Quotations from Robert Heinlein

Heinlein is one of my all-time favorite authors. I think I've read about 85% of his work, and it never ceases to amaze me how far ahead of his time he was. He was also quite a Libertarian, and had very strong feelings about personal responsibility and liberty.
I'm sure he'd be sickened if he came back today and saw the great numbers of sheeple wandering around, totally clueless.
Enjoy the quotes; they're some of my favorites.

“You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.”

“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”

“I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”

“Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.”

“No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.”

“Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.”

“Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.”

“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things”

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”

“Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.”

“The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.”

“I never learned from a man who agreed with me.”

“They didn't want it good, they wanted it Wednesday.”

Happy New Year!

Gonna have a quiet one this year. My YF's brother and his YF are coming over here tonight for a while. They've got a new 'interactive' version of "Pictionary" that runs on the Wii, and my YF bribed her son and his girlfriend so that we could have a whole bunch of us play this (stooopid) game.
Oh, well, at least the pizza will be good!
Have a safe, happy and hopefully prosperous New year everybody!
See you all on the flip side....

Update: "Pictionary" on the Wii is way better than the non-electronic version!

Rise of the Muffler Men

While browsing around on Wikipedia for something totally unrelated, I found a picture of the "Gemini Giant" fiberglass statue that stands in front of "The Launching Pad" in Wilmington, IL, one of my hot-rod haunts from days gone by. We always just called him "The Spaceman", but it turns out he's a member of the tribe referred to as "Muffler Men".
The first of the Muffler Men was a giant Paul Bunyan figure made for the PB Cafe in Flagstaff, AZ in about 1962, by Bob Prewitt of Prewitt Fiberglass. Most of the figures produced later by International Fiberglass came from that one mold, often modified to suit what the customer wanted.
The whole story is here on the Roadside America website, and is an interesting look into the people behind these giant glass figures.
For more info on the guys, just Google "Muffler Men", and you'll find more than I thought was possible!

Merry (and I'm NOT sorry!) Christmas!

After reading about the moon-bat lefty who apologized for attending a Christmas party, I modified my title.
Here's wishing all my friends who do, and don't, visit my little blog a very Merry CHRISTmas, and a prosperous New Year.
I'm not sure about the last part, given the nature of the economy!

"Best of the Best" Shuttle Launches 1983~2010

Some pretty impressive film in super slow motion of the engines firing, and liftoff.
When I worked for Boeing on the Sea Launch program in the Range Operations Group, one of our responsibilities was to maintain the cameras that took footage like this. They were 16MM, 400 frames-per-second, and were housed in 3/8" thick steel plate housings. The windows the cameras were pointed out of were about 5" in diameter, and made of two layers of borosilicate glass. Depending on the launch profile, the outer window would usually get trashed, but sometimes came through the launch without a scratch.
The housings, on the other hand, got pretty beat up every launch. After each launch we'd open up the enclosures (about 60 1/2" bolts), pull the cameras out, put the tops back on the enclosures, and do a minor sealing up with silicone caulk for the trip home. The cameras and enclosures got a full check-out, cleaning, and complete sealing once we got down to the launch site for the next launch. Every two years or so we had to scrape off the ablative coating and reapply it, and it was nasty stuff to work with!
Anyway....knowing the work that goes in to just getting these films makes me appreciate their beauty all the more.
Enjoy!

Vintage Computing, Part Deux

Well, I finally got enough stuff dragged out of the garage to get a decent PC put together to run "Grim Fandango". My first attempt with the old HP Vectra VE didn't work very well. I had trouble getting the game to install, and it wouldn't play. Then the audio quit working, and I couldn't get it to come back, so rather than spend more time troubleshooting it, I went deep into the bowels of the garage this morning, and dug out what I thought was enough stuff to get something decent running. It took a while, but my trusty FIC VA-503+ motherboard was located, and I spent some time brushing the dust off of it, cleaning the connectors on it, and making sure the fan on the heatsink was good to go. Then I located an AT-style power supply, a 40 GB IDE hard-disk, an IDE CD/DVD drive, a floppy and cables for all the drives, an AT-to-PS/2 keyboard adapter, a 3Com PCI Ethernet card, my Aureal Vortex PCI soundcard, and got my BIG box of memory modules out. I loaded the board with two 64 meg sticks of PC-100 SDRAM (PLENTY for Win98!), checked all the jumper settings, plugged in an ancient NVidia AGP graphics card, crossed my fingers, and powered it up. It powered up OK, but the BIOS settings were all out-of-whack, so I shut it down, and put a new CMOS battery in after cleaning the coin-cell holder contacts. I booted it back up, set the clock, and checked some other settings, as replacing the CMOS battery usually restores it to the OEM default settings for things like type of drives installed, which video slot gets initialized first, and a host of other things. The Windows98 install went OK, but I couldn't get the NVidia drivers to work right with the card, so back out to the garage. I found an ATI "Rage 128 Pro" still in the box, so I brought that back in. As a rule, I prefer NVidia cards over ATI (now AMD) for gaming, but the only other NVidia cards I have for an AGP slot are newer GeForce cards, and the Grim Fandango forums indicate they don't work as well as an older card. I loded all the correct drivers, did the "Windows Update" routine (download, reboot, repeat), and made sure the basic PC was running OK. The heatsink on the video card runs cool-to-the-touch, as does the heatsink on the AMD K6-III/450 MHz processor. Got the game loaded, and it runs smooth as silk! This PC would have been pretty "Hot Stuff" back when the game was released, and even though it runs smooth, the graphics aren't up to the standards of today. "Grim Fandango" was unique in that it used very high quality static backgrounds that the characters moved in relation to, so it has a unique look to it.
I'll post another picture later in the week after I get everything mounted into the new case I have coming. And I still have to find the drivers for the motherboard so I can get things like the drive controllers and AGP slot running at maximum performance. There aren't any "Yellow Ball Exclamation Points" in the Windows Device Manager, but I distinctly remember from using this board years ago that having the correct drivers makes a noticeable difference in performance.
Time to hit the hay here, and listen to the rain. We've had 1.9" since midnight, and more is on the way.

