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Wednesday, October 15th, 2003
I've been listening to a CD over and over again for the past few days; it is "Dark was the Night" by Blind Willie Johnson. Every time I listen to it I like it a little better -- and I did not dislike it to begin with! If anything could persuade me to believe, it would be good gospel music like this. Last week I bought a portable CD player, which I had been meaning to do for a while now. My thinking is that I will listen to music on the train to and from work and that, with repetition, I will come to a deeper understanding of the songs. This is certainly happening with Johnson -- I had thought his songs were quite simple, with few lyrics and not much happening on guitar, and that his main attribute was his awesome voice; but in reality there is quite a bit of musical complexity under the surface, and the lyrics have some pretty insightful bits that you don't catch until the third or fourth repetition. Jim came over last night and we played blues for a couple of hours. He is really into Leo Kottke and is showing me some neat stuff. We played a really long set of songs in D (I was using dropped-D tuning and he was using open-D), jamming from one into the next; I discovered that it is hugely confusing to jam from "C.C. Rider" into "Stagger Lee" (and probably vice versa) because the songs are quite similar in certain ways -- in mid-verse I will forget which one I am playing and slip into the other one.
posted morning of October 15th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, October 14th, 2003
I've been interested for a long time in learning to play blues using alternate tunings. I may finally have found my avenue into this; namely dropped-D tuning. It is standard tuning, but with the lowest string tuned a full step down. I liked the key of D a lot already and this makes it a lot more fun. Specifically, I'm using it for "Down on the Corner" by Creedence; "Stagger Lee" by John Hurt; and "C. C. Rider" by John Hurt. A nice side effect of using this tuning is that it's encouraging me to play up the neck rather than staying in first position all the time. You can play really nice stuff on the G chord by fingering G bass on the 5th fret with your thumb and fingering the treble strings on the 3rd through 5th frets. (And don't play the A string.) Mike told me he was having a lot of fun with open-G tuning and I'm looking forward to experimenting with that some.
posted evening of October 14th, 2003: Respond
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Researching lumber sources for the past few days I came up with this idea: I want to make a page devoted to lumberyards and sawmills in the area. There are already a number of online resources (including the very useful Woodfinder) which I am not really trying to duplicate; what I want to make is a list of personal picks from ww'ers I know and trust -- i.e. the WoodCentral crowd, as well as CJWA members. I have posted requests for recommendations in a couple of places and will see what comes of it. I will be using this post as a holding area for candidates as I work on the list. Candidates so far: - Hutt Lumber, Newark
I found this in the phone book while looking for soft maple for my upcoming bookcase project; I have not found anyone who has bought lumber there, but I think I will use it because they have the right price and are nearby. No weekend hours. - Monteath Lumber, South Amboy
Recommended by several people incl. Lee Alexander, Phil Vitale, Bob Sheppard. They offer a 10% discount to CJWA members. - Rosenzweig Lumber, Bronx
My primary source when I was in NY and they are still close enough by. No weekend hours. - NJ Hardwoods, Plainfield
Recommended by Joe Hurst and by Bob Sheppard. - Wolbach Sawmill, Easton
- Agincourt, Belle Mead
- Bay Ridge Lumber, Bayonne
- Northeastern Lumber, Jamesburg
- US Mahogany, Matawan
Recommended by Lee Alexander, Jack Feinstein, Philip Berman. 10% discount for CJWA members. - Medford Cedar Products, Bordentown
Recommended by Jack Feinstein. - East Coast Log, Bloomsbury
Recommended by Steve Antonucci. Wow â?? I just spoke to the owner of East Coast Log and he confirmed all lumber is $2/bf. He is around on Saturdays from 10-4. He has a lot of turnover so not all species will be in stock all the time.
East Coast Log
50 CR 639
Bloomsbury, NJ 08804
(908) 995-2902 - Casterline, Morristown
Recommended by Mike R. -- the man who works there gave him a lot of help though he did not end up buying the lumber. Also by Philip Berman who says they are a bit expensive. - Center Lumber, Paterson
Recommended by Philip Berman. - Jay Samuels, and Rich O'Connor of WoodFinder, both write to recommend a number of smallish sawmills in NJ and PA.
- John Aniano writes to recommend the unfortunately named Rippoff sawmill in Allentown, NJ; Mike Obertlick's sawmill in Howell, NJ; Willard Bros. in Trenton; and Josh Cavet's mill in NJ.
- Congden Lumber in West Orange: very close to me and they have hours on Saturday morning.
posted afternoon of October 14th, 2003: Respond
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Thursday, October 9th, 2003
My next woodworking project will be a built-in bookcase for Ellen's office. I am going to use this plan from American Woodworker as a starting point, but will make a few modifications. There will be three verticals instead of two, to double the amount of shelf space. A half-round table will come out of the middle of one side of the bookcase, to match the look of Ellen's desk (which is half-round on one end). I will be using mortise-and-tenons instead of biscuits to join the shelves to the verticals. The case will be built from soft maple; I hope to buy it at Rosenzweig's Lumber -- but only will if I can get a day off work soon, as they do not have weekend hours. Update: Actually the place I will buy the lumber if I can get a day off work soon will be Hutt Lumber in Newark (sorry, no web presence; their phone number is (973) 242-7300 and their address is 301 Badger Avenue; they are open 8 to 3:30 Monday through Friday) -- they carry roughsawn 4/4 soft maple for $2.42/bf, as opposed to $2.92/bf at Rosenzweig's, and are closer. (Rosenzweig's soft maple is D2S but that does not make a difference for me as I will be reducing the thickness anyway.) Looks like I will need 100 bf for the project, but I think I will buy 120 and err on the side of caution.
