Chore time

Serpentine,
originally uploaded by Greg Gladman.

I was wondering why people didn't turn to the ancient device of stilts when it comes to doing something productive such as cleaning out gutters, cropping tree limbs, or knocking out wasp nests. I know there is the obvious product liability concern, but it is not as if they are necessarily much more hazardous than the usual alternatives (ladders are especially common sources of injury), and if the kind of work being done is mostly in one place, rather than walking down the street or whatever, steps could be done to help stabilize the worker. Perhaps a harness around the midsection could be added, either rigged up to the work area or with a long third attached as a sort of seat could be arranged to create a stable tripod. The advantage is that the person would be more mobile and could move (with care) more efficiently than one who has to move a tall ladder from place to place.

Another crop of falling-apart rants averted

fail,
originally uploaded by Sidereal.

• Social bookmarking site ma.gnolia had a catastrophic failure that claimed not only the production database, which would not be unusual, but also apparently all their backups. What, no offsite database dumps? Fortunately, I have been posting my bookmarks also to delicious for the most part, so nothing much lost.
• My laptop at home froze up, then refused to boot, even in Safe Mode. Off I went to my wife's computer to download and burn the latest Knoppix which allowed me to verify that the hard disk was still readable. I brought it in to work the next morning prepared to copy my data files off to an external drive, but somehow the Windows XP installation healed itself, so the retrieval operation changed to one of backup. Gee, and I was all set to install Ubuntu 8.10 on it.
• The new furnace has been working a bit over-well, causing the radiator in the downstairs bathroom to spit out a lot of brown water all over the floor through its vent. We consulted with the plumbing company and it seems as if it's likely not a problem with that expensive unit, but either a problem with the old vents or with some kind of crud in the pipes. So I'll take a shot at saving a couple of hundred bucks by replacing some air vents on my own and seeing what happens.
• The "auxiliary" (12V) battery in our Prius lost nearly all its charge today while we were at church, and was recovering only very slowly over the next half hour, so we called a service station to come and give us a jump start. The verdict is still out on this one, but it seems not to have re-manifested in a handful of starts since, so we'll hope for the best until we can get it in to the dealer's.

Now any one of these can turn back up again (except for the Magnolia one), so this is possibly only a full-blown rant deferred, not avoided. Watch this space.

What did not happen over the last 36 hours

When I came home from work on Monday, hoping to have some supper before we went to church, it was not to a scene of happiness.
The acrid chemical smell in the air led us to suspect a fire in the microwave oven, so my wife had called the Fire Department, who told us we should not stay inside. It was cold and my wife went into our neighbor's place across the street, while I did not.
Besides the four or five fire trucks there was a freelance photographer there and eventually a person from the gas company, who I did not speak to at first.

Once they took a look around, they opened the windows and doors, then brought in large industrial fans on extremely long extension cords to take away most of the fumes, while we waited, wondering what was happening. Eventually one of them told us that the gas furnace had overheated and had to be turned off and sprayed down with water to cool things off, and that it was not any problem with the microwave at all. I went in to look at the old furnace, which did not seem to be in very good shape after all this.
We ended up not making it to church that night. Also, we did not have much heat in the house except for a couple of small space heaters we set up.
The next morning, I stayed home to make some phone calls, hoping to find out whether our homeowner's insurance would provide any payout (it would not). A gas company representative came by and quickly determined that the boiler was shot and could not be repaired. We measured the size of the rooms and he based on a few other quantities, he determined that the old 200000 BTU input boiler was too large for the residence. Their quote on a new, smaller, modern gas boiler was not something I wanted to accept immediately though. I called other heating contractors in the area and the first couple could not set up appointments with me right away. One of them did come to visit, discuss what they could do, and agreed to set us up with a newer, even better, system, though not appreciably lower in price than the first quote. Since they could start right away, however, and in consultation with my wife, I agreed, drawing down heavily on a line of credit I had wanted to spare. The heating company spent the following ten hours pulling out the old unit and putting in the new 150000 BTU unit, finishing just shortly before midnight, a couple hours later than expected.

