How awesome is this?

A couple years ago I recorded a little album of solo piano Christmas music. Here’s one of my favorite tracks from it:

You can download the whole thing from the original post if you want. Merry Christmas!

On the topic of my previous post, I had this Twitter interaction with Stephen Granade:

twitter.com/cjhubbs/s…

twitter.com/cjhubbs/s…

But then I started wondering… what about Lebowski?

So then I had to do it - casting The Big Lebowski using Winnie the Pooh characters.

The Dude

This one is pretty obvious. Winnie the Pooh himself gets to play The Dude. His laid-back personality is nicely analogous to Jeff Bridges' beloved stoner.

Walter Sobchak

Based on my Twitter assertion, I’m gonna commit to it. Tigger is the only Hundred-Acre Wood inhabitant with a personality big enough to play a John Goodman character. Think of it as the grittier side of Tigger. You know he’s not always been such a jovial tiger.

Donny

Who’s gonna be the weasely, nervous sidekick to Tigger’s Walter? I think it’s gotta be Piglet.

The Big Lebowski

A large, pompous man with a big attitude? Owl gets to play this role, no question about it. And then to serve his needs:

Brandt

This nervous young assistant (played brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Lebowski) goes to Rabbit. You can just see him puttering around straightening all of Lebowski’s photos and trophies outside his office.

Minor Characters

• With Kanga being the token female in the Hundred-Acre Wood, we’ll give her the role of Maude Lebowski.
• Christopher Robin would have to paste on a mustache and work on his Texas accent, but we’ll give him the role of The Stranger.
• And where’s Eeyore in this whole thing? Based on his general outlook on life, I think he’s one of the Nihilists. However, as my friend Andy said:

https://twitter.com/The_Pulpiteer/status/530449494027296769

Last night I briefly moaned on Facebook about a small inconsistency that bugged me whilst watching The West Wing Season 4 Episode 18 (“Angel Maintenance”). At the end of the episode, Air Force One’s pilot announces over the intercom that they are cleared to land on “runway three-niner”.

There’s just one problem with that announcement: there’s never any such thing as a runway 39. Runways are numbered based on the compass orientation of the runway’s direction, with the units digit lopped off. For example, a runway running directly East-West would be marked “09” on one end and “27” on the other end.

Having thus been minimally annoyed, I followed up by checking Google Earth to determine what runways Andrews Air Force Base (the intended landing site on the show) does have.

Well, it has two of them that run roughly parallel to each other:

And when you zoom in on one end of one of them you can see it’s marked “01 R”:

From this you can quite easily conclude that the other runway ends (with associated names) are “01 L”, “19 R”, and “19 L”.

But that’s not all

Aside: The plot of this episode is that AF1 is heading in from a long flight and they can’t get a green light on the nose gear. So, the president manages crises from the air for a few hours while they turn circles over West Virginia and try to solve the problem.

I continued on Facebook to comment that there were other nits I’d like to pick with the plot.

Another nit that I’m tempted to pick at is that the press attache makes up a story that the reason they’re not landing right away is that there’s a fuel spill on the runway that has to get cleaned up. And a reporter asks “don’t they have another runway?” and she replies that apparently it affected both of them. In point of fact, Andrews AFB has two runways that are parallel, so an incident shouldn’t affect both of them. But given that it was a made-up story, I guess we should expect factual inaccuracies.

I had a couple pilot friends “like” my comments and provide a few snarky remarks about “artistic license”… but then my friend Daniel chimed in.

Daniel is one of those people who’s uniquely qualified to comment on a plot involving a Boeing 747: he’s a 747 pilot. Here’s what he had to say:

