Mary Learns to Ski

My body still hurts from yesterday.

Here's a clip of Mary taking her first ski lesson.



Hope it works.

We Go Skiing

One of these days, we are going to (re)join the family in attending the annual ski trip. Really.

In the meantime, we'd like to get the kids on skis so they don't have any difficulty 'fitting in' with the rest of the gang when they're out on the slopes. So it is important for us to find a place to practice.

Michigan isn't known for fantastic winter sport facilities -- at least not known to us -- but we have to use whatever is available. Luckily, there are quite a few skiing lodges within a reasonable distance of our home, and we decided to take advantage of that short distance today when our friends down the street invited us to go with them.

We had originally planned on having the boys do some tubing and the girls take the skiing lessons, but Deb decided at the last minute that she didn't really want to go; and then when we got to the lodge, the tubing area was closed due to poor snow conditions (it was too warm to maintain the powder, and everything was turning to slush, and tubes are worse than skis for sticking to soggy snow); so it was just Mary and I out on the slopes while the boys hung out in the lodge and chatted, or went outside and threw snowballs.

Mary had a wonderful time. She had a one-hour private lesson, and her father was encouraged to go somewhere else so he wouldn't interrupt the lesson with bad advice (or just distract her with his presence); so I went to the intermediate slope and tried to find my snowfeet again.

After the lesson, Mary and I practiced back on the bunny slope for a couple hours - that girl has some serious stamina! -- with a break for lunch in-between.

Then it was time to go home.

NOTE: I added a link to our Flickr website in the "Links" section. And there are new photos posted!

Merry Christmas!

Got the WiFi hooked up, so I'm cruising the net upstairs on the laptop while the boys are cruising the web with their DSes.

Updated the Flickr site in case you wanna see some of the photos of our cookie-making expedition to the neighbors' house, and the kids showing off their new PJs.

But now I gotta run to play Heroscape with Adam and James.

Later!

At Piano Lessons

My throat is still a bit scratchy, but that's OK because the church where the kids take piano lessons has WiFi. What could be more fun than to cruise the net while waiting?

Cheryl's out shopping while the rest of us wait here in the church library. I hope she remembers the cough drops!

I took a trip over to Phil Vischer's site. Haven't been there in a while. He's eagerly awaiting the release of the Veggie Tale's "Pirates Who Don't Do Anything" movie. Hope that works out for him, after all he's been through since the last epic VT release. Not sure if we'll go see it. The kids have gotten so big, and we haven't watched any of the old vidoes in so long. Their tastes have moved on from Veggie Tales to Lord of the Rings.

Of course, I also visited my brother's sites. Didn't have anything to add, though. I love reading their stuff (and remembering to turn down the volume on Kel's site so my ears don't get blasted), but can't ever think of anything clever to add. Nor spiritual, like Jan. Nor educational, like Jeanne. Nor inquisitive, like Mom (like, When are you coming for a visit? or When are you going to post some new pictures?). I prefer utter lunacy, if possible.

Hmmm. For some reason, that makes me wonder what Judy's up to these days...

Spent the whole weekend sitting around the house feeling lousy and trying to get up enough energy to do something other than slogging through the 950 emails which were crying for my attention. No kidding, 950 of 'em clogging up my Inbox waiting to be reviewed. In my particular line of work, that's approximately two weeks' worth of email (around 100 per day), and unfortunately at work I'd only had time to look at them briefly before moving on to more pressing matters, hoping to find the time later to catch up.

Weekends are catch-up.

This past weekend, I only managed to slog through about three hundred or so before the NyQuil caused me to drift into a pleasant state of somnombulism, while the kids watched Harry Potter 5 and Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and then went outside.

The boys cleared the driveway of the powdery white stuff and ran down to the neighbors' house to play. Mary went over to another friend's house to play. Deb worked on snow-forts.

Now if I could just get rid of this nagging cough, maybe I could go out and play, too!

Hookey

I'm out sick today.

Yesterday is a blur of bad meetings and panic situations and excruciating conversations with people who have no right to be doing what they are doing. All the while, the head was pounding and the throat was getting scratchy and the body was aching and the temperature was fluctuating somewhere between Medium and Well Done. But there were too many things to do, too many "critical" meetings to attend, for me to take the day off.

Getting home last night, I skipped the dinner thing and went straight to bed, me and my precious bottle of Nyquil.

Woke up this morning and decided to bag the whole work thing. But managed to get up long enough to send out some email to the appropriate people, letting them know that my cube would be empty today. Still had some fairly important meetings, but those were handled in the technologically advanced method of phoning in for a telecon. That is to say, the meeting moderator called me up at home and I put in my two cents while trying not to cough too much.

Checked email off and on. Managed to respond to a few of them, too.

Now onto my third dose of Nyquil for the day, and still haven't had a chance to go back to bed.

Maybe after dinner. If I live that long.

Sucked Back into the Past

It's time to go back to work again -- on a Sunday! -- and this isn't even my regular work, it's more of a charity thing.

But it's doing what I used to do, Training and Support, so it's like going back in time.

There's a group of five or six guys showing up bright and early Monday morning to be trained in the use of our software, and the guy who is supposed to provide the training is not a software type. So he enlisted the aid of two of the guys who used to provide the training, one of whom is me.

But don't tell my boss. He's rather upset that I would even think of helping out this "other" project, when there is so much to do on my own project.

So I've been doing it on my "off-hours", in the evening and on the weekends, trying to get the lessons updated and customized for the new project. We (the improvised training team) spent the better part of yesterday running through the slides and making corrections and checking that everything worked on the hardware. Today we'll try to get everything polished up.

And tomorrow, I'll be doing my normal job running the Systems group, all the while worrying that the Training is going well. If it doesn't, I won't be able to help out, due to other commitments.

Isn't politics fun?

The Von Trapp Family Singers Strike Again

I'm the impulsive type, as you might've suspected, and it's gotten me into more trouble throughout my life than is possible to relate in the short amount of time left; but it will come as no surprise that my impulsive nature has once again brought us to the brink of disaster.

Musically speaking.

Way back when - a month ago? - when it was announced that there would be a Christmas Workshop at the church, I volunteered our family to take part in the entertainment portion of the day's activities. The Christmas Workshop is a time when folks gather at the church to have a bake sale, make crafts (especially for the kiddies), and visit with each other. The entertainment portion of the day's activities is comprised of random people who get up on stage and do something to entertain the folks who are standing around stuffing their faces with bake-sale goods, or simply waiting for their crafts to dry. Some people sing, some people play a song on the piano or guitar, some people sing and play a song on the piano or guitar. Hopefully the same song. In the same key.

It wasn't supposed to be a knees-knocking, nerve-wracking kind of activity. Sure, the music takes place up on the stage, but it isn't like a real performance. It's more like singing a song in a mall, with people wandering around mostly not paying attention, but without the Muzak blaring from the ceiling speakers.

We practiced, too. Starting nearly a month before the event, we selected our music, we went over the tunes, we sang, we transposed.

Then Thanksgiving came along, and more work piled up, and the evenings got busy; and as the day rapidly approached, our preparedness was not where it needed to be.

Especially mine.

But then I'm never really prepared. Too much of a perfectionist. And I never get enough practice time. And I can't remember the words, so my eyes are glued to the lyrics in front of me. Makes for bad stage presence.

The kids did wonderfully, of course. Mary played her solo piece, Deb sang Noel with me, Adam did his solo piece, and then we all sang "We Wish You a Merry Christmas".

Of course, it all could've come out much worse. As we were going up on stage, Mary decided she didn't really want to perform. Ditto for Deborah. And since Mary was first on the program, we had to switch things around right off the bat. Until she changed her mind. Which she did. And then Deb changed her mind, and they were both back "on".

Perhaps it was due to Adam, who performed beautifully on his "Twelve Days of Christmas" (all verses). We all stood behind him as he played the piano, and we all sang, and we only occasionally got ahead of - or behind - each other. Adam's a real trooper when it comes to just Doing It. (It got us through the Boy Scouts' popcorn sales.)

I look forward to the day when we can all get up on stage and play and sing together again as a family. Now that we have three piano players, one clarinet player, and one guitarist, it should get very interesting!


After it was all over, we all breathed a sigh of relief and headed home.

Countdown to Christmas

Last night during our family devotional we calculated that there are only 30 days til Christmas. Two weeks and a little bit over (as they say in Pirates of Penzance).

So it is officially Panic Time.

We haven't written any Christmas cards yet. We haven't done any shopping (and weren't about to join the madding crowd on this Friday last). We've just been trying to get through the days.

Will we ever find the time to do any of those things that need to be done prior to the big holiday?

There are so many things on my at-work list. Tests to write. Procedures to update. Documents to review. Spreadsheets to create. Meetings to attend.

Then there's the at-home list. Preparing for cold weather. Finishing the basement. Fixing the car. Schedules to keep.

At the end of the day, all I want to do is to climb into bed and hide from the world. But the next morning, the world is still there, waiting. And I have to get up and get dressed and get more and more behind on all the things to do.

And now Christmas...

Flickr Fotos

Finally uploaded some Thanksgiving photos to Flickr.

Click here for Meyer Thanksgiving Photos.

Give it a go, eh? And let me know if it doesn't work.

Don't Shop for me, Argentina...

