Damon William Hill's Journal

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Paying for the Priviledge
The Pacific Northwest is usually known for mild weather. This year has been an exception of some extremes.

An unusual cold snap last December gave many local areas snow accumulations measured in feet, not inches; I experienced my first white Christmas and learned to dread the sight of fresh snowfall.

And after several years running of mild summers, we're dry as a bone and hot, hot, HOT... There's been no significant rainfall in two months and little expected for another two. Temperatures will be in the mid 90s this week, some places reaching 100F.

I have a window A/C unit, but it won't fit in the sliding windows. Life is irony.

Too Big for his Britches
The cats are getting used to the neighborhood and vice versa, or so I thought until this afternoon when I found Blitz attempting to assert territory in our (his) backyard with a juvenile raccoon. He better not try that attitude with Big Momma Coon; she'll clean his clock and I'll be stuck with the vet bill.

Oh, and we've got beaver. I don't see any signs of lodges or dams in the river, so maybe they just cruise up and down stream, nibbling at trees as they wander. Several people have taken to wrapping wire mesh around tree trucks to discourage North America's largest native rodent.

Occasionally in the early dawn I wake up to the sound of migrating geese, honking as they fly in formation overhead.

Cottonwood trees are very common here, and the white fluff flies so thick that it accumulates just like a light snowfall.

Operational -- Sorta...
I've gotten the washing machine connected and rewired the dryer for a four-wire plug. Presto! We now have clean underwear.

I hereby declare this battl--er, laundry room fully operational.

The rest is going to take awhile. Essentials first. The cats are taking it well although they're not yet fully integrated into the neighborhood and its many roaming cats.

No Foolin'
It's April 1st, and we're essentially living out of the new home.

Cable got installed today, with Internet,and suddenly it's begun to feel like Home.

We've been working on the move for the past month and we're exhausted, with more work
yet to finish moving out, clean up the old house so the landlord can do his things for
the next tenants, and finish moving in and organizing in much smaller quarters.

On the whole, this crisis could be a good thing after all. Our cost of living should
be cut in nearly half and the new place, a rather nice mobile home with a very clean
interior and lovely landscaping, have given us a new sense of purpose and organization.

The next hurdle will be getting employed. I'm feeling very apprehensive about that,
since my electronics career appears to be dead and likely job prospects seem poor at
best.

End of an Era
Furpoint Station will soon be history.

Due to tremendous financial problems only partly due to the economy, I'm cashing in my retirement fund and buying a mobile home. Much will be lost, but the rent and energy costs of this house are killing me and it can't continue. It was a difficult but unavoidable decision. Stress alone has caused me to lose fifteen pounds since early October when the economic train wreck began unfolding.

I'll still be in Auburn, trying to cope with poverty and get re-employed in a bad job market. Phil's off to live with a friend and Dawn and I will be living in the mobile home. With four cats. Oy.

It's likely I will be mostly off the Internet as well, unless there's >really cheap< access by ancient telephone modem in the Seattle area; otherwise I'll check in once in a while via the library.

It's going to be a tough year or several.

Lenticular
Once in a while, Mt. Rainier dons a hat. These are "lenticular" cloud formations and sometimes are very spectacular--other times they are mistaken for UFOs. The photo's a bit fuzzy because it was taken right at sunset and there was a lot less light than I'd like to have had. The camera is Dawn's birthday/Christmas present, a Nikon Coolpix L18.

You may have noticed from this view how much bigger and higher Mt. Rainier is compared to its much smaller neighbors; thus it is that Rainier tends to make its own weather as the prevailing winds and water vapor collide and get lofted much higher into colder realms.

My God, it's full of 'shrooms!
What grows in the damp early fall, in our back yard. They're steadily surrounding the house; this view is on top of a pile of compost.

I don't know when I've seen fungi so thick and profuse. Can anyone identify them? Mycenae?

And Tipsoo, Too
We've been up to Chinook Pass and Lake Tipsoo three times since the pass (5432 feet) was plowed and avalanches cleared in early June; this is typical except for the sheer amount of snow during the winter season, and the two or three feet that unseasonably fell during June.

