-Nick

This is not a new thing for me, not at all. I have a very clear memory of lying half-awake in my old bed at my old house, sometime when I was fairly young (still in Franklin). I was at the point where dreams and reality are difficult to distinguish, and thinking, “What if the past three years have just been some really weird dream? What if I wake up tomorrow to find I’m still in third grade, not sixth?” (I have a memory of having a memory of having similar thoughts three years prior, probably about kindergarten or something).

The day before I first moved to IIT was kind of like that, too. I was working, and busy all day – the marina I worked at was having their open house, and it was probably the biggest party I’ve ever been to. Sometime near (slightly after?) midnight, I was handed a wad of cash, equipped with a brand-new marina baseball-style cap, and sent on my way home. On the way, I realized I had no place – I was no longer a high schooler, no longer a “I-just-got-out-of-high-school-now-I’m-working-for-the-summer”-er; but I wasn’t a college student yet, either; for that dark, lonely drive home, I was stuck in-between.

And now, it’s kind of the same. Only I didn’t have a job this summer, and I’m not going back to school. I’ve had a few months to, mostly, think about things. I’ve watched some of my friends get Real World Jobs; and it’s not like they’ve instantly morphed into Adults, which makes it seem even weirder. In the meantime, I’m at home, still trying to become One Of Them, unprepared for the massive, irreversible changes that, real or not, I believe I’ll have to go through. I hope this isn’t throwing my game off; it’d explain why I’ve done so poorly at interviews, I guess.

Hmm. So. Passage of time. You can’t go back. I remember my graduation, and my last exam, and the last freshman class; my first date, first kiss, first dumping; and before that, my first college classes, the first time I owned my own computer, using non-dialup-internet with NO WIRES EITHER! that first day, writing ‘cout << "Hello, world!" << endl;' and compiling, and seeing it show up. And marching band, the fateful suspension-provoking solo; the Jambo, my first summer camp, my first by-myself-with-no-parents camping trip; later, my brother's early camping trips (I could've been a better brother). All that, all of it is what's going through my head right now. And I want to go back, even to the worst of it, to live it again.

And I can't.

Time doesn't work that way. (Niagra falls, the first set-up of the new Elephant Ears booth). It only goes one way, you only have memories, maybe pictures. (Gold mine in South Dakota, caves in Tennessee, Lincoln's tomb).

meh

I think I need a new hobby. My blogging is starting to get really whiny.

For the Facebook users: I may, in the near future, start importing notes from the new one. Since I already imported all my old posts into the new one, this may mean they’ll show up double, or something. Don’t be too confused if this happens.

Oh. And I’m working on a new website, but I’m not going to link you to it until it’s actually up and running (there are pages there, but they are unfinished, and look it).

Also, I’ve done enough coding to realize how valuable comments are. While teaching Matlab to freshmen, I was consistently frustrated on how little they commented. I usually told them that I’d take points off if they didn’t comment enough, and in my examples I tried to include lots of comments (sometimes over half of the total text of each .m file), but usually to no avail.

Occasionally they did, though, and this was helpful in ways I hadn’t expected. Once, while looking at two submissions, I was struck by how similar they were; in fact, identical! Now, it’s easy enough for two simple scripts to be the same… but the clincher was the identical comments (including a mis-spelling). Ha!

Anyway, I’m kind of crazy about comments in code. The other day, I was writing a Reverse-Polish calculator in Perl, just to try it out, you know? and this is the beginning section:

my $answer; # is mine; yours may be different.


The rest is actually more boring, and in addition it doesn’t work quite right, proving my earlier assertion that I’m not an actual programmer. But, I’ll figure it out soon.

Have a nice day.

Note: I just spent the better part of an hour tracking this file down, you had better be happy with it

Let me tell you a bit about this thing, before anything else. Historiography is, put briefly, “the history of history.” A historiographer takes historical events, and looks at how, since it occurred, society’s and historians’ views and descriptions of the event have changed. That may sound rather pointless, if you’re not thinking too hard about it, but I promise it isn’t. Take the last 100 years, and the “Middle Ages” as an example. Up to relatively recent times, all history focused on the “big people” – kings, generals, major nobility and high clergy. The 20th Century saw an increasing focus on “the little people” in every-day life, and this eventually effected what historians researched and reported; many tried to learn what life was like for peasants, rather than just nobles. Woman’s rights came to public attention, and historical women were investigated more, approaching the level of their male counterparts. And minorities: similar story.

