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SteveSgt's TMI(Too Much Information about Steve Sergeant.)Does this look like the page of an urban sophisticate? |
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About SteveSgtMy full name is Steven Eugene Sergeant. I was born in Davenport, Iowa, USA. I am the owner, webmaster, and chief indian of Effable.com. That means I am also responsible for most of what you see on the main page of this site, so take a look at www.effable.com. InterestsTMI About
Too Much Old InformationSearch for TMI |
Mon, 11 Aug 2008Back on July 21st, I was contracted to record an Interview for the NPR business news show MarketPlace. On a Monday morning, I went over the to the headquarters of Ebay, and sat in a small conference room with an Ebay corporate spokesperson, along with one of their corporate attorneys, Edward Torporco. MarketPlace reporter Renita Jablonski interviewed Edward over the phone while I recorded him there in-person. The piece containing that interview aired on August 4th. It was titled A good deal or a steal?. The story containing the interview appears 23:04 minutes into the show. They only used a total of 23 words from the 13 minute interview I recorded. You can hear the show here: It's fun doing these little bits of contract work. Unfortunately, the opportunities don't come as often as I'd like. Sun, 20 Jul 2008Anybody who knows me knows how hard it is to part with favorite toys that I'm the proud owner of, even if I don't use them anymore. That's really been the case with Zephram, my 12-1/2" telescope. I have to rationalize this. As much as I love going out and looking through the scope, I've become more interested in less sedentary activities in the past few year. And now that the thing has sat unused for almost exactly a year, I think that's telling me that I could use the money I could get out of it elsewhere. Once I've uploaded some ads, I'll add their links to this post. Tue, 15 Apr 2008Last night, Jean and I attended the Goldman Prize awards ceremony. This event is always inspiring to find out about some real successes in the various efforts to make our world cleaner and more sustainable. Last night's presentations didn't disappoint. The awards are chosen by continent. So the winners for each of these regions were:
In the presentation, I was most impressed by the work of Ignace Schops and Marina Rikhvanova. Though for doing the most with fewest resources, perhaps Jesús León Santos should have impressed me more. In short, all of the recipients have achieved something impressive. This morning, it was in the news that Chevron denounced the award of the prize to Pablo Fajardo Mendoza and Luis Yanza. Chevron declared the prize recipients con men. An act of desperation from a cornered rat, perhaps? Sun, 23 Mar 2008Wed, 12 Dec 2007"The nation's broadcasters on Feb. 17, 2009 will be turning off their analog over-the-air broadcasts." This quote is from an Associated Press article I saw in Wired Magazine. The article is about how retail outlets will begin selling converter boxes so that people can receive digital television on their analog sets. The government, in an attempt to minimize civil unrest, will be offering $40 discount coupons for these converter boxes. So even though you can buy some klunky converter box, or an expensive new flat-panel TV to replace your old one, I'm declaring February 17, 2009, The End of Television. There will be some important social aspects of television lost in the switch to digital TV: First, range. The digital signals don't carry as far as the analog signals. With a digital TV, you can get a clear signal slightly farther, but at the outer-most fringes of signal coverage, instead of a somewhat snowy screen, you get nothing at all. So digital TV serves smaller geographic areas. Second, the number of channels. A digital TV signal can carry more than one stream of video -- it can carry as many as eight. Most stations, though, are only transmitting between 2 and 6 streams, or sub-channels. There are more channels to fill with more programming, and so the quality and originality of any one of those channels, and the funding to produce or acquire that content, will be less. Local stations will have, as they say in the industry, a hungrier beast to feed (the on-air schedule), and will have less money with which to feed it. Finally, copy protection. The digital TV standard contains a number of permission codes within the signal. All commercially-available receivers have to obey those permission bits. They tell the receiver whether you're allowed to watch a particular program, and more importantly, whether you can record it for time shifting, for your personal archive, or for other legitimate fair-uses such as academic research or as a reference for your own reporting, commentary, or satire. In other words, the creator of the content has a little cop invading your home, telling what you can and can't do with the signal you received. So enjoy it while it lasts. All of your video equipment will become obsolete (unless you've already bought into the new age). TV as many of us know it will die on February 17, 2009. Tue, 30 Oct 2007We had an earthquake here a little over an hour ago. We had kind of a sideways lurch, followed by sharp vibrations for maybe 10 seconds, followed by over a minute of slow rolling. It was kind of exciting, but there was no damage here as far as I can tell. Nothing even fell over. Our local paper had this article: 5.6 earthquake hits near Alum Rock And the USGS has this information: Magnitude 5.6 - SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA, 2007 October 31 03:04:54 UTC Tue, 25 Sep 200710:35am: The UPS truck drove up and it's brakes squealed to a stop in front of our house. If Moriko was still alive, she'd be barking up a storm. It was obviously a busy and harried day for the delivery driver. By sound alone, I guessed he was coming to our house, so I scrambled to throw off my bathrobe and put on the first clothes I could find — a flannel shirt and my olive/gray kilt. I went out to the door and opened it to see a stocky, muscular, early-30's Hispanic woman in a UPS uniform carrying a relatively small padded envelope. She had a short, boyish, haircut. I noticed part of some tattoo mostly hidden by her short shirt sleeve. As soon as I opened the door, she stopped abruptly about halfway between the turn in the sidewalk and the front door. She looked me up and down with an intense stare. I saw her expression go from surprise to a mischievous grin. She said, "Hi. I think you got a book." She resumed walking toward me more slowly than she had been, and handed me the electronic box on which I was supposed to sign for the package. She kept inching closer, right up to the threshold of the door. I handed back her signature