/project/multiplexer
Ramblings in a State of Insanity
Some Kindle Thoughts
02 years ago
Eric is trying to persuade me that the Amazon Kindle is not the end of the Codex as we know it or the end of human civilization. He bought me a book to read, a collection of highly goofy essays called “Things I Learned from Women who Dumped Me,” and conned me into reading it. I’m 70% done with the book, but I figured I could post a little commentary now.
- Reading off the Kindle does not give me headaches. If I try to read a long piece on a computer screen, I get throbbing headaches, but I did not have this issue with the Kindle.
- It is light and easy to hold and easy to flip pages. Eventually hitting the next page button doesn’t feel any different than turning a page.
- The raft of buttons at the bottom means I can prop it up on my chest and see it clearly. This is, oddly, a major plus.
- Clicking it on and being at the page I left off is really nice — no lost bookmarks or fumbling around with pages or having to skim pages to figure out where I left off.
- The controls aren’t bad. Takes a bit to get used to it, but not bad.
- Nice and light. Weighs much less than a paperback.
However, not knowing what page I am on in relation to the book is a bit weird. I finally realized the bottom bar is the chapter marks. I also find going to the Table of Contents to be really kludgy.
My verdict on it is that reading a book off the Kindle feels very much like listening to an audio book off Audible, except reading it instead of listening to it. It will not work for dense histories or reference books or art books or anything that really requires tons of focus. It’s pretty much great for the newest Christopher Moore novel or an Elmore Leonard novel or a history book by Sarah Vowell but I shy away from anything serious, dense, or requiring an index or lists of citations.
In my mind, I’d treat the Kindle more like an Audible subscription. These are books you don’t really need to keep but they’re nice to sort of breeze through with 1/2 of the attention and half the brain. It’s great for read once, toss away paperbacks. I like it in an it’s okay to read outside sort of thing, but it’s not going to be parting me from my books or book collections any time soon.
Terrifying Baby Dragon and Bag of Noro
0Two completed projects:
1. A terrifying baby dragon! He’s terrifying. And made of yarn. He also sat for a side view to show off his awesome back spines, wings and tail! He was made of many individually crocheted pieces but he is very cute. I will do more dragons in the future! He is looking at me RIGHT NOW.
2. This fat-bottomed bag is made out of 2 skeins of green and brown Noro all the way from Japan and stuffed in luggage! The first picture does not do it justice so here it is, filled with bunnies. It is a bunny-bag ratio! This bag is basically exactly 2 skeins of Noro — no more, no less. I was convinced I was going to run out for a while. I could snazz up the bag with some ribbon and a pin, I think.
Anyone Have a Primer on Protesting?
0It’s been so long since the Conservatives in this country have really gotten up a good protest that they’ve gotten out of practice. I want to be 100% clear:
* You named your protest Tea Bagging without putting it into, say, google, just to check.
* Your protested what you felt was about wasteful spending by buying one million teabags. Did you plan on drinking one million cups of tea? At $4.97 for 100 Lipton tea bags, that’s $50K on not even consumed tea.
* You protested the government running up debt and selling it to China by buying tea bags made from tea (dust)… from China.
* When you went to actually protest by dumping 1,000,000 tea bags in DC it turned out you didn’t have a park permit to protest and thus you were put down by the Man in the form of the US Park Service. (What happened to the 1M tea bags?)
* … and you protested taxation with representation by pretending you were being taxed without representation. Sometimes even dressing up! You didn’t even look up the Boston Tea Party on Wikipedia did you.
Okay, guys? I am seriously not against you protesting at all. Don’t think that I am. I’m good with you venting this way. But I think you need to go back, socialize a bit, run a few web searches, and try this again. Maybe try a few groups on Meetup? Meet at a coffee shop? Start small?
The Pink Elephant
0I had some pink yarn, and I wanted to do an experiment with it, so on a whim I gave in and decided to make a stuffy pink elephant. However, the pink elephant was (much) larger than I expected him to be, so I ran out of the original color mid-ear. So she is part-pink and part-purple.
Here is the pink elephant staring right at you in a pink elephant sort of way. She also sat for a nice side portrait. Then I did a size compare between the pink elephant and an ANSI Standard 4 Year Old. As you can see, the elephant is relatively large compared to the 4 year old.
My biggest sin: I am being too conservative with the stuffing. It leaves the stuffy very squishy but too floppy.