History always studies the past through the lens of the present, and other events that have occurred since. It’s not always 100% accurate – so much is taken for granted now, for example, that was not true a thousand years ago. Historiography tries to find what these changes in view are, when they occurred, and maybe even why they occurred.

That being said, I learned about historiography in a history class during my last semester of college. I wrote the below paper on the early historiography of Charlemagne, a Frankish King in the late 700′s and early 800′s AD. The text has been edited slightly, mostly to correct grammar or spelling mistakes.

In other news: today I recorded the below song, using the mic built into my laptop, as well as the booster/preamp pedal I built myself; I figured I’d name it after the kind of trashy sound it has. Then I went for a bike ride, and got two flat tires, and had to walk home.

further edit: next post makes number 50! that’s some kind of milestone or something, right?

Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, or just Charles, was the Carolingian king from 768 to 814, C.E. He is one of the more renowned figures of medieval European history, and thanks to his biographers, one of the more well-known and well understood. He united substantial portions of central Europe, fostered some development of the arts and education, and was partly responsible for the tight integration of the Catholic Church with his administration. He conquered several territories and peoples, and was crowned Roman Emperor by the Pope. However, he is not just some “shadowy figure from the depths of history,” whose deeds are known, but whose personality was lost over the years; instead, he is a real, three-dimensional figure, thanks to the two biographies written by his near-contemporaries.

The first biography was written by his servant Einhard. Einhard was one of the beneficiaries of Charlemagne’s education campaign – he started life in a fairly poor family, but thanks to his hard work in school ended up in Charlemagne’s court (mentioned in Notker’s biography as well, on 3). In his biography, he referred to Charlemagne as “my foster-father,” referring to the way Charlemagne treated students and courtiers similarly to his own children. Einhard’s biography was written between 829 and 836, within about 20 years of Charles’ death. Einhard mentioned the end of the Merovingian and the start of the Carolingian dynasties and the list of Charlemagne’s ancestors (giving the background of the empire Charlemagne came into), listed Charlemagne’s military campaigns (in order). He followed with other details of Charlemagne’s life, and ended with his death. It was organized very well, logically laid out, and was meant to be an overview of Charlemagne’s life, giving an overview of all of his accomplishments in a mostly chronological manner.

The other biography was written by the Monk of Saint Gall, who is believed to be someone known as Notker, sometime around 883, for Charles the Fat (one of Charlemagne’s grandson). Notker was separated from Charlemagne’s time by several generations, and as such he had to acquire his information second or third-hand (19). He also had a much less organized, more anecdotal and rambling style. Besides this, there are several other differences, mostly in content and in the portrayal of Charlemagne as a ruler and a person.

The first noticeable difference, however, is the style of writing. Einhard wrote his “Life of Charlemagne” in imitation of Suetonius’s biography of the Caesar Augustus. It was laid out in a logical fashion, proceeding mostly chronologically. This biography presents all the major events of Charlemagne’s life that the author knew. Notker’s “Life of Charlemagne,” on the other hand, was more of a compilation of anecdotes and legends that grew up surrounding Charles, many of them likely after his death. There were many interesting tales, but they were not arranged at all systematically. The tales were written in whatever order they came to Notker; it begins with a tale of two Scots who traveled to his court, and at at least two points he even acknowledged having “diverted” (18,29). It is certainly an interesting read, but it feels more like “leisure reading” than a serious attempt to record history.

Another difference is the content. Einhard’s “Life” was given a nice table of contents. This may have been added later, but it gives a nice visual to the fact that Einhard’s biography was given a good outline, and covers all of the major portions of his adult life. The sections are written in a generalized way, shortened in order to fit the whole story, without anything unnecessary. Notker’s “Life,” however, was filled with anecdotes about his life, as well as a few about some of his family. On page 28, Notker began talking about King Lewis; on page 34, he talked some more about Lewis, as well as Pippin; from 38 to the end, he talks exclusively about Lewis. The end of the manuscript trails off, uncompleted. Examples of the anecdotal nature of Notker’s account can be found throughout the entire work (pages 1-40).

