Another episode of speedy builder theater.

This time I build a loft in a minute and a half. Tried not to over engineer this one and still stay safe, I think it came out pretty well all and all. Sleeping up there is a bit claustrophobic, but I think it’s going to work out.

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Broke the twenty mile mark today, which is cool, besides the whole century goal one of the things I wanted to be able to do was to be ale to ride twenty miles without a lot of effort. That’s just what todays ride felt like. I stopped a few times to do run some errands, CVS, drop a note in a jeep, price out some lumber at Home Depot, grab some shirts at the Gap, and some groceries on the way back home. All and all it feels good, and I still feel like I could climb back on the bike and ride more. Progress rocks.Oh yeah, so the days total ride - 20.73 miles.

All the rides I’ve done up to this point have been in the same general area, today I went north instead of south. Up the hill by the airport and through the woodsy bits over on the west side. Had some trouble with the GPS today so the data isn’t great, milage today read 13.36, but I think the GPS was shut off for about half a mile or so.

My good friend Nellie dragged me out into the rain drenched woods of Rhode Island with the promise that I would leave smiling and happy no matter how low I may be after seeing a bunch of half crazed loons in marching band. Who knew she’d be right.

What Cheer? indeed.

A slightly shorter ride than the last one, 14.89 miles, which surprised me, I thought I’d taken a slightly longer route. Some killer hills. Starting to really feel like I’m riding again.

A bit more today, 15.68 miles, felt hard the whole way though this time. I think I may need to change the way I’m eating to fuel this kind of work.

13.17 miles today, rained some, but it was warm out.

A short ride today, not much time, just under six miles.

As a part of my data junkie aspect of this fitness thing I though I’d weigh myself so I have something else to track. The weight I’m at now feels quite good to me so this isn’t about loosing anything, if anything I suspect I’ll gain weight as I add muscle mass. I really just wanted a data line for my graph. So stopped in at an Ocean State Job Lot and bought a scale, sitting right next to the scales was a huge stack of various workout videos on VHS. I realized today that I probably won’t be able to ride every day, and it will be a few more weeks before it’s warm enough to swim. The tapes were two bucks so I figured trying it out couldn’t hurt. I’ve never done this sort of thing. I tired a yoga class once and enjoyed it so I grab the least lame looking of the yoga tapes. Don’t tell my sister Mary I’m doing yoga to a tape, I’ll never hear the end of it. So anyway, the tape goes for an hour, it’s kind of tough to work with at points, there is a struggle between watching the screen and getting the pose right, and the pace and strenuousness of some of it is a bit beyond me now, but for two bucks it’s a good way to keep active when other options don’t work.

Went out on the bicycle today, first time this season that was anything more than a quick trip to the store. Not that long a ride, about eleven and a quarter miles, rode over to the bike path along the river and back. Felt it a bit when coming back over the hill by Holy Cross, but not as badly as I feared I might.

I’m once again going to have a go at getting in shape. Many times I’ve assessed myself decided that I needed to exercise more or some such thing. It’s never stuck. Unless some sort of physical exertion has been a part of my regular work or recreational life I tend to fall out of shape somewhat. Nothing awful, but jut to that point where the flesh and muscle feels somehow a limiting factor. So once again the physical fitness regimen. Past attempts I would head into this simply thinking that I need to get into better shape and just start trying to exercise, calisthenics, cycling, what have you. I’ve tried the measurement of progress thing, how many reps and the like, but it occurred to me that I never had a target in mind outside the vague goal of feeling better and stronger. I suspect this may be part of why I haven’t kept with it in the past. So this time I shooting for something concrete. One hundred miles in a single day on the bike, and a one mile swim, perhaps by the end of the summer. I’ve always liked the idea of both activities. Back in the day I remember some of the older kids at summer camp doing the mile swim. That sounded good and exciting to me, a real accomplishment in my mind at the time, and it being the scouts they got a badge for it of course. Later I heard about cyclists doing a ride they call a century, a hundred miles in a single ride. That sounded like a thing of substance, an accomplishment much like the mile swim. So I’m going to target those things. I don’t know what a reasonable time line is for achieving either of them, or what sort of training schedule I need to do or any such thing. I’m not racing in any way so speed isn’t a factor. I’m not going to buy new gear, my old heavy bike and Converse All Stars will do me fine I figure. Being a data junkie I’ll track stuff of course, that’s part of the pleasure for me. Motion Based has a neat set of tools for interpreting GPS data in a manner relevant to training, I put todays ride up there and play with that a bit. I’ll use 43 Things to prompt me along. I’ve added both the ride and the swim to my list there, it has a neat feature where you can plug in a goal and have it send you a message at some point in the future asking you how it’s going. Computers rock.

