Chidorho

The economic downturn has been stressful, and different people handle it in different ways. Sunday, I was in Safeway, and this elderly man pushed his cart next to mine and said "May I help you?" I looked at him, puzzled, because he wasn't wearing a Safeway uniform.

"I work here," he said.

"Oh," I said. "Well, in fact, I'm looking for little loaf pans, for banana bread."

"Aisle 14," he said.

I went to aisle 14 and discovered baking goods. But no loaf pans. Then it occurred to me that this fellow might have recently lost a job, or perhaps a lot of his retirement money. Maybe this had left him a bit confused about the difference between wanting a job and having a job.

As I was leaving him to head to aisle 14 I saw him approach someone else and ask "May I help you?"

Before putting down plywood in the attic, I wanted to have a convenient source of light up there. Yesterday I installed a light switch to control an outlet, both at the top of the attic stair I finished installing a few weeks ago. For a source of power, I opened up the nearest junction box and tapped in. I tested the result with a hand held drill. For some reason, when I flipped the switch and pulled the trigger on the drill, the drill didn't turn, it just hummed softly. I was confused by this until I noticed that the office overhead light came on whenever the drill was humming. The junction box wasn't for routing power, it was for a switch. All I had accomplished was to turn my drill into an inefficient, backup switch.

Fortunately, there was another, better-behaved, junction box nearby.

While visiting San Francisco's 54th Annual Precious Cheese North Beach Festival yesterday, I learned about Chromira printing technology. Chromira digital printers are produced by a Santa Barbara company and have been  around for 10 years. They differ from the ink and toner digital printers I'm familiar with in some fundamental ways. In my limited experience, printing color is a subtractive process. You start with white paper, and you take away the colors you don't want by putting down little dots of cyan, magenta, or yellow. If you don't want any color at all, you could put down cyan, magenta, *and* yellow. But this uses a lot of ink, and even then it tends to look brown, so these printers always include black toner or ink. It makes sense, right?

Now the Chromira printers use an additive process. They employ red, green, and blue LEDs to lay down color on appropriate photographic paper at 300 pixels per inch. So here's the funny part. On their FAQ page, under "How many LEDs does Chromira have?", we read

To print with LEDs it is necessary to have Red, Green and Blue LEDs. Rumors of a 4th, Black LED are not true. ZBE's precision control circuitry allows Dmax to be attained using Red Green & Blue only, without the need for the black LED.

If you replace "black LED" with "white LED", the above would actually make sense, since it's an additive process. As it stands, it suggests a lucrative opportunity for LED manufacturers. Don't throw out your rejected devices, just market them as black LEDs.

Another consequence of using an additive process is that the paper must be loaded in the dark, and the printer must therefore be located in a darkroom. If you feel bad that the printer on your desk uses a subtractive color system, just be happy you can fill the paper tray with the lights on.

At work we have an automated build server with an attitude. Here's the response I received after submitting a set of version labels on Friday:

Oh nuts!  Your build failed.  But there's good news, too!  No electrons were
harmed in the making of your horrible, useless, messy, dissapointing, total and
blatant failure of a build.  Boy, aren't you relieved?

Here are the exciting details:

(I'll spare you the exciting details.)

A previous response from the same build server:

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the
seventeenth day of the month, on the same day were all the fountains of the
great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

Today, though, all we've got is your build.  How exciting!

And one more:

How exciting!  How exciting!  How exciting!  How exciting!  How exciting! 
How exciting!  How exciting!  How exciting!  How exciting!  How exciting!

Anyway, it's nice after submitting code changes to know that somewhere, somebody (or something) really cares.

[This blog entry brought to you by: Peer Pressure! Thanks Sowmya and grieve]

Other than returning some rental equipment and dealing with the building inspector, this retrofit is done! The stray epoxy on the bolts was a non-issue. Had to run to Home Depot for a drill bit extension, but otherwise, the nailing and screw driving went smoothly.

When the big one hits, watch this space. I'll let you how well the retrofit worked.

Yesterday, I received a copy of the Korean translation of our book. It's a little surreal to peruse: pages filled with characters I can't read except for occasional, untranslated phrases like "Data Carrier Detect" or "ioctl" or "Hello, world!".

