Thanksgiving 2007

Thanksgiving '07

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We spent Thanksgiving at Carol's brother Bob's house in north Seattle with his family and Carol's nieces and nephews and other family. 17 people altogether. The feast was delicious and we all had a great time. Audrey and Charlotte ran and ran and ran with their cousins and came home exhausted. They both slept all night and "late" the following morning (until 7:15!). Carol and I went to bed at 9:30 and had our best night's sleep in a long time. We failed to get up at midnight to hit the outlet malls.

Charlotte decided a few weeks ago to give talking a serious try. All of a sudden she has a lot of words. The first color she learned was brown, which she says as "brr". Then she learned yellow ("lellow"). Anything that isn't brown is "lellow". She regularly says "uh oh" now. Carol is "maaa" and as of this week I am "la la" very consistently. Charlotte also clearly says "baby" and "happy". Carol heard her say "puppy" once but she hasn't repeated that. This morning Charlotte was sitting on my lap looking at family photos and she started saying "Audrey" clearly and repeatedly.

Audrey's favorite thing to do with me is play chase. We often play for a long time when I get home from work. Charlotte plays sometimes, too. Lately Audrey prefers a variation where once I catch her I wrap her up completely in a blanket and squeeze her, or reach in and tickle her. She could play this game for hours. Sometimes I pick her up in the blanket like a sack of potatoes and carry her somewhere else in the house. "Where am I now?," she'll ask from inside. When she's watching TV she loves to be all buried in a blanket nest so she just has a little opening to look through.

Audrey is also trying to learn letters and numbers. She's been singing the alphabet song. She can't quite get it right yet, but if we sing along with her she can make her way through it. And she's starting to do some reasoning with numbers. This morning at breakfast she said, "We have three girls and one boy." I started asking her questions like, "If your cousin Kristen came over, how many girls would we have?" Audrey was able to reason it out every time.

Halloween '07

Halloween '07

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It's been two weeks of Halloween around our house. That's how long ago Grandma and Grandpa took the girls shopping for costumes. The girls have worn their costumes almost daily ever since. They each chose their own. Audrey had been saying for weeks that she wanted to be Spiderman for Halloween. Charlotte couldn't communicate her desires, but we could have guessed it would be dog-related. Dogs are Charlotte's favorite thing. When they entered the toy store, Charlotte made a bee line for the dog costume and wouldn't even consider anything else.

On Halloween night Carol and I took turns taking the girls Trick or Treating while the other stayed home to answer the door. It was a little cool out, but not too bad. Carol took the first shift with the girls and they did both sides of the street on our block. When they came home for the handoff, Charlotte chose to stay home with Carol and Audrey and I headed out for Round 2.

Audrey was a very polite Trick or Treater. Several houses tried to get her to take several pieces of candy, but she'd often say, "No thank you, I already got one piece." We only visited about 5 or 6 houses before Audrey told me she was finished and wanted to go home. On the way home she told me that she wanted one piece of candy before she went to bed, and one piece of candy every day until it was gone. I told her that sounded like a very sensible plan. I think someone had been influencing her in the days before Halloween. Amazingly, Audrey has almost stuck to that plan. She is definitely not gorging on candy, even though she knows it is available. Charlotte, too.

We've had a couple of fairly lazy weekends. Carol's been working on her latest furniture project. I've been futzing with the pickup truck. This weekend I got a radio installed in it (it had none) and tried to fix the horn, which doesn't work (I tried a bunch of solutions, but there is a short somewhere in the wiring harness and all my attempts to outsmart it just blew fuses). Other than that we were unusually lazy. Nice for a change.

The midterm for my Biostatistics class was two weeks ago. I was feeling disheartened after the test (open book tests are the worst!), but grades came out this week and I scored well above average so I'm feeling more motivated again. I'm only taking the course for my own edification - there's not really anything riding on it - but an expectation of high grades was programmed into me very strongly as a child.

Since having kids I've lamented that I never "read" anymore. I realized this week that I still read just as much, I just don't read books. I read tons of material on the web, including news and whatever historical or technical topics grab my interest during the week. For example, I'm reading "A Tale of Two Cities" a little bit at a time from dailylit.com. That led me to do a few hours of reading online about the French Revolution. I'm also a throwback who reads the local newspaper cover to cover every day. I've done that all my life. Anyway, I was amused to have the sudden realization that my reading hasn't stopped, it's just changed shape.

Someone pointed me to dailylit.com a couple of months ago. "A Tale of Two Cities" was the thing that caught my eye the most, and made me wonder how I got all the way through four years of high school honors English classes and college without every reading a Dickens novel‽ I'm really enjoying it. I never knew Dickens was such a smart-ass. Right up my alley.

Bringing Vinyl Albums Into the 21st Century

When I was in my twenties and financially irresponsible, my favorite form of retail therapy (and debt accumulation) was buying records. I built up a collection of more then 500 vinyl albums. Most of them were acquired during the three years or so that I was a DJ at community radio station KCMU; they reflect my tastes at the time which were heavily influenced by the eclectic nature of the station.

