Puttering in the Study

Study Ceiling additions: Thomas Jefferson & George C. Marshall

Got two more ceiling medallions up this week - the long-awaited Thomas Jefferson for American history and Gen. George C. Marshall for military history.

I decided to do both at once since they are side by side, and I felt like I had gotten better at getting better images to work from.  What I've learned the last few is that I need to plan on four shades, with most of the face being the lightest.  To get the right model, I usually have to brighten or darken the image so the contrast looks right, and then "posterize" the image for four shades, going back to the light/dark settings till I have the kind of image I think I can paint.  This was especially necessary for the Jefferson medallion, since I really wanted to use a particular Rembrandt Peale portrait, and it was very difficult to get it to resolve into normal patterns of light and shadow.

Oddly, the Jefferson came out pretty well, while the Marshall is pretty bad.  With the cove lighting on, it looks way more like Eisenhower! But a man in a suit is a hard image to get right to start with when you have no artistic background, and the textured ceiling is not helping.  

But I am glad to now have all four of the history stacks covered - world, American, military and naval.  The south wall now has five of nine, the west wall two of four, and the east wall, still just one of eight.

(Complete coincidence it's Marshall and Jefferson - I just got that).

Study ceiling: Constantine XI Palaeologus faux bas relief

As I've posted before, Constantine XI Palaeologus is my favorite Byzantine emperor, and I've been looking forward to getting his faux bas relief into place over my world history stack in the study.

At the right side of the picture is my first attempt at portrait, that of Admiral Nimitz over the Naval History stack.  I decided to do these in round porthole-shaped panels, so the first step was to insert panels over the stacks (I did three at the same time today so I'd be a step ahead for U.S. and military history when I get around to them).  I didn't include portholes in my original design for the "parapet" in the ceiling, but it's an easy detail to add.  )The photo at right shows a series of circular panels already added on the east wall).

To do this, I take a protractor and draw the necessary circles on the ceiling.  Then I pick out the highlights and shadow lines, and paint over the old lines, shown at right as I'm finishing up.

 

There are no known reliable images of Constantine, the last Byzantine emperor, and I sure was not going to use the most common one , a truly awful woodcut shown at right 
so I decided to go with the statuet of his that stands in Cathedral Square in Athens (which I was happy to show off to the boys when we were there in 2011).

The first step is to locate a good head shot (at left), then "posterize" it is Picasa where it's down to four shades (at right).   Next you print it out and use a protractor to figure out how it fits in the circle, and mark a grid to help in transferring the photo to the wall. The relevant sheet for Admiral Nimitz and the sheet for the future Thomas Jefferson are shown behind

 

The next stage is to transfer the drawing to the ceiling, shown at right. 

 

Obviously I can't draw, but you really don't have to - if you haven't figured it out by now, this is now just paint by numbers, and you keep overpainting till it looks right.   In this case, I had an image of Constantine's original signature in the original Greek, so I extracted his first and last names so I could put it under his portrait, instead of Latin letters.  

Very enjoyable project - I think start to finish less than four hours. 

Organizing the Library - Shelf IV.4 - Ancient Greece

I have kept the books in my library in a database for many years, but as the database has migrated from one Palm application to another, and now to an iPad app, the database's capabilities have grown.  Sometimes some data has dropped off, or numbering has been lost, so I have been trying to work through a shelf each weekend checking the database against the shelf's contents to make sure that all the books are in the database, each book has its library number pencilled lightly inside the front cover, and most recently, that each record in the database includes a photo of the book.

Today I was in the world history stack (stack IV), shelf 4 - the shelf devoted mostly to ancient Greece.  The sculptures of the Acropolis and Pheidias' Athena Parthenos should give it away.  It sits above Byzantine history (which features the icon of Christ Pantocrator and you can barely see the minarets of Hagia Sophia), and below Roman/Italian, with tiny models of Saint Peter's and the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  I did leave three books unentered at right as the program started crashing.  I'll add them later.

But this helps me tell when I'm in a bookstore whether I have a certain book already or not - or whether the copy that I have might be an older one.  I only note location as room in the database (here "study"), and not by stack and shelf, because that would be compulsive-retentive.

New study audio equipment - Sony STR-DN1030 receiver

I'm upgrading in the study again - this time it's a new receiver, a Sony STR-DN1030, and new back surround speakers, Polk Audio T15s.  

