All this writing

Life has gone on. The burning wreck that was April bleeding into May has receded into the distance and with the turn taken in June, moving to a lovely new home, I can't even see it in the rear view mirror of life any more. Out of sight, out of mind. So with all of that out of mind I've new things and thoughts rushing in to fill the vacated space.

Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts. A pile of pennies, each individually rather worthless but collected and marveled at none the less by myself like a child with a tiny allowance. Am unsure what to do with them. What does one do with non-actionable ideas and pondered upon questions? I write them down frantically and it makes me happy. My red notebook brings me joy when I simply lay my finger tips upon it. I feel like I'd like to clean up and share my rambling musings in some form but am unsure how to best do so or if it's even a good idea.

But the important thing is that I've already recorded them for myself and in the end that is the only audience I can truly hope or expect to please or perform for. For some reason I thought these ramblings were a new phase, an exciting swell of new ways of thinking... But that's only because my memory is poor and my periods of actual Rebeccian archeology infrequent.

The move required me to fully uproot and transplant myself somewhere else, somewhere smaller and so I was forced to dig up and turn over the top layer of sediment and creation cruft. The churn kicked up many (all?) old sketchbooks and loose leaf doodles and assorted desperately collected gaming detritus. I had the thought today to perhaps prune some of the notebooks- plucking out the "good" sketches and discarding the rest- assuming many blank pages between them. Instead I got a kick to the heart and a rush of memories.

I flipped through two spirals from my time at Cisco, the pages covered in incomprehensible notes about FPGAs and clock signals and truly wandering sketches. I looked into my own youthful gaze, captured in scribbled pen during an evening ride home. The damn things are like paper pensieves.

Another smaller spiral had skinny lists of TODOs and interview notes from yet another job transition. Perhaps I could have done away with that one but it was so small and such a quaint little snapshot of crafting efforts that I tucked it back on the shelf. The next was filled with scribbled text- first pages of prose I have no real recollection of writing (but written with the correct tempo and chalked full enough of alliteration that I could identify it as my own). Then were angry rants and silly musings that felt like a grip about my throat. Those feelings forgotten suddenly back and filling me with indignation or rage or that (now less frequent) strong feeling of distance and alienation.

Finally (flipping backwards as I do and often write) I hit the block of notes for and drafts of letters sent to friends. Dear This. Dear That. Names I still know and message. Names I miss. Names I no longer reflect upon. I didn't read them (I hate dwelling on my written letters once sent- one of the primary reasons I prefer physical to electronic mail) but my eyes couldn't help picking out phrases here and there. Reading backwards I tried to guess (some times with a sense of dread) what name would be at the start. I put that book back on the shelf and declared myself too emotionally exhausted to dare peek into another.

Later. Surely later. I enjoy writing things out by hand in order to think. Surely knowing that they will sit there patiently to return to, legible to me no matter how scribbled, is part of the reason I do so. I think so. I think. I think I need to think a bit more about it later... now onto chicken bones.

Small magnetic single throw double pole circuit

Back when I was a wee lass I saw Jurassic Park and knew then I wanted to get into computers so that I could create special effects. When I was a bit older we were visiting San Francisco and I went on an Aliens themed "3D" ride around Fisherman's Wharf (or maybe it was in Seattle?) Anyway, I remember being blown away by the experience of the seats moving and air hissing and decided I wanted to do computer stuff that would effect the real world. Fast forward a couple more years and I was at UW, majoring in Computer Engineering with a focus on embedded systems. Fast forward a few more after that and I'm a web dev tinkering with JavaScript... whoops. Might have miss-stepped somewhere along the way... but my love of computers is sound.

I have an inkling of knowledge on how to do things In The Real World but it's pretty weak. Turns out EE is hard and intimidating. But my interest remains strong. This, combined with my experiences doing several Escape Room games and the delight I had playing in a friend's Harry Potter puzzle LARP has lead me to the obvious conclusion that I should organize my own escape game.

Happily we got a lot of rain this weekend here in San Francisco. Not only does it help the drought problem, it allowed me to stay inside most of the weekend coding and crafting. And boy howdy is there a lot of coding and crafting to be done for this project.

A majority of the project is computer systems/pure code which I've been chipping away at, but some elements are hardware related and I've certainly been avoiding working on them. I enjoy it! But... it's hard. Thankfully I made actual progress on one portion but also wound up scrapping a different portion after repeated failure. Lets focus on the positive though!

If there's a chance you'll be playing in the game (you know who you might be, my so few Readers), I'd recommend not reading the rest of this post.

