Paradise ponders, floods and snow stoppers edition...

Paradise ponders, floods and snow stoppers edition...  On Thursday morning, before the latest snow melted, I snapped the photo at right.  It shows our garage with a bit of snow on its roof, and if you squint hard you can see that there's a (new) piece of metal extending horizontally, about a foot above the gutter.  That's a “snow stopper” for standing seam steel roofs, invented by one of the employees (Tyler) of the roofer who installed all my roofing.  When he described it to me, I was a bit skeptical of its efficacy – so I had him install one on my garage (my worst snow falling-off-the-roof problem) as an experiment.  If it works, I told him, I have several other places that I'd add it to.

Well, based on the first test – admittedly an easy one, as we only got a half inch of snow – it's working exactly as he told me it would.  The snow is stopped in its tracks, and only a little bit escapes through the inch or so high open area underneath it.  That open area also allows the melted snow trickle through into the gutter.  We'll see how it does with a heavy snow, but for the moment I'm much encouraged.  I'm going to love it if this really does keep the giant piles of snow from forming right in front of my garage door!

Debbie and I took a drive up Blacksmith Fork Canyon this morning, mainly to see the river.  It's just barely above flood stage right now.  The muddy river is violently boiling through normally sedate rapids.  There are a dozen or so spots where the river is over its banks and onto fields or pastures.  There's some visible damage – bank erosion, trees toppled, etc. – but less than I'd expect for the power of the water we see.  That foot bridge that I snapped a photo of a week ago is gone with nary a trace – even the abutments, such as they were, have vanished.

Paradise ponders, 1,200 miles of electrons edition...

Paradise ponders, 1,200 miles of electrons edition...  Well, we rolled back into our garage late last night, after driving nearly 1,200 miles over the past two days.  For some reason I'm a little tired today. :)  We left home at 5 am on Tuesday, and pulled into our destination (Lazy K Wrought Iron's Kalispell shop) just under 12 hours later. 

This trip was a bit of an experiment for us, to see if we liked traveling a long distance in our Model X.  The big question mark was how the charging stops we'd have to make would work out.  Bottom line: it was great, and we'll do it again without hesitation.  We knew that traveling in such a comfortable, quiet, easy-handling, fun-to-drive car car would be great.  We weren't so sure that we'd like the stops every couple hundred miles to charge the car, though.  We stopped four times on the way up to Kalispell: in Idaho Falls (Idaho) and in Lima, Butte, and Missoula (Montana).  The amount of time we stopped varied from about a half hour to just over an hour, depending on how much charge we needed in order to reach the next Tesla Supercharger.

In the case of those particular Superchargers, there was something nearby to occupy our attention: a restaurant, a coffee shop, or the like.  I'm not sure if that's true for all Superchargers, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that's true.  The Supercharger in Lima (at right) is in a tiny little town, but behind me was a restaurant (Jan's Cafe) that truckers seemed to favor.  We didn't eat there, but we noted that it got good reviews on both TripAdvisor and Yelp.  The other Superchargers were all in fairly large cities, with lots of possible charging-time activities within walking distance.

Each time we stopped for charging, we got out and walked around at the very least.  Often we grabbed something to eat or drink, and found a restroom.  This “stop every couple hundred miles or so” is not our usual traveling style when we're traveling to get someplace (as opposed to sightseeing).  For many years now, we've made high-speed dashes for long distances with very little stopping.  So this experience was a bit different for us, and ... we liked it.  It made the drive more relaxing and much less tedious.

Before this trip I spent some time with Tesla's Supercharger map and Google Maps, planning our route.  The tricky bit was trying to estimate how far our battery would take us, as I know it varies by what speed you're going, how much altitude change there is, what the temperature is, the wind, etc.  It's complicated!  Then when we started actually making the trip, I discovered completely by accident that the Tesla's navigation system does nearly all of this work for you – though not perfectly.  If I put our final destination in, the navigation system figures out all the Superchargers I'll need to stop at, and even tells me how long I have to stay there in order to get my charge up to snuff.  Very nice indeed!

But, as I mentioned previously, it's not a perfect system.  One thing in particular it seems to disregard is your speed.  I'm not sure what assumptions it makes, but it doesn't seem to take into account the high speed limit roads.  Several of the Interstates we took have 80 MPH speed limits, and that means the traffic was flowing along at about 85 MPH typically.  Aerodynamic drag on a car increases as the square of the speed, so the drag at 85 MPH is about double that at 60 MPH, and the drag probably dominates the power requirements for the motors at high speeds.  I suspect the navigation system simply assumes some fixed power consumption per mile, and when the road happens to be a high speed road, that estimate is considerably off.

So that meant we needed more charging than the navigation system estimated, which isn't really a big deal – those superchargers are fast.  But they're apparently not all created equal – our charging rate varied by about 2:1 from one Supercharger site to another.  I'm not sure why the rates varied, although some things I read this morning make me suspect that there was a partial failure in the lower speed ones we ran into.  It seems that the Supercharger equipment has a couple of levels of redundancy, including a modular approach that allows the charger to continue to work (albeit at lower speed) in the event of some kinds of electronics failures.  Slower charging is definitely better than no charging!

One thing we noted with a bit of surprise is that all eight of our charging stops (four up, four back), we were the only car charging.  We had been a bit worried about being delayed by a backlog of cars waiting to be charged, but that certainly wasn't an issue!  Each of the Supercharger sites we visited had eight charging stations, so at least at the moment there appears to be plenty of capacity.  I'm guessing that this is very dependent on exactly what route we're traveling, and probably on the time of day as well.

Another little imperfection in the navigation app took me a while to figure out: the navigation system didn't know about the existence of the Lima, Montana Supercharger site.  That led to it trying to route us from Butte to Idaho Falls, but at the 85 MPH speeds on that road the battery didn't have enough capacity to make it.  If we'd made that trip at 70 MPH, the car said we'd make it – but that would have been inconvenient, to say the least.  Fortunately I did know about the Lima Supercharger (from the Supercharger map on Tesla's web site), so I knew we could stop there.

