July 4, 2011

It is 5:30am, Independence Day and time for my annual reflection on the past year. It was hot yesterday and not a cloud in the sky. Today day is dawning and it promises to be another hot one. The house remains comfortable for all but the late afternoon and early evening hours, and you can avoid even the brief periods of discomfort if you’re willing to put up with a slight stuffiness and you keep the house closed after 11:00am and open the windows to the garden as soon as the sun is past its zenith. For now, however, the heat is a novelty and welcome as the coming of summer.

Jo believes that spring and summer last year were particularly cool. I tried to get some historical data from NOAA and various weather web sites but I couldn’t get what I wanted in a useful format. Then I gave Wolfram Alpha a try, and, with a little prodding, it came up with a nice graph covering an appropriate range — the last five years — and using a reasonable metric — weekly averages:

We just took a little break to walk down to “downtown” Lost Altos Hills for the Annual 4th of July Parade. Probably doesn’t deserve to be capitalized, but this year the parade was a little bigger than last year. There was an antique Ford hook-and-ladder fire truck lovingly restored, a black police car right out of “Heat of the Night” — the cop was dressed in the same style and for a moment reminded me of Rod Steiger, and then the usual motley assortment of kids, dogs, scooters — in short, there were hardly any people viewing the parade along the side of the road since almost everyone was in the parade, walking along Fremont waving flags, arrayed in bunting and patriotic paraphernalia on their way down to Gardner Bullis School where watermelon was served for anyone who showed up. I wish I had my cell phone on me so I could have snapped some pictures. Fortunately, every picture worth taking has already been taken and Google has organized them so we can conveniently call up any one of them on demand, and so it was a matter of a minute to find a photo of “the” fire truck featured in the parade:

Well, usually my “Independence Day Report” is a serious reflection on the past year and typically it is part of my private journal, but this year I don’t feel much like being serious and so I think I’ll put it off and post this note and the July 3rd entry to my Brown web site to share with friends and family. In keeping with my usual obsessive style, I’ll end with a comparison of police cars. The one on the left was used in “The Heat of the Night” and presumably looks like the cop cars used in Mississippi in thd 1960s, while the one on the right is 1950s California cop car which looks like the one in Los Altos Hills 4th of July parade.

July 3, 2011

The other day Greg Corrado and I drove down to Sunnyvale to deliver a couple of servers to Colfax International — the company that built them — so they could upgrade the power supplies and memory, and install new Nvidia Fermi GPU boards in one server. We took my Volvo and I said something about how I liked driving a car built by a company that made Swedish fighter planes, since — at least the older Volvos — tend to be over engineered. After some further reminiscing about vehicles, I told Greg the story of almost destroying my beloved 3/4-ton pickup in a collision with a dairy milk tanker on a mountain road near Bedford, Virginia.

The pickup was a 60s-vintage Dodge Power Wagon — a precursor of the HMMWV and used during the Vietnam war to pull downed helicopters and their pilots out the swamps of Southeast Asia. I bought my Power Wagon from just such a pilot, Al Anderson, who used it to haul heavy equipment for his excavating company in Bumpass, Virginia, where Jo and I lived for six years after getting married. Al had replaced the front and rear bumpers with heavy-duty steel pipes which were welded to the frame so he could easily wrap a logging chain around one of the pipes and pull a tractor or loader out of the mud. I couldn’t find a picture that really does it justice but you can find YouTube videos extolling the virtues of the older Power Wagons, and this image shows the basic vehicle sans Al’s massive bumpers and his modified suspension which anticipated the “monster” truck look:

The tanker truck was barreling around the bend of a narrow country road when we met; my side view mirror caught the front end of his vehicle and a split second later my rear bumper caught his front axle, ripping it from the frame. The truck looked approximately like this before the wreck:

After the collision, the truck was incapacitated and the driver had to call for a wrecker and another tanker to offload the tons of milk he’d already picked up at local dairies. I came off unscathed except for some minor cuts from the flying mirror glass and the pickup frame was a little warped, but it was warped long before the collision from years of abuse.

The story has an additional twist; I was rushing back from Lynchburg where I had rented a gas-powered concrete finishing trowel, and Jo was waiting back at Squirrel Mountain with sixteen cubic yards of concrete on the way from Bedford Ready Mix Concrete Company. The rest of the story is too long to relate, but the short summary is that I was delayed dealing with the state trouper, Jo had to start the pour without me since the concrete was setting up, and the trowel which was loose the bed of the pickup was damaged in the collision, requiring we perform some rough-and-ready blacksmithing to get it back in shape so we could finish the large slab, which would have been impossible on that hot summer day without a gas-powered trowel:

The building site I was hurrying back to in order to pour and finish the basement slob was a piece of Squirrel Mountain which we had purchased to build a house on “speculation” as it were. You can check out Squirrel Mountain near the Peaks of Otter and the Blue Ridge Parkway on Google Maps here. If you click on the “satellite” icon and zoom in you’ll see the house we built by the lake near the base of the mountain. I grabbed two representative screen shots from Google Maps here:

The main house is an octagon with five levels; then there is a large single-level wing that housed a machine shop, and a smaller two-level wing with a greenhouse / solarium on the upper level and special wood storage level — the house was super-insulated and heated by wood and solar — that made it convenient and heat-conserving to add wood to the storage area from outside and fetch wood for the stove from inside. The land around the house and extending up to the summit is — I’m sad to see — cleared of trees, but it does make it easy to identify the boundaries of the land we used to own — basically the obviously denuded pie-shaped piece of the mountain plus the summit.

Boy that took almost an hour to write up! I told Greg that in my dotage I wanted to write up all the stories from our “other careers” before we went back to school at twenty-eight and started down the academic track. Now I’m not so sure. I think I’d have to be “dotty” indeed to put so much work into relating a bunch of stories that are probably only interesting to Jo and myself — and maybe just to me.

Today I started reading “I to Myself” an annotated selection from the journal of Henry Thoreau. Jo found it in the Los Altos library and thought I might find it interesting given my previous fascination with the autobiographies and diaries of historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Pepys. I’ve never found an equal to “Walden” among his other writings — “Walking” being second in my ranking — but I enjoy skimming through the over five hundred pages of this volume. Thoreau’s journal entries got me thinking about the journals that I’ve kept for the last twenty years.

I grepped through my Brown web pages and found an entry in one such journal that I started right after stepping down as department chair. The journal was — somewhat ostentatiously — titled “Diary of a Computer Scientist”, the working title for the book that was eventually published as “Talking With Computers.” I briefly made an early, password-protected version of the journal available online — user: "guest", password: "welcome". This included another story from Squirrel Mountain about “hacks” used in erecting the super structure of the octagon; this story never made it into to “Talking With Computers” but you can read it here if you’re curious. The Power Wagon figures prominently in the “hack” and there are some interesting schematics that illustrate the engineering, and which wouldn’t have been made had I not had some expectation of using them as diagrams in the book I was thinking about.