100 word minimum

Me and the ladies who lunch

Okay, so I skipped lunch. Fueled only by coffee and a chocolate truffle shaped like a pig (it was a big truffle), I headed out the road to Short Pump in search of light-up duckies.

The princess was telling me about a baby shower she'd just been to. One of the gifts was a set of duckies with LEDs inside which flicker in a multicolored pattern at a touch to the electrodes on their bottoms. "They're from Nordstrom. Only $12! I was telling Mountain Man [the husband] about them and he said, 'Those sound like something you'd like.' So I'm going to go get some."

Coincidentally enough, Oz and I will be going to a baby shower in less than two weeks.

So. Quest for duckies. We'll also get them something practical.

I found the duckies pretty quickly amongst all the highly gendered baby clothes (you can dress your kid in anything as long as it's a blue bear or a pink bunny) (only a slight exaggeration) (well, they had blue bunnies too).

The label says "Ages 3 and up."

Obviously these are for parents. No way will the power cell last three years till the kid is old enough to play with them. But very cute! The salesgirl said, "Oh, these are like the new hot baby gift. We are selling them like crazy!"

The Animal Squirters (insanely cute little rubber animals that squirt water) have no age label, so I grabbed a pack of those too. They're too big to choke on and we'll just hope there's no lead in the paint. If we buy a car seat, that'll cancel out the foolishness of the toys, right?

If you too go out looking for duckies, be sure to check out the great big saltwater aquarium in the Nordstrom baby department.

Then, with my Nordstrom shopping bag over my arm, I ventured out into the mall. Even though I hate shopping. But the mall is there and I am there, so I might as well look around.

I found a sale at Ann Taylor. I got a pair of slacks and a sweater at 70% off.

Instead of quitting while I was ahead, I went around looking for more baby stuff. Great color choices: pink or blue. Sheesh. This is the rich people mall. You'd think they'd have variety instead of unending bi-chromatic blandness. Where are the monkeys? That's what I want to know. A not-pink or not-blue onesie with monkeys on it? That's too much to ask from the mall.

It's not too much to ask from Google though. In 0.11 seconds I found a flying monkey onesie, sock monkey onesie, and monkey-including offerings from the Funky Monkey Baby Boutique.

Fight the pink and blue hegemony. Shop online. Not that you have a choice.

Thrashed

It's been a tough weekend for me and my elderly iBook. The iBook is a real trouper. It was purchased back in early 2002 and has been chugging along ever since with the original OS X release plus one tiny incremental update. It's a G3 600 MHz with a 20 GB hard drive, quite dainty and slow by current standards. But a great machine.

What hasn't been so great for a while: reading reviews of nifty software and not being able to run it because the OS is just too old. Scripts on web pages that don't run. Not being able to watch embedded video.

I finally bit the upgrade bullet. It's much less expensive than the new MacBook bullet, let me tell you, and now's the time. The current version of OS X is the last release which will run on my hardware, and my iBook only slightly exceeds the minimum system requirements. If this were a PC, that would mean I'm out of luck because you generally have to multiply the minimum system requirements for PC systems by a factor of four to get a usable system. The beauty of Apple is that a minimum system will run just fine. I went looking around online for people moaning about running Tiger on a G3 and couldn't find any. The beauty of Apple is also that such an absence usually means that what you think might be a problem is a total non-issue.

The new OS arrived on Saturday. I backed up all my data and verified whether my old software was going to run on the new OS. (Yes!) Backing up data, even with strict triage, takes forever when you've got a spanky new DVD begging to be installed.

So the first time I installed Tiger …

Yeah. Laugh.

The first install I did was an archive and install which would preserve my data. What that got me was a system that ran incredibly slowly and a hard drive which thrashed on system idle processes. iBook and me? Not happy.

The next install was a delete and install. No data but the system ran great. Very nifty. Except that I decided I didn't like my home folder name and you can't change that except by reinstalling.

