Happy Centennial, Cash!

One Tuesday back in 2009 I showed you some little turtles in the drawer of my cash register. In that post I promised more about the cash register in three years time. Now is the time!

Today my cash register is 100 years old!

In August 1994, Jerry and I visited New Mexico. We took a day trip over to Las Vegas. I don't really remember why we went over there. Maybe it was a play day with Peggy. I have no real connection with the town. My parents and older sisters all went to New Mexico Highlands University. I was spared. The only thing I really remember of our trips to Las Vegas to see Jack's Aunt Gladie was our excursions to the nearby Dairy Queen where I'd get a Dilly Bar.

One of our stops on our visit was an antique store on the plaza. They had a bronze National cash register for sale. I was working for NCR at the time and had been wanting to get a cash register. I admired it but decided that it would be too difficult to get it back to California.

Here it is in the antique store.

We went back to Los Alamos without a cash register. The cash register kept calling to me so I decided that we probably could have it shipped. We went back the next day and bought it.

We took it to a business in Los Alamos that ships things. They built a crate with 5/8" plywood, removed the "Amount Purchased" top sign and glass, reinforced the purchase price that was showing (I don't know how to have nothing showing in the amount purchased window) and packed it in foam and styrofoam peanuts. They knew what they were doing. The cash register got here in the same condition we left it.

Its condition isn't perfect but it's pretty good. Its locks are missing their keys. Its Finish C "should be highly polished and clear lacquered with a car quality lacquer, to protect the polished finish" but it's not very shiny.

The people at the antique store told us that they were about its third owners. Its first owner was in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. I think they told me that the son of the first owner used it in a shop in Las Vegas. It then went to the antique store. Now I have it.

I can't find the receipt but the price tag you see in the picture survives.

Ignore the "c 1912"! We know it's actual age!

On the underside of the cash drawer is the guarantee that the cash register will be mechanically correct for two years after it was delivered. It shows that it was built for A. A. Witherspoon of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. It was delivered April 3, 1912.

You'll notice that the Register No. and Size recorded on the guarantee are the same as on the front of the cash register.

This means that this is the original drawer. The cash register isn't cobbled together from pieces!

There is a modification that probably voided the guarantee. The spring that pushes the cash drawer out broke. There is another spring tied to what's left of the original one.

To celebrate my cash register's 100th birthday, here it is making its cheerful Ding! when it registers a sale:

My 100-year-old cash register!

Getting juiced

For many years I've been having orange juice with my breakfast cereal. For a while I was even using the juice on my cereal. I haven't been a milk drinker for many, many years. Now I use soy milk on my cereal.

For many years I've been telling myself that orange juice from concentrate isn't much more than orange-flavored sugar water that is fortified with vitamin C.

I've been saying we should get a juicer so we can make wholesome juices that have more than just sugar and flavor in them.

A couple of months ago I was down to one can of orange juice concentrate when we went to Costco. We came home with a new six pack of OJ.

A week later we went to Costco again. I don't remember why we needed to make a return trip in such a short time. We came home with Jack LaLanne's Power Juicer Deluxe. Impulse shopping at Costco is so easy (and fun!).

We have a new gadget! We've used it every day since then!

Carrots. Celery. Apples. Ginger. Pineapple. Pears.

Wholesome juices!

Here is this morning's juice. One glass has been made and one has its raw ingredients still to be processed.

Here are its insides after everything has gone through.

The spinning blade grates the vegetables and fruit into very tiny shreds and the juice is spun through the filter. The pulp works its way to the top of the filter and is flung toward the collection bin. A lot gets stuck in the chute along the way.

The recipe book suggests that we collect the pulp and make tasty treats like muffins. We just compost it. Even if the muffins were good for us there is no way that we could eat enough to use much of the pulp.

Since we've started using the juicer I haven't mixed up a can of orange juice.

What do I do with all that OJ?

Orange you glad you have neighbors with too much produce?

It has happened again!

Our very nice neighbors left two big grocery bags packed with Valencia oranges on our doorstep. Juice! A half-gallon of fresh orange juice! And that's only the first bag of oranges!

