Jim’s Random Notes

Flat plane carving is a style of figire carving that uses large flat planes to create features.  Tool marks are left in the carving and there is no smoothing or rounding.  The idea is to create the figure using very deliberate cuts.  The resulting figures are typically caricatures with exaggerated features.

Gene Messer, the carver whose YouTube videos I keep linking to, is a flat plane carver, and he has quite a few character carving videos online.  He also has a couple of picture tutorials on the Woodcarving Illustrated message board.  I decided to give it a shot.  First with this bust:

That figure is about 4 inches tall and about 1-3/4 inches square.  The tutorial video used a different sized block, and included legs and feet.  I probably should have waited until I had a block of wood the right size, but I’m pretty happy with the way this one turned out.  Even if I did make plenty of mistakes.

My latest figure is from one of Gene’s picture tutorials.  The wood blank is 3-1/2″ tall and 1″ square.  I think I did much better with this little guy.

Granted, I still have a lot to learn.  But I’m surprised at how relatively few cuts it takes to make a recognizable character.  And there is a lot of room for improvisation here.  I can see where just concentrating on these little guys could keep me very busy.

Web video is all the rage these days, with seemingly everybody getting into the action.  The 900 pound gorilla, of course, is YouTube.  Estimates of YouTube’s size vary from 100 million to 250 million videos.   My suspicion is that it’s towards the top end of that range.  But even 100 million videos is more than all the other providers combined.

Yes, there are video sites other than YouTube.  And, no, they’re not all porn sites, although there certainly is a healthy number of those.  Other video sites include Vimeo, CNN, ESPN, LiveLeak, Fox News, Hulu, MTV, Newsweek, YouKu, and at least two dozen more that I’m too lazy to list.  All the major networks have video sites.  Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, and even Google have videos.  Yes, Google video competes with YouTube.  Video is big.

Sorry.  You’ll have to locate the porn sites yourself if you’re so inclined.

That’s a Good Thing.  Except …  Except that every site has its own video player.  In order to play a video on the Web, you have to download the player and then stream the video through it.  It reminds me of the early days of video stores, when you had to rent a movie and a VCR.  Will that be VHS or Beta?.

Users don’t see this as a problem.  Yet.  Considering that many users see YouTube as the only place for video on the web, that’s no surprise.  But Web developers who want to embed videos from many different sources notice this problem in a big way.  Every player requires different embed code.  Every player looks different, with controls in different places and sometimes garish branding so that you know, without any doubt, where that video came from.  Some players have a JavaScript API that lets the embedding page control it, and others don’t.

The result is a horrible mishmash of wonky controls and hacked Web pages trying to get embedded video to work well.  Developers have to choose between excluding a particular video source, or including it with the understanding that those videos will look and work differently, and possibly cause their pages to crash, hang, or otherwise misbehave.  We don’t have just two formats to worry about, but 30 or more.  And for each one we have to know the magic incantation for obtaining the player, displaying it in a Web page, making it play a video and, if we’re lucky, controlling playback with a common set of user controls.  It’s maddening.

As it stands now, playing a video in a Web page is a heavyweight operation.  Web video is exploding, and this problem will only get worse unless the major players get together and standardize on a single video player.  Or at least a standard for embedded video player behavior and a standard API so that developers can concentrate on delivering the content that video providers want us to deliver.

And therein lies the problem.  It’s almost a certainty that YouTube will thumb its nose at the crowd and go its own way.  If we were extremely lucky YouTube would make their player available to the community, but that’s highly unlikely.  The better and more likely (although still not very likely) option is that the second tier of providers get together and create a standard.  Then, at least, developers would only have to worry about two players:  YouTube and everybody else.

I honestly don’t know what to expect here.  If my experience with MP3 music files on the Web is any indication, I probably shouldn’t hope for too much.  Although it’s true that the vast majority (well over 90%, based on six months’ crawling for different formats) of audio on the Web is MP3, there’s no standard player for streaming, and no standard API for controlling the disparate players.  And don’t even get me started on the pain of playing naked MP3 files.  Video will be much bigger than Web audio ever was.  I shudder at the thought of trying to handle 300 different providers rather than just the few dozen we have now.

