Dr Jonathan Foote, Marnia Johnston, Niladri Bora and I will be exhibiting SWARM throughout the entire festival. On February 13th we will present our talk.

We are greatly honored to be in company with the other speakers at the event. The program shows these other speakers:

• Douglas D. Osheroff – Nobel Laureate, Physics
• Oliver Smithies – Nobel Laureate, Medicine
• Paul Shuch – Executive Director Emeritus of The SETI League
• Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer – Director General of CERN
• Bernhard Schölkopf – Director, Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics
• Dr. Ashish Gupta – Managing Director – Investment Advisor at Helion Venture Partners
• Jaya Prakash Narayan – Former IAS and Social Activist
• Dr. John G. Baker – Goddards Space Flight Center, NASA
• Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis – Assistant Professor, UAEU & PHD, MIT Media Lab
• Graham Sparey-Taylor – Head, Nos Gwawr II
• Neeraj Kayal – Gödel Prize and Distinguished Alumnus Award
• Shantanu Srivastava – Managing Director & CEO, Ishan International Pvt. Ltd.
• Ken Lemons – Creator of Musical DNA

From the main “Talks” page

“When a person talks about his work, he is talking about a love affair”.
- Alfred Kazin

Be witness to lectures that are sure to blow your mind away. From Nobel laureates who climbed steep rungs to the very zenith of success to business wizards who have literally accomplished Mission Impossible, these talks have them all. This year we have talks with both a technial and an entreprenuerial flavour. From Turing award winners to “desi-innovators” with a rags-to-riches story, Techkriti ‘10 has it all. The talks form the essence of the festival where the triumph of the human mind is celebrated. So no matter what keeps each one of us ticking, let us all come together to assimilate the distilled essence of the roads to success.

Here is the full text of our biography

OrbSWARM - Semiautonomous Robots
SWARM is a fleet of semiautonomous rolling orbs. They were created to move, sing, dance, illuminate and interact with one another and those around them. SWARM is a large-scale collaborative project featuring members of several San Francisco based art and engineering groups including members of the Flaming Lotus Girls, the Sunflower Robots Project, members of the robotics, kinetic art, and Linux/open source communities. The group is particularly proud of its non-hierarchical collaboration style, allowing those with varied interests and expertise to work together. All SWARM designs and code are open-source and freely available to help and inspire other artists and engineers.

Niladri Bora joined Swarm in May 2007. He wrote code for the aggregator and the SPU and also did part of the custom machining for SWARM. Before SWARM he apprenticed at the Omnicircus. He was born and raised in Assam in north-eastern India but has been living in the Bay Area since 1999. He finds it ironic that he moved across the globe from one of the most earthquake-prone areas in India to the most earthquake-prone area in the Unites States. He is a graduate in Mechanical Engineering from Gauhati University but has worked in the software industry for most of his professional life. He is interested in electronics, programming and all aspects of robot fabrication.

Jonathan T. Foote received a BS (Electrical Engineering) degree in 1985 and a ME (Electrical) degree in 1986, both from Cornell University. From 1986 to 1988 he worked as a development engineer for Teradyne, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1993 he received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Brown University, where he also received a Brown Presidential Teaching Award and an Outstanding Research Award from Sigma Xi. He did postdoctoral research at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom from 1993 to 1996, and was a 1997 Fulbright Fellow at the Institute of Systems Science in Singapore. From 1997 to 2005 he was a Senior Research Scientist at FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc. Currently he is a freelance consultant. Dr. Foote has published more than 60 technical papers in the areas of signal processing and remote interaction, as well as 34 US patents. Dr. Foote was responsible for much of the electronic design on SWARM as well as microcontroller programming.

