Silver Case

My welder arrived last week. Haven’t used it yet, though…it requires a single-phase 30A service. I don’t have that. Currently I have three-phase circuits plus lower-amperage single phase supply. The electrician is going to come in Saturday morning and add a 30A single circuit to my workshop. As well, the plug Lincoln uses (NEMA 6-50 P/R) is not standard in Singapore. So I’ll have to change that connector to the Singapore standard.

If the plug does not fit, you must acquit.

In the meantime, I have other issues to sort out. For one, assembling a bunch of precision tooling jigs I received from Maine after a couple months’ wait. It’s an even more interesting task given that there are no reference materials.

Many, many pieces inside that box

Anwyay, if I am lucky, by next weekend (a three-day weekend!) I’ll be melting metal.

….now She is running along the coast north of Skikda, Algeria.

OOCL has entered the Med on it’s pay to an interim port in Cagliari

The OOCL Kaohsiung (last spotted three days ago?!) is off Halifax arriving in Singapore on September 19.

Avoid disputed waters, please.

I should clarify… this is the ship carrying my container full of tools and books from the USA. I suppose Mom would refer to it as a Treasure Galleon. Lord knows it was hard to convince her to properly submit the paperwork so that it could be sent on its Final Journey.

…it’s a kleptocrat

Last time I was in Tokyo, I went to Mannen-ya, a clothing store forTobi, Japanese construction workers. I bought several pairs of Tobi pants and a two Tekkou shirts. I already had a Japanese designer’s shirt (agribeaspo) that was based on Tekkou-styling, so I figured I should go authentic and get a real Tekkou shirt. They’re great for welding in.

がいじん 鳶

Today I wore my most modestly-sillhouetted Tobi while doing some brazing practice. Ling loves these pants too, but I bought them loose for me (95 waist) and so they’re impossible for her. I’ll be back in Tokyo this weekend, so I’ll find other Tobi shops.

I love wearing the stuff. I can’t wait to be in cool weather so I can wear my tobi-style mint green jacket, something I’ve had my eye on for six years, before I even knew these stores existed.

So much potential

Cycling along Yio Chu Kang road today, I passed this nic gas cylinder cap on the side of the road. I scooped it up, tossed it into my pouch, and headed on.

I’m going to turn it into a spider statue for Luke sometime.

Looks like my collection of tools, books, and ebay treasures will soon be picked up by the trucking company soon and sea-cargo’d to Singapore. My jigging equipment from Sputnik is due within days. And finally on friday I placed my order for a Lincoln Invertec v205 AC/DC welding machine to be air-freighted to Singapore.

It’s a brilliant machine, like Dad’s Miller– a 35lb inverter that has all the waveform and power control circuitry I could need from as low as 6amp to as high as 200amp. So everyone will have to brace themselves for Christmas presents this years…

Last weekend’s plantings are hard at work already, particularly one species of peas that seems to have the Holy Fire propelling it skyward.

I’ll probably have to replant the peas, at least, pretty soon.

By the way, note that I’m growing an interesting herb (exotic weed) Purslane, also known as portulacca.

Although purslane is considered a weed in the United States, it can be eaten as a leaf vegetable, providing sources can be found which have not been poisoned deliberately.

Apparently it’s got some beneficial antioxidants and fatty acids, although I tend to be put off by okra and things that have a  mucilaginous quality.

Hopefully it’s useful and then I can let it free-run in stale corners of the garden.

Extreme macro photographs of the surface of normal human eyeballs. Yeck

1) Tastes good already

2) Fermentation is beginning to take off. My cabbage kimchi was effervescing this evening

He is not amused

Sadly, both the North Korean soccer squad and I failed in our ideological struggles.

The North Koreans? By losing 7-nil on live TV.

Me? By very nearly scoring an own goal on my otherwise very scrupulous calorie counting.

The background, depending on which calculator and which assumptions you make, my daily caloric input for no weight change ranges between 2150-2450kcal. A week of 500kcal deficit = one pound of fat (3500kcal) burnt. I’ve found it pretty easy to assiduously keep <= 1800kcal as long as I monitor closely my intake. Overall, it feels like I’m eating 30% less than I nomally used to. That I’m not hungry even with that amount makes it clear that I was overeating before.

Anyway, so what happened? Saturday is going along as per normal. Then we made all this kimchi. Of course I start nibbling some after we had potted it. NIce spicy, garlicky, salty taste. Every hallmark of a good bar appetizer. Why not have a beer–I was still easily on track for the day.

Then five beers later it was time to drink the korean berry wine I had tossed in the freezer.

Then it was upstairs to watch Rome. With continued itchy-mouthy and diminished self-control, I woke up the next morning to realize I’d eaten the better part of a bag of tortilla chips and an ingot of cheddar choose. “Uh oh, this will not be pretty,” I thought to myself.

