News of Shawn

Thoughts on computers and languages.

2011-02-04T14:55:00.001-05:00

Note: this needs editing and more explanation. This is more of a brain dump / stream of consciousness thing...

It’s all about languages and communication.

All data is expressed in some language: binary, assembly, C, JVM bytecodes, relational data structures, LISP s-expressions, JSON, XML, API calls, object models, user interfaces (icon languages, screen layouts, etc), or even human language (so-called “human entered text” or “raw text”).

Languages have dialects.

Each use of a language (in a particular program, used by a particular user) is a dialect of the main language. Dialects can refine.

Every use of language fall into a universal pattern. One actor wants to send a message. So, the actor takes the data that is in its mind and translates it into some language that will hopefully be understood by somebody other than itself. Then, the actor writes this message into some substrate that is accessible by other actor(s).

At some point later, another actor (maybe the same one) reads the data from the substrate and translates it into some data that is comprehensible and meaningful to the reading actor. There can be multiple receiving actors (multicasting).

That’s it. That’s pretty much everything computers ever do.

Note that actors could be: people, computers, processes, networks, threads, function or method activations, or even the same actor at various points in time.

The substrate can be: computer memory, human memory, hard disks, network signals on a wire, phosphor on a computer screen, light or sound travelling through the air.

The data is generally information of some sort.

The language could be: encoding in human neurons, HTML, a programming language, data structures or bits in memory, records and bytes on disk, a particular set of icons or visual cues in a user interface, colors, sounds, etc.

There are two broad uses of this general pattern:

1. writing: data at rest. Here the data is stored, and the actors tend to be separated substantially through time.

Stored data creates backwards compatibility problems: this is the same problem as written language being written with some assumptions and cultural ideas shifting around it, making it no longer “readable”. In the worst case, the language is lost and nobody can read it at all.

This can be rephrased as: translation is hard because time passes, and the world may change in ways that the old language is lost, misinterpreted, or forgotten.

Examples: databases, books, in memory data structures, generated reports, current state of a user interface, etc

Canonical example: data structures

2. spoken/conversational: data in motion. Here you are communicating between two parties. The actors are usually very close to each other (even realtime). Also, the messaging tends to be bidirectional: a message is sent, and then the receiver replies to the sender.

This is inherently a translation problem. In the best case, the two communicators know each other intimately and there is very little (not none) loss of information. In the worst case, the two communicators share very little common understanding, and only very limited information can pass between them.

Examples: API calls, queries + results, messaging, RPC, user actions in user interface

Canonical example: API call (which has a two-way messaging component: the passing of information TO the function activation, and the passing of the result BACK from the function activation, so maybe this isn’t a great canonical example.

These two uses are identical. Each of them is communication between two actors at some point in time. One actor translates its intent into some new language, and then writes this language into a substrate that the receiver has access to. Then, the receiver reads the data in this language and translates it into something meaningful for himself. Note that there are two levels of translation, and a storage aspect to all communication. What we usually call “data at rest” is just a mechanism by which we can communicate with actors (perhaps ourselves even) that live in the future.

Translation is pretty much always lossy. There are lossless translations (lossless compression, pig latin), but for the most part, you are translating meaning and not just structure (Tao Te Ching to english, Cerner to Epic)

Made worse by the fact that people using a particular system are actually creating their own dialect through use: “misusing” fields, stylized work habits: this leads to the “broken” data that needs periodic “cleanup”. It’s not dirty data: it’s just in a dialect that you don’t understand, with its own idioms, etc.

Standards are just language definitions. They don’t solve the problem.

Most languages are domain specific.

Computers, processes, threads, groups of processes are people (or groups/committees) of people. Communicating between two processes or two computers is analogous to communicating between a computer and a person.

Computers are people (single autonomous processing units). Processes are like alters in a DID sense - that is, they are more or less separate people.

Algorithms are weird. They basically tell the computer-people what to do, and how to interpret and transform and whatever. It’s like neurons in our heads. There is also languages, data, and translations, but here it’s describing LOGIC, which is basically what the computer-people should do. They generally are logic for manipulating stored data and sending messages in various languages.

What about AJAX and other “rich” UIs? They are a more complex beast.

What about static typing? This is an odd one. Basically, static typing (and, really, dynamic typing that fails at runtime when you violate constraints) is telling the computer what the rules of the language are. Hence, XSDs, relational schemas, Java static types, pre and post conditions, etc are all forms of typing. They prevent violations of the language when writing algorithms, to make writing algorithms easier.

Alternatives are: comprehensive unit tests.

This kind of typing (and strong contract definitions in general) are a good thing, in balance. When many people, or people from different organizations, etc, are going to write significant amounts of programs or data in a certain language, it is nice to be able to say: this was “good” or this was “bad”.

On the other hand, static typing can bloat the bejeezus out of any program that has to do anything with dynamic data (read: all of the big ones), including: reading comma delimited files, relational data, XML, build user interfaces, etc, etc.

Template languages? They’re all about language translation. Language translation generally consists of two parts: reading the data of relevance into some intermediate language that is easy for a program to deal with (say, loading relational data into an in-memory data structure that represents meaningful business objects), and then generating some target language (say HTML or some such). Templates are a nice way for humans to express things in output languages: the program itself (the template) has the same general “form” and “shape” as the generated output. Some compiler backends use templates, as do UI frameworks and obviously report writing and HTML generation.

Blog moved...

2010-02-10T21:51:00.003-05:00

My blog has moved to blogspot (they're discontinuing the support of ftp upload). Kindof sucks, but here I am now.

CNC Haps: started a new Y axis, and Toner Transfer fun!

2009-11-15T20:17:00.002-05:00

Long time no write...

I've been busy recently working on more CNC fun-ness.

In particular, I'm trying a form of building a CNC axis with OSB (Oriented Strand Board, AKA chipboard, used for house sheathing).

Ugly, horrible wood, but unbelievably cheap: $8CAD per 4x8 sheet, 3/4 inch thick.

I'll take some pictures at some point (I'm in my pyjamas and my camera is upstairs!), but my scheme is to try to build an axis (and, if that works out, a whole machine) based on adjustable, simple construction using only OSB, 2x4 scrap, and wood screws. I'm using found printer bearings and linear slides (cheat), but my final design will probably use skate bearings and pipe of some sort.

So far, I've built an axis and carriage that slides nice and smooth, and mounted a hardware store coupling nut underneath (one of those long nuts). With a hand drill and a piece of threaded rod, it runs nicely.

My goal thus far (and still) is to build a DC gearmotor-based servo setup with feedback loop control. My current prototype is using a partially disassembled optical mouse wired to my Arduino. It reads changes in position accurately, but loses some ticks over long runs. It may not be accurate enough for my needs. We'll see. I still have to try improving the mousing surface (I figured just putting paper down for the mouse to run on. OSB is a pretty terrible mousing surface! :-) )

Next steps are to mount a drill motor and chuck, cut a piece of threaded rod to length, and use a bit of white plastic cutting board at the other end of the threaded rod for a bearing. Based on this, I'll write a little Arduino sketch that drives the thing around, and see how it all goes. Should be fun. :-)

I found a good source of skate bearings. Used rollerblades. At a church bazaar I was at this weekend, I got a pair of inline skates for $1. Each skate had 8 bearings, so each bearing cost me 6 1/4 cents. :-) I wish I'd picked up a few more pair. You can sometimes get them for free, too. Nobody wants old dirty nasty inline skates. Except me! :-) ABEC-1 bearings, nothing too great, but they spin nice, and should be good enough for my junkbot.

Finally, I'm sold on the wonders of toner transfer PCBs. I tried it twice tonight (the first one turned out backwards, and I didn't iron it quite enough), and the second time came out as close to perfect as I can imagine. I'm going to try the hydrochloric acid/hydrogen peroxide scheme talked about on the Net for etching -- trip to the hardware store in my future.

For reference, I've got an HP LaserJet 4mp - nice workhorse of a printer. I use generic brand Staples (Canada) HP compatible toner cartridges. I am using this week's Wal Mart flyer (glossy, thin, low quality paper) to print on. Scrub the board with a green scrubby, put the printed (reversed) circuit on the board, set a clothes iron real hot, and just press the heck out of it. Soak in an inch or so of soapy water, rub the paper a bit, then slowly remove. Then scrub the result with your fingertips.

I'm going to make 3 DC motor drivers based on the LM18200T. Simple circuits, just some female headers, a few components, and the IC. I've got some heat sinks I've ripped out of old electronics that should fit the 18200s.

Cool stuff. I'm enjoying it.

Oh yeah -- also, I discovered the joys of Active Electronics! They've got a retail outlet here in Ottawa, and it's awesome.

Disturbing.

2009-09-16T19:58:00.003-04:00

I find this very disturbing:

http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2009/09/the_trouble_with_sustainabilit.shtml

Is it just me, or is it clear to others that there are too many people on the earth, and that trying to shore up the alarmingly dwindling resources using technology is just delaying the inevitable. Some crash must come, just as though we were an island overpopulated by rabbits.

Why is this not obvious?

British finally own up to destroying Turing

2009-09-14T09:19:00.001-04:00

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20571

This is awesome. The treatment of Turing is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.

Gordon Brown is good to own up to this.

Today

2009-08-21T22:09:00.000-04:00

Today is the first day of the rest of my life.

For real.

Energy and Human Existence

2009-08-08T15:11:00.003-04:00

Weighty title. :-)

I recently read the netbook Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air, and found it quite thought provoking.

In particular, showing energy production and consumption in terms of kWh/d/person I find refreshing. Finally, somebody telling you something comprehensible.

The most interesting thing to me, however, was the insight (not horribly profound, just I hadn't had it before) that really all of life is an energy game.

Microbes burn energy to get to nutrients, which gives them energy.

Plants consume energy from the sun and use it to grow.

Wild carnivores use energy to catch prey, which gives them energy.

Some odd edge cases occur, as well.

If wild carnivores consume too much prey, then their source of energy is depleted. They need to either (a) find another source of energy, use another strategy, or (b) die.

Thinking of energy availability in terms of kWh/day/person is fun: if you have twice the people, the available energy per person goes down by half. If you have half the people, the available energy per person doubles.

This is the same as the wild carnivore. If there's lots of prey, the available energy per individual is high. Their life is good, so they breed. At some point, their prey is diminished or their numbers get too high. Either way, their available energy per person is too low, and they die off.

Humans are an interesting case. First, we discovered tribes/cooking/intelligence/agriculture/whatever that made us successful. All of the advantages conferred by these advances are in terms of increased available energy per individual. Life was good.

Life was so good that in many cases, human have outstripped their available energy. Forests are felled (all the energy in the wood is gone), mines are mined out, cropland is occupied, oil reserves are consumed, power grids can't keep up, whatever.

Really, this is very similar to the wolves that eat all the rabbits and then don't have any rabbits left. The only difference is that humans are creative enough that when one energy source runs dry, they move on to another one. And we're getting more and more creative all the time.

The trick, however, is that in all cases in nature, when life is good (which it still is for people), the population grows (which we're doing) until the energy is consumed (which it will be). Then, there's the big die-off.

We haven't reached that yet.

Environmentalists have been predicting doom for a long time. Leave aside the fact that environmentalists often have bizarre views on the world that don't quite match reality. The essential truth is that they're right. If we keep consuming energy, and keep increasing our population, we will eventually die out. It's nature, it's inevitable.

We need to do one of a few things to avoid this fate:

(1) come up with more sources of energy.
(2) consume less per individual
(3) stop growing / decrease our population

(1) is what we're mostly doing now. Some of the sources of energy are nonrenewable (like most sources of energy, just like the rabbits for the wolves), and will eventually be depleted. Some sources are renewable, but will still be consumed if our population keeps increasing. In the end, as long as we remain on this planet, this option can't work on its own.

There are other issues here as well. Consumption of energy costs more than just the energy itself. Pollution is a well known one, but the scarier one is global warming.

We may be seeing some global warming now, based on carbon emissions. This is largely irrelevant, I say, in view of the real risk.

Say we avoid this, somehow reduce carbon emissions, and everybody's life is good again. In the best case scenario, we find an essentially limitless source of free, nonpolluting energy. Say we perfect cold fusion.

All of the energy consumed from this clean limitless source would do something, but ultimately end up as heat energy. All of this heat energy would be generated where people are consuming the energy (say on the surface of the earth). If we manage to have an unbounded population and energy consumption, we're essentially piping the heat of a sun onto the earth. This is going to really screw up our living conditions.

So, short of leaving the planet (which is an option, at some point, although seeming increasingly unlikely with the current space climate), this is a dead end.

(2) is more interesting. Say we could get everybody (through a miracle) to cut their personal energy consumption down to 1/100th of what it is now. Note that this involves eating less, having fewer hobbies, heating and cooling less, probably moving less (you'd need to eat more). Eliminating all personal hobbies and entertainment.

Now, this is going to be a very difficult thing to do. It's basically like saying to the wolves: now eat fewer rabbits, please, and sleep more. It goes against our profound animal nature. As individuals, we want to grow, to succeed, to have more leisure time, to consume more energy.

This goes against our hard wiring. When energy is plentiful, we want to consume it. We strive consume available free energy.

Maybe you could do it. Probably the easiest way is to eliminate all culture and degenerate to a primitive society without modern conveniences. Cook everything you eat. Walk to get places.

This buys us time. Basically, if there's more energy to go around, then (nature says) the population will increase until we consume it again.

Which brings us to (3). This is by far the easiest solution, but it's the one nobody ever talks about. Sterilize 1/2 of the population at random, and the problem goes away in one generation, probably without much social upheaval. Oh, but this goes against our natural rights as creatures that live upon the earth! Can you imagine the riots? You can't even enforce parenting classes for new parents, let alone question their inalienable right to breed and reproduce.

No wonder, this is the fundamental force of nature as well. We're hard wired to increase our population when things get better, when energy is freely available. Going against this hard wiring will obviously ruffle some feathers.

So, we can't keep using more energy. We aren't likely to force people to change their lifestyles. We'd be shot politically if we proposed decreasing the population.

We have two more choices: (A) go into space, and hopefully (randomly) find another inhabitable planet, or (B) give up and prepare for the worst.

These are pragmatic options.

(A) is a nice dream, and I'm all in favor of it. I'm furious when the space program languishes - it may be our one real chance to do something here. Unfortunately, as an individual, there's not much you can do about it.

(B) is more interesting. Survivalists have been saying this for years: a plague, or a war, or something will bring down society, and they'll have to survive. Maybe this is true. Eventually, we're going to run out of energy, and they'll have been proven right. Will it happen in our lifetime? Maybe, maybe not.

What can you do about it? The real question here is what kind of society do you want to have after the crash? Do you want it to be a regression to primitive times, but with guns and Mad-Max style gang warfare? Do you want to lose our culture, our knowledge, the legacy of the human race?

It's unlikely that things will go quietly. It's a depopulation, obviously, and the depopulated will be unhappy about it. They'll fight. Lots of things will be destroyed. Society will likely collapse.

How do we protect the human legacy through these end times? How will the smaller human population that survives the wars have access to our legacy?

This is probably one of the most important problems of our day. By all means, try to stave off the end, by approximating solutions (1) (2) and (3).

But work on (A), and fund the space program.

And work on (B) too. Come up with ways of encapsulating knowledge, and spreading it far and wide, in ways that will survive the apolcalypse. Make sure that anybody sifting through the dust and rubble finds LOTS to rebuild with. Build enclaves and such that won't be destroyed somehow.

This we can do something about as individuals. Come up with robust ways of storing knowledge. Come up with easy ways of learning everything we know today.

The beauty of this strategy is that it works no matter what's the cause of the fall. If there's a plague or a bad war, or the goverment just screws up really bad, or terrorists get their act together and kill everybody. Disaster recovery makes pragmatic sense. It's a way cheaper than prevention (there are too many possible avenues of attack, but only one consequence).

Just some random thoughts.

Scene: babbage machine versus child

2009-08-01T20:18:00.002-04:00

A massive mechanical computer, building-sized, beneath the earth. Rusted iron catwalks and ladders run crazily through massive grinding brass and stone gears and clouds of dust. Rotating pillars throughout the structure glow from within with red-hot energy....

traps...

a small child, clutching a leather sack, calling for help as she rides a gear (the catwalk above which gave way). How to get to her before the slowly rising gear crushes her against another? The nearest catwalk is 10 feet away, and looks none too sturdy itself.

Complicated by: once involved in rescuing the girl, an attack by the guardians of the machine: tiny dexterous gremlins that grasp and claw, dressed in leather vests with dozens of pockets, wielding vicious curved wrenches.

The sack contains a tiny device: a glowing gemstone surrounded by several oddly shaped moving silver gears. What is its purpose? The girl does not know.

Age versus Earth

2009-08-01T20:12:00.003-04:00

An ancient man, crackling with arcane energies. Passing birds are electrocuted, and fall to the earth with a dull thud, smelling of cooked chicken.

Locked in a standoff conflict with:

A creature made of stone, earth and clay, bits of turf still attached, a gopher trying desperately to dodge the electricity.

Impossible to damage or destroy either participant, but they could damage each other with a little help.

Who to help?

Made more difficult by the fact that once involved in the battle, one or both sides summon reinforcements: either nearby plants and stones rise up in defense of the earth creature, or dozens of shockingly beautiful flying ethereal creatures come down to defend the ancient man.

After resolution, a previously unseen cloaked figure hiding nearby vanishes into a tornado-like cloud of leaves and dirt.

The Story of Stuff

2009-08-01T15:43:00.002-04:00

An interesting video, well produced, that talks about where stuff comes from, and where it goes.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

Politically charged, of course, but not nutty.

I find this INCREDIBLY funny...

2009-08-01T10:25:00.002-04:00

This is incredibly surreal to me:

Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.

Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, New York Times

And... they don't even get to EAT the food!

More pictures of the aluminum melt

2009-07-22T20:33:00.003-04:00

Melting Aluminum

Thanks to Jessica, I've got a bunch more photos of my first aluminum melt. Enjoy!

I took an old aluminum ladder that was hanging around the property and chopped a bunch of chunks off of it tonight. Getting ready for my second melt. :-)

I melted aluminum!

