evidence of my slowly waning sanity

I DONE GOT A NEW BLAWG

2008-03-27T19:09:00.004-04:00

EDIT: Ok newer than new blog: The Heat Lightning. You go there now.

A little math:
too much to say x too little made = new blog.

It's called Stereotropical (in honor of being back in the 305, at least for now) and it can be found here.

I'm also a twitterholic now.

Enjoy your ability to track my every move.

Sincerely,
John

Skycraft Surplus

2008-01-03T11:24:00.001-05:00

A million other people have said it, but I feel the need to say it myself:
Skycraft Surplus in Orlando Florida is truly the happiest place on Earth.

I bought parts for making an Arduino Punk console. Changes I plan on trying to make:
- Get rid of the LCD, replace with more LED's
- Possibly tap LED's instead of buttons? See here.
- 1/4 inch mono out in addition to a speaker

Which makes me realize I forgot to buy a toggle switch ... dang.

Party idea: Iron Bartender

2007-12-03T12:34:00.000-05:00

My brother and I just got back from moving a truckload of stuff from NYC to Miami. Of the many odd conversations we had, we discussed throwing a party around something we like to call Iron Bartender.

Basically: Iron Chef with booze. You get 10 minutes and have to make 2 drinks with "surprise" ingredients that have nothing to do with cocktails and may not even be liquid.

I've seen examples of other people doing this, but with 2 liquors drawn out of a hat and at bars as opposed to in my backyard. I think that's weak, and I propose the following as good surprise ingredients:
- Egg whites
- Jupina/ironbeer/something hispanic
- Carrot juice
- Red onion
- Coconut milk (solid canned kind)
- Melted ice cream
- Nik-l-lips
- Powdered Gatorade
- Powdered kool aid
- International foods fancy Instant coffee
- esoteric stout beer

Judging would be done by a revolving panel. Asian man biting into a yellow pepper optional.

The main problem with this party is expense, as:
1. You'd need to have a fully stocked bar, which is to say an example from each alcohol group, mixers, and the esoteric stuff no one ever buys unless they have a specific drink in mind (like bitters, rimming salt, maraschinos, etc.)
2. Failures would be an undrinkable mess.

I think it'd be worth it in the end. Kira has suggested having guests bring the alcohol, which I think would work if you covered the cost of handles of the basics (rum, gin, vodka, whiskey) and had guests bring what else they could afford.

2007-11-09T18:38:00.000-05:00

I think the Air and Space Museum is easily one of my favorite places in the world.

It's really a shame I didn't get down there until the weekend I'm leaving D.C.

Halloween

2007-11-03T00:20:00.000-04:00

Well I keep meaning to make a better build video/description for this, but suffice to say it's hard when you're moving over a thousand miles away in less than a week.

This is my Halloween costume. It's basically an Arduino microcontroller powered by a 9v battery and running a modified version of the code included in the Knock Tutorial on the website. 12 LEDs are connected in parallel to one output on the Arduino, and are triggered every time I speak into the piezo disk. The piezo is mounted on a sponge to ensure that bonking the helmet won't trigger it, only my voice.

Things I would have done had I had more time:
- Wired the eyes to flicker also when I spoke (currently they are powered independently by another 9v battery)
- Twisted the wiring and shortened the leads on the LED's so I wouldn't be talking sideways into the piezo
- Made a voicechanger, rather than using one bought from a big-box chain store

It scared the bejeezus out of every kid coming to our door. Mission accomplished.

wetshaving

2007-08-27T22:02:00.001-04:00

I wetshave. What is wetshaving?

Rather than:
- squirting largely unidentifiable gunk onto my face
- dragging the penultimate example of planned obsolescence in the world across my cheek
- following that with overdrying alcohol-based aftershave, and
- throwing away a can and untold razor cartridges every month

I:
- Rub my face down with a hot towel
- use a brush and mug to lather my face up
- get my double edged razor really hot and wetshave

Like many of my hobbies I had ostensibly intelligent reasons for picking it up that didn't really pan out. While old style double edged blades cost next to nothing, last forever, and could even be sharpened if I felt like it, the initial outlay of 60$ for quality equipment took a long while to pay off.

Once you figure it out, it really does work a hundred times better. Admittedly an electric shaver would probably work as well, but one of those isn't going to last me the rest of my life. It also passes from tool to heirloom, rather than from medicine cabinet to trashcan.

I will admit that there is the slightest touch of machismo involved here, but of the harmless and dare I say mildly charming variety. Starting the day the same way my grandfathers did while finding my own ways of doing it is a source of pride for me.

Things I've learned so far:
- Just because the bristles are soft doesn't mean you can't be rough with your brush. Despite any fears you may have, you will sometimes need to grind it into the soap to get a good lather. If you avoided synthetics and boars hair and went for the more expensive badger hair brushes, it should work just fine. For a long time I had too thin a lather while shaving and it frustrated me. I was given a stiff synthetic brush as a gift that I could get a good lather on, but the brush disintegrated quickly. I started muscling my badger hair brush into the mug a little harder and all has been great since.
- Turning off the water and listening to the razor go across your face is the best way to tell whether you're doing it right. Listening to the bristles get cut is a better guarantee of closeness than going against the grain and risking cuts and ingrowns.
- Patience patience patience! You'll figure out your own routine in time. It took a while for me to get it down, but now I shave in under 5 minutes.

I shave with a Merkur travel safety razor. I figured if I was going to splurge, the razor needed to be as functional as possible. This one disassembles and fits into a small pouch for transport. In retrospect though, having to travel with blades is something of a pain and I can't really bring my brush with me, so it's functionality is limited. Plus the handle is mighty short. So while I wouldn't buy this model again, I would definitely recommend Merkur's products.

The internet is rife with wetshaving converts. Kevin Kelly's Cool Cools website has a good writeup of Merkur razors.

As for soaps: there are plenty of different shaving soaps out there. Generally anything glycerine based will work well. I've used kiss my face olive oil soaps in the past and have been generally pretty pleased. Colonel Conk makes a specialty line of soaps that work very well. There's a good run down of all sorts of shaving soaps here. As for post shaving, lately I've used a very small amount of Jason's aftershave and I've been pretty pleased with that as well. The stuff is cheap and lasts forever.

I'm not sure how many other men really share my urge to experiment here given shaving is typically done first thing in the morning when anything but a rigid process will result in severe injury. I can say though that I'm thoroughly enjoying taking a bit more pride in my morning routine.

2007-08-27T21:23:00.000-04:00

Generally, things that are posted here go through the following steps:

1. I write something
2. I reread it and make edits
3. Repeat step 2 at least 4 or 5 times, usually with the intercession of sleep
4. I post it up here
5. I make more edits and changes (optional but usually done)

Usually somewhere in the many repeats of step 2 I get distracted by something else. To this end I have a whole slew of pinball entries that have never gone to press. Most of them have to do with introducing a grand scheme of designing my own pinball machine from scratch, a voyage so epic that it needs an epic blog entry (if only to convince myself I'm capable of actually following it through to completion).

All this is to say that it seems as though a trickle of new readers have shown up, and as a result I should probably get off my butt and post some of this stuff. Starting ...oh ... now.

Today's random geeky observation

2007-06-26T18:30:00.000-04:00

As one era of perenially sold out consumer gadgetry begins, another must end. To wit: I actually found a Wii in stock someplace today.

I will probably never own either but continue to lust after both. Both can only be used to waste time and for making friends jealous, neither can be justified as starting something new. Rationality and fetishism are at war, but the continued victory of rationality rests on the back of but two simple facts: I neither have 500$ nor a television set.

Back to pinball with me.

cash: crud

2007-06-24T20:29:00.000-04:00

When getting my old car serviced, a 1990 honda accord, my Dad said that 700$ to keep it on the road was reasonable. This was in 2000, when it was around 10 years old and I wasn't paying for anything on the car.

That car was a hand me down from him, and now I'm driving a 1995 accord that was handed down from my sister. In some ways I traded up (far fewer miles and a functional AC) and in some ways I've traded down (automatic transmission, champagne paint job that's falling apart, and drives like an angry hog). I don't particularly like it and I've done only enough maintence to keep it on the road in the 2 years I've owned it, or around 400$.

All this is to say that the 700$/year metric caught up with me during a month where I had already spent a lot of money, and as such I've learned the value of saving for a rainy day. Now all that's left is learning how to live off of peanut butter and saltines for a month or two (I think the secret is to slip an orange in now and then so my teeth don't fall out).

Anyway, all this is to say that I'm learning how to manage finances, first to get myself out of this small hole and second to save up for a new car or a rainy day. Also I wanted to note that buying an iphone was once a folly-filled possibility, albeit an insane one. Now it's been relegated to the "maybe christmas" bin, or better still, the "maybe if I'm dropped on my head" bin.