And it wasn’t.

Totally boned. I set myself back by five day’s progress rate, over a bunch of beers (good), korean wine (so-so), mass-produced cheddar cheese (not worth it) and tostitos (blech).
When I woke up this morning I had my customery short double latte and got to work gardening. As the day went on it occurred to me that since I’ve been tracking calories closely, I have a finer sense of my appetite. And what I was sensing today was that I wasn’t hungry at all. Hmmmm. So I just ate a small bowl of rice with a huge wad of kimchi before I rode to my workshop. I hate have that low glycogen feeling. I ate a handful of grapes while I was there, and cycled home to another small bowl of rice/kimchi and my customary fruit juice.
So what’s the accounting of this odd day?

I think I managed to neutralize my saturday night own goal!
whew.

We have a typical Soehnle bathroom scale. It’s been getting on my nerves lately as it had given me some flukey, inconsistent readings. I like telemetry, so I decided that I’d upgrade. I looked around and found Tanita, a Japanese manufacturer that makes all sorts of digital scales that scan your body etc. In fact, when I had a comprehensive medical last year, they had one of these scales. So I shelled out $500 and bought one of their best consumer models on friday.

WHAT A PIECE OF JUNK!

Firstly, I can’t believe it was made in Japan. It had the design-taste and construction quality of something made in Wuhan, China, or perhaps North Korean, not Japan.

But more importantly, the scale (presumably the simplest measurement) was total garbage. I could get on get off get on get off get on get off and get different readings each time. Sorry, I spent $500 for a digital scale, not a mettler balance, so I am not interested in estimating true weight through multiple observations.

I figure “well, if you can’t even measure my weight repeatably (let alone accurately), why should I believe that any of the other fancy measurements you take, body fat, hydration, muscle mass, etc, are believable?” Fortunately I bought it at Takashimaya, so there was no problem returning it.

So I don’t know, maybe the only real way to get accurate weight is to get a physician-style mechanical scale? Ugh. That’s gross and big. But these digital scales all have been shit so far.

Normally it’s a nice break when Ling and Luke are away. In this case they spent the last ten days visiting her grandfather in Malaysia. But I’m at this new job and been getting home late and exhausted every night. I’ve hardly managed to do anything interesting for myself except watch calories while they’re away. Last night I splurged and got myself drunk on korean berry wine and heineken while I ate cheddar cheese and watched some more episodes of Rome. (Wow, living large!)

Anyway, this may be an eventful week… One of Luke’s cousins was diagnosed friday with Hand Foot Mouth disease. The bad news? Those kids are very contagious BEFORE the blisters start showing. So Luke has been exposed. Ling comes back monday and then we have to cross fingers for a while hoping Luke doesn’t develop it. It’s a common kid disease here and he’s so far avoided it. At least if he gets it, it’ll be wrapped up before he starts Kindergarden in mid august.

I finally managed to get my iphone4 yesterday. It is a really nice upgrade. The screen resolution is amazing and I like the square-back shape more than the 3g-style rounded back. The camera is meaningfully better too.

The rest of the day? Some exercise and then get myself to the workshop to build a bicycle fork. Or something like that.

Kimchi

Yesterday Matilda and I made many pots of kimchi. I made a huge pot of cabbage, a pot of beans, and two smaller pots of towgay (bean sprouts) and towgay and cubed beetroot. It should be ready to eat in a few days. I’ve tried some of the cabbage already and it tastes really good. I put a lot of pureed garlic and ginger into it. While we were away, Emily kindly ground up the large amount of imported mexican chillis I bought in Pittsburgh a few years ago. I added a lot of that to the kimchi because the korean red pepper, although nicely red, was weak.

I can’t wait to have kimchi and rice for lunch tomorrow. I even have a nice new japanese lunch box for the occasion.

Green bean kimchi

I followed my own muse, adapted from one, two different recipes. The lady at maangchi, against all odds, got me really hungry for korean food (something that otherwise never occurs). The only thing I couldn’t bring myself to do was add chopped raw oyster to my kimchi. Those things make me sick 75% of the time I eat them a proper restaurants, so I can’t imagine what they’d do to me after fermenting in a pot for a week.

bavarian sauerkraut

And while I was busy rotting vegetables, why not rot some cabbage for sauerkraut too? Especially when I had a huge bag of juniper berries, caraway seeds, and bay leaves, to make bavarian-style sauerkraut. I loved the caraway seeds so much last time, that I poured tons into this crock.

Sedlings

After morning coffee I got out my collection of heirloom birthday seeds sent by Mom. Matilda and I started quite a few in some small pots. Lots of herbs, a collection of peppers, peas, and kale. I didn’t bother planting any root vegetables. It’s been raining so much here that they’d just rot, like my daikon did.

