August Winding Down

I lay on top of the sheets in my underwear. It was 3 PM on this summer day near the end of August. The day was hot and so the window beside my bed was open. In my house there is only me, and so I get to decide when to turn on the a/c, and therefore often – okay, always – the a/c is not turned on until the house is much too hot. But I like having the windows open. I like feeling the breeze coming through, I like smelling fresh air, I like hearing the sounds outside; I feel connected to the world. When I turn on the a/c, and I close the windows, then I feel like I’m shut away inside a box. With the windows closed and the a/c on, I’m more comfortable physically but less comfortable mentally. So I keep the a/c off and the windows open for as long as I can stand the heat.

Through the open window I hear a strange noise in the distance, kind of a loud crack. It was not the sound of an automobile colliding with another automobile. I once lived in a 3rd floor apartment beside a bad intersection where there were a lot of accidents. While I lived there I heard cars hitting cars, cars hitting pickup trucks, cars hitting motorcycles. This noise that came through my bedroom window was something else, but it had that flavor of something smacking something. It was not a good sound.

Then I heard another sound. This new sound was so weak that it could have been my imagination. The sound was so weakened by distance that when it reached me it must have been just a few molecules of air jiggling my eardrum. But it sounded like a distant human voice saying, “call 911.” I imagined the rest of the sentence: “Do you want me to call 911?”

I rolled to a seated position on the edge of the bed and put my glasses on. I trudged to the front room and looked out. Traffic had stopped on Westover Avenue and automobile passengers were leaning out their windows and looking down the street ahead of them. I trudged back to my bedroom and pulled on shorts and a tee-shirt. I put on socks and shoes. Time to investigate.

By the time I left my house there was already a cop at the corner directing traffic away from the accident. I walked to the corner and looked up Westover; another police car was at the next intersection, its blue emergency beacons flashing away. I walked down the street to the accident. Police were talking to a young black woman. She had been driving a red scooter. It appeared she drove through a stop sign and into the side of a car. The front of her scooter was smashed, but she looked perfectly okay.

I continued on my way until I circumnavigated the block. On the way I stopped to talk to a woman sitting on her front porch. Of course I knew both her and her husband who, she said, was inside lying on the bed. After ten minutes I felt like I was perspiring sufficiently to embarrass myself with growing wet spots on my clothes, so I continued on to my house. Once inside my house I got out of my sweat-soaked clothes as quickly as I could and hung them up to dry. I wasted no time turning on the a/c. Screw the smell of fresh air. It was time to burn some kilowatts.

ISS

Warm night air. Bare feet on concrete sidewalk. I scan the western sky expectantly. At first, nothing. Then I see the International Space Station sailing slowly out of the west, a point of light rising above the willow oak across the street – a bright star, not the brightest but brighter than most – moving slowly and steadily across the sky toward the northeast. Moving, but not going lower, not going toward the horizon, but rather going into the northeast sky, fading, dimming. I glance away as a mini-van turns the corner and passes. One headlight is out. It’s Elisabeth. (Last night she moved from her rented house into a nearby apartment. Why has she returned to her former abode?) Look back at the northeastern sky; the moving star has vanished.

This is the third time I’ve seen the space station. I recall the first time I saw it: a shuttle was chasing it across the sky then, ferrying passengers to, or from, the station. On that night there were two bright, moving points of light that instantly winked out as shuttle and station flew into Earth’s shadow.

There’s nothing remarkable about seeing the space station fly overhead. And yet it is something that has never occurred in the 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history. A species on Earth has learned how to climb above the atmosphere and circle Earth in the vacuum of space every 90 minutes.

Baby steps. How long from Columbus’s voyage to the beginning of a new country? To be around in a hundred or so years: that should be an interesting time.

Spaghetti

I fixed shrimp-basil spaghetti for dinner last night. I totally winged the recipe but it turned out pretty darn good if I say so myself. If you want to try it, I put the recipe (such that it is) on Google here. The recipe requires a certain amount of “winging” on the part of anyone who follows it. But it’s one of those recipes that is almost impossible to mess up.