The brand-new boiler does not take up as much room in the basement as the old one. Even the heating guy admitted it is not the kind of big purchase you would care to show off to people, all that much. On the other hand, it should not attempt to run while dry the way the old one apparently did.
All this for a price which, had I paid them solely in dollar bills equal weight to this twelve-pack of soda, I would not have reached. I wrote two unpleasant checks, since I did not even have such a heavy stack of cash on hand. Were it not for the pictures they still need to take for the local permit application, I would be at work this morning.
Still, we witnessed no explosions and no fires raging out of control, nor freezing pipes and no one crushed by hundreds of pounds of cast iron.
Clarification: Everything did in fact happen, that's not what the title's referring to. I have simply cast all the facts as negative statements, in the spirit of Raymond Queneau's book Exercises in Style (the chapter called "Negativities"), perhaps in order to be contrary, perhaps not.

More crane fun

Here is a list of some other things that a household bridge crane could bring within reach of the ordinary kook like me.

• A visual artist could use it to paint canvases many meters across in the paint-drip style of Jackson Pollock, ones too wide to reach across normally without having to step onto them. You could either come up with some arrangement with paint pots and servo motors mounted on the hoist, or else a harness to lift the artist up to apply the paint by hand.
• Along the same lines, the kids could put on a production of Peter Pan. Test those wires before flying too high, though.
• It seems to that the main room cleaning chore remaining once you have a robotic vacuum cleaner is the need to shift the furniture both to spare the carpeting from getting those pits where the legs dig in and to give the robot a chance to hit those areas underneath. A judicious application of hoisting points on your sofa, coffee table, TV, etc., would allow you to whisk them away (perhaps just as the Roomba is heading in their direction) and to redo the room layout every single time a cleaning pass is done.
• You could have one of the world's largest games of pick up sticks using a pile of aluminum trusses.
• At the end of a dinner party, tie all the corners of the tablecloth to the hook and lift the mess out of the way in one dramatic gesture. Or if your gearing is up to it, tie only the corners at one end of the cloth and execute the classic tablecloth trick.

Really, it's surprising that more people aren't already clamoring for the personal bridge crane already.

Someone's ringing the bell

Designer Li Jianye has designed a pair of doorbells for computer people (an Enter key) and for musical people (piano keys). I say, "why stop there?" How about a doorbell which sends you an SMS message when someone pushes it, so that if you are away from home, you would know about the event? It could have a little webcam to snap a picture of your visitor to send to you via MMS, and if you chose, there could be a little screen where you could message your visitor back.

I'm pretty sure that it could be implemented pretty easily with an Arduino Diecimila and a home computer.

Probably you would want an option to lock out the messaging functions if the doorbell gets pressed too often, to frustrate any annoying pranksters in your neighborhood.


Update: This was also posted on the Make: Blog. Also, I have an Arduino coming in the mail soon, so we'll see what doorbell-related tricks we might be able to have it do.

Memory aid 2008

quipu,
originally uploaded by mobebu.

The Incans invented a method of keeping accounts using the number and placement of knots on a bundle of cords called a quipu. It provided the user a flexible and durable way of keeping a tally of one's flocks, crops, or houses.

Bridge Crane

Back when I was in experimental physics, they used bridge cranes like this one to stack 25 ton concrete shielding blocks and to position massive dipole magnets.

Bridge Crane,
originally uploaded by Echo_29.

It consists of a set of massive box beams that roll on tracks and which themselves support one or more moving trolleys running up and down the beams. I say "they" because of course one had to be a qualified member of a crew to operate one of these behemoths, one person on the floor able to hook and unhook the load communicating to the crane operator up in a mobile cab by means of international hand signals:


They did let us use small cranes to move detector components around a bit, but nothing in the multi-ton scale.

It would be a daring piece of industrial home design to put a bridge crane into a living space. Since the crane itself has to transit along rails, a large open room without interior walls would be optimal. It would be especially useful when one wished to move a grand piano from place to place (say around a sunken living room), though it might be possible to dream up some other use cases. I imagine that one could stack one's Costco purchases on an attractively designed pallet out by the carport, then hoist them up and over to the pantry area (the garbage and recyclables would make the return trip, of course).

Signs for the colorblind

I'm putting this out now even though the cool illustration of the concept has not worked out to my satisfaction.

Color blindness is a condition that a bit over 1% of the population possesses, something like ten times more prevalent among males as compared to females. Here is a typical colored dot test for one of the most common types of color blindness:

If you see the number 21 instead of 74, you probably have red-green color blindness.

