Swans Necking

Swans Necking
Originally uploaded by keithgraham.

I am blogging from www.flickr.com. My flickr page is:

http://www.flickr.com/kpgraham

This is very cool.

Microphone going crazy on eBay

I created a microphone with a tone control in addition to a volume control. The eBay bidding is getting crazy.

Check the auction on ebay

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Pooram Elephants

My friends, Koch and Aji, sent me some pictures of elephants at a festival near their homes in India.


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Cubicle Sweet Cubicle

I have worked in dingy offices in cubicles formed by shabby partitions for most of my life. I had my camera in my pocket when I went to work, so here are some pics.

I work in a large older building in the heart of White Plains. It was built in 1930, and is mostly designed in a Deco style, but it is built from parts from a catalog. The design elements seem to clash and have no theme or unity. The architects just picked whatever seemed to fit. The outside is Deco with Classic Revival elements and a few Victorian designs. The inside is all polished terrazzo and Deco light fixtures.
An interesting bit of synchronicity is that I took my West Point qualifying test in this building. I did well enough on the test to get a recommendation to the academy, but my glasses kept me from passing the physical.

My cubicle:

Fellow Programmer Aji:

Fellow programmer Koch:

Mysterious office worker in cubicle behind mine:


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New Weekend Pics

The flea markets are all open. I was at the first Stormville Airport flea market Sunday. I did not buy anything, although I saw an Astatic D-104 harmonica for $30.

I walked around Rockland and I happened to have my camera in my pocket. I met James White. James was playing drums the first time that I played harp with a band.

The swans have built a nest and are sitting on the eggs. It's hard to see with the cheapo HP camera, but there is a trace of white on the right of the brook. Her mate is patrolling the waters.

Microphones news

I put up one of my frankenmics made out of a Harley-Davidson tail light on eBay last night. It already has two bids on it.

Here's an interesting story about Johnny Carson's tonight show microphone.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/johnny_s_microphone

South Park Keith

There's a site that lets you create your own South Park Character. I have only watched a few South Park episodes. I can't really take it in large doses.

http://www.planearium2.de/flash/sp-studio-e.html



South Park Keith

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Cover art for Astounding Tales "best-of"

I spent an hour today producing sort-of-art by running images through the Paint Shop Pro filters. The link goes to some hefty images, some over a meg, so don't bother or be real patient if you have a dial up.

http://www.astoundingtales.com/bestof

Arthur might use one for the cover. I am also going to ask the artist who did the cover of Issue 4 if I can use one of his images, but I wanted Arthur to check these first.

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StrangeTales.net fixed up

When there was the unpleasantness with AstondingStories.com, I registered StrangeTales.net along with AstoundingTales.com as alternatives. We went with AstoundingTales.com and I've been using strangetales as a place to put some odd pieces of thought and code.

When I started redoing the AudioCD.com interface (previous post), I decided to redo the StrangeTales.net interface and use it to feature a few programming projects. I made a new piece of pseudo-art for the background and added a links. I am quite proud of it.

http://www.StrangeTales.net

Testing a new interface

I have a very pretty home page template for the new AudioCD.com. This is just a home page for the time being. It works on FireFox and IE6, but I don't know about primitive browsers. If you have an old browser (IE5, Netscape, or older AOL) please let me know how it works.

http://www.strangetales.net/acd/index.html

The background should stretch if you resize the screen and the test messages should appear and then fade away and a new message appear.

Note that none of the links work. I am testing the template, not the code.

Predictions of Astrologers

This is a story idea.

I just read where Robert Burton, an English philosopher and Novelist during the early 1600s, committed suicide for the silly reason that his astrological charts indicated that he would die on a certain day. He wanted the charts to be correct and could not suffer the humiliation of having made an erroneous prediction.

This could be incorporated into a story in several ways. You could predict someone's death and the person would comply for any number of reasons. You could predict that someone who hates astrology will live a long life and he commits suicide to prove the astrologer wrong. You can come up with variations of murder by prediction such as provide an astrologer with doctored ephemeris (tables of star positions).

