Early November

Below is a cell phone photo I took today in the park across the street. My phone has a very poor-quality camera, but still you get the idea that fall is here. Most leaves have turned, and some trees have lost many, and some have lost almost none. Walking around the neighborhood I see big piles of leaves raked to the curb. Some of the piles are huge. I walked past one that must have taken many days to create (or many people working for only one day). That takes determination … or maybe, a leaf phobia. Personally, I’m not real big on raking leaves. I’ve found that if you leave them alone, nature takes care of them by itself … it doesn’t need our help. They gradually disappear on their own schedule. Where they go, who knows? To a big leafpile in the sky, perhaps. Of course, in this “civilized” land, just as we have to keep all our blades of grass trimmed to exactly the same length, if a leaf touches the ground it must be gotten rid of NOW.

There was a Halloween festival in the park, and the serpentine track in the grass is where the Haunted House stood. The track was caused by hundreds of kids tromping through the House.

Here’s a closeup of the tree in the above picture. Very colorful.

It’s been a fairly warm autumn. Roses are still blooming beside my house. This yellow rose is one of several blooming below an awning on the south wall of my house.

More later.

Reminder XR & UltraLite

One day in November of '07, I decided to teach myself how to write applications for Windows. To learn how to code, I needed to start coding. But what kind of program should I write? I recalled how difficult it was for my mother, when she was in her 80s, to remember to take her medications. It was impossible for her to keep track of what she had taken and when she had taken it. So that was the inspiration for my first program: a medical reminder program. I called it RxReminder. But during the almost-two-years I worked on it, someone else trademarked the name RxReminder. By then I had a lot of files that started with the letters "rxr", so I changed the name to Reminder XR™ (same initials). Along the way I also decided to write a medical reminder program in Javascript so it could run inside a web browser. It wasn't just a "lite" version of Reminder XR, it was an "ultra-lite" version. So I called it UltraLite™.

I learned a ton about how to write Windows programs. I created a website to offer my program to the public. The website is was "www.FreeMedicalReminder.com".

June beetles

The June bugs are out and about. More accurately, Cotinis nitida, the Green June beetle. Today is the first day I've seen them and it's the middle of August. The sight of June bugs takes me back to childhood. I recall seeing them as a boy, catching them, feeling their prickly feet stabbing at my palm, examining them, watching them buzz away - clumsy, near-sighted fliers thudding into houses and cars. They're supposed to crawl out of their underground homes in June. Hence the name. Why haven't they appeared before now? Is it a global warming thing? Is it climate change? Is Obama behind it? Is the CIA screwing with the June bugs? Or is the CIA screwing with the calendar? Perhaps the June bugs are on time, and it's us who are two months late.

Wikipedia says "Junebug is a common nickname for men who are juniors born in the southern United States." I don't think I've ever met anyone nicknamed "Junebug". Maybe it's a local thing.

I'm back

I shouldn't let my blog languish like I have. But really, there hasn't been much to write about. For the last month I've been working intensely on my reminder program. I'm obsessed about getting it to a release candidate. I've developed two websites so far, and neither is public yet. They're just testbeds for the html and Javascript. One is a Comcast personal site here that is plain old html. I just discovered wix so I have a Flash website here. When I started writing the program, I called it RxReminder for lack of a better name. Then, when I went to get the domain registered 18 months later, I found that while I was working on the program, someone had trademarked the name and registered the domain name. So what am I going to call it? I chose the rather lame Reminder XR ... it has the same initials: RXR. Still searching for a name that isn't already taken. And should I sell the program, give it away, or what? I wouldn't mind making a few dollars for the many hundreds of hours I've worked on it. On the other hand, I believe in the concept of community service, of giving back, of doing something to help other people get through the day.

The National Weather Service says my local temperature is 99°. It's August in Central Virginia. I'm a little surprised that it's ONLY 99°.

It reminds me of my last trip to the beach, two Augusts ago. The heat index stayed around 115° every day. The sun was the kind of sun that makes you feel you're getting a 1st degree burn by just stepping through the door. When I got a sunburn while sitting in the shade, I cut the trip short.

