renovationism

Many impressions come at less than convenient times – in the shower, while driving, when falling asleep. I don’t think this is coincidence. I think the mind is more open to external impressions, or those that bubble up from within, when it’s otherwise occupied.

They’re flitting, subtle. A bolt of lightning is rarely involved (when one is, it’s usually a warning sign). The challenge is recognition in the midst of preoccupation; implanting a tuning fork in your head that’s sympathetic to the frequency, then reaching out and focusing when it hums.

When an impression presents itself, and I am lucky enough to realize it, I usually have three instincts: I recognize it as something that might be useful, I debate whether it’s worth the hassle of capturing it (stopping the car, climbing out of the shower, turning on the light and waking myself up), and I realize that if I don’t capture it, it will likely be gone forever. Trust the first, squash the second, and believe the third.

I use post-it notes as the means of capture. I’ve created an environment where capture is easy: pens and notepads everywhere. I even use the notepad app on my phone, which is always in my pocket, to capture things when paper isn’t handy. Actually, I used to use the notepad app, but I’d forget the notes, and come across them weeks or months later, unable to sense the imperative power they once possessed. Now, I just send myself a quick email from my phone, and it’s near the top of my inbox when I get back to my computer.

How do you learn to recognize what’s useful? Well, you don’t really. It’s a game of odds. Capture everything. In a good week, maybe you make 100 notes. After you sort through them, maybe 10 or 15 sound like they might be useful in your current piece. Maybe one or two get used.

Some are big ideas, some are little bits of nothingness: a personality trait; a setting detail; the plot of a novel; a facial characteristic. Sort through them. Keep them handy as you work, but don’t try to force them. Don’t throw away what you don’t use. Keep it for later. You may never use it, but the list itself can be a good place to find a new creative impulse, a new beginning.

Some will come because of your current efforts – bits that are apparent because of the piece you’re working on. Others will be random. I find my mind more open to all types of impressions when I am actively working on a piece, but even in the down times, stuff pops up.

If it sounds like a lot of work, it is. And, it isn’t. When you notice the one detail about a person or place that truly captures it, that makes the tuning fork really resonate, it’s thrilling.

Build a capture mechanism that works for you, then trust it. And trust your instincts. The activity will bear fruit.

I don’t know if I like it, but what people are writing about it sure makes me cringe.

The Cube’s engine has fewer horses (122) than a Tweet can have characters (140).

Bulldog in a Box, in Shades – The New York Times.

I’m sure you’ve heard the accolades for Verizon FiOS TV’s picture quality. All well deserved. Bravo.

What you might not be aware of, though, is the quality of their DVR. Here are some features you’ll love:

1. When recording one show while watching another, and you attempt to fast forward through the show you’re watching, you have a good chance of seeing the DVR re-boot itself. The real benefit here is that you don’t have to worry about the show you were recording taking up all the disk space it would have taken up if it… well… finished recording.
2. There must be some secret magical code built into the data stream that signifies the start and end of commercials. When watching a recorded show, and the show returns from commercial, about half the time the screen will go all pixelized for 3 or 4 seconds and the sound will drop out for about 10 to 15 seconds. This is a great feature, because you’re not bothered with having to listen to the resolution to the cliff-hanger that lead into the commercial. Thank you, secret magical code!
3. The FiOS DVR is a wizard when it comes to disk space management. Just check out the picture below. I was so happy with this feature that I asked them to send me another unit. But don’t worry, it did the same thing!


fuzzy math

4. One surprisingly pleasant feature is that you can’t fast forward in approximately the last two minutes of a recording. This is so nice when there’s a little tid-bit, like the tail segment of a show, that you’re trying to locate quickly.
5. Verizon has built closed captioning into the DVR, and it’s a gem! Sure, there’s plenty of gibberish and scores of unreadable characters; that’s par for the course these days. Where Verizon stomps the competition is in timing. In many shows, entire sentences are only displayed for a fraction of a second. Verizon has really hit the nail on the head with this feature, because, hey, who reads these days anyway?
6. One feature they’ve cleverly left out is the ability to skip through large chunks of a show. So if you’ve recorded a 4 hour football game and want to quickly skip to the middle or near the end, all you have to do is fast forward. At top speed, it only takes many, many, minutes.

The health declaration form for entry into the People’s Republic of China.

Yes, I know. Technically, it’s not a sign. Get over it.

The form's heading reads: HEALTH DECLARATION FORM ON ENTRY/EXIT Entry-Exit Inspection and Quarantine of the P.R. China

Dry your eyes.

