Daybook

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

Carmax and the No-Haggle Revolution

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The last Sunday of April, 2001, Carol and I stopped at a Toyota dealership on the way home from church. We’d been thinking about a new car for some time. Our 1996 Jeep Grand Cherokee was not all that old, but it was a lemon and had become increasingly unreliable. We’d been considering the 4Runner and wanted to test-drive one. So we pulled into the dealer lot, and swung back the big glass door leading into a uniqely American vision of Purgatory. Six hours later, we emerged with a new 4Runner, and a solemn promise to one another that we would never do that again.

We’ve kept that promise.

It wasn’t easy. Carol and I did our homework. We scoured the Web for reviews, asked our mechanic and our nephew Matt, who’s a car hobbyist, and generally kept our ears open. We knew what we needed: A full-size SUV to replace our almost 20-year-old Plymouth Voyager minivan. The Voyager was 2WD, and the winters here in Colorado have been getting colder, grayer, and snowier. Our local government is throwing that classic extortion tantrum of selectively witholding public services until we raise taxes on ourselves, in this case refusing to plow streets in well-off neighborhoods like ours. Voters here do not bully easily, and have given them the finger three times in a row now, which still leaves us the problem of winter driving in a 2WD minivan. Winter this year basically began on November 1, which we took to be a Sign. We needed to trade in the van for something with a tranfer case. We were not going to do it by enduring another six hours of franchise dealership kabuki.

Our first thought was to use the Costco car-buying program. This is a no-haggle arrangement whereby the dealers and Costco agree on a price for each model and option. You ask for the price, and if you want the car, you pay it. That sounded fine to us. We used their Web site and contacted the Costco liaison at the big local Dodge dealer. We told him we wanted a 2014 Dodge Durango with our list of must-have and nice-to-have features. The guy did his best (I think) but didn’t come up with much.

Part of that was the odd list of features we wanted. Some, like a lack of second-row captain’s chairs, clustered in the two lower trim styles. Others, like a power liftgate, clustered in the higher trim styles. The color we wanted (a golden beige they call Pearl) seemed not to exist. The whites and reds did exist, but swam in a sea of black. You can get second-degree burns off a black car in Scottsdale, where we may soon be spending winters. Black was thus a deal-killer. We found a couple of contenders ourselves in the central Dodge inventory listings. The cars were on the far side of Denver. I emailed the listings to the Costco rep at the local Dodge dealer, who then had trouble getting the remote dealership to cooperate.

In the meantime, our nephew Matt suggested that we look at used cars. He’d bought a used Jeep through TrueCar and was delighted with it. I’d heard about CarMax, and had driven past their local retail location a number of times. So Carol and I looked at their inventory online, found a couple of cars that weren’t too far from what we wanted, and figured we’d give their system a try.

CarMax is a car-lot no-haggle system for buying used cars. We emailed a request for a test drive, and one of their reps contacted us and set up an appointment. We went out there and we drove ourselves a Durango. The car was a 2013, and whereas it drove very well, it had 27,000 miles on it and a V8 hemi under the hood. Carol and I wanted a V6 with under 15,000 miles on it. The CarMax rep, Derek Scott, scanned around other CarMax locations and found a couple of possibilities, again, up in the Denver area. He offered to have the best of them brought down to Colorado Springs at no charge so we could try it here.

He did. It took only two days. We drove it, we liked it, he stated a price, appraised the Voyager for a trade-in, and gave us a final number. We arranged financing, then went back the next day to push papers, and finally drove it home. No kabuki. No pressure. Sure, I might have gotten it for a thousand bucks less somewhere else (maybe) after another week or two of enduring the franchise dealership hell-hole. We felt disinclined to put ourselves through that wringer again.

So now we have a 2014 Durango Limited with 12,000 miles on it. We like the tan interior for the same reason we wanted a tan exterior–less heat absorption. The vehicle didn’t have a tow package, but it met all of our other requirements. I can get a real Mopar tow package installed for about $750, which I will when things settle down a little. (Our next assignment: Get new phones and a new carrier. Uggh.)