Dob Update
0We took the Dob out for real this evening because the evening was incredibly clear just as the sun went down. While Katie Rose was antsy while the telescope was positioned we were able to see:
- Some amazing cratering on the moon.
- The rings of Saturn and Titan.
The Dob was able to split the rings. Of course, nothing stayed in the view for very long because the Dob is manual and doesn’t have a worm gear to hold tracking, but for a little telescope, the optics were quite spectacular.
Katie got to see lunar details and the rings of Saturn from the driveway. Orion was a bust, but all in all, a pretty amazing success.
Museum and Gardening
0We took Katie to the Maryland Science Center on the Inner Harbor on the diagonal on the water from the National Aquarium in Baltimore. The Maryland Science Center is a hand’s on science museum focusing on dinosaurs, general Earth Sciences, Newtonian physics, (incredible amounts of) Biology, Space Sciences in cooperation with NASA and whatever special exhibits they are showing that season — right now, surviving Antarctica. My impressions:
All in all, we will return to the museum. It was accessible from 95, straight forward with parking, and lots of things to mess with. It was about the same size as the National Aquarium, so it’s a 4 hour museum, not a two day mega-haul like Air and Space down on the Mall. I want to look at what the benefits of being a member are and weigh if I want a family membership or not.
My tiny proto-biologist got out with a Cat in the Hat book that is an introduction to basic human anatomy, a second Cat in the Hat book with an introduction to Space Sciences, and a Discovery DVD on anatomy. (Katie is obsessed with how the human body works, and today’s organ was the lungs.)
Then I came home to resume my war. My Mom thinks I garden because it’s relaxing. I know I garden because I get to destroy my enemies, the weeds, with extreme justice. I’ve been working on it for the last month and I’ve actually de-garbaged it, pulled weeds, cut back plants, cut back the Rose Bush of Doom, planted more bulbs, and finally started laying down mulch. But right now I am out of mulch so I have been thwarted by reality. I don’t know what annuals are going to go into it this year. I haven’t thought that far. I am thinking things that grow big and aggressively instead of little sedate, timid things. And I am tempted by clematis on the side of the house just to see how insane the vine goes. It will need something to climb…
I’m doing a very small 3×3 vegetable garden with Katie Rose this year as an experiment in horticulture. It turns out Aerogarden has a vegetable seed-starter kit so we’re doing the daily observer-and-record cycle in the dining room while starting plants from seed. I find that I don’t care if I get a tomato out of it this year or not, but if Katie learns about how plants grow then it’s a score. After the seedlings move outside, the Aerogarden is going to be repurposed for cherry tomatoes.
It is very clear out so we’ve promised Katie Rose astronomy night. The Dob will go into the driveway and we’ll look at the Moon and see what else we can see…
AIG Bonuses
0Everyone is putting up their 2 cents about the AIGFP bonuses. So here is my little 2 cents — 1 cent, really, since I don’t have time to pontificate:
- It is pretty bad because these CDOs and credit default swaps are going to destroy the world economy and AIG was the primary peddler of these little toys. There is also a huge scam going on right now with the secondary recipients that makes me cringe.
- However, these were contractually given their bonuses.
- It is explicitly unconstitutional in the United States for Congress or any legislative body to levy an punitive tax to a specific group.
- They should have their bonuses.
- But nothing says the names and size of reward cannot be published on the front page of the Washington Post.
- I agree with Planet Money — the Administration has bigger issues. They should not even give lip service to any issue less than, say, $10 billion right now. $100 million is a tiny drop in an enormous river. Let it go, let the talking heads have outrage, move on.
Amigurumi!
0I buy yarn and turn it into stuffies!
I have made several things — scarves, mostly — but they haven’t been terribly interesting. Katie really liked the one I made for my Mom but otherwise they’ve just been scarves.
Then I decided to graduate to much more difficult crochet and started making amigurumi! These stuffies are tons of fun to make and they’re utterly adorable when they’re done. The first one I completed was a purple octopus but I didn’t have plastic eyes yet so I had to make the eyes. He turned out pretty good, and I am likely going to make him a pal. Katie immediately kidnapped him and now the purple octopus lives in Katie’s bed.
The more impressive amigurumi I made was the pink bunny in the white dress. The dress came out so-so, but the bunny came out spectacularly adorable. I can always make another dress, or a couple of dresses. The bunny is small and squeezable. By tomorrow morning, the bunny will also be stolen.
