| More Patio; Television; Variable roses |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|11:40 pm] |
I said I would never do this again, but in fact I'll be piecing out another section of patio to be made up as a mosaic of concrete pieces. (Karen has already ID'd a bunch of the candidate components.) This time it's small; about 3 x 4 feet, over by the white Brugmansia and the raspberries; a section of dirt formerly holding plants, to be replaced by paving. I had a section of parkstrip saved for this, but the green paint the city put on it, when they declared it had to go, is too garish for us to reuse it as is. Either the paint goes, or the pieces go. I'm betting it's the pieces that leave; we have plenty of broken concrete around the yard. (Some of it may have come from the racetrack, torn down around 1905 when the area was sold off in lots as a land speculation.)
Meanwhile, while we were in Alaska, our faithful DirecTV satellite TV system developed problems. Something in the RF chain is cutting in and out. We get full signal strength on all of the 32 transponders, but after a few seconds we'll get short intermittent periods of No Signal. This shows as a greater or lesser breakup of the TV image. The dish, LNB, and coaxial line date from 1998, and would have to be replaced for HD; so I think it's time. (The problem could be in the RF section of the receiver, but this is an early Hughes TiVo machine from 2002. Same strategy.)
After my experimental analysis of the problem, I spent a couple of unhappy hours examining replacement alternatives. DirecTV -has- re-signed with TiVo, but their new receiver with TiVo won't be out until 2010. Currently they are only shipping receivers with their own DVR, generally considered inferior to TiVo. Further, their prices and offers to existing customers seem to, um, suck, and I'm not sure if I'll have to buy the new dish (and perhaps a switching matrix) separately. Hi, ho.
AT&T now offers TV via fiber optic lines to the home, with DVR; but no TiVo at all, as far as I can tell.
Confusing the issue even more is a joint marketing agreement announced in Feb. of this year, with AT&T reselling DirecTV service in a discounted package. I have heard nothing about this since, and it may have fizzled out; I have to call AT&T tomorrow for illumination.
I didn't actually want to be working on TV problems, as we're concentrating on getting things finished before our summer BBQ at the end of July -- send mail if you're going to be in the area on the 25th -- but reality often interferes with expectations.
In other news, Karen generated four huge loads of cut branches from rose mutabilis this afternoon. I call this monster variably (of course) mutatis or mutandis when I'm weeding underneath it, with an occasional retrograde to its proper name when it's in full bloom. We installed heavy cardboard under it this season, so the weeding has been much reduced. We still get some of the usual long strands of Bermuda grass. |
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| The New Patio |
[Jun. 23rd, 2009|09:25 pm] |
Here's a photo of the patio construction project, essentially complete:
Click to go to the large version. The gray cement on the lower right is original; everything else is new. The pavers extend another couple of feet toward the camera, and the paving joint sand is being washed into the crevices. You can't really see it in this picture, but the center is a circular mosaic of gray concrete pieces. |
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| no change needed |
[Jun. 22nd, 2009|03:57 pm] |
My business bank, the Union Bank of California, is changing its name to the Union Bank and tossing out its old red and white logo for one with a large U (looking like tulip petals) in red and "Union Bank" in printers' blue. Union is set in a much heavier version of the face than Bank (so the letters in Bank have thinner aka lighter strokes). One could claim that Union is set bolder than Bank.
K speculates that the addition of the blue is to emphasize how American the bank has become, which is worth considering as it's actually a subsidiary of the Bank of Tokyo. Printers' blue looks purple to most people, so it's not exactly RWB bunting.
They write: "Let me emphasize that our new look will require absolutely no change or action on your part." For this relief, much thanks.