Third time? The charm. Nice home folder name, clear hard drive, nice operation, though software does boot a bit slowly.

Man, staring at the progress bar is exhausting. I'm sure my iBook would say that drawing the progress bar is exhausting.

After all that, I set about resetting all my settings, reconstructing my bookmarks (and remembering all my passwords and userids), installing software, playing with software, turning off sounds, redoing all my email accounts, and finding out that some of the data that I backed up wasn't really backed up. Oh well. I probably didn't need that data anyway. Except for some of my writings. Oops. But then I discovered that my elderly version of Word is able to extract text from just about any file, so that's okay. To minimize (if not eliminate) that problem in the future, I now have Word set to save everything as RTF by default.

I think I can call this operation a success. A long, drawn out, tedious, frustrating success, maybe, but that comes with the territory. And now I can surf with Safari and play with Scrivener to my heart's content.

Also, someone sent me a dollar! For my novel! My shareware release method is not highly remunerative, so it's always exciting to get a dollar. Thank you!

Obsolescence

It was only a matter of time. It couldn't last forever. We've had twelve good years together. We were lucky to get that. It would be foolish to expect more.

Today I discovered that the battery in my cordless phone will no longer hold a charge. Not only that, this type of battery is no longer available. Newer batteries won't plug into the phone and their much higher current rating would fry it anyway.

Other than that, the phone/answering machine still works perfectly. The handset has this great hands-free mode that is not available with current handsets: it's big enough to clamp between my ear and shoulder without forcing me to crunch up like Richard III. The sound has always been crisp and clear, and the range is more than sufficient to cover my whole house and probably a good bit of the neighborhood.

This evening we went on a battery hunt. Oz made sure to pick stores which also had a good selection of phones. Some poor kid at Best Buy listened to my rant about "for want of a battery" and then sold us a silvery Panasonic phone system with four handsets, at about half the price of my old cordless phone.

It's the end of an era.

Just a couple weeks ago I got a call from a friend. When I didn't recognize her voice, she said, "Didn't you look at the screen?"

"'Screen'? What is this 'screen'? We are strictly low tech here, babe," I said with true Luddite pride.

No more. We have screens now.

But I refuse to spring for caller ID.

Machinery

Oz got a new PDA, the result of a little retail therapy while I was in Ohio. When he went to install its desktop software on the PC, the PC choked. The little hamsters who run the hard drive cried "No more!" and lay down. He defragged the hard drive to little effect and then the machine went into constant reboot mode.

At this point, I started browsing the Best Buy site and quoting computer prices at him. That PC is my old one, purchased in 2000 and ridden hard since. Though parts aren't actually falling out and rattling around inside the case, some have ceased to function (though I expect the sound card merely needed to be re-seated) and Oz has reinstalled the OS at least once. It's been adequate for his at-home computing purposes, which mostly involve reading comics, but has become resistant to change.

It grew less resistant and stopped rebooting itself when I quoted the prices for new desktop systems and listed the specs in its general direction. This is totally not magical thinking. When I said, "So, wanna go to NTK?" the little hamsters in the old PC hopped back onto their treadmills and started scurrying like mad. Not falling for that, Oz started filling his pockets, the equivalent of me picking up my purse, and we hit the road.

Now Oz can read his comics really fast. A sleek black PC has replaced the two putty-colored machines under the table and an enviable LCD monitor has kicked aside the two giant putty-colored CRTs which have been dominating that whole corner of the office for the past couple years. The old machines are stacked in the corner.

In theory we'll have a net reduction in clutter out of this.

Eventually.

Richmond leads the way

Richmond's police department gets a nod from the New York Times in an article on data mining.

Mathematical shopping

We're walking along and across the street, we see the big, scrolling LED sign by the Walgreen's. It says, "We have Zeno."

I say, "Yeah, but do they have the paradox? Otherwise, what's the point?"

Oz says, "Well, we could go find out, except we can never get there."

