Category: Uncategorized

I didn’t pay much attention to any previous presidential inauguration, so I can’t actually compare today’s inauguration of President Obama to previous ones. I think it’s safe to say, though, that it’s been awhile since an estimated 2 million people made their way to the D. C. Mall to watch the swearing in of the new President. We’ve been watching the coverage on and off since shortly before he was sworn in; it’s now about 5:40PM in D. C. and the parade is still underway. The enthusiasm is amazing, and rather touching. The following video clip captures the mood well. It was taken before the parade, while the Obamas were making their way from the Capitol building to the White House. Listen to the crowd’s reaction as the President gets out of the car, and watch how appreciative he is as we walks along and waves to the crowd: read more

That’s one of Wm. Gibson’s best observations. To wit: Microsoft releases Songsmith, a fairly clever program that generates accompaniment (albeit banal accompaniment) for your singing. Unfortunately they plug it with a painfully awful advertisement. In response, the street starts abusing the software by running a capella recordings of well-known songs through it and showcases the results on YouTube and elsewhere. The ad and several such examples can be found here and this page has more. read more

You’ve probably never thought “gee, I wonder how they inspect high-tension power lines without turning off the electricity.” I know I haven’t. If you were to ask yourself that question, though, you’d realize that it must be a tricky task. There’s a remarkable video here showing how they do it. The short version of the story is that they use helicopters to put people in fireproof, conductive suits onto the lines, where they perch like birds.

[Found on Hack a Day.] read more

The various news sites say that the fire was 30% contained as of 7:00AM. The wind is relatively calm so they think they’ll have it contained by this afternoon. Some neighborhoods that were evacuated have been reopened and one of the roads that was closed is open again.

There’s ongoing coverage here of a good-sized fire north of Boulder. A good number of homes have been evacuated and as of 8:10PM MST the fire covered 6,400 acres and was still uncontained. The problem is that it has been very windy here with gusts over 50mph. The lower of the two videos on that page (as I write this) gives you a pretty good idea of what the wind has been like.

So far our area has not been evacuated, and I doubt that the fire will come close enough to warrant our departure. The fire is north and west of Boulder; we’re north and east of Boulder. The wind has died down also, so hopefully they’ll have it contained soon. read more

I’ve been avoiding using SMT parts with really small pins. I haven’t had any trouble soldering packages with pins on 0.05-inch centers, but I was leery of trying anything smaller. However, more and more chips are available only in TSSOP (and smaller) packages, so I figured I might as well give it a try. I’m happy to say that it’s entirely feasible, and not even difficult. Here’s a photo of a chip with pins on 0.65mm centers which I hand-soldered:

(The penny is there to give you a sense of scale. Also, the holes at the far right are spaced 0.1 inches apart, for a standard ribbon-cable header.) I did use a 5x illuminated magnifier while working but aside from that I used the usual stuff: standard soldering iron, flux pen, and very fine solder. read more

There are a few photos from our Christmas on my flickr site here.

May you have a very happy holiday of your particular inclination. We’re celebrating Christmas (hence the timing of this post, I suppose). The cats are amused by having a tree erected in the living room, and even more amused by the wrapping paper and other stuff that gets strewn around today. Our tree is sporting LEDs this year. I finally gave up on the incandescent variety last year because our strings burned bulbs out faster than I could replace them. It’ll be interesting to see how long they last, since it seems that, unlike the now-old-fashioned variety, you can’t replace individual lights on the strings. read more

There’s a good op-ed in the NY Times here. The early bit about the shock of coming back to the U.S. after visiting an Asian country rang particularly true for me, but the whole piece is good.