Monthly Archives: October 2012

October 3, 2012 · 11:26 am

Technology Wednesday–The Machines Are Revolting

Some of you might remember The Wizard of Id comic strip done by Brant Parker and Johnny Hart. (I was in school with Hart’s son. Or maybe it was Parker’s son. I forget. I also forget his first name, but he was a very funny fellow. Random observation, I know, but if you’ve read these posts for a while, you know that’s business as usual.) One early collection of the comic showed the short little king, aggrieved at something the peasants had done, shouting, “The peasants are revolting,” which struck me as incredibly funny. I can’t say why it just did. I’ve always been a fan of puns, and that one was a classic.

Anyhow, I ‘m here to say that the Revolt of the Machines continues at our house. About a month ago we had a new battery put in Becky’s car. Now when she turns off the ignition, something beeps five times. Neither the owner’s manual nor the internet provides an answer as to why this is happening or what it means. My best guess is that it has something to do with the security system, except I didn’t think the car has one. My two other cars have such a system, and it goes off without reason at times. My best guess for that occurrence is high winds. It’s a mystery, really.

Then there is my iPhone, which I wrote about wiping out all my contacts and calendar entries when it upgraded the OS last week. I managed to recover most of them since I had “synched” the phone with the computer and they were nestled in the iCloud. On the iComputer. In iLand, I suppose.

Then the keyboard died on the desktop (read main) computer. It had been acting funky for about a month, requiring multiple key presses for certain letters, not responding some times and in general acting naughty. Then it stopped working altogether last Friday. A computer with a dead keyboard is limited as to what the user (me) can put in. So I hied myself to Staples and picked up a nice wireless computer which practically installed itself. The installation “manual” consisted of a folded piece of paper the size of a large commemorative postage stamp with pictures which showed the batteries mysteriously floating into the battery compartment on the keyboard and the USB connector floating into the USB port on a computer. My batteries and USB connector did not float into their sockets: I had to put them in with my fingers. The computer recognized the keyboard (probably an old friend from the factory) and installed the driver and signaled me when the keyboard was ready to use. I couldn’t help contrast this experience with the bad old days when you had to type line after line of arcane symbols for hours to try to get your computer to recognize its new “peripheral.” And what’s peripheral about a printer when you want to print a new recipe? Sounds pretty essential and not at all peripheral to me.

I suppose there are just some things that are mysteries. And these are some of them.

The Autumn Leaves

We are fortunate to live in a neighborhood with a large number of towering oaks and maples. Their leaves are starting to turn to the blazing autumn colors we experience every year. The trees are one reason we bought our house here in 1988: judging from a couple we had to have taken out, most are about 120 years old. The builders who constructed the subdivision in 1968 left as many of them as they could, and we benefit from them every day.

They have to be maintained so they don’t fall over or shed huge limbs during storms. I’m glad we had ours trimmed up last year so that during the derecho in June we just had a few small limbs on the ground.

For some reason, I was thinking of leaf collections and wondering if kids still did that. I went through a collection stage when I was about eight through about age ten. I collected rocks, elephant figurines (no idea why now), models of airplanes, and leaves. Yes, I actually had a leaf collection of about twenty different kinds, carefully pressed and mounted in a big album I think I made myself. It was good practice for the required ninth grade biology leaf collection project. I pressed the leaves between pages of our encyclopedia until they were dried out. They were also very brittle and fell apart a couple of years later. Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose.

Thinking of my leaf collection made me think of encyclopedias since they were the pressing method.

I found that as an adult I had an aversion to encyclopedias. I wouldn’t agree to buying one for our children when they were younger. It was expensive, and, I thought, unnecessary. There were better ways to find out information even before the days of the internet.

My dislike of encyclopedias might have come from my elementary school experience. We were repeatedly warned not to copy our reports out of the encyclopedia. I don’t recall anyone actually trying to get away with this, so there was no trauma associated with some poor kid being hung from the flagpole after his report on dinosaurs, but the warnings must have scarred me for life.

It seemed to me even then that our teachers wanted us to use multiple sources for our information, to think for ourselves about how to put that information together, and to draw our own conclusions. That’s not a bad way to approach education.

