Brrrrrrrrrr-rrrrrrrr-rrrrrr
November 29, 2006
That chattering noise you hear is the sound of my teeth encountering a Minnesota winter.
It’s at once exhilarating and stupid. Exhilarating, because the air is so fresh and clear and crisp, almost as if there’s a different brand of oxygen out here. Some of my favorite winter moments have been spent in Minnesota.
Stupid, because (a) it’s not winter yet so it has no business being this cold and (b) after careful consideration of the 10-day weather forecast for Minneapolis, I chose a coat rated to about 25 degrees F.
It’s now 8 degrees.
If you believe in windchill factors, it’s actually 6 degrees below. During the windy walk from my car to the hotel airlock I decided I fervently believe in windchill factors.
The weather report forecast snow for tonight but I think it’s ‘way too cold (although my mother pointed out that it’s always ‘way too cold in Antarctica but still manages to snow regularly). Ironically, back in glassland we’re getting unseasonably cold weather with a generous helping of snow and sleet. Mom says my car will need to be dug out.
I did get to see a great Minnesota thunderstorm earlier in the week, something I dearly miss in glassland. But my hope for a good old Minnesota snowstorm will have to wait until my next visit, it seems. And by the time I get home, all the snow will be melted.
Drat. I’m visiting my favorite snowflake site (courtesy of CalTech) as a consolation prize.
Apparently having nothing better to do, these guys have developed a snowflake microphotography system that takes absolutely gorgeous pictures of snowflakes from different parts of the world. They’ve written a guide to recognizing different snowflakes in the field, helped the US Post Office put snowflakes on a series of stamps and just generally tell the world about snowflakes.
Seriously, though, they’re using these things in ongoing crystallography research, and generously sharing galleries and galleries of their work. Definitely worth a visit.
They’ve also got a section on frost, which explains why I couldn’t see out of my freezing car tonight. I’d rolled up the windows, trapping the moist heat from my body inside (I suppose) and when the temp dropped it condensed and made some beautiful patterns on the inside of the windshield.
Too bad rental cars don’t come with ice scrapers. Took about 15 minutes for the car defroster to work up enough gumption to melt it, which gave me plenty of time to study the dying crystallization patterns.
They would have been a lot more fascinating observed while inside a down parka.
Sam Donaldson’s mascara is running
November 28, 2006
My first trip to the White House as a reporter was not exactly an unqualified success.
For one thing, I hadn’t been in Washington DC long enough to really acquire the jaded affect of the rest of the DC press corps and I stuck out like a sore thumb. For another, I wasn’t exactly in the DC press corps–I was a PC reviewer for a newspaper about public sector computing, Government Computer News.
My interest in the White House was usually limited to presidential use of Macs and PCs. Clinton and Monica Lewinsky would never appear on my radar…unless Clinton used an optical mouse instead of a cigar.
Steerage
November 23, 2006
A friend and I had lunch last week and I learned she grew up on a farm in eastern Oregon, where she drove a combine, gathered eggs, herded cattle and did all those farm-ey things. We had lots in common; I didn’t grow up on a farm–far from it–but I did grow up in Fresno, California, where agricultural practices were so pervasive that “wheel-move irrigation” and the price of orange juice were a part of any teen’s lexicon.
We happily chatted away about aggie stuff and I told her I’d learned a lot about agriculture in my youth. Most memorably, however, I’d learned that you never slaughter cattle with your eyes closed.
Counting electric sheep
November 22, 2006
Just a short note–I’ve been using a new screensaver on my Macs and PCs lately and it’s so hypnotic it’s beginning to interfere with my work. It’s called Electric Sheep and it’s the brainchild of Scott Draves, an incredible electronic artist living in San Francisco. It’s called Electric Sheep in honor of one of my favorite scifi novels, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” (If you saw the movie BladeRunner, with Harrison Ford, you saw a much-modified excerpt from that book)
According to the electricsheep site, the screensaver is based on animating fractal algorithms (something that’s fascinated me for decades). Draves uses a peering arrangement to share computing resources and bubble the most popular animations to the top. Essentially, whenever the screensaver is loaded (and connected to the Web), part of its computing resources are donated to rendering new animations. Users can vote on favorite sheep, which then appear more often.
The images across the top are samples shot from my computer–I’m getting so hung up on these things that I’m snapping photos with my digital camera when my favorite sheep whizz by. It’s MUCH better than a screen aquarium.
You can download the screensaver directly from the site–it’s open source–and it works on Windows, Mac and Linux systems. You can also use a tool called Apophysis to manipulate the algorithms and design your own sheep…which can be uploaded back into the system for rendering and display to the world.
