Probably most of you geeky folks are somewhat familiar with Frank Herbert's "Dune" series.  A minor digression ensues...

One of the in-passing references in the first book is "truthsense".  In a nutshell, it's something a few people have and almost everybody doesn't have.  So the Emperor has a particular old crone hanging about who has the truthsense and who can alert him to people lying to him.  Fair enough, the sort of thing you'd find anywhere from the King Arthur tales to extreme-future sci-fi.

The interesting thing here is that in later Dune books Herbert revised the talent somewhat.  Now I'm probably stating the obvious that authors in general tend to tweak concepts quite a bit in a series, and even within the same book.  In this case one of the later books (I've forgotten which) the truthsense is something that most people have, needing only some specific training to use.  In particular the sense manifested itself differently in everybody, and so the training involved figuring out one's own way for noticing this new sense.  One character wanted to comfort the person lying to her, another wanted to punch that person.

To me this somewhat rings true... I've noticed that sometimes I'll have somebody telling me something, and my reaction is a bit unusual.  I'll be sort of fascinated by the way they are speaking, like I'm seeing something extremely unusual.  Just about every time it's happened I don't figure it out right away, though I've learned to notice that my own reaction isn't typical and that something is amiss.  This ties into my "24 hour rule" about major purchases, where I can't make any major (more than a hundred dollars or so) decision without a day to think about it.  Maybe once in a while I miss a great deal, but most of the time I figure out that it wasn't such a great deal overall. 

To some extent I think it relates to how my own personality causes other people to react in specific ways.  To people with An Agenda To Pursue, I'm an unkown, and such people tend to react by becoming even more forceful in their delivery, as if the only way to deal with me is to sell their viewpoint extra hard.

Fooling around with recording repetitive patterns on mandolin and then overdubbing roughly the same pattern with a different number of notes:
http://www.scotthelmke.com/mando-loops.mp3

So no ambitious plans for the holiday, other than *not* having to get up early this year to do sound for a parade.  I've actually managed to get outside so far, to put something back into my car trunk.

Aside from that I've been cleaning a bit, goofing off online.

Yes, my car came back from the body shop today.  Looks great, maybe there's a minor new little rattle but otherwise I'm impressed at how well the work was done.

So the forced "no car lifestyle experiment" ends.  Just about in time, too.  With the shows and other stuff going on this weekend I was going to have to rent something if the car wasn't done.  And the fridge is just about empty, though I did manage a successful small-quantity trip to the grocery store a few days ago.  One big issue beyond the usual "when winter comes I'm screwed" thing (the sidewalk is apparently where excess snow should be stored) is that I'm not really set up for carrying much stuff on my bike.  It's a recumbent, with a reasonably big cargo bag but not really comparable to a rack with a pair of panniers.  On the long-term todo list is a conventional bike with a real rack - either folding, or some old beater if I manage to buy a house this summer.  Nearest real grocery is about 1.5 miles.

So that was this morning's commuting event.  Construction, heavy traffic, and people suddenly needing to change into the freeway entrance lane.  The only actual traffic accident of my whole driving career, not counting a couple of minor parking lot fails.

The good news is that I'm OK, the other driver is OK, her car suffered only scratches on the bumper, and I was able to drive my car to work despite the huge chunk of plastic hanging off the front.  I guess that crumple zone foam bumper stuff actually works!   And despite how fast it all happened I wasn't moving that fast by the time we collided; If I remember I'll see if the body shop can download that data from the car.  I'll probably wake up with some odd sore muscles tomorrow, but I've studied Aikido and other martial arts enough to know I'm basically fine.  Not so much being tough as knowing how my body works and when I've been injured.

Anyway, looks like nice weather tomorrow through the end of the week, so I'll probably take the rental back tomorrow and try going car-free for a bit.

Happy birthday (early by several hours, though) to jiffjenn !

Everything goes better with Jiffer.  Though it's been quite a number of years since I've actually seen her in person.

