
Back in 1997, when I worked in a special effects shop surrounded by fellow geeks who obsess over and encourage this sort of thing, I began building a Boba Fett costume. I have a more or less authentic, fiberglass helmet and everything; it just needs a paint job and plastic for the visor.
It's an ambitious project, and it never came together for Halloween that year. A year later I was no longer in the effects business, and without the benefit of a workshop at home I didn't really have the means to finish it.
In 1997, there were plenty of web sites devoted to building various Star Wars costumes, and even a couple devoted specifically to Boba Fett... but in many cases there were more questions than answers.
Today I came across a link to a Photoshopped Hello Kitty Darth Vader that was originally posted on The Dented Helmet, an entire site dedicated to Boba Fett costumery. It occurs to me that I haven't done any internet research on the subject since maybe 1999, and that there is probably exponentially more and/or better information out there. I don't think it's likely that I'll finish the costume in the next three months, but it's at least got me inspired to go take stock of the parts I already have. Maybe next year.
Oh yeah, the other thing I would need to do is make some friends and get myself invited to a Halloween party.
When reading software or programming language documentation and how-tos, I find phrases like "Doing X in Bob's Wonder Suite is as simple as clicking Y" rather irksome.
If it's really true that all I need to do is click Y, then it will be pretty clear to me how simple it is, won't it? Just say "To do X, click Y", give it a useful index entry, and have done with it.
I finally got around to checking on the batch of Yorkshire style bitters I racked to secondary back in March. Gravity was pretty much exactly the same; I call it done.
Tastes good - this should be a nice crisp beer to have on hand for the rest of the summer.
Not sure if I'm up for bottling tonight or not.
It's the last day of a four day weekend, and I haven't touched the neck of the cigar box instrument I started building last weekend, and I haven't done a thing with the music-centric web site I've decided to set up.
Some kind of deep social conditioning has predisposed me to feel guilty about this, about not spending every waking moment of free time Doing Stuff. It's not so much an "Idle hands are the work of the devil" feeling as it a "I've squandered a perfectly good opportunity to get a bunch of work done on personal projects" feeling.
Maybe I have, but dammit, I should not feel guilty about watching the Twilight Zone for a couple of hours if that's how I decide to wind down an evening.
I've been carrying an idea for a lightweight, easy to learn and use CMS around in my head for at least a year now. Last week I went so far so to write down what I felt would be reasonable goals for a 0.1 release. I even thought of a great name for it. This morning I spent some more time thinking about the problem and boy, I really don't want to spend a month of nights and weekends to reinvent this wheel.
The problem is, I also don't want to spend a month of nights and weekends trying to learn some existing CMS that is either total overkill for a one-man site (Joomla, anyone?), or not suited for the type of site I want to build (TextPattern and the like are nice, but I want something a bit more than a weblog.)
I feel as though I'm about to do something stupid like throw together a hand-coded site just to get something started, then add functionality as needed. The old spit and baling wire approach! It's how I started my first weblog in 2001, and why I ultimately abandoned all such tinkering in favor of the basic functionality the Blogger provides.
I would try to be savvy this time around, though; If I spend my time working on hacks to glue existing services together (Blogger, Flickr, etc.) it may be time well-spent.