Back in the 90s I had to go about furnishing a small apartment that was all mine, no roommates. I needed a coffee table and, for whatever reason, ended up using a metal trunk for the purpose. It had so many drinks spilled on it and got gooped up with so many candle wax drippings. Fast-forward to today, where (until two weeks ago) it served as a bedside table. It was covered in mostly-immovable things like a table lamp, multiple alarm clocks, charging stands, and so on, meaning it was difficult to open. When moving up the coast from Orange County to Portland, I’d stuffed it with t-shirts and things, then forgot about it. I replaced the trunk-bedside-table with a proper, and more accessible, bedside table a couple of weekends ago, which gave me the opportunity to sort through the contents of the trunk.
The coffee-table turned bedside-table trunk, with all its stains and imperfections.
The t-shirts in the trunk could be sorted into some broad categories: hacking, Betty Page, shows, and work. I was very much into the “hacktivism” of the 90s. Let’s start with the hacking.
The (partial?) collection of hacker shirts.
Through a friend organizing and encouraging me to go, I wound up at the second Defcon (lower-left shirt). The other ones I think are out of order: 3, 5, and 4. I guess I don’t have others (or if I do, they’re in another box), but I do have badges from Defcon 2 up to 13. That might be fodder for a different post. The hacker print magazines at the time were 2600 (which is still going strong) and Mondo 2K (which is hilarious, looking back at it). The other four are assorted nondescript hacktivism-type shirts.
Betty Page and some anime chicks that I don’t know where they’re from.
The next category would be “Betty Page and anime.” An alternate category title might be “shirts that make me cringe today and which I wouldn’t be caught wearing.” These cringey shirts went off to Ridwell for textile recycling.
A trip of NIN shirts
Nine Inch Nails, from the Broken and Downward Spiral tour era.
Penn and Teller shirts.
Next up are some Penn and Teller shirts. I remember at one of these shows, Weird Al was in the audience. At intermission he was politely and embarrassedly signing autographs.
TMBG shirt frontsTMBG shirt backs
They Might Be Giants: Apollo 18 and… something after Apollo 18.
Shirts from former jobs.
This is where my opsec reveals some osint. While working through college, I ended up at Virtual World (an early multiplayer VR arcade), getting fired from there (for hacking the games), and at Virgin Interactive Entertainment. Shirts and hats. I’m pretty certain I have more Virgin shirts in a box in the back of the closet.
Saying farewell to the trunk
I no longer have a use for the stained and rusty trunk. It’s lived a good life, and I felt this t-shirt time capsule was a fun distraction. But it was way past time to move on to adult furniture.
(Addendum: Christine snagged it from the curb and plans to use it to store costuming.)
I got this suitcase some time around 1995. I was just starting out traveling on my own. In that era, I was extremely goth/industrial, and I thought it fit as both a functional and esthetic accessory. A metal suitcase was badass. It fit my style — even moreso with band stickers. This suitcase treated me well, I treated it well, and I have a lot of fond memories traveling with it.
My computer-adjacent retail job at the time meant that I had to save up a lot of pennies to purchase a fancy Zero Haliburton (no relation to the Desert Storm contractors) suitcase. But I wanted it — no NEEDED it to fit my image — so it was totally worth however many paychecks it took to obtain.
Fast-forward a bunch of years. It turns out a metal suitcase is HEAVY. And that weight counts toward your checked luggage weight. And let’s face it, this Bad Boi is just WAY too much of a chonker for carry-on. AND in Europe, both checked and carry-on restrictions are more restrictive than the US.
In this century, I ended up getting a carry-on (which I can also check) from Briggs & Riley, which checks all the size boxes for both the US and Europe for carry-on. As a secondary, I have a really nice Tom Bihn Aeronaut, which is an extremely well thought-out duffel-bag-slash-backpack that could be a carry-on or checked bag. I also have a packable and expandable duffel-slash-backpack from REI that folds in upon itself like an ouroboros, which works in a pinch when you so many souvenirs that you’ve run out of space. I don’t remember the last time I actually used the metal suitcase. Maybe 15 years ago?