OK, it means I don't have to throw out my old checks etc. Wouldn't have. |
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| Construction |
[Jun. 21st, 2009|10:26 pm] |
I've been doing a lot of landscape construction lately. Finally I finished the riprap-mosaic patio section, which I extended out in all four directions with 16"x16" paving stones. This made other parts of the back forty look bad, so I filled in another curvilinear triangle next to it with more pavers. Built the last two of the frames for the raised beds. The back forty is now structurally complete, and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) vgqn has been filling the old and new beds with appropriate flowers, vegetables, and shrubberies. I owe a photo or two and will see what I can do for you.
While we were in Italy, the city decided I would have to remove the cement in the parkstrip (the area between the sidewalk and the curb) in front of our house, and replace it with dirt. Oh, yeah, they agreed by telephone (hope this is real) that gravel would be OK, too. The total area to come out was about 175 square feet, which is really quite a lot. (We have a long street frontage.)
So this past week I broke out all the old concrete -- it was really in bad condition -- piling the large pieces up for K to use as stepping stones between the roses and the new succulent garden she's built in the front-yard meadow side. Some of the smaller pieces of concrete rubble were used as below; the rest are presently piled at the edge of our driveway awaiting a disposal plan.
This past Tuesday a three-gate dump truck from U-Save Rockery dropped three piles onto our driveway: three cubic yards of redwood bark (mulch for a neighbor, who promptly hauled it off); one cubic yard of granite fines (finely granulated granite, used as base paver sand); and two cubic yards of pea gravel. This is a lot of rock.
Over the next three days I pulled out the concrete (as I said above), removed and stored some of the underlying dirt, graded the spaces, and on one half of the parkstrip wet the mud and stomped in smaller rubble bits as a base. For the other half we've decided to skip that step and see if the current hardness of the clay will suffice.
There were a lot of stones that came out during the grading process, and these I hauled back behind the garage to the "native-stone pathway". Yes, it's native stones, lots and lots of them.
I should also mention that the grading included removing a lot of weeds and roots that had grown up among the cracked concrete, including no less than six (rather small) Mexican fan palms. I had not been able to remove them earlier, while the concrete was in place, but now they went.
In any case, K laid all of the sand and then gravel in the first half space, and raked and brushed it flat. Saturday morning she and spikeiowa finished the other half, stomping down the gravel and binding it with the granite fines.
So far, so good. We still have to stomp and bind the first half we did, but it's already usable. spikeiowa and vgqn and I hauled the spare gravel to a storage pile whence it will be distributed into other parts of the yard (a pathway here, a planter there, and the rest on the native-stone pathway behind the garage). The driveway is still partly blocked by the remaining sand, but that will go away shortly.
Just writing all this has reminded me of how amazingly exhausting it's been. During this time I didn't bother to go to the gym; no point. We did go to yoga Tuesday night, which I am sure must have helped a lot in keeping those muscles stretched. |
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| Post |
[May. 16th, 2009|05:55 pm] |
I installed the LJ iPhone app before we went off to Italy, but somehow it didn't get sync'ed in; and I had trouble logging in using the regular web page from the iPhone. So I didn't post anything while we were over there. (It's on here now, as demonstrated hereby.) I'm going to make up for that graphically, with a bunch of pictures on mikeandkaren.org as I get them processed. I'll warn you in advance there are a lot of pictures of buildings and art. Posted via LiveJournal.app. |
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| Full Up, Work Instead. Destroy. Read. |
[Apr. 12th, 2009|10:54 pm] |
Our afternoon hike in the Sunol regional wilderness turned into a Sunday drive past the Calaveras reservoir, because they put up "Lot Full" signs when the crowds of Easter Sunday revelers crowded it into more family, less wild. Instead of hiking we worked on the yard and garden.
I've finally got all the large pavers I need to finish the border on the reconstructed mosaic patio. K is thinking it should all be painted, but I argue for the natural approach. The grading and fitting of the border will be work enough, and there are living things taking over the yard that need more attention than dead concrete.
It was a beautiful day, something rare during the time akirlu was staying with us. Really, it's even made it to tolerable inside the house! We weren't freezing our butts just to impress the Seattleite.
