Justin

Liz was absently thinking my birthday was later in the week so hadn't planned for it being today that we would go get some food to mark the day. Perhaps she learned her lesson over this, because this meant that I had to make myself some last-minute plans, and dragged her along over her protests that these (outdoor) plans were NOT her idea of fun and she wasn't dressed for it and she was going to freeze to death. But I had a car that does ~ Mach 0.3, a full tank of gas, a trunk full of everything needed for anything, and enough food and snacks to get us to Mexico!
(And a rapier.)

But by then it was 11pm, so instead of Mexico, we only went as far as Kora and Simeon's place out at Snoqualmie. It was a great night - full moon, thick fog, barely below-freezing temperature, no cars on the road, heaters on, and a co-pilot to pass the snacks.

Liz hadn't seen the Falls before, so I drove there, and forced her from the warm car out into the cruel cold night, with a background soundtrack of Liz repeating that she hates cold, and that I'm crazy, and that she's only doing this because it's my birthday, and godamnit.

We walked to the lookout, the falls thundering, the spray wetting us, and then peering out over the railing, she was finally able to see... the same empty gray wall of fog as everywhere else and in all other directions. Except louder and wetter!

Liz also looked kind of cold, but I wasn't ready to get back into the car. So I took her into the forest and we walked down to the bottom of the gorge to see the falls from their base.
The full moon was shining through the trees, casting moon-rays in the fog, it was amazing. I so wished I hadn't left my camera in the car, there were so many incredible shots to take! But I was pretty sure that if I went back to get it, and then spent another 20 minutes standing still with a camera, I'd turn around to find Liz had become a small lifeless popsicle, and then I'd have to call her mum. So we walked on!

Clambering through huge wet rocks and uprooted trees in the freezing foggy dark is fun. It's obvious, right? Even just reading that sentence, you just know right away that that has got to be a good time. This wasn't immediately apparent to Liz for some reason, but she eventually had to concede that it was exceeding expectations. And eventually she even had to partly unzip one of the coats she was wearing, as movement started to defeat the cold.
Not everything was great - unfortunately I was wearing my good boots, which have no tread and so were quite slippery, and rocks cut and scuff the hell out of pristine leather, and they are now no-longer my good boots :-(

Onwards to Simeon and Kora's place. I had decided to open my birthday champagne with the rapier. I had never done this before, but I had done some research on the technique and was confident I could do it without a hitch. The others were.... not so confident.
Unfortunately, as we headed outside, the stairs were iced over, and my boots have no traction, and I had a bottle of champagne in one hand, and a sword in the other, so when I slipped, I had no hands available to grab the railing, so I fell down half a flight of stairs until I came to rest on the ground at the bottom. But during the fall, I managed to keep both the bottle and the sword from hitting anything, so all was good.

I lopped the top off the champagne with the rapier, poured us all a glass, and we had a birthday toast.

Liz is a bartender, and a very good one at that. I'm a total lightweight. She opens more bottles in a day than I open in a month. And she just got schooled. :-)



Here is the bottle after the cut!

Then we retired inside to warmth and comfort, and talked and talked for hours until it was almost time to get up and go to work. It was a good birthday.

So I now have independent confirmation that Cirque du Solei people did indeed come to the club last year, thus solving the mystery.

In other news, I realised that the new short hair means it will be a lot more fun to drive with the top off the car. So now I just need it to stop raining... in Seattle. :-/
Temperature doesn't matter - car has heated seats :-)

It's my birthday on Tuesday one week from now. I don't really have any plans yet, but thought I'd at least let you all know. :)

I've been meaning to do this for years - finally got around to cutting off the long hair.

Here's the traditional quick bathroom-mirror snap:



( another pic )

The dealership, as a goodwill gesture, replaced the large race-brake pads on the front wheels with ceramic pads. (Race brakes tend to squeal, and they rapidly cover the rims with brake dust, but hold up under extreme heat. Ceramic pads are quieter, and not as dusty, but heat-fade quicker during motor-racing. I don't race, so the disadvantages of race pads were annoying).

