A Small Robotics Project

Many Halloweens ago my then-five-year-old-son asked if we could make some animatronic zombies for the front yard that would leap out of their shallow graves and chase people.  After an extensive feasibility study that lasted at least fourteen milliseconds, I had to tell him “Umm… no”.

Now he’s eleven and, while he is still interested in robotics, he has tempered his expectations on what can be done with technology from 2020, a limited budget, and little to no access to magic.  I wish more people I have dealt with in the past were that reasonable.  I really do…

So it was no big surprise when he said “Dad, I want to make an animatronic dragon head that blinks and looks around and stuff.  If that works, then maybe we can make a bigger one that has a body and stuff.” I told him “Boy… did YOU come to the right place!  Let’s do it.”

Now, I know the very, very best way to absolutely and irrevocably crush someone’s interest in something is to “start from the beginning”.  Like a kid is going to totally dig a 45-minute lecture on Ohm’s Law or giggle with joy while sorting a bag of random resistors by color code…  Don’t even get me started.

But you gotta put the first stake in the ground somewhere, and I wasn’t going to just build it myself.
I believe the “Hello, World” for robotics is getting a light to turn on and off on command, so we started there.  I kept the “lessons” to 10 minutes or so, with each one building on the last.  Using an Arduino Uno as the base, here’s what we did, day by day:

1) Blinked a light on the Arduino at various rates using changes to software
2) Introduced breadboards, and blinked a light on a breadboard instead.
3) Blinked two LEDs on a breadboard at different rates using changes to code
4) Changed the blink rates using variable resistors on the breadboard instead of software changes
5) Replaced the potentiometers with photoresistors instead.  Now the lights blinked according to how much light fell on these devices.
6) Replaced the lights with an H-bridge and motor combination.  The motor now turned clockwise if the left photocell saw more light, and counterclockwise if the right one saw more light.  Nothing happened if the difference between the two wasn’t big enough (dead zone was programmed into software).
7) Embedded the photocells in a couple of ping-pong balls and glued them to a stalk that was coupled to the motor.

[I tried to embed a short video of it in action in this blog post but there seems to some sort of error with the upload.  Bummer.]

The next step is to Paper Mache a dragon head and embed the disembodied eye-balls into that.  At that point, he wants to stop work on that one (no blinking, he decided) and make a new head that tilts up and down or turns side-to-side in response to touch.  Easy-peasy, buddy.

Stand by for pics of our progress!

H1N1 News vs. Coronavirus News

TL;DR: If you are interested, please check out these links to the posts I wrote eleven years ago regarding the Swine Flu pandemic.  There may (or may not)be parallels in how the current Coronavirus news is being meted out.

September 02 2009: Post 1
September 27 2009: Post 2
November 12 2009: Post 3
February 2010:Post 4

A little while ago I was thinking about posting something about the Coronavirus scare going around.  Before I start:

First, I want to make it perfectly clear that I am just some guy on the Internet.  Make of that what you should.

Second, I have nothing but sympathy for those who have suffered due to the current crisis. 

So please keep these in mind as I repost four of the articles I wrote eleven years ago regarding the Swine Flu Pandemic.  Thanks.  [Note: I have not re-verified the links from the original articles below, so many of them are probably obsolete.]

September 02, 2009

On April 23rd of this year, the first death attributed to the H1N1 virus was confirmed after flu-like symptoms began showing up in the population of Veracruz, Mexico, who happen to live near the Smithfield Foods pig farm there. Testing later showed that the herd was clean, but the so-called swine-flu virus continued to spread through the local human population. Containment was not an option once the virus went international.

For several months the media went absolutely bonkers about this pandemic and you could not turn on the TV without seeing reports of sickness and death throughout the world from this "new" killer disease.

High profile cases reported on the quarantining foreign travellers in China and group of tourists from India after they were sickened while on a field trip to a NASA in the US.

Articles describing predicted vaccine shortfalls, rationing, and National Guard “distribution assistance” began to appear in the mainstream media. WHO declared the H1N1 outbreak a Level 6 pandemic, and then stopped counting infections and instructed hospitals it was no longer necessary to test for H1N1 because of the cost and time involved in doing so. The ECDC stopped publishing infections and began reporting only on deaths starting August 11th.

The Obama administration recently published a report that 30,000 to 90,000 people could die from this illness in the US alone by the time it ran its course. As of today, 2,992 people have died worldwide, and there is a bill in the Massachusetts legislature that could allow swine-flu related warrantless detainments of private citizens.

There. I’ve cherry-picked the last several months of swine flu news to make it sound like we are all doomed. Are we?

Based on curve-fitting (I started compiling data about two weeks into the crisis) of periodically published data from the WHO and ECDC, the one millionth serious infection should have taken place sometime during the middle of this month. Hey, I know this uses a lot of assumptions that make my effort only slightly better than a wild guess. For example, if you plot morbidity rate, you see that it starts high and gradually drops to below 0.5% (the fatality rate of “run-of-the-mill” flu and pneumonia), levels out somewhere around 0.4%, and climbs back up to near 1% (at this point the ECDC stopped publishing infection counts). Does this mean that the virus a) is less lethal than regular flu and only looks worse because of underreporting or b) the virus has mutated into a deadlier form (like the 1918 influenza pandemic) .

