Kickin’ TV

Recently I realized that the all the television I’ve watched this fall has consisted of: Local on the 8’s a few times a week, Dennis Kucinich emptying his pockets on the Colbert Report, my kids singing the Spongebob Squarepants theme to wake me up one Saturday, a cool show on extrasolar planets, and a few instances of random channel flipping. I’ve heard that the average American watches 6 hours of TV a day, but I don’t see how that’s even possible.

It’s gotten to the point where I generally find TV difficult to watch, largely because of the constant interruption of commercials. I always mute the ads, but even so.  More an more they go for disturbing, just to get me to buy things I don’t want. It’s like thought control from a Kurt Vonnegut story. It used to be when I was a kid there were 4 ad breaks an hour, totaling about 10 minutes an hour. Now it’s about 50-50 each of show and ads. It makes is hard to tolerate even if a show is good, and most of the shows out there are not. And with cable it’s even worse than regular TV. You’re paying twice to watch the show, cuz you’re paying for the channels and then you pay again by being shown ads.

I’ve been wanting to get rid of cable for a long time. For a few years we were getting our internet via cable in a bundle, so to drop cable wouldn’t’ve saved much money, but now we’re getting our internet thru the phone company via fiber. And the cable company just raised our rates to $650 a year! I’d go for a system where I could pay for just the channels or show I like, but the industry is too greedy to allow that sort of thing and they want me to support hundreds of channels I don’t like, so goodbye.

Plus we have NetFlix and a pretty good shelf of DVD’s so we can watch what we choose without ads pretty easily. I tend to like movies and documentaries. One thing I want to do this fall and winter is watch the entire (13 hour long) Lord of the Rings trilogy. I started in September and now it’s mid-December and I’m halfway thru The Two Towers. So I’m doing pretty good.

Now we’re back to plain old TV with rabbit ears. Have to figure out how to get the weather report from the internet or the radio or regular TV. Other than that I don’t miss it. I haven’t even seen how the channels come in yet. Our house never had a roof antenna but I might look into getting one if we need to. Meanwhile, I can take the $650 I saved and look into buying a drum set!

Bathroom Tile Project, Part 1

Earlier this year we put up some tiles in our kitchen. We were so happy with the result that was decided to do our bathroom too. This project got off to a slow start, because around the time we were getting going with the planning we had to contend with cracked concrete on our foundation and then a leaky pipe in our walls, so those projects took priority. And then we had to go thru several rounds of picking out tile and drawing up plans, only to discover the tile house couldn’t fill our order and we had to change our plan. Also prerequisite to the actual tiling, I had to fill some cracks in the walls. Where the walls meet the ceiling in the bathroom had deteriorated over time, which was one of the motivations for tiling in the first place. I patched it up with joint compound and sanded and painted it, all of which was a nontrivial job in and of itself.

So finally over Thanksgiving weekend we had all the materials and were ready to go. We laid down all the tiles in 2 sessions, filling the area above the tub surround to the ceiling and also creating a backsplash behind the sink. We went with a motif that involved small glass tiles set into the main tile field in a diamond pattern, which called for a fair amount of cutting. Also, the walls were not square and flat, so we had to compensate for that. Luckily, compared to the kitchen there was very little in the way of obstacles, just the shower head and one electrical outlet.

This past weekend we did the grouting. All that remains is the sealant and caulking, and then we’re gonna paint the walls which did not get tiles. Going with a light green. Should be nice. When that’s all done we’ll do the second bathroom the same way but in blue, sometime after the New Year.

Tea With Warriors – Quiet Revolution

Hello world, I’m back from Thanksgiving break. Four and a half days of getting caught up on rest, enjoying the company of family and friends and getting some work done around the house. Sleeping in, going to bed early. Lovely to just sit around in the morning and listen to the birds.

…

when you wake up feeling
in your empty space
are you in a rush to fill it
and let the outside take its place?
sit back and feel the rush of the machines
as they fill the spaces in between

lead a quiet revolution
beating wings
are part of your solution

Over the weekend I received a copy of the CD Quiet Revolution by Tea With Warriors from my friend John Neumann. Congratulations John! It sounds great. If you’ve checked out the rough mixes last time I blogged about it, John has added some guitar parts, polished the vocals, and taken the to level and EQ everything quite nicely. The album is now for sale on CD Baby, so check it out.

And while you’re there, pick up a copy of The Brothers Zing – Buzzy Tonic!

…

Today it’s back to work getting up early and waiting in the cold rain for the train, and then running the gauntlet of relentless New Yorkers, trying to avoid getting poked in the eye with an umbrella. Coming down with a cold. My project has to ship by Christmas. Fun fun fun.

Origami Hot Air Balloon

I have a new design for the balloon with a tighter lock on the basket.  The inspiration came from Michelle.  She was folding the classic cup last weekend. I taught it to her to submit to the Origami by Children thing for the Convention last year; I was surprised that she remembered it.  I took the idea of the lock on that, folding down the 2 corners.