It would not have to be astrology. Suppose a programmer had a program that was uncanny at predicting certain kinds of events - elections or oil prices, etc. What if the programmer began to alter the output of the program to manipulate the reaction to the predictions - kind of an information theory Heisenberg principle.

Doing Panoramas

Erica is kicking around the idea of making some money off of her fancy camera by doing some real estate shots, especially panoramas. We've been looking into it and it seems like something that we can do, leveraged by my own techno-dweeb background.

I created a little javascript program to display panoramas. This code is simple - about twenty lines of code - and works better than the stuff that you pay for. It will work on most browsers that support cascading style sheets, which is about 99%.

I went into the back yard and took 10 overlapping pictures. I then loaded them into a progam called iVista Panorama. It took about 15 minutes, but the progam did a nice job. I resized the image (it is still about 400k) and put it in a web page. You can see the watermark running along the center of the image left by the free version of the software.

You can see it at my www.paperthetown.com domain. It still has a loading problem and sometimes you have to press refresh to see the who image. I have to fix that.

weekend pics

I had a busy, if uninteresting weekend, and I have the pics to prove it.

Friday night I finally had a good poker game. I won $6, which is a big night. Here's a picture of Jim, and then later, Jim and Bob.



On Saturday, I went town to the Trenton State Computer Festival. This is the oldest computer fair and flea market in the world. I first started going to these around 1981. This one was not so interesting, but I did manage to buy a 16 meg compact flash card for a buck and some phono plugs. Here is an idea what it was like.



Sunday, I went up to the Reinbeck Flea Market, about 75 miles north of here. I didn't buy anything interesting except some quilt patterns for Erica. But the good news is that the Historic Diner in Red Hook has reopened after it had a fire this winter. The old diner is very cool and for about $10 you can get a good home cooked lunch for two.





I brought Erica's new fancy camera over to my Mother's house. My Brothers Ward and Larry are going to Amsterdam tomorrow and I wanted to talk to them before they left. Here they are:



They wouldn't hold still for a picture. They were out junking because it is cleanup week and were unloading their cache of gold and treasure form the car.

Here are some pictures of my Mom and the house.



I grew up here at 21 Vine Street, Central Nyack, NY. (They renumbered it to 19 a few years ago.)


That's my old room - the left window on the second floor.


Mom made me take another picture of her in front of the flowers because the porch was covered with treasure from junking.



This is a picture of Zack, Mom and Larry's cat. Zack is the world's nicest cat. He loves to sit on your lap and just loves attention. Zack has cancer, but he's on chemo and is doing very well.



It was just a boring weekend. I put about 300 miles on the car and have very little to show for it, but at least I filled up the time. Erica and I finally finished Night over Water by Ken Follet, the book on tape we've been listening to.

I just got back from doing some junking myself and I got a Paul Butterfield LP, a BBQ Bob and the Spare Ribs tape, and Angela's Ashes and Hiroshima books on tape.

Cat Nights

Space.com had a nice article about Cat Nights and feline constellations. Their lead off paragraph, however is a great idea for a short story.

Not too many people are aware of the term "Cat Nights," which goes back to the days when people believed in witches. Old Irish legends have it that a witch could turn herself into a black cat eight times, but on the ninth time she couldn’t change back. Supposedly, this is where we get the saying, "A cat has nine lives."

Garden Gnome story idea

I've often thought that there has to be a good story in ceramic garden gnomes. The story would be a variation on a fairy tale, told in modern times with garden gnomes coming to life and doing good or evil.

So now - truth is stranger than fiction - the real story is written for us.

Read CNN gnome story

Jean Collop was woken early on Tuesday morning by the sound of an intruder on the roof of her home in Wadebridge, southwest England.

"I grabbed the first thing that came to hand -- one of my garden gnomes -- and hurled it at him, and hit him," she recalled.


