Before the internet, when someone moved to another city, it was a lot of work to stay in touch with them. If they moved to another province, even harder. If they moved across the ocean, fogeddaboudit.

But with the internet, the world is smaller. You can write letters that are received the same day. Long distance calling is way cheaper, and VOIP is widespread. And now, with Facebook, the world is smaller still. As more and more people join, the world shrinks and shrinks and shrinks.

“How do you know so-and-so?”

“Oh, he was my sister’s boyfriend in high school.”

“I went to camp with him when I was twelve.”

And it was pretty cool. We all apologized for what we saw on Facebook, feeling like we were snooping into someone else’s life, and we all readily forgave, knowing that we, too, indulged in the guilty pleasure in our spare hours.

But then it stopped being cool. Facebook started to do all of these really creepy things, connecting their various features together in ways that were startling in the level of automation. Did we even know a computer could do that?

“So-and-so became friends with so-and-so after they both attended ______ last night.”

Email alerts showing up as,

“X (friends with Y) commented on Z’s status.”

How on earth did a computer know that Y was the closest connection between us and X when it was Z’s status that was commented on? Why didn’t it just say X was friends with Z?

And then, people stopped apologizing for what they’d seen on Facebook.

“I really liked that story you told last night,” says an acquaintance in a large group in real life, and it takes you a moment to realize what they’re talking about. You have an assumed audience and since the acquaintance didn’t comment or like the status they are referring to, you are startled that they’ve even read it.

I’ve done this to others, too. I struck up a conversation with a slight acquaintance at church by asking her about a picture she was tagged in on Facebook.

The argument is that these things were posted for everyone to see, which is true. But I think those of us who saw these technologies emerging are becoming more wary of them. And it isn’t just what the technology is capable of, but what it allows the people using it to do.

If I post one status update a week and you read each one of them all year, that’s 52 ‘interactions’ you’ve had with me. That’s enough to make you feel like we’ve been in touch the whole time. But if you’ve never commented, I’ve never had any interaction with you. It’s a false, one-directional relationship, and it’s jarring when that overlaps with a real-world relationship we might have. My statuses are carefully crafted (I am a writer, after all). The witty, dry-humored nuggets you might read online are not really my personality at all. I’m quiet and introspective and even if I think of something funny to say, I don’t say it unless I know the people I am with.

When Mike and I share stories online (even seemingly personal ones), they aren’t very secret. These are things that we have thought about and talked about and feel comfortable sharing with the world.

It is with these thoughts that we are introducing a new policy. M and I are both able to discuss what we post here. We can request that the other not post stories we’re not certain about sharing. We typically run posts by each other before putting them up. But the third person in our family can’t express any opinions whatsoever.

As her parents, it is our prerogative to put her stuff online. But we want to respect that right, to respect her, and to respect the independent adult she will one day be.

We are approaching Clara’s first birthday. In a few hours, she will have made one full trip around the Sun (far out!) and with each extended stand and attempted step, she is becoming a toddler. She was never just a generic baby, but every day she becomes even less so, and becomes more and more Clara.

So we are now archiving the posts on this blog. Anything over a year old is gone—disappeared. We want to respect Clara’s right to choose what pictures and stories of herself are part of the public record. And until she can actually make those choices, we will err on the side of less.

We hope that our friends and family will also respect this policy. Please check with us before posting pictures or videos of her anywhere. On Facebook, please tag M and I in pictures of Clara, and regardless of where they are posted, please remove them after a year. (By letting us know, we will be able to remind you.) We know that our friends and family are as keen to share pictures as we are, and we love seeing them, but we feel strongly about the importance of this. Thank you for respecting our decision on it.

If I’d had more confidence with electronics at the time, I probably would have tried to build a chipamp, but I didn’t, so I bought a vintage Kenwood KA-7100 for about $100.

