The Unnaming of Memory

Recently I’ve been frustrated by a realization I’ve had. From my entire college career — spanning four years of my young adult life — I have only scattered, fragmentary memories. People, places, events.

People… but strangely, few names.

Had I been born slightly later, I could reminisce over photos on my social media accounts, laugh as old status updates pop into my “Memories” on Facebook — “so-and-so posted this on your feed five years ago”. Scroll through photos on Instagram… with each face neatly tagged with a name.

But my time at college predated that. I graduated the year MySpace was started — and nothing is left of my tacky customized MySpace profile but a memory of Tom’s goofy smile.

Reading the Bible

About a week and a half ago I finished doing something I’ve said I should do all my life.

I finished reading the Bible.

Old and New Testament, all 66 books and 800,000+ words, from “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth” to “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.”

Of course, this obviously requires a few qualifiers. I grew up primarily in a Methodist church, so I’m speaking of the Christian Bible. To be more specific, the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). The NRSV is the revision that I grew up reading, even though it, like every translation of the Bible, has its proponents and detractors. I did not include the deuterocanonical / apocryphal books.

(And even though I said I read it all, I’m pretty sure my eyes glazed over quite a few begats in the genealogies…)

New Backpack

My trusty old Wolf Creek backpack has been through a lot. I got it sometime in middle school. It was my daily carry throughout high school and college. It’s gotten me through camping trips, hikes, and every business trip I’ve ever been through.

That’s something like 25 years of dedicated service, and though I’m pleased with how it’s held up, it’s time to retire this old guy.

My old Wolf Creek backpack. It’s so old I don’t remember exactly when I got it, or whether this style had a name.

So come check out my new backpack.

9/11

Today marks 20 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It was a pivotal event in history: like the JFK assassination or the Apollo 11 moon landing, everyone who lived through it seems to remember where they were when it happened.

I know I remember. On 09/11/2001, I was a sophomore at a college in North Carolina, 500 miles away from the Twin Towers.

This past week, I’ve heard plenty of people telling the stories of where they were and what they did that day.

This is mine.

Where in the World?

Back in November my wife mailed a birthday card to a friend in Canada. It disappeared for five months, before showing up in our mailbox yesterday, stamped “Return to Sender” for insufficient postage.

But half the stamp is in English, and the other half… well… that’s certainly not Canadian French. It’s not even the Latin alphabet. It also doesn’t look Greek or Cyrillic. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego Did This Letter Go?

Parlez-vous français? If this is Canadian French, it’s changed a lot since my high school days.

VB6 to VB.NET – The Most Useless Change

How long can a coder hold a grudge? Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to, oh, about twenty years ago.

The year was 2001, and Microsoft was cooking up something called the .NET Framework. I was in college, but had been developing personal projects for myself and others for years, mostly using Visual Basic. So naturally I followed any news on the future of Visual Basic with great interest.

Rumors abounded on the fora and newsgroups of those olden days.

(“What’s a newsgroup?” I hear some younger coders asking. But that is another story for another day.)

Some rumors were exciting.

VB.NET would support inheritance, the long missing piece of the Object-Oriented PIE pie. Without this, VB was often described as “object based, not object oriented”.

The VB compiler would also be released as a freely downloadable command-line tool. No need to overcome the then-significant cost barrier of purchasing Visual Studio!

Other rumors were disappointing.

VB.NET would not get its long-sought standalone EXE compilation. On the contrary, it would be dependent on a 19-megabyte .NET runtime download, just to run “Hello, world!” (Cue 56.6k modem noise.)

And the Visual Basic language was changing dramatically. In fact, VB.NET broke backward-compatibility with VB6. The changes were so significant that many complained the new language wasn’t even Basic anymore.

One critic coined the pejorative name Visual Fred to emphasize how different the language had become — a name that can still be found today in both the Jargon File and the Urban Dictionary.

But this is a story of a single change to the language. A change that is — in my opinion — the most useless change.

Gov++: Git for Government

A friend of mine reposted this image on his social media. A summary: “What technology are you shocked has not advanced yet?” “The legal code… Why not put the laws into a git repository…?”

News flash: computer programmers think world would be better if everyone did things the way computer programmers did.

Something I’ve noticed about folks in STEM fields is their unwavering belief that every human endeavor would be improved by appling the principles used in their own field of expertise.

I can’t say I’m an exception: as a software developer, I too often think that government business would run more smoothly with the application of technologies such as Git, Jira, and test-driven development.

Rather than entertain the thought that I might be wrong, I’d instead like to think about what git-based legislation might look like.

Christmas in BASIC

Long ago, when I was a child too young even to type, Christmas meant presents under the tree, snickerdoodles baking in the oven… and my Dad programming his Commodore 64 to play a Christmas carol.

The SID chip on the C64 supported three voices that could generate triangle, sawtooth, rectangle, or noise waveforms. Ever the audio perfectionist, my dad would fiddle endlessly in Commodore BASIC to generate the perfect bell, guitar, or drum sounds.

Not many years later, I would sit at our IBM-compatible, in the blue glow of the QBasic editor, trying to code the perfect Christmas scene, complete with twinkling lights on a tree and snow blowing outside a window.

This was a tradition for years, but as DOS faded away, so did our Christmas coding traditions.

Now that it’s Christmas Eve, I thought I’d take a brief nostalgic look back.

Will Carrots Grow in a Flower Box Planter?

The cheapest plastic planter boxes available from my local home and garden store, circa 2015. Obviously I never bothered weeding.

Will carrots, a taproot vegetable, grow well in a flower box planter? That’s the question I asked myself back in April, when our planting season started.

Tonight is our first potential frost of the season, so after months of waiting, it’s time to find the answer.

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My process was as follows.

First, I located two unused planter boxes in my shed. The boxes measure six inches deep if I’m being generous.

Next, I filled the planter boxes with the finest leftover potting soil, also found in my shed.

After then lovingly scattering a handful of old carrot seeds to the wind over the loose soil, I gave the whole setup a good watering, then settled in for six months of salutary neglect.

Today I carefully dug out all the carrots in one box. The other box I gave to the kids, whose retrieval strategy was more “give it a good yank.”

Are Smartphone Cameras Good for Astrophotography?

The Moon and Mars, around 2020-10-03T02:00Z

As Betteridge’s Law of Headlines suggests, the answer is no. But this was excuse enough for me to lug my old telescope into the yard for a gander at the Moon and Mars.

The Moon appears nearly full — just one day past the Harvest Moon.

Mars is just a few days from its closest approach to Earth, and about a week and a half away from opposition (so Space.com tells me), so it’s looking pretty bright itself.

During my viewing, a few hours before optimum for the East Coast, Mars appeared to be about three lunar diameters from the Moon, which would be somewhere around a degree and a half. That’s wider than the field of my widest eyepiece, hence the hop from one to the other in the video.

The telescope is a Celestron 4.5″ Newtonian that I’ve had since I was a kid. It’s been gathering dust for a very long time, and is a tad out of collimation. Video was shot by hand-holding my Moto G to a 25mm 1.25″ plössl eyepiece.

And no, I didn’t expect much, other than to enjoy a cool evening and view two of my favorite objects. Yes, I went down to a 5mm eyepiece to check out the detail along the lunar limb.

Mars showed its distinct color, but I never got sharp enough focus to see any detail. The best view was with my naked eyeball, past the limbs of the apple tree in my front yard, watching the Moon and Mars rise together.

Someday I hope to visit them both.