I choose to think it is just cases being underreported. I mean, I have had the flu a few times and I have never bothered a doctor about it. I can only think of a couple of people that have, as a matter of fact. In addition, when you think about all the people that will catch this and not report it because of lack of insurance, can’t afford to take time off from work, or the fact they live someplace where there simply are no hospitals, it seems like the morbidity rate I calculate is at least an order of magnitude too high.

But if you do take the 0.4% number and assume that 3.5 billion people - half the globe - eventually become infected over the next few years (spreading at a rate akin to the 1918 outbreak) then that means that, over the next couple of years, 14 million worldwide will die from this disease - 61,000 in the USA. It is a remarkable coincidence that my “back of the envelope” 61,000 number falls smack in the middle of the Obama administration’s range as put out in their badly worded press release.

But comparing the number of people killed during the 1918 pandemic to the population of the world at that time, and doing the same thing with the current global population for even my probably-way-too-high-estimate, it seems that the current outbreak is at least an order of magnitude less worrisome than the one from nearly a century ago.

So why the panic? Why the incessant “1918” comparisons on the news? If this is so much less serious than regular flu, why the rush for inoculations? Why is Elmo helping children in the Fight Against H1N1? If the situation is so out of control, why don’t the infection and death graphs follow a severe and worrying exponential curve, rather than the tamer path actually seen? Why does WolframAlpha show a mortality rate of near 1% when a recent article stated that "800,000 have been infected in NYC alone", but with only 54 deaths, this makes the real rate a hundred times lower, doesn't it? Why do many reliable sources (look them up) say that this will be no worse than any other flu season? If that is the case, why is this so darn newsworthy?

With all of the data out there pointing in different directions I really don’t know. I have a couple of theories, though neither fit the observed facts. One is an equal mix of “unlikely” and “crazy”. The other is just “full-on tinfoil-hat crazy”. I am not going to post them, though, because I am interested in what you think and I don’t want to tilt the discussion in any direction.

So tell me what you think, because I am at a loss. Should we worry? Is everything OK? What data am I missing? What’s the real deal here?

September 27, 2009

For those of you following the H1N1 pandemic news, here is some more information for you regarding the "crisis" (also see previous H1N1 post if you are interested).

My (admittedly very basic) analysis shows that the number of daily worldwide deaths due to swine flu has plateaued at 50 or so. As a matter of fact, the 7-day moving average may actually be trending downward, but that is not real clear yet. A huge majority (90%) of the world's population lives north of the equator and this might just be the calm before the flu-season storm. Who knows?

The US has 4.6% of the world population, but accounts for 14.7% of the reported H1N1 deaths. This is most likely due to better identification and reporting than due to population densities. Assuming things stay steady, this seems to imply about 2,700 Americans can expect to die from this each year for the next 3 years (the expected duration of the pandemic). This is about 20 times less than administration’s mid-range estimate, and will bump up the overall death rate in the US by 0.1%. The overall death rate from flu alone will increase by 4.8%.

Run-of-the-mill flu and pneumonia kills about 60,000 Americans every year.

As a comparison to the 2,700 estimate, 4,000 die per year in the USA in house fires and 600 die per year in lightning strikes. So my day-to-day concern is somewhere between those two things. Mind you, I am not a statistician or a medical doctor. I only can look at the information presented by official, unbiased sources and try and figure out how to interpret the numbers in a way that is meaningful to me.

Of course, if millions of people call in sick to work all at the same time our already wounded economy might be temporarily affected a tiny bit. But this might be offset by the huge amount of money being pumped into the works for vaccines, cold and flu remedies, face masks, advertising, etc, etc.

Maybe there is something to worry about, but maybe not. Any thoughts?

November 12, 2009

At left is a graph I have been updating since a few weeks into the Swine Flu Pandemic. I was going to post it a few days ago but didn't get around to it (laziness, mainly). Recent headlines from MSNBC and other places have galvanized me into posting quick article.

Most of the information I have been getting has been through the European Center for Disease Control. I stopped getting my information from the CDC in the U.S. because I like the daily, more globally-concerned format of the data from the ECDC better.

The headline that caught my attention was “Swine Flu has sickened 22 million in the U.S.”. My numbers show that serious illnesses from this outbreak should be closer to 2 million, and that's world-wide. I thought, okay, this is a typical wild exaggeration by the media designed to capture my attention. After all, to avoid overworking emergency rooms, they stopped general testing for H1N1 months ago (at the recommendation of the CDC) when a patient showed up with flu-like symptoms, so how could they claim these numbers?

The sub-headline read “CDC: 4,000 in U.S. died, including 540 kids, between April and mid-October”.

4,000?! I “knew” that number was way off because my curve fitting shows roughly 1,000 in the U.S. should have died over the past six months, pretty close to today's ECDC published number of 1,004. But sicknesses can be misinterpreted – deaths cannot. So what is the deal?

Apparently the CDC has been under-reporting the numbers for a while. They knew they were wrong, but, in the absence of the correct numbers, they have been publishing gross underestimates for a while. I am looking forward to tomorrow's ECDC update and how they explain the discrepancy.

