instant classics

Heirloom Tech: Zassenhaus Coffee Grinder

2011-12-08T05:30:00.001-08:00

Move over, Mercedes and BMW: here is German engineering at its finest. It's an elegant, zombie-proof (as in, will continue to be useful after the zombie apocalypse) method of grinding coffee, from the finest Turkish grind up to a decent size for pour-over, if not quite French Press.

Yes, this is the Zassenhaus Turkish Coffee Mill, one of the finest pieces of coffee kit available for purchase. Zassenhaus does make some other coffee mills (including the always-in-demand knee mill) but the shiny brass Turkish mill is the sexiest of the bunch. While the wooden box mills summon images of hardy New Englanders on a chilly winter morning, the Turkish mill seems more suited for a charming square in Greece (or, uh...Turkey.)

But back to the zombie-proof aspect of all this. Yes, this machine depends on the sweat of your brow to pulverize your coffee into very tiny, even particles (the quality of the grind is as good as you'll get from any powered grinder...probably better, since there is no motor to heat the grinds) but in exchange you'll never have to worry about the power being out. You can travel with it. You can have beautiful, even coffee grinds in the woods...or yes, after attacks by zombies or malevolent aliens have taken the power grid offline. While your cell phones and videogame consoles lay dormant, undone by the lack of electricity and the near-complete breakdown of society, zombie-proof heirloom technology like this hand grinder will soldier on, unbowed. Even if the breakdown of society has slowed the import of good coffee beans.

And for that, we salute you, Zassenhaus Turkish Coffee Mill.

Brush-on Super Glue

2011-12-01T17:37:00.001-08:00

Everybody loves superglue, right? Cyanoacrylate glues are ubiquitous because they are strong and quick-drying. But most of them are packaged in tiny tubes where you're supposed to just dab your glue joint with a drop from the end of the thing. Eventually you stick your hand in there and get the fast-drying glue on your hands, or get the workpiece stuck to yourself.

Hey, what if you instead had a brush? No, not a disposable glue brush, but one integrated into the bottle?

Guess what: it exists. A few brands make it, Quiktite, Loctite, and best of all, Stewart-Macdonald, the guitar supply company.

Yes, this is as amazing as it seems. It is a completely new superglue experience and renders the tiny tubes obsolete. 100% no-brainer instant classic.

Design Love for the SX-70

2010-09-20T15:25:00.001-07:00

An ebay SX-70.

If you're not familiar, the SX-70 was Edin Land's crowning achievement. As this ad (by the Eames) tells us, it is "a compact, folding, electronically-controlled, motor-driven single lens reflex camera, capable of focusing from infinity down to 10 inches to exploit integral self-processing film units." An amazing bit of technical jargon masquerading as marketing that could never be unleashed on the public today. Or, in other words, the first modern Polaroid camera and film.

The SX-70 is a far cry from the plastic instant Polaroids those of my generation are familiar with. It's a beautiful piece of 1970s design. Folded down, one might mistake it for an oversized cigarette case. Popped up, it is, in fact, a fully-functional SLR camera with automatic exposure. SLR cameras are fairly complex things; I don't know of any other camera of this complexity which collapses as fully as the SX-70.

That's right...a Polaroid that focuses. Instead of a "fixed focus" lens, where a tiny aperture is used for large depth of field and the photographer just hopes that it comes out OK (in reality everything comes out a bit blurry) the SX-70 allows for proper focus. Many models even had an old-school split focusing circle to make manual focus easier.

Manual focus, but automatic exposure, adjustable by two stops in either direction. It's a photographer's Polaroid, and I'm dying to take pictures with it, using the new films from the Impossible Project.

Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work. The camera ejects the darkslide perfectly, with the motor running smoothly, but hitting the shutter button results in...nothing. And, as you might imagine, fitting a real camera into a package that folds makes working on them a bit fiddly. A brief look underneath the housing didn't show anything promising...I am afraid that I might need to go deeper. Sigh.

Passages

2009-10-29T07:49:00.000-07:00

I first encountered the Kokoromi Collective a year or so ago, when I read a bit about the music to their 2d/3d platformer, Fez, on the blog Create Digital Music. Around that time, I heard tell of a game which had been exhibited at their Gamma256 event, which was a showcase of retro-styled games with pixelated graphics. There was some buzz about it.

As it happens, I didn't download and play it at the time; I was busy. Some other things happened as well. But a few days ago, I finally took the time to download Passage.

I wouldn't say that it was an earth-shattering experience, exactly, but, there's something undeniably beautiful about the game. I keep thinking that "impressionistic" is the word to describe it: it's so simple and melancholy, oddly open-ended for so simple a game...it's an exquisite experience, a tiny masterpiece which left me full of more emotion than I had thought a game could inspire. Download it, and play it for its entire five-minute running time, and see if it speaks to you.

Ballparks

2009-09-08T17:43:00.000-07:00

I've finally had a chance to visit the new baseball stadiums which have debuted here in New York this year, and I feel much the way I thought I might.

Disclaimer: I am not a fan of the New York Yankees. But this isn't about the team so much as the Stadium. I'll try to be objective.

At first I was unimpressed with both stadiums; compared to AT&T park in San Francisco or Fenway, baseball's oldest, both stadiums feel antiseptic and show a lot of bare concrete. But Citi Field has grown on me -- in an era of smaller and smaller parks, the Mets have bucked the trend and built a gigantic, old-school baseball stadium. It's got the modern amenities, and even the upper-deck seats in which I sat had a decent view. It's also got some old-timey brick and a few quirks, mainly the scooped out right area in right field (Mo's Zone) where a ball can rattle around or take a strange hop.

But then Shea Stadium had set the bar fairly low. Its historical highlight, after all, was probably a Beatles concert, or that game where they Red Sox almost broke their world series slump. (Ok, I understand that the 1969 had some rather magical moments, and that 1986 team also had its moments.) Nobody was sorry to see that stadium go, and it's undoubtedly a nice upgrade for Mets fans.

I had been incredulous about the Yankee stadium redux when I first heard that it was planned. Ok, the 1970s rehab project had changed it drastically from the park it was when it was built in 1923 and soon thereafter made famous by the Ruth's heroics. But it was, fundamentally, the same park. The Yanks still played on the same diamond at least. Sure it had its deficiencies: it was 1970s-feeling and concretey. The concourses were also pretty dark and drab. I can understand why an update might be desirable. But to jettison the history that came along? That seems strange, especially for a team with the storied history of the Yankees.

And then I saw the park.

I had decent seats for this one: field level, 21st row left field. A nice view, and the seats were wide and comfortable, with soft cushions. But...the new stadium is distinctly similar to the old one. Big and full of concrete. Once you get past the facade, which is reminiscent of the 1923 park and definitely an upgrade over the previous one, the park is not going to win any beauty prizes. The concourses are nice and open, the concessions are very nice (and expensive even by the standards set by other major leage baseball stadiums) but...aside from the facade, there is not even a touch of the old-timeyness which has been the rage ever since Baltimore's Camden Yards was built in 1992. Not a bit of brick is evident; perhaps it would clash too much with the flatscreen HDTV monitors?

George Steinbrenner's goal was to give Yankees fans the best stadium in baseball, to match their team. And in this "inaugural" year, the team has certainly played well; they have the best record in baseball. But the stadium falls flat, at least for me. I had imagined a place that would blend the hominess of a Camden Yards or AT&T Park with the majestic size of Yankee Stadium, a place that really had it all; it's not that. Of course, I might have a different opinion if I had visited the sumptuous VIP seating, boxes, or dining rooms; maybe they saved the best for the true elites.

Nevertheless, I'm guessing that this time, the field in Flushing is going to be the one to age gracefully; and for now, the diamond where Ruth played grows weeds across the street from the new Cathedral.

Charlie Parker and Michael Jackson were born on the same day.

2009-08-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

Coincidence? Probably. But they were both great American entertainers, innovators who were unsurpassed in their own, self-created genres, and both of them came to an early and unforunate end: Parker died at age 35, fifteen years younger than MJ.

Today there will be a celebration of MJ's life in Prospect Park just a few blocks away; WKCR's birthday broadcast (24 hours of Bird) is going out over the air today as well.

The Blight

2009-08-26T15:25:00.000-07:00

Woe is me, my friends, for we, all of us, are stuck in a predicament so dire that it is almost beyond description. What if, I ask you, the fruit of your labors, the carrot at the end of the stick, long chased-after and all the more desirable for it, were to fall to dust suddenly upon being grasped? What if, gentelmen, a long-desired woman, finally within your grasp after years of wooing and betrothal, was overcome by stroke and died, even as she finally lay on your marital bed? Truly I tell you that you would be no sadder than I am now.

For I am stricken with the blight: the Late Blight, the very disease which decimated those potato crops, sending hordes of German and Irish immigrants to these American shores. OK, I am not directly affected by the disease, I mean, I don't have blight-sores opening up on my own arms & legs, but it's still bad. In fact, it's worse: it's hurting the tomatoes.

First, a bit of backstory: in two of the last four years, I have cursed myself by planting tomatoes. Each time I planted tomatoes, fate intervened such that I had to move, unexpectedly, on August 1st, just as the tomatoes bore fruit. Somehow, my tomato misfortune deepened last year: I was traveling in August, and was unable to eat any top-quality heirloom tomatoes at all.

But this all pales in comparison to the destruction this year: my ill luck has sunk the entire east coast tomato crop, hitting the heirlooms varieties, with their limited defenses, hardest of all.

In truth I have already eaten more heirlooms this year than last, but the Blight has resulted in a much thinner and weaker crop than I would have hoped for. For me, knowing that the Blight is waiting around every corner has, in fact, become an incentive to enjoy the season as much as I can, and I implore each and every one of you to do the same.

Heights #2

2009-08-20T12:57:00.001-07:00

Another image from the Brooklyn Heights rooftop. The heights has such a spectacular view of lower Manhattan...

Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn Heights

2009-08-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

Last night from a rooftop in Brooklyn Heights -- nice clouds because of the impending storm. Not a terrible thing to see every night and every morning.

Speakers/Ethan learns to veneer

2009-07-24T14:59:00.001-07:00

So I've been building a set of kit speakers for awhile: the Tritrix from Parts Express. They had a crazy sale for the parts -- less than $250 for the drivers, crossover parts, and pre-cut mdf for the enclosures, which is a transmission-line design.

Of course that doesn't include the money I spent on tools or the $80 I spent on the koa-wood veneer. What I've learned: veneering stuff is hard. This picture doesn't show the ripples I can't get out or the badly-matched seams. I got raw veneer (as opposed to paper-backed) and I can understand why people might want to use the paper-backed stuff; but nothing is going to beat the grain on this koa.

Update: actually you can kinda see how crappy the seam is.

Grand Army Take #2

2009-06-12T09:22:00.001-07:00

Here's another attempt at Grand Army Plaza, this time a foggy night with fairly long exposures. The fog really seemed to bring out the colors in addition to diffusing the light. The only thing I'm not totally happy about is how the light-trails end abruptly as they cross the image boundaries. Not quite sure how to deal with this but I'm fairly sure I can fix it in the gimp.

Storage!

2009-06-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

This building just looks great at night.

I took this image with my normal camera and then corrected the perspective in Hugin...it doesn't look quite perfect to me, but the walls look vertical instead of diagonal. Apparently this is really important, and people buy incredibly expensive tilt-shift lenses to correct this for their architectural photography.

Grand Army Plaza

2009-05-26T08:55:00.000-07:00

Today I did a quick panoramic of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn; the light wasn't ideal for what I wanted, and I did it a bit too quickly: as you can see, a few features that I would have liked to preserve are cut off here, so I think I'm going to go back and try it again. The walk light also blocks the modern Richard Meier building, so I think I'm going to have to change my position a little bit; stay tuned.

Pano of my new home

2009-05-17T11:36:00.001-07:00

This is a quickie 3-shot panorama I made of the intersection just outside my new home in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It's the intersection of Washington Ave & Sterling Place, and Tom's Restaurant is visible at the corner there. I haven't been yet, but it's on the horizon.

I made a run to B&H this morning and got a new tripod head, so be on the lookout for more panoramic images of Brooklyn, and (this is exciting) night shots!

Sawin' logs

2009-05-01T11:32:00.001-07:00

I had a nice little man-moment using power tools earlier, when I cut up these two blanks out of a board recovered from a NYC building...these guys are destined to become lap-steels. The tall one might become a bari steel, for more of a howl than a whine. You also get a glimpse into my workshop, with Jimi overlooking it all sort of like a patron saint.

What was lost has been found

2009-05-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

After literally years of searching, I've finally found the cache of Nintendo games that were lost during the move to this house eight years ago. Included are such classics as Shadowgate, Ninja Gaiden, Kung Fu, Dragon Warrior, Snake's Revenge (Metal Gear 2) and my favorite, the original Final Fantasy. I think I recovered close to 30 games, though a several were doubles from when we consolidated our collection with a friend's a few years ago.

Oddly enough I didn't play too many of them...I guess the idea of getting sucked into a video game isn't quite as enticing as it used to be. Also, I'm sure I need to replace the batteries on most of the role-playing games that allow you to save your information. It would be a shame to lose all that progress!

There's really only one major piece that's missing from this collection: we've never had a copy of Bubble Bobble, which seems to be the most desirable Nintendo game in the used market. One day, maybe.

Panoramania #2

2009-04-18T07:33:00.000-07:00

This is actually the first panorama I made -- this one is in Red Hook, looking back from where the Beard building juts out into the ocean. It was made up of three hand-held shots. The building on the right behind the old streetcars houses the Brooklyn Fairway, which is a worth destination in itself of course. The Statue of Liberty is visible in in the distance as well. Once again this is much smaller than the full-size panorama.

Panoramania

2009-04-18T07:17:00.000-07:00

I've been in Brooklyn occasionally shooting some photos, and I don't know, one thing led to another, and, suddenly, I've started shooting some stitched panoramas. This one was shot on the boardwalk at the Empire-Fulton Ferry Park in Dumbo, out of eleven distinct pictures. There are a few artifacts (that boat is actually longer than it appears, and the railing is blurred oddly) but I'm pleased with the way it's come out.

This wasn't even shot with a tripod -- these are hand-held shots stitched together with hugin, a vigourous-seeming open-source project. Also, the version above is only about a fifth of the resolution of the actual finished panorama.

Now, I wonder where you can get this sort of thing printed (cheaply)...

With the grain

2009-04-05T19:26:00.000-07:00

I was wandering around Manhattan and Brooklyn snapping a few pictures today and I found myself musing on why I've taken a liking to photography recently. (If you haven't been paying attention, it's my latest obsession.)

I realized that I like taking pictures that are at the limits of a camera's capabilities; I've always liked low-light photography, and I also like images with extreme dynamic range. The phenomenon is similar to "euphony" in the sound world, which is when a sound reproduction technology fails to reproduce the source realistically, but does so in a way that is pleasing to the ear. The canonical example is electric guitar amplifier distortion: the amplifiers which created the sound of rock couldn't reproduce the electric guitar signal cleanly at the volumes guitarists needed, but the distortion added harmonic content to the signal and actually made it sound better. Today it's hard to imagine electric guitar without it.

Cameras do something similar. In fact, they capture images far less transparently than today's audio recorders do; they have trouble dealing with light levels in which our eyes function near-perfectly, and even in the best of conditions, transform the captured image. Film grain (or digital noise and artifacts, as in the picture above) can be pleasing or ugly, and of course I prefer it to be pleasing. But I think there's something a bit deeper than that at work: while audio pretends at perfection, the camera makes no attempt to hide the fact that it cannot make perfect copies of reality. As its image loses its focus or softens to noise, it allows a veil of modesty to be drawn between the viewer and reality.

Our perceptions are far from perfect, and the camera does not hide this but actually accentuates it. It tells us not that we are all-knowing (and by extension all-powerful) but reminds us that we have limitations. It advises us not to grip too tightly to our ideas, because there is some knowledge that will always be beyond our grasp. And perhaps best of all, it tells us to know our limitations, and use them to our advantage.

Windows on the world & new leaves

2009-03-31T19:33:00.001-07:00

I bought a camera. These days, a digital camera is, just as Steve Jobs decreed a few years ago, part of the digital lifestyle. Obviously I like to take pictures of things, self-document, try to capture the beauty, wrestle it to the ground and stuff it in a bottle, lest it flits away on butterfly wings.

So with the new camera (which just means room, after all, sort of a room of one's own, where one can collect light and fix it down, just as one can do with thoughts) I've composed a paean to the amplifier, the early silverface Deluxe Reverb which a kind fellow sold to me for the princely sum of $50 when he'd decided to move on entirely to solid-state. To be sure, I've spent a few more dollars on repairs, and I even had it open myself a little while ago (I managed to escape without a jolt) but, without a doubt, this is one of the finest sources of sound I have ever known.

The image is a tricky one to capture: it's low light, and the jewel, as you can see, is overexposed: it has a huge dynamic range. One day I'd like to be able to capture the facets of the pilot light's jewel very sharply, with just a hint of the surroundings...

Trad. arr EMH

2009-03-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

I'm about to sell this parlor guitar that I've been working on for a bit, and I made a couple of demos.

In all honesty, the Poor Boy arrangement is all John Fahey's, it's basically what he played in the 1978 Hamburg concert you can see on YouTube (but not quite as good). The other one though is mine, a more or less spur-of the moment thing.

Morning coffee

2009-03-24T14:30:00.000-07:00

As I was making my coffee this morning the sun caught the bottom of my hand-grinder, which at some point last year sat in water just long enough to begin to oxidize; the sun brought out the hint of green copper. I composed this before I lost the light.