Click the pictures for larger views and more commentary.

Yes, there's a lake out there...somewhere. Mind where you snowshoe or ski--you might find it.

The parking lot would not be free of snow until late July; just the restroom was dug out enough to access. We watched people enjoying some late skiing on nearby extreme slopes.

Our second visit in July and the meadows are still under one to three feet of snow, with most of the lake outline visible. But no flowers when they normally have begun to bloom; even anemone (pictured) and avalanche lilies were only just peeking.

Ah, August and finally things are starting to look normal. The alpine meadows are once again verdant and sprinkled with the bright colors of wildflowers.

Alas, the mosquitoes are especially plentiful so we aren't able to relax and contemplate the serene beauty of the Cascades. Staying on the move helps keep the bugs somewhat at bay, so we walk around the two lakes, photographing the flowers and scenery before heading down to less marshy places with fewer whiny bloodsuckers.

Summer and Snow
Last week, we drove up to see the wildflowers in the alpine meadows at Paradise. Well, that was the intention. Seems there's still up to several feet of snow on much of the meadows in early August. Almost the only flowers were the early risers, avalanche lilies.

At slightly lower and sunnier elevations, the summer flowers are blooming if definitely a bit late. Here are my favorite magenta paintbrushes.

We'll be heading back up to Paradise and Lake Tipsoo in the near future to catch the meadows in belated full bloom.

Lost: Spring going on Summer
Here it's the first week of June. Typical Pacific Northwet: fifties in the daytime, forties at night, and wet--drippy, incessant wet. My strawberries still haven't ripened, about two weeks late going on three.

Oh, and there's up to two feet of fresh snow forecast for the mountains.

The Paradise visitor's center at Mt. Rainier has at least eight inches of fresh snow on top of the twelve feet still on the ground. Don't believe me? Check it out via Webcam:

http://www.cascadeclimber.com/web_cams.htm

Global warming? It's been put on hold. I've put back on my normal winter layer of clothing: double undershirts, heavy flannel longsleeve shirt and various sweaters or sweatshirts. But I'm not sweating--my hands are cold.

Don't get me started on gasoline prices. Grrrr...

A small Bloggeration
This blog has been read by (0) people.

This is probably for the best.

Recommended Reading: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

Not Gonna Be My Day, Week, or Month
I'm pedaling hard, and going backwards today.

The original idea was to update Dawn's computer, which has been accumulating the infamous Windoze 'bloat' with each upgrade and hotfix, and software install. It's slow and flaky, and Dawn isn't happy with it. Time to upgrade with an honest Windows XP, not this bootleg Win 2000, and do so on a SATA drive for a bit more speed and storage space.

So, off to the store to buy a Western Digital 160Gig drive (SATA II) and XP. Get home, install drive, motherboard won't even see the drive in BIOS. Eventually I determine that the new drive WILL run normally in other computers, but it and the MSI KT6 Delta LSR motherboard in Dawn's computer aren't talking. A call to Western Digital (in India, of course) stumps them; they want me to call back on Monday so I can talk to an "expert". I suspect the MSI motherboard isn't happy with at least some SATA II drives, for whatever reason.

So, I hatch the plot to swap out with another SATA I drive that I know works in this computer, and set up the two drives to transfer files on the backup computer. Now the old drive doesn't work. At all.

My none-too-keen eye spies a surface mount component on the desk; looks like a 7 ohm resistor. A close inspection of the drive's electronics board turns up an empty space that the missing part fits in, but I don't have the skills or tools to solder in parts that tiny. I have no idea how I knocked it off, and I've got to somehow fix it because of all the files on that drive that I'd rather not lose. But not this weekend, it seems.

So it's off to the computer store again for any SATA I drives they may still have in stock.

Looks like yet another Lost Weekend in my love/hate relationship with computers...

...the computers are winning.

