Cafe Bucky

Oh boy - just got my prescription Ray-Bans. Ready to roll across 4800+ miles in the next few weeks. Even if every single mile hits me with glare, I’m polarized, baby.

I’ve always wanted to drive across the country. It’s funny that I have covered a proportionally larger swath of German road than the States.

But that’s about to change. I’ll soon be making stops in:

• Ashland, OR
• Portland, OR
• NYC (nope, have never pushed a gas pedal there)
• Pittsburgh
• Cleveland
• Chicago
• Des Moines, IA
• Ames, IA
• Omaha, NE
• Lincoln, NE
• Denver, CO
• Santa Fe, NM
• Sedona, AZ
• Flagstaff, AZ
• Grand Canyon
• Las Vegas
• Barstow, CA
• Bakersfield, CA

Hmm, I’ve been to ~5 of those places before, so this ought to be an adventure! Anyhoo … my posts are bound to go into travelogue territory. I may just switch to audio for a while, now that I have an iTalk. If anyone has some “see this” suggestions, let me know.

I did mention in Rev ‘Em Up and Shoot ‘Em that I was getting back to the track this year to do some race photography. Sophia and I made it to the ALMS race at Sears Point, and I was able to shake off a little rust. Some photos have been tossed up on Flickr. They’re just screen grabs of what I see in PhotoShop / Bridge. There’s a lot more to go through, but that will have to get in line behind my Portland, NYC, and Cross-Country trips …

I’m so out of practice! I might just hit the Portland ALMS race to sharpen up some.

Not only was I a little rusty at the race, but I wasn’t set up as well as I would have liked. There’s some things that I have managed to figure out about zoom blurs:

• Filters - I was using an 80-400 zoom, but without a filter. I should use a polarizing filter, in part to cut an f-stop off of the exposure. That’ll give me a little more leeway with shutter speed (I want slower)
• Monopod - get back to using that … a twist zoom isn’t as nice as a push-pull. Without a monopod, the twist gives a sideways motion to the photo (in addition to the zoom blur) that I don’t always want.
• Pan and Zoom - There are steady zoom blurs, and then there are the ones where I am zooming and panning at the same time. It makes a difference as to whether I should zoom in, or out, over the course of the exposure. I gotta think about what result I want

There’s a whole lot more I can say about zoom blurs. I will note that my blurs are all in-camera - I don’t use that aspect of PhotoShop. It’s a fun challenge to balance all of the variables (ISO speed, lens, amount of zoom, shutter speed, panning, timing) with moving cars. Not to mention the high contrast environment of asphalt versus bright sky. I’m sure it plays havoc with the exposure meter (”what the heck is he doing!?”).

Updated July 28th, swapping out Columbus for Cleveland …

Aside from OS updates, Mac mini and TiVO hacks, and studying LAMP + AJAX stuff in preparation for OSCON 2005, I’ve had the task of figuring out the route of a cross country drive.

I’ve never driven across America. The move out of NYC gives us a good opportunity, as we’ll have some things to bring back that we don’t want to ship, and it’s a one-way trip. We’ll set off August 11th, and take roughly 12 days. Oh, and by the way, yes, my house is pretty well watched, and booby-trapped …

The preliminary route is like a stone skipping over the urban archipelago. Susan and I are looking at it as a reconnaissance for future trips with more depth.

Aug 11 - NYC -> Pittsburgh (366 miles)
We’ll never leave New York. We’re just saying “bye” for the moment. I’m sure there will be more chapters.

Aug 12 - Pittsburgh -> Columbus, OH (186 miles) — Pittsburgh -> Cleveland, OH (139 miles)
Before setting off, we’ll visit The Andy Warhol Museum

Aug 13 - Columbus, OH -> Chicago, IL (354 miles) —
Cleveland, OH -> Chicago, IL (343 miles)
Stop in Indianapolis.