(Photo info: Olympus SP-565UZ, Super Macro, F3.5, 1/400, ISO 64, massaged a bit in the GIMP)

The Zassenhaus is in heavy use these days; I sold my grinder out in California but kept my espresso machine. Luckily, my schedule these days allows me ample time to grind coffee by hand and self-document.

Shining Stars

2009-03-13T10:14:00.001-07:00

I was reading the Times today and saw this opinion piece, in which Judith Warner bemoans the way that Wall Street had, during our recently-completed bubble, taken far too many of our highest-achieving individuals.

This is a point that hits close to home for me. I went to an "elite" school which sends a large percentage of their graduates to work in the financial sector; I knew some people who took that path, but I rejected it because of my personal belief that Wall Street doesn't do a whole lot for society. I know that most money flows through the world of finance, but I couldn't shake the feeling that they were, at best, middlemen, and, at worst, crooks.

The recession seems to have vindicated my belief to some extent. But why did this only happen after finance has taken down the world economy? I spent the past few years wondering if I was insane: I was working in an industry where I actually made something, and, of course, I was making very little money, at least on the scale of other people with my background.

I wasn't quite alone, though: I had a few friends from college who also pursued careers non-financial careers. They were teachers and scientists; one of them got an M.B.A. with a focus on sustainability and works in the green energy sector. These people are, without a doubt, the best & brightest crowd who didn't go in for the quick buck.

I don't mean to whine, but times have been tough for us: Judith Warner points out that, aside from finance, there are few careers where people like us can be adequately compensated for our talents. Even those among us who go on to tenure-track appointments won't do as well as financial stars; with the stalling median income, those of us in the private sector have fared worse than the tradesmen who benefited from the housing boom -- and, by the way, I don't begrudge them their share: unlike financial workers, they actually create things.

For me, I think that's what it all comes down to: we, as a society, need to value jobs that create. Artisan work is almost non-existent in this country, outside of luxury food. Jobs in the arts, including journalism and writing, have been devalued almost completely. Teachers are often squeezed; I've heard many stories of public-school teachers forced to be fired & rehired annually to get around budget problems, which keeps them from accruing experience and pay raises.

As a society, we've made a mistake: we bought in to the alchemy of the market, and believed that we could create value out of nothing. We forgot that the market exists for only one reason: to make it easier for creators to do their job of making useful products and innovating for the future. Investors deserve a reasonable rate of return for putting up their cash, I don't disagree. But we should always remember that the teacher, artist, and even the factory worker are the people who create value in our society. I don't imagine that the creators will ever be compensated as well as those who facilitate the market's workings. But we do need to make it easier for the creators to do their work: without them, our finances will always be a house of cards.

I hope that this is a lesson that other people are taking home from the economic collapse.

Rihanna: Date me.

2009-03-04T07:33:00.000-08:00

Ok, sure, this is weird because, you know, you're a huge celebrity whose personal life has been all over the tabloids, and I'm an unemployed non-celebrity who's currently living with his parents. But as it happens, I'm just back on the dating scene, and I don't think you should pass up this opportunity.

I think that we can get past those differences. I'm going to lay out a couple of arguments here that I think you'll find convincing. My basic premise is that you should date me not because of anything that may have transpired between you and this Chris Brown fellow, but because I'm such a great guy and incredible catch.

My high points:
-I'm a respectful and thoughtful guy in general.
-I have an impressive education, including top-notch universities, and a great appreciation for the finer things in life.
-I cook and clean. Ok, I cook more than I clean, but I do dishes anyway.
-No job to distract me from our time together.
-I may not be a celebrity now, but I am a pretty solid guitarist, so if it's important for you to date a celeb, we can probably jumpstart my music career with a duet or something.

Let me address some possible downsides:
-We don't know each other. Ok, there's a possibility that we might not hit it off immediately. However, I'm sure you'll warm to me in time.
-I am not a person of color. I don't know if someone's background comes into play in your thought process, but I'm sure that we can get past this issue. In fact, I think it presents an opportunity to expand our understanding of humanity. I will get to meet your family from Barbados, and you can come meet my New England folks. It'll be awesome!
-I am trying to convince you to date me in a blog post. Ok...well, you're just going to have to take the leap here.

So I think I've laid out a pretty convincing argument here. You just check out my blog here and my other website to get a feel for me, and drop me a line. We can meet up in New York, or maybe you can fly my deadbeat behind to LA or Miami or wherever you hang out...ok, Miami would be good now, but I really hate high humidity in the summer, so we'll have to talk about that later. Is that going to be an issue?

Also: President Obama, you should hire me for Culture Czar. No baggage here! Can we get some WPA-style public art going? Re-start art education in schools? We'll talk.

Exercise in Modern Dystopia #2

2009-01-28T08:01:00.000-08:00

This one is easy. Hop on your preferred mode of transport and take yourself to a Circuit City while the liquidation sale is still going on. I think you've got a few more days.

Inside, it's a somber scene: a few remaining employees working through the remaining stock. There will likely be a large security guard posted by the door, just in case customers try to enact a deeper discount. There are large signs posted everywhere about the terms of the sale -- they're all final, unsurprisingly.

And about those discounts...most of them are 15% off, which leaves them...well still way more expensive than even the most reputable online dealers. A Canon HV30 HDV camera was still more than $100 more expensive at the Circuit City closeout than on Amazon. A Toshiba 19" flat panel TV was nearly $50 cheaper. I'm guessing that the current Circuit City prices are barely cheaper than at their arch-nemesis, Best Buy. And the current prices are all labeled with the phrase "no further discounts."

So the liquidators in charge of Circuit City are betting that people will brave the depressing experience of this sale for a few bucks, instead of hitting up the bright & cheery Best Buy, or just sticking at Wal-Mart?

I'm thinking a lot of that merchandise isn't going to move. But go see for yourself.

An Easy Exercise in Modern Dystopia

2009-01-26T13:21:00.000-08:00

My fellow Americans: let's imagine, for just a moment, the view from outside our society, looking in. This is an easy exercise for just about anyone in the continental US to pull off. All you need is easy access to an area with some suburban sprawl and a sturdy pair of shoes.
Step one: imagine a location within this suburban sprawl that you might like to visit. This could be a big-box grocery or department store, a specialty retailer or restaurant. It doesn't matter. If you plan to do any heavy shopping, it would be a good idea to bring your own bags. This is not for environmental reasons, as you'll see in a moment.
Step two: walk to this location. If your desired destination is more than two miles or so away (depending on your physical condition) you might want to park somewhere closer and only walk part of the way. However, for the full effect, you'll want to make sure that you need to cross some highway onramps and other areas of high-speed traffic. I recommend that you walk from your home. As mentioned above, be sure to bring your own bags with sturdy handles, because the handles of plastic bags tend to become painful during a longer trip.
On your way, it's likely that there will be sidewalks within your immediate neighborhood. They will be mostly empty, with only yourself and perhaps a few children of elementary school age to be seen. Many cars will pass, however.
As you get closer to the suburban commercial district, it's likely that the sidewalks will disappear. If there are sidewalks, the only people you will share them with are, in all likelihood, recent immigrants riding bicycles to their physically-demanding jobs. This is far more likely in California than on the eastern seaboard. In areas without sidewalks, you may be forced, at times, to walk on the shoulder of the road, sharing space with automobiles. Do so carefully, as this is a very precarious position, due the size and velocity of the vehicles.
Drivers will likely allow you to proceed across roads at intersections; cross carefully, however, as automobile drivers are unaccustomed to sharing this type of road with pedestrians, or may be distracted. Some intersections, especially those with lights, may have pedestrian crossing signals; others, like highway ramps, likely have none.
To enhance the experience, you can undertake this expedition during inclement weather; this will increase your discomfort and reduce driver visibility, making it even more dangerous.
After some time, you will reach the parking lot of your chosen business. While within the lot, your relationship to society changes. On the outskirts, you must contend with cars as they attempt to turn into the lot and find parking. As you approach the entrance, however, you will enter into areas of higher pedestrian density. Once you enter the business, you will find that you have been welcomed back into the arms of commerce, and that you have returned to a common, accepted societal role. This may be slightly shocking, having just come from your walk through the nearby roads, where your pedestrian activities actively impeded the flow of the dominant automobiles.
I hope that you have found the exercise enlightening, and please use due caution on your return trip.

New Country, new project.

2008-12-03T09:04:00.001-08:00

Fresh from ebay, a vintage parlor guitar. This is an old, ladder-braced guitar sold by Buegeleisen & Jacobson as a Victoria B & J "Perfect Scale." It's an all-solid guitar (as was the custom back then) with a v-shaped neck and slotted headstock (obviously); the top appears to be spruce or cedar, and the back & sides are oak.

B & J sold guitars from Oscar Schmidt (of Stella fame) as well as Regal and others under their Victoria brand. I bought this instrument hoping it was a Schmidt Stella, and it may well be, though it's top kerfing isn't the square, as in many Stellas. Whatever the case, it's a guitar of similar quality & construction.

It's a bit hard to tell from the picture, but this instrument is in surprisingly solid shape. There is only one discernable crack, a very small one a bit below the bridge's treble side, which appears to have been filled with glue at some point (a bit messily). The bridge needs to be re-glued, though I wouldn't be surprised if it would hold strings in its current state. There's one cracked back brace, and another that shows evidence of having been re-glued. It's also missing tuners, obviously, but that should be a fairly easy repair with vintage reproductions.

The big question is how badly it needs a neck reset. There is a fairly graceful warp across the bridge, without too much obvious bellying and sink; the neck points a bit low, of course. After I've reglued the bridge (probably with liquid hide glue) and the back brace, I'll string it up with some low-tension strings and see how the action is. My guess is that it probably needs it.

Since I'm poor this is probably going to culminate in an auction. Oh well.

Back in the U.S.A

2008-11-20T18:57:00.000-08:00

Ah, the land of plenty. Cheap beer, burgers and bagels. As my brother put it, it's almost like I've come to a 3rd world nation after Scandinavian prices.

Also big in the USA: television. With ads. Including ads for the centerpiece of American commerce, the automobile.

I'm finding it depressing to watch the car ads. I'm sure some people are still buying cars, even American ones. The models they're producing are supposedly quite good these days, especially in comparison to the years when they fell so far behind in the quality race. But in the past few years, the ones just coming to an end, it seemed to me that the car of choice was a silver Mercedes-Benz. Or a Lexus...or a Toyota for a lot of us.

It's hard to watch the ads because it sure seems like the end of an era. How did this happen? During the 1950s and 60s, the US was so far ahead of the rest of the world that it wasn't even funny. They innovated. They set the style for the whole world, more or less, without too many complaints. Did they become too used to simply declaring what consumers should want?

I think that, like many other companies, the auto industry forgot what their purpose was. When they introduced seat belts, people didn't want them. They were ahead of the curve, providing features before the public asked for them. Why the missteps now? Despite the scares of the 1970s, they built the SUVs. Understandable -- people wanted larger cars. They built cars to be more powerful instead of more efficient, for the same reasons.

What's inexcusable, however, is the lack of innovation when it comes to efficiency. We all know the story of the EV1. There are still charging stations in California. I can understand not selling the vehicles in volume; I'm willing to give the makers a mulligan on the weird leases and destroyed vehicles.

But c'mon. We turned a corner last year and people want more efficient cars. They want plug-in hybrids. They want electric cars with solar panels. Detroit wasn't ready. They're leasing technology from Japan. They missed the boat. Can they get their mojo back? Or would $25 billion just give them more rope?

From the looks of the ads, I'm guessing they don't have a clue.

The Electoral College -- FAIL

2008-11-03T07:38:00.000-08:00

Just about exactly eight years ago, we had an awfully exciting election night. After a season of boring, overly-civil debates where the competitors could hardly differentiate themselves on the issues, but established strikingly different personalities, we had one of the closest elections in U.S. history.

As we all remember, it was a good, close election in which more citizens voted for Al Gore, and his opponent, George W. Bush won.

There are many reasons why the electoral college was put into place two centuries ago. Some of them were good, and others not as good. The main reason why Bush won in 2000, however, was because he took many of the less-populated states; since this has, for the past thirty or so years at least, been a bastion of the G.O.P., this tends to present a small but real bias towards them. Without that bump, the winner of the popular vote would have been elected in 2000.

This election promises to offer change, and the electoral map may look a bit different this year, but it's unlikely to be completely different. Polls have given Obama a consistent edge, but I expect a tight final tally.

Of all the possible outcomes, one stands out as more bitter than the rest: another minority win. The chance may be small, but if the built-in bias of the electoral college were to swing the Presidential election to the same party twice in eight years, it would be a tremendous loss for the process of democracy in the United States.

My new hero: Lloyd Loar

2008-11-02T12:39:00.000-08:00

From 1919 until 1924, The Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Mfg. Company, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, employed a musician/engineer named Lloyd Loar. He had studied at Oberlin and in Europe, and he'd been building instruments since around 1900. For Gibson, he wrote music and toured, playing on the then-novel Gibson instruments for promotional purposes. But he's best known for the enhancements he made to Gibson instruments while he worked there.

Loar suggested that Gibson use several techniques long employed on violins to enhance their line of mandolins, mandolas, mano-cellos, and guitars. He switched many models over to the f-holes, and started having the luthiers do tap-tuning, basically listening to the resonances of the main soundboards. While he wasn't a full-time luthier, he did build some instruments and did final tunings of some as well. As it happens, one of the instruments he signed (an F-5 mandolin, a top-of-the-line model with all the enhancements he introduced) became the favorite instrument of Bill Monroe, who, beginning in the mid-1930s, had a string of hits that basically created bluegrass.

Monroe's music created a tremendous following and basically canonized the Loar F-5 as the pinnacle of bluegrass mandolins. In the years following, people have hunted down the Loar instruments with a passion and many luthiers have copied them. A good copy will set you back around $10,000 these days. An original, like this one, will go for over $200,000.

There are not too many 20th-century instruments that will fetch six figures.

In his later years, Loar designed an electric piano (too advanced for its time, probably -- it was never a success), wrote and taught acoustics at Northwestern University. He died in 1943, having spent twenty years working on musical innovations. The crowning masterpiece, though, is certainly the F-5 mandolin. If anybody is playing bluegrass in a couple of centuries, he may be remembered as the Stradivarius of the mandolin.

Mini Rum Taste-off

2008-10-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

In an attempt to convince myself that not being able to buy Cuban rum in the States is no big deal, I bought a 700 ml bottle of Ron Matusalem, a Dominican Rum which is generally well-respected.

I tasted the two neat and...wow. The Havana Club is a bit darker, but they're close in color. The Matusalem is not bad...it's certainly smoother and less burnt-tasting than Bacardi, but it has a prominent and borderline cloying vanilla flavor (from this early-80s law case, it seems like they use some sort of vanilla infusion) that unbalances the whole thing. The Havana Club, on the other hand, seems perfectly balanced in comparison, with the smoke, molasses/vanilla, and alcohol heat in good proportion. The nose on the Matusalem was a bit hard to pick out at first, but after tasting, it's clearly dominated by the cloying candy/vanilla.

With that sweetness, I'm a little worried about the rum/coke possibilities: maybe it'll turn out like Vanilla Coke though, and we'll be OK. I don't think that anything is going to beat the Havana Club Cuba Libres anytime soon though.

If I could get my hands on some damn ginger beer here in Sweden, I'd make myself a Dark & Stormy.

Anyway there you go. Cuban rum takes the day. Let's end the embargo.

Upsides of Sweden: Trade with Cuba

2008-10-22T04:17:00.001-07:00

Ok, so this might be a bigger deal if I enjoyed tobacco, or if Systembolaget didn't charge so much tax on distilled spirits. But, still, this is pretty cool.

In the states, perhaps because of its very unavailability, Havana Club rum is a sort of holy grail. The biggest name in rum -- Bacardi -- was founded in Cuba and fled after Castro's revolution. The same is true of the Matusalem rum brand. Indeed, Cuba was, before the revolution, the home of the world's best-known rums.

The owners of the Havana Club, on the other hand, did not leave Cuba, and their assets were seized by the state. So Havana Club is a Communist product, now marketed by Pernod-Ricard all over the world...or most of the world, with the notable exception of one large nation just north of Cuba.

So, how is it? Well...let's just put things in perspective. Ron Bacardi, as everyone knows, is terrible. It's the worst kind of crap, which gets by on marketing and because it's cheap. It's tolerable in mixed drinks -- make sure you've got lots of ice in there -- but tasted straight, it's actually astounding how bad it is. The main flavor could be described as a sort of burnt, almost ashy taste. I'd rather drink Jim Beam than Bacardi, and I hate Beam.

So it's quite odd that I say this: Havana Club is sort of like Bacardi, but good. It's like it's what Bacardi is trying and failing to be. It's smoky -- the flavor comes from the heavily-toasted oak barrels its aged in -- but the flavors coalesce into something more like a whiskey than into the harsh sensory dissonance of Bacardi. This stuff can be sipped neat like a Scotch (though this bottle, the Añejo Reserva, isn't quite as smooth as a Scotch with a decade of age on it -- the average age of the rums is probably around five years) or makes a great mixer. It's really a little too good for mixed drinks. I was disappointed by the Dark & Stormy I made with it, but that might be the fault of the Swedish Schweppes "American" Ginger Ale I used, which seems to be the only ginger-type beverage allowed in Sweden. (I haven't seen any Barrit's, or any of the Schweppe's Ginger Beer, which is quite similar) However, pour some of this Havana Club over ice and add a bit of Coca-Cola and you've got yourself a true Cuba Libre, easily the best I've ever had. The smokiness and caramel of the rum meld with the Coke perfectly; this is a classy beverage, not the sticky-sweet headache-inducing beverage it tends to become with Bacardi.

