Friday, July 30, 2010

Kingdom of man

4 m². That's the surface area of the kingdom of man. (Where "man" = "the male, adult population (consisting of one (1) person) in my household".) With this humorous, yet surprisingly truthful moniker I'm referring to my storage shed. Of course, the most natural kingdom for a man would be a garage, but unfortunately, my financial situation doesn't allow for housing containing one in the general area I live in, so the shed will have to pass for a garage for now.

Until now, the shed has been mostly filled, in an unorganized way, with all kinds of extra stuff that hasn't been really necessary in the household, yet hasn't been unnecessary enough to be thrown out either. But now, I intend to change that.

I just finished scraping off the old plastic carpet from the floor of the storage shed. Tomorrow I'll put in a new one. Then I'll assemble a cabinet that formerly resided in the bedroom for organized storage space. Whew. Storing the parts of the cabinet for a year has been troublesome, but I've stubbornly insisted on doing so, because I've a vision. Tomorrow it'll be partly fulfilled.

Then I'll add a tool wall for keeping small tools in neat order and racks for storing un-hangable tools and miscellaneous stuff. I'll add some kind of supports to the ceiling so that rarely needed stuff can be stowed away there. Some kind of worktable must be constructed. I'll attach a vice and a wheel truing stand later to that. It might be hard to incorporate a sandblasting cabinet, a circular saw, an anvil and a forge into 4 m² but I'll do what I can.

I suppose that building up a shed, or a garage, is partly similar to interior decoration. The objective is to make the space function well for its intended purpose. In a way, I assume, that now, finally, I can feel the exhilaration that women seem to feel when they get to decorate interiors. Yes, I also like having nice looking and well functioning interiors in the house.

But there's also an essential difference. Interiors of human habitations are usually designed for good functionality for one or more persons and good looks. It seems to be very important that they look good for any visitors. They must be designed for several purposes, and for the purposes of several people.

In contrast, a kingdom of a man is designed solely for functionality, and especially for a single person. The person in question can decide where things go without asking anybody, and assume that things stay there without anybody touching them. I, for one, like to arrange my stuff very precisely. I usually remember where I've left stuff. It drives me nuts if the stuff in question is not where it's supposed to be. I don't have photographic memory, but I have a some kind of a fuzzy, three dimensional version of that. My ideal workspace can be a representation of the way I store stuff in my brain. It doesn't need to be usable, or even comprehensible, to anybody else.

One of the most satisfying things for a craftsman is to complete a task without having to rummage through all of one's belongings to find the thing that one happens to need at the moment.

Another very satisfying thing is the ability to alter the working space instantaneously according to one's needs. If I have an extension cord but not a suitable place to hang it, I can create it. I can just reach out for the hammer (without having to look for it because of my nearly photographic memory), then reach out for a large nail (without having to look this time either, because the nails are in the place they're supposed to be in), and pound the nail in the wall in an appropriate place. Presto! A place to hang the extension cord in.

Also, I think that functional is beautiful. A workspace looks good when it's functional. It may look grimy and messy to the untrained eye, it might smell musty. There might be a musty smelling, half naked, sweaty guy with a beer can in one hand and a nail gun in another standing in the middle of his 4 m². Don't bother him. He's beautiful. He's doing his thing.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

1 sec for idea, 15 min for execution, ∞ and counting for title

You remember the old game people used to amuse themselves before the internet was invented? You know, thinking of song titles that include the word "love" and then replacing that word with the word "crack" in order to make them funnier? Like, "The Power Of Crack" by Huey Lewis And The News, "I Want To Know What Crack Is" by Foreigner, "Greatest Crack Of All" by Whitney Houston, and, of course, "Addicted To Crack" by Robert Palmer.

Well, I do, because it changed the way I listen to hit radio, watch MTV and read music charts, forever. But now, I'd like to inflict another plague sprinkle even more amusement on mankind, namely, by inventing a variant of that old game. In it, you simply substitute the word "us" with the much funnier word "ass" in your chosen song title.