We had something called the New Century Encyclopedia at home, about ten dark burgundy volumes which did have black-and-white and a few color pictures. One of them, I recall, was labeled “Car of the Future” and showed something like the Batmobile with a single huge fin on the rear. It should have been called “Car of 1938.” One of the color pages showed poisonous snakes of North America. I am afraid of snakes, and, in those days, convinced that one day I would be bitten by a poisonous snake and die a horrible death. (I was bitten by a cat about a year ago and quickly developed a painful infection. But I am not afraid of cats. Go figure.) The information in any encyclopedia soon became outdated. (Although I still think Pluto is a planet.) We preferred magazines and newspapers for information and used encyclopedias for basic information.

The big guns among encyclopedias were the Britannica which I thought dense and dull (if authoritative) and the World Book which had pictures and a yearly update. Becky speaks of receiving a World Book one year for Christmas. I wonder what an eight-year-old would do with such a present these days.

Encyclopedias do have a long and distinguished history, reaching perhaps a culmination in the Encyclopédistes of the 18th century, a group of Frenchmen who attempted to gather all knowledge in a set of books. How Enlightenment of them. This effort reminds me of the Commissioner of the Patent Office reporting to Congress in 1843 that “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” And that from someone whose business was inventions.

Of course, encyclopedias have moved online along with a pile of other (sometimes reliable) information. The Wikipedia, a sort of peer-edited encyclopedia, is deemed about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. (I’d still rather have an editor looking over whatever I publish.) World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica have online editions, although they’re still published as books. They were originally sold door-to-door like much else. Door-to-door sales are not so long gone—we bought our first vacuum cleaner in 1974 from someone who was essentially a door-to-door salesman.

I wrote a newspaper column several years ago about my thoughts on encyclopedia and I thought I was going to be hurt by people who loved their sets. That’s fine with me, and I did hear a lot of good stories about them, including one from a fellow who used to sell them door-to-door. It was evidence of a bygone era.

As a teacher, I hope everyone keeps learning all they can. Remember to use a variety of sources, evaluate your material, think for yourself–and don’t copy out of the encyclopedia. You can always use them to press your leaf collection.

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October 1, 2012 · 11:30 am

Fence Conversion Step by Step–a How-to Guide

OK, here’s a nice shot of a panel of the old security fence which we needed when we had a pool, which we haven’t had for about five years now. Would hate to rush into anything. I know, the fence looks bad. That’s why I’m converting it (and have been since last October–I’m slow but good) into a lovely stylish scalloped fence: here’s how–

First step is to take off the old boards. They’ve been taken off in this picture and are hiding out of the picture except for one at the bottom. I will reuse the old stringers since I’m cheap. And the old posts.

Here the stringers have been relocated to the proper spacing for the picket fence, and the left hand fence post has been cut to its proper length. And you’re right, that bottom stringer is bowed. Not to worry: I will fix it with my magic stringer straightener.

Here’s a picture of my magic stringer straightener at work. It looks just like two landscape blocks laid on the warped stringer, doesn’t it? That’s because it is!

Now I have run a string from picket to shining picket to give me a gauge for the intermediate pickets. The string describes what is called a concatenary curve. It’s the same curve you see in the suspension cables for the Golden Gate Bridge. Except the ones there are bigger, much bigger. The red thing on the right is my level which I use to plumb the pickets. I also level the stringers with the level. Strangely enough.

Here I’ve installed about half the pickets on this section, screwing them in with deck screws using my cordless DeWalt drill, a birthday present from my wonderful, intelligent and thoughtful children. I would like a pony for my next birthday, please.

Here’s a shot of the finished side of the fence with our house and its picturesque garbage and recycling cans in the background along with the blue and tan yard waste cans. I have a lot of cans like that. And this ain’t all of them! I took this shot standing in our neighbor’s yard. She doesn’t yell at me for being in her yard because I am building a more beautiful fence. Artists are always appreciated, don’t you think?

And here’s a finished panel from our side of the fence, showing my DeWalt drill. Doesn’t it look portable and powerful? And isn’t it a nice yellow color?

Now you know how to convert your wooden security fence to a lovely scalloped picket fence! I should be done in about a week. I’ll post pictures of the finished product. And I’m sorry, but I don’t do fences for other people. I’m too slow and make too many mistakes. You can’t see them, but they’re there. Isn’t that just a parable for our lives? I thought so, too. Well, anyhow, I hope you enjoyed my little post on converting your ugly old worn-out security fence to a lovely, stylish picket fence.

And here are pictures of the completed project: