Travelogue
Just a short note to let readers know that there’s a new site section ready in advance of my trip to Italy this summer. Actually it is just a dressed up category archive, but well-dressed I must say. The Return to Barile subsite will collect all my posts on the homecoming (and there are many already queued). It also includes some background on the whole thing, an interactive map, and links to photos and such. These extras of course are only available on the site. Sorry, feedreaders! Obviously it will fill up quite a bit more as the trip nears and proceeds.
Enjoy: Return to Barile.
29 bulbs
Today was the first day in months that my calendar had not a single colored box on it. Nothing. Zip. Not a single thing to do. A good thing, too, since I got home at 4:30 this morning after a day I wasn’t sure I would live through.
Start with a friend’s annual Kentucky Derby party early in the afternoon, add a Cubs home win (.500 baby!), season with Cinco de Mayo cheer and a frozen margarita machine, then cap off with a concert that started at 1 AM at the Metro. (Amon Tobin. Mixed live in 5.1 surround. Sick sick beats. My mouth was agape half the show.)
So needless to say I woke late, way late. Had lunch with my saintly wife and the three kids who she mercifully steered clear of me. (Mercy for them, I am sure. I was no role model.) Then, of course, nap time for all. So, essentially my day began at 3:30 PM today. And then I started to feel guilty about wasting a completely open day. You know, the guilt of a thousand to do’s paired with an empty calendar.
Why not enjoy the free day, you say? Well, I did an inventory of home tasks and here’s what the list read:
Rear screen door is permanently locked from a particularly hard wind-slam. We’ve removed the glass pane for exit, but my kids have biffed over the door frame so many times that it seems parentally negligent not to remove the whole thing from the threshold.
Grill on the deck is rotting from the inside-out. Not that we didn’t cook dinner on it tonight, but it is a serious fire hazard. Basically it is no longer a grill. It is a open gas line where one may prop foodstuffs upon several layers of carbonized former foods for cooking.
Car with expired temporary tags and plates that simply need to be affixed. You’d think I would have gotten to this after the latest ticket. Sigh.
But here’s the kicker. There are 29 burnt-out lights in this house. Yes, 29. Can bulbs, regular bulbs, vanity bulbs, chandelier bulbs, outdoor floods. This place is a like a medieval scriptorium.
How did it get to this point? Not entirely sure. I kinda exhausted myself inventorying all the burnt out bulbs so now I’m on the couch catching up on Lost episodes with thelovelywife. I guess it’ll all have to wait until the next empty calendar day.
UPDATE: Wife reports that the oven light is burnt out. That should be nice and dangerous to replace. Total: 30.
Calling him out
This is classic.
From ChicagoSports.com:
The Lilly-Piniella incident was one for the books. Lilly [the pitcher] had slipped on a bunt attempt for the second time when Piniella [the coach] gave him some unsolicited advice.
[Lilly recalls the walk to the mound.] “I suggested to him, almost like football, ‘You better change your spikes,’ ” Piniella said. “Then I went out there and he said, ‘Skip, your zipper is down.’ ”
A quick check by Piniella revealed Lilly was correct.
If you’re gonna get yanked from the game for sucking you might as well needle the man in charge, no?
And if you’re wondering where all the posts have gone of late, fear not. The Italy adventure is consuming much of my time … and soon will yours.
“Nice, but a little weird”
I’ve been in Los Alamos, New Mexico helping Steve Delahoyde from Coudal Partners on their latest short film project 72°. The original idea was to travel here to scope the Black Hole museum/junkyard/post-nuclear monument for vintage computing equipment. Scope we did, and find we did. The pieces we need are huge, dirty, and packed into a dark aisle crammed with decrepit gizmos. If we end up using them for the film we might have to do so on (or near) location. Would cost a fortune to transport.
We also decided to do a little side documentary on the town itself. The place is amazingly normal on the surface … a little too normal. Think Pleasantville or The Truman Show. It is a company town through and through, but one in which the ties that bind are not as simple as, say, in a Ford factory town. Secrecy and security are pervasive. Perched on a hill with virtually no crime, Los Alamos also boasts a higher IQ per capita than just about anything but the smallest university town.
Steve writes:
It’s a town that has seen hardly any population growth since the 1950s. It’s a place where nearly everyone who goes to school here leaves. It’s a place where few people are allowed to talk about what they do for a living. It’s a place that has the largest average income of any town in the country, yet the retail sector is a shambles and few businesses survive.
Naturally we had to find out more. We spent two days interviewing anyone we could get our hands on. Merchants, teachers, lab employees and retirees, museum docents and even the town peace “kook”. (He’s no kook.) You never quite know what you’re going to get when you walk up to someone and ask to mic and video them, but almost to a person the interviews surprised and enlightened us.
