A day on the mountain...

A day on the mountain...  Yesterday morning we took off bright and early, heading down to Hilo and then up Saddle Road, which runs between the two biggest mountains on the island: Mauna Loa (to the south) and Mauna Kea (to the north).  Right in the middle of that road we turned onto the Mauna Kea access road, which eventually will take you all the way to the summit where the telescopes are.  We got off that road at around the six mile mark, though, and headed in a 40 mile long arc counter-clockwise around Mauna Kea, ending up in the town of Waimea, north of the mountain.  Most of the time we were between 6,000 and 8,000 feet high, on a dirt road that varied between a nice, flat back road easily handled by a two-wheel drive sedan all the way to a challenging four-wheel drive only road that took my full attention to navigate.

On the drive down to Hilo we got our first glimpses of Mauna Kea, and we were surprised just how clearly we could see it.  The Hilo side of the island is normally very humid, and the air consequently hazy.  There are many, many days when you can't see Mauna Kea from Hilo at all (and vice versa), but the day's exceptional clarity meant we could not only see the mountain, but even with our naked eye we could pick out the telescopes, snow fields near the summit, and broad bands of color around the mountain.  It had three distinct layers of color, even from 40 miles away in Hilo: reds and browns at the top, where cinder lies exposed and barren; yellowish brown in the middle; and a million shades of green on the bottom where the forests and pasture lands dominate.

As we got closer to the mountain while on Saddle Road, the middle band became more distinctly yellow, and it finally dawned on us why that was so: nearly all the gorse on the mountain was simultaneously in bloom.  Gorse is an invader, its seeds brought in with the grain that early ranchers purchased from Scotland for their cattle.  It has no enemies here in Hawai'i – nothing eats it or kills it.  The high, dry, bare sides of the mountain are excellent habitat for it – so it has spread remorselessly since its introduction.  Eradicating it is a high priority for those working to restore native habitats.  But...today it predominates in a broad range of altitudes on the east side of Mauna Kea – and the first third or so of our drive around the mountain was right through the middle of it.  The photos below all show gorse; darn near every plant was in bloom.  We've only seen it before with occasional plants in bloom, so this was quite a display.  The scent of gorse is like a mild, coconutty suntan lotion – and in mass bloom like we drove through that scent became part of the background.

In several of the photos below you can spot the cindery higher parts of Mauna Kea.  In the seventh photo in particular you can see Mauna Kea's summit and some of the telescopes there.  But look closely at that one: to the right of the summit you'll see what looks like a higher peak, more distant than Mauna Kea.  That's an illusion; in fact, that “taller” peak was much closer to us than Mauna Kea's summit, and over 1,000 feet shorter.  The clarity of the air and the lack of objects to provide relative scale creates all sorts of illusions like this. 

After we left the land of gorse, we entered koa territory.  The photos above include a few koa, as the gorse and koa territories overlap considerably.  The photos below were all taken across the northern half of Mauna Kea, more koa than anyone but a koa nut like me would want. :)  I love koa – they're my favorite tree, and in no small part that's because of the koas on the north side of Mauna Kea.  These photos were all taken in the now-defunct Parker Ranch lands.  When we first started coming here, about 40 years ago, the ranch was still going full tilt.  We saw cowboys on horses driving vast herds of beef cattle through this area.  Now the lands are mostly owned by private and public nature preservation groups until you get quite close to the town of Waimea.  Leftover structures and equipment (like the sheep's feet at right) litter the entire area.  There are no more cowboys and cattle to be seen.  But, on this trip, for the first time in our many trips here, we saw something else: vast numbers of small koa trees.  Some were seedlings sprouted just this year; others looked like they were ten or twelve years old.  During the day it occurred to us that twelve years ago is when the cattle were all removed – so I'm speculating that the reason the pasture lands had only occasional individual koas (instead of the usual forests) is that the cattle killed the koa babies.  Koa killers!  I will never look at cattle the same way again!

But the great news is that the koa are propagating in this part of Mauna Kea at a prodigious rate.  Before the ranchers burned it all off to create pasture lands, the flanks of Mauna Kea were all a gigantic koa forest – and now it looks like things are headed that way again.  I won't live long enough to see it happen, but it feels really good to know that it's headed that way...

Right in the middle of the koa territory is a monument to Dr. David Douglas, a famous botanist who was one of my dad's heroes.  Douglas died here on the slopes of Mauna Kea, caught in a pig trap (a pit with stakes).  The Douglas fir is but one of hundreds of plant species either named for him or by him.  When I first visited this spot, perhaps 30 years ago, it was completely overrun by the forest.  I had a hard time even finding it (thought it's just 1/4 mile from the road), much less seeing it.  Over the years local botanical groups have gradually improved the site, until now the monument sits in a small park-like area, overhung by koa and Douglas fir, surrounded by native plants.  The trail is now a mowed path through a sparse koa forest with a grassy floor.  It's beautiful.  I was fortunate enough to bring my dad here in the '90s, when he was still vigorous.  He made the short hike down to the monument, quite moved by the experience.  He spoke of it often in his later years.  All these memories came flooding in as I stood before that monument yesterday; I walked back to our car slowly, choked up and full of tears...

As we got closer to Waimea, we lost altitude and eventually entered into a thick fog.  As we drove down the road, we noticed that anywhere a tree overhung the road, there was a wet spot on the road beneath – and raindrops would hit the car as we passed under.  What was happening there?  Well, its the wind-driven mist condensing on the tree leaves and then dripping down.  A lot of mist condensing, because it really was “raining” under these trees, and it was sopping wet, as you can see in the photos below.  Debbie put an earlier observation together with this phenomenon and figured out that we were seeing lush green grass under the trees because of this phenomenon; I'm sure she's right.

