Unfinished Projects

Lots of family came out to Chicago for the weekend. It was hectic but fun. After some departures, I went to the Garfield Park Conservatory with my mom, Kara, and Jenn. Here’s the cellphone panorama.

It was my first time visiting GPC and I really liked it. Maybe when I am working on the thesis this fall, I’ll try to go there to hang out and write.

This photo is pretty different from the last one.

Also, I’ve got some more photos here from my trip home. If you like corgis as much as I do, click here.

I need to get this out of my system, before heading back to cold, cold Chicago.

Well, posting has been pretty scarce around here, but I did post a whole load of photos on flickr from my trip to Chile. Check them out, if you haven’t already!

I got a new cell phone and it has this really sweet panorama photo function. This happened to coincide with a couple of busy weekends out and about, so here are some photos that I took. If you really look at them, you can find the awkward spots where the three pictures overlap. But in general, the algorithm they use works damn well.

Here’s a shot from left field of U.S. Cellular park, for a White Sox-Red Sox game. The guy’s head in front of me got a bit messed up by the photo merging process, but the grassy stripes on the baseball field look good.

Jenn’s cousin and her boyfriend visited this last weekend, so we got out to do lots of Chicago stuff. The point was beautiful and I got a bit of swimming in. This was the weekend of the Air & Water show, so there were lots of jets buzzing overhead, and we could see the exhaust trails of planes doing acrobatics over Navy Pier.

Finally, we have the highlight of Millennium Park — Cloud Gate a.k.a. the Bean. I felt pretty touristy, snapping pictures there on a Sunday afternoon, but it looks so cool. Looking at this picture closely, I think that the girl in the blue dress just to the right of the sculpture shows up three times!

Yesterday I tried poaching eggs for the first time. I don’t think that I’m doing it quite right yet, but my third egg was much better than my first. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any Radio Zero to listen to (“music you can poach an egg to”), but I think that their web presence has faded since J. stopped doing the show.

The poached egg is served on a toasted Med bagel, with shaved parmesan and pistou. Evidently, pistou is French for pesto. It also seems a little bit different, with more olive oil, less garlic, and no parmesan. I got the recipe out of Bon Appétit.

The last month was a good one for live music. While I have fallen far from my peak concert-going days (I think that my last year in college and first year in Chicago were undoubtedly the high points), I did make it to two pretty excellent shows in March.

The first one was Xiu Xiu, playing at Reggie’s Rock Club. I was shocked to discover, from my obsessively compiled records, that this is the ninth time that I’ve seen Xiu Xiu in concert. While I was really into them back in the Knife Play and Chapel of the Chimes days, I’ve sort of cooled off on their releases, starting with La Fôret. The problem there is that I must have also forgotten what an engrossing and totally excellent live act Xiu Xiu can be. The main thing that has struck me time and time again at their concerts is the way that every song is constantly being tinkered with and re-arranged, so that the same song will be very different from tour to tour. I think that this probably says something about Jamie Stewart’s mental concept of what a pop song is. It’s as if he has a strong compartmentalization, where the lyrics, melody, rhythms, and harmonies all exist in different dimensions and can be experimented with individually.

I guess that a more prosaic explanation would be that the personnel and instrumentation for the touring version of Xiu Xiu changes rapidly. This particular version was a full band set-up with a drummer and bass/cello player, which I think really made some of the songs. It’s probably no coincidence that, when I first heard Xiu Xiu and got really into them, they were playing as a four-piece, not the somewhat skeletal acoustic outfit that they became on later tours.

Anyway, here’s a video I dug up of Xiu Xiu playing ‘Suha’, which was my favorite song of the night (and one of my favorite Xiu Xiu songs period). The video is not from the show I was at, but it is the same arrangement and the same tour. This version of the song has a pretty sweet Disintegration-era Cure sound to it (mostly the keyboard, I think). By contrast, the album version of the song is more orchestral and dirge-y; not as danceable, despite running off a drum machine beat. I also have to give a virtual high-five to the guy who did the videotaping because it came out well. I imagine that Xiu Xiu is a tough band to record live, on account of the fairly extreme loud/soft dynamics.

The next show I went to was the highlight of the month, the highlight of any month, BOREDOMS. I don’t think I can write a lot of description or analysis about this show because you just have to experience it yourself. At this point, they have transformed from a band into a full-fledged force of nature.

In a stroke of brilliance, the concert was moved from Logan Square to the Congress Theater, so that they could set up the stage in the middle of the floor and let the crowd roam all around. I took in most of the show while sitting or standing on the actual stage, which was behind the band, but a great vantage point for photos.

