My Current Bonsai

My Current Bonsai, originally uploaded by qpmarl42.

my meager bonsai collection

Bonsai and a Chair

I don't know if I've written about my current bonsai trees, but I will in this post.

But first, I would like to comment on a chair that I just made - out of an old car seat and some scrap lumber.

I cannot take credit for this idea. John did the same thing quite some time ago - with the match to my chair in fact. He got the driver's seat and I got the passenger seat. I know it's the passenger seat because it has the little foot lever which allows the back seat passenger to get out after the front seat passenger has forgotten about him.

Car seats are great¹. They're quite comfortable - think about it. On a road trip, you may find yourself sitting in a car seat for several hours straight. And while are likely to experience some discomfort as a result of being in the same position for so long, it is nothing like the discomfort you might experience from sitting in many other types of seats for so long.

The seat is out of a totaled Toyota Tercel. As with everything from Toyota, the seats are quite well designed and, as mentioned, comfortable. The car in question was the victim of a tragic accident. It survived the accident, living for some time afterwards as a field hoopie. But this life on the edge of the law lead to its eventual downfall.

Before receiving the death sentence, the car agreed to donate it's parts. The engine is sitting in a shop somewhere. The grill has been used for wall art. The seats have been used for computer chairs. Though at first, they were used unmodified - just taken out of the car and set down on the carpet. This is fine if you don't care about ruining the carpet - or sitting nearly on the floor - or falling backwards a lot.

The chairs were first used at the family farm in PA. When my parents sold the farm and moved to WY, I somehow convinced them that the chairs should go as well. Then the chairs survived another move from one corner of WY to the opposite corner - Greybull.

John lived in Greybull for a while. And while he did, he built a base on the driver's side Tercel seat for use as a computer chair. He attached a small table for the mouse. He retained the recline function, but I don't know if he retained the slide function. He took it with him when he moved.

Then I moved into Greybull. John took his car seat chair, but there was the other seat, so I decided to build a base for that one. I wanted to retain both recline and slide functions, so I had to design the base so that it doesn't get in the way of the seat components as they move. Recline is easy, but slide is a little more complicated. Also, the base must hold itself square because the seat rails can slide independently of each other.

The thing is made entirely from scrap - with the exception of the screws that hold it all together. I used wood decking screws with a wood block on each side of the seat's bolt holes to hold it onto the seat. I should take these out and replace them with 1/2 inch nuts and bolts - or maybe 3/8 inch lag screws or something. The original bolts that held it to the car floor were 1/2 inch or bigger, so there's a pretty big hole there and my current fastening job does not seem very secure - though it feels pretty solid.

Next I may make a mouse table. Though my desktop's case is just the right height - and I was using it long before building the car seat chair.

The chair is scratching the floor - I'll have to put some felt or something on there.


Now about the bonsai. The word "bonsai" literally means "potted" and could refer to any plant, but its use is almost always restricted to potted trees. I have tried to keep bonsai for nearly 6 years on/off. I've actually managed to keep a few trees alive in pots. And then killed most of them.

I started a maple bonsai from nursery stock - it died when I left it in Wyoming and nobody watered it. I bought a small juniper bonsai at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. It was doing quite well until I left it in the dash of my car one day and cooked it.

I've re-used the pots from both of these trees. The maple's pot was a rather large training pot². The juniper's pot was a rather small simple clay pot to which I have epoxied a neodymium magnet so that I can travel with the tree on my car's dash - to which another magnet has been epoxied.

In the large pot I have planted a common sagebrush which I dug up from my parents' back yard. It seems to be doing well, but I'd like to see it thicken up a bit. I chose this plant in reaction to the death of the maple. "Let them try to kill this one by not watering it."

In the smaller pot I have planted some type of evergreen - I think it's a spruce. I dug it up in the wild. It's quite small and is also doing quite well, but it will be a while before it's much to look at - if it survives that long.

The sagebrush is great because these things look seasoned and old anyhow. The spruce looks like a twig.

---

<sup>1. This does not hold true for all cars, but it does hold true for the cars that I choose to own. I will not even consider purchasing any car that does not have good seats - among other things.