Hmm, the runway 39 indicates that the writers and producers made not even a token attempt at any accuracy, as even a rookie pilot would have cringed in a quick scan over the script. Just to highlight how unlikely many aviation scripts are, the B747-200 (which AF1 is, although everyone in the military insists its not, its an E-4, which is also true) only has one green light for the gear. There are ten green lights back on the flight engineer’s panel, and the system is checked for continuity before each landing. In the event the primary (hydraulic) system does not work, any gear that cannot be lowered hydraulicly can be lowered by gravity (an extremely robust power source). This is accomplished by simply electrically removing the pin that holds the gear up, and, in the case of the nose gear, is actually faster than lowering it hydraulically (the hydraulics just slow down the nose gear when lowering). If that doesn’t work, and there is no record of the electrical back up failing, the engineer can go down into the forward cargo bay, and use a wrench (permanently attached) to physically remove the pin. If THAT doesn’t work, ten bolts can be removed covering the landing gear, and then the pin can be extracted. All of which, and the nose gear is not needed for a safe landing. The only use for the nose gear is to reduce the thrust needed to taxi, and facilitate steering. Ironically, there are a large number of real emergencies that can occur on large aircraft. Of course, it might take an hour or two of research to learn that….

Do I have awesome friends or what?

It’s fun when somebody has a topic like this right in their wheelhouse. It reminds me of when I was in high school and my friends' dad was a submarine captain. Getting his opinions on The Hunt for Red October… hehehe.

Or when I watched an episode of Human Target a few years back and ripped the whole thing apart when their plot revolved around someone reprogramming avionics software while in the air on board an airplane THAT WAS FLYING UPSIDE DOWN THE WHOLE TIME.

OK, maybe I’m not over that one quite yet.

So, yeah, I have pretty awesome friends.

Yeah, this is a nerdy post. I’m not expecting it’s of huge interest for my usual readers but might be helpful to others searching for more information on this configuration.

In my quest to use my home-built DVR to capture video that can be easily played via my Roku, I ended up purchasing a used HDHomeRun Plus (HDTC-2US). (This replaced an old original-model HDHomeRun that was still working beautifully.)

The HDHomeRun Plus has integrated hardware to do H.264 video transcoding, so if you want to stream live TV across your network you can do it at less than full HD quality, and you can also record video at lower bit rates.

Hardware Setup

This is the easy part. The HDHomeRun has three plugs on the back, and you simply plug in each of them as the QuickStart instructions show you.

The coaxial cable coming from the antenna in my attic connects to the antenna port; the ethernet jack connects to my router, and the power plug, well, you can figure that out. The power adapter is different than the original HDHomeRun (the Plus takes 12 volts; the original takes 5). A nice improvement here is that even though it’s a dual tuner, it only requires one antenna input. The original model required splitting the antenna signal and plugging it in twice. Getting the extra cable and splitter out of the signal path improved my signal strength on a couple of channels.

You’ll also want to make sure you have the latest firmware installed. The HDHomeRun client software might do this for you automatically; if not, the firmware is rather unintuitively available on the Linux Downloads page of the SiliconDust website.

Software Setup

First, assuming you’re running Windows 7 like I am, install the Windows HDHomeRun software. This will include the configuration app and the QuickTV app. You can run the configuration app to scan for channels and watch them directly from the configuration app.

Then you can bring up Windows Media Center and configure it using the steps on the HDHomeRun Instructions page. That should get you to the point where you can record video using the HDHomeRun and WMC.

The Video

Recording with the default HD settings, this setup will record full high-def TV signals in MPEG2 video format (using the .wtv file extension), with file sizes at about 6 GB per hour.

But that’s a huge file and doesn’t stream well, so I wanted the HDHomeRun to record as H.264. With the latest (June 2014) firmware update, there is the ability, using the HDHomeRun Config application, to select a default transcoding profile. Click on the HDHomeRun device in the left column of the app, and then choose the transcoding level you’d like on the drop-down that becomes available.

That seemed too easy, to the point where at first it didn’t seem like it was doing anything different. Indeed, WMC continues to record .wtv files. However, the .wtv video container now becomes a lot smaller - on the order of 1 GB / hour. It turns out that the .wtv format is just a wrapper around various formats, so if you record the transcoded video, the .wtv container holds H.264 video.

Preparing for Playback on the Roku

Interestingly enough, the .wtv file played pretty directly on the Roku - apparently it managed to recognize the transcoded video format. However, to get the file into the typical .mp4 format so that it can playback on various devices, one more conversion step is necessary.

