BeigeJournal

On this warm February 28, with temperatures near 15°C, I went out for a 90 minute, 30.5km ride. That brings the 2004 total distance to, um, 30.5km.

The last time I was out cycling was 2003-12-22, commuting. 2785km in 2003.

Don’t you hate that DVD region code system?

The January 2004 Skeptical Inquirer article “A Geologist’s Adventures with Bimini Beachrock and Atlantis True Believers” is up on the web site. It is an amusing story. Diving in Bimini was fun, but there were some frustrations: “Needless to say, none of these publications changed the minds of ‘true believers.’ I had foolishly believed publishing the facts would put an end to speculation and the numerous expeditions that were being financed by gullible donors.”

The geologists were a bit surprised by the behavior of some of the Atlantis enthusiasts:

A half dozen sailboats had already assembled at the site when we dropped anchor. The people on the sailboats had dropped more than their anchors: they were all naked. One nude boater swam over and asked, “Can’t you feel the force field? It’s strong here.” But this did not fully prepare us for what came later.

We suited ourselves in dive gear and soon found ourselves being filmed by two naked women. Apparently, humans just cannot get the feel of place while wearing clothes. In his 1997 book Paradise Fever, subtitled Growing Up in the Shadow of the New Age, Ptolemy Tompkins, the same fourteen-year-old son from our first trip in the mid-1970s, talked about life with his father and his New Age beliefs. In the book Ptolemy describes how everyone felt they had to get naked to investigate the stones. He also mentions his father’s disagreements with the “clothed geologists.”

I think the whole Atlantis thing is hooey, but if I was sailing and diving around Bimini, I’d be nude, too.

Don’t the Orange County Choppers people, or for that matter, the Boyd Coddington folks, ever embark on a project with enough time to easily finish it before the deadline? I suppose a frantic race to meet a near-impossible deadline makes better TV. That way everyone is sure to get stressed out and yell constantly, though I suppose Pauls Sr. and Jr. will argue in any event.

I do side with Paul Sr. on neatness. That shop is a mess. It is odd, though, how he always waits until everyone is maximally stressed to rant and rave about it.

Do they really argue that much, or do we get every argument in a three week period edited together for each hour-minus-commercials episode?

Electric resistance heating is a mighty expensive way to get a lot of heat but a very convenient way to get a little heat for spot heating. I bought a Lakewood model 792/Jr recently. Lakewood classifies this as a utility heater, and calls it the Junior Milk House Heater. It cost me $12.99 at my local Fleet Farm. I was looking for cheap and I found it. It is much too soon to tell about long-term durability, but it does appear to be better made than I’d expect for only $12.99.

It’s a fan-forced heater with 750W and 1500W settings. It is thermostatically controlled with the warmer/cooler sort of thermostat rather than something marked in actual units. The fan runs when the heat is on. There is no provision for running the fan without the heat on, nor is there any real use for running such a small fan other than heating. The two-bladed stamped-metal fan is probably not an advanced aerodynamic design but it does the job and metal is probably a good material choice given the thermal environment it works in. The fan makes noise, but not too much. I find it quiet enough for television watching with the heater very close by. This fan has two speeds, on and off, and “on” is roughly comparable in noise and fury to the low settings my air filters and summertime fans. It doesn’t put out a whole lot of air, but seems to be well-matched to the heat output. That is, the output is nice and warm, you’ll need to have the heater nearby if heating your own personal self is the goal, and the fan is not obnoxiously loud even close by.

The unit is a gray-painted metal box. Metal loops serve both as handles and to keep the vents from being completely blocked if the unit falls over or is pushed against a wall. There is a high-temperature cutout to try to prevent disaster, as well. I suppose in some sense it is ugly, but in another it has the look of industrial equipment minimalism. I’d say the general fit and finish is quite good for $12.99. Plenty of more expensive items look cheaper by attempting a more ambitious stylistic statement than can be done well at the price.

So far, I like it.

Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa by Nicholas Shrady. Simon \& Schuster, 2003.

