| Back on 2 wheels |
[Aug. 7th, 2008|09:30 pm] |
The other day, I took a couple bicycles to the shop, which have been sitting around in disrepair for a while. My mountain bike has had a slow leak in both tires, and a problem shifting that only allowed access to half the available gears in the rear. I'm glad to have it back again, as it opens the possibility that I may get back into doing some light technical trail riding, as is available within walking distance from my house at Walnut Creek Park. I could have done these repairs myself and used to do them routinely, but these days with so little free time, it's hard to motivate myself to get stuff like that done.
But this post isn't about that bike. The other bike I got back home today is special.
( More ) |
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| Linksys WMP54G in Windows XP x64 Edition |
[Aug. 3rd, 2008|12:07 pm] |
So, you're running Windows XP x64, perhaps after a disastrous stint with the 64-bit Windows Vista, and you're happy except you want to add a wireless card and you're finding that most on the market don't support your OS. I had a similar experience recently that had me buying 2 different cards, only to find that they aren't supported. First was a D-Link WDA-1320, and after the experience of being told by support that they simply won't ever provide a driver, I was a little more careful in choosing the next card, a Linksys WMP54G. I'd read several reviews of people who'd gotten it to work, so I bought one.
( Of course, it wasn't as easy as they let on... )
Let me also add that this sort of thing makes me even more ticked that Linksys does not support XP x64 with this card. It would have required no extra software development on their part; RALink has obviously done all the work already. |
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| Arms depot explosion in Sofia |
[Jul. 6th, 2008|11:08 pm] |
There's not really all that much that's remarkable about this video. Just your typical massive exploding stockpile of aging soviet era weapons and explosives, stored (of course) near the capitol and population center of a major eastern european country.
At approximately 1 minute and 33 seconds in however, there's a pretty cool moment in the video. Watch carefully, and you'll notice a shockwave radiating outward through the surrounding clouds of smoke. A couple seconds later, the wave hits the camera and only then do you hear the "BANG". |
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| Temporarily losing a friend, perspective of a teetotaler. |
[Jul. 2nd, 2008|10:55 am] |
I've got something in my head today that I need to get out, and after a quick epiphany ("Hey, that's what LiveJournal is for, remember what it was like to post to LiveJournal?") I figure I'll just lay it out here.
Last night I went to sit and talk with an old friend who'd recently been dumped, suddenly and as I would learn, very coldly and harshly by his girlfriend of a year and a half. I'd only intended to be there for a couple hours at most, since I have a lot of EV design work to do and I really couldn't even afford the break yesterday at all.
( Long, weird screed... ) |
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| The manufacturing force powering modern society |
[Jun. 27th, 2008|03:16 pm] |
Found a brilliant and insightful article, detailing the realities of manufacturing in China -- what it's doing to us, and what it's doing to them. |
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| Something rotten in the state of Denmark |
[Jun. 10th, 2008|03:33 pm] |
I probably should just let this sort of thing go, but I find such developments deeply troubling, on a moral and ethical basis.
How on earth are they going to fairly and accurately judge and rate the contestants' competitive performances, to assure an unbiased decision is made? The mens' efforts yield a very obvious, visible manifestation that can be easily quantified and compared. But for the women it seems like it's going to amount to little more than an acting contest. Just think of the accusations, the anger, the sweaty, inadequately-clad retaliatory catfights...
Of what further lapses of fairness and sportsmanship shall we find humanity to be capable? It's distressing, I tell you. |
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| Eh, it's in there. |
[Jun. 8th, 2008|11:10 pm] |
Managed to "finish" the mounting base I've been building this weekend, for mounting our digitizing arm in arbitrary positions in and around a car. It actually needs a lot of improvements (lockable ball joints being one of the most important), but for the moment we have it set up in the engine bay of the Mazda 3, and it appears to be stable enough to provide reasonably good measurement data.
Yep, pretty ghetto. Those are indeed Vise-grip C clamps welded to the ends, and the rest of the apparatus is made from aluminum plate and extruded aluminum L-channel. Aaron admitted he didn't think it was going to work :o) |
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| You ever have one of those days? |
[Jun. 7th, 2008|10:39 pm] |
One good moment today, getting to drive the 2002 Saturn SL we've been working on converting to electric power, for the first time.