Anyway: projects. Right now I'm working on a proof of concept, trying to hook up several shift registers and figuring out how to code them all. These next few weeks will be a little crazy though, with a trip to Miami planned and multiple old friends visiting me in town. We shall see how things come together.

for want of a horseshoe nail

2007-06-20T14:01:00.000-04:00

The last time I used a rhyme about nails was in reference to the Dismemberment Plan song Academy Award:

"Dangling yourself from the cross
all out of nails but here's your hammer boss!"

I think I just had the song stuck in my head, as it has little to do with anything.

Today's is in reference to the age old catchetism
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

This one makes a little more sense: little things, specifically tools and their ilk, are important. I'm learning this more as I get older, frequently as I try to use an inherited dremel to do jobs it is ill suited for.

Anyway, my uncle and my dad passed through a weekend or two ago. It turns out that one of many of my uncle's past jobs was for National Cash Registers. When I passed through Delaware on Fathers Day to visit Grandpa, he managed to dig out a switch adjuster and flexstone handy that he'll likely never use again.

Bringing yourself to spend money on esoteric tools that are equal to or lesser than the cost of shipping is difficult. Suffice to say, I was a happy boy.

Dear America:

2007-06-19T18:58:00.000-04:00

You know what makes me throw up in my mouth a little? The phrase "I just threw up in my mouth a little."

What started this, again? Mean Girls? Anchorman? I forget now, but honestly people: we've stopped quoting Napoleon Dynamite, we can stop quoting this now. It's about 7 words too long for the knee-jerk response it's supposed to be.

2007-06-11T22:23:00.000-04:00

Damn you James Kochalka, I can't stop listening to the Superf*ckers theme song!!

2007-06-09T23:40:00.000-04:00

When my cat (intentionally) knocked my nikon D50 off the dresser last Summer, my first thought was that the true blessing of the digital age was the lack of moving parts to break. When I tried to use the camera a week later and learned it was broken, I cursed the digital age's lack of independently replaceable parts.

Once upon a time, every town had a camera repairman someplace that could replace a spring or dust out the inner workings so your baroque mechanical time-freezer could work acceptably again. However I thought to myself at the time that there was doubtless a piece of broken circuitboard inside the camera, that was no doubt part of a larger unit that would cost as much as the camera itself to replace after labor was included.

The icing on the cake was that the only malfunctioning part was inherently mechanical; the jogwheel that lets you change settings no longer worked. The camera functions, by all means, but only in pre-programmed modes that I can in no way alter myself.

Compare this to my Konica, which against all odds somehow still works and is older than I am. The correct batteries for it are no longer produced and I have to put jerryrig batteries of a higher voltage, but it'll still work.

Such are the tradeoffs in the digital age. In the end it cost a little under 200$ to get fixed, which was about 1/3 the cost of a new camera. A few months later my Canon SD10's lens froze open. Again, this wasn't totally fatal, but actual picturetaking is now nigh impossible and generally the camera is useful only for taking movies.

I never bothered to get it fixed and just bought an outdated point and shoot digital camera off of Craigslist for 50$. If my D50 ever breaks again, I'll probably wind up doing something similar for it as well.

Thus we have another tradeoff: we no longer have easily fixable electronics and thus everything is disposable. But as things are readily disposable and obsolesence is always around the corner, the value of used things has declined. So I'm able to get slightly older cameras (and vintage pinball machines) for relatively cheap just by virtue of looking around. Hooray internet!

all out of nails, but here's your hammer ...

2007-06-09T23:28:00.000-04:00

So 20 shift registers, 5 multiplexers, one MAX7219, a bunch of dip switches to fool around with ...

... and one immensely small breadboard that I can't fit anything onto.

Crud.

Miami Expatriate: google maps "street view"

2007-05-29T21:25:00.000-04:00

(image co-opted from Gothamist)

Google maps has unveiled "street view" in a few select cities. It doesn't seem to be that big a piece of news, as I can't even find the story that originally lead me to try it out and it's not even mentioned on Google's official blog (at least not yet).

Whatever story I originally read, I didn't bother to gleam too many details. It seems a simple enough concept: just stick a bunch of cameras on a car, drive it around, and take pictures at set intervals. Stitch them all together and presto: instant virtual metropolis.

I used this as an opportunity to take in some glimpses of home. I read a months worth of posts in Transit Miami earlier today and found myself missing the way the sun beats down in SoFla (and, oddly enough, missing Burdines).

Random observations:
First, most of the pictures look like they were driving the truck too fast. The trees at my beloved Merrie Christmas park look rather blurred. Generally all the photos are undersaturated and have a low-fi, Holga-esque feel about them. (I'm not 100% undersaturated is a photographic term, but it fits the bill)

Looking into Miami International Airport from Le Jeune yields ... nothing but a view of how dismal driving on Le Jeune is now. Fascinating. Bet the Feds are happy about that. [edit: for reasons I can't explain, I can't get this link to work. I believe the link might be too long.]

Apparently the camera truck passed through my neighborhood on a Wednesday, as my dad's house has the landscaper's truck in the driveway (no I am not hotlinking that).

Finally, the pictures go pretty far down into Homestead. The last photo on Dixie is of a Shell station (I guess they stopped for gas and turned back?)

In short: good for a tour or possibly a stalk, but not sure what else.

Memorial day

2007-05-28T19:15:00.000-04:00

1. It was very hot
2. It brought 10 million bikers into the DC area
3. It had sales that enabled me to purchase jeans that fit
4. It was so hot that I believe I will spend the last few hours of it playing pinball in my boxers

that is all

memorial day weekend tomfoolery

2007-05-25T23:38:00.000-04:00

This is my Arduino board, set up for the LED Dimming tutorial. The board has 15 digital pins that can be used for input or output and 5 analog pins for input. Those, combined with analog multiplexers, shift registers, and an LED driver to drive additional lights gives me a lot of options.

A week ago I had no idea what the above were. I'm getting a better idea by the day, and even better, by tomorrow should have a decent book. Pretty soon I should have a good idea of how to go approach this.

For right now though, the right flipper on the OXO is stuck. Not stuck physically, but the electromagnet inside is borked and whenever you start a new game it'll seize up and the solenoid that's supposed to kick the ball in front of the plunger chokes. I'm going to go through all the steps at pinrepair and see if I can't get it to fire right. I'm a little nervous about having to replace a coil, not because it'll be difficult, but that I'll need to order something and it'll be a week before I manage to get the part. I'd be frustrated if I had this long three day weekend but no actual parts with which to do any work.

Arduino

2007-05-18T17:02:00.001-04:00

I have an Arduino microprocessor development board arriving in the mail today, so aside from pinball maintenance, this weekend will be filled with the sounds of programming (which really is just the ticky-tacking of a keyboard and the gurgling of cola leaving a can)

I've really wanted to fool around with an Arduino for a while, but really haven't had any reason to. Now, I'm looking into building my own pinball machine, a plot I will more clearly outline later.

In the meantime though, I'm super excited just about the idea of getting an LED to light up.

Pinball: Chapter 2 - Introductions

2007-05-17T11:30:00.001-04:00

This is my pinball machine. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.

I may now add my name to the list of bloggers who have used the training chant of the Marines into a witty phrase. Go me!

Anyway, it's a 1973 Williams OXO. This is a machine that was fun enough to continue being played but not popular enough to be considered worth taking care of. As such, they're exceedingly rare in good condition due to being "out in the wild" longer.

Mine has its fair share of cosmetic flaws but works pretty well. The backglass is in poor shape and there's a long groove that runs out of the plunger lane that makes the first shot kind of a pain.

The groove is worst on the left and right edges, meaning sometimes the pinball will actually get wedged on either side. I tried to fix it with copious amounts of playfield wax, but I think that actually made it worse. I don't mind it normally though, as it actually functions as something of a skill shot. The challenge is to shoot it at the right speed so it loses momentum just at the apex of the playfield arc (where the groove is both shallowest and most susceptible to gravity), thus making it drop towards the center targets.

Aside from the groove, all other flaws are fixable. Some lightbulbs here, some wax there. I'm getting new rubber rings this week and need to clean the contacts on the A/B targets. Its also set up for 5 ball play, which is just dumb as I get at least one replay nearly every time I play. On good days, I can get the scorewheel to turn over (pass 99,999) every time.

Truth is, there's a fair amount of maintenance work I should do, as I doubt its former owner likely ever opened it up and cleaned very much. I haven't yet due to lack of parts, time, and the intimidation factor of all those wires and switches. It's odd to open it up and look at all the things that could possibly go wrong inside of it. Having the manual around is reassuring, but that ease quickly fades when I glance at the schematic and realize I'm in somewhat over my head.

