Daywander

Odd thoughts put down at once, in stream-of-consciousness fashion.

Daywander

I put Carol on a plane Thursday morning for Chicago, after her mom was taken to the hospital late Tuesday night. Delores is doing a lot better now, but for a few days it was unclear just what was going on. We were both planning on flying out there on the 16th, so this wasn’t an immense change in our summer plans–it just means I’m here by myself for a bit, trying not to eat like a bachelor nor dress like a college student.

I didn’t get the whole story yesterday when I cited the YouTube video of Carol’s sister talking about her experiences at her local Ford dealership. It’s actually a clever piece of marketing, though I’m also sure it’s not viral: The dealership will award a gift certificate to the customer garnering the most clicks on their YouTube video by July 15. So do us a favor and go look at the video. Thanks! (I will admit I’m curious to see how many clicks a citation on Contra can generate, and this is a rare opportunity to find out, with real numbers.)

When Carol’s gone, I generally drown my sorrows by writing, but I ran into an interesting problem yesterday. I finished Chapter 7 of Old Catholics last week. I won’t know how good it is until I get a month’s emotional distance from it, but in the meantime there’s Chapter 8. The problem came in when I sat down to write, me in my shorts with an iced tea on the coaster, the sun beating down on the oaks outside my window, only to realize that Chapter 8 is the Christmas chapter. It’s about the quirky Polish Christmas vigil supper at St. JJ’s, and draws heavily on my own experiences with Polish Christmas vigil suppers, both quirky and ordinary. It was 86 degrees out yesterday afternoon, and no matter what I did, I just could not get my interior state to feel like Christmas. It may be the mark of a true hack to be able to write convincingly about Christmas during the second week of July, but I may need to go back to hack school. I just can’t do it.

No matter. I’ve been working on Old Catholics since 2005; what’s another five or six months’ delay? In the meantime, there’s “Drumlin Circus” to work on. It’s still at the notes-and-outline stage, but that doesn’t mean progress isn’t being made. Imagine a line of circus wagons pulled by woolly mammoths, and a show with an acrobat who performs in a cage with two live smilodons. (I may even work in a giant beaver.) And every artifact the circus owns; wagons, props, steam calliope, everything, is made out of drumlins. The Bitspace Institute kidnaps the circus master’s wife, who supposedly has a private drumlin that compels wild animals to obey her. After two years without her, the circus master finds out where the Institute is keeping her, and let’s say that he has a grudge. When the circus comes to a nearby town, it mounts a show that no one in town–especially the Institute–will ever forget. Pleistocene megafauna, scary clowns, calliope music, secret drumlins, the legendary Function Controller–we’re gonna have a real good time!

It may be as much as 35,000 words long. Jim Strickland is doing a Drumlins novella as well, and we may try to put the two stories together as the first Copperwood Double. I’m not an ace at tete-beche, but I intend to learn. Stay tuned.

Daywander

Jun 27th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Well, as a fair number of people have told me, the logo Carol and I saw the other day was the “hatchet man” icon of Insane Clown Posse, a hip-hop duo from Detroit that I’ve never heard and probably won’t. Key to finding the figure online is knowing that what he’s holding isn’t a map or a piece of paper but a hatchet. (In fact, it looks a lot more like a meat cleaver.) There’s also a girl-version of the icon, with a ponytail, but what we saw on the gate of a pickup truck was almost precisely what I show above left.

We had a relatively small gathering last night, but that was all right, as there were few enough of us to all sit on the two couches and talk about everything from dogs to SF to classic aircraft of the Strategic Air Command. We spoke of that lunatic Lt. Col. Bud Holland, whose lifelong ambition appears to have been to roll a B-52. (Detailed discussion here.) He tried, he failed, and you can see a video of the results here. Eric Bowersox and Sabrina Hoyt brought some Mountain Dew Throwback, made with real sugar instead of corn leavins’, and the original product artwork on the cans. There were intermittent thunderstorms all afternoon, but we had enough time between microcells to grill a batch of smoked brats and Ranch Food Direct burgers. By sheer coincidence both Mike Reith and Peggy Sargent brought cream puffs, and it had been so long since I’d had one that I’d mostly forgotten what cream puffs were. That memory came back in a big hurry, heh.

