The theater seats will go up on a box made of nice heavy plywood, which I’ll stain and coat in polyurethane. I’ll put cabinet doors on the front and use the space underneath for storage.

Today I’m building a couple of benches for the back yard using a bunch of scrap 2x4s. It’s all cedar wood, bought for a project which didn’t pan out, and it’d be a shame to waste such durable material. I’ll put the benches at right angles in the back corner of the yard, with the fire pit in the center. The yard still feels pretty barren, with all that gravel, but defining a seating area should go some way toward making it feel homey.

Doing carpentry with one’s dominant hand in a cast gets a mite tricky. Adam came over to help yesterday, but he’s off to visit family now. I am trying to let the process be slow and cumbersome, accept that I don’t know how long anything will take, and not get too impatient with myself, but it’s difficult when I feel so hungry to make.

I have two sets of four folding theater seats taking up room at ALTSpace. They were originally part of some lecture hall at UW, and they’ve been bouncing around the Seattle burner community for at least a decade now, ending up with me. I had this idea that I would use them to set up a little lecture / presentation area, but I was the only person interested, so the seats got tucked under work benches and have been sitting there collecting dust ever since, waiting for me to figure out what they might be good for.

Now I have a plan. I’m going to take one of them home and set it up in the kitchen. People always hang out in the kitchen during a party, and if you have people over for dinner it’s great to have somewhere for them to sit and chat while you cook. These seats have little fold-out tables designed for writing notes – they’ll make great little mini tables for people’s drinks and snacks.

There’s only room in the kitchen for one of these rows, but perhaps I’ll bring the other one home and install it downstairs. I’d eventually like to fill the place up with big squishy couches and things, but that’s a big project which will take a lot of time, and this would be an only moderately inconvenient way to get more seating in the meantime.

Problem is, these seats are designed to be bolted to the floor, and they don’t really stand up on their own. They are stable side to side, but not front to back. They’re also pretty low, designed to be mounted in an auditorium with a stepped floor. I’ll need to construct some kind of base. Surely someone must have done this before? I’ll just search for it on the internet and steal their design!

I can’t find a one. Is this really the first time someone has thought of this? It seems impossible. Help me, o internet: have you ever heard of such a thing or seen pictures of how it was done?

A nice article about an experiment in generating music: using freely available MIDI tracks to build a Markov model of melody, driving it with random numbers to produce new melodies of a similar style, then filtering and repeating until the model produces music which is acceptably similar to the input corpus. It’s a clever project and all the code is included, though I don’t see any links to example output.

Just made the appointment: the cast on my right hand comes off next Tuesday. It’s been fine – it’s not driving me crazy or anything – but it’ll also be nice to be done with it, mostly because it makes showering into such a production. I’ll have a soft cast for a month or so, then some kind of yet-to-be-determined physical therapy. It’s still looking like I won’t have to miss the entire ski season, so that’s something to look forward to.

King James Programming: someone trained a markov chain generator on both the King James Bible and the classic textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The results are glorious:

In APL all data are represented as arrays, and there shall they see the Son of man, in whose sight I brought them out

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even mention “classes” or “inheritance.”

And Satan stood up against them in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the role of procedures in program design.

Beautiful, cold blue day: clear views of the mountains west, east, south, and even northeast, a dusting of snow everywhere high up. I feel happy.

I went out for an early dinner last night and didn’t come back for nine hours. It was an adventure, and it was one of those nights that makes me love living in Seattle and wonder how I could ever start over anywhere else; I just kept running into interesting people, making new connections and restoring old ones. But it was complicated, too…

Started out with dinner in the U-district, then over to the Neptune for the Kronos Quartet / Degenerate Art Ensemble show. Lots of familiar faces in the crowd. Old friends, former co-workers, people I’d like to get back in touch with. The music was satisfying and weird and intense as I’d hoped. I don’t have the vocabulary to explain the dancing, and you’d think I must have been tripping if I tried to explain it, but I couldn’t stop watching it.