About CarMax I have nothing but the best to say. Their people were terrific (especially Derek Scott) and showed no impatience with us whatsoever. They brought out a car from another store without charging us for it, and gave us about what I expected for a 19-year-old minivan trade-in. Highly recommended.

I wonder, at this point, how long the traditional franchise dealership model would last if it were not protected by state law. I settled for a used car instead of a new car in part because I wanted nothing to do with a dealership. Even when I tried to work with a dealership (via Costco) the other dealerships didn’t seem to want the business. We would have replaced the Voyager years ago if we could have stomached the thought of going new car shopping as the law requires us to do it. I don’t think that the dealers, the manufacturers, nor the government itself have any idea how much that dealership kabuki has lost the industry in new car sales. It’s another example of a brittle business model that will fail badly when it fails, because its proponents can’t get their heads around the way their world is going.

I can’t say much about the car just yet. I’m still trying to program its multitude of options. (The Durango’s 626-page owner’s manual has to be special-ordered in print form and is not shipped with the vehicle.) It’s big, shiny, and so far works perfectly. I guess that’s more than enough for the time being.

Shirts, Dogs, and Dogs in Shirts

Oct 12th, 2014

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

The Front Range Bichon Frise Club held its (now expected to be) annual halloween party this past Saturday. Picture a dozen bichons in funny outfits tearing around club president Lindsay Van Keuren’s back yard on what could well be the last nice day this year. Carol cut a Party City grass skirt in half, and wrapped half around QBit and half around Aero. She did the same with a Party City lei and both again got half. It was a pretty effective costume, because QBit and Aero are aces at dancing on their hind legs waving their front paws in the air. The video I posted on Facebook prompted Dennis Harris to declare them the Duntemann Hula Hounds, which in turn reminded me that Marty Robbins had a song called “Lovely Hula Hands” back in the time that even time forgot. So could I write “Lovely Hula Hounds?” Sure. Will I? Maybe. I have to finish my filk of “YMCA” first. Sub in “bichon frise” for “YMCA” and you’ll see where I’m going with it.

Dash doesn’t dance on his hind legs, and in fact what he mostly does is get in trouble. So Carol bought a very appropriate costume for him that was basically a Depression-style prisoner outfit, complete with number, printed on a little T-shirt, plus a black and white hat to match. He got the award for “Scariest Costume,” which is itself a little scary.

Green Long Sleeve - 350 wide.jpg Speaking of shirts…I discovered a wonderful source of everyday shirts a year or so ago: the US military. I bought a couple of used Army dress green shirts on eBay, and later found a couple of Air Force dress blue shirts, one of which I was wearing in the photos above. I found a few more at Glenn’s Army Surplus here in the Springs, and my friend Lt. Col. Powl Smith gave me a few more when he retired from the Army recently. The shirts have two pockets, which is a requirement for my everyday attire. They’re rugged, and can be had in both long-sleeve and short-sleeve designs. Best of all, you can toss them in the wash, put them in the dryer for ten minutes, and they’ll hang up without a wrinkle. Yeah, they’re polyester blends. For me this is a feature, not a bug. I paid $15 each for the new ones, and about $5 for the used ones. So far, no regrets.

I’ve been quiet recently in part because I’ve been studying. The desktop database development world has a shed a few skins since I learned it, and I’m going to have to learn it mostly all over again. But if I do that, I might as well take notes, so I can teach it to everybody else. Lazarus Database Development From Square One, anybody?

Could happen. Stay tuned.

Here Comes the Putzmeister!

May 14th, 2014

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

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This is the machine that yesterday pumped liquid concrete into a hose, allowing it to be precisely (and rapidly) distributed into the voids that the crew had leveled, filled, compacted, and rebar-ed late last week. Ok, Michael Covington correctly tells us that “Putzmeister” translates from the German as “cleaning master.” That other definition you’re thinking of is actually Yiddish.

Quick aside: Seeing the machine reminded me of a very silly song my mother used to sing to us, called “Cement Mixer.” The key line (and what stuck in my memory) is “Cement mixer, putzy-putzy.” I think we may have had it on 78, possibly by piano maniac Slim Gaillard, who is the only man I’ve ever heard of who could play the piano with his hands held upside-down.