Several of the stores around here opened up at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, and last night we saw some of the carnage ... er, footage ... on the news. It was incredible. All those people crushing one another in an attempt to get the new toys before they run out. Is a Wii really worth your life?

Don't answer that. Some of you are nodding your heads.

I didn't get out til today, but that was merely picking up some humidifier and vaccuum cleaner filters at Sears. That doesn't count as "shopping", does it? Certainly not "Christmas shopping".

And the video game I picked up for James was really birthday shopping, not Christmas shopping. (Thanks to all you who donated to his "Lego Star Wars 3 for the DS" fund; he's been playing it nonstop since it got into his eager little hands.)

Most of the day was spent with silly little projects, like installing the tachometer in the Toyota, making labels for my Ubuntu distro CDs, backing up the XP CD, wiring James' room down in the basement, and playing more Lego Quest with Adam and the neighborhood boys.

And running over to work (twice) to run some quick little tests.

Still need to get some Thanksgiving photos up. Didn't get any good ones. They're all too dark or too fuzzy or badly (i.e. NOT) posed. Perhaps I should just do like everyone else and dump 'em on to Flickr.com. Mary made some more movies with her camera, mostly of her and her sister's Barbie dolls, but she moves the camera around so much that it tends to cause motion sickness. So don't expect to see any of those up real soon.

Next time I'm going to show her how to mount the camera on a tripod, like Craig and Kelly did, so twenty years from now they can show everyone how completely silly they are.

Especially their boyfriends.

Happy Post-Thanksgiving

Finally! Took me all day to get this computer booted up and running...

In-between playing a game of Lego Quest with Adam and the neighborhood boys - which lasted four hours - and nibbling on leftovers, and thinking deep thoughts about various things (all the work left to do on the house, mostly), and trying to update Ubuntu from version 5.10 ("Breezy Badger") to 6.0.6 ("Dapper Drake") because a bug in Firefox was making it impossible to do any net surfing. Took me til after dinner to figure out that it was possible to not upgrade all the way to 7.10 ("Gutsy Gibbon"), because that version requires 384 megabytes of RAM, and this ancient 1.0 gigahertz model only has 256.

I had burned a CD of 7.10, but it refused to install, and didn't bother to tell me why. Did some net checking and discovered that it was due to not-enough-memory. So I went back to the Ubuntu website and downloaded 6.0.6, and that worked fine. Although I must say that running it on a 1.0 gigahertz machine is really pushing the envelope. It's sloooooow.

I would run it on the fast PC (2.6 gigahertz) but the kids are using that one to play their games. And the games require Windows XP. And Windows XP on a 1 gigahertz machine is impossible, as compared to Ubuntu on a 1 gigahertz machine which is merely annoying.

Now that it is working, I can upload some pictures from Thanskgiving. Tomorrow. Right now, I'm heading to bed.

Washday has arrived.

I really hope it doesn't explode again.

The washing machine, I mean.

Took me til nearly eleven o'clock last night to get it all put back together, and it turned out that the most difficult part was not installing the motor, as I had imagined, but putting the spring-loaded cable back onto the rubber seal which keeps the water from leaking through the front-loading door. Remounting the motor took all of two minutes. Remounting the front door seal took three and a half hours, four wasted trips to various hardware stores trying to locate a spring expander (no one had it; when it occurred to me to check an auto parts store, they were closed), and no end of frustration.

But it finally became a washing machine again, and we celebrated by ... doing laundry. At eleven o'clock at night. What fun and interesting people we are!

Then we wrapped James' presents and put them out where he could find them in the morning. And wrote a silly card.

Then, finally, at one o'clock a.m., we went to bed.

It was so hard to get up this morning.

Platform Shoes

I got bored this weekend, so I slapped together some two-by-fours and built another platform in the garage.

No, actually, there just wasn't room for all my junk on the floor in the garage, so it was necessary to 'elevate' some of it to a 'higher realm' - 80 inches, to be exact - to the point where the Toyota would fit underneath.

That's the problem with having extra two-by-fours hanging about, you know. They're just screaming to be used to build something or other. Platforms, work tables, walls, something.

So the platform got built, long about Sunday evening, but not without an interruption here or there. One particularly bad interruption, actually. You see, on Saturday, the motor in the washing machine took a dive. Literally.

Seems the mounting bolt got shaken to the point where it just snapped, then it fell to the ground with a rather loud 'thud', and for some odd reason having to do with the lack of proximity betwixt motor gearing and drive belt, the wash tub failed to rotate and the clothes failed to become clean.

Pity, that.

Tore the washing machine apart on Sunday afternoon, after being reminded of the fact that it was broken (I'd completely forgotten, having had so much fun building the platform). Got the motor pulled out, found the bolt sheared off right at the base plate. Ran out to the store to get a replacement, and a bolt extraction kit, and a tap-and-die. Just in case.

Managed to drill through the old bolt to get the extractor started, after breaking one drill bit, but the extractor jammed up inside the bolt and broke off. Had to drill that out, then tried to use the tap to set the threads for the new bolt, but apparently I hadn't gotten all the old bolt threads out of the hole, for it jammed up as well and then it broke.

Had to drill out the tap then, and looks like I'll be repeating the process again tomorrow. By the time it was all said and done, it was too late to get to the store.

Oy, but I'm ready for Thanksgiving, just to have a couple days to catch up on all these house projects! Figure I'm going to corner the market on two-by-fours and build some more platforms. Or walls. Or something.

Sure beats software...

Rather Disappointed, Actually

The Toyota has a new used engine in it now, but they didn't tune it up right and I'm rather disappointed.

After nearly three weeks in the shop, I was expecting miracles. There were problems getting parts. There were problems with the parts once they'd acquired them. And, strangely enough, they failed to properly align the timing belt the first time and spent a couple days trying to figure out why it wouldn't work. But finally they got it all straightened out, and assured me it was "purring like a kitten".

A kitten with gas, I suppose.

There's something wrong with the exhaust system; it's making the same kind of noise that would occur if there were a hole in the muffler - but the noise is coming from the engine compartment. Perhaps they didn't get the exhaust manifold attached properly, or perhaps it has a hole in it.

The acceleration is sluggish, as though the carburator is flooding - but it's not quite the same because it never feels like it's about to stall. It just doesn't want to go too fast.

And the engine vibrates badly when it idles, as though the timing is still not quite right. It doesn't feel as though one of the cylinders isn't firing - I've felt that before from the original engine, when the cylinder with the bad oil seal would foul the spark plug and it wouldn't fire anymore.

I'm irritated and frustrated by it, because for the amount of money we spent, we should expect a perfectly-working engine.

But instead of taking it back to them and making them do it right, I'm going to do it myself, because even though I'm not all that knowledgeable about tuning up this kind of engine, I've lost any confidence in their ability.

The only person I really trust to do it right, my brother-in-law, is in Iraq. But I don't think I'll bother him with it right now. He's busy.

***

The van has been making odd noises, too, so we took it down to the Dodge dealer to have them perform the 120k-mile service on it. And have them find out where the squeaky noises are coming from.

I probably could've taken it to a regular shop, but the only one I knew about is the one I don't trust anymore, so the next-best thing is the dealer. At least they're supposed to be factory-trained.

They did OK, I suppose. A bit on the pricey side, but they found the source of the squeaking (bad brakes), and took care of all the regular maintenance checks that need to be made, like transmission and suspension.

And it only took a day, which is a far cry from three weeks!

Weekend Projects

It has been an incredibly busy weekend, and yet nothing was really done. Completed, I mean. Lots of things started.

Like the engine thing.

It is a big deal to me, this engine. I mean, it's our engine, right? And the shop was going to just toss it away, this huge hunk of metal.

Couldn't let that happen now, could we?

Not in this pack-rat of a household. I mean, there's boxes of electronics around here that can be traced back to that mess of a room I kept back in 1977. Can you believe it? Dragging around that old junk for thirty years. But it's my junk, man.

And this engine - well, it's gone three hundred thousand miles! Without a major overhaul! Sure, it was blowing oil and a few things here and there weren't working (like the carburator heat, which made it stall out in cold weather); but she's a sweet little 1.6L engine, steady and dependable. And I figured on keeping her around awhile.

Gonna rebuild it. Gonna give the boys a chance to learn the same things my Dad taught me, how to work on engines. See, my Dad was (and probably still is) able to pull out a Volkswagen engine on a Friday night and have it rebuilt and running again by Sunday afternoon. And he taught me how to do it, too. All except the machine-shop stuff. We had to send out for that work.

The guys at the shop were a bit surprised that I wanted to keep the old engine. Most customers don't care to ever see 'em again (assuming they ever saw 'em in the first place). Sorta like asking to keep your old tires, I suppose. But they didn't argue with me. Just asked me to come by on a Friday to pick it up so they wouldn't have to move things around to clear a path. So I came by with the van on Friday afternoon and picked it up - and the transmission, too - and happily hauled it back home. Naturally, I'd removed the seats from the van and put a tarp down so it wouldn't drip oil or other fluids all over the carpet.

Hmmm. I noticed that it took three guys to lift it into the van.

Got it home and - OK, smart guy, how are you going to get the five hundred pound engine out of the van by yourself and move it around?