So with new brakes, to get the best results there is a "bedding in" procedure to get a good surface mating between pad and disk. The process involves heating the brakes by braking from 60MPH to 10MPH a set number of times, without giving them a chance to cool.
It seemed a bit hokey, but as I was still sometimes able to get some quiet squeal from the brakes, and the overwhelming consensus of other owners with the same niggles with the same brakes was that the process helped considerably, so I decided to give it a go.

Speaking of brakes and heat, the C6 corvettes have been very successful in motorsport, winning a bunch of stuff like the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance races, a stock corvette breaking the lap record at Nürburgring, etc, etc. What this means, among other things, is that we have photos of corvettes operating the brakes at high temperature:





Those pics are both scary and reassuring. They have also been described as "brake porn" :-)

So anyway, I had to find a road where it was legal to get up to 60MPH (100km/h), and where I could repeatedly, safely, come to sudden near-stops, without anyone around. Especially not police, who take a very dim view of anyone doing anything unusual. In an urban area of millions of people, with a huge traffic congestion problem, there is no such thing as a deserted stretch of road, and what I wanted was a deserted stretch of freeway! All to myself. Unfortunately, Seattle only has four freeways (the 420, the I-5, I-90, and the 520), and it turns out that it's using all of them :-/

But, I reasoned that Redmond is mostly suburban housing, has absolutely no night-life, and no businesses open late. That should mean that at 2-3am on a Tuesday, while there would still be residents using the 520 to return home to Redmond, the only thing coming out of Redmond would be the occasional semi truck once they had unloaded their cargo at Redmond's department stores and gas stations. This suddenly becomes significant because 520 terminates in Redmond, instead of passing through. So at a particular time, at the extreme east end of 520, in one direction (westbound), it should be empty.

So driving on 520 towards Redmond, 2am Wednesday morning, and despite the traffic around me, as I crested the hill I could see down into the valley and over the barrier to the other half of 520; and saw miles of empty freeway. Unbelievable.

I drove to the end of the line, turned around, and had a freeway all to myself.
So I bedded the brakes. On the third or fourth deceleration, you could really smell it, despite the windows being closed. Soon after, I learned first-hand about what brake-fade feels like (although the smaller rear disks still have race pads, so those were preventing it being as bad as it would be with ceramics on all pads, but the difference was still pronounced), all the while while keeping an eye in the rear-view mirror, because it would be obvious from my lights to a (police) car entering the freeway even miles behind me that something was "wrong", and on top of that, it's a quiet car when driving placidly, but when bringing it rapidly from a near-stop to 60MPH, it's LOUD.

Improvement (after the brakes had cooled down) was instant, but I only care if the improvement endures.

The next day, I parked in a space among a bunch of other cars. And unbeknownst to me, the pile of rubbish on the curb contained a fire hydrant. You can't park next to those. The meter maid called a tow to impound my car.

One of the perks of having a silly car is that people know it's yours, so someone driving by noticed what was going on and tipped me off. Thanks to that tip, I was able to return to the car before the tow truck got there, and so having narrowly dodged all the impound and towing fees, the actual parking ticket fee is pretty reasonable.

The thing is, I've never seen a meter maid working at midnight before. Word on the grapevine has been that states with large budget shortfalls (such as ours - which relies on sales tax, which has been badly hit by the recession), have starting ramping up revenue collection from traffic infractions, issuing more speeding tickets for smaller violations, and so on. I wasn't sure how much stock to put in that, but as I said... I've never seen meter maids working at midnight before!

I actually got off lightly. She didn't notice that I haven't installed my front license plate. Meter maids are supposed to write you a ticket for that, and that ticket would have cost over four times as much as the parking ticket I was given for blocking firetruck access to a trashpile.

We'll see how long it takes for me to get fined for the front plate. Most people report never having a problem, but in these days of budget shortfall, and so many cars flouting the plate requirements, there is a lot of very easy money to be collected there. A crackdown wouldn't surprise me.

Back when I was a kid, I did something that I wouldn't normally do, and something that I would regret for the next twenty years.

I did my homework.