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No matter. The machine and the concreters did a helluva job. We have a driveway, a front walk, and a front porch again, in a nice sandy color and fairly subtle texture. It’s now cured enough to walk on (carefully) though we can’t drive on it for several more days. The texture-mold releaser dust has to be power-washed off of it before I can actually show you a picture of how it’s going to look. That’ll happen on Friday.

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The photo above is of the plastic sheets that apply the texture to the still-soft concrete. The bucket is the releaser dust that keeps the pattern sheets from sticking to the concrete. In use, the sheets are laid on the concrete and manually rammed with a pole-mounted thumper about a foot square.

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So far, wonderful. I definitely recommend the firm that did the work, Stivers Concrete. Rick Stivers got his big break by appearing with Ty Pennington on Extreme Home Makeover, back while he was still based in Escondido. Since then he’s fled California’s taxes and red tape to Colorado, and likes it much better here. We’re very glad he did, and we’re already looking ahead to summer 2015 for the garage slab and retaining wall projects. That’s about as soon as we think we can handle it, given that I have to put my lathe, drill press, and extensive scrap metal collection in storage, which in turn means that we still have a great deal of clean-up-and-put-away to do out there.

Whatever. My driveway is no longer an eyesore and a safety hazard. That’s victory enough for this year.

Creative Destruction (We Hope)

May 5th, 2014

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

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I had hoped to write more about the Cayman Islands today, but we learned soon after rising that the Big Duntemann Concrete Project would begin elevenses. And so it did.

Those outside my inner circle know that we’ve been having concrete issues since four months after we moved in. Actually, as soon as the first big rain happened circa May 2004, our front walk caved in. The developer replaced it. We were good for a few months, but toward the end of 2004 the driveway started cracking. By early 2005 it was looking serious, and not long after it started looking serious, the developer vanished. (Coincidence!) So we had the driveway mudjacked at our own expense in the summer of 2005.

Peace reigned for a few years. By 2008 the driveway had begun to crack again, and by 2010 was rapidly descending into rubble. Carol was taking care of her mom in that era, so we didn’t have the bandwidth to confront the problem–and we were in Chicago as much as we were here. Just after the Taos Toolbox workshop in July 2011, the gas riser pipe on the street side of our gas meter cracked after being pulled down into the settling soil for seven years. Toward the end of 2011 we had to have the lower level slab mudjacked, which destroyed the carpeting and made a mess of our lower level generally. I pulled my left supinator badly trying to move boxes filled (carelessly) full of books. I like what we have on the lower level now, but man, getting here sucked.

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So at last we’re having the topside concrete bashed out and replaced. It was funny to watch the Bobcat jackhammer work on the concrete slab. In many spots, the bam-bam-bam was not sharp but hollow-sounding. After a few hits, the jackhammer tip broke through and went down five or six inches instantly, which suggests–nay, shouts–that there were six inches of dead air under the slab.

My driveway now looks like a bombing range, and will for what might be a couple of days yet. At some point (soon?) the dump trucks will come, schlep out the rubble, and then bring back roadbase fill to bring the area up to compaction code. After that, the rebar and the pouring can begin.

We’re having the front porch slab cut out and manually removed as well, which means that getting in and out of the house is going to be problematic for a few days, especially given Carol’s ongoing recuperation from three foot surgeries. The cars are parked on the street, and the freezer is reasonably full, as is the dog food bin. Concrete cocooning? Hey, I’ve got steaks, wine, red peppers, and a grill on the back deck.

We’re ready.

Pinging Jeff…

Mar 12th, 2014

by Jeff Duntemann.

8 comments

Pong, everybody. Relax. I’m still here. And I’m very glad to say that I’m probably 1200 words from the end of my current book project. If it weren’t for some home repairs and carpet cleaning I’d be done by now, and I expect to be done by EOD Friday. The publisher is still reluctant to say much about the book, for reasons I still don’t understand. I’m puzzled, but in publishing as in so many other realms, those who write the checks make the rules.