We also planted one of Matilda’s favorites, what we call Asian Winged Bean. She labelled the pot in her Karen alphabet whatever it is they call it.

“Asian Winged Bean” as they call it in Karen language

Amazon today released an announcement boasting that sales of the Kindle device have tripled since the unit price dropped from $259 to $189. And with that, a related piece of news. Founder Jeff Bezos: “While our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books–astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.”

During our US holiday I bought Ling a Kindle. I bought her the small-size one. She likes it well enough. I tried it out, as I can get a cheap(er) subscription to the International Herald Tribune via Kindle than paper copy.

Horrible rendering. I downloaded ‘Here’s Looking at Euclid(*)’, ostensibly a math book. Manifestly incapable of rendering even a simple math formula. y = x² would be written

y

=

x

2

There is no way to control the font size, either. I find the pages too sparse. I’d rather more text on the screen and less “page forwarding”

Expensive. I paid $250 for the tiny screen. Two weeks later they dropped the price to $189. At least when I complained they gave me a refund on the difference without question. The full-size kindle, which I’d prefer to read a newspaper on, is $480!? That’s half-way to an iPad with none of the functionality. Their price points seem totally wrong and I don’t understand why they haven’t enjoyed any scale economics on their paper screens.

Nice screen; ugly case. The case is physically ugly and the tiny, round keyboard buttons are anathema to my fingers. I type faster on a calculator than this thing.

Kindle deserves an extensive design and UI rework. And I don’t understand why they aren’t selling them for 17.90$ instead of $179.00.

——-

* Here’s Looking at Euclid stinks. A collection of mediocre magazine-style articles collated together with some binder.

My second time capsule wouldn’t power on after I returned from a month away. The first time capsule had already died in May. Turns out that my time capsules were among a batch with faulty power supplies. They’re being secretly warrantied by Apple. But the support is, “here’s a new time capsule.” Not, “here’s a new time capsule with your recovered data in it.”

Fortunately the May failure spooked me, so I archived the second capsule, which had all the important data, before it failed.

But I’m sick of unreliable Time Capsules. After talking to Bugmaster and RogerWarez about other NAS and RAID solutions like Drobo, I decided on a few things:

1. No specialty hardware like Drobo. My last specialty hardware was the Buffalo Terable Station. That ended badly.
2. No reliance on a single backup system. Nothing seems to work very well, so I’ll keep multiple coverages.

So my new solution set:

I bought 2TB external USB drives for my iMac and MBP. I’ll be getting new Time Capsules returned to me this week.
iMac and MBP each Time Machine to a Time Capsule. iMac and MBP do online backups to BackBlaze. And iMac and MBP use Crashplan to backup to each others’ USB external drive.

So I’ve got multiple locations, including offsite, and multiple backup software schemes. Hopefully that gives me the coverage I want.

In retrospect I wish I had bought 2TB firewire drives, instead of USB, because firewire seems to be a lot faster (at least compared to my old USB2.0 computers). But otherwise, I am hopeful that this will be robust and low-maintenance backup for me. The BackBlaze backups will take quite a while… uploading 2-4GB per day of a 100GB backup job.

Raging Bull is one of those movies ‘more quoted than read [watched]‘. On yesterday’s flight back from London, the movie selection was particularly poor, so I pulled Raging Bull out of the classics menu.

Uhhh……. Like most “art” movies I didn’t really get it.

DeNiro’s transformation from 155lbs to 200+ was quite gross. It must have been equally gross in real life.

According to Scorsese, production of the film was then closed down for around four months with the entire crew being paid, so De Niro could go on a binge eating trip around Northern Italy and France.^[10][23] When he did come back to the United States, his weight increased from 145 to 215 pounds (66 to 97 kg).^[19] The scenes with the heftier Jake LaMotta — which include announcing his retirement from boxing and LaMotta ending up in a Florida cell — were completed while approaching Christmas 1979 within seven to eight weeks so as not to aggravate the health issues which were already affecting De Niro’s posture, breathing, and talking.

I guess I enjoyed watching it more than the wretched Green Zone I caught on the way back from the USA, but that is not much of a challenge.

Circumstances forced me to buy something to read at an airport bookstore. The selection is as bad as it sounds. I loathe business books, yet one caught my eye at a kiosk, “Poorly Made in China.” It rang a bell – The Economist reviewed it months (years?) ago. They write good reviews of books. They don’t review rubbish. So I bought it.

After reading it:

• I have no interest in ever getting involved in manufacturing in China
• I realize I got off very lightly in my own aborted attempt to have bicycle frames manufactured in Taiwan
• I wonder if design is not Apple’s only competitive brilliance. Apple seems to have better control over their manufacturers than most. (Although, maybe that’s slipping too: in the last three months the suicide epidemic at FoxConn has come to light, and there have been many component photo leaks popping up about the iPhone 4th Generation.)

