Today was Election Day here in merry Michigan, with lots of things on the ballot and, typically, not many people showing up at the polls. Especially for property tax issues.
It was also a day of confusion, because all our sorry plans went right out the window as the day progressed, and what was supposed to be our busiest day of the week turned into a not-quite-so-busy day due to various cancellations.
I left work early in order to help out at Adam's after-school Lego Club meeting; we're programming Lego Mindstorms, and it was my responsibility to set up some web pages for training the kids to build the basic kits. I left so early from work that I missed the phone call from Cheryl which was to have informed me that Adam was not feeling well, and had gone home early.
Of course, the truth was discovered once I reached the school, but my duty could not be shirked; the web pages must be installed on all of the science lab computers. The other children were expecting it. So the full hour was spent setting up the computers, and then it was time to go home and find out how the boy was doing, before running off to the next errand.
In the rush to get home, the polling place was bypassed, which left a bit of a guilty feeling, but it was our busy day, and there were other things to do - or so I thought.
Actually, it turned out that the other scheduled event was cancelled, and since Adam was not feeling well, he wouldn't be attending Scouts tonight, so that was cancelled as well.
Hoo-whee! A free evening!
Plus it gave me an opportunity to get on down to the polling place and perform my Civic Duty. So I hot-footed it on down to the place and walked into the room and stepped up to the lady behind the table and announced my name -
"Rob Meyer? The Rob Meyer?" she asked.
Puzzled, I nodded. Wondering if perhaps she had heard of me from a neighbor, or a friend at church, or a fellow employee, or perhaps a local law enforcement officer who had a warrant out for my arrest.
"I've been waiting all day for you! Your wife left this message when she was here." And she handed me the note I was supposed to get earlier that afternoon.
Adam has gone home sick and will not be in Lego Club today.
Oh. Thanks.
For a moment, just the teensiest slice of time imaginable, I had been Somebody. I had been Famous. My Name was Known, my company in demand, my presence sought.
Now I'm back to normal again, just me. Dad. Hubby. The guy who brings home the paycheck. With a free evening, an evening to take the other kids outside so their poor, sick brother can get some rest.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Resistance is Futile ... or is it Effort?
Sunday afternoons are generally reserved for quiet reflection on the state of our souls. The childrens' souls are generally in a state of needing to go outside and use up all that excess energy, which they did with remarkable success today, only needing to be tossed out again two or three times for violating the No-Noise Zoning Laws. Cheryl contemplated the some cross-stitch and some Bible study workbooks and some Harry Potter (I lost count of how many times she's read the books...) while watching the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice (one of our absolute favorites) and may even have reviewed the interior surface of her eyelids for a short while, whilst I was busily involved in making copies of a design document for Adam's Tuesday afternoon Lego Mindstorms Club.
In the course of the day, the basement was completely ignored.
After a mind-numbing two hours of scanning the documents (there were over a hundred pages), which was only possible due to the pleasant distraction of P&P and the also-pleasant distraction of laughing and commenting at all of our favorite spots in the series, it was discovered that Deborah was in dire need of a trip to the clothing store for some new outfits, so Mom and Deb departed on their mission while the rest of us stayed behind to snack on popcorn and other idle pursuits. It was a gloriously restful afternoon, which would've been perfect but for the slight discomfort of an ongoing headache and a slight nausea which grew worse in the evening.
No doubt it was a punishment for my complete lack of basemental ambition.
At length I returned to my earlier and most rewarding task of reviewing my acquaintance with the fundamental concepts of transistor electronics by designing, constructing and testing a set of astable multivibrator circuits for the purpose of training future electrical engineers. One of the components with which I had been constructing the baseboard the other day was discovered to be malfunctioning; that is, one of the transistors was shot. Having quite a supply of them on hand, the offending part was speedily replaced and full functionality was restored, and my heart was glad of it. It's always pleasing to have achieved some measure of success or accomplishment, even one so insignificant and small.
Tomorrow I hope to expand on the circuit to incorporate both capacitors and coils in order to illustrate the concepts of integral and differential calculus.
It reminds me of the great difficulty with which the concept of calculus was grasped by this feeble brain. Indeed, it wasn't until my third year in college that it even began to make sense, and then only when it was presented not as a set of theoretical exercises of infinities of series and summations, but rather as the source for the formulas I had learned years before while going through my father's correspondence course in electronics! Now I could see why the capacitor and the inductor operated in the way that they do! Now I could see clearly how to interpret the complicated schematic diagrams which were no more than a set of obvious building blocks connected by trivial filtering circuits!
