Wheels within Wheels

A well-known Heinz product.

The number of US states Barack Obama claimed to have visited during his presidential campaigning.

My age.

About a month ago, I ran across this web post. Yesterday, I ran across this article, which is excerpted from a new book I’m going to have to read. Fascinating stuff.

My personal take on Sapir-Whorf is that language doesn’t provide an absolute limit to what you can think about. Instead, it limits what you can think about easily. If the first were true, then how would any new concept make it into language in the first place?

An interesting personal sidelight is that I remember having an absolute internal compass until about the age of 11. That was about the time my family left England - I wonder if I’d internalized the subliminal clues where I lived, and coming back to the US changed the clues enough to disrupt my compass for good?

Fruit flies like a banana. I found out just how much when a couple of bananas on a high shelf became “out of sight, out of mind.” I could certainly have used this advice a week or so ago.

I’ve enjoyed doing software development, but it hasn’t been the most lucrative career. Of course, if I’d gotten into web development a decade or so ago, or been actively involved with any of the other hot-technologies-of-the-moment, I could have earned more money. Of course, at the moment, I consider myself lucky to be employed at all.

It fits in with something I read years ago … there’s a “money stream” that flows through organizations, and the closer your position is to being on the banks of the stream or actually within it, the more money you earn. As a programmer, I’ve usually been nowhere near the stream.

There are other problems with being employed as a technical person. Management often considers engineers fungible, so experience is discounted - except when your resume is being considered. I can remember seeing advertisements that required five years experience with software that had only been available for three - if you hadn’t been working on the development team, you didn’t qualify for the position. I also remember a cartoon from some years ago showing a hiring manager reading a resume, with dialogue on the order of, “I see you have ten years of experience with the technology, twenty-four patents, and forty publications. No Master’s degree. The position requires a Master’s degree.” At least this time around, I haven’t seen any ads that state “x months in the position offered” as a requirement.

Then you have the pressure. Not just feature and schedule pressure, but the knowledge that your work may be safety-critical. If you’re programming the anti-lock braking system for an automobile, or the fly-by-wire stability system for an aircraft, you are subject to worries and pressures that someone programming a media player application doesn’t have.

All of which leads up to this picture, which I found here:

… but I do appreciate tools. Some are beautiful, some are special-purpose, and some are just fun.

And some are beautiful, fun, and strange:

Second video via Ace of Spades HQ.

It’s been a few weeks since my last update. I’ve been busy, but not really that busy. I went to a wedding in Missoula with my daughter, celebrated the birthdays of a couple friends, got some stuff done at work, gave my daughter one of my ukuleles which she got autographed at the Jake Shimabukuro concert, and so on. The concert was very good (which I’d expected), and Jake finished with a performance of Bohemian Rhapsody (which I hadn’t). It’s going to be on his next CD. I picked up his DVD, Play Loud Ukulele, while I was in Hawaii … I’m enjoying that, too.

In any case, I’ve been saving this link. It’s to part one of a three-part article on trying to locate the diner portrayed in an iconic painting. The painting always reminds me of the Tom Waits song (and album), Nighthawks at the Diner, although the lyrics seem to refer to a diner in San Francisco, rather than Greenwich Village. It’s a good article, and the website as a whole is worth a look. I’ve long been interested in “hidden history” and the like.

Burt Prelutsky’s essay here resonates powerfully with me.

I have an Android phone and love it, so this looks pretty interesting to me. Via Make.

It’s the Tom Swift Centennial. I started reading Tom Swift books one Christmas when my brother and I each received a Tom Swift book and a Hardy Boys book. Now it’s my other brother who collects them. In honor of the centennial, I think that some Tom Swifties are in order. If you don’t like those, you can look here for others.

And, speaking of bad writing, the results of the annual Bulwer-Lytton competition were released during my hiatus. Personally, I’m rather taken with the runner-up in the Detective Fiction category.

There were two thick letters from the IRS in my mailbox this afternoon. Luckily, they were for a prior occupant - I get all sorts of bills, collection notices and the like for him and several others. I’m relieved that these were in that category.

I made no announcement when I left, but I left on vacation on the 28th, and returned home last Sunday. Unfortunately, I fell sick two days before we left Maui. I’m just now getting over it. I also sunburned the top of my head the first time we went snorkeling, which is now peeling and looks like THE WORST DANDRUFF IN THE WORLD!

In any case, we had a fine time - two nights and a day on Oahu, staying in Waikiki, followed by the rest of the week on Maui at a resort a little north of Lahaina. Major activities were snorkeling, walking around, and taking driving tours to the summit of Haleakala and along the Road to Hana.

I acquired a new (to me) ukulele on Oahu - I had wanted to visit a ukulele factory while we were there, because I figured that more of them were likely to be on Oahu than Maui (most of Hawaii has a small town/rural feel - Honolulu is the largest city in the state). I knew that several of them gave tours, but we only had Saturday on Oahu, so I figured I’d be lucky to find any factory open on the weekend. The only two factory tours I found listed in the guide books were for the Kamaka and Koaloha factories. Kamaka only provided tours during the week, which was a pity, because I own more than one Kamaka ukulele, but Koaloha was listed as having tours at 10am and 1pm on Saturday. Since it was between our hotel and Pearl Harbor, we decided to stop on our way to see the Arizona Memorial.

It took us a little while to find; some of the street signs for the side streets weren’t too noticeable. When we got there, the large sign was out by the street, but it wasn’t obvious that you had to make your way to the back of a deep parking lot between other buildings to get to the Koaloha facility. We made it, though, and we could see two men working on ukes through the screens. The guide book was wrong, though - there were no Saturday tours, and these guys were just trying to catch up a bit on the weekend. Ah, well.

So, we went on to Pearl Harbor and spent a few hours at the Memorial. The main museum there was closed for renovations, but the movie and the static displays around the area were well worth seeing. When we left, we decided (spur of the moment) to take the Likelike Highway over to Kaneohe Bay and travel back along the coast. While there, we came across this driveway display, which I couldn’t ignore:

That’s Kimo Tulley. His older brother, Tangi (pronounced “Tung-ee”) made the ukuleles - Tangi Ukuleles was started by him and their father, Jim. I actually wasn’t planning on buying a uke; I’m working again, but I’m not earning what I was before I was laid off. I couldn’t pass up the chance to try playing a few of them, though. I wasn’t interested in a six- or eight-string uke - I’ve got a six-string Kamaka tenor uke already. I narrowed down to the two I thought sounded best, which were on the back table … the mango concert uke on the left, and the koa tenor in the middle.

The concert had loud and clear sound, but I decided that I liked the sound of the tenor better; it was sweeter. Marion thought that the tenor sounded best, also. I still wasn’t going to buy, but at the prices he was asking ($160 for the concert, and $280 for the tenor - I was expecting at least two or three times that), Marion told me I’d regret it if I didn’t buy it.

So I did, although we had to go to an ATM first, because we didn’t have that much cash between us. I had brought my $20 pawn shop “beater” uke on the trip, but I hardly touched it after that - the Tangi tenor sounds so much better. It’s got some wear and dings, but nothing significant. I think it was built in 2005 … there’s a date branded in the wood inside, but the last digit is a little blurred.

I like having striker plates both above and below the strings; sometimes I strum pretty hard, and that has an effect on the instrument. Actually, if you look at Willie Nelson’s guitar, you can see that he’s worn through part of it after so many years.

I think this is going to become my go-to ukulele. It looks and sounds beautiful, and it’s nice to have a good ukulele that has a good story associated with it.

… nostalgia for the Navy life.