One of the highlights of last weekend was touring the retired battleship USS New Jersey.  A 2+ hour tour cost us only $20 each, and was led by a veteran sailor who took us through some pretty interesting spaces including one of the main gun turrets and the 80's-vintage high tech control room. 



One thing that should have been obvious to me before but hadn't been was the armor around the bridge and original fire control.  Serious armor around a fairly small cylindrical space with narrow little view slots.  Well duh - of course you want those guys protected!



This was an open space near the bridge on the starboard side.  I didn't have a real camera along, so I wasn't thinking in terms of taking a lot of photos.  Probably a mistake... but I've been working on traveling lighter on trips lately.

Just back from a long weekend in Philadelphia, visiting dagoski .  Great geeky time - took a tour of the retired battleship Arizona, even.

Huh - the results seem kind of accurate/appropriate for me.

Your result for The Social Persona Test (What kind of man/woman are you?)...

Lord of the Misfits (QLAM)

Quirky Liberal Alpha Male

Take The Social Persona Test (What kind of man/woman are you?) at HelloQuizzy

This morning I had the bright idea to investigate DNS settings. After all, my MacMini and MacBook are things I'd tweaked up myself (former software and networking alpha geek) while the Windows netbook I just plugged in out of the box. And the the Macs were crapping out on finding perfectly good addresses that the netbook could find.

Everything seems on the up-and-up... all the computers were pointing to the Netgear router/access point/Internet box (192.168.1.1) as the DNS source, and the router itself was getting whatever was automatically assigned by the ISP. I looked up a couple public DNS servers and plugged those addresses into the router's DNS setting, and everything works again!

Maybe a call to the ISP is in order, though I don't know what they'll say. Your typical ISP telephone person usually responds to a well-crafted and thoroughly confirmed problem report with "is your computer plugged in?"

This is getting very strange... my main desktop here at home is a Mac Mini. Recently I've been having trouble with YouTube and other Flash-heavy sites. Some sites that may not even use much Flash have been rendering badly as well. Meanwhile the tiny little XP netbook I brought home Saturday has no problems at all.

I got the latest Flash, etc. The problem even manifests in both Firefox and Safari, and just now I discovered that it's doing the same thing on my older MacBook. It's almost like only my Macs are having problems accessing certain Internet addresses.

Sound familiar to anyone?

Yes I know - some of you have been biking all winter. I'm not quite that tough, though the main issue is that about half my bike route is on forest trails. Very scenic, very nice, and impassible as soon as the first real snow falls. But back in the middle of March when it hit 60F here I rode to work one day, just to check out the trail, and it was still muck. But today, which I have off because I'm working tomorrow on a show, I went out for a bike ride and checked out the trails. They're good to go! I think the maintenance folks must have come by in the last couple of weeks and rolled them out, because despite some horse and bike tracks they're in much better shape. And dry, which is the big thing.

I'll have to get back into the habit of getting up a few minutes earlier and checking the weather report more carefully each morning.

Chainmail shirt #5 - finished after more than two years.  Guess I'm not really into the chainmail stuff as I used to be.  This is a partial copy of a an earlier shirt, I don't think I'm going to bother with the fancy collar.

And if you catch me talking about starting another, please come shoot me.  Let me know ahead of time so I can Paypal you travel money.

So last night I had a dream where I was playing the old board game "Risk", where you deploy armies around the world to try to eventually take over everything.  Only we were playing the version where you had to go out personally and run Clear-Com (intercom system popular in the entertainment industry for backstage communications) between cities so that your armies could communicate.  We made it a little easier by limiting the game to the continental USA only.  I woke up just as I was heading out with a bunch of 100' mic cables to link up Toledo with Detroit and Ann Arbor.