When we stopped at Lazy K's shop, we got to meet Kevin and Abigail, the couple who owns Lazy K and with whom we worked remotely to get our fireplace door and sun room casement window covers built.  They were as nice in person as they were with all our calls and emails!  We also met their daughter, who helped us load the covers into our car.  Then we traveled just a few miles more to Whitefish, Montana and up to the Lodge at Whitefish Lake.  Though we were only there for the night, we enjoyed the beautiful view from our room's window (at right) and the nice people who helped us.  We ate dinner at the Tupelo Grille, where we had a wonderful mahi mahi entree and a shared appetizer of ahi poke (poke in Montana – what a world!).

Then yesterday on the drive back, we had beautiful scenery all the way, like that at left.  Debbie spotted a couple of pronghorn antelope herds, which made her day.  Along the way we saw signs advertising a “testicle festival” – you know you're in the western U.S. when you see that!

When we finally rolled into our garage it was about 9 pm.  We were dismayed to see that our property was covered in a blanket of snow, but by the middle of the next day it was all gone.

The objective of the trip was to bring home our new casement window covers, and that we did.  I've unloaded them from the car and brought them into our sun room.  On Monday my brother Scott will be here, and with his help I'll put them in place.  They're just as beautiful as the photos we saw.  Once they're in place, I'll snap a photo and post it...

Paradise ponders, eyeball pressures and drained batteries edition...

Paradise ponders, eyeball pressures and drained batteries edition...  But first: I stand accused of being an idiot, something I suspect is entirely possible.  The proximate cause of the accusation is that I failed to post a photo of the towel hanger in situ after I repaired it.  So ... there it is, at right.  Satisfied, accusers?

Some evil virus has invaded my body, and I've been feeling low the past few days.  Today, so far, is the worst of all.  Fever, sniffles, sneezes, and coughing – all the classic symptoms.  Sure don't like being sick...

I had my eyeballs examined today.  I've been going to see the optometrist roughly annually my entire adult life, even when I don't need a new prescription.  Mainly that's because glaucoma runs in my family, and if I'm going to get glaucoma, I want to know as early as possible.  My pressures today were 13 mm Hg, which is at the low end of normal.  Glaucoma is usually diagnosed by abnormally high pressures, so that was a relief.  Better yet, this past year my optometrist purchased an instrument that maps the thickness of the eye's retina.  Thinning indicates damage from a number of causes, including the two main ones that I'm worried about: glaucoma and macular degeneration.  I have no observable retinal thinning.  Yay! 

But this time my visit was also prompted by problems I've been having with my vision, especially at close distances.  This is less worrisome (it happens to nearly everybody older than about 60) than it is simply a necessity for a new prescription.  When the optometrist did the refraction (to measure how my eyeballs were working), sure enough my prescription had significantly changed.  New glasses are now on order, and I've been advised to get very friendly with magnifying devices for closeup work.  Sigh.  Sometimes getting old isn't so much fun.  Beats the hell out of the alternative, though!

This afternoon I worked for a while taking down a barbed wire fence.  The fence actually belongs to Tim D., my friend and neighbor to the north.  He normally puts it up every fall and takes it down every spring, so that his horses can pasture in his alfalfa field after the last cutting.  Tim just had back surgery two weeks ago, though, and even the modest effort of taking down a fence line is more than he's allowed to attempt.  I needed that fence down so that a contractor working for me could get a skid-steer machine with a trencher through to Tim's field.  The east/west row of risers that currently goes through the middle of my back yard is coming out, and we're putting a new row of risers next to Tim's field.  He's the only one that needs them any more, so we're also going to adjust the riser spacing to be correct for his odd-shaped field.  He and I spent an hour or so just talking this afternoon.  I get a lot of pleasure from those conversations, and simply being able to help him a little – he was so much help for me when I was getting the barn built...

Debbie and I are making a two day trip starting early tomorrow morning.  I'm not taking my laptop, so there will be no blogging on those days.  We're headed up to Kalispell, Montana to pick up some iron work that the folks at Lazy K Wrought Iron did for us.  We'll be staying at the lodge on Whitefish Lake (just north of Kalispell) tomorrow morning.

One little added frisson to this trip will be that we're making it in the Tesla Model X.  This is far enough from home that we'll have to charge the car several times in each direction.  The Tesla superchargers are in all the right places, so I don't expect this to present any challenges.  Nevertheless, it feels like we're living a little dangerously having our electric car several hundred miles from home!  I'll let you know how this goes...

Adjective order...

Adjective order...  Several times this past few years I've run across a discussion of this topic, but I don't remember doing so before that (though it's possible I've simply forgotten this).  I may have posted about it before, too.  Anyway, it's fascinating that we all subconsciously put multiple adjectives (or adjectival nouns) modifying a single noun into a particular order – and any other order just sounds wrong.  Consider this phrase that “sounds right” when I say it out loud:

• small shiny steel ball

Does that sound right to you?  It does to me.  But there are five other orders we could have put those adjectives, and they all just “sound wrong” – even though by normal grammar rules they're all perfectly ok:

• shiny small steel ball
• shiny steel small ball
• steel shiny small ball
• steel small shiny ball
• small steel shiny ball

The first one of these sounds less wrong than the others, at least to me.  The last four, though, grate on my sense of grammatical propriety.  There are some rules for this, not widely known.  I don't recall a teacher ever mentioning these rules – they're just something we all seem to “know”.  Can you recall ever hearing someone use adjectives in an order that seemed wrong?  I can't.

Things like this reinforce my understanding of just how complicated people are.  And how far artificial intelligence has to go to even come close to what we do – without even knowing it!

Paradise ponders, “My Ding-a-ling” and “Oopsie!” edition...

Paradise ponders, “My Ding-a-ling”  and “Oopsie!” edition...  I'm listening to Chuck Berry as I write today's post.  So sad that he's gone, but isn't it amazing that he made it to 2017?

Our big weeping willow is about to pop out in leaf – in a day or two we'll have the first deciduous green.  Yay!

Debbie and I have had a small hanger for kitchen towels for something like 20 years now.  As originally purchased, it was three plaster cats sitting with their backs to you, nicely painted, with a simple steel hook assembly below it (you can see these two parts in the third and fourth photos below).  The hooks were screwed directly into the bottoms of the cats, and the backside of the cats had a hanger on it, like a picture hanger.  This caused us problems on three separate occasions when we accidentally knocked the whole thing off the wall.  When it struck the cabinet below, the cats would break (once in two places), and twice the hooks detached because the threads stripped out of the plaster.

