I recall the story of the Rosetta Stone that enabled the decoding of ancient languages. Now, we have an equivalent in computer handbooks. I was looking over the documentation for my new laptop. Some of the sections are written in 18 (!) languages. If by any chance things really go to hell and some of this survives, it will be easy for future ( Read more... )

Sometimes we get a job that's just plain fun. The firehouse here in Mont Vernon is being torn down after being condemed and a new one going up in it's place. As the town photographer (self-appointed), I volunteered to take photos of the entire process. I shoot the building as it was, to demolition and then to reconstruction. This series will be on ( Read more... )

When I was just in my teens, a local large home on Main street was sold to a bank for development. They didn’t want the building, just the land it was on. So, the contents were sold off in an all day auction. I had about $3.00 to my name, so wasn’t too optimistic about my chances of buying anything. It turned out that there were lots of nice things ( Read more... )

We spent an interesting day touring the sugar and orange plants out of Clewiston, FL. It was both better in some ways and disappointing in other ways. The bus tour driver was very informative about the history of the area was very familiar with the operations of both industries. The orange processing plant was in the process of changing over from ( Read more... )

I was walking back from the shower last night and took some time to look at the ( Read more... )

The Norton Sound was a pretty good ship and duty, but was overcrowded with GS ratings, (missile technicians). Some of us were assigned to really minor duty. Some of the third class petty officers were on constant head cleaning duty. My first job was with two others in a tiny supply office where we dispensed toilet paper and other cleaning ( Read more... )

When I worked for Natural Power in New Boston, I had a nice little outbuilding next to a tumbling stream where I set up an office upstairs to do electronic design, circuit board layout and silkscreening. I probably spent 95% of my time alone, doing my thing ( Read more... )

Back in 1962, I attended the Ampex tape recorder school for one week in Redwood City, California. I think the recorder ID number was an FR-600. It was a Navy sponsored class prior to installing two large seven + one track recorders in the telemetry shack on the USS Norton Sound. The eighth track was low fidelity used for voice annotation only. I ( Read more... )

I was junking some old computer stuff, but as usual, opened the cases to see if there were any salvage possibilities. I was quite surprised when I looked inside a ten year old US Robotics 28Kb modem. The number of parts, complex ICs, surface mount devices, transformers and so on is amazing for such a simple application. Now, the work is probably ( Read more... )

As a windmill engineer, I've climbed a lot of towers. The tallest tower I went up was a 300 foot met tower on the end of Sears Island in Penobscot Bay in Maine. It was put up to monitor wind data for a potential nuclear power plant that was never started. It was a great view, but I didn't have a camera with me at the time ( Read more... )