Chad Weider

Last time my younger cousins paid us a visit, I dug up our (rather large) collection of Legos so we could keep them entertained. Naturally I got to building things with them as well. Ostensibly for ‘research’ – the fact that Lego’s instructions are designed in such a way that 5 year-olds can build quite complex objects in ~20 steps is impressive, but I digress.

After they left I decided to keep indulging in past childhood and build some more sets. As I was flipping through the binder of instructions those for set #6563 caught my eye:

While it may seem innocuous at first glance look a little closer:

You see that it comes with two suspicious looking brown 1×2 pieces, copious amount money, and suitcases to carry them in. The pontoon plane also has a safe for storing “the goods”. Hmmmm…

It appears that Gator Landing is all about DRUGS!

For those of you who may not now, my handwriting has a bit of a notorious reputation. A full explanation of how my writing came to be will have to wait for another day, but today I’m posting about the newly adopted writing style that I’ve began using on occasion.

So… getting more to the point – my handwritting, while it might look “good”, it certainly cannot be construed as legible by any measure. Now this isn’t a problem for me in my normal writing (I’m the kind of person who is quite happy putting up with a few inconveniences for something of aesthetic value), but it does become an issue when you want people to notice and read your message – which was just the situation I found myself in a few days ago…

Thankfully I had spent the last week drawing sketches of type for typography class, so when it came time to post a few notes on the wall, I was quite prepared. For my nice clean, readable (and easy to draw) typeface I chose the fine typeface Futura.

I still need to work on getting accustomed to the large counters in the ‘e’ and perfecting the curve of the ‘s’, I’m pretty proud of my new note posting script.

With weather being anything but conformable, everybody out here is wearing scarfs, gloves, balaclava, etc.. A day or two ago I saw a student walking down the sidewalk wearing this:

For a moment I had gotten all excited, seeing some random guy with the Mozilla Feed icon on his head, but soon enough I realized it was just a North Face beanie. Ah well…

That’s my story for today. And I’ll leave you with this sorta interesting fact – that the “beanie” is more properly referred to as a tuque.

A gigantic Papier-mâché BNC Connector near the Marina. I have no idea from whence it came or what on earth it could conceivably be used for.

And before you ask – no, I did not find the female connector.

No, not that kind of fun – I’m talking about fun with endothermic reactions!

You see – Dust-Off isn’t really compressed air (pressurized Nitrogen is pretty boring) but is in fact liquid difluoroethane. So what happens when you release a liquid with a boiling point well below that of room temperature (-24.9 °C)?

Lets find out:

You get a reaction that will absorb an awful lot of energy from it’s surroundings (you can freeze sh*t).

Getting more to the point- around here, in the summer, I come across a fair bunch of house spiders and, while I don’t mind them outdoors, can’t have them wandering around indoors. The problem is that they can be pretty tough to catch (especially the small ones) and mashing them makes a mess (especially the big ones). However, with the help of the aforementioned fluorocarbon, dealing with insects is a breeze.

All you need to do is give the can a good shake, tilt sideways and aim and fire. If you do things correctly the nozzle (moistened by shaking) will produce a directed spray of very fine difluoroethane droplets that, due to the their large surface area, vaporize rapidly – making the immediate surroundings very cool.

Bonus: on a humid day, your very likely to see frost form from the spray!