Buck stops here.

“I live in a Buddhist temple,” he said in a thick southern accent, with the same inflection that other pious use to imply that they never get drunk or laid, and are hence without sin.


His comment instantly transformed the moment from the drull type of moment that clouds my daily graces into the one of those surreal moments of epiphany that happen from time to time.


This is because, in my mind, I was thinking, “...and I live in juvenile correctional facility.” However, I kept my emitter clamped, and pushed the door to the parts store open, inspite of the wind.


The moment was special, because I realized that I very rarely, if ever, say what I am really thinking, and the phenomena is becoming more pronounced. 


I replayed several interactions from recent memory in my mind while I waited to order new brake parts. The car sat with its big Volvo ass in the wind and its brick nose decorated with a new pink sticker notifying the good people of the world that one of my jalopies had again failed inspection. A few hours previously I sat outside while it waited in the inspection station. Apparently the previous owner was unaware of the impending deminse of the rear brakes. Or that an unrestrained battery is illegal in Virginia. At least the mechanic didn’t accuse me of being incompetent this time. The last one had no problem enunciating his opinion of me.


No, when things get confrontational or illogical I get confused and silent. Earlier that day, I told someone that they needed to attach the drill clamp to the drill press table or it would spin free and leave a trail of hell. To my surprise, they said, “ok”, then tightened the chuck, flipped the switch, and pulled the handle. The bit dug into the brass work piece, causing the piece and clamp to lift off the table and swing around to crashed into the base of the press. The drill press made an awkward 60 hz hum as it tried fruitlessly to push the clamp through its own support. I reached over my erstwhile machinist companion and nudged the switch off. “oops.” I said. Whatever other commentary and chastising available was simply ignored. It’s always like that. 


My internal dialog was interrupted by the purchase of 4 brake pads, each the size of a deck of cards, and two rotors, one of which would be delivered the next morning. I felt a hundred dollars lighter. Like a newer, poorer, man. 


I wonder if i am a foil to the folks who seem to be very good at finding ways of saying what everyone else is thinking, be it with poise and accuracy, or with sheer blunt force. Why am I not one of them? Should I care? When I wrote in my journal more, I wrote about frustration at coming up empty with retorts. This is a long standing behavior. Perhaps it is just the way that I am to the world.

Together till the end

Sometimes it's easier to imagine a story than actually tell it.

It pays to read your bills

You might guess that I learned to handle and pay bills from my parents. However, I only really learned the value of being on time and having the money in the budget.

I learned how to budget from my parents.

But I really learned about bills from Packrat, whom I lived with for two years in college.

Packrat is very good at picking out the details of bills. He possesses a certain suspicion that each one is somehow wrong. Maybe they are? I also learned how to do a good job managing bills among multiple housemates. I believe that skill made living with 4 other people manageable when I was in grad school.

It's pretty common to divide and conquer when you're living with other people. The concept that dividing each bill among the housemates seems simple, but it can be convoluted if someone forgets to pay or suddenly moves out. Also, at the end of the month, everybody has to write a lot of checks to balance between the wildly dissimiliar amounts owed. It gets nasty quickly if someone forgets, or if someone keeps getting hit with a big bill (like heating oil...).

Instead, I took Packrat's route of simply putting all the bills in my name. I payed the bills, everyone payed me. I put the bills and math I used to determine the amount owed on the fridge. The bills were always on time, and if someone was having a bad month, I could spread their amount owed ahead a little until they did have the money. While this requires an individual to step up for a big monthly ding, with a little budgeting, things can be made to balance out. The only real need is to have enough money to pay 1 months bills ahead of time. Everyone in you house will love you for making things easy. It doesn't take long, as long as you can do a little arithmetic.


I also learned to be suspicious of what I was being billed for. I read every bill quite carefully. You can learn alot about what you do and what can be done to you.

