Monthly Archives: January 2006

Christmas 1980

Christmas 1980, Kevin and I with my new Atari 400While i was home visiting my mom, we spent some time going through my mom’s collection of old photographs. We ran across this old Polaroid of myself (left) and my brother Kevin in Christmas of 1980. I was sixteen years old, and had saved for the better part of a year to get about three hundred dollars to buy this computer, and my mom kicked in the last of the money as a Christmas present. This little gem had 16K of memory, and I couldn’t afford any storage device (not even tape at the time), but I think I see the box for the Atari Basic cartridge in the foreground, so I must have sprung for that. I also see in the little shelf above my desk what appear to be prescription bottles, but are in fact small bottles of paints (I used to paint miniatures for Dungeons and Dragons). I also remember the Moosehead beer shirt that I am wearing: Kevin gave that to me, and I wore it alot, most of the way through my undergraduate years at college.

Just thought I’d share this blast from the past. Oh, and here’s a bigger scan showing more details.

I feel useful today…

There is an old joke about what men are good for: the punch line reads something like killing spiders, barbecue and oil changes.   I’d like to pretend that I’m a handy person, but when the truth comes right down to it, I pretty much consider myself a software guy, not a hardware guy.   Still, I think the software mentality teaches you to think about debugging in a more general sense, and occasionally it pays off.

Like today.  I mentioned briefly that my right windshield wiper had failed during my trip to Truckee over New Years.   While occasionally the wiper would twitch, it wouldn’t move very regularly, but would occasionally catch and flop all the way over to the left side, and then get in the way of the left wiper blade.   I was going to take it into a garage to have them charge me $50, but as I was waiting for my wife to get showered, I decided to give it a couple of minutes of my own attention.

I felt that it must be something minor, rather than a motor failure.  Had the motor failed, it would have been likely been catastrophic: the wiper blade wouldn’t twitch at all.  I felt it must have been in some part of the linkage that connects the wiper motor.  I had no idea what that linkage might be, having never really examined this stuff before, but it was a working hypothesis.

I marched out to the car, undid the rubber bands that Carmen had set up to keep the blades from flopping around during our trip home (while still moving I might add, a splendid McGyver moment for her) and stared at it for a moment.  I picked up the blade and tried to move it along its normal motion.  It moved easily, freely.   I then did the same to the one that worked.   It didn’t move at all.  Ahah!  I next popped the small plastic cap off at the base of the wiper arm, revealing a 5/8 inch nut.  It was finger loose.  Ahah!   Back to find a 5/8 socket.   A simple bit of tightening, and it worked.  For a minute.   Then it was loose again.   This time I really tightened it.  And voila!  It appears to function.

Saved myself a trip to the garage and some annoyingly large amount of money for a simple bolt tightening.

I feel useful today.

King Kong

Last night was the first opportunity that Carmen and I felt we could spare the three hours necessary to view Peter Jackson’s latest blockbuster film, his remake of the classic 1933 film King Kong.    It’s a colossal film, much in the same visual style of Jackson’s earlier Lord of the Rings trilogy, with many big, sweeping vistas, extended action sequences and a fair amount of just just showing off.

It’s a good film, mind you, but it is just a bit much at times.   It’s not actually boring, but you can see that there are entire scenes, entire plotlines, entire subtexts that really aren’t very central to the story.  We’d expect that in Lord of the Rings, where the plotlines and subtexts are really part of the joy of the story, but they aren’t really necessary in King Kong, and actually seem a bit like showboating: “I’m Peter Jackson, and I’m adding an hour of footage just because I’m Peter Jackson“.

By way of example, consider the roles of Hayes and Jimmy (played by actors Evan Parke and Jamie Bell).  They are crew members on the boat, and Jackson spends a fair amount of time creating a level of backstory for these characters, yet in the end, there is no real payoff: the role that the characters play is entirely incidental to even the secondary plotlines of the film.

Then, consider the extended “brontosaurus and raptor stampede”.  The only thing that really accomplishes is we get to see a lot of extras (in the Star Trek universe, all these guys would have red shirts) get trampled by CG dinosaurs, while the major characters somehow karate kick their way to safety.

The spider pit is a bit over the top as well, and again only serves to thin the heard of red shirts.   If any of these scenes were incompetently done, they’d really detract from the movie, but even though they are well done, I think as a whole the movie feels a bit self-concious and over the top.