(Another memorable thing about that trip to the beach was that 50 miles into the trip my right front disc caliper seized up with the brake ON. I was in the middle of nowhere, so I drove the next 100 miles with the brake on. I had 220 horses and 4-wheel drive - one locked up brake had zero chance of stopping me. But when I got to the beach and found an auto shop, that wheel was smoking hot, and I mean that literally.)

There's something about August. I recall driving into Helena, Montana, one sunny August day. The air was hot and the sun was blistering. I remember thinking, "this is the hottest place I've ever been", and maybe it was. I've never been to Death Valley, but if it's hotter than central Virgina in August, then no thank you.

Seeing The Space Station

I just watched the International Space Station (ISS) fly over my house. At 5:07 AM, it rose out of the northwestern sky, sunlight reflecting off its solar panels, becoming higher and brighter by the second, and flew seemingly directly over my house. I watched it become fainter as it sank lower into the southeastern sky. It was visible for about 6 minutes. It wasn't the first time that I had seen the ISS.

The last time I saw it, I was living in Roanoke. I had left my apartment and was walking to my car and just happened to look up. Like just now, the ISS was high in the sky. Unlike just now, there were two points of light traversing the sky, one following the other. The trailing point of light was sunlight reflecting off the Space Shuttle, which was in the process of docking with the ISS. Or maybe it was undocking. I watched them until the earth eclipsed their sun and they suddenly switched off; first the ISS blinked out, then the shuttle blinked out.

I didn't get up early to see the ISS fly over. Rather, I haven't gone to bed tonight. Or, I didn't go to bed last night. Is tonight already last night at 5:30 AM? Yeah, tonight is in the future over 12 hours away.

It's strange to see the Space Station go overhead. Moving so fast, so quietly. Knowing there are people up there riding on that point of light in the sky. Knowing that in about 90 minutes they'll be up there again in the very same spot - relative to planet Earth, that is. I certainly won't be in the same spot to see them again. Earth's rotation is carrying me eastward at 1000 miles per hour. When the shuttle is again directly above the spot I was in at 5:07, I'll be about 1500 miles to the east.

The ISS is not a spectacle, but it's definitely worth seeing.

RxReminder

I'm almost finished with RxReminder. The setup program used to install a registry key so that RxReminder would start when Windows starts. However, that turned out to have a serious flaw; the application wouldn't work properly until it was closed and restarted. So now I have the setup program place a shortcut to the application into the common startup folder.

I also upgraded the program icon. The old icon looked like this:



That design has evolved and now it looks like this:

The to-do list is getting short. The main thing I have to do now is add error-handling code in critical spots.

Stay tuned.

VirtualBox and Windows 7

I'm writing this from a Windows 7 computer. It's running on Sun's VirtualBox, a free, open-source virtualization product that is installed on my Vista box. I can put Vbox into fullscreen mode, and then there's no hint that it's running on a virtual box. It looks and feels like you have a pc with Win7 installed. Or... I can put Vbox into seamless mode, and then I'm back at my Vista desktop, but I can still run Win7 apps and they appear on my desktop as if they were Vista apps. Pretty cool.

I tried using the Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, and it did work, but I think the Sun product works better, and it definitely gives me access to more of the physical machine's resources. Sun's Vbox required me to go into the BIOS and enable the iVT setting (Intel Virtualization Technology®) before I could successfully install Vbox. Windows 7 is a free download from Microsoft until August 2009. It expires in July 2010, but until then it's a free preview of Microsoft's next OS.

I just tried to upload a screenshot - and totally forgot that the pictures are on my "real" computer. That's how good the illusion is. I'll publish what I have and switch back to the real computer where my photos are located. (Back in Vista now.) This is my Windows 7 desktop before I began installing applications. (Click image to enlarge.)

(Back in Windows 7.) Now, check this out. I wanted to post a picture of the Windows 7 desktop in fullscreen mode. So I went back to Windows 7, put it in fullscreen mode, hit "Print Scrn", opened Paint, hit Ctrl-V, saved the image to my Win7 pictures folder, started up Firefox and now I'm writing from Win7 again. Here's the desktop in fullscreen mode. (You'll notice I've added a few icons to the desktop.) Notice, also, the desktop is no longer in a "box" as in the above photo. There's no way to know that this Windows 7 desktop is really just a process running on a Vista machine.