When we got to Waimea, at around 5:30, the first thing on our mind was to find a place to eat.  Debbie did some research online and picked Merriman's, and a fine pick it turned out to be.  This is very much an upscale restaurant, both in price and presentation.  The staff were unpretentious, totally approachable, and just a delight.  The food?  Well, let's just say I'd be happy to pay for that meal again.  It was superb.  We started with a mini loaf of bread, warm, with a delicious butter (herbed).  I had iced tea that had just a bit of passionfruit flavor, with a little flask of sugar syrup to sweeten it (nice touch, that).  Our shared appetizer was a quesadilla stuffed with kalua pork and caramelized onions.  We jumped on it so fast that I forgot to take photos of it, as I did with our entrees, too.  We each ordered an entree but we split them, so we both got some onago (local red snapper) and ono (a classic Hawai'ian fish).  They were cooked absolutely perfectly, not overpowered by any sauces, and were accompanied by wonderful local vegetables.  Finally, for dessert we shared a bread pudding topped with coconut sherbet (second photo below), and a creme brulee topped with burnt sugar mixed with coconut (first photo below) that came with some macadamia nut cookies.  Both were simply wonderful...

A lovely day in Hawai'i...

A lovely day in Hawai'i...  We woke before daybreak this morning, had a leisurely breakfast, supplied by Hale Ohia.  That papaya at right, with lime wedges, was part of it.  Two locally grown bananas and a mini-loaf of homemade banana bread was the rest, along with great coffee and tea.

First thing we did today was to set off on a walk we always make on our trips to the Big Island: the Kipuka Puaulu loop trail just a few miles from Kilauea Crater.  This trail is only a little over a mile long, with little elevation change, but it was our first test of how well Debbie could do on an actual hike.  She did really well!  Made it all around the loop without any problem at all; ended up tired but not hurting.  An excellent start, and an even better portent!

The photos below were all taken along the trail.  It's a beautiful place, full of native plants (the invaders are being eliminated carefully).  It's best known, though, for the birds that it attracts – in fact, an alternate name for it is “Bird Park”.  We saw lots of apapane, an elepaio, and an oma'o.  The apapane were downright common – we had more good sightings of that beautiful bird today than in all our previous visits combined.  The elepaio we've seen before, but never as close as the one we saw today, who was bathing in the water left in a stump.  The oma'o we have never seen before, and we only spotted it today with the assistance of a fellow we met on the trail who turned out to be a local who was also an avid birder.  Meeting him was a real stroke of luck – not only did he help us spot and identify birds in Kipuka Puaulu, he also told us of three other places to go see native birds.

The last photo below shows orange algae growing on the trunk of a koa tree.  This algae grew only on koa trees, but not all of them.  Perhaps one trunk out of 100 had this bright orange coating.  There was nothing obvious that told me why one tree had it and another didn't.  So far as I could tell, the algae did no harm to the host tree.  Strange thing...

We had a wonderful time on this hike today.

After the hike and bird-watching session, we stopped in at the Volcano Art Center (in the National Park), where we saw some really beautiful native woodworking.  Our favorite pieces were two rocking chairs made of curly mango wood.  Gorgeous, they were.  Then we took off for Hilo, where we visited Walmart to stock up on some supplies we'd missed, and then to Dragon Kitchen Sushi for our evening meal.  Dragon Kitchen was not the typical sushi joint.  It's one of three vendors in a small food court inside an old building along Hilo's waterfront.  In a tiny little kitchen, a sushi chef and a helper prepared all the food and acted as cashier.  You place your order at the counter, then they holler at you when it's ready – and you take your food to some tables shared by all the vendors.  It's quite inexpensive.  For less than $40, Debbie and I stuffed ourselves with great fish.  The sushi itself was also different, as it was made with brown rice instead of the usual white rice.  We liked it all very much, washed it down with some ice cold green tea.  We left with happy bellies and not a trace of hunger.

There was one rather unhappy moment today, though.  On the way to Hilo, we stopped at the studio of Dan DeLuz, a well-known wood turner in Kurtistown.  We had visited him many times over the years, and I've purchased a half dozen or so bowls that he turned from native woods (koa and milo, mainly).  On our last visit there, about 12 years ago, we had a long, relaxed conversation with him – about the native woods, his turning techniques, and life in general.  This afternoon when we drove up, there was a woman sitting outside his studio reading a book.  She asked us what we wanted, and when we said that we were here to see Dan she told us that he'd passed away five years ago.  She was his wife, Mary Lou, and we stayed and talked a while with her.  When she found out we'd been there before, had talked with Dan, and owned some of his bowls, she was instantly relaxed and friendly.  She also advised us to hang onto those bowls, as their value has gone up markedly since Dan passed away.  There's no way I would part with those bowls, anyway, as they're so beautiful.

It's sad to ponder the absence of someone like Dan...

Tomorrow we're going to get up early and head for Mauna Kea.  The forecast calls for clear skies, and they've been clear for a week – so the road should be good and dry, and we should have no problem making it all the way around the mountain.  At the moment I'm writing this, Debbie and I are enjoying a glass of champagne on the front porch of our little cabin.  The sun has just set.  We're surrounded by bird song in the ohia forest around our cabin.

It was a lovely day...

A strange day in Hawai'i...

A strange day in Hawai'i...  Well, after a meal of delicious “local style” Ahi poke, we drove up to Volcanoes National Park as planned, but things went a little differently than expected.  On the plus side, I paid $10 to get a lifetime pass that gives Debbie and I (and anyone else we can stuff in our car) free entrance to any federal facility (meaning National Parks, National Forest, etc.).  I qualified for that by being over 62 years old and being a U.S. citizen. That was good!

