Teleidoscope

Mon, Apr 27, 2009

Continental 2

Posted at 2:43 pm MDT to Travel

I had the alarm clock set for 4:30, but awakened at 4 and saw snow covering everything. I decided trying to get any more sleep would be hopeless, so I headed out to the airport earlier than I had originally planned.

There was snow everywhere and the rental car said the external temperature for most of the trip was 32 F, but the highways were wet with occasional patches of slush. I drove well below the speed limit, being in an unfamiliar vehicle, but still made decent time.

By 6 am I had returned the rental, taken the shuttle to the terminal, passed through security, and bought some breakfast. I ate in the seating area that served Houston.

After the 7am flight had loaded, the gate attendants came around to the few people left in the seating area and asked: Were we scheduled to fly to Houston?
Did we have connections? and Had we checked bags?

My answers were Yes, Yes and No, so they put me on the earlier flight. That was just as well, since by the time the plane was de-iced and took off it was after 8.

I was able to watch them de-icing the Frontier jet with the white rabbit on the tail while we waited to be de-iced. It was fascinating. There is one tanker truck on each side of the plane being de-iced. The trucks have guys in booths at the top of big cherry-picker arms riding up and down and around controlling the nozzles that spray the de-icer solutions. They have to stretch the cherry-pickers all the way up to spray the top of the planes tail, but they stay lower when they are working on the wings and ailerons and plane body. First they spray some pink stuff that melts ice and snow and colors any snow and ice that hasn't melted yet, so they can see what they missed. Then they spray some green stuff that helps prevent additional ice from forming.

Even after we finally took off, the plane flew the long way around to avoid bad weather over central Texas, so we arrived a half hour later than the 8 am flight's original arrival time. But that still left me a comfortable amount of time to reach my flight to Mobile.

I heard the Houston gate attendants telling people they already had printed out new boarding passes on later flights for people with connections to Newark (and, I suppose, other destinations). That was unexpectedly well organized -- I'm even more impressed by the Continental staff in Bush airport in Houston. (Though I tend to think that flying from Denver to Newark by way of Houston is a prime symptom of what is wrong with aviation in this country...)

I'm going to add Continental to my list of favored airlines, along with Frontier.

After all that, my flight from Houston to Mobile actually arrived 15 minutes early.

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Sun, Apr 26, 2009

Unfinished Symphony

Posted at 8:32 pm MDT to Media

Last night was the final concert of the 2008-2009 season for the Boulder Philharmonic. They played three pieces, and the soloist also played an encore.

The first piece was "Lyric for Strings" by George Walker, a living African American composer. There was a family connection in this piece: the Concert Master of the Boulder Phil is his son.

Next was Schubert's 8th "Unfinished" Symphony, followed after the intermission by Brahms Second Piano Concerto, with Jon Nakamatsu as soloist.

Nakamatsu was an excellent pianist -- more showy in his encoure than during the Concerto-- but I have to confess that the Brahms did not really grab me.

I loved the Schubert, and the Lyrics for Strings, though, so I may just have been in the mood for melody. Being tired from travelling probably didn't help.

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Continental

Posted at 8:31 pm MDT to Travel

This weekend is my last weekend home before the end of the contract. The trip from Mobile would not quite have been faster if I had driven, but it was 11 AM before I reached my front door.

And I am really not fond of landing in thunderstorms in commuter jets. The plane from Mobile had 57 passenger seats. Things got very bouncy at the end of the flight from Mobile to Houston. And then, already running late because of the weather, we sat outside the gate in Houston until after my flight to Denver (which was on schedule) took off.

I have to say Continental treated me very well. They gave me vouchers for a hotel and a meal, so I spent the night in a bed in a Marriott, not in the airport terminal.

They were giving out a number of vouchers. I guess the storms disrupted the evening flight schedules pretty badly.

The weather in Denver was drizzly and cold, and I got home late enough, and tired enough that I gave Nanette a call at the Farmers' market and told her I wasn't coming down.

The weather was nicer today (Sunday), but now another front is moving in. I'm worried things may be nasty when I head to the airport at 5 am tomorrow.

I'm glad I'll be driving the next time I travel from Mobile to Boulder, which will be May 16th.

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Tue, Apr 21, 2009

Browser Crashes with Kubuntu 8.10

Posted at 6:21 pm MDT to Technology

I was having huge numbers of browser crashes with Kubuntu 8.10. Both Firefox and Konqueror were having problems.