Dog Zoe

My previous post was about Zack and Zoe, only I didn't have a real photo of Zoe, only a composite photo, a 'shopped impression of Zoe, all fur and teeth. And bark. A lot of bark. I managed to get this photo of Zoe. (OK, maybe it's been 'shopped just a little.) I don't know what Zoe looks like when she's being nice. I haven't yet experienced that side of her nature.

Dog Zack

I mentioned my neighbor's Schnauzers, Zack and Zoe. Here's Zack...

He's a sweetheart. He just wants to be friends and lick you and get petted.

I don't have a picture of Zoe; however, through the magic of Photoshop (actually, Paintshop) the picture below represents my impression of Zoe when I got a little too close to her. I imagine this is the last thing you would see as Zoe lunges for your jugular and bites your head clean off.

Carey, her owner, says she's going to train Zoe not to do that.

I say, capital idea.

Windows 7

Even as I type these words, I'm installing Windows 7. I want to take it for a test drive, and see if the software I've written will run on it.

I downloaded Windows 7 RC (release candidate). The only pc I have with enough horsepower to run Windows 7 is my home pc with Vista Home Premium. I certainly don't want to upgrade my Vista system to a release candidate of unknown stability that will expire next year, and making a dual-boot system offers ample opportunity to screw up my computer (recall Murphy's law: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.).

I decided to install Windows 7 on a Virtual Machine. I would have liked to use VMWare Workstation, but that costs $189. Microsoft Virtual Machine 2007 is free, and I already have it installed on my pc. I use it to test software in a Windows XP environment. So I created a new virtual machine and started the Windows 7 installation. Even though I have a 64 bit computer, I had to install the 32 bit version of Windows 7. The Microsoft Virtual PC program apparently can't handle 64 bit code, but that's a minor detail.

(Time passes...)

It's done. The installation went quite smoothly and took about 20 minutes, then came the setup (account name, time zone, product key, etc.) which took about 5 minutes.

Here is a screenshot of the Windows 7 default desktop after a clean install. This is the default desktop background - Windows 7 comes equipped with a number of images from which you can choose your desktop background.

(More time passes...)

At this point I am writing this blog from the new Windows 7 machine in full screen mode. I had to reboot my computer before I was able to install VMAdditions. I probably only needed to reboot Windows 7, but rebooting the host covers all the bases. If you install VPC you will definitely want the VMAdditions. And, when I tested a program I had written primarily for Vista, it didn't function properly until I rebooted.

Here's the desktop background photo I decided to use - for a while, anyway.

RxReminder tested again / Zack and Zoe

Yesterday, I finished coding version 3 of the RxReminder task scheduler interface (one for Vista, one for XP). Last night it underwent its first sea trial, and it hit a sandbar.

I puzzled out what had gone wrong. There was no bug in the task scheduler interface; it worked as designed. There was no bug in RxReminder; it worked as designed. The new task scheduler interface has a different behavior than the old interface, a behavior that RxReminder was not designed to accommodate. Adding about 4 or 5 lines of code to RxReminder should take care of that. I'll test it again overnight.

I was outside a little while ago when I heard a lot of barking and looked up in time to see a gray schnauzer go whizzing past, chasing a black cat and trailing a pink leash. It was running faster than I could, but not faster than Carey - my neighbor two doors down the street. She caught it, so I said congrats on being in good shape - a hundred fifty foot sprint and she's not even breathing hard. So she stopped, we talked, and I got introduced to her two dogs, her "children" Zack and Zoe. They're siblings. Both are barkers, but Zack soon showed he was a lover, not a biter. He just wanted to lick my face and hands. Zoe, however, has pretensions of being a pit bull. She's definitely a biter. I wish Carey luck and patience while training those dogs. Sometimes you can get a dog and end up being lucky; you get a dog that requires little or no training. Some dogs just have very good natures. Other times you get a dog that has a nervous disposition, or neurotic, or irritable, or whatever. And then you have to train your dog. You'll be happier, and the dog will be happier. Too many people don't want to bother.

I wish I had thought to take out my cel phone and get a picture of Zack and Zoe. I'll try to remember to do that next time I meet them.

New task scheduler interface runs aground

I finished version 3 of the RxReminder task scheduler interface yesterday, and last night it got its first sea trial, and it hit a sandbar.