Today I decided to fix spaghetti with meat sauce, and so I put a pound of ground beef into my slow cooker. I have one of those 6 inch by 10 inch rectangular-shaped cookers. I’ve had it for years and I no longer have the user guide. It has 5 heat settings, none of which are “Off”. I assume the settings are Low, Medium, High, Super-High, and Burn-Baby-Burn.

My intent was to brown the meat then add store-bought pasta sauce and simmer it for a while. Using a spatula, I cut the lump of ground beef into small pieces and spread them out over the bottom of the cooker. It takes the cooker a while to get going, as one might surmise from it’s name: slow cooker. So I walked to the computer and sat down and almost immediately got distracted, and I kind of forgot about the ground beef in the slow cooker. After a while – a good while – I remembered the slow-cooking meat, and went to the kitchen and looked into the cooker. I saw that I now had a 6 inch by 10 inch hamburger patty. I spent the next 5 or 10 minutes cutting it up into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces until I had converted the large patty into what could pass for browned ground beef if you didn’t examine it too closely. (I admit I did consider dividing the large patty into small square patties and pretend I was eating at Wendy’s, but in the end the original plan prevailed.)

I poured pasta sauce into the cooker and stirred the sauce and meat to blend them, and put the lid on the cooker. When it gets to boiling I’ll turn the heat down to medium and let it simmer for an hour. I don’t really know why I’m letting it simmer for an hour. Like many things in life, it just seems like the right thing to do.

Late Night Shenanigans

I was in bed trying to sleep when I heard a police siren. It sounded close. I looked out the window and saw a car in my neighbor’s back yard and a police car stopped in the alley behind my house. The siren was blaring, because that’s what sirens do: they blare. I glimpsed a man dash away from the car with an officer in foot pursuit. In a minute the officer came back, inspected the just-abandoned car, and called a tow truck. The tow truck driver was a young woman wearing short-shorts. She had much nicer legs than your average tow truck driver. She drove the car onto the rollback tow truck and chained it down, and off it went to wherever bad cars go. I wondered briefly what the car chase was about. After all, fleeing a police car seems the tiniest bit of over-reaction to getting a speeding ticket, so I assumed the driver’s misconduct was something more serious. Perhaps he had just robbed a convenience store, stolen a car, and fled with the loot. Whatever. I returned to bed. Another exciting day at the hacienda had come to a close.

Luck

I had a long and winding dream last night, as I often do. I won’t try to recount it all, but there was one small part that I will write about. I dreamed my brother went to North Carolina to buy a car. In the dream, he said he went to a town called Luck. So of course I Googled it and as it happens, there really is a town called Luck in Madison County, North Carolina. Well, it’s less a town than what one might call a fork in the road, but it’s on Google Maps, and it has an entry in Wikipedia, and I reckon those two facts alone make it semi-officially a town.

Luck is on the eastern side of North Carolina highway 209, about 20 miles northwest of Asheville. On the western side of 209 is part of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

On a satellite photo, Luck appears to consist of two houses and a derelict gas station. (Click the image to view on Panoramio.) But I have no doubt that up and down state highway 209 and county road 1163 (the fork in the road), one would find a scattering of homes whose occupants count themselves a part of the Luck community.

Oh … about the car that my brother bought in Luck. It looked just like an Amphicar, the car from the ‘60s that you could drive on land and water. (Check out this page.) President Lyndon Johnson had an Amphicar, and he liked to frighten guests by driving them down a hill on his property and straight into a lake, all the while shouting that his brakes had failed. Lyndon could be quite the joker.

But my brother’s car only looked like an Amphicar. In the dream it was a brand called Phaedra which, as far as I know, is a brand that does not exist outside of my head. The Phaedra had an insignia on its front that looked like a golden, backward pilcrow. In case you’ve forgotten, a pilcrow (¶) is a typographical paragraph mark. In the Middle Ages, before the paragraph was invented, a pilcrow was used to indicate a change in the writer’s train of thought.

