In Sputnik’s Orbit

A few thoughts to tide you over…

 

A Roar in the Darkness

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It is difficult to describe the sound made by a turbojet engine, but I’m a writer; I can do it.

Imagine a couple of little girls clowning in the bathroom, screaming at the top of their lungs as only little girls can do, their screeches reverberating off the tile and running together like a skewer through your eardrums. Now imagine that as a steady sound, modulated by a fan spinning a thousand revolutions a minute and amplified by six foot speakers of the sort employed by a well-funded heavy metal rock band. Now multiply that by eight, one for every engine on a B-52 bomber, and by the six steel and concrete interior surfaces of a military hanger, and if you imagine for a moment that a rabid ice pick is grinding its way up through the fractured remains of your vertebrae and into your skull, then you’ve got the picture just about right.

When I was five or six, my mother pulled me out of bed one night and whisked me and my brother and sister off through the moonless darkness to pick up our daddy. He’d been gone a long time, and though I didn’t quite understand it at the time, he had been on temporary duty in southeast Asia, dropping cluster bombs and napalm from a machine engineered to save the world from godless commies or kill us all in the effort.

Men in blue uniforms and green nylon flight suites met us at the car and ushered us into the darkened hanger, a big, gray building on a big, gray sea of concrete. My mother put me down and conferred with one of the uniformed men and led me to believe that daddy had just landed. We were in one of the original hangers built during the forties when the base first opened, a line of which stood as a sort of bulwark between the streets and buildings where the people lived and worked and the tarmac where the flight machines strutted and preened. I knew the hanger was much too small for Daddy’s Stratofortress, but I expected any moment that the great jungle-green beast would poke its nose under the roof and the door would open and down would come a yellow adder and daddy’s leather boots and a trunk full of coconuts and gifts from Japan and Thailand. What I didn’t expect was the sound.

Presently, we heard the sing-song whine of the jet approaching through the ubiquitous backdrop of aircraft engines in motion, at idle, and lumbering on their test stands. Outside the giant telescoping doors, an airman waved flashlights with colored plastic signal cones. Another stooped to retrieve something from the shadows. Still others ran about purposefully, then darted back into the hanger. All of these men wore hearing protection, and not mere earplugs or the meager earmuffs one might see on the shooting range, but serious, bulky units in military gray.

The whine shifted and moved, then rose in pitch and broke into the coarse, disharmonic roar of jets under power, as if Niagara falls had gone on a bender and come to tell us off, shouting from the parking lot till the ground shook and the metal walls rattled—or perhaps my eardrums did. Then a flashing red light cleared the rolling doors and the sing-song whine returned, reverberating through the suddenly tiny hanger till the black shadow of the airplane came to rest and the engines spun down, all but one, and finally, through I felt I must have blood pouring from my ears by then, the last engine spun to a stop.

We were glad to see daddy, and I think he was touched, though he still had paperwork to do and was too exhausted from the flight to show much emotion and would probably just as soon have swung by the O-club for a drink before heading home. When we pulled back into our driveway after midnight, the neighbor had set out a great illuminated sign: “Welcome home Maj. Hardwick,” and I could still hear the turbines drilling through my head.

I’m not sure whose bright idea this all was. It is distinctly possible I suffered permanent hearing loss. For as long as I can remember, I’ve avoided loud noise and worn hearing protecting around machinery. When I was in college I carried ear plugs in case I got invited to a club or party.

That was a long, long time ago, but I’ll never forget the grating feel of the jet roar conducted through my bones. We called it a cold war, but it was fought with real jet fuel and explosives. It was fought by real soldiers, tired men and women whose families waited just beyond the flight line, the front line in a new and endless kind of war.

 

Is VOIP Slowing Your Network

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While working on my home network, I moved my VOIP modem downstream of the wireless router with the result that my download speed immediately doubled.

I’ve used voice over IP service since 2004, and I think this is the original VOIP modem. Apparently, it’s been acting as a bottleneck ever since. It didn’t matter in the old wireless-b days, and the fact that it hasn’t had more impact on the last few years of increasing use of streaming video is a testament to the resiliency of digital packet communications. But I’m glad I found it now.

So go take a look at your cables. Let no restraint stand between you and the web.