And this happened just as my pitcher of orange juice from concentrate was down to its last swallow. Such good timing!

The bag that's left weighs 11 pounds. Another half-gallon of fresh juice is on its way.

A great start to another Thanksgiving

Happy Turkey Day!

It's off to a great start.

First, we had our espressos.

The coffee was recently roasted with The Roadster, ground in Rocky and brewed in Silvia (why don't I have any posts that really feature Rocky and Silvia?).

Jerry's is in a coffee mug. It has milk and sweetener that wouldn't fit in an espresso muglet. Since this is a holiday, we got an extra treat with our coffee. I made some bizcochito biscotti from a recipe in New Mexico Magazine.

Then we had breakfast.

(A lot of the following is a repeat from last year's thankfulness. We had about the same breakfast last year!)

The pancakes were made with:

• Wheat and oats that we milled this morning with our KitchenAid grain mill
• Vanilla made the BobBIE-Baby Way

On top of the pancakes we put:

• Peanut butter ground in our BlendTec Blender
• Pomegranate syrup made from juice from our bush

We swallowed our morning pills with:

• Pomegranate juice from our bush. The juice is cloudy since it was what was at the bottom of the pitchers where the juice settled (we wanted clear juice for the jelly I made).

I'm thankful that:

• We had a nice, wholesome, home-cooked meal and didn't get overfed
• There aren't a lot of dishes to take care of
• We have all our gadgets that make fairly healthful meals like this fun to make
• I have friends and family who humor me by reading these silly messages
• I have Jerry to take care of all the hard parts of Thanksgiving meals (and the rest of my life)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Now, we're off for an adventure (with picnic)!

One more day at the Grand Canyon

After breakfast with the ravens, I went out on Desert View Drive in search of a new spot for a movie. I ended up at Moran Point. I got my camera set up at 8:20 and had it click away until 10:30. I was alone for much of the first hour and the car was parked right by the camera. I was able to sit on something more comfortable than a rock, stump or wall now and then.

A couple from Michigan asked about my automatically clicking camera. I explained what was going on and dragged out my laptop and made them see a movie I had shot the day before. They were politely impressed and took off.

Later, I was sitting on the wall near the camera and I heard a voice behind me saying something like "Well, here's Charles!" I turned around and there was John from Encinitas.

John has a print hanging in his living room of the painting that Thomas Moran made from Moran Point. I had no knowledge of who the point had been named for. I think he said that the print was produced by Moran himself and isn't a modern, mass-produced reproduction.

I showed John the movie I was making when we visited the day before. He was more impressed with the result than the Michigan couple.

Now you have the opportunity to be impressed with watching two hours of the view from Moran Point in just over one minute. (Remember, you can press buttons on the player to show it in HD and full screen. I recommend both!)



Later, as I was turning onto the road to Lipan Point, there was John from Encinitas at the stop sign leaving the point. I didn't make a movie there. I had run out of patience for standing around for long periods. Besides, the camera's batteries were running low and it takes a long time being plugged in to get them recharged.

More clouds

I left Grandview Point and continued east. The last viewpoint on the rim (or first if you start at the east entrance) is Desert View. This has the Desert View Watchtower.

Watchtower (undergoing renovations)

The inside of the watchtower has murals on the ceiling.

Watchtower ceiling

And murals on the walls.

Watchtower wall

And views of the canyon.

Desert View view

I made a short video here. It was shot in only half an hour starting around 2:15, October 23, 2010. It was getting very cold and windy and I was getting discouraged with all the thick clouds. I wanted scattered, puffy clouds but had to deal with thick ones. You might be able to see the landscape shaking from all the wind. I need a sturdier tripod. And I need to check that the camera is horizontal.

Oh, What a Beautiful Day!

I left Yavapai Point where I had recorded the three hours of thick, morning clouds and headed east. I stopped at Grandview Point.

The clouds were finally breaking up so sunshine reached the canyon floor. This time we see not only clouds moving but their shadows as well.

