That wasn’t fun. I woke up Tuesday morning feeling a little cruddy, but basically okay. Four hours later I staggered back home with a fever, collapsed into bed, and then stayed there for thirty-six hours. I’m back at work today, but wow did that virus ever hammer me flat! And I’m supposed to be in the middle of moving to the new house. Oh, well, we have until the end of the month.

Half of all serious head injuries happen while someone is inside a motor vehicle. Stop the deaths! It’s time for a mandatory car-helmet law.

Well that was great. We got the keys on Friday and threw an “empty house party” on Saturday, having moved in exactly none of our belongings. I stocked the fridge with beer, plugged in a couple of speakers and a laptop downstairs for music, turned on all the lights, and that was the extent of the preparation. It was a weird concept for a party, so I didn’t know if people would actually stick around, but the total absence of chairs, couches, tables, and other furnishings did not seem to be a significant problem. People brought their friends, their friends brought more beer, there was a mountain of snack food, and everything just seemed to take care of itself. Somebody brought a bunch of liquid nitrogen and there were mad scientist mojitos going on in the kitchen for a while – I think Kent was involved but I’m not exactly sure how it all happened. Divide rolled in around ten, carrying a burn barrel he’d just finished welding, and so we had a fire in the back yard. People hung out and talked and came and went and I’m not sure I even got to say “hello” to everyone who was there, which is one the one hand disappointing but on the other a clear sign that the party was a success.

Well, there we go: bought a house. Got the keys and everything.

This game is best when its commencement is inferred and not announced.

One person says a word which is a compound of two shorter words.
Next person says a word, also a compound of two shorter words, where the first half of the new word is the same as the second half of the previous word.
Each player continues, picking a compound word whose beginning half is the ending half of the previous word.
No player may reuse a word previously chosen, though word-components may be reused.
Two-word phrases are acceptable substitutes, particularly toward the end of the game when the well has begun to run dry, though compound words are worth more imaginary points than two-word phrases. The point deltas are never mentioned directly and are left to the aesthetic determination of the other players. Winning on points is also known as “losing”.

Example:
A: (innocently uses the word “firefly” in conversation)
B: Flypaper.
A: What?
B: You said “firefly”, so I said “flypaper”.
A: Yeah, and? …Oh. Hm… uh… “papercut”.
B: Cutthroat.
A: Throatlatch.
B: What? What the hell is “throatlatch”?
A: I don’t know, some piece of horse gear. I read it in a book once.
B: Okay, fine, fine, have it your way. Latchkey.
A: Keyboard.
B: Boardroom.
A: Roommate.
B: Mateless.
A: Lesson.
B: Less…on? Lesson? Hah. Very funny. No. I already gave you “throatlatch” and I’m not convinced that’s even a real word – you can’t have “lesson” when it’s blatantly not a compound.
A: Who says it has to be a compound? “Less” and “on”, it’s two legit words.
B: But it’s so gross, what are you, twelve?
A: Your fault for painting me into a corner – what else IS there? You nearly killed the game there and I’m just trying to save it.
B: (gives a long, hard look)
A: Okay, fine, “less than”.
B: Than what?
A: What cheer.
B: Cheerleader.
A: Leaderless. (bursts out laughing)
B: You’re a dick! What’s wrong with you!
A: (giggles) Okay, okay. Leadership.
B: Shipwreck.
A: Wreckless!
B: (groans)
A: Wreck yard.
B: That’s terrible. You lose ten points. Yardcare.
A: Care…free.
B: Freefall.
A: Fall-guy.
B: Guy wire.
A: Wirehead.
B: Is that a real word or just something from science fiction?
A: Who cares? It’s a real word now.
B: Okay, fine. HEADLESS.
A: Hah! Cheater. Less wrong.
B: Wrong way.
A: Waystation.
B: Stationkeeping.
A: Keeping time.
B: Time travel.
A: Travel time.
B: Well… that’s totally uncool, but I suppose it’s legal. Timepiece.
A: Piecework.
B: Workhouse.
A: Housefly.
B: Flypaper.
A: You already used that one.
B: Damn it, you’re right. Flyweight.
A: Weight class.
B: Class clown.
A: Clown car.
B: Car phone.
A: Phone home.
B: Homework.
…and continue until the novelty has worn off.

Another tale of bureaucratic stupidity and the idiotic consequences of small-minded, courage-free, judgement-free “zero tolerance” policies: a 16-year-old high school student has been expelled, arrested, and charged with two felonies for doing the classic dissolving-aluminum hydrogen gas reaction.

Two felony charges. At age sixteen. For being so engaged in chemistry class that she decided to take what she’d learned and see if she could apply it further.

You know what? I did the same damn thing when I was sixteen, and I was a whole lot less responsible about it than Ms Wilmot apparently was. One day in chem class I set up an apparatus under the fume hood in the back of the class room, dissolved a bunch of aluminum into a vessel of hydrochloric acid, captured the resulting hydrogen, then blew the whole thing up.

It made a great big bang, startled my fellow students, and broke some glassware. I got a bunch of head-shaking and “there he goes again” remarks from my fellow students, and proceeded to clean up the mess and replace the broken glassware. I don’t think my teacher even had to tell me not to do it again – that was pretty much obvious. Oops.

Well, here I am, two decades later, and I defy anyone to explain how my life or the lives of anyone around me could have been improved in any way if I’d been dragged off to jail and charged with felonies for that little adventure. It’s easy to see a whole bunch of ways my life could have gone Very Badly Indeed had I been treated as badly as Ms Wilmot’s school has treated her.

It’s infuriating, it’s absurd, it’s utterly wrong, it’s just so goddamn stupid. “There are consequences to their actions”, the administrator says. Well, yes, if you mix chemicals, they react in certain ways! Those are the consequences! She didn’t hurt anyone, she didn’t even risk hurting anyone but herself, she just tried a really basic experiment! It was less danger than setting off a firecracker! Give her extra credit and bump her up to AP classes, send her to community college, something – this is a person who needs support and encouragement and access to resources she can use to continue feeding her curiosity and knowledge!

Such a waste, for her and for all of us.

In thirty-six years of life, I have called twenty different buildings “home”, and I’m about to add a twenty-first entry to the list. This time I’m buying: unless something goes horribly and unexpectedly wrong in the next couple of business days, Ava and I will be exchanging a big stack of signed paperwork for a set of keys, then moving a mile north-northeast to a nicely updated Craftsman bungalow over in Madison Valley.

A thread on pnwriders.com lists an array of riding routes radiating from Seattle. Looks like fun – I could use a few new places to go…

Here’s a promo video for this year’s Iron Monkeys project, the Guardian of Dawn. Biggest project they’ve ever tackled, looks pretty cool. Bummer that I’m not going to Burning Man this year; wonder if they’ll set it up here in Seattle afterward…?

A wooden floor made out of interlocking Escher lizards: wow!

I haven’t done much with Radian in the last few months – I’ve been trying to buy a house, and my coding-energy has been focused on the startup I’ve been working for since October. What’s more, I’ve been vexed by a persistent and remarkably slippery bug, manifesting itself as any of a variety of failures. Everything worked fine in the small, but every time I tried to build a complex program, particularly one that used more than a single IO action, things would go mysteriously wrong – objects would suddenly have the wrong types, internal invariants in the map object would suddenly fail to check out, data would mysteriously become wrong…

I’ll spare you the litany of attempts I made and directions I pursued; I took another crack at it last night and the problem was suddenly obvious. Twenty minutes later, I’d fixed it. Well, then! That’s nice. Time for a new release.

Bikeexif has a roundup of armored denim jeans suitable for high speed motorcycle riding. Aside from the great big logo on the back left pocket, I really like the Dainese kevlar-lined jeans.

LEDs are less efficient at higher currents: this well-known mystery has meant that LED lighting performs very well in small scale applications but becomes less economical when you need a lot of light. A team of researchers based at UCSB and the École Polytechnique in Paris have figured out why: “a complex non-radiative process known as Auger recombination [is] behind nitride semiconductor LED droop, whereby injected electrons lose energy to heat by collisions with other electrons rather than emitting light”.

The Crazyflie Quadcopter weighs 19 grams. Its PCB is its chassis. It uses the typical nRF24L01+ chip and its processor is an equally typical STM32F103, so it should be relatively easy to program. IMU is an Invensense MPU-6050. It’s like a laundry list of all the obvious best choices for a hacker’s toy – nothing weird and undocumented, just the totally normal parts you’d pick if you were going to design this yourself, all soldered up and ready to fly. Cost is $173 and it’s backordered far enough in the future that you’ll be able to buy the inevitable Chinese knockoff in a toy store before you get one of the originals.

