Stuff-mo-tron

Jason and Shadows

I was able to get together with my friend Jason this weekend, for a photo shoot I've been planning in my head for quite a while. I did a similar thing with my friend Sara, with beautiful results, and I was thrilled by how the shots with Jason turned out.

If I keep on this lighting style, I'm going to have to create a gallery show or something.

Get Your Play Produced for Free, and $50 to Boot

Annex Theatre, where I'm Technical Director, has released its 2013 Request for Proposals:

Annex Theatre's 2013 Request for Proposals

We have eight show slots -- four mainstage and four late/off night -- and we're looking for awesome new work to stage. Annex is unusual, in that the season is selected by consensus among the company, and not dictation from on high. Part of that process is that we need your proposals.

It's a sweet deal, too. Produced plays receive a full staff, including marketing and production management; we'll find all the designers and stage manager if necessary; help with casting; no rent, for either rehearsals or performances; dedicated budget for production costs (sets, costumes, etc.); free marketing through a variety of media; and at the end, we pay you. Granted, we don't pay much (we wish we could pay more), but we've got to cover our $6k/month rent somehow.

So if you have an awesome project you want produced, send in your proposal before the deadline! Details are all in the link above.

Sideshow!

Theater keeps me pretty busy, I guess. One of the ways is occasionally producing fun little video projects to promote shows. Like, for instance, this one:

I'm having a lot of fun with Sideshow. I'm designing lights and working on props and set pieces, and the show is very pretty. I like that it falls somewhere between dance and theater, not quite settling in either world.

Jurisprudence 2012 - Alice's Tale

(Catch up on the story so far here.)

WARNING: This installment contains very graphic descriptions of beatings and violence. Not recommended for the faint of heart.

The first witness we heard from, at length, was Alice. Like all of these young women, Alice is a person for whom the linear narrative is not terribly familiar. Her life happens in episodes, and these episodes may or may not be related in a coherent fashion. Sometimes one will spark a recollection of another, and as often as not, the order of events is so chaotic as to be nearly unintelligible. Alice was not the worst of them, either: that's Rose, who comes later in the story.

Alice's involvement followed a pattern which would grow to be familiar. Her family was not particularly functional, and she was left to raise herself. I can't recall now if Alice's parents were addicted to drugs or not (I know Jennifer's parents were). In any case, she started out her life as a prostitute online, in late high school. She was introduced to the concept by a friend, after complaining that her job at KFC (or some similar place) didn't pay enough. "Why not try prostitution?" was apparently sufficient argument, once she learned how much money a prostitute could make in a night: $400-1000. That's a lot better than $9/hour, at least from a financial standpoint. The first experiences weren't great, but she got used to it quickly.

So, she started posting ads online, and meeting dates. I didn't take notes on where this was happening, but I assume she was renting hotel rooms for these activities. I think she was living with a friend during this time. At some point, Matt contacted Alice, and she started willingly working for him. This didn't make any sense to me, as she said it wasn't a romantic relationship at all, he apparently just stepped up, said "give me all your money," and she said alright. She also described a fairly heavy-handed beating policy, which seemed to be Matt's primary method of communication with her.

At some point, Matt said he was going to California, and either suggested or insisted that she should go with him. This was a trip with one other person, who I think was a male friend of Matt's. They all piled in a car, and headed south. They stopped in Portland and a few other places on the way, so she could work and make money. I started to write that she was making money to fund the trip, but I'm not actually sure that's accurate. By my reckoning, Matt was taking in anywhere from $300 to several thousand dollars a day. I have no idea where it was all going, although he seemed to have spent it all somehow.

When they reached California, they spent a few days going to different cities, mostly in the Bay Area, and Alice would be set out on the local strip to walk and make money. At some point Matt bought a new Cadillac; by new, of course, I mean "used and on the verge of breakdown," because that's apparently his preferred vehicle type. I think the California car cost him $800. Alice grew increasingly unhappy during this time, and was rewarded for her trouble with more beatings.

At some point, Matt's girlfriend, Nancy showed up. She had been in jail at the start of the trip, and came down to join in the party (and the beatings) in California. This caused some consternation for Alice (now my memory's playing tricks on me), because she thought she was Matt's girlfriend. I say my memory's playing tricks on me because I distinctly wrote in my notes that Alice didn't have a romantic relationship with Matt, although I now think that must have meant it didn't start romantically. She definitely was unhappy at Nancy's appearance because she thought she had a romantic relationship with Matt, so I'll trust my recollection in this case.

With Nancy's arrival, Matt's treatment of Alice became much worse, in any case. There was no longer any pretense of an intimate relationship between Matt and Alice. It was just, "Get out and work," and any disobedience resulted in a beating.

After some time, they turned around and headed back to Seattle. Alice described repeated beatings, although this time it was apparently because she wasn't taking her turn driving (her offers to drive were ignored). Nancy and Matt fought incessantly, at one point the car spinning 360° due to a particularly intense (and presumably physical) argument.

At this point, I lose the line of the story, and it skips ahead. Alice made a split from Matt a few times, after the second time getting him to promise to stop seeing Nancy, and stop making her walk to find dates; online only. He agreed to these conditions (I wish I could recall how she effected the split), and she came back to work for him again. Apparently he stuck to his agreement.

Matt's relationship with Alice terminated in a big blow-out.

She had been working happily enough (during this time, I think he was regularly beating her, and threatened to kill her family, although she ignored the threats, saying she was only afraid of the beatings; this despite the fact that he had taken a picture of her ID, which included her home address on it; so "happily enough" is relative). On the night of the blow-out, she'd set up a double-date with herself and another girl. She was in the bathroom with a date, and the other girl was in the main part of the hotel room. At some point, a pizza was delivered to the room, and some amount of money, possibly $300, went missing. Matt barged in -- the way she told it, he must have had psychic money-sensing powers, bursting in mere moments after the money was discovered to be missing -- and demanded to know about the missing cash.

Alice didn't know anything about it. She made it sound like it was either the other girl or the pizza delivery guy who disappeared the money, although this part of the story was never particularly well described. In any case, Matt was upset, which probably means he was being violent. Alice had had enough, and she called a friend to come pick her up. She was leaving.

This was all happening at one of the hotels on Denny Way, probably the Best Western Loyal Inn. Alice left, and went to the Hurricane (a 24 hour dive cafe) to wait for her friend to show up. Her friend showed up, and in the mean time, Matt had called her back: he'd left some stuff in the room, and she had the key. He couldn't get a key, because he wasn't registered for the room. Alice's friend (possibly named Keith -- good enough for this account, in any case) said she shouldn't help him out, but Alice was moved by Matt's request, and agreed to meet him to let him into the room, or give him the key (I forget which).

So, against Keith's better judgement, she went back to meet Matt, presumably only to receive more abuse. She fled back to Keith's car, and as she was closing the door, closely pursued by Matt, Keith was pulling away. Matt caught up with them, and pulled Alice out by her hair, ripping out a chunk of hair that took the scalp with it. Alice sat on the stand and parted her hair in a particular spot to show us the area -- about 1 square inch -- where hair doesn't grow any more, quickly and self-consciously smoothing her hair back over the spot as soon as we'd all seen it. This is an image I'll probably never forget. Alice's face registering defiance and shame in equal measures, her hands working through her hair to cover the scar.

Matt was successful in getting her out of Keith's car. No one ever said what happened to Keith, but I assume he realized he was in well over his head and took off. Matt bodily threw Alice into the back of Jennifer's car, and they went for a ride. Jennifer drove and hurled abuse at Alice (probably as much out of fear that such a thing should happen to her as any actual desire to inflict harm on Alice) while Matt punched, slapped, choked, pulled hair, and verbally abused Alice until her face was nothing so much as one giant bruise. This drive lasted several hours. Matt's message seemed to be nothing so much as "Don't cross me."

They got back to the hotel, Alice gave Matt the key, and somehow escaped (perhaps when he went up to get his Playstation 3 and other valuables he'd left in the room). She ran for it. She didn't have anywhere to go, she didn't have anyone to run to, but she ran. Down Denny Way. She said she wandered like that for a few hours, and I forget what happened to her after that, but it was the last time she saw Matt until she entered the courtroom. We found out after the trial that Alice now lives out of state, and flew in on her own dime to testify against Matt.