Met some friends outside the theater after the show, went over to some house I’d never been to before, to the birthday party of some guy I don’t know, one of the people involved in producing Sparkle Donkey Tequila. Oh, hey, there in the back yard it’s Comfort, the Church of Mez/Groovlabs shade structure, set up as a German-style beer hall. People wrestling in the straw, people doing keg-stands, a table full of pretzels and sausages. And half of them are my old friends from KAOS! Heck yeah. I drank some beer and caught up on things. Awesome. Never did meet the birthday boy.

Next we decided to go find the Jerk Church fundraiser party at Hazard Factory, but while we were heading out we heard the cops had raided it and stolen all the booze and the cash box. Suck! We decided we’d go restart the party – went by ALTSpace and picked up a box of fireworks, then headed to Georgetown, intending to arrive with liquor and excitement.

But we didn’t make it. On the freeway offramp we came across the scene of a terrible motorcycle crash. The rider had hit a slick, slammed into the guardrail, and flipped off the bike – falling four stories down to the train tracks below. Oh, man. It was so quiet – people were still trying to figure out what to do. The bike was still running. A broken brake line squirted hydraulic fluid in my face when I tried to move it. I was a little bit stunned. People helped me wash the gunk out of my eyes, then we rolled the bike out of the road.

The cops showed up, the paramedics arrived, we left. It was sobering. I’ll likely never learn who the rider was. He (probably he?) likely died instantly – we arrived seconds after the crash, and he wasn’t moving. It was a long fall.

Tragic, certainly, but – also – not a terrible way to go, when you have to go. One moment you’re full of life, doing something you love, the next moment you’re gone… And it’s one of the things you have to accept as a possibility when you ride a motorcycle. Of course you do everything you possibly can to avoid it, but you just don’t get to control everything. My own recent crash reminds me of that: what else could I have done to avoid it? Added more and bigger lights to my bike, maybe. Taken more time to practice rapid braking maneuvers, maybe? But there it was, things suddenly went wrong, and now I have my right hand in a cast. Things suddenly went wrong for him, and now he’s dead.

But really – this is just life. It’s immediate and dramatic when you’re on a motorcycle, because the risks are obvious, but this is something that’s true for everyone. You just don’t know, you can’t know, you can’t control it all. Things happen, and lives change or end. Nothing for it but to take reasonable precautions and then embrace whatever time you get.

Anyway. No party mood after that. It was late and quiet. We went wandering through the industrial district, roamed up through West Seattle, hung out at the viewpoint for a while, talking and taking pictures. Calm returned, perspective shifted, friendship deepened. A good night, all considered.

Healing up slowly. I went into the office for a half day yesterday, and again today. I got tired really quickly, but I got some code written. It feels good to be productive!

Today so far is the first day I’ve started to feel more or less normal since the surgery. I went out and got coffee at Zoka, and I’m working on doing a little coding. I still feel much more tired and spacey than usual, but it’s nice to be able to do at least a little clear thinking again. My hand seems to be healing up nicely – not much pain there anymore. I’ll go back in Tuesday for a checkup.

I crashed my bike last Friday. I was riding east on Cherry Street when someone at a stop on 16th headed southbound across Cherry, right through my path. I braked hard, skidded, went down, and somersaulted up the street, ending up spread-eagled on my back. This intersection happens to be adjacent to Swedish Hospital, and I was immediately swarmed by helpful bystanders, one of whom was an MD. I felt banged up but not seriously hurt – but never mind, an ambulance arrived in moments, I was strapped to a board, and off I went to spend my evening in Harborview.

Many hours and two sets of X-rays later, the total damage report was this: one broken thumb. No scrapes, since I was wearing my customary head-to-toe leather and full-face helmet, nor even any bruises – but my right thumb won’t move without a great deal of pain. That’s it! Seriously – my muscles were sore but I had zero bruising. I felt like I got off easily.

