Stuff-mo-tron

Supernova update

I got an email back from Supernova, to the effect that they are quite capable of swapping lenses, but that it will require me to send the whole light back to them, as it will involve soldering in a different LED in addition to putting in a different lens. Hopefully I can pursue that course of action soon, as riding with the light in its current configuration is irksome.

Headlight pattern

I just uploaded this video showing the headlight pattern of the Supernova E3 Pro with the "glare-free" asymmetrical beam.

My ride home last night was enough to show that I'm not at all happy with the asymmetrical beam pattern. It casts far too much light too close, with the result that I found myself repeatedly staring at a spot 10 feet in front of my front tire. That's incredibly unsafe when compared to keeping your eyes at the horizon, and I really don't want a light that encourages that kind of unsafe riding.

I would be very happy with an asymmetrical beam pattern that wasn't so deep, and could be focused further out, but my hope now is that Supernova will be able to sell me a symmetrical lens, or swap out the one I have, or something. Peter White won't take the light back, because I actually installed it, cutting off some of the supplied wire. Silly me, actually installing a light. Still, I've read anecdotally that Supernova will swap lenses, so hopefully that will work out. I really don't want to have this ridiculously spendy light on my bike that angers me every time I ride in the dark.

Supernova E3 Pro first impression

Last night, I finally got my new Supernova E3 Pro headlight installed. I received this, along with the new Schmidt Dynohub, a few months ago. I finally got the hub built into a wheel last month, and I finished installing the light yesterday.

The E3 is a dynamo headlight that was designed to be the ultimate dyno light, and the price reflects that fact. If I weren't biking every day (and getting incredibly sick of batteries that need constant recharging), I wouldn't have sprung for it. But I am, and I did.

I opted for the shaped beam version, which has a pattern similar to a car's headlight: a sharp cutoff at the horizon, so as to avoid blinding oncoming drivers, while casting as much light as possible on the road in front of you.

I had actually temporarily installed the light a week or two ago (with a hilarious combination of zip ties, alligator clips and safety wire) and gone for a brief ride along a dark trail. That proved that the beam pattern was pretty useful, and showed that my intended mounting location (right under the handlebar) would work well.

My very first impression of the beam was that it wasn't very bright. That is, it seemed about as bright as my current headlight (a NightRider MiNewt X2). Then I realized that, although it seemed about as bright, the bright area covered something like 5x the area of the MiNewt's bright spot. That means it's a tremendously brighter light, it's just spread out into a much larger, more useful area. There's not much point in spearing a single point in the distance on a bicycle, it's not as if I ever move any faster than 40 MPH at the fastest, and 25 MPH normally.

The beam pattern itself is a bit odd, being quite wide, with "saddlebags" of brightness off to the sides, and not as much right in front. I have a feeling it was designed to be multipurpose, including being useful for offroaders. I'll see if I can get a photo or video of it, and post that here.

The LED or optics give the light a greenish tint, which is a bit displeasing -- when spending this kind of money on an LED light, I expect excellent color, and greenish is not an excellent color. Now that I look at posted pictures of the beam pattern on both Supernova's site, and the Peter White beamshots page, I also have the impression that my beam is a weird shape, and not what I thought I was getting, particularly compared to the beamshot on the Supernova page. I may be talking to Peter White (where I got this light) after tonight's ride.

The light itself, in terms of construction, seems to be well built. The mount is a very pretty machined piece, and the light body suggests high quality. It's fairly heavy, but that's to be expected, since this light includes a lot of aluminum to dissipate heat, as well as a large capacitor to act as a "stand light," keeping the light on for a few minutes after you stop riding (for use at stoplights). The stand light is about half the brightness of when riding, but it's still enough to be seen pretty well. I didn't time it, but my stand light was still glowing 5 or so minutes after a ride. It seems to slope down brightness over time.

Other than the beam pattern, I'm pretty happy with this light. It was spendy, but ideally that's bought me a bright, durable light. I'll post updates as I have them, but I hope to get some photos and possibly video in the next few days.

A Lovely Non-Motorcycle Picture For A Change

Goodness, but those flowers look gorgeous...