For that step I’m using MCEBuddy 2.X. MCEBuddy is pretty slick for a free app. It has the ability to sit and monitor for new recordings, convert them, rename them and move them around on the disk based on show and episode information, and do transcoding. It’ll do serious transcoding if you need it to, but since my .wtv files are already H.264 on the inside, there’s a transcoding profile called MP4 Unprocessed. This is a quick operation (about 10 minutes for a 1 hour program) that transforms the .wtv file into an .mp4 file. Quick and easy.

The end result of that process is H.264 encoded .mp4 files, all ready to stream to my Roku within 10 minutes of the recordings being completed from my over-the-air antenna. Pretty slick.

From an #askTK session on Twitter today:

Perfect answer. Love it.

For reference, my current pile:

American Airlines and a stalled warm front have conspired to have me sleeping overnight in the Chicago O’Hare airport to catch a flight home first thing in the morning. So what’s a guy to do? Live blog, why not? Here’s the offending weather picture.

A traditional Liveblog would add posts at the top, but I’m lazy and like to see things in chronological order, so I’ll update at the bottom.

8:30 pm Eating dinner at the Chili’s in the atrium of the airport. It’s pretty busy for this time of night. The bar is full, undoubtedly with folks who know that they’re gonna be here a while. The gate agent told me they set up a bunch of cots over by gate K1 to handle scenarios just like this. I’ll be grabbing one of those before it gets too late. First to get my check and then go find a power outlet. This phone battery won’t last forever.

9:04 pm Some serious lightning outside and rain coming down pretty good. The airport folks have probably 150 cots (complete with airplane pillows and blankets) set up already and have carts full of more cots ready to go.

That’s the stack still waiting to be set up.

Wandered down a ways and found a lonely cot right next to a functioning power outlet. Score!

9:16 pm Time to watch a movie before sleeping. Fortunately I have a fully stocked iPad for just such an occasion. Tonight’s feature: Drinking Buddies. With Olivia Wilde and Ron Livingston it can’t be too awful, right?

9:50 pm Sharing my power outlet for a while with a gal who has a thick southern accent and an iPhone 4 with a dead battery. The cots are filling up here by gate K1.

10:51 pm Movie over. I liked it. Revolutionary idea that a guy and a girl could be friends and not immediately head to the sack. There’s no way though that Olivia Wilde’s character could drink that much beer every day and stay that skinny.

Cots full of people off in both ways down the concourse. And people still heading past us to make late-night west coast connections.

Made a quick trip to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, switched to glasses. Time to try to get some sleep.

There was a second cot down by my feet when I claimed this one; a few minutes later somebody grabbed it and moved it further down the concourse. 30 minutes later the airport folks set another one up in its place. And 2 minutes ago somebody took it, too, to some other location. Maybe I’m scary looking. Of course maybe nobody just wants to sleep next to my feet. I can’t blame them.

11:15 pm I am 6-foot-4 inches long. This cot is decidedly not. Yawning a lot but there are lots of lights still on and it’s noisy. Wonder how long that’ll persist?

11:25 pm All my yawns feel unfulfilling somehow. Still really bright. Breaking out my Cubs hat to lay over my face in hopes it’ll help me get to sleep and give me a little local cred.

The hat smells almost as bad as my feet.

11:38 pm Not having much luck sleeping. It is quieting down some now, though. Created a Foursquare location. Hope other people will use it!

12:05 am No luck sleeping so far. Can’t even seem to get that good yawn in. It has quieted down quite a bit in here after midnight; all the automated announcements are turned off, as are some of the overhead lights.

Some lucky folks are sleeping - the guy next to me is sawing logs - but many are laying restlessly awake on their cots just like I am. Starbucks will be doing brisk business in the morning.

12:52 am Still no luck sleeping. Think I’d have better luck on the floor than on this cot - it’s just too small. I think I’ll go wander around. I wonder if I can find a piano…

1:08 am Ok, once I got up and walked past all the cots I realized I severely underestimated how many there are. At least 350 now stretched out, all full. And flights still arriving and departing. (I feel sorry for the folks whose flight to Charlotte is now departing at 3:18.)

Lots of people up, wandering around, getting McDonald’s, sitting talking. Guess it never sleeps here.

2:38 am

Spent the last hour playing a piano I found in the concourse wine bar. Had security come by, identify an unattended bag, then stand around and chat for 15 minutes while waiting for the police to come pick it up.

