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just a bear whose intentions are good
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 30th, 2012|01:36 pm] |
Here are the lyrics to a song I wrote last year. It was inspired by reading an article on an auto-appendectomy performed in Antarctica in 1961. (Which I was going to link, but the bastards put it behind a paywall.) It occurred to me that today would be the appropriate day to post this. I put the first verse in quotes to make the tense and time shift a little more excusable, and to indicate that it's meant to be an excerpt from the doctor's journal, which I in fact partially cribbed from a bit from that article. Not that you can hear that when you listen to the song! It's a bit short, but I'm not sure it needs anything more.
"Tomorrow is May Day, I'm afraid I've spoiled it,
My comrades run the autoclave to sterilize my tools,
Outside the storm that howls in the Antarctic night is
speaking for the pain I hide, acute appendicitis."
Artemev stood by with my instruments,
Teplinsky the mechanic held the mirror—
Oh! My poor assistants!
Their faces were as white as the ice.
Oh! My poor assistants!
Whiter than their surgical whites.
Two hours passed between the first incision
I made in my own abdomen, and the final stitch
And though I nearly died, I want no fuss or bother
I only did what needed done: a job like any other
But Artemev stood by with my instruments... (repeat bridge and chorus.) |
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| Lessons Learned, G4G10 Exchange Gift Edition. |
[Mar. 23rd, 2012|12:01 am] |
One of the distinctive features of the Gathering for Gardner, a recreational mathematics conference which I will be attending next week, is the Gift Exchange. One is encouraged to provide enough copies of a gift for everyone who is participating in the exchange. Then, at the end of the conference, everyone gets a big bag containing one of each of the gifts. One may, in lieu of a physical item, write a paper to be included in a book that is printed up, and pay one's share of the printing cost. This is what I had to do last time, since I got my invitation to the conference with less than three weeks' notice. (I suspect that this was a side effect of the centrality of the gift exchange to the conference: since everyone made X gifts, it'd really suck if they didn't all get given. And when the number of attendees doesn't come up to the number of gifts, they have to scramble madly to find more attendees at the last minute.)
Anyway, this time around, I came up with a really nice idea for a puzzle to make as a gift for the exchange. And then sat on it for a while, because I was busy with grad school. And then sat on it longer, because, well, procrastination happens. And then, oops, it was seriously time to not sit on it any longer.
My exchange gift is a puzzle consisting of ten skinny rectangular pieces that slot together to make a ten pointed star. The mathematically nifty thing about it is that there are two possible positions for each slot, and the pieces can flip; effectively the slot patterns can be specified by four digit binary strings that are reversible, (so that, e.g., 0011 and 1100 are equivalent.) There are exactly ten such strings, and each of the ten is represented once in the set of puzzle pieces. (There will be a blog post about the puzzle's particulars on my puzzle blog at some point, I promise.)
I knew that I wanted to use clear acrylic for the puzzles, on account of it being cheap, shiny, and lasercuttable. It took me longer than I expected to get from the idea to a cuttable drawing. First there was some trig and algebra needed to determine the proper position and width of the slots. (High school math: actually useful!) While I have drawn up puzzles for lasercutting in Inkscape in the past, this was a case where I had a lot of parameters that I wanted to be able to tweak, so it made more sense to write a program to output the drawing. I used the Cairo vector graphics library, and Python.
I ended up going with Ponoko for the cutting. Being able to upload a file and get a quote immediately was very nice given the tight time frame I was on, as was the fact that they were in California, and therefore normal shipping would only take two days. (And there would be two shipping cycles, one for the prototype and one for the final version.) And the price looked okay, although I don't have a lot of data points there. With a Ponoko Prime membership, cutting is about 1/3 off. The break point where this starts to look good is about $100; I was way over that, so it was a gimme. (Also, Prime jobs are expedited compared to non-Prime jobs, which was nice given I was in a hurry. Earlier in the month there was a 20% off deal on non-Prime lasercutting costs; It looks to me like the best thing to do if you have something not at all urgent to make is just to wait for a sale. (Also, in the lessons learned department: remembering to cancel your Prime account after you are done with it is important. Oops. Maybe I'll make a few more things this month with it while I have it still.)
