I designed and built this table to replace the bar I had in the kitchen area. The table leg design and construction was my design based on other projects I had done. I used AutoCAD to design and lay out the legs. the stretcher pieces on the bottom were fit in by hand and involved some compound cuts. One of my more ambitious builds. Very happy with the way it came out!
The leg shape was created with two radii resulting in a curved taper. I used AutoCAD to determine the angle to tilt the legs and rotate them outward. The bottom of the legs is just slightly smaller than the table’s footprint.
The detail shows leg attachments to the table and stretcher between the two legs. The legs are held in place by bolts. the upper stretcher was fit with a compound cut. Both stretchers are held in place with mortise and tenon joints.
The long stretcher between the table assemblies is held in place with a mortise and tenon joint. The two stretchers are glued to the legs.
The stretcher between the two leg assemblies is held in place with a dowel
Final assembly before finishing. The table top uses bubinga and maple trim pieces with a wood banding strip running lengthwise down the middle.
The table replaces the granite bar and cabinet. It opens the kitchen up better than I expected. My bar stool from an artisan in Argentina I got earlier looks excellent with it.
Dining Room Lamp
I replaced the dining room lamp shortly after moving in with a temporary fixture until I could find something nice! I finally found a unique wooden lamp by an artisan in Greece that fit my aesthetic. It is made from a mango wood veneer. I built a cherry, walnut, and maple ceiling panel similar to those in the bar area for the finishing touch. Very happy with how it came out.
tubridy.net turns 25 this year. Here is a bit of the history of how it got here.
I was working at the time providing marketing support to the third-party resellers of our software product IronCAD. The IT department had set me up to publish a secure portal on our corporate website to provide them with news and information about our product. I used the now-notorious FrontPage to do the authoring.
The notorious Microsoft FrontPage. It used tables to do web layouts which fell apart once browsers improved.
I decided to look into getting my own website – whatever that meant! I checked for tubridy.com but, alas, it was unavailable already. tubridy.net however was not. At that time Yahoo was the top dog in the internet world. I set up a hosting service with them that lasted over twenty years before switching to GoDaddy a couple of years ago.
tubridy.net V1 – Built on Microsoft FrontPage
I really liked the fact that I had an email address that was essentially my name. I used FrontPage to build a site to put my photos on and share personal news.
In 2008 when I got laid off for the last time, I decided to make the web my profession. I had been doing interface design at the time and discovered a career in user experience design just waiting for me!
tubridy.net V2 – Built using Dreamweaver but not very responsive for different screen sizes
I taught myself HTML and CSS and learned how to use Adobe Dreamweaver and multimedia tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premier Pro. I rebuilt my website using Dreamweaver and built other sites to develop my skills.
At about that time, I landed a job at a firm contracting to IBM as a User Experience Designer. Their third-party group was interested in my skills and experience in software marketing for their web group. I ended up working as a web designer for over 8 years with this group before retiring in 2018.
IBM Business Partner Portal – Text heavy and old school to start
I became interested in WordPress a couple of years into my stint with IBM. I used it to develop a website for a non-profit with the idea they could learn how to use it (they didn’t). I decided to switch my own site over around the same time. HTML coding was fine – for a while! WordPress also provided functionality it would be hard to develop on my own. This would be the third – lost – version of tubridy.net!
V3 – The lost version – no good backups ๐
I was still using Yahoo’s web hosting service which was sold in the mid-2010s to another company. At that time the quality of the hosting service really sucked and there were frequent problems. I had hoped the new company would improve but that did not materialize. It all came to a head when I lost the site in 2020 with no good backups.
I switched services and am now publishing with GoDaddy. What an improvement that was over the Yahoo crap!
V4 – The Excellent Adventure!
tubridy.net is officially in its fourth incarnation now. I have been building it out with content from the huge photo library I amassed over the years. I have published two of my Excellent Adventure trips so far and looking forward to a great trip in the spring of this year.
They are tearing down city hall. It’s been there all my life (that I remember) although it has changed over the years. I got my first speeding ticket shortly after learning how to drive and had to go to court there. I bailed out my friend Bill when he got busted for reckless driving!
After 60 years they are tearing down the old city buildings on the corner of Minuteman and Orlando
The corner of Minuteman and Orlando is the heart of the true Cocoa Beach. Compared to Tourist Cocoa Beach whose city hall is Ron Jon’s Sufshop. World’s Largest Surfshop and Cocoa Beach Eye-sore. Don’t even get me started.
The Silver Surfer at Cocoa Beach’s finest parking garage!
They have been slowly replacing the city offices. first was the Fire Station. Then we got a three-story parking garage and the silver surfer ๐. Then a new cop shop ๐ฎ๐ปโโ๏ธ. Then and giant cell tower ๐ตโ๐ซ.
