Sunday, April 3, 2016

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Just finished putting the last coat of orange paint on the sides for my trailer.  The experience of painting this trailer has convinced me that I need to get a paint sprayer :)  While I was putting the next-to-last coat on (yesterday) I remembered that I have to do some black painting, of bare metal parts.  These are the latches that hold the top corners between sides together, plus the exposed bolts on the pockets mounted on the bottom.  I will do this last bit of painting (or possibly just the first coat, if it turns out to need two) this afternoon.  By Monday afternoon, or possibly Tuesday morning, I should be ready to actually use this trailer!

Yesterday afternoon Debbie and I ventured down to Maddox Ranch House for our “lupper”.  We both had fried chicken for our entree.  I thought it was the best I've had up here, but Debbie likes the fried chicken at Angie's better.  They both are very good to be sure.  I had soup (a cheesy broccoli and carrot cream soup) and Debbie had a salad (with homemade raspberry vinaigrette dressing); both were outstanding.  There were of course all the usual things about the meal to be fond of: the bread, the drinks, the excellent service.  But then there was dessert: fresh strawberry pie for me, raspberry cream pie for Debbie.  That strawberry pie was strawberry heaven on earth: perfectly ripe berries, a sauce that had just the right sweetness, and fresh (real!) unsweetened whipped cream.  I didn't taste Debbie's raspberry pie, but judging from the noises she made while eating it, it must have been pretty spectacularly good.

While we were enjoying the meal, I saw one particular waitress walk by our table a dozen or so times.  She was perhaps 35 years old, and not a beauty by conventional standards – but she had a wonderfully sunny and cheerful face as she greeted all the diners and coworkers she passed.  Her smile was infectious; it cheered me up every time I caught her (which was often!).  On our way out of the restaurant, she happened to be walking toward me, so I stopped and told her how much her beautiful smile had cheered me – and I got my own 10 kilowatt smile in response.  That was fun :)

Paper tape...

Paper tape...  This article brought back all sorts of memories for me.  Several of the earliest computers I built (back in the mid- to late-'70s) used paper tape as their only non-volatile memory.  I started with a baudot teletypewriter (a Teletype Model 28 ASR) jointly purchased with a friend that we named “Ralph”.  When I got tired of waiting several hours for a long tape to load, I built an optical tape reader that could read a couple hundred characters per second – a huge advance.  My little hobby area had a large number of paper tape rolls, each containing the object code of a program or the text source code.

Hobby computing was just a bit different back in those days!  Not better, just different.  In some ways it was more exciting, because all of us participating in the hobby had the sense that we were oddballs on the fringe of something growing.  We really had no sense at all for how big and important these little computers would become – we were just having fun pushing the envelope of what was possible...

Local online paper...

Local online paper ... pranks the community for April Fool's.  The idea of a “Gentleman’s Club” (a common euphemism for stripper bar) in Cache County is pretty much unimaginable – unless it were the kind of gentleman's club they reported!