- The merchant who fields angry requests from townspeople not to sell a tourist t-shirt with a mushroom cloud on it.
- The Los Alamos native who returned (a rare act) to teach geology at the high school and who sees an upside to the devastating fire in 2001 that denuded nearby mountainsides: easier access to rocks.
- The retired physicist working at the hardware store who remembers a Japanese couple thanking him at the science museum for Los Alamos’ role in ending WWII.
- The irate lab employee who can’t believe the rest of the country doesn’t know (or care) about the fact that the laboratory is now a for-profit venture run by a consortium apart from the US government.
- The man who sees little difference between the fire that spread out of control after being deliberately set by forestry officials and the consequences of nuclear arms proliferation.
We’re looking forward to sharing these amazing stories with you, as Steve works to edit the many hours into a coherent piece. For now, here are two video snippets: postcard one and postcard two. As always you can follow the main film’s progress at the 72° blog.
See also: The discards of Los Alamos
Nano is the new micro
Long time readers of this blog (hello, you two) might remember the micropost. It was a little area for blurbs too small to be full posts. I discontinued it in June 2005 for the simple reason that it was too difficult. I had to edit the homepage Movable Type template each time.
But now comes Twitter, a service built around microposting or nanoblogging, as I like to call it. So, like the marginalia, music playlist, bookshelf, and photostream (all powered by sites elsewhere and excerpted here) the micropost now surfaces on the blog via Twitter. An experiment — as everything on this blog is, but one that I think might have staying power because of the administrative simplicity.
Feed readers: the micropost lives in the upper right of the blog home page. For now it a little bonus for coming to the actual webpage (until Feedburner supports Twitter, that is). You can subscribe to the microposts separately, though.
For nostalgists here are all the microposts prior to me canning them the first time.
Wired loves this little stuff.
Gadgetive
I’ve made some purchases recently. Let me tell you about them.
Got an AppleTV. All I ever wanted was an Airport Express (you know, the digital audio network bridge) with an HDMI out (for video). But Apple engineered it differently. In fact, the AppleTV is much more like a networked iPod video than a video-equipped Airport Express. It has a drive that you can synch media to or you can stream media from elsewhere. Strangely, if you want to put media on the AppleTV you must synch. Unlike iTunes and the iPod you can’t just drag media to the AppleTV to upload. This seems odd to me since it means anything you put on the AppleTV must also live in your iTunes library. That’s a lot of duplication for very large files. (Though it does show me the value of iTunes 7’s support for multiple libraries. Video can “live” in the iTunes library but reside on a different volume than all the music.)
Others have covered the AppleTV in much greater detail. I will add only these blurbs.
- No gigabit ethernet, which seems odd given gigabit on every other Mac and their focus on next-gen wireless.
- Wonderful, wonderful UI. Front Row meets Coverflow.
- It looks fine, not great, but fine on a standard def 4:3 TV. There was misinformation regarding whether this was possible at all.
- The music and photo handling — not reasons I purchased an AppleTV at all — is surprisingly good. Begs for party usage.
I really bought the thing so I could rip the DVD player out of the kids’ area. They’ve ruined dozens of discs from overhandling and are on their way to trashing a third DVD player. Now there’s no physical media to manhandle. And the AppleTV runs so damn hot the kids avoid it like a stovetop.
Finally broke down and bought a Novatel Merlin UX870 high-speed 3G wireless card. Cingular supports it — and supposedly will sell it — but I could not wait any longer. I have longed for wide-area wireless for years, but it was not until post-GPRS/EDGE speeds were fairly ubiquitous on Cingular that it became practical for me. The Novatel is a fantastic device. It is tiny (fitting in the ExpressCard slot) and I’ve gotten 3G speeds (UMTS/HSDPA) 90% of the time I have used it in Austin and New York. Last I tested it I was getting 800Kbps download. Not sure about the upstream, but I have been moving lots of big files around with no problems. I’m still resistant to Blackberry-style lashing to a wireless device, but this is going to make my life a lot easier. I’m tired of hunting out Starbucks and begging friends to use their T-Mobile accounts.
Over the holidays I went on a digital video tape transferring spree. All that usage finally jammed the tape door shut and pretty much has required taking the thing apart. So, in additional to not knowing if I put it back together correctly I’m just sick of physical media. (See above, kid-smarm on DVD’s.) I was totally smitten with my friend’s hard-disk video recorder, but it was way too pricey. Coincidentally my Canon G1 still camera has come to its end-of-life. So, two needs, not much money, and still gadget-happy. Enter the Canon Powershot TX1. It does not ship until June, but here’s why I was so impressed.
- High-def (720p), flash media-based video recording
- 7.1 megapixel still camera
- 10X optical zoom
Looking forward to that one.
