Ponders from the road...

Ponders from the road...  I'm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, tonight.  I just took a left turn :)

Yesterday afternoon, Debbie and I drove down to Salt Lake City to have dinner at the Red Iguana.  We've learned that if you get there before about 3 pm it's never crowded, and yesterday was no exception.  Learning from our past couple of visits, we ordered one of the specials: a skirt steak and shrimp, with tomatillo sauce.  It was superb!  The sauce was heavenly – these people know their sauces, that's for sure.  I had flan for dessert, and Debbie had hot rice pudding.  We went home with very happy tummies.  Also with a truck full of hooch – we stocked up at the giant state liquor store that's just down the road from the Red Iguana.


I left Paradise at just after 5 this morning, and I arrived at my motel in Albuquerque almost exactly 12 hours later.  I'm a little tired of driving :)  I did take some photos today, all from the truck as I was zooming along.  In order: (1) coming off the east side of Soldier Summit, not far from Carbon, (2) the La Sal Mountains, taken from about 15 miles south of Moab, (3) and (4) scenes from northern New Mexico, (5) the San Juan Mountains as seen from southern Colorado.  Tomorrow I head almost due east, and my trip will be almost entirely on I-40 – not nearly as interesting as today's drive...

Slow blogging alert!

Slow blogging alert!  I'm off early tomorrow morning on my grand road trip adventure.  I'll be picking up my brother Scott and his possessions in Virginia Beach, delivering Utah bacon to my mom in Charlottesville, buying industrial quantities of Duke's mayonnaise to take home, and finally delivering Scott to his new home in Newton before I finally straggle back in to Paradise.  There will be almost 5,000 miles of driving, during which blogging will be difficult :). When I'm not driving, most of the time I'll be visiting, eating, or sleeping.  Occasionally, if the spirit moves me (and especially if I have some photos to share), I may post.

Or not :)

See y'all later!

Pleasant nerdly surprises in Paradise...

Pleasant nerdly surprises in Paradise...  So I was troubleshooting my solar panel installation this morning, to see if I could figure out why the networking wasn't working properly.  Last night, last time I checked, I was seeing something odd: I could ping the inverter for 45 seconds, then it would go down for 10 seconds, then backup up for 45 seconds, down for 10 seconds, and repeat forever.  That didn't look very good, but I was tired so I went to bed.

This morning when I checked, I got a solid ping!  The inverter was staying up just fine.  So I thought I'd check to see if it was communicating with its monitoring server, which is up in the cloud somewhere.  I tracerouted it as far as Frankfurt, but after that the routers stopped responding.  So I logged into my MikroTik router in the shed, as I knew that it had some sort of a packet sniffing facility.  I got that working, and discovered that every two minutes the inverter was indeed “talking” to a server.  Naturally, that made me wonder what it was saying – but the packet sniffer in the router was fairly primitive, and basically just gave me an undecoded byte dump of the packet contents.  I wanted more.  I wanted the kind of powerful decoding, filtering, etc. that Wireshark provides.

So I started poking into the notion of setting up a mirror port, which is how I've monitored this sort of thing in the past.  I figured that if I could set up a mirror port, then I could take my laptop out to the shed, connect it to the mirror port, and monitor to my heart's content.  But ... my router doesn't support port mirroring.  What to do?

On the MikroTik router's packet sniffing page, I noticed a feature I didn't understand – but it sure sounded intriguing: streaming.  What on earth does that mean with respect to a packet sniffer?  Well, with a little googling about I discovered that if you enable that, instead of logging the packets it will encapsulate them in a UDP protocol called TZSP and send them – stream them – to any IP address I want.  Furthermore, Wireshark understands TZSP out of the box.  So all I had to do was (on the MikroTik router) enable streaming to the IP address of my laptop (still in the house, connected as usual).  Then I just ran Wireshark on my laptop, still in my bathrobe, and voila!  My inverter's packets were magically appearing fully decoded in my laptop.

Jeez that was easy!

Icicles in the moonlight...