Teardown: complete

Well, taking the engine out of the bike and getting the top end off goes a lot quicker when you have some motivation. My findings so far: the piston rings were in fact in the wrong order (the correct order is square profile first, then stepped profile, then thicker oil scraper; I had the square and stepped rings swapped); the combustion chambers were positively swimming in oil, far more than I had expected to be there; the oil didn't seem to be coming from the valves, or at least not much; still nothing that should be making that clunking, rattling sound at idle; oil all over the engine is from the points cover gasket not sealing.

It was nice, at least, to get the engine torn down enough to confirm that I'd done the rings wrong. I can probably get it corrected, cleaned up, and back together this weekend, assuming nothing goes wrong. Hopefully, that's not a big assumption.

I have discovered (well, more confirmed, I guess) that Orbital is excellent engine tear-down music. I'm sure you were dying to know that.

Well, that's not encouraging

I did several more CL175 break-in runs tonight, and it's very likely I've done something wrong in my reassembly. The engine is coated with a thin film of oil, and the exhaust is a perpetual blue haze. The crankcase breather is dripping an unhappy looking mixture of water and oil, and has been blown half off its attachment point.

The best guess I've got is that I messed up installing the piston rings, and got the top two swapped. That would mean that oil is not effectively removed from the cylinder walls and is getting into the combustion chamber, and combustion pressure is not adequately sealing the top ring against the wall. That would lead to positive pressure in the crankcase, which might be responsible for, oh, I don't know, oil seeping from every gasket.

I guess I'll be taking the engine apart again to check on the piston rings. Not an auspicious beginning. But maybe my new valves will come in while I've got it apart, and I can send the head off to the shop. There's a reasonable chance that the valve guides are worn out, which could lead to some smoking, but not as much as I'm seeing (and especially not considering that the engine didn't smoke before).

It is highly suspicious to me that only the left side sparkplug was oiled, and the left side is where I bent that intake valve. Hopefully I don't have multiple problems cascading upon each other!

Back to the workbench, I guess. At least I'm not facing anything mysterious -- tearing down the engine is almost something I can do in my sleep at this point, and either the rings are in the right order, or they aren't. Of course, one mystery does remain: that clunking in the head is still there, exactly like before, and I still have no idea what's making it. Hooray for progress?

Random picture post

I took this picture of the CL175 today, and thought it was pretty cool. Figured I'd share.

A milestone is reached

As I mentioned in the previous post, I made myself an adjustable CL175 camshaft last fall. That must have been around October. In order to do that, I pulled the camshaft from a spare engine I had, and did the modifications, cutting down the sprocket and pressing on an adapter flange.

Around the same time, I realized that my street CL175 (as opposed to the race CL175) was making these odd, and somewhat disturbing clanking noises at idle. It sounded like a loose cam chain, or loose valves, or something. I adjusted the valves, and adjusted the cam chain, but all to no avail. I knew I wanted to test the adjustable camshaft I'd just made on the street bike, so this seemed like a perfect confluence of events: tear down the street engine to look for the rattle, and reassemble it with the new camshaft installed.

The engine lower half assembled and awaiting the top end

That way, I could make mistakes on the street engine without imperilling the race engine. I have another street bike, so it was no hardship to do without the street CL175. I don't have another race bike, and if I messed up that engine, I would be unhappy. It turned out to be a good choice, as I ended up bending one of the valves as I was working on the street engine; the street engine has old valves, while the race engine has new valves. I would have been annoyed indeed to make that mistake on the race bike.

The problem, of course, is that life (in the form of holidays and theater) got in the way. I found that between Thanksgiving and the end of this last run of shows a few weeks ago, I just didn't have time to work on the project. What little free time I did have was dedicated to things like sitting still for a few minutes, or going to bed before midnight, or occasionally collecting the terrifying dustbunnies around the house and introducing them to their new home in the circular file.

Degreeing the camshaft; the blue degree wheel is attached to the crankshaft

Finally, though, all the shows ended, and I've been able to pick up the project where I left off. The last few days have been full of engine work. This morning, I was mysteriously awake two and a half hours earlier than normal, so I decided to seize the opportunity and work on the bike. I was close to done, and it was just possible I could finish it this morning.

As I continued work on the project, I realized that I just had two major tasks left: reconnecting the exhaust, and reinstalling the gas tank. Both of these things are fairly simple to do, and by around 8:45, I had the bike completely reassembled, adjusted, oiled, gassed up, and ready to go. I kicked the motor over a few times to get the oil system primed and pumping. Then, it was the work of mere moments to flip on the choke and press the go button.

