Home

We began our return to America four years ago today--that's Felix on the luggage carrier there, not Gideon--flying in from Amsterdam to find an apartment, preparatory to the final move a month later. A successful trip, we found and rented our current place, a two-bedroom, one-bath, across-the-street-from-the-playground-and-with-two-garages-worth-of-storage-space steal that suited us very well at that time.

That was then, this is now. We're a bigger family in every sense, the playground is no longer the center of our universe, and we're tired of renting and of living with the sense of innumerable life projects on hold until we find our real home. It's time, long since time, to buy a house and say farewell to this one.

Easier said than done. We've been hunting for a house for many months and getting the lay of the land for some years. Fairfax is the place for us, that much we know, and it's a precious piece of knowledge, but Fairfax is a very challenging market, combining as it does high prices, low quality, and limited stock, something like what you might find at a gas station minimart in the middle of the Mojave. In a word, a bad place to shop.

So we've been hunting, yes, but we have not been finding. Nothing to bid on, nothing we could even imagine ourselves in, and meanwhile a new real estate bubble has started rapidly inflating, driven by the Bay Area's continuing economic success and the beginning of the end of low interest rates. A frustrating search accompanied by a looming sense that the window of opportunity, for us in this place, is rapidly closing.

And then comes word from our real estate agent, friend and father of friend: he thinks he has an opportunity to buy something off market, might we be interested? Yes, we might very well be, what's the story? It seems our realtor's wife's sister has lived for a long time with a man but that relationship has ended, she has moved out, and he, busy with other matters, no longer needs or wants his property here in Fairfax. If we can agree on a price, and move quickly, we might be able to buy from him and shortcut around the nasty frantic bidding war part of things.

But it gets better, much, much better. The realtor's wife's sister threw a birthday party in this house for the realtor's little daughter, Lucy, friend of Felix, a couple of years ago. Felix was invited of course, and he and I attended. The theme was Knights and Princesses (a joke I only now, two years later, get: the house is on Court Lane) and Felix chose Knight.You see him, below, striding into the party, tube sword in one hand, holy Bible in the other, just as it was getting started:

And, more pertinently, you see the house there on the left, the covered patio in center, and at the back, the barn.

That's right, a barn, a real barn, with barn doors, and a hayloft. I love barns. I loved the house, too, and all the space around it, and when someone pointed out to me that the entire party was taking place on only half the property, the rest being a kind of paddock down below next to a lovely creek, I realized that this was really a very special piece of Fairfax and exactly the sort of piece that we were dreaming of owning one day.

That day is today, for it is this selfsame house our realtor was proposing, and with a lot of help from him, from a no-nonsense mortgage broker, and not least from our generous family, we threw ourselves into the negotiations, the contracting, the endless DocuSigning TM, and came out the other side holding, as of this morning, the deed.

I could tell you more about the house, post some pictures, but we don't yet really know the place, and the photos we have are all of someone else's house with someone else's stuff in it. (Hint: Use the "Breakfast by Email" box to make sure you don't miss a future posting containing those pics.) And besides, at the moment I'm thinking, and so writing, less about the house and more about the process, the lucky, lucky process that got us it, and about the person who is, and from the outset always has been, the one who has brought us every good thing there is to be had in Fairfax. I mean Felix of course, lord of this land. It was Felix's friend Lucy's dad who found us the place and brought us the deal. It was his friend Noah's dad who introduced us to the mortgage broker. And it was his friend Logan's dad who crawled under, over, and around it and gave us the professional reassurance we needed that the structure was basically sound. And they all did this, I think, first and foremost because at this point Fairfax just wouldn't be Fairfax anymore without him. So thank you Felix, you creator of community and very fine fellow:

And Felix, welcome home.

Charlie and the Automat

My friend, the Automat documentarian, has turned up a great deal of material I never found, including, for example, the existence of a New York automatic restaurant pre-Horn & Hardart, footage of H&H company picnics dating to 1926, and, my favorite, a "transcript of MSS notes relating to Modern Times, found at the Manoir in 2003 in a cupboard which seemed to contain things CC took out of the archives when writing My Autobiography."

It probably hasn't taken you a very great leap of imagination to interpret the "CC," above: it's Charlie Chaplin of course; the Manoir is his Swiss estate, My Autobiography is exactly what you'd expect, and Modern Times is his famous movie about the Machine Age and its discontents.

