Stuff-mo-tron

Thu, 30 Nov 2006

A friend of mine asked a question today, which boils down to "what do you call someone who's not as familiar as a friend, but not as distant as an acquaintance?"

I suggested "frequaintance." It's got parts of "friend," "frequent" and "acquaintance." In terms of neologisms, it's pretty much perfect.

Damn! I guess you didn't hear it here first: Pink Fish Media: New Words. Oh well, at least I came up with it without knowing someone else had already done so. And the timing is surprisingly close. Maybe it's just something in the air.

Wed, 29 Nov 2006

So, the last time I said anything about the idea of building an airplane, it was pretty negative. I had a comprehensive awakening to the horrible situation we're in, as a society, regarding energy usage. It sounded pretty negative, and it pretty much was negative.

I had a thought, a month or two ago, which amounted to, "if I ever want to do it, now is the best time." The logic goes like this: building an airplane isn't very resource-intensive, but flying it is. Since the goal of building an airplane, at least in part, is to fly it, building an airplane is therefore an exercise in using gasoline. If I'm going to do something which uses gasoline, it's going to cost more the later I do it (assuming that oil is going to get more scarce and therefore expensive, which seems reasonable).

If it's going to cost more the longer I push it back, then it makes the most sense to do it as soon as possible. That assumes I really want to do it, but it's an acceptable assumption.

Only now, a month or two after I had that series of thoughts, I'm no longer so certain I want to build an airplane. It still sounds interesting, but the idea no longer maintains that obsessive hold on me that it did a few months ago. Now, with the benefit of some space, it seems a bit crazy. Not crazy like I couldn't do it, but crazy like, "why would I want to?"

So now, I'm not sure. Flying has gone back to its holding position of being something I'm intellectually interested in, but something which doesn't really call to me in any sort of visceral way. I passed a few months without even thinking about airplanes or flying. Then I thought to myself, "Hey, I haven't been flying lately, maybe I should fix that," but it didn't really sound all that appealing.

I think I've again reached that place where flying doesn't matter any more. I'm glad I know how to fly, I'm glad I could go back to it, but I can't really get excited about it. It's expensive, and it's a lot of work. I can't use it to travel because it's so very dependent upon weather. I don't find myself craving it for fun.

I figured some of my handful of readers would be interested in seeing the snow conditions chez Ian:

That's snow that fell two days ago, and hasn't shifted since. Amazing! It's very rare for snow in Seattle to last for more than 24 hours. Of course, even now, the temperature is all the way up to 27° F, from a low of 17° last night. It's practically balmy!

That shot of the road, by the way, is why I've been spending a lot of time working from home rather than clambering aboard the sidecar rig and going for a little slip-n-slide. It's inch-thick ice, not the slush it kind of appears to be. The roads are much more passable further south, but getting there would entail far too large an exposure to morons in SUVs who think four wheel drive exempts them from the laws of physics.

Tue, 28 Nov 2006

The weather lately has been pretty odd. This month was .08 inches away from being the wettest month ever recorded in Seattle. Suddenly this last Sunday, it started snowing, and tonight we're supposed to get down to 16° F (-9° C). There was a winter storm warning for last night, and we got about 3 inches of snow at my house.

Now, I looked over at the barometer, and it's gone mad! Well, kind of. Yesterday, I saw it get down into the low 29.6s. Now, it's up at 30.34 inches. That's a huge swing, and if I recall anything from my meterology training, that should be clearing out all the clouds for tonight. It's gonna get cold without those clouds holding in any warmth!

Mon, 27 Nov 2006

It started snowing pretty hard last night, to the point that there was two and a half inches of snow on my deck. I went to bed certain I would work from home today, which I did. Sort of. I discovered half-way through the day that the one critical app I needed to use simply wouldn't work from home, over a slow VPN line.

So, I saddled up the sidecar rig, and headed out. The roads were effectively clear when I left today, and I felt a bit silly driving my big moto-behemoth down the clear roads. I should have ridden a bicycle! Oh well.

I had an errand downtown this evening, and got back out to the sidecar at about 7. Suddenly, having the big, stable sidecar rig was looking pretty good. Snow was heaving down out of the sky at quite a pace. Even downtown, it was starting to stick, which meant that 100 blocks to the north (where I live), it would certainly be sticking, probably on the road in a fairly unsafe manner.

I got myself rolling, snow flitting past me like confetti. No problems so far. I rolled out of downtown and onto Aurora, a major street, somewhere between a four-lane suburban road and a freeway. Still no problems... but, what's that? The engine stumbled a bit, and I rolled on the throttle to clear it. Phew. No, it's stumbling again.

