Author Archives: Ted

Christmas Music

by

I’ve always liked Christmas music. One of the things I liked about Christmas Eve was how the radio stations would switch over to non-stop Christmas music for 24 hours. (Starting in October, like some stores and stations do now is a bit much). I bought my first iPod in late fall, and didn’t start loading it up until mid-November of that year — right at the start of the holiday season, which means I have a ton of Christmas music on my iPhone now — so much, that I had to create a Smart Playlist called “Not Christmas” for the other eleven months of the the year. Continue reading →

New Mac

by

I picked up a new MacBook Pro last night. The old one, an Early 2011 Macbook Pro started crashing on me earlier this week, and by the end of the week, wouldn’t start at all. Apparently, there’s a lot of that going around. In my case, it started pretty suddenly – I was editing a scan in Photoshop, when suddenly the screen scrambled, and then the system crashed. I rebooted, verified the disk with Disk Utility and went to bed. I was just drifting off  when the computer restarted itself, by itself. Not good. Over the next few days, I saw the start up screen shifted over by a third, and another time, I saw vertical bars. By the time Thursday night rolled around, I couldn’t get past the gray startup screen, and had seen a Blue Screen of Death a couple of times. In hindsight, the fact that I couldn’t preview my TIFF scans could have been a clue too, though I put it down to an incompatibility with Mavericks.

Anyrate, after reading up about the situation, it seems like the cure would have been a motherboard replacement; this for a computer which was nearly four years old, and had been running slowly anyway. I would not have chosen right now to replace the computer– Christmas is coming up and I just spent about $1000 replacing my front brakes, but I didn’t see much choice, so I started looking at the Apple Online store, trying to choose between my options. Continue reading →

Temporal Anomalies

by

I just finished retouching a scan of one of Dad’s slides from 1958. In the picture, Grandma is watching my cousin Bill, as a baby, by her living room table.

Bill and Grandma

Bill and Grandma

I was zoomed in at 100%, retouching away the dust spots and mold, moving over the picture millimeter by millimeter.

Inset of his hand

Inset of his hand

As I got to the section by his hand, I noticed he had his hand on a spent flashbulb.

If you saw one, would you even know what it was?

Back then, if you wanted to do interior photography of people, you used a flash gun with expendable glass bulbs filled with, I think, magnesium wire and oxygen that burned instantly to produce one pop of light. Dad must have used it for one of the previous pictures, set it down on the table, and the baby picked it up, as babies are wont to do.

One-shot flashbulbs were replaced with flashcubes when I was a teenager, soon to be replaced with electronic flash units, good for thousands of pictures, replacing calculations of guide numbers and distance and f/stops with automatic exposure.

It got me thinking—how much of our current everyday technology will be obsolete and unrecognizable in a few decades?

New Kayak

by

I first went kayaking in 2004, on a rainy day in Bonaire, on a guided trip through the mangroves of Lac Bay (which, according to our guide, was not a swamp. Despite appearances).

I started paddling the Charles around 2007, through Charles River Canoe and Kayak. I’d been using their winter business, the Weston Ski Track, and decided to give kayaking on the Charles a try. I liked it, especially in the Newton/Auburndale region, and have been a season pass holder for the past couple of years, and have been thinking about getting my own for a couple of years, but have been holding off due to the uncertainty at work.

Unfortunately, Charles River Canoe and Kayak lost the concession to the Newton Boathouse in 2013, and have been operating the boathouse for the new concessionaire, Boating In Boston. Apparently, that relationship is ending, and they’re closing the paddling store with a going out of business sale*, with equipment 30 – 50% off. I got a boat, life jacket, paddle, and some foam blocks and straps to get the boat home for around $1,200, saving $500.

The boat I got is a Wilderness Systems Tsunami 145. Most of my paddling has been, and probably will be on the Charles, but I wanted something I can take out on the ocean, or at least Cape Cod Bay in the future. I was a little hesitant–I’d had a very unpleasant experience with a Tsunami 140 on one of the shuttled river trips, but the 145 is a designed for paddlers who are (ahem) slightly larger. I tried it out a couple of times, and found it to be comfortable.

I’ve had the boat for two weeks now, but only really got to take it out yesterday. I was busy last Saturday, and it took me a good chunk of of last Sunday getting the roof rack set up – don’t get me started on multilingual instruction sheets that are all diagrams with little explanatory text, so I only had enough time to whet my appetite for it. Yesterday, I took it for a nice long paddle through the Charles in Dedham.

