It's still snowing in Paradise...

It's still snowing in Paradise ... and it gives every indication of doing so all night and all day tomorrow.  We've got about eight inches on the ground right now, wet, gloppy, heavy stuff.  The temperature is well above freezing, so the snow is half-melted before it even hits the ground.  I'm guessing it's all gone by the end of the day on Thursday...

Heard on NPR this morning...

Heard on NPR this morning...  I got in my truck this morning to drive home from Home Depot.  When I flipped on the radio, there was a program in progress.  Starting with the first bits I heard, this dialog between an NPR on-the-street reporter (NPR) and a young woman (YW) he approached cold (transcript is from memory, but if it's not perfect it's very close):

NPR: I'm here to see what people on the street think of Bernie Sanders.
YW: Ok.
NPR: What do you think is the first, most important issue that Bernie should tackle?
YW: Auto-correct.  He should fix auto-correct on smart phones.
NPR: (giggling) Yeah, I'd like that fixed, too.  But seriously, what would you want Bernie to do?
YW: I was serious.  I can't think of anything more important than that!
NPR: (still giggling) Well, what about, say, terrorism?
YW: (peeved) What, don't you think terrorists have problems with auto-correct?
NPR: (speechless for a moment, then walking away) I'm so ashamed right now.

The. Doom. Approaches.

Bad news in Paradise...

Bad news in Paradise...  Our vet phoned this evening to tell us the lab results on the tissue she removed from Koa last Thursday: they got a definitive diagnosis -- it's an osteosarcoma.  That's an aggressive bone cancer, malignant and usually metastatic.  When it's not in a limb or digit (as with Koa), there is no treatment with even a reasonable chance at a good outcome.  This is a fairly rare cancer in cats, rare enough that our vet has never seen it before.  She's going to do some research on it, but ... we're not expecting good news.  It seems likely we'll be doing palliative care for him, treating his pain and any secondary issues as long as we can.  We'll buy him what time we can, but we won't let him suffer.

He's actually looking pretty good at the moment, better than he has for a few weeks now.  We've isolated hom, and he's getting lots of attention, a heated bed, and all the kitty junk food he wants...

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  That may not look like all that much at right, but it represents a whole bunch of progress.  As I write this, I'm pretty much wiped out, physically, from the effort it took to get to this point today :)

The first task came before I mounted the wooden platform (the orange thing) onto the steel frame (the part with the wheels).  I'd already assembled and aligned the frame, but I never had aired up the tires or greased all the (numerous) points that need it.  There are 8 zerc fittings plus a couple dozen exposed metal points where good old-fashioned grease was needed.

I figured I'd do the easy part first: the zerc fittings.  Little did I know how much work that was going to be!  I used up all my grease (about a half tube) on the first zerc fitting.  I have a pneumatic grease gun, so that took about 15 seconds.  Off to Tractor Supply I went to pick up a couple tubes of grease.  When I got there, I found them on sale for half price, so I bought eight of them.  Good thing I did – I went through four entire tubes before I filled those fittings.  There must be huge grease reservoirs inside the wheels.  That's a good thing, I guess, but I was sure surprised!

Then came the time to mount the wooden platform onto the frame.  That platform weighs around 160 lbs., more than I can maneuver by myself.  It started out up on sawhorses, as you've seen on previous posts.  I roped it to my hoist and lifted it up, then positioned the frame under it and lowered it back down.  The job of getting it exactly in the right place while lowering it the last little bit was made especially challenging by the fact that the control for the hoist was 15 feet over my head, in the loft.  I ran up and down the stairs about 20 times before I finally had the thing in position, about 1/2" above the mounting holes.  Then all I had to do was lift the frame slightly and slip the bolts into place.  That sounds easy when I write it like that, but it was actually quite a challenge: heavy parts that needed to be held to within 1/16" or so of the right place while inserting the bolt with my “free” hand.  That part would have been a lot easier with a couple of helpers :)

But I got it done.  Yay!

The cart rolls around very nicely.  All the sides are built (I forgot to take photos of that event), and tomorrow they're going up on sawhorses to be painted.  Then I'm done!

“I hate to say something that ugly...”

“I hate to say something that ugly...”  Listen.

Things you don't expect to hear...