Yesterday I visited an orthopedic surgeon, whose verdict is that it’s going to heal improperly – my tendons are pulling the bone fragments apart. I’ll develop arthritis in a couple of years and eventually lose the use of that joint. Well, that’s no good! So I’m going in for surgery on Friday; he’ll install three pins, which will hold my thumb in place for six to eight weeks, and I can expect three to four months of recovery before I can resume my normal vigorous life.

I was feeling pretty upbeat until I heard that. I have been experiencing such a small amount of pain I haven’t bothered to take anything for it since Sunday, and I’d hoped that meant the whole thing would blow over soon. Nope: this crash is going to change the shape of my life for the next few months.

Not riding my motorcycle is a hard thought to swallow. I’ve let it become part of my self-image: I don’t just ride a motorcycle, I am a person who rides motorcycles. How can life be boring, when I can go ride any time I want? Whenever I feel like things are getting too ordinary, up I go on two wheels, and zoom – I’m on top of the world. Ugh, I’m going to have to let go of that for a while.

I’ve been riding my motorcycle to work every day – now I’m going to be losing an extra hour a day commuting by bus. So much for the idea that working in Bellevue is no big deal. I guess I really am just going to be working and maintaining life for the next while; it will be hard to find time for extracurricular creative projects.

Skiing…. I’m going to miss the whole early season. Damn. And so much for my ambition to get back into climbing.

Oh, well, I’ll manage. It will be OK. It’s not going to be the winter I had imagined, but that was already going to be true.

I haven’t done anything creative lately. I’m just spending a lot of time at work and riding around on my motorcycle.

A random thought crossed my mind this morning, so I called Adam up and we went east to shoot guns at West Coast Armory. I put a couple hundred rounds through a .22 revolver, while Adam blasted away with a 9mm. Lots of fun.

I’ve been feeling a little bit under the weather for the last day or two, so I will probably keep it quiet for the rest of this grey gloomy autumn day and go to bed early. (Ugh.) I’ll get some code written first, though.

Doug Flag-themed sweatshirts from the Cascadia Independence Project. Bad preview, stylish idea. Might buy one.

Ava commented last night that she regrets upgrading her iPad to iOS 7. It’s not really better, and now she can’t go back to the system she felt comfortable with.

I think back to the release of Apple’s old Macintosh System 7, and I realize that it’s been a long time since I felt excited about software upgrades in general. My home computer is still running OS X 10.6 and I have no plans to upgrade it. The newer versions are just different, not better. I still don’t really use Windows much but I hear the same kinds of things over there. People upgrade reluctantly, and the new system seems to be built more for Microsoft’s benefit than for theirs.

I’m reluctantly downloading Xcode 5. I’ve been ignoring it, but apparently some of my co-workers got suckered in, and now in order to keep the project files in sync we all have to upgrade. What a waste of time! Who cares? What can the new version possibly do that the old one couldn’t? I’m sure Apple is very excited for me to upgrade, but it’s really a big waste of my time, as things will inevitably have changed and broken and I’ll have to get them working again, and at the end of the whole process I’ll (hopefully) have exactly the same thing I have now: a window I can type code in and a button that says “compile it”. At least when I upgraded gcc I got access to the new language features in C++11, which are actually worth something!

To some degree, this must be just a reflection of the fact that computers themselves have largely topped out. The only thing that has made any significant performance difference in the last two or three years is the introduction of solid-state storage. We no longer have ever-faster processors coming along every couple of years and making brand-new capabilities possible, but software makers still have to keep developing new software in order to fund their continued existence, so they get ever more cosmetic and esoteric in the features they try to sell.

Maybe I’m just getting old.

My netbook, the supposedly disposable Eee-pc 1000 which has outlasted two macbooks, currently runs Ubuntu 12.04. Its GCC does not support C++11. This is how to upgrade.

