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buh-bye Blogger, Hello Wordpress!

I am being forced to migrate my website off of blogger as they are discontinuing their FTP publishing which I use to have my twitter tweets show up on my blog.

The blog URL will continue to be mike.creuzer.com, but the site may go away for a short period during this period of time.

You may need to update bookmarks & links to the site. You may also need to re-subscribe to the RSS feed as it is being moved to feedburner.

The first post on the new system will be on my new baby, Bella! So stay tuned!

Paiute Deadfall Trap with a plastic tote and my cat

I've been going to Primitive Skills Meetups for about a year now. I have a blast there, as it allows me to get away from the city for a while. I've learned how to make my own mead, make spoons with fire, forage for wild foods. All kinds of stuff.

This month, we are going to be doing a session on traps and snares. I am a presenter!

Like I said, I love this group!

I am going to be showing a few styles of traps and snares that I have either fiddled with, thought would be useful, or want to learn. Another presenter is going to do the traditional Figure 4 Deadfall, so I will demonstrate an alternate - an Asian Inverted Figure 4 dead-fall. I think this alternate is much easier to set and also easier to carve. I will also show a squirrel snare set, penny locks for traditional snares, and also a paiute deadfall.

So anyway, I needed to dust off some of my trap setting skills. The last time I had set any traps, it was to my (now) Father-in-Law's amusement as I was catching my kittens at the time. He hadn't seen anything like it and was having a blast watching me. It was a while ago. I was using a figure-4 made from some scrap wood from when I made my bedframe and a plastic tote.

I took an evening off from cleaning and packing and moving, and this time, I am trying the paiute dead fall using more of the same scrap wood from my bed frame that I've kept for 3 years now and moved from Florida to Illinois. (I am such a pack-rat - hence all the cleaning & packing & moving)



Brother (my cat) is such a good sport. He quickly wised up to the fact that indulging on his beloved kitty treats made a big blue tote try to fall over him. I never did get an unassisted clean capture of my feline friend, but, the above video has a few humorous spots anyhow.

Poor Brother!

Mini woodsman bucksaw out of a hacksaw blade

Brother is inspecting my latest contraption, a mini bucksaw made out of a coping saw blade. It's an outdoor woodsman style made with a bit of 550 paracord to tighten it up with a twist-stick.

Here you can see the twist stick a little bit better. To tighten it, you simply put a few twists in the cord with the stick and let the stick catch in the cross beam to hold the whole thing together.

If you look closely, you can see where the left piece has started to break in the middle because I twisted it up too tight. I went with a through the hole style assembly, but that proved to weak with the light pieces of scrap wood I was using.

I used the starting-to-break saw to re-cut the saw notches in the ends of two new peices of wood. The blade slips into a slot in the end of the wood.

You can also see the mortices I cut into the wood with my pocket knife. This proved to be fairly week, so the new one simply has a triangle shaped notch that goes about 1/3 of the way into the wood.

Here you can see how small and compact the whole thing works out being. This is the boot knife I keep next to my bed. It's not large, but not small either.

I can make the whole thing from scratch with just the saw blade, a knife, and a bit of cord. I made this saw while watching a movie with the wife tonight. She's pretty lienent about me having fiddly fingers and movies.

Android

My wife got me a new phone for our 1 year anniversary. She got me a Samsung Moment which is an Android Phone.

Let me say. I love this thing. It's basically a small computer that can make phone calls. Probably in that order of functionality too, as I have trouble answering calls.

It has a slide out keyboard, which is good as I get to use the whole screen to view instead of half of it being tied up with a touch screen key pad. There are two issues with the keyboard. The shift key is one key too high - it needs to be switched with the 'fn' key and there is no real tab key to tab through form fields. There is a little optical pointer thingy, but I've not figured that thing out yet. I am typing this post on my phone if that is any indication of the keyboard usefulness.

The phone syncs up with my google account. This is pretty good as I heavily use google services. I had my old phone contacts copied to my new phone. I had to merge a bunch of duplicates as the phone contacts synced into my email contacts. But know I have about everyone I've ever contacted in the last 3-4 years on my phone. (No jokes about making it into two digit numbers please)

The signal reception seems to be fairly poor. I think my old phone was a good reception phone, so I may notice the step down more than some.

Text messaging is a blast on this thing. Adding photos is a bit cumbersome, but I quickly adapted. I just installed Handsent SMS which made texting even nicer.

The web browser is quite good. About as good as I could expect. Flash doesn't work on it, but I've only been to one website where that's a problem rather than a good thing - breaking all the ads. A few big sites like facebook detect that I am on a touch screen phone and give me a different version of the site.

YouTube videos work great on this phone. I kinda feel a bit like Neo in the Matrix, being able to learn how to do anything on the fly. Heh, tonight our waitress was Turkish, so my wife and I looked up turkey on wikipedia.com right there in the restaurant.

The Android Market is quite functional. After an initial hiccup with it refusing to download apps that a phone reset and a few hours trolling some forums to find a fix, I haven't had a problem since. There are a ton of free and paid apps to be found. I've downloaded ssh and vnc clients which allow me to connect to my computers and run them from my phone. I have a couple of contraction timers - for when the baby is ready to come. There is a lot of sudoko games - a lot!