So there it is. Just head on over to your local Systembolaget and plunk down your 269 SEK (about $35 at today's exchange rate) then head home and recline with a mojito and some late Hemingway.

I play guitar

2008-10-13T09:06:00.001-07:00

Ethan plays guitar in Sweden from Ethan on Vimeo.

Yay!

The upsides of Sweden: Salt Sill

2008-10-09T03:47:00.001-07:00

I know what you're thinking: all this time in Sweden, no blog posts about Swedish fish. Well, folks, that's all about to change.

See above: looks just like what we Americans think of as a Swedish fish, the reassuring red gummy candy, except it's black. Black as night. And if you look close, there are some specks of whitish crystals there...well, it turns out that gummy candy is, in fact, quite popular here in Sweden. However, it's not the sweet red stuff that people favor. In fact, it's this black licorice type shown here.

If you're a black licorice fan, I'm sure you're thinking only one thing: well, sure, black licorice is good, but there must be some way to enhance it? The Swedes have found an answer: salt. Yep. Salt. Ammonium Chloride, to be exact. Lots of it. Actually these fish are only mildly salty; those salt crystals are from smaller, saltier candies in the same bag. The salt level seems to be the main difference between these salt sill, as they're called, and a large variety of candies in other shapes. The super-salty ones tend to be skulls. Those have a powdery outer coating consisting of, yes, salt, but also what I think is citric acid, so they are salty and sour. They are, in my opinion, really gross.

These salt sill are actually rather tasty, though. Once you get used to them.

Sarah Palin believes a Red Dawn in approaching?

2008-10-03T15:14:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin, discussing the need to fight for our freedom: "...or we're going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free."

That's right folks. If we don't elect John McCain (hereafter to be referred to as John McClain, since a Die Hard reference is appropriate), we're going to get a stooge government who allows a Red Dawn-style invasion; we'll wake up one day and a zombie Fidel Castro will have risen from the grave to force Americans to...be Communists I guess. Or maybe it'll be Islamic extremists who take away our freedom; perhaps a zombie Ayatollah Khomeini will be installed as Caliph of the USA after President Obama officially surrenders to the terrorists.

That is unless we get President McClain to take out the evil-doers: Yippee ki-yay, motherfuckers. Sounds like maybe he should've gotten circa-84 Patrick Swayze as his VP choice.

One thing is sure, though: that time when men and women were free was definitely the 1980s, when men were men, and women were women, and both sexes teased their hair freely...

Oh, and: can someone tell me why "Joe Six-pack" is now the average voter? Can we just go back to "Schmoe?" Please?

Let's just talk about the food issue here in Sweden.

2008-10-03T00:31:00.000-07:00

OK, folks. Do you see that thing there? In the picture? That is a tunnbrödsrulle. It's basically a wrap, with tunnbröd, a flatbread made from wheat and rye, on the outside; inside, yes, that is a hot dog. If you want to class it up, you can get yourself a "chorizo," which as opposed to the standard definition of "a paprika-flavored sausage from Spain" apparently means "slightly larger hot dog" in Sweden. The next main ingredient is always instant mashed potatoes, which have a jaundiced, yellowish cast to them. Also present, usually, is some attempt at salad, usually limp iceberg lettuce; crispy toasted onions, apparently a Danish specialty, ketchup & mustard, possibly mayo with pickles...but the crowning glory of this thing has got to be the räksallad.

Yes, that's right, shrimp salad. Pieces of alleged shrimp smothered in mayonnaise.

I'm not going to lie to you: there is something awe-inspiring about these things. They are large, they put together ingredients with the undisciplined joy of a nine-year-old left alone in the kitchen; they are kind of delicious, in that "I know I'm going to regret this later" kinda way. Actually, it's more like "am I enjoying this right now or am I actually disgusted by this thing" kinda way.

To top it off, these things are like 50-60 SEK, or, with current exchange rates, $8-9. They are, by far, the cheapest option for eating. The other low-end meal option is the kebab, which will run you probably 60-75 SEK. The kebabs are actually respectable, and I have no issue with them at all.

Let's compare this to the bay area for a minute though: taqueria fare is widely available, at prices far less. Often taquerias use fresh ingredients, sometimes make their own salsas, and are generally quite tasty. Some are downright sublime. Also, there is a great deal of individual variation; the grill stands where you get these tunnbrödsrullar seem to be supplied by about two vendors, and basically have a standard, unchanging menu.

Of course in the Bay area, you have other low-end, delicious options: Asian places, like E-noodle...also I have no idea wtf the people who gave that place poor reviews are talking about. The place stays open until 3 am which is a rarity for the peninsula. There are kebabs. There is Indian food. There are delis that serve delicious sandwiches. There is the peerless In-n-out.

I don't know if I have really conveyed just how limited the food options are here. Sure, the rullar are OK once or twice, but they are not really that good; the limited options are what really hurt though. Sitting down at a full-service restaurant will usually cost upwards of 120 SEK per dish, or nearly 20 bucks.

To be fair, the grocery options are not bad. The selection of yogurt, muesli, cheese and sausages is excellent; meat is not too bad. Vegetables, however, are not up to my standards. (Although to be fair, when I left Palo Alto, I'd been turning my nose up at Whole Foods veggies and shopping for fresh stuff almost exclusively at the farmer's markets.) There is one exception to this rule as well: chantarelle mushrooms are very plentiful and often very fresh. They apparently grow wild here during the summer.

So I guess the real take-home message of this is that I am a whiny nit-picker when it comes to food. But I'm not wrong. Somebody needs to shake up the low-end food market here in Stockholm. We need some intrepid taco-truck entrepreneurs here and we need them now.

Just sit back and enjoy...

2008-09-18T01:43:00.000-07:00

Lenka, the Australian songstress, is just a little bit caught in the middle. Like all of us. Just enjoy the show, she implores.

The video shows us a young singer, who smiles coyly at the camera as she is summarily jerked around by an unseen hand, moving her into and out of the situations of daily life.

This is probably how it feels when one is at the center of a media campaign like the one promoting her debut album, Surprise. But is she really promoting the kind of passivity depicted in her music video?

Certainly, this is an idea with its supporters: Buddhistic withdrawal from the world is, I think, a kernel shared by many religions. It's what allows for the Christian capacity for suffering. And there is no doubt that it is a useful tactic at times when one cannot affect the world around them. At some point, everyone needs to learn that there are things they can't change.

But let's not forget that it's this passivity which allows the great injustices of the world to continue: without it, would the serfs of Europe supported the rulers of Europe through the middle ages? Would the caste system have flourished so long in India? It seems to me that the current citizens of the world are already quite good at passivity: it is the implicit message of the television medium, and most of us have been indoctrinated by it from an early age; this culture of passive media consumption has been extended out of the home by the iPod. Lenka, it would seem, is preaching to the choir, through iTunes.

I should mention that it's an idea with which I've never been entirely comfortable. This world may well be a false one, as the Buddhists and Gnostics have it, but nevertheless it's the one in which we live. To completely embrace passivity is to give up on the possibility of improving the world for future generations, which seems irresponsible to me. It should be possible to live within the ethical and spiritual guidelines of a religion and also deal responsibly with the problems with which we are daily faced in this world.

The song happens to be a fairly inspired bit of pop candy, aside from a nagging similarity to Avril Lavigne's "Complicated." But the lines are longer here, lilting easily into the choruses; the melodic resemblence only serves to make it even catchier. The material is also easier to take without the superficial dressing of teen angst and watered-down punk. One wonders if Lenka is giving us a hint that she knows what she's doing as she emphasizes the word "pop" in an early verse.

Throughout the video she is mostly passive; at one point, however, she reaches out and holds on to a microphone as the unseen hands lift her from the stage, delaying her exit for a few lines. This, and a certain slyness in her smile as she mugs for the camera, makes me wonder if she's as dedicated to utter passivity as her lyrics might suggest. She might be enjoying the show now, but I would imagine that she's worked very hard to put herself into the middle of this media blitz; still, there's not more than a hint of sarcasm or wit in this confection. We'll see how long it lasts.

I've been reading about pop music for the past hour or so, and I'm starting to feel a bit unwell. Here's a some footage of Django Reinhardt to clear the palette.

Lindt Excellence Chili

2008-09-17T06:19:00.001-07:00

As you know, I am a dedicated corporate shill, and now I must once again ply my trade.

(Ok, I'm kidding, but, I would be willing to accept donations even from corporate sponsors.)

This Excellence Chili stuff is fantastic. I think Lindt's Excellence line is pretty solid dark chocolate, not too bitter or waxy, maybe even a bit sweet for some. But they've hit the nail right on the head with this one: it's about 49% cocoa solids, and at first it comes off as sweet dark chocolate, even a bit creamy. At first bite you may be disappointed: this doesn't have the immediate, obvious spice of a Mexican hot chocolate with chiles.

The chili comes on slowly, as almost pure heat. Amazingly, it doesn't overpower the chocolate or push it off balance: in fact, it's hard to imagine a better balance.

It's the time factor that really makes this a treat: at first nonexistent, then subtle, finally palpable, the heat is a wonderfully nuanced addition that both highlights and enhances the chocolate. Highly recommended.

Get out of jail free

2008-09-16T01:28:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm here, more or less installed in my place in Täby, I have of course turned my attention back to the most important things in life, those topics which don't change simply because one moves to a new continent or begins a new chapter in life. Yes, I am back to analyzing the cultural impact of electonics.

Awhile ago, when we realized that we'd probably prefer not to bring our desktop computer to Sweden (a bit of a shame because it was a nicely-configured box which was serving us well) we decided to get another laptop. After much hemming and hawing, initially favoring windows machines because of their prices, Brett settled on a white Macbook, nearly identical to the one I bought last fall. In large part this was because of an available deal on Adobe's CS3 suite, but the proposition was also helped along by a back-to-school iPod giveaway.

So, earlier this summer, we found ourselves proud first-time iPod owners.

I'd avoided the iPod phenomenon for a few reasons: first, it was an expensive toy, and I generally enjoy hearing the sounds from the world around me. I tend to read while on public transit, and listening to music in addition makes one a bit too isolated for my taste. Second, it just seemed to popular. But this dabbler in HCI could hardly resist the temptation of getting a $300 toy for free -- the iPod touch, running the same OS as the iPhone.

Nor could I resist spending the $10 for the firmware 2.0 upgrade, allowing me access to the App Store, with a good selection of quality applications, including some solid free ones.

The iPod Touch in an impressive piece of hardware. It's even been handy while I was running around Stockholm without good internet access. But there are some serious caveats.

Sure, you can render websites just fine, but you can't download files.
No cut & paste. This is inexcusable on a device with this much power.
No terminal app -- not even one that would only let you log in to remote devices.
In fact, no real "root" access to your system.

It's a shame, because the iPod touch (and particularly the iPhone) are powerful, well-designed pieces of hardware that could really be fully-functional computers. But the artifical restrictions imposed by the iTunes / App Store system handicap them to the point where they are mere toys.

But to realize this yourself, you need to jailbreak your device and see what you're missing. The best post-jailbreak features are actually low-level OS features that should have always been included on these devices: a terminal app, openssh (for logging into your iPod), netatalk (an AppleTalk server, so you can share files to it) and an extended preferences app, BossPrefs.

The jailbreak is free, and most of the stuff I just mentioned in GPL software.

Why do we have to hack our way into the devices we own? We're really just adding back in functionality that's been arbitrarily removed. Listen, iTunes, is a fine piece of software; it's got its detractors, but it's largely adequate. However, as a software platform, it sucks. I don't want to live in an iTunes world -- I want to live in the world where I have root access to my devices, and I can hack or break them to my heart's content. I also want to have the things that I've grown accustomed to, like cut & paste and, uh, the ability to save files.

So let's just do a little comparison, between the iPod Touch and the Nokia N810. The Nokia is basically an overgrown cell phone, running a modified version of Debian GNU/Linux. It's got a slide-out keyboard and a pen-touch screen. It's got GPS, and 2gb of storage. It's got wireless and an ARM processor, similar to the iPod Touch. The storage is expandable with a MicroSD card, so let's just say that the hardware is basically similar, with some interface differences.

So what is the difference? With the Nokia, you get less "sexy" factor, and instead, you get the ability to save files, cut & paste, and a terminal with root access. You basically get a PC in a small form factor. This blows the jailed iPod out of the water in terms of utility; a Blackberry does the same for the iPhone.

So why do we need to download a sketchy hack just to get this basic functionality? The only answer that I can imagine is that the Apple Touch devices are for entertainment only; Apple has no interest in creating a device with any real utility. Apple's profitability has come from one of the most vapid, useless products ever (the iPod) and this is the future that they want to pursue.

Apple: don't forget us, the power users and hackers. Listen, Steve: there is a reason that the Touch was my first iPod, and it wasn't because I need bigger cover art.

3.5 beer sucks

2008-08-25T06:44:00.000-07:00

Sweden is a lovely country, with many fine features to recommend it, as I am discovering daily. Moving to a foreign country is hard. I could expound on both of these topics for awhile...but not today. Today I'd like to discuss a real and pressing problem with life in Sweden: the beer sucks.

This shouldn't have been a shock: most of the places I've been in Europe kinda suck when it comes to beer. The most famous beer from Sweden is Carlsberg, which, yes, also sucks. It's a light lager, just a tiny notch better than American crap beers from Anheuser-Busch & Coors. There is a general dearth of quality ale in this country; a real problem for a country with a long, dark winter.

But it's worse than that.

The Swedish control alcohol very closely -- all alcoholic beverages stronger than 3.5% alcohol are sold only at state-run stores called the Systembolaget. This means that at your local grocer, the only beer available is crap 3.5 beer.

Let me explain my objection: I couldn't care less what the alcohol level of beer is, as long as it's delicious. You can still get drunk on low-alcohol beer; it's what lots of people do, pounding can after can of Coors Lite or some other commodity product. It is, however, very hard to brew a flavorful, mouth-filling ale. Regardless of one's attitude towards alcohol, the sugar content of beer (the brewing term is gravity, I believe, from "specific gravity") which of course determines its alcohol content, is perhaps the main component of the beverage. It contains most of the caloric content, largely determines its mouthfeel, and is the main pillar around which a beer is built. Without sufficient alcohol, most beer styles cannot be achieved: no stouts (Guiness is a relatively low ~4.2% abv) no bitters (Fuller's is higher, at ~5.9%) and certainly no California-style IPA beers, where the massive hopping is only possible because of high alcohol content. Don't even think about Belgian-style dubbels and trippels.

Alcohol is a serious issue: alcoholism is tremendously problematic as a public-health issue, and I think we are all familiar with the possibilities on a personal level. And maybe the Swedish policy does, in fact, help. But it's very odd to come from California, where aside from the high drinking age, alcohol policies are lenient and continental: beer, wine and even spirits can be sold in grocery stores. Sweden, on the other hand, seems to have policies that are even tighter than Massachusetts -- aside from the easy availability of 3.5 beer. Which, by nature, sucks.

The iPod Age

2008-07-24T14:09:00.000-07:00

Did 9/11 Prepare us for the iPod?

Autumn 2001 was a confusing season, full of upheavals. I don't need to remind you of the attacks that opened the current political age, but I may need to remind you of the stock market crash on the 17th of September, and the original name of the “Global War on Terrorism:” Operation Infinite Justice. In early October, the U.S. began operations in Afghanistan. On the 9th of October, the anthrax scare began. From the cool distance of nearly seven years, it's hard to remember the intensity of the hysterical, paranoid atmosphere which filled the aftermath of the attacks.

It's also easy to forget the events of October 23rd, 2001, a day as important as any of these others (arguably more so) to the everyday life of the average American consumer. On this day, Steve Jobs made the original iPod announcement, heralding the age of the personal digital media player.

By mid-November, the telltale white earbuds had started popping up on the ears of early adopters around New York. It was always good to have a little extra entertainment in those days, in case your train was delayed up the track while the authorities investigated a mysterious package. Even better, these shoppers were doing their patriotic duty by spending their money on consumer goods, the cornerstone of the economy.

The iPod experience is that of a personal cocoon, separating you from your environment, wrapping the user in a personalized experience unshared by others in their surroundings. Generally, it decreases the user's awareness of the world, replacing it with entertainment of one's own choosing. During the unpleasant upheavals of the fall and winter of 2001, this was an understandable and popular choice.

During this time, political debate fell silent. The people of this country gave the benefit of the doubt to its President, and his administration began a number of operations aimed at increasing our security, an understandable response to that most spectacular breach. After the start of the campaign in Afghanistan came the Patriot Act, on October 26th. In addition to the expansion of enforcement powers (or encroachments on civil liberties, depending on how you see it) other provisions were aimed at the integration of intelligence between branches.

In the original iPod announcement, chief among the touted breakthroughs was also integration: the device was designed from the start to work with iTunes for easy syncing. The iPod was clearly a better class of device than the competition; Apple had also spent a great deal of time on user interface, which was (and largely still is) a weak point in most competing devices. The hard drive was also superior to those in other devices. But the real selling point was its ease of use: iTunes was a class-leading piece of software, with which you could manage your digital music collection: in addition to allowing you to rip your own CDs (and, later, purchase content over the internet) it now worked seamlessly with the slickest portable music player available. With the iPod, Apple advertised vertical integration as a feature, and people have whole-heartedly adopted it. As of July, 2008, the iPod market share is close to 90%.

The Patriot Act has not proved quite as popular, but it was reauthorized by a large margin in 2005. What strikes me about both the iPod movement and the political era after 9/11 was that people showed that they were more than willing to hand off autonomy, as well as privacy, to either the government or a private agency, in return for improvements. For the government, this meant improved security. For the iPod, it meant a system that any computer-literate person could easily use. This, to me, is the commonality behind what I call the iPod age.

