Andrew Underwood

This is steampunk

This steampunk styled guitar has me drooling. I’ve been planning on giving my guitar a custom paint job but this modification inspires me.

Via Gizmodo via BoingBoing

It’s the Library’s Fault

Back in December I took a few books out of the library including one about remote sensing. That particular book was the largest of the ones they lent me. When finished with them, I returned all the books a few days before Christmas. The next time I went to take books out of the library I was told that the remote sensing book hadn’t been returned and was still overdue. They let me take those books out anyways, which was nice. So I went home and looked around for this book even though I was 99% sure I had returned it, especially since it was the largest of the group and hard to miss. A month later or so I got a letter in the mail informing me that I had lost the book and I owed the library $40 to cover the cost of it. By then I had gone back to the library a few times to look for it, sifting through unsorted books and looking in other related sections to see if it would turn up. It didn’t and after a while I started ignoring the problem because I felt I wasn’t in the wrong. Then last Friday I got another letter from the library, “Oh great,” I thought “another reminder that I have to pay them $40.” Except this time the note said that there was an overdue charge of $17 and they wouldn’t allow me to take out any more books until it was paid. So today I went back to the library and headed to that familiar spot on the shelve and there it was, complete with a sparkling beam of light coming from the ceiling tiles and choir music. I picked it up and took it to a librarian who cleared my account after hearing my story but she could offer no explanation as to how this all happened. Where was the book all this time? I sure don’t know but the moral of the story is don’t trust shifty eyed librarians. They will take your money and the book and fly to Mexico!

Physicist David Deutsch Presents at TED

This is pretty good and worthwhile sharing.

It’s Alive!

If you like to read about technical things or perhaps mini-essays, you should check out my friend Aaron’s Blog. This is his second attempt at this after a long hiatus from the blogosphere. Except this time he’s hosting it on his home computer, so I hope it can stand up to the wave of crawler bots about to hit it.

Jam Session

A few weeks ago Michael and I sat down and jammed on our guitars for about an hour. There wasn’t ever really any structure but there were a few interesting bits that came out of it. It’s all totally random and we were just making it up as we went along. I’ve selected some clips to put up and you can find them all here in mp3 format.

If you’re only going to listen to a couple, I can recommend a sampling:

• From the distortion section we have drunken sounding commercial music. Fit for something 15 seconds long.
• A slow clean bit, it gets unstructured around 20 seconds but it breaks down nicely.

My Computer Monitor Garbage Can

Could this be the first garbage can that has a linux commands directory stuck to the top? I just took the guts out of my old monitor that was dying to get this awesome refuse receptacle.

The Practice, Then the Race

Well a month has gone by since I was in the Birkie and I said that I would talk about it a bit more. First I’ll backtrack to three days before the race when I went out to the the race area for a 30 km practice ski. The starting location for the race isn’t a usual skiing area. It starts on a lake and then the trail goes into Elk Island National Park. The trail wasn’t groomed yet so I had to find where it started coming off the lake via guess and test. I found the trail head and almost immediately I hit the fence that encapsulates the park. It’s the 8 foot high page fence type to keep the elk in. The gate was closed and I was considering taking off my skis and climbing it.

Right then two park rangers came along the inside perimeter on double track skidoos. They stopped on the other side of the gate I was standing at and came to talk to me. I asked if this was the Birkie trail and they confirmed. Then I asked if I was allowed to come in, to which they replied “Sure, here, we’ll open the gate for you but you’ll have to climb the fence to get out.” That was fine with me so they let me through and stayed there to shovel away some snow around the gate. As I was leaving them one ranger shouted up to me “Oh yeah, you might encounter some Wood Bison on the trail!”

Sure enough, about 1 km up the trail there was a handful of Bison standing right on the trail. At this point the trail was straight and followed the fence. I had never had to deal with Bison before and wasn’t too sure about ‘Bison etiquette’ if you will. The only time I’ve seen Bison before was from the safety of a vehicle. I knew the rangers were going to keep going after they finished digging out the gate so I just waited for them to catch up. I didn’t want to climb the fence to get around them and I also didn’t want to go around them on the inside because the snow was deep and I didn’t want to put them in a position where they would be between the fence and myself. Two minutes later the rangers came up from behind and went straight towards the Bison, at which point they just moseyed off the trail. They only moved enough to get out of the way of the snowmobiles, however. The rangers kept going.