Much to do after the last word rattles out of the keyboard. Getting rid of XP is high on the list, given our April 8 deadline. This afternoon I ordered a refurbed Win7 laptop, a Dell e6400. How could such an old laptop be useful to me? Easy: I don’t do much on laptops. It’s a travel computer, for Web, email, and some light word processing–like writing Contra entries on the road. It cost me $240 postpaid, as they used to say. I’ve had very good luck with used Dell machines in the last ten years. Every machine in the house but my quadcore is a Dell refurb. I already have two Win7 Dell 780 USFFs for upstairs, and installed Win7 on my lab machine over a year ago. That leaves the laptop and the quad, basically, and if I didn’t need to use the quad to finish this book, the quad would be running Win7 by now as well.

The SX270s are now all bookends. They make very nice bookends.

Oh, and the computer junk pile is getting impressive.

The list of things to do Post Book is long. We need to replace our driveway slab, which is descending into rubble. Ditto the garage slab, the replacement of which will require putting my lathe, big drill press, tooling, and metal stock in storage somewhere. There’s a lesson here: Soil compaction matters. We spent thirty grand mudjacking the lower level, recarpeting, and repainting. Settling soil pulled our gas meter down so far the pipe cracked and damned near blew us over the top of Cheyenne Mountain. I made a number of mistakes having this house built, and I will never make those mistakes again.

Then there’s 3D. I drew 81 figures by hand for this book project, all of them in Visio. (I actually drew 83, but two of them won’t be used.) I’m very good at Visio. However, Visio is inextricably a 2D CAD program, and every time I’ve tried to use it for 3D, it makes me nuts. I took a lot of drafting and engineering graphics when I was in school and know how to do it. (Sure, it was with a T-square. Ya gotta problem widdat?) I need to be able to draw things in 3D. I downloaded the free version of Sketchup after Google bought it in 2006, but was too busy back then to spend much time with it. I see that Google sold it a year or two ago, and the new owners are positioning it as an architectural CAD system. That’s fine, since I know from earlier tests that Sketchup can do telescope parts, and if it can also design me an observatory, I’m good with that. I need somewhere to put an observatory, obviously, but that’s a separate challenge. So learning Sketchup is another priority.

Fiction, too. I’m going to try finishing Old Catholics. If that doesn’t work, I’ll start The Everything Machine, complete with a 3D scale drawing of a thingmaker, courtesy Sketchup. (I tried that in Visio years ago. Uggh.)

I will also be doing some intensive research on Oscar Wilde, for reasons that only a few people in my inner circle understand.

As I always say, Boredom is a choice. I may be tired, but I am not bored. And in a few days, I suspect I will no longer be tired. Bring it on!

The Other Shoe Drops

Jan 16th, 2014

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

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Carol’s home and sound asleep upstairs, after having her right foot fixed late this morning. She won’t be walking unassisted for a couple of weeks. No problem; she has a knee scooter, crutches, and me. Oh, and practice: Having had her left foot and ankle repaired on Halloween, we both know the drill. Time and love will do the job. Our nephew Matt and his beautiful fiancee Justine will marry this coming August, and damn, there will be dancing.

The surgery RN asked Carol about her allergies, and Carol wore the fire-engine red badge above during surgery. No cats or mangoes were encountered, nor any other difficulty. The surgeon came out to the waiting room to let me know all was well, with an X-ray of Carol’s foot in his hand. He explained the pins and the bones and other things that lie far outside my core competence. My main question was simple: Is my forever girlfriend all right? The answer was all I needed to know: She is.

The Pack is over at Grandma Jimi’s getting washed and groomed and will then spend the night, so for now peace reigns at Phage House on Stanwell. When we dropped them off, Jimi gave us a crockpot full of home-made chicken soup. There’s most of a very good pork shoulder in the fridge and another in the freezer when we finish that. I laid in a couple of bags of Costco torta rolls and a fresh quarter wheel of Stilton cheese. We’re short on diet ginger ale, but the wine rack is full. If there’s any hunger in this house in the next week or so, it’ll be the sort of hunger where most of TV is from. (Especially The Weather Channel, more on which when time allows.)