Since the beginning, the filter switches on the front panel have had bad contacts. Early on, I opened it up and jumpered one of them in the bypass position, to avoid having to wiggle it every time I wanted to listen to something. It’s particularly frustrating when they’re all double-pole switches, and the bad spots are in slightly different places for the left and right channels.

Inside, it’s a pretty neat piece of equipment:

It’s all analog, of course; you can clearly see the multiplexer circuit board on the back wall (top of image), the power supply in the back third, then the transistors in the middle, and main amplifier circuit in the front. And finally, the front wall is the user interface and filters.

In this closeup of the power supply area, you can see the AC voltage coming in from the transformer on the left, and separate diode bridges to rectify DC for the left and right channels (just to either side of the big relay labeled DEC). On the right, the red and white wires feed DC to the phonograph input preamp and filter circuitry.

The wires exiting that board at its top (near the relay) are the final amplified audio, going to the speaker wire screw terminals and headphone jack.

The massive capacitors at the bottom smooth the output voltage from the power supply. The relay is part of a soft-start circuit; it helps limit the rush of current which would otherwise occur to fill those capacitors when the device is first powered on.

These are wire wrap connections, “popular for large scale manufacturing in the sixties and early seventies.” This is the interface to the multiplexer. The wires with blue and yellow stripes are the left and right signal departing, red is DC power, and the other wires (with black stripes) are all grounds.

Here is the other end of those wires, at the input to the filter circuit board. The signal path proceeds in a serpentine path around this board, ending with the main potentiometer (the volume control).

Here is the exit from the filter board, transmitting filtered and volume-controlled left and right channel audio to the main amplifier.

After the amplifier, there is another mechanical multiplexer, this time to choose between speakers—the unit supports an A set, B set, or both.

This is the underside of the power supply rectifier.

It’s amazing looking at these boards: single layer PCBs, through-hole components, everything hand-soldered. Nowadays, something like this would have a microcontroller and be built on four-layer boards using monolithic chips like the LM4780. And everything that could would be a surface-mount device. The proliferation of surface-mount devices has been essential for the miniaturization of electronics in the past thirty years. Also cost-reduction, since surface-mount components can be easily populated by machine (using reflow soldering).

It’s been a great amp, but over time, the switches have gotten worse, and now the main volume control pot has bad spots too.

As well as music, we also use this amp for our television audio. It sounds like such a first-world problem having to get off the couch to change the volume, but the reality is that Clara sleeps literally in the very next room, so it’s nice to be able to actively modulate the loudness of a movie we’re watching.

I’d been looking for a while for a good microcontroller project, and modernizing this amp has been a great one to work on. I’m in the process of developing a schematic for a simple AVR board which will replace the existing multiplexer and filter boards, and provide the following features:

• volume control
• multiplexing between inputs
• detection of audio in inputs
• automatic power on/off of the main amp
• dual seven-segment display (for volume level)
• trainable infrared receiver
• mechanical encoder interface for a physical volume knob

In the Nerd Handbook, Michael Lopp describes nerds not just as having, but needing to have, a project. This has been a fun one to immerse myself in, and I’m looking forward to sharing more details about component selection, layout, fabrication, and testing.

For about two or three weeks, Clara was nodding.

We would ask her if she wanted something, and when she did, she would nod. Vigorously when it was urgent and more relaxed when it wasn’t. We could tell that she was still experimenting with it. Sometimes we would ask her a question and she would pause before slowly nodding, as if to say, “Hmm. I wonder what will happen when I do this?” And we’re almost certain that she doesn’t understand that nodding means “yes”, which is an affirmation. We’re pretty sure that the connection went as far as, “When they say a word I recognize and that’s what I want, if I make this totally arbitrary gesture, I get it!”

Oh the power, for her and for us! She had the power to get what she wanted by simply shaking her head! We had the power to communicate with her and almost completely eradicate frustration for all of us!

And then, one day, it stopped.