Boeing Surplus: an Institution's End
Surplus electronic stores are like a toy store to me; alas, their numbers are dwindling and even electronics parts stores (Radio Shack doesn't count) are disappearing. So it is with a sigh that I and many others bid goodbye to Boeing's surplus store in Kent, Washington. It was a source of used test equipment, parts, chassis, office chairs, old computer equipment, multi-ton manufacturing equipment, aluminum and titanium blocks, and aerospace exotica--things too strange to describe in these pages. And usually at bargain basement prices, or less... Over the past five or six years I've snagged some test equipment I couldn't have afforded otherwise, and I was hoping for more such finds.

The last day was a melancholy one for me; I missed going on Wednesday, which is usually the day that new items are put out for sale. Friday's opening found me at least 150th in line and by the time I could get in the door, the benches where electronic gear is usually placed had already been stripped nearly clean. One person had apparently just grabbed everything that looked usable and piled his shopping cart to overflowing, likely to resell most of it on Ebay. T'ain't fair.

I didn't even finish checking the rest of the benches, just turned around and left.

Maybe it's the time of the year, dark and overcast, and the holiday pressures that combine to leave me in a depressed funk. I hate depression. I've lived with it all of my life, and there's nothing to do but tough it out when it occurs.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

So we went to see 'Golden Compass' and were much impressed by the extremely realistic CGI and the overall setting of the movie; the animal daemons were especially appealing to my inner child.

The overall story seemed muddled and fragmentary, in no small part due to the confused production of the movie with multiple directors. I've purchased Phillip Pullman's novels to try and get an idea of what he was really trying to say.

Summer at Lake Tipsoo
Isn't it supposed to be summer already? Not at Chinook Pass (5432 ft.), even in late June. There's still at least a foot of snow, even the parking lot at Lake Tipsoo is still mostly covered.

The thaw is coming and by late July or early August the alpine meadows will be green and full of the Cascade Mountains famous wildflowers. But for now, spring has only just arrived.

Photo by Dawn Jaekel, June 26, 2007

Crow for Supper
No, not eating it; caring for it.

Dawn found an injured crow at the nearby park, which we easily captured under a sheet. It seems calm, just making an occasional "caw". Its right leg seems injured. It's a bit smaller than I would expect for a crow, so it's either a juvenile or a local Northwestern Crow.

Right now it's in a pet carrier on the back porch, its occasional caw getting the cats' attention. We've got a call in to a wildlife rescue center for advice on what might be done. I hope it doesn't involve money, because $500 of maintenance on the truck (a new radiator over the weekend) has eaten my budget for the month.

We're also mindful that it could be sick.

(next day)

Not surprisingly, the bird was dead this morning. It's double-bagged and in the trash, the pet carrier was washed out and sprayed with a laundry bleach solution, and the sheet used to capture it was washed with bleach. Just in case it was infected with something nasty.

Thirty Years?!
It's been THIRTY goshdarn years since the first Star Wars movie, which I almost ignored at the time--didn't even know it was science fiction. The 70's weren't a great time for me and I was out of it in more than a few ways for most of the decade. The movie was fun stuff, but looks positively dated and a bit tacky and crude by today's standards.

30 years. I'm feeling old.

Watched a two-hour special about it tonight; I'm not sure I buy into the premise of it being a story of and for the ages. It was a great spectacle but uneven story-telling, and I didn't expect it to be an immortal literary landmark, just good entertainment ("you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll kiss your money goodbye").

Still an open question whether Lucas, or anyone, will do the third trilogy; I fully expect Episodes 4 through 6 to be remade. Someday.

Well, the heck with that. I'm enjoying all the other movie magic that computer technology is making possible. Pixar's where it's at these days; they take the effort to tell a good story and have fun doing it, and coming up with fresh stories that stand on their own. And that, more than slick animation technology, is what it really comes down to.

Current Mood: retrospective

Snoqualmie Falls on a fine day in May
We haven't gotten out much since last fall, partly because Mt. Rainier park has been closed since the severe flooding; normally we'd drive up to Paradise at least once in the winter to stomp around in the snow (over ten feet deep, sometimes twenty) and admire the icy mountain scenery. A spate of fine spring weather this week has so far led us to visit another one of the region's jewels, Snoqualmie Falls. It's a 268 foot dramatic drop with an inn and a park.

