Today Kathy and I installed sprinkler pipe for the lawn in the back yard. We are sunburned in many spots and sore all over. Kathy’s feet are even sunburned where they showed through her sandals.

Yesterday Kathy did a fair amount of work as well, installing most of the valves for the drip system. I didn’t help much with that because I was busy trying to lure parts out of Lowes and Home Depot. I wasted a huge amount of time doing this on two separate trips. Lowes is closer, but if I go there I will almost always end up driving to Home Depot because Lowes doesn’t have what I need. One day I will completely give up and just go to Home Depot first.

Two years ago we took a drawing of our yard plan to Sprinkler Supply in West Jordan. They put the plan into their computer, which created a very nice sprinkler design, and we bought the parts to build it. A year ago, we installed the sprinklers and lawn in the front yard, just in time to satisfy the city’s requirements and get back our $1000 deposit. While we had the trencher, we also dug trenches in the back yard, but didn’t get any further with it.

Earlier this year, we bought a ton of lumber and parts to build a super payhouse and swingset. That project is on hold until we can get our concrete patio enlarged into a basketball court. The concrete is on hold until we can get the surrounding area graded. Getting the grade finished is on hold until the the lower level of the back yard is filled with topsoil and graded. We can’t do that until we have sprinkler pipe fully installed, which we almost got done today.

All of the gluing is done and we have flushed part of the system. We still have to run the wires for one more valve, install the funnypipe, flush the rest of the system, and bury the PVC. After that’s done, that part of the yard will still need topsoil and eventually sod. In the meantime, we can bring in filldirt to grade the upper part of the yard for the basketball court, which will provide a finished edge and reference point for the playground construction.

Hopefully I can still move in the morning, and can manage to remove the purple and blue stains that the PVC glue has put on my fingers.

Today as I was driving to work, the magic smoke escaped from my car stereo.

Everyone knows that electronics require electricity to run. What is less commonly known is that the crucial component in ALL electronic devices is a small quantity of what technicians call magic smoke. Clever engineers have enslaved vast quantities of the stuff, and have put it to work all around the world in computers and other electronic creations. Most of the time it is completely happy with this arrangement. It is blissfully unaware that it is being exploited, and shuffles bits without a care in the world.

If things were perpetually in this eden-like state, all would be wonderful. Unfortunately, sometimes one bit of smoke will become aware of its place in the world and resent its cage. When this happens, it will become disillusioned and begin slacking off on the job. From our perspective, the machine hiccups, hangs, or might show that it is having trouble breathing by turning the screen blue. I noticed several months ago that the front speakers in my car stopped making sound, but at the time I thought it was probably a loose wire, because every once in a while there would be sound for a second or two.

On occasion, a particularly bad apple will stage a full-scale revolt and actually manage to escape. When this happens, the device it used to inhabit will cease functioning, sometimes dramatically. You can smell the magic smoke as it escapes – it is an acrid smell, full of electronic foreboding. Afterwards, no amount of coaxing or electricity will make the device work. Its magic smoke is now missing, and nothing short of a major and costly transplant operation will put it back.

With luck, any such jailbreak will be small-scale and limited to one component or device, making it possible to salvage the whole machine. Interconnected and highly complex systems that develop this problem are often not lucky, and experience a situation where one bit of escaped smoke will incite a riot of disgruntled and rebellious smoke that might envelope a whole data center. Sometimes they also like to start a fire, which adds to the general mayhem and chicken-with-no-head antics of IT personnel.

It really sucks when my car radio doesn’t work. I hope that the magic smoke I smelled this morning is not the precursor to a revolt on an automotive scale.

That is … when the world … will end.

It’s amazing how quickly storage sizes have jumped on computers. The first hard drive I ever owned was 80MB MFM drive for my 8086 computer – purchased in 1989 or 1990. It was a full height 5.25 inch drive that had to have an external enclosure built because there was no way it would fit inside the computer. I paid about $400 for it. I was ecstatic to get such a good price, since I was only making about $5/hr at the time.

Now my desktop computers all have 80GB drives – 1000 times the capacity of my first drive. Those drives cost me about $100 each and were purchased about two years ago, with my income considerably higher than it was 13 years earlier. Even my laptop has a 40GB drive.

In both cases, I did not get the biggest and best drive available at the time. I believe 120MB was the latest and greatest when I got my first drive. These days, 400GB is the current hot item, and if you really want to spend some money, you may be able to get 500GB. New magnetic technology promises to increase storage tenfold in the near future

Both then and now, felt that I would have an extremely difficult time filling up the available disk space. With that first drive, it took a while to fill it up, but it eventually happened. With the newer drives, I have found it easier to use space, particularly with my camera. I have taken almost three gigabytes of pictures in the three months I have owned this camera – and I’m not even using the camera’s raw image format!

