Posted on by mwhybark

The Macon

Back in 2002, I started running posts here focused on lighter-than-air aviation. Originally, I had intended to run a post a day on the topic for a week, so I called it Blimp Week.

The topic overfilled the week, and while I haven’t been posting tons on the topic of late, every now and then something comes into my email that merits a new post.

When I started posting on the topic, I tracked down illustrator Kent Leech, who (with his father) created a magnificent cutaway illustration of the US Navy dirigible the USS Macon for the National Geographic Society. The image can be purchased within the National Geographic volume Inside Out, as the frontispiece. I had looked and looked for the picture online but simply had no luck.

Mr. Leech kindly responded to my questions about the image, but was not able to come up with a link to the drawing either. Years later, in May 2010, he followed up with a link to the drawing, hosted on his own site. Instead of embedding the image here, I’ll just pass that link along, and urge you to go check it out. He has some other interesting drawings on the site, too, such as the Turtle, the MG-TC (attention Eric!) and a vacuum tube.

Here’s some of what he had to say about the image creation process for the Macon illo back in 2002:

My father and I did that illustration back in late 1991. It took appx 6 weeks from start to finish.

I am afraid I have no posters of our illustration, and at present there is no image available on-line.

It was great project to work on! We went to moss landing and saw the parts they caught in the fishing nets (small chunks of the structure). Mark Holms was the art director at Nat Geo at the time. He was able to find old photos of the Macon (in a dumpster!!) that helped us do the illo. We even built a model to photograph (for the perspective). It is pretty crude, but it did the job.

Right after I hit post on this, I found a promo site for a National Geographic documentary on the Macon, which includes a very simple, but kind of amusing, in-browser interactive Sparrowhawk skyhook landing sim!

Further poking about revealed the raison d’etre for the documentary: in 2005 and 2006, the Macon’s resting place, 1500 feet down within the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, was exhaustively surveyed and documented by an archeological team. On February 11, 2010, the 75th anniversary of the wreck, the site was added to the National Register.

Stories2010 Images Sparrowhawk Portwing 300

Above is an image found on the NOAA press release site. It shows the wing of one of the Sparrowhawks lost when the ship went down; the planes were in place inside the dirigible when she went down.

Posted on by mwhybark

Hype it!

Right, so I did all this in Google Reader and realized I wanted it here too.

BoingBoing highlights a trailer for a forthcoming film by Luc Besson (Fifth Element, among others):

The film is to be called Les Aventures Extraordinaires d’Adele Blanc-Sec and is based on the work of Franco-Belgian comics artist and writer Jacques Tardi.

On Google reader, I initially commented,

OMGEEE

Adele Blanc-Sec is a Victorian-era supersleuth, a kind of anti-Holmes or anti-Irene Adler, originated by the profoundly great and influential francophone comics artist and writer Jacques Tardi.

Besson, of course, worked in B-D (bandes-dessinee, comics) before turning to film, as did the Jeunets. Jean-Pierre Jeunet told me that his film ‘A Very Long Engagement’ was influenced by Tardi, specifically by the adaptations of novels featuring the character Nestor Burma, a private investigator in interwar Paris whose life and views are profoundly shaped by his experiences in the trenches of the Great War.

i think it’s interesting and exciting that Besson and Jeunet, whose styles are flamboyant and extravagantly visual, are both influenced by the relative cool and discipline of Tardi.

I AM EXCITED SIGHT UNSEEN!

and after viewing the (quite promising) trailer, added:

Without nerding out, the characters and situations seen in the trailer appear to be fairly straightforward revisualizations of the originals. Ms. Blanc-Sec is more conventionally attractive in the trailer, but despite her creator’s choice to depict her as an idiosyncratic beauty, she is in ink lovely as well.