Ahhhh....The Joys Of "Vintage Computers"

I ws cleaning out some stuff in the garage the other day (actually just separating piles of stuff), and I found a box that had my favorite computer games in it. Now I'm not much of a gamer, so the fact that I even saved these particular games kinda surprised me. The two that I played the most were "Grim Fandango", and the "Descent" series of games. I've also got "Half-Life", but never really got into it much. So, deciding that I'd like to play Grim Fandango again, I started looking at the requirements. The last time I played it, Windows 2000 had just started to become big, and I remember ripping out some hair trying to get the game to play on that platform. Since my garage resembles "Jim's Vintage Radio and Computer Emporium", and one section of my radio room is "Jim's Vintage Software Archive", I figured I had enough stuff (the YF calls it "Junque", notice her spelling of my treasures!)) to build a rig that would run Windows98 at a reasonable rate to play the game. I already had an older HP Vectra VL that I had been using as my hardware-based firewall from when I ran my "Community Wireless Network", and it had an original Pentium 233MHz processor with 128megs of RAM and a 6 gig hard-disk. I dug out an old 3dfx "VooDoo 3 2000" PCI video card, and an Aureal Vortex sound card, my Windows98 discs, and proceeded to get this ancient beast running again. Not being a big fan of Internet Explorer, I looked for a version of Firefox for Win98, but no joy, so I grabbed Netscape 9.0 from the AOL/Netscape archives. Then I had to grab some USB Mass-Storage drivers so Win98 could read my external drive.
My first thoughts are it's not fast enough, so back out to the garage to dig out some more stuff. Well, let's see....I've got an Epox MVP3G-M motherboard (one of the best "Super 7" motherboards ever made!), an AMD K6-III+ good for 500 MHz, and enough memory to stuff the board full. The sound card will fit, and since the "Super 7" motherboards also have an AGP slot for the video card, I can put one of my newer NVidia GeForce cards in for plenty of video processing power.
Hmmm....no case for it! All the computer cases and power supplies I have "In Stock" are for later ATX motherboards, and aren't compatible with an AT style motherboard. Off to eBay, where I found a brand-new TechMedia case that includes the power supply, a floppy, and has built-in speakers. What's really "Deja Vu" about this is that this exact case was what I built several PC's in many (well...10 or more) years ago, and I was stunned to see several vendors still have them new-in-box!
The case should be here sometime next week, and it'll take me a day to build it up, load Windoze on it, and get things running smooth.
More to come..........

My Son, the EMT!

YOW! Just got news from my son that he finished his EMT training with an overall grade of "A"!
We had quite a talk about his training on the way up to Angeles Shooting Ranges the day we went, and he was quite pleased with how things were going. Now he just has to to take (and pass) the NREMT test. He was telling me that the ambulance company he did his ride-alongs with was hiring, so he might leave his current job at a large grocery store chain, and go work for them. After some "time-in-grade", he'll be eligible to go to Paramedic school, which he's really looking forward to. Once he gets certified as a Paramedic, he's thinking about applying to one of the local Fire Departments, or maybe the LAFD Academy.
Yep, his Mom, Step-Dad, and my YF are *very* proud of him.

Obama Busted By Jamie and Adam

Hmmmm....the other night when I was flipping through channels, I thought I saw our famed "Mythbusters" team with Teh One. I'm not sure if Obummer will be making a guest appearance or not (haven't had my coffee yet this morning), but I did find this little clip floating around in cyberspace.
Enjoy!

Not In Log

For those of us who "Chase DX", and collect the QSL cards, the words "Not In Log" are devastating. You KNOW you worked the DX station. You KNOW you had the band, frequency, date and time correct. You KNOW you heard the DX station reply to you. What could have happened? It's anybody's guess, but getting your card returned with "Not In Log" stamped on it is a real letdown.
Anyway....we've all seen this clip many times, and in many variations, but I found a new spin on it called "Not In Log". The technical references are spot-on, but the "Pin in the coax" line had me rolling on the floor!
Enjoy!

Hand Dancers....or something.....

I'm not sure what to make of this. One of my friends sent it to me as a spoof of "River Dancing", but I think it goes a bit beyond that.....