2. A training pot is for new bonsai created from nursery stock or wild plants. It is larger than most bonsai pots to allow the tree to grow a denser root mass before trimming the roots and planting in a more traditional pot. A tree that is grown to be bonsai from a seed probably doesn't need a training pot - just progressively larger bonsai pots as it grows.</sup>

Random thoughts for Wed, 10/25

I guess I gotta start putting a date in the title 'cause I can't have 50 posts with the title "random thoughts"

My mom made some burgers for dinner today. Wild elk burger - there's none better.

Skipping ahead several minutes, in order to give you a taste of my family's perspective on elk burger - I was frying up an elk patty on the stove and my dad said "Why'd you make it so small". I said, "so it'll fit on the dinner roll." (My mom had dinner rolls ready AFTER dinner - her one burger and cottage cheese dinner). And then I pointed out that it's as big a patty as you'd expect if you went into any restaurant and ordered a standard burger - it was close to 1/4 pound if not more.

Back to my mom's burger - I took a bite out of it and commented on the rareness of the meat. She gave a characteristically vague answer. I like my burgers pink in the middle, but this thing was like steak tartar wrapped with a thin layer of cooked meat. So I ate it.

While frying my second burger, I was watching the pan and its contents and noticing the changes as they cooked. And I started thinking about heat, which got me thinking about thermal conductivity and such, including insulation, which got me thinking of asbestos. And asbestos brought me to the following story. (and I may have already written a post about this long ago)

I was with a relative, sitting at dinner at the house of some family friends. I think they were serving spaghetti. They set the table. I took notice of an item on the table and began a conversation about it. It was a hot pad - the kind that you set hot things on to keep them from burning the table. And I noticed that it was made of asbestos. I am no expert on asbestos, but it was fairly obvious because it said "Asbestos" in large, impossible to miss letters and the thing looked like it was straight out of the 50's. None of them seemed to have any idea what asbestos is or why it might be notable to have an asbestos pot holder on their dinner table. Well, I figured that it's safe enough as long as it is not cut it or otherwise damaged it in some way that might release asbestos fibers into the air.

It's freakin freezing in here.

Limits on Panoramas

I'm making ever larger panoramas. I made one of the walk from the front door to my parking space. It's all red stone with grass growing between it. I'll say a bit more about it on my picasa page when I upload it. And I've made a few of the mountains with my camera's zoom maxed out (optical only, not the useless digital zoom).

The mountain one that I'm working on now is composed of 59 images. in 3 rows - though the top two rows are much shorter than the lower row which is all mountains. The top two rows are mostly clouds, but the clouds were changing too fast and my stitching software is having a hard time finding corresponding points in the overlaps. So this reveals the first set of limits - changing weather conditions and a slow camera. If I could take pictures faster, the weather wouldn't be so much of a problem.

Another limit is my own patience - which is responsible for the incomplete second and third row (from the bottom) in the zoomed mountain stitch. Of course most of the missing parts would be all clear blue sky, so I might paint them back in. But I was shooting a tree in our yard with my camera zoomed in and gave up 1/2 way through as it was taking far too long and it was just an experimental shoot - not something I'd care to frame and hang on the wall.

And then there's always the limit of the computer hardware to handle very large stitches. Though the stitching software takes a 59 image and, though it takes a little while, churns along without complaint. It did complain about the lack of matching points in the all cloud pictures though.

A little free association

I had a really good idea for a post, but completely forgot it, so I'm going to try a little free association. I'm just going to put my brain in gear and let my fingers put it down on paper (so to speak). I'm going to try to edit it as little as possible - I'll fix typo's but probably leave spelling mistakes and stuff. And maybe my original post idea will pop up somewheres.

I been doin panorama scenes with a photo stitching program and my Kodak 6?0 camera. I think it's 670 zoom or something - anyhow it's a pretty good consumer level camera - it doesn't have some features that consumers generally want, but I like the results I get with it - for its price range. I need to learn more about photography. I'd like to become a professional photographer some day. I don't think I need to go to school for this - just absorb as much information as I can by talking to other people, reading, and by doing it - you know, trying different things.