The most notable difference is the portrayal of the subject, Charlemagne, himself. Einhard actually knew him when he was a child and Charlemagne was an adult, and had tremendous respect for him. As such, he portrayed him as expected for a respected authority figure someone knew as a child: he is larger-than-life (he was described as both tall and tubby); a great leader, a great Christian, and in general a good man; but he does have some human failings, such as an unhealthy fondness for food and family. He was portrayed as being wise, but occasionally not knowing everything. To Notker, though, Charlemagne was more the shadowy figure of legend. Right away, he was described as “not less admirable” than the Roman emperors (1). Notker described many of his brilliant works, such as “bringing down the proud,” and “raising up the humble,” (an often-repeated theme) (10); he always seemed to know what was going on, who to blame, and who to give trust to. He was portrayed as prophetic, knowing that the Northmen would eventually give much more trouble to his descendants than they already were; he also was said to have made prophetic comments about some of his descendants and the future of his people, notably the growing threat of the Northmen (32). Notker’s Charlemagne was “wise,” “careful,” “unconquered,” “energetic,” and many, many other things (8, 11, 14, 15, 16, 21, 31, 36, and likely a few others). Einhard praised him similarly, but in ways that made him seem more human and less divine than Notker. In one anecdote, Notker tells of how all of the various groups of people known to him living in the East lived in constant fear of Charlemagne, more than their own rulers (25); Einhard mentioned foreign policy, saying that Charlemagne had friendly relations with most countries, but did not quite go that far in praising the ruler.

The differences between these two can be partially explained by the context in which each was written. Einhard, as mentioned, personally knew Charlemagne. He lived in his court and was a first-hand witness to some of the events he put into his biography. Having known him, it was impossible for Einhard to deny Charlemagne’s human nature and some of his failings. He also had other primary and secondary sources available, such as documents made in Charlemagne’s court and people who knew him. Notker was writing several decades later. Charlemagne (and, one may assume, all of his contemporaries) had been dead for a long time. Most of the material available to him was third-hand at best, so he did the best he could, and put together a collection of stories about Charlemagne. Even in such a relatively short time, legends around a great figure grow mighty tall, and by the time Notker was putting together his biography, Charlemagne had become a kind of folk hero and one of the shadowy legends of history. In addition, Notker was not writing for historical prosperity; he was writing to please his king Charles the Fat. It is easy to see how a collection of amusing or inspiring anecdotes might be more pleasurable reading to a busy monarch than a monolithic narrative like Notker’s.

Notker and Einhard both wrote biographies about Charlemagne, titled “The Life of Charlemagne.” They both praise him as a great Christian and ruler of the Franks, but they take a different perspective on him. Einhard personally knew Charlemagne, and paints him as a three-dimensional, realistic person, with many accomplishments some failings. Notker sees him as a legend that he learned of from his elders, larger than life and infallible. Einhard laid out his biography logically, as a kind of historical record of Charles’ life, while Notker put together more of a collection of anecdotes. As much as Notker’s biography can be criticized, it is still helpful. It gives another perspective; it shows what people thought of him at the time, and his ascent to the status as a folk hero. It does not give an overall picture of Charles’ life, but does fill in some of the blanks. Overall, the existence of these two different biographies is great for history, since they give such a detailed perspective into Charlemagne’s life.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are in a car, driving down the road (I hope you are not reading this while driving, I would be very disappointed in you if you were; if you are, please pull over before continuing, and try not to hit anybody). Think about all of the things that are going on. Let’s start simple, and say that you are the only car on the road.

Most of the interesting stuff is happening in or near the car. The tires interacting with the pavement is an important one. Tires are designed so that, when placed on a car of sufficient weight, they produce enough friction that your wheels do not spin uncontrollably, or start skidding, or anything of the sort. As all drivers soon learn, this is not foolproof – a little rain, or a little oil – or worse, a little of both – and you have no control over the vehicle’s direction of travel. Which is bad, because a road is a pretty narrow path – each lane is about 12 feet (about 3.6 meters) wide, and a typical car is a little over half that in width, meaning losing direction control could quickly send you off the road.

