 8th, 2004 — Posted in Journal, Recipes

Got a chocolate party to go to? This is a quick and easy – and delicious – chocaholic’s delight!

Ingredients:
2 bars of dark cooking chocolate
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
1 teaspoon of instant coffee
1 egg (optional)
half a packet of milk arrowroot or other plain biscuits

Method:
Half fill a large pan with water, bring to boil. In a second (and smaller) pot put in the chocolate and margarine and put that pot in the larger one so it works as a ‘double boiler’ – the contents of the smaller pot should be melted slowly and stirred in together.
Boil a kettle and use just enough hot water to dissolve the instant coffee (about a teaspoon) and pour the coffee into the chocolate and stir in well.
Take a bowl and break the biscuits into pea-sized chunks.
Take the chocolate mix off the heat and allow to cool. Stir in the egg (optional).
Now add the biscuit pieces and stir until well covered in chocolate.
Pour the mix into a bar-tin lined with baking (greaseproof) paper
Refrigerate until set – about 2 hours.
Turn out the bar onto a board upside down, making sure the paper is completely removed, dust with icing sugar and slice thinly to serve.

This has been adapted from the recipe of a family friend called Makiko 🙂

Variations can include half a cup of mixed dried fruit, or nuts substituted for an equivalent amount of the biscuits.

Enjoy!

cheers
Jerry

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On the subtlety of hints…

Posted by Jerry on May 3rd, 2004 — Posted in Journal, Woodwork

My partner Sharon (who writes the ‘in-a-minute-ago’ blog) and I have a great symbiotic relationship – if she leaves some of her threads in a mild sprawl across the lounge, then I can leave my music gear (mixing desk, microphones and a spaghetti of leads and plugs) decoratively draped across the dining room … And then after a while, just when the respective sprawls are looking a bit entrenched, it’s time to clear the decks – like a metaphoric clearing of the mind, ready for the next project.

A while back it became apparent that the threads had been fruitful and multiplied – to the point that they were never going to fit back in their respective boxes. So we sat down together to design a storage system that would, at least temporarily, solve the problem. Basically it would be a cabinet with drawers – lots of drawers, but it needed to be able to sit beside her chair, be accessible, and be compact enough to enable a coffee to remain in easy reach.

I had never made a drawer before, and my woodworking skills are … well… not those of a cabinet maker. So I set to work to come up with a simple enough design to provide a workable storage system. It took me about nine months to complete it, as I wrestled with the design brief. Aiming for simplicity, I looked at how chipboard furniture was assembled, but decided that I also wanted real strength (who knows when the threads might become beads – which are much heavier!).

This was a good chance to test the dovetail jig I had not yet used. I found that by cutting the two sides and the top and bottom as pairs, then they would at least start out at the same length. I also wanted the top few drawers to be in pairs, rather than full width, for added visual interest. I dovetailed the top and bottom to the sides, making an open box. But before installing the top, I decided that the divider between the top pairs of drawers should literally hang from the top board. So I ran sliding dovetails the full width of the top and centre divider, figuring I could conceal any minor tearouts (the damage) later with some beading.

Next came the drawers – a real challenge! How do you hang drawers so that the hanging device is not intrusive, and that leaves a bit of room for the intended contents! This took another month or so to figure out. Once I had made the drawers (really just trays with handles) I found that if I started from the top, then screwed in the drawer runners (inset slightly to allow the same quarter inch square dowel to be glued to the front to provide drawer dividers). With the drawers cut to size, I realised that the very top pair wouldn’t fit, so I cut them down on the saw bench, claiming this was a design feature to hold scissors, thimbles etc – you won’t tell will you? 😉

Oh the other consideration is that I like to contrast different timbers, so some of the drawer fronts are in a red maple, the white drawers are in pine and Tasmanian oak, and the sides are in pine. And I arranged them to make three bands of contrasting colour. Finally the handles – I thought I’d surprise Sharon by giving the handles a sewing theme, so I contrived, cajoled and persuaded Sharon to make a trip to Spotlight – a little spot of textile heaven – so that I could side-track her among the fabrics while made a subversive dash to the dolls craft section where I found miniature darning mushrooms, miniature thread bobbins and a tiny teapot and coffee mug – all in wood. I had excused myself saying I needed to check out the boy toys in Supercheap Auto Parts next door, and with that I scurried unseen to the checkout with my gains and so to the car where the handles-to-be were safely stashed.

I think Sharon liked the result – because next thing, I kept finding woodwork magazines casually left open to articles on designing whole rooms of storage systems…

The finished cabinet

Cheers

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