I entered med Alerts for 8 AM and 8 PM. Here's what the revised scheduler should have done. At 12 midnight, the computer should awaken and run RxReminder. RxReminder would have looked for the first Alert time (8 AM) and put it into the scheduler. Actually, there is a factor called WakeAnticipate: a lead time subtracted from the wakeup time to allow the system time to wake up; the default is one minute. RxReminder should therefore schedule itself to run at 7:59 AM. I checked the computer shortly after 10 AM. I was hoping to see a red X on the reminder's status, indicating the Alert was issued but there was no response. Instead, I saw a question mark, meaning the Alert was not issued. This was disappointing and puzzling.

I looked at the program's log file, and this excerpt was very interesting:

Stopped : 11:26 PM, Monday, June 22, 2009
Started : 12:00 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Resuming: 12:00 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Stopped : 12:00 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Started : 12:00 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Stopped : 12:00 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Started : 8:00 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Resuming: 10:10 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009

I stopped the program at 11:26 PM; I wanted a full test of the scheduler, meaning that the program should start itself. At 12 AM it did. Here, something strange happened. The program shut down (not logged), resumed, stopped, started, and stopped again, all at 12 AM. It apparently did schedule the 8 AM Alert, but it should have awakened at 7:59 AM. Instead, it awakened at 8 AM. The Alert is issued at the moment when 7:59 AM changes to 8 AM

RxReminder Task Scheduler Interface - Redux

I just finished version 3 of the Task Scheduler interface - make that two task scheduler interfaces, one for XP and one for Vista.

The first version put a wakeup task into the Task Scheduler for each Alert time. Conceivably, you could have scores of tasks in the Task Scheduler just for RxReminder Alerts. It was bulletproof enough; all the scheduled Alerts were in the Task Scheduler, so there was no way the Task Scheduler could miss an Alert. But with possibly dozens or scores or, conceivably, hundreds of RxReminder tasks in the Scheduler, it sure didn't seem very elegant. So I came up with version 2.

Version 2 put just one task in the task scheduler, but it had multiple triggers: one trigger for each Alert time. It seemed like a fine idea, and once again a bulletproof solution - all Alerts had triggers in the RxReminder task - but then I discovered (by experimentation) that there is a maximum value for the number of triggers a task can have. I had both daily and runonce triggers, and when I hit 47 it would take no more triggers. So I came up with version 3.

Version 3 puts one RxReminder task into the Task Scheduler and that task has 3 triggers. When RxReminder is started, and whenever a change is made to its dataset, the program searches for the next med alert and next appointment alert for the current day and adds their times to the RxReminder task triggerlist. And, the RxReminder task also includes a daily trigger at 12 AM. The 12 AM trigger ensures the computer wakes up and runs RxReminder at the start of each day to scan for the first Alert of the day and put its time into the Task Scheduler.

This version is NOT bulletproof, because the Task Scheduler contains only the next Alert for the day and not all scheduled Alerts. But I like this version. It seems to be the most elegant version, and I hope it is the final version.

Oh yeah, I also mowed the yard and washed and dried and folded and put away laundry today. The fun just keeps on coming.

RxReminder inches closer to finish

RxReminder is getting closer to its final destiny, which possibly is a big yawn. In the last few weeks I've finished writing the code that calls upon the Task Schedulers (both XP and Vista) which wake the pc from sleep mode so an Alert can be issued. Also, I've tweaked the code to keep the system from going back to sleep until the Alert is closed.

What else have I done lately? Oh yeah ... there was a bush in my back yard, kind of tall and scraggly-looking and with no function other than to serve as an obstacle to vehicles entering or leaving the back yard. I called it George. You know - George the bush. Now, it's gone. Or, mostly gone. There's a 12 inch (30 cm) tall "stump" (more like the top of a rootball) that I still have to deal with.

(left) George the bush in his more "blossomey" days, which occurred mostly in April. The rest of the year he was an obstacle to mow around or dodge with a car.

(right) George the bush  sporting his new buzz cut. Gone but not forgotten; not until I get that dang rootball chopped down to ground level. I see a pickaxe in my future...






Speaking of "Gone", whatever happened to Joey Heatherton?

