IDLE HANDS

Soooo, I made a longboard.

There are a lot of tutorials out on the internet on how to make a longboard. a longboard is a longer skateboard, with larger wheels. It’s not as much for making tricks and going down ramps and such, you can, but, well I babble, sorry.

First of I went and bought good wheels and bearings, then I mounted them on a paper, looked good.

Then me and my kid brother went and cut out that shape and mounted the wheels on it, just to try it. worked great.

Then I added some love to it, sanding down the edges and painted it some, this is the result. For griptape I used “halkskydd” for stairs and such. the best thing is that it already had the glue on the back, just peel of the protective skin and apply.

I also cut out a stylish skull with my CNC cutter.

Sadly It broke at the front, so I had to cut it down some, so now it’s a not as long-board as it used to be. Have some more sanding to do, but it actually handles better. It’s easier to find the middle of the board when the board is smaller. I’ve also learned how to foot-break.

I also put the holes for the screws at the front to far up, so I’m guessing I’ll be remaking the deck real soon now.

When I grew up skateboarding was 99% about getting the speed up to fail a trick. You had to step up on the skateboard and then wiggle back and forth to get the speed from standing still. It was dead hard, and boring, and one of the reasons that I never really did more then trying.
But the kids today just dont do that, they kick of with their feet or just pushes of into speed directly, why did we not think about that when I was young? What was our problem? Why did everyone do that? And it was not only Swedes, my friend Neal from UK had the exact same Epiphany.

So why am I talking about skateboarding? Well my kid sister Sofie’s boyfriend Love is starting up a skateboard production company called Red Wall Movement some more images here I decided to be a patron of the arts and get one.

Then I really had to dive into all the skateboarding things so I knew what I was getting, long story short, I’ve built 3 skateboards myself, one of them is burned up and will never be spoken of again. The other 2 are one for Tova and one for Lukas. They enjoy going downhill real fast.

This is Love’s board to the left, and the kids boards (that I made) in different forms of readiness. We’ve since painted them and attached wheels and so-forth.

I’ve also gotten a helmet. I look like a retard, but I can say that I want to be a good role-model for the kids, witch is sort of the truth, but I’m more afraid to get hurt.

Yes dear blogreaders, it is time again for a culinary blog-post.

I was introduced to the novel concept of preparing eggs in the micro-wave. Apparently all you have to do is oil the inside of a glass or eggcup, put the egg (without the shell) inside the glass and microwave it and it you would have a nice egg.

I thought I could do better.

So I added substituted the oil for bacon, it tasted great, although the short period I had the egg in the microwave did not make the bacon crisp. Some pre-preparation might be suitable to obtain that result. But I like non-crisp bacon, so it was a win for me.

Here are pictures of the dish:

Applying sliced bacon to the sides of a glass.

Adding the egg.

This is the result, upside down, on a glass plate.

Sliced and ready for consumption!

A package, parcel, box or letter is not sent or on it’s way if there only is a tracking number for a package, parcel, box or letter created. The item needs to be set on a truck, lorry, boat, train or aeroplane for it to actually be shipped. Please fix your terminology, it will help me sleep better at night.

In other news, I’ve ordered some stuff on the internet and the waiting is awful, especially since above!

Me and the kids wanted to do something a saturday some weeks ago, and since we’ve gotten a subbase or maybe a regular base from their grandfather we’d think we’d do something with that.

The cone on the speaker was pushed in, and it was missing one of it’s feet, so it wiggled a lot.
There where no regular speakers so it was only that.

Thinking that we probably should get some fresh air we walked over to a thriftstore and browsed all the chairs, and one sofa, but we settled for one chair that was perfekt for them to have at their computer.

When we had carried it home we attatched the base speaker to it and also added two sattelite speakers that I had in the garage 🙂

It is a succes, the bass kicks you in the butt, the stereo is really stereo and you’re really getting immersed in whatever you are looking at.

We’ve tried it for film-viewing, iPhone/iPad games-playing, we even had it hooked up to Spotify another weekend when we cleaned the house.

I’m sure you can fix one up to, it was fun, easy enough for the kids to help design and build and useful to.

A while back I read “The Frustrated Songwriter’s Handbook”.  The book describes the immersion composition teqhnique, wikipedia.

In short it’s a “game” where you “compete” against a few fellow music makers and try as hard as you can to make 20 songs in 12 hours.

So me and three friends tried it out yesterday. I ended up with 18 songs and a few that where actually good.

I learned a lot about my own creative process and I’ll definitively learn some chords and an instrument to play them on. Probably the keytar.

Anyways Staffan has made his favorite song public, it’s here:
Kallelse by Staffan Lincoln

And you can read more about it here.

And here is the one I’m choosing to share with you all, it’s in samic style
006 – Jojk by Larsby

A while ago (2 years) our mailman squished our mailbox with his bike and it has been a little wonky ever since. Almost as long ago we got a new mailbox and I’ve finally used the CNC machine in my basement to put our name on it. And since Lukas was home sick today and me at home taking care of him I had no excuse to not put it up.

But not before we made this little beauty:

It’s a 10l bucket with a a pump and a hose that moves the water and fertilizer from the bottom to the top where it pours down over some clay pebbles that holds the plants there. I find DIY hydroponics are very interesting. It shall be most interesting to see if and how good this works.

I had my 34th birthday this last Saturday, it was awesome. Many guests and good presents.

Here is a video of two presents I got, a meeblip and a rockband3 keytar.
The meeblip was an easy build, and the Keytar smarter and more capable then I thought. I’ll be rocking the house soon.

I read a blog posts by Derek Sivers about how easy it was for him to become an entrepreneur after accepting the facts of living as a a musician. This got me started thinking about how there are things that are similar, but that you implement very differently.

If you make a song or an album, most of the time you’re trying to say that it’s unique or at least new and fresh from whatever the prospective fan/music listener has ever heard before. You’d never do that with an application or a car. Imagine how stupid it would sound if you tried to sell an iPhone app only by telling that it is “new, fresh, and you’ve never used anything like it before”

When you made an app, you know that this is not the end, it’s rather the beginning of the life of the app. You now need to tell the world that it exists. As loudly and proudly as you can. Music often travels a very short way from the artist. Just adding it on the Internet does not make it spread. Not many songs are viral, not even the hit’s you hear on radio.

When someone tells you that you’re app doesn’t work on blah blah blah, you listen to them and try to fix the bug. When someone tells you that they don’t like you’re music, you possibly hate them and call them poseurs. What if you listened to their critique as if it was a bug and then (if you want them as costumer) tries to fix it next time. It could be that the super loud snare really isn’t all that great.

If someone critiques your music, it’s often to late to change anything, and if you do have the time to change stuff you think real hard about if you want your song to move the way that where suggested. If you’d apply this on app-making instead of adding every single feature asked for you might end up with a better app.

As a musician it could be that you only send you’re songs to some record companies and hope they will like it enough to give you money. This would be as if an app developer only sent their application only to (apple, google) and hope that they press “show in market”. That would be stupid, send it everywhere.

If you’re making an app, you might try to act all corporate and hide behind a web-page. If you are a rock ‘n roll band you put your faces on the front page and tell everyone what you’re favorite food is. If you’re a small company you might as well act as rock stars, it’s less douche.

I’m sure there are more, but I want to go take a bath now, if this at all resonates with you, feel free to think about it and utilize it as you like.