Before delving into the minutia of the day, picture me in a quite delightful environment- on the back porch in front of a nicely powered but not overwhelming fan (just enough to blow the bugs away and keep me the right temperature), in the glow of a venerable old fluorescent desk light on top of the boom box which is playing Rock Steady Ska music on the show Positive Vibrations from KDHX-FM watching adolescent cats (Galileo, Newton, and Cookie- yes, my boys who named them are science geeks) eat bugs while I type a post on the laptop via wifi.

Now roll the clock back about 16 hours. I drug my carcass out of bed about ten after six this morning. I had a large agenda and wanted to clear it all. I was fully conscious and dressed about ten minutes later and mere minutes after that I was out in the driveway putting the radiator and main cooling fan back into the engine bay of my 92 chevy corsica. It’s a long story, but I was hoping to have this car back in action after a long “operational hiatus”. I had gotten a good suggestion from a gearhead neighbor earlier in the week and had worked on replacing the fuel pressure regulator the evening previous until it was too dark (and I was too tired) to try to install the radiator.

I was surprised at how easily I got all the junk back where it belonged under the hood, but turning the key resulted in absolutely nothing. This due, presumably, to the fact that I had stupidly not disconnected the battery last time I worked on it some time ago. I put the battery in the back of the van and headed to the parts store which didn’t open till seven-thirty. It was about seven. I headed down the street to another part store which was open, but did not sell the brand of battery I had. They said it was too flat to charge and that I should take it across the street to the store that carried that brand- which also did not open till seven-thirty.

I bailed on that plan and proceeded to agenda item two execution. I went home, told the boys to wake up and get ready to go to the Sportsman’s Barber Shop for haircuts while I took a shower and changed clothes. Isaiah was pretty much ready when I was, but Gideon required motivational assistance as is typical with his morning arisal. I was greatly disappointed to see about five people already seated and waiting at the barber shop when we arrived minutes after it opened at eight. We were in luck, though. One of the two regular barbers was on vacation and there was a part-time fill-in man at the usually unmanned middle chair. Everybody already there was waiting for the owner and the fill-in man was doing nothing. All three of us had haircuts in just about an hour and we all look just fine. Well, the boys looked fine. My haircut looked fine but the rest of me didn’t look any better than it usually does.

We rolled back home and I told Ruth I was going to go mow my mom’s yard. Mowing Mom’s yard and my own was agenda item number three. I dropped the battery off at the right part store on the way to her house. The guy said it would be about an hour and a quarter. I had a good mow at Mom’s house. I actually greatly enjoy mowing. I can zone out in the physical work and think about things. It was a bit of a slog in the 88° weather at 44% humidity but I got it done. I’ve been mowing that yard for about twenty-five years now. I think what made it a bit of work this morning was that there was zero shade. The sun had cleared the eastern treeline and was hammering me the whole time, but I got it done. It took a bit longer than usual under the condition, but that was OK because that got me back by the part store perfectly on time to discover that my battery was shot but still under warranty FREE replacement!

Unfortunately the niceness of the batt replacement was mitigated by the fact that the car did not start. However, the pressure regulator was obviously a contributing factor that had been fixed as evidenced by the fact that there was fuel pressure on the rail and none gushing out of the throttle body as it had been before. I am thinking maybe replace spark plugs fouled by fuel probs when the regulator failed. I am hoping to not have to deal with the timing chain. Or something. Maybe the gas has gone bad, but I’m not sure of a good way to fix that, either.

Well, anyway, it was time to finish agenda item three by mowing my yard. I put all the tools and final assembly parts back in the trunk and yanked the rope on the mower. Again, it was a bit more work than it should have been. Perhaps because I was already a bit worn from the first yard, and perhaps a bit from the same brutal morning sun. I usually mow in the later afternoon where the harshness of the glare has worn off a bit. Against my inclination, but exhibiting prudence I was proud of, I took several water breaks during both mowing sessions which turned out to be wise. I still need to bag the front a bit, but didn’t have time to do it today. It looks OK (just OK to me), but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs and I was already further down in the day than I wanted to be.

Agenda item four was lunch, which was ready when I got out of the shower.

Agenda item five was the St. Louis Renaissance Festival in Wentzville, Mo about an hour from our home. We were all buckled in the van and mobile about two-thirty which was an hour and a half later than I’d wanted us to be going, but checking the website just before we left verified that the faire was open till six, not five and we should have plenty of time to see it all.

We arrived at about a quarter after three. I sincerely hoped that the main joust didn’t start till three-thirty, but when we’d paid for our tickets and instantaneously been transferred through time and space to the 16th century French village of Petit Lyon and handed the printed map/program I discovered that the joust wasn’t till four-thirty- we’d have plenty of time to experience the faire before we had to worry about getting decent seats.

The first destination of note was the German encampment where after watching a crossbow demonstration, Isaiah got rudimentary training as a pikeman. I must say, as a pikeman Isaiah could be a good swordsman. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it was the cast on his right arm that threw him off a bit. That and perhaps that the pike was twice as long as he is tall.

From there we made our way through the village noting the many sights to be seen- and the many not to be seen. Why is it that so many people that should not wear skimpy costumes have the desire to do so? And for that matter, what do skimpy outfits of any kind have to do with 16th Century France? Perhaps they should change the name to the “St. Louis Renaissance and Tangentially Related to The Fantasy Genre & People Who Want to Wear Costumes That Expose More of Themselves Than They Should Faire” because I saw a lot of rolls of snake-belly white abdomens and anachronistic, flat-out Dungeons & Dragons fantasy type junk that simply cannot pass muster for an historically accurate simulation. Camel rides? In 16th century France? Gimme a break… Though to be fair to the Faire, they have no control over the costumage and livery of attendees and actually it did seem that the participants mostly adhered to a consistent set of guidelines, generously interpreted as they may have been. The camel-master had a large purple feather in his tricorne hat and was wearing musketeer-style boots.

By the time we’d made our way around to the jousting grounds, it was time to start looking for a decent seat in the decidedly non-period, but accommodating aluminum bleachers that surrounded the lanes. We found some on the front row, though at the far corner of the grounds which proved good enough. The sun had crept out from behind the clouds and once again was casting its baleful gaze brutally down on our shadeless heads. The kids got grumpy and restless so Ruth took them to find something to drink while I kept the seats. They returned with $4 worth of strawberry sno-cones (no comment necessary on economic expediencies vs. historical accuracy- and they were quite welcome, I might add) just in time for the event to begin.

Last year we weren’t able to stay for the main joust event complete with mortal combat. We were only able to see the ring-jousting only demonstration which concluded with the man-at-arms regaling us with descriptions of flashing blades and spouting blood to be seen later in the day. This time the real deal was the only one we got to see, but it greatly fulfilled the gory advertisement.