On the other hand, when we entered the park with our new pass, we found the entrances to the visitor center and art center blocked by police cars and policemen wearing gas masks.  Seriously!  Kilauea Crater is venting lots of fumes, and the trade winds are blowing them to the southwest – right where the visitor center and art center are.  They're closed until the fumes go away, which might be never.  Worse, the park was just overrunning with tourists.  We saw ten or so gigantic tour buses, many more smaller tour vehicles, and hundreds of cars.  Most of these people were making the most superficial tour of those features the National Park Service deigned to mark.  Most of them looked bored and unhappy.  Any wildlife that might have been there would have retreated to positions a few miles away.  We skedaddled – this was not our kind of scene!

So we decided to try driving up the Mauna Loa road, which takes you to about 9000' on the east flank of the volcano.  That road we've been on many times in the past; it winds through the most beautiful koa forests I know of, through several kipukas, and through some spectacular old lava flows.  We saw some interesting things along the way.  Mamane were in bloom all over the place (the yellow flowers in the photos below) between about 7,000' and 9,000' altitude – more than I've ever seen before, so we must have timed our visit perfectly.  We saw about ten Erkle's Francolins and a half dozen Kalij pheasants, both introduced (non-native) game birds.  These birds were almost fearless – they'd let us to within a few feet of them before sidling away.  I was even able to get some iPhone photos of them.

The next-to-last photo is a Mauna Kea silversword, a rare and endangered species planted by biologists near the summit of Mauna Loa road.  A short trail from the parking lot leads to a place where some silversword plants are living in a roped off area just a few feet from the trail.  This is new since our last trip here, and I don't know what the backstory is – but I'm guessing that it's related to success in cultivation. 

The last photo is a koa seedling, a baby koa if you will.  This seedling has both the juvenile leaves (the tiny ones growing in two rows) and some adult “leaves” (though they're not really leaves at all, as the linked article explains).  The first time I saw these half-and-half plants I was really puzzled, but on a trip here with my dad I got the explanation from him.  Apparently this is quite a common occurrence amongst members of the pea family, which the koa is.

After getting back down from the Mauna Loa road, Debbie pointed out that restaurants were likely to be crowded tonight (Valentine's Day), and besides she was tired and really just wanted some more of that delicious poke.  I'd be a poor excuse for a husband if I wouldn't indulge her in some more poke for Valentine's Day, wouldn't I?  So off we went, back down to the KTA in Hilo to buy some more poke.  It was a close call, though: the woman in front of us in the poke line bought nearly all the remaining of the “local style” ahi poke (which is the one Debbie wanted).  Luckily there was just barely a pound left when she got done, and we left with our poke and a nice bottle of champagne.  We'll be eating and drinking that soon!

The view out our window...

The view out our window ... this morning, at Cottage 44 in Hale Ohia.  We spent the morning down in Hilo, gathering essentials (coffee, tea, poke, wine, etc.).  Next stop: Volcanoes National Park, where I will buy my senior citizen pass. :(

Poke, if you don't know it, is a delightful sort of fish salad.  It's made with raw sushi-grade fish.  That fish is very abundant here, as there is a good-sized fishing industry based in Hilo.  The local grocery store (KTA) carries about 20 varieties of poke on any given day, most of it selling for around $15/pound.  That is an absurdly low price for something that closely resembles very good sushi.  We bought a pound of it this morning, and we've already eaten half of it! :)

Made it!

Made it!  We are in Hawai'i, on the Big Island.  It was a long travel day yesterday - we got up at 5 am Utah time, and got into our cottage at Hale Ohia at about 3:30 am Utah time (12:30 am local time).  Yikes!  On the good side: absolutely nothing went wrong.  The rental car folks were there after hours, as arranged and promised.  The cottage folks had all the arrangements done for us, even though we arrived long after their closing time.  And after some sleep, the two of us are ready to drive down to Hilo to do some stocking up for our visit.  We'll have a good meal, too, and then come back to visit the Volcano Art Center in the National Park, and pick up our pass...

And visions of unums danced in his head...

And visions of unums danced in his head...  Over the years, I've posted here on several occasions here about my various battles with numeric representation in computers.  There are lots of specific problems I've run into, but I believe they all fall into one of just four general categories:

• Programmer ignorance.  Up to about 15 years ago, this generally meant ignorance of how floating point numbers actually worked in a computer.  More recently, I'd have to add widespread ignorance about how even integers are actually represented (most especially two's complement representation, and underflow/overflow).
• Trying to represent fractional decimal numbers in binary floating point, especially for money.
• Performance issues, especially with conversions to-and-from strings.  To a much lesser extent, actual math operation performance, especially with divides.
• Insufficient precision, usually the result of a poor choice in early design phases.  You might be thinking I mean single-precision floating point vs. double-precision floating point, but actually the most common issue I've run into is use of a low precision integer (say, 16 bit instead of a 32 or 64 bit), especially with overflow on a multiply.

I have spent hundreds of hours over the years learning for myself about these issues, implementing solutions and workarounds for them, fixing existing issues, and (more than anything else) teaching other engineers about them.  It's a topic near and dear to my geekly heart.  So, when I read an intriguing little headline the other day, I just had to go check it out.  There's a fellow named Dr. John Gustafson who has proposed an entirely new floating point numeric representation with the objective of eliminating at least some of these problems.  As best I can tell from the bit of reading I've done so far, it would deal handily with the first and last bullets above.  I'm reading more, in the hopes that he's also going to tackle the other two.

The core proposal he's got is for something he calls unums (short for Universal Number) – a new way to represent numbers (real or integer) in a computer.  If that name's not sufficiently grand for you, his book about the first version of unums is called “The End of Error” – that ought to do it!  I've purchased that book and I'm about fifty pages in at the moment.  My first comment has nothing to do with the subject matter, but rather with the style: this is one of the most readable and understandable books on a computer science topic that I've ever read (and I've read quite a few :).  Hats off and a bow to Dr. Gustafson for that!