Not much to report, which is good. I’m currently writing a summary of coding GUI apps in Python using Tkinter, followed by a summary of coding GUI apps with FreePascal and Lazarus. Then this interminable chapter will be over.

More tomorrow.

Excerpted From Old Catholics

Dec 24th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Cathedral Demonstration Turns to Riot

(AP) Violence erupted at a noon-hour protest in front of Holy Name Cathedral, as demonstrators from the liberal Catholic organization Christ With Us traded taunts with counter-demonstrators from the reactionary conservative group Voluntas Dei. The march, targeting the recent moratorium on marriage annulments announced by Pope Pius XIII on November 27, began peacefully, but descended into fistfights that spilled into the street near Wabash and Superior about 11:45 AM.

Chicago’s Cardinal Peter Luchetti quelled the riot by addressing the crowd through a police megaphone. Police arrested twelve of the demonstrators, who were charged with disorderly conduct and reckless endangerment. Two were later charged with criminal destruction of property. Numerous demonstrators were injured, seven requiring hospitalization.

Cardinal Luchetti later met with representatives from the two protesting organizations in his office at the Diocesan complex. No details of the meeting were released.

Tensions between liberal and conservative factions in the Roman Catholic Church have been running high since the Pope’s unexpected announcement and promise of an encyclical on the indissolubility of Catholic marriage…

Rob again scanned the headline piece from Friday’s Chicago Tribune and tossed the paper back on one of Suzy’s end tables. There would certainly be more in Sunday’s edition, much more, especially now that reporters were doggedly searching for anyone who might have been there and could provide a provocative quote.

Rob had turned his cellphone off and yanked the cord from his answering machine in annoyance after the twentieth call. Merciful God in heaven, what were the chances? To one side of the news item was a photo of Cardinal Peter Paul Luchetti with his hand on the forehead of the young injured woman from Voluntas Dei. To the other side was a photo of Peter speaking into a police megaphone, at his elbow a befuddled-looking middle-aged man in a gray overcoat. The caption was peculiar, not only for what it stated but for what it left out: “Cardinal Peter Luchetti spoke to the crowd through a police megaphone shortly after violence broke out, accompanied by his seminary friend, former priest Robert Prendergast of Chicago.”

He had given his name to no one. And where was Suzy? The photo had been cropped to exclude her completely, even though she had been standing perhaps a foot behind him.

“Rob, stop staring at that paper!” Suzy had an ancient blown-glass ornament in each hand, and the pile of boxes labeled “Shiny Brite” was growing on the carpet by her bare feet. There were cookies in the oven and a new log on the fire, and it smelled very much like Christmas. Rob put down his brandy snifter of eggnog (spiced up and fortified with some very good Scotch whisky) and took the ornament that Suzy held out to him.

“They cut you out of the picture,” Rob said in protest, edging around Suzy’s half-decorated balsam tree to confront a bare spot with the ornament.

“Like I need that kind of attention.”

“But why me and not you?” Rob tucked the ornament onto a vacant branch, touching it with one finger to make sure it could swing freely.

“Resigned priests are hot right now!” Maria said, and laughed. From her place on the stepladder she stretched to reach the 8-foot tree’s tip with the little plastic angel she held. “Get an interview on The Talk and you could land a national book deal. You could be famous. Give me a year or two to get in with a big New York house, and I’ll even publish your book.”

Maria Farella was finishing up her master’s work in journalism at the University of Chicago, intending to build a career in publishing. Like her mother, she was intense, but did not have Suzy’s sense of irony. Rob had never met her before his return from Indianapolis, and still wasn’t sure when to take her seriously.

“I don’t want to be famous. I want to marry your mother, and…” Rob paused, thinking about those still-unmentioned incardination papers.

“…and still be a priest.” Suzy bent down to pick up another ornament. “All we have to do is crack the vows thing.”