Marnia Johnston is a sculptor living in San Mateo, CA. She is an interdisciplinary instigator collaborating with engineers, synthetic biologists, programmers and tinkerers, In her most recent collaboration she conducted a workshop with graduate students, artists, biologists, programmers and roboticists. She recently co-curated the show Multispecies Salon II with Dr. Eben Kirksey at the California College of the Arts, in conjunction with the American Anthropological Association, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Johnston’s sculptures and drawings have been exhibited widely in California, most recently in the Consilience of Art & Science exhibition at the Pence Gallery in Davis, California, and at San Jose’s ZeroOne Biennial event, SubZero. She has also had work shown in New York, Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, North Carolina and abroad. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Icheon World Ceramic Center and has been recognized by the World Ceramic Biennial, South Korea with a diploma of honor and a medal of honor. She has also been recognized by the Marin Society of Artists with an award of merit.

Born in California, Johnston holds a BFA from San Jose State University and MFA from the California College of the Arts (CCA). She continues to sculpt out of her studio in San Francisco, CA.

Lee Sonko is a machine artist, entrepreneur and one of the founding members of SWARM. He is a faculty member in the Kinetics and Electronics Department at The Crucible in Oakland California and a member of the the San Francisco based Flaming Lotus Girls art group. Lee has partipated in SWARM from inception, proposal, design, fabrication, re-fabrication (as is always the case), administration, organization. Some other projects that Lee has made significant contributions to include The Serpent Mother, a 170′ long fire breathing skeletal serpent built with the Flaming Lotus Girls and Colossus, an impossibly agile 25 ton kinetic sculpture built with Zachary Coffin. He has also designed various microelectronics projects for professional and recreational use.

Lee has presented on art and technology before numerous audiences including Google IO, Robogames, The Coachella Music Festival, Hacker Dojo, Maker Faire, Burning Man, The Head-Royce School, Yuri’s Night, and Noisebridge.

Tutored 2 students today

Started teaching Intro to Mechanical Sculpture class last night

Starting teaching Electromechanics for Everything class tomorow night

I’ve got to straighten out my flight plans with a guy 12.5 time zones away. Hopefully he just woke up

(via, and they tell you how to use a semicolon for other, less nefarious purposes too!)

Read this article about The 6 Most Statistically Full of Shit Professions.

And follow the links. This is science people! And it’s awesome too.

What I want is an application to crawl each of my several private mediawiki sites and make them available offline on my iPhone.

Some products that almost fit the bill include:

• Instapaper – can’t grab password protected pages
• Several Wikipedia caching programs – really close! If they could grab my password protected Mediawiki sites, I’d be set
• Evernote – I haven’t tried it yet but I don’t think this is what I want
• I can make html archives of my Mediawiki sites. I can view this on my laptop which is good. I would like to view them on my iPhone.
• Apps that make Data URLs like Filemark Maker are nice but it’s a multi-step process involving my home computer
• Web pages saved on the PC then viewed with Dropbox. Again it’s multi-step process each time I want a new archive. Maybe I/you could crawl my site with wget and throw that into Dropbox. The HTML archive won’t be pretty and I’d have to manually “Favorite” a lot of pages.

Do you know of an application that can do this? Or maybe you’ll like to write it, becoming  rich and famous?

They were delicious.

It was a crazy event!

I met some cupcakeers. They were intensely into … CUPCAKES!

I met a woman from Holland and man from Estonia who had never eaten a cupcake before!

Totally beautiful, sumptuous visuals, gorgeous realization of an alternate world. And the aliens are totally hot!

I should write more about it but I’m short on time. So here’s bullet points:

the first 1/2 of the movie hurt my eyes with the 3D, maybe they were pushing objects forward of the screen with the effects instead of behind the screen? The 2nd half had less issue with this. Coraline was crisper in 3d, but that was at the Alameda theater and done with real claymation.

CGI or costumes?! Wow, it’s really hard to tell. Must have been both.

They got the helicopter sounds wrong! The most common flying machine in the movie is this totally awesome looking “scorpion gunship”. Each of the 2 “wings” has 2 co-axial counter-rotating 3 bladed propellers in a ducted fan. So it would sound a lot like the “woooooo” of a jet engine. Maybe with a bit of resonance, like “wooowooowooowooo” But the sound effect they used is that of a regular 2 bladed helicopter, going “Tuh Tuh Tuh Tuh”. Every time I heard the sound (which was a lot toward the end with all the crashing and smashing of those machines!) I cringed :-(

Ooo, pretty!

