Daybook

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

Junkbox Telescope Gallery

Some years back I posted Jeff Duntemann's Homebrew Radio Gallery, and for reasons unclear it's become one of the most popular pages on my site. (Tube construction may not be quite dead…) So a while back I wrote up and (almost) finished a page about all the various telescopes I've built out of junk since 1966. Longtime Contra readers have seen some of the photos, but a few are new scans of prints I've had in a box for decades.

Jeff Duntemann's Junkbox Telescope Gallery sat unfinished on a thumb drive for some months, until I finally bore down and finished it a few days ago. It's not a how-to; there has never been and will probably never be a better junkbox telescope how-to than Sam Brown's classic All About Telescopes, which is in turn a compendium of shorter booklets that Brown published through Edmund Scientific in the early-mid 1960s. $14.95 is cheap for a book like this. If you ever have the least inclination to put together a scope from scratch, buy Brown's book first.

The page is mostly a photo collection, with some odd notes on how I did what I did. Note well that you don't have to grind and polish your own mirror as I did. Ready-made 8″ primary mirrors can be had for $300 or sometimes less, and the rest of the scope can be, well, junk. Also note that I think Dobsonian mounts are silly: With a 2″ 45° street elbow you can have something approaching an equatorial mount if you live in the US.

Building scopes like this is mostly a lost art, and there are definitely advantages to scraping up the cash for a Meade or a Celestron. (Tapping in “M31” on a keypad is less messy than lying on your back in a cowfield and sighting the nearly invisible object along the edge of the tube.) But it's a good kid project, because when you're done you—and any involved kids— will know exactly how it works, and that's worth something all by itself.

Open That Bottle Night

Feb 24th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Last night was Open That Bottle Night, the annual event that Wall Street Journal wine columnists John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter created almost by accident a few years ago. The idea is for people who have been saving a bottle of wine with emotional or historical connections to their lives to stop hoarding it, just open it, and enjoy it. It was a golden opportunity for us to pull out the dusty bottle of the Schlossadler Gau-Odernheimer Petersberg Dornfelder Rotwein 1994 that we had originally intended to open on our 25th wedding anniversary in 2001. The bottle has a peculiarly effective sort of self-preservation instinct: We forgot and left it behind in Phoenix when we drove to Chicago to celebrate our 25th in 2001. (9-11 was only a week before we left, and other things than wine were on our minds.) We then figured we'd open it on the 35th anniversary of our meeting one another in July 2004, but again we were in Chicago. The following year we figured we'd open it on July 31, for the 36th anniversary of our meeting, but were famously foiled by my flop into a patch of poison ivy. We then figured we'd open it for our 30th wedding anniversary in 2006, but by that time the bottle had gotten so far back in our memories that we clean fergot.

That bottle was a survivor, heh.

So a couple of weeks ago, while reading John and Dorothy's column in the WSJ, Carol looked up from the paper and said, “We have to open That Bottle on February 23.” This time for sure, Rocky!

And so we did. David and Terry Beers were here for dinner, and we cobbled together a Polish feast, with some kielbasa, honey millet bread, and cheese pirogi. Although I was concerned that the wine might not have survived (like all dornfelders it's fairly light, with only 9.5% alcohol) 14 years isn't all that long a time, and just as several people reassured us, the wine was unbowed.

What I did find remarkable was how indistinctly I recalled it. (We had bought half a case in October 1996, for our 20th, and I would think it would have remained clearer in my mind.) Dornfelders are almost invariably off-dry to semi-sweet, and this one is about as sweet as any dornfelder I've ever had. I remember it being a little drier, perhaps because I've had numerous drier dornfelders since then. The fruit was explosive, with some of the most intense black-currant flavor I ever recall in a wine of any stripe. It went well with the kielbasa, and the four of us had a wonderful evening talking about life, relationships, dogs, writing, ebooks, and ultra-mobile PCs. (It's that kind of crowd.) I don't recommend dornfelders to everyone—sweet reds bother a lot of people—but this one was a keeper, and if you have an open mind, sniff around the odd corners of your larger wine shops and try one.

