Where Are My Teeth?

If all you have is a hammer

Walking in the woods this morning I was struck by what a variety of sounds woodpeckers make. There's the hollow booming of a big bird on a big, mostly sound treee, the high-pitchd clacking noise on a small branch or when there's a crack nearby. Any number of variations on the standard rat-tat-tat, including a few with pauses where it seems the bird is thinking for a moment "what was I doing again?" (I know that given the size of a woodpecker's head nad the amount of padding that has to surround the brain, that's unlikely.)

Sometimes each blow will have a slightly different sound as the woodpecker forces its way into the tree, just the way that you can here the changing pitch of hammer blows as you drive a nail into sound wood.

Duh.

Dandelions two feet tall

As I was on my way to the mailbox this evening (while Julie was grilling pork chops for dinner) that's exactly what confronted me. Heads up past my knees, stalks the diameter of a McDonalds milkshake straw. And those serrated leaves standing up in the underbrush like so many machete blades.

Some of the stalks were beaten down to the ground, others curving snakelike around the adjacent plants. I pulled a bunch of the heads -- even if they grow back, at least it caused the weed to waste some resources. And I wasn't about to mess with taproots the size of baking potatoes.

Frankentosh: The Sequel

Yesterday I resurrected Julie's old mac clone, which had last been seen accepting a minimal linux installation that left it unable to actually do anything, but was a tour de force in bad kluge art.

Let's review: back in 1997 the machine was a 200-mhz 603 from UMAX, with a whopping 64 megabytes of RAM and two gig of hard disk (replaced under warranty within a week of arrival). Since then, it had gone through a couple of OS upgrades, stopping at 8.6, and had the folowing components replaced or added:

CD-ROM (twice, because something in the firmware insisted on only Apple-branded parts)
Ethernet card (the old one just started dropping packets everywhere one week)
CPU (a 300 MHz G3)
RAM (another 128 megabytes)
USB ports

It was well past its last legs.

So when Julie got an emac, a linux conversion seemed the obvious thing to do. Except that the minimum useful installation (with things like, say, network connectivity and a window manager) required about 1.8 gig of free space for unpacking and installation. Add a couple hundred megabytes for the MacOS partition required to boot this particular flavor of linux, and you had an interesting problem. (Answer: install a text-only version of linux with just enough network stuff to download the rest of everything from another machine sitting on the next desk over. And then very carefully install the graphical environment in tiny bits that don't break the 1590 megabytes of space available.)

The bad taste that left in my mouth, and the unlikelihood of doing anything interesting on a machine with slighly more free storage than a palm pilot, left poor Lisa Simpson (OK, we have stupid names for our machines) sitting on the floor for six months or so. Until yesterday, when I finally got sick at tired of my first generation slightly-faster-than-a-floppy jet-turbine-cooled external firewire drive. I replaced it with a silent model of twice the speed and capacity and two thirds the price.

And then it struck me: (Well, it had struck me earlier, which was why I got the new drive in the first place, but lets go with the narrative line here) inside that first-generation firewire was just a stupid run-of-the-mill IDE drive with some bad interface cobbled onto the side to talk to a firewire port. Put that in Julie's old mac and you could maybe do something useful.

So I gently slid a swiss-army-knife blade under the adhesive on the "BREAKING THIS SEAL VOIDS WARRANTY" sticker, unscrewed the four screws that held the bottom of the case together, unscrewed the four screws that held the drive mount to the case, UTFSTH the drive to the mount, unplugged the power and data cables, and voila: bare 60-gig drive. Same thing, only fewer screws, to get the old drive out of Lisa Simpson, plug in the new drive, boot from CD, and zowie!

There was a minor hitch with getting the new Frankenbox to boot from disk (I had stashed a copy of the system folder from atoher machine on the firewire drive for safekeeping, and it had to be eviscerated before it would give up control) but now -- whee! -- I have a 60 gigabytes of raw storage power waiting for, say, a linux digital tv recorder or something equally stupid. Maybe I'll leave 5 or 10 gig for the mac partitition, just for old time's sake...