I can imagine it being worth seeing it in IMAX. But there were no good showtimes at the Metreon :-(

Yup, the 3D movie experience has saved modern cinema from being outmoded by large screen televisions in peoples’ homes.

Exploring the world reminded me of this fantasy book I read that had lots of word-play with real magical hangman trees and steaming bread trees… Argh, I don’t recall the name!

Why do I say it’s a scam?

• The ingredient list has nothing but common, inexpensive ingredients like undecylenic acid (a good topical antifungal. Buy a lifetime supply for $20 at a health food store)
• Crazy expensive, $40 for 0.5 oz. And that is a 2-4 week supply. You’ll need to treat for 3-6 months
• Online marketing. Googling for “fungisil” finds loads of fantastic, glowing reviews that were obviously written by poor marketers and not users.
• Lots of online marketing comparing Fungisil to Zetaclear. And no reviews of Fungisil to other antifungal topicals.

I previously wrote about this and got some help, thanks!

The Facts:

My apartment was destroyed on Oct 24th by my upstairs neighbor who opened a hot water main and flooded out the three units beneath hers.

There is no power, the kitchen has been demolished completely, no one can live there.

After three months waiting while insurance companies point the finger at each-other, I’ve been forced to file a lawsuit last week.

We named in the suit: Jeannette, (the neighbor who caused the destruction), the co-op, the board of directors of the co-op, the management company of the co-op.

We tried to get approval to start reconstruction on my dime so my place would not continue to rot and I could get home sooner, but the co-op won’t sign the alteration agreement.

I have been living in a hotel suite that State Farm has been paying for. They will stop paying as of February 11th. This hotel costs almost $7k a month so no way can I stay here.

This could take a year to even get to trial. We are hoping for a summary judgment before then but must be ready for the worst- what my attorney calls The Doomsday Plan.

When it does get to trial or in front of a judge, we WILL win; no one is arguing the facts, just which insurance – co-op’s or Jeanette’s – should pay for what.

I have a good lawyer but he does not have a magic wand. He is very expensive, this will probably be $20-30K in lawyers’ fees, which I may or may not ever recoup.

I have a wonderful mother who will help me financially, but she is not rich.

The Primary Need:

A place to live, hopefully in Manhattan, while this process labors on. At least for three months, more likely for six, maybe even longer if we are forced to go to trial.

This place must also take my kitty.

Best case it would be furnished. But I could move my furniture in if it would be a long term arrangement.

The place must be large enough that I can do some work.

Secondary Needs:

A licensed architect who can do drawings for the permit. I can do the preliminary drawings in CAD but need the pro for the permit, (at a great price).

Physical help when the time comes to move. Marriott may let me stay a few extra days at a cut rate so it would probably be the weekend of 13th and 14th.

A job.

What You Can Do:

Put your network on alert to help me find a temporary home.

Help me find an architect who will work at a low rate or even contingency. It’s very little work on their part, just must have it right so don’t break any laws.

Volunteer to help me move when I must- esp. if you have a car. Be my Valentine?

Let me know of any small or large design or acting jobs. Hell, any jobs at all-I must get back to work.

Help me appease whatever Gods I’ve apparently angered-Pray, Chant, speak in tongues, holy water, sacrifice – Anything!!!

The Emotions:
Overwhelmed
Frustrated
Sad
Angry
Frightened
Did I mention Overwhelmed?

Hopeful, still hopeful it will all be okay some day.
Grateful that I know lots of good people.
Xoxo, L

If you can help or know someone that might be able to, please comment here, email Laura at ljhanna at verizon dat net or call her at 917 + 796 – 7682.