This video captured the canyon and clouds from 11:20 till 1:00 Saturday, October 23, 2010.

Oh, What a Beautiful Gray Morning!

I set up an alarm on my iPod to wake me up at 6:00 Saturday morning with the hopes that the clouds might disappear overnight. I wanted to have a glorious sunrise to record.

I didn't get the greatest quality sleep that night because there was rain that beat on the tent and the pad wasn't fully inflated. But I was sound asleep when a very loud phone rang. It was the iPod doing what I had asked. It must have roused everyone in the campground who weren't already awake. I turned off the alarm and lay there for a while. The iPod rang again. I guess I just hit the snooze button.

I dragged myself out of the sleeping bag into the cold, damp world. The clouds were still there, thicker than before. A beautiful sunrise was not to be seen.

I took a little Sterno-burning "stove" to heat water for portable Starbucks coffee. But this first morning I didn't have time to heat water. Even though there were thick clouds I wanted to get to the rim and be set up for the time the sun was rising. So I just poured a packet of the coffee into cold water and drank it.

That's not the best way to prepare Starbucks Via. It didn't dissolve. But I figured that the clumps of coffee powder would digest and I'd get my caffeine dose. I ate my bagel with Jif peanut butter (if you can call it that).

How can a product that has more than just fresh peanuts taste "more like fresh peanuts" than peanut butter that's just peanuts and salt? Anyway, it doesn't need refrigeration. I suppose I could have taken a natural product and just stirred it well but it would have been a bit messier than Jif.

I went back to Yavapai Point where I had filmed the rain moving through the canyon the evening before.

There were a lot of low clouds. There was no sunrise to be seen that morning. But clouds breaking up and the sun coming out is a good subject for a time-lapse movie. And there's the Grand Canyon behind all those clouds!

So I set up the camera right at the edge of the canyon. There was a 300-foot drop just a couple of feet beyond the camera. The camera was pointed over the edge so I thought that there was going to be no chance that anyone would get between the camera and the canyon. But I was wrong. There are two frames with a Japanese tourist getting a picture of the canyon from the very edge of the canyon. If you blink, you'll miss her.

While I was standing there (I couldn't just wander around and leave the camera unattended), someone asked about what I was doing. We discussed our photography hobbies. He had just started taking landscape pictures. He has a very sturdy looking tripod. I need to get one myself. We introduced ourselves. John is from Encinitas. (Hey, the REI where I got the camping gear is in Encinitas...what a small world.)

I stood there from 7:00 to 10:00. The sun made only a few, very brief, appearances.

Here is what clouds moving through the Grand Canyon the morning of October 23, 2010, looked like. The three hours are reduced to a minute and 11 seconds. It starts out slow with just clouds visible. But the canyon eventually makes an appearance. Give it time to develop.

It was a Grand time

Jerry and a friend of his made their annual trip to Phoenix last weekend. I thought that since I was going to be alone for four days that I might as well get out of town myself. Ever since I got my time-lapse movie gadget, I had been thinking that clouds and shadows in the Grand Canyon might be interesting subjects for time-lapse movies.

I checked the lodges in the Grand Canyon Village but they were all completely booked for that weekend.

Then I checked the hotels in Tusayan, the smallest incorporated town in Arizona, that is just to the south of the park. There were some rooms available but I didn't really want have to travel all that distance every day.

I looked into other alternatives.

Home away from home

I thought that camping might be the way to go. I figured that I might be able to spend what I'd have had to spend for a hotel room on camping gear and end up with accommodations for future outings. Jerry and I headed over to REI to see what this gear would cost.

It turns out that they rent gear. What a deal, for less than what it costs to spend a night in a hotel room 20 miles from the canyon I could rent a tent, a sleeping bag and a pad for three nights! I could see if I enjoy camping before making the full investment. I reserved the gear and a campsite.

I went camping for the first time since the road trip from hell. (Actually, I think I never spent a night in the tent on that trip. I think I always slept on the coffin at the back of the Carryall.)

We went over to REI Thursday evening to pick up the equipment.