The engine fully reassembled, and installed in the bike; ancillary components only partly installed

Lo and behold, after a few cranks, it fired up, and ran as if nothing had happened! It's just as finicky about starting as it was before the teardown, but I can't say I'm entirely surprised by that. I ran it through the initial 10 minute "Do nothing but idle" phase of Duke's break in method from the Ninja250 board. I'll have to modify it for the CL175, in terms of target RPM, but that's the basic method I'll be following to break in the new rings.

It was a glorious feeling to finally have this long-stalled project going, and working again. I can't wait to go home tonight and start riding it again. I'm sure there's more work to be done to get everything set just right, but the correctly aligned camshaft promises noticeable improvements in power and economy.

The fully reassebled bike, just after the first run

(Man, you can really tell the difference between the real camera and cellphone camera pics, can't you.)

Update: It's been pointed out to me that I left my handful of readers hanging! Did I find the rattle? Well, maybe.

As I tore the engine down, I was discouraged to find that there really wasn't anything that should be causing the rattle. It sounded like it was coming from the head, which is why I was thinking valves or cam chain. It all looked about right as I took it apart.

When I reassembled the bottom end, I did discover that one of the oil baffles under the crankshaft (which are held in place with spring tension) was loose. I bent it a little bit so it'd exert some pressure against its retaining pin, but that was the only thing I found that was a likely source of rattling inside the engine.

As I was reassembling the whole thing today, I ended up inverting the muffler a couple of times, and noticed a very loud clanking coming from it -- apparently one of the internal baffles has come loose. That's even less likely to be the source of the rattle, but it was pretty loud as I handled the muffler, and I suppose anything is possible. I'd love to ditch the stock muffler (which is heavy and makes taking off the exhaust pipes a serious pain), but that's more fabrication than I'm ready for right at the moment.

So, the answer is a solid maybe. When I started the engine this morning, it didn't rattle, though. I'll take it.

Motorcycle nerdery ahead

So, last fall, I made myself an improved camshaft for the CL175 streetbike. (Seriously, if you're not into engines and tuning, you can completely skip this entry.)

Then, life got in the way, and I've only been able to get back to it in the last few weeks. Finally, a couple days ago, I got all the bits and pieces put back together, clean, beautiful, new oil seals, the works. I had stalled enough. Time to degree the cam.

Degreeing the cam is not, in concept, hard to understand. The camshaft is locked to the crankshaft with a chain. The tensioner makes sure there's a minimum of slop in the chain. As the crankshaft moves the pistons up and down, the camshaft controls the opening and closing of the valves. Easy enough.

If a valve opens too early in, say, the power stroke, then some of the expanding gas gets blown out the open valve instead of powering the crankshaft. If that same valve opens too late, then the exhaust stroke isn't as effective, wasting some power on compressing the exhaust against a closed valve. Likewise a bunch of similar scenarios -- the cam has to open and close the valves at exactly the right time, if you want to make the most power.

Degreeing the cam is just the act of making sure the cam is lined up exactly where it should be in relationship to the crankshaft, so that the valves open and close as the manufacturer intended.

Honda, at least with the 60s and 70s era 160/175 motor, wasn't always super precise when pressing the cam sprocket onto the camshaft, as far as how everything lined up. It could be off. It could be off by a lot. According to Mr. Bateman's article on cam degreeing, even 1 degree of cam timing is pretty significant.

That's what made my degreeing experience so interesting. After first bending a valve and cursing a great deal, and then remembering that I had a couple spare valves from the race engine (note to future cam degreers: no really, don't stick the piston stop pin in the cylinder with the valves adjusted to .002"! Really!), I got my shiny new adjustable cam degreed.

What should I find, upon degreeing the cam as I'd pressed it back on (admittedly without any precision at all)? 98°. The 175 is supposed to be at 105°. Yeah, that'll never work. I did the math real quick, and decided I had to move the cam 3.5° thataway (the cam rotates at 1/2 rotation per crankshaft rotation). I did, and was almost blown away by how easy it was. Turn the crank around a couple of times, loosen the three bolts, and give 'em a quick tap with a drift and hammer. Done. Without the adjustable adapter, you have to take the head halfway apart, pull the cam out, press the sprocket off, and press it back on to do the same thing. I'd taken a ~30 minute operation and performed it in about 3 seconds.

