Silver Case

For that sweaty, tender love that only one man can share with another man in the bowels of a post-apocalypse nuclear fallout shelter.

After I replaced my failing Intel-based PC with an iMac, I called up a PC Repair guy, had him haul away the PC for diagnosis and possible repair.

He told me today that the two Western Digital harddrives had basically died and were slowly corrupting the filesystem.

I didn’t think these were cheap drives (I bought them 22months ago) but he hypothesized that leaving my pc on all the time in a case with such minimal air flow aged them very quickly.  Yuk.

I’ll see if I can get the drives replaced under warranty (I have the cards around in a folder here) and reinstall the pc.  “I” meaning HIM.

It does concern me a bit that heat is aging component so fast, as I have my infrant NAS sitting on all the time.  I would prefer not to lose the data on that, and in my experience, these drives seem to die simultaneously, not serially, allowing the parity raid to recover stuff.

Aku The Bicycle

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Today we bought Luke a bicycle helmet so that he can ride with me. While we were browsing, the cute salesgirl pointed out their line of Paul Frank-designed cruiser bikes.

We all liked this one the most, so I bought it. Now Ling, her mom, and Matilda-the-maid have a bicycle they can ride to the market or accompany Luke and I with.

The finish of the bike is really really nice. It’s super simple single-speed, with a front caliper brake and rear coaster break. The fork is hugely raked and the handlebars feel like they’re the tiller for a large boat. But, boy, it weighs a purple ton.

I haven’t booked the miserable internal, domestic flight from Newark to Pittsburgh, but I’ll do that later.  Presumably we can get some gross night flight later that evening. Worst case, we’ll fly to Pittsburgh on Friday morning.

Luke gets his hair cut at a Japanese-style men’s barbershop called ‘Barber Minami’.

This morning I asked Luke, “who cuts your hair?”

He answered, “Ba-ma-ma-ma-ma-MIIIIIIII”

Today I bought a toy for the boy an I, a Dahon Mu XL folding bicycle, Dahon’s premier city biking folder. Then I bought the boy a Bellelli Clever Duck bicycle seat that cantilevers off the seat stem and allows him to ride with me. I was so excited about it that I wanted to wake him up from his sleep to take him on a ride. Only two things prevented me: 1) angry mother 2) I haven’t got him a helmet yet.

So Saturday we’ll get a helmet for little bugger and then go off for rides… The botanical gardens are nearby, our favorite french bakery, orchard road, etc. etc. It should be terrific fun.

On the ‘practical’ side, I can ride my bike to work now, and if I am not in the mood to ride home, simply fold it up, toss in the taxi, and fetch a ride home.

The bike is really elegant, like my Fujita folding kayak. It’s slightly different than the photo shown. Mine has a parallelogram shock-absorbing seat based on some elastomer plugs. As well, the front wheel hub is a high-efficiency dynamo that powers a tiny Hella light on the front.

I chose this model over others because it has a mostly-closed chain system, simple, strong V-brakes (as opposed to always-problematic disc brakes), and most importantly, a sealed 6-speed hub, instead of deraillers that will get knocked out of alignment easily and smear grease everywhere.

I have a long list of projects to work on.  One of them involves some graphic arts.  I decided to brush up on some of my drawing skills, and since I have a Wacom Intuos tablet now, I used that.  I dug out an unread copy of “The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.”

I was reading the beginning of it, where it explains the two hemispheres of the brain, how they differ, and how, generally, the left dominates the right.

“The data indicate that the mute, minor hemisphere (left) is specialized for Gestalt perception, being primarily a synthesist in dealing with information input.  The speaking, major hemisphere, in contrast, seems to operate in a more logical, analytic, computer-like fashion. Its language is inadequate for the rapid complex syntheses achieved by the minor hemisphere.”  — Jerry LEvy and R. W. Sperry, 1968.