Whoa… seems I need a new gig.

Now this is fun. The Log, kickin’ it VT style.

Click your heels three times, and this link as well to make it go away.

Data is neat stuff. I like spreadsheets, it’s true. Graphs are neat. With this attitude it should be no surprise that I will occasionally spend time just looking through the raw logs of this site.

For those non-geeks out there a short explanation. This webpage you are looking at is stored on a hard drive of a computer located somewhere in Philadelphia. I give the owners of that computer a few buck every month and in return they let me save things there and keep it connected to the internet all the time. So when you look at this page your computer is reading the files from that machine. Now that computer in Philly that this page lives on makes a note every time someone reads a file on it. So when you looked at this page that computer noted the date and time you looked at it, as well as some information about your computer, like if you are using a Mac or a Windows machine and such. If you came to this page via a link on another site, or via google or some such thing it will tell me that too. Those notes are what are called raw logs. They look like this. Scary huh?

Yeah, so sometimes I find it relaxing, amusing, and occasionally enlightening to look though the raw logs. Sometimes I find neat things.

This evening I was doing just that and found that there are a number of people out there using some images I made. This one here was showing up a lot in odd places, peoples myspace pages, on chat boards, etc. The image is a part of the lomography in the photography section of this site, I titled it “Scary”. So dig this, if you go to Yahoo’s image search and search for the word scary this image comes up on the first page, weird. So niece Nina, a photo of you making a scary monster move when you were a little kid is now one of the preeminent definitions of scary on the world wide web, at least for the time being, our 15 minutes has been greatly reduced in these modern times.

That’s not the only strange place images of mine are showing up. A graphic I made for the presidential campaign of my old band is showing up on another myspace page, in his people I’d like to meet section no less. Where was he when we were selling tapes?

I don’t know Italian but it seems as though another of my photographs is illustrating a poem (or since I remain ignorant of what is written I can be vain enough to imagine it inspired the writing of a poem) on someone’s blog. Does anyone know Italian? If so please be so kind as to provide me with a translation.

Yes things are very messy around here right now. A new lead in (mouse over the “me” in the last line) I’m trying some new plugins (look over in the sidebar (unless I later change my mind & take them out then don’t bother because they’re not there) a list of books I’m reading at the moment) playing with layout, & a few other things. So that’s they way it is right now. Messy, undignified. High WIP.

Trying Twitter.

Mondrianian?

An alternate viewpoint

More mess’in round. Data junkie crack.

Early adopter fun means no screwy usernames http://mog.com/william/. Could it be? a social networking site that is actually interesting? Hmmm….

So I just downloaded Flock and I’m mess’n ’round with it….

Blogged with Flock

HoJo’s Tallahassee - Sleeppppp

Moblie Bay, Alabama

On the ferry from Dauphin Island to Fort Morgan. Ferry showed up well over an hour late (unless I changed time zones, did I change time zones?) Update: Umm, yeah I did

Dinner at Toucans in Mexico Beach right on the shore. Lovey lovely.

Wakulla Springs State Park

Took a short walk to Sally Ward Spring. Insect noises are so loud here. Saw an alligator!

Got me some o’ that internets stuff. Here’s my ego-centric map o’ the day.

Port Inglis Restaurant. Had Alligator tail on the menu but well, I ordered the grilled Grouper. Yummy. Local dive all the way, complete with bad blues rock band singing out of key in the dark dingy bar.

Update: Name of the town rang a bell, a faint one mind you, and in times like these I often run a search locally on my machine to see what comes up (btw I so dig indexing tools like spotlight on the Mac, totally changes the way I interact with my data) an lo and behold seems like the little town of Ingles has come to my notice before, in fact this band I used to play in formally blacklisted the town. Fancy that. Further research shows that the owner of the fine eatery publicly objected to the ban, since there’s an attached bar (totally biker dive looking place) Janus has proposed lifting the ban, reforming the band and heading down for a gig. Hmmmm….

Gulf coast. First time I’ve put my feet in that body of water.

Taking a short road trip prior to doing a work conference thing. I’m at the first state park I found after driving due west from the car rental place. Nuclear power plant in the distance, strange lush vegetation, pelicans fishing, armadillos scurrying, sun setting into the sea.

Anyone who has been in my house in the last two years has been subjected to my speech about how one day I’m gonna cut a hole in that wall. Well folks the day has come. For some reason altering a wall is a great and glorious symbol of home ownership for me and I’ve been wanting to do such a thing long before I owed my own place. How fortunate I was that the first place I own has a need of a hole in a wall.

