Live from Austin!

A local pet store has a sign up that says Parakeets will make your dreams come true!

This may be a justified claim, under certain circumstances. For instance, if you’ve ever had a dream about giant Marshmallow Peeps coming to life and pecking you in revenge, a parakeet can certainly make that dream come true. More appealingly, though, if you’ve ever wanted to be like Saint Francis of Assisi, that’s a dream parakeets have the power to help you with. Or you could be like Uncle Remus with a blue bird on his shoulder.

The bird has proven to be a somewhat expensive dream come true, however. A budgerigar is about $20 in the stores, but if you buy a baby budgie from a small breeder like we did, it’s a little more expensive. You also likely have to follow the buddy-up procedure. But that’s just the start.

Next there’s the cage. We got about the largest we could find with parakeet-size bar spacing, solid metal. I forget how much we paid, but cages run about $60-100.

Then you need perches and toys. Since budgerigars are miniature parrots, they need mental stimulation: brightly colored toys they can climb on, objects they can peck and pull at, bells, and so on. Plain wood perches like the dowel that comes with the cage are bad for bird feet, so natural wood perches are a good idea, and those can be surprisingly expensive for a product that literally grows on trees.

(We also got a fluffy bed, which he snuggles into when he’s feeling chilly. The first morning after we put it in the cage he had ‘bed head’ when he got up, which was hilarious. Also, when I go to cover the cage, sometimes I get to see him shuffle over into bed. Very cute.)

Then there was the initial vet checkup. We did it to be on the safe side, and so that the vet would have some baseline info on the bird. Then things got expensive, as we had to replace all our cookware.

The problem is, Teflon (PTFE) non-stick coating gives off toxic fumes when heated, assorted fluoride compounds. While the fumes are arguably safe to humans at the levels emitted during regular cooking, they are apparently much more deadly to birds. Opinion seems to be mixed as to exactly how deadly, and to make matters worse, there’s no warning–humans can’t smell the gas, so one minute you’re making an omelette, the next minute you’re equipped to take part in Monty Python’s most famous sketch.

We decided we had to play it safe. So, we replaced all our pans with stainless steel. New saucepans, new frying pans, new wok, new crepe pan, new baking sheets.

So overall, the actual price of the bird is a tiny fraction of the cost of getting a budgie, 10% at most. It still seems a bit odd, really, that the bird is so cheap when the actual investment required (in time and money) is so significant. With other pets, like a dog or cat, you at least have to come up with a chunk of cash for the animal. Hence the regret seen regularly on budgie forums, that people buy them because they look cute and are cheap, not understanding what they’re getting into.

We were at an outdoor street fair the other week. Someone was selling budgies, giving away a free cage with each bird. Needless to say, the cages weren’t really large enough to be a parakeet’s primary cage. It made me angry, but what can you do? I have to remind myself that millions of small birds die every day, of hunger or predation or illness. I can only make sure our bird is well looked after.

After hearing me mention that we considered a Subaru Outback as plan B if we couldn’t get a Prius, a Subaru dealer tries to sell me a new car. I don’t seem to be buying it, so he takes me to a special Subaru dealership hidden away in the countryside.

The area is surrounded by trees and grass. The buildings are large and low, like aircraft hangars. We walk past lots filled with SUVs. I explain that I’m really not interested in SUVs.

He points at a sports car. I look at it. It’s a nice design, but it’s only about 2 meters long, so I’d never fit in it. I’m similarly unenthusiastic about the Subaru Clown Car. Then he shows me a car I could actually fit in, but it’s bright pink and looks like it was made by gluing together giant models of male and female genitals.

I start to suspect that these cars are deliberately unsellable, so he can push me towards an SUV. I say that I’m really not interested in buying anything. The salesman says I’ll change my mind once I’ve had The Subaru Experience.

We climb into an SUV and close the doors. Suddenly, a circular-saw-wielding maniac in a hockey mask attempts to cut through the door next to me. The door stands up pretty well to the attack. I’m obviously startled, but the salesman grins at me and says something about the ruggedness of Subaru SUVs. I can’t hear it above the whine of metal against metal. Then the attacker lunges the saw through the window, the blade touches my arm, and I discover it’s fake. The whole thing is fake, like a movie.

It turns out that this Subaru dealership is a converted movie studio where they stage elaborate scenarios intended to convince people to buy vehicles.

