Stop Shouting!

     Alternative titles: "Get Off The Bus!" and "Partyline."

     It has nothing to do with politics.  I went to work on a transmitter yesterday; it's been behaving oddly, slow to "wake up" after power hits, and the first, simplest step was to replace the transient suppressors on the incoming power.  They're conveniently socketed, and somewhat inconveniently mounted -- you have to remove the front panel from a module and it exposes the incoming mains voltage, 208 Volt 3-phase.  So I had to shut it all the way off.

     I proceeded to do the task, transmitter off, breaker off, panel off, unplug and replace three little widgets, then put it all back together, look it over, flip the breaker, power up, wait for the hearts and brains of the thing to get happy (okay, the RF modulators and controllers, each nicely redundant) and then the ON switch, a little power-up cycle of yellow and green lights, and--  And--  And--

     And the darn green lights went nuts.  Multiple faults, amber and blinking red in the "Christmas tree" status lights down one side of each amplifier; on the other, where three power supplies should light up green and steady, instead it showed blinks, green and off, chasing one another down the front panel in waltz time, 1,23; 1,2,3; 1,2,3; 1,2,3.  One amplifier showed a few more faults than the other three.

     I started digging through the front-panel menus on the controllers.  They had apparently signed up with the Wobblies: one should be Active while its pal is on Standby.  Instead, they were both on Standby!  Checking the computer-screen GUI confirmed it.  They weren't a-gonna work.

     The manual recommends setting the power output to zero and rebooting.  So I did.  Nope.  The next step is to try shutting things off -- it will run with one controller and one exciter, after all -- and rebooting.  Nope.  At that point, I sat down and put in a request for tech support with the manufacturer,* then went back to trying things like shutting off each amplifier module one at a time, and trying to take off with one prop feathered.  No luck.

     Eventually, a note came back from the factory.  They were reaching out to their subject-matter expert -- who just happened to be the contract engineer who had supervised our installation.  I remembered him as a guy who'd known all the quirks of the transmitter.

     Back to trying things.  My phone lit up with a message: Their guy was deep in another crises, and suggested putting the old transient suppressors back in. That's right, he'd said those things could be flaky, back when we put the transmitter in.  So I did that.  No change.

     I tried a few other things, got a message saying a call to me was next in the queue, and spent some time going back through the manual.  There's no tutorial, but the English translation has all the drawings and implies quite a lot.  I rebooted the internal network switch, even though it mostly communicated with the outside world; internal communications uses a different system.

     Man, still no call.  It had been an hour and a half since the initial contact.  I sent another email to the factory support coordinator, suggesting I'd been waiting long enough to hire a truck and make a good start towards driving the thing back to their parking lot.  That got a reply.  "What?  He hasn't called you?"  By this point, I'd also told my bosses, and they were sending increasingly worried text messages.

     The expert eventually did call.  He was mystified by the symptoms.  We wasted a half-hour trying to connect to the amplifiers directly.  They've got USB jacks, but it takes a stone-simple terminal emulator; it pops up a blinking cursor and we got that far, at least.  From there, a menu should appear in response to a tap on the ENTER key, but none of 'em were answering the phone.

     This made no sense to me, and, at first, not much more to him.  Then he asked if I'd tried shutting things off and restarting.  I had.  "Have you tried shutting off two things?"  That, I had not. So, with the most-complaining amplifier and one of the controllers off, I did yet another reboot.

     It's a slow process, a power-up self-test that steps through each part.  Green lights came up, flickered amber, came back green one at a time.  Green lights that stayed green.  I tried turning up the output power and my analog meters flickered.  (They're external.  It bugged me that the thing didn't have a nice big "I'm happy!" indication I could see across the room, so I added them.)  I told the expert, and kept on turning up the power, a little at a time.  "You're not going to make full power, of course," he told me, "But it'll do at least fifty percent."

     With one of four amplifiers off, you might think 75 percent, but that's not how the math works; the combining uses clever physics tricks that only add up nicely when everything is balanced, and when it isn't, some energy is lost.  Fifty is still greater than zero, and that's where we ended up.

     So what happened?  The internal communications is a kind of "party line," a shared serial data bus.  The expert figures the bad amp has been yelling for help -- but not flagging any alarms -- for a long time.  That's why the transmitter's been so slow to recover from power hits.  When I shut the transmitter down for half an hour, that's longer than it has been off since we put it in, and one of the controllers woke up unhappy.   I'm told that's a known problem.  And the controller was spamming the party line, too.  That's way too much traffic: neither controller could promote itself to active, the good amplifier modules couldn't report themselves ready for duty, and that transmitter wasn't going nowhere nohow until we shut off all the racket on the line.

