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Pysanka - also called Ukrainian Egg Decorating - is an art form that consists of building up layers of wax over progressively darker dyes before melting the wax to reveal the final design.

As a kid, I learned about pysanki in about sixth grade, and that winter and part of the next year I spent hours in the basement decorating and blowing out eggs. A good number didn't turn out as well as I liked, but I remember being pleased by several of them.

I've ordered a kit (dyes, some wax, three kistkas) and am excited to get it. It's a fun way to spend time and I think it can teach patience, creativity, and planning.

When I have a moment, I'm going to figure out how to "finish" the eggs so that they can last awhile. I remember experimenting with some spray-on glossy finishes, but people ship eggs and my eggs were never strong enough to consider shipping. So I'm sure there's some way to finish the eggs and perhaps turn them into Christmas ornaments or something.

Edit: http://www.learnpysanky.com/ and All Things Ukrainian look like informative sites.

I used to have plenty of time for podcasts. Two hours or so per day, at any rate - Buzz Out Loud, This Week in Photography, and a few others. When I was caught up, I'd have time to listen to This American Life.

Lately, no time. I'm tired of telling iTunes to keep downloading episodes of shows I'll never listen to, so I've let a bunch of them go dormant. I likely won't ever get back to them.

I have a small-ish project - an application icon, a document icon, and 10 or so toolbar icons (many of which are quite simple, like "line" or "oval"). Project would need to be done in about four to six weeks.

I've previously used Fernando Lins, but - good for him - he's graduated and has shifted his focus from icon work to more "serious" graphic design.

Recommend people who are free or recommend yourself - I'm open to suggestions. I'll combine the feedback/comments here with my own research and what people and friends tell me privately.

Thanks.

I've heard this quote a few times in the past, but for some reason, it's stuck with me lately: "Privacy is a modern invention."

That's true, and yet it's not at the same time. Anonymity is a modern invention too. If someone stole chickens from you in 1200, odds are you could figure out who it was. If someone steals your identity in 2010, good luck…

Here's another relevant quote: "Necessity is the mother of invention."

That's what I'm jokingly calling it. I don't have a thousandth (or perhaps a millionth, but who can measure such things?) of the hockey talent Sidney Crosby's got, but I scored the overtime game-winning goal in a 4-3 championship game, just like Crosby did at the Winter Olympics, and it feels good.

The game was played two nights ago. Matt wristed a shot in to make the game 1-0. They tied it up on a bad giveaway to make it 1-1. Paul, Matt, and I entered the zone and Paul won the puck behind their net against a guy - a great play - and pushed the puck to Matt. He pushed it through the crease and I one-timed it home beneath their goalie to put us back up 2-1 to start the third.

The rest of the third was hectic. The other team would score the next two goals to take a 3-2 lead. With only minutes remaining, Ryan tied the game back up.

In OT, we went down a man as Shannon took our only penalty of the night. I hopped on for the second half of a 4-on-3 penalty kill. Matt took the puck out of the zone and I resigned myself to busting tail to get back in the zone - I felt guilty joining "the rush" ((Can you call two people skating a "rush?")) - but when Matt wristed a shot off the goalie's far pad, and the puck slid out to me with a wide open net in front of me, all I had to do was guide the puck in. Anyone could have done it, but I suppose there's a little to be said for being in the right position at the right time. And some luck, too.

Game over. Tungsten Blades win the D Cup.

So for two seconds, I knew what it felt like to be Sidney Crosby. Okay, maybe a second and a half.

I'm turning off Entourage's sync capability with the Mac OS X Address Book.

All too often it screws up the order of fields, the names of fields, or the actual existence of data in those fields.

For example, for a number of months I've had a heck of a time getting one phone number to stay associated with one contact. Every time I opened my MacBook Pro - even if I added the data in with wireless disabled and then enabled wireless ((Enabling wireless allowed MobileMe syncing, among other things.)) the data would be over-written and the phone number removed and the order of other items re-shuffled.

Enough is enough. I haven't had these problems at all since disabling Entourage's sync capability a week ago. I like Entourage, but stuff like this should just work. I long for the days of Claris Em@iler - or a stripped down Entourage that ditches "My Day" and the entire calendaring application. Heck, just let Entourage do email and use the system-wide Address Book for email.

But that'll never happen. Microsoft can't remove from software - it can only add.

Yes, please.

