Digital Chum - Virtual fish guts and other nonsense

Books

The Library

Nov 11th, 2020
by Dan.
3 comments

(tl;dr… the finished library pics are at the end)

Bookshelves

When we had our house remodel done back in 2015, there was a room added that was specifically designated as a library… my room. Until January of 2020, that room was basically a big storage room while we finished other rooms and got organized from the chaos of a huge, full-house remodeling project. Then, finally, I started working on it sporadically as time permitted. I had been drawing various plans for months, waffling between building them from scratch and using Ikea Billy Bookcases and tricking them out to look like custom built-ins. I went for the “build them from scratch” option.

Here’s an idea of what the room has looked like for the past few years. The liquor boxes are full of books, not liquor… and no, I did not drink the liquor that WAS in the boxes!

  • Library to be 2
  • Library to be

The goal was to have an “old world traditional” look mixed in with a bit of a “Lord of the Rings” fantasy vibe and maybe just a tiny pinch of Steampunk… so when you walked in, you felt like you were walking into a different world.

So after a lot of measurements and bookcase design and figuring out how wide to make the bookcases on each wall, I got to it with a few sheets of red oak plywood from Home Depot. The bookcases were all 11-1/2 inches deep, but the widths varied a lot. The widest one is 31 inches.

Bookcase sides

I had nineteen bookcases to build, which seemed overwhelming, but I figured “baby steps,” right? I started with enough plywood for the first three bookcases. It was a lot of cutting, an absurd amount of drilling (for the adjustable shelves – 2,052 shelf-pin holes), and a lot of gluing and clamping. I made various jigs to help with streamlining the repetitive process, but I won’t bore you with those here.

Unfinished bookcases

Eventually, I figured I should get them out of the garage and into the library to make sure I’d measured correctly. I put them in more-or-less the correct spots and was mildly surprised that I hadn’t borked that up. Unfortunately, I found the exterior walls were kicked out a bit at the bottom, so the bookcases on those walls wouldn’t be able to get attached flush to the wall, but that was something to deal with later. La! La! La! La!

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Playing with Library Designs

Mar 5th, 2015
by Dan.
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I had been using Chief Architect’s Home Designer Suite 2015 to do my house models to play around with furniture layouts and the like, but found it too limiting. The Pro version would probably be better, but I’m not going to shell out $495 to help figure out where to put my couch.

So I tried out Google’s Sketchup program and, after a relatively short learning curve, started making some models and had a go at creating a design for my library. I took the measurements from our actual Architect’s drawings and built the "room" and then went from there.

I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to play out. This was just a first draft of a design and it’s all kind of rough, but SketchupSketchup made is really easy to visualize how things would look and how the colors would work together. Here are a few pictures of my first go-round (more pictures after the break). Click on any of them to get a larger view.

Library Design 001-06

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Review: Zombie Fallout

Jun 27th, 2012
by Dan.
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Zombie Fallout Zombie Fallout by Mark Tufo
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Before I get started, I should admit that I could only make it halfway through this book because it was so bad, so I’m only reviewing the first half. However, I doubt the second half could have done anything to redeem what I’d already endured.

I really can’t understand all the good reviews of this book. The writing was horrible… inconsistent, juvenile in many cases, and packed full of grammatical errors. There were cultural references that were simply wrong… saying that the American Express motto was “Don’t go anywhere without it.” Really?

The author scattered in a selection of big words every now and then that were completely out of character with the rest of the writing. They weren’t unknown words (like “lugubrious”), but it made it appear as though he was stuck for a word and quickly thumbed through a thesaurus to grab a flashy adjective. It was simply distracting.

The main character was, in turn, smart then stupid then brave then a coward then loving then antagonistic… no consistency. The wife has absolutely no good qualities. It was just bad, bad, bad.

The writing aside, even the zombie part of the story didn’t make sense. One hour after things went spiraling into zombie apocalypse, there were rotting, maggot-ridden corpses? How does that work? The main character, even though he supposedly knew about zombies (from fiction) and had been sort of looking forward to the zombie apocalypse, didn’t seem to know to shoot them in the head. Wait… actually, he did mention that you needed to destroy the brain, but then he would waste entire clips of M16 ammo spraying the body of a single zombie… without killing it.

It was hard enough to stomach the bad writing and really bad characterizations, but then showing no respect for the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief took it over the top and into the land of discarded books.

I tried, though. I really tried.