Smile, you're on …

There's nothing like a little playing with cables and following directions to make one feel all engineery. Today I stopped glaring at the web cam and set it up. It was quite easy, though it took a lot longer than it should have for me figure out I had to upgrade the firmware in my elderly router. It seems they shipped these routers without functional UPnP (the bit that deals with how my internet connection has dynamic IP addressing) and the camera needs an IP address to work with the free web addressing provided by the manufacturer.

Once I got it going, it was … fun. I pointed it at the cats' dish and watched them eat. When I used the web based controls to pan the camera, the cats got very interested in the camera, which makes a little mechanical noise, and gave me comical close-ups of noses and whiskers. Kitty-cam is so cute! I emailed the camera's web address and password to Oz.

Then I had to get it working as a security device, that having been the point of this exercise. The camera has a motion detector and though it can't save images, and the free web address doesn't include any storage space, the camera can email or FTP the images to some other place. Now this is an excellent application for one of my Gmail addresses, because that 2.77 GB of glorious Google storage can hold over a quarter million of these little web cam images. When the motion sensor gets tripped, the camera starts emailing images until there's no more motion. The file name of each image is a date and time stamp. Getting the email capability set up was kind of fiddly, but it's working now. That Gmail account now has a few hundred shots of our legs and feet, and the cats walking around in the kitchen.

I'm figuring that I'll put the camera in a strategic and unobtrusive place and turn it on whenever we're out. If the burglar comes we'll catch him in pixels.

Later that afternoon the phone rang. When I picked up, Oz said, "Okay, now you walk into the kitchen."

I'm so accommodating.

"Okay, now I can see your feet."

I sat on the floor and bent my head down to peer directly into the lens.

"There you are! Oh! I can make the lens move. The kitchen floor is so shiny."

I went back into the office and, while the cats lingered in the kitchen, Oz fiddled with the pan and tilt until he got Monte Alban's attention to the tune of several close-ups of a big green eye.

"Hee! Hee!"

God, but we're easily amused around here.

Paranoia Parade

To web cam or not to web cam?

But first, the infamous Dead Man's Tulips:

Would anyone happen to know what these are called really?

But back to the web cam. I was thinking about surveilling my kitchen because the recent rash of burglaries featured kitchen ransacking. I thought that would be a good way to catch the burglar sort of red-handed, or at least make up for the lack of witnesses.

I did a little research, found a wireless web cam with good customer reviews (most have reviews to the effect that "This piece o' shit doesn't work!"), and procrastinated on ordering it because we got an alarm system and the web cam was kind of expensive. Then I ordered it anyway, because we were going out of town, and I even paid for shipping, as opposed to the free super-saver shipping option, so I could be sure to get it in plenty of time before we left.

Then I waited. And waited.

The stupid web cam got here a couple days ago. Three days after we came back from vacation and twenty days after I placed the order. So. I am not surveilling my kitchen. The web cam is sitting in its box on the couch and getting glared at. It cost just a little too much for a toy. Now that one burglar has been caught and the crime wave is slowing down, it doesn't seem likely that I'll be catching a thief with it.

I'm thinking about returning it. On the other hand, I could surveille my cats. But it's not like I have a monkey hot spring to point it at.

Hauntings

The other day I got a call from Dr. Smith, my faculty mentor at engineering school. It seems that the guys down at the super-duper research facility (which ought to hire me because I am so great) have a few questions about the Hamster project. Which I haven't looked at for over a year now, but I guess I can rack the old brains. I had them email me a few of their questions to jog my memory.

Their questions were easy. I feel the urge to simply tell them to read the documentation, though the answers to some of their questions ("Why did you do it this way? What does it mean?") wouldn't be in there.

I'm wondering if they need someone to fiddle with the code. Me? Would they pay me? Well, I wouldn't do it for free.

And Dr. Smith has got me thinking about getting back to the job hunt. When I told him that I was still translating, he said, "But, the world is missing out!"

