Captain Kangaroo, of course!

Captain Kangaroo, of course!  Via my pistol-packing, lobster-eating mama...

A wife's love...

A wife's love...  Via my brother Scott.

A very old man lay dying in his bed. In death's doorway, he suddenly smelled the aroma of his favorite chocolate chip cookie wafting up the stairs. He gathered his remaining strength and lifted himself from the bed. Leaning against the wall, he slowly made his way out of the bedroom, and with even greater effort forced himself down the stairs, gripping the railing with both hands.

With labored breath, he leaned against the door frame, gazing into the kitchen. Were it not for death's agony, he would have thought himself already in heaven.

There, spread out on newspapers on the kitchen table were literally hundreds of his favorite chocolate chip cookies.

Was it heaven? Or was it one final act of heroic love from his devoted wife, seeing to it that he left this world a happy man?

Mustering one great final effort, he threw himself toward the table. The aged and withered hand, shaking, made its way to a cookie at the edge of the table, when he was suddenly smacked with a spatula by his wife. "Stay out of those," she said. "They're for the funeral."

It's all too easy for me to imagine that happening here, in my house :)

Way back in the '60s...

Way back in the '60s ... when I was just starting my electronics career, I built a theremin using vacuum tubes.  I didn't design it myself; just built it from a schematic I found somewhere.  It worked fine, but sounded so awful to me that I disassembled it and used the parts for something else. 

Never did it occur to me that one could make a theremin with a dead badger.  Not once.  But it did occur to this fellow.  That should worry us, I think...

Andrew Klavan...

Andrew Klavan: I'm angry, so I'm voting for Donald Trump!  Is this really why Trump has so much support?  Angry low-information, low-cogitation voters?  That's it?

I don't know whether I hope that's true or false...

Mercury (the planet) is really weird...

Mercury (the planet) is really weird...  The trove of data collected by the MESSENGER robotic explorer didn't help make it less so, either.

Spam of the day...

Spam of the day...  Every few weeks I go through my spam folder, just to make sure that no important email got accidentally misclassified as junk.  GMail's filters are remarkably good; it's rare for me to find a false positive like that.

Sometimes the subject lines of the spam are enough to entice me to open it, just to see what it said.  Here's one I opened today.  I'm still laughing as I copy this over.  The number of people who are tricked by this sort of thing has to be vanishingly small – but when the cost of sending email is (literally) zero, that doesn't matter...

Subject: 2016 Compensation Payment

UNITED NATIONS OFFICE OF INTERNATIONAL OVERSIGHT SERVICES
Internal Audit, Monitoring, Consulting and Investigations Division

From: Mrs. Carman Lapointe

Good day to you, my name is Mrs. Carman Lapointe Young the United Nations Under-Secretary I was sent to Nigeria last week by the United Nation and is to officially informed you that your name is among the scam victims that will be compensated this 2016 with the total sum of $5.5Million approved by United Nations and other stake holders and this is the reason why the united nation sent me to Nigeria to make sure people like you receive there fund from here in Nigeria without any hitch, and I have a mandate with UN stake holders who approved your fund to make sure you receive your approve compensation fund before I go back to NEW YORK to summit my report, and I am contacting you now because your fund is ready for you to make the claim

Note the United Nation have ordered the appointed paying bank to program your fund in form of ATM Card and they have successfully program and activate your ATM Card so as am talking to you now your ATM Card is ready for use, Again I want you to know that you are only require to come down here in Nigeria to sign and pick up your Card without paying any cent but if you cant come down here in Nigeria to sign and pick up your ATM Card then you will have to pay Delivery fee of $250 and bank will hand over your Card to DHL and they will deliver it to your address within 48hours so I want you to tell me if you want to come down here to pick up your Card or you prefer to send the $250 so that DHL will deliver your Card to your address?

Note for easy communication contact me via this email (mrs.young112@gmail.com) or phone +234-7061268585, Thanks for your understanding, I wait to hear from you soon as you receive this email from me

Mrs. Carman Lapointe
United Nations Under-Secretary
General for Internal Oversight

I just love the part where “if you cant come down here in Nigeria” then for a mere $250 DHL will deliver your ATM card (loaded with $5.5 million!) right to your home address.  What a deal!