Alas, we have no bottles of anything even remotely that old, and certainly nothing with that memorable a run of brushes with consumption. So next February we may just go eenie-meenie-mynie-moe and pull something from the rack. The wine is the thing, sure, but more than that, it's about friendship and having history together. This July, Carol and I will have known one another for 39 years, and we're pondering a whomper party somewhere in summer 2009. I guess it's time to shop for That Special Bottle so we'll have something to pass around in celebration of friendship, ours and that of all the many people we value in this beautiful and extravagant world.

Carl & Jerry Volume 5 Is Out!

Feb 7th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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This one took a lot longer than I had hoped—and certainly longer than the seething two weeks I spent on Volume 4—but the fifth and final volume of Carl & Jerry: Their Complete Adventures is now complete, uploaded, and available on Lulu.com. This has been my major spare-time project for well over a year, and I scratched my head now and then as to why it was taking so much time and energy. Well, here's why: It required 989 pages in five separate books to print the 263,232 words and 311 illustrations in the 119 stories. That's a lot of stuff. I mean, a lot.

But it's done. I'm extremely happy with the way it all turned out, and the fan mail has been very encouraging. The only complaint I've seen is one chap moaning that, “You mean, there's only 119 stories?” Yup. I wish there were more too; Carl & Jerry are sui generis. The only thing even remotely similar is Bertrand Brimley's Mad Scientists Club, all books of which (fortunately) are still in print, in nice new editions with all the original Charles Geer pencil sketches and watercolors. Somewhere further on the fringes are Tom Swift, Jr and the Danny Dunn books, but the fact remains that Carl & Jerry were talking about real technology, not Repelatrons and antigravity paint. Read the stories and you will learn a few things, albeit things that were first-run between 1954 and 1964.

I added a few things to Volume 5. One is a schematic published a few months after the story of Carl & Jerry's primordial beambot, “The Lightning Bug,” from a Popular Electronics reader who built his own Lightning Bug. That's one of my top 5 all-time favorite Carl & Jerry yarns, and I've posted a free PDF containing it. It's unusual in that if you want to build your own, the circuit is right there and ready to go.

One thing that added some time to the task was a topic index that ran to 19 pages. People have written me to ask, “What was the Carl & Jerry story where the crook was getting away in an iceboat?” All they remembered was the iceboat. That's just the way human memory works; quirky is too kind a word for it. So I went through all 119 stories and built an alphabetical topic index, including any memory tag I could think of for each story. If you want to look up all the stories about Carl's dog Bosco, it's there. If you want to know which story saw the boys build a proton precession magnetometer, it's there. Skunks figured significantly in two stories, so flip to “Skunk” and there they are. Ditto Norma, Mr. Gruber, radio-controlled models, sonar, fishing, smoke signals, Morse code, car thieves, and on and on. Dare you not to find a story you remember there.

Finally, I added two new stories, written today in 2008 and not forty-five years ago. One is by George Ewing WA8WTE, who actually built the gadget in the story he wrote, way long ago at Michigan Tech, about the same time that Carl & Jerry were at fictional Parvoo University. It's basically about building a seismometer from a broken pinball machine, and it's beautifully done. The other story is my own, and I borrowed a gimmick from Arthur C. Clarke as way to explain how reflecting telescopes work. Both are tall tales, but that's what John T. Frye was offering back in the 60s, and both stories are authentically tall, done very much in Frye's own style.

And so it's done. Here's the link to my Lulu storefront where all five books may be purchased. Many thanks to Michael Covington, for putting the bug in my ear back in August 2006, and to Pete Albrecht, who taught me how to un-halftone the illos. (He also did quite a few of them for me.) Also, thanks to Doug Faunt N6TQS who sent me the last few issues that I didn't have and somehow just couldn't nail on eBay.

And now it's on to other things. Writing, of course, and putting together the two collections of my short SF that I've been promising for years. And FreePascal from Square One. Plenty to do here; all I need now is the time to do it.

Puppies, Not Pigskins

Feb 3rd, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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I dislike sports generally, though I watch baseball on occasion in honor of my Cubs fan father. Football always seemed ridiculous to me somehow and hockey—well, it's the spawn of the devil. So we're not watching the Super Bowl today. (We have gone to Super Bowl parties on occasion for the sake of the company, and we stop to watch only when the commercials come on.) We have the Puppy Bowl on right now, and George Ewing tells me that WE has a Cutest Puppy Pageant scheduled as well, but as we don't get WE here it's hard to tell.