Aug 14 - Chicago, IL -> Ames, IA (356 miles)
Ames, Iowa, you say? We know someone that was born there, and so we’ll shift (all the more) into documentary mode. Check out beautiful Iowa State University.

Aug 15 - Ames, IA -> Lincoln, NE (221 miles)
This day is a sort of calm before the storm of driving the long stretch to Denver. We’ll stop in Des Moines and Omaha.

Aug 16 - Lincoln, NE -> Denver, CO (488 miles)
Lots of miles. Lots of Nebraska. I won’t drive through Kansas if I can help it.

Aug 17 - Camp out with folks in Denver. Chill out after so much driving.

Aug 18 - Denver, CO -> Santa Fe, NM (391 miles)

Aug 19 - Santa Fe, NM -> Sedona, AZ (410 miles)
Squeeze in desert photography. Try to stay cool.

Aug 20 - Sedona, AZ -> Las Vegas (277 miles)
Quick visit to Grand Canyon. Keep the miles down today. End up in Vegas.

Aug 21 - Las Vegas, NV -> Bakersfield (290 miles)
Desert, Desert, and more Desert. Stay with folks.

Aug 22 or 23 - Bakersfield -> Petaluma (318 miles)
Home stretch. Get Sophia home in time for first day of school on the 24th :-)

A whirlwind, ain’t it!? It would be nice to have three weeks or so to do this. Hopefully this will be well paced.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am holding off on any major Mac purchases until the Intel versions come out. We just got a Mac mini for my daughter though … and that lead to slight mods, which are always fun.

When I went to order, my idea was: don’t pay California sales tax, get 1gb RAM, and get the faster processor with airport + bluetooth. If you start shopping around, you’ll notice that retailers generally have airport + bluetooth, but with 512mb RAM, or they have everything with a SuperDrive, and it’s more expensive, and so on. Ordering direct from Apple was out - lots of sales tax!

So I ordered a Mac mini with 256mb RAM, and an airport + bluetooth kit which would usually be sold to some species of Authorized Hardware Tech. I went to Crucial.com for a 1gb RAM chip. No sales tax. Parts to put together.

I won’t post photos of the surgery here. It’s pretty easy to track down various bits of Mac mini disassembly. The basic idea is to look at the pretty pictures that others have posted, have tools handy (2 putty knives and a very small philips), a clean surface (terry bath towel), and lots of patience.

Hints on Mac mini modding:

• Try not to. Oh? You want to save some money and you like 3 dimensional puzzles? Ok, that’s different. I will warn that it’s a bit non-trivial, and it should NOT be the first computer you’ve ever opened up.
• Disclaimer: You can do some serious damage to your mini, and / or get shocked (seriously). This is a two beer job, but don’t drink both beforehand!
• Start first beer.
• The bit about opening the case with a putty knife … I say: use two, and sharpen them first (scrape on concrete to get a nice edge, and then definitely clean off / dry the blade) Wedge them in slightly on either side before pulling back, otherwise you’ll have one side popped open, and no seam to work with on the other …
• For the airport + bluetooth card, you will need to remove the drives and fan unit. That uses three screws. Be careful to unfasten the tape to the power wire, so that you can pull the assembly off cleanly. Study the pictures (MacWorld) and (JohnWaller.org) before plunging in.
• Start second beer.
• Once you have the drive unit off, might as well swap the RAM chip. Don’t wait till later, when an antenna will be blocking the path.
• The kit comes with two tiny screws. You’ll use them to fasten the airport + bluetooth daughtercard (be sure that card is seated properly - do not spill beer onto motherboard). Take your time.
• Figure out how you will route the two antenna cables. Look at the pictures to see how they end up. Be gentle with rotating the cables where they connect to the daughtercard.
• When repositioning the drive assembly and tightening its screws, take care not to pinch off the antennas or other cables.
• When putting the case back on the mini, be careful with alignment, and don’t force the metal tabs on top of the ports. It all fits, but it’s not a brute force deal.
• Finish beer, boot, check for 1gb ram, airport, and bluetooth!

