A series of photos with captions explaining why Seattle is objectively superior to the place you grew up. With comments such as

In the ’60s, the federal government tried to confiscate this mountain range under the principle that it’s not fair for one city to have so much view.

and

Seattle invented bricks and mortar in the 5th century BC. Then in the 20th century AD, it invented Amazon.com and made them obsolete.

I’ve been reading Two Sides of the Moon, a dual autobiography of the space race. Dave Scott tells his story from the American side of things, and Alexei Leonov shares a Russian perspective.

I was a gung-ho space nut in the ’80s, so Scott’s half of the book covers familiar ground. It’s competent and friendly, but pedestrian; I don’t think I would recommend it as a stand-alone read. Paired up with Leonov’s account, though, it’s a lot of fun. Nobody in America really knew what the Russians were doing during the space race, and we never heard much about the cosmonauts or the progress of their space program – just the propaganda highlights. Scott and Leonov trade chapters back and forth, in roughly chronological order, and getting to watch each other’s space program through foreign eyes is what really makes the book work.

As a child of the Cold War I grew up thinking of the USSR as an oppressive wasteland run by power-mad hypocrites; their space accomplishments were scary and threatening. Through Leonov’s eyes, you see the pride and straightforward human enthusiasm that went into it all. The political posturing is miles away; what matters in this tale is the ingenuity, courage, and resourcefulness that made the milestone flights happen.

When I got in to work this morning, the office was dark and there was nobody around. Google apparently considers both New Year’s Eve *and* New Year’s Day to be holidays, and since those events fall on weekend days this year, we end up with a four-day weekend. Well, okay. I did a little work but it’s hard to get much done when there is nobody around to review your code.

I’m back home now, thinking about walking over to ALTSpace to do some more work on the dress for Jeanine. I brought a muslin down to Sacramento for an in-person fitting, and it came out reasonably well. I had to add another bust dart and take in the existing one, but overall size and style worked out nicely.

I spent some of the long hours on the drive home thinking about the projects I want to work on in the upcoming year. As far as Burning Man goes, I haven’t thought much about whether I’ll go, but in any case it seems like a good year to avoid getting involved in a big project. I have a few mid-sized projects that have been rolling around in the back of my head for a few years, and this might be the summer to tackle them.

Specifically, I’m still thinking about that laser angel costume. After doing the motorcycle seat last summer, I feel confident I can handle the leather sewing involved in the armor pieces, and after a year’s worth of high-current LED projects I have some new ideas for the lighting effects. I’ve also learned how to work with laser-cut acrylic, which could add a lot of sparkle and shape to the design.

The other project vying for priority is the Playa-Time clock system. I think I would try to recruit a group to help me build this one, since it’s very much the sort of work that can be parallelized. Besides, it somehow seems fitting that a custom time zone for the playa ought to be created by a group rather than an individual.

I’ve come down to Sacramento for the annual family Christmas. Ava brought her cat, Oedipuss, whose curiosity and positive attitude make a well-tempered traveler. We had Christmas dinner on the 23rd, as has become usual for us; there are many other families tied in to ours now and it’s easier for us to shift back a day than for all of those others to accommodate us.

Mom hosted the dinner but we all produced it – different people took on each course. Ava and I stopped at the Pike Place Market on the way out and picked up a whole steelhead, which we baked with dill and lemon. Others prepared an onion-mushroom consomme, kale-pomegranate salad, roast ham – I can’t even remember all the courses. It’s really nice to watch the family grow up and continue to become more a small community of adults and less a mob of children. Reminds me a little of my burner community in Seattle…

We’ll be visiting in Sacramento for a couple more days. We don’t have much planned but I’m sure we will find ways to hang out with family. This afternoon I took a nap on my mom’s living room floor and now we’re doing the laptop zombie line on the couch with Carolyn and Jeanine. Come to think of it, this might be a good time to make Jeanine try on that muslin I mocked up and see about adjusting its fit.

George R. R. Martin knows what he is doing. A couple of chapters after I nearly threw the whole story out in disgust, a trip east to check in on Daenerys went surprisingly well. She has her travails, of course, but I’ve begun to wonder whether her branch of the story – largely disconnected from the rest – was included specifically to give the reader a break from the misery of self-immolating Westeros.

I started reading George R. R. Martin’s unfinished seven-volume series “A Song of Ice and Fire” a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve made it part way through book three, “A Storm of Swords”. The first book was delightful; the writing sparkled, and it’s always fun to discover a well-imagined fantasy world. As the story has unwound, though, it has become almost unbearably grim, a relentless litany of betrayal and misfortune, and I’m not sure I will bother to finish it.