The electricsheep system is not small–you can spend a couple hundred megabytes on hard drive space, it eats every nanosecond of bandwidth you can give it, and it’s certainly a time-waster–but it’s worth it.
Fascinating stuff.
The last of the ring mottles
November 21, 2006
A ring mottle is not some wierd kind of pigeon. It’s a type of patterned colored glass used by some of the best-known stained glass artisans in history, i.e., Tiffany, LaFarge, etc. (I believe Tiffany’s studio invented ring mottle, but don’t quote me.)
The ring mottles are gorgeous when you see them in person but I don’t think they photograph very well (see above). I’ve used them in cabinet doors, or just to hang on the wall. Never tried fusing them, but supposedly fusing/slumping temps make the distinctive rings go away. I’m told the rings are caused by localized crystalization, and remelting those crystals turns a ring mottle back into plain old streaked colored glass. Ring mottles are expensive enough (and pretty enough) that I’ve taken the experts at their word and never tried fusing one..
Anyway, got a newsletter from Bullseye announcing that they’re discontinuing ring mottle glasses “to concentrate more resources on our innovative line of Bullseye Compatible glass for art and architecture.”
Hmmm. Wonder if Bullseye will do that with their other non-fusible glasses, and if they’re part of a larger trend? Certainly in the circles I travel Bullseye is better known for compatible, i.e., kilnworkable glass, and there’s obviously a nice market there. The folks at Spectrum told me that their fusible glass business is accelerating much faster than their other glasses. Be interesting to compare stained glass vs. fusible glass sales ratios over the last 5-10 years and see what the industry is doing overall.
Oh well…I’m not an expert on modern colored glass business, so who knows? The rest of the glass industry seems to be waking up to the fusible glass market and as far as I’m concerned that’s a great thing. The more choices, and the bigger my palette, the better.
In the meantime, it’ll be sad to see the BE ring mottles go.
Mom’s making her own glass
November 18, 2006
Held an informal workshop in my studio a few weeks ago–enjoyed it very much and my “students” appeared to get a kick out of it as well–and Mom suggested that she would like to do some glasswork, too.
She’s a terrific ceramic artist; some of the pieces she’s thrown for my birthday/Christmas gifts are among the favorites in my collection. Ceramic artists have a pretty ingrained understanding of the effects of heatwork, and we’ve often discussed the differences between ceramics and glass in that respect, so I figured she’d take to it.
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Freddie grows fangs
November 18, 2006
Freddie, my new MacBook Pro, has been living with me for not quite three weeks; we took a week-long business trip together. In some ways I’m more impressed than ever.
In others, I’m like the honeymoon husband who says, “But sweetheart–you never told me you could only sleep on a bed stuffed with earth from your native homeland. And how come my neck hurts?”
Make no mistake, there are still a lot of things I love about Freddie; the degree of thought that went into her design is staggering.
Uninstalling on Windows can be tedious and long-winded. Uninstalling on a Mac (if they’ve used “packages”) is as simple as dragging the unwanted application folder to the trash. Macs only have one-button mice (which drives me crazy) but put a two-button mouse on Freddie and she uses both buttons without hesitation.
Most of my issues, to be fair, aren’t with the computer but instead with Parallels and Microsoft’s Mac Office suite. Parallels lets you run Windows XP alongside Mac OS X.
Running Windows XP on a Mac is one of the reasons I bought Freddie in the first place, as I said before, but given my experience to date it’s not reliable enough for business. And a really dumb tech support policy from the Parallels folks doesn’t help. Most problems, fortunately aren’t fatal:
- Even with Parallels Tools installed, Windows can’t consistently recognize devices. Filling in a field in a form usually makes the mouse cursor disappear until I dip down to a Mac window and back.
- I’ve yet to be able to write to a CD or DVD from within Windows, even though Parallels says it’s turned on and active. Worse, while Parallels is running I can’t always get to the DVD drive from the Mac side, either.
- Ditto for USB, although a dual reboot (Mac and Windows) usually brings it back.
- Parallels’ dual-mode XP screen is bigger than the laptop screen and I can’t reduce it, which means that the Start bar is off the page and unusable. The only way I can access the Start panel is to move to fullscreen mode, which means I lose the Mac environment unless I have a second screen attached to Freddie.
- More seriously, Parallels/Windows completely lost network access the moment I left home for the airport. Neither I or a very skilled network manager could figure out the problem.
So I spent the trip in an electronic bucket brigade, working in XP, saving my files into a shared Windows/Mac folder, switching to Mac and retrieving them, then mailing or uploading them wherever they needed to go. It took about two hours of that nonsense to have me wondering why I hadn’t just bought a plain old Windows machine for much less money and skipped the whole Parallels experience.
