Recently in Images Category

I'm testing my Olympus E-1 Zuiko 35mm macro lens with a new diffuser lamp assembly:

Figure is a small piece taken from an artbook of Masamune Shirow, Intron Depot 3, "Star Ship Police" by Beagle.

A few days ago I ordered an Ebisu/Yebisu beer at Tanto Japanese Restaurant (an izakaya) in Campbell, California, and was told by the waitress that it's now being sold under the label "Sapporo Reserve":

Yes, that's a Japanese beer sold at a Japanese izakaya, served in the glass of a Korean competitor, Hite.

My buddy Tom shows off a crazy Japanese t-shirt recently:

"OTHER PLAMS No thank you has lost many a butter cake okY? work step by step toward you goal step by step enjoy!"

The back says: "rupture of diplomatic relations good"

Is someone channelling E. H. Bronner?

Yesterday I attended the Pleasanton Highland Games, the largest event of its kind in North America, with my friends Dale Seago and Garland Glessner. I'd missed a few of these over the last few years, and I'm likely to miss several more, so I was especially happy to have attended this one, since 1.) I serendipitously met some friends I'd not seen in years, 2.) I got to hear the Wicked Tinkers live, and 3.) I met this sweet young lady, selling handmade silver whiskey flasks:

She'll be working at the Northern California Renaissance Faire this fall; find her and say hello. Sorry, won't tell you her name, you'll have to work for it...

Gunshot taken at 7:07am east Texas time, photo shot taken at 8:43am, Tuesday last week:

As mentioned in a previous post tonight, this was taken from about 110 metres, from a blind near an identified hog trail, on a very large ranch of a friend of mine. I waited for 20 minutes before determining that none of the hog's clan would be following in his hoofsteps before calling my buddies (also in blinds about a mile from mine) for retrieval.

Last week, I took a coyote, a feral hog, and assisted in a friend's take of another feral hog, using one 150-grain Remington Core-Lokt in .308 caliber shot from a Jeff Cooper edition Steyr Scout in each encounter. This particular round (or remains thereof) I dug out from underneath the skin of the one I took:

This particular round hit the hog midships, high, and completely busted the spine, spleen, and vented the lower lobes of the lungs, causing pneumothorax evidenced by a "deflating balloon" sound when I first moved the hog carcass. Intererestingly, the lead core seems to have punched through the hog, leaving the copper jacket:

Here, I show the path of the bullet, taken by the hog from about 110 metres, entering starboard and (partially) exiting port:

You know, in this shot, I look almost as (literally) knackered as the hog itself. East Texas is hot and humid this time of year...

How does this look? I picked up a new Olympus Zuiko 35mm 1:3.5 macro lens for my Olympus E-1, and this was my first test shot, the Citizen titanium watch I wear nowadays:

Once again:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Robert A. Heinlein
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

I like this one:

More, from our recent weekend sailing, in the shipping lanes outside the Golden Gate Bridge:

This quarter's physics lab is my favorite, covering topics in classical electrodynamics. Here's a characteristic curve for the charge/discharge of a capacitor:

Seen on an office window in a walk through San Francisco, Dr. Baldwin Louie's "dental warrior" mascot:

...yesterday at Vertical Challenge 2006 at San Carlos Airport, California, a car hoisted down the length of a runway, then dropped it:

I'm very happy I had my Olympus E-1 kit in the trunk of my car, since my friend and I stumbled on this airshow quite by accident, seeing all the helicopter activity from the highway whilst driving north intending to watch the jumbos landing at SFO, from the shoreline at Burlingame.

Taken a few minutes ago, on Castro Street in downtown Mountain View, California:

The person in the shot - whom I don't know - ran up to the vehicle when I was composing this shot, and jumped into frame without a care. She is of The Billion Monkey Legion of people with digicams caught by other Monkeys with digicams. One Of Us. The vehicle in the shot is a T-Rex 3-wheel superbike.

There's nothing like hauling your ass out of bed, making the trip to the airport or marina, and just getting out:

This was a few miles out on the ocean side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Bright sun, great swells. I slept very, very well last night.

So I'm at my friends' house in the East Bay, and I'm teaching their toddler son Josh how to use my Sony CyberShot digital camera. Lesson #1: pointing the camera, keeping fingers off the lens (a hard one to teach); Lesson #2: composing the scene:

OK, so he's not yet ready for the Rule of Thirds. He picks up the trick of framing a face within the viewfinder boundaries quickly though:



The young dude, I think, is ready for his own camera soon!