The jousting began with the two participants individually galloping down the field to catch on their lances rings tossed skyward by squires, but this innocent exhibition of skill was not destined to last long with age-old enemies Sir Thomas and the dastardly Sir Duncan competing on the same lanes. Soon comments were made and insults exchanged and a challenge was called. The combatants galloped straight towards each other, lances clanging off shields until Sir Duncan was unhorsed and Sir Thomas, bound by the code of chivalry even when locked in conflict with a blackguard like Sir Duncan, jumped from his steed and took sword in hand.

The armored foes traded the clang of lances for the ring of swords and pressed close, each looking for a chance to pierce the others heart like the the pickles on the long fork of the roaming vendor selling “vegetarian sausages, a bill for a dill”. At one point things looked dark for the hero, Sir Thomas. There was a sharp gasp from the crowd as Thomas seemed stunned and soon to be finished by Duncan, but Duncan was wearied from the battle and as he retreated to gather his strength, Thomas also recovered heroically regaining his wits and his might to despatch the scurrilous Duncan to his fate in the afterworld.

After this show what was there to do but to visit the sword makers and sample their wares? To Gideon the Roman gladius crafted in the forge of Badger Blades was like a longsword but he wielded it valiantly. Isaiah, too, took steel to hand and assumed a battle-ready stance prepared to enact carnage on any and all who opposed him. Both are skillful, fearsome warriors, long trained and battle hardened in the use of all shapes and types of swords, light sabers, and the sticks that stand in their stead in this real wold that fades to a dim shadow in the blazing shine of their imaginations.

While we boys were admiring this panoply of killing tools, Ruth and Elsie had strolled through some markets offering items more appealing to the feminine mind and Elsie had discovered a pink and purple magic princess wand upon which she spent some remaining birthday money and which required the boys both to declare that they “should get something too!” despite the fact that neither had brought coin of any realm in their own coin purses. Nonetheless we undertook a quest for affordable trinkets as we made our way toward the time-space portal that would bring us back to 2010. Wooden swords were the treasure we sought. Alas, though we found many, none were affordable and thus was born agenda item number seven about which we shall hear later.

Agenda item number six was supper- Panterra’s Pizza on the way home. I have no prosaic account of our repast. We ate good pizza, the boys got to play a video game. We had a good time. The small office furniture store right next to that Panterra’s was a hobby shop the first time we went to the Faire several years ago. It was sadly going out of business the day we first saw it and we contributed to the growing bareness of the shelves in the form of a few model rockets and rocket related items. I always note that storefront with a tiny bittersweet nostalgia, but the pizza always brings me straight back to the present.

The seventh agenda item I mentioned above which was born hastily in a spirit of “sorry we didn’t find anything- IF you are good maybe we can…” was to visit Lowe’s hardware store on the way home for some PVC pipe of an appropriate diameter along with pipe insulation and duct tape with which to create swords of a type I must fess up and admit to in college not only having fashioned, but wielded in conflict of arms on numerous occasions. This agenda item was, of course, created contingent upon appropriate behavior up to the very minute the money was spent and it was too late to return the materials to the shelf. This agenda item was only accomplished at Ruth’s vehement insistence on the expansion of the contingency, since to my mind the boys’ behavior didn’t quite meet the requirements. But they were pretty good at the Faire so she was right. We did not yet, however, combine the elements into the devices they are destined to become. This, once again, is contingent on behavior up to the point at which I fire up the forge (and the slick PVC pipecutter I bought last winter after a freeze burst some pipes under the kitchen) and bind eldritch energies into the blades to harness the mighty power of imagination that can transform them from the shining steel of valiant, questing knights to the glowing blades of light with which galactic adventurers deflect and redirect the particle beams of their enemy’s crude blasters.

If the car had started this day would have gone on record as 100% perfect. As it is, I guess the best description it can qualify for is tremendously super. Actually mega tremendously super- I forgot about seeing a half basset hound, half shar-pei dog at the Faire. It was odd looking, but not in a bad way. Isaiah said it looked a bit like Satchel from the comic strip Get Fuzzy and we all agreed.

Since our van is now payed off and Gideon has graduated from preschool, we have a bit more discretionary (I was going to say disposable, but the only people who have truly disposable income these days make considerably more money than I do) revenue and I decided it was time for an upgrade.

Last Thursday night, I forget what exactly prompted it, but Ruth suggested that in light of the abovementioned additional discretionary amounts, I should go ahead and get the monitor I had picked out some time ago. She said it would be an early Father’s Day present. So I clicked a bit and it was on it’s way.

Since I placed my order about midnight Thursday night, I figured it wouldn’t get here till Tuesday at the earliest. I was pleasantly surprised when Ruth notified me Monday afternoon that it had arrived. In fact, I was kind of meaning to cheese out of work a few minutes early, but something came up late in the afternoon that scuttled that plan. I did eventually get thome, though, and there it was waiting to be hooked up.

I had never heard of Hanns G until my buddy Ed from work got one with the computer he had built at a local computer store. He had only good things to say about it so I felt confident saving a few dollars on a lesser known brand. I am quite pleased with it and happy about the price. So far it seems absolutely perfect. Some of the reviews on Newegg mentioned dead pixels on arrival and I had hoped I would not have a similar experience since I envision such things getting hairy.

“I’d like to return this monitor you sent me. It has dead pixels right out of the box!”

“How many, sir?”

“How many what?”

“How many dead pixels, sir…”

“Uh…. one…”

“Sir, please read the bottom of your invoice stating that the minimum number of dead pixels to justify a replacement is four.”

“But I just plugged it in and there’s a dead pixel. Come on, is this how you treat your customers? Hello? Hello?”

I am very glad that such exchanges remain only in my imagination and not my memory.

Now it is like I have just cleaned my glasses for the first time in months. It’s a pleasure to use my computer for things other than browsing for the first time in a long time. Not only is the picture crisp and bright (with actual gamma), but there is now enough real estate that I can enjoy using my favorite programs like Blender, InkScape, and Gimp.

Of course, the first thing the boys wanted to do was watch The Trap Door on the new monitor. The second thing they wanted to do was play Bionicle games on it. I acceded to the first request and we spent a few funny minutes with Burk and the gang while Ruth cooked supper. The second request was not granted until this morning when I left for work.

Isaiah was downstairs reading a book when I came down as he usually is. He asked if he could get on the computer. Initially I said no, but then I changed my mind and logged him in. I stipulated that before he could play games he needed to write a blog post.

So it seems my early Father’s day present has been a gift to everybody. Ruth had discovered that FaceBook looks much better on an LCD, the kids have found that it works great for our favorite Youtube content, and it is a smashing price-point compromise for digital content development.

