Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Damon William Hill's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, April 19th, 2012
7:37 pm	No Two Ways About It One-sided love's delusions are all that I recall. I'll never know love, at all. Current Mood: very (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 1st, 2011
7:38 pm	Bootlegging the 'Net Being offline sucks. It's frustrating having a computer that does very little without an Internet connection. And it'll likely be next year before we can afford the service again. So I hauled out my USB wireless widget and had a look at what was in range. Aha! One, just one, out of a dozen routers wasn't protected and at random times I could connect, unreliably. The weather has an effect on WiFi reception just as it does on UHF TV reception, generally not good during rainy and windy conditions. I needed a better antenna, so does the TV, but the budget's too lean for even modest hardware purchases. Experiments with a metal pie pan as a reflector gave marginally better results, but the revolution came when I set the USB widget on top of the pan, it serving as a ground plane. May still not work during bad weather, but it'll do for now. Now I'm pirating a service and I know it, but I'm poor and desperate and worst of all, bored without my Internet connection to the world. Getting an occasional fix at the library just isn't enough; even having access to a terminal at work during breaks and lunch doesn't quite scratch the itch, though it helps. So, 'til my unsuspecting neighbor wises up and locks his router I can connect, and I feel connected. Work's pretty interesting for the moment; I'm in Hydraulic Build Unit cleaning parts and labeling aircraft hydraulic parts, and attempting to assist the mechanics who do the modifications to the gear. Despite the minimum wage pay it's steady work and will hopefully lead to better things. Maybe I'll master the cantankerous labeling 'gun' and be able to keep up with the afternoon 'surge' as well. At least for a few weeks until I'm reassigned to another department. Gardening this year was modest but somewhat successful: the pumpkin vines contracted a mold infection but produced one small pumpkin, the tomatoes (cherry, grape "Juliette", and Early Girl) in their five gallon plastic pails finally bore sweet fruit (much to Dawn's pleasure) and the strawberry bed is being populated with runners from the strawberry pots. The cucumbers didn't do squat, but we had a good wild blackberry season. I just wish I had more sunny exposure and room for a more ambitious garden. Compost made a big difference. (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 16th, 2011
10:38 am	Employment at last! I'm now working a full-time job; the work's menial and my back is killing me, but it's a paycheck. Building small parts that go into Boeing airliners; nothing so exotic as you'd expect, it's pretty boring work that's the lowest common denominator of a complex machine like a modern airliner: clamps for hydraulic and other pressurized lines. My income's more than doubled, but we're still on a tight budget for the present. Hopefully this job will lead to better things, depending on what Voc Rehab can find for me. I'm still looking for work in electronics, even as I repair audio gear at home in the evenings. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 25th, 2011
2:00 pm	It does ADD up, after all. After many years of suspecting I have attention deficit disorder based on symptoms, Voc Rehab does a evaluation and confirms it so. About 45 years late, I fear, to do much good in my life, but I have to start somewhere. Running the gamut of doctors to find someone who will prescribe appropriate medication has been a frustration; I had the diagnosis in January and won't get an appointment with a psychiatrist until early March. grrrrr.... In the meantime, I'm researching the subject online as I can, with the help of a book: Delivered From Distraction, by Dr. Edward Hallowell Maybe it'll be life-changing, or not. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 14th, 2011
10:11 am	Temporary Hiatus Due to poverty, I'm ending cable and telephone service. We'll be on cell phone and the occasional visit to the library for Internet. My presence here will be sporadic at best. The recession/depression sucks. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 13th, 2010
10:22 pm	Truckin' at 125,000 miles Age is catching up with my '97 Dodge Dakota. Had to replace the battery last week; still, it was over five years old and had been abused with several deep discharges. 'Bout $100 I'll never see again. This week it was the starter. There went another $320 or so; I jacked up the truck to see if it was feasible for me to replace it myself. Looked tight, very greasy and the rain made it too inconvenient to attempt; I suppose I was lucky to find a shop open on a Saturday that was able to fix it in short order. I'll probably take it back shortly to have a full tune-up since it's getting balky in cold weather. On the whole the old girl's not in bad shape, but money's way too tight. Got to get employed RSN; the job prospect the temp agency indicated last week seems to have evaporated. I'd hoped to be employed by now. :( (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010
