April 2017

sun apr 2
For 41 years, I’ve kept a notebook.
To-do lists. Cool ideas. To-do lists. Project sketches. More to-do lists. First drafts. Drug-induced ramblings. Book suggestions and embarrassing thoughts. You name it: if it went through my head, it went into my notebook.  And somewhere, I’ve got a big cardboard box filled with every spiral-bound notebook I’ve ever filled.
I mention this because I haven’t been using my notebook much lately. When I filled up the last one, I went looking for a new one, and none of the usual places had one the right size.
Grocery store: nothing.
Drug store: nothing.
Staples: nothing.
The only one I could find has an over-sized wire spiral that makes it too big to fit in the canvas notebook cover I use, so I basically stopped writing in my notebook, and I’ve been using post-it notes instead.
It’s kind of a shame. Maybe I should start a blog ? …

wed apr 5
There’s a secret shelf built into the headboard on my bed, good for a coffee cup on Sunday mornings.
I have a secret compartment under the floor in my bedroom closet, big enough for a gun or a couple $1000 in small bills.
I put 4 secret compartments in the cabinet I built for Adam. Too bad the magnetic mechanism that opens them barely works.
And today, I built 2 secret compartments into the luggage boxes on my motorcycle. The way I figure it, if I’m far from home and I get robbed on the road, I’m going to be glad to have a spare key and some spare cash, and a secret place to put them. All it took was some rubber baby buggy bumpers and a sheet of plastic and – presto! – instant false bottoms!
They’re very convincing.

fri apr 7
This morning I went to the dump and, since I was in Stowe, I headed for the Harvest Market, an overpriced deli catering to rich folk and ski bums. Just as I got there, they put out fresh loaves of their ciabatta bread, still hot from the oven. There is Nothing like really good, really fresh bread.
At the other end of the scale, I was digging through a cardboard box in the shop and came across a bag of stale fortune cookies and, since I was starving, I scarfed them down. One of them, I noticed, tasted particularly like cardboard, and then I realized that I’d eaten it fortune and all.

wed apr 12
Last summer, I decided I was tired of tulips.
A couple of years ago, I went hog-wild and bought hundreds of early-, mid-, and late-blooming varieties and planted them in a design that was supposed to be an animated, expanding heart shape, as viewed, over the course of a couple weeks, from the living room window. It was a great idea, but a little too ambitious, and it went over like a lead balloon. The next year, the bulbs bloomed again, but they’d spread, and the design was, shall we say, a little ragged. So last summer, I dug them up and planted them elsewhere.
At least I thought I did. I’d spent several hours on my knees in the dirt, and sifted the top 8″ of soil thru my fingers, pulling out every bulb I could find. And now it’s spring time again, and it’s pretty clear that I missed as many as I removed, because the whole area I dug up is full of random tulip sprouts. I shouldn’t complain, because who doesn’t like a splash of vibrant springtime color? It’s kind of an affront, though, to my sense of planning and order, and a reminder that a garden does what it wants to do, and there’s only so much you can do about it.

fri apr 14
I went to the DMV today to renew my drivers license, and it’s apparently been a couple of years, because there’s a retirement home where the DMV used to be. A quick google search on my phone straightened me out, and I headed across town to the new location.
It was Friday, springtime, and apparently the day after the local Driver’s Ed class ended. The place was packed. I took a number and settled in. I’d brought a book, but reading while watching for your number to come up don’t mix, so I people-watched instead. The way it works is: you wait for your number to be called, go to the window, fill out the forms, get your picture taken, and then wait for your new license to get printed. I sat there watching people pick up their new licenses and … every single man took it, looked at it, put it in his pocket, and left. Every single woman, though, took it, looked at it, groaned, and left.
I was there for about 90 minutes, watching the numbers flash by.
B72 at window 2.
C21 at window 7.
A94 at window 19.
And I got to thinking: what’s going to happen after the A’s get to 99? Will it cycle back to 0? Or will it go to 3 digits? The suspense was killing me, and I thought about sticking around if they called my number before they got to A99.  (They went to 3 digits.)