Oh, did I mention it was damaged by the TSA? Yep, I bought it pre TSA-standard-lock-overrides and they “had” to bust it open once. For reasons. So the latches work great until you bump it too hard, which is fine when packing and rolling, but manhandling luggage is sort of the luggage handler’s job. My workaround was a big-ol’ thing that’s basically a seatbelt with a combination lock (TSA-approved key, of course!) that wraps the whole thing like a Victorian schoolboy’s pile of books. I have to ratchet that band around the body for it to stay closed when facing abuse.
Even though it’s been in the attic for over a decade, I still have an emotional connection to that suitcase. It holds nostalgia. But it is 100% impractical and just takes up space. I can’t even tell you the last trip I took it on. To keep its memory, I decided to take some photos. But also: recently I started 3D-scanning objects with Polycam, so decided to scan it as well. Nominally, this is for 3D printing, but in this case it is entirely for fun. I thought it would be nice to have a spinny 3D model to remember it by. The one big flaw with capturing the model is that the reflectiveness of the metal made the surface a little more wobbly and pock-marked in the scan than in reality because it couldn’t get a good read on the reflection’s depth. But I’m just going to treat that as a feature. Pretend that it got even more banged up over the years, having gone on so many wonderful adventures.
So this post is the memory honoring the suitcase before I finally get rid of it. Thank you, suitcase, for so many amazing trips.
Last week someone posted the following charming picture to Twitter:
I found it lovely. In part, this is because he’s a perfectly British mole, in a waistcoat, enjoying tea in the rain. But also because I have a spot where I can enjoy the very same lifestyle and mood, weather permitting. The house has a built-in deep alcove with a bench. In fact, you can comfortably fit two people in there and both stay perfectly dry.
I liked the picture so much that I thought I might find a higher resolution version and print out a copy to pin in the house. Unfortunately, Google Reverse-Image Search wasn’t super-helpful on that front. After pointing to that picture, it suggested about 6 other instances — all variations on the same tweet, some screen-capturing the tweet plus text, others reposting the image with different captions. Fortunately, one of those tweets had a big bunch of responses, one of which pointed to the source. Right there on page 37 of A Great Big Ugly Man Came Up and Tied His Horse To Me, a British book for children, is the full uncropped image.
Page 37 in all its glory.
It’s even better with the verse, and not just because it dunks on Devon.
Rain on the green grass, And rain on the tree, Rain on the house-top, But not on me.
Throughout the length of this pandemic, I don’t think I got sick once. If I did, it was brief and minor. Masks, hand sanitizer, and isolation. Several years ago, before the pandemic, I put together a sickday television playlist — something I could put on, shuffled, to get me through a day of sickness. You see, I have hundreds upon hundreds of DVDs (and an increasing number of Blu-Rays) of movies and television shows. I rip those into a Plex server so that they’re immediately available. Think of it like a video jukebox. Only with the sickday playlist did I start taking advantage of the playlist feature.
My 80s sickday playlist has about a half-dozen different shows. My main criteria is that the shows had to be syndicated in the 80s, and that I probably saw the syndicated episodes on cable when home from school. They also need to be fairly forgettable and entirely self-contained episodes. Things with multi-episode story arcs don’t work well when you are on shuffle. Nor do they work well if you have a fever and are going in and out of sleep while watching. Fortunately, very few shows of the era had anything more than a two-parter pair of episodes. I avoided dramas and mysteries for similar attention-span reasons.
When a show to add occurs to me, I will order the box set of DVDs and load them into the Plex. The current catalog on the sick-day playlist is:
I Love Lucy
The Addams Family
Gilligan’s Island
The Monkees
Batman
Knight Rider
Lost in Space
My one problem with this setup is that I have far more I Love Lucy episodes than any other show. Because of the way the randomness works in the playlist, I am more likely than anything to get one of those shows. What I’d really like is a randomizer that first picked a show, then picked an episode within that show. That would give me a far greater chance of seeing Batman or Lost in Space rather than yet another Lucy or Knight Rider episode. I may see if I can hack together something like that.
If you were going to add to this playlist, what shows would you pick?
