Ian Schaefer

Some of you who attended the ATF conference in Terra Alta, WV a few years ago may remember my presentation on the ‘Monotype’ Disaster. In short, the first caster I acquired was damaged during shipping. I’ve had it in storage ever since, with the intention of using it as a parts machine. In the mean time I obtained three additional casters – two fully functioning and another for parts. The costs of storing these large machines has finally forced my hand and I will be disassembling it and offering caster parts from the original machine. In fact, the damage to the first caster – though mortal – was restricted to a a very specific area. Most of the late-model british composition caster are in pristine condition.

If you are in need of Monotype Composition Caster parts, please contact me. I am particularly interested in trading parts for composition and display matrices, as well as wedges, stopbars, keybars and other tools of the typecasting trade.

Smiles, Everyone Demo CD Sleeves

Keeping with the do-it-yourself approach my band has taken to producing our demo, we’ve opted to print letterpress sleeves for the promo cd. Production is underway here at my print shop in Lititz. Read the rest of this entry »

It took a bit longer to complete than we expected, but my band, Smiles, Everyone, finally has a new eight-song demo. You can listen to it here. We are actively seeking gigs in Philadelphia and Lancaster, PA (and points in between) for the summer and fall of 2009.

If, like us, you crave new, original music, please listen and tell us what you think.

Super Snark Sailboat - Aft port view

I just bought this sailboat, an 11′ Super Snark. I’ve wanted to learn to sail for a few years—this seemed like the perfect sailboat with which to start. It is purportedly unsinkable and very stable. The ABS clad EPS foam hull certainly seems very durable and indeed, could not possibly sink even if completely swamped.

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This is the first live test of the setup described in the previous post.

Every now and then—well, every spring—I get the urge to go hiking, which to me means looking for interesting, beautiful, or uncommon flora and fauna. Over the years my interests have varied among ferns, fish, insects, birds, fungi, and trees. This year it’s back to the ferns and fern allies. I recently had the idea to start recording more data about my ‘discoveries’, and with the iPhone, GPS, camera, this blog, and geotagging, I could have a bit of geek fun recording it.
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Here is my current bass rig for Smiles, Everyone, which includes:

Ampeg Bass Rig

Fender American Deluxe V bass
Humphrey modded Boss CS-3 Compressor
Electroharmonix Big Muff
MXR M-80 DI +
TC Electronic M-350 processor
Ampeg SVT3-Pro amplifier
Switches for amp mute and eq boost, M-300 bypass and tap tempo

I don’t use half of these pedals 90% of the time. Only the compressor and mute are essential. M-300 is for occasional phaser and tremolo. Big Muff is for fun.

In mid-December I finally plunged headlong into Facebook. It’s really astonishing how much time I’ve spent attending to it over the past month–to the detriment of this website. At the same time, I’ve noticed just how many visitors end up on this site from Facebook…so I must attend to it, too. Get my house in order for the new guests, namely old friends and new, who are curious what I’ve been doing and why I have a website.

Having left the design unfinished makes me particularly uneasy. I also noticed that there are a few missing photos, victims of the move from TextPattern to WordPress. And then there’s the new band website…a similar port, but with a smaller database, thankfully.

A friend recently asked for my input on building a pond at his mod little house in Lancaster. Now in the second winter on our pond, I have some time to philosophize about the process of designing and building a pond.

I like to think of a pond as a model of nature… Read the rest of this entry »

Dan got a new MacBook Pro today. Aaron got an iPhone. Started me thinking about the computers I’ve used or owned over the years.

Prehistory

Coleco Pong – Dad had one at the little house he lived in after my parents divorced. I was maybe 8…or 9 or 10, which would be sometime 1977 – 1979.

Commodore Pet – at Heinz Semder’s import office in Brooklyn. I only really sat in front of it.

Borroughs 68000 – I took a Pascal programming course at Franklin & Marshall when I was in seventh grade. We used terminals (Honeywell or Teledyne?), but I have no idea what the OS was. Once they toured us through the Burroughs 68000 mainframe room. What a cool memory. A roomful of well organized blue refrigerator shapes. Whisking tape machines…and those massive, multiple-platter hard disk machines that were about the size of a dishwasher. Capacity? I don’t know. Each student had a chance to make a punched card—probably with our name.

Mattel Intellivision – Shared it with my step-dad for years.

Commodore Vic-20 – Dad bought this and I started learning BASIC programming. Cool sound chip, simple as it was. 1/4 audio tape storage.

Commodore 64 – My first computer. Awesome sound chip, SID. Programmed in BASIC, Logo, Pascal, broke things in 6510 assembly language. Massive external 5-1/4 floppy drive. Used GEOS for a short time before it finally fried…something in the power supply must have shorted, because when I opened it up, paths on the circuit board were warped and wavy. Melted!

Atari 1200XL – My friend Rick got this for Christmas. Best thing I did on it was write a program to make random geometric shapes. We thought they results would make great OP t-shirts.

Apple Macintosh SE – Borrowed from Casey Dixon, who would later become my wife.Apple Quadra 605 – The first computer I bought on my own.

Apple Quadra 630 - Second computer I bought.

iMac – This was Casey’s.

Apple PowerMac 8200AV -

Apple iBook – Casey’s first generation iBook I think.

iMac G4 17″

Apple Powerbook G4 – One of many laptops I used at Ritter. Other machines I used there include Quadra 950 with Daystar accelerator, PowerMac 7200, PowerMac 9500, G3, G4.

Apple Powerbook G4 – 15″ Casey’s last school computer.

Apple iBook xxxx – I’m not sure which one Casey has right now.

Dell Latitude 810 – My Develisys laptop. Ah,…Microsoft Windows. Words cannot express…

iMac 24″ Intel Core Duo – my current machine.