Dec.03.2007

interlaced putting up the christmas tree and learning how to run gnuplot from a command file. got gnuplot to read the data from a Tclforawk run and make a plot.... had to do this manually, but the plan is to make this the default process for Tclforawk and get rid of those silly ####### barcharts.

The Salvation Army

you see the SA bellringers in front of stores and in malls every Christmas. probably most people pass them by..... i don't ..... and i almost always drop a $1 or so in the bucket, because ......

a million years ago, i was poor, had 2 infant kids, no furniture, no beds or matresses, no stove or refrigerator (we kept the kids formula in a styrofoam ice chest)..... this is not a joke, and we were not "fashionably poor" .... we were actually poor, because i lost my job for 6 months and we lost what little we had. i bought a stove, some matresses and some curtains i think.

i have kept these receipts in my notebook now for hmmmm....36 years..... and i have been fortunate in that i can still remember (when i now have everything that a person could reasonably want in his life) what life is like for people who have nothing.

i am an extremely fortunate person to have the life i have today .... due to the graces of other people in my life..... hey, it's almost Christmas and i thought i'd put that on the table.

Where my stuff comes from .....

These 3 products were Made with Pride in the United States of America .... (the carpet is from Indonesia, picture taken with a Japanese camera.)

Dec.06.2007

made up the heat transfer final exam, which i will post on the course web page and due back to me via email on monday.

did something i never did before .... exempted 3 students from having to take the exam. they have done so well on the previous assignments, there's no way i could give then less than A even if they bomb this test .... so why put them thru it, right?

found a few more old ID cards.... see above, dec.01

Dec.08.2007

the pond looks kind of Christmas-like today....

Dec.09.2007

after breakfast, mike and me went to the RC car shop .... watched some dirt racing.... getting fired up about this again. must gather up my stuff and figure out where i was 2 years ago!!!

started a page of car pictures.

Dec.10.2007 .... GE strikes again....

Here lies JVM1660WH02
Born April 2005
Died December 2007

called the GE helpless line .... got lost at submenu 3-5-2-7-4 option 4-2 which linked me into a jiffy lube station in downtown Sri Lanka.... they were kind and polite, and offered me a free oil change if i ever visit.

i'd buy a new microwave, but i'll bet my shoes that those wall brackets are GE special and we'd have to chip wall tiles off or add more tiles if we got another model.

Zak is driving me buggy because he is becoming a feline clone of me .... he prowls around the house after me, sticking his sniffing nose in everything and hobbling with a bad right front shoulder.
now he's sniffing the RC car .... and here he comes sniffing the HP-UX station .... then across the keyboard and then off the desk..... the cat's just crazy .... or bored .... or crazy AND bored..... there he goes .... settled in my rare corinthian leather executive swivel-pivotal heated vibrating office chair for a nap.

dumb cat looks damn good in that chair .... he should be running a company somewhere.

deb's upstairs ironing, a pot of my .....ummmm...chicken stew i guess is on the stove and i am ..... obviously....typing.

my students .... 18 out of 19 of them anyway .... got their final exams back to me before the 6:00 deadline ..... the holdout was predictable .... an intelligent but rebellious dude who will not be told when to be creative by the likes of old people like me. it's 6:15PM and he just failed the course..... and i feel worse about it than he does.

getting ready for my JA class, i dredged up the data on the balance of trade in the world today. the USA is the only industrialized country on the planet that buys more stuff than it produces (imports more than exports)....and we get most of our imported goods (in dollar value) from #1 = Canada and #2=China, #3 = Mexico, #4 = Japan.

the pivotal point happened around 1975....

Dec.12.2007

we lived on coney island, in brooklyn, from 1955 - 1960. my parents owned a house there, and it was a prime time in my life.... i went in at 10 and came out at 15. in terms of people and neighbors, it was the supreme place to be.... people were lower middle economic class, form every european and slavik country and everyone spent all their free time out on the stoop (front steps of the house).

i remember hanging out down at the coney island creek and throwing rocks at the water rats as they ran about. this was fun in 1955 or thereabouts. the creek was a pretty smelly pit of slime, but hey where else could you find rats to throw racks at, huh?

this week's new yorker has some things to say about the gowanus canal, which is in upper brooklyn. these are not good tidings, and it's sad to read the words, and in some ways it is extremely disturbing to read this....

this is not some 3rd world country they are talking about .... it's new york city, USA in the year 2007 .... they have to dump chlorine in the water so it will be upgraded to "merely filthy"..... think about that for a few minutes.

JB and me went to best buy today and because of his relentless pressuring me, i caved in and bought myself a digital picture frame (about 4X6 image)..... set it up at home and when debbie came in she got pissed because she had already got me one for christmas..... (which will become my office area frame)..... so now i will have 2 !!

Dec.14.2007

10" of wet snow last night .... G snowblowed the driveway and i shoveled out back.

