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Who is your favorite artist? Arthur Ganson has topped my list for many many years! Look him up.

Videos of many of his art pieces… AMAZING

His TED Talk

His website

This piece is at the Exploratorium. I love it.

A few months ago we were at the ECPC Messy Art Day. Abigail had just gotten off of the spin art ride and while they were mopping up her spin art and making it go away I said to her “It makes me a little sad when they make the art go away.” And Abigail responded, “It makes me happy because they are going to make new art.” My job here is done.

I’m looking for help fixing my Mediawiki installations. Ready to pay $. Comment or email me.

Update 7-21-19: Turns out, fixing Mediawiki is easy. Just insert 8 hours of your life into the slot

Here’s a flying tip, I always check my airline seats on SeatGuru.com before picking them. It lets me avoid bad seats and often get better seats at no extra cost. I just booked a flight to Nashville for my cousin’s wedding and got extra legroom seats on all 4 legs! My last flight, I avoided one of those dreaded limited recline seats!

Here I am booking my flight tonight :-)

For the last 10 years or so I’ve been earning airline miles and cash with credit card offers. The whole family usually flies on miles alone. I get about $2,000 in value per year out of it. Here’s how:

In brief:

Every three months or so, sign up for a new credit card that offers miles or cash back. Spend the required amount, set the card in a drawer for a few months then cancel the card. Keep a log of all the cards you’ve used and your accumulated miles. Use the miles and cash-back whenever!

All of it:

• When signing up, pretty much the only important benefit is the signing bonus. Look for credit cards that offer things like “25,000 miles if you spend $2,000 in the first 3 months”. Offers for 30k or 50k miles are even better. Don’t bother with any reward smaller than 25,000 miles.
• Only be working on one credit card at a time. But having 2 cards in your wallet is a good idea just in case.
• Keep track of your cards by physically putting notes on them. I print out a document in 6 point font and tape it to the card. Notes usually read something like “spend $2k by [date] for 25k miles. 2pts/$ on restaurants. Cancel by [date] or $95 fee”.
• Always pay off your credit card in full every month. Always. If you are tempted not to, stop reading right now.
• Cancel the card before they charge you a yearly fee. Most cards say something like “$95 per year, waived for the first year”. It is rarely worth paying the yearly fee for the next year’s bonus like a free companion airline ticket or points-back. I sometimes give my reason for cancelling as that I don’t want the temptation of overspending.
• It mostly doesn’t matter what airline or offer you sign up for, you’ll find a way to use the miles eventually. The offers keep changing and the airline codeshares keep changing. So just earn miles on whatever airline and it’ll probably work out. Lately I’ve been earning and spending on American and Alaska (they codeshare), previously it was United. I stay away from hotel miles because I rarely stay in them and hotel miles aren’t worth as much. “80,000 hotel miles” sounds like a lot but it isn’t, but 25,000 airline miles is usually a round trip ticket! Most miles expire after 1-2 years; if you are getting close to expiration, you may be able to convert the miles into Amazon gift cards; the exchange rate is sometimes not great but a little free money is better than no free money.
• To start with, just get one new card every six months. Once you start getting the hang of it, you can get a card every two to three months. Juggling too many cards for your comfort zone is no fun and companies may worry something funny is going on and you might get denied.
• Keep track of when you sign up and receive rewards. Many cards stipulate something like “Signup reward is not available to those who received a new Cardmember bonus within the last 24 months.” In 1-4 years you’ll probably be coming back to this card.
• Keep track of your earned miles from all your airlines and such in a document. When you have enough miles for a flight, use them!
• If you have a business, you can open cards under the business’ name and use more cards.
• Always consider the “exchange rate” of points to dollars when you are considering a card. Earning a penny per dollar is the “norm”, like on a “1% cash back” card. But when you pay attention to signing bonuses, you are earning more like 10 cents on the dollar. It’s like getting 10% off EVERYTHING!
• Where to find the best offers keeps changing. Google “credit card offers” and you’ll find lots of them. Here are some of my go-to spots: http://milecards.com/, http://www.flyertalk.com/, http://milevalue.com/, http://boardingarea.com/viewfromthewing/, http://www.hustlermoneyblog.com/,
• Keep track of all your cards and all your accumulated miles in a document.
• Here are the credit card perks I pay attention to. All the other perks are usually not worth my time:
  • Signing bonus
  • Free first checked bag on an airline. Otherwise, checked luggage can cost $35/bag
  • Can I trade the miles into dollars at a reasonable rate?
• Keep your oldest credit card, even if you don’t use it. That will help boost your FICO score.
• If you are worried about your credit score, I’ve been doing this for more than eight years and my FICO score was above 780 last time I checked.