The Dissident Frogman has incorporated my Japanese translations of his popular "Support Denmark" banners into his multilingual contributions archive page.

My thanks to knowledgeable friends Mariko and Garth for their thorough critiques of my pre-final draft. Thanks also for feedback on the issue of translating the original phrase "the legacy of the West", which was problematic, by these people on the honyaku mailing list: Richard Thieme, Peter Durfee, Benjamin Barrett, J.C. Helary, and James Sparks.

Here's another from my collection, a 1960 Signet Books edition of the 1949 classic of George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Now that I've wrapped up what turned out to be a surprisingly subtle and difficult volunteer Japanese translation job (which I'm very happy to have done, I should note), I'm going to blog a bit more for fun. Combing my bookshelves, I pulled another several titles with interesting cover copy and art. Here's one: "Strike From Space: A Megadeath Mystery" by Phyllis Schlafly and Chester Ward, 1965, Pere Marquette Press:

Interesting author blurb from the back cover, above: "Phyllis Schlafly... was a ballistics gunner and technician at the largest ammunition plant in the world." This is particularly interesting, since the WikiPedia entry for her doesn't mention this, only her academic bona fides (I'll be correcting this omission later, wearing my WikiPedia Contributor hat.) Now, "the largest ammunition plant in the world" was, at the time of publication of this book - and still remains - Lake City Army Ammunition Plant (LCAAP) in Independence, Missouri... did she actually work there?

Yesterday, I visited Ramen Rama in Cupertino, California, with my longtime friend Suzu. Here's another of what Brian Micklethwait refers to as a "Billion Monkeys" moment:

Some other tech industry friends of Suzu have started a company called Yelp, whose product is a business reviews website, where Suzu and I have reviewed the ramen shop. I've not populated this blog with restaurant review entries to my satisfaction, since the blog format is not granular enough (without hacking) to support a taxonomy for star ratings and such, so I'm going to experiment with posting my reviews on Yelp and pointing to them from here. Putting my own reviews in the context of others' should add value to the opinions.

I've caught the "Billion Monkeys" meme from my English blogger friend Brian Micklethwait (whom I met during my London sojourn in the early 1990's), who coined the term to describe those who take digital photographs of, well, others of those who take digital photographs of others. Here's one from my trip last spring to Beijing, a tour guide in the Forbidden City:

I must admit of course that the "Billion Monkeys" thing didn't occur to me at the time... I was simply taken with a rather attractive young Chinese woman.

Yesterday, I scanned the cover of a pocket WWII English-Chinese dictionary published by the U.S. War Department in 1943, at the height of the war. Today, I've scanned the cover of another from my collection, published shortly after V-J Day, in September 1945: TM 30-481, "The Supplementary Japanese-English Dictionary", this one a very large hardcover which I just barely fit on my scanner's flatbed:

From the Preface:

This dictionary of 43,000 terms is supplementary to the following six standard Japanese-English dictionaries with which it forms a complete set of seven:

...which I will paraphrase thus:

• a technical manual of about 100,000 terms which was in "final editorial stage" at the time;
  
• another technical manual of about 4,000 terms which was claimed in a similar state;
  
• Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary, Harvard Univ. Press;
  
• Kato's Medical dictionary, 1944, German language edition (!);
  
• "Ozaki's Sea Terms";
  
• "Creswell's Military [Dictionary];
  

I'd love to see a copy of the 100,000 word technical manual... anyone know if this was ever actually published?

In preparing yesterday's "Little Red Book" post, I discovered that my US $99 Canon all-in-one scanner/printer/copier is an excellent proxy for a macro lens on an expensive camera (I have an Olympus E-1 but don't yet have that lens.) Here's another old school example from the many I have in my personal book collection, this one from 1956, "New Worlds of Modern Science":

I love this type of thing.

A few hours ago, I went on a somewhat controlled shopping binge at one of my favorite used book shops, one in Sunnyvale, California. I found this little gem, TM-633, "Chinese Phrase Book" published by the U.S. War Department in 1943:

Included phrases in this pre-Maoist American Little Red Book run the gamut from "Are there Taoist priests in the mountains?" to "I have been poisoned" to "Don't try any tricks!" to "You will be rewarded" to "Give my horse water."