Attack of the Mole People

I have moles living under my backyard. At first I thought it was thousands but after a little research I realize it's probably one or two. They have tunnels all over my yard, and when I walk through the yard the ground feels bumpy as hell. How do you convince the little buggers to move on? Does it take black powder and fuse? There's also a possibility that it might be a pocket gopher. I take it a pocket gopher is a small gopher, not a critter that lives in your pocket, but this needs more research.

I talked to Carey who lives 2 houses down, and she said she has them all over her yard, and her neighbor does, too. It's an infestation. (Have to admit, I almost wrote molestation. So tempting.) We're under attack. Our yards are turning into Mole Central. I guess the thing to do is put down grub killer, as moles love to eat grubs. I just hate to spread poison on the yard, what with the myriad of cats that live in the neighborhood. Again, more research is needed.

My shrubs in front of the house - boxwoods and Japanese holly - are "in decline". That's horticulture-speak meaning they're all dying. They're developing big holes as sections of the plant die off. They're starting to look like they've been attacked with an ax. It's time to replace them. Carey said there is a dwarf nandina that is hardy and would be a good replacement. I guess I'll have to check this out. I have a few of the heavenly bamboo nandinas - the kind that grows eight feet tall if you let them - and I have to say: not loving them. Carey said she thought the Firepower nandina would look good. It turns florescent red as winter approaches. That much red might be overwhelming. I have a brick house, so it's already presenting a lot of reddish color. Firepower might look good in front of a white or pastel-colored house, but I'm not sure about putting them in front of brick. Maybe a few Firepowers mixed in with another plant? I don't know; I'm not a landscaper. On the other hand, Carey has arguably the best landscaped house on the street, so I tend to think she knows what she's talking about. I'll see what other suggestions she comes up with. Carey, are you listening?

Biker Chick

I don’t remember her name, but in my mind she will always be “biker chick”.

I first saw her one dark night, standing with her thumb out on a street corner in San Francisco, and I stopped and offered her a ride. She was in her early twenties, attractive, with blond hair, wearing jeans, work-style shoes, and a denim jacket over a halter top. She sat behind me in my camper van on a little sofa-style seat that doubled as a bed. She was quiet. I stopped at a convenience store and bought a box of donuts. As I pointed my van back onto California route 1, I removed a donut for myself and passed the box to her. A few minutes later I looked behind me and saw her lying down, asleep. The box of donuts was empty. She must have been hungry and exhausted.

I was hoping to make it to Big Sur that night, but I was tired, too. The highway was dark, and I found a place where I could pull off the road. I quickly fell asleep.

The next day my hitch-hiking passenger was more talkative. She was a biker chick, the girlfriend of a biker. She had a four year old daughter in Florida that she missed and she was on her way there to see her.

It was late afternoon when we got to Los Angeles, and I pulled my van off the road next to a public beach. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next, and while I stood on the beach and pondered my next step, my passenger got out of the van, walked across the highway, and stuck out her thumb. When I looked across the road two minutes later, she was gone.

Florida was three thousand miles away, and I felt some regret that I let her slip away so quickly. I felt I should have taken her at least part way home. I’ll never know what happened to her, but I’ve always hoped she made it home, back to her little girl.

Denver

Once, I sat on a mountaintop just west of the city of Denver, Colorado. I had endured several long days of driving, and it was nice to sit in the grass on a quiet, sunny afternoon and look out over the city. My canine companion was enjoying herself, too. Happy to be out of the van, she romped through a tree-filled meadow that looked more like a park than a wild mountain meadow. As the sun set behind me, I sat in grass and looked out across the plain a mile below me. I watched the shadows of the Rockies creep eastward until they covered the city. I sat there as dusk settled on the desert and the lights of the city came on. I sat there while total darkness descended on the mountains and the desert below, and I watched as tens of thousands of stars that made up the constellation of Denver sparkled into luminosity like some great heavenly galaxy somehow brought to Earth. The sight was truly mesmerizing.

Far away, tiny points of light in the sky above Denver moved ever so slowly toward the ground, ever so slowly blending with and becoming lost in that maze of lights that was Denver. I knew what those tiny points of light really were. They were the landing lights on jet aircraft delivering planeloads of passengers into the Denver airport. I, in fact, had flown into that airport, had seen it from the perspective of a passenger riding one of those points of light. Now I was seeing it again from this most extraordinary vantage point.

