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Something’s Burning…Again

Jun 11th, 2013
by Jeff Duntemann.
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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.

Posted in: Daybook.

Odd Lots

Jun 9th, 2013
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

Posted in: Odd Lots.
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Man, But I Miss Knobs

Jun 7th, 2013
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

avh-x2500bt_hero_large.jpgThe six-disc changer in my 4Runner’s console stereo dropped dead late last summer, after serving me well for eleven years. Considering the mechanical nightmare the damned thing was internally, I’m a little surprised it lasted as long as it did. So for about ten months now, I’ve been reduced to listening to the radio, in a town where radio is not a priority. (Irony, however, is a Colorado Springs delicacy: With just about every other town and county but Denver voting to ban legal marijuana, the home of Focus on the Family looks like it will soon be the highest city in the state.)

I haven’t listened to pop radio in the car for maybe 25 years, since I started recording mix tapes off vinyl. I expected to develop (however unintentionally) an appetite for recent pop music. Hey, it worked with Madonna in 1986. Not this time. I found one band worth investigating further (Owl City) and bought four, count em, four MP3s. A couple of Owl City tracks, Kelly Clarkson’s “Catch My Breath,” and Two Door Cinema Club’s moody song “Sun,” which I bought because it contains the word “drumlins.” Just that, based on ten months of mostly cringing and reaching for the volume knob.

Now I can’t even do that.

After punting for far too long, I went down to Car Toys earlier today and had them install one of these. It had a Bluetooth phone feature I wanted, since I don’t like manhandling a phone in the car. It plays MP3s from a thumb drive, and every MP3 I have that’s worth hearing will fit on a thumb drive. (Not a big one, either.) It looks for all the world like a smartphone held sideways, complete with the little four-square menu button. All it lacks is a volume control knob. It has a mute button, which will come in handy, just like it does when The Weather Channel plays that excruciating commercial about the poor woman who’s been falling on her kitchen floor and failing to get up since before they tore down the Berlin Wall. It has firmware to update, God help us, and…cripes, I wasn’t ready for this…a remote.

At the risk of sounding like an MP3 on autorepeat, well, all it lacks is a volume control knob.

I’ll get used to it. (I got used to Madonna in 1986, after all.) Mostly what I want out of it is hands-free phone calls and MP3 playback. I know why it doesn’t have a knob: Knobs take room on the panel that you could otherwise fill with icons. And a knob would add another 85.67 cents to the UMC. Besides, knobs are just so 1952.

Just like me.

Posted in: Rants.
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Odd Lots

May 30th, 2013
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments

Posted in: Odd Lots.
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Taps

May 27th, 2013
by Jeff Duntemann.
10 comments

FWDuntemannII1942-255 wide.jpgOur house is on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain, and our back deck looks down on Fort Carson. We hear bugle calls at 6:30, noon, and 5:00, accompanied by a cannon. Then every night at 10 PM, taps drifts up the mountain. If I’m still up and around, I go out on the back deck and remember three men. When the echoes die away among the mountain canyons, I salute, and whisper, “Thank you, gentlemen.”

All three served their country in World War II. Only two came back. One gave me life. One gave me his daughter’s hand in marriage. And one…he died for you, me, and everybody else who thinks that freedom matters critically in the history of our world.

SteveOstruska1945-550Wide.jpgFrank W. Duntemann was attached to the AACS (Army Airways Communications System) and served first in Italy and then Africa. He claims that he slept through the bombardment of Monte Cassino, and having seen him sleep through my puppy Smoker’s biting his ear and drawing blood, I can almost believe it. He sent Morse code on a Vibroplex bug, and could copy it in his head and pound it out on a typewriter as fast as anybody could send it. I could fill a book with the stories he told.

Steve Ostruszka was in the Navy, and served on the destroyer USS Woolsey (DD-437) until the War ended. Or so we think. Unlike my dad, Carol’s dad simply refused to talk about the War. Nearly all of what we know of his days as an engine mechanic on the Woolsey came from his brother Ed, who also served on the ship.