As with the last time I saw Boredoms play, three drummers kept up a tireless, manic, and yet perfectly precise rhythmic whirlwind for a full hour and a half. This time, instead of grooving along in the monolithic Seadrum beat, the drum pattern would shift, wander, and cycle back to themes from earlier in the set.

Of course, dominating the stage was Eye’s seven-guitar contraption. All the guitars were tuned to various complementary open tunings, so that he could just wail on the whole thing with a wooden rod and unleash cosmic-sounding layered chords. Naturally, this kind of abuse broke a lot of strings and required constant retuning. So, here’s the shot of this one dude who hung around a mixing board and then sprang into action to fix up the instrument whenever there was an opening.

I left the show feeling exhausted and satisfied, so I can only imagine what it’s like when any of those drummers crawls into bed after each night of the tour.

Alright, here is all the sillier stuff from my holiday trip down Baja way.

First off, we have this sign from a military checkpoint outside of La Paz. Ben and I were stuck waiting there for a while, so we had plenty of time to marvel at the really poor translation.

Next, we have the fairly ubiquitous cow warning signs from highway 1 in Baja. Evidently night driving there is very dangerous due to black cows that sometimes wander onto the highway. The cow signs, of course, were irresistible to people with spraypaint and stencils.

Continuing north, Ben and I ended up staying for an afternoon and a night in Loreto, a small town full of gringos on the Sea of Cortez. We stayed in the most hilarious hotel room I have ever seen, at the Hotel Junipero Serra. Walking into the place, it seemed a bit sketchy, but then we saw our pink satin room and knew that we had to stay there (and take some glamor photos).

In addition to the truly rad hotel room, Loreto also gave us what may have been the best meal of the entire trip (though I stuffed myself so much that I could barely sleep that night). La Palapa served us some really good seafood and perhaps the best carne asada I’ve even eaten. We were documenting every place we ate at, just in case one of them might strike us down with Montezuma’s Revenge. First, it looks like Ben might be having some trouble.

But don’t worry folks, he’s alright!

Jenn’s iPod has been on the fritz for a long time now, but the general problem with it was pretty well know. In fact, my iPod had the same problem too and it was explained and repaired for me by a friend who used to work at an Apple store. Basically, one of the connectors through which information travels between the hard disk and the processor is really flaky. My iPod was fixed just by unplugging the flexible printed circuit from this connector and then reseating it. I had tried this several times with Jenn’s iPod and it provided a temporary fix, but eventually came the time to try something a little more drastic.

The flaky connector is 40 connection, top contact type, surface mount flexible printed circuit (FPC) connector with 0.5 mm pitch. The particular one found in the iPod is some very low profile model that I don’t recognize (in terms of manufacturer or part number). However, we do use an electrically identical, but slightly larger, connector in my thesis experiment — HiRose FH12-A40-S-0.5SH.

So, the task is just to pop the old connector off and replace it with a new one I had lying around (which just barely fits). A photo of the insides of the iPod, minus the hard disk, is shown below.

The first step is just to get the damn thing open, which might be the hardest part. There are plenty of websites that give instructions, so I’ll just cover the basics. Holding the iPod face down, apply pressure to the back, along on of the edges, to push the metal back outwards and away from the white plastic front. This will open up a gap between the front and back pieces. Next you have to wedge something slender in there (or better yet, two somethings) and use them to detach the clips that hold it all together. I used jeweler’s screwdrivers but these will definitely ding up the plastic and bend the metal. If you want your iPod to stay looking pristine, you had better find a softer (plastic) tool.

Once it is open, the dominant feature is the hard disk, which can be unplugged. The FPC which connects so poorly to the iPod circuit board actually has a pretty nice connection to the hard disk, which seems to endure repeated connection and disconnection quite well. Following the FPC to its other end, you will find a crappy little connector soldered down to the circuit board. That connector has got to go!

I took the connector off with a little help from the soldering iron, but mostly just with a small screwdriver. This is not the right way to do it and I’m lucky that I didn’t lift off any solder pads. In fact, I’m really not the right person to look to for soldering advice, so good luck with this part. I will say that the connector in question is right next to the battery (which I didn’t try to remove), so you have to be careful about how much heat you apply.

The red box on the photo above shows the new connector that I put down. You can see how big it is compared to the 40 contact FPC connector of the type that Apple uses along the left edge of the circuit board (near the top). Hand soldering forty 0.5 mm pitch contacts is a pain the ass and I had to retouch several things. Fortunately, I had access to a microscope to check out my handy work. However, soldering under the microscope is not a skill that I possess, so the one time I tried that, I couldn’t keep track of where my hands were and I let the iron melt away as some of the plastic case (fortunately a part on the inside of the iPod). Anyway, I eventually made all the necessary connections and I am pleased to say that Jenn’s iPod is back to a fully functional state.