Daybook

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

My 2009 Plan File

Dec 31st, 2008

2008 was Not My Favorite Year. Too many deaths, too many illnesses, too many trips to the dentist, and too many financial collapses. I have high hopes for 2009, but that’s part & parcel of being a Pollyanic Old Catholic. Hey, when you’re down this far, every direction is up, right?

So in this, the last (I sincerely hope) Contra entry that I will ever edit by hand, I present my plan file for the coming year:

Get Contra settled in to its new home on contrapositivediary.com under the WordPress platform. Easy one, though we’ll know more tomorrow.
Begin and complete the rewrite of Assembly Language Step By Step for the Third Edition, and hopefully see it into print by the spring of 2010. This is a big-un, and the top priority, as there is considerable money riding on it.
Finish and publish Cold Hands and Other Stories, my second SF collection. Richard Bartrop has already sent me sketches for the cover art, and they look great. As soon as I can get “Drumlin Wheel” completed and cleaned up, I have enough material for a book, and after that, finishing it the book is just a few days of focused work.
Finish Old Catholics, or at least get another 50,000 words into it. (I have about 27,000 words down now.) This has been fun, and it’s certainly the quirkiest thing I’ve ever attempted to write.
Build a couple of radios. I have the schematic for John Baumann KB7NRN’s 2-tube FM BCB receiver, and that’s tops on the list.
Get my 40M dipole out of my alarm system’s hair and do some hamming on the low bands.
Get a 6M vertical of some sort situated in the attic.
Get the last crown installed in my mouth. (This should happen in early February.) That’s the end of a miserably massive piece of oral rehab that begin in January 2008, and (mercifully) this last step involves no cutting.
Finish and launch a couple of model rockets with the local club.
Read Many Books.
Eat Less Sugar. Eat More Meat. Lose More Weight. (More on this shortly.)
Enjoy the immediate presence of my wife, my dogs, and this extravagantly beautiful world.

Other things will certainly happen along the way, and maybe half of the above list will not happen, though I have great faith in the second item and complete faith in the last.

As for tonight, well, Carol and I will remain at home, watch a movie, brush dogs, and maybe have a glass of wine. There’s a decent conjunction of the Moon and Venus just after sunset, and I intend to gawk at that a little. Come midnight, I may jump up and yell “Bang!” in honor of fireworks, if I’m still awake. (If I’m not still awake, the kids down on Villegreen will handle it for me, and I’ll be awake one way or another.)

Happy New Year from both of us; like, how hard could that be?

“God Bless All Of You…On The Good Earth”

by Jeff Duntemann.

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apollo8sdtamp Forty years ago, we watched three human beings travel to the Moon. Well, they got there, and took a spin or two around it, and then came home. They didn’t land, but that’s ok. (Gravity wells are a bitch.) We didn’t appreciate at the time what a feat it was, and would not in fact understand the bittersweet truth for many years thereafter: We had a window; it opened, and it closed. It may not open again—but while it was open, we took it.

Nonetheless, that was a Christmas unlike any other. For years afterward I had a poster with the Earth rising over a gray Moon and the inscription: “In the Beginning, God…” It was part of the Christmas Eve reading by Borman, Lovell, and Anders as they circled the Moon, which brought tears to countless eyes (including my own) and continued the movement of my idea of God into the cosmic, far beyond the cartoonish oversimplifications that were taught in Catholic grade school, things that, sadly, still define Christianity in most of the world. God and the universe are far larger and more complex (and wonderful) than we can possibly imagine, but I gave it a good shot, and forty years on I am a different man for it. I require broader perspectives in myself than I otherwise might have been content with, and (more significantly) I challenge all conventional wisdom. That was my biggest Christmas present in 1968.

Carol and I will rejoin her family later today in Crystal Lake (along with Bill and Gretchen and the girls) to have Christmas yet again. (Why do something that good only once?) I leave you for the moment with the conclusion of Apollo 8’s Christmas message:

“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”

Sliding Into Christmas

Dec 24th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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I’m not even sure I’ve mentioned that Carol and I are in Chicago for Christmas, though it’s a shorter trip than most and (as always) nothing has happened quite as quickly nor as well as we had hoped. This is worse weather than I’ve seen on a trip here in years: bitter cold followed by three days of more or less continuous precipitation. (As I was saying while shopping the last few days to anyone who would listen: “So much for global warming.” Let’s see if we can make it a meme, or at least a contrarian tagline.)