Then there was Robert Williams, Jr. of Necedah, Wisconsin. He graduated from Necedah High School in 1942, and enlisted in the Navy immediately. At some point in 1942, he kissed his best girl good-bye, and got on a train for California to ship out on the Pacific. I don’t know what ship he was on, but at some point it was attacked by the Japanese, and sunk.

His best girl was my mother.

Like millions of other men and women in WWII and since, Bobby Williams gave his life to help ensure that others could keep theirs, and it was true of me in a very weird way. Absent his sacrifice, I wouldn’t be writing this. I wouldn’t “be” at all, which is a strange thing to meditate on. Now, the chain of contingencies leading to any individual life is long, and doesn’t end until the moment the genetic die is cast. Nonetheless, I wish that he had come back. He loved my mother, and no one should die so horrible a death at 19 or 20.

I’ll go out and listen for taps tonight, and I will thank them again. I will thank countless others for what they gave and for the lives that were changed or lost altogether. We must go to war with the utmost reluctance, but having done so, we must honor those we send, in the hope that every war will be the last that our world will ever see.

Posted in: Memoir.
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Odd Lots

May 25th, 2013
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments
  • Yes, I’ve been away from Contra for longer than I’d like, and the Odd Lots have been piling up. Some of that away was necessary for my sanity, and was spent by the pool at a resort in Phoenix, where Carol and I discussed things like the wonder of a single-celled organism that is 10 cm long. The secret appears to be evolving superior organelles. Bandersnatchi, anyone?
  • While I was gone, someone released a new OS for the Raspberry Pi: The Pidora Remix. It’s basically Fedora for the Pi. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ll flip another SD card out of the drawer soonest and burn an image. Man, you have to run like hell just to stay in one place in this business.
  • The Raspberry Pi’s main competition, the BeagleBone, now has a 1 GHz ARM Cortex A8 version that ships with a Linux 3.8 kernel. BeagleBone Black supports the Linux Device Tree, which does a lot to decouple hardware details from the kernel. Looks terrific–now all it needs is an installed base.
  • I noticed a system resource draw-down when I had iTunes installed on my old and now electrocuted quadcore. The software took a lot of cycles and memory, even when it didn’t appear to be doing anything. The discussion has come up on Slashdot. (The poster also mentioned Rainmeter, which I tried once and found…ok.) I try to run a lean system here, and I frown on things that want services, tray icons, and 15% of my cycles all the damned time. (The Dell Dock does precisely that. For showing a row of icons. Sheesh.)
  • Amazon is setting up a new markeplace for short fiction, with a twist: It offers to share revenues on fan fiction with the authors of the original items. It’s unclear how many authors will accept that, but I would, like a shot. (I guess all I’d need are some fans.) In truth, Jim Strickland and I talked in detail some years back about opening up the Drumlins World to all authors who’d care to tell a story there, without even asking for money.
  • Clinical depression may be linked to sleep cycles, which appear to have a genetic basis. How to fix this is unclear, but I’ll testify that depression in the wake of losing Coriolis laid waste to my sleep habits for a couple of years. (Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for the link.)
  • The Man Who Ploughed the Sea may soon be mining it…for uranium. I’d cut to the chase and just mine it for gold, so I can buy more ytterbium for my Hilbert Drive. Alas, there’s less gold in the oceans than we thought (1 part per trillion) and not much more ytterbium (1.5 parts per trillion) so maybe I should just extract the uranium (3 parts per billion) and make yellow pigments to sell on Etsy.
  • I’m not sure I buy this, but it’s an interesting speculation: That the Younger Dryas cold snap was triggered by a smallish asteroid that crashed…in Lake Michigan. Click through for the maps if nothing else. My favorite Great Lake is deeper and more complex than I thought.
  • Save the apostrophe’s! (From a fate worse than dearth…)
  • And save us, furthermore, from new Microsoft technology that counts people in the room watching your TV. Because having more than one person watching a TV show or movie rental is…is…stealing!
  • 3-D printing is still in the stone age (and the Old Stone Age at that) but if we don’t allow berserk patent law to strangle the kid in its crib, wonderful things will happen once 3-D printers are no longer CNC glue guns. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • I’m starting to think that 3-D printers like that will soon make one-off repro of small plastic parts like the ones at the center of kites practical. I guess the challenge is somehow getting the precise shape of the part into a file. If I weren’t trying so hard to be a novelist I would probably have a 3-D printer already. For the moment I’m glad I didn’t jump as soon as I otherwise might have.
  • Speaking of CNC…and guns: Plastic guns are dumb, dangerous, ineffective, and basically a stunt that seems designed (probably in Autocad) to make politicians say stupid things and make enemies. The real issue is cheap, portable CNC machines capable of cutting metal. That horse is out of the barn and beyond the horizon.

