walkabout day 18

Berkeley Bowl Produce Section

OMG -- look at those brussels sprouts!

And all the Berkeley People who refused to get out of the way for the photo. It was too busy to actually get through a checkout line to buy something, but maybe tomorrow...

I had dinner with Ken at Cafe Rude, after helping to retrieve Lost Cat Found posters, clearing North Berkeley of same. It's actually a good story with a happy, if still skittish, cat ending: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/laf/4286571969.html.

Followed by a beer with K, Brian, and (big) Conor in the cold cold outside Jupiter seating.

Yup, the weather changed 12 hours after I arrived and is now colder, well actually warmer but damper, than S.Fe. I just can't win on the weather I guess.

walkabout day 17

I have arrived in the airbnb promised Oakland/Berkeley borderland. My room in a shared house is cozy and serviceable (once I installed the necessary extension cords), although there are no ice cubes in the fridge?!? Waiting for dinner with Brian and Maggi now.

From King City, I took one of my "shortcuts" through Santa Cruz to visit my old homesite. It has been remodeled:

Former site, Soquel Mobil Home Park's famous Space Two

However my very first volunteer fire department is still across the street, although I was not a volunteer at the time -- I did learn to imitate the call-to-arms siren for a music of the spheres class -- and it's not entirely apparent if it's still a volunteer operation -- no one was home when this photo occurred.

Soquel Fire Station

And. The old Grange Hall which was the location of one of my first off-campus performances, staring (oh my memory) Joe Hannan, Cynthia Haagens, Adella Basayne, Annuel Dowdell, and others who will doubtlessly be reading and pissed off, is still there and still in use as a theatrical venue:

I have to admit, it does look like a church...

Now that I'm settled I have time to peruse my email offerings:

To: <randyjones6@etantdonnes.com>
Date: 1 Feb 2014 10:28:43 -0600
Subject: Come fly with me

how do you do treasure?

My name is geraldo, im really hot russian girl
I very like the virtual hot meeting, if you are
realy interesting to love chat, meeting, or
change photos.

But I just at a loss for how to respond these days.

walkabout day 16

Shuffled out of santa buffalo and had lunch with Lindsay in SLO at Bon Temps Creole Cafe -- recommended -- then a bit of wine tasting in Paso Robles --the Wine Region of the Year -- and now huddled in the King City Comfort Inn -- quote-endquote. Not that much to report. But it may seem important to my biographers.

Also managed to make this report using the gdm-tablet.

Is it over 140 chars? I forget what i was thinking....✳↕↗➡✴©

(postop note: The gdm-tablet would _not_ let me add a "label" -- the walkabout 2014 indes-thingie at the bottom -- to this post, so this is from my actual laptop computer which _almost_ works as expected.)

walkabout day 15

Carrillo. Cabrillo. Or was it Castillo? I didn't even want to try to get the gdm-tablet-maps-program to pronounce them. But I got off the highway at the wrong one and then the gdm-tablet-maps-program hard-crashed the gdm-tablet -- the power switch didn't even work, but fortunately the Googlers knew their program sucked eggs most of the time and put in a watchdog timer that pops up to ask if you would like to End the Program or Wait another 5 minutes to see if it might do something. I found my way "home", finally, using my mechanical compass and brief sightings of the ocean.

Anyway, prior to this excitement, I took a trip up the gorgeous highway 154 to the Cold Springs Tavern for lunch and then further up the testicle shrinking 1 or sometimes 1-1/2 lane multi-switchbacked Painted Cave Road to way past the Chumash Painted Cave and then partially back down the testicle shrinking multi-switchbacked Road to the actual Cave. Which was a bit of a disappointment:

Chumash Painted Cave -- main entrance, no fee required

Chumash Painted Cave -- cave paintings, using my gdm-tablet-'flash' option

It sure didn't look like Art & Place but at least it was only a few feet from the road. Their photographer probably had a gate key. I missed it on the way up because there was another tourist's SUV occupying the Chumash Painted Cave State Park parking area that would have normally been marked as the downhill turnout lane.

It was on the return leg that I got all my Spanish  r's, b's, and s's mixed up and took the wrong Santa Barbara exit.

Then I had an hour to kill before going to the SB Maker Space meeting whereby I hoped that:

1. I wouldn't have to use the gdm-tablet-maps-program;
2. I would remember which of the r,b,or,s's I wanted on the way back -- for record it's Castillo

And speaking of the gdm-tablet, I copied my Walker code over just in case I wanted to show it to someone and it turns out that, even though the files are good-old-plain-text there appears to be no way to convince the gdm-tablet to think of them as such because everything is app oriented and I don't have a code-viewing-app that has registered itself to view them. As per standard practice there are about a thousand google-hits for "android file association" and the only one that seems to address my problem references an app which no longer has the menu option I (might) need to use.