Oh my gosh...

Oh my gosh...  If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that almost two years ago we ordered a Tesla Model X (their 4WD SUV).  The photo at right is what ours should look like.  We did so knowing that the delivery date was uncertain, so I'm not finding any fault with Tesla on this score.  For all that time, until early this afternoon, we had absolutely no clue when our Model X might actually be delivered.  All we had to go on were (a) our order number, which is in the 12 thousands, and (b) the news reports that told us when the first ones rolled off and what the production rate was. 

That changed today.  We got an email from Tesla that gave us a delivery time of “mid 2016” – still not very precise.  But that's the most we've ever had :)  There's also a little line that says if we'd care to change the interior configuration to include an extra row of seats, then we could get it as early as April or May.  Well, the configuration we chose already has too many seats for us, so we certainly didn't want to add even more.  Of course we chose the configuration that would be made dead last :)  So we're stuck with “mid 2016”.  But hey ... that's only a few months away.  The probability that I'll live long enough to actually see and drive our Model X is increasing.  Yay!

Paradise, on foot again...

Paradise, on foot again...  It's March 11th – my brother Mark's birthday, and the first day we were able to go for a nice walk this spring.  Debbie and I, together with two very excited dogs (Miki and Race) walked for two miles along dirt roads near our house.  This is a real first for Debbie: first time she's walked this far in well over a year, because of the knee injuries she's suffered.  She had no problems at all on this walk – hooray!  We did the two miles (which includes about 400' of elevation change each way) in roughly 75 minutes.  That's about 20 minutes more than the typical walk I did alone last year along the same path, and about 30 minutes more than our record (set when we were actually trying to go fast, instead of our normal leisurely gawking pace).  It's still wintry here, as you can see from my photos below, but it was oh-so-nice to be outside again.  The temperature was around 60°F, about as nice as one could possibly ask for.  The two lower photos are panoramas, each covering about 200°..

Curiosity is looking at nodules on Mars...

Curiosity is looking at nodules on Mars...  Here are a couple of photos, one of the area, one of a nodule...

A solar eclipse...

A solar eclipse ... as seen from space.  This photo (via APOD, of course) was taken by a high-orbit satellite (Deep Space Climate Observatory).  The dark spot in the upper left of the Earth's surface is the fuzzy shadow of the moon.  In the center of that shadow, people were experiencing a total eclipse of the sun.  In the fuzzy edges, a partial eclipse.  Click on the thumbnail to embiggen.

Home defense...

Home defense...  Via my pistol-packing, lobster-eating mama...

A liberal acquaintance in California asked me what I thought he might need in order to defend his home and family from home invasion, and the like.

I suggested a 9mm, a couple of clips, and a box of shells.

A few days later he sent me this picture and asked me how to make it all work. He voted for Obama … twice.

Yeah.  I know.

A history of English...

A history of English ... in just five words.  Interesting piece.  Here's a sample, with one of the five words:

“Tea”

Tea was first imported into Britain early in the 17th century, becoming very popular by the 1650s; London diarist Samuel Pepys recorded drinking his first cup in 1660.

By the 18th century it had become a symbol of fashionable society and a staple of the coffee house culture; Dr. Johnson was a self-confessed “hardened and shameless tea-drinker.”

The word “tea” derives from the Mandarin Chinese word chá, via the Min dialect form te. The Mandarin word is also the origin of the informal char, as in a nice cup of char. A love of tea is so ingrained in British life that the phrase “cup of tea” has come to stand for anything viewed positively. We express dislike by saying: “it’s not my cup of tea,” we comfort the bereaved with “tea and sympathy,” and gloss over any social faux pas with the phrase “more tea, vicar?”

The human stupidity demonstration known as Daylight Saving Time is coming this weekend...

The human stupidity demonstration known as Daylight Saving Time is coming this weekend...  So I thought it would be a good time to show this video again.  Buried in there is a map of the world showing all the time zones with different rules – something I've talked about before as being an amazingly complex mess.  The map in the video is already out of date :)

Seen on Facebook...

Seen on Facebook...  Via my lovely bride.  I found it for sale here (on a site I know nothing about).  This could be a big seller around here!

Dell, crapware, and Windows 10...

Dell, crapware, and Windows 10...  My friend and neighbor Tim D. recently bought a new computer.  He chose an inexpensive Dell model sold through Walmart.  Shortly after he bought it, he called me for some help: his new computer was vastly slower than the one it replaced, and he basically had no idea how to do anything.

So I ran over to his house, delighted to be able to do something to help repay him for the weeks of assistance he gave me in the past couple of years.  I had no idea what to expect.

First thing I saw was that the Windows 10 screen was like some alien thing had taken over his computer.  I haven't used Windows for nearly 10 years now, but I expected to see at least something recognizable.  There really wasn't much!  Everything seemed to have new icons, new names, and new places on the screen.  Those bits and pieces of Windows lore that I could dredge up were largely useless.  If it's that alien for someone like me, who has lived and breathed computers for almost 50 years – imagine what it's like for a non-techie who has no understanding of the technology and uses computers only casually!  Poor Tim was completely and totally lost – and I wasn't much help until I did some online reading to figure out a few basic things.

Then there was the crapware.  If you're not familiar with the term, here's the Wikipedia article.  This stuff isn't on every new computer (it's not on Macs at all, for example), but it's on nearly every low-cost Windows machine.  Dell has a reputation for being amongst the worst crapware offenders, and after seeing Tim's computer I can understand how they got this reputation.

Some of the crapware is “opt-in”, meaning that you have to install it before it does anything.  Most of it, though, was pre-installed – very, very annoying.  Worst of all was a malignant piece of crapware called NowUSeeIt Player: it was not only pre-installed, but it came with no uninstall program.  I call it “malignant” because it was putting up dozens of pop-over ads per hour.  Most of these were for bogus “security programs” that had scary-sounding (and looking) screens that tried hard to look like a Windows error screen.  They tried to scare the viewer into calling (with their credit card ready!) a company that really was just a front, would do nothing to help your computer, but would take some money out of your credit card account.  Probably they'd steal your credit card number, too!

Altogether, over the course of about four visits with Tim, I probably spent 5 or 6 hours cleaning his crapware-infested brand new computer.  A non-technical person would have been there much longer, and might not have succeeded at all.  That's just awful on Dell's part (it was their choice to earn a few bucks per machine by installing this horrible stuff).  I'm sure they don't care, but ... though I've often recommended Dell to people in the past (and bought quite a few of them myself), I will no longer do so.  In fact, I will actively recommend against Dell until I can satisfy myself that they've dispensed with the crapware.

I did have one piece of this experience that made me chuckle.  I found a guide on the Internet somewhere that described how one could get rid of NowUSeeIt Player even though it had no uninstaller.  Mainly it involved deleting registry keys (The “registry” is a uniquely Microsoft invention that is mostly horrible).  I had no idea how to do that on Windows 10, but I imagined it was some new tool, with a new name, that worked completely differently than the old tool.  That led to the chuckle.  There's no new tool.  You just use RegEdit, the same tool one used on the earliest versions of Windows.  So far as I could tell, there was nothing new or improved about this notoriously awful tool.  Using RegEdit is roughly akin to being force to hammer in a nail by using your pen knife, with the blade as the handle.  Tim and I tediously deleted the 100 or so registry keys that the NowUSeeIt Player installs, and afterwards his computer was (a) blessedly free of those incredibly annoying pop-over ads, and (b) at least three times faster than it had been.

Dell, you should be ashamed of yourselves.  You owe your customers a heartfelt apology, at the very least.  You really should find a way to compensate them for the tortures you've visited upon them, too.  Along with their geekly friends who have gotten them free of your crapware!

Taxes...

Taxes...  Man, I hate this time of year, when I have to sit down and spend hours torturing myself as I calculate how much money I have to give our government – which it will promptly spend mostly in ways that I find abhorrent.  Not fun.  Since I retired a few years ago, this tax computation has gotten worse – the tax consequences of living off your investments are way more complicated than living from a paycheck that's had taxes withheld.

