I started this morning by putting up a swing and a trapeze bar with rings, adding to the knotted rope ladder that’s already up. The swing is actually higher than the ones at all but the biggest parks! It looks a bit shoddy, I know, but the ropes should support a thousand pounds, so my biggest thing to keep an eye on is whether the I-beams fray them at all. Nefarious has a friend coming over tomorrow who I hope will be suitably impressed.
That big room with the swings is the least finished room so far — it’s got tons of unpacked stuff, garbage, and miscellany scattered about. We’ve got the living room 90% done, and as you can see from the picture (which you can click for a much bigger version) I did some serious ladder climbing to hang paintings twenty or so feet up. The concrete floor — which I’m told is seriously reinforced with metal, as this was once a munitions factory — is a bit uneven so it was a little scary up there!
Other than that, I ordered a cool TouchShield kit yesterday, so when that gets here I’m very much looking forward to starting work on some microcontroller programming — I’m planning on using those skills to really do a great job of the submarine and hovercraft projects.
Today was Nefarious’s sixth birthday (Caitlin baked a cake)… Among other presents she got an R/C tank that has a video link in it (a camera on the tank, and VR-esque glasses that you wear), so she’s in military industrial complex training already — smashing the tank into me while I hear her cackling like an evil genius from another room.
We also scootered down to one of the new parks we have pedestrian-distance access to… A bit grimey, but not without its charms I guess. Unpacking is coming along nicely and the studio is starting to take shape. It’s nice having space for all our books again, and I installed a PS3 media server so I have easy access to my entire collection of music and movies (before I copied stuff onto a memory stick as needed). Anyway, it’s slowly coming together. I’ve got a new game on the way too, and I think I’ll continue in my trend of relatively minimal computer use and get to sketching.
Some musings by Nefarious from a recent notebook… They’re one of my favorite things that she does at school — a mix of word practice, creative writing, and illustrations.
This is James and the Giant Peach.
(Continued)
Well, today is our last full day in this apartment, although I suppose we do officially have it until the end of the month. Tomorrow both this apartment’s contents and my storage unit will get moved to the new studio. We’ve been moving little things over in dribs and drabs but this will deal with the bulk of it. Nefarious has been loving the giant space. A full swing will go up soon, but in the meantime I hung a climbing/swinging rope from one of the I-beams, which are strong enough that I could likely winch my truck into the air from one.
It’ll also be nice having some pavement again — Caitlin picked up a couple boxes of sidewalk chalk (which we enjoyed many times in the past). I was really inspired by the recent “Chalk Flood” in Grand Rapids in which something like 30,000 sticks of chalk were given out to the public to decorate the streets — what a wonderful, and low cost, public art festival that’s much more community oriented than most street fairs and other somewhat analogous celebrations.
Timing was right when we finished off at the studio yesterday (getting new keys, feeding the fish, and so on) that we stopped by the park to see what food vendors were there. Since the weather is so summery now (although it was windy enough that Nefarious did end up borrowing my jacket), there was a hot dog cart, an ice cream truck, and a chip truck, so that was a very nice luck.
The water at High Park is teeming with minnows right now. I don’t know if that’s natural or if the ponds have been stocked (people do go fishing in Grenadier Pond), but there were tons of them.
Speaking of breeding, Oddee has a good list on Medieval sex practices today that I think most people will find interesting. Oh, and did you know slow loris love getting tickled? Anyway, depending on the schedule of the cable company, I may or may not be online over the next few days.
There are a few bugs still, and I haven’t fully cross-browser tested it yet, but I’m prepared to show what I’m working on. It’s pretty resource intensive, so I doubt it’ll run in IE except on faster computers but it should be OK in Firefox and Chrome on most modern computers. It’s pure Javascript with no canvas element or plugins (ie. no Flash)… I think it’s an interesting exploration of what you can do with Javascript. As before, feel free to examine/use the source code.
Click either screenshot to load game… To be honest it’s not as fun as Bing-Bong! but it’s a bit more ambitious from a back-end point of view and has some interesting upgrades to the code (at full steam the game has fifty or so threads handling all the objects; it’s really fun).
