Clay Bird's Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Clay Bird's LiveJournal:
[ << Previous 20 ]
| Thursday, May 10th, 2012 | | 12:16 am |
In which I come home with a shiny new electric guitar
Today, work had a big meeting. It was about as boring as most all-hands meetings gets. If you don't work for a place that does all-hands meetings, be glad. The senior management gets EVERYONE into one room and talks about the stuff that they think is important for everyone to know. How much most of the attendees actually care about this stuff is usually rather a lot less than how much the management folks think they will care... and so, everyone is bored and doesn't want to be there. So as to entice folks to actually show up, they try to make it fun. My company likes to hold them at Ram's Head Tavern or Dave & Buster's, and bribe everyone with free food. It tends to work pretty well. Better yet, they told each person that was speaking that they had 1 minute to speak, and then their time was up! In reality it was closer to 3 minutes per person, but that's waay better than 10+ minutes per person when more than a dozen people get to stand up and talk at you. The best part of the deal, though, is that my company gives us Dave & Buster's game cards so we can entertain ourselves and feel that the trip was worth it, if we don't have a need to leave immediately. Now, I'm not much of a video game person in general. I kinda like rail first-person shooters (games, not drinks), I like racing/driving games a bit, I enjoy the skiing simulators and such, but what I LOVE above all else are the token drop games that give you tickets. I don't care if it's one where you roll a token down a ramp so it jumps through a moving target, catapult it onto a platform, roll it down a moving ramp so that it hits something skinnier than the edge of the token itself, drop it onto the moving platform and hope that it pushes others to drop off the edge, propel it through a hoop, or bounce it off a moving target so that it lands in a basket that releases a ball that rolls down a track and lands on a spinning pinwheel that has a bunch of small-score openings and one jackpot hole that's REALLY hard to get.... I love 'em all. They're engineering problems, backwards timing and patience, and I kick serious, serious ass at them. Work gave me a D&B play card for showing up. They gave me another because I knew the answer to some questions they were asking to try to make people remain engaged at the meeting. I had a goal in mind, and after I used up both play cards I put a couple dozen more dollars of my own on... and I brought home a sparkly new electric guitar. I seriously didn't think I'd manage it, but my timing was doing well this evening. For a grand total of about $24, I have moved up from just having a cheap acoustic guitar to play with to also having a cheap electric guitar! My attempts to teach myself acoustic guitar, by the way, have been going well. I haven't been able to put much time into it since Pirate Swing (I had to work at it leading up to that, as I was performing on guitar for the first time there), but I'm getting smoother at it, learning more chords, and it is finally beginning to feel natural instead of clumsy and contorted. (Compare a guitar neck to a violin. I've been playing violin since I was 5. You'd better believe a guitar feels freaky! WAY too broad, 50% over budget on strings, these 'fret' things to get in the way, and each note is WAY far away from the next note. What the heck is up with that?) I'm sure I'll make no progress any time soon, but now I've got it, so I can begin. Blues guitar is calling to me, and the Janet Robin concert I saw last weekend was singularly inspiring. Eventually I'll go there... | | Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 | | 1:02 am |
I broke the wall. Oops.
Rock climbing tonight was a little more exciting than normal. On my final climb of the evening, as I stood up on a hold, it snapped right off the wall and unceremoniously dumped me. My right leg (the one I was standing on at the time) felt it afterward: I kicked the wall pretty hard with my big toe, and a few muscles got stretched a lot further than they would have had there been steady footing like I'd expected. On the up side, now I have an interesting souvenir. Finished the climb with no trouble, with a few more people looking than when I started :-) | | Monday, March 26th, 2012 | | 3:13 am |
| | Tuesday, March 6th, 2012 | | 12:10 am |
More happy updates!