The security guy told me that his 17-year-old son was shot 3 times last Friday in a drive-by shooting and is still in the hospital. Meanwhile, dad works the graveyard shift at O’Hare and worries about his son. Taking a minute to pray for the dad and the kid.

The terminal is getting quieter now. There were a few flights still coming in during the 1:00 hour, but now things have turned over and the new folks are coming in for the morning shift. The security guy chatted up a 50-something Polish baggage handler who has his folks living with him, walks with a limp, but has been doing the job day in and day out for 15 years. It’s a sobering reminder to me, miffed that I missed my flight home to the suburbs, that there are folks getting paid a lot less who do a lot harder jobs at worse hours. I have much to be thankful for.

3:21 am

I’m parked in the food court at a table next to a plugin. There are three 24-hour shops open: Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Dunkin Donuts. And they’re all staying fairly busy.

There are a dozen or so people sitting up here in the food court, most working on laptops, one writing longhand on a legal pad.

I’m mostly through my venti Americano and watching Leo DiCaprio playing J. Edgar Hoover. So far so good. By the time it finishes up the sun should be rising and my flight will be only a couple hours away.

4:21 am The morning crowd is starting to show up and the food court is starting to smell good as the breakfast sandwiches start cooking. I suppose there are 5 am departures that people are showing up for, and they seem remarkably perky.

I’m in line to grab a Dunkin donuts breakfast and then to walk over to my gate. Three hours until departure.

I replied to some work email over the last hour, too, including a note telling my boss I wasn’t planning on coming in on Friday. I don’t think he’ll object.

4:43 am At my gate. The status board still says those two blessed words: “On Time”. Put on my one remaining clean shirt just to make it feel like a new day.

Here goes nothin'!

5:44 am

Kudos to American Airlines for having gate agents out in force this morning. They knew they were gonna have lots of people to deal with and they appear at least reasonably equipped to handle it. Very glad I got a seat assigned and a boarding pass last night so I’m not standing in one of those lines, though.

Bought a real newspaper for the first time in years just to give me something light to read. The Chicago Tribune is up to $1.50 for the daily but feels thick enough that it might be worth it.

7:06 am

Boarding the plane. Thus endeth the Liveblog.

As a Cubs fan I set up my Yahoo sports iPhone app at the beginning of the season to pop up an alert with the final score at the end of each game.

My trouble is that the Cubs are, well, the Cubs. They’re currently 11-20 and 9.5 games back in the NL Central. (And it’s only May 7!) Which means I see a lot more alerts that look like this:

And not nearly enough that look like this:

Which gets kind of depressing, because if the Cubs' season continues as it’s going right now, I’m going to see a “Cubs Win!” alert only about 55 times this year, and a “Cubs Lose” alert more than 100 times.

So here’s an idea for some enterprising app designer: allow me to select the Cubs as my favorite team, and to get alerts for final scores, but add a flag that only alerts me when the Cubs win. That way every three or four days I get a nice surprise… and I don’t have to deal with the disappointment the rest of the week.

I’d buy an app like that.

I have some other posts planned, but my buddy Geof pointed out something in a Supreme Court ruling today that made me chuckle.

In Environmental Protection Agency v. EME Homer City Generation, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissent (joined in by Justice Thomas). And Scalia never shies from making pointed opinions.

And it’s (more or less) true! (Scalia quoted Karl Marx, but not directly from the Communist Manifesto.) On page 3 of the dissent (page 40 of the PDF) Scalia says that the “EPA’s utterly fanciful “from each according to its ability” construction sacrifices democratically adopted text to bureaucratically favored policy.”

Now, Scalia wields a deft scalpel, inserting the (unattributed) quote to show even more disdain for the EPA’s action that the majority of SCOTUS affirmed.

As I was paging through the decision to find the reference that Geof mentioned, I also found another reference that amused me: Justice Ginsburg (a very liberal Jewish lady) quoting from the Gospel of John:

Some pollutants stay with­ in upwind States’ borders, the wind carries others to downwind States, and some subset of that group drifts to States without air quality problems. “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.” The Holy Bible, John 3:8 (King James Version)

(From page 8 of the PDF. Apparently the KJV merits a full-blown citation.)