I saw a tweet yesterday morning that was a combination of scary and eye-opening. I knew that you could have covid and not know it, but I don’t think I had fully internalized this fact. You could have it, not yet know it, and pass it along to your friends. With the Omicron variant even more virulent than the previous ones, that started feeling a bit more frightening to self, friends, and family.
Christine and I have a large number of events this Christmas season. Fortunately, they’re all with friends who practice health safety — no wacky anti-vax extended family or whatever. But still, some are in public-ish places: a couple of bars/restaurants, a private room in a karaoke joint (where you have to go through the public room to order drinks), the bus rides to get there, and so on.
This tweet helped me realize that I could bump up my level of responsibility a couple of notches. That I can help normalize taking tests before events. This is something that I’ve decided to start doing, and that I’d like to encourage you to do the same.
What a wild ride this year has been, huh? Earlier this month, Christine and I put together Christmas cards that attempted to summarize the year. We didn’t have enough space to cover everything we wanted, plus 2020 threw us a curve-ball after our print deadline. First, let’s start with our card:
If I had to pick a theme for 2020, it would be “self-isolation.” After our big Disneyland trip at the end of February and two nights out at stage shows, we started staying at home before the official mandates to do so rolled out. Fortunately we both work jobs that can be done from home, but it was a big blow to our social schedule and interactions.
298 days of self-isolating, and counting. Also a set of political counters and the Air Quality Index.
A lot of our activities ground to a halt. But that’s not to say that nothing else happened. Nor is it to say that there isn’t more than a few brief sentences behind the things we called out in our holiday card.
This article is an attempt to add a little more texture and depth to our 2020.
Cats
Last year’s card featured our cats: Norman, the formerly-feral stray that “came with the house,” Cornelius, the naked Sphynx cat, and the two new goofy kittens, Vincent and Basil (who are mostly Sphynx, with a Devon Rex grandparent, and a little more fuzzy than you’d expect).
We all had a good year, and the cats are quite pleased that we’re spending the majority of our lives in the house with them. Even if we sometimes put humiliating clothing on them.
Disneyland & Black Spire Outpost
Christine and I kicked off the year with a two-year anniversary trip in late February to Disneyland. Black Spire Outpost (a.k.a. Batuu, a.k.a. “Star Wars Land”) was the highlight of the trip. It was such a fun immersive experience. It wasn’t just rides and scenery. You could interact with the scenery. You could interact with the employees and they’ll stay in character, using vocabulary, phrases, and greetings unique to the location, and adding to the experience that you’re on an off-world outpost.
In the first 20 minutes of being in that part of the park, a resistance fighter approached and recruited us into some hacking activities. She showed us how we could get close to a computer panel and then use our “data pads” (smartphones) to hack in and retrieve some vital plans. These sorts of missions were set up all around the outpost, both in common areas and in the ride queues. Often, a successful hack meant something happened in the real world: a computer panel would beep and flash, a droid would turn its head around, a space ship would vent smoke. We spent a good chunk of time hacking for the resistance and avoiding stormtroopers and Kylo Ren.
Christine hacking at the Cantina.
We also spent a good amount of time at the Cantina. In fact, several nights we closed it out, which was fun experience. The energy generators, which are flaky throughout the night, causing brownouts in the bar, finally cut out and the DJ droid shuts off in a dramatic performance.
An evening at the Cantina.
We got to fly the Millennium Falcon and Christine got to meet Chewbacca.
We both built droids and Christine had a magical, emotional experience building her own custom lightsaber.
One of our favorite takeaways from the trip was eating “Ronto Wraps.” These come from a food stall and are framed sort of like galactic street food: meat (or fake meat) cooked over a rocket-engine-turned-roaster, served with spicy slaw and other toppings in a pita. We liked them so much we tried several recipes to make them at home. They’re now a weekly meal to go alongside watching The Mandalorian on Disney. We’ve also made a few attempts at recreating the fancy Cantina drinks, served proudly on the laser-cut replicas of the Cantina coasters I made in the basement.
We also eat popcorn from R2D2’s head on those nights.
Long story short: it was a fun time and a highlight of the otherwise-mostly-drab year.
