Our House
After Christmas, it was time to catch our collective breath. As of New Year's
Eve, we had passed out 850 programs (flyers? pamphlets?), one per family. We
estimate about 2000 people saw our display, in that some cars had more than
one family in them, some people came back multiple times, we missed some
cars when we were gone for part of the evening, etc.
Actually had time to read some books. Also started building stuff for next
year's Christmas display, namely, musical notes. Son Jon brought us about
half a pound of LEDs, and we're going to have light-up notes running up and
down the trees. Got the idea from an
Animusic video. All I have to do now
is design and build a working 5-volt control of some kind.
Christmas display had to stay up until we could have the Hardware class over
for pizza, when I show them the electronics. Shortly after that, um, "party",
the daily highs dropped from the 40s down into the 20s and 30s, and it snowed.
Well, we got some of the stuff down and put away whenever the afternoons were
above freezing but it's a mess, with all the snow and mud.
Mud? Why for we have mud? Well, after piling dirt all over the driveway, it's
hard to get it down to the gravel.
Piling dirt? How much? Well....
|
Omigosh! What happened?
The drains downstairs would gurgle whenever the washing machine or dishwasher drained
upstairs. We had the whole thing reamed out about 2 years ago, so we figured
it was tree roots again.
Was it ever! Called the fine folks at Weed, the ones who muck out the main
city sewer over here by the college whenever the pumps give up, which seems
to be twice a year. Well, maybe not, but we know the guys by sight at least.
During December, they had 3 trucks going, running those "suckers" all one night
(pun intended). So they came to our house with their roto-reamer thing. Couldn't use the
cleanout in the garage for some reason, had to come in and pull off the
downstairs toilet. Sixty feet in *KLUNK!* stopped the motor instantly.
Now what? Went and got their camera thing, which reminds me of a larger
version of what the doctor used to "inspect" my innards some time back.
Went under water (?) almost immediately, couldn't see a thing. Next day,
a couple of other guys came with a geolocator (which looks like the camera
except it sends out a radio signal), found the blockage over
across the driveway as you can see from the photo. So they came back with
the big machine and started digging. When they hit the pipe, about 4 feet
down, sewage spurted up about 3 feet.
OK, so the old pipe was that ceramic terra-cotta stuff. There was a cleanout
*under* the driveway, and traffic had finally broken it. A big tree root
had grown down the broken cleanout and completely filled the pipe. Only
question left was "How did it work at all?" So they found a couple of more
blockages using the camera, tore up about 30 feet of driveway and replaced the pipe. Put in a new
(blue) cleanout that sticks up where we won't run over it, filled in the
trench.
I'm going to sit down when I open the bill....
But it was worth it. I mean, Kathy went and bought a little port-a-potty like
the hunters take up into their deer blinds, we took showers over at the campus,
tried not to drink anything before bedtime, couldn't wash our hands in warm
water (couldn't run it to let it warm up), and on and on. Eating from paper
plates, taking laundry to the laundromat. You don't miss the
water 'til the well runs dry. Or until you can only drain a tablespoon full
at a time. This went on for several days, as they kept searching for the
problem and then dug up the place. "Just like camping out!" said our friends
cheerfully. Yah, right. We were getting crabby and had to be careful not to
snap at each other. Wasn't just the inconvenience, but the "meter" was running
at about $100.00 an hour. We're glad it's done.
|
Geek Stuff
Up at school, we dismantled the "cluster in a box", the four-mainboard computer
that Dave Swain built last year inside an AS-400 case. I have a new lab assistant,
Henry, and he ripped
the innards out of some old (less than 1 GHz) computers and built four "Intel®
Inside" computers with new power supplies and everything. There was actually
a fifth mainboard and power supply that "matched", so he assembled a fifth one
also. All of these were needed for the Networking class so they can install stuff
and connect them together in various strange and wonderful ways. The old 400- and
600-MHz machines just don't pack it with XP.
Had a lot of leftovers after all of this, so we
built a computer-on-a-board out of old "spare" parts. It's mostly for
display, but it actually runs. As I write, we have Solaris installed on it but
it will probably end up with Windows. One of the "ancient" computers had a
5 1/4" hard drive, 6 GB. There is a little window on the bottom where you can
see the little armature that moves the heads. We're working on a way to mount
the drive so that the "tourists" can see the movement as it seeks data. I also
attached one of the 4-inch fans from the AS-400 (just for decoration) to the board, sort of to
illustrate the fact that cooling is important. (Sounds like a P-38 on a short
runway. Well, maybe a long runway.... What's that, kids? Oh, the P-38? The Germans called
it "der gabelschwanz Teufel" or "the fork-tail Devil"; twin turbocharged 1150HP
engines, mission radius of
P-38: Lockheed Photo
|
700 nautical miles capable of 350 knots. Scared the pants off the Nazi pilots
with a cannon and four machine guns. New pilots said that takeoff was "like
getting hit in the [rear end] with a show shovel." Really tore up the Nazi
airfreight from Sicily into North Africa. Bagged at least one Japanese admiral
over the Pacific, who thought he was out of range of the Yanks. But I seriously
digress....)
Had to reboot the CIT server after only 444 days. They don't make BSD like they
used to ;-). After so many severed network connections, a lot of "cruft" builds
up in the system. I think it ran out of file handles or something like that.
But considering the number of students who thrash it using FTP and Telnet to
transfer Web pages to it and do programming on it, it's pretty solid. Could use
a couple hundred more gigabytes for storing installation sets, though.
Now just in case y'all wonder what we think of Vista™ around here: it's overhyped.
We will install it for normal use after about the first service pack, or whenever
they start putting new 64-bit machines on our desks. We have a bunch of 64-bit
lab machines that the students have built, but we mostly run Linux or XP on them.
(64-bit BSD really screams when it's crunching numbers. I have yet to find a
numerical problem that requires multiple CPUs. But then, I'm not forecasting
the weather nationwide, either!)
Sometimes I feel like a real old-timer. We were discussing the user-interface
design of Windows 95 (which hasn't changed much in spite of the Vista hype --
the basic design is really good), and one student said, "Well, didn't Windows
3.1 have a taskbar?" Oops! They've never
even stood close to a machine running Windows 3.1. So I found an old backup
CD and installed Win 3.1 on a lab machine. Golly! It's only been 12 years...!
But hey, have you ever run Win 3.1 on a modern machine? It's like a twitch game
or something; windows appear *bink!* instantly when you click the mouse.
For the User Interface Design class, we did the sensible thing and set up two
machines with dual monitors. That way, they can see the Web page or manual on
one screen while programming on the other. I used it for a couple of hours and
I'm completely spoiled! We just installed some video cards out of junked machines
and Windows XP picked them up immediately. Mouse cursor runs across both screens
and even the screen saver stretches to fit both screens.
Concerning Gentle Jazz: We have a gig scheduled for February, but haven't been
playing anywhere since Thanksgiving. (Just in case you wondered if we've given
up our instruments.)
|