I felt tempted to dive in to the chat/bitch fest but I held my tongue/fingers because it didn’t seem like any benefit could come of it. After my second email I even got an email asking me to stop submitting feedback because, well the author didn’t say it in as many words and didn’t mean it in a mean way but, because my email wasn’t part of the bitching.

I done good.

The Crucible (not done yet!)
IUH
Techkriti (an Indian technology conference I’m presenting at in 2 weeks) (done but needs fixing!)
Flaming Lotus Girls

My biography is now on the Faculty page of the IUH website (was here)  :-)

Lee Sonko http://lee.org
Lee Sonko is an entrepreneur, educator, machine artist, organizer, hacker, geek and baker. Those attributes often team up in his life to help explore the world. He is a founding member of SWARM, a San Francisco based mechatronic art robot group. He is also a member of the Flaming Lotus Girls and teaching faculty at The Crucible in Oakland. Lee’s love affair with good bread goes back as long as he can remember. Making and eating bread is his daily reminder of the simplicity and purity of the experience of creation.

This is art that sells itself. Literally. And that’s why it’s art.

I love it!

The art is currently selling itself on eBay

…
WHEREAS:

A. Artist has created a work of art titled “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009)” (“the Artwork”) which consists of a black box that places itself for sale on the auction website “eBay” (the “Auction Venue”) every seven (7) days. The Artwork consists of the combination of the black box or cube, the electronics contained therein, and the concept that such a physical object “sells itself” every week.
…

A Ted Talk

David Blaine: How I held my breath for 17 min

FNA

Went to the shooting range with Schuyler and his friend Mitch. While I was officially Schuyler’s Parent or Guardian because of his tender young age (!), I spent the most time with Mitch, giving him a shooting lesson. It was fun and sometimes funny watching him load the magazine backwards, try desperately to operate the slide, and hold the gun in a position where he’d surely bonk himself in the head if he were to fire the gun for real. All that said, he did great on the range! I was thinking it would just be good if he got out there but in his last round, he took 7 shots, all on the paper, most inside a small circle. And darn we had fun!

(and click on that image to the left. I wasn’t trying to but I caught the slide and kick of the gun perfectly!)

After, Schuyler and I came back home, we chatted and cleaned the gun and then off to Papalote, where I got 2 more stamps on my Burrito Card. My next burrito will be free! I liked the sound of that I asked the cashier to repeat the words, “Your next burrito will be free.” Wee!

I got a call from my dad and emails from my aunts Dorothy and Ernestine telling me how cool it was that I’m speaking at Techkriti and the company I’ll be keeping there.

Laurie came over and we all chatted about all manner of things… from niobium to the magic of twist ties to baking bread. We baked. I figured it would be good practice for my upcoming bread teaching class and, well, there was no bread in the house! Schuyler ended up staying so long that he got to have some and take some home. We opened up the last of my lonza and talked about making some of our own! It might be possible to sweat the meat in a refrigerator inside a plastic container and a drainage rack!

I’m already forgetting many of the nonstop jokes we chatted up. It was a really good day!

I reflashed the daughter board on Orb 3 and Michael Toren and I roll tested it. The moment I hit the joystick the orb took off and wouldn’t stop even when I let go of the joystick.
…
P.S. 1 – The kill switch is not easy to hit when the orb is running away from you very fast.
P.S. 2- The box shop is out of band aids. I would grab a box but it will be a few weeks before I am back.

(locally archived) (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License) (this track from Amazon.com, at no cost)

I wrote on Curt Smith’s website (of Tears for Fears fame)

Curt, Thank you so very much for this song.

I found All is Love when browsing around for for Zoë Keating’s music. I’ve played it 50 times in the last week on your website. It hits me at a very deep level and I don’t know why. Every time the song ends, I get this slow lost feeling, as if I had been on my way to somewhere beautiful and then, despite trying to keep it in my memory, I slowly forget how to get there. So I find the page and hit play again. That’s all I can do. I don’t know what you’ve stirred in me but it’s worthwhile to explore.