Tip # 1: Always keep a tape measure in your car.

Tip # 2: Remember to bring the tape measure into the store with you.

If you need to catch up, click here to read “stairs” part 1: stringer structural stupidity.

A few years back, when I was framing the basement, I had a large load of 2×4s delivered from Smoot Lumber in Springfield. Some of them were warped beyond usability, and I set them aside in my junk pile. My estimation of lumber quantity was low, and I had to make several trips to Lowe’s and/or Home Depot to augment. Spend any time buying lumber at Lowe’s and/or Home Depot and you’ll find a lot of twisted wood. I guess it’s cut and packed while still a bit wet, and once they cut the straps at the store, the pieces dry out and warp.

I was obsessed with finding quality lumber. I’d dig through the stack of 2×4s, piling the bad pieces in the aisle, looking for the elusive straight pieces, which always seemed to be at the bottom. Once I’d found enough, I’d have to re-stack the bad stuff to clear the aisle. I’d load the truck, take it home, and unload it into the basement. The next day, I’d find that a bunch of the pieces had dried and warped over night. It was only straight in the store because it was at the bottom of the stack and hadn’t had a chance to dry out.

Needless to say, my junk pile grew.

You might think all of that experience would have been in the back of my mind while considering 2×12s for the stair stringers. And, you might also think I’d take seriously the warnings I read about dimensional lumber for stringers. Take, for example, the following picture, from page 34 of Building Stairs, from Taunton’s For Pros By Pros series, showing where shrinkage can occur. In addition to shrinkage, the “teeth” of the stringers can warp to the left or right.

What can go wrong?

Did I take all the warnings seriously? Well, if you think so, then you haven’t been reading closely. Remember?

I’ll cut to the chase. Yeah, both of those things happened. On the bright side, I’m not moving quickly, (I cut the initial stringers in July of 2006, and replaced them, as detailed below, in April of 2008), so the problems became apparent before I finished the stairs. Also, the emotional attachment I had to the original stringers had mostly evaporated by the time I switched on the reciprocating saw to cut them out.

What, you may be asking, was the solution? Well, Building Stairs didn’t have that nice little picture just to taunt me. They offered a more stable alternative involving plywood and a lot of glue. The problem is, stringers are usually pretty long, and pretty thick, and plywood comes in 4×8 sheets that are only 3/4″ thick. So, I’d have to laminate several pieces together to create the board from which I would cut the stringer. In the photo below, the longer pieces are 8′ long, and the shorter are 4′, giving a 12′ length. And two layers gives it a 1.5″ thickness (which, if you’re not familiar with dimentional lumber, is actually how thick the 2″ edge of a 2-by is). Overlapping the joints gives strength.

Jigsaw puzzle

A gallon of Elmer’s carpenter’s glue, two dozen clamps, and 24 hours of dry time later, and I had one stringer. Repeat. Repeat again.

A few clamps

Once the laminated boards were ready, I trimmed the edges, then marked and cut the stringers. And it is will no small amount of embarrassment that I tell you that, after having measured and cut the original three stringers, I cut all three of the new stringers wrong. It was only off by a half an inch, but, believe it or not, your feet can tell the difference. And so can my pride.

What did I do? Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Crisp and clean (and correctly cut) stringers

Version 2 of the rough stairs have risers and treads made of 3/4″ plywood. Unlike stairs v1.0, This is a permanent underlayment to which the finish risers and treads will be attached, adding strength and rigidity to the structure. I also left a rather significant gap on each side for installation of the skirtboard.

Was all that work really worth it?

Next on “stairs” – finish anxiety.

Poor Microsoft. Vista and Zune took two of the spots in Time’s The 10 Biggest Tech Failures of the Last Decade. At least they keep trying.

Obama turns controversy into jokes, lesson at commencement

President Obama on Wednesday turned a flap over his commencement speech at Arizona State University into a joke — then a lesson about never being satisfied with one’s accomplishments.

…

“I learned to never again pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA bracket,” he said, referring to the school’s basketball team. “It won’t happen again.”

“President [Michael] Crow and the board of regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS,” he joked.

…

“I come to embrace it [the suggestion that he hasn't achieved enough in life], to heartily concur, to affirm that one’s title — even a title like president — says very little about how well one’s life has been led,” he said. “That no matter how much you’ve done, or how successful you’ve been, there’s always more to do, more to learn, more to achieve.”

Humans are social creatures and, as such, are generally predisposed to follow society’s morés. For better or worse, that’s how we maintain acceptability to those we choose to associate with.