Things you don't expect to hear...  I listen to NPR sometimes to get a better understanding of progressive views, so you don't have to.  On the way back from an errand this morning (picking up grease from Tractor Supply!), I heard an NPR reporter named Alina Selyukh giving a report about the Apple/FBI brouhaha over the terrorist's phone that the FBI wants to unlock.

So what's unexpected about that?  Here's what: her report was cogent, accurate, and very much on point.  One example of the unexpected excellence: she spent a bit of time discussing some of the speculation on the nature of the outside (i.e., non-Apple) help that the FBI is getting to unlock that phone.  She listed several methods, some of which required physical access to the particular phone (hardware-based methods) and some of which did not (exploits of software vulnerabilities).  Alina then talked about how the methods requiring physical access really don't impact our personal security (for our own iPhones) nearly as much as the software vulnerabilities do.  That's a distinction that's obvious to a technologist, but not to many people, and Alina did a great job navigating that with easy to understand language.  Her whole discussion, in fact, was completely jargon-free.

Kudos, Alina!  That was a very nice job.  And you've just enticed me to follow you on Twitter – and I have to tell you that's the very first time I've even been tempted to follow someone on NPR.

Paradise pictures...

Paradise pictures...  This is what it looks like right now.  Left-to-right: looking out our back door, out our front door, and the pile of snow on the front porch (which I'm about to go shovel).  Sheesh...

Wait, what!?!

Wait, what!?!  Reading this article made me feel ... old.

I've worked with (young) people who didn't believe me (until I showed them via Google) when I told them that computer screens used to work by shooting electrons through a vacuum to strike phosphorescent material that glowed.  These were cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), familiar to anyone over about 30 years old – but literally museum pieces today.  Those CRTs seemed magical to us in the '70s, when they started to replace teletypes as the human interface to computers.  At first CRTs were only monochrome (e.g., black & white), then in the '80s full color CRTs started to become common.

Those CRTs were far from perfect.  The displays were a little fuzzy, the devices were large, heavy, and power-hungry, and the fidelity near the edges was notably worse than in the center.  Still, they let us put text and pictures on a screen, and they were way better than those damned teletypes.

Then the flat liquid crystal displays came along in the '90s.  They got better and cheaper very quickly, and in the blink of an eye they totally replaced CRTs.  They're smaller, lighter, sip electricity, and (best of all) their fidelity is darned near perfect.  The fuzziness is gone ... text is crisp and clear from edge-to-edge.  Lines are straight.  The screen is flat, not curved.  They are so much better than CRTs that nobody cried when CRTs went the way of the dodo.

And then ... these nuts go to a whole bunch of trouble to make a video game played on a modern flat screen look like the very imperfect CRTs.  Because nostalgia, or something less charitable.

And here I am remembering how magical it seemed the first time I saw a teletype printing computer output.

I feel old.

Mind, blown!

Mind, blown!  This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time.  As Will Smith says: I gotta get me one of these!  The magnetic viewing film is available today from Amazon (at that link) and it's quite inexpensive; I just ordered myself a piece.  The latch magnets are on backorder at the moment, but I placed my order.

The engineer in me wants to know how they print these things.  From the speed and the fact that they're doing it on rare earth magnets, I'm thinking that they somehow reorient the fields inside an existing conventional magnet.  The vague descriptions on the Correlated Magnetics site seem to support that notion.  But I have no clue how they can do that on the scale they're working with...

Three, going on four...

Three, going on four...  Inches of snow on the ground right now, in Paradise.  And it's still snowing.  Really!

The weather forecast calls for a high of 45°F today, and rain through this evening.  You'd think that would take care of most of this white stuff, but it's not quite so easy.  The snow has been sliding off the roof of our house all night, and now we've got piles all around the house about 18" high.  That will take another week or so to go away, especially on the north side of the house.

Sheesh.

This man is ready for spring!

Quote of the day...

Quote of the day...  This time, from P. J. O'Rourke:

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

“Individual responsibility.”  Sounds almost anachronistic, doesn't it?

Tom's corollary: “I hate it when I’m an idiot!” 

Curiosity is looking at...

Curiosity is looking at ... some weird and wonderful eroded rocks, on Mars...

Morning smile...