I can never think of Denver without remembering how beautiful, how awesome, the city looked from that mountaintop, sparkling like a million jewels in the darkness of a warm summer night.

Cheerio

Sense memory is amazing. Years go by, and one day a whiff of some aroma brings back those feelings and memories of long ago. The aroma of freshly made gingerbread drifts by and I’m five years old sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table. A whiff of “Coppertone” and I feel beach sand under my feet, salt spray and sunshine on my skin. I rarely drink bourbon, so I don’t know why the taste of bourbon on the rocks should mean anything to me, but it does. The taste always takes me to Los Angeles. Well, to Santa Monica, to be specific. When I think of Santa Monica, I think of riding in a glass elevator on the outside of a hotel. The elevator faces the Pacific Ocean, and if I look below to the other side of Ocean Avenue, I can see Cheerio, my favorite restaurant. I love their steaks.

My room is on the top floor and the only transportation to the lobby is a glass-walled elevator on the front of the building. Every morning I leave my room and walk to the elevator. Daylight shines through a crack between the elevator doors, and I know that if the doors could open without the elevator being present, I would be looking into space, looking at a fearful drop to the street below. But when the doors open, the elevator is there.

I step into the elevator and my first view is a magnificent expanse of blue Pacific water. Looking right and left I see the outside of my hotel -- I am actually outside the building now -- and I feel somewhat like I am standing in space. As the elevator carries me gently to street level, the ocean slowly sinks behind buildings across the street that become taller with each second. I go to the parking garage and get into my rental car, and I drive to work. In the afternoon I return to the hotel, park in the hotel garage, and walk to the elevator. The elevator carries me up, and the buildings across the street fall away from me as the Pacific rises into view. The afternoon sun sits above the horizon. Sunlight sparkles across an impossibly large expanse of water. I go to my room, flop on the bed, turn on the TV, and unwind for an hour. Then I go across the street to Cheerio and order a steak, medium rare.

On weekends I drive to the observatory on Mount Wilson, marveling at the sight of snow on the ground not that many miles from L.A.’s hot beaches, or I take the scenic, winding road over to Thousand Oaks and get on the Ventura freeway to drive back to L.A. Sometimes at night I visit one of the clubs on the Strip or drive to Marina del Rey for a seafood dinner in a dockside restaurant.

Cheerio is probably gone now. The hotel is probably gone, too. But all these years later, the taste of a bourbon on the rocks takes me to Santa Monica -- to that amazing glass elevator and those great steaks at Cheerio.

The Electrician

This is a true story.

I was fresh out of college with a shiny new Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering - a B.S.E.E. I had studied electronics since I was 9. At that age, my father gave me a copy of the American Radio Relay League's (A.R.R.L.) handbook. It was loaded with esoterica involving resistors, capacitors, inductors, triodes, tetrodes, pentodes, and mysterious concepts like resonance, reactance, and impedance. I was hooked and started reading and learning, and began taking radios apart, fixing radios, fixing TVs, and building circuits on a foot-square project board (literally a board, it was made of wood with standoffs for tubes and component connections). I went to night school at age 13 to study radio repair. I was too young to enroll but I audited the class. I got good grades, too. By age 14 I was operating my own ham radio station. How could I not end up being an electrical engineer?

I had struggled to pay for college. Now I was a new graduate but I had no money. I had a job as a missile guidance system design engineer, but no actual money. Nada. I borrowed $200 from my mother to put down a deposit on a tiny one-room trailer. And I use the word "trailer" intentionally; it was more trailer than mobile home. But it was affordable, so I moved in. Shortly after I moved in, the electrical power started flickering off and on. Before going to work one morning, I called the landlord about it. He said he would send over an electrician to fix it. I came home from work that day and arrived mere minutes after the "electrician".

At this point I should explain something about my trailer's electrical power. In the small plot of land that passed for a backyard there was an electric utility pole. On the pole was mounted a fuse box. Inside the fuse box was a single 30 amp fuse and a disconnect switch. An electrical cord terminated with a standard 3 prong plug ran from the fuse box to my trailer. On the bottom of the trailer (so it was out of the elements), mounted close to the side of the trailer, was a standard receptacle - like the one you plug your toaster into. The electric cord from the fuse box simply plugged into my trailer like your toaster plugs into the wall outlet.

