Why It Took Me a Minimum of 74 Steps to Build a Simple TV Stand

I recently built this TV stand for a spare TV:

Well, that's not quite the final product. The fact is, that there was a major design flaw, which I will explain below.

At a high-level, the process of building it could be broken down into these four steps:
The high-level list of the process was this:

1. Decide to build a TV stand out of wood.
2. Cut the pieces of wood.
3. Screw the pieces of wood together.
4. Attach the stand to the TV.

The fact of the matter, was that in reality, there were many more than four steps in building the stand. In fact, when I wrote them down there were 74 steps.

The point of this post, is that in designing and building something to its final form, there are often an huge number of steps to get to the end that you never considered when you started the project. There's a process you go through of thinking, designing, building, fixing mistakes in the design, fixing mistakes in the building. Most of the time, things don't go as expected and/or you haven't thought through everything that was needed to be successful.

This can apply to many things designed and built including: a software application, a work of fiction, or in this case a simple TV stand made of a few pieces of wood.

The Only Purpose of this Post is to Help People Reflash Their Nexus 7 Tablets

(You probably don't want to read this unless you care about reflashing your 2012 Nexus 7 tablet from Android 5.0 (Lollipop) back to a release that make the tablet usable. After a few missteps I was able to reflash it, and the point of this post is for help others deal with the problems I had while reflashing on a single website, instead of the multiple ones I needed to solve the issues I had.)

How can you tell if you have a light saber or a heavy saber? (How to Entertain Children #1)

For my son Liam's tenth birthday party, his chosen theme was a mashup of Star Wars, Star Trek and Dr. Who. Here's the invitation my wife sent out:

IMAGINE IF YOU COULD TRAVEL ON THE T.A.R.D.I.S. TO A GALAXY FAR, FAR, AWAY AND BOLDLY GO WHERE NO ONE HAS GONE BEFORE....

The Doctor (10th one of course), Captain Picard, and Yoda request your presence at the celebration of Liam turning 10!  

Please drop your children off for a scavenger hunt and birthday treats.

Gifts are welcome but not required. Daleks, Klingons, and storm troopers will be turned away.

WHAT: Liam Rudoff is turning 10!

WHEN: Saturday, February 7, 2015, 1:30 pm - 4:00 pm

WHERE: Gallifrey....no, wait……Alderaan…oh, that won’t work either…Okay…our house 

We promise to have your children returned to this time period and universe by the time you come to pick them up.

Nobody Ever Complains About the Chocolate Covered Toffee (Recipe Included)

One thing I bring quite often to parties is chocolate covered toffee. I've been making it since sometime in the '90s. The recipe is from an inherited 1951 copy of The Joy of Cooking with a broken binding (you will find the latest printings no longer have instructions on how to skin a squirrel, which I have gladly never had need to use).

The toffee is quick and easy to make, I usually have all ingredients on hand, and it will be eaten quickly. This is all that's left of the batch I made yesterday for a gathering:

1 cup sugar
½ cup butter (1 stick), cut into 4 to 8 chunks
¼ cup water
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup sliced almonds, divided in half
6 oz chocolate: chips, chopped or melted

Prepare a cookie sheet with parchment paper, silicone pad, plastic-coated freezer paper (which I use), or grease it if you have no other option.

In a saucepan put the sugar, butter, water and salt. Under high heat, cook without stirring until it reaches 285° F. Take off heat, and immediately stir in ½ cup almonds.

Pour from saucepan (carefully!) onto prepared cookie sheet, and with a spatula spread it until it's about ¼" thick.

Sprinkle chocolate chips or chopped chocolate on top of toffee. Wait about a minute to allow chocolate to melt on the hot toffee, then spread (if you don't have chocolate chips, and you want to avoid chopping bars or chunks of chocolate, just melt in the microwave and spread on top).

Sprinkle the remaining ½ cup almonds on top and use a spatula to press into the still melted chocolate.

When cold and hard, break into pieces. If you need it to harden quickly (which I usually find I do since I wait too long make it before leaving for a party), let cool about 10 to 15 minutes, then place the cookie sheet in the freezer another 10 to 15 minutes.
 