So I had the prototype made, and it came out basically perfect. Perhaps just a smidge too tight, so I tweaked one parameter very slightly for the final version, and put in the order.
Ponoko says that you can request them to have your order by a specific date and they'll see what they can do, so I did that, and they did in fact ship it on the date that I said pretty please ship it by, so go them. They even called me a bit earlier, worried that I'd wanted to receive it by that date rather than have it sent by that date, and they had only enough stock of the material on hand to do half my order. (Lesson learned: you can clear them out of a material with a large order. Good to know.) In retrospect, I should have had them send the order in two parts, which they seemed on the verge of offering to do, just to have more time for the post-processing.
When I received the final order, a number of pieces were loose, and a couple of them were broken. This appears to be entirely Ponoko's fault, rather than the shipper's, so boo them. That said, I had unknowingly set them a somewhat unreasonable task there, by ordering an odd number of sheets of a thin material with a very large number of very small pieces on each sheet. The significance of the odd number is that their P2 size appears to be half of the size of a full sized sheet, so an order of multiple P2's is shipped as a number of full sized sheets, plus, in the case of an odd order, one half sized sheet. The loose and broken pieces were all from the odd sheet out. There was a cardboard spacer on the other side of the box to balance out the odd sheet, but it apparently wasn't quite the right thickness. It really probably didn't help that my order was in 2.0 mm acrylic, which they only offer in clear, and which, apparently, isn't a big enough seller to keep a lot of stock of it on hand. It did have to be 2.0 mm, though. Any thinner would have been too fragile, and any thicker would have been prohibitive in terms of cost. (Not only would the thicker material have been more expensive to cut, but the pieces would have had to have been made wider to accommodate the wider slots.
Now all that was left was the post-processing. And here is the real lesson learned: DO NOT ASSUME ANY TASK IS TRIVIAL IF YOU HAVE TO REPEAT IT HUNDREDS OF TIMES.
The order arrived with backing film on both sides. 400 puzzles. Ten pieces per puzzle. Two sides per piece. 8000 bits of backing film that needed to be peeled off. I gave myself a day and a half for that. Not on the basis of any calculation, just a vague feeling that it shouldn't take too long. Four and a half days later, I finished making the sets and sent them off. I roped in ![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) algeh to put insert sheets in the bags: again, a task I thought would be trivial, but when multiplied by a few hundred, took several hours. (There was one set that was missing a piece, so she was also counting pieces in the sets to find the one with the missing piece, which mad it take longer. Another lesson learned here is that I should have started looking for the one with the missing piece immediately after I found the wayward piece, rather than allowing it to get buried in the pile.
I spot checked a few of the sets for fit as I was peeling. Most turned out perfect, only one was a little loose.
Until I got to the troublesome odd sheet out. I wondered if the pieces falling out had to to with the kerf being slightly wider on that sheet, so I spot checked a few, and they were all pretty loose. Loose fit doesn't make the puzzle any less solvable as a puzzle, but it does make the completed puzzle fall apart, (literally) as an objet d'art. I can't tell if the kerf was actually any different on that sheet, but I could see that the material was visibly thinner on that sheet than in the prototype, which has the same effect. Lesson learned: Ponoko is actually not kidding when they warn that material thicknesses can vary by ±10%. It's not that I thought that they were kidding so much as I thought they were covering their asses in the remote event of thickness variance that was actually vanishingly unlikely. In the future I should make sure that I am allowed to adjust my drawing to the material thickness if the available material varies significantly from the stated thickness.
Still, in the main, the project appears to have been a success. I only needed to use half of the problematic sheet, which works out to 4% of the puzzle copies. Hopefully, nearly all of the rest should be reasonably tight, and hopefully the other attendees will like the puzzle. |
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| retreat |
[Mar. 8th, 2012|02:18 am] |
Last weekend was my madrigal group's annual retreat. This year we spent it at Camp Westwind, which is on a beautiful mile-long stretch of beach south of Cascade Head. It's used as a youth camp in the summer, but last weekend we were, I understand, the only group there. Since there is no other access to the beach that is both public and easy, and since it was not the tourist season, we nearly had the entire beach to ourselves. In fact, when I went out after our afternoon rehearsal and before dinner on Saturday, I was, for a while, the only person on the whole beach. I found a Japanese plastic float on the sand, which felt strange, a reminder in an empty and wild landscape that the vast ocean was connected to a human world thousands of miles away, even as its connection to the human world on this side was at its most tenuous.