Looks like my name in Korean is "빌 피어스". I hope that doesn't mean something bad.

Of all the phases required for this seismic retrofit, the one involving epoxy had concerned me the most. When you squeeze the caulking gun's handle, and the resin and hardener enter the mixing nozzle, an inexorable chemical reaction begins, and it doesn't stop until that epoxy is harder than cement. This process takes place regardless of whether the epoxy happens to be neatly placed in a bolt hole, or not-so-neatly smeared on the anchor bolt threads where you are planning to later place a nut.

In fact, the epoxy doesn't set up all that quickly. For example, after inserting the first bolt and watching the excess epoxy ooze out through the anchor plate hole, I had more than enough time to crawl back out and find some rags and a toothbrush.

After a little experimentation, Mike and I came up with the following technique for the epoxy phase: 

1. Fill the holes 1/2 to 2/3 of the way. That's less than 2 squeezes of the caulking gun handle. It's hard to get this part right. The caulking gun isn't like a syringe with accurate markings on the side. You squeeze the handle, it builds up pressure, and then the epoxy oozes out the tip for a while. At least a third of our holes had too much epoxy and required some cleanup.

2. Put the anchor plate in place and insert the bolts.

3. Where necessary, use rags and a toothbrush to clean up the exposed portion of the bolts.
 
I had tho't before starting that we might want to secure the plates first. This would ensure that the tops of the plates were flush with the mud sill. In fact, we had better luck filling the holes correctly with the plate out of the way. When we did put each plate in place, it tended to stay where we wanted it.

Another wrinkle: we used Simpson Strongtie's SETPAC-EZ epoxy tubes which are designed to work with a standard caulking gun. It turns out these tubes are just a tad to large for the standard caulking gun I purchased at Home Depot. I could get them to fit by using a utility knife to whittle down some excess plastic at the end with the nozzle. I did this under the house, and in one case, I cut a little too much. It looked fine until I tried to dispense it and the resin oozed out at the wrong place.

Overall, this phase went smoothly. Of course, we don't know yet how well the nuts will tighten onto the bolts we had to clean up.

Having worked on a seismic upgrade, I've occasionally wondered whether the effort will ever pay off. I don't really want to come home some day to find my neighbors' houses in rubble while ours proudly stands. But still, what a shame to have all that work wasted....

Well, perverse psychology aside, we were reminded this evening that we really do live in an earthquake zone. The trembler that rocked the suspended lamps over our dinner table at a Mountain View restaurant was one of the strongest I've felt while living here. And according to the usgs, at magnitude 5.6, tonight's earthquake was the world's second biggest earthquake of the last five days.

Yesterday, Mike and I finished what I believe--or at least hope--is the hardest part of the seismic retrofit: drilling anchor bolt holes in the concrete foundation. This job took us from 10:30am to 11:30pm (with an extra stint for me from 7:45am to 8:45am this morning to blow the dust out of the holes with compressed air), and I can now summarize the task with several observations.

Observation 1. Friends make hard jobs easier. I already mentioned Mike's help (I might not have started this project if he hadn't been so enthusiastic). But I didn't mention Cindi. She helped out yesterday by running to OSH for a new pair of coveralls when Mike, who had mentioned last time that his pair were a little tight where it mattered most, noticed that they had gotten even tighter after going through the laundry. Cindi contributed with a steady flow of comfort food throughout the day,  including lunch from Whole Foods, halloween candy, a cream puff from Beard Papa's, a batch of chocolate chip nut bars, and a home-cooked Thai dinner. She also graciously tipped the stereo speakers over and cranked the volume in order to pump through the floor relevant numbers like Men at Work: "Do you come from a land down under?"  and Talking Heads: "Burning down the house".

Observation 2. If you live anywhere near Redwood City, Ed of AAA-Rentals is your friend. He graciously let me delay my order twice when I was sick, and didn't charge extra when I returned equipment a tad late. (Side note: I had Roto-rooter out this week to clear a drain. After writing a check for a number too embarrassingly large to mention here, I asked how much their rooter cost. He said it was expensive; a couple thousand dollars. A better idea, he said, would be to rent one from AAA-Rentals. Next time....)

