Shallow Thoughts

Life in the Baitball

I'm flying R/C electric planes again. I'd overdone it a few years ago and burned out; it stopped being fun and I had to take a long break from flying.

But lately I'd been hearing intriguing stories from Dave about the group he flies with at Baylands. They weren't doing the endless hovering-and-rolling-circles that's all the rage in electric R/C circles. (Not to disparage 3-D flying; anyone who can coordinate a rolling circle gets my respect as a pilot. I just lost interest in spending much time at that sort of flying myself.

No, what they've been doing lately is combat flying ... dogfighting. The kind of flying I always thought looked most fun, only Dave and I could never get anyone else interested. You mean, there's a whole group of people dogfighting and I'm missing it?

When I came out to visit, a couple of my old dusty planes in tow, Dave let me use one of his old Boomers (a bit easier for a rusty pilot to fly than the full-on Wild Wing) for the combat. We only had 4-5 planes in the air, but I was hooked right away. Dogfighting is way more fun with five planes than it is with only two. It's still surprisingly difficult to hit each other, even when that's what everyone's trying to do. But even when you don't make contact, it's exciting and beautiful.

When you get a lot of planes in the air, twisting and turning and looping and trying to stay in a little compact region because that makes it more likely they'll hit, Dave put his finger on what it's most like. You know those David Attenborough nature shows where a huge school of sardines or anchovies has gathered, and dolphins herd them into a tight compact ball of shining shimmering silvery streaks, and then the seabirds come and dive from the air while the dolphins are darting in and out from below? Attenborough calls it a bait ball, and that's what Dave calls our combats.

We're gradually pulling in fresh mea--er--new recruits to add to the fun. A week ago last Saturday we all trooped up to Dublin to meet with some east bay combat flyers. We had as many as ten planes all fighting at once. Pete has a video online of the Dublin Melee ... video from a digital camera really doesn't get the feeling across, but it's a start, and gives some idea of the challenge of keeping track of which plane is yours.

Try imagining David Attenborough narrating about the bait ball while you watch the video. Helps a little, doesn't it? Or if you're going for the feel of combat, ditch the narration and play something like the "Asteroid Field" theme from the first Star Wars.

Tags: planes, combat, dogfight, radio control, baitball
[ 21:20 Sep 30, 2008    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Wheelchair antics

My mother is temporarily in a wheelchair due to a broken ankle, so we've been helping out and learning all about wheelchairs.

I've actually been fascinated by wheelchairs for years. I'm not sure why; maybe it was seeing some of the interesting off-road racing wheelchairs built by bike companies like Cannondale, and the amazing feats of various sorts of wheelchair athletes. But it's been fun and interesting getting some firsthand experience. And, I have to say, Mom looks pretty cool in her slick little wheelchair and black high-tech looking ankle boot.

I already knew about some of the inconveniences that go along with not walking, like all the stuff on the high shelves in stores (fortunately Mom can stand up on her one good leg), and how much more complicated baths and showers become. Not much we can do to help there.

The first big issue where we can help is getting in and out of the house. The front porch is out -- it's three steps down, so no chance of managing it in a wheelchair. The garage is the same way. But the door to the back patio is a lot more promising: only one relatively small step down. Getting out is easy as long as you're prepared for the lurch as the chair goes over the edge. Getting back up with no ramp is the trick.

But we found several ways of handling it. My first tries involved getting a running start and trying to wheelie up -- that works for the front wheels, but the rear wheels don't have enough traction to get over the lip. Dave had an idea worked better: lean forward and grab the doorway with your hands and just pull yourself up. (This is really easy if you can cheat and use one foot; without that, it does take a bit of arm strength.)

Mom found her own way, though: stand up on the good foot, reach down and lift the chair up over the edge then sit back down.

We've learned a few other things:

Handicapped parking spots are almost always full. I'm amazed at how often we've seen this. It's not cheaters -- when I've bothered to check, the other cars always the correct placard. Apparently there are just a lot more people with handicapped placards than there are spaces to park in.

Related: A lot of places don't have sidewalk ramps, so you may have to go way out of your way if you need a ramp.

On the positive side, people are pretty accomodating. One of my mom's friends told her "The seas part for you when you're in a wheelchair". We haven't quite seen that, but when people happen to notice the chair, they do try to make way. The biggest problems have been in places like Fry's, full of nerds so intent on their shopping that they have no idea what's around them.

Good thing people are accomodating, because Wheelchairing is hard work: harder than you think it will be, at least on rough surfaces like carpeting or grass. Good way to build up those shoulder muscles! Especially uphill (though going backwards makes the really steep ascents a lot easier).

Perhaps that explains why, when I've visited elderly relatives in nursing homes, I've noticed that although many of the residents are in wheelchairs, none of them use their hands to wheel around. Instead, they push themselves slowly along by shuffling with their feet, looking like something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

And speaking of nursing homes, another minor mystery. They initially sent Mom home with a walker (like the walking denizens of the nursing home use) instead of crutches. I'm curious why. I've tried crutches a few times, and remember them as being fairly easy to use. The walker seems much more difficult. You have to limit yourself to slow baby steps, or else you tend to bump into the front of the walker with your legs as you swing through. It's harder, too: your hands get sore from holding so much weight on your palms. I can see how it would be a good balance aid for someone who moves very slowly anyway. But Mom isn't like that -- she gets around just fine when she has two good legs. I hope she won't be stuck using the walker for long once she starts walking again.

