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Wanted: Milking Trainer

December 7th, 2007

On January 11th, at precisely 1:30 PM, Kate’s mom, my mother-in-law, the estimable State Representative Barbara McIlvaine Smith, will compete in the Celebrity Milking Competition at the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg.

Now, my New York City friends might be thinking of this as quaint. Which it is, in a way, but not if that way means small or low-stress. The Pennsylvania Farm Show is a big, big event, and, if you were going to be doing something difficult and unfamiliar in front of a big crowd — if you were going to be up on stage doing a mysterious activity, competing against local meteorologists, football stars, and assorted ringers, you would want some serious training. Rocky IV-style training. With a wooden stool, a bucket, and steaming breath:

My dad’s friend, chef Fritz Blank, was a regular competitor. Chef Fritz holds a degree in microbiology, grew up on a farm, and knows all about milking cows. He would be the perfect merciless trainer for Barb. Unfortunately, Chef Fritz retired to Thailand, and so is not available for riding in a golf cart and shouting through a megaphone.

So we need help. Specifically, we need milking lessons. And I don’t think using a plywood cutout and a latex glove is going to do it. I’m not quite sure of the best way to proceed — there are lots of dairy farms just to the west of us, but any dairy farm has been automated since the Fifties, so there’s no reason why a dairy farm, just because it’s a dairy farm, would be able to teach hand milking. I think we’re looking for a small farm — but a small farm that has the eye of the tiger.

I might try calling a local Amish Raw Milk farm, or the really excellent, organically-run Meadow Run farm, since they do active outreach to the community (they have an open farm day that we really enjoyed this year.) Or maybe I could call the Chester County 4H Club and see if they have someone that would be willing to train Barb. And Kate, and me, and Lydia — after all, I think “milk a cow” should be on Heinlein’s list.

Any suggestions on where to find a by-hand cow-milking trainer before the turn of the year? Please make a suggestion in the comments, and I’ll let you know how it goes. (Also, if my comment tool breaks or annoys you, please let me know by sending an email to john DOT young AT gmail DOT com — I don’t want to lose that one comment that holds the keys to victory!)

UPDATE: I got a response back from the Landis family at Meadow Run farm, which is gracious and packed full of AWESOME INSIDER TIPS. They say:

“Unfortunately I don’t think we can give you the milking lesson you’re looking for. Though we had been milking 3 or 4 cows outdoors that had calves this summer, we have now stopped. We would suggest contacting a dairy farm that would have indoor milking areas (in these freezing temperature). I know Seven Stars Dairy in Kimberton has lovely organic Jerseys although I’m not sure if they allow people to come in. You might check www.localharvest.com under dairy farms and call one of them.

You could mention to your mother in law that squeezing tennis balls in both hands for a few weeks prior can help build up the hand’s milking muscles. I think stamina and hand strength is as important as technique. Most people who don’t milk regularly just get tired very quickly. My second piece of advice is to pet and talk nice to the cow before milking since it’s all about the soothing and relaxation of the cow so she “lets” her milk down for you. I hope that’s not too much information, but it is certainly true.

Thanks so much for the advice! I’m going to be calling Seven Stars Dairy, and also our friend Meg, who graduated from Penn Veterinary school a year ago, and probably knows a cow.

Update 2: It’s starting to look like Penn’s New Bolton Center may be the way to go. My only reluctance here is that, if we go to the New Bolton center, that means Barb is not Rocky, but rather Barb is Dolph. I’m sure they’ll have her milking under water, squeezing gleaming stainless-steel “milkometers” while grimacing a ruthless Teutonic grimace. Actually, that sounds pretty cool. I’ll call Meg this morning.

Update 3: Meg came through in spades. She called a large-animal vet friend of hers, with whom she had ridden as a part of her schooling. Her friend knows a small dairy farm in the area, and reports that they will be “delighted to teach Barb hand milking.” This is great. I’ll give them a call and report back. Did I mention that I just finished re-reading All Creatures Great and Small and All Things Bright and Beautiful? Boy, talk about the right time to be doing this.
It’s beginning to look a lot like… uh…

December 6th, 2007

Christmas in the flower district, as I was walking across town on the way to work.
This is what traditional banjo-playing has been up to while I wasn’t paying attention

December 6th, 2007

I mentioned a couple of years ago that I play the banjo some, but I haven’t really taken the banjo out of its case for a long time. So Laird, my chief (and, sadly, now only) banjo-playing uncle — more about that later — just sent along this video via my mom, demonstrating what traditional music has been doing while I wasn’t paying attention:

I’d like to think that everything in life gets this weird and awesome if you don’t pay attention to it. I’m hoping that the gardening-tools area of the garage is now facing off into competing teams, or that the boxes full of library books in the basement are having, you know… grammar rumbles.
First Guerilla Drive-In Sticker Sighting

November 30th, 2007

Lydia: “Look, Mommy, a sticker like daddy has!”
Kate: !!!
Kate took a picture and sent it to me:

Yay, cool! I gave out vinyl GDI stickers at the showing of Local Hero in October, and we were wondering when (if ever) we’d see the first one. Hurrah!
Photographers: I get it now.