I also found some agates. I do like shiny rocks!
We sang quite a bit as usual. Because we have a recording date coming up, we've been focusing on polishing the songs we're going to record. But we did break out some songs that we let slip out of our active repertoire last year, and noodled around with extra verses and original language versions that we never sing, which was a lot of fun.
I ate way too much food. I can never stop snacking at these things. And the cooks in the group outdid themselves with Saturday night dinner, delicious tamales with homemade salsas, and flan for dessert. Oh, and guava margaritas.
Saturday night folks turned in a lot earlier than usually happens, (certainly a lot earlier than on Friday night, when I lost a Scrabble game in which I managed to play HEXANE.) But I stayed up a bit longer and read a couple of stories from the free Tor.com Best of 2011 ebook.
And then -- I couldn't go to bed. Because I'd forgotten which room I'd moved my stuff to that morning. (There was some shuffling due to Saturday morning arrivals and people with CPAPs moving into the same room so as to disturb those of us without less.) And I didn't want to
have a 50% chance of disturbing people in the wrong room, so I just sat on a bench in the meeting room area all night and put my head down on the table, but I didn't actually sleep.
And I know how dumb that is, but I get in this sort of cycle, where I've done something dumb, and then I need to punish myself for it. So it wasn't just the anxiety about disturbing people, but it was also that because I'd been dumb and forgot which room I was supposed to be in, I lost my sleep privileges.
In other news, I've received the prototypes I had made of my exchange gift for Gathering for Gardner, and they turned out nearly perfect. I've put in my order for the exchange gifts themselves, and I am awaiting delivery. (I cut things a bit closer than I should have in terms of the timing of getting them made, but hopefully it shouldn't be a problem.) I still need to make the slides for my talk, but there's plenty of time for that. |
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| Conflikt 5 |
[Jan. 31st, 2012|02:55 am] |
Last weekend I went to the Seattle area to attend the filk con that I attend every year.
As I tend to do, I came up with a instafilk at the special lunch event on Saturday. They put slips of paper with words on them on each table as prompts; our words were "knight" and "dance". I went with personifying a chess knight, and interpreting its move in the game as a dance. Other people at our table wrote a Toby Daye song to the tune of "Night and Day". (Later, I had the surreal experience of having Bob Kenefsky approach me with the suggestion of encoding the knight's move into the rhyme scheme of the song, which makes me wonder what Kenefsky is putting into his own lyrics that he's not telling us about, and how he could manage to put that sort of thing in and still write things that are awesomely clever on every level that is accessible to mortals.)
Some moments I'll keep: Talis Kimberley's concert was pretty awesome. The Suttons breaking the signer, followed by the signer breaking Brenda Sutton. Char McKay's Twinkie song, with actual Twinkies raining upon the audience. The story of how the talking hotel elevators at a Worldcon hotel were surreptitiously given plaques that read "ANOTHER FINE PRODUCT OF THE SIRIUS CYBERNETICS CORPORATION" (Which was especially awesome because ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) algeh and I were listening to the Hitchhiker's radio series in the car on the way up.)
At 5 p.m. on Sunday, I checked my email for the first time since I left. Before I left I had suggested meeting up with folks on IFmud on Sunday night, but I hadn't heard anything back from them, so I assumed nothing was happening. But at that moment I saw an email exchange where a meeting was set up, and fortuitously another mudder (Stacy) was also visiting from out of town, so the meeting was going to happen despite my failure to respond to the emails. So I got on the light rail, sort of taking it on faith that the meetup hadn't been canceled or moved, and Jacq and Sam were there, and Stacy showed up with a friend a bit later, and then inky showed up, and we played an epic game of Balderdash, in which I barely managed to eke out the win by guessing the definition of "perjinkities".
By the time I got back, the Dead Dog Smoked Salmon circle was winding down, and people were at the point of mostly singing their maudlin farewell songs, and I don't have any of those, so I didn't sing anything.
