Home-Grown Corn-Cob-Pipe

So I am a pipe smoker these days, following in the footsteps of so many of our fore-fathers… and I am also an amateur corn-grower… LOL as seen in my photo below… just about a weeks growth so far…

I planted about 2 pounds of seed here, 1 each of sweet-eatin’ corn and a favorite decorative Indian corn.  I am already pretty excited with their rapid growth even though they have a full gestation period of about 63 days…  So I have myself 1 $6.00 corn-cob pipe and I thought maybe I could make my own from some of my own crop… how fun would that be… So in about 2 months when I have some corn ready for pickin’ I will do just that !!!  I would like to make something along the lines of the photo below… with a more pronounced bend, as that is my preference, but we will see how far my artisan skill-set takes me… I found a pretty good step-by-step tutorial on how to do this so I will start with that…

Step 1
Find a firm ear of corn that has thick enough pith so you can hollow the ear. Cut several ears and look at the cross sections. Gauge which cob feels just right in your hand. Once you have selected the appropriate ear of corn, allow it to dry.

Step 2
Determine the end that fits your hand. Cut or snap off a length that will work for the size of bowl you prefer. Generally, 3/4 to 2 inches is fine. If you want, trim the bowl evenly. Don’t shave the outer area of the bowl. This gives a soft touch and looks rustic.

Step 3
Use a pocket knife to scrape the center to about 2 inches deep. Do not go deeper into the woody part of the cob that gives the pipe strength. Aim for a final diameter of about 1/2 to 3/4 inch.

Step 4
Fashion the pipe stem. Use the corn stalk, cutting the thinnest part that is closest to the plant’s top. Using a pot holder, heat a metal coat hanger over a flame. When the metal is hot, but not so hot as to break off, hollow out the stalk. Once you have hollowed the stem, blow to clear debris.

Step 5
Cut the mouth piece and opposite end just above a joint. Hollow the mouth piece and cut a flat slice from one side to form a U-shape opening.

Step 6
Cut a hole in the bowl positioned just above where the bottom of the hollow begins. Use a twist drill, carefully maintaining a right angle to the bowl. Bore a full twist in one direction and a half-twist in the opposite direction. Take care not to make the opening too large for the stem. Insert stem with U-shaped opening facing upward.

Step 7
Smoke. The first smokes will burn any pith in the bowl and will season the woody area. New pipes are harder to keep lit. After only a few smokes, though, you should be easily rocking on your front porch, teeth clenched around a homemade corncob pipe.

Here is the link to the tutorial above, ya know to give proper credit to the author and all… 🙂

http://www.ehow.com/how_4499718_make-corn-cob-pipe.html

I just had to post this… Check out this awesome BJarne I just picked up on eBay… look @ the size of this thing… LOL.. I got turned on to these huge pipes from watching my fav pipe guy on youtube… PipeFriendCHS He is a big fan of the extra large pipes and just watching him smoke makes me just want to smoke one too… So now I can 🙂  I have also seen some monsters from Mario Grandi, but nothing for me on eBay currently… I’ll keep lookin’ though 🙂

Photoshop… make my life easier, please?

Ok so basically I stink @ Photoshop, as I have used it about 10 times in my life, BUT seeing how it appears to be an essential aspect to Web2.0 design, I have to at least give it a shot right?  So let’s start with something that my 10 year old could prob do but I was having a great deal of effort finding a quick and simple solution for.  I need to remove the background from an existing logo… easy right? Maybe… but not from my searches… So I am posting the < 1 minute final solution I used that worked for me to make this:

(I added the ‘glow’ intentionally) … So open the file you want to do this to in Photoshop.  Then open a new file with a transparent background.  Go back to the original file (in the upper left in the example below).  Select the ‘Magnetic Lasso Tool’ from the Lasso ICON and sort of slowly start to trace around the entire circumference of the image (or whatever shape you are trying to select) connecting the line completely.  I guess there is some trial and error here in terms of how you want the edges to work, but I selected to ‘feather’ them using a 2px attribute to give it a softer edge and make a ‘glow’ (as it is a LAMP after all…) but you can experiement with this until you are satisfied… Once you have done this, hit <CTRL>-c (copy) while focused on the original image… then select the new transparent workspace you opened and press <CTRL>-v to paste it onto the new workspace, thus rendering it onto the transparent background.  Done.  It would appear that there are TONS of ways to do this, but this one worked for me…  Hope it saves you a bit of frustration. 🙂

I thought I would add a final pic of what I ended up using this for.