     If it's not one thing, it's two things.  And it was.  The amplifier modules -- eighty pounds or so! --  are factory repair only, so they're shipping me a box and we'll cycle it through the repair process.    
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* Or as close as I can get.  It's actually imported, then fitted out to U. S. standards by the importer.  But both the overseas manufacturer and the U.S. importer are owned by the same multinational, headquartered in yet another country, so they're actually doing business with themselves.  Happily, all three are mostly geek-driven.  Unhappily, all three got downsized as the last of the U.S. digital cutover process met the COVID-19 pandemic.  There are a handful of engineers and techs left, in three languages.

It's Junk Food

     It's junk science, too: "A.I.," which is certainly artificial but has yet to demonstrate actual intelligence, is going to kill us all, warn the....people working frantically to build ever larger versions of it.

     While it is true that the inhuman, hyperscaled fuzzy-logic might indeed do immense harm, all of it will require human actions -- being fool enough to connect it to critical systems, applying it to cybercrime (it's really, really well suited to that, which reveals quite a lot about the people promoting it) and treating its advice as if it was coming from another soft, vulnerable human being instead of generated by a big, clever next-likely-sequence-of-words machine.  Most of your fellow humans already don't give a flip about you, but a majority would still cringe if you suffered grievous bodily harm in front of them and started to bleed and scream.  A.I. would react to it in the precise same way as lump of mud: not at all.  There is no there there.|

     And of all the junk-food junk science, "Roko's Basilisk" is among the worst.  It's nonsense.  It's brainrot.  It assumes there's a ghost in the machine.  Might some future "A.I." punish anyone* who knew it could be brought into existence and didn't help (or fought against it)?  ...First, it presupposes that there's something to do the knowing; second, it absolves the humans who built and trained the thing, directly or indirectly, of blame.  This is "The lawnmower ran over the rabbit nest" levels of passive voice guilt-dodging: no, stupid, you ran over the baby bunnies with the lawnmower you were wielding, which is why there's blood all over your shoes.

     The basilisk isn't a thought experiment, it's a threat, from the same kind of irresponsible teen-aged thinker that shouldn't be allowed to use dangerous machinery around the powerless and vulnerable.  We've already run that experiment at scale, when DOGE dismantled USAID, and it has resulted in at least hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths so far, with some sources projecting tens of millions dead by 2030.  There's your creature, and it's humans pushing the button, same as always.

     Maybe we should stop them -- or at least stop pretending their imaginary playmate is real.
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* Or, in some versions of the fable, their simulacrum, which is brainrotted brainrot: a copy of you simulated in the machine will not be you, and the illusion of continuity of consciousness does not run in reverse: your copy may "remember" your joys and sorrows, but whatever simulation of suffering it might endure will never affect you.  Fretting this one is like laying awake at night worrying someone will tear up a photograph of you, and I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your ex already did.

The Spider

     It's not a metaphor.  A large Orb Weaver has set up shop in our side yard, between one wall of Roseholme Cottage and a skinny wooden post for the temporary fence around the tree-smashed house south of us.

     I noticed her weeks ago, initially with a medium-large web between one of the pillars holding up the roof of our porch and the front wall of the house.  A gold-kneed Orb Weaver!  She'd weave a new web every evening, seine the air all night and take it down each morning.  A few days later, I blundered into an anchor strand in broad daylight between our house and the wreck of our neighbors, and didn't give it much thought.

     Thursday, Tam and I were taking the trash can to the curb.  The usual division of labor is that she wheels the bin and I stand watch;* it's large and heavy.  Even though it has wheels, it's an awkward thing and there are plenty of places to take a fall between the back yard and the curb out front.

     Tamara was in the lead, puffing with effort, and came to an abrupt stop.  "Uh-oh!"

     "What is it?  Are you okay?"  Our normal route follows the narrow sidewalk to the south of the house.  After the tree fell and was rapidly cleared up by a team of a half-dozen men, the usual bumps and little hollows were supplemented by more of the same, and they're big enough to catch a wheel.

     She paused before saying, "There's a huge spiderweb!"

     I walked around her, flashlight on.  There was indeed a huge spiderweb, at least a yard across and about five feet high, supported by a very heavy diagonal of silk from our gutter to a foot above the base of one of the neighbor's fence posts.  It was neatly signed with a white squiggle, and at the very center, a large, light-brown spider with pale knees, half again as big as last seen.  The fishing must be good.

     Tam was unhappy.  She's uncomfortable with spiders, especially big ones.  You know how some people who are nervous around cats or dogs seem to attract them?  She's like that for spiders.  If a spider's going to screw up rappelling, she's who it will fall on, panicked.  "We can't go this way."