The goal: Have a surface that players can place an object on. The object has several magnets embedded in it, which activate switches below the surface when aligned correctly. The switches are attached to an Arduino which informs the computer, which informs the game server, which then has an effect on the game.

Turns out the end portion of it- the Arduino talking to the server is suuuuuper easy given the pySerial library. So the question here is about the circuit. Magnetic switches in a small space. Not difficult, right?

First attempt: run a wire to a bent paperclip, tape the wire to the hidden "floor" below, and use the wire as a hinge. Have the "surface" above be wrapped in tin foil and ground that. Now the wire runs to an Arduino pin in `INPUT_PULLUP` mode. Boom! Done! Success! When the magnet moves above the paperclip, the paperclip jumps up and grounds itself against the "surface" above and you've got a closed circuit!

Problem: There's only a couple pins on the Arduino and I'd like there be be a number of sensors so that different configurations can be recorded. That means each sensor circuit needs to ground 2 pins so I can have more unique combinations (That's multiplexing... right? Maybe?)

Next attempt: ... somehow close 2 circuits with a single paperclip's movement rather than just 1 circuit.

Problem(s): The paperclips I bent all had a single point of contact where the magnet was. The wire hinge was a bit too ridged/constricting to allow smaller pieces to rise and fall. I tried many different shapes and sizes and padding/fringe along the top of the paperclip that contacted the surface above. The signal was finicky, rarely closing both circuits.

eventually... "success!" (the signal is still a bit finicky, but good enough to go forward for now)

The solution? Have lots and lots of craft items laying around your house... No, really. The solution? conductive thread & copper tape

Conductive Thread : something needs to hold the paperclip to the "floor", allow it to pivot, and make sure it's connected to the circuit. Wire hinges were proving to be too ridged along with folded tape or aluminum foil. Enter the ever magical conductive thread. Taking two strands and tying them to the paper clip solved this problem. The clip was bent to be flat along the bottom, one strand tied to each corner, then the strands taped down with masking tape. It was a smooth hinge and a reliable connection. I wrapped the floor with aluminum foil and grounded it so that each paper clip is grounded via it's conductive thread tie downs.

Copper Tape : originally acquired for stained glass purposes, it's great. One side sticky, one side copper & conductive. Note that the sticky side is not conductive (sadly). I used this to mark out the traces on the bottom of the surface, where the paperclip would connect to. The tape is already pretty thin but I was able to cut it in half and place very close to each other- like laying out a sticker circuit board. I cut the paperclip to be U shaped, anchoring it to the floor at the bottom of the U. Now when the clip jumps up towards the magnet and closes the circuit, it has 2 little points contacting the 2 different traces (rather than one broad one).

A Quite Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving this year was a medium sized gathering in the South Bay with friends. No family, mine being scattered about this year and all the girls lacking the freedom/time to travel. Alas. Looks like Christmas will also be Steckerless for the most part.

My contribution to this year's meal was potatoes and pie. My much anticipated (by me) purple potatoes and coconut cream (aka vegan mashed potatoes) was an absolute dud this year. I blame the potatoes. The pie however went well. Earlier this year I had a pie crust near-fiasco... which is ridiculous now that I look back at it because I have/had a food processor. Used it for the first time to make pie crust and am never going back.

Adam made Pumpkin Pie to ensure a reasonable dessert was available. I couldn't top the Venn Diagram Pie of years previous but thought hard to come up with something fun. Wound up with Indecision Pie. I used scrap aluminum (from a project waaaay back when) to create structural supports for some concentric circles. Blind baked the crust with only the inner circle for the first 12 min since that has the foil & pie weights portion. Removed foil & weights and added super-thin outer circle and cooked another 15 min. When it came out of the over I removed the inner support right away (no problem) but the outer support I left in place until I filled the apple section because it was likely to topple if left alone. Middle portion was left-over pumpkin pie and some raspberry filling ended up in the center.

In hind-sight go apple, raspberry, pumpkin next time. Apple & pumpkin: that's a no.

After dinner there was some tarot reading for some folks and one of the dogs. Amusing and silly. Sadly no one in attendance actually knows much about the cards so every step of the way required flipping back and forth through a book. There was also an I Ching reading/toss(?). There was also a walk. A fine tradition, that. I love the post-Thanksgiving meal walk, wherever it may be or go.

Many things to be thankful for this year. A year of changes for myself and many around me, most (all?) of them for the better. Lots and lots of new jobs, I gained a brother-in-law, there was another Dr. Stecker in the family (for about 2 weeks before she went and got married and took his name- ARRRrrrggg!) and if things All Go Well there will soon be another one (who will keep her title/name pairing). I am thankful that these job changes have been for the better. That I've been gaining family and not losing it. Relationships starting and deepening rather than fraying or ending. I retain my health and others appear to be doing well (except perhaps for the dear Grandmothers). In fact my health along several different axes is in a much better state now than it was this time a year ago. The world at large seems to be becoming more hostile and dark (though perhaps that's just my age tinting my world view) but I am thankful that my life appears to be trending the opposite direction. I'm meeting more people who I find enjoyable. I'm continuing to add to the "things I can do" pallet of possibilities.

Life is good.

Winding down

So I'm fast approaching the 3 month mark of being unemployed and things are winding down here. I've already begun the process of finding new work- have applied to a number of places already. Am targeting Nov. 9th for a start date. Fingers crossed that I can a company that both interests me and wants to hire me. Am never able to escape that Woody Allen joke "I'd never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member" in terms of work though...

In terms of the things winding down: I'm excited that most my projects/goals/objectives of this hiatus have been met or are very near the finish line. Other than claiming I was going to do TWO quilts rather than just one (because I'm an idiot), I feel I've done an excellent job of scaling my ambitions to my expected available time. The quilt is essentially done, just needs some more superfluous stitching and a wash. The books are going to be finished come hell or high water. I've learned to cook chicken a number of ways (some of them even fast and easy!) and feel rather confident I could prepare a "meal" on the fly now after work without excessive stress or research. I've got 3 branch libraries to hit and then I'll have tackled 'em all. I had an excellent run of 5+ mile a' days there and don't feel guilty or bad that I've slipped back down to a steady 3 miles a day because I want to, you know, DO THINGS during the day and walking takes a hella' lot more time than initially anticipated.

(I dehydrated a hard boiled egg. I DO NOT ADVISE IT)

I guess the main let-down of this whole extended vacation was I failed to advance my drawing skills. I had hoped to tackle landscapes and I've made not a pinch of progress on that these 3 months (or past 10 even- it was one of my few resolutions this year). I also failed to attend any sort of fitness bootcamp nonsense thing, which I never really seriously considered but had always faintly hoped I'd do given sufficient free time. Maybe three months just wasn't "sufficient" enough, 6+ months off and I'm sure I'd get around to it...

In terms of other, just general awesome things:

Saw the whole blood moon eclipse thing. Happiness.

Went to the SF Super Hero Street Fair with company. Had a drink even! Danced with Santa. Was swept off my feet by random silver spandex man and made very happy. Good times.

Finally took another stab at hard crack sugar. It went better this time. I am emboldened.

Suko and I have not yet abandoned archery. This makes me proud of us.

I got a calligraphic letter from Katie in the mail, and it wasn't even a reply to something I'd sent. Just outa' the blue. So nice!

Enjoyed opening weekend at the Petaluma corn maze. Highly recommend it.

Onto New Things

So July 10th was my last day of work at Rdio. I learned a lot during my 2.5 years there and chose to leave for a number of reasons. There's a large number of really awesome people still working there and I wish the best of luck to them. I still plan to use the service and do some side projects with the JS and Android SDKs.

As a tech worker in the Bay Area I understand I'm extremely privileged and lucky when it comes to employment. Because I have the freedom and security to do so, I've decided to take a couple months off before looking for my next thing. And so today was the end of week two of that horrible phrase which I'll use once and avoid using from here on out: "funemployment"

I've lots of projects, both in progress and still in the idea stage, that I want to work on. I have years of learning-to-cook to catch up on. I've a basement that still needs to be cleaned/sorted/half thrown out/organized. I've travel and friends and beautiful weather luring me outside. There's so many things to do and I already feel like there's not enough time in the day. At least my previous stint between jobs helped prepare me for that one. I'm not surprised when the end of the day rolls around so soon, but I still grit my teeth and wince.

A couple key things I'm trying to focus on:

Visit all the public library branches in SF. I'm at 6 of 28 right now.

Try to walk more than 5 miles a day.

Finish piecing/appliqué of quilt so I can start actually quilting it (and taking it with me when I travel).

Wrap head around food/cooking.

Draw more.

Doing so-so on everything other than the drawing and quilting. Purchased a dehydrator at the start of week one and have been experimenting with that. Dehydrated mango- insane success. Dehydrated avocado- not so much. Dehydrated rhubarb- iiiiinteresting. Anyway, also hope to blog more in coming weeks. We'll see how it goes.

Bay Area Public Transportation Hike

I've never owned a car. Adam got rid of his car shortly after we moved to our current home. Luckily SF is an excellent city to be carless these days.

