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Are you a better eye-baller than me?

The photos I mentioned the other week have arrived and now adorn my office wall, as you can see.

hanging

Do they look level and equally-spaced to you? They should do, as I used a spirit-level and tape measure to mark the holes out. Normally though I'd "eyeball" it and just place the holes where I thought looked level.

Years and years of DIY have led me to believe, rightly or wrongly, that I have a good eye for a level or for the mid-distance between two points. A useful skill to have at times.

Just how accurate is my "eyeballing" though? Not something I'd ever thought about until (tenuous link about to happen) I saw The Eyeballing Game on kottke.org on Friday. Karen and I then spent a night of marital competitiveness trying to better each others score. Hey, life's crazy when you get married and have kids.

Needless to say I won with my low score of 2.65. Can you better that?

It's worth looking round the rest of the game's author's website if you have chance. Especially if you're in to your DIY (Jerry, I think you'll like it). There's even a page on how to build an igloo.

Comments

  1. The left picture drops slightly to the right. But better not touch it...

    Link

    No need to understand the short german dialog. The above scetch "The picture is not level" is as famous here as the "Dead parrot" in Britain.

    Christian.

  2. Beautiful pictures; I meant to write that already when you posted them!

    Pascal

    • avatar
    • Mark
    • Mon 20 Oct 2008 07:41 AM

    Shouldn't the left picture be in the centre of the wall that it's in?

    Or are you trying to be artistic?

    • avatar
    • Jake Howlett
    • Mon 20 Oct 2008 07:51 AM

    There's another one to the left of it, that's just cut off in the picture I took, so it doesn't look too weird when you're there.

    • avatar
    • Mark
    • Mon 20 Oct 2008 08:02 AM

    Shouldn't the 3 wall spaces on the left hand wall with the 2 pictures be equi-distance? Or at least the outside 2 wall spaces.

    When putting pictures up, I measure the wall, then the width of all the pics, then divide the remainder by how many wall spaces there will be (maybe allowing a little extra for the outside 2 if I feel wild and crazy). But I'm a slave to symmetry.

    • avatar
    • Jake Howlett
    • Mon 20 Oct 2008 08:06 AM

    Possibly. Depends how nerdy you are. If you're the kind of person to hang signed copies of Mansfield Town football shirts up the stairs then I guess so.

    • avatar
    • Mark
    • Mon 20 Oct 2008 08:17 AM

    Just cos I'm highlighting something that you'll think of everytime you look at those pictures.

    You wont believe the amount of time it took to measure and get those shirts equally spaced up the stairs so that they were equi-distance horizontally as well as stepped up equi-distance. I nearly designed my own mathematical theory..

  3. I'm more interested by the fact that Jake has 15 tabs on his workspace and appears to be running on a screen res of about 2048x1440. Good enough Eyeballing?

    • avatar
    • Jake Howlett
    • Mon 20 Oct 2008 11:24 AM

    That's pretty good eyeballing Dragon. You got the number of tabs spot on. Although the resolution is 1920x1200, so you're a bit out there.

    • avatar
    • Kerr
    • Mon 20 Oct 2008 11:37 AM

    Good at finding center of circle? Good at bisecting angles? Find a new job in a pizza shop :)

  4. Sounds like fun - firewalled where I am at the moment though :-(

    But to your question, they look very level to me... and you still have green outside! Fall came and went outside my office window at home for the most part by this past week... just the Hawthorne remains.

    • avatar
    • Jake Howlett
    • Mon 20 Oct 2008 02:01 PM

    Fall Jerry? Autumn?! Seems to get later here every year. Leaves are falling as we speak though. My view then changes from lush green to the neighbours junk. The trouble with over-looking the *bottom* of the neighbour's gardens is you get to see what they don't want to. I get to see a pair of ladders, a rusty bike and a traffic cone amongst other things. A midnight paddle up the stream beckons in order to retrieve them.

    Make sure you look at the site (link to his homepage on bottom of page with game on) when you get home Jerry. There's a loads of DIY tips on there!

    • avatar
    • Lance
    • Mon 20 Oct 2008 04:04 PM

    4.82 after 2 tries...

  5. Bisecting the angle seemed easiest - seconded by finding the point of convergence and the equidistant point on a triangle. Making a parallelogram or right angle seemed very hard - which explains a lot about my office! Scored 6.06 but had one really bad score on finding the midpoint (48.1) because it didn't say "and make it straight", or so my excuse goes.

    That guy has a rocking wood shop - especially that he bought used or built many of the items. Great furniture too. Thanks for the link Jake!

    • avatar
    • Heather
    • Tue 21 Oct 2008 12:44 PM

    The look straight to me!

    I envy the green. In Saskatchewan, Canada the trees have lost their leaves, we've had 6 or 7 inches of snow dumped on us in one day already (thankfully its melted now) , the car windows are all frosted up and its usually -7 to -10 Celcius in the morning.

    .. and this is just the beginning! :(

  6. The photos look great, where-ever you put them they're beautiful kids.

    I'm blown away by how tidy your desk looks!! I trust a photo facing the other way would show stack of books, loose papers, and miscellaneous cables ;-)

    Thanks for taking the time to run a site that always has something to tempt us to try something new.

    • avatar
    • Jake Howlett
    • Wed 22 Oct 2008 05:52 AM

    Thanks Paul.

    I like to keep my immediate working area clean, but you're right, the rest of the desk isn't as tidy.

    Most of what's there is because it's "to do". Once done it gets removed/filed. My desk acts like a big to-do list.

    Glad you find inspiration to try new things from this site. That's the idea and it helps inspire me to hear people say it works. Oh and the "best blogger" award you can see on the window-sill helped too ;o)

    • avatar
    • Seth
    • Thu 23 Oct 2008 12:29 PM

    I got a 2.31 on my 2nd game... your pics look good to me!

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Written by Jake Howlett on Mon 20 Oct 2008

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