10:08 pm	Never buy Moen! The kitchen sink faucet was leaking a little, and Dawn was after me to fix it before the counter rotted out. (It wasn't leaking that bad at all, but, eventually...) First step, shut off the hot and cold water valves to the sink; the hot water valve wouldn't even slow down the flow. I eventually located the main water cutoff to the house, which at first didn't seem to have any effect and was forced at first to cut off the hot water valve at the heater. Eventually it bled off the pressure; oh well, I needed to find that valve anyway. Now I can fix the leaky outside faucets at my leisure. Made by Moen says the label on the tilting handle, so I took a gander at their site and located what was probably the right model with an exploded diagram of a surprising number of parts. Set about dissembling it and that went pretty well until I got to the actual valve cartridge, which wasn't budging. Back to the Web, which ominously contained many tales and some expository videos of how to change out Moen valve cartridges--they don't want to come out at all, even with the special removal tool. Even then, you have only a 50% chance of getting it inserted the right way so the water flows hot when set to hot, and so forth. Off to Lowe's, where I eventually found the right part # (I hoped!) and a clerk helpfully pointed out an appropriate removal tool, not unlike that used to extract bearings from drive shafts. Much cursing and frustration later, we ended up going out for barbecue while I pondered the problem. Finally, with a vise grip and a hammer, I pounded the darn thing out--halfway there! The replacement generally resembled the original but wouldn't you know it, it was just as stubborn about going into the housing. Eventually, I tried whittling a candlestick to fit into the housing and rubbed some paraffin into the metal; after that, with much less effort, I finally got the darn thing to fully insert without breaking anything. Reassembly and test, successful! No leaks, and hot water comes out when desired, not cold water--luck is finally turning my way! The next day, I hop into the truck--battery can't deliver enough juice to turn over a cold engine. Sigh. Ah, the joys of home ownership and entropy... (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 25th, 2010
1:13 pm	Back From the Dead: Zombie Motherboard So, sometime in June my computer goes belly-up. Won't even POST. Two electrolytic caps on the MSI K7N2 Delta 2 motherboard were swollen and vented--obvious clue there. But I'm not worried, for I Had A Backup Plan. Yes, a whole 'nother computer running on the network as a file server and backup, and grinding away at SETI workunits when not being accessed, which is nearly always. To make a long and sorrowful story short, I pretty much screwed up and wound up with no computers; I'll spare you the wretched details. Dawn had the laptop I gave her a couple of years ago, but was reluctant to let me place my incompetent hands on it; at least I was able to get my daily Internet 'fix'. So I order up a batch of appropriate replacement caps, desolder (with difficulty) and replace (with less difficulty) the bad caps, and...it LIVES!!! No Green Screen of UnDeath, either. Some more time is necessary to get the hard drive Windows XP installation back up to speed and work out the quirky boot issues--2 gigabytes of memory is now virtually essential to insure smooth operation. It also appears that I have inserted the memory chips several times too many and the sockets are too loose to function with my old memory. Windows XP runs wretchedly on 512 megs in the center memory socket. "Brains...brains...brains..."(shuffle, shuffle) Really, this is ridiculous. Well, the recovery plan is to go to the backup computer anyway with a fresh Windows XP install and the 2 gigs, and get all of the necessary files transferred over; once again I'll spare you the wretched details why this wasn't accomplished three weeks ago. Or that once again I didn't have comprehensive backups. Some Happy Day I'll own a Real Computer: an AMD quad core at 3+ GHz with 8 gigs of memory and SSD and a honkin' video card which SETI can access for super-computer-like math powers and a Xonar Essence ST audiophile-quality sound card. Running 64-bit Windows 7. First, I've got to find real employment. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 26th, 2010
2:06 am	Summer and Sixty I turn sixty on July 19th. I don't >feel< old, just a kind of resigned middle-age average, coping unevenly with an unideal life and making the best of it I can. (Comment on this)
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
4:40 pm	A Lion Named "May" A very windy night and day, with gusts up to nearly 40mph. It's been sunny here, rainy in many other locations. As I was taking a brief walk along the river, admiring a neighbor's vegetable garden (lots of peas and asparagus), I turned around in time to watch a medium-sized tree fall into the river with a big splash! The culprits were our beaver; they'd gnawed at the base of the tree and a big gust of wind finally broke the weakened trunk. The other trees they've felled recently show signs of having had the bark chewed off the limbs and trunks. I'd only just cleaned up the yard of small limbs and debris; I'll have to do it all over again after that lion named "May" finishes roaring through the newly leafed-out limbs. (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 28th, 2010