The week before my trip the weather here at home turned wintry. Lots of rain and gloominess. That weather headed to northern Arizona.  I drove up to the Grand Canyon on Friday and for much of the drive there was rain but it quit when I left I-40 at Williams. There was hope that the weekend would be dry!

I got to the campground at around 4:00pm. I pitched the tent between the channel that drains the campground and a shallower channel that looked like rain had recently run through. I then drove to Yavapai Point with my camera.

I got my camera and intervalometer set up around 5:20. Sunset was around 5:40 but there was no sun shining. The thick clouds hid it and were dropping rain in the canyon. But there was enough light for the camera. I had it take pictures of the canyon and the rain for a half hour.

Over the weekend I made several time-lapse movies. Mostly of the heavy cloud cover. There wasn't a lot of sunshine.

Here is the movie I shot that first evening. It shows a rain shower moving through the canyon.

I didn't have the best night's sleep the first night at the campground. I think that I didn't give the self-inflating pad enough time to puff up so it wasn't the softest possible bed. And it rained. The tent kept the water out but the rain beating on the tent was a noise I wasn't used to so it kept me awake much of the time. The sleeping bag kept me warm.

Camping might be a fun way to experience nature. At least in warmer and drier weather.

Short Ride in a Fast Machine

Here's a little time-lapse movie I made this evening. No music to this one.



If you want to hear John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine, here's a YouTube video of a performance.

I'm not going to blog every video I post to YouTube. You can subscribe to my channel if you want to be notified when I post new movies that don't show up here. Or just see them show up on your Facebook News Feed (if you're my friend there).

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Give me a second

In my last post I showed you my first time-lapse movie. Here it is again for your convenience.



I got a new gadget! I got myself an intervalometer. This is a device that plugs into my camera and triggers the shutter at a regular interval.

I got a Pclix LT. This intervalometer lets me have the camera take shots anywhere between every 0.4 second to once every 100 hours. I'm guessing you can really set it to fire the camera every 0.1 second but no digital SLR camera can respond that quickly.

After Izzy asked how long the roast took in my first Hottop roaster video, I looked at the timestamps on the segments from that video and found that from start of the preheat to the end of the cooling was about 25 minutes. So I figured that's how long it would take to roast the batch for this video. That turned out to be very close.

I then needed to come up with a bit of music to accompany the show. It needed to be short and evoke caffeinated hyperactivity. Rimsky-Korsikov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" seemed to cover all that. My recording of it lasts a minute and 33 seconds.

I decided to make my video at 24 frames per second.  I needed 93 seconds (the length of the music) at 24 frames/second. That meant that I needed around 2200 frames. I planned on shooting around 1500 seconds of roasting (25 minutes times 60 seconds/minute).

Now, I just had to divide my 1500 seconds by 2200 frames and came up with 0.68 second per frame.

I set the intervalometer to have the camera shoot a picture every 0.7 second.

I turned on the intervalometer as the second hand approached the 12 and hit the start button on the roaster when it reached the 12. My hand makes appearances when I dumped the beans into the roaster after the preheat period and when I needed to make adjustments to the heat element and the fan. When the cooling finished and the roaster shut off I let the camera take a few more shots then turned off the intervalometer.

I used QuickTime Pro on my Windows system to paste the resulting frames together. It is easy to do. You just point at the first picture in a folder that contains numbered images that all start with common letters and it makes a QuickTime movie. A minor problem with that is the camera makes a new folder after 999 images. It turned out that I just needed to make a segment of the movie for each folder the camera made.

(I have the QuickTime Pro license on my Windows system because I started making my little videos before I got a Mac. I don't want to spend another $29 to get a Pro license for my Mac.)

I also made a short segment from five frames (at one frame per second) before I pressed the start button for the countdown.

I pasted the four segments together using iMovie on my Mac and added the title. I added the music track and had it kick in when the time-lapse part of the movie started. Amazingly, the music lasted exactly the right amount of time. Such planning!