Morning smile...  From The Onion, this lead:

ITHACA, NY—In an ambitious attempt to revive a population long considered to be on the brink of extinction, scientists announced Friday they have slowly begun to reintroduce normal, well-adjusted human beings back into society.
According to officials at Cornell University, where for the past 18 years conservation researchers have operated an enclosed sanctuary for humans who are levelheaded and make it a habit to think before they speak, the endangered group is being cautiously reintegrated into select locations nationwide in hopes that they can reestablish permanent communities and one day thrive again.

Read the whole thing!

I expect this attempt to fail :)

California leads the way...

California leads the way ... to lower employment and more automation.  They've struck a deal to raise the minimum wage to $15/hr statewide.  I'm expecting the other usual suspects (Blue America: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, etc.) to follow suit soon.  That's great news for states like Utah whose minimum wage is the same as the federal rate (currently $7.25/hr) – kids who want a job but whose skills aren't worth $15 an hour will move from states like California to states like Utah.  In other words, motivated workers will vote with their feet.  Blue America will lose those good workers and employers will cut jobs or replace unskilled workers with automation – something we're already seeing in those cities that have raised the minimum wage to $15/hr.

I am so glad to be living in fly-over country!

Paradise Ponders...

Paradise Ponders...  I had an extra-long session with the kids I'm tutoring yesterday morning.  One of them (Abby) is really digging into programming, mostly because with just a few examples the key ideas are starting to make sense to her.  She came back over for a second session instead of going to the local Easter egg hunt with the rest of her family.  I gave them a homework problem of a simple bubble-sort (of an array of integers), and she wanted to see what it would take to modify it to work with strings (an array of names).  I showed her how to use the Chrome developer tools and I swear I could see that cartoon light bulb going off in her head.  We spent about an hour going over a number of questions she asked, including one on sort performance that got us into an overview of Big O notation and what that means for performance characterization.  She's picking this stuff up way faster than I did.  Debbie was in the kitchen watching us work, and she tells me that Abby looked very excited as we worked.  It's fun for me when the kids actually want to learn; so very different than my volunteering experience years ago in the Chula Vista “magnet” high school, where not a single student was interested in anything at all about the class...

The rest of my day yesterday somehow got consumed by some shopping and other running around.  I didn't do a darned thing on the trailer – and I thought I would finish the construction yesterday!  The weather turned out to be very nice – blue sky, sunshine, and mild temperatures.  That is, until Debbie and I decided to take a drive out to Porcupine Reservoir.  There we ran into snow flurries – while still under that nice blue sky and in sunshine!  The nearest clouds large enough to produce that snow were miles away, so what must have happened is that winds were blowing that snow a long way from the source cloud.  It was weird!

We chose Porcupine Reservoir because we hoped there would be fewer weekend visitors there, and that worked out just fine.  On the other hand, there wasn't very much wildlife to see.  The most interesting thing we (Debbie, actually) spotted was a group of four Sandhill Cranes foraging in a field about a quarter mile off the road.  We had a great view of those strange birds.  We also got to see some baby goats and lambs in a couple of farmyards.  There were a few deer, too, but that was it for wildlife.  The reservoir itself was looking very spring-like: all the ice is gone, and the level is up to within about 15' of the top.  I don't think we're going to have any water issues this year!  I walked across the entire earthen dam and took the photos below on that walk:

Both were taken near the south end of the dam, the first looking west across the drainage and the second looking east across the reservoir. It's a pretty spot...

My friend and neighbor Tim D. has been gone for a few days to the Green River area for some springtime sightseeing with his family.  He enlisted us to give his dogs (Lexy and Marley) a little attention during the day (in the mornings and evenings his granddaughter Randi was there to take care of them).  This is nothing but fun for us: those are two delightful and cute little dogs, and after being penned up for 4 or 5 hours they are very happy to see us!  They had a grand time playing with each other.  The photo at right was from one of those visits.  Tim and family are back now, so we no longer get to indulge in this dog-sitting :)

Trailers in Paradise, and ancient cats...

Trailers in Paradise, and ancient cats...  Well, I made some more progress today, though not as much as I'd like to have.  I've got one of the long sides assembled.  Each of those 18 joints (between 2x4 and 1x6) has a bolt through it, and was glued.  Partway through I realized I hadn't purchased enough 1x6s for the slat.  Dang!  Another trip to Lowe's or Home Depot...