2:33 pm	Wild Life, on the White River We have beaver. Living on the White River means having wildlife. Plenty of crows year-round, a pair of nesting Canada geese and some ducks, salmon runs in the fall, rabbits, squirrels, raccoons and coyote. Deer at one time, but I haven't seen any in several years. At least a couple of homeless humans, too... The other day Dawn mentioned a tree had been cut down and was laying in the river. I checked, and sure enough, it had been nibbled through by what could only have been beaver. Auburn, Washington is a suburb of Seattle and Tacoma, and hardly the wilderness beaver would suggest. The White River, which has its headwaters at Emmons Glacier on Mt. Rainier, is a broad and strongly flowing stream which turns latte-colored in summer during the melt. They aren't going to build a dam like you'd think, so I guess they're lodging in debris piles and brush thickets along the banks. One smaller tree has also been cut down--both are cottonwood--and stripped of its bark. Waiting to see how the larger tree will fare. The river won't rise significantly until next fall's heavy rains set in, so the beaver will have time to make use of their harvest. They've been at it in this neighborhood off and on since I moved here in 1996 and likely long before then; trees show the signs of North America's largest native rodent at work. Some trees have been wrapped with wire mesh to discourage them. Altogether a pleasant place to live, on the edge of the wild. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 20th, 2010
6:47 pm	Ah, Spring! 'Bout time, too. Showers are moving in now, but it was sunny and very warm today, making it easy to step out and get some minor chores done here and there. Going for some cucumbers, tomatoes-in-a-bucket or several, and more strawberries this year. I need lots more topsoil and potting soil. The strawberries I transplanted last year did poorly in contrast to the annual bounty I was accustomed to at the previous house and garden. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
2:02 am	Perspective Lost. Long time ago. Seeking same. Have you seen? Resources on AADD could be useful. It's just a theory, but... * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Going to a "hamfest" in the morning, to browse the "boneyard" for esoteric electronic whatevers. Not much of a budget but there are a few odd things I need, even if I don't know what they are until I see them. Something to look forward to, especially since I haven't been to one in a long time. (Think flea market) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, March 5th, 2010
11:49 am	Singularity Why am I? It's an old question: the meaning of existence. Probably comes from too much introspection. In all of Time and Space, here I am trying to contemplate the whyness of me, what I am, whether any of it means anything other than the meaning I chose to give it. God remains mum on the subject and perhaps I don't want to know. I'm depressed enough as it is. I'd forgotten to renew my Paxil prescription the prior weekend, and forgot about the prescription itself in my array of daily meds; now it's catching up with me in the form of bizarre, complex dreams within dreams and jarring mood swings. And serotonin hangovers that make my head throb. Can't get a refill until next week, so it'll be a long weekend. And here I am, a tiny bit of the Universe self-organizing to question its own existance as it wanders down the entropy trail. It's a very lonely feeling, sitting here in Time and Space and whatever other dimensions; my mind wanders and it's hardly called 'thinking' when I can't even hold onto the threads of a thought. All the lonely people, where do we all come from? Where do we go? I'd rather make up my own reasons than have certain people impose theirs on me. Better to explore possibilities than accept reasons for not having a life. I'm tired of sitting alone in my darkness, wondering why. Mostly, I'm just tired. (Comment on this)
12:06 am	Disconnection Tonight's message of depression and gloom, a summary of my conflicted life in one word. I'd like to have happy messages, telling you about what I'm doing with my life, the good times I'm having, the things I'm looking forward to. But that's not the way my life is, or really ever has been. Much of my past I just want to forget. High school reunion? Why? I hardly had any friends then and the door slammed closed with graduation; those people are forty years gone. I hardly remember any of them and I wonder if any of them would remember me. A roomful of aging strangers and blank stares; I need to get off that mailing list. College? Nope; that was a horrible experience of crushing loneliness, depression and failure. Nothing to go back to. I want to forget that. For a time I had a good job, but that's twenty years gone with my career. I drift, no rudder or compass. At one time I had aspirations of being an artist and/or writer; I can't. That died years ago, too. What am I doing with my life? I don't know. I can't explain because those aren't the words other people want to hear. Family? Let's not go there. Perhaps I'll reconnect with something in a day or so. For now I'll just mindlessly surf the Internet and then pull the blankets over my head, and try to sleep. Maybe. You think this is depression? It's been much worse than this. Current Mood: empty (Comment on this)
Friday, January 22nd, 2010
1:39 am	Running on Emptiness ~funk~ (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
1:11 am	Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes As Dawn, who is a big fan, comments: "This is not your father's Holmes. Like the recent Star Trek movie, it seriously messes with canon." But we agreed that for the many liberties the movie took with canon, it's a fun romp in gritty London-town with skewed characterizations all getting pretty well beaten up, and a bit of steam punk (such as the crude spark-gap radio) tossed in. I've been recently watching the old British-made Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett in the title role and enjoy it for the almost painfully authentic late 19th century settings and British character actors (who tend to be lots more like Real British People, warts and all). As yet, I haven't read any of Doyle's novels, but Dawn will fix that sooner or later. So, purist or not, we give it a hearty thumbs up for entertainment value. More movies to come, when we can budget them and make up our minds which to attend. (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 31st, 2009