I had marked 5° increments on my adapter (you can see a few more pictures of this stuff here), and moved the pointer what looked like about 3.5 degrees, more or less. I re-tested, and found I was at 103°, so I'd gone the right direction, and adjusted it just a tiny bit further. The numbers worked out to 105° on the nose. Hot!

So now, the engine awaits final assembly, and I can finally put it all back together, and see if it works! I really hope the old cam was actually at 98° (but don't expect it was, I'm not sure it'd run at all in that condition) -- the performance increase from re-setting the cam at 105° would be huge! And the best thing is that the increased performance would come along with improved fuel economy. I've got my fingers crossed.

And, the second exposure

I know you're just dying to see it.

Note the yellow stain along the bottom edge. I'm pretty sure that's oxidization from being old. Never a good thing.

And here it is inverted and contrast-enhanced (but nowhere near as contrast-enhanced as the first one):

So, more developer time is good. Fresh film will be even better.

Whoops

I developed the second exposure from our epic four-shot 5x7 photo shoot on the 31st. The first exposure was pretty milquetoast, as far as contrast went, so I went from 11 minutes to 15 minutes in the developer. It definitely made a difference, but the contrast still seemed weird. In fact, once I looked closely, I realized that the bits of the film which were covered up by the film holder were... well, kinda foggy.

Uh-oh, thought I. 10 year old film. I might be dealing with film that's just past its use-by date. So I developed an unexposed sheet of film, to see if the film right out of the box was foggy and gross, or whether it was somewhere else in the process (such as handling, the film holder, light leaks in the camera, etc.) that it was getting fogged.

So, this is the completely unexposed film:

That's pretty much exactly what it's not supposed to look like. Note the even darkness (it should be nearly glass-clear), plus the slight yellowish fringe around the edge. Oh well, I guess that 10 year old film is junk. I'll still process the other two exposures, because they're salvageable, but I know I'll get much better results with fresh film.

Well, this is why I wanted to do a throw-away photo shoot first.

Spring is sprung!

I walked out the door to head up for lunch today, and stopped in my tracks. Between the towering rooflines of the buildings around me, I could see a strip of sky, and it was pretty stunning, bright blue and big puffy clouds. It was clearly a day on which I needed to bring a camera with me.

So I did. And when I got to the cherry tree, I knew just what needed to happen. These were photographed near the PCC store in Fremont.

The photos are unretouched, except for a slight bump in exposure and exposure offset, which has the effect of increasing contrast and dynamic range. In Photoshop, look under Image > Adjustments > Exposure (at least in CS4).

The Positive Benefit of Negative Dreams

I woke up from an anxiety dream this morning, and found that I couldn't get back to sleep. It wasn't a normal anxiety dream, in which there's just a vague feeling of tension. This one was definite, and quite realistic.

It was after a performance of Penguins, and several people were walking away from the theater, talking about the show. There were some actors from the show, and some of their friends, and myself. At some point, one of the friends is describing a part she particularly liked, which included a prop gun. Only, instead of miming a gun with her forefinger and thumb, she actually pulled out the gun itself as we walked through this public square, and started gesticulating with it.

My reaction was swift, and had none of the moving-through-molasses quality that dreams sometimes have. I swiped it out of her hand, and pulled the slide back to check that it was empty. I ejected the magazine. In the midst of this, I also fumbled it, and it dropped on the ground, breaking several large chunks off. While doing all this, I was also asking in a too-loud voice and with rather too many expletives who had let her have this thing.

The commotion brought over a police officer, and then the dream branched into a bunch of different exploratory endings as the cop A) pulled her own gun on me; B) started waving around some kind of magical gun-sensing wand that looked like a boom microphone; C) sauntered slowly over to talk to me; etc. None of them ended particularly badly for me, as I just reacted calmly and laid down the now-broken blank gun and kept things mellow, all the while casting dirty glances at the person who'd brought the thing out in the first place.

Of course, the anxiety part of this dream is that this is the exact situation I've been worried about for as long as I've been helping productions as armourer: someone brings a fake gun out in public, and Bad Things happen. In real life, it's pretty reasonable to guess that this situation would lead to someone causing a panic, getting shot, getting arrested, etc. I give each cast a speech filled with dire warnings about this kind of thing happening.

