Food

Roberta X posted a couple of bit of food news today. The first is that Hostess has gone bankrupt. This is terrible! I really like their stuff, though I'm not allowed to eat it anymore. It's got sugar in it, ya know. There was a time when Hostess cupcakes were a standard part of my lunch. There were like the one bright spot I could count on every day in my miserable existence. Not quite sure what they put in them, but only Hostess brand snacks would do. All those other knock-off brands just didn't quite cut the mustard.

Portland Food Trucks

The other was a link to Roaming Hunger dot com that posts locations of food trucks for Indianapolis. Do they cover other cities as well? Yes they do, and Portland is one of them. Seems food trucks have come a long way from the days when they were know as Roach Coaches.

Update June 2019 replace missing image of a taco (?) with Portland food trucks.

Quote of the Day

"As both a Converse Chuck Taylor tennies addict and a sci-fi freak, I want these so much I am willing to be sucked into the jet intake of a spaceship to get them." - Leeann on Look! A Baby Wolf!

I just love it when spaceships have jet intakes. Never mind that they are not logical, they're still cool.

Monitors, Part 2, or Maybe Part 3, I forget

The bargain monitor I picked up at Green Century on Monday has been replaced by another ViewSonic Monitor that I picked up yesterday at Computer Drive Connection in Cornelius, which has been replaced by my ASUS monitor that I bought at Iguana Micro a year or two ago. There was nothing wrong with the ViewSonic Monitor I got from Green Century, it's just that my sweety's computer won't generate that particular resolution.
    So I went out to Cornelius yesterday with a list of specs in my hand and picked up another one that has a resolution that the computer can deliver. I think we're golden until I get home and older son points out that the word BAD is engraved in the backside with a red Marks-A-Lot. Somebody's being funny. I hope. It's a little chilly, and the monitor has been sitting in an unheated warehouse, so I go take a nap while it warms up in its new home. Wake up, plug it in and turn it on, and . . . hey! There's nothing wrong with it after all. It works fine, we just have to adjust the display settings, which takes some doing, but I finally get the computer and the monitor to agree on - get this - 1600 pixels by 1200 pixels. This thing is huge! It didn't look that big in the store, I suppose because I was imagining that all the other screens there were tiny, but here on the desk it's friggin' enormous.
    OK, wait a minute, it's not quite perfect. The display is a tad washed out. How can that be? It's an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display, also know as a flat panel display) fer crying out loud, not a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube, the old, heavy, solid glass, TV like devices). I fiddle with the front panel controls, but I am unable to correct it. Well, it's pretty good, and really big. And cheap, don't forget cheap. We'll see what sweetie says.
    Sweety takes one look and says yucky poo. Not in so many words, and not quite that quickly, but that's the end result. So I swap out my monitor for hers. Now she's happy and I . . . I have a new toy to play with.
    First off I had to fiddle with the settings on my computer. LCD monitors work best when the resolution settings on the computer agree with the native resolution of the screen. LCD monitors can display pictures that are generated using a different resolution, but they come out just the slightest bit fuzzy. The highest resolution I can obtain using my Windows Display Settings Dialog is 1600 x 900. I have always been a little skeptical of this because sweety's computer, which is virtually identical, same make, same model, bought within 6 months of mine, has a half a dozen higher settings available.
    Powerstrip to the rescue! Stumbled over this program name when I first ran into the resolution disagreement. It's a wonderful little program that you can download for free and runs on every version of Windows under the sun, and allows you to tweak your video driver seven ways from Sunday. It's also the absolutely worst program in the world, having a bunch of screens of totally useless information and no clear method to get where I want to go. I have to click at least a dozen times to get it to do what I want. You just have to ignore the parts you don't understand, which is like 99% of it. CNET comments on it here.
    So now I have a really big, slightly faded monitor on my desk. I don't know whether I'll be able to fix the fade, I suspect not, but we shall see. Meanwhile this thing has a trick support. It has a vertical post that it slides on so you can raise and lower it. This doesn't have much appeal, but it also can be swiveled (pivoted) so you could compensate if your desk was tilted sideways at say 30 degrees. Funny thing is though it won't go all the way to 90, which would be really sweet. But since it is a simple mechanical connection, no wires or electricity involved, I might be able to correct this with a file. Stay tuned.