Parallels support, which waited almost a week to respond, arrived too late to save the trip. They told me to once again to install the latest build of their software, which got the network going again. This is the third build I’ve had in less than a month; I’ve seen beta cycles that aren’t that fast.
Finally, I mostly abandoned Windows for the MS Office Mac trial version that came pre-loaded on Freddie…and that started a whole new set of problems. Every time I did any major operation in MS Office I got a nag screen telling me to buy a copy, and some operations such as print were strictly forbidden.
The nagging extends to e-mail—it wasn’t until a bunch of mails didn’t go through that I tried some mail trials and discovered that Office was substituting an “Office 2004 Test Drive User” name for mine in all my e-mails. My clients’ mail filters automatically dumped them in the junk mail folders.
Microsoft doesn’t let you buy a license key and unlock the trial version (you must delete it before you can install the one you’ve bought). I had purchased a copy but in the week it took to arrive I got enough MS-nagging to last two lifetimes.
Freddie, however, remains as charming as ever, even with the Parallels limitations. About the only thing I’m really disappointed by is her sound system; you’d think Apple could figure out a way to shield the MBP’s mini-plug jack to avoid all the truly painful noise. The salesman suggested I buy a set of Bose USB speakers “to ensure there’s no system noise.” Now I see why.
So…would I have been better off buying a Windows laptop? Let’s not go there yet. There’s enough good stuff about the MBP that I’m determined to make this marriage work.
Who knows? Maybe the next Parallels build will solve all my problems.
FiOSity
November 14, 2006
Get a load of this:
What you’re looking at is my Internet connection speed coming from Ookla’s “Speedtest” software. Verizon just installed a FiOS (FibreOptic Services) connection to my house. SpeedTest is clocking about 15Mbps on the download (roughly 10X the speed of a T1 connection) and about 1.7Mbps on the upload, or just slightly faster than a T1.
Yeeehah.
And right now it’s about $35/month, including the wireless router, with about $20 for the installation. That’s cheaper than my cable modem. In a year it goes up to $45/month.
I’ve had a long-standing interest in the last mile problem–there are still vast stretches of the US where broadband simply isn’t available. Until 3 years ago my parents (in Cape Girardeau, MO) were stuck with dial-up–not even ISDN.
12 years ago the Washington DC suburb where I lived didn’t offer cable or DSL yet, so I concatenated multiple ISDN lines for speed. That was OK when it worked, which was about half of the time–Bell Atlantic had problems….
So did the cops–they assumed that any residence with 10 phone lines was up to no good. Took some fast talking to convince them I wasn’t running bookies or hookers, especially when they saw the server racks in my basement.
I made a rule right after that to never again live in a house that didn’t ALREADY have broadband. That policy got a lot of odd looks in 1997, but now real estate and rental agents pretty much take it in stride.
FiOS, though, is new for me–it’s Verizon’s PON (Passive Optical Network)–AT&T sells a competing service called U-verse. It’s more normally a small/medium business offering, so hopefully they’ve had time to get most of the bugs out.
The tcom crews came through here over the summer and tore up the roads to bring the fibre into the neighborhood. Installation into my house took two visits, one to prep the outside lines and the one today, to actually get the connections into the house.
That last, from a great tech named Stephanie, took about four hours. She installed a new fibre box and phone box (my voice phone is also on the system) outside, stuck a power/battery backup system in the garage, and ran Ethernet CAT5 cable into the house. Then she hooked up the router, an Actiontec, which is roughly the size of a small briefcase and has an extremely nice admin interface. (I like it better than my old Linksys admin console, anyway)
I’ve got my main desktop wired into the router; the rest of the household is wireless. About the only problem we had was setting up Freddie Mac–the MacBook Pro’s Airport connection sneered at the default 64-bit WEP encryption key. Fortunately the Actiontec supports multiple security protocols, so we found something a bit more stringent and Freddie happily joined the network.
So…just how much faster is this thing? Hard to say–there are a lot of variables in any Internet speed test. I tested on two different Oookla Speedtest sites within 5 minutes of each other, and the second never returns more than 10Mbps on download. Freddie Mac, my new MacBook Pro, runs about 20% slower on the wireless connection; Fred, her Windows XP alter ego running in Parallels and using the same connection, is about 20% slower still.
It does appear to be faster overall. Because it’s a shared pipe I’m noticing slowdowns in the heavy usage (i.e., 6-8pm) period. And my 15Mbps connection doesn’t mean much if the server I’m connecting to only supports 1.5Mbps.
Still, on Day 1 I’m pretty happy with the results. Since the best connection is one you never have to notice I hope I never write about it again…
Wordplaydough
November 10, 2006
Note to all who call a spade an individualized excavatory device:
Stop it.
