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Daywander

Sep 30th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

I got my light-brown Clarks Natureveldts back from Resole America today, and although I may have talked about this here before, it’s worth saying again: Shoes that fit well are worth keeping, and the soles will invariably wear out before the uppers. I’ve been wearing Natureveldts as my casual everyday shoes since 1987, and they fit my fairly wide feet a lot better than anything else I’ve tried. They also wear like iron, at least if they were made before Clarks moved production to China sometime in the early oughts. I still have two pairs that go back to 1994 or so, and have replaced the soles several times, each time through Resole America. Turnaround time is about ten days, and cost is $75. Quality of the rework is superb.

I have a pair of Chinese Natureveldts on which the leather on the uppers has begun wearing through after about four years. They’re basically disposable shoes now, though not cheap ones. The fit is still good, but as with so much else, quality is no longer a choice we’re offered.

We’re also not offered the choice of buying dry-roasted peanuts without MSG in them. Safeway has five different brands, all heavily laced with neurotoxins. Oh ye who can actually eat that crap without consequences (I cannot) answer me this: Does it really make the peanuts taste better?

BearFromBehind.jpg

It’s a little disconcerting to look out your office window and see a toothy 200-pound omnivore walking down the sidewalk in front of your house. I snatched my camera out of the dock and ran out the front door, which may sound nutty, but I felt a little nutty, and followed the booger down the street, taking video as I went. He didn’t hurry and didn’t even turn around to look at me, and whereas I pondered jumping up and down and yelling “Roogie! Roogie! Whoosh!” with a Thurber accent, that would have been a little too nutty. Mostly I was happy that garbage day was yesterday.

I looked and did not find an answer to this question: When a concept exists today that did not exist in ancient Rome, are there Latin fanatics somewhere who create a Latin-ish word for it? (The French are masters at this.)

Carol’s better, the Pack is home from Jimi’s, and although my back still hurts, the weather has gone from mostly pleasant to extremely pleasant. I still need a basing diagram for the 6993 Geiger-Muller tube, but if that’s as bad as it gets, I’d call today a serious winner.

Odd Lots

Jul 2nd, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

Odd Lots

Jun 28th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Odd Lots

Oct 8th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • If like me you stand amazed at the precision of the English language (which is distinct from the precision of the people who use it, which is all over the map) do visit Obsolete Word of the Day. Many of the citations are old slang and many words do double duty: A slype is slang for a man who talks much about seducing women but lacks the courage to do so. Its formal use is architectural: the connection (often a covered but not enclosed passage) between the chapterhouse and the rest of a church complex. Much more there; you can sink hours on this one. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • Here’s a gatherum of peculiar or downright gross sodas from around the world. Yogurt-flavored Pepsi, anyone? Or (urrrp) Placenta? Alas, Inca Kola is not mentioned, though it should be. (Thanks to Bob Calverley, via George Ewing.)
  • The title on this article is wrong (or perhaps some people understand the term “hyperdrive” differently than I do) but it describes a new twist on an interesting and mostly forgotten 1924 speculation of mathematician David Hilbert: that a stream of particles moving at greater than half the speed of light could accelerate a nearby stationary object without subjecting that object to inertial forces. That wouldn’t be a true hyperdrive, but a genuine inertialess drive would almost seem like one if we limit the frame of reference to the starship. (I.e., we could go from here to sunlike star Zeta Tucanae in a week or so from our perspective, though 28 years from the universe’s perspective.) This is mighty exotic physics, and if there’s anything to it, we may learn more once Felber’s hypothesis is tested using the LHC, or perhaps the Tevatron.
  • I saw a trailer on what may be an interesting new film comedy: The Boat That Rocked , which had been originally (and I think more appropriately) titled Pirate Radio. It’s about the 1960’s offshore radio pirates operating just outside the UK’s territorial waters, something that’s always fascinated me. I’ve been taking notes on a novel I call (or called, sigh) Pirate Radio, exploring the notion of untraceable Internet broadcasting through large-scale powerline networking, and that research brought the old UK high seas radio pirates to mind. Probably won’t write the novel, but it’s been a good excuse to read up on things I haven’t looked at since I read them in Popular Electronics in the 1960s.
  • Don’t miss the Steampunk Genre Fiction Generator. Stumbling through it with no malice (or anything else) aforethought, I came up with: “In a leather-clad Aztec empire, a young farm boy with dreams stumbles across a talking fish, which spurs him into conflict with murderous robots with the help of a cherubic girl with pigtails and spunk and her discomfort in formal wear, culminating in convoluted nonsense that squanders the reader’s goodwill.” Somebody else write it and I’ll pay a quarter for that!
  • The ice melt across Antarctica during this past Antarctic summer (2008-2009) was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite era. I’d worry a little less about rising oceans swallowing New York City, as much as I sometimes find myself wishing for them to do so.
  • I used to wonder how corn mazes are made (and still do, for older mazes) but if you’re doing one today, you’re basically going to need a lawnmower and a GPS receiver, and a way to overlay a drawing onto a GPS-enabled map display. Oh, and a large field of corn that you’re willing to seriously mess with.

Odd Lots

May 21st, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • I like nuns (most nuns, if perhaps not all nuns) and I’ve said good things about the few that helped me get started on the road toward personal discipline and basic thinking skills. Over at the Make blog, they’ve got a few photos of an offering left at a monument dedicated to one Sister Nicodema: An elaborately painted wooden lightning bolt carefully delivered in an elaborately crafted custom case. No idea who she was or even where this is in the world, but somebody gets points for originality in implementing the tribute. She must have been one helluva teacher. (The great German term “geistesblitz” comes to mind.)
  • I thought of another couple of Irishisms associated with my grandmother Sade Prendergast Duntemann: Kafoothering (furiously fussing with, or frantic activity generally) and curniklee, which defies easy definition but might be described as gross dirt. Both spellings are phonetic, and I’m guessing the originals are from the Irish language. I haven’t myself used “curniklee” in decades, but “kafoothering” is a wonderful word that bears remembering.
  • Those who don’t read Contra comments on my WordPress main site may have missed Jim O’Brien’s insights on “oonchick,” which in Irish is spelled “oinseach,” and denotes a person of pathetic foolishness or stupidity. He also suggests that since in Irish the suffix “og” means “young,” a “gomog” may be a young gom, which in Irish is an idiot (or an “eejit” as Sade herself might have said.)
  • The “Axis of Evil” patterns that people see in maps of the cosmic background radiation may be caused by lensing at the boundary between the solar solar wind and the slower interstellar wind. Or you can have my completely speculative opinion (not peer reviewed) that the pattern is due to the cumulative effect on the cosmic background caused by everything massive in the universe acting as a very lumpy and unevenly distributed gravitational lens. The universe is not perfectly smooth and featureless. If the cosmic background is indeed leftovers from the Big Bang, it is the farthest source of radiation possible. We’re seeing it, in a sense, through slightly wrinkly glass. How could it be otherwise?
  • At least we’re not seeing the Blessed Mother in the cosmic background hiss… (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • I’ve known about the Baby Name Voyager for some time, but I don’t think I’ve cited it here before. It’s a Java app charting the popularity of names given to infants since the 1880s. The name “Jeffrey” barely existed until the 1930s, peaked about when I showed up, and then was mostly gone again by 2000. I always thought it was a bad idea. I wanted to be James, and was almost Eric. For a truly fascinating graph, though, enter a single letter, to see the relative popularity of all the names beginning with that letter. Like Q.
  • I’m not a beer drinker, but down at Shop and Save, they have Russian beer in 2-liter plastic bottles. I’ve never before seen beer (nor anything else alcoholic) in what most people think of as soda bottles, and I always figured it was either illegal or simply a bad idea chemically. I guess not.

Odd Lots

May 11th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment
  • The rest of Bichonicon was uneventful enough (and I was tired enough) that I decided it wasn’t worth a whole ‘nother entry. Aero won a ribbon on Saturday, but did not win points. Carol and I ate too much fast food. We came home. End of story.
  • I did briefly run into St. Louis native Nancy Frier, granddaughter of the man who founded Alox Manufacturing Company, maker of shoelances, kites, marbles, military radar corner reflectors, and lots of other odd bits. She had visited a marble factory in West Virginia and showed me a video of glass marbles being made on a machine very similar to the one Alox had used. It’s a great video, and when she uploads it to YouTube I’ll post a link here.
  • And I found two bottles of Diet Green River. The trick is to look in small local grocery stores or local chains, like Garden Fresh Markets or Shop and Save. Have not yet checked the local Butera, but it’s on my list.
  • A reader chided me that “All your damn dogs look alike. Post more pictures of Carol.” He’s right about the dogs, I guess, but I have posted quite a few pictures of Carol in my photo gallery. In fact, here’s an almost 40-year run of the two of us together.
  • From the Words I Didn’t Know (or at least understand) Until Yesterday Department: “Kukla” is Russian for “doll.” The eponymous little guy on the seminal Kukla, Fran, and Ollie kids’ show had been built as a doll for a friend by puppeteer Burr Tillstrom, who liked the doll so much that Tillstrom kept him, and made him the star of the show.
  • From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday (And Didn’t Think Were Necessary) Department: A merkin is a wig for women’s genitalia; basically, a pubic toupee. Sheesh. English has a word for everything.
  • Here is A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. I think it’s truer than people will admit, especially the Pascal entry. Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.
  • Blandishments: Salt-free mustard and ketchup.
  • A guy scraped Twitter data for the phrase “just landed in” and mapped the air travel data, hoping to create a new tool for epidemiology. Germs like jet aircraft for various reasons, and this is the first genuine use for the Twitter system that I’ve ever heard of.
  • I follow Icecap as part of my ongoing climate research, and it’s interesting for another reason: It consists of a navigation column and three narrow content columns. I’ve never seen another blog with a layout quite like this, and I like it. Narrow is better than wide, especially for small print. Scanability (given that I don’t read every entry) is high.
  • Finally, some images speak for themselves. This is one of them. (Thanks to Baron Waste for the link.)

