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Welcome to my home page. I live in New York, NY and Oak Bluffs, MA; I'm married to Julie; I'm dad to Hazel. I work as a programmer; I have a dog, and she has a web site too.

Thatcher's rants and musings

rants index: current | 2007 archive | 2006 archive | 2005 archive | 2004 archive | 2003 archive | 2002 archive

26 October 2008

Bilge Pump

More fallout from my continuing paper purge. I've been meaning to do this for about the last, oh 15 years or so. Here it is, the cartoon I drew in college with my friend Sutty, Bilge Pump.

16 October 2008

Politics

I was watching the news with Hazel the other night. They were showing a graphic of Obama with a donkey symbol, and McCain with an elephant symbol.

Says Hazel: "What?? He [McCain] has an elephant?!? Barack Obama needs a unicorn! And he [McCain] needs a unicorn, and then that would be fair!"

14 October 2008

Scott McCloud (but really all about me)

Paul Krugman has a Nobel Prize, but I have a Scott McCloud comic. This is from back in 2003 -- I've been doing a paper-purge lately and came across my copy of the magazine where it appeared.

27 September 2008

Rabbit Ears

I fired Time Warner Cable in a fit of anger last week. The final straw, among other screwups, was that they had sent me yet another bill still charging me for Road Runner (internet) even though we had moved and I had repeatedly told them to cancel it.

So I got home, read the bill, and called with the intention of asking them to please fix it, again. I waited on hold, in vain, for 45 minutes. By then I was angry enough that I thought "screw it, this is ridiculous, cable TV is not worth this much money and aggravation, I'm done with these jokers."

I wrote up a snail-mail letter to their customer service address, telling them to disconnect me, with a final check. I signed it "Hasta la vista, baby".

I stayed angry enough to get the letter into the mailbox several hours later. Then I got a little bit worried -- what was Hazel going to watch in the early morning? Julie pointed out that she intended to watch the Presidential debate int the comfort of her own home, come hell or high water. Time Warner sends a bunch of un-encrypted signals down their wire, which our awesome new HDTV is capable of tuning, but I wasn't sure if they would cut that off completely. They might. I would, if I were them.

Our TV begs to be fed with an HD signal. I did some frantic research on satellite TV. DirecTV looks decent; it's somewhat cheaper than Time Warner Cable for similar channels, and looked like it might have more HD. I never actually called them, but their customer service couldn't possibly be as bad as TWC.

But satellite would be a bit of a hassle since we live in a NYC co-op. Even though we're on the top floor and have easy access to places to mount a dish, we don't actually own our roof, and there would be some approval steps involved.

With the Presidential Debate and other TV needs in mind, I figured I would hedge against the cable going dead. I went to Radio Shack and bought a set of $15 rabbit ears. They're on a little plastic base and sit behind the TV, with a coax output that goes straight into the TV.

So here's the thing: rabbit ears are great!!! Thanks to digital broadcasting, we pay a whopping $0/month to get the major networks in flawless HDTV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and couple random local/minor stations). We get a bunch of other digital TV signals, including a sightly cheesy, but adequate, dedicated kids network ("Qubo"), and a lot of Spanish-language stations (sometimes good for soccer coverage). We get a bunch of analog stations as well, like PBS. The PBS analog reception is acceptable but very obviously inferior to any kind of cable or any of the digital formats.

The over-the-air HDTV looks quite awesome, a bit better than on cable. The over-the-air standard-def DTV looks even better (compared to cable standard-def). I've heard that the cable networks transcode, and of course they have to make room for the fricking zillion channels of total garbage in their lineup, so over-the-air wins on picture quality.

Rabbit ears win in another seeminingly small, but IMO important way -- the Samsung TV remote controls everything, and the channels are in a reasonable order. With TWC, you get SD and HD versions of many channels, with the HD versions off in some region of high channel numbers. Like if you just tune to channel 2, you get low-res transcoded awful looking 4:3 CBS. The hi def is on channel 802 or something like that. With rabbit ears, the HDTV CBS channel is on "2-1", right next to "2", and you can easily delete "2" right out of the channel list, so you never see standard-def CBS again.

Digital broadcasting also provides a halfway decent built-in channel guide -- i.e. you press the "info" button on the remote and the TV shows the name of the show, summary, length, etc. You can go into the channel list and see the lineup for the next day or so. The TV's UI is better than Time Warner's too.