I decided it was time to upgrade because at present I have no control over the receiver's setting from the study because I keep the receiver (which is too deep to fit on the study shelves) in the adjacent wiring closet, along with the satellite box.  I moved it there in 2008 after getting my Harmony 890 RF remote.  The original plan was to have the back of the shelving removable so that I could have full access to the back of the A/V equipment, but while we framed the wall that way, after the bookcases went in I wasn't comfortable hacking a huge rectangular hole - which would have to be recessed for the equipment to go back into it to get the depth I needed - in the back of the new cherry bookcases.  So for several years (2004-2008) I just lived with the A/V equipment overhanging the shelving.  As I said, I moved it in 2008 when I got a RF remote, but always had the problem that I couldn't see what the receiver was set on, and the codes the remote could access were usually "scroll" ones, so I was never sure if the insanely complex sound settings were right.  

What I needed was a GUI interface so that the receiver's setting could be viewed and changed on the TV.  That's what this unit has.  It's a terribly, terribly primitive and slow interface, and still suffers from the same problem that it doesn't give you a full menu of selections, but it's better than what I had.

What I had not anticipated was how much the new receiver would change my setup.  Instead of the TV getting its video via HDMI from the Blu-ray, satellite box and Apple TV, with the audio from all three plus the SACD player going to the receiver, now all the HDMI cables run to the receiver, and one HDMI cable runs to the TV.  When I got done, I had a stack of RCA cables, plus an unneeded IR audio and coax audio (I think they're called).  And for the first time, the subwoofer is working for both audio CDs and TV/DVDs.  That's a nice improvement.

I had been worrying about how to hook my old SACD player up, since I really like the sound it gets on the few SACD disks I have, and was surprised to find that the Blu-ray player played SACDs at (apparently) full quality using its HDMI cable.  So I could take out my bright silver SACD player completely.  That meant I could adjust the shelving to accommodate only the very slim Blu-ray player under the TV plus the Apple TV box next door.  I mean, if the Apple TV light wasn't on, you wouldn't know there was anything on that shelf at all now - and the center speaker can stand upright (it was bothering me greatly that it was on its side because the lettering was running vertical..).

Of course it's taken me several hours to get the wiring transferred and the old cables pulled out of the way, and then redo all the settings on the Harmony remote, but now I have the den activities down from four to three (the separate audio CD activity is gone): Study TV, Study Blu-ray and Apple TV.  I have not yet been able to get the Apple commands to work through the Harmony, but that's really not that big of a deal.

I looked at upgrading the Harmony to a 900, but it offered very little new for a $350 price tag, so I stayed with the 890.  I don't like the 890 much, frankly, but it's working okay, and I have figured out the programming so it can control all the stuff in the study and the home theater upstairs.

The receiver is also wifi-ready - thats its big selling point - so it can receive AirPlay signals from an iPad or iPhone, as well as being controllable using iPhone apps (which is really would prefer to the awful GUI).  The problem is that without the remote I can't log it onto the house's wifi.  I have a IR repeater coming to let me use the receiver remote in the study for that next week.  I tried hooking up a small TV in the closet to do it in there, but neither the RCA nor the component jacks worked with my old Toshiba TV.  So the Internet will just have to wait.  As a practical matter, I don't need it except for audio settings because the Apple TV lets me do whatever I want with the Apple devices, and both it and the Blu-ray player have access to all the online services (Netflix, Amazon, YouTube) including the radio services like Pandora.  I could hook the Apple up directly using the front USB port (although it would mean running a cable from the closet through the wiring hole to the study shelving) but there's just no need.

As I mentioned, I also got two small bookshelf speakers by Polk to replace the previous 1994 Boston Acoustics, which got moved to the back after I blew one during the Apollo 13 launch sequence in 2007.  The blown one still buzzed badly when something loud was played.  The one remaining good one I promoted to center front, to replace a cheap Pioneer, and I have been very happy with them so far.  You can see it at right, over the subwoofer, which had to stand upright because it's too deep to lay down.  I really need to come up with something to put over the subwoofer, because that's really a lot of black down there.

So a few notable improvements over the previous setup - and now we have two unneeded Sony receivers, not counting the college Sony and law school Pioneer (I actually think I gave that one away).  

Study ceiling update; Admiral Nimitz goes up over the naval history books

With moving work e-mail and calendaring to Google Apps, it's become a lot easier to work in the study at home, and I've been spending more time here.  One of my favorite work breaks to to keep plugging away at the study ceiling. 

I have almost finished the second phase of work, which consists of adding a parapet or dado at the base of the ribs, with recessed paneling.  To see the difference, compare the picture to the left (before) with the picture above (after). What you'll see that's new is the parapet running just above the bookcases.  To the left below is a detail of the dado wrapped around the base of one of the recessed columns.  (I specifically copied the boxes from the railings around my mother's house).  I particularly like the one over the fireplace, where I did three panels to match the paneling over the fireplace.

