12 February 09
Kit Building
My Ultra RX-1 ultrasound receiver kit AKA the bat detector arrived yesterday. It joins my kit-building queue, behind a Elecraft dummy load kit and ahead of a SW-40+ QRP transceiver kit I recently ordered. The Elecraft kit is simple, about the same level of complexity as the crystal radio I put together a week-and-a-half ago ; I don’t expect to receive the SW-40+ kit for a couple of months so the bat detector kit is something to put together in the interim.
As Pica says, much of working by hand is putting pieces together: this is certainly true in electronic kit building where the exercise is to take a box of resistors, capacitors, ICs and so on and delicately yet precisely solder them on to a printed circuit board to make up a working piece of gear. The bat detector kit has 78 parts, many more than the dozen or so parts of the crystal radio kit. I need to figure out a system for keeping all the parts sorted (capacitors the size of grains of millet are awfully easy to lose). Egg cartons? Those plastic boxes to hold sewing bits and bobs??
Part of the appeal in learning to build these kits is opening up the black box. An electronic device gets transformed from being a mysterious gizmo that somehow does stuff to being something whose internals one understands, at least in broad outline. It is a great leap to go from the kit-building stage to actually being able to design these devices, but the tinkering and learning that goes along with kit-building is how you get there.
On a completely different topic, happy birthday Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, both born 200 years ago today!
11 February 09
Construction
Taking this woodwork class (last week I glued the pieces of my breadboard together, tomorrow I should be planing and sanding as well as perhaps rounding corners) has reinforced to me how much working by hand involves putting pieces together, whether they be fabric to be sewn together, brush strokes, pieces of wood or metal, letter strokes, knitting pieces. It helps to look at a two-dimensional surface and be able to translate it into its three-dimensional glory.
I am finding myself mesmerized by shape, and color. The almond tree is blooming; that soft pink around the center, five perfect petals, surrounded by soft white, against a tangle of gray-brown with a brilliant cerulean behind it all… the chest and head of a house finch as it takes a bath in brown water with newly brilliant green grass behind it. This is stuff I see all the time, but I am newly alert to it again. Smooth on rough, orange on blue.
I’m a designer and I’ve been missing things. Sometimes it takes the gray of February to see them again.
18 January 09
Anar
I did this pomegranate monoprint for the first issue of qarrtsiluni. It’s been sitting here, the non-digital version, waiting to burst, not knowing where to be sent.
3 January 09
Journal Rookery
No one shall now accuse me of having a shortage of chronologically-kept notebooks. We went to the San Francisco Center for the Book today to take a course from Carolee Gilligan Wheeler on making the personalized daybook. Pica was particularly excited about this course, and since I was in much need of figuring out a planner system for 2009, we both signed up for the class. As seen at left, we ended up with two books apiece, with six signatures of 32 pages each, good for making a six-month daybook with a page for each day.
Oddly, I’ve never actually tried to keep a page-a-day planner, for keeping track of meetings, events, and grocery lists. My Hipster PDA effort minimized the chronological aspect of planning, and I’ve never been too interested in DayRunners or their ilk. Carolee’s course was good fun, and ensures that I will have the most unusual planner in the office. (We also learned why never to go to Prague in January).
This brings my collection of journals that I’m currently keeping to at least six:
- My sketch-of-the-day book — I’m now using one of the many blank books I produced during last fall’s bookbinding courses.
- The notebook I keep for work. Happily the campus bookstore now stocks Clairefontaine notebooks, so I’m using one of those, alas they stock only the lined, rather than gridded version.
- An ancient bird field notebook. I’m not very good at keeping field notes, hence it is old and in fact in need of rebinding.
- My logbook of all the radio contacts I make on HF (a gridded Clairefontaine notebook)
- Today at Arch Drafting and Art Supply I bought another gridded Clairefontaine notebook which I intend to use for keeping track of miscellaneous radio catches in the wild world of shortwave radio (e.g. pirates and spies hanging out on the lower half of the 6900-7000 kHz segment).
- The daybooks we made today.
Have I reached the journal event horizon yet?
16 December 08
Volunteer Potatoes
Pica dug these potatoes up today from her vegetable garden after the above-ground bit got killed by a recent frost. She didn’t plant these; they grew from bits left in the ground from previous generations of potatoes. I sketched these using Graphitints in a blank-book-of-mine-turned-journal.
11 December 08
Bird Book
Yesterday was the Yolo Audubon Society’s annual Fall Drawing and Bird Identification Workshop in preparation for Sunday’s Christmas Bird Count centered on Putah Creek west of Winters. In addition to the grand prize (a framed print of a Terry Isaac bird painting) we were all encouraged to donate prizes for the event. I made a blank book and decorated the cover by calligraphing the names of the birds on Yolo Audubon’s Watch List for the county.
Cold winter weather is coming, just in time for Sunday’s count. Our portion takes us up to the top of the Blue Ridge mountains, north of Putah Creek. There are rumors we might even get a snow flurry or two up there.
6 December 08
What's New Is Old
Davis is home to a homeless bicycle museum. The California Bicycle Museum was formed recently after the university in 2001 bought a collection of bicycles dating back to 1823 that was owned by a rancher near Modesto. The museum is seeking a permanent place to display these bicycles, but in the meantime they are on temporary display in the community center adjoining Central Park, open during the times of the Farmers’ Market.