The dark tone may be a function of the story’s great length, as book three is only approaching the middle of the tale, and one expects the tension to build up toward some climax. There’s a flow to a good story, like there’s a flow to music. You build up to a small peak, ebb back for a rest, build up to a bigger peak, ebb back again, until you push across the crest, then all the threads of the tale cascade together as you ride down the far side.

In “Song of Ice and Fire”, though, there’s plenty of tension, but never a moment to stop and breathe. Every glimpse of apparent peace just sets someone up for a new betrayal; every near accomplishment is merely preparation for a greater catastrophe. I find myself detaching from the characters, unable to care about their troubles and hopes, because the author seems determined to inflict so much pain on them that there will be nothing left to celebrate when the conflicts are finally resolved.

Part of what made the first book so much fun was the strength of the author’s novel perspective on the whole fantasy-adventure idea, but it’s come to seem less like he’s reinventing fantasy and more like he’s simply demolishing it. Let go of romance, he seems to say, let go of all those pretty myths; forget all those notions about the Knights of the Round Table. Let me show you what it’s really like. It was fun, at first, but it’s grown stale. The misery has become predictable and is no longer interesting, and I’m growing impatient for the payoff. What is it I’m supposed to be enjoying about this story? Why should I slog through thousands more pages of this if the characters I like are only going to fail, suffer, and die? If the author wants to keep the story going he needs to start throwing in some surprises where things actually go right for a change.

I’ve started using a new Galaxy Nexus phone in place of the old Blackberry Curve I got from Ava. The touchscreen keyboard is better than I expected. It’s still weird not to be able to feel the button click, but the touch pads are much bigger than the physical keys I’m used to, so it’s not actually any harder to hit the letters I aim for. I’ve stuck with the Blackberry this long largely because I didn’t like the idea of a touchscreen, but it’s really not so bad.

In honor of Kim Jong-il’s passing, here’s a retrospective gallery of DJ Dear Leader’s most memorable performances.

This enormous digital clock kit looks like it would make a good base for the “playa-time” project I’ve been wanting to set up at Burning Man some year. 9.4″ x 2.7″ is pretty big – it’d be easy to see, even up on a 10′ pole.

I like psychedelic trance music. I like it a lot. I listen to hours of it every day at work, in fact, and have done so for years. I used to maintain a constantly growing collection of albums, but these days I mostly just listen to Radio Progressive or Divbyzero.

A friend with similar tastes related a conversation he had with his wife. “Why do you like psytrance so much?”, she asked; “it’s so driving and repetitive!”. “Exactly-” he replied, “it’s so driving and repetitive!”

Good psytrance really is driving and repetitive, but that’s just the foundation. The steady pulse of the 4/4 kick and the robotic throb of the rolling 16th-note bassline that define the style free the composer up to go completely nuts in the higher registers. When it’s really hitting the mark it feels you are riding some giant machine, surfing on a railway engine as it roars down the track. Underfoot it’s massive power and rumbling vibration, overhead it’s all lightning and meteors, a crackling network of interlocking arpeggios hissing and sparking and melting together. It’s power and clarity and unstoppable energy, and at its best it completely swallows you up.

Of course all music ebbs and flows, but the most satisfying moments when listening to psytrance are the points where it feels like the music has found a steady state: the entire sonic spectrum is full, the machine is powered up and roaring away, throttle wide open. I stand in front of the PA system and it feels like standing in the waves at the beach – endless, they roll in, lift you up, push you back, pull you forward, and all you can do is ride.

I was rummaging through my fabric bins hoping for inspiration on Saturday and saw a small piece of some quilted material, a cotton/dacron/cotton sandwich, left over from a pair of pants I made several years ago. The idea of a short vest for Ava popped into mind, and I proceeded to stitch it up, using a bit of embroidered silk for collar trim. It’s a neat little high-waisted thing, lined, with four silver buttons and an inner pocket. I’ll try to get a picture later, if I can convince Ava to model it. A quick, simple project was a nice break after the highly technical ski pants.

Ava and I are going to get a little Christmas tree later tonight – we’re planning to put it on our coffee table. I spent a couple of hours with a soldering iron this afternoon getting ready, and now we have a ten-foot string of animated lights to wrap around it. Yes, that’s right: each light is driven by its own 20 MHz RISC processor. Technological overkill? Certainly – but it was also cheaper than running them all on a single controller would have been.

I finished the ski pants last night, fancy trapezoidal belt loops and all. That was really rather a lot of work, but I’m delighted with the result. Now I want to go back and spiff up last year’s jacket to match – redo the collar, I think, and add a lining.