It is in working shape though, and so long as I maintain it, it will likely continue to be. I've found many resources for fixing and maintaining EM machines, so an afternoon spent with the right tools will probably do a world of good. Hopefully that afternoon will occur this weekend.

Recently I sketched out all the functions of each switch in an attempt to figure out how it works on a basic level. This sketch will come in handy both for figuring out the schematic and in a future project, to be announced.

Pinball research

2007-05-15T21:11:00.000-04:00

Poring through the Internet Pinball Database is very addictive.

More to come.

Random Friday Craigslist rant

2007-05-11T17:22:00.000-04:00

Craigslist is evidence both of the downfall of western civilization and those maddening bits of sanity you see in the eye of a storm.

Try to find a reasonably priced used bike on Craigslist. You will find posts containing:
- Incomplete sentences and absolutely no description other than brand and price
- People trying to pawn off bikes they bought 4 years ago from K-Mart for 20$ cheaper (or the same price) as a new one would cost today
- People selling expensive, obtuse parts

In other words, they’re selling to:
- Nobody
- Fools
- Rabid enthusiasts

Where does the normal person fit in? Well, we don’t really. We’re expected to go and spend 500$ on something that will probably live in our garage 90% of the time or else deal with the craziness above.

I need a hybrid of some sort. I don’t see any point in paying 500$ for a bike as I’m not sure I’ll ride it enough to be worth it. In theory, I could buy a used bike and then sell it at a loss later on if I decide I want to upgrade. This is how I approach all my major purchases, basically trying to find a way to treat it as a rental until such time as I can devote myself to it. This is why I tend not to buy things I can’t easily offload on ebay or craigslist (cars and televisions come to mind). My most recent major purchase I bought used online and will likely one day sell online, if and when I ever sell it.

The solution for the insanity of Craigslist is to post a wanted ad and hope sane people find you, and furthermore that you don’t come off as a total jerk via your obtuse demands. I did that today for a bike, and so far I’ve gotten one response for a 15 year old bike with an attachment of a picture of the modern model. So far, this isn’t looking promising.

Pinball: Chapter 1 - Genesis

2007-05-11T11:37:00.000-04:00

A metal ball. A surface to roll it on. Angle the surface down and put some stuff on it to impede the balls downhill progress. Make a way to get the ball to the top and another way to keep it from falling to the bottom. Make the latter challenging. Assign numbers to the impedements and make them bounce the ball unpredictably. Put some glass on the top so the ball doesn't fly out. Keep score, smirk while bending the rules, frown when you get a tilt.

Work with what you have. Early on, just wood and metal. Later, relays and lamps. Later still, PC boards and LEDs. Paint it. Hell, paint everything. Silkscreen images in bold primaries and dayglow, cover bumpers with plastic. Add cleavage. Oh crap, Pac Man. Add more plastic, make ramps. Put in a few displays. Switch from using art that riffs on pop culture to licensing popular franchises.

Watch as the institution you helped create largely disappears. Consolidate, go bankrupt anyway. Resurge and almost die many times. Pull the plug but lie dormant, let the industry fold but never send the bedside mourners away. Realize the fervent love of a few will keep the spirit alive, somehow and somewhere.

A metal ball. A surface to roll it on. Someone crazy enough to fix, supply, rewire, wax, and refinish everything else.

What more do you really need?

Blonde Redhead at 9:30 club May 6th

2007-05-07T21:55:00.000-04:00

You can't go home again. You can't step in the same river twice. You can't un-eat a sandwich. Er ... you get the idea.

Rae and I went to see Blonde Redhead last night. BR is a band with a long career arc that has only in the past few years begun to distinguish itself from the continual stream of no-wave noise that NYC produces. Their album Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons was an amazing balance of dissonance and focus that continues to be one of my favorite albums. Their followup, Misery is a Butterfly, didn't so much tweak the formula further as much as it buried it under a tidal wave of synthesizers and production. Carefully calculated dissonance was replaced with swirling keyboards and synthesizer loops all recorded at the same meandering tempo. End result: pretty, but kind of boring.

Full albums, that is albums that don't sound like the artist just quit on 1/3 of the songs before fleshing them out, are exceedingly rare. Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons is an album practically bursting, whereas Misery is a Butterfly (for all its overblown production) left me wanting. They've recently come out with a new album called 23 that I've been wary of exploring, despite critics describing it as their "loveliest and most accessible work to date."

I should probably shut my mouth until I have actually heard the album, but what I caught of last nights show made me unwilling to expend the effort. Midway through the third song I remarked to Rae that they sounded like Billy Corgan's solo music. Learning that the new album was produced by a guy who worked with Depeche Mode, Smashing Pumpkins, and My Bloody Valentine is unsurprising.

Of what I saw, there was no audience interaction and very little actual music being played. The band was content in a lot of circumstances to plink out an introduction but then let the pre-recorded synth tracks play for them. We left at the start of the fifth song, victims of exhaustion and my inability to realize that just because a band released an album I adore years ago doesn't mean I'll at all be interested in them now.

Fields, who opened for Blonde Redhead last night, weren't half bad, and I'm not saying the night was miserable. In fact I can honestly say our first trip out to 9:30(!) was a pretty good time. It just wasn't the stellar night I had vainly hoped for when I bought the tickets. Granted though I was compelled to make myself go out more by the stellar Dismemberment Plan reunion show last Saturday. That show was the complete opposite of last night: fun, boisterous, exciting, and (for better or worse) recycled. While you can't go home again, home might still send you a postcard once in a while. The trick is finding it in all the junk mail.

pinball, weddings, and springtime

2007-05-01T22:28:00.000-04:00

Like an old friend who you just don't want to admit you've drifted away from, such is my listless companion the internet. Not having DSL for a month meant that the only time I spent online was at work, which of course meant very limited surfing and little personal email.

It’s been such an eventful ... well, fill in the blank.
Literally every time I started to write the above sentence I have had to either stop and put it off or got so overwhelmed I quit before I began. Lately more the former stopping than the latter quitting: this morning for an emergency meeting, earlier this morning for mailing rent, last night for sleeping, the day before for wanting a clearer head, the week before for lacking internet and time, the week and a half before for general business and birthdays, two weeks before for wedding number two, three weeks before for moving, four weeks before for wedding number one, two months before for really just not having much to say except for it being cold and me being bored.

(To put this even more into context, I wrote the prior paragraph yesterday intending to upload it last night. I ran out of time both last night and this morning.)

As I said, there's almost too much to recount. This growing up holding down a real job stuff means days seem to blur together a little bit. Unfortunately, the camera hasn’t traveled with me as much as it used to, so I don’t have photos to jog the memory.

Here’s what I do have:

1.

Wedding #2: Jessica Deller and Justin Davis. I was a bridesman … attendant, whatever. I got Jessica on the Today Show, which I guess is worth something. I don’t even know who hosts the Today Show anymore. In short: a ridiculous, exhausting weekend. I think I’m accidentally wearing the groom’s boutonnière in the above photo.

Of course, Rachel caught the bouquet.

2.What happens when you have a generous tax refund and a somewhat unexciting birthday?
Wish fulfillment, that’s what!

It's a 1973 Williams OXO. I cannot put into words how awesome this thing is. For now, the movie at the end of this post will have to suffice.

Donny seems to like it too, except when it’s turned on and making a racket.
My new hobby will get its own post in the future.

3.

Rae and I went to our first real show in D.C. on Saturday, the Dismemberment Plan reunion show. All proceeds benefited J. Robbins’ son Callum. The show sold out in under 4 minutes, after which they added another show the night before, which in turn sold out in about the same amount of time. While Friday's show apparently featured wackier antics (i.e. something involving an erotic cake), according to reports the vibe and enthusiasm of the Saturday show was far better. The crowd rushed the stage during The Ice of Boston, as you can see above. Amazing, amazing show.

In other news, I’ve been writing a whole lot. Being busy has actually increased my total output but unfortunately taken away the time that would be necessary to condense and proof. I have a huge glut of writing that spans from my last month in Tallahassee through Christmas and finally to my birthday just a few weeks ago. I'm finally paring it down now and will have it uploaded to the usual channels.

In terms of projects, Rachel and I are currently decorating my new apartment with the following goals in mind:
- Super cheap
- Somewhat modern/funky
- Matches my pinball machine

Due to my likely not staying in the place past the end of the year, painting, buying new furniture, and spending any serious dough are all pretty much out of the question.

