Playing at the toy store in Gilman Village. Cellphone + kaleidoscope = FUN…

MILES…

Is what I traveled yesterday. On Friday the 10-day forecast showed me ten days of sunny weather. By Sunday it was revised to 9 days straight of rain after a dry Monday.

I was planning a long bike ride into Montana to pass the last two weeks of my vacation. I planned on getting my saddlebags in the mail on Tuesday, and leaving tuesday afternoon. But after the forecast change I quickly whipped up a nice dayride that would take me over two mountain passes, never seeing the same scenery twice.

(click to see it in google maps..)

It was a quite enjoyable ride that had me pulling back into the driveway at around 6pm. Oh, I did finally get the saddlebags in the mail today and got them installed, after a few problems, around 7pm. The ten-day forecast has changed once again though, and I might be able to get a full week of riding in just yet. Now at least I’ll be able to bring clothes. :-)

• Leona Rostenberg and Madelein Stern, Old Books, Rare Friends, (Doubleday, 1998) Snippets of the lives of two great friends and antiquarian book sellers/enthusiasts. (Hoping that this is less dry than some of the Basbanes books…)

• Eugene Field, Second Book of Verse, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898)

• Eugene Field, Loves Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896) Eugene Field was an American poet known for his children’s verses. Also a great book lover, this book delves into the beginnings of his love affair with books and provides several stories of his adventures and often humorous takes on bibliomaniacs. This volume, published after his death in 1895 and compiled by his sister, contains the following from “The Bibliomaniac’s Prayer”:

“But if, O Lord, it pleaseth Thee
To keep me in temptation’s way,
I humbly ask that I may be
Most notably beset to-day;
Let my temptation be a book,
Which I shall purchase, hold and keep,
Whereon, when other men shall look,
They’ll wail to know I got it cheap.”

(Fitting given that I paid only six dollars.)

• William Canton (Editor), The True Annals of Fairy Land: The Reign of King Herla, (J.M. Dent & Co, ND[1900]) Book of fairy tales beautifully illustrated by Charles Robinson.
• Grimm, Lucy Crane (Translator), Household Stories from the Collection of the Brothers Grimm, (Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, ND[ca 1900]) A small collection of fairy tales from the famous Grimm brothers, illustrated by Walter Crane.
• Currer Bell/Charlotte Bronte, Villette, (William Whiteley, ND[ca 1900]) A favorite novel, of particular interest as I have been told I am related to William Whiteley.

I remember the first time I read Jane Eyre. I was an angsty fourteen year old (surprise, surprise) who regularly raided her mother’s bookcase. Mom didn’t have very many fiction books, but she did have this old paperback copy of Jane Eyre. I remember devouring the entire book in one weekend. I was hooked. In subsequent years, I’ve read Jane Eyre in one edition or other nearly a dozen times. (I’m one of those lucky, lucky people that can happily re-read a favorite book over and over again and never tire of it.) It’s become such a favorite of mine, that a portion of my antiquarian collection is given over to the Brontes. And if ever I am in possession of a spare $40,000, that first edition Jane Eyre is mine.

After about the third time I swiped it off of mom’s bookcase, I had commandeered the book for my own. But somewhere between moves in my twenties, this particular copy was lost and forgotten. So when I recently ran across an eBay listing for the same exact edition, I jumped on it. $4 and four days later, it’s here. Unfortunately, it reeks of paint thinner, but opening that package was still like greeting an old friend. And once I’ve aired it out (and perhaps Febreeze-ed it), it will be a happy addition to my shelves once more.

(In times of stress, women buy expensive shoes. Men buy expensive watches.)

Welcome to my new interest. RFID’s (pronounced arphids) are small electronic devices that when put near a specialized electrical field, generate a structured pulse of energy that contains a unique number.

You can use this number to validate an objects identity and perform many interesting functions. One supermegacool function that has been floating around the web in the past year has been using an embedded RFID ampoule to unlock a deadbolt on a door. As the air turns cold in my neck of the woods and thoughts turn to indoor projects, I have begun the process of building my own RFID deadbolt.

I have already collected many of the parts. This was the first test of combining the embedded controller, RFID reader, and reed relay. It worked perfectly and I was able to get a decent video of the action. What you are seeing is me waving a test RFID tag in front of the reader, then the controller (bottom right) reading the serial data from the reader, it comparing the input against approved ID’s, and then finally the controller triggering a small reed relay to turn on the led.

More detail, including the breakdown of the components and code, in the upcoming posts. Along with fun discussions about how you actually go about embedding the RFID tag and the type of people that think this is the mark of the beast.

Spent the weekend cruising around on my motorcycle. Saturday was a trip to Kirkand and the mega-Target, with lunch at Starbucks. Sunday was brunch at Borders in Issaquah followed by the movie Miami Vice which was, surprisingly, acceptable.

These last two days have made me look forward to getting my on-order helmet of super-thin carbon fiber and kevlar. After getting past the fact I was going 70 mph on the freeway with my body only a few feet away from the pavement, the hardest part was simply trying to keep my head up in my huge damn helmet.

All in all, though, it was quite a fun weekend…