Category Archives: Blather

Ramblings of a man who sees the world just a little bit differently.

Blather

Drugging My Cat

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Wiley lounging on my Dyna.
Wiley lounging on my Dyna.

Imperial Star Wiley Raz-Ma-Taz, our flame-point Siamese, was born April 21, 2007. I think he’s had a pretty good life so far but, poor guy, he’s been having some trouble coping lately. Maybe he’s been watching the news too much… Whatever, we set out to help him.

I won’t bore you with the details. But over the course of a month or so working with a local veterinarian we settled on a successful drug regimen. The miracle drug? Fluoxetine, better known as Prozac. Yeah, this is an off-label use of the drug. I’ve since learned that it’s more common than one might think.

Wiley’s always been an easy cat to pill. Maybe it’s a trust thing. Sometimes he appears to look forward to his next dose, perhaps he somehow knows that it brings comfort.

Unfortunately his dosage requires that the 10 milligram tablet be quartered. That breaches the coating and that means it tastes awful! It’s bitter (self-tested) as all get-out. Mixed with saliva from an angry cat it foams and dribbles and… well, you get the idea.

Never underestimate the fury of an unhappy feline – especially when you’re working near its mouth!

Medication time quickly turned into a nightmare to which none of us looked forward. Even though the drugs helped Wiley this was putting a serious hurt on our relationship!

Pam found a place in China to buy unfilled gel-caps online and ordered some.

Size-5 gel-caps, sourced from China.
A thousand size-5 gel-caps, sourced from China. They were cheap, too. The estimated ship estimate spanned the better part of a month, which was a little scary, but they actually showed up in a week or so. You can click this or any other image in this article for a larger view which will appear in a new window or tab.

The quartered tablet fragments fit pretty well into the gel-caps. Life started to improve. Still, the quartering process troubled me. No matter how careful, no matter how sharp the razor blade, the size of the quarters varied and sometimes even became damaged beyond being useful.

Imprecise dosage and waste: there were still two problems to solve!

Back to Amazon… And in a couple of days I had what I needed:

  • mortar & pestle [ link ]
  • spatula [ link ]
  • milligram scale [ link * ]

* Updated April 11, 2021 – This scale has gone out of stock but the Amazon recommendation engine will happily point you toward an equivalent.

I had a few tablets on hand because I had just stocked up so I began by weighing each of them. There was a slight variation – just a couple of milligrams. I averaged the weights and divided the result by four – my quarter-tablet goal. Then I went to work.

Ready for crushing.
Two 10 milligram tablets are ready for crushing. 10 mg is, of course, the amount of the drug and not the weight of the tablets!
Tablets crushed to a powder.
In a few seconds I’d reduced the tablets to powder. If you look closely you can still see some flecks of the tablet coating. It’s kind of like the candy coating a plain M&M, but much thinner, very hard and brittle.
The weighing.
I’ve used the spatula to transfer 53 milligrams of pulverized tablet to a small square of waxed paper sitting in the weigh pan. They make anti-static squares for this purpose but I guessed that the Florida humidity would keep static under control. I guessed right. I creased the waxed paper to make filling the gel-cap easier. Needless to say, the scale is zeroed with the waxed paper in the weigh pan before adding product.
The setup and work product.
Here’s the setup and the finished work product. The hardest part is dumping the weighed powder into the size-5 gel-caps; it takes a steady hand and a good eye, but it gets easier with practice. Notice, there’s very little residue on either the waxed paper or the spatula, indicating that my static is under control.

The final result? Worth every nickel of cost and every moment of work!

That the evil, bitter taste is now gone is a clear win. And I’m convinced that consistent, accurate dosing is exactly what Wiley needs. He’s back to his old self! Our relationship is back on track, too.

Blather

Aqua•Comb

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filter-media
Typical cartridge filter.

Owning a swimming pool is practically a requirement in Florida. Our pool, like many, uses a replaceable cartridge-type filter. The filtration system is simple, works well, and it’s easy to keep up. The trade-off for that convenience is the cost of the filter media.

In case you’re not familiar with these things I’ve included an image of a typical filter cartridge. It’s remarkably similar to an aquarium filter, but larger. Mine is about 2 feet tall and maybe around 10 or 11 inches in diameter. It’s basically a perforated plastic tube wrapped with a deeply pleated fiber media, with some support rings at either end. Situated vertically, water flows from the outside in, through the perforated tube, exiting through the bottom of the perforated tube. Any debris not caught by the skimmer basket and pump screen becomes trapped within the pleats.

A top-quality, name-brand filter cartridge costs around a hundred bucks.

My contractor suggested that frequent cleaning would extend the life of the media. It made sense. Cleaning is theoretically simple: direct a spray from a garden hose at the outside; work your way around the unit, letting gravity carry away any debris. In practice, the pleats make this a time-consuming task. And after a while, crouching on the ground with a spraying hose in one hand and stabilizing/positioning the cartridge with the other hand makes every minute feel like an hour.