So Scalia quotes Marx, and Ginsburg quotes Jesus. That’s my amusement for the day.

One of my secret guilty pleasures (and here you get to plumb the depths of my weird mind) is reading Supreme Court opinions. (I enjoy listening to recordings of the oral arguments, too, but they can get rather dull at times.) I’ve had a fascination with the legal system and particularly the US Supreme Court since I was in high school. I contemplated taking up law as a career path before studying engineering instead, but law continues to fascinate me.

The beauty of the Supreme Court is that by a time a case gets to that level, they’re not dealing with run-of-the-mill principles or with trying to establish facts. The facts have already been established by lower courts, the principles already argued back and forth a couple times in appeals; the USSC only takes on the case when there’s a novel principle to be decided, and when that happens, some of the top legal minds in the country get together to argue the merits.

The thing I enjoy about USSC opinions is that they’re scholarly and dense without being utterly incomprehensible. I’m no legal scholar and undoubtedly don’t get all the case references, but I can sit and read through a 10-page opinion and pretty much understand the gist of the argument, think it over myself, and try to decide which side of the opinion I’d come down on. And sometimes the Justices really get fired up with an opinion, and then the reading gets fun.

But this shouldn’t all be abstract - here’s a recent example.

Navarette v. California

Navarette v. California was argued before the Court on January 21, 2014, and the decision and opinions were published April 22 (today as I’m writing this). The case summary and opinions are available on the USSC website, and the headnote for the decision provides a nice summary of the case:

A California Highway Patrol officer stopped the pickup truck occupied by petitioners because it matched the description of a vehicle that a 911 caller had recently reported as having run her off the road. As he and a second officer approached the truck, they smelled marijuana. They searched the truck’s bed, found 30 pounds of marijuana, and arrested petitioners. Petitioners moved to suppress the evidence, arguing that the traffic stop violated the Fourth Amendment. Their motion was denied, and they pleaded guilty to transporting marijuana. The California Court of Appeal affirmed, concluding that the officer had reasonable suspicion to conduct an investigative stop.

So did you get that? We’re arguing here over whether the police had a reasonable suspicion to make a traffic stop and conduct a search. The word “reasonable” is key here, since the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution says, in part, “The right of the people to be secure… against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…".

In this particular case, an anonymous 911 caller claimed that a truck “ran the [caller] off the roadway” and reported the truck’s make, model, and license plate number, suggesting that the driver might be drunk. The highway patrol found the truck, followed it for 5 minutes, didn’t see any additional erratic driving behavior, but stopped the truck anyway. When they approached the truck, they smelled marijuana, performed a search, found a bunch of it, and made an arrest.

So there’s the question. Does the Fourth Amendment require an officer who received information regarding drunken or reckless driving to independently corroborate the behavior before stopping the vehicle?

Today the US Supreme Court decided that the answer is yesno. [Whoopsie there! Thanks to _steve in the comment below for correcting me.] Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Kennedy, and Breyer. That opinion runs from page 3 through page 13 of the decision PDF, and it’s not incredibly dense. (It’s also in a narrow-width column so it’s not as long as it sounds.)

Here’s the summary paragraph of the decision:

Like White, this is a “close case.” 496 U. S., at 332. As in that case, the indicia of the 911 caller’s reliability here are stronger than those in J. L. 2, where we held that a bare-bones tip was unreliable. 529 U. S., at 271. Although the indicia present here are different from those we found sufficient in White, there is more than one way to demonstrate “a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the particular person stopped of criminal activity.” Cortez, 449 U. S., at 417–418. Under the totality of the circumstances, we find the indicia of reliability in this case sufficient to provide the officer with reasonable suspicion that the driver of the reported vehicle had run another vehicle off the road. That made it reasonable under the circumstances for the officer to execute a traffic stop. We accordingly affirm.

So that’s not too awful or confusing, right?

Then the fun begins, because you have a dissenting opinion written by arch-conservative Justice Scalia which is joined by the three most liberal members of the court, Justices Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor. And Scalia, when he gets a little bit wound up, can be entertaining. This one is a prime example.

