Category: Uncategorized

I’ve mentioned this before, but my friend Jenny goes through computers like crazy. She bought a Dell in 2011 and it failed just after the 1-year warranty expired. She paid to have the hard drive replaced by Dell in May, with the repairs being warranted for 90 days. So promptly when that time was up, the hard drive failed again. I have no idea why, but when the computer tries to start up, the hard drive makes a clicking noise, which I told her is the “click of death.” Continue reading “Computer Shopping”

On July 4, SyFy ran a Twilight Zone marathon. I recorded all the episodes I could and have been watching them when nothing much else is on. Twilight Zone is one of those great shows where many of the episodes have become famous cultural icons, often imitated or referenced in other shows. One famous episode is “It’s a Good Life” featuring a little kid who sends people “off to the cornfield” (his mother is played by Cloris Leachman, who became famous on the Mary Tyler Moore Show). Another is “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” an early role for William Shatner (who would become Captain Kirk a few years later), where he sees a gremlin on the wing tearing up the plane he is in.

It had to be difficult to make a show like this. You needed a different plot, a different cast, and different sets for every show. With TV seasons much longer back in those days, Rod Serling and the other writers had to come up with an awful lot of ideas, held in check by a pretty low budget and a 30-minute timeframe. Honestly, some episodes didn’t need the full 30 minutes. One famous show, “Eye of the Beholder,” was about a horribly ugly woman whose face has been treated to make her look normal, but spends almost the entire episode under bandages. Only at the end do they remove the wraps, and in horror discover that she still looks gorgeous by our standards (played by Donna Douglas, who would become Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies), but terrible by their standards since they are all ugly (explaining why we haven’t seen any characters’ faces the entire show). That was probably a 5-minute idea stretched out to a whole show. Continue reading “Twilight Zone”

I saw a link today for an article about work starting on the 17th Street bridge. I clicked on it because I had worked on coming up with plans for the repair. When I got to the article, there is an embedded video and the picture shows a finger pointing to the plans. I drew that!

Here’s the article.

The caption for one of the pictures says:

Georgia Department of Transportation engineers have drawn up plans to reinstall decorative fencing on the 17th Street bridge using what they say is a more secure method involving bolts secured by nuts and steel plating. Previously, the structure was attached by a fast-set epoxy.

But it wasn’t “engineers” plural, it was just me! Actually the vast majority of the plans were drawn by our consultant under the original contract for the 17th Street bridge, and all I did was modify those drawings.

Last week I looked out the back window of my house and saw a baby robin hopping around back there. I have learned that this is normal and they aren’t supposed to be in the nest, so the best thing is to leave them alone. The mom will keep feeding them while they are on the ground until they can fly and feed themselves. It hadn’t rained in a while and I thought maybe that bird could use some water. I put a cookie sheet with edges on it on the back patio and poured some water into it so that there was a shallow source of water. I would look out there but didn’t see the bird drinking. I thought maybe that the bottom of the pan would be too slick and found a pan for a paint roller that had a little traction to it and had varying depth. But it was bright orange plastic and the bird didn’t go near it either. The next day it was supposed to be even hotter and would reach an all-time record of 106 degrees. I told Carol about what I was doing and she said I should put out a sprinkler because birds love sprinklers.

I put my old-fashioned harp sprinkler back there and set the water so that it was only going up maybe a couple of feet in the air (it wouldn’t even move back and forth). When I went back inside I noticed there was a bird already eying the sprinkler and ruffling his feathers like he was imagining taking a bath. Within a half hour a juvenile robin came hopping along. He could fly, just not all that well. He and his mother came along and would drink water off of the wet grass. It is probably the same one I had seen on my patio. Then a juvenile mockingbird and its mother stopped by. The sprinkler was right next to a fig tree in the back yard and the mockingbirds seemed to hang out there. They are territorial and I think they were trying to intimidate the robins away, but the robins are little bigger and there was enough water for everyone.

Continue reading “Backyard Oasis”

While on vacation I wrote some spreadsheets that would calculate the odds for different dice variations of the board game Risk. One of the variations is to use an extra die on defense or attack which I was able to calculate, but Excel doesn’t have enough rows to run all the possible rolls if both the attacker and defender have an extra die. Plus, every spreadsheet took some work and there get to be a lot of different combinations that I didn’t want to run, though I still wound up with 27 different spreadsheets. I knew the best thing to do would be to write some kind of program that would let you input the different options and then have it calculate the odds for you. I had tried this once before, but I don’t know if I finished it. When I pulled it up, it didn’t seem to work.

Computers make this kind of thing easy. If you have 5 dice, you can do For:Next loops of 1 to 6 for each dice, then nest the loops to try out all the different combinations. If you want to do 8-sided dice, you change the loops to run from X to Y where X is 1 and Y is 8. Or any other number. Then you keep running totals and give the answers when all the iterations have run their course. But it still took a few nights of working on the project before I started making real progress.

Once I got it working, I used my spreadsheets to check the math in the program. After I got the bugs worked out, everything was agreeing perfectly except when the attackers had an additional die. I narrowed the problem down to a bad formula on the spreadsheet! So it was kind of good to have an independent check. I went back and fixed the blog posts that had the numbers wrong.

I compiled an executable that can be used in Windows, but it doesn’t do the Fighter correctly from Star Wars Risk where you can replace a 1 with a new roll (you can enter the lower limit of the dice as 2 instead of 1 and it will be kind of similar). And it might be neat to turn the program into something that would do the rolling for you when you have big masses of armies facing off. You could enter the number of attackers and defenders and let it roll a certain number of times or until one side loses and it could generate all the rolls randomly and print a tape of all the battles and results.

Anyway here is a page I made where you can download the program.

Time for an iPhone app?