Jack’s Old & Busted Blog

Plans for My Father’s War Machines
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Going through my Dad’s effects, I found these drawings. They were in a cigar box (his “bank”) inside a chest full of his childhood toys. I assume they were made when he was 10 years old or so, which would date them during WWII. He was a big Buck Rogers fan, so I am lucky to have some original Buck Rogers “Big Little” books. From reading those, I can see their influence. For me, these are amazingly creative for a child growing up in Malvern, Arkansas, to uneducated parents in the 1940s.

“Black Water” Ray Gun (80k)

“Horse Gun” (76k)

“Exelarator Gun” (76k)

“Robot Man” (76k)

Went to Kansas City this weekend. We really like the Country Club Plaza area. It’s like a giant outdoor yuppie amusement park. One curious thing is the traffic. It’s a very busy area, but pedestrian and auto traffic get along great. I’m convinced KC drivers are just plain better than they are here. More courteous, anyway.
An obnoxious thing about KC is the almost total lack of meaningful road signs. In most big cities, you can rely on signs to eventually get you to the interstate. Not in KC. You can drive for miles on major intra-city thoroughfares and never have a clue where the big slab is. As one guy at the gas station put it, “Most cities have signs; we have secrets.”

Bought five Lotto tickets, none of which paid off, obviously. Like I’d be diddling away online right now if it had. Is there really any point in buying more than one Lotto ticket? Do the Fates look down and say, “Wait a mintue, this guy bought a dozen tickets”? All those wasted chances are bound to becosmically redeemed somewhere, somehow. Buying more than one ticket is just inviting a piano to fall on your head, if you ask me.

I’m thinking about getting a negative scanner (Minolta DiMAGE Scan Dual II). Most of what I shoot professionally is digital, but I have a substantial investment in film cameras personally. With a negative scanner, I can achieve more megapixels than I could afford by buying a digital camera without losing any of the frame. Of course, there are tradeoffs. One of the great things about digital photography is its ability to handle different lighting without filters or tungsten-balanced emulsions. And there’s a built in ongoing cost for film and developing, although it’s cheaper when you don’t need prints.
One other thing: film keeps getting better. People are always talking about more and more megapixels, but they forget that film research continues to go forward, with finer grains and better color. I guess the bottom line is that I trust my lenses, my cameras and my experience with various films. And $249 plus shipping is a LOT less than a Nikon D1.

Happy birthday to me!
A generational divider: Whether or not you can remember when cars lacked a third tail-light.
Time for coffee. BIRTHDAY coffee.

Yay! Sharpeworld is back from hiatus (website). One of my favorite sites.

I’ve had more fun than I’d like to admit playing this OSX port of the classic ASCII-dungeon game Moria (Angband). This totally brings back memories of when I was teaching in the wilderness of Izard Co., and would spend hours in the evenings (after long motorcycle rides through the splendid scenery) plodding away at this seemingly simple little game on my Mac Classic II.

I’ve always had a strong prejudice against the whole Fantasy genre, and particularly resent its intrusion, nay contamination, of Science Fiction (or SciFi, whatever). With the noted exception of the Classics (Tolkein, C.S. lewis) Fantasy requires less skill than wild imagination, and few writers are able to craft universes that are both moral and magical. To my taste, true SciFi is superior because it is about normal people interacting with technology, or its natural conclusion.

But I digress. Angband is a fun game. It has a rigid rule structure that discourages cheating (other than the backup save *natch*). It requires a lot of imagination to make it work. But after a while, those little colored ASCII letters and numbers start to come to life and it’s a blast.

I still remember the day I killed the Balrog. Took me about three months, I think.

The Slow Race is supposed to be one of the safest things you can do at a motorcycle rally. I was in the heat for third place Saturday at the Bikes, Blues, and BBQ rally here in town, when I discovered otherwise.

I was in the middle lane, doing reasonably well (rules: last one to cross the finish line is the winner; put your foot down or go out of your lane, you lose), when the guy on the decrepit Sportster beside me began to wobble. Instead of just putting his foot down, he decided to gut it out and have the bike fall over on its left side, pinning him under it. Of course, he wouldn’t let go of his ape-hanger handlebars, so he wrenched the throttle on full, causing the bike to do sideways doughnuts on the ground. On his last “spin,” his rear tire collided with me. No damage to me, though, and you couldn’t tell from his.

People seemed very concerned, probably thought I was a lawyer on the k-bike.

On a side note, I saw a guy on a Japanese rocket bike do an 8.4 second quarter mile @ 177 mph on the drag dyno. It’s amazing the volume of air that is blown out of an exhaust at that output. They had other diagnostic dynos there that were very popular. I thought about spending the $50 for the analysis, but there’s not much they could do for me to improve over stock. The HD guys spend a fortune to get their stodgy v-twins to get 100 hp. Sort of like getting a pig to sing.