Bits

I watched the debate last night. To me, the most notable point was Biden lamenting the profiteering of the largest companies during the pandemic, doing an I-feel-your-pain with small businesses, and at the same time promising more shutdowns.

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Local bloggers brought up a change in how the Minnesota Department of Health reports coronavirus hospitalizations. It's a subtle but infuriating change. Up until September 24, they were reporting both cumulative hospital and ICU coronavirus admissions, and daily populations of each. They've changed the latter to report not populations, but new admissions only.

In the old version, you could see where the state stood with respect to hospital capacity. That was the whole reason for the Governor's lockdowns in the first place:  to slow down the spread and not overwhelm the medical system. The graph became more and more embarrassing to him over time, as the ICU numbers stayed flat in the 200s.  (In the spring, the state worked to expand ICU capacity from 200-odd beds to nearly 3,000). He has locked things down too hard and too long.

Neither version tells how long people are staying in the hospital and/or ICU.

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One thing I left out of yesterday's van carpet post was that we also had to replace some hardboard panels between the van's carpet and padding. These are to support the carpet over some depressions in the van floor. My husband took a sample of the old hardboard to the store, and found that the closest approximation in thickness and stiffness was super-cheap panelling.

Cleaning van carpet

We were finally able to buy a van, but some assembly was required, as the seats, carpet, and plastic panelling had been removed from the back and stored in a garage, where they got musty and mildewed.

We also had time constraints, as our planned road trip was coming up, so we didn't have time to order new carpet, have it shipped, and install it. My husband found a guy who cleans auto carpets, but he was too busy to take on ours.

He did advise my husband to use a solution of Pine Sol to clean the carpet, and to use a scrub brush, with lots and lots of scrubbing. He also sold him some automotive carpet padding.

The new padding is very nice stuff, more substantial than the original, and very pleasing to walk on. It cost $12 per yard, and we needed seven yards. There are enough scraps left over for some kind of rug project for the house, and I would consider buying more of it.

With supplies on hand, the next step was to remove the old padding. Most of it pulled off, but there was a lot of glue and fibrous lint left over.

I found that the best way to get that off was to lay the carpet upside down out in the sun, which warmed and softened the glue, and then use my fingertips to drag the lint and glue off. Scrapers didn't work as well, probably because they weren't as warm, and they tended to dig into the rubber backing of the carpet. I had a number of helpers, and they did a lot of the work, but even so, it took a long time and raised blisters. When we ran out of sunlight, I tried our steam cleaner. This worked, but the steam tended to make the backing crack, when used in the quantities needed.

For cleaning the top of the carpet, I used the Pine Sol and scrub brush, which worked fairly well, but didn't take out the rust stains. Pine Sol also doesn't rinse out very well, I found. We also learned that it now contains pine oil only for fragrance, as pine oil has become scarcer. I don't normally use it.

Drying the carpet went all right. I hung it over the deck railing overnight, and the next day my husband set it up in the garage with a dehumidifier.

Putting the new padding on required some cutting and piecing, but was straightforward. My husband found some spray adhesive from 3M that was appropriate for the materials. It was nice stuff, but we really needed a second can of it. Wood glue did not make a good substitute, probably because the rubber and padding didn't absorb water from the glue the way that wood would.

In the van, the quality of the padding isn't really noticeable. But I am planning to reuse it, once we replace the carpet.

EDITED TO ADD:  There were also some hardboard panels that we had to replace.

A chair, among other things

We've been working very hard on a major project, which is just beginning to come together now.

In other projects, my husband brought home a chair from somewhere. It is held together by a system of bolts and screws, and about a quarter of them were either not original, or missing entirely.  All of the other ones were loose.

I found replacements in our hardware hoard, but had to enlarge one of the holes a bit.

To avoid walking all the way out to the garage to get a drill bit, I ended up carving the hole larger, using a gouge from a set of little chisels that I have.

Then I had trouble getting one of the bolts to go in; a problem that I solved mostly by persistence.

 

Blogger design team, please beat yourselves over the head with Donald Norman books

I've been using the new Blogger interface for two minutes, and while I had previously promised not to like it, now I have several definite reasons to not like it.  It's very nice to have that little "Revert to legacy Blogger" button there, but since I've had some education in human factors, I will take a look around first.