I tried every fix I could find by googling

What finally seems to have worked was editing nsswitch.conf and removing the value "wins". I've had only one browser crash in the few days since I did that.

It's weird that a problem with Samba (which allows connections between Windows and other machines) would break the browsers. But somehow it is not surprising that something Windows-derived is the problem.

The next version of Kubuntu is due out at the end of the week. I'll back up the laptop while I'm at home this weekend in preparation, but I probably won't try to update until at least a few days after the release: the servers are always swamped at first, so the download would take forever.

It will be interesting to see what works differently and which bugs are fixed. Also what ends up newly broken...

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Mon, Apr 20, 2009

Dirty Rice

Posted at 6:01 pm MDT to Technology

In honor of being on the Gulf Coast, I've made Zatarain's dirty rice from the box a couple of times, but I thought I should try making the real thing at least once.

1 pint package of chicken livers, diced
cooked until pink goes away
1 large  onion diced, cooked until translucent
1 large rib of celery, diced and
1 large red bell pepper, diced, cook a couple of minutes
1 1/2 cup rice
3 cups chicken broth
dash of red chile flakes
fresh ground balsk pepper
salt

The traditional recipe would also include chopped up chicken gizzards, but the packages of gizzards were huge.

I'll have to try this at home with the chicken from the Farmers' market. And dice the veggies and meat smaller next time, when I should have my good knives available.

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Sun, Apr 19, 2009

Work in Progress 04/19/09

Posted at 5:06 pm MDT to Net of Mirrors

Here is the current state of the first image: The Trickster. There are a lot of things I want to do with shading and such that I know are possible, but I haven't figured out how to do them yet.

I also desperately need to rework the hands and foot. The general anatomy is iffy, but the hands and feet are just placeholders at the moment.

The head came out pretty well, mostly because it is semi-traced from an illo of an actual Japanese fox. (The internet contains everything.)

And I haven't quite made up my mind whether he is just an animal-headed god like Anubis or has a fluffy tail. I'm leaning toward adding the fluffy tail, but haven't quite figured ot how to handle it.

See more ...

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Sat, Apr 18, 2009

Lefty Tablet

Posted at 2:48 pm MDT to Technology

The Intuos3 works very nicely except for one problem: it has control buttons on the upper left that provide things like "Shift", Control", "Alt", "Space" and a touch strip that acts like a scroll wheel. Unfortunately, that location is where my writing hane naturally rests, since I am what is called a hook-handed lefty. Things kept going nuts.

With a bit of googling, I learned that I could use the "xsetwacom" utility to adjust things.

I could probably have turned off the buttons, but that would be a nuisance: the art programs use those control keys a lot.

Turning the pad upside down puts the buttons at the lower right, which is safer. I could probably learn to draw upside down (especially since I am not used to using a graphics tablet at all, and not much of an artist in physical media). I used a trackball with my first laptop that fit between the top of the keyboard and the screen, but only if it was rotated 90 degrees. You look at the screen and your hand does whatever is needed to make the cursor go where it need to go, and even if the necessary motion is not "logical" it quickly becomes normal.

Fortunately, with xsetwacom available, I don't need to learn to draw upside down. With the following commands run automatically when I log in, the pad will be rotated 180 degrees, the touch strip swaps end for end so "up" means "up" from my point of view, and the shift and space keys are swapped so "Space" is sort of bottom center and "Shift" is above the other control keys. Alt and Control are OK where they were.

# invert graphics tablet for left handed use
xsetwacom set pad Rotate HALF
xsetwacom set pad StripLUp "core key down"
xsetwacom set pad StripLDn "core key up"
xsetwacom set pad Button4 "core key shift"
xsetwacom set pad Button1 "core key space"

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Thu, Apr 16, 2009

Insomnia Again

Posted at 6:35 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Gah. Last night I went to bed at about 11. I was awake enough to look at the alarm clock at 1:30, 2:30, 3:30 and 4:30. Also 5:30, which is near enough to when the clock goes off that it was basically the end of the night. There's been way too much of this for the past few weeks.

I'd say that I was eager to get back to my own bed and quiet house with no upstairs and downstairs neighbors, but I'm prone to bouts of insomnia even at home.

But I'm feeling very worn. I think I need to spend a lot of this weekend napping in bed or on the couch.

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Tue, Apr 14, 2009

Tablet

Posted at 9:11 pm MDT to Technology

My new toy, the Intuos3 graphics tablet has arrived. I edited xorg.conf to activate it, and rebooted.