I quickly learned that having spare cartridge on hand is a good idea. Swapping cartridges handling the rest of the maintenance to bring the filter system back online only takes several minutes, leaving one free to concentrate on the cartridge.

Filter Flosser
Filter Flosser. Quality made from aluminum, but not very effective. Click the image for an enlarged view and you’ll see why.

Over the years I’ve tried several tools and tricks. I first rigged a stand from PVC tubing to orient and support the cartridge at a comfortable height and angle. (It doubles as a towel rack poolside. Or maybe the towel rack doubles as the work stand?) Water everywhere! Cleaning was much more effective because it freed a hand to spread the pleats. But there sure are a lot of pleats and by the end of the job my fingers were raw! The media, it turns out, is kind of abrasive. I tried a tool called the Filter Flosser (inset), designed to concentrate a water blast between the pleats . That’s a pricey tool that’s not very effective. I even tried letting the media dry out, cleaning it with a jet of air from my shop compressor. That beat my fingers up even worse, took about as long as the garden hose and wasn’t as effective.

Enter the Aqua•Comb!

aquacomb

This awesome little unit caught my eye at the local Pinch-A-Penny, where I pick up chemicals and what have you. The guy behind the counter (who happens to own the store [at the time of writing – it’s a franchise and he sold it]) told me that he bought one for himself and it works great.

I thought the price was somewhat high for plastic. But it really does work, saves a ton of time, uses less water, and makes way less mess. Okay, the tag says “…as little as 5 minutes” so it could be more – and it is. But still, nowhere near the time it took by hand. The bottom line? Worth it!

Why? The comb teeth, for one. They get between the pleats, way down deep, and they save your fingers. The water jets are fewer and, thus, more powerful. It’s easy to direct the jets down for optimal water flow as the comb teeth provide access between the pleats. For complete coverage you do need to follow the instructions, but overall it’s so fast that what reads like repeat work really isn’t.

This tool – along with its derivative products – is going to make the inventor a well-deserved bundle of cash! What’s more, it’s an American company, making products from USA sourced material with American labor. Which is more than Harley-Davidson can say.

Here’s their website, go see for yourself. If you have a pool or spa using cartridge filters – or a horse or dog (use your imagination!) – and you do your own labor then you probably need this product.

Blather

Thor is Dead – Well, Maybe Not

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Way back in 2008 Pam​ was outgrowing her computer, a P4-based HP laptop. Yeah, right. Remember those ‘desktop replacement’ laptops? Lots of power (well, for its day) but it must’ve weighed ten pounds. With a power brick that was about the size of a real brick. Yeah, you remember.

So I built her a desktop. Kick-ass (well, for its day) dual core Intel processor, three huge hard drives, gobs of memory, rockin’ graphics card to drive the bleedin’ edge HP monitor she saw at a Digital Life show… She named it Thor, and it was good.

Over the years Thor got his share of tweaks and minor upgrades. New drives here, more and faster memory there, but substantially the same old box. Fast-forward to today.

hqdefaultThor’s been feelin’ the weight of the ages, actin’ flakey, a little unstable.

The guy in the brown truck brought some stuff yesterday afternoon. Motherboard, CPU, memory, power supply rated for the Intel Haswell chips… Almost a quarter of the cost was covered by rebates and other incentives. Free shipping. No sales tax.

Pam named it Kermit.

Kermit’s just burning in now. In a couple of weeks I’ll start messing around. Clocks, timings, and so on, tuning for performance. But for now, so far, so good.

So where’s my geek hat… Windows 10 activation/licensing was an issue, for a while. I was a little worried going in. Thor was on Windows 7, caught the free upgrade to Windows 10 back in July. No Key. What was gonna happen when the box booted? Kermit booted to a non-activated state and subsequent boots loading drivers and such remained non-activated. But after loading chipset drivers – the motherboard was WAY different – Windows 10 came up fully activated once again. Symantec activation and licensing was another hurdle. (Disclosure: We run their security product on our Windows desktops here, I recommend ’em and buy OEM licenses in bulk.) What happened was the existing license pretty much evaporated and jumped to an unused license in my pool of unused seats. I had a conversation with the folks at Symantec (online chat with ‘Ace’, actually – ‘Ace’ probably has too many consonants in his real name) and put the licensing right. No other gotchas so far.

So, what of Thor? Probably… clean him up a little, pull a chassis out of the back, stuff in some drives, install a Linux server image, and put him to work. No rest for the weary here; earn yer fuckin’ keep!

Blather

Dodge Dart

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When I was in my twenties I went through one of my car-less periods, only a motorcycle for basic transport. Rain or shine, winter or summer, I rode. Jerry, a guy I knew, felt bad for me one wintry day. He gave me a car.

I don't recall the year, but it may have looked something like this. Certainly not as clean.
I don’t recall the year, but it may have looked something like this. Certainly not as clean.

