Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Jo, our Polish visitor...
Jo, our Polish visitor ... took a bunch of photos while she was here. With her permission, I've reproduced some of them here. It's fascinating to see what catches a visitor's eye when they see our area for the first time!
Paradise ponders...
Yesterday afternoon I started catching up on a mountain of paperwork that's been building on my desk. This morning I'll finish that, and then (I hope!) I can start working my way through my mom's belongings that are now stored in my barn. There will be some sad moments as I do this, I know. Some of them we'll be keeping, some will go to Scott, some will be shipped to various and sundry relatives, but the bulk, I think, will be donated. We may be able to find good homes for some things, but much will go to Deseret Industries – an organization of the Mormon Church that does a great job getting used goods out to people who could use them.
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
Construction progress...
Construction progress... The footers have been curing for the past few days. This morning Jim and his son are here knocking off the forms for the footers. Jim tells me that the concrete contractors will be here later today to set up the forms for the mud room and the sun room foundations. Either later today or (more likely) tomorrow, the concrete truck will be here to pour. At the same time, they'll wheelbarrow concrete to the back yard to fill the six footers for the deck. Progress!
Monday, July 11, 2016
Weather station's solar panels...
Weather station's solar panels... Some time ago I purchased a Weatherhawk 621 weather station, but with all the things going on around here I never got around to installing it. The technology it uses is interesting - it measures all the usual weather factors without using any moving parts. Wind speed and direction is calculated via an ultrasonic system that measures the speed of sound in both directions along three axis 120 degrees apart. Precipitation is measured via a gigahertz radar that measures reflectivity to measure the non-vapor water in the column of air over the station, and the Doppler effect to measure the rate of fall.
It's a heated model, so that no ice will accumulate on the radar antenna and ultrasonic transducers. Because of this, the power consumed by the station is much higher in the winter. The station will be mounted a long way from any power source, so I'm going to use solar panels to charge a couple of truck batteries, and a controller to give me a constant 24 volts. Those solar panels will be pointed toward true south (not magnetic south) to maximize the light they'll catch. But what angle from the vertical should they be?
I'd have guessed something like 45 degrees from the vertical. When I calculate it, though, I come up with approximately 30 degrees from vertical (closer to straight up and down than flat). We're at roughly 41.5 degrees latitude here in Paradise. Add the earth's 23.5 degree tilt to that, and mid-winter the sun's elevation at noon is just 90 - (41.5 + 23.5) = 25 degrees. The rest of the winter it's between 25 and 35 degrees. Splitting the difference to work well all winter long, we get about 30 degrees. That's what we get for living so close to the North Pole!!!
It's a heated model, so that no ice will accumulate on the radar antenna and ultrasonic transducers. Because of this, the power consumed by the station is much higher in the winter. The station will be mounted a long way from any power source, so I'm going to use solar panels to charge a couple of truck batteries, and a controller to give me a constant 24 volts. Those solar panels will be pointed toward true south (not magnetic south) to maximize the light they'll catch. But what angle from the vertical should they be?
I'd have guessed something like 45 degrees from the vertical. When I calculate it, though, I come up with approximately 30 degrees from vertical (closer to straight up and down than flat). We're at roughly 41.5 degrees latitude here in Paradise. Add the earth's 23.5 degree tilt to that, and mid-winter the sun's elevation at noon is just 90 - (41.5 + 23.5) = 25 degrees. The rest of the winter it's between 25 and 35 degrees. Splitting the difference to work well all winter long, we get about 30 degrees. That's what we get for living so close to the North Pole!!!
Singing along...
Singing along... One of the constants of my childhood was the family singing together, led by my mom. We'd sing at all sorts of times and places, but most especially, we sang while in the car on a long trip. My mom was always the one to initiate this, leading us with mainly folk songs, such as You Are My Sunshine, Clementine, or Go Tell Aunt Rhody. Mom loved to sing herself, and often sang while she worked – but she really loved listening to her kids singing along with her. We were mostly terrible singers (especially me!), only occasionally being able to hold a tune, but that didn't seem to matter to mom.
Dad seemed to enjoy listening to us, and would sing along himself during these family songfests. But I cannot recall him ever initiating the singing when mom wasn't there.
I remember coming into the house one time when I was a teenager, probably in the late '60s. Mom was alone in the house and unaware of my entry. I heard her in our living room singing an old country & western song I didn't know (and still don't), singing along to a record playing low. When I walked into the living room, I saw that tears were streaming down her face, and that she was sobbing while she sang. When she saw me she stopped, and seeing my reaction (I was shocked) explained that the song she was listening to was her dad's favorite. She had been extraordinarily close to her dad, and he had passed away a few years before then.
Someone could have done nearly the same thing with me a few minutes ago. I was listening to a YouTube video of “You Are My Sunshine”, and it brought back instant memories of mom...
Dad seemed to enjoy listening to us, and would sing along himself during these family songfests. But I cannot recall him ever initiating the singing when mom wasn't there.
I remember coming into the house one time when I was a teenager, probably in the late '60s. Mom was alone in the house and unaware of my entry. I heard her in our living room singing an old country & western song I didn't know (and still don't), singing along to a record playing low. When I walked into the living room, I saw that tears were streaming down her face, and that she was sobbing while she sang. When she saw me she stopped, and seeing my reaction (I was shocked) explained that the song she was listening to was her dad's favorite. She had been extraordinarily close to her dad, and he had passed away a few years before then.
Someone could have done nearly the same thing with me a few minutes ago. I was listening to a YouTube video of “You Are My Sunshine”, and it brought back instant memories of mom...
Paradise ponders...
This morning I ran up to Valley Implement and purchased a replacement sprinkler plus a patch for a hole in the 3" pipe that the mower also made. The repairs took only a few minutes (once I had the right parts), and after that I mowed the rest of our yard. I've got the irrigation going now on the front yard, too. That means I've got a total of 20 sprinkler heads going simultaneously, and thankfully our water pressure is high enough today for that to all work well.
A couple of puppy videos below for your daily puppy fix:
Got my hair cut this morning. The barber was terribly disappointed that I wouldn't let him trim my beard :)
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Paradise ponders...
Paradise ponders... Sorry about the absence, everyone – I was just a wee busy between all my usual chores and the fun job of escorting our Polish guest, Jo B., to see the sights in Cache Valley. There wasn't any time leftover for blogging! Jo is now in Chicago, visiting relatives, before continuing her American adventure in Charlottesville, Virginia and New York.
We only had three full days with Jo, but we packed in some fun things. I took her four-wheeling (her first time ever!) on a fairly tame road, from Avon over the pass toward Mantua. We couldn't go all the way through, as the road on the Mantua side is closed to vehicle traffic until July 15th. Jo got some nice sightseeing though, anyway. She wanted to see small American towns, so I took her through Avon, Paradise, Wellsville, Mendon, and Newton – very classic small-town America. I also took her to Angie's to get an American breakfast – and her face when she saw Angie's huge portions was really quite funny :) My breakfast (ham steak and eggs) took up three plates. She took a photo of that, and if I can get a copy I'll post it. Debbie joined us for a trip up to Hardware Ranch and along Ant Flats road, where Jo got to see deer, cedar waxwings, Sandhill cranes, and trout swimming in the stream. Then we took her to Aggie's for an ice cream cone (she had a two scoop waffle cone, which looked to have most of a quart of ice cream in it – which she was quite satisfied with!). Our driving tour through the temple grounds we kept short, because there was an event going on, but the grounds were gorgeous, as always.
A few random photos I took this week are below. First one up is the sweet pea plantation in our “yard” just west of our house. They're really quite beautiful at the moment. The second photo is a plant that the locals call a “wild poppy”, but of course it's no such thing. It looks like a relative of a plant we had down in the desert east of San Diego. The last photo is just before sunrise one morning as I took the puppies out.
Construction continues, though of course not as quickly as we'd like :) The photos below show the progress; the last three show the current state of things. The footers are curing for the mud room and the sun room, but the deck's footers are not yet poured (and we're not sure why). I ended up helping out a bit on the deck. They needed six holes that were about 36" square and 30" deep. Their backhoe's bucket was just too big to easily do that. My backhoe's tiny bucket (12" wide) was perfect. So I saddled up, dug those six holes, then helped fill them back in after they got the forms placed. My little Kubota is handy sometimes :)
We only had three full days with Jo, but we packed in some fun things. I took her four-wheeling (her first time ever!) on a fairly tame road, from Avon over the pass toward Mantua. We couldn't go all the way through, as the road on the Mantua side is closed to vehicle traffic until July 15th. Jo got some nice sightseeing though, anyway. She wanted to see small American towns, so I took her through Avon, Paradise, Wellsville, Mendon, and Newton – very classic small-town America. I also took her to Angie's to get an American breakfast – and her face when she saw Angie's huge portions was really quite funny :) My breakfast (ham steak and eggs) took up three plates. She took a photo of that, and if I can get a copy I'll post it. Debbie joined us for a trip up to Hardware Ranch and along Ant Flats road, where Jo got to see deer, cedar waxwings, Sandhill cranes, and trout swimming in the stream. Then we took her to Aggie's for an ice cream cone (she had a two scoop waffle cone, which looked to have most of a quart of ice cream in it – which she was quite satisfied with!). Our driving tour through the temple grounds we kept short, because there was an event going on, but the grounds were gorgeous, as always.
A few random photos I took this week are below. First one up is the sweet pea plantation in our “yard” just west of our house. They're really quite beautiful at the moment. The second photo is a plant that the locals call a “wild poppy”, but of course it's no such thing. It looks like a relative of a plant we had down in the desert east of San Diego. The last photo is just before sunrise one morning as I took the puppies out.
Construction continues, though of course not as quickly as we'd like :) The photos below show the progress; the last three show the current state of things. The footers are curing for the mud room and the sun room, but the deck's footers are not yet poured (and we're not sure why). I ended up helping out a bit on the deck. They needed six holes that were about 36" square and 30" deep. Their backhoe's bucket was just too big to easily do that. My backhoe's tiny bucket (12" wide) was perfect. So I saddled up, dug those six holes, then helped fill them back in after they got the forms placed. My little Kubota is handy sometimes :)
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
Gulp moment...
Gulp moment... I was just reviewing my blog's statistics, after noticing that there was a spike in page views yesterday. Those page views all came from Facebook – someone somewhere apparently posted a link to my blog, and quite a few people clicked it. In the course of trying to figure out who might have done that, I checked to see where (geographically) the page views were coming from. While doing that, I noticed that there was a big drop in page views from Virginia.
Because mom, of course.
She was one of the few people who was a regular reader of this blog. And now she's gone.
Miss you, mom. In more ways than I had thought I would...
Because mom, of course.
She was one of the few people who was a regular reader of this blog. And now she's gone.
Miss you, mom. In more ways than I had thought I would...