There’s a lot more going on inside the car, too. To turn, you manipulate the steering wheel. That’s connected to a steering column, which through clever use of hydraulics, is indirectly connected to your front wheels. Turning the steering-wheel causes the wheels to tilt (going from |==| when straight, to /==/ when turning right, to \==\ when turning left). There’s a lot going on in between, including hydraulics and, often, electronics. If any of that fails (hydraulic leak, lose power, blown fuse), you may again lose direction control, or at the very least lose power steering (reverting to “manual” steering, where the physical effort put forth by you is the actual effort used to tilt the wheels, except worse, because the steering system is set up to be powered, so it’s not at all optimized for manual steering!). A car with well-aligned wheels goes straight when you release the steering wheel; but if the wheels are at all out of alignment (or on some cars, if you’re accelerating), you may find the car drifting to one side or another – meaning you need to pay more attention to steering, even when you’re going straight.

There’s the transmission, too. For most of you, it’s probably a magic black box; the engine turns it, gears inside do things, and another connection is made to the wheels, so they’re all spinning at the right speed; and you rarely mess with it, except when you need to back up or park. Manual (stick/tree shift) transmissions do still exist, too (my mom has one!), in which case you realize that there’s a bit more too it – at different speeds, you need to shift to different gear-ratios. This is tricky when you’re first learning to do it in a manual transmission car; imagine the complexity of a device that does all of this mechanically, shifting gears when it senses it needs to. More parts, right? More parts means more things that can break, jamming up the works -and this is a particularly bad place to jam things up, since it determines whether or not a car can be moved at all, and (from what I’ve heard) is a ridiculously difficult piece of machinery to fix.

It’s connected directly to the motor, our next focus. Fuel/air mix goes in, rotational motion (“a spinning shaft”) comes out, right? Sure… if you’re taking a black-box kind of approach to it. There are explosions going on inside the engine. EXPLOSIONS! The fuel/air mix enters, yes; then, the spark plugs (at least one for each cylinder [most cars have either 4, 6, or 8 cylinders] [the cylinder is a kind of "reaction chamber" where what I am describing goes on; it consists of a piston and the surrounding metal frame of the engine]) makes it explode, pushing the piston out (transferring thermal energy to mechanical energy, in what I consider to be a pretty inefficient way). The exhaust leaves, and more fuel/air mix enters (you can learn about this cycle here). Stuff happens to the exhaust; it goes down a pipe towards the back of the car, through a catalytic converter (which reacts un-exploded gasoline) and a muffler (which makes it quieter). Problems with those won’t necessarily affect your driving, but they will affect your mileage; and if there’s a leak in one of the pipes, you could end up with toxic fumes in the cabin (“inside”) of the car, which leads to mental impairment of the operator (“you” or “the driver”). My main point, though – EXPLOSIONS! Isn’t that, like, dangerous or something? (When there was an explosion on Serenity, didn’t Zoe get hurt, and everyone almost die?)

How do you stop? With… brakes, right? What if the brakes are broke? What if they’re overheated, if they drag, if the pads are all gone, if there’s water on them? Then, they don’t work. You keep going until you hit something. That is bad.

The last major component of the car I’d like to mention is the electrical system. This system isn’t all that dangerous in and of itself – cars don’t produce or use dangerous levels of electricity. However, there is a lot that does depend on it, and a lot that goes through electronics or computers (the accelerator, oxygen sensors, spark plugs, to name a few). And… what happens when it gets wet? Well… it shorts out and stops working, that’s what. Happened to me once, it was pretty terrifying.

So, there’s so many things just inside the car that you should be worried about – enough to make anyone who stops to think about it, think twice about operating a motor vehicle. There are other potential problems inherent in driving, as well.

There are obstacles in the road. Little rocks, small branches, and squirrels don’t really count; boulders, pieces of other vehicles, teenagers, deer, those are all problems. You shouldn’t hit them, because then bad things will happen (damage to your vehicle, severe damage to yourself and your vehicle, lawsuits and possible criminal charges from the teenager’s parents and bff’s). It’s important to pay attention to what’s happening on the road in front of you, so that if a teenager riding a deer jumps out in front of you, you know to aim for the le… to try to avoid them. And, hopefully, to avoid them in such away that does not involve running your vehicle off the narrow strip of pavement and into a fire hydrant or toddler. These obstacles are more common than you may think, even if you drive; if you don’t believe me, then give me some credit, and the next time you drive, make a mental note every time you adjust your driving because of something you see in or near the road.