I'm still running Windows XP and probably will continue to do so until hell freezes over, or they start giving away computers in Cracker Jack boxes, which I hear is going to start happening next week. In any case, these helpful instructions are for Windows XP. If you are running a different version of Windows, or god forbid, some other operating system entirely, you're on your own.

To get to the Windows Display Settings Dialog, point at the background on your Windows Desktop and right click. This little menu should pop up.

Click on Properties, and then click on the Settings tab.

Screen resolution (pixel dimensions) can be set with slider at the lower left.

Monitor-Computer Compatibility Chart

Palace of Culture and Science

Riots in Warsaw! What else is new? There is always someone making a fuss about something somewhere. This time is just happens to be "in the shadow of the Palace of Culture and Science, a neo-gothic, Soviet-era skyscraper in the city centre." A Palace, eh? A little Googling delivers this pic. It's the tallest building in Poland.

Dream

Ugly Betty Special Amanda's Sexy Outfits

Nothing special except that there were a couple of bits that were just crystal clear, and that I remembered so much of it.

My wife and I are driving in an older built up suburban area. There are commercial and residential buildings. There is a haphazard arrangement to everything, there are no sidewalks or curbs, roads kind of meander here and there. I've been to a zillion places just like this, it was mostly realistic. We stop at a house. I look around the corner and see that the there is a line of trees or shrubs along the property line. The back yard is really deep. I have to go somewhere so I get back in the car. I pick up a skateboarder who can direct me. He gets in the back seat. We take a right and head down a hill. At the bottom, the road curves to the right again and he gets out. I'm driving along and I can see that the back yard of the house where I dropped my wife and I realize I used to walk by here and see these really deep back yards all the time. I go back to the house. Inside it is well lived in, not a disaster but not pristine either. There's all kinds of stuff lying around, people here and there, red shag carpet on the floor. I turn a corner and there is a kind of cubbie hole with somebody's bed in it. I go back to the other room and sit down to watch some TV with the other people. A woman in the corner is aghast at the blue and gold outfit that a woman is wearing on TV. I don't remember actually seeing it, but that doesn't stop me from responding in my best fake Southern Hillbilly drawl that "I used to have one just like it", which gets a snicker from a couple of the other people there.

Update April 2021 replaced missing picture.

Alyosha

A graduation party is held under the statue of Aliosha. First-year students celebrate the end of the year. (Colin Delfosse)

I was impressed when I found out that the Russians built big statues out of concrete. This one is Alyosha. It is in Murmansk, a port in Northern Russia. It is about 400 miles Northwest of Arkhangelsk, another Northern Russian port city, and about a thousand miles Northeast of Bergen, Norway, my current point of reference for all things European.


View Larger Map
The statue does not show too well in this satellite view, but notice the length of its shadow.
Update March 2016. Replace missing picture, lost when Military Photos website died.

Low Melting Point Alloys

30-30 chamber casting (top) and 30-30 shell (bottom).

I gave Jack a hand casting an impression of the firing chamber of his Martini-Henry rifle. He used Wood's Metal, an alloy with a really low melting point. Boiling water will melt it. It has another interesting property in that it doesn't shrink when it cools, so you can cast an impression of something and your casting will have exactly the same dimensions as the object you copied. You can understand how that would be important in a project like this.
    I got a little curious about this material so I did a little reading and found there are a whole bunch of different metallic mixtures that have relatively low melting points. Wikipedia has a chart. Reading over this chart it appears that only a handful of elements are used in any of these alloys. Well, this is just crying out for further analysis, so I transport their data into my own spreadsheet and mung it around, and presto, we have a new table. Not sure whether it tells us anything significant, but at least the similarities and differences between the various alloys can be easily seen.