More of Finding my Father in a 1957 Mexican Movie

After my previous posting about a photograph my father, Leonard Rudoff, took of a movie being made in Acapulco and realizing that he was in the movie itself, I decided to buy a DVD of the movie, "El bolero de Raquel" ($6.99 on Amazon) to see if I could get higher resolution view of him than in the YouTube video.

What I didn't realize until I saw the movie on DVD was that in the one minute scene at the pool, he's in three different shots in three different places (so much for continuity).

First, so he can be recognized, from his slide collection here are excerpts from a couple photos of him about the same time in Mexico, one with him swimming in the same pool at Hotel Caleta:

From the DVD, here he is in the background in the movie, first as Cantinflas as the boy are having the drinks poolside:

Then as the headwaiter and Cantinflas argue:

Not high resolution, but clearly him.

And here's a clearer view of him with a camera on the diving board as the waiter is pushed into the pool:

And I might as well show the full photos from above with my father. This is with his brother Alex in their stylish 1950's wear:

 And at the the pool at Hotel Caletas:

I have no idea who the woman is, but there are enough photos of unknown women in his slides that I will likely have a later post entitled, "Who Are These Women That Accompanied My Father and Uncle to Mexico in the 1950's?"

Your Own Words May Unexpectedly Surprise You

Nine years ago, I took a playwriting class called "Unreal Theatre" at Seattle's Richard Hugo House. In that class, I adapted a short story I had written, "The Circumstances Around Steve Wickland not Receiving The Silver Star", into a play.

After the class ended, the instructor, Bret Fetzer, asked if he could produce a single performance of it a late-night cabaret put on by Annex Theatre. Here's a video of the 10 minute production:



Previously in this blog, I wrote of the unexpected emotional resonance that my college band's song had on someone.

But that can happen to the author as well. The last day of the class, four actors came to do readings of the students' plays (not the actors in the above video). These were cold readings; they had not seen the plays before. I provided four copies on my script with lines highlighted for the actors.

As the story unfolded for the actors, they were able to become the characters as they read their dialog for the first time. It's an impressive skill. But what amazed me was that they took my words and brought out an emotional depth to the story whose existence I was completely unaware of, and they did it on the fly.

The actors took my words and made them their own, resulting in an enhancement of my work.

I imagine authors whose work is published as an audio book discover this as well.

I would say this is an extension of my words in my previously mentioned post:

How a piece of art is interpreted is completely out of the hands of the creators. Things can have meaning beyond their creators' intentions.

A play is, of course different from prose. A reader's interpretation of prose is internal, while plays are meant to be interpreted publicly by actors and directors, and the writer may have little say in that interpretation (I was happy enough that Bret wanted to direct my play that I told him to do it anyway he wanted).

(This can go wrong, as shown by any number of bad film adaptations of novels.)

The point of this post is that if you ever hear your work read out loud, don't be surprised if an aspect of your work is revealed that you didn't expect to be there.

(#SFWApro)

I Find My Father in a Scene From a 1957 Mexican Movie as a Waiter Falls into a Swimming Pool

A few years ago I had the thousands of my family's slides scanned. There were family vacations, and also a number of slides of visits my father made to Mexico in the 1950s, before he was married (he died in 1994). 

This was one of the more interesting ones:

This is clearly a photograph of a movie being made at a hotel, and my father managed to capture the exact moment when an actor playing a waiter is falling into the swimming pool:

My brother Matt had the photo up a Flickr page, and a couple of years ago received a message from a Michel:

It is a filming of the Mexican movie "El bolero de Raquel" where there appears recognized actor Mario Moreno "Cantinflas" ... That's a nice memories of that beautiful Acapulco, very different from that of today.

My father also took a photo of Cantinflas:

"El bolero de Raquel" was released in 1957 and can be found on YouTube. Here is the scene that includes the waiter's fall into the pool (1:43 into this video):

Michel identified the location as Hotel Caleta in Acapulco. The hotel and pool are still there:

If you look at my father's photo, you can see a diving board in the foreground, which means my father was either by or on the diving board.

Watching the scene from the movie, the diving board is in the background:

It's very low resolution, but there is someone on that diving board, and from his reverse angle photograph, that must be my father.

Update: I bought a DVD of the movie, and with its higher resolution discovered that he was in three separate shots in the one minute scene at the pool. See new blog post.