Well, we did it again yesterday, so I decided to fix it once and for all.  I cut a piece of scrap redwood 2x12 to the right size, then milled most of it down to 3/4" thick (first photo below), sanded, and painted with water-based acrylic.  Then I sanded the back side of the plaster cats perfectly flat (getting ride of its black paint in the process) and glued them to the milled part of the wood.  The second photo shows the clamp-up I did for that – six clamps for such a little thing!  But I wanted to be gentle with the plaster so I didn't crack it with the clamps, and yet I needed even pressure.  I was wishing I had a few bags of lead shot; that would have been easier, but this worked ok.  The third photo shows the completed hanger, ready to be mounted in the kitchen.

This is where the “Oopsie!” happened.  I assumed there was enough horizontal clearance for the board I cut to fit on the side of our kitchen cabinet.  Nope.  It was about a half inch too wide!  Doh!  Turns out there wasn't much clearance on the original hanger, and I'd added a little over two inches to the width.  Dang it!  Back to the shop, where I whacked off about 3/4" from both sides, re-sanded, and put a coat of acrylic on it.  I'll put a second coat on in a couple of hours, and then I'll try to hang it again.

This little project is the first time I've used an acrylic finish in probably 20 years.  I bought it for my stairs project, on the recommendation of a very knowledgeable employee at our local paint store.  This stuff has come a long, long way.  First of all, it's water-based, so cleanup is a cinch: soap and water.  Second, it's a true matte finish – there's none of that “plastic look” that I so disliked with the acrylic and polyurethane finishes I'd used in the past.  Third, the drying time is just a few minutes to handle, and only two hours for re-coating.  Fourth, there's no obnoxious odor at all – its smell is actually pleasant.  Finally, the can it came in is a modern marvel.  It looks like a standard pressure-fit metal lid, but it's not.  It's made of plastic, and it opens easily and cleanly, and snaps right back into place with finger pressure.  Awesome!

Paradise ponders, redwood “flour” and raging river edition...

Paradise ponders, redwood “flour” and raging river edition...  Yesterday I sanded the rest of one side of the largest redwood slab I made (44" x 38").  While I was doing that, I noticed a flaw that had escaped my attention before: about two inches of one joint, at the end, was not tight.  There was a narrow gap, around 1/64" wide at most, that ran from top to bottom.  Functionally this is harmless, and I was going to just ignore it until I had a brainstorm.  The sanding produced a cup or so of extremely fine sanding dust that is actually tiny particles of redwood (first photo below) with the consistency of white flour.  What if I mixed some glue with a bit of this “flour” and then squished it into the crack with a putty knife?  I'd done similar things with sawdust in the past, but that's far too coarse for this little crack.  So I tried it (second photo) and then this morning I sanded it off (third photo).  It worked perfectly!  Then I googled it to see if I'd thought of something new, and of course I got about 25,000 hits on “sanding dust glue” – and the first few I looked at were describing exactly this, right down to the putty knife.  :)  There really isn't anything new under the sun!  It's a great little trick, though, even if I wasn't the first to come up with it...

Debbie and I just got back from a jaunt up the Blacksmith Fork Canyon to Hardware Ranch.  We saw quite a bit of wildlife, including deer, elk, a mink, blue herons, kingfishers, red-winged blackbirds, and bald eagles.  The first three birds returned this past week, as we haven't seen them all winter until today. 

But the main event of our little drive this morning was the Blacksmith Fork River itself: it is very high.  There is some minor flooding in a few places, but for most of it's length it's less than a foot below the banks – meaning it's a couple feet above normal levels.  Instead of a clear, sparkling stream we have an angry, muddy stream full of debris.  This is happening because of the well-above-average precipitation we had this winter, which in the mountains was mainly in the form of snow.  That snow is now in the process of melting, and the streams are carrying it off.  Our reservoirs have been partially emptied in anticipation of this, so that these high (possibly flood) level waters can be safely captured.  There's considerable worry, though, that the reservoirs will be unable to capture all the runoff this year.  If that happens, there will be flooding below all the dams – flooding that hasn't been seen here for decades.

The first photo below shows a rickety little footbridge that we're very familiar with.  Normally it is two to three feet above the river.  Not so much right now – we're not sure that bridge will survive the spring.  The second photo is the view from that bridge, looking upstream.  Normally the river is only around 10 feet wide at this point.  It's about triple that right now...

And in response to a reader's complaint, the photo at right is the outbuilding that's being re-roofed right now.  I took this photo strategically, so that it would only show the complete sections. :)  On Monday the rest of the fascia and soffit should be installed, and they'll begin on the rain gutters.

This ain't yo' momma's belt sander!

This ain't yo' momma's belt sander!  I tried out my new belt sander for the first time this morning.  Wow!  It's been nearly 30 years since I last bought one of these, and I was very surprised at how much they've improved.  A belt sander is a pretty uncomplicated tool: a motor, a drive (usually a belt), a couple of rollers, a metal plate, and that's about it.  What could they do to improve that?

There are two huge differences between this sander and the one I purchased last century.  The first one I noticed was the noise: this one is much quieter than my old one, and blessedly free of the loud metallic rattles that my old one emitted constantly.  The second thing I noticed as soon as I applied pressure on the wood: virtually no sawdust escaped it.  My old one filled the room with fine sawdust in seconds.  This one emits so little that I don't even need to wear a mask!  I have no idea how they did this, but whatever they did seems to actually work.  Very nice, that is.  Then there is one slightly subtler improvement.  My old sander, when you turned it on, would generate so much torque that it would jump uncontrollably in your hands.  Because of that, I always started it in the air, then lowered it onto the work.  This sander starts much more gently; so much so that I can safely start it while resting on the work.  This isn't really terribly important, but it's a nice thing that I appreciate.

On the right bottom side of the photo above, you can see an area I sanded with a 60 grit belt.  In under a minute I removed all objectionable edges in about 1/6 of one side of that landing piece.  Even going through three finer grits it's only going to take me an hour or so to sand the whole piece down.  Very nice!

Until this morning, I was annoyed at myself for leaving my old belt sander in California.  Now I'm actually happy I did!