I love it!

I also like the use of the word woken. Coming from the Hudson Valley and being descended from the Dutch settlers, germanic variations on some common English words are part of my vocabulary, but I have to careful not to use get or got in the perfect tenses or verb forms ending in en or on because they sound strange to people outside the region.

New Word - Politikverdrossenheit

Politikverdrossenheit - contempt for the political establishment.

The German language allows for making new words by concatenating existing words. In English, we just have phrases that are often repeated. New German words, though, have a certain appeal in that they usually encapsulate an idea much better than a phrase.

As an English speaker, words like Schadenfreude, Weltschmerz, Zeitgeist, and Realpolitik (German nouns are capitalized) seem more precise in meaning, because they do not depend on the use of familiar ordinary words.

John Ballard sent me this word - thanks, John.

An Incident on Hook Mountain

A friend of mine, Tommy, had a horrible experience that I am considering turning into a story.

Tommy used to be a heavy drug user. One night, while on a binge, he met a man at a bar in Nyack. They went outside and smoked a joint and the guy said he had some good stuff in his car. They went to his car and he drove to the dirt road at the top of Hook Mountain and went in about 20 yards.

The guy turned off the lights in the car and opened the glove compartment, and pulled out a pistol. He turned it towards Tommy and smiled.

Tommy, who had one hand on the door latch, just in case, leaned back and fell out onto the dirt road just as a shot was fired. He rolled as he hit the ground and went down the cliff on that side of the mountain. He tumbled down about 100 feet until the underbrush stopped him. The man got out of the car and started firing into the darkness, but Tommy held still until the guy left.

Tommy walked down the side of the mountain, through the convent at the bottom of the mountain and up Middletown road to the hospital where the put a bandage on the bullet wound in his neck. Luckily it was a small caliber gun and didn’t hit a large artery.

It was a long time before Tommy gave up drugs, but he counts this incident as the one that led him to eventual sobriety.

Geek Alert! Geekspeak follows

I’ve written a links page in PHP and MySQL. www.harplinks.com. I did this in three days, although I have been tweaking for a few days since it went live.

The page is entirely generated from a couple of thousand harmonica links that I’ve snatched off of the internet at various times. It is better than a search engine because you can rate links and report dead links and it keeps track of the most popular links.

I’ve also made the code generic in that I can configure it for new web pages.

I am looking to make an aviation links page and a pain-relief links page. T

Well, I think it’s cool, even if no one else does.

Synchronicity

Synchronicity!

On these pages, I often write about my experiences in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These were turbulent times for me. I had discovered that I like to write and I had a real feel for it. I also discovered, as they say, sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. It was during these years that I met Erica and married her. I had my experiences with LSD, mescaline, hash and pot. I fell in love with blues, especially blues harmonica. I went to several colleges and was expelled from a couple. My life seems to have turned on a fine point in late December of 1968. It was then that I wrote the Albums - 4 collections of poems, stories and essays. These are still the high point of my writing life. I think that this is when I really considered myself a writer.

The years before these times were prelude and the years afterward were mostly dull days in labor at jobs that I didn't like.

The Beatles record, Abbey Road, was released late in 1968. I went with my friend, Randy Carnefix, to a house in Nyack where he thought that we might be able to hear it. The house was the notorious Russell house on Sixth Avenue. The Russell's were beatniks and were well known in intellectual circles in the Hudson Valley. Their son, Stuart, was also infamous, but as a heavy drug user.

Randy and I went into the house and up to the attic. There was a room there that had been occupied by an artist. The walls and ceilings were painted with a Hieronymus Bosch-like mural on the walls. The background was black paint and it seemed to show tiny souls in hell or heaven as flames with human shapes. There were holes in the walls where the owner had attacked his creations during a bad LSD trip. The artist was in Canada to avoid the draft, so Randy and I used his hi-fi equipment.

WNEW-FM in New York City was playing Abbey Road from beginning to end without commercial break. This was the first time that I heard the album and I was blown away by the cliff hanger ending at the end of I Want You (She's so Heavy).

