facemelter

Part of my job (a small part) involves subtitling our training videos in various languages. It's a copy & paste job — not difficult, but kinda boring. To make it interesting, I listen to music from my subtitle language's country of origin. For example, when I worked on Swedish subtitles I listened to Opeth and The Hives. When I worked on Portuguese I listened to Seu Jorge.

This week I'm subtitling in German. My soundtrack has been a German group my sister introduced me to — speed metal band Accept. I present, for your head banging pleasure, their biggest hit... Fast as a Shark.

Fast. As a goddamn Shark. I don't even know what that means, but I love it!

YouTube also has this live version, intercut with 20 seconds of the lead singer in a speedo flying a radio controlled airplane for some reason. The twin Flying V attack at 2:15 will melt your face off.

vote for the ALS Association

The Star Tribune (Minneapolis newspaper) is donating a full page ad to a local non-profit organization selected by an online poll. The ad will run in a Sunday edition, seen by more than a million readers. You can nominate the ALS Association, Minnesota/North Dakota Chapter by voting here.

You are required to register with an email address, which is kinda annoying, but it's for a good cause.

this old (remodeled) house

I'm finally getting around to posting remodel pictures. In order to make our little 1938 house wheelchair accessible, we needed to totally redo the bathroom, widen hallways, and figure out a way to get from the garage to the house without going up or down stairs. We met with a few different contractors, and finally decided to go with AccessAbility Options. That was pretty much the best decision we ever made. They were awesome.

Getting right to it, here is what our dinky little bathroom used to look like.

Then, it looked like this for a while;

Eventually, we ended up with this;


The shower drain was moved to the center of the shower area, and the shower floor slopes gently in that direction. It will allow me to roll on in there when I can no longer walk. Also, the new fixtures, lights and tile totally kick ass. That doesn't relate to accessibility in any way, I'm just really happy with our choices.

Just outside the bathroom is our little hallway. It used to have doorjambs at each end, which were removed, and a hard corner right here where this little cutout is.


Now it looks like this. Surly the cat is demonstrating how much easier it is to make the new wider corner.

Our back door was down one step from the main level of the house. There was no way to bring the door up without messing up the interior stairs, so we figured we should put a new one in. This window seemed like the logical spot, so out it went...

...and in went a new back door.

The new door opens onto our fabulous new deck;

it's quite a bit bigger than the old one, and it's 9 inches taller so I'll be able to roll from the garage, down the "dock"...

...to the deck and into the house without having to go up or down hills or steps.

Construction is on hold for now. We'll pick up again next spring when we put in that half-pipe so I can do stuff like this:

i voted

i just voted with the help of a ballot-oval-filler-inner-machine thingy. after watching me struggle to sign in, the friendly precinct election officials asked if i wanted to try it out. hell yes i did!

the machine scanned my ballot first. then, it presented each race one at a time on a touch screen. the candidates names showed up as buttons—just tap your choice and move on. it's like someone crossed democracy with an iPad. after i finished filling out my ballot, the machine filled in all the little ovals an spat the ballot out.

side note; you may be one of the many americans who think the very future of humanity hinges on tonight's election results. whether your guy wins or looses, i encourage you to watch the video below. it will make an election, or any contest for that matter, seem utterly insignificant.