CJC.org

It’s been said that the formative years of Americans can be dated to their memories of Saturday Night Live eras. I’m pegged to the late ’80s/early ’90s, and, perhaps for that reason, Sting, despite all the albums before and since and all the pop trivia around him, is irrevocably associated in my mind with the Richmeister (Sting-a-ling-ling! Makin’ copies!). Perhaps I’m just demented.

Sting made his Cleveland stop on his Broken Music tour on Friday night, but appeared at the Cleveland Heights Border’s store for a book/CD/DVD signing. I found out about this when I stopped by the store after aikido the week before and saw their fliers up. Grace is a big fan, and I went and got the Bring On The Night DVD signed for her.

The signing was at 1PM and I got there at around 9AM when the store opened. Earlier in the week, I had overheard one of the store managers say that they expected long lines, but when they unlocked the doors, there were only about 40 people. After presenting our receipts for the items, we got our passes and lined up in the designated areas. Unfortunately, we couldn’t leave the line without having someone hold our spots, so I had brought my laptop — to go a local cafe in case the passes were numbered so we could come back later — in vain. It wasn’t that bad, though, mainly because it was a bookstore and there was coffee and snacks there, though no free Wifi. For the morning, I was stuck in the triangle formed by the dictionaries, maps and kids books (Early reader Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith books were nearby; I now know the plot details, expressed in easy words.) People brought Sting books for signing, and were passing the time reading those. Others were chatting about past concerts, following him around the country, etc. — the usual stuff one hears on a book-signing queue hours before the actual event. (I had, as someone might say, no dog in that fight: I kept my head down and read my history book. An overheard remark that “that woman has a police record!” took a while to parse as the woman having a vinyl from the Police.)

I was on TV. Channel 5 News had a small crew there doing the end-of-broadcast-segment and I wound up in the background of an interview. I have a screen capture as the last picture on the slide show of the Borders event. The guy behind me had a basket of forget-me-nots from the local florist to present to Sting (something from his book). He was also interviewed, but the editors cut that one and focused more on the cliched “giant line of women going to see Sting” angle instead: the Y chromosome would have upset the story. Anyway, I might post the video sometime later, if I figure out how to edit it properly.

The picture-taking was actually a bit more difficult than I thought it’d be. I brought the 80-200 f/2.8, thinking that there’d be enough light in the store, but had problems with low ISO settings: the lens is long and I felt I needed relatively fast shutter speeds to deal with camera shake. I was also off with the initial shots in terms of white balance, with a somewhat deceptive interior lighting temperature. I’m not quite satisfied with the mucking around I had to do to reduce yellow/red saturation: I should have shot NEF. The ISO noise was corrected pretty neatly using Noise Ninja, though. Anyway:

A few people in line asked me for copies: my immediate neighbors in line and some guy further back, who actually approached me somewhat abruptly. I’ve mailed off the 0.5 megapixel versions. If they want higher resolution images for printing, I suppose I’ll suggest that if they like the pictures, they can buy stuff for me off my Amazon WishList.

By 1PM, the line had wrapped itself through the store and was almost out the door. The signing itself was pretty quick for me, mainly because I was closer to the front of the line than not. Sting was quite pleasant; he signed the DVD itself, and then shook my hand. I had nothing to say vis-a-vis baskets of flowers, chit-chat or general gushing (though Richmeister thoughts did emerge, I restrained myself: there would have been a lynchin’) and I wandered off afterwards. I found the people who had been standing next to me, showed the pictures I had on the camera LCD screen, and told them I’d email them over the weekend.

The concert in the evening was pretty good. It’s mostly older songs, so I didn’t recognize most of them, just the old Police hits and a few of the more recent ones. No pictures from there, though, as cameras weren’t allowed (though people tried to take pictures with their phonecams; no idea how those would turn out, but I guess they’d be good enough). Sting sang “A Day In the Life” as a Beatles tribute. It sounded weirdly hollow, not least because I had just listened to St. Pepper during my CD ripping exercise. The Beatles did a lot of weird things to produce the sound on the album, things that can’t be recreated on stage with a four-man band. Sting also closed one of the encores with a rendition of “Every Breath You Take” that was peppy and almost entirely without the creepy, menacing stalker undertones of the original version. Strange how intonations change things, though one can’t entirely get away from the lyrics.