Thank you for the message in this song. I look forward to the album release.

Curt writes about the song

Click here to listen to “All Is Love (featuring Zoë Keating),” Curt’s first new solo material in nearly two years. It will be released on January 24. 2010.

Smith is releasing “All is Love” via his KOOK Media label as a standalone single, which will be available in digital format from AmazonMP3, iTunes, CD Baby, thesixtyone and other online retailers.

Smith met guest artist Zoë Keating online. “I was looking for a cellist to play on the track and heard about Zoë through Twitter. I watched a few of her performances on YouTube and thought she was fantastic and innovative.” He sent her the in-progress tracks, and a month or so later she hand-delivered her cello parts to a Tears For Fears concert outside of San Francisco. The two will perform in concert, as a double bill, on March 23 at renowned L.A. venue Largo at The Coronet.

“All Is Love,” began life as a demo track for a television pilot theme song (the original version, called “Halfway Home,” streams on Smith’s website). While the pilot didn’t get picked up, Smith liked the musical idea he’d begun, and reworked it with longtime collaborator Charlton Pettus. In a departure from his usual lyrical themes of longing and loss, All Is Love’s anthemic chorus (”When every mother’s loving every son / When all is love, there’ll be love for everyone”) looks forward with hope to a time of peace and calm. “I was inspired by the 2008 U.S.presidential election” says Smith “The verses are about the negativity of all the advertising, whilst the chorus invokes the inspiration I felt about positive change.”

Like Smith’s previous solo effort “Halfway, pleased,” he’s releasing “All Is Love” under a Creative Commons license. The license Smith uses allows others to freely share, perform, and remix his work,so long as the uses are non-commercial, Smith is credited, and any derivative works carry the same license. “I’m a big fan of Creative Commons,” Smith says.”It’s a no-brainer as far as I’m concerned. It affords you the opportunity to set the ground rules of how people can use your music upfront.”

Background vocalists on “All Is Love” include singer-songwriters Michael Wainwright (who opened for Tears for Fears on its 2009 U.S. tour) and Jason Joseph, as well as Pettus’ daughter Georgica. Charlton Pettus and Smith share writing and production credits.

Smith plans to play several Los Angeles-area solo gigs in 2010, working around a busy schedule of Tears for Fears concert tours taking place in Australia, New Zealand, southeast Asia and the U.S. EastCoast. He’ll continue to release new tracks as he completes them, with the possibility of compiling them into an album when he’s got enough material.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Lyrics to “all is love (featuring zoë keating)”

Written by Curt Smith and Charlton Pettus

Look what you’ve done
You’ve blown it all
On vanity and sympathy
See how you run
A pot of gold
And a bleeding heart to go with it

Chorus:
When all is love
And the hurt is gone
We’ll all reach out
To touch someone
When every mother’s
Loving every son
When all is love
There’ll be love for everyone

Look what you’ve lost
Innocence and faith
And save yourself at any cost
Here’s what you’ll find
When the bottom drops out

Chorus

Close your eyes and it’s gone
Don’t look down till it’s over
Hold on tight, everyone
We’re halfway home

Chorus (repeats)

When all is love
When all is love
There’ll be love for everyone
When all is love
When all is love
There’ll be love

Look what you’ve done

Short form:
Their sales website is huge and very pretty. They spent a lot of money on it. Omnipage 17 costs about $150, Omnipage 17 Professional costs about $500. And there’s the “Enterprise” version.

I clicked the pretty “chat with a representative” popup on their site to find out what’s up with the extra $350.

Want to know what you are paying for? Salesmanship.