FWIW: I am not a conspiracy theorist. Sometimes people just make mistakes or do the best they can with the data they have – this is most likely what is going on here. It would have been nice to know that the error bars were so huge. Even knowing that the data were “plus or minus 100%” would have been a vast improvement.

As I wrote in my previous H1N1 posts, it looks like there are a lot of different data out there that can be used to “prove” anything regarding this outbreak. I am genuinely puzzled and concerned here. I plead genuine ignorance on my part – no passive-aggressive shenanigans or accusations of malfeasance are implied.

Any help to make sense of the situation would be appreciated.

February 10, 2010

I think this will be my last H1N1 Epidemic Update.

The ECDC seems to have stopped publishing daily updates in favor of weekly ones (unless I am missing it), and the news seems to have stopped reporting on it, I can only assume that the epidemic is over.

BTW, I have no idea why the spikes in the graph are there, but I suspect it is a reporting issue.

Nothing really too much more to say other than my condolences go out to those that have been effected.

Pancake and Waffle (Conclusion)

The next day I went to PetSmart (not the one run by the dead-eyed animatronic… the other one) to see what they had in the way of terrariums.  After talking with a super helpful guy there I decided that a 40-gallon jobber would do nicely.  Thanks, José! You were awesome!

But where to put it?  It’s not like I could cram it onto the boy’s already crowded desk.  Really the only place it would fit would be in the middle of the room where his foosball table was.

What?  Oh, yeah.  I never mentioned that, did I?  I built a 75% scale foosball table a while back.  

Here are some pics of that.

It was a fun build but, since he never really used it, into the attic it went, leaving just the base. That surface happened to be the perfect dimensions for the new hamster home.  Yay!

But Pancake was still MIA, so, you know… Not so much “yay” for that bit.

Around 1AM the next morning my wife woke me up to say she was hearing noises coming from our son’s room.  The boy and I had crashed on the sofa in the media room after binge-watching The Simpsons and the cat was still curled in his bed downstairs, so it was time to investigate.

I glanced into the boy’s room to discover that, yes, Pancake had returned and was busying himself trundling along the noisy-noisy wheel of noise at top speed!  No way! I snuck over to the cage door and deftly closed it.  He was trapped!  Well, trapped-ish...  I then lifted the cage into the waiting terrarium and left it there.  Now… NOW, he was trapped.  We woke up the boy, told him the news, and he darted to his room.

Smiles and sighs all around!

So, yeah.  It would be like you or I breaking out of jail, enjoying a few days of freedom and then deciding to return to the prison to hit the treadmill for a bit.  Hooray for taking definitive action without the burden of forethought!

The next day we went back to the PetSmart and asked a different guy about getting a replacement Robo and told him what happened.  We (the wife and I) explained that we all knew that there were risks inherent in putting two unrelated hamsters in the same enclosed space but surely a 40-gallon terrarium would…

“Oh, no no no no!” he admonished us, overly cheerfully and certainly overly loudly.  “Robos that aren’t related will fight each other all the time!”  The boy had turned away from the shelves upon shelves of “cool looking stuff to put in an aquarium” (the terrarium stuff was lame) to listen in on the conversation. He was aware of the risks, too, but he also knew that, if they had a big enough space and didn’t have to fight for perceived resources, they wouldn’t necessarily go all psycho on each other and they would eventually get used to having a roommate with slightly different DNA than themselves.

“As a matter of fact,” he continued gleefully, “they are very cannibalistic, and they will…”

“DUDE!” I said, stopping the narrative dead and nodding meaningfully toward the boy.

The salesclerk looked at me, perplexed.  It then dawned on him that, while his message was on point, understood, and appreciated by all, his delighted tone needed to be adjusted a notch or two downwards. We thanked him for the warning and promised to look out for any signs of the little guys hurting themselves (from stress) or each other (out of the dark Cthulhu-like malice that apparently defines the dwarf hamster soul).

So… yeah.  We bought a new hamster and a bunch of terrarium stuff and everything went into their new de-luxe apartment near the foot of the bed.

After a few days of watching them behave themselves (for the most part) and absolutely launching themselves in random directions off the new and gloriously silent treadmill we saw that all was well. 

The boy drew this to commemorate the occasion:

This has not happened.

Yet…

In the meantime, Long Live Pancake and Waffle!

STORM MODE 2020!

AHHHHHH!  STORM MODE!  STORM MODE!

What the heck is that stuff??

Honey!  Come quick!  I knew that when Betelgeuse exploded it would rain down shredded Corona Locusts down on us from on high!

It's in the Bible!

What do you mean "Where?"  near the back where it talks about God's judgement being meted out in three to seven inches of white fluffy dollops of vengeance! Don't you read?! DOESN'T ANYONE EVER READ?!

And look! our son left us a message on the back porch with his last gasping, freezing bits of strength!

We'll be seeing you soon, my boy!

In the aaaarrrrmmmmsss ooofff annn angel...

Pancake and Waffle (Part VII)

Yes, Waffle had passed. 