There is also the ancillary bug/feature that I will never end up watching E! True Hollywood Story or The Girls Next Door past my bedtime. I feel a little bit sad about The Daily Show and C-Span. But only a little.

Rabbit ears rule!

15 September 2008

CLUE

Speaking of the elusive Clue, here's a T-shirt I designed:

Obama:
click to customize/order

Here's another one:

Obama (a la Corona) shirt
click to customize/order

5 September 2008

McCain and Palin

Dear Candidates McCain and Palin,

As individuals, you seem like nice enough people. Unfortunately your policies are regressive and I don't want either of you to become President of my country. Thanks for reminding me to max out my contribution to Barack Obama, who seems to have a little more of a clue.

Sincerely,

-me

25 July 2008

Energy

Oil prices are up, and it is painful. The prospect of having to buy heating oil is particular scary for those of us in the northeast US; it is going to be a serious problem this winter for a lot of people. Nevertheless, in the big picture, high oil prices are a good thing. It's about time we finally got serious about conservation and sustainable energy. Before oil prices shot up, we were not properly focused on the problem.

Some links:

Werbos has some good slides about the near-term future of electric cars. The battery stuff is interesting, he points out that the new Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries appear to be a major breakthrough. LiFePO4 has some great qualities:

  • long cycle life (~2000 cycles)

  • safe/stable (they don't burn or explode if abused)

  • high current capability (good for vehicles; you can draw a lot of power quickly to accelerate)

  • relatively fast initial charging

  • made of non-scarce non-expensive materials

The only real technical downside that I know of is that they have lower energy/volume density than some other Lithium technologies. Their energy/mass density seems to be on a par with conventional Lithium-Ion but since they weigh less for a given volume, you need a physically larger battery for the same energy content. But it's not a major problem; they're still very good batteries.

They're not dirt cheap yet, but the Chinese (e.g. BYD) seem to be getting there fast. There are dudes in China selling phenomenal scooter batteries on eBay, and some vendors with actual web sites as well.

It looks as though these batteries will be good enough and cheap enough to make electric and plugin hybrid cars truly mainstream within the next few years!

Why I'm Against Nuclear Power

A few otherwise-rational-seeming techies loudly promote nuclear power as a way out of our oil/climate/etc energy problems. They cite some impressive facts, like its relatively low cost, proven technology, the fact that coal-burning plants release more radiation than properly operating nuke plants (due to the trace uranium in coal going into the atmosphere), and that nuke power plants use a much lower grade of fuel than weapons.

But, because I actually read the news, I know they are wrong. We should not be promoting nuclear power. The two basic problems:

  • Uranium enrichment technology for power production is also applicable to weapons (see Iran).

  • We still don't have a viable strategy for nuclear waste, and there's nothing on the horizon.

21 July 2008

Household Notes

BTW we've been pretty happy with the Minka Aire Concept II, except for that one broken remote receiver.

6 July 2008

Lemuria

Jersey Beat turned me on to a band called Lemuria, from Buffalo NY. I heard a couple songs on myspace and ordered their album "Get Better". I've been listening to it a lot. It's wicked awesome, a little bit like Jawbreaker meets Team Dresch. Not as frenetic as that would be, but still hits my spot.

26 June 2008

Shopping For Lights

Shopping for lights. Ugh, what a pain. Shopping online is a huge hassle; there are all these massive aggregators like Google Product Search, Nextag, etc but they don't really help that much since I don't already know what I want. The problem is that I'm wandering around in pages and pages of fixtures, very few of which a) I like, b) I can afford, and c) might meet my actual lighting needs. The search engines do a decent job of indexing every SKU in existence, but very poor job of directing me to online stores that stock the kind of thing I want to choose from, so I can browse a richer vein of options.

Other problems are due to the nature of online shopping -- while I can generally judge whether I like the shape of a fixture from the photo, it's not easy to judge materials/finish quality, size, and brightness.

I ended up taking some time off work and letting my feet do the walking. I had to go to IKEA for other reasons, so I looked there, but they really didn't have much; their surface-mount ceiling lights were affordable but pretty heinous. Google Maps had alerted me to the existence of a cluster of lighting stores around 59th St and 3rd Ave in Manhattan, so I walked around there. Most of the stores were full of high-end gilt antiquey stuff. The first place I walked into, when I mentioned the word "affordable", the dude was like, "Nope, that's not us." LOL! He directed me around the corner, to The Lighting Center which also has a decent website. They had a pretty wide range of "affordable" stuff, and actual people to help direct me around, which was nice. But nothing there really looked great. I took a bunch of photos but was kind of discouraged.

