Daybook

Descriptions of what I did recently; what most people think of when they imagine a “diary entry.”

37 Years of Joyful Determination

Oct 2nd, 2013

Wedding Rice Thrown - 500 Wide.jpg

Carol and I just got back from Chicago last night, after twelve out-of-breath days largely spent marrying off our older nephew Brian. Done! More on this later; it was a wedding like no other. I’ll post pictures when pictures start trickling in. (The photo above is another couple you may know, dodging a mixture of rice and punch-card chad.)

Brian and his lady Alexis are now at the beach on an island on the opposite side of the planet, and Carol and I are still cheering for them. They’re not our children, of course, not precisely (Brian is Carol’s godson) but we’re very proud of them for a great many things. Among these are a sense we see in them that marriage can work, and a determination to make it work that we recognized instantly. We recognized it instantly because that determination lies at the very heart of our own lives together.

Thirty-seven years ago today, Carol and I took that determination and made it explicit: We would stand beside one another no matter what. Marriage is friendship sanctified, and we had been working hard on our friendship for seven years by then. It’s difficult to describe how much deeper and stronger our friendship is now. The best we can do is let our friendship stand on its merits. Time shatters what cannot hold, and perfects what cannot be broken. You’ve seen us, spoken with us, worked with us, and celebrated with us. I think you all know which way Time has taken us.

For Brian and Ali and all the rest of you who have chosen the path of marriage, we offer our encouragement and our applause, in the hope that Time will grant you all that it has granted us, and more.

Pat Thurman K7KR, SK

by Jeff Duntemann.

8 comments

I’m numb. This past Tuesday we lost Pat Thurman, K7KR. He had been struggling with multiple medical issues for a couple of months, and at some point they simply overwhelmed him. Flesh is fragile, even when the spirit is strong.

Like many people, Pat knew of me from my books and my magazine work, and when I announced in my DDJ column that Carol and I were moving to Arizona at the beginning of 1990, he sent me a note and told us to get in touch once we arrived. We did. Pat and his wife Sue became instant friends, and within a year, neighbors, out in the wild dirt-road country at the northern tip of Scottsdale.

Pat was a DXer and contester of formidable skill. While I watched in awe, he put up a 75′ winch-up tower with a highly engineered ground system and a couple of very large steerable beams. (I contented myself with a 200′ longwire and a 6M vertical.) His thunderous signal was heard around the world. His official DX count is 245 countries. (There are 340 right now.) Mine? 17.

We did a lot of offroading in the Tonto National Forest in his high-clearance Jimmy, and visited Sheep’s Bridge. On one of those early trips, Pat stopped the Jimmy for a tarantula in the road. We got out and gathered around the tarantula, which was the first (though it would not be the last) that I had seen in the wild. I wanted a picture, and for scale Pat tossed a quarter onto the road about a foot away from the spider. I worried that the quarter would scare it away. Not so: The tarantula pounced on the quarter so quickly we figured it just teleported. Then once it realized that quarters weren’t edible, it ambled slowly off into the brush.

Pat and Sue were early and eager beta readers for The Cunning Blood, and the inspiration for my Filer Fitzgerald character came from a character in one of Sue’s shows that promoted reading for grade schoolers. It was for that same show that I built The Head of R&D, as I mentioned here some time back. We ate a lot of dinners together, drank a lot of Dornfelder, laughed a great deal, and talked about all kinds of things.

If I can point to any single force that hauled me out of the spiritual mailaise I’d been in for twenty years back in the early 1990s, it was Pat and Sue, and their aptly named parish, Our Lady of Joy. My childhood religion was grim, Hell-centric, and focused on self-denial well beyond what I would call “a healthy discipline.” We originally attended the Sunday night “teen mass” with Pat because Pat and Sue had twin teen sons, and Sue was in the music group. I was astonished: The music they played and sang was downright exuberant: “Send Down the Fire,” “The Canticle of the Turning,” “One Is,” and many more. It made me wonder if there were more to Catholicism than a celebration of human and divine suffering. Our Lady of Joy allowed me to imagine a Catholic tradition that celebrates the physical world, and a God who will not settle for partial victories. Pat and Sue didn’t follow us to Old Catholicism, but without their influence, Carol and I would never have known the journey was even possible.

