Oscar's Poem

No posts recently. I’ve been a little busy renovating the bathroom (more about that below the fold). Meanwhile Oscar came home with a poem and since I wanted to introduce him to markdown, here it is:

A Poem by Oscar*

tinkle tinkle little bat wonder where the potty at,

straight ahead or to the right, caves are very dark at night,

little bat why do you frown? did you tinkle upsidedown?

• so a quick search on Google reveals that perhaps this wasn’t as original as I was lead to believe. In fact the author of this little ditty was Dianne Rowley and it was originally published in “Peter Peter Pizza-Eater” by Meadowbrook Press.

I know you can learn almost everything from the interwebs but renovating a 100 year old house doesn’t seem to be one of them. It’s always entertaining working with things created before the age of standards.

Things I learned: 1. Stripping paint from old wood is very satisfying. 2. Modern furniture is not designed to work with 8” skirting boards. 3. Peanut butter must be runnier somewhere else.

Turns out that tile adhesive is actually the same stuff as tile grout. Every website I read with instructions for grout indicated it should be mixed to the consistency of ‘peanut butter’. We don’t actually have peanut butter in this house, but from memory it was pretty thick. Actually tile grout works much better if mixed to the consistency of runny porridge. I wasted quite a lot before I discovered this, it’s very frustrating to have the tiles keep falling from the wall as you hang them.

Anyway the bathroom now looks great.

I’m also working on a python application for automated identification and counting of cone photoreceptors in AO enhanced retinal images. It’s going pretty well and I hope to have a release version by the end of the week. If anyone has experience packaging python apps please let me know.