Quote of the Day

Retrofitting is a pain and takes 4 times as long to do anything.
What would it be like to build something new? - Iowa Andy

All three of my younger brothers are involved in remodeling old houses. They all have more energy than I do. Well, they are younger. I will do small repairs: plumbing, wiring, cars, etc., but I hire out anything bigger. I think the last big project I did was painting the inside of our garage in Beaverton. It had already been drywalled, it just needed a coat of paint. I mean how tough can it be? It took me three years to get it done.

Cadillac Dream

I dreamt I was trying to maneuver a really long Cadillac. The situation was kind of like a parking lot, but the lanes were painted like a game board (like Life or Monopoly or something). There was a U-Turn on a part of the board that had been folded up so it was almost vertical. I was trying to keep the speed up so the car would not fall off the board, but slow enough that I could negotiate the turn, AND keep the car within bounds. I almost made it through cleanly, but the left front tire drifted over the line just as we were completing the corner and crushed some painted-on flowers.

I must have had to drive the whole circuit two or three times, because I went through that same corner two or three times. Then I was turning right into the exit lane, which was as long as one side of the board. At the end of the lane the path bore to the left, off the board and between two sets of black posts (like you see in parking lots to keep people from driving into the stores). So I make a right turn at the corner of the board and into the entrance to the exit lane. The car starts around this corner and proceeds down the exit lane, but the car is longer than the exit lane!

While the back end of the car is still negotiating the right turn, the nose needs to start turning left to negotiate the path between the posts. So do I keep turning right, or start turning left? The answer is start turning left, because, just like in a cartoon, the body of the car is behaving just like a snake and bending around the corners.

Quote of the Day

". . . any system which does not give ample opportunity for talent to displace unearned rank will, in the end, come to grief."

Kevil Mahonney, lawyer to the rich & powerful, at dinner with the stars of our story, Against The Odds by Elizabeth Moon, page 317.

Using Hexadecimal Numbers in Google Spreadsheets

Google Doc's does spreadsheets. I was mucking around with one today, trying to sort out the SFR's (Special Function Registers) in a PIC32 microcontroller. Some of these registers have contiguous addresses, but in some places there are gaps. Some are big gaps, some are small gaps. I wanted to find out just how big these gaps are.

I had the addresses in hexadecimal using 'C' language notation in one column. Turns out Google Spreadsheet doesn't understand that notation, matter of fact it doesn't really understand hexadecimal at all. To do anything with a hex number, you have to convert it to decimal. Further, you best not be using eight digits. That's more than Spreadsheet can handle. So we use:

• mid(cell address, start position, number of characters) to extract a portion of the number(for example 0xbf80f440). In this case the strings are all ten characters long (counting the leading 0x), the first three digits are all the same, so we only need the last five. So our function call looks like this: mid(cell, 6, 5)
• hex2dec(number) to covert the hex number to a decimal number,
• subtraction to calculate the difference between the two numbers, and lastly
• dec2hex(number) to convert the number back to hexadecimal format.

Put it all together and the contents of a sample cell looks like this:

=dec2hex(hex2dec(mid(B166,6,5))-hex2dec(mid(B164,6,5)))

Operator

Fran was telling me the that her Mom really liked Jim Croce, and boy, that sure popped open a memory archive I didn't even know existed. I think this is one of his better songs. He had some that were nice and catchy the first time you heard them, but they got old pretty quick. They sure stuck in my memory though. Songs like Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown and Don't Mess Around With Jim. Time In A Bottle is another one that I thought was pretty good.

Jim Croce died in a plane crash in 1973 (1973! gee willikers pops, were you really alive back then?). Wikipedia had this to say about that:

Croce had just completed a concert in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and was flying to Sherman, Texas for a concert at Austin College. The pilot and all passengers (...) were killed instantly at 10:45 PM EDT on September 20, 1973, less than an hour after the end of the concert. Upon takeoff, the Beechcraft E18 plane did not gain enough altitude to clear a pecan tree at the end of the runway, which investigators said was the only tree for hundreds of yards. The official report from the NTSB^[6] hints that the charter pilot, Robert Newton Elliott, who had severe coronary artery disease and had run a portion of the three miles to the airport from a motel, may have suffered a heart attack. A later investigation placed sole blame for the accident on pilot error.

So have we lost more pop music stars through airplane crashes? Or drug overdoses?

Update September 2015 replaced missing video.
Update July 2018 replaced missing video.