Icicles in the moonlight...  Quite beautiful, they are.  Unfortunately my camera couldn't capture it in such dim light...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  That bowl of luscious-looking soup at right is Debbie's homemade tlapeno (Mexican chicken soup), moments before I ate it last night.  I had another bowl this morning.  I think it was her best ever, and that's saying something – she's made this many times.  This version was made with homemade stock (based on the turkey carcass), with both chicken and turkey meat in it.  The other ingredients include carrots, onions, celery, garbanzo beans, avocado, and cilantro.  Ah, heavenly!

The solar guy was here today, and we got the inverter talking with our network  I'm not sure it's all working correctly yet, though, as the inverter keeps dropping and reacquiring its IP address.  I'll do some network troubleshooting on that tomorrow.  By happy coincidence, the Rocky Mountain Power guy came out today (at the same time!) to change our meter to a “net” meter, which will allow us to sell power back to them.  That's all turned on and running now, and the solar array is producing power.  Not much, though :)  The panels are covered with snow!

The photo at left is of the sunset here tonight.  Just gorgeous!

Paragraphs like this...

Paragraphs like this ... are why I love The Daily Shot, Ricochet's daily email:

Also for the record, Alan Grayson is from the Bronx, but he wasn’t “born” so much as he congealed in a cesspool. He’s running to take Marco Rubio’s Senate seat next year, so perhaps he said this to get attention. But there’s an equal chance that he would have said the exact same thing if he were in a straitjacket, rocking back and forth in the padded cell of a lunatic asylum.

You can subscribe here.  It's free.  Ricochet itself isn't free, but it's worth every penny of its (very modest) cost...

A bit of perspective...

A bit of perspective...  Petrophysicist Andy May has published an updated version of his timeline showing climate and human civilization (low resolution image at right).  The first version was the best graphical summary of why I'm a global warming skeptic I'd ever seen.  The updated version is even better.  You can download the full resolution PDF; that's the only way you can read it well online, or print it (if your printer can handle big paper).  It's well worth your while to do so, if for no other reason than to gain a bit of perspective about warmist claims...

Not a happy read...

Not a happy read...  A former U.S. nuclear missile launch control officer believes that we're at risk of an inadvertent nuclear war with Russia...

“…destroyed its soul.”

“…destroyed its soul.”  If Britain's socialist trends herald the U.S.'s ... then this is what we have to look forward to:

The fact that more than half of Britain’s households, 13.7m, receive more in welfare benefits than they pay in taxes. The fact that this represents a rise from 45.9 per cent of households in 1997 to 51.5 per cent today. The fact that 20.3m families now receive some kind of state benefit. The fact that for 9.6m of these families, benefits account for more than half of their income. The fact that nearly five million people have their rent paid by the state. The fact that vast numbers of people, first through Incapacity Benefit and then through Employment Support Allowance, have been redefined by the state as ‘incapable’ — of work, of independence, of dignity, in effect — and have been put out to pasture. There are parts of Britain where a state-sanctioned culture of incapacity has deadened community spirit, destroyed its soul.

This is by Brendan O'Neill, who wants to blow up Britain's welfare system and start over.  Others (and perhaps him, as well) also want to blow up Britain's vaunted National Health Service.  Its dysfunctionality has been much on display this past year, and serves as a sobering example of where ObamaCare is headed unless our politicians work up the courage to kill it.

The Paris climate “talks” this week are a total waste...

The Paris climate “talks” this week are a total waste...  Just looking at the roster of attendees is enough to infer that, but James Delingpole explains in more detail.

A local note: I have yet to run into even a single resident of Cache Valley who finds the global warming alarmists credible.  Not one.  Now, mind you, I don't know any of the academics at Utah State University (in Logan, 12 miles north of us), and I'm sure some of them are firmly on the warmist bandwagon.  But not out here, where people actually work outside.  The farmers, especially, dismiss the global warming alarmism as twaddle that is refuted by the evidence visible to them.  Many of them wish there really was some global warming, as a couple of degrees C warmer here would make a huge difference (in a good way) to their productivity.  But there's nothing.  They either see no changes over their lifetime, or they think temperatures average slightly cooler...

