Paradise Had No Plugs

It's been a stressful week for me. There were some pretty big events at my office, and I had a couple of pretty long days. I have to say that by the end of the week, I was completely ready for a vacation. The last day of school for the kids was Thursday, so their vacation officially started Friday morning.

The Pirate and I carpooled on Friday, so we stopped off and did a little shopping, then got home and turned off the power. Burritos ensued, and then one of the most satisfying nights of work I've had in a long time.

Wednesday, I bought a ~1930 Royal typewriter. I got it for a song because it hadn't yet been cleaned or reconditioned. The amazing John Dolphin of Santa Cruz Business Machines showed me how to clean the mechanics of an ancient typewriter, warning me about the fact that people who didn't know what they were doing would lubricate the machines with things like sewing machine oil. The sewing machine oil just attracts dust and dirt, gumming up the works. He said that the right thing to do was to take a thin piece of metal and just jiggle it around in the crevices where the keys come up to strike the paper, then shoot it with compressed air.

Butter knives were too wide to fit into the crevices, plastic might break in the crevice and be impossible to get out. I tried a thick tapestry needle, but it ended up being slightly too thick. This is where the embarrassing packrat tendencies of the Co-Prosperity Sphere play into our favor. We had an old tape measure that was stuck. 33 inches (not even a full yard) of tape stuck out and would neither pull out more nor go back in. And yet, we couldn't bring ourselves to throw it out.

The Pirate took tin snips and cut a 1/2 inch thick, 4-inch long strip off it. I then took the tin snips and cut one corner off, making a sharp end. It worked perfectly, dislodging some of the dust and oil that had gotten itself in there over the years. The next step is seeing exactly what we need to wire this manual keyboard to an electronic one. More as things develop!

Saturday was equally productive. Yard work by the ton, shopping, and haircuts. But mostly, emotional and mental relaxation. Once again, the electricity goes off, and all of my tension and stress magically melt away. The lack of buzz and hum mean that there's nothing tugging at the edges of my awareness. I just thought of something. My father-in-law has Parkinson's, and has been steadily losing weight for some time. He says that when your muscles are contracting constantly 24/7, it burns a lot of calories. I think the same thing can be said when something in your environment is buzzing or humming 24/7. There's always some part of your attention caught by that noise, and I think that the more you fracture your attention, the more stress you have.

It's Saturday night, and I feel like I've been on vacation for a week!

This week's tip: if you do choose to turn your electricity off, and you remember to put plastic bags of water into your freezer, then transfer them to your fridge - use the heavy-duty freezer bags. We're 4/4 for thin freezer bag failure, and bailing out your fridge isn't fun.

My Bad-Ass BIAJ

If there's one thing you can count on, it's that the gang at the Co-Prosperity Sphere is always spinning off ideas. No matter the economy, the climate, whether these ideas make our butts look big, we're throwing off ideas like a Van de Graaff generator throws off static!

While we're still working on other things, a certain mania has hit the CPS. Brain mania. This is the project I mentioned in the last post, and although I first had the idea several months ago, the wheels are finally turning.

The Inception
Many years ago, someone gave me one of those little toys that you put into water and it expands to many times its original size. This one was a tongue. It was made out of some substance whose surface was squidgy and slightly pebbled, like a real tongue. The jar I had put it in to reconstitute it was none too clean, and over the years of sitting on my desk, the water in the jar eventually turned the color of weak tea, or very strong formaldehyde. People asked me all the time if it was real. I was laid off from that job shortly before Christmas, and as a parting shot, I got one of my friends to enter the tongue in a jar into the company's annual white elephant exchange. I happened to be conferring with HR while the company party was going on, and even from across the building, I could tell exactly when my present was opened.

Over the years, I've mentioned the concept of a brain in a jar to several people, and one reaction has captured my attention: the sight of my friends recoiling in horror at the very thought of a disembodied brain in a jar. Mostly, they can't articulate why the thought upsets them, but it's clear that the entire thing touches some primal fear center. I want to know more about why the thought of a brain in a jar upsets people.

The Catalyst
Although I'd noodled the different components of the whole, I hadn't given the entire thing much serious thought because there are pivotal portions of it that are beyond my technical reach. It wasn't until the Maker Faire this year that the Pirate looked around at all the creative energy and caught fire. It went from yet another silly idea that the wife spun up to something that we're actively moving on.

The Brain in a Jar
The idea is this: a brain in a jar of some sort of preserving liquid. From the brain, wires and electrodes emerge, winding into a sort of umbilicus that disappears into a wooden box. The brain's only organic sensory input is a single eye, attached by its optic nerve directly to the brain.

The wires from the brain lead into a hand-worked wooden box, which also has leads to a keyboard and a microphone. The wooden box has as one side a display that shows three things: one portion of the screen shows what the eye sees. One portion shows an oscilloscope showing the noise being received from the microphone. The largest portion of the screen shows a chat program where people will be able to interact directly with the brain.

The Process
The addition of the Pirate to the team meant that the programming and computer hardware portions of the project suddenly got much easier. And we were utterly inspired by the fabulous project documentation from the Pirate's friend Steve Chamberlin's project Big Mess o' Wires, so we've been keeping some pretty intensive documentation of our process, which makes the Pirate very happy.

So far, it's been a lot of just deciding what the functionality is going to be. Does the brain float? Should it talk? What style do we want for the overall thing? As we make decisions, the whole thing becomes something near and dear to our hearts: a series of skills to be learned and problems to be solved. At the end of each solved problem, we are left with a tangible piece of a whole that will eventually be MADE OF AWESOME.

Stay tuned. We'll let you know how it's going

An Evening in the Sphere

The Pirate and I headed over to the Maker Faire last weekend, and had our brains recharged and inspired. I bought a pair of sunglasses from the very talented and self-effacing Stuart Breidenstein and the Pirate and I walked out with a Minty Boost kit and a few other odds and ends. The biggest thing we walked out with was the desire to restart the brain-in-a-jar project, of which you'll be hearing more in future.

So, in the spirit of "let's make some stuff," the Pirate and I spent our Wednesday night making some stuff. The Pirate got out our soldering iron and third hand (no one should be without a third hand) and put together the Minty Boost. Meanwhile, I dragged a bunch of oils up from the soapmaking stash in the basement and made a big batch of body butter using my favorite fragrance, the Gap's long-discontinued Om. I now have five old Body Shop shea butter containers filled with my creation. It's a lot different in texture (I used 60% shea, 20% palm and 20% coconut oils), but goes on wonderfully, is very moisturizing and smells amazing. Next time, though, I'm thinking castor oil. It'll give the finished product a little better spreadability without making it more greasy.

At the end of the evening, we hadn't caught up on any reality tv. We hadn't watched another installment of someone else doing things we'll never do. Instead of sitting by, passively consuming, we were creating stuff. To me, that's always the best evening in the world.