Will we succeed? Will John have an apartment worth going into? Will anyone ever bother going to see it? Time will tell!

Bonus! Movie!

blog identity crisis

2007-02-15T21:30:00.000-05:00

Today I read tips on how to get people to read your blog. This was mistake number one.

Mistake number two was taking seriously the advice that I should stick to a single focus.

It seems like everyone who has a blog suffers from a minor identity crisis at first, writing on a scattershot set of things that as a cohesive whole make no real sense.

Truth is, I think I would much rather remain identityless. I'd prefer a reader should walk away without much of a greater idea of what kind of human I happen to be, should this mythical reader ever exist.

In the long run I prefer bookkeeping to journalism.

return of snow day

2007-02-15T21:27:00.000-05:00

My honeymoon with Snow ended abruptly when my mother in law Ice came to town.

The scene: 8:20 AM, Valentines Day, trudging through 4 inches on the ground x 3/4 of a mile trod x the width of my body ≈ a cubic crapload of ice covering every damn thing I could see. Few, if any of the streets were plowed and the absence of my Maryland associates is unsurprising. It had snowed about an inch and a half during the evening before but immediately followed that with about 3 inches of sleet and freezing rain. This sat on the ground for about a day, got kicked around and plowed and generally unsettled, until the night brought the mercury way down and solidified everything into a nice sheet that I could hardly dent even when I jumped up and down on it. My front lawn is currently a skating rink, as you can see above and below.

The boots I scoffed at when I was 13 and went on my sole ski trip in were suddenly my sloshy savior. I think they were bought a little large for me on purpose and were unbelievably uncomfortable then, but so was everything when you're a boy from Miami who's been plopped on the side of a snowy mountain for 4 days. Today, they fit perfectly and I trod through the puddles of slorshy muck without fear. Well, until I realized that the danger of splashing dirt onto my dress pants was very real and I should tuck them in and cool it a little. I can also walk across the frozen sheets without fear of falling, which is downright amazing.

I refused to put the boots back on when I went to lunch once this week and spent the whole trip sloshing through dirty puddles and nearly busting my ass in dress shoes. The people working at my little indian place were obviously bored with the dearth of customers and sitting at a table together. They pointedly looked at my shoes as I clumsily glided through the door before giving me a small cup of soup that tasted like the deity Agni was tossing curry down my throat. Perfect for a sick guy on a winter day.

All things considered, I kind of like the cold. Getting home is an adventure. Tonight I wandered around the frozen soccer field near my house and kicked chunks of ice into the net.

snow day #2

2007-02-07T22:13:00.000-05:00

Even if I live in the north from today until the day I die, I probably will never resist the urge to mess around with the snow. I found myself making snowballs and chucking them at streetlights several times today. Note that to passerby, a man in a suit making snowballs must be an awfully odd sight.

The same goes for watching a man in a suit make a tiny snowman on the tables in front of a coffee shop in Arlington. An older man who was moving his bicycle looked at me funny, but old men with huge helmets riding bicycles while wearing 14 layers on their upper bodies and nothing but thermal underwear on their legs really have no right to take anything very seriously.

Normally I kind of dislike the huge black tomcat that regularly pees on my front stoop, but I imagine last night wasn't too pleasant for him.

p.s. one more picture from last night:

modern healthcare

2007-01-28T23:36:00.000-05:00

I'm having to read quite a bit on healthcare for my current job. "Having to" is an exaggeration, as the truth is that I've been tossed into reading endless documents and trying to pluck out relevant information for clients that I hardly know about and have never actually met. Thus in order to make sense of what I'm doing, I read as much as I can in my spare time in the office.

I've often thought of picking up the equivalent of "healthcare for dummies" to read over, but I'm not sure such a tome exists, nor am I sure it exists outside of the 100$+ world of largely unreadable textbooks. Instead I've turned to the second easiest outlet: blogs. There are a surprising number of healtcare blogs out there, with many written by hospital management, healthcare consultants, and individuals in the insurance industry. It's interesting reading the back and forth between them, especially given the current initiatives in Massachusetts, California, and in the Federal government.

In my own mind I've continually compared the healthcare crisis to the problems facing the modern American school system, namely, there's lots of snake oil and frequent shameful comparisons to the rest of the industrialized civilization. Unlike education though, healthcare has the added problem of being an inconcievably large industry with many players that all have their own lobby. Despite the gap in money being involved, there is one overarching nuance that I believe the two have in common: you could throw every single economist in the world at each and you would not come out with a solution to their problems. Why? Well, until today I couldn't really tell you. It just seemed like whatever problems they had weren't rooted in concepts that economics is suited to solve, and keep in mind this is coming from someone who would sincerely like to go back in time and replace at least his undergraduate degree with one in economics. These are not problems that are solved via transactions but via a perspective behind the transactions that can't really be quantified, at least not by the traditional economic thought that goes into policymaking. (To that end, I suppose the problem is more that of any science, namely that the wrong people use it the wrong way. But I digress.)

Today I stumbled across something that encapsulated much of my recent thinking. The article was not directly about healthcare, but it touched on related issues. The article, "Unhappy Meals" by Michael Pollan, was published recently in the New York Times and essentially argues that "Nutritionism" is to blame for America's dietary failings. That is, focusing on components instead of the whole, the vitamin and not the food, is harmful and is largely to blame for recent diabetes and cardiovascular disease epidemics. It struck a chord with me not only because it mentioned issues severely effecting the healthcare industry, but also because permeating the article was an argument against reductionism. Pondering all this tonight, I wonder now if the current American belief in our ability to micromanage everything, from our calcium intake to our children's education to a land war on another continent, has really been the thought on the tip of my toungue.

The real money quote from the article is the following:
"It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we’d have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That’s not what we’re doing. Rather, we’re turning to the health-care industry to help us “adapt.” Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It’s gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it’s working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society — estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care costs — is unsustainable."

Joe Paduda, a principal in the consulting group Health Strategy Associates, recently asked in a blog entry where the starting point for healthcare reform should be. I'm now going to go out on a limb and propose my own snake oil: lets start with healthier people that need less care in the first place, rather than continuing down this circuitous path we've made for ourselves. Obviously this isn't meant as a single cure all for every issue and is in fact a comprehensive perspective shift on behalf of our entire culture. Furthermore having healthier people that eat less (for lack of a better word) crap means less money flowing through a large sector of our economy, and we simply can't have that overnight. What we can have is a gradual shift towards a healthier society, and not with softball "eat more of ____" tactics that have been the official standpoint of the Feds for the past 20 years.

Perhaps I have a bit of a bias, as I am 90% vegetarian (or as I found out tonight, a "Flexitarian") and eat meat essentially once every two weeks. I had been making it my goal to consume as much raw food as possible when I had an unfortunate brush with the Florida Bar Exam and essentially lived off of coffee and anything microwaveable for several months. In closing, I'm taking this opportunity to get back on the wagon and I'd like to invite anyone out there to join me.

lasers + dark + girlfriend = fun

2007-01-16T08:03:00.000-05:00

Click any for a bit of the zoom on the interesting parts.

meta-post

2007-01-15T23:27:00.000-05:00

Nerve is hiring bloggers. I'm not sure if they're paid or not, and thus I'm not sure if "hiring" is the right word to be using, but either way I'm pondering what it'd be like to be selected for a position like that. What the hell qualifies you to blog? If you're so embroiled in the middle of something (an industry, a scene, a political office) that entitles you to the information necessary to craft an interesting piece of writing on a near day to day basis, how would you find the time or the drive to write it down voluntarily? Or do so without violating an NDA? This is even odder given Nerve's subject matter.

I can't claim to be an elitist who disdains bloggers and their output. I read at least 10 work-related blogs daily, and I would probably be hopelessly lost without them. I also read several local blogs both in D.C. and in Miami, trying to grow an attachment to the former and not grow too far away from the latter.

After a while it feels like who you know (and for that matter who knows you) is more important than what you do. Your little position in a sphere of connections is more important than your content and being linked is more important than being incisive. The end result is a lot of people clawing for the most or the biggest mentions. The fact that I'm not terribly great at networking has kept me from wanting to start publishing anything online.

Anyway, I guess this is me saying "this is becoming a normal blog." Normal in this context usually means "I will post three times and never again. Here is a picture of my cat doing something stupid." I hope to avoid that. Whether people will ever read this, I haven't a clue. Either way, here it is, complete with cliché "what is a blog?" meta-entry as a starter.

