Blinky Lights and Shiny Objects

My computers all have huge hard drives and large amounts of RAM, but that doesn't mean they can hold everything and do everything and still run smoothly.  Computers, Windows computers at least, run better and are much happier the less stuff they have on them.  Here are my favorite ways to clean up my computers and improve performance and security: 1) Delete old restore points.  This isn't obviously presented as an option and isn't possible unless you've got administrator privileges. But it can reclaim a lot of hard drive space.  Restore points build up each time Windows Update installs or updates anything on your computer.  I haven't found an option that auto-cleans them up, so here is the method for manual deletion.  These instructions are for Windows 7, but there is something very similar in Windows Vista and even Windows XP Professional. A) Open a Windows Explorer window (windows key + E) and select your computer in the left pane, so that the hard dr...

...by taking things out of it. There was a weekend last year when I finally understood and internalized the raw fact that we weren't moving into a new house any time soon.  We'd been in our starter house for nine years, and I checked Zillow.com, and something went "click" in my brain.  If I wanted to live somewhere better with more space, it would be because I upgraded this house and got rid of a bunch of stuff. The upgrades have gone very well, and should form the subject of many posts which are relevant to the title of this blog.  This essay is about de-cluttering, specifically lessons and hang-ups experienced by a pair of engineers who were raised by people who were raised by people who lived through the depression. I had previously considered "clutter" to mean useless trinkets set out for decoration, so I didn't think I had any.  Nope.  I could look around my house as a whole, and think, "How do two adults and one cat need so much STUFF to...

Public Service Announcement: your local mall might have a 3D body scanner that will tell you what pants and jeans will fit your shape.  A Me-Ality kiosk recently came on-line at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, IL, and I tried it out this week. If you can stand still for less than 20 seconds, fully clothed with your shoes on, and you can handle low-power radio waves reflecting off your skin, you can do this.  They ask you to fill out a form with your email address, and it is worth giving a real email address, because of the information you will be getting. After the scan, you get a bar code that refers to your measurement data now stored in their system. Mercifully, they never show or print a picture of your 3D point-cloud derriere. They do print a list of all the pants in the mall in their database that should fit you.  For me, that was 6 types of dress pants and 20 types of jeans.  (I was expecting "ERROR DATA NOT FOUND" as my only result, so this is a lot of mat...

I play Minecraft .  One of the things you can do in Minecraft is farm resources.  I finished building a greenhouse around an island last night.  Here is a screenshot of a view of the greenhouse taken from the glassed-in second story of my home base.  That is where I grow wheat and pumpkins . The sugar cane plants along the shore line are also part of my cultivation project.  Unlike my gardening skills in real life, I'm getting significant virtual return on these plots.

I wouldn't usually bring a large, expensive camera on a trip that is mainly about relaxing and sand.  But, now I've got this older DSLR that just sits around most of the time and wouldn't get $200 on eBay if I tried to sell it.  I took it to Cozumel for our vacation, and at the very least I loved having a real viewfinder to look through on those sunny days.  I only brought a few lenses, none in my "first tier" class, but more than serviceable in the Caribbean light.  I even treated the post-processing more casually than usual, simply clicking the "Perfectly Clear" box in Bibble 5 and adjusting very few other parameters.  Here are some of my favorite pictures:

I figured out what lens I was going to get to cover the telephoto range.  LensRentals.com sells used lenses after they've been rented out for 20 weeks or so.  I bought a used copy of Sony's constant f2.8 aperture 70-200 zoom from them, which retails for $1800, for much less than that.  I am so happy with this lens!  I used it on a tripod to shoot a wedding ceremony, and with the in-body image stabilization on my camera I am also able to hand-hold it for walk-around shots like the one above. The only problem is that now I want to upgrade all of my lenses to glass this nice.  No one ever said photography was a cheap hobby. 

I met Scott in 1996, at the nerd camp "Operation Catapult" held at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.  We both ended up attending RHIT for college, and we both moved to the Chicago area after graduating.  Scott has been a wonderful friend, the sort who you don't see all the time because they are always booked solid but you know that they would clear their calendar to help you.  In 2008, he took time off from his career to hike the Appalachian Trail, a long-planned adventure that didn't end the way he expected.  He wasn't able to finish the trail due to an injury, but he did meet Audrey. Audrey and Scott are now married, and starting off on crossing the country in an orthogonal direction to their mountain hike.  You can get all of the details at Cross Country Audrey and follow along with them as they bike from California to Maine.  The trip is being undertaken to raise money for an organization that helps people who have been diagnosed with multiple sc...