By now, in summer 2008, the satisfaction levels of the Bush Administration and Apple iPod have diverged significantly. While people are still lining up for hours for the privilege of buying an iPhone, Bush's approval rating has fallen to about 30%. It's taken quite awhile for their stories to diverge, however. In my opinion, this divergence started in early 2003, when both Apple and Bush were readying themselves for their next push. For Bush, it was the war in Iraq: For months, he'd been making the case that Iraq had terroristic ambitions and posed a danger to the United States. Apple, on the other hand, was about to launch its own offensive: iTunes was about to be released on the Windows market, giving the iPod (now running on USB) much larger target market.

We know how both of these turned out: while Apple's market share skyrocketed, the Bush administration's claims of imminent danger turned out to be largely unfounded. Apple's integrated personal entertainment solution worked great for windows computers, and by 2004 became the most popular digital music player available. In 2004, after a war with very few American casualties, Iraq became a very dangerous place for Iraqis to live. While Bush narrowly avoided defeat in the general election, his approval rating has steadily fallen, and the administration's oversight of the war in Iraq has been roundly criticized, undermining the larger “War on Terror.”

It's fairly obvious why things have turned out this way: advertising. The implication of the Bush security plan was this: leave everything to us, and we'll take care of it. Trust us and we'll make you safer. Unfortunately, in order to secure reelection, Bush's strategy was to make people continue to feel unsafe: holiday travel seasons would carry alerts of obscure origin, and voters were constantly told that another attack was inevitable. Despite what we'd handed over, which by then included the lives of many young soldiers in addition to the rather more ephemeral idea of civil liberties, we were still told that we were unsafe. We were told that we needed another Patriot Act, and more war, to be truly safe.

From a consumer experience, this is clearly an unsatisfying transaction. In 2006, many people decided to go with another vendor, and both houses of Congress swung to the Democrats.
For Apple, however, things went better. We handed over our ears, installed software on our computers, and everything worked more or less as advertised. The hand-over of authority over our media players has been a much more satisfying transaction, even as Apple locked down the players and incorporated DRM schemes. The darn things just work.

It's easy to imagine that the war on terror presented an opportunity for conservatives to push through imperatives which they had long desired, especially the war in Iraq itself. Likewise, the iPod was an opportunity for Apple to create an integrated experience which the user can configure in only a few ways; Apple had complete control over the user experience of this device, something hinted at by many of the UI decisions made, perhaps heavy-handedly, in OS X.

While the end is near for the Bush administration and their policies, as both candidates rush to distance themselves from his actions, I don't think that the iPod age is over. The iPhone 3G has just launched, with further integration: now applications are available for the device, which is nearly as powerful as the iBook of 2001. These applications are available, of course, only through iTunes. In addition to the locked-down software experience, there is no choice of service providers. Demand is nevertheless huge, and will continue to be.

It's harder to forecast the political side of things: McCain offers largely the same deal Bush did, as he supports the Patriot Act and recent modifications to the domestic surveillance system. Though Obama has said that he would like to see the Guantanamo Bay detention facility closed and talks a good game on civil liberties, it's unlikely that the Patriot Act will be repealed.
So maybe it doesn't look like we're going to get a “refund” of our civil liberties. In this case, all we can hope is that the next president will deliver on safety – and, doing so, make the transaction as satisfying as Steve Jobs has with the iPod.

Steel without wheels

2008-07-08T12:28:00.000-07:00

So, after graduation, I of course needed something else to do immediately. As it so happens, I was in luck -- though I'd finished my monome project, (except for one led that went bad, and some screw-tightening) I had another project going. I'd decided to build myself a lap-steel guitar, basically from scratch.

I'd seen some plans here, where they claim that "Building a lap steel is easy," and also there is some good information at Brad's page of steel. On the recommendation of a TA at the PRL, I went to Southern Lumber in San Jose and picked out a nice piece of "Phillipine Mahogany." This is apparently not a true mahogany, coming from a different species, but it has a mahogany-like grain and looks darn good. Cost: around $35. Then, things got busy with school and the wood sat. Sometime in the second quarter, I decided to buy a pre-made pickup and aluminum wraparound bridge from Ryan Rukavina, who build lap-steels and parts in Missoula, Montana. Cost: around $155, but beautiful work, and actually a good price for the quality of the parts. Here's a picture that highlights his work:

That pickup is coverd in cocobolo wood with an extremely beautiful grain. It looks really, really nice and sounds quite good as well. 8-string pickups are hard to find at decent prices, and Rukavina came through for me on this one. Look him up on ebay to find his parts auctions.

Lastly, I needed tuning machines and wiring stuff. Tuning machine ended up costing about $48, plus a wiring kit for one-pickup guitars and some chickenhead knobs, from Stewart Macdonald. Cost: around $70, for a grand total of about $260. Not terrible. The cheapest 8-string lap-steel on the market is Morrell's at $265 from Elderly Instruments, and this has a better pickup and much nicer tuners. Plus I got the satisfaction of doing it myself. I'm fairly happy with the way it's turned out. (Oh, don't worry about the $15 or so I spent on finish, steel wool, and rubber gloves...or the hours of labor, hand-sawing, routing, sanding)

I'd be even happier if I hadn't found this a little while before I finished: the Dynalap kit, made by a guy in North Kingstown, RI. $230, including all hardware; just needs to be sanded. Note the art-deco design of kit #2, actually closer to my original intended design than what I achieved. I found this just after I'd made the big order.

But it's all good. I'm just excited that I made a working instrument, and I've been having fun trying to teach myself to play.

Beertender is total crap

2008-06-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

Look at this bullshit -- "Beertender."

This is a $300, Heineken-branded product the sole purpose of which is to make your fake keg from Heineken look cooler. (OK, it actually refrigerates it too.)

Copy from the web page: "It's not often you use "beer" and "stunning" in the same sentence..."

Perhaps this is because you are drinking Heineken, which, in addition to basically being American-style pissbeer in the first place, arrives skunked (or lightstruck, a well-understood beverage defect) because of the damn green bottles which should be prohibited by beer quality laws. Brown bottles do a much better job of blocking the UV light that denatures the flavor compounds and causes the lightstruck flavor.

This is a terrible product, possibly even worse than the fake espresso machines which are seem to be somewhat popular these days. At least the fake espresso machines do something that you can't do with a refrigerator. Why do people buy shiny plastic crap that is meant to look like it's expensive and cool, but is actually overpriced garbage that doesn't deliver the performance implied by its crapulent appearance?

I can almost understand the coffee thing -- some people don't want to spend 10-15 minutes getting their morning fix. Sure, E.S.E. pods are better than these Nespresso things, and you can get a Francis Francis machine that sure looks cooler than the Nestle product...but this fake beer tap is beyond the pale.

Look at this: an actual beer keg setup which costs far less than the craptacular Heineken device. Even if you add in a CO2 tank, you'll still be nearly $200 under. That means even if you purchase a used fridge for kegerator use, you can still get yourself a kegerator setup with which you can use actual kegs (and thus, actual beer) for far less than this shiny monstrosity.

I demand not only that Heineken retracts this product, but also that they offer a formal apology to anyone who has seen the advertisements for their intelligence-insulting product. Then, they should change the color of their bottle glass, and buy me a pony.

Monomed.

2008-05-19T19:36:00.000-07:00

With the help of the fine folks at Machinecollective, I've finally put together a proper, giggable enclosure for the 'nome. xndr put this together to help monome kit buyers with the trickiest bit of putting the kit together, getting a proper faceplate cut to the exact specifications you need.

This particular setup is a leftover prototype, which included a baseplate as well; they threw in some spacers, and voila, an open-sided enclosure. V. cool.

I'd originally intended to go translucent, but the white does match the laptop, and actually does let some of the ridiculously bright led light through. One project down.

Next up: let's see if I can finish building my 8-string lap-steel, for which I've bought quite a few parts from Ryan Rukavina, who in addition to building pretty wild lap-steel guitars, has begun making high-quality parts and selling them on ebay.

After that: steal enough time somewhere to just play with this stuff.

Infused with genius?

2008-03-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

Inside that murky jar, lying in wait, scarcely visible through the condensation in this Lensbaby macro-picture, we have none other than: ginger knobs and strips of bacon, just starting their multi-week infusion process. What began life as humble Muskovskaya Vodka is will now be elevated into something far nobler; wouldst that we could all make such a transformation in our lifetimes. But such rarefaction is possible, perhaps, only after our ultimate demise.

We can rejoice, however, that in several weeks, after the ginger and bacon has imparted its essence to the spirit, after it has been strained and cooled, and the congealed bacon-fat has been carefully removed, that we can commune with these earthly projections of the quintessence of flavor.

Maybe I should add some peppercorns.

Monome progress...sorta...

2008-03-28T17:31:00.000-07:00

This might be more sideways progress than anything else, but I made a cardboard enclosure so I can use the device for now. The whole process took...awhile...but the thing sits in a box and can be pressed, although since my hand-cut holes aren't perfect, some of the buttons are a bit obstructed.

Still, I'm fairly happy since the thing is usable now and I can start messing around with the fairly sizeable set of existing applications written for it.

I know you dig my "just-mailed" style, with holes cut right through the labels and stuff. That tape on the corners? That's the high-strength stuff with strings in it. Oh. Yeah.

Recommendation 2008: Barack Obama

2008-03-20T11:01:00.000-07:00

As I'm sure that faithful readers are waiting for this blog's recommendation for this political cycle, and the candidacies are reaching the final stage, I believe it's now time for me to endorse a candidate, Barack Obama.

The reason is simple: his recent speech on race. In it, he showed a willingness to do something which politicians are generally unwilling to do: look on both sides of an issue, and actually consider it. Yes, it has come in response to a political crisis; yes, it did speak of religion a bit too often for secular thinkers like myself. But it serves as proof, I think, that Obama is the best choice for tackling our society's current problems.

Hillary Clinton is, to be sure, an impressive candidate herself, and I think that it's telling that Obama has been able to upstage her in the public debate. By now, she is a master politician, who would, no doubt, lead this country sure-handedly. Personally, I have been turned off by her recent tactics, which seem to be rooted in the current political dynamic; Clinton simply does not have the transformational potential of Barack Obama, despite the fact that she, too, would be a first. I expect that Hillary will win the Democratic nomination.

John McCain, who I suspect will win the general election, probably cannot be as poor a president as George W. Bush. Although, as a pacifist, I abhor his militarism, he does seem to be a man of principle, who would make decisions based on actual situations and information, as opposed to whatever twisted ideas drove the Bush administration to the needless war in Iraq. I do not, however, expect him to do anything to address the growing problem of health-care in this country, or do anything to improve the economy for working people.

Barack Obama is our best chance at not only changing the tone of debate in Washington to provide something more useful for the citizens of this country, but also towards making progress on the long-standing issues which plague us. Both Ms. Clinton and Mr. McCain have been in Washington too long to take truly brave, transformational stances; though both would almost certainly be an improvement over the craven, war-mongering administration in place now, neither have the potential of Mr. Obama.

Hope is a powerful message; and although the potential for failure is always present, audacity is necessary to change situations for the better. In this, Mr. Obama outclasses all his opponents, and for this reason, he should be elected president in November.

Dangerous profession...

2008-03-20T10:40:00.000-07:00

You can't make this stuff up. It's a New York Times article about opera mishaps, and it's really fairly entertaining. Bottom line: think twice before taking that role as Tristan. In fact, maybe just steer clear of Wagner completely.

Also, I put some new stuff up at FoundSound. A couple of videos from a class; I really like one of them, "Road Movie / Ocular Harpsichord."

Shaving the Yak

2008-03-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

Just a quick one folks.

Some good stuff: If you haven't seen Peter Rose's The Pressures of the Text, follow that link RIGHT NOW and spend 17 minutes watching it. It's an art video, featured in the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

I also just want to spend a moment to point out what Trent Reznor is doing. While Radiohead's In Rainbows experiment was cool and all, the new NiN album, Ghosts I-IV, is, I think, a much more ambitious project. According to the faq, it's covered by a Creative Commons License, which is a big step for an established artist to take. He's doing a free partial download, and selling the double-album download for $5. And a monome was involved in its production! (Although I guess the very Reznor-looking guy in that video is not, actually, Trent.)

Even cooler, however, is his remix web site, where he's making current and older projects available for download in multi-track formats, and even putting out some material you can't find elsewhere. (an instrumental version of The Downward Spiral, for example) More artists should be working this hard to foster the creative community. Also, working this way on the Ghosts project seems to have allowed him to spread out a bit musically -- it's instrumental, and most of the album is mellow and atmospheric. Personally, I enjoy it a lot more than his early, aggro-industrial stuff.

By the way, isn't it amazing what you can do during finals? Especially things that aren't related to your schoolwork?

The monome works.

2008-03-08T21:42:00.001-08:00

Instead of spending time studying for exams or working on end-of-quarter projects, I took a few hours yesterday to solder together my monome kit. And...amazingly, it works.

The kit is an easy build, for the most part -- the only tricky bit is the 64 surface-mount diodes, for which you'll want some tweezers and a fine-tip iron. But there's plenty of space and you don't need a magnifier or anything like that.

This shot is of the monome running a version of conway's game of life, written in ChucK. The actual lit-up buttons look white only because of the exposure; they're actually a brilliant green.

As you can see, however, my current kit enclosure is a half-open usps box. Weak. The soldering and stuff is really the easy part -- the trick here will be finishing the thing up nice. Hopefully in not too long, there'll be a picture of a nice, finished kit up on this blog.

Monome kit unboxing.

2008-03-04T18:44:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of elaborate unboxing ceremonies for exciting new devices, I have decided to further fetishize my new monome kit. So, as you can see above, this might not be the most exciting box ever seen, but it's a pretty neat item. If you haven't heard of the monome, it's a 'minimalist' input device designed by some hip people in Pennsylvania. It's basically a grid of lighted buttons, which talks to your computer. It's up to you to decide the mappings of these button presses, and what the computer does for feedback.

So it's not as pretty as the box for the MacBook Air. At least not on the outside...

Mmm. Nicely textured, recycled-looking paper. Good stuff. Now, let's see what $264 buys you these days...

And there you have it. Two boards: one for logic, with the usb interface and the plumbing to talk with the keypad, and the keypad itself. The logic board comes with some chips, sockets, and passive components in addition to the usb connector. The keypad comes with the board, a roll of surface-mount diodes and a couple flat cables in addition to the board. The real star of the show here is probably the keypad itself; nicely textured rubber buttons that give off an air of quality. Note what's missing: screws, usb cable, and an enclosure. All to be designed and supplied by the end user, myself.

To get a sense of what's possible, take a look at this gallery of finished user kits. I'm hoping that mine will come out as nice as some of these do. I've got great plans...but not a lot of time right now, as the quarter comes to an end. Stay tuned for further updates.

New look, AdSense...

2008-02-26T21:59:00.000-08:00

As noted below, I've been doing some virtual freshening up. As you can see, this site hasn't been spared -- we've got a new template, and I succumbed to the promise of vast riches that is AdSense...in the past I've been mostly OK with the sort of material Google suggests, and I'm actually quite interested in what they'll throw up here. If there's a huge public outcry, I will happily remove it.

My other blog...

2008-02-26T21:42:00.000-08:00

I've been organizing some stuff on my website...and since I've been in school, I've actually created some amount of content...so I've started putting it in Found Sound, the blog section of the site. I'll be leaving a link on the right side of this page.

I've been doing some video stuff recently, and that's what you'll see if you go there now. It's a mixed bag right now, some interface stuff, a music video, and something that's sort of in-between. Check it out if you're interested.

I just back-graded.

2008-02-06T21:34:00.000-08:00

If you weren't already aware of this, new cellular phones are totally lame. That expensive iPhone or Nokia N90, and the heinous bluetooth dongle on your ear say only one thing: douchebag.

No, no. Why spend $400 on a brand-new phone when you can spend nearly $200 on a Motorola Dynatac, the first cellular phone that one person could lift alone. Retrobrick.com will sell them to you for only around a hundred pounds: not bad considering that they cost around $4000 in the early '80s.

Ok, I am not that elite. I can't quite get down with an expensive phone that only runs on an obsolete technology -- but I have gone back about half a decade, to the Nokia 3390, a classic GSM dual-band phone with a glorious green-screen monochrome display. No BS .5 megapixel camera, no stupid screen savers or background that makes the text unreadable. Just telephone and text messaging. Sure, it's no DynaTac, or even MicroTac for that matter, but it's not a bad backgrade.

I am so l33t it hurts

2008-01-25T10:22:00.000-08:00

Ok, so even I would have to admit that this is a fairly trivial side of computational aesthetics -- how your machine looks. However, I couldn't resist designing my own "skin" for the new laptop. In addition to being sick of seeing just how quickly the white plastic was scratching, there's a certain utility in being able to tell your white laptop apart from the rest: I'm living very close to Cupertino now, and this is definitely Apple country.

So, I scanned in a page from Thomas Pynchon's V. and uploaded it to Unique Skins' skin-designer utility. Props to them for providing this service at the best price -- they undercut some of the other players in the "skins" business by about ten bucks.

If you're not hip to the skins (and why would you be unless you want people to know how cool you are just by looking at your iPod or, uh, MacBook) there is a thriving business of printing images on pre-cut slices of 3m ControlTac, which is a removable, non-gooey self-adhesive vinyl. There are a bunch of people doing this: GelaSkins, which specializes in images from hip graffiti- or anime-inspired artists, MacVatar, which is obviously Mac-oriented, and Skinit, which seems to serve more plebeian tastes...as well as dozens of others. They protect the finish of your new (disposable in three-five years) laptop investment, but mostly allow you to modify the appearance without spending a lot of cash, adding a bulky shell, or voiding your warranty.