Guest House
In case you haven’t heard, I’m building an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU). That’s a fancy name for a guest house or granny-flat. Portland has strict limits on city boundaries, to help prevent sprawl and help encourage higher-density housing. Think about how different New York City might be if Manhattan wasn’t an island. It could conceivably have been another sprawly, congested Los Angeles without that hard boundary. In the past decade, Portland has encouraged major-road real estate into retail-below / apartments or condos above. They’ve also pushed to turn residential single-family land to multi-family dwellings. These come in the form of duplex-conversions and tiny houses.
The particular “tiny house” I’m building is just under 750 square feet. Once the pandemic has subsided and folks feel comfortable traveling again, the short-term plan is to use it as a guest house for friends and family as well as for short-term rentals (think Airbnb and Vrbo). This should help offset, and perhaps fully subsidize, the mortgage. Medium and long term plans are still in flux, possibly downsizing into the guest house and renting out the main house, but regardless of what happens, you can be sure they’ll include more international travel.
Progress as of Thanksgiving.
The new house features a window-bench (as a reading nook) on both the outside and inside of the big bay window! The concrete floors are plumbed to provide radiant heat directly from the floor. The kitchen is smaller than what we’re used to, but still quite competent.
Inside the ADU, the living room and kitchen, the beginning of January.
If things go according to schedule (spoiler alert: they probably won’t), the contractors will be complete in late February.
Protesting
You may have seen that the protests in Portland hit national news. It’s true that Portland has the worst track record of police violence in the US. But it’s also true that the protests were mostly peaceful — contrary to national news reports of “antifa violence.”
The first night after George Floyd’s murder sparked riots in Portland. Agitators smashed store windows and stole merchandise downtown. But after the initial riot shock, the protests were a peaceful (on the protestors’ end) affair, constrained to two city blocks — a park in front of the courthouse and the neighboring justice center (the “police station”). The rest of Portland, outside those two square blocks, and pandemic aside, was business as usual. Portland wasn’t a “war zone” any more than a sit-in or even a renaissance faire is one. There was a medic tent and a food tent (later a food truck) that took donations and handed out free BBQ dinners. There was a constant flow of people giving speeches.
But you could almost set your watch by the police response. Nightly at about 10pm they’d decide it was suddenly an unlawful gathering and start throwing tear gas and flashbangs (concussion grenades).
The blur around the lights isn’t fog. It’s CS gas (tear gas).
Although we outfitted ourselves to go out a couple of times, it was difficult for us to keep up with the nightly protests. The pandemic led to business closures, which led to a lot of folks out of work, giving them extra incentive to protest night after night. We’re significantly older than the median age of the protestors and start the workday early, which made it rough to continue this trajectory of help.
Christine has contributed on the media front. She summarized a lot of the misconceptions of riots and violence in Portland in her YouTube video The Revolution in Portland. Her podcast, The Daily Rose, is a counter-voice to the narrative pushed by the alt-right. It touches on both Portland and national events and news topics.
And if you’re a fan of the musical Hamilton, you may be interested in her parody of the King George song (“You’ll Be Back”) that swaps in Trump as the main character.
Fires
A practical side-effect of gearing up for protests is that we were already prepared for the west coast fires. Portland is known for its clean water and fresh air. But when the fires hit, our air was classified as “hazardous.”
CDC’s Air Quality Index (AQI) scale. We routinely had values of 400+.
At other times during the pandemic, we’d go outside on walks and hikes. We’d have picnics. We’d generally enjoy the natural surroundings. When the fires hit, even the simple act of going out the back door of the house, to get around to the basement door, to grab something from down there and return to the house, required a mask of some kind. Until we found every possible draft in the house, we even had to wear N95 masks at night when we slept. The indoor AQI was often above 100.
This is indoors.
Air quality in the house at night.
I built some gadgets to keep track of all the numbers.
The fires also pushed back construction schedule on the guest house — which is fine. Folks need to stay safe, and subcontractors seem to play the manly-man part and not even wear masks to protect themselves from COVID, much less from the fire smoke.