Can we help you find anything?

Other than the way out? No.

We went to Circuit City this evening to try and spend a $50 gift card Oz received (this was a corporate gift, not a personal one, so if we sound ungrateful, well, I guess we are, but we really hate Circuit City). "Try" being the operative word because we really couldn't find anything we wanted. I wouldn't mind getting another SD card for my camera, but they cost $15 less elsewhere and why should we give Circuit City extra money that they don't deserve? Oz wouldn't mind getting another mouse/trackball for his collection, but they didn't have any he liked. We looked at some cute Crumpler camera bags, but I think they sacrifice functionality for the cuteness. (To be specific: The capacity is small for the size of the bag, and the extra padding in combination with the design makes the bag too stiff to get the camera in and out easily. I tried.) And through it all, the little sales boys sniffing around for a commission, except when Oz found the shelf of odd things (the vacuum tube radio was almost appealing) for $10.

I fled while Oz was still looking at the mouses and sat in the car, watching the storm approach and admiring some pictures I took earlier in the evening of a surprise architectural find in the neighborhood (see the large size for more detail).

Oz finally escaped empty-handed and we drove away, passing by all the stores where we'd actually enjoy spending $50.

"Oh, Borders! You just went there today, didn't you? We could always get books."

"There's Bed Bath and Beyond! Right there!"

"Yeah, we could get some new towels. What about chocolate? They could have given you a chocolate gift card."

Like weasels

I finished up my translation job for the week early today, so I had the afternoon off. Since Oz was off too, we had the afternoon to goof off together. We went shopping. We managed to not buy anything (except for a hugely expensive desk chair which I need because of my poor, aching back) till we got to the big electronics store, where we found the photograph printer we wanted. While wandering around, Oz found 1 GB USB drives for only US$30 and it seemed silly not to get some. Never mind that we already have plenty of memory in that form.

We consumed like weasels. Things didn't get out of hand, although Oz did get fussy about a USB cable, because it wasn't pretty enough.

Me: "Oh, come on. It's shiny!"

Him: "But it's ugly. I don't like it."

Me: "You think this is Japan? You think you can get a pink one with cute mousies on it?"

Him: "What about these gray ones? They have a … geeky tag."

Me: "Ooh, and gold-plated. But look at all the returned ones. Everyone who buys that brand brings it back."

If only I could get him so excited about plumbing fixtures.

Ah, well.

Easy peasy

So, the site is all on the new host now, the domain's been transferred, and it's running on Movable Type 3.2.

It looks the same, though, doesn't it?

One new thing is an RSS feed for the comments:

http://100wordminimum.org/comments.xml

Not that there are a lot of comments, but if you're using an aggregator to read the blog, there it is. This is something I could have implemented in the old version, but I never got around to it. All I had to do was find a template and set it up.

Another new thing is comment moderation. If you post a comment, I get to see it before it gets published. If you're planning to post 50 comments with links to your online pharmacy/insurance/porn site, it won't ever make it onto the blog, not even for a minute, so don't bother. If you're posting a proper comment, there may be a slight delay between your posting and publication, but that's all.

The MT upgrade and transfer to a new host turned out to be exactly as easy as signing up. I've heard enough stories about what can go wrong, that I prepared for every eventuality, backing up files in different forms for every eventuality, making notes on my file structure, constant obsessing. But all I had to do was sign up (I picked a Movable Type hosting partner) and include a note in the Special Instructions field about how I would be coming to them from version 2.64. They moved my files over and ran the upgrade for me. As far as I can tell, everything is where it's supposed to be.

The one thing I had to do on my own was set up hotlink protection. My new host isn't using cPanel, which would do it for me, and I had to set it up myself because within a few hours after the transfer, hotlinks started popping up in my referral logs. Shocking hotlinks, like the kid (I'm assuming) on a pony forum who had a sig with three screens of hotlinked pony pictures!

