3 January 07
Place Blogging Directory
Lisa Williams of Watertown, Mass. has just launched a directory and aggregation site for place blogging called, appropriately enough, Placeblogger. She has been populating the directory with catalog entries these past several months but ever since the site’s public launch at midnight of this new year visitors have been adding entries at a reasonable clip. I added one for Feathers of Hope this evening.
2 January 07
End
Death has been much on my mind lately. My father died in December seven years ago; James Brown, Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein just died. The 3,000th American military casualty in Iraq was just announced, surrounded by scores and scores of Iraqi deaths. The ten thousand candles lit on New Year’s Eve in Davis’ Central Park were a stark reminder of it all. So much death.
I attended a healing ceremony following Mass at a Franciscan church in Sacramento yesterday. A friend is about to undergo surgery. It’s a fourth knee reconstruction (the first, over 30 years ago, was occasioned by a motorcycle accident). But this friend is not well, so very not well that 7-8 hours of anesthesia for the surgery are a real concern. For her, naturally, but also for the medical team and particularly her cardiologist. Her femur is now hollow; if they don’t operate, she’ll lose her leg. If they do, it’s a risk whose odds I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with.
But it’s win-win, said brown-robed birkenstocked Father Anthony, cheerfully. If she dies, she will be with God; if she doesn’t, she gets to be with us.
Yes, he really said that. In exactly that way. You have to hand it to these chaps for not bothering to sugar-coat the issues.
It is so long since I swam in circles of that kind of certainty, though, that I hardly remember what it’s like. They wouldn’t really call it certainty; they’d call it faith.
The prayers yesterday were like a dim echo. I knew them all. I said them. I even said “we look to the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come amen.” I said it. To say it marked me as a member of the Tribe of Catholic. To say it was also meaningless and therefore hypocritical.
To those who operate in this realm of certainty, it wasn’t meaningless, my repeating the words. He’s there even if you don’t believe, they’d say. He hears it anyway.
Which sounds like Pascal’s wager, to me. Operate on the assumption it’s all true and what have you got to lose? Like Thomas, though, I’m after a bit more evidence. There’s an awful lot of evidence against, at the moment…
31 December 06
J Street Venture
The Yolo Bypass is an imposing barrier. It’s about 15 miles from our house to Sacramento, but taking the trek over the causeway is not something we do very often, and we don’t know our way around that city very well. But we do have a beat — we head over to Midtown and J Street.
Yesterday it turned wasn’t a very good day to head over there — two of the stores we wanted to go to were closed on account of the holidays. That would Art Ellis, a small family-run art store, and Metro Electronics, something of a rarity, an actual electronics parts store. All was not lost, as there is another art store a couple blocks up, and Pica was able to get her printmaking paper.
After that, we tried the Thai restaurant across the street from Art Ellis, Thai Basil — it was very good. So we have the basis of a good Saturday outing, followed by lunch, and maybe a trip to the Crocker Art Museum near the river. Sundays don’t work though — neither Metro Electronics or Art Ellis are open.
30 December 06
Freezers in the Loo
I’ve written here before about the fact that a freezer containing cheetah and island fox samples sits in the women’s room at work. Today Numenius and I stopped by to pick up some newspapers I’d been soaking for a compost layer and I heard beeping. The freezer had gone from its normal -79°C to -25°C and was alarmed! alarmed! We lost power on Thursday night and I assumed this was somehow related.
This is a long weekend, New Year’s Eve weekend. I tried five numbers before I reached a person, who said he’d get his wife to call me back on her cell. More logistics. She asked me to look into the other freezers, one a -80° freezer and two -40°s. They were all full of pelican and elk bits; no room for spare fox carcasses, alas….
Eventually the professor in charge of the island fox project was reached; eventually she cleared out a bunch of other samples from some coolers, and eventually I met her and a student at the Wildlife Health Center to transfer this critical material to a separate place where it can be kept frozen.
Revco. The freezer company. It turns out there are hundreds of these stories, of freezers going on the fritz over holiday weekends. There are two kinds of freezers, apparently: the ones that have failed and the ones that are going to fail. (ALWAYS on a holiday weekend.)
Good thing I was looking in on the compost. By Tuesday, that freezer would have been stinking and the loo would have been flooded with fetid canid bodily fluids.