Both the Gimp (GNU IMage Processing) and Krita (the KDE painting program) are able to see it. So tomorrow I'll be able to start playing with it. (I didn't sleep well last night, and won't get sleep tonight if I start playing with it this evening.)

The tablet is called a 4x6 model, but it is a widescreen model so it actually has more active area than that. I don't have a ruler (annoying) but the active area is a little larger than a standard paperback book. The unit as a whole measures about 8.5x10.5x0.5 inches, so it will be easily portable. The next size larger tablet (nominal active area 6x8) is 13.5x10.5x0.5 -- basically the size of my laptop but thinner -- which seemed like overkill, aside from being more expensive

I also got a case for for the tablet, and an accessory pack with spare stylus points, etc., because they were available now. They might not be readily available in the future since the model is no longer current.

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Mon, Apr 13, 2009

VMWare on Ubuntu 8.10

Posted at 9:58 pm MDT to Technology

VMWare server wasn't passing CTRL-ALT-DEL to windows clients since I upgraded Ubuntu to 8.10. (I was able to log in to my RedHat 5 client, so I could tell that the basic keyboard handling was not broken.)

I checked for vmware update and upgraded to VMWare Server 2.0.1, but that did not fix the problem.

Googling the ubuntu forums, I found a note that "The solution is to add "xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true" to ~/.vmware/config or to /etc/vmware/config".

Once I made the change and restarted VMWare (the restart may not have been necessary) I was able to get into my Windows clients.

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Muggy

Posted at 8:04 pm MDT to Weather

I awoke this morning to darkness and thunder. The sun came out for a while at midday, but mst of the day was cloudy.

I would be miserable in this climate without airconditioning, and even with it, I find things unpleasantly humid. I'm glad there is only another month on this contract. If this is what the Gulf Coast is like in April, I shudder at the thought of June.

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Sun, Apr 12, 2009

Waffles

Posted at 11:26 am MDT to Technology

I made sourdough waffles for brunch, using the Belgian waffle plates for my George Foreman grill. The only ones that released well were the waffles where I brushed the plates with oil immediately before adding the batter. Next time I'll use plenty of PAM before the plates are hot.

That may be a long time from now -- I leave for the drive home on May 16, and the frozen leftovers from this batch of waffles, may last until then.

I don't use the George Foreman for waffles when I'm at home: I prefer the regular (non-Belgian) waffles from my regualr waffle iron. But it is nice to have the one piece of equipment that is multi-use when I am living remotely.

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Iconography

Posted at 9:16 am MDT to Net of Mirrors

I seem to be about to commit iconography.

I've always wanted a set of the Net of Mirrors with Asian imagery.

Last week I ordered an Intuos 3 graphics tablet (it was on sale, probably because the current model is the Intuos 4) and I've been reading up on digital art. The tablet shold arrive this coming week. In the meantime I'm playing with designs and symbolism and doing some preliminary setup in the tools. I'm planning to use Krita (pixel graphics) and Karbon-14 (vector graphics): they are both part of KOffice, so they are supposed to work well together (especially in the forthcoming 2.0 versions). And Krita 2.0 will have a sumi-e mode.

Maybe by the time I am ready to do anything elaborate, they will be ready for me. In the meantime I can be learning and practicing techniques with the existing versions.

I'll be starting with images for the 4 seasonal gods, not because they will be easy, but because I more or less know what their iconography is, unlike some of the more abstract mirrors. Five Confucian Virtues? Images for the I Ching values? Not so much.

The gods really want to be a set, so I can put them in variations of the same setting. Each of them will be sitting on a verandah and wearing more or less Heian style robes. Each of them needs to be holding a musical instrument: flute, stringed instrument, drum, hammer-and-bells. And they will have animal(-ish?) heads. Spring is a fox, Summer is a hawk, autumn is a bear. I'm not sure if winter has a deer's head, or a man's head with antlers.

There will be a garden with at least one seasonal tree in the middle distance and a forest and mountains farther back. The skies will be different: daylight and blue sky for summer, either full daylight or night with a full moon for winter (the shadows for moonlight on snow may be a stretch), sun setting beyond the mountains for autumn. The Spring trickster gets mist or rain or -- if and when I can manage it -- a rainbow.

The nice thing about digital art is that I will be able to go back and adjust the images as I get more practice and experience and my skills improve. With 160 images in the Net (more than twice as many as a full Tarot deck!), I'm going to have a lot of practice by the time I have a full set. And I can play with levels of realism over time: I think I want a sort of Ukiyo-e feel (and of course all of my Ukiyo-e books are in Colorado, but there should be some online) but that may change over time too. Fortunately, with digital images I can go back and play with the shading and detail.

