So cruising up I-5 from LA yesterday, in southern Oregon just beyond Grants Pass, and we notice this incredibly acrid smell. 10 seconds later, white smoke is coming out vents. We pull over, pop the hood, and see flames in the rear of the engine compartment. We look underneath and see flames underneath the car. A quick call to 911, who want to know exactly what mile marker we are at, who knows? By the time the 911 call has ended, flames have broken through to the passenger footwell.

We grabbed a few very critical things and stepped back, not knowing really what to do. HUGE kudos to the trucker who stopped with a fire extinguisher and put the flames out, and huge thanks to the second trucker who stopped, and huge thanks to all the truckers who passed word about the event via radio. In another two minutes the entire interior would have likely been in flames and the car would have been a total loss, the trucking community saved us. As it was the damage appears very minor, the exhaust pipe dropped off and hot exhaust gas straight out of the catalytic converter likely started the fire, missing almost all vital parts.

The fire crew showed up in another 10 minutes out of Grants Pass and cooled down everything, making sure nothing could flare back up. And Audi Roadside Assist got a tow out to us in half an hour, so that was good. Grants Pass Towing took us all the way to Beaverton to the nearest Audi dealer. And we negotiated an extra fee to just keep going to Seattle, so we ended up getting home albeit a few hours late, but huge thanks to Grants Pass Towing.

I won’t name the aftermarket exhaust installer who installed our exhaust, but it seems highly likely that this was the source of the problem, raspberries to you guys.

Finally, all the crap we carry in our car and no fire extinguisher? Lesson learned. If you don’t carry a jack and spare and you get a flat, your car doesn’t explode or burn to the ground or kill you, you are just inconvenienced. Probably would be wise to carry accessories that actually save lives and/or prevent catastrophic loss, instead of accessories that just enhance convenience.

Next on the bucket list – something involving poisonous snakes. Or maybe killer bees.

* “Across the Nightingale Floor”:amazon by Lian Hearn. Well regarded YA novel, tells the tale of a young man from humble beginnings who with the help of several mentors discovers his magical powers and rises to great heights. Well worn territory but nicely told. Amazon says 4.5 stars, that might be a little rich, I’d say 4, but it is a quality tale. * “All Other Nights”:amazon by Dara Horn. A ripsnorter of a tale. A young Jewish Northern spy during the Civil War wrestles with his duty to country, his family, himself. Makes a lot of poor decisions along the way but an element of redemption at the end. Amazon says 4 stars, that seems good, tho I could even inch a little higher; while the setting is familiar, the character is unique. * “American Rust”:amazon by Phillip Meyer. Life in the rust belt sucks, there are few ways out. Somehow two young men turn a tragedy into an escape for themselves, but not without a lot of trials. Amazon says 4 stars, I might stop at 3.5. It is a good story and gives much to think about, but, well, it is a little bit of a downer at times. * “The Imperfectionists”:amazon by Tom Rachman. A trendy story, Amazon gives 4.5 stars. It is a very interesting story, doesn’t follow the typical novel structure as it weaves and bobs over 30-40 years of the operation of a newspaper seen through the eyes of different people, all with their own personal issues. But it hung together for me and ultimately was a rewarding tale.

While not the major element of the last two books, they both had themes of parent/child estrangement. And they both leave you feeling that there is no worse hell than being estranged from your child, particularly when the estrangement is largely of your own making. And the best way to become estranged is to make the relationship about you, instead of about your child. Good lessons.

The nice folks at “Monster Guts”:http://monsterguts.com just sent email reminding me it is 6 months to Halloween. I’ve been on hiatus the last couple years but it may work out that I can do a smallish display this year. I may have to tone down my ambitions but we will see.