This is the fourth year that Animal Planet has done the Puppy Bowl, and acccording to Wikipedia it consistently has the highest ratings of anything programmed opposite the Super Bowl. I consider it a work of utter brilliance: For several hours, a rotation of five or six puppies (out of a total “slate” of about twenty) just mix it up in a little set painted to look like a football stadium. They wrestle, haul toys around, and slop in their water bowl. Every so often one of them takes a crap, after which a human extra in a referee's outfit steps in to clean it up.

We left the Puppy Bowl on for QBit while Carol and I took Aero and went over to visit Jimi Henton—on roads that were basically empty. Jimi is the bichon groomer and breeder from whom we purchased Aero. Aero enjoys some Puppy Bowl action with Jimi's several bichons, most of them his close relatives. (QBit is unrelated and doesn't enjoy them as much.) We enjoy them too; I could never have that many dogs, but every now and then it's fun having a pile of four or five bichons on your lap.

Jimi has only one puppy at the moment, who arrived as a litter of one the day after Christmas. We snapped some shots this afternoon, and that's him up above. He's five and a half weeks old, and completely beautiful. His nose is darkening up nicely (bichon noses are pink at birth but become totally black after a few months) and he's not as manic as a lot of puppies his age are. He's destined to be a good size for a bichon, simply because he got all the nutrition while gestating, but he also looks to be show quality and a real heart-stealer. Jimi will be selling him once he's eight weeks old, so if you're looking for a great bichon puppy—and especially if you want to show him—contact Jimi at her Web site.

Right now I'm going back to the kitchen to put some supper together while watching the Puppy Bowl. Football? What's that again? Oh, right. Pass.

Banging Our Shins

Feb 2nd, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Groundhog Day. Snowing like hell here, and not only didn't our groundhog see his shadow, he couldn't even get out of his burrow. Nor did we get out of ours: Carol and I slept in and spent part of the afternoon watching…Groundhog Day.

I was going to write a longish essay on what may be the finest film of the past fifty years, but I realized that someone else had already written it. Basically, What He Said.

To be human is to learn better, no matter how much it hurts. Some catch on faster than others, and while it's clear that a lot of people die before they learn much of anything at all, I'm not going to be so arrogant as to claim confident knowledge that death is the end of all learning. Maybe we're only beginning. Of course it's better to learn sooner than later—but if the alternative is to keep banging our shins on things without end, I'm guessing that even the worst of us will eventually figure it out.

That's the message of Groundhog Day: You repeat Sixth Grade until you learn the lessons. Then it's on to Seventh Grade. (I'm good with that. You can have Eternal Rest. Give me Eternal Challenge!)

My 2008 Publishing Plan File

Jan 24th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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This oral surgery business has set me back on a number of projects (no, scratch that; all of them!) but things get a little better every day and I'm hard at work again on several fronts. The fifth and final volume of Carl and Jerry is getting close to finished. I'm now doing the topic index, which is an interesting concept. I regularly get messages from guys who ask me, “Hey, Jeff, what was the Carl and Jerry story where they set up a talking skull for a haunted house?” That's all they remember: The talking skull. So there will be an index entry like the following:

Skull
November 1959: V11 #5 Book 3 p.81 “The Ghost Talks”
On Halloween, Selsyn motors and a glowing skull haunt a house for Norma's sorority.

The topic index will have entries like Iceboat, Dogs, Kidnapers, Bootleggers, Capacity-operated relays, RC models, Telemetry, Tesla coil, Norma, Mr. Gruber, Theremin, Ultrasonics, and so on. I already have a complete chronological index on the Web here, but I wanted to make the search possible by topic, and if all you remember is that the boys were fooling with a police speed radar unit, you can look up Radar and see both stories (there were two) in which police speed radar figures significantly. After the index is done, I have two “new” Carl and Jerry stories to typeset and then it should be finished. I'm hoping to have it available by February 10.

