Blog: 2008-09

Dumbbell

Among my near-term goals are to resume doing weights to get in better shape, and to refinish my battle-damaged kitchen table.

Over the weekend, I picked up some sandpaper, sanding block, and polyurethane. After an hour of sanding off some of the eroded varnish and water damage -- an hour spread over two days -- I began to wish I'd picked up a cheap electric sander.

Then I remembered my plan to do weights, and suddenly the idea of using a labor-saving device for sanding, and then turning around and doing the empty work of lifting dumbbells with those saved arms, seemed kinda dumb.

By the way, this is the table that was featured 2008-08-05. In addition to restoring the table from water damage and from when multiple people used it as an ironing board, I'm trying to get the wood finish closer in appearance to the IKEA birch veneer that is now going on in the bedroom and the office. (As soon as I'm fully converted to birch-y, I'm sure the landlord will refinish the ebony-stained hardwood floors, perhaps in an oak color. Then I'll have to refinish all my birch-effect with cherry stain, or paint everything black.

Also, a side effect of sanding a slightly-wobbly large table like this in energetic manual bursts throughout the day and evening is that the downstairs neighbors might find the noise awkward. "Again?!"

Cafe Kiraz

This evening, they burnt my hot-grilled sandwich slightly, and the avocado was getting on in years, but these small complaints remind me that the place is normally excellent, so I'd like to recommend...

Cafe Kiraz on Hampshire St. in Cambridge (MA, US). If you're around Inman Square, Area Four, or Kendall Square, this is a good place to get sandwiches and salads for pickup. They also deliver to a broader area of Cambridge.

I usually get one of the spinach salads and/or a hot-grilled eggplant or hot-grilled portabella. The hot-grilled sandwiches are a little oily and heavy by nature, so I'm not always in the mood, but sometimes it's just the thing. They also have a lot of roll-ups, calzones, pizza, and frozen yogurt.

Take-out is usually ready in 10 minutes. They have a few tables inside for eating in or waiting for takeout, but it is more oriented towards takeout and delivery.

This location on the corner of Hampshire and Prospect has seen several themes and changes of management. Around 2000, there was the excellent name of Grateful Deli (with signage matching the nearby Squeaky Cleaners), which had a huge mural of Jerry Garcia covering one wall.

Power of Plants

I'm finally feeling better after the antibiotics kicked the bug's butt, my consulting workload is pretty light at the moment, my apartment is looking pretty bare now that I no longer have a photo studio, and the weather is going to get cold soon. So this Sunday was the perfect day for a pilgrimage to Home Depot for a floor plant and some painting supplies.

I must've spent at least 20 minutes agonizing over the houseplant choice alone, much to the amusement of the Home Depot employee who was working in that section. (The last time I spent so long agonizing in a retail setting was at Macy's or Filene's, picking out just the right complement of open-stock cutlery for an ex-girlfriend's birthday present.) I finally chose a plant that was a little sloppy and imperfect, yet healthy and full. I bought it a nice gray planter.

On the way back in the late afternoon, wheeling my plant down Prospect St. towards Inman Square, I moved to the side and paused to let an older woman go past. She stopped too, and began admiring and complimenting me on the plant. She was wearing a bright white, had dark skin, and grey around the edges of her multicolored irises. The lines of her face said she was older, but her hair was black and she was strong and alert. She said that this was no ordinary plant, because of something about the bright green colors. I said I thought it would be cheery during the winter. Then she clarified, something like, "If you put this plant under your door, no bad will come in to you." I felt like I'd received a blessing. "I hope so." I thanked her and wished her a nice day.

The fancy full-color card on the plant identifies it as Assorted Foliage from costafarms.com. The woman reinforced my suspicion that, even if you get mass-produced houseplants through Home Depot, if you put the proper care into picking just the right plant, it is still special.

Seasonal Retail and Grocery Deals

I know very little about retail and even less about the grocery business. However, there seem to be two interesting seasonal things happening around September, at least in Cambridge near MIT and Harvard.

First, September seems to have all sorts of deals that I imagine are designed to attract newly-arrived or newly-returned students to particular stores and products. I imagine the intent is to build awareness and habits in September that might persist for years.