Now I need to clean up and reconfigure the whole computer desk set-up, but first I think I’ll start up Blender…

The first major milestone even was Elsie’s second birthday. We had big plans for this day. My father was visiting from Arizona and it was Friend’s Day at the St Louis Zoo, of which we are members, and a lot of stuff was going to be free there so we had the grand idea that we’d spend Elsie’s birthday at the zoo with grandpa. We were all excited about it and had been looking forward to it for a long time. We were even going to call Isaiah off school for a day to be able to go.

Unfortunately, it turned out that we shouldn’t have called Isaiah off school.

That Friday morning was grey, chilly and wet– not exactly good going-to-the-zoo weather. We were all pretty disappointed, but it wasn’t actually raining, just threatening to, so the deal was not totally off yet. It was good that it wasn’t actually raining for another reason, too. I was putting the finishing touches on an unexpected radiatorectomy on our minivan. My dad and I had begun examining the van in earnest the previous afternoon about 3-ish to diagnose frustrating cooling problems and it was evident very quickly that on top of anything else, the radiator would have to be replaced immediately. We wrapped that project up long after dark when we’d gotten the new radiator installed except for the fact that it was just too dark and I was too tired to finish hooking up the particularly troublesome bottom radiator hose and I decided I’d finish it in the morning.

I did finish the radiator that morning and it only took three trips to the parts store for various small crap that had not been planned but was necessary to complete the job- one trip for a tool, two trips for different size hose clamps. Luckily the rain held off till I was just done adding water back into the cooling system. Disappointingly, just after I finished it did begin to rain for real which dampened (literally) all our spirits in light of the plans we had for the rest of the day.

We all kind of moped around the place for a few hours till– guess what? The sun came out and the weather turned beautiful just about the time my dad showed up (and just about the time Isaiah would have been getting home from school). My sister, brother-in-law, and their son, Griffin, met us at the zoo and we all had a most tremendous time for Elsie’s birthday at the zoo– and at dinner with Grandpa on the way home!

The next milestone came two days later when Gideon graduated preschool on the following Sunday afternoon. He did a fine job in the ceremony– even singing and doing the motions with the songs he was supposed to do (which he doesn’t always do). He had a good time in preschool and I am very proud of him. He’s far ahead of the curve for entering kindergarten in the fall. He knows and can recognize in print all the letters of the alphabet, he can count to 100, he knows all the colors, etc. He’s a sharp little fellow and when he wants to be, he is kind, helpful, and sweet. Though he doesn’t always want to be…

Another milestone occurred two days ago on Wednesday when Isaiah completed the fourth grade with one B– in math, and all other grades As. Additionally, he had the highest AR score in his school and was asked to be in the Safety Patrol next year. He also was on the math team for his grade and school this year. I think it was a good experience for him. Perhaps especially in light of the fact that experience can be defined as “what you get when you don’t get what you want”, but he did it and I am proud of him for that.

One other recent milestone that was not an achievement but was an accomplishment which pleases me happened when we paid off our minivan. Yes, the same one that needed the new $200 radiator. Of course the one that needed a new radiator the same week we made the last payment on it. Don’t get me started about cars. It will, however, be nice to have a car payments worth of extra income each month. If, that is, we don’t end up spending it to keep the van on life support.

And while discussing milestones, I’ll mention two more from Elsie. First, her hair is long enough to put into a ponytail now. Well, perhaps ‘ponytail’ is a bit of an exaggeration, but there is enough to gather together and have a bit sticking out. It’s very cute and it makes her look older. The first time Ruth attempted that particular stylistic configuration Elsie wanted nothing to do with it, but she got used to it quickly and now I think she actually likes the way it keeps her hair back. The final milestone is that Elsie has started making up songs with actual words. She’s been singing songs with noticeable tunes for quite a while– Frere Jaques and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. As a matter of fact, now that I think of it she’s been singing the words to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for quite a while, but the other night riding somewhere in the van was the first time I heard her making up a song from scratch with real words in it. All kids make singy-songy rhythmic noises that seem like songs with lyrics that are mainly comprised of baby-talk at her age and she has been, too, but now she is making up songs that are about stuff. She was singing about ladybugs and butterflies. There was not a great deal of thematic development and the rhythm was not quite as rigorously metrical as, say, Frere Jaques. The song was something along the lines of “Ladybug, ladybug, butterfly, ladybug” but I thought it was pretty neat.

I’ve three kids that love me, though with the boys it’s sometimes hard to judge from their behavior. I am proud of both of them. They are both very bright. Gideon can write his own name very well, find all the letters of the alphabet on the pages of a book, and count to one-hundred and he just graduated preschool a couple of weeks ago. Isaiah is the readingest kid there is, just about. He can absorb a four-hundred page book from the library in a matter of days and he has the highest Accelerated Reader score in his school. They both have powerful and active imaginations although I’d rather they apply them to things other than Star Wars and Lego from time to time…

Elsie’s turned two a couple of weeks ago and while it may not be her favorite word, “no” is the one she says most these days. She’s as cute as one girl can be, but strong willed and not always concerned with what her parents want. She’s at the stage where she likes to mimic speech and if you ask her she’ll gladly proclaim “I a mockingbird!”. She’s also a good mommy to her baby dolls (when she’s not scolding them for letting their hat fall off, or dragging them around by their feet) and a good (pretend) cook in her toy kitchen.

I have a wife who is truly my much better half and I frequently refer to her as thusly. She’s also a good mother and homemaker. And a better best friend than I am.

I have a job that is enjoyable frequently, fulfilling every now and then, and not too stressful. It could be stressful if I let it get to me, but hey, you know, it’s only work. I’m sure not getting rich, but on the other hand I don’t have to worry about whether my services will be required next month. In days like these it’s not bad to have more work than people. Especially when you have specialized skills.

I have two vehicles that are both paid for (Huzzah!) one of which is in condition that isn’t too embarrassing for the family to show up in. The other of which, the boys like because it has those “old-fashioned crank kind of windows” and it gets me to work while Ruth hauls the kids around in the minivan all day.

We are paying for our home contract for deed, so all the shenanigans with the mortgage industry have a lessened impact on us. We’ve got a nice yard, a nice back porch to sit out on and read, and a house we like- even if it could use some declutterization. It’s home.

So I guess, taking stock, things haven’t changed a great deal in the big picture other than the kids growing up more each day and time going by faster and faster.

The movie was ‘The Tale of Despereaux‘. The main character, Despereaux, is a mouse whom Elsie liked. His first appearance in the movie on the day he is born and when we first saw him as a fuzzy little mouseling, Elsie giggled and waved hello to him. Her second favorite character, which she also waved at, was a cat who was not friendly at all, but Elsie likes cats so she liked this one, too.