Yesterday was unusually bad here in Des Plaines. Our condo is only a few minutes from Randhurst Mall, the oldest enclosed mall in the Chicago area and at one point in the mid-60s the second-largest enclosed retail space in the country. So I decided to head up there, hit Borders on the outskirts, and then prowl the mall for some last minute gift ideas in the smaller shops. It took me half an hour to get there in our rented Camry, slipping and sliding down Rand Road at ten to fifteen miles an hour, dodging whackos in their CJs who didn’t seem to grok important things like the reduced coefficient of friction. And when I got there, egad: They had closed the mall three months ago. (One downside to being an out-of-towner is being out of the loop. Hey, you coulda told me about that! This is my hometown! That was my mall! Most of my underwear came from Randhurst when I was a teenager!) When the snow melts (if it ever does) they’re going to tear the mall down and build a “lifestyle center,” which is code these days for “more damfool condos.”

Well, they’re certainly going to tear it down. Whether the condos actually happen or not, we’ll see. In any event, some of the outlying big-box stores were open, and I picked up some odds and ends at Borders and Bed, Bath, & Beyond. Spotted a book I had heard about and meant to grab for some time: Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, (reviewed briefly here) which is a polemical history of the battle over whether fat or carbs make you overweight. You’ve all heard my opinions on that, and with some luck Taubes will have organized the research into a form that I can digest and cite to the carbohydrate deniers when they dive down my throat for eating bacon and eggs regularly and yet having the temerity to weigh less now than I have in 20 years.

I barely got home intact after threading the ice ballet back along Rand Road, and (having nabbed a reasonable night’s sleep) will shortly be headed off to Crystal Lake (a 35-mile slither out Highway 14) to pick up Carol, visit her mom, and then mid-afternoon head back down to Des Plaines for our Polish Vigilia supper at Gretchen’s. Vigilia is Polish for “vigil,” and it’s a Polish custom we observed on Christmas Eve when Gretchen and I were kids. In short, the family gathers for simple foods from the old country (ok, augmented by some odd Americanisms like Hawaiian salad) sweet red wine (the first Gretchen and I had ever had) and a blessing ritual I didn’t appreciate until I was much older: Breaking oplatki (a thin white wafer like Roman Catholic communion hosts) with one another and offering a blessing and a wish for the coming year.

Do read what I wrote back in 2001 about Vigilia and oplatki. It’s as true now as then, especially with our nephews grown men with ladyloves of their own, and Gretchen’s girls becoming interesting individuals in their own right-and at top volume. After a run of years when it seemed like every Christmas there were fewer hands across the table to offer oplatki, life is reasserting itself, and reminding us that renewal happens. Bidden or unbidden, recognized or unrecognized, God is with us, and (as slippery as things get at times) life is good.

Scanning Some Personal History

Dec 12th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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We live in a wildfire zone, and there’s not much to be done but make it easy to run if we have to. That leaves everything we have to go up in smoke, and while most of it is replaceable, a good deal isn’t. The worst of it is our photo album set and our boxes full of loose photos and slides. I’ve been scanning them as I can, but it’s a slow business and may not be done for a long time.

It has been a good opportunity to look critically at the photos as they come to hand one-by-one, and decide which are worth keeping come hell or high water (or a wall of fire) and which are not. People rarely throw away the bad ones, even when they’re out of focus or virtually identical to three or four others on the roll. I’m so used to nuking lousy digital camera shots that I was surprised that so many bad slides remained in the boxes, including a few that were so out of focus or exposure that it was difficult to tell precisely what they were. I guess I figured that they were paid for and therefore could not be wasted, like the last few ounces of a huge pile of heavily spiced pasta that you can’t bring yourself to eat but can’t bear to put down the disposal.

In going through a box of slides, I realized that I was only scanning about a third of them. The rest were bracketed attempts at excellence that missed the mark or just plain booboos. (Having a small light table to preview the slides certainly helped.) I had to smile when I realized that I only keep about a third of my digital camera photos too, depending on what they are. I do better at things that sit stock still than I do at QBit and Aero tearing around the house or trying to do tricks.

So in fits and starts, Carol and I are preserving an era of our history together that isn’t in the photo albums, because (for the first three or four years) we took slides almost exclusively. It’s startling to see myself as an adult with hair, given that it’s now a small and shrinking percentage of my life, basically, 1970-1985. (The photo here is from the backyard of our first house in Chicago, the summer of 1978.)