If you’ve seen this book, you’ll remember it. It’s a parallelogram. It’s the leaning book about the leaning tower of Pisa. It’s kind of an obvious idea, but one does have to admire them for actually doing it. I assume the binding machines are not really designed to make parallelogram books. It won’t pack into boxes neatly. Doesn’t sit on the shelf normally. It must have cost extra all around, but it does get attention. Thankfully, the print isn’t leaning.

It’s quite an interesting book, as much about the history of Pisa, the surrounding region, and the other buildings in Pisa, as about the tower itself. It is not really a book about the technical details of the tower and efforts to keep it from falling over, though of course a bit of that makes it into the book. It is more about the people and events that produced the tower in the first place, and the way it is perceived. I found it very enjoyable.

I just saw a newspaper ad for a minivan [2004-02-26: the Mercury Monterey] with front and rear parking sensors. They illustrate the advantages by showing a van without sensors crashed into a storage shelf in a garage, with spilled paint dripping off the hood, and a van with sensors (illustrated with little red arcs coming from the front bumper) not crashed into the garage wall. Now, I understand rear parking sensors. The back of the vehicle is way back there (way back there on some of the larger vehicles), and since your seat faces the other way it’s a bit awkward to get a good view. Avoiding hitting things with the front, on the other hand, seems easier. There is this really big window to look through, and your seat, oddly enough, faces forward. Radar interfaced with the cruise control to help avoid highway accidents? Makes sense. Radar to help avoid hitting the garage wall while creeping forward? Um, maybe you should just pay more attention.

The annual Friends of the Medical College of Wisconsin Chili Supper was last night. A large number of people prepare chili according to their own recipes and serve it to the gathered multitude, who get the chance to try an amazing variety of chilies. It really is remarkable how many variations there are.

As of Monday night Lapham Peak was a bit icy, with a very few bare spots, but generally quite skiable. It appears likely that the snow will still be reasonably good Tuesday night, but conditions will probably deteriorate rapidly later in the week.

Naturally, I use MPlayer to play video files on my Linux systems. MPlayer is open source under the GPL and can handle just about any file you can throw at it. It also supports a great variety of output devices, including not only plain and fancy X11 support but also a vast array of special hacks to get better performance for video while cooperating with X11, various non-X11 modes, and some oddities.

One of the oddities, which I discovered while looking through the documentation, is text-mode ASCII-art. Naturally, I thought that this was a joke. No one would actually implement such a thing, right? Well, some folks with spare-time issues have written the AA-lib ASCII-Art library to turn bitmaps into ASCII-art, and, indeed, another person with excess spare time interfaced AA-lib with MPlayer, so, yes, there really is an ASCII-art output mode for MPlayer, so you can watch your movies in text mode. It really works, and it is just the most bizarrely amazing thing I’ve seen in a while. Just download the AA-lib, do the usual configure, make, make install, and then rebuild MPlayer. The MPlayer configure script will automagically detect AA-lib. Find a video that will look good as ASCII-art (the 1948 Lucky Strikes square-dancing cigarettes commercial from the Prelinger Archives, for example), try mplayer -vo aa filename, and prepare to be amazed.

Lapham Peak State Park is still completely snow covered, with good ski conditions. Current weather forecasts indicate that this may not remain the case by the end of next week. So go ski. This may not be the end, of course. Last year’s first good snow was early March, with another skiable snowfall (for a day or two) in early April.

Is there a problem with people eating these things? Do people munch on the desiccant and then complain angrily that it tastes pretty bad? I suppose it is harmless to warn people not to eat something that they shouldn’t eat, but one wonders what items we will end up so labeling in the future.

Cory Doctorow, novelist and EFF Outreach Coordinator, gave a talk on copyright and the entertainment industry at the University of North Carolina recently, a video of which, as he informs us on Boing Boing, is available for download at iBiblio.

It is available as streaming Real or as a 362 megabytes MPEG-4. I thought it was a great talk and I did enjoy having video so I could see Cory and watch him gesture and move around and basically be the animated person he evidently is. The quality of the recording is OK, with some audience noise but not enough to seriously impede understanding.

