So I had spent a long cold winter fabricating around forty-or-so old tymee tilt out storm windows for our 1895 house. That was tough but I was left with an even more vexing problem of how to protect an elliptical leaded glass window high up on the facade. First was getting on a  high ladder and taking measurements and then reproducing it in drawing. Suffice to say, the ancient Greeks figured out how to easily draw an ellipse with two sticks and a piece of string, but I cheated with digital drawing software and made a print out as a template. That was quick … then came a long period of

So I ride my bike to and from work almost every day and given NHV's slow but methodical march towards normalization of bicycles on roadways, I decided it would be safe and proper to get a bike light. The bicycle accessory industry has a dazzling array of options with equally dazzling expense. Because my priorities are focused less upon lighting the roadway and more upon making my presence evident to motorists, I opted out of spending hundreds of dollars on a high tech “bike light”. My solution is a pretty high lumen, decent quality LED flashlight from Home Depot ($30-$40) and two pipe clamps (

A long time ago I saw a funny logo about bike riding in San Fran and, given the rustic state of our own city's road infrastructure, it inspired me to rework the logo for New Haven. I've always been fond of the New Haven Railroad logo designed by Herbert Matter and used that as the basis of the design. I then merged in a human figure ala Saul Bass (Hitchcock's "Vertigo" logo) and a touch of Milton Glasier's "I Love New York" logo. However, I knew nothing about silkscreening and had to teach myself (meaning heavy reliance upon the intertubes and sage screenprinting advice from awesome local

Do you wuv puppies? 

Do you wish to allow them the dignity of eating at a wittle table?

Do you hate the unsightliness of dog dishes sitting on your floor?

If you answered yes to all of these questions and love 1 hour projects, this one is for you. I took some scrap 5/4 pine (1-1/8" actual thickness...the table frame wants to be meaty to hold the bowl properly) and cross cut it into three pieces (the table can be any height or width that suits your canine friend). Get two stainless steel bowls with a lip at the top so the bowls don't fall through the table holes. The tricky part is measuring

So on July 4th I did an epic barbecue involving dry rubbed, apple smoked pulled pork served on Hawaiian Malasadas (Portuguese deep fried donuts) with fresh cabbage slaw and mango/jalapeno sauce...but that’s not what this blog entry is about. A byproduct of that effort was me not wanting to waste the half inch of fatback (skin and fat layer) that I cut off of the two pork shoulders. I decide to make Chicharróns, which is small squares of slow baked fatback that shrink into succulent, crispy chunks of fatty goodness that you salt and eat, preferably with a cool beer...but that's not what this