Yamming

He's so serious in this photo; it cracks me up. He does love sweet potatoes, though. Ok, actually it's a baked garnet yam cut with breast milk. Yes, I know that a garnet yam is not actually a yam (genus Dioscorea), but a sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas).

Super Bowl with only one Pittsburgher

We watched the Super Bowl over at Maya and Ryder's house. It turns out that Silas was the only Pittsburgh-born person in the room, which I found pretty interesting. Nonetheless, Maya and Jan love football in a fully naturalized Pittsburgher way. :) Not that Ryder and Ben weren't showing the Steelers love, but not as exuberantly as these two ladies. Rachel, Bethany, and I aren't much into football in general, but still find the Super Bowl interesting and fun.

Silas was fascinated by the big HDTV. He hasn't spent much time in front of one. We don't have one, but he gets a little time in front of the computer. It was cute how he'd get super absorbed in trying to figure out what the TV thing was, but then people would start cheering, and he'd look back at them trying to figure out what they were yelling about.

It was a fun night.



Ryder's cheesing it up in the background. He was kind enough to lend Bethany his hat and Terrible Towel as well. We wandered the closed off streets of Bloomfield for a bit before I took Silas home. He fell asleep despite the crowd and fireworks and police sirens.

45 minutes in two museums (musea, if your prefer)

Here is the last post from my urban hiking yesterday. Here are a couple of shots from the 45 minutes I spent in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Museum of Art. They're attached and the entrance fee gets you into both. We have a family membership, so it is easy and painless to go and gawk at art, casts of architectural facades, and long-dead animals for a short amount of time. Above is an adolescent tyrannosaurus rex. Below are a set of plate armor from the 1500's, a sculpture of the Buddha from the 13th century, and a close up of a favorite part of one of the paintings in their collection. The artist escapes me right now, but I'll update this when I remember. Perhaps Bethany knows and will comment before I can update.

St. Paul Cathedral

On my stroll through Oakland yesterday, I checked out St. Paul Cathedral at 5th and Craig. It was opened in 1906. It's a beautiful building that creates a very peaceful atmosphere inside, despite the old stodgy man that went out of his way to brow beat me for taking pictures. I gave the other three people inside a wide berth so as not to get in their sight lines and disturb their thoughts or prayers.

Urban hike to Oakland

As I can't really do much exercise yet because of the surgery and recovery, I went for a nice urban hike. I wandered from Bloomfield into Oakland and back. Total of 4.4 miles, not including inside distance walking inside of the buildings. I stopped into a lot of businesses I'd never been in. I also went inside a big old catholic cathedral. I made it to the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History a bit under an hour before closing. I'll post pictures in following posts.

The GPS got pretty confused a couple of times. For instance, on Craig St. below. I promise you that I didn't run around in circles in the middle of the street.

The GPS unit doesn't really like urban areas so much with all the buildings and whatnot. I did go into a few shops here. I perused some great antique books at the Caliban Book Shop and Townsend Booksellers. Both had some wonderful old texts. Caliban has a small corner devoted to music, which they call Desolation Row CDs. Perhaps it's a separate business that rents the little nook. In any case, I got the new Animal Collective and Blitzen Trapper CD's. Jury's still out on both. I've only gotten one quick sort of background listen in. There is a nice little Indian grocery and a Middle Eastern grocery and food counter along the route.

Leaving Bloomfield heading toward Oakland, one must cross 'the Gully.' It's where the water once ran out of the hills toward the rivers before this place was fucked over by having a city put on it. I get really sad sometimes when I imagine how beautiful this area was before it was concreted over with Pittsburgh. It makes for a nice city, but damn it, I'd much prefer the original hills and the spectacular confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers without taming from the dams. I bet the gully was a wonderful wetland and riparian area.


From the second floor of the building that houses Dreaming Ant, the sun paints a nice glow on the buildings of Oakland.

Dorkbot meeting

Last night, Bethany and Silas went to dinner before the Dorkbot PGH meeting with Maya, Ryder, and me. It's pretty obnoxious, but I love the Patagonia full body fleece Silas is wearing.

The Dorkbot meetings are sort of a salon where presenters come and speak about their work or projects that loosely relate to electronics and generally art, but not always. They are held all over the world. It's a nice federation of geeks. In Pittsburgh, it's held at the Brillobox, which is a bar/restaurant that serves vegetarian food and great beers (see above photo). Their second floor has a small bar and is a good space for group meetings like this or for bands to play. For instance, I'm hoping to go see Tapes 'n Tapes there in February.

In any case, the speaker this month was Chico MacMurtie, director of and vision guy behind Amorphic Robotic Works, which is a collective of engineers and artists that dream up and build mechatronic sculptural pieces. His lecture was interesting, but being the vision guy and not the engineer, he spoke mostly from the perspective of intent and process and physical solutions and not very much about the electronics nor controls. Below is a picture of him presenting a piece he was commissioned by Citroen to do in Paris. It was a transformer type of piece where a Citroen-looking vehicle changed form into a large totem type of structure that filled the gallery space to something like 60 feet tall. It was called Totemobile.

The second half of his talk focused on his more recent efforts at inflatable robots and structures. He has some interesting projects in the works. He and the crew still have some work to get things to where he wants them to be, but it's interesting so far.

Salt and draftstopping

In general, our sidewalks at work are more dangerous due to the piles of salt than any snow or ice that may or could possibly accumulate. The driveway in the picture above has not been salted for a couple of days and has been pulverized pretty well by the cars. However, the sidewalk continues to be pretty treacherous.

I picked up some bread at Pennsylvania Macaroni Company today. Dave and I were admiring their draftstopping measures on their exit door. They've filled some of the gap with tape, then used fender washers and screws to attach a strip of clear hard plastic to the door on the right of the picture in order to block the airflow. Pretty crafty.

Evening commute (from November)

In looking through my post list, I found an old post for which I had uploaded pictures, but never wrote text and published. Evidently, I had a nice evening ride home from work...

Eetazeeb

so powerfool!

Silas is fond of his zebra.

Pearls Before Swine is one of my favorite comics. I think Silas's sympathies might lie with the crocks...

The image below is from, I think, the first exposure we have to Eaatazeeb Corporation. You can read the comic here.

2008 bike mileage

I finally got around to tallying the miles on the bike last year.

1,843 miles. That's what the GPS says. I did screw up here and there forgetting to start the watch or forgetting it altogether, so the actual mileage is slightly higher. The total elapsed time, including stops and whatnot was 158 hours.

Most of the summer would have been pretty consistent mileage, but I had a number of work trip that took me out of town for 3-5 days at a time. It tapered off when Silas was born in August.

Except for a few days at the end of the year and occasionally driving for a part work day on my way to the airport for a work trip, I commuted by bike to/from work every possible day of the year. I'm guessing it works out to about 200 to 225 work days at 5.5 miles per day. So, I feel good about offsetting over 1,000 miles of car commuting with the bike.