The value of the dream is that I had not, up until this morning, considered what I would do in a situation like this. I think that in the dream, I reacted partly right, and partly wrong. The right reaction was to get the pistol away from the person waving it around, clear it, and ensure it was safe. The wrong part was to make a commotion about it. I should have just dropped it in a pocket and immediately headed back to the theater, saving any loud speech for later, and in more private circumstances.

On this topic, I wanted to relate a story which directly bears on this situation, and illustrates perfectly what can happen. I wasn't involved with this particular show, and heard about it second-hand from one of the people involved.

A theater company, which shall remain nameless, had a temporary rehearsal and storage space in a light industrial part of Seattle. It was mostly warehouses and industrial businesses, but there were some consumer businesses there, a gym across the street, etc. For the show they were rehearsing, they had these wooden rifle props, which were approximately shaped like AK47s.

What a real AK47 looks like

On a smoke break, several of the actors were standing outside the door, goofing around, as actors do. They had brought a couple of the wooden rifles out with them, and were presumably play-acting shooting at each other. A few minutes later, smoke break over, they went back inside, and continued with rehearsal.

About 20 minutes later, everyone looked up in surprise as the door banged open, and a dozen SWAT officers poured in the door, assault rifles up, and shouting, "DROP YOUR WEAPONS! DROP YOUR WEAPONS! HANDS UP!" Real SWAT officers. Real assault rifles, capable of shooting real bullets that would go through a bulletproof vest like butter.

The actors, fortunately, dropped the wooden guns and stood there with their hands in the air, as Hollywood had trained them to do in a situation like this (note: this is a fine reaction to have in this situation). Fortunately, no one thought he'd be a joker and aim his stick at the SWAT guys. Fortunately, the situation was quickly defused, and everyone had a hearty chuckle as the SWAT van trundled off. No arrests, not even a fine for calling out the van.

What had happened was this: one of the gym patrons across the street had seen the actors, questionable looking fellows even in good light and close up, playing with AK47s outside a warehouse. The patron's mind being full of 24 and airplane hijackers, he naturally hopped it to a phone, called 911, and reported a group of suspicious men with assault rifles in a warehouse.

As the police, this is not the kind of call you half-ass. You don't send a couple of patrol officers in a cruiser to check it out. You call out the anti-terrorism troops you've been training for just such a situation: terrorist cell in Seattle. I'm sure the chief could see the headlines scrolling through his head about his cool, overwhelming and successful response to the situation.

Not only the SWAT van and many SWAT officers arrived. There must have been dozens more normal patrol officers. They shut down a 2 block radius around the building. The response was huge.

Fortunately, as I said, no shots were fired, and no one was hurt. However, all it would have taken was one joker, and it would have been a very real tragedy. A dozen edgy guys with machineguns turn into a wall of molten metal death very quickly.

The moral of this story, of course, is that theater props stay in the theater, and they're not for joking around. You use them for your scene, then you put them back on the prop table. The AK47 props were plainly not AK47s up close, but from a distance, it's hard to tell unless you know what you're looking for. My greatest fear on any of the shows I provide prop guns for is that someone's going to get hurt or killed because they didn't take my warnings seriously. I now use this story as part of my gun speech, just in case anyone thinks I'm joking.

Cherry Memories

When I was a big wee lad of 17, I had a crush on a girl. I would leave cherry blossoms in her locker, and ever since then, blooming cherry trees remind me of her. Even now, I miss having someone like that in my life. Older and wiser does not always mean older and happier (although a lot of the time, it does).

Photographed in Fremont, camera balanced carefully on knee.

Dustbunny Pride

His Majestic Dustiness, Conqueror of Floors and Corners, Lurker Under Beds and Despoiler of Tidiness Everywhere, King Dustius von Bunnenstein, the Holy Dustbunny Himself, did command my death for crimes against dustbunnies everywhere. Fortunately, by quick use of my wits and a nimble wisk-broom wrist, I was able to avoid his terrible, dusty wrath, and escape with my life. The kingdom of the dustbunny mourns the loss of their leader, and has vowed to regroup and conquer, and I fear it is only a matter of time until I must face a reprise of the terrible, dusty ordeal.

First tries, all over again

My friend Melanie and I finally went out today, and shot some pictures with the 5x7 camera. I've only been getting ready and geared up for this moment since, oh, last summer.