All-in-all, a good day.

One of those Cooking with Google moments, where I have leeks and chicken thighs from Westside Markets. This is derived from a Julia Child recipe. It’s somewhat instructive as to how one does ragouts:

• 1 or more c. chicken broth
• 2 tbsps. olive oil
• 1 large leeks (white and tender green parts only, quartered lengthwise, washed, and cut into julienne match-stick size)
• 1 c. sliced onions (slice lengthwise, through the root)
• 2 large cloves of garlic, smashed, peeled, and minced
• 2 large tomatoes, peeled, seeded, juiced, cut into strips
• 2 or more tbsps. tomato paste, as needed for color and taste
• salt, pepper, and Italian herb seasoning
• 4 chicken thighs, skinned and boned
• 1/4 c. or so fresh minced parsley

Make the ragout base:
Warm the oil in a heavy 3- to 4-quart casserole or saucepan, stir in the leeks, onions, and garlic and simmer over moderately low heat for 5 minutes or more, until limp. Stir in the tomatoes, salt lightly, add 1/4 tsp. of the herbs, cover, and simmer 10 minutes or until the tomatoes have rendered their juices and the vegetables are tender. Taste very carefully and adjust seasoning, which should be reasonably strong and gutsy. Ahead-of-time note: May be completed 2 days in advance; keep covered and refrigerated.

Braise chicken:
Salt the chicken meat lightly and bury it in the ragout base. Bring to the simmer, cover, and simmer 5 minutes until chicken is done. Be careful not to overcook.

To serve:
Serve the chicken pieces and vegetables over boiled rice or pasta. Serves 2.

We’ve just signed a new 1-year lease on our apartment. The rent didn’t change, and so there wasn’t much incentive to look for another place to live. What would cause us to look more seriously (as opposed to the non-serious sports-pages way New Yorkers continuously look at real estate)?

Our thinking was that a rental was definitely what we should do for the first year in Cleveland, because we didn’t know the city and we shouldn’t get stuck owning a house without being familiar with local conditions first. Downtown Cleveland seemed a good fit for New Yorkers, and it’s turned out to be the right decision: the location straddle the places of interest around the city looking east and west (ten or fifteen minutes away from the Hospital with many alternate routes in case there are problems on the highway; midway between shopping centers; judo to the west, aikido to the east; Westside Markets a quick drive away; interesting places to walk to when the weather is nice, quick airport access, etc.) Though we like the location, we’ll still move, if conditions change.

Financials are an obvious possible condition. Rent hasn’t gone up for us, though rent in the neighboring Bingham seems to have increased by at least 7%, which seems unsupported in the Warehouse District housing market, where “apartments available” placards sprout up on the sidewalks nearly every weekend. Perhaps they’re justifying it by arguing that, when tenants signed a year ago, the project was much less complete than it is now (so more amenities are currently available): we saw the building a bit over a year ago when we were looking for apartments post-Match, and the entrance was a construction zone, Constantino’s Market was almost a year away from opening, the was much raw drywall in and around the sales office, etc. Established residents of the Cloak, in comparison, have had a new construction site open up next to us; and we’ll be living with it through the year at least.

The future of the neighborhood should also be brought up. This is still thought of more as a nightlife/entertainment district, as these articles show (they talk about the death of The Flats, too, as a cautionary tale). If the entertainment side implodes before the residential side becomes fully established, what happens? This is arguably more an issue for prospective buyers of Warehouse District condos, though, as renters would have more flexibility to move, given that any sort of implosion would take a few years.