It was the start of the school year, and so I still had enthusiasm. So I actually did my homework, and did a good job on it. My brother was watching a movie on TV, and every ad-break, he would come and tell me that there was a good movie on that I should come and watch. I kept doing my homework.
When I was done, I caught the end of the movie. It was "Flash Gordon", and from the bit I saw, I regretted having missed it.

As for my homework, all that did was catch the eye of my teacher for that year and make him think that I was a good student, so for the rest of the year when I was back to normal, he thought I was under-performing. Also, my grasp of physics has improved since then, and I now know that the homework was partly incorrect anyway.

So the tally for doing homework:
Win: 0 Lose: 3

I never did see Flash Gordon. So 20 years later, I put it in my netflix queue, and finally remedied The Night That I Did My Homework.


Interestingly, I discovered that as a kid, I misheard dialogue in a way that made it better. Catching only the end of the movie, I didn't know that Flash was a quarterback, I assumed he was some kind of space superhero. So when, during the challenge with the prince, he gets stung by the venomous beast, he asks how long the poison will take to kill him.
"Hours... days... depending on you strength." replies the prince.
"weeks" groans Flash quietly.

But he is not a superhero, what he actually said was "Please!" before asking the prince to kill him. But as superhero dialogue would have gone, "weeks" is a good response :-)

Another thing that struck me, was that some of the women's more elaborate outfits wouldn't look out of place in a ballroom dance competition. I'm not sure whether that's good or bad, but it is funny :)

Speaking of science fiction, here are some of the controls and instruments in the cockpit of my spaceship - I'm living in the future! :-)

Karen isn't so fond of these pics, as there are better ones of her, but these are the ones I like so far. We'll probably be getting more pics at some point too.

Just finished competing at Seattle Star Ball. It was my first competition with Karin, and I think we did pretty well. Our events spanned Saturday and Sunday, and on Sunday morning I got a txt from her that morning pointing out "If we make finals in all our events, we'll be doing 22 dances. Eat your Wheaties!" :-)
We did make the finals in every event, and while we bombed out in a few dances, we got some placings I'm pleased with - 3rd in Pre-Novice Standard, and 3rd in Gold Latin.
I should write more about the dancing - it was a good weekend - but maybe some other time.

After those 22 dances, I was all set to head off, and threw my gear in the car, then discovered in horror I was locked out. I was still wearing my latin attire, so I had no pockets, which meant my phone, money, keys - everything I had was in the bag I'd just put in the car, which meant I was locked out with nothing but the shirt on my back. Furthermore, (other than a large rock) the usual car break-in tricks don't work on this kind of car. I was stuck, 40 minutes drive from the nearest spare key, and it was midnight on Sunday so everything was closed, so even the best case scenario was looking rather grim. Then I remembered the Onstar system. I found Karin, we used her cellphone to call Onstar, and had them remotely unlock the car. Saved!
I was so relieved. I think this means I'll have to pony up for an Onstar subscription - my free trial period runs out this month.

Speaking of the car, I h4X0R3d it. The car has a system called CAGS (Computer-Assisted Gear Selection). Now, a lot of people will tell you that the reason they buy a manual transmission is precisely so that the computer does not get to "assist" in their gear selection. But a little bit of computer assistance (when you're not driving hard) raises the mileage high enough to bypass some EPA tax/fee/emissions thing, thus lowering the sale price of the car. So the engineers that implemented CAGS - deliberately I'm certain - gave the CAGS system it's own separate fuse, so the car gets the good gas mileage, but if drivers want the computer to butt out of their gearbox, it's a trivial job to disable the system.
Except the EPA requires that car computers monitor all emissions-related systems for malfunction, so it has to check CAGS. So if you just pull the fuse, you disable CAGS but the computer notes a malfunction. So you have to make a special fuse with a resistance high enough to disable the system, but low enough that when the computer looks at the system, a connection is made and it sees that it is present.
So that's wot I did.
I actually like CAGS. what it does is this: when you are driving like the proverbial grandmother on the way to church on Sunday (which for me, is frequently) and you shift from first to second, it bumps you into fourth instead. Since you're just tootling around, the V8 can be at a near-idle and still generate enough power to accelerate you, so 2nd and 3rd are wasteful if you're not driving for performance. CAGS teaches you to let the motor run at lower RPM than you would at that speed in a regular car if you're just driving normally. It's kind of fun to change gears and have the car bump you into a higher gear as you do it.
But I've had the car a few months now, and CAGS has me pretty well trained, so there is no further need for it and it was time to get rid of it. (for example, it sometimes tries to bump when I don't want it to, because it doesn't know that I already know that fourth is appropriate but I choose something else due to something about to happen)
The instrumentation still notes when to skip gears though, which is a fair compromise :-)