The only downside to the movie was the inevitable (at any G rated movie) audience of bratty kids and clueless guardians, but we had a good time nonetheless. Even though we were joined at Wendy’s afterwards by the grandparents and children who sat directly behind us. All through the movie the boy kept asking “Where’s my birthday present?”. At the restaraunt the kids (who sat behind us– not mine) were running around and being generally annoying as only those kinds of kids can. It was a nice switch when gramps delivered the food to their table and they quited down to stuff their faces.

I commented to Ruth that in 60 years the cycle would perpetuate itself and those now hyperkenetic kids would be the shuffling zombie grandparents saddled with hyperkinetic kids grandkids.

I’ve been working pretty hard this week on a project for my job. I am retexturing a model of the MV-22 which was made almost ten years ago and had been orginally textured with bad photographs of a real MV-22. With an updated version of the environment database, I had converted all the original models that had been delivered when the original MV-22 model had been built. Many of them had been converted then, from older versions.

Anyway, with the delivery of the new database, the appearance of the MV-22 model was no longer considered acceptable. It was ‘too dark’. So I used most, if not all, of my 2D raster image magic on the old 256×256 image textures to make them ‘brighter’. At first everyone was pleased with the transformation I had enacted, but a few weeks later it was now no longer good enough, despite the fact that I had made it clear that I had pushed the images as far as they would go. Any further ‘brightening’ would begin to wash out the images and reduce distinction.

Nonetheless something had to be done. I was emailed an image of a model of an MV-22 from a competitors image generator and asked to make something that looked like it. Aside from the fact that the competitors model probably had five times as many polygons (For those non computer graphic geek readers, polygons are equivalent to ‘sides’. Any 3D computer graphics are made of a number of poygons– flat surfaces, or ‘sides’. Think of a soccer ball. Consider all the hexagons and pentagons that cover the ball to be flat, but the ball is still mostly ball shaped. If there were more, smaller shapes covering the ball it would look rounder. So in a 3D computer model the more polygons used, in general, the smoother and more like what it is meant to depict it looks), the model looked almost bone white, unlike any pictures I’d ever seen of an MV-22 and decidedly unlike the muddy, dark, grimy old model I had spent two weeks making look far better, but still crappy.

In addition to having more polygons, I noted that the competitors model did not look like it used photographs for the textures, what we call ‘phototexture’. It looked like a videogame asset with textures created by a digital artist instead of by a camera. It looked very nice and accurate, but missing the certain amount of visual noise and subtle shading that phototexture adds which frequently (but not always) makes less than great phototexture look better than great, for lack of a better word, illustrated texture.

Seeing this, I told the project manager that the phototexture on the model had gone as far as it possibly could and that if it still needed to be brighter, we’d have to try a different approach. I explained about the impression I got from the competitor’s model and asked if he thought the customer would accept retexturing job that would make the model look entirely different, but brighter and better considering the bad phototexture it currently had. He said they would and I went to work ‘illustrating’ the new texture.

I downloaded a bunch of images from Flickr to use as references and a line-drawing three-view of an MV-22 I found on google and began digitizing and drawing in InkScape. InkScape is an open source vector graphics editing program which I love. It isn’t quite up to par with Adobe Illustrator, but it is 100% free and all the fancy stuff in Illustrator that’s not in InkScape I probably wouldn’t use anyway– as if there’s any chance I’d be interested in something costing multiple hundreds of dollars even if I did want those features. Beside that, it’s open source! I love open source software and use it for just about everything. The one notable exception is the browser Opera which I also love and will remain loyal to over FireFox even thought it’s not open source, though I use FireFox, too.

Anyway, I started with the basic outline and some line details like windows and such. Then I started adding small details like panel lines, rivets, access hatches, small vents, and numerous small dookickeys and gizmos. When I had a good start on the outline of the shape and a fair amount of little details, I exported the vector image to a bitmap and used it as the texture on the existing model. The initial result was encouraging to me. It looked like the black lines of the 3-view had been drawn on a white model, but the general fit of the image to the geometry of the model was in the neighborhood so I forged ahead.

Let me here note that the model was originally in a format called OpenFlight which is prevalent in visual simulation applications. The program that this file format is for is called Creator and we use it frequently. I however, being an open source proponent, prefer to use a program called Blender In fact, I started using Blender before I got bitten by the open source bug and I love it. Again, it may not have all the features of programs such as Maya which are used by the likes of Pixar, but it has everything I need for the right price. Also, fortunately for me, Blender can import and export OpenFlight files and is much more conducive to the way I work than Creator.

So I imported the OpenFlight file of the original model into Blender and saved it as a Blender file. Then I used the texture mapping tools in Blender to apply the image I’d created with InkScape and this is how I’ve spent the lion’s (and the lamb’s, too for that matter) share of the past week. Bouncing back and forth between InkScape and Blender– adding features to the texture image, mapping them onto the polygons in Blender, then back to InkScape to tweak the image, then back to Blender to re-tweak the texture mapping and so on, and so on.

One of the things that has taken the most time to get just perfect is shading. The geometry of the model (the number and shape of the polygons) was created almost ten years ago when our systems could handle far fewer polygons than they can now. I don’t have time to rework the geometry (or I would), so I have to get every bit of kick out of the textures that I can. Part of that kick is making it look round. The MV-22 is, like almost all aircraft, curved. The geometry of the model is pretty flat-ish. Most of the side of the fuselage geometry is totally flat. In order to make it look round I added shading to the texture image I am creating with gradients. This has been surprisingly successful, but takes a bit of practice and plenty of time even once you get the hang of it.

It’s not quite finished and I am working as fast as I can, but it’s slow going. A coworker asked me today when I thought I’d be done so he could take a copy to the site to show the customer. I explained that I was going as fast as I could and that turning up the heat won’t make the cake bake faster. I think I’ll be done creating and mapping the texture tomorrow. Unfortunately there is work remaining after that to convert the model back to OpenFlight and work after that to clean up the conversion of the texture mapping which for some reason rarely flows through perfectly. Images rendered in Blender of what I have accomplished so far were enthusiastically received by both the project manager and the guy I told about the cake thing, though, so I’m not worried.

It’s funny how time goes by fast when you’re doing something you enjoy. I really find it delightful to use programs I love to do something I love and produce a product that makes me feel great every time I look at it. It’s even more enjoyable when I can plug in my earbuds and crank up the electronic music I love and just do my work. The word ‘cyberspace‘ has come to mean, basically, the Internet so cyberspace is not a good word for where I have lived this week. I’ll call it D-space, combining the ideas of 3D and digital (hence the D) to describe the alternate universe I travel to.

Sometimes I make it to D-space at home, but often. A prerequisite to visiting D-space is the ability to depart from meatspace (ie, the regular universe) which is greatly enhanced by a big monitor and plenty of memory and CPU horsepower. None of which I have as much of as I’d like to at home, but all of which I have a nice amount of at work. It’s only through the catalystic application of the abovementioned electromusic that I ever make the trip at home.