Here are some examples for your listening pleasure:

All About Us Ass - t.A.T.u

Breaking Us Ass In Two - Joe Jackson

Can't Hold Us Ass Down - Christina Aguilera

Don't Forget About Us Ass - Mariah Carey

I'm Waking Up To Us Ass - Belle and Sebastian

Love Will Keep Us Ass Together - Captain & Tennille

Love Will Tear Us Ass Apart - Joy Division

Never Tear Us Ass Apart - INXS

Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Ass Now - Starship

One Of Us Ass - Joan Osborne

Tearing Us Ass Apart - Eric Clapton

The Difference Between Us Ass - The Dead Weather

The Planets Bend Between Us Ass - Snow Patrol

They Don't Care About Us Ass - Michael Jackson

What About Us Ass - Ministry

You Love Us Ass - Manic Street Preachers

You've Made Us Ass Conscious - The Audition

Two Of Us Ass - The Beatles

Us Ass - Regina Spektor

Us Ass Against The World - Westlife

Us Ass And Them - Pink Floyd

Come to think of it, you could go one step further and replace both "love" and "us" in some song titles, like "Crack Will Tear Ass Apart" by Joy Division. But no. That's vulgar.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Perfectionism vs. entropy: is reasonably good good enough?

I just finished renovating the bathroom. Well, I didn't renovate it all by myself, the workmen did most of the job, but I got to finish it by doing the ceiling. By finishing, I mean that I finished doing any work on the bathroom for the moment. I tightened the last screw, put away the tools and sat down for a while, marveling at the beauty of it.

Then again, there's still some very minor things to do, which I'll do later. Like attach the handles to the cabinet beneath the sink. So, actually, the bathroom isn't perfect yet. And even if I actually manage to attach the handles tomorrow, from experience I know that something will break relatively soon. Even if the bathroom would somehow manage to get to the state of perfection, it would not remain there for long, provided that the family is going to use it.

I am, in some sense, a perfectionist. I find it hard to stop doing things that I've started to do, until they really are finished. But then again, I've become aware of the effects of entropy. By entropy, I mean that things tend to get less organized over time, if something is not actively done to prevent that. Take, for example, the bathroom that is considered perfect just now (July 24th 2010, 21:40 CET). Suppose that I remain seated in this chair before the computer for three days, and then go upstairs and inspect the bathroom. There will be specks of tooth paste in the mirror, hairs in the drain, scratches on formerly immaculate surfaces and dust on the windowsill. And in a longer period of time, there will be more and more faults, until the bathroom will inevitably be completely renewed again in 20-30 years (at most).

In theory, I could prevent the entropy, by devoting my life to the task of keeping the bathroom perfect. I could clean it twice a day, repair any damages as soon as possible, and spend all of my free time standing guard in the bathroom in order to prevent all passing persons from doing any inadvertent or intentional major damage. This would, however, affect every other aspect of my personal life in a damaging way. I wouldn't be able to work and my social life would probably cease to exist. The rest of the apartment would become horribly disorganized. My family might complain somewhat. Therefore keeping the bathroom perfect can't be seen as a feasible solution to the whole entropy problem.

Every new thing is going to get scratched before long. Therefore I can't have perfection. I can't stand much disarray either. I'll have to settle with accepting compromises, mediocrity, fuzzy logic then. What is perfection anyway? Technology tends to improve, so a pristine bathroom built in the 80's couldn't be considered perfect according to the standards of today. Even the best circle that I could draw with the best tools available would be imperfect on the molecular level. Human science doesn't have a complete understanding of quantum physics yet. Therefore perfection as defined by humans is inevitably an approximation.

The perfect bathroom is still basically impossible because of the lack of sufficient technological sophistication. I'll just contend myself with the rustic models avalaible today. There are, however two inventions conceived by mankind that satisfy even the perfectionist:

1) Gardening. Nature achieves perfection by being naturally wild, uncontrollable and unpredictable. Therefore a garden can be perfect without being totally in order according to human standards.

2) Bicycle. The bicycle is such a good invention that it hasn't changed much in several decades. It hasn't needed to, because it was good enough already. The bicycle continues to evolve all the time, but slowly, because there isn't much to improve.

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Modern

In a desperate attempt to become more trendy and even slightly popular, the most boring blog in the world is in Twitter now. Although I kind of suspect that to the youngsters, Twitter is already so 2008, and this half-hearted marketing attempt only serves to make me appear more like the fossil that I am than to... exactly what am I trying to accomplish here again? I forget.

So, in order to live up to the name of the blog, I guess I'll just tweet a "how does this thing work?", then never update again. That's boring for you. And I definitely will not update the picture either.

But then again, I'd really like to see the famous "fail whale". That means I'll have to sign on to Twitter every now and then. I suppose that they've finally gotten their site to scale by now, so, in all probability it should take several years to see it... oh, there it was.