Today was also a red-letter day as during one of the breaks I started on the next phase, which is adding faux bas relief medallions in the new recessed panels above each of the bookcases with my favorite historical figure for that subject.  (You ever get the feeling I think too much?  Me either). 

I had been planning to start with Thomas Jefferson over the American History stack, but I happened to run the picture of Admiral Nimitz (for the Naval History stack) through the photo editing process in Picasa and he came out far easier to do in four shades than the Rembrandt Peale of Jefferson I have been working with, so I skipped the practice on the pine board and went straight to translating a print of the photo onto the ceiling.

First step, as I mentioned, is taking the original picture, and in this case changing it to black & white, boosting the contrast, and converting it to a four shade basically "paint by numbers" image.  I then created a grid on the picture and a corresponding grid on the wall and during breaks while working on, well, work (after all, it is the Labor Day weekend) , I added the four colors, going back and forth between the colors as I learned which paint brushes worked best for which parts.  I also changed a couple of the colors as I went, as the relative contrast didn't look quite right, and I expect to keep changing it as I work my way around the room.  Finally I added the name below, and here's a before (with workshop door open, I now realize) and after of the naval history stack with Admiral Nimitz glowering down from on high.

No one will mistake me for an artist, certainly, but it adds a little more texture to the ceiling, and certainly a lot more personality!  And with it being at least six feet away, and barely six inches wide, it can get away with a lot of artistic inadequacies, but it seems to be doing what I wanted, which is adding more detail and texture to the ceiling.

The next candidate, as time permits, is Mr. Jefferson, and after that Constantine XI Palaeologus for the world history stack (last Byzantine emperor, thanks for asking), and eventually Frederick Law Olmsted and Andrea Palladio for landscape architecture and architecture, respectively.  Fiction looks like J.R.R. Tolkien, theology Pope John Paul II, Cowboys Tom Landry (yes, it's a stack as well, and I am from the school of thought that Coach Landry's the greatest Cowboy of them all), and I'm still undecided on military history and science fiction (two categories you'd think I'd have strong feelings about), as well as music and film.  And even with those filled, I still have twelve more panels that will eventually have medallions, once I figure out what "subject" the medallion should be for them.  But even the blank medallions look really good, I realized when I started drawing them today.

But I expect, actually, to start on the clouds for the skylight next, since that's a far more glaring gap than unpopulated medallions.  Just depends on how many breaks I need tomorrow...

 

 

Study Electronics Updates - Apple TV

While the boys are at Camp Fern I have been making some updates to the study electronics.

The study PC was really getting cramped for hard drive space and has slowed down so bad, and there is so much it won't run now (it's an XP machine and I haven't had luck upgrading machines to 7) that I replaced it with a new Dell Inspiron 2330 all-in-one that gets rid of the separate tower.  I used the transfer cable to move files and it worked out generally okay.  Still working on transferring Quicken and some of the other programs.  I also backed up my external hard drive backup with an online backup with iDrive Sync.  It will take days to get all the documents and photos I need to save to back up online, but once they do, I'll have a secure backup, plus access to documents from any machine.  I also made sure iDrive syncs with iAnnotate, so if I want to work on home documents the same way I do office ones, I can.  I may end up adding the office to iSync because I certainly have the room.  Have not decided on that yet.

The old machine was still great for Internet and basic office work (word processing, etc.) so I moved it up to Collin & Parker's room along with the good computer speaker system, replacing the two really old PCs they had up there - neither of which could even get on the Internet.  Speaking of which, the machine is pre-wifi, so today I added a wireless-N adapter so when they get back from Fern they can play games in their room - someone they've rarely been able to do before.  So right now they have, for the first time, a nice, neat new computer setup.  They will be so excited to have their own computer now.

Next up were some upgrades to the TV/audio system.  First up was an Auvio docking station for my iPhone so I can listen to my Audible books while painting the ceiling.  It is snugged in below the TV and has its own remote, but it is an "application" on the Logitech remote now, so I can click on it and play Audible or music files.  The second is now largely moot, but it's still a nice option.

I was reading some articles yesterday morning about viewing photos on a TV and one of the applications discussed was Apple TV .  When I looked it up, it looked like a really useful option for the study, since it would

1. allow the TV to stream audio and video from the new PC via Home Sharing on iTunes; and
2. allow me to put images/video from the iPad up on the TV. 

It has other features as well - access to online movie content through iTunes or Netflix, but that overlaps partially with what the Sony Blu-ray player already does (as well as the Roku players in our bedroom and the twins' room) so I doubt I'll use that much.  So I got that installed yesterday and set it up as an additional application on the Logitech remote just now. 