I know from the web reading that I've done that Dr. Gustafson has proposed a quite different “unum 2.0” from what's described in his book (and what he now calls “unum 1.0”.  I'm going to read the book first, and get a good understanding of unum 1.0 before I tackle 2.0.

If unums look like they really would be as revolutionary as Dr. Gustafson would have them, they're going to need rather a lot of work to be done before they can be widely used.  For many applications (though not, I think, for business applications), hardware implementations will be a must.  He's already working with Intel on this idea, and there's no better way to make hardware happen.  There will also need to be implementations in language compilers/interpreters.  That will be a major challenge!  Just as with IEEE floating point, the compilers will have to work with or without hardware support.  There will be performance issues to worry about.  There will be legions of programmers to educate.  And so on.

If I get done with my reading and conclude that Dr. Gustafson has something worthwhile here, I'm going to consider volunteering to help with the Java implementations.  That could be a lot of fun!

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Well, we're almost packed for our Hawai'i trip – just have some last minute packing of electronics tomorrow night, and a tiny bit on Monday morning.  Then we're outta here.  A friend is driving us to Salt Lake City, where we'll catch a flight to San Francisco.  There we'll wait for 5 hours before catching our flight to Kona, on the west coast of the Big Island of Hawai'i.  There we'll pick up our rental 4x4, and make the long drive (about two and a half hours) all the way around the island to Volcano Village.  It will be about 11:30 pm (local time), or 2:30 am (Utah time) by the time we get there.  A long day, that will be!

Yesterday we took our friends and neighbors Tim and Jeannie D. out to lunch at Los Primos, where they'd never been before.  Both of them have lived near here their entire life, and for them the menus of Mexican restaurants are deep mysteries that are filled with terrifying things like “pollo” and “refried beans”.  We interpreted for them. :)  Tim, who likes spicy foods, ordered a pollo burrito mojado.  We had warned him of their immense size, but he figured he could take half of it home.  His first few bites had him reeling a bit from the spiciness level, but after a bit he started shoveling in a rhythm – until he finished the entire thing.  Jeannie and Debbie both ordered carne asada plates, and Jeannie made happy noises the whole time she was stuffing her face.  Both of them liked the relative quiet of the restaurant; it's entirely possible to have conversation while you're eating there.  Much fun for us to introduce them to one of our favorite haunts!  Plus they got to ride in the Tesla.  When I accelerated relatively gently out of their driveway, they both commented about the pickup - but when I stomped the accelerator a bit later, both of them were pretty amazed. :)  But from their reactions, clearly what impressed them the most were the falcon wing doors.  Tim cackled in delight when his door neatly avoided the car next to us as it opened...

Melotte 15...

Melotte 15 ... via APOD, of course.  Those are false colors, of course – but 'tis beautiful nonetheless...

Jupiter from below...

Jupiter from below...  “Below” here means above Jupiter's south pole.  This image was created by a “citizen scientist” using camera data from the Juno robotic explorer that NASA made publicly available (more here).

Botany Photo of the Day is back!

Botany Photo of the Day is back!  After a hiatus of over a year, this daily email with beautiful photos linked is back!  Hooray!  At right is one of the photos from today's email (click to embiggen), a plant I've seen often in some of the areas that Debbie and I love the best.  This photo looks like it was taken in northern Arizona or southern Utah – our stomping grounds!

If you like what you see here, you can subscribe to it yourself (it's free) by filling out the form on the left side of the page linked above...

How on earth does Scott Adams do it?

How on earth does Scott Adams do it?  Today's cartoon (below) captures perfectly one of my main complaints about the current engineering management fad, which goes by the moniker “agile”.  When I was subject to those agile processes, in the last year or so before I retired, I experienced interruptions to my work flow such as I had never had before.  It finally got to the point where I told my boss that I was going to work from home, cell phone off, not watching email or the oh-so-interrupty messaging application the engineering team used.  If he didn't like it, that was fine – I'd happily quit.  He caved and let me work from home most of the time.  My productivity skyrocketed once I was (mostly) out of that “agile” loop!

If I had any talent in any of the areas necessary for a Dilbert-like cartoon, you'd easily understand how I could come up with something like this.  But Scott Adams has been independent of any technology job for a long time, since long before the agile methodology was even a gleam in its cursed father's eye.  How does he manage to do this?  I have no idea; I just stand in awe...

I'm ancient enough that I can remember a half dozen or so engineering management fads that came and went, from the late '70s up until my retirement in 2013.  All of them shared some “features”:

• Lots of work for the managers at every level.  This looked impressive to upper management, convincing them that something good was happening.
• Produced numerous reports purporting to track progress and predict development completion.  In reality all of those reports were bullshit with varying degrees of stench.
• Reduced the productivity of all the most productive engineers, and encouraged them to leave.
• Encouraged the other engineers to value process over skill, experience, or knowledge.
• Produced managers with all the fervor of psychotic badgers, but without the attractive personality.  Somehow these managers tended to rise in the ranks, exacerbating all the other bad effects of the current fad.
• Fizzled out after enough time passed that even the least-aware upper management folks understand that it didn't work.

The joking response to this would be to encourage anarchy in small engineering teams, and get rid of all these engineering process schemes.  The thing is ... I'm not at all sure that's a bad idea.  In fact, it's more-or-less the situation at every startup I've ever been associated with – and they were definitely the most productive engineering teams I know of.

In other words, engineering process may well be a Communist plot!

Model X update...