I'm planning to go to Hawaii in November - as most of my family knows by now. I've been planning to take a lot of pictures while I'm there. The place I'll be staying is off the power grid, but uses solar energy to power the few things they need electricity for. They have a computer to get on the internet and stuff, but must limit their time on it because of the limited electricity availability. So I'm planning to stock up on batteries for my camera. I got a 2 gig camera card. I'll have my laptop with me. I might keep the pictures on the card until it's full, then transfer them to the laptop, using the computer for nothing else so as to conserve its battery charge. I plan to take my bicycle - I'll make a cover for it to take it on the airplane. And I should be able to take my bike into town once in a while - with my computer and camera (of course). To charge it and maybe get some internet access somewhere that I can take my time - chat and so forth.

Photo stitching came to me at a very convenient time. I will have enough time in Wyoming to play with it and get good at it so that I can get some really good shots in Hawaii.

No. I am not at all concerned with the recent earthquake in Hawaii. I am not afraid of earthquakes. So long as the place wants me, there is little that will keep me from going.

My motivation for going to Hawaii is quite extensive. It's something I've been thinking about for probably more than a year now - what was the date of my post titled "Yup, they have a webpage" or something like that. that's how long I've been thinking about it.

I almost gave up the idea earlier this summer. I was working in Kentucky on a water park. My biggest goal right now is to become a commercial diver (deep sea and the like - it's technically not SCUBA though it uses some similar equipment). While working in Kentucky, I was overcome by the desire to pursue this goal - and other lesser, but still very significant goals. This desire was mostly subconscious and I didn't really understand it at the time. It was making me crazy (er... crazier) - if you could have observed me at this time (and if you already knew me), you would likely be shocked at my very uncharacteristic behavior. Not that my behavior was really "bad" just very different for me. And I was very at ease about it. I did not know what was causing it or how or why. Now I believe that it was a combination of many factors which were all converging in that one period. It's over now, but the change is done. I am set on a course to reach my goals. But the need to pursue diving was so strong that I did not want to take the time to go to Hawaii first - and after diving school, it would be very impractical to go because I'd have loans to pay off and I'd have to work to do so. So I was resigned to the fact that I would not get to live in Hawaii for any significant length of time.

At the peak of my craziness, I quit my job, borrowed my (ex)boss's car, went to a water park with some former coworkers (had the time of my life there), returned my boss's car, drove a friend's camero to a car dealership and bought a car, and then went back to the water park. The job, building water slides, was definitely the best job I've had so far. And I stayed at it far longer than any job I'd ever had. I think my record before the water slides was 4 months - when I was at the Air Force Base in Alaska. I may have worked at the machine shop longer than that though - but it definitely wasn't more than 6 months. I built water slides for something like 20 months. There were lots of people doing it who didn't like it for various reasons. Some people quit. Some people quit, then came back, then quit again. I did not agree with any of their reasons for leaving and I did not leave for any of the same reasons. Instead of my reasons for leaving, I'm going to discuss the reasons that I stayed as long as I did. Within 3 months of starting the job, I was already feeling the urge to move on. It would have come sooner except that this job was totally unlike any I'd had before - living in hotels, eating in restaurants 2 or 3 meals a day, building waterslides (the work itself is quite unique). A big reason that I did not leave sooner was the travel. I have the wanderlust, the need to travel, absolutely no connection to any particular geographic location and no want of one. I need change - I quickly get bored and start becoming depressed with prolonged routine. When I'm on the move, I feel alive - life is good, worth living, exciting! The job provided that, if not at the pace that I would like - and work left little time for anything else, but work was rewarding, often exciting, often fun. I liked it. Also, I liked the people I worked for and with - my boss, his brother and their family(ies), and my other coworkers. Some people were irritated by the workings of the company - pay schedules and the like, but none of that bothered me as long as I got paid none of the other stuff mattered - though I could sympathize with those who were irritated by it. Some people experienced a great deal of stress in their personal lives because of our work schedules and being away from family for extended periods - there was one divorce and threats of at least two others, but being absolutely single I did not experience such problems - though it did contribute to less serious family problems for me - but it was often also an escape from some such problems. So I stayed longer than many of my coworkers. I hated to quit, but could see no alternative. Due to my mental state, my performance was really starting to slide and my motivation was nearly non existant. If I did not quit, it would rapidly get worse. I had to will myself to hold onto some degree of sanity long enough to complete the Kentucky job, of which I was in charge. My boss became concerned with the progress of the job and came down for a few days - I felt terrible for making him have to do that. And I felt terrible for quitting, but I saw no alternative.