Suggested topics include:
- All the drawings I've been doing lately
- Musing on the Suburban/Metropolitian/Working 9 to 5 state of a recent graduate
- Photographs, in the event I ever start taking them again
- More crap I've made (upcoming: refinishing my laptop, hopefully more high speed photos, another DS case)

Banned topics include:
- Whining
- Asking you to check out my Amazon Wish List
- Politics (hopefully)
- Ever using the word "Blogosphere" or for that matter blogs as a topic generally again

By the way: was "Meta" ever someone's word of the year? Hasn't it since been added to someone's banned words of the year? Can we be a bit more proactive on rectifying this situation, k thnx.

comments ahoy!

2006-12-11T07:10:00.000-05:00

I never really got around to responding to any comments that I received when I posted the DS lite case tutorial. This wasn't because the output of support and interest wasn't awesome, but more the fact that I know personally that when I stumble across a specific entry on a blog and then go on my merry little way, the chances of me catching an update are slim. I think that's a sad excuse for not trying.

Anyway, the comments boiled down to these:
that's awesome! look at mine!
I did! I looked at every one linked and wound up feeling odd that I'd gotten any attention for something so boring!

denim?
I still like using fabric that's a) lying around b) thin enough to fold up but c) thick enough to take a beating.

updates?
Actually, my DS has just spent the past month and a half sitting in my apartment broken. Due to a comedy of errors with nintendo, it's taken a while to get it fixed. Now that I've finally gotten it back I was thinking of making another one, seeing as how I have something lying around that I want to use for fabric and an urge to make a sleeve for my ipod as well.

Specifically: I wanted to cut up my grandfather's old suede jacket. I've never really worn it, it doesn't fit all that well, and it's stained and marbly. I have a bunch of his other clothes (specifically shirts), so I wouldn't feel too bad about cutting it up, and in fact I think it'd make me happy if I put it to good use somehow. I was thinking of lining it with more denim, or perhaps with some felt or something softer this time. I thought I'd also go ahead and make it shorter, as I rarely carry earbeads with me and the second pocket is superfluous. Furthermore any reduction in amount of material brings it that much closer to actually being able to fit in a jean pocket.

Anyway, this is a fantasy for when I have time. This and programming Arduino for use in my high speed photography stuff will likely remain a pipe dream until I can rediscover the concept of "free time."

the tally of broken electronics:

2006-10-18T10:39:00.000-04:00

3 months ago, one of the two hinges that held the screen on my laptop broke and the PC card slot stopped working, banning me from both my external hard drive and ipod while also making my computer a seemingly more fragile thing. I have been waiting for it to finally die with baited breath, but in the meantime:

- My cat intentionally knocked a 700$ nikon camera off the dresser, causing the jog wheel that you use to change settings to break and render the camera a very large point and shoot. Cost to repair: 150$
- My 300$ canon SD10 had the lens freeze open, causing all pictures to be overexposed into pure white. It will, however, still take movies.
- The top screen of my 130$ DS lite, which had never worked properly since the day I bought it, finally decided to die. The kid on the phone stated that this could only be due to to impact and was not covered under Nintendo's "best game manufacturer warranty in America." Out another 60$.

All that's left now are my ipod and computer, the former of which has a nagging problem of refusing to turn off, and the latter now also has a fan that is about to die and makes grinding noises that are becoming more and more frequent.

If I had been smart, I would not have paid a cent of the above and taken the obvious clue that it's time I became a luddite.

how to make a nintendo DS lite case from an old pair of jeans and some glue

2006-06-14T21:14:00.000-04:00

I gave into gadget lust and bought myself a DS lite when it came out on Sunday. Among my first observations was the fact that despite being truly pocket sized, it unfortunately lacked a way of taking any games or accessories with you. The boxes games come in are illogically large and there wasn't really a good way to stow headphones.

I've seen other homemade ideas, ranging from those that require extensive sewing to those that are, frankly, kinda grungy. I wanted to make something functional that wouldn't require my learning how to sew.

What I came up with was basically a pouch with some extra fabric to wrap around the DS. (click for bigger)

It kind of looks like it should have drugs or something in it.

The idea basically was to use origami-style folding techniques (you can see this in making the pouch), trial and error, and a crap-ton of glue to make a case that could be stowed in a pocket or (more often for me) the small pocket of a bookbag without fear of scratching or losing my game cards all over the place. You could apply the same concepts (which aren't really even complicated enough to be called "concepts") to make a case for an ipod, a PSP, or any other pocket sized electronic device.

It rolls up like this:

I made one originally out of an old pillowcase, but wound up making another out of the denim I had saved from making shorts out of an old pair of jeans. As I have no idea how to sew, the whole thing is held together with fabric glue. The pockets for accessories are just extra bits of glued on fabric with one side not glued down.

This is the basic template.

The top portion can be as long as you want, or rather, as long as however many times you want to wrap the denim around. Everything else is just a little wider than the DS's depth, width, and height. I didn't want anything to be too snug for fear of having to force the DS in and out. It's only held together with glue, y'know.

I cut the denim to be a little larger than the width of the template, and then glued the edges down. This is easily the most time consuming part as you have to glue ALL the cut edges to prevent fraying (similar to how you have to add stitches to hem pants). Note that I also ironed every place I put glue in order to make sure it set properly and out of impatience.

I then stuck the DS in the bottom and stuck it so a little bit of fabric hung over it. This was kind of a mistake as the denim was too thick to roll up right, unlike the pillowcase I had tried before. It still works fine though.

I then tucked in the corners and glued them to themselves, then folded them up and glued them to the to...wait, screw this. This is impossible to write down. Just look at the pictures.

I then cut into the edges, folded them in, and glued them down.

Add some extra panels to serve as pockets for headphones and games, and voila!

I'm going to ask my girlfriend to help me add a button to it later on. Yes, I am this inept. For now, it works pretty well on its own.

If you want to do this yourself, a few tips:
- cutting fabric will generally be a pain unless you either have a rotary cutter or put weights on the fabric to hold it down.
- an iron will really help this process and will make sure you don't get glue all over your DS in the event you're impatient.
- cut everything a little large so you can just cut more off if it doesn't fit.
- yes, you have to glue the edges. yes, I realize this is a pain.

*edit*
I've rewritten the above a couple of times to try to make it sound less dry. Studying for the bar means being able to do menial, mindless tasks and generally not being able to write without getting a headache.
In other words:
in: occasional crafting, occasional playing videogames, reading with a very closed mind, doing word problems
out: reading anything of social value, writing anything readable, sleeping
limbo: food, hygeine, social skills, existential rage

*edit2*
What do you think happens when I cut down this pantleg?

That's right, I wind up with a single very long stretch of fabric.
So in other words, no I did not make myself daisy dukes.
Weirdos.

*edit3*
I can't believe people are still stumbling across this!
I've had a bunch of comments for which I can't think of a better way to respond to than the update posted above. Go there, now!

doodles from the first week of bar prep

2006-06-03T22:14:00.000-04:00

The bar prep class I am taking is entirely on video, with different professors and lecturers giving talks on each different section.
The first section, multistate criminal law, was taught by Professor Whitebread, who looked like somehow Henry Kissinger and Ben Stein had a kid that could only talk out of one side of his mouth.

He was an amazing lecturer and kept the class laughing, which makes me think that likely we did crim law first entirely to keep us interested and not thinking we'd made a horrible mistake thinking we could become lawyers, or alternately spending 2500$ on this course.

Over the two days of whitebread, 6 hours total, I drew him many, many times in the margins of the first looseleaf notebook I've taken notes with in a long time.

I drew this the first day of lectures, before I was even introduced to the magic that is Whitebread.

"yar, I be 12" (what with all the guns and pirate shit)

As usual, the first attempts are like you drew something from an angle that you can never get again.

I think I was still thinking "ben stein" at this point.

I love taking quotes out of context. This one is "one of doreen's spring guns turns ned's head into goo."

The spring gun is the seminal device used to illustrate the boundaries of defense of home arguments in using deadly force against an invader. It comes up a lot.
Oh. And he's a loaf of bread now. An angry loaf of bread. I don't know why he's angry, as he was in fact quite chipper during his lectures, in an oddball sort of way.

"We're going to do subtle and sophisticated homicide today"

He had a bowtie that I kept forgetting to include.

And somehow a pirate theme got incorporated. I think I kept drawing skulls and crossbones and somehow the two melded together.

Day 2: I just started with pirates right off the bat.

My urge to try to make him talk out of the side of his mouth made him look more and more like Dick Cheney as I went on.

Whitebread meets Captain Crunch ("Fuck toucan sam!"). I actually sincerely hope he never finds these, at least not the ones with profanity in them. Not that they're at all accurate or well done or anything.

Whitebread was either a heavy smoker or was recovering from a cold, because he coughed quite a bit.

I realized I'd been drawing his glasses all wrong. That + fixing the mouth --> no longer looking so much like Cheney.