Observation 3. The key to a job is the right tools. I used a hand drill once to put a hole through the stucco on our exterior wall. Based on the time that took, I would have estimated the time of this phase of the retrofit at about ten years. But not with the Bosch 11235EVS SDS-Max Rotary Hammer Drill. Weighing 15 pounds, this little marvel will chew through concrete like hungry workers through nut bars. And it massages your brain at the same time. Other key equipment: a good dust respirator, safety glasses, elbow pads, knee pads, coveralls, ski cap, and my personal invention, the two-boards-bolted-together-with-washers-in-between metal bender.

Random tho't while vegging with a cold and looking for a video of the Democratic debates:

Video compression will be more effective in the future when the compressor and expander are smarter about human perception. For videos about people, the faces (and especially eyes) need to be rendered most carefully. The details on the walls (or Obama's tie or Clinton's jacket) can be glossed over. In general, the portions of the image that humans focus on need the most detail. The intelligent image compressor of the future will analyze each frame like a cartoon artist who, with limited lines and brush strokes, generates the optimal image to convey what the viewer believes is important.

And if the results look cartoonish? Well, that's a small price to pay for snappy downloads. For the primary debates, it might even be an improvement.

Last week I received my first royalty check: $1271.16.

Yay!

It'd be nice if checks like this would keep showing up on a regular basis, but I have reason to believe otherwise. When the book was slashdotted, it jumped to Amazon's top 500--for the space of a few hours. Last time I checked it was in the top 24,000.

Since fame is fleeting, I'd like to spend this $1271 on something that will last. Ideas so far:

• a classical guitar
• an IPhone (with money left over to buy two future IPhone replacements as they go out of date)
• a digital SLR camera

(and more ideas...)

• a telescope
• a microscope
• an oscilloscope

What would you do?

Last Wednesday Cindi and I skipped our Ultimate Frisbee game to join the Homebrew Robotics Club on their field trip to Anybots (http://anybots.com). Anybots is the brain child of Trevor Blackwell (http://tlb.org), who made enough money on a startup back in the day that he can now devote himself to building androids. If you haven't already seen the video below, it's a good way to meet the robots Dexter and Monty without any fear of them falling on you.

Trevor and his colleague gave an engaging presentation, but the robots weren't behaving as well that night as they did in the video. Dexter was having trouble with his compressed air/power cable. As we gathered around, he took a few steps, started to topple toward his left, and then, before falling into the audience, was yanked into the air by two ropes. The ropes hung from a protective metal framework, and, after letting him swing a bit, they lowered him to a standing position. He was good at standing. He stood there, wearing a pair of blue tennis shoes, and when Trevor pushed him, he recovered easily. In a later demonstration, Trevor held the cable, and Dexter walked quite well.

Unlike Dexter, Monty had arms. He didn't have legs; he rolled around on two wheels. Kind of like Rosie from the Jetsons, but with bigger wheels. Segway style. Monty's left arm was paralyzed that evening, but his right arm and hand worked well. Trevor tele-operated him from backstage, and he successfully threw a ball.

It was inspiring to see a small team realizing their dreams to build robots, tho' I wonder about the near-term outlook for commercial products. The Anybots lab struck me as a place driven by passion, generous resources, and few deadlines.

The hardest part of anchoring the house still lies ahead: securing the mud sill to the foundation using metal plates. Before taking that step, I have to bend the plates (which are manufactured at 90 degrees) to the correct angle for our trapezoidal foundation. Sunday's task was determining the exact placement for each anchor plate, and measuring the angle each would have to be bent. To help me out, our friend Mary graciously donned the spare coveralls and spent a couple hours under the house recording foundation angles, which I measured with a magnetic protractor.

The metal plates I'm using (HFA6s from Simpson Strong-Tie) are designed to be bent to the appropriate angle. But considering they are supposed to hold the entire house in place during an earthquake, it's not surprising that bending them is nontrivial. Pictured here is Mary, fiddling with another protractor, and my first scheme for bending these plates. The best part of this scheme is that it justified buying and installing a 6", 40 lb vise from my new favorite toy store: Home Depot.

If you look closely, you'll notice that this scheme is good for increasing the angle of the metal plate, but not good for decreasing it. More about that later.

Friday and Saturday it rained for the first time in several weeks, and it is probably for that reason that a colony of ants under our back yard decided to move. I noticed that many of the ants were carrying larvae, and they were carrying them into our outdoor water heater shed. I opened the shed and discovered, on a horizontal board, a mass of larvae covered with ants.