I’ll be showing them off at the ALTSpace open house tonight!

7.0″ TFT display, 24-bit RGB, 800×480 pixels. Might be useful for that dual-screen, eight-core microcontroller-driven laptop concept I keep flirting with.

Yves Rossy is at it again, flying in formation with a couple of fighter-jets using a custom built delta-wing jetpack. It’s like watching a guy on a motorcycle race a couple of Formula-1 cars, except they’re all flying.

I got my motorcycle back today. It was a bit cold out but perfectly clear, and it was nice to ride around a little after work. The rear brake lever is adjusted a little strangely but the brake works fine. The new tire looks exactly as it should, and the new clutch works smoothly. Now that I have the machine back in hand – four weeks later! – I can finally replace the munched headlight with the eBay replacement that has been sitting on my shelf collecting dust.

I spent a couple more hours on the ski pants tonight. This project has definitely taken longer than I expected, but these pants are also the most complex garment I’ve ever constructed, and I’m pushing the finish level as hard as I know how. I want this garment to last for at least five seasons, and I want to feel comfortable and look stylish the whole time, so I’m taking my time getting it right. Tonight I inserted some darts into the waistband, stitched the inner seam down, and got about halfway through the belt loops (ballistic nylon trapezoids, lined with supplex – no raw edges exposed anywhere!). One more evening should be enough to finish the belt loops and cuffs.

Air Light Time & Space is having an open house:
Wednesday November 30th from 7 pm til 10 pm
Wine and snacks will be served
Show-and-tell: bring something you have made, or something you are working on – let’s inspire each other!
Open to the community, please bring guests.
If this goes well we will make it a regular weekly event.

A.L.T.Space is located at 2318 E. Cherry Street, at the corner of 23rd Avenue, across the street from Garfield.
Look for the tall metal gate next to the row of garage doors – our door is at the end of the narrow courtyard on the right.

All the major shell pieces are cut out. The articulated knees are finished and the rear pockets are sewn on. I’ve also made a lining: it’s a nylon / dacron / interfacing sandwich, quilted together. I haven’t decided whether it will have elastic cuffs independent of the shell, or whether the shell & lining cuffs will just be sewn together.

Next I will make some zippered front pockets, and I should have enough time to sew up the main body seams tonight. That’ll leave the zipper fly, the waistband, and the cuffs for tomorrow.

I spent a couple of hours working on shop improvements today, too. The heat in the south half of the space was not working, and it was uncomfortably chilly in there last night. We’d been talking about installing programmable thermostats anyway, so I bought a pair. Now the shop will heat itself up during the day and cool back down at night – it should already be warm for the first person who arrives. Also I got a dozen more little plastic bins for the big wooden cabinet: two of its eight shelves are now devoted to little containers. We’ll put all the sewing and crafting tools in there, and some of the sewing notions too.

I ordered supplies for another project: I’m going to build a set of microcontroller-driven Christmas-tree lights. Each light will incorporate a miniaturized version of the controller I used on the Shame Project, which will drive a standard (low-power) LED. It will run the same evolving rhythm pattern generator algorithm, but I’m going to tweak the color selector: the colors will be fully saturated and limited to the range from red to green. That is, the lights will use reds, oranges, yellows, and greens in varying brightness, but no blue, white, pink, or purple.

New idea for a very old problem: buffer-centric IO is a nifty zero-copy input abstraction.

Last winter I made a custom ski jacket out of gore-tex and ballistic nylon. It’s getting up near winter again, and I am thinking about designing a matching pair of trousers. I’ve been wearing a cheap pair of waterproof overalls for the last five or six years, and while they do the job they are neither flattering nor especially comfortable. The cuffs are also pretty well slashed up by errant ski edges.

My concept is a slim, bell-bottom style pant with a contrasting quarter-panel on the front outside thigh, plus articulated ballistic nylon knee inserts and wide cuff covers. A double waistband with integrated poly-webbing belt would keep snow out. Contrasting, top-stitched patch pockets with hidden zippers would provide a safe place to stash keys or a cell phone, and a thin line of retroreflective piping would add a hint of flash to the side seams.

Ava and I went out to La Push this weekend to celebrate her birthday. It was dark by the time we rolled in on Friday, but Saturday was clear and bright. We got up late and spent the day rambling around on the beach. It was cold but there was very little wind so it was easy to bundle up and stay comfortable.

The River’s Edge Restaurant has a disappointingly thin seafood menu for a place next door to the fishing marina. It was expensive and not very good – we’ll bring our own food next time.