"Modern Times" is one of my favorite movies, so to discover that Chaplin thought of including the Automat therein really tickles me. But it's even better than that, because the notes contained in the MSS, though sketchy in more than one sense, so effectively communicate Chaplin's thinking and intent that it takes hardly any imagination at all to watch these never-filmed scenes on your mind's screen starring, of course, Chaplin himself. Having a lot of mental footage of Automats and people using them is not a prerequisite, and since I can't yet share the Automat documentary with you that's just as well. With or without that I think you'll enjoy getting a glimpse into the mind of a master, so without further ado I present to you Charlie Chaplin at work.

Making

Late last year David, a friend, colleague, and neighbor (not to mention someone with real Maker cred), proposed that he and I go in together on a 3D printer; over a glass of New Year's champagne, shared with our wives, we agreed to go halvsies on this not-inconsiderable purchase. We saw it as a way to introduce our kids to 3D design (Autodesk's raison d'être) and to discover for ourselves the reality of this intriguing technology.

David had a specific printer in mind, an Ultimaker, and, out of a desire to drink as deeply as possible from the well of experience, we decided to order it in kit form. We placed the order and waited eagerly for its arrival. Or at least I waited. David went out and got a commission from the Autodesk Gallery to build a redesigned version of his "Big Ball Maze," a sort of giant toy maze better seen than explained. Here's one view of it:

That's David in the background, and Gideon in the fore, "playing" the machine. As you can see, as goes the disc in Gideon's little hands so goes the table and the balls (should have been a single ball, but that's Gideon for you) upon it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Having invented the thing and built more than one of them David already knew how to make a Big Ball Maze, but the agreement he had struck with the Gallery called for a redesign with the goal of introducing 3D-printed elements wherever reasonable (again, in line with Autodesk's strategic interest in this technology). This meant, at the very least, designing and printing in plastic a number of parts that were constructed from wood in earlier models, and for this task, as well as for other miscellaneous labor, David invited me in as half partner on the project. To be clear, David did not need me for any part of this work: in addition to being the original designer of the piece he was already a competent 3D designer, whereas I had no almost no experience with these tools and had spent far less time than he researching the printers themselves. But he was facing a deadline and I had a spare garage. In any event, I agreed and immediately made my first, and arguably most important contribution, by insisting that we not wait for our printer kit to arrive (it was being shipped from the Netherlands and I know from long experience not to rely on speedy delivery across that particular route) but that we instead find a way to get access to Autodesk's fleet of Objet 3D printers.

Printing on the Objets had a number of implications, the most important of which were that a) each print run meant asking for favors (someone else had to load the file and oversee the print operation) and though these were very willingly given we naturally felt inclined to limit the number of iterations; and b) we could print without a thought given to "overhangs," i.e., the points in our design that would have to be printed with nothing underneath them, because the Objets can print with two materials simultaneously, one being the "final" plastic, the other a different kind of plastic that is easily washed away and which can be used to provide removable supports in those areas of a design where overhangs exist. Don't try to reread that last sentence, just look at this, a picture of our first print:

See the hole through the middle? It's easy enough to print the bottom of that cylinder but what happens as you get half way up and have to start closing the circle? There you encounter an overhang. The beauty of the Objet is that it fills in the cylinder as it goes with a separate plastic that you later wash out. So in this picture you see one big hole where we've removed the support plastic and six small ones around it with the support plastic still in them. Here's what it looked like once we cleaned it all up:

There's the design on the screen and there, lower left, is the piece as printed. Let's think about that for a second: I made this on my computer, and then magic happened, and then there it was, on my desk. Amazing.

That was our first print on Autodesk's printers, a draft print in every sense: we hadn't perfected the design, we didn't print it in an especially sturdy plastic, but it was certainly good enough to test the precision of the printers (fantastic) and to see back home whether the piece made sense as part of the maze table we were building in my garage. It did, and so we went ahead and designed all the parts we thought we'd need for this project. Then, again on Autodesk's machines, we printed them, and here are most of the results:

These are a set of parts that hold all of the mechanically functioning elements of the Big Ball Maze. The three pairs of supports are variations on the tower structure shown on the computer screen above and all either hold a motor or one of the spindles around which the strings that pull the maze table in one direction or another are run. But wait, why green rather than the white plastic of that first print? Because they are made from a different plastic altogether. These were intended to be final prints so we chose a sturdier plastic (very similar to ABS, the plastic used to make LEGO) which, as it happens, was available only in green. This illustrates a limitation you face when  printing yourself rather than via a professional print service: even if you own a small fleet of printers you probably aren't going to stock a million different colors. Fortunately, we didn't care.