When Abbey Road ended, the DJ just started it over again. I think I listened to it three or four times that night.

Randy and I went downstairs later that night and discovered that there was a wedding going on in the dining room. A Nyack High School football hero from the class a year ahead of me was getting married to a young woman dressed in an antique wedding gown. They were getting married at the Russell's because she was white and he was black. Interracial marriages were much less common then than they are now. Nyack has always been a liberal town, but I doubt if any of the churches would have allowed the marriage, back then.

Here is the synchronicity part. The young woman, who got married that night, is now the roommate of my mother's best friend. She heard that I knew about computers and eBay and wanted me to sell her son's sports memorabilia. Her son (she was pregnant with him that night in 1968) was a drug dealer who died recently as a result of his dangerous profession. She did not know me and I did not know her, but after a few minutes discussion, it was discovered that our worlds overlapped briefly back then,

I don't have time or the inclination to sell her stuff on eBay. I have a feeling that this is a very bad idea and I cannot profit from it in any way. People think that their stuff is gold and most often is just dross. Selling her son's treasures can only be a disappointment for her. I feel that a drug user would have parted with anything of value long before his death. I don't want to be the one to disappoint her.

Randy Carnefix moved to California and had a child named Oak. I haven't seen him in thirty years, although Larry claims to have seen him from across the street in Nyack about ten years ago.

Stuart Russell died of a drug overdose and the house is now yuppy-fied with new owners. I am guessing that the elder Russells are long dead because they were old (to my young eyes) in 1968.

My friends from this time are scattered far and wide and I don't hear from them much - except for Jimmy Callan, who still lives in the same house in Upper Nyack. I'll be playing poker with him this Friday night. Anyone want to play? It's only a $6 buy in! The other night we listened to Abbey Road on vinyl.

Kind Words

I do what I do because I like doing it. Often I am asked to make a microphone, amp, web page, or program for cash and I usually won't do it. My standard response is, I do this stuff for my own pleasure. If I did it for pay, I'd have to find a new job. I'd like to say that I do things for the glory, but lately there has been precious little glory.

Over the weekend, I received a couple of nice ego boosts.

First, in a comment left on one of my websites, a reader praised what he said was good writing in one of my articles about blues. Here's what I had written that prompted the comment:

Blues is a back porch, fish fry style of music to be played by and with friends. Blues is the music of a people who can't afford to go to Bruce Springsteen concerts, or buy the latest Madonna CD. All you need is three chords, some beer, and good friends, and you have your own blues concert.

The reader left the comment "Nice Writing!" It was very kind of the annoymous reader to take the time to say something nice.

Next, in the latest edition of AlienSkin Magazine, the editors made kind comments about Arthur Sanchez and the Astounding Tales website. Here's what they said:

AlienSkin would like to congratulate Arthur Sánchez on his latest endeavor, as editor-in-chief of his new online magazine, Astounding Tales. It's published on a quarterly basis. Several of us staffers took a look-see around the site, and read a few of the stories. We found the site to be very well laid out, easy to navigate, and quite easy on the eyes. And Mr. Sánchez, of course, has impeccable taste and chose some wonderful stories to delight his readers. And we were indeed delighted.
Way to Go, Arthur! Much success to you!
Mr. Sánchez also has a story appearing in this issue of AlienSkin, entitled, A True Being, which is being featured as one of our Spring Specials.

I know that they don't mention me, but when you read that the site is nicely laid out and easy on the eyes, that's me. I am quite proud of the mention, even if it is not by name.

Audio Review - Legends by the Masters of Fantasy (volume 1)

This is another bargain book on tape from BookCloseouts.com. It cost me $8.99, but the list price was $25.

This tape is two novelettes of about 90 minutes each. The first is The Little Sisters of Eluria by Stephen King and the second is The Seventh Shrine by Robert Silverberg, who is also the Legends of the Masters series editor. The title of the series is Legends by the Masters, but it makes no claim that any of these are actually good stories.