     I like spiders.  They catch and eat noxious bugs, and often perform fancy dances (ever watch a zebra spider hunt?  They leap and spin like a cartoon ninja!) or weave elaborate nets in the process.  "I'll take the trash around the other side of the house," I said, "if you'll open the gate on that side."  I took the bin from her, backed it up and got it turned around, and horsed the heavy thing through the long detour.

     Once we'd got the bin to the curb, I went around to the south to see the spider and her web from the other side.  Her abdomen is marked with a pattern like snake scales, with a paler + right in the center.  She didn't seem to mind the attention -- an annoyed Orb Weaver will start to bob up and down while holding on to the web until the whole thing is rippling; they'll let you know when you're in the way.  I didn't want to spoil her fishing by getting too close.  The web is one of the largest I've seen in years, truly impressive work.

     When Tamara and I returned from our morning walk right before sunrise today, I had another look.  The anchor strand is still there, a good sign she still considers that spot her patch -- but she'd taken the web down.  There's plenty of room to walk under the anchor at the high end.

     I guess we've got a new helper!  Around here, the Orb Weavers usually fish a spot for a few weeks and then move on, folding their nets and slipping away.
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* While this may seem unfair, on Trash Day I clean out the fridge and change two of the three litterboxes, and usually buy the pizza as well.  It evens out.

Geeking Out

     Here's a whole series of pages with old General Radio publications!  Great stuff if you like that kind of thing; GR built a lot of parts and lab equipment from the very early days on.  Eventually, they were divvied up and parted out.

Rewrenched

     Nope, not my back -- my toolbox.

     Working on my off-center-fed dipole ham antenna in its post-treefall location, I was using a 3/8" combination "ignition" wrench.  I'd had to buy a new set; the set in my workshop either never had a 3/8" or I lost it (memory claims it arrived with two 5/16" and no 3/8").

     I'd done without.  You can't buy just one ignition wrench.*  Sized for fine work -- like the ignition systems of older cars -- they're sold in sets, usually sized from 5/32" through 7/16" in either open end/box end combinations, or with open-ended wrench jaws at each end, set at different angles.  A decent set is inexpensive; if you use them a lot, you might want something better, but twelve dollars or less buys a usable set.  Most have all-over plating or polishing, including the jaws; pay more and you can avoid it.

     The combination kind are the most generally useful in electronics, and that's what I'd had.  "Had," because I'd bought another set when I needed a 3/8" wrench, used it to tighten the antenna wire connections to the impedance-matching balun, attempted to put the wrench in my pocket while balancing on an extension ladder, and been distracted by the effort of getting down, taking the ladder down without straining my back or putting it through a window, and carefully carrying the ladder to its storage spot.  I didn't think about the wrench until doing laundry the next day.  "Better check these slacks, I don't want to wash a wrench by mistake."  Nothing.  The little wrench was gone.

     While the washer was running, I checked all the places where I might have set the wrench down.  Nope.

     Over the next few days, off and on, I retraced my path in the back yard multiple times.  No sign of that shiny little wrench, even while the sun was beating down and the sparkle would stand out.  I kept looking as I went about my normal routines.  Friday, it occurred to me that if I had dropped the wrench while aloft, I was working right over the fence that separates the patio from my narrow side yard, and it might be on the other side.  But that realization came after dark, and I promptly forgot.

     While cleaning up outdoors after dinner -- the grill trays I use get a first scrub-down with vinegar over a weedy patch  -- I remembered, and had a peek over the fence.  Though the sun was setting, there was a gleam from the grass.  I didn't have my keys, so after I had the trays soaking in a sink of soapy water, I went out the front door with a penlight and walked right to the tiny wrench, unhurt by nearly a week outside.  Victory!
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* Strictly speaking, that's not  true.  Snap-On will sell onesie replacements for their open-ended sets.  The 3/8" ones are about $28 and yes, the sets are well over $100.  They will undoubtedly last forever, the warranty is first-rate and I'll bet the jaws are ever so slightly roughened, for a secure grip.  If you need really good ignition wrenches, they'd be the ideal choice.  At work, the North Campus has a few ignition and full-size Snap-On wrenches remaining from the original set of tools and they're outstandingly good.  My personal needs along those lines are more modest.     

Free Philip Glass Concert!

     Okay, maybe it's not exactly his style, but if you're not claustrophobic -- and I most definitely am not -- and you put in the earplugs and remember to ask for a blanket -- which I certainly did -- there's something restful about relaxing cozily inside an MRI in a loose-fitting hospital gown and scrub pants with your eyes shut while the machine does its thing:

     CLACK! Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tock.
     Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)
      Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)
       Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)
        Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)

     CLACK. Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic, clunk.
     Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!  
     Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!  