Tomorrow we hike. Later tomorrow, if K can find one at Yamaguchi's Nursery, I will test a Bugblaster water spray on our hibiscus plants. With it I will destroy the Giant Mexican Whitefly, if I have to destroy the hibiscus which harbors it.
Meanwhile, I'm a quarter of the way into the fourth of the Stross "Merchant Princes" novels. Friends assured me last night at PENSFA that Stross has promised to wind the series up with the sixth book. I'll be plenty ready for that to happen by then. |
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| Pergola, With Jay |
[Apr. 5th, 2009|11:38 pm] |
[I wrote this as a comment for klages; but put it here also, so that you won't need to thrash around in commentspace. She wrote about (or at least pictured) a pergola in troubled economic times, and our pergola is where we spent the late afternoon. Not otherwise mentioned is the scrub jay that hops around and expects me to give him peanuts.
Here quote:
When I had a little money, I put it into restoring the columns of our pergola. (The book budget was unaffected, Erasmus or not.) Later on, when I had a little more money, I put it into replacing its roof -- not a fancy one like the one on the pergola in the picture, but a simple, modern roof of lexan sheets to keep the rain out.
We sat under the pergola today and discussed Thoreau and Walden. Because these are troubled economic times, and every penny counts, we ate a simple meal of mostly Thoreauvian foods. vgqn made a classic hasty pudding, and provided bread and cheese and drinks. Donya made a bread with rye and cornmeal and molasses, such as Thoreau described baking himself. spikeiowa brought red wine and cheese and bread. I found a sweet black muscat wine such as someone -- not Thoreau, who refused to drink because it required money, and he didn't want to become any more dependent on money than he had to be -- might have drunk in Concord in 1845. One might think I could have found a Concord Grape wine, but I didn't have one in the cellar; and these are troubled economic times. Thoreau, the non-drinker, never mentioned any wine by name, but he mentioned that nearby him lived some muskrats; so I felt that the name was close enough to justify this one.
We ate from three cheeses, which Thoreau doesn't talk about much or at all; he eschewed dairy products, as requiring too much access to troubled economic money. However, we justified our actions by noting that Thoreau's mother and sister often brought him food, and that he likely ate cheese at Ralph Emerson's house, or in Concord after the Lyceum lectures, or in Cambridge when he went in to borrow books from the Harvard library. I haven't yet found anyone who detailed exactly what Thoreau actually ate, except Thoreau himself; and he is definitely an unreliable narrator.
vgqn and spikeiowa got this book group moving a few years ago, when we read our way through Proust's autobiography. Today we couldn't help comparing the two bios in terms of sentence structure, philosophizing at length, and general consideration of just how they would have got on in the social environment, including which would have said what to the other if they had ever met.
The party we had at the end of In Search of Lost Time had a lot more wine than this one. |
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| Updates and stuff |
[Mar. 29th, 2009|09:39 am] |
We went to Northern Virginia and Washington DC last week, and I plan to write about it. vgqn has already posted about the mystic pyrex scrollwork amphora we saw.
But right now I want to point people to aa musical video remix demonstration that I found to be a lot of fun and really quite amazing. Read the comments that follow, if you are into copyright issues, or just consider where in this the creativity resides. The links from the Techdirt site will take you to WIRED where you can find out much more than you want to know. |
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| Killing Mosquitoes by Force or Violence |
[Mar. 15th, 2009|10:38 am] |
Our friend Jordin Kare made the WALL STREET JOURNAL in an article Rocket Scientists Shoot Down Mosquitoes With Lasers. This is truly technology in the pursuit of benefit for all mankind!
A few years ago, on a summer trip to Minnesota (where mosquitoes are the most dangerous of the many dangerous wild inhabitants) I suggested a mosquito-killing machine based on a pile of meat, an infrared source, a protective screen, and a giant vacuum cleaner (to suck in the mosquitoes halted by the screen). I'm sure you're envisioning this even as I write.
