| Giveaways and saleaways |
[Oct. 22nd, 2009|10:39 pm] |
We've given away five DirecTV receivers and two microwave dishes for them; a 4' x 7' solid-core door intended for use as a worktable top; three Sierra Club engagement calendars (not used) from 1975 and 1976; videotapes; a kneeling chair; and a bunch of three-ring binders. Mostly using Freecycle, but some on Craigslist.
Giving things away can be hard work. Selling is harder.
We have lots more stuff to give away. I'm hoping Saturday to pass forward my files, from the period during the 1970's when I was a transit activist in the Santa Clara Valley, to a current activist. It's also time to take a load to one of the local resale charities.
And of course we give away books all the time. Selling books is possible, but harder.
Selling magazines seems to be the hardest thing of all. |
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| On with the week |
[Oct. 6th, 2009|09:52 pm] |
The music festival was amazing. Apparently, 750,000 people came to it. They were all sitting where I wanted to sit, but with some luck and some dedication I found us places just to the left of the soundboard, at the "Banjo" [topname] stage.
The people in front of us had come down from Tacoma, WA. One of the men asked me in all seriousness if he had seen me somewhere, like on television. I assured him I was nobody he was expected to know, and that in all probability it was just that my appearance was so universal he was mixing me up with someone else. I didn't say Jungian archetype, because we're only talking about appearances here. There were a lot of other people there wearing broad-brimmed hats.
Back to work: I'm mucking about in the bowels of the MySQL database that powers magazineart.org. Luckily I have a couple of similar database/image sets I can try things out on first, with no fear of a major screw-up of the big one (it says here). There are now over 7000 magazine covers and advertising art pages on the website, most of which I have at least touched with Photoshop, and some of which have taken quite a bit of time in restoration.
Yesterday I received my contributor's copy of "Femme Fatale / The female criminal," published by the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales. (No, I don't know why the Trust did the book, either, not thinking much of the link with the criminal history of Oz that was used as justification.) It's an odd size, about 5" x 7", 128-page hardcover with pictorial boards, and with much color inside, printed in Singapore. I supplied an image of the cover of Gun Molls 1930-10, and others supplied many more pulp and paperback covers. I didn't get paid for this, except in copies for me and the owner of the pulp, but I do expect to get paid by a Danish tech magazine for supplying the image of a very striking ad for G. Washington's Instant Coffee.
Exciting as all of this is, I still haven't found a way to make a living at it. I suppose that if everything collapses I could find work as a Photoshop monkey; but if everything collapses, no one will be paying Photoshop monkeys for anything, anyway, and so there you are. It's a good thing I'm semi-retired. |
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| Hardly Strictly Bluegrass |
[Oct. 2nd, 2009|10:37 pm] |
The usual cohort seem all to be out of town, so I'm driving up toward the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival tomorrow by myself. Somewhere along the way I'll give up trying to get closer and park, catching a Muni bus for the rest of the trip. Most likely.
It's an amazing show, not even half of it bluegrass (though that part is also great), and it's free. See http://www.strictlybluegrass.com/ . For some reason, a lot of people go.
Intellicast says that the the weather in San Francisco tomorrow will be "nearly record low temperatures." One year we froze our butts off, but this time I'm takin' Minnesota clothes. (Or what I imagine to be Minnesota clothes, not having come from there myself.) On Sunday the weather will be even colder, but ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) vgqn will be free of Master Gardener events, and we'll both go there and freeze together. |
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| Out, Damned Stuff |
[Oct. 2nd, 2009|10:25 pm] |
I sold a set of the Harvard Classics for $160, but no one has bought the collection of AMERICAN HERITAGE magazine (185 issues for $140) or the stack of 1950's/60's PLAYBOY issues at $75. Maybe I'm asking too much.
Anyway, the new LP record price guide came in, so I'm about to trawl through the LP collection and send the not-so-worthwhile records off to Amoeba in Berkeley for whatever I can get for them. The valuable ones, like the Roy Orbison, Trashmen, and Beatles Butcher-Cover, I'll put on eBay.
In case you're wondering, it's not for the money (though the money is nice), but for the space. I have plans. |
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| Bees, Reducs |
[Sep. 28th, 2009|03:36 pm] |
We had bees, and arranged with a beekeeper [Mark Small at smallbees.com] to move them to an apiary at his location. The pictures show bees living in an architectural decoration; dead bees which had found their way into the house through the walls; and the man in the bee suit removing the tiles and vacuuming the bees up. There's a closeup of the very large combs, and the confused bees shown huddling together when they can't find the queen. The bees haunted the front of the house for a day and a half, and have now mostly gone away.
Here's the closeup of the combs, with angry bees, during the removal process:
As always, click for larger. |
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| Zorpia |
[Sep. 21st, 2009|09:26 am] |
This came in the morning electron mail:
"Arunpratapmall wants you to become a Zorpian"
[Holds up hand] Excuse me, may I go back to my own quantum universe now?
It says, "Hi, You must be special! Your friend Arunpratapmall, has invited you to be apart of Zorpia!"
Small pictures of two of Arunpratapmall's Friends are shown. One is an infant; the other has only eyes and the bridge of a nose.