The older I get, the more I’m certain that friendship is the cornerstone of the human spirit. Alas, the older I get, the more I see my friends leaving this world for other realms. I’m 61 now, and I know enough math to understand that that’s just how things work. Does friendship even have a point, if death can end it so easily?

But…maybe it does, because…maybe it doesn’t. If you get my drift.

K7KR DE K7JPD / TNKS GUD LK ES 73 CUL SK.

Ohm’s Law Is a Bitch

Jul 10th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

8 comments

Jimi Henton, the local breeder from whom we got Aero, Jack, and Dash, brought me her dog grooming dryer some time back to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it. Carol has the exact same dryer, a Chris Christensen Kool Dry. It’s basically an SCR-controlled variable-speed fan in a box, putting out 114 CFM through a hose.

Jimi said it wasn’t blowing as much air as it used to, even after she cleaned the filter and made sure nothing else was gummed up with dog hair. It still blew, and the pot still varied the fan speed, but it wasn’t as loud and clearly didn’t have its out-of-the-box oomph. Worse, she’d had a new motor installed last year. The first one had gone for eleven years before dying; this seemed kind of premature.

I wanted to compare the two dryers to get a sense for how much air was being lost in Jimi’s. I have no way to measure airflow here, but sitting on the laundry room floor I noticed Jack’s little soccer ball, much reduced from its original size, but still round enough for my purposes. With only a little skill I managed to get the ball levitating over the nozzle, as any kid who’s bright enough to put a vacuum cleaner in reverse has done. On Carol’s dryer, the ball wobbled between 18″ and 24″ above the nozzle. On Jimi’s, it was maybe 4″.

So there was work to do, somewhere. Upon opening the dryer up, at least one problem was obvious: The 1,025 watt AC motor was wired to the speed control with #24 telephone wire, and too much of it. (You know, the stuff with the two-color, bands-on-solid insulation.) Close inspection showed two cold solder joints, coincidentally (heh) where the #24 wire hit the speed control pot. The plastic insulation on the phone wire was blackened with heat. The dryer slowly was cooking itself from the resistance of all that skinny wire. No need for a fork; it was done.

Jimi had ordered the motor from the manufacturer and then had somebody local put it into the dryer. She called him an amateur. No. I’m an amateur, with a callsign to prove it. I do electronics because I love it. Whoever installed this motor was…an idiot.

All fixed now, using some #14 stranded wire and soldering skills I learned when I was eleven. Both dryers now loft the soccer ball two feet hgh. Ohm’s Law is a bitch, dude. Please go back to sharpening scissors.

Summer Doldrums

Jul 9th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Yes, I’ve been gone for awhile, and for any number of reasons found it inconvenient to put anything together until this evening. I’ve been having some trouble with that old book-hauling injury in my left arm, spent ten days in Chicago, fixed some stuff (including an interesting repair on a dog grooming hair dryer) and learned some new things that I didn’t expect to learn, including a few that I probably didn’t need to learn.

In short, I’ve had nothing much to report, and in the summer heat just felt better reading books and taking it easy in the cause of getting my whiny supinator to shut the hell up. The gruel here is on the thin side, but that’s summer.

My younger niancee, Justine, made me aware of something called Prancercise by demonstrating it in front of the whole family. Damn. I thought she was kidding. Then I watched the video. Wow. It has nothing on the Invisible Horse Dance, but it could be the next craze at weddings. Or maybe not.

Weddings. We did attend a terrific wedding, of the daughter of my oldest friend Art. At her reception I saw something called the Casper Slide–not to be confused with the skateboarding stunt of the same name. And if you are confused, you’re not alone. I think this is why the real name of the dance is the Cha-Cha Slide, developed by a Chicago DJ named Casper. I watched the dance, and apart from some stomping, it looked a lot like the Electric Slide. But hey, what do I know about cultural tropes?