At this point the boy had attended as many funerals as he had attended weddings, so he is well-adjusted to the impermanence of all things. 

For example, here is part of an e-mail exchange we had before we got the hamsters:

Thank you!  Ivam learning that hamsters can't be put in different groups so let's get 2 of the same type that look different. also if possible i would like to request a phodopus roborovskii hamster, as they live up to 3 and a half years, not like others that live to one and a half thanks. also are these two hamsters it, i mean when they pass away is that all the time i get with hamsters

Here, he is considering getting longer-lived hamsters because he is worried that, when they do die, he would never be allowed to get replacements.  Here was my response:

I’m not sure what to say.

You are going to be a completely different person at 12 or 13 or 14 than you are now. You might find other things fascinating then.

It will probably be up to you how long you want hamsters. Usually, people don’t choose pets by lifespan, otherwise everyone would own tortoises or parrots. Fish die all the time, for example, but people still love aquariums. 

It’s just the way God made the world so we can learn to appreciate how awesome and precious and special life really is. Things need to end so other things can begin.

If you take good care of your hamsters and you love them and treat them right (like I know you will), then, when they die, we can get new ones if that is what 12- or 13- or 14-year-old Ethan wants.

So, don’t pick by lifespan. Don’t treat them like the world’s saddest countdown clock. Choose them based on how much love you can give them and how much happiness they will bring you.

Love you,

Dad

So it was agreed that, when the hamsters eventually scurried off to squeeze themselves through the bars of the Pearly Gates, their replacements would keep the name Waffle or Pancake. No Roman numerals. The names would be like the titles “King” or “President”.  After passing, they would get an appropriate descriptive adjective tacked on to their name like an old-school British or French monarch.

At some point, all fathers find themselves doing something that is many, many sigma into the tails of any “My Life’s Accomplishments Probability Curve” they could imagine, pre-kid.  When the nurse hands you your infant for the first time, things like “teaching a kid how to ride a bike” and “treating a skinned knee” and various other Norman Rockwell things plunk suddenly near the dead center of that curve.  Other stuff like “Being roped into playing Joseph in several area church Christmas plays” and “Writing a series of stuffed-animal-centric comic books”, while extremely unlikely and definitely unthought of at the time, falls well outside the peak but is still somewhat plausible.

It was with that in mind that I began converting one of my son’s magic wand boxes into a miniature casket fit for a hamster.

There were still several wand boxes left over from the 2017 project.  It was short work to cut one in half and modify it like you see in the pic on the left.

We each placed something of personal value into the coffin.  The boy chose a small hunk of geode, the wife chose a small polished stone from one of the family’s vacations, and I chose a silver dime.  A hole was dug in the forest out back and Waffle the Brave was laid to rest.

(To be continued…)

Pancake and Waffle (Part VI)

The traps I bought are basically finely off-balance seesaws.  Food goes in one side of a tube, and the rodent enters from the other.  When the mouse or hamster or whatever reached the food, the idea is that the weight of the critter combined with the effort to get the food causes the food end to drop, the entryway end to lift, and a one-way door gently closes, entrapping the critter.

Instead of the recommended peanut butter I just placed some hamster food in the food end and distributed the four traps around the boy’s room. 

In the morning we discovered that the food in two of the traps had been turned to crumbs and that some of the food in the food dish in the cage had been eaten… or at least pushed around a bit.  But no hamsters.  It seems that the hamsters did not weigh enough to unbalance the trap enough for the door to shut.  Super.

Before we went to school and to work we moved the traps around a bit but this time I hot-glued the food to the food end of the trap.  Maybe the extra time spent struggling there would cause the doors to close properly…  Hey, it might have worked, except that evening there was no evidence of any of the food being eaten and the food dish seemed undisturbed.

This was starting to look less and less like a “search and rescue” mission and more and more like a “recovery” mission.  Out of desperation, I resorted to the one tool I had hoped not to involve in this whole deal.

The cat.

Rocket (the cat’s name is Rocket, you see) had been sequestered from the second floor of the house since we got the hamsters.  No sense in giving the Robos tiny little cardiac arrests while we were at work.  Or downstairs.  Or just by leaving the bedroom door ajar for ten seconds. 

I opened the door to the upstairs hallway and slowly followed the cat around.  I could tell he smelled…  something… he just wasn’t sure what.  He walked into the boy’s room and sniffed around the bed a bit.  I followed him ready to grab him at a moment’s notice in case he did discover where one or both of the little guys were hiding.  After a few minutes he left the room and he sauntered down the hallway toward the master bedroom in his usual cat way.  No longer hunting.  Just out for a stroll.  I picked him up, shut the door, and brought him downstairs again.

It was a longshot, but, hey, it might have worked.

My usual routine when the wife brings the boy to karate after school is to make myself dinner, head to the media room, and fire up Netflix (dude, you gotta watch Norsemen… it’s awesome). As long as I shut the doors to the media room it’s pretty relaxing.  The cat just stares at me through the glass and pouts quietly. 

This time, though, my peripheral vision caught a brownish-white fuzzball arcing majestically through the air on the other side of the French doors.  Sometime during the show Rocket had found his new buddy (maybe in the laundry room?) and was teaching how him to play “Grievous Bodily Harm: The Home Game”.  I dashed out of the room just in time to catch the hamster in mid-tumble down the stairs.