Second, winter is approaching here in Boston, and I recall good deals on things like canned soups arrive around this time of year. And of course, in the case of canned soup, you could pick up ten cans each day of the sale, and they'll keep til long past you're thoroughly sick of eating canned soup.

(Not that I'm advocating canned soups. Most of them have scary levels of sodium. Most are also not safe for vegetarians, even if they're "vegetable" soups. And stay away from ramen noodles!)

Trader Joe's Finds & Customer Always Thinks He's Right

Two things at Trader Joe's that I just discovered...

Soy & Flaxseed Tortilla Chips. "6 grams of protein per serving," "500mg of Omega 3's per serving," and "Good source of fiber." I never thought of tortilla chips as healthy.

Guacamole Kit. "2 avocados, 2 roma tomatoes, 1 onion, 2 cloves of garlic, 1 lime, 1 jalepeno pepper," $2.99. If, as I, you think avocado is perhaps the greatest food ever and that tomatoes share second place, this is a good way to buy two avocados and get misc. other things for free. It comes in a plastic container, which is good in that you don't have to fondle the veggies for likely bruises, and bad in that you have to recycle the container. I'm still trying to think of what to do with the jalepeno, other than let it burn a hole through my abdominal cavity, though.

Also spotted in the Saturday afternoon gridlock of Trader Joe's: middle-aged man berating a young TJ's employee. First I overheard the man say, "I'll call you 'Sir,' too," which was a little odd, but I thought he was being nice, or maybe Texan. Then, moments later, I heard him start sternly grilling the kid with a monologue about how Trader Joe's can't make up its mind whether it wants to be a grocery store, and how they should have all the things that people expect to find in a grocery store. I'm sure that guy who was stocking shelves or whatever was personally responsible, has the Trader Joe's CEO and buyers on speed-dial, and will get right on that, Sir. No Trader Joe's berry granola for you!

More on the Mac Mini & "Renting"

After urgently buying a Mac Mini the other day to reproduce a reported problem, I confirmed with too-few billable hours that the problem did not appear to be in my code, but was probably in deployment, a transient network issue, or what we in the biz sometimes call "pilot error." (We don't use that term when the users are actual pilots, of course.)

Owning a Mac Mini doesn't make a lot of sense for me, so I'm picking up a less-expensive old Mac laptop instead. As for disposing of the Mini, I'll probably first try a return and volunteer a $100 restocking penalty, which I suspect is around their profit margin, so long as that doesn't screw anyone out of a commission. But if it looks like that's not a good deal for everyone involved, I'll just sell the like-new Mini on eBay for almost what I paid for it.

Years ago, I'd occasionally encounter a certain person who reportedly came from a wealthy family and had a then-mythical "black" American Express card. He had the means to buy whatever he wanted, but for some reason was inclined to "rent" the greatest electronics toys from retail chains. By "rent," I mean buy, use, get bored, return. I think credit card companies could detect those patterns of behavior, and add an additional field on each credit card statement -- "KARMA" -- easily quantified in terms of dollars.

I'm Now the Ambivalent Owner of a Mac

I need a Mac to debug a problem that reportedly only occurs with the Mac version of Safari when talking to a particular configuration of our server.

I splurged and got the cheapest Mac that I could have today: $599 Mac Mini.

Plugged into the Mini are an old Dell-branded CRT that I found on the curb, and a compact IBM TrackPoint keyboard that I got cheap on eBay because it was a French version.

It is not pretty.

And what is the point of a Mac, if it is not pretty?

I look forward to selling the Mini on eBay, as soon as I can replace it with a used Mac laptop, to keep in a drawer in case I again have to reproduce a browser problem.

Photography Gear for Sale

I'm suddenly burnt out on photography after 8 or so years, and selling all my gear. It's a highly refined kit I've been using successfully for news, portraiture, dance, fashion, etc. If interested in buying all or most of it as a lot, please let me know.

It's predominantly Canon, with good copies of the lenses. Includes 20D, second 20D with focusing screen, 17-35/2.8L, 70-200/4L, 50/1.4, filters (quality 77mm polarizer, a couple mulicoated UV filters, and Hoya green box polarizers for 62mm and 58mm) two 580EX, ST-E2, OCSC2, third-party intervalometer remote, White Lighting Ultra 1800 with large softbox, various studio gear like like stands, backdrops, collapsible reflectors, grid, barndoors, and lots of spare batteries and rechargers. There's also a LowPro backpack that holds all the cameras, lenses, and Speedlights, in addition to your laptop.

