damont

It's been five months since I made a post here that could be seen by anyone other than me. Time to change that. And since I spent a week and change of March in southern Mississippi, might as well tell you about that. I was being the shop minion for White Wolf and the Phoenix (Not Quite All Your String-related Needs But A Whole Hella Lot Of Them) which is run by Megan (White Wolf) and herveus (the Phoenix). The latter and I carpooled from the DC area down to the event site near Lumberton MS, and back afterwards.

The trip south was largely without incident, unlike some prior years (looking at YOU 2024), with the usual stops overnight in Kingsport TN, breakfast at the Dandridge TN Waffle House, and almost the entire length of Interstate 59 from extreme northwest Georgia to almost the Louisiana/Mississippi border. (I-59 goes into LA, but only for about a dozen miles before ending at Interstates 10 and 12.) Herveus and I met Megan in Picayune, where we overnighted and did our "town run" for supplies. Dinner on Thursday night was at the Atchafalaya Seafood Company location, where they were very kind and let us slide in under the tag right at closing time. The food was tasty. The portions were ... SUBSTANTIAL. We were eating leftovers for days.

Friday morning after breakfast we made our annual pilgrimage to the Claiborne Hill supermarket in Picayune. Highly recommended, especially now that the remodeling is finally complete. Then it was off to Kings Arrow Ranch, for checking in and setting up. The weather was gloriously cooperative, and the cordless leaf blower we'd invested in paid off handsomely both for us and for our neighbors. Friends were a little behind schedule getting there, so we assured them we could feed them if the site cafeteria closed before they arrived (luckily it did not, all was well). We weren't quite finished unloading the RV by sunset, so we were cleared to leave it there overnight. As with the past four years, I had the RV for sleeping.

Opening Saturday's weather was warmer, and promising to get hotter and muggier on Sunday. We finished unloading the RV, and spent the weekend completing the interior setup for the shop and the back tent, including the weather strips for redirecting rainwater underneath the underfloor tarps and safely out the downhill corners. In the meantime we also took the car and RV out to their respective parking spots, and opened up for business while still finishing with setup. Sales for the weekend were healthy, despite Sunday's weather fulfilling the promise of being relatively hot and excessively humid. But we knew those conditions wouldn't last!

About 2 AM Monday the skies opened up. This was a massive frontal boundary crossing the country from west to east and stretching all the way from Canada to the Gulf. I heard reports of severe weather but nothing TOO close to us, for which we were grateful. Temperatures dropped quite a bit during the storm which was still dropping stuff on us nearly 8 hours later... only what started as rain had turned to SLEET. As I reported to many friends at the time: "Definitely sleet, according to what I found on my cloak when I arrived at the shop."

Weather definitely put a damper on foot traffic and sales on Monday. Behind the front conditions got VERY cold. By Monday evening I was wearing the cloak in the shop and on Monday night I spread it on the bed as an extra blanket, as one does. (Remember this cloak is substantial wool, lined in raw silk. It serves these purposes well.) Tuesday dawned below freezing and it felt like it took forever to get anywhere close to warm. Tuesday night was almost as cold, the thermometer at the shop was only 1-ish degree C (about 2 F) higher than the previous nights low. At least on Wednesday things warmed up more quickly.

After another slow sales day Tuesday, the pace picked up with the warming temperatures. Wednesday was already a good day BEFORE Moonlight Madness started, and we were kept busy the entire evening, with foot traffic continuig past 11 PM before sputtering out. Sales were continued healthy on Thursday and Friday, with Megan noting just how low the shop's stock was getting, and saying she was going to need to put the pedal to the metal on production of inkle-woven stuff (belts, garters, trim) in advance of her May-June-July circuit and Pennsic.

The weather held for the rest of the week, not getting too hot and no more precipitation, and when Strike Saturday arrived we had a pretty uneventful time making final sales, paying the sales taxes, tearing down, loading up the vehicles, and managing to leave site just as the sun was setting.

The trip north was again loooooooooong as expected, but mostly free of incident, with an overnight stop east of Tuscaloosa AL, late lunch in Dandridge, and a detour in the Shenandoah Valley to avoid a highway-blocking accident near Mt. Jackson VA. We arrived in Lanham just after 11 PM. The next day there was searching the neighborhood for the youngest cat who had managed to sneak out (no luck that day, but she showed up on her own the day after that), then I finished my trip and landed back at Mom's just after 7 PM.

Quotable from random points during the week:

• Is it really an event (particularly GW) if you're not sewing in a hotel?


• "Happy Birthday" just sung next door in the requisite (e+pi) keys...