She was in her high chair, banging her tray to communicate her dissatisfaction with the meager offering we peasants had provided. So I did what I had been doing since she started nodding. I plucked alternatives off the shelf (“Cracker? Banana? Cheerios?”) and showed them to her.

“Is this what you want?” I asked, raising my eyebrows and nodding.

But she didn’t move. She didn’t nod. She didn’t point. Her eyes didn’t even grow wide with excitement. She merely watched me with a superior gaze as if to say, “Oh, I’m done with that game. That was sooo two weeks ago.”

And it continued the rest of the day. I persisted in believing that she would nod as she always had– maybe she was just having an off day– and she persisted in keeping her head still. Nothing would sway her.

“Sleep?”

“Potty?”

“Milk?”

“Want to crawl around naked, play with extension cords, and eat dust?”

Even such a promise would not shake her from her staunch abstainance.

But that is how it goes. The experiment is done at present. Something in the future will trigger her interest and it will emerge again. Until then, we have to get by as we always used to: a checklist of all her needs and the endurance to try each one until she seems content again.

The only trick is that you need two special ingredients: citric acid, and rennet. We were all ready to order these online, but then we found that they were both stocked by our local specialty grocery store.

The first step was to gently heat up a gallon of whole milk to about room temperature, and add citric acid powder, to make it curdle:

Then you add the rennet, which “clobbers” the milk into curds:

The milk is now clearly dividing between curds and whey, so the remainder of the production is about extracting whey from the curds so that we get a soft mozzarella cheese, rather than a really soft, crumbly cheese (like ricotta).

This is the final stage, warming the curd mass in the microwave, draining off whey, and then stretching and kneading them into a cheesy, mozzarella-y blob:

And what did we do with the result? Made pizza, of course.

This first effort was a bit of a mixed result. For starters, I was too stingy; I should have put a lot more of the cheese on the pizza. But I also forgot to knead in the salt, so the overall flavour was more bland than creamy or cheesy. It also didn’t melt the way we expected it to—it kind of got toasted and crumbly, rather than melty and gooey. Tara reckons I probably didn’t do enough of the stretching and kneading in that final step, which will be something to watch out for when we do this again.

There was a lot of whey leftover—I ended up using most of it over the course of last week in place of water when making rice, bread, and the pizza dough.

We are indeed intending to do this again sometime, but given that it takes a lot of milk and effort to make not a whole lot of cheese, the product will have to come out really stellar in order to feel that it’s worth doing this over just stocking up on Cracker Barrel when it goes on special.

I can imagine that this kind of project would be really awesome if you had a lot of surplus milk in your household—for example, by living on (or near) a dairy farm. These were the instructions we followed, for the ambitious.

Two weeks ago, my hand slipped as I was filling up the reservoir for our humidifier—not the first time I had dropped it, but this time it was mostly full; down it fell into the bottom of the bathtub. Crack.

I love making things. I love making new things out of leftovers and waste. I love fixing things that other people would throw away (sometimes after they have already done so). I love improving things that aren’t even broken, like waxing our kitchen drawers so they slide more easily, or changing the circuitry in a toy to reduce the volume of its sounds. There are dozens of things in our home which I have built, rescued, fixed, improved upon, or otherwise fiddled with.

So it makes me very sad when I break something beyond repair. Beyond repair? Me and my tube of porcelain epoxy will do our best, but I know it’s not the same. It won’t be as strong, and it won’t look as nice. Some things can be fixed back to the way they were or better, but a lot of things cannot.

I tried to fix the reservoir for the humidifier, but even with silicone sealer along the crack, it still leaks too much to be useable. I’m going to try once more with superglue, but it may well be finished. I know that it’s only $50 to replace it, but in some ways, the inexpensiveness of it actually makes it worse: Much less than being something carefully considered before purchase, and then maintained and adapted over a long useful life of service, it is a handful of cheap plastic parts which were designed and built not to last, but to perform a minimally satisfactory function, and be discarded at the first sign of trouble.