Expensive punctuation...

Expensive punctuation...  Consider this sentence, lifted from a Maine state law:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.

That sentence defines what occupations are not eligible for overtime pay.  A recent dispute centered on the meaning of that sentence.  In everyday English usage, there are two possible interpretations of that sentence because there is no comma between "packing for shipment" and "or distribution". 

A US appeals court has ruled that the sentence above is ambiguous, and therefore a labor dispute should be decided in favor of the employees rather than the employer.  More examples of such ambiguous legislation or contracts here.

Reading about this reminded me (rather too forcefully) of one of my least favorite aspects of executive life, back in the bad old days when I was still one of them.  I spent a ridiculous amount of time reading all the language in contracts, including such details as whether to use the Oxford comma or not in any particular sentence.  On a large contract (as the examples linked above illustrate), a large amount of money might ride on possible interpretations of contract language.  What really got me going on this issue was discovering language that was almost certainly intended to deceive or trick us, in draft contracts coming from large multinational corporations we were considering doing business with.  It was easy to tell if these were deliberate constructions or not: we would simply red-line the language in question and propose an unambiguous alternate.  If the other company pushed back on our change ... then we knew it was deliberate.  I consider that dishonest behavior myself, and I see no need for that in a legitimate business contract.  Given what I saw, however, I have to conclude that mine was a minority viewpoint – at least with many large corporations.  There were exceptions, thankfully.  And the small businesses I dealt with never seemed to have this issue.  I suspect it has to do with the point at which a corporation becomes large enough to have a permanent legal staff – they seemed to believe that such trickery was part of their job description...

Paradise ponders, where the hell did that day go edition...

Paradise ponders, where the hell did that day go edition...  Yesterday I was scrambling all day long.  I was feeling a bit off (and I am today as well), but none of the day's activities were onerous – there were just a lot of them!  I never even thought about making a post, much less actually doing it...

Miki, our oldest field spaniel, went to the groomers for a haircut yesterday.  He came out looking sleek and fit, and acting very happy.  I'm thinking we let him get a bit too shaggy.  When I walked into the groomer's 45 minutes early, I expected a little confusion when I checked in.  Nope.  The groomer recognized Miki immediately, greeted him in a happy way, and it was clear Miki recognized her as a friend right away.  A little later, still talking with the groomer, she asked about Cabo and Mako – obviously remembering them from their one haircut about six months ago.  She especially asked about Cabo, wondering if she still had “those eyes”.  :)  When I assured her that Cabo still had that same face, the groomer was delighted – and then showed me the photo of Cabo that she kept on her phone.  Wow!  Then she went on to say that her experience with our four field spaniels (she's given Mo'i a cut as well) convinced her that her next dog needed to be a field spaniel.  Our dogs apparently made quite the impression!

For the past couple of days we've had roofers working on our small outbuilding.  This is the oldest structure on our property, built in 1990 by the owners who built the house we now live in.  They used that outbuilding (which has power, heat, and a bathroom) and an RV as their domicile for the two years it took to get the house built.  I don't think it's received any TLC since it was built.  The roof was fiberglass and asphalt shingle, the gutters aluminum.  The shingles were wearing out, the underlayment was all dried and cracked, and the gutters falling off.  That old roof has been removed, as have the gutters.  New underlayment is down, and the entire roof has been sheathed in standing seam steel, matching our house.  On Monday they will be back to install fascia and soffit (all aluminum), and later next week they'll put the new gutters up there.  They'll also be replacing the gutters on our house, which are also in bad shape plus the construction we did last year involved several roof-line changes that also require redesigned gutters.

Yesterday and today we have “Blue Stakes” people here to mark the locations of the various underground utilities (gas, electric, cable TV, and phone).  This is in preparation for another round of digging in our yard, scheduled to start next week.  This time, the digging will be in all our yard covered with lawn – about three acres in total, in four discrete pieces.  This round of digging is to get sprinklers installed.  This is a system I've been working on getting installed for nearly two years now; it's proved far harder to find a craftsman to do the work than I ever thought it would!  I finally did find one, though, and this same fellow is going to sod about an acre of our lawn, and overseed the rest.  He's also going to fix all the various grade problems caused by our paving our driveway three years ago, and from the construction last year.  All this right in the middle of mud season!  There's going to be quite the mess around here for a while...

I went to Angie's for breakfast yesterday with Bruce N., a local friend whom I hadn't seen for a while.  He's got lots of interesting things going on in his life, including plans to build an extension onto his home in Avon, and a large steel barn close by on the same property.  These projects are both derived from the fact that one of his sons has moved in with him, complete with wife and four grandkids (with another on the way!).  That leaves very little room for Bruce and his wife June, so they're building an extension for themselves.  The barn is something he's wanted all along; a place to park tractor, mowers, truck, etc., and to have a baby goat pen alongside for his grandkids.  He got surprised when they started looking for a contractor to excavate the foundations for these projects – everyone is so busy now that the times being quoted would completely mess up their plans.  So Bruce and his son decided to buy a medium-sized Komatsu excavator (similar to the one above), use it this year to complete a long list of earth-moving projects, then sell it.  That's way cheaper than putting 3 or 4 hundred hours on a rental, and they'll be able to tackle some other projects they'd like to do (drainage ditches, terracing, etc.).  They took delivery of it just yesterday, and now Bruce has to learn how to operate it.  Sounds like fun to me!

Debbie and I grabbed lunch at Los Primos yesterday.  She was really, really hungry and put away that entire carne asada plate at right.  I had a couple of gorditas.  As usual, all of this stuff was delicious.  Also as usual, the staff were super friendly and smiles were everywhere.  We love this place...

