Swingin' to the oldies (with the oldies)

Ladies and gentlemen, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, playing such hits as "In the Mood", "String of Pearls", and "Stardust".

We had a great time listening to this band as well as the Four Aces (Love is a Many Splendered Thing). We even got to dance - see our happy feet - as the last part of the show. It's always more fun when you can dance to the band rather than just listen. We can cut a rug with the best of them, but the other dancers, which I must say were a bit older (than dirt), were pretty cutthroat on the dancefloor.

The show was at Three Little Bakers, which is apparently a Delaware institution. The most I can say is that it is no Bimbos 365. If you want to go swing dancing in this area you take what you can get.

Tubing down the Potomac in Harpers Ferry

Today we were tubers. Not potatoes - we went tubing down the Potomac river near Harpers Ferry at the confluence of the Shenandoah and the Potomac rivers. The day was nice and the sun came out and we had a great time shooting through the rapids in our inner-tubes.

The other pictures are the Shenandoah and the Potomac from Harpers Ferry and the abandoned train bridge.

Leaving Las Vegas

I also promised to tell you if I won anything. This is a wad of cash just before it goes into my bank account. I was a little uncomfortable carrying all this cash around Vegas. I wasn't so unconfortable as to not be glad I won! Next stop, the racetrack.

This is what Las Vegas looks like from a suite atop one of the hotels. Pretty nice.

Our New Spokes-Robot Overlords

You know you live in a dark distopian future when even the pretty spokes models at the tradeshows are being replaced with talking robots.

This robot (on the left in the picture) is what you get when a bunch of engineers have a bunch of components left over from their work and they decide to do something clever with it. This robot's arms, hands, mouth and even lips moved and gestured as he hawked the products he was selling. It is fasciinating to watch. Unfortunately he is taking a job away from some beatiful spokesmodel. This is just the wages of progress.

I for one would like to be the first to welcome our new mechanical spokes-robot overlords.

Viva Las Vegas

The lights are so sparkly and twinkly here in Las Vegas. I have landed here to do some work instead of having too much fun.

However, the shiney machines keep drawing me over to play video poker. The one armed bandits have become no-armed bandits since you only need to press buttons to play.

I haven't won anything yet. You will be the first to know if I do.

Old tech is the best tech

Delaware has been home to the DuPonts for more than 200 years, so they and the company they founded have left their mark on the area, from our corporation friendly laws to their mansions dotting the landscape. I like to call their former homes, YADM's - Yet Another DuPont Mansion. It is really nice that they donated the land because we have an abundance of very nice parks and greenways in the area because of it.

I had the chance last week to go the Hagley Museum, which is the site of the first DuPont company powder works and is where the company started all that time ago. The Hagley Mills are actually several acres along the Brandywine river and contain the mansion that was the first DuPont home and office and all of the gunpowder mills and machine shops. The DuPonts made gunpowder, which was very dangerous, but the company safety policy was in place even then, and they were able to make it safer and more economically than their early competitors.

The mills are on the Brandywine like many other mills were because the Brandywine river provided a ready flow of water with a steep descent over a short distance that could be used to power the mills since water was what they had for energy back then.

My favorite place on the museum grounds is the machine shop. This shop was run back then using water power, and eventually steam power. It is a marvel of early engineering because it is all run from a water turbine and the machines are connected to the power by a series of belts drive from a main drive shaft. Engage the clutch on a machine and the belt moved from a free wheel to one that powered the device. Twist the belt before you loop it and engage that belt and the machine runs in reverse.

They even have a variable speed drill driven by two cones which connect with a belt between them. Belt at one end contacts the thin part of the driving cone with the thick part of the machine cone and the drill runs slow. Move the belt to the other end, thin part of driving cone moving the fat part of the machine cone and it runs faster, with continuous variation in between.

The shop has a drill, lather, grinders and other assorted tools. For demonstration these days they use an electric motor to drive the main shaft. I wish I had more and better pictures of the equipment but the lighting in the room is very poor. Back in the late 1800's when they used this room it was lit only with oil lamps even though it ran overnight shifts. You can imagine how much of a strain that was on the operators. With many lamps in the room they achieved the power of one fluorescent light tube, how many lights do you have in your workshop when you are working? The tour guide also pointed out that the entire room was about four horsepower. How many horsepower was the last drill or saw you purchased? Certainly machine work is much easier and fast in the modern world than back then, but this shop is an achievement in its genuine ingenuity in power transfer and was very modern for its day.

If civilization ever fell, you could go out to this museum, rip out the electric motor, reconnect the water turbine (it is still there) and run an 1800's machine shop. For this reason the Hagley Museum machine shop is on my apocalypse team, and so are the docents that know how to run the place if I can get them.