Sunrise Surreality

Dec 12th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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When the sun comes up, the eastern horizon is sometimes clear while the rest of the sky is overcast. This can make for some interesting color effects, especially on the tall pines immediately across the street from us. The photo here was snapped perhaps five minutes after the sun broke an unusually clear horizon.

The Future of Contra

Dec 1st, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Earlier this afternoon, I finally did something I’d been meaning to do for literally years: Configure a dedicated domain for ContraPositive Diary. It’s done, and I’ve pointed contrapositivediary.com to the WordPress instance I created back in September on Fused Network. I’m still learning it, testing it and interviewing widgets and plug-ins, so although the domain and the blog are now live, there’s still not much to see.

That will change on January 1. On that day I will stop editing Contra entries by hand (as I’ve done since 1998) and begin using WordPress. Entries from 1998-2008 will remain pure HTML and be accessible as such. I’m going to copy them from duntemann.com over to contrapositivediary.com, but the copies on duntemann.com will remain there until I kill the Sectorlink hosting account and move the domain over to Fused Network. I intend to keep my LiveJournal account, and use the LJXP crossposter plug-in to automatically cross-post anything I post on WordPress to LJ.

There’s a lot of other stuff on duntemann.com that has to go somewhere. The duntemann.com domain is begging for a new index page anyway, and I’m working on how to organize it. I do know that my Maker material on electronics, telescopes, and kites will all be rewritten using CSS and placed under my junkbox.com index. I intend to install a new instance of the Gallery photo manager there, and move the Tech Projects portion of gallery.duntemann.com over to gallery.junkbox.com. Beyond that, well, I won’t know until next year.

Some conceptual issues remain undecided; e.g., should I continue to group short link citations into larger Odd Lots entries, or just post them as I find them as individual entries? The way I do it now is an artifact of how I create Contra entries generally: I keep a text file in a window and add short items to it until I decide it’s time to format them and post them as a group. That becomes unnecessary with WordPress, and I can streamline the whole process by just popping up Semagic (or something like it) and posting them Right Now instead of storing them locally until I have time to format them for uploading.

WordPress itself is an amazing thing. I’m still trying to figure out what all it can do, either by itself or with the jungle of plug-ins you can find for it. What I know it can do is save me time, which seems to be in shorter supply every year, and that, ultimately, is what the whole exercise is about.

A Conjunction, If You Can See It

Nov 30th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Carol rode a Canadair regional jet home yesterday, and I am mysteriously a much happier man. (We have not been apart for this long in one chunk since she was in grad school in Minnesota in 1976.) I have not in consequence been much inclined to write on Contra today, but I must mention something that will be worth looking for: A three-way conjunction of Venus, Jupiter, and the crescent Moon that will be potentially visible today and especially tomorrow. See it if you can, in the west just after sunset. Spaceweather has some details. I would have looked tonight but it's sleeting here in Colorado Springs, and I got word from Gretchen that there is considerable sympathy sleet in Chicago this evening as well. But if it's clear where you are tonight or tomorrow (or the day after, for that matter) don't miss it.

For This Beautiful and Extravagant Creation

Nov 27th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Thanksgiving Day. Giving thanks is a special case of living mindfully, which is always a good idea, whether or not there's an open manhole a few steps ahead. The older I get, the more mindfully (and thankfully) I try to live, not only because I've discovered so many fascinating things to be mindul of (and thankful for) but also because I don't have an unlimited number of years yet to be mindful.

It is a very good time to be mindful. When I was young I knew what a “water bear” was from crude little drawings in a library book, but now I can see them with electron-microscopic clarity, and understand that surviving from the Cambrian era, well, damn, that can't have been easy. (It's easier to grasp a billion years when you're fifty-six than when you're seven.) And I always thought that barred spiral galaxies were the coolest kinds, but it wasn't until the past few years that the Hubble Space Telescope could show them in a glory that still makes me gasp. There may be better times to live in the future (and I have strong faith that there will be) but there have never been better ones in the past.

This year's Thanksgiving Day is a little more poignant than most. Carol and I have been apart for a month now, and there's nothing to make you feel thankful for something like losing it, even for a little while. (She'll be coming home soon, soon enough that I've begun washing towels, rugs, and the big comforter on our bed. Living with multiple dogs is a grubby business.) And, as I've related privately to some of my online friends, this has been a weirdly grim six weeks in and around my inner circle. The number of deaths, major surgeries, and life-threatening diagnoses among people I care about spiked a couple of weeks ago, and it wasn't just deaths among the old, but among young people in their 30s and 40s with small children at home. Tragedy clusters sometimes. Be thankful in the calm between storms.