And finally, provided a raft of links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Tardi

http://lambiek.net/artists/t/tardi.htm

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_at_ep_srch/192-3539107-7940826?ie=UTF8&search-alias=books&field-author=Jacques+Tardi&sort=relevancerank

http://www.fantagraphics.com/index.php?keyword=tardi&Search=Search&Itemid=62&option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.browse

Posted on by mwhybark

All at Once

ITEM! My Treo 680 has given up the ghost. I suspect I will just drop data and use a non-data phone for a while. I’d love to jump over to an iPhone but while finances are uncertain I can’t commit to the platform.

Eric Sinclair wisely pointed out a shared-minutes, shared-data plan on T-Mobile which I initially dismissed out of hand but on reconsideration am likely to pursue once I have the handsets I want in hand.

Here is my desired featureset:

– Palm OS (not that important, but I have a raft of apps. I’m quite aware that it’s at end of life.)

– large screen

– fully-featured non-lockin ereader available for the platform (nearly all of my leisure reading happens on a phone now)

– alphanumeric keypad or equivalent (screen-only is fine)

– wifi connectivity option

– hackable for tethering, don’t care if it’s outside TOS

I would immediately seek out a Palm Pro or Pre, but it seems that the Pro is Windows Mobile only and the Pre is not yet CDMA/GSM available. Centro is the closest, but it’s clearly a downfeatured version of the 680, the device I just broke.

I can have some of these features but not all at once, it seems. This of course makes me want to map my cell number to Google Voice and just drop the handset altogether.

My desired handset price point is $50 or free. Eventually I can imagine forking out some dough to Uncle Steve for an iPhone or inheritor but right now, fuck that.

So here’s what my findings indicate: I’m fucked, what I want is unavailable. So my next most important goal in this matter is saving money. Our monthly cell expense is about $120. I’m thinking if I port our numbers to prepaid I can get that down to under $40, no data.

ITEM! Viv’s iBook G4 died after about five years of faithful service. The problem appears to be a wear-and-flexion-related soldering failure which is remedied by a procedure called ‘reballing.’ Reballing quotes and anecdotes on the intarwebs indicate that one may expect to pay from $40 to $300 for the procedure. In the iBook G4’s case, if the procedure involves a full-machine teardown and rebuild, it will be around $300 – the 5-year old iBooks are a BEAR to disassemble.

After diagnosing the issue, I was able to clone the boot drive using Firewire Target mode to an old PowerBook of mine, so Viv’s set.

But of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. For several years I amused myself by buying old and broken Mac laptops on eBay and rebuilding them, so even a hairy laptop teardown holds no trepidation for me. So I set out to release the motherboard of Viv’s dead iBook, and on the way, swap out the hard drive for another retired laptop drive I had handy.

Things went swimmingly!

It was a complex teardown – the motherboard replacement procedure has about sixty steps to the halfway point – but straightforward enough. The hardest tool to locate was a 4mm socket wrench, not a -hex- wrench, but an actual wrench to fit around a 4mm nut. I have boatloads of Torx and other obscure twisty doohickeys but this was the first time I had encountered an actual nut in years.

Once I had the drive pulled, I went off book, confident I knew what I was doing, and yanked the drive ribbon off the end of the harddrive as I have done countless times in the past.

DISASTER!

The mating end of the drive ribbon was connected to the drive proper with a familiar black connecting comb, but the ribbon itself employs an innovative cost-cutting technique. Instead of mounting the connection points on the familiar green stiffener of a sliver of circuit board, the connection points are mounted directly to the highly flexible ribbon itself. The comb released the ribbon-mounted connectors BEFORE it released the rather more durable double row of connecting teeth at the base of the drive.

The tiny connectors unzipped from the ribbon like spring-mounted seeds from a noxious weed.

After a calm but dispirited hour attempting to reseat and true the liberated connectors, which bear a resemblance to tiny gold-plated squash blossoms, I accepted defeat.

The motherboard is pulled and I’ll get a local quote tomorrow – the hosed part is about $30 online. I kinda wish the local guys would quote me on the phone, I can’t imagine that they are gonna give me a $50 estimate. If they are over $70, it’s out of my range.