I love yarn you can squeeze! Yay!
Watchmen
0I have always liked the Watchmen graphic novel, although I have to confess that of all of Alan Moore’s work, From Hell was always my favorite. Or maybe the Green Lantern short story, “Mogo Does Not Socialize.”
Watchmen is essentially unfilmable in its complete form unless it has a 13-part HBO mini-series. It has too much stuff. And I don’t mean just the pirate story that was left on the cutting room floor: extended character backgrounds, extended backgrounds of characters within characters, sub-characters with full backgrounds, side stories, everything that makes Watchmen.
Zach Snyder did, what I felt, was the best possible job he could have with the material in two and a half hours — and it is a full two and a half hours. He stripped Watchmen down to the main story, he gave as much background as he could, and he filmed the essential panels. Jackie Earle Haley is awesome as Rorschach. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a great Comedian. The opening credit sequence does a great job of summing up huge swaths of the graphic novel. It is a distilled Watchmen. It is a more faithful adaptation than his adaptation of the 300 simply because he didn’t need to pad out the material with extra story. It preserved dialogue. It even preserved the pacing and scene transitions.
And being a big comic nerd I am, I greatly enjoyed the very faithful adaptation, and I understand there is only so much Watchmen one can cram into the two and a half hour time frame. I will buy the three and a half hour version with all the cut parts put back in and the reams of director’s commentary.
DinkyScope
12 years ago
One of Katie’s very first words was “Moon.” She’s been fascinated with the moon, and now Jupiter, Saturn, Venus and Mars, since she could point up at the sky and point out that there were holes up there through which light passes. We figured she was old enough to understand basic instructions, so we were bad and bought her a present.
We bought Katie her very first piece of serious scientific equipment, the Orion SkyQuest XT4.5 Dobsonian telescope. It’s an interesting scope because Orion advertises it as their starter/kids pack to get kids started. It costs just as much as a crappy refractor from the Mall but it’s a real scope that can do real scope-like things. And sure, she’s only 4, but one cannot be too little to have a telescope!
Here’s what we have learned in the whole 6 hours from owning this scope:
- It is an awesome scope for the price. The scope is only $200. Because a Dob is just a light bucket, Dobs are cheap. They have high mirrors – cost ratios. The one doesn’t have any electronics, but it is exceptionally well built, sturdy, and all the gears work like they have been greased with butter.
- It was easy to lift, easy to set up, and took about 5 minutes to get going and shooting things.
- Even without the mirrors properly aligned, I took it out, put it on the driveway, got it pointed at the Moon (in daylight!) and let Katie see the Moon through the eyepiece. This was a moment of extreme excitement. It wasn’t even a full Moon, or in the dark, or with one of our high-quality eyepieces.
- If I had this Dob, even without electronics, when I was a kid I would still be in the backyard.
- This is seriously making me consider one of the big Dobs with all the electronics and gears. We have a Mak-Cass and it is awesome but it is mostly for planetary viewing. The big Dobs will get you the best Hercules Globular Cluster you’ve ever seen where you can make out about 10,000 stars.
If you have a little kid and you want to get out and look at the planets and the Moon and some real easy to find deep field objects, this is a hell of a piece of starter equipment. It’s a ton of telescope for the price, and it’s good for Mom and Dad, too.
Review: Blackberry Storm
22 years ago
by zenith
in technology
I am not a gadget nerd. In fact, I am oddly gadget adverse — unless it works out of the box and works easily, I will put the gadget down and never pick it back up again. This is odd considering what I do for a living but there it is: I generally don’t do gadgets because they have terrible UI design and they annoy me. I love my iPod, I put up with my Palm Tungsten because I need a checkbook, and everything else gets on my nerves.
I have, up until now, avoided the Blackberry addiction. What I wanted originally out of a phone was a phone that made phone calls. Then I wanted a phone that made phone calls and got me football scores when I could not be watching football. But as my parents, and my entire family, moved off into gadgetland and away from actual phone calls, simply having a phone that made phone calls became more and more challenging. Over Christmas, I had weird arguments with my Mom because I couldn’t get to my regular email until 8pm at night and there was Mass Panic.