He looks closer to the crazy he looked in real life here, although he kind of looks like your gym instructor now.

Yeah, I don't even know what's going on here. Suddenly he becomes a tree spirit.

Piratish.

There will likely be a lot more of these as the next two months of my life evaporate in a puff of smoke.

And in case you are wondering, yes Whitebread has a homepage

In closing, the mental image of Henry Kissinger and Ben Stein in bed together smoking cigarettes will likely haunt my nightmares tonight.

series of ice block being smashaged!

2006-05-26T21:34:00.000-04:00

Round whatever we're at now.

I smashed some things again. I borrowed a telephoto lens from a friend and that made a world of difference.

enlarged versions:

first of what is likely to be many series of exploding chocolate rabbits

2006-05-08T18:49:00.000-04:00

click any of the below for a zoomed image of the explosion

Notes:
- i need stronger firecrackers. these are designed for noise not for force and require large openings to put in, as seen here:

The fuse is also in the middle, which makes this a huge pain in the ass.
The firecrackers I used before were small and didn't require large holes. They also were REALLY LOUD. I'm driving through South Carolina in the coming weeks and will see what I can do in terms of getting bigger firecrackers.
- despite this, someone called the cops on us setting off fireworks. they didn't arrive until half an hour after we had already gone inside, and they never talked to us or anything, but I can only assume they were wandering around my complex because of us. i suppose it was a sunday, but come on: i live on a street with 6 frat houses. if you aren't used to dumb shit happening by now at any hour of the night, move.
- yes, some of the bunnies came in ice cream cones. why? well, why the hell not?
- i forgot to adjust the F of the camera and as such all were taken at F5.6, which means the last couple got knocked out of focus.
- I'm not sure if the nikon D50 has wonky autofocus or if its just the lens I have on it.
- i'm also considering giving them little suicide bomber headbands in some completely and totally tasteless attempt at turning this into an art project. on the one hand, juxtaposing superfluous candy images of pagan symbols of the most sacred christian holiday with self appointed muslim martyrs seems like an interesting comment on self absorbed western christian ideals. on the other hand, it feels like every other piece of art out there: trying way too hard to be witty the but in the end just being tacky and intentionally insulting so as to try to create some kind of controversy and dialogue. See the works of Andres Serrano
At the same time, I have chocolate NASCAR cars, and how ridiculous would it be to turn them into little car bombs?
- coincidentally, those NASCAR cars were hellzaexpensive compared to the other chocolate things, i guess because it cost a lot to license the car likenesses.
- speaking of Andres Serrano, I once had a professor who met him and asked him about his photographic techniques. it turns out the fucker has no idea how to operate a camera, develop film, or enlarge his own photographs. i don't think I will ever consider anything I ever pursue, be it random odd photographs, paper cut outs, or writing, as art for the simple reason that people like Andres Serrano consider themselves artists, and I want to have as little in common with them as possible. In the end I make shit for the sake of making shit. The product is insignifigant to the process.
- there will be a lot more where this came from

an exploding bunny

2006-04-17T23:40:00.000-04:00

Just a single bunny with a firecracker shoved in it.

I took a movie of the process with another digital camera. I would have blown up more but for a neighbor getting angry. I have yet to have really found a good place to pursue this project, especially given the noise factor + the need of darkness.

I took the movie mostly due to show how the process goes. Mostly funny for the commentary.

attempt whatever we're at

2006-03-02T19:51:00.000-05:00

Before I describe the process of building my second circuit and its eventual success, it's important to note that I have absolutely zero electronics experience. Having someone walk me through the process of completing a circuit, before even really understanding circuit diagrams, is helping a lot in the process of learning because I'm watching the effects different things have without completely and totally lost. I'm also learning from mistakes with someone over my shoulder, as the steps online offer an e-mail address for help if your circuit doesn't work.

That said, I recieved the kit for my second trigger and messed it up. Not a big mess up, but enough of a mess up to fry a timer and make me embrarassingly angry for about 24 hours. I actually followed the diagram incredibly well, I just failed to shove a capacitor hard enough into the breadboard. 2$ later at radio shack, the trigger works flawlessly and, might I say, exactly as I would have hoped.

As it was, I was afraid to take the open breadboard and simply stick it next to a splashing bucket or a smashed bit of ice. Thus i needed to cram it into something, the only question being what. The traditional place for such projects, an altoids case, wasn't big enough. So I stopped by the easiest, one stop shopping location where one can find the most extraneous, wastefully packaged gifty food crap in the world:

I couldn't find any tins that were large enough without being too large, and I was close to pursuing the wild idea of simply gutting a rubber duck and sticking the circuit inside, stitching the rubber duck up afterwards and soldering in switches such that i'd only need to dissasemble it for replacing the battery. I didn't try this as I didn't think the duck was quite big enough and it

Instead, i found a large novelty egg that a pez dispenser came in and decided it'd be perfect. The bottom was flat such that it could sit on a surface without moving, it came apart easily, and it was large enough.

Here's a picture I dug up online of them:

I naturally chose the sheep as it's the scariest goddamn thing I've ever seen. I'm googling for an image of it rather than having to take another one, and a wealth of cute, non-slutty looking pez lambs are coming up that are making me wonder what the hell they were thinking when they designed this scary thing. I think i'm sticking a firecracker in its head.

Anyway so I took the stuff out, put a frosting of matte finish on the inside of the clear plastic, glued down the weights on the inside of the egg (pennies and washers, it was all I had) then zapped that with some spray plasti-dip.

The delay worked great and I finally managed to get the precise moments i had been trying to get.

click for biggins!

Note that blocks of ice took flight in a lot of these, either in total or in chunks. The first few attempts had the delay set for too long, and by the time the flash went off, the ice block was already out of frame. The last few i tried zooming out a bit, and as such the last few are granier crops.

i think my neighbors think i'm nuts. i'm going to need to post printouts in my window and ask for forgiveness for doing crazy stuff on the pool deck after dark.

how i got started taking these high speed photos

2006-02-26T16:43:00.000-05:00

Two years ago, I bought a wealth of chocolate bunnies at local dollar stores and Ekerds around town. I had no idea what I was going to do with these bunnies, so I simply froze them and figured that eventually I'd use them for something that didn't involve eating.

One night my friend David came over to my apartment to meet me before we headed out for a drink. I have been known to force random friends to do random things, and David is usually my most willing target. This night was special, for it yielded the following: a firecracker placed in a frozen chocolate rabbit.

The gif is all the essential frames from the AVI my digital camera captured crammed together.

The last day of classes, when everyone was drunk at a neighboring apartment, I decided to try again, this time with a web camera that had a higher FPS than my digital camera did.

It took some doing, but it worked:

What I liked about both of these was that there was an instant in which they were spectacular. The first had a single frame in which purple cracks showed through the chocolate, immediately before flying into indiscernably tiny bits. The second exploded in sparks that momentarily held the shape of the rabbit before collapsing outward.

Rest assured come post easter, I am doing this again. Both with movies and with the expanded strobe set up I plan on having by then.

attempt 3!

2006-02-24T09:41:00.000-05:00

I feel like I could do this a hundred thousand times and never feel I'd gotten it quite right. This is a good thing.

Notes:

Notes:
- This time on "odd photo experiments with john," we're throwing stuff into a bucket of water. The trigger would usually go off a) when the stuff accidentally hit the side of the bucket as i threw it in the dark b) when the stuff slammed the bottom of the bucket after making a big splash c) immediately upon touching the water.
- I went ahead and ordered another kit with a delay.
- ISO 800 is a no-no. Too much noise to be worth cropping.
- I cut out the internal light meter on my Vivitar 2600 and soldered the leads together, creating a short and shortening the flash. How does this work? danged if I know. Shorting the thyristor on the other flash worked, and it also worked here. It actually worked a little TOO well as now the flash is super short and weak. This is unfortunate as I don't want to get the flash too close and soak my gear.
- Ok I KIND OF know why it worked. The light meter was a piece of glass covering a photoresistor. My confusion stems from not having enough experience with the flash before cutting it up to know whether it flashed longer the more light hit it or shorter (i would guess longer, as I've removed ALL resistance and it flashes a very short time now)
- I didn't have a trigger for the 2600 and thus any double exposed below were a single flash with the sound triggered 283 (with a red filter) then a manual flash by the 2600 (no filter). Sometimes this came out right, oftentimes not.
- yeah that's a 7 inch i'm throwing. I picked one I knew I'd never listen to. Sorry The Hex, I'm not the only one who thinks that single sucks horribly (i got it on sale for 99 cents, realized it stunk, and later found a copy in the music directors closet of my old college radio station with a review that said "as hard as it is to believe Troubleman Records but out a bad release, this is shit.")
- a telephoto lens would be good. i should see if i can find a non-AF cheap telephoto lens that'll fit my camera on ebay.
- i think i'm going back to ice tomorrow. my bathroom is cramped.

attempt 2!

