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…

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.

What were they thinking, eh?

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.

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!

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.

(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.

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.

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

Exactly one week before that was San Jose, CR:

…quite the difference, eh? One letter difference in the airport codes, too - SJC vs SJO. Anyway, the coincidence amused me, but thanks to good luck on Southwest my case of Traveller’s Butt isn’t too bad. Check out this luck:

If you’re me on an airplane, that is absolutely the luckiest you can get. Seat 10E (I think) on the 737-xxx has a space in front of it, for over 1m of legroom! Bliss. Doubly lucky since I had gate pass B30something.

Back home now, just ran out to Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve for a meeting this morning:

So I’ve been quite the travellin’ fool of late. Home sounds good for a while.

Click the image for or here for the pictures, a superfast 4-day trip to La Selva Biological Reserve in Costa Rica. Supercool, incredibly hot & humid, and not nearly long enough to enjoy.

Yesterday, amid much hullabaloo and inflated expectation, Apple introduced the second generation iPhone or ‘iPhone 3G.’ Announced yesterday, it’ll be available July 11th. There’s a bunch of incremental improvements (Battery life, faster wireless, GPS, nicer shape, metal buttons) and some extraordinarily clever RF engineering (ten wireless bands on just 2 antennas - brilliant!), but the basic unit doesn’t change much. Much to my surprise, the software (iPhone 2.0) will also be free for generation-1 units such as mine. Previously, in iPods, new features were never released for older hardware, so this is a delightful change.

Nevertheless, as it stands now I won’t be getting one. And it’s a toddle that a lot of other geeks won’t be, either. Here’s why: The first-gen iPhones introduced the idea of ‘activation at home.’ Instead of sitting at a desk with some clerk, forking over credit card, SSN and driver’s license, you simply bought the iPhone and walked away. Once at home, you plug the phone into your computer, on your own time, and ran the streamlined activation via iTunes. As a way to reduce consumer frustration and humiliation, it was brilliant, and had the side benefit of helping stores too - you didn’t need activation staff, counter space, etc, and you could sell more phones in less time. Huzzahs all around.

(One of the main reasons this worked was the revenue model - the phone were expensive (started at $600) and AT&T had a monthly kickback to Apple based on subscriber revenue.)

The downside of this became evident later, as literally thousands of geeks bent their efforts to unlocking the iPhone for use on other networks, or simply to write and run their own programs. Since you didn’t have to activate in-store, or make any sort of promise, it was much easier to do and many (yours truly included) did just that. 

Now, however, they’ve changed the revenue model to copy other cell phones: The phones are subsidized down to $200/$300, with AT&T footing part of the bill. The elephant in the room is that you now have to activate before you leave the store. Think long lines, annoying idiot salespeople, and a required new 2 year contract with a minimum monthly cost of $70/month. (Your bill will be higher, due to taxes and such.)

Because of this, you can’t order one online any more, and anyone wanting to hack their phone faces the breach of contract fee from AT&T, which is probably at least $200. This is really going to put the hurt on iPhone hacking, which they probably accepted as an ancillary cost to reducing the numbers of unlocked iPhones in the wild. I wonder how they accounted for the customer backlash of in-store activation?

Tech companies such as Apple regularly ignore propellerheads such as myself for the very $imple rea$on of money: Though vocal, we’re just not that large of a market, and stuff that makes us happy doesn’t necessarily translate to mass sales. Therefore, those of us who wanted to upgrade and use it on, say, T-Mobile, are acceptable collateral damage. I do suspect that they’ve underestimated how peevish people are going to be at the bad old activation hassle, though. Fingers crossed for the resumption of sanity, because there’s one thing that I’m completely certain of: The iPhone 3G will get hacked anyway. People like this will make it happen, so why play King Canute?

(In the meantime, I’ll probably buy a 16G gen-one unit and give/sell my 8G to a relative that wants one.)

It still just walks the USB tree and looks for the device, but now it’s a Cocoa GUI!

Cool. Easier to mix C and objective-C than I thought…

No, it’s not terribly impressive, and no it’s not a huge amount of work either, but that’s my first Cocoa GUI program, hacked just a bit from the example in the textbook. (Cocoa programming for Mac OS X, third edition.) Kudos to Kevin for the tip; Aaron Hillegass is an unusually gifted author and his experience teaching the material shines through on every page. Highly recommended.

I’m having a lot of fun with this. Objective-C is pretty simple for anyone with C, and 10.5 adds garbage collection. I was reading 2nd edition and hating the retain/release manual memory management, so auto-GC is a huge incentive for me. InterfaceBuilder is still complicated, but the book explains well so off we go!

I liked the combo of sign plus flowers.

This nifty little toy is a wonderful pedometer, and it saves up to 41 days’ worth of data onboard that you can download to your desktop for viewing and analysis. Unlike most of them, its based on an accelerometer chip instead of a tilt switch, so you can toss it in a pocket or bag and it’ll still count accurately. The included software is Windows-only, and I’ve not made a lot of progress in writing an OSX driver. I’ve gotten as far as USB bus enumeration and finding the device I want; it looks like all I need is to download and parse a single ‘report’, but anyway. Project page is here on googlecode if you want to help out.

Here’s a screenshot of the week of the trip, click for fullsize:

(That’s running on VMWare Fusion on my Mac, by the way.)

That’s a lotta walking! Over 12000 steps on two days, and 52 thousand for the week. Now you know why your feet are tired after a conference… It claims 30.4 miles, but I think I need to recalibrate my step distance, I doubt that I walked that far. Interesting regardless, I though.

Update 5/24/08: Bug fixed, courtesy of those lovely Debian developers. Album posted here.

As with the G-shock, nothing tests an outdoor watch like The Anna Test. Her teeth didn’t leave marks, so it passed!

Today we visit to do paperwork. Quite bittersweet really.