Something generally needed to be done, so I gave in and got a Blackberry. And, because I will carry it for the next two years, I got the Latest and Greatest, the Storm. Keep in mind that I don’t have an iPhone, so I am not comparing it to any Apple devices. It has also been updated to the newest service packs.
Good:
- It does what I want it to do! It gets my mail! It runs twitterberry! It will get me into Facebook if I am feeling masocist. It generally gets on the net and grabs news and my feedreader! Google mobile apps are a real lifesaver and I became very happy after I discovered the LJ mobile interface.
- I have been very happy with the Gmail support. It deals with my email flawlessly. It is not difficult to send or respond to mail, and it has really nice Gmail — Contact book integration. It doesn’t crash and support for reading email is very smooth and very clear. Considering that Gmail with push mail integration was my #1 feature request, this makes me quite happy.
- Google Talk is very good. It will run multiple conversations at once and thread them. It will alert when someone has responded so you don’t need to stare at the Blackberry.
- The web browser works well in landscape mode with zoom. I found I could read Washington Post, NY Times, CNN, etc. without any real problems.
- I can type about 30 words/minute when the keyboard is in QWERTY landscape mode. This is actually very good — and I like that it lights up the letter it thinks I want under my fingers before I push it. Granted I type normally at around 90 words/minute, but this is really so much better than the terrible SMS I was stuck with before.
- The contact book and calendaring systems are very powerful, which is expected from a Blackberry.
- I actually like the size. It is smaller than I expected and very thin. It fits in my hand comfortably.
- Post a full day of use, it was down 1/2 a battery. This is, of course, after the service packs were applied. Before that, it drained 1/4th the battery in an hour of use. Apply the patches!
Quirky:
- The tilt sensor is a little bit quirky. Sometimes it doesn’t respond, and sometimes it tilts when you don’t want it to. I get that it’s like that for all these sorts of devices.
- It gets confused where you want to click sometimes. You have to click away and click back where you want before it will respond to the click.
- When typing on the QWERTY keyboard, sometimes it pops up and suggests some strange characters. I’m not sure how to turn that off, but I really don’t need anything outside the main ANSI set.
- I couldn’t… figure out… how to make a phone call. And it’s a phone! Nominally! I did figure it out, but then I had to navigate a voice mail system, and I got lost trying to get the button pad up. Not the most intuitive interface in the universe.
- When using the browser, it likes to zoom in/zoom out when what you really want to do is scroll. I’m sure that’s easily controllable, but I’m not sure how.
- Twitterberry has a deeply goofy interface.
- You do have to really press on the screen to get it to do anything, and I worry about two years of wear and tear on the device. I can see that breaking.
Bad:
- The interace for setting an alarm is terrible. Just terrible.
- The screen gets gunky fast. As in, a half an hour of use fast. I found micro-fiber cloths clean it pretty well, but it desperately needs a cover. It has to have a cover.
- The lock button is in an awful place and it is not obvious in the least.
- The “say a command” button gets pushed every time I try to put it back in its little case. Gah.
Overall, I can see how people get hooked on these devices. Just being able to get my email without being plunked in front of a computer is a fantastic thing indeed. In general, using it is a real positive experience. It does occasionally do some inexplicably strange things on me, but in general I have walked through everything I want it to do (read RSS feeds, leave a comment on LJ, get twitter, read my mail, launch google talk, send an SMS, organize contacts) and it does all of this pretty well.
If you have an iPhone, don’t bother. But if you have Verizon and you’re eyeing one yeah, go ahead and get it.
Stimulus Nattering
1I know the stimulus bill argument is over and done and Obama is signing it in Colorado today, but I was struck by a question that I really had no answer to and it was — how are tax cuts stimulative right now at all? This makes no sense to me but I am looking at recovery.org and it lists $228B in tax cuts.
* How does patching the AMT hole keep people from paying AMT when they aren’t rolling over their stock options and taking out enough in profit to pay AMT? I asked H&R Block about AMT, since I am starting to get concerned about paying it, and they gave me a handy little ‘your introduction to AMT’ thing which basically said if you cash out your stock options, it will bite you. But if everyone is taking a 40% bath on their stock options, is anyone cashing them out and thus avoiding AMT?
* How does fixing the rate of capital gains taxes at 15% help… anyone? If no one is making money from capital gains because all their stocks and funds took a huge bath, how does that get money into the economy?