Oh, yes, and there will be work to do as well, the work for which I receive monetary compensation. Not much in the way of personal satisfaction these days, but one can't expect to enjoy oneself all the time in those sorts of things. It is the natural course of things that when the budget gets tight and the manpower list grows short, those of us who are left will be forced to do double-duty (or triple or quatro). It doesn't bother me as much as it once did; after all, it is not a matter of life or death, merely a matter of income. And if one looks hard, one can find something of redemptive value in the work-a-day experience; there are wonderful people with which to fellowship, and there are computers on which to play, and there is the eventual arrival of that most blessed moment when the internal alarm says, Go Home, to Hearth and Wife and Kin.
In the course of the day, the basement was completely ignored.
After a mind-numbing two hours of scanning the documents (there were over a hundred pages), which was only possible due to the pleasant distraction of P&P and the also-pleasant distraction of laughing and commenting at all of our favorite spots in the series, it was discovered that Deborah was in dire need of a trip to the clothing store for some new outfits, so Mom and Deb departed on their mission while the rest of us stayed behind to snack on popcorn and other idle pursuits. It was a gloriously restful afternoon, which would've been perfect but for the slight discomfort of an ongoing headache and a slight nausea which grew worse in the evening.
No doubt it was a punishment for my complete lack of basemental ambition.
At length I returned to my earlier and most rewarding task of reviewing my acquaintance with the fundamental concepts of transistor electronics by designing, constructing and testing a set of astable multivibrator circuits for the purpose of training future electrical engineers. One of the components with which I had been constructing the baseboard the other day was discovered to be malfunctioning; that is, one of the transistors was shot. Having quite a supply of them on hand, the offending part was speedily replaced and full functionality was restored, and my heart was glad of it. It's always pleasing to have achieved some measure of success or accomplishment, even one so insignificant and small.
Tomorrow I hope to expand on the circuit to incorporate both capacitors and coils in order to illustrate the concepts of integral and differential calculus.
It reminds me of the great difficulty with which the concept of calculus was grasped by this feeble brain. Indeed, it wasn't until my third year in college that it even began to make sense, and then only when it was presented not as a set of theoretical exercises of infinities of series and summations, but rather as the source for the formulas I had learned years before while going through my father's correspondence course in electronics! Now I could see why the capacitor and the inductor operated in the way that they do! Now I could see clearly how to interpret the complicated schematic diagrams which were no more than a set of obvious building blocks connected by trivial filtering circuits!
Oh, yes, and there will be work to do as well, the work for which I receive monetary compensation. Not much in the way of personal satisfaction these days, but one can't expect to enjoy oneself all the time in those sorts of things. It is the natural course of things that when the budget gets tight and the manpower list grows short, those of us who are left will be forced to do double-duty (or triple or quatro). It doesn't bother me as much as it once did; after all, it is not a matter of life or death, merely a matter of income. And if one looks hard, one can find something of redemptive value in the work-a-day experience; there are wonderful people with which to fellowship, and there are computers on which to play, and there is the eventual arrival of that most blessed moment when the internal alarm says, Go Home, to Hearth and Wife and Kin.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Energetic Lethargy
It's Saturday afternoon, almost time for A Prairie Home Companion, and I've been working on the basement walls and putting off a trip to Home Depot. I hate having to run to the store in the middle of the afternoon because by the time I get back, the momentum is gone, and usually no more work is done anyway.
I'd rather be playing with my electronics, or working on my Linux server, or writing software, or anything anything anything but working on the house. I hate working on the house. I hate having a house that isn't finished. I hate looking at the basement walls and the basement ceiling and the vast, ugly unfinishedness of it. It feels like a huge millstone hanging around my neck, prodding me in the head every now and then to remind me that it is impossible to relax in my own house because It Isn't Done Yet.
I understand why they have to sell houses this way. No one can afford them otherwise. Perhaps we could've found an affordable older house that was already finished, but our last venture with a used house was far less than successful, definitely not to be repeated.
All I want is to sit in my house on a Saturday afternoon and not have to worry about all the things that have to be done on it. Cleaning is not a problem. Vacuuming is enjoyable (especially when listening to John Denver tunes). Even scrubbing the toilets is pleasant in comparison to the awful, horrible, headache-inducing thought of A House Unfinished.
And it isn't the work itself that bothers me. My dad made sure I didn't leave his house without understanding how to measure (and measure again) and saw and hammer and drill and put two boards together and build up walls and hang insulation and wire outlets and repair plumbing and do all those things that are required when you have a house - and I'll be forever grateful to him for that. Especially since I don't hit my thumb anymore. Actually, the work itself is very enjoyable - even calming, in a way.
But - for a perfectionist as myself, it takes much longer than it should. To paraphrase Orson Welles, "I will build no wall before its time." Edges must be straight. Angles must be right. Levels must be ... level. Which is one reason I don't hire out for the work (unless it's clearly beyond my skills, like concrete work). Or ask friends to come over and help me. I don't trust anyone else to do it right (except my Dad, of course).