My recipe for a quality halloween experience:

* Fog. Love fog. You have to have some fog. There are a million options out there. At the minimum, you need a machine that has a duty cycle timer on it so that you can let it run unattended all evening – you don’t really want to have to manually control the fog all night. I have about 4 of these. If you want to go bigger, well the sky is the limit. I have a whole-yard water-based fogger that puts out an impressive amount of fog via a 1/4” tubing distribution network. What I’d really like is one of these “babies”:http://www.google.com/search?q=Jem+Glaciator+X-Stream+Heavy+Fog+Machine&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a but that seems extreme. Or a liquid nitrogen based system which is really extreme! * You need to have some quality “bones and skeletons”:http://www.anatomical.com/category.asp_Q_c_E_57_A_HALLOWEEN+ITEMS to spread around. Not the crap sold at the seasonal halloween stores. The 10lb bag of bones at anatomical is pretty nice. * Thunder and Lightning. You’ve got to have thunder and lightning. If you don’t do any other lighting, do this. I’ve liked the “i-zombie”:http://www.i-zombie.com/ controllers in the past. * Ambient music. If you want some music playing the background, it is hard to beat Bach organ fugues in a minor key. Almost any of them will do. * Tombstones. You can buy some nicelooking but pricey foam stones at the Halloween specialty stores. And there are a million guides on the internet to making your own out of foamboard. You can whip thru a lot of them in little time in foamboard, I would make your own. And they store easily and are usable year after year. * Coffin. Whip one or two up out of plywood, your “basic plans here”:http://www.shallowvalley.com/pincherplans.html.

If that is all you do, well, you will probably have the best place in the neighborhood.

Optional but very very good additions to your project:

* “Hallowindow DVD”:http://www.hallowindow.com/. This thing looks awesome. It does demand a projector and some sound equipment but I love it. * “Webcasting gun”:http://monsterguts.com/miscellaneous-prop-parts/the-webcaster-gun/prod_202.html. Simple but makes great webbing. * Another simple webbing idea – get some black thread and dangle a bunch of it from the trees over your driveway, etc. No one can see it and everyone feels like they are walking thru spider webs.

I probably won’t get to my more extreme efforts this year

* Talking animated tree with voice modification box. This has always been a huge hit but it takes some work to set up. * Pneumatics. A lot of work to set up and maintain. * My full size mausoleum that I built out of foamboard a few years back. * Various animated ghosts. Always winners but certainly won’t have time.

Rich summarized his “current photography workflow”:http://www.tongfamily.com/archives/2010/05/panoramas/, lots of good stuff here. My flow is different, it is interesting how much divergence there is between our solutions. We have similar camera gear and take similar numbers of photos I suspect, but the way we process is radically different. I bet our workflow for other digital tasks is not nearly as divergent; the photo software and storage market is very diverse.

* I also shoot in RAW and JPEG but I don’t do much with the RAW. It has been hard to find consistent RAW support in tools and so I have tended to ignore the RAW. Tho that may change… * Aperture is the core of my process. I import all photos off my storage cards into Aperture, I manage everything as Aperture libraries. I organize libraries in a Year/Month/Event hierarchy which seems to work well. Aperture exposes this structure in the file system and thru the common dialogs on the Mac so I tend to be able to get at photos easily from any app. * My first line of backup defense is BackBlaze. It trickle backups constantly in the background transparently and so if I fail to do more explicit backup operations, I have this protection. * I also dump photo albums to smugmug using the aperture plugin on an irregular basis. This gives me another level of backup and a way to share with family. * Finally I copy the aperture libraries to a usb drive every once in a while for additional protection. * Aperture is pretty fast at previewing photos and has fine basic editing tools for cropping, touchup, color and exposure correction, etc. Good enough that I never feel the need for Photoshop or other expensive tools. And there are a ton of plugins available if I really felt like more photo munging. * Aperture 3.0 also has RAW support which I have yet to play with but need to try. * I don’t do any HDR or panorama or other deep processing today. No time.

That is pretty much it. My solution is a little more expensive than Rich’s, I pay for Aperture, Smugmug, and Backblaze. But I find it all to be pretty fast. It does demand a reasonable MacBook, I just updated to the new i7 Macbooks with 8M ram and the biggest hard disk I could get.