Anyway, I looked around and found a site which would generate the necessary code for me, ran into some minor issues (immediately corrected by my host) with my text editor inserting extra characters into my code. I thought I was using a safe text editor, but it seems not.

Now I think I've got things how I want them, but I'm sure I'll find more tinkering to do.

What else did I do today? I got some work done and watched France vs. Togo while I was messing with my code. We picked up the mass market paperback of The Hallowed Hunt yesterday and I've been devouring that. I think this means I've been kind of a lazy slug.

Service interruption (?)

I'm in the process of transferring to a new host right now. A really helpful host who is doing everything for me, file transfers and the upgrade to MT 3.2. How nice! With luck, you all won't notice anything. But if you do notice anything, that's what's going on.

ETA: Seems like it's all done.

Moving on over

Last week I got a note from my hosting service. It seems they're closing down and I have to find another hosting service and transfer my domain. That doesn't seem to involve much more than giving some other service my credit card number. But transferring my site is a bit more complicated (or maybe not, I've never done this before so I don't know). I've been thinking about either upgrading to a newer version of Movable Type or switching to WordPress. To you, the reader, this really doesn't matter, but if you have any experience with either process, please feel free to pass on any tips, suggestions, or warnings.

Now, about that luck

And yesterday, I also spent two hours on the phone to Bangalore trying to get my ISP to understand that there was some problem on the network in my area.

Two hours.

At the start of which, after some unknown time on hold, I told the support person that there was some problem on the network, because the connection speed had been crawling and now, even though I was (mostly) able to connect, nothing was getting through.

"All right, then, why don't your turn off your modem and turn it back on again."

"Well, I've already done that about a hundred times and it doesn't make a difference ."

So it went. I understand that they need to work through the checklist and make sure the problem isn't my equipment. I'm sure that 99.999% of the time the problem is the user. But, hello, not this time, okay? And who knows, my router is old and even solid state electronics fail eventually, or they may have changed something on the network side so the firmware in the router is no longer compatible.

We finally got through this lady's checklist and when the problem still remained (because, see an hour ago, not my equipment), I got a trouble ticket number and kicked up to the next level. Where I was told to turn my modem off and then back on again.

Eventually, while we were going through a ping check, someone said something to my helper "Andy," who told me, "So, I don't want you to be angry, but it seems we've had a lot of calls and some outage in your area."

"Yeah. That's what I said."

But the checklist didn't end there. At last, I was told that they were going to have to talk to the vendor in this area (the phone company) and that my service should be back by evening.

My service was actually back before then. But still!

Then, yesterday evening, a telemarketer called me. They really picked the wrong day to try and sell me VoIP.

Better living through technology

Today, for the first time, I saw a practical use of text messaging. Up to now, I've only seen text messaging used to pass notes in class by engineering students (who can't afford not to pay attention). Oz and I on very rare occasions exchange text messages of a word or two, mostly to be silly, and then afterwards we say, "God damn, but entering those letters sure is tedious! My thumbs hurt!" I realize that text messaging can be very useful, but I've never seen it with my own eyes, until this morning at the hair salon. The woman who cuts my hair, who happens to be deaf, needed to call her (ex?) husband to find out when he was coming to the shop to fix the air conditioner. Instead of having someone else make a telephone call (she doesn't have text telephone gear at the salon, only at home), she pulled out a Sidekick and text-messaged him. I thought this was most excellent: off the shelf technology that meets her needs without modification. She just made a face and said, "Eh. It's the only way I can call people."

And thanks to the Internet, I made ozarque's Frugal Cheesecake this afternoon. It was easy to make and turned out very tasty. I made one substitution and had to adjust the baking time. I have ideas for a few variations on the theme, so when I don't have a blinding headache and I've done some more fiddling in the kitchen, I'll post my version.

All work and no play

Today I tried a new productivity plan. I know I've been wasting too much time on the Internet and since I don't have a helpful employer tracking my keystrokes or blocking access to non-work-related sites, I have to build the block within.