And speaking of the SB Maker Space. There was no meeting scheduled, even though on Monday I told the main guy that Thursday looked like a good night to visit because there was a regularly scheduled meeting, and he agreed. But I got a tour from a 3d printer enthusiast who had to apologize for the inaccuracy of his 3d printed motor mounts on his homemade 3d printer. They do have three milling machines of various sizes but my 3d guy was afraid to use any of them.

For dinner I thought I would assuage my grief with one last dose of happy-hour oysters, only to find that the Enterprise Fish Co bar seating area was packed to over-flowing with revelers. So I paid a 50% premium for a lesser tuna crostini at the Blue Tavern which, since I discovered it last week, has made it onto the gdm-tablet-map-program map. If it hasn't already crashed.

walkabout day 14

We had a little Marine Layer incursion this afternoon:

So much so that I couldn't see the off-shore cruise ship that was sloughing tourists into the market-space. But it was still mostly pleasant sitting on a log at the beach watching three varieties of sand pipers piping around while waiting for the maid-avoidance-timer to run its course.

Then I got part of the Walker wall-stall-avoidance sensors to work under generally ideal conditions. Followed by a dozen happy-hour oysters at Enterprise Fish Company provisioned by a bubbly-bartender who claimed to have brought the sun back downtown this afternoon on her way to work. Causation? Correlation? Serendipity? The guy on the next bar stool thought: Worth Flirting With disaster.

walkabout day 13

Approaching the two week mark and it's all beginning to feel normal.

Following this 'mornings' maid-avoidance walk I worked on Walker for a few hours. I found that there is a significant difference in data behavior between a slippery table top and one covered by a bath mat -- my only available flat&frictioned surface -- whereby I (or my progeny) may be able to tell the difference between walking and stalling, such that, bathmatfully, we get this data (the first lump is the startup-standup):

 motor current used while walking

The yellow and blue lines are from one diagonally synchronized set of motors and the cyan and magenta are the other diagonal set. The kinda peaks to about value 60 are the actual move forward actions (around 'time' 80, 165, and 200 for instance) and the other lumps are leg position resettings. So (one can) see that the move-my-body motions use a bit more power than the rest. The story on acceleration is less clear...

The synchronized accelerometer readings

However, compared to not getting anywhere, we may be able to get somewhere in automata land:

running into a brick wall, motor currents

and relevant accelerometer readings

On a frictionful surface the motors use way more current while stalled, and are out of sync -- c.f. the yellow/blue and cyan/magenta disjuncts vis the first graph. But the acceleration is still equivocal...until we do some preliminary statistics. Then we find that the average of good-walking acceleration values is about twice that of the stalled-in-place, so there may be some room for educated distinction here.

After making this great break-through I went for a short sunset walk on the promenade:

Another day in paradise at the Santa Barbara Pier

And then to dinner down the street at Toma. Another swell Italianate experience. Enhanced by the bar sitting experience. Joined by a local environmental planner and a, part time, local, mental, resident. Somehow I seem to attract a particular incomprehensibly loquacious sort of personage. All made more than rightly right by a slightly +1 glass of Alexander Aqua di Vita Grappa (not available online) -- selected on my part by bottle attractiveness -- for which the bartender awarded me the (subsequently empty) bottle.

walkabout day 12

Some more maid-avoidance-walking-around-behavior. And then some nearly serious work on Walker. This proved to be perspicacious because this evening I attended the junior come-on attraction for the local Maker Space in the basement of the downtown library. My little walking guy was a bit of a darling. Or at least a good introduction. These guys seem to be serious in that they have three milling machines -- small, medium, and large -- a (large) lathe (to be traded for one of more manageable size), a buncha welding equipment, and a small blacksmith's forge. Plus the usual 3d printers and suchlike. I'm going to visit the grown-ups' space out by UCSB on Thurs before I blow out of town.

On the morning walk I ran across a lovely Nordic maiden riding Grendel's dragon:

The meeting was enlivened when a much younger young woman and her slightly older young mother arrived for a gleeful ride as I was taking a walk-breather-sitdown outside.

After the Maker Meeting I went to Bouchon for a really swell Frenchish dinner that had not a wit of raw fish, although medium-rare salmon with mustard sauce almost slipped under the wire. Especially accompanied by delicious (Los Olivous, CA) Demetria SavBlanc.

Then, on my walk back 'home', I found this inexplicable department store display window: