All posts by Dan

…But Your Uncle Wouldn’t Allow It

Sabers

It started innocently enough.

I had just picked up Master Replicas’ newest lightsaber, Yoda’s personal model, and it put me in mind of the fact that I’d been meaning to take a closer look at the copper highlight kit for my Return of the Jedi Luke Skywalker model. But I’d lost the link, and so had to do some digging.

Eventually, I found what I was looking for.

In getting there, though, I blundered across a couple of sites that I hadn’t known about, and discovered that there’s an active community of do-it-yourself sabersmiths who aren’t waiting around like good little consumers to be delivered, over the counter, the next generation of technology.

They’re combining so-called power LEDs, like Philips’ Luxeon series, with ingenious optics to produce bright, luminous “blades” that are virtually impervious to impact damage.

They’re building systems of modular hilts to let you assemble your own personal model, and thinking up inventive ways to adorn them, including bargraph-based charge indicators.

Maybe most impressive of all, they’re building their own microcontroller-based sound and light modules, with capabilities that put the Master Replicas stuff to shame — blade flicker, solid-state motion-detection, high-resolution and -quality sounds, and even a certain degree of programmability and customizability.

Well. It seems I’ve found my expensive obsession for the summer.

Having it Both Ways

Politics

George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, on the tour circuit for his new book, is busy trying to sell a new dubious claim: that he was somehow the victim of circumstance, that all of the bad decisions about pre-war intelligence were made by somebody else.

Pause and admire that for a moment. The head of the CIA, the original black-bag outfit, a dupe, a pawn, a patsy. Savor it.

Various quarters, however, are noting that his protests and disavowals ring slightly hollow for as long as he keeps the Medal of Freedom George Bush hung around his neck, or profits — to the tune of $4 million — from the contract with his publisher.

Not to put to fine a point on it, a group of former CIA officials have penned an open letter basically pointing out that he’s full of shit.

For some reason it puts me in mind of a They Might Be Giants lyric: “Can’t shake the Devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding.”

The Spirit of Cooperation

Politics

Surprising absolutely no one — with the possible exception of those kids in the back of the classroom whose steady diet of wall candy has rendered them too slow to figure it out from the previous several hundred instances — President Bush has recess-appointed a couple of party hacks to positions for which he knew Congress would never approve them.

Apparently no one inside the bubble has gotten around to disabusing him of his misapprehension regarding the word “bipartisan” — it does not, despite the presence of the morphemes “part” and “bi”, mean “you spread both cheeks while I do whatever I like.”

Here’s hoping his awakening is both rude and not long in coming.

Serendipity

Biking

Unbleached #2 coffee filters, accidentally purchased for use in a #4 machine: useless.

Unbleached #2 coffee filters, for refreshing, through removal of suspended particulates and other gunk, the citrus solvent you just used to leave your chain spotless: perfect.

Thermopylae Soon

Life

As I told my mother during a recent conversation, there’s an outside chance that your life has taken something of a wrong — or, at the very least, strange — turn when you find yourself departing, shortly before midnight, the building in which you work and thinking, without any immediate irony, “Boy, it feels good to leave early for a change.”

The IEEE Comedy Hour

Hardware

Yesterday I stopped by the Apple Store to buy a short, thin FireWire cable, just about the perfect length and weight for conveniently connecting the external drive I now use as the destination for my SuperDuper! backups.

The cable lists for $14, and was my only purchase: the Cisco employee discount of 8%, combined with the California State Sales Tax of 8.25%, conspired to produce a register total of exactly $13.94. I’m not sure I was successful in explaining to the bemused fellow behind the counter just why I thought that was funny.

It may be that I need more sleep.

Entr’acte

Life

Notes for a sketch of the Bay Area in the ethereal week between Christmas and New Year’s Day:

It was graying, though dry, as my plane landed at SFO yesterday morning; driving home from the airport, I heard several warnings of possible flash-flooding later in the day. Patches of lighter cloud still stretched across the sky as I headed to work after dropping off my luggage and checking in on the cats, but you could see darker bands moving in from the southwest.

At some point during the day, while I banged out code in my cubicle, the promised downpour arrived. It slackened a bit come mid-afternoon, and I took advantage of the lull to venture out in search of a late lunch. I thought, as I did so, of Holly: the smell of wet concrete in my nostrils, something we discovered early on held special significance for us both, and the warm, reassuring weight of my hooded felt jacket, a typically tasteful gift from her, would have made it hard not to. I can’t say that I even pretended to try.

The rain gradually gave over to wind as night fell. This morning, I woke to the sound of swaying trees sighing, and found myself, as I drove to work, feeling like a canoeist in rapids, fighting capricious currents to keep my course. I arrived none the worse for wear; still the gusts, undaunted, made one last try for me as I approached the building entrance, forcing me to wrestle them for control of the door.

Nonetheless, it’s a beautiful day, bright and clear. Say what you will about the wind, it’s scoured the skies nearly clean of clouds, and the air of haze. The hills are sharp in the distance, their slopes greening in the wake of the rain.

It could all change tomorrow, of course, but at the moment it feels almost like spring is just around the corner. Maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s something else entirely, but I can’t shake the suspicion that 2007 is going to be an interesting year.

Trauma Center

Games

Sometime not too long ago, and I wish I could remember where, someone mused about what it would be like to play a game in which your principal job was to patch up the hapless victims who’d been brutalized in all of the other video games.

It turns out that a game along those rough lines, Trauma Center, actually exists. That’s not the surprise. The surprise is that it’s apparently quite good. I might have to check it out once I get around to acquiring a Wii of my own.

Now all someone needs to do is create a version that supports heterogenous networked play: as your roommate piles up the casualties in the latest Vice City franchise, you’re the one whose emergency room they show up in. Just be sure to keep the guy playing Halo off of your local network. (“Doctor, this man has plasma burns over 30% of his body, and is carrying shrapnel from a Covenant Needler.” “Oh, for Christ’s sake! I’ve only got 21st-century medicine to work with here!”)

Update: Holly has helpfully pointed out that it was in fact Demetri Martin, in a recording we listened to while en route to Palm Springs. I was thinking that it might have been Tea Leaves or possibly xkcd. I’m glad someone around here’s got a decent memory…

On Second Thought, Maybe It Wasn’t Thirsty

Hardware

Should you happen to, say, accidentally dump a healthy helping of Diet Pepsi upon your MacBook’s keyboard and find that, despite prompt flood-control measures, a column of keys has become unresponsive to user input, you may conclude that the time has come to open it up for cleaning.

If you’d rather not find your way into a $1500 laptop via a trial-and-error approach, then you’d do well to peruse iFixit‘s excellent, detailed, and exhaustively illustrated guide to stripping the computer down to its bones before picking up that jeweler’s screwdriver. Highly recommended.