Where things are in WordPress

In my initial struggles with WordPress, namely the PHP that I am not versed in… I was going a little bonkers. Where do things go? I was using a nice editing/design suite, Artisteer, but that still didn’t get me where I was trying to go with logos and such.  Ok so maybe I was looking @ doing some heavy customization, that isn’t applicable to a basic blog, BUT… that is what I wanted to do.  So you surely have seen the dashboard for WordPress, right? LOL … I decided to just whack away @ the PHP code until I figured out where it was going and how it would affect my page(s)/design(s).  For me the command line is how I work best and it is basically instant for changes so I would suggest having a browser open on your site/page and dive in using SSH to the root of your wordpress theme files. This is one of my favorite themes, Bloxy Two:

[root@centOS54 bloxy-two]# pwd
/var/www/html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/bloxy-two
[root@centOS54 bloxy-two]# ls -l
total 192
-rw-r–r– 1 root root   233 May 22  2009 404.php
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  3510 May 22  2009 archive.php
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  3783 May 22  2009 comments.php
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  1141 May 22  2009 footer.php
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  2969 May 22  2009 functions.php
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  3017 Mar  4 16:43 header.php
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root  4096 Feb 19 20:21 images
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  1750 May 22  2009 index.php
-rw-r–r– 1 root root   704 May 22  2009 page.php
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 64078 May 22  2009 screenshot.png
-rw-r–r– 1 root root   532 May 22  2009 searchform.php
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  1380 May 22  2009 search.php
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  2127 May 22  2009 sidebar.php
-rw-r–r– 1 root root  2652 May 22  2009 single.php
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 10398 May 22  2009 style.css

So being in this root theme directory, you can now make changes to all of these files using your favorite editor.  It is worth mentioning (I really shouldn’t have to though) that the wp-admin page provides you with the ability to edit these same files.  OK, now although it may seem straight forward, this part may or may not be.  It depends entirely on how the Author created the template/theme.  For example, the footer.php file my not even exist?? Say what?? LOL No worry, you can always create it, but first get to know the theme and how it works.  The best way to do that, if you are not PHP savy, would be to just start making some basic changes to see how it all works.

A good point of note here would also be to take a look at the /images dir under your theme root. This can be quite revealing in terms of the layout; i.e. what was created with Photoshop and what is based on just background colors and texture simulations.

So in keeping with the footer, lets take a look @ it shall we?  Honestly, most of it means nothing to me.. and most of it you can just leave alone.  I wanted to add some navigation to the file so here we go trying. I ended up with this:

<p>
<a href=”http://annlee-entertainment.com/”>Home</a&gt; | <a href=”http://annlee-entertainment.com/?page_id=1″>News</a&gt; | <a href=”http://annlee-entertainment.com/?page_id=6″>Contact Us</a> | <a href=”http://annlee-entertainment.com/?page_id=23″>Terms of Use</a> | <a href=”http://annlee-entertainment.com/?page_id=25″>Trademarks</a&gt; | <a href=”http://annlee-entertainment.com/?page_id=38″>Privacy Statement</a><br /><br> <font color=#000000>Copyright &copy; 2010 <?php bloginfo(‘name’);?> Entertainment, LLC. All Rights Reserved</font></p><br>

Which renders as this:

Which was exactly what I was looking to do. See not so bad.  The funny thing is that this code, as I am sure you can see, is HTML not PHP.  LOL… What took some time was figuring out where to put it, and how to format the HTML, cause I don’t really know that very well either… (What am I doing designing websites???) Who knows… All this took was a bit of time and playing around with formatting to get it exactly as I wanted. Trial and error. Basically, well not basically, exactly, this is a theme that someone else made/designed and with a bit of playing I was able to determine where they put things and then I changed them to suit my needs.  The logo on top was a bit more difficult to say the least.  Well I had to design it first, which I am not really versed in Photoshop… (damn, what do I actually know how to do here???) but in any event I created a cool logo and now I want to plop it somewhere on top of the header, where it belongs…

As you can imagine, this is in fact the header file.  I said what i did above because in playing I have found that the logos don’t always go in the header, especially if one is not present in the design. One theme I was messing with actually used the comments in the header space. So just be sure to understand your design before you start editing files.  So this is what I ended up with for a header.php edit:

<!– Testing point here for logo graphics –> <– This is the ‘comment out’ syntax in PHP… <!– all commented out between these characters–> so I moved this closer around a lot while testing.

<div id=”header”>
<div id=”sitetitle”><h1><a href=”http://annlee-entertainment.com/”><img title=”Annlee Entertainment, LLC” src=”http://annlee-entertainment.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/annlee11.png&#8221; alt=”” width=”500″ height=”190″ /></a></h1></div>

And again, here is what was rendered:

You can go take a look @ the whole site in larger view to get a better idea… But here is the whole layout:

The logo on the right is just a widget with the HTML text pointing to the .png file on the server. Nothing big there. So anyway… This should at least get you started as I did in customizing some pre-built themes and/or your own themes outside of the design suite.  Enjoy…