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Tue, Apr 07, 2009

Kubuntu 8.10

Posted at 10:08 pm MDT to Technology

I backed up the laptop when I was home over the weekend, and Sunday evening I upgraded to Kubuntu 8.10. I had been running 8.04 with the KDE4 alternate interface, and was a little worried that the update might choke, but I wanted to get things stabilized and cleaned up before before the next release of Kubuntu is available and 8.10 downloads become less accessible.(9.04 is scheduled to be released April 23)

I was actually pleased with how well the upgrade went. I had to migrate my emails and Konqueror bookmarks back from alternate space, but everything pretty much worked, even though the upgrade tool spewed warning messages like crazy about the KDE pieces.

Konqueror is being flaky, but it was flaky before (part of why I moved to the experimental interface in 8.04 was Konqueror being flaky) and at this is a less annoying flakiness. At least Restore session works well when things die.

I've spent the parts of the past couple of evenings cleaning out some of the nooks and crannies of the experimental KDE that weren't cleaned up automatically by the upgrade tool and trying to make sure that I am using matching version of all the KDE components. I think I've got KDE itself up to a pretty consistent 4.2.

Next step is to try to get Koffice consistent, but first I need to google and see if I can figure out which set of the available files I should be using.

The one bit of the software installation that is still throwing updater errors is the configuration of the "at" program, and the dependencies of the kformula program which is part of Koffice are acting weird. I may try forcing both of those packages to redownload. I suspect they got corrupted somewhere along the line but I haven't found any similar problems by googling (though googling for problems with "at" is a little tricky) so it ought to be a problem with my download not with the package in the repository.

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Fri, Apr 03, 2009

Storms

Posted at 8:36 pm MDT to Weather

Yesterday was a long day and a stressful one. There were thunderstorms and flooding and tornado warnings in Mobile up through midafternoon.

When I got to the airport the weather was still engaging in special effects and precipitation. By the time my flight was due to leave the sky was clear, but that didn't help much: the storms had disrupted things enough that the plane we were supposed to ride to Houston didn't arrive until 45 minutes after we were supposed to take off.

This was worrying, since I only had a 55 minute layover. And the plane from Mobile arrives at the B concourse and the Denver-bound plane leaves from the E concourse.

I didn't have a wheelie bag, so I couldn't run, but I managed a rapid trudge. Fortunaly, the Denver plane was delayed 20 minutes. I arrived just as they were loading the back of the plane.

So I made it to Denver, and was able to take care of the task that required this trip.

Getting back to Mobile may be equally exciting: they are predicting a blizzard for Colorado for this evening through much of tomorrow. Getting to the airport on Sunday morning may be interesting. (At least Shawn thought to warn me about the weather, for which I am very grateful. We were able to change my car rental to specify a 4 wheel drive vehicle -- so I've got a decent chance of making it to the airport.)

My back isn't complaining as badly as it was at this point of the last trip.I have figured out a way of schlepping my non-wheelie bags through the airports that bothers my back less. Oddly, carrying the two bags -- by the handles doesn't work, even though they are about about the same size and fairly close in weight.

What does work is to use the shoulder strap for the bag with the laptop, which is a bit heavier than the other. But I have to put my head through the strap so the weight of the strap falls on my right shoulder and my left hand steadies the bag on my left side and supports some of the weight. The other bag is carried by the hand grip in my right hand, hanging straight from the shoulder.

This makes no sense at all. Why does a method that seems to put most of the strain on my right side bother my back less than a balanced load?

I'm tempted to use the small wheelie bag for my next trip home even thooough I don't need anything mearly that big for these trips, and I'll have to gate check it between Mobile and Houston. Actually, I should gate check the overnight bag for the morning flight from Houston to Mobile: it's a very small plane with overhead storage that it pro forma rather than useful.

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Wed, Apr 01, 2009

Charity of the Month -- Boulder Phil

Posted at 9:31 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Cash flow was a little odd in February and they are usually my biggest single donation, so February and March are the Boulder Philharmonic.

April is going to be a bunch of smaller donations: I've made a start with PBS and NPR memberships: WHIL, which has inhabited my clock radios and car radio here in Mobile, Colorado Public Radio, and both Denver PBS stations KRMA and KBDI (my DVR has been accumulating cooking shows while I am away). WHIL has been having pledge season...

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