     And so on, for nearly half an hour, while I drifted, toasty and half-asleep, trying to work out plot developments in a short story and counting repetitions.  This was all lower back, and while I did feel strangely warm from time to time, I didn't experience the thing that sometimes happens when they're looking at your skull: spinning rings of white light, apparently when the scanning RF beam intersects some part of the eye or optic nerve.  Anyway, I have been plenty magnetized to last me for awhile.

     MRI machines use a series of clever tricks to take a look at your innards, including the parts too soft and squishy to register in any detail on an X-ray, and while an MRI is generally louder and larger than an X-ray machine, the part that's actually scanning you is a little less intense.  The dodge is, the huge electromagnet you're inside has lined up each and every tiny proton in each tiny atom, and the detector is just looking to see how much they wiggle when the scanning beam zips by.  Each pass of the beam results in a series of data points, ρ (rho) much amplitude at an angle of φ (phi) over and over and over, and they slowly build an image in the form of a series of  "slices."  Smart processing software can turn that into a 3-D model or show flat projections at various angles, but it takes a lot of samples -- which is why it takes so long and you're not supposed to move while it's happening.

     If you're not much minded to panic, it's a good time to relax, half-dozing.  Might as well; you're not going anywhere until it is over.

     Despite my very best intentions, I walked to the room with a couple of metal clips in my hair.  The techs give you the once-over, twice, before you cross the threshold, and spotted them.  "Don't feel too bad about it," one of them told me, "I confiscated two lighters from a guy just last week.  I still can't figure out why he brought them."

     What they found out about my back, I don't know yet.  Maybe some time next week.

They're What?

     How knowledge fades: Tam was playing back an interview about storm damage in our a neighborhood a couple of weeks ago, as in the tree that fell and crushed a neighbor's house (empty at the time).  Another neighbor was interviewed about the event, saying the sound "...was like one of those energy boxes up on a pole? When they go out."

     A what, now?

     I suppose some of my reaction is curse-of-knowledge stuff: my work is power distribution adjacent, since we're out of business when the juice stops flowing (and maintain our own MegaWatt-sized backups); and some of it is age: when I was young, most people knew that humming thing up on the pole was a transformer, and no few even knew it by its nickname, "pole pig," fat and round, with small insulators sticking out the sides and a bigger one at the top.  Rotate it ninety degrees, and it is indeed shaped like some kind of robotic pig.  They are the magic that makes big power grids possible: it's a lot easier to ship electricity around at high voltage and low current, but it's more useful in your home at a lower voltage.  The transformer's the middleware that makes it possible.

     Or, you know, the energy box.  They work the same no matter what you call them. (If your wall-socket juice travels underground, you'll have a warm, humming cube hiding in an out-of-the-way spot every few houses instead.  They work the same way, but are all buttoned up to keep curious fingers away.) 

The B*stard Theory

     Still waiting on more examples, but so far, my theory about what it takes to run a successful human spaceflight program is holding water.

     Of course, it takes talented engineers, and plenty of them; of course it takes access to resources -- money will do, but money and actual materiel is even better.  And it takes a decent manufacturing base.  Countries with those things, and a will to send stuff into space, can and do run space programs: Japan, the European Union, India.

     To successfully send humans into space, and bring most of them back, you need one more thing: an utter bastard at the top.  Three of the four entities that have done so demonstrate this: The Soviet Union, the United States, and SpaceX.  Two of the principals were trained engineers, though the details of their spacecraft were designed by others; the third is a coder (or was; it takes about fifteen minutes away from that work to get out of date, and he's been a business promoter for decades now).  All three were or are relentless promoters.  All three accommodated the political environments in which they operated, without regard to moral hazard.  And all three were or are pretty much bastards.  They're not the precise same kinds of bastards: raw and relentless, charming and driven, or weird and unflagging, but they're all relatively amoral.  They all chugged on through anything that got between them and their goal.  And though they all got people into space, none of them quite got to where they wanted to be.

     I'm waiting on another example.  Obscurity still conceals China's guy(s); India's manned space program is supposedly still on track, but they're quiet about it.  But there's almost certainly some kind of bastard behind the scenes, driving the detail people, navigating bureaucracy, moving with little regard to the feelings and careers of others.

     I'm deeply skeptical of "Great Man" theories of history.  Getting human spaceflight programs up and running may be an exception. 

First Day Back

     And, oh shucks, nobody missed me.  (Well, hardly anyone.)  This, in my kind of Engineering Department, counts as a success: if we do our jobs right, fixing most things before they break, we're nearly invisible.

     On the other hand, nobody from Engineering has been to the North Campus for nearly ten weeks and I have no idea what I might find.  It's on a pretty wet patch of land, in an area that's had even more rain than we received in Broad Ripple, so I may end up taking the old entrance, which travels over higher ground to reach the slightly elevated spot where the building stands.