I had already figured out where the engine was going to stay once it got in the garage. Went to this 'Harbor Freight' store earlier on Thursday and picked up an engine stand for forty bucks. {Also picked up a cheap radio control airplane for forty bucks, but that's another story.}

Anyway, got the engine home and was preparing to figure out how to get it out of the car and onto the engine stand when it occurred to me that the engine mounting bolts were missing. Well, not really missing; I suppose they needed them to install the new engine. That's the trouble with keeping the old stuff - you can never be sure which parts come with it. So how can I man-handle this engine onto the engine stand without the bolts? I gotta have bolts to secure it to the engine stand, right?

In the meantime, I didn't want to drive around town looking for the bolts with the engine rolling around in the back of the van, so it needed to come out. And the two of us couldn't lift it - and being a guy, there ain't no way I'm going to go knocking on doors asking a neighbor to come help me lift the engine out; that would be admitting that I ain't smart enough to figure a clever way of doing it by myself.

So I got clever. Stacked some two-by-fours on top of a couple car jacks, supporting the other ends on my ladder, and made a ramp that came right up to the tail end of the van, and just slid it right out of the van and onto the ramp. Had to stick a couple two-by-threes underneath one end of it to steady it, but at least now the seats could go back in the van, and it was possible to run out to the store to look for bolts.

Tried to find the bolts at Home Depot and Lowes, but they didn't have 'em. In fact, it seemed they had every size except the ones I needed. Naturally.

So back home I went, empty-handed.

The problem was, see, that the weather is going to turn cold and windy pretty soon, and the van needs to be in the garage. I'm not in the mood to go out every morning and scrape the ice off the van. And the engine on the ramp was in the way of the van. {Yeah, I shoulda thought of that before I made the ramp right up to the van; shoulda backed up the van into the garage at an angle so it would've been out of the way, but that would've just made things too easy.}

OK, there's this perfectly good engine stand here, but it needs a little help. Can't mount the engine onto it without the bolts, so I'll have to come up with something to give it a little help. And since the engine weighs a lot more than I do, it's gotta be something that is stable so the thing don't fall on my foot and send me to the emergency room.

Well, there's a few more two-by-fours sitting around in here; oughta be able to do something with those ...

Took me most of the evening to finish up, but finally put together a little platform for the engine stand, sorta like a little wooden cradle for the engine to sit on so it's still on the stand but not bolted to it. And since the engine stand is on wheels, I can still move it around the garage.



Got the engine put on it, then moved it out of the way so the van could fit into its normal spot in the garage.

Mission accomplished!

See what happens when I have too much time on my hands?

***

My next project was trying out that R/C model airplane. Obviously, it's not one of those high-end deals, not for forty bucks. In fact, it's a cheap piece of foam attached to a plastic body with a multiplexed single-channel radio pretending to be a two-channel. And it has no steering other than speed control over two separate motors.

I don't have a circuit diagram, but I suspect it's merely a pulse-width modulated signal that determines which engine gets the higher cycle time, so you 'steer' it by running either the right or left engine at a higher speed than the other, and since the engines are mounted on the wing pod, it's basically pushing the wing left or right.

Because of this, there's no 'up' or 'down' control, either. That's done by careful control of the engine speed. If you max the throttle, it climbs. If you drop the throttle below a certain level, it dives.

It's an odd way to control an airplane, but it's efficient given the cheapness of the design. And it's going to take a lot longer than the twenty minutes of practice I got today to master it.

At the end of twenty minutes, I'd broken the canopy and the tail skid and shredded the front edge of the wingtips. Other than that, it seemed to be in pretty good shape.



Can't wait to try it again later. But there won't be any time the rest of this week, between work and all the other activities. And it's supposed to snow on Tuesday.

It must be Winter, my Skin is Dried Out

The humidity around here drops like a rock when the cold weather comes in. It's easy to tell because all of a sudden the skin feels like parchment and the eyes feel like they're being rubbed with sandpaper and the throat is in constant need of liquid refreshment and the head pounds with sinus pressure and the cats give off sparks when they are stroked.

It's a dangerous time for electronics, too, as the sparks from the fingertips fly off like lightning to toast little circuits in the stereo and the tv and the computer; and turning a switch is a roll of the dice to see how many electrons want to join the human bus on a trip to Ground Central.

That could explain why the TV is being weird. Sometimes it auto-detects the composite signal coming in from the VCR, sometimes it doesn't. And it seems to depend on whether the audio channel of that video source is switched in by the receiver or not.

Another weird thing is that the receiver shuts off if the volume knob is spun rapidly to zero. Not sure if that's a feature or a bug. If it's a feature, it's undocumented.

Time to get out the ol' humidifier and turn this house into a subtropical wonderland.

More Boring Work Stuff

It's ten thirty on a Tuesday night, and I'm at work again. Why? Because somebody (who shall remain nameless) decided to use his eyeball to block a soccer kick.

Said somebody is supposed to be doing what I'm doing right now - updating and testing this software that was scheduled for completion last week. I'm supposed to be technically leading the Systems Group, not putzing around with code til all hours of the night, trying to make it do things it really wasn't designed to do.

It wasn't supposed to be this difficult. And it wouldn't have been - for me - if [insert name here] hadn't been so aggressive on the field. Must've been trying to impress someone.

But this is debug code inserted into a special build of the operating system to diagnose a problem that occurs intermittently during all-night testing, which means even after all this work, this code will never (theoretically) see the light of day. It's throw-away code, destined for the dung-heap when all is said and done. Assuming it helps us pinpoint the source of the failure which is keeping us from completing our overall Qualification mission.

Not only is it debug code, it's kludged debug code. The developer hijacked an unused function and rewrote it to peek into the innards of the software and provide a gateway for the application to see what's going on deep down in the bowels of the computer. In effect, it's the patient with the scalpel.

Yikes! Reminds me of poor [insert name here]. So young, so talented, so suddenly bereft of sight. His doctor made him sit in a dark room for three days with the damaged eye all anesthetized; couldn't watch TV, couldn't work on the computer. About the only thing he could do, was to listen to the radio.

I'd feel much sorrier for him if I was at home with my feet propped up, reading a book and sipping a soda.

48 Years and Counting

I get an electric kind of thrill when telling people about my parents' wedding day, because it is the kind of story that has inspired me and molded me to become the person I am.

It creates an image in my mind of the kind of people they are, defining their personalities in a way that brings me no small amount of pleasure. Like all images, it is of course tinted by my own viewpoint and muddled by separation of years and the confusion inherent in second-hand recitations of oft-heard histories, and my own understanding of the event is limited by how much information has actually been passed down.

No doubt I'm spreading all sorts of misrepresentations of the facts whenever I tell it, because my brain has never had the capability of retaining facts very well, only impressions.

But my impressions - my mental images of those two people who formed a union forty-eight years ago on the dry, dusty wasteland of West Texas - have remained throughout the years, not so much keyed on the moment-by-moment timeline of events as on the character of the two young people involved, their motivations and desires that shaped the future that has now become the past and present.

Oh, how I wish there were a motion-picture record of the entire episode - the courting, the building of the relationship, the assistance from friends and mentors who guided them along the way; even more so, a mental record of the thoughts and emotions that were going through their minds at the time, a self-described analysis of the decisions that were made at crucial points, the flow of things that brought them both to the point of saying, "Let's get married."

Sometimes I try to cast my mind back to my own courting days to remember what it was like to be the young bachelor at church looking over the beautiful young single ladies, debating their good points and not-so-goodpoints, wondering how on earth it would be possible to logically calculate the merits of one over the other, going out with this one or that one to find out what they were like, all the while wondering if I was in some way revealing too much about myself such that they might be too disgusted to tolerate my presence.

I wonder what it was like to be a young soldier out in the middle of nowhere, separated from family and friends, eagerly anticipating the gatherings at church or at people's homes to have the opportunity to spend an hour or two with one of those delightful young ladies...

And then to find one that one of them wanted to spend the rest of her life with me.

I admire them both for their ultimate practicality in handling the 'wedding' event. As mentioned, it has inspired me to have a great deal of respect for frugality and common sense, eschewing formality and ceremony. Whether that was truly their intent, or merely the proper way to handle things given the limitations of their current circumstances, doesn't really matter to me. What matters is that they didn't wait and drag the whole thing out just to have a fancy wedding. They had an opportunity and they took it as a matter of course. Simple, practical, efficient.

That's my parents.

Lucidity

I can't say whether or not I'm actually lucid or not; it still feels like dreaming. There has been little sleep of consequence over the past few weeks, owing to the nature of my work patterns, which has been a constant state of panicked chaos. And just when it seems there might be a moment of respite, certain exterior forces gather together in one point of time to drive the stress level through the roof.

Let's not get into the details; everyone has been there, and my case is not unique. Moments of life arise when it seems that everything is happening at once, that multiple needs are pulling at you in different directions, and there is neither time nor mental energy available to take it all in. Some people seem to thrive on such an environment. The rest of us experience stress.

It is curious, however, to realize (looking inward) how one deals with such stress, especially when the realization dawns that there is no possibility of actually doing all the things that are being asked, nor of being in all the places required. A certain amount of procrastination sets in, a near-fascination with the prospect of sitting by and watching the disaster come and go, knowing that, although it will not result in an immediate, physical danger, the possibility exists that it will have serious consequence on the stability of the future.

At some point, a kind of mental peace settles in as one realizes that there is nothing that can be done to avoid disaster, that the opportunity for taking effective action has passed by, and that the choice now lies in moving on with things as they are and accepting the consequences, or moving on to something else. Moving on is always an attractive option as it provides a means of starting afresh, a clean slate, whereas the alternative provides nothing more than a return to the known state of stress which has no guarantee of lessening.