• -- Is Odyssey still running?
  -- Yes it is.
  -- I got coffee this morning. Fully operational death star and all that.


• We have found a critical mass of heralds.


• -- whose pottery is that in the photo you just posted [on Discord]?
  -- That's yard sale stuff ... Please Don't Make Us Take This Stuff Home


• [on one of the subfreezing mornings] The floor isn't lava, it's ice-nine.


• [Best quotable of the week, heard coming from outside the still-closed shop tent one morning about 15-20 minutes before we opened up, voice was about 10-11 years old] "Daaaaaaad! Economic necessity override magic!"

Ten years ago I posted about this but now I feel that the post bears repeating, so I am doing an almost verbatim copy-paste.

Most folks above a certain age (and some below that age) are aware of what happened fifty years ago this evening, if only because of the very well-known song that the late great Gordon Lightfoot wrote about it. On 10 November 1975, an early and vicious winter storm hit Lake Superior, and took down the SS Edmund Fitzgerald with all her 29 crew.

My father-in-law was a merchant mariner -- an engineer to be specific -- up through the mid-1960s, when a medical condition caused his retirement. His son was career Navy, also in engineering. Tonight my thoughts are with all those who go down to the sea in ships, with special prayers for those (and the family and friends of those) who didn't come back.

Here's an excellent video with an intro of an ABC newscast from the following day (Harry Reasoner behind the mic), footage of the big ship herself, and Gordon singing the song live in the background: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Okay, for this next bit of the project we return to the right side wall for the area above the French doors, and between them and the main back wall of the house. To go above the French doors I would need two trapezoids and an irregular pentagon. I cut the smaller trapezoid because it needed to go in first, and then went on to cut the second trapezoid. Except that somewhere in there I made a mistake in measurement, and the two sides that were supposed to abut each other weren't the same length -- off by about a centimeter. So I erred on the side of caution and recut the angle so those sides matched.

This turned out to be compounding the oops, as the mistake in measurement had led me to cutting the second trapezoid too short on that side. So now, after dry-fitting the two sections, I had a very skinny rhomboidal gap at the top of the panels. HEAVY SIGH. After very careful measurement I cut out two very skinny triangles, removed the right-hand trapezoid, inserted the one triangle and banged it into place with a bit of scrap 2x4 (that scrap got used as a hammer, or as something for a hammer to hit, multiple times during this project).

I fastened in the first trapezoid after that, put up the second trapezoid again and rested it on the flashing, then slowly moved it into place with my right hand while holding that second skinny triangle in place with my left hand. Everything went together neatly in the end, and while I had a really ugly 4-way intersection of two unsightly seams, I also knew that Caulk Covers A Multitude Of Sins, and this is one such.

Next I had to cut the pentagonal piece -- really just a rectangle with the upper left corner cut off. Measurement had to be careful here to the shiplapped side edge came JUST over the right side edge of the French door frame's side flashing. This way the edge of the long strip (between the doors and the main house) would mate up with it properly. Thankfully that went off without a hitch, and now that wall looked like this.




(Right side wall, all panels installed EXCEPT between the French doors and the main back wall of the house. Click to enlarge.)

Next I had to cut the small rectangle that would eventually go in the bottom corner up against the main house. Before I installed that I would need to make a cutout -- more on that later -- but I needed the piece cut so I could support the long strip without needing hands, while I used said hands to nail and screw that strip in place.

That ended up taking longer than I expected, as I had to take the long strip down a couple times and shave off the cut edge to match spots where the main wall of the house wasn't straight. (Settling is, after all, very much a thing after 50 years, and settling never happens evenly. NEVER.) But eventually, with the aid of that small rectangle, a rubber mallet, the sledgehammer, and the aforementioned scrap of 2x4, the long strip was correctly positioned and fastened in place. I then removed the bottom rectangle for measuring and cutting out the outlet box, but that's a story for another day.

At the end of that particular day here's what it looked like. Click on the thumbnail for the full size photo.




(Right side wall, all panels installed EXCEPT in the bottom corner nearest the wall of the house. Click to enlarge.)

Yet more to come.

So last time I had taken all the old siding and caulking off the back porch's side walls. My dad determined that it would be much faster and more economical to have the professional painter, who had done the laundry room (and various other rooms) earlier in the year, come back and paint the panels instead of paying for my time to paint them. I agreed with this assessment.