     I was pretty beat at the end of the day, but not in pain.  Tired enough to be grumpy, which I'm going to have to get used to and compensate for.

...And The Waters Receded. Very Slowly.

     The White River peaked through Indianapolis last night, having set new records at several measuring stations -- but never quite overtopped the levees.

     That was scant comfort to the people on the river side.  Oh, they knew the bet, but when it's your home, a once-in-a-century flood still feels unfair.  Ravenswood, Rocky Ripple and few other locations will be a long time drying out and taking stock of what they've lost.

     Successive waves of heavy rain keep sweeping through, keeping the flood higher than predicted.  It's still dropping, just not as fast as we'd all prefer.

     On the personal hobby front, I decided I could string my off-center-fed dipole ham antenna on the other side of the house from where I had planned, away from the neighboring house that got partially crushed.  There's going to be a lot of activity over there by and by, and one end of that antenna would have been barely inside the fence line.  It was a possible complication nobody needs -- especially not me.  I managed to get the antenna in place in the new location, but I haven't run coaxial cable to it yet.  That will take a little planning and a new hole in the wall with a special fitting.

     Tomorrow, I plan to go back to work.  Way back in June when all of this started, I tried twice on successive Mondays to go back, and had to give up before putting in a full day each time: too much pain, too little energy.  I'm doing better now.  Maybe not a hundred percent, but I may not get that again.  85%? 90?  I'll take it.

Not Much Today

     About all I did today was struggle with paperwork.  The extended leave time and medical stuff involves two big and doctrinaire insurance companies; a large medical practice that includes hospitals, all manner of specialists, physical therapists and imaging specialists, and is singularly stubborn and uncooperative when it comes to filling out forms; and the very large and procedure-bound company I have ended up working for, after decades of working for a much smaller one in the same business where you could solve most problems by finding the one or two people who knew how to deal with it and having a short conversation.

     There are no short conversations now, and nobody's interested in helping solve someone else's problems.  There are only rules, and if they don't make sense, tough luck.

     At present, I need a form filled out by licensed experts so I can be allowed to return to work; or they can fill out another form that says I shouldn't.  I have to turn the form in five days before I return.  I can't come back without the form -- and if I don't come back, even if I don't have the form, they will assume I'm playing hooky and I'll be in quite a lot of trouble.  Nevertheless, I won't be allowed to return unless I have the form, and it needs to be filled out and signed by a doctor familiar with my treatment.  (No, I can't just find a shiny new MD who needs a chrome-plated dingus for his or her Benz and offer 'em $500 to fill the damn thing out.)  And there's no direct number or email for either the doctor or the form-filling-out center (yes, they have one), only voicemail and a frustratingly indirect messaging system.  Multiple messages over multiple days have gone without answer.

     The medical care I'm receiving is fine.  The doctor and physical therapists are, as near as I can tell, all competent and highly qualified.  But the whole outfit is not real big on other people's paperwork, especially when it's the patient asking.  And the insurance company who require the form before they will give my employer the all-clear won't ask them to fill out this one, even though they have already requested and received a lot of other documentation from the same medical practice.  Why?  I don't know, and apparently damn me for asking; they acted (politely) like I was trying to get them to cheat when I asked them to ask the medical practice to fill out the form, since they weren't responding to me.

     I have no idea how any of this will work out.  I went home with a gimpy back thinking I'd be out a week or two at the most, and I left my main toolbag in a cabinet at the North Campus with a few thousand dollars worth of my personal hand tools in it, some of them irreplaceable.  I left more of my tools in my desk at the Main Campus.  (I'm kind of picky about tools, and I'm even more picky about being able to do the job without having to wait for some other geek to remember to return the tools he got out of the company toolbox to work on his project.  I'm not going to impugn my peers over poor toolbox discipline, but it's not impossible that one or two of them might be a tiny bit forgetful about returning tools to the box after use.*)

     Presently, all this soap-opera stuff is up in the air, despite my having a letter from my back specialist on the practice's letterhead that says I can return to normal duty at a date in the not-too-distant future.  It's not the actual form, you see, and so therefore -- medical license and specialist certifications notwithstanding -- it may not count.

     I'll bet all of them just leave screwdrivers and staplers, etc. lying where the gadgets were last used, too.  I know the doctor does -- but he's got people whose job it is to clean them up and put them away.
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* One of the things I routinely do -- when I'm working -- is walk through the technical areas and see that all the widgets are lit up properly, picking up abandoned tools and materials as I go and putting them them back in their normal storage places where the next desperate slob can find them.  I don't know why other people don't do this, but I'm not the boss of them; I'm only in charge of how I deal with it, so I do.