This story wouldn't be complete without at least a cursory glance at Alice herself. This was a young woman of perhaps 22 years, with medium brown, straight hair. She had a chubby, expressive face, and was noticeably overweight, although not grotesquely so. She was very engaged when she spoke, and frequently widened her eyes and lifted her eyebrows as if to cement a point, although these facial punctuation marks rarely intersected sensibly with what she was saying. She referred to Matt as "the Defendant" almost exclusively, calling him by name only once or twice. The Elf asked her if she'd been coached to do that, and she said she hadn't. She didn't strike me as being particularly intelligent, although I didn't have a whole lot to go on. Of the witnesses closely related to this case (which is to say, those who were not the police officers, hotel managers or other legitimate professionals), none except Matt himself impressed me as being very intelligent or self-aware.

Up next, we get bored to death (I'll skip through it so you don't have to have quite such a genuine courtroom experience).

Jurisprudence 2012 - Opening Arguments

(If you need to catch up: Preview and Dramatis Personae.)

Opening arguments commenced on, as you might expect, the first day of the trial. We were all settled into our chairs -- our seating order would be identical for the next five weeks, with one minor exception near the end -- and Colbert started out, detailing the story we were about to spend the next five weeks listening to.

The stories really only have one central point, which is Matt, the defendant. Then, the substories can really be broken into three parts: that of Alice, the earliest prostitute we heard from, that of Jennifer, who was the subject of the kidnapping charge, and that of Rose, who was a minor player in the drama, except for the fact that she was, actually, a minor, which makes things much worse for Matt.

The story of Alice began a year or two ago, when she started working for Matt. She started working for him willingly, and the story skips to a trip she and he took to California on a whim, about a year ago. This trip did not go very well. She thought she was Matt's girlfriend (tangentially, all three women would prove to have very dysfunctional notions of what it means to be in a relationship with someone, and there are heavy-handed doses of domestic violence mentality scattered throughout the tale). Then Matt's real girlfriend, Nancy, showed up part way through the trip -- when they'd started out, she was in jail -- and things went downhill fast. Alice was put out to walk the street everywhere they landed, and told to make money, or else. The or else part came down soon enough, and she was beaten repeatedly on the return trip.

Next up, Colbert told us about Jennifer, who was lured in to Matt's clutches through Alice, and would shortly thereafter find herself shoved into the trunk of Matt's car, where Matt repeatedly threatened to kill her, taking her down to a casino next to a river, and eventually driving her around in that trunk for over 24 hours, only to turn her out and get her turning tricks with as much speed as possible.

As it happens, these opening statements didn't necessarily bear a 100% relationship to the truth which was eventually stated in the trial, but this is what we were told at first.

The Elf's turn came up after lunch, and was surprisingly short, if not sweet. He somewhat sternly admonished us as to the nature of evidence, and what is and what is not evidence. Interestingly, his opening statement didn't have much to say about the case itself, particularly anything we might be thinking about as regards Matt's involvement in any of what was to come.

We Begin Hearing Testimony

And with that, with surprisingly little ceremony, the testimony started. The state presented first, and Colbert called in his first witness. This was a police officer who is apparently one of two experts nationwide on the practices of prostitution and pimping. Luckily for everyone involved, he's based out of Kent. I would have figured that every major city would have a guy like this, but apparently not. We're just blessed with a real expert around here.

On Extracting Information From a Witness

The method of extracting information from a witness, in case you're not familiar with it (and if you've watched courtroom dramas, you're probably not) is pretty straightforward. For a friendly witness (we didn't have any hostile witnesses in this trial), the attorney who called him or her is allowed to ask general questions. "What did you do at this time and place," that sort of thing. He is not allowed to lead the witness, which would be a question like, "Were you driving a green Cadillac at this time and place?" The witness is not allowed to volunteer information outside the scope of the original question, or ask questions of the attorney (although "I didn't understand," or "Could you please rephrase the question?" are allowed). In addition, there are apparently ridiculously complicated rules about hearsay, which boil down to, "You can't tell us what other people said; you can only relate direct observations." Ask a lawyer.

Then, on cross-examination (which the opposing attorney is entitled to after any direct examination), the opposing attorney may ask the witness leading questions, and generally has greater license to make mischief. Nothing like actual license to make mischief, of course, but I think it's seen as a trade-off for having to deal with a witness who may be interested in thwarting you. Suffice to say that our policeman turned pimp expert wasn't particularly batting for either team, so the confrontational style wasn't demonstrated quite yet. That comes later.

Alles Über Prostitution

Our expert related, through a series of questions, more or less the following information: first, some terminology. The place where prostitutes walk is called the track or the blade (including the much more pedestrian the street, but I suppose no one needed to be told that). The free-spending gentlemen who pick them up are called dates or tricks, and are no longer frequently called johns. No one said it, but I think the term john is now somewhat dated, and might be what an older person would say to make themselves seem with it.

Prostitutes now get their dates primarily through two methods: online, or walking. Online, there are two major choices, which are backpage.com and tnaboard.com (no links; you wanna check 'em out, type it in yourself). Craigslist used to be a major player, but they took down their "escort" section a few years ago after a major scandal. Backpage is where you post ads, as you might post an ad on Craigslist. Tnaboard.com is more of a forum-style place, where you don't have to pay, and can have conversations and profiles, and clients can leave you reviews. There are a few other place, but those are the big ones.

Walking is much what you'd expect. The girl walks along a major arterial such as Aurora Ave N, International Blvd, and similar roads: traffic moving below 50 MPH, lots of places to pull off, usually light industrial or stripmalls. Prospective client comes up, brief chat ensues, during which time the girl tries to feel out if the fellow in the car is a cop or not (policemen do not have to tell the truth to the question, "Are you a cop?"). If the client passes muster (and I got the impression they pretty much always do), the girl gets in the car, and they head off to either a hotel, or a secluded parking lot, depending on what the date wants.

For online dates, the girl will post their phone number, along with creatively misspelled text and larger-than-life photos -- if you've ever tried to buy something on Ebay or Craigslist, you have an impression of the concept, if not the exact execution. The date calls the girl, they have a similar conversation, trying to suss out if the guy is a cop, and then arrange a time and place to meet. For these dates, the girl usually rents a room in a hotel, and not the fleabags I had always associated with hookers on Aurora. Most of the hotels we heard about were the same moderately-priced but decent places I use when I travel: Best Western, La Quinta, Ramada, etc. This hotel room would be the location for the date.

Either this guy or another of the police officers described a "big hug" the girl would give you, which would give them a chance to see if you're armed, as they moved the hug to different places where you might have a gun strapped to your body. It sounded somewhat comical in the telling, although as with everything else in this case, it's deadly serious.

On the Matter of Rules

The rules of the Game (aka the Life) are like something out of a particularly vicious fairy tale: if you look another pimp in the eye, or talk to another pimp, he's allowed to steal you away like a wicked fairy. You're not allowed to talk to another man than your pimp, unless it's specifically in service of setting up or transacting a date. You're not allowed to talk to other women unless you're recruiting them for your pimp. All the money, and I mean all the money goes to the pimp at the end of the night. If you need some food, or clothes, or anything else, you ask your pimp for it, and he pays for it. If you're caught holding back money for yourself, this is justifiable cause for a beating or other similar punishment. Likewise, if you're caught talking to another man who's not a client, beating or similar. Likewise for breaking any of the other rules.

Pimps have more or less three tools they use to keep their prostitutes in line: charm, threats, and violence. You can imagine the order they go in, and how quickly the relationship usually progresses. First contact will usually be very pleasant, and it's not uncommon for the girls to believe the pimp is falling in love with them, in a relationship, committed to them, and so on. Flattery and charm are the name of the game at that point, with a healthy dose of manipulation thrown in. When the charm starts wearing off, the threats come out. Should these fail, the threats are quickly fulfilled. I won't go deeply into this, because it is depressingly familiar. The same techniques are used in pretty much every domestic violence situation everywhere. Flattery, cajoling, abuse, violence, apology, repeat. The woman thinks she's in love, and if only she could change these awful things about herself, he'll come back/change/quit being an asshole. It doesn't work, of course.

He had some interesting terms, of which I only remember one, for the types of pimp. The one I remember is gorilla pimp, which is what you call a pimp who relies on violence to keep his girls in line. Matt would prove to fall under this category frequently, which is probably why I remember it.

Up next, we hear our first testimony which relates directly rather than generically to the trial.

