Toddler's Creed

This is credited to Elisa Morgan, president of MOPS International (Mothers of PreSchoolers).

Toddler's Creed

If I want it, it's mine.
If I give it to you and change my mind later, it's mine.
If I can take it away from you, it's mine.
If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.
If it's mine, it will never belong to anyone else, no matter what.
If we are building something together, all the pieces are mine.
If it looks just like mine, it is mine.

Boy that hits close to home. :)

Favorite OS X Gizmos & Gadgets Redux

In my other post below I said "SoundSource" by RogueAmoeba but I've since discovered a better freebie utility called "Detour." It does the same thing as SoundSource, only you can set the input audio and output audio on an application-by-application basis. Very cool, and it has instantly replaced SoundSource.

Another gizmo I use that I forgot about is "Mouse Locator" by 2point5fish.com. This little gizmo does one simple thing: when the mouse has been inactive for a specified amount of time, and you move the mouse, it puts a large bulls-eye over the mouse so you can locate it visually immediately. Since I installed it, not once have I lost the cursor on my screen. That, combined with the built-in OS X ability to increase the size of the cursor, has greatly lessened by frustration with moving the mouse round and round in a little circle in order to find the crazy thing.

Digital packrat

I have a 100 GB hard drive in my PowerBook.

I have an 80 GB hard drive in an external enclosure. I use it for long-term, live archives of student work, digital photos and other things.

I have a 60 GB hard drive in an external enclosure. I use it for daily backups of my documents and applications folders.

I have 20 CDs and DVDs with digital photos that I've taken.

I have 30 other backup CDs and DVDs.

I have an information bank on my computer with 100 MB of text information gleaned from newsgroups, email, etc. all about computer programming, running servers, computer software, etc.

I have several huge websites.

I have 421 little notes/memos on my PDA about all kinds of things, ideas I'm working on, things I don't want to forget, little informational tidbits, etc.

Who is ever going to look through this stuff when I'm gone?

Who is ever going to know the programs on my PowerBook and how to use them efficiently when I'm gone?

Who is ever going to know how to run my server when I'm gone?

Who will take care of my websites? Who will care what I've written in my blog?

No one. No one will care about my photos, my programs, my server.

But that's fine with me because all of these things enhance the quality of my life. Occasionally I cull stuff out. Occasionally I consolidate. Occasionally I compile.

There's little difference between this kind of digital packratting, having 5 or 6 file drawers or boxes filled with clippings, or having drawers and shelves filled with occasionally-used tools. In fact the analogy is quite close, in my opinion. One type of packratting is analog, the other two are digital. I'm pretty good at the analog kind--my files and workbench are fairly neat. I'm getting better at the digital kind--tools are improving, I'm getting better at keeping things organized. There's a sense of satisfaction in being able to lay hands on the information or tool whenever I need it for my work or recreation. In fact, I am immensely satisfied when I can search at will for information and lay hands on it within seconds or minutes.

It's a lot of fun.

My Favorite OS X Gizmos & Gadgets

There are some software and hardware gizmos for OS X I can't do without. Some are free, as noted, and some are shareware which I have paid for. I always pay for shareware I use. Here are the top 7.