Looking back over the years, these things have occurred in about the same three-year cycle, so it doesn't surprise me that it is occurring again. But there doesn't seem to be quite the same level of stress this time; it doesn't feel as though my career is in danger - or in limbo. Indeed, my career seems to be going along quite swimmingly, assuming my career plan is to remove myself from the more rewarding aspects of engineering and take on what I would consider as the dull and boring avenues of management.

I don't like management. I don't like dealing with people who bicker and argue and refuse to get along. I disdain conflict.

Today's final hour was a microcosm of the horror story which accompanies each day's travail.

Departure time was scheduled for five-thirty, and my final task was to assist in the running of some tests in the lab. One of my code reviewers was walking past the lab and noticed me, so he came scurrying in to confront me with what he considered to be a critical problem.

The problem was, naturally, another person. This other person disagreed with his assessment of the code and refused to make the requested changes. The reviewer was incensed that the coder would refuse to recognize his authority as a reviewer to dictate the terms of the code fix, and demanded that the proper procedure be followed.

When I say incensed, I mean exactly that. The man was getting extremely emotional about the problem. He was insulted because the coder didn't agree with his assessment. He took a personal affront that someone disagreed with his comments.

Both the coder and the reviewer have a teensy bit of a problem with Ego, so the fact that they disagreed didn't surprise me. What surprised me was the non-professional, emotional response that it generated, like two little children arguing over a toy.

I reminded the reviewer that the procedure called out for a moderator, a third party who would step in to handle just such an occurrence, and suggested that he forward the comments to that person and get the problem resolved as soon as possible. And asked him specifically not to talk to the coder again about the problem.

I also told him in no uncertain terms that I will tolerate petty arguments over such issues between team members, and that it is more important to me that the team members work together in harmony than that we figure out who was right and who was wrong. First, because I don't believe with their Egos that they could ever admit that the other person was right; and second, because there is nothing that makes work more of a drudgery than having to deal with conflict between team members every day.

In other words, he may be right, but if he's going to argue over every dotted 'i' and crossed 't' just to prove to everyone how right he is, I don't want him on my team. I'd rather have a team of idiots who get along than a team of experts who argue all the time.

My last exercise in management, which just ended this past week as I handed over the reigns to someone else, suffered from the very same problem. After the first team meeting when I took over the role of technical lead, it was obvious that two of the members could not be in the same room together. Rather than exclude anyone from the meeting, I simply abandoned the idea of meetings, instead focusing on one-on-one interfacing and lots of email. And as each person finished their portion of the assignment, they were moved off to other projects. In the end, the team was reduced to myself, my 'lieutenant', and our documentation person. This, from an original group of ten. And it must be stated that my 'lieutenant', a young man half-distracted by his PhD work, did more to further the progress of the project than all the other developers combined.

So now it is his project, and more power to him.

Meanwhile, the pressure is on for me to get the new team organized and working, and it looks like there may be some more trimming ahead.

Onward!

It was 20 Years Ago ... but not today

Having the proper tools is critical to any professional.

It's difficult to believe that over twenty years have gone by since the last time I possessed the proper tools to do a proper job.

Can you imagine a carpenter going twenty years without a table saw? Or a drill?

Yet for the past twenty-odd years, I've been plugging away at my electronics using only a multimeter. Which is OK if all you want to do is measure static voltages, or verify your diodes are working properly.

But the key to any kind of serious electronics design is having the key element in the electrical engineer's toolbox - an oscilloscope.

{An oscilloscope provides a graphical image of the voltage level at a particular point in a circuit over a span of time, thus allowing you to verify the changes in a non-static signal as it travels through a circuit; for example, you can see the audio signal as it travels from the antenna of the radio all the way through to the final amplifier, to pinpoint where the buzzing is coming from, so you can fix it...}

The biggest obstacle to obtaining an oscilloscope is the price. Current models are in the $10k - $20k range. And they generally keep their value, because they are precision instruments. So even a ten or fifteen year old unit can cost $4K - $10K.

My financial priorities have obviously been in other areas for the past twenty years or so.

But ... with all the overtime lately, and the fact that I'm not getting any younger, it occurred to me that it was time to finally do something about this serious lack of engineering capability.

Naturally, I wasn't going to purchase a top-of-the-line model. There's been quite a bit of overtime, but not that much.

So after browsing through the various on-line test equipment vendors, I found one that was willing to part with some old 'scopes for a reasonable price: $199.

Hey, at that price, why not get two?

So I did.

And now there are two new toys in the house!

Which should help out getting rid of the backlog of electronic equipment in need of repair.

Right off the top of my head, the following list comes to mind:

1 - 15-year old 19' color TV with a dying high-voltage circuit
1 - 5-year old receiver with a suspicious hum in the power supply
1 - 20-year old tape player / stereo with bad tape controller circuit
1 - 15-year old VGA monitor with bad high-voltage power circuit
2 - radio control receiver/transmitters with bad components
2 - old VCRs with on-board microprocessors (salvageable)
5 - 10- to 15-year old motherboards with bad components
10 - 5- to 15-year old computer power supplies in indeterminate but nonfunctional state

I can't wait to get started on them!

Star Trek : The New Voyages

Star Trek is a phenomenon which will not die.

The show originally aired in 1966. That was forty years ago. It spawned six television shows, ten feature-length movies (there's an eleventh on the way), and a host of sci-fi conferences.

And now there's a new on-line series, resurrecting the look-and-feel of the original 60's show, which attempts to answer the on-going question of "What else happened during the first Five-Year Mission?"

(The original series only lasted three seasons, cutting short the 'Five Years'.)

In the beginning, it seemed like just a joke, an ego trip for the 'star' of the show, James Cawley, in an effort to pass himself off as the next incarnation of James T. Kirk. He was financing it; he was starring in it; and he had a bunch of friends whose acting abilities left a lot to be desired.

And it was on the net for goodness sake! How cheesy!

By all rights, it should've been relegated to a fifteen-minute frenzy on YouTube, flooding the servers for one day and lost in oblivion the next.

But Mr. Crawley wasn't interested in a one-day wonder. And he wasn't really interested in being hailed as the 'new' Kirk.

He was really interested in the Question.

Interested enough, in fact, to finance a large portion of the project himself. And interested enough to make sure that no one made any money off the deal, which would've placed them square in the legal sights of Paramount.

No, the whole venture was - and is - a labor of love for those people who know what Star Trek is really all about: the fulfillment of the promise of Apollo. The Final Frontier. To boldly go where no one has gone before. To re-imagine the future where race or religion or gender is no impediment to experiencing the ultimate adventure of exploring the Universe.

To imagine where we might have gone had we not turned our backs (mostly) on space exploration thirty years ago.

To imagine where we might go if we made it more of a priority.

To explore ourselves even as we explore the Out There.

**

So far, they've completed three episodes and are working on the fourth. They're getting better with each one. I just watched the third one last night, and was very impressed. As a fan of the Original Series, it was awesome to see the return of Sulu (George Takei), and especially the clever (and poignant) way they worked him into the script.

I can't wait to see the next one!

How Doth the Little Software Bug

How doth the little software bug
improve my shining code
By making it go opposite
the way it should have flowed;

And look! upon his countenance
he wears an evil grin
because he plans to take what's OUT
and turn it back to IN

In vain I try to kill the beast
who turned this art to dung
But every time I recompile
Alas! My program's hung

And yet I labor on to crush
the horrid, vicious sprite
By adding lots of printf's
to the code, both left and right;

But still the noxious vermin lives
and tramples ROM and RAM
Until my brain is spinning and
I don't know where I am...

To sleep, to rest, perchance to dream
is all my goal of late
But staying up to battle bugs
appears to be my fate

And now, please pardon while I go
to pound on keys and cry
Until the moment that I find
the bug and make it die

Labor Day

Yes, I'm here at work on Labor Day. What better day to be working, eh?

At least it's quiet. No one else is stupid enough to be at the office on the last day before school starts. Tomorrow begins the major shift in our schedule, off the laid-back, easy-going, not-much-to-do routine which has been the norm since Cheryl and the girls returned from their West Coast tour, and back to the hectic, every-moment-spoken-for frantic pace of fall/winter/spring.

It is times like these when envy of the "real" homeschoolers rears its ugly head. For them, it is nearly business-as-usual. For us, it is time to shift into high gear, and there is nothing more frustrating to me than attempting to keep up with all the activities that other people toss into the pot of Life.

My ideal is to have nothing to do but sit and think and write. Were there enough time in the day, it might even be possible to get a few things done, since a lengthy sit in the chair often prompts me to get up and start cleaning house, or making something out of wood, or pestering the children to go for a bike ride. In my old age, it has become nearly impossible to sit for more than twenty minutes at a stretch because my joints start to ache and my legs start to twitch and my mind starts to wander.

But ... were it possible, my day would be spent in a comfy chair composing poems and short stories and essays about nothing in particular, strumming my guitar, designing electronic circuits, cruising my favorite websites, and sipping a chilled glass of Dr. Pepper. All the while talking to Cheryl as she works on spreadsheets and cruises through her own set of websites and comments on the crazy things going on in the world today.

Should the world endure to the day when my need for employment comes to an end, and the children have all gone off to their separate destinies, perhaps that will become our reality.