Today, I learned that there is a new toll-free prefix out. In addition to 1-800, there is 1-888,1-877, 1-866, and now, as of October, 1-855. This is in a special note at the back of my verizon bill. There is even a reminder to update by call management software to recognize it.

Interesting.

Swedish Brick

On Thursday, I closed the deal on the Volvo. On friday, I registered and titled it.

I spent a most of the rest of the weekend under the hood, and more often, under the dash, getting the long list of quirks ironed out and and assessing which components need to be ordered to get it to pass inspection.

Somebody at Rockauto is going to be putting their kid through college thanks to me. Mufflers and exhaust pipes, turn signal covers, rear gate lifters...

The Girly is going to be peeling the many excess stickers off. It has military base, college, racing, Volvo, and rockband decals. It's been around a bit.

Though, it is less rusty than the ChevOldsmoBuiac.

It is remarkably well engineered. All the powerlocks and windows still work, and the dash is rattle free. It's supported by a metal frame and not pure plastic. Cars should be built like this.

The funny thing is I knew it was going to be mine as soon as I saw a "Type-R" sticker on a 4 cylinder station wagon.

Melancholytron

We finally got a box of prints back from NCPS. They called several times to verify how we wanted the slides cut, so I was beginning to worry that it was stuck in some loop. After 7-10 days, and one oversized dink in the bank account later, we had hour prints back.

I have -more or less- given up on local film developers. After the Rivers in Dover couldn't handle jobs with more than two weeks lead, and could not scan a slide to save their pathetic lives, and after the Walgreens machine operator generated a bunch of Advantix landscape prints from standard 35mm film, then later printed from low resolution scans, the project seemed hopeless.

Fortunately, I seem to have resolved that issue. If my bank account can handle it.

These are a message from the year 2009. They tell you that the world is bluer and greener than you ever remember it being. That there are apples and berries everywhere, and life is good.

What is dark blue and has 361255 miles?

Wish List Overload

No longer having a dissertation to work on has removed a great deal of guilt from my daily life and added a modicum of free time to my day (I'm trying to sleep at least 6 hours a night now).

Since this new turn of affairs, I've been trying to start all the projects I've been putting off for the past umpeen years. I've had a lingering sense of frustration that I'm not making progress on any of them, really.

Starting all backlogged hobby projects at once is not wise. There is simply not enough time in the day. I am simultaneously trying to read books (I need to know a lot more about hydrology), catch up on photography projects, learn how to bake bread, improve my handwriting,, improve my writing, figure out if my gps data analysis project has any direction, work on my robot, learn an open source data analysis tool beyond igor, start rock climbing again, hike more, start running again (my 4 mile bike ride to work is really not enough...), and get more involved in the community (because, lets face it, we're here for a while). I'm probably missing something.


How am I not surprised that I am making little progress.
 
It occured to me some days ago that I used to obsess about individual tasks in a very single minded fashion. One thing at time. I should probably take that approach.

They are just hobbies, right?

Right.

It can only portend weasles and midgets.

Core #6 of a quad core processor is showing 60% saturation. I can only imagine...

Put it in a drawer under your socks

I pulled the hard disk out of the laptop, put it in a case, and dropped it in a drawer. The hard drive contains everything I did in graduate school and an extremely foozy operating system. I haven't touched it in over a month.

I have other things to worry about now.

A Little Bit More Autumn

I have been wanting to take a photo like this for a long time:

Capturing a really, really, really good glowing forest photos is hard, nearly impossible. I think this is the first time I've really managed to do it. 

Or maybe all of virginia decided to turn warm and yellow for a day.

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

My brother showed up sometime late Wednesday night, and put his VW into gear and quietly pulled out of the driveway Saturday morning (approximately). This was our first true long period together in over a year (since when, last thanksgiving? Oh yea! The fridge died... I remember that!)