1. XMenu adds a menu to the menubar that can be configured however you like with folders aliases & file aliases. I don't have to run to a finder window and access the Applications folder to find any app I want to run. I like to have a list of aliases of my most-used apps, and then aliases of my most-used folders (like Documents), for handy access. Freeware, from devon-technologies.com.
2. iSeek from ambrosiasw.com. Allows you to define searches that can be accessed from your menu bar. Kind of like Spotlight for the Net. Shareware.
3. SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba Software. This handy gizmo allows you to switch between input sources and output destinations. Handy if you have things like a Griffin iMic and a powerbook, where you might have the iMic plugged in with speakers attached, or a mic in the iMic, or you might be completely portable and want to use the internal speakers and the internal mic. Plays well with the Sound preferences pane in System Preferences. Freeware.
4. Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard. I have a 5-button mouse (actually, 2 of them, one for home and one for work). The Microsoft Mouse preferences panel is outstanding for allowing you to control the mouse buttons and functions.The Microsoft Wireless Ergonomic Keyboard is also outstanding. I don't use the wireless mouse because it doesn't have forward and back buttons for browsing, which I find indispensible on the mouse. The Mouse is Intellimouse Optical 1.1A USB. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but they got this one right.
5. TinkerTool and TinkerTool System. Indispensible. TinkerTool is freeware, TTSystem is shareware. Highly recommended for both setting hidden systems prefs and settings, and for performing periodic system maintenance. By Marcel Bresink Software-Systeme.
6. Synk. I don't hear much about this backup utility, but I find it performs flawlessly for what I need. I need to be able to plug my external hard drive in and backup certain folders. I need to be able to either archive the changes or throw them away. I need it to work in the background. Works perfectly. From http://www.decimus.net/synk/.
7. There's a little gizmo that I have forgotten the name. It's somewhere on my hard drive. But what it does is so important. It switches the function of apple-N and shift-apple-N in the Finder. When I remember where it is, I'll post it.

That's it. My top 7. Enjoy.

Managing info Digitally

I used to have all my little "pieces of info" on pieces of paper, spiral notebooks, etc.

Then I graduated to a Franklin Planner, and used that during the mid-80s well into the late 90s.

Then I got a PDA and incorporated all that into my trusty Handspring Pro, which I still use. I wore out my first one, I'm on #2.

Managing information in my computer is another issue. I've tried several things--word documents, FileMaker Pro databases, Entourage, and now a nice program called "DevonThink Pro."

All those emails I want to save, bits and pieces of info related to education, business, personal, etc. all are stuffed in a DevonThink Pro database. It's 100 MB but now it's finally all consolidated (been working for some months). I still have a few things to sort and split (to transfer from FM Pro to DevonThink it was necessary to export multiple records as long text files, and now they have to be re-split into records). Ah well it give me a chance to cull out unimportant/outdated stuff.

DevonThink Pro is by devontechnologies.com.

Cinnamon update

I have faithfully been taking two 600 mg tablets of cinnamon morning and night (2400 mg/day) for a little over a week now.

On 10/11 my blood pressure was 114/66. It is about the same now. So far, then, no big blood pressure change.

The other measure that may be affected by cinnamon is the cholesterol. I will have it tested in a couple of months, trying to keep most everything else the same, and we'll see what happens. I have my new blood pressure medicine (Zocor), but haven't started taking it yet.

Digital Rituals/Digital Lifestyle

Look at this list. Am I immersed in digital rituals or what?!?!?

• Check my email, read NYT Headlines email, access interesting articles online & print sometimes for future reference
• Sync my PDA
• Update my PodCasts (Tips from the Top Floor, Just Thinking, Let My People Think, President's Address, LensWork, 2-Minute Photoshop Tricks)
• Backup my hard drive
• Write to my blog (not often enough)
• Check my calendar on my PDA
• Balance my checkbook online
• Pay credit card balance (monthly) via direct transfer
• Look at favorite comics widgets
• Glance at local weather widget
• Glance at CNN news headlines widget
• Glance at midwest precipitation forecast widget

OK, so I don't do all these things every day, but most of them I do every day.

Get Info

Information Overload

I read the morning Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on Sunday mornings (that's the only day of the week I get it). First I drag the junk out (like classifieds, real estate, and glossy ads), perusing the front pages of each news section to see if there's anything I want to go back and read later. I see in the Target ad there's an interesting cabinet for sale that will work in my garage, maybe I'll get 3 or 4 of them. Looks like the Wisconsin Badgers win over Minnesota is worth reading, also an article about a guy losing weight. Read the funnies. Throw the junk away.

In my email every day, I receive the New York Times headlines email: Top stories, International, National, Washington, Business, Technology, Editorials, and Op Ed. I always look over the headlines and today's interesting Op Ed was about finding an original, long-lost Beethoven manuscript. I clicked the link and went to the NYT website. It didn't have enough info, so I typed "Grosse Fuge" manuscript into Google and found the main NYT article that showed a media slideshow with narration and photos of the manuscript.