Well, that will end the commercial messages for the day.

Nerd note: this is the place where Pynchon claims that the classic WWII-era graffito, the Kilroy, was derived originally from a band-pass filter; this ties into my obsession with the
history of computing, and WWII's influence in pushing the computer to the prominence it has today. Plus I think the band-pass Kilroy looks rockin'.

The Vacuum Brew

2008-01-23T22:31:00.000-08:00

Long time. Even faithful readers have no doubt left the inevitable withdrawal period caused by a lack of my ruminations; perhaps a few have, like mice once addicted to cocaine, continued to grab this page once in awhile. No matter: an update has arrived.

Over the winter break, an excursion that took me back to Brooklyn for the first time in several years, I had a chance to sample the nectar from a vacuum brewing device owned by the illustrious Keith Polasko of Split the Lark, who, in addition to being perhaps the best singer/songwriter left alive since the untimely self-instantiated death of Elliot Smith, is an aficionado of a beverage often considered merely quotidian: coffee.

In his apartment (littered with all sorts of amazing objects; in addition to his musical pursuits, he is an avid collector of most things arcane or obscure) there sits a modern stainless-steel Cuisinart drip brewer, unused, atop the refrigerator. It has been upstaged completely by a Yama vacuum brewer, a technology which, though perhaps older, is generally considered to deliver a superior brew. I'll admit that I sat and stared at the thing during its entire cycle: I'd never seen it before. The water slowly boils in the lower chamber, until the upper chamber is almost filled; then, you take it off the heat and the vacuum in the sealed lower chamber sucks the water back down, leaving the grounds.

It's a brew favored by connoisseurs; the new Blue Bottle Cafe in San Francisco has just installed a bar so they can serve it. Although it doesn't have the "set it and forget it" ease of a drip machine, it certainly has more panache, and the brew is certainly better than most drip machines: it's effectively unfiltered for better body, with no stripping of aromatic compounds, and maintains close to the perfect brewing temperature for better extraction. Most drip machines don't get hot enough for proper extraction, which is fine if you're using bitter, mass-produced, pre-ground stuff, but means that you're missing out on some of what your locally-roasted microlots have to offer.

Although I start my day with espresso, I have been enjoying brewed coffee myself. I brought a bag of Ethiopian Idido Misty Valley home-roast with me when I headed east, which, when brewed drip or single-cup, had a much fruitier profile than I'd gotten from the espresso machine. I had to admit that I enjoyed it quite a bit more brewed. Brewed coffee also tends to have a flavor shift as it cools; sometimes for the worse, often just...different. Like seeing more facets of a gem. Although I'm still partial to espresso (at 9 bars of pressure, you get things out of the beans that don't appear at one atmosphere) brewed coffee is certainly better for single-origin coffees that have a "delicate" profile: usually more acidic coffees with more fruit, less body, and floral aromatics, which are roasted lighter.

So I've been making some pots of press, and secretly lusting after a Yama. More gear is the last thing I need, of course, but there's something awfully charming about that siphon.

Back to the Future.

2007-11-20T09:25:00.000-08:00

Thoughts on upgrading.

I have been slow to come to the laptop thing -- I had a 400mhz Winbook for awhile, from the era when networking was thought of as an option, and required a card with a terrible dongle on it. A few years later, I swapped a turntable for an obsolete orange iBook. Just a few days ago, I went whole hog (well, mostly) and shelled out for a brand-spanking-new MacBook, freshly updated by Apple to Intel's newest CPU architecture, and with a decent (though hardly top-of-the-line) graphics processor.

These two computers have nearly a decade of computing advancements between them. In that time, Apple has rolled out a completely new operating system, changed its processor architecture to industry-standard x86, and gone through an entire generation of products, along with several update cycles.

That's a lot of progress. The new MacBook runs a slick, modern OS, is almost two gigahertz faster in terms of clock speed (not to mention the extra core) and has built-in Airport "Extreme," Bluetooth, twice the USB ports (for a total of, um, two) Firewire, Dual-Layer DVD burner, 3d-accelerated graphics. It also has more than twice the total pixels, with a 1280x800 widescreen display. It really outclasses the old machine in every way.

Save one, and it's a doozy.

Take a quick look at that top picture again. Check out those surfaces where your palms rest, and the keyboards on each laptop. Orange iBook: nice, curved surfaces, and actually quite a decent keyboard. All the surfaces of the machine are curved, and it's comfortable in almost any position. New, white MacBook: it's square, with a sharp 90-degree edge right where your wrists are. This means it's decently comfortable if you're sitting at a desk, but it really doesn't feel good in many positions where the old one felt just fine. Also, the chiclet keyboard is really pretty bad. The key travel is small, and it's large enough, but the tops of the keys are flat, which is not as good as when they're curved, at least in terms of comfort and usability.

In a lot of ways, the design of the MacBook is a big step backwards. In the years in between these two computers, Apple went square. For desktops, where a human isn't in constant contact with the main cpu portion, this is fine. Square is pretty bad for laptops, particularly when it's taken to the extreme that Apple brings it to. Does it look cool? This is always arguable, but yes, even the bottom-of-the-line MacBook is a fairly slick-looking computer. But it's given up some serious ground in terms of ergonomics, which is a real shame.

More thoughts later -- I'm still in the process of learning Mac OS X and installing Ubuntu (which runs quite nicely on the iBook, by the way) on the machine. My feelings are really still quite up in the air, and we'll see if the MacBook really wins a place in my heart. It's got a ways to go.

Gesha.

2007-11-15T15:05:00.000-08:00

I just made an espresso out of this coffee: Guatemalan Acatenango Buena Vista Gesha.

So what's the big deal? The "Gesha" part, which is a rare cultivar (like varietal for wine) which was apparently imported from an old Ethiopian stock into Central America a few years ago. And people love it. It's sweet, full of exotic fruit, and amazing, florally aromatic.

I made some French Press out of it a few days ago -- pretty good, sweet, tasty, nice aromatics. But the espresso (even in the Starbucks Barista here at school) was simply nuts. The floral character was intensified, and the mouth was more powerfully sweet than before...highly recommended. Run, don't walk, and order a pound or so of green, go to Target and get yourself a chefmate popper if you don't have a decent way to roast, and enjoy.

On winning.

2007-10-28T22:27:00.000-07:00

Papelbon throws a high-90s fastball past the bat of a pinch-hitter in Denver, and suddenly it's the end; a good feeling, but not the all-encompassing euphoria we felt as we watched Johnny Damon's grand slam in game 7, 2004; even the 3-1 comeback against baseball's other best team, the Cleveland Indians, didn't have the drama of the earth-shattering '04 series, which saw the rise of David Ortiz as the best clutch hitter in baseball.

But it wasn't bad.

This year, everyone who follows baseball knew that the Sox had all the components necessary to get the championship. A few big free agents padded the already-impressive lineup; mostly, they've worked out, although Dice-K hasn't looked as dominant as he did in the World Baseball Classic, and I'd still rather have Trot Nixon out in right than J.D. Drew. (Nixon is a gamer, and we saw him rise to the occasion in the ALCS game 2, even if Drew has more natural talent.) The question was only if the Sox would return to pre-2004 form and fold.

Folding to the Yanks ended up being out of the question; they did something amazing by making the playoffs after a spectacularly bad start, and seemed to bring the ghosts of the past with them when they played the Sox in the second half of the season. In the end, it wasn't enough to get them past the Sox for the division, even with Boston's nonchalance towards winning at the end of the season.

Folding to the Angels wasn't in the cards either: the Angels couldn't bring a healthy team to Fenway, and Manny Ramirez woke up to play some baseball with a spectacular walk-off homer in Game 2, off the excellent K-Rod no less.

Folding to the Indians seems like a distant memory as well -- despite being down 3-1 to Eric Wedge's well-balanced team, the comeback seemed almost preordained. Beckett's win in game 5 over C.C. Sabathia, who before a mediocre-to-bad postseason might have won the Cy Young, was almost inevitable: Beckett is now the game's best big-game pitcher, as Curt Schilling hands over the torch, Clemens (who never really wore that crown anyway) retires, again, and the Yank's Chien-Ming Wang foundered badly this fall. Beckett's slow walk off the mound will doubtless be seen again in October.

There were surprises -- Manny showing up to hit was a big one, after his worst big-league season. Mike Lowell leading the team in RBIs was another; the arrival of Jacoby Ellsbury was huge (I think he might have won himself an opening-day start by hitting over .400 in the World Series, sorry Coco) not to mention Dustin Pedroia hitting over .300 as a rookie, despite a ludicrously long swing. The biggest, of course, has to be Clay Bucholz' unheard-of no-hitter, in his 2nd start in the bigs. The fates were smiling on Boston that day.

But still...this is all a bit new to us Red Sox people. I'm sure half of us were expecting Matt Holliday to hit a 7-run, 3-game-winning homer in the bottom of the eighth today, but the modern, professional management in Boston had put victory out of reach of even the hottest team in baseball.

So we'll see. The Sox are still 19 world series short of the Yankees (and also trail the Oakland Athletics and Cardinals in that category). I also suspect that the reports of the Yankees' demise may have been overstated a bit (unless they lose Posada and Rivera in addition to letting A-Rod go) and there are a couple of great teams in the central division that aren't going anywhere. The Tigers still have all the talent they need to win, though the Indians' pitching should keep them at the top of their division unless Fausto Carmona loses his nerve. The Angels will be tough if they can get another bat behind Vlad (although he's got to stop expanding his strike zone in the postseason.) But there's no getting around it -- the Sox are the top dogs now, just like they were a century ago. Last time, the Yanks knocked us off our post in the early 20's. If we can stay on top that long this time, I'd be very surprised.

So let's enjoy it now -- hats off to the 2007 Boston Red Sox, who, whatever else you might say about them, just proved themselves the best in the game.

Sportswriters are wicked lame.

2007-10-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

So the Sox came back from a 3-1 deficit in this year's ALCS to be jeered by sports columnists all over the country -- look here for one example, but it's not just him. I've read several similar columns.

So you win one world series after nearly a century, and that's O.K. -- but more than that, if you continue to win, to please your adoring fans, if many of the same players from your previous win continue to play well, well, that's just too much. You should make like the Chicago White Sox, apparently, who, a mere two seasons after their last World Series, and impressive rout of the Astros, turned out an 18-games under .500 season. Or the Tigers, who despite one of the most all-around-talented teams in baseball, showed only flashes of the brilliance of which they're undoubtedly capable.

It seems to be the story of the day -- the Red Sox have become the Yankees, and now we must all hate them, as well as the Patriots (also dominant) and any other Boston team that manages to have a successful season.

They're not wrong -- that's not the problem -- although the Red Sox are still going to have to deal with the ACTUAL New York Yankees, who trailed us by only two games at the end of the season, still have the best offense in baseball (and this year, they very nearly did look like the "best offense ever," as they were hailed by Tim McCarver in post-season 2006) and, oh yeah, have a whole bunch of young pitchers coming up.

Maybe the sportswriters are right -- the Sox are the New Yankees. The Bronx is dead now that Torre's gone, and Boston is the new sports powerhouse.

I'm a longtime Sox fan and as such, I've seen some disappointments. I came into this thing just after the '86 loss -- a bitter pill to swallow for fans who really do go crazy when the Sox looked like they might do it "this time." The late '80s and early '90s didn't bring anything for the Sox that was great, but the late '90s did bring the resurgence of the New York Yankees -- which was really more of a return to form for the most dominant team in sports.

Just remember this: if the Sox are to become the dominant team in baseball, we're going to have to beat the Yankees year after year, who, in case you haven't noticed, have been pretty good.

Coffee is still rad.

2007-09-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

Check out this excellent piece in the New York Times.

It's an article on "Direct Trade" coffee, the method of importation favored by Intelligentsia, Stumptown, and George Howell, and other top-tier coffee roasters.

This process still amazes me -- the coffee buyers from these fairly small businesses travel around the entire world, from Guatemala to Indonesia to Rwanda, doing what it takes to ensure quality product, which often involves stuff like donating bikes to rural African farm workers. It also results in top-tier farmers making far more money for their product than on the coffee commodity market, even for Fair Trade-labeled product.

It seems seldom today that capitalistic interest dovetails so squarely with development and humanitarianism: although this was not always the case, it's refreshing to see things going the right way sometimes.

Man I am such a sucker for coffee. Fuck. I'm going to go drink like eight cups right now.

JESUS VIDEO NEWS

2007-09-04T22:40:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the JVN network. First up tonight: I am definitely going to hell.

I have been working on my submission for the soundtrack, and well, here it is.

It's my cover version of a traditional spiritual that I have an album of Lightin' Hopkins singing. Anyway it's a pretty straightforward deal with me signing, no fancy production or techno-dance beat -- I'll save that for the Trent Reznor style single.

And even better, I've actually started editing the thing after I figured out that basically every free option out there is actually worse than windows movie editor.

This is happening people. I mean, it may suck, but whatever.

Extra Rich.

2007-09-04T16:25:00.000-07:00

Did you know about this? Clover Stornetta Dairy of Northern California (my personal favorite milk producer, apologies to some other prominent dairies) makes milk with extra fat. Notice that label though: more milkfat than state minimum requirements. This isn't straight off the cow by any means -- this milk is made up of constituent ingredients (milk, non-fat milk, and in this case, cream) like most commercial milk, then blended to the required fat content.

Now, I'm not complaining -- this is obviously the easiest way to do it from a commercial standpoint. But it does kinda destroy the image of a pure, natural ingredient.

This post has been dedicated to Richard J. Seymour.

Sea change

2007-08-22T15:23:00.000-07:00

Hello.

I have changed venues all of a sudden, going from the high-end luxury world of wine to a university town, Palo Alto. A high-end luxury university town, sure, but it's still a big change.

In September, I'm going to be starting a one-year MA program at Stanford's CCRMA, where I'm going to learn a whole bunch of (hopefully valuable) stuff, and hopefully make some music as well.

Also new: bicycles. I bought a couple of kickin' older bikes for Brett and myself: for her, a Peugeot City Express, a sturdy hybrid bike from the '80s, and for me, a Miyata Triplecross hybrid. We're not exactly going spandex and carbon fiber here, but it's actually really nice to use a non-polluting human-powered vehicle to get where you're going. We have kept one car (my SAAB blew its head gasket and I sold it for $400...just about what we spent on the bikes plus accessories) so we're not exactly carbon-neutral, but it's a start. Bikes are incredibly efficient (5 times as efficient as walking) and actually don't cost much, if any time, compared to cars for our commute. Also, keeping up an aging European bike is still far cheaper than maintaining an aging Euro car. We'll see how we feel when it rains, but for now it's really great.

Vinyl.

2007-07-12T22:11:00.000-07:00

Bam. There it sat, a u-line record mailer, laying next to my door, nearly overlooked.

I opened it, greeted with a couple brown protective layers, discarded soon enough. Inside the album, a jewel a bit more than twice (four times?) the size of the compact disc; the cover art large enough to communicate the idea that the front photo was taken on a grainy medium-format in bad light; the seal, only a nod at an idea on the cd package, actually sealing the gatefold double record package. A peppermint-stripe slipmat as a bonus.

Kick ass. Two 180-gram doses of vinyl love, the Icky Thump release.

Let me level with you. I like vinyl. I think it sounds better. Most of the time, it's a feeling, an idea that the vinyl is a bit more spatial, or has a bit more "depth." This time I've got proof, as long as you're willing to record your vinyl copy and compare the waveform to the one you ripped off your cd.

Not willing to do that? Well then just listen to the record. It's special. The bass drum sounds deep and round and really, really loud -- just like an unmuffled bass drum in your garage kit. I'm really sorry that CD listeners are going to hear a distorted version with nasty digital sound artifacts. The CD version sounds like somebody ripped it to a low-quality mp3 and then burned it. It is seriously messed up.

Listening without the horrible distortion messing with my head, I've come around on a few songs -- Rag and Bone is my new theme song for craigslisting; I even like the thrashing Little Cream Soda ok. Listening on vinyl also paces the album better; without a pause, I get a bit worn out between I'm Slowly Turning Into You and A Martyr For My Love For You; with a side change everything is cool.

The vinyl sounds fan-effing-tastic: the highs shimmer up out of a well of deep bass; yes, the sound seems spaced better, too. But best of all is that deep bass hit, which was clearly meant to be the star of the album, a motif for bringing the whole thing together. It's deep and thick and clear loud and clean; this is the icky thump the album was named for, and it's a shame more listeners won't be able to hear it.

Clipping

2007-07-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

This clipping issue on Icky Thump is bothering me more and more. I need some closure.

(Start reading just above {rant ensues} for my take on the issue)

Jumpin' it

2007-07-02T21:11:00.000-07:00

It's just like Sick Boy said: "...at one time, you've got it, and then you lose it, and it's gone forever."

When Jack White dubbed bass onto the first single of his fourth album, Elephant, I think that we all new a phase had come to an end. What's more there were no incredibly catchy, and also incredibly simple brain-stickers like You're Pretty Good Looking or Fell in Love With a Girl. Sure, there were plenty of great tracks on that album, but it was, well, different. It wasn't as clean and simple and joyful as the first three albums -- but then, we said, that's development, isn't it?

