day 5 – gotta reboot the toaster

separating
Originally uploaded by mikefranklin

Monday rolled around and was much like Sunday – food, friends, computers, cameras and kids

Up early, I found that the there was no internet access. We’re not sure why, but the DSL modem gets screwed up as the day goes by and needs periodically rebooting. Problem is that it’s on the ground floor, and is a bit of an effort to get to. John found last year that it was on the same Ground Fault Circuit as the toaster oven was in the kitchen, so just popping that switch powers down and up the modem. Convenient, since I spend most of my time in the kitchen anyway…

Breakfast was late in the morning, and after a bit of menu adjusting, I presented a shopping list to Annette who was heading into town with the other two women for a bit of shopping. John and Steve went kayaking, and the au pair looked after the kids. I was left (mostly) alone to prepare lunch “for 2pm.”

I prepared the “mongolian marinade” for the beef we were having for dinner, finished the bread Annette had started, and made a red sauce for pasta – 4 onions sauteed in butter and olive oil for about an hour, to which I added finely-diced carrot, garlic scape (the flowering part), and two cans of peeled plum tomatoes. And then made pasta dough – eggs, flour, spinach. Also made some “british cookies” – not sure why they were called such, but they were tasty.

Sometime around 3:15, the guys came back from kayaking; 3:30 the women were back from shopping, and we commenced with the final preparations for lunch. The kids ate outside on the deck, so it was fairly quiet inside except for the occasional screaming contest which prompted someone chuckling, “I think that one was mine.”

Lunch over, we commenced with dinner preparations. Steve made the pumpkin-seed brittle; Annette made the chocolate-almond shortbread cookies with the help of two of the youngsters; Cherene prepared the espresso-steeped dates for Tuesday, and Steve made the peppermint-candy gelato. Quite fun to watch everyone working.

The kids ate early, and were shuffled off to bed so the adults could eat in relative peace: appetizers of pumpkin-seed brittle along with pagnotta (bread) and the “standard” spreads of hummus, goat cheese, garlic & olive oil, and muhammara. Second course was the “grilled mongolian beef” (quite tasty), steamed vegetables with a honey-orange vinaigrette followed by salad with a champagne vinegar vinaigrette, and ending with the chocolate almond shortbread, peppermint-candy gelato, and the rest of the “british cookies.”

Quite well received so far, with the only complain being “not enough chocolate.” hmmm… I shall endeavor to remedy that…

day 4. hello, goodbye and more food

helping dad
Originally uploaded by mikefranklin

Sunday was fairly uneventful, discounting a small horde of kids running around underfoot.

I was up at 6, and enjoyed a blissfully peaceful hour alone before the little ones wandered out of their bedroom.

Gotta love vacations — I’m not actually sure where the time went until noon or so, but I think it was some mix of IMing, chatting with friends in person, menu-making, and various kids climbing over me.

Steve, Cherene and their two kids arrived sometime in the morning, so it even louder for a bit. With the arrival of Steve came another D80 (John as one as well), with an 18-200 VR lens, and an sb800 flash. He kindly brought me a gift of a do-it-yourself flash bouncer – velcro + a thin flexible white foam sheet. And I let him play with my lenses, at least as long as he was within eyesight.

Lunch was pretty random (= unprepared); the kids played, we talked cameras and photography and computers, and their intersection at Photosynth

Sandee, Michael and their daughter left, and suddenly it was 4pm … time to start thinking about making dinner. A quick check of the recipes suggested I wasn’t going to be able to get 9 hours of marinating for beef, so that was postponed. So, with help from John, Ian and Steve, we managed to get dinner done by 8:

Semolina-flour bread which Annette had made earlier in the day, with hummus and muhammara (Syrian spread of roasted red peppers, pomegranate molasses and other spices), followed by freshly made fettuccine (thanks to John and Ian) with a cream-pesto sauce Steve and Cherene had brought, followed by steamed vegetables, salad with a raspberry vinaigrette, and a selection of cheeses. Dessert was cornmeal cookies and freshly-made cream gelato with a warm cherry sauce. Quite good.