It was an old Dodge Dart. I don’t recall the year. If you’re anywhere near my age you’ve probably seen thousands upon thousands of these old Dodge Darts on the road. They were bulletproof: slant-six engine; three-speed on the column; torsion-bar suspension; bench seats complete with the saggy back rest. This one was blue. The interior was all musty from sitting in Jerry’s mom’s backyard for months and months. (She may have pressured him to get it out of there, helping lead to my good fortune.)

I remember when Jerry bought the Dodge. He wasn’t much of a mechanic and he had asked for my help with its assessment. “The clutch is slipping some,  you’ll need to replace it eventually. But otherwise it’s reasonable.” I think he paid a couple hundred for it.

When I got my hands on that old Dodge the clutch was still slipping some. The engine had two operating temperatures: hotter than hell, and hotter than hotter than hell. Coolant boiled out regularly; the water jugs in the backseat were a permanent fixture. But that ol’ engine never faltered, not once. In fact, it always delivered excellent heat. And judging by the sludge in the crankcase I don’t think Jerry ever got around to changing the oil in the couple of years he had it. I know I didn’t.

I used to have fun with that slippery clutch! I knew a new friction plate would be cheap and easy to install. It became something of a game to see how much abuse the poor little clutch could take. I’d wind that little engine for all it was worth and sidestep the pedal just to catch a whiff of the burning plate.

I was using that very technique to enter the highway, pulling out of a local titty bar one afternoon, when the clutch signalled it had finally had just about enough. The sound was odd and clunky – not good at all. A bit of friction remained, though, and the car lurched ahead. I didn’t dare touch the pedal during the short ride home.

The decision had been a sound one. The very next pedal depression was its last. Oh, the pedal would move alright, but it no longer mattered. Engine on or off, pedal or not, any gear could be selected at will while the car no longer moved on its own.

So the next weekend I picked up a friction plate, release bearing, and other assorted parts and set to work. The drivetrain and transmission came out easy enough. But what remained of that poor clutch was a sight to behold. Some dust and shredded friction material along with some broken metal fell out of the housing to the asphalt. It was one of those moments that fairly begged for a digital camera. But this was WAY before that technology became ubiquitous. In short order the new clutch was again transferring engine power to the transmission!

I was working in Bridgeport, Connecticut at the time and Monday morning I set out from my New Jersey home with confidence. With a week’s worth of clothing (and several water jugs) in the backseat, all was well with the world and the ride up Route 95 went without incident. But as I reached the job site there was a mighty clunk from the front end as the left front quarter sagged nearly to the ground. A quick look confirmed my suspicion: the torsion bar had broken free, its mount in the frame rusted out.

At the end of the day, before I checked into my hotel, I found a salvage yard and limped the old Dodge to its final resting place.

The yard operator paid me just about enough to cover my clutch parts.

Blather

Poison Ivy

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I never had poison ivy, never in my life. I could handle the stuff, nothing. “Lucky you,” the doc said when I asked, “you’re just immune.” Until that time back in 2001…

poison-ivyMy dad had two rows hedges he wanted removed. There was plenty of poison ivy in those hedges, which is one of the reasons he wanted ’em out. When he trimmed ’em he’d get some poison ivy for his trouble. I told him I’d handle it.

So one morning I set to work. I crawled under each bush, wrapping the bottom with my trusty tow strap. Attached the loose end to the front of my Jeep and yanked the thing out by the roots. Then on to the next. One after another, about 80+ linear feet all told. Some came out easy, some not so, requiring more wrestling to re-attach the strap and/or dig with a shovel or pickaxe. Then haul it all out to the street by the armload Sweaty, dirty work it was.

The shower felt pretty good.

By nightfall the itching and oozing had set in bigtime. I woke up looking like the Michelin man.

I figured it’d go away pretty quick. After all, I was immune. I figured wrong.

After a couple of days of agony I dropped in on the local doc. He walked into the examining room, took one look, turned and left without a word. Came back with shots and gave me a prescription for 15 days of prednisone (ultra-high dose immediately, then very high and tapering off in five-day increments). Hydroxyzine hydrochloride, too, several times a day for the duration. And finally, some kind of voodoo ointment (Diprolene AF) to help combat the external symptoms.

“But I’ve always been immune! WTF??”

“No more,” he told me, “those days are over for you. You got yourself one severe overdose.”

Over the next couple of weeks my skin slowly dried up as the itching and oozing subsided. And I put on a good fifteen pounds, too, because I ate everything in sight. I was famished-hungry 24/7. Fucking steroids.

And yes, today I’m sensitive to the damned plant. Not as bad as some, but enough that I treat it with respect.

Blather

Windows 10 Upgrade – Follow-Up #1

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I planned to follow-up the first article after about a week but you know how that goes sometimes…

New oddity with Windows 10. Since it has to do with wi-fi connectivity it could be vitally important for some, so here goes.

Basically, IPv6 works perfectly but IPv4 does not – at least not completely, and at least not for me. In the context of the web, it means that any site that’s IPv4-only becomes pretty much unreachable. That’s a lot of the web!