So, as I came around the corner of the trailer, what I saw was a guy sitting on the ground taking this plug off the end of the fuse box wire.

"Found the problem?" I inquired.

"Yeah. Bad plug."

I watched him take it off, and I watched him put the new plug on the wire. I observed that he crossed the hot and neutral wires from the way they were connected on the old plug.

"You've got the wires connected backward," I said.

"It don't matter," he replied.

"Sure it does."

"No it don't."

"Of course it matters whether you've got ..."

He shot me a stern look and said, "Look! I've been doing this for twenty years and I'm telling you it don't matter!"

Even though I was an electrical engineer by training and had worked in and around electronics for over 12 years, I decided not to argue with him. From his point of view I was a kid. What could I know? Hell, maybe he knew something I didn't know. Maybe he was right and it really didn't matter. But from my point of view, he was about to do something very dangerous.

A number of homes in the mobile home park were all powered by a large transformer. This transformer could pump out hundreds of amps all day long, day after day, without being overloaded or getting hot. Under a severe overload it could supply thousands of amps. The neutral wire out of the transformer was grounded at the transformer. The neutral wire in my trailer was grounded at the trailer. By crossing the wires at the plug, this electrician was going to apply a direct short circuit to this large power transformer. A direct short circuit limited only by the slight resistance of 12 gauge copper conductors. This looked bad. Very bad. Those thousands of amperes would flow through my fuse box. And, for a few milliseconds, through that 30 amp fuse.

The electrician plugged the fuse box cable into my trailer and walked over to the fuse box. I slowly backed up, putting about 10 feet between me and the fuse box. He threw the switch that connected the transformer to my trailer.

The fuse box exploded. A tongue of flame at least six feet long shot out of the fuse box, roaring past the electrician's head like a monster blowtorch from hell. The sight was so incredible it was burned into my visual memory. It was unbelievable. It was the mother of all short circuits. If this electrician's head had been directly in front of the fuse box when he threw the switch, he would probably be dead now. Or, seriously burned and blinded at the very least. I was impressed.

The electrical blowtorch died after a few seconds. The electrician was stunned. I mean stunned!

"What happened?" he asked me. "What happened? Why did it do that?"

"I told you, you crossed the wires to the plug."

"It shouldn't have mattered," he said, but with far less certainty now than before. He sat down in the grass and took the plug off and put it back on ... with the wires uncrossed this time. The fuse box had a hole where the fuse had been, so the electrician wired across it. He wired across the burned disconnect switch as well. Now, the only disconnect was at the trailer. Where the power cable from the fuse box was plugged into the trailer - that was now the disconnect.

The electrician refused to plug the power cable into the trailer. He wouldn't do it, because that meant connecting the monster killer transformer - the Forbidden Planet Krell power unit - to the thing (my trailer) that was obviously possessed by an electrical demon. So I walked over to it, picked up the plug, and plugged the cable into the trailer. Naturally, nothing happened - nothing, that is, except I had power to my trailer once again.

Now the electrician was impressed. He shook his head. "How did you know that? You must fix radios or somethin' for a living."

"Yeah," I replied. "Something like that." And that was the end of that. Except for one thing.

I mentioned the fuse box panel had a hole where the fuse had been. I knew the fuse had come out of that box like a bullet. I looked for it, and I found it. It had flown about 30 feet. It was an ordinary household fuse with an Edison screw-type base. When I found it, the fuse was still screwed into its socket that had been mounted inside the fuse box. The fuse and socket had been ejected together like a bullet. I took the burned fuse/socket object to work and placed it on a shelf above my desk where I would see it every day. It seemed there was a valuable lesson there and I wanted to remember it.

James H Hammond

This is a photo of a tintype: a photo of a photo. The tintype shows my great-great-grandfather James. As little as I know about my great-grandmother Ellen, I know less about other ancestors. James H Hammond was born April 26, 1846. The story goes that he fought in an artillery unit during the Civil War and thereby lost a leg - amputated below the knee. He got a prosthesis but by all accounts he remained pissed off about the whole thing.