In Windows Explorer, double-clicking on a folder name in the list pane opens that folder so you can view its files.  This is nothing new.  Over the years I have become accustomed to double-clicking and having that folder’s files appear in the list pane.  Life is good.

Well, life was good.  For reasons unknown, many of my servers now are opening a new window whenever I double-click on a folder.  This is exceedingly odd.  I have not changed any settings, and nobody else here logs in to those servers except to check on status.  Even so, I can’t imagine that they would modify Explorer’s behavior.

When it comes to that, I don’t see a setting anywhere that says whether it should open a new window or open in the same window.  The View settings in Tools->Folder Options doesn’t have a setting for this.  Oddly, if I right-click and then select “Explore” (the default), it opens in the same window, which is what it’s supposed to do when I double-click.  Selecting “Open” opens a new window.

Later:  I just installed the latest Windows Server 2008 Service Pack on one of the servers in question.  Problem gone.  Weird.

Even later: Reader Roy Harvey notes that the setting is on the General tab of Tools -> Folder Options, labeled “Open each folder in the same window.”  On my servers that still exhibit the problem, that radio button is checked.  There’s a bug in Expl0rer somewhere that’s fixed by installing the latest service pack.

So after five days working with Facebook, I’m mostly impressed.  I have a few minor nits with the user interface, but it may be that they want the UI to be somewhat mysterious.  I think they want you to explore, and if things are just a little bit wonky, you’ll be more apt to wander around blindly and stumble into things that you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

The other day I was seriously impressed with the ease of building and maintaining a photo album.  But today I’m having the weirdest problem adding a picture to an existing album.  This picture won’t upload:

I realize that it’s not the greatest thing ever carved, but somehow I don’t think that’s the reason Facebook is rejecting it.  Their Java-based file uploader happily reports, “File upload successful!”  But the picture never appears in my album.  The “simple file uploader” fails with this message:

File bamboo.jpg: This error occurred because either the photo was a size we don’t support or there was a problem with the image file.

Granted, the size is a little bit odd (192 x 582), but there are other odd-sized files in that album.  I’ve tried resizing the picture, changing it to a .png file, renaming it, etc.  All to no avail.  Facebook simply will not accept this photo.

On a related note, Facebook is not working well with my new Firefox 3.0.11 update.  I’ve had one hang, one unexplained disappearance (Firefox just exited), and some pretty bizarre behavior.  I wonder what’s going on.

Update 2009/06/29

 I played with it a bit more, resizing the image, saving it with different photo editor programs, and even changing the color as one commenter suggested in order to get past a possibly over-Freudian image filter.  Nothing worked.  I finally ended up using the entire picture that includes some background (wires and other junk on my desk) in addition to the carving.  That worked.  I don’t know why.

I resisted the whole social networking thing for a long time, mostly due to preconceived notions.  In the past, I was a member of many different social networks:  bulletin boards, Compuserve forums, etc.  The explosion of users that came with the rapid Internet expansion lowered barriers to entry and reduced the value of those forums.  The signal to noise ratio became so low as to make them useless.

Anyway, seeing as how we’re building social features into our product, it seems like I should get acquainted.  Since the other guys at the office are members of Facebook, as are a number of my friends, I figured I’d sign up.

So what do I think, after just a few days?  Facebook is definitely a Good Thing.  I enjoy being able to post quick updates to let people know what I’m up to, and I like seeing what’s happening in their worlds, too.  And, I’ve connected with a few people who I hadn’t heard from in 25 years or more.  I can see where Facebook or something like it could become an essential tool for keeping up with friends and family.

I was getting tired of the bears and little trinkets, so I thought I’d learn how to carve something else.  Since I liked that 5-Minute Bear tutorial so much, I figured I’d take a crack at the 5-Minute Wizard:

The blank is a piece of basswood, six inches long and one inch square. I thought they’d make nice tree ornaments, but six inches is pretty big. I think four inches would make a better ornament.