Sometimes, we become conscious of our behavior. And sometimes, we realize that our behavior, although successful in outcome, isn’t necessarily right.

I admit that I only became familiar with the shift lever after the disfiguring incident. The twisted piece of metal looked sad, and my immediate thought was to do what I could to straighten it out. I let my own ideas dictate my behavior, and even when researching the part online, the exploded parts diagram in front of me, I wasn’t cognizant of its true nature. I let my estimation of how it operated dictate my actions. It seemed the right thing to do.

I just assumed that bend wasn't supposed to be there.

The way I thought it should be.

I knew the repaired lever didn’t feel exactly right when riding. It felt like it should be a little more outboard than it was. I assumed that was because the arm had bent at the root, a bend I wasn’t capable of fixing.

Today, I stopped by the parts counter at the shop and purchased a replacement. When I got in the car and tore open the package, I was shocked at what I found. The bend that I had hammered out was supposed to be there. It was other, more subtle bends from the incident that had disfigured the part – bends that I couldn’t begin to understand and wouldn’t have been able to fix even if I did.

The way it really should be: new part on top, repaired part on bottom.

True, I made the bike operational again. My neanderthal bludgeoning achieved my goals. But at what price?

Let the pedal be a pedal.

Last summer, I laid my motorcycle, a 2006 Ducati Monster S2R 800, down on its right side. Typically, when someone says they “laid their bike down,” they mean they crashed it. My incident wasn’t quite as exciting. As I pulled into my driveway, I turned the wheel to the right in preparation for backing it into its usual parking spot. The low speed and awkwardness of the tight turn made me lose my balance. I couldn’t hold it up, so I literally laid it down gently on its side. The brake pedal was damaged, as was the brake light actuator it’s attached to, which caused the brake light to stay lit. I drove it to the shop and a few hundred dollars later, it was good as new.

Today, I decided to wash my bike, mostly because the white wheels had a lot of dirt on them and needed prettying up. As I washed, I had to move the bike back and forth to get at different parts of the wheels. You can probably see where this is going – soapy wet palms (and carelessness) caused it to slip and I laid it down again, this time on the left side.

Now, those of you who ride might be saying to yourself: the sidestand is on the left, so why wasn’t it down? An excellent question. I was moving the bike forward and as it slipped, the sidestand caught on the pavement and folded up as the bike went down.

After struggling to get the 400 pounds upright, I assessed the damage, and found that the shift lever had been bent inwards and had impacted and bent the tie rod that connects it to the gear box.

The shift pedal and tie rod, just above the sidestand

Close-up: neither of them are supposed to be bent.

My first reaction was to finish washing the bike. I guess they call that denial. Afterward, the only thing left to do was bemoan my situation. What a way to start the summer riding season. And I cringed as the expected repair cost. One unfortunate thing about pre-1997 Ducatis is that the service book has incredibly high hours and rates, so pretty much any service, even an oil change, involves a credit check and a second mortgage. With a damaged shift lever, the bike wasn’t rideable which meant the shop would have to pick it up, upping the cost. I remember trying to schedule a pick-up when I had a screw in the rear tire and it was like pulling teeth. I finally pumped up the tire and rode it to the shop before the air ran out, my friend Chris following me in case of… well, you know.

Upon closer inspection, it seemed that the only damage was to the shift pedal and tie rod, and not to the gearbox itself. So I grabbed a few tools and took it apart.

Disassembly with an Allen wrench and an open-ended wrench.

The offending components.

Both pieces are aluminum. The tie rod is fairly thin, and it didn’t take much to knock it straight again. I sandwiched it between two pieces of wood to protect its surface, and hit the wood with a hammer.

Whacking it between some two-by-fours

The shift pedal was a different matter. It’s forged and fairly thick. And it was bent in the middle and also bent slightly at the root, where its shaft is supposed to be 90-degrees to its hub. And, it’s a complex shape, so arranging blocks of wood to support it, protect it, and allow for the necessary banging/bending would be a bit more complicated.

The shift lever is a bit sturdier...

...and takes a bit more precision.

After bending the shaft mostly straight, I decided not to attempt to bend the shaft at it’s root, because it didn’t seem to be necessary, and I had no idea how I’d do it anyway.

Not perfect, but serviceable.

After re-assembly, it seems to be operational. The part of the shift lever that contacts my foot is still a bit more inboard that I’d like, so I’ll probably see if I can get a new shift lever from the parts counter at the shop or online.

I haven’t done a test ride yet. I thought I’d post this first, in case of… well, you know.

Time for a test ride.