The Rules for Living

When we were younger, my twin sister and I had a variety of rules that we devised for living. Don't get too excited that you have found the key to life here, they were narrowly defined rules for certain situations that we memorized for quick action.

Rule 1: Your objective is length.

When you are in high school everyone has to write the dreaded essay for whatever class. I was comfortable with writing and with reading lots of books, if that was required for the book or lab report, while my sister found these things less enjoyable. I don't ever think we ever stooped to reading books for each other, but we definitely proofread each other's reports so the other could help with the writing and getting to that critical word count or page length requirement. Whenever we did this she would ask that I help increase the length of the report. "Your objective is length." As you have guessed I can be wordy when required and I would go through the report and replace one word with two, or a phrase and bulk up the report.

The problem with being wordy is that when you get to the next level they don't like that style of writing and you get to learn again. It also turns out that wordy writing is bad style. In college all the lab reports and projects needed to be written in cold third person and passive voice so I learned that. In graduate school my advisor only wanted active voice and to lose the wordiness. This time the relearning process was extremely painful. I probably took an extra year in graduate school just because of that.

I hope this current writing foray will help me learn the new style.

Rule 2: Make the light.

Taking advice from teenagers on driving is probably a bad idea. Please go take a defensive driving course, I did. Also, don't try to extract any deep meaning from this one about light or knowledge or anything like that, it merely refers to stoplights.

Rule 3: Never get behind a Strohmann's truck in the left lane on Ridge Pike.

You can see here why we stopped making rules. They became too specific and not general enough. Strohmann's was a bread company with a factory on Ridge Pike. If you got behind one you would be stuck because they were always making left turns into the plant and it took forever because traffic was shooting by at high speed. It was a good rule for its time.

I am sure there were other rules that I don't remember anymore. Do you remember any similar rules from childhood?

Zombie Weekend

It was a zombie kind of weekend. It was certainly too hot to do anything but sit inside and wait for fall. While no actual undead appeared, there were many references and coincidences regarding them.

Firstly, I am reading a terrific series of online novels, Monster Island, Monster Nation and Monster Planet, centered around a zombie-caused apocalypse. They were written as a serial novels last year (Monster Planet is in progress) by David Wellington and they have a great short chapter suspenseful feeling in each post reminiscent of the movie serials from the early days of movies.

On television, in cableland, where every movie is on sometime, somewhere, we happened to catch a lot of zombie movies this weekend. The 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead" was on, so was "Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse" with Mila Jovovich (just say the name a few times slowly, trippingly on the tongue). A hilarious send up of the zombie genre, "Shaun of the Dead" was also playing. I recommend this movie, as it has some great deadpan british humor, and is set in England, which greatly diminishes your access to guns should a zombie breakout occur. This leads to some constrained and difficult weapons choices (a cricket bat for instance). The zombie movie that started the modern myth is George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and is available at the Internet Archive.

Other zombie resources on the web include the Zombie Infection Simulation, a little JAVA applet that lets you simulate a zombie breakout in a city, very useful for planning purposes. There is also the Zombie Preparedness Initiative or the The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency, both with helpful survival hints in the event of a zombie incident. In fact zombies are a potential major cause of the apocalypse and one of the reasons I suggest having an apocalypse team picked and ready to go.

Just remember, aim for their heads.

My Apocalypse Team

I play a little game for fun at party's sometimes. If you find yourself in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who do you want by your side and what skills do you think are going to be important? It certainly depends on the cause of the apocalypse. Is it nuclear or biological, aliens or zombies, rapture or rupture? I think it is important to plan and have an apocalypse team in mind on the off hand chance that you might need one.

So who do we choose and why? I have my fiance on my apocalypse team. Not for the obvious reason that she would be mad at me if she wasn't, but because she has important talents for after the apocalypse. She knows about plants and knows how to grow things well and cooks great meals, she is good with tools and can build shelters, she can ride a horse and she's pretty tough. I have two other friends at work that I want on my team because they can hunt and fish and know something about dressing and butchering animals.

Why am I on the apocalypse team you ask? Well, I can ride horses, and I can make the ruthless decisions that will need to be made for the sake of survival. I also came up with the idea. I mean, we will need management even in a post-apocalyptic future, right? I'm a people person (or a zombie person if necessary).

'Negative' Space Support Our ... Ribbons'

Here is a documented sighting in the wild of a "support our troops" ribbon magnet with the extra added cleverness of using the "negative" space in the loop to make a heart. This way the supporter can "heart" the USA at the same time.

I have also seen them with crosses in the "negative" space as well, but I have yet to capture one. I do plan on putting together the cladastics of this meme soon. As you can see, I am gathering data.

By the way, this van had two of these ribbon magnets in different colors. Of course, you can't just have one!