At breakfast I read a Daily Bread devotional, and one from the Institute for Creation Research. That one's pretty interesting to me, it's about Jesus as teacher.

Now I finish my breakfast, back at my computer, and flip over to my OS X Widgets and read over my favorite comics. I use the very cool WIMIC widget to view: B.C., Rose is Rose, Garfield, Wizard of ID, Animal Crackers, Dilbert, Calvin & Hobbes, Foxtrot, Frank & Ernest, and a couple of others.

While I am looking at my widgets, I notice the precipitation map shows we probably won't have rain, and the weather forecast widget says maybe rain tomorrow. I click on the CNN Headlines widget to refresh the headlines, and note thankfully that the votes in Iraq are being counted. None of the headlines interest me enough to click on them, so I'm done with that for the time being.

All this before 7:30 am.

Our player piano

This is about our player piano.

My in-laws were given this piano (a Wurlitzer-Kingston player), as close as I can tell, somewhere around 1946. They were building their house in Syracuse NY right after the war and one of the neighbors came by and asked them if they wanted it. My in-laws said yes, so they all rolled the piano down the street on pipes, then alongside the house and into the basement. There it stayed for 50 years. My wife remembers as a kid playing the piano rolls. I came into my wife's life around 1980, and when visiting her home, I went to the basement occasionally to tinker with the piano. A little oiling, cleaning, etc. confirmed that it was still a working player.

My father-in-law decided they needed to do some basement cleaning in the mid-80's, and they asked us if we wanted the piano. We did, so we drove to NY with a UHaul to pick it up. Once we got it back home to Detroit, the first thing I did before anything else was to strip and refinish it. It had been painted chocolate brown. After refinishing, it is a beautiful mahogany. Unfortunately I could not save the Wurlitzer decal on the keyboard cover.

Now to the restoration. For years I tried patching with various combinations of cloth and rubber cement without much success. I got the piano working about 50-60% of what it should be. The air motor did not turn smoothly, and many of the keys did not play crisply. So the real problem was that the motor bellows and the key bellows were leaking, and the paper/cloth needed to be replaced.

Well, we moved to Wisconsin from Detroit, and we brought along another of my wife's inherited pieces, a metal porch swing. I stripped and painted it, and we decided we wanted a cover for it. From one of the gardening magazines, we ordered an all-weather cover. When the cover came, lo and behold, it was made of a lightweight, flexible, dense fabric (I still don't know the name of it) but to all appearances it looked to me to be the perfect fabric for rebuilding my piano. And the cover came in its own bag made of the same material, and there was plenty of fabric in the bag for the job. First I tried repairing the motor, using contact cement and this new fabric. It worked! The motor started running perfectly smoothly, with no erratic turns or dead spots. Wow.

So, during Memorial Day weekend in maybe 1998 or so, I took the whole player unit to my workshop and rebuilt 90% of all the 88 bellows. Some of the lower and upper bellows didn't need replacing, but most did.

Wow, once I replaced those bellows and worked on a couple of other linkages that were leaking air, did the player play nicely! Very crisp runs! Wonderful.

Sorry I don't know what that fabric is called, but it worked perfectly. It was a miracle.

Just found out that replacement fallboard decals are available. I'll get a replacement and also get some replacement knobs and rubber bumpers and felt soon.

Fixing the bass bridge on my piano

We have a player piano. I love it, it's great! Wurlitzer-Kingston (or is that Kingston-Wurlitzer). Made around the turn of the century (as in 1900, not 2000). I've restored it to about 95% completely functional. Someday I'll give you the details on my restoration.

One thorny problem has been the bass bridge, which has nothing to do with player action, it's part of the Kingston piano. The bass bridge, for those of you who don't know, is a curved bar of wood about 2 1/2 inches high and about 1 inch thick and about 1 foot long. The strings for the lowest notes on the piano are stretched across it in a slight arch, pressing the bar into the piano's sound board which amplifies the sound of the vibrating string. If the bass bridge is poorly installed, damaged, or poorly constructed, then sound from the whole lower range of the piano will be poor.