Until then, my day will be spent banging my head against the software & hardware on this project, attempting to make it work in spite of itself; and preparing charts and graphs and plans for all the upper-management types to show them all how impossible the task has become; and rushing home at the end of the day to remind my children that their father is still alive and well and madly in love with their mother.

Dryes

Dry eyes.

I've got extremely dry eyes.

Is it from allergies? From dry air? From too many long hours spent in front of too many monitors?

Hard to tell. But my eyes are hurting anyway. I put the drops in, and they are soothed for about half an hour, and then they start hurting again.

I'm drinking my water.

I'm not dehydrated.

I'm just ... dry-eyed.

Cheryl says that the goldenrod is blooming, as is some other poofy-looking plant (can't remember its name). And I'm sniffling from something. So the little antihistamine pills are a-poppin', too.

Could be the antihistamines, I suppose, drying me out too much.

Hard to look at the monitor now. It's too bright. Too painful.

Time to put my head under a nice, cleansing shower, and then put my head into a nice, soft fur-infested pillow.

And sleep.

Strange Dreams

There's something wrong with my brain. Circuits aren't working correctly, my memory is going. I've been worried about it, and as with anything that causes worry, it manifests itself in the most ... interesting ... dreams.

Last night was a doozy.

It was a reunion party, a reunion of all my old High School friends, in some kind of weird apartment/house with circular stairs leading up to the second story, and I came down the stairs past all these achingly familiar faces, smiling at them all but unable to remember their names.

Got down to the living room on the bottom floor and they were all standing around talking to each other and having a wonderful time; and suddenly Cheryl was there, and they asked her why I was acting so odd, so distant, and she explained to them that I had suffered some kind of brain damage or something; and then I laid down on the floor and assumed a motionless pose while trying to remember any of their names; and everyone walked around me, continuing to enjoy the party.

It feels like brain damage, this inability to remember things. It may be due to all the medications taken for allergies or headaches; it may be due to complete laziness on my part, owing to my focus on work and family exclusive of most everything else. I've always had problems remembering things, especially when in front of crowds. Going to church can be a real challenge because even after three years of being at the same place with all the same people, it is difficult to remember their names.

And lyrics! Even with the songs posted on the walls, even after singing them over and over again, year after year, my brain can't remember them. When I'm doing the children's class in the morning, after all this time, I still need the words in front of me to do our traditional closing song. And I've known it since before we left Seattle.

I'm hoping it's just laziness, some little switch that hasn't been turning on inside my brain because I've forgotten how. But it hasn't turned on, even after hours and hours of practice.

It used to be easy to memorize things, back during high school. All that was required was repetition. Now the repetition doesn't seem to help.

Which reminds me of how I used to write songs. Songs - and stories - can't be written when life gets too busy. My brain does not multitask well. The best songs or stories I've ever written were done during times when there was really nothing else going on in my life. The few months spent in Joplin, Missouri, back in 1987 (?) were probably the most productive because it was just me and my guitar and my little typewriter. Ever since then, though, it's been difficult to find any quality time to just stop everything and think.

Some people manage to do it, even with family and job and church and other social activities. I don't know how they do it. To come up with anything of a creative nature, my brain requires nearly an entire day of nothingness, no activity, just so the circuits can settle down and clear out all the day-to-day panicky thoughts and the concerns of the moment that keep me from thinking straight.

That also explains my reticence in taking on a more managerial position in the company: it requires too much thought, and intrudes too much on my other goals. When in charge of others, their concerns become my concerns, and they don't stop the moment the car leaves the parking lot. They carry over into the evening, and the weekend, and there is no opportunity to clear the mind and relax.

These past two weeks have been the worst. Two eighty-hour weeks in a row, and there is little left of my brain to offer.

And it's raining outside.

Over Time

It's been a long, long week, and it's only Monday.

Last week was a killer - 81 hours on the clock! And that's just the amount of time spent at the office. Today will only be another 12 or so, but that's the way it goes when one is doing two jobs at once.

I'm still getting the hang of the 'new' job, and mostly what I'm getting is the sense of pointlessness of all the statusing and metrics-oriented activities that this job entails. Or, at least, those activities that some people seem to associate with this particular job.

I consider a 'Tech Lead' job to be one in which a Technical person leads other Technical persons (aka engineers) on the One True Path to Enlightenment - getting the work done so the product does what is supposed to do. That doesn't have anything to do with sitting in meetings listening to people go on and on about budgets and schedules and forecasts and Earned Value and other accountantly terms.

The True Facts of this job are that there is no money in the budget and no schedule left and still tons of work to do. All the worrying and fretting in the world won't change those facts. Yet some of these management types sit in these meetings worrying and fretting about the financial decisions as though they have some relative importance. The only decision that needs to be made is, are we going to finish this project, or are we going to stop?

If we're going to keep going, then they just need to shut up, get out of the way, and let us get our work done. Spending six hours out of an eight-hour day in meetings is not how things get done!

But until those little 'issues' get fixed, it looks like I'll be spending roughly three-quarters of my day twiddling my thumbs instead of fixing and testing code, which explains why I'm still here at midnight - trying to get something done!

Summer Stock

I couldn't resist. It was only $8.99 at Costco.

This is why some people cannot be trusted to go shopping, even with a list. If the route includes a walk past the bargain DVD bin, I am sunk. There are so many classic movies available! And they MUST be viewed!

But can anyone in their right mind walk past Judy Garland and Gene Kelly and Marjorie Main and Hans Conried and Phil Silvers? In a musical? I think not!

I had heard about the movie for years but never took the trouble to rent it, even though it was touted as one of Judy's best. After watching the Making Of tidbits, it's a downright miracle that it was ever made!

First off, it was supposed to be a 'reunion' movie, a years-after rehash of the old Judy Garland / Mickey Rooney "Let's do a Show!" routine from the Andy Hardy series. The story is practically the same, only the specific situation has changed.

But apparently nobody thought Mickey Rooney had the chops - or the popularity anymore - to handle it, so they went looking for someone else. And it was Judy who got one of her old friends to jump in. [Apparently, she had helped Gene Kelly when he was just starting out, and they remained close over the years.]

Can't imagine it without Gene and his choreography. It would've been a much, much different - and much inferior - show had he not come along.

But the show almost didn't happen, because it was during a period of Judy's life when she was struggling with depression and anxiety, and stressing out over her weight; and it would be gracious to say that she was a bit unstable. Her co-stars were annoyed and frustrated by her inability to show up on time, or to work regular hours, or to even show up at all some days. However, they all pulled together to make it happen, going far past the extra mile to encourage her and lift her up when she really needed it.

They talked about (in the Making Of) how they all tried to make her laugh. Apparently when she laughed, her depression would subside. And then things would get better.

And whenever she sang, all her troubles were gone, and it was magic. Her friends all said that all the annoyance and frustration was worth it once she started performing.

Most importantly, the head of MGM didn't lose faith in her even when she was falling apart. He said (in effect) that she had made them so many millions of dollars, they could afford to cut her some slack.

The one thing about the picture that really grabbed me, was the scene where she has just got her tractor, and she's singing "Howdy, Neighbor!" as she's driving down the country lane behind the wheel of that beautiful, new tractor, past the fields and the orchards and farms.

It's uncanny. It reminds me of Mom. That's the way I picture her when she was a kid, back on the farm in Indiana, sitting up on the tractor with a big smile on her face, waving at everyone, happiest person on the planet. She certainly gets the same look in her face sitting on the tractor over at Uncle Joe's. And I'm sure she gets that same look on her face as she's cruising around the grounds down in Texas.

I can watch that scene over and over again, and think of Mom the whole time.

Happy tractorin', Mom!

Modern Technology

Modern Technology is just amazing. I'm sitting at my dorky-looking homebuilt computer desk (so embarrassing I won't be posting any pictures of it) watching the NASA video of the current shuttle mission, listening in on the incredibly boring (to anyone but space/engineering geeks like me) radio transmission and watching as they take the bolts off the truss they're attaching to the International Space Station, all the while cruising several internet sites and typing on my blog.

This is so commonplace. It doesn't amaze anyone anymore. It's like being amazed that a cell phone can also take pictures.

But I grew up in the Seventies, watching the moon landings and the Skylab missions and the long, long build-up of the Shuttle, and all of this was just pie-in-the-sky science fiction dreaming back then. We knew there would be all this awesome technology, but we really weren't quite sure what it would be like, and because it was something we hadn't grown up with, it could never be "normal".

Remembering my absolute joy when my first 8080 microprocessor booted up with my very first program, after weeks and weeks of soldering and wiring and programming and staring at little red LEDs which let me know what was going on, it is impossible to feel blase about sitting in this little office with seven computers.

My 8080 ran at a blistering 2 mHz, resulting in something on the order of 500,000 instructions per second. My first Z-80 ran at 4 mHz, with an unbelievable 2 million instructions per second. My first 8086 ran at 8 mHz. The computers in my office range from 166 mHz to 2.6 gHz. That's well over a billion instructions per second!

(That doesn't answer the question of why Windows is still so slow, but we always move forward to meet the technology, straining our resources, so there is always room for improvement.)

The latest acquisition in the fast computer is a DVD writer. Now I can sit here and make backups of up to 8 gigabytes of my data (mostly photographs). Or create and distribute my own movies.