He wasn’t moving as I held him in my hand and gently lowered him down into his cage.  After a few moments he started stirring around a bit… slowly at first then with more and more confidence.  I could tell he was injured but he ate a bit, climbed up the tube to the second deck and got on the treadmill.  After a few desultory rotations he climbed off and went back downstairs to the food dish.  I placed the cage inside an open cardboard box and I passed the news on to the wife and boy that one of the hamsters had been found. 

When they came home, I filled them in on what had happened.  They were happy to see him back in the cage but we could all tell that he was moving far more cautiously than normal. 

Sadly, Waffle did not make it through the night.  Pancake was still MIA.

Pancake and Waffle (Part V)

“What do you mean ‘They’re gone’?”, I said, upon receiving the report that the morning feeding didn’t go as expected.

I got up, inspected the cage thoroughly and determined that Pancake and Waffle had indeed somehow freed themselves from the “cage that was totally ok perfectly fine 100% super awesome for dwarf hamsters”. 

As I stared at the abandoned critter prison a quote from a book I read a while back came to mind: “You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.”

I mulled this over for a bit.  “Freedom” in this instance included the freedom to be seriously injured from a fall off the desk, the freedom to starve to death in a remote corner of the house, the freedom to discover that the question “Who’s a good kitty?” is hugely rhetorical…

 After a bit I realized my wife and son were staring at me in that hopeful, expectant way that those of us who have earned their “Dad Merit Badge” immediately recognize.  “Please make this not be happening,” their looks said.  And, like all dads everywhere I did not say “Well, what the [insert expletive here] do you expect me to do about it?  Whip out my trusty ol’ Cosmic CTRL-Z Button and magically poof them back into there?  Then what?  Call my boss and say I need to blow off that client meeting and take a personal day to escape-proof a [insert similar expletive here] hamster cage? Cuz that would go over well…”

Instead… Ok… Suppressing mentally exhausted sigh… Glancing around the room… Placing arms akimbo in expected heroic-dad fashion… Engaging upbeat tone of voice… Aaannnnnd “ACTION!”

“Ok, here’s what we are going to do.  We are going to put the cage on the floor with the door ramp wide open.  Re-attach the wheel to the side of the cage, make sure the food dish is full, and make sure the water bottle is accessible.  After work, I will get some of those humane mouse traps that don’t hurt or poison mice.   They shouldn’t have gone very far.”

No one questioned the lack of promise of a happy ending.  No one questioned the difference between “immediate action” and “clear progress toward a goal”.  No one considered the phrase “They shouldn’t have gone very far” was worded with absolute precision and did not mean “They couldn’t have gotten very far”.

Hopeful smiles all around. This was the right answer. 

After work I went to the PetSmart where we bought the hamsters and their “cage”.  I told the manager what had happened, and she just stared at me for a bit.  What she did not say was “Well, what the [insert expletive here] do you expect me to do about it?  Whip out my trusty ol’ Cosmic CTRL-Z Button and magically poof them back into there?” 

My goal in going there was that, since these people have probably heard the “my small creature is lost” thing about a billion times, they probably have a way of catching them safely.  I have never worked at a pet store but it is not out of the realm of my imagination that somewhere, sometime, some lizards or mice or hamsters maybe got dropped by a salesperson or a skittish customer, ran behind a six-foot high pallet of Chihuahua Num Nums or whatever and had to be extricated somehow.  Maybe they had some sort of fast-acting bait/pheromone/vacuum cleaner attachment or something.  I dunno.  Something…

I want to make this bit perfectly clear.  My goal going in there was NOT any of the following:

• To request a refund
• To demand a refund
•  To threaten them with a bad review on social media
• To threaten them with a $200,000 lawsuit because of the unbearable trauma our family has suffered (this is 2020, after all…)
• To see the salesclerks immediately rend their garments, don black armbands, lower the store’s flag to half-mast, organize a candle-light vigil, and rename Aisle Six to the “Pancake and Waffle Memorial Aisle of Cage Fluff and Hamster Treats”

I just wanted to see if they had humane small critter traps.  They did not.  I mean, wow!  Talk about a missed opportunity!  They could even price them on a sliding scale directly proportional to how distraught the customer’s children were!  Pfft!  That’s just leaving money on the table in my opinion, but there you go.

So, with the misguided hopefulness of a three-year-old trying to communicate effectively with a Chucky Cheese animatronic, I gave the cage make and model to the manager in case the store wanted to have the info and re-assess their previous claim that it was suitable for Robos so other people don’t lose their pets in the future.  

She just nodded at me. Or at least toward me... 

Ok, then…

I went to another pet store and a Home Depot before finally finding what I needed at a local Lowes.  I bought four of the traps and returned home to begin Operation I Sure Hope This Works.

(To be Continued...)

Pancake and Waffle (Part IV)

Where was I…  Oh, yes.

We got them (Pancake and Waffle) home uneventfully and placed them in their cage on the boy’s desk.  They ran around excitedly, sniffing at everything and exploring every square inch of the cage crawling up and down the tubes, acting shocked when they saw each other, dashing around some more, scaring each other again, and finally settling on the food dish as the most interesting thing in their new home.