The Stephen King story is from his Dark Tower stories. There is a preface by Stephen King claiming that the story stands alone, which it does.

The Little Sisters of Aluria drops the reader down in the middle of a journey with the enigmatic gunslinger. It progresses through a series of events and concludes with the gunslinger continuing on his way without ever doing much of anything. Each event appears to be as much a surprise to the author as to the reader. King is a master at stringing together events to create a story, but I am sure that he wrote this story one day without any idea where it would end, other than the hero walking on to his next adventure. Each event is encountered without reason or foreshadowing. King strings these events into a story by force of personality. The little sisters command some kind of medical bugs, but by the end, it seems, they may be constructed of the bugs - it is not quite clear. There is a dog with a cross on his chest in the first scene, which appears in a later scene and kills a sister, but it is not clear why. There is a gold medallion that the sisters are afraid of, but the reason is not explored. The sisters drink blood, but they are not vampires, they just like it. The story is just a bunch of King-ian horror elements, stirred well and presented in the context of the Dark Tower narrative.

Robert Silverberg had a big hit with Lord Valentine's Castle. It was a Novel where Weltschöpfung (World Creation) is an important part of the book. (I love to use those academic sounding German words.) The world that Silverberg created was called Majipoor. Lord Valentine's Castle was the engaging story of a street juggler who is really a usurped emperor of Majipoor. He must regain his memory, and fight a war where dreams are the weapons. It was good stuff.

Less good, were the books Valentine Pontifex and The Majipoor Chronicles. I've read them both and they held my interest because the first book was so powerful. The Seventh Shrine is a story from one of the later books. It is full of explanations of who Valentine is, the politics of Majipoor, and the plots inherited from the previous books. This slows the story down. The Seventh Shrine is basically a murder mystery where all the red herrings come from the long exposition of old history. Even though I did not remember who the murderer was, I found my mind wondering and twice I had to rewind the tape a few minutes because I was not listening.

The production was well done. The readers were competent, if not memorable. For some reason, the book production editors think that synthesized music is just what audio book buyers want. Always hate any music that is not performed by real musicians, please!

Despite the poor quality of the stories, I will move on and try another in this series. There are two more volumes at BookCloseouts.com and I think there are a total of five in the series. Perhaps the next set of tapes will be better.

Erica's new camera

Erica did quite a bit of research and found that the Nikon DK-70 is, for the money, the best camera for someone like her - a beginner trying to learn photography. So far, she is studying the manual and taking a course in photography. In the mean time, I am taking the pictures. I set it on Auto Mode and started snapping pictures. Today, a rainy cold day in April, I put on the the telephoto lense and took some pictures in the back yard. Then, I carried it with me on our walk around Rockland Lake. As you can tell the pictures are very much better than the old HP camera that I have been using.

Here are some pics:



What would this blog be without a closeup of Gracie.



Max was sculking about.









Our yard is an official backyard habitat.


Now on to wildlife at Rockland Lake.

















It started raining when we where about halfway around the lake; cold rain, with frozen drops of ice in it. Here are some cold people walking with us.


The last picture that I took of a robin, it was just blur. With the telephoto lense, I got this picture of a female Robin, swollen with her unlaid eggs. The camera is too smart. It focused on the branches in the foreground and the robin is slightly out of focus.

Cat and Mouse

Gracie and Ollie each caught a mouse today. The lack of a heating system has upset the balance of nature. Either the cold house or the heat of the wood stove has forced the mice that have been surreptitiously living in the walls and under the fridge to show themselves.

Jed Hartman wrote extensively about finding a humane mousetrap, and being afraid to touch the mouse (see Jed's blog lorem ipsum). I, on the other hand, have vicious little cats who torture the mice before they die. I feel for the mice, but I know enough not to try and rescue them. I don’t really worry about the mice and the cats get so much pleasure out of it.