Also yesterday our persevering oven repairman  (Jim) came for his next attempt at repairing our two broken ovens.  This time, he succeeded with one!  Yay!  He had the right part, it was identical to the one he was replacing, and it all worked on the first try when he buttoned up the oven.  The oven he fixed had an intermittent temperature control problem, and in that oven all of the temperature control is contained in a single thermostat assembly, which is what he replaced.  So that oven should now work correctly.  The other oven was the one he worked on during his last marathon visit a couple of weeks ago.  That oven exhibited the same wildly high temperatures with 100°F swings even after he'd replaced the thermostat assembly.  This time he was on the phone with the manufacturer's technician (Viking is the manufacturer) trying to troubleshoot it.  After an hour or so on the phone, they concluded that a control board (electronics) was at fault.  The old thermostat probably was just fine.  So we've ordered that part (about $200), and now we're expecting Jim for the fourth visit in a couple of weeks.  The labor charge for the repair is fixed, and if you calculate the per-hour charge it's going to work out to about $5/hour.  Darrell's is taking a bath on this one.  Little do they know that a cloud of weirdness follows us everywhere.  Probably our address and phone number will be tacked to their wall after this, with instructions to hang up should we ever call again. :)

Non-standard addressing...

Non-standard addressing...  This blog post by national geek treasure Ken Shirriff details how the Intel 8008 designers saved a few then-precious gates by addressing a stack with a sequence that wasn't in the usual binary numerical order.  Long-time readers may know that the 8008 has a special place in my professional life: it was the heart of the first microcomputer that I designed and built myself.  Until I read Ken's post, I had no idea that the 8008 addressed its stack this way – as a user of the 8008, there was no way to detect that.

That general technique, though, I've used myself, back in the '70s and '80s when I was designing a lot of digital hardware.  I got there in two steps.

The first step was a mental leap I made when wire-wrapping a Z80 prototype that included some dynamic RAM and an EPROM.  The way the chips were oriented on the board, to connect the Z80's address lines to the eight RAM chips and PROM chip in the ordinary way (that is, A0 to A0, A1 to A1, etc.) would have caused the wires to cross over each other twice in an aesthetically annoying way.  It dawned on me as I thought about my stupid problem that the RAM chips really didn't need the address lines to be connected in the ordinary way at all – I could connect them in any way that was convenient, and it wouldn't change the operation of them.  In fact, the address lines could be differently connected to each individual RAM chip (though that wasn't convenient or neat) and even that would still work just fine.  All that really mattered is that the 12 bits (4k RAMs) of address all be connected, so that each possible address presented a different state of address lines to each RAM.  The EPROM was a slightly harder case, as it might be in either of two places: the Z80 board itself, or the EPROM programmer.  The programmer's address pins were wired in the usual way, so if I wired my board in an unusual way the addresses wouldn't match.  But that problem was easily solved, too: a simple little program would “scramble” the sequence of the bytes I wanted to program in the EPROM so that they'd match how I'd wired my Z80 board.  Unconventional, but it would work – and I built my board that way, along with several later boards that made it to printed circuit boards where the layout convenience actually saved us a layer.

The second step happened when I was building a piece of test equipment for the Marines.  There are a lot of good stories in that experience. :)  This piece of gear was based on a Z80, but had lots of discrete TTL logic associated with it.  One requirement included 16 bit address counters for some RAM that collected state information.  There were 32 channels of information, so 32 of these 16 bit counters were needed.  Extensible 4 bit counters were standard TTL parts, and the obvious choice – but I'd have needed 128 of them for the job.  Extensible 8 bit shift registers were also standard TTL parts, so if I could figure out how to use them I'd only need 64 of them, saving a hefty pile of parts in my design.  Remembering the lessons I'd learned above about “scrambling” the address lines, it occurred to me that there was no requirement for a standard binary sequence.  I was already familiar with using shift registers and a few gates to generate pseudo-random sequences for noise generators, so I jumped right to that as a design solution.  I ended up taking 2.5 parts (shift registers plus gates) to build each of those “address counters”, a very nice parts count reduction from the original approach that took 4 parts. 

It did cause a bit of an issue when my design went through an independent design review, though.  The engineer doing the review had never seen a pseudo-random sequence generator, so I had to spend quite a bit of time in the review convincing him that they actually worked.  Then he flat-out didn't believe the RAMs would still do the job if not addressed in sequential address order.  I actually had to step him through a chalkboard example of a 3 bit address memory to convince him.  My customer was quite discomfited by all the back-and-forth between the reviewer and I.  The reviewer had a reputation in San Diego for being a top-notch digital designer.  What kind of a weird design had I made, that this guy was so puzzled by it?  Fortunately for me, when the review was over (and my design approved with no changes) that reviewer went out of his way to say what a great design it was, and that he'd learned several things he expected to apply himself.  With that sort of endorsement, I was hopeful that I'd get more business from the Marines.  I would have, too, had I been willing to do the work – but it took nearly a year for me to get the check for the first work I did.  Not many small businesses can afford that sort of payment delay.  The Marines approached me several more times with projects they wanted me to do, but I turned them down.  I wanted to get paid!  :)

Doom. I feel the doom coming on...

Doom.  I feel the doom coming on...

Paradise ponders, puppy birthdays and irrational numbers...

Paradise ponders, puppy birthdays and irrational numbers...  Today (3/14/2017) is the first birthday of Mako and Cabo, our little field spaniel puppies.  The video at right is one I took of them last June, when they were about 3 months old.  It captured one of their play “battles” in slow motion.  They still do the same thing today, though the physics are now a bit different since they weight a lot more.

We celebrated this morning by giving them some half-and-half with their morning kibble, and by letting them have two bananas instead of their usual one (split between four dogs).  The little puppies have no idea why they got this bonanza this morning, but (trust me on this) they weren't complaining. :)

Today is also Pi Day, commemorating that most famous of irrational numbers: pi.  Of course there's a web site dedicated to it, where you can find the first million digits of pi if you're looking for some reading material.

A few years ago I read a study that attempted to measure adult innumeracy in various countries around the world.  There were two questions related to pi on there.  The first one asked for a definition of pi.  The second asked the test taker to write down as many digits of pi as he or she knew.  Americans stood out for their ignorance of these.  I don't remember the exact numbers any more, but it was something like 15% of Americans could define pi as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.  The average number of digits known by Americans was less than one.  That means a great many Americans didn't even know that the first digit was “3”!  I remember comparing those results with those from Estonia, and being appalled at the gap.  The majority of Estonians could define pi, and the average number of digits was over 4.  On a good day, after my morning tea, I can remember 6 or 7 digits – which makes me extraordinary for an American, and slightly above average for an Estonian.