Is it wrong to feel so sentimental about stuff?

I was reminded of this recently at our small group meeting. Clara is definitely an Angel or Textbook baby. She is predictable and easygoing. She is portable and loves meeting strangers. She is also a Spirited baby. She is very vocal and knows very clearly what she wants and doesn’t want. When she’s upset or excited and gets going, it takes time to calm herself down. She is also Extroverted, meaning she gets her energy from being around people.

Because of this variety in her personality, it has been confusing and difficult trying to convince her to sleep when we’re outside of the house. At home, she goes down like clockwork. After a quick cuddle (more for mom’s sake than baby’s), she goes down in her crib and easily puts herself to sleep.

But when we are visiting friends and family, it is often a disaster. We try to put her down to sleep when she becomes tired, but it ends up being a battle with all parties feeling miserable by the time it’s over. I couldn’t understand why she struggled and have often felt embarrassed at such struggles. Babies’ sleeping patterns are, for better or worse, a huge topic of conversation and it was embarrassing to tell people that Clara was a wonderful sleeper only to have it proven wrong during every visit where she required a nap.

At small group, I finally decided that I would take whatever time Clara needed to settle. I told the group to start without me and after setting up Clara’s sleeping arrangements, I held her and gently rocked while praying for immeasurable patience. And it was while I was holding Clara that I had the above realizations.

Clara could hear everyone moving around upstairs and wanted to be part of the action. She was exhausted, but she wanted to explore the new place. She was wound up from seeing and interacting with people she knows and likes. She needed my help to transition to sleep. God gave me patience beyond measure and we rocked. She would settle her head on my chest and then suddenly push herself away, energy warring with her desire for sleep. We rocked for 20 minutes, and then finally, as my baby does, she put her head on my chest and it stayed there. Her body relaxed, her breathing slowed, and when I put her in her bed, she didn’t protest. I wished her a goodnight, crept up the basement stairs, and Clara put herself to sleep like she does at home.

I had originally intended to get some nice hinges, clasps, and pieces of Lexan, but hadn’t had a chance to get out to Home Depot, so after a particularly exasperating day, went ahead and executed with what we had available: a big cardboard box, and some spare hardware left over from other projects.

This is what remains of a shelving unit I built back in 2007. It has served well in its various roles, but is probably bound for a future basement or rec-room, so I wasn’t too concerned about putting some holes in the front to fasten this piece on.

And it’s easy access to get at our games—just twist down the clasp at the bottom, and fold the whole thing up:

The other shelf is a flimsy, inexpensive unit from The Brick, but the shelves are nicely finished on the front, which I didn’t want to permanently ruin:

For this one, you untie the bow, and then pull off the cardboard to gain access.

The hooks are screwed to the underside of the second shelf, so will be easily removable in the future.

As Clara becomes older and cleverer, these simple measures will no longer stump her. But that is part of the excitement. The older she gets, the tougher she’ll be—there may well be a point sometime in the future where she has to pull over a pile of boardgames on herself in order to learn a real-world consequence of getting into stuff she knows she’s not supposed to be into.

For now, though, it’s easier and safer to just block her access.

So it was in equal parts for her amusement and containment that we acquired a Jolly Jumper.

Unfortunately, though, our apartment lacks any sort of lintel trim on its handful of doors, which presents a problem for installing the clamp.

“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just put up some trim, and away we’ll go!”

But then, if I’m getting out the tools for this anyway, why not just hang the thing somewhere we can minimize the likelihood of wall-bashing, and maximize the fun?

A quick Home Hardware trip later, and we’ve got a beastly new hook in the middle of the living room. I confirmed with a stud finder that the fire alarm was in a joist, and put our new hook in the same one. I swung briefly from it myself just to confirm–if it can support 180 lbs of daddy, it should be good for 16 lbs of Clara, no matter how jollily she jumps.

I don’t think she really gets it yet, but we’ll give her a few more chances and see how it goes.

Boing.