In fact, the thesis of the book seems to be to subdue the Left Side to allow the Right Side to draw, because it will do a much better job at it.

Thinking about these differences, and dominances occured to me that maybe that’s what happening with Luke.

Luke likes Lego. One of his favorite lego toys is Lofty the Crane.  He knows how to put the crane together, however, on piece he puts on 90degrees wrong. Although the crane is fine, it’s less strong, and the crane boom falls off easily.  If you make the (very small) correction, so the boom is better, he becomes, as Matt can attest, apoplectically angry.  Shockingly angry in fact.  You can see the same thing going on with some of his Thomas the Train legos.  Three locomotives. One blue, one red, one green.  He’ll happily put them together, but if you mix a red piece with a green piece or anything like that, he goes apeshit and wants to take them apart immediately, to the point of smashing the legos until they fly apart.

He seems to have very precise, very insistent view on how everything in the world is supposed to go together and he brooks no consideration of alternative methods.

We’ve all seen this for several weeks, months now, but it just occurred to me tonight maybe it’s a R/L brain thing… He has a supremely dominant Left side thinking?  Or perhaps his brain is still growing and the Right hemisphere comes along later?  Or the bit of brain that connects and commingles the thoughts of the R/L is still forming?  Luke is right-handed, which corresponds to more Left-sided thinking.

….and everyone is a total  klutz today.

• Meet Ling and Luke for lunch today (he’s recovered from a four-day long bout of fever).  He’s acting quite clumsy and manages to trip while goofing around, fall with his chin on the edge of a table and then ricochet into a giant table umbrella stand.
• After I  left them to go back to work I walked to the car, got in, looked around and realized I had put myself in the front passenger seat.
• Mister met us in the street after Ling and  returned from a late dinner. Sniffing around the neighborhood he scared himself senseless by banging his head into the new aluminum sheeting gate installed at the construction site next door.

We all notice that Luke is talking a lot more, and a lot more clearly today.  I suggested to Ling that perhaps his recent fevers helped set the epoxy in some of his brain circuits, or that maybe it melted some brain cells that moved from the coordination part of his brain into the talking part of his brain.

It’s to the point that Luke is originating words that no one realizes we told him.

Oh, and now he is expecting to tomorrow morning take the bus (ugh) to have breakfast (ugh) at Do-D0-Dohhhh [mcDonald’s] (ugh).  I may have to find an alternative breakfast with him.

Comic book nerds are always excited about lame cross-over episodes of their series.   “Oh neat…  Superman is quarreling with The Hulk”   “Wow… Captain America is a lot quicker than Green Lantern” etc.

Well, the real cross-over episode I’d like to see would be between televisions most dangerous and charismatic homosexuals:  standover man Omar Little and  pedophillic white supremacist Theodore ‘T-Bag’ Bagwell.

My favorite tv series is The Wire, but lately I’ve been enjoying a dvd rip of the first season of Prison Break.  In both cases these guys steal the show from all the other more vanilla, more inhibited characters.  They have a primal  joyfulness and truthfulness to their care-free existence that everyone else must envy.

Little fellow has had a cold and runny nose for a while now.  After we played all weekend, Sunday night he got a fever, so Ling took him to Doctor Y. Y. Yip this morning (Luke know refers to him as ‘Yip’ in his new found voice. The ‘Yip’ comes out sounding like Luke was a coyote pup). He gave him some oral antibiotics and some runny nose medicine.

He was ok during the day, but late afternoon his fever returned, which makes him feel and act horrible.  I hurried home at 6:30 because we were supposed to go pickup the new maid, Maltida-from-Burma.  I came home to a crying kid and a crying mom. She’d been trying to get him to take his medicine for thirty minutes and was at wit’s end.  I tried my hand too… cajoling, threatening, bribing, bluffing, disguising, outwaiting, debating with Luke to absolutely no avail. He absolutely refused the viscous antibiotics. He normally doesn’t refuse anything except pink panadol, but he felt like shit and was particularly resistant.

