At Least There's Not Frost Heave: Photos of Winter in Northern Virginia

Winter in the burbs is boring too.

Fun With ClearType

Text anti-aliasing is one of the the subtle things that makes modern computers much nicer to use than their ancestral 1990's era counterparts. It makes text render on screen without hard edges. It uses some trickery to do that, carefully choosing which colored elements around the text glyphs to give them a smooth looking appearance. Closely examining the characters onscreen (lean in really close, get a magnifying glass, it's happening on your screen right now, I guarantee it!) shows slight blue, green, and red tones in places that blend to gray when you're further back. This gives the impression of sub-pixel size features from a distance, tricking your brain into thinking you see things that really aren't there.

On windows, the piece of code that handles the text render is called ClearType.

Sadly, cleartype doesn't seem to know about monitor rotation, so having the color elements stacked vertically instead of horizontally can yield some interesting results. For instance, some character elements can actually vanish. This happens text is rendered on a color background with a rotated screen, thin vertical lines completely disappear.

Rotated Display:

Normal Display:

In normal rotation, there is a faint hint of darkness where the vertical bar on the * should be, but on the rotated display, it's just plain gone. When I first saw it, I wondered why there was a multiplication sign displayed when I pushed Shift-8.

Speaking of Cold

My feet just got cold.

For the record, I felt deeply disappointed when I found out about Google's recent purchase of Nest. I've been really impressed with Nest thermostats, and had fantasized about installing one in my house, but when I heard about the aquisition, my mind filled with a cloud black, ill formed visions: Google+ integration, statistics about my activities sent to advertisers, the thermostat getting hacked and running the heater in July, or the thermostat becoming an abandonware brick.

This is all easy to imagine after the shutdown Reader and Wave, and the abandonment of a few other products that worked great. The most frustrating part of cloud computing is lack of control. Once something is gone, its gone.

In retrospect, we're just on the cusp of what can be done with interconnected systems, so the downfall of an bellwether company is just part-and-parcel of the process. Remember BeOS?

Ice to the Nines

We had a pretty brutal cold snap last week. Then it rained. There was ice all over everything, and the roads were a skating rink.

This is what winter is like in the burbs of DC.

 

Obviously Wrong

I thought this was why my desktop was ignoring its power button. I plugged it in correctly, but it's still ignoring the power button with the same level of enthusiasm as before.

Old Glasses

I haven't gotten new glasses since before I went to grad school. That feels like a lifetime ago. Maybe I should stop taking goofy pictures of my old glasses and do something about it.

The reason I haven't is that I haven't failed my old need-new-glasses test: I used to get new glasses every time I realized I had trouble seeing things like street signs in the distance. The last time, for instance, I remember standing at the top of a cliff talking with someone about a car wondering in the distance. A car they could see, and I couldn't, save for the long dust cloud pointing it out. Either that doesn't happen here, or my vision is stabilized.

Either way, the glasses are getting fogged with the scratches of nearly a decade of use.

Bad Brain Box

In a brief continuation of a previous disaster story, I tried all manner of futzing with the ECM to get the Cutlass Ciera to hold a decent idle.

Removing and reinspecting the ECM board showed now other obvious signs of failure. The apparent cracks on the this transistor proved to be an incomplete coat of acrylic. 

After removing the ECM and control fuses, I went through the ECM connectors in the harness and carefully bent each pin so it would have more force to grip the main board, and I sanded the contacts with emory cloth. Sadly, this brought no joy, so I caved I purchased a refurbished ECM. My research showed that the ECM used in this car would work in something around 300 GM models between 1985 and 1995 (ish), with all behavior dictated by the ROM that was placed in the board.

Opening the ROM bay of the refub unit showed a mainboard that looked worse than the one it would replace. It had multiple layers of lacquer, visible corrosion, and an obviously older design that featured many more through-hole components.

Compared to the semi-function ECM, which was all nice and clean and loaded with surface mount devices.

A peak inside the working unit:

Swapping the ROM was easy. It turns out the holder is keyed and designed to support the pins of the chip. Unless done without any regard to care, and perhaps using a hammer, exchanging it is very easy.

Unamazingly enough, the car works great with the new ECM.

I considered, for a bit, trying to reflow the flakey board once I had the replacement in hand, with the mindset that I could send it back and reclaim my ~100$. However, after spending so much time trying solutions that didn't work, it seemed silly to ride that particular merry-go-round again. There had been some musing about using a toaster oven or heat gun to reflow the board, but after the car was running again, stinking up the house with particular activity seemed a bit silly.

Instead, I celebrated by changing the oil.

Box Canyon

I spent a lot of time over the holidays digging through the archives. I have a solid 10 years of photographic records now.

Fall, October 2 2004 5:47 PM MST.

The olds was still navy blue and primer at this point. Packrat still had his bronco. Both are in the photo are there, so, I know this is a caving club trip. Also because the cliff face I took this from is an extremely hard climb, so much so that I don't remember many people doing it and the route names completely escape me. Not that it matters, the names have probably already changed (again). But, an overhanging cliff is a great place to practice free rappels. It's nice to take first timers someplace where there is lots of light and they can walk to the start and walk off the finish. We started at dusk and fooled around until everyone was comfortable and bored. That weekend, we went to a real cave.

A lot of the bouldering stuff is at the left. Battle arms, Waterfall, and a chossy route called Pumpkin Spider come to mind. I had to stare at it for a good long time to remember all that. I never saw water flowing in the canyon, not even after the Great Hailstorm of 2004.

I have surprisingly few pictures of Box Canyon. At least, there are only a few that are recognizably box canyon. In retrospect, one needs to be pretty high up, and not be busy with ropes or anchors, and have a camera handy, in order to actually get a photo, much less a good one.

Of course, I spent so much time in box that you'd think I'd statistically get something worth looking at. Then again, it would be years before I owned a memory card that would hold more than about 30 photos. I used to have to pick and choose. So your guess is as good as any.

Life in NH, and then here in DC is so wildly different that some of the things I used to do seem almost fairytail in nature. To share a canyon with a few people, alone, for hours is unheard of. The cars are all new. There are lines and paperwork everywhere. People don't know anywhere else and aren't keen to leave. They like it this way.

I like things that way.

In a way.