More frequently at home, I find myself travelling to W-space like I have been for the past hour and a half. That’s W for Writing and it’s a trip I intend to do more frequently this year than I did last year. Just like I always intend to every Janauary. Right now, however, I am about to board the transport back to regular old ‘at home’.

Yesterday went almost according to plan. We had a good time at the bookstore and a good supper at Culver’s, but no movie. I’d missed the part at the top of the ‘Five Buck Club’ email I got yesterday saying that the list of movies the club discount was valid for went into effect today (Friday) instead of yesterday (Thursday) so the kids were disappointed when I said “Sorry, no movie tonight. We’ll come back tomorrow.”

The boys weren’t thrilled about it, but Ruth suggested to help them get over it we take them to the Matrix to see if they could find something to spend xmas gift cards on. The one in Edwardsville was a total bust in the toy department so we went ot the one in Wood River where Gideon found an assortment of four whole things for ten dollars– three hot wheels and a Planet Heroes character on clearance, and Isaiah found nothing of interest and decided to save his card.

What’s that? What do I mean by ‘the Matrix’? Why Wal-Mart, of course. Not everybody realizes, but Wal-Mart is actually the Matrix.

One major incident I have been remiss in describing here has been recounted on the Internet elsewhere. Last Monday (12/30/08) Isaiah learned how to ride a bike.

Since the temperature was near 60° F, Ruth’s folks called and suggested we come over to their house to let the boys ride bikes in their driveway. Gideon could also play with the new remote control 4-wheeler he got for his birthday earlier this month.

When we got over there, Isaiah started bugging me to take the training wheels of the bike that was now too little for him and put them on the bike that is just the right size for him (now) that Ruth traded for in a garage sale she and her mother had held in early autumn (when it was just a tiny bit too big for Isaiah). I told him that he was too old to ride a bike with training wheels and that it was time he learned to ride a bike for real. He was a bit leary at first, but was willing to give it a try.

We started out in the driveway, but soon progressed to the street in front of Ruth’s folks’ house which is in a subdivision and has very little traffic. Isaiah would pedal away, slowly learning to balance as I walked beside him, beginning with two hands on the bike and eventually supporting him with a single hand on the cross bar of the hanldebars. Though the traffic was sparse, there was a bit of it and there were several cars parked on the street so I suggested we put his bike in the van and take it to Glazebrook Park which is a nice park (with no good web links) about five minutes from Ruth’s folks’ house.

About forty minutes and one ripped blue jean knee later, Isaiah was riding his bike on his own consistently for long enough to qualify as ‘really riding a bike’. Stopping, turns, etc. were still among the finer points to be mastered at a later date, but he was really riding a bike! I figure (looking at a pdf image of the park with trail distances) we probably traveled close to three quarters of a mile in the process of going back and forth with me supporting, then guiding, then barely touching, and finally following Isaiah as he grasped the knack of balancing.

He’d wiped out several times, cried on a couple of the more painful ones, and put a hole in a pair of jeans he’d gotten for xmas, but he was very happy and proud of himself. He couldn’t have been much more proud of himself than I was of him, either. I still get a bit of a lump in my throat when I think about it.

I had to push him a bit, but only a little bit to get him over the training wheel mindset and get him to start thinking “I’m going to learn to ride a bike today!”. That was a big part of what made me feel so good. Yes, I’d helped him learn to ride a bike and that was tremendous– but also I’d gotten him to decide to do something and to get out of his comfort zone and do it! That also made me feel very good and proud of both of us.

When we got back to Ruth’s folk’s house, Gideon was working on riding the bike Isaiah had wanted me to take the training wheels off of, but the tires were flat. So, after everybody watched Isaiah show off his new skill up and down the block, we took it to the gas station up the road to air them up. Gideon had a good time taking the valve stem caps off, holding them for me, and putting them back on as we aired up not only his bike tires, but the van tires, too since I was surprised to discover FREE air– no quarters required.

Gideon had a good time and was pretty good at riding the training wheel bike on the driveway. I sat and watched him for twenty minutes. Then Elsie came out and figured out how to operate the no-pedal tricycle Gideon had outgrown a few years ago. She had gone backwards on it before, but now she was going forwards, too! It was a day of cyclery for all the kids.

we took Isaiah’s bike home with us so that he could practice some more this week and Tuesday I loaded him and his bike in the van and we drove a few blocks to a large church parking lot where he further developed his skill to the point where he learned how to consistently take off on his own and to turn well, if not sharply. There were no major crashes, though several minor ones, and big smiles on both our faces. When it was about time to leave I suggested a stunt! That was accepted with rough-and-tumble eagerness and Isaiah successfully rode off a four inch curb!

Yesterday Gideon had mentioned that he wanted us to get his bike from Ruth’s folks’ house, too. Today Ruth did and after lunch today I took both of them back to the same parking lot and they both rode around and around for about forty-five minutes. Gideon did a great job of riding around in his training-wheeled bike and Isaiah is quickly getting to be a pro. There were only a couple of non-trivial accidents today.

The first one was when I was looking the other way, fooling with getting my ipod earbuds out of my pocket (I wanted to finish listening to the Security Now podcast episode #176 and the boys were mainly riding around saying things like “woo hoo” and “yee-haw” at wich I could nod and smile without actually having to hear the verbiage) and Isaiah rode smack-dab into me. He didn’t fall off and I was the only one to receive any pain, but it was not too big a deal.

The other one was about three quarters of the way through the day’s riding. I turned to see him on the ground a split second after he fell, but evidently he went down face-first and cracked his noggin. There was a red spot the size of a silver dollar on his forehead and I thought his nose might be a bit scraped. He cried a bit, but got right back on and he and Gideon both nagged me into ten more minutes when time was up. I didn’t mind– they were having a blast, I was enjoying watching them, and it gave me time to finish listening to another podcast while I watched them.

I am very proud of both my sons. Neither of them are perfect, but nobody is. Lately I have been working on telling them more often how proud I am of them and this week it has been easier than ever before. They are great boys and I am very glad they are mine.

A time for starting over, of new possibilities, and an opportunity to evaluate one’s current situation and determine how to improve it going forward, it’s a unique opportunity.

I have a number if improvements in mind for myself. I also have a number in mind for those around me. I could expound at great length on ways just about everybody I know could do things better. Strangely, very few exhibit an aura of receptivity when I do so… In light if such attitudes, I will do my best to focus my energies on self improvements.

One of which, the most notable to readers of this website (all four of them- Hi, Dad!) will (hopefully) be the implementation of my perennial decree to actually write in a timely manner. I think part of that will b
e made easier by what will probably turn out to be the most important, beneficial, and powerful change I intend to make.