The one downside was that the painter couldn't get us into the schedule until the beginning of June, leaving me just six days of calendar time to get everything cut into shape and put up. But in the meantime I was able to get pricing on the Texture 1-11 panels from several different stores -- all three of the big chains that had stores locally (sorry Menards, you don't qualify) plus the small local chain (four or five stores in eastern PA) that we get most of our lumber from, and anywhere else in reasonable driving distance just in case. Lowe's had far and away the best price on them, I'm talking 1/4 to 1/3 cheaper than anywhere else. So off I went in late May after clearing out the back of the minivan. (And by clear, I mean removing the seats too.)

And... WIN! These 4 ft by 8 ft panels *could* be made to fit in the not quite 8ft long cabin of the minivan. It's actually about 7'8" long. Spare tire is propping them up in the rear so the panels are on a diagonal, which is how I got them to fit in the space.




[Panels in the back of the van. Click the thumbnail to get the full-size photo.]

Earlier in May my dad and I had gone to the paint store to get the cans of primer and paint the painter said we'd need. On the first of June I moved the cars out of the garage, the painter came, and I helped him set up the painting station in the garage. Both sides of the panels were primed -- and with excellent timing, that process used up ALL the primer we'd gotten but I didn't need to go get more! Then the "show" sides of the panels were painted, and by the next morning they should be dry and ready to get cut up and placed.




[Painted panels, drying in the garage. Sawing and placing to begin the next day. Click to enlarge.]

The next post in this series required a metric crapton of measuring and math before taking saw to wood. Details to come!

Bit of a story to start this post.

When I was in first grade, back in New Jersey, I was befriended by a fourth grader. In retrospect this was weird as hell.

My world was, up to that point, mostly limited to my extended family and the families on our one-block-long street. Of the family members right in our neighborhood, I was the only one old enough to be in school yet; and while there were older kids on the block, they went to the Catholic school. So it's not like *they* would know any random fourth graders at the public school where I was attending. And fourth graders were on the second floor of the school, which was restricted to fourth grade and older ("You must be *this old* to ride this ride...") so it's not like we ever had a chance to see each other in passing, really. So it really was odd that this fourth grader should have any interest in hanging out with me. But he did, and being the sort of kid I was, I accepted this befriendment. We rarely saw each other except in the schoolyard before school; the timing of recesses and lunch hours meant we wouldn't cross paths then, and once school let out we were GONE. But for a year and change, this odd before-school friendship lasted.

Then for a month or so in the spring of second grade, I didn't see him in the schoolyard. Kids notice this stuff, but there were plenty of reasons why this might be -- including that his family might have moved away, something that was known to occur and that happened to ME three years later in the late winter of fifth grade.

But one morning the assistant principal sought me out before school.

Not that I had any idea why the assistant principal would have reason to know who I was, but I suspect he asked my teacher to point me out. Because he wanted to talk to me personally. And as gently as he could, he let me know that my friend had died; victim of an inoperable (by early 1970s standards anyway) brain tumor.

That was my first known exposure to cancer.

(It's possible that one of the two great-uncles who died when I was four years old had succumbed to cancer but I was too young at the time to be told any details. Deaths in the family before that, I was too young to remember, and there hadn't been any in the two-plus years since then. But I digress.)

Cancer has claimed the lives of many family members since then, and many friends as well. One of my undergrad classmates received his bachelor's degree posthomously thanks to cancer, that was a somber moment amongst the celebrations (and heavy rains). But while cancer has been a part of life pretty much all my life -- and while both my parents are cancer survivors, my mother more than once -- Big C had never hit this close to home since that sad morning in second grade. Until two and a half weeks ago.

My kid sister's husband was first diagnosed with colon cancer in 2020. He went in for his first colonoscopy since he'd just turned 50 and there were no known genetic risk factors. But that test revealed not just colon cancer, but Stage 4 colon cancer. And what might have been lesions on his liver from the cancer having metastasized. Lots of medical intervention was attempted. And, amazingly, it appeared to work. John's "numbers" dropped to near zero. They kept at it, trying to balance beating down the cancer with the fact that the treatments basically wiped him out.

The whole California branch of the family came east for Eldest Niece's wedding last October. John looked okay but he certainly got tired easily. He had to head to bed pretty early during the post-dinner part of the reception, which we all accepted as just SOP at the time. Then at some point in early summer last year (I think), they discovered that the cancer had spread to his lungs. Treatments were continued to see what could be done, but if we had to be honest with ourselves, we were playing for time now. I was hoping he'd make it until this coming summer to see their second child (Eldest Nephew) graduate from high school.

That wasn't to be. Monday before Christmas my kid sister called to say he was being transferred to home hospice care. That Friday morning, in his favorite chair, he finally let go.