Sunday we drove out to Neah Bay, bought some smoked steelhead, and hiked out the short trail to the end of Cape Flattery. I love that place, standing out on what feels like the edge of the world, nothing but Tatoosh Island with its little lighthouse, then half a planet’s worth of ocean.

We found some bullwhip kelp washed up on the beach the day before, and it was fun to see the floating forest of live specimens swaying in the low tide around the sea stacks.

It lights up the room really well – the light is focused directly down on Ava’s desk, but it’s enough light for the whole room, and it brightens up the walkway outside too.

I don’t have equipment to measure the power spectrum, but subjectively the light appears a little too warm. The new power supply runs the white LEDs at a lower current level than I’d originally planned; I would guess they are putting out about 75% of the planned lumens. It’s not bad – it’s very comfortable, easily the warmest light I’ve ever seen out of a non-incandescent light. If I were going to build another light using the same driver, I’d use a different ratio, but this device will do its job nicely.

I spent a quiet afternoon today soldering up an array of LM317 current regulators, attaching them to the LEDs, and running up a pair of power rails. It sounds simple but there were many little pieces of wire to cut, strip, and tin, and the whole thing took about five hours. Ava came along and helped out, which was fun.

ALTSpace was really hopping – there were people in and out all day. Cassie was doing some paper cutting work, Jason and a friend of his spent a couple hours building computers out of all the spare parts he has on his workbench, Mel was working away on jewelry, Brian did some beer brewing, and a couple from Austin stopped by just because they happened to be in town. It was great. One of my big goals for ALTSpace was to create a social hub and it’s great to see that happening.

The Millwheel and Flume teams took a tour of Google’s datacenter in The Dalles yesterday. I can’t say much about what I saw, but there’s rather a lot that I would say if I could. It was an eyeball-widening sort of place.

I still don’t like the fact that the computer industry has decided on massive centralized datacenters as the way we’re going to do things. It’s great that Google is committed to not being evil, but no organization maintains its original values forever, and we’d all be better off in the long run if we built evil-tolerant distributed systems.

Of the dozen projects I listed a month ago, I’ve completed #2 (ALT&S expansion), #3 (living room couch), #4 (mysterious music project), #6 (dimmer for Hunter’s geode sculpture), #8 (repackage Shame Project lights for use in my living room), and #9 (serger workbench for ALT&S).

I haven’t touched the electric skateboard; it’s too cold and rainy out to ride such a contraption anyway. The high-output full-spectrum light has had a couple of setbacks, but once that next Digikey package arrives I should be able to finish it up in a night or two. The City Light thing – well, they weren’t actually looking for a proposal, just some kind of artist resume. It was frustrating and nothing is going to come of it.

The rhythm synthesizer algorithm is still kicking around in the back of my brain, but I may divert that mental energy toward learning to use Ableton Live. It’s been a long time since I did any studio production work, and the Mysterious Music Project reminded me how much I enjoy composition. I haven’t lined up any live-PA gigs lately; I think maybe I will spend some of this winter “in the studio”, making dance music.

Last on last month’s list was my motorcycle: it’s been in the shop for the last two and a half weeks. I’m not sure what’s going on with the mechanic but I’m getting worried. He had to order in a new front tire and some special tool to replace the clutch, but still, it shouldn’t be taking this long. Meanwhile I have been driving the car to work, or having Ava drop me off. It’s not so much fun.

The new active project list:
0) Finish assembling the full-spectrum LED array
1) Radian: clean up after introducing a new allocator and a new X64 backend
2) Recruit new members for ALTSpace – lots of room now
3) Acquire and learn to use Ableton Live

That’s a really short list. No wonder those boxes of fabric at the shop have been catching my eye every time I walk by…

I do have a few things on the home improvement list too:
– install AirPort base station for better internet access in the office
– figure out why one of the Shame Project lights doesn’t light up and fix it
– weed old stuff out of wardrobe
– help Ava hang up her wall-sized mirror
– introduce a more rational organization to the file box

Our kitchen has one big light, on the ceiling in the center of the room. It is adequate but not bright; you want something a bit more intense when actually cooking. I added a strip of under-counter LEDs months ago, which helped a lot on the preparation side of things, but it’s still pretty dim over on the range itself.

While rummaging around looking for a camera cable this afternoon, I happened to find an Edison-based LED bulb I bought three or four years back. It was one of the very first generation of LED-based home lighting products, and I never used it for anything as its light beam was too narrowly focused: but aha, I thought, this would make an excellent spotlight for the range.

A cheap screw-on base and some not-at-all-up-to-code wiring later, it works perfectly: bright white light pointing straight down at the stove top.