Model X update...  I took the photo at right just a couple minutes ago.  We've got fog here, the temperature is in the low 40s, it's raining intermittently, and the snow on the ground is melting at a prodigious rate.  We're forecast to get about an inch more rain between now and Saturday night; the snow may be completely gone by then.  That will be an amazing transformation!

I forgot to mention in my earlier post that we actually did have a chance to try out the auto-steer feature.  On one of our trips back from SLC, we were on I-15 in rush hour traffic.  For about three miles we were going slower than 45 MPH – so I engaged the auto-steer to see what would happen.  Bottom line: it worked just fine.  It wasn't very exciting; we were simply lane-keeping and the adaptive cruise control kept us at a safe distance behind the car in front of us.

One thing we've noticed (whether or not auto-steer is engaged) is that where there's a traffic sign that arches across the entire freeway the adaptive cruise control seems to be fooled.  Most of the time we just feel a brief deceleration as we approach the sign, then it picks up speed again right afterwards.  Sometimes, however, the car seems to think that a collision is imminent – the crash alarm starts sounding and the brakes are slammed on.  This always happens when it's far too late to actually stop before the sign, so what happens is we slow down abruptly, sometimes by 30 or 40 MPH, and then we pass the sign.  Once past the sign, the alarm goes off and we speed back up.  The first few times that happened it was quite disconcerting, as I had no idea what was causing it.  After a while I put the pattern of the signs together, so now I'm on the lookout for it.

I've also learned a bit more about how the adaptive cruise control works.  It uses forward-looking sensors to “see” the cars in front of us.  I know the car has radar, cameras, and ultrasonic sensors looking forward.  I know (from reading) that the radar is involved with the adaptive cruise control; I'm not sure about the cameras or ultrasonic sensors.  Anyway, what I've discovered is that the car the system is “looking” at is always the car directly in front of my car.  That's not always ideal.  Consider the case where there are two lanes of traffic going in each direction, and the road is turning to the left.  If I'm in the left lane, a car that's ahead of me in the right lane might be directly in front of my car.  In that case, if the other car is going more slowly than I am, the adaptive cruise control will slow me down – even though my lane is completely clear ahead of me.  That tells me that the adaptive cruise control has no sense of the layout of the road, despite having an excellent map available to it, and a vision system that is clearly tracking where my lane is (I know this because it shows the results on my dashboard!).  The left hand of their driving automation doesn't appear to know what the right hand is doing. :)  Hopefully they'll fix this one of these fine days...

Paradise ponders, surprises and hectic days edition...

Paradise ponders, surprises and hectic days edition...  I can't believe I missed two sequential days of posting.  I can't remember the last time that happened...

Nothing bad happened, but there was sure a lot of stuff that did! 

Debbie and I both got colds on Sunday, but I recovered within 24 hours and she's still miserable.  The poor girl is on the tail end of the current cold, where her pattern is to cough and cough and cough.  Ugh...

Monday we made a surprise trip down to SLC, for Debbie to get an injection.  This was for another drug (Prolia) to help with her osteoporosis.   A new drug means a new battle with the insurance company – they don't want to cover it, and her doctor insists that its the only one that will help her.  Her doctor says the insurance company's recommendation (which, of course, is much less expensive) is completely inappropriate for her.  So we're paying out of pocket, and the doctor is going to battle for us.  This tension between our healthcare provider and our insurer is becoming a pattern, and I'm afraid it may be the new norm.  We're not too happy about that, especially when we're paying an absurd amount for our health insurance premium, relative to the benefits being received.

I took my Tesla Model X down the service facility on Tuesday, as planned.  The problem with the spoiler they replicated immediately.  The first thing they tried was to “recalibrate” the spoiler.  After some discussion with the techs, I confirmed that what that meant was to recalibrate the position sensor for the spoiler.  Once they finished with that, the spoiler worked great!  But once I got the car home on Tuesday night, it again didn't work.  Tesla is still working on an answer for me on that.  The mirror problem that I thought I had turns out to just be my el stupido: The mirror wasn't dark, it was the rear window that I look through.  It is, in fact, tinted very dark – so even when the mirror is not darkened, it looks like it is.  Well, to me, anyway.  The techs there told me that nobody had ever complained about that before.  Oh, well.

That evening I met up with an old friend, Doug W., and his wife Dee.  We had dinner at the Red Iguana.  My entree is in the photo at right: a grilled chicken breast smothered in tomatillo sauce, with roasted (and seeded) jalapenos and some grilled shrimp.  Lovely, it was (both the company and the food)!

Yesterday Debbie had a hair appointment, which in her priority scheme ranks just behind life-saving emergency medical treatment.  Ordinarily she would drive herself down to Ogden (where her stylist has her offices), but because of her cold she's been getting very little sleep.  I didn't want to let her drive in that condition, so I drover her down and waited while she got her hair done.  That took five hours out of my day, so I got little else done.  But we did both get back here safely. :)  Also, we had a fine meal at Maddox, where I learned something interesting while reading a poster about their founder: he lived in Paradise until his early 20s!  I had no idea...

Today I'm concentrating on getting ready for our upcoming trip to Hawai'i.  We leave on Monday, bright and early, and we return on the 28th.  We're staying at our favorite bed and breakfast in the islands: the Hale Ohia Cottages, just outside of Volcano Village.  We've been there about eight or nine times over the past 25 years or so, but it's been about 12 years since our last visit.  We can hardly wait to be there again!  We'll be in Cottage 44; if you happen to be in the area, stop in and say hi!  They have WiFi there, and we'll have our laptop, so you can expect some posts and photos from there...

Yet another dichotomy...

