1 March 09
The Longest Capitol Corridor Train Ever...
… was what we rode on yesterday, some friends and I.
It was full of knitters.
A train with 486 knitters, one knitter’s husband, fifteen staff. Knitters got on in Sacramento (described as lemmings over the cliff by Yvette who got carried along in that current), Davis, Martinez, Richmond, Emeryville, Oakland, and got swept down the east bay to Santa Clara. They had to put two trains together to fit us all in.
I have now, gentle reader, fondled qiviut hair, which costs $90 for a small ball. (And bison, which costs $50.) I bought some luscious Blue Moon yarn (hand-dyed silk/merino worsted). I gave myself a budget and stayed within it (this was nothing short of miraculous, let me tell you; I could have spent ten times my budget within the space of say 10 minutes, and that’s including the queues for paying). (I have, as I believe I mentioned, fondled qiviut.) It was like Macworld on steroids, this place. I overheard the gal at the Calistoga-based button shop say she was really glad she wasn’t into yarn. Ha.
Mostly the fun was the trip down and back, with Mary knitting up her hay bale twine to the amusement of the news crew and Maria working on the mobius scarf Mary had started just because she needed a knitting fix and Yvette learning how to knit on two different-sized needles and Elizabeth bringing her wit and smarts to the whole proceedings. I spent many a slackjawed moment yesterday. I ran into two people I didn’t even know were knitters.
I’m still a bit overwhelmed. But I will dream of qiviut.
28 February 09
Building The Bat Detector
While Pica headed off to Stitches West today, I worked on my bat detector kit. It was a long haul — double-checking that the right parts were in the right place, soldering them in place, checking the soldering, clipping the leads, checking the step off in the instructions. The kit has testing instructions at various steps in the build, but the later testing steps are hard to do without a signal generator for a 40 kHz signal and ideally a scope. So I carried on. I somehow managed to do in the power indicator LED (it worked before lunch, it wasn’t working after lunch, I may have shorted it out with wire leavings underneath the circuit board), but didn’t let that stop me. The most troublesome point was when the leads to the 9 volt battery broke off the board. Cleaning out the holes in the board so I could resolder the leads was a major ordeal.
As shown above, the kit is now all wired, but not put in its case yet. Testing it (no bat required, rather it suffices to jingle some keys) revealed another problem besides the LED: the 10K thumbwheel pot for the volume control is internally loose, makes very poor contact, and probably needs replacement. I’m learning that electromechanical parts are frequent points of failure. At least all my soldering seems fine. So I’ll finish up the project once I get replacement parts.
26 February 09
Delighting in a New Vowel
Hanging around the hispanohablantes on Ravelry has introduced me to the gender-unspecific vowel that is apparently now being widely used in Spanish texting: @.
Spanish, like many Romance languages, has an obligatory masculine/feminine divide in nouns. Sometimes the endings are unintuitive (la mano [the hand], el drama [drama]) but mostly “a” is feminine, “o” is masculine. This being a culture where historically the masculine incorporated everyone, in the 60s if you said “hola a todos” it was assumed you meant hello world, or hello everyone, masculine feminine and neuter.
I’m delighted to see new spanish-speaking knitters chime in on Ravelry with the “hola a tod@s,” the ‘o’ encompassing the ‘a’ as a perfect, ambi vowel. It’s particularly heartening because in fact not all spanish-speaking knitters are female, nor are all of them straight, and I love the inclusiveness that’s implied…
25 February 09
Country In The City
I heard a seminar today by Richard Walker, a geographer at UC Berkeley, on the environmental history of the Bay Area, following the lines of his recent book The Country In The City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area. The tale of how so much of the Bay Area landscape came to be preserved as open space is a remarkable one of grass-roots politics, and Walker gives a good telling of it. The bit that cuts to the bone for me is how much of my own identity (I who roamed Tilden and Wildcat Canyon when young) has been shaped by the results of their efforts. His book now rides high on my reading list (soon to be joined, I suspect, by Grey Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco — Brechin is giving a seminar here in a couple of weeks.)
23 February 09
Drawing Davis
I’ve been meaning for some time to draw people’s attention to the staggeringly excellent Urban Sketchers blog, a place where talented artists around the world post, collectively, their sketches of urban life. This exciting project was probably inspired in no small measure by the Worldwide Sketchcrawl movement, which although not self-described urban has certainly featured a lot of urban settings. The work on Urban Sketchers, though, is extraordinarily high quality, and a welcome other window onto the world than the lens of a digital camera.
Long-time followers of Feathers of Hope know we both sketch, but these days I do mostly birds and Numenius does mostly cats. Another Davis sketcher, though, is a charter member of Urban Sketchers: Pete Scully.
Pete is featured in today’s Davis Enterprise. Big shout out to Pete! Keep them coming!
22 February 09
Academy Awards We'd Like To See
Somehow I found myself this evening at yet another annual Oscar party, the occasion of which coincided with a friend’s 65th birthday party. I did well this year: the only two movies that I saw which were nominated for anything both won: Slumdog Millionaire and WALL-E. Usually I spend the entire evening spending wondering who all those folks up on the stage are, most of whom I wouldn’t recognize if I were trapped in an abandoned elevator with them.