Jurisprudence 2012 - Dramatis Personae

Before launching into the full-on narrative, I thought I'd sketch out some of the players. I introduced a few of them in the last article, but this will hopefully give you a better view of who we're interacting with. A reminder in case you haven't read the previous episode: all names have been changed to protect both the guilty and the innocent.

Judge Johnson: The judge is necessarily a kind of cypher. If she lets her personality out, she risks letting her impartiality out as well. If she does that, one side or the other calls "Mistrial!" and the whole thing is rendered useless, do it again, and black marks for her. So most of my impression of Judge Johnson was of a very proper woman in her 50s, somewhat severe, in a black robe. I would be hard-pressed to say for sure what her ancestry was, but it looked to be mixed -- I wouldn't normally mention it, but race came up several times during the trial, so I feel it's fair in this case. She had portraits of Martin Luther King Jr (not unexpected in a King County Superior Court room) and Malcom X (less expected) hanging opposite the jury box.

During the course of the trial, she didn't really say anything unless it was directly pertinent to the action in the courtroom. Occasionally there would be a glimpse of emotion behind the proper words, and the two I ever perceived were amusement and annoyance. Her face was set in a sort of permanent contemplative frown, which came from furiously taking notes while trying to maintain a neutral, indifferent, composed demeanor. I was impressed both at her control of the courtroom and her restraint in the face of provocation.

Mr. Colbert: The prosecuting attorney appeared to be in his late 20s to mid 30s -- it was hard to tell. He had close-cropped black hair, was always well-shaved, and wore rimless rectangular glasses and well-fitting if conservative blue or grey suits. He always had a white shirt and subdued tie. Although I didn't pay any attention to them, I wouldn't be surprised to find that his shoes were always recently polished. The one time we saw him out of a suit, he was wearing a sweater that immediately put me in mind of Mr. Rogers, a sort of loose-fitting but still trim powder blue affair.

In demeanor, Colbert was mostly quite professional. Almost everything he said was completely professional, and even when he was laying into witnesses later on, his tone was acceptably pleasant and unfailingly polite -- it's weird to hear someone politely suggest some of the things he was suggesting (Matt, our defendant, was not accused of delivering flowers and rainbows, after all). The "mostly" part comes from his reactions to the Elf, when he was seen to roll his eyes dramatically, hide a smile behind his hand, or other such minor gestures that the court reporter couldn't enter into the written record.

Mr. The Elf: The defense attorney is going to stretch my descriptive abilities, but here goes. Imagine a man in his 70s. He is short, completely bald, and not particularly overweight, except that someone appears to have stuffed a large pillow down the front of his shirt. His face is faintly punctuated by a sparse white beard that extends from his cheekbones into his collar, and you can almost see where the artist drew in each individual hair, like a character from the Simpsons. When he opens his mouth, there's one front tooth that commands attention, and its companions shuffle backward into his mouth, having clearly nominated the leader by taking a hasty, ragged series of steps back when the lips called for volunteers from the company. Pity the front tooth, slow on the uptake.

His voice, when he speaks, puts me in mind of Diane Rheim, whose bizarre radio career is put on display every weeknight at midnight here in Seattle. It's a slightly ragged voice, which has seen better days, but is still clear. His manner of speaking is bizarre: loud, but very slow, to the point of caricature. When he says the word "evidence," (which we hear a lot), it's three very distinct syllables, very nearly three separate words: "eh-vuh-dence." Most other multi-syllabic words receive a similar treatment. He said at one point that he's been a lawyer for 43 years, and his speaking style must be heavily influenced by that experience. His questions (the vast majority of what the jury hears from the attorneys are questions to witnesses) were convoluted to such an extent that witnesses, clever and simple alike, routinely had to ask for clarification. I was usually able to get the sense of his question, and only once or twice did I completely lose it, but then my whole job was to pay attention to what he was saying. I wasn't ever surprised when a witness would cock their head to the side, and say, "I'm sorry... I didn't... Could you rephrase the question?" They always had this quizzical, puzzled expression on their face, as if they'd been unexpectedly smacked in the face with a halibut.

The Elf's wardrobe deserves a special mention. His suits, while nicely matching, appear to be a grab-bag of out-of-date fashions. There is at least one wide-lapeled tweed number that's straight out of an episde of Laugh In. He has a rotating collection of what I can only call atrocious ties. One is a hand-painted, almost photo-realistic collage of vegetables: alternating green stalks and orange bodies of carrots and other unidentifiable root vegetables, shocking in its veracity. Another is an overlapping pattern of paisley which must have geuinely originated in the 60s, alternating blues and greens with the occasional jarring point of red and orange in a dense pattern sure to make any tripping college student stop and stare for an hour or two. There are others, but they fade into insignificance when compared to these shining examples. When reading, he'd usually install an enormous pair of glasses on his face, huge lenses magnifying his protuberant eyes ludicrously.

The Elf was comedically afraid of technology. This was something which grated on me as the trial wore on (and clearly grated on Colbert and several of my fellow jurors as well). We had evidence that was on (very low-quality) video tape. We had evidence which was AVI files on a DVD. There were CDs. Cellphone records figured hugely into the evidence. There was a handgun, although the Elf was clearly more comfortable with guns than with what he thought of as "high tech." All of these things produced an honestly baffled reaction from him, which worked to his detriment. He made self-deprecating jokes about being low-tech, but didn't follow that up with any kind of Columbo-like unmasking of his actual clever death-blow dealt based on technological evidence.

If not for the fact that he was defending a man accused of a veritable raft of nasty crimes, he would have seemed to be a complete caricature.

As long as I'm going there, I should say that both attorneys were white.

Matt, the defendant: a man in his 20s, black, with closely cropped hair, clean-shaven. We discovered early in the trial that he was actually 21 (I would have guessed he was in his late 20s initially). He wasn't unattractive, inasmuch as I'm any judge. For the majority of the trial, our view of him was as the person sitting to the Elf's left at the defendant's table. I'll save his personality for later, as it didn't become apparent to us until at least half way through. He was almost always attired in a plaid button-down shirt of some variety, and disappearingly-normal pants. Of course, he was mostly seated, so I didn't get much opportunity to see his lower half.

His manner during the trial was almost scholarly. He was constantly taking notes, occasionally passing one to the Elf. He was very engaged in the whole process, as he was to prove later. This was no constantly-confused and -surprised Larry, as from my previous trial. Matt was clearly intelligent and on top of things.

The Courtroom: In TV dramas, the courtroom is almost universally this kind of majestic wood-paneled chamber, dark and forbidding, with the judge elevated high above everyone else, pounding a gavel and shouting for order. Our courtroom was considerably more mundane. The back wall, which the judge sat in front of, is indeed wood-paneled, but it was a light-toned wood, with odd green stripes between panels. The remaining three walls are white. When you walk in the door, the first thing you face is the audience seats, a set of almost ecclesiastical-looking pews facing the judge. Turn to your right, and you're facing the jury box against the right-hand wall. The defense table is parallel to the bar, facing the judge, and the prosecutor's table is beyond it to the left, perpendicular to the bar, so that the prosecutor sits facing the jury. Both tables are heavily built, but have a certain cheapness to them that seems a bit out of place.

The bar separates the court staff from everyone else -- it's almost literally a bar in the normal, drinking-establishment sense of the word. It's a horizontal wooden surface, about a foot deep, and the width of the judge's box. In our case, it was broken by a couple of microphones and a triangular speakerphone. Behind the bar, from left to right, are the bailiff, the court clerk, and the court reporter. Behind these three, and slightly elevated, are the judge, and the witness stand.

It struck me (as these things do) that the setup was actually defensive: an aggravated defendant bent on getting to the judge or witness would have to come over or around his table, and climb over the bar or detour around it. Either direction, there's someone in the way, and the two King County Jail officers sitting heavily by the door would doubtless spring into rapid action in such an event. The obvious exit is past the officers. It happens there's also an exit through the judge's chambers behind the courtroom, but it took me weeks to realize that. There are prominent cameras on massive, welded supports on three of the four walls. The cameras point at the judge, the audience and defendant's table, and the plaintiff's table. I finally spotted one which might have covered the jury, an unobtrusive smoked dome of plastic in the ceiling over the audience. I found myself wondering who was watching 6 cameras in each courtroom, or if they were only for recording the action.

