Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Peggy gave us this one.

I forget where she said it came from. Mexico? Central America?

The swastika has been used all over the world for millennia and isn't always evil. This one surely isn't evil.

Check out my new roadster!

I've been worried for a while.

You might remember that I had a hot air coffee roaster die a couple of years ago. According to Sweet Maria's, hot air roasters have a warranty for a year and that if they are well cared for they will last a couple of years.

A dead coffee roaster is not a good thing.

As I said, I've been using my roaster for more than two years. Last fall I was thinking that I'd better take action since I don't want to be without my coffee. Sweet Maria's said that the manufacturer of the roaster I was using (well, the manufacturers of all hot air roasters) had put production of their roasters on hold. The manufacture kept pushing back the time they'd be reintroducing the roasters. They're now saying they'll be ready at the end of 2010 or early in 2011.

So much for preventative action.

In the past few months the roaster has been making sounds like it is under stress. Coffee roasting makes a lot of dust and oily residue that clogs vents and gums up bearings. And its sounds of struggling seemed to be getting worse. I'm afraid it is very near the end of its life. And replacements aren't available.

I was getting very worried.

There are other hot air roasters available that have smaller capacities than my roaster handles. But I've been thinking that roasting every other day was a little too often. That maybe I need a roaster with a larger capacity.

Replacements of my roaster aren't available. Even if they were, I'd still be bound to the roaster a little more frequently that I want to be.

If only there were a roaster available with a larger capacity.

Meet The Roadster:

It's a Hottop Drum Coffee Roaster (basic model). It roasts in a rotating drum. It's quiet. (Hot air roasters are LOUD!) It roasts 250 grams of green coffee. The old hot air roaster did 150 grams. If anything wears out, it can be repaired. If anything in the hot air roaster's base wears out, you buy a new roaster. (I did have to get replacement roasting chambers for the hot air roasters. But it's the base with all the moving parts that was about to die and that would mean the end of that roaster.)

I couldn't make a movie of it in action. I needed to pay attention to what it was up to. Maybe later you'll get to see it running.

For its first roasting I just let it run through its "Auto" program. It churned the beans and the temperature rose and rose. It turns out that I needed to tell it to turn down the heat. It got up to the target temperature while the first crack was still going and it dumped the beans into the cooling tray. I wanted to go at least to Full City Roast or Full City Roast+. I have to use it and learn how to adjust it to get the roasts I'm after.

That's part of the fun of home roasting.

Why "Roadster"? Well, the day it came I sent Jerry a text message apologizing for not stopping at the grocery store to pick up some milk. I told him that I had a coffee roaster with me that I needed to get home and play with it. The phone is a smart phone and it helps people by correcting spelling errors. I watch the keyboard to see that it is entering the letters I want. I don't look at the part of the display where it shows what it's going to send. That's where it will make choices for you when it doesn't like the word you've entered. Sometimes it isn't terribly smart. I usually don't proofread what I've typed since I had done that while I typed.

It changed "roaster" to "roadster." So that is the machine's name.

It turns out that the New York Times's technology blogger had recently done a post where the perils of smart phones' autocorrection feature are shown. I'm not alone.

Beauty is fleeting

A couple of years ago I posted a picture of a cactus blossom we had outside our family room. Our cactus patch usually produces one blossom at a time. And only a handful of them in a season.

This year was different.

Some years, we would have a bunch of buds start to form but only a few would develop. The rest would just fall off. This year there were a lot of buds and they all developed. They all bloomed almost at once.

Here's our little cactus patch with the flowers starting to open on Tuesday evening.

Here they are about an hour later.

And here they are yesterday morning.

Here's a close-up of the show at the top of the tall cactuses.

These flowers last a day then collapse. I was going to show the pictures of the aftermath yesterday evening but I had to wait till tonight. A second batch of flowers opened last night.

Here you get to see the first day's flowers starting to droop alongside the flowers that are starting to open.

The top clump, some closing and some opening.

Here we see this morning's new flowers with yesterday's finished flowers.