For me, 2009 will be ‘The Year of Time and Task Management’. This is one of my biggest problems and if I can get it licked, or at least improve my approach to planning what to do when (and following through with the plan), I’m confident I’ll find myself getting over some humps that have been slow going.

Actually, I guess I’ll amplify that a bit. 2009 will be ‘The Year of Time, Task, and budget Management’. It’s reather embarrassing to admit that for a person like me, with an analytical, technical, engineering-approach mindset my attitudes and behavior toward money is pathetically reactive and sloppy. I am even more confident that in this area a methodical, planned approach applied rigorously will yield amazing results. Of course, the danger in that area for me (the way my mind works) is to go so far that I have every bite of food calculated to the penny so that I can know, say, “I just had a snack- a glass of Coke and a bag of potato chips which cost 97¢ and has depleted our weekly provisions by .32% but that’s right on schedule for today and I can do that once more before I go to bed”.

My challenge in this area will be finding the right balance that gets the results we need without driving my family (or me) insane. I can get very “these aren’t K-Mart underwear” when I get into the implementation phase of a new plan. I have already created a set of linked spreadsheets to account for all budgetary items for this month and the next. I also am working figuring out how to incorporate mind maps into the budgetary system– or more specifically FreeMind mind maps since to me mind mapping == using FreeMind. I have never got much out of mind mapping on paper and have never found another mind mapping program that I liked (which I could afford).

In mentioning FreeMind, I’ll also note that using it is one of the ways I am going to improve not only budgetary endeavors, but especially but in time/task planning. I have already been using it for that purpose at work for a year or two now with good success. Now I’m going to incorporate it fully into planning my activities in all areas of my life. They say, and I agree, that there is great value in simply writing something down in a list to help you order it in your mind and remember it. I am going take that wisdom and apply it computerically since I am more of a typing guy than a writing down, guy. One of the reasons I love using FreeMind so much is that it makes creating complicated, ordered lists and then rearranging, removing, or adding items in the list very easy. So another area– on the implementation level, at least– where I am going to improve myself is in increasing my use of FreeMind both in extent and sophistication.

NOTE: I guess I’m doing pretty good on my first day of 2009 here at r-l-w.net– I just checked the text statistics for this document and I’ve written over 700 words (including this note) in about half an hour! I also guess that, though I don’t necessarily think of myself as ‘a geek’ I probably qualify strongly in the minds of most folks since not only am I talking about one of my main New Year’s resolutions as instead of ‘eating less’ or ‘excersizing more’ to be increasing my use of a program that helps me do something most people have never heard of and barely grasp when they do, but I am judging my success at creating this website in characters-per-second.

I have a number of other things knocking around in my head (which is safe because there is nothing for them to bump into) which you’ll probably be bored by in following days here, but right now I am going to demonstrate that my attitude and behaviors are changing by terminating this transmission to move on to the next phase of this morning’s activities- which are all planned out in a mind map, of course– five levels deep, in fact!

This afternoon we’re going to Edwardsville, IL (about a 20 minute drive) where the closest Borders bookstore is located– where the boys and I all have gift cards from different gift events birthday, xmas, etc. that we need to spend before they start shrinking and Ruth has a good email club coupon to use. After that we’ll have an inexpensive treat somewhere along the lines of Culver’s or Wendy’s which actually is a treat around here since almost all of the Wendy’s around here closed and only a few have reopened in our area. After that, if all goes well, we might even take in a movie at the theater where we have discount club cards.

So there, you go- Roger’s New Year’s Day 2009. A good day planned– a good year planned. All that’s is to make it so…

I got up before the sun and went for a strenuous walk of non-trivial duration. Earlier this year for a week or so I managed to get myself up out of bed early enough to go for a long, fast-paced walk for about two weeks in a row. Then the weather (I think) dis-cooperated and broke my habit.

I don’t know if my body will go along with my plans again tomorrow morning, or the morning after to create a new habit, but if it does I don’t think the weather will be forming the barrier to habitization it did back when there was snow on the ground like the last time I tried.

In fact, on this, the first day of my new undertaking, the weather tried mightily to confound my effort and failed.

I was about six blocks from home when I remembered that Ruth had said that today was, according to the TV weatherman, supposed to be “the wet one” this week. I remembered her proclamation because I felt a few drizzly drops and realized I had been seeing (thought not fully registering) flashes of lightning several times as I’d made my way uptown.

I was at about the half way point of a decent route and decided to loop back around instead of extending my path up the next block. As I turned left, I thought I detected an increase in the precipitation, but I wasn’t sure. I figured there was nothing to do but keep going anyway and I could decide at a later point to finish the loop I was on or extend it in the other direction when I was closer to home.

As I approached the turn to take me back home from the loop I was on I decided to extend one block and if conditions recommended, simply turn around and retrace that block and make the turn I’d just passed. Before I reached the middle of the block conatining the designated decision point, I realized the slight drizzle had progressed to very light rain. However I had also reasoned that when I got home I’d be getting right in the shower anyway, so I needn’t worry about getting wet.

I must say that in all my almost forty years on planet earth, I do not recall ever having intentionally walked in any kind of rain other than a sprinkle for a distance longer than say, running from the front door to the car. I do not recally ever having done so before today, that is.

As I passed the point at which I had planned to either abort or extend my mission (I had decided to extend) the rainfall increased in density steadily. I remember noting to myself as I walked along the increasing intensity of the downfall.

· Yeah, I guess it’s actually raining now… for real
· This has now transitioned from ‘just raining’ to a ‘pretty decent’ rain.
· OK, now it’s really coming down!

Thoughts along these lines continued constantly trending upwards until this:

· It is POURING down now.

Walking with my head down staring at the sidewalk in front of me I still had to keep squeezing my eyes shut and trying to wipe away the water from them with my fingers like windshield wipers againts my tightly clenched eyelids. It was getting a bit chilly, too, in my totally saturated t-shirt and jeans. The temperature was probably about 72° F and a bit windy. Not being a hypocondriac in the least (in fact I tend in the other direction to figure that if I can still move a limb and no arteries are severed, a doctor is not required) and prone to ignore such conditions when striving doggedly towards a goal, I was nonetheless reminded of hearing the story told by a historical reenactor portraying Martha Washington how our nation’s first president met his untimely end. George had been riding all day, it seems, in a terrible rainstorm and had just gotten home about suppertime. He stomped in shedding his sodden coat and hat and sat down, against the entreaties of Martha that he at least change into dry clothes, and ate supper. George was a stickler for prompt mealtimes. He was also dead within the month from the sickness his decision to eat on time (and in cold, wet clothes) he earned him.

Though my eyes were beginning to feel quite irritated by the influx of rainwater and the chill beginning to seep into me, I finally arrived at my front door. Standing in our entryway I was now cold and clammy from the touch of my wet clothes. I peeled off my t-shirt and let it drop to the tiled floor with a loud splapt. Fortunately the laces of my boots were not overly recalcitrant and I was soon in the bathroom running warm water for a shower.