Dawn loves this place and several times a year she'll spend an entire afternoon here. Today the falls were especially photogenic with the snowmelt swelling the volume and the late afternoon sunlight creating a brilliant rainbow at the base.

Lots of mist, forcing us to camp a little further away because our favorite spot was getting soaked by the heavy spray. The falls are east of Seattle, just off I-90 and located in a rocky gorge. Peregrine falcons nest on the south wall of the gorge; the nest is visible from the viewing platform on the north wall.

Old tech, new tech
Now I'm in the middle of trying to retrofit a 30+ year old Heathkit tuner which I'd purchased from Ebay. It's an AJ-1510A, once their flagship tuner and in its long-gone day something of a technological tour de force: true digital display and tuning, a kind of digital demodulator instead of a ratio detector or discriminator, programmable cards to preselect all of three stations, and most of the electronics are on seven plug-in cards that go into a backplane.

Overall, it works pretty well and sounds better than my existing tuner with an extremely quiet background, even though it's bulky and rather kludgy by modern standards. I'm going through it, after repairing some initial problems with bad capacitors in the power supply, and replacing many of the parts in the audio path with better quality parts: metal film resistors, polystyrene and film coupling and timing caps and so forth.

I've finally come down to redesign: the intriguing detector circuit apparently uses an ancient 709-type opamp. That's really old stuff, just about first generation linear IC, and there are many better parts available now. I pulled the old one, installed a socket, and plugged in several modern types I had handy: AD797 and AD848 among them.

So far, I have a multi-megahertz oscillator. The existing design's feedback loop has a 68k resistor and plenty of compensation; somehow I'll have to figure out what the actual gain's supposed to be. Otherwise, I'm clueless. I've replaced the original components and the tuner still works, so I've not lost any ground thus far.

I haven't found much information online to explain the detector design, nor do I have access to a good FM alignment generator like a Sound Technology 1000A, which I really need to determine if I'm really making progress.

KPLU (jazz) and KING (classical) are almost Seattle's only FM stations that offer a musical alternative to overcompressed rock, rap, soul, western and gospel. For now, I'll just sit back and enjoy the music while I ponder design issues.

Current Mood: technobabble
Current Music: bluesy jazz

Down again
Trying out a new Bissel vacuum cleaner on Friday afternoon, which is pulling embarrassing amounts of crud out of the carpet even after multiple passes. I turned off my computer and moved it aside to vacuum behind my desk. Turned the computer back on; no joy.

Somewhat later, after testing the hard drive on another computer and running SpinRite on the drive with no results, I'm guessing the FAT got munged during the reboot and I don't know how to recover from that, at least not yet.

Backups? Of course not. This snafu quite spoiled my weekend and I've decided to live without the silly thing for a while as I research recovery options and how to do proper backups. I'm time-sharing the upstairs computer with Dawn, who wisely doesn't trust me with the thing.

I just took delivery on one of these:

http://tinyurl.com/37pyvd

It's a Tektronix distortion test set; Audio Precision it's not and it's more than I can afford but I went for it anyway.

Snow Problem!
Considering that I'm a two hour drive from Canada, you'd think we'd get more snow here. We don't. In the mountains, yes. Down in the lowlands, the Pacific Ocean moderates our temperatures both summer and winter, which means snow is an irregular thing here.

Yesterday afternoon, a little atmospheric disturbance north of Seattle got wound up a bit and headed south, turning the afternoon rush hour into another commute from Hell. It finally drifted down to us, depositing five inches in three hours, and turning Auburn into a winter wonderland with all the trees heavily loaded with fluffy snow. And now it's getting really cold, so it won't melt away quickly like it usually does.

And here's a photo of wintry FurPoint Station with my snow-laden Dodge Dakota parked out front:

Current Mood: wintry wonderland