With its 144V pack, it performed pretty strongly, though not as strongly as I'd hoped. Still, it's not a bad car, and low-end acceleration is actually pretty brisk. 1st gear is a bit too low to be practical, and it's pretty easy to spin the tires so we normally start out in second gear instead.
( More ) |
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| It's Hot Steamy Food In Your Face, Right Now. |
[Jun. 4th, 2008|10:39 pm] |
Yum Brands' latest innovation, the Feed Bag. |
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| Disappointing tactics |
[May. 2nd, 2008|02:18 pm] |
I don't know what good it could do to post this here, but this sort of thing pisses me off enough to say something. Plus, it goes along with a conversation I was having last night. Maybe it will be helpful just to have another page out there with a link.
That they bask in their own ignorance and don't really bother to understand what they're arguing against is one thing, but resorting to actively deceptive practices and lying to the public is something worse -- with which I'm beginning to strongly associate at least the central proponents of Intelligent Design. This article about Ben Stein's new movie Expelled is a good summary of some stuff I've read in the past couple of days, put together in a handy list. The first item (which I hadn't seen before) is the smokiest gun in the lot, I think. For no really good reason, I'll quote it here:
( Read more ) |
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| unsettling |
[Apr. 11th, 2008|01:15 pm] |
This is one of the most depressing things I have read in a long time.
I vehemently disagree with its central concepts and I believe the author has made some profoundly foolish choices -- her situation is in large part the fruit of her own hubris. Some of this she acknowledges but of some of it she seems to remain self-righteously ignorant. Due to the problems that her distorted worldview has helped her to create for herself she's obviously become very bitter, and flavored by this her article comes across more as irrational, unfocused invective than sound relationship advice on which a reasonable person would base their most important life choices.
What really depresses me however is that not everyone will agree with me whether they've read her article or not, and that I am at this stage in my life undeniably the broken and deeply flawed creature she recommends to her readers. Her friend who is waiting for his dream girl to change her mind and come back to him, he confuses me especially. He seems happy to think that eventually she'll be forced by circumstance to settle for him, despite his knowledge that even after a concerted effort she's failed (repeatedly) to find a sufficient emotional connection with him to provide fulfillment in her life. Am I just wired differently, that I find such a situation to be tragic? The absence of hope is a far more comfortable thing to me, than hope of that kind.
For a more analytical (if perhaps not very scientifically rigorous) treatment of the situation, this is the article that lead me to the one above. |
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| Fixing the Neptune |
[Mar. 26th, 2008|11:51 pm] |
Due to my grandfather's failing health, I'm soon to have my mother and my brother, and possibly his wife staying with me at The Projects (aka. my house). This is a situation I've always sort of known would happen. Not the very unfortunate cause, but just the sudden need to get my house in order such that it's livable to those who have not been gradually indoctrinated into the domestic chaos that surrounds me despite my best but largely ineffectual efforts to subdue it. ( more... ) |
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| A great speech today |
[Mar. 18th, 2008|09:38 pm] |
Over the past few years, I've gathered a sort of reflex reaction to presidential speeches; whenever I think about the president giving a speech I invariably cringe inside, and honestly I can't bear to listen to them. I read summaries afterward, but actually sitting through them makes me embarassed, as I think about how people all over the world can listen in and wonder what on earth we were thinking four and eight years ago.
Today, I listened to a speech that contrasts so completely, it gives me hope for the future. Apparently there are indeed still some intelligent, articulate people in politics these days, and one of them is even running for president. I can only hope.
I haven't been able to sit through more than just a few minutes of speeches like these in a very long time. Tonight, I listened to the entire thing. |
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| A single neutrino penetrates the skull... |
[Mar. 12th, 2008|11:16 pm] |
Have you ever had one of those moments when a long-unresolved mystery suddenly becomes clear? With no additional information, just a random connection in your mind of different pieces of information -- not even necessarily something you're thinking heavily about at the time, but just something that clicks .... ?
Unfortunately, it happened to me on the topic of something a bit silly and mundane, but it was pretty cool to see it happen anyway. Almost like some part of my brain was on autopilot for a moment, and came up with the answer without my asking it to.
Several years ago, I had roommates, and a couple of those roommates had some mutual friends between them. On one evening there was some kind of small party going on, with a bunch of people I hadn't met hanging around, and at one point they were doing board games or something similar and sort of had stuff sprawled out on the floor. I don't remember anymore if the particular person I'm thinking about was one of Shawnasee's friends or Skyler's or both, but at any rate I remember at one point he asked if he could borrow my KitchenAid stand mixer. As I recall he'd been taking cooking classes and wanted to demonstrate for some other people there how to make pizza dough.