Songs of mine that I sang in circles: My Poor Assistants, Jar of Tang, Fine Brains for Zombies, and Slugs in Winter. I'm thinking about starting a policy of not repeating any of my songs for a couple cons after I sing them. I hope this will encourage me to write some more. My Poor Assistants is about my only new song in a very long time, and I'm sure people are getting tired of hearing some of my songs. It's funny how I can write a decent half-song in 40 minutes, but I don't manage to do anything for months before and after. |
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| Laser Fail |
[Jan. 8th, 2012|10:40 am] |
(I tried to post this last night to lj, but my lj client appears to no longer be working. So I'm doing the socially conscious thing and crossposting to dreamwidth.)
Lessons of the day: I am an idiot, and ADX Portland's laser cutting services are... disappointing.
So it's been a while now since the last time I lasercut some puzzles, (at Portland TechShop, before it folded) and I've had a few good ideas in that time, and now I'm done with grad school and have a little time to get back to that hobby. Last week I put together some drawings for puzzles and queried ADX (a newish local makerspace) about having them cut, and I sent in the file and made an appointment to bring in some sheet acrylic and have it cut.
The laser cutting appointment started out well. ADX was using Linux with CUPS printer drivers for the Epilog laser cutter, with the result that the guy there could just fire up my SVG file in Inkscape, select all of the lines and make a quick change to the line properties to make them how the setup wanted so that they would be recognized as vectors for cutting, and hit print. This was rather nicer than the bad old setup that TechShop had of requiring a step to export from Inkscape and then import into an ancient version of Corel Draw. Since my file was so clean, and needed no more fixing up than that, laser guy waived my setup fee, which was kind of him. It did not occur to me that I should have wondered what the setup fee would have been before I got it waived, but then, I am an idiot.
So the drawing was all ready to go at that point. Well, not quite. I was using 3/16" thick acrylic, and that wasn't one of the default settings. Laser guy made a new setting for that, interpolating between the 1/8" and the 1/4" settings. The power level he picked jibed with what I recalled using at TechShop, (and this was in fact, the selfsame 45W Epilog laser cutter that TechShop used to have before it folded) so I figured it would be okay. And there I was an idiot. I had thought ahead of time that they might not have experience with 3/16" acrylic, and thought about bringing some scrap pieces from my old projects to test the setting on, and forgot to actually do so. So we loaded up a pristine sheet into the machine, and laser guy hit print, and the laser started doing its thing, quite properly to all appearances.
Twenty-five minutes later, the laser stopped doing its thing, quite properly to all appearances.
Then laser guy took out the sheet of acrylic. That indicated that something was not entirely proper. The purpose of a laser cutter is to cut things into pieces. This was not pieces. This was piece. And here is where I was really an idiot, because I could not say the thing I was desperately wanting to say which was that he should just put the sheet back and run it again at a lower power and faster speed to finish off the cut. Instead, laser guy started bending and prodding at the pieces to try to get them to come apart, and only succeeded in breaking one, which I knew would happen, because I made the same mistake with one of the TechShop projects. And even then, the rest of the puzzles could have been salvaged if I had managed to say something, but I still couldn't get the words out of my mouth, and laser guy broke apart the sheet and broke some more pieces, and by then the entire sheet was a loss.
Still, I was ready to go on with the rest of the sheets I brought, with the cutter running at a slightly higher power and slower speed.
At this point, laser guy imparted a very important piece of information. "You do know that we charge $2.50 a minute for laser time?"
Well, I did then. I didn't ask earlier, because I just assumed that it would be some amount I would find reasonable, because I was an idiot. I think I might have thought $1 a minute reasonable. I don't know if it actually is. I do know that the cost of lasercutting things at TechShop had been utterly ridiculous in my favor, on account of me getting the super cheap pre-opening promotional rate for a month of membership, and then coming in and using the cutter for hours on end. But $2.50 a minute, for maybe a half hour per sheet once the extra time to cut through properly was added, with six puzzles per sheet, works out to $12.50 per puzzle just for the cutting, which doesn't leave much room for margin at the prices I was hoping to sell the puzzles.