The Bailiff: the bailiff deserves special mention. This is the only court staff the jury ever interacts with. If not for her, you might suspect the entire court is composed of cold, uncaring people -- not that they are, but the rules of conduct say that the jury can't interact with pretty much anyone involved in the trial, in order to avoid an appearance of bias. Our bailiff was pleasant, and clearly a warm, caring person. She was occasionally oddly constrained in her answers to questions, although it was only odd when you didn't think of it from a judicial perspective: there are some questions she has to bring to the judge for legal reasons, and on these, she'd immediately clam up. We got used to her, and when she had to leave the court for a week mid-trial, it was almost jarring to deal with the temporary bailiffs who came in to cover for her.

The Court Staff: As I said before, we basically had no interactions with the court staff, but we spent a lot of time sitting in that jury box, and some of that was dead time, while one of the attorneys was checking his notes (almost always the Elf), or preparing some exhibit. During that dead time, I'd find my eye wandering to check out the other people in the courtroom. To properly imagine the court reporter, you have to imagine a man with shoulder-length white hair, a drooping mustache, and the thing which is clearly missing from the scene: a saxophone. I only realized it as I was thinking over his description for this article, but he clearly needed to be playing a saxophone in a smoky nightclub. The only words I ever heard him speak were on perhaps three occasions when he said he couldn't hear someone. His face had a sort of dead appearance when he was recording, and now I can perfectly picture it coming alive as he peals sweet licks from his tenor sax.

To picture the clerk, you need only imagine a poorly cast American remake of a fine foreign fantasty film. He is the rogueish ex-thief, or wizard, who has too much of a Western star in him to make a good fantasy character, but far too much fantasy to ever actually star in a Western except as an incidental character who goes down in a shootout two minutes after being introduced. He has long salt-and-pepper (mostly salt) hair tied back in a ponytail, and a similar beard with a pronounced mustache, framing a squarish smiling face. I saw several other people with similar tonsorial choices, and found myself wondering if it was some kind of fad at the courthouse to have court staff who had long white hair and facial hair.

With that, I think you've had enough teasing. Coming up next, we hear opening arguments and launch into testimony.

Fridge Update

My replacement chest freezer has finally arrived, and more on that later, but I wanted to note that the little dorm fridge has settled down to an average daily consumption of 321 Wh per day, or 117.2 kWh/year. That's vastly different from the EnergyGuide label, which says 328 kWh/year.

As a point of comparison, a 2 W clock consumes 48 Wh/day, or 17.5 kWh/year. My stereo stack, if left powered, consumes 8 W when off, for 70 kWh/year (fortunately I turn it off its power supply when I'm not using it, for zero kWh/year). The watt-meter goes on the new fridge next, but I'm curious to get some long-term numbers on my computer, and one or two other things around the house.

Jurisprudence 2012 - Preview

If you're one of my half-dozen readers who knows me personally, then you'll be aware that I've been in jury duty. Since February 6th. That jury service finally concluded last night, and this is your preview to what will eventually be the whole story.

On an important note: this story will necessarily include some fairly gruesome descriptions (not so much this entry, but later entries) of awful things done to people. If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea, you may want to skip them. The defendant was not sitting in court because he was a pleasant man.

For this installment, I'm just going to go over the setup, some of the players, and an outline of the charges. As I did the last time I was on a jury, I will be changing the names of everyone involved, including my fellow jurors if and when they come up. In this case, I'm actually concerned that one of the defendant's friends could find these stories and figure out how to get to me. All will become clear, but I expect the story to unfold over the course of the next month or two in this particular forum.

It all began late last year. I got a jury summons for December 26th. Although I was all set to jump into action, as the date got closer, I realized that I'd be literally flying home from California the night before jury service, and that trying to be at the courthouse at 8 am would put me in a particularly bad mood. So I went to the handy juror website, entered my number, and deferred it to the (as I thought at the time) clever date of February 6th. This was just after a show opened at Annex, so my schedule would be relatively clear, and I figured even if I got on a jury, it would be a 3-week trial, max. That'd have me finishing up just as the show finished, so I could wrap it all up, close the show, and get on with my life.

So, I turned up at the courthouse on the 6th, and commenced what I figured would be my requisite two days of sitting around before being dismissed. I did indeed sit around, but before terribly long, I was called for Judge Johnson (remember, names are all changed), and picked up my juror number -- 74, as I recall. They picked around 200 jurors initially, and it quickly became clear why: they expected the trial to go until March 16th! Five solid weeks of trial, and (as I didn't realize at the time) deliberation after that. Interesting side note: we finished on March 15th. Not bad, judicial prediction system!

Instead of sending me up to the courtroom, I was instead handed a questionnaire. It was a bunch of questions I answered "no" to, along the lines of "Have you ever been the victim of an armed crime?" or "Have you or anyone you know ever been the victim of sexual assault?" Comparatively speaking, this was very generic stuff, and didn't say much about the case. I believe that was Tuesday, the 7th.

I was excused for Wednesday, and told to come back Thursday. I didn't realize why, but they were selecting the remaining hundred or so jurors for the pool.

On Thursday, I came back as instructed, and did a bunch more sitting around. It's a key feature of jury duty that you spend a bunch of time cooling your heels (or, as I read in one of the Raymond Chandler stories I've been going through recently, "practicing your foot-dangling"). Finally, I was called up to the courtroom itself. With about fifty other people, I trooped into an elevator (not all the same elevator, of course; we're not hyper-flexible professional clowns or anything), where we were lined up in the elevator foyer. The bailiff got us lined up in order, with the initial twelve people separated out, as they would be in the jury box itself. I was perhaps 20th in the "not in the jury box" line. I assume that all the people who disappeared between #1 and #74 were culled either by the questionnaire, or by having a big obvious reason for not being able to do a 5 week trial.

Once we were all in the courtroom, the judge ran through some preliminary information: here are the charges in the case, here are a raft of names, do you know any of them? Some of the people raised their hands, and there may have been one or two people who actually knew the person involved, as opposed to simply recognizing a relatively common name.

The charges numbered 8 total, and I couldn't remember exactly what they were through most of the trial, but knew they were all more or less in line with "being a pimp." As it happens, they were three counts of promoting prostitution, two counts of rape, one of robbery, one of kidnapping, and one of unlawful firearm possession. I'll get into them in more detail later.

We went through the "I can't afford it" folks with comparative dispatch, and moved on to Voir Dire, which is the process whereby the attorneys get to know the potential jurors, and can assess their fitness to be on the jury. Questions came out about prostitution. What did we know? What had we experienced? What about movies like Pretty Woman? I'm sure there were other questions, but those are what I recall.

There were a few stand-outs in the selection process I wanted to mention, although I have to do some set-up first. The defendant, who I'll call Matt, is black, and 21 years old (although he looks older, and I would have guessed he was in his mid to late twenties, at first). He was dressed in a button-down plaid shirt and khaki pants, and sitting next to his defense attorney, who reminded me of nothing more than an aged leprechaun, with a bald head and a thin white beard over crooked teeth that smiled easily. I ended up calling him The Elf in my notes, and that's as good a name as any for these pages. The prosecuting attorney, when we got a good look at him, reminded me of Stephen Colbert, although I realized as we went on that my first impression was largely made on superficial points: rimless glasses, dark hair, nice suit, general build. I referred to him as Colbert in my notes, and I'll keep that for here.

The first stand-out juror really stood out. He was in the jury box, sitting in seat #4 or 5. I have no idea what his name was, but I ended up thinking of him as Piggy. We were all asked these various questions, as I was saying, and when it got to be Piggy's turn, he revealed that he had been in the military, he was now a security guard somewhere, etc. This is a man who was probably in his late 30s or early forties, significantly overweight, with little porcine eyes behind square, metal-framed glasses, and a bristly little mustache punctuating a swellingly fat face. He positively dripped "ex-military." Asked about potential problems he might have being objective in the trial, he described when he was an MP somewhere, and was jumped, making it clear without saying so that he was jumped by a group of black men, and that that might cloud his judgement regarding Matt. Then, he leaned forward a bit (I think he was talking to the Elf), and said, "May I speak frankly?" I could sense him translating "Permission to speak freely, sir?" into civilian-ese in his head. The Elf nodded, said, "Go ahead," and Piggy leaned forward, pointing at Matt from his shoulder to the tip of his slightly quivering finger.