Yet another dichotomy...  After an email conversation with a couple of friends, I've learned that the world of free electronic design automation (EDA) is mainly divided into two highly polarized camps: those who like Eagle, and those who like KiCad.  Years ago I had some very unhappy dealings with AutoCAD (who owns Eagle), and KiCad is a CERN project – so for me the choice was easy.  I'm now a KiCad guy! :)

After downloading it, getting completely flubberblated, reading some tutorials, cursing whoever it was that designed their user interface, gradually coming to understand that the OSX version is way behind, I finally managed to actually create a schematic.  This is the touch sensor part of the mud room switch project I posted about yesterday.  I'll keep publishing these in sections, as I build and test them.  This part works just fine.  Vcc, BTW, is 5 volts.

In all the years that I've been building electronics projects, I've never before used a schematic capture program (or EDA of any kind, unless you count circuit simulators).  The closest I've ever come is using Visio with a component outline library.  That's really just a drawing assistant; it doesn't “know” anything about the circuit.  KiCad, on the other hand, can generate net lists (for SPICE, for example) and directly generate the artwork for printed circuit boards.  Most of the (eighty bazillion) online prototype PCB houses will directly take KiCad (or Eagle) files, so presumably it would be pretty darned simple to get boards made for homebrew projects.  One of these days I might actually try that, but this is not that day. :)

If anybody actually wants this schematic, I'd be happy to share it.  It would make more sense to wait until I've actually finished, though!

Some electronics fun...

Some electronics fun...  The photo at right (taken with my iPhone peering through a 2x magnifier) shows the current state of one of my projects (I have lots of projects!).  This is the beginning of a touch-activated switch that will go onto the new cabinetry being built for our new mud room.  The cabinetry will hide a three-way light switch for the mud room lights.  This project will let one of the cabinet's knobs take the place of that switch, by toggling the state of a relay each time the knob is briefly touched while the cabinet door is closed.

The stuff you see there is the regulated 5V power supply for the electronics, plus the touch sensor.  The little wire visible coming out from under the top of the vector board will connect to the knob.  The blue 20-turn potentiometer adjusts the sensitivity of the circuit.  The funny thing with a white cap below the potentiometer is a switch, for resetting the touch sensor chip if it gets stuck.  The chip is the tiny little black rectangle with six leads just above that blue potentiometer.  It's the smallest component of all – smaller than the quarter-watt resistors and absolutely dwarfed by the 0.47 microfarad capacitor (the green monster on the right side).

It's kind of mind-boggling for this old fart just how small this stuff has gotten.  I can still remember (not very fondly, actually) when I did all my electronic construction using lug strips and point-to-point wiring, most resistors I used were huge 5 or 10 watt things, and the active components were vacuum tubes with sockets an inch or more in diameter.  Things sure have gotten much smaller!

Much to my amazement, when I finished wiring all this stuff and fired it up, (a) there was no smoke in the air, and (b) it worked on the first try!

Model X update...

Model X update...  I just finished installing a software update.  This one promises to enable some more auto-driving functionality.  Though I read the release notes, it's still not entirely clear to me exactly what was just enabled.  Many of the release notes covered things that were released in the previous release, talking about them as though they were new.  Also, the same language is in there about “calibration” requiring potentially several days of driving before the features are actually enabled.  So ... all I really know is that I just installed an update.  I have no idea what it's going to do, or when. :)

Super bowl?

Super bowl?  Two readers emailed to ask why I haven't been commenting on the super bowl (or, as I like to call it, the “stupor bowl”) game that's happening today.  Obviously these two readers don't know me well.  For their benefit (as well as for my other readers who may not understand about me and sports):

I don't know anything about sports – I cannot even reliably identify which sport is being played in any particular game.  I don't know how the games are played, or what the rules are.  I don't watch or follow any sports.  I don't know the names of any sportsmen (or women).  I don't care about sports.  I don't have any favorite teams.  I don't “root” for any teams.  I don't even know the names of any teams.  I care about sports less than I care about the abundance of fleas in Irkutsk, less than Debbie cares about stray inductance in 5% carbon film resistors, but slightly more than I care about Hillary's career opportunities.

Just to be clear for the more obtuse: I will not be watching the super bowl game today.

Actually, the only reason I even knew it was today is because it showed up in the news that I read.

More Milo...

More Milo ... this time on Tucker Carlson's show.  Again, excellent.

I just felt...

I just felt ... the strangest thing!  I walked from our house into our barn, about 50'.  I wasn't wearing a jacket or a hat.  It's nearly 50°F out, and the sun was out.  I felt the warm sun on my head – what an odd feeling, after a couple months of winter!

If you've ever done any electronic logic design...

If you've ever done any electronic logic design ... then most likely you already know that ROMs can be used to replace any collection of logic gates.  In effect they can be thought of as extremely simple FPLAs.  For instance, a 4kb ROM has 12 address lines and 8 data lines – which you can think of as 12 logic inputs and 8 logic outputs, and the outputs can be programmed to be any function of those inputs.

If you've actually used ROMs as logic in practice, then you've probably also run across their main drawback: glitches in the outputs when an input changes.  If you're circuit is synchronized this isn't an issue, but for pure logic without synchronization, it is potentially a major problem.

So when I ran across a homebrew computer that claimed to be built entirely with ROMs, I was really curious how this might have been done.  About a third of the way into the web page, I ran across this:

Some observations have led me to assume that when the address input changes from a value A to a value B, even if the same value X is memorized in all the addresses in T(A,B), a transient state can appear on the data outputs during a few nano seconds. This transient phenomenon can be enough to “break” the storage loop. I worked around this problem by putting a 1nf capacitor on each data output of the EPROMs used to implements registers. This solution gives no guarantee of reproducibility. It could be improved by using resistor capacitor circuits in the storage loop instead of single capacitors. Without this hack, the computer crashes after running a few tens of thousands of instructions.

