Joseph Palmer

Anna Karenina Display At The MLK Library

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:26:16 PDT

Costume Shop Photo: Eric Wolfinger courtesy of Opera San José

Monday I spent the day helping San Jose Opera set up a display at the library for the upcoming west coast premiere of Anna Karenina

I happened to catch this image of Judy whipping a seam on the corner of the costume shop display. ^_^

Update: Please note that the marvelous poster sized image in my photo was captured by Eric Wolfinger. Please go to his website, his work is nothing short of spectacular.

Saturday Bee Blogging

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 10:48:31 PDT

This is Clive, in a butternut squash flower.

Friday Cat Blogging

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:10:35 PDT

Miko enjoying some sunny snoozes.

Yes, this is a repeat of almost every sunny day.

Lifemarking

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:02:02 PDT

Lifemarking is like bookmarking for your life. In this case I'm dropping a couple of items in my blog where I know I can find them later.

The 13" Macbook Pro joined the herd on July 20. Normally I'd have blogged this in real time, but lately I tend to tweet, and the tweeds are picked up on Facebook.

I re-installed Windows XP last Friday, after my DVD drive refused to work for no apparent reason. It took a couple hours to get back to where I could do CAD, but my full suite of music and photo software took nearly two days to install. The machine feels much faster, I expect there was a great deal of cruft in the registry from trying various softwares over the last year. Still, It's probably time to upgrade the machine to a nice 64 bit i7, but some of my essential software doesn't run on Win 7. I guess I'd better get in on that downgrade offer.

Oh yeah, Laser Alliance does laser cutting in Silicon Valley.

I'm Not The Joe You're Looking For.

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:09:58 PDT

I've been seeing a number of hits from the Lincoln Center website, sending them here with the promise of a "Lesson: Joe Palmer teaches Swing and Lindy Hop". That's not me. I do cat pictures, grouchy blog posts, romantic fanfiction and paper airplanes. No Lindy Hop.

P.S. I'll put up the link to the Lindy Hop lesson here if you have it. I've already notified the Lincoln Center of their mislinkage. Maybe they like paper airplanes.

FYI:

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:17:11 PDT

The U.S. Sankey diagram shows it all. About 85.5% of the entire energy consumed currently in the U.S. is based on fossil fuels (40% oil, 22.5% gas, 23% coal). Another 8% are nuclear. Everything else combined (hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, biomass) contributes only 6.5% to our total energy. — Will Stewart

Notes From The Prop 8 Trial

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 09:27:07 PDT

In the official Prop 8 trial transcript there was this exchange:

THE COURT: And people — I don't know whether they change their national origin, but on St. Patrick's Day everybody is Irish.

(Laughter)

MR. COOPER: I've experienced that change myself.

(Laughter)

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Caturday Cat Blogging

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 12:13:20 PDT

T-Chan: Hmmm...

Amplifier Stand Project

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:59:26 PDT

I really like the sound of my little amp, but it's way to small to leave on the floor. I thought of buying an amplifier stand that gets it off the floor and tilts it back, but that would have made the controls hard to see and use.

My solution was to locate the center of gravity of the amp, then add threaded inserts from the inside, then build this crude stand out of some left over oak. I probably could have made external brackets that attach with existing screws, but that would have been much more work, and it's not like this model of amp will ever be a collectors item.

As you can see, it tilts back to point at my ears, and is easy to tilt forward to expose the controls.

This one's the prototype, so it has some workmanship issues, but I'll probably just use it as is.

It's Just Crazy...

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 09:59:34 PDT

When we moved into our new house one of the median trees was looking sickly, and we even had one gardener come by and say they were going to remove it for the former owners.

This spring it didn't leaf out, so we requested a permit via the city website, but no permit paperwork arrived. Hrmmmm. So I called and got a real person who told me that it had been sent. Okay. I requested a duplicate set, which came the very next day. I filled out the paperwork, and a couple of days later we found a notice printed on cheerfully bright paper posted on the dead tree giving neighbors a 14 day period to object to removing it.

Yup. That's the plan. Let's just wait 14 days with a dead tree looming over the sidewalk and street, so that any old random person could register a complaint about removing said dead tree - as if leaving the aforementioned dead tree in such a condition of being, well — really, very, quite dead, on the basis of a citizen complaint was even remotely a viable option. Did I mention it was dead? Well, it is.

Now, this once had been a nice tree, but it wasn't anything approaching a heritage specimen, either in species or size. On Google Maps it was already looking quite sickly in images taken before we bought the house. We love trees and are more than happy to pay to have it replaced.

It's just crazy that the city tree expert couldn't just hand me a replacement permit on the spot. Or better yet, our favored tree service is run by a state certified arborist. Why can't he do the inspection, and sign the permit paperwork, then replace it on the spot? It'd just a dead tree. There's no reason to wait two weeks and burn city resources on this.

Resumé Update

Tue, 25 May 2010 22:53:50 PDT

I'm being poked from multiple directions, so I finally got around to updating my Resumé

I guess this means I'm officially back in the pool.