Finished, but non-working clocks in Paradise (and some other thoughts)...

Finished, but non-working clocks in Paradise (and some other thoughts)...  Well, I've installed the last component in that clock kit.  When I fired it up, the hours were stuck on "12" and nothing I did could make it budge.  Yay!  Another problem to troubleshoot!  But not tonight...

Tomorrow is going to be a bit of a busy day. 

First we have Debbie's surgical followup visit.  The last time we saw the doctor, about two weeks ago, he expected much improvement by now on her tendonitis.  There is some improvement, but not nearly enough to satisfy Debbie (or me).  We're hoping for some better plan of action.

When we get home, the solar installers are due here for the final step of our solar installation: getting the networking up and running, so the system can be remotely monitored.  I've got everything all ready to go, network-wise, whether they choose to use WiFi or direct wiring.  It really should be easy to get this working, but you just never know what might go wrong :)

Then I'm going to start packing for my trip!

Icicles in Paradise...

Icicles in Paradise...  Conditions are apparently just about perfect for icicle formation.  It's clear, but quite cold (just 9°F when we got up!).  The photo at right is from the exercise room on our second floor – it's the closest I can get to the icicles without actually going outside.  And going outside is definitely on my “avoid” list this morning!  We've now got around a hundred 3 foot long icicles on the north side of our house, and about the same number of 2 footers on the south side.  The shed, with its not-so-steep roof, doesn't have nearly the display of icicle gloriousness...

It hardly seems possible, but I don't think my calendar is lying to me: I leave on my grand cross-country adventure in just three days.  It seems like I should be scurrying about getting ready for the trip, but truthfully there's little to do.  I'm going to be picking up a few regional delicacies (can you say smoked bacon?) to take back to my mom, I need to pack a week or so worth of clothes, and a computer bag – but that's really it.  The big things that needed to be done (getting the truck checked out, getting an overhead rack installed on the truck, getting a trailer hitch, etc.) have already been done.  The weather forecast looks good for the whole trip, though anytime you're looking a week or more into the future you have to take that forecast with a truckload of salt.  Bright and early Wednesday morning I'm going to climb into my (cold!) truck and point the nose toward Albuquerque, New Mexico – the first stop on the trip...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Another stage of the clock is done: the tens-of-minutes digit.  This time it did not work when I fired it up.  Yay!  Troubleshooting!  But the fun didn't last for long, as the problem turned out to be the same trace broken, on the same (2^3) flip-flop, as I ran into on the prescaler.  Once I saw the symptom (stuck 2^3 bit) I went right to the problem.  One jumper, just as before, and that problem was fixed.  There was another small problem: the top segment of the LED wasn't lighting for a 5.  That problem could only be a particular decoder diode, so I went looking for it – and discovered a single unsoldered joint on the exact diode that had to be the source of the problem.  One press of the soldering iron and everything worked.  Photos of the current state of the clock:

There are a whole bunch of components on there!  So far the kit has been darned near perfect.  A couple of board errors for a board this complex isn't exactly unusual.  If it was being manufactured in large quantities, the sorts of broken traces I ran into would be tweaked out.  Undoubtedly this is a low volume board, so these sorts of problems are totally forgivable.  Lots of extra components are included, though I haven't needed any so far.  There wasn't quite enough solder included; I ran out partway through this stage.  I have a big roll, though, so that's a non-issue.

The weather continues to be cold (around 20°F) and intermittently snowy.  Some of my neighbors are plowing, but I'm holding off as there's more snow int the forecast...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Right now we are mostly pondering the weather, which has turned snowy with no warning at all.  When we went to bed last night, the forecast was for overcast and no precipitation.  When we got up this morning (at 3 am), it was snowing – and now the forecast calls for snow throughout the morning.  We've accumulated a couple inches already, and the roads are icy.  Current radar image (at 8:30 am) is at right – all that blue stuff is where it's snowing.  I just got back from a trip to our local hardware store, and I pulled one car of the ditch on the way there, and another on the way home – and that's on one 3.5 mile stretch!  People here actually know how to drive in the snow, so when you see cars in the ditch, you know the roads are slippery...

