Sunday
August 30, 2009 at 12:29 pm | In Life | Leave a Comment
Pretty much what it means to be a basset when we come to visit.
Another day, another fence.
Now, back to the crossword puzzles?
Colorado
August 30, 2009 at 8:06 am | In Ankle, Life, Mountains | Leave a CommentIt’s good to be back in a place I’ve sometimes called home.
There are bassets
Fences get fixed
There are alpine sunrises.
We can get high above it all.
There are friendly summits.
Sometimes it’s all about the quartzite.
Another day, another orientation.
Downtime
August 23, 2009 at 7:21 pm | In Ankle, Life | Leave a CommentSometimes I don’t want to take it when it comes, but it’s good to do. An only barely ambitious to-do list for the weekend is only barely touched on Sunday evening at 8 pm. Saturday saw a lot of lounging about, TV-watching, some cleaning, reorganizing, and planning for the future. Sunday, today, saw some more of the same, an unexpectedly exuberant sweeping of myriad discontinous locations outside the house, an enjoyable aquatic trip, and a fruitful, if circuitous, trip to vulture free furniture from a soon-to-be-expatriate grad.
The aquatic trip is of greatest notability – an attempt to combine a sailing jaunt with a long swim turned into a struggle to tack the sailboat to the swim’s start. Our first stab at the problem saw us fifty feet from shore after an hour’s oscillation. The sacrifice of a pair of jumper cables to the sailmaking gods got us to aerodynamic nirvana. Inconsistent wind got us to within decision’s distance of the start of the swim, but tedium sent us home. Lesson learned: The sailboat in question will only work as a safety boat (start, stop, speed control, turning) in conditions where swimming could be unpleasant. Fine day on the sunny and warm water.
The to-do list includes finding the camera charger – a task which catalyzed a room-cleaning, house sweeping, box destroying, and dust-bunny herding episode. Alas, I still can’t find it. If a similar experience at work doesn’t turn it up, I’ll have to turn to fiscally more drastic measures. No photos today….
Ah, yes; downtime. My ankle seems to have liked the combination of five days on, two days off. I did a number of things barefoot today that I couldn’t have a week ago. Progress continues.
Future
August 16, 2009 at 9:16 am | In Life | Leave a CommentIt’s now. I just walked into the kitchen where my housemate is having a coherent and smooth Sunday morning video chat with his parents on the other side of the continent. I feel like I walked into an epsiode of Star Trek. It’s pretty incredible that such a feat is possible with very inexpensive hardware.
The world is becoming so very small; the next decades will be neat!
Audio fixes
August 14, 2009 at 5:09 pm | In Linux, Physics | Leave a CommentI keep needing things like this, so I’m going to stick them all in one place:
Fairly frequently with Debian, I’m finding that sound is getting blocked by various applications. Being insufficiently clever/motivated to find the right solution, I simply resort to killing the processes that block the sound.
Apparently, xpdf can block up the sound card
Diagnostic commands that have worked in the past:
lsof -w $( find /dev -group audio )
sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
speaker-test -c 2 -t wav <– how neat is that?
These fixes enabled watching this excellent introduction to the dark sector by Chris Stubbs, which I’m now most of the way through. At least to my physics-addled brain, at least the first half is very accessible to anyone.
Medley
August 12, 2009 at 11:47 pm | In Life | Leave a Comment
A little post-processing reveals Loowit’s ashen rivulets of snow.
A fine long weekend with very lovable company.
Friday saw the orderly dissection of some rocks.
Saturday saw friendly aquatic fog navigation, the churning of water with many hands and feet, and a not-dam sojourn. Who knew that swimming a distance equivalent to my morning commute could look so effortless?
Sunday we Explored.
Monday saw interviews, ice cream, lengthy hobbling, the resucessitation of dummies, and a brief canine-enhanced rest on a free outdoor sofa.
Huzzah!