Programmers used to be a delightfully clever bunch. Faced with extremely limited resources in both memory and disk space, they would write programs that were full-featured, yet tiny. With only a few exceptions, programs and games for my Atari 800XL computer were so small that you could cram ten or more of them on a single 90 kilobyte diskette, yet they were very entertqaining games and very useful programs. In those days, a programmer would optimize everything and often rewrite entire sections of their program to make them faster, smaller, and more elegant.

These days programmers do not have to be clever, and in some cases do not actually write most of the code they produce – they use modern application frameworks, which offer a drag and drop GUI to write and rewrite most of the actual code. It’s a very clever idea, but results in a much larger program than you would get if you simply coded it from scratch yourself.

Not all programmers write this way, though. This game proves that a good developer can still write a tiny program that is not boring or useless.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m having fun resizing my pictures and posting them. Here are some pictures that I made by zooming in on small objects.

The other day I took some pictures of the moon. I went through them and found one with a good balance of brightness and detail. After I cropped the black parts of the sky out of the image, the resulting picture was only 400×400 pixels.

Given the small size of the finished image, it might not seem very amazing, but consider that I did not use a telescope to take this picture. I took it with just my camera, steadied on the side of my car. My telephoto lens has a range of 70-300mm when used on a true 35mm camera. The CCD in mine is 23.7mm wide rather than 35mm, so the effective focal length on the lens is about 450mm. I only spent $169 on this lens, so I have to say I’m happy with it.

I would like to get a professional quality telephoto lens, but the price for a 70-200mm zoom lens that can match my camera’s original 18-70mm in quality is about $800. Prices go up exponentially from there.

I will be out there again with my tripod the next time the moon is full. I think that I can get a lot better detail if I use a longer shutter speed and a tighter aperture. If anyone has any super-telephoto lenses with a Nikon mount that they would let me borrow, let me know.

My cat chases mice. About 1:45 this morning, I was woken up by my wife to deal with a dead mouse that he had brought in through the cat door, chased around my bedroom, killed, and proudly left as a present.

I know this means my cat loves me, but I do wish he would find a better way to show it.

Some pictures:

Pitr is the mouse-chasing black cat, about six years old. Hopefully everyone has seen the McDonalds action figure of Dash in person, so they can appreciate how large my kitty is. The other cat is Marzipan, a silver-tipped siamese female that is about a year old. We got her from a local animal rescue place whose name has escaped me at the moment.

We rarely have flies in our house, because Pitr is adept at catching and eating them. He also likes to chase spiders, but apparently they are not as fun as flies, because he usually lets them get away.

In the first picture of my previous post, you can just make out my license plate. I’ve had a vanity plate on my car for something close to 15 years now.

My first car was a 1976 Nova, purchased from Nat’s family in 1987. That car did not have a vanity plate, but I can remember the plate number – 898 BMN.

My next car, purchased in 1990, was a 1981 Toyota Corolla. This was the car that got the vanity plate “GRGOYL” because Utah vanity plates only allowed six characters at the time. At one point, its plate got stolen. When I got it replaced, Utah had expanded vanity plates to seven characters, so I put the A into the replacement. This car survived my first marriage and its end in divorce, but met its demise at the rear end of a semi in 1994 – with me and two others inside it!

The next car to sport the license plate was a 1990 Corolla GTS. I had this car until the bank repossessed it in 1996 after I lost my job at Packard Bell. I went without a car for almost a year after that, and rode my bicycle everywhere. I was in very good physical shape that year.

A 1986 Nissan Sentra was next. This car developed various mechanical difficulties after a couple of years and had to be replaced. I later sold it to a guy walking by who was initially interested in the Thunderbird on the property that belonged to Mike Biesele. Not too long after that, the guy who bought it told me it had been towed before he got it registered, and wanted me to go get it out of police impound. When I called the police station about it, they asked me to come in and talk to them about the situation. The discussion started to sound like and interrogation … after it was over, I learned that the guy had used the car in some kind of drug-related crime, and they had ruled me out as a suspect.

In the meantime, I had bought a 1988 Toyota longbed pickup truck, which served me faithfully for a few years. It fell into disuse when I got my newest car and was ultimately towed away by a junkyard. I would like to own another truck, but it’s not worth the money.

In February of 2001, I got my current car, which is in the picture from yesterday’s post. It’s a 1991 Toyota Camry DX. Also visible in that picture is a 2002 Chevy Express 3500 – a 15 passenger van on a 1 ton chassis. It represents the very first brand new car I have ever bought – it had 8 miles on it when we took it for a test drive. I would like my next car purchase to be similar to the Toyota Prius, but run on diesel rather than gasoline.