A friend of mine, Clay M., came up with a clever and fun way to help his daughters understand pi.  They baked a pizza, then cut it up into a lot of skinny slices, 20 or so.  Then they arranged these slices side-by-side, alternating the pointy end up or down.  This made a rough rectangle whose height was the radius of the pizza (diameter/2) and whose length was pi * radius.  By simply measuring the length of the “rectangle” they could measure pi – and then they got to eat the pizza.  Win!

Paradise ponders, acidic wood and big hunks of redwood edition...

Paradise ponders, acidic wood and big hunks of redwood edition...  Yesterday I got a bit of a scare: I discovered that wood I'd left on my table saw's cast iron table had left big ugly black marks and rusty corrosion on it.  What the hell did that?  Well, the wood was redwood (4x4s) that I'm using for the stairs I'm building.  It turns out that the red heartwood of redwood lumber is highly acidic – something I had no idea of until yesterday.  I'd left the wood on that table for just two days, and the corrosion that developed in that short time felt like sandpaper when I ran my hands over it.  Not good at all!  The wood also had a terrible black stain on it, but fortunately not on a side that will be visible when I've finished the stairs.  After trying various ways to remove the corrosion, I found one that worked: a combination of M1 oil, Scotch-Brite pads, and elbow grease.  Two hours and some sore arms later, I had removed nearly all trace of that corrosion.  The only way you can see it now is by spotting a slight discoloration when you get the light at the right angle.  I put a new coat of M1 on it and called it a day.  But I will never store redwood on metal again!

What I was really trying to do yesterday was to get my big redwood “landing” built.  And I did!  I cut up six 4x4s into eleven 44" lengths, then drilled holes in the ten butt joints for dowel pins (60 holes for 30 pins, 3 on each of the 10 butt joints).  I used the jig I made yesterday to do that, and it worked fine.  The first photo shows the finished glue-up in the clamps.  With a piece this big, there's a danger of bowing.  The easy way to minimize that is to have clamping from both the top and the bottom, which is why you see so many clamps here.  There are other ways to solve this problem, too, but if you've got the clamps, this is the easy way.  This morning I removed the clamps and put the two slabs (big one near the camera, small one away) up on my workbench to get ready for sanding.

I'm quite pleased with how well these turned out.  First, there's no bowing at all on either slab.  I'll be installing “ribs” on these before I'm finished, and that will (or should!) prevent any future bowing as well.  Second, the joint mismatches are all well under 1/32", thanks to the dowel pins.  This will make them easy to sand to an acceptable flatness.  Well, it would be easy if I had a belt sander.  I thought for sure my trusty old 4" belt sander made the trip to Utah with us, but I searched high and low for it yesterday and it's just not here.  Apparently I left it in California with some of my other tools.  I ordered one last night, as for work like this (which I'd like to do more of), it's an essential tool.  “Like this” means “too darned wide to fit in my planer!”  So work on the steps is stymied until Thursday, when I'll have the new sander...

I did have one thing go slightly wrong while gluing up that big slab.  If I do something this large again, I'll be doing it in two steps to avoid the issue.  Because this time I did it all in one step, by the time I got done gluing and doweling the tenth joint, the first two joints had partially hardened.  It took me about 30 minutes to do all the gluing, so apparently the limit for TiteBond II glue is around 20 minutes at the 70 °F I was working in.  The specs say 10 to 15 minutes, but it seems to be a tad more than that.  I know from past experience that the bond will still be strong – this is more an aesthetic issue than a structural one.  There is a tiny gap remaining on the first joint, and an even smaller one (nearly invisible) on the second.  I worked some more glue into them to hide the issue, which I'm sure nobody but me will ever notice.  Still, what I should have done is to first glue up two smaller slabs, then in a third step glue those two together.  Had I done so, my working time would have been within limits for all of it...

Another sign that spring is springing...

Another sign that spring is springing...  The past week's production from our solar panels.  We had many weeks of zero production recently, because of snow (see 6 March, below).  They've been completely free of snow for four days now; the less-than-perfect production is because of intermittent cloud cover.  Soon we'll start seeing those perfect curves again, when we have our first clear days...

USPS fail...

USPS fail and medical care...  No surprise in a USPS fail, right?

For years now we've routinely tracked the progress of packages shipping from Amazon to us.  The vast majority of these packages ship via Fedex or UPS, and the tracking for them is easy, fast, and accurate. 

But every once in a while, an Amazon seller will ship to us via USPS, no doubt to keep the cost down.  Usually this is via one of the “priority mail” boxes that don't charge by weight, and the item is something heavy.

That just happened to me: a couple of woodworking clamps are headed my way, and the seller sent them by USPS last week.  Four working days later, the USPS tracking number still shows “No information available”.  I cannot recall even one instance in which the USPS tracking system actually worked.  The items I ordered shipped on March 8th, and the USPS estimates delivery on April 24th.  The first time I saw such a ridiculous estimated delivery time, I was quite alarmed – but the package actually arrived in quite the timely fashion, as have most of the others.  I can only guess that the USPS sets the estimate so long so that no matter how badly the screw things up, they can still claim an “on-time” delivery.

The USPS likes to claim that they are not a government agency, and technically they are correct.  However ... for any practical purpose, they really are a government agency: their subsidies, rate regulation, employment regulation, Congressional oversight, the franking privilege, etc. make them effectively one even if technically they are not. 

My point is that the kind of awful service delivered by the USPS is always what we get when we let the government run something.  As a veteran of the U.S. Navy, I can attest to the almost unbelievable amount of economic waste in the military.  All of us know how wonderful the DMVs are, especially in the blue states (where government bureaucracies have run the furthest off the rails).

So how is this related to medical care?  Like this: the progressives in this country deeply, desperately desire our healthcare to be a so-called “single payer” system, meaning that the Federal government pays for it all.  The UK's NHS is their model.  This is the connection, and the part I least understand: what they want is for the same “quality” of the USPS, or DMVs, to be applied to our healthcare, too!  At least the damned post office won't kill me!  Talk with any UK residents about their three month waits for an MRI, or their relatives who died of cancer while waiting for diagnostic tests, and you'll see our future should a single payer system ever be put in place here.  What I simply cannot understand is why anyone wants this!

Who wouldn't want some effective corporate organization (Amazon, anyone?) to take over the USPS?  I'd be willing to wager that the quality would go up and the price down – so long as there was competition...