12:28 pm	Sloughing the Naughts Goodbye, good riddance, just go... The 'Naughts weren't quite that bad at the very beginning; after all, it wasn't just a new century but a new millenium and how many of us live to see that calendar event? I certainly had a lot of changes, even improvements, in my personal life: Dawn, who helped me survive the Nothing Decade. The finish really sucked, very badly. Nowhere to go except up. On that note, I'm applying for a temporary job with the Census. (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
6:02 pm	A Melancholy Christmas Tale The Season was always kind of a mixed blessing thanks to our dysfunctional family, but there were some good times a long time ago and I miss those. Time has considerably passed and now I really have no more family; my sister and I are no longer on speaking terms and I don't expect any resolution short of Divine intervention. It's a sad story and shouldn't have gone the way it did: Ten years ago, our father died and gave everything to my sister; I got his contempt. Well, it wasn't that simple. Over the many years, her husband shamelessly sucked up to our father and his strategy worked beautifully; he literally got a gold mine and made sure I got the empty shaft. Despite promises to share equally there were practical problems and I was totally locked out of decision making. There >was< sharing up to a point and I was happy to get what I did, but it all ended permanently a year ago. Now they're talking impending poverty and not telling what really happened to that real fortune. I'm just screwed in the dark. Where's the truth; what really happened? I may never know. Our mother? There were problems there too, but she was infinitely wiser and put her more modest fortune into a trust, away from greedy and selfish children. It's a gift that will keep on giving after we're gone. In a strange way, a distant ancestor who'd bought land in Texas over a century ago and my great-aunt Ann Latimer of Memphis, a public health nurse with a kind and compassionate heart, made the next step possible: When the economy collapsed and I realized I'd been sand-bagged, I bought Dawn and myself a modest but nice used mobile home, taking a large loss on money invested and meant for retirement. I'll just have to work until past retirement age and accept a very modest lifestyle, and wonder if my sister's husband will ever lower himself to a rational level for their sake. I knew this was going to happen, ever since my father informed me of his decision almost twenty years ago, a crushing blow from which my life has descended into its current depressed ebb. So much for family, and family values. Ours were hopelessly compromised. As I say, it's a long and sad story with far more depressing details than will appear here. I just wanted to summarize my current mood. And Santa didn't bring me a Tesla Roadster; I really want one of those electric cars. Never gonna happen now. But just that's me being foolish, as I so often have been. Ironically, I ended up with my father's truck and that was a genuine Godsend from my sister. Yeah, the Naughts sucked like a giant vacuum cleaner and I just stood there and took it apathetically. Now, who's fault is that, except mine? Nothing more I can do except put it in the past and get on with my life as it is. But shouldn't there be a difference between humility, and humiliation? If you read this, pray for my sister. None of this is her fault. I smolder with hatred for her husband and my father, and that's done me naught but harm. But I cannot hate her. I just feel sad, for both of us. It shouldn't have happened this way; I could have handled this much better than I did. Blessings: Dawn and the cats, and a small but comfortable house of our own. We'll take it and be happy as we can. Count your blessings too, and have a happy holiday, with Family if you can. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
8:43 pm	December Redux About this time last year we were freezing our buns off, and plowing through uncommonly deep snow. This December it's bitter cold again; 11.5F this morning according to the Fluke thermocouple. No snow at all, just drying out after a wet November. The dreaded Green River flood has so far no materialized, so I'm hoping we'll have dodged the bullet for this year. Aside from continued aimlessness, unemployment and discouragement, I seem to be in an extended "audio mode". I've been playing with electronics as a hobby and vocation since the 70s, building Heathkits and various audio projects including versions of Marshall Leach's audio power amplifier design. That project was perhaps >too< successful--I've been using essentially the same design for over 30 years with occasional updates and a rebuild or two. Nothing else came along that promised a clear design break with significantly better sonics, just a nagging feeling that there ought to be >something< better out there. Malcolm Hawksford's "error correction" concept with a combination of feedback and feedforward has a good feel, so I'm slogging through the theory trying to wrap my sluggish brain around it and hopefully start gathering the necessary parts for a genuinely New Project for the coming decade. It may be my last major audio project. I could use much better speakers, too. (4 Comments |Comment on this)