Blunt Instrument

Steve Duin's column in the paper this morning was talking about the level of respect and fear between the police and the populace. These two lines got me going:

The average police officer and the average citizen are still on the same side.
Most of us believe that, I trust. It's why we approach police when we need help.

Once upon a time I heard someone say that "the law is a blunt instrument". Because of that you only go to police as a matter of last resort. Any encounter with them is as likely to be detrimental as helpful. My experience with the police has never been positive, or if there ever was a positive experience it is more than outweighed by the negative. My solution is to avoid them as much as possible. Keep a low profile, don't do anything that will make you stand out. (This blog would be an exception, if anyone ever read it.) So does that mean I am afraid? Or is it just that I have been cowed enough to keep me from making serious trouble? Or maybe it just means I am all-growed up.

The Mask Of Dimitrios

The Mask Of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler
Excellent story. Alan Furst mentions it in his book The World At Night, and when I look it up, I found a comment that Ian Fleming has James Bond reading it on a flight to Moscow. Well, shoot, guess I better get me a copy.
Dimitrios is a one man model for SPECTRE. He gets his start with robbery and murder, but soon moves on to wholesale drug dealing, espionage and extortion. The book follows a successful English writer as he investigates this criminal's career. Along the way he (and the reader) gets an education in just how espionage is conducted, and how the world of drug smuggling operates. One of the key elements is a private bank that :

• finances operations in the Balkans that are processing heroin for distribution in the West.
• engages in assassination (another of Dimitrios' occupations) when the policies of certain countries threaten their profits.

I just love me a good conspiracy theory. Fits right in with why I like Godfather Part III so much.
Notes about stuff that was new to me or just worth noting:

Places

• Smyrna. Greek city on the West coast of Turkey. Scene of massacre and huge fire in 1922.
• Strait of Otranto. Between Italy and Greece, it is the entrance to the Adiratic from the Mediterranean. My friend Jack knew that Brindisi, near the heel of Italy, is on the Italian side of this strait.
• Corfu. A Greek Island on the Eastern side of the Strait of Otranto. (p. 140)
• Annamite - a mountain range of eastern Indochina. Also a person from that region. (p. 223)

People p. 124

• Proudhon
• Montesquieu
• Rosa Luxemburg

Books & Authors, p. 177 & p. 229

• Pearls of Everyday Wisdom (not found)
• Plato's Symposium, uncut
• Poems Erotiques, cut (!?!)
• Aesop's Fables
• Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphrey Ward,
• Dr. Frank Crane
• Lame and Lovely
• Just Human

Turns out Just Human and Lame and Lovely were both written by Dr. Frank Crane. Wikiquotes has this to say about him: "Only scarce remnants of his works on positive thinking and a populist political philosophy have survived for reflection by modern readers." Which tells us quite a bit about the character whose books these are.

Words

• Unknown
• Fiune ???? (p. 140 )
• English
• catarrh - sinusitis - pronounced cut-ar
• "an old hair carpet" probably made of goat hair. Goat hairs are longer than sheep's wool (!?!). (p. 236 )
• German
• Weltschmerz - world-weariness (p. 178)
• French
• maquereaux - mackerel, slang for pimp (p. 180)
• stupefiants - drugs
• en grande tenue - in full dress (p. 206)
• affiche - displays (p. 235), or:
• public notice
• bill
• poster
• placard

Quotes

• "Ach! warum, ihr Gotter, ist unendlich, alles, alles, endlich unser Gluck nur?" - Goethe (p. 151)
Translation: Ah! why their God is infinite, everything, everything, at last, our only happiness?
Google provided most of the translation, but failed with Gluck. Stu supplied happiness. All I could find using Google was a Latvian theologian from the 16th Century. Now I notice that Wikipedia translates gluck as luck. I am listing this quote only because I spent the time translating it. It's not here because I think it's worth quoting in and of itself.
• "Are the desires for money and power inhuman? With money and power a vain man can do so much to give himself pleasure. His vanity was one of the first things that I noticed about Dimitrios. It was that quiet, profound vanity that makes the man who has it so much more dangerous than ordinary people with their peacock antics. Come now Mr.Latimer, be reasonable! The difference between Dimitrios and the more respectable type of successful business man is only a difference of method - legal method or illegal method. Both are in their respective ways equally ruthless." (p. 183) I encountered another passage worth quoting about vanity in Ashenden.

As I can see from the uneven spacing between bullet points, Google Docs and Blogger do not want to cooperate with each other. Bah.

Update January 2012. Corrected a typo. Tried to correct the spacing by editing the html. Failed. Bah, again.