Open Source Surfing

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I recently replaced my old Linksys WRT-G wireless-g router with a new ASUS RT-N66U wireless n. I did this mostly to get some new features and better coverage as only a few of my devices support the newer n wifi standard. But the connection has been spotty on my new Dell Inspirion 2020 and the Linksys has never offered good signal quality and the ASUS had glowing reviews.

So I upgraded and things improved. But while the connection on the Dell is clearly better overall, it still frequently slows and stumbles—as in, when it works it works well, but it often doesn’t work at all for minutes at a time and it works well only occasionally. Not acceptable. I won’t bore you with my sleuthing, but it turns out my problem is mostly wall geometry and interference. Microwaves bounce off of almost anything and I’ve already moved my network equipment to the most central feasible location.

What to do? I could run cat-5 cable from the router to my office. I could buy a wireless-N repeater. There are even a couple of devices that bridge from wireless to USB or SD cards, though none of these offer much better throughput than what the old Wireless-G router would give, if only the signal quality wasn’t a problem.

So…I pulled out the old router, went to www.dd-wrt.com, and read over the long and complex instructions for switching to the DD-WRT open source firmware. To make this work, I had to install tftp, futz around with the Dell’s network settings a bit, and replace the router firmware with three different incremental versions. But finally, after about an hour, I had it done and followed these instructions to configure the old router as a wifi repeater.

That done, the old Linksys connects to my new router and I connect by Dell to the Linksys acting as a repeater. I did some initial testing. With a wireless G connection to the repeater sitting across the office on a high shelf, I was getting twice the throughput I had ever gotten on the Dell with its N connection and getting it consistently. Why? Because even through the WRT-G is older technology, it’s simply got a better radio and a far better antenna than the Dell. Plus, the Dell is an all-in-one design, so its unimpressive wireless chip is probably further hampered by noise–as is often the case when electronics are crammed in a small space.

Next I turned off the Dell’s wireless and plugged it into the repeater via a cat5 cable. Now, according to www.speedtest.net, where I was getting download speeds of between 2.5 and 4 Mbps, I now consistently get speeds between 9.5 and 11 Mbps. That’s actually the same as I get if I plug directly into my cable modem. In other words, I now have a solid 54Mbps connection, which is faster than what my cable provider can feed. So that’s as fast a connection as is possible at this time. No need to crawl through the attic with a 70-foot’ cat5 cable. No need to pay $50-$150 for a wireless n repeater.  Just a few minutes and some free software.

Ah, open source. It’s the future.

As From a Ghost

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Once, I was browsing for music at the local mall when I noticed a familiar splash of color. It was a girl: thin and pretty and wearing a cheery, white-and-orange checked sundress. She was turned the other way, talking to her friend, her face obscured by straight, auburn hair spilling down to her waist.

I knew her, though. I knew the way one knows his kin and kindred in a pressing mob, more by hints of mannerism and movement than by any specific detail. When I said her name, she turned and spoke, a sweet tone, a kind word, a pleasing, sensuous smile.

The wrong smile, not your smile, and I scurried off as from a ghost.

Empire Lost

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As a writing exercise, I was asked to re-imagine a scene from Milton’s Paradise Lost in a more contemporary setting. I could imagine none more appropriate:

A puddle plunked where the stone of the platform should be. Darkness in daytime. The kind of day Japan had seen too many of, the kind that wiped Pompei and Krakatoa maybe. The dark shifted a little, just enough to show a bit of sky instead of roof.

I climbed, through or over what I still don’t know. I climbed the way a man does when he hasn’t figured yet if he’s half-buried or half-dead. I stopped when there was nothing left to climb. When I thought, maybe both.

Tuesday, a handful of yen and a pack of smokes had bought a night in Mrs. Ying’s comfort house near the unfinished imperial bunker outside Nagano. I’d been sent to fetch minister Tōgō south for a meeting with Stalin’s man. If Japan was the land of the rising sun, it had seen brighter days. But the mighty imperial navy had shown its stuff, and so had imperial mettle. The meeting was to take place inside the great Mitsubishi torpedo and ammunition plant. We’d helped Stalin beat Hitler just by remaining neutral. In coming years, we’d help him beat the Americans just by staying alive. At least, that was the message on Tuesday.

This was Thursday. Tōgō was dead. The train station was gone above the platform—the ammunition plant too, and the Kawanami shipyards and—hell, all of Nagasaki. Not peppered by American bombers. Not burning and scarred and broken up. Gone. Erased. From the river to the hills.