And there is always the budget to consider. There is never enough money in the budget or time in the day to get done all that needs to be done. And when do you stop? I'm not good at deciding when to stop, especially when I could keep going 24/7 and still not finish.
I need to run to Home Depot or Lowes or Menards (the Michigan hardware store) and get some more of that solid foam insulation for the walls, but I'm just not in the mood right now. The walls are firmly connected to the joists and the floor, they're level, the outlet boxes are installed, and that's probably good enough for one day.
It will be so nice when it's all done.
I'd rather be playing with my electronics, or working on my Linux server, or writing software, or anything anything anything but working on the house. I hate working on the house. I hate having a house that isn't finished. I hate looking at the basement walls and the basement ceiling and the vast, ugly unfinishedness of it. It feels like a huge millstone hanging around my neck, prodding me in the head every now and then to remind me that it is impossible to relax in my own house because It Isn't Done Yet.
I understand why they have to sell houses this way. No one can afford them otherwise. Perhaps we could've found an affordable older house that was already finished, but our last venture with a used house was far less than successful, definitely not to be repeated.
All I want is to sit in my house on a Saturday afternoon and not have to worry about all the things that have to be done on it. Cleaning is not a problem. Vacuuming is enjoyable (especially when listening to John Denver tunes). Even scrubbing the toilets is pleasant in comparison to the awful, horrible, headache-inducing thought of A House Unfinished.
And it isn't the work itself that bothers me. My dad made sure I didn't leave his house without understanding how to measure (and measure again) and saw and hammer and drill and put two boards together and build up walls and hang insulation and wire outlets and repair plumbing and do all those things that are required when you have a house - and I'll be forever grateful to him for that. Especially since I don't hit my thumb anymore. Actually, the work itself is very enjoyable - even calming, in a way.
But - for a perfectionist as myself, it takes much longer than it should. To paraphrase Orson Welles, "I will build no wall before its time." Edges must be straight. Angles must be right. Levels must be ... level. Which is one reason I don't hire out for the work (unless it's clearly beyond my skills, like concrete work). Or ask friends to come over and help me. I don't trust anyone else to do it right (except my Dad, of course).
And there is always the budget to consider. There is never enough money in the budget or time in the day to get done all that needs to be done. And when do you stop? I'm not good at deciding when to stop, especially when I could keep going 24/7 and still not finish.
I need to run to Home Depot or Lowes or Menards (the Michigan hardware store) and get some more of that solid foam insulation for the walls, but I'm just not in the mood right now. The walls are firmly connected to the joists and the floor, they're level, the outlet boxes are installed, and that's probably good enough for one day.
It will be so nice when it's all done.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
A Return to the Basics
It came over me like a flood of old memories the other day, this strong desire to do something that I had not done in oh, so many years. I'm not sure where it originated, if deep in some stressful moment, like when the child on his first day of school desires the comfort of his blanket to relieve the tension of the new and frightening experiences; but I needed, desparately needed to do this thing. And so I did.
Turning away from the computer, I pulled out the pencil and a pad of paper and drew the sketch that so filled my eager mind: a set of four parallel lines, horizontal, crossed with two verticals, then some triangular waves connected to the odd circular icon in the middle, the one with the descending arrow, with more wavy lines, more parallel. At last, it was complete, except for the best part - the calculations! V=IR, Ib=(Vcc-0.7)/R1, Ic=(V-0.2)/R2. How rapidly the formulas come to mind still, how quickly the values are filled in, tasted for correctness, savored, enjoyed.
Ah, it was heavenly bliss.
When the world becomes a complicated and frustrating morass of impossible demands and there is nothing on the horizon to bring peace to a troubled mind, it is always refreshing to return to the things in life that bring the greatest satisfaction, the simple joys, like the calculations for the quiescent state of a bipolar NPN transistor.
It was one of my favorite classes in college, the one where we took apart the 741 Op Amp, block by block, until we understood the reason behind every diode, every resistor, every element of its ultra-slick design, from the basic current source to the Darlington-paired outputs, until we could explain the function of each and every element in our sleep. It was the one class where I actually experienced that moment of explosive understanding, that 'click', where suddenly It All Made Sense, and suddenly it was So Easy.
I hadn't experienced that for a long time, since my father had let me study his correspondence-school books on Electronics back when I was ten or eleven and I devoured it, ate it, drank it, breathed it, dreamed it, until I realized with a cosmic thud that this is what I was meant to do, this is my life's work.
And now I was so eager to return to it, the simplicity of transistor electronics, the joy of creating a simple circuit that does nothing more than modulate the rate of change of current flow through one path by application of a smaller current in another path: a simple controller. If there was nothing else in the world over which I could have control - not my job, my house, the weather, the future, my children - at least I would be able to control this little 40 milliampere current racing through this tiny silicon sandwhich over this tiny wire to excite the photons off this light-emitting diode and thus signal that there was something in the world I could count on.