Alas, the thunderstorms prevented me from getting any Field Day time in yesterday, and with less than an hour remaining in the contest and yet another thunderboomer passing overhead as I write, I doubt I’ll get any time in this year at all. I created what I had hoped to be a low-profile inverted vee, and in truth, when I told people I had antenna off the back deck, several people looked and just didn’t see it, when when I was pointing right at it. It’s designed to be portable, and is attached to the deck railing with bungee cords. I’ll try to get a couple of days’ contacts with it, then roll it up and put it back in the garage.

There was more bear action yesterday. Late afternoon, our doorbell rang, and it was our new neighbors from across the street. Heather and Glen had gone for a walk with their two small boys, aged two and four, and left their garage door open. When they returned, sho’nuff, a bear was in their garage ransacking their garbage can. Heather asked to bring her boys inside, but about then Glen came back and said he’d driven the bear off by throwing rocks at it, after which it vanished up the street and ran between two other houses. (Glen’s an Army officer. Spend some time in Iraq and bears lose a lot of their mystique.) I’m guessing it was the same bear I saw yesterday about lunchtime, eating dog food down in our gully near our back door. It seems a little too comfortable with people and a little too willing to be out and around during the day to stay here, and if it comes back too much we’re going to have to put a call in and see if it can be relocated.

Lots of leftovers from last night, and I’ll be grilling Ranch Food Direct burgers again this evening if the rain will just stop for half an hour. The West is getting soaked this year. Our local reservoirs are full, and western Nebraska’s massive Lake McConaughy is refilling (after a 9-year drought that the doomsayers warned would be permanent) at a rate of two feet per week. When we first saw it we marveled at the broad sand beaches, which were not in fact beaches at all but recently exposed lake bottom. It was about 30% full when we first saw it several years ago. It’s now over 80% full and the water level is rising fast. (Note the end of the curve on the graph, and then see this graph to get a sense for the insane amount of water flowing into it this year.) We hope to take a long weekend up there before the summer’s over.

This coming week should be fairly peaceful. I intend to do some fiction writing and perhaps even finish an experiment I have on the bench downstairs, concerning how well IN23A microwave diodes serve as AM BCB detectors. What I know of detector theory tells me that such detectors should be socko. We’ll find out–that’s what science is for.

Daywander

Jun 22nd, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

It’s fawn season again, and yesterday we saw a mother deer leading a fawn that was no bigger than Jackie, if perhaps a little taller. Figure that: A deer the size of a bichon. The poor thing can’t be more than a day or two old, and it’s wobbling unsteadily around the First Curve on Stanwell St., where teenagers roar by in their parents’ elephantine Escalades and probably wouldn’t even notice if they had small animals wedged in their grilles. (We’re mostly thankful that they don’t miss the curve and plow through my office window.) Last night about 8 or so, mom had gone off somewhere, and junior was simply lying on our neighbor’s mulch, about six feet from the pavement. It wasn’t as obvious as it could be, but there are much better hiding places in the area. I guess we can think of it as evolution in action.

Our nephew Brian was out for a few days last week, and we all went down to the Garden of the Gods for a vigorous walk around the rock formations. I took a photo of Brian and Carol and something very weird happened: A dazzle from one of Carol’s rings just happened to hit the camera the moment the shutter snapped. Green Lantern must have that problem a lot, but this is the first time I’ve seen it from Carol.

My low-key inverted-vee antenna should be up and running off the back deck by Field Day, and will be 32 feet on each leg. That will get me the 20 meter band and up, and given that I’m feeding it with a short run (~10′) of open wire line through an MFJ Versa Tuner 2, I may get 40 as well. I’ll certainly try.

I’m still testing EPub readers. This morning, at Jim Strickland’s noodging, I installed the Barnes & Noble Desktop Reader. Not a bad item, but as with all the readers I’ve tested so far, doesn’t quite get it right. The presentation on my test files has been pretty good so far, but this time the software does use the title tag, and thus puts up only half of the Beyschlag ebook’s title. Also, it puts my test books up in two-column format, and I still haven’t figured out how to control the column settings. Neither of my two test books with cover images show their covers as thumbnails in the library pane. To its credit, the reader renders PDF documents pretty well, though of course there’s no metadata and thus no display of title or author.