Of course, if they really stopped, I’d be on welfare. Finding the right words has paid the mortgage for many years.
Still, there are times I wish that people wouldn’t assume that originality and confusing the hell out of the customer are the same thing. I mention this because I encountered a perfect example just now in my hotel shower. I reached for the soap and was confronted with this:
Scrub.
Wash.
Soften.
Tame.
Cleanse.
This is what happens when a creative pushes the envelope so far he pops clear through and lands in a heap on the floor. I can just see three guys in black turtlenecks sitting around a granite and steel conference table:
“I know! Instead of using tired old words like “shampoo” and “conditioner” on these hotel packages, let’s be INNOVATIVE and ORIGINAL…”
As a result, I’m asking a not very innovative or original question: What the heck am I supposed to put on my washcloth? The Scrub? The Wash? Should I play it safe and stick with the familiar shape of the Cleanse?
Thank heavens these guys don’t also supply this hotel with airsickness bags, feminine tampons and toilet paper. If they did, I’d be writing about the Barf, the Plug, and the Sh….never mind.
Yes, your honor, that’s the truth. I swear.
November 3, 2006
Do you ever wish there were some kind of absolute truth machine? One where you feed the words into the hopper at one end and at the other end a bell dings and a screen pops up saying “Yup, it’s true,” or “Absolute, total BS. Ignore it.”
I sure do. It would save so much time.
When I was in college I concocted a series of proofs and equations I called the “calculus of truth.” They were based on the idea that there was no absolute truth that really mattered, and that in fact what did matter, the global perception of that truth, changed over time in fairly predictable patterns. If you could slice time into fine enough chunks and analyze the various claims floating around inside those chunks you not only could figure out the “truth”, i.e., the optimal global perception for that time, but you also could predict its origins, how it would change over time and its historical perceptions at 20, 50, 100 years and beyond.
(It probably isn’t necessary to mention that I wasted a LOT of time in college.)
If we had the ability to freeze time, stack all the stories together so their points corresponded and then twist and turn them into something that really fit, my little truth calculus might be useful. Unfortunately, I can’t freeze time, and I don’t have enough spare time to figure out which political action committee is telling the fewest election campaign lies THIS time.
So…I’m going to take the popular, expedient route. I’m going to grab a couple of issues that I am familiar with and feel strongly about and research those to come to a well-reasoned, thoughtful decision. For the rest I’m going to rely on soundbytes and gut feelings, or maybe close my eyes and hope the checkmark lands in the right box.
Dammit. And it’s not just politics, although this being the week before elections they’re at top of mind right now.
I saw a commercial last night featuring Ben Stein on a raft in some pristine northern lake, presumably Alaska. He tells us that Alaska seafood is great, that it’s a renewable resource, and that I should grab a fork and eat as much as I want because there’s plenty more where that came from.
About an hour later I came across this article in the Sacramento Bee (OK, so the Bee papers aren’t exactly a paragon of truth and virtue, but still…). It says that we’re eating so much seafood these days that by 2048 those species will “collapse” and we’ll have to eat sea squirts.
Interesting. So does that mean I should stop eating fish? That I should only eat fish when I’m visiting Alaska? That I should sue Ben Stein for fraud? Or should I grab a fork and eat fast because in 2048 I’ll become a vegetarian? (presuming, of course, that I’m alive and still have my teeth)
Or does it maybe mean that I add overfishing to a brain circuit already crammed with global warming, domestic violence, deforestation, overflowing unrecyclable trash piles, child abuse, the AIDS epidemic, starving children, teen pregnancy, drug cartels with more power than the oil industry, gay bashing, terrorism, some Colorado pastor who may or may not be a gay meth-ridden massage freak (and why anyone should care), the increasing consolidation of the media into a single newsfeed that may not be the truth but it’s a helluva lot cheaper than actually researching the story, air pollution, the immolation of women in India, water pollution, the rise of slavery, cruelty to animals, female circumcision, the Republicans’ Capitol Hill arrest record which now threatens to beat the Democratic record set under (sometimes literally) Clinton, genocide, the alarming rise of serial killers, elder bashing, an asteroid heading our way, our unpreparedness for a west coast tsunami…
(slap) getting a grip now
So, since Amazon so far doesn’t carry truth machines, I’m repeating my election policy, focusing on the issues that I feel strongly about and might be able to affect (you can probably tell what they are from reading the above list). Otherwise, I’ll get through life as best I can. I promise to “Awwwwwwww,” whenever a story about something else on the above list pops up on the news. (except for the one about the pastor)
And that’s the truth.