Some time later, the mixer stopped working. I wasn't there to see it happen, but I was there shortly afterward, and I remember fiddling with it trying to see if it was just a transient problem. No luck.
Fast forward about 4 years; after several false starts over that period of time, just this afternoon I managed to get it fixed and running again. The failure was a thermal fuse, which "blows" like a normal fuse except it happens at a certain temperature (140C in this case) instead of a certain electrical current. The motor had overheated, and the thermal fuse saved it from burning out. I finally spliced in a replacement I picked up at Fry's and put everything back together.
What's been bugging me though, is how/why it happened. I've been telling myself it happened because he must have been kneading the dough with the dough hook above speed 2 (which the manual warns you not to do). I wasn't there to see it, and he said he wasn't running it too fast, but I never did think of a better explanation. He said it had been kneading for a while, and it just stopped. If he had been running it at the proper speed (going faster doesn't make much sense, for kneading dough), it certainly wasn't doing anything beyond its capabilities.
This evening, a couple hours after I'd gotten the mixer put back together and used it for the first time in years, the answer hit me. When I took the mixer apart a while back (it's been sitting in pieces in my garage for at least a couple years), I noted its interesting cooling strategy -- the exhaust vent is at the back, and the cooling air is pulled up through the hollow body of the stand itself. Within seconds, that thought and all the rest started to self-assemble in my head:
- They'd been playing board games on the living room floor
- He'd put the mixer there on the floor with him so they all could watch it working while they were playing
- The air intake is literally underneath the foot of the mixer
- Back then, I had carpet.
Ding! It was choking for air, while kneading heavy pizza dough. Ordinarily, the machine has more than enough power to do this sort of thing (475W) but in that case, it's easy to see why it failed. Easy enough, in fact, to wonder why it didn't occur to me sooner.
When Holmes or Poirot put all the pieces together and find the murderer, I bet it feels something like this. Except that it's about something a little more important, and makes a better story. :o) |
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| Random thought, perspective on oil usage |
[Mar. 6th, 2008|12:48 am] |
While reading about the current record-breaking price of oil, I started thinking about how much petroleum we pump out of the ground and use every day. Just for the US, daily petroleum consumption is over 20 million barrels.
In the petroleum industry, a barrel is a unit equal to 42 US gallons. 20 million barrels therefore is equal to 840 million gallons. These are really big numbers, and it's kinda hard to visualize what exactly these amounts mean.
In agriculture, ecology, and similar fields there is a somewhat popular unit of measure for large quantities of liquid that would help wrap our minds around exactly what kind of amounts we're talking about. The unit is called an "acre foot", typically used to measure the amount of water in a lake or passing by a certain point in a river over a given measure of time. It literally refers to water at a depth of one foot, covering an area of one acre. That's a lot of water -- 325,851.429 US gallons in fact.
So for those like me who can't do the math in their head, that gives us approximately 2,578 acre feet of oil.
Let me say that again. 2,578 acre feet of oil. 2,578 acres covered by a standing foot of oil. Or put another way, a 257.8-foot-tall container of oil, with a bottom surface that's 10 acres large. The US uses this much oil every day. |
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| Participatory Democracy |
[Mar. 4th, 2008|09:57 pm] |
Wow, what a process. I've voted in the Democratic party primary today, and I attended the caucus this evening.
The voting went pretty smoothly, despite that they'd misspelled my last name in the registration. I was given a card to correct it (of course, someone's going to have to read what's on the card and type it in somewhere, which means they'll probably get it wrong again), but I was allowed to vote anyway. Voting was disappointingly still electronic. I guess that's probably the way it will be from now on. I still don't know who made the system, but at least it didn't appear to be Diebold.
The caucus, on the other hand .... was a mess. They were "Unprepared" for the turnout; they'd apparently expected between 20 and 30 people, and they got somewhere between 200 and 300. Our precinct's election activities are always carried out at the junior college near my house, and they'd picked out a room for everyone to gather. I got there at about 7:10 and the room was full; the long hallway outside it was about half full of people standing around. The hall is probably about a couple hundred feet long, and there were people lining the walls and standing in the middle. A half hour later it was completely packed, and then someone stepped out and told everyone in the hall to go to one end or the other depending on whether they were supporting Obama or Clinton. I didn't have to move, but probably half the people in the hall did. Lovely.