Here’s how I discovered it. I’ve had wire line phone trouble over the past few days. Interestingly (and thankfully!) my ADSL (1 pair of 2 coming into my home) remained fine while my dial tone went away. The voice pair indicated itself as permanently in-use and the pair at the demarc, when I tested, indicated reverse polarity. Today a tech came out, verified that the problem was on their end, and went to work.

He disconnected me out at the pedestal while he worked so I figured I’d simply use my smartphone’s hotspot. I use the feature often enough because it speeds my Internet connection by a factor of 35 or so over my wired ADSL connection. But this was the first time I needed to use it since Porky’s Windows 10 upgrade.

The hotspot connected straight away. I pointed my browser at the host I was working on and it reported ‘no connection’. I gave Google a quick ping and it answered – with its IPv6 address. I gave my target host a ping and it didn’t answer at all. I forced an IPv4 ping to Google (using ping’s -4 flag) and it, too, refused to answer.

I probed Porky’s network configuration for a while but haven’t come up with anything definitive yet. Until I do, the Windows 10 upgrade for the TwoFace2, our Surface Pro, is off the table. We use that little box often when we’re out and about at client sites and stuff, getting Internet through our smartphones when we do. Having that not work, or work only with IPv6 hosts, is not an option.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, the tech located two separate problems (!) with my voice pair between here and the CO, some 12,000+ feet away. (“Probably all this rain,” he said, “or maybe squirrels. Kill ’em if you see ’em, okay?”) He said he reassigned me a clean pair which restored my dial tone. I resisted the temptation to bitch about their antique DSLAM and just thanked him instead.

Shortly afterward the skies opened up. It’s the rainy season, after all.

Blather

Windows 10 Upgrade

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Like millions of others, I’ve been running Windows 10 in a non-production environment for months and months. Mostly on virtual machines, the experience has been… pretty good!

But all the playing in the world is no substitute for a live update to a production OS running a production application load. Here are my experiences with Porky, my work-a-day desktop. Porky’s no slouch in the performance department. As we like to say sometimes, your mileage may vary.Windows 10 logo

Getting Ready
For those wanting to jump right in Microsoft has provided a Media Creation Tool. The tool handles the download for your chosen Windows 10 version and produces either an ISO file or a bootable USB thumb drive. I initially chose both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 10 Pro versions and elected to produce an ISO file. To my dismay, the result was a file that’s too big to burn to DVD. Bummer, intermediate files are cleared when you finish with the tool so I couldn’t simply make the bootable USB stick without another lengthy download. The moral is that unless you enjoy a blazing, unmetered Internet connection, choose carefully when running the tool.

Use the resulting ISO or USB stick to either upgrade OR do a clean install. This is important: to upgrade your license key and activate Windows 10 you must UPGRADE your already installed, qualified Windows version FIRST. Do that by running Setup from the media. After you’ve upgraded and activated, if you wish, you can use the same media to do a clean install by booting it. Activate your clean install using your upgraded license key.

The remain preparation was simple. Over the past week or so I’ve reviewed applications, drivers, and so on, and upgrading/updating where necessary. And just before I imaged the boot drive. I verified and tested the image. Then I backed up Porky’s data drive array to an external drive. If Windows 10 left a smoking hole in my floor my data would still be safe.

Upgrade Duration
The upgrade took a while, which was a surprise. Not counting the download over my coffee-stirrer of an Internet pipe, upgrading my test environments – and the releases came hot-and-heavy toward the end – took only tens of minutes. Porky, by contrast, took well over an hour to complete. What’s more, there were a few periods of inactivity where progress appeared to stop altogether. If I had less patience I might have bailed. Instead I rode it out. Eventually a desktop appeared, sorta.

What’s this? VGA?
Porky settled into its first Windows 10 desktop in VGA mode, using only one monitor! The screaming fan of the mid-range Nvidia card was the clue and Device Manager confirmed that Microsoft had inserted their own generic display driver. A 280+ MB download from Nvidia plus a bit of fiddling fixed that.

Sleep
It was getting pretty late; the sun would be up soon. Even though Porky’s cold starts are lightning fast I use S3 sleep for a week or so at a time, which makes starts near instantaneous. Bump the mouse and it’s ready to work by the time my ass hits the chair. So that’s what I did in Windows 10.

When I returned to the office, coffee in hand, Porky was awake. Fans were screaming (not a good sign), the keyboard backlight was dark, and both keyboard and mouse were unresponsive. I leaned on the power button and Porky went down hard. I counted ten and powered up.

What the??? It was almost as though S3 sleep had worked after all!

Something’s flakey with recovering from the S3 low-power state. I’m not sure what. But I’ll be cold starting Porky until I get it sorted.

Start
I’m already used to the new Start menu, but that didn’t prepare me for the devastation the upgrade would bring. I’ve used the non-desktop, tiled interface in windows 8.1 as nothing more than an application launcher. I grouped my typical application loads together and my scroll finger had learned to horizontally move to the correct group. Finding things was easy!