"I dunno what he did, but I can tell you one thing. I know his type, and he's guilty! I dunno what he's guilty of, but I know he's guilty of something!" Everything in his manner screamed, "That black kid there is guilty because he's BLACK!" At that point, Judge Johnson held up her hand (interesting side-note: Judge Johnson looks like she has significant black ancestry, and there were very nicely sketched portraits of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcom X hanging opposite the jury box; probably not the most conducive environment to pull out your petty racism, Piggy), and said, "That's enough! I'm going to excuse this juror for cause. Any objections?" Both attorneys shook their heads no. There was a palpable reduction in tension as Piggy made his waddling, porcine way out of the jury box, and rollingly stomped out of the courtroom, his mustache bristling with impotent anger. As I commented to some friends after relating this incident, there are lots of ways to get yourself off a jury without making everyone around you think you're a racist asshole.

The other interesting juror was #124 (or so). He diverted nearly any question asked of him into a haranguing lecture on the abomination of the for-profit prison system, and how he would be unwilling to commit anyone to such immoral ~~torture~~ imprisonment. His manner bespoke exactly the kind of screeching trustafarian, libertarian (because no government interference in our lives would be COOOL, man), entitled rich-kid nature that I came to despise at Evergreen, lo these many years ago (my fellow juror Hal refreshes my memory: #124 claimed he was actually in favor of more and bigger government; my impression of him as having the smug self-satisfaction I'm referring to stands, though). He wasn't excused that day, but when we were called back next, he was told he could go, to exultant fist-pumping on his part, and a collective sigh of relief (expressed as nervous laughter from some) on everyone else's part.

That was more or less the end of that day. We were excused for Friday, which is the normal day off for trials (which is to say, I think everyone's working hard on Fridays, they're just not doing jury trial work).

Watch this space for further updates. I won't be going into this kind of day-to-day detail for much of the trial. At 24 (or so) days, that would be far too much writing, and it would read like a very dry transcript. I think I'm going to aim for a more episodic style this time around.

Musing on the State of Things

I've come across this very interesting thought in the last few days. It all comes back around to the practical in its way, but see if this makes any sense.

I was looking at chest freezers, like ya do when in an Existential Fridge Crisis. I was thinking of how I thought of refrigerating appliances: they were these big, boring things that just ran and ran and ran, until eventually they got too smelly or the light just wouldn't come on any more, or whatever. We had a second fridge in the garage when I was growing up that must have been at least 20 years old, and was still running strong.

I can't recall now exactly what brand it was, but it was GE, or Frigidaire, or something like that. I'm pretty sure, when it was built, that it was built in a plant owned by that company, which made a bunch of different things for the company, but was only making things for that company. Whoever bought that fridge when it was new probably got it at least partially out of brand loyalty: GE makes good refrigerators, so I'll choose this one.

It was not, I'm sure, terribly efficient. It was probably, compared to now, pretty expensive once you adjust for inflation. It didn't do anything other than cool things down and light up when you opened the door -- no ice makers or water dispensers or multi-fold doors. An insulated box with a cooling system built in. There was a freezer section, but it was made out of the cooling coils, so it wasn't a proper freezer, it was just the coldest part of the fridge.

But the thing is, when that late 60s model fridge was bought, it was an investment, and you knew where it came from, more or less. This smacks strongly of pining for some lost golden age, but I can't help feeling that it's somewhat true. The consumer trusted what they were getting, trusted the company, trusted that this was a worthy investment.

Contrast that with now. Our world is full, full of refrigerator options. You can get french doors, or side-by-side, or bottom-freezer, or top-freezer. You can get one made by LG or Frigidaire or Amana or GE or Haier. Well, you can get one with any of those name plates on it, at least. You don't know, without doing your research (and sometimes not even then) who actually made that appliance. Which factory did it actually roll out of? Which country was it even made in?

If you look at models of small chest freezers, it doesn't take long to realize that there are basically one or two versions of 5 cubic foot models. I spotted the same thing with a Kenmore, Frigidaire, and GE label on it, judging by external styling cues. So, who actually made it? I went to Consumer Reports to check on reliability ratings for different brands, and... they don't list them any more. Not on freezers, anyway.

And where this really wraps its coiled tail around, and smacks itself upside the head, is that I no longer trust any of those names. A guy at the Sears store said they had to discontinue a particular small freezer model because the company making it had reliability problems. Where before I could take a survey of friends (this would have been before I was interested in buying appliances, but work with me here), heard their experiences, and made a pretty good guess about the right choice for me. Bob loves his GE, Jason isn't so hot on his Amana, Sally really digs her Frigidaire, etc. Only now, that data is meaningless.

Sure, it's cheaper. It's a lot cheaper. It's ridiculously expensive to tool up for something as specialized as a freezer. You have to spend millions of dollars on dies and presses and forming machines and specialized coolant handling equipment. Why do that for each of the two-dozen models you want to sell, when you can just buy Joe-Bob's small freezer, slap a new badge on it, and call it done? Joe-Bob is a specialist at small freezers.

Then again, it's cheaper still to move that manufacturing off-shore, where maybe the labor conditions aren't quite as stringent, and people are willing to work for a bit less. Shipping is ridiculously cheap, after all. And you can still sell it for way more than it costs you, and it's still cheaper than the one you used to sell that was made locally.

This is not, despite where it seems to be headed, any sort of political argument.

Instead, it's a question of attitude. I, as a shopper, no longer trust anyone. I'm completely disillusioned. GE is the company that's so large it's more or less one with the government and defense industry, and exhibits frightening influence over American politics. Frigidaire, Amana and Kenmore are all meaningless distinctions on an appliance made at some huge, anonymous factory in China, where I don't really trust that they're going to do a good job, and I expect workers are living with horrible conditions for shitty pay. That's not what I want, but I don't seem to have a choice. If I wanted to go out and pay $300 for a well-built appliance instead of $190 for one made in China and shipped thousands of miles, well, that's not an option.

What's most interesting to me is that the companies doing all this seem completely unaware of it. They're pursuing magical dollar signs at the expense of attitude. Thank god, really, that there are so many clueless consumers out there (and more every day, thanks to increasing wealth in India and China, among others) who are also in pursuit of the magical dollar signs.

(To be fair: I'm also a clueless consumer on some stuff, and I certainly find myself comparing ridiculous 1% price differences in pursuit of the "best deal." I'm no better than anyone else, just every once in a while I look beyond my feet and see the landscape we're standing in, and am horrified by it.)

Interesting Fridgely Data Point

I was able to pick up my chest freezer last night, but discovered upon unpacking that it had a giant dent in the lid, so I'm going to check in with Sears, and see if they'll exchange it for one that's not a reject from the Scratch-and-Dent table.

However, while I was pottering around on fridge-related matters last night, I took the opportunity to plug the mini-fridge (a Haier 4 cubic foot dorm fridge) into the watt-meter.

It's only been about 15 hours, so obviously this is too small a sample to extrapolate a fair value from, but extrapolate I did, and the numbers are surprisingly good.

In 14 hours and 47 minutes, the little fridge consumed .23 kWh, or 230 watt-hours. That works out to around 375 watt-hours per day, or 136 kWh per year (again, all rough numbers). This compares very favorably with the EnergyGuide's 328 kWh/year number, and I can only guess that the EnergyGuide's testing method includes a lot more opening and closing the door or something -- I only opened the door about three times, very briefly, during that 14:47 period.

This also bodes extremely well for my efficient fridge project: the chest freezer is rated, on its EnergyGuide, at 279 kWh/year, and that's when it's running as a freezer. Running as a fridge (which is much less arduous on the compressor system) should net a substantial energy savings.

I'm leaving the watt meter plugged in, just to see what happens when I get a larger sample size. I'll be very interested to see how this little fridge fares over a period of a few days, and the fact that I have to exchange my new chest freezer (which is advertised as arriving in 12-14 days on the Sears website) means that I won't have any reason to unplug the little dorm fridge soon.

Update: Sears was in fact able to take back the freezer, but I have another two-week wait while another one arrives. Also, I have more data from the little fridge: .56 kWh in 39:33, or .34 kWh per day, or 124 kWh per year. Things are looking pretty good for my most-efficient-fridge project.

The Fridge is Dead! Long Live the Fridge!