Anyway, that was one little piece of my dream. You wouldn’t like most of my dreams. They’re quite tedious. Much like this blog post.

Battery Goes Bang

Seems like it’s always something. A couple of days ago it rained especially hard, so I went upstairs and peeked under the eave to see if the roof was leaking. You see, I had a new roof installed three years ago, and it leaked. The roofer who installed it refused to come back and fix the leak. So I paid another roofer to fix the leak, and I thought it was fixed. But when I looked under the eave I saw it was leaking again in the very same place it had leaked before. Oy.

Just last month my Jeep developed a problem. It would start but it wouldn’t keep running. I guessed (correctly) that the problem was the Idle Air Controller (IAC). I borrowed a set of hex keys (Allen wrenches – the brand name Allen was stamped into them) from my friend Butch and removed the IAC. I cleaned it and re-installed it, but that didn’t help. So I trekked around to the AutoZone store for a new IAC. I trekked back home, installed it, and it fixed the problem. That was three weeks ago.

This morning I went to my garage, got into my Jeep, put the key into the ignition, and turned the key to start the engine. BANG!!! Blue smoke poured from under the hood. I got out, raised the hood, and saw the problem immediately. The battery had exploded. You don’t have to be a mechanic to know a battery shouldn’t look like this. (I disconnected the battery cables before I took the picture – the explosion didn’t blow them off, in case you were wondering.)

What a mess. Battery acid was all over the front of the engine and dripping onto the cement floor of the garage. I used a box of baking soda – all I had – dissolved into a gallon of water to neutralize the acid. This time I asked Butch to drive me to AutoZone for a new battery. I was not about to lug an automobile battery back to my house. I got the battery, installed it, and the Jeep started right up. I have transportation once more. It’s a good feeling.

Blooming Lagerstroemia

Today is Sunday. I woke up late: 7:30 AM. The sun was already up too high but I went for a walk anyway. On every street bloomed Lagerstroemia (named after the Swedish merchant Magnus von Lagerström), commonly known as crape myrtle or crepe myrtle. There are around 50 varieties of crape myrtle. There is the bright red Dynamite Crape Myrtle, the deep pink Pink Velour Crape and the purple Twilight Crape Myrtle (which has bark that changes color). Some have white blossoms. So it can be said that when you’ve seen one crape myrtle, you definitely have not seen them all.

The neighborhood would be a poorer place without them.

Arthur

Arthur grazed the Heights this morning, as you can see from the WunderMap below. See the little red “pin” just left of the yellow-green blob? That’s me. But the rain stayed away, and the only wind was gentle puffs of air that came through the open window beside my bed.

I must have awakened around 5 or 5:30. I didn’t look at the clock, but it was pre-dawn, and the daylight peeking through the Venetian blinds was gray. The air coming through the open window beside my bed was cool in a refreshing way. I don’t usually run the a/c during the night, and sometimes the house warms up a bit because the exterior walls are still warm from the day’s sunshine, and so the cool air coming through the window felt good. I lay on top of the sheets. The gray dawn lingered for a long time, it seemed, and the cool breezes though the window lingered, and it was very pleasant, and I didn’t want to get up. But I finally did – get up, that is – around 7:30.

By noon the air is 79° and the day is sunny. It’s the fourth of July, of course. I was studying the Declaration of Independence and noticed a bit of punctuation that everyone has apparently overlooked. It’s a period. In England, I believe it’s called a full stop. What I found was that this bit of punctuation – this period, lost until now – totally changes the meaning of the document. When he wrote the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson was trying to express his admiration for England’s King George III and how nice it was to be a British subject. You see, Jefferson was quite the Loyalist. But unfortunately, due to that lost bit of punctuation, the colonists thought he was calling for a War of Revolution. Before Jefferson knew what was happening, events had unfolded way out of control and, well, the rest is history. America became an independent nation because of that lost period. (You may not believe me but remember, you’re reading it on the Internet so it has to be true. I couldn’t write it if it wasn’t so.)