Paradise ponders...
Paradise ponders... We had a nice meal for the holiday yesterday: the best burgers I could figure out how to whip up. For the buns we had Macey's onion-and-cheese rolls, which we've been enjoying for some time now. The burger was ground choice sirloin, about as good as burger gets. Add ripe beefsteak tomato, extra sharp cheddar cheese melted over the burger, ketchup, Duke's mayo, lettuce, and Bermuda onion, and you've got quite a feast. Later we had an ice cream soda made with Aggie's chocolate almond ice cream. That was some fine eating!
Today we have a guest arriving: Jo B., who hails from Poland. We've never actually met Jo before, nor have we ever spoken with her. I've played nearly 300 games of Scrabble with her, though (all over the Internet). She's a friend and business partner of my sister Holly, an a professor of math and programming. Jo and Holly have exchanged visits before, hugely enjoyed by both. We're looking forward to showing Jo a bit of rural and small town America. She'll be flying here this afternoon from a visit with relatives in San Francisco. The culture in San Francisco is about as far from the culture here as you can possibly get in America – it will be interesting to see if Jo picks up on that, and if so, how she reacts...
Today we have a guest arriving: Jo B., who hails from Poland. We've never actually met Jo before, nor have we ever spoken with her. I've played nearly 300 games of Scrabble with her, though (all over the Internet). She's a friend and business partner of my sister Holly, an a professor of math and programming. Jo and Holly have exchanged visits before, hugely enjoyed by both. We're looking forward to showing Jo a bit of rural and small town America. She'll be flying here this afternoon from a visit with relatives in San Francisco. The culture in San Francisco is about as far from the culture here as you can possibly get in America – it will be interesting to see if Jo picks up on that, and if so, how she reacts...
Monday, July 4, 2016
Bit-twiddling...
Bit-twiddling... I used to have quite a bit of fun with things like this in assembly language. The need doesn't arise very often these days, especially in the later versions of the Java language where many twiddling primitives have been added.
Reading through the linked bit-twiddles brought back a memory, from 1981 when I worked for a company called Xscribe. They made an electronic stenographic machine (the StenoRam 3), shown at right. This was a battery-powered device, and back then there was really only one choice if you wanted a low-power microprocessor: the RCA 1802. This chip's claim to fame wasn't processing power :) The 22 key switches on that thing were read on input bits, and they needed to be debounced and decoded in firmware. Any combination of keystrokes was potentially valid, which added to the complexity. The firmware that did this work involved a lot of bit-twiddling, and because the processor was so slow, the performance was critical. I remember spending days agonizing over four or five lines of code, trying to squeeze a few cycles here and there. Lots of challenging, puzzle-solving fun!
Shooting with mom...
Shooting with mom... On one of my visits to my parents, in the '90s, they were living in a small apartment while they waited for their new home to be built. This apartment was located on a lot adjacent to the lot their house was being built on, which was very convenient for them.
Mom owned a .357 revolver, which she had purchased for her own protection. This was a gun she kept in their house, not on her person. At the time of my visit, she'd only been to a firing range twice to practice with the revolver, and she wanted to be more familiar and comfortable with it. She knew that Debbie and I owned firearms, so she asked me if I'd take her to the range for some practice. She had about 100 rounds she'd already purchased, magnum loads For those readers not familiar with firearms, “magnum” is a marketing term that generally means the round has more gunpowder or a heavier bullet than the “normal” rounds of the same caliber. In mom's case, it meant a slightly longer round with more gunpowder. She had never practiced with magnum rounds before, and she knew they would make the revolver “kick” more, so she wanted to practice with that.
When we got to the range, we were the only ones there. Because of that, we didn't even need a range master (the guy in charge of telling people when it was clear to fire, when to cease firing, etc.). It was just the two of us on a big range with about 40 firing positions. We set up a target at 25 feet. If you're not familiar with shooting handguns, that may seem close – but it's actually a fairly long range for such a short gun. For self defense, the actual range is generally quite a bit shorter than that. So if you can shoot reasonably well at 25', you're in good shape for close-in self-defense use.
Mom was all business with that revolver. She didn't “shoot like a girl” at all. She had been worried about the added kick of a magnum round, but it turned out to be a complete non-issue for her. She still had very strong arms and hands back then. Each time she fired, she had the sights back on target within a couple seconds, most of the time under one second. That's not bad at all! After about 50 rounds, she was getting 4" groups (in other words, her bullets were all hitting within a 4" diameter circle drawn around the bulls eye), which is more than good enough for self defense. For the last 50 rounds, I did my level best to distract her (trying to simulate the chaos of an actual event where she needed to use the gun), and I failed miserably – she was just as accurate when I was screaming at her as when I wasn't.
Each time when she was reloading, she told me about the fantasies she was having as she aimed her gun at the target. She had a list of imaginary targets that she'd like to put a bullet into. Her list was comprised entirely of politicians, a class of people she generally thought of as dishonest, corrupt, lying thieves. The major difference between them, in her mind, was a matter of degree and whether they'd been caught. Bill Clinton, in particular, disgusted her; for him she reserved a special contempt and a special desire that he meet a painful, punishing end.
When we were done practicing (I shot a few rounds myself, mom the rest of them), she wanted to clean the weapon right then and there at the range. I prevailed upon her to wait until we got home, where I watched her do one of the most thorough cleanings of a revolver I'd ever seen. She must have used 30 cotton patches in the process! I also ran her through a bit of safety drill on the revolver, to make sure she knew how to “safe” the gun in a way that would make law enforcement comfortable, and also that she knew how to reload in a hurry. She didn't know about speed loaders, so I went with her to a nearby gun store to buy some.