I'll be posting on eBay or somewhere shortly, but feel free to contact me in the interim.

Concert Crowd Shot HOWTO

At the this summer's EarthFest outdoor concert festival in Boston, before I picked up my photo pass and got inside the secure area myself, I snapped this shot of a professional at work. A few interesting things about this:

• We see an example of how the act of observing a scene with the camera can influence it.

• The skilled concert photographer is instinctively drawn to the cluster of attractive young ladies.

• That's a great use of a monopod and cable release to get a pretty crowd shot.

• Be careful, swinging $7K of heavy camera-onna-stick over people's heads.

Cheap White Seamless Worked

The affordable white seamless photographic backdrop paper (aka sketch vellum) that I mentioned 2008-09-04 worked very well for a studio shoot today.

The sketch vellum is not especially shiny, so the fact that I was blasting it with a White Lightning Ultra 1800 might have helped.

For this shoot, I just used two clamps to hang the end of the roll from the drop ceiling frame. The drawback to having the roll in front instead of behind is that the floor portion -- the part that gets dirty -- is not at the end of the roll. I think I might just cut off a 15 ft. length and use it 4 times, since generally only one side of one end gets dirty in a shoot. That would give 8 uses per roll, which is slightly over $2 per use. Or, if we use a sheet 3 times (never foot stains above a model's head), that's about $3 per use for a roll, which is still quite affordable by photography standards.

If both dirtied ends of a 15 ft. length are cut off, that still leaves around 5 ft. of paper that kids can use for large drawings or crafts. Or keep it on hand for the occasional headshot backdrop.

More Debian ThinkPad T60 Tweaks

Woke up bright and early this Saturday morning, all energized and relaxed, and sat down at 7am to start coding security-related stuff. Then the antibiotics I'm taking to be safe after a probable tick bite started doing a number on the empty stomach they prefer, so I decided to instead do things that don't require much thinking. Which meant building on the momentum of last night's success with iwlwifi (2008-08-05) by trying to fix some of the remaining brokenness with my ThinkPad T60 under Debian.

The first order of business was trying to improve the overheating situation. I made the CPU frequency scale down to 1GHz. I verified that the fan control was working, and that the fan simply is not that great. I will probably revisit both, to see whether scaling the CPU down to a few hundred MHz helps and works reliably, and to maybe engage in the dangerous business of controlling the fan speed myself.

Then I put the hard-drive into a more power-saving mode and set my own spindown timeout, by adding to /etc/hdparm.conf:

command_line {
    hdparm -S241 -B127 /dev/sda
}

I also removed one reason for a spun-down disk to spin up (though there are more to tackle), by editing /etc/default/syslogd:

SYSLOGD="-m 0"

I forced use of the radeon driver of a recent Xorg (I had to manually edit xorg.conf). This means Xv now works, which means I can do things like scale videos, and it might even mean that I can play many YouTube videos in a row without a thermal overload shutdown. DPMS blanking now works too, which I could see adding a year or more to the life of my backlight.

I'll be curious to see whether these changes create reliability problems with standby/suspend/hibernate/etc. I plan to use suspend a lot more, as another way of managing the thermal problems. Letting the T60 run idle with the lid closed gives it a light baking. Suspend was not an option before the wireless driver was replaced.

I still long for my old T42, but the T60 is now getting close.

All Star Sandwich Bar

Since I've been epecially curmudgeonly for a month now, here's one thing that brightens my day...

The best "gourmet sandwich" place I can think of is a short walk away, in Inman Square (Cambridge, MA, USA): All Star Sandwich Bar.

Not a lot of vegetarian options, but the Veggie Cuban sandwich is great. Everyone I've brought there has liked it.

All Star a little more expensive than the pizza & sub joints, but it's a different class of sandwich. The Veggie Cuban, for example, is $7, whereas a typical "veggie sub" averages around $5.

I haven't figured out the fries. If you're craving fries in Inman, try Bukowski Tavern. Or walk down Hampshire St. towards Kendall, and get some at Cambridge Brewing Co. (CBC).