Almost perfect cinnamon rolls

This should make it clear why people who like really exact recipes hate me:

1. Make 1:4 sugar syrup by putting a short quarter-cup of sugar in a measuring cup and adding near-boiling water from the hot tap till you reach 1 cup.
2. Pour about 5-1/2 ounces of the syrup into the hummingbird feeder.
3. Pour the rest of the syrup over about 2-3 cups of instant oatmeal (whatever was left in the big container). Rinse measuring cup by filling twice with water from the hot tap and pouringthat over the oatmeal.
4. Leave bowl covered at room temperature for 4 hours while you go to burlington and the grocery store and cook some chicken stock for the rice you're having for lunch.
5. Add a couple of shakes of kosher salt (between a teaspoon and a tablespoon) and put the oatmeal in a mixing bowl.
6. Add about two cups of all-purpuse flour and 1/3 cup gluten along with about 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/2 tablespoon instant yeast, and mix into a slack dough.
7. Add more flour until the dough comes away from the sides of the bowl, then add a few slivers of butter so it won't stick while it rises.
8. Let rise covered about 2-1/2 hours or until roughly doubled.
9. Punch down and roll out on largest available Silpat, adding flour to keep from sticking.
10. Mix up the remaining cup and a half of King Arthur Cinnamon Filling, with a generous 6-7 tablespoons of water. Spread on dough.
11. Roll up across the short dimension and cut into disks about an inch and a half thick, placing in a 9x12 pan previosuly sprayed with baking release goop or otherwise buttered.
12. Second rise about an hour and a half. Preheat oven to 350
13. Cook for 20 minutes, read the instructions on the back of the filling bag, put some aluminum foil over the pan and cook for another 20 minutes.
14. Remove from oven and let cool, loosely covered.
15. Did I mention that we seem to have a new hummingbird at the feeder? We have one ruby throat and one plain.

I love my mac

Yesterday while I was conversing with Julie via instant message (our desks must be a good 20 feet apart as the crow flies) I knocked over a not-quite-empty can of soda onto my keyboard.

I wiped the spill up as best I could, but after a while the keyboard stopped working properly. The mouse was fine, but the text was coming out in all caps. One advantage of a transparent keyboard housing is that you can see when something is sloshing around inside (one of the disadvantages is that you can also see all the bread crumbs and other detritus that accumulates it you eat at the computer) and indeed some of the spilled soda was doing just that.

So I unplugged the keyboard, set it on a diagonal for the soda to drain out, plugged in a spare, plugged the mouse into the spare and kept typing without missing a beat.This morning, after the "compact" layout of the spare keyboard had bugged me for long enough, I unplugged it, plugged in the now-dry favorite, and went back to work. I can't imagine how many components I wuld have fried back in the old days.

You've all been waiting for this

Yep, another post about my teeth. Today I threw out my old toothbrush head and replaced it with a new one from our stash in the closet. I'd been thinking about it for a while, so when I saw the bit of green something that had lodged in the bristles yesterday morning and been damply moldering ever since, the choice was clear.

The new head is supposed to be compact and able to get into more nooks and crannies, but I'm not sure I believe it. The sound is different, and the bristles are definitely not as soft, but I will soon show them who's boss.

Did I mention that I finished my spool of dental floss last night? Oh what a time of transitions.

Black helicopters my ass

Did you know that "Federal Law" prohibits the cooking of resaurant hamburgers to anything but "well done" and "medium well"? Neither did I, but I'm sure our kindly iron-haired waitress at Friendly's would not have misled us. Only a few months ago, it was medium, medium-well and well, but the forces of shoe-leather are closing in. Soon their victory will be complete.

Of course, if factory-farmers had listened to what microbiologists have been telling them for 30 years about herd sanitation and indiscriminate use of antibiotics to "improve growth" it's quite possible none of this would have happened (one of my first stories as a science-writing intern was about just this subject) but who am I to stand in the way of progress?

There's a guy living in the woods

I probably never would have found the camp if it weren't for the old geezer on the mountain bike, albeit you also have to give credit to whoever designed my new camera's insanely obscure controls. So there I was, in the middle of Hubbard Park, and what do I come upon but a bark-and-branch shelter with a sleeping bag inside and an empty rucksack in the doorway. (I thought about taking a picture but it seemed like an invasion of privacy.)

You can't really call it a lean-to because it has a ridgepole -- think of it more as a classic pup tent with the cloth replaced by bits of wood. It's set between a couple of low hillocks, but if you stand up in front of the thing -- is it a hut? -- you can see the grass by the new picnic shelter maybe 50 or 80 yards downslope. Of course you can't get there in a straight line.

I thought I knew what I was doing leaving the hut, but I ended up mostly bushwhacking through the pines until I got to the park road. It's much easier to reach from around the back (which would be around the front for 99% of Montpelier): you go up past the sledding hill and into the woods on the far side of the meadow where people run their dogs, then bear right where a bunch of paths diverge toward the leaf-identification display. Up the slope with the occasional stone steps, left at the top, then where the main trail goes left back into the plateau swamp, go downslope to the right wherea sapling is cracked at head height and angled down to the ground. A dozen more yards, blink and you'll miss it.

If you're wondering where the geezer and the camera come in, I didn't go the way I just described. From our house, it's about 50 years to the park gate, and about that again on the road to the spot where a trail branches off toward the swamp. (I might have gone another way, but the path I usually take was being jogged by a couple of middle aged runners one of whom was complaining about how his girlfriend ruined his exercise schedule by wanting to run with him and then not enjoying it properly.)

