Chris Palmer's Avoidance Central

A New "4-Hour" Book is Coming!

2011-11-29T22:35:00.001-06:00

I'm a big fan of Tim Ferris' previous two books, even if I'm not brave or dedicated enough to do everything he suggests. He's the ultimate self-experimenting, human guinea pig.

So far, I've lost over 15 lbs based on the diet suggestions from 4-Hour Body and I've felt great, not weak and crabby like I usually am when I diet. It really does seem to depend more on the foods you eat (or don't eat) rather than the quantity or timing of them. This isn't what I would have expected. The exercise advice is great as well - I just got through doing a set of kettlebell swings.

4-Hour Workweek is certainly an inspiring book, but it's a big leap for most people (like me) who are, regrettably, getting "set in their ways." Nevertheless, I've decided to take some of the advice a piece at a time, starting with getting a handle on my finances, doing better planning for what I want to do with my money instead of flying by the seat of my pants, and setting up some automated income sources.

Now Tim has a new book coming out called 4-Hour Chef and you can get a great deal on pre-orders on it now at Amazon (it won't be released until next year). Since I love to cook already, the advice in this book should be painless to implement. Of course, judging from his previous books, I'm sure he'll find some ways to make it edgy and out of my comfort zone. In particular, it's supposed to contain a bunch of "slow-carb" recipes, which is the diet plan from 4-Hour Body. In a nutshell, it is no starch, no fruit, no grains, no processed junk, no sugar. Or, you can look at it as super-Atkins with lots of beans - veggies, eggs, meats, and beans. The mashed cauliflower coconut dish looks interesting already...

You can see the book trailer, read about the associated app(s), and learn more about the book on Tim's blog.

Aeropress Coffee

2011-11-22T08:12:00.001-06:00

I don't know how many of you really like coffee*, but if you do (or you know someone who really likes coffee and you need a Christmas gift), the Aeropress is amazing.

I found one at the local Essex store a few months ago for about $15 (they're $26'ish on Amazon). I'd read stuff from all of the hardcore coffee geeks raving about it on Boing Boing and even on Make, so I thought I'd give it a try.

It requires a bit of a ritual to make, but it's incredibly easy to clean, so that kinda makes up for it in my opinion. It's fun in a geeky science experiment sort of way.

For a large cup of coffee, a double espresso, or a double latte or cappuccino, you grind two scoops of beans as fine as you can (espresso grind - this is why my cheap blade grinder works fine, it can't do uniform grinds for drip coffee, but it will eventually powerderize it perfectly). You put a disposable filter in the Aeropress cap, put the cap on the cylinder, put the cylinder on top of your cup, then pour the coffee in (funnel, scoop, 300 filters, and stirrer included). You heat the water separately. I use a cheap electric kettle and a cooking thermometer. You don't want it boiling hot, but about 175-180 degrees is apparently perfect (again according to the coffee geeks - lower temp = sour brew, higher temp = bitter brew due to the different temperatures that oils and alkaloids brew out of the coffee beans). Then you pour the hot water over the coffee in the cylinder (using the calibration marks on the side of the tube), stir for 10 seconds, then put the plunger in and slowly press the brewed coffee out through the paper microfilter. The coffee, while dark, is perfectly "clear" - no coffee grounds get through. This means you can refrigerate it after brewing and it won't get bitter.

What you have in the cup is about 2 shots of espresso (you can make 1-4, but I usually do 2). For espresso, you're done. For American coffee, fill the rest of the cup with hot water from the kettle. For latte/cappuccino, add hot or frothed milk. You can also refrigerate it and make great iced coffee with it by combining it with cold milk.

To clean, you remove the cap and plunge the grounds into the trash (they come out like a hockey puck). Rinse the cap, bottom of plunger, and stirrer and stack it all back together.

Honestly the best coffee I have ever had and much better than the $3-4 double tall non-fat latte that I (used to) get at Starbucks.

It uses a lot of coffee per cup, but it's still cheaper per serving than Keurig k-cups. It also must be the most efficient way of extracting caffeine from coffee beans, because one latte or double-shot Americano from it has enough caffeine to make my scalp tingle. Caffeine itself is bitter, and I think it's interesting that regular coffee beans from one brand will be more bitter (but not unpleasantly so) than decaf beans of the same type from the same brand. Cameron is also addicted to it now (at least the lattes - he makes it the night before and puts it in the fridge, then mixes it with a cup of milk and microwaves it in the morning). I've been drinking a lot of decaf at night, which I rarely ever do.

BTW, it was invented by the guy who invented the "Aerobee" flying disk - the hollow Frisbee thing that holds the Guiness world record for the farthest flown object thrown by a human being.

* A good working definition of "really likes coffee" is whether you/they have a coffee grinder at home, even a cheap blade one. It isn't 100% essential for the Aeropress, but highly recommended.

Google Fiber for Huntsville

2010-03-26T13:11:00.003-05:00

My submission was too long, so I'm posting it in it's entirety here and linking to it from my submission:

Huntsville is the high tech center of the south.

Despite it's relatively low profile, it consistently ranks in the top cities in the United States (or the world) to live, start a business, educate your children, retire, start your career, etc. Huntsville has more engineers per capita than just about any city in the world. World class research parks and high-tech start-ups, NASA, Redstone Arsenal, first class schools, top research universities, great standard of living, and friendly people. Despite that, Huntsville is in one of the poorest states in the country and one with little investment in future infrastructure. All of which would make Huntsville an ideal showcase for the power of ubiquitous, super-high speed Internet access.

For example, consider my household. I am a computer engineer. My wife is a high school teacher (at Virgil Grissom High School - a school ranked in the top 50 high schools in the nation). I have two kids (one at home, one in college at Auburn University). In our house, we have three computers (two Windows, one MacBook), an X-Box (frequently on XBox Live), three iPhones (use wifi at home - 3G isn't that fast), 2 iPod touches, and one Nintendo DS. We regularly stream movies and TV shows to our computers, phones, and to our TV via our internet enabled BluRay player using Netflix. Our cable box supports on demand HD video (and we have three cable boxes). We regularly use Google Chat to video chat with our daughter in college. We use Google Docs to proof papers and work collaboratively. It's not uncommon for us to be watching a streaming movie while using Facebook and/or Twitter on two computers and an iPhone simultaneously while things are downloading on the other computer. I often work at home using my work laptop and VPN. When my daughter is home from college, add another iPod touch, another MacBook, and a Blackberry with wifi.

You would have a hard time being more wired than our family, but this is not an uncommon amount of home tech anywhere in Huntsville.

Despite that, our internet is via a cable modem hooked up to a wireless router. Reliability is so-so (it used to be much worse) and speeds, particularly after work, are horribly inconsistent. Often it's even hard to watch a non-HD YouTube or Google Video clip without it stopping to buffer at least once or twice. Netflix streaming usually drops to the lowest quality (highest compression) if we try to watch during prime time. Video chat is hit-or-miss in peak hours with lots of compression artifacting and stuttering. Downloads of songs and software can take from a few minutes to nearly an hour (or longer for big software patches or HD video).

In such a high-tech city, we should do better, but our primary connectivity options are from cable companies with little competition and too many households sharing connection points and consuming bandwidth prioritized to delivering cable and On Demand movies rather than other internet traffic.

For these reasons, I believe Huntsville would be a *perfect* test bed for the power of a full fiber optic network infrastructure and I'd love to be able to brag about it to the rest of the world.

Long Time, No Blog & I bought a Mac

2009-04-27T12:28:00.001-05:00

I was skeptical about the Mac's reputation as being great for photos and video and for how easy it is to use with different hardware. This will probably change once I have a problem, but saw far that reputation is entirely warranted.

On the photo side, I plugged in a USB card reader and inserted by CF card from my Nikon and imported my pictures in iPhoto. Pretty much the same procedure as Picassa, but iPhoto handles the Nikon RAW (.NEF) format files (Picassa doesn't) and gives you access to a complete RAW processing page where you can tweak everything to your heart's content. On the PC, this requires a separate, hard to use program from Nikon or you have to have Photoshop. It also has a "blemish remover" tool that does a localized blur/smudge/blend so you can remove shiny spots or blotches on people's faces (Renee loved that feature).

Also, right out of the box, the Macbook's LCD screen is properly calibrated and color-corrected. I still can't get my HP laptop's display to match the HP LCD sitting right beside it. No matter what I do, the colors and contrast don't match.

For video, I shot some stuff at prom with my Canon MiniDV camcorder. I've imported stuff from this camera to my PC using two different programs and it was pretty much a nightmare of drivers and figuring out user interfaces. I plugged the firewire cable from the camcorder to the Mac and iMovie started up automatically, told me I had a Canon connected and said that if I click "Import" it will rewind the camera, import all of the video, automatically detect scene transitions, and then rewind the tape when it was complete (or I could open a manual settings box). I clicked "Import" and it did exactly what it said. I haven't figured out most of the iMovie bells and whistles, but I was able to add start and stop fades and superimposed titles and trim down unwanted footage in a few minutes. Then I said "Send to iDVD" and it transcribed the video footage and brought up iDVD where I created an animated root menu screen (wrapping the video clip around a rotating cylinder) and created a chapter. Then I went to iPhoto and created a slideshow of the best prom pictures (it has a library of royalty free music and a bunch of slideshow templates). Then I send send the slideshow to iDVD and it went over automagically as a new chapter on the DVD.

I stuck in a blank DVD and clicked Burn and less than 10 minutes later, had a working DVD with animated menus, edited video chapter, and video slideshow with music. I needed a couple of copies and burning subsequent copies took less than three minutes each.

Also, straight from iPhoto and iMovie, you can export pictures, videos, and slideshows straight to Flick, Facebook, YouTube, iTunes, or several other sides/locations/formats. You don't even have to worry about formats and file extensions - it handles it all correctly.

Amazing. All done with software that came on the machine right out of the box.

I'm Still Alive

2009-02-08T12:00:00.002-06:00

But I haven't been blogging. I'm working on some stuff. Basically right now I'm trying to convince Blogger that I haven't abandoned my blog.

Book Reviews/Recommendations

2008-07-06T17:57:00.003-05:00

These last few weeks have been murder at work, but for some reason, the more I work and the more I have to do, the more likely I am to escape as much as possible into some good books. I haven't been avoiding work too much, but I have managed to squeeze in a lot of books at lunch, breaks, and bedtime in the last couple of weeks:

Uglies, Pretties, Specials, and Extras, by Scott Westerfeld
I'd heard a lot about these books on Boing Boing and Scott Westerfeld is one of the people who wrote positive blurbs about Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. They are a series of teen/young adult novels and I'd picked them up and put them back down several times because they looked interesting, but seemed clearly aimed at the teen girl markets. From the back cover and description, they are about, apparently, a near future extrapolation of society where everyone gets a free and perfect plastic surgey makeover when they turn sixteen that makes everyone perfectly beautiful, eliminating any social distinctions based on looks. The main character, Tally, is fifteen and still "Ugly" - a normal looking teenager looking forward to her birthday when she can become a "Pretty", but who gets trapped into chasing after her friend, Shay, who doesn't want to become a Pretty and chooses to run away to avoid the surgery. The books have big pictures of teenage girls on the front and the jacket descriptions make them seem like they are going to be about high school cliques and boyfriends in a society much like ours where plastic surgery is normal and expected of everyone.

I broke down and bought Uglies, the first book in the series, and put off starting it for a few days. In fact, I bought it to foist it off on Morgan to see what she thought of it. After I finished World War Z, I picked it up and though I'd read a few chapters. The book jacket is misleading. Evidently, the publishers thought that teen girls were their best-bet target demographic and didn't want to scare them off reading a hardcore SF novel. Everything that I just said above is true, but the series is actually set several centuries in the future (at least four hundred years) and is full of hoverboards, nano-technology, bio-engineering, and cyberpunk-style rebellion. A bioengineered plague that infests and destabalizes petroleum products (making them combust on exposure to oxygen and spreading the spores in the resulting smoke) destroyed all of society and decimated humanity. Now everyone lives in isolated, "perfect" cities where all of their wants and needs are provided and their lives are carefully planned and engineered and the high technology lets them live in total harmony with their environment (it's a tree-huggers wet dream - the people react to the thought of cutting down a tree as if it were murder and they're taught that the "Rusties" - basically us - were murderous, violent, insane people who destroyed the world and almost wiped out humanity. Kids are born and live the first few years of their lives with their "perfect"/middle-Pretty parents, then they are shipped off to dorm-schools (they still see their parents). When they are around puberty, they are considered "Uglies" and live in high-school level dorms where they are educated until they turn sixteen. At sixteen, they have the surgery and become "New Pretties" and live in their own section of the city for several years until they are ready to assume careers, when they have other surgeries to make them "Middle Pretties" and look more mature - then they can marry and have kids. The New Pretties are coddled, have few rules, and live life as a perpetual series of parties, beautiful friends, beautiful clothes, champaign, and entertainment.

I told Renee that the book surprised me, I was expecting The O.C. meets Gattaca, but instead it was just like Logan's Run, but instead of killing you at 30, they turn you into Paris Hilton at 16.

Tally wants nothing more than to become a "Pretty", but her best friend Shay runs away and the shadowy Special Circumstances group tell Telly that she must follow Shay and help them find where the escapees are hiding or they won't turn her Pretty (again, just like Logan's Run where they turn up his life clock and turn him into a Runner). Of course, and it's pretty obvious and not much of a spoiler, it turns about being a "Pretty" involves something a little more sinister than changing your looks.

That's all I'll give away. I've read the first two (Uglies and Pretties) and I've started the third (Specials). I think the first three are a complete trilogy, but there is a fourth book (Extras) that is just out in hardback - I'm sure I'll get it too at this rate. The books are full of action and really complex moral and ethical dilemmas about individual freedoms vs. the good of society, whether it is right to make choices for people who have been engineered to be unable to make choices on their own, how people change as they mature and whether these changes make them different people, the role of beauty in society (of course - that is what I though the books were all about, but it is only one facet of it), and how much you can muck with biological and the human psyche and still be human. Despite the covers, they really should equally appeal to boys, but also to anyone who likes really good SF novels.

World War Z, by Max Brooks
This book was a wonderful surprise, I'd read some reviews and recommendations by the zombie movie fanatics on Ain't It Cool, but I didn't really think it would be that great of a book and I really didn't believe the format would be that engaging or coherent. The book is written as if it were the creation of an investigative journalist about 5-10 years after a world-wide zombie outbreak. If you've watched any zombie movies, you know the drill. He picks and chooses a bit on his zombie mythos, but basically his zombies work like this: A mutant viral disease breaks out in China that kills infected people and then reanimates their corpses as flesh-eating zombies. It's not the "everyone who dies comes back to life as zombies" like in the George Romero zombie movies, but other than that, it could be Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead or even Shaun of the Dead - the zombies are completely unintelligent, slow and shambling (no fast zombies like 28 Days Later (Widescreen Edition) or Half-Life 2), don't bleed, their body parts continue to move even when hacked off, they have no memories or emotions, and the only way to kill them is to burn them or destroy their brains. The virus is spread by bites or even scratches - anything that brings zombie fluids in contact with the human bloodstream. Incubation rates in normal humans is variable, so some infected people manage to travel by air or car to other parts of the world before the virus kicks in an zombie-fies them. The infection rate is 100% - no one is immune, so the zombie plague spreads like the ultimate disease vector simulation. They don't need air, so they even walk or drag themselves underwater, and millions wander around the bottom of the ocean or in lakes, attacking people in the water or dragging themselves on shore in distant areas that have isolated themselves by air and boat travel and kicking off new outbreaks. Their bodies freeze solid in winter, but thaw out in the spring. They don't decay, but eventually they wear out enough to "die" or become ineffectual, but there is no "cure", so new outbreaks and fresh zombies can arise. The initial military response is ineffective, since we've all developed our military to modern needs - air superiority, bombs, tanks, missiles, and the like - all of which are pretty much useless. Drop a cluster bomb into a group of zombies and you kill a certain number, but you spread a bunch of crippled zombie parts and a zombie torso laying in the grass or rubble is more dangerous than one up and walking around - at least you can seem them. Tanks and planes are useless. Nukes might wipe out concentrations in cities, but the world would be a radioactive wasteland of zombies if they were used to their full potential (although a few nukes do get fired). They have no emotions, so they can't be demoralized or scared away - in fact they call each other with their moans, so any armed conflict becomes a fight to the total destruction of one side or another with the zombie ranks increasing if they manage to infect soldiers or other human combatants.

So, back to the structure of the book. The journalist has travelled around the world interviewing survivors of World War Z. The book is a set of the transcripts from these interviews, set in chronological order, but scattered around the globe. Some of the transcripts are very short, others are mini-short stories, but, with only a handful of exceptions, once you hear the story of one person in one country, they never appear again in the book (although other stories might reference the events of their stories or intersect with them). It doesn't seem possible that a coherent storyline could emerge from this, much less a story that keeps you turning the pages. Everyone interviewed survived and you know that humanity eventually "won" the war, but you don't know how until all of the story unfolds. Even more interesting, different types of people and governments approached it differently, so there is a very interesting and realistic analysis of society, psychology, history, and politics involved. In short, it was amazing and thought-provoking. He did a massive amount of research into different governments and societies, different military hierachies and weapons, and, except for the science of the zombies, he gets the rest of his science and science fiction right (one of the survivors was the commander of the ISS - they had a six man crew at the beginning of the outbreak, three escape in the Soyuz escape pod, the other three remain in orbit and rig together some long range EVA vehicles out of satellite tenders to steal supplies from a new Chinese space station and wind up spending a few years in orbit before being rescued by Spaceship Three after the war, but cosmic rays have given them cancer and their bones and muscles have degenerated so much they are are bedridden and sick for the rest of the time they survive on Earth - he even gets his space science and physics mostly right).

BTW, the author, Max Brooks, is Mel Brooks' son! He wrote the The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead book before this - one of those fake handbooks, where he outlined all of the details of his flavor of zombies. In World War Z, the survival guide is a real publication printed by the U.S. Government. He doesn't dwell on the scientific and biological details on how the zombies "work" (which is good, because there are several things about them that are impossible in all probability), but they are not supernatural and, despite what a few groups of people think (and he does interview them and their detractors as well), they aren't based on some outer-space plague, or biological warfare agent, or "When there is no more room in Hell, the dead shall walk the Earth" ala George Romero. Needless to say, it does have a great deal of gore and violence and some of the scenes are tense, and horror-movie like, but it didn't really seem like a "horror" novel to me - more of a military/poltical/psychological SF satire - completely serious, but obviously winking at the reader about everything from global politics to every zombie horror movie ever made.

Chasing Darkness, by Robert Crais
This is the latest in the Elvis Cole mystery/detective series by Robert Crais. If you ever read detective/mystery novels, or just like good books, you should check out this series (and Crais' other books, as well). When I was in LA, I purposefully set out out to visit some of the places that Elvis Cole frequents and where he lives, so this was another book where I could visualize the settings vividly - Mulholland Drive, Laurel Canyon, and Hollywood and the Valley). Too short, but another great book in the series.

Fearless Fourteen, by Janet Evanovich
I've recommended these books before, but I continue to enjoy them. These are heavy chick-lit comedy/mystery/detective novels about Stephanie Plum, an inept New Jersey girl who works as a bounty hunter for her cousin's bail bond agency. This is obviously the fourteenth book in the series and is totally laugh out loud funny. Yes, it is chick-litish (and Evanovich also writes, or has written, straight-forward bodice ripping romance novels), but don't let that scare you. Stephanie's romantic problems (she's torn between Morelli, a police detective she grew up with, and Ranger, the superbad head of a private security/mercenary organization) are are funny as the crime stories she gets mixed up in with her sidekick Lula (a four hundred pound black ex-hooker) and her family (particularly grandma Mazur, who is around 80, goes to funerals for fun, and is way beyond caring what anyone thinks about her or who she offends and has decided to live as much as she can before she dies - in this book, she gets addicted to a World of Warcraft style MMPORG and runs around talking about PvP kills, "griefer" players, and making pacts with the King of the Wood Elves).

OK, break is over - back to work....

Little Fuzzy

2008-06-05T22:50:00.005-05:00

I was reading Boing Boing and saw this story about how the audiobook of Little Fuzzy won the Publisher's Weekly Fantasy (?) Audiobook of the the Year. That's cool and I'd love to hear it, but even more interesting in the article was that most of H. Beam Piper's books never had their copyright renewed so they have fallen into the public domain. This means you can download Little Fuzzy and others as free Project Gutenberg e-books or even download a free audiobook version (not the award winning one, though). The audio book reader is a volunteer and she seems to do a pretty good job. I've only listened to a chapter or two so far.

Anyway, Little Fuzzy is one of my favorite SF books of all time. Unlike a lot of SF from that time (early 60's), it's really not that dated, despite a little political incorrectness. The ideas of protecting cultures and identifying sentience in other species (or defining sentience/consciousness in general) are still current. It also touches on environmental issues and even on anthropogenic climate change. I haven't read a lot of Piper's other books, but I do know that his future history that Fuzzy is a part of was one of the main inspiration for the Traveller universe.

If you haven't read it, you should. If you have read it a long time ago, it's probably a good time to reread it.

This image of the original book cover is from Wikipedia and I'd never seen it before. Michael Whelan did the book covers in the 1980's and also co-illustrated a great children's picture book version of Little Fuzzy that I also own.

Sam and Charlie

2008-06-03T09:38:00.004-05:00

Our friends, Jeff and Leslie, had twin boys last October who were born 13 weeks premature. Sam and Charlie spent almost three months in the hospital before being able to come home. You can read the whole scary and ultimately uplifting story on their CaringBridge site.

A few weeks ago, they had a dedication service at their church and Jeff performed a song called Jesus Bring the Rain. He put it up on YouTube over a slideshow of Sam and Charlie and I wanted to share it with everyone.

Cool Teaching/Learning Program

2008-05-12T11:16:00.002-05:00

Wired recently had an article about a program/technique called SuperMemo (WikiPedia) which uses a pretty sophisticated algorithm to quiz you on information based on a memory reinforcement technique. Basically, you create (or download) a set of "flash cards" for a topic. The program then presents the questions to you, you answer (to yourself - it doesn't interpret your responses or anything) and then you grade each card on a scale of 0-5, where 0 means that you had no idea of the answer, 1 means you remember the subject, but couldn't remember the answer, 2 means you got it right, but it took way too long to recall, 3 means you answered it with some difficultly, 4 means you're pretty sure you've memorized it for now, and 5 means that it's so ingrained in your mind that you're positive you'll remember it for a long time. It goes through each card in the "deck" until you've graded them all with at least a '2', then you're done for the day. The next day (or so) when you run the program, it picks the cards you've graded the lowest and presents them to you. The ones you've graded higher don't always show up, so you may not see a '3' for a couple of days, a '4' might not show up for a week, and a '5' may be up to a month or more. The intervals and technique are based on several psychological studies that chart how long facts hang around in your short term memory and how many times you have to recall them in order to put them in long term memory (the spacing effect and the forgetting curve). It also plays on the psychological finding that being quizzed or tested is the most effective way to study - blind recall and grading/correction has been shown to be much better than re-reading texts, studying notes, or re-copying notes.

It sounded really cool, but SuperMemo is evidently a bit of a mess. The good versions cost money, the web site is pretty ugly, the program has a lot of features for creating content, but it's cryptic and not very user-friendly, etc. That being said, there are some really great resources there on how to write the most effective kind of study questions and I really need to download one of the trial versions and give it a real try..

Since the earlier versions of SuperMemo were free and the algorithms were documented, there is an Open Source version of the same type of tool called Mnemosyne which is much more basic, but free and easier to play around with. The first thing I did was create a deck to teach myself the resistor color code, which I've never really memorized effectively beyond remembering "Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly" and counting on my fingers or looking at a printed chart. After a week or so, I've just about mastered it except for the really odd (and infrequently used) portions, like extremely high tolerances and fractional multipliers.

I wish I'd known about it earlier in the year when I could have got my kids to give it a try. It is particularly good for foreign language vocabulary and for continual reinforcement of things you learn over a whole year. Because of the interval learning, it's not great for stuffing in a bunch of facts to cram for a final. For example, in a history, foreign language, or science class, if you put in your facts and vocabulary at the beginning of each chapter, you can study them up to the test and then keep them in the deck so that you are constantly practicing them up to the final or mid-term. It would have been great for chemistry (memorizing ions and compounds, periodic tables, etc.). Of course, it's not so great for math since it can't "generate" problems.

I'm trying to think of something to memorize next with it to give it a better workout. Any suggestions?

Morgan's Movie Quiz

2008-03-26T11:29:00.001-05:00

My daughter, Morgan, created her version of the favorite movie quote quiz.

Same rules as the last quiz...

1. I figure life's a gift and I don't intend on wasting it. You don't know what hand you're gonna get dealt next. You learn to take life as it comes at you... to make each day count.

2. You know it's funny what a young man recollects? 'Cause I don't remember bein' born. I don't recall what I got for my first Christmas and I don't know when I went on my first outdoor picnic. But I do remember the first time I heard the sweetest voice in the wide world.

3."All we are is dust in the wind," dude.

4.She's gone. She gave me a pen. I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen.

5. As you know, the concept of the suction pump is centuries old. Really that's all this is except that instead of sucking water, I'm sucking life. I've just sucked one year of your life away.

6. We're in the middle of a revolution Jude. And what are you doing? Doodles and cartoons?

7.Iris, in the movies we have leading ladies and we have the best friend. You, I can tell, are a leading lady, but for some reason you are behaving like the best friend.

