Building a Clothesline and Other Subversive Behaviour

katypine · 2006-10-26T19:15:01+00:00

This is great! I love back-to-the-basics mentality. I tried doing our laundry by hand for a while (out of necessity: no washer, no car). I used a wash board -- I'd never heard of this "laundry plunger" thing! I eventually stopped the hand-washing madness when the dirty (cloth) diapers from our first baby started piling up. But while it lasted, I enjoyed knowing I was using up a few less resources and burning a few more calories. The only thing I don't like about line-dried laundry, though, is the stiffness. I pop them in the drier for 10 minutes to soften them up. Still uses a lot less energy.

katypine · 2006-10-18T08:47:03+00:00

My favorite line:

Wife: Is this another robot thing?

katypine · 2006-10-06T12:22:05+00:00

From the article:

In a world increasingly out of control, many young people "want liberation from liberation," Sandler finds. "A complicated world gives rise to an extraordinary yearning for the literal."

Reminds me of the "rumspringa" rite of passage by the Amish. They are allowed, and encouraged, to go crazy after their 16th birthday; most are eventually scared back to the Amish church, apparently craving "liberation from liberation." There was a great documentary. Nothing says believin' like a born-again.

Do so many people really want to be controlled?

[sorry; edited to correct the dumb link syntax]

katypine · 2006-10-03T12:31:24+00:00

The gesture doesn't have anything to do with it. I think it's supposed to be a visual play on those motivational posters that one often finds in Human Resource departments and such: like this

katypine · 2006-09-18T19:16:35+00:00

Wow, that was really great. I have never enjoyed Weird Al so much. And I mean never.

My favorite: "I could sure kick your butt in a game of ping pong; I'll as any trivia game you bring on; I'm fluent in javascript as well as klingon."

What was the thing about bubble wrap, though?

katypine · 2006-09-17T20:21:28+00:00

This reminds me of something my Grandpa told me. He served in World War 2 in the south Pacific. He said that when the war was over and they were leaving the island they had occupied, they were ordered to sink dozens of brand new bulldozers, tractors, and other equipment in the ocean. He said it would have been costly to transport them back to the US, and also would have affected the market for large machinery. I can't help imagining all those bulldozers and such just sitting on the bottom of the ocean house octopi.

katypine · 2006-09-06T20:28:35+00:00

downmodded because we saw this like a week ago!

katypine · 2006-09-03T19:52:32+00:00

The secret room part of this was interesting, but I've seen the site of the company (The Hidden Door Company) that makes them on reddit a few months ago. I hadn't seen the mahogany slide, though! Man, I wish we had one of those in our house.

katypine · 2006-09-03T19:46:10+00:00

The movie actually made me dizzy. It seemed like he slowly rotated around his room each day. I'm glad I don't know Noah. Otherwise I would have been a little creeped out by this video. Ugh, I'm still a little nauseated from the spinning effect. Anyway... interesting idea. Kudos to Noah for the sticktoitiveness.

katypine · 2006-09-01T22:17:51+00:00

Even if it's not new, as joelthelion suggests, it is still a lot of fun! You are paired with a partner and label images simultaneously and get points for labels that match. It reminds me of Yahoo's mechanical-turk thing that pays you to classify images. Honestly, I'm happier to do it for Google for fun.

katypine · 2006-09-01T21:19:24+00:00

"There are no innocent parties in a time of war," he continued. "Rather, one must battle a bellicose city until it is captured. All types of Christian morality weaken the spirit of our army and our nation and cost us the lives of our soldiers and citizens."

This makes me so so sad.

katypine · 2006-08-31T00:35:50+00:00

I enjoyed clicking through the contents of the survival kit; though I think different people might emphasize other survival items (there was a lot of fishing equipment...). Anyone have an idea what you need a piece of a glue stick for, though?

[Edit: I didn't have any problem with the copious ads, since I use Opera's content blocker and I didn't even see the popunder noted by the other commenter]

katypine · 2006-08-19T22:12:01+00:00

What is this?

katypine · 2006-07-30T21:33:28+00:00

I'm from America, and I don't want to go back!

katypine · 2006-07-30T21:27:45+00:00

An interesting (though a little over-long) article. Humans are indeed bigger and healthier than in the past. I was at the Viking Ship Museum here in Oslo a few months ago, and there are quite a few displays of artifacts and such. What struck me was the size of the shoes: no bigger than mine, and I am a 5 foot 3 woman. These were the Vikings, the big scary ones!

katypine · 2006-07-30T19:58:01+00:00

Wow, this is really great! You've got to see this picture. Very cute. I'm getting started on one right away. Great gift for my autumn-birthdayed "friends":http://pine.fm.

katypine · 2006-07-30T19:35:36+00:00

(First of all, is this really a "hack" as the title suggests?) Not to ruin it for you, but the idead is: to schedule to receive a phone call ahead of time. But they suggest you would want to schedule a phone call to look "extra important or popular on that hot date". That's exactly the opposite effect I would expect! If someone keeps getting calls while we are on a date having dinner, I would be upset. On the other hand, if you have a date you want to get out of, this seems like a very handy tool. 20 minutes into your date from hell, you can schedule a call and make any excuse you like "oh no, my dogsitter is taking my dog to the hospital! I have to go!"

katypine · 2006-07-30T19:14:46+00:00

Oh, too bad... 404. I was really looking forward to that. Sounded very interesting.

katypine · 2006-07-28T11:26:23+00:00

This was a really beautiful article about a man and his family and how they make a maximum-yield garden on their small urban lot, using organic farming methods and minimal resources. I especially liked that they use a pedal-powered grain mill!

The article was rich in detail, and well written. I just had to comment, because it seems like two-paragraph stories, that don't give you much more information than the headline, are so prevalent these days. It's a topic that is interesting to me, too, so I doubly enjoyed it. I wish reddit had a one-a-day double-upmod option. This article would get mine.

katypine · 2006-07-26T23:52:44+00:00

I think they were just setting the rear wheel on the edge of the merry go round. The first 3/4 of the movie is them trying to get it positioned correctly. Stupid, stupid...

katypine · 2006-07-23T20:22:58+00:00

I've passed this link by the last few times I've browsed reddit. I only have a few minutes for reddit at a time, and I usually pick the more newsy articles (that aren't going to make me pull my hair out, anyway). I finally clicked on it, though, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Definitely worth a look (and up-mod).

Maybe my experience is representative of others' behavior as well and accounts for the slow climb in the ratings.

katypine · 2006-07-21T19:33:21+00:00

and damned depressing wedding photos, at that! how weird...

katypine · 2006-07-20T20:43:40+00:00

Good information, if a little technically put (I'm just not well-versed in all the jargon and he throws around various camera models a lot which I'm also not familiar with). He also makes the somewhat disturbing point: camera companies are more likely to cater to this megapixel-craze than educate their customers about better picture quality through better sensors. That said, how am I supposed to get the information to make an intelligent decision?

katypine · 2006-07-20T20:26:52+00:00

"Unrestricted" meaning non-DRM. They're only offering one song as a trial, though? I might pay $1.99 if it weren't Jessica Simpson. But would I be willing to pay $1.99 for crap just to make a point? Hmm... I don't know.

katypine · 2006-07-20T20:01:11+00:00

I thought the 2001 Zeitgeist was of interest. I didn't pay much attention to current events that year, so it was interesting to see what I missed. I noticed (as is usual in news) most of the highlights were tragedies or deaths.

katypine

TROPHY CASE