Another bit of knowledge that was true but unwelcome is that Barnes & Noble comtinues to come apart at the seams. Their CEO quit the other day over the failure of the Nook tablets to capture any significant part of the tablet market. The Nook division is for sale, and Microsoft is making slobbering noises. The Nook guys have been on my you-know-what list for some time, for pushing down updates that freeze in mid-install and can’t be removed. (I don’t use AMV, but I wonder if it works at all after the installer gets stuck.) Leonard Riggio wants to take back the retail division. A lot of stores are closing, and half the remaining stores have leases that expire in 2016. And everybody’s wondering what happens after all this happens. Especially publishers.

I learned that the Chicago Tribune has a page dedicated to documenting every single homicide that happens in Chicago. That this would be a big, frequently updated page is bad enough. That is exists at all is worse. I guess Chicago is a terrific place to be from.

There’s a video on domesticated fox, pointed out to me by Pete Albrecht. I mentioned the Russian research on Siberian fox years ago, but this is the first time I’ve seen videos of the animals themselves. It’s sad in a way; the poor things are stuck somewhere between fox and dogs, and are at best unreliably tame. It’s pretty clear to me, however, that this was the same process our ancestors used to turn wolves into dogs. And it didn’t take thousands of years.

I learned that the backlight behind the controls of my new car stereo changes color continuously.

Ok, ok, I can see eyes glazing over. That’s it for tonight. I hope to get back on my usual schedule shortly.

Dude, Where’s (the Rest of) My Thumb Drive?

Jun 21st, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

My new knobless car stereo worked beautifully…except that it couldn’t keep time. The LCD clock display was erratic from the beginning. For the first day or two it was gaining five minutes per day. Then the whole thing reset to January 1 at midnight. I set it again to the current date and time. It ran fast for a couple more days. Then it reset itself again. Nothing was done to the car in that time frame, so it wasn’t that the battery was disconnected from the stereo.

It was just a lemon. So I invoked the 30-day warranty and took it back.

Yesterday I had them swap it out for a Sony XAV-601BT. I’m watching its clock (and everything else) but so far it’s glitch-free. Oh–and it has a volume control knob! It can do hands-free Bluetooth phone wrangling, and a lot of other stuff I haven’t figured out yet. But in addition to all that, it has a USB port on the front panel. That means I can plug a thumb drive right into the stereo itself, and not into a wire dangling off the back of it.

Skin and Fit.jpg

Of course, having bent more than one thumb drive by careless use, I wanted to be sure that a casual hand-wave wouldn’t destroy a drive with every damned MP3 I own on it. So I bought me a thumb drive unlike any other: The 16GB SanDisk Cruzer Fit. Once you plug it into something, the part that sticks out isn’t quite 1/4″ long.

Dude! Where’s the rest of my thumb drive? But no, that’s all there is. It’s just a bump on the stereo front panel.

The stereo is still on probation, of course, but I’m thinking this one is a keeper. More as it (hopefully doesn’t) happen.

The Black Forest Fire From a Safe Distance

Jun 11th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

Black Forest Fire June 11 2013-1.jpg

I hope.

Actually, it’s about 17 miles NNE of here. I drove down Broadmoor Bluffs to where I had a good NE horizon to take the shot. The location is about 200 feet higher than downtown Colorado Springs, so it’s as good a vantage point as I’m likely to get.

We’re just looking over our shoulders a lot today. I don’t think we’re going to stop any time soon.

Something’s Burning…Again

Jun 11th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Noonish today, Carol asked me to go out on the porch and sniff. There was a haze in the air that we don’t generally see, and the faint whiff of fire. I knew that there were a couple of fires over a hundred miles SW of us, and didn’t give it a lot of thought. I had a writers group meeting at 1 PM up at the Pikes Perk coffee shop at Academy and Vickers. We wrapped up a little before 3, and when we got out into the parking lot, Cynthia Felice began gesturing wildly to the northeast. I was already in the car, but I jumped out and looked where she was pointing.

Immense plume of black and gray smoke. I watched for the motion of the billows to get a sense for its distance. My guess was 6-7 miles. Once I got home it was all over the local news, and we learned that it started in the Black Forest area northeast of Colorado Springs. Measured distance from Pikes Perk to the fire is about eight miles, so I was close. From our house on the other side of the city (we’re less than a mile from the NORAD entrance, if you know where that is) it’s about 18 miles to the fire. I should have snapped a picture on my phone, but I wanted to get my butt home ASAP.