Last night I finished another digit (the minutes digit) on my clock kit.  Once again, it all worked on the first try – and I'm a little disappointed that I don't get to troubleshoot anything.  Now I've started on the tens-of-minutes digit.  It's beginning to look possible that I might finish the kit this weekend – especially if the snowy weather keeps me indoors!

Here's the scene just a few minutes ago from my office window.  Tim's horses don't seem to mind the snow at all – they're out there in the alfalfa field, mowing that alfalfa down into the dirt.

Time for me to go have some breakfast.  I sense an open-faced turkey sandwich, with dressing, in my immediate future!

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  There's a 26" long icicle outside our office window right now.  Sunshine on our dark grey roof is melting a little snow, and the 22°F temperature is making it freeze again quite quickly.  It's a beautiful morning here, not black at all – but cold as heck :)

This morning I worked on the next section of my clock kit, finishing the tens-of-seconds counter.  It all worked on the first try.  I'm not sure whether I'm happy about that, though – it's kind of fun for me to troubleshoot the problems :)  In the second photo below, you can see (sort of) my 'scope, a Rigol DS1102E.  I bought it several years ago, when it cost nearly twice what it does now – and I thought that was a real bargain!  It's really quite an amazingly capable oscilloscope for the money.  It's also (to my ancient sensibilities) amazingly small.  'Scopes like this, back in the '70s, weighted over 100 pounds, were the size of an oven, and were generally rolled around on carts.  They also cost $15,000 or so, and didn't have nearly the feature set of this little thing – most especially they didn't have the spectrum analyzer capabilities...

Black Friday in Paradise...

Black Friday in Paradise...  It will be great!  It will be ... exactly like every other Friday in Paradise :)

We are participating in exactly zero store sales, online sales, or any other kind of sales.  Most of the day we'll be wondering just what the hell is wrong with all those crazed shoppers we see on the news web sites.  Haven't seen any around these parts, though.  Last week there were a bunch of local stores that had signs saying “Black Friday is today”, or something much like it.  If they were attempting to generate a shopping frenzy, it was a dismal failure.  If they were trying to say Black Friday is nothing special, they may well have succeeded...

Paradise ponders, part II...

Paradise ponders, part II...  Now with photos!

That stock pot at right is what we brined our turkey in, and that's what it looked like just before I brought it in at 7 am this morning.  The snow looks all nice and fluffy, but it wasn't – it was basically ice with a little air mixed in to make it white.  When I got the pot inside, I couldn't remove the lid – it was frozen in place.  I had to wedge a knife between the lid and the pot, and pry quite hard.  Then I had to melt the ice off the lid with hot water.  This should have given me a clue what I was going to run into when I went outside to plow, but I'm too dense, so it didn't.

At daybreak I went outside to plow the driveway.  The good news: this year, with the tractor in the (nice, heated) shed, it started right up.  I didn't have to melt the ice in the ignition switch like I did last year :)  The bad news: the driveway was basically solid ice, with a weird icy snow on top.  I slipped and slid all over the place while walking, and the tractor did the same while I was plowing.  The tractor actually slid right off the driveway three times, and it was quite a challenge to get it back onto the driveway!  I had to use the differential locks and approach the driveway straight on.  The plow got the snow off easily, but had a lot of trouble with the sheet of ice that's right on the pavement.  Probably 50% of the driveway is still covered with ice, but with the snow scraped off the pavement is showing through.  This means that the sun will heat the black asphalt, and the ice will melt soon (if the snow remained on top, it wouldn't). 