2006-02-22T12:08:00.000-05:00

hammer!

Sand wedge!

I figured out that I've been exposing them far too long. These ones had shortened exposures so less ambient light was exposed and, in some instances, so there wasn't a second flash.

They got a little boring at this point, so these are just the detail shots.

Lessons:
- I either need to take shorter exposures or start doing this in a totally a dark area. I'm thinking of putting a 2x4 across my bathtub and doing this inside there with the door closed. Alternately I can start opening the f-stop a little further (i've been doing this at f11 for a decent depth of field).
- the flash keeps flashing twice; once on impact, and once again when whatever I hit lands (this is especially true in the sand wedge pictures). Solutions: either move the sensor further away or turn down the sensitivity.

The most important problem thusfar is the flash goes off at the very first instant of impact. this isn't necessarily the most interesting moment to be frozen. What I need is a way to delay the firing of the flash by tenths or ten thousanths of seconds before firing. This could be accomplished by soldering in a delay, which I could buy from the same place that I bought the flash from. This is unfortunate as it's another 20$ to throw at this project, with another 6$ yielding me a whole new sensor/delay setup (s/h is 6$ flat from this guy, so I can spend 18$ just getting a delay, or 25$ getting a delay and a new sensor). I'm tempted to do this and have 2 flashes going off at different times and from different angles but with different color filters on them (i.e. red at instant of impact, blue midway through explosion). I'm doing more research into doing this, the biggest problem being I have only 1 vivitar 283 (the easy to use flash for this project). I might wind up having to open up my other, smaller and cheaper flash and re-solder some connections to get it to flash for a shorter duration as well as for triggering remotely (as it lacks a PC cord). In other words, If I start this project from scratch, I'll be out 20$ and have a somewhat useless trigger stuffed into a tupperware container.

The alternative I thought would work when I bought it was moving the trigger further away, as the time it would take for the sound to reach it would create a minor delay.

So lets try some math:
Sound travels at around 700 miles an hour.
There are 5,280 feet in a mile.
700 x 5,280 = sound travels at 3,696,000 feet an hour.
Divide that by 60 (minutes in an hour) you get 616,000 feet a minute
Divide that by 60 again (seconds in a minute) you get a number around 1000.
Ok, so sound moves about 1000 feet a second. Meaning moving the sensor an extra foot away would take it another 1/1000 of a second to respond. I'm not sure I can move it any further than 5 feet and still have it work (it was at about 2 feet last night). Obviously more experimentation is required.

While all the above math might seem superfluous, it will come in handy for a later project that will involve much larger distances and incredibly loud sounds that will likely trigger the flash no matter how far away it is.

high speed photography rig

2006-02-21T17:37:00.000-05:00

I assembled a high speed camera rig of sorts. Really its just sound trigger for a flash, soldered together and stuffed into a tupperware container. Leave shutter open on camera, make noise, flash goes off. What i'm actually most proud of is the fact that I managed to solder the thing together and a) not mess it up b) not burn the hell out of myself and c) incorporate an on/off switch that wasn't in the plans. You can see it in the pictures below. I bought the kit from here in the pre-soldered chip version that has since been discontinued.

Last friday night was kind of a test run and wasn't done in a dark enough place. Plus it was rainy and freezing, so not a whole lot was done. Later: bottles will be thrown or shot with slingshots or those crappy little pistol crossbows, and firecrackers will be stuffed into all manner of things. I kinda wish I had a backyard for this as opposed to a pool deck. I also need to start taking the pictures in RAW format so I can twiddle with the exposure more post taking the photo.
So far the results aren't as exciting as I would hope, but it's getting it at the instant of impact. I might later on add a delay to it so as it'll wait increments of 1/10,000 of second so as to not get things at their most speedy and blurry.

note: After reading the instructions for setting up my flash (half the reason i chose to do this project was that I owned the flash already and the chip and other components cost like 25$ total), I realized I was doing it wrong (namely, I needed to make a short in the thyristor to make it flash for as short as possible a time. i would never have figured out to do this on my own). The last picture is from an attempt done later on that had the flash at the right setting. Note that I found out that my flash, that I inherited from my family, is still made and costs 120$? I feel kinda bad putting stickers all over it now.

click on any of the below for an enlarged detail of the impact

(the flash unfortunately went off twice with this one)

2005-09-25T11:03:00.000-04:00

things I have been doing lately:

1.

2.
scale model making (i inherited all these modeling tools and have all this spare material, might as well use it)

3.
trying to figure out a way to make a case/pouch for the regular ipod i bought last week

4.
studying my freaking brains out (I'm a law student, recall)

fashionably barely on time, my entry into TUAW's nano contest

2005-09-11T16:29:00.000-04:00

It's always difficult to participate in a contest where the mixture of competition and luck is unknown. Take, for example, an elementary school science fair project. I felt my lovingly adorned three fold piece of foamcore devoted to the strength of bargain priced paper towels was worthy of better than a garishly yellow 4th place ribbon. Technically I wasn't competing, yet there was a yellow slip of fabric telling me I had lost.

See also this contest from The Unnofficial Apple Weblog (aka TUAW. Try to say that out loud, you'll sound like you have a mouthful of toothpaste). What, really, are the judges looking for? Wit and verve? Somehow standing out from the other 100 someodd entries? How well I pimp their site? If so, wouldn't pimping be a function of how many people read my blog in the first place? If I'm actually smart/famous/geeky enough to have a wide readership, do I need someone else buying my gadgets for me? Am I disqualifying myself merely for asking these questions?

It goes without saying that I'm a fan of the site, enough to read it several times daily and have it replace maccentral in my bookmarks bar. Also enough to try to get my lame little duct tape shuffle case posted on the site. As soon as I get my Nano, either through this contest, xmas, or the sudden burning desire to be separated from 200$, I will likely be doing the same for it as well.
With an eye towards thrift and without further ado, my top 10 list of posts on TUAW. I could have simply chosen the posts that reported on the coolest things (i.e. the ipod graveyard) yet were from other sites, but I neither think that should count nor does it really do the website justice.

10. duct tape shuffle case
I had to list the first (and only) post I had linked from TUAW. This was a gimme. Be happy I had the foresight to put it lowest on the list.

9. megaman effect
I have basically four categories of favorite posts. This one falls into the "ridiculously cool software I would never have otherwise heard of" category. I spent way too much of my childhood playing NES not to adore this app.

8. ipod graffitti
The second category is humorous apple-related randomness. Again, emphasis on the fact that I wouldn't have heard of this elsewhere. In NYC I can see this being a huge thing, for if I lived in that city I'd probably spend all my time plugged in too.

7. freeware february: menumeters
This is hands down my favorite application. I've tried Konfabulator and ipulse, and neither just give me what I need in the simplest way of getting it. Interestingly enough, I actually learned about this app not from this post but from comments made on a screenshot in another post (that I now cannot find). Regardless, I can now give a shout out to my favorite piece of software and what was my favorite series on the site at the same time.

6. best mac mod ever
A combination of my two favorite things that I sincerely doubt I am alone in posting on my top 10 list.

5. ctrl-alt-del creator mocks Gates
The next category of favorite posts are probably closest to my heart: those that are purely tech/development related and cater to the extreme end of my geek side. Anything about the history of computers makes for a fascinating read (in this case, watch) and this kind of takes the cake. I'm normally not much of a Microsoft basher, but it's still entertaining to watch their foibles (see #1).

4. what Apple could stand to learn about maintainability
I had a green Imac that died on me a while back. This frustrated me to no end as it left me with a 3 month span wherein my only contact with the outside world was via an old Powermac. Self servicing the videocard on the device was somewhat out of the question and the labor costs would have exceeded the current value of the computer. Hearing an honest, down to earth discussion of what kind of pain in the ass it is to self service a mac was nice given my own experiences gutting my big ball of green plastic.

3. april fools is stupid
It is, too. Especially on the internet.

2. i don't want an itunes phone / why is impossibly small a good thing?
The final category of posts I like is hard to pin down. They're honest, they're open, and they're critical in what feels to me like obvious ways. I can't imagine wanting an Itunes phone and I can't imagine anyone else wanting one either. What I like about both these posts is that it makes it increasingly obvious that multiple people contribute to this blog and often disagree. All authors take a respectful, sometimes paternalistic stance to mac zealotry, but regardless realize that Apple is just a company that has made and will continue to make mistakes. Not every step in consumer technology necessarily benefits either technology or the consumer. Reading commentary from people who recognize this is refreshing.