So for a couple months at least I've been thinking about getting an iPod Touch as a portable WiFi terminal of sorts.  I'd use it for the Palm Pilot type stuff I've been doing since the Palm Pilot and even the Newton, plus be able to carry around bigger PDF documents and do email and such. 

But I keep running into dumb "oh, it won't do that" limitations whenever I research the idea.  The latest is fast text entry... I've visited the Apple Store and spent a bit of time with the on-screen keyboard, and am not interested in using it that way very much.  OK, there is a stylus available which would make it a bit easier than thumbs, but still.... an on-screen keyboard.  Ick.

OK, how about Palm Graffiti style entry?  There's maybe one app if I unlock the unit, which seems a bit drastic.  And I'm not real fond of the current version of Graffiti anyway, compared to the original set of keystrokes.  

Final idea - a Bluetooth keyboard!  Nope.  There is apparently some sort of Bluetooth installed, but locked down to very specific products.

This Onion spoof seems rather on-target:
www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary

OK, what do you think this does, and why?

Don't ask why, but once again I've found myself trolling YouTube for old Twilight Zone episodes featuring Jack Klugman. 

But hey, a lot of great actors showed up there in their early days.  William Shatner... OK, nevermind.  But Klugman was in my favorite best-ever episode, "A Game of Pool", along with Johnathon Winters.  Truly minimalist in the best old TV style, just two actors with a basic setup and a room to work.  Sadly, that episode cannot currently be found on YouTube.  What I found instead is "In Praise of Pip", which I don't really want to summarize.  Suffice to say that it's another minimalist story and some great acting from Klugman.

What is sort of interesting is that I'm from the generation that was aware of the original The Twilight Zone, thanks to the olde days of no infomercials and so old weird stuff showed up on broadcast in just about any non-primetime slot.  For me The Twilight Zone was basically "science fiction" but really it was "speculative fiction" but really really it was Weird Stuff Thought Up by Rod Serling.  And the SF stuff (either definition) was as cheaply produced as possible, which meant that the non SF stuff had a leg up as far as believability.  As long as the acting held up... and now that I'm a bit older I find that the old live TV era acting was pretty impressive.  You had one shot to get it right, even tougher than playing regular live theatre where it was a different audience every night.

Wikipedia tells me that Klugman tied Burgess Meredith for most appearances on The Twilight Zone, so I'm off to YouTube again.  Meredith is another obscure favorite.  Bonus points to anyone who remembers him in the old very-late-1970's "Captain Nemo" TV series, which might have disappeared after the pilot.  Records from those days are spotty at best.

I've been mulling over the whole phone/data thing.  I like the idea of a smallish device that acts as phone, internet, etc, but I'm pretty sure that I'd be happier with a smaller and cheaper phone that I don't have to worry about as much.   A small data/internet device would still be handy, at least in the "fits in the bag and doesn't weigh much" sense.  Not something I'd have in my pocket while loading a truck for a show, basically.

So there are a few odd contenders, and I'm looking for input.  Basic needs are WiFi for email (prefer web browser, not some proprietary email app), ability to store and view big PDF files (equipment manuals and other documentation - 50Mb wouldn't be unusual).  Calendar would be nice, I'm currently using a Palm Z22 for that sort of thing.

iPod Touch:  Wins in most categories, falls on its face with PDFs which can't be stored locally.

Kindle:  Maybe a bit on the big side, doesn't seem like it has WiFi.  Otherwise I like some of the stuff about it.  Likely to be a great way to do big PDF files.

Palm, um, the one with WiFi:  Drastically limited memory by today's standards, internet browsing doesn't look very useful anyway.  We've got an RF spectrum analyzer at work based around this one, so I'm now realizing I should play around with it a bit next time I'm at the office.

What else?  I've got my old G3 iBook as a stunt computer, but it's really too big and heavy to carry on a lot of shows.

Happy Birthday dagoski !

It seems not that long ago that we were learning to throw each other across the room at AMAS, but in the real world it's more like five or six years at the least since we were both training there.