mon apr 17
I made some progress on c3pr last week and – sort of – got the per-frame image processing time down from a couple hundred mS to around 20 mS. This is a big deal, and I had to sit back and ask myself: what’s the next ‘big thing’ I need to focus on? And I decided I need to finally get my feet wet with 3D mechanical CAD.
At IBM, everything I did was 2D, and there’s a limited correspondence between how you model something flat vs in space. I guess it’s time to learn, because a pencil and paper is going to run out of gas fast.
Alas! It seems that learning new tricks is not one of my strong points, and I quickly got frustrated because nothing seems to work “like it ought to.” In desperation, I found a series of tutorial videos on you-tube, and I’ve set myself a goal of watching 4 videos per night. Because my hearing sucks, even good video soundtracks are dicy, and this series of lessons is narrated by a Portuguese guy with an accent, so I’ve been using the auto-generated closed captions. The CAD program I bought is called Varicad, and the captions never get the name right. It refers to itself as ‘vera cod’, ‘very card’. ‘vertical’, and even ‘vodka’. Combine that with the way it stumbles over the rest of the words, and it’s been a pretty tough lesson, but I’m still learning a lot.
Remember Dragon Software’s “Naturally Speaking?” Complete with the tangle of speaker and headset cords? Artificial Intelligence has come a long way, but it’s got a long way to go.

tue apr 18
I think I may have over-done it today.
I’ve been installing flooring next door and, because they’re wide pine boards, they need to be face nailed: 3 nails every 16″ or so, using cut nails, which have a blunt tip and a taper which makes them harder to pound, the deeper they go. For basic installation, I put in 1 nail, and spread the work over a week or 10 days. But today I went back and put in the rest of the nails. I’m guessing I put in 20# of nails and, if you do the math, that comes out to about 10000 hammer blows.
My knees hurt. My hips hurt. My abs hurt. My shoulders hurt. I feel old.

sun apr 23
I went to the dentist and he told me I have “regressed,” and my gums are going downhill.
Apparently it’s not good enough that I’m flossing every day, and he wants me to start going to a periodontist. Fuck that, I told him, but I agreed to go on a 3-month cleaning schedule instead. (I stopped going to the periodontist a few years ago after his building burned to the ground. I swear I had nothing to do with it!) The dentist tells me that my gums were improving back then, but I remember I was also using a WaterPick at the time, so I decided to start using it again.
I dragged it out, dusted it off, filled it up, and plugged it in. It hummed, but nothing came out.
I took it apart, cleaned out the crud, got it working again, and set it up in the bathroom, where I started using it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I don’t exactly fire on all cylinders when I’m sleepy, though, and last night, I knocked it over with my elbow and the entire reservoir of 50/50 Listerine and water fell over and soaked the floor, the rug, and my implant processor. I cleaned everything up and, while the floor smells great, my processor stopped working and, even after drying all night, it was making lots of clicks and staticky noises. So I … took it apart, cleaned out the crud, soaked it in water, and then … dragged out my vacuum pump, dusted it off, filled it with processor pieces, plugged it in, and turned it on. Nothing. I tracked that down to a blown outlet strip, fixed it, ‘cooked’ my earpiece for an hour, and … everything’s fine again. Whew!

wed apr 26
Today, I was cutting grooves in the cabinets for next door when the router bit broke, so I made a quick trip to the hardware store for a new one. They keep them in a locked cabinet, so I went and asked the clerk for help. He walked over to the cabinet, squoze the whole thing till it was out-of-square and the latch popped open, and he says to me: “There you go.”

thu apr 27
If someone were to tell me about a book they were reading in which the human race, after cold war nuclear planetary destruction, was saved by intelligent, tentacled extraterrestrials with gene-manipulation talents, and cross-species inter-breeding played out in such a way that the humans are the bad guys, I’d probably tell them to get a life.
Well I’m here to tell you that Lilith’s Brood, by Octavia Butler, is really good science fiction.

fri apr 28
We feed the cats in separate rooms and we lock Carbon in with her food because she plows through it and then tries to horn in on BZ’s bowl. When Carbon was new, we wanted the 2 cats to be able to see and sniff one another without getting into a fight, so we started off by using a window screen across the doorway to keep them apart, and never got around to trying something more permanent. It took her awhile, but she finally figured out that all she had to do to get out was push it aside, so today when I gave her her breakfast, I just shut the door to keep her in.
That door has an expanded metal grille in it and, when Carbon tried to get it open, her claws got stuck and she was left hanging, helpless, from the door. She had a look on her face that said: “Don’t just stand there. Call the fire department!”