* “Life As We Knew It”:amazon by Susan Beth Pfeffer. Total downer, post-apocalyptic story narrated by a teenage survivor. Really drug me down, kudos to the author for really establishing the tone. Amazon gives 4 stars, I agree. * “Orphans of Chaos”:amazon by John C. Wright. The Greek gods are at war and it is spilling over onto Earth. Not a new idea, somewhat entertaining but lacks the mortal/immortal conflict that is at the heart of many of these stories. Amazon says 3.5 stars, that seems a little rich, but there is something that kept me engaged all the way thru. * “Altar of Eden”:amazon by James Rollins. If you like Crichtonesque pseudo-science formulaic thrillers, then this is for you. Unfortunately I don’t like Crichton and this is a weak attempt at the form with depthless predictable characters. Amazon has a bunch of breathless 4 star reviews, I give this a 1 star. Didn’t bother to finish. * “Alexandria”:amazon by Lindsey Davis. A very nice mystery set in Roman Alexandria. Very breezy modern tone, really brings the era to life. Enjoyable. Amazon says 4 stars, agreed.

Taking Finite Element Analysis this term which would be way easier if I actually had ever taken a basic course in mechanical engineering. Beams, trusses, springs, cantilevers are all foreign to me, I was learning about resistors and capacitors when the MechEs were learning this stuff.

Web to the rescue: * “Cantilever calculator”:http://www.efunda.com/formulae/solid_mechanics/beams/casestudy_display.cfm?case=cantilever_endload#target up at efunda. * “Moments of Inertia”:http://www.efunda.com/math/areas/IndexArea.cfm and other basics for beams of any shape * A ton of other basic calculations up here as well: “efunda engineering calculations”:http://www.efunda.com/formulae/formula_index.cfm * Of course Wolfram Alpha has a wealth of info as well.

Just starting to look thru iphone and ipad apps as well. Wolfram ALpha I already have, there are several civil enginnering apps as well – Statics, Civil Engineering Calculations. May try some of them.

* “Using paint to save commonplace furniture”:http://design-milk.com/purpose-restoration/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=Google+Reader&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+design-milk+%28Design+Milk%29&utm_content=Google+Reader. These are freaking awesome, I absolutely love these. * “Aspiral clock”:http://design-milk.com/aspiral-clocks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=Google+Reader&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+design-milk+%28Design+Milk%29&utm_content=Google+Reader, innovation in timekeeping. * “Shadow Bulbs”:http://design-milk.com/shadow-bulbs-by-melissa-borrell/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=Google+Reader&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+design-milk+%28Design+Milk%29&utm_content=Google+Reader. These look super, can totally see using these in selected areas. * “Philips Robust small appliances”:http://www.coolhunting.com/design/philips-robust.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ch+%28Cool+Hunting%29&utm_content=Google+Reader. The warranty lengths are appealing and they look good. * This “first mirror”:http://design-milk.com/mirrors-by-addiction/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=Google+Reader&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+design-milk+%28Design+Milk%29&utm_content=Google+Reader is fabulous. I would buy it tomorrow.

Ok took my first day trip today to San Jose with no laptop – iPad only. I can’t imagine ever taking a laptop on a day trip again. Massive reduction in bag weight, no need to pull the iPad out of carry on bags at security, good email and web access at airports and job site via free wifi, good rendering of board slide decks. Awaiting return flight and battery still at 63% after moderate use. The only thing I didn’t try out is the dongle for attaching to a projector.

My only dissatisfaction is with Numbers which has a pathetic set of spreadsheet features.

But otherwise this thing is a home run. I saw 3 others on the plane.

* “Caught”:amazon by Harlan Coben. I love Coben and this book is ok but felt a little choppy. Some side characters introduced and discarded just to service the plot, and the ending felt a little scattered as if Coben toyed with multiple endings. Not his best. I’d say 3 stars. The Coben fanboys on Amazon give it 4.5 stars, they need to get out more. * “The First Rule”:amazon by Robert Crais. Solid Joe Pike tale about Eastern European crime gangs in LA. Believable plot twists, much more compelling than the Coben above. I give it 3.5 stars, Amazon says 4. * “The Fourth Assassin”:amazon by Matt Beynon Rees. A Palestinian visitor to the US is entangled in politics, crimes, and murders involving Palestinian emigres in NY. No idea how accurate the depiction of the Palestinian community is, but I found it engaging. Some of the plot leaps were a little unrealistic – I am not convinced NYPD cops would overlook a beheading in exchange for some information on a murder plot – but still good. 3.5 stars from me, Amazon says 4.

I’m using my iPad to remotely login to an XP machine at UW to run ANSYS, which still feels exactly like ANSYS from the 70s: painful syntax, all upper case, incredibly modal. Takes me way back – card punch machines, pin feed dot matrix printers, disk packs, paper tape. Man those were the days.