2009-07-19T16:59:00.005-04:00

Melting Aluminum

Note: this is very dangerous. Melted aluminum is hot enough to vaporize human flesh. Dropping molten aluminum on water causes flash vaporization and hurls the molten metal everywhere, like a fragmentation grenade. Be VERY CAREFUL if you do this. In a world of way too many stupid warning signs everywhere, this is a warning that is very real: take it very seriously.

A long time dream come true: I melted aluminum this afternoon!

I've wanted to do this for a long time now: I never believed it would be particularly difficult, and I was right! Anybody can melt aluminum for practically free. :-)

I've always had a thing about recycling - I generally am against it, giving away my valuable materials for somebody else to benefit from: on the other hand, I have no way of taking advantage of them myself.

Melting aluminum changes that. I can make cast metal objects, and keep my own aluminum. Aluminum is a valuable metal, but it's essentially free - you can get free aluminum garbage everywhere: people mostly want you to haul it away. :-)

First, I took a couple of coffee cans (free off Kijiji). The first coffee can was going to be my fire chamber. I drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom of it for airflow.

The second coffee can was going to be my air chamber. I Dremelled a round hole near the bottom of the can for the forced air to come in. The fire chamber had to sit on top of this can, and to make it secure, I chopped slits down the side of the air chamber can so that it could expand and grab hold of the fire chamber can.

Next, I got an old blower out of a fume extractor (free off Kijiji). I wired a Decora lightswitch to it (free from my junk box from previous home renovations ), and a mains power cord (free from a dead hair dryer I got from Crystal at work). I built a air director from the wide rectangular output port on the blower to a small round hole that matched the hole in the air chamber. This was made out of aluminum foil (free-ish from Lisa's cupboard), and taped with foil tape (free from previous home renos).

Lisa got me a bean can (free from her cupboard), I bent a spout on it with pliers, drilled two holes near the top, and made a loop of steel single strand fence wire (free from our quarter mile spool that we use for fencing) as a handle. Instant cheap crucible. Won't last too many melts, but for free, can't complain!

Finally, I filled the fire chamber up with charcoal ($10 for an expensive bag of lump charcoal at Home Depot - it's all they had) packed around the crucible. Doused with lighter fluid ($5 at Home Depot), it started easily. Once the flames died down a bit, I turned on the blower, and was rewarded with a dull roar of fire. Soon, the bean can glowed red hot. I dropped a bunch of crushed soda tins (free garbage) into the fire, they melted, and I poured the aluminum out into a coffee can of sand.

Basically free. The only thing I paid for was the charcoal, of which I used probably 50 cents or so, and the lighter fluid, which I used pretty aggressively, but still -- this was a super cheap project.

If you're even cheaper, you can make your own charcoal. :-)

The result was the awesome ingot in the pictures! Hooray! This was awesome!

The furnace itself held up very well. It's still outside with cooling coals in it. The label burned/melted off, but otherwise, it's in good shape. The crucible also held up well. I wouldn't trust it through too many melts (I don't want to lose aluminum), but it's fine for single use melting.

I used around 8 cans (I didn't count beforehand), hammered flat with a hammer. The ingot (or rather, "mishapen blob" :-) weighs 1.95 ounces. I didn't weight the slag, but I got about 1/3 aluminum by volume. The slag is pretty neat nasty looking stuff. It's still outside also.

A fun project. Recommended (but heed the warnings at the beginning of this post!)

Fixed my MacBookPro noisy fan for free!

2009-04-12T19:45:00.004-04:00

Fixing MacBookPro noisy fan for free

I've had a very irritating (and worrisome) noisy MBP fan for a few years now. It was the right fan, by the right speaker.

It got worse today. Which is irritating: I figured that I'd have to bring it into a service center, or the fan would die, and my MBP would overheat, and worse things would happen.

So I read around online, and found one guy who replaced it himself. He bought a replacement fan online, and put it in.

I read around some more, and some people tried lubricating it, etc.

I've had luck fixing power supply fans before with a bit of light machine oil and a good cleaning, so I thought: what the heck, how hard could it be? I mean, I spend most of my waking hours taking apart electronics, the only difference is that I want this one to work again when I'm done. :-)

So I tore it all down, and took the fan out (thank you iFixit.com for detailed teardown directions). It was quite easy: even the dreaded front of the case stickiness wasn't too bad: I guess I'm used to that by now: I just eased it open with my little pry tool I have for just such occassions. Only a couple little nicks to give my MBP character. :-)

I took the fan out, and sure enough there was some dust. I cleaned it out, and read the fan: apparently it's just a little +5V job. I hooked it up to my bench power supply, and it ran silent (+5V to red and ground to black, in case you're doing this yourself). Nice.

I reinstalled it in the computer, and before plugging it back into the motherboard, I hooked it up again to 5V: still silent. :-) So then I reassembled it.

I had two scares:

1. I didn't follow the iFixit.com advice, and I didn't actually unplug the keyboard from the motherboard. I just swivelled it sortof out of the way (you can see in the pictures). Once I forgot though, and kindof yanked it, and it came partially unplugged. So then I plugged it back in and all was well.

2. I put all my screws on a piece of paper, labelled. I thought about it at the time, be careful not to bump it. Then, when I grabbed wires to hook up the fan to my bench top power supply, I bumped it. Luckily, nothing went far (about a half an inch move), but I nearly had a heart attack.

I turned it on, and I now am the proud owner of a silent MacBook Pro. It's amazing. In all the years I've had this thing, it's chugged along. Now it sounds like a brand new computer! Just to make sure the fan was still operating (maybe it was TOO silent!), I cranked it up with smcFanControl, and sure enough, the fan still works.

I'm so happy.

Oh: I forgot. I don't own an T6 Torx driver. So I just used a .05 hex key: it works fine.

Z axis begun

2009-04-12T18:32:00.002-04:00

Free CNC Machine

Built a support structure for the Z axis today -- the first time I've used my sliding miter saw to do half lap joints. It turned out pretty well. :-)

Now I just need a motor and some sort of carriage, and I'll be set.

The software is working out pretty well, although there were some odd artifacts in the plots today that I want to investigate. Also, the stepper on my Y axis stopped working for a while. I am suspicious it overheated: I might need to do a chopper current limiter on my driver circuits, but it started working again, so that's fine.

The fan on my MacBook Pro got noisier again. :-( At some point I'll probably have to replace it.

A little further towards a CNC machine

2009-04-11T22:37:00.003-04:00

Free CNC Machine

Big progress yesterday and today.

First of all, I wrote a bunch of new software to drive the mill. My basic architectural choice was to let the firmware draw lines only, and do smart buffering to drive all curves from the host machine. With some care, the buffer size on the Arduino can be quite large.

I've defined a virtual machine on the Arduino to handle a stream of operations. A timer interrupt sits and loops and reads and processes instructions off the queue. A series of registers are used that can be updated or read by instructions.

The interesting twist in this VM is that each instruction can take a fair bit of time to execute. One instruction, for example, is GO, which travels in a straight line at the current feedrate to the point defined by the X, Y, and Z registers. The timer loop is controlled by the feedrate, and each time through the loop, the same instruction's SLICE function is called (as in timeslice), and it does one step or whatever. Other instructions are LOADX, LOADY, GORELXYZ - it's a CISC machine, and the instruction set will be optimized to keep the mill busy with the constraints of the queue.

Also, Philippe (a friend from work) came over yesterday. His kids came to see the goats and sheep, and he came to drop off some awesome old electronics. :-) He brought a bunch of stuff, but one critical piece he brought was a scanner. I couldn't leave it alone, so I stripped it down, and replaced the Y axis on my machine with the scanner. It works good! :-) It's nicer to put objects on.

I drew a few more houses with the machine (my only interesting program to date) with the new software, holding the pen by hand over the moving bed.

Now all I've got to do is build some sort of gantry for the Z axis to mount on. For starters, I'd be happy with something that would just hold the pen for me. :-)

Very cool. It's coming along! Pictures will be up soon...

Mini Free CNC - Mark 0.1

2009-04-05T21:17:00.002-04:00

So I have my first "working" "CNC" machine. :-) It's actually kindof silly.

As I was scrounging old and dead electronics from around Ottawa, I realized that scanners and dot matrix printers have already got the mechanics and motor control for stepper-powered axes.

So, I took an old scanner and an old dot matrix printer, ripped everything except the motor and the belt-driven gantry out of each, and stacked them on top of one another orthogonally.

Then, I built a couple of L297-based stepper drive circuits on my breadboard, hooked it up to the Arduino, and wrote a little sketch.

Tonight, I have my own 2-axis CNC machine drawing a picture of a house. I have to hold the pen in place by hand, but it does the drawing. :-) It's very neat.

First real success. One more axis, a little more work, and I'll be doing interesting things in no time!

Duinoscope v2.0

2009-03-05T21:33:00.004-05:00

I revised my free Arduino oscilloscope software in a couple of ways: I changed the Arduino side to use the StandardFirmata sketch (one less thing to maintain, and quite a bit faster), and made a number of improvements to the software. In particular, I added support for digital inputs, so Duinoscope is now capable of being a primitive logic analyzer.

The biggest limitation right now is the low sampling rate. I'm going to try a couple of approaches to improve this, but it's already quite useful in handling low frequency signals. I used it to debug my rotary encoder project based on a PS/2 mouse.

Here it is, in all its glory: load it into Processing, follow the embedded instructions, and enjoy!

/*
* Duinoscope: the free Arduino-based Oscilloscope/Logic Analyzer, V2.0
*
* Requires StandardFirmata to be loaded into a connected Arduino.
*
* Hereby placed into the Public Domain.
*
* 2009 by Shawn Vincent   <svincent@svincent.com>
* http://www.svincent.com/
*
* Inspired by source code by an anonymous poster at
* http://accrochages.drone.ws/en/node/90
*
* There are a lot of features that this program *could* have, but
* doesn't.  It is not a high end tool, but it's free, and it's a
* single file Processing sketch.  What can you ask for?  Hopefully
* you'll find it as useful as I have.
*
* The biggest limitation is that the sampling rate is limited by
* Firmata and the refresh rate of the Processing sketch.  The latter
* is not too hard to deal with, I plan to investigate if the Firmata
* limitation is hard to resolve.
*
*/
import processing.serial.*;
import cc.arduino.*;

/*
Instructions for use

1. Build two fonts:
  Courier-48.vlw and Courier-14.vlw
using Tools>Create Font... in the Processing IDE.

Place these fonts in the data/ directory of the sketch.

2. Install the StandardFirmata sketch onto your Arduino.

This sketch can be loaded in the standard Arduino IDE
using File>Sketchbook>Examples>Library-Firmata>StandardFirmata

Upload this sketch to your Arduino using File>Upload to I/O Board

3. Configure as needed

In the Configuration section below, add or remove elements to the
'data' array to configure the scope elements to display and which
pins you would like to monitor.

Advanced: it is possible to do different processing on the inputs
before display.  A sample OhmStream that calculates resistance of
a resistive sensor using a voltage divider is provided.  Others
could be added easily.

3. Run Duinoscope in Processing and enjoy.


*/


// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// ---- Configuration
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

/**
* This array defines the data sources read from the Arduino.  Each of
* them represents a graph on the display.
*
* You can modify this if you like, to change colors or labels, or
* more dramatically, to change the type of data source (so that you
* can see values in Ohms rather than Volts, etc).
*
*/
final DataStream[] data = new DataStream[] {
new VoltStream("analog 0", analog(0), color(255,0,0)),
new VoltStream("analog 1", analog(1), color(0,255,0)),
new VoltStream("analog 2", analog(2), color(0,0,255)),
//     new VoltStream("analog 3", analog(3), color(255,255,0)),
//     new VoltStream("analog 4", analog(4), color(255,0,255)),
//     new VoltStream("analog 5", analog(5), color(0,255,255)),

//     new VoltStream("digital 0", digital(0), color(127,0,0)),
//     new VoltStream("digital 1", digital(1), color(0,127,0)),
//     new VoltStream("digital 2", digital(2), color(0,0,127)),
new VoltStream("digital 3", digital(3), color(127,127,0)),
//     new VoltStream("digital 4", digital(4), color(127,0,127)),
//     new VoltStream("digital 5", digital(5), color(0,127,127)),

//     new VoltStream("digital 6", digital(6), color(255,127,127)),
//     new VoltStream("digital 7", digital(7), color(127,255,127)),
//     new VoltStream("digital 8", digital(8), color(127,127,255)),
//     new VoltStream("digital 9", digital(9), color(255,255,127)),
//     new VoltStream("digital 10", digital(10), color(255,127,255)),
//     new VoltStream("digital 11", digital(11), color(127,255,255)),

//     new VoltStream("digital 12", digital(12), color(255,0,0)),
//     new VoltStream("digital 13", digital(13), color(0,255,0)),

};

public static AnalogPin analog(int pin) { return new AnalogPin(pin); }
public static DigitalPin digital(int pin) { return new DigitalPin(pin); }

// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// ---- Global state
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

/**
* The connection to the Arduino
**/
Arduino arduino;

/**
* Large font used to show the current value of a data source.
*
* Make sure you have these fonts made for Processing. Use Tools...Create Font.
**/
static PFont bigFont;

/**
* Smaller font used to show additional information about the data source.
**/
static PFont smallFont;

// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

/**
* setup: called once
**/
void setup()
{
// Connect via Firmata
String serialPortName = Arduino.list()[0];
try {
arduino = new Arduino(this, serialPortName);
} catch (RuntimeException ex) {
throw new RuntimeException
  ("Could not find an Arduino on "+serialPortName, ex);
}

// force all digital pins to be input pins.
for (int i=0;i<14;i++)
arduino.pinMode(i, Arduino.INPUT);

// set the size of the window to 80% of the screen
// Note: DO NOT USE P2D RENDERER.  For some unknown reason, it causes
// analogRead() and digitalRead() to return spurious values.  Grrr.
// http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1236214804/0
size(screen.width*8/10, screen.height*8/10);

// load the fonts
bigFont = loadFont("Courier-48.vlw");
smallFont = loadFont("Courier-14.vlw");
}

// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

/**
* draw: called to render each frame.
**/
void draw()
{
// once per frame, read stuff from the Arduino.
for (int i=0; i<data.length; i++) {
data[i].readData(arduino);
}

// clear screen to black.
background(0);

// render the graphs
for (int i=0; i<data.length; i++) {
data[i].drawGraph(this,
  0,     height/data.length*i,
  width, height/data.length);
}
}


// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

static abstract class Pin {

protected final int pin;

public Pin(int _pin) { pin = _pin; }

public abstract int read(Arduino arduino);
}

static class AnalogPin extends Pin {
public AnalogPin(int _pin) { super(_pin); }
public int read(Arduino arduino) {
int r = arduino.analogRead(pin);
if (r < 0 || r > 1023)
  System.out.println("Bad value a"+pin+": "+r);
return r;
}
}

static class DigitalPin extends Pin {
public DigitalPin(int _pin) { super(_pin); }
public int read(Arduino arduino) {
return arduino.digitalRead(pin) * 1023;
}
}


abstract static class DataStream {
final int PrevValuesCount = 1000;

private final String name;
private final Pin pin;


private int val = -1;
private int min = -1;
private int max = -1;
private int total = -1;
private int count = 0;

// cyclic buffer
private final int[] prevValues = new int[PrevValuesCount];
private int prevValuesNext = 0;

private final color displayColor;

PImage prevImg;

public DataStream(String _name, Pin _pin, color _displayColor) {
name = _name;
pin = _pin;
displayColor = _displayColor;
for (int i=0; i<PrevValuesCount; i++)
  prevValues[i] = -1; // initialize to undefined.
}

public String getName() { return name; }
public color getColor() { return displayColor; }

public void add(int v) {

// add value to cyclic buffer
prevValues[prevValuesNext] = v;
prevValuesNext = (prevValuesNext+1) % PrevValuesCount;

val = v;

if (min == -1 || v < min) min = v;
if (max == -1 || v > max) max = v;
total += v;
count++;
}

public int getPrevRaw(int i) {
int idx = (prevValuesNext-i) % PrevValuesCount;
if (idx < 0) idx += PrevValuesCount; // normalize negative mod stuff
return prevValues[idx];
}

public abstract String getUnit();


public int getNowRaw() { return val; }
public float getNowCooked() { return cook(getNowRaw()); }

public int getMinRaw() { return min; }
public float getMinCooked() { return cook(getMinRaw()); }

public int getMaxRaw() { return max; }
public float getMaxCooked() { return cook(getMaxRaw()); }

public int getAvgRaw() { if (count == 0) return -1; return total / count; }
public float getAvgCooked() { return cook(getAvgRaw()); }

abstract protected float cook(int v);


static float toVolts(int analogPinValue, float minValue, float maxValue) {
return round(map(analogPinValue, 0, 1023, minValue, maxValue), 10.0);
}

void readData(Arduino arduino) {
add(pin.read(arduino));
}

/**
* Render the current graph for the given data stream.
**/
void drawGraph(PApplet applet, int x, int y, int width, int height) {

// calculate some stuff useful throughout this method.
final int labelWidth = 300;
final int bottomPx = y + height;

// hack: don't draw right to the top.
height -= 1;

// Draw out the detail data smallish.
drawTextualSummary(applet, x+width-labelWidth, y);

int graphWidth = width-labelWidth;


// draw the max/min/avg line - kindof cute feature
{
  // max
  applet.stroke(50, 0, 0); // dark red
  int maxV = getMaxRaw()*height/1024;
  if (maxV >= 0)
applet.line(x, bottomPx-maxV-1, x+graphWidth, bottomPx-maxV-1);

  // avg
  applet.stroke(0, 50, 0); // dark green
  int avgV = getAvgRaw()*height/1024;
  if (avgV >= 0)
applet.line(x, bottomPx-avgV-1, x+graphWidth, bottomPx-avgV-1);

  // min
  applet.stroke(0, 0, 50); // dark blue
  int minV = getMinRaw()*height/1024;
  if (minV >= 0)
applet.line(x, bottomPx-minV-1, x+graphWidth, bottomPx-minV-1);
}

// draw the actual graph line
applet.stroke(getColor());
int prevValuesCount = graphWidth - 20;
int prevRaw = getPrevRaw(1);
for (int i=2; i<prevValuesCount; i++) {

  // now we know 'curr' and prev'
  int currRaw = getPrevRaw(i);

