Words and pictures from Silicon Valley by Chris Gulker
From the monthly archives:
We can cross ‘upgrade WordPress’ off our New Year’s Lesser Resolutions list. You’re looking at it! We made one small mistake (a misplaced ‘?’ plus angle bracket) in the config file, but quickly found and fixed it in TextWrangler. Two months, two upgrades… and, as of post #1, no ‘403′ errors in MarsEdit…
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As the New Year looms we found ourselves making the usual list of resolutions for the New Year. Buddy Scott and I, over our morning coffee, talked about the usual random topics, including at least one New Year’s resolution. I brought up my determination to do our loop walk at 3 mph and also to complete the 3-month Brain Fitness Program from Posit Science as Resolutions Number One and Two.
Scott mentioned a British friend who had been blogging about the shortcomings of cash including counterfeiting, recalling an incident where an attempt to copy a $20 bill on a networked copier resulted in a phone call from the Treasury department.
Of course, I immediately put a twenty on my $200 Canon multifunction scanner/copier/printer/fax and produced a scarily real-looking reproduction. I guess the Canon doesn’t have the built-in anti-currency copying feature (aka CDS) built into high-end scanners and programs like Photoshop. You can see the detail captured by my inexpensive rig in the crop reproduced here. Good luck, Treasury… I think the counterfeit cat may be out of the ink-jet bag, as it were (btw, I destroyed the copy – it was only the face side, anyway). So far, no calls from Treasury – but then our Canon is on a USB port, not Ethernet, so no IP address.
After Scott and Lilly departed, my thoughts went back to The List So Far:
There are a bunch of Lesser Resolutionss: get AirTunes working with the stereo, upgrade WordPress, learn more about neuropalsticity among them. We better get going…
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Woke up this morning somewhere near the Napa/Sonoma county line to see pretty clouds drifting in a deep blue sky. We’re still hanging out at our ‘undisclosed location‘…
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Granddaughter Grace was the center of a very cheery Christmas this year. She’s shown here with her two favorite presents: a 10-foot-long tunnel she can crawl through and a large blue box that had held one of her mother’s presents.
Linda and I had as much fun as we’d had in a long time: this has been a hard year for this family, punctuated as it was by the deaths of Linda’s Dad and our close cousin Kelly. Without John, Julie and Grace, there would have been very few bright spots.
Indeed, this was the year we passed the torch - Christmas Eve and morning were spent in Oakland at John and Julie’s home. As Julie and John prepared to visit Julie’s dad, we escaped to a hidden location…
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We walkers (Scott, Tiger Lily and I) took note, if not warning as we made our rounds on wet Menlo streets. Scott talked about Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s new book that tracks the reasons for success. One of Gladwell’s maxims is that it takes 10,000 hours to become really good at anything (he notes the Beatles played 8 hour sets in dive clubs for 7 years before they became phenoms).
In an article forwarded to me by physical therapist Heidi Engel, a doctor who specializes in neural retraining of stroke victims says it takes 10,000 repetitions to relearn a task – interesting concurrence.
Warming up over coffee, we also talked about Stuart Kauffman, whose book ‘Reinventing the Sacred‘ is my current reading. Kauffman, a biologist who also studies complexity at Santa Fe Institute sees criticality (a rare state of exact balance between ordered and chaotic systems) in everything from molecules to cells to humans to the global economy. After 14 chapters of careful, densely parsed reasoning from first principals, I’m hoping we’ll be getting to the ’sacred’ part pretty soon. Outliers may be next up for the Kindle…
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We noted, a while back, that we had decided to go mano a mano with a stereo speaker problem we’d been having. It wasn’t easy, thanks to near-unbelievably bad Sony product design, a broken (actually, critter-gnawed) wire under the house and some other issues, but we finally succeeded.
An amplifier dedicated to producing thunderous low tones turned out to be the answer to our receiver’s shortcomings. As a result, our woofers are now pumping out rich and pleasing bass tones where previously we had clear and sharp mid tones and treble and very modest bass.
This morning I almost cried listening to Santana’s Soul Sacrifice and, previously, King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King. I was a teenager in the 60s when component stereo brought deep bass to music… my music cortex now demands crunchy, booming, buzzing bass..
The big surprise has been how much better jazz sounds: the string bass so often found on jazz tracks is now live and clear, complete with the buzzes, rumbles and fretboard noise. R&B gently shakes the house and DVD movies sound like we’re in a theater, much to spouse’s delight. Now we need a good way to get iTunes connected to the receiver…
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Here’s a cheery holiday image (at least from my perspective): it’s a picture extracted from the MRI study made of my brain this morning at UCSF. The small white squiggle in the lower left quadrant of the picture corresponds to the glioma (brain tumor) in the right parietal lobe of my brain (the ‘perspective’ here is looking up at my head from my feet).
This image hasn’t changed for about a year now (compare it to the left-hand image, made 2 years ago in this post). As a result, I’m off chemotherapy, off steroid therapy and working hard on getting my left side back – all good things. Without the need to go for chemo infusions every 2 weeks, I can think about dreams like spending a month in France next year…
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Frost and icy puddles greeted Scott and Lily and me as we headed out into the 38-degree morning. Lily didn’t seem to mind the sharp air as she busily led the way through a neighborhood of frosty roofs and lawns.
One puddle, reflecting the warm colors of the morning sky, had big crystals of ice on the surface. The less-travelled streets were slick with a thin, icy layer – I had to wobble carefully around a few spots.
It was good catching up with Scott – he’d been out of town for a week, and we cancelled last Tuesday’s walk due to the miserable weather. Scott has an amazing array of interests and somehow finds time to be well informed about all of them. This morning’s conversation ranged from clever uses of Blogger and one of its plugins to the choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at President-elect Obama’s swearing-in to a recipe for New Orleans cassoulet to Bay Area radio icon Dave Morey’s imminent departure from the KFOG morning show – a not atypical morning discourse.
Lily was a muddy-pawed mess by the time we made it back to World HQ, and Scott spent some time with a towel and scissors cleaning her up as we sipped Peet’s coffee and chatted. We had KFOG on the kitchen speakers this morning – we’re both Morey fans…
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The UNIX gods are good today… the 403 we were seeing yesterday has just disappeared… I haven’t touched anything on the server or in MarsEdit. And we’ve been thinking about upgrading to WordPress 2.7…
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Finally, a photo of the new LED lights in the Redwoods, seen here from the driveway (above) and from down the block.
The lights turned out to be particularly hard to photograph against a bright Western sky on a clear night. I stood in my long-suffering neighbor’s driveway for almost 90 minutes for the sky to dim enough to produce the vertical shot: the horizontal was a relatively quick grab as I made my way, sniffling and numb-fingered, back to the house.
The new lights are bright, cheery and stretch much higher into the trees than the old incandescent set, but their LED bulbs use less than one-tenth of the power of the old ones. A green and cheery ‘win-win’…
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