Tofutti Cuties

Among other things that brighten my day are Tofutti Cuties, which are on sale this month at Harvest Co-op in Central Square (Cambridge, MA, USA). They even have Chocolate in-stock, which I haven't seen there for a while.

A freezer full of Tofutti Cuties, sushi takeout, and two rented games for the PlayStation 2 that I found on the curb... I think I'm set for today's Hanna storm. I have some experience with stormy Hannas.

Move Your Debian ThinkPad T60 to iwlwifi

If you have an IBM ThinkPad T60 running Debian testing with the ipw3945 driver, and lately you have immense trouble connecting to with WPA2-PSK... you want to use the iwlwifi drivers.

Moving to the new driver was surprisingly simple:

1. apt-get install firmware-iwlwifi

2. Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to put the newer kernel entries first (after bumping 2.6.22 up all this time).

3. Reboot. Watch wireless connect perfectly the first time, in a matter of seconds.

Now I just have to disable that wireless LED. Who thought that a bright green light blinking in horizontal center at bottom of the screen was a good idea? For now, a small piece of black gaffer's tape works.

White Photo Backdrops & Central Square Art Supply Stores

I haven't shot for two months, and am a little under the weather right now, so rather than resume my main project, I'm going to do a low-key (but high-key; ha, a lighting joke) fashion shoot this weekend.

I already have white walls, a large gray muslin, a large natural canvas, and black Kraft paper. The problem with backdrops for full-length is that they have to roll out onto the floor. Cloth white backdrops are not good for dirty model feet, and my landlord would frown upon the installation of a cyclotron. They also might need ironing. I could get large wipe-clean panels from Home Depot and rig them up, but then I'd need to store them, and I wasn't sure about the seam. So I decided to find affordable white seamless paper that I could tape or clamp in place.

I knew from past research that large rolls of paper are expensive to ship, so eBay was out. I also knew from past research that people selling used rolls on CraigsList tended to have spent premimum prices and often expected more than rolls can be found new at discount places. Plus, CL is infamous for flakiness (I could write volumes on personal experience with this). So a local store was called for.

Calumet in Cambridge has white seamless starting at $27 for 53 in. x 12 yd. While in Central Square this morning, I checked the two art supply stores for something cheaper and maybe a little wider. The store with the crayon-y "Artist Supply" signage (secretly, Artist & Craftsman Supply) store across the street from Pearl won. Borden & Riley Sketch Vellum #116, 60 in. x 10 yd. for $16.64 plus tax.

Incidentally, Pearl has fliers in the store with 20% coupons right now, good through September. I'm guessing these are for new students, so this might be a once-per-year thing.

(Photo illustrates perils of cloth backdrops that need to be ironed. I intentionally didn't iron, thinking Gimp postprocessing would be easier. Kristen in a white Oxford shirt, hence the gray backdrop.)

Alarm Clocks are Evil

A long time ago, I decided that there is little place for alarm clocks. Better to condition your body to sleep as much as it needs to, and to wake at regular times naturally. No alarm clocks, no noisy upstairs neighbors.

The other week, I had not been sleeping enough, had been up for two days, and had a meeting or on-call hours or something the next morning. So I reluctantly set my alarm clock for what would be less than three hours later.

During that sleep, I had a recurrence of a dream I'd had once before. We were in store that was a combination of farmer's market, craft fair, and dollar store at once, set in a wide garage with one of the doors up. In this iteration, it was also an office supply store, over to the left, with some printer paper (which, incidentally, I happen to be running low on).

Winona Ryder comes to outside the front of the store, looks in, and then leaves. Then she comes back, and it's raining, and she's getting drenched. Last dream, I could not get to her because there was a maze of tables blocking my way. This dream, I manage to get past the tables, and Winona and I start talking. She is disaffected, but she warms to me. Then we're walking down a corridor paneled in light wood that might have been my grade school (or it might have been IKEA birch veneer, like the coffee table I am trying to buy). She says it's too loud in the corridor, and she pulls me into this storage closet. We both know that the storage closet is about to be rocked by the unleashed passion of two soulmates who found each other.

At that very moment, the alarm clock sounds.

I immediately knew it was my alarm clock, and that this was just a dream. And I immediately wondered whether I wanted to scream "NOOOOOOOO" because the alarm clock took me from sleep, or because it took me from Winona.