Fun
The pandemic and social distancing meant we couldn’t hold a third-annual Potions Party. But it didn’t mean we couldn’t have fun. We had quite a few happy hours over Zoom video conferencing, a few even included board games that we’d strategically picked to be compatible with remote play over a video call. We also attended a Zoom-based karaoke night. It was a successful “night out” with friends, despite the video latency causing the karaoke part to be a little less successful.
Christine and I went on a few hikes, had some picnics, and visited Multnomah Falls. Christine loves kayaking and I hadn’t been since I was a kid in scouts. This turned out to be a wonderful activity to do with friends. The size and maneuverability of kayaks meant everyone maintained healthy distances.
Multnomah Falls. Not pictured: the 6′ separated line of folks to get to the area; the park rangers limiting headcount.
Kayaking with Christine and Nico.
Cars
We had a semi-unexpected event occur after publishing the holiday cards. Earlier in the year, Christine’s Prius had its catalytic converter stolen. It was an older model car, and apparently that theft is becoming more and more common. They can be sawed off the car in 60 seconds and then folks can resell them for the raw palladium and rhodium for a few hundred dollars. The age and condition of the car combined with the cost of putting in a replacement almost totaled the car on paper, so she made the difficult decision to sell it. At the same time, my car, at 21 years old — old enough to drink! — hadn’t been doing well. Being a convertible, it has never really weathered the Portland rain terribly well. Since bulldozing the garage to make room for the guest house, it really was on the decline. I ended up donating it to the Humane Society for a tax write-off.
My Eclipse getting towed away.
Our original plan was to be carless. We have amazing public transit, with the bus and MAX trains. Taking Lyft (similar to Uber) everywhere can get a little expensive, but nowhere near equivalent to car and insurance payments. For years, we had a local rental service (car2go) that left cars parked around the city that you could unlock and rent by the minute with a smartphone app, then leave elsewhere in the city (as long as it’s in their service area). But the pandemic made public transit and ride-sharing more risky, and car2go ended up closing shop in Portland. We revised our plans to bring in a used car.
My original aim was to get an older pickup truck or Subaru Outback. This would keep the price low and give us some good hauling ability — something I’d been lacking in the 2-seater convertible. Various friends talked me out of the pickup, mostly around comfort, safety, and the security of storing gear. When looking at used Outbacks, I discovered that they hold their value quite well in Portland. For only a few thousand more, I could just get a new one.
We made a plan to test-drive an Outback and also decided to check out the plug-in hybrid Crosstrek while we were at it. The Crosstrek is a little smaller than I wanted and significantly more expensive. It also only seems to come in terrible-blue and less-terrible-blue. I didn’t think I’d like it, but we both loved driving it. Plus, going either hybrid or full-electric is the right thing to do these days. With the plug-in battery, it has a full-electric range of 17 miles if you stay under 60MPH. Beyond that, or faster than that, the gasoline engine kicks in, powering the drivetrain and charging the battery.
Happy New Year!
Despite the pandemic and political situation, we still managed to have a pretty good year. We’re extremely thankful to have jobs that can be done from home and to still be gainfully employed.
Happy New Year! We hope yours is filled with an abundance of joy and love!
For the past year-plus, I’ve been using the One Second Every Day iOS app to create a video collage of each month. I leave Live Photos enabled, so each second is not just a still image, but could be a quick snippet of candid video. Christine and I have already established a pattern of taking a selfie at 8:22pm each night, which is a convenient backstop if nothing else happens that day. I try not to fall back to the 8:22 photo if I can. If I’m working on a project or out in the world photographing interesting or odd things, I’ll try to capture those in the collage. But this past year, with pandemic-induced isolation, the majority of the photos after March are our 8:22 selfies.
I mostly made this for myself, but feel free to watch — whether it’s the whole thing, the first 10 seconds, or randomly skipping around.
We’re in the middle of a bonafide pandemic. COVID-19 has caused people to go a little bonkers, as if preparing for the apocalypse. Along with shelf-stable food, many stores have low or zero stock of hand sanitizer, bottled water, and toilet paper. I can understand the food — folks are encouraged to self-quarantine for a week or two, and it’s helpful to have shelf-stable food so that you’re not going to the grocery store. The hand sanitizer, too. But the water? If our water supplies stop functioning, we have much larger issues than a virus. And the toilet paper? I just don’t understand.
