Viewing Category: Geeky
Charged up from our on-site experience at the San Jose Tech Innovation Museum, I had this funny idea about a museum that would house everything that I thought was cool. I realized that a lot of the things I like have some kind of transformative power, and that a lot of these artifacts were actually devices that were designed to translate from one kind of energy or data to another more convenient form. The idea that you can convert one thing to another is a foundation of practical engineering, and perceptually being able to switch your brain into a more convenient plane of reference is a skill that I've been interested in cultivating since the 10th grade.
Examples of Transformation Exhibits
- Devices that convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, and vice versa!
- Glassblowing: From sand to shaped glass!
- Mathematical conversion of coordinate spaces to imaginary spaces: Euler spaces come to mind...Ugh.
- Extreme Makeovers and Fashion: It's amazing what you can do with a little bit of applied shadow!
- Empire Building: The process of integrating cultures is difficult and devious task.
- Landscaping, Feng Shui, Interior Decorating: Being able to transform the flow of a physical space is pretty amazing
- Baking Bread: The sheer number of variables involved in creating a great loaf frankly astonishes me. And who wouldn't want to go to a museum that smelled like freshly baking bread?
Examples of Translation Exhibits
- Language Concepts, Linguistics, and Psychology of Communication: There are certain common concepts that most languages share. I'd like to know what they are.
- Codemaking and Codebreaking: Especially physical devices used for this. They're just cool.
- Signal Reproduction: From sound to video, the ability to convert physical phenomena into digital form, and then store it in another physical-based media, is pretty amazing.
- The World of Signals: Everything in Electrical Engineering is a signal, and every signal is arbitrary. If I'd known that when I started engineering school, I might have been good at it.
- Time and Money: The idea that time = money dates back to Benjamin Franklin. Is it true? How do you measure it?
I've decided to call this new institution The Museum of Transformation and Translation (aka THE MOTT). Since creating my own museum and collecting all the artifacts that I'd like to have in it will be prohibitively expensive, I decided to create a Wiki version of it in the Public Wiki area. And because I'm an aging nerd, I am building it to resemble an old-school text adventure. I guess it's more accurate to say that it's a hypertext fiction approach I'm taking, but never mind that.
Right now it's just a placeholder, but if anyone would like to come by and build an exhibit by describing an interesting collection of transformation/translation related concepts or artifacts, come on down!
Last Christmas, a good friend of mine surprised me an indoor electric grill. I was surprised in that Why, I never considered getting one of these way, where you're actually not sure what you're going to do with the gift. I like grilling outside and burning stuff, and the idea of doing this in my house didn't seem like quite a good idea because of two problems:
My kitchen doesn't have a good exhaust for high-heat cooking, not that my crap stove can generate the tens of thousands of BTUs I'd need to make a decent stir fry. The exhaust issue is related to the second problem:
My overly-sensitive smoke detectors, which readily go off if I even boil a lot of water. On second thought, the smoke detectors are probably just right, but it's still pretty annoying.
Because of this, I couldn't even conceive of grilling in the house. This course of action had, in the past, produced too much smoke and anxiety to be fun. So the gift, after an initial period of admiration, was left in the box unused and forgotten.
Fast forward a year, and I stumbled upon the grill again while cleaning my office. With the wisdom that advancing age must have bestowed upon me, I could immediately see a new application for the grill, and this was entirely due to the grill being in my office. You see, my office is vented to the outside. It's in the basement next to the storage room, which is also host to the litterbox for my cats. One of the first things I did after I started working down here with the cats was to figure out how to exhaust the fumes from their sandy deposits. Step 1 was to get a Littermaid Automatic Scooping Litterbox. Step 2, after the Littermaid failed to completely contain the smell, was to visit Home Depot to by an electric ventillation fan and an outside vent pipe that would fit in the tiny basement window. With one portable Ground Fault Interruptor outlet for the fan (just in case) and some duct tape to seal the vent pipe to the window, I now constantly vent the nastiness into the Great Outdoors where it belongs. There have been some additional side benefits too: visiting smokers can actually smoke in my office when it's cold out, and the smoke gets sucked outside pretty quickly.
Anyway, I reasoned, what works for cigarette smoke and litterbox odor probably would work for the gently smoking meats and sizzling steaks. So I cleared off the top of my drafting table and set up the grill:
The grill itself, a nice West Bend electric, is about the size of a large scanner, fitting approximately 4 burger patties at once with a flat area off to the side suitable for toasting buns. Unlike my mom's ancient electric skillet from the 70s, the electric grill unit is immersible in water (simplifying cleaning considerably) and has a separate drip pan that fits underneath it. The manual instructs you to fill the drip pan with water, which is a good trick to make cleanup easier (the grease doesn't harden and char). I have tried this in conventional ovens but it tends to create steam at the same time, creating a mushy gray yuckiness on the bottom of the meat. I was pleased to see that this grill didn't seem have that problem when I tested it just now with lightly-salted cross-cut beef short ribs marinated with a touch of low-sodium soy sauce. Overall cooking time was around 15 minutes per batch. While the smoky charcoal taste was lacking, the convenience of working and grilling in the same space was, dare I say, exhilarating. I can see a bit of grease that has escaped, so this isn't the sort of thing I would do every day, but it's just a bit crazy, which is what I needed today :-)
It's that time of year again for all good builders, geeks, and DIYers in the Manchester, New Hampshire area to gather for BarCamp Manchester (USA). It's coming up this very Saturday, July 28th, at the Amoskeag Business Incubator on S. Commercial St. It's the second barcamp ever, and I'm looking forward to remeeting the friends I made last year.
Cost? FREE! There will even be free food for lunch. You just need to register on the Wiki. I'm not sure what the limit is this year, probably about 120 or so, so make sure you get on the list. Last year's BarCamp was a lot of fun; it's amazing to see how a self-organizing conference bootstraps itself up into a full-fledged event.
This year I'll just be there as an attendee. Hopefully I'll remember everyone's names. :-)
There was a lot of talk about Twitter at SXSW this year. Though the concept seemed trivial and useless to me when I first heard of it, it does do one thing very well: closeness through shared environmental context. A big part of friendship is just hanging out and doing things together without direct communication. You can learn a lot about someone by just watching what they're doing; Twitter is a kind of virtual version of that.
So here's my Twitter profile...I'm going to give this a try for a couple weeks and see what happens. The theory is that I might feel like I'm part of a tribe.
I'm really surprised how quickly my local domain name servers picked up on the new server IP address...at least as far as regular web addresses goes. My email, though, is still going to the old server at FutureQuest, so I guess DNS MX records are a different sort of animal. I'm having a good time playing with this neat lookup tool to see what's going on. The mysteries of the Internet, made a little more clear :-)
It looks like a few comments got posted on the old server...I suppose I should have locked it down or disabled it entirely. I think I'll go do that.
