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Toronto

I’m killing time in the Toronto airport after having spent the last couple of days visiting with Angeline’s family while she and her sister and brother-in-law are here for an endocrinology conference. All in all it was a great trip if too short — I had a nice time playing with Angeline’s nephews, drinking beers with Sameer, and wandering the city on my own whenever I had unscheduled free time.

Rather than bore with details, here are some of my general ugly-american impressions of the city from my fourth visit:

  • Toronto wants to be NYC it seems, but I have to say that I find TO more enjoyable than its stateside counterpart. Perhaps it’s the general lack of rudeness.
  • Every Canadian knows every famous Canadian. This is because every time Alex Trebek, say, is mentioned on Canadian TV, they say, “oh by the way, Alex Trebek is from Canada!”
  • In Toronto, the movie “13th Floor” was called “2nd Floor,” because in some buildings only non-prime numbers that start with ‘S’ are considered lucky. Okay that’s a lie, but the elevator in Angeline’s brother’s condo really takes number skipping to an extreme.
  • There’s a store called ‘Bowring Canadiana’ which I pronounce “boring” in my head and I giggle to myself
  • Lots of US brands here have different names than in Canada. I saw a commercial that said, “It’s not delivery, it’s Delissio!” And it makes me wonder if DiGiorno is the name of a Canadian serial killer or something. You know, it’s the little things, le big mac, and so on.
  • Meals:
    • best: eggs, bacon, potatoes, crepes, cantaloupe, pineapple, strawberry and
      two pieces of toast at Cora’s which I found serendipitously a few blocks
      from the hotel
    • worst: Ritz Caribbean, which had jerk chicken for $3.99 CDN. Cheap and
      edible, but the pointyness of the jerk-flavored chicken bones was somehow
      off-putting.
    • trendiest: SushiTrain on Yonge, where Angeline and I split four maki rolls
      and a pair of nigiri. The Japanese-modern decor blended well with the
      dance music overhead and the tasty fusion style offerings. Place was
      dead on a Saturday night though.
    • best deal: danish and (harsh) OJ for $2.68 at the airport Tim Horton’s.
      Same would cost $8 at Charbucks.


I am looking forward to a nice nap when I touchdown in DC in a few hours.

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Arduino POV


Arduino POV
Originally uploaded by bluesterror

Since everyone else is doing it, I decided to hack together my own persistence of vision thing this evening. This is a circuit where you have a single vertical line of LEDs, but if you turn the LEDs on and off fast enough and wave them around, your eyes are fooled into seeing complete letters. It only took about 20 minutes to write the C code to load up onto my trusty ATmega8, then I used a camera with a long shutter period to take the picture to the right.

I realize my blog has devolved into Bob’s Dumb Project Of The Week lately. I’ll have to work on that. Lots of travel is coming my way soon: Toronto this next weekend, Atlanta in three weeks, and Warrenton, VA somewhere in between. I shall report on them soon enough.

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Arduino Clock


Arduino Clock
Originally uploaded by bluesterror.

I spent part of yesterday and today assembling this monster of a digital clock. The brains behind it, like my previous project, is a Dallas RTC chip; the rest is just microcontroller glue to read the time over the bus and write the hours and minutes to a quartet of seven segment decoders. The arduino microcontroller board can run off of a 9V battery so this assembly is portable, like the, er, $0.50 worth of electronics that are in your wristwatch.

Angeline had a good question for which I didn’t have an entirely satisfactory answer: “Why?”

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Brian K

Last Monday I attended an ACM lecture featuring Brian “Zapp” Kernighan, coiner of the name “Unix,” the ‘K’ in awk, as well as the ‘K’ in K&R. The gray-haired professor reminisced about the golden days sitting across from Ken Thompson’s and Dennis Ritchie’s desk (Ritchie is a slob of the first order). The salient points: make software more simple, avoid the second system effect (as in Multics), and find a small group of talented guys and start a revolution (probably not in operating systems). In other words, a pretty good summary of The Mythical Man Month.

A bunch of nerds got him to sign their copies of The C Programming Language. It was sad.

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Della Porta in Flight


Della Porta in Flight
Originally uploaded by bluesterror.

AC and I went down to the Washington Monument grounds to try out the kite today, on a lovely sunny, breezy day. It took a few adjustments of the bridle to get the thing aloft, and the tail kept getting tangled up, but once I had it figured out it took up all of my line and was still pulling pretty hard. Quite a nice sense of accomplishment to see what began as a couple of rolls of nylon actually fly and not look half bad.

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Fancy Stripes Cont.


Fancy Stripes Cont.
Originally uploaded by bluesterror.

I’ve made more progress on the Della Porta. The sail is now complete, after sewing each of the 16 panels to its neighbors, first with a 1/4″ straight seam on the back and then with a zig-zag stitch over the good side. I only had to use the seam ripper… oh, let’s call it less than a hundred times. On to step 3…

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Fancy stripes


Fancy stripes
Originally uploaded by bluesterror.

I started work on another kite this week. This time I’m following a plan, one of the howtos over on kitebuilder.com. Hopefully, my much improved sewing skills coupled with some RTFM-ing will lead to more success in this venture. The pattern is from a quilting block called ‘Fancy Stripes’ and should be about 3′ by 4′ when completed.

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Grilled

I officially opened the 10 month grill season last weekend. The only thing worse than doing the propane exchange rigamarole at Home Depot: doing the exchange at Home Depot, getting handed an empty tank, looking at the guy funny but assuming he knows what he’s doing (after all that’s his job), going home to verify that yes, the new tank is empty, and going back to try to find someone who cares so you can finally take the new tank home and cook with it because it’s now 4pm and you haven’t had lunch yet.

One nice thing about amateur home cooking is that you can create that which you cannot find in a restaurant. In my case: I made fajitas with one of the several filet mignons in my freezer. You may say that is silly to use such an expensive cut of meat in place of a $3 flank steak in a cooking application where toughness really doesn’t matter, and you may be right, but that doesn’t change the fact that the “file-tas” were damn good. Now I just need to figure out how to work bacon into that equation…

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In flight

AC and I showed up on the mall to throngs of kite fanatics, their sails dotting the sky very much like a plague of locusts. In the stiff breeze, my kite lept to the sky…then went unstable, hit two people, and the kiteline yanked the grommet off. Still, it flew, and it wasn’t too bad for a first try given I learned a ton from the first stitch on. We spent the rest of the morning flying my two store-bought kites (toddlers love the spinner on my diamond kite), but already I’m contemplating my next hand-made.

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Kite Day

For those that don’t know, Saturday marks the beginning of the Cherry Blossom festival, and consequently the annual Smithsonian Kite festival — always a blast. Last year I wanted to make a kite for the event, but never got around to it. So, last Sunday I opened up that roll of nylon sitting in the corner and got to work.

Last night, I bought a cheap sewing machine for the appliqué work necessary for the design (the obvious fractal). Clearly, home ec in middle school was worthless. I had to take apart the machine twice to remove big gobs of thread stuck therein, until I learned how the bobbin is supposed to be threaded. Then, tonight I went to work on the kite after some practice and proceeded to sew some really hideous seams.

So, I’ve decided this will be my “one to throw away,” though I still hope to have it in the sky this weekend. First I have to fix the hole I punched in the sail.