The day after I carved the third wizard there, I picked up a branch in the yard and carved this:

The wood is from one of the Red-Tipped Photinia bushes that are at the south side of the pool.  It carved fairly nicely when it was green.  I’ve put some up to dry.  Guess I’ll find out next year how well it carves once it’s seasoned.

I had hoped to follow along with Allen Goodman’s Shelf Elf video series, but didn’t have a basswood block of appropriate size.  I did, however, have a somewhat smaller piece and an idea.  Thus was born the shelf wizard:

The picture is a bit blurry, I know.  The wizard is designed to sit on a shelf, with his beard hanging over.  The piece is a little less than three inches from tip of beard to top of head.

I have been carving quite a bit, actually, but haven’t taken the time to post anything here.  I carved quite a few of those little bears while I was in Phoenix, and a few other things, as well.  Here are a few of my miscellaneous doodles.  You can click on any of the pictures below to see the full size image.

I carved this letter opener from a piece of mesquite that I picked up in Phoenix.  After sanding, I put a line of super glue on the edge and sanded it again.  It works really well.  The blade is about 2-1/2 inches long.

This, too, is a letter opener.  It’s 8 inches long, with the handle and blade being of equal size.  The wood is called Indian Rosewood (Dalbergia Sissoo), again from the Phoenix area.  After sanding, I gave it a light coat of mineral oil to bring out the grain.  I like the way it looks, but it doesn’t open letters very well.

The … whatever it is, above, started out as a branch from an oak tree here that didn’t survive last year’s drought.  I had intended to carve one of my little bears, but the wood is so hard that I became frustrated.  It’s kind of cute, but mostly a very good reminder of just how hard it is to carve oak.  The piece is 3 inches tall and about 1.25 inches in diameter.

This little doodle is another piece of Indian Rosewood.  I started just whittling a relief that curved around to capture each knot on the branch.  Somewhere along the line I got the idea to try making a corkscrew.  Nothing more than a curiousity, really.

I carved all of the above pieces with my Buck pocket knife.  There’s nothing real special about the knife other than it’s quite a bit sharper now than when I bought it.

I know these pieces aren’t exactly high art, but working on them did keep me amused and occupied during a particularly difficult period.

We’ve all experienced it, the anger and frustration that ensues when we try to open one of those clamshell packages that contain whatever new geegaw we picked up.  You can’t open it with your bare hands.  Normal office scissors are ineffective.  If you’re lucky you can puncture that plastic armor with your pocketknife, and if you’re lucky you won’t cut yourself with the blade or with the packaging itself.

The term for these feelings is wrap rage.  Consumer Reports officially recognized the phenomenon in 2006 when it created the Oyster Awards for products that are particularly hard to open.

It’s so comforting to know that I’m not alone.  A YouTube search for “wrap rage” results in almost 100 hits, including local television news stories, product demonstrations, and parodies of all sorts.  It’s the product demonstrations that amuse me more than anything else.  Some resourceful entrepreneurs who experienced wrap rage themselves decided to make a buck.  There are dozens of different devices designed to simplify the process of opening the clamshells.  Millions of units have been sold.

Amusingly, some of those devices are themselves distributed in clamshell packages, resulting in something of a chicken-and-egg problem.

The reason for this type of packaging is apparently theft deterrence.  If things are that hard to open, it’s unlikely that a thief will be able to remove small items from oversized packages and slip them into a purse or pocket.  I suppose it works, but at what cost?  Large retailers like Target and Wal-Mart are willing to annoy and inconvenience their customers with these packages rather than come up with a less intrusive way to deter shoplifting.

I have to admit that I’m surprised by the almost complete lack of outcry by the environmental movement regarding these packages.  Small items, especially, are often surrounded by many times their weight in protective plastic–plastic that more often than not ends up in landfills because even dedicated recyclers often don’t know whether the clamshell packaging is recyclable.  Environmentalist groups boycotted Big Macs back when they came in Styrofoam containers.  But clamshell packages?  I hear crickets.