Back at the climbing gym this evening, where I got in twice the number of climbs I can usually manage in that number of hours due to a consistently faster recovery time. Well, not that I recovered form any particular muscle condition faster, but that my muscles didn't get as far gone form any given climb as they used to. Yay! Success. Success feels good. | | Thursday, March 1st, 2012 | | 12:47 am |
Rock climbing and weight loss: a GREAT combination
For the last month and a half, I've been doing the one reliable thing I've ever found that works for me to lose weight: eating less. To keep myself honest, I'm writing down EVERYTHING I eat, and how many calories it contains. It's all in a Google Doc spreadsheet, I can get to it any time and enter my latest meal. Writing it down comprises admitting that I've eaten it, and so I'm hesitant to eat it unless I'm hungry enough to admit to it. As such, I've been eating a lot less. On average I've been taking in about 1800 calories a day. Which, it seems, is about what I ought to be eating. Various web sites that talk about Base Metabolic Rate (BMR) - the number of calories your body burns in a day when you just sit around and do nothing - and given my height and weight, tell me mine is anywhere between 2900 and 4700 calories a day. A pound of human body fat is about 3500 calories. So if you add up my daily deficit (my BMR minus my daily intake), given the potential BMR range, I'm burning somewhere between 2.2 and 5.8 pounds a week. I currently slightly exceed the reliable range of my bathroom scale, but a friend that checks hers frequently assures me that mine weighs her 6-10 pounds heavier than her home scale, which in turn agrees with her gym's scale. So I don't have a good way to measure the pounds I've lost in the 6 weeks or so that I've been doing this... but I surely can measure the changes. How my clothes fit has always been my biggest and easiest indicator for what my body is doing. Two months ago, I was on either the 3rd or 4th hole of my belt, depending on how much I had eaten recently. Now, I am *solidly* in the 4th hole, haven't visited the 3rd hole in over a month. My pants are looser, my shirts are looser, my climbing pants are looser, my climbing t-shirts are looser. At the climbing gym, I've been using the treadmill before climbing for ~30 minutes at 3.1 mph, which for my approximate weight burns me 300 calories. 6 weeks ago, this had me sweating hard, and I'd have to sit for a while to recover before I could even consider getting on the climbing wall. I've had a lot of personal projects going on in this time, so I've been on the tradmill not nearly enough and on the climbing wall maybe two or three times since all this started. Today, though, I went for an hour at that 3.1 mph rate with no difficulty at all, and didn't need long to recover - I was more worried about drinking all the water I wanted than anything else - and then I finally got back on the wall. Now, usually when I climb after a number of weeks off, my arms are substantially weaker than when I left off climbing, and reach a state called "pumped" after a single climb, even a substantially easy one. ("Pumped" means that even when your muscles are doing nothing, they feel like they're clenched - they're tight and hard, and if you do try to use those muscles, they're weak and practically useless. Stretching and shaking them out helps the muscles recover faster by increasing blood flow, but it usually takes me a while - up to 45 minutes - before I can do another good climb once my arms have become pumped.) Today I climbed three climbs in reasonably quick (for me) succession, and while after #2 and #3 my arms felt a little bit tired, at no point did they feel at all pumped. This is ground-breaking for me. I don't remember the last time I finished a climb and didn't want to complain about how useless my hands felt. I know my legs have gotten stronger from the treadmill but I don't think they've gotten stronger enough to make this kind of a difference - I think that the only real big factor here is my weight loss. Again, I don't know how much I've lost, but a bunch of folks have told me I look smaller, I feel smaller, I look smaller in the mirror, my clothes show that I'm smaller, and now my arm muscles at the rock climbing gym agree as well: I'm easier to lift. So, it continues. I don't have a target weight goal, I just have this method, and I'm going to keep on following it. (I'm one of those weird people where incremental goals do nothing). If I only eat when I'm hungry, and stop eating when I'm not hungry any more, it'll be interesting to see where things level off. I love how it's going so far! Current Mood:  ecstatic | | Friday, February 24th, 2012 | | 12:15 am |
We have success!
My timer project has been causing me a little bit of frustration. When I ported the program to a smaller chip (the ATtiny2313) it looked like it was going to work ok... until I attached useful things like LEDs to the circuit. Then, poof! The computer couldn't see the chip, couldn't program it, and nothing was happy. A hunch paid off. I moved the LEDs to different pins and everything's working beautifully (test run is going now to make sure I adjusted the timing correctly: 5-minute timer was running in 5:06 on fresh-ish batteries). So, now I can produce these with no worries, and have working products a week and a half early. That makes for some serious satisfaction. ( Pictures within! )In case I never mentioned it, these things are for the "Office Hours" section of the swing dance & blues workshop event I help run every year in Ann Arbor, MI called Pirate Swing. People taking the workshop have the opportunity to get one-on-one or couple-on-one with any of the six instructors and ask specific questions about their dancing - lead or follow technique, a specific move - and get some help. In the past, one answer has led to another question, so we are looking for the best way to make sure everyone gets a fair shot at the instructors' time. These timers were our answer, subject to my whim on design and specifics of how it worked. 5-minute slots per question, one such timer per instructor. Push the button to start the timer, and the green light displays. 4 minutes in it turns to yellow (1-minute warning). At 4:30 in, yellow and red light at the same time (30-second warning) and at the 5 minute mark, the display turns to straight red. It remains there until the button is pressed again, at which point the timer starts a new 5-minute period. And, as you saw if you looked at the pictures, when you turn the power on, all three lights come on to let you know that it started up right, and isn't in the middle of something. The fun part is that there were a couple ways for me to do this. Because I'm not a programmer, and because I'd never actually used one of these programmable microcomputers before, this was the slightly more complicated possibility - in that I was going to have to teach myself new stuff. Once I had that down payment of time to get the thing working, though, everything went WAY faster this way than any of my other options. Also, this is the cheapest option by far, and best of all is the part that I already mentioned: I can update how these things operate in under a minute. If I'd gone with the more familiar cascading 555 timer circuit option, this would be a one-trick pony, and any adjustments would have to be by hand, to each one, with a lot of trials of timing and fiddling with the adjustments. In the end, I had a lot of fun developing this, and got a lot of satisfaction out of it. I have to build 5 more of them, but that I can do in a day pretty easily, now that I know what I'm doing. | | Saturday, February 18th, 2012 | | 1:43 am |
Programming success, or at least close enough.