A nice introduction to bare-metal programming in C, with a simple startup entrypoint.

USB Condoms sever the data lines and pass through only the power lines of a standard USB connection, letting you charge your phone from any random USB port without having to worry that it might hijack your data.

Since when is the President-seemingly-for-life of Russia the sensible, measured, law-abiding one? This New York Times op-ed by Vladimir Putin responds to the proposal that America should bomb Syria, in order to punish whoever was responsible for the poison gas attack, and his carefully phrased, thoroughly diplomatic expression of concern about the long-term consequences of such makes far more sense than anything I’ve heard from Obama on the subject.

How the NSA Could Stop Sucking And Be Awesome Instead:

I’ve still got that memory of what it feels like to have nationalistic pride in an organization that’s on the forefront of mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Sadly, that power has now been turned inward, but I think it’s possible to fix NSA’s image, and use it to make America a better place.

It should go without saying that NSA needs real oversight, and needs to stop spying on Americans. After that, though, I think there are some concrete things that NSA could do to redeem itself, and maybe even attract talent.

I have no direct experience on the subject, as I was home-schooled all the way through, but this Salon article by Peter Gray makes a lot of claims that reflect my own reservations. Regular school has always sounded awful to me, and I cannot imagine how kids deal with it; I have always wondered if it is just me or if it really is that bad. The author of this article seems pretty certain that it isn’t just me:

School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

I haven’t really been working on any creative projects lately. I bought a house, and work got busy. I haven’t sewed anything in months or started any new projects.

I’m still grinding along on the massive LED chandelier. I made a PCB layout error which means it is going to be somewhat more difficult to connect the driver boards to the controller boards. I will probably just jury-rig adapters for all the boards, but I am thinking about spending the $381 to reprint them. Oof.

I have thought about selling the KZ1000 frame, since I haven’t touched it in a year, but I might still build an electric motorcycle some day, and it doesn’t really cost me anything to let it sit there at ALTSpace.

Kind of a bummer. I really bit off more than I could easily chew with this chandelier project.

I haven’t touched Radian in a while, either. The world went multicore, alright, but the high-performance desktop computing applications I anticipated just haven’t materialized. Our incredibly powerful desktop computers pretty much spend all their time running Javascript, and shared-memory multiprocessing doesn’t get you very far in a giant datacenter. Radian was an interesting experiment that proved a conceptual point, and it kept me sane during a couple of otherwise pretty frustrating years, but it doesn’t seem to have any practical applications.

Right, well, what I really wanted to talk about was the handful of projects I am thinking about working on over the fall & winter.

– strings of colorful walkway lights for forest festivals
– music-sensitive laser projectors that mount on the back of your hand (like a cross between my laser-projector backpack and the laserfingers)
– a new edition of the human-pedal-powered Skybeam, using LEDs instead of halogen bulbs
– walk-through laser dome, hundreds of beams shining down on the ground that you can play in
– organize a corporation to buy a piece of land to use as a big group campground for burner festivals and other events

this one will never happen, but wouldn’t it be fun?
– trampoline art car for next summer’s critical massive

It’s that time of year: everyone is leaving for Burning Man.

I’m not going. Really! I made it stick, and I’m almost home free! There’s still just barely enough time to buy someone’s spare ticket, throw a bunch of gear in a couple of bins, chuck it on a truck headed south, motorcycle my way down to the playa, and find some friends to crash with… but it would be one amazing last-minute accomplishment, and instead I’m taking Amtrak down to Portland tomorrow evening for Michael T.’s bachelor party.

Yeah. I’m doing it. I’m such a bad-ass that I’m actually skipping Burning Man.

Oh well, I’ll be back next year. I have a few projects in mind…

A new social network called PRSM makes sharing your personal information easier than ever.

GPGMail 2 – a plugin for Apple’s Mail.app which implements public-key encryption. Includes GPG Tools for general-purpose file encryption and decryption.