The new Start menu seemed to have been filled by madmen on drugs. Finding stuff will be a pain in the ass until I could get organized. And sometimes, stuff just seemed to be missing altogether…

Missing Applications?
SmartFTP was the first of the missing. After confirming that it was still installed I ran a Repair sequence with its installer to bring it back. The installer complained, leaving a blank desktop in its wake. Via Task Manager I ran explorer.exe to get it back. The SmartFTP client runs, but it’s got some visual artifacts and the interface has some glitches. I guess the vendor will be updating that sucker pretty soon.

Have other applications fallen off the Start menu? Dunno, time will tell.

email
It’s no secret that I’m a heavy user of the venerable Eudora email client. It worked great in my test environments so I expected no problems. One click and the mail flowed.

Eudora hasn’t been maintained in nearly a decade. Kudos to its development team. The old girl lives on!

The first email check of the day usually brings me a bunch of stuff to do so I busied myself with that.

Performance
Microsoft has managed to do it again. I said before: Porky’s no slouch. Yet every (modern) Windows upgrade - 7 to 7SP1 to 8 to 8.1 to 8.1 Upgrade 1 to (now) 10 – has brought a noticeable performance boost. I’ll take it.

Other Weirdnesses
I’m only mentioning  odd stuff I notice. If I don’t mention it here then either I don’t use it or it seems okay.

SmartFTP I covered earlier.

Microsoft Word put itself through a series of gyrations with dialogues popping up and going away faster than they could be read. But that was just once. Thereafter it launched just fine. This was version 2010, by the way. I’ve seen no compelling reason to upgrade Office.

Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended requested a Repair process when first launched. It took a while and asked for a reboot afterward. This is version 9, by the way. Acrobat’s expensive and this one works for me. The Repair sequence, available from the Help menu, took care of it. I can remember needing to do this before but can’t remember when or why, and I’m too lazy to search the system notebooks.

Cold starts will sometimes fail to load the driver for the Ethernet hardware on my motherboard. Porky’s cabled directly to my router through 1 of 2 available Ethernet ports on my motherboard. The port in use identifies itself as an Intel I210. The driver identifies itself as an Intel driver version 12.12.50.6. Near as I can tell, this is the latest and greatest, the Intel site shows nothing newer for Windows 10. The problem shows as a ‘no network’ condition, in Network Connections the adapter shows as Disabled and won’t Enable. In Device Manager, Update Driver Software finds a local driver, loads it, and the connection sets itself up straight away.

Conclusion
So far, this is less than a half day of experience following my Windows 10 upgrade. A few inconveniences, no showstoppers. I have yet to exercise the new stuff. This article is basically in the name of remaining productive, to help you decide whether to go ahead with your upgrade or wait it out a little.

Typos, bad grammar, and all that crap are my own. In the interest of speed, hey, you get what you pay for.

Blather

Selective Service

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A friend recently asked…

I was wondering if you had to register for the draft, or you’re in that “gap” group where Selective Service was doing next to nothing? At one time, some of us had to show younger co-workers what a draft card looked like and explain it! You’re younger than I am but maybe not THAT young.

I DID have to register.

I was designated 1S because I was still in high school. Vietnam was in full swing and I watched a number of my older friends leave to serve. (Some made it home whole, some not so whole, and some never made it back at all.) During my final year, 1973, the draft was still going strong. I had left home that spring and as school wound down I was watching that lottery stuff pretty carefully. I’d soon go from a safe 1S to a prime 1A target. Now, I was a skinny little shit, not especially keen on combat. Having already lost friends there, frankly, it scared me. There was this other, fairly new designation – Conscientious Objector, or 1AO – that one could apply for, and I tried for that. As a 1AO, if inducted, I’d serve but wouldn’t be assigned to active combat. There was a bit of paperwork, I collected letters from teachers, church… wherever I could… to substantiate my application. It didn’t work. I became a 1A. Then, in the lottery, my number: 26! It looked like I’d be going in. I waited for my letter. It never arrived and in August the whole thing shut down. The active draft was one of the first things to stop, it was such a political hot button. I’m fairly certain I got very, very drunk when the news hit.

I learned, as I filled in the gaps of this story, that the groundwork for an all-volunteer U.S. military began as early as the end of January, 1973, although it took a while for the shutdown of the draft to actually happen. It leads me to wonder how many young bodies inducted after Laird’s signature but before the last kid shipped out didn’t come home…

I’m pretty sure I still have my draft card somewhere but I can’t recall seeing it for a very long time. It’s probably in that file of papers I dutifully (and securely) care for when I relocate. Stuff goes into that store after which it seldom sees the light of day.

Funny thing. Registration was compulsory when my kid came of age. It was easy, not like it was when I registered and had to personally appear at an office downtown. The process may have actually started with something as simple as an extra checkbox on his DS11 when he upgraded to an ‘adult’ passport at 16. Shortly after he turned 18 he received a letter containing his registration information. There’s no active draft today but his registration card is, actually, a draft card, should the government choose to start drafting again.

