Yesterday I finally got some space cleared and recorded a story for my podcast. After almost a year it will have updated again.

I sent the audio to Steve to clean up and add in music and what not. Just before I was going to go to sleep last night, Steve messaged me to say "There's this annoying hum in the audio... and it's right in the normal speaking frequency range, so I can't easily quash it without really distorting the voice..."

So this morning I re-recorded using different equipment. Last night I used a headset mic that I'd used in the past, just because it was quick and easy and I wanted to get it done. This morning I set up the Blue Snowball mic I got for Christmas and the resulting audio is much better. And of course I couldn't help editing the story slightly as I read it, going so far as to change one character's gender and name (Jim Fitz became Jen Fitz) after I realized this story had no female characters, and it was the easiest way to distinguish the two speakers in that scene.

I was in a rush to get something recorded finally because Alternia Comics is going to start regularly updating content Friday, July 10. It's an arbitrary date I picked because alarin612 said "Okay, pick a go-live date."

After I recorded the story again, I also reapplied aluminum foil to my window. Yesterday Mike convinced me to open my window, which necessitated tearing at least part of the foil that was there already. We found that while the breeze is nice, I have no screen, and since I put a book case under the window, with my to-be-read pile stacked on top, there's a nice stairway to the open window for the kitten. Less than ideal. The sun woke me up for the first time in months this morning. Hopefully that won't happen again tomorrow. And I put the foil up in two sections so I can now open the window without destroying everything.

Two days ago Mike and Amy and I busted up part of the front walk. When they bought the house last year, part of the walk had come up due to the tree root growing under it. We finally pried up the broken slab of concrete and flipped it over on to the lawn so we could get at the roots and dirt under it. The plan was to remove filler from under the cement so it would lay flat again. We had shovels, a dirt rake, a hammer and chisel, a san angelo bar, a hand axe, and a sledge hammer. When we got the concrete up, we quickly deduced that the root had been there first, and when they went to pout the walk, they simply cut through it. It was clearly visible on both sides of the path, and had clean, straight cuts.

We shouted to the heavens for the umpteenth time upon finding something like this in the house. "WHY!?"

We continued on with the plan, using the axe and chisel to cut the root back. Before lone we got frustrated and took turns just smashing it with the sledge, which actually worked fairly well. Managed to get some big hunks off. After a bit of clean up work, wherein it was discovered I seem to have some talent with the hand axe, we dropped the slab back in place. Mostly.

Our angle was a bit off and it cracked, splitting in to two pieces. We managed to work the smaller one in to place, not quite level with the rest of the path, but much more so than it had been before. Half an hour of trying to jimmy the larger piece in to place was met with little result. Frustrated again, we went back to what worked before: smackin it with the sledge.

We now have some artfully arranged stepping stones (made from the old path) in the path, and a hunk of concrete destined for the dump.

While I was relaxing tonight, chatting online, I got the urge to modify my Stedi-Stock camera mount. The mount itself works pretty well. My recent trip to the Ren Fest was shot with the help of the Stedi-Stock. Mine is now decorated with speaker wire, a 9 volt battery, electrical tape, expansion slot covers from an old desktop case, and a red LED.

I'm not sure what else I can do with it at the moment to make it look more steampunky on the cheap.

Yesterday, Saturday, was a Steampunk gathering at the Colorado Renaissance Festival. In character, many of the players were from their airship, the Lorelei. They meant to take a trip to the actual Renaissance period, but their chronometric-navigator had missed the coordinates. Instead of traveling in to the past, they instead went to the future, to a re-enactment of the Renaissance time period. My pictures of the event can be found in my flickr stream though I am not in any of them, for obvious reasons. There were several group photos taken. I'll link them here when I find them.

All in all it was a lot of fun, and I'd like to go back to the Ren Fest another weekend this year, in ren-garb this time.

Today, Sunday, Mike and Amy laid out a new garden bed in the corner of the backyard. Pictures of the area will likely show up in Mike's Picasa album before long. The bed that's pictured there now is one of the smaller beds, roughly two feet by five feet. The new bed takes up most of the corner of the yard, an area at least ten square feet, but oddly shapped. While they spread the manure, newspaper and cardboard, I "mulched" the weeds and other plants we hadn't planted in the back yard. The bed design is based on Amy's father's designs of permaculture; he believes in gardening without disturbing the topsoil much. The newspaper and cardboard act as barriers for weeds growing up in to the garden while breaking down and creating rich soil for the garden proper. I say I was "mulching" because in David's design, weeds are pulled but not thrown away. Instead they are tossed back in to the garden.

After the paper layer is set up, hay no longer suitable for feed is spread on top, along with more manure if you want to get things growing quickly. The weeds are tossed in with the hay, returning the nutrients they've taken from the garden, when mulched after the garden has gotten going anyway. More about David's designs can be read on his website: Organic Landscape Design.