I haven’t yet mentioned cliffs, buffalo herds, sheer rock walls, or dead-ends yet, but these are all things that also make driving more dangerous. There’s a lot of stuff to watch out for, in the car and out of it, but as long as you’re listening for funny noises and watching what’s in front of you, you should be fine. Driving at this point is a little attention-demanding, but easy enough for most people.

But we were pretending that you were the only one on the road. Which is never the case (even at 2 AM)

You can anticipate what pedestrians and inanimate objects are going to do pretty well; you can even think of multiple things they’d do, and plan to do things that’d be safe with any case.

You can anticipate, to some degree, what other drivers are going to do. They (usually) signal when they’re going to turn, and have those red lights that come on when they’re slowing down. You know that you can keep enough distance for reaction to sudden moves, and everything will be OK.

However, other drivers aren’t all in front of you. You have to look out behind yourself, too (for those approaching from the rear, or those too close if you’re trying to stop); and both sides (if you’re turning or changing lanes); in fact, all 360 degrees.

So, add that to watching for the non-other-cars stuff we mentioned earlier. It’s harder, but if you put a majority of your concentration with it and are smart about your mirrors, it still sounds plausible.

That’s not all there is to it, of course.

You see, the other drivers are reacting to those same non-car cues that you are. In addition to reacting to the a) environmental (my “from-here-till-the-end-of-the-blog-post” term for “people, cats, large sticks, and other things that affect your driving without being moving cars”) cues and to b) other automobiles’ presence, you also have to anticipate c) the reactions of other motorists to a).

But d) they also react to other motorist’s response to a); including your own! We have recursion!

And they react to your reactions to their reactions to your reactions to a) (and so on).

And you need to be able to accurately predict what they’re going to do, in order to not hit them, or get hit by them (or get trapped in the left lane when you need to turn right, or…)

Suddenly it’s not so easy. If I wrote a computer program trying to do this, it’d quickly overflow all the memory, and maybe shut itself down (I am not a good programmer, but still). And you’re expected to be doing this. Brains are nice and all, but they overflow too, they can’t process all this real-time either.

So, here’s what you should really do. Put all of your attention into driving. Prioritize (front is more important than back, so spend more time looking there; closer things would hit you sooner than things further away, so watch them, umm, “closer” – that kind of thing). And be careful, and give other people lots of room to make decisions, and avoid sudden moves and lane-changes and distractions and all of that. Plan out where you’re going ahead of time (don’t even rely on your GPS; go over your Google Maps directions before you leave, if you need them). Also, don’t be a jerk. And don’t drive over the speed limit, things come up way too fast^[1]

I think this sounds reasonable enough. Do you think so? I do.

My point: this is more than enough to concentrate on. This is why I do not talk on my cell-phone when driving, I definitely don’t text while driving, and I only manipulate CD’s while stopped. And as a general rule, I’m respectful of other drivers, and stay within what I consider a fair distance of the posted speed limits.

Other people don’t seem to get that, though.

At 5:20 on Monday, go to the nearest major road (for me, Kennedy Avenue; for you, maybe Cline or Broad, or Glen Elyn Road or North Avenue or State Street). Count how many cars you see in five minutes in which the operator is also operating a cell phone.

Cell phones distract you. They draw your attention away from the road and driving. Even with a hands-free device, you are still more distracted than you would otherwise be (I also believe that you’re more distracted than you would be while conversing with a passenger, because the passenger can also see when they should be shutting up and letting you drive, and is less likely to expect your full concentration). Texting while driving is even worse, since it distracts your attention, your vision, and at least one of your hands. So, you’re not paying attention to where you’re going, you’re not looking there, and you’re not steering all that effectively – where do you end up?