Then it was time for the kids to go to bed; yay! Afterwards, the others attacked the immense pile of dishes (hey, my responsibility ends after dessert is served ), we chatted for a bit, and I went to bed … ready more of the same on monday.

day 3, cinderella

cinderella and the prince
Originally uploaded by mikefranklin

Saturday too, arrived too quickly for a morning on holiday.

The day was mostly centered around local production of Cindarella, for which John & Annette’s oldest child was the associate director in charge of lighting. We had to drop her off at 11am, and later leave the house at 2:15 to all be at the first show at 3pm. It was a short drive, but herding children is much like herding programmers … which is usually compared to the impossible task of herding cats, so it was best to leave a lot of time.

Unlike years past, the youngsters were up rather early 5:30 or so, and running around just above my bedroom. By the time I was up, they’d disappeared to the playroom leaving me alone to prepare a cup of espresso, and start working on menus for the week.

That lasted about 2 minutes as Ian – the youngest – popped his head out of his parents’ bedroom, looked at me, screamed, then slammed the door. He tired of this after 3 or 4 more times.

The other kids reappeared, and were able to more-or-less prepare a more-or-less normal breakfast for themselves. In years past I had the rather difficult task of explaining that M & Ms were not an appropriate breakfast, or that no, I didn’t think Mommy let them have huge gobs of Nutella on their toast.

The rest of the adults slowly appeared, and breakfast for the rest of us was made, as I was trying to prepare menus for the next few days. Not entirely sure where all the time went, but shopping list in hand, I went with Annette to drop off her daughter at the theater in town, and do some shopping.

I left John in charge of making lunch – specifically shaping and baking the bread I’d already started, making pasta, and making a sauce.

First stop was a small farmer’s market, where it seemed that 80% of the stands sold exactly the same produce, which is perhaps not surprising since they’re small farms in the same environment. We picked up a box of fairly random produce which they’d won at an auction and stopped so Annette could chat about knitting. Some years ago, I bought some wool in Iceland, since she’d volunteered to make me a sweater. So far, I think there’s a basic design, but hey, I’m patient.

After a couple of brief stops, we ended up at a pretty decent grocery store whose selection has been improving each year. 40 minutes and 6 large bags later, we were done. Only, Annette had misplaced her keys. Turns out she’d left them on the back seat of the car, with the windows down… and they were just as safe as if they’d been in Montgomery.

Back at the house, the bread was about ready to come out of the oven, the sauce was simmering but a bit too watery, and the pasta was being rolled to perfection by John. So I turned up the heat a bit, looked around for some herbs (I’m not fond of dried ones, generally, but they can help in a pinch) and added a bit more olive oil (since that helps everything).

The pasta rolled, we cut it into papparaelle since that was fastest, and I made a modified insalata caprese – rather than layering tomatoes, buffalo-milk mozzarella and basil, I just chopped it all, and tossed. Lunch over, we hopped into several cars and headed off to the theater.

The program warned against flash photography and required “battery operated” cameras. We pondered if manual film SLRs would be confiscated, but did conclude we could shoot without flash, as long as we turned off the autofocus assist lamp. The kids were cute, as you can see in the flickr set, and energetic. It was quite the enjoyable production.

Back at the house, I had a video chat with Nik, while watching the John and Michael put together a new Weber grill. The old one had sort of died after staying out too long in the salty air.

By 6:30 or so, it was time to start preparing dinner, so I baked some figs for dessert, and rummaged around the over-stocked refrigerator to figure out what to have to vegetables and salad. While a couple of us cooked, the others kept the kids occupied, and then fed.