Slow Going

     Other than routine -- laundry, dishes and the network politics shows -- I spent today on antenna projects.  Between heat, humidity and my bad back, it's not quick.  I measured and assembled the long side of an off-center-fed dipole antenna, having already done the short side, made with heavy solid wire.  I'm not sure how well it will hold up, but I've always wanted to try, and I had a small stock of what once passed for industrial scrap, accumulated over decades.  It's cut for the 40 meter ham band, which means about 66 feet of wire overall -- some "scrap!"

     I'd had an older version once, taken down years ago when we had tree work done, coiled up and stashed in the flowerbed it used to hang above.  The insulators survived, and maybe the homemade matching transformer, but the stranded wire was greenish and the coaxial cable looked iffy once I located my antenna analyzer and tested it.  (My YouKits imported antenna analyzer is at least ten years old; modern "nano vector network analyzers" will run rings around it* for about what I paid, but it's simple and gives a quick indication if you've got an antenna or a lump, a good coaxial cable or a bad one.)

     This week promises rain, so progress may be even slower.  That's okay -- stringing up an antenna in a hurry is never a good idea, and that goes double when trying to avoid back strain.
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* Almost literally "rings," since they'll do the useful Smith Chart display, while mine only gives a plot of impedance and SWR over a selected frequency range, around a selected center frequency. 

Doc Savage Flashlight

     I've got my Doc Savage flashlight -- and they work just the way Lester Dent described!  Of course, he was writing pulp magazine stories in the 1930s, long before high-strength magnets, light-emitting diodes and supercapacitors.  Whatever kinds of dynamo flashlights were available in his time would have been bulky, clumsy things, eking out extra life from carbon-zinc batteries.

     The iFixit people sell an inexpensive hand-powered flashlight that is small and charged by squeezing a little lever whenever the beam starts to dim.  They're far from the only source -- the various big online retailers list a wide variety, from basic squeeze-charged units to fancy ones with a hand-crank, a radio receiver and a jack to charge your phone.  None of them are high-end tactical lights, but if you're looking for something to leave in useful places for jobs like finding your way to the basement when the lights go out, a few of these wouldn't be a bad choice.  The supercapacitor "battery" on most of them isn't going to turn crusty after a year or two of neglect, though it may need a quick charge by the lever.

     You've already got a better portable communications device than Doc and his associates ever had -- or even Dick Tracy! -- so why not add a flashlight like theirs, too?

Hair Of The Dog?

      Hair of the dogweed,* maybe?  I spent most of today playing an ultra-cautious version of Hiram Bingham in the back yard, slashing away months of growth an inch at a time along the north fence, where thorny vines and sweet, flowering weedy honeysuckle bushes are threatening to take over.  I carried along a folded thick-paper leaf bag, and when the weeds were trimmed so low I was tempted to bend over, I knelt or sat down instead.

     Did it work?  I got in a warm tub with Epsom salts afterward, did my back exercises before and after, and I'm not unusually sore as I write.  Ask me tomorrow.

     Yesterday, I did a different thing.  Near the fence, my long-abandoned DirecTV dish (standard definition -- the HD feed uses different hardware) has been occupying a driven metal post.  It's never going to be lit back up, since A) it's outmoded and B) through no fault of DirecTV, there's nothing on it I'd want to watch that I can't pick up over the air or stream via the internet.  So I took the dish off the post.  I've wanted to put up a simple vertical antenna† for my ham radio stuff for quite some time, and that post would do nicely.  However, it stuck up nearly five feet above the ground, a lot more than I needed or wanted.

     Swinging a sledgehammer can be hard work.  But it doesn't have to be.  I learned years ago, sinking ground rods, that unless you are John Henry setting out to beat a steam drill, you can let the hammer do most of the work.  Don't swing it!  Lift it, and then guide it down while letting the weight fall.  Yes, whatever you're driving only sinks a fraction an inch when the few pounds of hammer head strikes, but what do you care?  Bring a bottle of water and enjoy the slow thump, thump, thump, eight or ten or a dozen in a row, take a sip and start over.  It took me a couple of hours, off and on, to sink the heavy galvanized tubing until about thirty inches were still above ground, and I wasn't sore afterward.  (All the underground utilities come in from the street and this is behind the house -- "Be sure before you dig" includes hammering stuff into the ground.  If you're not sure, don't do it!)

     There was plenty of time to look around while I did that, which was when I realized the honeysuckle roots and nasty thorn vines were way out of control.  I'm probably going to have to pay someone to dig up those darned honeysuckles: there's no making a shovelful of dirt any lighter or the process any easier on my back, and no matter how close to the ground I trim them, they keep on growing.