I initially wasn't going to run the audio through the receiver, just the TV via the HDMI cable, but after I realized how handy the streaming audio from my iTunes account was going to be, and how bad the audio from the TV sounded, I switched the optical audio cable that had been a backup source for the SACD receiver to the Apple TV, and it sounds great.  The location of the unit itself took a little thought - I decided to put the unit in the study, instead of the wiring closet, which meant running a second IR emitter from the extender in the wiring closet IR extender to the study (there was already one, serving the Blu-ray and SACD players).  Setup of the remote went fine.

In checking the remote's settings, I ran across the same problem I have had ever since moving the audio receiver into the wiring closet - I can't see what its settings are, and as a result get weird audio surround settings.  The underlying problem is that many of the receiver's settings scroll through, so while the remote can dictate what inputs are set, you can't control remotely what the sound settings are, and thus might get some bizarre "concert hall" sound settings or inappropriate movie surround settings without knowing it.  I am learning which buttons not to press, but I still probably need to go into into the closet to check what the audio settings are depending on whether I am watching a movie or listening to music if I am really interested in getting the right settings.  (Assuming I can even figure out what those are - what are the "surround" settings for music?)

The basic problem is that the receiver is several inches too deep to fit on the 11" deep study shelves, so it has to go into the closet, but that means I can't see the settings. Hopefully eventually I'll be able to get a smaller receiver, or find a better way to monitor its settings, but for right now, this will have to do.

Update: just looked at some newer receivers, and not only do they display their settings on the attached TV, but the setting are also controllable via iPad/iPhone apps.  And here I thought I had fairly up to date equipment...

First phase of study ceiling completed

I haven't had a chance to post on it since last weekend, but I finally got the first phase of the study ceiling painting completed.  After putting up the ribs and the coffered sections over each end, last weekend I figured out how to do the skylight in the center.  I rolled on a very light flat blue, then painted faux parapets with recessed panels.  The panels line up with the coffers and their sides (and the angles for the parapet corners) were set using a string from the center of the skylight so that from the exact center of the room, the perspective is correct.  That conflicts with the highlights and shadows through the rest of the room, which are correct more or less for one corner of the room, but I thought the skylight really needed to be set for viewing in the center. 

I also worked on the lighting in the room quite a bit.  Changes included:

• Raising the rope lighting behind the cornice so it casts a brighter light on the ceiling
• Cutting metal half circles to place on top of the the wall sconces so that they don't throw light up on the ceiling - just  the bookcases.
• Buying two torchere lamps to throw light on the skylight area to reinforce the illusion that it is daylight.  As they throw a lot of glare at eye level, I've smeared the inside of the alabaster globes with mahogany wood filler (a very thick stain-like material used to fill the pores of mahogany when a smooth surface is desired).  They need more, and I will probably add some oak to end with with an amber-looking globe.

I'm very happy with the way the skylight turned out, but it really does need clouds.  And I have already started on the plan to add a faux parapet above the bookshelves to help fill in the space on the sides

Study ceiling update - first coffer grid in place.

I posted three weeks ago about the first stage of my trompe l'oeil porject for my study ceiling - specifically the nineteen "ribs" that support the main frame for the ceiling.  It took five or six weekends to get that done, but in the process I figured out the right paints to use, and techniques for getting straight lines and for obtaining the right perspective for a three-dimensional shape of a flat surface.  I'm still learning but it's easy to fix mistakes when it's just paint.

This weekend was the first of the two coffered ceiling that will go at each end of the study to accommodate the can light fixtures.  The west end ended up being a piece of cake, since the can lights are 60" apart and that worked out perfectly for a 4 x 4 grid. 

The first step was to mark off a 20 x 20 grid on the ceiling, which I did with thumb tacks and thread, as you can see to the left.  Also marked was the large "cross beam" that separates this end of the ceiling from the center section. 

Next I used a ruler, pencil and a straight edge to mark off the coffers within each grid, including the inner and outer lines, as you can see to the right.

Finally, I painted the new cross beam and the coffers.  It took three tries to get the right color for the "bottom" of the coffers - a 2:1 mixture of the ceiling paint and the principal shadow paint.  It'[s intended to simply be the principal color but in shadow.  The photograph below increases the contrast significantly, so it looks much darker than it actually is.  To the naked eye, the coffers actually don't appear any darker - they just recede.  But as long as the can lights are off, they do sort of disappear into the ceiling.  And the effect when you're sitting under the coffers reading is to make the ceiling look much taller than the previous plain tan paint did.  Your eye is now definitely drawn to the ceiling - it's becoming the most prominent feature in the room.