So at that point I bailed, and laser guy quite reasonably nullified the cost of the cutting time already spent, and I was out only one sheet of acrylic and some gas money for the day. Laser guy referred me to another place that had the power to handle thicker materials, but I looked at their website and it was all "2000W laser" and "we can cut through 1" of solid steel," so I suspect they might be overkill for my purposes.
I still want to get these puzzles done, but I don't really know whether it can be done for what I would have considered a reasonable price. A quick search of local places that might be able to do it didn't reveal much in the way of promising options, so I don't know if it will happen.
On the plus side, a couple of chunks of puzzle pieces came out in a form that might make attractive coasters. I'm thinking of donating them to the InterFilk auction at Conflikt. |
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| Orycon 33 |
[Nov. 14th, 2011|02:57 pm] |
Good con. Last Orycon I missed most of Saturday and Sunday due to a conflict with the Revels megarehearsal. This time I lost Friday and Saturday evening time due to conflicts with the dress rehearsal and performance for a concert of the Lewis & Clark Community Chorale.
This time around, I attended a few more writerly things than in the past, on account of I have a completed short story that I'm trying to sell, which makes me a real wannabe writer, as opposed to a vaguely-would-like-to-be writer. I did one ORC (Open Read and Critique) session. The format of these is one writer reads his or her story for 5 minutes, then each other person present gives a one minute critique. I found out that I'm bad at processing a story as I'm hearing it and thinking critically about it at the same time. I also found out that my story (or at least the opening) came across as YA to more than one of the other people there. I'm not sure what to do about that; the issue appears to be that it opens with a scene with the female viewpoint character shopping for clothes, which I suppose is the sort of thing a young female reader would stereotypically be interested in. Of course, I put the scene in there in response to older female readers in its first critique group complaining that the character ought to care about what she was wearing for the main event in the story, so I can't win. (And I would have a hard time taking out the scene at this point, because the shop clerk became an important character in her own right.)
There was a "Story Outline in an Hour" workshop; to my surprise I nearly came up with an outline of my own. And the folks running the panel explained that it really ought to be a 90-minute workshop, since it takes about a half hour to explain the process as it goes along, so an incomplete outline seems to be about par. I don't know that I want to do anything with this particular outline, but the process itself may be very useful in the future.
The songwriting workshop was much less methodical, and not terribly helpful, except that they did come up with a bunch of prompts, so I escaped to the hallway, wrote a short song, and then came back in and sang it. I'm not sure how or if this could be done well. Part of the problem is that my process is different from the usual filk processes. I do not play an instrument, so the "noodle on your instrument until you come up with something" plan fails for me. Also, I mostly write originals rather than parodies. I always start from words, and by the time I have a couple of rhymed lines, a melody generally comes to me. (This also happens when I read poetry.)
The Metallurgy of the Japanese Sword panel was really fun. It was nifty to see the connections between the physical chemistry and the traditional swordmaking processes, and how they came together to produce swords with properties that were desirable for their intended use, (i.e. killing people.)
I only saw a few concerts, because they were mostly in the evenings, when I had to be away. I did see and like the Double Clicks, who were pretty fun, a sister act with hipster/geek-ish lyrics. I would have liked them more if they had been better singers though.
As always at these things, I become keenly aware that I need to make more geek friends. There are lots and lots of awesome people at cons, and only a few I know and can talk to. |
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| Too many words |
[Nov. 5th, 2011|07:45 pm] |
The last time I touched my android space opera story, it was 3900 words, and I had submitted it to Strange Horizons without having changed it from the the state it was in this spring when I first sent it out. My planned next step after it was rejected, (and it was) was to fix some issues that came up in the latest round of critiques, and submit it to another market. Unfortunately, the market I want to send it to next has a hard limit of 4000 words, and the last revision pass sent the story somewhere north of 4150.
So I need to cut some, which is actually possibly a blessing; I think this is a good opportunity to tighten up the story a bit. I wonder if I could get a beta reader to volunteer to look at it with an eye toward where it could stand to be trimmed? |
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| Recent Doctor Who Watching |
[Oct. 28th, 2011|12:14 am] |
Despite the breakup, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) algeh and I have continued watching old series Doctor Who. I picked the latest batch by biking to the Beaverton library, and taking ones that I haven't seen since back in the day, (or ever) and that didn't have Daleks. Prior to this, we've mostly been slogging through seasons 18 and 19, although Doctor Who and the Silurians was in the mix, as were The Pyramids of Mars, and the VHS version of Shada, with Tom Baker linking narration that tries really hard to make the bits that were never filmed sound exciting.