There is some practical part of me that thinks that 362 megabytes for a talking head, even with sweeping gestures and a Mickey Mouse t-shirt (a talking torso, then), is somehow, well, a bit big. A few megabytes of audio would be almost as useful, though not nearly as much fun. On the other hand, I do feel like a brave new member of this brave new 21st-century world when I casually download 362 meg, as if it were really not that big of a deal. And in fact, with disk just over a buck a gigabyte these days and ever faster networking, it isn’t that big of a deal.

Even as I railed against excessive wasteful frills I used to download those huge audio files in early nineties from Internet Talk Radio, back when those 14 megabyte files were just huge. That was uncompressed 8-bit 8kHz audio in those days, since there wasn’t anything to compress audio with yet, and high-speed Internet was 9600 bps. My gigabyte hard disk was huge. I actually do still have a DDS tape with hundreds of megabytes of ITR on it, but since my DDS drive broke many years ago, the tape isn’t doing me much good. I could just download them anew from the museum, since the files don’t seem that big anymore, especially in the modern compressed versions.

I suppose that for all my complaints about excessive bloat, I am willing (eager, sometimes) to download huge files (14 meg ten years ago, 360 meg now) if in the end it will actually work. Give me a huge open-format file that I can spend forever downloading and then play on Unix successfully and I’m happy. It’s proprietary streaming-dropouts that I can’t stand.

And speaking of huge files that work, have you seen the Prelinger Archives? A huge collection of educational, industrial, promotional, and whatnot films, all in the public domain. Amazing and wonderful.

I have used Mozilla FireBird 0.7 for some time and have been very happy with it. Now version 0.8 is out, with many a bug fix, and it has been renamed yet again, to Firefox.

(2004-02-23: If you like the endless renaming, try Firesomething, which will randomly change the product name in the titlebar. Fireemu, Lightninggoat, Supersheep, etc. Mildly hilarious.)

The customizable toolbars are nice, the search bar for Google plus a zillion Mycroft plugins is very convenient, the vast array of extensions for seemingly every need are great, and it is a good performer even on what would now be considered very slow hardware, at least if you have plenty of RAM. The new download manager, so far, is nice. The bookmark-add dialog has gotten even more elaborate, which I am so far undecided on.

As is usual in the open-source world, a less-than-unity version number shouldn’t stop you from trying it. If 0.8 is this good, just imagine 1.0. I highly recommend it.

Back when I was a lad, in the nineteen-eighties, TV listings would be marked (R) in those cases when the show was a rerun. Nowadays, to save ink, I suppose, rather than marking reruns, new episodes are marked (N). My impression is that this is less a matter of a lack of new programs than a much faster growth in the number of channels (around 10 back in my youth, but well over 100 now) than in the amount of programming to fill them.

The Discovery Channel group comes to mind. It used to be just the Discovery Channel and TLC. Now it seems they have Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, Health, Travel, Times, Kids, BBC America, Science, Home and Leisure, Wings, Español, HD theater, and FitTV. With fourteen channels, there’s gonna be some reruns. I suppose it is useful to have specialized channels. If they had only one channel, there would probably almost always be something new on, but not necessarily something you want to see. With fourteen channels, if you are in the mood for an aviation rerun, well, they have a channel for that. How about some more specialized channels?

• Cute Fuzzy Animal Planet
• Big Sharp Teeth Animal Planet
• Discovery Bull Crap Channel (for Atlantis “documentaries” and the like)
• Discovery Naked Rainforest Tribe Documentaries
• Discovery Naked-but-with-digital-fuzz Rainforest Tribe Documentaries
• Discovery Motorcycles
• Discovery Building Wacky Machines Out Of Junk Channel

While reading Dan’s Data I saw, in the VGA Silencer review, this:

Nvidia’s User Deafening Department hit new heights with the double-width “FlowFX” coolers on their early top-end GeForce FX boards. Those things were so ludicrously loud that this parody video was actually made by, and stars, Nvidia employees.

The video is fantastically funny. It depicts a meeting in which they discuss their video card as the Harley-Davidson of video cards, with scenes of a video card being used as a hair dryer, a leaf blower, a coffee grinder, and so on.