—————————————

Here’s the transcript. My commentary (not from the conversation) is in bold

—–

Please wait while we find an agent to assist you…
Hello, welcome to Nuance Chat. Please briefly describe your goal or question and I will connect you with the best resource to meet your objectives.
Customer: What is the difference between Omnipage 17 and 17 Pro? Can you show me a comparison page?
Erin Sim: That’s a good question. What I can do is transfer you to a sales agent who can answer that question and ensure you are getting the correct product. Would that be helpful?
Customer: sure That’s odd, I didn’t make it directly to sales? Whatever…
Erin Sim: Great! Before I transfer you can you please provide me with your name and phone number?
Customer: I’d rather not, thanks. Why would this guy need my phone number? Followup sales call?
Erin Sim: No problem, I will transfer you now. Your expected wait time is 5-10 minutes as we are currently experiencing higher volumes than usual. Thank you for your patience.
Johannes Wehrmann has entered the session.
Erin Sim has left the session.
Johannes Wehrmann: Hello, welcome to Nuance sales support, please let me review what you have entered.
Customer: Hi, What is the difference between Omnipage 17 and 17 Pro? Can you show me a comparison page?
Johannes Wehrmann: There isn’t a comparison between Standard and Pro.
Customer: There is a $350 price difference. You spent $100,000 on your fricking Omnipage website and there’s no way to compare your products? WTF?
Johannes Wehrmann: I can discuss your requirements with you and explaing the differences.
Johannes Wehrmann: Would you like me to call you? … and fill my head with OCR sugarplums?
Customer: I want OCR that works. You sell a product, I buy it. It works. I want to convert image PDFs into Docs. Not hard. I don’t want to be put into the sales funnel. Thanks. Bye. Ok, maybe I’m a bit punchy. But how many people’s pocketbooks did they slime their way into? I have no respect for this kind of sales.
Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

I took my car to the mechanic at 400 Guerrero. He said, “I looked for a few hours. Maybe it’s the throttle sensor, maybe the computer. I don’t have the equipment to check the computer. Take it somewhere else. I won’t charge you.”

I took my car to a dealer in Walnut Creek, Michael Stead (because all the local Chrysler dealers are closed because of effing General Motors going into the shitter). They replaced the throttle sensor for $500. Before I got home, the problem manifested itself again.

I took the car to the dealer again and now they say it’s an intermittent open connection in the electrical system. They want to charge me $1,800 to replace the entire wiring harness. Is this reasonable?

The dealer will reimburse me the $500 for the mistaken throttle sensor problem. And I should get $500 free money from the state.

If I get a second opinion, might a mechanic be able to find and replace the one bad wire in the electrical system for less than $1,800? Do I dare try cutting and soldering wires myself? I mean, if it’s broken copper in a wire, it’s $1 of wire that’s gone bad.

1550Hyde
2 1/2 of 5 stars. It was “fine”.

My yellowtail was cooked fine with a bit of bitter green sauce on it. The cooked baby green things beside it were nice if a little bitter. My friend’s salad was entirely arugula (which as we know is rather bitter) with some oil & vinegar. The coffee my friend got was rather bitter (though maybe that’s the style for coffee in San Francisco). I appreciate “bitter” as a culinary tool but hey!

The server was very nice. My friend asked for a substitute side-order. The kitchen missed the instruction and the server promptly brought her the side she wanted. The plate of the side was hot but the side was cold on the inside :-( It was this cauliflower thing which was good if a bit… wait for it… bitter.

For desert, the chocolate pudding stuff was really good. As was the banana bread! And the bread set on the table was very good. Though I suppose none of those items were made in-house.

But we had a lot of fun riding the cable cars on the way home!

Teaching Faculty at the Crucible – teaching 2 classes starting in February
- Introduction to Mechanical Sculpture
- Electromechanics for Everything

Tutoring School Students – right now I have a 2nd grader and 4th grader

Teaching Bread Making at the Institute for Urban Homesteading

Presentation Manager for SWARM’s trip to Kanpur India

I just installed RSS Count Comments. Findable on Wordpress.

When you read my RSS feed, you’ll now see the number of comments in each post. So a title might read:

It Was on Fire When I Got Here (3 comments)

I installed this because comments are so very important but you’d easily miss them when reading just the RSS feed.