Obituary for John Anthony Soper

It's been a rough few weeks. Not how any of us wanted to spend our winter holidays. "Middle" sister and her husband are flying out to SoCal for the memorial service. Kiddo was up this past weekend and we have worked out how to get his Grandma's laptop to display on the big TV, so next Monday we can watch the memorial service livestream that my middle sister's husband is setting up.

And slowly -- VERY slowly -- life will rebalance. But there is a huge hole in the family, and achieving that rebalance will not be an easy road.

#fuckcancer

I know, like I didn't already have too many projects going on. But this one actually involves getting paid, and also has a deadline. This involves replacing the aluminum siding on the side walls of my parents' screened in back porch with plywood Texture 1-11 siding. The aluminum has been showing its age, and the wall against the main body of the house has been Texture 1-11 from the beginning of the porch.

There's a bit of geometry involved and I may end up cutting a test piece out of some spare MDF I have lying around. Anyway, I'm basically in charge of everything exccept painting, which my dad is subcontracting out to a pro we know who can do a much quicker (and somewhat better) job. (He did a bunch pf interior painting for the parents in the late winter and early spring.)

Photos and updates will get posted as things occur, though the first few things have already happened so I'll have to catch up during the rest of this week.

Happy 2023 everyone; also, Happy Asian Lunar New Year since we recently passed that holiday as well. This is a quick post to say that I'm still alive, unlike several family and friends who have passed away in the last 2-3 months. I'm also hunting in and around the metaphorical sofa cushions looking for a spare thousand bucks to get me through the next two weeks of bills, without actually expecting to find it.

Yes I have two or three story threads I've left hanging, and as my energy allows I'm still working on them, but don't have anything ready to post publicly yet. Hope you have a reasonably happy and prosperous new year.

This school year (2021-22), I am marking the 40th anniversary of my freshman year in undergrad. And right now, I am marking the approximate 40th anniversary of a very funny story regarding one of my classes.

By the way, this story really calls for an icon that says "I .LT.3 FORTRAN" -- if only I find pix of the correct typeface (IBM 1430 band printer). I'm planning to tell the actual story tomorrow (Wednesday, 6 April). But for this and some other related stories t come later, a but of background information is needed. Part 0 of this story series, as it were.

BACKGROUND:

Once upon a time at the College of William and Mary in Virginia (Chartered in 1693), the gathering place for computer users was a place called Jones Basement. The focus of our attention is the machine room (accessible only to operators and admins) and the printer room next to it.

During my freshman year, the primary machine was an IBM 370 mainframe; all programming classes were still being taught on it. They had just installed another machine, a PR1ME 750 supermini. For the entirety of my college career, the printer room contained three printers. One was an honest-to-pete PR1ME printer (for the PR1ME). One was a Printronics dot-matrix printer, which was always loaded with 8.5x11 white fanfold tractor-feed paper, and thus the only printer useful for printing out essays and term papers and such. (This is important later.) Between those two was the Behemoth -- an IBM 1430 band printer, capable of speeds unmatched by today's laser printers until the late 2000s. (And the 1430 is *still* faster than most modern inkjets.)

The 1430 was this BIIIIIG box -- I mean it was bigger than two large size people. We called it the Behemoth for a reason! The top was flat and level. When the printer ran out of paper, it would warn you with several seconds of beeping, and then the printer would obligingly open the top, which would then no longer be level. HUGE warning signs were posted about *never* *ever* leaving coffee cups on top of the 1430. (I can't IMAGINE why... >.> <.< )

The printer room contained one other piece of computer equipment: a card reader, whose function was to read the decks of punch cards that people brought in. For those of you who are now asking "What's a punch card?"... they're about 3-ish inches high by maybe 7-ish inches wide, made of much the same cardstock as manila folders. Each card was divided into a matrix, 80 columns wide and 12 rows high, of rectangles (taller than they were wide), which could have rectangular holes punched in them (or not). For text files each column represented a single character, so your standard card held a single line of text with a nominal maximum length of 80 characters. "*Nominal* maximum?" I hear you asking in the back. Yep... for any serious punch card user, the real maximum was 72 characters. Those of you who remember FORTRAN may remember that you always had to end your line of code by column 72. Why? Because IBM reserved the last 8 columns of an 80-column punch card for sequence numbers. This made your card deck easy to get back in order should you drop and scatter it on the floor; they even had machines that could re-sort a scattered card deck according to those sequence numbers... *IF* one had remembered to punch them in (or have them punched in later, which was also something the sorting machine could do).