Brown twilight drifted with smoke and the smell of burning flesh, and hung over fire and misery in all directions. Across the way, the cathedral gate poked up columns like logs from a fire. The dome lay in filth like a turned-out chamber pot. Where cherry trees had marked the canal, there wer eonly tangled girders, curling shattered roofs, and piles of tile and brick. Close by, there were other piles, heaps of rubble and ordinary things: chair legs, a shoe, a silver bento melted and charred. The station clock lay on a mound of rubble and charcoaled limbs. The face was black. The hands were gone. Flash-burned shadows read eleven o’clock.

Behind me, the rail line was just another heap, a tunnel from the mighty empire south into hell. Tōgō was dead, and the prefect. But it didn’t take a prefect to read what it meant. It meant the war was over, the empire done. Like an over-confident sumo apprentice, Japan had forced its enemy across the ring, only to be crushed by his weight.

And that was it. Two million dead and a generation of fanatics who so balled up history it was good for nothing but setting fires. Well, they were burning now—just as bright and warm as Tōjō and the emperor had dreamed, I imagined. If they had feared and hated America as neighbor, they could hate him nowas sovereign. But the time for fear was over. What more could an American president take than the emperor had surrendered to pride?

From the east, towards the medical center, came a lone woman’s cry. A chorus of moans suffused the middle distance. Nothing moved around me but fire and falling debris. The ball field by the river would be open land. Somewhere to the east, I’d find survivors. Somewhere in coming days, I‘d meet new masters.

I‘d survived the war. I damn sure wasn’t going to choke on peace. My boot crunched through what had been a centuries-old temple. I bowed toward the bay– toward the twilight gray of the sea, and recalled the English we had once amused ourselves by learning from the wireless.

“Welcome to Japan, most honorable sir. Would you please to buy some smokes?”

Better to deal with foreign devils than die for a disgraced god.

A Little Feature That Every Shower Needs

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ShowerEvery shower needs a place to put the shampoo and soap, the razor and the washcloth, and various sundries. Usually, this is some built-in that’s hardly usable or a caddy hanging from the shower arm–right where it’s in the way. A few years ago, when they started selling the Scrubbing Bubbles “Automatic Shower Cleaner,” I decided to give it a try, and in so doing came up with a superior solution.

Houston has very hard water, which is to say, there is so much lime in the water, if you let the sprinklers hit the siding, the house will slowly turn gray as limestone forms on the brick. This cleaner, while not likely to meet up to it’s hype, seemed likely to help (and experience has born this out) but only if mounted where it will spray all the glass. Hanging it from the shower head wasn’t going to do the job. Instead, I found a simple ceramic robe hook and mounted it in the right location by drilling through the tile, then sealed around it with latex calk.  While I was at it, I mounted two more hooks (shown here), one to hold my washcloth up out of the way and the other to hold the show caddy. This puts the caddy over to one side where it doesn’t interfere with the show hose and doesn’t get in the way.

I’ve had this installation for about six years now, and it’s been a neat solution. I really haven’t given it a second thought until the other day when I replaced the old rusted caddy with an adjustable stainless steel unit by Simply Human. I hung the new caddy, tried it out, and was left wondering  why every shower isn’t made this way.

Now yours can be too. All you need is an all ceramic robe hook (the metal mounting bracket will be sealed behind the calk, and a $2 masonry bit.

 

Dinosaur’s Toes

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Image

Wow, this brings back memories. In the late ’60s, my family did a lot of rock hounding in the South Dakota back country. Once, we stopped for lunch at a spot overlooking a gulch somewhat wider that this one. My sister thought the eroded tallus looked like the toes of some giant creature, and forevermore, the badlands were the “dinosaur’s toes”.

For more photos of the badlands, check out The Constant Rambler, at http://www.theconstantrambler.com/road-trip-planner-for-custer-park-badlands-and-mt-rushmore-sd/

“Callista’s Delight” to Appear in ASIM

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ImageMy short story, “Callista’s Delight”, will be published in the January issue of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.

“Callista’s Delight” is about a woman who takes her little girl out under the stars to witness the greatest triumph in the history of human engineering–or the moment she looses her daddy. It earned an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest and was long listed for Britain’s James White award. Despite that, ASIM had it reviewed by its science advisor, so you know it’s full of SciFi goodness.

