Ghost in the machine

I want to let this one go but I can’t; it’s stuck in my head.

I was at Home Depot for the third time in 72 hours or so at lunch. On Friday I picked up the wrong module for the media distribution center, and when I went in this morning to return it and get the correct one, I picked up the right box. But when I got it to the car and was driving to the office, I opened it at a stoplight and realized there was no module inside—just a punch-down tool.

I thought, Great. Not only would I not believe myself if I went back with the opened box and told them there was no module inside when I bought it, but I had used the self-checkout and so there wouldn’t even be a cashier to vouch that they had seen me.

But I went back and stood in the return line, and did a slow burn as I waited, and waited. And when I explained to the return cashier, whose first language was not English, she called over the MOD, and then the head cashier.

I started telling the story to the head cashier, but she cut me off. “You were here this morning, weren’t you? I saw you.” Yeah, I said. “Go ahead and get a correct module. Sorry for the trouble.”

I had set myself up for nothing but trouble: go in first thing in the morning, take the purchase path that involves no human contact, walk out with no proof that I hadn’t just taken the module out of the box. But because someone happened to see me and vouch for me, the system made an exception.

Hugely important, that human ability to make judgments and to decide that there should be exceptions. It doesn’t get implemented in code that way, and we forget about it all the time. But we are more than just ghosts in our machines. Sometimes we’re here to make decisions they can’t, so that people who need help can get it.

See if you can’t lock down that plaster chunk, Artoo.

i think this shopvac has a bad motivator!

Looking at HouseInProgress’s post about their weekend painting exploits, I was struck by the incursion of a familiar silhouette into the bottom photo in the article, just beneath those fantastic windows. Yes, the familiar big ass ShopVac, steady presence in all good home renovation projects.

Which of course leads me to the comparison: ShopVacs are the astromech droids of the houseblogging world. Tireless workers dealing with thankless jobs, they’ll all essentially identical except for the colors.

(I can’t be the only one to be geeky enough to make this comparison, can I? No, I see I’m not. I’m probably the first one to note that the high-pitched whine a one-gallon ShopVac makes when you accidentally tip it over and lodge the vacuum float in the top of the unit sounds a lot like Artoo’s squeal when he gets his droid ass shot off in the Death Star trenches, though.)

The blog in the machine: redesign of Democrats.org

Democrats.org, the official site of the DNC, has relaunched, as I hinted this morning. Much more prominent messaging on the party’s agenda, strategy and initiatives.

The code-head thing I hinted about? Well, for one thing, the site is now being served as XHTML 1.0 Transitional (though there are some minor validation weirdnesses). For another, if you view source on the main site pages (i.e. the pages that aren’t part of the Blog Formerly Known As Kicking Ass), you see mt-* URLs, including mt-search.cgi. Word has it that the whole DNC website has been ported to a customized, mostly static version of Movable Type.

I could be wrong, but I think this is the first time a blogging platform has taken over an entire web presence for a major American political party. (For all I know, that sentence doesn’t need the qualifier “American,” but I don’t have enough information to go out on that limb.)

Peer to peer found harmful

So Grokster loses. Software developers are responsible for the actions of their users. Hollywood’s dying business model lives to hemorrhage money and customers for another few years.

At least the ruling attempts to provide a test that should help lay down a line for evaluating whether peer to peer developers are subject to litigation:

“One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright … is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses,” Justice David Souter wrote in the ruling.

I will be interested to see Lessig’s take on the test. It seems to me that it might be possible to interpret that test pretty broadly.

Media wiring day 1: Go Fish

Yesterday was the second day in a row it’s hit or exceeded 100° F (that’s about 38 C, for those of you following along in metric countries) here in Boston. On the face of it, not a rewarding day for home improvement projects. But the open stud bays in two of our bedrooms aren’t going to go away by themselves. And my spur-of-the-moment declaration that I was going to run wiring for phone, cable, etc. up the bays before I closed them has taken on a life of its own. Lisa was particularly enamored of the idea of a phone upstairs, as our new air conditioning, while not loud by any stretch of the imagination, still generates enough white noise to make hearing the phone downstairs more difficult.

So I started running cable yesterday afternoon after returning from church. And quickly learned a few things. Like: it might have made sense to drill my own holes for the wiring between floors, rather than sharing space with the pipes the AC contractors ran. (No real issues until I got to the final run into the basement, at which point things started to get very tight.) Also learned the benefit of dedicated wiring conduit and true bundled cable. I fished my lines from basement to second floor one at a time, since I didn’t have a whacking great hole to drag them through, and it took me almost all afternoon. And I still haven’t run the speaker wire, which I decided to add to the mix at the last minute because I thought it might come in handy.