Since the visit from the repair guy, the fridge has ceased to make any noise, and rapidly warmed to room temperature. Today, I finally crowbarred enough time out of my schedule to clean out the remaining food and stuff (batteries, film, etc.), in preparation for the departure of the old fridge. I'd clean it, but honestly, I don't see the point. It will never be used to hold food again, or at least not in its old capacity as a cooling box.

This precipitated a bit of a crisis, though. What to do about getting a replacement? I've always kind of hated refrigerators, but have always felt compelled to stick with what everyone else was doing. I don't think I can live without one, mind you -- my love for cheese, among other things, pretty much argues against that.

My choices seemed to fall into three more or less broad categories. The first, fairly obvious choice was to run out to my favorite appliance emporium, and order up something Consumer Reports thinks highly of (despite their bad call on my old, departing fridge, I really do think I just got lucky with this particular unit). This has a certain appeal: it's easy, I could probably get free delivery rolled into the price, and I'd have a Shiny Perfectly Normal Kitchen again.

However, choice 1 galls me for a few reasons. New fridges, to get the kind I prefer, are expensive. The cheapest CR-recommended bottom-freezer fridge is $1000. I did that 10 years ago, and look where it landed me. On top of that, no matter the brand, type, or amount you spend, vertical refrigerators (with doors that open outward, like a normal fridge) are horribly inefficient. Every time you open the door, all the cold air pours out onto the floor, and the compressor has to spend a bunch of energy re-cooling all the new air that just replaced it.

My second choice was to run out and buy a used upright fridge. This also has a certain appeal: back to normal kitchen land, but for half the money (or so). Dave, before he left, spent a good solid 10 minutes telling me about the fine variety of used bottom-freezer models he has on his showroom floor, starting at a very reasonable $500. He almost had me convinced: I just wanted to get on with life, and quit dealing with this stupid problem. This seemed like a cheap and reasonable way out. Then, I noticed that my old fridge had completely died, immediately after his visit. Intentional or not, I have no idea, but whatever he checked out killed the thing. If it was intentional, there's no way I'm going to reward sabotage by going and paying him a bunch of money for a used appliance. If it wasn't intentional, that's such sloppy work that I don't think I'd trust him to rebuild anything, much less buy a used/rebuilt fridge from him.

I could always hit up another used-appliance place, but the more I thought about it, the more it rankled me. The more it rankled me, the more I thought about option three, which has always been a bit of a pipe dream of mine: convert a chest freezer into a fridge.

Years ago, I read about this guy, who converted a chest freezer into a fridge. He built a special controller to do it, relying as he is on solar panels for all his electrical power. I loved the idea, but was always put off by having to build a controller. It's also sufficiently weird (who do you know who has a chest-style fridge in their kitchen) that I didn't want to commit to it. Plus, aren't chest freezers always these huge things that you store sides of beef and mafia hits and $50,000 in? I couldn't imagine where I'd put such a thing in my little house.

Still, it's a really interesting idea, and I started doing some research. I found compactappliances.com (they have everything on the Internet). I looked around at a few appliance sellers. The thing that shocked me was that one of my searches turned up a commercially-produced freezer controller! On Amazon! For 50 bucks! It turns out that this idea of converting a freezer into a fridge is very popular with homebrew folks. Who knew!? And once something is popular with homebrew folks, you have a viable market. Voila!

The magic thing about a chest freezer is that when you open the door, it doesn't dump all the cold air onto the ground. Cold air is heavier than warm air, so it naturally wants to go down, pouring much like water would. You wouldn't have a water tank that opened on the front -- you'd have to refill the thing every time you opened the door. So why have a cooling device that drops all its cold air on the floor every time you open it? The chest freezer, on the other hand, is basically a fish tank for cold air, and when you open it, there's nowhere for all that air to go. So the system doesn't have to work to cool down all that air; much more efficient.

Thus, yesterday, I spent some time driving to a few of the local appliance merchants. None of them really had anything in stock -- they all had one or two chest freezers, but I guess they're large enough and unpopular enough that keeping them in the store is impractical. Fair enough, although I would have preferred to see these things in person.

The freezer that looked the most promising to me in my research was this model from Sears, a Frigidaire in shiny black. My other appliances are either stainless steel or black, so it was appealing to get something that matched. It's also the right size (my fridge cavity is 36" wide, that freezer is 35" wide), and at a claimed 7.2 cubic feet, is probably more capacity than I will ever need in a fridge. They don't have it in stock, so I ordered one online, and expect it to arrive in a few weeks.

I also settled upon this controller to do the conversion. It wouldn't satisfy the Mt. Best guy, as I'm sure it draws a small amount of power all the time (hopefully not too much). Still, for my uses, it should be perfect, and I'm all in favor of not having to build it myself. It should arrive sooner than the freezer.

To be sure, the freezer I'm getting isn't perfect. It doesn't have a light. It's a touch wider than I'd like (I'd rather have something 34" wide, for a bit more airflow clearance around the unit). But it's pretty close.

The thing that's giddy-making about all this is the numbers. This freezer is rated to use 279 kWh per year (I'll just compare the EnergyGuide numbers, which are fake, but should be roughly the same degree of fake between models, offering effective comparison). The little Haier dorm fridge I got as a temporary measure (4 cubic feet) is rated at 328 kWh per year. And that's not a freezer, it's just a refrigerator. Picking a random Kenmore fridge off the Sears website (this one, as it happens), I see it's rated at 465 kWh per year for a claimed 22.4 cubic feet. This is more or less what I'd get as a replacement upright if I got a new one (although I wouldn't bother with an ice maker).

Ok, so, what's neat about all that? Well, we're comparing an Energy Star rated full-size fridge (465 kWh) with a non-Energy Star dorm fridge (328 kWh), with a small non-Energy Star chest freezer (279 kWh). That is, two appliances which maintain a temperature of about 8°C vs. one which maintains a temperature of -10°C. So, that's pretty cool. Clearly, it's an efficient freezer. Now here's the real magic: I'm using it to maintain a temperature of 8°C. I won't know what it actually uses until I get it all set up in a few weeks, but numerous people on the web claim 100 to 200 Wh per day consumption with this type of setup -- that is, (at 20 Wh/day) 73 kWh per year. I certainly hope that's where I end up!

Another detail that I'm quite excited about is that by its nature as a freezer, my new device should have an overbuilt cooling system for fridge use, and should be over-insulated. Both these features suggest efficiency, as well as longevity, a trait I'm quite fond of. One of the things that hit me hard about the dying fridge was the disappointment of having spent extra money to get something higher-quality, and having it crap out on me well before expected.

So, I've got some negative experiences filed away with this fridge dying (including the as-yet un-priced repairs to my new-in-2004 oak floor, several boards of which are now warped and sticking up, presumably due to the pools of water from the dying fridge), but it's also opening the door to a project I've wanted to do for years, and which will noticeably reduce my energy footprint.

I'll report back here as things go together. I'm really looking forward to this project. If it's as easy as it appears, I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in decreasing their energy costs.

Fridge Fail

After my fun times (previously mentioned below) looking for a repair business that would deal with me reasonably, I came upon Dave's Appliance, on Capitol Hill. They came warmly recommended by a friend, so I gave them a call. The person who answered the phone was uncertain Dave would come out as far as my house (which is a whole 10 miles north of Capitol Hill), but scheduled me anyway, and Dave was indeed able to make it all the way to outer Siberia where my house is apparently located.

(Snide side-note: Apparently, to anyone who is based out of Capitol Hill, anything that's not Capitol Hill is Very Far Away. It's a weird, pervasive attitude that I find somewhat bizarre, given that I ride a bicycle to and from Capitol Hill on a regular basis. It's not that hard, guys.)

Anyway, Dave came and went today, and I found the experience discouraging on a number of levels. I've always had an uneasy relationship with contractors and repair people -- I usually call them in because I don't have the time to do something, not because I'm incapable of doing it. In the case of a fridge, I'm sufficiently out of my depth and willingness to buy special tools that it made sense.

The first disappointment, and the most obvious one, was that Dave proclaimed my fridge irreparable. He said that the "sealed system" was defective, without being more specific about it, and that it wasn't worth repairing. He immediately launched into a discussion of all the fine used refrigerators he had back at the shop, including a phone call to someone who was there, to look around their stock. I bought this fridge new around 2001 or 2002, which makes it only 10 years old -- a significantly shorter lifespan than I had anticipated when I spent about $1000 on it 10 years ago. I don't want to replace it.