And there’s another one. A new fire broke out down near the Royal Gorge to the west of Canon City at about the same time. That one is even farther away; I measure about 30-35 miles from here. Still, we’re seeing the smoke from here, and the air smells a lot more like fire.

The Black Forest fire is blowing toward the northeast, directly away from us and away from more populated areas in Colorado Springs. However, several houses have already burned, and it doesn’t sound like there’s been any progress yet in controlling the fire.

I’m putting the dog kennels in the 4Runner. I’m watching things on TV. We’re in no immediate danger, but cripes! Up in Black Forest homes were burning half an hour after the fire was reported. When there’s a 30 MPH wind, these things happen fast.

I’ll report here and on Facebook from time to time. Check Facebook first.

Remembering the Known Unknown

May 13th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

Now, this is a weird one: Yesterday, while talking to Carol about how monasticism amplifies the dangers of dualism, I tried to remember the name of the poet who wrote “Wherever the Catholic Sun Doth Shine.” Failed. This annoyed me; the poem is a very big favorite of mine, and someday I’ll have it printed on a poster and framed. I punted and went on with the conversation, but the memory failure rankled me.

Ok, sixties moment and all that. Happens to the best of us. The weirdness started when it suddenly occurred to me that the last name of the poet was the same as the last name of Indiana Jones’s archaeologist rival in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was absolutely certain that it was the same name…but I still couldn’t remember the name itself.

Sheesh. I could see a picture of the poet. He looked a little like H. P. Lovecraft with a squarer face, and I knew that the two were contemporaries. I could see the archeologist in the movie. I could even hear his voice. The name, nowhere to be found.

It hit me sometime later: Hilaire Belloc, of course. And the fictional archaeologist, Rene Belloq. (I don’t consider the difference in spelling significant.) I think most of us have the experience of remembering facts about a person while failing to remember the name. I distinctly recall asking Carol: “Who was the woman in Albuquerque who showed a bichon named after G.W. Bush?” I could see the woman in my mind. I could see the bichon. I knew where they lived. Carol had to remind me of the woman’s name.

I don’t think I’ve ever before had the insight that two people had the same name, without being able to remember the name itself. I’ve read a number of arguments that the invention of language made our brains explode and allowed us to make the final leap to true intelligence. I’ve heard counter arguments too, and I think the counters have it: We could think long before we could speak, and when we evolved machinery for managing language, it ended up somewhere else in the gray matter. (Odds are that Michael Covington knows a little about this. Or maybe a lot.) I’m guessing that we store facts about stuff in one place, and we store names in another place. We store relationships in with the facts (I think) and we can recall and understand facts and relationships without necessarily having a name tag tied to any of it. I had a little plastic drawer devoted to spade bolts long before I knew the term “spade bolt.” Not knowing what they were called only became a problem when I tried to go buy more. (Like a lot of things in my junkbox, I have no idea where the ones in the drawer originally came from.)

I don’t bring this up because it’s surprising; in fact, it makes perfect sense. I’ve just never had my nose rubbed in it so vividly. We once lived in a world where everything was a game of charades, 24/7. Language was a damned useful invention. I’m a little surprised that it took us as long as it did.

Where’s the rest of SQLite?

May 2nd, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

8 comments

Wait. Oh. That’s all there is.

Really.

I had this problem once before, with the Atlantis word processor. It’s 5MB installed. 5. The first time I installed it I suspected I had downloaded a corrupt file, but no: However they did it, the wizards over at Atlantis implemented a damned fine Word 2000 clone in 5MB. It doesn’t have the collaboration features, but for solo work it’s a very big win, and exports extremely clean epubs as a side benefit.

For a fair number of years now, my non-Delphi database work has all been in MySQL. (With Delphi I use a VCL product called DBISAM, which is linked into the compiled .exe and doesn’t have to be installed separately.) Because SQLite is available for the Raspbian OS and MySQL isn’t (as best I know; Percona runs on Arch Linux) I’m going to be using SQLite as a database teaching tool. So when I installed it the other day, I stared at the 600K .dll and wondered, Is that all there is?

Yes, that’s all there is, my friend–so let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the tools and have a ball. ‘Cause that’s all there is!