Most annoying is the User Guide button, which brings up a longwinded sales pitch but no user guide. I assume you have to sign up for a B&N account to get the user guide, and I will at some point, but probably not today. I do understand that the product is designed to work tightly with B&N’s online bookstore and won’t slam them too hard for that integration, but basic “here’s how to do it” information should be there long before the sales pitches begin.

Nobody’s perfect, but the winner so far is FBReader, even though it inexplicably displays my copyright notices in ancient Greek. We’ll get there. Just not as soon as I’d like.

Daywander

Apr 28th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

We’re going to see just how fat our pipes are tomorrow, when Canonical cranks open the spigot for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. It’s an LTS release, and I’m guessing that a lot more people will be grabbing it than usual. I may download it just to see how well the torrent works on Day One; in fact, I have a new hard drive on the shelf for my SX270 here and if abundant time presents itself this week (possible) I may swap in the new drive and install the release. This is the second-to-last machine I have that still uses the System Commander bootloader app, and I’d really much rather have grub everywhere.

Other pipes will also be in play: We got a note from the condo association last week telling us that the water will be shut off for eight hours tomorrow while the plumbers fix our backflow valves. We may fill the bathtub for emergencies tomorrow morning, but I suspect that Carol and I will go shopping (there’s a Mephisto store in Deerfield) and then stop over at Gretchen and Bill’s to run the dogs and take a bathroom break.

Interestingly, the sunspot machine more or less shut down two weeks ago, after switching on roughly January 1 and keeping a spot or two (though mostly small ones) in view almost all the time since then. Some have been predicting a double bottom to the current solar minimum, and if we run a long stretch of spotless days going forward, this may be Bottom 2.

Speaking of double bottoms…while I was in the checkout line at Bed, Bath & Beyond the other day buying Tassimo coffee disks, I was confronted with a POS display for a product called BootyPop. I guess the best way to describe it is a padded bra for your butt. Really; I write SF, not fantasy, and couldn’t make up anything that bizarre.

We had dinner with the family the other night at Portillo’s in Crystal Lake, and whenever we eat at a place like that, I wander around gaping at what I call “junkwalls”–old stuff tacked to the wallboard to make the place look atmospheric and (in this case) 1925-ish. Close to our table was a framed piece of sheet music for a song called “Ketchup Rag.” It was published in 1910 and is now in the public domain, and you can see the piece here. Writing entire songs about condiments seemed peculiar, but once I got online, I discovered that ragtime had an affinity for food, and there were in fact a Cucumber Rag, a Red Onion Rag, an Oyster Rag, and a Pickled Beets Rag, among many, many others. I confess a curiosity as to what the Ketchup Rag sounds like (it’s a complicated piece, that’s for sure) and discovered to my abject delight that there is such a thing as sheet music OCR. One example that particularly intrigues me is Audiveris, a Java app that can evidently scarf down a PDF and spit out a MIDI file. I’m downloading it even as I type, and with some luck will get it working later this evening. If it works (or even if it doesn’t) you’ll see a summary in the next Odd Lots.

Daywander

Feb 3rd, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

13 comments

Not having much luck making Workstation 6 function, and two conversations and numerous emails with VMWare’s tech support people hasn’t helped. I install the product, I enter the serial number as requested, and get this error message. Has anybody else ever seen this? Or can anybody even explain it? I emailed the screenshot to VMWare, and that’s about the time they clammed up.

I hate to abandon Workstation entirely. VMWare’s snapshot system is far superior to that of VirtualBox, and I use it a lot. I’ll miss it. Boy.

And while I’m asking peculiar things, let me ask the multitudes here how you pronounce “iodine.” I have always said eye-oh-dyne, but Bob Thompson, who knows more than a little about chemistry (and certainly more than I) pronounces it eye-oh-deen. This lines up with the rest of the halogens; we don’t, after all, say “broh-myne.” So? Which is it?