So now I'm working, temporarily, for a guy in Wyoming doing some stick-framing construction. My boss left for a few days. He left me in charge of the crew. Why me? I don't want to be in charge of anybody but me. It's not my fault that none of the others are very compitent. I don't think that I am. So I'm just trying not to mess it up too bad. Fortunately I only have one day left of this. I told my boss, before I even started working for him, that I am leaving in November. My second day on the job he was trying to talk me out of it.

My typing with the Colemak layout is getting faster. I really like it. I still have to work on a few keys - like ":/;". And my fingers need more practice on all the rest, but my speed is now tolerable - still making too many mistakes though. I would fail high school word processing with this many mistakes.


I need to get some better photography equipment - a professional digital camera (Nikon's look good), a professional tripod with panorama head, dual camera head, various lenses and lense filters, etc. A fisheye lense would be nice - they have up to 180 deg field of view - could stitch some 360 deg spherical projection scenes with one of those.

If I won the lottery (impossible since I don't play), I would probably spend a large chunk of it on camera and computer equipment. If someone handed me a million dollars and said I had to spend it on camera equipment, I could easily do it.

I may be going down to the Gros Ventre (Grow-Vaunt) this weekend with my dad. He's going down to try to find an elk rack that he left down there - I'm hoping for some decent weather so I can shoot some panoramas.

Well, I'm quite tired now. I don't think that my original post idea came up. I'd like to keep going in hopes that it will, but don't think that my brain is functioning well enough anymore. Sorry about the long spiel in there.

My phone service has been cancelled because I didn't pay the bill last month - I am not sure if it is worth re-activating it or not. If the early termination fee is less than $150, then I think that I am going to go that route because it would be cheaper in the long run since I probably won't be using the phone much in Hawaii.

maybe next time I do this I'll go into another long spiel about my reasons for wanting to go to Hawaii - besides the everyday desire to visit Hawaii that everyone must have. My real reasons actually have nothing to do with "Hawaii".

picture taking

There are some really good views around where I work, so I took my camera with me today. Long story short, when I left thismorning there were no pictures on the camera card; when I got home, there were 95. It should supply me with stitching material for quite a while.

Here 'Tis

This is the image that I was talking about in the previous post. The limits of this page layout do not do it justice - the limits of most computer monitors do not do it justice. It should be printed at high resolution on paper 4 ft high and 38 ft long. But since that's not practical, here it is at 500x209 split and stacked so it fits on the monitor better. I should have split it in thirds instead of half for 500 px wide viewing, but I didn't - oh well.

The original image is roughly 19800 pixels wide and 2400 pixels high. It's over 300 Mb uncompressed - most of the 700/900 Mb used by the gimp as stated in the previous post were undo storage (I think). turning down the undo levels or disabling it all together should speed up processing considerably.

I plan on getting a flickr pro account sometime soon - and then I'll upload some big ones to flickr. Until then I'm going to work on getting shots of some better scenes and do some more experimenting with photostitching - there are lots of possibilities that I haven't tried yet

I'm going to need more RAM

So I got into photo stitching - making panoramas (360 deg cylindrical projection, etc) .