Dinner was a fairly simple affair: grilled salmon with a lime/cilantro/garlic scape sauce, and steamed vegetables with covered with a mix of onions, garlic scape, and shredded carrot I’d sauteed in some olive oil. Then a salad of mixed greens with a fresh raspberry vinaigrette, followed by a selection of fine french, italian and spanish cheeses along with the bread we’d made earlier in the day. Last was freshly-made strawberry gelato, and baked figs in a lemon syrup… which turned out pretty well considering that the lemon was dry and the figs were a wee bit moldy.

Then everyone else cleaned up, and I went to bed

day 2, heading to Friday Harbor

waiting in line
Originally uploaded by mikefranklin

Friday morning arrived much too early, after a too-short night of sleep.

John had gone off to the gym, so I attempted to find breakfast. Coffee wasn’t a problem: I bring my own personal espresso machine and ground coffee, but since the family is mostly on San Jan for the summer (John goes up for weekends), there wasn’t much food.

The network was still problematic, so I just played with the cat until John returned. After a bit of playing with access controls and new firmware, John had gotten things working and I was back online. He’d gotten out his HP laptop and plugged it in for me “just in case” and mentioned with chagrin that he always needed to plug it in since vista “just sucked battery power.”

He looked at my MacBook Pro with a bit of amusement, noting that a number of his colleagues at Microsoft bought MBPs, then installed and ran Vista on them … while covering the Apple logo with a Vista sticker. Apparently the quality is higher than what they can find in windows-only laptops.

I have the pleasure of cooking while I’m here, and I collect recipes during the year to try out. In preparation for shopping, I ran through the various recipes to find the extraordinary ingredients, and then called Annette (John’s wife) to see which of those items she didn’t have. We packed the car with a pile of stuff, and it was off to a local Whole Foods to shop.

Unlike shopping trips of yore where we shopped for a week to feed a bunch of hungry people, this was fairly minimal, as most things could be found on island. We needed plum sauce for some recipe, but the employee I asked wasn’t very helpful — he’d not tried either, he said, but figured they were pretty good. And, he added, if we didn’t like the one we bought, we could just bring it back for a refund. Gotta love good customer service.

While I discussed the merits of various chocolates with another employee, she mentioned that she also worked in the cheese department, which was our next stop. She helped with those selections, and I think we escaped with only $175 of french and italian cheeses. And a British cheddar: I asked about Montgomery – which I normally can get in Boston. She laughed and explained that it was her favorite, but they’d been out for a week or so. She pointed out the second best British cheddar as a worthy replacement.

The cashier was pretty chipper, and asked if we were planning a party – she’d guessed because of all the expensive stuff (“so much cheese!”) – and explained that she liked to cook, but didn’t know how to cook the “fancy food” that we were seemingly going to make. I suggested any Italian cookbook by Marcella Hazan, since that’s from where I got a lot of recipes and inspiration.

From there it was off to our “traditional” stop at The Grape Choice in Kirkland, run by a fellow who’s a state legislator in his spare time. He wasn’t at the store, so we chatted with the another fellow which wines to get.

Sadly, they didn’t have any Banyuls (great for chocolate desserts) but the did have a pair of red and white Bandol, which is quite excellent. The remainder of the case (12) was a mix of French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese wines. I made some comment about coming out every year and cooking, and he chuckled and said he did remember me from the past couple of years, but didn’t think it had been so long since I’d been to the store. haha, nice to know I make a favorable impression.

From there it was off to the ferry in Anacortes, in the midst of a steady traffic. We figured we’d end up on the 5pm ferry by managed to squeeze in as Standby #12 – a high likelihood that we’d be on the 3:10 ferry. Indeed, the staff waved us out of the parking lot and as we approached the ferry in a mass of cars, I asked John how they could tell how many standbys to let through.

Just as he was explaining that they did this every day, so had a pretty good idea of how many cars fit on – as well as using their radios – we were stopped because they might have let through too many standbys. Fortunately, we managed to get on, and had a pretty uneventful ferry ride, though John did want to play with all of my lenses, and looked forward to playing with them more during the week.

