We drove out of the rain at the California State line. We stayed a couple nights in Redding and a couple of nights in Clearlake. Today, Thursday, we arrived in Gilroy California. It was in the 80’s today and nary a cloud in sight.

Number 2 Grandson, Patrick, when he heard we were headed this way asked if he could have our old stereo. We bought this back in the 80’s so it is almost new and state of the art…almost. The speakers are the most impressive. They stand four feet high and have twelve pound magnets. The tuner/amplifier is state of the art. Inputs for everything you can imagine: three video channels, tape deck, cd player, phonograph and even one auxiliary channel for your 8 track. Well at least that one will handle the i-pad. The s-VHS tape deck is state of the art. It will handle stereo high fidelity audio and overdubbing. Five channel sound…never heard of it! Blue Ray? What is that? Hey it had a remote, but we can’t find it.

In the end it formed the perfect segue to another of my Family Legends stories: Back in the dark ages, about 1961 to be specific, I was attending Washington State University. I moved into a cooperative dormitory called Pine Manor. We had 100 members and we lived in a wooden building of two stories decorated in knotty pine. Students paired up, two to a room, two rooms adjoining a single sleeping room with two bunk beds. We hired our own cook and a Dorm Mother. We bussed our own tables, swept the halls and did the light maintenance tasks. We served dinner every evening as a sit down affair. One member was assigned to escort the Dorm Mother to the head table and proper manners were compulsory. We elected a President, Vice President, Sergeant at Arms and Treasurer. Yes, it sounds a lot like a Fraternity but without the overhead; that is no rush week, no plebes, no test files and no Greek letters.

About mid semester we held an election and a new slate of officers took over the positions. One of the first tasks they took up was re-writing the dorm rules. One of the principal rules was the quiet hours. They took the following form:

Hours of quiet shall be as follows:

• 12:01 am to 7:00 am

• 9:00 am to 12:00 noon

• 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm

• 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm

• 10:30 pm to 12:00 midnight

Now don’t get ahead of me! Yes, as you can plainly see there is exactly one minute in the 24 hour day that is unaccounted for. That is the famous noisy minute at exactly midnight to 12:01 am.

Nothing makes the blood quicken in a group of bored engineers-in-training faster than to find a defect to exploit. One of the students came up with a five hundred amp stereo audio amplifier. You can bet it was one of those analog type with the big glowing tubes. No one had speakers to absorb 500 amps but between and among us we strung together all the speakers we had and lined them up in the main upstairs hallway. Someone else contributed a record of drag race cars burning rubber, squealing tires and roaring engines. Oh yes, we called time and set our clocks to the official time. All this on the Q.T. so as not to tip our hand to the new President.

As twelve midnight approached not a sound was to be heard in Pine Manor. Then for exactly one minute dragsters with nitro-fueled engines roared to life. They laid rubber the full length of the hallway. Then all was quiet again.

The next afternoon a new set of quiet hours was posted.

Next came the ham radio and QSL cards for spreading the words. I sold my ham radio intending to buy a better one but instead purchased a CompuColor II computer based on the intel 8080A CPU and 32 kilobytes of memory. With a 300 baud modem we could have posted notes on the popular bulletin boards of the day but that was not exciting to us. Glen and I were both learning to program in Basic and Assembly languages. We were computer geeks with a capital ‘G.’

This all happened long before Al Gore ‘invented’ the world wide web and before anyone coined the term “blog.” These family legends are the stories of my youth and younger adult life experiences that I would have blogged had I the opportunity. Here is my first story:

You are welcome to comment in our blog web site or reply to this address:

gary@dinsmore-enterprises.com

This first story is about the CompuColor II computer purchased in about 1979. Ironically it cost about the same as the new laptop Lenovo 510 I purchased this year.

We had ourselves a CompuColor users club. The group included an eclectic assortment of members. One was ‘Phil-I-can-read-any-floppy,’ and another was ‘Larry-the-hardware-guy.’ One of our first group inventions was the ‘flippy-floppy.’ The five and a quarter inch floppy disks were a significant expense and they only held 53 kilobytes. By nipping a notch in the opposite edge of the jacket you could use both sides of the disk.

Compu-Color II Users Club Meeting

Everyone was busy creating programs in Basic and we would exchange programs at our monthly meetings. That is where ‘Phil-I-can-read-any-floppy’ achieved his popularity because often a floppy written on one machine wouldn’t read on another machine. Phil had dual drives and on one of them he loosened the stepper motor adjusting clamp. By fine tuning the stepper motor he could read the offending floppy and then write it back to a different floppy. If the new floppy wouldn’t read on another person’s machine he would then adjust to their standard and write another floppy that they could read.

At one meeting ‘Larry-the-hardware-guy’ came with a circuit diagram and instructions for a memory expansion board. Within a couple weeks I had purchased the required memory chips and hand wire wrapped the circuit to create my own 16 kilobyte memory expansion board. It cost $75 for the chips. My current computer has 4 gigabytes of memory. At the price I paid for 16 kilobytes, the memory for this computer would have cost $18,750,000.