The second scenario is to experience how a Subaru Outback stands up to an attack by rabid wolves. The answer is: pretty well. Once the howling stops, we get out and head into a nearby building.

The salesman hands me some protective clothing. I put it on, but when I look in the mirror it turns out to be a waiter’s outfit. We walk through into a long room with tables laden with food along both sides. At the far end is some sort of car. We’re going to be experiencing how well a Subaru stands up to a custard pie fight.

I’ve had enough. I don’t want to get custard and whipped cream all over me. I run back out into the corridor. Alarms start sounding, alerting everyone to an escaping customer. I exit the corridor into a garage filled with assorted special-purpose Subaru vehicles. I’m delighted to find a Subaru customized for ram-raiding. I get in, hotwire it, drive out through the garage doors, and escape.

One of my random Internet pastimes is answering surveys. Partly I do it because I suspect I’m an interesting edge case for their data set, the exception that will prove their rules. Also, at the end they offer some of the statistics they’ve gathered, which can be interesting. And sometimes, the act of answering trivial questions can lead me to odd insights about myself.

Like just now.

It was a survey about motor oil. Since I’ve only been driving for a little under 3 years, and since we’ve always taken the car to the dealer for its oil change, I’ve not had much occasion to learn about oil, or the oil changing process.

In fact, while answering the survey I realized that the sum total of my knowledge about oil changes is what I learned from the ubiquitous Castrol GTX ads on UK television in the early 80s.

Specifically, I know three things: I know that Castrol GTX is a brand of oil. I know that it is viscous and golden in color.  And I know that if you pour it gradually onto a sheet of metal on which a metal spanner is resting, it will cling to the edges of the spanner and flow around it.

And now that I pause to think about it, two of those things might be totally untrue.

But there’s something a little disturbing about the idea that if I had to go buy oil for the car right now, I’d probably buy Castrol GTX, simply because of a TV advert shown 25 years ago (and thousands of miles away); an ad that didn’t really work on any level beyond pure abstract brand awareness.

And even more amazing is that with less than a minute of effort I managed to locate the ad on YouTube.

I’ve been laughing at some online galleries of photos by home inspectors. (Volume 1, Volume 2.)

The wrench foundation is basically what was under our house, but with wooden shims instead of a wrench, and concrete instead of metal for the pillar.

The one that made me laugh hardest was the air circulation masterpiece.

Anyhow…there’s a saying that hard work pays off tomorrow, but laziness pays off immediately. Well, sometimes laziness pays off tomorrow as well, especially when it comes to gardening.

Last summer I noticed that the grass out back wasn’t doing too well. I have to assume it was planted by whoever built the house, and that they just picked the cheapest grass seed. In winter and spring it would grow like crazy, and then in summer it mostly turned brown and died. It clearly wasn’t suited to a Texas climate.

Then this summer, I noticed that some kind of plant was gradually taking over. It was a bit like clover, but bigger. It started as a couple of patches, but by mid summer it had pretty much replaced all the grass on the right side of the path, and had somehow made the leap to a patch on the left side. I pondered whether this was the kind of thing that ought to be treated with weedkiller.

In the end, though, I wasn’t too concerned about doing anything, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was too damn hot to do anything; and secondly, we wanted to get rid of the unsuitable grass anyway and replace it with something more suited to local conditions. The plan was to get some buffalo grass sod put down, or perhaps a hybrid like Turffalo planted via plugs.

Then last week we paid an arborist to inspect our trees and offer advice on how to best take care of them. I asked him about the stuff that had eaten the lawn, and he told me it was Horse Herb. It’s a native ground covering of the Texas hill country. It thrives in the shady areas under live oak trees, forming a thick, lush, lawn-like surface that you can mow just like a regular lawn.

So by being lazy, we got a free native plant lawn replacement. It doesn’t need watering in summer, and you only have to mow it every 2-4 months. It produces tiny yellow flowers at the end of summer, and is apparently robust enough to crowd out weeds. Sure, you can’t play golf on it, but you can walk on it, sit on it, and watch squirrels dig in it.

So instead of expensive lawncare, our best bet is to roto-till the bald patches in the back yard with some organic fertilizer, get some Horse Herb seed from the Lady Bird Johnson wildflower center, and sow. Then simply leave it alone. Awesome.

The other secret to Texas lawn care I have discovered is mulching. Get a mower which mulches. Sure, it’s good for the lawn, but what’s even better is you don’t have to rake, bag up clippings, or drag sacks of yard waste around.