1. bill gates: "the ipod is just a passing fad."
Oh Bill, you never cease to entertain. This needs no explanation, but suffice to say if Bill is down on it, chances are I like it.

honorable mentions:
griffin's ifill
Holy crap, where did this come from? I only found it while browsing the archives. You mean I can record my friends radio shows from my old station easily? Heck yes!

henrico county: let the ebaying begin!
This whole debacle kind of disgusted me. Kudos to TUAW for driving the absurdity home.

OSX Liger
This made me laugh for a solid 5 minutes.

notes, warnings, updates

2005-07-22T20:26:00.000-04:00

A word of caution about the shuffle case: the adhesive from duct tape tends to get everywhere, and it's worth noting that the left channel output on my shuffle started getting crackly last week. I dabbed a q-tip in rubbing alcohol and, after squeezing as much excess alcohol from the tip as possible, daubed it into the minijack port. This fixed all my problems, but suffice to say I've retired the case I was using until I can make a less trashed one that I will likely hit with some dullcote to bind the adhesive.

Dog days of summer + family traumas (the word "tragedy" sounds so awful) + work - free time = not much worth reporting here.

i thought summers were supposed to be lazy

2005-07-17T02:36:00.000-04:00

So summer has been much more busy than I could ever have imagined and haven't had a chance to sit down and work on much of anything, much less answering the comments people left in the comments for the shuffle sleeve. I actually didn't think I was going to get blogged anywhere and it was kind of a nice surprise.

Answering the most common questions posted in my comments:

can I have a PDF of the design?
Sure! Right here. Sorry it took so long to get up! I made the PDF via photoshop so if issues pop up with downloading it or opening it let me know.

would this work with a normal ipod or an ipod mini?
See, I've thought about this, and the problem is cutting a circle out in the middle for the scroll wheel. As you can just press (and see) through the case on the shuffle, it isn't an issue. The fact that you have to cut the circle for it, which potentially can have the sticky edges that is the bane of making anything out of duct tape, makes me kind of wary of doing a project. Also as I don't presently have a mini or a regular ipod, I can't make a stencil for it. I've seen duct tape ipod cases elsewhere on the web, and generally they seem kind of crappy. Not that this thing is a work of art or anything.

why not a plastic bag/condom/something that didn't take time and effort?
Note title of blog.

In other news, my W on my tibook has popped off seemingly permanently and is driving me nuts. Likely the next project is salvaging a key for it someplace.

quickie

2005-05-04T16:21:00.000-04:00

This is my desk. This is obviously an old picture as the desk is not strewn with crap (yet the boxes as seen there are still sitting on the floor). My father is an architect and there is a strong tradition of "a door and two filing cabinets" workspaces. I believe the only horizontal surfaces in his house that do not follow this form are the kitchen counter and the dining room table (which, coincidentally, is a very large and old planning table that tilts like a drafting board and has a 50 year old patina of scratches and graffito from the school from which we "borrowed" it).

I masked out the stripes and painted with what is no doubt my favorite spraypaint (possibly bordering into obsession?) Krylon's Ultra Flat Black.

how to make a duct tape ipod shuffle case that doesn't suck

2005-04-28T17:35:00.001-04:00

15-20$ for an ipod shuffle case is a little nuts, and when I bought my shuffle such cases were a month off anyway. I had already scuffed the side against my cellphone (not my keys, my CELLPHONE) and realized some form of protection was in order.

I recall the duct tape ipod case that had made the rounds a while back, and realized that given the size of the shuffle, making one for this thing would be simple. Plus you could simply trace the edges onto a sheet of paper, cut it out, and cover it with duct tape and be done with it. You don't need a hole for the buttons as, so long as you knew where they were, you could press them through the tape.

This is what I came up with:

Yeah, not pretty. Plus not terribly functional as I hadn't left a way to operate the back switch. I also realized that I didn't really want duct tape rubbing against the shuffle itself as I'd wind up with clumps of adhesive on the thing. The sharpie indicators were less than graceful as well.

The way to fix the last problem seemed simplest; make it out of some clear material of some sort. Wrapping it in another type of tape seemed the logical solution, as well as coloring the paper I was using to cover pencil marks.

yeesh. Sharpie and packing tape, not a good combo.

I had started to buy black paper to try this idea again when I realized two things while wandering around wal-mart:
- the clear duct tape that has been making the rounds on the "internets" would be perfect.
- if I used a clear paper of some form, the frame would be totally see through so I wouldn't have to worry with cutting little holes and the overhang of tape, etc.

About at this point I also decided to finally hook up the scanner my mom had given me secondhand (she had bought an all-in-one scanner/printer) and scan my pencil outlines. I used the jpgs I scanned to draw outlines in quark xpress and printed them out, several to a page.

Here is the one I've been using as of late:

the back:

The interior is vellum, the exterior is clear duct tape. The top is a single piece of red duct tape for decoration. This had begun to get a little ratty and I never had liked how the vellum wasn't really see through (the ipod is in that thing, and you can't really see the buttons through it, although it is transparent enough to have the LED indicator shine through).

Today I decided to print out another one (and write this stuff up. The wonders of avoiding studying for finals!). Here's how I went about it:

The print-out is on top of a small cutting pad, taped down. On top of it (although it's nearly impossible to see) is a piece of overhead transparency taped down. I took my x-acto knife and cut around all the edges and gently scored the edges where I would be folding it.
wound up with this:

somewhat assembled:

now meet my friend tape!

I put the ipod inside the folded transparency and then wrapped a strip of tape around the whole thing, cutting corners where necessary to get it to fold correctly.

Anyway several strips later, we have:

The earphones hold down the tab on top when they're plugged in.

With the ipod inside:

Man this is a crapload of pictures. Anyway, done. I've been meaning to make a PDF of the outline but I'm still not entirely satisfied with how it works (has to be a better way of doing the back switch). I'm also not entirely happy with this one because so much gunk got onto the edges of the tape, but for demonstration purposes it will do. I'd like to try other types of paper, or maybe something more transparent than my vellum yet less so than transparency. I have some fuzzy paper, so I could make (no joke) a velour lined ipod case.

Anyway if anyone really wants a copy of that PDF, ask and I can see what I can do.

**EDIT: comments are now enabled for anonymous users. oopsie.

2005-04-28T14:18:00.000-04:00

Rasterbator + hogans alley =

I plan on making 2 more of this size across the wall, with smaller b/w ones of the cop inbetween them.

These two I made seperately for another wall.

video game dorkitude

2005-03-17T11:46:00.000-05:00

combine these three things

to make multitudes of these things

yeah this was elsewhere on the internet. I had the idea before I saw it, although I assembled it using pixelblocks which i realized were a) expensive b) expensive and c) a real bitch to put together.

this guy currently hangs in my window:

Once I saw that someone else had tried this with these beads, I smacked myself on the forehead for not remembering those lazy days at summer camp when I made octagonal keychains of jumbled colors that I was too lazy to sort.
Making these things made me realize why this is the penultimate camp activity; it keeps the campers quiet and focused for hours sifting through piles of beads to find that elusive shade of purple.

Speaking of colors, nearly 4 kits of beads later with endless hours of sorting and NOT A SINGLE RED ONE. 4 shades of pink, no red. What the hell? I can't make mario without red! I tried! He looks like gay pride mario!

yeesh.

old keyboard keys

2005-03-11T08:01:00.000-05:00

magnetic tape + gluegun + several very old thrown away keyboards from the University of Miami =

I was thinking if the god of the internets had a keyboard the layout would be somewhat like what you see above.

It tends to explode if I open the freezer door too violently.

welcome!

2005-03-09T16:45:00.000-05:00

WHY I DO THIS CRAP:

Generally I don't like spending money on my projects/wastes of time. I sit in my apartment and drool over home electronics projects or general geeky things I find on the internet and realize that I'd have to spend 50$ in materials and tools just to get started on it. For something I'll use likely twice, this doesn't appeal to me. What especially doesn't appeal to me about such a project is the fact that I won't be making anything new or appealing to anyone else. I'd rather make something new from scratch and figure out the ins and outs than follow someone else's instructions to reteach me something that, while totally new to me, is common to others (again, using skills I'll likely only use twice). Granted I'd like to someday work on the stuff I find, like make my own computer from scratch or solder my own headphone amp, but for right now I don't have the time.

So with this in mind, I like my hacks cheap, meticulously made, and design-wise as perfect as I can get without being wasteful. Enjoy if you can, duplicate if you like, and if you improve on anything, for the love of god tell me!

thanks for reading!

~j