8. Elliot? You're gonna name the kid Elliot? No, you can't name the kid Elliot. Elliot is a fat kid with glasses who eats paste. You're not gonna name the kid Elliot. You gotta give him a real name. Give him a name. Like Nick

9.You seek a great fortune, you three who are now in chains. You will find a fortune, though it will not be the one you seek. But first... first you must travel a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril. Mm-hmm. You shall see thangs, wonderful to tell. You shall see a... a cow... on the roof of a cotton house, ha. And, oh, so many startlements. I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward. Though the road may wind, yea, your hearts grow weary, still shall ye follow them, even unto your salvation.

10.And if in some distant place in the future we see each other in our new lives, I'll smile at you with joy and remember how we spent the summer beneath the trees, learning from each other and growing in love. The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds, and that's what you've given me. That's what I hope to give to you forever.

11. Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young girl whose stepmother always made her stay home with the baby. And the baby was a spoiled child, and wanted everything to himself, and the young girl was practically a slave.

12. Here's the deal I'm the best there is. Plain and simple. I wake up in the morning and I piss excellence.

13. Wow, you're fast. I'm glad I caught up to you. I waited 5 hours for you. Why is your coat so big? So, good news - I saw a dog today. Have you seen a dog? You probably have. How was school? Was it fun? Did you get a lot of homework? Huh? Do you have any friends? Do you have a best friend? Does he have a big coat, too?...

14. We met it seems, such a short time ago. You looked at me, needing me so. Yet from your sadness, our happiness grew. Then I found out, I needed you, too. I remember how we used to play. I recall those rainy days, the fires glowed, that kept us warm. And now I find, we're both alone. Goodbye may seem forever, farewell is like the end. But in my heart's a memory, and there you'll always be.

15. I'm sorry, sir. I could never answer to a whistle. Whistles are for dogs and cats and other animals, but not for children and definitely not for me. It would be too... humiliating.

The Quote Game

2008-03-13T15:40:00.008-05:00

After playing on Jodi and Ren's blogs, I decided to give this a try myself.

Here are the rules if you want to create a quiz yourself:

Pick fifteen of your favorite movies.

Go to IMDB and find a quote from each movie.
Post them on your blog for everyone to guess.
Fill in the film title once it’s guessed.

This part is for the contestant/blog reader:

No Googling or using IMDB search functions.
Leave your answer(s) in the comments.

NOTE: I'm going out of town in a few days, so if you don't answer quick, you won't get any feedback for a week or so most likely...

NOTE 2: My counting skills are off. Once I pasted them in there, I found I had sixteen. Sue me.

The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. [not El Mariachi - although I do like that movie] [Bladerunner - Jeff]
The leading banker in Amsterdam is now the pastry chef in our kitchen.
I have some rope up here, but I do not think you would accept my help, since I am only waiting around to kill you. [The Princess Bride - Rick]
There's the television. It's all right there - all right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray. Commercials! We're not productive anymore. We don't make things anymore. It's all automated. What are we *for* then? We're consumers, Jim. Yeah. Okay, okay. Buy a lot of stuff, you're a good citizen. But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask you? What? Mentally *ill*. Fact, Jim, fact - if you don't buy things - toilet paper, new cars, computerized yo-yos, electrically-operated sexual devices, stereo systems with brain-implanted headphones, screwdrivers with miniature built-in radar devices, voice-activated computers...
Say, Jim! Whoo! That's a bad outfit! Whoo! [Superman - Jeff]
You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity. Farewell. [Toy Story - Jodi]
Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.
Forget the fat lady. You're Obsessed with fat lady. Just get us out of here! [Independence Day - Mark]
Another one of them new worlds. No beer, no women, no pool parlors, nothin'. Nothin' to do but throw rocks at tin cans, and we gotta bring our own tin cans. [Not Plan 9 From Outer Space] [Forbidden Planet - Rick]
Bad karma, dear! [Valley Girl - Jeff]
It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage. [Raiders of the Lost Ark - Rick]
That's a human ear all right.
Little brown eel comes out of the cave... Swims into the hole... Comes out of the hole... Goes back into the cave again... [Jaws - Mark]
Oh, it's probably some kind of hunting lodge for rich weirdos.
The central message of Buddhism is not "every man for himself".
Spontaneity has its time and place. [The Sure Thing - Jeff]

John McCain: Is he a Cylon?

2008-03-06T23:33:00.003-06:00

I think I said this before, but now that he got the nomination and I've been hearing and seeing him more often, it continues to bother me...

He looks and talks just like Colonel Tigh on Battlestar Galactica.

It doesn't help when he's seen with his wife, since Tigh's wife was a younger blond as well (at least McCain hasn't poisoned her because she was a traitor).

Every time I see him, I wonder where his eyepatch is.

The voice is even closer, so radio doesn't help.

Worst of all, I keep thinking, "We can't trust him. He's secretly a Cylon!"

I even saw him in person and thought the same thing.

Yes, I'm a bit loopy. BG season 4 (the final season) looks like it's going to be awesome and now we've finally got Sci-Fi on HD, so I'm really looking forward to it...

After I posted this the first time, I found this image from another blogger who thought the same thing:

W&W Electronics Closing Sale Starts Next Week

2008-02-28T17:39:00.003-06:00

I wrote about W&W Electronics here in Huntsville a while back in this blog post. As I rushed in yesterday right at closing time to pick up some connectors for the cool new Arduino Motor Shield kit I was putting together, the clerk said that the clearance sale starts next Monday, March 3rd.

Everything in the story will be 50% off (at least to start) and their goal is to empty out the story within a month or two.

Time to put together my shopping list...

Start a Band!

2008-01-31T19:59:00.000-06:00

This is too cool not to share. On the re: Becca blog that a friend of ours writes, I learned about a cool game to randomly generate a band name, album name, and album cover.

Go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article on the page will be your band name.

Then
http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the last quote on the page will be the name of your album.

And lastly
http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/?
The third picture is your album cover.

Another friend of hers liked the game as well but didn't like having to go into a photo editing package to create the cover, so he wrote a web application to do it automatically:

The Random Band/Album Generator

It gets the results and lets you crop and position the picture and text, change fonts, change font colors, or re-fetch any of the three elements. You can then preview it and download the "album cover."

I think it's interesting that our brains are so programmed to scan album covers and try to make sense out of enigmatic band names and album titles that most of these don't even seem out of the ordinary. In fact, I find myself wondering what the music would be like...

Here is my favorite result so far:

By the way, I hereby lay claim to the band name "Zealots of Piety" - I'm surprised it isn't a real band.

A Couple of Reviews

2008-01-23T09:05:00.000-06:00

Cloverfield

We saw Cloverfield this weekend. The audience wasn't the best and we were treated to repeated farting noises as the movie started, a laser pointer light show repeated occasionally through the film, and several people yelling "That sucked!" and "What a waste of money!" at the end of the film. Sad and annoying as that was, we still loved the movie (and none of us got motion sick).

I can't believe people griped that you didn't see the monster enough. In fact, I would have been just as happy without the longer, clearer shots of it toward the end. A sufficiently developed imagination can create a scarier creature than any CGI shop and fear of the unknown and unseen (in fiction at least) is scarier than fear of the known and seen. In fact, the most tense scenes of the movie, to me, were the scenes where you knew the monster was near, but for whatever reason the camera wasn't pointed at it (either Hud was running or he was concentrating on what he was doing, like crossing the roof). The sound effects and sound editing were amazing in those scenes as well.

As for not explaining what the monster was or where it came from, which seemed to annoy many members of the audience, that worked well for me. I'm a sucker for monster movies, particularly giant, city-destroying monster movies, but they never get past my sense of disbelief. Either you have to accept that they are supernatural in origin, or that radiation mutated iguanas can grow to Godzilla size, or that giant apes are prowling around uncharted islands somewhere. No matter how good, or at least fun, the monsters are, you never "buy" the explanation for them. I'm not saying that I believe the Cloverfield monster is possible, but you are not given an explanation to disbelieve, so the mystery is, in this case, more interesting than any possible explanation.

Even with the crappy audience, I'm glad I saw it in a theater. I expect that since the audience reaction was so polarized, the hype that made it #1 at the box office will drop off quickly as negative word of mouth spreads. Some of my friends said they weren't terribly interested in seeing it based on the trailers and I told them it was exactly what you should expect from the trailers, but better than I expected.

The Soldier Son Trilogy, by Robin Hobb

I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but I don't consider myself a big fan of fantasy fiction because so much of it is dreadful. It takes some pretty strong recommendations and reviews from people I trust before I will start a fantasy book, much less a trilogy or series of books. Two authors that I do respect, Orson Scott Card and George R. R. Martin, both highly recommended books by Robin Hobb. Frankly, without their recommendations, I would have put them back on the shelf after reading the back covers. There is nothing in their descriptions that would lead you to believe that they were anything more than your standard sword-and-sorcery, rags to riches, mythic quest rehashes. In fact, even the names of her characters are off-putting. In the first series of her books, The Farseer Trilogy, the main character is the illegitimate son of a prince of the Farseer family and a common naming convention in their kingdom is to name children based on desirable character traits and illegitimate children have the name or prefix Fitz attached to the name of the father (if known), so the protagonist's name is FitzChivalry Farseer. Eek.

The second trilogy, the Liveship Traders, seemed even more stupid. Yes, it's about sentient sailing ships and the covers of all three look like bodice-ripping romance novels mixed with Dungeons and Dragons tie-ins. They were even better than the first series.

Once you get past the names and the marketing, you will find that Robin Hobb is an amazingly good writer. Her books are unpredictable (to the extreme), unique (she isn't just rehashing common fantasy themes), emotional, and, above all, meaningful. They aren't just escapism, but are ways of setting up complex moral, ethical, social, political, and even environmental dilemmas in a setting that is different enough from the "real world" to make you think of them in objective ways, but realistic enough to make you emotionally connected to them.

One other warning: another characteristic of her books is to completely and utterly torture her main characters, leading them through increasingly bleak circumstances, bad decisions, life altering tricks of fate, misunderstandings, separation from loved ones, treason, and more to the point where you are positive that their lives are ruined and there is no way the books can resolve anything in any happy or satisfying way. Then she resolves everything in a happy (or at least bittersweetly happy) and immensely satisfying way. As entertaining and well written as they are, they aren't always a "fun" read. Two and half books into any of the trilogies and you will be wallowing in despair and misery along with the characters.

Sorry for the digression, but I wanted to cover the background before recommending her latest trilogy of books which I just finished. The Soldier Son Trilogy consists of Shaman's Crossing, Forest Mage, and Renegade's Magic. I was even surer when I saw Shaman's Crossing that I would not like this series. It is set in a frontier society where a vaguely British colonial society is expanding across the plains and deserts into the mountains and confronting native tribal societies - obviously America's westward expansion and treatment of Native Americans with the names changed. To make it worse, the magical beliefs of the native tribes are real: they do have magical powers. The book's main character is Nevarre Burrelle, the son of a moderately wealthy landowner who in the first book is trained as a boy by a "civilized" native then is sent off to a military academy to become a soldier. Of course, since these are Robin Hobb books, his life is soon turned upside down as becomes alternately a pawn of the native magic, a victim of plague, an enemy of the native tribes, obscenely fat, a traitor to his own people, an outcast of his family, cursed by a god, a criminal, a shaman, and potentially a tree.

I was expecting the books to be about how evil white men destroyed the peaceful native tribal societies and despoiled nature. Instead, the books were incredibly well balanced and were about conflicts between differing cultures and the good and evil that all people can do when they are trying to do what they believe is right, or just trying to get by. Once again, by the middle of the third book, I both hated and felt deeply for Nevarre and was convinced that there was no way the book could resolve itself in even a slightly satisfying way. I was wrong. I e-mailed a friend of mine who is also a big Hobb fan when I finished it and said, "Holy crap. She did it again."

The Farseer Trilogy

Assassin's Apprentice
Royal Assassin
Assassin's Quest

The Liveship Traders Trilogy

Ship of Magic
Mad Ship
Ship of Destiny

The Tawny Man Trilogy

Fool's Errand
Golden Fool
Fool's Fate

The Soldier Boy Trilogy

Shaman's Crossing
Forest Mage
Renegade's Magic

Slashdot Jumps the Shark (Politically)

2008-01-14T14:21:00.000-06:00

If you ever had any doubt that Slashdot readers were totally clueless about anything not related to technology, check out their answers to the question: "What would you do if you were elected President of the United States?"

Slashdot - What Would You Do As President?

I thought that I had read some silly, extremist, malformed political opinions before (from both sides of the political spectrum), but I was wrong (until now). It almost made me feel better about the sorry crop of candidates running for president this time - at their worst, they are all smarter and more capable than most of these guys. Unfortunately, people like this vote...

Although, "Two interns at the same time" was pretty funny (a nod to Office Space).

UPDATE: Maybe I jumped the gun on the jumped the shark comment. Once people who actually spent a few minutes thinking started posting and Slashdot's moderation system kicked in, the discourse became a bit more sane...

GTD vs. It's All Too Much

2007-12-31T09:06:00.000-06:00

Recently someone commented on my post about clutter and said that he had just started reading David Allen's Getting Things Done book, but after reading my blog post, he wondered if the It's All Too Much book might be a better start. Since I had been thinking about New Years' resolutions, I wrote a long, semi-rambling reply to him and then decided that I would clean it up a bit and post it here.

Hmm, good questions. The answer may be just to read both, as they complement each other quite well, but I'll go into a bit more detail.

Getting Things Done (GTD) is largely about getting control of your "stuff", but it concentrates on two phases and primarily on informational "stuff". The first phase is to do a clean sweep of your home and workplace and organize it - mail, papers to file, magazines, catalogs, e-mail inbox, calendars, notes to yourself, etc. He suggests that you go through your house and/or office with a laundry basket and put everything into one huge "inbox", then process each piece using his flowchart. You are not allowed to put anything back in the box or put it aside - you must file it, turn it into an action or project, handle it right then (the two minute rule) or trash it. When you get through, your home or office won't be empty of stuff, but you will have gotten rid of a large percentage of it and what you have kept will be usefully organized. Best of all (and the biggest psychological benefit of this) is that your head will be clear of stuff as well. It is a great feeling to not have nagging worries about upcoming bills, projects to do around the house, or wondering where your tax papers are. The second phase is to try to handle every new "input" into your life the same way - don't let it pile up, process it in a timely manner, collect the appropriate information and assign tasks, etc.

The first part is time consuming, but easily "doable" by anyone. I guarantee that anyone who does it will feel an immediate benefit. The second part is like many other things in life if you are like me - it's hard to make yourself do it continually. I'll do it religiously for a few weeks, haphazardly for the next month or so, then let it slide. Every six months or so, I'll feel the worry start creeping up on me, re-read (or at least re-skim) the GTD book, and start all over. Every restart is easier though because of all of the crap I've processing before (I'm no longer sorting through tax returns from my college days, for example). To me it's like diet and exercise - you know it's good for your health, you know that not doing it is bad, you know that you feel better when you do it so it's not just delayed gratification, yet sometimes you eat junk food and despite all of your New Years' resolutions, it's hard to make yourself go to the gym everyday.

It's All Too Much was, to me, a different sort of book. GTD is about attempting to create a set of procedures for dealing with life in an information overload society. As I said before, it is a book that I reread periodically to re-inspire myself and to re-evaluate how I'm doing things. I'm convinced that if I could make myself do everything in it 100% of the time, my life would be better for it. It's All Too Much, on the other hand, is a book that I'm not as likely to reread, at least not as often. Instead of a set of procedures to deal with life, it's much more of a wake-up call. GTD deals with mail, and papers, and magazines, and e-mails, and calendars. It's All Too Much deals with all the rest of the physical "stuff" in your life - clothes that don't fit or that are out of style, books that you won't ever re-read or reference, magazines, "collectibles", hobby materials that you "might get around to getting back into some day", broken items that you might get around to repairing someday, things that you never use but that seem too nice to throw away, gifts that you never use that you don't want to get rid of in case it hurts someone's feelings, etc. It has a few good "life rules", such as after cleaning out your closet of things that don't fit, hang everything remaining with the hangers backwards. When you actually wear an outfit, hang it back up with the hanger forwards. At the end of the season, discard all of that season's clothes that are still hanging backwards - for whatever reason, they aren't clothes that you actually need. But primarily, it is a great book to read before you start cleaning out your closet or garage because it lets you put things in perspective and gives you a set of questions to ask yourself, such as "When will I ever use this?", "Is it worth taking up the space, dusting it, stumbling over it, or whatever in between the times that I might use it?", "If I need one of these ten years from now, would it be easier to buy another one or borrow one when I need it?", "With my busy life, is it really worth my time to fix this toaster one day or just throw it away and buy a new one?" and so on.

Just about everyone has problems with the GTD sort of stuff from time to time - "What do I do with this piece of mail?", "Where did I put the manual for my camcorder?", "How do I deal with the 352 unread messages in my e-mail inbox?".

On the other hand, not everyone has a problem with clutter, or, more importantly, many people don't realize they have a problem with it. You don't have to live in a house full of old newspapers stacked to the ceiling to have a problem - a superficially neat house with bulging closets, a full attic, and a garage with no room for cars can be just as bad.

I'm never going to achieve a Zen-like state of minimalism. I like my books and games and electronics parts and gadgets, but achieving balance and simplifying things as much as possible are good goals to shoot for.

The short answer is that I don't know what your house or apartment looks like, but I'd suggest reading and trying GTD first and if after phase I of GTD, you don't think you're decluttered enough, read It's All Too Much (or just check it out from the library and take notes). I would also recommend subscribing to the RSS feed from Lifehacker and 43 Folders for good tips and for tools (paper, computer, or web-based) for doing GTD.

One more note that I left off in my original e-mail reply:
GTD feels great while you are doing it because every step makes your life simpler and removes items from your "psychic RAM" as David Allen calls it. On the other hand, de-cluttering your life as described in It's All Too Much is extremely painful while you are doing it. Unless you are just lazy or into total avoidance, most of the stuff you accumulate you kept for a reason that seemed good at the time. Going through that accumulated cruft years later brings on feelings of nostalgia, guilt, and sometimes inferiority ("I really wanted to learn how to do that, but I never took the time and now I realize I wasted my money") and speaking of money, it also makes you realize how much money you've likely wasted over the years. On the bright side, once it is all done, you will feel better and it's good to see all that stuff in a pile for the trash or for charity because it helps you make better decisions in the future.

Converting Video and Other File Types Online

2007-12-05T09:49:00.000-06:00

I needed to download a YouTube video and convert it to an AVI to test some video software I'm working on. I had installed a Greasemonkey script on my home computer that lets you download the video as an FLV (Flash video) and I have found tools here and there to convert to any other format, but some tools work better with some formats than others, so I've got one to make iPod videos, one to make WMVs, and so on. Even though this was a work project, most of the sites that host the video conversion tools (or the ones that do online conversions for you) were blocked by my employer (I guess video == porn and format conversion == piracy to them), but I found one that wasn't blocked AND it was cooler than any of the other ones I had used, Zamzar:

Zamzar.com

You can upload a file from your computer or give it a URL. In this case, I gave it the URL to the YouTube video and told it to convert to AVI. A few minutes later I got an e-mail with a download link to my AVI file. It doesn't just do video, it will do Office files, PDF, image files, audio files, and video. Here is the complete conversion chart with supported types:

Zamzar File Conversion Types

An Alternative to Presidential Debates

2007-11-28T09:58:00.001-06:00

I would like to see a presidential essay contest. You put all of the candidates in study carrels so they can't crib off each other, give them pencil and paper (or, if you are really generous, a word processor NOT connected to the internet so they can check their grammar and spelling and compose easier), then you give them 5 HARD topics (not provided in advance), tell them to pick 3 and then write at least a one page position paper/essay for each of the three without consulting reference material, their speech writers, or their campaign advisers. Give them a few hours. At the end of the time period, put all of the papers (unedited and uncorrected except by the candidate) on the Internet.

Not that this would ever happen in a million years, but wouldn't it be cool? Who do you think would write the best paper? What would be some good topics?

A few off the top of my head:

Discuss how price controls, tariffs, and subsidies can positively or negatively affect the local, national, and international economies. Provide examples
Describe how the post WWI division of the Middle East into nations defined largely by European fiat has affected the political and social instability of the region in the past 90 years.
Describe your opinion on whether the two party system compliments or detracts from the original intent of the bicameral legislature and the concepts of senators vs. representatives.
Describe your opinions on the role of the government in financing scientific research and give examples of what you consider appropriate or inappropriate types of research. Be as technical and precise as possible, providing explanations based on your reading and research on the topics discussed.
How should politicians deal with long term issues when all of the short term solutions would affect their popularity and chance of re-election or would negatively affect their political party? At a minimum, consider environmental issues, social security and welfare programs, and subsidies.

I'm thinking of some others, but feel free to add your own in the comments.

Sad Geek News - 40+ Year Old Electronics Store Going Out of Business in Huntsville

2007-11-27T15:03:00.000-06:00

Now that Radio Shack only seems to sell toys and cell phones and random cheap but overpriced gadgets, the Internet is pretty much the only place to buy electronic parts and equipment. Years ago, there were many electronics stores. Most of the catered to TV and radio repair techs or ham radio folks, but they were fairly easy to find. Now, with computers and big box stores and mass produced disposable electronic gadgets, the old independent brick-and-mortar shops are disappearing.

Maybe it's just because I've recently rediscovered an interest in electronics (largely through Make), but there seems to be a new renaissance in DIY electronics - the concepts of physical computing, the rise of microcontroller development tools (which make creating complex electronic hacks much easier than when you had to assemble everything out of discrete components or dozens of ICs), and the hacker/Maker culture have all combined to make it an interesting hobby again.

You can't compete, price and selection-wise, with DigiKey, Jameco, Sparkfun and all of the other online electronics stores, so the last remaining independent stores are closing. You can't really complain that the business model is shifting - change is constant and increasingly rapid - but some shifts, such as this one, have a built in Catch-22. When I got interested in electronics it was purely because I got some Radio Shack Science Fair electronics kit which I liked and which led me into my local Radio Shack (back when they were good sources of parts and kits) and just browsing the aisles spurred my interest and imagination. Without local stores and knowledgeable staff, I'm not sure how many people will get interested. Unless you already have some background in electronics, online shops and three-inch thick catalogs from Jameco or Digikey are overwhelming. In other words, if you have the knowledge up front, you can find what you want and do whatever you can dream up, but if you are starting from scratch, the learning curve can be daunting. The web is turning into a great learning resource, but it still seems that in most cases you create a shopping list of what you need for a particular project and just order it. If you are cooking, you might look at a recipe, then go to the store to buy what you need to make it. As you are shopping, you see all of the other foods on the shelves and you start thinking, "What if I substituted X for Y in this recipe" and "Oh look, Z is on sale, I wonder what I can make with that?" You lose that when shopping for parts online, although some stores like Sparkfun have blogs and forums and project ideas to help out beginners and to suggest new ideas.

Anyway, I had only recently found the only decent electronics store left in the Huntsville, Alabama area - W&W Electronics. It's been in business for over 40 years and has a huge store full of new and used (and even antique) parts. They don't carry the latest microcontrollers or sensors, but they do have just about everything else - digital and analog ICs, all kinds of semiconductors and discrete parts, dusty electronic kits, wires and connectors, power supplies, test equipment, speakers, motors (everything from DC hobby motors to stepping motors to huge AC motors), meters, transformers, PC board making supplies, LEDs, soldering equipment, proto-boards, fans, switches, project cases, nuts and bolts hardware, pumps, sockets, wire-wrapping supplies, heat shrink tubing, vacuum tubes, solenoids, crystals, and hundreds and hundreds of other items. The owner, who now scoots around the store in an electric wheelchair while his grandson runs the register, seems to know where everything is and what can be substituted for what. His knowledge of the technology probably stops at the mid-1980s or so, but he is very nice and helpful. One of the things about the store is that most of the semiconductor items are "behind the counter" and the first few times I went there, I figured it was off limits for browsing. It may have been at one time, but I finally asked if I could look around back there and he said, "Oh yes, look anywhere you want except for the offices" and after that I felt free to wander around and browse the whole store. I've spent hours there and I don't think I've seen half of what they have.

I just went there today at lunch to pick up a few things (a PIR sensor for $7, some ferrite coils for the Joule Thief project, some header pins for breadboard connectors, and just to browse). While I was looking around another person made a crack about how all his town had was a Radio Shack and how he has to drive an hour to come to this store to find stuff if he doesn't want to order it online and the clerk said that he'd better find what he needs now, because the store will be closed in six months and in five months they would be having a huge clearance/grab bag sale where they were going to sell everything in the store.

This is very sad news and I felt like I'd just been kicked, but it also gave me the "Oh my God" cold-sweats at the thought of a clearance sale. I usually go there to wander around and occasionally to pick up an odd component that I need in a hurry. Now I'm going to have to make a huge shopping list and try to figure out what I need to buy to fully stock up on everything I might ever want now that there won't be a local source anymore (and since if I time the sale right, I can probably get it all at a steal). So I guess that's one thing on my Christmas list even though the sale won't be until around the spring - spending money to fill my garage electronics workshop with at least one of everything (well, more than one of some things and I probably won't be buying too many vacuum tubes, although I have seen a few cool retro projects - maybe I'll stock up on them as well).

When I get more details on when the sale starts and the actual closing date of the store, I'll post it here and on the Make forums. It's ironic that Huntsville can't support a local electronics store. Huntsville has one of the highest engineer-to-population ratios in the country. Maybe we can at least help them go out with bang.