Being an idiot while driving is also bad. Talking on a cell phone is an example of it, I suppose, but there is more to it than that. Tailgating is bad; driving 25 mph over the speed limit and weaving is bad; not checking your mirrors for my car before you switch lanes is bad too (and annoying! grr!). Driving drunk… don’t even think about it, man. There are other things, too, which I’ll try to illustrate with an example. Yesterday I was driving home from Madison, and I was heading East^[2] on I-90 somewhere between Rockford and Chicago (at which point it is a four-lane highway, relatively small for the Chicago area). Now, travelling above the posted speed limit of 65 mph is against the law, so I wouldn’t tell you if I was travelling at 72 mph instead, so, let’s just say I was had cruise control on at what I felt was pretty much the fastest you should be travelling on a highway anywhere, especially with a 12-year-old car that felt ready to shake itself apart if it went any faster, and that I was in the left (“fast”) lane (because I was going a little faster than the trucks and slower cars, and consider weaving and lane-switching a non-ideal, not-very-robust solution). Out of nowhere, a guy in a smallish, sporty (though oldish but not “classic”) black car zooms up behind me. I’m in the process of passing someone to my right at the moment, so he pulls up behind me, and starts tailgating. He flashed his lights a couple times, starts looking upset. I maintain my speed, because, you know, why speed up if I’m going as fast as I think I can already? I can’t move over, of course, because I’m passing someone. A couple minutes later, we’ve passed the other vehicle on the right, so my tailgater zooms into the right lane. He pulls up alongside me, looks at me (90 degrees, directly to his left, right at my face) and points (I’m guessing to the right lane, behind his car or something). He’s saying something, I couldn’t tell what (because I’d only glanced over to see). Anyway, all I actually saw of him was longish, unkempt hair; kind of gaunt face; real disreputable, pissed-off kind of guy. And then he zoomed along in front of me, and kept going. And I was upset for a while, because I didn’t actually do anything wrong, and now someone’s mad at me! Gee!

I’d like to say that, down the road, he got pulled over or in a minor accident or something, but that is not the case. I’d also like to say that that was the only time that happened, but it was not (at least two other times stick out in my memory, just along that same stretch of highway; once because it was a largish pickup truck, who was especially unfriendly with the hand-gestures and lights; another, because I thought I recognized the sedan’s driver, though this was likely mistaken).

So, yeah. Don’t be a jerk. Did you know that driving over about 60 actually decreases fuel economy in most cars? (wind resistance increases swiftly, turbulence becomes a factor, and the engine is revving higher than its fuel-efficiency peak to keep up) So, don’t do that either.

Driving places is actually very dangerous. There are dangers from environmental factors, dangers within your car, and dangers from other drivers. There are plenty of distractions already, and adding a cell-phone conversation or text on top of that is just crazy-stupid. Driving aggressively and idiotically aggravates the other things, since it gives other people less time to react and makes them angry (and therefore distracted or less attentive). So I would like to ask of you these several things: that you drive smart; that you do not use your cell-phone while driving (except, at most, to say “hey I’m driving, can you call back or wait for me to pull over?”); and that you try not to be an idiot. Most of all, remember that the other cars you see out there, are not just mindless machines. Inside each and every one of them is a human operator, with human needs and wants, human distractions, and human emotions. Don’t be a jerk to someone you don’t even know.

Thank you; I now yield the soap-box to the next lay preacher in line.

-Nick Leep III

^[1]I learned in driver’s ed that, despite what the Indiana Driver’s Manual says, you should pay more attention to the residence time between you and another car (e.g. how long it takes you to get to a spot in the road they just passed) than to the actual distance. Later, when I became a chemical engineer and started doing calculations with flows and pipes, this made so much more sense, 700x or something; there’s a theoretical basis, and “advanced” mathematics to describe it, and everything (I am being a nerd now, please tell me this is ok. Or I will cry. )

^[2]I was actually heading more South than East, but US highways have an interesting system. Highways with even numbers are East-West highways, and highways with odd numbers are North-South highways. No road is perfectly straight or perfectly lined up with the cardinal directions, of course, so this ends up being a generalization and naming convention more than a reality; even so, I’m actually a really big fan of it, even if it means heading “west” to get from 95th to 31st on the Dan Ryan.

