The Professor
Originally uploaded by zieak.

We meet again!

I like open source stuff. I like standards. Myspace is neither. But fortunately some people are able to scrape content and make it usable for the world.

If you find someone’s blog you like make this: http://blog.myspace.com/zieak but replace my name with the blog you’re interested in following. Copy that into this website http://weblog.randomchaos.com/myspace/ and the result will be valid rss.

If you are not using rss readers you should. a reader will make it so you don’t have to log into a site to view the content. I have my homepage set to google. I used the customize google option and now my homepage shows news headlines, the weather, most recent posts on forums i read, most recent comments on my weblog, all kinds of dynamic content. If you use thunderbird for email (which you really should) then you can set that up so that new posts arrive in your mail as if someone emailed them to you.

Until the day that i can have my cell phone send the gps coordinates to a web server and that computer plots my transmitted coordinates on a map so people can follow me around, apps like this will have to do. I would much rather be sending SMS or MMS messages from on the road so i can produce some sort of map/blog mash-up.

I just finished a day of advocating in D.C. I wasn’t lobbying – although there was some of that done. I did the same trip last year but we only ended up meeting with staff of our representatives and never even saw our legislators. This time i shook the hand of all three. (I’m so starstruck.)

If you ever go quail hunting with Dick Cheney do not, i repeat, DO NOT, get between him and a quail. He will shoot you. And then he will have God give you a heart attack. It might just be best to not go hunting with him.

It has been a while since i shared one of my projects but don’t you dare think that i have not been making things. Or, more accurately, starting to make things. My latest project has been in the mental lotto ball hopper for the better part of a year. I wanted to make a windchime out of one of those colorful children’s xylophones. Here’s where i pretend to have just gathered the materials and tools and put it together and not tell you how much time i spent with wires and string trying to figure out the best way to get a good tone out of the chimes.

You need:

• $9.11 (more if you are less resourceful, less if you have non-monopolistic hardware stores)
• Vice grip pliers or something similar
• A drill and drill bits

Here is the meat of the project. The child’s xylophone cost me a dollar at a Value Village. I broke off the metal pieces by hand and bought enough of the beaded keychains to hang them all. They were 50 cents each.

I found this clock in the free pile outside of Salvation Army. The aluminum piece is what finally inspired me to finish this project up. The price was originally marked at $5 and had dropped gradually to 12 cents. I’ll be using most of it for other projects. Kind of like the plains indian tribes used most of the buffalo.

You can see that i have drilled holes in the piece of aluminum from the clock and hung the chimes. I played around with the order of them but having them in the same order as the xylophone makes the nicest sounds.

I didn’t know what i wanted to use to hang the windchime up until i saw the beaded chain available in the hardware store. It was $.99 a foot and i bought 3 feet. I also bought two cable compression thingys and used my vice grips to tighten them down onto the beaded chain.

I normally don’t do this. But last week i bought some Lego at the Salvation Army. A bag of train tracks. They are a more modern set than those that are in the family collection though. I bought the bag for $2. I decided to list them on eBay. Right now they are over $40. [edit: they sold for over $100 - nice profit margin!]

Look mom! I’m on the radio! Listen for my little chuckle to myself when i suggest a non-profit giving a grant to the federal government. This actually made statewide news this morning I guess.

May the Norse be with you.

No Norseplay.

Norse of nature.

Norseback riding.

Norsing around.

Hung like a Norse.

Norse of one.

Norse feeding.

These may be the product base for me to have a booth at the Little Norway festival this year. Hmmm.