I encourage all my friends to install this very small plugin! It’s just 7 lines of code. :-)

In preparing to go to India to show off SWARM, I had to get stuck with a bunch of needles. Joy.

I got my immunizations at the San Francisco Department of Public Health Adult Immunization & Travel Clinic

They knew which vaccines I needed but I checked up myself with the CDC here and here.

I made an appointment a few days in advance. It took about 1.5 hours with the interview, shots and discussion.

I received

• Typoid – 4 pills taken every other day for 8 days. Take at least 1 week before travel. Don’t take with antibiotics (my antimalarial is an antibiotic!). Effective for 5 years.
• Antimalarial – Doxycycline – 1 pill a day starting 2 days before travel, ending 28 days after. No possibility of psychosis like many antimalarials!. Effective only as long as you take it
• Polio – injection. You should get 1 booster in a lifetime. This was it.
• Tdap – Tetanus, Diphtheria, and Pertussis. injection. Effective for 10 years
• Hepatitis A – injection. Effective for 10 years. I need to go back in 6 months for a booster
• Cipro – oral antibacterial to take with me in case of illness while travelling
• Hep B immunization (Lee already got in 2005. Effective for 10 years.)
• Measles – 2 shots needed in a lifetime. By 1990 almost all colleges required boosters. Effective for life.
• Ultrathon insect repellent

Total bill from San Francisco Department of Health: $307
I have to pick up the Cipro and Doxycycline prescriptions from Costco. (you don’t need a membership to buy from their pharmacy)

A day later, both my arms hurt and are stiff from the injections.

I’ll have to pick up some permethrin for my clothes to and maybe a mosquito net from REI and I’m ready to go.

Whooever said international travel was fun was in the middle of a psychotic episode from the mefloquine.

And it sucks but this post belongs in the “Art” category.

I just added the “Bread” Category to this blog. I have retroactively put all my bready posts into this category.

I just finished a 25 pound bag of First Street Bread Flour from Smart and Final. It was about $12. Standard loaves come out a bit softer and sweeter than with the previous Hotel all-purpose flour (I forget the exact name, it’s from Smart and Final and has the word “hotel” in it). I like it.

I just made some focaccia with it and it was very easy to flatten out. The Hotel flour has a strong tendency to spring back.

The classes start in February. Of course, I’ll be in India for part of February so another Crucible faculty member and all-around-good-guy Sudhu and I will be co-teaching some of the classes and he’ll be subbing for some :-)

It’s a really nice piece! Use the power of the Google on “Animanemone” and watch it! They’re from Minnesota.

It’s great to mull on…. it’s like watching grass in the wind. Totally fun to put your hand on it and feel the buzzing of the motors. And it’s just so many fun tiny pieces. It’s zen and not zen. :-)

————————————————–

And Ken Murphy’s awesome “History of the Sky” was there as promised. I zoned on that for a while. Tototolly groovy!

————————————————–

I only got to look at Cubatron from afar :-( … not enough time in a night :-(

Do you want me to bring anything back with me?

…
“The mechanic opened the hood and… has there ever been a fire in your car?”

“Hmm? mmm. Ha! No, but it’s been to Burning Man! All that dust under the hood! And you can never get it out. The mechanic has never seen a car that’s been to Burning Man, has he?”

“Ah, he thought that was fire extinguisher dust…”

Eric asked on the SWARM list
Eric: anyone get anything?
Lee: I clicked Refresh until my fingers were bloody stumps. But nothing. I’m writing to you now with voice recognition soft wear because I have no fingers.
Mark A: lolz… “soft wear”

Just now I just tried to wiggle the bed like the earthquake but the frame is too stiff. It was the building doing that wiggling! The motion was entirely horizontal, head-foot / east-west.

The US Geological Survey says this about the earthquake:

The count’s oh and two.

I’ve loved this list for years. I remember when Luke Sullivan started quoting them at me with funny faces. I laughed and laughed! Though, truth be told, I was and am jealous that he has such an awesome memory… he could quote most (all?) of this list from memory!