We arrived in Friday Harbor, drove to the house, and were greeted by three screaming kids (4, 5, 9). Nice to see them, but, um does the wireless work? Turns out it didn’t, at least until John upgraded the firmware (a recurring theme). And it seemed particularly slow. “hey, we’re on an island, what do you expect?” he chuckled.

John and Annette went into town, and I was left to watch the kids, as they watched a movie. They were tolerably well-behaved, and their limits were well defined, at least from my perspective: dinner, two cookies only, movie. All other “uncle mike, can I ….”’s were answered with “no.” Really quite simple, if repetitive.

Dinner for the (tired) adults was a simple affair: grilled salmon (which could have benefited from a cilantro/lime sauce if I’d remembered), brown rice and corn on the cob with a bit of lemongrass in the water.

Another couple and kid arrived, so there was a bit of bedlam with the kids, and again it was pointed out the network was a bit slow, so John rebooted the router .. and like magic, we finally had normal ADSL speeds. ahah!

And then it was time to sleep … ready to be woken by the steady thump-thump-thumb of kids running above my bedroom at 5:30am.

a hard day’s night

I normally spend the week of the fourth of July with friends at their home on San Juan Island in Washington. Times for flights seem to have become increasingly worse, while the fares have gone up quite a bit. There are fewer nonstop flights, and there are rather too many red-eye return flights to boston.

Finally, I managed a pair of nonstop one-way flights: JetBlue westbound leaving at 6:10pm, and Alaska airline returning at 8am or so, a week later. And perhaps not surprisingly, when I actually bought these, the price was $125 less than the same fares were the day before. But never as low as they used to be.

Generally, it was a day of delays, made more pleasant by IMing with various friends – my thanks to Nik, Adam, Andrew, Nathan ( special thanks for the youtube video of the 7 hour plane delay), Ondra, Karl Otto, Lars Ivar and perhaps others.

I left work early to make sure I had enough time – finding a taxi is rarely easy, and one never knows about the lines in security.

Somewhat to my surprise, I found a taxi quickly and it was a short, 10 minute ride to the airport. I’d checked in online (after having received an email reminder from JetBlue) and had my boarding pass, so went immediately to the ‘Bag drop only’ line… where I waited for 20 minutes.

My bag was taken, and the agent noted that my 6:10 departure had been delayed to 8:23, boarding was at 7:50, have nice flight, and Next In Line, Please.

The terminal was mere moments away, and security was quick for me and my giant camera bag. I guess they’ve figured out what lenses look like. Some passengers had a rather thorough patting down, which I didn’t quite understand, but presumably a buzzer buzzed and that was adequate reason.

Much to my surprise there were a plethora of outlets, and as I plugged in with my back to a sunny day, I was happy I’d gotten a matte screen on my macbook pro … I could actually see! Another fellow sat down next to me, waited an inordinate amount of time for his laptop to start up (mac starts up immediately, from sleep), and then spent several minutes adjusting his position and that of the screen, but gave up and moved to less sunny spot.

I wandered off to find my gate in anticipation of boarding at 7:10, and after wading through a sea of youngsters tossing around small beach balls provided by the staff, I was welcomed to the “youth volleyball entertainment area” by a smiling JetBlue agent. Bad weather across the country had made quite a mess of travel, and they were doing what they could to keep the kids happy.

Turns out, however, that the plane for Seattle had not yet left New York, but had left the terminal there, and *might* be arriving in Boston in time for boarding at 8:30. Gates were changed and stories of delay exchanged between weary travelers as we waited, and then eventually boarded at 9:10.

Around 9:30, we taxied out… and then taxied back to a gate. The pilot explained that the lavatory sensors indicted full, even though they’d been apparently emptied. We left again – with no further explanation – around 10, and were finally airborne by 10:15 or so, with an expected 5 hours 45 minutes in the air.