Meant to put this up a few weeks ago: me and Dale Seago at a recent (21 January 2006) Rabbie Burns Birthday celebration in front of San Francisco's Edinburgh Castle Pub:

It was busy that night: I managed to snag the last booth upstairs in the mezzanine area, with a sightline into the area where we expected the haggis to be piped in. It took an hour and a half to get our fish & chips, which were worth the wait; they're made at some nearby mom & pop shop and delivered in. In the meantime, we enjoyed a few of the most excellent Belhaven peat-smoked ales, my first time trying that, and I thank Dale for introducing it to me.

The festivities were well worth the trip up to the city. The piper was very good - and looked every bit the part, wish I'd snagged a good shot of him - and the Burns poetry readings were rousing, marred only ever so slightly by some rather self-consciously narcissistic political posturing on the part of a (I'm not making this up) Scottish socialist lesbian Buddhist working class nun.

The night culminated in a hearty reading of "Address to a Haggis" followed by a free-for-all of flying forks in a frenzy of delectation. I managed to snag a small amount, happy I had any, and returned to the booth to enjoy it... and discovered to my gratitude that Dale had managed to snag double servings for both of us! I quite enjoyed it, and may even keep a small stock of it in cans for emergencies.

How do I even begin to explain this one...?

Still going through my burgeoning archive of travel photos. Here's a ride I took - a bungee chair - in Beijing's Wangfujing shopping district. The guy on the chair is not me:

I'd had a bit to drink when I decided to do this myself; the boisterously friendly Chinese guy who shared the chair with me (since it was cheaper for 2, cheapest for 3) was plastered. I bought a copy of the video taken by the elderly, cage-mounted VHS camera, without having taken into account (I'd been drinking, remember) that the camera was recording in PAL format... doh! Eventually, I'll get it converted to NTSC, or directly to MPEG. Should be fun to see.

I'm going through a year's worth of iPhoto archives and found this, taken in organic chemistry lab by my friend Jenny... me in Maximum Nerd mode:

Yes, I've descended into kittyblogging. This is my friend Jen's cat Willow about to pounce on my camera lanyard:

Something about all this Mohammed image craziness has gotten under my skin. Large, nasty, violent crowds of adherents to a pre-medieval death cult have made it their mission to nullify the very concept of "freedom of speech," and this really, really pisses me off (notice that I'm now blogging again?) and I have chosen to vent. So, inspired by Michelle Malkin's courage in posting "the 12 forbidden cartoons, I've decided to lash myself to the mast and join my fellow blogbursters in posting all of them myself. Here they are:

I took a break from studying this evening and visited a number of local stores to buy Danish food and booze products. Here's what I came back with, minus duplicates (I had to buy more than one of the tins of ginger cookies):

From left to right, purchases from various stores in Cupertino, California:

From Trader Joe's:

• Rosenborg Danish Blue cheese
  
• Silver Goat Organic Feta cheese
  
• "The Queen's Cookies" Ginger Spice Cookies (made in Denmark for Trader Joe's)
  

From Whole Foods:

• Denmark's Finest Havarti cheese
  
• Denmark's Finest Havarti cheese with dill
  
• Rosenborg Danish Blue cheese
  
• Blue Danish Castello Triple Cream cheese
  
• Fontina Danish Cheese
  

From Safeway:

• Denmark's Finest Fontina cheese
  
• Denmark's Finest Blue cheese
  
• Primo Taglio Havarti with Dill cheese
  

Especially notable and tasty are the ginger spice cookies made under contract in Denmark for Trader Joe's:

The thing that's missing from the first picture above: Danish beer. None of the three supermarkets above had any Danish beer - assumedly Tuborg and Carlsberg - and the one place I think might have such beer (Cost Plus World Market) closed tonight before I could check out their stock. I'll try there tomorrow night. In the meantime, I'm enjoying my Havarti with Newcastle Brown ale tonight.

I encourage all of my readers to participate in this Danish buycott.

The Dissident Frogman has updated his "Support Denmark" banner blog posting with banner versions in additional languages such as German and Simplified Chinese.

I've been too busy to blog the last few weeks: heavy school load and lots of travel. Your guess where I was last weekend:

I picked up a decent sword stand in San Francisco's Chinatown yesterday. It's 23 inches high, $25 (apparently non-negotiable in the store from which I bought it) and comes in four matt-lacquered wood pieces with a set of wood screws. Power screwdriver in hand, I assembled it in a couple of minutes. Here it is with my Bugei Samurai Koshirae Katana:

The base is indented to hold the end of the saya in place, and seems fairly sturdy. They're available in most of the tourist gift shops in San Francisco's Chinatown. Not as common as the conventional over-the-mantlepiece (or in the tokonoma) horizontal stand, but has a nice "shotgun ready rack" aspect to it.