Of course I found out why the main light is so dim: it has two sockets, but only one is populated. Ha. Still, this LED device solves the problem, and only burns 3 watts. It’d take at least 10 or 15 watts in the ceiling fixture to yield the same effect.

I’m sexy and I know it, yeah!

I did some more work on the light module for Ava’s desk last night. The goal is to construct a full-spectrum array comparable to a 500W halogen work light, to illuminate her work surface and help stave off the Seattle grey-sky winter blues. I estimate that it should be possible to produce a comparable level of light using only 150W. Of course LED-based lights are available at all brightness levels now, but I am not aware of any commercial full-spectrum units yet – and after designing this project it is pretty easy to see why. Give it another year or two and I think this sort of light will be available off-the-shelf, but right now it is still a challenging hobbyist project. Perfect for me to play with!

As per usual, I have gotten myself in a little deeper than I expected. Every LED project I’ve done previously starts with a fixed-voltage DC power supply, then I add appropriate current regulation for each LED circuit. This time I knew I was going to be drawing a great deal of current, so I thought it would make more sense to run all the LEDs off 120VAC. This is not as crazy as it sounds: it’s the same thing all those LED christmas light strings do, only I’m using much more powerful emitters. Instead of running all the lights in parallel, regulating each one independently, I decided to run all the LEDs in series with a single regulator: dividing a single power loss across all the lights, instead of multiplying it by the number of lights.

I started with a bridge rectifier and a large capacitor; the output, I expected, would be roughly 120VDC. Each of the Bridgelux emitters drops 8.9V, so I wired up a dozen of them in series. Then I threw in an LM317HVT linear regulator, rated for 40V / 1.5A, and configured it as a 1-amp current regulator.

This did not work. The lights came on briefly, then something went “pop”, and the lights went out. In the second or two before I managed to disconnect the power, two of the LEDs flared on and went “pop”, leaving a black smudge across the lens. Uh oh.

Further testing revealed that the output from the rectifier was nothing like 120V – instead I was getting something close to 170V! Now of course the whole point of alternating current is that the voltage alternates, swinging back and forth constantly. When we say that wall outlets supply “120 volts” or “110 volts”, that’s the RMS average – at any given instant, the outlet voltage may be anywhere between -170V and +170V. I expected that my little rectifier/capacitor setup would smooth out the peaks and valleys, giving me a nice steady 120V, but it appears that I’m drawing so little current that the voltage just stays high all the time. This is just a guess, really – it would all be so much easier if I had an oscilloscope.

I think the first “pop” was the LM317HVT, which is designed to handle a maximum of 40V difference between input and output. On encountering a 60V difference, it must have fried itself closed; with no remaining current regulation, the LEDs started overloading, and thus the bright flash and the pop as the magic smoke escaped.

I ordered a bunch of replacement emitters, replaced the two damaged ones, and added six more to the chain. Now I have eighteen of the Bridgelux units wired up in series, for a total drop of 160.2 volts. I also threw in a 10-watt, 68-ohm resistor to help out with current regulation. This seems to work, and it is almost hilariously bright. I should be able to replace the LM317HVT now and keep the current set where I want it.

If I can get this to work, the next step is to augment the “neutral white” spectrum with three other frequencies. “White” LEDs have a big spike in the blue range and a softer, broader lump in the yellow/green; this setup stimulates all three of our color receptors more or less equally, so the light looks white, but it doesn’t actually illuminate colored surfaces evenly. The reds are very weak, and there’s a noticeable gap in the cyan as well. My solution is to interleave colored LEDs with the white ones, adding 660nm (deep red), 627 nm (red), and 505 nm (cyan). I’m sure somebody, somewhere, has tried something like this before, but I haven’t been able to find any trace of it on the web, so I don’t really know how it’s going to come out. I expect that I will have to tweak the color balance somewhat, but in the end I hope to have a very bright light with all visible frequencies reasonably well represented.

I had this idea, while I was out hiking with my sister Jeanine, for a piece of music I wanted to compose as a gift for my mother on her birthday. I thought about it all afternoon, as Jeanine and I ground our way up the snowfield leading to Muir Pass, and by the time I got home I had pretty much worked out what I wanted to do.

One day at lunch, my coworker Josh H. mentioned that he sings in the Byrd Ensemble. A few emails back and forth with the choir’s director sufficed to arrange a recording session.

This is the result. It is a medley of my mother’s two favorite hymns: the Doxology, set to Old Hundredth, and “Crown him with many crowns”. I’ve reworked the harmonies, but the melodies came straight from the traditional tunes.