Great Customer Service (or, Should I Be Ashamed?)

2007-11-19T16:01:00.000-06:00

I have an L.L. Bean field coat that I've had for maybe ten years. It's faded (in a mostly good way, but like under the color, it's still much darker where the sunlight never hits it and you can see it under there), the woolen lining is a bit frayed, and about half of the buttons had broken (not just came off, but sorta cracked and shattered). I couldn't find exact replacement buttons, so I'd been checking out cloth stores for similar sized ones to replace all of them, but strangely having little luck (the ones I bought to replace the first lost one didn't fit the button hole perfectly and it wouldn't stay buttoned.

I'd read about how L.L Bean really stands by their lifetime guarantees (not just warranties, but "satisfaction guaranteed" forever) and that they actually fix up their returned items and donate them to charity (for a huge tax write-off, I'm sure), so even though I didn't remember exactly when I bought it or what I paid for it, didn't have a receipt, or even know what model and size it was (the tag was so frayed), I boxed it up, filled out a return form with honest answers ("wear and tear", "cracked and missing buttons", "bought over ten years ago", etc.) and sent it back. I filled out the form for them to replace it with the current style of the same coat, but evidently the numbers didn't match up or they were uncertain of the size or whatever. I just got an e-mail today saying that they had processed my return and were sending me a $129 L.L. Bean gift card to purchase a new coat of my choice (or anything else I wanted). No questions asked.

I wonder how many people totally abuse this? Theoretically, you could return any shirt or pants you bought there if they were worn out, didn't fit any more, or anything. Evidently, not enough people abuse it to make them lose money in doing it, but as happy as I am about a new coat, I actually feel sort of bad about it.

Great company, though. It's hard to imagine that L.L.Bean and Abercrombie and Fitch started out years ago as direct competitors in outdoor clothing, cold weather gear, and fishing/hunting/camping supplies, but Abercrombie and Fitch mutated into an obnoxious preppy mall-monstrosity selling stressed out "stylishly damaged" clothes (faded, wrinkled torn, and filled with holes), while L.L. Bean has kept their image and quality intact (and you can still buy fly fishing rods and sleeping bags from them). Put another way, you could return ten year old items to L.L. Bean because they were worn out even though they are in better shape than the distressed clothes that A&F sells as new at highly inflated prices.

It must be that time of year, my TV convergence went out again

2007-11-08T10:38:00.000-06:00

Last year, just around Thanksgiving, the convergence on my Panasonic HDTV went out. Facing $500 to have it repaired or over $1000 for a new TV, I Googled around and researched and figured out how to fix it myself for less than $50 and it worked great. I posted the experience and the instructions on my blog and I've helped scores of people repair their own, many of whom had never used a soldering iron before.

Fixing my TV, Part I

Fixing my TV, Part II

As luck would have it, very near to exactly one year since I fixed it, it is screwed up again. This time, it comes and goes, but it is definitely the same problem. Some people had suggested in the comments to my original posts that I use the higher priced, and supposedly higher quality, parts ($29 vs. $6) and replace the power resistors at the same time. This time, I ordered the higher priced parts from partstore.com (with overnight shipping) and I'll replace the resistors at the same time (I'm pretty sure I can get them locally), so wish me luck in getting at least another year or more out of this TV. The higher priced parts are supposed to be exact factory replacements for the Panasonic part number C5AA00000108 (STK392-110). In either case, I saved money and got another year of life out the TV and even though I'm paying nearly $100 for this repair (with the overnight shipping), it's still less than a repair shop or a new TV).

Even if we get a new TV soon, and I'd really like to, it would be nice to have this one still working for video games in the rec room or to sell.

Cool Music Saturday

2007-09-29T13:28:00.000-05:00

First, the obligatory "I'm sorry I haven't blogged in so long" apology...

There.

Classical Swing

Brian Setzer has a new album called Wolfgang's Big Night Out , which consists of rockabilly/jazz/big band swing/guitar heavy adaptations of classical music. Yeah, the idea is a little corny, but the whole swing revival thing is a weird mixture of corny and cool and I'm a big fan of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Squirrel Nut Zippers, and Cherry Poppin Daddies. Great album. Tracks include "Take the Fifth" (Beethoven's 5th Symphony), "One More Night With You" (a great song set to Grieg's Hall of the Mountain King), "1812 Overdrive" (1812 Overture), and "Take A Break Guys" (God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - a great tune for your Christmas mix CD or playlist).

I heard a bit about this album on NPR Thursday morning then I heard about Amazon's new MP3 store (which I'm ready to ditch iTunes for). You can listen to previews of the tracks on the Amazon site.

The new Amazon music store is very cool. Individual songs are usually 99 cents, but I've seen 89 cent tracks a few more expensive ones as well. Albums are variously priced, but always cheaper than buying the constituent tracks. Best of all, all the songs are non-DRM'ed MP3s - listen to them on any computer, use any MP3 player, cut them into ring tones, or burn them on as many CD-Rs as you want - no technical limits (there are, of course, ethical limits and what you agree to do with them by clicking the "terms of use" agreement). I'm not sure if they are watermarked or not. The new DRM-free iTunes tracks are - you can do anything you want with them as well, but if they show up on BitTorrent, they know who bought them originally. Unfortunately, I don't think you can make Amazon Associate links to MP3 songs yet, so here is a normal link (not that I make much if any money from Amazon Associates anyway).

Wolfgang's Big Night Out

Rock vs. Opera, Revisiting the 80's

I always "test" new music services by looking for obscure stuff. Amazon's catalog isn't nearly as big as iTunes, but I'm sure it will grow. When I was telling Renee about it, she said I should search for this weird song that we saw the video for on MTV over twenty years ago. We only saw the video once. Several years ago we were talking about it and I started searching around to see who recorded it and to see if I could find a copy. It took me forever to find it online back then, there were no MP3s on any of the "sharing" sites, no one had heard of it or the group, etc. I finally did find it and even bought the LP from a used record store in Seattle.

Anyway, once Renee mentioned it, I decided to search again since the amount of information on the net has grown exponentially since then. Amazon's music store didn't have it, but YouTube did. Not only did iTunes have it, but they had four or more albums by the group (mostly in Norwegian). The song is a mash-up of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" with the "Queen of the Night" aria by Mozart by Dollie de Luxe from the album "Rock vs. Opera". No, it's probably not worth all of the effort I had put in to finding it, but it is a good example of how connected information is on the net and how the "long tail" works. I still kinda like the song as well and it fits in well with genre mashups like the Setzer album.

Here is the song on YouTube (I still can't find the original video):

In the original video, a garage band was practicing in an apartment and an opera singer was practicing next door. They try to drown each other out, then end up synching up. I think the song was different in the video, with a lot more lead up as they each played and sang different sections before merging into something closer to the recorded song. This YouTube video consists of pictures of Dollie de Luxe from concerts and album art.

Arduino, Beakman's Motor, and Instructables

2007-09-16T17:11:00.001-05:00

Over ten years ago, I set up a web page describing how to make a simple electric motor that I saw on the Beakman's World TV show. Over the years, it has had hundreds of thousands of hits and I've received a lot of fan mail and questions about the project. I know that it is has been the subject of a lot of science fair projects (with quite a few wins) and I provided a few suggestions on using it in a science fair project. The hardest part of those suggestions had to do with how to measure the speed of the motor. I had several ideas, but I'd never tried any of them.

The other day I got another one of the "How do I measure the motor speed?" e-mails on the same day that I got my Arduino Diecimila board from the Make Store, so that sort of answered my question of "This is cool, now what do I do with it?" concerning the Arduino board: I made an optical tachometer to measure the speed of the Beakman's Motor and posted it on Instructables.

I hadn't even built one of the Beakman's Motors in a while, so it was a good exercise for that as well. The one I built runs at 1200 RPM, just in case you were wondering.

Instructable: Arduino-Based Optical Tachometer

Just as an aside, I've always been interested in hardware and electronics, but I'm always frustrated when I build something. I think I've finally figured out that I don't do it often enough to have developed any real skills for electronic construction (or design, for that matter). I think it through, read and research, make a few notes, collect my parts and then think it is all going to work first time, but then I forget basic stuff, have to look up basic facts (resistor color-code?), I'm appalled at how bad my breadboard full of parts looks, and so on. Just like any other physical activity, it takes practice and hard work to develop skill - knowledge alone won't do it. I need to build more stuff.

UPDATE:
The Make Magazine blog posted a link to my project (well, I submitted it to them, but they picked it up and posted it).

Crap Cleaner (the computer kind)

2007-08-28T11:26:00.000-05:00

My laptop and desktop at home (and to some extent my laptop at work) have been really sluggish. I knew the problem was too many startup programs (most of which I don't need - do I really care if my Quicktime files open a little faster because I have a program running in my system tray all the time?) and a messy registry (I install and remove a lot of software), but I kept avoiding doing anything about it. Then the other day on, I think, Lifehacker.com (or one of those productivity blogs that I read so much that they destroy my productivity) I found a highly recommended program called CCleaner (nee Crap Cleaner) that did an amazing job of decrufting my system. It will clean out temporary files, old Microsoft hotfix installs, program caches that you didn't even know were there, dead links, and lots of other stuff (full configurable). Just running that on my home laptop cleared 1.3GB!

Then it will scan and cleanup your registry (it took two passes for mine - rescan after the first pass). It will backup all changes to a .reg file in case something doesn't work. Again, this is fully configurable as well. Most of the stuff this cleans up is dead/invalid file extension links, registration information for COM DLLs that don't exist on your system anymore, settings for programs you don't have installed, etc. I just kept my fingers crossed and selected all of the options. It found like 350 problems on the first pass, then found another 120 on the second pass. Third pass passed clean.

It also gives you a much quicker interface to Add and Remove Programs where you can run the uninstaller on things you don't want anymore. If you've deleted or moved the files so that it can't find the uninstaller, it will let you delete the entry (which the control panel app won't let you do). You might actually want to do this step first (or at least re-run the registry clean portion afterward).

Finally, it will list every program that is configured to run on startup. This is a potentially risky thing to mess around with because some of the programs are cryptic, but useful or necessary. Many of them are programs that periodically scan for updates to your software, so you can remove them if you prefer to periodically check for updates manually. The best thing to do is to Google each program name. Look for a link to one of the anti-virus companies - they usually provide a page of info for these type programs to tell people what they are for, whether they are adware or spyware, and the consequences of deleting them.

After I did all of this on my home laptop, it boots up to the desktop in less than a minute (it was taking 3-4 minutes to be fully responsive) and comes back from sleep and suspend much faster. The improvement wasn't as great on my work computer, but was still noticeable. I'm going to do my desktop at home tonight (I never use it much and the kids have it so crap loaded that it drives me crazy - it's time for a rebuild or a new computer).

Crap Cleaner Homepage

Oh yeah, go through and confirm all of the options before running it - there is help and a guide on the website if you don't understand what some of the options do. None of them are really harmful, but some of them may annoy you. I told it to leave my cookies and stored passwords alone since for many sites, I prefer for the browser to keep my passwords and for the sites to remember who I am. I also didn't let it reset/clear my "Open with..." choices, recent documents, and recent programs (I think they're unchecked by default).

NOTE: One other option to look out for, by default CCleaner installs that parasitic Yahoo Toolbar and a wedge to check for updates to itself (one of the things I used it to remove from other programs). Be sure to read all of the installation options carefully when you install it!

NOTE 2: I don't suppose there is anything inherently wrong about the Yahoo toolbar, I just hate any program that "tags along" on other installs if you don't read the fine print. It also used to be notoriously hard to remove. In fact, this time when it got installed, I removed it using the Control Panel and it still didn't go away from the browser. Instead, you have to click the pencil icon by the search input box and select Uninstall from there. It asks you why you should ever want to remove such a wonderful and useful program so they can make it even better. I suggest that you be brutally honest with them.

NOTE 3: I do love the Google Toolbar, but mainly because I get to install it myself when I want it and it plays well with Google Apps, GMail, Blogger, etc.

Join the Cult of the Amateur and Rule the Miscellanous Web of Everything That Is Killing Our Culture

2007-08-24T14:59:00.000-05:00

Often, by accident or choice, I wind up reading books that interact or relate to each other in interesting ways. In this case, it is three books that cover the latest Internet technologies, dubbed Web 2.0, but the intentions of each book are very different. In fact, reading them at the same time is like watching a cage match of ideas.

It has been said that the difference between a fact and a Truth is that two Truths can be "true" even if they contradict each other. In these three books, the authors start with many of the same facts, but reach entirely different ideas about what Truths those facts add up to.

First up is Everything Is Miscellaneous, by David Weinberger. This book tells how the Web 2.0 concepts of blogging, self-publishing of web sites, videos, and photos, and the tagging of information is building a new type of information structure that is changing how we work, play, and live. In other words, it is causing major changes to society and is shaking up industries and institutions that control information.

Its basic premise is simple. Weinberger defines three orders of organization. The first order is based on matter. What an object does, what it looks like, how it is used, and, most importantly, where it is. An example would be books on a shelf. You might alphabetize them, group them by subject, group them by size, or just jumble them all up and remember what they look like in order to find one again. Either way you sort or organize them, you have to pick one way because a physical object can't be in more than one place.

The second order is where you classify the objects, perhaps by multiple criteria. The example here is an index or a card catalog. You might code your books then create a card catalog that organizes cards by subject, author, dates, etc. You can have more than one card per book, so you have a higher order of organization, but you still have to make up front decisions as to what types of cards you will create. If you create a new type of card, you have to resort the cards, rescan the books, create new cards for each book, and so on. If you don't have a fixed category for something, it goes under "miscellaneous" and that leads to the last order.

In the third order of organization, items from the first and second order can be tagged and linked in a near infinite number of ways. Of course, this is the model that is emerging on the Internet. If you search for a book title on Amazon, it may appear in many different categories there, from the book's Amazon page you can read reviews contributed by others. You can find other editions and other books by the same author. You can find books that other people who bought that book also purchased, link to movies based on that book, find out who starred in them, find out what else they've been in, and read a news story about their latest arrest.

Or, to use another example, instead of taking your photographic prints (first order), picking out the best and putting them in a photo album and the rest in a shoebox (second order), you can now take your digital prints and put them on Flickr, name them, sort them into multiple albums (sets), link to them on your blog, share them with others, and apply multiple tags to them so that others can find them (or so they can be grouped together with pictures by other people who have the same tags).

The book is full of examples like this and really drives home the idea that we are living in an increasingly information rich age. Are you old enough to remember when, if you were watching a movie and thought, "What other movie was that person in? I can't remember the name!" and you didn't have any way to find out other than hoping it came to you? Now you can pop over to IMDB.com (which is a largely user created database) and find out. This is a trivial example, but now you have almost any fact or information you need just a few clicks away - probably more information that you can process easily and much of it is generated not by authoritarian sources, but by other people and that is the heart of the Web 2.0 revolution.

Of course, the big fish in the Web 2.0 pond is Wikipedia, the user created encyclopedia. I am a big fan (and an occasional contributer) to Wikipedia and Weinberger is a fan as well. I won't go into what he has to say about it in depth, but he spends quite a bit of the book explaining why, against all odds, Wikipedia works and what that kind of collaborative knowledge means for the future. It also leads me to the next book...

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen, covers much of the same material as Everything Is Miscellaneous, but arrives at a very different conclusion. I want to stress up front that I thought this was a very good and very thought-provoking book and I highly recommend that you read it. I didn't agree with everything in Miscellaneous, but I agree with a little less in Cult of the Amateur. Of course, since I am neck-deep in the Web 2.0 culture, I guess that is to be expected. The fears that Keen brings up are valid (if sometimes overstated) and really should be considered talking points for anyone developing, using, or exploring new technologies.

Keen focuses on several aspects of the new Internet. First of all is the concept of self-publishing and narrow-casting - blogs, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, iTunes play lists, etc. His argument is that these increasingly popular sources of information, art, news, and opinion are destroying the foundations of the modern information age and news media. He cites the examples of misinformation in blogs, the crumbling of traditional newspapers, magazines, and radio and TV news organizations and states they are all being replaced by amateur "news" that is un-vetted, unprofessional, untrustworthy, and just plain bad. He argues that there is a reason there are editors, publishers, and peer reviews in traditional publishing paths and that without them, all "news" is just gossip and opinion.

However, as Weinberger points out in his book, sometimes consensual editing does work and the idea of throwing out blog entries, forum posts, pictures, video, etc. and then letting the users assemble the information by links, tags, and popularity does a surprisingly good job at filtering down to a useful consensus. Yes, there are inherent dangers in letting crackpots and zealots publish anything they want because some people will be tricked into believing them, but maybe the benefits outweigh the costs.

The second answer to this problem is more troubling, but no less true - things change and when they do skills, professions, and careers often get radically transformed or they go away entirely. It sucks to be a typesetter or a classified ad sales person at a newspaper when newspapers and classified ads are dying. I'm sure it sucked to be a farrier when people stopped riding horses everywhere, too. Despite the gloom and doom and layoffs in newspapers and newsrooms, the U.S. unemployment rate is extremely low (and it dropped again last month), so people are working at doing something in this new economy.

A second area he covers can pretty much be summed up as "Why Wikipedia Is Bad". Again, his argument is that without professional editors, user created references like Wikipedia can never be trusted and he has plenty of quotes by encyclopedia writers and professional librarians to support his point (sarcasm intended). He drags out the traditional big scandals Wikipedia has gone through, but neglects the studies that Weinberger cites about the error rates in Wikipedia vs. Brittanica and how quickly those errors were corrected in Wikipedia once they were uncovered.

I love Wikipedia, but I wouldn't use it as a reference in my dissertation. What I do use if for is what it was intended to be - a first place to go to learn general information about any subject and to provide links and background materials to dig deeper into it if I wish. It also helps to understand it, to read a page's history and discussions (particularly if it is a contentious subject), and to verify any information that doesn't sound right. As Weinberger also points out, the cross-referencing nature of Wikipedia articles provides a certain amount of checking as well. If the article says Thomas Jefferson was born in 1835 and the year links to the Wikipedia article on 1835 which lists births of other famous people, you'd have to be pretty stupid to not figure that these people were not his contemporaries. In order to really spread disinformation, you would have to edit dozens or hundreds of linked articles.

One amusing argument against Keen's idea about the superiority of books and the failures of Wikipedia is when he discusses Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Keen talks about how professional books are superior because they are fact checked, edited, proofread, and can therefore be trusted, but online articles are often full of misinformation. Or, even if the online information is correct, it may be biased in many different ways. When discussing Wales, he says that Wales attended a one room private school in Huntsville, Alabama then dropped out of the University of Alabama. If Keen had bothered to properly reference Wales' Wikipedia entry and follow a few links, he would find that the one room schoolhouse he attended was an elementary school "in the tradition of a one-room schoolhouse" and that from the eighth grade on he attended Randolph School, a respected and expensive private school in Huntsville. He then got his bachelor's degree from Auburn University, a master's degree from University of Alabama, and then left before finishing his PhD there. Quite a different picture from the one Keen presents. Is Keen's portrayal of Wales factually true and unbiased?

Of course, the ultimate evidence against the factual superiority of the printed word can be found in the list of bestselling non-fiction books, which would include crap like The Secret, crap by Sylvia Browne, crap by Kevin Trudeau, and books of opinion by talk-show hosts (half of which are crap depending on which side of the political fence you fall). Are these all objectively "true" because publishers publish them, editors approve them, and many people buy them? Is there a way that errors in them can be easily pointed out and corrected?

Finally, and on firmer ground as far as I am concerned, Keen delves into the underworld of the Internet. Rampant pornography, Internet gambling addictions, identity theft, loss of secrecy, and theft of copyrighted materials. Yes, these are bad (some very much so). Some are less bad than others and while I wholeheartedly believe that artists and creators have the right to profit from their work and prevent it's theft and misuse, DRM and other methods of punishing the innocent that the guilty can bypass at will are doing much more harm than good. In fact, my comments about newspaper people losing their jobs applies equally to the music and movie industry. Artists are getting paid more and there is much more diversity in the offerings to the public, but it is a solid fact that the 100 year history of the recording and movie industry is undergoing a rapid change that they refuse to deal with. The old models just do not work any more, but people always seem to find new ways to work, create, and make money. More power to them unless they are trying to make that money purely by suing others.

You might, as I did, get mad at some of the stuff in this book, but it is well worth reading. And if some of the technologies they talk about in these books leave you scratching your heads, that brings me to the third book...

If Everything is Miscellaneous preaches that the new Internet is a way to change the world for the better and Cult of the Amateur preaches that the new Internet is destroying society, Rule The Web, by Mark Frauenfelder, co-creator of Boing Boing and editor of Make magazine, is a step-by-step guide on how to accomplish either (or both, I suppose).

I won't spend too much time on this review since it is so long already, but I would like to heartily endorse this book. I'm a web geek, so I can humbly say that I already knew 95% of the stuff he describes, but just that extra 5% made the book worth it. Plus, it is an extremely inexpensive book, just $14.95 MSRP. For people who know how to use the mouse, start a web browser, and send an e-mail, but little else, this book will have them creating blogs, manipulating Flickr, finding almost anything they ever wanted to know, and keeping themselves (and their computers) safe while browsing the cool and wonderful (or wicked and dangerous) world wide web.

Of course, it should be noted that books like Rule The Web straddle the line between the old world publishing and Web 2.0 worlds. Frauenfelder has a companion web site where he posts new material, updates, and corrections (and allows user submissions and comments) in addition to his contributions to Boing Boing and Make, which are, in my opinion, the kind of thing that makes the Web 2.0 much more of a blessing than a curse.

Chumby - The Coolest Idea I've Seen In a Long Time

2007-08-24T12:39:00.001-05:00

I was reading an article on the Make blog about Open Source Hardware licenses. One of their "real world" examples was for a new product called Chumby, an open, hackable wi-fi enabled web viewer gizmo. I've been wanting a digital picture frame for a while, but the only one I've really been interested in is one that connects via wi-fi to my Flickr account and streams certain tagged pictures. I don't want to resize and copy my files to an SD or CF card and remember to keep them up-to-date. They do make ones like this and the price isn't too bad, but it is a lot to pay for a one task device. Other wireless picture viewers require a service contract. Uh, no. I hate subscriptions.

The Chumby looks like a good compromise with a lot more promise. It's a cuddly little computer with a touch-screen that streams "channels" of content from the web with no subscription fees. You can use it as an alarm clock, put it on your desk or by your bed, or put it on the coffee table in the living room. It can show videos, pictures, news feeds, jokes, or just about any web content. You can use the touchscreen to play games. Both the hardware and the software are Open Source - you can download the PC board layouts and schematics and build your own, download the source code and modify it, add new sensors or outputs - whatever you want. If it's good, it can become part of the product for everyone.

They're not available for sale yet, but the promised price is under $200 (so I'm figuring $199.99). I hope they're available by Christmas, because I want one. You can go to their site and create a Virtual Chumby and play around with the channel concept. Here's mine (currently only displaying a Flickr feed, I think). You can click on it to get your own.

Where I Work (Testing Embedded Google Maps)

2007-08-21T11:46:00.000-05:00

This should be a Google Map centered on the building where I work.

View Larger Map

STARDUST (GO SEE IT)!!

2007-08-10T21:56:00.000-05:00

Sorry to shout. The movie was absolutely great (not that you should get your expectations up or anything). We all just got back from seeing it and everyone in the whole family loved it. Applause and some tears at the end and everything. The cast was dead on (even the guy who played Tristan who was a perfect choice since he was surprisingly good in exactly the right way for his character). Best of all, it felt like a Neil Gaiman story. Wow.

The only bad thing was that it was showing on one screen at our multiplex and the theater was only about 1/2-2/3 full, which is very sad so everyone should go see it quick.

Technorati Claim

2007-08-10T10:53:00.001-05:00

Technorati Profile

Former Professors

2007-08-10T10:00:00.000-05:00

Something someone said to me yesterday got me to thinking about a person I went to school with at Auburn, so I Googled him (unsuccessfully). As such things happen, that led me to Googling other people I knew at Auburn and checking out the faculty to see how many of my old professors were still there. In the Computer Science department, I think only three professors are still there that were teaching when I went (from 1985-1989). At least one had died, my senior project adviser and ACA coordinator P.A.D. DeMaine, but I found that he had a Wikipedia entry.

I remembered another teacher that I really liked and looked him up to see if he was still there and he was, so I sent him an e-mail. His name is Dr. Cyrus "Sonny" Dawsey and he teaches geography. I met him at an Amiga user's group meeting and, since I needed some humanities electives, I signed up for his geography course. I enjoyed it so much that I also took an elective course in Latin American Geography, which was his field of expertise. He had great slides and stories of his travels in Central and South America, including my favorite story of how he took a VW van full of students on a drive from Texas to Manaus, Brazil where they sold the van, took a steamer down the Amazon, and then flew back home. What an adventure! I've never had the chance to travel there myself (yet), but that class probably has something to do with my enjoyment of Latin American authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges.

I had always been interested somewhat in geography and cartography and back then there was no field of GIS, but Dr. Dawsey had written a mapping program for the Amiga that allowed you to digitize fairly crude maps and color code them based on demographic data files. Pretty trivial these days, but computer graphics were fairly limited then. Seeing that program was probably my first experience with computer generated mapping. Eventually I wound up with a job in GIS creating software for mapping power and water utilities and then doing contracts with HUD for mapping nationwide special program areas and locations of HUD homes.