I can go to Target and buy a pack of 50 plastic disks that allow me to store 400 gigabytes of data.

Or I can purchase a little disk drive that allows me to read and write 500 gigabytes of data.

When all this computer technology started - for me, at least - there was no way to store data permanantly. The 8080 was attached to a 1,000-byte memory chip, but the data would disappear the moment power was removed. So all my programs had to be entered via a set of 25 switches on the front panel. Every time it was turned on.

The first game I wrote (in BASIC on the Math & Science Center mainframe) was stored on punch-tape. I still have the punch-tape, but there are no readers available now except in museums.

When Marc Montoni and I were using his TRS-80, we could write programs to a cassette tape drive, very slowly, but at least we didn't have to retype them every time.

In the electrical engineering lab in college, we used to play Ultima on the Apple IIe, and the game fit on a single 5-1/4 inch disk. What was that, 160kbytes?

Working at the insurance company during college, we stored our entire dBase II program and database on a 5 megabyte hard drive. And backed up to 8-inch floppies.

The first IBM XT we got had a 10 megabyte drive.

Now I have a 512 megabyte flash disk in my pocket. I've had it for three years; it's ancient history. One of my friends went to a seminar and they were giving away 1 gigabyte flash disks like they were key rings.

I'm still in awe.

Boys Will Be Boys

Speaking of books - I was speaking of books a moment ago, wasn't I? - Cheryl got James the Dangerous Book for Boys, which is a real hoot. Wish I'd had the book when I was a kid. Sort of a "Everything You Need to Know in Order to be A Real Boy" kind of thing. Unless you were growing up in the Thirties, in which case you already knew all that stuff. Morse Code. Knots. Battle history. How to Build a Tree-House. Even the Windtalker's code!

Not that James needs any more encouragement to be dangerous. He likes to do dangerous things already. And drag his brother along with him. Whereas Adam is usually content to sit in his room and dream up new games and strategies and characters. The inclusion of this book in our Library should make things verrrry interesting.

Books always make our lives more interesting, don't they?

Certainly the Harry Potter series has made our lives interesting. I don't know what Cheryl is going to do now that the final book is done, after spending all that time talking with folks over the Internet about it, and reading everyone's ideas of what was going to happen next. It's all over! What's left to talk about?

Perhaps they'll try to guess what JKR is going to write next. I'm rather curious to know if her next book will be as good as the first one, if her success was due to her writing skills, her "voice", her characterizations, or the story itself. Will she remain in the genre of fantasy, or move on to something different?

Shhhhh...!! We're reading!!!

{Be vewwy, vewwy quiet. We're hunting Harry Potters!}

The Book arrived today, so Cheryl is busy reading it. I'm busy preparing for VBS. The kids are playing quietly. Except for James, who went with the neighbors on a hike.

The geocities site has been updated with a few pictures. After reviewing them, I realized there weren't very many this year. Pictures, I mean. Spent my time visiting and playing with the kids rather than taking photographs.

Sorry about that, Chief!

Home at Last

We arrived home safely, and are now showering the road dust off our tired bodies.

Pictures of the reunion and the Creation Museum and various other people/places/events are forthcoming.

But first, a nap.....

Creation Museum, Here we Come!

It's been a fun / bizarre family reunion, and while I'd love to take a few minutes to post some photos (especially of the Big Fun we had on Saturday night!), it's late, and we have to get up at 6 a.m. to drive up (or is it down?) to the Creation Museum in Kentucky (or was it Ohio?), so I'm going to go to bed. OK, OK. Maybe a couple pictures, just to shut you up...
Two Boys in a Creek	Two Boys Behind the Waterfall
The Fun Wagon!

Independence Day

What better way to spend this, the day we celebrate our nation's independence, than standing on a sidewalk as the parade of American flags goes by?

Well, that would've been nice, but that wasn't what we did.

Instead, to soothe my frantic nerves (after too much overtime), we stayed home and worked on little projects around the house. Like cleaning the garage. Fixing sprinklers. Putting together another computer. Watching movies on YouTube. Stuff like that.

Got some exercise, too. Had a nice bike ride with James (to Target, to purchase another game for his DS with the money he earned) and an evening walk with Cheryl.

Our neighbors bore the burden of the celebration, bringing in truckloads of explosives to shoot up into the sky. We watched. For free. It's nice to watch people who were born in another country coming to this country and becoming successful, buying nice houses, raising nice families, becoming part of the community, and spending every July 4th blowing things up. In some countries, they use real explosives!

It was actually quieter this year than most of the other years. Even as midnight approaches, the noise level is rather subdued. Perhaps everyone found better ways to celebrate the founding of this new country. Perhaps they are all reading their copies of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. Perhaps they are all reading a book about the Revolutionary War, and remembering the hardships of that rag-tag band of rebels who gave up several years of hearth and home and harvest in order to become truly free.

Perhaps they're all busy reading up on the goings-on in the House and Senate (both State and Federal), and finding out what their local City and County Councils have been doing lately, so that their next opportunity to cast their vote will not be missed. Perhaps they're getting together with other citizens in grass-roots committees to figure out better ways to plan and organize their communities.

Let's hope they're not all falling alseep on the couch while Jay Leno and all the other late-night pseudo-celebrities tries to entertain people with crude humor and pointless (and boring) interviews with people who have gotten rich and famous for doing nothing more than standing in front of a camera reciting badly-written scripts. This is a wonderful country, but it sure can be baffling at times...

Sixty Hours later...

I have to tell you a funny story. OK, two funny stories.

***

Everything was working fine with the software by late Wednesday night. Or early Thursday morning. I started an overnight test, went home, grabbed a few hours sleep, got back to work to check the results. Everything looked good. Seems like we were set for the Release.

Got a call from Configuration Management. Did I realize that the revision number was incorrect? Seems that the previous person in charge of this project never actually did a release, so it should've been Version 1.

Hmmm. That's interesting. The previous person in charge of this project had told me we were on release 8, which made this upcoming release version 9.

Checking into the release database, it turns out they had never actually released a PRE-PRODUCTION version, only EXPERIMENTAL versions. (There are four types of releases: development, experimental, pre-production, and production.) We are required to release a pre-production version for Qualification tests.

But ... they ran Qualification tests on the first version last year, right? Well, I guess not. At least, not with a pre-production version of the software.

Oops.

Since the version number is embedded in the software, I had to rebuild it and re-run all my tests. So the release was delayed til the afternoon. But it got done. Now we could all relax and let the Qual testing begin.


***

The build was ready, checked in, submitted to Configuration Management, and available for the Hardware folks to use in their pre-Qual tests.

It was going to be so nice; I was going to be going home on time tonight!

Then I got a call around 5 p.m. The Hardware pre-Qual tests failed. My presence was requested in the other building (where they were running the tests). So, instead of going home as I had planned, I detoured over to the other building.

The whole lot of them were gathered around the test station, wringing their hands and casting aspersions at the software. I reviewed the test failure log and shook my head; couldn't figure out how that error had occurred. Unless ...

Then one of the guys suddenly got this weird look on his face and said, "I think I know what's wrong." We all looked at him as he walked around behind the test station and starting fumbling around with the cables, muttering. He was looking for something and not finding it.

Turns out, the test station wasn't set up right. Some signals weren't getting through because a signal converter box was missing.

The software had actually detected a hardware failure!

And that took us til 7:30.

Can I go home now???

Late Late Late Night Benediction

So I'm sitting here at work, it's ten o'clock, there's a new build to test, and the lab computer goes belly-up, BSOD, down for the count. At least until reboot.

Why am I sitting here in the lab at ten o'clock at night?

Because the software has to go out tomorrow.

(Actually, it was supposed to go out last Friday, but that was a billion bugs ago, and there's only a million more to go.)

It was thought to be 'done' this afternoon around 4 p.m., when the tests passed on the Test Rig across the street, and everyone in the group laughed and smiled and threw up their hands in celebration, and went home.

But something in the log file nagged at me, something that should not have been in there. The test was reporting a Pass even though the log data showed very clearly that it had failed.

Why wasn't anyone else worried?

They're all so eager to just be done with it. This project has dragged on long enough, and we have to get something down to Chicago next week to throw in the thermal chambers, and right now they're probably willing to put the box in the chamber even if it doesn't boot up, just to get it out of the way.

But not me. I'm a bloody perfectionist.

So I'm slogging through the code, adding debug routines here and there to try and figure out what's going on (this is, after all, someone else's code, so it takes a while to figure out what was going on -- so much for documentation!!), loading up the box and re-running the tests, gathering more data, analyzing it, going back over the code, feeling like I'm banging my head into a brick wall -

When suddenly it becomes clear. There's a major disconnect between the guy who wrote the software, and the guys who expected to use it. The guy who wrote it, he expected the code to be run once, and continue running forever. The guys who expect to use it, they are going to be starting and stopping and re-starting this software throughout the whole test sequence. But it wasn't written in such a way as to handle that case. It's definitely a run-once kind of code.

Oops.

So the next question becomes, how can this code be massaged to work the right way, without having to rewrite the entire thing from scratch? I'd really like to go home now...

---
{much later, after much coding & caffeine}

Massaged the code for awhile, to no avail. Still failing. Ran it in both manual and automatic mode. Thought it was fixed because it was passing in manual mode, but then it failed in automatic mode. Weird. Tossed in some more debug code.