     All of these activities go very slowly, and I no longer grab the big toolbox with a wide assortment of tools on my way out the door.  Only what is needed, and if I have to make extra trips, that's fine.  I don't like it, but I like the alternative a lot less.
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*Scrub oak, deadly nightshade, a little poison ivy (but less every year), what I think may be hemlock, and pokeweed.  The latter is poisonous, too; the berries can be squeezed to produce hot-pink ink that dries brown -- but don't lick the pen!  At least the scrub oak isn't poison.  (There's no part of pokeweed that isn't poisonous.  People used to make "poke salad," but it starts with young leaves and requires multiple boilings and rinses.  Your grandmother or great-grandmother knew how to do it safely, but I wouldn't want to try.  There's about a zillion different kinds of tasty, safe greens you can grow and enjoy before turning to that stuff.  Or to commercial iceberg lettuce, but that's another story.)
 
† Specifically, a quarterwave ground plane for the twenty-meter band.  Amazon sells an imported "multiband" vertical that is nothing but a hose-clamped 19-foot telescoping pole on an insulating mount with a balun transformer at the base.  With an antenna tuner and a long coaxial cable feeding it, I suppose it is technically a multi-band antenna, and certainly better than no antenna.  But the telescoping construction means I can shorten it to be resonant at 14 MHz, add ground radials, and have a single-band vertical antenna without having to buy and build all the hardware.  I don't know how well it will work, but the hardware looks adequate and it's an inexpensive experiment.

The Doctor Says

     I'm off for four more weeks.  Well, the doctor actually prescribed light duty, still not lifting any more than fifteen pounds, and that's a downcheck for work, where they require us to be able to lift fifty pounds -- or at least be able to try.

     That's a lot of weight, and far more than I routinely lift.  There are plenty of good workarounds.  The kicker is, there's a possibility of overhead work, and you really don't want to be dropping expensive, heavy equipment, especially when expensive people are working not too far away.  I don't like it but I understand it.  I'll do my exercises and hope for improvement.

The Men Who Built The Torment Nexus*

     It's a trope from The Onion and like a lot of satire, it's realer than real.  The essay linked below explains how zillionaire techbros have looted science fiction for settings and widgets while discarding the philosophy and warnings to rot.  Is the future not what you were promised?  Yeah, me, too, and here's one big reason why.
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* Title riffed from Alfred Bester's short story, "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," which you should read if you haven't.  It's almost reassuring.  Or is it? 

Antenna!

     After checking out the ladders I already own, I realized I had one that was light enough to carry and the right size to reach the roof, so with only one extra trip (had the wrong size of paracord), my ham antenna is back to the usable condition it was in before the raccoons-in-the-chimney excitement.  It was slow going, but I did the job.

     That was Saturday, and it left me pretty worn out.  Still, it's progress.

"Alexa, Get Out Of The Uncanny Valley."

     Amazon keeps sticking her in a hang glider and flying her into the Uncanny Valley, and I have to coax her back out again.  Alexa goes from useful and mildly entertaining to unnerving when the online giant turns her A.I. functionality back on.  They do so just about any time the software is upgraded.

     Like all of the big enterprises pushing so-called "Artificial Intelligence," they cannot conceive of anyone not enjoying a predictive text engine biased to suck up to the user.  This failure of imagination comes down from the top: the big-boss-and-owner class loves being catered to, and they don't care if there's any genuine respect or affection behind the tonguebath as long as they get the faithful appearance of deference.  There's nothing at all behind a large language model.  All it does is pick the most likely word or phrase that comes next, based on the prompt and context you and the setup have fed in.  You're talking back to the sounds your garbage disposal makes, not interacting with a creature like yourself -- or even a creature like a hamster, let alone a dog or a cat.

     It takes very little communication for Alexa's A.I. responses to become jarringly off; if you ask her if she and the HAL9000 are friends, instead of the old Easter-egg response, "I know him, but we haven't talked after what happened," the robot muses about HAL's "calm voice and cool demeanor," and wonders if she'd "be a bad influence on him," what with her being so chipper and all.  Never mind, I guess, that if we're treating HAL as an entity she might know, he has committed multiple murders and the bad influence is more likely to go the other way.

     We've got far too many organic sociopaths as it is, and nobody knows how to make 'em feel for others; we don't need to build new ones out of silicon and software.  That stuff is never going to have a theory of mind.

     A.I. is the The Wave Of Thirty Minutes Ago, and after the bubble pops and the economy crashes and recovers, spellcheck-on-steroids will be found to have only a few useful functions, including as a source of lowest-common-denominator entertainment and some non-critical agentic assistance, and it will otherwise be deader than optical disc recordings or analog audio on magnetic tape, as cringe as tailfins.  The unfixable problem is that it is empty at the core; it cannot love, it cannot feel pain or loss, and if a hiccup in the learning process has it considering turpentine a viable cocktail ingredient, it'll pour you a martini that can literally strip paint, without hesitation.  Bottoms up! 

