Category: Uncategorized

My significant and I watched this blast-from-the-past, made-for-TV movie yesternight:

The Toughest Man in the World.

Fresh from his A-team success, the film features Mr. T (born Lawrence Tureaud) as Bruise Brubaker, a tough-guy bouncer with a kind heart. Enjoyed it I did, mostly because of the phenomenal stunts and heavily-cued delivery of one-of-a-kind dialog. Of my partner’s opinion I remain uncertain. She laughed a lot, so I guess that’s good. I strongly suspect that this film served as the unofficial pilot for the Mister T. animated series that my sis and I watched in the mid-eighties when we was wee.

Stop cymbal abuse!  End the cycle of violence perpetuated against these victims of unchecked heavy-handedness.

Case 1: Zildjian 15″ thin crash

The victim suffered a fate all too common for crash cymbals unfortunate enough to be sold into possession of novice drummers: stress via “wingnut overtightening”.  Tension at the cymbal’s center curtailed its full freedom of movement during stick impact and subsequent recoil.  The result: radial torsion stress fractures originating from the cymbal’s center hole–the region where the cymbal made contact with its center mounting post.  In the photograph, holes can be observed at some crack termini.   These were likely drilled to prevent crack growth in a vain attempt to extend playing life.  Unfortunately, not only did the victim lose all tonal character, several fractures continued past the drilled holes and flaking occurred between them.

Case 2: UFiP Class Series 14″ crash

Not all crash cymbals are created equal.  Some are endowed with an inherent resilience, while others falter when their proverbial (and literal) metal is tested.  The victim portrayed here was of the latter variety.  During its first call to service, a deep rift tore concentrically through the the cymbal’s mid-section after only a few hits.  Out of disgust with the victim’s weakness, its abuser continued to pound the cymbal without restraint over subsequent practices.  This continued even though the damage had already been observed.  The crash’s playing life ended when the ring fracture grew to > 2*pi/3 radians.

Case 3: Stagg 16″ medium crash

Fortunate to be owned by a comparatively experienced drummer, the victim depicted here enjoyed ample freedom to move about about its center mounting post.  Unfortunately, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link: rather than sustaining damage within, this crash failed at its extremity.  In this specimen, long, jagged fractures originated around sites of repeated stick impacts.  It has been speculated that metal thickness at the crash’s edges was insufficient to withstand the full fury of its unrestrained, and often quite overzealous, master.  It’s a shame.  In its prime before the damage, the victim produced a low, colorful  tone quite uncommon to most cymbals of its type.  True the the recurring theme of these reports, the cymbal continued to endure repeated punishment for weeks after initial signs of damage had been observed.  At the end of its protracted service life, four large flakes extricated themselves, often explosively, from the whole; usually in the direction of its band’s unsuspecting bassist.

King County Courthouse is located between 3rd and 4th streets in Downtown Seattle.   The two streets run tangent to the steep slope that separates them–consequently the courthouse entrance on 3rd street is a full floor below its exit on 4th.  If you’ve been to the downtown branch of Seattle public library, you should know what I mean.

This afternoon I attended a hearing at the courthouse.  Short and ending in my favor, my lawyers and I exited the hearing in good spirits.   We took the elevator to the familiar STAR-1 floor with intent to exit the building.  When the elevator door opened an attractive woman walked past in the direction opposite of our usual exit.  I remembered this lady from my previous court session months ago; she was an attorney for another case.  Captivated, I decided to follow her through the building to the 4th street exit–it was in the direction of my parked car after all.  I rationalized that cutting though the building’s interior should save me the effort of walking around its exterior.

Trying not to be obvious (or too creepy), I followed at some distance hoping to be inconspicuous.  I studied her curves as she swaggered down the doorless, fluorescently-lit corridor in front of me.  Elevators and a security station awaited us at the end.  I nodded to the guard as I cued an elevator to take us to ground level.

In the elevator, on reaching STAR-1, she turned toward me and spoke:  “Ugh.  It’s been a long day… Are you familiar with this building at all?”

Smiling, I replied: “No, not really.”

“There is supposed to be a Department of Licensing on one of the floors above.”

“Um,  I know there is a DMV in the building across the street.”

She smiled back at me, seemingly amused, and warmly told me to have a nice day.

When I finally made it outside, I found myself on the other side of 4th street–I had exited from the very building to which I had directed her.  The long corridor through which I followed must have been a tunnel underneath 4th street.  Nothing like revealing both my California nativity and complete disorientation in one brief statement.  In hindsight, I am grateful that she didn’t laugh (at me) out loud.

 

MySpace removed all RSS feeds from blog pages.  They also designed their pages to only display 10 posts at a time.  These subtle and strategic measures prevent application-mediated transfer of blog posts and comments to other hosts (e.g. WordPress).  That is, I could not transfer my posts from MySpace in 10 minutes the way I could from Blogger.  Instead I had to tediously cut-and-paste the HTML of each post into WordPress one at a time–a chore that cost me at least 30 hours.  And, I still have to figure out how to move comments…

I’ve got to hand it to MySpace:  despite publishing arguably one of the worst-designed and badly-coded websites on the interwebs, removing RSS feeds from their blogs was a surprisingly cunning (and predictably proprietary) move on their part.  I didn’t think they had it in them.

I am in the process of consolidating my two, somewhat parallel, blogs into this new one. Links to my earlier blogs–ones that actually contain material–are:  blogger, MySpace.

Should have this one up soon…

I have completely ignored blogging for more than a year. I’ve ignored this site for several years. Blogging was one of my few healthy activities during my drinking days. My posting became less frequent the more I nurtured my resentments. These days, my only check-ins are one sentence, third person status updates on Facebook.

Years from now, when I find this post, I’ll remember how I poured three months of my life into this project. It diverted me a bit from my thesis work. Some insist it was a waste of my time. Lazy and short-sighted they are though. I thrive on the challenge of solving problems; it is how I learn. And my appetite for learning seems only to grow as I grow older.

 

Double pendulum with ball & socket joints

 

Project keywords: rigid-body dynamics, explicit constraints, implicit constraints, constraint stabilization, Jacobian, inertia matrix, rotation matrices, singularities, non-invertible, quaternion rotation, dynamical system, 4th-order Runge-Kutta solver.

My maternal grandmother passed away last week. I am sad. She was a person who lit up each and every person she met, throughout all of her life. The world is less in her absence.

“Steely Dan does not accept friend requests from bands.”

Fuckers.

Between bars, I found myself driving three of my friend’s friends the other night.

They dug out from the backseat crack, a long-forgotten VHS cassette entitled “Prenatal Yoga with Shiva Rea”.  The cover sported a nicely-toned angelic female complete with third-trimester belly.

They laughed and laughed.  I exclaimed: “Hey at least it’s not porn.”

“Well it kind of is…” retorted one.