I took 11 shots of the scenery from the hill behind my parents' house. I loaded all 11 images (6 megapixels each) into some stitching software and let it go to town. I had to fiddle with some control points - though the software is very good at auto setting them. And I didn't like the way the images were blended because even after fixing the control points, there were places that didn't quite match up - the software just blends them in the middle of the overlap. So I saved the output to a layered TIFF file in order to manually blend the images. TIFF is a lossless compression so it doesn't generate very small files like JPEG. The layered TIFF is over 500 Mb. When opened for editing, the gimp reports that the image is consuming over 700 Mb. After blending the seams, it's taking up over 900 Mb.

The Gimp is a very cool application. It uses it's own disk cache and tile caches large images, so the only hard limit on how large an image you can edit is the amount of free space on the drive where it is storing the cache. However, long before reaching this limit, unless you have very little free space, you would find that editing very large images becomes impossibly slow - there's no way around this other than increasing the RAM size.

So I need to get more RAM. I believe that PC systems top out at 4 Gigs (linux systems may be able to overcome this, but I'm not sure), but I don't think this is enough - what do I do when I have a 20 something megapixel camera and attempt stitches with 50 or more photos? Resize before stitching? I think not!


I must build the ultimate photo stitching computer.

card reader

Do they make a wireless keyboard with an SD card reader built-in? They should. I'd get one - if it was also a high quality keyboard.

sore

My arms and wrists are a bit sore from typing a lot - but I am getting faster with Colemak

funny fingers

So I'm learning a new keymap. Of course I expect a transition phase when my typing speed will be very slow as I retrain my brain to use the new keymap. I am still in this phase, but I am pleased with my progress.

But my fingers (or rather, my brain acting through my fingers) have been displaying some rather strange behavior.

I learned the entire keymap the night that I decided to learn Colemak - conciously that is. If I concentrate, I know where the keys are. From now on I will use "learn" to mean the subconcious learning of the key or key pattern which is necessary for typing with any practical speed.

Since my decision to learn Colemak, nearly everything I've typed has been in Colemak - every email, every blog post, every chat session. Only a few shell commands entered on my desktop before switching it to Colemak were typed in QWERTY. I am using KTouch ( a KDE typing tutor) to learn the new keymap.

As expected, my fingers want to go to the QWERTY key positions. This gets worse when trying to go faster and relying more on the subconcious. Familiar key sequences are particularly difficult. I have to hit the brakes pretty hard on my fingers or they will try to enter the sequence as an atomic unit without consisering the individual keys - in QWERTY of course.

One kinda strange phenomenon is that adding new keys confuses learned keys. The home keys T and N are learned pretty fast as are S and E. With these 4, I can cruise through the lesson extremely fast with very few mistakes. Going further, not only are the new keys more difficult, but the first 4 get confused quite a bit as well - this perpetuates through all the lessons which each add 2 keys. This isn't all that surprising though as I seem to remember the same sort of thing when I was learning to type for the first time.

Interrestingly, I picked up a few sequences in Colemak rather quickly - before even gaining any reasonable proficiency with the individual keys. These include "the" and "keymap" - the latter is quite surprising because I really suck with "K", but not too surprising because I've used it a lot in those blog posts and chat sessions I've been typing.

I expect my fingers to go for the QWERTY positions, but what's surprising is that they've been going for seemingly random keys - even when the right key is in the same place as in QWERTY. It seems that they know that the familiar position is not right, but aren't sure what is, so they just take a shot in the dark.

Perhaps the funniest thing is the feeling of surprise after hitting the correct key. The finger goes for a key and the brain shouts "Noooo..." 'cause it thinks the key is not the right one, but it's too late, the fingers were moving too fast to get the message in time. The key is pressed and - surprise - it was the right one after all. By the time this process completes, the fingers are a few characters past the one that caused the surprise. It usually happens a few times in rapid succession perhaps self-perpetuating.

It's an interesting experiment anyhow.

Join the club

Hey North Korea, welcome to the club.

remapping the keyboard

I switched from qwerty to the colemak keymap. Here are some pictures.

The keymap is handled by the operating system and doesn't reqire any physical change to the keyboard, but I've set it as the default keymap on my laptop, so I decided to switch the keys around to match it.