Fast forward a few years to Get Behind Me Satan -- Blue Orchid is, just as was intended, a total blueball experience, kicking off an album with far more orchestration than any of the previous four, one in which the sessions were fraught with problems, with off-rhythm crashes covering messups...but an album that seems to get better with age. The creepy "Did Jack sell his soul?" feeling, enhanced by the giant heart at the live show, the ghostly theme, and Rita Hayworth popping up again and again...and maybe best of all, My Doorbell, a song just as catchy as any Jack'd written before.

Then something unexpected happened. Jack White made an album with an old friend and released an album with a few incredibly catchy songs, that had a single which hit higher than any White Stripes single had.

And that, I think, is when it happened. The shark was jumped.

There's no shame in it -- it happens to everyone. Led Zep, the Stones...the Beatles...well it woulda...Paul has anyway. Often it happens at the moment of greatest commercial success -- didn't Led Zep IV turn that band into a caricature forever, even though they put out several excellent albums afterward? Michael Jackson did it with a ride at Disney World, for goodness sake -- at least he didn't go out like that!

There's nothing wrong with the album really: Icky Thump is a great tongue-in-cheek riff...there's a lot of play-acting and character creation here, which, yeah, Jack is good at. A south of the border theme? Timely. There's a fake-country last song...bagpipes...(Battle of Evermore?)...blah blah blah. Jack's guitar work has taken shape much more than even on GBMS...he's a true stylist as a lead guitarist now, which was of course missing from the early albums. But some of Sasha Frere-Jones comments about the previous album hit home with me now...yeah...Meg is really not that great a drummer, and her signature rides finally feel old here. But really the problem is more visceral...I just don't feel the boundless giddy joy that the old albums make me feel, even though most of the tracks are good. It's lost the sense of effortlessness that the old albums had, and as a listener, I need to labor as well.

And...worst of all...does the album keep breaking up audibly, or is that just me? This isn't warm sound of tape breaking up...this is the sound of digital equipment clipping. CLIPPING. Captured for all posterity in unchanging digital fidelity, never to be smoothed by a needle travelling again and again over the peaks and valleys of its waveforms.

{rant ensues}

It's for real. It's on the left channel, throughout the damn album...I'm not the only one who noticed. That, my friends is a fuckup. A big one, if you ask me -- am I going to have you buy the vinyl to avoid this? The answer, my friends, may be yes.

Oh, don't believe me? Ok -- does your system have a decent set of tweeters? Should be easy then. Put the cd on. Stick your head near the left speaker. When it gets loud there's a chhh chh kinda sound when the guitar is big...that's digital clipping. If you don't believe me, rip the track and look at it in Audacity. It's too hot. The lines go right from the top to the bottom, and then at the ends, there are flat spots -- that means the rest of the curve is lost, and the sound is distorted. When it's done right, the waveform looks curvy, and the biggest peaks just get near the edges -- they never go over.

Whoever mastered it (Vlado Meller, whose oeuvre includes Kenny G's Faith and Celine Dion's Let's Talk about Love, and, ok, Weezer's Green Album) just put it on disc too hot, and it sounds messed up. Obviously messed up. That is, as I understand it, exactly what you're trying to avoid when you master a disc. If I were Jack White, I'd have his head. As a consumer, I consider this recording to be defective.

But then if I were Jack White, my album just debuted at #2 on the US charts, and basically, even if my album is f'd up, it's still the hottest shiz out there. And all you rockers still need to buy my album...even if it (and I) have crossed over an important boundary, and lost a little something.

3than.com

2007-05-28T11:04:00.000-07:00

Just so you know, some really exciting stuff is going on over at 3than.com, which as I'm sure you know, is my website. Specifically, I'm working on it. Right now, I just put up some actual content, in the "found sound" section; there are a couple of mp3s up there, some of which you may recognize, considering that well, if you read this page you probably know me pretty well. Also you can look at my resume.

I'm going to put up some better stuff just as soon as I invent/create it. I promise.

I just pulled out a hair.

2007-05-22T18:10:00.000-07:00

Here's the thing, though...it was a gray hair. And it was in my ear, on the outside of the lobe, just about a the level of the ear canal. I pulled it, expecting, for all the world, nothing more than a stray blondish strand, or perhaps one of the odd reddish twisted locks that seem to have crept up beyond my hairline.

But no...a few quick pulls with a tweezer, and there it was, glinting silver on the tip of my finger; a sign of my body's hopefully slow, but decidely sure, breakdown. The progress toward an inevitable end.

Yes, my first gray hair. And hopefully not my last.

Some other stuff...

2007-04-10T18:20:00.000-07:00

From LITWC...check this out. It's an interesting piece -- Joshua Bell pretends to be a street musician at a train station in DC -- and nobody stops. Duh. It's the morning -- people have to be at work, and most employers don't appreciate it when their employees show up late. Simple as that.

I wanted to point it out, however, because it's one of the best uses of multimedia that I've seen in a newspaper -- edited sections of video are used to illustrate points from the story. This is the reason why we're not going to be reading the news on paper anymore. It's an effective use of media; it has the "you are there" quality of video without the "you are an idiot" effect of mass-media TV news.

2007-04-10T17:55:00.000-07:00

So...this is the first truly legit latte art that I've been able to make...you can see that a few of the bubbles have started to pop there, because instead of drinking it immediately, I ran and grabbed the camera (obviously) and let Brett take a pic (you might be able to tell that too, from the quality of the picture).

Anyway I was pretty jazzed, but I haven't been able to do anything quite this rad since.

I bet Mayer couldn't do that.

Finished!

2007-04-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

OK -- I think we both knew that we weren't finished with this.

Customarily going for overkill, I bought a NOS (that's new old stock, meaning an unused vintage part) 5" Zenith speaker and popped it in there; then, a plain brown shipping box and voila! A totally finished practice amp that runs off a 9-volt, gets loud enough to annoy my faithful girlfriend, and can still be used to store some stuff.

It seriously sounds bitchin' too; I'm sure I'll post some sounds up at some point.

In other news, www.3than.com is up again, though without much stuff on it at this point. Stay tuned.

MAKE my day, punk

2007-03-22T18:48:00.000-07:00

That, my friends, is my latest creation. I'll admit that I didn't come up with it, but hey, it still rocks. You can also see the my level of handiwork: I couldn't get it to fit in the box (because I chose the box last, so it was a random shape) so I just stuck everything on one side of a stoned wheat cracker box.

Continuing the nerdiness, I quickly jammed out a couple .mp3s with it. Check it out here or here. Not bad for around $20 of parts per amp, huh?

Oh, and check out my rippin' guitar shredding. AND THAT'S NOTHING, BTW, JOHN MAYER!

About the recording: that's an Audio Technica at2020 condenser near the speaker (as pictured, maybe 8-10 inches away) and the left channel is a directional condenser (MXL 993) pointed at my strat. The second .mp3 also as my Maxon OD909 running. There's no processing on the tracks, except for normalization on the first one.

The speaker is a tiny, tinny driver stolen from my old pc. I think I may get a larger speaker to unleash this tiny monster.

Yeah, Make rocks. Now I'm going to rip open my other b-day gift (the year one box set) and drool over some more projects.

OK, so it's been a long time.

2007-02-22T22:24:00.000-08:00

Oh, I know what you've been thinking: that other whine country blog has got me licked. Or maybe I read Living in the Whine Country, and just put my tail between my legs and gave up.

Not so.

I checked that first one in late August last year, and I thought to myself, "Shit, this guy is posting all the damn time -- he's totally going to win the "best blog with the name Whine Country" award or some crap. But look who's on top now in a google search. Me. Ok, I'm not up there with litwc, but shit man, that guy has like five posts from the last two days. And at least two of them have fairly cool stuff (ruggedized military usb drive, insanely creepy video of a chick with two heads).

Whereas those other blogs may well post more often than I do, and sure, they're probably better written and stuff, but I have one thing going for me: I AM COMPLETELY INSANE.

Which is why I am taking this moment to announce the identity of my arch-enemy: John Mayer.

Sure, he's got the fame, the money, the women. The custom stratocasters. The guitar trio.

IT SHOULD BE ME, DAMMIT!!! I could have written those crap pop songs. Your body is a wonderland. Dammit. It's so obvious....

I will not cease to fight against this oppressor until I have vanquished him in an all-out guitar duel, a la Ralph Macchio vs. Steve Vai at the end of Crossroads.

Eat that, local blog competition.

Bourdain in Beirut

2006-12-09T13:51:00.000-08:00

I saw something pretty remarkable last night: Anthony Bourdain's show on his experiences in Beirut, during the war of last July.

Brett and I have been on a bit of a Bourdain kick recently; we caught a couple of his shows, and then she had the chance to interview him for the Bohemian. She also started reading his book. Friends will also remember that it was his restaurant in New York that ended my several years of vegetarianism, and it was on his advice that I bought a Global knife. We went to his reading in Sonoma, and I must say I was impressed. He seems to be a very personal and "real" guy who just happened to get lucky and famous, and now he's living his dream. Also, he really knocked 'em dead at that event.

I had also heard, of course, that he was one of the American evacuees of the Beirut bombing.

Yes, it is extremely weird to view war through the lens of foodie culture. And yet in this case it was highly appropriate, I think. Beirut by all accounts had come a long, long way, and was just on the verge of becoming a real tourist destination for westerners. It was also, as Bourdain said during his reading, just what the neo-cons are supposed to want the middle east to become. It was a booming, pro-business, multi-ethnic, tolerant, and westernized place. Althought I had never really imagined travelling there before, seeing what it was like really made me wish that I could go. (Especially since I am extremely deprived of middle-eastern food in Napa; there's a persian restaurateur, but he basically serves California-type food.)

Bourdain started shooting the day of the Hezbollah raid which captured two Israeli soldiers; that act, which resulted in the death of seven other soldiers, initiated the bombing which basically destroyed the city; it easily killed hundreds.

Bourdain and his crew were whisked away by an american security consultant, and watched most of the war from a hotel above Beirut, to the north of the bombed area. From there, it seemed oddly clear: the unassailable machines of war scattering death throughout the city. I guess I'm an unrepentant pacifist, but I just don't get it -- the urge to escalate, to completely destroy the enemy, seems so obviously wrong. It seems so clear that it will end up causing more total pain and death, that I find it difficult to understand why rational people choose it.

Now, yes, there are more obvious examples: the enemy footsoldiers approaching your borders, murdering your families. I would take up arms. I understand the desire to stop terrorism; it's just that it's clear that conventional military force is pretty much useless against it. In fact, as in the case of Hezbollah after this war, it usually feeds the terrorists. The use of massive force cedes the moral high ground to the terrorists, at least in the eyes of those in the theatre -- who are the very people who will be recruited into the ranks of those terrorists.

We need to find a better way; we need to create a lasting peace in Israel. Yes, the tactics of Hezbollah are abhorrent; they celebrate violence in a way that is extremely damaging. And yet they are responsible for much less death and destruction than our side, the peaceful, tolerant westerners.

So that's all. It seems like a perfect metaphor, though -- one moment, we are eating kibbeh, enjoying the fruits of tolerance, going about our existence as though there were no problems in the world, and suddenly, the forces of violence and destruction wipe it all away. I feel as though, despite all of our attempts to deal with terrorism, we are still ignoring it in the ways that matter.

Git 'er done

2006-11-03T17:04:00.000-08:00

I swear I'm going to fix this truck, just as soon as I get this hose off the radiator with a pipe wrench. Maybe I should have drained the coolant first, or at least let 'er cool down...

Check out the reshaped 'burn. Very key.

Mullet Over

2006-11-03T16:45:00.000-08:00

I don't know if you've had this experience, but when harvest season starts off with your boss giving you a mullet cut in front of all your coworkers, well, enough said, really. I mean, you've got a mullet, so that's pretty much all there is to talk about.

A word on the mullet: now that I've gone right through to the other side of mulletdom, obviously I have a new perspective on things. First off, it's true what they say: it's all business in front, and you've still got the party in the back. It's really the best of both worlds. I mean, your hair is out of your eyes, so you can go ahead and do your framing, laying concrete, siding, digging ditches, or, as in my case, winery lab work. And yet, you're still obviously out to have a good time. Yeah, you're a party guy.

Also it should be noted that, should you choose to get a mullet, your friends pretty much will talk about it constantly for the entire time that you've got the hairdo. Your coworkers will get over it in about two or three days, but if you, say, unexpectedly go to a party with your new mullet, you're pretty much the center of attention. If you were to, for instance, walk down the street in the Haight and meet some friends, they pretty much won't get over it, and people will start talking to you spontaneously in bars and such. And want to take pictures with you.

Yes, you will need to grow the 'stache as well. Of course you will. The mulstache is part of the look, you can't half-ass this like your fuckin' faux-hawk. A faux-mullet isn't going to fool anyone. That's just a bad haircut, not the rank, over-the-top class-defying mindfuck of a hairstyle that will make you the coolest kid in class for like six months, when some other guy goes for a mullet and suddenly there are two trendsetters, not just one.

So that's my call -- it's got to be done. All of a sudden, you're way more amusing and hip than you used to be with your new mullet, and you can say, when it's all said and done, I did it. I brought back the mullet almost single-handedly. I saw an opportunity and I took it. I was there before the people in Levis and iPod commercials. I was there before the kids in suburbia grew out their hair, before the hipsters in New York and LA grew rattails. I had the balls that the mullet-watchers don't. I went somewhere they were deeply afraid of. And it was good. For about two weeks.

A day in the life

2006-08-23T19:27:00.000-07:00

Or, at least, an email in the life.

From Rich:

Well anyway, here is the latest of the best (and worst really in a way) achewood:http://achewood.com/index.php?date=08232006(it's clickable as well)

-Rich

My response:

That is so apropos, really, seeing as how I recently watched the 1971 film Le Mans starring Steve McQueen -- not rally cars of course, the Le Mans was sports cars, but there are a couple of really gnarly crashes in it.

It reminds me of the end of the Italian Mille Miglia, when the Alfonsode Portago, a Portuguese nobleman, killed eleven spectators when his Ferrari careened out of control after a tire blowout. Tons of people have died racing automobiles, although we tend to think about that as a thing of the past.

Of course we enjoy the fruits of all those high-speed pursuits when we fire up our modern automobiles with airbags, disc brakes, and multivalve engines. Worth it?

That's the end of the email. And it's the end of August -- that means it's almost time to fire up the industrial machinery and start crushing the almost 9000 tons of grapes that will come through the 'wood. I've got to finish up my pre-harvest prep. Including hiring another lab tech -- know anyone?

I bought a bunch of espresso pods for the Solis -- so far results are mixed. Pretty poor really -- I can only get a decent shot maybe half the time, which is weird because you'd think they should be more consistent if anything? I dunno. Got some decaf pods too, which is cool.

I have to finish up cleaning and go home. Such is my glamorous life in wine country.

Dude --

2006-08-19T13:21:00.000-07:00

Check this out. That's right, another blog with the same name, from the same place, with way more posts than mine. This can lead to only one conclusion: my blog name is totally weak. Oh well. It may be too late.

So I've started a new project: I'm going to try to make a chronological chart of my material obsessions over the past few years. After all, the impetus to change career and get into the wine business started off as an obsession with food and wine beginning in 2002-2003; since then I've been obsessed (as documented by purchases) with: handmade persian rugs, coffee and espresso equipment and autombobiles. There were also occasional flare-ups of some "background" obsessions: hi-fi audio, guitars, and computer gear.

The real difficulty of this is finding a good way to graph the intensity of the obsessions in addition to when they are active. I think we may also do a chart for Brett's obsessions: moving to Europe, Swedish handicrafts, being an artist, etc. I believe that this exercise will be most informative.

Long time no nothing

2006-08-01T22:46:00.000-07:00

Hello, gentle reader. It has been too long since my last entry in this forum. A brief synopsis of what's been going on: Brett and I visited Richard in L.A. Richard, who has a diagnosed mental disorder, was institutionalized. At around the same time, Israel invaded Lebanon, quite possibly starting a larger conflict in the Middle East. Then, Brett and I moved. Also, my boss quit and I got a small promotion at work.

So...yeah, it's been busy and rather stressful. I will expand on some of these topics later if anyone is interested. Or if not!! That's the great thing about a blog. Anyway, toodles.

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control

2006-06-23T23:49:00.000-07:00

OK people -- tired of Koyannisqatsi? Add this one to your list of mind-blowers: documentarian par excellence Errol Morris' 1997 masterpiece, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.

It's about four people: a topiary gardener, a lion tamer, a specialist in naked mole rats, and an MIT robot scientist. It sets two of the characters against the others, in a way...on one side you have mechanation, trans-humanism, and insect social structure, and on the other you have the total control of nature and animal instinct. It's totally brilliant and makes you think more than once about, well, everything. I don't want to spoil too much, but pay attention when they start talking about feces. It'll make you squirm for sure.

All this makes me think about what I love about car racing, especially vintage car racing. Actually, I don't care much for modern car races, but with the old cars, I'm totally mesmerized. It's because it catches the entire evolution of automotive development: they start off with these pre-war cars with like 25 horsepower and end up with 1960s V8 monsters, and all the while they balance the power and handling...and it's all a pointless pursuit, more or less. We would have all been better served if they'd built a train system that goes everywhere. But there's something caught up in the intersection of the technical struggle and the beauty of the sheetmetal designs that, I would argue, embodies the best aspects of humans as a species. We have an enormous capacity to create diverse forms of beauty. This is obvious. What isn't so obvious is the relationship between beauty and pointlessness. I seems like it's at its peak when the entire exercise is utterly pointless, like wild animal shows: They're dumb: downright stupid, but there's a certain awe about them that's impossible to deny. But it's almost the as great when an everyday task or need is transformed by an invention: I would argue that as a society, we "Americans" are totally in awe of the automobile. Look at all the people that commut in pickups with giant v8's, or new sportscars, and tell me that this is the product of a rational mind.

