Hello all and welcome to my most excellent web page! My goal in adding this page to the WTS is to entertain my fellow toasters, and maybe even a small segment of the rest of the Web. I'll endeavor to add something new every week, so keep checking in, or look for any announcements about my pages in The Wunderland Weekly News. My offerings will fall into two categories: First, original works; artwork, music, photos, or writing that I'm collecting here for self-publication on a scale unimaginable a few years ago. Hopefully, the world's collective yawn won't totally blow me over, but I think you'll enjoy it if you've gotten this far. Second, Stuff I Found On The Web, brought back and held up to the light for your enjoyment. There's a whole underground world of music publication on the Web through a device called "MIDI", and I have a link page or two of my favorites for you to cruise. Also, in commenting on an issue or interest of mine, I'll write some essays filled with links for you to read. Go directly to the corners of my electronic world by using the navigation bar appearing at the top of this page, or jump down below this section to find out what I've added this week. I'll also be experimenting with time, allowing you to scroll through previous weeks' versions of my pages where appropriate.
Here is this week's nanofic: It's based on Andy's nanofic from last week!
Well, it looks like this week's art experiment has become a "learning experience". I attempted my first object casted out of concrete, a prototype to help me on the road toward another more ambitious concept. I elected to build a pedestal for the sundial I had put together several months ago. The sundial was an intended gift that hadn't come out as good as I'd hoped, so I kept it and put it out in the yard atop a small unsightly pile of bricks to see how well it would work. It's only a small copper disk atop a round brick substrate, and the hammered-in lines are shallow and a little uneven, but it has acutally proven useful after all so I want to put it on top of some kind of nice looking column and move it out more into the center of the yard. I made a form and filled it full of nice cheap ready mix concrete, dyed red to match the brick-like round stone of the base of the sundial disk. However, the test bricks I cast out of the leftover concrete are very crumbly and aren't hardened yet! Either I flubbed the water proportions, or the stuff I got from the hardware store just isn't the right selection. So, I'm leaving the thing in the form for several days to try to maximize my chances of getting something solid that holds together. But since I was going to post a picture of the finished product, here's at least what my form looks like loaded up:  Shell unbroken. As you can see, duct tape is once again the lazy man's solution to a mechanical engineering problem. Speaking of sundials, I can point you to some educational sites I found when trying to learn what I'd need to know to make one. It turns out that the seasonal change of the sun's angle and asymmetry in the earth's orbit can make a simple unchanging sundial inaccurate up to 50% of an hour for parts of the year, and not in any simple way, either. One solution to this is to simply turn the sundial every once in a while to compensate. Of course, this means using a watch for calibration, and what kind of purity is that, and what would we do after armageddon when the batteries to all the watches have run down, eh? Well, as you may expect, some clever and obsessive folks out there have already thought this through, and there are a couple of web sites that will help you design a sundial with lissajous lines graphed to the seasons that if you read it right will always give you the correct time! The Sundial Generator will even generate an attractive gif of a disk with multicolored lines and a mathematically designed pointer (called a "gnomon") given a set of earth coordinates that you submit (which you can find out through the equally web-fun process of consulting MapBlast and other sites). There seems to be two main pages out there that contain links to sundial pages around the world. All the good pages I found were on either of these two, but both seem to also be full of dead links. Here are the two clearinghouses: Sundials On The Internet, a page operated by the *British Sundial Society*! The BSS page has lots of internal content, including this introduction which succinctly explains the frustration of discovering that sundial making is not as simple as you'd expect it to be. Sundial Links, no-frills, tons of links, but many dead. Some other nice links: a pretty nice brass sundial engraved with the graph of the deflection angle for the year. Notice how wavy it is. Made by this guy Sunpath, a company that's done a lot of interesting stuff. And speaking of fun web sites, I just this week found out about The Dialectizer, which will translate any web page so that the text comes through humorously mangled. I guess it's been around for a while (look at the other educational sites on bored.com, but it made me laugh to try it out on my own pages. So for your entertainment, here's last week's page in jive and redneck ("as enny fool kin plainly see"). You should also try "elmer fudd" and "swedish chef" on your favorite pages also.
Other corners of my annex:Play my MIDI links! (why and how) f1.7, Charles Dickson's Photo Essays Future Links:
The Lisa Joy Adulation Page
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