I allowed myself to check email and Bloglines no more than hourly. I did it, but it was harder than you might think. I found my fingers reaching for the key sequence to boot up my browser constantly. Pretty much every time I got bored with the patent I was translating, which was depressingly often. (Yes, I'm good at this translation gig, but it's just not doing it for me anymore.except financially. Note to self: Start looking for an engineering job again.)

Success was mine in the end. I finished the patent at a reasonable hour and then read a magazine. Yes, catching up on print publications, what a concept! In the days before engineering school, I carried a lot of magazine subscriptions, but as the life was slowly sucked out of me by the neverending barrage of homework, I stopped reading them and let most of the subscriptions expire. I still read lots of mysteries, YA novels, and seventeenth century history, but not much of the current science and arts reading that I used to do. Time to get back in the habit, no?

Not a proper entry

(I try to avoid blogging about blogging.)

But this is kind of interesting.

In this entry, I linked to and wrote about a Washington Post article. Today my referral logs showed that someone came to me from that article.

Sure enough, through the magic of Technorati, that article now links to me:

Fame, fortune, and regular calls from the mainstream media whenever they need a quote from a blogger are sure to follow.

Right?

Etched in stone

The concrete sidewalk that slopes down along the edge of Libby Hill park has long been an obstacle on my daily walk. It's smoother than the spallstone road, but the roots of oak trees, decimated by storms over the past several years and now gone, have left a legacy of disruption. The slabs have been thrust this way and that. Here an edge protrudes six inches above its neighbor. There an edge hangs out into space, forming a surprise step down for the unwary walker.

This last week, the city had a crew in, breaking up the worst offenders and carting the chunks away. Then the spaces were leveled and framed with wood. Then metal wire mesh appeared. Yesterday, I saw that concrete had at last been poured and scraped smooth. Today the new patches of sidewalk were scratched with names and dog paw prints.

Some wight had scratched something that warmed the tarry cockles of my engineer's heart. A binary byte! 01100101, to be exact. Unless I was looking at it upside down, in which case it would be 10100110. A hex 65 or A6 (0110 being palindromic), or an ASCII "e" or "|".

That's what it says, anyway, but what does it mean?

Computers!

My living room is filled with old, dead computers, boxes for old, dead computers, monitors, boxes for other things, piles of books and magazines .

In order to give myself a feeling of productivity without having to use my brain too much (Brain already tired. Ugh.), I decided to add to the collection. I still have yet more monitors, boxes, and dead technology in the sitting room closet, after all, and why not make a clean sweep? Or, really, a dusty, coughing sweep.

Now the living room is filled with even more boxes and old electronics. Too many boxes to fit in the supercan, so I'll have to dispose of them over a few weeks. The computers and so on will go to the recycling center where they will dispose of them safely.

While I was rearranging all the technology, I plugged the quite nice speakers which came with my new system into my old machine which Oz uses. Now he can listen to Wait Wait . Don't Tell Me! whenever he wants. I also decided to see if I could improve the machine's performance. The hard drive is thrashing big time and, unsurprisingly, the problem turned out to be fragmentation. That partition is also too full to defrag. Still being productive, I pulled out the ancient Partition Magic floppy to rearrange the empty space on that hard disk and . the floppy is no good anymore.

I guess the next time I'm feeling productive, I'll start researching partition management utilities.

A little knowledge

At first I knew a little about science and I made fun of bad science on TV and in movies.

Then I learned more science and my "making fun" got a little bit harsher.

Then I studied math, physics, electrical engineering, computer hardware design, software engineering …

In parallel with that, I developed a firmer understanding of storytelling, character development, narrative structure …

And I got vicious. (Well, some might say I was already vicious, but not in this particular way, exactly.)

This all happened without my realizing it until we went on a trip and watched cable TV at the hotel. We were watching the Science Fiction Channel, long may it live in infamy, on a Friday night, some hodgepodge of Battlestar Galactica, Stargate permutations, and a lot of commercials, none of which were familiar to me because I am a pop culture illiterate.

