Moonsaddle

This arrived a couple days ago, and I just put it on my bike. I've been having some discomfort that I think is caused by my old saddle, so I decided to give this a try before springing for something like a Brooks.

I rode up and down the block and made some adjustments. It's going to take more fine tuning though. I'm about to bike the eight miles to Petrifying Springs Park for an anthropology club get together; I'm sure I'll be stopping a time or two for adjustments.

I think it has potential, even though it feels oddly like I'm sitting on a toilet bowl.

Last Day at the Archives, Meeting the School Techy

During my last day of work at the archives yesterday, the two staff members I work with, along with one of the new student workers, had a mini going away party for me. There was a very pretty tray of cake and cinnamon rolls, and people got together on an Amazon gift card for me to help me acquire more of my Summer reading materials. They gave me a really sweet card too. Working at the archives has really been the best job of my life, for so many reasons: the people, the wonderful materials I got to work with, the interesting research I did; I'm going to miss it a lot. I felt more emotional than I expected to as I was walking out the door for the last time. But I'll be back at least once over the summer for a Poky Little Puppy photoshoot, so I'll definitely see people again. And now that I'm no longer a student, I'm going to keep up with a number of Parkside people on Facebook. It's nice living in the future, with so many more ways to keep in touch.

Anna also arranged for me to meet Vince. He'd become kind of a legend in my mind; the guy who has a cave down in the sub-basement where he fixes everything from our microwave at the archives to the reel-to-reel deck I donated to the library, to laboratory equipment for the science departments. It was a real treat to meet him in person and get a tour of his lab. He has an amazing array of electronics down there, most of which I didn't recognize at all. I did pick out a Commodore Vic-20 plus tape drive, a laserdisc player, and a jacob's ladder out of the background though. Vince also talked about some of the equipment he's working on, like a cell counter, an electron beam generator, and bunches of other stuff. One of the most memorable things to me were a couple of Altair 8800s tucked in a corner. Two of them! And as Vince was happy to point out, not even the Smithsonian has a working one of those. The ones at Parkside are surplus from the biology department; they actually used them about four decades ago.

Vince grew up, like me, wanting to take everything apart and learn how it works. My parents never let me disassemble a TV though. Vince got that experience, complete with having the flyback transformer discharge into his body and send him flying across the room. Maybe it's better that I missed out on that? Anyway, I kind of wanted to be him when I grew up, when I was little, and it was awesome to get to talk with him. I think I'm going to see if he wants a few things of mine that I'm going to get rid of. A benchtop 13.8 volt power supply, a pretty old analog multimeter, things like that. I'm also going to see if I could commission him to repair my IMB Model Ms that have issues. Maybe I could trade him a keyboard in return for some repair work on my other ones?

I think someone needs to do some oral history interviewing with him; he must have wonderful stories.

Which Books Can I Bring Myself to Part From?

So many books. I think I'm going to leave 95% of my fiction with my parents; I won't have time to read a lot of it. But what non-fiction do I bring with? Does the giant Marilyn Stokstad art history tome come with? It's wonderful reference, but will I use it? What about my equally weighty Kenkyusha Japanese-English dictionary? I absolutely plan to get back to learning Japanese, but not 'till I get conversationally fluent in Spanish. Which of my history monographs will I want access to? What about all of my (and my grandfather's) collection of books on blacksmithing and art metal? It makes me sad that I do so little smith work these days, because doing so makes me feel connected to him.

Will This Thing Blow Up and Kill Me?

I need an adult. Or someone who knows more about high voltage safety than I do.

If I connect this thing up to a couple of wire coat-hanger ends and fire it up to make a kick-ass jacob's ladder, how likely is it to explode in a ball of fire and/or send metal shrapnel toward me at a high rate of speed? I scavenged it from an abandoned building and the output is specced at 15kv.

It wouldn't be my first jacob's ladder; I have another one I built with a neon sign transformer of about half the voltage. I just don't know if there are likely to be internal problems in one this old that's been subject to freeze / thaw cycles. Is this an oil-filled transformer? Does that make a difference?

It would be so pretty!

David Harvey's "Rebel Cities"

The first chunk of David Harvey's "Rebel Cities" positions cities in the context of global capitalism, discussing development trends through history and cities' role as a sink for excess capital. It was heavily economical and, as I noted, a little beyond me. The second part though, which I've just started, is beginning with a discussion of theories of the commons. Anti-capitalist activism, he says, often rejects any kind of hierarchical organization in favor of horizontality. This is problematic because solutions that work for, say, fifty farmers sharing a source of water (or, I imagine, a group of fifty participants in a chapter of Food Not Bombs), do not work at a global scale, or scales beyond the local.

Then, addressing public space in cities, he notes "Public spaces and public goods in the city have always been a matter of state power and public administration, and such spaces and goods do not necessarily a commons make."

This should be interesting.

Also, today's sentence from Duolingo: "How many dogs eat cheese? (¿Cuántos perros comen queso?)"