Maria backed down off the stepladder. Rob had never met Joe Farella but knew that he must have been tall: His formidable daughter was at least 5’11” in her Christmas toe socks, and towered over Rob and Suzy both. “Poor angel,” she said, hands on hips, sizing up her work on the decorations so far. “We’ve stuck a tree up her butt every year now for how long, Mama?”

Suzy looked up toward the top of the tree. “Christmas 1979. Find me a treetop ornament in the shape of Pope Pius XIII and I think we’ll let her retire.”

Maria laughed again and bent down to the floor near Rob to pick up another box of ornaments. She put her left hand on his shoulder and shoved down far enough so that she could kiss the top of his head. “Please crack the vows thing, Fr. Rob. Andrew’s finally coming around, and I might find a ring in my stocking this year. I want you to marry us so bad.”

Rob felt himself blushing. As soon as Bishop Hughes received his incardination agreement, he would gain episcopal faculties and lose his last excuse to dodge the question of what he could and could not do as a priest.

Suzy turned back to the tree, glass ornaments in each hand. “Dumpling, he can marry you and Andrew any time you want. What he can’t do is marry me.”

Rob did not want to re-ignite the vows argument in front of a young woman who, in Dr. Pangloss’ best of all possible worlds, might have been his own daughter. “Maria, your mother and I both need annulments, each of a different sort. By our dumb luck, both kinds are hard to come by these days.”

Maria sat down on the stepladder, stretching her very long legs out in front of her. “It all sounds like a paperwork problem to me. Would God really get upset if you two just went off and did it?”

Rob blushed again, unsure what answer he could make to that. “Doing it” had more than one meaning, and both were an issue. He pursed his lips but said nothing.

Maria’s smile faded. “It’s really all about sex, isn’t it?”

Suzy turned back from the tree, and nodded toward Maria. “It is about sex. It’s always about sex. Sex is the only thing the Church cares about anymore. If I could make a case that I’d never had sex with Joe it would be open-and-shut, but there’s this little problem I have, and she’s sitting right over there.”

Rob expected Maria to laugh, or at least work up a little of her mother’s impish grin. Instead, the young woman who was so good at eye contact looked down at her feet and smoothed her plaid wool skirt across her knees. Suzy and Maria had gone this way before, Rob realized, and it clearly hadn’t turned out well. What did Maria think of her father? One might argue about the process-and the paperwork-but under certain circumstances marriage could be reversed. Fatherhood, now…

Rob knelt on one knee by Maria’s feet and placed his hands over one of hers. “It’s not only about sex. Love needs to respect the promises that it makes.”

Maria looked up. Rob expected tears. What he saw was the sort of confusion that was the precursor to anger. “Maybe. But why shouldn’t promises respect the love that created them?”

Daywander

Nov 13th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

Buck Walking.jpg

This has been a busy two weeks, hence my silence. Carol had her foot surgery on Halloween, and she still can’t walk unassisted. She’s resting with her leg up on cushions, generously draped with bichons, catching up on her reading. Her mood is good. The leg is improving every day, though she still has two weeks to go before the cast comes off and she can put significant weight on both feet.

I’m working on a book project, for large values of “work.” The work isn’t all in the writing. The worst of it lies in the critical difference between a casual understanding of a topic and a detailed understanding. Ever since I got my first Android device and looked into writing apps for it, I’ve been reading up on Android and the ARM processors that lie beneath probably 98% of all Android instances. I picked up the broad strokes quickly: 32-bit single-issue load/store RISC architecture, 8-stage pipeline (for ARM11, at least), dual cache, lotsa registers, several privileged processor modes, SIMD instructions, and good coprocessor support. A little study revealed an instruction set optimized for staying out of system memory and keeping the pipeline full at all times. I had read about but not meditated on a remarkable ARM feature: Virtually all ARM instructions can be conditionally executed based on flags embedded right in the instruction itself. Do a comparison that sets the zero flag, and then any following instructions compiled/assembled to execute when Z=0 will percolate smoothly through the instruction pipeline but not do anything. In essence, instructions whose condition bits aren’t satisfied become NOPs. It’s like branching past a block of code without actually branching and thus messing up the pipeline. Pure brilliance.