Well, that's about as hacky as you can get!  Basically he's using capacitors as a sort of low-pass filter to keep the transients from affecting his ROM logic.  One would never engineer something for production like that, as the necessary values for those capacitors would be affected by all sorts of things, from ambient temperature to which production run of ROMs was being used.

Still ... having a computer built entirely from logic implemented in ROMs is pretty cool! :)

Paradise ponders, outdoor liquid water edition...

Paradise ponders, outdoor liquid water edition...  Yesterday morning was cold and very foggy (see photos below).  It wasn't cold enough to form hoarfrost, though.  Later in the day the temperature rose above freezing – and it stayed there all last night and so far today.  This means that the snow and ice that's accumulated over the past month is starting to melt.  Even yesterday morning (when I took the photos below) most of the snow had slipped out of the trees, as you can see.  This morning there's no fog, and it's wet outside – from some light rain and (lots of!) melting snow and ice.  Our driveway has running water on it, something we haven't seen outside for quite a while now. :)

Animated circuit simulator...

Animated circuit simulator...  At right is a screenshot I took from an animated circuit simulator I ran across yesterday.  It's called EveryCircuit, and it runs on Chrome browsers, IOS devices (iPad, iPhone), and droids.  The circuit is a simple relay driver with a diode snubber, copying something I have in real life – which let me look at the actual circuit with an oscilloscope, and compare it to the simulation.  They were remarkably close, even with the component's values at the default setting.

I go looking for simulators every once in a while, hoping to find something a bit more interactive and usable than the bog-standard SPICE simulators.  Those feel to me like I'm using hand tools to build a house – I wanted a circular saw, dammit!  I've found some interactive simulators before, including (if memory serves) an earlier version of EveryCircuit.  They were so simple as to be nearly useless.  EveryCircuit is not.  It is not as complete or as sophisticated (by far) as a decent SPICE implementation – but it is complete enough to serve for the vast majority of my purposes.  It works remarkably well on the iPad, and despite the small screen of an iPhone it's passable there as well.

There's a very active online community with vast quantities of user-contributed circuits.  I did a search for “zero crossing” and got 16 results.  The quality varied from pathetic to quite good.

It's free to try (even on IOS or Android), but the trial comes with some severe limitations.  To buy it is a one-time purchase of $14.99, which is the least expensive commercial simulator I've ever run across.  It's now part of my electronics toolkit.  I'm sure I'll still bump up against its limitations now and then, and for all I know they'll go out of business some day – so I'll still keep a “real” SPICE implementation lying about.  But for the common little jobs I need to do, this will do just fine...

Things every hacker once knew...

Things every hacker once knew...  This is a fascinating essay by Eric S. Raymond.  Almost everything in it is well known to me, though I don't think Eric would consider me a “hacker”.  I'm five years older than he is, and I suspect I started with electronics (though not computers) a bit younger than he did – so some of the things he lists don't even seem that antique to me! :)

Update: first link fixed.  Thanks to all who commented or emailed to let me know!

Model X update...

Model X update...  We've had our Tesla Model X now for just over a month.  How do we like the car after having had it for a while?

Very much, thank you!

We continue to be thrilled by the visibility and quiet, perfect for the kind of sightseeing and wildlife viewing that we love so much.  The comfort of all the little things like heated seats and automatic doors is very nice, though it still feels a bit weird for we who have been driving pickup trucks for 30 years! :)

I've had just one problem with the car other than those I've previously described in posts: the rear-view mirror inside the car is permanently darkened.  All three rear-view mirrors are supposed to automatically darken when there are bright headlights behind the car, and the two exterior mirrors work fine.  The software upgrade is performing well, though I'm still a little disappointed by the restrictions on it.  We haven't been able to try auto-steer yet, because the limitations currently in force mean that there are no roads anywhere near us where we can use it.  The current restrictions are (a) you must be on a limited-access highway (i.e., an Interstate or something like that), and you have to be going under 45 MPH (i.e., high traffic situation).  Well, in this neck of the woods we have neither Interstate nor heavy traffic, so we're SOL until the restrictions get lifted.  This is promised once sufficient experience has been gained by the entire fleet of Tesla cars.  Won't be much from northern Utah!

We're going in for our service appointment (to look at the non-retracting spoiler and the rear-view mirror) next Tuesday afternoon.  Later that same day we're meeting friends for dinner at the Red Iguana.  Should be an interesting day!

Oh, one other Model X related thing: we've purchased a couple of accessories.  The first one, which we're already using, is a pair of color-coded silicone covers for the Tesla fob (which replaces a key).  The covers add some cushioning and waterproofing, but the color-coding was what we really wanted: red for my fob, black for Debbie's.  The fob is how the Model X figures out who you are, and determines the settings for the seats, mirrors, etc. that it restores to the driver's seat.  We've also purchased a couple of tempered glass screen protectors, one for the giant screen in the center console, the other for the smaller screen in front of the steering wheel.  I'll be installing those this weekend.

Random morning thought...

Random morning thought...  While I was reading the news this morning about the 63,411 things that Trump did last night, a memory surfaced: some advice I got many years ago from an executive trying to teach me how to manage an engineering group.  He told me the most important thing I could do was simply to do.  When I looked baffled, he said “Do something, even if it’s wrong!”  That led to a more interesting discussion about the importance, in leadership, of making decisions and setting a course of action.  Even more interesting was his assertion that a core skill of managers is the ability to make decisions in the presence of imperfect or even absent information.

I felt the truth of that advice on many occasions in my decades of management experience.  I was surprised by just how often subordinates would be unable (or unwilling, to the same effect) to make a decision and instead raised it to me.  I hope it's true that I didn't do the same to my bosses!