Redshanks and Omathauns and Gomogs, Oh My!

May 4th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
7 comments

I had an Irish grandmother. Her Irishness was off the scale, pinning the needle and wrapping it around the (green) post three times, one for each Person of the Trinity. She was wry and cranky and as a younger woman had an operatic voice, which she used mostly to ridicule the whole idea of opera. (If I had inherited her voice, by God, I’d use it for the same thing.) Sade Genevieve Prendergast Duntemann (1892-1965) was quite the character. Back in 2005, I published the marvelous letter she was writing to my father when WWII ended. She gave me her Underwood typewriter–the same one from which that letter emerged–when I was only ten years old, and in doing so changed me forever. Words, both spoken and hammered in uneven type on a smeary two-color cloth ribbon, were the bond we had together.

And some of those words were…odd. Four in particular come to mind, though she died 44 years ago and I may have forgotten a few. I always assumed she had made them all up, as making things up was one of her gifts. (I believe that my knack for storytelling came down from her through my father.) Then, as the years rolled on, I started encountering them in real life:

  • Redshanks, in her parlance, were small imaginary animals that burrowed in her garden, making a mess. As a preschooler I imagined them as bright red mice with little horns. I would build redshank castles with my blocks, and my father and I once made redshank houses with strips of papier mache laid over half-flattened beer cans. I later found out that redshanks were also Scottish mercenaries serving in the Irish army circa 1600. There may have been an ancient family tradition coming to the surface here; had the Irish Army ever marched through County Mayo and trampled the Prendergast tomato patch?
  • An omathaun was a silly, clumsy goof–a word she applied to me often, and my father perhaps more than that. Again, I thought it was a pure Sade invention, until we saw the scraggly Irish cartoon fox in Mary Poppins yell “You heathen omathauns!” at the pursuing fox hounds. As with a lot of things, it was hard to research because I didn’t know how it was spelled. I suspect that in the original Gaelic the “th” was the single letter thorn (which looks like a crooked “d”) and today it’s generally spelled omadhaun. Sade had this one precisely right.

So. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. The two other words I will give you phonetically. My favorite is gomog, which in use was a somewhat stronger version of omathaun, particularly when there was a lot of frantic motion involved. “Running around like gomogs” is an expression Carol and I still use to describe QBit and Aero tearing through the house at flank speed, yapping like hyenas. I’ve already used the term “gomog” as a sort of immaterial AI PDA in my magic-as-software fantasy novel, Ten Gentle Opportunities, which I may finish someday with some borrowed Irish luck. (Quick, where’s my shamrock?)

And finally, oonchick. (Again, the spelling is phonetic.) An oonchick, if I recall the nuance correctly, was a dullard, albeit one deserving of some respect. I suspect it was Sade’s opinion of President Eisenhower, though we never talked politics. Mostly it was spoken in conversation I overheard, about adults I did not know. Sade was never short of opinions, just as she was never short of words.

I miss her, as I miss all those who were ever kind to me; and I miss her more than many, because of the peculiar power that her kindness imparted. I’m sure, as my mother lugged the heavy cast-iron contraption with “Underwood” painted on the front out of the car and up to my room, she was wondering, “Now what in heaven’s name is he going to do with that?” Sade had a hunch, and she was right. Wherever she is, I hope she got the word.

