Damon William Hill's Journal

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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

As the year turns...
This isn't my favorite time of year; the days are short, almost always overcast, and what little sun comes through is low on the horizon and, well, watered down. We've had way too much water and not a little wind, and I'd like a week in Florida. At least we're 'over the hump' and the days are slowly getting longer. The long range forecast promises a warmer winter as El Nino settles in, but we'll see how that works out.

I've been feeling aimless for weeks; the holiday season and the gloomy days probably contribute to that. My life began to change radically in 1990, and sixteen years later going on seventeen, I still don't feel like things are in the proper groove. Can't look back without getting depressed, so I try to look forward and hope for the future.

Current Mood: aimless
Current Music: Special EFX

Yet Another Toy
Boeing Surplus is a dangerous place for me. Bad enough that I discovered Wednesdays are THE day to show up and look for the newest assortment of high-tech castoffs and bargains. Worse yet that I find things I could use at great prices (a HP 3478A 5 1/2 digit DMM for only $25, lab power supplies for $25 to $35, assorted tools and knick-knacks, RN55s by the pound). Now I'm bringing home technology strays I'm not sure what to do with. It's like kittens; I can't quite say "no". And mean it.

Today it's a QuadTech 1417 Four-Terminal Capacitance Standard. Formerly built by General Radio, one of the Old Royalty of electronic instrument makers. It's a deceptively simple thing: a precision 1 uF capacitor with a couple of switched inductors that make the capacitor look 'bigger', up to one FARAD. It didn't sell last week at $110, and this week it was going for just under $50. I'd looked up the thing and what it was intrigued me. Now I own it and I still don't quite know for certain what I'm going to do with it. I can use it for instrument calibration and measuring dielectric absorption, but apparently I also need an impedance bridge, which I don't have for some reason.

The darn thing apparently sells new for over $6000; I got it for $50. How could I say no to Such A Bargain?

I was supposed to be cleaning up my bedroom this week; instead, I bring in more complications. Well, I >did< make a little progress in sorting out some things like my shelf of Audio Amateur magazines, to which I've continuously subscribed since 1970. That definitely needed doing. But I still can't sleep in my own bed; I've been sleeping in the garage, under a lot of blankets.

Really, my life's not >that< weird. Really. C'mon, you believe me, don't you? My God, you should see the place and the sort of stuff Boeing casts off...

'Tis The Season--argh...
Christmas season is upon me, and as usual I'm wading in my own self-inflicted chaos and not likely to get anything Christmasy done in time. I've haven't been traditional since I moved away from Georgia; lots of things changed over the years and there's little family left to uphold much tradition anyway. Sigh.

As a gift to myself, I'm going to be spending a few daze trying to clean up my bedroom. This is more of a challenge than it sounds, and I won't be paying much attention to friends' LJ entries for a while. My current projects have gotten bogged down in the mess, and I won't make any more progress with them until I reimpose some semblance of order.

Dawn and I did make some progress cleaning up and organizing the garage last summer, and that's been a big help. I've got an organized workbench and most tools hung up neatly, so minor projects and repairs have a place to be expedited. Thanks to our packrat natures, the garage's still stacked high with stuff, so another round of cleaning and throwing out is still needed. Maybe this spring, when it warms up... Given our typical Pacific Northwet fall (which has been more like an early winter), I'm pretty much stuck indoors anyway.

Late October musings
We've had our first hard freeze, and it's not even decently November yet. The frost was thick as light snow this morning and the tomatoes are dead, dead, dead. I enjoy fall up to a point; the colors are nice (but not as nice as North Georgia in the fall) and the rains haven't quite yet set in for most of the next six months. But the sun's retreated well to the south and shines only weakly after 1pm, and nights come too early. Mt. Rainier turned white with fresh snow overnight and I-90 got shut down briefly by an unexpected snowstorm; I thought this year's winter was forecast to be warmer than normal? Oh well, our winters in the lowlands are usually mild and peak in December. If really I want snow, I just have to drive to the east less than an hour...

Time to trash the tomato vines and work on cleaning the gutters. Again. I hate that chore with a passion.

A Cat Containment System
There's no getting around the fact that we have too many cats for this house.

Our current feline crew of four is restless, and constantly looking for ways to get outdoors. Since we've lost at least two to the nearby street, Dawn decreed that all cats shall be indoor cats--but the cats don't see it that way.

We're hoping a cat run will give them some safe outdoor time that they obviously crave. The project was started without much idea of how to proceed and came together over several months, without any real reference material or ideas. After some thought, we proceeded with a modular system that I kind of invented as I went along, with input from Dawn and an idea or two from Phil. Design by committee sometimes results in camels instead of race horses, but I encountered only one significant design snag; given my lack of carpentry skills, I'm fairly pleased with the way the design has worked out.

I used regular lumber, light plywood and 2" wood screws, with cheap outdoor carpeting glued to the three platforms in the tower. Chicken wire surrounds it, stapled to the wood. Wood preservative was painted onto the wood, but I don't really expect it to last much more than five years in our damp climate. No matter; I'll just rebuild and repair as needed.