Where the strings stretch across the bar, they are also threaded between two pins, forming sort of a elongated "Z". The 2 pins are each angled toward the string, and fitted very snugly in holes in the bridge. Over time, because of humidity, dryness, age, sideways pressure of the strings, etc. the pins can loosen and even split the wood, again resulting in poor bass tone.

About 40 pins on mine were seated in split holes.

What to do?

Well, my dad was a carpenter of sorts, and a few years ago he took the original bass bar and duplicated it using a piece of oak and some of his woodworking tools. The result was fairly good but not perfect. There are three important dimensions: the bridge must make perfect flat contact with the sound board, the strings must zig zag between the pins; and the strings must make contact with the wood of the bridge at precisely the same point as they make contact with the pin, which means the bridge is beveled crisply across the pin holes. Getting those three dimensions right was a challenge: some of the strings didn't zig zag enough because of imperfect hole positioning, some of them were touching the wood/pin inconsistently, and I don't think the contact with the sound board was perfect. But I had his improvised bridge installed for quite a few years, and we have had lots of fun from from the piano.

A few weeks ago I started researching the issue, and found these options: (1) have the bass bar duplicated by hand (fairly expensive) (2) have it replaced with a generic blank (not as expensive but not as good and (3) repair it with slow-setting epoxy. I talked with a fellow online about having it duplicated and he didn't want to mess with it. So I decided to give epoxy a try. Step by step, here's what I did:

• I bought some slow hardening epoxy from Ace
• I mixed up an ounce at a time
• I used a wire to poke the epoxy down the hole where the wood around the pin was cracked or deteriorated
• I rubbed some vaseline on the pin and poked it firmly down into the hole
• The cracks were at the top, on the surface of the bridge, so when the pin poked down, it settled into place with the right position and at the right angle
• I made sure the epoxy was mounded up around the pin above the surface of the wood in order to have solid reconstruction of the area around each pin's hole
• I worked my way all the way down both sides of the bass bridge
• There were about 10 holes that were solid and didn’t need any epoxy, the rest I epoxied
• After the epoxy had set but not hardened, I used vise grips on each pin, gave it a little twist and pulled it out
• The next day after fully hardening, I used my orbital sander to flatten the mounded epoxy
• Then I used a small sander attachment on my Dremel (about 3/4 inch diameter) to sand the proper bevel across each hole or pair of holes
• I had a couple of holes I had to re-epoxy
• Finally after curing a day or two I installed it in the piano, inserted the pins (used a clamp to move each string sideways enough so I could insert the pin straight in its hole) and tuned it up
• Result: sounds really good across 3/4 of the bridge, from the low end up
• The upper end of the bridge I don’t think is seated firmly on the sounding board, the strings don’t resonate as well (there were three dowels for the bridge to set on and keep it in place, and the upper pin is broken so the bridge seems to be a bit off location at the upper end)
• I did not glue the bridge down (yet)
• So far there's been no sign of failure

Since getting this far, I have received some advice about how to fix the tone across the rest of the bridge. Basically I need to screw, bolt, or glue the bridge down firmly to its mount. I'll post an addendum to this blog when I have accomplished that.

Testing Cinnamon

After researching the benefits of cinnamon on cholesterol and blood pressure, and having high blood pressure (I take Diovan) and high cholesterol despite leading a fairly active lifestyle, reasonable weight, and eating pretty well, and since the good doctor gave me a prescription for Zocor, I thought I'd give cinnamon a try.

I purchased several bottles of 600 mg cinnamon tablets. I take two in the morning and two at night, for a total for 2400 mg per day. I've been taking it for a week on this regimen.

My normal blood pressure with Diovan is in the neighborhood of 115/75, which is good. So far preliminary blood pressure readings have been in that range. Today's reading was 114/63. One person on the Internet claims that with cinnamon plus Diovan their blood pressure dropped low enough to cause them some problems so I'm monitoring it closely.

I'm going to take it for two months until my supply is gone, keep my diet etc the same, then go to the doctor to have my cholesterol checked. I'm comfortable with the Diovan, but I'm a little leery of adding Zocor on top of it. My latest cholesterol reading with fasting and eating oatmeal every morning was total 258 LDL 190 tri 115. Will keep you posted.