Bookshelf:

Recently Read & Reviewed:

• Karl Schroeder, Permanence

• John Scalzi, The Ghost Brigades

• Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Currently Reading:

• Catching up on Asimov's, Analog and F&SF

Next Up:

1. Karl Schroeder, Lady of Mazes
2. Karl Schroeder, The Engine of Recall
3. Sean McMullen, Voyage of the Shadowmoon

A Heckuva Weekend

Last weekend was a very busy weekend, but not something to write a journal entry about: It was largely a whole bunch of shopping punctuated by gardening and some rest breaks. I finished entering receipts into my financial database tonight and realized just how many stores we hit last weekend. We were very productive!

This weekend is more worthy of an entry, even if we spent Friday just catching Debbi up on the two Doctor Who episodes I watched when we were in Massachusetts in April.

Debbi has lately been inspired by my friend Karen to take up walking as a regular form of exercise, and she (Debbi) is currently training to walk a half-marathon next month. (Debbi used to jog, but she damaged her knee some years ago and can't really jog anymore.) I don't mind a shortish walk, and I enjoy hiking in the sense of "going somewhere to walk and see fun things", but long walks around the neighborhood aren't really for me. However, Debbi is doing an 8+ mile walk every weekend as part of her training, and she's trying to stay motivated. She has a walking group she sometimes joins, but they don't go as a group every week.

Yesterday our compromise on this was to scope out an 8-mile walk from the house, and I walked the first mile or so with her, until I could point her on the right path. But, I brought my bicycle with me, and when we got there I changed into my biking shoes (since I have those clip-on pedals which require special shoes - they're totally worth it, by the way) and took off on a ride along more-or-less the same route. In fact, I did a big loop and caught up to her after about 15 minutes, and then I took off again. So I got in a nearly 11-mile ride on top of the walk, which was a lot of fun.

We're having a heat wave here, so Debbi got pretty warm towards the end of her nearly-three-hour walk, which wrapped up around 12:30 pm. But I think she had a good time. And it was mostly territory she'd biked but hadn't walked before.

I don't know whether I'll be up for this every weekend, but maybe I will. Who knows?

Meanwhile, I am trying to bike to work twice a week, and hit the gym one time a week to lift some weights. So far, so good. Eventually I may punt on the gym altogether and just bike in three times a week. But twice a week helps me keep my schedule more flexible.

Later in the afternoon we made a run to OSH to pick up some things for the week's home project: Replacing a light switch.

A push-button dimmer in my bedroom had never worked all that well, and last week it stopped working altogether, so my track lighting was just permanently off. Yay. So I wanted to replace it. So I bought a book on doing basic home repair, read about replacing a light switch, bought the requisite tools (a circuit tester, a wire stripper, a replacement dimmer, and some new screwdrivers, as my old ones are nearing their end), and set to work. It looked pretty simple, assuming I didn't electrocute myself: Turn off the power at the circuit breaker for the room (this is the "don't electrocute myself" step), remove the panel, remove the old dimmer, detach it from the two wires leading into the wall, attach the new dimmer's wires to the wall wires, screw the switch to the box, replace the panel, turn on the power again, and voila!

Voila! is French for "what the fuck is that?", which is what I said when I looked into the box.

Well okay. First I turned off the power. My house is wired rather oddly. Today's oddity is learning that the same breaker controls all the power to the front and back bedrooms (but not the bathrooms), and also to the lights in the garage (wha?). But no big deal. Mostly I just wish my kitchen and living room were on different circuits.

The first thing that threw me was pulling out the dimmer and saw that one of its wires was attached to one wire going into the wall, and the other was attached to three wires going into the wall. What the--??

The second thing is that the old dimmer had two wires, while the new dimmer had three wires: Two 'hot' wires, and a green grounding wire. But I couldn't figure out where to attach the grounding wire in the box.

Poking around in the box, I saw that each of the four wires went to a different cluster in the wall, and one of the four clusters was labelled (on the rubber sheath around the cluster) "ground". "Aha!" I think, "Two of the wires must be hot, and two must be the ground, and since the old dimmer had no ground, whoever installed it just attached one of its wires to the hot wall wire and to the grounding wires!"

So I installed the new dimmer, hooked the grounding wire to the two wires I figured were the ground wires, put everything together, turned on the power, and...

...nothing.

Not only did the switch not work, but the other switch behind the panel (it's a two-switch panel) didn't work, and the electrical outlets in the room were no longer working.

Okay. Being at something of a loss, I removed the new dimmer, installed the old dimmer, and put everything together. I turned on the power, and...

...the track lights came on, but were not controlled by the dimmer. And the outlets still didn't work. What the--??

Okay, long story short: Debbi called our friends Lisa and Michel for help. Michel is something of a handyman, knowing something about many different things, and certainly more about electrical systems than me. He came over and tinkered for a while and managed to get everything working by changing the new dimmer's hookup to different combinations of wires. More importantly, he pointed out that all four of the wires were hot, and that the ground could be hooked up to some random copper (unshielded) wires in the back of the box. He said my house is old enough that most likely that wouldn't do anything - there probably isn't a grounding system in my house, as it wasn't standard back then.

The reason for the four wires is that the track lighting was spliced into an existing circuit, so two wires are for the old circuit and two are for the track lighting circuit, and since the old circuit (for the outlets) is always "on" those two wires are attached to a third wire and are not controlled by the switch. The fourth wire is controlled by the switch and controls the track lighting. So that makes sense. Obviously the other switch is spliced into the same circuit, and he said I could probably mess with things to change what the switches control. The tricky thing is just working out which wires go to which circuit. So all of that makes sense, and I think it explains why the track lights just came on in one of my tests, but were not controlled by the switch. (I could probably read up on how alternating current works, but frankly I can't be bothered!)

So, all's well that ends well. But boy, some of these home projects are harder than they look. I'm glad I'm not trying to do any plumbing.

In the evening we went to see X-Men: The Last Stand, the third in the X-Men film franchise. The reviews seemed to be saying, "good acting, good special effects, story no worky". Diane Patterson's review is especially succinct, although I don't think it's as bad as she does.

The story is this: A businessman (Michael Murphy) is able to develop a way to reverse superhuman mutation. Magneto (Ian McKellen) and his allies see this as humanity effectively declaring war on mutants. Meanwhile, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) has managed to survive being crushed by water at the end of the previous film, and returns, but much more powerful and just a little bit insane. She apparently kills Cyclops (James Marsden), and confronts Magneto and Professor X (Patrick Stewart), with disastrous results. Consequently, Storm (Halle Berry) and Wolverine (High Jackman) are left to rally the mutant forces of good to stop Magneto's efforts to destroy the mutant "cure", even as the government - having developed the cure into weapon form - moves to stop Magneto itself.

Beyond Diane's central criticism, I think the film's biggest problem is that there's too damned much going on. Other than McKellen, and a handful of good guys (including Kelsey Grammer, who is terrific as the Beast), none of the actors really get to shine. Which is a shame since plenty could have been done with Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones) or Madrox the Multiple Man (Eric Dane). And frankly either the "mutant cure" or the Phoenix (Jean Grey) storyline would have been plenty for one film. As it is, the Phoenix storyline sits like a dark cloud, and when it rains it's all too brief, making you wonder what the point was.

The film misses plenty of bets for good geeky fun: For example, with this film, all five of the original X-Men have appeared on screen in Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) and Angel (Ben Foster), and it would have been nifty to see them all together.

I also personally have a problem with an X-Men universe in which Cyclops isn't the protagonist and hero. Unfortunately Hugh Jackman's performance has turned Wolverine into the protagonist of these films. And he's great, but having a stronger Cyclops would have made the story much stronger. It's a pity, really. There just isn't much subtlety to the film. Although the spectacle is certainly impressive, and there are good action scenes and some funny moments. But overall it's not nearly as good as the second film.

From the final scene (after the credits), it looks like they're planning to do a fourth film. But it's hard to see where they go from here. And hard to see myself caring much.

Today we went to - it's almost embarrassing to say this - our first baseball game of the year, the Dodgers at the Oakland A's.

Did I mention we've been having a heat wave? It was up in the mid-80s today, but fortunately our seats were in shade by the third inning or so, which made it much more bearable. The Oakland Coliseum is pretty strange with the whole upper deck closed off and under tarps. Those were good, cheap seats and I went to many games up there. Now the A's have - I think - the second-smallest seating capacity in baseball (just behind the Red Sox). The motivation is to encourage more people to buy tickets ahead of time rather than day-of-game if they think there might be a sellout. I wonder if this is actually working, or if it's actually hurting attendance?

I think A's concessions have gone downhill. My pizza and soda both seemed smaller and more expensive than in the past, and the selection of ice cream is not nearly as good as it was a few years ago. Alas. This will certainly encourage me to look for alternative means of feeding myself when going to a game.

All that bitching aside, the game was pretty good, with Joe Blanton pitching a good game into the 9th inning. The A's put together a 4-run 4th inning with help from a Bobby Kielty triple, which held up and led to a 5-2 A's win. There were a couple of good defensive plays, including Andre Ethier throwing out a runner at the plate from left field, and Mike Rouse nabbing a ball at second base on a diving grab, getting the out at second, and nearly the double play.

Not as exciting as tonight's Red Sox/Braves game, but still pretty good.

And that, I think, covers it for this weekend. Whew, what a long entry!