Happy Fourth of July!

Windows 8

My first post on this blog, written on November 9, 2008, was a short review of Microsoft’s then-new Windows Vista operating system. I liked Vista and used it until my computer died a few weeks ago. So it’s appropriate that I say a few words about my newest OS: Windows 8.1. But I thought rather than write another “I love Windows 8” or “I hate Windows 8” article, I would write a “I just got Windows 8 – now what?” article.

What it is

There are three versions of Windows 8. They are: Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 8.1 Update. Soon (rumored to be released in July) there will be one more version: Windows 8.1 Update 2. Despite the similar names there are enough differences that a program written for Windows 8.1 may not run, or even install, on Windows 8, so you should definitely get the latest version. I will use the term “Windows 8” to refer to all versions of Windows 8. The term “Windows 8 apps” means apps designed to run on Windows 8, not on the Desktop. The terms Metro apps, Modern apps, and Windows 8 apps mean the same thing: an app designed to be launched from the Windows 8 Start screen and run in full screen mode, not on the Windows Desktop.

The Windows 8 Start screen has large tiles which can display current information: a weather app might display the current temperature and weather conditions on its tile, while a sports news app might display current scores of important games played that day.

On a touch display, you touch a tile to launch its application. On a non-touch display you use your mouse to click on a tile. Windows 8 applications run full screen. You can have more than one application open and running but only one application will be shown on the monitor. Initially there was no way to terminate (exit) a Windows 8 application; it was up to the operating system to decide when to do that. But Microsoft has changed that.

How to get to the Desktop

It’s clear that the Windows 8 Start screen with its tiles is designed to be used on tablets and phones. Let’s assume that you have a keyboard and mouse and therefore you want to use the familiar Windows Desktop and you want to install your old applications on the Desktop.  If you are at the Start screen, click on a tile labeled “Desktop” to get there. Or put your mouse cursor in the lower left corner of the screen and click the Windows icon that appears (where the Start button used to be). That will open the Desktop.

How to resize icons

The application icons on the Desktop may be too big or too small. To resize them, click anywhere on the Desktop (to give it focus) and then hold down the Control key (Ctrl) while turning the scroll wheel on the mouse. You can make the icons larger or smaller.

How to open Control Panel

You can open Control Panel from the Start screen or the Desktop. Easiest way: Go to Desktop, right-click the Windows icon (bottom left corner) and in the popup menu click on Control Panel.

First things first

The first thing to do with a new Windows computer is to run Windows Update and get all the latest security patches and new features. This may take a while to complete. After it has completed, run it again. Some updates only become available after other updates have been installed, so run Windows Update until it says there are no more updates to install.

As I said previously, a program written for Windows 8.1 may not run, or even install, on Windows 8. So get the updates.

Anti-Virus

Your computer may come to you without an anti-virus program. Or perhaps it has a free trial of an anti-virus that you don’t want to use. Here is one option:

Go to Control Panel. Click “Programs and Features” and uninstall the bundled anti-virus. Then in Control Panel, click Windows Defender and make sure it is on. Windows Defender on Windows 8 is not the old Windows Defender. For Windows 8 it is essentially the same thing as Microsoft Security Essentials, which protected my Vista machine for several years. While you’re in Control Panel, click Windows Firewall and make sure it is on.

Browser

If you prefer a browser other than Internet Explorer, this would be a good time to get one. Other popular browsers are:

• Firefox
• Chrome
• Safari
• Opera

DoNotTrackMe

Unless you want to be tracked across the web by almost every website that advertises, your next stop should be Abine (abine.com). They have a product called DoNotTrackMe which blocks most Internet tracking beacons. They can also mask your email address for you, so that websites that want your email addy don’t have to know your real email address, and yet you can still receive their emails (until you don’t want to). Anti-tracking and email masking are free. Abine offers other services for a premium.