Oh, right, carb ice. That is, conditions were right such that ice was probably accumulating around the intake of the engine, slowly choking off the flow of air and fuel, gradually reducing power. In airplanes, there's an easy way to fix that -- you pull the lever marked "carb heat" and wait until the scary stumbling stops. On a motorcycle, there is no such thing, so I did the next best thing, and resolutely pressed forward.

Fortunately, my intended route (Kristin had reported that going up hills around my house was a total mess as people slid out on the ice) took me off the major street a few hundred yards before a solid-looking wall of traffic started. I traversed my carefully-plotted, hill-free route. Still not bad, and the engine had stopped stumbling. Hooray for small favors.

At 80th, I suddenly found a Taco Del Mar burrito incredibly enticing, so I peered up the hill, and decided it was worth it. I turned up 80th, and up probably the steepest hill in that area. No problem.

Burrito successfully in hand, I turned into another wall of traffic on Greenwood Ave, and dropped down into residential streets again. I wasn't moving fast (there was slush on the road, and I couldn't tell if it was really slush, or rapidly freezing into ice), but I probably got home way faster than if I'd stuck to main roads.

On the way, around 90-somethingth, I looked to the right, down a very slight hill, and spied a presumably-4WD truck nose-first into a ditch. I found myself chuckling inside my helmet. I despise those drivers who seem to think that four wheel drive somehow equates with perfect traction on snow or ice. Really, really not the case. I wasn't happy at the truck driver's bad luck, but I hoped he (for it was almost certainly a man) learned a little lesson. Those drivers are incredibly dangerous for everyone else, since they also seem to think that 4WD equals perfect traction for braking, too.

A few minutes later, and I was home. No problem. One wheel drive, three-wheeled sidecar-thing vehicle beats 4WD truck! I didn't ever slip, unless I was intending to (I really had to restrain myself from trying out a 360° bat-turn on the slippery road). I did one brake test to determine how much braking traction I had (not much) and a couple of throttle-goosings to see how much acceleration traction I had (about the same, maybe less). So I stuck with about 15 MPH (25 MPH speed limit normally on this residential street) as a maximum speed, and slowed for intersections.

Sun, 19 Nov 2006

I've been getting positive responses to this whole crazy "novel in a month" thing. I'm not exactly surprised, but it's encouraging, and far better than the other sort of response: "Why would you waste your time on something like that? Are you a crazyperson?"

The editing has gone well so far, although I'm only up to chapter 15 or so (out of 70-some). I'm just doing a first pass right now, embellishing a lot of passages which look pretty in my mind, but come across as fairly bland (or "require imagination on the part of the reader") in the text. I've got some ideas for other story bits to insert, to flesh out the world a bit more, but I think those are going to wait until the first editing pass is done.

Probably the biggest problem I'm running into with the novel is the mental block which says, "every published novel I've ever read has been in someone else's voice; this novel is in my voice, therefore it's not publishable." Of course, that's completely ridiculous when confronted as a logical argument, but it's pretty compelling as an emotional one.

I find myself faced with a fair amount of slack time at the holidays this year, and I'm thinking about writing another novel. Mostly it's a matter of technology -- the laptop on which I can do editing has a whopping half-hour battery life or something. On the other hand, the ancient "laptop" on which I do composition lasts something like 15-20 hours on a charge. That argument alone is fairly compelling.

I was thinking about writing a story around the Rocketmen mythos my friend Web came up with. It seems like a ripe hunting ground for ideas and storylines. I'll have to see whether that turns into anything or not. It would certainly be cool to have two two-week novels under my belt.

Thu, 16 Nov 2006

In an odd twist, I found myself repairing someone else's Aerostich suit today. I was pedalling frantically up the hill under Aurora on my way home, and when I got to the top, I found the rider of the R1100GS who'd passed me a minute earlier. Something looked amiss, so I stopped and asked if all was ok.

He turned around, and after a brief establishment of motorcycling cred, demonstrated that his main zipper had separated, and didn't want to move towards unzipping. We talked back and forth, and eventually he stepped out of a boot, and got his leg free of the stuck zipper. We worked out a method by which the slider could slowly be worked up the zipper, and had it sorted out in about 20 minutes.

It was just an interesting moment. It always makes me happy to help out someone who's kind of stuck. I'm sure that with a bit of thought, he would have figured it out, but the process might have taken longer, and it's much easier when you've got someone else to hold the flashlight.