---

I'm drawn to "hyper-miling" (driving so as to raise your gas mileage as high a possible), and my car displays the gas mileage in realtime, and I think you could get some pretty good results from this car, but the most effective hyper-miling techniques are just stupid dangerous, and I don't plan to die or be horribly mutilated just to save a few cents on gas. So I just do a few things that aren't anywhere near as effective, eg, I'll just pick the right gear to best coast down hills, instead of being a hyper-miler and shutting off the engine entirely, saving a lot more gas but also driving without lights, indicators, airbags, power-steering, ABS braking, power-braking, stability control, and all those good things that KEEP YOU ALIVE. Most of the other gas-saving techniques are similar.

An interesting thing about this car though is that its the opposite of many cars; usually, the the biggest drag is pushing air, and the faster you go the faster you have to run the engine, so optimal cruise speed usually under 50Mph. With this car, the drag is low, and the engine is big, and the high gears are tall, so you get the best mileage at a much higher speed - the engine takes a fair amount of gas just to be running, so the car would need to be moving quickly to counterbalance that loss enough to get the MPG into the mid-30's, but it does exactly that because of the low drag and tall gears.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure what the optimal speed is yet, because I suspect it might be faster than what is allowed by law, and the only flat bit of freeway around here is the Evergreen floating bridge, which has a limit of 50MPH :-/

This week, I:

Flew over the Pentagon (restricted airspace my ass)
Travelled under the Pentagon
Touched a piece of the moon
Touched a piece of Mars
Touched a piece of Earth (just to complete the set)
Looked inside the Apollo 11 capsule, went inside part of Skylab, and saw the space shuttle.
Read the Washington Post - in Washington DC.
Scoped out security guarding the Hope Diamond
Scoped out the security guarding the White House.
Learned how to identify meteorites.
Discovered that some my childhood toys (which I still have) are modern classics on display in the Smithsonian.

And a whole lot more.

Washington DC is an odd city. The inner city is like a model rather than a real city, because it's not lived in, but perhaps because of that, it works really well – a city that works in practise as a city should work in theory. It caters to tourists and politicians and diplomats and businessmen and students and military and administrative and security, and it does this very well because they're the only people there. It's clean and functional because everyone there has a purpose, the infrastructure is designed to assist and accommodate that purpose, and once they are done, people leave. In effect, it solves the biggest problem that cities struggle with – having people living in them.

The architecture and look of the area very much draws on that of the ancient Greeks and Romans. It's iconic and also ironic – it achieves the grandeur of Rome at its mightiest, but while this was presumably symbolic of the republic, today it also seems overwhelmingly imperial, the mighty heart of Empire. And it really does feel like all roads lead here, that you are looking at the center of the world.

We spent five days here. We visited all the museums of the Smithsonian that interested us, and briefly checked out the other big touristy places (the White House, Lincoln Memorial, etc.) The Smithsonian is awesome, especially its Air and Space museums. Spending all day every day in the Smithsonian was enough to see most of what we wanted to see. For lack of time we still rushed past exhibits that would have been a major attraction in most other museums, but we had time to see the best stuff unhurried.