Anyway, this batch:
The Dominators (2nd Doctor, season 6)
The Quarks really are the saddest robots ever. And they recharge by hugging themselves, which is adorable. I've never been too fond of Daleks, but one thing they really had going for themselves is that they were not the Quarks. There are some awesome villain lines, like "You would dare to defy a Dominator?!" and "You are not fit to be a Dominator!" Good stuff for spicing up your BDSM play, I guess. The only reason the Dominators are remotely credible as a threat is that they land on a planet of not terribly bright pacifists. Anyway, this is dumb stuff, but at least the pacing is quicker than Doctor Who and the Silurians.
The Creature from the Pit (4th Doctor, season 17)
The eponymous Creature is apparently infamous for looking very much like a giant schlong. And, wow. Its reputation is most certainly deserved. This is the season when Douglas Adams was the script Editor, so there are occasionally some good bits of Adamsian humor in the dialog. And the Wolfweeds are great. Sure, actual wolves could do a lot more damage, but there's little that can compare with K9's reaction to having giant melons pile up on him. I mean, he doesn't actually do or say anything, so the reaction is all in the viewer's head, but that's why it's so brilliant. |
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| eBook impressions and observations |
[Oct. 12th, 2011|11:29 am] |
Since the price of the 3rd generation Kindle (now rechristened "Kindle Keyboard") was recently lowered to the point of being within my budget, I sprang for one. Some impressions:
1. I bought the ad supported ("With Special Offers") version. The ads and Amazon offers have been unobtrusive and inoffensive. It's entirely likely that there will be an occasional Amazon offer worth taking them up on.
2. I know I can't expect too much from free ebooks, but you'd think Amazon would have someone whose job it is to make sure the free version of Pride and Prejudice that comes up on top in a search is acceptable. It really isn't. All of the instances of italics are rendered as ALL CAPS. The version from the Project Gutenberg site is also unacceptable: there is an extra empty line after each paragraph. My third try, the version from freekindlebooks.org, looks much better.
3. The annoying feature of the Kindle itself that turned up in P & P was Publicly Highlighted Passages. I don't see why anyone would want this. Luckily, it was easy enough to turn off.
4. Curlyquotes, people! Except for the one large-press ebook I paid money for, and the freekindlebooks.org P & P, every single ebook I've found so far has straight quotes. The Project Gutenberg FAQ still calls for straight quotes, fer chrissakes. (The thing about that is, as long as people were primarily reading the HTML version, or going farther back, the ASCII text version, straight quotes were not wrong. But if you are putting something on an ebook reader, then book typography rules apply.)
5. The combination of navigation via links from a table of contents and numbered chapters is infelicitous. I may wish to reread such-and-such a scene, but have no idea of the chapter number. Were I editing the table of contents for such a book, I would add informative and not-too-spoilery chapter titles to the table of contents. The paper version of Pride and Prejudice in my possession does just this.
6. Baen is entirely too kind. (But would it kill them to use curlyquotes?) The Baen CD material for the Vorkosigan series alone is worth most of the price of an ebook reader to me.
7. Most other publishers could stand to be more kind (in terms of ebook pricing.) In particular, reprints of old stuff could be cheaper. Since there's no used ebook market, the
8. Indie authors are kind, but I still haven't found one up to Big Publisher standards in sf/f. (I haven't looked too deeply yet.)
9. Relatedly, I do like the free sample excerpts. With the free samples, the experience of browsing the Kindle Store isn't that far behind being in an actual bookstore.
10. The actual reading experience is very smooth. I think I prefer it to reading paper books, overall.
11. The default font isn't my favorite. I'd prefer something with a stronger difference in weight between horizontal and vertical strokes. I expect that such a font would look worse at smaller font sizes with the Kindle's resolution; I assume this is why the default font is the way it is. |
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