Anyway, I sent him letter saying the usual "you probably don't remember me, but..." (and he vaguely remembered me from the Amiga meetings) but adding that I really learned a lot from him and that much of what I learned has affected my interests in literature, my knowledge of the world, and maybe even some of my career choices.

He sent me a nice letter in return, telling me of changes in the university and changes in his department (because of the rise of GIS, his department moved from Humanities to the College of Science and Math, merged with Geology) and he now teaches classes in GIS using Intergraph software (where I work now). He also sent me a link to some pictures he took this March where he was the lecturer on a cruise ship to South America and along the Amazon.

Amazon Trip

Finally, in searching his page I found out something else interesting. A few years ago there was a piece on a TV news magazine and some local news coverage about the Confederados, a group of southern Confederates who, dissatisfied with losing the Civil War, moved to Brazil and set up a colony there. What I didn't realize was the Dr. Dawsey and his brother are the ones who wrote the book and did all of the research on them, so I ordered a copy from Amazon (fitting, huh?).

Small world...

Comic Con Report

2007-08-06T08:19:00.000-05:00

Whew. It's been over a week and I'm just barely recovered. This was my first Comic Con. I used to regularly attend small regional SF conventions, but it has been years since I've been to one and I've never been to one this large. By my best estimate, we only experienced less than 10% of everything that was going on and we were there every day, including preview night.

I'm not sure where to begin in writing up what we did. I would return to the hotel room every night, upload my pictures to the computer, then read Ain't It Cool and other web sites to see what I had missed. I did get to see some of my blogger buddies from L.A., Karen (who I had met before) and Jodi (who I met face-to-face for the first time). We also had a great time outside of the convention in San Diego and Los Angeles, but I'll put that in a different post.

Here are some of the highlights (click photos to see larger versions):

Sergio Aragones (the Mad artist). I got an autographed comic from him written out to my dad, who is a big Mad fan ("To Hoppy. MAD'ly, Sergio Aragones").

Paramount Pictures presentation: Previews and clips from Stardust, Beowulf, Iron Man, Drillbit Taylor, Spyderwyck Chronicles, and Hot Rod; Neil Gaiman, Adam Samberg, Jon Favreau, J.J. Abrams, Leonard Nimoy, and many others; the live videocast from the Indiana Jones set with Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Gerard Butler, and Shia Labeouf (and the big surprise - Karen Allen!); great swag (movie posters, comic books, and free t-shirts)

The Lost panel - not too many hints and surprises, but very entertaining

The Heroes panel (Kevin Smith showed up at this one - he's going to write and direct one of the Heroes: Origins episodes next year).

The Battlestar Galactica panel (the creators and writers and the major female actors - including Lucy Lawless, who is coming back).

Futurama. This may have been our favorite event. Matt Groening (and it is pronounced grayning, by the way), David X. Cohen, and the entire voice cast was there. Bongo did a special comic book about the return of the show which was very funny. They showed a five minute preview of the first new Futurama movie, then the voice cast did a live reading of the comic book in all of the character voices. It was awesome. John DiMaggio, the voice of Bender, was hilarious.

David Prowse, Peter Mayhew, Lou Ferrigno, and several other celebs doing autographs (for big bucks, so I just snapped pics from a distance). Cameron and I were walking through the exhibit hall and Peter Mayhew walked right by us and I said, "Look! It's Chewbacca!" and with everyone wearing costumes, Cameron was looking for someone in a Chewbacca outfit and not at the seven foot tall guy who just walked by.

The "Who Wants to be a Superhero?" finalists from last year. Feedback was the nicest "pro" we met. We even discussed C# programming.

Costumes and crowds.

Many celebrities (Jane Wiedlan, Erin Moran, Marc Singer, etc.)

Orson Scott Card (who remembered me from our e-mail conversations)

Cameron's pictures with Katie Sagal, Richard Hatch, and others

Renee and Morgan posing with Nathan Hamill (Mark's son who works at Bongo comics) and his story about playing Winnie the Pooh with Harrison Ford on the set of Return of the Jedi.

Babylon 5 panel (some funny stories).

Cameron and I watched 20 Million Miles to Earth with Ray Harryhausen doing a live commentary.

Live steel fighting demonstrations: Blunted, but real, swords and heavy armor.

Swag and merchandise.

The exhibit hall where we spent hours but probably only visited 1/3 of all of the tables

I didn't get to see Ray Bradbury :-( but, overall, I can't complain much....

The Whole Comic-Con Picture Set on Flickr

Comic-Con 2007

2007-07-23T13:51:00.000-05:00

We're getting ready to leave tomorrow. Everyone has packed (except for me), Renee has worried over the itinerary, I think we have dog-sitters arranged, the camera batteries are charging, I've got a mental list of things to bring for possible signings, I'm already distraught over the scheduling of events, and Renee is worried about the crowds. Now all I have to do is finish a few things at work so that I'll have a job when I return and then I can relax and prepare myself for chaos.

Wish us luck!

Comic-Con 2007

Things I Learned While Camping at the Beach...

2007-07-09T16:50:00.000-05:00

My daughter and some of her friends coerced me and another of their parents (who is a friend of mine from high school) to carry them camping in Gulf Shores over the weekend. I thought they were crazy for even attempting it, but then I figured that if they had carefully planned it out, it would be a great experience for them and I had rather be asked to chaperone than to not have them ask me.

There were five girls, three boys, and two adults. The kids are all juniors in high school. The girls had a tent, the boys had a tent, and Bruce and I had a tent. We stayed at Gulf State Park for two nights and, all considered, had a great time. It helps a lot that our kids and their friends are really good kids that we didn't have to worry about them getting into, or causing, trouble.

Here are a few things we learned...

Camping on the coast in July in tents with 95 degree heat and 80% humidity isn't the most comfortable way to spend a vacation, but it does make for an interesting adventure.

When you leave the campsite, be sure to zip up all of the flaps on your tents, including the ones that cover the mesh "windows" in case it rains while you are gone.

It rains at least once every day on the gulf coast in summer.

Applying spray sunscreen in random patterns while standing in the wind can produce very interesting sunburn patterns.

Applying sun screen to every part of your body except your back means that you get a sunburned back (note that #4 and #5 are not about me - I looked like a total dork with a floppy hat and a long sleeve t-shirt most of the time I was in the sun and re-applied sunscreen every thirty minutes).

It's hard to sleep in a campground when drunk rednecks in RVs are partying at 1AM (complete with music, strobe lights (!), and drunken "Yee Ha!" yells). They threw up and went to bed just as we were about to call the rangers.

Every restaurant has a wait of over one hour, particularly if you are a party of 10. If they don't, you probably don't want to eat there.

If you're camping in the summer on a lot with no trees with high temperatures and humidity, being near the bathhouse is a blessing. The Gulf State Park has very clean, air-conditioned bath houses with nice showers, hot water, and electrical outlets. We contemplated pulling our sleeping bags in there once or twice.

Our kid's musical tastes aren't that different than ours. I even had to tell them to stop playing 80's music because I was sick of hearing Bon Jovi. I still don't like "Party Like A Rock Star", though.

Kids grow up fast and if they ask you to do things like this, you should probably say "yes" because you may never get the chance again. When we got back, I thanked them for forcing (or tricking) me into going.

A few more pics are here.

New Kitchen and Dining Room Floor

2007-07-09T16:43:00.000-05:00

About a month ago, on my wife's birthday, our dishwasher pump sprung a leak and ruined our kitchen floor. After a month of replacing the dishwasher, trying to pick out flooring, waiting for an insurance check, and scheduling the installation, we got our new floor installed late last week.

Our dining room has had carpet since we moved in and we didn't like the idea of a carpeted eating area, so we had the same flooring installed in the kitchen and dining room. It looks like stone tile, but it is actually a laminate flooring that snaps together and "floats" (which means it isn't nailed or glued down). The stone slab look is purely a visual illusion, the floor is flat and smooth.

Here is a close-up of the floor:

Here it is in the kitchen:

Here is the corner of the dining room (my lens isn't wide angle enough, but I wanted to show the wall colors along with the floor):

Opinions Requested

2007-06-21T10:51:00.000-05:00

Assume that this is your house and you were preparing to replace the siding with vinyl siding, or even just paint it.

Given the style the house, the white garage door (which will stay white), the color of the window trim (which you are too lazy to change unless absolutely necessary), and color of the gutters and porch (gray and which you are also too lazy to change unless absolutely necessary):

What color would you choose? (Note that the color does not have to change - white is a valid choice)

Should the trim be a different color? (Again sticking with some gray and burgundy'ish in the window frames, if possible)

In your opinion, would a stronger color go against the style of the house? (Something like olive or slate, not purple or sky blue)

Please leave comments on this post - they would be greatly appreciated. Please ignore the towels on the railing and the hose reel in the front yard. They are not required elements for choosing colors.

UPDATE: Thanks for the suggestions in comments and via e-mail. We decided to stay with white overall, most of the gray will be green, the burgundy window frames will stay and the shutters may become burgundy or a green that matches the trim (we'll have to see what looks best when it comes to that). Hopefully it will be done before we head to California.

I Have Good Children

2007-06-19T10:06:00.001-05:00

They understand me all too well. This is what they got me for Father's Day:

Oh yeah, speaking of gifts, I never explained about our anniversary. The 20th anniversary is the "platinum" anniversary according to the new list. It turns out that things made of platinum are, strangely enough, really expensive. Since we have a lot of expenses on schedule for this year already, I was pretty sure that Renee didn't want me to spend an outrageous amount of money on platinum jewelry, so I had to improvise.

I finally settled on roses. My plan was good, but I had one little hangup on it. The part that went great was a platinum plated real rose. They take a real rose, preserve it in resin, paint it with a conductive paint, plate it in a copper solution, and then electroplate it in real platinum (only a few atoms thick, but it looks great). My plan was to get 19 real roses and the 20th was the platinum one. Everything went great except that I couldn't find 19 roses at the last minute (I won't embarrass myself telling where I shopped), so I had to settle for 18 real roses, the platinum rose, and a box of rose printed stationary.

For our anniversary dinner, we went to 801 Franklin, a highly rated (i.e., expensive) restaurant here in Huntsville where we had an absolutely perfect dinner - a calamari salad, roast duck breast and confit for me, a lobster and shrimp dish for Renee, a bottle of wine, and a molten chocolate cake dessert (compliments of the house).

It was twenty years ago today...

2007-06-12T14:39:00.001-05:00

...that Renee and I got married.

We looked like this at the time:

Happy Anniversary to Us!

I'll tell everyone what I bought her for an anniversary gift after I give it to her...

Embarrassing Trivia

2007-06-08T09:23:00.000-05:00

Today is my birthday and I decided to treat myself to a coffee and banana nut loaf at Starbucks, something I've been avoiding while dieting.

As I was standing in line with about twelve or fifteen other people, the manager yelled out, "Trivia time! A free drink to the first person who can give me the full names of both members of Wham!"

Everyone, including me, starting thinking and muttering, "George Michael and... that other guy." After about ten seconds with no one coming up with it, I dredged through the mass of trivia in my head and said, "George Michael and Andrew Ridgely" and got a free double tall nonfat latte. The manager said I could get a free pastry if I sang a Wham! song, but I said I would happily pay for it instead.

If that wasn't embarrassing enough, they didn't take my name and when my coffee was ready, the barrista yelled, "Wham guy."

Sardis High School Class of 1982

2007-06-04T08:53:00.000-05:00

This weekend we went to Renee's 25th high school reunion back at our old high school, Sardis. Actually, it is the site of our old high school, since they tore down the old building and built a very nice new school in its place. Renee and I went to the same school, but I was two years behind her. We knew each other and had a shared pool of friends, but we didn't date until after school (after all, she was a cheerleader and I was in the band, not to mention the age difference, so that would never have worked).

Here we are before the reunion. Renee looked great, but she was still stressed out about going. That kind of stuff doesn't bother me that much and she didn't have anything to worry about.

This is Renee and one of her best friends, Kim.

Several of the attendees could still wear their letter jackets. All in all, everyone looked good and seemed to be doing OK in life.

Here are some of our other friends from this class. We keep up with these guys pretty well, at least by e-mail and Internet. Others, of course, we hadn't seen in years. Too many of the people there hadn't seen each other since graduation.

The full set of pictures are on my Flickr account...

Sardis High Class of 1982 Reunion

Cool Graph

2007-06-01T09:52:00.000-05:00

Cool for me, at least:

From PhysicsDiet.com, my public profile is here.

Hacker's Diet

Can you find the GeekAWay weekend on this graph? The very flat region is where I didn't record my weight for a few days, so I just entered the same data for the missing days. PhysicsDiet just upgraded their software to correctly interpolate missing data, which is a feature that many users had asked for.

Just in time for my wife's 25th high school reunion tomorrow night (maybe I shouldn't have put the number in there).

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

2007-05-30T11:29:00.000-05:00

Read this book in one day and feel a bit let down. The material, like the burned world being described, is worn out and mostly dead. Been done before. Still the approach is fresh. The prose is well crafted and beautiful, even when describing despair and horror. But the lovely prose can be distracting. Entertaining, but intrusive. The characters, the man and his son, are nameless. Maybe to embody the everyman. Their character comes through strongly but without identity. The voice of author predominates. Who is supposed to be writing this?

Literature professors and literature majors often say, between the lines and never so bluntly, that popular fiction, or genre fiction, or pulp fiction is all plot and no substance. The only skill they attribute to the author is in telling a story for its entertainment value and the highest measure of their writing skill is to not intrude on the story. To be transparent. Real literature to them is about the writing. And ideas, themes, symbols. The magic of words. The plot is not important and the story can be as mundane as someone wandering around a city for a day and returning home. The authorial voice in these books is more important than the voice of the characters. The dont often acknowledge that the best fiction does both. The author speaks through the characters and the plot and the story and the words themselves but doesnt intrude too much. This author is loved by the critics and literarati but is far from transparent.

Everything in the world is burned. The world is grey. Wet ash, gray sky, smoke still, lots of rain. There is no date or explanation for the fire. It is up to the reader. Is this a manuscript left in a drawer that was started in the cold war times? The fire seems nuclear. But ambiguous. Maybe it is the biblical apocalypse of the world destroyed not by water but by fire. Maybe it just seems relevant now due to global warming but even lecturing ex-vicepresidents wouldnt imagine this extreme. All the ex-vicepresidents are dead here though. Everything is dead. No plants grow and the trees crumble to dust if not burned already. No bugs. No animals. When the canned goods ran out people turned to cannibalism.

Who is writing this book? There is no paper. Its all ash or sodden pulp. The man is teaching the boy to read and write as they go south. On the road. Running from winter and slowly starving. Or he was teaching him but as they starve and hide from other horrors the lessons have stopped. If the text is this distinctive surely the author is important. Its not the post literate voice of a surviving culture. Like on my namin day i kilt me a bar. This author uses a large and expressive vocabulary. And short choppy sentences. Fragments. All apostrophes must have been burned in the fires that scorched the world. There are also random wordcontractions. This may be another literary allusion as the man and boy go south to find the snotgreen scrotumtightening sea.

There are few proper names in the book. They are avoided here too. Only God and a man who said his name was Ely are properly named, but Ely said that he was lying and wouldnt tell them his real name.

Dialog is like this.
Are you talking now?
Yes.
Where are we going?
South.
Do you want to die?
Yes.

The road should be capitalized. But it isnt. It’s the everyroad. The road that goes ever on and on. The allroads that leads to that city across the sea that burned while the emperor fiddled and has presumably burned again. They have a roadmap but the names are useless now. They havent seen the sky for maybe eight or nine years. All nights are dark. Quiet. No birds, no animals. They hear rain and thunder. Sometimes trees fall. The road is that path to the sea and also the greatest danger, because they dont know who theyll meet on it.

Perhaps the fire should be capitalized, too. But there are two fire symbols in the book. The fire of destruction or purification that cauterized the world and the fire the man and boy carry. That is the fire to live and the fire of hope and the fire of determination. The ash from both fires is everywhere.

Reading the book in one day is fairly easy. At lunch they set off with their shopping cart. Freezing as they go south. At supper they are avoiding cannibals and finding roasted children on firespits. After a warm bath the man swims naked in the cold sea out to a shipwreck and fills his pockets with whatever he can find. Literary allusions abound. By bedtime there is sadness followed by a little hope and the end.

The book is currently a bookclub choice by a popular television hostess. The world in the book is past television and the boy wouldnt know her name. The man would but wouldnt speak it. Names are past as well. The wires are melted on the tarmac of the road and there wont be television anymore. Ever. The book is about human nature distilled and crystallized by horrible circumstances and about love and hope, but all of these postapocalyptic books are about the same thing. Even the bad ones. This one is very good, but perhaps not great.

The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. They went on.

That was a quote. Its hard to tell since the quotation marks burned in the fire along with the apostrophes and birds. The book has a lot of that. Horror and beauty. Pretentious and versey.

Great Weekend

2007-05-29T08:10:00.000-05:00

This long weekend I:

Saw Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End
Caught up on the last four hours of Lost
Read the new Michael Connolly book, The Overlook
Finished cleaning the downstairs of the house
Washed and cleaned out my truck
Hauled another pickup load of stuff off to charity
Got a haircut
Finished making my cell phone charger box out of an old silverware cabinet
Played with Brio trains with my niece's 1.5yo son
Cooked a great meal of grilled tri-tips, corn on the cob, baked potatoes, green beans, and Vidalia onion salad
Lost three pounds (down 23 so far) despite the cookout and the fry-up and the broiled salmon
Had company on and off all weekend
Played Scattergories with friends
Kept the house clean through all of this
Didn't do any work (as in job work)
Didn't even get on the computer, although I checked my e-mail once or twice on my phone
Got up extra early this morning, got to work early, and wore a shirt that I haven't been able to fit into for a year or two

This morning when I got to work I found this neat article. Certainly some of what I've been doing in the cleaning, organizing, dieting, and exercising have been conscious decisions over the last few weeks and months and much of the inspiration has come from similar articles I've read online. I wasn't working from a list this weekend, but it was interesting that I think I touched on 20 or so of these tips:

52 Tips for Happiness and Productivity

Old Machines, Old Books, and Google Book Search

2007-05-25T14:18:00.000-05:00

In the latest issue of Make Magazine (volume 10) there was a review of a reprint of a book by Gardner Hiscox called Mechanical Movements, Powers and Devices. This book contains simple drawings and descriptions of just about every mechanical device in use as of its publication, which was around 1904.

After I read the review I was browsing the shelves at Barnes and Noble and found a similar book called 507 Mechanical Movements by Henry Brown for $7.95. I flipped through it and found that it was very similar to the one reviewed, so I bought it.

At first glance, these books don't seem too useful, but when you start looking through these devices you realize how many of them are still in use today and how valuable this could be as a research tool for just about anything mechanical that you might wish to construct, repair, or use. There are diagrams in here for pulleys, gears, linkages, pumps, cranks, windmills, and many other types of devices. Even if you never intend on building any of them, some of them are a fun visual puzzle to try to figure out why they work the way they do. Just in looking through the book you start to imagine Industrial Revolution era mills and factories, Victorian steam locomotives, and old Sears and Roebuck catalogs. They are a lot of fun if you have the proper mindset.

The reason these books are so relatively inexpensive is that they are out of copyright. The Brown book I picked up was published by Dover Press, which specializes in reprints. I liked the Brown book so much that I wanted to buy the Hiscox book, so I Googled it and found something very neat: Since the book was out of copyright, the Google Books project had scanned copies of several different editions that you can read online or download in PDF format! I've used the Google Books search a few times, but I didn't realize how many complete texts are available for download.

Here is the Hiscox book and a few others with related material. It isn't the exact version described in the Make review, but it is close. There are several editions of it going back to 1872. The Brown book is unavailable, possibly because of the editions that are still in print.

Mechanical Movements, Powers and Devices

Mechanisms and Mechanical Movements

The Engineer's Sketchbook of Mechanical Movements, Appliances, Devices, Contrivances, and Details

I'm sure there are hundreds or thousands of good books out there in in the Google library. Please let me know if you find ones to share!

Note To Self: Always Take "Before" Pictures

2007-05-23T14:12:00.000-05:00

Stay with me, these unconnected thoughts and title all tie together.

Occasionally I have a recurring dream where I discover a new room or wing of the house that I had either forgotten about or never knew was there. I think the last one was finding a rec room with a pool table and pinball machine in my attic. My favorite was finding a 5,000 square foot library of rare books through a hidden door in the closet. Like flying dreams, these are the kind of dreams where when you wake up, you're ticked off that it was just a dream.

We've been in this house about three years. It has a two car garage and a few times since we've lived here, we've stacked junk on top of itself enough to get a car in (both cars once, but I don't know how we did it). There was stuff in the garage from the previous owners, stuff that we moved from our previous junky garage, stuff that we put there when we moved and haven't touched yet, stuff that we've thrown in the garage to temporarily get it out of the house, and stuff that belongs there (tools, lawnmowers, bikes, etc.).

I like stuff. Lots of different stuff. Pretty much my whole life I've always believed that my biggest problem with stuff was not having any place to put it. Bigger houses, bigger garages, more bookshelves, more shelves in the garage, and more storage containers. I'm not one of those crazy people that they find six months after they died in an avalanche of newspapers, but I had reached the point where I was constantly frustrated that nothing was clean or straight, I couldn't find anything when I needed it, and doing things that should be enjoyable, like working on a project or a repair, were avoided because of the stress of finding a place to work, finding my tools, tripping over the junk, etc.

So (here is the part where it all starts coming together) I read a book about decluttering your life (It's All Too Much, by Peter Walsh - see link at the end of the article) and a few weeks ago I started. I began in the "study", which is our guest/computer/music/junk room. I threw away three or four garbage bags full of CD cases, unlabeled CD-Rs (they may have good stuff on them, but I figure if I didn't bother to label them and haven't missed them, I may as well ditch them), papers, old magazines, broken toys and gadgets and hauled off an entire pickup truck load of stuff to the thrift store. Some of the stuff was hard to get rid of for various reasons such as:

I really used to like this and it has sentimental value (note: old software that won't run on your new computer shouldn't be considered to have sentimental value, no matter how much you liked it 10 years ago)
This is broke, but one day I might fix it
I know I don't use this, but I paid a lot of money for it
Even though this is really neat and cool, it is totally useless
I got this at the thrift store, but I bet I could sell it on eBay

I got over it. I didn't throw away favorite toys or things we really liked, but I did decide that the value of something wasn't really affected by how much I paid for it or what I might sell it for on eBay if I got around to fixing it up and marketing it. Instead, I made a huge pile of stuff I was getting rid of and then contemplated not only how much money I wasted, but how much I would save in the future if I never did this again. Once I was through, the room was not only functional and clean, but I could find the stuff I really needed and see the stuff I wanted to see. It's certainly not minimalist, but it is much better.

Next was my library. It's large and I decided that this library full of books was enough. Not that I wouldn't acquire more books, but that if the shelves were full, stuff had to go before new stuff came in. I think I can live with that for now. I cheated a bit by moving the kid's books to their room and some of my tech books to work and to the garage.

Finally, this weekend, I tackled the garage. It took me two solid days, another pickup load to the thrift store, and an immense pile of trash by the road. I took out half of the shelves and got rid of all of the plastic storage bins. I threw out duplicate and substandard tools. I brushed cobwebs until I felt like I was crawling with spiders. I swept up enough dirt to fill a few flowerpots. I put up pegboards, cleaned out tool boxes, and hung things on the walls (always where they could be seen and accessed). I threw away or gave away basketballs, footballs, soccer balls, and baseballs (keeping one or two good ones of each). I threw out old paint and half empty cans of cleaning stuff, stiff paint brushes and rollers, damaged rolls of tape, and dried up glue. I found lots of just pure trash that had accumulated. I designed a workspace and reclaimed my workbench which had been used as a large shelf in my past two garages. When I got through, I was amazed. Every time I go out there I get a weird feeling of deja vu and I finally realized it was because it was just like those dreams I have. I suddenly discovered 500 square feet of space in my house that I didn't know was there before and it's full of cool stuff to do. If I wanted to, I could even park a car in there, but for now I like the space and I've even completed two repairs and projects that I had put off because I couldn't find the tools or the space and have started on a third.

As for the title, I'm kicking myself that I didn't take pictures of the garage before I started, but here is what it looks like now: More pictures on Flickr

Making Suggestions With Too Little Data

2007-05-11T14:37:00.000-05:00

I was over on Netflix today looking for a movie. I went to my "Movie's You'll Love" recommendation section and started scrolling though them.

Everyone is familiar with how these systems work. You rate movies and it compares your ratings with other members and gets lists of movies that you haven't rated that it predicts you will rate highly. This actually works pretty well in most cases. Amazon used to provide really good suggestions until I made the mistake of ordering some gifts for people and now their recommendations for me are all messed up. Where the system really doesn't work is for genres that you care nothing about combined with a small amount of data to make the correlations (the "my TiVo thinks I'm a gay Nazi" effect from the guy who watched a Hitler documentary and an episode of "Will and Grace" when he first got his TiVo - after that, his TiVo filled itself with Third Reich shows and shows about homosexuality).

As a perfect example, I'm not likely to ever rent a DVD of sports highlights, but there is a section in my recommendations for them and it tried its best. The funny think is not only how bad the suggestions are for me but the odd things it based the recommendations on.

I had already marked these as "Not Interested" before I took the screenshot. It actually predicted that I would give them 4 1/2 stars each!

So, apparently if you like Batman: The Animated Series, you must be a wrestling fan. I can almost buy that one, but there's no accounting for taste. The Batman cartoon is more realistic for one thing. The second one is my favorite. If you like watching IMAX documentaries about Beavers, you're sure to love a disk of NBA highlights.