And tonight the show's over.

We've never had a show like this one. It was pretty while it lasted.

(There are a few buds that will open in a few days but we won't have such an opulent show again this year.)

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A light catcher.

It's hanging at the back of the hall where it doesn't catch much light.

Time stands still

Here it is again, the solstice. That can only mean more solorgraphs.

Not much has changed from the other two times I tried this.

These first pictures are from the paint cans on the chimney. For my first try at solorgraphy, I had the cans attached to the chimney vertically and had the pinholes centered on the cans' sides. This let me see a lot of the foreground but it chopped off much of the sun's paths towards summer.  The second time, I put little blocks on the bottoms of the cans so they were pointed a bit higher in the sky. This made it so that there was nothing captured on the roof but got more of the sun's higher passes.

This time I pointed the cans straight ahead again but I moved the pinholes higher on the cans. This got more of the sun's paths than the first try and some of the foreground that was missing from my second attempt.

The tops of the sun's paths are still missing.

See the first post for the views taken with a normal camera.

Here's the view from the Guinness can I had on the weather station's tripod. I moved the pinhole higher on the can so it got all of the sun's travels across the sky. But the beer can doesn't seem to want to capture anything but the sun and a few trees' silhouettes.

I guess this picture shows our weather pretty well. We had a very warm January. This picture shows that we had a long period of sunny weather in the early part of the year (near the bottom of the sun's travels). Then it shows we had our normal May Gray and June Gloom as the sun climbs higher.

We're finishing up our June Gloom. Now we're heading into hot weather.

One day in March I found some 3-pound coffee cans at work. I thought that if a little quart paint can got more detail than a Guinness can, maybe a big coffee can could show even more detail.

It does.

But it doesn't manage to get much height.

I have 8 by 10 inch photo paper. That doesn't wrap very far around the inside of a coffee can. So I made 7 by 17 inch sheets by stapling two overlapped sheets together and trimming the height.

Here are my pictures from coffee cans that were strapped to the weather station's tripod below the Guinness can. In the bottom picture you can see the chimney where the paint cans were hung with care. These two pictures are looking in the same directions as the first two pictures above.  They're just 15-20 feet to the north of the chimney's pictures.

The black things on the bottom corners are little magnets I used to keep the paper in place.

I might try the coffee cans one more time. If I move the pinholes I suppose I can get a little more of the sun's paths. But I'd lose the stuff on the roof and not really get much more of the sun. But I have a lot of photo paper left so there's not a lot to lose. Unless I fall off the roof. 

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A small Eagle Dancer by Randy Chitto.

A map to the Far Side of town

A few days ago I mentioned that I have another Liō strip that I haven't shared.

Well, here it is.

Yay, Liō!

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A cane with a turtle as its handle. Poss gave it to us.

Its handle.

Good grief! I've now finished two years of these Tuesday posts. And we've got a lot more turtles to go!

You think that's funny?

Yesterday, both the San Diego Union-Tribune and the North County Times left newspapers in our driveway. Was it National Newspapers' Drum Up Business Day?

You might recall that we are getting our news electronically through a subscription to the New York Times Reader. The news is always delivered by the time we wake up. It's never wet from being dropped in the lake at the end of the driveway. It doesn't have comics.

Wait, the lack of comics is kind of a drawback.

There are a couple of the syndicators of the comics that have free access to their strips on the web. I wonder how long it will be till they make us pay for their products. I'll pay when that day comes. I suppose I could pay now for the ability to see their entire archives of the comics but I don't.

So I read the comics on the web.

The Union-Tribune's lineup of comics is the same as when we quit taking the paper. I looked over their comics to see if I had forgotten any important ones. I don't think I had. There might be one.

These free papers have given me the opportunity to examine my comics reading habits.

The Union-Tribune has two full pages of comics. They say that the comics in each of the four columns kind of have some commonality. Two of the columns have titles.

Here's what I think of their comics.

The first column of comics is titled "OFF THE WALL."