Our oldest cat is a fellow we call Koa.  We're not sure exactly how hold he is, but it's somewhere around 16 or 17.  We noticed a hard lump on his right hip a few weeks ago, and we've been visiting the vet with him to try and figure out what the heck it was.  Yesterday on one of those followup visits, she (Dr. Russell) advised us that it was getting larger, faster, and had started to invade some bone in his pelvis.  That didn't sound good, and the behavior was tumor-like, though she saw no other indications of cancer.  She advised surgery to remove it.

So today we took him up there to get that surgery.  He came through it just fine, and he's home now trying to recovery his dignity (and get some sleep).  The bad news is that the mass she removed was like nothing she's ever seen before – it looks like neither a typical infection nor a tumor.  We always get the weird things, it seems.  So she's going to simultaneously send samples off for biopsy (mainly to see if its a tumor), and culture it (just in case it's an infection of some weird kind).  We're putting the poor lad on Clavamox (antibiotic) preemptively, just in case it turns out to be an infection.  Early next week we should have a bit more information, and can make a decision about what to do.  We hope...

Shrimp in Paradise...

Shrimp in Paradise...  Last night Debbie made a new dish for us: shrimp in a tomatoey sauce with stewed tomatoes, with garlic, bell peppers, and mushrooms sauteed in butter, Italian seasonings, over spaghetti noodles.  Delicious!  Somehow we both managed to eat these gigantic servings, much to the disappointment of the dogs...

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  I got a few good hours in my shop this morning, and got enough done that I'm enjoying a sense of satisfaction about it.  First thing I did was to install the handle and wheels on my welder.  I'd bought the “portability” kit a while back, but then stupidly never actually put it together.  That's done (at right) and it does indeed make the welder portable.  Well, more portable than it was :)

The rest of the photos show various steps and progress with my fabrication of the stakes.  There are 18 stakes, each of them 2'6" long.  These were cut out of 8' 2x4s, and then one end of each had to be sawn down to match the pocket size.  That involved sawing about 1/4" from the bottom 5" of each of the narrow sides of each stake, and about 1/8" from the wide side.  In the first photo below, you can see just how thin a slice that made on the wide side!  I did this with my band saw, which made short work of something that would have been quite tedious without it.  Then I drilled three carefully placed holes in each of the stakes (for 54 holes in all); these are where the bolts that hold the slats on will go.  I finished all of that fabrication today – so now I have all 18 stakes sitting nicely in their steel pockets, and holes in the right place for each one.  Tomorrow I'll start putting on the slats!

“I hate you both!”

“I hate you both!”  You'll see why...

An even better way to stop robocalls?

An even better way to stop robocalls?  I've written here several times about our Sentry 2, the best call blocking device I'd ever tried.  A few weeks ago I read about an alternative to having your own call blocking device: a free service called Nomorobo.  We've been using it now for three weeks, and I have only positive things to report:

• It really is completely free.  They never even asked for a credit card.
• It's a blacklist-based system - it looks up the number calling you, and if it's in their (apparently huge) database, it gets blocked.  If the caller is not on the blacklist (and presumably your friends, family, and local people are not), they get through without any trouble.
• You don't have to do anything to maintain it.  With the Sentry 2, I spent some time every week adding numbers to block and numbers to allow.  With Nomorobo, I do nothing.  I like nothing :)

Here's what it's like to use the service.  Whenever someone calls you (including any robocalls), your phone rings as usual.  If it's a robocall, the phone rings just once: after that, Nomorobo blocks it and you're done.  If the phone rings more than once, it's a real call.  That's it.  That's the complete operating instructions.

We've had just one robocall slip through since starting our use of Nomorobo. That was a political call for Bernie Sanders (boy did they pick the wrong household for that!).  Our neighbors reported getting dozens of robocalls in the days leading up to our primaries this Tuesday.  Nomorobo blocked all but one of them.

At the same time, now we have zero problems with people getting through that we want to get through.  The Sentry 2 greets callers it doesn't know with a deliberately intimidating message, so if a store calls us and we don't have their number programmed in, they get that message.  Now they just hear the phone ring, as though we had no call blocking at all.

Summary: winner!