About 90 minutes after I arrived (and about 30 minutes after the announcement was made that sign-ins had started), the mass of people finally started to actually *move* perceptibly. I eventually went in, put my name and my choice down, and went home. I figured I'd probably regret not sticking around for the rest of it, but I figured I'd achieved the main thing I'd gone to do and I really was really getting tired of standing around rebreathing other people's exhaled air.
All in all, a pretty cool evening. |
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| Carbon fiber ... shortage? |
[Feb. 25th, 2008|09:48 pm] |
I've been spending part of this evening trying to help someone out, who is trying to build a carbon fiber shell for a solar race car.
I wanted to get some ideas on prices for various dimensions, weights and weaves of carbon cloth. What I discovered is that several sites are mentioning a global carbon fiber shortage. Apparently, word got out that carbon fiber kicks ass, and now people with deep pockets are starting to design everything out of it.
Of course that page seems a bit old and apparently this thing has been going on for a couple years now, but enough sources for carbon fiber are still mentioning this shortage that it seems it may still be a problem. I've found some hybrid weaves of Kevlar and carbon, that are just a little cheaper, and actually a little lighter as well. Undoubtedly not as strong, but perhaps the difference in strength won't be important. I am no expert on building solar cars, but my guess at the moment is that the strength of the frame is going to be the most important thing; the skin only needs to be strong enough to withstand handling and road vibration; it shouldn't be counted on to support loads.
Hope they have better sources than I've been able to find; $25-35 per square yard seems like a lot of money, especially given their need for about 100 square yards of the stuff. |
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| WANT. |
[Jan. 28th, 2008|11:57 am] |
There's something cool about riding a powered skateboard that looks like a normal board, but I think this is how all powerboards should be designed, from a practical perspective. There are so many places I'd like to rid my Exkate X24, except that it doesn't have the wheels to go over even smooth, flat unpaved trails. With large tires, problem solved. Any surface these wheels can't handle, I don't want to be riding on without handlebars.
Apparently the same motor and controller as on my board; good that they're putting a heatsink on the motor end bell now. I'm going to guess there's a nontrivial efficiency loss from the tires which might explain why the battery pack appears significantly larger on this board. |
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| Now it's really stuck in my head |
[Jan. 21st, 2008|09:55 pm] |
As getting back to writing in my journal here is in itself a return to the past (sort of), it seems (sort of) appropriate to post about a concert I went to this weekend. I've only been to 3 concerts in my life due to reasons I don't really even understand. In what might seem like a waste of these few experiences, the first and latest have been for Information Society, which was influential in my late high school and college days. I don't think it's evident from their popular songs, but there is definitely a geek element to the band, and that was definitely still present on Friday night.
It was really cool that the original 3 members were together again for the tour, but a bit strange that Kurt Harland was on stage singing songs from their latest release when in fact he only sang for one track on that album. Hearing the old material in the original voice was definitely stuff of nostalgia though, as the sound of it brought me back to my freshman dorm room, cranking the stereo to 11 and feeling the thumping against my ribcage while earplugs kept my ears from rupturing. Basically the same thing as at the concert -- without the plugs, I probably would have had some temporary deafness, and maybe a little permanent damage. I'm grateful to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) errantember for having remembered to bring them.
Note: Say you're wanting to buck the trend and protect your hearing at a concert, and you don't have any of those fancy clear hidden earplugs. Suppose also that you don't want to look like a responsible, self-respecting dork with bright blacklight-illuminated orange tufts hanging out of your ears. Handy tip: cut off the 1/4 inch "bell" at the end of the plug (you brought your Leatherman or Victorinox, right?), and insert normally. There will just be a dot at the end of your ear canal, yet enough to remove easily. Not a perfect solution but you'll feel less self-conscious, if you're that sort of person.
As the last item for this post, I have to mention ... there's one (actually, several) of their songs that's sticky in a strange way, it gets stuck in your head invariably in an alternative form. It's juvenile, but it's pretty unavoidable.
I want to know
What you're drinking
Those are piss stains you can't hide
I want to know
What you're smoking
Tell me what's blown your mind |
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annoyed
amused
blank
tired
giggly
thoughtful
drained
curious
excited