  // if the value exists, draw the line.
  if (currRaw >= 0) {
// scale to the size of the widget
int prevV = prevRaw*height/1024;
int currV = currRaw*height/1024;

applet.line(x+i-1, bottomPx-prevV-1, x+i, bottomPx-currV-1);
  }

  // keep track of prev
  prevRaw = currRaw;
}

// draw lines between each graph
applet.stroke(70, 70 ,70);
applet.line(x, bottomPx, x+width-1, bottomPx);
}

/**
*
**/
void drawTextualSummary(PApplet applet, int x, int y)
{
int now = getNowRaw();
float nowV = getNowCooked();

int min = getMinRaw();
float minV = getMinCooked();

int max = getMaxRaw();
float maxV = getMaxCooked();

int avg = getAvgRaw();
float avgV = getAvgCooked();

applet.textFont(smallFont);

int smallOffset = 5;

int curY = y;

// draw the name of the data source in the data source color (legend)
applet.fill(getColor());
applet.text(getName(), x+smallOffset, curY+=14);

// draw the rest of the values in white.
applet.fill(255);
applet.text("min: " + pad(concise(minV), 7) + getUnit()+" " + min,
   x+smallOffset, curY += 14);
applet.text("max: " + pad(concise(maxV), 7) + getUnit()+" " + max,
   x+smallOffset, curY += 14);
applet.text("avg: " + pad(concise(avgV), 7) + getUnit()+" " + avg,
   x+smallOffset, curY += 14);

// Draw out the current cooked values biggish
applet.textFont(bigFont);
applet.fill(getColor());
applet.text(pad(concise(nowV),7) + getUnit(),
   x+smallOffset, curY+=48);
}

}

public class VoltStream extends DataStream {
private final float minValue;
private final float maxValue;

public VoltStream(String _name, Pin _id, color _displayColor) {
   this(_name, _id, _displayColor, 0, 5);
}

public VoltStream(String _name, Pin _id, color _displayColor,
     float _min, float _max) {
   super(_name, _id, _displayColor);
minValue = _min;
maxValue = _max;
}

public String getUnit() { return "V"; }


protected float cook(int v) { return toVolts(v, minValue, maxValue); }

}

public class OhmStream extends DataStream {
private final float otherResistorOhms;

public OhmStream(String _name, Pin _id, color _displayColor,
    float _otherResistorOhms) {
   super(_name, _id, _displayColor);
otherResistorOhms = _otherResistorOhms;
}

public String getUnit() { return "ohm"; }


protected float cook(int v)
{
float vOut = toVolts(v, 0, 5);
float vIn = 5.0;


/*
Voltage divider theory says:

vOut = R2/(R1+R2)*vIn

Through simple transformations, we can get:

R1 = R2 * (vIn - vOut) / vOut
*/

return otherResistorOhms * (vIn - vOut) / vOut;
}

}


// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------



static String concise(float v) {
if (v == 0 || v == Float.NaN
|| v == Float.NEGATIVE_INFINITY || v == Float.POSITIVE_INFINITY)
return String.valueOf(v);
else if (v>1000000)
return round(v/1000000.0, 10.0)+"M";
else if (v>1000)
return round(v/1000.0, 10.0)+"K";
else if (v<0.001)
return round(v*1000.0, 10.0)+"m";
else if (v<0.000001)
return round(v*1000000.0, 10.0)+"u";
else
return String.valueOf(v);
}

static float round(float v, float factor) {
return round(v*factor)/factor;
}

static String pad(String s, int size) {
if (s.length() >= size)
return s;
return "                                                     "
.substring(0,size-s.length()) + s;
}

Mouse Destruction Part Two

2009-02-22T12:44:00.001-05:00

Mouse Destruction

So, now that I've got the basic exploded mouse working, the next step is to make it useful.

Basically, I want to have a wheel of some sort that acts as a precision odometer. For this, I need a rotating shaft that holds the mouse encoder wheel, and some sort of enclosure that holds the sensor in alignment. Also, I'd like the whole thing to be essentially dustproof.

My first attempt was educational, but ultimately a failure. I was hoping that the solid 24gague wires I wired the thing together with would be solid enough to hold the sensor in position. Unfortunately, it just wasn't stable enough.

To hold my encoding wheel, I am using a shaft that I scrounged off of something (probably a floppy drive or CD-ROM). I've got a dozen or so of these.

I cut the encoder wheel with a hobby saw, so that it was just the wheel with a hole in the middle (if your mouse is different, you may also need to drill a hole). I put some electrical tape around the shaft to make it thicker, and friction fit the encoding wheel onto it. This part seems to have worked out very well.

Earlier, I had bought a bunch of tiny tupperware containers from the dollar store - something like 9 or 12 for a dollar. They're a perfect size to hold everything, and have the bonus of being dustproof.

For my first attempt at mounting the shaft in the container, I just drilled some holes through the side of the container to hold the shaft. I started out with small holes, and gradually grew them until they were big enough. On one side, I did a final ream of the hole with the drill at an angle, so I could get the shaft in.

This part worked ok-ish. The shaft rotates well against the tupperware plastic. The main issue I have here is with side-to-side movement. I don't own any shaft collars, so I tried electrical tape and plastic. It worked poorly, and I had too much side-to-side play. I need a better solution for holding the shaft in place. Maybe I'll just break down and buy something. :-(

Next, I needed to put the sensor in place. I cut a rectangular hole in the side of the container for the ethernet jack with a utility knife. To ensure a tight fit, I started with a small hole, and gradually enlarged it until the jack just snapped in place.

This part worked well. The ethernet jack holds tight.

Finally, I tried to line up the sensor, by simply bending the wires and putting it in place. In the end, this worked very poorly. I was able to get it to operate, but not consistently. I tried putting some plumber's putty in the container to help hold things in place, but it didn't help.

In the end, the problem seems to be twofold: the shaft has to have less side-to-side play, and the sensor needs to be fixed in place relative to the wheel. Otherwise, if the ethernet jack is stressed, or the container is moved, you lose precision. The fact that the container can flex makes things worse.

I think you could use this design as-is, but it would always be finicky and unreliable. The whole point of this thing is to have a reliable position sensor so I can use cheaper motors and simpler controls. So it's back to the drawing board.

I think my next attempt might involve some rigid plastic from a cutting board, to help build more of a structure to attach things to.

Oscilloscope, Finds, and the mouse-thing finally works!

2009-02-21T20:14:00.004-05:00

*pant pant*...

So I got my mouse/rotary encoder project working (finally). It's kind of a story, though.

It didn't work at first at all. Just dead. I did some testing and thinking, and realized I'd hooked one of the wires up wrong. So I fixed that.

And it still didn't work.

The real problem was the lack of test equipment. I don't have an oscilloscope to use, and trying to diagnose with a multimeter doesn't really work (Aside: I'm still using the same multimeter that my Grandma Brower gave to me when I was in gradeschool. I love that multimeter).

Anyway, I was getting nowhere fast with the project, so I set it aside for a while.

I started working on some other things, mostly prompted by an awesome find on Kijiji.

Some guy in Orleans was giving away a whole bunch of DB-25 connectors. Like, scores of them. He also said in the ad that he had "other components", useful for "robot building".It was like the Universe was creating the perfect siren call for me. How could I resist? Oh yes -- all for free, of course. :-)

We went out there, and brought back 4 or 5 big boxes of things: a huge bag of resistors, the aforementioned db-25 connectors, tons of cables, odd connectors, a bunch of very nice oscilloscope probes, dozens of fans, motors, relays, switches, pots, a true rotary position encoder, some old pneumatic components, tons of old parts from old HP laser printers... it goes on and on and on.

I spent a bunch of time sorting through it all, putting it into nice boxes, sorting the resistors.

I also spent a bunch of time extracting useful parts out of a bunch of my other Kijiji finds: I got a bunch of nice gears, motors, heat sinks, power transistors and MOSFETS, diodes, rectifiers, power resistors, thermisters, optocouplers, switches, pots, connectors, dozens of odd things. I've got quite a stash, now. I sorted all of this, too, so now things can be found. :-)

My sorting system is quite simple. Small parts get put into tiny Zip Lock bags from the dollar store, by type and value. Groups of small parts get their tiny bags rubber banded together. Larger parts go into larger Zip Lock bags, and other bags (if necessary).

These bags then go in one of several places: on my desk in some open tupperware containers (for really common things, like resistors), into a few rubbermaid containers that sit next to my desk (for slightly less common things, like motors), and into a few rubbermaid containers in the basement (for even less common things, like fans). It's very nice.

Then I started using these parts to make stuff...

I made a pair of helping hands using an old massive transformer, some bronze wire, and a couple of alligator clips.

I made a nice power connection center on my AT power supply using an old power supply connector and a terminal board from an old stereo.

Finally, and getting back to our story, I made a "poor man's" oscilloscope, based on the idea of this web page. I've got an Arduino with 6 analog inputs. It makes a nice oscilloscope for dealing with low frequency signals at low voltages (like PS/2 mice!). I based my code on a comment on that page, but pretty much rewrote it. I'm posting it at the end of this post, in case you're interested. I'm placing it in the public domain.

At first, I tried to use the oscilloscope probes. There were various issues with them that I don't understand yet. Maybe a loose connection. Anyway, I switched to using a piece of wire.

Using this oscilloscope, I was able to diagnose my mouse. I took another mouse I hadn't touched, and investigated what sorts of signals it set off. Then I tried mine. Not only did it seem really wonky (and dead!), it started heating up and made a bad smell as I worked on it. Not good. Nothing made any sense. The voltages were all wrong.

Then I put 2 and 2 together. It was the damned cable! One of the 2 ethernet cables I was using was a crossover cable. :-O

Once I found a proper cable, and hooked it all up, everything worked! I hooked the resulting frankensteinian thingamabob up to my Arduino, spun some rotary encoder disks in front of the receivers, and watched as the serial cable told me about positive and negative motion. A wonderful day.

Anyway, here's my version of the Poor Man's Arduino Oscilloscope.

Features:

capable of doing transformative readings (you have to write code to configure it - pin#2 is configured to connect to my thermistor with a 120K resistor voltage divider in the source code below)
shows real time display of all 6 Arduino plugs
simple and pretty clean. I'll probably work on it some more, but it's good enough I think to give it out to folks...

Processing code:



/*
* Oscilloscope Viewer
*
* Based on source code by an anonymous poster at
* http://accrochages.drone.ws/en/node/90
*
*/
import processing.serial.*;

Serial port;


final AnalogDataSource[] data = new AnalogDataSource[] {
new VoltDataSource("analog 0", color(255,0,0)),
new OhmDataSource ("thermistor", color(0,255,0), 120000),
new VoltDataSource("analog 2", color(0,0,255)),
new VoltDataSource("analog 3", color(255,255,0)),
new VoltDataSource("analog 4", color(255,0,255)),
new VoltDataSource("analog 5", color(0,255,255))
};

final int DataSourceCount = data.length;



/**
* make sure you have these fonts made for Processing. Use Tools...Create Font.
*
* "bigFont" is a 48 pt font of some sort. It's what we use to show
* the "now" value.
**/
PFont bigFont;

/**
* "smallFont" is a 14 pt font of some sort. It's what we use to show
* the min and max values.
**/
PFont smallFont;

abstract static class AnalogDataSource {
final int PrevValuesCount = 1000;

private final String name;
private int val;
private final int[] prevValues = new int[PrevValuesCount];
private final color displayColor;

public AnalogDataSource(String _name, color _displayColor) {
name = _name;
displayColor = _displayColor;
}

public String getName() { return name; }
public color getColor() { return displayColor; }

public void add(int v) {

// shift the new values into the array, move everything else over
// by one
for (int i=PrevValuesCount-2; i>=0; i--) {
    prevValues[i+1] = prevValues[i];
}

prevValues[0] = v;
val = v;
}

public int getPrevRaw(int i) {
return prevValues[i];
}

public abstract String getUnit();


public int getNowRaw() { return val; }
public float getNowCooked() { return cook(getNowRaw()); }

public int getMinRaw() { return min(prevValues); }
public float getMinCooked() { return cook(getMinRaw()); }

public int getMaxRaw() { return max(prevValues); }
public float getMaxCooked() { return cook(getMaxRaw()); }

abstract protected float cook(int v);


static float toVolts(int analogPinValue, float minValue, float maxValue) {
return round(map(analogPinValue, 0, 1023, minValue, maxValue), 10.0);
}
}

public class VoltDataSource extends AnalogDataSource {
private final float minValue;
private final float maxValue;

public VoltDataSource(String _name, color _displayColor) {
    this(_name, _displayColor, 0, 5);
}

public VoltDataSource(String _name, color _displayColor,
    float _min, float _max) {
    super(_name, _displayColor);
minValue = _min;
maxValue = _max;
}

public String getUnit() { return "V"; }


protected float cook(int v) { return toVolts(v, minValue, maxValue); }

}

public class OhmDataSource extends AnalogDataSource {
private final float otherResistorOhms;

public OhmDataSource(String _name, color _displayColor,
    float _otherResistorOhms) {
    super(_name, _displayColor);
otherResistorOhms = _otherResistorOhms;
}

public String getUnit() { return "ohm"; }


protected float cook(int v)
{
float vOut = toVolts(v, 0, 5);
float vIn = 5.0;


/*
  Voltage divider theory says:

  vOut = R2/(R1+R2)*vIn

  Through simple transformations, we can get:

  R1 = R2 * (vIn - vOut) / vOut
 */

return otherResistorOhms * (vIn - vOut) / vOut;
}

}

void setup()
{
// Open the port that the board is connected to and use the same
// speed anything faster than 38.4k seems faster than the ADC on
// the Arduino can keep up with.  So, if you want it to be smooth,
// keep it at or below 38400. 28800 doesn't work at all, I do not
// know why. If you turn on smooth() you need to drop the rate to
// 19.2k or lower.  You will probably have to adjust
// Serial.list()[1] to get your serial port.
port = new Serial(this, Serial.list()[1], 38400);

// set the size of the window
size(screen.width*8/10, screen.height*8/10);


// load the fonts
bigFont = loadFont("CourierNewPSMT-48.vlw");
smallFont = loadFont("CourierNewPSMT-14.vlw");
}

void draw()
{
readArduinoData();

background(0);

for (int i=0; i<DataSourceCount; i++) {
renderGraph(data[i],
     0,
     height/DataSourceCount*i,
     width,
     height/DataSourceCount);
}
}

void renderGraph(AnalogDataSource data, int x, int y, int width, int height) {

final int LabelWidth = 300;

int bottomPx = y + height;

int nowRaw = data.getNowRaw();
float nowCooked = data.getNowCooked();

// Draw out the now values with the big font.
textFont(bigFont);
text(pad(concise(nowCooked),7) + data.getUnit(),
 x+(width-LabelWidth+10), bottomPx - 10);

// Draw out the min and max values with the small font.
textFont(smallFont);
drawdata(x+width-LabelWidth+60, bottomPx - 94,
     data);

// draw the lines in green.
stroke(data.getColor());

int prevValuesCount = width-LabelWidth;

for (int i=0; i<prevValuesCount-1; i++) {

// next line draws the line needed to get this value in the
// array to the next value in the array.  the offsets (6+ in
// the next line) were used to get the values where I wanted
// them without having to actually do real spacial
// math. There's a hack in getY that offsets a little, too.

int currV = data.getPrevRaw(i)*height/1024;
int nextV = data.getPrevRaw(i+1)*height/1024;

line(x+i, bottomPx-currV-1, x+i+1, bottomPx-nextV-1);
}

// draw the boxes in gray.
stroke(70, 70 ,70);

// these 5 lines divide the 6 inputs
line(x, bottomPx, x+width-1, bottomPx);

}

static String concise(float v) {
if (v == 0 || v == Float.NaN
|| v == Float.NEGATIVE_INFINITY || v == Float.POSITIVE_INFINITY)
return String.valueOf(v);
else if (v>1000000)
return round(v/1000000.0, 10.0)+"M";
else if (v>1000)
return round(v/1000.0, 10.0)+"K";
else if (v<0.001)
return round(v*1000.0, 10.0)+"m";
else if (v<0.000001)
return round(v*1000000.0, 10.0)+"u";
else
return String.valueOf(v);
}

static float round(float v, float factor) {
return round(v*factor)/factor;
}

static String pad(String s, int size) {
if (s.length() >= size)
return s;
return "                                                     "
.substring(0,size-s.length()) + s;
}

void drawdata(int x, int y, AnalogDataSource data)
{
int now = data.getNowRaw();
float nowV = data.getNowCooked();

int min = data.getMinRaw();
float minV = data.getMinCooked();

int max = data.getMaxRaw();
float maxV = data.getMaxCooked();

text(data.getName(), x, y);
text("val: " + pad(concise(nowV), 7) + data.getUnit()+" " + now, x, y + 14);
text("min: " + pad(concise(minV), 7) + data.getUnit()+" " + min, x, y + 28);
text("max: " + pad(concise(maxV), 7) + data.getUnit()+" " + max, x, y + 42);

}


void readArduinoData() {
String s = "";
while (port.available() >= 3)
{
    // read serial until we get to an "A".
    s = port.readStringUntil(65);
}

// sanity check. make sure the string we got from the Arduino has
// all the values inside.
if ((s.indexOf('B')>=1) & (s.indexOf('C')>=1) &
(s.indexOf('D')>=1) & (s.indexOf('E')>=1) &
(s.indexOf('F')>=1))
{
    // s string doesn't contain an A at the
    // beginning. it's at the end.
    data[0].add(int(s.substring(0,s.indexOf('B'))));
    data[1].add(int(s.substring(s.indexOf('B')+1,s.indexOf('C'))));
    data[2].add(int(s.substring(s.indexOf('C')+1,s.indexOf('D'))));
    data[3].add(int(s.substring(s.indexOf('D')+1,s.indexOf('E'))));
    data[4].add(int(s.substring(s.indexOf('E')+1,s.indexOf('F'))));
    data[5].add(int(s.substring(s.indexOf('F')+1,s.indexOf('A'))));

}

//           data[1].add(int(random(1024)));

}

Arduino code:


#define ANALOGA_IN 0
#define ANALOGB_IN 1
#define ANALOGC_IN 2
#define ANALOGD_IN 3
#define ANALOGE_IN 4
#define ANALOGF_IN 5

void setup() {
Serial.begin(38400);
}

void loop() {
int val[5];

val[0] = analogRead(ANALOGA_IN);
val[1] = analogRead(ANALOGB_IN);
val[2] = analogRead(ANALOGC_IN);
val[3] = analogRead(ANALOGD_IN);
val[4] = analogRead(ANALOGE_IN);
val[5] = analogRead(ANALOGF_IN);

Serial.print( "A" );
Serial.print( val[0] );
Serial.print( "B" );
Serial.print( val[1] );
Serial.print( "C" );
Serial.print( val[2] );
Serial.print( "D" );
Serial.print( val[3] );
Serial.print( "E" );
Serial.print( val[4] );
Serial.print( "F" );
Serial.print( val[5] );
}

uC Hobby Prize!