Last year was the worst of all for us, as the 2014 tax year was complicated by our moving from one state (California) to another (Utah), owning two homes most of the year, major investments changes, etc.  This year was considerably simpler, and the tax software I use (TurboTax) surprised me by making something else much simpler: for the first time it automatically imported all the tax data about my stock trades from my broker.  Even the basis (price I paid) was correctly imported.  This saved a lot of manual lookup and typing.  Bottom line: I did our tax return in just a few hours this year, instead of the several days I was anticipating.  That, at least, is a positive thing.

But I still have to let them steal my money and waste it on something stupid (or worse), and that really grates on me.  Argh!

More memory memories...

More memory memories...  This article discusses several old computer memory technologies.  Most of these are things that I actually worked with back in the '70s when I was in the U.S. Navy: magnetic drums, Williams tubes, mercury acoustic delay lines, and magnetic core memories.  I also worked with a couple others not mentioned here: electrostatic dots and steel wire acoustic delay lines (photo at right, not mine).

I feel old today :)

PEX rules!

PEX rules!  What is PEX, you ask?  It's a (relatively) new technology for plumbing, one that's now nearly the universal way plumbers use when plumbing a house.  Wikipedia has a good article about it.  The photo at right (not mine) shows a typical PEX connector (the brass fitting), PEX tubing (the semi-transparent tubing), cinch clamp (the silver strap around the tubing near the brass fitting), and the crimp cinch tool (the big tool working on the clamp). 

I was at my brother's cabin yesterday, installing a new pressure tank for his water system.  The old water tank was a teensy 2 gallon job that was mounted right on the wall, directly threaded into some copper pipe.  The one I installed was a 20 gallon, floor-standing tank.  We had to run about 6 feet of pipe between the old tank's mount and the new tank.  If I had run copper pipe, I'd have had to cut four pieces of pipe to precisely the right length, plus three 90° elbows and two solder-to-threaded adapters for the ends.  I'd have needed a box full of tools, probably five or six hours, and an enlarged cussing vocabulary to cover all the mistakes I made.  Plus it would most likely have leaked the first three times I tried it.

What a difference with PEX!  Because it's quite flexible, I only needed two fittings: adapters to threaded pipe at each end.  I only needed one piece of pipe, and no elbows.  Cutting the pipe was as easy as using a pair of scissors – the cutting tool slices right though the pipe like scissors on paper.  I'd never used PEX before, so I wasn't sure how hard it would be to use the crimp cinch clamp tool.  Turns out it's about as challenging as a pair of pliers.  You just put the tool onto the clamp and squeeze – you're done!  Then when I turned everything back on, it didn't leak a drop.  Total time was about 30 minutes, and most of that was just me being careful with techniques that were new to me.

Count me as a new PEX advocate.  I'm actually thinking about re-plumbing the mechanical room of our house.  The current setup is an incrementally-installed copper pipe mess.  I sometimes have to study the pipes for fifteen minutes just to figure out which of the maze of valves I need to turn on or off.  With PEX I could easily make a manifold-based system with individual valves for every water destination...

Same thing for Trump, or Sanders...

Same thing for Trump, or Sanders ... and about 90% of our Senators and Representatives.  They aren't the problem – it's the low-information, low-cogitation voters who vote for them that are the problem.  I periodically suffer from an attack of the dooms precisely because I don't see any viable path to fixing that problem.  Via my pistol-packing mama, who isn't voting for Hillary...

Curiosity...

Curiosity ... is into some new and exciting things as it climbs Mt. Sharp on Mars!  These are from today's dump of raw images, and there aren't any notes on them yet.  The first one, to my amateur rockhound's eye, fairly screams “water!”  Those whitish deposits look like minerals that crystallized after having been dissolved in water; we see things like that on Earth all over the place.  The second photo appears to be taken looking across the slope that Curiosity is climbing – it looks fairly steep, though I'm not sure the camera was level when it was taken.  It also looks quite hazy, presumably from dust and not water vapor...