I have gone though a good number of iterations on the project of making a set of LEDs do what I want them to, and am writing this even as the final test runs. The final state of things is both simpler and more complex than the original design: The output gives more information than originally planned, and is simpler to program, and simpler to build. Win/win/win! In a few days, the circuit boards and chips I ordered will arrive, and then it'll only be a handful of hours of work time after that that I'll have half a dozen of these things produced and operational. SUCCESS! The test run just came in at a something like 5-minutes-plus-less-than-half-a-second. I'm not going to fiddle with the timing any further until I learn whether the internal clock on the chip runs at a different speed on the ~4.5VDC that three AA batteries will supply than it does at the ~5VDC that it gets when attached to the programming rig that I'm using. (The nominal 8Mhz clock counts out 5 minutes in 4:52 while attached to the programming rig as it is now; so I've lied to it a little bit to make its output match with a stopwatch). This is so much fun. I am SUCH a geek. | | Thursday, February 16th, 2012 | | 11:56 pm |
Another night of glass :-)
Once again, I had the delightful experience for an evening at the glass studio of actually having a clue of what I am doing! More and more, I feel that I have better control over what the glass is doing. While the first 6-7 months after I took my first class, I was proud if I got a piece into the annealer and the "interesting" shapes were victorious attempts to salvage a piece, rather than let it fall off the rod and shatter on the floor. Today I made a few pieces that turned out pretty much the way I wanted them to. One had a bottom that was too thin, and so it broke when I was finishing it - but again, I did almost everything right, and the next time I make one of those, it'll go even better. I also picked up some pieces that I made a couple weeks ago, and I'm *REALLY* happy with them :-D ( Take a look at them! ) | | Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 | | 8:51 pm |
Das Blinkenlights
I'm not sure what was wrong with my 2am code, and I'm not even going to bother trying to debug it. I made a new attempt at lunch today and just tried it out, and now I'm getting pretty adept at getting these three little lights to do what I want them to! Next step: Buttons! (Since the first programming class I ever took in college, I've sworn I'm NOT a programmer, even if I'm an engineer that makes computers do what I want them to. To a non-tech-geek what I do at my job might look like computer programming, but I know that it's not. If I'm doing this now... and liking it... I might have to change my stance on this whole "programming" thing, and admit that I could qualify as an amateur hobbyist. This is an odd thought, but I'm kinda digging it anyhow.) | | 2:01 am |
My god, I love my toys
I'm working on an electronics project :-) The fun part is that I get to make a thingy that will do exactly what I tell it to. (The hard part, of course, is figuring out how to tell it to do exactly what I want it to.) I bought a USBTinyISP microchip programmer a few years back, built it, and then never did a dang thing with it after that. I also got a handful of Development boards, and a small compliment of blank microcontrollers to go with. In the last two days, I've had to re-learn C (which I haven't touched since 1998), and have successfully connected the computer to the programming dongle. I've built a development board, mounted components to it, and right now even as I type this, I'm watching it make three little LEDs blink on and off every few seconds. I tried to get it to blink them in a cycle, and that didn't work out so hot. I want to debug, but it's 2am and I have to go to work tomorrow. Soooo... to bed I go. But I'll be back. And I'll make it do *exactly* what I want it to. < > | | Saturday, February 11th, 2012 | | 12:43 am |
Once more, with feeling.
