Category: stardate

Maker Faire was very very popular this year. I spent about an hour in traffic, and another hour trying to get parking. Amazing! Resolved: next year, 1) take public transportation (it’s right next to Bay Meadows) and 2) I’m getting there when it opens!

Getting there was worth the wait though. The Neverwas crew was there with their 3-story mobile Victorian house, and this time the steampunk element was in force, including Steampunk Magazine. They had musical acts (Abney Park), a bar, and artifacts on display, like a monitor that looked like it was made out of brass (no power cords).

I did much better this year in that I did not generate more projects for myself; I only added tools to work on existing ones.

TechShop had a pavillion; I had a chance to attempt converting my vector file into a Janome “.jef” file– I brought my laptop with Illustrator along with a jump drive. No dice, however: the computer was severely overwhelmed by the file; I believe the pattern had way too many lines in it.

The Diet Coke / Mentos guys were there and put on a “concert.” There was a guy with a working replica of R2D2, which was awesome. There was an entire carnival with rides made from bicycle parts, all run off of human power.

The Long Now Foundation was there with their new bearing design, which they say will rotate only 30 times in 1000 years. The clock is now self-adjusting, using a “memory wire” and a ray of sunlight once a day.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the RepRap project uses goo that is biodegradable. I also had an interesting discussion with a lady from Wikipedia about why my articles are constantly being deleted.

More photos… there are a jillion on Flickr now as well.

One time we went surf fishing and caught some perch.

We took the fish home and cooked and ate it. When we were about to throw the heads and guts away, we looked at the garbage bag, and this little white isopod was sitting there, still alive, angry that we ate his home. He was living in the mouth of a perch.

Then Ben busted out his giant book of north american sealife and identified the exact species of isopod.

Q1: Consider the plain y=1?
a) find a point on the z-axis on this plain
b) find two other points on the plain
c) find a vector perpendicular to the plain
d) find a vector parallel to the plain
i need to show all my work thanks!
11 minutes ago – 3 days left to answer.

A1: You are doomed.

1) do you even know what a plane is?
2) what does y=1 mean? draw all the points at y=1. There’s your plane.
3) You can’t even spell “plane” properly.
4) do you know why you have to show all your work? So they can tell if you’ve been getting your answers from somewhere else!

I recommend you study your book instead of screwing around on the internet.

These questions are so basic that if you can’t answer them yourself, you’re going to look like an idiot in class.

Q2: Is love the greatest power in the universe?

A2: Actually entropy is the greatest power in the universe.

Q3: I am very ugly and nobody loves me, what should I do?
I am afraid to die, but I am so lonley I don’t know what else to do.

A3: 1) graduate high school
2) go to college and get an advanced degree
3) make a jillion dollars
4) buy your own plastic surgery, go on a diet, learn how to dress and use cosmetics, learn about fashion and art
5) return home and enslave the fat aging ex-pretty people

All the most fabulous and beautiful people I know started off ugly and unpopular. We are in our 30s now… everyone who was pretty back then is now fat, poor, and dumb. Learn from this example.

My schedule is sort of brutal recently – I get up around 7am and work on film editing until about 9, when I go to work. At 6pm I head home, and work on film until about 12. So that’s what I did Monday and Tuesday…

Wednesday I had dinner with my dad at Shan Dong (a tiny restaurant in Oakland). He lives in Auburn so I don’t see him very often. Lately I’ve been recording stories about his childhood on my memo recorder that dumps to .WMA files. I’m trying to figure out how to get them transcribed easily; like feed them into Dragon or something.

THEN, on Thursday, at work we had a big “fire drill” where a large client came in to inspect the company. I had to make a presentation, which I then didn’t get to do because of changing plans. Then, that night, Diane and I had a big party at my house for actor Gary Shail, who had a small part in Shock Treatment, which is the sequel to Rocky Horror Picture Show. The cast that plays in San Francisco is Bawdy Caste, and Diane is a player there.

Gary Shail flew in from the UK to make a special appearance, so Thursday was his welcome party. It was a potluck, so everyone brought food and booze; we actually netted alcohol. Then next night was the show (Shock Treatment) at the Clay, which was very good. Well, the movie was ghastly.

But the cast was very good. They had all the costumes and choreography. Gary Shail did a little bit of improv at the beginning.  Incidentally Gary Shail is also in Quadrophenia, which might be a more stomachable movie.

The events manager for the Clay Theater was very impressed with Bawdy Caste’s performance, and apparently Peaches Christ saw the show (sort of in disguise, since he was wearing street clothes and was therefore a he).

Then, yesterday I took a training class at Tech Shop to learn how to use the embroidery machine. Looks like I have to convert some graphics to vector in order to do them justice.

And TODAY… I get to go to work. We’re doing a deployment for a different client we sold something to. I think it’s going to be a lot of me sitting around. I am there from 2pm until potentially after midnight. One of these took until 4am.

There’s a bird that sings from around 6:30 through 9am. It’s a very distinctive call… I remember it from my childhood. What the heck kind of bird is it? I got up at 6:30 this morning with a shotgun microphone plugged into a miniDV camera to record him. Since it’s a weekend and early in the morning hopefully I got it without much traffic noise.

My plan is to convert the sound to .WAV or .MP3 and send it to birdwatching sites, so someone can identify it. Yesterday, just for fun I bought more bird calls at the sporting goods store. I love bird calls.