The second disappointment, a bit more immediate, if not as large, as the first: the service fee. When I'd scheduled the appointment, the person I talked to on the phone said the service call would be $57. Now, this is significantly cheaper than the $100-130 everyone else seemed to be charging for the same service, so I wasn't exactly shocked when Dave said the whole call would be $106. He added, by hand, a $40 charge to the otherwise computer-printed invoice, for labor. Presumably, if he'd come out and immediatley driven away again, that would have only cost $57. I found it a bit disingenuous to immediately almost double the bill. When I mentioned that he might ask his employees to actually mention that a full service call would be $97 before tax, and not $57, he started into what was obviously a well-worn monologue about the merits of an automatic answering system.

The final disappointment, and one I'm not willing to lay at Dave's feet necessarily, was that after he left, the fridge (which, to my perceptions, had been running its fan constantly for the last few weeks that I'd been aware of it) was completely silent; the temperature inside was up to 13°C, from 8°C a few days ago. The constant flow of cold-ish air out the vent had ceased. The thought crossed my mind more than once that in his diagnosis, he may have left something unconnected, whether intentional or not. I'm not accusing him of sabotage, but the thought certainly occurred to me. It reaffirmed my dislike of dealing with repair services, certainly.

In all, that was a very disappointing visit, and has left me perplexed as to how to proceed. I was expecting to spend $200-300 to replace the guts of the frige, but now I find myself faced with $500+ for a used fridge from Dave's collection (not my only choice, obviously, but the data point I have right now), $1000+ for a new fridge, or trying to find a way to make my little 4 cubic foot dorm fridge work for me in the long term. There's also my long-held desire to turn a chest freezer into a highly efficient refrigerator, and all the upsides and downsides to that plan. And that, really, is a topic for a different post.

Hee!

My fancy new oscilloscope (a Rigol DS1102E) finally arrived. Out of curiosity, I checked out the AM carrier wave on the transmitter I built a few weeks ago. It's... not so good.

That's supposed to be a nice sine wave. Clearly shy of the mark. Still, how cool is it that I have an oscilloscope that can output an image file like that? For $400, that's pretty hard to beat.

A Special Hint for Appliance Repair Businesses

Ok, so I came into the kitchen this morning to find that the refrigerator had drooled a bit. It's been warming up lately, but I wasn't aware how fast -- everything in the freezer is unfrozen, and it appears that all cooling is more or less out of commission. So, fair enough. I ignored a bunch of warning noises from the fridge in the last few months. Something has now gone horribly wrong (however, I'm pretty sure it would have been just as horribly wrong if I'd called someone in at the first bad noise).

I'm guessing the motor needs to be replaced, or possibly there was a leak in the coolant system. In any case, the issue is probably beyond my technical skills, as I'm functionally ignorant of real cooling systems.

My first step, after cleaning up the spilled water, was to pull up a search on appliance repair businesses in Seattle. There are many of them, all apparently businesses which focus primarily on repair (as opposed to businesses which sell appliances, and do repair as a side-line). That's cool, I like a service which knows what it is.

Unfortunately, if you do the same search reasonably soon, you'll quickly notice a problem. Not one of these businesses lists any, let's say, substantial information on their website. There's no indication of price. There's no indication of schedule. There's no suggestion of actual parts in stock, or timeliness should orders need to be placed.

Some of this, of course, is costly to provide on a real-time basis, and that's not what I'm expecting. But a page of prices for call-out and labor-per-hour would be easy to provide, and go a long way toward preparing me for what I'm facing. A suggestion of how long it typically takes to schedule a service call (to be fair, one or two do have this) would be great.

And really, when I call your business number, I shouldn't get a mumbled voicemail that I can't understand, to leave a message which may be returned today, or may be returned in a week (no, saying, "We'll get right back to you" doesn't inspire me with confidence somehow).

What's interesting is that it looks like these places all bought websites from the same developer, or at least all copied their text and layout from the same place. I had to check phone numbers on several, to see if I was getting different businesses or not.

It's only a 12 year old fridge, and was a reasonably spendy one at the time (bottom freezer is apparently an unpopular choice, despite being easier to deal with). I'd rather not trash it yet. The hope now is that repair places won't inspire me to aggravation. I'll add updates as this thing progresses.

Update: No seriously, look at these two sites:

Seattle Appliance Repair Service

Seattle AC, Heating and Appliance Service

Tell me those aren't basically the same website.

Lesson Learned

Basically since getting back from all the end-of-year holiday madness, I've been trying to buy a Kobo Touch e-reader. I was initially all set to buy one from Kobo itself, but discovered that they charged tax on top of shipping when you buy it from their website. I'm not opposed to paying sales tax necessarily, but it feels silly to pay sales tax and shipping on an online purchase without a pretty good reason.

I figured there had to be a cheaper way.

So, I hit up Amazon, of all places. There I found a used Touch from what looked like a reputable company, for $105, with $4 shipping. Ok, that's a deal I can get behind. I placed the order and waited.

What arrived was a Kobo Wifi, which I'm pretty sure is an entirely different model. I contacted them the same day and got a return authorization -- the Wifi model would have been acceptable if I just wanted an e-reader, but for a variety of reasons, I had my heart set on a Touch. Fortunately, they were easy to deal with, immediately apologized for their incorrect listing, and I moved on.

What I would have preferred was to buy a used one. This comes from both price and resource-wastage perspectives. On the one hand, $150 is more than having one of these things is worth to me (the new price from Kobo including tax and shipping). On the other hand, buying a used one means one less thing headed for the landfill. So, I hit up Ebay.

What I found was a lot of people selling this thing for $140-200. Now, it costs $129 from Kobo, at least that's the listed price. You can also run down to your favorite Target or Best Buy and get one for the same price. I'm not sure why Ebay sellers think people are excited about paying more than full price, but there it is.

I looked around, until I found one that was available for the surprisingly (suspiciously) good price of $85. At this point, I should mention that Kobo sells two models: the Kobo Touch, and the Kobo Touch with Offers. The difference is, like the Kindle, you can get one with or without advertisements, and you have to pay more to avoid ads. I personally abhor advertisements, so I was uninterested in the "with Offers" model.

Without thinking too hard about it, I ordered the $85 one from Ebay, through a seller who had a lot of them he was selling off for a charity. It occurred to me about 20 minutes after I'd placed the order (I have no idea why it didn't occur to me to check this before hitting the button) that it was too good a deal, and I'd probably ordered a "with Offers" model. I double-checked, and indeed. Fortunately, it was so shortly after ordering it that I was able to cancel, to the consternation of the seller, who didn't understand why I was so unhappy. They had listed the item as a "Kobo Touch." No mention of Offers. Although when I double-checked the model number they listed, the results that came back were overwhelmingly "with Offers."

So, lesson learned, thought I. Suspiciously good deals are suspicious. I looked around some more, and found one for $115, which made no mention of Offers, and the model number checked out: N905-KBO-B. If you look that up, you'll see a page of full-price Kobo Touch readers. Awesome, thought I, and pressed the go button. It was a bit more than I wanted to pay, but I figured I was avoiding the scourge of Offers.

That one finally showed up, and I happily unpacked it, and started playing with it. All good, fun device, well built, etc. That evening, I sat down to get it registered, as apparently you can't use the wifi feature without registering it. That finished up, and I had a twinge of unhappiness as I saw the Recommended for You list that had suddenly appared on the home screen. That was ok, though, there was a way to turn it off, and just show books you already own. I was mostly hopeful to use this device to read PDFs of scripts, and to read classic novels, which are freely available via Project Gutenbert and Archive.org, so that worked out fine.

However, I turned it off, and what should appear on the screen, but an advertisement! It was supposed to show the cover of the book I was reading. Nonplussed, I called up Kobo customer support, and talked with a sympathetic young woman, who explained to me that unfortunately the Recommended for You section was non-negotiable, and received my (polite but plain) ire with aplomb, and promised to forward my complaints to the development team. Key point that I missed in that phone call, due to the rage and whatnot: she was talking about the recommended titles list. She didn't once mention advertisements on screensavers.

So I reloaded the thing to factory firmware, and determined that I would simply live without wifi, but I was pissed. I wrote a scathing journal entry (next one down from this, which I've since removed as being incorrect and unfair), and contacted a couple of websites about this: Kobo was forcing advertisements (the key differentiator between the $100 and the $130 model) on people who'd paid the extra fee to avoid ads! If it had been true, I believe it would have been the downfall of the company -- you can't steal 30 bucks from thousands of customers and laughingly tell them to suck it up.