Tonight I spent a couple of hours prepping the darkroom area (my bathroom, with light-tight covers on the window and door). I located and washed out all the old chemical bottles and trays from the last time I did this -- 1999 or so. The chemicals contained in those bottles were... impressively full of crud. Lots of rinsing.

Finally, it was time, and I turned out all the lights and processed my first sheet of 5x7 film in over a decade. It went pretty smoothly, but I clearly have some work to do.

That's the first look at the negative (hanging in my shower stall, still drying, why do you ask?). I inverted the colors, dramatically upped the contrast, and that's the result. Obviously I'll be doing more with it than just photographing it hanging in the shower stall, but as it's still wet, that's all I can offer for the moment.

The contrast is so low that I suspect my development time was way too short. This was 11 minutes with Microdol-X (itself about 10 years old, but freshly mixed), and it clearly needs more like 14-15. Fortunately, I took two exactly identical exposures, so I've got another one to play with. Working with 10 year old film and developer is a bit of a crapshoot, but it's a good way to do some initial checks, and make sure that I don't have light leaks in the camera, or any other really obvious operational problems before I go blow money on fresh film and chemicals.

In any case, hooray for progress!

Alecto madness

Alecto: Issue #1 opens on Friday. If I've been a bit quiet lately, that's why. Talk about a time suck.

Anyway, one of the fun projects I'm doing as part of this is making a "comic book" drawing of them for their biography page. Last night, while I was getting pictures of folks, I got this entirely badass picture of the run crew (Regan, Noelle and Mike):

I liked it so much that I wanted to share it.

And I suppose it would be teasing if I didn't share the corresponding comic book image:

HHB UDP-89 first impression

I work with a small theater in Seattle, Annex Theatre. Recently, we had an event where we needed to play a DVD. We have a really snazzy projector up, all HD and everything, and we were feeding it with a $60 flip-open travel DVD player. When this cranky piece of crap player refused to go beyond the first chapter on the DVD, I'd had enough.

I talked to our managing director, and figured out how much we could spend, and started looking at options. I quickly settled on the Pioneer DVD-V5000 and DVD-V8000 models as being likely, but then, buried deep in the search results at B&H, I found the HHB UDP-89.

This player looked like the answer to all my desires in a DVD player. It handles pretty much any format on a CD-sized disc with the notable exception of Blu-ray. It has highly reputable audio hardware, including balanced stereo out (which doesn't appear on any other DVD player I could find). It has the necessary front-panel buttons so it can be operated without a remote. It's only 1U high, which means it will take up less space in the equipment rack. Of course, it's also a $1000 player, but it looked like a good investment in the future, and would match our fancy projector well.

It finally arrived yesterday, and I spent a few minutes plugging it in and getting it temporarily situated in the equipment stack (the rack is still a bit of a pipe dream, at least for the stuff we have to access frequently).

When I pulled it out of the box, I had a very favorable first impression. This is a dense unit, and I suspect that if I open it up, I'm not going to find that density supplemented by weights (unlike some cheap consumer equipment I've seen). The front panel is very plainly a thick, milled piece of aluminum, very attractive and speaking favorably of the quality inside.

Once I got it powered on and had spent a few minutes playing with it, though, that favorable impression evaporated somewhat. The buttons feel quite cheap and plasticky, although they emit a loud click when pressed, so at least there's no question of "Did I press that button or not?"

The power-up process takes a shockingly long time, something like 10-20 seconds before it responds to any control inputs. It's not a big deal in the long run, but it's pretty surprising for something that's a new design. You have to wait for it to boot up before it will even stick out its tongue to accept a disc. The disc tray itself is thin and springy, which at first seems cheap, but then I realized that its springiness was its salvation -- it could be thin without being brittle and breakable.

Once I got a disc in (a CD, as there was a rehearsal going on that I didn't want to disrupt with a video projection), it quickly read it and was ready to go. I was pleased to see that the auto pause function was given its own, clearly labeled button. This will make it the favored CD player for production use, almost certainly.

I quickly realized why the auto pause button was so prominent: when you pause the playback, then skip to the next track, it will automatically start playing again, if auto pause is off! This is counter to every CD and MD player I've used in the last decade, and is going to screw up every first time operator of this player.