* If small businesses are falling over one after another after another, and the banks won’t lend to start new ones or keep revolving credit for existing ones, how does giving tax cuts to small businesses help any small businesses? How does some $100 a week or even a $1000 a week help if what the business needs is $50K in revolving credit?
* How does a tax cut to me — which I will not see because I make too much money — giving essentially me $30 a paycheck — do anything?
These are real questions. I am not trying to be facetious. I just don’t understand how tax cuts on $0 moves money around the economy. The problems are so much fundamental that sloshing pennies around just doesn’t do anything.
I am generally in favor of direct Keynesian stimulus because hey, a job at least gets a paycheck into someone’s pocket, even if it is short-lived, and at the end of the day someone gets a road or a train out of it. But realistically, I don’t think it will work, either, not without coupled with some seismic shift in understanding:
- How the credit crisis works
- How we got into this mess
- What it means when there is oversupply
- Why retail is massively overbuilt
- etc.
The system has shown cracks that painting over and patching with some spackle is not going to help. In the last 10 years everything in the world changed and we were busy having two wars and spending ourselves into the grave.
The days when someone can graduate from high school, get a factory job, go buy a house and be content until retirement are very much over. But how do you tell that to the 45 year old autoworker at GM? What do you do?
Quick Test
52 years ago
by zenith
in Uncategorized
I did the upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1 through Blue Host’s new tools. It was really quite painless, but I am checking all my plugins and whatnot.
Nothing to see here but a horde of dancing monkeys. Dance, monkeys, dance!
Warning: Politics and Football Metaphors Ahead
0Watching the brand shiny new Obama White House is like watching Michigan Football before it started to Drastically Suck beyond All Comprehension: two fruitless runs up the middle and then OH hand off to the half-back in the back field. Two fruitless runs up the middle and then OH we decide to pass and hey that sometimes works. Two fruitless runs up the middle and then check this out it’s the Option.
This generally makes me want to throw things at the TV. Here we are at 3rd and 8 again for the 42nd time this game! Are they going to do something now?
I am picking up the same frustrating vibe. Sure, yeah, they’ll eventually drive down the field but look at all the messing around first. The newest incarnation is the complete so-called “Geitner Plan” that was “released” yesterday. There’s no plan. It’s the political incarnation of running up the middle for maybe a yard. We have a banking crisis, the banks are refusing to lend (still), foreclosures are still hoovering capital out of the market, banks are turning into capital-eating zombies, and the entire system needs a good, solid audit from the top down. We have lots of bankers who are out of work who I bet would like a paycheck to become government auditors.
What are we going to do? Not what Geitner and Larry Summers recommended to Japan (which they eventually did) or the Sweden plan of lopping off heads of zombies. Oh no. We’re going to do… what? Sort of bad bank? Sort of not? Sort of be very nice to banks and half-privatize, half-nationalize and not really bother with audits or try to figure out what we wrong and force the banks to suck up their bad risk and bad bets and close the doors on the ones that are clear failures? Because we most certainly have zombies running around going “Oh give us 6 months and our assets will be worth something OH give us 6 more months and we’ll have it figured out OH just 6 more months really…”
And now Team Obama, who clearly plays by the Big 10 Playbook, will be forced to sort of try another run up the middle and will get roundly thunked for it and then come around and go oh I guess we should come up with something real if we’re going to make the down.
Gah. I still love Obama for his Incredibly Wonky Ways and his ability to craft an actual sentence but come on guys. I’d rather you take an extra two weeks and present something real than whatever nonsense is being picked off the bottom of your shoes.
Completed Projects
0I got a ton of completed projects out of my queue. Don’t think that I have stopped crocheting! I just started several projects at once and they all sort of finished at once.
I made fade this nice black shell stitch hat with a carnation that I sent through the mail so I couldn’t put up until it was received. I made the flower much tighter than the first one I did and it came out well. The picture doesn’t really do it justice.
Katie demanded a bag that had to be pink with pink flowers! She would not let me stripe it with any other colors so the bag is very very pink. I was able to put in a little purple on the flower. For the picture I pressed it into its proper service, carrying around stuffies. Spongebob was pressed into service for this picture.
I made an amazingly purple bobble-headed hat and scarf. It is amazingly bobble headed and purple. And a scarf! You can see the stitches from the side view are actually pretty even.
Everyone wants scarves… just as it gets warm out. But I have yarn for scarves, so scarves shall be made!
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