You don’t really grasp how much of a topic you don’t understand until you need to explain it in detail. Most hardware guys know how exceptions work, in broad terms. But…does the CPU disable interrupts automatically upon entering an interrupt handler? Or does the handler have to do it explicitly? Things like that require drinking from the doc firehose in a way I haven’t had to for some time.

The book hasn’t been announced yet, but I think I can reveal that it’s mostly about hardware, and that I’m not the sole author. More later, but (I think) sooner rather than later.

I do that all day. In the evenings Carol and I cuddle on the couch and watch TV. TV is a little outside of type for me, granted. (Cuddling with Carol is a lot of what I live for.) But I was poleaxed at how good the comedy writing is on the nerd series The Big Bang Theory. I hadn’t seen more than a few isolated minutes on TVs at doctors’ waiting rooms, and once for maybe half an episode at my sister’s house. TBS has been running several rerun episodes back-to-back on most nights, and we’ve watched what’s been on for a week or so. That nowhere near exhausts the canon, which is now seven seasons and 145 episodes long. Sure, it’s over the top. But it’s a lot less over the top if you’re a guy like me than some jock who went into insurance sales. I’ve met a fair number of Leonard Hofstadters, and at least one remarkably close instantiation of Amy Farrah Fowler. Even if you don’t like TV much, give it a shot.

I’ve had to wonder if all the equations on the whiteboards are real and not gobbledegook meant to fool the rubes who are not into string theory. Maybe a physicist reader will clue us in.

More animal stories: We’ve had an 11-point buck wandering around the neighborhood recently, close enough to the house that I could stand about twenty feet from him and count his points. (He has a small extra one on his left side.) The deer have been thronging our property because the little stream in the gully has been running continuously now for probably six weeks. Ordinarily it runs for eight or ten hours after a bad rain and then goes dry again. Running for several relatively dry weeks suggests that a new spring has opened up on the mountainside above us. It’s not a lot of water, perhaps half a gallon per second. But it just keeps coming and coming, and I’ve begun to see mosquitoes on my office window, staring longongly at my exposed forearms through the glass. The low spot just before the Villegreen cul-de-sac is now a swamp. The deer love it. We see them in groups of eight or nine standing around the flowing water, drinking. Mr. Big Buck sits or lies there, his grey muzzle confident, daring me to disrupt the party by running out there and yelling dumb things like “Roogie! Roogie! Whoosh!” Probably not.

We’ve noticed something else: For the last six weeks or so, we’ve neither seen a fox, nor smelled a skunk. Ordinarily it’s one or the other down there in our gully. Now, nothing. Dare we hope that it’s because the 24″ corrugated iron pipe under Stanwell is half-full of water all the time? We’ve seen both species coming and going at the pipe entrance when it’s dry, though not at the same time. (They’re ecosystem competitors, and they fight. We had a dead skunk in the gully once for several months. Don’t mess with fox.) Nobody likes to sleep in a pipe that’s got eight or ten inches of water in it. We’re good with that.

If you’ve never seen the film Pirate Radio, rent or stream it. Carol got it for a dollar at the local Blockbuster while they were blowing out their inventory. Rehabbed fishing boats really did park off the coast of England once, broadcasting rock’n’roll and manic DJ chatter while deliberately tweaking the BBC bluenoses who eventually shut them down. A little raunchy but goodhearted, and the 1966 period look was uncanny. (I was 13 in 1966 and remember the era well, largely because I didn’t have a girlfriend to distract me.)

One of the other dollar DVDs she bought astonished me with its awfulness. Yes, I loathed Cowboys and Aliens. Sue me; it sucked bigtime. Every bad Western cliche that’s ever seen print or film was there in seething, wriggling, vomiting color–except when the film retreated into faux moody darkness so deep you had no idea what the hell was going on. The aliens looked and moved like gorillas in alien suits. The HQ spaceship was stolen–most appropriately–from Alien. The formidable Daniel Craig was utterly wasted. The aliens were so stupid they set down a wrist-mounted raygun right next to Craig so he could put it on and start blasting them. The plot made very little sense except when it was utterly predictable. I’m glad we got it for a dollar–which was probably five dollars more than what it was worth.