Will we still be running ANSYS in another 40 years?

My current MacBook Pro (17”) has been ridden hard and put away wet. The hard disk is laboring, the screen has a bad defect, the motherboard wifi seems to have given up the ghost. And I’ve been riding up against disk limits and ram limits from the day I got it.

So thank goodness the new machines are out. Now I am trying to decide – 15 or 17” ?? I love the 17” screen but it is a beast to carry around and I’d like to think that I can get by with 15” for mobile use. Especially since I can bring up the iPad next to it and use that concurrently. The key things to consider:

* Weight. The 15” is a pound less. That is significant. * Processors. A wash, you can get the same processors with either. * RAM and Disk. Also a wash, same 500G drive options available either way. * Video. Same video card, the 17” obviously has much higher resolution * Ports. The 17” has a 3rd USB port (useful) and an expresscard port (yawn). The 15” has an SD card slot (this is way better than expressport). * Battery life. Both claim 8-9 hours. * Price – the 15” will be about $300 less.

All things considered, I am leaning towards the 15”. I’ll miss the bigger display surface but I honestly only really need it occasionally. I’m also thinking that for my most intensive computing work (matlab, aperture) I may want to step up to a full desktop machine anyway and so can get the big screen there.

* “A Reliable Wife”:amazon by Robert Goolrick. You know what sucks? Sending away for a mail order bride, only to discover she is your estranged son’s lover and has come to poison you, and so you allow her to do so, believing it will provide absolution for how you treated your son, and then things get really complicated. Cures you of nostalgia for the good old days. Amazon says only 3 stars but I found it much more compelling. * “Flight from Monticello”:amazon by Michael Kranish. The tale of Jefferson’s days as governer of Virgina during the Revolutionary War. Makes you wonder just how we won the war, given the general ineptness of the Virginia government. And certainly makes you question the moral basis for the war – we were fighting to preserve the Virginia slave economy? Amazon says 4.5 stars, it is a very good book. I’d love to read a British perspective of the war after reading this…

So here is my first week of good and bad apps, I have spent way too much trying things out. My motto – “Buying iPad apps so you don’t have to!”

These look good and I actually use them:

* “iAnnotate”:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iannotate-pdf/id363998953?mt=8. As “previously discussed”:http://theludwigs.com/2010/04/the-ipad-and-pdfs-conclusions-for-now/, the user interface is byzantine, but it works largely as promised – i’ve read and annotated close to 100 pdfs now. One commentor says it dies on large PDFs so not perfect yet. * “Wordpress”:http://iphone.wordpress.org/. Really a much better interface than the iPhone version. It is not bugfree, a lot of people including me are having problems with copy/paste. But nice. * “Evernote”:https://www.evernote.com/about/download/iphone/. Solid effort, works well. * “Wolfram Alpha”:http://products.wolframalpha.com/ipad/. Now that the price is no longer insane, this is a great app to have. I wish it failed a little more noisily when the wifi connection was lost, but still good. * “Pages”:http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/pages.html. Nice looking and adequately featured. * “Kayak”:http://www.kayak.com/news/creating-kayak-ipad-app.bd.html. Nice extension of iPhone app. * “Tweetdeck”:http://www.tweetdeck.com/desktop/. I find the portrait display to be a little odd but in landscape mode does a nice job of using screen space. * “Weather HD”:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weather-hd/id364193735?mt=8. Doesn’t display nearly enough forecast data, but it is beautiful. The night scenes make me feel like I am getting forecasts for a moon of Jupiter. * “NPR”:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/npr-for-ipad/id364183644?mt=8. I’m not a major NPR junkie but a lot of useful info in here. * “Bloomberg”:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bloomberg/id281941097?mt=8. Don’t know if this is the best stock app but it is free! * “Soundhound”:http://www.appsforipad.net/soundhound-ipad-song-recognition/. Nice looking and faster than Shazam. * “Minigore HD”:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minigore-hd/id364238135?mt=8. Beautiful, my timewaster of choice on the iPad. * “Statsmate HD”:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/statsmate/id351404712?mt=8. Might all be available in Wolfram Alpha but I find this useful as a way to quickly get stat table info. * Apple’s calendar app. It looks beautiful.

