Category: Toys

Building Again

August 25, 2012

It’s time for another building kit. Let’s see if you can guess what it is before I finish 🙂

I’ll start by saying that even though this looks like LEGO, it’s not. The pieces are much smaller:

Here’s the start. If you guess it from this you’re good!

Let’s add some pieces…

Got it yet? How about some more…

A spark has ignited in some of your memories! Let’s make it burn:

Oh yes, you know it now don’t you? What about after this:

Yes! It’s the Nanoblocks Neuschwanstein castle set. It’s tiny! That green base is only about 8 cm along the side. Here’s the finished product:

This version of the kit has 550 pieces. Nanoblocks also makes a deluxe, much larger version with 5800 pieces (and lights!) that I want. Maybe someone will buy it for me 🙂

Everyone on the west coast went to Santa Cruz yesterday, so naturally we joined them. This meant that a 40 minute drive actually took 90 minutes. Then we had to find a carpark, which was not easy. But eventually we succeeded, and made our way to the shore.

That’s the pier there (or ‘wharf’ as they call it), and the less popular side of the beach. We walked to the end of this pier, filled with fisherpeople, souvenir stores, restaurants and homeless guys. We had a nice lunch in a restaurant with a view, although B & L looks like they weren’t having much fun:

Must be my company 😉

At the end of the pier, Bernard’s mood had clearly not improved:

It’s almost like he was faking it isn’t it? 😉

Bernard took a panorama of the wharf on his phone. Strangely, I seemed to end up in it multiple times. Once again, it’s almost as if this was done on purpose!

As you walk along the wharf, you can hear suspicious sounds emanating from underneath. At several points mysterious stairs lead to platforms underneath, where visitors can view the source of the sounds. They look like this:

California sea lions! Cute little buggers; this photo was taken by noodling my camera around a chain link fence. I was about 2 feet from this guy, who I suppose could have nipped my fingers off in a millisecond had we not become fast friends on sight!

After we’d spent enough time out on the wharf to guarantee beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had sunburned my cheeks and the top of my head, we started back toward the shore and the Santa Cruz boardwalk.

As you can see the crowds were quite large. The lines for the rides were particularly long, and in most cases in the open, hot sun. Needless to say, I joined none of them. Lakshmi headed for the sand, while Bernard and I zoomed toward the principle reason we’d headed to Santa Cruz – the arcade 🙂

We had a tournament! The rules were simple: Play games that gave scores, and for each game won (ie. higher score) that person got a point. The overall winner would be the one with the most points. The following fifteen games were played: Track & Field, Soul Calibur 2, Strikers 1945, Kung Fu Master, Tempest, Dragons Lair, Pac Man, Street Fighter Alpha, Tetris, Asteroids, Ripleys Believe It Or Not (Pinball), an old-timey arcade light-gun game, Panic Museum, a very terrible DC comics fighting game and one other I can’t recall.

Kung Fu Master is still fun. It had been aeons since I last played it!

Strikers 1945 is an awesome shooter. If I lived in Santa Cruz I’d play it all the time. I wonder if AW recalls the time he and I beat this on two player in a tiny little arcade in the Randwick mall?

The overall results of the tournament was 13-2 in my favour. The Schmitz arcade legend it seems survives in only one of us these days ;P

So effortless were my victories in most of the games that when it came to Pac Man, in which I went first and set a score that Bernard deemed undefeatable, we agreed if he scored 25% of my total he would win. Even then I prevailed! In fact on one of his lives it was almost like he was demonstrating the absolute shortest path possible into the jaws of the red ghost 🙂

Note the advanced “one hand leaning on the cabinet” pose I adopted for Pac Man!

Right after I had beaten Bernard in SF Alpha, a guy who had been watching joined in and challenged me. He was about my age and (I suspect) planning to impress his younger daughter who was wit him. In Bernard’s words, here is what happened:

“What happened? Well he was destroyed! (laughing) He didn’t stand a chance. He was destroyed. He didn’t seem to enjoy it at all. (laughing) He was destroyed pretty decisively. I think you perfected him actually on the first round.”

The guy returned for a second game, in which I played sub par to give him a chance, but rapidly defeated him again. He looked crestfallen. Such is the fate of all who challenge a master 😉

You’re wondering which of the two games Bernard was victor in? Well the first was Track & Field. Were I a sore loser I may be inclined to mention I may have prevailed had my jump button actually worked. But the other game? It was this arcade light gun game.