For a bit more nostalgia check out this link to Old Computers.com. It almost brings tears to my eyes to read these posts from other old time users.

Glen and I both became hooked on writing programs for the CompuColor II. At one point I was teaching computer classes at the local community college, Portland Community College. I came across a program on the Apple II called Visicalc. It was a very kludgy early spreadsheet program in the lineage of Lotus 123, Symphony and Excel. I actually had the nerve to drive to Belleview Washington and call at the Microsoft offices. I got an audience with one of their managers and tried to talk them into letting me port that program to the CompuColor II. They thought it over for about 15 minutes while I waited and came back with a counter offer. They would sell me the rights to the program for $70,000. Now that was more than my house was worth, but think of it… So close, so very, very close.

I will close now, but before I go I must add one disclaimer. These stories have been told over and over again around the camp fires and in various gunkholes for many years. I will not be held accountable for slight embellishments that may have crept into the stories over the years.

Love from Hillsboro where we are still waiting for the new granddaughter. (but soon)

Gary and Judy

Salty: As in pertaining to a person associated with the salty seas. Perhaps an “Old Salt,” indicating a crusty old individual who has been too many years at sea, (perhaps even adrift.)

These are the things I contemplate as I look up my son’s new blog site, www.saltygeek.com

This past week I have been an accomplice to the Salty Geek. The salt part it turns out is a 40 gallon salt water reef aquarium. It turns out that managing a salt water aquarium takes a lot of skill, work and knowledge. My part has been helping with the chemistry. At least here I am on my own turf. Calcium chemistry, alkalinity and pH were part of my every-day work back in the paper industry.

The aquarium is fascinating to watch. There are two clown fish that follow you from one end of the tank to the other. There are also a dozen or so hermit crabs and a couple dozen snails and their specific job is janitorial. They love to eat the algae that likes to grow on the rocks and walls. The largest have shells about an inch in diameter. Most of them are a half inch or smaller. The hermit crabs are continually clamoring over the coral rock picking at the surfaces. The snails slowly ooze their way over the surfaces scraping and cleaning as they go.

This week’s addition has been five coral animals brought in on a chunk of “live rock.” The coral ranges from round mushroom shaped animals over an inch in diameter to patches of stalks with feather dusters on top.

If you are at all interested, I encourage you to visit Glen’s website. At www.SaltyGeek.com

Here is a question for all of my readers. After you look over Glen’s site, think about how it would work for my blog. I see a couple of advantages.

1. It is more polished looking.

2. It is interactive, that is you will be able to comment on the blog about the posting. My existing web site has no opportunity to comment except to reply directly to me via e-mail.

3. There would be an option to pick up new posts by rss feed and not by e-mail, (if that means anything to you.)

4. I currently use a rather restrictive template to create the actual web page. I would probably be more fluid in my web page layout. I still plan to send the text only version by e-mail.

5. The “recent posts” sidebar allows you to catch up if you didn’t have time to check things out when I first posted the blog.

6. There is a search feature that allows you to find an episode about a particular topic.

So what do you think about making the change?
(Yea) Into the fast lane and floor it.
(Nay) Why mess with it?

While we are at it, if anyone wants to drop off my mailing list, just reply to me by e-mail and request a change.

Thanks all. We are heading for Arizona in the morning. Expect to be in Boron, CA by tomorrow evening and all the way to Wickenburg for the Four Corner States Bluegrass Festival by Thursday. See you there.

Gary and Judy

Glen's Reef Aquarium

Photo Credit: Glen Dinsmore

Red Mushroom Coral

Photo Credit: Glen Dinsmore

We are now in Abilene. No not Texas, but Kansas. It is about 80 miles west of Topeka. It is famous for one of its sons, President Dwight Eisenhower. We will be exploring his Library tomorrow and probably a couple other museums also. We have learned the Kansas can be windy. Arcturus was a real handful with gusty north winds blowing across I-70 today.

We got our mail-in ballots into the post office today. I have to admit there are some things that are a real pain-in-the-neck with full-timing. Getting “snail-mail” is one of them. You must predict where you will be about a week into the future. Sometimes that is hard to do. We still like to wake up in the morning and say, “well which way should we go today?” We get lots of ideas at the visitor center when we cross into a new state.

You probably noticed that this e-mail has an entirely new look. My web-site provider offered me the free use of a mail list service. The way it works; I send my blog to the mail list service and it forwards it directly to each of you. My regular e-mail list chokes up when I have more than 30 addresses on it. I have about 90 regular readers and I must send each e-mail four times to keep it under thirty. The address header must contain all of the addresses in your group and that is a pain. Now you will each get an individual e-mail. In addition there are three url’s/mailto addresses that allow you to do the following three things:

1. Unsubscribe from the list. Either the url or the mailto will get you off the list.

2. Subscribe to the list. You can set up your spouse to get their own copy of our blog.

3. The Help option gets you an email of instructions that you don’t really want to read… Trust me!

I welcome feedback on the new process. Those of you with permissive-spam filters may have to re-authorize this new sender. Be sure and let me know if you don’t get the blog at all.