It helped that my sister gave me a Lowe's gift card for my birthday; having unlimited free supplies removed some inhibitions about cost. Mike's Porter-Cable battery drill and wood screws works better than nails, allowing tighter construction and easy disassembly and modification. I just drill a pilot hole in the top piece of wood and the two pieces snug together in a few seconds, without the impact and hassle of hammer and nails.

A door got added a bit after the fact, when I realized that occasionally we would need to get inside for cleaning and maintenance. A 'shower cap' of clear plastic drop cloth was stapled to the top to help keep the upper platform dry in wet weather and to discourage pine needles from dropping through the top.

The first module, a three-platform tower, has been completed and installed next to the laundry room window. I installed a snap-in cat door on the window screen and cut a hole in the chicken wire, so the cats can come and go as they please. For winter use, I have to somehow cut an acrylic sheet to fit in place of the screen, with a swinging door; that should be an adventure.

So far, they seem to be enjoying the new addition to the house. I think they like the openness of the enclosure, which lets the air blow through and carry interesting scents, and having a wider field of view of the interesting things in life: birds and squirrels in the yard and on the side fence.

A run, with the bottom open to the lawn, and a second tower will be added soon to expand the system so all four cats can share the open space without feeling too crowded.

Now that I've got the design semi-perfected, I'm giving thoughts to possible elaborations and improvements. How well the thing will suffer the weather remains to be seen.

Honey Cats
So we were on our way this morning to Twin Falls State Park, near North Bend, Washington.
(Twin Peaks fans will know the place; we ate supper at a restaurant that was used in several episodes of the show.)

As I was driving down the street to the parking area, something caught the corner of my eye and I HAD to stop and photograph this scene. The sign reads "self service", but I'm sure this very friendly sales staff helps bring in more customers.

Wanna play! Meow!
I'm up early, for me (I seem to be semi-retired and have a loose schedule, if any).

Mittsy is meowing, wanting me to play; her favorite game is chase and pounce, the target usually being a wadded up Arby's sandwich wrapper or a small ball of aluminum foil. One of us casts it forth and she madly dashes after it, pouncing it and sometimes dribbling it downfield like a soccer player.

Then she'll bring it back, sometimes all the way to within my reach, sometimes not, and beg me to throw it again. Meow! Meow! If I throw it low, she's agile enough to often block it in mid-air. Not bad for a pretty fat cat, who could use some exercise--as does her equally tubby owner, alas. The laser pen doesn't excite her very much (Blitz goes bonkers for that little red dot). Female cats seem to exhibit the most aggressive 'hunting' behavior like this, perhaps because in the wild they need to be feeding kittens as well as themselves. You can take the cat out of the wild, but never entirely take the wild out of the cat.

One of her favorite treats are small bits of french fries; I assume she likes the salty taste or possibly the fry oil. She knows the sounds of food preparation, as do the other cats; I may find them lined up begging for bits of sandwich meat, even terribly shy Tym gets almost bold at supper time.

For an occasionally hysterical cat cartoon: http://twolumps.net/ (I'm easily amused)

I was hoping for a Shuttle launch this morning, but a bad fuel cell ended today's attempt just as it began.

Bettin' on the crocs--Steve's End
A Ballad For Steve Irwin

Well Steve, we knew somethin' was gonna getcha,
and rasslin' reptiles seemed mighty risky;
so we put our money on the crocs.

I mean, your line of work an' all,
how long was it gonna be, before somethin' got ya?
And we bet good money on the crocs.

Now tigers is dangerous and leopards are treacherous,
and giant hornets and African bees'll swarm ya,
yet we wagered our paychecks it'd be the crocs.

Coulda been the snakes or spiders or the
poisonous centipedes, and them stingers and venom
and stuff.
Still, we put our life savin's on the crocs.

Or even coulda' been a rude ‘roo,
they kick you know, and them toenails is wicked,
but we borrowed money and bet it was gonna be crocs.

Now you go huntin' dangerous animals,
well they'll sometimes hunt you back!
And we talked our friends and families,
into bettin' on the crocs.

And then a stingray, of all God's critters,
it wasn't even the poison,
but a stray spine right through your bleedin' heart!

Crikey, Steve, why couldn't it have been the crocs!

(Rest in peace, Steve Irwin. We're sure gonna miss ya, man.)

Cat up a tree
Things were going nicely this morning, considering that I have two appointments today, including with my doctor.

That was before the Big Break. It looks like Blitz pushed out a screen, and Blackie followed him. Possibly Tym got out too; we haven't seen her but this time of day she hides in the garage, napping.

My first clue was the crows making a fuss, and I spotted Blackie in the back yard. By the time Dawn and I got outside, he'd run most of the way up a fir tree where he clings, meowing piteously. I'd need a ladder twice as long as what I have just to get near him, and that'll only make him climb as high as he possibly can.

I guess we'll just have to hold vigil in the back yard until the silly, clueless twit decides to come down. I'm hoping the hot afternoon sun and a black-furred cat will force the issue.

It's going to be a very annoying day.