The information display is pretty minimal, a small two-line dot-matrix display with a few dedicated icons (CD, auto pause, play triangle and pause bars were the ones I noticed, though I'm sure there are others). There is no time button on the front panel, most likely in the interests of clarity, although I'd expect to find one on a pro CD or MD player. Still, a time button (for switching between at least elapsed track time and remaining track time) would be a welcome addition, even if it is a bit useless for a DVD player. I suspect the function is available via the remote control, although I didn't check.

Fortunately, the player is quicker to respond once it's playing a disc, as compared to start-up, but it's still a bit sluggish. I pressed a track skip button and it took a second to catch up -- a potentially fatal flaw when you need to skip several tracks quickly, particularly in a tense production moment. You'd better be counting button presses, because the display lags. I suspect Sony avoids this by making sure that the display is always quick to respond, even if the underlying system and mechanism is taking a moment to catch up.

Granted, this first impression doesn't actually say anything about the UDP-89 as a DVD player, but I was interested to see my own reaction to it. As there's little out there in terms of user review, I figured I'd share my reactions. I expect I'll have more to say later.

Just to ensure that I'm not leaving you with the wrong impression, I was overall quite favorably impressed. The build quality, with the exception of the plastic front panel buttons, seems to be top notch. The slow UI is something that could easily be corrected with a firmware update, which is a procedure clearly outlined in the manual, although no updates are currently available.

I'm looking forward to powering up the projector and putting the UDP-89 through its paces with a couple of different DVDs. If I can scrounge together enough cables, it'll be fun to hook up to the theater's 5.1 system and get real surround sound going. I'll try to come back to this topic in the future, and keep you updated on our snazzy new DVD player.

Happy birthday, David!

I think the mountains came out for my brother's birthday. Of course, he's in LA and couldn't possibly have seen them, but it seemed likely in any case:

The Durable Power of Infamy

This morning, I came across some coupons from Silence Heart Nest, a restaurant in Fremont, which took over the space from the Longshoreman's Daughter restaurant. It's a new-agey-feeling place, with all the servers in saris, and a menu heavy on the happy/hippie food. I looked at the coupon, saw that it was from this place, and scoffed to myself: "Yeah right, you won't catch me going in there again." This is the story of that reaction.

In the early planning of SketchFest Seattle last year, we were having meetings about once a month, and we found ourselves generally meeting for brunch on our meeting days. It was a nice way to get together and discuss the pressing issues while taking our time and being leisurely about it.

One time, we decided to stop in at Silence Heart Nest, having heard that it was a good place. They seemed to be doing a brisk trade that morning, but we were able to find a corner table for four, and sat down to our discussion.

Food was ordered, and consumed. It was pretty good, and reasonably priced. We had our discussion, and ended up sitting at the table for a couple of hours, deeply embroiled in the issues of putting on a quality sketch comedy festival. This was our usual mode of meeting, and we'd done it at many restaurants.

I remember looking over occasionally to see if we were sucking up table space unnecessarily, but there was never much of a line at the door, and the servers didn't seem anxious to get rid of us. So we stayed, and we discussed.

Eventually, two hours after we'd gotten there (having ordered a full round of breakfast for everyone), we flagged a server and got our check.

"You know," said the server (I must necessarily paraphrase, my memory's not that good), "you guys have been sitting here for a really long time, and you've been taking up a perfectly good table, costing us a lot of income. It was really quite inconsiderate of you, and maybe next time you have a meeting like this, you could take it somewhere else after you eat, like a local coffee shop or something."

We four sat there, stunned. Glances were exchanged across the table. There were sotto voce conversations affirming that each of us had been looking out to see if we were being an inconvenience to the restaurant. We paid our bill and left, much more quickly than we might otherwise have done. There was still nothing like a line at the door -- there might have been two people waiting for a table.

As we walked down the sidewalk away from the the restaurant, it was generally agreed: that was about the worst possible way for our server to handle that situation, short of actually screaming or producing weaponry. In a normal restaurant, it wouldn't have even come up. SHN is arguably a small space with relatively few tables, and could be excused for being anxious for high table turnover. It would have been acceptable, if a bit weird, if someone had come over and politely asked us to clear out after we were obviously done eating. Laying a heavy guilt trip on us after we were done left us feeling like we'd just transgressed, without having any indication it was a problem during the transgression itself.

So, congratulations, Silence Heart Nest. Your ill-timed scolding has not only guaranteed that I'll never be back, it has also produced this journal entry, which will be read by at least a half-dozen people, who might even have the same reaction.

The durable power of infamy, indeed.