The flight was uneventful except for some minor turbulence. I managed to consume a reasonable amount of water; the older couple seated next to me instead managed some gin and vodka.

Arrived at 1:30am and met up with my friend John – a roommate a MIT years ago, and we waited for my bag, which arrived without significant delay. Then it was off to Bellevue (near Seattle), where the first order of business was to ensure wifi access. John has a pair of wireless routers since one is inadequate for complete coverage in the house and uses a MAC address filter for security. My macbook worked after the first router was setup, but stopped after the second was set up. we blamed firmware, and called it night.

I ended up in the room of the four-year old – pale blue, and surrounded by stuffed trains and the like.

Then the next morning it was time to go shopping and head up to San Juan Island.

search terms

People find this this blog with the strangest searches…

(I walk)

Another trip to the genius bar at the Apple store

Last Thursday I opened my macbook at work and noticed that part of the top case was splintering off , parallel to the front just above IR sensor. I was heading up to Vermont that afternoon, so decided I could just secure it with some tape, and get it fixed on Monday.

I made an appointment at 5:40 at the Apple store midway on my walk between work and my apartment in Cambridge, and arrived at 5:35 as requested. As is normally the case, they were running 20-30 minute behind, but provided a vibrating pager so I could wander around the mall. Conveniently, the pager plays music when it’s out of range, but I’ve never heard that: seriously, who would need to leave the Apple store?

It was finally my turn, and Russ-the-Genius took one look at the crack and said “we can replace that – can you wait 30 minutes?” I then mentioned my irreproducibly dodgy AC adapter: sometimes when green light would be on, but the macbook would claim to be on battery power, other times it would be plugged in and there’d be no light on the plug. Of course, it worked for Russ, but he muttered something about not wrapping the cord so tightly around the brick, and said they could replace that as well.

I purchased AppleCare (extended warranty) when I got the macbook last May, and I’m glad I did, since the macbook is not out if its included warranty, and I overheard someone else asking about a topcase replacement: $240 for parts and labor.

Off I went to wander, just after posting to my tumblr, and being engaged in conversation by an older fellow complimenting me on my typing skills who really just wanted someone to talk to, I think. So, we chatted for a bit, before my rumbling stomach suggested I find food.

Back after a thoroughly dull meal (hey, it’s mall food), I hung out at the genius bar listening to other people’s problems and making small talk with geniuses who gave the impression that that they somewhat remembered me (including the one who had replaced my hard drive some hours after my return from Norway).

• Short, young, slightly plump, slightly underdressed young lady batting her eyelashes at a genius, “can you help with me this?” She pulled out an AC adapter from a tiny pink shopping bag, and handed it to him, mumbling some problem. He patiently explained that if she’d brought her computer with her, they could replace the cord for free. No amount of eyelash-batting could sway him, it seemed, so she wandered out.

• Young dude with too much blond hair covering his eyes wondering about problems with Flash installations. “We’re limited with what we can do with 3rd party apps,” explained the genius, “but make an appointment, bring in the laptop, and we can probably fix it.”

• Baseball-wearing middle aged fellow holding what looked like a 3G iPod. “Can you help me? It doesn’t work.” Genius asked for a name, asked if there’s an appointment (“er, a what?”), noted that there are no iPod slots left that evening, then asked for the iPod to take a look at it. He plugged it in, took a listen, and then proclaimed the drive to be dead. Suggestions in hand, (new one, or ipod rescue), the fellow wandered off.

“Let me see if Russ has that fixed for you” said the genius immediately next to me. Just as he was turning to head to the back room, Russ wandered out, my macbook in hand. 10 minutes of paperwork for that, another 10 minutes to get a new ac adapter and paperwork for that … and I was ready to go.