With Carl and Jerry in the can, my next major push will be to get two anthologies of my own SF out there on Lulu and as ebooks. The two volumes will be:

Souls in Silicon, including all my SF featuring any sort of artificial intelligence, plus a significant excerpt from The Cunning Blood; and
Firejammer!, which will contain all the rest of my published SF plus the title novella, which has never seen print and, given its 27,000-word length, is unlikely to in traditional markets.

Unlike my earlier Lulu publications, these two will get ISBNs and be available on Amazon. I also intend to make them available on the Kindle. Most of the material has already been typeset, and a lot of the remaining effort will go into things like finding art for the covers. I'm hoping to get these both out by midyear; Souls in Silicon may happen sooner.

In loose moments I've been recasting the 1993 print edition of Borland Pascal from Square One for FreePascal, and will release an initial volume as a free ebook sometime in late summer. As FreePascal was designed to be compatible with Borland Pascal 7, this should work. The ebook will be free, but I will offer an inexpensive printed edition with a color cover on Lulu. The first volume will cover the basic concepts of programming, installation of FreePascal on several platforms, the use of the console window IDE, and the core Pascal language. Much of the book is now obsolete, and it doesn't really cover OOP beyond the basic idea, so if additional volumes happen they'll take a fair bit of work and won't be out until 2009. I'm also considering adapting my portions of The Delphi 2 Programming Explorer for Lazarus, but that won't likely be this year either.

Toward the end of the year I may release a third Old Catholic history title, which will be a compendium of several shorter items from journals published between 1875 and 1900.

Note well that this is a publishing plan file; I still intend to do a fair bit of writing and will continue to shop my material to traditional markets. I hope to finish Old Catholics and make some headway on The Molten Flesh—and if I can't get traction there, I will go back to Ten Gentle Opportunities. Shorter items may pop up at any time; writing is a messy business. But you knew that. I hope.

Fuse Fuse Revolution

Jan 22nd, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Yee-hah! The drugs are gone and I got my monsters back! Ok, last night's monster was nothing special, but at least I'm no longer dreaming of repairing Xerox machines for Hilary Clinton. And the monster is probably the least interesting aspect of last night's major dream.

But it was still a monster, and that counts for something. I dreamed that Carol and I were vacationing somewhere in England. In a small hillside village we were browsing in shops and in a sort of street market, and that's where we first saw the monster: It was a big, totally hairy 9-foot tall Sasquatch-ish thingie. It wasn't doing anything special; in fact, it was browsing the market stalls and stepping into shops just like we were. (In the morning it occurred to me that the poor thing was probably vacationing from western Oregon, where so many tinfoil-hat types are searching for it that it must lead a pretty stressful life.) We later saw it again while touring some old castle.

Now, I have a protocol for dealing with dream monsters that has worked well for me these past 55 years:

Don't get too close;
Don't make eye contact;
Don't engage them in conversation.

(I use this same protocol in the real world for beggars, religious fanatics, and women leaning against buildings.) Every time I saw the monster, I quietly started herding Carol in the opposite direction, and once again, it worked.

But toward the end of the dream, I saw something remarkable: A video game vaguely similar to Dance Dance Revolution. It consisted of a typical game console, plus a low square platform with nine cells that you step on. When the game begins, the platform lights up in dull red, and the nine cells display callouts for common nuclei. The object of the game is to put one foot on each of two nuclei that can fuse. For example, if one cell says 7Li and the another 1H (Physics types will know what I'm talking about) you step on both and the game console totes up the energy you've generated, with a display on the console in MeV. Each time you successfully fuse two nuclei, the pressure value goes up and the platform's backlight slides up the spectrum a little from red toward violet. As the pressure goes up, more exotic fusion reactions become possible, and if you know your nuclear physics you can rack up quite a score. The machine we saw was in a pub, and a young business-suited British gentleman was playing with a pint in his hand.

Damn, I remember thinking, he must know his carbon-nitrogen cycle cold.

Anyway, I have no idea whether this makes sense as a game, since I don't play games other than some Snood and an occasional round of Mah Jongg. But it was the coolest thing I've seen in a dream in quite some time, certainly since before I had my gums worked on a week ago Monday. Nor am I sure there are enough possible fusion reactions to make such a game interesting, though in the heart of a supernova (once you goose the platform into the purple zone) who knows what's possible and what isn't?