Good Bye again from Kansas
Gary and Judy

Question: How many mad scientists does it take to find out if different sized balls fall at the same speed?
Answer: In our case three plus lots of mismatched technology.

Our grandson, Patrick, is doing his science fair project over the mid winter break. He chose as his hypothesis that different sized balls fall at the same speed because of gravity. Now he has to prove it. Grandfather, Son and Grandson all put on their thinking caps and started tossing around ideas about how we could measure the effect. The stopwatch was quickly ruled out; none of us could time it that precisely. The grandfather person reminisced about physics class and a super accurate spark timing device that burned holes in a strip of adding machine tape attached to the falling weight. Alas and alack the technology was not available to us. Next we tried the digital camera that can take short video clips. That brought us to an interesting new problem; modern technology is too smart. To save space the camera only records a new picture when it notices something has changed. We discovered the camera only recorded a new photo every second or third frame. We tried to fool the camera by placing a floor fan in the field and putting a strip of duct tape on one blade. The fan was too speedy even at the slowest speed. Ah Ha there is a ceiling fan in the master bedroom. We briefly thought about removing the fan and jury-rigging it on the living room floor and supplying the electricity by poking the wires into the socket of the drop cord. Then we pictured in our minds eye the Mother-person arriving home and noticing her beloved fan wopping away in the middle of the living room floor and decided against that option. Well being the skilled scientific thinking team that we are, we hit upon the ingenious plan of bringing an image of the fan to the experiment. Soon there was a mirror propped in the stairway and a sheet of red paper taped to one blade of the fan. By now the living room looked like a cyclone had struck. We had the furniture pushed back to make a safe landing zone. Patrick was stationed at the landing at the top of the stairway. Grandpa was cameraman and Dad was retrieving balls and tossing them back up the stairs.

When the gals returned to the scene we were starting to get the furniture back in place and Patrick was busy counting frames on the computer. He was able to find out that the camera records 25 frames as the stopwatch changes by one second, and the ball falls sixteen feet from the banister of the stairway in about 25 frames. So far the team has not repealed the law of gravity, but we do know that it comes in jumps and starts. Pictures never lie. Isn’t modern technology wonderful?

Judy and I send you greetings from frosty Gilroy California, where we are visiting Glen and Barb and their three sons, Cody, Patrick and Bryce.

Love to all, Gary and Judy.

P.S. Today is our forty first anniversary. We have spent the last year and a half in a thirty four foot RV and we are still together and loving every minute.

We do have to end on a sad note, however. Judy’s brother, Lloyd Starr, passed away in Sequim Washington Saturday, February 18, 2006. He continued to enjoy life to the end, in spite of limitations that emphysema put on him. He enjoyed hand creating model trucks and construction equipment from wood. He is survived by his three sisters, Sonja, Genaveve and Judy and their families.

Gary

Patrick Tests the Theory of Gravity, See Mirror on stairs.

Let me introduce Eddie Mauget, better known in this area as Lewis. He lives in the Raleigh area and works here as a contractor this fall in Winston-Salem. We didn’t get to meet his wife, Carey. From Ed’s description she sounds like a wonderful gal. Another good buddy was Bob Parry. Bob and his wife Pat live in King SC, on the fringes of Winston-Salem. Bob commutes to Charlotte NC to work five days a week. We visited with Ed on the evenings of Wednesday and Thursday, then we hung around to visit with Bob and Pat on Saturday.

What did we reminisce about? Lots of back yard experiments. How about the water pipe ram jet? This was a one foot chunk of one inch water pipe, a six inch piece of inch and a half pipe and two bell reducers. We ground the tip of a ball point pen cartridge until the ball fell out. We washed out the ink and drilled a press-to-fit hole for this fuel injector in the top of the bulged out part of the ram-jet.We then hooked that up to a model airplane gas tank with regular gasoline in it. Now here comes the innovation. To make a ram jet go it has to be flying at probably a hundred miles per hour. Now we were under sixteen at the time so we couldn’t mount it on the side of a car and go out and drive a hundred miles an hour while pouring gasoline in this thing, so we did the next best thing. We hooked Bob’s Mother’s vacuum cleaner up to the front of this and sent a blast of air into the combustion chamber. We started the fuel and touched it off at the end of the exhaust pipe. We had a flame coming out a foot long. It was fantastic. We tried the experiment a couple days later and forgot to switch the hose on the vacuum. It took us a few seconds to figure out the flame was going down the hose and into the vacuum and we had to shut it all down. Yes, the vacuum did survive. Electrolux made a good product back in those days.

I know this sounds like we are all ledgends in out own minds. There is one thing for sure, we were geeks before they coined the word. We all three have had long careers as engineers. It sure was fun comparing notes and remembering the past.

Good bye from North Carolina. Judy and I send our love to our friends and relations.