Anyway that's all for now. Throw that one on the queue, and if you can stomach another documentary, put Morris' late-1970s masterpiece Gates of Heaven on there as well. Two words: pet cemeteries. Pet cemeteries that I've seen with my two eyes -- and Brett has recently written about.

Vintage Race 2006

2006-06-14T19:02:00.000-07:00

I know that you have been waiting patiently for an update, gentle readers. And I think that I do have something that might interest you.

Our story begins last year, June 5th, 2005 -- Brett's birthday weekend, and I've already messed up by not getting her a cake. Oops, who knew it was such a big deal? My plan for recovery, you ask? Why not take her to the Jaguar Vintage Car Classic at the Infineon? I mean, what girl doesn't like that?

Oddly enough, she consented. And odder still, once we got there, she loved it.

Really! She loved it. Both of us got teary-eyed, sitting there in the sun watching an amazing array of old racing and sports cars, not in a museum, but cranking around a racetrack, screaming their hearts out. And she hasn't stopped talking about it since.

This year, we brought the camera and she, Brett Ascarelli, my fabulous in-house photographer, snapped some shots. Here are a few favorites:

These cars are so damn small!

Check out the smoking E-type -- it had to retire after about two laps. Too bad -- that was the mid-late 1960s production sports cars race, and it's fun to see the E-types in a race dominated by Shelbys and Corvettes.

Next up is the "Piranha," a crazy kit car that's based on a Corvair!!! Unsafe at any speed!

But here's my personal favorite: unbelievably, there were a couple of SAABs on the track that day, Sonnett V4's, which were actually raced! About 2,000 Sonnett V4's were produced, a fiberglass-bodied two-seat sportscar. And I totally love them. They were powered by a ford v-4 good for about 65 hp, SAE. Probably like 50 by today's measurements. But they were out there, and they're beauties.

Performance

2006-05-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

Above is a picture of my first successful performance modification: I have added an "intake" to my old Saab. Perhaps this isn't so impressive, since really it just consisted of removing the factory air filter assembly and bolting the new, larger air filter in place.

Translation: I have found another geeky obsession to bore you with.

Well...that's all for now. I was really excited about it for a minute.

I'm a friggin' mechanic all of a sudden.

2006-05-12T18:25:00.000-07:00

So this monday, after spending the weekend ordering stuff for the "new" car and getting its oil changed, I was greeted by an unwelcome occurance: a terrible squeal from the engine compartment, followed by a small "clunk," heralding a major change in the material status of the alternator belt, and ushering in a new era of tool-time for yours truly.

Despite the $92 pre-purchase inpection and around $500 of work done on the car since then, my reputable but perhaps overworked mechanic in Sonoma had no idea that the alternator belt was on its last legs, or even, apparently, that the car is meant to operate with two belts instead of one. Oops. This does not bode well for the aforementioned timing chain rattle.

Flash back to Monday morning, around 8:30 AM, (nearly the same time and day of the car accident that has caused the automotive content of my life to rise so drastically). Myself, calling the shop that works on Brett's car:

(Ring ring)
"'s Auto Service."
"Yeah, I've got a question for you -- how are you guys with older Saab nine hundreds?"
"Uh...we don't work on Saab 900s (you idiot)."
"Um...ok, thanks..."

Next shop no answer.

Next shop:
"Selbach European."
"Uh, yeah, do you guys do Saabs?"
"What's the problem?"
blah blah...
Them: "Yeah...well, we could take a look at that. Thing is, we're just really busy right now. I mean, wow, we are plowed under..."
"O.K. well, thanks, maybe if I can't get anyone else to do it, I'll call you back."

Moments later I order a set of replacement belts from a Saab website, resolving to do it myself. Today, Friday at 6:30 pm, they are on the car and took me to work today. However, that was not before a mishap with the order (two power steering belts, one alternator) that delayed all of this by two days.

Not to mention all the grease and dirt on my hands, and teaching myself with the help of a book how to do it. That said, it really wasn't too bad, despite the Saab "backwards engine" setup, where all the belts are right near the firewall. All the bolts turned easily, and I didn't even cut myself; as long as I get home tonight, I'd say it was pretty much a success. Now, here's the big question: will I now be emboldened to tackle further projects with this (my only) car? I've heard that it may be possible to deal with the timing chain rattle by replacing a guide accessible under the valve and timing cover; this may have the fringe benefit of clearing up a major source of possible vacuum leaks, the valve cover gasket. And of course, here's the big question: could I deal with the project to convert the car to a light pressure turbo? Most of the parts come from the turbo engine and are a direct fit, although it involves replacing a whole lot of them. It would mean a probable 10-15 hp gain, and a gain in fuel efficiency as well (so far the 2.1 naturally aspirated engine is getting worse mileage than the old car with its far more powerful 2.0 turbo.) But would the gain in efficiency offsetthe price of super?

I have spent a whole hell of a lot of time thinking about this stuff since my old reliable auto was destroyed. And money. Back in the day in NYC I spent about $60 to $70 a month on transportation, a little more if I took the bus out of town or took a cab somewhere. Furthermore, it was all electric and I could read while I went to work. Sure, I've caught the car bug, and I love the joy of the open road and all that, but I could sure do without the extreme cost ($3.25 for 87?) and the life-threatening auto accidents.

But this just looks right...

2006-04-27T18:08:00.000-07:00

Well I must admit I miss the rush of taking Pete's Audi for a spin with the top down, but we all know that when you get down to it I'm a SAAB guy. I found this baby on the side of Highway 12 in Sonoma; my co-worker spotted it. It's a 1991 SAAB 900S with 164,000 miles on it, in remarkably good condition. I had it checked out by Universal Auto in Sonoma who gave it a more or less clean bill of health, and did a bit of work on it. Well, it has a coolant leak -- I think that it's a just cracked expansion tank -- we'll see tomorrow. 1991 introduced the 2.1 liter naturally-aspirated four in the "S" cars, which has the reputation of being the most problematic of the classic 900 engines, but I think it should take me a few more miles. I'd like to swap in a rebuilt turbo engine someday; it would probably cost me a few grand, but it would still be much cheaper than a whole new car.

There is one big problem though -- the heated seats don't seem to be working. The guy who sold it to me swore that they worked, and maybe they did before it sat through this rainy winter. Maybe a mouse took a liking to some wiring? Maybe somebody stood on a seat and broke the wire in it when they were cleaning it up? Anyway, I'm going to find out.

And I really hope that nobody runs into me -- although it seems they're trying. Going around the bend between Ravenswood and Viansa today, there was a tractor coming the other way on the highway with its blinkers on, and a long line of cars waiting patiently behind it. All except one -- a brand new silver Corvette, screaming towards me in my line AROUND THE FUCKING BEND. I hit the brakes (he didn't) and we came within probably 3 feet of highway head-on collision. I mouthed "motherfucker" and drove on -- but I swear to you if we'd collided, I was about this close to pulling his battered, midlife-crisis body out of that fiberglass piece of shit and beating out of him whatever life was left. The other accident was, at least, just that, a simple accident caused mostly by road conditions; this was a really, really stupid decision that could have easily cost that asshole his miserable life -- and mine, which I was planning to do some things with. Right on the other side of the bend, a few hundred feet away, is a straightaway with a dotted center line for passing, but no, he just couldn't wait.

I hope that he realizes what a lucky guy he is tonight; if I had been driving Brett's car (which has shitty brakes compared to the old SAAB) or if I just hadn't been paying attention, he would've ended up with that big ol' engine on his lap.

From across the void...

2006-04-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

The other day, as I was driving home, I heard a recording of a call to 911 from a victim of the 9/11 attack. It really brought me back.

I've told this story a few times but somehow I keep feeling the need to retell it; somehow I don't think I've quite done it justice yet.

In terms of weather, September 11th was about as good a day as it gets in New York. The sky was preternaturally blue, and totally clear in every direction. I lived at that time in "South Williamsburg" Brooklyn, two stops outside Manhattan, right underneath the elevated tracks for the J-M-Z. I'd recently bought a digital camera, and for some reason I had thought of bringing it to work with me that day; in the end, I didn't.

I read novels or the New Yorker on the way to work; I took the J train back into Manhattan briefly, and then caught the F back to DUMBO, (Down Underneath the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, the stupidest acronym in New York) in Brooklyn. As the train made its way slowly over the Williamsburg Bridge, a woman exclaimed that "that building is on fire." Nobody paid any attention, really. People say lots of things, and the view of the towers is often obscured as you go over that bridge. I looked up long enough to see what she was talking about, and think to myself, isn't that the World Trade Center?

I also remember thinking to myself that the black, gaping hole looked a lot like something I'd seen in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Specifically, I think, the right panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights.

My commute took me back underground; the question, "Hey, did you see the fire in the WTC?" went on deck for small talk at work. By the time I reached the York St F stop, the second tower had been hit. A column of smoke trailed over DUMBO. A woman said to me as I walked, "Two planes hit those two buildings," and I answered, "No, it was only one!" I imagined a single-propeller plane, far off course, losing control; I also remembered the famous statement about the WTC: that it had been engineered to withstand a plane crash.

There was a clear line of sight from my workplace to the towers; it was just over the east river from them, and there is a famous park there which has views between the two bridges. I saw the two towers smoking from just in front of the entrance, and then went up to the sixth floor. There, I found confusion. No one's cellular phone worked; we had no radio or television (not that it would have helped us, since the antennas were on the towers) and most websites were down. The New York Times frontpage would sporadically load; the best connections seemed to be with IRC servers, far away. The conversation was about the attacks; that was where I heard about the attack on the Pentagon. Also I heard there were five more jets in the air, and that fighters had been launched to intercept them, and many other crazy things. I heard about leaflets dropped from the planes, as well.

Some of my coworkers went up the the roof to get a better view. There was a janitor up there who wouldn't let us on the roof (building policy) but we looked out through the door, which framed the towers against a background of pure blue. We could see things falling from the towers: people jumping. A coworker of mine, Shu Li, brought his camera and recorded it.

Back in the office, more confusion. I remember seeing people leaving Manhattan, walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, from another office suite. We desperately searched for information, and tried to contact our families (who often knew more than we did about what was going on) and it was from one of them that we heard the first tower had fallen. After that the office gathered down on the street to stare at the other tower; it fell as well, with a sound like bricks being thrown into an empy dumpster, and just as loud, even on the other side of the river.

I walked home through Brooklyn that day; a little south of where I lived, the Hasids were giving out water to those who were walking home. At home, my roommates were on the roof. They'd received calls from family telling them what happened while they were asleep -- no jobs. That night, we went out to a Mexican restaurant on Bedford Avenue that was operated "cash only" as a sign proclaimed on the front door. I remember saying that if I were President Bush, I would immediately invade Iraq, regardless of actual causality. Turns out he was thinking the same thing.

For me, and I think for many people who experienced it, even through television, the whole even has been relegated to a strange, surreal part of the mind: the "antipodes," as Aldous Huxley called it. A place that we don't visit very often, because there's no real way to understand it. The recording of that phone call brought me back there, to the time when we were all struggling to understand what was going on and how to react, when a 911 call, even a fire in the World Trade Center, might be business as usual on some level. Stay put and we'll come get you. The implication in the fireman's voice is "we've all got problems," a very New York attitude, I think, and on some level reassuring: they know how to handle this, calm down.

If only it were. It seems to me that what has followed has been worse than what happened. It was a terrible thing, it changed all of our lives, and it changed them for the worse. It has provided an excuse for war that has killed many more than died that day, and a basis for the terrible fear which pervades our society. Yes, some people are exploiting that fear, but that cannot last forever, and I hope that we can see through it soon. Horrible things can happen to anyone at any time, a point which we seem determined to prove. But the way forward is along the path of justice and wisdom, a path from which we have strayed. It seems that many statements beginning with "September 11th changed the way we look at..." often point away from lessons we have spent many years and lives learning.

And why should we all be there at 7:30?

2006-03-21T21:08:00.000-08:00

Sometimes in life, things just don't make sense. One thing leads to another, unforseen complications arise, causality is indirect or simply lacking.

Around a week ago, I found myself at a party, eating sushi off of an ecdysiast's torso. I won't lie to you: in a way, it's a titillating idea. There are a couple of drawbacks, however. The fish, usually served cool, quickly rises to body temperature, the body in question belonging to a mostly naked woman that you, the eater of said sushi, really doesn't know very well at all.

I don't know quite what else to say. Don't try this at home? I mean, no one got hurt...

It should be mentioned that Brett Ascarelli (my domestic partner) took this picture, and also the picture in the "After the Flood" post, and should be credited, as she recently reminded me.

BLAHGTASTIC!!!!!

2006-03-17T18:32:00.000-08:00

So, I showed my coworkers the posting with the side view of my car in it, and they all got excited that I had a blog! WOW!!!

The upside of this is I have new readers. The downside is that they'll make fun of me for writing stuff like, I dunno, alternate storylines for the Star Wars prequels, rants about audio or computer stuff, or just about any other topic would actually treat in this forum. The solution: make this blog so dull that no one in their right mind would actually read it.

It's almost as if I'd planned this from the start...

iPod "HiFi"

2006-03-09T21:00:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: I have not heard the product.

Rant: What the hell has happened to home stereo.

In the 1970s, there was a war: this one wasn't related to oil, or terrorism or even communism. It was about winning the home stereo market, and it was fought in Japan, California and elsewhere. Marantz, Technics, Sansui, Onkyo, and many other manufacturers were building stereo "hifi" systems that pushed the envelope in terms specifications and features. You remember what they looked like: silver and shiny, with weighted controls and glowing lights in the darkness. Your dad probably had one until he threw it out in the early '90s or late '80s and bought a some black box that purported to have better specifications. That one probably broke about 5-7 years later, and he got another one. This one doesn't even have a phono preamp, and all the vinyl records your parents once had are not getting moldy in the basement. Then, one day, they just said "what the hell" and bought a Bose wave radio at the mall.

The iPod HiFi is for you, the hip kids.

Here are my objections:
1) Placement. The Apple website shows the HiFi next to your sweet flat-panel TV. I guess the imaging is so good that you can put it anywhere and still perceive stereo.

2) Frequency response. the plus-minus 3 decibel area is 53-16,ooo. I am more or less OK with 53 as the low end -- 40hz is generally considered the cutoff for perception, and a lot of the stuff down there is perceived as "thump." But 16k is just too low for truly detailed high end. There is nothing in the audio world that would describe itself as even close to "audiophile" that has a high end of less than 20k. High-end tweeters are much higher than that.

3) What the hell kind of amplifier is in there? What's the thd? Is it a 50w amplifier with a distortion of 0.01% or is it a crappy 8w piece of shit like what's in every boombox? Hmm, I wonder why there aren't any specs on the website.

4) No nobs or controls on the unit. Oops...where's the remote? Honey? Have you seen the iPod HiFi remote? HAVE YOU???? DAMMIT HONEY I NEED THAT REMOTE CONTROL, I CAN'T CHANGE THE VOLUME!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHERE IS IT!!!

Now, that said, if the thing sounds "good," I think that's great. Sounding "good" is certainly subjective, and if it does image halfway decently, and represent dynamics and timing well, I think it could be a steal at $349. I just don't understand why there aren't any tweeters on it.

Mind you, I just bi-wired my Linn Katans (~$900 or so, without stands, claimed performance 75-20k hz) to my Nikko NR-719 amp ($84 on ebay, with luck showed up working) which is a 35w amp from the late '70s that claims 35w into 4 ohms with 0.05% thd. What's more important is that the phono stage sounds basically like you're in the same room with the musicians. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't mind putting a little effort into having stuff sound good -- while iPods and the like are cool, and make it easy to listen to your favorite music, I'd rather work a little, pay some attention, and then have something pay off by sounding great. Plus I'd rather listen to reissues of Son House on Yazoo or Art Blakey lps than mp3s from the iTunes store. Jazz just sounds better on vinyl.

Man, it's been a fricking blogfest today. I guess I really don't want to do my taxes.

Condensed version...

2006-03-09T18:13:00.000-08:00

Here is another view of the mangled SAAB. Check out the dimple over the rear wheelwell. The frame is so bent that the rear hatch won't open. They must have forced the doors open -- they won't close. I really could have died here, and I must say that I'm glad my SAABie gave its life to save mine (and the passengers in the other vehicle -- crumple zones help absorb impact that affects the other car as well.)

Drive safe, folks.

Doesn't look too bad there...

2006-03-09T17:33:00.000-08:00

Through a wonderful and mysterious set of circumstances, my boss (and when I say my boss I don't mean my immediate supervisor. I mean the guy more or less in charge of Ravenswood's production, the wise and generous Peter Mathis) has lent me a truck. I know what you're saying -- "But that's not a truck! That's clearly an Audi TT Quattro!"

Why yes it is. See, the magnanimous Peter Mathis required the use of his pickup truck this evening, and rather than tell me "Tough luck kid," thereby requiring me to thumb for rides on the side of highway 121, he lent me his well-loved roadster. Which is, by the way, totally sweet.

This is a sports car. I'm not sure which edition this is, but it's either the 180hp or 225hp turbo version. It has a 6-speed manual, which is a wee bit clicky with short throws, but feels sturdier than just about anything I've used before. The brakes are awesome -- if my old 900 had brakes like this, I think that I may have avoided the accident entirely, or possibly just been rear-ended by the pickup behind me. I bet his ABS works too.