Nothing in the science fiction I have been reading since I was twelve years old prepared me for the present future. |
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| A clearing-out question |
[Sep. 10th, 2009|09:55 pm] |
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I found Sierra Club Wilderness Engagement Calendars for 1975 (2 of them) and 1976, all unused. (I was using something else. Life was dull, but it wasn't that dull.) They're in nice condition and have beautiful pictures. What should I do with them? |
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| Busy |
[Sep. 10th, 2009|09:45 pm] |
Amazingly, the set of Harvard Classics sold in a day; the buyer picked them up this evening. They were priced to sell, but I didn't think they were that underpriced; also, no one else had contacted me. I have things ready to go onto the shelves where they once sat.
Now if I can only find a buyer for the AMERICAN HERITAGE issues. I'll price them cheap to someone I know--that's a hint to those of you with empty shelves. Sometime next week I'm taking a truckload of LPs to Amoeba Music in Berkeley to see what, if anything, they'll buy.
ObNote: we're not running out of money! It's all about clearing some space for a change in the usage of the basement.
On another front, after struggling along without much publicity for the last couple of years (that was when Boing-Boing did a writeup), the magazineart.org site got laudatory reviews in metafilter and Good Morning Silicon Valley over two days. Yay! Daily visitors have tripled, and I've even got a new Photoshop volunteer. |
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| Stuff, Out |
[Sep. 9th, 2009|06:41 pm] |
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I've been spending a lot of time in the basement, picking things to send off to new homes. So I've just listed my set of the Harvard Classics, and nearly 200 issues of AMERICAN HERITAGE, for sale. At the moment they're just on the local Craigslist, but most probably they'll go on eBay in a while. |
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| Termites |
[Sep. 5th, 2009|03:12 pm] |
Never rains but. This morning calimac came over to pick up some LP records and as I pulled an E. Power Biggs disk out from the section of music history recordings I found the sleeve was missing the bottom back corner. Ook.
At least twenty LP's damaged, some severely, but none of them precious to me. That's the good news. The bad news was, oh yes, it was termites that have done the damage. Even more unfortunately, they're still living there, all white and wet and muddy. It's a basement bookshelf that backs up against a wallboard hiding a section of the foundation, so the little beggars have tunneled through the dirt and concrete and found their way into the back of the bottom shelf.
Not very many houses in California have basements, but many houses in our area have, or had, termites. We had them in 1992, in a different location. They live underground in huge nests, and send tunnels off for tens or hundreds of feet searching for wood. Or something somewhat like it, in this case. Better LP sleeves than wooden beams; but, still, they will have to go.
I've been getting rid of unnecessary possessions, as a discipline for improving access to living space. This will accelerate the process. I had less stuff in the basement in 1992, and moving it around so the termite crew could access the concrete slab was an arduous process then. I think I've just declared yet more material possessions to be surplus. |
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| Bees Again; and More |
[Sep. 3rd, 2009|09:42 pm] |
Our bee expert says that there doesn't seem to be any honeycomb inside the walls, and that he thinks they're currently using the walls just as a secondary chamber for the hive. We agreed that he will take the tiles off the architectural decoration on a Saturday within the next four weeks, and we'll see where the situation leads from there. It does seem likely that the hive is in the decoration and not in the walls; it will be much easier to deal with it there, so please forward all possible quantum probability streams to make it so.
Meanwhile, people I asked to send magazine scans have sent a great many, and I'm working hard just to keep up with them. Here's what's been added in recent times.
When my doctor moved from one clinic to another, I moved with him, and tomorrow morning I'm visiting the records center for the old clinic to get copies made of my old medical records. This seems so Twentieth Century. Partly this is necessary because in the past (say ten years ago), my previous doctors didn't pass along the entire results sheet of my lab tests, so I can't compare numbers with current. I'm hoping the medical file actually contains these results. |
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| Bees |
[Sep. 1st, 2009|10:16 pm] |
We have bees. Unfortunately, we're not beekeepers, and we have bees in a place where we don't want them: inside the front wall of the house. They're living between the stucco and the interior plaster, with access through a small hole in an architectural decoration at the front of the house.
When we thought they were only in the decoration, we started working with a beekeeper who thought he could move them. So much for past thinking.
Thursday he's coming by again to reassess the situation, after my recent discovery of bees in the walls and bees with access to the attic.
I'd like to keep them alive and somewhere else; but, one way or another, those bees have got to go. After they're gone we'll have to open the plaster wall and/or take out one of the windows to get access to where they are presumably building honeycombs. Honey and walls are not good friends to one another.
I've made a lot of progress in getting rid of excess books and other stuff, and the weather has been good. But bees are what I have on my mind. |
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| TAFF Visit |
[Aug. 22nd, 2009|11:11 am] |
We had a small dinner party BBQ for visiting TAFF guy Steve Green. There are pictures at http://www.mikeandkaren.org/mikespix/2009/TAFFDinner-08-20/index.html. Steve is the one sitting, in the first picture, with his head directly below the BBQ's chimney.