2009-02-11T20:39:00.003-05:00

ucHobby Prize

So I had a very long day at work today. Long story. Mostly I was looking forward to going home and seeing my wife and eating a delicious supper (as always) :-).

Lisa picks me up from work (we share a vehicle), and when I get in the van, there is an envelope for me! My prize came!

I never win anything, so maybe I'm making too big a deal out of this. A few weeks ago, uC Hobby had a "make a comment, maybe win a prize" contest. I commented, and soon I was selected as a winner!

This is even cooler, because uC Hobby is one of my favorite sites. I especially like the scrounging sections -- it suits my philosophy of building stuff - rip things out of dead and obsolete electronics, and build it into something new.

Anyway, I just had to show off my prize. It's a series of PCBs for breadboard adapters: some MIDI ports, a pair of terminals, and a prototype board.

Completely unexpectedly, there was also a Really Bare Bones Arduino PCB as well. :-) I love my Arduino, and a tiny Arduino that can be easily embedded in stuff? Extra awesome.

Now I just have to collect the components to populate some of these boards. I'll poke through my stash...

I love this community.

Killing mice is fun

2009-02-06T20:12:00.005-05:00

Mouse Destruction

As one of my first "useful" electronics project, I'm trying to turn an old PS/2 mouse into a modular rotary encoder sensor for my Arduino.

I got a bunch of old computers and miscellaneous hardware off of a local classifieds site: for free! I stripped all the useful stuff out and threw out all the useless bulky metal chassis.

One of the things I got with the free stuff was a bunch of old mice: PS/2, serial, and some newer USB ones. I opened them all up, and chose the most likely one: the emitter/encoder pairs were more isolated from the rest of the board, and the circuit was fairly simple.

I tested it first. I ripped apart an old PS/2 adapter I had for a jack, and plugged the mouse into my Arduino. I used some PS/2 driver code I got off the net to make sure the mouse worked and that I could see the readings on the Arduino. This worked fine.

The rest is simple: score the PC board on each side a bunch of times with a utility knife, and use a pair of pliers to break it off (I actually shattered one of them doing this and had to reconstruct it with superglue).

Next, I soldered wires carefully from the pins of the LEDs and phototransistors to ethernet jacks that I ripped out of old network cards (that also came in the great big boxes of junk I got for free!)

Finally, I followed the traces using a magnifying glass and a continutity tester to likely points on the remaining PC board, and soldered wires from them to additional ethernet jacks.

Lots of continutity testing with an ethernet cable and the various components plugged together, and I'm pretty confident I didn't screw anything up TOO bad. :-) If you look closely at the pictures, you'll probably see my lousy soldering job. I haven't done any significant soldering since high school. 1992 -- 17 years ago! Jesus. I used to be better at it. I think I got a bit rusty. :-)

So I haven't actually plugged it in and tested it yet, and probably won't tonight. I've got to go into the basement and fetch another ethernet cable, and it's time for snacks and TV now. ;-) You have to plug in both sensors for either to work (since the PC board wasn't designed to have them removed...)

Fun properties: the sensors are interchangable (the emitter/detector pairs were identical, and I wired them with the same ethernet pinout).

No real reason why this would fail: maybe the quadrature signals will degrade over a long ethernet cable (and I haven't even got an oscilloscope to test this), or maybe I wired something wrong and I'll have to figure out what, or maybe my lousy soldering job will short something out. But barring odd stuff like that, I'm really just spreading the mouse PC board out, so I see no real reason why it would fail. :-)

Assuming this all works out fine, the next steps are to hack apart the rest of the mouse case to get the rotary encoding wheels and their mounts, and then rig the whole thing up into a box somehow to protect it from dust and set up some kind of real axle.

This whole thing will make a nice sensor in a project I'll do. Not bad for a week of evenings, puttering around with a hobby I haven't touched in 17 years. Wow.

Photos!

2009-01-03T15:38:00.003-05:00

Life around Four Horse Haven

I (finally) got the pictures off of my camera. Embarassingly, the earliest ones were from April of this year, so basically, I haven't offloaded my pictures for a year. :-)

But, they're done, and organized nicely into neat albums on my Picasaweb page. Some of the albums is listed here. The others are there too, just poke around. :-)

I also updated my electronics album.

... aside. Ha! Oliver is asleep beside me, and he's wagging his tail, and now he's nursing. :-) He's very cute. It's all I can do to keep from laughing and wake him up...

Oh yeah. I've uploaded some pictures of the breadboarded circuits to my electronics album - always the intent, I just had to offload them. :-)

I got the PS/2 mouse talking to the Arduino yesterday. I failed to get the USB mouse working with a USB-PS/2 adaptor (I think the mouse doesn't support it). Not thrilled -- I either have to figure out how to chop apart the PS/2 mouse (a pain because it's double sided and much more complicated), or use the USB mouse somehow (unlikely) or get another mouse (with no guarantees). ... big unknown problem #1. I'll figure it out somehow.

Really, a nice lazy day. Did some laundry, fed some goats, hung some hooks yesterday, mostly hung out.

I finished reading Watchmen. Very very good. Worth reading. I stayed up way too late finishing it up.

And, the best thing of all, Lisa is coming back today! Yay!

Motor control achieved!

2009-01-01T16:30:00.005-05:00

Updated: added schematic for circuit.

I just achieved motor control from my Arduino, using an LMD18200 (LMD18200T). I had some minor problems, but, as always, they were entirely due to my choice to use a PC power supply for power. Apparently if you don't bypass the supply voltage properly with capacitors, the spikes generated cause the ATX power supply to stop generating nice voltage.

In the end, though, I was able to control the speed and direction of my 12V cordless drill motor by typing characters at my Arduino through the USB cable.

The LMD18200 got BLOODY hot. I touched it. It hurt my finger. :-) No serious burns, though. Just enough to know that I'm for sure going to need a heat sink of some sort. ... I think it got hot enough to start its overheat protection stuff. After a while, the motor started to cut in and out. These motors are very high amperage.

Very exciting, though. Now if I can get my mouse ideas to work, there shouldn't be much standing between me and CNC goodness (just the 5 or 6 unknown issues). Huzzah!

My first "interesting" circuit

2009-01-01T10:17:00.003-05:00

Here's the first "interesting" thing I've done with my Arduino - a real interactive circuit!

I disassembled 4 strands of LED Xmas lights to chop out the LEDs, and got a whole bunch of superbright blue and white ones. I took apart a dollar store light activated nightlight, and got the photoresistor inside.

Then, based on some sample code on the Internet (heavily modified, and pasted below for your edifitainment), I got the two of them to interact. :-)

The interesting feature of the code below is that it's "self tuning" -- basically, it remembers the range of light readings from the photoresistor, and uses that to map to the entire range of LED brightnesses. It has entertaining properties. It flashes randomly until you start altering the light levels dramatically. If you turn on the lights or do anything really dramatic to change the environment, you can kill the sensitivity, and need to reset the program.

I played around with fading the light on and off (hence the "targetBrightness" and similar stuff below), but was unhappy with the results and just nullified it.

A little hack job to get my feet wet. I love this Arduino. :-)


int photoResistPin = 0; //define which pin for the Photo resistor
int ledPin=9; //define a pin for a LED

void setup() {

Serial.begin(9600);  //Begin serial communcation

}

int highestSeen = 0;
int lowestSeen = 1024;

int currentBrightness = 0;
int targetBrightness = 0;

void loop()
{
int currentReading = analogRead(photoResistPin);
Serial.print("Saw: ");
Serial.print(currentReading); //Write the value of the photoresistor to the serial monitor.

// learn from history: dynamically map brightness range to range actually seen.
if (currentReading < lowestseen =" currentReading;"> highestSeen)
highestSeen = currentReading;

Serial.print("  [");
Serial.print(lowestSeen);
Serial.print(" - ");
Serial.print(highestSeen);
Serial.print("]");

// figure out what our new "target" brightness should be.
targetBrightness = map(currentReading, lowestSeen, highestSeen, 255, 0);

Serial.print("  Want: ");
Serial.println(targetBrightness);

int currentDifference = targetBrightness - currentBrightness;

int stepCount;
if (currentDifference > 0) stepCount = 1;
else stepCount = 1;

currentBrightness = currentBrightness + currentDifference / stepCount;

analogWrite(ledPin, currentBrightness);

delay(20); //short delay for faster response to light.
}

New Hosting Provider, New Hobbies, New Year

2008-12-31T16:38:00.002-05:00

It's been a fun 2008. Lots of good and bad stuff happened. I'll focus on the good.

We got three new animals: Grover (the new goat), Gordon (the new sheep), and Oliver (the new puppy). They are all wonderful pets, and round out our household nicely. :-)

I've switched hosting providers for svincent.com to bring all of our domains under a single control. As a result, there may be a few odd things here and there. I'm hopefully fixing it all up right now.

I've started playing around with electronics again. Kindof like my robot obsession of years past, with a few differences: 1 - the world has changed a lot since then, there's way more available online, and it's easier to learn; 2 - I'm doing it "on the cheap" - scrounging materials and tools where ever possible, living under strict budgets; 3 - I've got a real concrete goal: I want to build a CNC milling machine capable of driving around and cuttin' stuff, for under $200 or so. If I fail, that's ok. It's the process that's fun.

To that end, I got an order from Digi-Key with various electronics bitz and a little solderless breadboard. From RobotShop.ca, I got an Arduino Duemilanove which makes embedded electronics fun and easy. It's very cool -- I've got a few little LED projects going with it already.

I scrounged a few hundered ultrabright white and blue LEDs from some dead Xmas lights from this year, plus a photoresistor from a dollar store nightlight, and built my first little reactive circuit. :-) Fun stuff.

I'm really enjoying playing around with this stuff.

Also, Jessica got me the Watchmen graphic novel for my birthday this year. I'm kindof obsessively reading it (my first time reading it). Awesome so far. :-)

Lots more stuff (and I mean TONS more stuff) happened in 2008, but that's my current trains of thought on it.

Genesis

2008-11-23T08:50:00.001-05:00

The obsession began October 29th 2008.

It began with this blog post.

Then I remembered the ShopBot people.

Then I wondered if you could build one yourself.

And so it began...

Think - Make - Think

2008-11-22T14:24:00.000-05:00

All I want to be,
is someone that makes new things.
And thinks about them.

-John Maeda

Ancestors of Shawn Vincent

2008-02-24T07:09:00.004-05:00

Ok, so wow.

I contacted Erik Wulff about the Larson family tree that I mentioned in my last post.

http://torslev.dk/...

Turns out he built the information in conjunction with Sheila M. Larson from Erwin, SD. I assume this is Sheila Marie Smith who married Larry Allen Larson. She would be my mother's cousin's son's wife. So some sort of Nth cousin, M times removed from me? I never understood this sort of stuff.

He was kind enough to send me a query from his database that starts with me.

Here it is. Awesomeness.

-Shawn.

Ancestors of Shawn Vincent

First Generation

1. Shawn Vincent [11046], son of Don Vincent [11044] and Judy Brower [11023].

Second Generation (Parents)

2. Don Vincent [11044] .

Don married Judy Brower [11023] [MRIN: 3366]. Marriage status: 0.

Children from this marriage were:

i. Christie Vincent [11045]

1 ii. Shawn Vincent [11046]

3. Judy Brower [11023], daughter of Delmer Brower [11022] and Marion Francis Larson [10879].

Judy married Don Vincent [11044] [MRIN: 3366]. Marriage status: 0.

Third Generation (Grandparents)

6. Delmer Brower [11022] .

General Notes: .
More About DELMER BROWER:
Nickname: Del

Delmer married Marion Francis Larson [10879] [MRIN: 3356] in Nov 1950. Marriage status: 0.

Children from this marriage were:

3 i. Judy Brower [11023]

ii. Donna Brower [11024]

7. Marion Francis Larson [10879], daughter of Francis Larson [10826] and Mildred M. Coulson [10876], was born on 18 Mar 1926.^¹

General Notes: .
More About MARION FRANCIS LARSON:
Graduation: 1944, High School
Residence: 1972, Huron

Marion married Delmer Brower [11022] [MRIN: 3356] in Nov 1950. Marriage status: 0.

Fourth Generation (Great-Grandparents)

14. Francis Larson [10826], son of Jeppe Larsen [10827] and Hanne Bæk [10832], was born on 10 Aug 1889 in Erwin, South Dakota, USA ^¹ and died on 4 Jul 1972 in Huron, SD ^¹ at age 82.

General Notes: .
Notes for FRANCIS LARSON:
Per "Erwin: The First 100 Years" - 1987, in a story by Pearl Larson Francis Larson (born Aug. 10, 1889, died July 4, 1972) continued to farm (second generation). He married Mildred Coulson Nov. 30, 1911. Mildred was born Aug 7, 1890 and died May 5, 1965. they had four children: Leslie Edward, Clifford L
eroy, Ruth Mildred and Marion Frances. In 1928 they moved to a farm two miles south of Lake Preston, SD. In 1943 Clifford moved onto this farm and still lives there (1987).
Francis and Mildred had farmed the homestead north of Erwin from 1909 to 1928. In 1943 they moved into Lake Preston, buying Phil Murphy's house. They lived in Lake Preston their remaining years.

From Pearl Larson's scrapbook:
50th Wedding Anniversary Napkin (11/30/1961) - Anniversary celebration was Dec 3rd, 1961 at the Congregational Church, Rev. Horace Smith led the prayer
picture of Francis with Dick Linstrom tat Lutheran Academy at Canton, SD,
Wedding Picture 1911
Picture of Francis Larson & cousin, Alfred Beck in big fur coats
1911 Wedding announcement
1919 picture of many small children including Clifford & Leslie
Picture of first car - a Ford bought from Erickson & collins of Bryant, SD 1917
Francis & Mildred moved their family to a farm south of Lake Preston (per 1928 picture)
Francis & Mildred 50th Anniversary picture and news - per news Fred Coulson was the couple's best man on their wedding day and Mrs. Anna (Larson) Long had been their bridesmaid Francis obituary - He farmed in the Lake Preston and Erwin areas until 1943 when he retired and moved to Lake Preston. Service was at the United Church of Christ, Friday, July 7, 1972, Rev. Beryl Melcher. Mr. & Mrs. Welsey Jones sang a
duet. Pallbearers were Ivan Warner, George Jensen, Edward W. Coulson, Otto Hasche, Clinton Tibbets, Vernon Marquardt.

The May 11, 1910 census shows Francis as head of household, with sister Anna and cousin Christ as the other members of household.

See Marion's reading from Francis and "Millie's" golden wedding anniversary for a charming look at the couple's courtship and life.

More About FRANCIS LARSON:
Burial: July 07, 1972, Lake Preston City Cemetary, Lake Preston SD
Education: Lutheran Academy, Canton, SD
Social Security Number: 504-24-1407

Francis married Mildred M. Coulson [10876] [MRIN: 3290] on 30 Nov 1911 in Erwin, South Dakota, USA.¹ Marriage status: 0.

Children from this marriage were:

i. Leslie Edward Larson [10780] was born on 12 Sep 1912 in Erwin, South Dakota, USA,^¹ died in 1981 ^¹ at age 69, and was buried on 24 Sep 1981 in Lake Preston, South Dakota, USA.^¹

ii. Clifford Leroy Larson [10877] was born on 12 Oct 1914 ^¹ and died in Mar 2000 ^¹ at age 85.

iii. Ruth Mildred Larson [10878] was born on 7 Nov 1916.^¹

7 iv. Marion Francis Larson [10879]

15. Mildred M. Coulson [10876], daughter of Edward Coulson [10885] and Mary Golseth [10886], was born on 7 Aug 1890 in Erwin, South Dakota, USA ^¹ and died on 15 May 1965 in Lake Preston, South Dakota, USA ^¹ at age 74.

General Notes: .. MILDRED M.3 COULSON (EDWARD2, JOSEPH HENERY1) was born August 07, 1890 in Coulson farm, Kingsbury County, Erwin, South Dakota, and died May 15, 1965 in Lake Preston Hospital, Kingsbury County, Lake Preston, SD. She married FRANCIS LARSO
N November 30, 1911 in Mildred's home in Erwin, SD, son of JEPPE LARSON and HANNE BAEK. He was born August 10, 1889 in Erwin, SD, and died July 04, 1972 in St. Johns Regional Medical Center, Beadle County, Huron, SD.

Notes for MILDRED M. COULSON:
From Pearl Larson's scrapbook -
Funeral service at United Church of Christ Tuesday, May 18, 1965, Rev. Joseph Runner. Pallbearers Lyle Waby, Alfred Coulson, Kenneth Golseth, Roy Brown, Alfred Barr, Vernon Marquardt

Mildred died when a blood clot hit the heart. She was in Lake Preston Hospital for a blood check-up, as her blood was low and had black out.
Mildred walked 1 1/4 miles to the Albert Jensen Country School where she took her first eight years of schooling. Because she was needed at home, Mildred stayed and helped her parents. Then on Nov. 30, 1911, Thanksgiving Day, married a ne
ighbor boy, Francis Larson, going to live on his farm three quarters mile south, the Jeppe Larson homestead.
They lived here through a few drought years. As 1928 was no big year. So they moved to a farm south of Lake Preston. Then in 1943 they turned that farm over to son, Clifford Larson and moved into Lake Preston where they bought the home o
wned by Phil Murphy, near the railroad trakcs.

Mildred spent many happy years busy in her garden and flowers. Helping her church and Aid. Then suddenly on May 15, 1965 she passed away in the Lake Preston Hospital when a blood clot hit the heart.
Mildred and Francis celebrated their Golden Wedding December 3, 196a at the United Church of Christ in Lake Preston, SD. Best Man, Fred Coulson was present, but Bridesmaid, Anna Long was unable to. She was in a retirement center in Watert
own and not well.

