Monthly Archives: July 2013

Hello World!

Maxwell Lazer Katz was born this morning at 6:27 AM, 3 weeks early. He’s 6lbs 1oz of beautiful baby boy and he seems to like being out in the world, or at least be pretty relaxed about it. Sam was strong and brave – she pushed hard and well and got him out while Kelly Rae Kerwin and I helped her. She’s doing great – was even able to stand to walk in to our recovery room.

We’ll be in Mount Sinai in Room 832 for a few days then back home to learn more about this wonderful little person and find out who he’s going to become.

Secret Project D – a Custom DIY Dresser

Secret Project B has been so on my mind that I totally forgot to write up my Secret Project D!

thin_hudson_dresser

Sam had been talking about wanting a dresser, but none of the ones we found really fit where we wanted to put one. We liked West Elm’s Hudson dresser. Clean modern style, but it was too deep to fit our space. Sounds like a job for me!

Screen Shot 2013-07-03 at 5.57.12 AM
I made measurements and decided that the best way for a nerd like me to proceed would be to make a sketchup design. I found a sketchup model of the thin hudson and made my dresser model based on that.
I started working on this last August on nights and weekends.

Screen Shot 2013-07-02 at 1.26.10 PM

Screen Shot 2013-07-02 at 1.27.52 PM

Afterwards, I dropped by a West Elm to see how they put theirs together. That’s when I realized that I didn’t have to make the stretchers in the carcass solid – I could make them a frame and they’d be just fine. Also – less weight in the furniture will be helpful when we move it around.

Then life gets in the way – the project was on hold for months. After figuring out what I wanted to do I bought tools, and got started in December.

I decided to go with a furniture grade plywood. Not all plywood is crappy – some looks really nice. I went with Baltic Birch. It’s good looking, the beveled edges on the drawers have a sweet pinstripe on them and I could get it nearby at the Brooklyn Dyke’s Lumber1.

bevel_drawers

Plywood has a couple of other sweet properties for small apartment woodworking. The cross-grain layering of plywood makes it very stable with regard to moisture. This means I don’t have to have a jointer or planer to flatten the wood. In addition, the sheet of plywood has a continuous grain veneer – so you cutting the drawer fronts from one sheet of plywood preserves that grain across the drawers.

drawer_fronts

When you buy lumber, you have to know how to order it, and you need to know how much you want. The sales folks are used to dealing with people who order very large amounts, so not knowing makes you an irritant. You won’t get what you need. Fortunately, if you build your model in Sketchup first, there’s a handy plugin that calculates how much lumber to buy and gives you a cutlist based on your model. It even gives you a plan on how to get the most out of the wood with the least waste. That’s so helpful!

Armed with my cutlist, I grabbed a truck from zipcar and brought back three huge 4’x4′ sheets back to my woodshop in the sky.
wodshop_in_the_sky

After many nights and weekends of cutting, swearing, panicking, gluing, screwing, sanding and shellacing I got the dresser done. My woodshop in the sky has turned into a baby room, so I’ll have to find a new place to make any future furniture. If any folks are interested in either how I made it or what I’ve learned about small apartment woodworking, I could write more about that.

1ks-see-ya-later

  1. I cannot imagine the creepy search terms those folks find in their server logs  (back)

Back to work

My brief break between jobs was restful and fun. Rode my bike every day, exercised every day, and had some fun adventures. Not a bad time, but I’m ready to start a new, longer adventure at work in my new job. I’ll be doing Product Development at a new company. I’ll be doing a lot of the same sorts of work, but I’ll have the backing to really push for more change.

 

In Egypt, a small lesson

lasers dazzling a government helicopter during egyptian protests against mosri
I remember when Egypt elected the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Many Americans were very unhappy, they had been hoping for a more liberal government. Some advocated intervention to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out of power.

Right now, Egyptians are tossing Mosri out of power. If Americans had intervened, we would see a reaction against that. You have to respect the autonomy of a democratic process to let people find their own way.

go read

From this Gizmodo’s How a lone coder cloned google reader.

Go Read is a web-based RSS reader.It is designed to be as useful as Google Reader.

When you built your house on sand and then you find your house collapsed, it doesn’t seem so smart to rebuild your house on sand, but taller. So I just wonder about writing your google reader clone in a language designed by google and hosting it on a hosting platform run by google, where the only way to sign in is to use google.