My previous PDA was a Palm V. 16MHz 68000, 160×160 B&W screen that could do greyscale in special modes that most software didn’t use. I didn’t particularly want to replace it, but there were a few issues I was having.

First off, the fact that it was serial based rather than USB meant it was a pain to connect to any modern computer; getting it hooked up to the Mac involved a USB to serial adaptor, special drivers, and a lot of futzing with Palm Desktop, and the end result was painfully slow. As a result, I hadn’t synced it in ages.

Secondly, I’d never liked the screen. Going from the Newton MessagePad to the Palm had been a serious downgrade, necessitated by Jobs killing the Newton. I’d been waiting around for some usable Palm devices with at least 320×480 resolution and a 10cm screen, and they finally started appearing in the last year or so.

Other than USB and a big screen, I didn’t really care too much about fancy features; just the obvious stuff—a beeper you can hear easily for alarms, either Bluetooth or wi-fi with an option for the other one, enough memory for a comprehensive GTD list, and maybe a few games and e-books, and connectivity to Mac and Linux.

I did consider the “smart phone” option (again). I came to the same conclusion as last time I considered it: it just doesn’t work. Generally speaking, I want my PDA screen to be as large as possible, and my phone to be as small as possible. Specifically, I want my PDA screen to be big enough to be usable for reviewing an outline of a hundred or so items, and my phone to be small enough to fit in the pocket of my jeans. The Treo 650 fails both tests—it’s too big for a phone and too small for a pocketbook. I’m sure it’s just the right size for some people, but not for me.

Pocket PC devices? Yeah, right. Even if I was prepared to assist Microsoft’s plans for World Domination, the Pocket PC is pretty much crippled unless you run Windows and/or Office, and I don’t run either. So Microsoft eliminated themselves from consideration.

Nokia Communicator? Tempting, but Nokia don’t seem to sell it in the USA. Or at least, I’ve never seen one, and I’m not buying one without seeing the screen first.

Psion? They seem to have given up on the consumer market, and they always price-gouged outrageously for proprietary peripherals and upgrades. No thanks.

Sony Ericsson P series? Again, I’d never actually seen one, and didn’t fancy buying sight unseen, especially not after my experiences with the Sony Ericsson t68i. Plus, you know, $700…

Zaurus? Tempting again. I kept waiting for Sharp to start selling the clamshell Zaurus machines. Unfortunately, all they sell in the US is the SL-6000. It’s thick and heavy and has a keyboard that’s too small to use, hidden in a sliding mechanism. I don’t like sliding mechanisms, they’re too unreliable. I met some guys from Sharp at a show, and told them I hated the 6000, and when would they be selling the SL-C7xx series or some other clamshell design? They said that they both wanted clamshell Zauruses too, but the Japanese mothership had decided that we were wrong, nobody in America wants clamshell machines. I wasn’t prepared to pay $800+ to Dynamism for an unwarrantied Japanese import Zaurus re-flashed with a partially translated OS, though clearly the fact that some people are rather puts a hole in Sharp’s official position. Anyway, I waited a year or so to see if Sharp would relent and sell my a PDA I wanted, then crossed them off the list when they failed to do so.

So, my short list of options was: Tungsten T3, Tungsten T5, Sony CLIE PEG-TH55, Tapwave Zodiac.

The Tungsten T3 has a gratuitous sliding mechanism. The slider wasn’t going to protect the screen, and I couldn’t imagine any concievable circumstance where I’d want to make the screen smaller than it already was, so what was the point? The T5 kinda illustrates the uselessness of it. I expect it was purely a matter of wanting to recycle the case of the Tungsten T and just drop in a different screen instead of having to do a major redesign. So, not really very appealing.

Ah, the Tungsten T5. Looks like a fabulous device until you read some reviews. The biggest problem is that Pa1mOne b0rked the OS on the T5 and the Treo 650, so that every single database entry is now allocated in 512 byte chunks, like on a desktop PC. So if (like me) you carry small databases with hundreds of phone numbers, to-do items and scraps of info, suddenly they bloat out to 10x the size. To me, it seems like that rather ruins the point of the thing. Palm say they are going to fix it, but the fact that they’ve given Treo 650 owners free memory cards to make up for it suggests otherwise, and they’re keeping very quiet about fixing it for the T5. The T5 has 128MB, so allowing for bloat of the kind Treo 650 users have observed, it’s like a 32MB machine—and Palm think that’s OK.