Tags: accessibility, wheelchair
[ 18:50 Mar 31, 2008    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Keyboard Cable by Rube Goldberg

Dave and I were helping out with replacing the keyboard on a friend's computer. Isn't it funny how keyboards never come with cables that are quite long enough to go from the front of a desk to the back, down and around to the computer that sits underneath?

This particular desk has a backboard that makes the cable take a more circuitous path than most, and when we unplugged the old keyboard, we discovered that it was plugged in using an extension cord.

And what an extension cord! It's a PS/2 to 5-pin AT plug adaptor ... connected to an AT to AT extension cable ... connected to an AT to PS/2 cable on the other end. Each of the three pieces is yellowed with age, but to three different colors.

Unfortunately the mass spectrometer is on the fritz again so we weren't able to establish accurate Carbon-14 dates for each of the three pieces.

Tags: humor, hardware
[ 12:09 Mar 29, 2008    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Happy Vernal Easternox

Happy three-days-past-vernal-equinox, or whatever spring holiday you celebrate!

Turns out this time of year is a holiday in just about every culture. Who doesn't want to celebrate spring? The sun was out today, and a mockingbird and a house finch were having a singing contest (usually the mockingbird would win that one easily, but this one wasn't very persistent). And for those of you in the southern hemisphere ... well, fall can be lovely too.

Slate had an odd article a couple of days ago, on Why Easter stubbornly resists the commercialism that swallowed Christmas. Jesuit priest James Martin speculates that Easter, unlike Christmas, remains a religious holiday because its subject matter is too, well, gory and serious to adapt well to fluffy children's stories. It's more fun to decorate your front yard with a scene of barnyard animals, angels and a newborn baby than a scene of a bleeding man being tortured and killed.

Well, okay, he may have a point. Except ... what religious holiday is he talking about? All through my childhood, Easter was the holiday of running around searching for brightly dyed hard-boiled eggs hidden outside, plus fluffy bunny rabbits, and lots of chocolate. (Well, on that last point, I suppose when you're a kid, just about any holiday calls for chocolate if you can talk your parents into it. Still, there generally were a lot of chocolate eggs and chocolate rabbits.)

It wasn't just my parents; just about everybody I knew, even the ones who went to church on Easter morning, did some sort of egg decorating or hunting. And I didn't see a lot of crucifixion figures decorating the neighborhood flyers or seasonal ads, just bunnies and painted eggs.

If anything, I'd say that the non-fluffy nature of the Christian Easter story makes Easter a much less religious holiday than Christmas. We may not send out Easter cards, but neither are we deluged with images of crucifixion.

Anyway, happy Vernal Equinox, Easter, Purim, Norooz, Holi, Magha Puja, and house finch singing day to everyone! Here, have some chocolate.

[ 20:42 Mar 23, 2008    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Convair B-36 Peacemaker

Dave was browsing old airplane pages and stumbled across a neat find.

The Convair B-36 Peacemaker has a wingspan of 230 feet (for comparison, a Boeing 767's wingspan is 156 feet), and it's powered by four pusher-prop radial engines plus four turbojets, ten engines total. Wow!

But that's not even the cool part. The cool part is the list of B-36es still in existence. There are apparently only five of them left: one at Castle Air Force Base (hey, that's not that far from here -- a two or three hour drive, and we used to autocross there now and then); one at the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio; one at the Pima Air Museum in Tuscon, Arizona; one at the Strategic Air & Space Museum in Nebraska; and one in pieces in a field in Newbury, Ohio owned by a Mr. Walter Soplata, who bought the plane when the Air Force was about to scrap it.

Wouldn't that be a cool accessory to liven up your back yard?

Tags: planes
[ 13:50 Mar 22, 2008    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

She's Geeky tech unconference

I just got back from She's Geeky. What a rush! It'll take me a while to wind down from this fabulous all-women meeting.

I have to admit, I was initially dubious. A conference for geeky women sounded great, but it struck me as kind of expensive -- $175 (with a $125 early-bird rate). That's very cheap as tech conferences go, but for a two-day "unconference", it was enough to turn off most local techie women I know: nearly all of them knew about She's Geeky and said "I'd love to go but I can't afford it." Full disclosure: I said the same thing, and wouldn't have gone myself had I not gotten a "scholarship", for which I am immensely grateful. (In retrospect, considering how well run it was, it probably would have been worth the early-bird price. But that's not easy to tell ahead of time.)

Monday consisted of lunch and informal discussion followed by two sessions of scheduled talks. I particularly liked the afternoon schedule, which included two different sessions of speaker training: the theory being that one factor holding women back in technology jobs is that we don't make ourselves visible by public speaking as much as we could. I went to the "Lightening (sic) Talks" session, headed by Danese Cooper. It didn't make me lighter, but we got some great advice at giving conference talks (lightning and otherwise) plus two rounds of practice at three minute talks. I'm not sure what I enjoyed more, the practice and useful feedback or the chance to listen to so many great short talks on disparate and interesting subjects.