I’m also surprised that, as much as people complain about these packages (and I don’t know anybody who extols their virtues), there hasn’t been a huge revolt by consumers.  Why aren’t there more people (or more vocal people) agitating for the abolition of this unfriendly, environmentally harmful, and dangerous to open packaging?  Again with the crickets.

After fighting one time too many with opening an armor plastic package to get at something that I found wasn’t worth all the effort, I will now make a concerted effort to avoid those packages whenever possible.  I’m done risking life and limb to open things.  If retailers want to sell me stuff, they’ll have to make it convenient for me to buy and to open.

I use Horde for my web-based email here at mischel.com.  Not because I particularly like it, but because it’s the best of the three options I’m given by my ISP.  The other two options are Squirrel Mail (aptly tagged “Webmail for Nuts!” because you’d have to be nuts to use it), and the interestingly named RoundCube Webmail, which is two oxymorons in one.  Not that Horde is so much better.  It’s just the best of three bad options.  To date, it hasn’t aggravated me enough to make me want to go to the trouble of switching.

Tonight I went searching in my Trash folder for a message.  Since their search function is, to be kind, somewhat lacking, I figured I could more easily find the message by sorting the folder by the From field.  Then just scroll down to the ‘M’s, (the message in question was from my sister Marie) and locate it.  So I sorted, scrolled down, and … there were no messages from Marie!  Where are they?  Why, they’re sorted further down with the ‘O’s, of course, because her email address starts with ‘O’.

That’s just stupid.  I could maybe understand it if the program showed me the email addresses in the From field, but it doesn’t.  It shows me the name.  So what I have is a list that’s sorted by email address, but shown in what appears to be random order.  You want a sample?  How about the following?  The first column shows the names as they appear in the list when I sort by the From field.  The second column shows the email addresses, which aren’t shown in the user interface.

I think you get the idea.  If you’re searching for that email from Amazon, are you going to look for it with the rest of the ‘A’s, or with the ‘M’s?

(Spammers and email harvester bots, please pick up those email addresses and spam the hell out of them.  They do it to me.)

Is there any wonder that people think computers are confusing?  What moron decided that sorting by email address and displaying the name would be a reasonable user interface?  Whoever designed and implemented that should be sentenced to three months working with Microsoft’s Business Desk, as well as a boot camp like refresher course in user interface design.

The really odd part is that sorting things the way they did it is more work than doing it the way that makes sense.  The From field in an email address appears in one of two ways:  either it’s a naked email address (jim@mischel.com), or it’s a name followed by an email address in brackets (Jim Mischel <jim@mischel.com>).  A simple sort by the From field would have placed things in the proper order:  by name if there is one, otherwise by email address.  To sort the wrong way, they had to parse the From field, extract the email addresses, and then sort.

More work to produce less useful output.  Yeah, that’s a good idea.

Idiots.

I’ve had enough.  I’m looking for a better email solution.  It has to be web-based, and it has to let me keep my current email address.  Oh, and the interface has to be at least as good as Yahoo’s.  (And I’d rather not use Yahoo for my email because it does stupid things.)  Preferably, I can keep my current ISP and either change the DNS entry for mail, or I can have the other mail provider reach to my ISP and get the mail.  Either way, I have to free my email from the Hordes.  Suggestions?

I still have a hard time referring to the new crop of mass storage devices as “flash drives.” The “flash” part is correct, seeing as they’re built with flash memory, but the “drive” part is just … wrong. There aren’t any moving parts. It’s like referring to “dialing” a telephone. Or the telephone “ringing.” You don’t hear that good ol’ Ma Bell … bell … anymore.

In any case, solid state storage has come a very long way in the two years since I last talked about it.  You no longer have to build your own device from parts cobbled together.  Today you can get flash “drives” in the 2.5″ form factor with capacities up to 512 gigabytes.  That’s right, half a terabyte of solid state storage.  Granted, the 512 GB units are ridiculously expensive, but the 128 GB units are pretty reasonable.  We just got one in the office for about $300, delivered.  That’s expensive compared to conventional storage ($2.35 per gigabyte compared to 10 cents per gigabyte), but it’s still an incredible deal.  It’s less than you would have paid for a 128 gigabyte hard drive five years ago.