Seeing the achievements of people and of humanity in such concentration sorely reminded me of how much my life is stuck in limbo right now, prevented from using my talents for greater ends than my current wasteful treading of water. Unfortunately, there is not much I can do about that right now, or in the near future. :-(

On the bright side, treading water is fun, because it means I get to indulge in living :-)

I realized that the reason why everyone here rudely parks up your ass when stopped at traffic lights on hills, is because automatic transmissions are so much the default here that many people are just unaware of the risk that a manual can roll backwards slightly when the light turns green. You don't need to know this to get your license, and many people have simply never driven stick.
(And because drivers here are thus obliviously giving zero margin for error, I use the hand-brake religiously, far more so than I ever needed to in NZ :-)

Realizing how dominant the automatic is here caused me to also realize that when stopped at lights, it's pretty easy to tell who ahead of you is driving with which transmission, from how their brake lights operate. (It depends on the situation of course, but generally, an automatic can't be stationary without a foot on the brake pedal, so the brake-lights will never go off until the instant the car starts moving again. Whereas on a horizontal road, it is common for a manual to release the brakes, and when on a hill, the need for a hand-brake-start makes it likely that the brake-lights will go off before the car starts moving, because the hand-brake does not illuminate the brake-lights.)

Around here, you don't often see a stationary car with the engine running and the brake-lights off.

Watch the attempt to overhaul healthcare in the USA - I'm starting to view it as a litmus test for whether the USA is chugging along or in inescapable decline.
I can think of no other issue that better hits all the following as hard:
1. Critical to the nation at every level
2. What needs to be done is crystal clear
3. There is an almost unprecedented "perfect storm" of alignment in political power, and that power is determined to address the issue.

This is predictive of the wider future of the USA because despite 1 & 2 & 3, it's still quite possible (probable?) that healthcare is not going to get fixed beyond a superficial bandaid - and if so, this would show that even in the very best-case scenario, the USA can no-longer function adequately to maintain itself.
Such an outcome would show that any and all leadership of this country is powerless to steer it even to save it, due to the unyielding inertia of its entrenchment at every level - that large parts of the system have seized in place. (Large parts clearly have seized in place, the question is whether they've ground the rest to a halt - that's a point likely to have no return)
As a touch of hyperbole, a human equivalent of this may be brain injury sufficiently severe that basic tasks of self-maintenance cannot be performed. Life goes on for some time, but realistically, quality of life is going to be downhill from there.

The big problem is going to be #2 - it's only slightly shocking how dumb and/or amoral and/or brainwashed and/or provincial and/or partisan people can be, what's really shocking is how widespread these things are, how much traction they get here.

The USA is huge in every sense and every indicator - so the same immense inertia that is part of the problem also suggests that there will be plenty of good miles left in the country yet. But I think healthcare today is a litmus test that will show the overall trajectory of the future.

I had to work this weekend, but aside from that:

There is another guy in Kirkland with an almost identical (to the layman) car in the same colour as mine.
As I merged onto the freeway yesterday, I found myself driving right beside him. We exchanged The Wave, he pulled over into my lane, and we drove convoy until his exit, wherein we waved again and parted ways.
I kind of would like to have seen it from outside the car :)

In other car news, it finally dawned on me (while toying with the idea of installing a camera system) that I hadn't bought a car, I'd bought a new hobby. Which is the LAST thing I have the time for. (Un?)fortunately, the modifications I can make are very limited (or need to be very clever) as I need to keep the car entirely stock for export.

---

In a clothes store, some interesting nike sportswear (stretchy undershirt sort of thing) caught my attention. I briefly pondered its potential to be abused into use as clubwear, but was put off by the nike logos.
But by the next day, I knew there was something to the idea, and I had to try it. Went back, bought it, blacked out the logos, put it with a few other things that changed its look, then wore it out that night. A surprising number of people liked it enough to comment :-)

Being able to pull a semblance of style out of the weirdest things is something I like being able to do, because when I was a kid, I always thought it was an ability I would never have. Now, I'm of the view that design is design is design, and if I'm a designer, then it doesn't matter if I'm a designer of X, by God I should also be able to do a fair job of designing Y, or Z, or whichever other alphanumeric substitution I feel like dabbling in :-)

This is a "semi" truck. Semi is short for "semi-articulated tractor-trailer".
This machine can be loaded up with 50 tonnes of, well... anything, and then haul that load to the top of a mountain.



It can do this because it has an engine that can generate 400 horsepower!

But... what would happen if you took all that horsepower, and built an engine and transmission designed to use that power for speed instead of for hauling? And then you crammed all that into a little two-seater car?