This is a timid phase one. Just a small hole to see how it is done. Long term it will be a bigger and probably a lot different than it is now. But none the less I think it is doing just what I wanted it to achieve and I had a grand old time doing it. Still needs to be properly finished off, but the big part is done.

The Middle East in Cambridge. It happened to be Russian Punk night, the band Grazhdanskaya Oborona was playing who are apparently incredibly important in the development of underground an punk in the U.S.S.R. Of course I’m an ignorant american and didn’t know any of this (if you’re an ignorant american as well you can find more about this band in this wikipedia article)

The place was full of russians, I was one of the very few non-russians there. Before things started we ran into three guys who had driven in from Chicago to see this show, that’s about a twenty hour drive. A twenty hour drive to see a punk show. Wow. Sure I once drove the twenty hours to Chicago to play a fifteen minute punk show, but I have to put the emphasis there on play. I can’t imagine driving anywhere near that far to watch a band.

Tired, sluggish & not sleeping well last few days. I’m sure it’s a result the muggy heat as of late but I thought I’d try combating it anyway. Tried some early morning exercise. Not something that is a regular habit with me at all but I’ve been in a habit changing state of mind.

So at about quarter past seven I jumped on the bicycle and when out for a spin. Cooler this morning but still ever so humid. Windy. Looks like a storm could hit at any moment.

Rode along the park toward Main, down Beaver past the athletic fields then onto Park toward Webster Square. Cruised through the shopping plaza on the off chance that Radio Shack might be open super early (I need a new battery for my speedometer) no such luck. Left the plaza on the other side and went up Heard and into Hadwen Park. Rode through the park leaving at the Knox Street gate, the out onto Webster and headed north. Took a little detour through Notre Dame cemetery just to get away from traffic and enjoy riding. Riding up the hill out of the cemetery toward the gate I started feeling the effects of the exercise, clearly not in the best of shape! Once back on Webster I continued north to Main. Rain started to fall, enough to be real rain and not mist, but not so much as to make riding difficult. Very pleasant, I rode home slowly.

The ride was about five and a half miles. Not bad I guess but I’d like to get back to the easy twenty I used to do oh so long ago.

Today I bought a 21 year old Mercedes-Benz 300D with 252,900 miles on it. I paid less than the seller was asking, and more that I had wanted too, but I think I got a good deal. Time will tell.

The real question is will I be able to afford to keep the thing supplied in parts. The most recent repair I did on the Chevy was a replacement of the heater core, parts for that job cost me about twenty bucks. Same job on this car would run over three hundred. Now of course a three hundred dollar heater core is going to last a whole lot longer than a twenty dollar one, but at some point there is going to be need for new components and the cost is going to hurt the wallet real bad…

But I have a friend who owns porsches so I guess I sort of had to go this route…

Come on click the play button. You know you want to sing along!

Yat-Kah is totally my new favorite band.

Several weeks ago I noticed a post on boingboing, a punk rock throat singing band? That totally gets clicked on. I figured if anything it would result in a chuckle. Back in the mid-nineties when Tuvan singing was all hip with the elitist npr set and it was on all the smart wise and gentle radio shows I really got into it. I remember a letter read on NPR where a listener related an experience of hearing a story about the Tuvan singers while doing the stuck in traffic commute thing. Being fascinated with the sound he tried to emulate it himself. Seeing a fellow in an adjacent car making strange faces, mouth movements & such he realized that he was listening to the same program and doing the same thing… of course I had done the same that exact thing as well.

The sound of throat singing is just amazing. From the first time I heard it I thought it would sound great with loud guitars and drums. To stumble on someone doing that is great! Most times when you here the blending of of a non-western music with contemporary popular western forms it usually seems to be done by some American or Brit trying to show off how wide their influences are, or it’s by an ex-pat type in London or Paris. I think these guys are different. I think these guys are just some dudes out in the middle of nowhere doing what they do. They live and breathe the whole Tuvan thing (being Tuvan and all…) and one day heard something different on a radio or beat up noisy cassette tape that had been copied six times over and righteously determined that it rocked and started doing something with it. I think they’re closer to the Minute Men than Peter Gabriel.

Well anyway they rock. And they’re my new favorite band. Go buy a CD from them, or at least download a free mp3 or buy something from iTunes. Tell’em William sent you.

Janus has added loads more to the Dirtbombs Tour diary.

Working on a some draft web pages for it.

http://mhoh.pair.com/~wburdett/dbs/tourdiary/

Well the darkroom is kinda ready for business. I light proofed the door, hung a shelf. Put up the timers & safe lights. There a still some details to work out, and the ventilation is still in temporary mode, but I think I just might have a working darkroom. I’ll pull the chemistry from storage tomorrow and see if I can remember how to process film. Maybe I should go wash out the tank now…

Plumbing.