After nearly an hour of this, Luke was terrorized and Ling was worn out so I said enough.  I paged Dr. Yip and he called the A&E ward at Gleneagles and gave the nurse orders for an antibiotic jab. uh oh.

While we were there, the effects of the fever suppository (administered by a grimacing father) kicked in, and little boy, up two hours past his bed time, started feeling good again. Delighted he was up in the dark, he was having a grand time in the hospital lobby.  When his turn came we brought him in and sat down on the exam table.  I think he new something was up because suddenly he looked pensive.

Poor little fellow. We all held him while a fourth nurse gave him his jab in his little thigh.  He was shrieking and carrying on, but after it was over, I pointed out, “see, it’s all done.”

He almost immediately stopped crying and then one of the aunties came by and offered him a packet of crackers. He eagerly opened them up and started eating.  After they put on the bandage, he thanked and said good-bye to all the nurses and orderlies.  Goofy little guy.

I think the jab is going to leave his leg sore.  Anyway, as soon as we got home he immediately went to his maternal grandmother to show off his sore leg and circular bandage.

In our analysis, he cried for 20 seconds in the hospital, as opposed to crying for an hour over the oral antibiotics.  So I don’t know how much a threat, “if you don’t eat your medicine, we’ll take you to the hospital for a shot” is going to be.

By Ling’s calculus, it’s a great plan — three day’s of shots is the full regime, as opposed to a week of oral meds.  It’s considerably less grief all-in-all.

This is the n’th weekend in a row where at three, four pm, the house is just insufferably hot. Total dog-day.  It sucks the life out of me to do anything. I’m amazed that I managed to convince myself to play with my Print Gocco, in fact.

Anyway, I had the epiphany this afternoon that “fuck it, my new house is going to have smartly-setup airconditioned that is actually efficient enough to use regularly. At least that’ll make me more productive.”

Currently, although we have air conditioning in all the rooms, we only really use it in Luke’s room and my bedroom.  The house is leaky, so it’s not especially efficient, and the living room isn’t easily chilled.  It’s a really nauseating feeling walking out of my 73-degree office into a wall of 89-degree living room, so I tend to just leave it all off and pant at the fan.

What the new place needs is:

1) a way to easily partition segments of the house off so that the entire zone can be chilled down.

2) units that are new and efficient and aren’t going to cost an exhorbinant amount to run regularly.-

Walking Tour

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Looks like I’ve almost got final approval from the Land Authority to buy this freehold house (freehold, landed properties are restricted from foreigners. As a Permanent Resident I have to seek special approval).

As well, my mortgage is almost finished with Citibank. For better or worse, the only mortgages offered over here are floating-rate. Currently rate is 3.7%/annum, but it could go to whatever it wanted. I asked a loan officer why there were no true fixed rate mortgages and he uttered some incoherent about “people not being able to guess where mortgage rates would be in 30 years.” Whatever. It doesn’t matter, it’s not available.

Anyway, I started uploaded and crudely organizing and commenting on a collection of photos I’ve taken of the place. There is quite a lot of stuff we want to do to the place, and we are not going to move in until it is all done. (I have very cheap rent here that lasts till April, so I have time)

This late afternoon I was looking for a project to work on and decided to play some more with my Print Gocco kit.  Last time I left it, I was using print gocco fabric paints and working on stencilled t-shirts.  I resumed my prototyping work today and figured a number of tricks.

•  You need to swab the squeegee over the stencil/print several times in order to get good ink passthrough and absorption. It will tend to make the lines a bit thicker, but overall it’s a better result. I pres fairly hard, too.
• Messy as hell. Be meticulous in keeping ink off the print side of the screen.
• My Canon bubblejet printer seems to make prints that are very usable for gocco master-making.
• I tried to clean and save my print screens last time, but I find that they were subtly broken in some cases — air blisters formed between the screening material and the thin plastic layer.  This means the ink presses through in something of a blur.
• khaki = 2-3 parts orange, 1 part green. If it’s too dark, a tap of lemon yellow lightens it up a bit.