Due to the drought, the water levels are noticeably low. I put in at the boat launch off Great Plain Avenue, and the river bank at the water’s edge is actually river bottom, which I found out the hard way when I sank into the mud up to my knees, and got stuck. My flip flops are now stuck there until some future archeologist finds them. I paddled upstream to the put in at Charles River Park, intending to go further, but there wasn’t enough water. So I turned around, and continued back downstream until I got to Motley Pond, where I turned around.

The boat is comfortable –my two concerns had been a tight cockpit, and back support. The cockpit is small, but not too tight. I was able to adjust the seat back so I was able to sit up comfortably, and used the leg raisers to bring my legs up to the roll pads. The boat has a rudder, but the water was shallow enough in several places that I had to flip it up. The boat tracks well even with the rudder up, but obviously steers better with the rudder down.

The boat definitely is more “tippy” than a recreational kayak. I got so that I was comfortable taking my Nikon D80 on the rental kayaks I was using, which was great since it allows for longer lenses and a polarizer. I think that for a while anyway, I’ll be back to my Canon G12 inside the waterproof housing – just in case.

About the only thing I don’t like so far is the color – I bought it on clearance, and the “dusk” color was the only one available. It’s really ugly, with a base color of a kind of tomato orange with oversprayed areas of gray. Having my own boat vs. renting definitely has tradeoffs: I had to pick up a roof rack, it takes time to get it up there and snugged down, and it takes up a lot of space in the garage. On the other hand, I’m no longer limited to rental locations, and I’m really looking forward to exploring the waterways around me.

*After a couple of weeks the message changed, and the sale was now billed as a “moving” sale. They’ve found a new location for the store – 132 Charles Street in Newton.↩

Amazing Grace

Image

One of the things I liked best about my old job was being close enough to the East Bay Bike Path to be able to go for a ride after work. I just love going for a ride along the water around sunset

I decided to go back for a ride this evening. The days are short enough now, and night falls quickly enough now, that I had to time things carefully. Tarry too long at the far end of the path, and it’s fully night by the time Pomham Rocks Light comes into view.

Tonight, I timed it just right. The sun was still pretty high when I paused by the water in Warren, but the sun had set and the clouds had turned pink by the time the lighthouse came into view. And then, Judy Collins’ Amazing Grace came on the iPhone, and it was perfect.

IMG_0367.JPG

Growing up, during our vacations at the Cape my parents liked to go for rides after supper, usually winding up at a beach for sunset. The radio station my dad liked had to sign off at sunset, and often signed off with Amazing Grace. Hearing it again at sunset brought back a bunch of memories.

Five Weeks In

by

I’m now about five weeks into my new job, working as a front end developer at a startup in Newton called appScatter. So far, I’m liking it a lot.

I really like working with the guys I’m working with. Rami is warm and friendly, knowledgeable, and laughs easily. Mike is smart and enthusiastic and very positive; his style is to encourage rather than enforce. Mark is even newer than I am, and I’m still getting to know him, but he dove right; he’s enthusiastic and inquisitive.

Unlike my old job, this position is strictly front end; I’m building a single page app using AngularJS, and it’s been quite an adjustment. I knew nothing of Angular before; I spent part of the week before I started boning up, and felt I understood it at a conceptual level, but of course, practice was another matter. Once I actually started digging into it, I was fighting syntax the whole way. Every stupid little thing — and it was always the little things; the big things were relatively easy — seemed to take forever. I wasn’t used to the Angular style of passing functions around in the arguments of functions; it didn’t help that I was moving from a fairly plain text editor (Homesite) to Sublime, which autocompletes quotes and parentheses and brackets, and doesn’t select text quite the way I was used to. So I was ending up with extra or missing quotes and brackets and parentheses, and was in JavaScript Hell for a few weeks. It didn’t help that I’d given wildly optimistic estimates for my tasks, based on how I would have done them the old way.  I feel like I’m gaining on it now, and the last few pieces I’ve added have come along a lot more easily. I’m spending more of my time on the fun little details of smoothing out the user experience, and less on the basics. I’ll have a lot more to say about Angular, I’m sure.

The other adjustment I’ve had to make is not having access to the server or the database to help myself on the client side. In ColdFusion, the basic generation of the page is done on the server, usually by cfoutputting a query, often one I wrote myself. Now, I’m making web service calls, getting the data, placing the data in Angular’s model layer, and letting it handle the display.

The commute is shorter than the commute to Rhode Island, by about 20 – 40 minutes each way. About the only thing I miss are the people and my sunset rides along the East Bay Bike path.