We finally made it to the exhibit today and were quite impressed by the collection, which ranges from the 1823 draisienne with no pedals (you sat over the frame and pushed it along) to the latest design in streamlined human-powered vehicles with a full fairing. What struck me was how little bicycle design has changed in the past century. Once the safety bicycle came along in the 1880s and pneumatic tires were added shortly after that, the bicycle looks quite modern. One of the bikes in the collection was a track bike used by the great American racer of a century ago Major Taylor, illustrated above. The lines of the bike resemble any track bike of today, though the wheelset was made of wood and he trained on a particularly massive set of wooden rollers (as seen below the bike in the illustration).
Of the evolution of bikes in the twentieth century Frank Berto in The Dancing Chain writes:
…around 1908 there was a fork in the road: English cyclists took the right fork and would pedal their three-speed epicyclic hub for the next 40 years. French cyclists took the left fork and rode their derailleur gears right up to the present. American cyclists fell down a hole in the road and continued to pedal single-speed coaster brake bicycles for the next 60 years.
26 November 08
Another Book, Another Blog
The project I was working on when I hurt my finger last week got finished this morning, a book for a coworker who is moving on after 20 years. I tried a new binding technique, “Belgian Secret Binding,” in which the stiff spine is encased by threads from the front and back. The pages are in turn woven onto the spine’s woven threads. It’s cool but fiddly — maybe I should try these new techniques when there isn’t a deadline, when I don’t have to fit taking a friend to the airport in and around weaving blue and gold cord.
A new blog I’ve been avidly following recently is Urban Sketchers which features a number of fantastic sketch artists including Davis’ own Pete Scully. There’s a lot of material and if you aren’t careful it runs away with you.
23 November 08
Books For Notes, Books For Sketching
As Pica relates, today we went to Stockton to catch Jack Laws’ bird sketching workshop at the Central Valley Birding Symposium. Despite it being too early in the morning when I got up, I actually came up with a coherent idea for how I would take notes in the workshop. Pica once got from the campus print shop castoff 7“x17” sheets of Endeavour Velvet Book paper, and we have several stacks lying around. It’s not very good paper for anything other than color offset printing, but it works as scratch paper and for practice projects. I took eight sheets of this paper, and folded these in half to make a 7“x8.5” single signature pamphlet. I took notes and made sketches on the signature in the workshop, hoping I had neither too few or too many pages. At home I made a little cover for it out of a sheet of ivy Canson Mi-Tientes paper, and bound it with a three-hole pamphlet stitch.
I was doing my class sketches with my Derwent Graphitints, and was thinking didn’t Derwent recently double the range of the Graphitints from 24 to 48 pencils? Some searching revealed this wasn’t the case (I must have been thinking of the expanded range in the Derwent Drawing Pencils), but I did come across a distressing blog post about lack of lightfastness in the Derwent Graphitints. This post however was in a wonderful new blog by Minnesota book artist Roz Stendahl, the themes of which being sketching, visual journaling, bookbinding, and dogs. She had a great post at the beginning of the month about a major reason I’m interested in bookbinding: how else as a sketcher can one be assured of getting a sketchbook that’s exactly in the format, paper, and design that one wants?
16 November 08
Round The Gyre
In the early 1970s Davis was a happening place environmentally. The city was a pioneer in designing transportation infrastructure for bicycles. And over in west Davis, architect and developer Mike Corbett built Village Homes, an ecologically sensitive development with lots of interior green space, solar design, community gardens, edible landscaping, and natural drainages. The 70s came and went. The flourishing of environmental ideas at that time gave way to the growth of the 80s (Reagan removing the solar panels Carter had put up on the White House perhaps being a good symbol of this). Village Homes was much admired but never really emulated.
We spent the day at a Green Summit meeting held up in Woodland, about 10 miles north of here. A number of local environmental groups helped put this event on, including our own favorite, the Yolo Audubon Society (in her capacity as YAS president, Pica got drawn into being on the event steering committee). Despite the weather being spectacular today, the event drew over 230 people. The event was organized as a symposium with about four different concurrent sessions. Topics included habitat issues, water issues, land use and urban design, and outreach.
I settled into going to the urban design sessions, followed by one in the afternoon on youth and the outdoors. The first speaker led off with a bit of Dickens (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”) to set off the theme of sprawl versus infill for the Sacramento region and beyond. I agree very much with the premise of these urban planners that infill and compact growth are the key to preserving habitat by keeping development out of the wilder places of our landscape.
Sprawl and infill are not new issues for urban planners. But have we perhaps circled back around to the insights of the 1970s? (Though adapted to the 2010s — Mike Corbett today in response to a question about the non-adoption of the Village Homes model, said that what he would take from that model would be the elements, but not the design itself: we need far higher densities now.) I was heartened by the presentation of Mike McKeever, executive director of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) who talked a lot about their blueprint planning process which through a massive effort to elicit citizen input came up with a compact growth plan for the region. Happily to date, people may be acting on this plan — e.g. vehicle miles traveled are down in the region.
Here are the key factors now in this region. 1) The population in the Sacramento area is expected to grow substantially, probably by well over a million by the year 2050. 2) The region is being hit hard now by the housing crash, and the worst-off areas are the newest, most sprawling developments. 3) Responding to global warming is becoming much more of a political imperative, especially in California where the state has taken a lead on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 4) People are starting to recognize that cheap energy isn’t always to be counted on. For instance, solar housing design is now a good selling point.
So having looped around this way before in the 1970s, are we now about to set off down the track towards sustainable design for real? We hope so.