So here is a picture of model. CP and/or diagrams to come eventually. As you can see I improvised a stand from an Easter egg dipper. I put a marble in the basket as payload, to keep it from falling out of out of the stand.

Here Be Dragons

I’ve been getting back into folding again lately. A couple of weeks ago my friend John from Maryland visited and we spent the weekend doing a lot of origami (in addition to introducing Lizzy to Settlers of Catan). He’s working on a new book or origami polyhedra, which is always fascinating for me since there are not alot of people doing polyhedra from a single sheet. I came up with a design for a stellated icosahedron. I worked out the CP but it’s pretty difficult to make 3-D. I made a study of a half stellated icosahedron which should be a bit more doable.

I also came up with a new design for my Hot Air Balloon just before John’s visit. Recall that I developed this model at the OUSA Convention back in June. It is the newest member of my series of flying-vehicles-based-on-a-polar-plan. Others include my Rocketship and UFO, and the forthcoming Dirigible. The main change to the Balloon is in the basket. The original version had the basket made from one corner, but it had the problem of not holding together very strongly. The new one makes a basket joined together from all four corners and is more secure.

I am working on an exhibit-quality version of the Balloon now, and soon will post pictures and the CP. I realize I’m running out of nice paper for origami. I tried it out of a few different kinds: all my nice Japanese foil is used up, and anyway foil looks nice and folds well, but is terrible to photograph. Regular 10″ kami works pretty well, but doesn’t look that special to me. I have other papers in my stash such as Wyndstone but that my be too thick for the strings, and I don’t need a really large sheet anyway, 10 to 12 inches will do. So I’ll have to take another look and see what I come up with.

Meanwhile I have interesting problem, which is the balloon doesn’t stand so it needs some kind of stand or holder. I’ve never had a model that needs this before, although I’ve seen plenty of models that require propping up its something I’ve tried to avoid until now. I made a stand out twist ties but the wire wasn’t stiff enough and the weight of model causes the stand to bend. The best I came up with was re-bending and old Easter egg dipper, but end loop that holds the balloon isn’t big enough, and besides its bright orange. So I need to find some wire that is thin and stiff and bendable and black. If any origami people out there can recommend a good kind of wire and where to get it, I’d be grateful.

The other origami thing I’ve been doing of late is folding dragons. There is a Chinese food and sushi restaurant down the street that we go to alot and Jeannie suggested I make them a nice gold dragon as a gift since they’re so nice and their food is really good. So I did, and along the way I got some ideas and folded several more variations with different body proportions. Then I learned that the Origami Society, who does an origami holiday tree every at their headquarters in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, was having as their theme this year fantastic an mythical creatures. So I just had to fold one to contribute to the tree!

I dropped it off one day last week. It’s about a mile and a half from my office to the museum, and most of it is thru Central Park, and it was a beautiful crisp fall day, perfect for a brisk walk. They’re already setting up the bleachers for the Thanksgiving parade. I met the OUSA people who were in the middle of putting up the tree. The lighting ceremony is on Monday. I’ll have to take the kids in to see it once it’s up.

Lego Cruise Ship II

You may recall how I helped Lizzy build a Lego cruise ship a few weeks ago, but she considered it “too pirate-y”. So she took it apart and built her own. Hers is white and green, a much less swashbuckling color scheme than my black and red. It’s also smaller and sleeker, although it uses the same approach to its construction. Once the basic boat was done she decked it out with a steering wheel in front, a party bar in the stern area, a sleeping cabin complete with bed inside, and lounge chairs on the upper deck. Then she added some passengers, including a princess getting married to a prince by the ship’s captain. Must’ve been inspired by a movie. At this point she apparently was no longer able to resist the allure of pirates, so the crew is looking rather motley, and they’re flying the jolly roger. As an added bonus she even made a Lego mermaid.

Lizzy had this to say about it:

“My lego boat is called The Pirate Cruise. It is beautiful and the scene for a man and a woman getting married. The woman is a princess named Felicity and the man is a prince named Benjamin, but people just call him Ben. The captain of the ship is performing the wedding. The cruise is special for the wedding cruise. There are friendly pirates on the cruise.”

160 The Hard Way (PC HD Upgrade)

Since I’ve been working at home from time to time this fall I needed to install a bunch of software on my machine, and the inevitable finally happened: I ran out of hard drive space. Rather than deal with perpetual offloading stuff to another drive I decided to get a new bigger hard drive and swap the old one out. Since my old computer died I’m down to one computer, which went from being my music studio computer to my everything computer. So I also decided I’m gonna get a new machine for the studio sometime this winter. And it’s gonna be a Mac, my first new one in over 10 years. I was a long time Mac user, practically from the beginning in the 80’s, until Paul Allen personally forced me to switch to Windows when I worked for Interval Research Corporation, his secretive Silicon Valley think thank. But Vista looks like a total dog that jumped the shark, and PC hardware design reminds me more of Soviet-era cars with each year. Meanwhile the Macs keep getting better and better. Not only are they sleek and shiny and integrated and all, but they include Linux and you can run Windows on ’em still. Best of all worlds.