As I waited for the water to heat up I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that my eyes were indeed irritated. The entire white of each eye was almost pink with bloodshot. It would have been an appropriate look for a horror movie.

As I got in the shower once it was hot, I was thinking about my red eyes and my mind did not dwell the least bit, or even have the least glimmer in the background of an incident from the night before last. Gideon had been in the bathroom taking care of business when he shouted for Ruth.

“Mom! I’m on the potty and there’s a big spider in here!”

Ruth came to see what the hubbub was about and sure enough there was a US quarter coin sized spider hanging a few inches from the ceiling by a thread of web.

“Don’t worry, Gideon,” she teased “He won’t bite you if you don’t bite him.”

Well, the next day Ruth mentioned idly wondering where the spider had gone because it wasn’t up on the ceiling where it had been. In fact she hadn’t seen it.

I had just got done shampooing my hair and had reached out to grab a bottle of body wash. It was a red Wal-Greens brand bottle with our last name neatly hand lettered in Rub-a-Dub permanent marker on it since it was the one Isaiah had taken to camp with him last week.

These two seemingly unrelated things came together in sharp juxtaposition as I simultaneoulsy grabbed and dropped the bottle to the floor of the shower upon seeing that stupid spider three inches from my hand. So I guess the spider is half-smart. He figured it wise to make his primary location on the other side of the shower curtain where he didn’t have to see and be seen by us, but he didn’t realize that not only is that a relatively bug free region, but every morning (at least) he’d be exposed to an even greater (due to proportional size differences) deluge than the one I had just escaped. As a thought provoking aside, isn’t it funny how the apparent size of a spider is directly proportional to it’s proximity to one’s person? That is, the closer they are the bigger they seem– far more than can be accounted for by the normal foreshortening effect of perspective.

And in conclusion, I’m not dead yet and feel fine so hopefully I will die of old age (at an old age) instead of from a fatal chill as did the father of our nation.

And since I’ve stayed up far later than I meant to, having begun this account far past my bedtime, I’m not sure whether I’ll be concerned about the weather in the morning or not.

For the second year in a row Isaiah has attended a summer science program put on by the local school district. For a few weeks the kids spend Tuesdays and Thursdays from 8:45 am to 1 pm doing science-ish activities and going on field trips. Today was the last day of this summer’s program and they had planned to have a picnic at the park with parents invited so I had taken the day off to attend. Being Thursday, I’d also have the opportunity to go to Play Pals with Elsie- something I don’t get to do nearly as often as I’d like.

Though it had stormed pretty well last night, it was cool and dry this morning with clear sky, but the grass was still a bit wet and we didn’t know whether the picnic would be at the park or if a backup plan would be in effect. We soon discovered when we dropped him off that the picnic in the park had been converted to lunch in the cafeteria due to the wet grass and possibility of more rain.

From there, Ruth, Elsie, Gideon, and I went to Play Pals. I wish we could have found somebody to watch Gideon during Play Pals, but I think all Ruth’s relatives were busy so he went along. He could have behaved a little better, but I tried to be patient with him because it’s a difficult environment for him. I generally try to cut him a little more slack than the other kids because he’s the middle child. He’s too little to do the big kid stuff with Isaiah and too big to play with the little kid stuff Elsie is interested in. It’s hard for him at Play Pals because not only does he want to do something while he’s there, but he went to Play Pals when he was younger. So not only is he a little too big for the climb-on ride-on toys, but he’s comfortable in a familiar environment that he doesn’t fully realize is not his place anymore.

All things, considered he could have been better, but he was OK. Elsie, of course had a blast as always and I had a good time watching her do one of the daytime things I generally just get to hear about. She is as active as 14 month old Isaiah and 14 month old Gideon put together! She’s always in motion, crawling, moving, climbing. She really likes to climb. The little dress she had on today, did not lend itself well to her attempts to scale the toddler size ramps and steps, but that didn’t stop her from making numerous valiant efforts. After all the paying customers had a chance to make one with Ms. Amy the Play Pals teacher, I helped Gideon make an American flag with star stickers and red fingerprint stamps for stripes. Unfortunately I discovered the hard way that I had the wrong memory card in the camera and was only to take a few pictures before it was full. On the other hand, the card in the camera was mostly full of pictures of Elsie at Play Pals on previous days and not being able to take pictures of my own enabled me to forget about fooling with the camera and spend time enjoying my rare time there. When we got in the van I noticed that the odometer read 155544. I made a mental note to watch the mileage closely because I’d have an opportunity that day to photograph an interesting number sometime today.

Play Pals runs from 9 am to 10 am and we’d been told that parents could show up at the (no longer really a picnic) picnic anytime after 10:30, so we went by the house to get a different memory card for the camera and then went to the middle school (in the building I went to high school in) to see what was going on at the science program.

Not too much was going on there, actually. Some kids were playing board games in the cafeteria where we would be eating, but Isaiah was not among them. We ventured through the halls and found him coming out of the gym with a friend named Steven. One of the program personnel then began hearding everybody from the gym and the computer lab back down to the other end of the building where a movie was playing in the auditorium.

It was kind of interesting to see the inside of the Main building of what used to be Alton High School. I hadn’t been in it in over twenty years. I was surprised how little it had changed, but then change is not a strong point of our American educational system. The auditorium also had not changed- but it was very much the same as I am sure it has been since long before I was there. In fact my maternal grandfather went to school in that building way back when it was new and I’d bet the only very noticable feature that had changed since then were the new seats.

Down front the kids were arrayed in front of a projector screen upon which a small LCD projector was showing an unmentionably nauseating “movie” I later learned was called ‘High School Musical 2′ or something like that. I knew Isaiah and his buddy Sam sitting with the other kids were enjoying it no more than any of the rest of us. Ruth, Elsie, Gideon and I were sitting near the back of the auditorium just kind of waiting around.

After a while it was time to go down to the cafeteria for the (non) picnic. Isaiah was already in line, so I told him to save spots for us when he sat down. He and his buddies Steven and Sam (who he went to preschool with) got a table against near the wall by themselves so there were seats for us. The lunch was school cafeteria hamburgers, an apple, a small bag of doritos, a juice ro milk, and a small cup of ice cream. The hamburgers were surprisingly good (though small) and the ice cream was not-surprisingly good. Elsie especially enjoyed the ice cream I fed to her. I asked the boys what they had learned and they did a good job of recounting several of the projects they did with details- things like making paper and a biosphere.

The program lasted till the regular time of 1 pm so I asked Isaiah if he wanted to stay or go with us.

“Where are you going,” he asked.

“Home.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Uh, nothing. We’re just going home.”