Re-captioning old children’s books, FTW!

Jun 19th, 2012
by Dan.
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I think the devil does it.

Review: The Magicians

Dec 15th, 2011
by Dan.
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The Magicians The Magicians by Lev Grossman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Magicians is an absolutely wonderful book that un-selfconciously references Harry Potter, Narnia, Tolkien, and other fantasy works somehow without being plagiaristic at all. The main characters are wonderfully developed… distinctively different people who complement each other and keep the story racing along without a single dull moment.

Grossman ties the entire book together with articulate grace, weaving seemingly insignificant events at the beginning of the book into key points of the entire over-arching storyline. The Magicians is a truly satisfying read that left me wanting more.

View all my reviews

Review: Journey to the Center of the Earth

Aug 8th, 2011
by Dan.
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Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne weaves a great story, interspersed with somewhat tedious observations about geology, paleontology, and evolution (thought not nearly as tedious as the repetitive classifications of aquatic life found in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). The characters are interesting, though the narrator (who is the nephew of the intrepid professor) tends to be whiny and overly dramatic (read “drama queen”) about the perils they are facing, sometimes to the chagrin of his uncle.

I was somewhat disappointed in the ending, and the book should properly be re-titled Journey a Small Percentage of the Way to the Center of the Earth but the story was entertaining, nevertheless. Verne is great at weaving stories in a way that makes it easy for you to imagine being in them yourself, and Journey is no exception.

I listened to the unabridged audio version of the book read by Tim Curry (making the book all the better, in my opinion!).

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Review: Footfall

Aug 7th, 2011
by Dan.
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Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle Footfall by Larry Niven
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was perhaps the most tedious science fiction book I’ve ever read… or listened to (I had the audio book). The book had way too many “main” characters, most of whom had no bearing on the outcome of the book. Some seemed completely pointless. The alien names were unnecessarily complex and having a section of the book describing their language and its construction seemed self indulgent (of the authors) and tedious.

The book suffered from a lack of coherent story line, uninteresting characters, pointless dialogue, and unbelievable events. The premise was interesting (alien invasion), but the execution was poor.

I give it two stars only because the narrator of the audio book (MacLeod Andrews) was simply spectacular. His narration was the reason I was able to suffer through the book to the (disappointing) ending.

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Seriously, guys? Swords would be less painful.

Apr 12th, 2011
by Dan.
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Boromir and Aragorn have a poetry-based pissing contest…

“Then let us start as soon as it is light tomorrow, if we can,” said Boromir. “The wolf that one hears is worse than the orc that one fears.”

“True!” said Aragorn, loosening his sword in its sheath. “But where the warg howls, there also the orc prowls.”

That’s an actual quote from The Lord of the Rings (a bit before the fellowship enters Moria). I kid you not.

It’s like Dr. Seuss briefly took over for Tolkien. WTF.

I made my d20 saving throw

Mar 11th, 2010
by Dan.
2 comments

Saving throw vs... Megan is reading the first book in the Warrior Series, a fantasy series about clans of cat warriors, and I asked her if, when she finished the first book, she was going to start the second one right away or if she was going to read one of the new Bella Sara horse books she just got.

She said, “I already started one of the Bella Sara books. I’m dual-wielding books.”

[…]

I’m so proud.

My daughter is awesome!

Oct 28th, 2009
by Dan.
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This evening, I was waiting for my new laptop to get through all its updates and my wife and I were watching NCIS while waiting, which allowed my eight-year-old daughter to stay up a little later than usual because… you know… we didn’t want to miss any of the NCIS episode to go tuck her in and I needed to be there to click “Next” on my laptop. Priorities.

While my daughter was, in turn, waiting for my wife and I to finish our important “tasks,” she grabbed some paper and colored pencils and wrote and illustrated a four-page book. Though the book doesn’t show off her graphic artistry (she can do much better), when I read the book, I was delighted… and proud. Here’s the book (click to embiggen).

Title Page
page01		 Page 1
page02
Page 2
page03		 Page 3
page04

Now, of course she doesn’t know everything, but if you’re going to learn everything, history and science are pretty good starting points. This creation of hers happened without any prompting on my part tonight, so I was especially pleased that she felt it was a cool enough topic to illustrate… in the 10 or 15 minutes she was waiting! She read it to me and my laptop and NCIS got ignored from that point.

I think my laptop is still prompting me to click “Next.”

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