Paradise ponders, superstar mutts edition...

Paradise ponders, superstar mutts edition...  So I took a few quick photos of Mako and Cabo to assuage the demon readers who are pestering me about them.  Here are the superstars:

I took these before the sun rose, which is why they aren't as crisp as you'd expect.  The first one is Cabo, the little girl.  She has those eyes all the time, perpetually looking startled.  Sometimes the lighter hair on her head stands straight up, like a little mohawk cut.  The second is Mako, the big boy.  At the moment I took that, he thought I had some food.  The last photo shows both of them, and gives you an idea about their relative size.  Despite being much smaller than Mako, Cabo holds her own in any play battle.  That's mainly due to her completely ruthless nature.  When they're “fighting”, she will chomp down on any part of Mako that happens to be handy – yes, including those parts.  Ouch!  She's also much quicker and more agile than Mako, so she'll make fast runs at him and bowl him over.  Mako, on the other hand, appears to be much more polite about their battles.  Sometimes he even looks offended when she does something outrageous to him, and often he looks befuddled by the sheer speed with which she does it.  Despite all the mock fighting, though, these two are best buddies.  They spend all day in each other's company, even when they don't have to (our yard is big).

Yesterday afternoon, our neighbors across the street (Gary and Elayne S.) called us and invited us to go to dinner with them.  That was completely unexpected, but we hadn't seen them for a while, so we eagerly accepted.  We ended up going to a place we'd never been before: the Logan Steakhouse, which recently began the process of turning themselves into the Copper Mill.  Their web site apparently isn't operational yet.  We'd read bad reviews of the steakhouse, which when combined with high prices kept us away.  The reviews for the new Copper Mill were very good, though, so we'd been planning to try it out.  Our outing with Gary and Elayne was the perfect time to do that.  Debbie and I shared a fish & chips plate, and it was delicious – cod done perfectly, great fries, dinner rolls right out of the oven (or they sure tasted that way!), and a nice salad for Debbie.  Price was modest, too.  We approve!

Our conversations over dinner were mainly catching up on the past few months.  Somewhere in the conversation the subject turned to our solar panels, which Gary wanted to know why we had installed.  That led to a discussion about our Tesla (because the panels largely were justified by the need to charge it), which Gary and Elayne didn't know we had.  It turns out that their son has been urging them to get one, and they really couldn't figure out why.  That led to Gary and Elayne wanting a ride in our Tesla.  Gary wanted it to be to “someplace important” :)  So we're going to out with them to Maddox sometime next week.  And who knows?  Maybe we'll end up with our neighbor having a Tesla, too!

We bought a couple nice chunks of fresh ahi tuna from Macey's, and that's our dinner today.  Yum!  It's hard to beat ahi for fresh fish...

I have a new question to use in order to rule political candidates in or out.  “Do you support getting rid of Daylight Saving time?”  If they say “no”, they're not getting my vote...

The crazy is taking over the world, part 88,372,119:

The crazy is taking over the world, part 88,372,119:

Paradise ponders, dowels and maple-nut bar edition...

Paradise ponders, dowels and maple-nut bar edition...  A few days ago, Michelle H. (a friend who's a member of the LDS ward that we're in) invited Debbie to an auction being put on by the Ladies' Relief Society.  This auction was something completely new to us.  Everyone attending (all women, I believe) filled out questionnaires.  From Debbie's description of the questions on it, I think they're trying to make a measure of how good and how faithful you are.  The questionnaires were scored, and the points one scored become the currency for the auction that followed.  Additional points were also awarded for things like participating in the song, staying until the end of the auction, etc.  Debbie ended up with a few hundred points, while others had thousands.  As Debbie said, having some was better than nothing, because in the auction she bid on a couple of items and won them!  She brought home two maple-nut bars and two big mason jars of homemade soup.  We only have one maple-nut bar now, as I ate the other one – delicious!  The soup looks fantastic: an Italian sausage soup with a tomato base and orzo.  I may have some later tonight!  All of the items being auctioned were homemade food items (and possibly some craft items, too).  The ones that went for the most points were things like pork ribs and roast turkey – and some homemade fruit pastries from a woman well-known for her baking.  Debbie also got a hearty breakfast out of the event, including samples of some of the aforementioned fruit pastries.  Debbie understood fully why they fetched a high “price”!  The best part of all for Debbie was that she got to meet and spend time with some of the local women.  She had a blast – she was all smiles when she got home.

While she was off stuffing her face and having a great time, I managed to get the next step (literally!) of my stairs project done.  I finished the drilling jig and used it to drill dowel holes in all of the faces to be glued, and I did the gluing and clamping.  The first photo below shows my test of the drill jig and depth setting on the drill press.  The goal was to have the hole depth be just a hair over half the length of a dowel peg, so that the same amount of the peg would be inside each piece.  That worked great.  The second photo shows a test fit of two pieces of the step held together just by the dowel's friction.  That fitting showed no errors of over 1/32", and that I can fix by sanding.  The third photo shows the little mark I made on each glued face to keep the orientation straight.  One arrow points to the upper surface; the other to the end that the jig should be fit onto.  The fourth photo shows the jig clamped to a step piece, ready to be drilled.  The fifth photo the clamps in the process of being set up.  The plastic is there to keep glue from dripping onto the workbench.  Note the two scrap boards that actually touch the clamps; these spread the clamping force more evenly across the face of the boards.  The last photo shows the boards all glued and clamped.  I had to move the end clamps right after gluing as the tops of the boards were pulling together with all the clamps on the bottom.  This will be even more of a challenge on the larger step, and I think I'm going to address that by using all eight of my pipe clamps on it: four on the bottom and four on the top.  Once the glue fully dries on the first, smaller step I'm going to sand out the small misalignments.  Tomorrow I'll tackle the big step!

Fake news...

Fake news...  Remy weighs in...

Paradise ponders, howling dogs and red-winged blackbird edition...