If Nathan Myhrvold actually funds this project and it becomes available, I'll forgive his patent hoarding company six cloud-computing patents and a trademark to be named later.
Way to go, Jordin! Set lasers on Kill. |
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| Practice Walking, or Walking Practice |
[Mar. 8th, 2009|11:34 pm] |
vgqn has written about yesterday's walking (read, hill-climbing) tours of Berkeley, so I will only comment here that we did another one today. This time, pretty much on the flat: the Los Gatos Creek trail for a bit over four miles (Camden to the Vasona Dam, and back). We were a bit tired after this, our legs still being somewhat under the spell of yesterday's marvels. Actually, we were really tired after this. A couple of years ago we did just fine on a bunch of hikes up, down, and through Bryce Canyon National Park, but things have not been maintained as one might have hoped.
Medical researchers are on the cusp of finding the chemical messengers that tell our muscles to bulk up. I'm not talking steroids here, but the messages that get sent when you use your muscles hard a lot. Work out regularly, and the body responds by diverting precious food energies away from unsightly storage bins, and into the building up of your powerful and glamorous actuation devices aka muscles. SCIENCE NEWS had some notes a while back on chemicals that caused rats to build up their abs et al (or whatever rats have that corresponds to abs et al) without having to serve time in the rat gymnasium. Actually, K and I are serving time fairly happily in the gym, four or five days a week, and I even miss it when we can't. I also look forward to each session's being over, leading me to believe that alternative solutions would be welcomed on occasion.
Most likely this chemical messenger will be found to have bad side effects, such as causing one to vote for the wrong party or misplace the car keys. More likely, it will be suppressed by a gang action of the diet companies, big Pharma, and 24-Hour Nautilus. If these pills don't show up in a couple of years I'm going to have to do something about it. But right now I think I'll go to bed and sleep. |
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| Photos from a new camera |
[Feb. 6th, 2009|09:54 pm] |
Jan 31st vgqn and I went to San Francisco, for the Ferry Plaza farmers' market and a stairway walk in the Pacific Heights. I had a new camera, and I used it. It was a test.
The Nikon S560 is a point-and-shoot of good numbers and tiny size and weight. Reviewers tend to like some things about and dislike others. Here are a closeup at the market and a distance shot not quite at full zoom (X5 range). The originals are 10 mp at 3648 x 2736 pixels, here shrunk to 500 x 375 pixels (but if you click on the picture you get 1000 x 750). Macro mode works pretty well. Long shots are OK, and this will be fine for touristing overseas with a backpack, but when I want real detail I'll bring the D80.
and
OK, one more, the local zeppelin. Maximum focal length, supposedly equivalent to 174 mm for a 35 mm camera:
Automatic exposure and dynamic range selection have worked very well with this camera (at least for the rather easy cases I've given it), but this shot defeated it and I had to bump the contrast and saturation quite a lot in Photoshop.
More after the cut, including some shots of congregating kitchen tools in the Ferry Plaza Sur la Table (Abstract. Very abstract.) and the answer to the question "Stairs? In San Francisco?"
( Here be cut. ) |
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| Had to Buy It |
[Jan. 27th, 2009|10:04 am] |
How could I not? Turned out to be very nice light, fruit, maybe good summer, wine.
Origin is mysterious, but a little sleuthing turned up a cached story about Ironstone Vineyards, in Murphys, California, and a music festival they sponsored in 2007.
With Ironstone as the source, another link; this one talks about the multicolored rubber cork (industry jargon is "closure").
Here's the back label:
It's supposedly in distribution in states across the U.S., but I've only seen it in the usual place.
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| Media News Morning |
[Jan. 26th, 2009|10:05 am] |
It comes in bunches.
Not only is MAD going quarterly, there are layoffs at all the Warner properties, including DC Comics ... and at Diamond, the best comics distributor. (Amazingly, I have a little bit of Time-Warner stock, because years ago Adobe invested in Netscape; explanation on request.)
