… So I Rewired It …

Part of every trip home involves attacking the “to-do” list of things my mom can’t take care of by herself. She has several wonderful neighbors who do some more immediate things like plow and shovel her out when it snows (she mows their lawn in nicer weather on her riding mower), but other tasks can wait until one of the children visit. Wrangling the artificial tree from and back to the basement, lugging things to the attic, etc. are normal November/December/January chores.

But there were three bigger jobs. One neighbor has a very large generator that was put to use during the recent ice storm; our street only lost power briefly, but the houses behind us were on the wrong side of a fallen tree and were without power, and he supplied them with enough to run the heat and other basics. To facilitate hookup for the next power outage, he decided to shuffle some breakers in our house so he could backfeed through some outlets in the garage. So I helped a little with that.

The second job was to extend the recently-installed sump pump drain further away from the house; the original placement was on the high-elevation front side of the house, and only about 5′ away. The ground had become saturated and all of the water being dumped was just filtering back in to the basement. So I got to go down to the HO E DEPOT (the “M” was being replaced) and get some PVC pipe and run the drain line off to the side of the house, about 20′ away, and an area that will drain down the hill. There was snow on the ground, so I couldn’t do a proper job and bury the pipe, a task that will have to wait until better weather.

The last job was repairing the ancient pinball machine in the basement game room. It was a relic when we got it, about 35 years ago — relays and gears and a mechanical score display, which had gone out of vogue when digital displays and electronics came out. It hadn’t been looked at since my dad died, some 12 years ago, but hadn’t seen much use for a few years after that, until my nieces got old enough to want to play. By that time my mom had re-done some flooring upstairs and installed the old carpet in the game room, and it was some time later that we noticed that the key that opens the machine was missing, and was probably sitting on the floor, under the carpet and all of the junk laying on top. So, no access to the guts of the machine, until my mom had someone in to drill out the lock this past fall.
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Maybe They Should Buy a Computer

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Wait, what? Two frikkin’ weeks to process an electronic request to update an automated process? Does this perhaps involve the Gerbil Express and pneumatic tube data transfer system? Are you baking clay tablets for data storage? This should take two microseconds!

The Earth is My Canvas

Examples of GPS drawing

The drawings and maps are made by recording location and movement using Global Positioning System technology. GPS data contains latitude, longitude, altitude, and precise time information that can be rendered, sculpted and animated.

I'm Shocked. Shocked! That TV isn't Real.

CSI lies and suspicious science over at Cocktail Party Physics

Forensic science has come a long way since Sherlock Holmes bragged that he could identify 140 types of tobacco from their ash. And far be it from me to diss one of my favorite shows on the TV I don’t own, the original CSI, which is loaded with fantastic sciency goodness, even if it is a little unrealistic. CSI? Unrealistic? Hate to break it to you kids, but, yeah. At the very least, the speed with which our intrepid heroes get their results would make any cop, ADA, or defense attorney double over in laughter, when they’re not crying.

Time-compression is the sin here, and it’s not new nor confined to CSI. I can go back to some of the favorite shows of my youth, like Adam-12, where all of the boring inaction of real-life policework has been culled. And newer shows, like NUMB3RS, display time compression as well. And the shows know this

A related sleight of hand is time compression: Charlie solves huge problems in short order. On CSI, tests come back in hours; in real life, they would take weeks. “We get bagged on a lot for that,” says CSI executive producer Naren Shankar, possibly the only writer in television with a Ph.D. in applied physics. (Shankar´s first Hollywood job was as a science researcher for Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

Time compression, to me, is a forgivable sin. I am willing to concede the trimming of the dead-time so that the show can be wrapped up in an hour. The streamlining of the false-positives fall into that category, too, for me, though I wonder if they couldn’t be worked into the story lines. (It’s quite possible they have and I’m just not remembering)

The act that bothers me more is the magic TV shows often do with image enhancement. Some low-resolution, blurry image is analyzed, and that tiny section off in the corner is blown up and magically transformed into a high-resolution crystal-clear image, revealing crucial detail (often the face of the killer, or the license plate of their car). Sorry, but if all you have is 640 x 480 from some crappy security camera, it’s not going to get better than that. Once you get down to one pixel, you can’t subdivide it.

What I Didn't Get for Christmas

But I am so tempted to acquire …

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In order to accomplish this feat, the guys from Manapotions increased the voltage to the firing motor using 2 x 9.6v battery packs. More juice equals a faster spinning motor. A faster spinning motor means that toy darts will come down on your enemies like rain. As an added bonus, they equipped the gun with a sweet LED round counter and a slick paint job. Seriously folks, this thing is like the A-bomb of office warfare. And the best part is that it is a cheap upgrade.

via

Yeah, I Noticed

Google Blog Search loses its bearings

The Google Blog Search results have generally been the fastest and most useful tool of this kind (Google displaced Technorati, which had long served in this role, some time ago). But a couple of months ago Google Blog Search started becoming pretty much useless. Instead of only reporting links from the “main” blog content, it reported all links on a blog page, including the so-called “sidebar” or blogroll, where many bloggers place a lengthy static list of blogs they read.

via Daring Fireball