Four weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a Halloween party in Manhattan. I wasn't prepared with a costume, unless you count my normal get-up below as, um, "Visiting Silicon Valley Guy." On the left is Perry Metzger who is, ahem, a eusocialist insect:

I'm just about to crash soon, having come back from the first of a multi-day Bujinkan training seminar by Arnaud Cousergue of Paris (Vincennes, actually) at the Bujinkan Martial Arts Center in Sacramento, a couple of hours' drive from here.

That's Dr. Pete Lohstroh, a UC Davis reproductive biologist, and myself. Pete's interested in medical nanotechology too, by the way, but that's deliberately off topic. I really do meet cool people in this art.

The shiner I acquired Thursday night is even more pronounced in this photo, but it doesn't hurt at all anymore. On a related note, Arnaud ended the day insisting on the use of padded training weapons through the end of the year, for various reasons with which I entirely agree. To that end, on the way back from Sack-of-Tomatoes to Saint Jose, I stopped at the Home Despot near the Sacto dojo and acquired the requisite materials:

- a $1.97 bag of thin 6' bamboo rods from the Garden section
- a $1.97 6' section of 5/8" inside diameter foam copper pipe insulation

I then duct taped 3 pinky-width lengths of the bamboo together at 9-inch intervals, put that inside the foam, and placed styrofoam caps at the ends, duct taping those. I finished by taping the entire thing lengthwise.

Looks surprisingly good, and not at all like a late-night vodka fueled project. I took photos of every step of the project which I will be posting in a few days.

Time to crash now.

A gift from my training partner last night, and proof that padded training weapons are a good idea for some types of waza:

That's from the end of a 6-foot hickory pole, received during a sword evasion drill (sword in my hand, bo in his.) I was fortunate: my training partner had enough sensitivity to have placed the tip of the hickory right down across that eyelid into the left zygomatic arch. Pretty cool, actually.

I'm rested now and recovered from last weekend's attendance at the 4-day tactical shotgun course at Front Sight Firearms Training Institute near Las Vegas, Nevada. I surprised myself by making Distinguished Graduate, so I'm now qualified to come back to attend the 4 Day Advanced Tactical Shotgun course. On the second day of training, Greg Carroll snapped this pic of me after the two of us had done our respective runs through the outdoor canyon "clean the hostage takers out" simulator exercise:

The (visible) firearm is my Benelli M1 Super 90, with a nylon tactical sling and a GG&G M3 Tactical Illuminator mounting rail in the 2 o'clock position on the foreend, not the 10 o'clock position GG&G recommends on their website (experience in a previous course having shown me that, as a right-handed longgunner, the 10 o'clock position allows the light to bump on.)

I'd last done a tactical shotgun course about 4 years ago, and so I was quite interested to see how training doctrine had changed in respect of that weapon at Front Sight. The men in the evolution I attended - those 13 in the class who were there for the full 4 days - were all at least previous attendees at another weapon systems class (e.g. defensive handgun, practical rifle) so the class was run at a slightly accelerated pace befitting the audience. Attendees were about evenly divided between cops, active duty military (a Marine heading back to Iraq soon) and private citizens, all of whom were treated exactly the same by the instructional staff, the excellent Chuck Burnett and John Pierson.

One difference I noticed was the much heavier emphasis on incorporating movement, keeping the fight dynamic, and training that way to the limited extent allowed in the "square range environment." I was particularly pleased that, after the Monday (4th day) afternoon skills test, and the "load and go" indoor tactical simulator, I was allowed to do several rounds of 2-man team shooting on the move, with my new friend David L. Loads of fun, and I was pleased to find that a walking skill I'd been cultivating the last few years, walking fast with very short tank-tread heel/toe action to keep the hips and shoulders on level planes, allowed me to get good hits moving both forward and backward, without muzzle bob.