We ended up chatting about other stuff, and I mentioned my novelling adventures. Steve, if you're reading this, click on the "All" category above, and scroll down a bit.

Tue, 14 Nov 2006

If you've been around me at social, gameplaying occasions, you've probably had me try to force this lovely game down your craw. It's called Pants Down, or Hosenabe in the original Swiss-German.

It's fun. It's easy to learn. It's not that easy to play well, like all good games.

Anyway, I've finally gotten off my kiester, and written up the rules, fact-checked by our own Swiss exchange student from years ago.

Sun, 12 Nov 2006

I think it's official, I'm now a ridiculously speedy novelist. At 9:30 tonight (or thereabouts), I passed the 50,000 word mark, hitting 50,909. The story's not done yet, but it's pretty close. The final battle's been won, the heroes have escaped, and now there's just the wrapping-up to do, and the inevitable, cheezy setup for the next story in the series.

That is, if you've been keeping track, 50,909 words in 11 days, 21.5 hours. 285.5 hours. Averaging 178.3 words per hour, 4279.6 words per day. Average wordlength is 5.77 characters per word.

Other interesting stats: I went through three sets of batteries on the Model 102 (the last one persevering only about 1 hour for some reason, despite being fully charged). 99% of the book was written on the Model 102, with minor editing happening on other computers. Rewriting and editing will not be happening on the 102, thank you very much. That thing is painful to edit with.

My average writing session length was probably around 3 hours. I seemed to hit about 1,000 words per hour, although I'd guess it went as low as 700 wph, and as high as 1,500. I definitely write better in multi-hour sessions than I do in short bursts, although more than 2 hours and I start getting antsy for some physical movement.

I guess I'm going to spend the rest of the month doing some rewriting and horrible, horrible embellishment. Oh yes, there will be adjectives. Adjectives aplenty. Editors will cringe from my very presence, sensing the horror all a-churn in my brain.

Thu, 09 Nov 2006

I am pleased to report that, since installing the new Velox rim tape, I have had zero (0) flat tires. Hooray!

Of course, now that I've posted this, I'll get down to the bike tonight to find both tires flat, my patch kit glue dried up, and the spare tube eaten by mice. Who like rubber.

Wed, 08 Nov 2006

It felt like the first pleasant news in years as I woke up this morning to hear that the House of Representatives will be controlled by the Democrats come January. Pleasant, of course, until I remembered that the Democrats are politicians too, and they're just as likely to pull all the stupid politician tricks that make me aspire to some day live in a mythical land where there are no politics.

So I have this message for you, Democrats: you'd better follow through on all this idle chatter about building concensus working on bipartisan solutions. And don't go thinking this gives you any ground from which to pitch weird lefty non-issues like gay marriage.

We have important things to worry about in this country, and gay marriage, stem cell research and a thousand other "hot issues" are not among them. What we need are healthcare coverage for everyone, wildly reformed education (how about paying teachers commensurate with their impact on society?), wildly reformed foreign policy (like, let's stop being the World Police, how about?), civil rights reform and re-establishment and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of environmental protection (Kyoto protocol ring any bells?). Sorry for the parenthetical rants, but it's not clear to me that when I say anything obvious, a politician will actually understand my meaning.

And if I hear anyone going around spouting off that old saw that "if we weren't in Iraq, we could be spending all that money on other things!" I'm going to start smacking people. "All that money" only exists because it's paying for the war. No one's going to spend that level of cash on anything else, because they don't want to. So quit it with the weird financial logic. There are many, many fine reasons to stop spending $100,000 every second, or whatever ridiculous level it's currently at:

What are not good reasons to stop spending all that cash in Iraq, I hear you say? "So we can spend it on other things" is the ripest one I've heard, but I'm sure there are others. That money, all those billions of dollars we're spending, is going to cost us many times over, and I'm sure we'll still be paying it off 100 years from now. I don't have any math backing that up, but unless something drastic happens, that extra trillion dollars (or two or three, however much it ends up being by the time we can actually get ourselves extricated) will still be costing us interest for the lifetime of any child born today.

Finally, what I said before, about keeping your "bipartisan" promises? Yeah, not kidding about that. If you want to see another term, if you want to see any support at all, you'd best work with everyone. Compromise is hard. I'm not going to be 100% pleased with your solutions. If I'm 100% pleased, it means you did something wrong, because somewhere, there's my opposite, who's going to be 100% displeased. Overall, I should only be happy about 50% of the time, or you're doing it wrong. Always keep that in mind: compromise means you'll probably end up only partially pleased with the agreement.

