Marc's Public Blog

It was an interesting mix of Burning Man folks and contraptions, computer and other geeks, and generally creative folks. It was quite an interesting mix :)

Electric Miata

Big hand that could take metal and crush it

Remnants from Burning Man :)

All those objects are fakes that came from a 3D printer

Radio controlled battleship battle

Lifesize Mousetrap I saw at burning man a few years ago

Victorian keyboards

with matching laptop

wirewrap 4Mhz CPU

running a modified Minix

The beloved Diet Coke and Mentos guys did their show

And a repeat of the famous youtube video

Anyway, the low point of the show was when they had to address how effectively we're no better now with regards to science vs christians who still feel very threatened by evolution since it obviously contradicts Adam and Eve, than we were 200 years ago.

The part I didn't know was how the church leaders knowing that they can't get so called "creationism" (nice word that makes it sound like science) into classrooms if it's not science, to do anything they can to pass it for science even there is obviously not a whole lot to back it up.

The pretty despicable part was the very careful and misleading statements that they had fed to school children so that the children themselves went to the school board and asked stuff like

But the part that was more worrying was the flat out brainwashing they were doing in some churches where they were teaching all their churchgoers how to deny and push back evolution without giving any critical though into it of course. They also had cute evil little songs that were teaching the little drones how to respond. Scary, really.

And all this because some people can't admit that maybe some stories in the bible may just be stories, or they may have been simplified to something that people at the time could understand. Neither case should invalidate faith in general or the existence of a god. Even if you push evolution all the way back to the big bang (and while I'll defend evolution all day long, I'm the first to say that the big bang is really a lot more of a best guess theory and just the best we can come up with without current knowledge), there is still nothing wrong with whoever your favourite god is, to have created the big bang, or the universe.
But no, conservative Christians can't deal with such a happy medium because it contracticts the bible, and the bible must be right everywhere, or many feel their whole life would have been a lie, and they can't have that.
Now, the good news is that they are only a portion of Christians out there, many others don't have a problem taking the bible with a grain of salt with regards to taking its general message, but giving details like how long creation took (like a day being a metaphor for 1000 years or somesuch), some leeway. Whether you agree with that or not, at least they have a belief that makes sense, and don't have to feel threatened by scientific discoveries or theories.

It's too bad that for so many other people however, church and critical thinking are incompatible. I suppose many of the critical thinkers just become "spiritual, but not religious", which I can understand a lot more easily. Of course, I'm going to guess that some of the church leaders don't want that to happen since they can't quite control the "spiritual but not religious", nor get money from them, so it sure looks like they suppress critical thinking as much as possible to stay in control.

But eh, if they insist, I think it's only fair to also teach about the_tons, and how X_enu came with his spaceship and dropped all the bad souls in a volcano on earth, which in turn created us. I mean, that sounds like a perfectly good explanation. That's called scien_tology and there is even "science" in the name, so it must be true. I think it's only fair that this be taught in schools side by side with evolution.

Anyway, carry on, I just had to rant a bit. Thank you for indulging me :)

I finally found a fix for this, which somewhat justifies the extra money I spent for an ethernet connected receiver: I wrote an lirc configuration that effectively telnets to the denon to tell it to change volume when the hauppage receives a relevant remote code for that.

lircrc:

# Denon
# Mute
begin
prog = irexec
button = MUTE
repeat = 1
config = /var/local/scr/denonmute
end

begin
prog = irexec
button = Vol+
repeat = 1
config = /var/local/scr/denoncmd MVUP 3
end

begin
prog = irexec
button = Vol-
repeat = 1
config = /var/local/scr/denoncmd MVDOWN 3
end

denonmute:

#!/bin/bash

FILE=/var/run/denonmute

test -f $FILE || touch $FILE

# prevent bounces
[ $(( $(date "+%s") - $(stat -c "%Z" $FILE) )) -lt 2 ] && exit

if grep -q MUON $FILE 2>/dev/null; then
        CMD=MUOFF
else
        CMD=MUON
fi

echo -ne "$CMD\r" | nc -q0 denon 23
echo $CMD > $FILE

denoncmd:

#!/bin/bash

# $0 cmd [repeat]

for i in `seq 1 ${2-1}`
do
        echo -ne "$1\r" | nc -q0 denon 23
        sleep 0.2
done

exit

And there you go, I can now send volume requests to my mythtv and they get forwarded to my denon over TCP/IP. Pretty cool :)

The Sunol Ohlone park is not huge, but it had some nice hiking trails with good views of the east bay, from the Calaveras Reservoir, Mission Peak, and Mt Diablo. On the trail, we saw free range Cows, a pheasant with babies, many lizards, butterflies, chipmunks, and birds of prey.
At the top of Eagle View Trail, we had a nice view of the whole area while sitting on a shaded bench and eating a late lunch.

The pictures below are clickable and bring you to the map of where they were taken.