But I have coax cable, terminated on both ends with F-connectors, and category 5 cable run to the office and the master bedroom, as well as cat 3 which I’ve punched down into the phone block. Next steps: pull the speaker wire; mount the receptacles and pull the cables through them; and gird up my loins and pull the cable wire across the ceiling of the library into the distribution center so the cable connections will light up. I’ve resisted doing the last point for long enough. After that I’ll insulate the bays (since there was only horsehair insulation, I feel bad closing them up without providing at least some modicum of real R-factor) and hang drywall, and start plastering. Then we get to paint. (Joy, joy.)

Unfortunately all these next steps are going to have to wait till Wednesday, since I have rehearsals at the beginning of the week.

QTN™: Dogfish Head Midas Touch

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted beer tasting notes; a reflection, I think, on the limited availability of off-the-wall beers in this little corner of the Boston suburbs, if not on my actual consumption. So it’s with pleasure that I renew the series with notes on the Dogfish Head Midas Touch Golden Elixir.

The backstory of this beer is almost reward enough: analyzing the residues found in drinking vessels in a Minoan grave site, archaeologists found they comprised a mix of grape wine, barley beer and honey mead. Dogfish Head took the finding and ran with it, creating a barley-based beer in which the yeast was fed with honey and Muscat grapes, with a little saffron added for color and bitterness. But the taste of the beer is almost as complex as its origin. Starting with a nose a bit like a Duvel (or other golden Belgian ale), the taste is sweet without a hint of the complex esters (banana or bread flavors) normally found in more complex ales. But a second after the first swallow, you get the part that balances the sweetness: the 9% ABV that provides the counterpoint to the up-front sweetness. There is a little bit of dry-cracker taste, as with more expensive wines made with méthode champenoise, providing the other counterpoint to the honey flavor.

This is one sophisticated beer. And as the alcohol content suggests, it should be drunk accordingly: in small quantities, preferably with friends about with whom you can share your reactions.

Funky fresh for the … 60s

I’m reluctant to give the Funky16Corners blog any more press, especially after it got well-nigh BoingBoinged into non-existence last weekend. But the music he posts—MP3s of funk, R&B, and soul 45 sides from the 1960s—is just too good not to rave about. The author, Larry Grogan, takes garage sale hopping for vinyl and turns it into something beautiful. And he is apparently also involved in a group blog, Funk and Soul, covering much the same ground.

I was going to write about my own garage sale vinyl experience from this week (a bunch of 80s sides—about a jillion early Elvis Costello albums, a David Byrne 12″ from the Catherine Wheel, the Cure’s Japanese Whispers, Big Science—along with Bob Dylan’s debut and a few tasty jazz recordings), but Larry has put me to shame. Perhaps I’ll be able to give my finds their proper due later today.

Well, that was interesting

It’s early morning on Sunday the 26th. I thought I’d be posting about the free Hatch Shell concert from earlier tonight. As it turns out, though, I slept through it.

And when I say “slept through it,” I mean I went upstairs for a nap at 4:30 PM and woke up at midnight.

And now, of course, my body doesn’t want to go back to sleep because it’s already had almost eight hours.

What’s the opposite of insomnia?

I have long suspected that my occasional marathon naps have something to do with depression, but this is a new one—I don’t feel depressed, just disoriented. Unless, of course, I’m hiding something from myself.

Where I hope to be in 75 years

Boston Globe: 82 years later, R.I. couple still holding hands. Tarnation. If Lisa and I ever make it that far—and I’m concerned about our individual vitality rather than the vitality of our marriage when I say that—I hope I’m saying “She had legs. And I said to myself, ‘I need to meet that broad’.” And I hope I can still move fast enough to keep Lisa from smacking me. 🙂

Oh: and how perfect is it that he was a typesetter? If there is ever a job that prepares one for the long view, it is that.

On that note: congrats to Furious on her nuptials last weekend. Sounds like quite a party—and I hope you’ll post the full vows at some point, as “I vow either to cook or clean up but rarely both” is about as perfect a replacement for “obey” as I’ve heard in this two-career world. Also have to give big ups to the choice of “Handle With Care” for a first dance, even though there’s an interesting contrast with that vow. I too have been uptight and made a mess, but the beautiful thing about marriage is that one never has to clean it up oneself.

AC Days 3 and 4: mission accomplished

First, the punch line: for the first time, as of about 2:00 PM this afternoon, I am making mortgage payments on a house with central air.

Details: yesterday, under Lisa’s close eye, the contractors pulled all the tubing, connected the electrical wire, installed the compressor, installed a new thermostat, and test-fired the blower (albeit without refrigerant). Today the head HVAC guy came out to inspect the system, and (long story short) the AC is now running upstairs.

Which is good, given the outlook for the weekend:

sunny day, sweeping the clouds away

So what’s next? Quite a lot, actually: The installation of the first floor and basement air handler; installation of a new Viessmann boiler and connection to the hot water coils in both air handlers; and removal of steam pipes, oil-fired boiler, and oil tank. But that’s a matter for a few weeks in July.