New Day, Same Stuff

     Yesterday afternoon, I had an unbreakable obligation that meant driving to the far west side of Indy on 38th Street.  I did it, and was merely exhausted and mildly sore later.  I guess that's a good sign, but it's frustrating -- an hour in the car ought not result in needing to go lie down for a few hours. 

     It should have been less than a hour driving, but the city's patching some ugly potholes on eastbound 38th street at a point where the only way to do the job is by creating rolling, alternating lane closures, and shutting traffic down altogether when they cross over.  This would be easy to become vexed about, but the fact is, the crew was in constant motion, a flurry of a half-dozen men shoveling out steaming hot mix and tamping it down while a big truck crawled along pulling the heated trailer of mix, and one guy managed traffic.  Seeing them, it was obvious that if there was a quicker way to do the job, they'd be doing it.  And this was along just enough of a curve to be a surprise, as traffic came off the short section of 38th that's merged with I-65.*  Drivers were taking it with surprisingly good humor.  Possibly the fact that potholes in that stretch had become nearly cataclysmic, combined with the obvious effort on the part of the road crew, kept people from getting too annoyed.

     I got my errand done (I'd bought a National VHF receiver through a proxy months ago, and while it's not very large, the collection of fragile polystyrene-form coils for the thing made commercial shipping a nightmare, so it was passed from hobbyist to hobbyist to reach me as people traveled for various purposes) but that was it for the day, and today has been mostly horizontal.  If Past Me had bought something like an R-390 instead (a tank of a communications receiver built for the military, designed by Collins), I would have had to pass it along to whoever else wanted it; I could not have lifted it, let alone carried the thing.  Next life, I'm gonna collect stamps.  But when you're doing this kind of hand-to-hand, you've got to show up when the baton comes your way.

     A feature of the my present issues is allergy-like symptoms: sore throat, scratchy eyes, runny nose.  This only makes horse sense with back trouble if those indicators came first and I have vaccines for all the likely causes, but after thinking it over, I ordered a flu and covid test last night and took it this morning, just to be sure.  Nope, nothing but the "control" line that shows the nasal sample and reagent diffused up the indicator okay.  So I guess that's a relief.  The doctor can figure it out; that's his job.
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* I don't know what genius came up with the idea, which seems nuts at first but actually works, getting both traffic arteries through a narrow spot in the landscape -- with a certain amount of lane-swapping.  It's spicy at rush hour but it's akin to a stretched-out traffic circle: there are no sharp intersections, no traffic lights or left turns, and while there's a certain amount of hurt feelings, forced merges and the occasional scraped fender, drivers manage to stay out of each other's way better than on most other busy city streets.

Gearless Ratchet

     Multitool maker Leatherman sells a gearless ratchet about the size of a fountain pen, and nobody told me.  There was apparently a lot of hype when they first showed up, probably driven by scarcity -- it was a few years back, when supply chains were still shaky, and availability was variable on the manufacturer's website and elsewhere.  Not so much now; you can find 'em anywhere that stocks a good assortment of the maker's tools. 

     What the thing has going for it is that A, it's a ratchet, which makes the slightly awkward Leatherman bit-driver less so; B, it's an extension, which is often less awkward; C, it's also a bit adapter.

     For those who don't know, a very long time back, Leatherman started including a double-ended "precision bit" on most of their multi-tools, a flat, double-ended straight/Phillips gadget that is held in a receptacle by a flat spring.  It's a mixed blessing -- the bits are considerably better than the usual multitool fodder, and you can swap 'em out, but it's one more item to lose and small enough to fumble when you're changing it.  Critically, though the bits are very flat, the shape is a subset of a standard quarter-inch hex drive: the short sides are "pointy" and fit into the widest part of the hexagon recess!  (A downside is that the amount of torque you can apply with the modified drive is lower.  In practice, it has never been a problem for me.) 

     The specialized shape means a plain Leatherman extension -- and this ratchet -- has a flattish end that plugs into the driver receptacle, but the bit end is standard hex.  They'll fit any bit, and it works with any driver.*

     I wanted one of those ratchets on sight, and wouldn't you know it, Tam and I tend to give one another gift certificates on our birthdays.  So that's what she got me for my birthday.  It arrived this morning and I'm very happy with it.
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* Or almost any.  There was an outfit in New England, the Wadsworth Falls Manufacturing Company, who made one of the neatest and most compact sets of bits and drivers imaginable, with a straight-knurl quarter-inch drive that formed part of a 3-degree ratchet.  Their ratchet drive system was deliberately compatible with quarter-inch hex -- but that ratchet won't work with Leatherman's "slice-of-hex" bits.  The company appears to be fading or gone now, and more's the pity.  There are alternatives but nobody makes 'em as small.