Start Button

Windows 8 Desktop mode is similar to Windows 7. The major difference is that the Windows icon (where you would expect a Start button) takes you to the Start screen and its large tiles. There are other differences, but not having a Start button is the crippler.

I installed Pokki (from pokki.com). It’s a free download. It gives you back your Start button and more. If you search for “Windows 8 start button” you will find several similar apps with different features. Some are free and some require a small fee. I like Pokki – I think it’s better than the Windows start button. MS says the Start button will be added back in some future update. Until then, use Pokki or one of the similar apps.

Utilities

Next you’ll probably want to install Adobe Reader so that you can read PDF files. (There are other PDF readers available if you search for them.) After that, you’ll want to install Adobe Flash Player (well, you may not want to, but a lot of websites still use Flash). In both cases, beware of “optional offers” unless you really want to have other software installed along with what you went there to get. Look out for checkboxes followed by words like “Yes, install the free … etc, etc” and uncheck them.

If you watch movies on your computer you may want to get the VideoLAN VLC media player. Windows 8 can play some video files, but not all. I first installed a codec pack and was less than happy with the resulting video quality. VLC media player works well and has all its own codecs and splitters self-contained.

If you use Skype you’ll probably want to get Skype for Desktop, even if Skype for Windows 8 is already installed.

Applications

If you don’t have Microsoft Office you can install the excellent and free OpenOffice from Apache. It can open Office documents as well as documents from the discontinued Microsoft Works.

If you want to dabble in graphic art, or take it to a professional level, without spending a dime, then GIMP for Windows is for you. GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free, powerful image editing tool, with many plug-ins and tools available, and with much online support through documentation, forums, FAQs, and so on.

You should definitely use Backup software. For backup, I use a program that I wrote, but there are many others on the ‘Net and I’m sure there are some that are both good and free.

If you want to create web pages, NetObjects has an app for that. It’s called NetObjects Fusion Essentials and it’s free. Or you can pay for one of their more-capable versions.

If you want to learn programming, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Express 2013 is a good place to start. You can use it to write C++, C#, and Visual Basic programs. It’s free. Be sure to get the version named “Express” as they also sell “professional” versions.

Miscellaneous

Programs you use frequently may have shortcuts on the Desktop. I open Control Panel’s Sound applet frequently to change where the audio goes: computer speakers or TV. So I put a shortcut to the Sound applet on my Desktop. To do that, right-click on the file and drag it to the Desktop. Drop it and choose Create Shortcuts Here.

Or pin it to the taskbar. For example, to pin Snipping Tool, first run it. Put your cursor in the upper or lower right corner of the Desktop so that the Charms bar appears and click the Search icon. Type “snip” into the search textbox and Windows will suggest several possibilities. Click on Snipping Tool. The Snipping Tool appears and at that point you can right-click its icon on the taskbar and select “Pin this program to taskbar.” Alternatively, if you installed Pokki, you can add it to Pokki’s list of favorites.

What Windows 8 doesn’t have

Windows Vista and Windows 7 came with Windows Media Center. Windows 8 does not. To install Media Center onto Windows 8.1, you must first purchase Windows 8.1 Pro Pack for $99.99. Then you can purchase Windows Media Center for $9.99. That’s a lot of 9s.

Summer 2014 Begins

It’s June 21, the longest day of this year, the day of summer solstice for 2014 here in the northern hemisphere (winter solstice down under). Summer solstice is considered the first day of summer, although we’ve already seen plenty of hot days in central Virginia.

My last blog post was written May 21: one month ago. I won’t say nothing has happened in the past 31 days. It’s just that nothing worth telling the world about has happened. On the other hand, that’s never stopped me from writing before.

First, the faucet on my kitchen sink developed a drip. It’s a modern faucet so it doesn’t have an easy-to-replace faucet washer. You see, if it had a washer, fixing it would be a breeze, and we can’t have that. It has some kind of valve for which no one carries parts, so I may have to replace the entire faucet assembly: hot water, cold water, and sprayer. It’s ten years old and that seems to be par for a faucet lifetime these days. But fixing the faucet – plunking down $200 for a new one, turning off the water, crawling under the sink with a basin wrench in one hand and a flashlight in the other – is on hold until the drip becomes just a little more annoying.