Some part of me is obviously ready to write some SF again. I gotta get busy.

Dreams of a Gum Surgery Fiend

Jan 18th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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This is getting old. No, scratch that—it was old before it started. It is now real old. This morning, while I was still blearily sipping coffee and waiting for the microwave to cook my oatmeal, Carol looked at me across the table and said, “You're turning black and blue.” And it was true: The damage I had previously been able to conceal by just keeping my mouth shut is now leaking through my cheeks somehow, and I have blotches. Not many, not big, but sheesh, this was gum surgery. I didn't have a limb stitched back on. I didn't have my gallbladder removed. I wasn't in a brawl.

Carol, at least, tells me that the swelling isn't any worse than it was yesterday. Yay wow halluluia. It is, however, increasingly asymmetrical, as the left side appears to be going down a little faster than the right—or maybe the right side is still swelling and the left side finally stopped. The pain drugs keep me a safe distance from suicidal, but there are…side effects.

My dreams are changing. They are moving from otherworldly to thisworldly, and I'm not sure that's entirely a good thing. I've had my very personally specific brand of dreams for 55 years, and a guy should go with what works. Magnetic monsters that rise from my tool cabinet and look like walking globs of stuck-together screwdrivers and ratchet sets, well, fine. I can deal with tools. Rotating horned skyscrapers, sure. I used to live in Chicago and I like innovative architecture. Freeze-dried dinosaurs stacked up like cordwood out on the parkway, no sweat. I have a fireplace. Talking doughnuts—hey, I knew guys in college who not only talked to their doughnuts but argued with them. If that sounds weird to you, well, you don't remember the 70s.

I wish I was artist enough to do CGI. I would show you some things, man…

But no. Last night I woke up at 5 ayem from a new kind of dream. I am not making this up; you can ask Carol yourself. There was nothing freaky in the dream at all. There was nothing in the dream that does not already exist in this world, and that's a first for me. It was disturbing in the extreme: I was wandering around Hilary Clinton's red-brick condo in Park Ridge (outside of Chicago, where she grew up and near where I grew up) looking at her record collection while Hilary was talking strategy with two of the senior guys from her campaign team. She had a lot of Steely Dan. Ms. Clinton was charming, pleasant, and every so often came over to me to see if I wanted more nachos or another soda. I looked at my watch and remembered that I had volunteered to give them all a lift downtown in a few minutes, and decided I didn't want any more Diet Mountain Dew.

She was good with that. So I took my toolbag and went out to look for my car. It was gone. I had parked it in a no-parking zone, and the old guy on the second floor leaned out the window and told me he had reported me and they towed it. Dayam.

The nachos had nothing to say. There were no talking doughnuts. Where were the weird creatures? The space habitats? The mutant Frank Lloyd Wright bungalows floating on antigravity cushions? The fiendish intelligences breaking through from the eleventh dimension to steal our souls? No. Nothing at all. I dug for my car keys and pulled a spool of corotron wire out of my pocket, and woke up in a cold sweat.

Last night I dreamed I was Hilary Clinton's copier repairman. You couldn't beat that for weirdness by tossing in a Maidenform bra. I want off these drugs. Dear Lord, please let it be soon. Please.

And On the Third Day, He…Ached

Jan 17th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Figgered I'd surface for a few words; I'm between pain pills and can think a little bit. However, my face is badly swollen and I've lost three pounds in as many days, largely because eating requires the detailed use of your mouth.

Before the surgery, the medical office handed me pages of fine print about the procedure and its aftermath, which I skimmed, as it was depressing. However, it was true in an interesting respect: The worst doesn't come until three days after the procedure itself. In truth, I was so sedated that I no longer remember much about being in the chair and getting worked on. And the first and second days weren't too bad. But this morning, mon dieu…

And there it was, in the fine print: Swelling peaks on the third or fourth day post-surgery. Now, I'm no Hugh Grant and don't care that much how I look, short-term. But swelling hurts.

So I'm reading, daydreaming, and lying on my back in bed being bored. I'll report more when I can think clearly enough to report on something.