More About MILDRED M. COULSON:
Burial: May 18, 1965, Lake Preston City Cemetary, Lake Preston SD
Nickname: Millie
Residence 1: 1943, Lake Preston, SD (Phil Murphy house)
Residence 2: Bet. 1890 - 1900, Lived on Coulson farm (N of Larry & Sheila's called "Fred's")
Residence 3: 1900, Moved to town of Erwin
Residence 4: 1911, Jeppe Larson farm
Residence 5: 1928, farm S of Lake Preston (1976 Cliff lived there)

Mildred married Francis Larson [10826] [MRIN: 3290] on 30 Nov 1911 in Erwin, South Dakota, USA.¹ Marriage status: 0.

Fifth Generation (Great Great-Grandparents)

28. Jeppe Larsen [10827], son of Lars Jeppesen [10828] and Ane Margrethe Sørensdatter [10829], was born on 7 May 1854 in Tversted Sogn (1),^² was christened on 5 Jun 1854 in Tversted Kirke,^² and died in Mar 1904 ^¹ at age 49.

General Notes: .
Kirkebogen for Tversted sogn
Fødte drenge 1854, no. 4
Jeppe Larsen, født den 7. maj 1854, døbt i kirken den 5. juni 1854
Forældre.: Husmand Lars Jeppesen og hustru Ane Margrethe Sørensdatter paa Rimmen
.
Census 1855, Tversted sogn
Lars Jeppesen, 48, born Tversted parish
Ane Margrethe Sørensdatter, 41, wife, born Tversted Parish
Christian Larsen, 6, child, born Tversted Parish
Søren Christian Larsen, 4, child. born Tversted Parish
Jeppe Larsen, 1, child, born Tversted Parish
Copy of Jeppe's homestead file from the National Archives And Records Service, Washington DC 20409 mailed to Dale Larson 1/24/1985, the invoice says 26 pages x $0.35 per page - $9.10. Copy Certification says Copy from the National Archives
, Record Group 49, Additional Info, Watertown, Homestead Final Certification File 4270

April 6, 1881 Homestead application #15881 at the "Watertown, Dak" Land office made application for 144.57 acres E 1/2 of SW 1/4 lots 3 & 4, Section 7, Township 112N, Range 54W, final certificate No. 4270.
June 4th 1881 made application to Mitchell land office via Kingsbury county, swearing that he wasa single person over the age of 21. The words "Citizen of the United States" are crossed out leaving "have declared my intention to become a citizen of the United States" and also that he resides on the land and that it is for the purpose of settlement and cultivation. June 16, 1881 paid $13.61 to the Mitchell Land office , via Kingsbury County, for application #15881 for 144.57
acres SW1/4 of 7-112-54, signed "Jappe Larsen".

June 16, 1881 paid $13.61 registration fee to Mitchell Land office for application #15881.
On February 16, 1888 Jappe filed an Intention to Make Final proof at the Land Office at Watertown, D. T. (Dakota Territory), agreeing to appear April 4, 1888 before the Judge in Probate Court in Kingsbury County with witnesses Anton Peterso
n, Martin Nelson, Christ Peterson and Ole O. Bjordal all of Erwin, SD.

March 29th, 1888 Chas. J. Lord publisher of the "Bryant Post" signed an Affidavit of Publication stating that Jeppe Larson's notice of intention had run in his paper for six consecutive weeks.
On April 4, 1888 Jeppe and his witnesses appeared before the Kingsbury County Probate judge and all testified to Jeppe's occupation and improvement of the land. Jeppe's and witness testimony all concurred, that Jeppe had stayed with his brother Soren for two years as he was too poor to make the improvements, but he had worked on the land during that time and had broken 3 acres the first year for wheat, oats and barley, then 11 acres the 2nd year and increasing until 95 acres were broken prior to the 1888 hearing. He had built the house and buildings and lived on the homestead continuously since his marriage "November 16, 1883". To the question, "When and by whom was your house built? Is it habitable at allseasons of the year?", Jeppe answered, "The one I have now, June 10th, 1883. It is." He declared his farm implements owned as "1/2 interest in (sp?) Bariston Wagon Farming Mill section breaking plow cultivator, cross plow dray, 2 horses,16 head of cattle". To the question "Articles of furniture over every kind you keep in your residence and how long you have had them there", Jeppe answered, "2 stoves, 1 bed and bedding, 4 chairs, table, dishes, cupboard (& cans?). Signed
"Jeppe Larson". "The Judge signed Jeppe's Final Affidavit, stating that he was a US Citizen and had lived on the settlement continuously since January of 1882. File includes Jeppe's Certificate of Naturalization.

On April 7, 1888 the Watertown Land Officer certified that a copy of Jeppe's Homestead notice was posted in their office for 30 days beginning February 16, 1888.
On December 19, 1888 the application was "examined' by M. S. Wade. The examination shows that the deadline for date of settlement was not met and includes an explanation, "was poor and did not have means to make the necessary improvementsto get on land within 6 mos". Eventual improvements prior to examination were "House 8 x 24, Barn 24 x 36, Granary 12 x 24, Well, 4 acres in trees and 90 acres broken, total value of improvements $975. Kind of crops: Wheat, Oats, Barley.
Residence claimed: 6 yrs, 9 mos & 19 days. Military service claimed: none. Number of absenses: none since Nov 2, 1883, before that on land at intervals. Claimant's family: Wife & 2 children.

Watertown Land Office receipt, says recommend for Patent and refered to Division "O" January 14, 1889.

The homestead was Patented August 16, 1889.

*********************************
Wedding date per Christ Peterson's testimony on behalf of Jeppe's Homestead application.

****************************************
(The first step of Naturalization being completed in Freeborn County, MN - Jeppe's final Citizenship was granted in Kingsbury County)
Certificate of Naturalization, Territory of Dakota, Kingbury County. In District Court: And now to-wit: At a time of said Court now being held at DeSmet in and for the County of Kingsbury in said Territory upon the forgoing Oath and Affidavits and Further proof having been made by the production of a certificate that the said Jeppe Larsen did before the Clerk of District Court Freeborn County Minnesota the same being a Court of Record having common law jurisdiction, make the requisite declaration of his intention to become a Citizen of the United States and to renounce all other allegiance, as required by the Laws of the United States. It is Ordered by the court. That the said Jeppe Larsen be, and is hereby
Admitted to be a Citize of the United States. By The Court: James Spencer, Judge. C. L. Dawley, Clerk. W. E. Whiting, Deputy. Dated this 1st day of April, 1887.

Jeppe married Hanne Bæk [10832] [MRIN: 3291] on 16 Nov 1883.¹ Marriage status: 0.

Children from this marriage were:

i. Anna Margaret Larson [10872] was born on 29 Oct 1887 in Erwin, South Dakota, USA,^¹ was christened on 21 Nov 1887, and died on 19 Apr 1962 in South Dakota ^¹ at age 74.

14 ii. Francis Larson [10826]

29. Hanne Bæk [10832], daughter of Frands Christiansen Bæk [10863] and Ane Elsine Christensdatter [10864], was born on 22 Feb 1857 in Tversted Sogn (1),^² was christened on 9 Apr 1857 in Tversted Kirke,^² and died on 1 Jul 1897 in Erwin, South Dakota, USA ^¹ at age 40.

General Notes: .
Kirkebogen for Tversted sogn
Født pige.: Hanne Bæk, født den 22. februar 1857, døbt i kirken den 9. april 1857
Forældre.: Frands Christiansen Bæk og hustru Ane Christensen 21 aar af Terpet

Kirkebogen for Tversted sogn
Afgangsliste 1874, no. 29
Hanne Bech, 18 aar, Tjenestepige, afgang til Hjørring

Per East Bethany Cemetery History - 2002
(P/Marker: Hanna/Hanne Larson,) Hanna was a Beck (aunt to Alfred Beck) and married Jeppe Larson. She was born on February 22, 1858 and died on July 1, 1897.
*************************************
Per Pearl Larson's scrapbook - Hanna's name was spelled "Bek" in Denmark, Hanna died of blood poisoning.

Hanne married. Marriage status: 0.

Her child was:

i. Johan Bech [10977] was born on 17 Apr 1881 in Terpet I Tversted Sogn,^² was christened on 9 Oct 1881 in Tversted Kirke,^² and died in 1947 ^¹ at age 66.

Hanne married Jeppe Larsen [10827] [MRIN: 3291] on 16 Nov 1883.¹ Marriage status: 0.

30. Edward Coulson [10885], son of Joseph Henery Coulson [11085] and Mildred J. Armstrong [11086], was born on 21 Nov 1863 in Liverpool, England ^¹ and died on 13 Oct 1942 in California (1) ^¹ at age 78.

General Notes: .
Notes for JOSEPH HENERY COULSON:
From "Erwin: The First 100 Years" in a story by Pearl Larson Joseph Coulson and Mildred Armstrong Coulson came from Liverpool, England to the United States in 1881. They had 11 children: William (never married), John, George (never married), Henry (Frank and Bert Coulson's dad), Thoms (George and A
lys Coulson's dad), Charles (never married), Robert (Alfred Coulson's father), Edward (Fred, Mildred, Hattie and Edith's father), Rebecca (Mrs. Fred Waby) (Mrs. Myrtie Marquardt's mother), Mary (Mrs. Tim Waby), and Ann (Mrs. Billy Brown).
Joseph passed away in 1882, near St. Charles, Minnesota. Mildred came to South Dakota with her son in 1882, and homesteaded northeast of Erwin. They recorded the first claim in 1883.

PL Coulson notebook: "Dorothy Chase tried to find Ed's dad's grave, but church burned and so did the records, no head stone."

More About JOSEPH HENERY COULSON:
Burial: St. Charles, MN
Immigration: 1881, From Liverpool England to St Charles, MN

Notes for EDWARD COULSON:
From "Erwin: The First 100 Years" by Pearl Larson
Edward Coulson was born in Liverpool, England on November 21, 1864 to Joseph and Mildred Armstrong Coulson. He came with his parents to St. Charles, MN in 1881 (PL C1 - spent 1 year in MN near St. Charles where his parents were buried).
After his father's death he came to South Dakota with his mother to land northeast of Erwin. In 1883 he was only 19 years old, too young to homestead land, so he waited until 1888, when he took over the land his mother homesteaded. On May 22, 1888 Edward married Mary Golseth, sister of Knute and Martin Golseth of Erwin. (See Golseth). They had four children; Fred Coulson of Brookings, Mildred (Mrs. Francis Larson) of Lake Preston, Hattie Coulson, now living in a Bro
okings Rest Home, and Edith (Mrs. Dale Dunbar) of Laguna Beach, California. In 1900, Edward and his family moved into Erwin. (Here Edith was born. Bought the first house on the south side, east of the railroad tracks. Continued a little farming. Land west of Erwin sold to Pete Olson). Later he took a job carrying mail (for a few years). Then in 1919, he decided to move to Santa Cruz, California (Hattie and Edith moved with them). Edward and Mary lived there until their deaths, Edward on October 13, 1942. Mildred and Fred remained in South Da
kota.

Pearl Larson's notes:Mildred Armstrong Coulson purchased some land NE of Erwin, SD. Lived in sod shanty until their house was built. Edward being 19 years old could not buy the land as law stated he had to be 21. It was recorded and signed by Grover Clevelan
d in 1883 and in 1888, five years later, when Edward was 22 years old, he bought the farm from his mother.

Ed Coulson sold farm in 1916 to Pete Olson. this is now lloyd Carlsons farm. Ed worked in a hardware store in Erwin. Then carried mail part 1918 & 1919. Moved to Santa Cruz in 1919.
*********************************
See Hattie CoulsonBible Copy
Birthdate information from Hattie Coulson bible has Edward's birthdate as Nov 21, 1863, but obituary has 1864.Bible shows Edward as the last born (after Rebekah) and "Edward Coulson born Novem" is clearly original, but the "21" and probably the "1863" though on Hatties copy, appear not to be the same handwriting as the rest, so Rebekah & Edward's b
-days will take some more research.
*****************************
See 1900 Census, Hartland Twp, Kingsbury County, SD shows Edward Coulson 36, born Nov, 1863.
*****************************
Celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary in 1938.
*****************************Regarding birthplace, a letter from Hattie Coulson to Pearl Larson July 7, 1979 says, "Frances has birthplace South Carlton, never heard that before. Pa always said Lincolnshire, but I belive that ending "shire" means country or township a
s we have here." Also, "I remember pa saying when they came to New York, some went to Canada, who were they?"
*****************************

More About EDWARD COULSON:
Burial: I. O. O. F. Cemetery, California
Education: England
Immigration 1: 1881, From England to St. Charles, MN
Immigration 2: 1872, Per 1900 Census
Occupation: 1900, Mail Carrier
Residence 1: 1883, Hartland Township, SD
Residence 2: 1882, South Dakota
Residence 3: 1900, Erwin, SD - first house on S side E of railroad tracks (1976 Carl Stevens' house)
Residence 4: 1919, Santa Cruz, CA

Edward married Mary Golseth [10886] [MRIN: 3307] on 22 May 1888 in Desmet, South Dakota.¹ Marriage status: 0.

Children from this marriage were:

15 i. Mildred M. Coulson [10876]

ii. Fred E. Coulson [11153] was born on 4 Sep 1893 in Erwin, South Dakota, USA ^¹ and died on 21 Jul 1983 ^¹ at age 89.

iii. Hattie A. Coulson [11154] was born on 23 May 1897 in Erwin, South Dakota, USA ^¹ and died on 31 Oct 1993 in South Dakota ^¹ at age 96.

iv. Unknown Coulson [11155] was born before 1900 in Erwin, South Dakota, USA ^¹ and died before 1900.^¹

v. Edith Coulson [11156] was born on 7 Jan 1904 in Erwin, South Dakota, USA ^¹ and died after 1993.^¹

31. Mary Golseth [10886], daughter of Ole Golseth [10958] and Marit Ronning [10959], was born on 18 Jan 1868 in Tronhjem, Norge ^¹ and died on 25 Jan 1948 in California (1) ^¹ at age 80.

General Notes: .
Notes for MARY GOLSETH:
per 1900 census, had 4 children - 3 still living in 1900
Per obituary - died at the age of 80 at her home at 1115 Mission St, Santa Cruz, CA, following a lengthy illness. She was born January 18, 1868 in Opdalen, Norway, coming to the United States as a small child with her parents. For a short
time they made their home in Minnesota, later moving to Dakota Territory where her parents homesteaded. She was baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran faith.
She was married to Edward Coulson on May 22, 1888 at DeSmet (SDak) and they made their home on a farm near Erwin where they lived until they moved to Santa Cruz, California in 1919. They celebrated their golden wedding in 1938. Mr. Coulson passed away Oct 13, 1942 and since then she has made her home with her daughter Hattie. She is survived by four children, Mrs. Mildred Larson, Lake Preston, Fred E. Coulson Brookings, Hattie Coulson of Santa Cruz, CA and Mrs. Edith Dunba
r of San Marino, CA, one brother Martin Golseth of Erwin, one sister, Mrs. Julia Gorseth, Irene, a sister-in-law, Mrs. Rebecca Waby of Lake Preston, six grandchildren, 6 great grandchildren, other relatives and a host of friends.
Funeral services were held Wednesday, January 28 at 2:00 p.m from the chapel at White's Mortuary. The Rev J. C. Colyar conducting the services. During the simple rites, Mrs. Arista Mellor sang "Old Rugged Cross" and "Lead Kindly Light" wi
th William Reid at the console.

Serving as pallbearers were Ross Rittenhouse, Clark Arneal, Leonard Marks, Clark Johnston, William Little and Neil Reid.

Interment followed the service in the I. O. O. F. cemetery.

From Pearl Larson's notes from Coulson family bible, "Indian stole Mary Coulson shoes and ran off."
In 1881 the Golseth family came to the United States where the family lived near Lanesboro, Minnesota. In 1882 the Ole K. Golseth family moved by prairie schooner and ox team to SD. Homesteaded on land 7 miles northeast of Erwin SD. Mary
was 14 years old, Julia was 17 years old. Mary's brother Martin was 11 years old at the time and walked the long distance prodding the two family cows that were tied to the back of the wagon.

Mary and Martin went to school in their local territory. Martin later went to State Normal at Madison, SD.

Mary and her sister Julia worked in Huron as housekeepers in their early years.
************************
See 1900 Census, Hartland Twp, Kingsbury County, SD - Mary stated as mother of 4 with 3 children still living
************************

More About MARY GOLSETH:
Baptism: Lutheran
Burial: January 28, 1948, I. O. O. F. Cemetery, California
Confirmation: Lutheran
Residence 1: Dakota Territory (after Minnesota)
Residence 2: Minnesota as small child when first in America
Residence 3: Bet. 1888 - 1919, Farm near Erwin
Residence 4: Bet. 1919 - 1948, 1115 Mission St., Santa Cruz, CA

Mary married Edward Coulson [10885] [MRIN: 3307] on 22 May 1888 in Desmet, South Dakota.¹ Marriage status: 0.