Mom's attitude toward guns (including the possible need to use one) was very pragmatic, and unsurprising to me. It was of a piece with her no-nonsense, no-bullshit character. If a bad guy was threatening her or her family, putting a few bullets in him would seem to her like the obvious and sensible thing to do. If that meant the bad guy was killed or crippled, that's not something she'd be losing any sleep over. To her, that gun was just a convenient “power” tool – she'd have been just as comfortable with a knife or a pitchfork used for self defense. But the gun was a better tool for the purpose, so to her it was clear that she needed to have one, and how to use it. So she did.
My dad, on the other hand, didn't like being around guns at all. He made it clear that the revolver was entirely mom's affair, and he good-naturedly refused to have anything at all to do with it. I once tried to get him to talk about the reasons why he had that reaction to guns, and all he would say to me was that after his experiences in North Africa, he wanted to stay as far away from guns as possible. Dad wasn't in combat in North Africa; he was stationed far behind the lines at a telegraphy site. But I know from my reading about WWII that many of the Allied casualties (both dead and wounded) were evacuated to the same general area where dad was (in eastern Algeria, and later near Tunis). The conditions were awful – a shortage of both doctors and medical supplies, and no proper hospitals at all. This was an early experience in the war for the U.S., and things were terribly disorganized. Dad quite likely saw some horrible things, and most of those would have been caused by bullets. But that's all just speculation on my part, based on that one statement – dad never said any more than that on the subject, at least not to me...
Mom owned a .357 revolver, which she had purchased for her own protection. This was a gun she kept in their house, not on her person. At the time of my visit, she'd only been to a firing range twice to practice with the revolver, and she wanted to be more familiar and comfortable with it. She knew that Debbie and I owned firearms, so she asked me if I'd take her to the range for some practice. She had about 100 rounds she'd already purchased, magnum loads For those readers not familiar with firearms, “magnum” is a marketing term that generally means the round has more gunpowder or a heavier bullet than the “normal” rounds of the same caliber. In mom's case, it meant a slightly longer round with more gunpowder. She had never practiced with magnum rounds before, and she knew they would make the revolver “kick” more, so she wanted to practice with that.
When we got to the range, we were the only ones there. Because of that, we didn't even need a range master (the guy in charge of telling people when it was clear to fire, when to cease firing, etc.). It was just the two of us on a big range with about 40 firing positions. We set up a target at 25 feet. If you're not familiar with shooting handguns, that may seem close – but it's actually a fairly long range for such a short gun. For self defense, the actual range is generally quite a bit shorter than that. So if you can shoot reasonably well at 25', you're in good shape for close-in self-defense use.
Mom was all business with that revolver. She didn't “shoot like a girl” at all. She had been worried about the added kick of a magnum round, but it turned out to be a complete non-issue for her. She still had very strong arms and hands back then. Each time she fired, she had the sights back on target within a couple seconds, most of the time under one second. That's not bad at all! After about 50 rounds, she was getting 4" groups (in other words, her bullets were all hitting within a 4" diameter circle drawn around the bulls eye), which is more than good enough for self defense. For the last 50 rounds, I did my level best to distract her (trying to simulate the chaos of an actual event where she needed to use the gun), and I failed miserably – she was just as accurate when I was screaming at her as when I wasn't.
Each time when she was reloading, she told me about the fantasies she was having as she aimed her gun at the target. She had a list of imaginary targets that she'd like to put a bullet into. Her list was comprised entirely of politicians, a class of people she generally thought of as dishonest, corrupt, lying thieves. The major difference between them, in her mind, was a matter of degree and whether they'd been caught. Bill Clinton, in particular, disgusted her; for him she reserved a special contempt and a special desire that he meet a painful, punishing end.
When we were done practicing (I shot a few rounds myself, mom the rest of them), she wanted to clean the weapon right then and there at the range. I prevailed upon her to wait until we got home, where I watched her do one of the most thorough cleanings of a revolver I'd ever seen. She must have used 30 cotton patches in the process! I also ran her through a bit of safety drill on the revolver, to make sure she knew how to “safe” the gun in a way that would make law enforcement comfortable, and also that she knew how to reload in a hurry. She didn't know about speed loaders, so I went with her to a nearby gun store to buy some.
Mom's attitude toward guns (including the possible need to use one) was very pragmatic, and unsurprising to me. It was of a piece with her no-nonsense, no-bullshit character. If a bad guy was threatening her or her family, putting a few bullets in him would seem to her like the obvious and sensible thing to do. If that meant the bad guy was killed or crippled, that's not something she'd be losing any sleep over. To her, that gun was just a convenient “power” tool – she'd have been just as comfortable with a knife or a pitchfork used for self defense. But the gun was a better tool for the purpose, so to her it was clear that she needed to have one, and how to use it. So she did.
My dad, on the other hand, didn't like being around guns at all. He made it clear that the revolver was entirely mom's affair, and he good-naturedly refused to have anything at all to do with it. I once tried to get him to talk about the reasons why he had that reaction to guns, and all he would say to me was that after his experiences in North Africa, he wanted to stay as far away from guns as possible. Dad wasn't in combat in North Africa; he was stationed far behind the lines at a telegraphy site. But I know from my reading about WWII that many of the Allied casualties (both dead and wounded) were evacuated to the same general area where dad was (in eastern Algeria, and later near Tunis). The conditions were awful – a shortage of both doctors and medical supplies, and no proper hospitals at all. This was an early experience in the war for the U.S., and things were terribly disorganized. Dad quite likely saw some horrible things, and most of those would have been caused by bullets. But that's all just speculation on my part, based on that one statement – dad never said any more than that on the subject, at least not to me...