There are a few issues - my laptop keyboard has the numpad embedded in the alpha-numeric keys, accessible with numlock - switching the keys around mixes up the numpad keys. This doesn't really matter to me though because I don't ever use the embedded numpad - it's a pain in the neck.

Another issue is the home keys - now they're T and N. They don't have the little nubs that let you know that your hands are in the proper position. It hasn't affected me much yet, but I was thinking of gluing something onto T and N to fix this. I probably won't.

Colemak is less than a year old - it was just released in January.

here's an account of one user's switch

Gender Roles

Recently, and for a class I don't really enjoy, I created a paper about the effects of toys on gender. My paper really wasn' t that great but some of the things I realized about toys were frightening. While most toys in their general states aren' t that harmful, society establishes gender in children through the toys they allow a boy or girl to play with. There are some toys, like Barbie, that are horrible from any aspect. I mean why would anybody let their child play with a doll whose head pops off in order to fit the clothing on? And talk about the clothing, where is it anyway? There are some toys that could be beneficial to children of both sexes, but are they acceptable for both? Why, of course not. We wouldn't want little Jane to think that playing with Legos is acceptable. Even the ones that they make for girls aren't something girls would want to play with. According to Karen "they weren't cool, I hated that my mom bought them for me." (Or something to that nature) She like any "normal" child wanted to play with the regular ones. The fact that our society says that it's bad for a girl to play with toys like Legos is extremely sad and shows how out of wack our whole country is. Dolls also express to our girls that makeup and scanky clothing is the way to go, which is another thing that needs fixed. Why do we want to show every inch of skin to the general public? Don't we want to leave anything to the imagination? These childhood toys really screw with our minds. The action figures we give little boys aren't any better for them. They promote boys to be tough and ruthless in their pursuit of happiness. They also impel them to steal and plunder which impedes their sense of right and wrong. This is exemplified through todays adults who's consciences have been so degraded that they don't feel it is wrong to cheat and steal, such as in the case of the Enron fiasco. The toys that we let our children play with today really are the tools that set up the gender roles of tomorrow. So why do we let society our continue in this nasty direction?
I guess you might have guessed it was from a women's studies class.

Heathy Tortillas

Whole wheat tortillas are awesome - they're healthy and taste good (if you don't think so then it's probably because your taste buds are accustomed to unhealthy white flour stuff and stuff).

The Ezekiel 4:9 tortillas are especially healthy 'cause they're made from sprouted grains (google search it).


But these whole wheat tortillas have a drawback - they're kinda hard and break easily. I found that if I let the Ezekiel tortillas soak up a little water then they get softer and hold together better.

My brother suggested heating them as well, so I was thinking maybe heating them in a frying pan with a little water in it (no oil or anything else and not too much heat).

I haven't tried this yet 'cause it was just a few minutes ago that we were discussing it and I've already eaten dinner tonight - I'll try it tomorrow and write about it afterwards. All I have are regular whole wheat tortillas though - no Ezekiels

The eternal battle between phones and email

So today I was chatting with Philip, and I'm pretty sure his phone rang, because out of the blue he decided to tell me that "Telephones should be outlawed. They're so intrusive." Of course I agreed because I hate the things too. If you lived with me you'd know that I hate picking up the phone, probably because my dad doesn't like phones either and I tend to have the same feelings as him on most issues. O right, back to the phone thing. Anyways, we decided that it is like early 1900's technology and is very intrusive. Email, chatting, and pretty much any other form of communication is much more friendly. Email is like, "hey, you got some messages from some people" and you're like "cool, I'll take a look at that when I'm ready." Telephones are like "hey, you! someone wants to talk to you! Now!" and you're like "ALRIGHT! I'm coming, hold your horses." And you have to stop whetever you're doing to answer the phone. Cell phones are like 100¹⁰⁰¹⁰⁰ times worse because you can't escape them, I suppose you could if you really tried hard, but I guess it would defeat the purpose of having it in the first place. This is probably one reason why I don't own one, that and I guess I don't want to pay for it either. Anyways, phones=bad. I guess this is all I have for my first post on Philip's blog. I hope you weren't too bored.