The new crop of solid state storage devices really is worth taking a look at.  The one we got (G.Skill Falcon), claims throughput of 230 MB/sec on read and 190 MB/sec on write.  In initial tests, we were able to sustain very close to the 230 MB/sec read rate, and our sustained write rate was close to 150 MB/sec.  That’s about three times as fast as we can read a convential hard drive, and four times as fast as we can write.  We won’t be replacing all of our hard drives with these units, but we certainly can use the speed in a couple of critical I/O-bound applications.

Earlier generations of these solid state storage devices had some interesting limitations.  The first generation units were almost universally slower than or, at best, just a little faster than conventional hard drives.  Many of them also used more power than a spinning hard drive.  And some were just unreliable.  Things have improved quite a bit.  Hard drive manufacturers have gotten power consumption down to the 6 or 7 watts range, but that’s still 50% more than the 4 watts or so that the SSDs are taking.

The cost per gigabyte is huge and even a 200% performance increase doesn’t justify that price for the normal user.  But imagine you’re a developer with a laptop computer that has the typical slow laptop hard drive.  A lot of my development tools are I/O bound on my laptop.  Just try starting up Visual Studio some time.  Tripling the I/O throughput could very well greatly improve the development experience on that machine.  That would be $300 well spent.

There are other advantages of SSDs besides the performance boost, but again they won’t justify the cost increase for the average user.  The reduced power consumption mentioned above is less of a benefit than you might think because the hard drive takes relatively little power when compared to the CPU, RAM, and display.  Still, any little bit helps by reducing generated heat and increasing battery life.  Shock resistance and temperature tolerance are much higher on the SSDs, and since there are no moving parts the thing is absolutely silent.  It seems that the lack of moving parts would make the thing more reliable, too, but it’s hard to say.  I don’t know if I can believe the 500,000 hour (57  year) MTBF that hard drive manufacturers claim, much less the 1.5 million hours claimed by the SSDs.

One of my coworkers pointed out that the SSD or something similar is essential to private pilots who are flying unpressurized aircraft over 10,000 feet.  Modern avionics packages often include computers that display moving maps and download real time weather data.  That data has to be stored somewhere, and a conventional hard drive becomes unreliable at high altitude because  there isn’t enough air to float the head over the platter.  Considering what avionics packages cost, an additional $300 for an SSD wouldn’t even be noticed.

I wouldn’t recommend the SSDs for normal users, simply because of the high cost per gigabyte.  But if you need a relatively inexpensive way to increase your I/O throughput, if your computer has to run in areas that are outside a conventional hard drive’s operating environment, or if you just want to have the latest geeky toy, then by all means pick one of these up.

A while back, a wind storm tore a branch from one of our elm trees.  Figuring it’d make good fodder for my new found carving hobby, I trimmed it, stripped the bark, and put it up in the rafters of my garage to dry.  All except for one piece:

I knew immediately what I wanted to make from it, but I left it sitting on my desk for months because I was afraid I’d mess it up.  Last week I cut most of the jagged end off with my coping saw, and started carving.

The resulting piece is just under 6 inches long from toe to heel.  It’s not perfect, but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.  I did all the carving with a utility knife (box cutter) and my pocket knife.  For finish, I just sanded it and then let it soak in mineral oil overnight.

More pictures in the gallery.

Kameeke got her name from the little boy next door whose attempt to say “come here, kitty” sounded like “ka mee kee.”  Debra acquired the cat in early June of 1989, about two months before we met.

Kameeke had been a part of our lives from the first time I went to pick Debra up for a date.  Debra showed me in and asked me to sit for a few minutes while she finished getting ready to go.  She said that the dog (Sandy) didn’t like men very much and would probably be standoffish.  The cat, she said, was unlikely to appear, as she always hid when company came over.