Happy Independence Day, fellow U.S. citizens!
Happy Independence Day, fellow U.S. citizens! For the past few weeks, every time I meet a kid around here I've been asking them if they know why we celebrate on the Fourth of July. Out of about a dozen kids, only one didn't know the reason, and she was only about 8 years old. All the rest knew it was Independence Day, and even that it was the day we declared our independence from England.
Something tells me that if I were to make the same (highly unscientific) survey in San Diego, the results would have been much different...
Update, just a few minutes later: reader, friend, former colleague, and Idaho mogul-of-everything Doug S. sent me this video. It was made in San Diego, and it shows that my intuition above was ... totally correct.
Thanks, Doug. I think...
Something tells me that if I were to make the same (highly unscientific) survey in San Diego, the results would have been much different...
Thanks, Doug. I think...
Sunday, July 3, 2016
Ghosts from the past...
Ghosts from the past... If you've been reading this blog a long time, then you probably already know that I'm the author of Tarbell Basic. What? You never heard of Tarbell Basic? Well, don't feel bad – neither has about 99.99999% of humanity, and about 99% of the remainder wish they hadn't heard of it :)
I wrote Tarbell Basic in the late '70s, nearly 40 years ago. In the world of software, that qualifies as genuinely ancient history, I think. It was written in Z80 assembly language to run on the operating system CP/M, using an assembler, linker, and debugger that I also wrote as part of the same project. The last time I worked on any of the source code for Tarbell Basic was probably in 1980 or 1981 – about 35 years ago.
I have no memory of when I last had an actual copy of that source code, but I strongly suspect that it was around the same time I switched over from CP/M to MS-DOS for my development environment – in 1982 or 1983. It wasn't so easy to move files from CP/M to MS-DOS, and so far as I know I never did move the Tarbell Basic source over. In any case, I haven't had access to that source code for something like 35 years.
Starting about 15 years ago, or maybe a tad more, I've occasionally been contacted by an enthusiastic hobbyist. It's happened several times a year; probably over 50 times altogether by now. Most often they want help fixing a bug they've found in Tarbell Basic. Sometimes they want help understanding the non-standard Z80 mnemonics we used. Sometimes they want the latest version of the source. Once (just once!) someone wanted me to autograph their copy of the Tarbell Basic manual (I did!).
This morning I had two people contact me about Tarbell Basic. One fellow, from New York, was very insistent that I immediately email him a copy of the very latest source code. When I emailed him back to tell him that I couldn't do that, as (a) I no longer had access to it, and (b) I didn't own it – he threatened to sue me, and recommended that I “lawyer up”. I wonder what theory he'd pursue in a lawsuit? Willfully thwarting a New Yorker? I wrote back telling him to quit being such an idiot, and asking why this was so important to him. I got an answer just now: this guy is running his business (a pawn shop) on a custom program written in Tarbell Basic! It was originally written in the early '80s for a CP/M machine, and was long since ported to a standard PC running a CP/M emulator. His current programmer, a kid, told him that he had to have the source code to modify Tarbell Basic to accept bigger programs, as he was out of memory. Hah! I told him he was doing the equivalent of patching his horse-drawn chariot to compete with modern taxis, and he should bite the bullet and rewrite it in a language from the current century. We'll see what happens with that :)
I wrote Tarbell Basic in the late '70s, nearly 40 years ago. In the world of software, that qualifies as genuinely ancient history, I think. It was written in Z80 assembly language to run on the operating system CP/M, using an assembler, linker, and debugger that I also wrote as part of the same project. The last time I worked on any of the source code for Tarbell Basic was probably in 1980 or 1981 – about 35 years ago.
I have no memory of when I last had an actual copy of that source code, but I strongly suspect that it was around the same time I switched over from CP/M to MS-DOS for my development environment – in 1982 or 1983. It wasn't so easy to move files from CP/M to MS-DOS, and so far as I know I never did move the Tarbell Basic source over. In any case, I haven't had access to that source code for something like 35 years.
Starting about 15 years ago, or maybe a tad more, I've occasionally been contacted by an enthusiastic hobbyist. It's happened several times a year; probably over 50 times altogether by now. Most often they want help fixing a bug they've found in Tarbell Basic. Sometimes they want help understanding the non-standard Z80 mnemonics we used. Sometimes they want the latest version of the source. Once (just once!) someone wanted me to autograph their copy of the Tarbell Basic manual (I did!).
This morning I had two people contact me about Tarbell Basic. One fellow, from New York, was very insistent that I immediately email him a copy of the very latest source code. When I emailed him back to tell him that I couldn't do that, as (a) I no longer had access to it, and (b) I didn't own it – he threatened to sue me, and recommended that I “lawyer up”. I wonder what theory he'd pursue in a lawsuit? Willfully thwarting a New Yorker? I wrote back telling him to quit being such an idiot, and asking why this was so important to him. I got an answer just now: this guy is running his business (a pawn shop) on a custom program written in Tarbell Basic! It was originally written in the early '80s for a CP/M machine, and was long since ported to a standard PC running a CP/M emulator. His current programmer, a kid, told him that he had to have the source code to modify Tarbell Basic to accept bigger programs, as he was out of memory. Hah! I told him he was doing the equivalent of patching his horse-drawn chariot to compete with modern taxis, and he should bite the bullet and rewrite it in a language from the current century. We'll see what happens with that :)
Mom and dad in Hawai'i...