It seems I've done this a few too many times recently. Today, I remember the best guitar player I knew. Phil Mathieu was a musician of the highest degree - I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that more than half of the days in the last ten years, he was playing in the orchestra pit at the Kennedy Center for one show or another. I knew him, though, from when he sat on his amp and noodled around at family events - my cousin's bar-mitzvah, years ago, and much more recently, his wedding. When he had a free night he'd add some backup mandolin to Ruthie and the Wranglers. He often looked tired, but the kind of happy, satisfied tired that you get from doing a lot of something that you absolutely love. At the beginning of the week, I got word that he was in the hospital, all systems shutting down. Today, his wife and his mother made the wrenching decision to, as they say, pull the plug. The respirator went silent, and not long after, so did he. This is the third death of a wonderful person in my life in the last 6 months. Not a one of them made it to 60. Not a one of them had more than a tiny bit of warning, either. A sudden heart attack, a sudden plane crash - minutes at best for each, perhaps only seconds. Even Phil probably only had a day or three, and he had a bit of warning and was received into medical care. I hate it when my friends have to leave the party early. | | Sunday, February 5th, 2012 | | 12:09 am |
I'm the kind of guy who laughs at a funeral
Today, a great number of people gathered to pay respects and say goodbye to the father of one of my best friends. His name was Doug, and he was one of the best people I ever met. He, his wife Cherri, and their daughter Heather, have been some of my closest friends since I got to know them over a decade ago. And if you've ever had good booze that I provided, it's 99% likely it was because of them :-) In addition to being great friends overall, they taught me about good wine and liquor, and a great deal about being a good host. Attending gatherings at their house, I noticed that every party started and ended at the bar in their living room. For a long time, the majority of the main level of my own house languished in abandonment. When I built the hard-cover bookshelves, I also built a small bar into an awkward corner of the room, and since I completed it, it has been near the center of almost every get-together I've had here, from friends over for dinner to a wedding reception that some friends held at my house. Doug had a few passions outside of his family, and his friends, and his work: the outdoors, hunting, and flying. In the middle of last Sunday, due to a sudden and unexpected problem with his small prop plane, he crashed while flying solo. Today, family and friends gathered at their church to say goodbye, and I spent the whole day with them as the crowd dwindled to just the most core group, about eight of us - the absolute distillation of the family that you choose. Toasts were made, stories were told, some tears were shed, and we laughed as long and as hard tonight as we ever did before. This makes the 5th funeral I've been two in 2 years, and I'm getting really tired of people I care about that haven't even reached retirement age dying suddenly and unexpectedly. With the number of people I've lost in the last few decades I'm pretty comfortable with death in general. But when it happens too early, as it did for Doug, it's a shock, and it's hard not to feel cheated of time we all ought to have had together. | | Monday, January 23rd, 2012 | | 11:00 am |
Fantastic weekend!
I had a wonderful weekend... I got to see a lot of people, play games, eat good food, relax, and have an all-around good time. As there is balance in all things, it seems fitting that today my car doesn't start. | | Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 | | 9:48 pm |
SOPA protests the web over
There was some interesting discussion today about SOPA. Most of the proponents I heard talking about it that weren't politicians didn't understand the downsides of the proposed bill until someone much more paranoid/cynical explained it, and then they usually changed their minds. NPR had a bit about it too. Earlier in the day I heard them talking about why it was a bad fix for a real problem, and then on my drive home they were talking about how places like Reddit and Wikipedia were blacked out for a day, and a couple work-arounds to view Wikipedia. That made me stop. Work-around #1: load the Wiki page you wanted from Google's cached library. Workaround #2: get the page you wanted in another language, and then use Google Translate to turn it into English for you. My solution had been much simpler. Since I wanted to see what each blacked-out service had to say about the SOPA and PIPA topics, I went to Wikipedia and read their discussion/FAQ about SOPA. They tell you how to view the English Wikipedia site with no trouble at all. I quote, "Our purpose here isn't to make it completely impossible for people to read Wikipedia, and it's okay for you to circumvent the blackout. We just want to make sure you see our message." Once you read their info, all it takes is half a dozen mouse clicks in pretty much any browser and you're up and running. NOBODY mentioned it. I wonder how many people knew. I'm disappointed that even trusty NPR failed at this one. | | Friday, January 6th, 2012 | | 1:37 am |
Late-night calls
A late-night phone call from a dear friend, where I get to hear good things, makes my world a happier place. | | Tuesday, December 27th, 2011 | | 2:29 am |