When Debra came back downstairs after about five minutes, the dog was plastered against my leg on the couch, and Kameeke was curled up in my lap, purring.  When she saw that, Debra says, she figured I couldn’t be all bad.  If the cat and dog liked me, there must be something good about me.

Kameeke wasn’t a hugely affectionate cat.  She’d come by now and then for some loving, but then would hop down and go off to her corner.  She liked being in the same room as the rest of the family, but didn’t need to be reassured every moment.  That suited me just fine, as I don’t think I could handle having a cat lying on my chest and drooling on my face all the time.  A few minutes here and there was quite sufficient.

Kameeke carried her age well.  She started slowing down, of course, but she’d still tear through the house from time to time, and she never lost her fascination with string.  It was only just recently that the years started catching up with her.  At some point we realized that “cure” wasn’t an option, and when it became evident that all of our efforts were just prolonging her suffering, we acknowledged that it was time to let her go.

We’re richer from having known her for 20 years: countless smiles, some real belly laughs, and most importantly the love she showed when she crawled up and asked to be petted while she purred.  We’ll miss having her, but will always remember.

Rest well, Kameeke.

It’s been a long trip—about two weeks longer than we expected it to be.  But that’s the way these things go sometimes.  Debra’s dad was in the hospital, in a rehab facility, in ICU after a procedure called kyphoplasty, and finally in a hospice facility where he’ll likely stay.

To say that it’s been a difficult time would be an understatement.  One of the most difficult parts has been dealing with bureaucracy.  So much so that I have said, more times than I care to remember, “The wheels of bureaucracy grind you under very slowly.”

I often release tension by blogging, but I don’t feel quite comfortable detailing what all we’ve been through in the last three weeks.  Perhaps some time from now, when emotions aren’t quite so high and I can reflect on things a bit more clearly.

One thing I’d like to mention, though, is that the ICU nurses do a very difficult and demanding job, sometimes while having to deal with uncooperative or even abusive patients and family members.  And yet they go about their tasks competently and seem to always have a smile.  I was so impressed with their work that I carved them a little bear in recognition of their efforts.

I don’t suppose the nurses are terribly impressed with my carving skill, but they seemed to appreciate the acknowledgment.

It’s 9:30 PM on Friday in Phoenix.  Debra and I will be on the road by 6:00 AM.  From where we are in the West Valley, it’s about 1,100 miles to home.  Figure 17 or 18 hours.  Tomorrow is going to be a long day.

The New York Pizza Department in Goodyear, AZ serves the best pizza I’ve had the privilege of enjoying in a very long time.  Of course, it takes 20 or 30 minutes to get the pizza once you order it, and it ain’t cheap.  But it’s good.  Debra especially liked the white pizza:  ricotta cheese, fresh tomatoes, fresh spinach, garlic, and mozzarella.  My pepperoni and sausage with fresh basil was quite good, too.  Highly recommended.

Debra saw a beer called Four Peaks Kiltlifter on the drink menu there at NYPD.  Always willing to try a new beer, I ordered one.  What a delight!  This beer has some very good flavor.  A little sweet, and a smoky flavor that at first reminds you of baker’s chocolate.  At 6% alcohol you probably don’t want to have more than two of them in a short period.  We’re going to buy at least a sixpack of this stuff to take home.  Maybe I can figure out how to duplicate it.  Again, highly recommended.

Another beer I recommend is Red Hook ESB.  It’s a lot more popular now than when I last had it several years ago, but it’s as good as I remember it.

There’s a Black Bear Diner here, just across the parking lot from the hotel.  Debra and I have eaten there three times now, enjoying our 10% hotel guest discount.  The service is definitely better than what you’ll get at the big chain pancake places, and the food is very good.  My only gripe is that the portions are huge.  Even the “smaller” portions are more than I normally eat in a single meal.  I don’t know that I’d go out of my way to find a Black Bear, but if there’s one nearby when I’m hungry, they’ll get my business.