The last time I had my album collection available for use was when I lived in Boston before moving back to Seattle in 1997. Since then they have been in boxes in storage. A few years ago my storage locker was burglarized and my turntable was stolen, so I didn't even have a way to play albums any more. But I would still occasionally think about favorite music that was languishing in those boxes. Once I moved everything from the storage locker to the attic in my new garage, I also started worrying about all that weight up there.

In May, I bought a USB turntable at Costco and started the project of ripping albums to MP3s. Carol's father is interested in doing the same thing so we split the cost.

I ripped a few LPs in June but then got busy with school and the garage and stopped for a couple of months. At the beginning of September I started again and got pretty serious about it. I just finished this week.

A lot of the music I was buying in the 80s was pretty experimental. Much of it is outright angry. Many albums I would just bypass without even listening to. Others were borderline and I'd drop the needle on a few tracks to decide if I wanted to invest the time to convert them. Much of it is interesting, but I know I'll never listen to it again. Other albums had historical interest (some local New Wave bands, for example) but I knew I'd never want to listen to those again either. I think in the end I ripped about 1/3 of the albums I own.

I also came across many albums I know I never owned - I must have inherited them from a previous relationship. Most were junk (and in poor condition), but there were a few gems. Some Sergio Mendes from the 60s, as well as a couple of "Disneyland" label albums that are stories: "Snow White", "Peter and the Wolf", etc. from 1960. The latter are humorous because they tell the whole story on one side of an LP - limited to about 15 minutes - by speeding up the music and speaking very quickly.

I figured I'd write about my experience so that should you tackle such a project you'll know what you're getting into.

First of all, if you have a sizable collection your project is going to last weeks or months. I recommend that you set up a dedicated "station". You need room for the turntable, a staging area for the records, and a place for the computer within reach of the USB cable from the turntable.

Once you start ripping it's a multi-stage process:

1. Put on a record.
2. Fire up the ripping software (I use Audacity, an open source audio tool that came packaged with the turntable)
3. Start the record. Set a kitchen timer for 18-20 minutes.
4. When the timer goes off go check on the record and wait a few minutes if it isn't done yet. "Pause" the software, flip the record and start side 2, un-pause software. Set the timer again.
5. Timer goes off for side 2, "stop" the software. At this point you have the entire album as one big waveform in memory. You can save the raw data to a file, but I never did.
6. Using the software, pan and zoom around in the waveform to find song boundaries. This is easy for most "song" albums (the song breaks are readily visible in the waveform) and harder for less commercial works that have sounds between "songs" or pieces that blend together. You also probably want to clip out several seconds of silence at the end of every song.
7. Make markers at the song boundaries and type in song names at the markers. Audacity's UI for this is fairly crappy - double check before hitting return on each title. Depending on the album, you need a place to put the album cover and or the record itself to read the song titles from during this process.
8. Tell Audacity to store songs as MP3s. Enter artist and album title and "go". It takes about 5-10 minutes to write out the MP3 files. I made a file hierarchy in c:\<artist>\<album>. I knew I'd eventually import it all into iTunes so the structure didn't really matter, but I'm anal that way.
9. (optional) I edit the filenames that Audacity creates and put the track number as a prefix (e.g. "01-<first song title>.mp3") so I get file ordering that mirrors song order on the album.
10. Go to step 1.

Overall it takes about an hour per single album. I worked it into other stuff I was doing. For example, I can rip an album in the morning: start side 1 as soon as I get up and then go make breakfast for the girls. Turn the record over and then make breakfast for myself. Then maybe do the editing and title entry and saving (or leave it until evening). In the evening I can do several albums while doing other things like homework and dinner.

Note that Audacity has a feature to find "quiet" spots between songs automatically, but I never tried it. I liked doing it myself so I could put cut out as much blank space as possible and put the song start points exactly where I wanted them. This step is best accomplished using headphones. Audacity can also attempt to remove pops and other vinyl noises, but personally I find them charming so I didn't bother.

Once I was done I imported the ripped files into iTunes. Audacity sets the ID3 tags pretty well, but it has a weird list of genres so you have to fix some of those in iTunes. I also like to set the y part of "track x of y", and the compilation flag if appropriate. Then adding album art is a whole different task since you have to do it manually for LPs. iTunes does it by Gracenote signature - i.e. number of tracks and length as they are on the CD; your ripped tracks are never going to have the same time signature so iTunes rarely finds album art automatically. I find the album art somewhere (amazon, usually, or by Google image search) and drag it to iTunes. An image size between 200x200 and 300x300 works pretty well without wasting disk space.

I also add "from vinyl" to the comments for every ripped song. I have a smart playlist called "Vinyl" that automatically includes everything I've ripped.

I ended up ripping 173 albums (some were double or triple LPs) totaling 1,713 songs and 8.71 GB.