I would like to request that whoever is teaching the medical community that gallbladder problems are only for the over-forty set, to please stop it.  After my previous post, I got tired enough of severe abdominal pain after eating that I decided to keep bothering my doctor until he figured it out and fixed it. Symptoms, for at least ten years previous, include occasional sharp stabbing aching pain in my torso, near enough to my stomach that I was told it was "just gas".  Pain started 20 minutes to 45 minutes after eating a rich meal, and lasted a few hours, then went away completely.  Sometimes the next few meals would also cause pain, even if they were not rich or fatty.  I'd told my doctors, and nurses, and family, but no one could figure out what was really wrong.  They would test my thyroid again, even though I'd already had it tested and everything was normal.  They would suggest it was a food sensitivity, or an allergy to a preservative, and I had t...

This is an easy pattern for a knitted scarf.  I made it up to practice knit and purl stitches, to build up speed and work on keeping an even gauge as I go.  It is supposed to be wavy when finished, resembling the shape of a sinusoid curve.  This is done simply by alternating garter stitch sections, which lay flat, with stockinette stitch sections, which tend to curl towards the knit side.  I alternate the side the stockinette faces to form the max and min points.  So, this is a very nerdy project. (Any yarn and needle size can be used, gauge is not important, adjust stitch count for the width of scarf you want.) Yarn: St. Denis Nordique, 100% wool, 50g per 150 yards, 2 to 3 balls, blue eggshell Gauge: 19 stitches for 4 inches Needle: US 8 or 5.00mm Cast on 30 stitches. Rows 1-4: knit all stitches. Row 5: purl all stitches. Row 6: knit all stitches. Row 7: purl all stitches. Rows 8-13: knit all stitches. Repeat rows 5 through 13 until scarf i...

(Title of post is from an Eddie Izzard routine where he talks about laundry.) I wear enough red clothing that reds get their own load. Pity the poor white article that gets accidentally swept into that pile! One particular expensive t-shirt was abused in just that manner, oh, many years ago. I kept it around, not sure how to remedy the pale pinks and splotchy reds now decorating the whole of it. Technology has advanced, and now they sell small packets of dry chemicals to remove evidence of this particular moment of stupidity. I tried out Carbona's color run remover on the shirt. After soaking for about an hour, most of the shirt was whiter than when I bought it. The commercially applied graphic was not harmed at all. There is a small splotch of very light pink where the darkest red splotch used to be, but you have to know it is there to see it. (I think the chemicals in one packet were exhausted by removing the rest of the color, and didn't have enough strength to tak...

Now that I have basically the nicest camera I can imagine , I've been working on upgrading my lens collection. In late November of last year, I bought a Konica Minolta 28-75 f/2.8 lens, used, from eBay. It is my absolute favorite lens ever, and I love having the constant f/2.8 aperture. The focusing is fast, and the only thing it is missing is macro capability. In most situations, this is the only lens I use. My wider angle needs are covered by a Vivitar 19-35 f/3.5-4.5. My candid very-low-light shots are handled by a "vintage" (thanks, Barb + Nik!) Minolta 50mm f/1.7 prime lens. The hole in my arsenal is at the telephoto end. I've got a Minolta 75-300 f/4.5-5.6 (known as the Big Beercan style lens) that I also bought used from eBay but has MAJOR problems. For example, it can't change apertures anymore and I think the AF motor has a short circuit inside the lens, so it is manual focus only. I've got a Quantaray 75-300 f/4-5.6 that I bought used from a local g...

If I don't start posting simple, small, things again, this blog may never restart. (I hope you are all using feed readers like Google Reader instead of checking this site manually, I'd feel less guilty for wasting your time.) Anyway, at the mall tonight I learned that I am in a minority for wanting to wear boots all year, and am particularly stupid for trying to buy more of them at the end of April. I found a few pairs on clearance to replace the ones whose heels have worn down past the point of repair, then came home and ordered another pair from the Internet. I also stopped in the Apple store. iPads are slightly smaller than I thought they would be. Maybe all the people in the promotional video are smaller than I thought, so the scale was not coming through correctly?

