Fnord.

Out running errands, took 10 to stop by Peets for a latte. Got the tall-sized chair by a window, amazing how a baby makes you value small quiet moments.

Oh, that old thing? That’s my Marinemaster.

Even by my standards!

First off, the scary sphere:

Check out the plate details:

Yep, that says ‘North American Aviation, Missile Division.’ I have no idea.

Now, if this doesn’t say ‘Death Ray Sci-Fi,’ what does?

(Especially with the blue center and handle, tres cool.)

Last but not least:

Well, maybe it is least, we used to use these in our labs to watch temp and humidity. Min bid $50, ouch.

Anyway, you can browse their catalog online, kinda cool. 

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:

Update 8/18/08: A Japanese-speaking relative was kind enough to translate for me:

I think this watch was given to someone who worked for Japan National Railroad.

The top part is “Commemoration of Meritorious Service Award”
The bottom is “President of Japan National Railroad”

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!

Update 7/24/08: The seller has quite kindly offered to fix the quickset, so I will mail it back to him and revert to anticipation. 

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.

Update 8/18/08: See Per Mildner’s comment - the secret is MallocScribble. 

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.