We spread some hay on the bed tonight, but ran out of the bale David dropped off months ago. Tomorrow we'll get the bale David hasn't yet found a use for.

We have three beds in the backyard set up this way, including the new giant one. The small 2x5foot bed is a double-dug bed, tilling and mixing the soil two shovel heights below the surface, leaving the first shovels height mostly intact. We then spread the cardboard, newspaper, manure and hay on top.

Things are growing like mad. A pumpkin planted a few months ago has gone crazy with stalks stretching out in at least a three foot diameter, covering a good part of the six foot diameter bed it's in. It's gone past some stalks of Sage growing next to it, and actually wrapped a vine around a sprig of Spearmint a few feet away.

Mike is now turning a few leaves from the spearmint plant in to spearmint extract for use in making candy.

Beginning yesterday, I undertook the task of organizing my LEGO bricks. The idea had been in my head since I read about a stacking method for stored bricks to a) make them easier to find in a bin and 2) make the stacks easy to break apart when a brick is needed. I read a blog post detailing that method a year ago, and have forgotten the source. duaiwe, do you remember? How to organize your LEGO bricks for efficient building on Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, source of many wonderful things. Thank you, oddharmonic for the link.

I was driven to organize them because Big Erik discovered Steampunk.

Bear with me, this will make sense. Eventually.

Before I moved back to CO, Mike, Amy, neonphog and laurenlydon were playing in a couple of GURPS games with a friend they knew named Erik, often called Big Erik because there was another, smaller Erik in other gaming groups Big Erik was also in. He stands at least 6 feet 6 inches tall.

Due to scheduling conflicts, Erik is no longer in the weekly game Mike runs. I ended up taking his place in the game, though not his character. Several weeks ago, Mike got a hold of Erik and found out it's just scheduling that's stopped him from coming to games, and another night works better for him, so we arranged another gaming night: board/card games and hanging out mostly.

A few weeks ago, Erik discovered the Steampunk culture and really dug it. He decided to run a Steampunk role-playing game, using the GURPS ruleset. Being a Steampunk enthusiast myself, I heartily agreed when asked if I wanted to play. So far we've only set up characters and a bit of backstory. We have an airship because we stole it from the slavers that had captured us and were going to sell us. En-route we staged a coup and murdered the slavers and took their ship for our own.

I have a small-ish (1x2x3 foot, roughly) storage container about half full of LEGO bricks that hadn't been touched since I packed it in Portland. I pulled it out of my room and set it in a corner of the downstairs living room in January and hadn't really touched it since.

After looking at some of the Steampunk creations on The Brothers Brick LEGO blog, I was itching to build again. And now I had an excuse.

After getting rough dimensions for our boat from the GURPS books, and figuring a stud-to-yard ratio (2 studs:1 yard), I started work on a minifig scale model. After laying out a bunch of flat bricks to get an idea of the shape of the top deck, I ran in to a problem: it was difficult to find the bricks I wanted, especially the little (2x2, 1x1, 4x1, etc.) ones, or the hinges or angle brackets or other specialized pieces.

I had a pile of LEGO bricks in front of me, and started sifting through them for similar pieces to group together. Quickly, several flaws were realized, not least among them was the distraction of "Ooh! That piece will go great here" or "That'd be an awesome part of the deck-mounted beam-cannon at the bow!" I stood up, stretched, and sat back down on the other side of the pile, where I had more open floor space. I began sifting again, but this time with the intent of making smaller piles. I started with a two-pile plan: thin bricks and tall (standard size) bricks. Again, I quickly discovered flaws. The two-pile plan was not granular enough. I ended up with 6 piles: thin, tall, "flat" bricks (pieces connect only on one side, unable to stack with themselves: minifig hats or smooth pieces), Technic rails, Technic rods, and Bionicle joints (both ball-and-socket and the rotating, ratcheting joints of the newer sets).

Each pile was further sorted by type, then color and finally stacked.

I started after dinner yesterday and finished after breakfast this morning after working until about 3AM.

Once the sorting was done, I could get back to building. I finished the upper deck, including pilot's cabin, cannon, and giant laser rifle, and got most of a lower deck built, complete with windows and portcullis at the bow. Though I didn't have suitable rods for the portcullis bars, so I used blaster rifles from the Star Wars sets I have. My rationale was that we've converted the ship from its slave trading days, and now that door would mostly be used when the crew went on raids. What better place for an armory than on the way out the door? ;)

I had to stop building when I realized I have no more suitable bricks to finish the hull and add a gas bag on top (air ship, remember?)

I'll take pictures soon.

The only other thing I've done today is some fiddling with karaksindru.com. I set it up so that it pulls posts from my rss feed here and posts them on this page automagically. I have something similar set up on the new Alternia Comics site, but alternia hasn't been updated in forever.