We clearly need a list of alternative Academy Awards, perhaps to honor the less glorious but hardly inessential roles in film production. Let’s see:
- there’s the obvious Best Best Boy
- and Best Gaffe by A Gaffer
- Can’t forget those who back up the renderfarms: Best Systems Administrator
- For those who stay for all the credits: Best Titling
- and Most Amusing Clip Shown After Nearly All The Credits Are Finished
- And what about Best Lettering Outside Of A Titling Role (The Tale Of Despereaux is a good candidate here)
- And everyone in the film crew should be interested in Best Catering On Film Site (or maybe not — maybe filmmakers don’t eat like bicycle racers).
17 February 09
The Great Parking Lot Bird Count
As Numenius said, we spent hours in the rain on duty on Sunday providing radio support for the start of Stage 1 of the Amgen Tour out of Davis.
I completely spaced this weekend’s Great Backyard Bird Count, but I can report the following birds from my six-hour stint at the east end of the City Hall parking lot in Davis, the first hour of which was in total darkness:
Cedar waxwing (max. 43)
American robin (max. 35)
Rock pigeon (max. 12)
Long-billed curlew (1, flying west-northwest).
The end.
15 February 09
Rainy Departure
We got up very early, before 5, for our assignment to provide radio support to help out the City of Davis in hosting the start of the Tour of California, the race starting at noon. It’s quite windy when we head out, a strong breeze from the southeast in advance of the coming rain. I put on my full raingear garb — tights, jeans, rain pants (by now quite ripped and in need of replacement), my heavy weather boots, synthetic fleece sweater, mittens, neck warmer, hat, and rain jacket over which I put the orange volunteer t-shirt, all of which is needed because we end up spending the next six hours standing outside in the rain. (At least we got a nicer looking t-shirt than most of the volunteers, due to the technicality of supporting the City of Davis rather than the Amgen Tour itself.)
Our post was the City Hall parking lot, about 5 blocks from the starting line by Central Park. This was set aside for VIP and overflow media and race staff parking. I was over on A Street, one block further away from the race start than the B Street entrance to the parking lot where Pica was stationed, and it turned out to be a pretty lonely outpost. Only one or two cars ever parked on my side of the lot. (As the coordinator of our radio ops put it later on, I guess VIPs melt in the rain). Pica at one point wanders to my side to share the rumor, later verified, that Lance Armstrong’s time trial bike had been stolen. The weather throughout the morning is a mix of wind and light and medium rain.
At 11:30 we’re given the clearance to go off-duty and I start heading towards the race starting point to meet up with Pica. My route takes me through where all the team buses are parked: a chaotic melange of cycling fans, race team staff, and cyclists making the final adjustments to their garb and setting off on their bikes to the starting point. We take up position somewhat behind the actual starting line, and don’t see that much, a brief look at a big pack of cyclists moving on out. It was however quite cool to be standing right opposite the Astana team car and looking into it, rather like finding oneself six feet from a major league dugout and seeing the manager ponder the handwritten roster. We start wandering back towards our car, and hear over the radio that the riders have made it west past the point where they can actually start racing.
After dithering about what to do for lunch, we end back home and get online to check on the live action at cyclingnews.com. The Spanish rider Francisco Mancebo has gone off on an early attack and has taken a substantial lead (at one point over 10 minutes) on the rest of the peloton. We settle in for a nap. Charlie is very confused by our behavior today, tries to rouse us a couple times, gives up, but on waking I find him dozing cuddled up next to me.
I get up at 4:30 and check the race play-by-play. Much excitement! Mancebo is still leading, but only by a minute or so, and the race is into the final circuits around the city of Santa Rosa. The major contenders for the race, led by Astana (Armstrong and Leipheimer’s team) have been in hot pursuit of Mancebo and their elite group of about 17 riders are about a couple minutes behind Mancebo. They don’t bridge the gap though; Mancebo wins the stage and takes the overall tour lead.
It’s a fantastic start to the race. Had the weather been good, what probably would have happened is that the peloton would have arrived in Santa Rosa together and there would have been a bunch sprint at the end, to be won by the likes of Tom Boonen. The lousy weather however favored a breakaway and the peloton was loath to ride it down, having their hands full with maneuvering in the rain and lots of mechanical difficulties. In the end, the heavy hitters in the peloton had to take action, blowing the field apart: the main peloton finished over 5 minutes behind Mancebo.
Tomorrow the riders leave Sausalito toward a finish in Santa Cruz, heading first of all over the Golden Gate Bridge. And more rain is coming.
14 February 09
Amgen Tour of California: Prologue
We took the train over to Sacramento this morning along with hundreds of other people to see the start of the Tour of California, which turned out to be the most efficient way to do it… The course circled the State Capitol, a tight, under-three-mile sprint that was longer than sprinters like but not long enough for the long-haulers.
The riders came by every minute or so, preceded by a motorcycle proclaiming their name and chased by a team car (almost always a Subaru Outback), another motorcycle, and the applause and cheers of the crowd. I think this was a very sophisticated crowd, one that gave reigning Tour de France champ Carlos Sastre a special ovation (he has the flu, though, and will be content to finish the race apparently). Obviously many people were out to see Lance Armstrong in his big comeback (local shops have flyers in them proclaiming “Armstrong Rides Again”), but that wasn’t all.
It was a great day, and the rain just about held off. Tomorrow we are working rather than being mere spectators and it is expected to be pouring rain and howling wind. Getting dressed for an assignment that starts at six am and will go on until at least 1:30 will be challenging, but I think layers are the order of the day. We will be City Hall Alpha and City Hall Bravo, respectively.
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!