Wow. I verified it by searching for the sqlite3.dll file on my system. The Calibre ebook manager uses an older version (as do a few other things) and the file was not only that same unbelievable size, but smaller. Can you implement a relational database engine in only 372K? I guess you can.

One reason SQLite’s .dll is so small is that it contains no UI at all. There’s a bare-bones command-line management utility available as a separate download. As some of you may know (or suspect) I dislike command lines intensely. So it wasn’t long before I had two free GUI management apps for SQLite databases. One was recommended by Chris Newman’s book on SQLite, SQLite Database Browser, and the other is SQLiteMan. Both are free and installed without drama. So far I prefer SQLiteMan, but it’s really too early to tell. SQLiteMan is supposedly compilable on the RPi. I intend to try that. I’ll let you know how it goes.

One other reason may be that SQLite is “typeless,” which means that the engine does not do type-checking on reads and writes. You can put anything you want in any field (apart from key fields, which are treated specially) and if it makes no sense, it’s your screwup on your conscience. I’m a strongly typed guy and this would rankle, if it didn’t allow a database engine to come in at half a megabyte.

There are wrappers for most common languages, including Lua and Lazarus/FreePascal, both of which I have here and have been fooling with in recent months. I’ve been very spoiled by DBISAM, and I’m interested to see how well SQLite works in non-server applications. More as it happens.

Goof-Proof Meets Green Giant

Apr 27th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

Goof-Proof Flying-350 Wide.jpg

Well, the punk felt lucky today, so after Carol and I got back from some shopping midafternoon, we threw Dash and QBit in the back of the 4Runner and went down the hill to the park to fly a couple of kites.

But not just any kites. In the past few months I managed to score a Hi-Flier Goof-Proof Kite and a classic RB Toys Green Giant kite. Both are collectible, but like I said, it was a beautiful day and I was feeling lucky. I was lucky, actually, since I got both of them back to the house without damage or drama.

The Goof-Proof Kite is rare but not legendary, and most people have never even heard of it. It’s listed in the 1977 Hi-Flier trade catalog but not in the 1987 catalog. It’s a 36″ plastic bow kite with a twist: There’s no bow. The cross stick is in two pieces, and the pieces attach to the vertical stick with an injection-molded plastic connector that provides about 15% dihedral and a single mount point for the string. The dihedral makes a bow unnecessary, and the single mount point makes a bridle unnecessary. You tie your string to the plastic loop at the center of the connector (which pokes through the plastic sail at the kite’s center of balance) and that’s it. Done. Goof-Proof.

Goof Proof Connector 500Wide.jpg

I don’t have a lot of experience with single-point kites, and what I’ve had has been marginal. The problem is that the bridle and the bow are the only real adjustments you have on a two-stick kite. You’re at the mercy of the wind and the kite’s designers. In this case, the kite did fairly well in the very light and intermittent wind we had in our late afternoon. It was unstable without a tail, but 4′ of tail did the trick and didn’t weigh it down very much. (Kite tails are about wind resistance, not weight.)

I paid $25 for it, and I’ve told people for years not to fly classic kites. But having done that, I went back to the car and did something even nuttier: I flew an original 1972 RB Toys Green Giant promo kite. I don’t have to describe the kite in detail. If you want to know more, read the larger article on them, linked above. It was the first time I’d flown a kite like that since 1987. I hadn’t imagined it: They fly better than almost anything else I’ve ever had. But having paid $50 for it (and considered it a steal at that price) actually tossing it into the air was crazy. 41 years is a long time, and I don’t know how well the plastic center connector keeps on a decadal scale. (RB Toys didn’t expect they’d be flying forty years after manufacture!)

1972 Kite With Jeff-500 Wide.jpg

I had another insight while the Green Giant was in the air: That little camera we found in the bushes a few months back might be just the thing for kite aerial photography. I’d have to make a mount for it, and I would need a bigger and ruggeder kite than I have right now. But remote control really isn’t necessary if all you want to do is take video. Start the camera, launch the kite, and let it run as long as the kite’s in the air. I’ll read up on it, and when time allows I think I’ll try it.

When time allows. Aye, there’s the rub.