Mom and dad in Hawai'i... Longtime readers will know that Debbie and I are huge fans of Hawai'i – though not for the reasons most people are. We never go to a beach. Instead, we hike the beautiful volcanic island scenery, watch for wildlife, and go four-wheeling on the major volcanoes of the Big Island. In the first years we started going (late '70s) through the early '90s, we didn't have enough money for anything fancy like a motel or a bed-and-breakfast, so we camped. We loved the campgrounds on Hawai'i back then – they were uncrowded, cheap, in beautiful locations, and the facilities (especially in the state parks) were fantastic. We especially liked Kalopa State Park and the Namakani Paio campground in Volcanoes National Park.
In the early '90s we decided to invite mom and dad to visit Hawai'i on one of our camping trips. We had already done that with Debbie's mom, and it was a rip-roaring success. The cost was considerably more than we could really afford, but we knew that such a trip would have to happen fairly soon – mom and dad were getting older, and there probably weren't many years left when we could do it. So we dusted off a high-limit credit card, gulped, and just did it.
Debbie and I look at those trips now as one of the smartest things we ever did. My mom and dad talked about that Hawai'i trip for the rest of their lives, and so did Debbie's mom until Alzheimer's claimed her mind.
My mom and dad had done quite a bit of traveling together, usually with at least some of their kids. All of it was on a shoestring budget, driving and camping. They'd been all over the continental United States and southern Canada. Travel itself wasn't new to them. But to get to Hawai'i they had to fly – something they had rarely done up to that point. Beyond that, though, Hawai'i was exotic to them, with scenery, flora, and fauna that was completely unfamiliar. We might as well have been in Africa from their perspective!
It was terrific fun for us just to watch them reacting to the new things they were seeing. Countless times they'd see a plant, flower, bird, or piece of volcano that had them goggle-eyed with wonder. My mom didn't like hiking, generally, but we even got her out on some of the easier trails and to tour botanical gardens and orchid nurseries. I remember her standing under a papaya tree, staring up in wonder – it was nothing like she'd imagined it. Mom and dad walked together under a giant banyan tree near Cafe 100 in Hilo, both of them floored by its sheer size. Mom particularly enjoyed the large monkey-pod tree forest near Lava Tree State Monument, and dad shared my admiration for the koa forests at high altitudes on Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.
One morning when we were camped in Namakani Paio, we were up and making breakfast. A lady came out of another cabin and started hollering at the birds for making noise – and that got mom laughing so hard she could hardly breath. That lady came out repeatedly, really mad at the birds (who were simply greeting morning as birds do). Dad discovered the native orchids growing out in the old a'a lava fields, and we took a short hike to enjoy those.
Neither mom nor dad had ever been four-wheeling for fun, though dad drove two-wheel-drive trucks often in places where many four-wheelers wouldn't dare go. Also, he did a lot of off-road driving for his job in the Army Air Force during WWII, putting antennas in high places. We took them to the summit of Mauna Kea, and then all around it at around 9,000 feet altitude. We chose a spectacular day, with perfect weather for such a trip – and they got a rare treat, because even on the northeast side of the mountain we had perfect visibility. This trip was full of exotic scenery for mom and dad, with the ocean-and-landscape vistas everywhere you looked. Mom loved those views, especially when we got to the north side and were traversing the old Parker Ranch, looking over emerald-green rolling hills and broad, sloping sugar cane fields. Dad liked that area as well, for the koa forests and the frequent little pu'us (old, small cinder cones grown over with greenery).
We had some memorable meals there as well: fresh seafood, Thai food, and stuff we cooked, often using the unusual things available in the supermarkets there. Mom particularly enjoyed the food there – so many things that she liked, and had never had before. One example: a custard dessert she had at a Thai restaurant that she liked so much we went back twice more just for that. Another: mahi mahi sandwiches at Cafe 100, which she declared were the best fish sandwiches she'd ever had. We went back there a half dozen times for more :)
The very idea of my parents in Hawai'i is still sort of mind-boggling for me. They seemed very out-of-place there; it's not the sort of thing one would ever imagine them doing. Even during the trip, though, we knew we'd be happy we took them. Afterwards, separately and years apart, both my mom and dad went to some pains to tell me just how much that trip had meant to them. Dad wanted to go again, but didn't think mom would be able to. We even made tentative plans for another trip in the late '90s, but the efforts around selling the farm and building a new home made him cancel it. On my first trip to visit mom and dad after dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, mom started talking with me about that trip. She got very emotional, choked up and crying, in the course of telling me how much she and dad cherished that trip to Hawai'i. That's a memory I hold onto these days. It makes the four years we spent paying off that damned credit card seem quite trivial...
In the early '90s we decided to invite mom and dad to visit Hawai'i on one of our camping trips. We had already done that with Debbie's mom, and it was a rip-roaring success. The cost was considerably more than we could really afford, but we knew that such a trip would have to happen fairly soon – mom and dad were getting older, and there probably weren't many years left when we could do it. So we dusted off a high-limit credit card, gulped, and just did it.
Debbie and I look at those trips now as one of the smartest things we ever did. My mom and dad talked about that Hawai'i trip for the rest of their lives, and so did Debbie's mom until Alzheimer's claimed her mind.