However, as my glowing resentment slowly cooled, I started to get hints, possibly delivered via sledgehammer, that I had been too hasty. Finally another call to Kobo delivered the true result: I'd purchased a "with Offers" model, without knowing it.

There is no indication anywhere on the box that this was a "with Offers" model. There was no indication in the model number (which had been different, in the $85 listing). It was only by combining the information from call #3 to Kobo that my model was "affiliated with Target" with the Target website (where the only black-colored model like mine I could find was the ad-supported version for $99, with, damningly, the exact same model number as the full-price versions in different colors) that I finally got the hint that was confirmed in call #4.

Fortunately, my ire is fungible, and was immediately redirected on the Ebay seller, who finally agreed to a full refund under threat of negative feedback (and what would have been an equally scathing diatribe here). I'm sending that thing back today, ads and all, and they're welcome to it. $115 for a $99 device doesn't sound like a particularly good deal to me, even if I decided to live without wifi.

So, what is this lesson I've learned? One I already knew, of course, but have to re-demonstrate to myself every once in a while: people are deceitful bastards, and will cheat you any way they can, particularly when it's via an anonymous, faceless transaction on Ebay. I found lots and lots of "Kobo Touch" listings, and not one of them included the words "with Offers." Care to wager how many of them were actually the ad-free, full-price model? Me neither.

Wow. I just... Wow. (updated)

I've removed my post on this, in which I incorrectly assumed that Kobo was forcing screensaver ads upon non-ad-supported readers. After working with Kobo to figure out what the problem is, it turns out that I was duped by a false Ebay listing.

I apologize to Kobo for my harsh words, they were unwarranted given the full facts in the case.

ADI v1.0 Officially Works

I am ridiculously pleased at this moment.

The new printed circuit board works perfectly! Well, very close, and close enough that I could slap this thing into a case and call it done!

Initial smoke testing (apply power, see if anything goes foom) came back negative, no smoke in evidence. Swapping the ATMega chips around proved to be more troublesome than I'd expected, but careful perseverence paid off. At first, the LCD wouldn't display anything, and I had this overwhelming moment of, "Oh jeez, where do I even start?" I don't have an oscilloscope any more, so I was limited to a multimeter for testing.

Fortunately, the first thing I tested ended up being the problem. The LCD's RW line (read-write? something like that) was at +5v, when it should have been at ground. I checked the layout, and, sure enough, that was the second LCD pin that I had incorrectly routed to power instead of ground. I clipped the wire, jumpered it temporarily to ground, and voila everything worked!

Final tally: two mistakes total, and both of those easily worked around. Not bad for my first-ever PCB design! I've already corrected both pins on the 1.1 version of the design (which will also include an ICSP header). I'm also pondering how this thing is going to get cased, and thinking about going with a premade case for simplicity's sake. That would also mean that anyone else who wanted to build the project would have one less step involved.

Overall, obviously I'm completely pleased. I didn't expect this thing to work right out of the box (to the extent that it does). Aside from two jumpers on the LCD, it's working exactly like I thought it would. When does that happen?

One interesting factor that's pretty surprising is the power consumption. I figured this board would be pulling down 100-150 mA, but even at full backlight, it's only drawing 40 mA at 7-15VDC in. There must be some power-hungry component on my cobbled-together system that's not present in this board (the USB chip is the only thing I can think of), but whatever it is, it's great news! At 40 mA (call it 50 for a bit of safety-factor), a set of 3AA batteries would theoretically power this thing for 50 hours! (Not really, of course -- once the voltage drops below about 4.3, it'd probably stop working.) Any vehicle's electrical system will take this load without even noticing it. Just shy of .03 watts! That's not a typo; point-zero-three.

I can't wait to get this thing in a case, although that is a completely different challenge, and one which is roughly commensurate with making the electronics in the first place, depending on how I go about it. I'm just amazed that it works, and so pleased I can call it "good enough," and move on to the next phase!

The Penultimate in ADI Progress

After a fairly annoying day, I came home with a freshly-printed transparency of the top paste layer for the ADI board -- that is, what would soon become my solder stencil. I'm using solder paste on this project, and this allows me to apply it in a single swipe.

The advice from Sparkfun on creating a solder paste stencil is that you send out your stencil files, and have a production house do it. They also say, several different ways, that this is nowhere near the critical step you might think it is -- in other words, that close is good enough.

I took that advice to heart, and decided that I would give it a try in the most homebrewed way possible. I opened up the circuit board in Eagle, and selected only the tPaste layer to view. I printed this out, onto a standard laser jet transparency that I picked up at an office supply store. The box claims that it's a 5.3 mil thick sheet.

When I got home, transparency and new X-acto knife in hand, I very carefully cut just inside the tPaste lines (and only cutting out a smaller square in the middle of the CR2032's minus pad). This resulted in a somewhat amateurish, but serviceable-looking stencil. Granted, I wouldn't want to do this for hundreds of SMT devices, but for my three devices, it wasn't bad.

After that, I just swiped away with the paste (also from Sparkfun) and a utility razor blade. Voila! I did it twice, rejecting the first one as being a bit too messy on the BMP085, which has miniscule pads. The second attempt wasn't any better, so I just very carefully separated the adjoining solder paste blobs with the razor knife, and called it good enough.

I borrowed a hotplate from a friend who's treaded this path before me, in order to do the heating. The idea (as documented by Sparkfun here) is that you apply the paste, drop your components in place, then stick the whole mess on a hotplate or skillet. You heat it up until the solder liquifies, then you pull it off and let it cool down.

That is, more or less, what I did. I had checked beforehand with my handy IR thermometer, and found that this particular hotplate had a hotter spot in one area, so I determined that I would stick my board there. I cranked that sucker up to HIGH, dropped the board on the hotspot, and watched it carefully. Within about a minute, all the solder had gone liquid, and I pulled it off.

I actually think the heat was up too high (the plate itself got up over 320°C), as the board got a little scorched-looking on the bottom. I think it could have been set to a lower temperature and still done the job just fine. But scorching aside, the board looked great, and testing revealed no solder bridges on the BMP085, which was my only real concern.

The downside to this approach is that I now had a handful of components stuck to the board, and any real chance of doing a phased installation, with intermittent smoke checks, was gone. So I stuffed the whole board and soldered it all up. It looks great, but I haven't taken the final step of applying 7-30 VDC to the input terminal to see what goes foom.

In documenting the LCD connector, I did discover that I made one mistake: the pin 12 connection should be to ground, not to +5v. It's easy to work around, just don't attach a wire from pin 12 to the LCD, but it's a little silly. That fix will go into the next version.

My next step is to take my fate firmly by the horns, apply power, and see where the smoke escapes. For now, I think I'm going to go to bed while I can still ride the good feeling of making progress, without the disappointment of destroying components. Leave that for another day.

Photographic Opportunities

Once again, I'm reminded of the amazing opportunities I get when taking pictures at theatrical events. From 14/48:

ADI, Populated

I finally had some time this evening to sit down with my new ADI board and see if everything actually fit (it looked like it did on paper, but you can never tell for sure).

It actually all looks really good, with only one exception -- the potentiometer in the upper right hand corner doesn't fit into its space very well, the holes for the leads are a bit too skinny. I can make it work for the first version, and be perfectly happy with it, but I'll tweak that on the next version (which I've already started modifying, and will include an ICSP header above the processor, in that blank space toward the LCD connector).

Now I'm just waiting on getting a hotplate to do the surface mount parts (which I'm hoping to document for the ADI page). Well, I still have to confirm all the connections with a continuity tester, but I don't expect any problems there. I may be only a day or two from having a working one-board ADI!

Update: Three things, actually. First, by straightening out the legs of the potentiometer, it slid right in, so no changes required there.

Secondly, out of curiosity, I piled all the parts onto the balance to see what they weighed. Including too-long leads on most of the components, and a paper package around my 2032 battery (but no solder), the entire ADI weighs a mere 71 grams. Of course, a case and some wire is still required, but that's pretty light.

Finally, I did a quick sanity-check of the connections on the board, and they all look good. I still have to do a proper checklist, but things are looking very positive for this board actually working like I want it to.