I don’t know what it’s supposed to be (apart from a door), but I kind of like the look.
Archive for the ‘Activities’ Category
Just because
Saturday, October 9th, 2010That was the week that was
Monday, September 6th, 2010… so to speak.
Tuesday was my birthday, and part of my celebration was to get tickets to Tomfoolery at the Denver Victorian Playhouse. I enjoyed it (how can you not enjoy some vintage Tom Lehrer?), but was somewhat disappointed in the performance. Given that the performance we attended was an extension at the end of the run, I did not expect to see performers forget their lines, which happened at least twice.
I was also bothered by the songs not matching the recordings. Some of that may be due to censorship imposed on the LPs by the recording company (I’m thinking specifically of the line from Be Prepared – the LP has “keep that pot well-hidden where you’re sure that it will not be found;” the performance – and the songbook Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer – have the line as “keep those reefers hidden where you’re sure that they will not be found.”). There were other changes that didn’t appear to have that type of historical background, though. The most egregious example was probably The Vatican Rag (which is not included in the songbook, unfortunately), which was performed with an extra verse – I don’t quite remember, but it may have been made by munging parts of the first and second verse together – and altered lyrics where Mr. Lehrer included Latin phrases. That was a bit hard to tell, though, as the performers mumbled the Latin sufficiently that it was hard to make out what they were singing.
I’d seen Tomfoolery once before – back in the 1980s, I’d seen a performance at Hannigan’s Greenhouse, which was an actual working greenhouse. I was mentioning this during intermission when one of the crew (Stan Li) introduced himself to me – he’d also been crew on that production. He said that show ran for eight months, two of which were in Hannigan’s Greenhouse before the humidity became too much for them. The one vivid memory I have of the earlier production was of the performance of the song, Smut. The cast for Tomfoolery consists of two men and two women. In the current production, all of them are involved in this song, moving about the stage while holding pornographic magazines. In the earlier production, one of the women did it as a solo performer, dressed as a little girl and holding a large teddy bear. Much funnier staging, I thought.
My birthday activities finished up with a trip to Keystone Resort to go biking in the mountains. Beautiful area; we biked the trails from Swan Mountain Road through Dillon and into Frisco and back. The 20-30mph winds Sunday were a bit of a problem, though. Saturday would have been a better day for biking, but traffic going into the mountains was bad to the point that we couldn’t have done it. Still, a good time was had by all.
Thinking must be too hard
Monday, June 14th, 2010Yesterday evening, Marion asked me to replace the battery in one of her smoke detectors … it had started giving her the “low battery” beep, and she couldn’t manage it herself.
It turned out that I couldn’t do it, either, without the help of serious tools. A few months ago, she had her house painted. When they painted the ceiling, the workers apparently detached the removable part of the detector, painted the ceiling and the mount, and then reattached the main part of the detector without letting the paint dry. Really, they should have not painted the mount, but they did.
The first thing that happened was that I broke off the cover of the smoke detector while trying to unscrew it from the mount. I ended up using a sharp chisel to slice away the various parts of the locking mechanism, and now I have two further tasks – see if the painters did the same thing with her other smoke detectors, and then buy and install replacements.
I’m back
Thursday, June 10th, 2010I 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.
What you see may not be what you get
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010There’s an interesting post here about heisenbugs and compiler optimizers. I’ve found two compiler bugs in my time. One was related to the optimizer, although it wasn’t due to the compiler generating incorrect code. Well, not quite, anyway.
In one case, a commercial embedded cross-compiler, the optimized code the compiler was generating was logically correct code. The problem was that it was incorrect in context. I was accessing machine registers that had to be accessed with 16-bit operations – if you tried to access half of the register with a byte operation, the processor would overwrite the other half of the register with random data. Naturally, the compiler was optimizing 16-bit accesses that only dealt with one byte of the register to 8-bit operations, because that was the better thing to do when dealing with normal memory. The compiler could produce code for several related variants of the processor in question, and I’m not sure that the register restrictions in question applied to other processors at the time.
I reported what was happening to the vendor, and they changed it in the next release of the compiler, but I couldn’t wait for the fix, and had to use assembly language to produce my access routines.
The other instance involved an IDE that used GCC as a cross-compiler. Our code wasn’t working, and initial investigation showed results that made no sense – one passed parameter was getting the value meant for the other, and another was getting a garbage value. Closer examination of the generated code showed that the stack frame for the function call in question was being built incorrectly, which beggared belief. Why was it only happening on this one call, rather than on all of them? If it were a general bug, there would be virtually no programs would be compiled correctly – what was it about this one call? Further investigation showed that the vendor had grabbed a version of GCC that had been pulled from distribution after about a day because of a significant bug involving calling across languages – calling C routines from C worked, as did calling C++ routines from C++, but calling one from the other didn’t … the specific bug that we were seeing, although we didn’t realize that it was due to a cross-language call until we saw the release notes on the GNU website. We were lucky that the vendor provided the capability to tell the IDE how to access other tools, or we’d have been dead in the water on our project.
It’s not often that you run into compiler bugs, unless you’re the one maintaining the compiler (in which case you probably see them more often than you’d care to). Most times, the problem is in your code, not the compiler. However, you can’t rule it out, particularly if you’re doing things that stress the compiler’s capabilities, or use features that most people don’t require. Some people make a point of looking for compiler bugs, which is nice of them. It’s not what I’d care to do on a daily basis, although I have designed and written test code to verify that language features work as intended.
Helping out
Sunday, November 8th, 2009I did a little volunteering for Project Cure yesterday. I doubt I’ll do much for them on an ongoing basis – they’re located in Centennial, at the south end of the metro area, and I live up at the north end.
Normally, they collect medical supplies to be sent overseas. However, they’re not allowed to send out supplies for human use if they have less than a year before their expiration data. As a result, I hauled a carload of assorted IV fluids to the Humane Society facility in Greeley. They were glad to get them, although they weren’t certain where they’d put them all. Things at the Humane Society were complicated by the fact that they were holding both an adopt-a-thon and a dog vaccination clinic at the time. We did manage to get everything unloaded and stored, though, and I got to see a number of cute puppies and kittens in the process.
Happy Halloween
Saturday, October 31st, 2009I made a Jack-o-lantern today, but I left it a bit late. It doesn’t look all that good, but I’ve never claimed to be an artist.
I’ve done better Jack-o-lanterns in the past; you can see a couple of them here.
I did do a web search for Cthulhu images, though I didn’t find anything that particularly helped. I was quite taken with this one, though, which riffs on one of my favorite Miyazaki movies. Actually, I’m not certain that there are any Miyazaki movies that I don’t consider favorites.
More notes per song
Saturday, October 24th, 2009Tonight, I’m going to see Steve Martin in concert, playing banjo with the Steep Canyon Rangers. It should be a good time – I’ve heard some of the songs already. Actually, I’ve heard earlier versions of the songs already; I have a copy of the LP, The Steve Martin Brothers. The post title comes from the liner notes:
Dear Banjo Music Customer:
Note for note, banjo music is the cheapest music available in America today. While the average rock song has 75 to 100 notes per song, banjo music can have a full 200 to 300 notes per song, not including fade-outs. So called “easy listenin'” records may be easy on the ears, but they’re sure hard on the pocketbook at an average of 50 notes per song. It’s ok to listen to free music on the radio, but my music dollar will be spent on banjo music every time.
See you at the movies!
Steve
Should be a fun evening. I’m certainly looking forward to it. Maybe I’ll see if I can get him to sign the LP.
Not much to show after thirty years
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009I was going through boxes in the garage the other day, looking for things to fill the bookcases I recently assembled, when I came across the October 1979 issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia. The magazine is now known as “Dr. Dobb’s,” but things back then were a little looser, with many companies having fanciful names – among the others I recall are Pickles & Trout, Parasitic Engineering, and Brown Dog Engineering, and Infoworld was once known as the Silicon Gulch Gazette. I used to work for a word processor company called NBI. Management claimed that it stood for “Nothing But Initials,” but I’ve seen one of the company’s original business cards, and its original name was Necton Bylennium, Inc. As an aside, I read about a man in California who was starting a computer consultancy back in the early 1980s who had trouble coming up with a business name that contained “computer” or “data” that wasn’t already being used, so he ended up naming his business “Solfan Industries,” with “Solfan” being an initialism for “Sick Of Looking For A Name.”
In any case, that issue of DDJ contains an article which is almost my sole publication to date in the computer field, apart from a letter to the editor in an old Apple II user group publication, a program distributed by the same user group, and a caption in one of the E.E. Times‘ Immortal Works competitions. Not a lot of output for thirty years, is it? Ah, well, something is better than nothing, and it’s not as though I haven’t been doing other things in the meantime.
Another hobby to occupy me
Sunday, October 4th, 2009I’ve wanted to do luthiery for a few years. I’ve built one kit ukulele, which was fun, but didn’t come out as nicely as I’d like. I’m not doing anything currently, but I’d like to get more involved in building instruments. Among other things, I have a broken Kamaka soprano ukulele I was given by a friend that I’d like to repair.
I ran across Kathy Matsushita’s amateur luthiery page some years ago, then lost the link. I found it again recently, and there are some new things on it.
Another option is classes; at least one of the local luthiers has run classes in which you build a guitar from scratch over the course of a few months. Too bad I can’t afford to do that.