I'm aware that I haven't posted photos from our trips to Italy, Alaska, or the Montreal Worldcon. So I don't know how long the MySQL image database at MikeAndKaren.org has been fritzed. I hope to be able to find out what's happening there, but I face this issue with much trepidation, as a great deal of the image gallery juju there (MySQL + PHP + magic dust) is, um, difficult to work on. |
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| A well-attended party (another one) |
[Jul. 26th, 2009|10:14 pm] |
The last of the crowd left around 1 am, but I didn't get to sleep until after 3, what with the buzzing going on in my brain from the conversations and all. At least I only had to deal with sleep deprivation this morning, having had very little alcoholic to drink over the entire course of the evening.
When you host a party like this you're pretty much on your feet from the time it begins (say 4 pm) until the last guest leaves. Almost everything got eaten, so there was little food to worry about at the end. There was plenty of mess, though. We went to Peet's for coffee and breakfast before tackling the worst of it.
All the new construction was put to use. Well, no one could sit in the adirondack chairs in the mosaic patio, as we found the Deodar had deposited little lumps of sticky sap on their surface, and I had to make up warning signs. But the recycled parkstrip chunks by the hatchcover bench next to the white Brugmansia look good.
The new front walkway steps were finished four days before the party, and served us well. Their solar lights are back on, showing the beauty of the new concrete to the passing world at night. For the solar lights in the back yard, I replaced some dead batteries, and all are working except for three of the multicolored bubble lights. These last I put together as an impromptu garden sculpture in the newest bed in the Back 40; they look like something out of a, um, science-fiction movie.
K did the garden tours, so you should ask her how those went. We didn't do any house tours this year.
K and I showed various people the artifacts from my local-archaeology dig, which I sometimes call "Time Team Martin Ave." I didn't get to the descriptive labels for them, but I think most people recognize potsherds, marbles, and lumps of rusted metal without our having to spell things out. The tie plates and spikes from the trolley line that used to run down Martin Ave. take a little more explanation. We also have an electrical power-pole insulator left behind by the PG&E crew that came in during a BBQ a few years ago; it was over a hundred degrees F when the party began, and the pole-mounted transformer in the next yard boiled over and had to be replaced with a new one, the process starting while we were all still sitting around in the back yard. I also have a white ceramic sherd with some Roman letters on it reading "microwa"; I believe this came from an offertory vessel dedicated to the domestic god Microwa (god of small bits of pottery and ceramic, probably).
I don't know if any new startups got put together at this year's party, but I certainly heard from a number of people that they are suddenly, sometimes unexpectedly, available for work in a new location. |
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| The Moon; Cement; TV |
[Jul. 20th, 2009|11:17 pm] |
When we walked upon the moon for the first time, I watched it at a small party in the home of Felice Rolfe, in Palo Alto. Just a few of us, one being (I think I recall this) Dave van Arnam.
Earlier I had taken the front page of the San Francisco CHRONICLE and printed out some photo-reduced copies on 8.5x11" paper, using a documentation scanner/copier recently installed at my workplace. I handed these out at the party. What fun we had with optical systems in the days before there were computers to do it for you.
I haven't seen Felice (now Maxam) for decades, but heard from her yesterday. She's having a party (yes) on the same Saturday we're having our BBQ (damn). PENSFA started in her living room in 1968; we kind of forgot to mark its 40th birthday last year.
On another arm is the story of our friend the cement steps, which was done well, and will be ready for people to use this Saturday. Done well except for the clown who disposed of excess cement on top of one of Karen's plants, and the washwater in my newly laid gravel parkstrip. I've called the company up to complain.
Yet another arm: there is no news on the TV. No, wait, I mean there is no news on the situation about satellite TV. I'm off looking for an old TiVo box that someone will hand over for little or nothing; Craigslist hasn't yet supplied me with that. On -our- TV, some of the progarms record perfectly and some have too many dropouts to watch; I haven't been able to find a pattern (time, channel) in which is which. |
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| TV; Steps |
[Jul. 18th, 2009|11:04 pm] |
We progress slowly. A neighbor gifted me with two (2) DirecTV receivers, one with digital video recording, but neither with TiVo. I set one up to monitor transponder signal strength, with the original receiver providing audio (so we would be able to tell when the original receiver had a hiccup [aka hiccough for those of you with variant orthographic values]). No hiccups were received during the test period, before we went off to make dinner, and then went to a show. More on this anon.
Valley Concrete came early Thursday morning to break up the old steps and build the forms for a new set. They did an excellent job. In the process we were able to throw out hundreds of pounds of old broken concrete. However, said company did not come back Friday morning to pour the concrete into the forms they had built. At this point I'm hoping for Monday.
As we continue to clean up the back yard for the summer BBQ I discover more stones, and more old broken concrete. I'm not sure what to do with it all. However, K did clean off and we set up a shelf unit under the deodar; on this unit we now display the artifacts, archaeological and geological, I have found in various digging projects in this yard. Plus the fishplates and spikes from the trolley line that once ran along our street, buried for seventy years but made accessible during a bit of road work some years ago. Plus a few pretty stones and mining samples we've picked up in our travels. Mostly, though, the provenance is simple: "Here". These are the efforts of our local Time Team. |
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