By the way, the beavers movie is excellent - one of the more entertaining nature movies I've ever seen and it's great to watch in HD. Supposedly, a good bit of it was done in studio and it isn't truly a nature documentary, but it's still great.

Does anyone else have worse, or funnier, bad recommendations to share?

Embarassing Hack

2007-05-10T16:31:00.000-05:00

I've worn glasses all of my life for nearsightedness. Recently, I've evidently gotten old enough that my arms a bit too short and the text on my nifty new laptop at 1920x1200 resolution is a little hard to read. I can bring it into focus, but it causes eyestrain after a while.

I don't want to get bifocals yet and if take my glasses off to put on reading glasses, I can't see more that two feet away. I've got nice polarized sunglasses that clip on the outside of my glasses, matching the lens size and frame color, so I figured that I could buy clip-on reading glasses that would work the same way. Evidently, you can't. I found some that clipped at the top and flipped up and down, but I didn't like that idea too much.

So, I decided to make my own. They're pretty dorky looking, too, but they work really well. I put the step-by-step instructions up on Instructables.

Bamboo Flute

2007-05-08T13:38:00.001-05:00

Well, I finally got around to making something (after I reorganized half of my garage).

We were at Dollar Tree the other day and they had dried bamboo (about 4' long) with really long growing sections (12" - 20") that were uncracked, thin-walled, and very clean inside. I remembered reading about making bamboo flutes when I was doing some research before buying my Xaphoon and thought (without remembering any details) that these would be ideal since you wouldn't have to bore through the internal divisions between growth sections. So I bought one.

I did a bit of reading on how to do it and found that my memory was correct, these would be perfect. Each $1 piece had at least three sections, 2 of which could be used.

I picked the worst workable section of mine to experiment on (the better piece I'm saving until I work out the kinks). I cut it off with a Japanese pull saw, which works great on bamboo. Then I measured it to 18", which should make a flute in the key of F (I wanted a low pitched one - I'm not keen on the idea of a bamboo piccolo). I cut the tone hole with a small drill bit, then shaped it and sanded it to the right shape with a Dremel. Using Cameron's digital tuner, it was an F, but a little flat, so I sawed off another 1/8" or so and it was a perfect F.

Now it was time to do the finger holes. The tone hole took too long and I wanted to try to do it the "correct" way, which luckily involved a blow torch and a red hot poker (getting to make something with power tools, blow torches, and red hot metal is a big plus). I bought a 1/4" steel rod and a cheap propane blow torch, fired it up, and, holding the rod with an oven mitt, heated the tip to cherry red and burned the finger holes where I had them marked (I found the measurements on several web sites). This is really cool - it makes a neat sound and lots of smoke. You're supposed to fine tune as you burn the holes, but I skipped that part. Once I had them burned, I indented them with a wide sanding cylinder on the Dremel, then sanded the whole thing lightly.

I haven't decided on a finish yet, but I did have some hemp twine to bind the ends and the middle (to prevent cracking and because it looks cooler that way). I'm going to use one of the unusable pieces to try a burned finish on the bamboo, like my xaphoon. If it works, I'm doing that on my next one. I'll probably finish it with lacquer or linseed oil.

Oh yeah, I think it works pretty well. After all of this work (which actually only took less than an hour total), I remembered the fact that I can't play the flute :-) I'm getting a little better and it's kind of fun to play. Of the six tone holes, one is definitely off pitch. There are ways to adjust them (bigger holes, making them more oval, etc.). You're supposed to make them all flat then adjust them to be on pitch. If they're too sharp, you're just out of luck. The one that's off is very flat. I can play "Ode to Joy" on it (it skips the bad note). As a matter of fact, I can play "Ode to Joy" badly on many different instruments - for some reason it's the first song I learn.

Once I get where I can play this one well enough (at least getting a solid steady tone on all basic fingerings and a consistent overtone on some of them), I'm going to make one with the better piece. I also went back to Dollar Tree and bought three more canes, including one with a section long enough to make a bass flute in C. I got all of the usable pieces they had - I might check the other Dollar Trees. I should have enough to make four or five more. I know two or three good flute players, so I may ask them for advice on making them better.

When I make the next one, I'll take pictures of the process and post a better "how-to".

Diet Update

2007-05-07T11:14:00.000-05:00

Diet Update

I do just fine unless I eat out at places I really like (like Pepito's, Mater's, etc.). I've been saving lots of money by not eating out, though. Sometimes, I just eat frozen dinners for supper and I've found quite a few that I like a lot. I've also cooked some great meals.

Even though I'm not even remotely a vegetarian (see below), the best frozen dinners that I've found are from Amy's Kitchen. Their bean burritos and Indian dinners (the mattar paneer and palak paneer) are amazingly good.

Warning, non-vegetarian friendly content ahead...

The other night both kids were gone off with friends, so Renee and I bought some steaks to grill. We're usually feeding four or five people, so we get ribeyes or occasionally some t-bones. Since there were just two of us, I bought two fillets mignon (is that the correct plural?) - about 8-9oz each and we had them, some whole green beans, and a salad (and I had a couple of small glasses of wine). This was a bit of a splurge (particularly the wine), but I think those were the best steaks I've ever cooked, thanks to Alton Brown and some Tuscan guy I saw on Rachel Ray one day.

The two fillets cost around $18, but the total meal was less than the price of a single large fillet at The Outback and was much better.

I've also found a great way to grill tri-tips (even though Costco is the only place in town that I've found that carries them). My whole family is convinced that they were the best steaks they've had (Renee and I agreed until the fillets the other night). Best of all, the tri-tips are really cheap. You can feed five or six people for around $14 worth of meat (or feed 3-4 and have left overs for lunch, or, in our case, breakfast - I think a few slices made it to lunch).

We also found a strange recipe for boring old chicken breasts that sounds weird, but is really good. You just salt and pepper them and saute in olive oil and lots of garlic, then when they're about half done, you add a generous few tablespoons of balsamic vinegar. The vinegar mostly cooks out, the garlic caramelizes and doesn't overpower everything, and it makes a really nice, rich sauce on the chicken. Even Morgan liked it.

The Scary Garage Beast

2007-05-04T17:12:00.000-05:00

Last night I decided to get a head start on cleaning out my garage. I turned on the light, opened the door (the switch is inside behind the door), and just as I was stepping in (bare footed), I realized that I was about to step on a baby opossum. So, in my most manly manner, I screamed like a little girl and slammed the door.

My first priority, after regaining my composure, was to run get the camera. Renee was afraid that when opened the door again, it would run into the house. I got the camera (by now the kids were downstairs to see it) and opened the door, just in time to see it running along the ledge around the wall behind the workbench. We opened the garage door to eventually shoo it or deposit it outside, and began trying to find it, photograph it, and then catch or herd it out.

I never did get a good picture of it (Morgan did - I'll append one of her pictures when I can), but it did lead me on a slow but frustrating chase behind all of the junk in the garage. It wasn't really afraid of me, it just seemed to want to hide, but not very quickly. Eventually I got it near the door and used a long bamboo handled butterfly net to push it out. The funniest thing was that it just didn't like being pushed around - every time I pushed it, it would stand its ground and push back. Only when I released the pressure would it run away.

I don't know how old opossums have to be before they can survive on their own. The night before I had started several somethings in the shrubs when I went to pick up Morgan and I suspect that the unseen creatures were a opossum family and this little guy ran into the garage to hide. When I got back, I closed the door, so he'd probably been there all day. I felt bad for pushing him back out into the night by himself, but I wasn't really up for trying to cage him and/or trying to find somewhere to take him.

Isn't it strange how we react to animals? Seeing any unexpected animal causes you to panic a bit. Adult opossums are one of the ugliest critters around, yet for some reason, all baby animals are cute. When this guy was running away, he looked like a really big rat - creepy. But when he looked around, all of a sudden he just looked like a cuddly little critter. Weird.

Panoply 2007

2007-05-03T09:27:00.000-05:00

Panoply is Huntsville's outdoor arts festival that is held every spring downtown in Big Spring Park. This was the first Panoply in nine years that managed to run all three days without rain, so it set attendance records with over 140,000 people attending.

The weather was perfect. We only attended on Saturday, when my Mom came up to visit. We spent most of our time wandering around the art tents, where painters, photographers, sculptors, jewelry artists, etc. display their wares for sale. Cameron had a piece in the student art tent (the picture above) and we always enjoy looking at the art from all of the local schools.

Big Spring Park is in downtown Huntsville and has a unique place in the history of Huntsville. John Hunt was the first non-Native American settler in the area. When he arrived in North Alabama in 1805, he found a very active spring and built his cabin there in 1805. At one point in Huntsville's history, the stream fed by the spring was turned into a stone-walled canal that ran to the Tennessee River about 15 miles south of the spring head. Now, there is a large lake fed by the spring that is the centerpiece of the park. Surrounding the lake are grassy lawns, gazebos, benches, a Japanese style bridge, and the Huntsville Museum of Art. Across the street is the Von Braun Civic Center. The water is crystal clear and the lake has a large population of koi, as you can see below. This picture was taken from the concrete landing seen at the bottom of the picture above.

In addition to art for sale and show, there are also plays, music, kid's craft activities, festival food, parades, and wandering performers. While I was waiting for my Mom to finish talking with a painter, I took several pictures of a barbershop quartet that was performing behind the art museum:

Here is the Flickr set containing all of the pictures.

Biting The Bullet

2007-04-29T13:05:00.000-05:00

We've talked about it and tried to get around to it for the last several years, but this year we're committed to it - we just purchased non-refundable flights and registered the four of us for Comic-Con this year. There's no backing out now without losing a lot of money.

The flight itinerary is weird. We wanted to spend a little time in LA either before or after San Diego and flights into LA are cheaper than flights directly into San Diego, so we we've been playing with online travel booking sites until I was just about ready to throw the laptop through the window. Orbitz.com has been particularly troubling. Every time I search another site for low fares, Orbitz.com results appear at the top with abnormally low fares. Then, we I click through to book them, it says, "I'm sorry, the $195 fare you selected is no longer available. The next best fare is $350, see details below." Then, we you look below, there is nothing, but the $195 fare is still displayed. All of the Orbitz.com fares involved Northwest Airlines in the bait-and-switch prices, so I started avoiding clicking on anything that mentioned Orbitz.com or Northwest.

Finally I got flights for Huntsville to Burbank via Denver, then a return flight from Ontario to Huntsville via Houston. Not as cheap as the mythical Orbitz/Northwest flights, but cheaper than I expected. We'll fly into LA, spend the day, then drive to San Diego. After Comic-Con, we'll have two free days to do whatever we want in Southern California before returning.

Now the only problem is going to be finding hotels in San Diego...

Problems With Google

2007-04-27T15:11:00.000-05:00

I am a big Google fan. I love GMail, Google Documents and Spreadsheets, Picassa, Google Talk, Google Search, Google Toolbar, Google Earth, and Google Maps is the best (true dat). I'm sure I left out a few more.

The last few days, though, a lot of things are broken or acting weird. First, I've been having with the "Link" button both in GMail and in the Blogger editor. The URL box pops up, I paste a URL, hit "OK" and... nothing happens. No link is inserted.

A friend of mine e-mailed me asking if my GMail notifier in Google Talk was working. Mine was, his wasn't. He uninstalled and reinstalled it and it still doesn't work.

Here is the weirdest one:

I saw a link on Make (I just tried to create a link there and it didn't work again) or Craft (I won't bother with the link) about making towel animals, like they do on cruise ships or Disney resorts. The article it linked to was uninformative, so I typed this into Google Search:

folding towel animals

My browser (Firefox) became unresponsive. Totally locked up. So I killed it an restarted it. Everything else in my saved tabs reopened (I love that feature), so I searched again:

folding towel animals

It locked up again. I restarted again. This time I searched for:

monkey farts

Boom. 316000 results in 0.17 seconds. By the way, the top result for "monkey farts" is a scented candle company. Eww. Then I changed the search term to:

folding towel animals

My browser locked up. So I went home. Today, I just tried it again and it still locks up my browser. "Monkey farts" still works fine.

Something is very wrong here...

Geekaway, Spring 2007

2007-04-27T15:06:00.000-05:00

The Geekaway went very well. I got to see some people that I haven't seen in too many years, get together with other friends that I don't see often enough, and meet a few people that I've only encountered online (FOAFs and online gamers). We ate too much junk food, played GURPS, watched movies, played hacky-sack, geeked out, and finished with a trip to Mater's.

Pictures are here (if you are brave enough to view them).

Busy, Dieting, and Geeky

2007-04-20T09:34:00.000-05:00

Jodi's post reminded me that it has been a while since I've posted as well. I've been pretty busy at work, but that has never been much of an excuse before...

I'm nearly two weeks into my diet. In the interest of shaming myself into sticking with it, I've been sharing my weight loss data. You can see it here on PhysicsDiet.com. I'm pretty much following the Hacker's Diet.

This afternoon I'm heading off to spend part of the weekend with a bunch of friends from high school (plus a few college FOAFs and a few guys that I only know from online conversations). We're trying to recapture our youth or something like that. Since I've embarrassed myself by posting my diet stats, I'll continue in that vein and reveal that we are actually going to play role playing games and I am going to be the gamemaster. I haven't done that is probably fifteen years or more and please don't trouble yourself visualizing a bunch of 40 year old guys sitting around the room rolling 20 sided dice and fighting orcs - I'm sure the reality will be much worse.

That reminds me of one of my favorite Futurama quotes: "Hi, I'm Gary Gygax and..." he rolls a reaction roll "... I'm happy to meet you!"

300

2007-03-20T13:28:00.000-05:00

Wow.

That was so much better than I expected it to be. It certainly isn't for everyone, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

It had the most beautifully graceful violence ever filmed and is the best example of cinematic propaganda since Leni Riefenstahl worked for the Third Reich. As much as I am loath to admit it, maybe the Iranians do have something to be concerned about. Not that I think the film was anti-Persian or pro-US (and I certainly don't think it was financed and planned by the Bush administration), but it was a film about fighting for freedom and patriotism and democracy against overwhelming odds and without popular support. On the other hand, it's also about how to manipulate intelligence and popular opinion to achieve military goals. It's also about the glory of war - much more so that any film I've seen in a long time. I'm not saying that is a good thing (the glory of war part), but it was interesting to contemplate and thinking is one thing that I didn't expect to be doing after watching it.

When I got home last night I looked up some reviews and did some reading on the history of the battle, so I'll go light on the spoilers, but there were a few things I wanted to put down "on paper".

I was really amazed at how historically accurate it was considering how stylized it looked. It did take some large liberties, but not much more than many films have done. Of course, the primary source of history for the battle was the writings of Herodotus, who freely mixed supernatural elements into his history and tossed in a few monsters and outright myths just for good measure. According to most of the sources I read, though, his biggest exaggeration on the Battle of Thermopylae was in the size of Xerxes' army - he said between two and five million, modern historians put it at "only" about 150,000 or so. There were indeed 300 Spartans, but there were about 5,000 other Greeks involved (the movie portrays this as a few hundred at most), but it was the 300 Spartans led by Leonidas that makes the last stand after everyone else leaves. The overwhelming military superiority of the Spartans also seems to be true - maybe not as much as in the movie (see below), but in the first day of fighting, apparently the Greeks killed hundreds (or maybe thousands) while only suffering less than a dozen losses. Part of this was training, part was the tactics of the phalanx, and part was the choice of terrain (the narrow pass of Thermopylae - the "hot gates" - where the superior numbers had to funnel into a narrow formation against a prepared defender while thousands of their own army behind them cut off their retreat). The movie is full of cliched lines (you've heard most of them in the previews), but most of them came straight from Herodotus and other period sources. In other words, they said them first, so they weren't cliches then. "Lay down your arms!" "Come and get them" and "Our arrows will blot out the sun!" "Then we shall fight in the shade". Archaeologists have found densely packed Persian arrowheads at the battle site - so that is probably true as well.

Some reviewers have said that it was Jingoist in its portrayal of the good guys as perfect human specimens of white men while the bad guys were ugly, weird, black, brown, feminine, Asian or some combination of the above (another called it the gayest movie ever made since the Spartans go around with bulging muscles wearing leather shorts through most of it). Well, they have a point to some extent - art, comics, movies, and Frank Miller in particular have a tendency to portray people's inner character through their physical appearance and the Spartans are portrayed as being pure of spirit and body while the enemies were portrayed as being strange, twisted, and scary (see below again). It is unfortunate that the portrayals fit these racial and cultural stereotypes, but it would have been stupid if the Spartans were portrayed as a multicultural bunch and the Persian army (which historically consisted of a group of armies taken from and hired from the nations they had conquered - Asians, Africans, other Greeks, Middle Easterners, etc.) was portrayed as evil white guys.

Other reviewers complained about the style over substance issue and 300 was all about style, but I don't think everyone was reading between the lines as much as I was. I didn't expect deep characterizations or much dialog and I wasn't surprised. It was the kind of film that would work well with subtitles. Overall, the film's technique of painting over live action with tons of CGI is another milestone in cinema technology, like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Gladiator, The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Sin City. We are getting to the point where anything that can be imagined visually can be filmed and the look of films is undergoing a change from the realism of photography to much more impressionistic and experimental techniques and they're able to do it cheaper (in relative terms) than they ever have before. If you are telling a story that is a mixture of history and legend, traditionally the two options have been to either ground it in historical reality or to make an idealized fantasy. 300 chose a middle path, it only seemed like an idealized fantasy.

So, now for my opinion on the slow-motion fights, the visual style, and the exaggerations (like the eight foot tall Xerxes, the elephants that were as big as the oliphaunts in ROTK, the monstrous people, the amazing heroism, and the physical perfection of the Spartans) - this is the "see below" part:

What many critics and reviewers missed, in my opinion, was the framing story and the narrator. At first I was upset that there was a narrator because he was doing the stupid "describing what you're watching" type of narration most of the time. Then I realized toward the end of the movie, and to an even greater extent as I drove home, his importance and the whole point of view of the movie (and, to some extent, the whole message of the movie). The narrator is telling the story of the battle to the Greek council as a sort of flashback (not a spoiler, he's the first thing you see after the credits) and the whole movie isn't supposed to be visually portraying the reality of the battle or any of the events - the movie is showing you what the council is "seeing" as he tells the story. All of the idealism, the horrors, the monsters, and the historical inaccuracies are from his telling the story in order to create a mythic history that will inspire them to continue the fight. The early scene with the wolf, in addition to being a foreshadowing of the battle itself, was an obvious nod to this - the narrator is telling the story like a legend and the wolf portrayed is obviously a monster from a legend or a fairy tale. Even the slow motion battle scenes fit perfectly with the cadence of a spoken epic poem (or, admittedly, the breakdown of panels in a comic), where the action and confusion of the battle slows down as he describes the exact movements and deeds of one of the heroes in detail. The Spartans are perfect physical specimens, the enemy is ugly and weird. They have monsters in their army. The traitor is a misshapen outcast of Sparta. The war elephants are three stories tall. The Persian army was so large that it disappeared in the distance. Leonidas and his army were perfect Spartans - brave and defiant and true to the end.

The whole movie was propaganda and was about propaganda - how words and legends and rhetoric can sway a nation to unite and fight. It also shows how well it works - Xerxes taunts Leonidas that he will be forgotten in defeat and Leonidas' last order is to tell their story so that it won't be forgotten. Here we are 2,500 years later watching a movie about them, there is still a monument to Leonidas at Thermopylae, and his "Come and get them" line is the motto of the Greek army. I think they have been remembered.

Epigram on the burial mound of the Spartans:

Go tell the Spartans, passerby,
That here, by Spartan law, we lie

Note: For the record, after reading this the next day, I'm not sure that everything I wrote about here was planned and thought out by the makers of the movie - I probably brought some of it in with me. Then again, that is the cool thing about art, whether it is books, movies, photographs, paintings, whatever - it is a dialog between the creator and the viewer and they both participate in the experience. It's also a bit like the Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote " where he examines the idea of reading books as if they were written by different people. Maybe I saw a 300 made by a different person and it was different from the one everyone else saw.

I did read through the graphic novel, which I had not done before seeing the movie, and while some scenes and images were taken directly from it, there were significant differences in it as well. The framing effect was there, but not nearly as strongly as it was in the movie, so the same excuse fails when you consider the graphic novel and movie together. I like Frank Miller's work, but in this case I think I liked the movie better than the book. I admired Sin City, but it grossed me out a bit. The books, which are just as violent as the movie (or more so), do not. Hmm.

More California Books

2007-03-15T09:04:00.000-05:00

Jodi recommended a book to me the other day, Stigma, that was written by a coworker of hers, Phillip Hawley. It is his first novel and it was pretty good - a few rough spots and few cliches of the genre, but overall a nice solid thriller and great read about a ex-Navy Seal, ex-black ops pediatrician (that's a new combination). Like I've mentioned in previous posts, I like reading books that take place in places I know (and there aren't that many books that take place in Huntsville) particularly if they mention odd places that I visited by accident or that are off the main tourist trail. For example, in Stigma, a character hides in Griffith Park behind the observatory in a culvert that, as far as I could tell, is about 100' further down this trail that I hiked down on a whim (or at least I imagined it to be):

I thought I had a picture of the culvert area itself, but I must not have posted it to Flickr.

Now I'm reading Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (I had to edit to remove the apostrophe, its absence is significant). Vinge taught at UCSD and unlike his sweeping space opera books, this one takes place in the near future and a lot of the action takes place in San Diego and around UCSD, so there are many places that I've visited or seen, like La Jolla Cove and the Geisel Library at UCSD. One character also makes the drive across the mountains to the Anza Borrego State Park which we also took the last time we were in San Diego. It's an excellent book so far - alternately funny, scary, and thought-provoking.

The only recent book that I can remember reading that takes place in Huntsville is Code to Zero by Ken Follett.

Edit on 3/16:

One addendum to this post that isn't worth another entry. I'm not finished with Rainbows End, but I'll probably finish it tonight. I often pick up weird connections between books and I can't elaborate on this one without revealing spoilers for both Stigma and Rainbows End, but there is a strange serendipitous connection between the plots of the two (in the motivations of the "bad guys").

Recipes From Books

2007-03-07T08:18:00.000-06:00

But not from cookbooks...

I was reading Robert Crais' latest book, The Watchman, and Elvis Cole was cooking a vegetarian sandwich for his friend Joe Pike and the girl he was guarding. The recipe, simple as it was, sounded pretty good so I tried it on Sunday night when we had broiled salmon and again last night when I grilled some tri-tips (yeah, I'm not a vegetarian). It's a good vegetable side dish or it's good as a sandwich...

Elvis Cole's Veggie Sandwiches

Take equal amounts of zucchini, yellow squash, and eggplant. Slice them lengthwise into strips about 3-4" long and about 1/4" square. If you're using a big eggplant, you might want to put the slices of eggplant in a colander and toss them with salt and let them sit for a bit to remove any bitterness. After letting them sit, rinse them thoroughly.

When you're ready to cook them, heat a skillet on high heat and toss the vegetable slices with a generous amount of olive oil, cracked pepper, and salt. I also added a dash of spicy no-salt seasoning and a few sprigs of fresh thyme. When the skillet is hot, dump in the veggies and saute on high heat until they are tender and just a bit browned - don't overcook them.

For a side dish, you're done. For the sandwiches, take some good bread, toasted or crusty, and spread hummus on it and top with the grilled vegetables.

When we had the salmon, we had a baguette, so I just cut it into thin oval slices and topped each slice with hummus and ate it with the vegetables as a side. Mmmm.

Note that this doesn't mean I'm going to try Kinsey Millhone's peanut butter and olive sandwiches from the Sue Grafton books or try to emulate Stephanie Plum's fast food addictions from the Janet Evanovich books.

By the way, The Watchman was great and I highly recommend Robert Crais if you haven't read him before. It's the second L.A. detective book that I've read in recent months that takes place largely in the Echo Park area which I'd happened to have driven around in last time I was in L.A. The other one was Echo Park, by Michael Connelly. Even though I've only been there twice, I have a much better feel for the geography of these books now. I even made a special point to drive around the areas where Elvis Cole and Harry Bosch "live".

Reading List Meme

2007-03-01T08:54:00.000-06:00

I borrowed this list from Jodi and Ren. I filled it in several days ago but couldn't post it because Google's bots decided that my blog was a spam blog and locked me from posting to it until I verified that I was a human and they assigned a human to take a look at it. Aaargh.

In the list of books below, bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a ten-foot pole, put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of. I've also taken liberties to apply multiple codes, including half-read books that I still want to read and books that I've read, still own, but hate so much I'll never pick them up again (and I should get rid of them).