My mom and dad had done quite a bit of traveling together, usually with at least some of their kids. All of it was on a shoestring budget, driving and camping. They'd been all over the continental United States and southern Canada. Travel itself wasn't new to them. But to get to Hawai'i they had to fly – something they had rarely done up to that point. Beyond that, though, Hawai'i was exotic to them, with scenery, flora, and fauna that was completely unfamiliar. We might as well have been in Africa from their perspective!
It was terrific fun for us just to watch them reacting to the new things they were seeing. Countless times they'd see a plant, flower, bird, or piece of volcano that had them goggle-eyed with wonder. My mom didn't like hiking, generally, but we even got her out on some of the easier trails and to tour botanical gardens and orchid nurseries. I remember her standing under a papaya tree, staring up in wonder – it was nothing like she'd imagined it. Mom and dad walked together under a giant banyan tree near Cafe 100 in Hilo, both of them floored by its sheer size. Mom particularly enjoyed the large monkey-pod tree forest near Lava Tree State Monument, and dad shared my admiration for the koa forests at high altitudes on Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.
One morning when we were camped in Namakani Paio, we were up and making breakfast. A lady came out of another cabin and started hollering at the birds for making noise – and that got mom laughing so hard she could hardly breath. That lady came out repeatedly, really mad at the birds (who were simply greeting morning as birds do). Dad discovered the native orchids growing out in the old a'a lava fields, and we took a short hike to enjoy those.
Neither mom nor dad had ever been four-wheeling for fun, though dad drove two-wheel-drive trucks often in places where many four-wheelers wouldn't dare go. Also, he did a lot of off-road driving for his job in the Army Air Force during WWII, putting antennas in high places. We took them to the summit of Mauna Kea, and then all around it at around 9,000 feet altitude. We chose a spectacular day, with perfect weather for such a trip – and they got a rare treat, because even on the northeast side of the mountain we had perfect visibility. This trip was full of exotic scenery for mom and dad, with the ocean-and-landscape vistas everywhere you looked. Mom loved those views, especially when we got to the north side and were traversing the old Parker Ranch, looking over emerald-green rolling hills and broad, sloping sugar cane fields. Dad liked that area as well, for the koa forests and the frequent little pu'us (old, small cinder cones grown over with greenery).
We had some memorable meals there as well: fresh seafood, Thai food, and stuff we cooked, often using the unusual things available in the supermarkets there. Mom particularly enjoyed the food there – so many things that she liked, and had never had before. One example: a custard dessert she had at a Thai restaurant that she liked so much we went back twice more just for that. Another: mahi mahi sandwiches at Cafe 100, which she declared were the best fish sandwiches she'd ever had. We went back there a half dozen times for more :)
The very idea of my parents in Hawai'i is still sort of mind-boggling for me. They seemed very out-of-place there; it's not the sort of thing one would ever imagine them doing. Even during the trip, though, we knew we'd be happy we took them. Afterwards, separately and years apart, both my mom and dad went to some pains to tell me just how much that trip had meant to them. Dad wanted to go again, but didn't think mom would be able to. We even made tentative plans for another trip in the late '90s, but the efforts around selling the farm and building a new home made him cancel it. On my first trip to visit mom and dad after dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, mom started talking with me about that trip. She got very emotional, choked up and crying, in the course of telling me how much she and dad cherished that trip to Hawai'i. That's a memory I hold onto these days. It makes the four years we spent paying off that damned credit card seem quite trivial...
Paradise ponders...
Race (our adult border collie) is especially tolerant of the puppies. There have been quite a few times when he had two puppies hanging off him (on his ears or lower jaw), and he just keeps playing. Miki is getting a bit more tolerant of them, though he still does lots of growling and will nip at them when they're especially bad (say, when there's one hanging on each of his ears!). Both of them are still doing great:
The construction crew has knocked off for the long weekend. Here's what our three construction projects look like right now:
The first photo shows the yawning pit outside our bedroom, where the sun room will go. Notice the basement windows are fully exposed, and the old steel casements are gone. Each of those windows will get a poured concrete casement, with an area 50% larger than they used to be (to let more light in). Then a seven-sided foundation (7 sides of a regular dodecagon) will be poured, a conventional joist floor built, and the sun room installed on top.
The last photo shows the area outside our front door, where we used to have a brick walkway and a large poured concrete porch. Now there's just this giant hole :) Here there will be a mud room, roughly 10' x 12', built on conventional footers and foundation. It will have a porch that is semi-circular, seen from above, made from concrete faced with rock. That porch will be fairly close to our driveway, so we'll need a much shorter walkway. This will also be of rock.
Friday, July 1, 2016
Optical illusions...
Awesome illusions, these are. In both cases it makes absolutely no difference that I understand the mechanisms. My brain is fooled anyway...
Kudos for above-and-beyond customer service...
But there is one problem with them, and I'll call it a design flaw. The problem is that the female half of the connector (on the right side in the photo above) has an O-ring inside it – and if you are stupid enough to turn on the water when there's no corresponding male half inserted in it, that O-ring is likely to blow right out. Your chances of locating it in the grass is somewhere between slim and none.
So a couple weeks ago, I found the LR Nelson company's web site and wrote to their customer service department describing the problem, telling them that I had several connectors made useless by this, and asked them if they had replacement O-rings or (failing that) if they could tell me the dimensions of the O-ring. They're readily available in just about any size under the sun, so even just knowing the dimensions would have made me happy.