I also stopped by Home Depot. Their stuff definitely fits within my budget, but none of it looked good to me (let alone, Mrs. Thatch).

I figured I would be back online looking at stuff. My last stop before giving up was a store right around the corner from my apartment: Lightforms. For some reason I was biased against them -- I guess I have an inherent disdain for the general concept of a lighting store, since I have never needed one before, and resented the fact that they consumed an entire retail storefront near my apartment.

Anyway, I walked in, gawked at the ceiling for a few minutes, and suddenly saw something I actually liked! And it was on the cheap end of the range! The saleslady was very helpful and turned me on to the square version of the round fixture that was on display, and had some advice on sizing etc. For the record, I ended up with the Tiella 90 at around $90 each.

Score one for bricks & mortar. That said, I want to jot down some of the semi-decent online contemporary lighting stores, for future reference:

8 June 2008

Hazelisms

Hazel: "That boat was hunormous"

Me: [mis-hearing] "Twonormous?"

H: "No, hunormous. That boat was so hunormous, it was 6 inches taller than you, and 12 inches to the side of you -- 12 inches wider than you!"

Um, thanks.

Yesterday:

[looking at a bottle of Snapple]

Hazel: "What does it say there?"

Me: "Water, high fructose corn syrup, orange juice concentrate, citric acid, sodium hexametaphosphate, modified food starch, potassium benzoate, natural flavor, sodum citrate, potassium sorbate, glyceral ester of wood rosin, calcium disodium EDTA, yellow 5, red 40."

H: [pause] "Is that all?"

Books

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. A decent read, creepy. The characters are all kind of caricatures and a lot of it feels like social commentary on a society I know little about. But the devil's advocate character, Lord Henry, is icky but fascinating. He's the guy who says catchy things like "the only way to remove temptation is to yield to it", and a lot of other witty quotes you see attributed to Oscar Wilde. The book, to me, came off as a condemnation of that kind of thinking, so, what does it mean that those quotes are attributed to Oscar Wilde? Obviously they're things he came up with, but are they sentiments he actually endorsed? I guess if you want to quote a pithy saying like that, it's too awkward to attribute it to a fictional character?

Paycheck Philip K. Dick (collection of early short stories). There are a few classics in here, and pretty much all the stories are enjoyable to read, but a lot of them seem like little more than average/decent Twilight Zone episodes.

White Teeth Zadie Smith. Intergenerational interracial interdomestic family drama set in Britain. The portrayals of the disparate characters are impressively vivid. Smith seems to enjoy highlighting flaws and foibles, which is amusing but makes it hard to know who to root for, if anyone. But by the end of the book her affection for the characters bleeds through clearly.

The Club Dumas, Arturo Perez-Reverte. Translation of Spanish page-turning "literary thriller", dealing with rare books, satanism and manuscript pages of The Three Musketeers. I had a big problem reading this book because I had seen (on TV) most of the movie "The Ninth Gate" w/ Johnny Depp and directed by Roman Polanski. The movie was engrossing enough to watch to the end, but also kind of sucky and unsatisfying, in my opinion. So through most of the book I was seeing the movie in my mind. But, the book diverges from the movie in a couple important plot points, so the suspense wasn't totally ruined. Not a great book, but an entertaining page turner, and better than the movie adaptation.

_The Emperor's Children_ by Claire Messud. Another yarn about writers, less of a thriller and more like a prurient peek into the lives and loves of several New York writers; a revered gray-haired journalist, some young children of privilege, and a young weirdo. Has a pronounced "Sex in the City" vibe running through it. Decent, not mind-blowing. The most interesting character (to me, ha ha) is the intense loner weirdo, and he does figure prominently, but the other, less interesting, characters get a disproportionate amount of ink.

Misc

I confronted a guy yesterday who was sort of cutting in line in front of me at a snack bar in the park. The snack bar was staffed by recently-hired teenagers and was disorganized so I'd been waiting a long time and the line situation wasn't crystal clear, but my read of the situation is that he was definitely pushing the envelope. I said something to him, and he totally played dumb, claiming to have misunderstood the line, but ended up getting away with it as several staff people became available at the same time, suddenly breaking the logjam. That guy was a jerk. Southern accent, as tall as me, overweight, red face, not that that's relevant to anything. I hope you're reading, jerk-guy.