Rent considerations are only one side of the financial picture, as house prices in, say, Cleveland Heights may be attractive. (Arguably, they’re really not two sides of the financial picture, but rather a set of prices for a variety of the same thing, housing. I acutally don’t buy into the homilies about purchasing a house to build equity, or that renting is flushing money away: there will ba cost of housing that will appear in different forms — overtly in rent, covertly in mortgage interest and opportunity costs of freezing your money in an illiquid asset — but that cost will always be there. And renting may be cheaper than buying, as we see in this Wall Street Journal article comparing the cost of renting to owning.) We’re paying $1500 plus parking right now for a 1900 square foot apartment. Assuming average investment returns of 6% and property taxes of about 2%, the equivalent house would be around $250K (Yes, I’m ignoring tax effects. I’m assuming that the tax effects will wash out with the costs of ownership I’m not thinking of, like contracting to have a guy drive by with a plow during the winter, so Grace won’t get bogged down in the snow at 5AM when trying to get to the hospital, or the risks of facing a furnace or roof replacement.) There are clearly houses available for less than that, so this is always an option, though perhaps not a compelling one right now.

The reasons I don’t find the available housing stock compelling is that, while the Cleveland area isn’t obviously in the throes of a bubble (For those who believe that real estate prices can’t fall, we have the examples of the NYC real estate bust in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Prices took close to a decade to recover, but have boomed since. And there’s the example of Japan’s long and terrible hangover from its real estate bubble of the 1980s, from which it has yet to recover: 80% declines in prices!), a nation-wide collapse will still have an effect here in terms of general economic conditions. Our timeline for Cleveland isn’t actually that long: four years of residency and possibly a couple for fellowship, either here or elsewhere. This would probably put us in the middle of the bust for when we’d like to sell. Note that Cleveland’s house prices probably won’t go down that much — they haven’t risen much to be knocked down; there are indications that the demographic decline in the area is slowing in that Cleveland lost fewer people than before; there are indications that Northeast Ohio might be the focus of biotech entrepreneurship given the two hospitals — but houses are particularly illiquid around here. There are tales of taking six months to a year to sell a house, which is a long time to have assets tied up when we’d be adjusting to a fellowship or staff position elsewhere.

So many things to consider. But the rent hasn’t changed on the new lease, so we’re not in a hurry to make this sort of decision.

The main hard drive on the workstation has been running out of space for the past few months, and the limits of semi-draconian purging has reached its limit. Basically, the storage demands from the digital camera (4-6MB files for each shot), along with the NYT Electronic Edition downloads that are piling up, pushed the volume up to the 90% full limit. Time to get more space. The Alaska trip will also be in six weeks, and we’re going to come back with hundreds of photos.

We’ve had this $40 BestBuy gift card for almost a year without quite knowing what to do with it. I had been thinking of getting an USB external harddrive with it, but kept on putting off the decision because internal drives are much cheaper, and I didn’t have a USB2.0 card in the workstation until very recently. Also, why get an ATA internal drive when I’m planning on a new computer later this year, which will have a ginormous SATA RAID-1 setup? So I’ve been scanning the BestBuy weekly ad for bargains over the past few weeks, looking for a decent-sized external that would be made more affordable by the gift card. I almost pulled the trigger a few times, but never did. This week, they had a Western Digital 120GB drive for about $50 after rebates. Combined with the low-disk-space warning from early last week, I finally moved to pick it up.

The theory now is what I should have been thinking earlier: I’ll just pick up a USB 2.0 IDE enclosure when the time comes and I’ll have the external drive in the future to hook up to the new workstation. Today, I’ll have 120GB to fill up with media files. All this space actually solves an apartment organization problem we have, in that the CD case isn’t arranged in any discernable fashion. The corollary to the notion of lots of disk space is that I’ll finally get around to ripping most of the CDs to MP3s (yes, I’m probably years behind everyone else and it’s not surprising to find me using steel and flint to make fire), thereby putting most of the CDs into shoeboxes in the closet. Things will get neat quickly. And a couple hundred CDs should compress into 20-30GB of disk space, leaving plenty of room for other media.