Wednesday

• 12:00 PM (noon-ish): Leave (departing from NWI)
• 12 – 3 PM: drive
• 3:00 PM: Arrive at hotel, check in
• 3:30 PM: Down time / explore Madison?
• 6:00 PM: Dinner time (with the company, how nice is that?)
• 7:30 PM: Return to hotel, down time
• 9:30 PM: Try to fall asleep

Thursday:

• 1:00 AM: successfully fall asleep
• 6:30 AM: Wake up; breakfast
• 7:30 AM: Check out of hotel
• 7:35 AM: start driving to the company (expected 35-40 minute drive, according to them)
• 8:15 AM: Arrive at company, check in
• 8:30 AM: Interview
• (some time later): Return to car, begin driving home.
• (about 2-3 hours later): Pass through Chicago
• (less than 1 hour later): Return to NWI

The end.

For all the good it does, I will have my laptop (supposedly there’s internet at the hotel) and my cell phone (I have never had a problem, at least in a city, of not having reception) with me, so, if you feel so inclined, direct contact through those means should be possible, especially during the segments marked “down time”

So, that’s all I had, how are you doing?

I built myself a preamplifier.

One of my goals/dreams/wishes for guitaring/guitar-equipment/electronic nerdiness, was to build myself a vacuum-tube driven amplifier. Those of you unfamiliar with guitar amplification may be wondering why the fsck I’d want something so old, oversized, and over-heat-producing; and to those people, I answer “because it sounds better.” Really, it does. Not just stuff with the tone and quality (crystal clarity isn’t always necessary for a guitar), but the way in which it can be overdriven, the relatively smooth curve into overdriven/distortion sound, the specific harmonics produced when overdriven – it just sounds better.

They’re also about ten times more expensive than their transistor analogs (this may be a slight exaggeration – five times as expensive sounds closer).

I wanted to build one because, well, I can/could. But I didn’t, at least not yet.

But while I was searching the Tubes for schematics, kits, anything of the sort, I came across a nice, simple preamplifier designed using a single JFET transistor (if you don’t know what JFET means, or exactly what a transistor is, you are not alone; if you’d like to, remember that Google is your friend). Specifically, I found an article entitled “Discrete FET Guitar Preamp” which described the construction of, well, a discrete (as in, separate transistors/capacitors/resistors, NO integrated circuits) FET (field effect transistor – the kind seemingly preferred in guitar-effects-pedals-applications) Guitar (intended for use with an electric guitar) Preamp (device that boosts the signal coming out of the guitar slightly – to slightly less than what you need for headphones). As it happened, I had some of the parts I needed for it – including the transistor – from an old distortion pedal kit that hadn’t worked out so well.

I went out and bought the missing components and a circuit board, wired it up, and plugged it in. I heard sound – I then bypassed it, and was disappointed to find that the preamp actually made it quieter!

After fiddling around a bit, I decided to go to bed. The next day, I took all of the components off the board. Unfortunately, the transistor I had used (the only j201 I had) did not survive. Non-un-fortunately, I had other similar transistors left over from the project. In Tillman’s article, he mentioned that the first time he designed the circuit, he used a 2N5457 transistor instead of a J201. This happened to be the kind that I had left, so I used it. During this second round of construction, I used some smarter techniques (e.g. counted the number of connections each “wire” had, so I knew which ones to match where on the circuit board), and I discovered what had caused my original problem (i.e. mistaking legs on the transistor, therefore wiring the gate/source/drain all wrong! so, so wrong!) I soldered everything in, hooked in the battery and cables, and played – and it worked!

After confirming the results, I attempted several modifications. I wired the “input” jack to double as an on/off switch (done by using a stereo phone jack rather than mono, and wiring the ground wire from the battery through the “sleeve” and inner contact, which are connected by a mono cable when it’s plugged in, but disconnected when it is not). I attempted to add an LED, but it did not survive the heating/wiring process, and thus had to be removed. I wired all input and output through the 3pst switch that came with my distortion pedal kit. I also added an optional “extra gain” mode as described by Tillman in his article – by bypassing R2 with a large-value electrolytic capacitor (100 μF, probably a bit more than he meant; but it produces a nice distorted sound, either by overdriving the transistor or the amplifier, I am not sure which yet).