Tuesday started way before normal geek time, with bagels and espresso and an explanation by conference organizer Kaliya Hamlin on how we'd use the Open Space process. Sessions would be an hour long, and we had eight rooms to work with, all charted on a huge grid on the wall. Anyone could run a session (or several). Write it (and your name) on a card, get up and tell the group about it, then find a time and space for it and tape it on the grid. Rules for sessions were few. For session leaders, Whoever comes to your session is the right audience, and whatever happens is what should have happened. For people attending a session there's the Rule of Two Feet: if you're not getting anything out of the session you're in, you should get up and get yourself to somewhere where you're contributing and/or learning. Not hard when there are seven other sessions to choose from.

This all worked exactly as described. Whatever hesitance many women may feel toward public speaking, there was no lack of volunteer session leaders on a wide variety of topics, both technical and social. I signed up to give a GIMP session before lunch; then in a morning session on server and firewall configuration given by fellow LinuxChix Gloria W. and Gaba, I noticed a few people having a lot of general Linux questions, in particular command-line questions, so I ran back to the wall grid and added an afternoon session on "Understanding the Linux command line".

Easily my favorite session of the conference was the Google Maps API talk by Pamela Fox of Google. I've been meaning to experiment with Google Maps and KML for a long time. I even have books on it sitting on my shelf. But I never seem to get over the hump: find a project and a specific task, then go RTFM and figure out how to write a KML file from scratch to do something fun and useful. Pamela got me over that in a hurry -- she showed us the "My Maps" tab in Google Maps (you have to be signed on to a Google account to use it). It includes tools for generating some starter KML interactively, and it even has a polygon editor, all implemented in AJAX (Javascript) and running in a browser. Wow! What a great way to get a running start on map mashups. There's also a whole open source Javascript API and set of libraries for writing creative web mapping apps. I'm sure I'll be experimenting with this a lot more and writing about it separately. Just this talk alone made the conference worthwhile, even without all the other great sessions.

But I didn't get a chance to experiment right away with any of that cool mapping stuff, because right after that session was one by speaker and comedian Heather Gold. Heather had given Saturday night's evening entertainment, and I am very sorry to have had to miss the show to go to a night class. The session was on self confidence, getting over fear of speaking, and connecting with the audience. Since the allotted space was noisy (the same one I'd ended up with for my GIMP talk, and the noise was definitely a problem), Heather led our small group out onto the balcony to enjoy the warm weather. The group was diverse and included women at very different levels of speaking, but Heather had great tips for all of us. She has great presence and a lot of useful things to say, and she's funny -- I'd love to see her on stage.

Everybody had a really positive attitude. At the Lightning Talks session on Saturday, Danese stressed "No whinging" as a general rule to follow (in talks or anywhere else), and I'd say the whole conference followed it. While we heard about lots of serious topics women face, I didn't hear any whining or "men are keeping us down" or that sort of negativism. There were some bad experiences shared as well as good ones, but the point was in finding solutions and making progress, not dwelling on problems. This was a group of women doing things.

There are only two changes I can think of that could have improved the conference at all. First, I already mentioned the cost. While it was fair considering the fantastic organization, great people, plus catered meals, it still lets out some of the women who could have benefitted the most: students and the un- and under-employed. A few of us LinuxChix talked about how much we'd love to see a similar conference held at a cheaper facility, without the handouts or the catered meals. Maybe some day we'll be able to make it happen.

Second (and this is a very minor point), it might have been helpful to have runners reminding people when sessions were ending, and perhaps making the sessions 55 minutes instead of an hour to encourage getting to the next session and starting on promptly.

Even without that, people mostly stuck to the schedule and Tuesday finished right on time: pretty amazing for a conference whose agenda had been made that morning with cardboard, tape and marking pens. I've seen unconferences before, and they're usually a disorganized mess. This one ran better than most scheduled conferences. Kaliya and her fellow organizers clearly know how to make this process work.

We all pitched in to clean up the room, and I braved the rush-hour freeway. And arrived home to find that my husband had cooked dinner and it was just about ready. What a nice ending to the day!

Tags: conference, tech, chix, speaking
[ 23:01 Oct 23, 2007    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Math Skills

I just got back from the local Safeway, where a one-pound box of sugar cubes costs $1.49.

A two-pound box, same brand, is $3.99.

What a deal!

Even better, the two-pound price is up: it used to be $3.49 a few months ago (no change in the one-pound price).

I guess too many people were jumping on that incredible $3.49 deal, so they had to raise it.

Tags: science, humor
[ 16:25 Jul 26, 2006    More misc | permalink to this entry ]

Precision

On my wall I have a calendar with pretty pictures of wolves, and assorted wolf facts for each month. July features a wolf howling. In the lists of facts is:

If conditions are right a wolf's howl can carry 10 miles / 16.09 kilometers.

I wonder why wolves are so much more precise when they're howling in metric?

Tags: humor
[ 17:09 Jul 09, 2006    More misc | permalink to this entry ]