The issue is one that web designers need to be concerned with as they put together websites. Here is a tool (broken link) that lets you visualize what a given website looks like under the different types of color blindness - you can try typing in the URL of this page to see what happens. It would be cool if they could build this into a head-mounted display so a person could go out into the world and experience what it is like to see things with altered color perception.

My idea is to use this phenomenon to make signs that display different messages to different people. For instance, suppose a couple is made up of a normal vision wife and a red-green color blind husband. We could make a design for the bathroom floor out of appropriately tiles that would show the word UP to those with normal vision and DOWN for the color blind viewer, as an aid to behavior modification. My discovery last night is that even though it isn't terribly hard to make words when you're working with just two colors of tile, one needs a hell of a lot of tiles - hundreds, preferably - to display even a short word in a random color pattern in this way legibly, and as tiresome this would be to depict in a drawing program on the computer, it would be even more of a chore to do in actual colored tiles. (Even if the tile-setter isn't color blind.) Perhaps it would be better just to reproduce a pattern in miniature, as a wall hanging instead.

Another idea would be to make little tags which you would sew into your clothing, identifying which tops and bottoms go together when viewed by someone of the majority group - the color blind person would just have to match A with A and B with B instead of relying on their own distinctive color sense.

I think there are probably other applications if one just thinks about the subject for a bit more. I look forward to the comments.

Update (June 2008): In this post I have tracked down a source for those original color plates, if anyone is interested in owning a second-hand set.

Update (December 2010): This T-shirt (broken link) incorporates some of what I had in mind, although the non-textual part of the design kind of makes it less cool than the full-blown concept, along with a bit of a bad attitude.

Things I've said recently which would have been incomprehensible 25 years ago

• "Where did I leave my computer?" I was rushing off to an appointment and had mislaid my laptop temporarily. Back in the old days, we did have personal computers, though only luggable in the most generous sense of the term.


• "They left their two Bobcats in our driveway."
  The neighbors are putting an addition on the back of their house and we have agreed to let them use part of our property to bring their equipment through. Because of the recent rain, we have about 15 yards of mud that gets tracked through the kitchen now.
  The Bobcat(tm) line of small earthmoving equipment does not quite go back that far.


• "It keeps doing that whenever I'm not wearing the Bluetooth." Because of the hands-free cell phone laws here, I spend a good part of the day with a headset stuck in my ear, which mostly works fine. But when I do take the thing out and my wife calls, we often seem to get into this thing where the phone thinks it should be picking up from the headset instead of the built-in speaker, and she can't hear me, even though I can hear her. Twenty-five years ago a good many phones I used still had dials on them.


• "I was thinking it might be a good time to buy some more Chinese stock." I was at my doctor's office and the subject of the recent market downturns came up, and I mentioned the possibility of an opportunity to take advantage of the situation. The only Chinese stock we knew about back in the old days was usually made with chicken and ginger.


• "I haven't had T'ang-T'ang noodles in years." We were at a restaurant at the tail end of the Lunar New Year celebration, having the traditional noodle dishes. I'd have this dish at the old Joyce Chen's Small Eating Place in Cambridge regularly, though they were called dan-dan noodles.

For the record

I saw this edgy biohazard-themed laundry bag at Realm Dekor and thought that while this was cool (along with their shower curtain and bath towels, they really should have pushed it a smidge further and put the crab-symbol thingy on other household items.

Barware:



Tableware:



Major appliances:



(I thought the bright red would be a nice touch as well.) You could either intend it ironically, or as an actual service to your houseguests. One also might want to accessorize and expand on the theme with a nice set of

Saturday, December 16, 2006

A new record

I was down in the basement going through some old papers when I came across one which I came across one describing the original property tax assessment when we first moved here. It had the date of sale (our closing date) on it: 12-11-1996 - exactly ten years ago this last Monday! Today or tomorrow would be the anniversary of our actually moving in (it was a snowy day, as I recall). Perhaps there should be some kind of celebration when one reaches this kind of milestone, the sort of thing one has a round-number birthday or wedding anniversary?

I know I've got a picture of the place somewhere, maybe I'll post it here if I can locate it.

Ten years is the longest I've ever lived in one place, equaling the length of time I was in the house my parents still live in now. The place needs a fair amount of work - a new garage, back door, bathroom floors and tub enclosures, windows upstairs, some landscaping - all things we would like to do before selling out. Neither of us envisions staying here permanently, really, although circumstances currently do not suggest a good exit strategy.