I continued with caution, skiing on the trail that went along side the fence to my left and the bison only a few meters to my right. Luckily the Bison took no notice of me and I continued on not encountering any more as I skied up to the 15 km mark. I had to climb the fence to get out of the park and onto the rest of the trail system. Thus on my way back I had to climb it again to get back in.
It was starting to get dark on my way back and the temperature was going down to -25 C. I was pretty cold and tired and just wanted to get back to my vehicle. When I was about 5 km away from completing my ski I came to a turn in the trail and there were more Bison in my way. Except this time there were no park rangers to clear the way for me. This time I had to climb the fence to go around them.

This was especially uncomfortable since I was already cold and didn’t want to slow down, let alone trudge through the deep snow. Still I’d rather do that than be charged and squished through the page fence coming out in cubes on the other side. I knew I was almost back so I took some time to take my camera out and take a couple pictures of them, even though the light was bad and the the bison were obscured by the fence and some trees.

After climbing the fence twice to get around them I had to climb the fence one more time to get out of the park. A total of 5 fence climbs!

So, now on to the actual race day. My Dad was also entering in the special wooden ski category so we both stayed at my uncle’s in Sherwood Park which was closer to the race than Edmonton. The race it’self was what I expected for the most part. I seeded myself to finish in 6 hours among the mass of other skiers. The mass start was quite exhilerating, here’s a couple of pics from that moment I managed to snap with my phone right before the cannon went off. Yes they used a cannon.

I finished in 5:50, which was about what I was aiming for.  There were food and drink stations every 7 km or so and perhaps I did spend a bit too much time at a couple of them than I should have.  It’s hard to resist spending some time a feed station when you’re being offered a cup of noodles by a cute and chatty volunteer.  Next year I’ll be more hardcore and perhaps race to be competitive.

At the finish line I seem to have gotten frostbite on one of my fingernails and it’s in the process of falling off right now :(.  Also my shoulder was killing my the next day but it was fine the following day.

More point form blogging

• Both my Dad and I raced in the Birkie on Saturday. It’s a 55km cross country ski race, held every year out by the Blackfoot recreation area. He skied in the wooden ski with 15 lb pack category, I competed the ‘lite’ competition which was the regular ski without pack category. It took me 5 hours 50 mins to complete. My friend Aaron and his brother Tyler also raced this year. A more comprehensive account of this event later with pictures when I’m less tired.
• I’m back in the Crowsnest Pass for a few days. The list of things for me to do includes snowboarding or skiing in Fernie, ice fishing, and building my Canadian skateboard.
• Back in Edmonton my Primus voip phone went down on Thursday with no warning dragging our router down with it in a screaming ball of electronics on strike. What followed was a hair pulling excercise in updating firmwares that got our router back on line but the voip box still refuses to update despite multiple methods of update attempts.
• I was able to snap up andrewunderwood.com yesterday after waiting a long time for it to become available again after it had been parked by Tucows. I didn’t ever announce it before but I also have andrewunderwood.ca. Both adresses mirror aunderwood.com.

Since I’ll never be a writer in real life:

I am: Arthur C. Clarke Well known for nonfiction science writing and for early promotion of the effort toward space travel, his fiction was often grand and visionary.

How much food do you buy at once?

Usually I’m on foot when I go to the grocery store and how much I buy there is limited by how much I can carry.  I go for the baskets, for me one basket holds $30 worth of food.  This is an average, but it’s often very close to this.  Using just a basket, you’re bound to have to return fairly soon.  This isn’t all bad since your food is always fresh.

You could take your TankUV to the store and load up on 15% off day and save money.  This requires you to arrive early since later on in the day all the good stuff that was on sale is out of stock.  You have to brave the crowds.  Also, you are required to have sufficient storage space at home.  Personally, my roommate and I share the freezer attached to the fridge which isn’t too big.  However if you have a house and a big freezer it sure is economical to use this method.

I’ve been thinking about this after visiting my parents where they only go to the grocery store once in a while since they live out of town.  As a result, some of their food isn’t that fresh.  Some garlic I was going to use while there was almost sprouting.  Still good they say.