What dawned on me this morning is we're seeing that principle in action at the level of the President of the U.S.  The sheer speed with which Trump is taking actions means that we're seeing low information decision-making.  Well, I guess there's one other possibility: that all these actions were queued up in some master plan.  I'll dismiss that, however, on the basis that if any such plan actually existed certainly it's presence would have leaked, and most likely much of its contents.  So I think it's more likely that it's “Do something, even if it’s wrong!” that's going on.

So here's the big question: is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

I really don't know.  I do know, however, that it's frightening.

I'm handling it this morning by listening to Frank Zappa's Apostrophe, which ever gives me joy...

Milo's response...

Milo's response ... to the Berkeley riots.  It's excellent.  In particular, I like his point about the irony of this happening at UC Berkeley – where the free speech movement started...

Trump has already floated the notion of stopping all federal funding of Berkeley in response.  The challenge, as always, would be finding the right criteria – and the right judges – to use in determining which institutions of higher education should be defunded. 

I have a proposal for a way to avoid that tough problem: defund them all (to be clear: I'm talking about federal funding).  And yes, I'm serious.  If any particular institution is truly doing a vital job (and I'm very skeptical of that with respect to Berkeley!), then there will be market-based funding available.  If not ... well, then, that institution must not have been all that important to anyone other than its faculty, administrators, and students, then.  So why the hell should taxpayers be funding it?

Paradise ponders, shifty grout and hoarfrost edition...

Paradise ponders, shifty grout and hoarfrost edition...  But first, for your amusement, the video at right (try to ignore the fact that it comes from the New York Times).  The subject is very simple: it just shows people standing on a 10 meter (about 33 feet) tall diving tower as they try to work up the courage to dive off.  I couldn't stop watching it!

A few days ago I wrote about my grout project.  It's finished now, and we can use our shower again.  But there's something mighty peculiar about the caulking we're using: it changes color, and quite dramatically.  When it's dry, it's roughly the color of milk chocolate – a rich, dark brown that doesn't match our other grout at all.  When it's been wet for 30 seconds or so, though, something quite dramatic happens: over the course of about 10 seconds it changes to a very pale beige, almost precisely matching our old grout!  So ... while we're taking a shower, the new grout looks great.  After the shower dries out, it looks like someone spilled dark paint onto the patched areas of our grout.  Sigh...

Michelle H. is one of the friends we've made here.  She's also the lady who comes over to clean our house, and she's done many other things to help us when we're on trips or (especially!) while Debbie was injured.  She lives in Paradise, and is an altogether typical resident here: a devout Mormon, mother of eight children, friendly, full of smiles and good cheer, and (very) active in the community.  A few days ago we took her out for lunch at Los Primos (which she loves!), and on the way back home we were admiring the hoarfrost on the trees.  We'd had a freezing fog in the morning, and even the weeds were beautiful.  Michelle called it something else (“frosty fog” or something like that), and I told her that it was actually called hoarfrost.  I wish I had a photo of her face when I said that.  It was obvious from her reaction that she thought I said “whore-frost”, and most Americans would pronounce the two as though they were precise homonyms (there's actually a subtle difference).  It took a little while for us to convince her that we weren't having some fun at her expense! :)

A few days later, she was in our house while I was unpacking a tool I'd received in the mail.  She asked me what it was, and I replied (with the truth): it's a nut-cracker.  Once again, that face! :)  The tool I bought looks exactly like those at right.  Michelle only recovered her equanimity after I explained what the tool was actually for – splitting nuts that had become corroded onto a bolt.  Oh, poor sheltered Michelle, exposed to a couple of outsiders like us!

Our forecast has five days of snow in the next seven days, but none of the probabilities are high, nor are the forecast amounts large.  Better yet: for four days starting tomorrow, we're supposed to have temperatures well above freezing for most of the day – and on two of those days, we have rain in the forecast.  Oh, that would be lovely to have enough rain to melt down a substantial part of the snow mountains we have all over our place!

Yesterday while we were out gallivanting amongst the wildlife, someone came by our driveway and moved two of the largest snow piles I'd made so that we had better visibility when trying to leave our driveway.  We spotted that as we pulled back into our driveway.  Even around here, surrounded by the nicest people on the planet, that's still a very nice thing for someone to do.  I couldn't tell who did it; all I could figure out (from the tracks) is that whoever did it had a very large piece of equipment indeed – those tire tracks were about 30" wide!  A little later in the day I was taking our trash can out to the highway, and I saw the person who was doing the nice driveway-fixing – he was working on my neighbor's driveway across the highway.  I went over to find out who it was and to thank him, and discovered that it was a county employee!  He was actually assigned to do this work, as a way of reducing accidents by enabling people to see as they pull out of their driveway.  He was working his way along the entire length of State Highway 165, clearing everybody's driveway.  What an eminently sensible thing to do!  I've lived in California so long that I basically never expect the local governments to do anything sensible, so seeing it happen here is still always surprising...

Paradise ponders, super wildlife viewing edition...

Paradise ponders, super wildlife viewing edition...  Debbie and I took a drive up Blacksmith Fork Canyon, leaving shortly after sunrise.  The photos below are all from this morning's trip.  In addition to the beautiful sunrise and winter scenery, we saw dozens of deer, a group of nine elk, three bald eagles, five moose, and an American dipper.  Many of the large mammals were quite close to the road, close enough that I could get photos even without a telephoto lens.  The dipper was a hoot to watch, and we had a good long view of him.  He was hunting bugs in the stream, submerging often, and once we actually saw him catch some sort of beetle and gobble it down.  The bald eagles were roosting in trees, one of them just 60' or so from us.  The entire trip up to Hardware Ranch we didn't see a single car – we had the entire canyon to ourselves.  The elk herd at Hardware Ranch hadn't yet been fed, and they were all watching closely in the direction the feed carts come from.  A wonderful start to the day!