I’m using the open source CDEX to do the ripping and encoding. I’ve used earlier versions and it does a decent job. Interestingly, the old Ricoh DVD-ROM/CD-R I have in the main workstation (it’s a first-gen combo drive) gets wobbly with a non-trivial number of music CDs, leading to the dreaded jitter errors on the rips. CDEX somehow lost track of the 40x CD-ROM in that workstation, also. It’s fixed after a reboot, but the wonky behavior has led me to do more of this work on Grace’s old Dell (writing out to the network-mounted media drive and sharing CDDB info). Apparently, those Dell Dimension 4100s come with decent CD drives, as the jitter errors have been minimal.

I’m going to do the meagre collection of classical music CDs: we already have a fair amount of pop MP3 scavanged earlier, so the classical music pieces should balance things out a bit better.

I suppose the next step is to pick up one of those iPod things people keep talking about.

The battery on my old Treo 180 is nearing its end. While the phone has never great on battery life, I’m now only getting a bit over a day on standby and some minor usage.

The battery, though, looks like it’s easy to replace: Handspring Treo Battery Installation Guide. About $30, and they throw in a screwdriver for you. Note that this battery seems to have a bit more capacity than a direct replacement (1000mAh vs. 750mAh). I’m not sure if a higher capacity battery can be crammed in there.

Gizmodo is hiring an editor. After some encouragement from friends, I’ve sat down and wrote up the requisite three Gizmodo-like stories on tech products and thrown my hat into the ring. I don’t have much by way of recent gadgets — the TV is probably the newest, fanciest thing (or maybe the Tivo) (The last gadget I got was a combination stylus-laser pointer-pen-flash light. It’s a Belkin product that doesn’t have to do with cabling bits of computer equipment to other bits of computer equipment, so, naturally, the laser pointer and flash light parts no longer work. The stylus part still works on my PDA, but, then, so does my index finger.) The dearth of shiny new gizmos simply means I’m going to wander into the fanciful in terms of stories, though I did reject the idea of writing something about a perpetual motion machine, even though I wanted to say, “It’ll violate the laws of physics!”

Toshiba xxHM84 DLP RPTV

Toshiba came out with two lines of RPTVs that have TI’s HD2+ chips in their light engines. The xxHM84 line is the earlier one; for a couple hundred dollars more, you can get the xxHM94 line, which will have cable card functionality as well as a few other features. The picture’s nice and bright and very cinematic: the HD2+ chip keeps “clay faces” away and the seven-segment color wheel reduces the chance of seeing DLP rainbows. I actually have the 46HM84 — the first two digits are the TV sizes — because everything gets thrown through the Tivo, anyway, so I need the TV to be more a monitor than a self-contained unit.

One thing to note is that the the screen has a good anti-glare coating on it. Unlike some other RPTVs, you won’t be seeing that faint relflection of yourself sprawled out on the couch if you happen to watch TV in a brightly lit room. Nothing is more annoying than when you realize that reflection is there.

One drawback with this set is Toshiba’s use of light gray bars on the sides to frame 4:3 pictures in the 16:9 screen, presumably to blend in with the speaker wings on either side of the screen. As far as I know, everyone else uses black bars, which you can tune out more easily. On the other hand, Toshiba’s stretch modes for 4:3 content are very good, and you may never view the unstretched image.

Time Zones

Shiny, shiny toys that you can touch are nice, but some great tech are simply ideas. Just last Sunday, I was IMing my friend Jebediah in Springfield over our newly installed telegraph lines when I told him that it’s noon, and I have to sign off to go to a meeting. But, he replied, it’s still almost half an hour before the noon! He accused me of blowing him off, and there’s now tension in our friendship.

Our problem is that both Shelbyville and Springfield are defining noon to be when the sun is at the highest point in the sky. This was OK in the day when it’d take all day to ride the stagecoach from here to there, but that new telegraph is just causing confusion about when things happen.