Janky but cool: mini container gardening with cinder blocks.

In the long tradition of faux-Zen unix lore, here are some Git koans.

Boston Dynamics, makers of the BigDog quadruped robot, have developed a humanoid biped robot they call PETMAN. It has a surprisingly decent sense of rhythm.

Grimwire appears to be an interesting answer to the problem where web-apps are convenient and useful, but require you to give all your data to the app publisher and let them store it for you, rendering them disastrous from a security and privacy point of view.

The page does a poor job of explaining this, but as far as I can tell Grimwire is a system for decoupling web-apps from storage mechanisms. It aims to provide a common interface between frontend applications and backend storage providers, so that you can pick the tools you want to use and retain control of the data you want to manipulate with them.

Something like this ought to exist, and I wish them luck. I have my own server, after all – you’re looking at it – and I often use a webmail client to read & send mail on my own server when I’m not at home. I’d be much more interested in using systems like Google Docs if I could store the data on my own server in a similar fashion.

Bitcoin makes journalists say stupid things: bitcoin appears to be in another period of heavy public attention, and while the system is relatively straightforward from a cypherpunk point of view, financial journalists haven’t had to pay much attention to this sort of thing before, and some of them are clearly struggling to get a grip on it.

Oh, no. No, no no. Iain Banks is dying of cancer:

The bottom line, now, I’m afraid, is that as a late stage gall bladder cancer patient, I’m expected to live for ‘several months’ and it’s extremely unlikely I’ll live beyond a year. So it looks like my latest novel, The Quarry, will be my last.

From IO9, an introduction to The Culture, the galactic civilization threaded through most of Banks’ SF novels.

Ava and I spent the weekend in Portland with Thomas & Alison. We got tickets for the Vampire Masquerade Ball, which was good gothy fun and a nice excuse to dress up. I wore my tux, and Ava wore the beaded, trained wedding dress she picked up at Goodwill. It was fun and the music was all the good classic goth stuff. The sound quality was terrible, but I think I have become a snob, so it probably didn’t matter.

This morning we took the tram down to the Saturday Market (which operates on Sundays too) and had a great time wandering around in the sunny, happy crowd. We bought a couple of Nepalese scarves, had pierogis for lunch, listened to a talented cellist, and chatted with a lovely couple from Bend who do beautiful marquetry.

Tonight, had dinner at the Twilight in the last fading light of sunset; Barry joined us with his dog Muppet.

Very nice sunny weekend, and it is only March!

Grant Thompson cooks up four different variations of solid rocket fuel using sugar & potassium nitrate. And I do mean “cooks” – his lab equipment consists of a portable two-burner stove, a skillet, and a spatula. Slick production, and he actually builds a small, working rocket using his homemade fuel at the end.

Also useful is his video explaining how to build a fuse, which begins with the immortal words “When experimenting with homemade pyrotechnics” and proceeds with a level of fearlessness I haven’t seen since a ’50s-era science-experiments-for-kids book I checked out of the library back in the ’80s.

Git-annex Assistant is a program which synchronizes folders on different machines – a bit like Dropbox, but it’s all under your control.

I felt so good riding my motorcycle today that I couldn’t keep the laughter in. The morning was foggy and very cold – I had to cook the engine with a space heater for ten minutes before it would start – but there’s something about piloting the fastest, nimblest vehicle on the road that makes me feel like a superhero. I’m just flying, out in space, wind and air and rain all around me; the cars and trucks are just obstacles, not really part of my world at all. Everything else fades, it’s just me and the bike and the world around me, all right there, nothing else to worry about.

I feel a little silly sometimes to get such a kick out of this. Riding fast and beating traffic makes me feel special and awesome, larger than life, but it’s just the bike: anyone else on any other motorcycle could do the same. So where are they? Why are all these people poking along in their cars, feet shifting on the pedals as traffic waves ebb and flow? Why don’t they ditch those cages and come join me out here where life is great and commuting is fun? It’s not that hard! You just have to take the course and buy a bike and wear a bunch of safety gear and then ride a lot so you get comfortable on the highway and then just not care about the weather or the risk…

From Metafilter, LiarTownUSA: “an alternate USA where our products, signage, headlines, and fads are all slightly more surreal, sinister, and threatening.” Hilarious. I especially like the ads from “Apple Cabin Foods”, which are all just perfectly wrong, and the fake movies, at which I am laughing so hard my face is starting to hurt.