Just about the one and only major draw back to lacking a car is hiking. The Bay Area is wonderful for so may reasons, and one of the top o' the list reasons is the fabulous nature surrounding the cities here. Sure, there's Zipcar- and we've definitely used it for hiking- but driving 2 hours round trip for a 4 hour hike just seems... not great. Especially given that I almost always fall asleep right after a hike and leave poor Adam alone and bored behind the wheel. That's why it's always such a treat to find quality hikes entirely reachable via public transportation.

This week's find was a lovely hike up in the Oakland hills. Took the BART to Rockridge and then the 49B bus to Derby St & Claremont Blvd. There's an excellent collection of trails there.

The area is Claremont Canyon Regional Preserve is where we started and Strawberry Creek Canyon is where we ended. In particular we hiked the Stonewall Panoramic Trail & several fire trails.

As we were approaching the peak, we kept hearing these train noises. "Can we actually hear Amtrak from here?" we wondered. No, you can't. What you CAN hear is the super awesome Redwood Valley Railway which just so happened to be open for us on this weekday. For $3 a piece we hopped the train for a delightful ~12 min ride in the FREEZING COLD. We also forgot to stop Strava so when you check out the Strava results the flat ~2m portion in the middle is us hiking off the path, going around the train, and coming back.

Taking out the 2 miles and 30 minutes for the train trip, the hike was ~7.6 miles ~2hr 20min. Felt like a lot longer... because it was FREEZING COLD for most the hike. Be sure to check the weather and BELIEVE the reports before you head out on a hike, folks! End of the hike dropped us at the Berkeley BART.

Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive

My Oculus Rift arrived yesterday and I have no Windows machine to run it with (and they've still not released the Mac SDK). So rather than fall into a pit of despair, let's focus on some recent positives.

Visited my parents in Vancouver two weekends ago. Lounged in my verdant childhood backyard and gobbled a number of fruits and veggies right off the vine. Saw The Book of Mormon. Did a lot of reading.

Our head of Engineering keeps bringing in veggies from his garden, a most kind and appreciated gesture. On a Friday my posse & I made squash/everything/anything cookies. Too much egg resulted in them being more like mini muffins than cookies... but still good! The whole squash that was grated and tossed in did no harm!

Visited Seattle last weekend for a wedding. The planets aligned and my sisters were both in town as well (for their own Washington based weddings to attend). Always disturbing to see which parts of you come from your family, visible in the looks and behaviors of siblings. Weddings that prominently feature Jesus and preach about marriage belonging only to men and women are aaaaaawkward.

I've been carefully grooming a playlist themed on my character Jaya from the 4th Terminus game. Good times, been listening to it a lot. A lot. Have found myself doodling while sitting on airplanes (a disturbingly common occurrence lately) and I've been running through my list of tabletop characters but frequently finding myself back to drawing Jaya.

I've been pushing numbers around at work lately. Wringing my hands frantically wishing load times to be faster. Pulling at my hair trying to extract meaningful information from a pile of logged data. I appreciate the diversity of work for my current team- writing SQL statements, poking at iOS code, still battling JavaScript, and possibly getting better at python (I still hate python)

I saw Snowpiercer in theaters. Twice. Damn fine film. Most excellent. Best thing I've seen in a long while. I felt good while watching it, like someone hitting a hard to reach itch. Have finally escaped my horror shlump of reading material and am back on a good kick of distopian material. Am on book 3 of the Silo series (which starts with Wool). The author, Hugh Howey seems like a cool guy. Finally read Starship Troopers. Am looking forward to the new Mad Max movie coming out in 2015.

My old art blog just passed 10k views.

Finding Time

The year is almost over. I appreciate the time I've had recently to spend with my family, friends, crafts, and by myself.

It seems like nearly every day this month had some scheduled activity. Hopefully I'll feel like writing more about it later.

Just wanted to share a fun shot from this afternoon. Sitting in a sunny front room, listening to some great music* and sewing whatever the heck I felt like sewing.

My two current [active] projects are Elodie from the game Long Live The Queen and the scrap fabric quilt planned since Thanksgiving. Turns out my mother made me an amazing quilt for Christmas out of most of the fabric I was scrapping!

I spent all Monday sipping tea, sniffling due to a cold, and cutting 2.5" x 2.5" squares. It was fabulously calming after such a hectic month. When my mother got home from work both eyebrows rose rather dramatically and she asked if I "saw anything I liked". This is amusing because I knew she had made aprons for both my sisters and my sister's roommate. I assumed perhaps I might have been getting an apron too. HA! I love that when the youngest sister arrived home she bee-lined to the fabric pile I was working with. "Wow! Am I getting something? This looks like my kind of fabric!" she exclaimed right away, picking out the crumpled backing fabric for her apron. It was this horrid print of off-white/vaguely yellow cotton with light blue stripes on it. Very prairie kitchen-esque. It's amusing to know what you love and to find out that others know it too. For the record, the quilt's colors are spot on for me. Muted browns and blues, rusty reds, a pinch of gold, and a dash of black.

