Monthly Archives: June, 2009
Facing the Zoning Monster
This is brilliant. Sharon Astyk posts:
http://sharonastyk.com/2009/02/12/facing-the-zoning-monster/
She details town/city/neighborhood association zoning restrictions that forbid clotheslines, livestock, front-yard gardens, rainwater collection, commerce other than telecommuting, etc. Living in a town with some (but not all) of these restrictions, her words hit home. Why can’t I set up a small shop in my backyard and make a living with it, [...]
Open Source Practical Small Home Design & Construction Resource
An open source library of plans for building small houses is at:
http://www.planhelp.com
Alongside a companion website with photos:
http://countryplans.com/
And a very active discussion forum complements both:
http://countryplans.com/smf/index.php
The forum is also filled with free or inexpensive building design resources. Many of the resources will load into free of low cost CAD tools like Google Sketchup and 3D Home Architect. The communty of [...]
Framing Floor Joists and Walls
An old training film from the Navy on framing floor joists and walls:
This makes it look easy. The technique of placing the subflooring at 45 degrees to the structure, for strength, is particularly interesting.
Songs of the Newfoundland Outports
Yecats! A bloody treasure chest:
http://www.wtv-zone.com/phyrst/audio/nfld/outports.htm
Zoukfest 2009
Zoukfest 2009 is over, and it was both great fun and informative. Zoukfest was held in Albuquerque for the first time, over three days, at UNM, June 12-14. This is a shorter Zoukfest than in the past, but my understanding was that attendance was up, probably due to the easily accessible Albuquerque location. Attendees came [...]
Great Big Sea: Process Man: The Chemical Workers Song
Great Big Sea singing Ron Angel’s ”Process Man”, from their outstanding show in Albuquerque last winter.
Check the lyrics:
“The Chemical Worker’s Song (Process Man)”
[Chorus:]
And its go boys go
They’ll time your every breath
And every day in this place your two days near to death
But you go
Well a process man am I and I’m tellin’ you no lie
I work [...]
Facebook Targeted Marketing
I finally broke down a gave Facebook a go. It seems a good place to post pictures and hook up with old friends and acquaintances. Like MySpace, the user interface is pretty bad, but intuitive enough that if you dink around long enough, you can usually figure out how to do what you want. It [...]
Two Dvorak Technology Articles
Two Interesting recent articles from John Dvorak’s column:
Wither MySQL, Whither LAMP
As someone who makes their living with the LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), seeing MySQL bought by Sun, and now Sun bought by Oracle, runs cold chills. Dvorak also points out the difficulty of basing a commercial application on any GPL licenced component, and points out the [...]