A ways in I heard a noise behind me, and saw someone slowly wrestling a mountain bike along the trail. A few yards of riding, a few steps carrying, a few yards riding... Just before the first major morass with stepping stones across it, I turned back to see if he was close enough that I should let him pass, but no. So I headed across the stones with one eye on the biker in case he should decide to tear down the little slope into the bog and cream me from behind.

Five seconds and a couple of curses later I was standing with one foot on a rotten lg and the other ankle-deep in mud. At least I didn't fall down. The grey-haired gentleman on the bike rode through the shallow water on the downstream side like a pro, then wrestled his machine onward. As I watched him go, I savored the feeling of water seeping into my shoes, and took the left fork where he took the right.

I wandered down the hill, until I got to the trail that leads to: the other side of the road loop, the dog-run meadow, back up the slope along the northish border of the swamp to the park road by our house. Up I went for no good reason. At the top of the stone steps I paused to take a picture of a tree that had two nearly first-sized woodpecker holes in the side. The squareness and sharp edges of the cut were a sight to behold.

Except that at some point in the last quarter-mile I had apparent pressed the sequence of buttons that turns off the camer's auto-focus and activates a 6 feet to infinity manual-focus mode instead. None of the camera's menu commands covers this situation (it's not in the printed manual either), so I spent about 15 minutes watching my batter run down while pushing random menus items and possible two-button combinations. I promptly forgot what fixed it.

By that time I was impatient to get on with the rest of my walk, and it seemed as if a downslope trail branch would get me where I was going. Maybe it still might have, but it sure didn't today.

Pity the male firewire connector

Sometimes the marketplace just mystifies me.

I got a webcam to put on the other side of the window from the hummingbird feeder, but Orange Micro in its wisdom decided that more than 6 feet of cable would be a waste. So I can't get the cam (which by the way has a really stupid mounting foot) over to the window without disassembling my entire computer setup and moving my desk.

Easy, I thought: just buy a firewire extension cable. But no. At Circuit City, at Best Buy, even at Smalldog, you can't buy a cable with a female firewire plug on one end and a male plug on the other. Male on both ends only. And since Orange Micro saved fifty cents by hardwiring the camera end of the cable into the cute little spherical molded plastic shell, that's no use. (Oh, did I mention that they also saved money by including only a demo version of the software you need to run the webcam? If you actually want to use the camera, you'll have to pony up for software too.)

Gender changer plug, like in the good old days of RS-232? Not on your life. For something like $50, smalldog had a firewire hub they could sell me, plus maybe another cable to go from the hub to the computer, only they were out of hubs anyway. Some mail-order place on the web had a powered extension cable for which they wanted either $33 or $49.99 depending on what link I used to get to it. But sheesh.

Finally I found some poor garage outfit that specializes in selling modules that fit in the drive bay on the front of a computer and hold copies of all the plugs on the back of your computer -- and cables that go from A to B. Not only that, they have free shipping. I promptly gave them my credit card, and we'll see if they think I have to order one of their module thingies before they'll sell me their piece of wire with plugs.

But criminy.

Which also explains why you're not seeing any hummingbirds yet.

Before the twilight comes

The past couple weeks have been about as bright as it gets in the woods around here. The trees are just barely leafing out, and it's only six weeks till the longest day of the year. By the time the leaves are back down it will be almost that close to the shortest day. Come high summer, the woods will be mostly dark, and the ground will be covered with ferns and temporary brush. (And the insect population will be out in full force. Today it was just half a dozen bumblebees or so, wondering where all the damn pollen-bearing flowers were already.)

The manual for my clock

The are a couple of magnetic reed switches on the back of the clock, and a little magnet rod with a handle comes with the kit. There's a hole drilled in the back of the base for storing the magnet. If you wave the rod near the first switch, there's a beep and the clock shifts into menu mode. If you keep waving the rod near the first switch, the hours tubes display the number of the menu item you're currently messing with, and the seconds tubes display the current setting of that item. Which you change by waving the rod near the second switch.

The list of settings and what they do takes up an entire single-spaced page, in an order that may confuse you.