Simultaneously, two of the four major North American magazine distributors are hiking their fees 7 cents / copy. Expect a lot of titles to raise prices or shut down.
On the e-book front, Amazon is now only going to sell in Kindle format, dropping the Microsoft Reader and Adobe formats. We could all see that coming, once they bought MobiPocket (which is the underlying format for Kindle).
Overdrive (through its distributor Content Reserve) has just stopped providing services to FictionWise -- absolutely the best independent retail outlet for e-books -- but that doesn't matter to me, since I put CR on hold in 2004 when they instituted a per-title annual fee. (This meant I had to provide FictionWise with yet another format version of all e-books, but it was worth it.) Now CR has dropped the fee, but didn't bother to announce it publicly; I only heard about it from an industry group.
Finally, I have received an offer from Ingram Digital to do free conversion to Sony Reader format, of what presumably are the e-books distributed through LightningSource (another Ingram company). How these two divisions of Ingram will handle it all is opaque to me, but I'm sure that no unnecessary money will be paid to the publishers.
ObGoodNews: Discovery Channel believes it will make a lot of money repackaging 23 years of video for YouTube and other outlets on the internet. See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/technology/internet/26vault.html?_r=1 ; Seriously, yes.
Discovery was smart enough to retain the rights...AND the tapes...unlike some television companies, in the US and at the BBC, which thought of their back catalogs as warehousing burdens and deleted them. (So much for cultural history, eh.) |
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| A Well-Attended Party; also, Unexpected Sightings in the Rose Parade 1 & 2 |
[Jan. 2nd, 2009|12:09 pm] |
As <lj user="vgqn"> has already noted, we survived our NYE party. Something like 60 people came and made noise and had fun. Photos will go up on our photo site some day.
Just before midnight I said a few words about two of our regular attendees who weren't with us any more: Steve Cisler (memorial party) and Jim Killus. We hope for a better 2009; 2008 was a tough year in a lot of ways.
Yesterday and today we've been watching the Rose Parade (TiVo-friend). Early in the parade was a marching band whose drummers seemed to be wearing bands that said "I A M U" Ah, a school of identity philosophy. Sadly, they were from Pioneer Valley, and the drum straps exactly covered the P and the other part of the V.
Later on we saw a marching band from a Liberty HS in Pennsylvania, dressed in red uniforms that made them look like the guard at Buckingham Palace (except for the ones dressed at Scots bagpipers). They were playing, and I am quite serious about this, "Rule Brittania". Makes me wonder just who had fought for liberty against whom. Did the students in Pennsylvania think 1776 had all been an unfortunate mistake?
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| Out for a Walk Among the Rich and Famous |
[Dec. 28th, 2008|05:45 pm] |
It was a beautiful day (high 50's, sunny) and vgqn and I went out for a hill-walk. If we'd had more time it would have been a hike through some local park, but with a constrained schedule we decided to walk up hilly streets in Monte Sereno, a rich people's preserve just north of Los Gatos.
The view from Grandview wasn't that much to brag about, but a block up Highway 9 was Lexington Drive, which forked twice and gave us much to look at. Here's the 1930's house from the Hamptons, and over here the Norman style. And one, at 18331 Lexington, looks like a small version of the Huntington museum in SoCal.
Thanks to collected political donations information, I can see that in 2004 it belonged to Jack Tramiel. Perhaps it still does. If you lived through the microcomputer years of the 1970's and 1980's you know about Jack Tramiel.
Now I wonder who lived in the other houses on the street.
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| Healthy Vibrations |
[Dec. 4th, 2008|01:13 pm] |
A correspondent sent me this 1912 ad for the White Cross Electric Vibrator, which will restore your youth and clarify your skin, and do all manner of other things. Away, boredom!
The scan was high enough in resolution (and the printing adequate), so here is the actual image of the box --
a complete set, with every fitting you would need. |
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| Extreme Network Cakes |
[Dec. 3rd, 2008|08:47 pm] |
I'm sorry, I'll type that again. Extreme Holiday Cakes on the Food Network, Food Challenge show.