I don’t claim to be a great user interface designer, but I’ve designed a few programs that people have found useful.  And, like many computer users, I know a bad design when I have to struggle with one.  And, like users of other devices, we know when the interface is cumbersome.  It’s a sad thing, really, that we often don’t recognize good designs, but rather just the flawed ones.

The motel room here in Goodyear is nice enough, but it has some oddities, one of which is particularly annoying.  First, the room layout.

As you can see, the room was designed to accept two beds, but this one is fitted with a bed and a fold-out couch.  That’s all well and good and, as I said, it’s comfortable enough.   But putting the bed right next to the HVAC unit wasn’t such a good move.  The bed should be over where the couch is.  That would make entry into the room much less cluttered, and would allow air from the HVAC unit to circulate better.

The room also includes a writing table on the other wall, along with a dresser with a TV and a refrigerator/microwave stand.

It’s actually a pretty nice table with enough space for me to put my laptop and work reasonably comfortably.  Except for one thing:  it’s too high.  The table top is 32 or 33 inches from the floor.  Standard desk height is 29 to 30 inches.  That extra two or three inches makes a huge difference.  Without an extra cushion in the chair (I knew that couch was put here for a reason), I feel like a little kid sitting at the big kids’ table without a booster seat.  The table would be perfect height except for the casters.  For some reason somebody decided it’d be a good idea if the table could roll.

Finally, the bathtub fixture is just a bad idea:

The instructions read:

1. To turn WATER ON - Move HANDLE UP
2. To turn WATER OFF - Move HANDLE DOWN
3. For HOT WATER - Move HANDLE UP and to LEFT
4. For COLD WATER - Move HANDLE UP and to RIGHT
5. Once Water is Running, Move Handle Right to Left until you have Desired Water Temperature.

Please to not twist or turn handle, as this will break the shower handle.  For help, please call front desk.

Thank you for your Cooperation!

You just know that the instruction placards were printed and placed after guests had destroyed several fixtures.  I can only hope that the people who selected those fixtures don’t make that mistake again!

Phoenix is crazy.  I thought the Austin area was overbuilt with new housing developments, shopping centers, and strip malls.  Austin has nothing on Phoenix.  Friday we drove the 101 freeway from Scottsdale to Peoria, skirting around the city on the north.  It was like driving through one huge shopping mall.

Saturday we drove out to Buckeye (20 miles west) through yet more shopping malls and strip centers.  There are plenty of new housing developments, some of which have a huge number of vacant houses.  I also saw many “Coming Soon” signs for retail or residential developments that have been abandoned in various stages of completion.

I think what surprises me most is that I can’t see how the number of new homes could even come close to supporting the glut of retail development we saw.  They overbuilt on an astonishing scale.  How they managed to forget the lessons of 20 years ago, when the Phoenix area was one of the hardest hit by the S&L crisis, is beyond me.  I suppose everybody was once again saying, “this time is different.”  It wasn’t.

We managed to arrive in Phoenix during NASCAR weekend.  Phoenix International Raceway is in Avondale, which is right next door to the city of Goodyear, where we want to stay.  But with the race, hotel rates are sky high:  the Super 8 Motel wants $155 per night!  We stayed the first two nights with family in Scottsdale, but it’s 50 miles from the hospital.  Last night we stayed with another family friend out west, but he doesn’t have Internet access and we really do need to be connected.  We’re hoping that we can get a reasonably priced hotel after tonight.

Right now I’m sitting in the Starbucks inside the Safeway grocery store in Goodyear, AZ, connected to their wireless.  Free wifi is a wonderful thing for checking email or making a blog entry, but I don’t think I could do any serious work here.

Debra and I are on our way to Phoenix, driving rather than flying because we’ll be there a week or so and will need a car to get around. We left home just before 6:00 this morning. We’ve covered the 650 miles from Round Rock to Las Cruces, NM in 10 hours. You can really eat up the miles on I-10 in West Texas with the 80 MPH speed limit.

