Lindgren liked to sit on the small second-floor balcony with a view of the sea. There is a bench in a corner of the balcony. Karin Nyman, Lindgren’s daughter, who is now over 80 and closely resembles her mother, says: “Take a look under the bench.”
It’s easier said than done. Dates, a few words and many stenographic symbols are written in pencil on the underside of the bench: “July 3, 1963. Summer. Radiant. Like in the good old days. The early summer was magical. I was here all of June and wrote “Michel from Lönneberga.” The book is now finished. We bought a sailboat, the ‘Saltkrokan.'” Lindgren must have laid flat on her back to write these words, with her feet sticking out from underneath the bench. Perhaps she even wiggled her toes, just like Pippi.
Farting around
No. No, I wasn’t born yesterday.
Thank you for asking.
Background: I think I found a way to fix a broken display on my Yeasu FT-290R 2m all-mode radio. A broken display on these things is common, and displays are very much NLA. The FT-290 (2m), FT-690 (6m) and FT-790 (70cm) are all pretty much identical except for the RF bits, so a fix for one is a fix for all.
So I advertised on swop shop, looking for an “FT-290R / FT-690R / FT-790R”.
Hello Wouter ,
Thanks for the mail. I have the requested FT-290R / FT-690R / FT-790R
in an excellent condition I will be shipping via FedEx courier on a 3
working days delivery and will accept payment via Western Union or
Money Gram.Location: USA
What’s your complete shipping address?
First and foremost before proceeding with transaction we can only
accept payment via western union if you are satisfied with that kindly
get back to me.
Maybe I should ask for a photograph of this “FT-290R / FT-690R / FT-790R”.
Forget about the Hugo Awards
The 2014 XYZZY Awards are out.
I really need to find the time to play some of these.
(Actually, don’t ignore the Hugo Awards. As part of the Sad Puppy foofarah some worthy authors were nominated, some worthy authors withdrew, and Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem was up-leveled. I would not have read it otherwise, and I liked it. Recommended).
April 1st
From http://www.speedygrl.com/funnies/texts/computer.folklore.from.net.rumors.html
Another story, which took place on April 1st 1984:
I was requested to present Unix software tools to the Software
Workbench undergraduate course. After talking about grep, SCCS,
lex and what not, I described an experimental expert system that
creates applications by combining UNIX tools. Given an English
description of an application, the system produces user manuals.
Given an “O.K.”, it would go on and produce the actual
software.The system was a success: it kept some of the students busy for
a long time. Here it is, reconstructed from memory:#!/bin/csh -f
echo “What should your application do?”
echo “Type a short description followed by a control-D”
cat > /dev/null
echo “Working… here is the user’s manual:”.
/usr/games/festoon | some sed | nroff -man | more
echo “Is that O.K? If not, please describe what’s wrong.”
exec /usr/games/doctor
I’m I strange for finding this hilarious?
(Yes, I know the answer, never mind)
Geek line, do not cross.
17 year project
Today, seventeen years ago, we re-entered South Africa from Lesotho as part of the 50th Anniversary Tour of South Africa. All through 1996/1997 I’d been frantically putting a Land-Rover together, with much accelerated effort towards the end (if it wasn’t for the last moment I’d never get anything done).
With help from my brother, we ended up getting the Rand-Lover through roadworthy at the end of February 1998, and Elmari and I left on the trip on the 6th of March. It was a bit… frantic.
Since then, this mysterious package has been kicking ’round the back of the Rand-Lover.
Look, it’s wrapped in period-authentic newspaper.
But what can it be?
Look! It’s the trim…
…that goes on the back doors, here.
The intention was to fit these somewhere on the trip. A lot of things did get fitted, but the trim did not make the list.
Yesterday, Eskom blessed us with some more electricity rationing. There’s a round ‘tuit for me! Yay!
I used these captive nuts and M5 machine screws.
And there you go (actually it was a lot more finicky than it looks).
The colour mismatch is 17 years’ worth of fade on the door. Not too bad, actually.
I decided to leave the nearside door for another 17 yea… nah, kidding, I did both.
Ross Micro Eight (RE-815)
Some people collect tiny transistor radios. I don’t have enough of them to call it a collection but I guess I’m working on it.
The Ross Electronics Corporation imported transistor radios from Japan from 1955 to about 1970. They were located at 589 East Illinois Street and later (I think) 2834 South Lock Street, Chicago. As far as I can tell, there’s no relation to the Ross Radio Company of Youngstown, Ohio.
Here’s a better image of the schematic on the inside of the back cover (yes, there was a time when radios came with schematics).
It would be a mistake to expect good performance from a 1965-ish design running on one 1.5V cell, but the performance of my one is beyond mediocre. But then again, I didn’t really buy it to use it.
Mike has a nicer one, in a box nogal.
- Obituary for Eli Ross, July 8, 2006.
Kornbluth, visionary
In 1951, Cyril Kornbluth wrote a short story where a fellow ended up way in the future. A future populated by morons, because intelligent people breed less. A future with passenger cars
Swept-back lines, deep-drawn compound curves, kilograms of chrome. He ran his hands over the door- or was it the door?-in a futile search for a handle, and asked respectfully, “How fast does it go?” The psychist gave him a keen look and said slowly, “Two hundred and fifty. You can tell by the speedometer.”
Except that
Barlow began to wonder if he knew what a kilometer was, exactly. They seemed to be traveling so slowly, if you ignored the roaring air past your ears and didn’t let the speedy lines of the dreamboats fool you. He would have sworn they were really crawling along at twenty-five, with occasional spurts up to thirty.
Uptime
[root@mort ~]# uname -a Linux mort 2.6.6 #1 Mon May 31 12:28:13 SAST 2004 i686 unknown [root@mort ~]# uptime 08:21:51 up 900 days, 2:10, 2 users, load average: 0.21, 0.08, 0.03 [root@mort ~]#
Try that with Windows.
But they’re moving the datacentre today so that’s as high as it’s going to get for the next couple of years.