For text files, in addition to the columns of coded holes-and-not-holes, the character would be printed along the top of the card above the corresponding column. Anyway, since most of the programming classes were still using punch cards, that card reader was a VERY important element in our lives. And there you have the printer room: a small room containing two band printers (one of them REALLY HUGE), one dot matrix printer, and one card reader. Each of which made a certain amount of noise. Put it all together and you got a pretty durn LOUD room.

(Here endeth the background. Story to come tomorrow.)

(Originally posted to my GoFundMe earlier today, so I didn't bother to change the timestamp. This is basically copied verbatim (modulo formatting), including the fundraising stuff at the end; I *was* posting to GoFundMe after all. Feel free to ignore those bits if you want. Link to the fundraiser will be provided in the comments and upon request.)

Back in July, I said (or strongly implied) that it would be August before I got to covering Derek Lowe's July blog posts for "SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 related PSA / traditional weblogging meets the usual begging post" -- and not it's August, so let's check out the COVID-related stuff that our favorite pharmacological chemist and blogger talked about in his blog for Science Translational Medicine during the month of July.

An Update on Anti-Androgen Therapy for the Coronavirus

More on Vaccine Side Effects

Too Many Papers

How Well Does the J&J Vaccine Work Against the Delta Variant?

I'll cover Derek's August posts somewhere near the end of the month, and I might have the energy to put together a "links from all over" post before then (and wow is there ever a lot of COVID-related news). But for now let's move on to the usual PSA-and-begging part of this post. Frequent readers of these type of posts will be able to predict what comes next: the plea for those of you who are able to SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL BUSINESSES. Some of these were "essential" and never closed during the initial lockdowns. Others, after having opened back up, are now trying to figure out the best safe ways, if any, to stay open as we move back and forth between varying levels of semi- (or even complete) lockdown, highly dependent on location. What these businesses tend to have in common is that locally owned and operated businesses generally give better "bang for the buck" when it comes to keeping the local economy moving. So please do what you can to help keep your local economy a little bit more afloat. Locally owned businesses are, and will continue to be, struggling to survive and get back on their feet, so please patronize them as much as you can. BUY LOCAL. Please however, do so in a safe manner, especially now. Keep on, or go back to, wearing masks and other protective equipment when going shopping in person, continue and even increase social distancing. Act intelligently, because I know you can.

( Rest of the begging stuff is behind the cut. )

(Originally posted to my GoFundMe earlier today, so I didn't bother to change the timestamp. This is basically copied verbatim (modulo formatting), including the fundraising stuff at the end; I *was* posting to GoFundMe after all. Feel free to ignore those bits if you want. Link to the fundraiser will be provided in the comments and upon request.)

It's almost the end of May, and as predicted, it's been a crazy busy month on a number of fronts. (Though alas, not the job front.) So it is unsurprising that it's been over 3 weeks since the last installment of "SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 related PSA / traditional weblogging plus the usual begging post" and thus I must play a bit of catch-up. Warning: June looks to be just as busy, but I hope to get in at least a couple of these during that month! For now, let's take a look at what pharmacological chemist and blogger Derek Lowe has been talking about so far this month in his blog for Science Translational Medicine.

His most recent post points out that he's likely to continue decreasing the number of COVID-focused posts as time goes on:

A Word on Blog Topics

Here's one that's not really SARS-CoV-2 related but highlights one of the conundrums many folks in the sciences (especially the biological ones) face all the time:

Clearing Cellular Dead Wood

One opinion (from someone in the industry) on waiving intellectual property rights as a way to get more vaccines out there faster:

Waiving IP

The following article STARTS with "I’m going to regret writing about this..."

Coronavirus Origins

And to cap it off, here's a few more technically oriented posts.

Spike Protein Behavior

Integration Into the Human Genome?

An Outside Perspective

And now, as the prophecy (or at least the opening paragraph) foretold, it's time to move on to the usual PSA-and-begging part of this post. Regular readers of these tyoe of posts pretty much know what comes next: the plea for those of you who are able to SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL BUSINESSES. Some of these were "essential" and never closed during the lockdowns. Others, after having opened back up, are now trying to figure out the best safe ways to stay open as we move back and forth between varying levels of semi-lockdown, highly dependent on location. What these businesses have in common is that locally owned and operated businesses give better "bang for the buck" when it comes to keeping the local economy moving. So please do what you can to help keep your local economy a little bit more afloat. Locally owned businesses are, and will continue to be, struggling to survive and get back on their feet, so please patronize them as much as you can. BUY LOCAL. Please however, do so in a safe manner. Keep on wearing masks and other protective equipment when going shopping in person, continue social distancing. Act intelligently, because I know you can.

( Rest of the begging stuff is behind the cut. )