Sixth Generation (3rd Great-Grandparents)

56. Lars Jeppesen [10828], son of Jeppe Christensen [10833] and Johanne Larsdatter [10841], was born in 1807 in Tversted Sogn (1), was christened on 20 Dec 1807 in Tversted Kirke, died on 31 Mar 1887 in Tversted Sogn (1) ^² at age 80, and was buried on 7 Apr 1887 in Tversted Kirke.^²

General Notes: .
Hjørring, Horns, Tversted, Øster Tversted, , 10, FT-1845, Census
Christen Andersen 85 Gift Gaardmand Heri sognet
Ingeborg Larsen 48 Gift Hans kone Elling sogn Hjørring amt
Lars Jeppesen 38 Ugift Tjenestefolk Heri sognet
Lars Chr Sørensen 22 Ugift Tjenestefolk Bindslev sogn Hjørring amt
Ingeborg Sørensen 18 Ugift Tjenestefolk Bindslev sogn Hjørring amt

Kirkebogen for Tversted
1839-1856, opslag 113
Viet den 26. oktober 1849
Ungkarl Lars Jeppesen, 42 aar
Pigen Ane Margrethe Sørensdatter af Ø. Tversted 35 aar

Census 1855, Tversted sogn
Lars Jeppesen, 48, born Tversted parish
Ane Margrethe Sørensdatter, 41, wife, born Tversted Parish
Christian Larsen, 6, child, born Tversted Parish
Søren Christian Larsen, 4, child. born Tversted Parish
Jeppe Larsen, 1, child, born Tversted Parish

Census 1860, Tversted sogn
Lars Jeppesen, 53, born Tversted parish
Ane Margrethe Sørensdatter, 46, wife, born Tversted Parish
Christian Larsen, 11, child, born Tversted Parish
Søren Christian Larsen, 9, child. born Tversted Parish
Jeppe Larsen, 6, child, born Tversted Parish
Maren Sophie Larsen, 4 child, born Tversted Parish

hjoerring, Horns, Tversted, Østenkjær, , Hus, 9, FT-1880
Name: Age: Marital status: Occupation in household: Occupation: Birth place:
Lars Jepsen 72 Gift Husfader, husmand Tversted sogn, Hjørring amt
Ane Margrete Sørensen 65 Gift Hans hustru Tversted sogn, Hjørring amt
Christian Larsen 30 Ugift Deres barn Tversted sogn, Hjørring amt
Hanne Larsen 19 Ugift Deres barn Tversted sogn, Hjørring amt

Kirkebogen for Tversted sogn
Døde mænd 1887, no. 3
Lars Jeppesen, død den 31. marts 1887, begravet den 7. april 1887
Enkemand af Østenkær 74 aar (? 79)

Lars married Ane Margrethe Sørensdatter [10829] [MRIN: 3292]. Marriage status: 0.

Children from this marriage were:

i. Christian Larsen [10849] was born on 26 Dec 1849 in Tversted Sogn (1) ^² and was christened on 1 Apr 1850 in Tversted Kirke.^²

ii. Søren Christian Larsen [10830] was born on 26 Sep 1851 in Tversted Sogn (1),^² was christened on 16 Nov 1851 in Tversted Kirke,^² and died on 13 Oct 1937 in Beadle County, South Dakota ^¹ at age 86.

28 iii. Jeppe Larsen [10827]

iv. Maren Sophie Larsen [10850] was born on 22 Aug 1856 in Tversted Sogn (1) ^² and was christened on 9 Nov 1856 in Tversted Kirke.^²

v. Hanne Larsen [10831] was born on 16 Mar 1860 in Tversted Sogn (1) ^² and was christened on 8 Apr 1860 in Tversted Kirke.^²

57. Ane Margrethe Sørensdatter [10829], daughter of Søren Nielsen [10836] and Maren Sørensdatter [10837], was born in 1814 in Tversted Sogn (1), was christened on 12 May 1814 in Tversted Kirke,^³ died on 17 Dec 1880 in Tversted Sogn (1) ^² at age 66, and was buried on 26 Dec 1880 in Tversted Kirke.^²

General Notes: .
hjoerring, Horns, Tversted, Østertversted Bye, en gaard, 89 (88), FT-1834, C7531
Jens Nielsen 45 Gift gaardmand
Maren Sørensdatter 53 Gift hans kone
Anne Magrethe Sørensdatter 20 Ugift deres børn
Søren Christian Sørensen 14 Ugift deres børn

Kirkebogen for Tversted
1839-1856, opslag 113
Viet den 26. oktober 1849
Ungkarl Lars Jeppesen, 42 aar
Pigen Ane Margrethe Sørensdatter af Ø. Tversted 35 aar

Census 1855, Tversted sogn
Lars Jeppesen, 48, born Tversted parish
Ane Margrethe Sørensdatter, 41, wife, born Tversted Parish
Christian Larsen, 6, child, born Tversted Parish
Søren Christian Larsen, 4, child. born Tversted Parish
Jeppe Larsen, 1, child, born Tversted Parish

Kirkebogen for Tversted sogn
Døde kvinder 1880, no. 13
Ane Margrethe Sørensdatter, død den 17. december 1880, begravet den 26. december 1880
Husmand Lars Jepsens hustru ? af Østenkær i Tversted 66 aar, født i Tversted

Ane married Lars Jeppesen [10828] [MRIN: 3292]. Marriage status: 0.

58. Frands Christiansen Bæk [10863], son of Christian Pedersen [10972] and Ane Jensdatter [10973], was born on 28 Dec 1825 in Uggerby Sogn ^² and was christened on 28 Dec 1825 in Hjemmedøbt.^²

General Notes: .
hjoerring, Vennebjerg, Uggerby, Bechen, Et huus, 15, FT-1834, C5057
Christian Pedersen 66 Gift Huusmand
Anne Jensdatter 40 Gift Hans Kone
Peder Christ. Christiansen 12 Ugift Deres Børn
Jens Christ. Christiansen 11 Ugift Deres Børn
Frands Christ. Christiansen 9 Ugift Deres Børn
Anne Christina Christiansdatter 6 Ugift Deres Børn

hjoerring, Horns, Tversted, Sønderåen, Hus, 10, FT-1880, B2446
Frands Christiansen Bæch 54 Gift Husfader og mølleejer Uggerby sogn
Anne Elsine Chrestensen 43 Gift Hans hustru Her i sognet
Carl Bæch 15 Ugift Deres barn Her i sognet
Anne Marie Bæch 12 Ugift Deres barn Her i sognet
Chresten Bæch 10 Ugift Deres barn Her i sognet
Johannes Bæch 7 Ugift Deres barn Her i sognet
Kierstine Bæch 3 Ugift Deres barn Her i sognet
Ottine Elsine Bæch Under 1 år Ugift Deres barn Her i sognet

hjoerring, Horns, Tversted, Terp Tversted Sogn, , 5, FT-1890, C3111
Frans Christensen Bek 64 f. 20/12 Gift Husfader Husmand, Jordbruger Uggerby Sogn Hjørring Amt
Ane Elsine Christensdatter 54 f. 21/9 Gift Husmoder Tversted Sogn Hjørring Amt
Marie Bek 22 f. 15/7 Ugift Barn Tversted Sogn Hjørring Amt
Kresten Bek 20 f. 1/2 Ugift Barn Arbejder i Jorbruget Tversted Sogn Hjørring Amt
Johanes Bek 17 f. 21/9 Ugift Barn Tversted Sogn Hjørring Amt
Stine Bek 13 f. 13/3 Ugift Barn Tversted Sogn Hjørring Amt
Ottine Bek 10 f. 30/3 Ugift Barn Tversted Sogn Hjørring Amt

Frands married Ane Elsine Christensdatter [10864] [MRIN: 3303] on 5 Sep 1856 in Tversted Kirke.³ Marriage status: 0.

Children from this marriage were:

29 i. Hanne Bæk [10832]

ii. Anders Christian Bech [10971] was born on 15 Apr 1862 in Tversted Sogn (1),^³ was christened on 9 Jun 1862 in Tversted Kirke,^³ and died on 30 Oct 1928 ^³ at age 66.

iii. Carl Frandsen Bæk [10967] was born on 13 Dec 1864 in Terpet I Tversted Sogn ^² and was christened on 14 Apr 1865 in Tversted Kirke.^²

iv. Ane Marie Bæk [10968] was born on 15 Jul 1867 in Terpet I Tversted Sogn ^² and was christened on 13 Oct 1867 in Tversted Kirke.^²

v. Chresten Bæk [10966] was born on 1 Feb 1870 in Terpet I Tversted Sogn ^² and was christened on 18 Apr 1870 in Tversted Kirke.^²

vi. Johannes Bech [10965] was born on 21 Sep 1872 ^³ and was christened on 24 Nov 1872 in Tversted Kirke.^³

vii. Kirstine Bech [10969] was born on 6 Mar 1876 in Tversted Sogn (1) ^² and was christened on 4 Jun 1876 in Tversted Kirke.^²

viii. Ottine Elsine Bech [10970] was born on 30 Mar 1879 in Tversted Sogn (1) ^² and was christened in Tversted Kirke.^²

59. Ane Elsine Christensdatter [10864], daughter of Christen Olesen [10974] and Hanne Tomsdatter [10975], was born on 21 Oct 1836 in Tversted Sogn (1) ^² and was christened on 20 Nov 1836 in Tversted Kirke.^²

General Notes: .
Kirkebogen for Tversted sogn
Født pige.: Ane Elsine Christensdatter, født den 21. oktober 1836, døbt i kirken den 20. november 1836
Forældre.: Christen Olesen og hustru Hanna Tomsdatter, gaardmand i Øster Tversted
Faddere.: Madamme Ring til Nørre Elkjær - Jomfru Brix paa Nr. Elkjær - ? - ? - ?

hjoerring, Horns, Tversted, Vester Tversted, en Gaard, 39, FT-1840, C8732
Christen Olesen 32 Gift Gaardmand
Hanne Thomsen 31 Gift hans Kone
Ole Christensen 1 Ugift deres Børn
Ane Elene Christensen! 4 Ugift deres Børn
Johann Chr Thomsen 13 Ugift deres Pleiesøn
Johanne Marie Jacobsen 19 Ugift Tjenestefolk
Christian Godskesen 17 Ugift Tjenestefolk

hjoerring, Horns, Tversted, Øster Tversted, , 48, FT-1845, B7052
Christen Olesen 37 Gift Gaardmand Heri sognet
Hanne Thomsen 36 Gift Hans kone Heri sognet
Ole Christensen 6 Ugift Deres børn Heri sognet
Ane Elene Christensen 9 Ugift Deres børn Heri sognet
Jens Christensen 3 Ugift Deres børn Heri sognet
Anders Pedersen 36 Enkemand Tjenestekarl Heri sognet
.
hjoerring, Horns, Tversted, Sønderåen, Hus, 10, FT-1880, B2446
Frands Christiansen Bæch 54 Gift Husfader og mølleejer Uggerby sogn
Anne Elsine Chrestensen 43 Gift Hans hustru Her i sognet
Carl Bæch 15 Ugift Deres barn Her i sognet
Anne Marie Bæch 12 Ugift Deres barn Her i sognet
Chresten Bæch 10 Ugift Deres barn Her i sognet
Johannes Bæch 7 Ugift Deres barn Her i sognet
Kierstine Bæch 3 Ugift Deres barn Her i sognet
Ottine Elsine Bæch Under 1 år Ugift Deres barn Her i sognet

hjoerring, Horns, Tversted, Terp Tversted Sogn, , 5, FT-1890, C3111
Frans Christensen Bek 64 f. 20/12 Gift Husfader Husmand, Jordbruger Uggerby Sogn Hjørring Amt
Ane Elsine Christensdatter 54 f. 21/9 Gift Husmoder Tversted Sogn Hjørring Amt
Marie Bek 22 f. 15/7 Ugift Barn Tversted Sogn Hjørring Amt
Kresten Bek 20 f. 1/2 Ugift Barn Arbejder i Jorbruget Tversted Sogn Hjørring Amt
Johanes Bek 17 f. 21/9 Ugift Barn Tversted Sogn Hjørring Amt
Stine Bek 13 f. 13/3 Ugift Barn Tversted Sogn Hjørring Amt
Ottine Bek 10 f. 30/3 Ugift Barn Tversted Sogn Hjørring Amt

Ane married Frands Christiansen Bæk [10863] [MRIN: 3303] on 5 Sep 1856 in Tversted Kirke.³ Marriage status: 0.

60. Joseph Henery Coulson [11085] was born in 1815 in England ^¹ and died in 1882 ^¹ at age 67.

Joseph married Mildred J. Armstrong [11086] [MRIN: 3381] on 25 Oct 1841.¹ Marriage status: 0.

Children from this marriage were:

i. Mary Coulson [11087] was born on 1 Dec 1843 ^¹ and died on 7 Nov 1934 in California (1) ^¹ at age 90.

ii. Charles Coulson [11088] was born on 16 Feb 1845 ^¹ and died before 1948.^¹

iii. Ann Harriet Coulson [11089] was born on 15 Aug 1846 in Liverpool, England ^¹ and died before 1940.^¹

iv. George Coulson [11091] was born on 6 Jul 1847 in Liverpool, England ^¹ and died on 8 Sep 1906 ^¹ at age 59.

v. Henry Coulson [11092] was born on 2 Oct 1849 in Liverpool, England ^¹ and died on 7 Nov 1934 in California (1) ^¹ at age 85.

vi. John Coulson [11093] was born on 16 Apr 1851 in Liverpool, England ^¹ and died before 1948.^¹

vii. William Coulson [11094] was born on 14 Nov 1853 in Liverpool, England ^¹ and died before 1948.^¹

viii. Joseph Coulson [11095] was born on 28 Feb 1857 in Liverpool, England.^¹

ix. Thomas Coulson [11096] was born on 12 Dec 1859 in Liverpool, England,^¹ died on 23 Jul 1929 in South Dakota ^¹ at age 69, and was buried in Lake Preston, South Dakota, USA.^³

x. Robert Coulson [11097] was born on 9 Oct 1861 in Liverpool, England ^¹ and died on 17 Apr 1908 ^¹ at age 46.

xi. Rebekah Coulson [11098] was born on 21 May 1863 in Liverpool, England ^¹ and died on 28 Apr 1956 ^¹ at age 92.

30 xii. Edward Coulson [10885]

xiii. Joe II Coulson [11099]

61. Mildred J. Armstrong [11086] was born in 1820 in England.^¹

Mildred married Joseph Henery Coulson [11085] [MRIN: 3381] on 25 Oct 1841.¹ Marriage status: 0.

62. Ole Golseth [10958] .

Ole married Marit Ronning [10959] [MRIN: 3334]. Marriage status: 0.

Children from this marriage were:

31 i. Mary Golseth [10886]

ii. Martin Golseth [10873] was born on 16 Mar 1871 in Norge ^¹ and died on 29 Oct 1948 in South Dakota ^¹ at age 77.

63. Marit Ronning [10959] .

Marit married Ole Golseth [10958] [MRIN: 3334]. Marriage status: 0.

Seventh Generation (4th Great-Grandparents)

112. Jeppe Christensen [10833], son of Kristen Kristensen [10843] and Ingeborg Jensen [10844], was born in 1754, was christened on 24 Nov 1754 in Tversted Kirke, died on 7 Nov 1823 in Tversted Sogn (1) ^³ at age 69, and was buried on 16 Nov 1823 in Tversted Kirke.^³

General Notes: .
hjoerring, Horns, Tversted, Øster Tversted Bye, , 65, FT-1787, A7088
Jeppe Christensen 30 gift Hosbonde Bonde og Gaardfæster
Maren Christensdr 26 gift hans Kone
Ingeborg Jeppesd. 1 deres Daatter
Jens Jensen 11 Tienistedreng

Stod i 1792 Fadder i Tversted kirke til Else Nielsdatter

hjoerring, Horns, Tversted, Øster Tversted også kaldet Nørre Tversted, , 9, FT-1801, B8094
Jeppe Christensen 47 Gift Husbonde Bonde og gårdbeboer
Johanne Larsdatter 31 Gift Hans kone
Christen Jeppesen 15 Ugift Hans barn
Ingeborg Jeppesdatter 12 Ugift Hans barn
Lars Jepsen 6 Ugift Deres barn
Maren Jepesdatter 3 Ugift Deres barn
Rubech Pedersen 28 Ugift Tjenestekarl

Jeppe married on 29 Mar 1785 in Tversted Kirke.³ Marriage status: 0.

His children were:

i. Ingeborg Jeppesdatter [10847] was born on 30 Apr 1786, was christened on 30 Apr 1786 in Tversted Sogn (1),^³ and died on 21 Dec 1856 at age 70.

ii. Kristen Jeppesen [10845] was born in 1789, was christened on 27 Jun 1789 in Tversted Sogn (1),^³ and died on 23 Aug 1857 at age 68.

iii. Maren Jeppesdatter [10846] was born in 1792, was christened on 21 Apr 1792 in Tversted Sogn (1),^³ and died on 16 Jun 1876 at age 84.

Jeppe married Johanne Larsdatter [10841] [MRIN: 3296] on 7 Sep 1794. Marriage status: 0.

Children from this marriage were:

i. Laurs Jeppesen [10853] was born in 1795, was christened on 20 Feb 1795 in Tversted Kirke,^³ and died in 1808 at age 13.

ii. Jens Jeppesen [10854] was born in 1797, was christened on 6 Apr 1797 in Tversted Kirke,^³ and died on 14 May 1797.^³

iii. Maren Jeppesdatter [10856] was born on 25 Apr 1798, was christened on 25 Apr 1798 in Tversted Kirke,^³ and died on 18 Nov 1862 at age 64.

iv. Jens Jeppesen [10855] was born in 1802 and was christened on 31 Oct 1802 in Tversted Kirke.^³

v. Ole Jeppesen [10852] was born in 1804 and was christened on 13 Aug 1804 in Tversted Kirke.^³

56 vi. Lars Jeppesen [10828]

Jeppe next married on 24 Nov 1812 in Mygdal Kirke.² Marriage status: 0.

His children were:

i. Johanne Jeppesdatter [10858] was born in 1813 and was christened on 2 Dec 1813 in Tversted Kirke.^³

ii. Boel Jeppesen [10859] was born on 6 Oct 1814 and was christened on 17 Oct 1814 in Tversted Kirke.^³

iii. Johanne Marie Jeppesdatter [10860] was born on 28 Dec 1815 and was christened on 29 Dec 1815 in Tversted Kirke.^³

113. Johanne Larsdatter [10841] was born in 1770, died in 1812 at age 42, and was buried on 31 May 1812 in Tversted Kirke.^²

General Notes: .
hjoerring, Horns, Tversted, Øster Tversted også kaldet Nørre Tversted, , 9, FT-1801, B8094
Jeppe Christensen 47 Gift Husbonde Bonde og gårdbeboer
Johanne Larsdatter 31 Gift Hans kone
Christen Jeppesen 15 Ugift Hans barn
Ingeborg Jeppesdatter 12 Ugift Hans barn
Lars Jepsen 6 Ugift Deres barn
Maren Jepesdatter 3 Ugift Deres barn
Rubech Pedersen 28 Ugift Tjenestekarl

Johanne married Jeppe Christensen [10833] [MRIN: 3296] on 7 Sep 1794. Marriage status: 0.