After I finished plowing, I shoveled off our front porch and walkway.  Normally that's trivially easy – we don't get much snow in the first place, and it's been light, fluffy stuff in all our previous storms.  Not this time!  In some places I really needed a jackhammer –  that solid ice was not possible to shovel off.  So I did the best I could, and then spread quite a bit of salt.  I even put salt on the part of the driveway we'd walk on to get to the trucks, because I don't want Debbie slipping again.

After coming back inside, I helped Debbie with the cranberry-orange relish and potatoes.  Debbie already had the turkey stuffed and in the oven.  We're due for our dinner in about four hours.  Counting down, we are!

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  On a Thanksgiving Day morning.  Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

We've got about 3" of snow on the ground, and the forecast says it's going to stay below freezing for about four days.  I know from past experience, though, that the driveway will melt early – and then freeze into ice.  So at daybreak I'm going out to do a little snowplowing.  It's 28°F right now, and it will likely be another degree or two colder when I get started.  Brrr!

Yesterday we started our Thanksgiving Day cooking.  We made a pumpkin pie with a recipe new to us, and we're not at all sure whether the result will be edible.  The appearance is ... different.  I'll let you know how that turned out :)  We also did something new (for us) with the turkey: we brined it.  The brine recipe we used is really weird sounding: lots of salt and water (expected that), but also lots of honey, garlic, thyme, parsley, and pepper (didn't expect them!).  We're soaking it in the brine for 18 hours; it comes out at 7 am this morning (about fifteen minutes from now, as I write).  From then on out the cooking of the turkey is pretty conventional, but that brine step is really weird.  If we don't like it, we've got plenty of great frozen meals to fall back on :)  Debbie also made some chocolate pudding, from scratch.  It's extremely rich (this is Debbie who made it!), and almost black with the dark chocolate in it.  I got a caffeine buzz just smelling it!  Tastes good, though, but I couldn't eat very much of it.

We've been enjoying a fire in our living room fireplace for the past couple of days (photo above).  We haven't yet got our fireplace door, but Debbie's sister had the brilliant idea of just getting a fireplace screen (they don't cost much on Amazon!).  We did that, and now we've had several mornings and evenings with the pleasure of a crackling fire to sit in front of.  We're going to run out of firewood soon, though :)

If you are...

If you are ... a PCA (Programmer of a Certain Age), then you'll no doubt remember – and fondly – the HP-16C “Computer Scientist” calculator.  That's a photo of it at right (not mine, sadly).  I bought one of these shortly after they were announced in 1982, and I put lots of hours on it.  It was useful not only for programming, but also for digital hardware design (and especially for debugging).  Sometime in the early '90s, when it was on my lab table and I was soldering, I killed it by dropping the hot soldering iron on the keyboard.  Those keys work very poorly when melted to the case :)

I was seriously bummed when I discovered that HP no longer made them, and I couldn't get a replacement.

But I was all smiles when I found out that a guy in Switzerland had started a company (Swiss Micros) to make emulations of all the old HP calculators – including the HP-16C!  His version of it is called the DM-16, and it's quite a faithful copy of the original – but with a more modern (and powerful) computer inside it, and a much smaller form factor.  Oh, and also a titanium case! Naturally, I ordered one immediately – and today I received it.  That's a photo of mine on the right.  Within a few keystrokes, I remembered how to operate most of it.  That sure brought back some memories!

Burglary in Paradise...

Burglary in Paradise...  Well, there's much more news about the two burglars recently caught after invading a home in Paradise.  Aren't they cute in their purple suits?

For starters, the police have searched their home – and found evidence linking them to seven other burglaries.  Then there's the fact that their (rental) home is in Smithfield Canyon – just a few doors down from the B&B where Debbie and I stayed almost two years ago when looking for a home here.  There were two teenagers (their children?) found on the property, along with numerous animals.  All of these are now being cared for elsewhere.  The out-of-state owner of the property returned and reported a vehicle was missing; that's now listed as stolen.

Now these two are being held without bail.  That's probably actually good for them, as the folks of this community are not likely to be shy about administering a little homespun justice if they were found out and about...