Paradise ponders, howling dogs and red-winged blackbird edition...  Yesterday I was on the phone with Tesla several times – they were working to get my Model X fixed by the end of the day, but didn't want me to drive down there for nothing.  We had a deadline at 3 pm, as that would leave us just enough time to drive down there to SLC before they closed at 5 pm (and on a Friday, of course nobody there wanted to stay late).  Well, we talked right at the deadline and the tech was “very confident” he'd have it fixed by 5 pm, so we jumped in the #$%^(#@( Mercedes CLA 250 and headed down.  That car made us both crazy; we couldn't wait to get back in the Model X!  We made it into the service center just a few minutes before 5 pm, to see our Model X all nicely washed and being charged.  When we walked in the door, a smiling Denise (their front desk person) handed me my fob, took the key for the Mercedes, and we were out the door.  Zero paperwork, zero hassle.  That's really hard to beat!

When I checked my email this morning, I had a “service invoice” from Tesla.  I expected this to be a warranty repair, so I was really surprised and a bit alarmed by that.  Turns out the invoice is for zero dollars (they really should change the name of that!), and really just served to tell me what they did.  They replaced the hinges, as I'd been told, but they also replaced the actuator motor that actually moves the spoiler up and down.  They also put some special lubricant on the hinges that is supposed to keep them from corroding as they did.  We'll see how well that works long-term...

Debbie had made us reservations at Current Fish & Oyster, which is the first nice restaurant in SLC we've tried other than Red Iguana.  It was so hard to make ourselves deliberately go someone other than Red Iguana. :)  But we did it, and we were very glad: we had a fantastic meal.  We started with a pair of appetizers: crab cakes and mussels.  We both love crab cakes, and these were good – but as it turns out, they were the least impressive part of the meal.  The mussels were simply wonderful.  There were a dozen or so fat mussels, slices of an excellent chorizo (spicy Mexican sausage), and slices of a really good, doughy sourdough bread grilled in spiced butter.  There was a sauce poured over the whole thing that was aromatic and full of mussel flavor.  That appetizer was so good that we ordered a second one to share for dessert after our meal (really, we did!).  Debbie's entree was a fish stew (first photo below), mine was roasted scallops (second photo below).  Both were awesome.  Mine had a carrot-ginger sauce that was so good I had to sop it all up, and a rice cake in the middle that was darned near as good as the scallops themselves.  The vegetables included a new one on me: purple carrots, slightly less sweet than a normal carrot.  All of those veggies were delicious.  Debbie's sauce was just a bit too spicy for me (it included jalapenos), but then, I'm a spicy food wuss.  I tried one of her shrimps, and it tasted like it had just come off the barbie – really good.  Debbie had a glass of wine; I had their homemade ginger ale.  That ginger ale, presuming that you like ginger (I love it!), will make your brains fall out.  I'd go back there just for that!  We shall return to Current for another meal, for sure...

Yesterday while waiting for Tesla's service, I was planning to go to the next step on my stairs project.  That didn't happen, because I discovered that I'd messed up my jig: two parts that were supposed to be glued at a right angle were actually at about 80°.  That wouldn't do at all!  So I ripped the jig apart, re-routed the slot for the 1x6, and redid the glue job.  So this morning I'm right back where I thought I was yesterday morning.

On Wednesday morning we heard the songs of red-winged blackbirds.  These are our reliable harbingers of springtime, so we were very happy to see them.  We have the spectacular yellow-headed blackbirds in the valley, too – but about ten miles north of us, not here, darn it.  There are several dozen of them that stay near our irrigation canal, which is filled with water all summer.  Usually at this time of year it's empty, but this year, with all the snow and rain, it's running about half full just from the runoff.  That must make the blackbirds very happy!  Soon our barn swallows will return, too.  Some robins stayed through the winter, but the spring cohort is starting to arrive as well.  A pair of Canadian geese landed in the field north of our house yesterday, possibly the same pair that nested in an adjacent tree last year.  They were here this morning as well.  Lots of bird song around the place now!

For the last few days (and in the forecast for at least the next ten days) we've had highs in the 50s and 60s.  The snow is melting at a prodigious rate, both in the valley and up the mountain slopes below about 8,000' altitude.  Starting in a week, the forecast calls for frost-free nights, too.  Our “mud season” has begun!  Many of the fields around us are largely clear of snow, and some of the alfalfa fields are already greening up.  The only deep snow left on our property is the giant piles on the north side of our house, made by snow sliding off our roof, which this time of year are shaded all day long.  Some of those piles are still 6' high!

This time of year the sun is rising just south of due east of our house.  There is a small mountain peak in that direction from us, and that means we're in shadow in the early morning, while the valley both north and south of us is in the sun.  This morning when I looked toward my neighbor to the north, his trees were brightly lit.  They're all deciduous trees, so it was the branches and twigs that were lit – and he's got two weeping willows with bright yellow twigs, and a tree I don't know with bright red twigs.  Both of them were striking in that bright morning light, especially as seen from the shadow I was in.

A reader (Glen B.) wrote me this morning wondering why I haven't mentioned our puppies recently.  Well, there's no good reason other than my cranial density!

The two puppies, Cabo and Mako, are really not puppies any more.  They're a year old, and they're starting to get their adult personalities.  Cabo is much smaller than Mako – she's the smallest adult field spaniel we've had, and Mako, I'm pretty sure, is even bigger than Mo'i was.  Cabo is especially affectionate.  She loves to deliver kisses and ear nibbles, even while she's trying to chew a hole in Mako.  Mako is also affectionate, but in a lunky sort of way that involves leaping onto you, trying to claw his way up into your arms, etc.  Cabo, on the other hand, is very gentle.

The two of them sleep in crates in our kitchen at night, while Miki and Race have the run of the kitchen.  In the mornings, right about eight hours after we put them up for the night, Cabo and Mako make it known that they want out.  The way they do this has us laughing at them every morning.  Somehow they've developed the habit of using some highly creative canine vocalizations to get us up.  I think maybe they hear us laughing at them, and are encouraged by that.  We've never heard dogs making sounds like they do, so it's hard for me to describe.  I'm going to have to figure out a way to record them, so I can post them here.  Mako, in particular, is very good at these exotic dog sounds.

Anyway, those vocalizations are my cue to get up and let them outside.  But when I open the crate, the first thing they do is jump on me for attention.  By the time I've let them outside and I walk back into the bedroom to take my morning shower, my face, hands, and arms are covered with dog slobber – the detritus of ten million “Good morning, papa!” dog kisses.  Never fails to start my day in a cheery mood. :)