114. Søren Nielsen [10836] .

General Notes: .
Kirkebogen for Tversted
Den 22. oktober 1810, meldte sig til ægteskab, Ungkarl Søren Nielsen og pigen Maren Sørensdatter, tjenende for tiden i Mosbjerg sogn
Forlovere.: Lars Nielsen af Øster Tversted og Niels Hansen i Terpet

Søren married Maren Sørensdatter [10837] [MRIN: 3295] on 22 Oct 1810 in Tversted Kirke.² Marriage status: 0.

Children from this marriage were:

i. Niels Sørensen [10838] was born in 1811 and was christened on 20 Jul 1811 in Tversted Kirke.^³

57 ii. Ane Margrethe Sørensdatter [10829]

iii. Søren Christian Sørensen [10839] was born in 1820 and was christened on 16 Apr 1820 in Tversted Kirke.^²

115. Maren Sørensdatter [10837] was born on 15 Jan 1782 in Tversted Sogn (1).

General Notes: .
Kirkebogen for Tversted
1688-1809, opslag 354
Onsdagen den 16. januar 1782 blev inddøbt Søren Poulsen og Anne Jensdatter's barn kaldet Maren

Hjørring, Horns, Tversted, Øster Tversted Bye, , 57, FT-1787, A7088
Søren Povelsen 42 gift Hosbonde Bonde og Gaardfæster
Anne Jensdatter 44 gift hans Kone
Maren Sørensdr 5 deres Datter
Christen Andersen 26 ugivt Tienestefolk National Soldat
Niels Pedersen 11 Tienestefolk
Maren Pedersdr 26 ugivt Tienestefolk

Hjørring, Horns, Tversted, Præstegården, , 1, FT-1801, B8094
Christian Frederik ??Biørn 61 Gift Husbonde Sognepræst
Catharine Marie Semmen 61 Gift Hans kone
Ane Catharine 14 Ugift Et barn af familien
Søren Jensen 36 Ugift Tjenestekarl
Christen Christensen 41 Ugift Tjenestekarl
Jens Heilesen 18 Ugift Tjenestekarl
Karen Pedersdatter 27 Ugift Tjenestepige
Maren Sørensdatter 19 Ugift Tjenestepige
Christen Larsen 15 Ugift
Christen Jensen 14 Ugift
Christen Hansen 61 Ugift Opholdende Nyder ophold i gården
Dorthe Jensdatter 44 Ugift Opholdende Nyder ophold i gården

Kirkebogen for Tversted
Den 22. oktober 1810, meldte sig til ægteskab, Ungkarl Søren Nielsen og pigen Maren Sørensdatter, tjenende for tiden i Mosbjerg sogn
Forlovere.: Lars Nielsen af Øster Tversted og Niels Hansen i Terpet
.
hjoerring, Horns, Tversted, Østertversted Bye, en gaard, 89 (88), FT-1834, C7531
Jens Nielsen 45 Gift gaardmand
Maren Sørensdatter 53 Gift hans kone
Anne Magrethe Sørensdatter 20 Ugift deres børn
Søren Christian Sørensen 14 Ugift deres børn

Maren married Søren Nielsen [10836] [MRIN: 3295] on 22 Oct 1810 in Tversted Kirke.² Marriage status: 0.

Maren next married on 22 Oct 1820 in Tversted Kirke.² Marriage status: 0.

116. Christian Pedersen [10972] was born in 1768.

Christian married Ane Jensdatter [10973] [MRIN: 3337]. Marriage status: 0.

The child from this marriage was:

58 i. Frands Christiansen Bæk [10863]

117. Ane Jensdatter [10973] was born in 1794.

Ane married Christian Pedersen [10972] [MRIN: 3337]. Marriage status: 0.

118. Christen Olesen [10974] was born in 1808 in Tversted Sogn (1).

Christen married Hanne Tomsdatter [10975] [MRIN: 3338]. Marriage status: 0.

Children from this marriage were:

59 i. Ane Elsine Christensdatter [10864]

ii. Else Kirstine Christensen [10851] was born on 8 Nov 1849 in Terpet I Tversted Sogn,^² was christened on 23 Dec 1849 in Tversted Kirke,^² and died on 12 Dec 1912 ^¹ at age 63.

119. Hanne Tomsdatter [10975] was born in 1809 in Tversted Sogn (1).

Hanne married Christen Olesen [10974] [MRIN: 3338]. Marriage status: 0.

Eighth Generation (5th Great-Grandparents)

224. Kristen Kristensen [10843] was born in 1728 in Tversted Sogn (1).^³

Kristen married Ingeborg Jensen [10844] [MRIN: 3298]. Marriage status: 0.

The child from this marriage was:

112 i. Jeppe Christensen [10833]

225. Ingeborg Jensen [10844] was born in 1732 in Tversted Sogn (1).^³

Ingeborg married Kristen Kristensen [10843] [MRIN: 3298]. Marriage status: 0.

Sources

1. Sheila M. Larson, Erwin, SD, USA (1).

2. Kirkebogen.

3. www.familysearch.org (1).

Family Stuff

2008-02-23T19:33:00.004-05:00

I just found a couple of awesome websites relating to my family.

On my mother's side, the Larsons are from Denmark (my mother's mother). A family tree of this family since emmigrating from Denmark to the United States can be found here:

http://torslev.dk/...

Me and my sister are even on the list -- I always wonder how people find this stuff out. :-)

On my father's side, my father's father's father (my great-grandfather), Alfons Vincent made several trips back and forth to Belgium. Ship manifests and signatures are on this website:

http://www.ellisisland.org/...

Very awesome stuff. :-)

In other news (I haven't updated in a while here - as always, see the Four Horse Haven site for news) - work is going well, I'm now a team lead of around 10 people (my team keeps getting bigger). :-)

Working around the house, recently did a few minor projects that make a big difference.

I made a collared shirt, that turned out quite well.

The dogs and goats are happy and healthy.

Life is pretty good, all around.

Calendering

2008-01-11T21:23:00.000-05:00

Vaguely amusing:

Technology is kindof fun.

My typing speed

2007-12-27T22:05:00.000-05:00

79 words

Touch Typing online

I don't normally do these things, but this
one is kindof fun. :-)

I never knew my typing speed until now -- its kindof cool.

BMI, Fitness, and Mortality

2007-12-22T10:07:00.000-05:00

I know I've blabbed about this before, but I've been thinking about it again, and learned some new things.

Obesity isn't a significant health risk. People think it is: you keep hearing "lose weight and you'll be healthier". But this doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Turns out, if you look at any actual study (look here, here, here, or here; or do your own search for "BMI fitness mortality"), obesity isn't the problem at all: fitness levels are.

Where does the confusion come from? It's a basic stats error. There is certainly a CORRELATION between a high BMI and mortality rates, but a high BMI doesn't CAUSE health problems.

To put it another way, if you're overweight and fit, you don't have a problem.

I tried and failed, but if somebody could find any study (serious study, with more than a thousand participants) that contradicts this argument, I would LOVE to see it.

This all makes me mad, because this 'overweight=unhealthy' argument is used to justify a lot of social injustices, and it's bullshit.

Nuff said.

The past while...

2007-08-25T15:09:00.000-04:00

Wow - almost 2 months since the last update. Well, update here, anyway...

Most of the updates these days are over on the Four Horse Haven site - pretty much our whole lives are wrapped into this place now, and the few things that aren't are usually posted there anyway. :-)

We've settled in well at this new place. The dogs love it here, the job is wonderful, and it's nice to be able to look out your backyard and see fields and mountains, rather than other backyards. :-) We're clearing away land and looking into fencing options next.

Work is fun -- I've been there nearly 4 months. Not long after my 3 month probation was up, I got a sort of promotion: I'm now a team lead of a team of 4 people (including myself). It was really gratifying, I'm enjoying the role and think I can make a difference there.

Lisa and Jessica went away this weekend to Toronto, to drop Jessica off at Ryerson for her first year at university. Scary, sad, happy, and exciting all at the same time.

As a result, I have a whole bunch of free time: I'm staying here looking after the dogs. To make things more interesting, it's raining off and on, so my default activity (clearing land with the grass blade on the weedwhacker) is off the agenda.

So I've done most of the things I've wanted to do for a long time off my list, and it's not even 3:30 on Saturday yet. :-) I'm not used to having so much free time. It's actually nice -- I might take a nap later -- but I'm not sure I'd want it every day like this. :-)

Anyway, as time goes forward, posts will still probably be focused on the house blog -- I just thought I'd pop in here and make a quick update.

Four Horse Haven

2007-07-08T20:47:00.000-04:00

We're moved into our new house, the old house is closed, and life is pretty sweet right now.

There's a new blog for the new house at:

http://fourhorsehaven.blogspot.com/

We're slowly getting settled in.

And... the weekend's done.

2007-06-26T20:29:00.000-04:00

Lisa went back to Kitchener this morning. :-(

But only another few days, and it's Moving Day! I'm flying back on Friday, and I think the truck is coming out Saturday or Sunday. Yay! I'll get to sleep on a real mattress out here, and we'll be moved into our new house. A Huge Relief, I'll say.

Tonight I popped back to the nasty basement to do some laundry and pack up a few last things. There's still a carload of stuff to take out of there, but it's all pretty much packed up.

HOT today. Walking to the basement from work was brutal, under the beating sun. Laundry took forever, but I ate while I was doing it, and read my book (just finished Deception Point by Dan Brown. Excellent book).

The taxi back here was from DJ's Taxi, and it was a much better experience than last week. Rather than waiting an hour and a half, the guy was there in 10 minutes, and was really fun. Plus the fare was cheaper than West Way. Go figure. :-)

One more week... one more week... one more week... :-)

YAY YAY YAY YAY!!

2007-06-22T09:14:00.001-04:00

Lisa's coming here today!

Could it be any awesome-er!?

Wow.

2007-06-21T18:33:00.000-04:00

It's been quite the weekend / week, again. :-)

As I said, I went back to Kitchener on Friday night: it's a real quick flight. We went over to Lisa's parents house for supper on Saturday night, and did some work around the house.

On Sunday we drove back to Four Horse Haven.

This place is incredible. :-)

Anyway, we start to work on the place, cutting up the carpet in the living room. Nasty stinky crusty carpet. I'm guessing at least 50 years old. Underneath it is this faux laminate vinyl. We figure that it's glued down. However, once we get the carpet up, we discover that the vinyl is just nailed down. Around the edge. Underneath that was old linoleum, backed with horse hair padding. And under that, unglued, untouched barn board floor. I love the family who owned this house. :-)

That, of course, took a lot of time, over a few days.

Also, the applicances came: GE Profile stainless steel range and bottom-freezer french door fridge, and GE front-load washer and dryer. The dryer wouldn't fit, so we now have a working washer but not dryer. We've got to remove/move the sink in the laundry room, and all should be well.

Looked into new toilets. I think we're getting new Toto toilets put in throughout the house. We've ordered them, but they've got to be ordered (they had them in stock, but their in-stock models were damaged).

Lisa went back on Wednesday - she filled the freezer here at the house with frozen dinners for me. I just ate one. Mmmm. Delicious. :-)

Lisa found this: we figure that the house is the Gothic Cottage style. Apparently there were plans in the Canadian Farmer magazine in 1865, and there were thousands built. That's awesome. I want those plans. :-)
http://www.ontarioarchitecture.com/gothicottage.htm

Lots of cleaning, lots of work.

Fireflies every night, surrounding the house.

3 playful groundhogs that live under our Garage Used for Storage Needs Some Work, that run and hide whenever they notice us.

A lone deer, loping through the tall grass along our back fence line.

Cows visible from our windows.

Alpacas down two houses.

A view that goes on for miles of fields, straight to the mountains.

Huge mature trees.

Fresh air, beautiful breeze...

And SPACE. Tons and tons of SPACE.

Four Horse Haven, indeed.

Four Horse Haven - Updated!

2007-06-13T18:21:00.001-04:00

Wow, what a weekend.

Lisa arrived here on Sunday as planned, and we went on our walk through of the new house.

The guy had cleaned up everything: the house was empty, all the old dead farm equipment and cars were removed, the lawn was mowed, the floors vacuumed. There was a great big dumpster in the yard filled with garbage. It was a nice treat.

We went on our walk through with our agent, and another couple plus father showed up to take a look at the hot tub. We don't want it, they want it, they're willing (maybe) to chop it up and remove it from the house to get a hot tub for cheap. Works out good for everybody. They think it's possible, and will get back to us after we close in Kitchener.

The house is wonderful: it's remarkable how much it reminds me of Villa Villatrolla on Clyde Road in Cambridge. Same old house, same smell. Similar road and distance from it. Similar fencing around. Even the carpet/lino/bare floor ratios are about the same. We loved that house. I love this one, too. :-)

We took some pictures... I'll offload mine and post them. Mostly of the yard and outside of the house.

:-) It's going to be a fun house to decorate for Hallowe'en.

That night, we went to Mexicala Rosa's for supper -- I love that Kanata has mexican food! :-) Then we stopped in at Home Depot and looked at fencing and flooring and lighting, and finally went back to my nasty basement to go to sleep. We watched episode 1 of the next season of Stargate that Lisa brought.

Oh - she also brought me the latest Martha Stewart, a Lee Valley catalog, and a book: Horsekeeping on Small Acrages - that looks really good.

The next morning (Monday), I went to work, and at noon we went off to the lawyer to sign hundreds of papers that ultimately mean that we're going to buy a house. :-) We weren't that happy with the lawyer we used, but in the end, it seems to have worked out ok.

We ate in the food court in the lawyer's office - chinese food, that wasn't too bad, really, and then I went back to work.

While I was at work on Monday, Lisa was busy too - she got all new GE appliances ordered: stainless steel fridge (large, freezer on the bottom, french doors) and stove (flat top, convection, self clean), and front load washer/dryer. Plus a new matching microwave. They're coming next Tuesday, I think.

Plus she investigated fencing and lighting and all sorts of things for the new house.

That night we went to Carleton Place, and the Eating Place - our favorite place to eat. :-) I had the pizza, Lisa had the hot turkey sandwich. Delicious, all around.

The next day (Tuesday), I went to work, and Lisa dealt with the lawyers all day, doing her heroic best to get the various involved lawyers to work together and get closing done on time. And she squeaked it out -- she got the keys at 5:00pm.

We went out to eat at Baton Rouge, and went out to the house that evening. The idea was to change the locks and sleep over.

When we got there, there was this note:

June 12, 2007

Dear Lisa & Shawn,

Welcome to your new home! I thought you would like to know a little bit about it.

This house was built more than 140 years ago on a foundation 1/4 of a mile or so southeast of where it currently sits. It was moved here in 1950 by my father, using a team of 4 work horses. It is sided in red brick and originally had a porch across the front and a summer kitchen in the back. In 1994 I had all of the renovations done that you see today including the bathroom and a new well was drilled.

We have owned this home and land all this time. If the walls could speak, they would tell you many happy and sad stories of generations of our family. It has been very difficult for me to leave this home, but it is time to move on. My wish is that it will be a happy haven for you both, and that you will spend many joyful and productive years creating your own stories for these walls to record.

And didn't that make us teary. :-)

Setting to take the back door deadbolt out, we immediately ran into problems. There weren't any screws. :-) You get the collar around the bolt taken off, and there's just these two tiny holes, one on either side of the bolt.

Lisa and her internet skillz to the rescue: turns out this is a Lori-style deadbolt, and you need to use a 5/64 allen key to take it out.

So, back to Home Depot to buy an allen key (because, really, who has one of those!?), and back to the house to fiddle forever trying to get this to work. After probably a half an hour of failing to take it off with the key, I finally worked out the trick, and got the back lock off. The new one was easy to install, and life was good.

The front door one was hardly any trouble at all.

During this, it got very dark outside (it was probably 10:30 or maybe later by the time we were done the locks). And what did we see in our yard but thousands and thousands of fireflies - all through our yard and the surrounding fields. It was breathtaking.

There's so many bugs (all sorts - big ones, little ones, fireflies, june bugs, deer flies, mosquitoes, strange bugs I've never seen before) around that house. They're attracted to the porch light, and come in the house. I'm not sure if there's any way of dealing with that... probably not. It's bizzare, though.

Then we went back to my troll basement to get bedding to sleep over. We got back to the house, only to discover that I'd (stupidly) forgotten the power adapters to re-inflate the Coleman mattresses. SO, back to the troll basement, picked up the adapters, then a quick stop at Burger King for food - only to discover they're not open at 11:30 at night - so off to McDonald's because by now we were STARVING. :-)

Then we showered (it was bloody hot yesterday, and humid. The A/C at the new house, though weak, and the shower were extremely welcome luxuries).

Finally, we went to bed in our new house. :-) We're not homeless any more! Yay!

I love it.

Then, this morning, we dropped some stuff back here at my troll basement (having no car, I can't really live at the new place until we're moved in for real later this month -- it's just a bit too far), and I went to work, and Lisa made the 6 hour drive back to Kitchener. She got back safe and sound: I Skyped with her earlier this evening.

Yay yay! It's the beginning of the end, now. Friday evening I fly back to Kitchener for Father's Day and final house prep, Lisa comes back with me by car later in the weekend, and stays a couple days or so to receive the new appliances.

The next weekend she comes back, and it's our big weekend to do work in the new house. I'm not sure what we'll all do, but for sure it'll involve dog fencing of some description, and probably lots of cleaning and work (probably including some critical electrical work -- there's some fixtures that really need changing right away -- maybe including ripping up carpet and stuff, but that depends on what we decide to do).

Then the next weekend is our big moving weekend, with the truck and Lisa's parent coming up to help, and Jessica and the dogs and... and everything.

And then we're moved. But the time will go by quickly, because we're busy, and Lisa and I can be together quite a bit more than we have been for this whole saga since I've moved out here.

Big fun. It's VERY nice to be on the other end of this.

Oh: and the house's name? We've had Villa Villatrolla, Casa del Arbre, and this one is:

Four Horse Haven.

It just fits.

Oh yeah...

2007-06-10T12:51:00.001-04:00

I forgot this til now, but it's awesome..

We have confirmed that Rogers High Speed works at the new place, so that's another bonus. :-)

Lisa's on her way!

2007-06-10T12:31:00.001-04:00

I got a text message from Lisa, apparently she'll be here at around a quarter after 1. :-) Yay!

We've got our walkthrough this afternoon at 5, where a couple that may want to take the hot tub will come along. I'm looking forward to seeing the house again. I think we may take some more pictures, too, so stay tuned for that.