It was great to see him, and, uh, we didn't do much. We talked a lot, and I spent all day Friday at work so I would have enough vacation for thanksgiving and christmas. We are almost out of alcohol, so it couldn't have been too bad. We cooked a lot. Surprisingly, we spent no time playing computer games or chess, though he did determine that my FreeNas server simply won't mount FAT32 drives without a lot more pain that I'm willing to belly up. I believe I made grilled cheese while he did that.

He made vegetarian meatballs. I'm not sure that's the best name for a dish that celebrates a food that the parent gastronomic culture is in blatant denial of. I am trying to accept such eccentricities as a fact of life, and besides, it is somehow more descriptive than fried tofu breadcrumb mush.

He did spend some quality time with the dog. Twice he had the joy of yanking my overzealous mutt of some poor bicyclist, as well as helping yank his snout from a snout snapping jack russel. I find it amazing that after haveing his nose bit, went to go for a second sniff...

He also spent a day with The Girly, I gather they had a good time as no one was seriously injured when I came home from work.

We also engaged in the usual mutual photography session.

I (heck, let's be honest, -we-) have been quite nomadic for the past, oh, 9 years. I find it quite odd that we both landed within a few hours drive of each other in situations that can be described as "for the foreseeable future". I get to see him again Wednesday, and again for Thanksgiving. It's nice to have family in the vicinity.

Since he's family, he's also one of the few people who will get out and argue with me about something. We have vastly different views on image processing and printing calculators.

We have spent a lot of time considering the current job situation. I do not know whether to consider ourselves special or lucky to have had -multiple- job opportunities to pay the bills. In contrast, I can think of many colleagues and friends who have been empty handed for years now. While the options were not really all good, at least there were some palatable ones in there. It beats starving. However, now we are watching the world spin and wonder, a little, if the new found gravy train will stop.

I also think we are a dismayed that opportunities we had hoped for are not easily had right now, if ever again. We had some warning that things were going to be changing before the recession, but it is very hard to grasp the shape of the change. For gen X and Y, this means having to scale back expectations. Some tit-for-tat exchange of goals and realities has to be made to keep bread on the table. Or simply accept that there is no free lunch. We have microwaves, natural gas heaters, and flush toilets, thus enjoying what is probably among the most decadent existences known to humans, so there is some wiggle room. At the same time, part time work that would allow community involvement and some alternative definition of balance seem to be out of the question at the moment. The wisdom of un-ending higher education seems pointless in the face of staggering unemployment. It's all inside out and not working as planned.

Oh, I made a pretty good loaf of whole wheat, too. Even though I put in 3 times as much sugar, so it rose twice in about on hour.

Fresh bread and wine go very well together.

I'm going to choke you with this bar of soap

If i had kid with a swearing problem, I would probably just figure that they heard it from my own pirate mouth and resolve to use new and exciting insults and tirades that they would likely recite and then get in deeper trouble for. ("They are not fat bastards! That's inappropriate language! Never say bastard! Never call someone fat! The correct phrase is human gravitational anomolies.")

I should also seek to write posts that have the same gravitas as their titles. It's like I suck you in with great sizzle, and only to discover that I'm frying lard in pure MSG so my thugs can mug you and take 5 minutes off your life.

I have tabled the project to get my own server for a bit. After I let go of my elitism, figured out how to direct link images in Blogger to Picassa Alblums (so you can click on an image and see it full size), I found that *gasp* it's actually very easy to use, and does not get in you way. There is something to be said for being able to focus on writing and not worrying too much about neatly piling the input together for the ever-persnickety html generating perl code I wrote in 2006. Now if I can just get the D*&@%! style sheets fixed so that the blog margins will expand indefinitely.


Of course, I really like how wikis blur the lines between the writers. I should find my password to grue and work on that again. It was fun.