What you would get is this:

The Corvette C6.
And I just bought one.

( Pics, details, and first impressions - good and bad - inside )

I bought a car!

Pics will follow... someday. I have to take some first :D


In other news, I am now poor, and in debt. :-/
In other other news, I am now hedged against US dollar inflation :)

Section 47:

A gentleman's cellphone and multi-tool should always reside in the front left-side pocket of the pants, never the right-side (nor the rear where he might sit on them). This is so that over the course of his day, were he to suddenly find himself ballroom dancing with a lady, she would not be inconvenienced by these tools pressing into her hip.
(Note: Some advanced or unusual dance steps involve putting the lady into wrong-side position, where she would be connecting with his left side, but these steps are rare and so are unlikely to occur during the course of the average day)

FAIL!

This week I found myself ballroom dancing with steps that involved wrong-side position. My pocket wisdom failed me.

Have you ever wondered "What comes after modernism?".
No, of course not - everyone knows the answer to that - post-modernism!
But what comes after post-modernism? What do we call Today?
Thanks to The Onion, we now know that the post-post-modernist era will be known as the pre-apocalypse era.
I love this, and will use it henceforth.
And much like ancient Roman coins inscribed with the date "200 BC", future historians will regard my works and writings as laughably clumsy forgeries made in their time, rather than the genuine pre-apocalyptic works that they are.

Speaking of apocalypse, I just watched "The Knowing". It was marred by some batshit American-style "science" because it deals with religious themes (or an American audience. Take your pick), but some other parts, mixed up with Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" (which I am currently viewing online at hulu) got me thinking.

My cute reductionist thought is that technological civilisation does progress naturally and even inevitably from the basic replicating molecules that are the beginnings of life. We have an impressive array of stats and observations that suggest that habitable Earth-like worlds are a dime a dozen out in the wider universe. We have a lot to suggest that we could expect life to arise on these worlds. But getting from simple bacteria-like life to an intelligent technological society... how does that work? So:

According to Sagan, the Big Idea that started it all off, was the idea that things in the world happened because they had causes, and those causes were knowable (rather than causes that were inexplicable and thus the will of fickle, random Gods). Ie this idea that causes can be known, is the appearance of science - the beginning of the end of mysticism. And from the application of science comes a technological edge in survival, and from there, it's a straight run to technological civilisation.
But those fickle random gods - which explain the unexplainable - I think they arose because we are hardwired to see the world as causal. We can't help it - we're born that way. We can't stop ourselves. And thus, wired to believe that it is all caused, but being utterly unable to grasp the causes, we are forced to assume causes that we can grasp - because we must have our causes. And so we get the pantheons of gods, their soap operas, the spirits and mysticisms of the ages, all wrecking havoc in the world, influencing everything, explaining everything.
The reason we are hardwired to find causes and make these associations, is because it works - it gives a huge survival advantage. Your cat does it too, and likewise ever simpler and simpler animals do it in simpler and simpler forms. We have been forged over a billion years to operate no other way. We must think causally. We must associate things. Our brain simply does not do anything else. Ever advancing associative behaviour leads to us, and it leads us to gods and mysticism, and leads us also to science.

The laws of physics drive natural selection, and natural selection selects for associative behaviour in even the simplest of organisms. Refining it indefinitely over eons, technological civilisation is a natural outcome of this process. Perhaps an inevitable outcome, given sufficient billions of years. Technology, science, civilisation, mysticism, survival, adaptation, instinct, reflex, they're all sides of the same coin.

So that was my musings while cycling home tonight from the movie.

I should try to think about useful things instead :-/

Still no luck finding a car, so I'm tempted to widen the search to include another colour. Help me with my indecision:


flickr

Poll #1379698 Car colours
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

Which colour should I get?

EDIT: I've decided to buck the trend here. The thing I figured out about the orange is that it doesn't actually look as nice as it does in that photo - that car is parked on a white surface, which is dramatically altering it's colour. When these cars are instead sitting on, say, the road, the darker colour makes them murky. :-(

Word of the day: [colour] Radiosity. ;-)