Even ignoring the memory issue, though, there are other problems. The T5 has software compatibility issues. Most software developers are scrambling with updates, but good luck getting classic Palm freeware to run on it. The connector for sync is yet another new design, so none of the existing peripherals will work. And worst of all, it has no vibration mode. Yup, if you’re in a meeting, cinema, church or whatever, you can’t have it vibrate instead of beeping for alarms. It’s the same rather anemic speaker as the T3, and it’s mounted in the center of the back of the device, so as soon as you lay it on a desk, put it in a carrying case, or even hold it in your hand, the sound is badly muffled.

So in short, the T5 fails the basic functionality requirements due to some very poor design choices by Palm.

Next to be eliminated was the CLIE. Sony decided they weren’t interested in selling in the US any more. That left the Tapwave Zodiac, and I bought one.

Things I like about the Zodiac:

• It has the biggest rechargeable battery capacity of any Palm device.
• The case is made of metal, not plastic like the T5.
• Because it was designed for gaming, it has two front-mounted speakers for loud stereo sound, and a strong vibration function.
• It has a graphics processor, leaving the CPU free to do actual CPU stuff, so performance is lightning-fast.
• The internal memory behaves as regular Palm memory, with most of the free space being used to simulate an internal memory card. This is important because Palm OS craps out once files get large, so your photos and MP3s and e-books need to go in “card memory”. With the Zodiac, you get some “card memory” built in…
• …and then you’ve got two SD expansion slots, one of which takes SDIO cards.
• A proper navigation joystick and a complete set of application buttons.
• Most color Palm software seems to run, including titles which I know don’t run on the T5.
• Real headphone jack capable of driving a pair of portable Sennheisers.
• It’s black.

Things I don’t like:

• The stylus just clips on the back. I can see that getting lost.
• The sync cable is hard to clip on; it tends to feel like it’s clipped on, only to suddenly drop off half way through a data transfer.
• Case and dock cost extra. C’mon, guys, would it kill you to bundle a cheap neoprene carrying pouch?

Basically, it’s the nicest Palm device I’ve ever seen. It’s a shame that Tapwave’s strategy is to sell it as a game console, because it’s not so hot at being one of those. As a Palm organizer, though, it easily beats the competition—at least as far as the hardware is concerned.

Two nights in a row now I’ve dreamed about Austin.

Finances permitting, I think we’ve worked out where our house is going to come from. Today we got a Zipcar and went out to Acton, MA to visit Deck House.

The woman on duty at the sample house turned out to be an architect, a recent graduate of MIT who had worked for Autodesk and was now designing houses for Deck House customers. She’s very keen on green design, energy efficiency, and modern architecture, and had just returned from a green building conference in Austin, so it couldn’t have worked out any better, really.

Deck House make custom designed houses using parts prefabricated in their factory in Acton. Prefab components have a number of advantages. Firstly, because they’re assembled using factory equipment, there’s less waste, and the materials tend to be of higher quality (because otherwise there’s a risk of screwing up the machinery). Secondly, the construction standards are more rigorous, because the components have to withstand transport. Thirdly, building time and costs are reduced.

Unfortunately, most prefabricated and modular housing looks really awful. In fact, having looked at literally hundreds of house designs in the last couple of weeks, I have to say that houses in general look really awful. Like any business, the construction industry responds to consumer demand, and consumer demand is mostly for generic boxy ranches with enormous floorplans. Deck House have been forced to respond to demand by launching a line of more “normal” houses called Acorn, and apparently a lot of people ask them if they can hide the wood beams and put in multi-pane windows.

When it comes to architecture, sara and I are both prepared to think inside the box, as we seriously considered the possibilities that Glidehouse might offer. However, I’ve experienced the delights of living in a piece of modern architecture, and the bauhaus influence didn’t really lead to buildings which work as practical machines for living in. There are many good reasons why roofs should be pointy, it’s not just something mankind did for thousands of years for no good reason.

I’ve been reading lots of books on architecture and home construction. As far as materials go, our hope is to use as many natural materials as possible, and avoid chemical exposure. Wood, glass, metal, rock, cotton… and concrete. You can do amazing things with polished concrete. Wool is natural, but I’m allergic, and carpets are a great breeding ground for mold. Again, all this is subject to budget… I’m gradually building up spreadsheets of cost estimates. Next I think I need to select some major appliances, and on Monday I need to chase up the UK estate agents.