Often in these situations I just say nothing, fuming, and end up letting people cut in front of me. My problem is, in the rare case when I do say something, I wait so long that I'm so pissed that I can't be humorous and friendly about it, and afterwards I feel bad. So I'm even less inclined to say something in the future. But New York confronts me with many intolerable line situations with many impatient jerkoffs trying to get an edge. It's good practice for me. The best policy seems to be to say something right away before there is any confusion, real or invented -- "are you waiting in line?" works well. If the person is cutting inadvertently, they're set straight. If they're doing it on purpose, they're immediately busted but have a face-saving way out. I realize this is something most people learned in kindergarten.

28 May 2008

Google Earth Browser Plugin and API

Now it can be told: this is what I've been working on. You can write Google Earth apps using Javascript, including game-like things. It's pretty fun. It also integrates smoothly with Google Maps API sites; basically you just enable 3D, and most things will magically work.

14 April 2008

Bait And Switch

As an East-coast urban-dwelling latte-sipping NPR-listening birkenstock-wearing college-educated info-working Volvo-owning non-hunting non-bowling non-veteran effete limousine-liberal * snob, I admit to being totally baffled by the flap over Obama's recent comments. Reportedly he told an audience in San Francisco (ooh!) that some voters in rural areas are bitter about being econonically neglected, and vote on the basis of gun rights & religious issues when election time rolls around.

So, three thoughts:

1. Hillary & McCain are falling over themselves to say it shows that Obama is an elitist. Really? The two filthy-rich candidates, whose campaigns have literally been run by Washington corporate lobbyists, think the other guy is an elitist. The half-black dude from Hawaii, raised by a single mom, who spent his time prior to politics organizing job training programs, and didn't finish paying off his student loans until after the age of 40. That guy's an elitist.

2. Are any of these looked-down-upon voters actually offended? I'm sure some patch of astroturf will complain loudly, but to me, it's pretty cool that a candidate actually wants to confront the causes of people's bitterness, instead of distracting them with a bunch of bull, as per usual.

3. Is anybody else appalled that Hillary's taking up the Republican talking point here? McCain I understand, it's still totally ridiculous, but expected. But Hillary? Sheesh.

Anyway, unlike the Wright hoo-hah, this one seems like it could be a political net win for Obama once people are done processing it. Here's Obama's spin on it:

value="http://www.youtube.com/v/G6_mQ3h8lx0&hl=en">

(* No, I don't really wear birkenstocks or sip lattes, and I've been known to bowl.)

7 April 2008

Brian Dumps

Overheard

Julie: This summer we're going to have some corn on the cob!

Hazel: Corn on the log?

Julie: Corn on the cob.

Hazel: Oh! Corn on the hob!

Julie: Corn on the cob.

Hazel: No! Corn on the hob!

Books

Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge: Sci-fi set in a recognizable not-too-far future. The tech is believable but not all that fantastic. I also give him credit for taking a stab at character. But not super exciting in either dimension.

Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. Cheesy and windy, but readable. Has a Canturbury Tales vibe and some of the internal stories are good. But they seem to get worse as the book goes on, and it ends on a total anticlimax. Bleh.

Everyman, by Philip Roth. Short and to the point, another intense Roth masterpiece, a man's meditation on surgery and death.

Gang Leader For A Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh. I randomly saw this guy on C-Span, and had to read the book. It's a pretty fascinating memoir -- an Indian-American suburban Deadhead sociology grad student decides to hang out in the 'hood and see what's up. Exciting things ensue over the next half-dozen years or so. Yet the book seems kind of shallow and tentative in some ways. Still, a riveting story, worth reading.

Typee, by Herman Melville. I started with the free audiobook from Librivox but eventually that got so tedious that I just went and bought a paper copy and finished in a quarter the time. Has many parallels to Gang Leader For A Day -- chronicler engages the mysterious and frightening unknown (cannibal South Seas island village / inner city Chicago housing project) and reports back. Melville is a far more gifted yarn-spinner (no knock on Venkatesh). But, while it's full of perceptive observation, and is worth a read, it also is ultimately pretty shallow compared to say Moby Dick.

Fortress Of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem. Slightly outsized (or is it?) tale of a white kid growing up in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn (Boerum Hill in the 70's). Has some magical realist elements. The protagonist goes through stickball, graffiti gang, comics nerd, and snotty Manhattan teen to end up as a condescending rock critic dude with issues relating to the race/class predicament of his upbringing. I didn't realize it until now that these three books all center on the theme of racial/cultural alienation. Anyway, this one was pretty good although I never quite totally related to the guy's pain.

Beauty Tip

It's a sad day when I'm giving grooming advice, but this is an emergency. Ladies, could you all please stop plucking your eyebrows?! Don't end up looking like Marcel Marceau.

2 April 2008

What Does MP3 Compression Sound Like?

What does MP3 compression sound like? Kind of a stupid question considering that many of us listen to it all the time. But it does have an answer, sort of.

While I was uploading Sinkhole, I tried an experiment. I compressed the albums at 256kbps which, for me, is basically indistinguishable from the original. I took one song's mp3 and loaded it into Audacity (a nice free audio editor). I took the same song's original .wav file and loaded it into a second track in Audacity, parallel to the first. Then I inverted one of the tracks (i.e. reversed the polarity). Then I zoomed way in so I could see individual samples, and found an obvious peak in the audio (a bass drum hit). I slid one of the tracks slightly in time so that the extreme value of the peak was at the exactly same time in both tracks.

Then I played both tracks together. If MP3 were lossless, in theory I would hear nothing -- the two sounds should perfectly cancel each other out, leaving silence.

In practice, MP3 is lossy, and so I heard "what MP3 sounds like". Huh? Yes -- you can think of an MP3 as just the original signal with some junk added. I was listening to the junk.

In other words: 

Let A = original audio signal
mp3(x) is the signal x compressed and then decompressed by mp3.
So:
  mp3(A) = A + someJunk  (MP3 is just regular audio with some junk added)
  someJunk = mp3(A) - A  (I isolated the junk)
Here is the .WAV file;

it contains a snippet of the original so you can hear what it sounds like, followed by someJunk.

To me, it sounds like music blasting extremely loud, and I'm next to some newspaper wrapped around a coffee can full of old screws and nails. The newspaper and stuff rattle in time to the music, but the music is so loud I can't hear the rattling at all unless the music stops suddenly.

OR

Think of MP3 as the original signal with some stuff subtracted. The stuff that's left out is -someJunk.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

30 March 2008

Sinkhole albums free online

My old band, Sinkhole, just released two of our albums under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. This pretty much means you can do whatever you want with them, including use songs as background for your intermediate falconry tips video, but more to the point, download and listen to.

Groping For Trout


Core Sample

These two albums are the ones on Ringing Ear Records, the label that we (mostly Jon) ran. We also released two albums on Doctor Strange Records. We're checking with the Doc to see how he feels about us putting those online also. No promises.

5 Feb 2008

Yes We Can

"I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences." -- Barack Obama, 2002 full text

Obama is the real deal.

2 Feb 2008

This Election

This election (so far) has been the best and most democratic that I can remember. The primary schedule is not my favorite, but in most other ways it has been a big improvement:

Let's hope things stay good for a while.

Good Obama vids

I think Obama is a rhetorical and political genius. He gets the priority straight: inspire emotional motivation before trying to sell policy.

There are lots of good Obama speeches on youtube, but here are a couple representative samples.

On MLK Day at MLK's church, the poetic biblical emotional Obama:

If you don't have a half-hour to watch the whole thing, the best couple of minutes start around 17:45.

At some little community meeting in California back in November, the lower-key wonky Obama:

Part 2:

Here's another wonky speech that gets it right, addressing Planned Parenthood last summer:

8 Jan 2008

Senator Hillary Clinton on MLK and LBJ

I'm not a habitual political blogger, but I have been following the races, and I can't leave this uncommented.

Disclaimer: I'm pretty liberal in outlook, I almost always vote Democratic and I am an Obama supporter this time around. I would also add I am not a big fan of Hillary though I would certainly vote for her in the general election against any of the Republican candidates.

That said, I have lately become convinced that this lady should not be allowed anywhere near the Democratic nomination.

The latest evidence is this sound bite in the recent false-hopes-vs-get-it-done debate between her and Obama.

Senator Clinton: "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

(Here's the video.)

WHAT??? There are so many things wrong with this statement, it's not even funny. I'll grant that in some narrowly parsed legalistic sense, it may be defensible. But, among other things, it's just so incredibly moronic on a political level that it's hard to believe that she's still in the race. Wow. She's comparing Obama to MLK and herself to LBJ? Yeah, great talking point, good luck with that one, the voters will really go for it!

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