You know what definitely works in this car? The seat heaters. I've always been a fan of the feature, going back to the long, cold winters of my youth in Rhode Island. The heaters in our old SAAB 900s sedans would heat up just a wee bit before the engine coolant warmed enough to start blowing cold air. It's hard to describe how satisfying that was. Next to the seat heaters in the Audi TT, however, they seem like 90-pound weaklings at the Gold's Gym in Venice Beach. The heaters in this car were almost instantly noticeable. In moments, they were uncomfortably warm. By the time I figured out how to turn them off, I think I could smell cooking meat. You could probably fry an egg on the passenger's seat while driving, or at least keep your coffee good and warm.

What else? The steering is stiffer than anything I've driven, but feels really good. The car clearly has tons of grip, especially with the quattro option. Oh yeah, and it's fast. Way fast. Not by Lamborghini or even Camaro Z28 standards, but by 1990 Toyota Camry standards it's a screamer. And a revver. The redline is above 6000, heights to which I could never aspire on my boss's automobile.

Anything not to like? I'm not a complainer. But it is widely known that I have little but disgust for most newer cars, with their plasticky silver and heated drink holders. Despite the sumptiousness of the leather (which is considerable) the car's design is a little, well, gimmicky. There is a dimpled-circle motif that is maybe taken just a bit too far, especially since some of it is done in plastic that belies the VW thriftiness behind the Audi's luxo-splendor. That said, all the controls, even the digital ones, feel pretty nice.

If I had the money (surprisingly only three to five times what I'm considering spending on an 850) would I do it? Maybe, which is better than I thought. This car gives a pretty serious sense of control and seems sturdy. I think I would have survived the crash in this car -- the chassis of this car is definitely stiffer than the 900, and it has little mini-roll bars. I think it passes the safety test. The only downside is, of course, the cargo space in the roadster. That and the money of course.

Seems like a good way to cook bacon, though.

And the winner is...

2006-03-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

Coupla things. After a great deal of deliberation, it seems that my new vehicle will be...a Volvo 850. The SAABs 900s are too much of a gamble, and the only ones with ABS and airbags are the 1990-1993 models. If I could find one in good condition with relatively few miles, I would do it, but I think it's going to be easier to find a Volvo.

The only problem with the Volvos is that, basically, they're available in either manual transmission or turbo -- even the 1997 low-pressure turbo GLT model is only available with a four-speed auto. So I'm going to try to find a 1992-1996 GLT 5-speed, any color but white. (I am not about to be washing my car weekly, plus white just isn't my style.) I would love a turbo, especially since they cost only marginally more at this point, but the base model still has 168 hp, or just a tad more than the ol' 900 Turbo, albeit with a bit less torque.

I feel like the 850 is pretty much the last chance at having a really "Swedish" car. The post-1993 SAABs and later Volvos just don't have the simple, clean designs that made them feel unique. So, in that sense, I don't think that I'm abandoning my automotive roots. I'm just trying to make my way in a world where automobiles have become a rolling media center and breakfast nook.

Whatever, my issue. Maybe I should just get over it and buy a Grand Cherokee. Why not double my gasoline consumption for a little more room?

End of an Era?

2006-03-05T23:20:00.000-08:00

Recent events have caused a rather obvious and yet profound problem. I am, in a word, carless.

The problem is exacerbated by a couple of things. My car of choice, the Saab 900, is no longer produced, except in a debased form by General Motors. SAAB has more or less been dismantled. In fact, its headquarters are now officially in Detroit. Furthermore, even if I liked the cars, I couldn't afford them, seeing as how they are now aimed at the "luxury" segment of the market.

Last year, my father stopped driving them after having done so for 30 years, and I'm afraid that I may have to do the same.

But it gets worse. There are a few cars that I could be happy in, I think. They are cars which meet a certain basic level of safety (for which I have newfound respect) and performance (which I think has a certain bearing on safety) and a wee bit of style. In short, I want a car that runs, isn't a dog or a deathtrap, and doesn't look like crap outside, or have flimsy plastic bits everywhere inside. In cars made after 1998 or so, this is easy -- pretty much every car produced now is a luxury racer with an airbag and a dvd surround massage system with latte injection. I can't afford them.

This leaves pretty much one option, as far as I can tell: the 1992-1997 Volvo 850. More or less in my price range, first front-wheel Volvo, which adds to Volvo's bevy of safety features, quick and stylish. My new ride.

One little problem: very few of them, especially the more desirable ones with leather and/or turbochargers, are available with manual transmissions. I'm afraid I can't stand automatics. I don't feel like I'm driving.

What to do...I suppose it doesn't matter anyway, since I won't have enough cash for a new automobile until my insurance settlement happens (who knows when, or if they won't be able to wiggle out of it) or I receive a major donation or loan. (I've had some loan offers, to be honest, but I'm trying to avoid more debt.)

So what will it be? Anachronistic deathtrap or snore-worthy slushbox sedan? Stay tuned. Also there will be more pictures of the wreck, which currently adorns my lawn. (Insurance might need to see it, y'know?)

Thanks to all for your support.

She's not going to see 200,000 after all.

2006-02-28T11:54:00.000-08:00

As in the proverb I think the picture says it all. At about 8:30 yesterday morning, I was driving to work during one of our thirty or so rainy days up here in wine country when an SUV veered into my lane. At the time, it seemed like they had lost control of the car and were just sliding, but I only had about a second or so to judge (and slam on the brakes) before I smacked into them, still going around 40 mph. The red SAAB was my car.

Thank God, merciful Buddha and all praise be to Allah, but I crawled out of the car with minimal injuries. The airbag went off (despite the blinking SRS light) and the crumple zones worked exactly as designed. I'm not sure if the car saved my life, but it sure gave up its life for mine, and I'm grateful for that and the clever Swedish designers that made it that way.

The other car was a family of four, with a pregnant woman at the wheel. The accident induced her labor, and I hear that she delivered the baby safe and sound, a little girl. Her husband (I think) was in the passenger seat and got off with a cut over the eye. Their two little girls made it, too, although I think one broke her leg.

Anyway, I think we all got off as easy as we could have. I'm not really the religious type, but I find myself thankful for whatever force provided my good luck. And saying "Jesus!" a lot.

Also my birthday is coming up -- I'm taking donations for a new (old) SAAB.

Photo by Robbi Pengelly/Sonoma Index-Tribune

One of those days...

2006-01-24T20:20:00.000-08:00

I had the worst day ever just now.

I pretty much couldn't do anything right. First thing, as I get into work, my boss yells at me for stuff I didn't do the previous day. The thing is, I was stressed yesterday because I'm trying to get into a chemistry class, which I thought started Wednesday, but really started yesterday, so I was unexpectedly out until 10:15 instead of 6:00. To top it off, super-busy day, with tons of little things going not quite right. At lunch I got upbraided for not getting chips to go with the chili dogs, and not getting cheese on them.

After work, I get home as my girlfriend leaves for the city for a Swedish class. Then I frantically look for my college transcript for two hours, so I can prove that I took calculus...although I will have to take the placement test for the chemistry pre-requisite. Just now, I got a case of the fuck-its and tried to sneak back around the house to see if there was beer in the neighbor's kegerator -- of course there wasn't, and they caught me in the act. (Full disclosure: they're pretty much cool with the occasional missing pint.)

Still, the suckage level here is way too high. Did I mention that Columbia claims that they will only mail out a transcript within 48 hours of receiving my written, signed request? (In the mail today, but still, wtf?) WHO IS GOING TO REQUEST MY TRANSCRIPT? AL-QAEDA? I don't get it.

Then google video claims that I don't have flash 7. Is there no end to this?

Zassenhaus Turkish Grinder

2006-01-17T16:55:00.000-08:00

Yes yes. My dad got me a Zassenhaus Turkish Coffee Mill (Model 175M) for Christmas from Sweet Maria's. I took it to work for a couple of weeks.

Maybe I should explain, if I haven't already. At work we have a Gaggia Classic espresso machine, and on my first day, they told me how to use it. Now, I make all the coffees. The Gaggia is a pretty solid machine, although some sneer at it because of its small aluminum boiler -- the best ones are brass or copper. Despite that, it's totally capable of making great espresso and pretty good steamed milk. The boiler size makes it a bit weak for steaming, I think, but I think it would be alright if I just had a thermometer for the pitcher.

Anyway I usually buy the coffee, and it just seemed a shame to me that we had to get it pre-ground. It always seemed better the first day and then to decline by about the third. Plus, grind was an issue -- if I got it at Peet's, everything was cool, but if that isn't possible, then there's a problem.

Enter the turkish coffee mill, a can of Illy beans, and myself after a two-week vacation. Here's the straight dope: the mill is great. Probably the best damn thing since the espresso machine itself. As long as you've got time, that is.

The long version: I get to work and start weighing out 14-gram double shots. The first day's are far too coarse, and I actually started to worry. Maybe the burrs are off? The Zassenhaus' final burr is actually floating, not secured at all, and it took a few grinds to knock them into place centrally. At the end of the first day, I tried the adjustment nut again and found that I could tighten the burrs substiantially more than I had been able to.

On day 2, it became clear that the mill was going to work out. The setting from the end of the first day was basically dialed-in, producing a tiny rat's tail-like trickle. Everything was ristretto-fine, and it stayed that way for a couple of weeks, through the can of Illy and then a can of Trader Joe's Fair-Trade, Shade-Grown Ethiopian Yirgacheffe (which was damn good.) Then I decided to take it home. It probably doubled the time it took me to make coffees. This isn't a problem on Sunday morning, but it kinda is when your coffee 15 becomes a good half hour.

Does it make a difference? (Co-Worker question, many, I'm sure have no doubts about this one.) Yes, an obvious one -- getting the correct grind size is most definitely an enhancement. Plus the freshness. The Yirgacheffe's spiciness came through, and although it dissipated towards the end of the week, it remained quite tasty and satisfying. It reminded me of nutmeg and clove. Illy preground never works perfectly with our machine, so just getting to use Illy and a good grind is enough for me.

One sorta negative though -- the shots with both coffees seemed more sour than before. I'm not sure whether it's a temperature issue, timing, or something about freshness, but some of the shots were just too sour for me, and I like short, sweet/sour shots.

Oh, and all that grinding. Let's hope it's good excercise.

Quick note

2006-01-01T21:20:00.000-08:00

Turns out a couple of my friends are, more or less, avid bloggers who write much more often (and perhaps more interestingly) than I do.

Daphne is a tremendously intelligent music writer and ethnomusicologist grad student at Columbia...Rich is a student of science and technology, a grad student in materials science at USC, and an astute observer of techno-cultural trends. Both totally worth reading.

After the flood...

2006-01-01T20:48:00.000-08:00

Yeah...it's been a little while since my last post. A lot of stuff happened. Mostly, the holidays, wherein I had some time off, went back east to see the fam and my friends. Blah blah.

Anyways Napa flooded. Floods are crazy. I'm new to this, having come from the relatively disaster-free northeast. Aside from a couple of hurricanes, none of which caused any major damage, I haven't seen any real FEMA-level disasters firsthand.

Well it seems like we're going to be spared any FEMA intervention, but a lot of Napa flooded. Yountville and St. Helena, towns upvalley of us, are effectively cut off and there's major damage. A lot of the town of Napa, where we live, is flooded near the river...about two blocks from us to the east. There's probably about 10-20 feet of elevation, and the plain flattens out around there, so I think that we're relatively safe, for this one, at least.

Brett took this picture yesterday, when there was some sun between the two storms. This guy was letting his kids play in the floodwaters...I guess that the fact that his were the only kids playing in the water didn't make him stop to think. After they walked out pretty far in the rushing waters, somebody whistled and told them to come back, at which point Dad told everybody that it was OK, he knows what's safe for his kids. For my part, I couldn't stop thinking about this John McPhee story I read in the New Yorker a long time ago about how he was on a canoe trip as a kid and this other kid drowned. The unlucky kid got his foot caught between two rocks so his face was underwater and his lungs were filled with water in seconds. It took two days and a rescue helicopter to recover his body. Luckily, we didn't witness anything like that, despite dad's best efforts.

Those vines behind the kids are underwater. Cameron Stark, my old boss at Unionville Vineyards, said that wine country was slowly reverting to the swampland it was before California was strip-mined in the nineteenth century, thanks in part to global warming. Today as we drove back along highway 29 and looked out over the entire lover valley, completely flooded, it seemed easier to believe than in the dry summer months.

Oh, and I found this when I was looking for flood information earlier. Yeah. Thanks for calling me an idiot because the valley gets flash floods for a couple days every five years. At least my city isn't built on sinking silt from the Mississippi. If you ask me, though, the idiots are still the ones who don't fund river control and levee operations. Napa's flood control construction is, just like New Orleans', years behind schedule because of state and federal budget cuts. Oops.

The Wall Street Journal

2005-12-06T22:07:00.000-08:00

Brett and I got a free subscription to the Wall Street Journal through some sort of frequent-flyer thing. She really wanted to get a newspaper so she could keep up with the...uh...news. The thing is, we're really New York Times people when you get right down to it. We don't have enough money to really be interested in most of what the Journal writes about.

The other thing is that I really like reading opinion pages. Mostly, the Times opinion pages (most of which I can't read for free on the web anymore.) So...here, on day 4 of our subscription, I got too mad not to write a letter to the editor.

This is in response to a vehemently pro-Bush, pro-war piece by George Melloan called, "Yes, Virginia, the U.S. has a War Strategy," in the Global View column.

The text of my letter:
George Melloan's take on the Bush doctrine and the administration's recent retread of its policies seemed forced and shrill to me. I believe that all of us understand the "Bush doctrine," and, for a long time, a great many of us supported it. The problem with Iraq is that it never truly fit into the doctrine; Iraq, one of the most secular states in the Middle East, was never home to as many jihadists as Lebanon or the Palestinian settlements. Saddam Hussein himself was indeed a sponsor of terrorism, but almost exclusively against Israel, which was, until Iraq's destabilization at our nation's hands, the nexus of terrorism attacks in the Middle East.

To see matters most clearly, compare the campaign in Iraq with that in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, American and NATO forces intervened against a regime which had been criticized repeatedly by nations around the world, even Islamic states, and which had a direct connection to terrorism. Despite the problems inherent to regime change, the world (and the citizens of Afghanistan) are better off because of that invasion.

I believe that more and more people are finding it hard to make a similar statement about Iraq. The invasion has destroyed the world-unifying momentum created by September 11th, eroded our nation's moral authority, and worst of all, inflicted terrible costs on the people of the Iraqi nation.

But how does this affect our strategy for rebuilding Iraq? In a sense, not at all. But at the same time, how can Iraqis forget the horrible casualties of the "shock and awe" campaign, experiences of midnight raids against innocent citizens because of bad intelligence, and the images of Americans playing cruel games with prisoners in Abu Ghraib?

The Wall Street Journal's opinion pages should take into account that, at least in the case of Iraq, the administration's thinking may be so deeply flawed that whatever strategy they promote cannot provide a solution.

Ethan Hartman
Napa, CA

I think when you get down to it, there are two basic problems with Iraq. First off, George II should have picked a different country from George I, even if they did try to kill his dad. Secondly, the idea of invading another nation to stop terrorism is really a stretch, I think. In addition to the moral issues about removing another country's right to self-determination, it's hard to argue that it's effective. 9/11 was done by like 20 guys, mostly Saudi. We're not invading them. The British subway bombings were done by Brits. I forget who did the Madrid train attacks, but I can remember one thing about them: not Iraqi. What's more, none of these were the army or defense forces of any country.

Terrorists are criminals: they are individuals who participate in a spectacular category of crime, and should be treated as such. They should be apprehended by criminal authorities, and tried with all the rights due to the accused. Sometimes there may be sensitive information in these cases, and only then should the record be closed.

Another thing: in The Front, the 1976 movie about the 1950's blacklists starring Woody Allen, there's a line from the investigator that I couldn't help but notice:

We're in a war, Mr. Brown.
Against a ruthless and tricky enemy
who will stop at nothing...
...to destroy our way of life.

This is, more or less, Bush's line about the terrorists, and if the McCarthyists used the same one, it must be pretty facile. It got me thinking, though -- what if it isn't our way of life that they hate, but when our country takes ill-considered and arrogant actions like, say, invading their country?

I return triumphant.

2005-11-12T10:47:00.000-08:00

I must apologize to my faithful readers for my long absence. I have had a busy crush-time this year: soon after my last update, production started going full-steam, and I had very little time for anything but work. Things have cooled off now, however, and now the long off-season begins.

I have been thinking about the usual things: politics, espresso makers, etc. The big news around here is that I used some of my harvest money to invest in a new computer: Brett desperately needed something faster and with more storage for her digital photos, and I was happy to put the whirring beast out of commission. So I did some research and came up with this setup:

Asus A8N-E motherboard, based on the nForce4 chipset.

AMD Athlon X2 4200 (2.2 ghz, 1mb level 2 cache).

2 GB Corsair Ram.

2 250mb Seagate hard drives, striped

MSI nVidia 6600gt video card.

It can pretty much do anything: the dual-core processor is mainly for multi-tasking, media-production stuff, but, yeah, the gaming is a big step up. I got to play the Doom3 demo like I'd wanted for awhile(although neverball might be my new favorite game.)

The other exciting thing about all this is that I think I'm going to install Linux on it. It's been quite some time since I had a linux install on a machine of mine. In fact, I think it's been since 2003 when I left my sysadmin job. I want to do it for the sound programs, especially ardour, the fine, full-featured DAW software that has been steadily progressing.

What else, dear reader? Well...last night I did a reading of my piece published in the last Pearl Necklace 'Zine and I must say it went pretty well -- I even kinda enjoyed it. I think that the last time I did anything like that was also in 2003 or even 2002, playing open mic's with Josh Levine. Maybe this time more will come of it.

Anyway I must leave you now so I can play video games while Brett is at work.