After several dozen milliseconds passed, they grew bored with simply consuming the food, so they entertained themselves by pushing a chunk of hamster nibbles (or whatever it is they eat) around and around the food dish.  Wheee!

The treadmill on the second floor of the cage was re-inspected and, seeing that it was neither edible nor another hamster they hadn’t seen in, like, thirty-seven seconds, Pancake/Waffle (I don’t know.  Ask Schrodinger which is which, I guess.  You collapse the waveform...  I’m busy.) got on and ran.

He ran as far and as fast as his little legs could take him for about 10 seconds and decided he needed a break.  Dwarf hamsters weigh much, much less than a plastic circular treadmill and have no concept of “inertia” or “centripetal force”, so stepping gracefully off the side of the rapidly spinning wheel wasn’t in its top one hundred things to accomplish that moment.

A few rotations later, gravity took over and the little guy caromed off the axle and he ka-thunked onto the bottom of the wheel to the absolute joy of his audience.  Whether it was fun for him, too, or just your standard, run-of-the-mill brain damage he got on again and did the same thing.  And again. And again.

After a bit, the other guy competed his circumambulation of the Holy Food Dish and went to go see what the rumbly hubbub on the second deck was all about.  “Hey, that looks like fun!” he thought… maybe.  I’ll admit that it was equally likely that he thought [insert absolute silence here].  Anyway, he hopped on.

In case you haven’t run into this at your local gym, there is a reason they have a “one person on the treadmill at a time” policy.  Wait...  Are you telling me that don’t have a sign like that at your gym?!    Well, believe me the rules here are very, very, very clear.

They began to squabble and nip and bite and scratch at each other just like that old lady at my local gym.  Unlike Abuelita Grumpy-Pants, though, they eventually made peace with the fact that they could both technically fit on the exercise machine at the same time and didn’t go hobbling off to narc on me to the manager. 

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the term, a “zero sum game” is one where there is a definite winner (+1) and a definite loser (-1).  Those scores add up to zero, hence the name.  I’m sure you have conversations with “co”-workers or “loved” ones that are like that.

All the time…

Please tell me I’m not alone…

Sooo… watching the complete lack of teamwork involved when two Robos try to spin a wheel together really showcased the fact that zero plus zero is also zero.  It would be helpful if they ran at the same speed… or at least started and stopped at the same time… or tried to run in the same direction.  I think maybe they achieved three-fifths of a revolution once. 

Did I mention the wheel came free with the cage?  You get what you pay for.

 

At first it was like the soft rumbling of a distant thunderstorm… but not really.  It reminded me of when the people next to us in our old neighborhood bought their 13-year-old a drum set.  Then it reminded me of when he turned 18 and started playing with his band… Still ok, but a bit timesome at times… Then it reminded me of when he turned 23.  His band had long since broken up but, since he was still living at home, he no longer had alcohol restrictions or a bedtime or a job…

After maybe a week of these guys violating the heck out of the treadmill’s warranty, the plastic-on-plastic bearings went bad.  It got louder and louder and louder.  Eventually, it got so bad that we had to unmount the wheel from the side of the cage so the boy could get to sleep.  Nocturnal animals (admittedly passable drummers) couldn’t care less about your stupid school (work) schedule. 

They would have to find some other way to entertain themselves.

In the morning, they were gone.

(To be continued...)

Pancake and Waffle (Part III)

When the boy first brought up the topic of owning hamsters he made sure to let us know that they needed to be “Roborovski dwarf hamsters” or just Dwarf hamsters for short… or just Robos for even shorter.  He informed us of this roughly twelve hundred times a week because, you know, grown-ups forget stuff.

He’s helpful like that.

A couple of weeks before Christmas I bought him a book on the care and feeding of these critters so he would know what to do before he earned them by completing his guitar challenge.  I know, I know… I mean, a whole book? Pfft.  Everyone knows that the right and proper  way of learning how to do anything is to feast upon the vast cornucopia of bite-sized, sugar-coated chunks of online how-to!  That way you can become an insufferable expert in a hyper-specific field of your choice right away without being bothered with things like “depth”, “historical background”, or “storing things in long-term memory for future use”.

(Note to self: sign up for anger management class after telling those kids to get off my lawn.)

The book I got him is well written and is filled with a lot of interesting facts about these amazing creatures.  What they eat, how much space they need, social interactions (both with people and with other hamsters) – good stuff.  

If I were to write a book like on this topic it wouldn’t be nearly as useful:

You can tell the difference between a real Roborovski dwarf hamster and a randomly-wind-blown wad of dryer lint in the following ways

• Robo hamsters cost about $12 each.  Dryer lint is usually less expensive.
• Robo hamsters have large active eyes that make them trick you into thinking they are much, much smarter than the dryer lint.  Balls of dryer lint lack such affectations.   
• Chunks of dryer lint eat much less sloppily and noisily than Robos.
• Cats enjoy playing with Robos waaaaayyy more than they do playing with wads of dryer lint (more on that later).
• While both wads of dryer lint and Robos prefer dark, hidden places over open, well-lit ones, only the Robos are known for hitting the treadmill in the middle of the night.  Like, a lot.  And they are really bad at it… Probably because of the previously discussed lack of smartness.