I had one other problem – iTunes refused to add an album of purchased music. Russ wasn’t the iTunes guy, so he pointed out a manager I could ask; she found an iTunes dude to help. We tried various way of importing all of which failed. We (re) authorized the computer. We did not reinstall OS X. He found another iTunes dude who noticed — as I’d failed to do for some time — that while the files all looked OK, they were zero bytes in length, so of course they couldn’t be added. We chuckled… and they tried to assure me that Apple would maybe perhaps “do something” if I couldn’t find the original files. What fun.

Ongoing backup solution #2

hard drive
Originally uploaded by mikefranklin

I thought I was doing pretty well with a RAID NAS. My iMac backs up every night when I’m in Vermont, and my macbook every week or so, and always before vacations.

Problem is that my macbook drive failed as I was returning from vacation, and I lost 15GB of photos (though the better ones had been uploaded to flickr). Apple replaced the hard drive, and my restore from backup was successful … but I had no way to recover the photos.

To guard against that situation in the future, I just purchased this firewire 400 drive for nightly backups of my macbook, whereever I am. I’m currently using SuperDuper! which is pretty speedy and makes the drive bootable.

Thus, in the unlikely event of my new internal drive failing, I’ll be able to boot from the firewire drive, and continue working (or taking photos), until I can get to Apple to get it replaced.

Now, my backup plans work up to but not including loss of my NAS (whether by theft or destruction). I suppose to preclude those from happening, I should purchase another NAS to leave in a remote location and have them sync over the internet … Maybe next year.

D80 blinking CHA/CHR error

Friday night, after using a card reader to upload a bunch of bugs photos to my imac, I inserted my SD card into my d80, turned it on, and was faced with a blinking CHA (or CHR) on the LCD.

The last letter is difficult to figure out: it’s like a squared 8, with the bottom horizontal piece missing. A or R? Only Nikon knows for sure… though I guess I could could look in the manual, if I could find it.

Searching online yielded various tidbits of information, mostly relating to the probability that the card was not recognized by the camera – perhaps an unapproved brand? Well yes, RiDATA is not a recommended brand, but the cards have worked for over 15000 images in 8 months, so it seemed unlikely that the problem was that.

Cleaning the contacts didn’t (nor did they look in any way dirty). Reinserting didn’t fix it. Resetting the camera didn’t fix it. And oddly, my second SD card (also a 4gb RiDATA card) gave the same error. I thought perhaps it was the camera, but that was not a happy thought.

I tried again the next morning, hoping that it would magically work. It didn’t. I pondered some more, remembering that the error indicated some sort of card access failure. I checked the cards, noted that they were “locked” by a sliding switch, switched them to unlocked, and tried one in the camera: it worked! A rather simple solution, it turned out.

I was later informed (after a bit of chuckling) that the d50 noted on the back LCD that the card was locked – a feature sadly missing from the d80.

MPIX photobook review

the killer: binding by stapes
Originally uploaded by mikefranklin

Mpix was the fastest to process the book. I uploaded over the weekend; they shipped on Monday via the US postal service, and I received the book on Thursday.

Photos of the book compared to the Apple book are in this flickr set.

Generally, I was not impressed with the quality, though it didn’t have any glaringly awful problems affecting all of the photos. Photos looked a bit washed out, with blacks not being very deep, and darker photos with more contrast seem to have been lightened with the contrast reduced. I’m not sure if this is a simple conversion issue or whether Mpix decided to try to make my images look “better.”

The biggest issue was the “binding” – the pages were just stapled, not bound. I presume the hardcover book is not stapled, but given the image quality, I’m not really interested in trying that out.

One of my colleagues chuckled and said that I should try the office color printer: he thought it would yield better results. Another said that it was an “ok” book – one that a grandmother would certainly appreciate receiving of the grandkids, for example.

So, another publishing company not to use. I’ll stick with Apple for the best overall experience and the highest quality output — and the fewest printing options at a high (but not the highest) price, and with Viovio for nearly-as-good output, excellent service, and printing options which are cheaper and more numerous.