I thought this would be an easy bit. Get some pipes and such, hook’em up and I’m done.

There are a lot of different kinds of pipes! not to mention valves and materials and all that. Over the last two weeks I’ve spent a lot of time in Home Depot & Lowes just looking at stuff trying to get it in my head. I finally got a book and began to get a better understanding. I also found out about PEX. PEX rocks, particularly this kind that has screw together bits that are totally easy to put together. I installed the piping and valves in maybe an hour. The drain was a bit more difficult as I didn’t have the proper saw, but event that got done in about two hours or so.

So the darkroom is now plumbed!

A little bit more to do to make it fully light tight. I have a shelf I’ll put up tomorrow. The exhaust system is a bit ugly as I’m waiting for a replacement fan motor, but I’ve got a temporally one in place until that arrives. I can’t believe how close this is to being ready.

Remember this?

The time has come and the deed has been done.

So the first time I walked though this apartment with a real-estate agent I knew this room would make a great studio, a large bedroom with small windows and a half bath. Plenty of space to work, and oh so easy to build a darkroom. Between that, the location and the fantastic exposed brick wall that ran the length of the unit I knew I wanted the place and I did my best to contain my enthusiasm so as not to alert the realtor to my excitement.

Now that being said over the next couple of years I did very little to make the studio actually happen. After flying through the bookshelf a couple of weeks back I decided to buckle down as it were and get something done.

A photographic darkroom is a pretty simple thing. You need a room that is totally dark. The half bath with no window is just dandy for that. Just seal up the cracks around the door your done. Ventilation is important. Again the half bath comes though - it’s got a ceiling fan that can easily be modified to the purpose, but with a light tight door some sort of fresh air supply is needed. That got done early on. I cut a couple of holes in the wall in a light trapish configuration and put vent grills over them. You need shelves for stuff - piece of cake. And you need a big sink. That one threw me a bit. Again, early on I pulled out the little sink (sold it on ebay even!) that was in the space. But replacing it with a big sink was a different matter. A very large sink is needed. I didn’t know anything about that. I looked about a bit. Searched on the internet and found some very expensive nice sinks and some moderately pricey lousy sinks. None of them would do the right job. I read about some folks who made sinks out of wood. Crazy, sorta like an inside out boat. Difficult to do, lots of toxic fumey stuff, and not all that cheap - plus not really the best way to do it. The best way it to get a stainless steel sink. I saw some in catalogs and such that ran over $1k. Yikes. But a sink is sort of a simple thing. Just a box with a hole in it really. So I figured I need to have one custom fabricated. Sounded expensive. I even contemplated learning to weld & such so I could make it myself.

Now there is a key phrase toward the end of that last paragraph, “sounded expensive”. Which of course means I had no idea what I was talking about and just making stuff up based on a few bits of unrelated things I gathered here & there.

So the Monday after I finished building my sturdy shelf I decide to get going on the sink, I had some money set aside and what was I waiting for anyway? Quite some time ago I had looked into metal fabrication locally and found a place called City Welding & Sheet Metal Fabrication that looked good. So instead of just clicking on the web site and thinking “that looks quite expensive” I called them up to find out just what it would entail. Talking to a fellow on the phone it quickly became apparent that I didn’t really have enough knowledge of the subject to convey what I wanted over the phone, so I went down and met with Paul Black who asked me some nice simple smart questions and we made some sketches and in a few minutes had a plan. I asked him what it would cost and he went into the “prepare yourself mode” as he explained that the cost of stainless steel stock was at an all time high and although the task was simple and wouldn’t cost much in labor the stock would be expensive. So I though about my nice little bank balance and waited for the price.

One hundred and seventy five dollars.

Yep. That’s it. And it would just take a couple of days to get done. In fact I picked it up before the week was out. I can’t believe how long I dawdled getting this done. Grrrrrr. There must be a better balance between preparation and action.

So I spent the long holiday weekend making a stand for the sink out of slotted steel. Behold! It is a mighty sink on a mighty stand that will last until the end of days.

I woke up very early again this morning and decided to get to work on painting the shelf I built last weekend. Strangely enough I think I may be becoming a morning person…

As it’s a built in I’m thinking I want the shelf to blend into the space a bit. The corner it’s on is where the walls go from being painted white to black. So I painted the black bit today as I also needed to paint the new door to the darkroom the same color as well.

As for the other bit I’m not sure I’ll ever get to the point where I want to color to change enough to spend the time taking everything off in order to do the job. I keep reminding myself that this is a workspace and doesn’t need the interior design bits all dotted and crossed properly.

A little while ago I started working on a built in shelf in the studio. It’s a been an intermittent project, or better stated, I’ve been an intermittent worker. Bought a bit of wood… then at some point cut a bit of it… then a few days later screwed a bit of it to that… etc. etc.

This weekend I just dove in and and finished it. It’s the first time I’ve built a bookshelf, that is unless you count stacking milk-crates between boards building. My carpentry is getting a bit better. Everything is level, square and solid. The finish work leaves something to be desired, I’m no Norm, but not bad for a workspace.

I finally have pretty much all my photographic stuff (except for the darkroom things) out of boxes and in a place where it can be used again.

I still need to paint the shelf - and perhaps do a bit more finish wise…

For some time now Janus has been encouraging me to go to the track with him and race his very expensive european sports car. Now of course it nearly needs not to be mentioned, but this has always been wildly appealing, however I’ve hesitated because I don’t know anything at all about racing, and although he’s always assured me that the particular variety of racing is altogether safe I still fear doing something wrong that results in something awful happening to his wonderful (and did I mention the expensive?) european sports car.

Well Janus called me again to entice me to an event, and it just so happened that I was in just the right frame of mind to be lured into to spending the day with a friend doing exciting, and perhaps foolish things… So off we go to an autocross held by the Northeast Region of the Porsche Club of America at an airfield at Fort Devans in Ayer, Massachusetts.

Very different than what I imagined. I had guessed that it would be full of pretentious Porsche owners, but instead it was full of excited, friendly, and perhaps a tad geeky Porsche owners. Which in hindsight makes total sense. The Porsche is incredibly fun to drive, and a very good car to tinker with. Plus of course they go very very fast, and going very very fast with no cops about is amazingly fun. This isn’t a place to look at and show off pristine pretty cars (although there were plenty of cool cars to check out) This is a place to drive cars, drive them for all it’s worth, and there is nothing pretentious about that.

After signing up and getting the car ready for tech inspection we went out and walked the course. Hmmm… so here’s something I didn’t know really. Autocross is not drive around an oval kinda thing. It’s all squiggly. The race could have gone around in a rough oval on the runways & connecting roads, but why do that? That would be easy - and kinda boring. Instead a series of obstacles are created with those little orange road cones. Things like hairpin turns, slaloms, big wide turns, gates & boxes. Prior to the start of the race we walked the course to get a sense of what we needed to do. Walking it it seemed to me to be a nearly impossible task to maneuver a high speed car through the course, it seemed like it would be tough at low speeds even. But Janus was calmly describing the route & rules, talking about going fast here, sliding there, going even faster there. Hmmmm….. Still seemed crazy to me. And I was still convinced it wasn’t the best idea in the world and I would inevitably do something to his shiny red porsche.

So even though Janus offered to let me drive first I graciously declined. I wanted to see him go out and do it first. Was I really supposed to race out of that gate, spin around that cone, shift hard into second and slam the accelerator to the floor? Yep. That’s what he did. Three times. Then it’s my turn.

So I’m still not sure about this whole business and I take advantage of one of the more knowledgeable folk who are there volunteering as instructors. Tom grabs a helmet, jumps in the passenger seat and I tell him I’ve never done anything remotely like this before. The next two minutes consists of me flailing about trying to steer around cones while going as fast as I can (which isn’t all that fast) without hitting anything and such. The whole time Tom patiently points and tries to get me to steer the car in the right direction. Which I kinda sorta do… except for the very first turn where I go around the cone the wrong way - which according to the rules puts me off course. Hmph! Not the best start. At the end I have an awful course time, well over two minutes, something like 2:20+, nearly everyone was doing better than 1:50, the really good drivers where in the 1:30’s, the best were getting in the mid 1:20’s. But I had gone around the course kind of a little bit fast and I hadn’t wreaked the car or anything bad a all. I was still scared, my hands were shaking as I cued up for my next run. But wow it was amazingly exciting.

Over the course of the day I got a little bit better. I started driving around the course instead of flailing. Spun out a few times, recovered and kept going, and by the end of the day I had my course time under two minutes. No where near good, but I kinda got the hang of it, and the whole thing stopped being terrifying, although it never lost the edge of excitement. What a cool day.

Last Tuesday I had a very pleasant conversation regarding lomography and my work with the camera (philosophy, movement?) with M. Elizabeth Roman of the Telegram & Gazette which contributed to an article she wrote on the topic which appers in todays edition of the paper.

“The result is often described as detailed yet emotional, abstract and startlingly profound.”

Full article

The tinkering/repair spirt is still with me. After the triumphant experince with the airport, combined with a rekindled interest in lomography I had a go at repairing the Supersampler Sheri gave to me a few years back.

It may seem odd to attempt to repair a cheap toy plastic camera but I really enjoy the images I got in the brief time that it was functioning, and being the tinkering type I see non-functioning equipment that wouldn’t typically been seen as worth the time and expense to repair as a wonderful opportunity to learn.

It turned out to be pretty easy to fix. The film would no longer advance due to a malfunction in the mechanism that allows for the take up spool to spin free at the end of a roll. In it’s damaged state the take up reel spun freely all the time. Opening it up and poking around I came to the conclusion that I needed a thin shim between two gears on the take up reel. Poking around my shop wondering what sort of material I might have around that would work well for a very thin, strong, but easily cut material my eye fell on the cartridge of 35mm film siting next to the disassembled camera… a few snips later and a bit of reassembled and I have a functioning Supersampler once again!

Some time ago I acquired a non-functioning Apple Airport basestation, one of the early graphite models. Rumor had it that when these went bad it was due to some sort of minor component that was prematurely failing. Something to do with a poor manufacturing process and industrial espionage or some such thing… So anyway, I figured that someone who knows what they’re doing will have figured this out and written about it. That’s what people who know what they’re doing do. Right? Right!

Now I have a basic knowledge of electronics and a many many “broken” pieces of equipment have found new life under my hands, but until now those repairs were of the most basic sort. In most cases merely opening the item and giving it a good cleaning does the job. But this required a real repair, some little colored baubles on the circuit board were misbehaving and had to go. I’d never dug that deep before, but for some time I have been wanting to get a bit past cleaning capstans, lubricating transports and fixing broken solder joints.

And of course as there are folks out there that knew far more than I, and better yet, write about it in a way I can comprehend. Constantin von Wentzel has an excellent article posted that took me throughout the entire process, particularly the bits that were most foreign to me, identification and handing of the colored bits. The bit in question I now know to be a capacitor, wonderful! I’ve know about capacitors in theory but now there they were. Brown nasty bits, hissy, bulging, and not properly doing their bit to make the networks in my world wireless. Two new bright blue capacitors were acquired, the brown nasties plucked from the circuit board, the new ones nestled in place (although I’m sure Constantin would disapprove of my rough handing of the situation and my sloppy soldering) and the whole package is bundled up tight again and blinking happily

I am pleased as punch and now have a working base station, or what I kind of assume to be a working base station. It blinks nicely and I’ve been able to get in and configure it, but I don’t have a wireless device to connect to it test if fully. If your coming by to visit feel free to bring your wireless laptop get a hit of the clicky juice.

In anticipation of possible increased traffic to the site I’ve done a minor update to the lomography page (added some images to the wall and tidied up a few other things. I’m going to put the word(s) action sampler here just becuase I can’t belive it isn’t anywhere on the site) and took the text off the main page announcing a redesign that happened back in 2000.

Changes.

I’ve decided to dive in and do a major redesign of this web site. It’ll be a while before it’s done so I imagine that much will be awry in this corner of cyberspace during the transition. The old site is still up and will slowly be phased out as sections get revamped. I’m surprised at just how large the site has gotten. I started putting up web pages in 1995 and all of a sudden I look back and found I’ve built a 35 mb web site.

That was more than a little out of date! Funny how I thought the redesign would reach a done stage. That old site never was phased out and is still up in it’s late ’90’s glory for all to see.

I also upgraded the software that runs this section, Wordpress. Went from 1.5 to 1.5.1.2. Way too late an night to do this sort of thing and I messed up creating the backup in such a way that not everything really was backed up. But everything seems to be running OK so perhaps I got lucky this time….

Everybody’s doin’ it, I’m just another lemming on this geekfest, or as Janus puts it “A whole new way to not get laid.”

While playing with this I found out that I kinda miss floppy disks… well not really.

I almost never use removable media anymore, I just buy bigger hard drives or store stuff on some other place on the network. Gone are the days where this file, was on that floppy, that is in what drawer now? or maybe on this shelf? I hope it’s not in the bottom of that rusack…. Terrible days really. But it had the nice side effect of the rediscovered file, the thing saved and forgotten. Loading the unlabeled disk in vain hope that the file you want is on it… and while it is of course it’s not there, sometimes there is a neat file on it that you can’t for the life of you remember why you saved, or maybe you do and it triggers a neat memory lane thing.

To take the photo of the mysterious transparent monitor I used an older camera that’s kickin’ round the shop that uses floppy disks. The disk I grabbed had a photo on it I took some time ago of a neat old pulp thriller that I’d sent out into the world after registering it with bookcrossings and tagging it as a free, not lost. I left it at the Wonder Bar (The tables there remind me of OS 7 desktop patterns ) after having pizza and a glass of chianti with Sheri. Some weeks later I retuned for yet another glass of chianti and another pizza. We’re seated and given menus, in my menu is a short note state something along the line that the books is in safe hands or some such thing.