Yesterday I finished participating in the 2010 Ravelympics as a member of the Crochet Liberation Front's Flaming Hooks team. My chosen challenge was to use Tunisian crochet and make a sweater from the Spice Market Tunic pattern . The rules for the competition involve starting a project no earlier than the Opening Ceremony for the real Olympics started, and finishing no later than midnight PST on the day they ended. That is a lot of crochet in a short amount of time. Especially since I have a job to go to, other commitments to keep up with, and no previous experience doing Tunisian crochet. I worked crocheting sessions into spare moments, during long trips, over lunch, and put in a few marathon sessions when I had large chunks of free time. People would ask what I was doing, I'd explain it, then I'd get a variation on this next question: "So, what happens if you don't finish?" Maybe I read into it the wrong way, but it always sounded like they were wond...

I went to a Pro/E Technology day today in Wheaton, and it ended at 3pm. Since the weather was so nice (sunny, near but still above freezing) I decided to visit the nearby Morton Arboretum for the first time. I went ahead and joined for the year at the individual membership level. (This also gets me in many other gardens that participate in the American Horticultural Society's Reciprocal Admissions Program.) I had my big camera, warm snow boots, and two hours before the park closed. There is a sculpture exhibit that opens in April, Steelroots by Steve Tobin , but the sculptures were already placed among the Conifer section. Here are some of my favorite photos from the trip:

Did you know it is National Engineer's Week ? They celebrate it all week at work. They give us cake, and gifts, and hold competitions with nifty prizes. Today I won a portable hard drive by making the strongest table out of 8 sheets of newspaper. A few years ago I won a laser level by making the strongest tower out of index cards and staples. (I do real engineering, too, where they let me specify aluminum and stainless steel to make parts. But that is all year.) Happy National Engineer's Week!

I was as surprised as you were when I turned the corner at the grocery store and discovered from a display set up in the center of the cereal aisle that they now make INSTANT Irish Oatmeal ! That means I can have Irish oatmeal whenever I want now, not... never. I got my introduction to real Irish oatmeal on a horseback riding trip in the Canadian Rockies that I went on with my family a long time ago. I even bought myself a bag of the stuff from King Arthur's Baker's catalog . But then I think I prepared it a grand total of ONCE. It takes a looooong time to prepare, especially for a breakfast food, so I always passed over it in favor of other choices. Not anymore. I am eating it for dinner right now.

Luxury is making beautiful things because I want to, not because I have to. Top to bottom: The Irish Eyes motif from The Harmony Guides: Crochet Stitch Motifs: 250 Stitches to Crochet . The Clover Hat from Crochet in Color : Techniques and Designs for Playing with Color . Cold Shoulders from Stitch 'N Bitch Crochet : The Happy Hooker . (Luxury is also new pillows, fresh windshield wiper blades, a good song stuck in my head, and a cat on my lap.)

please send her over to Ravelry.com . We could use more crocheters to balance out all the knitters who have taken over a little. Seriously, I didn't bring my laptop on vacation last week, and I got along fine just using my iPod touch for Internet consumption. Ravelry works well on the iPod/iPhone, the only problem at the moment is that it has trouble marking forum posts as "read". That, and the screen was too small - I had to keep zooming in. So, a giant iPod (aka the iPad) would have worked even better. Will I get one? Ask me again when the 2nd Gen comes out. One problem is I wouldn't be able to carry it constantly like the iPod. First, it doesn't fit in my purse. Second I doubt I could legally bring it into work with me like I can with the iPod. (It is a bit too much like a computer and not enough like a phone or an MP3 player.) I'd lean towards the model with the largest hard drive, but no 3G service. I do like the display specs - it would be wo...

I finally canceled my free Classmates.com membership. They are no longer relevant now that we have facebook, and their most recent privacy policy update was concerning to me. I also sent in my cancellation notice for my L.A. Fitness gym membership. A new fitness center has opened up at work. It is free, convenient, and I won't fear for my personal safety. (That comment is about the parking lot at our specific L.A. Fitness, not meant to be a joke about the unfortunate murders in a different state.) I un-joined facebook and Ravelry groups I don't care about much, unsubscribed from marketing email lists, (except for the ones that send good coupons), lightened up my Google Reader subscription list, cleaned out my iPod apps, and cleared some of the mail off the dining room table. It feels nice, like I'm a little lighter.