I edited another half a chapter of FreePascal From Square One yesterday morning, and in laying out the edited material got up to page 136. The book I’m adapting it from is 800 pages long, but don’t look for anything that size. To be workable on Lulu, the book is going to have to stop at or before page 400. A lot of the material in Borland Pascal 7 From Square One just doesn’t apply anymore…who’s called the Borland Graphics Interface lately, or done text output by poking word values into the video display buffer? The BGI chapter was 100 pages all by itself, and when I slice out that and other things like overlays and DOS/BIOS calls, I’m really pulling 400 pages out of no more than 600 pages of useful material, maybe less. Should be done by June. I hope.

The issue of whether Amazon imposes DRM on Kindle publishers is complicated, and I’ll back away some from my statement to that effect on Monday, and will hold off until I try to get one of my own titles into the system. This article suggests that recent policy changes have made DRM optional. Having to face the DRM issue square-on has kept me putting off publishing on the Kindle for some time. As a very small publisher I’ve made this promise to my readers: No DRM of any kind, on anything, ever. I’m willing to forgo Kindle sales if the DRM decision is not my own, but from what I’m reading now, I think that won’t be the case.

As for Amazon caving, well, that’s more complex too. I see that Nancy Kress’s new book Steal Across the Sky is listed on the Amazon Web store, and her publisher, Tor, is one of Macmillan’s imprints. However, you can’t order it from Amazon at this time. (Third-party affiliates are offering it, but Amazon itself is not. Note the double dashes under “Amazon Price.”) Ditto Nancy’s Beggars and Choosers, another Tor book. Yesterday morning’s Wall Street Journal had a story explicitly stating that Amazon had conceded the price issue to Macmillan. But Amazon isn’t selling the books yet, so clearly the struggle goes on.

Off to church, to install an SX270 in place of a doddering old E-Machines box that is four times the size and probably a third the capability.

Daywander

Jan 27th, 2010

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

(“Daywander” is a new category I’m trying out. The idea is something less crisp than Odd Lots but still a collection of different things I thought about or did during the day. It may not work out, and if it doesn’t I won’t miss it overmuch.)

So. We have an iPad. It’s not like it was a surprise, and in broad strokes it was pretty much what everybody thought it would be. I’m very glad that Apple anointed the ePub format for ebooks…the last thing anybody needs is a new proprietary text container. Now we need to know if the Jobs Gang can face down Big Books over prices and DRM. News items I’ve seen recently indicate that books from the iPad store will be allowed to cost more than books on the Kindle, and I’m good with that. I routinely pass on supposed “bestsellers” because they don’t smell like they’re worth $25 to me. The market can decide…and the publishers need to learn that lesson. The bigger question is how much access small publishers will have to the Apple store. One of my goals for 2010 is to get some of my titles onto the Kindle to see how they do. Anybody can be on the Kindle, and the price of goods can be $0.00. I haven’t seen an indication…yet…whether free books will be available in the Apple store, or whether other stores will be accessible, or how difficult it will be for one-person publishers to get in on the action.

And for that matter, is there an SD card socket, so I can drop in the ebooks I already have?

As an ebook reader it looks socko; finally, color and enough resolution to display technical books with figures and detailed art. How well you’ll be able to read the screen outside is another big question that ebook freaks will obsess about. Not me…when I’m outside I’m enjoying the outside for being the outside.(Books to me are an inside thing.) The iPad display isn’t e-ink…but it could be. Why not two displays? Frontside for inside, backside for outside. Apple could do that blindfolded. The thing already costs $500 minimum. Another $75 for a second display wouldn’t kill it.

Hardware, mon dieu. I tried and failed to tweak the Intel driver for the SX280 this afternoon, as suggested by my sister’s friend Chris Meredith on my LiveJournal mirror, and described in this eye-crossing article. Bits don’t scare me, and I follow directions well, but the machine failed to present the tweaked 1600X900 resolution as an option. Hardware can be stubborn sometimes.