Tue, 07 Nov 2006

I went down to my local polling-place today, in the morning this time. My new bicycling habits may have any number of upsides, but lots of energy in the evening isn't one of them.

I finally found my registration card after a minute's fumbling, and handed it to the poll worker. As she was finding my name in the book, I looked over at the vote scanner (King County uses Scantron style ballots, which look disturbingly similar to SAT tests, with the little bubbles you fill in). There was a woman standing over it, with the machine pulled partially out of its housing. Someone had just approached with a vote sheet, and she instructed him to "just put it in the slot there," which I later learned is where absentee and provisional ballots go. The woman in front of me looked up and said, "would you like to vote electronically, or by paper?" Without considering the implications of the broken scanner, I said, "paper please."

I don't understand why more voting districts don't use the Scantron type of ballot. It's electronically countable, verifiable, and leaves a clear paper trail. I guess its major downside is that you have to print the ballots days beforehand, and last-minute changes are impossible. Scantron (or whoever makes King Co.'s scanners) may also charge a lot for printing for all I know, but it seems to solve a lot of the complaints with the Diebold machines. There's no way I'm going to accidentally fill out the bubble next to the candidate I don't want.

In any case, I filled out my ballot, even filling in the unopposed races, thinking to myself, "how crappy would it be to lose an unopposed race because no one bothered to fill in the little bubble?" Once I got it all filled out, I took it back, and slid it into the Memory Hole.

I stopped on the way out, and asked the head poll worker (who'd been hovering over the non-functional machine before) what was going on. It came out that she'd received a bad memory card for the scanner, and was awaiting a new one. "It's been over two hours, so I'm expecting it any minute," she said.

I asked what happened to the ballots which didn't get immediately scanned. "Well, they'll go into the Uncounted Ballots bag, and be counted at the county elections office." "Presumably counted," I corrected her, since she'd earlier admitted that no one had told her what actually happened with the Memory Hole ballots. "Right, but we just have to trust in the system. Every year, I've seen improvements in the process." She paused. "And that's a good thing," she cracked a grin.

I thanked her for the explanation, and she thanked me for stopping to ask. I think she was surprised to see anyone was interested enough to care about the process.

Mon, 06 Nov 2006

Like some kind of incandescent word-cannon, I managed to get over 12,500 words down this weekend. Ponder that for a moment. Twelve thousand, 500 words, averaging about 5.8 characters in length. It's kind of astounding.

Of course, that came at a price. I seem to average 1,000 to 1,500 words per hour, so I spent around 12 hours sitting on my butt, typing into an ancient laptop. Saturday saw about 8,800 words down, and Sunday about 3,700. By the end of Saturday, I'd barely left my chair, much less my house. I was ready to do almost anything that involved being not in my house any more. We had dinner downtown, at a favorite pub, Paddy Coynes. It was good to be out.

The story is progressing well enough, but I have a feeling I may be doing it wrong. That's not a concern for this month, of course, since the whole point is to spew words at a furious rate, and nothing else.

At the risk of selling myself short (or long, I suppose), I'll give you a glimpse into the story. Note that all names are subject to revision, I haven't found myself feeling particularly inspired about any of the names I've come up with. We follow the adventures of Jura Cortan, human freight captain, who has tried unsuccessfully to escape from crime for his entire life. The setting is a galaxy distant from our own, so I wouldn't have to worry about any research -- this is purely me makin' stuff up. It may or may not be long, long ago. That's really of no concern right now.

For a mental image of Jura, picture a guy from an old Kung Fu movie, one of the ones with long, braided black hair. Now cross that image with Han Solo from a certain popular movie series. That's kind of what Jura looks like. Sort of.

The story starts with Jura taking his latest job, a simple passenger transport, moving a young woman from the Kalinar system to the Borot system. She can only afford half the fee now, with the other half to be delivered by her presumably-rich uncle on Borot III. Riiight. As I'm sure you can imagine, this setup allows for a lot of (mis-)adventures to happen, and they do.

Only now, about 50% through my wordcount, I'm kind of done with that storyline. I found a way to continue it, but it feels like story #1 has wrapped up, and now we're starting on story #2. I don't know that that's the proper novelistic way to do things. It'll do, but it makes me wonder if #1 can be expanded to a full novel, or if the final product can make the two stories a bit more tightly integrated.