“In that case I’ll stay here.”

At home Elsie did a good job of NOT taking a nap. We were just being at home for a while when I had the idea to capitalize on our time without Isaiah to give Gideon a little extra attention. I asked him if he’d like to come sit on my lap and watch some videos on the computer with me. We ate Ritz crakcers and drank some soda while watched a few episodes of The Trap Door (snived from YouTube) and several more episodes of The Cheap Show before it was time for me to pick up Isaiah.

When we got back home I told Isaiah to sit right down and write a blog post while the science program was still fresh in his mind. He grumbled a bit, but agreed it was a good idea and sat down to work. Elsie was asleep in her play yard in the family room and Gideon was playing in the play room while Isaiah labored at the keyboard. I was sanding fins for the model rocket I am scratchbuilding on the dining room table. After Ruth had been gone a few minutes I noticed things seemed kind of quiet. I asked Isaiah if he thought some music would help him writing his post and he said he thought he would. When I asked him if he thought electro music or heavy metal would be better. He said heavy metal would be better because it’s cool, so I started up a Pandora channel and turned it up so I could hear it about ten feet away at the dining room table, but not loud enought to damage his young ears.

We were rocking out (and Isaiah was almost done with his post) when Ruth got home and asked the same question she always does when she goes shopping and we have the music on when she gets home:

“Don’t you think it’s a little loud?”

To which I invariably reply:

“What? WHAT?” while cupping my hand to my ear.

Elsie was still fast asleep and closer to the speakers than I was, so I figured it was not too loud.

After Isaiah finished his post, we took the boys to Ruth’s folks’ house while we took Elsie by the pediatrician’s office for a re-check following an appointment she’d had a while back. We had traveled several blocks when I told Ruth to get the camera out of here purse. Then, as soon as I went through the next intersection, I put on my right turn signal and pulled to the curb by a laundromat.

“What’s going on– is something wrong,” she asked.

“Nope, nothing’s wrong. Just hand me the camera, please.”

Though I find the philosophy of Ubuntu something to strive towards and am working to incorporate it into my life, it is the distribution of linux I refer to specifically when I say I have switched to it and in the remainder of this post that is what I am referring to when I use the word Ubuntu.

I live near St. Louis Missouri and am thus blessed to be within the listening radius of what many consider to be one of the best radio stations in the country and perhaps the world- the public radio station KDHX 88.1. This is both a blessing and a frustration. It is a blessing in that there is a great variety of diverse programming every day of every week. It is a frustration in that I just can’t listen to everything I want to hear.

I can’t get KDHX in my cube at work and being not only married, but the father of three children, it is just not feasible to sit down and listen to the radio whenever a good show is on. This means, that though I am familiar with the broadcast schedule of KDHX, this familiarity is largely a knowledge of what I might be listening to if I happen to be not at work and in the car when it’s on. This means I am frequently aware that something very cool is currently on the air and I’m not listening to it.

It’s also frustrating in that there is a ton of great stuff on KDHX I know my dad would love, but he lives in Arizona and although KDHX is streamed to the web, he still has dialup.

He has the perfect setup for listening to good music. His house has a nice courtyard area with an outdoor fireplace and even a small indoor bar (His place is seriously like a very small resort- ask anybody who’se been there). In fact, he often talks about sitting out in the courtyard in front of a fire with good music playing on the outdoor speakers. Everytime he mentions such an activity I wish I could get some of the good stuff KDHX broadcasts to him.

Well, thanks to my switch to Ubuntu, a good link by my friend Jay, and a bit of investigation and figuring out on my own, I have now solved both problems.

I now have mp3 files of radio programs broadcast on the Internet automatically saved to my hard drive. As long as my computer is turned on and booted into Ubuntu the shows I want will automatically be captured and saved for later listening.

I suppose I am setting myself up for hasselation and dire oppression by the RIAA making such proclamations, but to them I say you can’t get blood from a stone. Go sue some granny on a fixed income or a suburbanite mallternateen. You’ll have a better chance actually collecting a judgement from either of them than you will from me because if there were a debtor’s prison in the USA in 2008 I’d probably already be there.

Anyway, back to the cool tech stuff.

The Instructables link above that Jay sent me worked perfectly- it was flawless right off the bat. For one of the stations I wanted to record. The one that isn’t KDHX. The one that broadcasts the shows that I frequently am actually able to listen to.

The directions in the link did not work for KDHX. The reason was that the other station offers an mp3 stream which was fine with mplayer, the program instructables used. KDHX provides a stream in RealPlayer .ram format that mplayer could not handle. This was a bit of a stumper to me for a while (I am a command line old-timer, but new to the intricacies of linux audio) until I found the second link listed above which recommended the use of a program called vsound along with a program called totem that can play .ram streams. Vsound can take the audio signal that is going to the speakers and direct it to a file so that once totem is running, vsound can write the audio directly to the hard drive.

I copied the script that worked for the streaming mp3 station and changed the mplayer command to the vsound command. After a little bit of head scratching and syntax double-checking, I had it working. I could run the script, watch totem start, hear the sound, and watch the .wav file grow in my /tmp directory. Once I killed totem, I could even watch the script convert the .wav in /tmp to an mp3 in a directory on my storage drive and then delete the .wav file from /tmp.

It was a beautiful thing and I was very happy. I was happy until today when I noticed that, though running the script from the command line produced perfect results, and clicking “run now” on the etnry for the script in Kcron, a graphical user interface for cron (the linux daemon that make things happen on a schedule) produced perfect results, actually relying on cron to run the script at a set time produced no results.

The reason turned out to be that when cron ran the script, it was failing because it didn’t know where to display totem. Totem wants to pop up on the screen so you can see it while it’s playing and if it doesn’t know where to show up it dies. When I ran the script explicitly either from the command line or via kcron, totem knew to just show up on the screen since the user told it to run.

My difficulties were alleviated when I simply entered the variable DISPLAY=:0.0 at the beginning of the crontab (the text file cron uses to schedule things).

Now everything is absolutely perfect. All I have to do is remember to periodically burn some of the resultant mp3s to CDs so that I can actually send them to Arizona and so that my storage drive doesn’t fill up. Of course, my one extravagant expenditure of 2007 was $140 (you can see why I’m not afraid of the RIAA) for a 500 G hard drive so it will be a while before I run out of storage space for mp3s at 20 M / hour but once they’ve been burned to CD there’s not point keeping them around.

So I feel pretty good. Since I switched to linux I am finally able to harness the power of my computer to make it actually do something for me and I have learned a great deal about audio for linux and cron. I am now also free from the frustration of missing my favorite radio shows and able to improve the quality of my father’s life (if only in a small way) by sharing great audio entertainment with him to which he would otherwise have no access.

Open source rules, even for wannabe feebs like me.