Fnord.

In my continuing watch something-or-other, I fished this lovely item out of Ebay with the proceeds from my WatchReport posting last month:

Vintage Seiko, 5606-7000, ‘LordMatic’. Automatic, center seconds, day/date, quickset, hacking, 23 jewels, 21600vph. (Low to medium beat). This one has a gold-plate case, which is why I got it for $51; the steel-cased watches are more popular.

I can’t tell if it’s a front-loading movement or not, the caseback is Kanji:

There’s a lot to like about this watch. I really like the aesthetics of the face, with gold baton markers on a subtle sunburst-patterned silver dial. The hands are aged just a tiny bit, and only one tiny dial spot below the date. The crystal is a replacement, which is good for me.

The looks are a lot like classic Grand Seiko, but for a teeny tiny fraction of the price. I’m going to look into the case, and see if its possible to remove the gold plate; not sure what the base metal below is. Electoplating is possible, but I don’t have access to do so.

As with most 5606 movements, the issue is that the quickset day/date pieces have failed, despite claims to the contrary in the auction listing. Sigh. That exceeds my skills, so I’ll have to send it off to Randall Benson or similar. Rats!

The movement is otherwise quite remarkable, well finished and very well designed:

It wears beautifully, amazingly thin and elegant. The silver dial glows in the light, and the dauphine hands are very easy to read. Now if I could just set the day/date right… Soon!

More information:

1. The Ebay auction where I got this one
2. In-depth on the 5606 movement, by Randall Benson
3. More on the cases and movement, Reto Castellazzi
4. Seiko abbreviations, this is where I deciphered ‘SGP stainless’
5. Seiko production date calculator - mine is 1968 or later, since serial missing!

FedEx arrived today, delivering two semi-expected packages. One contained a Nike+ SportBand and a 1GB USB key with images and such… cool toys, courtesy of Nike PR. This is for me to review for WatchReport, of course.

Second package arrived a few hours later… Nike had managed to find a pair of size 15 Nike shoes with the proper pocket for the accelerometer!

(I covered the predecessor Nike+ stuff a while back, see this page also.)

So my watch habit got me a free gadget watch AND a free pair of shoes. Those who know my shameful secret quest for comfortable shoes will understand just how happy I am right now. Shallow? Why yes, I suppose I am…

I’m (cough) not much of a runner, haven’t done it since track in high school, so we’ll see. I will at least hit the UCSD track at noon to walk a bit and see how it all works. Hmm. This competes with my Omron…

So I’m trying to fix a bug in some old C code, where I want to add the ability to bind to a specific IP instead of INADDR_ANY. This is on my Apple laptop, which has the latest Apple Xcode (3.1) build on it. Oddly, the C compiler starts spewing bizarro error messages on code that I’m pretty sure is valid. So I backtrack, download Xcode 3.0 (gigs!), and that compiles it OK.

But the binary segfaults when you run it! So now I don’t have a working compiler. This is a problem for a code monkey…

Today, I tried again:

• Code builds and runs on Linux
• Download latest Xcode 3.1 from Apple, install.
• Compile fails.
• Go digging around hard drive, find copy of hello.c I have parked. (Yes, real nerds keep ‘hello world’ saved, in several languages, for just such occasions as this!)
• Compile hello.c:

cc hello.c
/var/folders/Sw/SwEOWKQ7FdihT03Yr5CBOU+++TI/-Tmp-//ccNBFXHP.s:15:section difference divide by two expression, "LC0" minus "L00000000001$pb" divide by 2 will not produce an assembly time constant

Well. Same errors as my code, though only one of them. It’s not (prolly) libraries, so WTF? Guess I’m off to flog the DSL downloading Xcode 3.0. Man, this sucks. Fink? Something else I’ve installed? No luck googling the error, oddly. Since I’m pretty sure others would’ve noticed a broken C compiler, it’s probably my problem. Crap.

Drupal’s GUI editor always gives me a lowbrow double-take:

What were they thinking, eh?

I was listening to Elbow this morning while working on a report, and was struck by this lyric fragment:

Words to make me stay

You said “Leave me and the plants die.”

It really struck me as a compressed vignette, a moment where two people are struggling to make a relationship work and one of them tries a bit of humor to lighten the mood. Elbow is good that way, succinct and intelligent lyrics everywhere.

(The song is Not a Job, from Cast of Thousands. Listen to it here on last.fm)

The next thought that I had was a bit random - while everyone likes to think that they have a sense of humor, those that have defective ones are the same people who are angered when you try to introduce humor into stressful situations. “This is no time for jokes!” and similar responses. On the contrary, stress is exactly the time for humor.