Posted in: Odd Lots.
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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.

Posted in: Daybook.
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Odd Lots

May 12th, 2013
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

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End of the Road for CS-in-a-Box

May 6th, 2013
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

Big news today: Adobe’s CS6 product is the last one that you’ll be able to install “out of the box” from a retail copy. Much fuss is being made about a move that was lead-pipe predictable after Creative Cloud went live last year. Some of today’s new stories give you the impression that there’s some dazzling new browser-based whatchamacallit technology behind CC, but after reading the Creative Cloud FAQ I’m not sure there’s any radical re-engineering going on at alll. Creative Cloud is not a browser-based technology. It’s just a new release of a digitally delivered client-side app suite, with a difference: You have to connect to the Internet at least once every thirty days to authenticate it.

So calm down. It’s just stronger DRM, and a leakproof end-run around the First Sale Doctrine.

The DRM, like all DRM, is probably crackable. Having to re-crack it every thirty days will slow the pirates down a little, but I wouldn’t bet on it being impossible. DRM is less significant than then other half: You can’t resell bits the way you can resell discs. There’s a pathway to de- and re-registering an Adobe boxed product, but it’s a nuisance and I’m sure Adobe has wanted to eliminate the whole process for a long time. This’ll do it.

Going to a subscription model means that people will no longer be able to buy a box for $500 and then use it forever. Big shops may be able to justify the cost. Smaller shops may stick with old versions. Doesn’t matter. Adobe obviously wants to eliminate the perpetual-license home market, which has always cost more in support than it generates in revenue. Going to subscriptions means a predictable and mostly reliable revenue stream. Losing individual users and very small shops isn’t much of a loss, money-wise. I also wonder if this may be the end of the road for Adobe Resellers. CC may do for boxed software what self-published ebooks are doing for books: eliminating the middleman.

Now, one final point I haven’t seen others make so far: Without a boxed product for pirates to steal, Adobe will lose a certain number of sales from people who tried it illicitly, liked it, and then bought it. (Most people credit this model with giving Microsoft a lock on the office suite market back in the 90s.) This makes me wonder if the otherwise-puzzling release of non-authenticating copies of all CS2 apps back in January was intended to keep the piracy-driven sales channel alive. In a sense, Adobe provided a pre-stolen copy of CS for people to install and fool with, no risky cracking required. A certain number of those people will like it enough to sign up for CC for better apps and sync services. Also, don’t underestimate the value of skills developed in using a product line. Unlearning a product and learning a different product is a pain in the butt. (This is why student versions at breathtaking discounts make sense in the long run.)

And for all the talk about CC being the future of software, c’mon. There are maybe four software companies in the universe that can pull this off. The future for $20-$50 apps like Atlantis is bright, and open source software has never been better. Adobe has kicked itself upstairs. That leaves a whale of a lot more room for everybody else down here.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.
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Odd Lots

May 4th, 2013
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

Posted in: Odd Lots.
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