For the uninitiated, unistrut and 80/20 are modular framing and support systems. Think about it at rapid development and prototyping for mechanical and structural engineering. Essentially, they supply machined bar stock with groves and slots at regular intervals, and a set of fittings that matches and some nice load tables so you can match everything together to get the performance characteristics you need. It reduces the amount of cutting and drilling to the minimum. It is a lot faster than having to cut and drill a bunch of raw bar stock on your own. Generally speaking (there is overlap), Unistrut is iron and generally works well with large loads and designs (think large racks, shelving, heaving equipment mounting) while 80/20 is best for small racks and enclosures that. The unistrut line is mostly steel. The 80/20 line is mostly aluminum. Industrial erector set is right!

Lately, I have been finding it is cheaper to get the unistrut straight from the factory. Some resellers have marked up the price a factor of 2 or more per foot. It pays to shop around.

The Project

I now officially have too many projects.

I was probably at that point several years ago.

I'm going to try to stop now.

Sometime a few weeks ago, I realized just how damn easy it is to interface mechanical devices to computers. If you have a TTL output, you can pretty easily bridge that to a solid state relay, MOSFET, real relay, or some other power actuator. You can fairly simply count pulses on a digital input. The realization that National Instruments doesn't hold a stranglehold monopoly on the digital I/O world helped a lot. I really wanted a USB-DAQ for hobby things, but did not want to pony up the money for one. It turns out, I don't need to.* There are many ways to interface hardware and software. They just don't tell you this when you get a degree in chemistry.**

So, I concluded that my GPS data analysis project is a little bit weenie and that if I wanted to have real fun, I should build a robot. A robot to do what? At first, I considered building one to dismantle hard drives. I enjoy hard drive magnets a great deal, and find uses for all the ones I have, but I sometimes find the process of removing magnets to be time consuming and injurious. I have a fair stack of hard drives to dismember. The were two problems with this project. (1) I would quickly run out of hard drives after the robot worked, and (2) i did not trust some soulless machine wielding a Dremel any more than I trust Charles Manson with a chainsaw at a Boy Scout camp. In fact, the outcomes are quite likely to be very similiar.


The next best thing, of course, was to build a robot to train my dog.

But train my dog to do what?

To hate robots. Of course.


The dog likes to growl and bark at nothing in particular. The punishment for this is the squirt gun. Of course, we cannot always grab the squirt gun in a timely manner, say, when our hands are full of dough. Having a mindless automaton to met out indiscriminate justice on those who bark at nothing-in-particular would be a great aide.

But first, I needed parts. While I know of a few sources of new motors and pumps, and what not, used is fine for this sort of project. Time to scavenge! I went to the local GoodWill and purchased all the remote control vehicles that were missing remote controls. I sincerely doubt the marketability of a non-working toy. If I were a kid, at least a toy should, you know, work. This whole excercise is a bit of a throwback to my childhood, where I scavenged components from garage sale finds (little known fact: 8-track tape players have very high torque motors).

I snagged a couple of gems: a toy with treads, a hummer with a beefy drive box and a wench, and a fire truck with a rotating pedistal, extending ladder, and a real water pump! Score!

The girly said that it looked like Christmas in our living room when she got up in the morning.

 I pretended it was christmas morning and unwrapped all that useless plastic from my presents.

For the moment, I must wait a bit to test all the components. I lack basic essentials like gator clips and a soldering iron.

On to thinking about how to find and ultimately shoot the dog. My first idea, which is now bubkis, was to use a video stream and some pattern matching to track and shoot either something that looks like the dog, or something that is simply the blackest object in the room. The problem with this idea appears to be one of available coding time and horsepower. I built a prototype in Igor, but it can only capture and analyze about one image per second, much less search for a pattern. Curiously, this is not due to CPU limitations, but the limitations of the image grabber. I experimented with some edge detection filters, but through up my hands after I found the frame rate unusable.

I think that, unless I can find some other way to get at the video stream that does not require -months- of coding, I will have to take a different approach. Perhaps stereo microphones with a bark/growl search and triangulation routine?

I have only begun to wonder how it will navigate the house.

