Hard to believe, but I'd never actually attended a con before. I knew what to expect, of course (except for the free Guiness in the con suite, which was a very pleasant surprise), having seen photos and reports from friends and such. But I figured it would be interesting to drop by Saturday and be a tourist.

The theme was Steampunk, with the guests of honor being the people who do the "Girl Genius" comic. Of course it wasn't limited to that genre, but the bulk of the costume was pretty good steampunk. Some great ideas there, and while I probably will never actually go to the trouble of making such a costume, I still had to start thinking about what I'd do for a steampunk costume and props.

I've been building microphones using copper, wood, and brass for a while now, mainly because it looks neat and because it's easy to work with. And before I'd even really known about the burgeoning Steampunk fashion movement I'd accidentally created one or two steampunk microphones: http://www.scotthelmke.com/clara-mic.html

So, today I had the brilliant idea that I could be a Steampunk concert taper. I spent the bulk of a 2-mile walk figuring out how to build a wood-and-brass folding microphone stand, as well as a boxy wooden recorder prop that could easily contain a minidisc recorder and a pair of matching headphones. Screw the mandatory steampunk goggles - I want headphones!

But anyway, the microphone stand is pretty much completely designed - all I need now is access to a table saw to make a hexagonal-cross-section length of wood and a way to drill accurate straight holes into the ends of dowels. And to finish some other projects that are higher priority. Damn. ;)

Happy approximate birthday to dagoski !

The vertical blinds in my apartment living room have had a lone "not the same angle" slat for as long as I've been here.  Only a minor annoyance, since it was at the end of the blinds instead of in the middle somewhere.  Still... kind of annoying.  This evening I was looking at it again, thinking that now that it's generally dark when I'm home I should get around to doing something clever to fix it or else complaining about it.

The internal dialogue:
Me:  Hmm... that's the slotted shaft that drives rotation of all the slats
Myself:  Yeah, same as the last time we bothered to look
I:  Well, maybe there's some simple way to pull it away and pop it loose
Myself:  Slip a fine slotted screwdriver blade into that gap, maybe
I:  Maybe just see if it'll twist back to normal
Me:  I've been here four years... they'll just replace the damn thing if I mention it
Myself:  Maybe just twist it a bit, see if some force will help
I:  Shit, force the damn thing.  If it breaks they'll replace it, and I'm sick of looking at it every day

*snap* and it popped right into the proper orientation. 

Why didn't I do that four years ago?

Yes, I have a good apartment management company.  I've been sniffing around looking for a bigger place, but they already offered to lower my rent $100 before I even mentioned maybe moving.  Lease ends Nov. 30...

A much-needed vacation, visiting my brother in Norway.  The usual complaints about having to travel all that distance, having to buy expensive tickets, the generally cool and rainy weather once I arrived.  But it was great to see the bro and family and not be at work for a few days.

I found myself in the O'Hare airport on the way out without a book for the flights... so I dropped by the usual Ludlum Outlet "book store" in the terminal, and ended up with a copy of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies".  Pretty good read - I'd never read Jane Austin, and the zombie additions helped move the story along.  Pretty funny, though perhaps could have been better.

I'm not much for guitar effects pedals, especially since I switched to playing acoustic almost exclusively a few years ago.  But just recently I traded a compressor for a looper and have been having fun with the electric again.

A looper is a guitar effects pedal that lets you record a "loop", typically something where you layer up several parts as if you were a band instead of some schmuck sitting in his living room at home.  In the typical application, you would start by recording a solid rhythm guitar part.  Then you'd kick on your octave pedal and add a bong-rattling bass line.  Next, you switch over to a cool overdriven guitar tone and record another solid rhythm guitar part.  Did I mention there's a frickin drum machine built into this thing?  Finally, you leave the loop playing while you rip off a wall-scorching solo or perhaps sing some powerful, inspiringly dark lyrics.

That's the marketing fantasy, anyway.  I had the idea that I wanted to record very short loops of simple patterns.  More advanced loopers will give you multiple loops of different lengths, but in this case I'm stuck with one simple loop.  Still, it's pretty fun.  Here's a sample.

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.