---
{a little while later}

Something odd going on here. It passes twice, then fails on the third try. And it seems to fail ONLY when restarting. Like there's something getting hosed up during the restart. But what's so special about the restart? The process is just supposed to suspend itself, not discard all the memory. But it's acting like something in memory is getting overwritten while the process is in a suspended state. So much for the partitioned system.

---
{really, really late}

It's really odd, but I don't have time for odd things right now. I'm tired and want to go home. Looking objectively at the problem, it's obvious that something is getting messed up during the first re-run of the test, something left in an unknown state so that it causes the comparison logic to fail. And the logic is failing in the middle of a loop, so it's a good guess that restarting the loop might reset the logic somehow. But there's no easy way to drop out of the loop ... or is there?

OK, so if I put a special variable in the failure-detection logic, I can use that to ignore any failures right after a restart. It gets set by the restart call, then when the comparison fails, it simply ignores the failure and keeps ignoring it until the loop finishes. Then the special variable gets reset, the comparison logic gets reset, and we get a 'clean slate'.

Let's see if it works...

---
{a little while later - midnight}

It works! Hooray!

Now let's zip this puppy up and get on home...

An Experiment

My head is still swimming from all the meetings which have taken place this week. It's all part of the "Getting in Over My Head" plan for the summer, where I play the part of "Befuddled and Confused" in this bizarre Morality Play.

For the past three years, this program has managed to survive despite the fact that we've been ignoring the proscribed software development processes, instead doing things on a panic-of-the-week basis.

In the normal software development process, we take a set of requirements which have been negotiated with the customer and design the software on paper, get approval from the customer on the design, transfer the paper design to an actual design, match the design against the requirements by running tests to verify that the requirements have been met, then release the software - and all the documentation that goes along with it (design documents, requirements documents, test documents, test reports).

In our "modified" process, the managers negotiate a delivery date with the customer, along with an 'incentive' payment that guarantees (by appealing to executive greed) that we'll make that date; then they turn around and demand that the engineers work 50-hour weeks (minimum) in order to meet that date; then the engineers, in order to meet the delivery date, ignore all the paperwork; and after much pain and torture, they make the delivery date, but have no idea what it is that they have delivered.

So why are they so surprised when it doesn't work as advertised?

**

The "mandate" for my new position is to ensure that the aforementioned 'correct' process is followed. This is what is known as "bucking the trend". I'm not sure if success is even possible at this late stage of the game, but it'll be interesting to find out.

After all, the worst they can do is to fire me.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

When I picture my Mom, she's always sitting on top of a tractor, out in some nameless field, with a big smile on her face and her eyes focused out somewhere far ahead, driving across with the plow hooked up and a huge cloud of dust behind her.

That's my Mom, the tractor-driver. It always impressed me that when she was a kid, she didn't want to be in the kitchen with her sisters, but out in the fields with her brothers, driving the tractor. Spunky, that. (Besides the fact that you don't have to do the dishes when you're helping outside, right?)

I think I drive like my Mom, too. Well, at least I drive like I imagine my Mom drove when she was growing up in Indiana back in the '50s. Fast. Not reckless, but fast, feeling the power of the engine and the feel of the road under the tires and the wind in my face and the shifting of the gears as my hand moves the stick...

There was this time, years ago, not too long after I'd gotten my license, and Mom was letting me drive the car back from camp, just the two of us. And we were heading down this country road out in Virginia, going along at a pretty good clip (within the speed limit, mind!), when suddenly this idiot pulls out in front of us. There was not time to stop, no time to think, barely time to react. I pulled the wheel smoothly to the left, veered into the other lane, zipped past the idiot, and then pulled back over again. Didn't even slow down. Of course, my adrenalin was pumping like crazy. And I thought for sure Mom was going to freak out, make me stop the car.

But she didn't. I'm not sure what thoughts were going through her head, but she just sat there seemingly calm as a cucumber. I think she said something like, "That was close!". But that was about it. And she let me keep driving. And we drove on home.

That's my Mom. Calm in a storm. Handles the tough times. Lots of strength in a tiny frame. And oh, so much fun to talk to!

Happy birthday, Mom! Can't wait to see you at the reunion!

When I'm Forty-Four

Each passing year, it becomes more difficult to deal with stress and stupidity at work, and not because my brain is falling apart (which it is, but that's another story). It's simply that life is too short to put up with idiots.

Forty-four means that in twenty years, I'll be sixty-four - no doubt singing that old Beatles' song, if I'm still able to sing.

And that is the question. Will I still be able to sing? Will I still be able to play guitar? Will I even be able to walk unassisted? Or will some disease or accident take away my ability to do those things which I take for granted now?

Seems like a waste of time to spend the best part of my life at work.

There is a lot of short-sightedness at work. Plans and schedules are made as though people are an inexhaustible resource, as though it is no big deal for people to work 50-hour weeks for months or years at a stretch without cracking. But people do not live to work. They work to live. Right?

Some people apparently enjoy working too much. And I don't mean the "fun" work of making things, creating things, putting together something tangible, something you can put in your hand as a final product and say, "I helped make this a reality"; it's the other kind of work, the supplemental work of creating budgets and schedules and spreadsheets and tracking matrices and cost accounts and weekly status reports and all the little paraphenalia that is supposed to allow us to keep on track, all the paperwork that, in the end, is put away in a file and never seen again, for which they sacrifice their evenings, their weekends, their families, their lives.

It is very difficult to take those seriously, especially when the data is so casually tossed aside when its usefulness is over. Most of it is round-filed the moment the status meetings are over. And someone stayed up all night long to prepare it.

There is a long-standing tradition at most big companies to make fun of the bean-counters, those little bespectacled minions who turn over rocks to count all the bugs underneath, and have their formulas for calculating everything from the number of hairs on their heads to the temperature of the coffee in their cups. They drive engineers crazy, talking about Earned Value and Cost At Completion and other fancy accounting terms, screaming for data which they can plug into some arcane mathematical structure to produce yet more data to prove that the engineers are having too much fun at the company's expense. But that data isn't real, it can't be seen or felt or touched or soldered or wired or switched; it is transient, and thus meaningless.

Yet this data is revered as Important, Critical, a High Priority; and woe unto those who enter the realm of the Status Meeting without it, for they shall be flogged severely.

So we spend hours a day preparing our status, and more hours attending meetings to talk about our status, and even more hours revising our plans so that we can have better status tomorrow; and all the while, the product languishes in its broken state, awaiting the few spare moments we might have in our busy day to actually add some functionality or fix something that's broken or test it in the lab.

And we end up spending long hours at the office trying to fit our fifteen-hour day into a ten-hour bag, and wonder why we're so tired by the end of it.

Meanwhile, the family is at home, going on with their lives, getting older by the moment, growing up, learning, expanding their horizons, figuring out what life is all about. Before we know it, the kids are grown, the memories are made, the world has moved on - and we're still sitting at our desks, trying to figure out how to handle the latest imaginary emergency with those intangible, unreal bean-counted numbers.

This is my forty-fifth year of life, having survived the first forty-four relatively unscathed. I think I'd like to spend less of it at work, and more at home enjoying my family. There are no guarantees on life or health. And the children are never going to get younger, only older, more independent.

Now if I could just figure out a way to spend less time at work for more pay...

Overcome by Events

There is a phrase we use here at work when a problem has been around for so long that it no longer becomes relevant, when so much of the software or hardware has changed with the passage of time that don't think the problem is actually a problem anymore. The problem is said to have been "Overcome by Events". OBE, for short.

This particular phrase applies not only to software and hardware anomalies, but also to documents and emails and discussion topics which linger too long in the "unresolved" category. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming flood of information to which we are all subjected these days, it can truthfully be said that most of the hot topics of today will be OBE tomorrow.

So are they really worth worrying about?

I have learned over the past twenty-five years in (mostly) the aerospace industry that they are not. Most of them become irrelevant after a few days, a few weeks, a few months. Going through all my old emails, it amazes me how many of them were marked 'Critical' and then got lost in the shuffle of priorities, and months later, it is difficult to remember why it was that they were so important. Certainly they are not hot issues anymore.

(This also underlines the difficulty of determining what is really Critical when everything is deemed critical. "When everyone is Special, no one is Special.")

The problem is determining which issues are really important at the time they first come to light, so that they can be dealt with in a timely manner. And not just the ones which are important to the sender, but those which are important to everyone. Issues which have only a single champion, especially a champion who is unable to articulate clearly the reasons why this particular issue should get attention from others, are lost in the noise. Typically only the issues which are raised to the appropriate level get that attention.

But even with issues being raised to a high level of attention, sometimes there are just too many of them. The limits of human attention span are breached. Our ability to cope with the complexities of the issues is maxed out. Stress scrambles our brains.

It is then that our safety mechanism kicks in, and we decide to let Father Time do his best work, and we simply step away from the problem for a while to see if it is really as important as it seems.

A week later, after things have stewed in the pot, the problem does one of two things: it either comes to a furious boil, spilling over the top and scorching everyone in its path; or, in the more likely scenario, it falls off the radar and joins the million or so other 'Critical' problems that have been Overcome by Events.

Unending Tiredness

I was tired of work on Monday, so I left.

The weather is beautiful, the air is just hot enough to feel refreshing when it's being blown across the skin in a light breeze, the sunlight is bright enough to suggest shade but not demand it. The pool beckons.