Bernard beat me convincingly in this game. 20 shots were provided for a dollar. I hit 7 targets, he hit 15. He actually played the game three times and did well in each. Had our tournament consisted of 15 rounds of this, the results would have been reversed 🙂

Computer World

August 11, 2012

If you worked at pioneering computer company IBM in the mid 50s, you likely began your day with a song. These songs were included in the ‘IBM Songbook’, a page of which is shown in the following photograph:

This was one of many, many exhibits at the Computer History Museum, which we visited yesterday. The expansive collection spanned from the very early days of computing (abacus and slide rule) all the way through to current applications of todays machines (such as Google Street View). It was highly informative and very entertaining.

Those are two early non-electronic ‘computers’. The above shot shows a device invented for the 1890 US census designed to tabulate statistics from the punched card census results, and the lower photo shows a planimeter (from the 1800s) designed to calculate the area of an arbitrary two-dimensional shape. Both of these were amongst the many examples of computational devices that were in use long before what we now think of as computers.

The above is a photo of the instructions attached to the Enigma Machine they had on exhibit. I include it here because I thought my dad may be interested 🙂

An example of many badges from the early days of computing that was displayed. Who said ‘computer nerds’ were a new thing?

Here’s my pointing to a button on one of the many examples of massive, 1960s era business computers on display. These devices were almost incomprehensible, with archaic user interfaces and unfathomable controls. What exactly was this button that had caught my eye? Here’s a closer shot:

If you want a laugh, google it. It seems the definition of the words ‘amplidyne sensitrol’ has now become: “That button on that computer at the computer history museum”

That’s an original Apple kit computer constructed and autographed by Steve Wosniak!

That’s the closest (very close actually, since I pushed some keys) I have ever got to the best computer I never owned, the ZX Spectrum!

The museum concentrated on computing in general, rather than various fields, but obviously could not ignore gaming. Although the game collection was not as large or impressive as at Strong Museum in Rochester, it still included some beautiful examples such as the Ultima display shown above.

One of the temporary exhibits was a profile of Street View, including camera cars and bikes and details of the technology used to create the images. Given that Google is quite literally down the road from the museum (we had lunch in an area that had some Google bikes in the carpark), this was a comprehensive and very interesting exhibit. For instance, did you know that various other countries or cities had created their own Street View-like technologies long before Google?

After the museum we set off for Lick Observatory, which is one of the ‘hills’ surrounding Silicon Valley. The drive would be an hour, and from the city the hills look rolling and peaceful so I was expecting a leisurely site-seeing drive. How wrong I was!

Now compare that GPS route to the photo I took on the famous ‘Hana Highway’ in Hawaii back in 2007. Which looks worse?

Yep, if you decide to drive from San Jose to Lick Observatory avoid Quimby Road, since it’s a shortcut to regret and horror, with ultra steep turns and evil gradients. The road is full of rubber marks where previous drivers went careening to their deaths over the edges, and the utter absence of any other cars is a sure-fire sign that you shouldn’t always trust your GPS 🙂

When we eventually got to the top alive, we found Lick Observatory to be an intriguing commune of homes and telescopes that sits on top of Mount Hamilton, at an altitude of about 4200 feet (which is, amusingly, lower than the city of Albuquerque!) About 18 people make this mountaintop their permanent home, although the several boarded up homes are evidence that the number used to be many more. A total of 10 telescopes (all optical) are situated at the top, but it seems Lick’s days of cutting edge astronomical relevance are behind it, with many of the scopes unused or used only for college classes or ‘public interest’ demonstrations.

That’s the telescope inside the biggest dome, a 36-inch refracting telescope that is still used today. A lovely lady who has lived at Lick for 34 years gave us a brief tour, but mostly we were able to wander around the mountain and have a gander ourselves.

The photos we took of the view of San Jose do not do it justice. Here’s one…

…with San Jose (just) viewable in the distance. The mountains don’t look that high do they? Well I guess they are not relatively speaking (again, I can’t believe the tallest mountain near San Jose is lower than Albuquerque!), but I can assure you the height is most detectable during the drive up and down the mountain!

Today we’re going to the seaside! My goals are threefold: roller coasters, retro arcade games and corndogs! Check back tomorrow to see how successful I am 🙂

Robot Claw

Category: Toys

Building Again

Seaside Rendezvous

Computer World