I am. For Carol, of course, more than anything else on Earth. For small things (like water bears, galvanized iron pipe fittings and Compactron tubes) and big things (barred spiral galaxies, comets, icebergs) and things distant in time more than space. (Origen, Lady Julian of Norwich, Roger Bacon, the Colossus of Rhodes, glyptodonts.) I am very thankful for my parents, who suffered too much and died too young but never failed me in any way even if they imperfectly understood me, and for people like Aunt Kathleen and Uncle Louie, who seemed to like me more than I sometimes deserved. I am very thankful for my sister Gretchen, she of wry humor and skilled hands, and my cousin Rose, who walked between the railroad tracks with me because that was just how life worked in 1957. I am thankful that my brother-in-law Bill happened to Gretchen when she most needed him, and for the girls they have brought into the world (better late than never!) who are growing up fast and may well live into the 22nd century. I'm thankful for Carol's sister, her mom (and her dad, whom we all miss keenly) and our nephews Matt and Brian, both now men in their own right. Close family ends there, but moving outward the lotus opens up quickly, with cousins and friends and mentors and other people who have changed my life without intending to, nor fully grasping the impact of their kindness and counsel.

I have a private prayer that I say every night, in my last moments of mindfulness before turning out the light, telling Carol that I love her most of all, and stilling the racket in the back of my head:

Lord God, I thank you for letting me live in this time, in this place, in these circumstances, among these good people, and within this beautiful and extravagant creation!

For so it is, and so I do.

In case anyone is wondering, I won't be by myself all day. I'll be having dinner with some folks from the local Bichon Frise club, people who truly have bichons like some people have mice. I'll be able to wrestle with a huge bichon named Jackie Gleason (all 26 pounds of him!) and perhaps get a look at our host's Mog collection. I'm counting the days until Carol comes home, but in the meantime, I'm mindful of the fact that life could be a whole lot worse!

Going Into Eclipse

Nov 22nd, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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As I mentioned yesterday, my publisher wants me to revise Assembly Language Step By Step over the coming year, for release in early 2010. I had assumed for some time that they considered the book a dead issue, though judging by my royalty statements, it continues to sell. And that's a clue: When the market is bad, publishers get nervous about striking out in entirely new directions with new series and lots of new titles. A handful of books are what they call “evergreens,” because they sell all year, every year, for years and years and years. I think that a lot of evergreen titles are going to be freshened up and reissued in the next few years. The publisher considers my book an evergreen (it was first published, after all, in 1989, and has sold steadily ever since) and the acquisitions editor had done her homework. She wanted DOS to go. She wanted to ditch the CD bound into the book. She wanted more Linux coverage. And if possible, she wanted me to use Ubuntu as the flavor of Linux cited in the book.

I'm cool with all that. I had decided years ago that DOS would be missing from any future editions. I had assumed that I would include coverage of 32-bit Windows console apps, but I'm not welded to that notion, nor to any particular Linux distro. The book is not about Windows, nor about Linux. It needs an OS over which to run the example programs, but which OS is mostly immaterial, so long as it supports the Intel 32-bit flat model. The book is a “front door” introduction to what computers actually are, and how Intel-based machines function under the hood. It's about that waydeepdown place where the software meets the hardware. It is not about how to make API calls nor how to coordinate all the folderol that happens inside large-scale apps.

A lot of people misunderstand the book, and I get gripes all the time about how it “doesn't go far enough” and “doesn't teach the principles of software development.” That's not what it's for, and I don't have the page budget to write enough book to satisfy all my gripers. The format has worked across twenty years and three editions, and I'm sticking with it.

There's still a lot of work to do. Much of the coverage depends on DOS, DOS calls through INT21, and BIOS calls through INT13. All that has to go. I need to explain how the software interrupt mechanism itself works, and for that I'm going to defy the Unix Gods and explain how to use the Linux INT80 call gate. This is heresy, but the mantra that “INT80 calling conventions can change at any time” isn't sufficient reason to keep the secret. I've asked several people to show me an example—even a single example!—of when a Linux INT80 kernel call changed, but so far I've seen nothing. And even if some of the more arcane kernel calls are still evolving, I doubt that the very simple calls have changed at all in many years. Proper warning will be given, but I don't bow before that particular altar anymore.