Lapham Peak State Park is still completely snow covered. The classic tracks are a bit icy in spots, which isn’t all bad, at least downhill. The skate lanes were being groomed while I was there.

The salted in-shell peanuts (groundnuts) from Outpost Natural Foods Co-op are considerably better than the usual peanuts. They are nearly $4.40 per kilogram, so one would hope for high quality. I’d say the flavor is well worth it.

The snow was very nice at Lapham Peak State Park on Tuesday night. It is hard-packed and a bit icy, and the classic tracks are rather worn on the sides in spots. I didn’t see any bare spots, which I thought there might be given the relatively warm weather we’ve been having.

I recently purchased some Black Jewell popcorn from my local Outpost Natural Foods Co-op. The unpopped kernels are small and black and the popped corn is small and bright white with black bits from the exterior visible. It is tasty, but the most noticeable advantage over the usual popcorn is that it makes much less of a mess in the hot-air popper. The usual popcorn pops so vigorously that a lot of unpopped corn is blown out of the machine, some of which then proceeds to pop in the bowl, scattering popcorn around the kitchen. Black Jewell stays in the machine and only popped corn, for the most part, makes it out. Less wasteful and much less messy.

The snow continues to be excellent at Lapham Peak State Park and on the Nordic Trail at the Kettle Moraine State Forest Southern Unit.

I hadn’t been to the Nordic Trail in quite a few years. I have been trying to remember where exactly I had seen certain things on a ski trail, and it turns out the Nordic Trail was it. It is a nice ski area with some very nice scenic views from the higher points.

At Lapham I just went down Big Slide (and up Gut Buster) twice. I think that is the probably one of the best overall downhill runs on a Nordic trail in this area. It is loads of fun if you have enough skill for it.

The snow continues to be excellent at Lapham Peak State Park. More snow is expected tomorrow night. This has certainly been a much better winter for skiers than the last two years.

I saw a few serious diagonal-striders this evening. I generally feel like the only fit classic skier left. Usually I am endlessly passed by fast skaters with brightly colored equipment, brightly colored aerodynamic clothing, and aerodynamic bodies and I pass the occasional person in cotton pants and a big puffy coat shuffling along at a painfully slow pace. Apparently there was a classic-technique race planned and the serious skiers were out. It is good to see what proper technique looks like, which I rarely get to see. Clearly, I need skate skis.

Can I explain this, seen by the tower at the Parnell trail in the Wisconsin Kettle Moraine State Forest Northern Unit?

No, I cannot.

Imagine what wonderful things could have been done if the effort that went into this had instead gone into something productive. Alternatively, imagine what harm could have been done if the effort that went into this had instead gone into something more harmful. I’d hate to have to get it down, though.

I’ve had this photo on my wall for a few weeks now:

It does somehow look a bit like a photo for a rural electrification promotion campaign sometime in the 1930s. Maybe in black and white?

I’m not sure what slogan should accompany it. I did not have in mind “Communism is Soviet Power plus the electrification of the whole country.”

If you want one for your wall or whatever other use, a high resolution version is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

There were many commercials on TV last night. I understand that occasionally they were interrupted by football. According to the NFL, they own all rights to everything about the game, including descriptions of the game. They don’t claim to own descriptions of the advertising, however. My favorite was the AOL TopSpeed commercial with the people of Orange County Choppers that Discovery Channel viewers know so well as the family that puts the fun in dysfunctional on American Chopper. They build a bike with AOL TopSpeed technology, then Mikey jumps it over a bunch of ready-mix trucks. It turns out TopSpeed is for the Internet, not for motorcycles, which would have been good to know in the first place.

The Shards O’ Glass anti-smoking ad was a delight, also. Do check out the web site, shardsoglass.com.

As of Saturday, 2004-01-31, Wisconsin’s Pike Lake Unit of the Kettle Moraine State Forest also features excellent skiing conditions. There are also an amazing number of ice fishing shelters out on the lake. It looks like a whole city out there when viewed from the observation tower on Powder Hill.