posted evening of October 9th, 2003: Respond
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My policy of reading COM and .NET Interoperability straight through from the beginning, rather than skipping the stuff I am familiar with, paid off yesterday when I found out something about programming the IDispatch half of dual interfaces, which had eluded me until now. IDispatch is an interface which allows you to support method and property calls on arbitrarily named members, meaning the client does not have to load type info. A common use for it is the "dual interface", in which type info is exposed but clients are given a choice whether to call methods directly or through IDispatch::Invoke. I always have supported it (in situations where I needed it and was not using a tool like ATL for the implementation) by hand-coding a lookup table in Invoke and GetIDsOfNames, and putting no code in the other two member functions. This is a big pain, primarily because of all the parameter translation you have to do in Invoke; and not supporting GetTypeInfo is a problem too, though it never made a difference in the situations where I did this. (Also I only support GetIDsOfNames halfway.) But it turns out COM exports three functions which you can use to implement IDispatch using the type library generated by the compiler from your IDL code. They are LoadRegTypeLib, DispGetIDsOfNames, and DispInvoke. I have never done any work really with type libraries but it is nice to know I could. Chapter 4, which I am starting today, is all about COM Type Information.
posted morning of October 9th, 2003: Respond
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Wednesday, October 8th, 2003
More window seat stuff. (The seat is completed and primed; it will not be painted until sometime this coming spring when we repaint the room. Pictures coming soon.) I wrote before about building the baseboard, which came out very well and looks great in the context of the room; the second molding I build, which is an apron under the "sill" at the front of the seat, was less successful, and I want to examine why, and what remedial steps I can take. First an explanation of what I was going for. Behind the seat are three windows, each with a sill and an apron molding beneath the sill. ("Apron" is the stepped molding which transitions from the sill to the wall.) I wanted to echo this by having the seat top jut out beyond the seat front, and have an apron beneath it. My plan was, to make it jut out by the same amount the window sills project from the wall, and duplicate the measurements of the existing aprons. (Note: this is quite different from the plans I originally posted here back in June.) The dimensions in place (roughly): Window sills come out 2 1/2" from the wall; aprons extend 7" below the sills and come out 1 1/2" from the wall at the top of the apron, 3/4" at the bottom. What I ended up with below the top of the seat is about the same; but it does not look quite right. The reason it does not, as I realized over the course of the past few days, is that the shadows are wrong. The purpose of the apron molding is to make a visual transition from the window sill to the wall; how this is done is by shadows falling where the apron depth changes. The apron I built is located diffently with respect to the light sources, and the shadows are not right. (Well two of them are.) I am going to leave it be for the time being, but eventually I think this could be corrected by making it deeper -- adding pieces in front of it. If I ever actually get around to this I will lay it out beforehand with a diagram of light sources to see what the shadows would end up looking like, before I start cutting.
posted afternoon of October 8th, 2003: Respond
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Tuesday, October 7th, 2003
Reading COM and .NET Interoperability -- the initial chapters are all stuff I'm pretty familiar with but I am reading it anyway, to make sure I'm on Troelsen's wavelength when it gets interesting. A note at the beginning of Chapter 2, that the COM specification was released in '93, made me realize my programming career has progressed in lock step with Microsoft's Visual Basic API. Well I was a little late coming on board... I wasn't programming when VB was introduced... What I am thinking of when I talk about the Visual Basic API is something that really starts with COM.* My first project when I came to Xyris was to make some improvements to their RTList VBX control. (A VBX is a DLL which specifies a custom control for VB 3.x, and maybe VB 1 and 2 as well -- I don't know anything about versions prior to 3.x. VBX is the predecessor to OCX, the OLE Custom Control, which is what COM controls used to be called.) I worked on RTList throughout my years at Xyris, moving it from VBX to OCX and then rewriting the OCX control in ATL (enough acronyms yet?) Nowadays I am starting the move from COM to .NET -- I am about a year and a half late getting started. Microsoft continues to rule my world.
* On rereading I see that this is quite vague. What I am trying to get at is the notion of programming windows applications with Microsoft's suite of GUI development tools, of which VB is the original one. Visual Studio .NET is the current incarnation of this suite.
posted morning of October 7th, 2003: Respond
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Monday, October 6th, 2003
Big news -- Patrick Farley has put Chapter III up on E-sheep. It costs a quarter to view (via BitPass) -- its value is many times as much. Take a look!
posted morning of October 6th, 2003: Respond
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Friday, October third, 2003
Riding on the train this morning I saw a poster advertising Wachovia bank's policy of not charging its customers to use other banks' ATM's -- and indeed of refunding some of the charges imposed on its customers by other banks -- scribbled thereon was, "Money forya in Polish"
posted afternoon of October third, 2003: Respond
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My current reading (starting today) is Andrew Troelsen's COM and .NET Interoperability -- I expect it to be dry reading material compared to The Corrections and The Life of Pi; but I have kind of high hopes for it to be more engaging and better written than any of the other API documentation I have read recently. I just read the introduction and Troelsen seems prepared to get to the point clearly and without the annoying cuteness you see in many of these books. I also like that the book has only one author; many of these books are written by two or more people and do not have a clear authorial voice. Anyways -- COM is what I work in by and large; and .NET is where I am headed; I have written one project in .NET so far and it was a pretty enjoyable experience. So I think this will be a useful book. I don't know how much I am going to blog about it -- depends on how useful it ends up being I guess.
posted morning of October third, 2003: Respond
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