This is a nerdy take on part of my “upgrading the PowerBook OS” process. I really can write exciting things about cliff diving, and skateboard jumping the Great Wall of China, and anecdotes about High Performance Driving Schools. First things first …

One project in my “Reset” month has been to redo my PowerBook from scratch to Tiger (10.4.2). It’s a small detour from the study of things LAMPish and AJAXian, but I consider it all part of the idea of resetting (and I have a little time to do it the way I want). An upgrade done right feels a little like getting a new machine. The “booting Tiger off the external drive” deal doesn’t show proper commitment :-)

Part of the process (that I let run overnight) is making good backups of my Panther system. I highly recommend Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner. I made one backup as a disk image (I have a cool WiebeTech ComboDock that lets me access IDE drives through Firewire), and another as a bootable drive on an external LaCie. So far, so happy.

Since I have an old iMac DV hanging around, I boot my old Panther system off the LaCie. It’s just like my PowerBook, but slower and smaller (1024×768). This takes the pressure off of having to copy everything back to my “new” PowerBook at once.

So all of that brings me to the point where I have a fresh PowerBook, an iMac that runs my “old setup”, and a terabyte of external FireWire drives that have 100’s of thousands of files.

The current step is figuring out what gets to live on the PowerBook, as in: “what gets to live on the internal drive?”. Certainly a full-on dev environment, and a representative swath of my photography, some (but not all) email, and so on. I call this the “filtering” step. What’s on the drive when I am out of the house and not necessarily on a speedy network? (another project is getting the Firewire drives on a box that I can get to from the outside world, oy!)

The conjoined twin of filtering is “organization”. I will certainly use Spotlight, and will tag some key files, but the age-old problem of “where to put things” remains. Is an artlicle about Flash Remoting to PHP something that goes in Tech/Dev/Lang/PHP? or Flash? How many links/aliases do I feel like making this time around?

The thing that occurs to me about organizing files and folders/directories, now that I’ve been doing it for about 25 years, is that it is all consistent with your state of mind At The Time Of Organization. The best you can hope for is to get everything slotted away in one flurry, before you change your mind as to “what goes where”. When we start getting inconsistent is when we start filing things away at different times, in a different mood, particularly with things that are outside the organizational scheme we already have (i.e. we suddenly need to make a new branch in our directory tree, and there are 4 equally great places to put it).

So today’s project is getting the PowerBook “caught up”, so that Tiger becomes my main boot. With enough focus coffee, I think I can get through it. I think we’re getting to the point where strict folder hierarchies are no longer so important (on a personal document scale), and where tagging becomes ever more important. Good thing, that!

I’m pretty happy to be back home in California. The echoes of NYC car alarms and other stimuli fade away. I’ll be back there in mid-August for a few days, and then comes the Long Drive West across the Country!

There’s a lot I can say about the pros and cons of NYC and Petaluma. If I were really hip, I could just podcast it in 5 minutes. To write it down has taken longer, and I’m not happy with the result.

The gist of it is that I love both places, but don’t want to spend 12 months a year in either.

A big thing I have learned from the bi-coastal experiment is a new-found appreciation for California, and for Petaluma in particular. No place is utopia, but Petaluma is undergoing a pretty significant change for the better these days. It’s a great place to be based.

It’s been a bittersweet day for London, with the morning after glow of winning the 2012 Olympics, and then this … How cowardly to bomb innocent commuters! My heart goes out to the people in London and the UK.

My own personal experience with Londoners tells me that this will not deter their daily routines. These are the descendents of those who flipped the bird at Hitler’s air raids of 1940. They will prove to be all the more united, in a strange mixture of grief and pride from the big events of the last two days. Woe be to those who would underestimate the “we’re all in this together” spirit of the Brits.

Yes, of course I’m writing a bit on the whole “back from NYC” experience. It’s a lot to meander through.

In the meantime, hope everyone had a great weekend! Happy Fourth of July.