• Doonesbury — This strip is one in my browser's bookmarks but is becoming more and more an "Old Favorite" (see below) for me. It's getting way too repetitive.
• Dilbert — Bookmarked. The stories usually hit close to home work.
• Pearls Before Swine — I love Pig. He's so sweet. Rat can be annoying but often gets in good lines. Stephan Pastis is my Facebook friend. I read his blog, too.
• The Fusco Brothers — I had forgotten about this one. I used to read it in the paper every day. It's kind of amusing.
• Pardon My Planet — I used to read it when we got the newspaper. But strips about youngish people's relationships aren't really compelling so it's not in my bookmarks.
• Get Fuzzy — Satchel is another sweetie. Bucky is kind of like Rat. He's often annoying but often gets in good zingers. His batting average is higher than Rat's.
• La Cucaracha — This is a good strip about race relations. I'm Lalo Alcarez's Facebook friend.
• Six Chix — A strip done by six women. Each gets one day a week. More relationship angst. Not worth bookmarking.
• Non Sequitur —It's in my reading list. It switches between a one-panel political strip (which I enjoy) to a story about misanthropic Danae and her family. Those are OK.
• Bliss — This strip beat out Liō to be the replacement for "For Better or For Worse" when that one went into reruns. I'm still reading it but it's a bit too snarky for me. I might drop it.
• Bizarro — This is one of the best comic strips being published. The artwork is extraordinary. The jokes are great. No other strip even tries to do both (at least not daily). (Dilbert and Pearls have good jokes but have simple art.) Dan Piraro has a very funny blog. Dan is my Facebook friend. He won this year's Ruben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.

Column two is titled "OLD FAVORITES."  They're not my favorites...I quit reading any of these many years ago.

• Classic Peanuts — I'm afraid I quit reading Peanuts even before Sparky died.
• B. C. — Why doesn't this strip go to comics heaven?
• Beetle Bailey — Misogyny and violence against subordinates are so funny!
• Blondie — Wow! Blondie started a business! The strip is sooooooo fresh now!
• Hagar the Horrible — It's horrible.
• Fred Basset — Never read it.
• Garfield — I don't read garfield minus garfield either. I used to work with someone who really loved Garfield and would tape it to his cubicle door every day. He had a round face and a beard. He looked eerily like Garfield.
• The Wizard of Id — Another non-funny strip. Why does it continue?
• Marmaduke — Brad Anderson used to live in Escondido. He moved to Texas (I think) and the town went into mourning.  Good god!, there's a movie based on this comic panel. Has the world lost its senses?
• Dennis the Menace — I enjoyed this 50 years ago when I was Dennis's age. We both loved peanut butter sandwiches. Grandma compared me to that scamp. I understand that Dennis is less of a scamp and is now a more politically correct child. Is that true?

The third column isn't titled but I think they said that they're all about Families.

• Baby Blues — I got bored with strips that feature small children long ago.
• Adam@Home — I quit reading Adam when Brian Basset quit drawing it. I don't know why the artwork should make much of a difference to the strip when Mr. Basset is still writing the text. But then, it is another strip that features small children. Maybe the change in art simply made that more obvious to me.
• Jump Start — I used to enjoy this one but then it decided to be Baby Blues II.
• Zits — Another I used to read in the paper but I don't like it enough to click on a browser's bookmark. I don't like Jeremy. He's just too overtly spiteful towards his parents. Is that how 15 year olds are? I wasn't like that, was I?
• Luann — This one didn't follow me to my browser. It's another that is youth oriented. Greg Evans lives in North San Diego county!
• Nest Heads — A multigenerational family strip. That should boot it from my online reading but it's still there.
• Drabble — I haven't read this in many years. All of the characters annoyed me.
• Sally Forth — Dull.
• Crankshaft — Look! He backed over Keesterman's mailbox! Again! FUNNY! Die, Ed, Die!
• Pickles — Yet another multigenerational family strip. And in my browser. Maybe it's because the old folks are the focus.