Odd Lots

Feb 7th, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments
  • German model train manufacturer Marklin has filed for bankruptcy, though there is still some hope that the 150-year-old firm will remain in business. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
  • Scientific American has an interesting retrospective on the infamous nuclear-powered B-36 that actually flew back in the late 1950s, with a live, air-cooled fission reactor in its rear bomb bay. I’m less twitchy about nuclear than almost anyone I know, and that item still gives me pause. (I do think that the stock B-36 was the coolest military aircraft of the transition period between props and jets, and one of the coolest of all time, period.)
  • From Rich Rostrom comes an aerial photo of the Fovant Badges, which are a group of military insignia cut into the Wiltshire chalk downs in southern England. They date back to WWI, and have been laboriously maintained since then–a job and a half, considering that some are over 200 feet wide.
  • When I first heard Cher’s uber-irritating hit “Believe” years ago I wanted to know what sort of processing was going on with her audio. I didn’t want to know enough to search too deeply, but it recently turned up on Slashdot. The gadget is called Auto-Tune. And Cher can actually sing when she wants to; one wonders what it could do for no-voicers like Bob Dylan.
  • I’ve never paid much attention to KDE’s Kate editor, but discovered today to my delight that it has syntax highlighting for NASM. I’d basically given up trying to find a lightweight Linux assembly language IDE to describe in my book, but half an hour of lightweight fooling around with it makes me think that Kate might be the one. Now all I have to do is become an expert in the next couple of weeks. Are there any books on it, print or e? I looked around and have found nothing so far.
  • From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: interpunct, which is a small dot used originally in Latin to unambiguously mark the spaces between words. It’s still used today to show you where the invisible characters are on your screen, and I recognized the concept immediately, but never knew what it was called.
  • From ditto: A placket is a flap of cloth that hides a button on fancy clothes. I have a pair of pants with one, and again, never knew what it was called until very recently.
  • Pete Albrecht pointed out a source of very nice cast aluminum house numbers in the Craftsman style–though at prices like these, I’m glad I have only a 3-digit address.
  • From the Painting the Devil on the Wall Department: One of the nation’s leading promotors of monster truck shows was run over and killed by a monster truck at one of his own shows. (Again, thanks to Pete for the link.)
  • From Ed Keefe comes a pointer to a stunt kite fitted out with a microcontroller, an accelerometer, and LEDs so that it could be flown at night and turn different colors depending on how fast it’s going and which way it’s pointing. I flew a kite at night in 1965 and only knew what it was doing by the crackle noise it made and how hard it pulled on the string. Technology advances…

Odd Lots

Jan 23rd, 2009
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet
  • From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: The Ranters were a wild-eyed seventeenth-century religious fringe group, who were perhaps most notable for incorporating nudity into their worship. (Whatever else they might have been, they sure weren’t Catholic.)
  • From ditto: In modern urban slang, a “butterface” is a homely girl with a great body, as in, “Every part of her was perfect but her face.”
  • And elsewhere on the words front, even William Safire, from whom the scariest words recoil in terror, was unable to determine the origin of that very up-to-date and with-it 90s expression, “it is what it is.” Wikipedia suggests that it was coined by John Locke, circa 1680. So much for being up-to-date.
  • From the Microprocessors I Never Heard of Until Yesterday Department: There was an 80376. It was an embedded variant of the 80386 that did not support real mode, but only protected mode, and was produced from 1989 until 1994.
  • Much angst is flowing about the blogosphere concerning the Conficker worm, but this is the first page about it that I respect at all. I’ve long since disabled Autorun, and in fact, “autorunning” things is one of the worst ideas in computing since DLLs. Make sure you’ve got that November patch they speak of
  • And while we’re talking worms, here’s some news on a piece of malware that comes in on pirated Mac software, evidently with the intent of creating an all-Mac botnet. The dangerous thing here is that a lot of nontechnical people seem to believe that the Mac is immune to malware somehow. OS/X is certainly tougher to infect than Windows, but it can be done, especially when people are sure that it can’t.
  • Carol and I launch our Internet-facing apps under a clever mini-utility called DropMyRights, which basically runs such apps with limited user account privileges instead of admin privileges, even if you’re running as admin. Doesn’t work on Win2K, so I have not used it myself until fairly recently, but I installed it on Carol’s XP box probably two years ago, and she has used it daily without any issues since then.
  • I have tried and failed to make a Linux utility called KGrubeditor work under my instance of Ubuntu Intrepid. When I attempt to launch it, an item appears in the taskbar for about fifteen seconds before vanishing, and nothing else happens. At least one another person I know has made it work correctly, but I just don’t see what I’m doing wrong. I installed it through Ubuntu’s apt-get shell and saw no errors during the process. If any of you are users and are aware of any trickiness in the utility, I’d love to hear more.
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