To fix this problem, the railroads are getting together on November 18 and dividing the country up into “time zones”, so that noon in New York will be exactly the time as noon in Cleveland, even if the sun isn’t in the right place in the sky. It’s a neat organizing idea, even though there are a lot of people who say that noon happening half an hour before the sun reaches its high point is against the laws of nature and Jeebus, or that it’s a group of corporate fat cats imposing their idea of time on us. But if the Shelbyville and Springfield clocks had been synchronized in “time zones”, I wouldn’t be getting “Away From Desk” messages from Jebediah now, even though I know he’s there.

150 Lumen Light Bulbs

Edison Industries has announced a new version of its light bulb, now capable of putting out 150 lumens. Banish the darkness! From our consumer point of view, we can now replace more than a dozen candles with a single Edison Bulb, and we don’t have to keep buying new ones everday as they burn down. Westinghouse’s best model only puts out 100 lumens right now, but there are rumors that they’ll be able to match the Edison version in a few months. No word yet on compatible lightblub sockets that work with the products from these two giants, though an industry committee has begun work on accepting draft proposals.

Bulb technology is now clearly on an exponential curve, with light output doubling every 18 months or so. We should expect to see 300 and 600 lumen bulbs for consumer applications in the not-too-distant future (the military is already testing 1200 lumen models). Naysayers will argue that 3000 lumen bulbs will violate the laws of physics, but we won’t know that until we get there.

We were in Madison, Wisconsin, for most of the weekend. Grace was presenting an abstract at the MARC 2005 conference held there this year, fulfilling the research-during-residency requirements for her program. While she was at the conference, I spent my time wandering around the capitol and sitting at coffee shops using their WiFi. (A while ago, Grace said that we’d be going to all sorts of professional conferences in, like, Hawaii, San Diego or New Orleans. Well, Milwaukee isn’t Maui. But Madison ain’t bad.) (We flew into Milwaukee because tickets were much cheaper, and because we were visiting one of Grace’s med school friends in a Milwaukee suburb before the return flight.)

The city sits on an isthmus between two lakes, as the lake-city-lake tagline used by the Visitors Bureau points out. It’s the seat of state government as well as home to tens of thousands of students at the University of Wisconsin there. For a small city, it’s pretty lively, with State Street being the main commercial street, running between the capitol building and the edge of the university campus. It’s filled with a good mix ethnic restaurants, shops, bars and cafes. We actually had Himalyan-regional food (Nepalese? Indian?) for dinner the first night there, which I don’t think we could have gotten in Cleveland. State Street and the surrounding area were also crowded late into the night with a lot of foot traffic, presumably because of its proximity to student residences and because driving right there is difficult.

(I’m not sure why Case Western doesn’t have a similar district near its campus. There’s a small triangle of shops and fast food joints at Mayfield and Euclid, but it’s not more interesting than, say, a mall food court. Coventry in Cleveland Heights is probably the closest thing to State Street, but it’s not walking distance from Case, nor is it nearly as lively. Yes, the student populations are probably different in size, but shouldn’t there at least be something?)

Here are some photos, mostly of the capitol building:

I think a polarizer would have helped for the daylight shots, whatwith all the non-metallic reflections off the stone, grass, etc. Certainly, I needed a tripod for the night shots. I did improvised beanbag shots using my hand resting on a concrete barrier on the convention center for a few. One or two of the shots close to the capitol building were actually handheld, ISO1600 wide open on the kit lens. They turned out better than expected.

The conference itself was a the Monona Terrace convention center, sitting on the western edge of one of those lakes. Nice lake views: the water almost looks like a rippling fabric. It was apparently thought of by Frank Lloyd Wright way back in the 1930s, but was built in the late 1990s. The center presumably looks much better if viewed from a boat in the lake or perhaps down one of the bike paths on the shore, but we didn’t go down that way. From close up, it’s all curved concrete walls and huge arched windows: the building is itself a sculpture. (Cleveland is contemplating a new convention center to either supplement or replace the 1920s-style brick on Lakeside Avenue. The problem is that convention centers are a money-losing proposition.)