I'm at a level of membership at Front Sight that allows me to take any firearms course free for the rest of my life, much like some golf club memberships. So, I get to take these courses again and again, which allows me not only to revisit, revive, and refine my skills, but also to work out equipment issues. I've discovered I really don't like the Lyman TacStar SideSaddle mounted on the left side of the receiver: it catches on my clothing, when loaded it dampens recoil (and hence reliability) on this recoil-operated weapon, and with the standard provided cross-receiver screw, was coming loose even though I'd installed it properly and Lock-Tited it. I guess a couple of thousand rounds will do that to the Lock-Tite. That, and I'm leery of over-tightening that screw for fear of impeding bolt travel. Oh, and there's the issue of potentially "egging out" the screw holes on the aluminum receiver. My friend David assures me that, should I care to keep the SideSaddle, I can send the weapon to a gunsmith who specializes in Class 3 firearms with aluminum receivers, experienced in setting up weapons to resist receiver failure, but I'm going to switch to keeping my slug rounds on a belt carrier anyway.

Nor am I going to solve the "problem" of having extra ammo by changing out the tube magazine from a 5 to an 8 round capacity. This is my home invasion repellant device... if I can't solve The Problem with what's available in that weapon, then I'm in a very serious situation indeed. I'm more and more preferring lighter, more maneuverable weapons the more I train, with as few bells and whistles as I can get away with. I've heard more than one long arms instructor over the years comment on how students will arrive at a course with their all-singing, all-dancing Space Gun rigs, everything mounted everywhere, only to find themselves quickly shedding equipment after the first day... especially when training in the 105 F degree desert heat. Heh.

Recommendation: check out Estate Cartridge's low-recoil 12-gauge 9-pellet 00 SWAT loads. I've used this buckshot at a previous shotgun course, and had made the decision to attend this most recent course with too little lead time to order more of the same for this class. So, I had a mere few dozen of them to use at various times during this course, instead using a mix of Winchester and Federal buckshot for most exercises. No comparison. At half the price of Federal, the Estate-branded cartridges gave outstandingly tight and nicely distributed (e.g. no annular "donuts of death") patterns, turning heads on the firing line and eliciting a number of "what are you shooting, man?" enquiries.

I had the pleasure of remaking the acquaintance of at least one old friend, who was taking a course on an adjacent range. Additionally, I was happy to have a couple of libertarian friends, longtime (but previously untrained) gunowners, take the full 4 Day Defensive Handgun course on the same weekend. Both men, Alan and Chris, came away from the experience very much more competent than when they arrived.

Seen on a trip to the supermarket:

Oh, yum, gotta eat me some of these right away. Not.

I walked into math class a few months ago and saw this folded cardboard box propped up in the back of the room, pulled out my Treo 650, and snapped this shot.

No, I don't understand the labelling either. My guess is that some Chinese packaging engineer was channelling Dr. Bronner when he wrote this.

My friend L. Neil Smith emailed this today:

"Russell --

I thought you and Dale [Seago] might enjoy seeing a project I put together a long time ago, possibly before you came to Fort Collins the first time. As you can see, it's a Camillus Marine Corps knife wedded to a bayonet. It fits my M1 Carbine, the standard issue bayonet for which is a disgrace.

Note the serrated portion at the base of the blade. That was done with a
checkering file. Ahead of my time, I guess."

Here's another:

My Bujinkan teacher Dale followed up:

"Very sweet piece of work -- nicely done!!

BTW, the Marine Corps has adopted a new official-issue bayonet which largely retains the look of the old Ka-bar, but with a longer blade (8" instead of 7"). It's an issue item for Marines, but available commercially for private purchase as well."

This is the new Marine issue item, the "ON3S ONTARIO Marine Bayonet Khaki Brown Handle And Sheath 8" Blade":

Another image from my recent trip to Beijing, this one a sign at Beihai Park admonishing visitors not to do or bring certain things into the park. I'm still trying to figure out what it all means. One is a pictogram apparently forbidding rifles in the park:

Seen in an elevator in the office building where my friend Serin works:

In the heart of Beijing is the huge, well-stocked Wangfujing Bookstore. If you need maps, there are thousands of them available on the first (ground) floor, just inside the main doors. English-language books can be found on the 3rd floor. Here's a pic I snapped with my Treo 650 cameraphone:

Thanks to Anton Sherwood for pointing this out a few minutes ago on a mailing list:

In Sunday's "Beetle Bailey" strip (linked today by FFF), Pvt Plato writes a minarchist screed on walls, even supporting selfishness.

For non-American readers, Beetle Bailey is a very well known American icon, syndicated in newspapers for decades.

Not only did