gadget. "Are you making coffee in there?" She asked, looking like she was ready to come on in. I said, "No, I don't drink coffee." I was a little perplexed about this turn in our transaction. She slowly lifted the envelope up to hand it to me, staring unblinkingly into my eyes with an even more mischievous grin. We were standing really close — she was clearly trying to stand in my space. I didn't want to back away from the door threshold, thinking it would look like an invitation for her to come in. After what must have been 10-plus seconds, the envelope had risen to where I could take it. So I did, and said pleasantly, "Thanks." I reached for the door to close it, and as I did so, she turned and stepped back down onto the sidewalk. She turned and looked carefully at me again. I paused closing the door; it was starting to dawn on me what was going on here. Her expression changed briefly to a pout, and then back to a wide-eyed smile. She said, "You are so-oo hot in that kilt. I WANTED to come in." She turned quickly and did somewhere between a fast walk and a skip back to her truck. She giggled all the way back to her truck. I stood in the doorway, and in amazement, watched her drive away. So I know women get this kind of treatment all the time, but when a guy gets this treatment, it's pretty bizarre. Thu, 06 Sep 2007For those of you who don't already know, today I turned fifty years old. Sheesh, I can definitely remember strains of ...hope I die before I get old, blaring at parties in college. But, in the spirit of present-day revisionism, I declare that fifty is the new thirty-five. So while chronologically I'm 50, I'm going to go on feeling about 35 or so. Because that's the way I feel and act most of the time. (That is, except when I start talking to 35-year-olds about things that happened in the late seventies.) I spent most of the day working on the show. I have to go out of town for an interview tomorrow, So I'm saving my playtime for the weekend. Jean organized a party for Saturday called fifty years of everlasting youth. It's a theme party around my interest in a theory called Calorie Restriction with Optimum Nutrition (CRON), first popularized by Dr. Roy Walford of UCLA. We have more RSVPs for the party than we've ever had in the house before. Wed, 01 Aug 2007This spring I did some field production and location recording for a famous public radio producer named Richard Paul. He produced a piece about Peak Oil for a series funded by Purdue University about the engineering challenges of the 21st century. At the end of this interesting, hour-long piece, the host gives me an engineering credit for the various recordings I made in and around the Stanford campus. The web page for the piece is here: engineering.purdue.edu/EngineeringImpact
Tue, 24 Jul 2007Last weekend I decided I needed to really push myself on a about as long of a weekend backpacking trip as I could manage in two days. As it turned out, I probably could have gone quite a bit farther. I started at the Leavitt Meadows Campground on highway 108 east of Sonora Pass. Anne, another Sierra Club leader, left me there about 6:15am and drove to what would be my exit trailhead to begin another, easier trip she was leading. I was underway hiking along the Walker River Trail by 6:25am. ![[Overall Route Map]](http://www.effable.com/~stevesgt/Backcountry/Backpacking/Trips/EmigrantTransSierraMap.png) Hoover-Emigrant Trans-Sierra Route Map I was carrying my lightest-weight gear kit, and had a minimum of 37 miles ahead of me to make it to the trailhead by the time Anne's group finished their trip. The route would also involve almost 3,800' of climbing on the first day, followed by almost that much of a descent the second day. And yet, considering other hikes I've already been on this year, this seemed reasonably within the range of possibility. I started out following a ridge, east of the Walker River, past Secret Lake, Roosevelt Lake, and Lane Lake. Past Lane Lake I scared four horses loose in a small meadow, but their owners, a couple of weathered older cowboys, didn't seem concerned. I crossed the Walker River before 10:00am, which put me over 10 miles down the trail, and started my climb past Fremont Lake and the Long Lakes. I took a longer break for an early lunch at Upper Long Lake before starting the steeper climb toward Emigrant Pass. About 18 miles in, at Grizzly Meadow, I stopped for a larger, late lunch. I could see vertical rock climbers on the bluffs of Grizzly Peak, occasionally yelling at each other. I hadn't seen another person since the Walker River. So far the trail head been clear, wide, and easy to follow. But past Emigrant Meadow Lake, the map said the trail was infrequently maintained. In reality, the map suggested a trail that wasn't there. Luckily, the route was quite clear due to obvious terrain features, and I got to make may own trail past Middle Emigrant Lake, and down along the North Fork of Cherry Creek to Blackbird Lake. I had some trouble finding the trail between Blackbird Lake and Emigrant Lake though, and I spent over 75 minutes going just 0.4 miles. I kept coming to small cliffs, and had to frequently backtrack. Back on the well-maintained trail, I hiked the length of Emigrant Lake and stopped for dinner on its western edge. I met two guys who had taken two days to get there from my exit trailhead. They asked me to suggest a campsite, but I told them that I wasn't really looking for campsites there, so I didn't notice any. After dinner, I had a lot of energy to push on through Buck Meadow and past Buck Lakes. At Buck Lakes I scared a group of about 15 horses and mules that were running loose. But we negotiated a way around each other, and I continued on until dark. Sunset came as I approached a bench some distance above the eastern shore of Deer Lake. I set up a stealth camp there near some pine trees, away from the trail and the water. I slept well and was awake and ready to hike before sunrise. That calculated out to a 27.5 mile day. By about 8:00am, I arrived at Gem Lake and found Anne and her group's camp site. They were in the middle of breakfast. I ate my breakfast while they were packing and breaking camp. Their hike out would be just over 10 miles, and would make a leisurely day for me compared to the day before. I was happy for the social interactions and the casual pace of this second day. We hiked out past Buck Meadow Creek, past the West Fork of Cherry Creek, through Groundhog Meadow, past Grouse Lake, and up out of Pine Valley to the Crabtree Camp trailhead. I'll probably plan this as a Sierra Club trip next year, but I'll take three days to do it with a group. But I know now, from the experience, that I could probably hike a 50 miles weekend and not be exhausted by it. |
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