1. + The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) This certainly isn't the worst book I've ever read, it is just that the tremendous hype made it much worse. It certainly doesn't deserve to be the massive bestseller that it is.
2. + Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. + To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. + Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. + The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. + The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. + The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. + Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. + Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. *A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. +Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. + Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. +Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. + A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) I'm not a big John Irving fan, but this is one of my favorite books ever.
15. + Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. + Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Rowling)
17. * Fall On Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. +The Stand (Stephen King)
19. +Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. + Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. +The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. +The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. + Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. + The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. + Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. +The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. + Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. + The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
29. + East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. + Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. + The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. + Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. +1984 (Orwell)
35. + The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. + The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much Is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. + The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) This is a wonderful book.
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. + Bible- I've read most of it
46. + Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. + The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. +The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. + A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. + Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. + Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. + The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. * The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. + Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. + The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. + Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. + The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. + War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. + Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice) I almost crossed this one out. I've decided that I don't like Rice at all. I've tried, but I just don't like her books.
65. * Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. + One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. + The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares) My daughter loves this and I did see the movie. Eh, it wasn't bad.
68. + Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. + Les Miserables (Hugo)
70.+The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) I have this in French, too
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding) I like the movie. Never had much urge to read the book, though.
72. + Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. + Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. + The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. + The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. * The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. + Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. * Not Wanted On the Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. + Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. + Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind) Ugh. Couldn't finish it.
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. + Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. + Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. * Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. * In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. + Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. + The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck) Can't remember if I finished it or not
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. + The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. + The Outsiders (S. E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. * A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield) Double ugh. A friend of mine was the author's neighbor.
100. + Ulysses (James Joyce)

As you can see, I have eclectic tastes and many books on my bookshelf that I haven't read yet. I remember reading Harlan Ellison saying that visitors always ask him if he's read all of the thousands of books on his bookshelf. He thought the question was absurd, so he always picked one of two sarcastic responses: "No, why would I want a collection of books that I've already read" or "Yes, why would anyone buy a book and not read it immediately cover-to-cover".

I also have the opinion that if a book is a "classic" there is usually some reason why people love it (not always so for extreme "lit-fic"). Not all books are written for all people and sometimes when you start a book, it isn't the right time in your life to appreciate it. Sometimes, you're too old. Sometimes, you're too young. Sometimes, you're just not in the right frame of mind. Therefore, there are several books that I own that I liked at one time, but don't want to ever re-read and there are others that I just haven't got around to reading yet for whatever reason, but maybe someday I will.

Birding Pictures from Nikon Cafe

2007-02-09T10:48:00.000-06:00

My boss, Frank, is on a photo shoot with a bunch of the Nikon Cafe folks in Florida. They started off on the west coast around Tampa and then moved over to the east coast around Cape Canaveral. I don't know how many total Cafe'ers there are on the trips, but they're from all over the country and at least one from Canada. There is a special forum topic on Nikon Cafe where they are posting their pictures and stories and I though some of you might want to check some of them out. Most of them are too busy shooting, visiting, and partying to sit down and post-process and post their pictures until they get back (I don't think Frank has posted any yet), but here are some of the good ones:

Burrowing Owl from Cape Coral

At the Venice Rookery

Vierra Wetlands

The Class of 84 Reads About the Class of 65

2007-02-01T15:38:00.000-06:00

In the thrift store the other day, a battered paperback caught my eye because I saw Michael Medved's name on it. When I picked it up, I saw it was co-written with David Wallechinsky (aka David Wallace) who wrote/edited the People's Almanac and the Book of Lists series. The book is called Whatever Happened to the Class of '65?. Time magazine wrote a cover story in 1965 about the graduating class of Palisades High School in LA, near Santa Monica and just off west Sunset Boulevard, calling the senior class the future of America and talking about how they had unlimited potential in the brave new world and all that. I bought it out of curiosity and because it was $0.75.

Michael Medved and David Wallace were in that class and were among the students profiled in Time. Ten years later, in 1975-76, they decided to write a book where they tracked down many of their classmates, particularly the ones mentioned in the Time piece, and interviewed them about what they'd done in the 10 years after high school. Each chapter is about a particular person and begins with their classmate's recollection of them, a little summary of how Michael and David tracked them down, and then a first person transcript of their interviews. The middle of the book has a photo section with their high school pictures alongside their "current" (as of 1975) pictures. It was like picking up a high school yearbook of a total stranger and then having someone tell you what the people in the senior portraits did after high school, something that I can only do for a small percentage of the 65 or so people in my our senior class.

Despite the fact that these people all graduated high school the year before I was born, or maybe because of that, it was completely fascinating and I read it all in a day and half (and then spent some time on Wikipedia looking up some of them). Palisades was (and still is to some extent) a school where the wealthy and famous attend. It's alumni include Jeff Bridges, Susanna Hoff, Christie Brinkley, and Forrest Whitaker. Time picked it probably because the students were affluent, fairly intelligent, and all good looking Californians. It was an interesting time in retrospect because this was the end of the 1950's and early 60's Leave it to Beaver generation and right at the edge of the hippy, anti-war, rock-and-roll, drug culture 60's and 70's. Most of the kids in high school fit (or were forced into) the standard archetypes - the jocks, the cheerleaders, the nerdy intellectuals, the outcasts, the wallflowers, the one black guy, etc. Their stories after high school were more varied, with plenty of 70's weirdness thrown in - lots of sex, drugs, draft dodging, communes, weird religious cults, and backpacking across Europe to "find themselves". A lot of the stories were predictable. The nerdy Jewish kid who everyone thought would grow up to be an accountant was, surprise, a successful accountant. Others were completely opposite. The quarterback/class president/homecoming king was involved in a weird religious cult and practicing acupuncture, psychic healing, and massage therapy and talking about his homosexual experimentation in Hawaii. The leader of a club/gang (in the Fonzie/American Graffiti sense rather than the Crips/Bloods sense) called the Saracens was a millionaire clothing store owner. The super-smart, studious, most-likely-to-succeed girl was crazy, weirdly religious, semi-homeless, and had been periodically institutionalized. They tracked her down in San Diego, but she refused to talk to them because they were Jewish. Only one student had gone to Vietnam (the rest described in detail how they managed their deferments, including Medved). Medved had embraced Judaism and had become very religious. David Wallace (son of novelist Irving Wallace - he changed his name because he was upset that immigration had changed his grandfather's name from Wallechinsky when he came to America) was a pot-smoking hippie living with his girlfriend in his father's house, but he and Medved had remained friends (Medved didn't drink or do drugs, but he did live with a Catholic girl in college before he renewed his religious beliefs).

All-in-all, it was a cool book. Wallachinsky wrote a follow up in the mid-80's that's out of print, but I'm keeping my eyes open for it. I also found an article online talking about some of the people in the book today (along with some criticisms of the book itself - for instance, one of the people they didn't interview won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in the 80's). It also criticized Medved because he didn't attend the 40th reunion (because it was on the Sabbath).

One of the weirdest stories was about Jamie Kelso, the super intelligent nerdy kid who did book reports on Sartre and argued with the teachers all the time. At the time of the book, he had went to and dropped out of several big schools, got involved in Transcendental Meditation, then became an OT (Operating Thetan) in Scientology, working with L. Ron himself in the Sea Org - the ultra-elite of the Scientologists) (he ran away from the Scientologists when he realized they were scary, crazy, and ripping people off and they were still after him), and had moved to Kansas to write, farm, study philosophy (he was big on Ayn Rand and the John Birch Society), and create art. Currently, he is a major white supremacist working with David Duke and doing a talk radio show.

As a side note, when my wife looked through it, she said that everything is true about Americans today getting fat. There were no fat people in the student pictures and in the 10 years later pictures, everyone was just as thin (if not thinner) than they were in high school. Of course, living in a vegetarian commune or spending a year in a Lebanese prison for smuggling hashish might have something to do with the slimness of some of them.

Huntsville Red Carpet Event

2007-01-29T13:42:00.000-06:00

It's not often you get to run into movie stars here in Huntsville, but my wife managed it this weekend. There is a movie called Constellation that was filmed entirely here in Huntsville several years ago and it is just now getting a nationwide release. It had it's official premiere here Saturday night (even though it's been shown at various film festivals around the world - it just now got a commercial release backing). I haven't seen it yet and the couple of reviews I found through IMDB have been generally awful (saying that it was, at best, a mediocre Lifetime movie), but I would kinda like to see it just because of the locations. It stars Billy Dee Williams, Leslie Ann Warren, Rae Dawn Chong, Harper Hill (from CSI:NY) and a few other minor celebs. Several of the cast members, including Billy Dee Williams and Rae Dawn Chong, were in town for the premiere and they had a big red carpet event at the Hollywood 18 theater.

Renee went to the Holy Spirit fundraising bash at the VBC with her friend Kay and they rented a room at the new Embassy Suites hotel adjacent to the VBC. Kay and Renee went down to breakfast on Sunday morning and Rae Dawn Chong, the director (who is Gene Wilder's nephew), and one of the other costars that Renee didn't recognize were eating breakfast at a nearby table so Renee, of course, went over and talked to them. Renee and Rae Dawn compared hair styles, talked about Huntsville, and she said how much she liked her in The Color Purple (which was the only movie she could think of at the spur of the moment). She also shook hands with the director and the other guy, Daniel Bess. For those of you who watched the first season of 24, Daniel Bess played Rick, the guy who kidnapped Jack Bauer's daughter. He's also appeared in dozens of TV shows like ER, CSI, and Firefly. It's a shame she didn't recognize him - she thought he looked familiar, but couldn't place him.

Billy Dee Williams was also staying there, but he evidently was laying low around breakfast time, so she didn't see or meet him.

Cool, huh?

Peter Weller is Cool Again

2007-01-25T08:49:00.000-06:00

Since I didn't watch last season's 24, I didn't know that Peter Weller played a villain in it and had received good reviews. I had most recently seen him in an episode of Monk and, while I like Monk OK (although the writing has gone down the tubes), I was thinking that he has really fallen in stature since starring in Robocop and Buckaroo Banzai.

I was reading in Wired today that after his career went from starring roles to bumming around in straight-to-video movies, he took some time (and some invested money) and spent a lot of time traveling. He took his interest in history and got his master's degree in Roman and Renaissance Art and, according to Wired, is about to earn his PhD. He teaches a class on Hollywood and the Roman Empire at Syracuse University. He said in the article that a lot of students sign up to get an easy A from old Robocop, but drop the class when he hands out his 450 pages of class notes and reading lists with everything from The Last Temptation of Christ to Virgil. So, while he isn't a physicist, he is about to be a PhD university professor/musician/actor (and according to Wikipedia, an expert Scrabble player) so that's pretty cool.

It's also a welcome change from all of the high school dropouts or drama major celebrities who try to equate their fame with being experts on history, politics, science, and psychology.

Note: I didn't suddenly have a blogging urge - these last three posts started off as e-mail threads with some of my friends and I just cleaned them up and posted them here since I haven't written anything in a while on my blog...

Oscar Nominations

2007-01-25T08:44:00.000-06:00

Typical for the last few years - I've only seen a total of seven pictures nominated (including the minor categories and animated films): Children of Men, Cars, Monster House, Superman Returns, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest , and Marie Antoinette. Sad, huh? I think I'm watching too much TV. Then again, I think that TV shows today are better than they've ever been with top notch actors, writing, and production values.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Pan's Labyrinth get so many nominations (5, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay for Guillermo del Toro). Maybe now it will get wide enough release to play in Huntsville. You should see his movie The Devil's Backbone if you haven't already. His American/Hollywood pictures have been pretty good for their genres (Hellboy, which I really like, Mimic, and even Blade II) , but his older Spanish language films Chronos and Backbone were even better, IMO.

Of the ones that I haven't seen, the ones I want to see the most (as in, I would rent them or watch on PPV) are The Departed, The Prestige, The Queen, The Illusionist (there's a title pattern here), and Little Miss Sunshine (that broke the pattern). Maybe The Pursuit of Happiness as well. Most of the rest I would watch when they hit free cable.

Thrift Store Finds

2007-01-25T08:37:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I dropped by the Thrift Mart on University at lunch. I've found a few good buys there, like a projection screen for $12, some games and a lot of books. I almost missed this yesterday because I don't always go through the house ware aisles:

It's a Weber "Smokey Joe" grill, the 10th Anniversary Simpson's Edition. There was a tiny bit of soot on the inner grill, but only in the very center like someone had burned something once, but never cooked on it. It is in perfect shape and had all of the parts (except for a manual, but it was obvious how to assemble it) in the original box (unsealed, of course) for $9.98. Brand new ones are selling on eBay for $100 + $25 shipping.

I really freaked out when I saw this one listed on Amazon (before I looked at any other listings): Grill on Amazon

It says "1 Used or New Available for $2,500.00", but supposedly it is a charity item.

I have a tendency to buy thrift store items that I think are good deals with the idea in the back of my head that I could resell them on eBay for a profit, but I never do. I might be able to get $50 for this one, but I'm thinking about keeping it. I have bought board games at Unclaimed Baggage and traded them on BoardGameGeek, but I've never really got into hardcore eBay'ing.

George R. R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" Coming to HBO!

2007-01-17T08:56:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure if I should be excited or horrified. These are easily my favorite fantasy books and quite a few people, such as my wife, who do not read fantasy or science fiction love them as well. I do know that I guess I'll have to subscribe to HBO.

They are intending on doing one book per season (which is about right in length since each book weighs in at about 1000 pages and there are dozens of characters). The books have an interesting pattern in that each chapter has a different point of view character, so this might be an interesting way of breaking them down into episodes. The books are also full of sex and violence, so HBO is probably a good fit. They won't even have to add gratuitous T&A - it's already in there. I checked Martin's site and he hasn't mentioned it there yet. Also, there hasn't been a Dance of Dragons update since October. Meanwhile, he has written and published a YA novel called The Ice Dragon. Someone needs to camp out at his house with a gun and an espresso maker and make sure he finishes the series before he dies.

Variety Story

Ain't It Cool's announcement and talkback

Wikipedia article for anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about...

Now everyone can start arguing about casting. Someone on Ain't It Cool suggest Ron Perlman for Sandor Clegane. I've never thought too much about because I've always been pretty sure that no one would ever attempt to film it.

The article also mentions that the same writers have just adapted William Gibson's book Pattern Recognition as a movie directed by Peter Weir. That is a good and very filmable Gibson book.

In other news, George Clooney's production company is adapting Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age for Sci-Fi. I love Sci-Fi's ambition, but I've been disappointed by most of their adaptations to say the least ( Dune anyone?). Maybe teaming with someone other than amateurs or Robert Halmi will make a difference.

I think Peter Jackson's serious and dedicated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and the success of the Harry Potter books and films (and to some extent the Narnia movie) has been a good thing for science fiction and fantasy films. Serious and mature series such as the new Battlestar Galactica has probably helped as well.

Ramblings about Children of Men

2007-01-16T09:54:00.000-06:00

We went to see Children of Men this weekend. It's one of the smarter SF movies ever made, even if the main McGuffin (that there was a sudden 100% wave of infertility worldwide) is unlikely and never explained. It is just a set up for an end of the world scenario that drags out until the last person dies so that the movie can explore the social and political implications. The movie opens with a news report about the youngest person on earth (he was 18) being killed by a mob in Argentina, which is probably what you've seen on TV ads or clips. I won't give away much else. I do want to see it again since much of the background information is portrayed by things like newspaper clippings, headlines, news stories in the background, and photographs. It is one of the most information rich movies I've watched. It's also full of interesting "Easter eggs", like Banksy graffiti and Pink Floyd album covers. It's based on a book by P.D. James, a British mystery writer who doesn't normally write SF type novels.

It has a very left-leaning/anti-Iraq war type message with a central story about dealing with immigration, although it is interesting, ambiguous, and complex in several ways. First is that it portrays a British police state with "Homeland Security" troops brutally rounding up illegal immigrants and sending them to prison camps for deportation, yet it's also obvious that this "works" to some extent because Britain in the movie is the only functioning nation left on earth (whether it is worth it to live in a police state rather than in anarchy is another question). Secondly, the underground movement against the fascist state, which you initially want to sympathize with, turns out to be just as ruthless and corrupt as the regime they oppose and their co-opting and arming of the Muslim immigrant groups proves to be deadly to everyone involved. There are a few scenes of the rich and privileged living in a guarded and gated compound inside London, which is meant to show the stark division between the haves and have-nots, but in contrast these scenes are among the brightest and most optimistic scenes in the movie. The only way to decode what went on in the past and what is going on in the rest of the world is to read the visual clues scattered through the movie. It is definitely thought provoking and it sticks with you long after you leave the theater.

Despite that, I can't wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone. It is dark, depressing, violent, and nihilistic. The plot is a fairly simplistic chase story and the main character, Theo (played by Clive Owen), isn't the most engaging character. Everything combined - the setting, the rich backgrounds and visuals, the characters (particularly in what they don't say), the cinematography and effects (which are subtle and need repeating viewing to appreciate), and even the music combine to make it a very complex film.

Isn't it weird that some of the best anti-war type movies are the most violent? And that no matter what kind of message they intend, much of the enjoyment or excitement of watching the movie is driven by the violence and action? Speaking of which, I also watched The Deer Hunter for the first time last week. Have you all seen it? I might have enjoyed it more if I didn't know beforehand that the whole Russian roulette thing had no historical reality, but I was amazed by the acting and the pacing of that movie.

Anyway, it seems like this is going to the year of the Mexican filmmakers. Babel won the Golden Globe for Best Picture last night (haven't seen it, but I did see 21 Grams and liked it). Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (which I'm dying to see - I love Hellboy and The Devil's Backbone. Mimic, Chronos, and even Blade II were also pretty good) won some Film Critic's award for best picture of last year (limited release). Children of Men is doing quite well in the box office and getting a lot of critical acclaim. Alfonso Cuaron has a weird filmography - A Little Princess (rated G), Great Expectations (the R-rated version), Y tu mama tambien (rated NC-17), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (PG and, IMHO, the best of the Harry Potter movies), and now Children of Men (very R).

How to Get Unlimited Minutes on Your Cell Phone

2007-01-09T15:24:00.000-06:00

...and never have to change phone numbers ever again!

This was kind of a follow-up as I was doing research after writing my Cell Phone Rant entry.

I just saw this tip on the O'Reilly Radar blog. There is a new start up called Grand Central (still in Beta) that allows you to pick a phone number that, supposedly, you can keep for the rest of your life. Once you pick a number you can redirect it to up to three phones simultaneously (like your cell, your home line, and your work number). When someone calls your Grand Central number, all of the assigned phones ring. When you pick up a phone, you get a message that says that John Doe is calling. You can press a key to answer, or you can let it go to voice mail. You can pick up at any time, even when they are recording a message, and talk to them. You can even switch to another phone, like if your cell phone battery is dying, by pressing '*'. Your other phone(s) will ring and you can pick the other up and hangup your current one. You can check your voice mail from your phone, from the web site, or have it automatically e-mailed to you. You can even use your new permanent phone number as a permanent e-mail address.

This service is completely free during the beta period. After that, the basic forwarding and voice mail will remain free forever. I've signed up, but I haven't tried it yet.

This is all very cool by itself, but the real hack is if you have T-Mobile's Friends and Family plan (or an equivalent). You can set your Grand Central phone number as a "friend" and give the number to everyone instead of your cell number. Now all of your incoming calls are free.

Cool, huh?

NOTE: This was already posted on the Consumerist page and, according to the comments, it may not work as described above (either that or something has changed since the original posts about it, because they claimed it worked). I'm stuck in a Cingular contract, so I won't be trying it out any time soon (although I am going to play around with Grand Central).

My Cell Phone Rant

2007-01-09T14:14:00.000-06:00

Yes, we're having problems with one of our cell phones. I've also been reading lots of posts on Consumerist about cell phone companies and their contracts. When a friend e-mailed me a link to a description of the new iPhone (which looks so incredibly cool), I finally got around to listing my rants/wish list about the whole cell phone industry.

The Rant...

Is there any other business in the world that is so dedicated to screwing customers out of as much money in hidden costs, unbreakable contracts, poor warranty service and insurance service, obfuscation of costs, and the inability to deactivate unwanted features as cell phone companies? I think they've even got payday loan/check cashing firms, used card dealers, appliance rental companies, and cable companies beat.

Some of these can already be done with some, or most, providers, but they don't make it easy and you're likely to have to spend a lot of time researching and arguing with at best uninformed and at worst intentionally dishonest salespeople.

This is what I think a consumer friendly cell provider should do:

Let you buy your own phone, of any type, at normal retail value (not prorated through the service plan) and use it with their service. You've got a two year old phone in a drawer from a previous provider or that your mom gave you? You might not be able to use all of the features, but if you can talk to our towers with it, just put in your SIM card and go. Note that most companies will let you do this (and you should by your phone from Amazon or someplace), but they will give you a hassle and the hard sell.
Let the phone manufacturers handle warranties and insurance. The first thing they could do is develop more waterproof phones.
No service contract (yes, they have "pay as you go" plans, but there are much more expensive and, if possible, even more confusing).
If you have to have a service contract, keep it simple. Cell phone companies make millions by hiding costs and adding service features. "Oh. Your bill last month was $350" - "Yes, but I do most of my calling at night and I have free nights and weekends" - "Yes, but nights start at 9PM unless you buy our extended nights and weekends which starts at 7PM for just $14.95 more per month."
Let you check your account balance (minutes remaining, current bill, text messaging charges, etc.) any time for free right from your phone.
For your kid's phone - let you set it up so that once their minutes and/or text message allotment is up, the phone stops working except for emergency calls (or maybe calls to a white list like the parent's phone or home landline). I think the Disney phones do this. Every parent I know who has bought their kid a cell phone has wound up with a huge unexpected phone bill in the first three months (some as much as $600 - not me, thank goodness).
Let you disable features on your phone or password protect them at the very least. No, Cingular, I do not want to launch the web browser from a button on the front of my phone and then pay download charges - no matter how small - for even loading the home page. You can go into the phone's setup menu and reconfigure every button on the phone except for the one that launches you into the Media Mall and web.
Every phone should come with a USB cable and should be recognized as a USB drive when plugged into any computer. A big plus if the phone had only a mini-USB connector as a charging/syncing port.
Phone software should be able to be installed by dragging the files directly into the phone using Explorer.
Ditto for getting music, pictures, and video on and off the phone. Our Sony-Ericsson phone came with the USB cables and software but the program is one of the crappiest pieces of software I've ever tried to use. It violates just about every usability rule ever documented.
Allow you to use any MP3 or WAV file as a ringtone. I can buy a full song from iTunes for $0.99 and listen to it on 5 computers, multiple iPods, and burn it to CD. If I want the same song as a ringtone (on most phones) I have to pay $2.99 for a 15 second snippet of it. Even on the phones that let you use your own music, you have to put it in a different directory and browse to it differently just to discourage people from doing it.
Stop filling the phone with dozens of crippled demos.
Put like three or four uncrippled games on the phone. "Oh look! My phone has Tetris" Then you clear three levels and get a "Thanks for trying out Tetris! Click here to purchase the full game for $19.95!" (actually, they even hide the price until you get further into the purchase screen). One or two really addictive, full featured games (like the PopCap games) would be more likely to entice people to buy more games from them than an annoyingly limited demo would - at least in my experience. I remember when you could at least play crappy version of solitaire and blackjack on your phone. Now I've seen phones with crippled solitaire programs.
If you're going to put a GPS chip in your phone (like my new Motorola has), how much money would you lose if you actually let people use it as a basic GPS without purchasing additional software? I might pay more for maps and driving directions, but it won't even let you do simple waypoints and tracks without purchasing software with monthly fees. I can buy a dedicated GPS with more features for less than $80 (and have another device to carry around).
While I'm at it, I would like a dual mode Skype phone that I could from Wi-Fi hotspots and bypass the cell charges entirely. If the phone manufacturers weren't in bed with the providers, they would provide this. Since the iPhone has Wi-Fi and runs OS-X, I'm sure someone will quickly port a Skype client to it.

Two more good suggestions (from Word Sneezer's Comments):

Free incoming text messages (even if sending cost a bit more)
Free incoming calls (particularly if they are under one minute)

New Years' Resolutions

2007-01-03T16:21:00.000-06:00

I guess one of mine was not to blog more frequently...

Just to remind myself, there are a few things that I have wanted to blog about, but haven't had the time or motivation:

Christmas presents and pictures (the Wii is a big hit and I like my xaphoon)
Fireworks
Cell phone woes
Year in review (I liked Jodi's post)
My attempts at mounting an LCD TV to the ceiling

So everyone can yell at me if I don't post something else about these things.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

2006-12-22T13:22:00.001-06:00

My favorite dystopian Christmas song:

Any my other favorite Christmas song/video:

The Washington Post has a nice story about how this video/song came to be.

Patently Cool

2006-12-14T08:50:00.000-06:00

I have been involved, at various times in my career, with researching and preparing patent applications. While I think the U.S. Patent system is somewhat broken, particularly in relation to software patents, you have to do what you have to do.

In doing research for a recent patent application, I got to know the USPTO's search system quite well and learned to hate it. Today I read that Google has applied their search and document handling capabilities to provide Google Patent Search and I'm very impressed - you can do full text searches or search by inventor or patent number, the abstract and claims are clearly presented, prior art references and references of a patent by later patents are hyperlinked, and you can read the entire patent online using a very nice document reader.

Here is my patent, Apparatus and Method for Testing Computer Systems (6029257).

Making A Geeky Christmas Ornament

2006-12-12T12:38:00.000-06:00

I saw this the other day on Make and it looked like another fun project to build with Cameron. I was impressed by the design of the widget and the open source nature of the project - the creator put all of the files, parts lists, source code, and instructions up for free, but if you didn't want to find your own parts and program the microcontroller yourself, you could order a kit for $5 (+$5 shipping).

I ordered a kit and it arrived in just a few days. We got it yesterday and soldered it together last night. It was also a big bonus to get a call from my wife saying that I had a package from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. Cameron attached it to his Christmas stocking (photos coming soon). My mom made the stockings for us quite a few years ago out of some really old quilts that belonged to her grandmother and they are personalized with tie pins and photo lockets and things. Cameron had complained that all his had was a tiny dog tie pin, so we decided to geek his out with an animated LED message.