I drove home and dragged (most of) the kids out of the house and took them to the pool and forced them to swim and splash and dive and play and have fun; then we high-tailed it home for dinner and piano practice.

Afterward, my eyes just didn't want to stay open, so I closed them, and napped.

It was a good nap.

Then it was time to wake up and go to bed.

The Weekend's Accomplishments

It's the first weekend in a long time which was not at least partially devoted to accomplishing work-related tasks, and there was a long list of home chores needing attention: hair maintenance, car maintenance, plumbing repairs, house cleaning, among other things. Most important, there was an important movie to watch.

But more on that in a moment.

First and foremost, it was time to catch up on the car maintenance. The van needed an oil change, and, since we are a DIY family, we did it ourselves. It took a bit longer than normal, owing to the fact that there were constant interruptions and distractions, like taking Adam down to the barber shop to get his hair cut. Then getting the boys started on the lawn maintenance (filling the gas tank, starting the mower, unravelling the cord for the weed-whacker, finding another cord for the backyard part of it). Then moving things around in the garage, unpacking the summer stuff from the upper storage area and figuring out what needs to get thrown out versus saved. Then vacuuming up the piles of sand brought in by the ants who were trying to make a nest underneath the concrete. Then tearing down all the extra boxes. Then helping Cheryl with her new laundry drying racks. Then trying to work on the sprinkler system. Then discovering that the vacuum backpressure valve (or whatever you call it) had blown out and needed replacing. Then discovering that one of the main water valves had cracked during a freeze and needed replacing.

Sneezing all the while. (Yes, the pollen is out, and in force!)

It was a long day, Saturday. Then Sunday came, and after church, after lunch, we headed out to the movie theater to (finally!) watch the new Pirates of the Caribbean flick.

We'd read that it was 'busy' - long on plot twists, short on character development. Somewhat true - there is a lot going on - but still quite a ride. The kids all enjoyed it immensely.

Afterward, it was home to rest up (and sneeze some more!) and eat the snacks we couldn't afford to buy at the theater, and then the kids went back to reading the books they'd borrowed from the library, and I went out to dig up the broken plumbing, and Cheryl worked on her studies.

Tomorrow, our summer home school starts. Something simple, I hear. Cheryl is going to have the kids write up a "what's next" scenario for the Pirates, to let them write their own ideas for movie #4.

And I'm going to try to catch up on work.

Last Day of School

Today is the Last Day of School.

It's a bit of a waste of time, really. What do they do for half a day? Sign yearbooks, say good-bye to those whom they won't see for the summer, chat with teachers cheerfully (for once) because there is no tension over missed assignments or bad grades or general unruliness, all the while looking forward to the final bell that signals The End.

Then they run off home to celebrate by doing the same things they would normally be doing on any other day off, namely eating and sleeping and playing.

It will be a few days before the novelty wears off, but wear off it will, and then they'll be getting bored.

Good thing we have a pool nearby...

5th-Grade Graduation

It is an odd thing, this 5th-grade graduation, a ceremony to celebrate the passage of a child from the elementary school into middle school. In my own personal history, fifth grade was just the year before sixth grade, which was still considered a part of the elementary school. Here, it is the end of elementary, and the beginning of that curious limbo-land of middle school, where the student is not quite grown up yet, but definitely too old for elementary behavior.

I'm not much on celebratory events (as most of you know). Too many times, an event which is significant only to a particular person or family gets blown all out of proportion, as though it were of great significance to the entire world. Certainly there is some merit in impressing upon a young person the magnitude of an achievement for which he/she has struggled mightily. Then again, there are some things which are achieved merely through the passage of time, requiring nothing more than mere survival (and avoidance of dangerous behavior patterns).

Which category does this falls under? I'm not sure. Perhaps my uncertainty has to do with the level of difficulty. How hard can it be to make it through fifth grade? Not as hard as getting through high school. Which is one of the reasons we make such a big deal out of a child's graduation from secondary school rather than elementary. (The other reason may have to do with the fact that, for many children, secondary school is as far as they will ever go.)

All that said, we're still proud of James. Not for the fact that he 'graduated' fifth grade, because that an expected event. And not for the fact that his teachers recognized his creative abilities (they tagged him with the 'future author' superlative, although he'd probably rather be known as a 'future artist'). We know he is talented. We also know that the teachers are required to give some kind of recognition to each child for the purpose of self-esteem, so that no one is "Left Behind" (although saying that someone has the 'prettiest eyes' is really pushing it!). Unfortunately, it still holds true that when everyone is special, no one is special.

Mainly we're proud of James because of the characteristics that we see every day: his gentleness, his compassion for others, his easy-going nature, his loyalty, his playfulness, his laugh, his talent for drawing, his willingness to eat whatever is in front of him, his silly voices, and his love for his family.

And he's just happy to have the summer off!

Game Called on accounta Rain

Didn't get a chance to work on the sprinklers after all. It rained most of the weekend; and what's the point of working on sprinkler's when it's already sprinkling?

We did manage to get into the pool ahead of the storm, though, and leave as things were starting to look a bit gray. Wasn't more than an hour or so before the rain started coming down in buckets, and the thunder roared, and the lightning flashed, and we sat in our nice, cozy little house and watched it all through the windows.

At some point - I forget when - we also managed to mosey over to the Library, where we took on a huge load of books. Plus a video or two. Kept the kids quiet for hours and hours after we got home.

Then on Sunday, we had the piano recital, where three of the kids (Adam, Deborah, Mary) played their pieces and then there was a reception and we ate cookies and drank punch (with sherbet ice cream in it) and went home to watch one of the movies. I can't remember which one. Hercules? or was it the Schoolhouse Rock video?

Man, my memory is getting bad.

Anyway, it was an exciting, action-packed weekend. Or not. At least there wasn't a lot of work going on. I got to catch up on some reading. And watch Schoolhouse Rock. And remember the 70s, fondly.

Hope your weekend was as much fun!

Success (?) at Last

It was a mad dash and a scramble, but we finally finished the effort to get the ATP software done.

There always seem to be last-minute concerns in a process like this, especially when it's all taking place on a Friday afternoon, and it only exacerbates the situation when half the team is in one building and the rest are in another. In our case, Engineering is over 'here', and Manufacturing is over 'there'. So after we declare our software good, they pack up all our hardware (and software) and truck it over to the other building, and run a bunch of tests in their Manufacturing Labs, and we talk on the phone for hours and hours, debating every little thing that comes up.

We had several hardware 'anomalies' which required explanation, but nothing that could be traced to the software. In some cases, we have to assume that the hardware tests have actually revealed hardware failures (the software can only be blamed for so much), and then the hardware engineers have to put their collective heads together and figure out if something is really wrong. But so far as we software weenies are concerned, we're done.

For now.

This whole push was simply to get the software in a state to support the ATP process, to allow Manufacturing to test the boards which are going out to the Customer's Training Lab, yet we know even now that there is still much that has not been tested. We are awaiting investigation of some areas which we simply could not complete due to bizarre, inexplicable integration failures. Once those problems are understood, we will have to revise our software again.

Well, someone will, anyway. I'm moving on to another assignment, another fire to put out. Our Certification activities are due for completion by next February, so for the next few months, that'll be my main focus. I'm passing this task off to another young engineer (who, incidentally, is just starting work on his Dissertation) and letting him have all the coding/testing fun, while it'll be documentation and planning processes and spreadsheets and budgetary concerns for me.

Oh, joy.

Meanwhile, this weekend looks like a good opportunity to put the lawn sprinkler system back together. The grass is looking a might poorly.

Disappointment

The left side of my throat has been hurting for over a week now. It started after my return from Seattle, beginning in the ear canal and sneaking downward til it got to the muscles in my throat, making it extremely painful to swallow.

Experimentation with various dosages of over-the-counter analgesics led me to self-prescribe two Excedrin migraine tablets every four hours. Anything less and it was impossible to deal with Life.

Consequently, my current daily prescription for Health and Livelihood is the abovementioned Excedrin plus one antihistamine tablet every four hours, switching to two antihistamine tablets at night right before bed. (That keeps me from waking up in the morning with severe sinus pain due to inhalation of cat fur during the night.)

My liver is probably shot by now.

The Good Doctor, who took a look at the interior of my ears and throat today, pronounced me fit as a fiddle, and proposed the thought that perhaps my malady was due to excessive drainage during the night, which irritates my throat and ear canal, causing pain. He gave me a sample container of Nasonex to try. The list of caveats for this medication is long and tedious.

It is always disappointing when the Doctor finds nothing seriously wrong in spite of the fact that the body is experiencing excruciating pain. It begs the question, Shouldn't there be some deep and dangerous meaning to all that pain? Can it really be caused by something so mundane as night drainage?

It would've been so much more satisfying had the Doctor said "Ah!", then leaned over and pulled a huge wood sliver out of my ear. It would've made more sense. We all know that slivers cause pain. And if it were long enough, it is theoretically possible that it could've stretched all the way down to the muscles of my throat to explain that pain as well.

(If this were an episode of House, they would've discovered some bizarre South American barbed tapeworm living in my Eustachian tube, feeding on ear wax and excreting hallucinogenic chemicals down my throat. Ewww!)

One side effect of all this medication is that I am exhausted all the time. And breathing in an asthmatic mode whenever attempting real exercise. Last night I attempted to run a quarter mile. My breath was gone well before the half-way point.

Such is the life of a software weenie.