I was silly and decided to make a Jaffa costume (from Stargate SG-1) for game today. ;) Given that game only lasted about an hour, I'm fairly glad that I didn't spend much more than two hours on the costume. I'd been meaning to make a Jaffa costume for awhile, though. Photos:


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I think I may have just finished painting number two as part of my attempts to learn oil painting. There are still quite a bit of things I have left to learn, and there are a bunch of things I'm not quite happy with on this one.


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I got inspired to try playing with oil painting. So far I really like it as a medium, but I am still learning and experimenting with how to work with it. This is my first attempt with oils:


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Whee... I am back in the US after 2.5 weeks in Spain, Croatia, and the UK! I think this is my favorite photo from the trip:


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So my ThinkGeek order showed up with my cold heat soldering tool (I wonder if they'd let me take it on a plane) and an Atari Classics game controller. I was quite traumatized when reading the packaging on the joystick as it says "A blast from Mom and Dad's past!" on the box. Eeeeeeeep.

I've made good progress on getting my house to listen to me. On the first and third floors I can now say things like:

• house, turn kitchen lights on
• house, what is status of the laundry?
• house, what temperature is it?
• house, I am going to watch a movie now.
• house, play some classical music.
• good night house.

among quite a few other things and ( Read more... )

Hm. I could use a domain name for random services I set up and for shared machines of mine which isn't "nygren.org". The problem is that there are just some things that would seem a little weird to have on nygren.org (such as email addresses for friends, etc). Preferably it should be something not tied to a particular project, and it should be ( Read more... )

The best received present this year was the gnome riding a Swedish dala horse that I made for my mom:


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This picture on the Daily Show last night really amused me (yeah, they photoshopped it). It is supposedly shows Bush at Nascar wearing Nascar-appropriate clothing:


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*sigh* It looks like lots of people with TiVos in MA are having problems with their TiVos failing to download program data. I am no exception. If you check under service information, it will show that it last succeeded to get program guide data on Nov 4 or so and that it "Failed while loading series". Rebooting sometimes helps, although mine ( Read more... )