Real time image processing: mixed bag.

...My poor dog...
 
*I tell people that I am stupid all the time. I am not sure they really believe me. I have countless examples of my own stupidity. It is things like this that should go on my stupid resume.
**If they tell anyone at all

Yie! Nothing like an Active Directory failure to keep you from doing stuff.

My own private thermopile

The girly and I have been wearing lots of sweaters as of late. The house genuinely seems frigid. Colder than the last one. Could it be that our pre-fab-love-nest is more poorly insulated than the ancient moldy slum-cottage we left in New Hampshire? The thermostat said it was 62.

Are we really that old? I'm pushing 30, but I thought I had a few midlife crises to weather before senility and the chills we a major issue. What next, sponge baths?**

Something, probably the poor lady pulling on a second sweater and a hat, possessed me to seek independent verification. With what, an oven thermometer?

Yea, it -starts- at 50°F.

My cheap-o multimeter came with a Type-K Thermocouple (actually, the meter and thermocouple is practically identical to the wikimedia photo...). It claimed it's 16°C (61°F) when the thermostat said 67°F. Thermal inertia of the meter? That could mean it was in the 50's before I fired up the furnace.

That said, I'm unsure about the meter's accuracy. At 600V, it's off by about 50V. What if it's the same here and our blood has simply thinned? I tried using the Fluke (whose NIST certificate has not yet expired!) to directly measure the voltage, but i was not able to get a useful measurement, as characteristics of the cold junction are poorly defined, the thermocouple does not give much of a useful value, as the voltage is way to low. It should be in the 100 microvolts, but instead it's a paltry 30 microvolts.

Now, in the time it took to write this, the cheap meter now agrees with the thermostat.... It must have an internal thermister to balance the hot junction of the thermocouple.

Damnit!

Where's a mercury bulb when you need one?


**I am always open to candlelight sponge baths with The Girly

Note To Self

Essential Rally Equipment:
Snacks
Water
Empty Bladder
Hat
Camera with long lens
Sunscreen
Step stool so select individuals can see screens.


Do not bring:
Weapons
Kimshi

Rally to Restore Sanity: Pretty Crazy

I am very protective of my free time, that is to say, that time where I don't engage in structured activities. As a result, I rarely engage in long range pre-emptive planning.

However, when I first heard about the Rally to Restore Sanity (hosted by John Stewart). It went on the calendar almost instantly. This was back in September. We had a lot to do: figure out the Metro, figure out DC, figure out what to put on our shirts, and figure out what to do with The Dog... there was a lot to figure out. Fortunately, that made it a lot easier when 10.30.10 arrived.

The stencil we made for our shirts.

We dropped of the dog at 0800, and found our way to the Vienna metro station by 0900. The Eastbound exit off 66 was jammed with cars trying to get in. Apparently, this was a popular idea. The eastbound parking lot was jam packed. Cars where lined up for a mile, threaded through the rows, and left. I hope the person who double parked the one empty space got a ticket.

 It is a bit of an intellectual oddity that the Vienna park-and-ride spans both sides I-66. What about westbound side? I had not noticed cars filing in there with the same abundance. I am not sure where the refuges were going, but it wasn't the westbound lot. We were delighted to find no line many empty parking places just across the bridge. Amazing. I wonder where everyone else went? To try their luck at East Falls Church. Good luck with that!

Amazing too, was the line for tickets. The automated machines were swamped with folks purchasing tickets. We, luckily, had plenty of credit on ours from the last trip, and waltzed past the line, through the stiles, and down the escalator, just in time to pack into the train.

Metro was caught quiet off guard by the Rally. Either they didn't get the memo or decided that it was not worth thinking about. Vienna only had a few employees on duty, certainly not enough to guide a lost crowd of out-of-towners lodged near Dulles. There were also not enough trains. Vienna is the last stop on the Orange line, yet the train inbound to DC was packed when it left the station, and few additional people could squeeze in at each stop. We managed to nab a seat, and watched sympathetically as people peered in from the podium, looking for a niche to cram in. The Girly scowled when I suggested we do the Royal Hand Wave and smile vacantly at each station.

