Monthly Archives: May 2012

Let There Be Light

Since Claire & I moved into our house a couple years ago, we’ve had a constant battle with the lights throughout the house.

Like most modern houses, it has a mixture of standard light bulbs and the small halogen lights. Neither one of those types of lights have been particularly long lasting, however the small halogen down lights have been particularly flaky.

In the last few months, we’ve had a collection of different light globes blow throughout the house and after replacing the blown light bulbs – no banana. We tried switching different bulbs from other light sockets, different brand lights and different types/styles of lights but to no avail. Claire and I were at the point where we thought the light socket had some how died because no matter what we tried, we couldn’t get the lights to work.

Today we tried again and were able to get them to work with a lot of wiggling & jiggling of the light bulb in the socket. I’m not really sure how that works but even when screwed in tight to the socket, the light bulbs won’t shine but after unscrewing them a little, wiggling this way, jiggle that way – they seem to come good. You’d assume that if it works less than 1/4 of a turn from tight, that it’d definitely work when tight but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Despite the annoyance of them not working for so long, its good to have all the lights in the house working again.

Man Vs Metro

Bear Grylls - Man vs WildBear Grylls is the face and host of Man Vs Wild, a massively popular TV show where Bear is dropped into some of the most inhabitable, remove locations on the planet and demonstrates first hand how to survive.

Having a black belt in Karate, Bear spent three years with the British Special Air Service (21 SAS) division where he specialised as a combat survival instructor, trained in evasive driving, parachuting, demolitions, trauma medic, unarmed combat and jungle warfare.

Elliot Loney on the other hand is not trained in any of those things but does a mean Bear Grylls impersonation, first seen when Bear got lost in a camping store and now as he manages to navigate his way to safety from the treacherous urban jungle!

Dynamic Sculptures

Reuben Margolin is an American sculptor known for creating beautiful mechanical, moving or kinetic sculptures that are inspired by nature and powered by math.

I’ve written about Theo Jansen’s Standbeests before, which are amazing wind powered PVC beach walking kinetic sculptures and you can see why the art from Reuben has my attention completely.

Spend a few minutes and be mesmerized by his art and the incredible attention to detail it takes to combine hundreds or thousands of individual components, lots of motors, cranks, wire and more into spectacular fluid art installations.