I worried needlessly. By the time we got on the road at 10 AM, the sun had dried out I-80 completely, and we did the 410 miles to Des Moines without incident, though the temps did not get above 20F. We’re now kicking back and taking it easy; less than 350 miles remain, and at [...]
Posts from ‘February, 2009’
Heat of Fusion
Well, we’re off to Chicago again, driving that familiar I-80 corridor, and yesterday got as far as North Platte, Nebraska. The target was Kearney, or at least Lexington, but winter threw us a curve: As we left Colorado on I-76, the temperature started to drop, and the quick dusting of snow that had passed over [...]
Odd Lots
The dairy that delivered milk to our house when I was a kid was indeed Hawthorn Mellody Farms (as verified by the Sister of Eidetic Recall) which was unusual in several ways: They had an amusement park in Libertyville, Illinois, complete with a miniature train ride, a petting zoo, Western town, and pony rides, that [...]
Dunteman’s Dairy, and Milk Caps in Winter
When I was a pre-teen, we used to get milk delivered to the house every few days. I don’t recall fersure which dairy it was (Hawthorn Mellody Farms?) but the milk was in massive gallon returnable glass bottles with wire carry-handles, and a paper cap was machine-pressed over the lip to seal it. The caps [...]
Odd Lots
I’m 77,241 words into the revision, of which about 25,000 words are new. So I now have a little less than 100,000 words to go, and I’ll have a book. More has to be rewritten than I thought, but mercifully, not all of it. This is going to be almost my sole project for the [...]
Glites, Gliders, and North Pacific Products
When I was a freshman in high school, I remember picking up an odd paper kite at Walgreen’s. It was called a Glite, and was billed as a “gliding kite.” I was intrigued, and as it might have cost as much as 35c, I was willing to try it. The instructions indicated that even on [...]
A Chart, If You Can Read It
The last couple of evenings I’ve been working at fulfilling a promise I reneged on ten years ago. Somewhere in the text of the second edition of Assembly Language Step By Step (which I was writing in the summer of 1999) I promised readers an ASCII chart as one of the appendices. I then plum [...]
Debuggery
In parallel with editing and (increasingly) writing chapters, I’ve been interviewing tools to feature in later parts of the third edition of Assembly Language Step By Step. Kate has the gig for editor, but the debugger slot has been annoyingly open for a long time. Since the beginning of the year I’ve been interviewing debuggers [...]
Looking for Mr. Beefheart
Stop looking, actually. He’s right here. (And that’s Mr., not Captain, thanks.) Carol was at a dog show yesterday and I blasted out 4600 new words on Chapter 6, so it was not an especially romantic day, but that’s OK; we have built romance into the very fabric of our lives together, and in a [...]
KDE Follies
I’ve been busy. And I’ve had headaches. This is mostly why you haven’t heard from me in a few days. I wondered for awhile if I was getting headaches because I was busy, but I’m coming around to a different point of view: I’m having headaches because I’ve been fooling with KDE. I used to [...]