Last night I got in at 2am. I was DP’ing for Digant Kasundra’s Cursed, which is a very funny script. Since we needed it to be dark, we set up at 5pm but could only start shooting around 9pm. Horrible. Tonight we shoot starting at 8pm; I hope we don’t go until 2am again.

  This may turn out to be a terrible idea, but I’m going to try binding my complete run of DC’s 1988 series of Doc Savage into a book.

The comics aren’t worth anything, and it’s a pain to keep them in the plastic baggies. I’d prefer to have them all in one place.

I have a few series of comics which I enjoyed, but pretty much everyone else hated (for example, “Harley Quinn”), so they will never be collected into a trade paperback.

I also have some comics where I’d like the trades, but can’t justify buying the entire thing again (for example, “Outlanders”).

There are two separate Instructables on this: one with just glue, and one with stitching, like I learned through the San Francisco Center for the Book.

• using glue
• stitching version (they bound their issues of Make magazine)

I love Batman because the message is that if you overcompensate enough, you can overcome the pain of the past.

Example from real life:

When I was growing up, I’d always heard of “the ice cream man,” but no trucks ever visited our neighborhood. We first actually got ice cream from one of those trucks when visiting my grandparents in Gilroy. There was a park on 2nd where kids would play, 2 short blocks from grandma and grandpa’s house. The ice cream would occasionally drop in, and we could hear the music from his truck from the house. We’d get a bit of money from my grandparents (or my parents if they were feeling especially charitable) and run to get ice cream. I usually got a fudgecicle. Don’t tell me you can just buy those in the store; it’s just not the same.

Back at home, we lived about half a mile from two different parks, so every so often I’d hear the music from the truck. Faintly I could hear the strains when playing in the backyard, but by the time we ran in the house, asked for money, jumped on bikes, and biked there, the truck was nowhere to be found. To this day I don’t know if we guessed the wrong direction, or we just weren’t fast enough.

Eventually we just gave up. The ice cream man music became a taunt. I felt bitter every time I heard his siren call. Very bitter.

So now I live in a relatively dense suburb of Oakland. Several ice cream trucks have us directly on their route; but I am taking no chances. I’ll be sitting at home or in the backyard, reading comics or surfing. Suddenly I perk up – the sound, the sound!! I’ll run into the house, grab my wallet, and throw on sunglasses and driving gloves. I jump in my black sportscar and floor it, tearing around the streets.

I search for the truck with a feverish intensity. Every few intersections I silence the motor and listen intently with the windows rolled down, triangulating on the sound of the ice cream man. The streets are laid out like sort of a maze, so it takes them a while to get out. Once I’ve figured out what street the truck is on, I gun it to intercept. A couple of times I have stopped my car directly in front of the truck so he cannot escape. I jump out of the car brandishing a wad of cash and demand an ice cream sandwich from the petrified driver. Sometimes Diane goes with me; bonus points if we are both wearing all black.

Overcompensation. I has it.

But I’d still follow Superman. He is the only one you can trust.

You know those Easter Eggs that look exactly like a real bird egg?  I saw one on the ground today while walking to work.  Sort of late for Easter, it must have been part of a leftover stash.

I have a terrible sweet tooth, and I would consider eating candy I find on the ground.  I picked the egg up, and squeezed it a little to see what kind it was.  But it turned out it was a real egg.  It cracked in my hands and made a mess; I killed a unborn baby chick.  That sucks; I felt bad about that.  Namu Amida butsu.

Although, not to rationalize or anything, but who lays an egg on the ground, not even in a nest?  How did it get there?  There weren’t even any trees around.  Maybe a pigeon?  They lay eggs in stupid places I hear.  Unless “mom” intended to sit on it in the middle of an open dirt pile totally unprotected from cats or the elements, I’m thinking junior was pretty much doomed.

Still a bummer though.

Q: I’m confused about Iraq. Every time I read that the surge is working, Iraq is a safer place, stability is being restored, etc., I see headlines which defy those assertions. I am becoming distrustful and confused as to whether progress is being made or not. Does anyone else feel the same way? And, if we are confused, what about the Iraqi people – how do you think they feel? Who to trust?

A: Every time you read the news, every time you watch news on TV,

Ask yourself: who owns this newspaper? Where is the information coming from? Would the source of information be interested in not telling the complete truth?

Recently, American journalism has become very lazy. Most of the misinformation about the Iraq war, about the threat of WMD’s, comes straight from the White House. Journalists are meant to do original research… sadly this is on the decline.

People who habitually read from more news sources were never “fooled” into the wisdom of invading Iraq; this is why there were so many protests even dating back to the beginning of the invasion. They knew it was an unwinnable war, and could only serve the interests of oil and construction companies.

Read about who runs Fox News, Halliburton, and the Carlyle Group. But be careful– some people find this knowledge very threatening.

New hobby tonight: giving accurate yet mischievious answers on Yahoo Answers

Q: I need a topic for my science project. I can’t think o any….. :(?
Well, can you give me a few ideas of a topic or tell me how I can go about with the medicinal herbs topic I had in mind and how I can relate it to science?

A: The Placebo Effect.

Make up a drug effect. Pick ten test subjects. Tell them a great deal about how this drugs will work. Then give them tic-tacs or some other non-drug. Insist this is a real drug you got with the cooperation of the medical clinic at the nearby college.

Observe them for ten minutes and report what they say. Record how many of them report feeling the effects you describe. Encourage their descriptions as much as possible. Write down any other “side effects” they feel from the fake drug.

Now repeat the experiment with ten more people. Don’t tell them anything about what you are giving them. Observe them for ten minutes and report what they say.