Cow Tipping anyone? :)

Oh, and it was nice that going there and coming back was best achieved by taking the fun Calaveras road from Hwy 237 :)

So, the show was enjoying for the most part, even if they were missing some continuity between some episodes, but I was disappointed by the ending.
It just felt cheap and rushed. That last episode just looked like just another episode, except that none was coming after :-(

But, a cell phone call from inside a car that's sinking under water? Seriously? Really?
I wonder if they're ok with it because most viewers don't know any better, or maybe this only bothers me because I'm willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to aliens or stunts, but not basic physics and science unless we're talking the Matrix where physics are negotiable :)

On the plus side, there was an interesting collection of cars. 4 were even cousins of mine :)

F355

F360 with my old brakes

F430 with carbon brakes

Race F430

the Ford GT was back too

Out of the 4 rungroups, one was a race prepared group, which made for some interesting cars.

All kinds of race prepared cars

small ones too

While it was an enjoyable day, the track felt a bit crowded at times (very few clean laps at my speed), and I never really broke 2:11 (compared to my best between 2:08 and 2:09). I think it was a combination of the brakes being a bit less effective when the pads were low and overheating more easily, and the tires being chewed up, limiting my speed in turns.
Still, no one passed me and 2:11 is still nothing to sneeze at I suppose.

I bailed after the 4th session as my rear pads were really wearing thin (that's a new one, it's always been the fronts so far, but good news that my rear brakes are working harder).
All in all, it was a reasonable day.

So there it went, I filed for willows, showed up at Palo Alto around 06:20 and had the plane ready by 06:40. When I taxied to the rununp area, I heard the tower folks on CTAF who nicely gave me a weather update even though the tower would be closed until 07:00.
I asked them if they would mind getting my IFR clearance, and they nicely agreed. When I was all done with my flight plan, it was 06:58, 2 minutes before the tower would officially open, so I just called CTAF to announce my takeoff and took off in the 600ft overcast. When I switched to norcal on 121.3, which is typically what I'd do after Palo Alto tower handed me over to them, norcal asked me "are you VFR or IFR?". I misunderstood that as whether I was on an VFR or IFR flight plan, not visual vs instrument actual conditions, so I said "IFR" for "IFR flight plan", except that this is right about when I entered the clouds.
Now, hopefully most IFR pilots would have figured out by then that I was supposed to be in contact with norcal before entering IFR for them to be ready for me, even if they knew I was about to enter the system since I had gotten my IFR clearance (but not release) from them. I could have gotten it in the air although staying VFR in the meantime would have been tough, or better, gotten it on the ground as a takeoff clearance, which is what I would have gotten if the tower had been opened. That said, I hadn't talked to the not yet open tower at all, I would have called norcal from the ground and gotten my clearance and release directly from them. This goes to show that you have to be careful when you get outside of the workflow you're used to.
Unfortunately, it's the mix of the two that caused my confusion, for a situation that I did learn 3 years ago, but never had to use. Thankfully there were no consequences and the norcal controller just gave me a friendly notice about my mistake in the procedure.

The flight to Willows was otherwise uneventful outside of a nordo cropduster that crossed my path on final probably just 30 feet over the ground (a fair distance from me), and the return flight was nice and brief thanks to a nice tailwind.

Fremont and Sunol

Mt Diablo in the background

Silicon Valley in the morning

Cropduster by Willows

San Francisco half fogged up

Southwest Landing at Oakland

Oakland Runway 29

Fedex landing at Oakland

The new paint job for the blimp for hire at Moffett

almost packed up

almost unpacked in my new location

An added bonus is that the new job allowed me to move back to the main campus in B40 :)

weather did look menacing

I got a free scooba 5900 from work. I was never really sold on the scooba, and indeed it looks like a finicky little device that needs a lot more help and care than a roomba, to the point that you may not save that much time compared to mopping yourself. It's also unclear that it's safe to use on our stone and hardwood floors, which might not be fully sealed. It also seems that the battery on the one I got is mostly dead, but eh, it was free :)
Maybe it's worth using it as credit for a newer scooba 350 or so, but I'm not sure.

In the good news department, after trying and ordering 3 pairs of hiking boots at REI, I think I finally found a pair that will work for me (i.e. that is wide enough without being way too long, which is otherwise bad for a hiking boot): Lowa Renegade GTX Wide. So far those seem both lightweight, which is nice, and willing to give more in the toe area. Hopefully they won't destroy themselves in a few days, but it seems like they may just work for my wide feet (I'm a 9 E wide).

Last, but not least, I've been spending a lot of time in the last weeks reading our 4 books on Hawaii and its Islands and working with a travel agent to plan our 3 week honeymoon. Those books are fantastic and have so much info, it's not even funny. In return, it's taking a lot of work to read all the useful info but it's allowing me to plan a very good honeymoon. Hopefully all that work will have been worth it :)