I think my favorite thing is ASE which allows me to program the phone right from the phone. My first script allows me to take a photo of a barcode on a book and look it up on LibraryThing.com and see if I have it already or add it to my library.

I think you can expect more posts about my new phone in the near future. Probably much to my wife's chagrin.

I made a baby!

Most of you should know by now that my wife and I are expecting.



This is one of those things that is so exciting that I wasn't sure how to blog about it. I had thought about putting up a help wanted post and then a followup post stating 'job filled' & announce the baby. I just couldn't work it around so it came out right. Probably part of why my blogging's been slow. I've been procrastinating and didn't want to blog about lessor things while such an important post was sitting in draft.

2009-12-03 Sonogram

My little girl is due April 28 2010. The doctor expects her to be born before then though. I guess this is part of why doctors call what they do "Practice", they can be all vague and stuff.





There was a baby shower in Florida. I attended. I still think showers are a ladies endeavor. I hope everyone realized I was half teasing when I said "No Pink!". The baby's a girl, of course we are going to get pink stuff for her. Heh - I even bought her a pink outfit. It's much to big, and camo, but still. I just didn't wall ALL pink stuff. But, anyway, we got some seriously cool loot at the shower. I don't know what half of it is, and there is a drastic shortage of stuff that requires assembly. But I will cope.

My baby-mama and I are doing fine. Her probably more-so then me. I've heard horror stories of emotional roller-coasters and midnight craving runs. I guess I got lucky! I've only been sent out a couple of times for ice cream. The bulk of any conflicts have been differences in understanding and expectations. Basically meaning, I am wholly underestimating the impact this change will have on my life.

Our current apartment lease is up at the end of this month - a few short days away. We are trying to buy a house so we have more room for our expanding family. It's a 'short sale' which means the current owners are trying to sell it for less then what they owe on the house while paying it off 'short'. They really need to call this an 'obnoxiously slow' sale.

We are working on Baby Residence Plan B. This entails clearing out the spare bedroom (my 'junk room') of all my stuff, deep cleaning, and installing baby stuff. The trouble is, it is in severe need of some drastic cleaning. I basically trashed the room before my better half moved in. Rust stains on the carpet. Tomcat spray in the corners. You know, serious cleaning.

With all this said. I am super excited! I've bought her a tricycle at a thrift shop. One of those good, solid metal ones. Like I had growing up. It was $10 or something like that. I had to have it! No cheap plastic knock-off big wheels for my little one!

So, that's what I have been up to the last half a year or so.

I made a baby! **happy dance**

Conundrum

I have a problem.
Blogger is halting publishing over FTP soon.

I publish this blogger blog over FTP so I have access to PHP in my template. This allows me to do a few things, like have my own static content, but most importantly, my interleaved twitter feed into the blog content on the main page.

I use a lot of google tools, such as picassa, google reader, etc. and they all have tight blogger integration. It makes things easy.

I tweet more then I blog now days, so having the unified tweet/blog timeline is the coolest feature of my blog right now. The little 'widget' on the side bar just doesn't cut it for me.

If I switch to hosted blogger, I will lose the ability to tweet to my blog. I suppose I could have the RSS feed of my tweets posted to my blog, but I am not sure I like that idea. I like being able to format my tweets they way I like to. I don't want them to appear as just another blog post.

I could switch to something like Wordpress, and write my own module that does the twitter tweets on the home page like how I want, but then I loose the easy of publishing using google tools.

I suppose I could possibly have a blogger blog set up and have the wordpress blog consume and publish off of the RSS feed. I would need to have a 'blank' template with a redirect to the wordpress blog then. I'd have to be careful not to get dinged by google for doing 'blackhat SEO' type stuff though.

So, I am stuck. I have a clock that's ticking, no time to actually DO anything about it, and no clue which path to take!

Any ideas, suggestions?

Leather Wrapped Travel Journal

I have been wanting a leather wrapped travel journal for a long time now. I could never find one that I liked however.
Yesterday, I bit the bullet, and bought a leather journal, and some graph paper pads the same size. I then took my brand new journal apart, with a knife, and put it back together again with my modifications.

I forgot to take a photo of the journal before I attacked it with my knife. So, you get to see it tore apart. I cut the strings at the knots, after I had written down the order I thought they had sewn it in.



Here is a new pads on top of a pad that came with the journal.



I sewed it together with 35lb braided fishing line that I colored with a permanent marker. I just held the marker in my knees and ran the line back and forth twisting it so it got colored on all the sides. Be careful not to pull too hard, or you can cut the tip off of your marker. (I knew this, and was gentile, no damage done!)



I used a #1 Milliner needle to sew the book back together. I used the lighter as a thimble to push the needle through the paper and leather. It was also useful for heat-singing the ends of the line.



Here is the finished book! Looks pretty sharp, doesn't it? You can see the stitches on the spine. I didn't figure the stitching order right, as I missed a section on the outside in the back. I am guessing that few hundred years ago, anybody literate knew how to sew these together.



And the pages inside.



I think I may try to tool the cover somehow. Brian gave me a meat-brand so I can brand steaks, but I think I may use that to emboss my name on the cover. Not sure how branding the name will look?

When I do this again, I think I will get just get regular paper refills, cut, fold, punch, stitch and trim the pages my self. It will be much cheaper. But, having seen how these pads where assembled, it's a good to buy them once.