At 240 pages, the book is adequately brief. The basic points he makes:

Manufacturers get a customer in the door by offering very aggressive pricing (“zero margin!”), then they proceed to do three things:

1) Cheat everywhere along the production process. It is a death of a thousand slices. No single betrayal is enough for a heavily-burdened importer to walk away from the table, but in their totality, the corner-cutting gives a margin to the manufacturer. Examples? Using “BB” class cardboard boxes instead of “BA”, then the packed boxes start collapsing on themselves at the retailers’ warehouses. Invoicing for 1.99 renimbi instead of the agreed-on 1.90 renimbi (which is equivalent to about a tenth of a US penny). Unilaterally changing away from agreed-on product specs.

2) Customers are squeezed by their buyers back in the USA who hold to contracts. The manufacturers know this and squeeze from their side, raising prices and passing on lower quality products. Chinese manufacturers can torment an importer with stalling and delays because the manufacturer pays essentially no cost of capital and gets a deposit from the importer up front, while the importer pays for its money and has contractual demands from its own customers.

3) Counterfeit their customers’ products and sell them direct to other markets and to the customers’ customers.

Midler illustrates American importers totally exasperated by their Chinese manufacturer who risk jeopardizing long-term large-sized orders by pulling small-sized stunts that antagonize the importer.

Midler says the key difference is that the manufacturer thinks in short-term survival and gains. “what will get me the most money in the next two months” while western companies are thinking of long-term strategic victories.

He could have described it more succinctly as a prisoner’s dilemma. The Chinese manufacturer sees it as a one-round prisoner’s dilemma where defecting on the importer gives them the best return. The western importer thinks many rounds, so desires the cooperate/cooperate mode.

But then Midler contradicts his “short term/long term” thesis by bringing up a whole new twist that says China “is thinking chess while the west is thinking checkers.”

He uses the example of soap. China manufacturers massive quantities of soap for an importer who sells to someone like Johnson&Johnson in the west (Midler calls this the ‘first market’). China does it for a tiny margin because the orders give them an understanding of western product demand and design. ‘Second markets’ also want these products and will buy them directly from China. China gets much higher margins on these sales. Midler is saying this is strategic, long-term thinking: give cheap products to the west in exchange for product knowledge and manufacturing reputation and then market to profitable markets not served by the western importers.

His last cautionary tale is that the deepest fucking is for those involved in “Joint Ventures” in China. Eager to get in on the “China Story”, western businesses find a local partner, invest money, and are strung along while the JV (operated by the local) generates no profit, or maybe even small losses. Of course what’s happening is that the finances and operations are totally opaque and the local partner is stealing all the profit.

Reading this book makes me even happier to live in Singapore. Here there is a strong rule of law and accounting. Commercial issues can be resolved officially. As well, it’s a (mostly) English-speaking culture, so there is far less problem of ‘inscrutable culture’ to further confuse the business. If I was going have something manufactured, I’d consider Singapore potentially better on a risk-adjusted basis.

One Last Note: the author also suggests that China’s population is not nearly as large as China claims. This reminds me of Robert Heinlein saying the same thing about the USSR after he went on a trip to Moscow.

The bike broke because the bike was poorly built — the weird webbing of metal the tried to link up the head tube, top tube, and down-tube achieves nothing more than making a massive stress riser on the downtube, which is exactly where it broke.

As Uncle Sheldon describes:

Stress Riser

A stress riser is a notch, crack or other irregularity in the surface of a part which creates a starting part for a crack or tear. A familiar household example of stress risers is cellophane: It is fairly difficult to start a tear in a straight edge of a piece of cellophane, but once a tear has started it is almost impossible to stop.

A similar effect occurs with other materials, including those used to build bicycle frames. Good design avoids placing stress risers in heavily loaded areas of the frame.

Stuff like this isn’t good, isn’t helpful. Look at fine lugged-bikes. The builders file the tips of the lugs down as smoothly as possible to avoid making stress risers. Contrast JP Weigle with this monstrosity.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

click on this picture

Sorting out stacks of money for various trips I’m taking over the next few days Ling pulled up some USD we had in storage.

The note on the left looks damn dodgy, but it passes the tests…

When I saw the note, and how it was not centered on the paper, I was sure it was a fake. But I checked the security features — I see the plastic strip and I also see the watermark on the bill. I don’t have a UV light or one of those marking pens, but it’s otherwise passes the test.

I just can’t understand how an off-center note can pass through the press when they have such fine control over everything else on the bill.

Ugh. I wouldn’t accept this note if someone handed it to me. It stinks of the streets.