Debra’s driving now while I check my email and make a blog entry using the Sprint Mobile Broadband connection supplied by the company she works for. It’s not especially fast, but we’ve had pretty good service throughout the trip. Ain’t technology wonderful?

It’s been 12 years since the last time I made this trip, and things have changed quite a bit. I’m especially interested in finding out more about the wind farm near Bakersfield, TX. There are hundreds (dare I say thousands?) of wind turbines lining the ridges along a 20+ mile stretch of I-10. With the speed of this Internet connection, it’d probably take me until my battery expires to find more info. So that’ll have to wait until I’m checked in at my hotel in Phoenix.

New road food: Doritos Toro Habanero chips. Yum!

Update:  It’s called Indian Mesa Wind Farm.  The Web site says that there are 125 turbines producing up to 83 megawatts.  I know I saw more than 125 turbines in that area.

1,050 miles.  16.5 hours.  I’m beat.

Goldie is my third 5 Minute Bear. It’s made of basswood, about 3 inches tall and 1 inch square.  I named it Goldie because I painted it with a very thin gold paint.

This is not (yet?) really a five minute project.  It took me about an hour to carve, and another 15 minutes or so to paint.  Still, it’s a far cry from the many days it took to create Pounce the cat.

I completed the cat carving Friday evening.  This morning I gave it a first coat of mineral oil and took a few pictures.

I call the cat Pounce, because that’s what it looks like he’s doing: crouching on the shelf, ready to pounce on anybody who walks by.  Pounce is about 4.5″ from nose to tip of tail, and about 1.5″ from the shelf to the tip of his ear.

I did this carving without instruction, starting from three pictures (top, side, front).  I’d carve a little, then look at the piece and the pictures trying to figure out how to free the cat from the wood.  The result doesn’t look a whole lot like the pattern, but it does resemble a cat.  So I’ll call it a success.

I’m going back to simpler carvings for a bit, to learn a little more about technique.  First stop:  the five minute bear.

I started carving a kind of cartoon cat a few months ago, but then got busy with other (non-carving) things, and only recently got back to the cat.  If all goes well I should complete it this weekend.

I found the Woodcarving Illustrated message board shortly after I started carving back in November.  There’s an unbelievable wealth of knowledge there, and the members are, as a rule, very willing to answer questions.  They’re extremely patient with beginners.  As with any message board, the quality of answers varies widely, but the experienced carvers really do provide excellent advice.

Many of the carvers post picture or video tutorials that show, step by step, how to make various types of carvings.  For example, Lynn Doughty’s Out West Woodcarving blog has dozens of projects with detailed instructions and sometimes hundreds of photos on the accompanying Picasa photo album.  I consider Lynn’s projects a bit beyond my current abilities, but perhaps I’m just being timid.  I’ll certainly look into them when I’m ready to try caricatures.

Gene Messer, another very skilled carver who frequents the forum, started making video tutorials and posting them on YouTube.  I’ve watched a few of the videos and, although I haven’t yet tried to do the lessons, I’m pretty sure they will be very effective.  As soon as I finish my cat, I’m going to try my hand at his 5-Minute Bear project.  He has a couple of other short and simple projects that look very appealing.  The 5-Minute Wizard, for example, would make a great Christmas tree ornament.

It’s no surprise that carvers specialize.  But I was pretty surprised at how narrowly some specialize.  There’s a fairly large subgroup, for example, that specializes in carving Santas.  Arleen, a carver from Pennsylvania, has produced a couple dozen videos that walk you through carving simple Santa figures.  She also includes basic carving techniques and some information about painting.  She, too, makes the carving seem very approachable.

I’m simply astounded at the wealth of information out there.  For free!  Even five years ago, you would have had to spend hundreds of dollars on DVDs or classes in order to get the quality information that you can find for free now on YouTube and on carvers’ blogs.  The sites I mentioned above are just a sampling of what I’ve found in my brief research.  There are surely more, on many different topics.

If you’re interested in carving—or in any other craft, come to think of it—you’ll probably be able to find a lot of very good tutorial videos on YouTube.  Take a look.  What have you got to lose?