Conceptual design for new City Hall, green space, and parking garage. The new Fire department is in the lower left.
Now we get a new city hall and what they are calling a community greenspace. Likely they will set this up for street festivals with food vendors and places to buy T-Shirts. Finally, another parking garage because as my hero Joni says:
Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
SpaceX fired off its 5th Falcon Heavy yesterday evening. It had been cold with very low humidity the past few days. Together with the sunset this made for mind-numbingly spectacular views of the launch. Particularly, the separation of the side boosters and their descent back to a near-simultaneous landing at the cape. My photo above – photos below courtesy of SpaceX ๐.
What’s not to love about Peter? He takes his time but nobody can craft songs like this guy…
โSome of what Iโm writing about this time is the idea that we seem incredibly capable of destroying the planet that gave us birth and that unless we find ways to reconnect ourselves to nature and to the natural world we are going to lose a lot. A simple way of thinking about where we fit in to all of this is looking up at the skyโฆ and the moon has always drawn me to it.โ
I live on a pretty famous road. Mostly it’s renowned because of Jimmy Buffet. I was a Parrot Head from the early 80s and knew all of his best songs by heart. A misplaced Florida boy living in dreary Seattle!
Jimmy Buffett A1A
If you leave my house and head south (which is the only way you can turn because it is a one-way road at this point) you will eventually end up in Key West. It also happens to be the singular path south through Cocoa Beach. You cannot often get a selfie standing in the middle of the road!
South A1A
It’s been a foggy couple of mornings so there is no sunrise this new year. Looking forward to a healthy one if possible and the third installment of ‘Excellent Adventure – The Left Coast’ come spring.
Another year has gone by, and time seemly speeds up with every passing year!
Tis the Reason for the Season
Since we have now entered a post-fact era, I decided it makes much more sense for today to be the last day of the year as well as the celebration of last year’s trip around the Sun. It makes a lot more sense in light of the fact that it is the shortest day of the year (at least in the Northern Hemisphere where thing count ๐) and it’s all uphill from here. Plus it gets rid of all of those other wanna-be celebrations that are, in fact, all derived from the Solstice.
Mother Earth
So in our little corner of the space-time continuum, tomorrow will be New Year’s Day and 2023 will begin! And since we’re at it we should really append the age of the earth onto the date too.
After two hurricanes the beach has been torn up with a new underwater topography. One of the results has been vast ‘graveyards’ of shells at low tides. I have made some pretty amazing – and easy – discoveries over the past couple of weeks on our morning walks. I never recall seeing a starfish on Cocoa Beach…
Cocoa Beach has hosted an art show over Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember. I always look for unique woodworking like this Nautilius shell made from spalted maple. You can check out the artist’s other work at Rustling Palms Studio.
I have been trying to gain a better understanding of how we Americans have gotten to the point we are – as fucked up as it seems. I found an article that summarizes a view taken by the late historian David Potter:
The European settlers who first came to the country found forests stretching on forever, flocks of geese so large that they required 30 minutes to take off. All of this possibility drove the settlers sort of mad. They found themselves walking more in a day than they had ever imagined, dreaming dreams bigger than they had ever imagined. These immigrants, the ones who werenโt brought here in chains, turned entrepreneurial, disordered, antic, religiously zealous, morally charged, messianic, and perpetually restless. They measured their life by how much they had grown and how far they had climbed. They were propelled by a central contradiction: They had this intense spiritual drive to complete Godโs plans for humanity on this continentโand they also had this fevered ambition to get really rich. They were propelled by a moral materialism that would never let them rest.
This follows several ideas that continually pop into my head: Manifest destiny and the fact that – indeed – America was founded as a Christian nation. I have, in the past, confused freedom of religion with freedom of belief.
Occupy Mars
Update January 2025
It’s official! Fearless Leader tRump mentioned Manifest Destiny when making some vague tRump-style commitment during his Inauguration Weave, ringing in America’s new Oligarchy.
It just fucking pains me to no end to have to agree with our Felon-In-Chief being a Liberal Coastal Elitist Sociopath. However, I grew up right smack dab in the middle of another President’s proclamation:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
President John F Kennedy ~ from an address at Rice University on the nation’s space effort, is a September 12, 1962
I am not going to hold my breath, but I have to admit it would be fucking bitchen for humankind to make it to Mars in my lifetime.
American Progressย (1872) byย John Gastย is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west.ย Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a school book, and highlighting different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation.ย On the left,ย Indigenous Americansย are displaced from their ancestral homeland. Updated by yours truly to incorporate our fearless leaders’ inauguration comments. – source Wikipedia