And now I must return a call from my loan officer. Excuse me.
“When possible make a legal u-turn”
I’m a sucker for rental car GPS, even when I know pretty well where I am going. This was recently a problem.
Two nights ago I had to travel from JFK to White Plains, NY — a trip I’d never made previously. Easy, right? Well, not so easy when the Hertz Neverlost demands that you exit on the Hutchinson expressway when that exit is closed for repairs. So I exited as soon as I could and figured I’d just find somewhere else to get on the Hutch. As I drove around sidestreets, frontage roads, and massive mall parking lots — which are cartographic black holes to the GPS — the unit kept recalculating, recalculating. But each time it forced me right back to the closed exit.
OK, fine. Reset. Choose “Least Use of Freeways.” Recalculating, recalculating. Right back to the !@#$% closed exit. At this point it became comical because it dawned on me that I would have to deliberately get lost. Really lost. Really far away from the right path — all in order to force the GPS unit to calculate a path that bypassed the closed exit. And this I did. Getting lost in NYC is not particularly difficult, of course, but the sheer density of interconnected streets makes getting sufficiently, distantly lost a challenge. It worked and I travelled through some very quaint, eerily quiet towns on my way upstate. To add insult to inury the device actually started telling me to turn in the opposite direction from what the map (and logic) clearly demonstrated.
Of course, I had a printed map in the passenger seat the whole time. But I showed that GPS unit who was in charge, yessir.
Brita city
Bioswales, blackwater, and benthic nets. Microbial fuel cells, hydroponic disinfection, and pervious pavement.
Were you thinking about these things when you were in college? I certainly wasn’t. Perhaps I should have been, because the student teams in the History Channel’s City of the Future Engineering Challenge sure seem like they have bright futures ahead.
Picking up on the popularity of their “Engineering an Empire” series, the History Channel last year held a design competition in LA, Chicago, and NYC. Professional design teams had one week to design a vision of their city 100 years in the future in such a way that would be sustainable much beyond.
The winner in Chicago was Urban Lab, a small outfit on the south side whose Growing Water submission presented a Chicago infrastructure that recycles 100% of the water it needs by un-reversing the flow of the Chicago River back into Lake Michigan, resurrecting the (currently) century-old idea of an Urbs in Horto “Emerald Necklace” of parks ringing the city proper, and carving latitudinal waterways alongside “eco-boulevards” to make the whole city-sized water filter work.
That was sorta the easy part. The heavy lifting was left for the students in the second phase who actually had to present the engineering behind it all. As a sponsor of the event (with a keen interest in promoting engineering, math, and science) IBM was asked to provide a judge for the second phase. This was me. I was elated. I wasn’t at all qualified, but I have been writing about the subcontinental divide, reversed river, and future Chicago here for a long time. The blog as street cred.
Undergraduate engineering student teams were fielded by the Milwaukee School of Engineering, Purdue University, U of I Urbana-Champaign, two from U of I Chicago, and Northwestern University. The presentations were simply remarkable. These kids — and they were kids to be sure — had put an amazing amount of time and thought into the tricky real-world problems of re-architecting a city at its most basic level. None of this was done for course credit.
Prior to the presentations the judges received ample supporting documentation for each solution: dozens of pages of equations backing up claims, diagrams, 3D renderings, and a bounty of specialized words to make the verbophile delight for hours. Advective. Biomimicry. Turbidity. Effluent. I loved it all.
The essence of the challenge in engineering Urban Lab’s design was how to design the filtration of the water in the terminal parks and along the eco-boulevards east of the subcontinental divide. Most of the teams focused on how this filtration would happen. Others also stressed the challenge of separating graywater (wastewater with everything but poop), blackwater (poop), and potable water while being able to accommodate the “100-year-storm” (Chicago, though above sea level, is essentially a swamp). Still others focused on the Urban Lab sidenote that existing santitation tunnels (not needed in their design) could be used for expanded mass transit. One team went into great detail about a Chicago Maglev train. This might be a great next project for the CTA as their current Brown Line expansion will likely finish up around 2106.
The team from UIUC won the competition with their notion of EcoTowers — residences at the terminus of eco-boulevards that pass graywater through a “biomimetic forward osmosis membrane bioreactor.” Duh. Of course they do. The towers themselves provide further filtration by running a curtain of nearly-clean water down the windows of the highrises for UV disinfection. Like living under a waterfall or inside the Beijing Olympic natatorium. Brilliant.
Chicago has a very long way to go to approach anything like this design, of course. Green roofs are a start, I suppose. Just glad people are working the problem. Even more glad that career-minded students are taking it so seriously. Bravo to all the teams.
See also on Ascent Stage: City of the Future and 10 Visions, an exhibition from the Art Institute
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