Close but…

* “Papers”:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/papers/id304655618?mt=8. I really really wanted this to work but I cannot get Web of Science access to work via UW proxy. Sigh. * “Kindle”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000490441 and “iBooks”:http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/ibooks.html. Both look fine and I am glad I have them, but I will still do most of my reading on the Kindle, better battery life and easier on the eyes and lighter. * Apple’s mail app. OK it works and in landscape mode has a nice message list, but not much else featurewise. * “Marvel”:http://marvel.com/news/comicstories.11835.download_the_official_marvel_comics_ipad_app. Beautiful and I could see using this, but difficult to figure out what to buy/try. * “Crosswords”:http://www.standalone.com/iphone/crosswords/. Looks nice but fatally fatally fatally flawed. Won’t download the NYTimes daily puzzle here on the west coast at 7pm the previous evening when it is available. Pisses me off. I will stay with 2 Across even tho it is lo-res because it downloads at the right time.

Kind of a waste:

* Apple’s Contacts and Maps apps. All this new screen space and nothing notable feature wise. Yawn. * The iPad store. I use this a lot but boy does it need work. With a kajillion apps, it is hard to find what you want, hard to remember what you’ve already mentally discarded, etc. * Numbers. Does not have enough spreadsheet functionality to be useful. * USA Today. No depth. * Twitterific. All this screen space and I get one lame list.

Never used – what does that say?

* Apple’s iPod and iTunes apps. I just don’t use this as a music consumption device. * Apple’s Notes app. This one is so lame compared to so many of the other billion alternatives.

No shows: Facebook, Byline, Tripit, RTM, Echofon

Some smart guys have noticed that “internally, the iPad looks more like a battery with a computer than a computer with a battery”:http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/the_ipad. This is a pretty fundamental point.

I remember back in my first job, working on automotive electronics strategies, someone asked me “how small can a CD player be” and to me it was clear – size would be dominated by the media and the controls, not by the internal electronics.

When we started buying PCs and TVs and cellphones and other gadgets, their sizes were dominated by internal considerations – tubes and motherboards and drives and power supplies and electronics and antennas and all kinds of crud. And we are still in the last stages of this – desktop computers are still big boxy things, many laptops are big chunky things. But thanks to Moore’s law, the electronics are in the last stages of disappearing, and with them the big clunky power supplies, and awkward big antennas, spinning disks, etc. The gadgets we carry will have their sizes driven by human interaction needs, and those damn batteries (getting batteries down in size/weight is a hard problem).

Which is why I think questions like “Which will win, the Kindle or iPad”, or “Will the iPad replace notebooks” are ultimately not very interesting. When gadgets all are lightweight and no bigger than they have to be, and electronics are basically free, and connectivity is ubiquitous, you’ll carry all kinds of these things around or have them in your house and not worry about it, just like we never worried about books vs magazines vs newspapers.

How bad would it be to be a Nook pusher right now? The Kindle has its adherents, the iPad is out there, why would anyone buy a Nook? I have to think that B&N is going to bail on this strategy at some point.

Amazon on the other hand I think is playing its hand well. At the end of the day, I doubt that Amazon cares that much about maintaining control over the Kindle hardware – it was just a vehicle for jumpstarting ebook sales. If people prefer to consume ebooks on phones or iPads or PCs or whatever, Amazon is there with the Kindle software and nice sync’ing of state across all your bookreading devices. I’d expect to see them continue to invest in the software and service asset, and it wouldn’t shock me if they sold the Kindle asset to some hardware company at some point.

Apple faces an interesting conundrum – why would you buy a book in the Apple store which can only be read on the iPad, when you could just as easily buy it in the Kindle store and read it in a dozen places?

Another thought – so many people look at the Kindle vs iPad battle as if it is some head-to-head winner-take-all cagematch. In fact tho, as the cost of electronics keeps driving down to zero, I’d suspect that rather than one unified device in my bag, I’ll have many smart devices all sync’ing to shared data in the cloud. Magazines, books, and newspapers all coexisted just fine in the old world, I carried them all in my bag. No reason why I won’t carry several different smart devices in my bag with different form factors and benefits. As long as they all sync data to the cloud, I’ll be happy (again, nice job Amazon).