Currently, the whole apparatus is semi-housed in the “stompbox” that I received with the pedal kit. The overdrive/bypass is currently activated by clipping one wire to another, a solution I hope to change in the future by the addition of a simple switch.

Future plans are to clean up the wiring on this pedal and to work on new ones. Future preamps may use a different layout, as my supply of J201 and 2N5457 transistors has run out; James Hawes has an interesting page that describes a similar circuit built with a retail-available transistor. There is room on the circuit board currently in use for at least one other equivalent circuit, so I’m thinking about adding a “second stage” on that side, possibly for better overdrive, possibly to compare the two transistors side-by-side. Main goals for now, however, are to clean this one up, and fit everything inside the box.

Below are pictures, and a recording of me demoing it.

View of the circuit board

Kind of unnecessary shot of the back - see my soldering skills?...

The inside of the pedal box. Not everything fits right now, and the wires go everywhere! I will fix it, sooner or later.

Embedded audio:

As most of you are likely aware, these posts also show up in my Facebook profile^[1]. This time I posted it as a link instead, but whatever; the point is, two people I have a great deal of respect for read it and complimented it, one suggesting that I would make a decent teacher. Which reminded me of another idea I had had – the writing and construction of a book of a teaching nature for the popular numerical computation software/language, MATLAB.

Have you heard of it? If you haven’t, then I know that you know people who have (I know this for a FACT).

Sadly, too many people who come across Matlab decide that they do not like it. They do not understand it, and having been brought up in modern America with our system of public schooling and our society’s views on knowledge and learning, they choose (yes, choose) not to learn it. Because they didn’t have a class teaching them how to use it, and didn’t get it on the first try, and can’t I just use Excel instead, anyway?

It makes me sad, it makes me :’(

No more of this, I said! I took up my cape and donned my tights and Goggles, and became a Teaching Assistant for the 2009 freshman class of Chemical Engineers at IIT.

They learned Matlab. Some better than others. Some learned less-than-honest ways of doing work, others worried over details. They were told to buy a book for reference, but I was kind of hampered by a lack of a standardized textbook (they expected, you see, for me to assign them chapters to read, and problems to do – they were fresh out of High School, mostly, you can’t blame them).

So, I thought: What if I made my own MATLAB textbook?

I never did, of course, but the idea has stuck with me.

This is what I come to ask you, the Public Forums of the Interwebs, about. Should I do it? If I were, this is likely how I would go about it:

• Create a new blog
• Make an outline for the book, asking for suggestions from friends and former teachers
• Write chapters, one at a time, each one being semi-standalone, and post each one in the new blog
• After it’s finished, search for a publisher.

This sounds like a decent enough plan to me, but I would value your input, of course.

I may run into a couple issues which would make things a bit difficult. The main being, Matlab is a proprietary software package, with all the restrictions that go with it. I don’t know that I can sell a book about Mathworks’s product, with their product’s name, and with multiple screenshots of their product.

Two solutions occur to me.

1. Ask Mathworks for permission, and hope they say yes (depends on me talking to people, and not being incredibly shy about it; also depends on them saying “yes” and “we won’t charge you, either.”)
2. Learn one of the similar, open source software packages (like Gnu Octave, Freemat, or Scilab, and write about that instead (several advantages: no need to ask for permission; also book copies could be distributed with a free electronic copy of the software described; disadvantage of me not already being an “expert” in these languages).

So, yeah. That’s how it is. If I started this, it would be an ongoing project, and I’d count on you to keep me on-task. Whichever way I choose to go with the two above options, I’m sure that I’m up for the task, with at least limited outside help. So, I appreciate your comments, and suggestions, and, yeah, thanks.

(Other issues to consider: what level of programming knowledge to aim at? [I'm thinking none, with a possible "second book" for intermediate users; should it have chemical-engineering-specific applications/examples? general-engineering examples?)

^[1]You know this because that’s where you read them. Because you are TOO LAZY TO GO OVER TO WORDPRESS and it drives me a little crazy, because I am not a fan of Facebook’s Notes^[2]
[2]I’m also not entirely happy with WordPress and its “oh you can edit your own CSS – NOT you have to pay for it! lawlz” too, but less than I am with Facebook, since WordPress at least lets me embed my Bandcamp music.


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