When the roaster turned itself off, I let the camera shoot about 10 seconds longer. I was going to finish the video with a fade-out of the clock back to ticking once per second. But I wasn't paying attention to the roaster and didn't realize that the drum was coasting to a stop during those 10 seconds. So I didn't have even five seconds of a motionless roaster and a ticking clock. Drat!

So, that's how you make a time-lapse movie of your Hottop Coffee Roaster.

It might have been better if I had used uniform, studio lighting. The sun being covered up by clouds sometimes was annoying. But maybe they added to the sense of weird time.

Now I have to make movies of things like sunsets. Last night's sunset was very pretty and I tried to record it. It didn't work. It was completely washed out. I have to figure how to set the exposure better. I made a movie of the fog lifting yesterday morning. A time-lapse movie of fog is boring. (Distant fog would be interesting but this was right across the highway.) We needed to leave shortly after it burnt off so I have only a very brief bit of clouds moving across the sky. It shows potential.

I love my camera.

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Time flies when you roast coffee

When I recently posted a video of my new Hottop Coffee Roaster doing its job, Izzy wondered how long it took to roast. I guessed around 15 minutes. I was wrong. It takes a bit longer. Colleen suggested that I reshoot the video with some old-time movie cliché showing the passage of time.

Your wish is my command!

Here is the coffee roaster with a clock ticking the seconds off!



I'll get around to telling you more about the movie in the next few days (if you ask for more).

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Taking the Roadster for a spin

As I promised when I introduced you to the Roadster, here (finally!) is a video of it in action.

Compare and Contrast

We had some parties to celebrate my mother's 90th birthday over the Fourth of July weekend in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Between parties, I hauled my camera to the spot where the water tank used to be above the house I grew up in (and where three of my nieces are now growing up).

I love my new camera. It can do everything. And with the help of the few accessories I've gotten for it so far, it can do even more.

One of the accessories I've bought is a circular polarizing filter. One of the things that the filter can do is darken the sky without changing colors since the sky far from the sun is polarized a bit.

The first part of my picture project was to see the polarized filter in action.

First, here is a picture looking west at Burnt Mountain. This picture has the polarizing filter oriented so that it aligned with the sky's polarization. It doesn't darken the sky. 

Now I have rotated the filter 90˚. The sky has darkened and the clouds became more apparent. You can better see the quarter moon just to the left of the mountain (about half way up the mountain).

I didn't do any tweaking of the colors so the greenery has gotten lighter in the second picture since the automatic exposure has compensated for the darker part of the picture.

Another thing that the camera can do is take very long exposures. Here is the same shot (well, zoomed in a little...I didn't really mean to do that) later that day. This was about 10:30 that night and the exposure lasted 107 seconds, not quite two minutes.

If I had had the zoom set the same for the two pictures we should have been able to compare the lengths of the stars' trails to the diameter of the moon in the previous picture. It takes about two minutes for the moon (or the sun) to move its width across the sky. So the stars' trails should be about the same width as the moon. At least for the stars near the equator.

I repeated this exercise with the mountain to the north. First, with minimal darkening from the polarized filter.

And maximizing the sky's darkening.

And a 206-second exposure that night.

Though there is nothing to contrast this picture with, here is a 13-minute exposure of Polaris and its surrounding stars.

To the left of Polaris is a short track of a meteor or a satellite flare. Along the bottom of the picture you can see the dotted line of an airplane's navigation lights as it flew across the shot. And from around the middle of the bottom to the middle of the right side there is a solid line, either a satellite or a meteor (or maybe it's a flying saucer!).

Now I have to make myself a barn door tracker and try to shoot the sky without the stars leaving trails. But then, I don't make it to places with dark skies very often. When you live in the big city, you give up a lot of your stargazing.

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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.

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!)

It's finally time to celebrate

Last year I posted the story of my reaching my official 30th anniversary with Teradata. I said that I would be getting yet another cheesy lapel pin with my years of service rendered in Roman numerals. I'd never worn any of my other milestone lapel pins.

My XXX lapel pin never came.

The manager of my department just dropped these things off when he got around to it. I figured that he was a busy man and that it was sitting in some drawer and would surface some time before I really needed it. I would never really need it so it would be delivered soon enough.