It was a long process but overall fairly painless. It's great having all that music available again in a format as convenient as iTunes. I rediscovered a lot of wonderful music along the way.

Spray Painting

Spray Painting

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Last week we got Carol set up with a compressor and spray gun. She has a project due for a charity auction next week, so it was time to get cracking.

I did a fair bit of research to figure out what to get. I also talked to our friend Matt who has an amazing woodworking shop in his garage (3-car garage with room for 0 cars). There is a "new" spray gun technology called HVLP (high volume, low pressure) that produces far less overspray and is therefore more efficient with paint and also less likely to coat the whole workspace in paint mist. But most HVLP guns require a very high capacity (i.e. expensive) compressor.

I finally figured out that there is a special type of HVLP gun called a "conversion gun" that "converts" a normal compressor for its use. A pretty strange terminology since you don't do anything to the compressor. We bought a Wagner HVLP conversion gun and a "normal" compressor. I chose the Makita MAC2400 because it runs at lower RPM than other models so it's quieter and lasts longer. The cooler temperature also means less condensation in the compressed air. And I like the compact shape because it takes up less room in the garage.

When I was trying to get everything set up I went to Fittings Inc. to get air hoses and the fittings I need to plumb for air from the garage to the studio (so Carol won't have to listen to the compressor while working). I thought air fittings were universal, but no. There are apparently 22 different styles of male fittings! It took two trips, but I got there. Fortunately another customer who was waiting there for his order gave me some good advice - use "universal" female fittings everywhere and then it doesn't matter what type of male fitting you use.

For now we've been painting in the garage. The gun is indeed very efficient with paint. It has a 1-quart canister that we would fill halfway. Putting a coat on the entire table and chair set only used half of that. And there is very little overspray.

The past two nights Carol has been working in her studio painting the details on the table and chairs. I wanted to take a photo of her working there but the camera battery is dead. Next time. She's loving the space. It's heated, has good lighting, and I bought Carol an iPod speaker system for her birthday so she has music to work by.

I'll of course post photos of the table and chair project when it's complete.

Honorarium for Scottie

Scottie Honorarium 10/27/07

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I started road cycling as a serious hobby in 1998. I'd been a pretty serious mountain biker throughout the 90s, but I kept getting injured. In the summer of 1998 I moved to an apartment in downtown Seattle. That made mountain biking less accessible as well as hazardous. So I bought a road bike. I think I rode my mountain bike about twice after that. I immediately liked the speed and smoothness and the more sustained workout one gets from road biking.

I rode mostly solo for several years. In 2001 or so I decided to try some group rides and went on a few with the Cascade Bicycle Club. I love the club and am a member, but I found their organized rides annoying - the rides I went on stopped way too often to regroup - negating the aforementioned sustained workout benefit. But on one aborted ride I met Greg Scott and we made up our own ride. We became instant riding buddies and rode together almost every weekend and some weeknights for a couple of years.

After a while, Greg asked if I wanted to try a Saturday ride he knew about that left from the Eastgate area of Bellevue. We joined in that day and I've been riding with the Saturday group semi-regularly ever since.

The Saturday ride is organized by a fine gentleman named Scott Sensenbrenner. Scott sends out an email in the middle of every week reminding people of the ride and suggesting the start time (earlier in summer, later in winter). The ride goes almost every Saturday year round. The only reason it's usually canceled in advance is a forecast for snow or ice. Scott's been doing this for something like 20 years.

Scott's the friendliest guy you could hope to meet. We often pick up strangers on the ride. Scott gets their email and they become a permanent part of the list. Everybody feels welcome. The group has a wide range of riders, from those who are new to cycling to current and former racers. Every year we talk about getting club jerseys. But the group is so informal that we can't even agree on a name, much less a jersey design.

I've made many good cycling friends from the Saturday ride. It's with people from this ride that I ride STP and the MS Bike Tour and all the other local annual rides. Many of my best days on the bike have been with this group. In the summer when everybody's in their best shape we have some fantastic paceline riding.

A few weeks ago, fellow member Dutch sent out an email organizing a collection. He wanted to give Scott a token of our appreciation for making this ride happen every week for so long, and being responsible for so much enjoyment by so many people. Dutch got a pretty good response. When he went to buy the gift certificate at VeloceVelo in Issaquah, they knew Scott and kicked in some more. Then Dutch waited for a week when he knew turnout would be high. This week he announced that today was the day.

Indeed about 20-25 people showed up on a cold, foggy morning to witness the gifting and show their appreciation to Scott. The "ceremony" such as it was contained the usual amount of sarcasm and ribbing. But it was clear that we all feel gratitude toward Scott.

Then we headed off for a 40 mile ride to Issaquah, Maple Valley and Renton. Fortunately it warmed up a bit after the first 10 miles or so and our fingers came back to life.

Thanks, Scott! I know you don't think you do much, but your welcoming spirit and friendliness are the glue that holds this whole thing together.