1) Number of hours difference between clock time zone and GMT.
2) Number of minutes difference ditto. For times zones that are off by half an hour.
3) Sign of the difference between time zone and GMT. + or -.
4) 12 or 24 hour display.
5) Scroll Frequency. How often to display other data: every 1, 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes.
6) Scroll Speed. How fast to move other data across tubes.
7) Scroll Dwell. How long to keep other data visible.
8) Coordinate Scrollin.: Whether to display latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and decimal seconds.
9) Temperature Scrolling. Celsius, Fahrenheit or none.
10) Date Scrolling. US format, European format or none.
11) Chime Frequency. Every 1, 5, 15 ,30 or 60 minutes
12) Chime Type. Silent, single, double, high/low, low-high, ticktock, hours in morse code.
13) Morse Code Speed. 5, 13, 20 wpm. (13 wpm was the requirement for a general amateur operator's license, but when I was 10 years old and had a novice license I could never get past 12 for receiving. That was the end of my ham career.)
14) Display Sleep. on/off. Turns off tubes at times specified in 15 and 16 to make them last longer.
15) Sleep Start Time.
16) Sleep End Time.
17) LED Flash. on/off. Controls the flashing LED that tells you the GPS receiver is operating properly. (This was new in the microcontroller version that Jeff swapped for the one I had installed, and scared the bejeezus out of me when I got the clock back because I thought the GPS unit had somehow been fried, when before I sent the board back, that was the only thing we were sure was working.)

There. Now if I lose the assembly manual I won't be screwed.

This is so cool

I've been working on this for about a month, and yesterday I got the circuit board back from the nice kit-seller guy who fixed my solder bridges and broken reed switch (and then went around the board replacing resistors and other parts whose leads were bent in an aesthetically displeasing fashion or weren't soldered quite right. Today I oiled up the base one more time and put on the feet, socketed the nixie tubes and found a spot on the garage where the GPS antenna can see the sky. (Yeah, that's right: these tubes are controlled by a microprocessor and a GPS receiver)

I have to say, I like it a lot. I wish I'd been able to finish building it myself, but it's still just one of the neatest things I've come this close to. It's like being in the computer history museum, only without driving on 101.

In addition to the time, every minute the clock displays the date, the temperature inside the clock and the antenna's latitude and longitude to 10 digits of accuracy. The GPS receiver is surplus, designed for a fancy cellphone project that kicked the bucket. I know it's goofy, but even vaguely being able to understand how this thing works makes me happy.

The wrong man

I picked up a couple nearly pristine paperback volumes of The Saint from the used cart at Barnes and Noble last week while waiting fruitlessly for Julie's luggage to arrive. For 88 cents each I thought it might be fun to refresh my memories of the young black-and-white Roger Moore.

But I was wrong.

When the tall, tanned devil-may-care figure of the books alluded to a payoff of "twenty grand" my mind's ear refused to conjure up Moore's baritone british, and instead the closest I could get were the cultured nasals of Cary Grant, pronouncing his a's like e's. So for the rest of the two volumes visions danced in my head of a cross between Grant and Gary Cooper acting out Charteris's purple prose.

Some of the passages in the books put even Edgar Rice Burroughs to shame:

"The eyes of the two men clashed in an almost physical encounter, like the blades of two duellists engaging, but the Saint's smile did ont change"

or

"His hands fell on the Saint's shoulders; and they had to reach up to do it. He felt the slight, supple stire of the sinews and smiled." ("He" being ostensibly the bereaved father who is really the archvillain, detected by the Saint only after 210 pages with the help of the inevitably-shot amber-haired bombshell.)

The internet being what it is, I also found out that "Leslie Charteris" wasn't a pen ame after all but rather the deed-poll moniker of Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin, born in Singapore, son of the wealthy chinese surgeon Dr. S. C. Yin , a direct descendant of the Shang emperors (1766-1050 BC). It was clearly inevitable that he come to America to write detective fiction.

pretty pictures

courtesy of a new digital camera, from the nice folks at smalldog.

Spring comes even to Montpelier

It was 50 degrees out yesterday, so I took a long walk, down the far side of the hill and across Elm St (where there's apparently some kind of property dispute going on -- there was a sign lying flat on the ground saying that the trail had moved because the land the old trail on had been sold, but no indication where the new trail might be).

There were dozens of hardy souls at the recreation center -- adults playing tennis, youths skateboarding, a couple of brothers taunting a sister with a basketball in the parking lot. A husky still in full winter coat was playing in one of the few remaining patches of cold open water on the grass.

The sound of rushing water was everywhere, but the north branch itself was deceptively placid -- if you didn't notice that the river level was a couple of feet above normal. All of the rocks and shoals and snags that usually make for infteresting eddies and rapids are well underwater, and the flow just rides right over them.

Of course, if you looked at the water surface, you might also notice that the river was flowing faster than the average person can run...

Thermos is getting grey

He's 11 years old and scared of pretty much everything that moves, but this winter he decided that if we weren't actually going to tear him limb from limb he would mostly recline his ground. That means when he's resting on your (well covered) legs you have to reach out and hug him rather than just talking about it or looking at him before he moves.

Of course, he's always more friendly in winter when there's body heat to be gotten, so the real question is whether he stays friendly once the weather warms up.