Maybe tomorrow I'll hook up two of 'em, toss in some coupling capacitors, and make me one of those monostable multivibrators. Ooh, the excitement! I can hardly wait!
Turning away from the computer, I pulled out the pencil and a pad of paper and drew the sketch that so filled my eager mind: a set of four parallel lines, horizontal, crossed with two verticals, then some triangular waves connected to the odd circular icon in the middle, the one with the descending arrow, with more wavy lines, more parallel. At last, it was complete, except for the best part - the calculations! V=IR, Ib=(Vcc-0.7)/R1, Ic=(V-0.2)/R2. How rapidly the formulas come to mind still, how quickly the values are filled in, tasted for correctness, savored, enjoyed.
Ah, it was heavenly bliss.
When the world becomes a complicated and frustrating morass of impossible demands and there is nothing on the horizon to bring peace to a troubled mind, it is always refreshing to return to the things in life that bring the greatest satisfaction, the simple joys, like the calculations for the quiescent state of a bipolar NPN transistor.
It was one of my favorite classes in college, the one where we took apart the 741 Op Amp, block by block, until we understood the reason behind every diode, every resistor, every element of its ultra-slick design, from the basic current source to the Darlington-paired outputs, until we could explain the function of each and every element in our sleep. It was the one class where I actually experienced that moment of explosive understanding, that 'click', where suddenly It All Made Sense, and suddenly it was So Easy.
I hadn't experienced that for a long time, since my father had let me study his correspondence-school books on Electronics back when I was ten or eleven and I devoured it, ate it, drank it, breathed it, dreamed it, until I realized with a cosmic thud that this is what I was meant to do, this is my life's work.
And now I was so eager to return to it, the simplicity of transistor electronics, the joy of creating a simple circuit that does nothing more than modulate the rate of change of current flow through one path by application of a smaller current in another path: a simple controller. If there was nothing else in the world over which I could have control - not my job, my house, the weather, the future, my children - at least I would be able to control this little 40 milliampere current racing through this tiny silicon sandwhich over this tiny wire to excite the photons off this light-emitting diode and thus signal that there was something in the world I could count on.
Maybe tomorrow I'll hook up two of 'em, toss in some coupling capacitors, and make me one of those monostable multivibrators. Ooh, the excitement! I can hardly wait!
Irrational Anger
The day did not start out well, or perhaps I was just too tired to handle such difficult subjects so early in the morning. My mood was not particularly surly while fixing breakfast for the children and packing their lunches and trying to get Adam out the door on time to catch the bus, but it grew dark and dismal after reading the news story about the school in Minnesota that was modifying its art curriculum in order to pacify some Muslim parents who were objecting to depictions of the human form (clothed or otherwise). I was enraged beyond reason, especially in light of the news of other adjustments that had been made in other schools for other religions - special prayer rooms, special fountains for ceremonial washing of feet - all of which were being paid with public monies.
You can be sure that if something like this were to occur in our local public schools, I would be the first to show up at the School Board meeting and demand the immediate resignations of all those who approved such idiocy. My own personal feeling is that religion does not belong in the public schools, not the religion of the supposed majority nor the religion of the minority. The public school is a place to teach basic required skills to children; the home is the place to teach the fundamentals of religion (in conjunction with the local house of worship); and if any parent feels the need to obtain special considerations for their beliefs, they either do without it until the school day is over, or go start their own school.
I have no respect for a people or a religion that seeks to impose its will and belief on other people through violence or the threat of violence. I have no respect for a people who become violent over a cartoon depiction of their supposed prophet. If a people cannot deal with the fact that others do not believe what they believe, they can just leave.
They will get none of my money, nor will any school that allows such stupidity.
You can be sure that if something like this were to occur in our local public schools, I would be the first to show up at the School Board meeting and demand the immediate resignations of all those who approved such idiocy. My own personal feeling is that religion does not belong in the public schools, not the religion of the supposed majority nor the religion of the minority. The public school is a place to teach basic required skills to children; the home is the place to teach the fundamentals of religion (in conjunction with the local house of worship); and if any parent feels the need to obtain special considerations for their beliefs, they either do without it until the school day is over, or go start their own school.
I have no respect for a people or a religion that seeks to impose its will and belief on other people through violence or the threat of violence. I have no respect for a people who become violent over a cartoon depiction of their supposed prophet. If a people cannot deal with the fact that others do not believe what they believe, they can just leave.
They will get none of my money, nor will any school that allows such stupidity.
Here we go again ... !
Just when you thought it was safe to go back on the Internet, yet another blog shows up. I apologize. Actually, I'm just trying this one out to see if it works any better than the other one I've been using, which has a few annoying problems. Guess we'll see!
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