I also thought that there were some continuity problems: the natives initially are protrayed as brutal savages, and yet somehow after the initial encounter, they are nowhere to be seen.   Other, more minor discountinuities seemed to jar me at 20 minute intervals.

Still, overall I’d rank it about a B+.   It delivers a lot of what you expect, even if it is a bit slow out of the gate, it keeps you interested and excited.  Naomi Watts does a great job as Ann Darrow, and while I think that Jack Black was reaching a bit beyond his grasp, he did a credible job as movie producer Carl Denham.  Adrien Brody takes what is essentially a pretty minor role as Jack Driscoll, Denham’s screenwriter, but looks great on screen, and gives a good performance with minor motivation.

It’s kind of gruesome in spots, you might wish to consider carefully whether to take younger kids.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.0

Well, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Like all previous upgrades that I’ve performed, this one seems to have gone without a hitch, and all things that I expected to work seems to work just fine.

The biggest change that is immediately visible is the new posting interface, which uses a WYSIWG type interface. It seems pretty nice, and has the added advantage that it should be difficult to actually create HTML which doesn’t validate.

There is a new anti-comment spam gadget called Akismet that unfortunately requires a wordpress.com API key to function (I really don’t mind signing up for a key, but it seems silly to create a blog for me just to get a plugin key). There are also some changes to the permissions system which seem to mean that I can’t create a link in this post. I’ll submit it anyway, and then come back and try to figure out what the deal is.

Still, seems pretty nice!

Addendum: Hmmm. I suppose that I could just enter a link by hand.  That seemed to work okay.  If you just type the html, it seems to actually do the right thing.

Further Storm Updates

Well, not just one, but three four separate segments of the fence which borders the back property line are down. It’s now a job that has transitioned between “Mark should do that in an hour or two” to “we should call somebody and let them do it”. I will be hiking up the hill to check the condition of our drainage ditches with a shovel and a rake and make sure they are flowing easily.

I’ll be glad when we bid adieu to this rain.

Addendum: Finished cleaning them out, some silt had accumulated in the top culvert, which I cleared with a shovel and rake. Bottom one flowing nicely.

Leap Seconds

Unnoticed amidst last night’s revelry was the passage of a scheduled leap second. If you ever wanted to know more about them, you could review the U.S. Naval Observatory page on Leap Seconds. After reading this page, you should be able to understand why the insertion of a leap second does not mean that the earth’s rotation has slowed down by a second out of the year, the source of many misguided extrapolation arguments given against the age of the Earth.

Back!

Whew. Back from my “vacation”.

I-80 was open earlier today leaving Truckee, but it took 2 hours to go 4 miles to the area where cars were screened for tire chains/4WD. My Expedition is of course the latter and had no trouble navigating the icy conditions through the Donner Pass, but was buffetted by the high winds which made the overall trip a little less than completely fun. As I finally began the long downhill slope to Sacramento, I breathed a bit of a sigh of relief, but then managed to get myself all worked up again as I neared Sacremento. When I crossed into Yolo county, the winds really picked up and there was significant flooding in the valley floor: in Fairfield on both sides of the highway you could see telephone poles sticking out of vast expanses of water where the river had jumped its banks. The weather was ugly (I’m beginning to use that word far too much lately) with blinding rain and heavy winds. Yuck. The ride which takes three hours in good weather took us nearly six and a half today. I also noted that my car’s right wiper has malfunctioned, so I need to look at that tomorrow. When I got home and collected my mail I found that there was no bills, and smiled a little, but then found a note stuck to my door by one of my neighbors about five housses down indicating that they had had a mudslide today, and that we should check our drainage to make sure that water was flowing properly. It was already after dark, but I hiked up the hill to check the two drainage culverts, both of which seemed to be be reasonably open and clear of debris, and water seemed to be flowing nicely. The piece of my fence that has blown down before blew down again though. I’ll have to trek up there and fix it in the next day or so.

All in all, virtually every time I got in a car in this vacation I ran into some brutal, inclement weather. The vacation was largely fun, but I’m exhausted. It will be good to get back to work and be able to relax.

Happy New Year everyone!

Flooding on I-80, AP Photo by Brian Zweernik

Addendum: Here’s a photo of I-80 the day before I drove on it. That would not have been fun at all.