My week in Cancun
Back just in time for Christmas, I spent the last week in Cancun, Mexico, celebrating the wedding of two of my best friends. This has without a doubt been the best vacation of my life. ( Day 1: Airports, van rides, grocery shopping as a foreigner, becoming acquainted with my new home )( Day 2: Breakfast at Turtle Bay, and the Mayan ruins of Tulu'um )( Day 3: Catamaran trip! )( Day 4: Adventure park, which I skipped. Rehersal dinner, and my birthday! )( Day 5: Arrachera again, bargain-hunting, and The Wedding Proper )( Day 6: Vans, airplanes, and not quite going home. )( Day 7: 9:30am breakfast, dinner, dancing. )( Day 8: Breakfast and departure ) | | Saturday, December 10th, 2011 | | 2:46 am |
I have a new toy
I am officially Eggbot enabled. What's an Eggbot? It's a robot that lets you draw on the surface of an egg, or a christmas ornament, or any other roundish object up to a tad over six inches in diameter. One motor rotates the egg on its long axis, another motor moves the pen arm along the north/south line, and a small servo handles the pen-up/pen-down operations. The result: a robot the size and shape of a shoe box that can take a vectorized image up to 3200px X 1000px and print it out on curved surfaces that used to be impossible to handle. ( Unboxing & Assembly )( Stuff I've made )More to come as ideas warrant themselves - but for now, I'm up way past my bed time, I've got some sleep to go catch. Current Mood: excited | | Thursday, December 8th, 2011 | | 1:28 am |
Health update
I've been rock climbing 3x/week (cumulative about 10 hours a week at the climbing gym), whenever possible including half an hour on the bike before I get on the wall. I did a little traveling and missed some days, so my grip isn't what I wan't it to be, and as a result I'm climbing one or two grades lower than I was a couple months ago. Last week I donated blood: Resting Heart Rate: 64 bpm BP: 130/80 Conclusion: climbing, being pretty much the only real exercise I do, is paying off in droves. HELL YES. I don't know that these numbers have *ever* looked this good. | | Sunday, November 27th, 2011 | | 12:40 am |
Want to try making glass? Your opportunity approaches!
Have you been following my glass posts? Do you want to give it a shot? Your chance is coming up! In a week, on Sunday 12/4, I have arranged for a bench and an instructor at my glass studio, to take you through the process of making paperweights to take home and enjoy, or to give as gifts. It's a pay-per-piece event, $50 per item that you make to take home. You get to take the piece through the entire process with guidance and help from the instructor, and you get to do as much as you are comfortable doing - and at any point, the instructor can step in and become your hands if you decide that you would be more comfortable as the art director than as the artist :-) Materials will be provided by the studio: tools, colored and clear glass, work space, furnace, gloryhole, annealer, all of these will be there to use with instruction on how to do so. I have been going to the studio regularly, making pieces that I am itching to give to my family as holiday gifts. If you have any hands-on make-stuff inclination, this is an AWESOME thing to try! The first two pieces I made were paperweights like you will make here. The first one was my Mothers' Day gift to my mom, the second sits on my desk at work and I smile every day when I look at it. I need to know who will be there, so if this is interesting to you, reply so I can put you on the list. (If I don't get enough people I'm going to have to cancel the event, and I really don't want that to happen.) So, come to my glass studio, make a piece or two, and have an exciting story to tell about it when you show it to everyone! The glass studio, DC Glassworks is just south of College Park, MD. To give you an idea of what I made my first visit or two to the glass studio:    And this last photo is a link to a few more photos of each of the five pieces in it:  | | Friday, November 25th, 2011 | | 4:19 pm |
Cloud photos: stereo pairs!
I took these photos while flying from Kansas City to Baltimore. With a typical cruising speed of ~550mph and a delay of ~5 seconds between photos, each of these photo pairs are separated by about 3/4 of a mile. Your eyes are about 3" apart, and the difference between what your left and right eyes see because of those scant few inches is what allow you to have depth perception. When I look down on the clouds I can see that they are fluffy, but aside from the hints given by light and shadow, I can't really see how the hills and valleys are shaped, as they're miles away. With these photos, though, it's as if my eyes were 3/4 of a mile apart, which increases my depth perception capabilities by a factor of 16,000x! I hope you've seen Stereograms before. A stereogram is a picture, or a pair of pictures, where your left eye and right eye aren't seeing quite the same thing. If you allow your eyes to relax so that they're pointed straight ahead instead of converging on a single point on the computer monitor (or the printed page), then the left and right images will overlap. This allows your brain to interpret the depth information in the photos as it usually would in real not-on-a-flat-computer-screen three-dimensional life. ( Enjoy! )I'm not sure if this in-flight idea was inspired by xkcd or if it just converged with it, but the two both flashed through my head in the same moment. |
[ << Previous 20 ]
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
bkleber's journal