This was a really great Father’s day!

Family let me sleep in late, oh so nice! We went out to Cafe Leila in Berkeley and had a great brunch. We had fun chatting and playing while waiting for our food. Their pancakes were impossibly fluffy “like chewing on a cloud”, Leila Omelette with sauteed spinach and mushrooms were divine, and Abigail’s breakfast burrito was pretty darn good! Then off to Target for casual shopping! I got some nice clothes and we stayed for almost 2 hours. I was actually happy that the store had remodeled, I was beginning to think that ALL stores were on their way out in favor of Amazon. At home, I got a wonderful dad nap while Megan and Abigail played. Then Abigail and I spent a good while washing her tricycle, sitting out there watching the garden grow, Abigail pay attention to the suds, and the sun shine was oh-so nice! Abigail was bent on cleaning some windows of the house so we went around to the front of the house with a bucket of water and sponges at it went well. Then it was off to a new Nepalese restaurant in the neighborhood, Zomsa that had just perfect noodle bowls and dumplings and everything else! THEN Baskin Robins! We laughed and had so much fun trading ice creams: their cotton candy ice cream is so light and cotton-candy-ish!! And their chocolate cheesecake ice cream is so chocolate cheesecakey, and mint chocolate chip so cheerfully mint chocolate chip! Hurray!

And I got to talk to my father, whom I love so much!

(this was supposed to be published After Father’s Day 2019 but didn’t make it out of my Drafts folder until June 2020, during the stay-at-home pandemic. I don’t know how the post languished in my Drafts folder for so long except to say that I spend a lot of wonderful time with my daughter Abigail! I’ll try to be more prompt about my Father’s Day posts in the future! :-) )

It is just impossible to track how much and how wonderfully Abigail is growing. So many big and little things! Here’s a couple examples:

Until about a month ago, she often made up words, throwing syllables   and phonemes together with joy. I certainly encouraged her! She’d throw her body at a couch cushion, throw up her arms and proclaim “Gurumph-a-do!” She doesn’t -randomly- put together words any more. Now it’s more refined. For example, her hedgehog stuffies are named, in order of getting them: Hedgy, Baby Hedgy, and now Hedgy-Rinsterstein! Rinsterstein?! I love it!

Today, out of the blue, she told me how “drum” was an onomatopoeia and she happily banged on the dining room table describing how it sounded like the word :-)

For a long while, Abigail’s 2 favorite (only?) TV shows have been Tumble Leaf and Daniel Tiger (I totally recommend them). She always says that she needs to watch while pooping in the afternoon, a practice that Megan and I haven’t really been down with. She’ll sit on the potty forever watching unless we go fetch her. Yesterday, she said, “Mom, where is Purple (her purple tablet computer)? I have to poop.” Megan said, “You can have a book.” And amazingly, she said “Ok!” and ran off to fetch a book to keep her company in the bathroom!

We read every night. In April we started reading chapter books. We made it through the first Captain Underpants book with gusto. I started reading the new (2013) illustrated version of The Hobbit to her. She was nervous at how many pages the book had, and kept flipping through it and asking to find the part with the dragon. I told her gently that we would get there eventually as we started. By the second page she didn’t want us to stop! We made it about 25 pages over a few nights before having to take a real break but she now can tell you all about Bilbo’s hobbit hole and Gandolf and the dwarves…

Megan and Abigail went to Texas for 6 days to visit Megan’s dear friend Jane and family. When they came back a few days ago, I swear that she had grown so much in body, speech patterns, and thoughts that I barely recognized her!

We got this bathroom scale. It measures body fat, water percentage, and bone mass.

I did some research about all the different scales, in the under-$10,000 category, they are all pretty much the same, fairly inaccurate but fairly precise. That’s to say it might measure your body fat percentage incorrectly but if it goes up or down, it will track it well. This one cost $30 and works just fine.

Here’s the manual: Conair Weight Watchers scale

I tabled for The Crucible today. I presented several items that I have grown fond of…

• A 3d printed hand that moves straight off the printer, via.
• A 3d printed figure of my DnD character, Newnam Hrothnor, printed by Devon.
• A laser cut and assembled Walking Man Automata, via.
• My daughter Abigail’s bust, 3d printed by Devon!

I just got an oscilloscope and the manual mentioned “Locating Sleeve: Using locating sleeve could ensure the stability and reliability of the tip exposed to the test point.” Say what?

Here is what a locating sleeve is for. If you need to carefully touch just one point on a PCB, you can take off the tip of your probe off, that is the tip with the spring loaded hook, and then attach the locating sleeve. Now it will be easier to touch just what you are intending to.