The fourth column isn't titled and is a hodge-podge

• Mutts — Here comes blasphemy: I don't like Mutts. It gets too preachy. Its retro style got old. It's repetitious. I don't read it.
• Pooch Cafe — I do love Pooch Cafe. This week the strip started a flashback to Poncho's (the main pooch) first year. He was the last in line to be born. I think it will be fun to see how Poncho becomes the pooch we know an love. Paul Gilligan has a pretty good blog where he gives us insight into the strip, advance views of it, and too many pictures of Poncho lookalikes.
• Sherman's Lagoon — Sherman is great. And did you know that Sherman first appeared in the Escondido Times-Advocate? He was in the classifieds in the beginning.
• Mary Worth — I have never read any of the continuity strips. 
• Rex Morgan M.D. — Continuity strip.
• Judge Parker — Continuity strip. For some reason, while my eyes passed from Sherman's Lagoon to The Duplex, I would notice that this strip had some interesting artwork. The artist really liked to draw hands being expressive. And, boy, those women were HOT! That artist died and I don't know what it looks like these days.
• Funky Winkerbean — This strip is a frequent subject of one (or more) of the comics blogs I read. It's full of tragedy. I don't read it.
• The Duplex — The duplex of the strip has a mangy beer guzzling man and his dog and mangy friends living in one end and a prim woman and her refined poodle living in the other end. It contrasts their two lifestyles. It's now mostly about the beer. It's in my list of strips.
• Grand Avenue — This strip is yet another multigenerational family strip. A woman is rearing her grandchildren after their parents were killed in an car wreck. Why do I read these strips that feature children? The strip is drawn the the Union-Tribune's editorial cartoonist. What I never figured out is why the paper doesn't include their featured artist's comic in their Sunday paper.
• Mother Goose and Grimm — This strip used to be a kind of Far Side Lite. It still does some off the wall stuff but it is mostly now about Grimm and his friends. I read it but don't always enjoy it.

Hidden in the Classifieds is:

• Family Circus — Why, oh, why do I continue to read this? I pondered this once before. I still don't get it. MAKE IT STOP!

Their Sunday comics page has

• Fox Trot — That Jason!

The North County Times has fewer strips and most are also in the Union-Tribune. What they have that the UT doesn't are:

• For Better or For Worse — This, as I said, got booted from the Union-Tribune when it went into reruns. It deserved to be booted.
• Big Nate — A kids' strip.
• Fort Knox — Don't know it.
• Frazz — Know it only from comics blogs that gripe about it.
• Cleats — Don't know it.
• Baldo — Don't know it.
• Dustin — Don't know it.
• Pluggers — Don't like it. It's a favorite target of the comics blogs.
• One Big Happy — Don't know it.
• Mallard Fillmore — My eyes! My eyes! (We live in a rather conservative area.)

Comics I read that haven't been in the newspapers I've read, so they must be good, are:

• Arlo & Janis — A comics blog has a tag named after Arlo for strips that get away with obviously sexual material that their editors should have done something about.
• In the Bleachers — I really like this one even though I don't like sports.
• Liō — I. LOVE. LIŌ. But you already knew that from earlier posts (and I have another Sunday strip on the wall that I guess I haven't shown off!). Mark Tatulli is another Facebook friend. He won last year's Ruben Award for Newspaper Comic Strips. The artwork in Sunday Liō strips can't be beat.
• New Adventures of Queen Victoria — A topical strip. Today's strip often contains yesterday's news.

While I'm at it, here are the comics analysis and cartoonists' blogs I read:

• BizarroBlog — Just read it. It's funny.
• Comics I Don't Understand — Where to go when you just don't get it. Usually you're not alone.
• Dean's Comic Booth — Reworked comics. Often not safe for work.
• The Scott Adams Blog — Scott Adams has ideas. Discuss. 
• Pearls Before Swine — Stephan Pastis's blog. Usually not about Pearls.
• Pooch Café — Paul Gilligan's blog about his art (and too many pictures of Poncho lookalikes).
• Scott Meets Family Circus — Scott Gairdner steps into Family Circus to explain to the Keane Kids how stupid they are.
• The Comics Curmudgeon — Comics get analyzed.
• arloandjanis.com — Jimmy Johnson gives us old A&J strips and occasionally discusses issues of the day.
• The Daily Comics Review — Comics get analyzed.