Don’t explain, just tell these to your friends, one at a time with a slow wry grin until they make a disgusted face at you.

Some of Larry’s favorite er-jokes:

• ‘56 Packer
• 7 layer cakeblower mechanism
• Baker Foundation
• Caesar
• Carver Mass.
• Cedar Junction
• Cooper tire and rubber
• Dan Risacher
• Dick Butkis: former Raider tight end
• Elevator Action (video game)
• Elixir
• Euler slope at the midpoint
• Exeter
• Exeter Mass.
• French and Taylor (textbook)
• Government Center
• Hunter-seeker-finder games in three-dimensions (real title of a chapter of Turtle Geometry by Hal Abelson)
• Innerspace (movie)
• Inspector Gadget
• Kris Pfister
• Mike Ditka: former Bear tight end
• Palmer Mass.
• Prizzi’s honor
• Raider tight end
• Refrigerator: former Bear defensive tight end (wow!)
• William Tucker
• actuator assembly
• amplfier response
• bitter almonds
• bitter end
• bittersweet chocolate
• bouncer up the hole
• butcher, baker, candlestick-maker
• can opener
• cedar drawers
• consumer awareness
• consumer goods
• consumer products
• copperhead
• cursor blinking period
• cursor movement
• dewar full of liquid
• distributor for replacement parts
• elevator shaft
• elixir
• evildoer
• explore outer space
• feeder pipe
• fiddler crabs
• fiddler on the roof
• filler items
• former tight end
• gladiator
• hunter sauce
• impeller inlet
• inflator figure
• inner back bay
• inner ear
• inner harbor
• inner sanctum
• inner tube
• inner workings
• interim
• liquor and wine
• liquor box
• liquor bust (WWN headline)
• liquor filled bon-bons
• liquor in the front, poker in the rear
• liquor lovers
• liquor-flavored maraschino cherries
• lubricator system
• non-dairy creamer
• open forum
• oven-stuffer roaster
• poker face
• poker lovers
• polar bear
• polar coordinates
• pumpernickel muffin
• reaper with a scythe
• resonator cavities
• rubber chicken
• rubber dinghy
• rubbermaid
• scout’s honor
• seeker head
• status rectum (medical term)
• stretcher
• succumb to damage
• succumb to fatigue
• succumb to injury
• sucker cups
• sucker for punishment
• sucker punch
• tailor-made
• taper down
• the official dictum
• tire and rubber
• tire sealer and inflator
• upper back bay
• uppercut
• user interface
• vacuum cleaner parts
• ventilator shaft
• visitor center
• whippersnapper
• whopper with cheese

He is at Unicom, The 15th International Unicycling Convention and Championships held in Wellington New Zealand this year!

I just read news and see that they are doing quite well in the standings. Of course, it’s much more about the journey and having fun, but it feels good to know that Berkeley is representin’!

From their website:

We won our second game 44-2 over NT Cyclones, and we won our 3rd game 32-6 over RSD United, a German team. RSD United gave us a game for a while, we were up just 6-4 at one point–they have some of the world’s fastest unicyclists. But things are going well so far. Tomorrow morning we play probably our toughest prelim, …against a French team (CYCL’HOP), and in the afternoon we will have our first quarterfinal game.

Marcus is 4th from left in the photo

As I stood on one side of the street, a cadre of Christmas tree bearing revellers trotted across the street, passing the ranger’s police car. He came on the PA and meekly said “Put those trees down, we’re going to be arresting people real soon.” The last two words trailed off in that “I wish it were true” tone of voice. He might as well have ended with upspeak. I’m sad that I’m the only person that heard him say it. Corey was in with the cadre and he only heard the first half of the plea, taking the tree I gave him over the hill to the already raging bonfire.

I want to thank Michael Prados for the beer, Jon for the happy wave, Jean and Ben for the conversation, Corey for his blatent disregard for the law, Rick for his balancing tree act and Charlotte for everything.