Every time you turn it on, it displays the next one of a sequence of 36 different messages, such as:

Ornament
Merry Christmas
Give Me Presents
All Your Gift Are Belong To Us
WARNING WARNING This Tree Will Self Destruct

Actually, there are two versions - we got the sanitized version. The original version includes profanity :-O

Two things really impressed me about the project. First, I like the idea of "sculpting" electronics without using printed circuit boards. You bend the pins on the microcontroller IC, then hot-glue it to the back of the alphanumeric LED display and solder the pins together directly. Secondly, the printed instructions are just incredibly well done. I've suffered through many poorly written and illustrated assembly instructions for things I've paid hundreds of dollars for and any of them could learn a lesson about clarity and design from the freely distributed comic book like instructions included with this kit. Even if you have no desire to build (or buy) one yourself, you should check out the instruction PDF.

He also has a similarly cool LED Menorah project...

I Finally Sold Some Shirts!

2006-12-11T08:57:00.000-06:00

Maybe it's just the Christmas season or maybe it was the increased traffic from the "Fix Your Own TV" posts, but after six months of listing them on Cafepress, I've now sold a handful of our "Don't call me a geek or I'll whack you with my lightsaber" shirts.

Maybe people are buying them to pack in with Force FX Lightsabers for Christmas presents...

What Not To Do

2006-12-06T10:53:00.000-06:00

Do not go to PopCap Games site and download the one hour free trial of Bookworm Adventures, particularly if you have played the original Bookworm game obsessively on your computer or PDA.

If you do, for some reason, ignore my advice and download it, don't blame me if you find yourself itching to spend the $29.95 to get the full version.

Cookie and Blossom

2006-12-04T10:24:00.000-06:00

Things have settled down quite a bit with the new puppy. She's now sleeping all night (well, at least from 11PM to 6:30AM, which is OK on weekdays, but not so fun on weekends). Cookie still hasn't quite got used to her yet, but that may be because Blossom tends to run up every time Cookie turns his back on her and bite him on his tail or hind legs. The only time they "play" together is if they stand face to face and growl over a toy. Luckily, the puppy is too small to jump on the couch, so Cookie can escape whenever he wants. The drawback to that is that the puppy knows she can boss Cookie around ("Gee, all I have to do is go for his hind leg and he runs way and jumps on the couch, then I can get his toys!"). We figured Cookie might like to nestle up with Blossom while they are asleep, but it always goes something like this:

They're both asleep on the couch:

Blossom realizes Cookie is near, so she crawls over to lay down beside him:

Cookie realizes the invader is in his personal space, so he gets up and leaves:

Sad, huh?

Fixing My Own TV, Part II

2006-11-27T08:56:00.000-06:00

Read Part I

Warning: This wasn't that hard of a repair, but if you don't know how to identify a capacitor or a high voltage assembly or know how to use a soldering iron, you shouldn't attempt to repair a TV set. There can be high voltages stored in capacitors and coils and in a projection set there are a lot of things to knock out of alignment or focus. Never work on a set that is plugged in and be mindful of where you are putting your hands. If possible, read the service manual for your set before beginning. That said, don't be afraid to void your warranty - particularly if it has already expired.

NOTICE: Since making this repair, I have been warned by at least two TV repair experts that I probably shouldn't have gone with the cheaper parts. There is anecdotal evidence that they have a high failure rate. I'm going with my supposition that the one that failed in my set was most likely the one that didn't have good thermal conductivity with the heat-sink, so I may be OK. Then again, they may fail this afternoon. If you are reading this and thinking of attempting it yourself, you might consider www.partstore.com as a source for the parts (or your TV manufacturer's parts site) and get the higher priced parts. Others have also suggested replacing the associated resisters connected to the convergence amps.

I think that if I hadn't been reading Make magazine and the Make blog every day, I wouldn't have attempted this. I have their t-shirt that says "If you can't open it, you don't own it", so I figured it was my duty to give it a try and I'm glad I did.

First of all, I'd like to commend www.electronix.com. Not only did they have the part for about a quarter of the price of other online parts stores, but I ordered my replacement parts on Monday with two day shipping and it was late in the day and I knew the order wouldn't ship until Tuesday. So with the holiday, I didn't expect the parts until Friday. They arrived Wednesday afternoon, so Wednesday evening, I was ready to begin. First I made a trip to Radio Shack to buy a new soldering iron and a desoldering bulb (my old iron was a bit crusty, so I bought a dual heat one with a stand since I would be working on the carpeted floor).

I disconnected everything and pushed the TV out from the wall so I could access the back. I removed about 10 hex screws and removed the fiberboard back. The inside of the set was incredibly dusty, so the first thing I did was attack it with some compressed air, trying to be careful to not blow dust onto the CRT gun lenses, the mirror, or the rear projection screen.

I found the offending components easily enough, but access was going to be a lot harder than I thought. To access the solder side of the PC board, I was going to have to disconnect about 20 wiring harness connectors.

I went and found some tape to label the jumpers with the numbers from the PC board, but when I disconnected the first one, I found the number printed on the header itself. All but about six were pre-labeled. For the six that weren't, I used a flap of tape and labeled them with a Sharpie marker.

These are the bad parts, two STK392-110 convergence amplifiers (Panasonic C5AA00000108) screwed to two large heatsinks (the Flickr picture has notes). I unscrewed them from the heat sinks and gently pried them loose with a knife blade.

Now that I had everything disconnected that I could (I didn't disconnect the high voltage wires, but I had enough slack to move the board with them connected), I unscrewed the plastic board holder from the wooden parts of the TV and tilted it 90 degrees to access the PC board.

It was pretty easy to find the solder pads for the STK392-110s, 18 pins in a row, one tilted at an odd angle. Luckily, most of the board was through-hole, but there were a smattering of surface mount components and the board was a bit flexible, so I worried that I would pop off a surface mount part. It didn't happen though. I used the soldering iron and the rubber desoldering bulb to remove the solder from the pins, then I reached behind and rocked the parts out of the holes. I had to re-heat a few of the pins to get them to release. Then I used some desoldering wick to clean up the pads.

I had read that most failures of this chip were heat related. I don't know which of the two actually failed since I was replacing both of them anyway, but I suspect it was this one that only had the heat sink grease applied to a narrow part of the chip back:

I had purchased some new heat sink compound, so I applied an even, but thin, layer on the backs of the new chips:

I then inserted the new chips into the PC board. I didn't clean the holes as well as I thought, so this was trickier than it should have been. I bent one of the pins and had to straighten it and run a piece of wire in and out of all of the holes before I tried again. Once in place, I replaced the screws holding them against the heat sinks to make sure they had good mechanical contact, then I flipped the board back up on its side and soldered each pin.

I triple checked all of my solder connections, then put the board down flat and reconnected all of the wiring harnesses, then triple checked them. When I was satisfied, I slid the board holder back in place and screwed it back to the wood.

Here are the new chips in place before I wiped off the excess heat sink compound and reconnected the wires:

One last check and a quick dusting of the lenses and mirrors, then I powered it up for a "smoke test". It worked! I screwed the back on and reconnected all of my video sources and moved it back in place. I only had to do a minor on screen convergence adjustment and then it looked perfect again.

It took me about an hour and a half. The parts cost $5.99 each, expedited shipping was around $16. New soldering iron and bulb cost me about $25 and the heat sink compound was $5. So the repair cost me less than $60 (and would have been less without tools). Compared to a repair estimate of $500, I saved over $440!

Before:

After:

Cool, huh?

Resources:

TechLore - The Consumer Electronics Community

FixYa - Technical Support, User Guides and Repair Service - this is where I got the best advice

HDTV Voice - High Definition Television Talk

www.electronix.com - Great online parts store

Service Manuals

Cool Unclaimed Baggage Find

2006-11-26T17:37:00.000-06:00

Just a quick note that my TV repair worked, but I don't have time to write a full entry on it.

This weekend we didn't get any Christmas shopping done, but I did find this really cool Star Wars stormtrooper painting at Unclaimed Baggage in Boaz. It is about 30"x40", on canvas, but just taped to some foam core and has a slight cut and a bit of damage, but it was only about $11.

It's signed "A. Ward" - does anyone know anything about this or similar paintings?

My First (and Last) Black Friday Shopping Experience

2006-11-24T15:33:00.000-06:00

Up at 3:30AM.

2nd person to arrive at GameStop at 4:30AM (Best Buy had ~500 people in line).

3rd person arrives, jumps out of car and gets in line.

Me and the guy who was there first get out and get in line. It's now 4:50AM. We don't know if the store opens at 6:00 or 7:00.

5:50AM. 15 people in line. We've bought donuts from some entrepreneurial kids. The GameStop employees arrive and say the store is opening at 7:00AM and tells us there are NO PS3s. I'm there for a Wii, the guy behind me doesn't believe him about the PS3, so he stays.

6:15AM. Employee comes out and says, "We have zero. Repeat. Zero Playstation 3s. We have only TWO Wiis. I'm not kidding." I was the second person to arrive, but the third person in line behind two others buying a Wii.

So I went home.

7:00AM. Back to bed.

Jonathan Coulton Songs

2006-11-21T16:09:00.000-06:00

I found this on the Mental Floss Blog today - A singer/songwriter named Jonathan Coulton has an amazing collection of original songs, covers, and mash-ups on his web site.

Geeky, funny, smart, $1 per song, DRM free, Creative Commons licensing: what more could anyone ask?

Go to the main page and explore the songs, here are some of my favorites (you can listen to them directly from the linked page):

"Baby Got Back" - This may pass that really cool "Hey Ya" cover as the best and weirdest acoustic cover of a rap/hip hop song ever recorded. A friend of mine said, "Yep, every time I heard that song I thought, 'Ya know what this song needs? A banjo!' Turns out I was right."

"Ikea" - I've been in an Ikea store only once, the last time I was in California. It helped me understand this song.

"That Spells DNA" - I love this one.

"Mandelbrot Set" - This may be geekiest song I've ever heard.

"Chiron Beta Prime" - Has to go on everyone's Christmas playlists.

"The Future Soon" - Good song

I'm still listening to others and trying to figure out which ones to buy...

Fixing My Own TV, Part I

2006-11-21T10:02:00.000-06:00

Read Part II Here!

Sunday morning, the convergence on our 47" Panasonic HDTV (model: PT-47W53G) went haywire. The green gun's image had a big bow in the bottom up about 8" and the upper right corner was stretched off screen, giving everything a weird set of green and magenta shadows. I was pretty sure it was a hardware problem, but I went ahead and made sure the problem occurred on all modes (standard definition and HDTV modes) and all inputs (cable, DVD, etc.). I knew that it was too far off to fix with the onscreen convergence menu and besides, the green channel is the fixed reference - you can only adjust the red and blue to converge on the green. I did go into the service menu to see if I could do a manual convergence enough to watch while I waited to get it fixed, but the green didn't respond at all.

Next, I started Googling. It took a while to wade through reviews and casual mentions of my model and to try to get the right search terms, but the general consensus I found was that the convergence amplifier chip had gone bad and that I could expect to pay around $400 to get it fixed. I called a recommended local repair shop here in Huntsville (American Video Services - they came highly recommended by several people, so I'll give them a plug) and that was about the quote I got, plus $100 for them to pick up the TV, fix it, return it to my house, and re-adjust it.

Now I had a dilemma. The TV cost around $1300 when I bought it three years ago and now, for the same price, I can get a bigger one with better features and go for an LCD or DLP instead of a CRT projection. But I didn't want a new TV for Christmas and it would blow the rest of our Christmas budget. Even if I had bought the extended warranty on the TV it would have expired by now. One annoying thing I found is that Panasonic and Hitachi sets that use this particular chip have a very high failure rate for it after about three years of use. It was so common that when I found the right sites, it was a common question - "Help! My red|green|blue convergence just went bad! What do I do?" followed by several replies of "Replace your convergence amp ICs." So, I am about 95% sure that is what is wrong with it.

Did I want to pay 1/3 to 1/2 the price of a new TV to fix this one?

Most of the replies on the tech boards I found followed the advice with, "You can replace them yourself if you know what you are doing." Hmm. Do I know what I'm doing? I've tinkered with electronics all of my life - building electronic kits, putting together computers, hacking weird projects, and opening up or tinkering with settings on just about every piece of electronics that I own. I can use a soldering iron and a multimeter. But I'm a long way from being an expert and I've never tried to fix something so expensive. You have to remove the rear of the TV, avoid the high voltage electronics, pry the chips off their heat sinks, unsolder the chips (over 32 pins), mount the new ICs on the heat sinks using heat sink compound, then solder in the chips. It isn't just a tweak a few trim pots or plug in a new board or module type fix.

I read and re-read the boards (which I'll list at the bottom of this post - they are great resources) and then decided I would try it. I found the part (an STK392-110, Panasonic part number C5AA00000108) based on links from some of the posts at an online shop called www.partstore.com for $29.08. The cool thing about this shop is that you can enter the make and model of your TV and it will list hundreds of parts specific to your model - tuners, amps, even replacement cabinet parts. Only one IC is bad, but the posts recommend replacing both. I was about to order them when I decided to search a bit more. I found another post saying that they got theirs for around $6 apiece from www.electronix.com and successfully repaired their Hitachi TV with them. Bingo - I checked their site and found the same parts (I hope) for $5.99 apiece. I ordered two with 2 day shipping for under $30. With the Thanksgiving holiday this week, I hope I'll them by Friday, but it may be Monday or later. I'll post part II when I get them.

Wish me luck!

In the meanwhile, we're using Renee's video projector from school and a neat freestanding projector screen that I found at a thrift store for $6 to watch TV in the living room. Strangely enough, we have three computers, four video game consoles, probably eight or nine DVD players (if you count the ones in the computers and game consoles), but we only have two TVs - the big one that's broke and the TV tuner in our desktop computer. The other TV is hooked up to the game consoles and doesn't even have cable ran to it.

Here are the cool repair/tech advice websites that I found. These should be useful if you have questions about TVs and other consumer electronic devices, even if you aren't going to fix them yourself.

TechLore - The Consumer Electronics Community

FixYa - Technical Support, User Guides and Repair Service - this is where I got the best advice

HDTV Voice - High Definition Television Talk

Read Part II Here!

Casino Royale

2006-11-20T15:12:00.000-06:00

In my opinion, Casino Royale is best movie ever made that is also a James Bond movie. In other words, depending on what you want in a James Bond movie, it may not be the best Bond movie, but it a great film by itself.

It has amazingly cool, but believable, action and violence, beautiful women, and a nice globe trotting sensibility. It also self-consciously plays with the cliches of Bond films without seeming like a parody - something that is very hard to do. After the bad self-parody in some of the other Bond movies, the Austin Powers movies, and the Mission Impossible series, I really wasn't sure if it was possible to make a good James Bond movie anymore. I didn't think Craig would work for the part. I wasn't happy with the director, either. Happily, I was very wrong on all counts.

A few interesting bits without giving much away:

The villain isn't threatening the world.
It was probably as gritty and realistic (plot, character, and action-wise) as it could be and still be James Bond movie.
Bond doesn't have any silly one-liners, but there are scenes where they write themselves and the film gives him a beat to deliver them, but he doesn't*.
There are no invisible cars. In fact, there are no gadgets of any kind to speak of. There are some extremely cool cars, though.
The sheer volume of stunts may make them unbelievable in total (as in, I can't see anyone being lucky that many times in a row), but there were no "Yeah, right..." moments like there are in the Mission Impossible or XXX movies.
The other reviews have said it, but Craig's Bond gets bruised, bleeds, gets blood all over him, and fights like someone trying to avoid getting killed rather than an actor in a choreographed sequence. He is cold and brutal, but human.
Despite the realism, it is still a fun movie.
They've been making Bond films for around 45 years and this is the first one in a long time that feels like one of the books (and may be even closer to them than the Connery ones)
The movie is a bit old-fashioned without seeming out of date.
Renee thinks Daniel Craig was pretty hot and that he is the best looking and most in shape Bond ever.

Anything I didn't like?

I can see why they did it, but I missed the ubiquitous Bond theme music throughout the movie (the reason, I think, they didn't use it was since this is a restart of the series in a way, he isn't really THE 'Bond. James Bond' until the end).
They didn't follow the movie opening formula and I didn't care too much for the song (not bad, jut not memorable).
I couldn't hear or understand some of what was said, but I'll probably see it again (noise and accents at fault).
No Moneypenny (although the movie does have a playful quip involving her name - Vesper: "I'm the money.", Bond: "Worth every penny".)
No Q, but after the death of the original actor and the lack of gadgetry in this one, that was OK with me. I like John Cleese just fine, but he would have stuck out like a sore thumb in this movie.
Uh, that's about it - it was great.

* (Minor spoiler, I guess, but not plot related) - Bond shoots a guy in the forehead with a nail gun. The camera pans from the nail to a close-up of Bond's face. I'm sitting here expecting some joke about being nailed. Bond looks for a brief second like he's going to say something, then leaves.

Remembrance of Dogs Past

2006-11-17T16:09:00.000-06:00

When we got our first shih-tzu, Cookie, we had a miniature poodle named Princess. Princess was getting a bit old and we decided that the kids needed a puppy since Princess never really got used to not being an only child.

Princess, of course, was a girl and the new puppy was a boy (well, non-functionally at least).

Princess died several years ago at a respectable age and we were left with just Cookie. Maybe once or twice did we ever call Cookie "Princess" and Cookie has always been a boy ("Good boy, Cookie!", etc.).

Now we have the new puppy Blossom, who is tiny (just like Cookie was) and is colored almost exactly the same and our brains are playing tricks on us. I mentioned about reading books on learning and cognition and there are lots of research about how visual and tactile triggers are used to fire off memory chains. Well my wife and I are experiencing this first hand. Both dogs have changed genders and, for the first time in years, my wife and I are both constantly calling Cookie "Princess" and "Prinnie", telling the kid's to take "her" out or saying "Good girl!" and referring to Blossom as "he" and "boy".

It's become so bad that we almost stutter as we try to second guess what we are about to say. Weird.

Meet Blossom

2006-11-14T10:39:00.000-06:00

Yes, we got a new dog. Morgan and Renee had been scouring the puppy pages on the web for a few weeks when Renee's sister's friend announced that she had two shih-tzu puppies that she was giving away. Their parents were both registered, but we aren't going to be breeding them, so I doubt we'll do the registration. The mom was only about five pounds and the dad was pretty small as well, so this one will likely be much smaller than Cookie. Right now at around 8 weeks, she looks like a guinea pig. She's colored almost the same as Cookie, so I think she's going to look like Cookie's Mini-Me.

I don't know if I'm 100% happy with the name, but I'm sure she'll grow into it. We were thinking Chinese because of the breed and we liked Lotus, but the kid's didn't. We were explaining that it was like lotus blossoms, so the kid's decided that Lotus Blossom was OK, but only if we called her Blossom because she is colored like a black and white cow and Morgan has a cow in a video game named Blossom (it all made sense at the time). In keeping with our completely fake and meaningless three name pattern (Cookie is Fortune Cookie Fangmuffin), we couldn't think of a third name. Dave provided it for us, so she is now Empress Lotus Blossom. Alternate names were "Cho", "Spoot", "Wuffles", and "Flower" (bonus points for identifying the sources of these four names).

Cookie isn't thrilled with the idea and is still pouting a bit. It's like having a baby in the house again. Most of the time, she just sleeps, but only for a few hours at a time at night, so you have to get up and play with her for a few minutes (read: 45 minutes at 4AM) and get her back to sleep (*Yawn*).

She likes to sleep on her back:

More pictures here. If I get some rest, I'll try to take better pictures - I'm not happy with these. She does have eyes and she's even cuter than she looks here.

Book Review: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

2006-11-09T15:12:00.000-06:00

I picked this book up on a whim at Costco because it looked like a nice companion to Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond. The book is a survey of what we have learned in past few years about pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas.

In a way, it is one of those "everything you know is probably wrong" books, but it is also one of those great books that describe how the scientific and historical research process works. There are a lot of unanswered questions and details on the sometimes heated controversies that arise when different pet theories contradict each other. The primary controversies covered deal with the oldest dates that humans colonized the Americas, pre-Columbian populations, and the extent and sophistication of American civilizations.

There are many surprising things (to me at least) in the book. I've read a bit about the pushing back of the earliest human history in the Americas, but the speculation on the numbers of people living here is pretty exciting. New scientific research is showing that there weren't as many constraints on the size of cities and communities as previously thought, particularly in the Amazon region and in Central America and evidence is showing that millions of people lived here. It's no longer even controversial that the Americas were a parallel cradle of civilization where governments, agriculture, technology, writing, mathematics (including the invention of the zero), and arts all evolved independently. Even the story (and controversy) about the creation and dissemination of maize was fascinating.

Everything is put into the perspectives of not only science and personality, but shifting cultural values and political correctness. Early Spanish accounts of Indian populations were, for hundreds of years, considered to be exaggeration, possibly to downplay the sheer magnitude of the number of indigenous people killed by imported diseases (as much as 90% and greater in some cases). In many cases, the carefully researched portrayals of primitive hunter-gatherer cultures were inaccurate largely because what was being observed was a culture torn apart by rampant disease. Many of the Amazonian tribes fled carefully tended rain forest orchards where hundreds or thousands of people lived to escape into the jungle to escape disease, living like castaways. Even the millions of bison roaming the American plains during the westward expansion may have been an out of control population due to the deaths of the native Americans who kept their populations in check.

There are also examinations of the myths about how native Americans lived in harmony with nature. There are the hippy-like opinions that they lived in perfect magical harmony, versions from early colonists that they were bloodthirsty, primitive savages, and modern versions (from Diamond, et al.) that they brought their own forms of ecological devastation. This books paints a more complex view. Certain societies doomed themselves by destroying their local environments (the Anasazi and the Mound Builders, for example). All of the groups made profound changes to their environments (widespread burning, for example). Some, like the Amazonian rain forest dwellers and the woodland tribes of eastern north America, treated their forests like huge orchards - planting desirable species, burning others to grow more berries, and killing more competitor species than they needed to eat to prevent them from eating their "gardens".

Other things in the book have been known for a long time, but often get over-simplified in textbooks. My favorite story in this vein was about Tisquantum (Squanto in our elementary school text books). Everyone knows that Squanto came and made friends with the pilgrims and helped them survive by teaching them how to plant their crops using fish as a fertilizer. What I didn't know was that Tisquantum had been captured years earlier and brought to Europe as a slave. He lived in Spain for a while and eventually made his way to England where he was able to hitch a ride back to America. He walked over a hundred miles back to his home and was then selected as a translator for the local tribes to meet with the Pilgrims. He did help them, but it wasn't the Indian planting ways he taught them - he learned to use fish as a fertilizer in Spain!

I won't give away any of the other revelations from the book - read it for yourself. As much as I like Jared Diamond, he can be a bit long winded and repetitious. Mann is more concise and readable probably because he comes from a journalism background.

Thank God It's Almost Over

2006-11-07T11:06:00.000-06:00

The political ads, I mean. Now we just get to suffer through the allegations of voter fraud and the armchair and watercooler rehashing of the entire election.

Many people consider Alabama to be a backward state (I know I've done my share of bashing it), but one thing I can't complain about is our voting procedures and machines. Compare this to the horror stories of hanging chads, butterfly ballots, touch screens, invalid machine activation cards, White-Out, dead people voting, illegals voting, etc.:

I went to my polling place, which is a church about three blocks from my house. I got in the L-Z line and gave the poll worker my drivers license, so she could verify that I am who I am, that I live where the poll records say I live, and that I am a citizen and eligible to vote. She found my entry on the printout, compared it to my license, then sent me to the next table. I printed my name on one list, then signed my name on the same numbered line on another then they handed me a ballot and a pen.

The ballot is a large (11x17ish) sheet of cardstock with large, clear print. Beside each name in each category is a large, bold arrow with the middle section missing. The arrow clearly points to each name. To vote for a person, you take the Sharpie like marker and connect the broken parts of the arrow. All it takes is a thin line, but I usually make sure it is quite dark and complete. Once you are finished, you take the ballot to a reader and feed it in (either side up) where it scans the ballot like a college exam Scantron machine, collects the paper ballot inside, counts your ballot, and gives you a green light if it didn't have any problems reading it, or a red light (and a returned ballot) if there were reading errors. If you get the green light, you leave your pen and pick up your "I Voted" sticker.

Votes are tabulated automatically and if there is a need for a manual count or recount, they have all of the original ballots, clearly marked and anonymous.

Why doesn't every precinct in the country do it this way?

Movies

2006-10-30T08:53:00.000-06:00

Two films I saw this weekend...

Marie Antoinette
Early reviews were pretty bad and box office returns have been even worse, but we still couldn't resist seeing this one. My wife is a major Francophile, with a particular interest in the period between Louis XIV and the French Revolution and her world history class had just reached that period in class, so she offered extra credit for anyone who went to see it. We met at the theater with about ten of her students to see the matinée. I think of everyone there, I enjoyed it the most.

The Good Parts
A few years ago, my wife and I went to Paris for a week and we loved the day we spent at Versailles. My wife has been there again chaperoning a school trip. Sophia Coppola was able to film pretty much the entire movie inside and around Versailles and, not only did it bring the period to life, it was really fun for us to see all of the places we had walked around. Renee and I had both read several books about Versailles and the tour doesn't get to show you everything. The elaborately paneled walls in the public rooms disguise hidden doors that lead to private rooms and to servant passageways so the servants didn't have to mingle with the courtiers. Not only do you not get to see these parts of the palace, but the tours don't even mention them. You get to see them in the movie. You also get to see what I assume is the actual opera house inside Versailles which is also not part of the public tour.