Luke has a cold, so Ling took him to the doctor this morning to get some decongestant.  She said that during the whole ten minute drive to the hospital Luke kept making his standard Police Siren noise and she couldn’t figure out why.   Even when she stopped, he was sitting perfectly still in his baby seat warbling “whew whew whew whew whew.”

That’s when it dawned on her. In her haste, she had forgotten to belt him up.  Sometimes he struggles to get out of his seat while they’re driving and she warns him that the police will scold him if he does that.  So naturally throughout the ride he was trying to get Ling’s attention that he wasn’t belted and that John Law was going to catch them.

It’s really hilarious the strange efforts he makes to communicate when he still can’t really talk yet.  I think those days are numbered, however, as he seems to be learning and repeating new words, spontaneously, with increasing frequency.

Life these days for Gov. Jim Gibbons of Nevada might kindly be described as suboptimal.

In the last few months, Mr. Gibbons, a Republican, announced a plan to turn coal into jet fuel to raise money (problematic, as Nevada has no coal to speak of) and proposed paying for a $3.8 billion shortfall in highway construction money by selling water rights under state highways (it turns out the state did not actually own the rights).

He told a local editorial board he could not pronounce the name of his energy adviser because she was “Indian” — she is Turkish — and vetoed a bill that would stop budget-busting tax breaks for builders of “green” buildings before issuing an executive order to end them anyway (with the exception of four companies).

Mr. Gibbons is the subject of a Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into whether he failed to report gifts from a military contractor while serving in Congress. The governor, who would not be interviewed, has denied wrongdoing, and once suggested that Democratic operatives might have paid off newspaper reporters who have written about his troubles with the F.B.I.

And faced with a collapsing public education system and extensive state infrastructure needs, Mr. Gibbons at one point threatened to veto the $7 billion two-year state budget and shut down government largely over his desire for a security center in Carson City — an idea that law enforcement officials dislike — and his plan to save small businesses two hundredths of a percent on their taxes.

“The Good Shepherd” is an amazingly constipated movie. Laborious and slow, filled with bad acting and bad crutches. I was actually astonished how much I ended up disliking it.

Set in 1940’s-50’s-60’s Washington espionage world, it just sucked. All the europeans were foppish homosexuals or traitors. Matt Damon is supposed to be grim, paranoid, and dedicated, but he simply acts with such a rigor [as in mortis, not discipline] that he reminded me more of Keanu Reeves, the world’s worst actor. Angeline Jolie, who absolutely screams SEX, is a horrible actress. That would still be ok in this movie, if she had a lot of sex scenes or long shower sequences, but no, this movie is Eisenhower America, so feast your eyes on her Eisenower hairstyles, Eisenhower dresses, and Eisenhower attitudes towards anal sex, heroin, and bisexuality. When Alec Baldwin did one of the better acting jobs in the movie, you know it’s trouble.

This made me nervous to watch Breach. Thankfully before I turned that on, I decided to clean my room, so I went looking for espionage-oriented podcasts to listen to while I tidied. [basically making piles of shit to take back downstairs and stick in large plastic crates]. I found this very interesting, very scathing review of Breach by the Counter-Intelligence Centre. It is well worth listening to, as the guy being interviewed, a former FBI Counterintelligence expert has real bona fides.

Everything worked pretty ok.  Only problem was that I was upgrading a dead, temporary directory, not the real WP directory. Took me a few minutes to realize my mistake.  Not sure there are many apparent changes in this version.

…is a really great combo, allowing me to have my iMac play stuff through speakers in my bedroom as my alarm clock each morning.

…that is until I forget the room speakers are still plugged in and acciddentally start pumping tunes into the bedroom my wife’s been asleep in for two hours already.