I’m not sure I can explain why space travel means so much to me.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting with my grandfather, watching one of the Apollo moon landings on TV. I’m not sure which one, but since the Lunar Rover was involved it must have been one of the later ones. I would watch Sci Fi TV shows with him as well. “UFO”, in particular, and sometimes “Dr Who” if it wasn’t too scary.

Later I began reading SF, starting with Arthur C. Clarke. By then “Space:1999” was on TV, and soon I read the novel of “2001”. I remember working out how old I would be in the year 2000. With some delight, I calculated that I would be the right age to be one of the people working on the moonbase. So that became my plan.

I learnt everything I could about the space program. I collected books about astronomy, and books with diagrams of how rocket engines worked. I learned about relativity, zero gravity, orbits, black holes, red shifts and how zero gravity bathrooms worked, all before I’d got as far as trigonometry at school. I memorized the sequence of vehicle maneuvers for an Apollo moon landing. I studied souvenir brochures from the Kennedy Space Center, with pictures of the Vehicle Assembly Building, Skylab, Soyuz, Gemini, and the Angry Alligator.

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There was a boy on the subway just now who looked to be about 14 years old. He was with his father. I think the kid was autistic, because his behavior was very like Raymond in Rain Man. He even looked like a young Dustin Hoffman in glasses.

“They shouldn’t be allowed to do that… They shouldn’t be allowed to do that…” “What?” “They’ve closed the doors. We’re not even moving. Oh, no, now we’re moving… How fast are we moving? Uh-oh, what’s that noise? What’s that noise!?” “It’s the wheels.” “The wheels are metal?” …and so on. It was quite entertaining, really.

I finally moved out of my parents’ house… in my dreams.

Although in reality it’s been over a decade, things seem to move slowly in the dream world. In real life my parents have moved twice since the house they still occupy in my dreams. Maybe it’s because I liked that house a lot.

Finally, though, the conflicts and the shouting matches became too much. They made for unsatisfying dreams. I decided I needed to find a place of my own.

As explained in part 1, there are definite rules concerning how mutable the dream world is. I couldn’t just make something up. I began exploring the more populated parts of the dream world, looking for something suitable. On the outskirts of a village on the edge of a town, I finally found what I was looking for.

The place was magnificent. Glass everywhere. Circling walkways led up to a glass dome, a kind of solarium, observation dome and greenhouse. Below were large, spacious living areas with wall-size windows. The only problem was, it was all in disrepair—vandals had broken windows, there were spider webs, the metal was rusted, and so on.

The first problem was to get everything fixed. That was relatively easy. Individual panes of glass, struts of metal, were small enough to be mutable just by focusing attention on them in the right way, and fixing a crack or removing rust was a small enough change to be allowed.

Next, I had to work out how I was going to get to the place and back. It was a bit isolated. No doubt other stuff would grow up around it, but for the time being I was going to be facing some boring transit dreams. There was a road, but I rarely drive in dreams, unless it’s a spy chase or some other genre that demands it. I originally reached the place by bike, but that wasn’t going to be any fun if the weather was bad. Finally, I managed to imagine/find something better: just through a hedge and across a small park was a bus stop, with a frequent bus into town.

The next problem was packing up all my stuff at my dream-parents’ house. That took two or three rather dull dreams, but finally I loaded the last box into a truck, sat on the back loading ramp, and waved my parents goodbye.

So now I’m in the new place. I was there last night. I still visit my parents, and they’ve visited me. Like in reality, distance has improved out relationship immeasurably.

If anyone has any suggestions for watches with interesting designs, please post links. Requirements: 24 hour time or analog hands, water resistant (preferably waterproof to a few meters). Preferences: Under $100, minimal maintenance required, shows day of week and of month.

My watch is broken. Again.

It’s a Seiko Kinetic. When it works, I love it. It never needs winding, never needs batteries, tells me the time and date and is accurate to within seconds a year. Unfortunately, this is the second time it has broken. It stopped at exactly 06:00 this morning.

When I bought the watch, I hadn’t factored annual maintenance into the equation. I think I’m going to go back to cheap Casio watches, which will at least run for five years without failing.

Alternatively, I’m still tempted by the Swatch Internet Time thing. They have some funky Internet Time watches in metal and rubber…