Entries by ben

For my birthday this year, Cyndi gave me a Flip Video Camera. It's a little larger than the size of a cell phone, a couple gigs of internal storage (an hour's worth), and a flip-out usb connector so you can plug it straight into a computer. It's brain-dead simple to use. Its simplicity & small size make it ideal for actually using, as opposed to a 'real', more expensive camera that would have a good chance of sitting on the shelf most of the time.

I've had it since July, but only got around to doing anything with the videos the other day. I setup a YouTube account and uploaded a bunch of vids there. The vids are mainly just family stuff around the house, and feature a lot of the kids (both in front and behind the camera--be prepared for some motion sicknes when they're running the camera). They also feature a fair amount of me being impatient with the kids.

Annoyingly, someone had already taken the username furiousben, so on YouTube, I'm just furiousblog. You can see all the vids or subscribe via RSS on my channel:

furiousblog's youtube channel

Here are a couple of the vids:

Kids at Washington Monument:



Lori, After Crying



The last Obama rally before the election was held in Manassas, which is just about 20 minutes from our house. We went with the two older kids and my Dad:





The kids jumping in one of the five or six piles of leaves we raked on Tuesday:

Most of you have probably already seen these since Cyndi posted them up on Facebook, but I figured I'd post here, too. Here are the two pumpkins I carved for Halloween:



I didn't cut all the way through, scraping out the design instead. They took forever, but I was pretty pleased with the results. I started with McCain, because I knew there would be a learning curve . I thought McCain was a little too dark, so I removed the skin from the shadowy part. It didn't actually lighten him up at all, and just made him look messed up in the light:



On a different note, I checked my Netflix suggestions today and had this:



My guess is that 'A Walk to Beautiful' is a eco-documentary about a historical bio pic that finds comedy in the mundane.

The excellent poll analysis site FiveThirtyEight gives 10 reasons to ignore the exit polls tonight.

Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls

These include the fact that exit polls have a larger margin of error than regular polls, they tend to overstate the Democrats' share of the vote, and they miss early and late voters. But my favorite reason is #10:

10. You'll know the actual results soon enough anyway. Have patience, my friends, and consider yourselves lucky: in France, it is illegal to conduct a poll of any kind within 48 hours of the election. But exit polls are really more trouble than they're worth, at least as a predictive tool. An independent panel created by CNN in the wake of the Florida disaster in 2000 recommended that the network completely ignore exit polls when calling particular states. I suggest that you do the same.

I love carving pumpkins. In the past, I've used templates that I found online to create Edward Scissorhands, aliens, etc. This year, I'm definitely going weirder:

President-o-lanterns



I'm thinking one pumpkin for each party, featuring both Pres. & VP candidates.

Over the past several months, I've become somewhat of a treehugging hippie (I know some of you think I already was, but I've taken it to a new level). I've started composting in massive quantities and started gardening. I also have a lot of plans for rain barrels, a gray water reclamation system and a homemade solar hot water heater amongst other things.

One of the things that I've been giving a lot of thought to is my lawn. Lawns are a pain in the butt to maintain, require unholy amounts of water, collectively generate more pollution from fertilizer runoff than farms and are completely unnatural.

For a month or two now, I've had a tab open in Firefox to this great article in the New Yorker:

Turf Wars

It talks about how we ended up with the absurd and unsustainable idea that everyone needed to have a patch of land covered with the exact same type of grass. It also discusses what we had before and a lot of the problems with lawns. I highly recommend reading it.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my lawn. I have a hill in my back yard that I planted grass on to keep it from eroding, but now it's mostly dead. For the bigger part of it, which is a little ways off from the house, I'm going to plant a 'meadow mix' of seed that will grow a mix of wildflowers and other plants. This will control the erosion, but will also require less water and maintenance, and will look good.

I've got big plans for the other half of the back yard, too, but they're a lot more involved and so will take a lot more time and effort (and money...) to pull off.

It's the front yard that's the real problem. Currently, it's just grass with some mulched areas next to the house. I've basically decided that I won't water the lawn, so it's not very nice right now. I'm not sure what I'm going to do there, but whatever it is, it will involve the elimination of most of the grass and replacing it with some sort of drought-tolerant, low-maintenance landscaping.