We regularly watch Ace of Cakes, and this is that cranked up a few notches. And with a Santa or Snowman or Xmas Tree theme. And with pyrotechnics.
I have to say that the crew that attempted to build a five-foot dodecahedron out of pentagonal sheets of crystallized isomalt took on the implausible. That they got as far as they did is testimony to their determination.
Their electromechanics didn't work properly, but another group still managed to blow up Santa's gift bag.
The other two contestants provided equally unusual and equally different cake (or, more properly, active diorama) designs. Santa survived smoke in the chimney he was entering, and elves wobbled as they tried to put a star on a Swedish Swedish cake.
It appears tonight's showing was the last, so you'll have to take my word for it.
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| With the Night Mail |
[Dec. 3rd, 2008|11:12 am] |
The book publishing industry is undergoing some very large cutbacks, with divisions being closed or merged-into, and dozens of workers, editors, and executives (sometimes all the same person) being laid off. [News from two free daily e-mail newsletters, the "Publisher's Lunch" and the daily letter from Publishers Weekly .]
And I have received the following spammail; it is nice to know that the Luch remembered me from that passing introduction so many decades ago. I, of course, consider myself one of the Needy, and am ready to send the request in (I've suppressed the actual e-mail address so that you lot don't go honking in before I get my share):
"From The Office Of Attorney Maldini paulo Esq. Paulo,s Chambers. Email: XXXXX@foo.bar
On behalf of the Trustees and Executor of the Estate of late Luciano Pavarotti,I hereby attempt to reach you again . I wish to notify you that Late Luciano Pavoratti left the Sum of of Eighteen Million five Hundred Thousand Dollars.($18,500,000.00 ) in The codicil land last testament to his will, this fund was set aside for the help of the less priviledged , needy and widows around the world. This may sound strange and Unbelievable to you, but it is real and true. Luciano Pavarotti was known for his humanitarian work. He was the founder and the host of the 'Pavarotti & Friends' annual charity concerts and related activities in Modena , Italy. There he sang with international stars of all styles to raise funds for several worthy UN causes and charity homes. Late Luciano Pavarotti until his death was a very dedicated Christian who loved to give out. His great philanthropy earned him numerous awards during his life time, late Luciano Pavarotti died at the Age of 72 years. According to him this money is to support your activities and to help the poor and the Needy. I will like to read more about him on this website (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0667556/bio) Please you should fill the information below for more clarities and identification of your Informations we have here so that will direct you on how to contact the paying bank for the release of your (money) fund. 1. Full Name . 2. Country. 3. Age. 4. Contact address. 5.Phone number(Mobile And house Phone). 6.Occupation. Yours in Service, Maldini Paulo,s
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| Updates |
[Dec. 2nd, 2008|11:27 pm] |
I now have an excellent proto-scar on my left forearm. It will turn out to have been expensive, but hey, no pain, no gain. Next one will be across the top of my nose, I'm thinking, if I can afford it.
Meanwhile, I've added some more pictures to the infinite-number-of-narrowcasting blogs I've started at one time or another. Try the railways blog or the Early Radio blog for some various stuff.
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| Chinese Fortune Aphorisms |
[Nov. 28th, 2008|02:45 pm] |
For some convention, an unknown number of years ago, we were asked to write fortune cookie fortunes. I seem to have written a page of them; then my brain imploded. No date on the paper; several of them are about gods, and there seems to be a short "inside" cycle. Here are a few (including some of the more Zen-like):
Only in wine and song are Man and the gods alike.
The riches of life are the ashes of death.
Man's fate is not separable from that of his gods.
The empire of the land is not the empire of the sea.
When you learn to fly, then you can make friends with the birds.
If you search for the god within you, you will find him outside.
A man with no friends may still take counsel from his enemies. |
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