November 17th, 2007

I always knew photography is hard, but I’m starting to have a new appreciation for it. After Lydia went to sleep, we stuck a couple of socks that Kate finished into the light tent, put the camera on a tripod, and took some pictures.

What looks nice and bright to the eye, though, looks dingy and yellow in the camera. I guess this is because the tent is illuminated with hardware-store floodlight bulbs, not color-balanced daylight bulbs, and I don’t see the difference in the real world, because my eyeballs do the correction automatically(?) I did remember the magic words “white balance”, though, pushed “menu” on the camera, and pointed at a little picture of a light bulb (instead of a little sun.) That got most of the yellow cast gone, and we got some pictures that I think look pretty good:

…but even that is only after I opened the raw image in Photoshop, selected the background, desaturated it, and adjusted the white balance to favor the highlights. I don’t think it’s considered totally cricket by crafters to manipulate your photos so much, though, so I’m hoping to find a different combination of light bulbs and white-balance settings that won’t need so much manhandling.
Basement light tent

November 15th, 2007

Kate’s at knitting tonight, so I finished the light tent in the basement, using oak dowels, a paper dropcloth, and lots of black duct tape. It turned out to be huge, much bigger than I had anticipated, and brighter, too:

There’s a slit in the front of the tent for the camera’s lens to go into, and a sheet of white oaktag inside. It’s kind of big and unwieldy (in retrospect, I should have made something this size), but it looks pretty good inside. I took this picture of my nerdle-point pillow, in progress, and the even white lighting made it very easy to punch the item off the background:
.

Now to make this project pay for itself by sticking everything nearby into the tent, taking evenly lit pictures, and selling it on eBay. Like maybe the cat. Here, Squeaky!
John’s Christmas/birthday wishlist: an XO laptop (one for me, one for a kid)

November 12th, 2007

Originally called the “OLPC” (One Laptop Per Child), or the “$100 laptop”, the XO laptop is designed from the bare metal up to be used by children in developing nations, to bootstrap a worldwide generation of skilled hackers, entrepreneurs, and knowledge workers. The laptops are designed to be low-power, chargeable using a yo-yo like pull charger (no electric grid needed), to connect with each other and the Internet using a wireless grid, and to show the source code of all the running programs in a way that lets kids learn.

You can read more about the project in a New York Times article here. Sure, it’s going to raise lots of issues (what if they get stolen? What about goatse?), but as far as I’m concerned it’s going to open a floodgate of information and enfranchisement. In twenty years, your employability, no matter where in the world you live, is going to be based on two things: knowledge of computers and command of apostrophes and homonyms. Any kid with an XO laptop can start learning both.

The non-profit XO project isn’t set up for consumer sales in the US — their mission is to get governments to buy them a million at a time to distribute to kids. But the governments are hesitant to write those big checks until they can see demonstrated enthusiasm for the devices. So from now until November 26, you can buy an XO laptop to be sent overseas, and get one for yourself. That’s one for a developing nation, and one for us to play with in Sharpless street, so Lydia can join the Worldwide Hacker Army. Here’s a description of the program. So, dear friends and close family — anyone who has me on their Christmas and birthday list — you would make me very happy if you would click on the button below and contribute a little something, you will have made a nerd very, very happy. At the end of the contribution period, I’ll take all the proceeds, contribute the difference, and place the order.

Contribute towards a “Give one, get one” XO laptop for John:

Thanks, and merry Christmas! And happy birthday to me, etc!
NERDLE-point!

November 6th, 2007
My current needlepoint project is to, you know, create a nice sofa cushion. A pillow. With a two-dimensional barcode design on it. Here’s the canvas, half-transferred from my printout using black acrylic paint:

The design is in a machine-readable format called QR Code; codes like this can be found on your UPS package or pharmaceutical label. 2D barcodes can contain all kinds of information, not just numbers.

The QR code stitched into the pillow contains an encoded hyperlink to the Wikipedia entry for “Pillow”, so if you’re a Japanese teenager with a DoCoMo QRcode-enabled cellphone, you could snap a picture of the sofa pillow and immediately, you know, start reading about pillows. Here’s a picture with some of the black yarn stitched in:

This is the first time I’ve tried painting a canvas, not just marking the intersections with a pigma pen. So far, I’m learning that needlepoint has three phases, and that the one where you just stitch the yarn into the canvas is by far the easiest one. The first, prepping-the-canvas phase, requires some cognitive sleight-of-hand (mapping pixel-shaped blocks to intersections, then painting the intersections, is trickier than I would have thought.) And the third phase, finishing requires all the tools of a carpenter and the black arts of an upholsterer. I haven’t tackled that one yet.

So far, though, I’m having a blast. I’ll post more pictures when I get an area that has both black and white stitched into it.