What they need to remember from Norman is the concept of Affordances, usable ones.  An affordance is something that the user can interact with, usually a control. A user interface for ordinary people needs to make the user's controls visible and understandable and usable, not hidden and obscure within the user interface.

Overall it seems their intention was to make a more mobile-friendly interface, cleaner-looking and less dense. Not simpler, because the set of user controls hasn't changed much. Some of the cleanliness has come at the cost of moving controls to sub-menus...such as Blockquote and Save.

They've changed the text boxes to only show a thin line at the bottom. Typing a post title feels viscerally precarious, like standing on the ridge of a roof, compared to the enclosed feeling of a fully outlined text box. Just what a writer needs when they're trying to put words together.

I'm also not a fan of the post thumbnails; which for an image-less post is an image of the first letter in the title, only in a different font, gray, and MUCH LARGER.

In the listing of Posts, the controls are all icons except for Edit, which you get to now by clicking on the title, and which I found only by guessing.

For the Labels chooser, they have hidden the full list of labels and have put in a search-based suggestion functionality, which updates with each new character typed. So if I type in the letter "s", it gives me a list of all of the labels that contain "s", starting with "accept and transcend". Typing "se" gets me a list that starts with "exercise" and ends with "serendipity" and "sewing". So I will often have to half-type the label I want, to get it far enough up the list that I can select it without having to scroll down to it. Or I can just ignore the suggestions, and type the whole thing myself.

Previously the listing was compactly given in a box, separated by commas. It was very difficult to accurately select them on a mobile device, for sure, but at least I could see them all, with a little scrolling.

On further use, observation, and investigation, I found that I could get the whole list of labels.  All I have to do is put in two or more labels, then a comma to indicate the end of the last one, then it will throw up the whole list, apparently believing that I am now getting serious about attaching labels to this particular post. In the scroll box, I can see seven labels at a time. I have one hundred and two.

It is also sometimes putting a recently removed label at the top of the list, since I've been experimenting with putting on and taking off labels. What else is it trying to think about for itself when I'm not looking?

More secure seat covers

The chintzy dining chair finally met its end when one of the screw holes ripped out, which got me back to thinking about how to mend the vinyl seats of two steel chairs. The damage was too large for a patch, but I didn't want to completely redo them yet, either,

That left me with making covers for the seats. I found that I had just enough of the waterproof canvas left over from the chair and table projects to cover both seats.

I decided to take the seats off and staple the fabric to the underside, right over the vinyl. The fabric was thin enough for me to get away with this; something thicker would make it hard to get the screws back in far enough.

I did have to piece the fabric together, so there is a seam running across each seat. Since this is a temporary solution, I wasn't very fussy about gathering in the corners, so the whole process went quickly.

Slices

The "Quick bar cookies" recipe on this post, which is actually a recipe for chocolate chip blondies, is very forgiving. I've recently tried substituting vegetable oil for the butter. This works all right, but comes out a little drier, as butter contains some water that the oil doesn't. I also tried adding cocoa powder and peppermint extract to make something more like a brownie. The family liked the result, and didn't realize that it was almost exactly the same recipe. Rolled oats were not in the original recipe, but I almost always add them, for nutrition.

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We've been very busy, and I was looking for a quick and fun project, and decided to paint one of our stump tables. The stump is a chunk of a large pine tree that my husband brought home from the county yard waste site last year. The wood was very green, and quite wet, so I kept it in the garage for months to dry it out, turning it occasionally. It picked up some dirt during that time, and lost over twenty pounds of weight, maybe as many as forty--I weighed it early on, and then later, but I don't remember the exact numbers.

Eventually I brought it in, and debarked it in the kitchen. There was some mold growing under the bark, so it had to come off.

The stump found a home in our living room/indoor parkour course. I counted the rings; the tree was sixty years old when it was cut down, and more than two feet in diameter.

Anyway, I mixed some paint to approximate a color that would fit into the decor, and painted the sides, just wiping the paint on with scrap fabric. I very soon had several eager helpers.

The color came out a bit bright for the room, so I plan on wiping on another coat at some point.

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A child wanted to learn to make angel food cake, after a lady from church brought us one. I had never made a foam cake, but our efforts were successful.

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Our resident papier-mache artist is thinking ahead to Halloween, and has made a good start on armatures (support structures for the papier mache) for upper and lower skeleton jaws, made out of milk jugs and tape.