Getting away from hardware for the nonce, it’s been revealed that the late Pope John Paul II beat himself with a belt and slept naked on the floor to move himself toward spiritual perfection. The Jesuits were big on this, and did this well into the 1950s: Each Jebbie had a little whip called “the discipline,” and was to use it on himself every night, presumably for the same reason. (Garry Wills wrote about this in his excellent book, Why I Am a Catholic.) What has never been clear to me is why hurting yourself has anything to do with spiritual perfection. (This is especially puzzling given JPII’s ecstatic writings about the holiness of the human body…so holy that we apparently must beat it up, mortify it, make it bleed. I guess.) Sorry. Don’t buy it. What “mortification of the flesh” really is is a powerful temptation to pride: People who hurt themselves and deny themselves can never quite hide the smugness that seems to come with the territory. My take? Real saints help others. Hurting yourself does not help others. Get real.

And in other news from the God side of things, this past Sunday’s Old Testament reading contained orders from the Hebrew Scribe Ezra, in the Book of Nehemiah, Chapter 8: “Eat fat, and drink sweet wine…” Hey, Ez! Got it covered!

Daywander

Dec 2nd, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

(Playing around with blogging styles here.) We got back from our Thanksgiving trip to Chicago yesterday afternoon, just before the deep freeze closed in again. Low tonight 10; high tomorrow 15; low tomorrow night 4. This is the coldest damned autumn we’ve had since we moved here, as well as the snowiest. Still, I’ll take this climate over Chicago’s three-month gloomfest any day.

I stuck my nose in the attic earlier this afternoon, scoping out what it might take to finish the job of shielding the leads from my garage smoke detector from my new-and-never-used wire dipole. What it will take is gloves and a winter coat, and wistful regret over not doing this in the fall. Wait a sec–this is the fall. And it’s not like I have any sunspots to coerce my signals into a path long enough to be useful.

My venerable 2005-era Kodak EasyShare V530 pocket camera is malfunctioning consistently and is probably scrap. I’ve said this before and it unexpectedly and inexplicably came back to life, but it’s been sitting dead in its little cradle for a month now, and I’m trying to decide what may take its place. I have the superb Canon G10 for technical photography, at which I’ve gotten tolerably good, but I still need an unfussy camera that will fit in a pocket, not need a case, and take a certain amount of rattling around with keys and small change (or big change) without damage.

In truth, what I’m really looking around for in a pocket camera is the champ at minimizing shutter lag. When I press the button I want the picture now–or as close to now as the technology permits. (I know DSLRs are good at this, but I want something small.) All of my previous digital cameras have required an ungodly amount of time to calculate what they’re going to do with the pixels that they’re about to capture, and this has meant a lot of missed shots of cute nieces and rowdy bichons playing dog soccer with Katie Beth’s beach ball. Sony seems to lead in most of the stack ranks on the shutter lag front, so I’m thinking about the Sony DSC-WX1.

Elsewhere in the Dying Hardware Department is my poor HP Laserjet 2100M printer, which I’ve had since, well, damn, I don’t remember, but probably 1998. I have pumped an immense amount of paper through that little cube, and replaced its worn-slick feed rolls in March of 2006, expecting them to work for another six or seven years. No luck. Paper feed has gotten erratic once more, and I’m not sure I want to go through the gnarly process of changing the feed rolls yet again. (That said, I have another repair kit on the shelf, so I probably will. I was the Lord High Feed Roll Executioner thirty-five years ago when I worked the LaSalle St. copier territory for Xerox, and such hard-won skills are a shame to waste.) So this might in fact be a good time to pop for my first color laser printer. I’m still shopping, but the HP CP1518 is the current front-runner. I know that the color laser cartridge market is a racket, but there have been times this year when I would really have liked color output for proofing book pages and covers. I guess if I do change out the rolls on the 2100 yet again I could park it downstairs for volume runs and keep the color unit up here. We’ll see, and soon–I need the tax deduction this year, courtesy my assembly language book.

Dash is sliding into puppy puberty: I caught him marking the baseboards in the front hall where QBit often sleeps. I rolled him on his back and tried my best to sound furious. He wagged his tail. A disciplinarian I’m not. I sense (nay, smell) interesting times ahead.