28 December 06
Difficult Connection
My efforts at receiving digital keyboarding modes such as PSK31 have hit a technical snag in that far too much noise from the computer is propagating back into the receiver along the audio cable that I use to connect the two. Yesterday I picked up a snap-on ferrite choke from Radio Shack to try to alleviate the noise problem, but that didn’t help, so I returned it. The next step is to try putting in a 1:1 isolation transformer into the cable somewhere between the computer and the radio, but a) generally useless Radio Shack didn’t seem to have that part in the store today though it shows up on their website and b) I would actually have to do some real wiring — scary! So I’m stymied.
27 December 06
Dark
I write this by candlelight and a failing laptop battery, owing to a strong north wind… we did get to go out today and see the northern shrike, however:
23 December 06
Weather Faxes
I realize I can download practically any weather chart I might dream of from the National Weather Service websites, but somehow it’s just neat to pull the weather fax transmissions for mariners over shortwave and look at those. The transmissions I was picking up originate from a station at Point Reyes and cover the North Pacific. Admittedly, I’m glad I didn’t need to actually read these faxes for nautical purposes: there was too much noise in the transmission for them to be legible. But I’m working on that.
22 December 06
On Holiday
Nine days off! I’m thrilled we’re staying put, not trying to catch planes and deal with weather.
A book arrived today from my sister and brother-in-law, Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation. I didn’t wait till Christmas to open it, nor to read it.
I haven’t read The End of Faith, but I will now. It’s good to read an atheist with a good command of Christian scripture. What to do about the lamentable state of affairs in the United States is something that was explored in this year’s San Francisco Mime Troupe play, but, as Harris points out, “the fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes [that the world is about to end and that its ending would be glorious, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.”
21 December 06
Feld Hell and Friends
Last Friday marked a momentous event in the history of ham radio — the FCC declared that knowledge of Morse Code will no longer be necessary in obtaining any level of ham license. This move has been long forthcoming, especially since many other countries in the past few years have abandoned the Morse requirement. My initial reaction to this news was a bit of guilt, followed by relief: my campaign to learn Morse Code has gotten sidetracked these past few months. The FCC decree goes into effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register, and from that time on all I’ll have to do is pass a multiple-choice theory and practice of operations exam to get on the air on the high frequency bands (30 Mhz and below).
What I’m immediately interested in is some of the digital keyboarding modes. These take advantage of the digital signal processing capabilities of modern computers’ sound cards. One hooks up the computer to the audio input and output of the transceiver, and types away at the computer to send digital signals over the air. The advantage of these digital modes, and for that matter Morse Code, over voice is that they work very well with weak signals.
There are many of these digital modes in use — some new, for instance PSK31, which has gotten quite popular, dates back to 1999, and some quite old. One of these, Hellschreiber, goes back to 1929 in Germany. It is essentially a fax mode, where one transmits an image of the text one types out, the characters getting encoded into a 49-pixel matrix. It was originally used over landlines and over radio, the latter version termed Feld Hell (Field Hell).
The name Hellschreiber comes from that of the inventor, Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell, who turns out to have had a very long and interesting career. He died in 2002 at the age of 100. He eventually got interested in typesetting, and in 1964 invented the first digital typesetting system called the Digiset. His company in 1990 merged with Linotype to form Linotype-Hell AG, a corporate name which seems to have lasted until 1996 when Heidelberg took them over and spun off Linotype as a subsidiary.
20 December 06
Solstice
I’ve hurt myself. I slipped yesterday on the plank across the ditch, trying to get Charlie inside before I was late for work. (Ha.) There was frost on the plank, and I came a cropper onto my back. No harm done, thought I after a brief horizontal assessment, but this morning I woke up with a kind of reverse whiplash. Muscle strain, said the doc tonight; it’s going to take about 4 weeks to heal.
!
Anyway, what I wanted to say was this: the best writing I’ve seen for ages and ages is Kathleen Jamie’s Findings, sent to me by my dear friend Joe in Glasgow. There’s a beautiful piece about looking for the darkest dark, failing to find it on a ferry trip to Orkney but finding plenty else to write about. Damn but this gal can write, and as we hunker down before the shortest day the longest night, sucking down anti-inflammatories, it’s a good time to ponder why we’re here. And what we’ll do with the time we have left.