Here’s how he starts:

Today’s opinion does not explicitly adopt such a departure from our normal Fourth Amendmentrequirement that anonymous tips must be corroborated; it purports to adhere to our prior cases, such as Florida v. J. L., 529 U. S. 266 (2000), and Alabama v. White, 496 U. S. 325 (1990). Be not deceived. Law enforcement agencies follow closely our judgments on matters such as this, and they will identify at once our new rule: So long as the caller identifies where the car is, anonymous claims of a single instance of possibly careless or reckless driving, called in to 911, will support a traffic stop. This is not my concept, and I am sure would not be the Framers’, of a people secure from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Then he starts busting on the arguments.

All that has been said up to now assumes that the anonymous caller made, at least in effect, an accusation of drunken driving. But in fact she did not. She said that the petitioners’ truck “‘[r]an [me] off the roadway.’”.. That neither asserts that the driver was drunk nor even raises the likelihood that the driver was drunk. The most it conveys is that the truck did some apparently nontypical thing that forced the tipster off the roadway, whether partly or fully, temporarily or permanently. Who really knows what (if anything) happened? The truck might have swerved to avoid an animal, a pothole, or a jaywalking pedestrian. But let us assume the worst of the many possibilities: that it was a careless, reckless, or even intentional maneuver that forced the tipster off the road. Lorenzo might have been distracted by his use of a hands-free cell phone… or distracted by an intense sports argument with José… Or, indeed, he might have intentionally forced the tipster off the road because of some personal animus, or hostility to her “Make Love, Not War” bumper sticker. I fail to see how reasonable suspicion of a discrete instance of irregular or hazardous driving generates a reasonable suspicion of ongoing intoxicated driving. What proportion of the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of careless, reckless, or intentional traffic violations committed each day is attributable to drunken drivers? I say 0.1 percent. I have no basis for that except my own guesswork. But unless the Court has some basis in reality to believe that the proportion is many orders of magnitude above that—say 1 in 10 or at least 1 in 20—it has no grounds for its unsupported assertion that the tipster’s report in this case gave rise to a reasonable suspicion of drunken driving.

That’s the USSC version of a smackdown, right there. But he’s not done!

That the officers witnessed nary a minor traffic violation nor any other “sound indici[um] of drunk driving,”… strongly suggests that the suspected crime was not occurring after all. The tip’s implication of continuing criminality, already weak, grew even weaker. Resisting this line of reasoning, the Court curiously asserts that, since drunk drivers who see marked squad cars in their rearview mirrors may evade detection simply by driving “more careful[ly],” the “absence of additional suspicious conduct” is “hardly surprising” and thus largely irrelevant. Whether a drunk driver drives drunkenly, the Court seems to think, is up to him. That is not how I understand the influence of alcohol.'

Thus, says Justice Scalia, “The Court’s opinion serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail consisting of two parts patent falsity.”

I don’t know about anybody else, but I love this stuff. And there’s something great about America when we have some of our greatest legal minds seriously arguing over the legitimacy of a traffic stop.

OK, this is pretty great. Organist Jelani Eddington performs a suite from the Star Wars soundtrack on a massive pipe organ. The organ was built by Wurlitzer in 1927 for a theater in Omaha, NE, and after restoration has been installed at a museum in the suburbs of Chicago.

A little more about the organ:

Mounted on the wall to the left are the 32' Diaphone pipes, and to the right are the 32' Bombarde pipes. A 32-note set of Deagan Tower Bells, the largest of which weighs 426 lb., hang on each side of the room. They are activated by huge solenoids from their own console, the organ console, a roll player, and even the doorbell button. To the rear of the room, the ‘Ethereal’ pipe chamber in the attic echoes softly from the skylight area, while the brass ‘Trumpet Imperial’ and copper ‘Bugle Battaglia’ speak with great authority from the back wall. …


The grand piano connected to the pipe organ is a 9' Knabe concert grand with an Ampico ‘A’ reproducing player mechanism. To the right of the console is a rare Deagan Piano-Vibraharp, which can be played by its own keyboard or from the organ console. Toward the rear of the room is a Spanish art case Steinway model A.R. Duo-Art reproducing piano, veneered in walnut with boxwood, pear and ebony inlay. A remote Duo-Art Concertola roll changer has been adapted to play Ampico rolls on the Knabe, or Duo-Art rolls on the Steinway, at the touch of a button on its control panel.