My first reaction was to grab a can of Raid from the garage. But  then I set it down, not far from the ants, and I took a picture instead and got on the internet to determine whether they were wood-destroying carpenter ants. If so, they had played into my hands. Their best hope for the future was lying there in a heap, fully exposed.

After zooming in on the photo, and looking at various pictures on the internet, I decided they weren't carpenter ants. Maybe they were just pavement ants.

I went back out to the shed, and noticed the heap of larvae had gotten smaller. I also noticed that a trail leading up and into the attic had gotten bigger and some of those ants were carrying larvae.

I sprayed the trail, and then I sprayed the interior of the shed and closed the door.

It's amazing how fast Raid works.

This story could have ended differently. Like some zen master in some ancient story, I might have casually mentioned, later in life, how on that autumn day I had fashioned a means of carrying the ants, perhaps with pieces of cardboard scented with jam, and how I had later witnessed the colony take root in the corner of the yard, well away from the house, next to the redwood tree.

Well.

I didn't spray the ants that were still in the ground. At least I can say that.

For a building to perform well in an earthquake, it needs to provide continuous load paths from the roof down to the foundation. There's a science to this, especially to construction of adequate shear walls. But I'm just doing a retrofit, and there's not an easy way to upgrade walls. Fortunately, the greatest loads are at the base of the house, and this is an area I have access to.

Yesterday, Mike and I completed phase 1 of the retrofit: securing the rim joist to the mud sill. Here we're displaying the key to the operation, the palm nailer. The space above the mud sill is limited by the floor boards to five and a half inches. Not enough room for a hammer, but just enough room for a compressed air driven palm nailer.

Notice in the photo one of the other keys to the operation: contractor gloves with special magnet powers.

At this point, a stiff earthquake could still take the house off the foundation, but at least it will take the mud sill with it.

One of the reasons I wanted to buy a house rather than a condo was so that I could take more direct charge of our home's earthquake readiness. Toward this end, I've been spending spare time over the last several weeks trying to decide how to anchor our home to its foundation. My first tho't was to throw money at the problem. I got one bid (from a contractor I didn't like) at $4400. I got another bid (from a contractor I liked a lot) at $7600. Since this is a lot of after-tax money, and since a friend has offered to help, I've decided to do the work myself.

One of the first steps was to perform a survey of the foundation and see how it attaches (or doesn't attach) to the house. There's plenty more to be said about the foundation, but perhaps more interesting is the mummified rat I discovered not far from the main crawl space entrance. What's curious is that, while his fur is completely gone, his whiskers are intact. 

Does this make any sense? Is it possible that insects have carried off his fur to line their nests, while leaving the unwieldy whiskers behind? It's a puzzle, but I did make one comforting deduction from this find. It appears the crawl space under our house has been dry for a long time.

A few weeks ago, I switched cubicles at work. From my old cube, I could see a small portion of the East Bay by looking through a hole in the wall I shared with my neighbor. The new cube, with two panels removed, opens onto an uncluttered walkway with floor-to-ceiling windows. This is on the eight floor, and on a clear day I can see a bike trail, the San Mateo bridge, Mt. Diablo, the port of Oakland, the Bay bridge, and if conditions are right, fifteen or so kite boarders.

Before I moved, my manager said I needed to ask Facilities for help, since they like to be involved. I told him I didn't need help, but suggested I could ask them to wash the windows. (I didn't, of course; I asked them to transfer the phone instead.) Coincidentally, within a couple days after I moved, Facilities washed the outside of my part of the building. The windows are spotless, and the view is awesome.

Gadzooks! It's already been a month since my last entry. This journal writing can be burdensome.

But I'm up to it. My fan base has expectations, and I don't want to disappoint. (According to livejournal I've already made two friends. Are you two reading this?)

Okay, here's the entry proper. This is an Ariolimax Columbianus I met recently while hiking at the Purissima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve. 

[missing image here]

Cute, eh? Actually, he's invisible. I assumed that uploading images to livejournal would be as easy as blogspot. But apparently it requires I upgrade my account, or host the pictures myself. And my deadline is in 30 seconds.....