I planted a flower garden today, first time in a long while. Actually it might be the first flower only type garden I’ve ever planted now that I think about it. All the past gardens had the primary conceit of being created for food production, flowers in those were an afterthought or an attempt at passive anti-pest type stuff (I seem to recall planting marigolds due to a rumor about some nibbly bug not liking them and as such hoping they would help keep more of the tasty foodstuffs for me).

So there might be some flowers outside my window this year.

Assembling it was neat. The plot is tiny, just a bit of dirt down at the bottom of a little window well three of four feet below ground level. It’s covered by a a rusty iron grate and for much of the day it’s in a good bit of shade. The small patch of dirt is in a sorry state, little chance of even the heartiest of weeds taking root there so I bought bags of dirt, about a hundred and thirty pounds. One hundred and thirty pounds of dirt sounds like a lot to me, but it only covers about a three by three area a few inches deep.

It’s a strange garden to work in. No way to really get to it. The top is covered by that iron grate. It’s about four feet above the floor level from the inside the house, and the window sill is quite deep. Getting into the space would be clumsy and uncomfortable at best, but I’m adapting to it, working remotely seems to be best.

I no longer have any gardening tools at all so I fabricated a tool to prepare the soil. I took a two foot piece of scrap moulding left over from when I replaced the baseboard in the studio and drilled a hole roughly in the center of it about half an inch in diameter. Then I affixed the board to the end of a pole and got something that somewhat resembles a very wide hoe. I used that to spread the dirt around the space in a nice even patch. Then I just threw some seeds in. Scattered them about willy nilly, no formal manner, a few over here, some over there, a bit of this on that end, etc. Then I just tossed a bit more dirt over the lot and called the seeds planted. Almost definitely not the best way to make a garden I suppose, none the less I enjoyed the method immensely. The impulse to start a flower garden outside the window had a lot to do with wanting to make the space feel different and the massive randomness of my methods seem in tune with that spirt if nothing else.

So perhaps in a few weeks there will be some morning glories, moonflowers and whatever else was in those little packets growing up toward the grate.

Went for a walk with Sheri up Soapstone Hill at the north end of Quabbin Reservoir in the Federated Women’s Club State Forest. Sheri saw a heron in the swamp along the West Branch of Fever Brook that took me a good ten minutes to spot once she had seen it.

Afterwards fried clams at Ronnies.

This is great. Run the words “hair style” through Yahoo’s new video search and my silly hair movie comes up twelfth. I learn this because looking at the server logs I can see that someone actually clicked on my head after doing the search!

Ah! it continues. Altavista’s video search brings it in at 16th for a search on “hair cutting”! Do you remember when Altavista was the gold stand for web search?

My word.

I’ve come across many an odd thing by looking though the server logs (remember the naked kayaking stuff?) but I think I may have just found the strangest thing yet. There is a bandwidth thief using an image from my site in his web page. It’s one of the first images to ever go up on this site. Years ago when I first started working on WilliamBurdette.net I put together some pages with pictures of my cats in order to try to figure out how to make an automated slide show… and to poke fun at the fact that at the time it seemed as though whole swathes of he web seemed to consist of badly made web pages filled with pictures of lonely geeks cats. I never really thought someone would look at them, the link to them is buried deep somewhere. But it’s happened, well, not merely happened, but someone has taken one of my silly cat pictures and put it on his site! Here’s the photo, and here’s the fellow who is stealing my bandwidth. What a small world. My great-great grandfather and his wife came to america from Lithuania. Generations later a nice little goth boy in Lithuania is admiring my cat.

The internet is ever so wonderful.

Joe to the rescue! Battery jumped and the truck is running charging the thing back up.

Argh! Dead battery.

Seems that in the process of cleaning up after the weekend repair I accidentally left the dome light on! Anybody wanna give me a jump?

Twenty some odd days later the heater core repair continues.

Got the fricken fraken heater blower off with the assistance of Sheris little monkey hands. Pulled the old core and put the new one in. No leaks. Heat. Nice.

The dash board is still hanging from a couple of bungie cords, but at least I can drive without a fine mist of antifreeze filling the cab.

Very basic look.

I’ve had a go at making theme for wordpresss. Chances are if this is a recent post it’s in use. (If this is an old post no then it could very well be wholly different.)

Deliberately goning for a super striped down old school web before html got its fancy party cloths look. Sorta in reaction to the super duper tech behind this, scripting, & back-end databases and all. The earlier incarnation of the log was by contrast quite basic, just a set of simple files for each months stuff that was displayed using server side includes. When I first put that page together it felt pretty slick too me compared to the way I had been mking web sites, hand crafting each page. I used that page to learn css and that seemed super duper cool and über current. Css still makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Kinda getting the beginning of getting the hang of PHP while I’m at it.

update Well I couldn’t leave well enough alone. Added a background image. Not quite so retro-web anymore.