I know that people watch these shows for the stories, not for the science. However, in good science fiction, science informs the storyline, otherwise the story is just a fantasy with spaceships and energy weapons instead of horses and magic wands. I realize that this whole debate has a lot of gray areas and, besides, some of my favorite SF stories are pure, unapologetic space opera. Some of my least favorite SF stories have fantastic technical accuracy, but the story has no life. Some stories fall somewhere in the middle of that continuum. To a certain extent, the author has to treat advanced science and technology as magic and get on with the story, or else get bogged down with design issues. I have this problem myself, so I am sympathetic. I am, however, totally lacking in sympathy for writers who are ignorant and write dialogue by stringing together a bunch of buzzwords without regard to what the words represent. It's the ignorance that gets to me, because ignorance can be overcome with minimal effort.

In this particular episode of whatever it is we're watching, a virus has infected all the computer systems of the mother ship. The first thing (I think, I haven't really been paying attention because I've been reading a book. A good book.) they try is blowing up a transmitter array, e.g. hit it with a hammer. The guy who comes up with this is obviously a mech-e. They do that, even though blowing up something that's attached to you when you're floating around in hard vacuum is a Bad Idea. And it doesn't work, because they've got another fifteen or twenty minutes of show. They turn things off and then turn things back on again, and that doesn't quite work which is not surprising because viruses do survive that sort of thing if they're resident in non-volatile memory.

And then two characters have to foil the virus by running off to a hangar and doing something technical which doesn't actually make sense, technically. But the virus closes the hangar doors and the controls can't be bypassed! The solution is to use the transporter beam, since the virus hasn't infected that yet, to transport the guys to the other side of the door.

Transporters are evil. They are an evil, lame crutch for the writers. The writers who use them should be flogged. Except for Star Trek where transporters are grandfathered in.

Oz cries, "It's an electric door. It has a motor! You only need to complete a circuit to work the motor!"

I cry, "So a real engineer would just rip out the control panel, bypass the network circuitry and controls, and hotwire the door! By sticking two wires together!" (And, I might add, look like quite the badass in the process. Well, a badass in the engineering sense.)

I turn to Oz and ask, "So is this what happens to engineers? We get all educated, then sit around, drinking whiskey and ragging on the SF Channel?"

I used to like Star Junk, and now I've spoiled myself for it forever.

Little realizations

In which I learn that the acquisition of knowledge does not necessarily supplant earlier misconceptions.

We've started watching Farscape, or "Barfscape" as Oz has nicknamed it. We're getting the DVDs in dribs and drabs through Netflix. The latest disk arrived on Friday. Oz said, "And it's the only video we have right now. And these are bad. And there's only two episodes! That last Buffy disk? They have four episodes, so if one sucks, then you still have three others that are okay. But these stupid Barfscape disks have only two!" So that's the verdict: bad and not enough of it. Oz says that they need more space-babes too.

While we were watching the insufficient number of bad episodes on this disk, I was thinking about acceleration and gravity, and how would forces act on people in a large spaceship making sudden changes of direction. This is my continuing fallout from watching the first twenty minutes of the last Star Wars movie in which gravity plays a far greater role than it should. We must have really annoyed all the people near us in the theater with all our little coughs and giggles at the blatant disregard for basic laws of physics.

Then the action of the story moved beyond the ship. The characters were down on a planet and, in response to a suggestion to hold off on some operation till night, one of them said, "We don't know if this planet even has rotation!"

I thought, "Well, you're not floating off the surface, so that should be a clue—Oh! I took physics. Inverse square law! Gravity is massive bodies acting on each other, it doesn't matter if they're spinning." So that stupid "if the earth stopped spinning, gravity would disappear and we (and the atmosphere) would float off into space" factoid that I picked up as a child is totally, completely false and not fact-like at all. Somehow I've managed to learn lots and lots of science without doing any mental housecleaning to pitch out all the misconceptions I've accumulated over the years.