But it turns out I may have accidentally hoarded a couple of these. After Cami Kaos blogged about toilet paper a couple of months ago, I decided to try out Who Gives A Crap? They are a B Corp who sells toilet paper online. It’s made of bamboo. Half their profits go toward building toilets for communities in need. And because I don’t always internalize quantity when making online purchases, I now have a *ahem* crapload of toilet paper.
What remains of my 48 rolls of TP.
About a year ago, I wanted to get some Purell for my shop in the basement. When laser-cutting wood or cardboard, I sometimes get some charred edges on my fingers. Since there’s no plumbing down there, a bit of sanitizer and a paper towel work really well for that. So I ordered a couple of bottles. I just didn’t notice that each was a liter!
To be honest, the Purell came in handy because I brought one to Puzzled Pint this month so we could provide sanitizer to the attendees. (And folks were amazed that not only could we find some, but such a big bottle!)
It also turns out that I like the Purell wipes for airline tray-tables and armrests, and they only come in giant boxes:
What remains of 300 wipes.
On the mask front, I started with a fancy mask with replaceable N95 filters (top-left, sepiatone paisley), to help with fumes and particles from laser-cutting in the basement.. It was a little small, so I got a slightly larger black one that takes the same filters (upper-right). It turns out that that style doesn’t fit my face too terribly well, and the elastic bands irritate my ears. I then ended up trying a Vogmask, which fit my face much better, with a more comfy strap! That one lives in the basement shop. Then I also bought a second one around the time of the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire for bicycling and going out.
That first sepiatone mask now lives under my pillow, coming in handy in the wee hours of the morning when the kitten occasionally wants to lick the inside of my nostrils. The black one fits Christine well.
I guess the trick to hoarding supplies is to do it long before you need to. Or have a time machine.
Last year, a little too late for snow season, I picked up a silly little contraption. I forget where I first saw this, but it turns out a lot of Amazon sellers resell a plastic mold, similar to a spherical snowball mold, except for making rubber-duck shaped snowballs. Because that’s a thing the world needs. It was silly and quirky enough to be an impulse buy. Winter over, it immediately went into storage.
Fast-forward to today. We’ve gotten a pretty good blanketing of snow — enough to stick, unlike earlier in the season. So of course I had to pull out the snow-duck maker!
They’re nearly melted now, but it was fun while it lasted. I hope they brought a smile to passersby.
I don’t think I ever owned a copy of Mad. I don’t know that my parents would have even let me. But I loved it when my friends had a copy. I saw it at school, I saw it out camping with Scouts. It was constantly in the background, and became a treat when brought to the fore.
My favorite parts were definitely the fold-in covers and Spy vs. Spy. The fold-ins absolutely blew my mind. I’d seen many optical illusions at that age, but never ones intentionally crafted to tell a story or reveal a punchline. Spy vs. Spy was just a more modern Tom & Jerry. Honestly, I remember the 1984 PC video game more than I remember details of the comic strip, but I remember loving it.
In chatting with a friend about hacker culture and how a young modern-day hacker might go about meeting others and making a name for themself, I took a little trip down memory road to 2600 magazine.
Back in the early 90s, I dipped my toe in hacker culture by regularly showing up at a local 2600 meetup. In the back of the magazine, they published (and still do) cities around the world that have local meetups for readers. These monthly events opened my eyes to a whole other side of computers, radio, and electronics.
I even wrote at least one article for the magazine, way back when. It described how to drop down to a DOS prompt in an old pen-based PDA: the Tandy Zoomer, which later morphed into the Palm Pilot. Yep, that probably dates me. I feel like I must have written a few more, but have no memory of what it could have been about.
I assumed 2600 went out of business and stopped publishing, but was surprised to learn they still exist. I ended up ordering a collection of recent back-issues and kicked off a new subscription.
2600 may have appeared on your radar even more recently. They published a list of our government’s concentration camps: http://concentrationcamps.us