Leo Villareal’s project The Bay Lights is the most impressive piece of LED art ever made. It is impressive in a technical sense – 25,000 individually controlled LEDs, lining the vertical stringers along the Bay Bridge – but it also demonstrates a graceful, elegant subtlety of creative thought. There’s no disco strobe effect here, there’s no HEY LOOK AT ME pulsing and hard-edged geometry; the awesome power of the $8 million light network serves subtle, detailed, gently evolving animation effects. Shadows, glows, particles, waves; motions that feel like the sweep of car headlights around a distant curve, the glow under rising fog, the sparkle of frost on a February morning.

If it’s night in the Bay Area, you should watch it for a while. Don’t expect it to do anything remarkable right away – you need to watch it for a few minutes.

Went up to Crystal today with Eric S. The snow wasn’t fresh but we had a good time anyway. The weather was strange – the sky was totally overcast, but the clouds floated above the level of the mountains, so you could see clearly across ridge after ridge. The light was even but not bright so it was unusually easy to see the volume of space and peak – the ridges didn’t just foreshorten down on themselves like they usually do when it’s bright. It would have made a good picture if I’d brought a camera… but who brings a camera skiing?

I skied hard and took advantage of the wide-open slopes – fast, fast, fast, skis biting into the snow… Oh, it’s fun. I could go on but you know what I mean if you’ve tried it, and I don’t have the energy tonight to really dig in and explain what it’s all about if you haven’t. I just feel tired in that really good way, my knees are sore, my cheeks are still warm, and I’ll sleep well tonight.

From ZDNet, good news about the open-source phone OS, including confirmation that it will run on my Galaxy Nexus:

Six weeks after Canonical first revealed that they were throwing their Ubuntu Linux hat into the smartphone ring, the company announced that on February 21, they’ll be releasing the Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu. According to Canonical, “Images and open source code for the Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu will be published on Thursday 21st February, supporting the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones.”

People who are less concerned about the openness of source code may be excited by the observation that this is the first time it will be possible to develop a single app which will run on either a phone or a PC. Bits will be downloadable here.

EVERY time you purchase an app on Google Play, your name, address and email is passed on to the developer:

The “flaw” – which appears to be by design – was discovered by Sydney app developer, Dan Nolan who told news.com.au that he was uncomfortable being the custodian of this information and that there was no reason for any developer to have this information at their finger tips.
…
“I can’t see any way to opt out of providing that information and it seems to be a feature of the Google checkout process. I don’t know whether it applies to free apps, but there are hundreds of thousands of apps that are available for pay on the play store and there are millions of people who buy Android apps out there, I’d say easily millions or tens of millions of people.”
“It’s active in every market that Google accepts payment for apps. That’s a lot of people having their personal information handed over without them knowing.”

Right, well, now I feel like my paranoid decision never to sign up for Google Play was justified. The article’s a bit sensationalistic – I don’t think anyone’s really going to get bank account details out of this – but quietly giving away someone’s contact info is not cool regardless.

Here is a PDF with information about the Tesla Roadster’s log system. It looks like they don’t record a continuous GPS trace, but it’s a pretty detailed record and not fully documented.

I like the idea of the electric car, and I’ve generally been impressed with the style and quality commitment I see in Tesla; friends who drive Tesla cars have been very happy with them. The New York Times posted an article today about aTesla test drive which didn’t go so well, and Elon Musk, head of Tesla, used Twitter to post an allegation that the author was not being totally honest about his experience:

NYTimes article about Tesla range in cold is fake. Vehicle logs tell true story that he didn’t actually charge to max & took a long detour.

Wait a minute. Forget the question of battery performance in cold weather; that’s old news. Forget the question of whether the journalist lied – disappointing if true, but we’re not exactly talking Judith Miller-level malfeasance here. No, what really concerns me is this: what the hell are “vehicle logs”? Obviously the Tesla cars are deeply dependent on computers: are those computers infested with spyware? How much does Tesla know about what the car was doing? Is this custom spyware for demo models only or is this something they can enable for every car? Do these cars record GPS traces or something? I’m suddenly worried that the Tesla future is actually a grim police state dystopia, where anyone who gains physical access to your car can reconstruct your movements from its computer’s memory.