Oz and I then had a mildly informed conversation about angular momentum, why they put launch pads as close to the equator as possible, and whether you might feel lighter at the equator than at the poles.

Not the children of necessity

One of my translator colleagues found a list of wacky inventions. These range from the frivolous (a patent for a "stick" that you can "throw" for your dog to "fetch") to the really unthinkable (the fart-propelled rocket toy). I was looking through the list and I found the butt-kicker! Oz and I actually saw footage of the butt-kicker on a French invention show.

The French invention show featured various inventions, from the significant to the silly, from different countries. The American inventions shown were all of the silly: the butt-kicker, the inflatable airplane (a real thing, from Goodyear), odd things that you work with your nose, and there was some digression into flagpole sitting. We noticed a distinct lack of coverage of the works of the Wrights, Edison, Farnsworth, Bell, etc. On the other hand, the French invention that they made the most of was a condom opener.

But about the butt-kicker. The footage that they showed was from the 1950's at the latest and was probably older. That apparatus had the user-controlled crank and so on that is claimed in the patent I linked above, which was awarded in 2000. I guess the patent examiner didn't have access to French television.

Embracing the dorkitude

You'd think that what with all last semester's agony over getting a micontroller to operate weather sensors, the last toy I'd want around the house is a weather station.

"But look, it has Atomic Time! I think Atomic Time is so cool!" And you don't have to set the clock yourself. Just about everything in my house has a clock in it and I have given up on keeping them all set. Self-setting clocks are the bee's knees.

We're at Best Buy so Oz can shop for a dryer (his old dryer is not making things dry anymore), but we've been driven into personal electronics in an effort to escape Tom Cruise who is smooching around on the flat screen televisions that are built into the fronts of the high end refrigerators. Oz tells me to pick out a weather station and we mess with the annoying talking display to compare the different models. We find that just reading the labels works better.

Anyway, our new weather station is really cool: Atomic Time, weather trends, indoor/outdoor temperature, relative humidity, moon phases, sunrise and sunset. Now in glorious gray LCD, I can access all the information that I now get by walking outside or checking the internet and the indoor/outdoor thermometer installed by the previous owners of my house.

In case you don't know Jack

Jack Kilby died last Monday. If you don't know who I'm talking about, hie thee off and read up. Jack Kilby is the person who developed the integrated circuit back in 1958, precipitating a whole revolution in computing.

In case you don't know, an integrated circuit is a circuit in which all the components are formed in the same piece (or "chip") of silicon or other semiconductor material. Originally, circuits were built out of individual components connected together with wires, making them bulky and error prone. Forming the components and the wires all in the same chip was the first step toward the extreme miniaturization that's made it possible to pack millions of transistors into the CPU of your computer and made chips small enough to pack into just about everything. This also made possible my microfabrication class where we hung out in the clean room and tried to make integrated circuits on wafers.

As an exercise, why not walk around your house and count the items that have chips in them?

I've counted thirty-two items so far and (Oh, the remotes! That's another five, no, six.) I keep finding more.

Where do I go from here?

Oz is lying on the floor and reading my latest issue of IEEE Spectrum, which I won't get to for a while. Busy reading The English Village Constable 1580 . 1642: A Social and Administrative Study, I'm behind on my magazines.

An ad catches my eye and I lean over. "Oooh. Pico."

"Huh?"

"Pico. We used their power converters on the Hamsters. Nifty." I grin.

"Are we going to have to get you set up with a soldering station?"

"Well. I don't really have room in this house for a workshop. But remember those BEAM robots? I could get a kit and experiment, maybe try doing some design. I'd have to get the software from somewhere, but I could design some circuit boards, have PCBexpress print them up for me…"

"You mean, you need a lab."

"That would require some investment. I think I need an employer with a lab."