Of course, to make this all quite humorous, I just got an email of familial bad news. So now I have to try and apply the medicine I’ve just prescribed. Ahh, life, never dull.

Thanks to some kind relatives, I got enrolled in the Time Zone Watch School last year, level one. (Sounds vaguely Harry Potter, doesn’t it?) TZWS, as its known, is an at-home self-paced class where you buy the parts and tools to disassemble and then assemble a watch. It’s pretty basic, the movement arrives almost completely intact, and you choose case and such. However, you do get to do quite a bit, tearing down and reassembling is quite intricate and you learn more than you’d think. (See old posts here and here for a bit more.)

Yesterday and today I assembled it and cased it up, check it out:

I got 2 or 3 dials and 3 sets of hands with the kit, so when I get level 2 of TZWS I’ll probably change them both. I liked how this came together, though.

It was a good thing that I had previously ordered 2824 stems for JP, though, as I made errors trimming the stem. It’s tricky, even with a micrometer, and I might have to go back once more and try again.

TZWS is amazing, and I highly recommend it. You hafta buy a bunch of tools (all hail Bergeon!) but they’re first-rate and you can use them for years. The unexpected benefit to me is the very Zen nature of the work: You have to be utterly focused, unhurried and gentle. It’s very relaxing, which I didn’t expect. Rewarding, too, and you get to have this wonderful little machine with you all the time that makes you smile whenever you see it!

One of the minuses of urban life is traffic. It can be hellish, even though the locally-absurd gas prices have reduced traffic a bit. In particular, I am of the opinion that few things are ruder, stupider and more dangerous than a sports fan on their way to a game. Except maybe that same fan returning home after a few beers and a big loss. Locally, any time there’s a Padres game downtown, the traffic backs up highways 163, 805 and 5 for miles. The Chargers aren’t quite as bad, since Qualcomm Stadium is east a bit, but still a problem, as are things like Fleet Week.

For whatever reason, web-based traffic feeds don’t have any concept of ‘monstrous event with traffic implications,’ though I really wish they’d get a clue. Maybe add a sidebar?

Initially, I had the idea to simply subscribe to their respective iCalendar feeds, and be warned that way, but that’s pretty noisy; all you really care about are home games, but there aren’t separate calendars for that.

Recently I found a solution that seems to work quite well called FuseCal. It can read all sorts of feeds, including graphical calendars (impressive, that) and allows you to filter them via strings. So I have three feeds right now merging into a tag of ‘traffic factors’

1. Padres + “at San Diego”
2. Chargers + “Qualcomm Stadium”
3. Fleet Week (all)

If you have any suggestions as to other events to add, leave a comment, also if you want I can make the feed public. So far I’m pretty happy - this is a free service, it works very well and the merge of feeds produces information that’s hard to get otherwise. Very cool.

I’ve been using Firefox 3 since it came out, and still can’t make up my mind about it. It’s still got a bit of an alien feeling about it, due to emulation of stuff like buttons, but the plugins are wonderful.

(Scribefire & AdBlock especially. The new PDF viewer is essential, too.)

I had to reinstall 1Password, but that’s no biggie, not hard to do. (Preferences in 1Password has an option to reinstall browser plugins.)

On the minus side, Firefox appears to be incompatible with the bookmarklet for Asaph, which is a major problem. I love my microblog, and the ultra-quick-posting ability of Asaph is addictive. Hmm.

I’ve posted about HDR before, the idea is to combine multiple exposures into a single image with a wider range of light and dark. Here’s my first attempt, using the Fuji camera, a tripod and the 1 f-stop auto bracketing. Processed in Photoshop CS3’s HDR code:

Yep, that’s my Marinemaster all right! (Click for enormous version)

Notes:

• I had to shoot in JPEG mode, as the Fuji won’t bracket in RAW mode. This reduces the quality quite a bit, and is super annoying.
• The Fuji’s bracketing is limited to +- 1 f-stop, and 2.5 or 3 would produce better results. I’ll try it by hand and see if it’s worth the trouble. Hand-setting the f stop and such is hard to do without moving the camera, and that ruins the result.

I’m still pretty happy with the result, quite professional looking in my opinion.

I was reading about Google Gears, and discovered that Firefox 3 on OSX is supported. It’s a quick install, and once you do so check out Google Reader - you’ll find ‘offline mode,’ where Reader will slurp down data for use offline and re-sync fast when you’re back to civilization.

Another reason to love Reader! It makes a compelling case for Gears, too. Highly recommended.