Dash threw up on our bed late this afternoon. We got it all before it soaked through to the mattress, but we have to wash and dry several more rounds of sheets and blankets before we sleep tonight. We have a perfectly good bedroom downstairs–but Carol only has one good leg for the time being, and there are a lot of stairs. Talk atcha later. I have to go upstairs and throw another round in the dryer.

New Photo of John T. Frye

Oct 14th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Reader George Cohn sent me a photo of John T. Frye that I had not seen before. It’s from the May, 1948 issue of Radio News, which contained the second installment of his very long-running “Mac’s Service Shop” column. Assuming the photo was recent when published, Frye would have been 38.

For those who don’t recognize his name, John T. Frye was the author of the Carl & Jerry educational stories from Popular Electronics, “Phone Phunnies” from QST, and a whole metric passel of other things in other places, including two books on tube-era radio servicing that from what I can tell have passed into the public domain. See my article on Frye and his creations Carl & Jerry. I republished all 119 stories in five books several years ago (plus one new storyI wrote myself, and another one from the late George Ewing WA8WTE) and they’re still selling. Frye was a paraplegic who never walked, and how he did what he did in his life is one of the great success stories of disabled people who just didn’t let anything get them down. Legs? We don’t need no steenking legs!

When XP’s svchost.exe Takes 100% of the CPU

Oct 10th, 2013

by Jeff Duntemann.

69 comments

I have computers the way some people have mice (those other mice, with legs) and two days ago, a couple of them went nuts. Carol’s SX280 went to 100% CPU usage and roaring fans, and when I turned it on, a second machine (an older SX270) did the same thing. Rebooting changed nothing, though it took a minute or so after reboot for the problem to reappear, which allowed me to do some hasty troubleshooting.

Meanwhile, my quadcore purred along without incident. All three machines use XP SP3, and all three are set for auotmatic updates. I pulled an older SX270 off the shelf that I knew was still at XP SP2 and hooked it up on the bench. Nothing so far. I booted into Windows 7 on my GX620 (it ordinarily runs Mint) and have not seen anything out of the ordinary.

The module sucking all those cycles is the instance of svchost.exe that runs all of the miscellanous Windows machinery, including updates. Hmmmmm.

This is not a new problem; in fact, this rang some bells so old the cloud of dust took an hour to settle. As long ago as 2004, people have reported svchost.exe suddenly taking the whole CPU. Quite a few reports indicated that the culprit was the Windows Update automatic updates client, wuauclt.exe. I turned off automatic updates on the misbehaving machines, rebooted again, and the problem went away.

That’s only a partial solution, of course. And the problem is evidently still with us. In the comments to that post, a user suggested this command series as a fix:

net stop “Automatic Updates”
del /f /s /q %windir%\SoftwareDistribution\*.*
net start “Automatic Updates”
wuauclt.exe /detectnow

In essence, you disable automatic updates, delete all the files from the subdirectory where wuauclt.exe keeps its logs and other data files (you can’t do this if automatic updates is running), restart automatic updates, and then force an immediate check for updates. This worked, and I dusted my hands together in triumph.

Alas, yesterday noonish, both machines again went nuts. Both are scheduled for replacement, so I just let them run. After about two hours of screaming fans, svchost.exe let go of the CPU, and everything returned to normal. In the meantime, my quadcore and that creaky old SP2 machine have shown no symptoms.

I still don’t know precisely what’s going on, but it’s almost certainly some kind of bug in automatic updates. (I’ve scanned all machines for malware and found nothing.) XP updates end next April 1, and by that time I’ll have replaced the two wonky machines with much newer Win7 boxes. (One is already on order.) In the meantime, I’d be curious to hear if anyone reading this has seen the same issue. I expected to see a flurry of online reports and found nothing, right up to a couple of minutes ago. So maybe Carol and I just got to the top of the XP karma fairy’s little list. Still looking, and certainly open to suggestions.