PS. In case you’re wondering, here’s how I made the design:
1. Went to semapedia.org and used their online tool to create a PDF of the Wikipedia “Pillow” URL.
2. Made a screenshot of the resulting PDF, opened the screenshot in Photoshop, and scaled so that the smallest box unit in the semacode was exactly 2×2 pixels. I used “nearest neighbor” scaling to preserve hard edges. This resulted in a design that was 58px by 58px.
3. Used the awesome KnitPro Web App to transfer the design onto a numbered grid. Before I uploaded the image, I increased the image’s canvas size to 96px wide by 120px tall, matching one of KnitPro’s existing sizes, so that KnitPro wouldn’t scale or antialias the design.
4. Used a fine-point red pigma pen to break the numbered grid into 8×8 boxes, and did the same to the canvas.
5. Carefully transferred one 8×8 box at a time to the canvas, painting the intersections of the threads to correspond to the black boxes on the numbered grid. When I messed up, went back and painted with white paint.
6. Trimmed the canvas to size, finished the edges with masking tape, tacked it to a frame, and got stiching!
Practically Perfect in Every Way

October 31st, 2007

It’s grand to be an Englishman in 1910!
King Edward’s on the throne, it’s the age of men!

I’m the lord of my castle, the sovereign, the liege!

I treat my subjects, servants, children, wife with a firm but gentle hand, noblesse oblige.

It’s 6:03 and the heirs to my dominion are scrubbed and tubbed, and adequately fed.

]And so I’ll pat them on the head, and send them off to bed.
Ah, lordly is the life I lead!

…Winifred, where are the children?
My second needlepoint project: Pixel Tree

October 23rd, 2007

My second needlepoint project is almost done; I’m stitching in the blue-gray between the orange checkerboard squares. Apparently, I like to photograph and post this stuff when it reaches 70% completion. Here it is:

I found the tree design while searching for “Pixel Art Tutorial.” I came across this great page full of swords, potions, and white-haired warlords scowling into the wind (all traditional eight-bit subjects). Here, pixel-artist Mithlomion shows you how to add greenery into your three-quarter-view adventure game:

Marianne from local needlepoint joint Fireside Stitchery showed me how to stretch a canvas onto a lightweight frame (wooden bars, rabbet joints, lots and lots of brass thumbtacks), and I bought a bunch of short hanks of tapestry wool (three-ply yarn; you separate the strands and stitch with just one at a time.

The challenge was to get the design on to the canvas. Since the design has so many different scattered pixels all over the place — and I didn’t want to freehand it yet — I tried making color separations.

I opened the tutorial image in Photoshop cropped to just the tree, and zoomed way in to the pixel level. Then did a “select color range” on each of the seven colors, floating each color as a separate layer. I then added register marks around the border, and a number to each separation to keep the colors straight. Here’s what the color separations look like:

Next, I monkeyed with the pixel resolution and device resolution of the file to match the canvas’ 18 threads-per-inch resolution. I tried sending a 53-pixel-wide file to the printer at a device resolution of 18 pixels per inch, but the printer’s own scaling algorithms softened the hard edges of the pixels, and everything looked mushy.

> Image Size dialog” border=”0″ align=”right” style=”padding-top: 10px; padding-left: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;” />
So, after a few false starts, I rezzed up the image to 10 times its original size, using Photoshop’s Image >> Image Size dialog. I used “Nearest Neighbor” for the resampling, to preserve the hard edges of each pixel. Then I set the device resolution to 180pixels per inch, and sent to the printer. This resulted in a nice, clean print of each color separation at the right size, theoretically suitable for tracing directly to the canvas.

I cut out each separation, put it on a light box, and laid the canvas over that, marking each thread intersection to be stitched with a Pigma marker (in needlepoint, a “pixel” corresponds to the cross where two threads of the canvas join; the yarn gets stiched around that.) Marking in four shades of green would be impossible to tell apart, so I mapped the colors: black for the darkest green, green for the next lightest, red for the next lightest, et cetera. The canvas ended up looking like a thermal-heat map, or a particularly lurid paint-by-numbers design.

Frankly, this didn’t work so well. Needlepoint canvas isn’t a strictly regular 18 threads per inch, and unless you possess superhuman canvas-stretching skills, it’s not really square, either. So I think I was working against the medium, here, and the registration ended up being pretty significantly off. For example, my canvas has a _lot_ more of the lightest green (separation 7) than the original art does.

Of course, this does not matter — I think the design looks cool, and each step of the process was (mostly) a Fun Learning Adventure. One solution would be “start freehanding it, you obsessive nerd!” However, I enjoy having pixel-level control over the design before it’s stitched, so I think I’m going to continue to find a way to assign each thread-intersection a color explicitly. Like counted cross-stitch, except I much prefer the wooly texture and thick dimension of needlepoint. Maybe if I get really good at stretching a canvas square, I’ll have better luck maintaining precise resolutions.

Here’s a closeup of the mostly-finished design. What do you think?