You get the idea…

The cage at PetSmart came with a “starter kit” that included food, fluff, some translucent tubes, a water bottle, and a treadmill.  How convenient!  “And this cage is good for Robos?” we asked. “Oh, yes!” cheerfully lied the lying salesperson, referencing us to the lie that was printed on the box. Ok.  Great!  We took the $70 minimum-security prison home, set it up on the boy’s desk in his room and returned to the store to get the twelve-dollar hamsters.

We saw a bunch of Robos had haphazardly stacked themselves in a far corner of one of the displays.  They were awake and docile.  Five tiny pairs of eyes stared at us, warily.

“Which one do you want,” asked the salesperson.

“Actually I want to get two.  The book I have says that they are territorial and they might fight each other. I would get one but I don’t want it to be lonely… these ones seems to get along”, he said, pointing to the pile in the shadows. “Will that be ok?” “As long as they are from the same litter and have plenty of space to move around, they usually get along fine,” the salesperson responded.  “If they start hurting each other you can bring them back.”

“Ok.  I’ll take… that one,” said the boy, pointing to the pile.  “This one?” asked the salesperson, also pointing.  “Yes!” said the boy.  The wife and I looked at each other and shrugged.  It was clear that our son and the clerk had connected on some sort of a cosmic level well beyond the normal human range of senses because, to us, they were all precisely the same.

The clerk slowly reached in…

Aaaannnnddd… cue “Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance”… ACTION!

The peace was shattered, and the hamsters immediately went all multi-ball, racing around and frantically leaping over each other in a desperate attempt to evade the fleshy claw machine slowly descending from above. Picture a less organized and way more adorable and clumsier “running from Godzilla” crowd scene from a 1950’s monster movie. 

Yeah… That’s about right.

I was thinking “No way is she going to grab the right one” when “the right one” dashed inside of a translucent hunk of plastic tubing and hunkered down, knowing for sure he was safe in there.  The salesperson deftly grabbed the tube and gently deposited the little guy into a container about the size of a Happy Meal box.  The second “right one” was captured in exactly the same way because he didn’t pay attention before, and he didn’t have time to look up the “How to Escape a Human Who is Slowly Reaching for You” video on YouTube that had the most “likes”.

The box was closed, we paid the bill, and we happily headed home.

(To be continued...)

Pancake and Waffle (Part II)

He was really hoping to earn the hamsters before Christmas, and it was already November, so he started practicing.  He was frustrated at first – his fingers didn’t seem to want to go where his brain was commanding them to go and hitting the correct string without looking down was “impossible”. 

But he stuck with it.

After a while he became a bored with playing the two games (he managed to get 500k in String Skip Saloon and about 1 million in Ducks Redux) so he started playing a couple of the easier songs.  “Next Girl” (Black Keys) and “Angela” (Jarvis Cocker) were slow and simple enough, but he was only scoring in the mid-30-percents for proficiency for each.  I encouraged him to practice parts he was having a problem with using the Riff Repeater tool – a feature of the software that allows you to gradually improve on sections of a song you are having trouble with. It didn’t seem to be helping at all.

And then it happened: the “click”.

We’ve all experienced the “click” at one time or another.  It’s when you are struggling with some seemingly impossible task when, suddenly, the light switch is thrown, the scales drop off your eyes, and the third metaphor you are looking for to tie up the end of a run-on sentence presents itself suddenly.

He quickly climbed up past 90% on both songs.  Since he, like his mother, has music “in his bones” I wasn’t all that surprised.  I, on the other hand, have to “fake the funk” pretty much constantly and often quite literally.  Nothing really sticks.  I just don’t “get it” on the same level as real musicians do.

He started playing “Satisfaction” (Rolling Stones) and wasn’t doing all that great – even on a ¾ size guitar his hands are too small to keep them in one place that high up the neck of a guitar.  In mid-December he went back to playing the games and managed to get 7 million in String Skip Saloon and a whopping 19 million in Ducks Redux.  For reference, you get a special achievement in both games for scores above 10 million… so, you know… not bad.

He got the hang of switching between easy chords by playing Dawn of the Chordead and Star Chords but he hated (still hates?) both of those games.  I guess it was a “too much, too soon” thing.  I dunno.  Regardless, that practice seemed to help him switch between phrases fast enough to start to do really well on it – routinely hitting in the low to mid 80%’s.

Christmas came and went hamster-free (bummer) but he was still on Winter Break so he practiced – he wanted to tell his classmates he got them when he returned to school. He went back to his easier songs and was able to hit Master Mode for a large portion of both. 

Master Mode?  Oh… It’s when you have nailed a phrase or phrases in a song well enough for the on-screen notes to gradually fade to nothing, forcing you off the crutch of visual cues and making you rely on your ear and you memory. He scored above 100% on one of the songs, but I can’t remember which.  It was pretty cool to see those notes disappear like that.

He decided to end the night with one more go at Satisfaction.  The pic on the left shows the result.