Crazy. Anyhow, this video itself is impressive:

On the left, my passport photo from 2004. On the right, my passport photo from last week.

When my wife’s sister and her husband recently visited Chile, they found this picture in a museum somewhere and sent it to my wife, noting that they’d found my doppelganger. I have to admit, I do see the resemblance. (Click on it to see the big version.)

The translation of the text with the photo (thanks, Google translate!):

CARL SKOTTSBERG aboard the ANTARCTIC A student of philosophy and botany of the Nordenskjold expedition. Was 21 years and was one of the last to leave the ship when it sank in the Weddell Sea. After being rescued by the corvette Uruguay, Skottsberg continued his career as a botanist and performed numerous trips. He was the founder of the Goteborg Botanical Garden whose main street that borders bears his name.

It turns out that Carl Skottsberg was indeed a Swedish botanist and explorer. It would appear that later in life his appearance and mine diverged a bit. (However, if anybody that’s handy with Photoshop wants to mock-up what this guy would look like with a shaved head and goatee… be my guest!)

For a moment in our 20s, though, we might have been brothers.

Last year I recorded some piano arrangements of familiar Christmas songs. I called it, originally enough, Carols for Christmas.

As I explained it last year:

It’s just over 30 minutes worth of music, all piano versions of traditional Christmas carols. There’s not a lot in the way of production - I recorded them using my Casio midi controller keyboard in single takes in GarageBand and did a minimal amount of editing to remove the clunky notes. The perfectionist part of me wishes I had another 80 hours to really refine and polish the arrangements and recordings; the engineer in me has declared “good enough”. The engineer won the debate this time.

If you’re so inclined, please enjoy Carols for Christmas as my gift to you this season. This download link will let you listen and/or download MP3s from Dropbox.

It’s been fun as my daughter Laura gets older (almost 9 and a half!) seeing her start to use things like instant messaging to great effect. A year ago she started trying to impersonate her mother while IMing me. (I caught on quickly. Becky doesn’t usually have typos.) A year later, she’s a lot better at the impersonation. (And has a lot fewer typos.)

I totally cracked up tonight when I saw the result of a Skype chat she had with my brother Ryan (who lives in London, England) earlier today. Ryan is well known for his silliness, and Laura comes by it honestly herself. Here’s the result:

I now know I must employ a sizable number of ninja warriors next time I make a cup of coffee and Laura’s around.

It’s Friday headed in to a holiday weekend and I’m tired of writing about serious topics, so it’s time to share this video - a 6-minute PBS feature on mandolin player extraordinaire Chris Thile.

Thile, only 32 years old but long known for his bluegrass/folk/Americana, has recently released an album of Bach Sonatas and Partitas played on the mandolin. As you’ll see in the video - he’s fantastic, and Bach’s music translates remarkably well.

This album is available on Amazon and probably lots of other places. I picked it up this morning and I’m looking forward to spending some time with it over the weekend.

We had a bunch of family visit our home the past couple days, including my grandmother, my parents, and two siblings. Such fun to have so many of us together. (And those that weren’t here were sorely missed.)

As one bit of evidence to document the weekend, here are four generations of family (my grandma, my dad, my sister, and my oldest two daughters) playing Apples to Apples. Grandma had never played before, but she pretty well cleaned up.

Playing this in the van while headed home:

Led to playing this as soon as I got home:

Led to this question: Please, oh please, Andrew Osenga, Cason Cooley, Mark Lockett, et al, won’t you someday soon Kickstart a one-night-only Normals reunion concert?

The end.

I like writing by hand, and I love the feel of writing with a good pen. In my experience, though, good pens are hard to find.

Several years ago I decided I wanted to give fountain pens a try. While I enjoyed the character that the fountain nib added to my writing, I always had a couple of issues: first, I could never get consistent ink flow through the nib. (Maybe I just wasn’t willing to spend enough on a pen? The Lamy Safari is usually spoken of highly, though.)

Second, my handwriting tends to be small, which means I value thin, precise lines. Not so easy with a fountain pen. (I keep a Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pen around for signing things at work. My signature: not so small.)