Well, this isn't your stodgy old NCR!

A few months ago a bunch of us got emails announcing that Teradata had come up with a new program for recognizing multiples of five years of service. We were told to expect another email giving us the details soon.

The day came and we got our emails that had links to the site where we get to choose a reward from several categories.

We could take a lapel pin, not the tacky one we had been getting all these years but rather one made of real gold and three little real (!) diamonds. We could get other jewelry like chunky silver rings for men or earrings for women. There were traditional gifts such as crystal bowls. They had a mountain bike. They had an Emerilware Deep Fryer for those who don't want to slog through another five years.

These were nice things!

I chose a watch.

But wait! There's more!

The back of the watch carries a bonus!

It had been branded with the company name! Sweet!

I finally have a service award that I actually use!

We love to have Jobs

On Monday, March 29, I got an email from Apple Store telling me that part of my order had shipped. It wasn't supposed to be delivered until Saturday so why was it being shipped so soon? It turned out that it was coming from China.

My iPad was on its way!

If you want to see why this is exciting, you should watch last week's episode of "Modern Family." It's a hoot. And very true to life.

Tracking express deliveries coming from China can be painful (watched pots, you know). It wasn't till Thursday night that it reached the U.S. There it was, in the land of Palin. I hope it didn't pick up too many cooties while it was being processed there.

I checked its progress Friday night before going to bed. It was still in Louisville, KY, and had just gotten its "Import Scan" on the morning that it's supposed to be delivered! I was getting worried.

I woke up Saturday and, before getting out of bed, checked its overnight progress using my iPod Touch that I had had the foresight to leave on my bedside table before going to bed. It had made it to Ontario.

It was still in Ontario.

There was no update on its progress after it left Ontario an hour later. I expected it to go to the local processing center then be shown as "Out for Delivery." But nothing. Lunchtime. Nothing. Relax, Chuckbert, Apple knows what they do.

After lunch I heard the noise of a truck coming to a stop nearby. Could it be? YES, IT WAS! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Witness the pain I went through:

My iPad:

My iPad and its friends, all reading the New York Times.

We see my MacBook Air, Motorola Droid (what, not an iPhone?!), iPod Touch and, oooooh!, my iPad. Just to complete the Apple family, I've included my iPod classic. I don't use it anymore. It doesn't talk to the Internet and the Touch plays all the music I've ripped. Can anybody give it a good home?

I needed the iPad because I've been using my phone and iPod to browse the Internet even though the computer was only a few steps away. Imagine, not using a MacBook Air because it is too big!

And the iPad can do other things. It's a book reader. I've downloaded a few free books.

Unlike the Kindle, it displays color pictures.

Speaking of "The Cask of Amontillado," I remember a few things about reading it in junior high school. I especially remember the line:
"The Amontillado!" ejaculated my friend, not yet recovered from his astonishment.
"Ejaculated!" we all tittered!  This was followed quickly by:
Unsheathing my rapier, I began to grope with it about the recess
"He unsheathed his rapier and groped it" (well, with it). We were on the floor in convulsions.

I have to go and get to know my new friend now.

The bleeding continues

It was time for a new gadget.

We replaced our old, tiny 36" television.

We decided that we're ready to have a High Definition Television. We got a 58" Samsung plasma set from Costco.

Even though its screen is much larger than the old CRT set's, it's not sticking way out into the room so the room feels much bigger now.  The old set stuck out almost a foot further into the room than the bottom of the new stand.

And we had to feed the hi-def-ness of the set. We got a Blu-Ray Disc player. And, of course, we upgraded our cable TV subscription to HD.

We've watched our first on-demand movies. In HD.

And the Olympics are watchable on on-demand. No commercial interruptions (there's only one commercial at the beginnings of the episodes). And you get to watch only the events you're interested in. I got to see both runs of each of the 12 finalists in the Men's Halfpipe finals without having to watch anything like the women's biathlon pursuit interspersed. All for no added charge! Yay, cable TV!

I know how most visitors to our house will spend most of their time.