I crashed the lunch at the conference. They had a fairly amusing presentation during the meal by a veterinary anesthesiologist who described sedating or anesthetizing all sorts of different animals, from goldfish (“an unusual intubation” which consisted of passing oxygenated water through the mouth and out the gills) through pet (kidney transplants for cats?) through rhinos (give the reversal agent and run out of the cage) all the way up to right whales (a foot-long needle was needed to go through the skin and underlying blubber). I’m still not sure why one would do surgery on a goldfish, though. I did have a ticket for the dinner, which wasn’t as well attended as the lunch. The food was, at best, OK: the Himalyan restaurant was much better than the cheesy chicken or the salmon.

Update: Oh, I was forgetful when packing for the airport, and had my tiny little, harmless Leatherman Micra taken away by TSA. We didn’t have checked in baggage since it was only a weekend. They did give me the option of mailing it back to myself for $8, but that costs almost as much as a new one. Of course, the next day, I would have liked a Leatherman in Madison when I was trying to open a bag of Cold-Eeze.

Update 2: This is where the Leatherman probably will wind up. Possibly, I should just buy a 100-lot of miscellaneous items.

I have to proclaim the total awesomeness of Sage, a feed reader for Firefox. My long-ago attempt to slap one together in PHP hasn’t been touched in close to a year because of the inconveniences that come from page loading as well as my lack of skill in reasonably formatting the output. Sage solves these issues nicely by using proper caching to the disk as well as a Firefox sidebar to organize your feeds. It’s neat, and it generally works well.

The only drawback is that the reader is more or less for that particular browser installation: Sage relies on a selected bookmarks folder to organize the feed list, and bookmarks are more or less localized to a given installation. My effort at the PHP RSS reader was as much to give me centralized management of feeds — the list is on my webserver — so that I could have the same feed list both at work and at home. This is less of an issue, now that I work at home, but I will go out with the laptop once in a while.

Firefox does have a bookmarks synchronizer extension, which would solve these issues. However, I’m not sure if it does scp/sftp off the bat, though a quick glance at the commentary suggests that there’s a version of the extension that give you the option of now throwing your plaintext password across the Internet.

Here’s a basic banana bread recipe that uses yogurt and baking soda for some of the levening:

2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup soft butter
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1-1/2 cup ripe mashed bananas
3/4 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Mix dry ingredients. Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs, yogurt. Mix with dry ingredients and add bananas, walnuts. Pour into greased loaf pan. Bake at 325 for 1 hour and 25 mins until toothpick comes out clean.

I’ve been making similar quick bread for a while, but always with a bit too much liquid. This recipe cuts back the liquid portion in half. And, to be more scientific, a probe thermometer should register a temperature of around 190F when it’s done (the internal temperature for soft breads; yeast breads should be between 200 and 210).

I found wififreespot.com to be pretty complimentary to, say, jwire.com, which lists mainly commercial wi-fi providers, e.g., Starbucks, Kinkos, hotels, etc.

No idea on the accuracy of the listings, yet. All such listings should also have a last-verified-date to indicate a hotspot’s staleness, which Cleveland Wifi Wiki just put in.

Anyway, we’re going to be at the MARC2005 conference this weekend, so the Wisconsin listing is nice to have, so I don’t have to rely on the hotel for internet access.

Update: Also, this article on cafes on Madison’s State Street from a blog posting by Ann Althouse. Almost every coffee shop in the University district seems to have some sort of Wifi, though I’m not sure what the “Cafe Connection” provider is, and whether they charge for it.

I suppose that at some (hopefully not too distant) future date, Wifi will be sufficiently prevalent so that websites and lists of locations are no longer needed: it’ll be as if casual dining establishments advertised that, yes, they have restrooms.