Then we get to fix the holes in the walls. Currently we have two open stud bays that need to stay open until the work gets done, at which point I learn everything about plaster repair. Fortunately the holes are eminently patchable with large pieces of backing board and I will get a lot of practice in making smooth plaster coats.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to turn lemons into lemonade. With those open stud bays, it sounds like a great time to run coax up to the top floor for future cable modem/TV hookups. Finally that structured media panel is going to pay off. And I might as well get started since Lisa is on the road all next week.

Nights are growing long: Alex Chilton free concert

Well, I may have missed Sleater-Kinney at Avalon (sob), and I can’t make My Morning Jacket and Wilco tomorrow night, but I’m damned if I’m going to miss Alex Chilton at the Hatch Shell on Saturday—for free. He’s going to be there with “the original Box Tops”—not sure if that means the actual band or the session players that played on all the group’s classic 1960s Memphis soul albums—but he could turn up with a Turkish prison band and I’d still go if he were singing.

For the uninitiated: Alex Chilton was 17 when he had his #1 hit with the Box Tops, “The Letter” (as in, “My baby, she wrote me a letter”); then went on to be the core of Big Star, a band which single-handedly created both indie pop and power pop, as well as reviving the “jangle” sound of the Byrds so that it could be absorbed by early REM. Unfortunately Big Star failed to make a chart impact and the band fell apart over several years, but not before releasing three incredibly seminal albums.

So this should be a fun show. For more modern day Box Tops stuff, check out what’s in Current Listening on the lower right side of the page…

AC Day 2: mid-course corrections

hood chocolate milk cardboard cap, fresh from the wall

After the workmen left yesterday, I cleared the area where they would be opening the wall in the morning, then went upstairs and tried to figure out where the equivalent opening would be upstairs. And said, “Uh oh.” The equivalent opening was right behind the radiator, right under the window. In other words, it was not a clear path from floor to ceiling.

This was a problem. What the contractor was going to do was to run coolant lines, drip lines, and electrical lines up from the basement to the attic through that bay. And the key was the copper line for the coolant. That wasn’t going to bend from one bay to another.

In the morning, the contractor confirmed my concern. We looked at all the options and figured out that the best solution was to open a bay in the office/guest bedroom instead, just inside the wall on the second floor, and meaning I had to open a little more ceiling in the basement. Sigh. But no biggie. At this point, I’m getting pretty quick at ripping down plaster, even on my lunch hour.

In the meantime, the guys were hard at work, getting the holes opened up for the vents and installing them, and doing the hard work on the wall opening. A few surprises remained. For one thing, all the contractors commented on how tough our plaster was. There were many hole saws and Sawzall blades that were sacrificed to cutting the holes in the wall. For another, we discovered the insulation material in the outside walls: an odd vapor barrier plus horsehair combination that explains our energy bills. Next priority: proper insulation.

The third surprise was the odd bits and pieces that popped out from behind the walls. I should have expected based on Aaron and Jeannie’s experiences that we would find a few things, but I wasn’t prepared for a bottle and a cardboard milk bottle cap (pictured), found in totally separate places in the house.

But at the end of the day we had:

  1. Eight outlets upstairs—three in each bedroom, one in the bathroom, one in the stairwell.
  2. Insulated mini-ducts running from the outlets to the air handler.
  3. An outlet and overhead light (though not yet connected) in the attic.
  4. Upstairs air return, installed but not yet connected to the air handler.
  5. Two opened interior walls.
  6. Electrical lines run from the panel, through the joists that were exposed in the basement ceiling, and tied off just at the base of their run.
  7. Bonus: an extra couple of electrical lines that were run by mistake and were undersized for the needs of the downstairs air handler. The electrician asked whether I wanted them connected to outlets upstairs. “Sure,” I said.

Whew. Tomorrow, we might have AC upstairs.

The sanitation of the Starbucks mermaid

If your first introduction to Starbucks was in the last few years, you may not realize that the woman in the logo is a mermaid—or that she’s holding her tails wide open in a fertility gesture. Dead Programmer traces the evolution of the logo from 15th century fertility symbol to 21st century corporate logo and explains how it has morphed over the years.

What he leaves unexplained is what happened when the first radical leap occurred, from the brown “coffee, tea, spices” logo to the green more stylized mermaid. As I recall reading in a print article about ten years ago, this happened as part of a general brand refresh (or first brand design) that also ushered in the use of subtle “steam” graphics in the packaging, the introduction of earth-toned paints in the graphics and the stores, and just about everything you think of as the modern Starbucks iconography. This all happened about the time Starbucks made the shift from mail order coffee into retail and began to appear on the East Coast. I think the article appeared in How magazine. (I can’t find the article online, but there was a recent article about the work of the in-house Starbucks design team that does appear on the How site.)

Original link via BoingBoing.