Then there was the approach of hot weather and my Jeep needed a dose of a/c refrigerant. Although it’s a simple operation and I’ve done it a number of times, this year something went wrong. I had a brain fart. Or a senior moment. Whatever. I won’t bore you with details. Suffice to say that when you try to recharge an automobile air conditioner and said air conditioner is not running, bad things can happen. In my particular case, the bad thing was an entire 12 ounce can of R134a with Stop Leak venting inside my garage. I can vouch that atomized Stop Leak does not have a pretty smell. But lesson learned; I bought another can of refrigerant and was able to get the a/c system to emit cold air once more.

Then my Jeep developed an issue with its idle speed. When I took my foot off the gas, the engine would slow too much, to the point it sometimes stalled. If it didn’t stall, it would bounce back to a normal idle speed. I decided the likely cause was a dirty Idle Air Control (IAC) motor. The IAC is attached to the throttle body by two screws; removing it was straightforward. It was indeed dirty. The pintle (the part that regulates engine air flow at idle) was sooted up. I cleaned it using throttle body cleaner and a toothbrush until the pintle was shiny. Then I reattached the IAC to the engine. I started the engine, and found it had a different problem: the engine wouldn’t idle at all. The only way to keep it running was to keep the gas pedal partly depressed.

In for a penny, in for a pound. I decided that the IAC was probably bad, and if the parts store had a replacement for less than 50 bucks I would buy it. Maybe it would fix the problem, and maybe it wouldn’t. But if it did, it would save me the hassle of taking the Jeep to a dealership and waiting hours to have it repaired. So I walked to the parts store. And as I walked beside busy Boulevard, I reflected on how unpleasant it is to not have transportation available in the form of a personal vehicle. I passed by a turtle on the roadside that had been squashed flat. “Yeah, pardner,” I said to the flattened turtle, “that’s what happens when you move too slowly in a world of automobiles. It’s no place to be on foot.”

The parts store had a replacement IAC in stock and it was about 30 bucks. I bought it and trudged back home and installed it on the Jeep’s engine. It worked. The idle problem is history. Woo-hoo.

Then came the next problem: my computer died. I turned it on one morning, and the fans ran, but nothing else happened: no splash screen appeared on the monitor, and there was no attempt to boot up. I thought possibly the power supply was bad, so I checked all the voltages. All were nominal. I checked the internal drives by cabling them to another computer. I concluded that repairing the computer would cost nearly as much as buying a new machine, and I’d end up with a six-year-old Windows Vista computer. So I decided to bite the bullet and buy a new machine. I placed the order and it’s on the way (says FedEx). It departed Nashville, Tennessee, at 3:07 this morning. I hope those FedEx boys are careful with it, and don’t drop it, nor toss it around too much. I hope the shipping container is marked “This End Up” and “Handle With Care” and “Consignee Will Kick Your Ass If You Break This Computer.”

And sometime along the way during the last 31 days (and maybe a few more) I gathered all of my dad’s letters that he wrote from the South Pacific to his new bride back in Virginia during the Second World War, and I typed them up, and I put them on the Internet where they will live forever. They’re mostly “mushy” love letters, but there is the letter in which he wrote of seeing American fighter planes (P-38 Lightnings) shoot down a Japanese Zero which then crashed near him. There’s the letter he wrote right after recovering from malaria (just a postscript, really, that read, “P.S. I was in the hospital for a while but now I’m out.”) There is the letter he wrote after seeing his buddies killed by friendly fire. (All the letters were read by army censors, and if the censors didn’t like something, they cut it from the letter.) One day I may read the letters again and try to decide if there are any that might be of interest to the general public, and maybe I’ll post links to those letters.

This post is long enough. I have to save something for July. ;-)