Louie's front yard from the upper window (effects by the GIMP....)

captain's log supplemental.... G and snowblower worked the driveway and i shoveled out back, deb is still on the phone (getting emotionally set up to go to work until 11PM tonight), i finished my second pot of coffee and can't find any worthy new yorker cartoons to post at the moment..... so here's a picture of my neighbors shovelling (ummm.... artistically enhanced by the GIMP).

for a precarious moment today, safety and caution were thrown to the wind as i insisted on doing this myself...... but the microwave is now up and running.... $135 later.

zak and me got bored after the microwave installation and deb going to work, so we watched Gamera / Saviour about a giant monster turtle who actually saved tokyo from....uhmmm... another monster i forget the name of.... then zak fell asleep and i put up a pot of some kind of soup and wrote an email to L.

dropped wood on the fire and grabbed the leica D2 because i was bored between monster movies.... tonight aint quite the night before christmas, but this is that kind of image. the only gimp-tweaks are the round corners and drop shadow..... the image is right out of the leica.

the short pencil is on the right.

implicitly, then, the long pencil is on the left.

on the topic of boredom, or the appearance of boredom...

(this is a tough write, and i will probably edit it a bunch of times over the next few weeks until i feel it represents how i feel).

M (who worries about me way too much) made a comment at lunch that i refer often to being bored..... that point is correct but somewhat misleading. i am not nearly as bored today as i have been for most of my life, and i am just beginning to recognize that fact. i point out that "i am bored" more than i used to simply because i am more free with my feelings than i used to be.

i have the luxury today of doing whatever i want to do each day, rather than whatever other people require me to do. also, for some uncertain (and irrelevant) reason i started to record my daily activities in these journal pages. and when i write down what i did today and how i felt today, it is kind of a revelation to me each day because i never took the time before to reflect on my days.

and often, what i did today (as i write it all down) .... despite the fact that i had a great time doing whatever it was! .... reads to be "boring" as viewed from my earlier outlook on life. (that's not clear to you but it's clear to me.) and i often feel the need to add a "boring" comment probably in reference to how i used to feel about doing simple things all day.

M should find something else to worry about .... i am fine, and having the best time of my life..... being a crazy old man is developing into my life's great adventure !!

Dec.20.2007

30 minutes at the RC shop with 2 experts tweaking cables and reading instructions off the Airtronics website, and we are ready to rock and roll....

A Better Script (than the one i used before)

.... for resizing a large batch of images and saving them in a different image format (say resize from very large width to 800px and also convert from TIF to jpg)... this is great for getting images ready for digital picture frame with a width say of 800 pixels..... if you leave the images (and file size) large, can't load too many into the picture frame or flash drive, plus the frame resolution drops them to 800px anyway..... might as well do it first and add 10X the number of pictures to the show....

..... this assumes Linux / Unix OS and that imagemagick is loaded on your computer .... if you have 100 images, this'll run in 45 seconds save about 6 hours of scaling each one by photoshop or whatever.

... am dredging up old pictures for my new digital frame gizmo.... this shot goes back maybe 5 years (?) to portland, ME ... nice day trip (overnight maybe)...... kind of similar to the stop me and mike made in concord, NH that day..... not much going on, but nice to be there.

and from Texas ......

Dec.27.2007

played with a chisel this morning and made my first timber and frame style joint (miniature) by hand. this is an incredibly strong joint design .... the load from the horizontal member gets dumped to the vertical member without passing thru nails, screws, rivets or welds (the dowel does not carry load, it simply holds the pieces from sliding) .... its as if the joint was one integral structure .... no wonder those old timber frame houses had to burn down or be disassembled piece by piece .... you can't knock them down !!

the living room blinds broke again ... cheap plastic piece totally disabled the $$$$ mechanism .... major headache... cost me 2+ hours today to work up a repair.

had lunch at the Moose Creek Cafe with Peter B. who is visiting from Boise (I 'da 'ho' ? ) ..... JB was working, so Pete filled in.... the talk drifted to energy (solar, wind, nuclear etc etc) as he is looking at a new energy type venture.... i gave him my lecture to watch the numbers ("the numbers dont lie") rather than listen to the sales pitch (which always lies). if you really want to de-rail a sales talk, sit there punching numbers into your calculator while the person is talking (and watch their confidence wither and their anxiety skyrocket !!).

deb's at work, and the weather sucks.

Dec.30.2007

root beer dates from medieval Europe, when people preferred to drink fermented beverages {smirk} rather than contaminated water. ( honoring tradition, i also prefer fremented beverages to contaminated water.)

in the 1870's, an American pharmacst named Charles Hires brewed up his own version, and that became the basis of what we know today as "root beer".... although there are endless variations.

in fact, i am about to brew my own batch of this wonderful stuff.

[postscript] it is a torment to drink root beer and not eat hot dogs at the same time.

"I wonder what the poor people are doing."

that was one of dad's famous quotes.... we'd be sitting on the front steps ("stoop") or on the porch doing nothing but talking. it'd be raining or wicked hot .... or just a day when it was smart to do nothing.

didn't have enough cash to blow on a wild trip somewhere.

then he'd come out with "I wonder what the poor people are doing right now." .... and we'd all laugh.

it's 11:04PM and it's snowing and i'm going to sleep.... (postprocessing, compliments of the gimp)

as you can see from this 1952 image.... at one point, Dad was a dude and Mom was a babe...