We were confident these pieces would hold up under the small strains they would face in operation. The ball and socket pieces, however, were facing a much more serious mechanical test: the entire weight of the maze table rests on the socket, which in turn must glide over the ball as the table moves. Would the plastic as printed be able to handle the load over time? Would it heat up and deform, or wear away? Unfortunately, by this point the deadline was upon us: the maze was due to be delivered to the Gallery so that it could be packed and shipped in time for the SXSW Create event. Product testing would have to happen in the field.

Things did not go well at SXSW, but not because the plastic wasn't strong enough. The ball and joint performed perfectly, but designing the motor and spindle supports as separate pieces proved to be a mistake. In the picture below you see (moving from screen right to screen left) the motor mounted on its support and attached to the spindle via a metal coupling (the double cylinder of metal in the middle of the photo). The spindle then extends through one tower via a skateboard bearing and on through the next tower at far left.

The part holding the motor and the part holding the spindle are two separate pieces and were designed as such because this made it easy to get at the six screws attaching the motor to its support (the small bolts near the coupling), but we didn't anticipate how difficult it would be to get precise alignment between the spindle support and the motor support. As it turns out if the spindle is even slightly misaligned with the motor's shaft the load on the motor is greatly increased. In initial (and all too brief) tests the problem didn't show itself, but after some hours of continuous use at the event one of the motors burned out. We arranged for its replacement, but it was only a matter of time before it happened again, so after the maze got back to San Francisco we decided to redesign this and some of the other parts before final delivery to the Gallery.

By the time the maze returned to us we had received and built our Ultimaker. This meant that we could now do our own production at home and that, in turn, meant we could iterate rapidly and repeatedly, designing, printing, evaluating, and then designing again until the desired part was in hand. Some 16 versions in, of which five were printed at least in part, we settled on this design for the combined motor-and-spindle support:

Three key improvements here: first, the spindle and motor supports are now a single piece and thus hold the motor in perfectly straight alignment to the spindle; second, the spindle supports are smaller, which reduces the amount of plastic used (we eliminated the exterior flanges for the same reason) and lets you get at the motor screws; and third, we added an hexagonal hole at the top of each spindle tower, allowing us to pin the bearings in place so that they cannot migrate out of their housings as they spin. Pretty slick, at least onscreen, but what about the many overhangs this presents?

Somewhat to our surprise, the Ultimaker, at the right temperature and speed, didn't have as much trouble with overhangs as we'd anticipated.  Here's a movie of it printing another piece, our redesigned foot peg holder, one which also features embedded hex bolt seatings:

Mesmerizing, isn't it? The overhangs don't print perfectly, small loops of plastic will sometimes be misaligned or will droop a bit...

...but since all of the holes in our design are there to be filled by bolts or bearings or some other bit of hardware these flaws don't show.

We spent a good deal more time refining our designs, figuring out how solid to make our fills (i.e., how hollow to make the interior of the printed parts; we found 20% fill to be enough in most cases), experimenting with print orientation to reduce the risk of parts shearing under load, and so on. Having a printer on our communal desk was simply an incredible luxury, and we've found its busy little sounds to be great company on a late night.

And many a late night there was. For me at least doing 3D design takes a lot of time. It's terrifically enjoyable and appeals strongly to my puzzle-solving instincts, but I'm still not very good at it and tend to make a lot of false starts. (Amateur-level 3D design programs--I used our own 123D Design almost exclusively; Dave used the professional-grade packages Fusion, Inventor, and Adobe's Illustrator--are not very good at versioning so a false start often means starting over from scratch.) That having been said the majority of our time--and this took a LOT of time, many nights each week for a couple of months in a row, so thanks here and everywhere to our patient wives; for my non-wife readership please take this as explanation for the paucity of postings since the beginning of the year--was spent on non-printing activities, like carpentry, finishing, and, for Dave, programming. In an ideal world we'd be able to print the entire thing. That world isn't far off.

Revenge of the Automat

Welcome to my 100th post, which post I'd intended to be an announcement that it would be my last. I've just been too busy doing things lately to be writing about them, or even to be thinking about them very much.  I've stopped diarizing, too, and you may have noticed that I hardly send emails or letters these days. Or perhaps you didn't, which is another reason to give it up: people, or at least most of my people, don't generate much content in response to my own, so what's the point?