You won’t want to miss it, so subscribe to ASIM now. Andromeda Spaceways, they’ll get you there–eventually.

Upgraded Treadmill Desk

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Treadmill desk made with $600 treadmill, $150 Ergotron LCD arm, and $30 worth of wire shelving. Prominently featured is my coffee mug from the Atomic Testing Museum.

Upgraded treadmill desk with coffee mug from the Atomic Testing Museum.

My treadmill desk has been such a success, I decided it was time for an upgrade. I put my little netbook spare back into mothballs and bought a Dell Inspirion 2020 all-in-one desktop ($400 at Best Buy). I outfitted this with a wireless mouse, a Microsoft Arc ergonomic keyboard, and a Logictech touchpad T650.

Then the fun began.

My improvised wire rack desk has worked well, but I knew it couldn’t stand up to the additional weight (It did, barely, but with a slightly scary wobble). So I ordered an Ergotron LX desk mount LCD arm. This is a well-made monitor arm, but left me with two problems: 1) how to mount it to my treadmill, and 2) how to mount my non-VESA monitor to it.

The Ergotron arm is designed to mount to a desk, either by clamping to the edge or bolting through a hole. The mounting hardware is extremely well made and could easily have been adapted to bolt onto one arm of the treadmill, but this would have eaten up four inches of usable space.

Instead, I needed to mount the arm’s riser to the treadmill’s handle grip, really a steel crossbar that stiffens the frame and has no other function but to hold two palm grip pulse sensors that I never use.

Rota-Lock perpendicular clamp.

Rota-Lock perpendicular clamp.

Rota-Lock makes a clever, $15 pipe clamp used to form perpendicular joints in scaffolding and light bar rigging for theatrical work. A continuous loop of heavy steel rod is bent and bent again to form perpendicularly opposing saddles. A forged seat rests between the pipes to be joined and is cranked down with a locking bolt until it forces the pipes apart–firmly locking them between its own recesses and the outer saddle. Because the 35mm riser and the treadmill handle are both a bit smaller than the smallest Rota-Lock is designed for, I left the plastic palm sensor in place and fit the riser with the rubber sleeve from a $3 plumbing pipe repair clamp. I also replaced the clamp’s locking bolt with a slightly longer one from the hardware store, just to give it a little more travel.

Pictured here (right), the black, Ergotron riser stands vertically in front of the horizontal treadmill grip. The locking bolt is on the left and can just be seen digging through the plastic of the handle sensor. This installation is not good for the 1,800 pound foot rating of the clamp, but should have more than adequate safety margins for my 20 pound computer. Anyway, it seems rock solid. Edit: Clamp has remained rock solid for over 3 years, with one removal and reinstallation for treadmill maintenance.

VESA Plate modified to fit Dell Inspirion mount.

VESA Plate modified to fit Dell Inspirion mount.

At the other end of the arm, problem #2 was easily solved. The Dell computer stand bolts on with an odd but heavy-duty steel plate that clips in such that the weight of the monitor tends to lock it in place. The Ergotron arm is pre-drilled to fit a standard VESA mount–that is, four bolts at the corners of either a 75mm or 100mm square. The VESA plate is sturdy enough, I simply drilled new holes to accommodate machine screws passing through the VESA plate (shown), through the Dell mounting plate (click to enlarge) and into the computer. Slightly longer metric machine screws (shown in top two holes) ensure that the mount will hold. Edit: Mount has remained trouble-free for over three years.

This only left me with the work surface to settle. The open wire shelving has its advantages, but it really isn’t a very good work surface. While testing out the new system, I found a handy scrap of 1/4″ plywood just the right width to fit the wire shelving. This was actually left over packaging from the treadmill, but was perfect for completing my desktop. The table saw cut it to length and nibbled away the recesses needed for the upper shelf to lock into the base shelf. A little sandpaper and spray varnish and voila!

Click to enlarge work surface detail

Work Surface

Click to enlarge Ergotron arm detail

Work Surface

Finished Treadmill Desk

Finished Treadmill Desk

The result is strong and sturdy and doesn’t shake at all. I can type at a comfortable level, swap out the keyboard for a laptop if needed, and even keep my coffee within reach. What’s not to love? So far, using this treadmill desk a few hours a week and using MyFitnessPal to track my calories, I’ve lost nearly 50 pounds.