The upside to working on a truck in the winter without a garage is that ones knuckles are already iced prior to smashing them. Preventative first aid of a sorts.

The there’s been a slow coolant leak in the cab for some time now, and the heater never really worked that well, so when the windows became covered in a thin foggy film on Friday night I pretty much figured I’d be pullin’ the heater core this weekend. The heater core is connected to the coolant systems by two small hoses and is held in place by four screws. A brand new core is only about twenty bucks. Oh so deceptively simple. To get to those four screw the dashboard has to come out. To detach the hoses… I still haven’t figured that out yet…

It wasn’t all bloody icy fingers and defeat this afternoon. Inside the dashboard there was lots of dust and rubbish as one would expect in a sixteen year old truck, but unexpected was a slip of 110 film. Now I never shoot that myself, so this came from the prior owner, whom I never met, bought this thing off a used car lot.

Finally making the switch to a database back end with a web based editor. The earlier version of this site The log

For some time I’ve been contemplating cutting my hair.

Do any of these work? Hmmm… maybe one of these instead. Send me your opinion @ tonsorial@WilliamBurdette.net

Spent a few hours converting the log & associated pages to XHTML. Still a ton of errors but I’ll get there…

After months of inactivity finnaly started working on the log page again.

Worcester, Massachusetts
1523968

Made it back. Stopped twice on account of a busted headlight. Once in Portland and again in Portsmouth. Just got warnings from the cops in booth cases.

Good Trip. East Coast done.

Next? Alaska?

Augusta , Maine
1521967

10.338g’s fuel. Thinking of heading home.

Ellsworth, Maine
1521137

Traveled through a bit of Maine I hadn’t been to since maybe 1993, perhaps `94. Drove through Milbridge & past the Bayview Family Campground & the Red Barn Restaurant. On Schoodic Peninsula I had hoped to stop in at the Bartlett Winery, the first winery I ever visited, but it was closed for the season. Oh well, next trip. It was still nice to have passed thorough the area, next time I’ll take a bit more time and find that lobster place that’s out here, best lobster shack I’ve ever been too.

West Quoddy Head , Maine
1520064

East end of the United States.

Walked along the coast for an hour or so. One of the points out here is the easternmost part of the U.S. coast. I don’t know wether or not I got to that point, but I’m close enough.

Time to eat some chocolate to asisst with warming up.

Machias , Maine
1519663
Drove further than I intended last night. Took a while to find a place to stay. Ended up in the Machias Motor Inn paying to much. But the view of the Machias River out the window eases the fiscal pain some. Ice flows, never seen anything quite like it.

Had dinner & breakfast at Helen’s Restaurant. Nice folks, good food. Particualry the one inch thick wheat toast.

Perry, Maine
1519148

Fuel .11.1 gallons

1:54 p.m. Atlantic Time

Alma Beach, New Brunswick, Canada
1516981

In the Fundy National Park. Tide is going out. Sea is red. Waterfalls. PBJ.

108
3/4/02 11:53 a.m. Atlantic Time

Sussex , New Brunswick , Canada ,
Blue Bird Motel and Dinner
1516590

Gorgeous sunny warm. Canadians. Air and everything breaths. Big. Trees. Good breakfast. Gravy on the fries last night.

Fuel stop. 29.898 Liters.

102

3/3/02

2:36 p.m. Atlantic Time
Blacks Harbour , New Brunswick
Canada
Grand Manan Ferry Pier
1515132

Didn’t really expect to feel like I would be in a foreign place, after all I’m less than 500 miles from home. But this is something else. The coast of the Bay of Fundy is so rough, almost unfinished looking. Huge waves crashing onto cliffs. Rocks Rocks Rocks. Scrubby pines. The wind is intense, I’m sure these waves aren’t routine.

At the border the truck was searched. I guess that heightens the sense of being in another country. That and the metric system.

98

3/2/02 6:29:00 PM

Augusta , Maine
1512883

More fuel. 9.508 gallons.

99

3/2/02 5:31:00 PM

Yarmouth , Maine
1512402

DeLorme . Cartography! Last time I drove by here a few years back Eartha was still being built. At that point it was just the skeleton of the worlds largest globe.

Boy it’s something. Makes me want to fly a space ship.

Picked up a copy of The Maine Atlas & Gazetteer .

100

3/2/02 3:02:00 PM

Westborough , Massachusetts
1510955

Fuel stop. 15.43 gallons

101