Other things to cover soon: Christmas cookie swap! Top books & music from this year. Recently watched movie reviews. Shareable code from my last work hackday.

* Apparently everything Lorde does is amazing.

Also listened to: http://asoftmurmur.com/?v=051500000503

Pumpkins!

I greatly enjoy Halloween. I miss the massive box of decoration supplies we had at my parent's house and the time spent by my sisters and I going through it every year. To embrace the season, several friends packed into our tiny kitchen and participated in ritualistic seasonal gourd mutilation.

Turns out there's a really cute pumpkin patch spot in the city over on the other side of Twin Peaks that Adam found. A bit pricey, but they have a lovely selection and seeing all the kids running around was fun. Clancy's if anyone's interested. Next year I'm getting a novelty pumpkin (the sort of corpse blue/pink splotched ones)

My pumpkins is the Aperture Science logo one. Adam did the traditional pumpkin face, Katie did the creepy eye, Vince did the triforce, and Suko carved a bird & tree on the surface of a little one (though sadly it's not quite thin enough to see at night). (not pictured is the fantastic Owl Gripping Mouse one done by the Adam & Clair team, which was taken home)

Turns out good prep work makes things a lot easier. I should put sheets of paper down more often! I am saddened by the fact that the little dinky pumpkin knives you get in the kits actually cut better then my collection of steak knives.

p.s.- apparently there are such things as grease ants

Chillen'

Just spending a nice and mellow evening at home with the boyfriend. We met over a game of Catan and it's still quite nice to just play some Race for the Galaxy together even if our overall boardgame playing has dramatically declined in recent years.

Denver Hackathon went well. Made something that I find useful-- haven't uploaded it yet anywhere. Will do so... "soon". Just ordered some more parts/accessories for my Arduino and plan on picking that project back up again... "soon".

Also I have a new quilt in the works. Most of the fabric cut, time to start sewing.

Spring Delights

The weather has been lovely lately. A lot of tasty food as been consumed. Suko let me steal some of her home made lemon curd and so I had to make a batch of scones to make use of it. (picked up some Rhubarb Grapefruit jam at the ferry building for Adam. Turned out to be far more tasty then it had any right being)

Finished the quilt remains pillow from last post. In further efforts to clean the basement up, I've put more things on the wall. A hoop with some colored threads was easy enough and a sunny afternoon with a dremel enabled me to mount the random collection of pencils (mostly colored) that I've collected so far. Both projects use hatpins as the key component.

The pencils have a thin hole drilled through them and they hang on a hatpin. There's a loop of thread that is tied to the pin on one end and a button on the other. The pin goes through the button and the weight of the pencils (and the tilt of the hanging) keeps the button in place.

Have I mentioned how awesome our back deck is with the hammock up?

I continue to have low level anxiety in my life. Perhaps work related? Perhaps turning-30 related? Its source remains unclear but its effect is becoming a bit more noticeable. I feel... "frayed"? when my mood manges to swing up. This just means I'm bit wackier then usual I'd say-- as would others. This week's evenings so far have been very delightful, which made me very happy, which resulted on my actions being commented on by others. Oh well. There are worse things to be then a happy spaz.

Mary Robinette Kowal was at Borderlands and was about as awesome as expected. In fact, I'd give her an "Exceeds expectations" review. (This being the lady that wrote Shades of Milk and Honey (Glamourist Histories) [and I will punch the next person who makes a 50 shades of gray reference. That horse is dead, ok?]) She kindly signed my copy of the 3rd book as well as the new copy of her 1st book I picked up. I love my Kindle, but it does sort of happer the lending of good things... So now I have a copy of the first book! And would love to lend it to anyone who'ld read it.

Tuesday was once again Dr. Sketchy's, with a theme of Morocco. I think the return to twice a month is good for me. This month's model was Aja, who we've had before and is a talented lady. She struck a number of poses with lifted arms or turned heads and did not budge an inch. A real pro!

Sadly I don't think I really made the most of the session-- my drawing mojo wasn't with me that night. As I commented to a fantastic fellow artist [Elle?]-- I've no problem with voluminous folds of fabric if they're done up in Wester fashion, I've figured out how to draw that. It's that I don't understand what's going on with the outfit and that's what's making it hard to draw. (Which I guess just means I need to perhaps practice a bit with the classic pile of fabric draped over a chair? Or perhaps a greater study of fashion) Anyway, something for me to think....