Still, even though I experienced chagrin at my idiocy, on the whole, it was a pleasant afternoon. My eyes are not as sharp as they were six years ago, the last time I did a laptop teardown and rebuild, but it was fun then and it remained fun today. I suppose that if it proves prohibitive to reassemble the device, there’s still some money on ebay in he parts, and god knows I have enough parts I need to get rid of.

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Stars and rings

Friday night, on a whim, I pointed my old and semi-cheapo Tasco birding scope at Saturn, and was unprepared for the clarity of the disc and rings. The scope, when deployed at maximum zoom to observe a territorial subject, displays bleeding and dimess, refractory halos around discrete subjects. So I tend to not use it at max zoom for looking at the mountains and so forth.

It’s a useful adjunct for nighttime astronomical observations, because:

  • it has a relatively wider field of view than the finderscope on the Meade
  • it needs to be used on a tripod
  • it shows astronomical objects in natural orientation, not inverted, as is the case with the Meade
  • it is capable of higher magnification than my binoculars (x50 vs x60)

So on Saturday, I geared up and got the big glass on Saturn proper. As is my tradition, I took absurdly poor pictures through the viewfinder, which I have not uploaded yet.

I was able to verifiably observe Saturn, rings in essence precisely edge on, Titan, and Rhea, the two largest moons. It’s possible I saw Enceladus as well.

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Taxes taxes taxes

Finally got going on the taxes, looks like a nice refund this year, which is great. Big unresolved variables are IRA contribs this year and whether or not it’s worth itemizing the cars – we had some big repair bills but did not keep mileage records; I couldn’t parse whether or not you can just waive the mileage claim. In thinking about it I would guess not, if mileage is the basis of percentile usage. I don’t think it affected our refund either way but need to run the scenarios.

The wind seems to have passed, hopefully that’s the weather shifting back to sunny.

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CONFIGURING

Your attention please:

I am tinkering with the blog with the intent of republishing every bit of my decentralized online activity here, from Twitter posts to Facebook comments. Until I have effectively adjusted the ways in which this content is republished here, the blog and RSS feed may prove annoying as shit. Feel free to yank the RSS feed for the blog from Google Reader, I’ll advise via Google Reader when things settle down. I will probably delink blog and Facebook for the meantime as well.

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Good and bad

Finally, we have higher-speed internet access: 2.x mbps as opposed to the former 256k dsl. Swapping out the access points and routers went very smoothly, thank heavens. The biggest stumbling block was dealing with the behavior of a mixed pack of Airport Express wireless networking devices. Thankfully they have settled down and give every sign of continued maintenance-free networking activity.

In practical terms, this means that Hulu is now functional.

I had a line on a near-mint large-aperture goto telescope, but in order to retrieve it I had to go to the Kitsap peninsula. After the windstorm overnight, the day was clear, warm, and bright, and I was looking forward to a ferry ride and a drive in the company of the pup. Alas, as I waited to drive onto the ferry, my car’s battery died. For the past couple of weeks, the car has had flaky electronics, and this was the last straw. On my way to the ferry, I had driven about twenty miles – the battery had received more than enough juice. It was apparent to me that if I got a jump and crossed to the peninsula, the probability of another non-starter event was very high, and so I waved off.

Tomorrow I take the car in to learn the expense entailed. That expense may very well curdle the telescope purchase.

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Back to the Old and Weird

Had brunch with Kineta and Demian before a viewing of the great “Old, Weird America” exhibit at the Frye. A communications snafu meant that Adrian was not tracked down to join, which seems a shame. I had seen the show a couple weeks ago while waiting for a League meeting and it knocked my socks off, especially the work of Dario Robleto.

Greg wants me to go see a collaborator’s screening tonight at around 9, I am inclined to do so. I need to spend tomorrow at the libraries, though, so I’m sorta dithering.