As I mentioned before, you can follow along with the numbers at this site. If you're feeling especially daring (or curious, I guess), you can read what I've got so far here, spelling errors and all. That'll get updated on a somewhat random basis, usually in the late evening, and there should be more every day if I'm writing like I'm supposed to. Consider yourself warned, it may be terrible.

Sat, 04 Nov 2006

My new bicycle headlight arrived yesterday. I excitedly tore open the packaging, although there was trepidation there as well -- the package made an ominous rattling noise as I'd picked it up, suggesting the pieces inside weren't very well secured.

Indeed, the box, once opened, revealed a confused jumble of pieces sitting apprarently at random among the cardboard cutouts intended to hold things in place. Fortunately, nothing appeared to be broken, and I was able to plug the light into its battery and play a little bit.

Before I got to the point of plugging everything in, I examined the retail box, which listed a bunch of information about the light. In particular, it listed the available modes for the three different models of light (CygoLite Dualcross LiIon, 300, 200). As I'd understood it, the different models differed only in battery and charger options. The LiIon model used the smaller, lighter (but more expensive) LiIon technology. The 300 featured a smart charger and larger, heavier NiMH battery. The 200 model featured an overnight (aka, "dumb") charger and the NiMH battery. Other than that, as I understood it, all three lights were the same.

Imagine my surprise and dismay when I saw spelled out on the box that, in fact, they were not the same. In fact, according to the box, the 300 and LiIon shared the same feature set (aside from the battery, of course), but the 200 offered an inferior feature set -- specifically, no flashing modes. Of course, I'd gotten the 200 as being cheapest, since I already own several smart chargers; paying for yet another one seemed silly.

Now, I wasn't married to the flashing modes, and hadn't necessarily intended to use them, but it would have been nice, particularly during the day, when a brighter flasher up front would have helped. Indeed, the little comparison chart showed that the 200 model lacked the four "special" modes (fast flash, slow flash, walking (aka "very dim") and SOS flash). I could care less about SOS, but the slow flash and walking light sounded quite useful.

I loaded up the Cygolite website, and examined the comparison chart. I could have sworn that it showed the features being identically but for battery and charger.. Ah, yes, there it was. The feature chart shown on the website and that on the product box were different. I was gearing myself up to write a very unhappy letter.

Before unleashing any electronic vitriol, however, I tried powering on the light, as I alluded to earlier. I was pleased to find that the light behaved as I expected, entering the flashing modes just as the 300 model had last week at REI. Oh good!

So, I got the battery charged (I was interested to see that it was mostly charged as I got it -- had I charged it the recommended 9-10 hours, it would have overheated), and I'm ready to go.

Of course, I spent the entire day writing and not riding my bicycle through the pouring rain, so I don't have any kind of real-world report yet.

It feels odd to be writing on a modern laptop. I'm doing all my novel writing on a Tandy Model 102, built in 1988 or so.

So far, by the only measure that matters (ie, word count), I'm doing really well. I would hardly call it a fabulous novel, but it's moving right along. When that website updates tonight at midnight, my number will increase by at least 4979, which is my current wordcount for the day, and the day is only about half over. I may write yet more.

The Model 102 lends itself to this particular endeavor for a number of important reasons. First of all, it runs for around 20 hours on a set of AA batteries. Then there's the fact that it's so old, it has absolutely zero internet access (although it does have a 300 baud modem). Even if it did have internet access, there's very little I could do.

This all means "no distractions." No flipping back to a web browser every few minutes, to "just check on something." Google has got to be one of the biggest time-wasters in the universe. It's a good time-waster, and very useful, but very distracting when trying to concentrate on something else.

For another thing, the laptop is so old that the term "slow" is kind of a misnomer. The screen updates at 600 baud (there's literally a serial connection between the screen controller and the main computer). I can type faster than it will display, particularly when it has to laboriously delete a word and redraw it when the word gets long enough to wrap to the next line. Editing in the middle of text is painful, since each changed character necessitates that all following lines be redrawn. This strongly encourages one to just leave well enough alone.

Anyway, it's a gambit which is paying off pretty well. I had no idea I'd write so much so quickly. Of course, now that I've set such a high bar for myself, I can't let it slide. Fortunately, it doesn't seem like it'll be a problem, but we'll see what weeks two and three bring.

Wed, 01 Nov 2006

Note to self
The sidecar brake caliper is from a Grimeca (most likely) flat tracker motorcycle from the late 60s or early 70s. Aaron got the pads and his rebuild kit from Omars, perhaps.

Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net.