Not this train: looking for space on a crammed Metro car

We considered getting off at a number of stops, but ultimately left when everyone else did. Sometimes fighting the crowd is a very bad idea. Hundreds of people tend to push pretty hard when they do it en masse.

From the subway, we first ventured away from the rally, reasoning that bathrooms without lines would be further, not closer to ground zero, and were rewarded with relatively pristine fixtures near the Washington Monument. Our reconnaissance trip made a few weeks ago was paying off quite well, having given us locations of useful things like bathrooms, a set of ready train tickets, and later, bearings that gave us a nice patch of grass to pause and relax on.

We tried to get close to the stage, but found the crowd far too dense, so we decided to camp out near a video screen. We pretty much choose the location because moving anywhere was getting impossible.

People

There were people everywhere. Thousands of them. We may not be good at government, or obeying traffic laws, or algebra, or english, or making crème bruleé, but we are very good at breeding, and we have celebrated our skill by doing it lots.

I was initially worried that the rally was going to be loaded with lots of political people trying to do political things. This sort of behavior would be very contrary to the goals of the movement, and I sincerely hoped that everyone would get the message and recognize what we were really rallying against. Fortunately, there very little politicking going on.

There were a few Pro-Choice, Get Out the Vote, and Libertarians about, one very large sign that might have been promoting Glenn Beck, but might not have been, and a disproportionately large number of people trying to get pot legalized. Unfortunately, I keep getting mistaken for John Lennon, so I spent a little time smiling politely while listening to people promote behavior that could quite possibly ruin my career if I ever did it.

This is how to organize a movement. Or something.

Politcos:

All and all, it was a very friendly and warm crowd who were generally not a big angry mob and pretty cool to be hanging out with. It was a new, kinder, gentler mob.

Of course, it is the individuals that give a mob it's character.

The Rally

The rally was delightfully defocused. Or, stayed pretty much right on topic throughout, depending on how you look at it. John Stewart &co did a very nice job organizing and planning considering the circumstances. The circumstances being, in my opinion, that they were wildly successful beyond any stretch of the imagination. When Stewart first got on the stage, he definitely affected the air of disbelief. As in, "Wow, there's like 10 million people out there. Um, ah, I guess it worked." This is definitely very close to the thought that crossed my mind, which was something like, "Wow, there are a lot of us!"

There was a series of skits and awards focused on marked cases of (in)sanity in our modern world. The most major heartbreak was when Stephen Colbert stopped Cat Stephens Yusuf Islam from playing Peace Train. We all wanted to cry, although having Ozzy start playing Crazy Train was some comfort. If anyone had to take one in the yarbles, it was The Media, who's needs for maximum profit and duty to inform the public result in an eternal case of freak out. Case in point: NPR firing reporters and preventing employees from attending The Rally. Nuts.

Post Facto

At 3 o'clock, the rally permit expired and we were no longer part of a rally, but a mindless hoard tresspassing on federal property. Thousands of people scattered in all directions. We wandered down, past the stage, in front of the capitol building, then a few blocks north, where we found a nice patch of grass to eat our picnic lunch that we had prepared (impromptu at the grocery store at 0800 that morning) to enjoy while the crowds scattered. 

Finally, green grass and a sandwich.

The tree of the knowledge of politics and real life never bears fruit.

Sunset in D.C.

Of course, hundreds of thousands of people don't easily scatter just like dog hair doesn't easily come out of the carpet. After a little over an hour, we packed, and trudged back to the subway to stand in line for the train. Fortunately, Metro had called in reinforcements, rolled every train they could find, and getting out was not quite the hassle as getting in. I slept in a slumpt pile on the way home.