A funny thing happened though that decided me otherwise: someone, in effect, asked me to read my dissertation. It's a story worth telling at some length, so I will. And there will be a picture, a great one, but you will have to wait for it.

You must know, though you may have forgotten, that I wrote my dissertation on the automat, and that much of it was about the Automat, the one being a machine, the other its most famous application. The Automat restaurant chain is long gone, but the topic is a perennial favorite, and one that brings journalists my way with some regularity. Less often it brings others my way, too, such as restauranteurs, or trademark collectors, or, most recently, a filmmaker. The journalists want a quote or two, which they get. Most of the others want advice: they are interested in reviving one part (the automat as the core of a new chain) or another (the Horn & Hardart coffee brand) of the old outfit. They, too, get what they came for. But the filmmaker, she wants a lot more.

She found me via a former professor, as best I could tell from the intro a college student interested in making a documentary on the Automat. A nice enough idea, I suppose, but not one I feel any need to contribute much to. I email back but take a few days to review some of her YouTube stuff first and by the time I decide I like it she's already on her way to New York City for three months of archival research and interviews. And that's not all: she's previously interviewed at least one or two of the necessary sources, has started collecting footage from film archives, has visited the Byrnes collection at the NYPL, has compiled an introductory video (sorry, not for public viewing), and has her first round of funding (in an amount already in excess of the total spent on me while I was doing this research all those years ago). Should I be surprised to learn that she has read my dissertation too? I shouldn't be but still I am.

We email now daily as I follow her reports from New York and thereabouts. We talk about the archives and archivists, about the Horn & Hardart "story," about copyrights and titles. Knowing I'd appreciate it more than most, she sent me this photo from her interview with a former Horn and Hardart ad exec:

Frankly it's marvelous, and as she steers me back to the topic I find myself facing an unpleasant necessity: I have to reread my dissertation.

That's what this post is all about, not writing (or filmmaking), but reading, so let me now get right to it: I don't read what I write. Having defended my dissertation I've never reread it. I completed the captions for the Corning book and then never opened that again either. I've never read any of my publications in journals, not even the first time they appeared. I've kept diaries since 1999 and have never read any of them. And because I haven't reread this material you may be sure I've forgotten almost all of it, hence the looming necessity of reading my dissertation.

So here's the thing: the only piece of work I've written and then found myself rereading is this blog. I don't read it often, I don't read most of the articles at all and probably never will, but on occasion I write one that I'm later drawn to return to. That's reason enough to continue, I realize, so I will.

Consider this a postscript: One of the first questions this filmmaker asked me was How many bound copies of my dissertation are in existence. The question took me by surprise: I think of my dissertation, if I think of it at all, as a file on my computer. But hardbound copies do exist, and she got her hands on one, and if I'm going to reread the entire thing then I'm going to need to get my hands on one too: I'll read a blog on screen but not that. My books are mostly buried in boxes, so am I really about to order my own dissertation via inter-library loan?

News, News, and Damn News

As the leading expert on the Automat I am called upon for a quote whenever something in that (admittedly slow-moving) world happens. I earned that exalted title and the calls that come with it by writing my dissertation on that subject, which writing took a good deal of researching, not a little of it in newspapers from way back when. One of the things I discovered in doing this research is that newspapers are inaccurate, which is the actual topic of this post, not the Automat, about which I have said all I ever need say.

When I say that newspapers are inaccurate I don't mean that they are biased (that statement hardly needs be belabored) nor, as Thomas Jefferson puts it, that they are guilty of "abandoned prostitution to falsehood," though surely some are. No, what I mean is simply that very many of the facts they report are wrong. The journalist, charged with telling us the Who, What, When, and How of the story very often cites the wrong people doing things that were never done at a time when they did not happen and in a manner that is untrue or even impossible. (I won't comment on how they do with the "Why.")  I think this happens because life is messy and journalists never, and I really do mean never, have enough time to do their work with a complete or even very high degree of care, not at least where the facts are concerned.

I don't mind that this happens (well I do mind, a little bit, because among the facts they almost always screw up is my name), but I wish more people were aware of this.  To quote Jefferson again, and this time more fully:

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, 'by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.' Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. . . . I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.  (Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell on Hume's Histories of England - Washington, June 14,1807.)

Read your paper, enjoy it, but please, do not trust it or quote it without doing your own fact checking.

Any guesses as to how I feel about television reporting?