moving

As a long-time (I mean, relatively... I suppose about... 3 years?) blog writer, I know that at least some of you have seen me move lots of times, from alliterationhouse.blogspot.com to nextto666.blogspot.com to sprinttotheend.blogspot.com to cerntainly.blogspot.com to biketotheearth.org... and I thought that I had finally found a more permanent blog home here at fearlesstost.blogspot.com.  I guess not!

Evan and I just finished sort of setting up a WordPress installation on our fearlesstost.com website.  We sort of started building it out during the recent thing-a-day sprint, but we didn't find time to do much more than come up with an overall design for the site.  Presumably the themes on the wiki (at wiki.fearlesstost.com) and the blog (at blog.fearlesstost.com) will be changing to reflect the sort of child-like drawing theme on the main page.  For now, though, we are just happy to have the things up and running!

So it's another blog move.  I didn't even have time to get attached to this blog before now... it's only been about 3 months?  Hopefully blog.fearlesstost.com will last longer.  :)  We'll be migrating these posts to there for posterity's sake... see you there!

diary of an aspiring grad, part ii

There is no time for a haiku!  I want to share the exciting news that I got accepted to UC Berkeley for their PhD program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science!  And that they will give me full funding, assuming that I maintain good academic standing.  Yeeha!

:D

:D!

:D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

wherever you go...

Lost, oh, my goodness,
Winding beyond the call of...
Anything, really.

We busted out our enormous paper map collection today to see how far we actually went on our bike trip.  Our initial estimate (based on our super old map) was 10,000km for the trip, but as we progressed we realized that we were going somewhat further than that.  During the trip we upped the estimate for the whole shebang to about 11,000km, but we're suspicious that even that is a gross underestimate.

We didn't make it through more than a few days on our mapmyride account, but going through that stack of maps is just heartbreaking.  Our route between Hamburg and Bremmen was about 240km, and according to GMaps the most efficient route (even avoiding highways/taking walking directions) is 110km.  We were so lost.

Anyway, it's fun in a way to do this.  I'm excited to see how the totals finally turn out when we get a bit further with the project!

trees

Bits and bobs get lost,
Scattered at random among
Other things.  But no more!

There are many kinds of trees, but for day 7 today we decided to create an earring tree to hold all my little dangly dudes.  We originally had a plan for a pretty epic metal contraption involving screen door screen, but when I was in the fabric store today I had an epiphany and realized that it would be about 1,000,000 easier to just buy an embroidery hoop and some sexy fabric and stick those suckers through.  We also got some ribbon with little rings sewn in that may be useful for holding necklaces, but since we're not allowed to hang things on the wall yet, anyway, we're holding off on that part.

Also, Fried left this morning!  Sad!  He even did our dishes before leaving.  And he left us with some delicious German chocolate!  If you ever have a chance to host this guy, seriously do it.

framed

What do you get when you combine a $7 painting from Goodwill with $0.07 of craft lace?

Obvious question: just what is that?

Fun is the primary goal of thing-a-day; that said, it also creates a prime opportunity to improve our space in a more practical way. This bargain-basement contraption is none other than our new laundry drying rack. We originally envisioned a freestanding rack with legs (from an ironing board, say) but quickly realized that we could just as easily set this frame across our bathtub.

Which brings me to an important point about thing-a-day (and life in general): simplify where possible. Judging by the semi-official thing-a-day site, this annual creative sprint is not meant to become a second full-time job; half an hour per day is all it takes to build something simple, cool, and possibly functional. (Also remember the famous dictum: form follows function.)

designer

Typing comes later,
For now, markers!  Be a child!
Whimsy does belong.


For day 5, we sat down at Noisebridge to hash out ideas for a website.  We are going, sometime in the hopefully not-too-distant future, to be moving this blog and all of our goodies to fearlesstost.com, and we wanted to come up with a fun site concept together (since Evan did most of the biketotheearth site back in the day).  We managed to pull ourselves out of technical details (writing a blog isn't that hard, anyway) to come up with a fun splash page:

So our blog will be organized into sections: one section for travel (the plane), one for robots (the robot Godzilla), one for our D&D campaign (the Godzilla dragon), one for SF itself (the bridge), one for plants (the island of trees), one for crafts (the craft shop), one for business/resumes (the businessman), one for cycling (the biker chick), one for music (the breakdancing dude), one couchsurfing/warmshowers (the dude on the couch), one for programming (the people on laptops), and one for our kitchen/recipes (the kitchen).  We felt that the whiteboard-like theme was representative of the fact that we feel our site isn't really going to be "refined."

We cleaned it up and are posting it on fearlesstost.com.  The links don't go anywhere yet, but it's a start.  (p.s. in the image below, the grey boxes just mean that it's transparent)

memories of up north

San Francisco is a beautiful city, but there's one thing it's not exactly known for: snow. Last time snow graced the skies above SF: 1976. Last time before that: 1887. What are two relative newcomers from places with real winters to do?

Okay, so maybe not as fun to play with as real snow - but these snowflakes are a welcome addition to our studio apartment!