Let me know if I've missed any good comics or blogs.

Chuckbert's got a brand new bag

A new camera bag, that is!

I love Costco. I can always find something I just can't live without. I had been thinking that it's time to get an SLR digital camera. I'd look over their selection and think it over a bit longer before splurging. But you know Costco, the next time you go they won't have what you had seen last time you were there.

Recently, they had a big display of Nikon D90 boxes right as you go in the door. This camera can do it all. It comes with two lenses, an 18-55mm zoom and a 70-300mm zoom. It has autofocus and manual focus. It includes a 4GB memory card. It comes with a bag to hold everything. IT TAKES MOVIES!

Chuckbert, get it now! It might not be here next time!

I'm glad I waited. I got a Nikon D90! Then and there!

I've made a very simple movie with it (see my previous post).

It took many of the pictures in my recent posts. This weekend I made a couple of outings to try it out some more.

I headed out east through Ramona and Julian, then south through Cuyamaca Rancho State Park to Pine Valley, west to El Cajon then home. For some reason I wasn't terribly inspired to take many pictures. I should have spent time off the highway in Cuyamaca but I just zipped through.

Here come a few pictures from that trip.

But first, in the early 80s I took some photography classes at Palomar College. The first classes used manual cameras and black and white 120 film. We used manual cameras so we learned how photography works. We used medium-format film because it's easier for beginners to handle than 35mm film. We learned that in bright sunlight that you needed a known exposure so we just needed to learn a simple formula for setting the aperture and shutter speed to achieve that exposure. No light meter was necessary. We learned how the aperture setting affected the depth of field. These were good classes.

One assignment was about symmetry. I got 9 points out of 10 on this picture of Ramona's town hall:

Part of the problem is there is writing above one of the windows and that draws your eye, breaking the symmetry.

Here's what Town Hall looked like on Friday:

Why'd they have to block it with trees?

Beyond Julian, I took the obligatory picture of a windmill and dead tree:

Here's a 180° panorama of five pictures stitched together. It was taken from the spot Jerry and I watched a very good episode of the Leonid Meteor Shower in 2000.

Colleen wanted to see the Unarius Academy of Science when she visited several years ago but we ran out of steam before we could get to El Cajon. I walked past it on this outing but couldn't bring myself to go in.

Jerry and I went to the Wild Animal Park on Memorial Day to get some fresh air and pictures.

Here's a picture Jerry took of me with his phone at the WAP. I'm sporting my new instrument:

And here are a few pictures my new camera and I took of animals:

I don't know if this is the February 14th or April 12th arrival. It's a boy in either case.

I have a new gadget!

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

This turtle post is kind of stretch.

Mikey gave me a Gömböc for Christmas.

This is a fascinating piece of metal.

So what is a Gömböc? Well, if you went to the link above, you'd see that it "is the first known homogenous object with one stable and one unstable equilibrium point, thus two equilibria altogether on a horizontal surface. It can be proven that no object with less than two equilibria exists."

So, since it is impossible to keep it balanced on its unstable equilibrium point, it will always wobble to its one stable equilibrium point no matter how you set it down on a smooth, horizontal surface.

Weebles do the same thing but they're not homogeneous. They have a weight inside their plastic bodies. A Gömböc achieves its stability completely through its shape.

So, what does this thing have to do with turtles? Good question.

It turns out that the shape of the Gömböc helps explain how some tortoises get back on their feet after they've been flipped onto their backs.

I made a little movie of my Gömböc finding its stable equilibrium point. It's not YouTube-worthy so here it is in Blogger's own video form.

I edited out a lot of the rocking. It takes a long time to finally come to rest.

We'll get back to more literal representations of turtles next week.

(Thanks, Mikey!)