Then I found the Uniball Signo gel ink pens, which are awesome. (I prefer the 0.38 mm width.) Unfortunately, they’re not sold directly in the US; I splurge every year or so and order a few from JetPens.com, which imports them from Asia.

Then last week somebody linked to and highly recommended the Parker Jotter ballpoint retractable pen. This little gem is stainless steel, refillable, and a little smaller than your normal sized pen; all winners as far as I was concerned.

Then I found out it was the pen used as James Bond’s exploding pen in Goldeneye, and that sealed the deal. (I’m a sucker for Goldeneye for some reason.) The video here is queued up for maximum clicky-ness. (Unfortunately I was unable to find one that ran long enough to get computer hacker Boris’s final, exultant cry of “I am invincible!”.)

And friends, the pen sounds exactly like that when I click it. Which is awesome. (Come back in a week to find out if I’ve completely annoyed my wife with the clicking yet.)

It’s March, which means the birthdays come fast and furious at the Hubbs house. Today the youngest member of our household isn’t quite so young. Katie P turns 4 today! This little sweetie never slows down for long… guess that’s what happens when you have two big sisters to keep up with.

Today we will celebrate with lunch at her favorite place… nuggets (and maybe ice cream!) at Chick-Fil-A.

Seven years ago today, in the dark of the early morning, Addison was born. This young lady is so special… a free spirit in a house full of engineers who has a built-in wiggle that won’t let her sit still when there’s music going.

She’s wildly creative (that’s a ‘boom box’ she created) and has the most delicious random thoughts. (The other day: “Mom, if you return library books early, does the library pay you money?")

Hard to believe this awesome girl is now seven years old. We love you Addie Grace!

Last week Amazon introduced something called AutoRip. Basic premise: you buy a physical CD from Amazon, and if it’s AutoRip eligible, Amazon will give you a digital copy of the CD in your Amazon Cloud Drive, gratis. I presume this is Amazon’s way of trying to push some physical-only CD folks into the cloud, and hey, it doesn’t seem bad for any of us.

What I’m curious about, though, and haven’t seen addressed anywhere, is the impact this might have on the pricing models for digital-only purchases.

Last night my wife headed over to Amazon looking to purchase an older CD of Jim Brickman lullabies - something instrumental for a kid to listen to at night. The MP3 version of the album is currently offered on Amazon for $9.99.

But wait, what’s this?

That’s right, this album is also available with a physical CD and AutoRip. For $8.57. And that CD happens to have free shipping with our Amazon Prime membership.

Which means that it was $1.42 cheaper for my wife to get the MP3 downloads if she agreed to have Amazon ship her a physical copy of the disc as well. Something is wrong with that picture.

While this CD may be an unusual case, it’s by no means unique. The original cast recording of Les Miserables is currently featured on Amazon’s “recently released AutoRip CDs” page at $18.99 for MP3s or $16.99 for the physical CD + AutoRip.

Other CDs on that page have pricing that seems to be more the right way ‘round - a recent Susan Boyle CD is $10.99 Physical/$5.00 MP3, a Toby Keith CD at $11.88/$6.99 - but some are awfully close to parity, such as a Lady Antebellum CD at $10/$9.49 and a Jason Aldean CD for $9.99/$8.99.

Impacts to the pricing model may be one reason keeping Amazon from extending something useful like AutoRip to books as well. It sure doesn’t seem like offering physical + digital cheaper than digital only is a money-making proposition.

For at least twenty years my mother has been requesting that I record some of my piano stylings. For one reason and another I’ve never gotten to it, until now. My mom got her copy last weekend when we celebrated Christmas with my side of the family, so now I’m free and clear to share it with you all. I’m calling it Carols for Christmas.

It’s just over 30 minutes worth of music, all piano versions of traditional Christmas carols. There’s not a lot in the way of production - I recorded them using my Casio midi controller keyboard in single takes in GarageBand and did a minimal amount of editing to remove the clunky notes. The perfectionist part of me wishes I had another 80 hours to really refine and polish the arrangements and recordings; the engineer in me has declared “good enough”. The engineer won the debate this time.

So please enjoy Carols for Christmas as my gift to you this season. This download link will let you listen and/or download MP3s from Dropbox.

Merry Christmas!