Alas, if DOS goes, Rob Anderton's excellent NASMIDE programming environment has to go as well, and something else will need to be found to help people load, assemble, link, and run the examples. I've got John E. Davis' text-mode JED editor installed, and in a pinch it will do, but the holy grail for me would be running NASM under Eclipse. Eclipse is a sort of Erector set (ok, a Lego set) for creating platform-independent IDEs in Java. Almost everything beyond the very basics is a plug-in. You can get plug-ins for most modern languages and toolsets, and Eclipse can run anywhere that Java runs. (Of course, your tools must either be in Java or available on the host hardware.) Eclipse itself and nearly all available plug-ins are free and open-source. I've already got it running here on both XP and Ubuntu. All I need is a NASM-oriented assembly language plug-in.

The infuriating thing is that such a plug-in exists, but it comes with no installation documentation, and it does not install the way all other Eclipse plug-ins I've seen install. Eclipse has a clever system in which plug-ins are posted on the Web using a standard format, so that the Eclipse environment can fetch them down and install them automatically, given a URL. I've downloaded the plug-in file and have tried just about everything to get Eclipse to suck it in or even see it. So far, no luck. If you've ever gotten it to install and work, boy, I'd sure love to learn the secret.

I have to scope out some new example programs, write them, and then describe them, and make sure that DOS and segmented Real Mode retreat into a few pages of historical context. It's months of work, even if it becomes my major project (which it will) and knocks most of my lesser projects back into the closet (which it might.) I'm slurping at the firehose right now regarding Eclipse, and have a couple of books on order. It's going to be a long climb, but I've made such climbs before, and they're always good mental exercise. It'll give this book (which I considered a throwaway back in 1989!) another eight or ten years of life. The publisher has always treated me well, and the book paid off my mortgage. What's not to love?

It's All for the Best

Nov 5th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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There's an odd human tendency to expect the worst in the absense of sufficient data. One of my readers wrote to me in a panic regarding my sadness of yesterday, saying: “Tell me you're not separating from Carol!”

People, get a grip. Carol's mom had a medical emergency and Carol is in Chicago looking after her. Our relationship has never been stronger. Carol's mom means a lot to me. I was still getting over the last vestiges of a very bad cold. I'm having my jawbone drilled for a dental implant tomorrow morning at 8 ayem sharp. My dinner exploded. You'd probably be a little down too.

As for dinner: I was being a bachelor, and I emptied a can of Bumble Bee canned salmon into a Corelle bowl to heat it up. I grill fresh salmon a lot, and I have reheated the leftovers in the microwave many times. Alas, canned salmon is packed in brine. Brine is a good conductor, and brine and microwaves have fun together. As best I can tell, a brine pocket somewhere inside that pinkish lump boiled and blew off the microwave lid and itself out of the bowl and all over the inside of the oven. I salvaged enough for dinner and for today's lunch, but that left me wiping out the oven for most of half an hour last night. I'm annoyed because it was a science experiment, and I'm supposed to understand a thing or two about microwave physics.

And my dogs. Well. QBit and Aero were playing tag all over the upper level right before dinner. They chase one another around at flank speed, leaning into the turns, yapping and growling and evidently having a fine time. I had gone to the powder room down the hall to get rid of some well-used diet root beer, and while the process was underway, the two of them barrelled unexpectedly into the room. QBit ran behind me and dove under the toilet tank. Aero, in hot pursuit, hopped up on his hind legs and put his front legs on the rim of the bowl. I half expected him to attempt a leap over the bowl on top of QBit, and tried to dodge. The rest I leave to your imagination. And now, whether I'm home alone or not, I close the door.

As for the election, I don't have much to say. It turned out almost exactly as I had expected, and I don't see any serious damage. Hey, we survived Bill Clinton. We survived GW Bush. Hell, we survived Herbert Hoover and Woodrow Wilson, compared to whom even GW is Gabriel the Archangel. We will survive Obama, to whom I wish all the best, and to whom (if they existed) I would send a case of Tut-B-Gone mummy foggers to deal with the lobbyists now lining up outside his door. Our problem is not now and will not be Obama. The problem is the parasites that gather about high office.

As for my Outrageous Proposition (see my entry for October 30, 2008) I think it went pretty well. Thanks to all who followed the rules and shared their thoughts, and I apologize for not participating more vigorously myself. Headcolds don't schedule their appearances in advance, and this one really took it out of me. But I encourage everybody to go back and read the comments. Aren't those better than raging rants? Isn't life just, well, better without anger?

I will be drugged tomorrow and may not post. After that, the cone of silence once more descends over politics. Like canned salmon, a little goes a long way. (Especially when you heat it up too much!)