I have more fiddling with the paint and the pattern that I want to do, but for now I'm just working to get the entire ceiling to this level of finish.  I'll come back later and add details like some panels on the principal beams and some additional shading on the coffer highlights.

That means that the next weekend I can work on it I'll do the corresponding coffered panel for the other end of the room (which doesn't work out nearly as neatly as this end did, unfortunately).  After that I have to start making some hard decisions about what the center section is going to look like, and start fixing the ceiling lighting so that the sconce, cove, and task lighting all work together to show the ceiling at its best.  Right now none of the three is right.

Home Theater Upgrade: Netgear Universal WiFi Range Extender / Universal Wireless Internet Adapter

People really shouldn't leave me at home alone (Jamie's watching musical in Dallas this afternoon and boys are coming back from balloon-watching in Albuquerque) behind I get lonesome and sad and actually go to Walmart after church for entertainment - and there's no telling what I'll buy.

Today's haul was a "couch mouse" for the new stand-up desk at the office, so I can scroll on my pants (it sounds dirty but really, it's not), the new Star Wars Blu-Rays for the herd (we srated watching Episode I before they left and by the time we got to the pod race we'd all decided that standard def on the study TV just was not cutting it), and the proverbial missing links for the home theater.

When we put in the home theater room when we built the house, we included two Cat 5e and two coax runs all the way from the wiring closet - surely that's be plenty, right?  But for some reason I can't seem to connect the right cables to hook the movie room's Blu-Ray player to the router in the wiring closet so it can access the Internet and get to the Netflix and Amazon Instant Video features that I have available in the study and in our bedroom (which use a Roku, I have to point out) and which I use a lot.  And because I was expecting I could, the new Blu-Ray player I got doesn't have wifi - I figured I wouldn't need it.  And because the wiring closet is pretty much on the opposite end of the house, the wireless signal couldn't get to the movie room anyway, and the last time I tried to fix this problem I couldn't find a signal extender, nor did the wifi USB device for the Blu-Ray player actually work.

Well, with electronics, just wait a few weeks and they'll come out with the right gadgets to fix anything.  Today our local Walmart had a Netgear Universal WiFi Range Extender, with a 4 port WiFi adapter.  I plugged it in in Grayson's room, and it got a good connection to the new Cisco router I put in this summer using the WPS button.  I then plugged the Universal Wireless Internet Adapter into the Blu-Ray player in the movie room, and again hit the WPS button and it picked up the extender signal.  I then turned on the projector and ran the setup and damned if the thing didn't fire up and connect on the very first try.  Never had that happen before.  I started up Netflix and Amazon, and both ran just fine.  The audio didn't work at first, but I discovered it didn't work with a DVD either - the old "TV & DVD" setting on the receiver was the culprit, and I found and corrected it.  I then sat down to watch the next episode of Bones on Amazon and a Star Trek animated episode ("Jihad") on Netflix just to test things out.  It's just weird going from a ten inch iPad screen or 40" study TV screen to a six-foot projected image.  I feel like I've just had an inappropriate relationship with Emily Deschanel because I've seen details in her face that nobody but her husband ought to see.  (The Star Trek was animated, but I still feel oddly closer to William Shatner).

I still can't believe it worked - and I'm now downloading and streaming wirelessly over about 100' in what looks to me to be high-def, and I did it by myself (granted it took seven years).  That's important because the screen in the movie room dwarfs everything else in the house, and the audio setup is better than anywhere else - even the study - with the six speakers positioned where they should be.  So if we really want to watch a streaming movie, we have a good place to do it.  At one point I was even doing it while using the same wi-fi network to watch the Eagles and Giants games on DirecTV Sunday Ticket on the iPad - which just got scary.  That's way too much media content to have in your hands.

S.S. New Amsterdam deck chair ... coming along

Well, obviously I need to spend a little time cleaning up the shop, but after a couple of pints of teak oil, the old deck chair from the S.S. New Amsetrdam is looking a lot better.  When I started it was light gray - as weathered as teak can get.  It was a darker brown like this when I got it 16-17 years ago - it's taken that long for the polyurethane someone slapped on it to wear off so I could sand it smooth and re-oil it.

I always assumed this came from the 1950's era liner (built in 1937), but given that two types are circulating on the Internet (at least they have different plates with the ship's name and "first clas only") I'm not sure if it is the predecessor, the 1905-1932 ship.  The plates on it do not look like these, although they say the same thing.

Instead, they are black enamel with brass lettering and outlines.