We did get to see one thing that the movie didn't show. There was a locked door with a window looking into a small dark room in the Petite Trianon. It was Marie Antoinette's toilet (an embroidered cushioned bench over a chamber pot) which photographed well with a flash pressed against the window. It's perversely one of our favorite pictures from Versailles. I need to find it and scan it...

Surprisingly, the movie gets the details right without overly exaggerating or simplifying them. The morning rituals where the courtiers, by social status, wait on the royals as they awake were painful, embarrassing, and accurate, as were the meals and social events. The characterizations of Marie, Louis XV, Louis XVI, and the various historical figures were accurate and well portrayed. The movie managed to realistically portray the pomp and grandeur without making it all look elegant and spotless - it was crowded, people's makeup ran, they sweated, they were uncomfortable, and they got muddy. All in all, it was beautifully shot.

Marie correctly denies saying "Let them eat cake."

The Weird Parts
A lot of the pre-release buzz had to do with Coppola's decision to use 80's alternative music in some scenes and I imagined the type of anachronistic use of music that was done in A Knight's Tale. Instead, I thought it was a very interesting way of setting a scene with the audience. Aside from the pop music, there was little or no incidental background music in the movie. For the first segments, where Marie Antoinette goes from Austria to France, there is no music at all. Whole scenes are deathly quiet, except for background whispers and the ruffling of clothes. This emphasizes Marie's isolation and sense of detachment. Later, as she attends state events and makes a few friends in the court, there is period music, but it is all performed by ensembles at the events. It is only when she begins to take charge of her life and begin to enjoy herself that the pop music begins and in these scenes it is used to show that, despite the time period and the trappings of court life, she was a real, teen aged girl and then a young woman. Using music from the 80's subtly portrayed this as being in the past, but not that far in the past. As she grows older and the events become bleaker or more adult, the music fades away. The closest the music intrudes on the real events is at an Opera Ball in Paris, where the crowd is dancing to the music, but again this is to show that this was pop culture of the time.

The other thing we knew going in was that, while the history was accurate, this is not an educational movie. You never see anything that Marie herself does not see. There are no scenes on the streets of Paris. You don't learn anything about the French Revolution. The storming of the Bastille is announced by a messenger to Versailles. Most importantly, the movie doesn't end with their imprisonment and ultimate execution, but with them leaving Versailles for the last time. The movie is better if you bring a lot of this knowledge into it. If you know that the court was isolated from the events of the Revolution and that Marie Antoinette was mostly ignorant of why she was hated, the movie is more poignant. You see her spending and gambling and having affairs in the Petite Trianon and pretending to be a village girl in her Disneyland-like Petite Hameau and you know that the Revolution is brewing 20 miles away in Paris. The last two scenes are wonderful, but only if you know everything they aren't showing you.

I also liked the decision to use "natural" accents for most of the actors. If they aren't going to be speaking 18th century French, why bother making them talk with French accents or stuffy Merchant-Ivery English? I even liked that her daughter spoke French, because it emphasized Marie's Austrian background more.

The Bad Parts
I didn't like the Converse shot at all. If the movie had played looser with the history and threw in deliberate anachronisms, I could have handled it. As it was, it was just stupid and jarring.

Renee liked how they portrayed the detachment from history just fine, but we both wished that the movie had a bit more dialogue. The early scenes with Louis were deliberately quiet and strained, but the latter half of the movie had a few too many montages of languid looks and sighs that Kirstin Dunst pulled off quite well (you could tell what was going on inside her head), but they were a bit over used. This wasn't terribly surprising, as it is one of the things Sophia Coppola is famous for.

The movie was rather frank about the issue of Marie and Louis XVI not consummating their marriage for several years and had quite a bit of PG-13 nudity and sexual discussions, but it never told why Louis couldn't perform and made it seem as if he didn't understand what he was supposed to do. This may have been a calculated move to show Marie's ignorance of what was going on, but it didn't quite work. In actuality, Louis suffered from a foreskin problem that caused him pain and it had to be surgically corrected before he could consummate the marriage and they eventually, as shown in the film, had four children (two of whom died before the Revolution).

The characters don't age much in the film, either. Marie was 14 when she was wedded to Louis Auguste and 15 when she arrived in Versailles. She was about 30 at the fall of Versailles. The movie doesn't compress the events - it throws out a few dates, shows the birth of their children and the changing of their friends and confidants, but little else is done to show the main characters as aging fifteen years in the course of the movie. I'm sure there was a reason, but I'm not sure what it was.

Well, that was a longer review than I expected, but the bottom line is that you shouldn't be scared of the box office returns - this was an excellent movie and one that we'll probably buy on DVD when it is released.

Thank You For Smoking
Wonderfully smart and funny. Even more remarkable, it was even handed in a way. Any movie that accurately portrays the tobacco lobby as evil merchants of death, but has you cheering for their slimiest lobbyist (Aaron Eckhart was great) has to be skillfully made.

There, that one was shorter...

I Love Sci-Fi Headlines

2006-10-26T11:57:00.000-05:00

I've probably mentioned it before, but after growing up reading Heinlein and comic books, I get weird deja-vu like moments when I heard news stories that sound SF'ish.

Today on CNN:

Space station cargo ship has problems docking

Yesterday was debates on the an amendment to approve (or disapprove depending on who you ask) human cloning.

Books

2006-10-25T16:00:00.000-05:00

Here are some short reviews and notes of books I've read recently (or that I am still reading)...

The Lovely Bones
Yeah, I know - it's packaged as a chick book, but I was intrigued that Peter Jackson is making the movie version as his next film. I picked it up at a used book store while shopping with Renee and the clerk, an older woman, asked if Renee or I was going to read it. I said I was and she looked surprised. She told me that she read it for her book club and didn't like it and wanted me to let her know what I thought.

I think that, despite a slight hiccup at the end, it's one of the better books I've ever read. It was certainly a page turner - I started it last night and finished it this afternoon. The summary sounds kind of morbid, sappy, and simple - it's told first person by a raped and murdered 14-year old girl as she looks down from heaven, watching her friends and family cope with her death. It is painful, sad, happy, and fascinating. I don't buy the New Age style Heaven that she occupies, but it is appealing and interesting. Not to spoil anything, but I think it was written by her friend Ruth - a belief that makes the supernatural aspects of it understandable and believable.

The Descent
This is the book that the movie was based on. Actually, this is the book that the makers of movie had to secure the rights to in order to avoid a lawsuit - the events in the movie and the events in the movie have nothing to do with each other except for the portrayal of the underground creatures. Personally, I think the author came up with the idea and it got too big for him. The filmmakers distilled the concept and the horror into a tight and original story of seven women trapped in an Appalachian cave with blind, murderous, degenerate human creatures. The book begins in Tibet and soon develops into a modern day rewrite of Journey to the Center of the Earth with a huge high-tech war between the surface and the cave dwellers, with huge underground cities, biotech weapons, genetic mutations, and religious overtones with dozens of characters, millions of miles of caverns, and ten or more years of future history. It's Jules Verne meets Michael Crichton meets H.G. Wells meets Dan Brown. All in all, it was a highly enjoyable mess.

Fragile Things
This is the new short story collection by Neil Gaiman. I'd read two or three of the stories before, and I've read about several of the others on his blog. Gaiman is one of my favorite writers, particularly his short stories. Some authors disappear into their books. In fact, in a novel, unless the style demands it, the author's voice shouldn't be present. In Gaiman's short stories, you're kind of always aware that it is a Gaiman story and his voice is always there. A friend of mine commented that he hates that kind of thing - reading a line that throws you out of the story and demands that you say, "Wow, what an interesting piece of writing or word choice." I agree, but I can forgive it in a short story. I just read Gaiman's stories not as, "I'm reading a story" but as "I'm listening to Neil Gaiman tell me a story" - there is a subtle difference.

For example, here is nearly exact quote that I loved, but when I showed it to my friend, he said that it was exactly the kind of thing he hates (but I still like it):

She was a blonde. A blonde with curves like a Raymond Chandler simile.

Neat.

Echo Park
While I still wouldn't classify mysteries or crime drama as one of my favorite genres, there are a few authors and series that love (Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series, Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, Robert Crais' Elvis Cole series, and a few others). Echo Park is the latest Harry Bosch book. My only complaint was that it was too short. I started it one night at bedtime, then took it on a flight to D.C. I read it in the airport, on the flight from Huntsville to Charlotte, in the airport again, then finished it while sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off, then I didn't have anything else to read. Yes, it was more of the same, but it was good.

A bonus was that during my recent trip to L.A., I drove around some of the areas from the book around Figueroa and, by missing a turn, the extreme east end of Sunset Boulevard. This was all fresh in my mind as I read the book, so it made it easy to visualize. In a previous trip, I made a special effort to drive up Bosch's street and around some of the areas from the previous books.

On Intelligence (still reading)
This is a very practical book on brain physiology and AI by the creator of the Palm Pilot (among other things). It's primary focus is in the understanding of the repeated neural structures in the human cortex and how they plastically organize to create the specialized processing and memory centers of the mind. He also proposes the idea of the memory-prediction model of human consciousness. Excellent so far (and not nearly as controversial as some theories have been).

One cool thing I learned was the 100-step rule proposed by Jerome Feldman. If a neuron takes 5 ms to fire and experiments show that an average person can, say, be shown a series of pictures and press a button if they see a cat and the reaction time is about 1/2 second, then that means that the brain is processing visual information, pattern matching, and making a decision on "catness" that involves no more than 100-levels of neurons. Of course it is massively parallel, but this still puts an interesting limit on how complex an artificial neural network should be to mimic the behavior (hint, we ain't there yet).

Stealing Ideas

2006-10-24T10:52:00.000-05:00

I've been in a funk for the last few weeks (recovering from traveling, or something) so I haven't blogged. I really don't much to say now, so to give myself a kick in the pants, I'll steal Ren's 10 questions....

Ten fairly random questions…

1. What is the last song you listened to?

"Pretty Fly for a White Guy" by Offspring (my daughter just discovered it and it reminded her a bit of "White 'n' Nerdy" by Weird Al ).

2. Who ~~What~~ makes you swoon?

As a guy, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to "swoon" - is this permitted? Salma Hayek comes close.

3. What is your favorite cupcake?

My favorite cupcakes are actually muffins (I don't do icing much). I like really chocalately ones.

4. What’s your favorite sweet?

Either Baklava or Chocolate dipped macaroons

5. What kind of writing instrument do you prefer to use?

Pilot G2 Retractable Gel Ink Rolling Ball Pen in black. Yes, my answer is that specific. Uh, I told you I was stealing (this time from Jodi) - these are my favorite as well.

6. What fascinates you, yet would surprise us that you are fascinated…by…it.

I'm not sure it would surprise anyone who knows me, but I'm fascinated by psychology, particularly consciousness and brain physiology as it applies to AI. One of my recent favorite reads was The Singularity Is Near and right now I'm reading On Intelligence.
It wouldn't surprise too many people to know that I'm fascinated by just about everything.

7. What did you NOT do in high school that you wish now you had?

I don't have too many regrets. I enjoyed my small high school, but it would have been nice to have more opportunities, such as any foreign languages (none were taught).

8. What kind of candy will you give out on Halloween?

We usually don't have any candy left over. We buy four or five bags of assorted "normal" candy - mini candy bars, Smarties, Dum-Dums. As for what the kid's bring home, I usually get the Almond Joys and Mounds (they don't like coconut) and I usually snag at least one Charms Blo-Pop. Does anyone remember the big (3" wide) Charms suckers? I used to love them, but I haven't seen them in a long time.

9. What gadget would you love to have but wouldn’t spend the money on?

Eek. I'm pretty flush with gadgets. I would like a high-def DVD player, but I'm waiting on the price to drop and the format wars to settle. Oh yeah, I would like an in-car navigation system.

10. Do you like horror movies?

Yes, but... I like good horror movies, but there aren't very many of them. I don't like slasher films and if it's cheap and cheezy, it had better be funny, original, or well written. Some of my recent favorites have been The Decent, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and Ju-On.

The Worst Job In The World

2006-10-02T14:24:00.000-05:00

I don't normally write about "serious" things on this blog, but I enjoyed (if that is the right word) this essay by Orson Scott Card quite a bit:

Homework, Part I: The Worst Job In The World

Homework, Part II: Why Do We Still Get Homework?

I'm thinking about forwarding a copy of this to all of my kid's teachers. Just about everything that he says about the horrors of homework apply to my kids, particularly to my 7th grade son. It is not uncommon for him to have 3 hours of graded homework in one night which, combined with band and required reading, is a recipe for misery for him and for us as we have to threaten and cajole him to finish all of his work before he can have any free time.

The Germans

2006-10-02T09:21:00.000-05:00

As soon as I got back last Thursday night from California, I had to help get the house cleaned and ready because Saturday we went and met Nicola, a 14 year old German student who will be staying with us for a week. She is from Münster. She will be attending classes at Grissom with Morgan all week, then she goes to Washington, D.C. for a few days, then New York City for a few days before returning to Germany.

On Sunday, she went to church with us (we took her to Aldersgate Methodist's "Bread" service - a casual service with a cool rock band, donuts and coffee, and a real laid back atmosphere) then we went to Cracker Barrel for an introduction to Southern cuisine (she liked the biscuits, cornbread, fried okra, and country ham but didn't care for the turnip greens, but she did try them which is probably more than my kids would have done in a foreign country). We also went by the Space and Rocket Center, but it was too late in the afternoon to shell out money for a ticket with only 1.5 hours to look around. When we got back home, the kids took her around the neighborhood and several of their friends came over. She and Morgan got on iTunes and compared musical tastes.

She goes to a relatively small all-girls school in Münster, so Grissom is going to be an eye-opener, I'm sure. The Freshman class at Grissom is larger than her whole school.

She's also going to get a double or triple whammy of American Football. This week is Grissom's big rivaly game against Huntsville High, so Wednesday is the Powder-Puff football game between the Grissom and Huntsville girls (with the football team dressed as cheerleaders) and Thursday is the Big Game. Cameron's middle school has a game on Tuesday night and he's playing in the band, but we may not subject her to three consecutive nights of football.

Saturday should be interesting as well. Renee's niece Geri's son is having his first birthday party in Fort Payne and it's going to be a huge affair at Desoto State Park, so she'll get to meet the whole family (and Geri's husband's family from Texas, as well).

So far, so good. Nicola seems to be having fun, but we're probably tiring her out. She speaks English well, but I remember how exhausting it was in Paris dealing with everything in a foreign language and that, combined with jet lag, is enough to wear you down.

The title of this post is a reference to my favorite Fawlty Towers episode.

Recovery from Hell Month

2006-10-02T09:09:00.000-05:00

I'm back in Huntsville and back at work.

Of the four trips I took this month, southern California wins hands-down as my favorite (although Denver was pretty cool as well). It was my second trip to L.A. and, surprisingly, I found my way around pretty well. I think I put about 400 miles on my rental car and only got lost once. I revisited some of my favorite places (Hollywood, Laguna Beach, Crystal Cove SP), but I also saw some new stuff (I expanded my area around Hollywood, hiked at Griffith Park, and spent the afternoon in Santa Monica).

I also got to meet Ren and her husband face-to-face. Her brother is one of my best friends in Huntsville, but I only knew her from her blog and the fact that she reads mine and looks at my Flickr pictures, particularly when I post pictures of her nephew. I'm not much of the social, talk to strangers, sort of person and I was actually a bit nervous about meeting them, but it didn't seem too awkward to me. I drove from Anaheim to Burbank to meet them at Chevy's, a tex-mex restaurant, and when they walked up we recognized each other immediately and sat and ate and talked for about 2 1/2 hours. It was a lot of fun. Maybe we can drag her nephew and brother out to L.A. sometime. I know I want Renee and the kids to come out and I can't wait to go back, myself.

I'm too big of a wimp to move and, I hate to admit, I don't think California is a place I would like to raise my kids, but of all the places around the country I've visited, California would be my choice of where to live.

I thought that I had a several week reprieve, but I got back to the office to find that we've signed a new contract with HUD and I've got to go to D.C. next week (hopefully only for one day). Maybe then I'll get to stay home for a while...

Brief Trip Update

2006-09-27T00:32:00.000-05:00

I'm too tired to do a full entry justice, but suffice to say that crammed a week's worth of sightseeing into one day on Monday - hiking around Griffith Park, exploring Hollywood, taking a bus tour, going to Amoeba Music (and buying some cool stuff - my favorite so far is the Neil Gaiman tribute album), driving down through Beverly Hills, and ending the day in Santa Monica at the pier. Actually, I ended the day by getting lost going back through the hotel and driving aimlessly through Inglewood and Compton (well, close enough). By the time I regained my bearings, I was closer to Niko Niko (see previous entry about Weird Sushi Story), so I ate there again before going back to the hotel.

Today (Tuesday) was a full day of training in downtown Santa Ana. After the training, David, his wife Mary, and I drove down to Newport Beach, then south to Crystal Cove State Park to walk on the beach until sunset (see picture above). Then we drove into Laguna Beach and had dinner at the Jolly Roger Grill (pretty good food - nothing to get really excited over, but good - maybe I was just tired).

Hopefully tomorrow we'll finish a little earlier, but I have no idea what to do on my last night. I'm sure I'll think of something...

Another Trip Report...

2006-09-25T10:22:00.000-05:00

I arrived at Orange County/Santa Ana/John Wayne Airport last night around 7:30 and by the time I got to my hotel in Anaheim, I was exhausted after the six hours of travel and the time difference, so I got online, checked my mail, ran across the street to Del Taco for a late supper, and went to bed.

This morning I'm up trying to figure out my itinerary for the day before I head out. I think I'm going up I5 to Griffith Park (if the haze burns off by then), then I'm going to drive over into Burbank and back around through Hollywood, trying to see some of the stuff that I missed. Then, I might head back toward the beach and back down a different way.

Ren gave me some food suggestions and advice to check out Amoeba Records, so I'll try to fit that in as well.

The Weird Sushi Story

2006-09-22T12:25:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd posted this on my blog before, but I couldn't find it. Evidently, I only wrote it up as an e-mail to my friends, so here it is: my weird sushi adventure from my last trip to Santa Ana...

(written almost exactly one year ago - 9/9/2005)
I have this quirk that when I'm on vacation or on a trip, I like to eat at interesting local places and try to avoid eating at any major chain or at least at any chain that we have back in Alabama. Last night I was really tired and the time difference meant that at 7:00 here, my stomach thought it was 9:00 and I had put off getting out on the highways at night to look for somewhere to eat. I left the hotel thinking I would just go across the street to a Del Taco (which is still a thriving chain in CA, but I don't know if was the same chain that used to be in Anniston). My hotel is on South College Street and I wasn't sure what college they meant, but I thought I'd drive north on it for a while to see what was there. I had my GPS in case I had trouble finding my way back, but I didn't bring a paper map. I kept driving, rejecting some places because they didn't appeal to me (Red Lobster and Olive Garden) and others because I didn't see anything written in English anywhere near the place. I drove through Fullerton (ah, that's the college -- Cal State Fullerton), but I didn't find where the college pizza joints and bars were, so I kept driving. I drove into the Imperial Valley and near Yorba Linda (where Nixon is from) and up the mountain into Brea (which isn't near the tar pits, but appeared very ritzy -- the only possibilities here looked like they would cost a fortune and might require better clothes than I was wearing). After Brea, everything starting looking dark and more barrio-like, so I decided to turn around and find something back in Brea (there was a mall there). The road I chose to turn around on was lined with menacing looking apartment complexes so I couldn't turn around, but the GPS said there was a major highway a few miles ahead that eventually turned back toward the way I came, so I plodded on.

By this time, I was 20+ miles from the hotel and I was starving and tired. I started looking for a McDonald's in desperation. Then, up ahead, I saw a large strip mall/shopping center complex (complete with Wal-Mart!) so I decided I would eat somewhere there. Off in a little island was a pizza place, a gyro place, a sub shop, and a sushi restaurant. They all looked very strip mallish, so I was wary about the sushi place. They were all chains as well, but I was way past caring at this point. I parked and walked over. There was no one in the pizza place, two people in the gyro place, and one or two in the sub shop, but the sushi bar was packed, so I went there.

I sat at an empty end of the sushi bar and started looking at the menu. Once I'd decided, I looked up and realized that there were only maybe three other non-Asians in the place. Cool, I thought, it must be good. A few minutes later, a young Asian girl in her twenties sits beside me (the bar was filling up) and orders a large sake and a beer. I thought she was waiting for someone, but she was drinking them both herself. I place my order. Then two Korean men come in and sit to my left (one seat empty). One of them is a bit drunk already and yells for beer and sashimi. The waitress, without asking what kind, comes back with two bottles of Hite beer in bottles that were the size of wine bottles and some small glasses. The guy tells the sushi chefs to get glasses and pours them all a beer and then stands and toasts them, yelling "Salut!" and downing whole glasses at a time. Then he sees the girl to my right and asks her name and she says "Patty" (?). He asks her to drink a celebration toast with them and she asks, "What are you celebrating?" and he says, "I'm drunk!". So they clink glasses while leaning over my sushi combo right in my face. Then the guy asks my name and I tell him and he says his name is Henry Kim. I say, "Nice to meet you" and continue eating.

Then Patty leans over and informs me that he is the owner of the restaurant and his getting the sushi chefs drunk begins to make more sense. He then tells me he is celebrating opening their 23rd restaurant in the chain (Niki Niki) and asks if I'll drink a toast with him. I say sure and he calls for me a glass. He pours me a beer and we clink glasses all around and yell "Salut!" (by this time he was joined by the third partner in the chain, so I'm surrounded). Then we all sit and talk and eat and drink his beer. Henry and the other two guys have been running Niki Niki's around southern CA for four years. He's Korean and only hires Korean and Japanese chefs except for this restaurant where he has one Hispanic guy, Juan (so we all drink a toast to Juan). Patty is a law student one year away from taking the bar. Henry asks if I want another beer and I tell him that I've got a long drive ahead and I get lost easy, which he thinks is hilarious. I tell them I'm from Huntsville and we have the "Does Alabama have sushi bars? Are they any good?" conversation. When I get up to leave, they all stand and shake my hand (even Patty) and pat me on the back, then Henry says, "Let me give you my card." He doesn't have any, so he says "Stay right here and don't leave!' and runs into the back for cards. He comes back, writing something on a card. He hands it to me and says, "I wrote my cell phone number on it, call me anytime you're back in California."

This had to be one of the weirdest meals I have ever stumbled across. Driving at random through a strange city and ending up drinking free beer and yelling toasts with a bunch of drunk Koreans wasn't what I expected when I left the hotel. The sushi was great, by the way.

What to do in Southern California?

2006-09-22T12:04:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm back from the Atlanta trip and have 2 1/2 days to recover, pack, and plan before flying out to Santa Ana for the next, and last, training session.

I was in Santa Ana and L.A. just about this time last year for the first time and I had about a day and a half (and a few evenings) to cram in as much as I could. Here is what I did then:

Free afternoons/evenings:
Drove down PCH to Laguna Beach and took a bunch of pictures. Ate at The White House in Laguna Beach, then drove back to Santa Ana through the hills.

Drove down to some big-ass mall in Santa Ana that was full of ridiculous expensive stores, bought a magazine and a tourist map/book and ate at a place called Claimjumpers (I think).

Drove northeast through Yorba Linda and had a weird sushi experience with a drunk Korean named Henry.

On my free tourist day:
Drove to Venice Beach and walked around, then drove up the highway through Santa Monica and Malibu. At Malibu, I drove through the mountains, ending up on the Ventura Highway. Cut back to Mulholland as soon as possible and drove along the crest before cutting down on Laurel Hills into Hollywood. Parked and explored Hollywood Bldv. - Chinese theater, beggers in costume, a comic shop, took pictures, etc.

Then I decided to get a closer look/picture of the Hollywood sign, so I drove up through the residential neighborhoods until I found the fire road that goes under the sign and got out and walked and took pictures (which resulted in my picture being used for the AIDS Walk Los Angeles signs!).

Drove back down through Hollywood, then through Beverly Hills, then back toward downtown. Stopped at the La Brea tarpits and walked around taking pictures until near dusk. Continued on downtown and drove through the city, then looped around near Chinatown and got back on the freeway and drove back to Santa Ana.

I recorded most of this using my GPS and Google Earth. Here are my pictures from that trip.

So... I need suggestions on what to do next Monday when I have the whole day to myself and a rental car with unlimited mileage. I never made much over the mountain into the studio areas. By the time I was near downtown, it was too dark to see much. I didn't really go to any museums or exhibits since I didn't want to get tied down in one place too long. And, on that long drive, I never decided on any place interesting to eat and wound up grabbing tacos and small stuff on the road.

Where should I go that I haven't been?
Where should I eat?
Where should I avoid?

September 19th

2006-09-19T11:01:00.000-05:00

Avast! It's National Talk Like A Pirate Day!

So you'd be perfekly within yer rights to be parlez'in with a fake 'n corny accent today matey. And a few Arrr's mightn't be out a place either. So you can ne'er say you weren't aforewarned. Well, I suppose yer might since I been remiss in postin' this 'til the day's done over by half. Arrr.

How To Be Speakin' Pirate-Like
Official Website?

Today I'm headin off to Atlanta town fer another two days o' trainin' fer HUD. I'll probably be skippin' me trip reports on account of (a) we're drivin' over, (b) it's a wee, short trip, and (c) I've been to Atlanta town enough that I probly won't be doing much in the way o' picture takin' or sightseein', I won't.

Trip Report: Day 7

2006-09-16T19:49:00.001-05:00

I'm home.