I got no response by email, so I just wrote it off as another failed attempt to get customer service (a far too familiar occurrence), and I made a mental note to find another source for quick connects. Then this afternoon I discovered a box on my doorstep, from the Fiskars company. I think of Fiskars as a company that makes scissors and pruning tools, so when I saw the name on the label I was scratching my head trying to remember what the heck I had ordered like that. Then I opened it up and discovered – complete replacement quick-connects for all 11 female connectors that I'd had a washer blow out on. Instead of sending me some O-rings worth a dollar or so, or the dimensions which would cost them nothing at all, they sent me 11 new quick-connect sets worth about $80. It turns out that Fiskars acquired Nelson in 2014, which is why the box came from them. Well, Fiskars/Nelson has a surprised and happy customer here.
That's definitely customer service above and beyond, and kudos to them for that!
High expectations...
When I was still living at home, mom would often say things like “That’s ok, but you can do better!”, or “That’s not good enough! With your abilities, you should be better than that!” Versions of this continued, for me, less and less frequently until about twenty years ago when they stopped altogether.
I've known for quite some time that my siblings and I all had very different reactions to this. For me, these were motivational: I interpreted them as the combination of two things. First, that my mom thought I could do darn nearly anything – and secondly, that the only thing stopping me from anything I wanted was my own laziness or self-doubt.
Through the time that I finished high school, my mom's exhortations served as a counter-balance to my uniformly awful experiences in school. I've written about my school experiences before, but in short I was bored to the edge of madness, I was in class with people much older than me (and physically and psychologically), and my introversion kept me effectively terrorized the entire time I was in school except when I was hiding in the library or in science or math class (where I actually felt competent). If it weren't for mom's hectoring, I think it's likely I would have given up on school altogether.
After I finished high school, mom didn't let up at all. I was accepted to a university that my parents could ill afford. They had to borrow against the farm to raise the money; back then someone like me could never have qualified for a student loan. I went for one semester – only to discover that the environment there was even worse for me than high school had been. My maturity level and mental state at that point was such that I'd be certain to fail at university. I couldn't keep spending my parent's money for a school that I wasn't ready for, so I dropped out and came back home. I had a series of odd jobs for a while, then joined the U.S. Navy to avoid being drafted (I had number 17 in the draft lottery, which meant I'd be going to Vietnam for certain). During this period, mom was particularly hard on me. The odd jobs – all admittedly awful, menial jobs far beneath my abilities – she was pushing me hard to find a way to learn skills that would challenge me.
For instance, I once had a job assembling the electronic coffee pots used on passenger airplanes. This was all mechanical assembly; the circuit boards were all built somewhere else. Most days when I came home from that job, mom would hector me – wanting to know if I'd spoken with the firm's one electrical engineer to see if I could get an internship or anything that would help build my skills. If I said “no”, she was all over me in a very unpleasant way. To my complete amazement, when I finally did work up the courage to speak to the engineer (a god-like creature in my view), he readily agreed to take me on as an intern for a couple hours after each work day. That internship was a formative experience – but I never would have done that if it weren't for mom humiliating me for not doing it :)
So for me, mom's high expectations and all the badgering when I didn't measure up were most definitely motivational. I was about 16 or 17 when I finally realized that there was some validity to her expectations – and her exhortations started to actually be motivating in a positive way. This was especially true the first two years or so that I was in the U.S. Navy. Though I was stationed in California, over 2,000 miles from her in New Jersey, with letters and phone calls she continued pushing me to learn more, do more, be more. In that period I started studying, hard, on my own. Much of the time I was studying things of particular interest to me: history, religion, math, science, electronics, and programming. Sometimes, though, I was studying things she urged me to – especially writing, but also evolution (and I never did find out why she pushed me on that particular subject).
For some of my siblings, I've discovered, mom's high expectations were less effective as motivation. Instead they more like impossible ideals that were frustrating in their unreachability. I'm the oldest child, and my siblings are certain I was treated much differently because of that. I'm less certain of that; in fact, in some ways I think the expectations (especially from my dad) were higher because of that. It doesn't really matter, though. We each live in our own version of reality, and we'll never really understand anyone else's. For myself, though, I am thankful for my mom's high expectations of me...
Paradise ponders...
Paradise ponders... Jim Johnson and his crew were here early this morning, loading up the first (and heaviest) of the two big chunks of our former front porch. He guesses that this chunk weighs in at two to three tons. It took several attempts to figure out how to get it onto his dump trailer. First they tried lifting it with the backhoe, but it couldn't raise the block entirely off the ground. Then they turned the tractor around to use the bucket, which just barely lifted the block off the ground. Another 100 pounds and I'd bet they couldn't have done it. The photos below show the whole process. That chunk was so heavy that we were worried about the chains breaking; luckily they didn't.
Today the construction crew is hoping to get the concrete forms in place for the sun room foundation and new casements. Those forms are going to be a bit tricky, as the sun room isn't a nice rectangle – instead it has seven sides all at 30° angles from each other. I'm curious to see how they do that!
My office is a lovely, cool, 70°F right now, even though it's already warming up outside. I can't hear the air conditioner working at all. I love my new air conditioner!
Today the construction crew is hoping to get the concrete forms in place for the sun room foundation and new casements. Those forms are going to be a bit tricky, as the sun room isn't a nice rectangle – instead it has seven sides all at 30° angles from each other. I'm curious to see how they do that!
My office is a lovely, cool, 70°F right now, even though it's already warming up outside. I can't hear the air conditioner working at all. I love my new air conditioner!
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