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.
8 February 09
Höllentour
Yesterday we saw the documentary Höllentour [English title Hell on Wheels] to get us psyched up for the upcoming Tour of California. This is a German film that follows one team (Telekom/T-Mobile) during the 2003 Tour de France. The team had a good though not outstanding Tour and the film focuses on the sufferings of the riders on the team. Andreas Klöden breaks his tailbone in a fall early in the race and withdraws halfway through; the sprinter Erik Zabel who was previously indomitable, winning six consecutive green jerseys from 1996 to 2001, finds himself coming up third or fourth in all the big sprints; Rolf Aldag wears the polka dot jersey for a day and comes down with a cold in the mountains; and Alexander Vinoukorov, though he wins a stage in the mountains, cannot best Jan Ullrich and Lance Armstrong and finishes third overall. As a cycling-mad priest says in the film: there are two sorts of suffering, negative suffering and suffering which occurs through great efforts. The latter is positive, ennobling suffering.
5 February 09
Social Media
I’m about to head out to a social media forum at UC Davis. The idea is that there is a need to understand ways to communicate with college applicants if you want to attract them to your campus, but there are many other ways the technology can be useful to university work, and I want to find out more about those sort of things…
Being a social person I’m interested in social media but have resisted, for a long time, signing on to things like MySpace and Facebook, because, well, I have two blogs, they are already getting neglected.
And then Ravelry came into my life.
Ravelry is a social network for knitters and crocheters that this morning stands at 281,975 members. Lest this sound completely innocuous and old-lady-ish, I should fess up that among the 25 or so groups I’m a member of (some of them genuinely dedicated to bits of knitting and fiber arts) out of the by now thousands of groups (some are outlined here ), several are shall we say not particularly old ladyish. An IVF doctor, interested in a sudden spike in traffic directed to his blog from Ravelry, discovered not just one but TWO groups of knitters and crocheters who are childfree by choice, one of them a great deal more vociferous about it than the other, which at least tolerates the presence of self-professed parents (“parenttrolls” are apparently a feature of CFBC groups on the web). The Lazy, Stupid and Godless group not only tolerates but encourages profanity (“twatweasel” is the most interesting word to have entered my lexicon since my twenties, I think).
I will be interested to see what transpires at this forum. But I doubt they’ll be discussing much knitting.
(A phenomenon I’ve encountered though is that people don’t tell you they’re on Facebook. If they are, they’ll find you; if you aren’t, you don’t get it, and they’re not going to waste their breath. No such restraint exercises itself among Ravellers, though.)
1 February 09
Crystal Roots
The tradition of building one’s own equipment is as old as the hobby of radio. Originally this was by necessity, but the tradition still continues, especially in the building of low-power and often quite portable transceivers. I like the notion of going hiking with a rig packed into an Altoids tin and making a Morse Code contact or two with it, so this angle of the hobby appeals to me. There is no shortage of high quality kits to put together as well.
One does have to know how to solder to build these things, which hitherto has been an stumbling block for me, but last weekend I took the plunge and bought a 25-watt soldering iron, and managed to solder a couple of wires onto an RF connector. This weekend I moved onto an actual kit. This was a very simple crystal radio kit put out by The Xtal Set Society. A crystal radio is a very simple radio receiver, quite popular in the early days of broadcast radio in the 1920s, that derives all its power from the energy in the radio wave, no batteries or amplification is involved.
I built the kit pretty quickly yesterday evening, but didn’t manage to hear anything on it last night. So this morning I took it out and tested it with a better antenna and ground. With a bit of tuning, I could hear tinny voices from its special earpiece put well into my ear. Amazing! The radio is unpowered, remember. I was picking up KHTK 1140 AM, a Sacramento sports radio station. I even heard a bit of the Sacramento Kings’ game (not that they are worth listening to for very much this season.) Changing to the lower tuning band of this radio, I also heard KSTE 650 AM, a Sacramento news/talk station.
It’s all quite fun. More kits await me.
28 January 09
Pre-Felting: Socks for a Giant
I’m taking a woodworking class in order to be able to build simple things (like bluebird boxes or a cold frame for my tomatoes and peppers). Carpentry is not unlike knitting, bookmaking, or dressmaking. Cut or make the pieces and put them together. Adornments optional.
25 January 09
A New Count
Today we participated in the first ever UC Davis winter bird count. Andy Engelis, who heads up the Museum of Wildlife and Fisheries Biology, had the idea to start this count of the 5,300 acre campus (the largest campus of the University of California system), modeling it on the Christmas Bird Counts. This first edition got off to a great start, with about 50 participants (I figure that many of these folks have been suffering from Christmas Bird Count withdrawal and needed their fix.)
We got to do the bit nearest our house; five of us walked the portion of campus east of Old Davis Road and south of the railroad tracks, birding along Putah Creek and in and behind some of the Vet Med field buildings. The most exciting bird was the Purple Finch that we tried very hard to turn into a Cassin’s Vireo based on its call and song, which faked both Pica and me out before Pica finally got a good look at it.
There is a lot less territory to cover on this count than on Christmas Bird Counts, which are based on a 7.5 mile radius count circle, so our count was over by noon and we all convened at Steve’s Pizza in town for our compilation lunch. Some of the good birds seen included a White-Throated Sparrow, a Chestnut-Backed Chickadee, Lark Sparrows, and an immature Golden Eagle. The number of bird species seen in total by everyone today was 102. We all had fun, and are looking forward to next year’s edition!
22 January 09
It's Raining, Oh It's Raining...
The soil laughs, muddy.
But it must have irked the skunk
Under the bathroom.
20 January 09
And The Heavens Smiled
If not the heavens, at least we all were smiling this morning at the inauguration party hosted by our friend Barbara. Bagels, orange juice, and champagne made up for a yummy breakfast. A couple of people in my office were at the actual event; I’m glad I at least made it to the televised version.
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.
17 January 09
Antarctica Calling
I’m still in a bit of disbelief about having had a radio contact with Antarctica late this afternoon. After a long walk, a late lunch, and a trip to Woodland we got back to the house around 4 PM local time when I settled into doing a little radio. There was an SSB contest going on so I figured I’d set up on 20 meters and try for a few quick voice contacts. The backdrop to this is that band conditions have been horrible of late (will we ever see sunspots again?) and I wasn’t surprised that 20 meters, being basically a daytime band, was pretty dead with nobody coming in from the east, though I did have a contact with a station in Hawaii.
I tuned around a bit more and heard “CQ CQ CQ this is Kilo Charlie Four Uniform Sierra Victor from McMurdo Station, Antarctica.” coming in weakly but clearly. Nobody else is trying to contact him either. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I think (a good rule in radio), and pick up the mike and reply. To my amazement he comes back having copied half my callsign. After several go-arounds he gets my name, full callsign, and location (he mentions he once took a couple of courses in Davis); signals both ways are weak but readable.
I’m not sure what fluke of propagation enabled that contact, but it was definitely a thrill. It’s 8500 miles from here to McMurdo Station, not bad for 75 watts into my little Buddipole antenna!