Who knew conglomerate could get so stretched out, bent up, and shattered? Not I, said the physicist.
Coolest water around, by a dam site.
Missing from this trip’s photos is, without doubt, the image of the southern Oregon Cascades with wispy laminar clouds just brushing their numerous angular summits. I’ve never seen them so pretty. The camera battery charger can’t hide forever.
Ski?!?
August 12, 2009 at 9:09 am | In Ankle | Leave a CommentAt 10.5 weeks after surgery, the resident told me I’m restriction free, skiing included, just as long as I pay attention to what my body has to say. He concurred with the previous resident’s diagnosis that I’m “too motivated for PT”. Boo. It’s certainly true that in another month or so, there probably won’t be much benefit to it.
Skiing seems too good to be true, especially given what skiing entails these days (a trip to Muir to ski suncupped ice), so I’ll leave turns until at least September, if not later. Seems totally strange to get unexpected permission to do something. Apparently it’s time to get after the long list of things to be done “when I’m healed”.
The ankle presumably will get punished for its success on the exercise bike tonight. I’m stoked.
194
August 11, 2009 at 10:57 am | In Drivel | Leave a CommentOn the trip home from the airport, I decided to check out the new Sound Transit light rail service. I was very impressed with the train and track – it’s smooth, silent, and effortless. The elevated rail seems as though it might have trouble in a quake, pitching cars off the slender track into the abyss, but I’ll have to trust that they’ve engineered it right.
The surface level light timing worked out well too – no traffic light stops for the train. I wonder how it feels as a driver; probably not too bad.
And now, as you might imagine, for the beef: The 194 bus takes 25 minutes from the airport to the International District station, whereas the train takes 28 from the off-site Tukwila station to the International District. Once the curiously-positioned but on-site airport station is put in, that’ll probably turn into about 30 minutes.
The 194 requires three or four constantly employed drivers and the maintenance staff to back them up, along with new buses every two years or so. The new train appears to have two or more staff at each station (at the moment), two people on each train, and a whole new maintenance yard to take care of the spiffy trains.
I’m pretty sure I voted for the levy that created the train system, but I’d done so with some expectation that the airport service would be faster and more efficient…. I suppose I’ll be riding the 194 until they’re phased out in December, unless the spiffiness of a new train pulls me back in.
The cost of the new 14 mile line was $2.7 bln.
Edit: Since this post is seeing a ton of traffic (from having a numeral in the title?) I decided to give it a little more attention. Offline discussion suggests that the hours for the train run significantly later into the evening, mitigating the 174 annoyance. Furthermore, the train will indeed run nicely during times of traffic snarls, which the bus cannot.
There’s more erudite discussion here .
Fit
August 6, 2009 at 10:47 am | In Physics | Leave a CommentFurious late night machining, aligning, and fiddling may have yielded a functional experiment for the long weekend. Came in this morning to make sure all was well, and so far it seems to be. Here’s a plot of the voltage across a thermistor in the apparatus.
Red is data points, blue is a three parameter exponential fit (14190 (2) second time constant)
It’s only a fine example of Newton’s law of cooling, but it’s refreshing to see something happen exactly the way it’s supposed to. There’s actually a little glitch under the “t” in “therm”.
Angels
August 2, 2009 at 1:46 pm | In Life, Physics | Leave a CommentThey dropped by this week.
Up in the air, Junior Birdman!
Backpack crutch cabana!
An anecdote: During the airshow, a family stopped by at my little spot to watch too. After the Angels had done their low show, their ~5 year old asked, “If light travels faster than sound…. <semi-incoherent gibbering as he tried to figure out exactly what it was he was curious about> … where did the sun come from?” Dad took it upon himself to try to answer. It took him a little while to compose his own thoughts, but in the end, his answer was far more correct than it was erroneous. I saw them again as I gimped back up the hill, merrily picking blackberries off the side of the trail.
Back to work! Gotta get this balance back up and running!
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