But that’s a few months away. I needed to upgrade the hard drive to my PC now. Never having done this before I did a bit of research and determined Norton Ghost looked like a good way to go. However, since my machine is a laptop and Ghost is designed to run with a workstation, the directions provided didn’t fully work, and the project turned into a bit of an adventure.

Luckily, I have an old, old PC that runs Win2K lying around, and also luckily Jeannie wanted to help me with this project. So we thought we’d do an upgrade on that machine first as a test. We have an old external hard drive case for laptops with a PCMCIA adaptor, and Jeanie has a box full of old hard drives she salvaged from somewhere. So we off we went. The process was complicated by the fact that the old HD was on its last legs, and in fact died while we were backing it up. We got the C drive (which was the boot drive) but the D partition was a mess, and it took a bit of time to determine what had happened. The only way to go was forward. We swapped the drives but the machine wouldn’t boot. Instead an alert came up advising us there was a problem with the pageSys file. Over and over in a loop. Norton says to set some jumpers on the new drive in this situation, but that advice is for 2 internal drives on the same bus in a workstation, so it looked like we were out of luck.

The internet to the rescue. It turns out all you need to do is reset the master boot record. (Bet you already knew that!) To do that you need to boot in DOS mode and run the magic command:

fdisk /mbr

and all is right again. The computer doesn’t have a floppy drive, but we were able to put the original Windows Recovery CD in, boot off of that, exit the utility app and we found ourselves in DOS.

On to the main act. We put the new 160 GB into the sled and ran Norton. We tried to boot of the system disk from the old machine, but the new machine wouldn’t let us, because the new machine runs XP. We found a DOS boot disk image on the internet and burned it to a CD. Thanks, Internet! Then we did the hardware swap, which on this particular machine meant taking quite a bit of it apart. Put it all back together with the new drive and booted, and…
Nothing. Hung mid-boot. Not even an alert. Now we were glad we did the experiment in win2K, cuz it was the same problem with the pageSys. So we put in the CD and spun up in DOS and said fdisk /mbr then it came around.

I ran some apps and everything looked cool. After some poking around, a couple of little things seemed off. I ran proTools and for some reason SampleTank was running in trial mode, and I had to go to their web site and get a new authorization code, which is bogus it’s running on the same machine. And I’m gonna need a new code when install it on the Mac.

It reminds me of that movie where the doctor says “technically the procedure is brain damage, but its no worse that say a night of heavy drinking.”

Flex Development and Weekend on Long Island

Work has been — well, programming can be a challenge, especially when learning a new language while trying to write a software application on a deadline. I’ve been deep in the steep part of the Flex learning curve, with its monumental edifice of pre-built components, loaded with design and usage assumptions. I’m trying to forge our designer’s interactive, animated, curvy concept into Flex’s prefab boxes. I’m particularly having difficulty with the HList Component, which does not give the developer the power and flexibility one would want or expect. Seriously, for example you can’t turn off rollover highlighting of a list item without also suppressing the event that the rollover action generates. Oy! Over and over with stuff like that. I feel like I’m trying recreate a wood carving out of Legos, and am running into the same limits as you face in real Legos: either it looks blocky or you have an over-reliance on specialized, one-off pieces.

A couple weeks ago I went to a wedding on Long Island for Jeannie’s cousin. It was on Friday afternoon, so I left work early and we were able to get out of the house on time with the kids. On the trip out it started to rain, and then turned into a severe thunderstorm, and naturally traffic was massively backed up to the point that by the time the wedding was over we were only halfway there. Well, I thought to myself as the wipers swished back and forth energetically but futilely, this is easier than writing code.

We dropped the kids off in Wantagh and proceeded to Babylon. Thanks to Nick & Lisa for watching the kids! They had a great time. Lizzy is now a fan of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. By the time we got there the rain had pretty much stopped. Got to the hall. Pointless valet parking. The parking lot was right there, but everyone had to wait in line, and the parking guy spilled my CD’s and maps all over the front seat. I can’t understand the format of the Long Island wedding. The meal is stretched out over the whole night, constantly interrupted by dancing, but only a few songs, not a real set. On top of that the music was EQ’d badly, with the mid-bass too loud drowning out conversation. There must be some “club” effect they use. It was a I good time anyway. Got to see lot of Jeannie’s family. Denis and Sarah were in town. Jeannie and I did take a nice walk around the harbor, spotting cabin cruisers. And we did stay ’til the end and danced, which is something we don’t get to do very often. Stayed on long island overnight and spent the next day at Jeannie’s sister’s house, with the whole clan. Like I said easier then writing code.