I don't know much about James, other than he was a farmer. I don't know where he was born, or where he died, or when he died. He married Harriet Murphree of Pike County, Alabama. I have their marriage certificate, and at the time of their wedding he was living in Butler County, Alabama. James and Harriet had four children. First to arrive was Augustus in 1869. I know nothing about Augustus except that he died at age 19. Their 2nd child was James Charles in 1872. He died at age 41. Their 3rd child was Ellen, who died at age 27. She’s my favorite ancestor. Their 4th child was Willie Lee, known to family as Aunt Willie. She lived from 1881 to 1969.

The photo above is a photo of a faded metal “tintype”. Tintypes were popular from the 1860s into the early 1900s. They were the first “instant” photograph, being ready in a few minutes. They came in various sizes; this one is about 2 x 3 inches. Most tintypes were black and white and shades of gray. Brown-tinted tintypes were popular from 1870 to 1885. Photographers often clipped the corners of a tintype to make it easier to insert into a frame. I held this tintype under the range hood and snapped a picture of it with a digital camera. Then I tweaked the brightness and contrast to try to bring out a little more detail.

It's hard to judge how old James is in this photo, and he appears to have a mustache and beard which somewhat hides his face. From his appearance and from the brownish tint of the tintype, I will guess he was 40 - 45 in the photo and that the tintype dates from 1886 - 1891.

Ellen S Hammond

Ellen Sephronie Hammond was my great grandmother - my father’s grandmother. She was born August 2, 1875. She married twice, had two children, and died young, at age 27. Her first husband was Frank Mayer. Her first child, Durward Broughton, was born 13 months after her marriage to Frank, and that child became my grandfather - but, a grandfather I never knew. I don’t know what happened to Frank -- whether he died, divorced her, or deserted her, but he wasn’t around for long. I like to think she shot some bastard who was really annoying her, and Frank took the blame and hightailed it out West, but I doubt I will ever know. Her second husband was a man named Jones. Ellen died in 1903 at age 27. Married twice, dead at 27 ... I can’t help but think Ellen had a bit of a wild streak. That and her untimely death make her my favorite ancestor.

I know nothing about her first husband, Frank Mayer. I do have their marriage certificate: a yellowed official document dated 29th November, 1891.

Ellen's second marriage produced a child they named Leon Thomas Jones. He may have been named after his father or grandfather - or perhaps a famous ancestor. It may be coincidence, but there might be a connection to the Thomas Jones that captained the MayFlower on the Pilgrim voyage in 1620. Following that voyage, in 1621 he captained the Discovery to Virginia. I have an ancestor named William Dawson, born in England in 1599, that came to Virginia on the Discovery in 1621. I've seen the ship's manifest, although I can no longer find it on the Web. That ship was primarily carrying cargo, but there were about 20 passengers listed on the manifest as I recall.

Prior to the Pilgrim voyage, Thomas Jones was captain of the Falcon. He was under arrest for piracy, but the Earl of Warwick procured his release so that he could captain the MayFlower. After his return to England he took the Discovery to Virginia and then northward, trading along the coast. The Council of New England complained of him to the Virginia Company for "robbing the natives" on this voyage. He stopped at Plymouth (1622) and "taking advantage of the distress for food he found there, was extortionate in his prices." In July, 1625, he appeared at Jamestown, Virginia, in possession of a Spanish frigate. He was suspected of piracy but sickened and died before an investigation.

Here is a description of Captain Jones from the book The May-flower and her log, July 15, 1620-May 6, 1621 chiefly from original sources By Azel Ames: "That Jones was a man of large experience and fully competent in his profession is beyond dispute. His disposition, character, and deeds have been the subject of much discussion. By most writers he is held to have been a man of coarse unsympathetic nature, a rough sea dog capable of good feeling and kindly impulses at times, but neither governed by them nor by principle. That he was a highwayman of the seas, a buccaneer and pirate, guilty of blood for gold, there can be no doubt. Certainly nothing could justify the estimate of him given by Professor Arber that he was both fair minded and friendly toward the Pilgrim Fathers, and he certainly stands alone among writers of reputation in that opinion. Jones's selfishness, threats, boorishness, and extortion, to say nothing of his exceedingly bad record as a pirate both in East and West Indian waters, compel a far different estimate of him as a man from that of Arber, however excellent he was as a mariner."