[sigh] Over the decades, like many others, my views on military service have changed a great deal.

I haven’t thought about those experiences for a long time. That was a good question, thanks for asking.

Blather

Inventory

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It’s been a long time – maybe too long – since I took inventory of the boxes we use regularly for various purposes around the house.

Except for the DOS box, and maybe the AutoCAD box, these are all in use with frequencies ranging from 24/7 to at least weekly. Omitted are the embedded things, iPods and so on. Making this list just now was a good exercise that surprised me. I mean, no wonder people look at me funny.

(no name) – MS DOS 6.22
Exists solely to run VisiCalc, the very first electronic spreadsheet that the world had ever seen. I fire it up now and again for folks to show ’em just what computing used to be. It has no name because, well, machines didn’t need names back then. You turned ’em on, used ’em, turned ’em off. Pulling the plug was every bit as good as thumbing the power switch.

change – Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 – 32-bit
This laptop runs software that I need to use in weird places, like out in the garage tuning motorcycles. It got its name because I bought it with pocket change. I told the story in another post.

coco – IOS, version 8 I suppose, too lazy to look
An iPad tablet. It’s good for reading magazines or looking something up quickly at the dinner table or controlling the TV. Bummer Safari sucks so bad.

darthvader - Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 2 – 32-bit
The media client that lives out by the pool, so we have cool tunes out there when we get tired of the radio.

dbox – GNU/Linux 3.13.0-36-generic x86_64
A VirtualBox host machine.

family – GNU/Linux 3.2.0-69-generic-pae i686
A secure, encrypted file server where the family’s data jewels are stored.

hydra - Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 – 32-bit
Out in the garage, this runs a long-term project 24/7 – when it’s up. Presently it’s down, though, because a fan protecting its I/O hub is threatening failure and needs a little lube. I’ll get to it.

isolation – Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 – 32-bit
A sacrificial machine, stuff that needs testing and vetting in a Windows environment isolated from everything – EVERYTHING else – runs here first. Air-gap stuff. Easy to wipe and restore to a known good image.

jesus – Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 – 64-bit
My son’s gaming rig and desktop. It’s slightly dated now, but as we built it and installed things, stuff completed faster than we thought possible. We’d look again, and yup, it was done, leading us to exclaim “Jesus!” The name stuck.  UPDATE - FEBRUARY 2013  jesus died, according to the BIOS status LEDS, of a processor initialization failure. jesus was replace by lucifer.

lucifer – Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 – 64-bit
Essentially jesus with a new motherboard, CPU, and memory. My son’s gaming rig and desktop.

macnam – GNU/Linux 3.2.0-69-generic-pae i686
A MySQL database server. Firesign Theatre fans will recognize the name.

magic – GNU/Linux 3.13.0-36-generic i686
The family’s intranet server. Holds subscription material, a software library, and so on. A basic LAMP server where, sometimes, a bit of Web development gets its start before being deployed elsewhere.

merc - Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 – 32-bit
An old, small HP netbook with a great keyboard. I’ll write with this out on the deck because the keyboard is so good and the battery life is measured in days.

minecraft  – GNU/Linux 2.6.38-16-generic-pae i686
Duh, it’s a minecraft server, what did you think it was?

overkill - Windows 7 Home Service Pack 1 – 64-bit
Used exclusively for secure communications with entities that require that sort of thing. Well-patched, no email, no browsing, no nothing except its one single purpose.

porky – Windows 8.1 Professional Update 1 – 64-bit
My primary desktop. It replaced whisky, the desktop I blew up with a ham-handed move with its internal power cables – while it was running. Oops.

rdnzl - Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 – 32-bit
An old, old laptop, usually hardwired to the DSL modem because sometimes the modem needs a direct connection to recover when  it misbehaves. On the other hand, just the other week it came in handy to run some old proprietary software to collect audio files from a Sony dictation device. You just never know. Frank Zappa fans will recognize the name.

sheepdip - Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 – 32-bit
Runs AutoCAD Architect, with which I heavily modified the design of a home. We presently live in the result of that effort. Named for a blended  Scotch whisky.

showtime – GNU/Linux 3.2.0-69-generic-pae i686
A media server. Music, video, and more.

success – GNU/Linux 3.2.0-69-generic-pae i686
A QuickBooks server supporting the business. Does double-duty as a file server for the business, too.

thor - Windows 8.1 Professional Update 1 – 64-bit
Pam’s desktop. Next in line for a refresh, the overclocked Intel quad-core’s getting a little long in the tooth.

twoface2 - Windows 8.1 Professional Update 1 – 64-bit
A first generation Microsoft Surface Pro, this is the travel box. Good enough for me and/or Pam to do just about anything when we’re on the road.

udesk – GNU/Linux 3.2.0-63-generic-pae i686
Just a plain ol’ Linux desktop, when I’m home and a Windows desktop doesn’t quite cut it.

win7-32 - Windows 7 Professional Service Pack 1 – 32-bit
For running stuff that I don’t want cluttering up a work-a-day machine. These days, that’s photo gallery processing, mostly. Naming this one wasn’t one of my most creative moments.

winnie – Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 – 32-bit
An unsupported holdout. Then again, there’s software that modern OSs won’t cope with, or have no modern analog, or I just don’t care to upgrade. That stuff runs here. One good example is when I need to pull something from an Outlook message store; I’ll be damned if I want Outlook near anything valuable.

Blather

Pocket Change

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I used to collect my pocket change at the end of the day and dump it into a jar. When the jar filled I’d roll the contents and and put the rolls in a box on a shelf in the closet. That went on for a long, long time.

One day I bought a laptop with it.

Well, it wasn’t actually a one-for-one exchange. It’s even better than that. I ordered the laptop, paid with a credit card. And when the bill came, I deposited the rolls into my bank.

I took ’em to the bank in a smallish cardboard box that weighed a good hundred and fifty pounds.

When I entered the bank I knew it was going to get a little weird. I warned the receptionist that I needed to deposit a large amount of coin. Then I warned the guard that I’d be back in a minute with a small, heavy cardboard box – and a hand-truck. They summoned a person with a cart and a shitload of those little aluminum roll-counting trays. When I returned we set to work.

I deposited something exceeding two grand.

Every computer in the house gets assigned a name – for life – when it gets access to my network. The new laptops name?

Change

Still have the thing, too. It’s resting in the closet, pretty much unused. Not too far from some rolled coin.

Blather

Lizard – –

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We have lots of lizards in Florida. Today, one less.

Pam had been out in the driveway hosing down a trashcan. We like to keep ’em clean – bears, y’know – and Pam was handling that chore while I was in the garage installing new foot controls on her motorcycle. She called me outside.

Pam was saying something about the hose and the water and how it wasn’t flowing, and my mind raced ahead. I was thinking the worst, of course: plumbing failure, well pump failure, and so on. I caught myself and tuned back in. Pam had checked the hose for kinks and, finding none, removed the high-pressure nozzle. And the root-cause of the flow issue had become painfully obvious.

A lizard apparently entered the garden hose. Then Pam came along, connected the hose to a spigot and added the high-pressure nozzle in order to work on the trashcan.

The lizard was undoubtedly quite surprised by the face full of water.

The exit hole of the high-pressure nozzle is no more than 3/16 of an inch when fully open. The considerably larger lizard made a valiant effort at getting through that tiny hole, tail end first. It failed. But along the way it managed to slow the flow of water to a near stop.

And that’s where I came in.

Lizzie was in pretty bad shape, as you might imagine. I tried, for a bit, to clear the nozzle. But it quickly became clear that tools would be needed and it wouldn’t be the most pleasant of jobs.

I suggested the medium-pressure nozzle and Pam resumed her work. I left the lizard-clogged nozzle in the grass and resumed my work.

With that move the lizard assumed its place in the food chain. By tomorrow or the day after, I figure, the nozzle will be clear.

No pictures because, well, y’know, it’s really kinda gross. I’ve got no qualms dispatching insects but dead lizards are sort of sad.

Blather

Flipflops

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Florida kills stuff.

I’m convinced. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe the moisture, I don’t know,

Dead flipflops exhibiting 'talking shoe' syndrome.
Dead flipflops exhibiting ‘talking shoe’ syndrome.

but it’s something. Stuff rusts that never did before. Stuff rots, falls off, just stops working… you name it.

A week or so back my flipflops failed. Notice the ‘s’? As in plural? Yeah, both of ’em. At the same time. In the same way. The soles began to delaminate. At first I thought I had stumbled over some irregularity but no, they were falling apart. The classical ‘talking shoe’.

“But they’re nearly new!” I complained. “And they’re the best damned flipflops I’ve ever had!”

“Bullshit,” Pam scoffed. “they aren’t new. You’ve had them for years.”

They came from Land’s End so I checked the records. Pam was right, of course. I bought them on July 29th… 2006.

I remembered thinking, back in 2006, that at $24 those were some pretty expensive flipflops. I guess after having a zillion pair of those plastic $2 flipflops they were pricey.

New flipflops, just delivered.
New flipflops, just delivered.

I began thinking about what I might do… contact cement, glue, epoxy…

“Just get some new ones already!” Pam advised.

She was already at her computer. Land’s End still had ’em, but what was once cloth or some sort of synthetic was now leather. I braced myself.

$59! But wait, they were on sale for $29. She placed the order.

And today Dan, our mail delivery guy, brought ’em.

They’re comfy and look like they’ll last forever. And they’d better. Let’s see… 2006 price divided by… Yeah, these should last until around April 2034. Later, if you adjust for inflation…

But Florida kills stuff. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Blather, Read It

BASIC at 50

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BASIC is 50 years old!

BASIC was my first computer language. I already had it in my bag of tricks when I bought my first computer, an Apple ][. It cost about $1,400 new, a huge amount of money back then. With that I became the first person I knew that owned their own computer!

My friend Joe who, to this day, doesn’t dick around much with social media, had been doing some CompSci work at college. He couldn’t understand why I’d spend so much on such a bitty box. What the hell could it possibly be good for? He came over to see the thing for himself.

Joe and pulled our first all-nighter programming Conway’s Life – in BASIC – into the box. I think the inspiration came from an article in Scientific American about cellular automata. (There may have been some burnt vegetable matter involved, as well.) By dawn we were watching patterns of dots crawl around on the screen. But hey, they were OUR dots, playing by OUR rules!

(Pam saw it! We go back *way* further than that. I doubt it made much of an impact on her; it would be a long time indeed before computers became generally useful enough for non-geeks to take seriously…)

Soon Joe had an Apple of his own.

We each found our way into lucrative careers in technology that have lasted to this very day. Our professional paths have intersected several times over the decades.

But I doubt either of us have programmed a single line of BASIC for a very, VERY long time. Lemme give it a shot.

1 PRINT “HELLO WORLD”

Now go read this great article from Dartmouth, where BASIC got its start. (Eh, the original link died. This one is an okay substitute, especially if you watch the video.)

Blather

Sneakers

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I had a pair of sneakers like these once. Well, okay, maybe they weren’t Converse – dunno if they were in business back then – but they were bright red and high. I was just a kid.

Had this bicycle, too. A righteous chopper, it was. Cobbled together out of a couple of junk frames and whatever other parts could be scrounged. Amazing what you can do with no cash, some imagination, and dad’s welder (when no one was lookin’). No brakes on that SOB. Stopping was an exercise in contorting one’s body enough to jam the bottom of a sneaker-clad foot against the front wheel.

I think you see where this is going. The sneakers didn’t last too long at all. The left one quickly got a groove worn clean through as I tried to check my speed going down the hill where Adam’s Lane crossed the Northeast Corridor. Delivered a nasty burn that, if memory serves, took an awful long time to heal.

Mom was pissed. So was Dad, when he got home from work. New sneakers, ruined. Bein’ where I ought not be. The illicit welding of bicycle parts of questionable origin. A burnt foot bottom that made me walk funny. It was that last that was the tip-off. Life wasn’t good.

I wore those sneakers, hole and all, for a long time. Must’ve been a lesson in there somewhere ‘cuz I still remember it pretty well.

Blather

Whisky Death

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And not just an ordinary death, either. I killed Whisky, and I killed it but good. Here’s the story…

Whisky’s – er, was – my desktop computer. One of the early Core-i7 systems back in 2009, it rocked rather nicely and handled anything and everything I threw at it. Okay, I hear ya: by today’s standards it was certainly getting a little long in the tooth, but I didn’t care. It still ran like the day I built it. Until March 27.

That morning I was running through the logs, see. We run lots of machines here and I like to keep tabs on ’em. And I found that one of the terrabyte drives, an old Seagate, half of a mirror of some rather important data, had failed. I knew the day would come eventually. Over a year ago the drive reallocated a couple of sectors, but the count was stable at 2 and never rose. I’d figured it’d start throwing more and I’d notice and replace it. And every time we’d be buying drives for this or that I’d shrugged it off. “Next time.” So there wasn’t a hot spare on the shelf.

So instead of getting on with my morning I set out to protect the data. I pulled a couple of other drives and a SATA card – spares for a Linux server – from the shelf and went to install ’em in Whisky’s cavernous case. The plan was to build a new mirror array and copy the data to it. But Windows was balky, seeing the card but not the drives attached to it. Hmm.

Who let the smoke out?
Not Whisky, just a representative image. But the damage is just as real.

The data cables were known-good but the modular power cable came from the parts box. So I grabbed another, plugged it into the power supply and the other end into yet another unmounted and unattached drive, figuring to see if it would spin up.

And that’s when the smoke came out.

I heard it and smelled it and nearly hit my head on the underside of the desk as all the internals went dark.

With eSATA you can do that, hotplug, the power connectors are such that you can apply and remove power without trouble. Not so with a regular raw SATA Molex. Clearly, I hadn’t paid enough attention.

At that point I wasn’t sure what had died.

But data data recovery was most important. I walked the good mirror half into the garage where there’s a project running on an old AMD box. Hey, any place where there’s some space, some power, and a network jack’s fair game, right? Windows 7 would be able to make sense of the mirror. Something more than an hour later the data was safe on our internal network, not a single byte of lossage.

I started troubleshooting hardware with the power supply. I found the 12V motherboard 8-pin connector voltage lacking. This is rural Florida and everything isn’t as available as in the northeast. I found a new one, retail, at a store about an hour and a half away. I used the trip wisely, stopping at other stores out in that area: Costco and Ikea.

Later that night I stripped Whisky to the motherboard and attached the new power supply.

I threw the switches. No response at all.

That smoke they put inside this stuff smells. Eau-de-silicon, we call it. It’s an expensive smell.

And that’s how Whisky begat Porky.