He smiled hugely and then stopped.  “Wait,” he said.  “You guys are both here.  I just got through playing my other songs above 90%.  I just got above 90% on this one.  Does that mean I get my hamsters?”

My wife looked at me and I looked at her.  She grimaced lightly.  I shrugged and smiled.  “Yes,” I said. “A deal’s a deal. Congratulations!” 

It was Saturday evening, January 4^th.

To be continued...

Pancake and Waffle (Part 1)

Oh! It’s-ah… Pancake and Waffle! Pancake and Waffle! Hamster services! [record halt sound] Wait… that’s not right.  Let me start over.

I think I described in the past that I wrote a Book of Challenges for my son.  In case I didn’t mention it, the book is a list of accomplishments (outside of the usual “make your bed” or “get good grades” or “please for the love of God clean the toothpaste off your sink – the hammer and chisel are in the usual place”) that he could do in order to earn rewards of some kind. 

Picture earning a merit badge except usually much harder and/or more time consuming.  The harder the challenge the larger the reward. A one-star challenge would earn something fairly cheap while a five-star challenge would have a more substantial payout.

Examples?  Sure.  Back when he was five he wanted Minecraft because the older kids at school were playing it.  In order to earn that one he had to be able to ride his bike well enough to circumnavigate the church twice without stopping – this involved transitioning from his usual comfort zone of freshly paved roads and cul-du-sacs to dealing with hills, grass, mole-holes, sand, and gravel. Thusly, Minecraft poofed into existence on the Xbox.  Other challenges have included solo-riding a fairly intense rollercoaster, earning various colored belts in karate, sinking 50 free-throws in a single basketball practice session,  and running a mile fast enough to earn the Presidential certification at school.

Get it? Got it.  Good.

One day this past fall he asked if he could get some hamsters for Christmas.  I groaned a little and struggled to come up with a way of saying “Pfft. Nope.” that resulted in no follow-up questions or begging. I was moderately against it just because I figured it would be a hassle. The wife immediately started publishing a highly pejorative and unnecessarily foul-mouthed Anti-Hamster newsletter which she then distributed to the neighbors while getting them all to sign a “NIMBY” petition against any future rodent ownership by my son.  She was just about to take out a full-page ad in the local paper railing against quote plague-ridden stink-bags unquote when I said “Look, let’s just make this a challenge – if he earns them he earns them.”  She tentatively agreed.

Since he hadn’t touched his guitar in years I gave him the challenge of completing three Rocksmith 2014 songs of his choosing at a 90% or higher level.  Once he learned them to that level of goodness he would then have to play them all in one night (a mini concert for me and the wife) while hitting 90% on all of them.

Up until that point the only thing he had experience with on that game were two practice arcade games.  “String Skip Saloon” teaches you to hit different strings (no fretting) in order to shoot banditos coming to wreck up your bar, and “Ducks Redux” is a game where you play the right notes order to shoot electronic ducks.  But, like I said, that was a couple of years ago. I told him not to jump into the songs right away.  Create a new account and start from scratch.

(To be continued...)

A Really Good Book

So…  Nice to see you again…  You’ve aged well.

My plan for this blog was to slap a big ol’ ABANDON IN PLACE notification on it and just walk away.  Which I did.  Later, my son, then nine years old, started reading it.  I can’t remember the exact circumstances of “how” of “why”, but I seem to remember showing him a few things like maybe his old drawings from when he was two or three. He says he thinks he started reading it after telling him about how he used to play with his Noah’s Ark playset when he was a toddler.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. 

He liked to go to the site occasionally and read (or re-read) about himself as a baby and about him growing up through the years.  He shared the articles with his classmates and with his teachers and they all got a good laugh.  Makes me smile to think about that.

After a while he asked if I could start writing again.  I said “Maybe… I don’t know.  There’s a lot of other things I’d rather be doing.”  He understood but he would still occasionally ask if I was going to ever write any more articles. My response was always semi-positive but non-committal.  The maybe-est maybe I could muster without implying “no” (because I just didn’t know) or giving false hope (because I just didn’t know).

So nearly three years of maybe-driven non-writing pass.

The night before Christmas 2019 my son hands me a gift to open.  It is large and heavy.  Hmmm. Clearly a hardcover book.  I open the wrappings and see the pic there on the left.

He had somehow found out that you could turn someone’s blog into an actual book.  It is over 400 pages long and covers the period from August 2007 through December 2012, which is why it says “The 36th Lock Volume 1” on the cover.  The binding is solid, the pages are glossy, and the print quality is superb.  It is really amazing to feel “time” made solid as I riffle back and forth through the pages.

But that’s not the best part.  Not by a longshot.

The best part is the Dedication:

The signatures are those of his classmates and of his current teacher.

Feels, little dude.  Feels.

It is 12:03PM Sunday, January 26th, the Year of Our Lord 2020.  It is 49 degrees and sunny.  I am listening to my wife talk with the 11-year-old as they sit together on the sofa downstairs. He coughs occasionally (some sort of bug going around at his school, we guess). The low rumble of a hamster wheel is just audible from a room off to my left. And I am writing.

This is awesome.