Two reasons primarily, why forgetting your birthday is difficult in 2010:

1. Facebook tells everyone, so they post happy birthday wishes on your wall.

2. Every vBulletin forum to which you've ever subscribed (that's still in existence, anyway) sends you a "Happy Birthday" email. It's like a trip down memory lane… "Oh yeah, remember when I registered for that forum to ask that one question…?" Or "Remember when I lived in southern Florida and regularly read a few forums on kayak fishing…?" (etc.) They're like the ghosts of birthdays past. Once I decided I wanted to get into flying RC helicopters - not my brightest idea - and so, yep, two or three emails from various RC Heli forums. It's a long, long list.

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So, seriously, what are the good and bad parts of the Obama "Hellth" Care Thingamajig we were just given?

I saw numbers that indicated that 65% of Americans didn't want the bill and 12% more were ambivalent about it. Are those the 77% of Americans that are employed and don't wish to pay for the health care for loser "children" who are 26 and living in their parents' basements? Or pay for health care for people who choose not to work?

🙂

Nah, don't read much into that - I'm being provocative on purpose. I have an open mind on this. Tell me. Seriously.

Today Carey and I took the kiddo to a local maple sugar farm to check things out, buy some sweet stuff, and learn a little bit.

We learned very little, bought $18 in products, and came home fairly disappointed. Carey and I learned more using our iPhones than we did in the half-hour presentation we left just past halfway through - after a ten-minute speech on the Asian Longhorn Beetle. The presentation was downright terrible. Three times as long as it needed to be, three times too crowded, and five times short on actual information.

Someone knew that "snow and mud" make for good syrup, but we were never told why. We were shown five grades (colors, tint) of syrup but not told what makes each. We were shown an evaporating table, but it wasn't explained how the sap moves along the channels - and why an evaporating table isn't round (it would probably be more efficient).

Did you know that it takes 40-50 gallons of sap - which is a lot more like water than syrup, of course - to get a gallon of syrup? Carey and I do now… because we looked that up on our iPhones while waiting for the first presentation to end.

The Millcreek Water Authority came today to install a new meter on the water line in the basement. The new one has a small wireless capability and a digital readout for rate, gallons used, etc. The wireless capability will allow them to "read" the meter while they drive down the street. No longer are we supposed to worry about our outdoor meters, either - those are not being used any more and can even be painted if we want.

Most of the time the guy was here he talked about how one family spent $700 for two three-month periods in a row because of two leaky toilets. So, do yourself a favor and check for any leaks, because the cost adds up quickly.

I redid the Golf Evolution site for the second time in as many months just now because I wanted to install WordPress and use it for content.

There are still a few pages which rely on a straight up PHP file - the newsletter and the contact us page (because there are no real good plugins to do those sorts of things, and I didn't feel like writing custom ones when I already had a working solution) - but for the most part Dave can comfortably make updates to the site as he sees fit.

WordPress has really turned into a "jack of all trades" app, and it's awesome how flexible it is for a free piece of software. Plugins exist for virtually everything, and some of the recent changes have been really nice.

I'm rebuilding the Whispering Woods website, and it, too, will use WordPress to handle both blogging and the static pages. It'll involve a bit more HTML than most of the Golf Evolution pages, but most of those won't need to be changed too much anyway.

As if anyone cares… 😉 Soon I'll be blogging about my cat. Guess I need to buy a cat…

I picked up a pair of new shoes today. They're Skechers, "Urbantrack Forward" model 50661 shoes, and they're quite comfortable. I will use them primarily for what I wrote yesterday.

They're black and brown, so I think I can wear them with black and tan pants without much trouble. I'm not sure what color socks to wear when I'm wearing tan pants though - beige? Black? What color belt do I wear, then, too? What color hat?

There may be no satisfactory answers. Yeah, I know, tell it to my cat…

I also picked up a large green binder with some page inserts. I'm going to do my color printing at Staples or a similar store. No sense buying a laser printer.

I may be "changing" professions soon. When I say "soon" I mean anywhere from several months from now to three years from now, depending on how you define "changing."

At the same time, my new role will still involve a lot of the things I've done for years to this point - developing and selling software.

More tk when it's somewhat official. Might be weeks before I even announce it.

I've been beta testing, but my NDA is up and Kindle for the Mac will be available shortly. Finally. 🙂

It's a rudimentary app that does what it does - display books - fairly well, and nothing more. The text controls include sizing and width of the page - I like one size up from the smallest, which is two sizes smaller than the default.

But at least it's here, and at least I can let the wife read some content on my Kindle while reading my own content on my computer, just as we could if we had actual books.