Then tomorrow, we've got our closing meeting with the lawyer: the only known bump, a lack of septic records, was dealt with last week.

Then Tuesday, we close, get the keys, and own our new house! Very exciting. :-) We've already got some supplies purchased for our immediately pressing home reno projects.

I'm trying to figure out what kind of light fixtures would suit a house of this era, while still being something that we really like. A lot of old-style fixtures are either impractical, or are very expensive, or look a lot like 70's light fixtures, which both of us hate. Decisions decisions. :-)

Yesterday I went out to Centrum, ate a nice steak at Jack Astors (which is a pretty boring Ottawa place to eat, but I've eaten at most of the Centrum places now already, and didn't want to eat someplace that Lisa would want to eat with me when she's here the next couple of days).

I bought another book to read: Dan Brown's Deception Point, which the cashier at Chapters said was his best book, and so far has been excellent. I like Dan Brown.

Then I was going to go to a movie, but the only thing I hadn't yet seen was Oceans 13, which I dunno... is maybe not worth the $12. So I went to Rogers Video instead, and got three movies for $9: The Bourne Identity, Master and Commander: the Far Side of the World, and Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Yesterday I watched Bourne Identity -- I've meant to watch this film for years, and it was excellent, like I hoped.

Last night I started watching Master and Commander, and it got late and I got tired. So I finished it this morning. Meh. I enjoyed it, but more as a documentary of shipboard life and potential content for gaming sessions than as an entertaining movie in its own right. It just didn't really hold my interest.

I still have Indiana Jones to watch. We'll see if I get to it before I have to return them. Plus Lisa is brining me 2 more Star Gate SG-1's to watch, so I might be saturated for video content. :-)

After I finished the movie this morning, I futzed around, and finally pulled out some miniatures to paint. I got a coat of paint on a few of them -- pretty fun. I'll post some pics here once I get some painted. I haven't painted in a long time, and I was never great, and I fear I'm even worse now. :-) Plus a lot of my paint is a bit spoiled, which makes it harder to do a nice job.

I need to find some different paint. The GW paints I've got don't seal properly without a lot of fiddling around, and so the paint doesn't last like I think it should. I should look at Fandom II and see what they have.

I especially enjoyed painting the base coat on a couple of dollar store dinosaurs I primed a few months ago. :-) I think they'll be fun to paint.

Half an hour until Lisa arrives! Yay! :-)

My Troll Home.

2007-06-09T12:17:00.001-04:00

The Trollish Basement

So I took some pictures of my trollish basement for all to enjoy.

Now you can see what I mean when I talk about stuff. Nearly all of my blog posts are written in this room these days.

Looking at the pictures of food has made me hungry. :-)

I think I'll put away the rest of my laundry and go out to eat today.

My day so far

2007-06-09T11:05:00.000-04:00

Today was the day to clean up and organize my room in preparation for Lisa coming. :-) I don't want her to think I live in squalor.

So I:

did my outstanding laundry (including my sheets!)
vacuumed using the awkward and heavy central vac
took out my garbage
washed all my dishes*
went through my Food Box and reorganized everything in it
put away my clean laundry nicely
organized all my Stuff, putting it in tidy places.

My room almost looks habitable now.

*this was an adventure. I took them upstairs to the kitchen to wash them. At the end, I turned off the water and heard -- water noises. I looked down, and lots of water was coming out of the cupboard beneath the sink.

Leak.

So, I got paper towels, cleaned up the mess, and then spent a long time tracing down the leak. Turns out the seal on the handheld spray device is gone, so when the water is turned on, it leaks like crazy.

So I cleaned it all up, put a note on the sink saying not to use it, and my job there was done. :-) I'm glad it's not my house. The landlord can deal with it.

Finally, I'm mostly done. It's only 11:10, so I made pretty good time. I started at around 10:00, after I talked with Lisa and took a shower. The place was due for a cleanup, and it looks pretty good now (well, as good as a place can be without furniture, everything stored in random boxes, etc.

Actually, now would be a pretty good time to take some photographs. :-) I'll stage the place, and then do that next. What fun! :-) I'm pretty sure it'll be entertaining to look back at photos of this place in years to come.

So I can't sleep in to save my life...

2007-06-09T07:47:00.000-04:00

So I'm tired all the time, because I'm not getting enough sleep.

So it's Saturday, and I sleep in for like maybe 15 minutes. :-) And I can't get back to sleep. Bah!

I could still get to work on time if I hurried.

OTOH, I'm trying out Camino. I dunno. It uses Mac native controls, but the next Firefox is supposed to too... The chrome, I don't know if I like more or less than Firefox.

I think I'll probably stick with Firefox. Nicer icon, too. :-)

Thunderstorm!

2007-06-08T19:42:00.001-04:00

The week is done, and to celebrate, there's a raging thunderstorm outside!

It rolled in shortly after I got home (thank god I got home before it did) :-)

I'm investigating test frameworks (JUnit, TestNG). Big Fun. :-) Unit testing is a good idea.

Tis now the very witching hour of night...

2007-06-06T21:35:00.001-04:00

...when churchyards yawn,
and Hell itself breathes forth contagion to this world!
Now could I drink hot blood,
and do such bitter things that the day would quake to look upon.

More Byzantine stuff at work. I'm using Eclipse lots at this job, which is kindof neat. It's really handy for finding out 'how many points in my code modify this variable?', and such like that.

Of course, I also have Emacs running, for when I want to do serious editing. :-)

Watched Batman Begins tonight for the first time. Excellent movie. Very exciting, funny, and a suspenseful plot. I liked.

Did my laundry also tonight, so I'll have clean clothes for the morrow. Yay me.

2 more days in the work week, 3 more days until I see my wonderful wife again. It can't come quick enough. :-)

4 more days until the lawyer meeting, 5 more days until we have a new house. It's actually happening. It's almost hard to believe. House purchases go on so long, and there are so many steps, that you almost stop believing that you're going to get a house at the end of it. But in 5 days, a house will be ours. Relief.

Funny, though. We're going to have a house in less than a week, I have a new job, I live in a new city, my life is entirely different. And all I can think about, the only thing I care about, is this Sunday, when I get to see Lisa again.

Living in Wonderful World.

2007-06-05T18:42:00.000-04:00

One fine day, you’ll look at me,
and you will know our love was meant to be.

Another fine day in wonderful-world. :-)

It wasn't bad. It was just lightly sprinkling on the way in to work, a little harder on the way home, but nothing my light shell that I keep in my backpack couldn't handle.

Work was fun: I did more Byzantian analysis. We'll see where it takes us tomorrow.

I ate at a new restaurant: the Barley Mow, had rib steak and caesar salad. It was ok -- but I was really hungry for steak and salad, so it was good. :-)

Then I got home and am planning to laze about for the rest of the night. Probably watch Stargate. Maybe read some more. That sort of thing.

Door to door marketers just rang the bell upstairs. At this moment, I'm glad I'm just a tenant here. :-) Or, as I like to call myself, Basement Troll.

Pretty good day

2007-06-04T20:32:00.000-04:00

Today is fun because it's exactly one week and one day until closing day, on the 12th. Less than a week until Lisa's here again (next Sunday).

I'm all excited. :-)

It was raining today, the first day it's been really raining for my walk to work. I wore Lisa's drover coat and my Tilley hat, but the coat isn't as waterproof as it once was, and the wind was a bit exuberant, and I was a pretty wet rat by the time I got to work. C'est la vie.

I spent the day at work reading through an incredibly Byzantine mechanism. It's kindof neat, exploring the deep bowels of a system. You learn tons about it. I have a few ideas about it now, and I'm looking forward to going in again tomorrow when I'm fresh.

It wasn't so rainy on the way ome, although it's still raining now. There's Yet Another Sens game on tonight. I should be more excited, but I've never much liked hockey -- it's been a bit of a shock to enter Ottawa just now, when the Sens have a real shot at the Stanley Cup. Go Sens Go! Suffice to say, I'm not watching the game tonight.

Eating Chef Boy-ar-dee again tonight. ;-) Kindof fun. Going to watch Stargate SG-1 again in a little while.

Then, I guess, sleep.

Another good day.

2007-06-03T17:11:00.000-04:00

Not nearly as long and hard as yesterday. :-)

I started out the day uncertain whether I was going to do anything. I mean, after yesterday I was pretty wiped. But I felt pretty good this morning, and at around 10:30 or so, I started to feel antsy. So I hopped a bus to Centrum.

Down there, I wandered through Pier 1 Imports, Wal Mart, stopped for a pizza slice at Pizza Pizza (it was really good), and picked up some groceries at Blobblobs (some bread, some PB cookies, and some band aids, for those who care).

Then it was only a quarter after one, so I went to the AMC 24 again and saw Knocked Up. Funny movie. :-) Worth seeing.

Then I hopped the bus home. Fun enough, and now it's a quarter after 5, the day passed, and I can get around to eating my box supper and watching Stargate SG-1, and stuff. :-)

Not as exciting as yesterday, but who wants days like that every day!? All in all, a fun enough weekend.

Now one more week, and we close on our house here! Hooray! Huzzah! Hey Nonny Nonny!! Very exciting. ;-)

:-) Of course...

2007-06-03T11:32:00.000-04:00

"Secrets are gifts, so use them well."

I saw no other references to it on the Internet at all...

I assume I got it right...

Dear God I'm not in my 20's anymore!!

2007-06-02T17:01:00.000-04:00

Downtown Ottawa Adventures

I feel like I'm going to die. I don't think I'll get up off my bed until tomorrow. Bodily functions will be challenging, I'll admit.

Today I did everything. :-)

I figured out the bus stuff last night (no thanks to OC Transpo's web site, which has got to be the most convoluted, useless, POS website I've seen), and it turns out it's pretty simple to get downtown on the bus from here. Just take the 160 to Centrum (like I always do), and then from there, take the 96 downtown.

Today, I woke up at around 7, dinked around for a bit on the Internet (caught up on my webcomics, mostly), and finally got out to the bus stop at around 8:30. 3 minutes before the bus showed up. Which is pretty good, since I didn't bother checking the timetable.

I got down to Centrum, and just transfered -- the 96 was pretty quick coming, and I figured I'd hit Centrum on the way back if I still felt like it. Downtown sounded more fun.

I had my trusty mapbook along, and I followed it as we went. The 96 does a nice run, up the 416, along the Ottawa River for a ways, and then finally through downtown. It runs through a couple of the most run-down neighborhoods I've seen yet in Ottawa, but that's not saying much: Ottawa is a very nice city.

I got off the bus on the McKenzie King bridge, and walked down to the University of Ottawa, and wandered through their buildings for a while.

On the way, I saw a bunch of people on a walk for breast cancer. There's pictures in my album.

I finally got down to where I thought Fandom II was, but turns out the address information here wasn't correct. It's 162 Laurier Avenue WEST, not East.

Wasn't so bad, it's not that far from one to the other. I walked down there, but it was still only 10:30am, they don't open until 11:00. So I walked down to Parliament Hill. That's an unbelievable thing. One day I'm going to go down there and do a guided tour of the buildings. Beautiful. Unbelievable.

Finally, I walked back up to Fandom II. By this time, my feet were getting pretty sore, and I was pretty hot. I hoped Fandom II had air conditioning. :-) They did.

Now, I know other people have talked about Fandom II on the Net before, and I've heard it's one of the best gaming stores in Canada. But Dear God, it's a wonderful place. It makes me excited about gaming again just going in there.

Every game I've ever heard of or seen, was there on the shelves. They had multiple copies of Ptolus. Gurps. Rifts. Rolemaster. Every 3rd party d20 supplement known to Man. Stuff from the Miniatures Building Authority, which I'd never seen in person. The guys not only knew what Fudge was, they had just sold out of Fudge dice. HUGE miniature selection. HUGE RPG selection. And that's not including the fiction or board game stuff, which I didn't even get into. Also a really active bulletin board with for sale/wanted/gamers/gms wanted stuff on it.

All this, and the store is clean, friendly, and professional (not one of those creepy fangroup stores where you feel unwelcome going in.

I love that store.

After there (I bought a book), I walked down to Sparks Street where I ate at Yesterday's. Meh. Not sure I'll go back, but I was hungry, and they fed me caesar salad, steak, and glass after glass of club soda.

Finally, I caught the 96 back to Centrum. At this point my feet were killing me, and I was pretty tired and hot.

So when I got to Centrum, I went to the AMC 24 and watched Shrek the Third. That was nice to sit in the dark air conditioning, drink water, and enjoy resting. I also took the opportunity to put a bandaid on my developing blister, which helped a whole lot.

Next, I walked down to Staples, where I just browsed, and saw those cooling pads again. I have to read more about them online, they again only had the 15" one -- I'd like something bigger.

Next, I went to Canadian Tire, and found (finally) the fans. I found a $120 "commercial grade" fan on sale for $60, so I grabbed it, bought it on debit (Canadian Tire Money!), and carried it back to the bus terminal.

Now, the bus terminal is at the FAR end of Centrum from Canadian Tire. No two points are further apart. That fan got mighty heavy on that long walk. And THEN....

as I was walking up to the terminal, I saw the 160 pulling up to let people on. So I ran, with my big heavy fan, a long way. I wouldn't have made it, but the bus driver saw me and waited.

By now, I'm dead tired, the sweat is beading off of me, I can barely catch my breath, my clothes are sticking to me, my muscles are all sore, and my feet hurt. But at least I'm on the way home.

I got off the bus, walked to the house, peeled off my clothes, went and had a shower (yay!), set up my computer, and here I am. On my bed. Where I'm going to stay.

But it was a fun day. Lots of cool and exciting stuff. Tomorrow I plan to have less fun and more rest. :-)

Oh: and upstairs in the other bedroom, there's a mattress on the floor. Nothing else in the room, but a mattress. I assume that means the other roommate is in the process of moving in. Probably today or tomorrow, I'd guess.

Rest now. Like I said: I'm not in my 20s anymore: I used to do days like this all the time, walking all around, but even with my walking to work, this takes a toll on me.

My new fan works GREAT, btw. :-) Very powerful. Almost too much air on low! Hee hee.

The week is done...

2007-06-01T19:25:00.000-04:00

It was only last Monday that we did the home inspection on our new house. It really seems like a year ago. :-)

I'm glad it's Friday. I'm going to try to go downtown Ottawa, I think, tomorrow. On the bus, like. Which should be fun.

Tonight, though, I'm just going to lay around and zone out. Tired.

Awesome.

2007-06-01T09:11:00.001-04:00

And THIS is why Google will win the tech wars.

Nuf said.

Some quick pics

2007-05-31T21:22:00.001-04:00

...of some wildlife I've seen around.

Kanata (at least the high tech north end that I'm living and working in), is right on the edge of the wilderness. The consequence of this is that the wildlife is really there.

On my way to work yesterday, I saw two deer crossing Innovation Drive, not a hundred feet from me.

In a ditch I pass daily on my walk to work, I saw a 6" fish.

And the muskrat I've seen a couple times, at a bus stop on Himes Road. :-)

Plus the Canadian Geese: they're everywhere. They nest in the parking lot at work, and big flocks of them we've seen in the field next to our new house.

There's a thunderstorm going on now outside.

I like this place. Even though we're technically in a city, with lots of jobs and high speed internet and everything, it still feels a lot like the country, even here in the city proper. It'll be fun to live here in the country. :-) Mmmm... outdoor fires...

The thunderstorm is getting quite violent, actually.

Heh.

Anyway, other highlights of the day are finally finishing most of the Perl programming I was doing. Mostly the job is Java+Spring+JPA+Hibernate/Toplink, with parser generators and all sorts of cool stuff, but randomly there was some Perl code to generate some Java code that I ended up having to refactor. Never done Perl before. I don't like it, but it gets the job done.

Also, today I finally got a garbage can in my cube. :-) I'll have to take some pictures of my cube environment to post online at some point.

Did my laundry tonight after walking home, at my chicken-flavored Ramen noodles, watched two episodes of Stargate SG-1, Summit and Last Stand. It's shaping up to be an excellent season.

Now I've got to put my laundry away, make my bed (really a double air mattress on the floor, although it self inflates, which is pretty cool), eat a snack from my box of food, and maybe read Deception Point by Dan Brown -- which is a pretty fun book, even if he gets some of the tech slightly wrong. :-)

This weekend I'm going to try to get down to Fandom II, which is apparently a Really Good gaming store downtown Ottawa. I've never tried going downtown on the bus before, it should be a fun adventure. I'll have to be careful: there's a Sens game happening that night (3rd game of the playoffs -- it shames me that I know that -- Go Sens Go!), so the city might get kind of crazy Saturday evening/night.

Not a bad life. I'll be glad when it's done, but I'm managing. And we close on the house

Power's flickering. Better post this.

What's for you won't go past you.

2007-05-30T20:29:00.001-04:00

...or so they say.

It's been quite a year, starting in January when I lost my job. A long process of job interviews, trying to figure out what what we wanted to do with our lives, where we wanted to live, whatever.

It's been an incredibly exciting opportunity. We had all the freedom in the world. I can work, really, anywhere. I'm good at what I do: finding a job isn't a problem: finding the right job is. We could pick and choose anyplace in the world (although, realistically, North America is probably the bounds: my dual citizenship only goes so far).

After investigating a bunch of opportunities, we decided that Ottawa was the place to be. Or maybe Ottawa chose us. That probably needs some 'splainin'.

If there's been one recurring theme in this whole process that we've discovered it's that: what's for you won't go past you. If you try to go down the "wrong" path, difficulty after difficulty will be thrown in front of you. Once you choose the "right" path, things go smooth and easy, and you find out in the end that it's better than your other opportunity anyway.

Our first major choice was where to live. We don't want to live in a big city like Toronto or San Francisco, which ruled out most of the big hotbeds for tech jobs. In the end, the way the opportunities laid out, the choices came down to: Waterloo or Ottawa.

Waterloo had the substantial advantage of being familiar and comfortable, and having friends and family there. Ottawa has way more tech jobs, and much cheaper land. We investigated jobs in both places, interviewing at lots of places. In the end, I got multiple offers, but the best opportunities were all in Ottawa. There wasn't anyplace with jobs that seemed worthwhile in K-W.

Probably not surprisingly: statistically, the more jobs there are, the more fun they'll be. In the end, the position I chose I'm extremely happy about: Emergis (formerly known as Dinmar). They make and support a product called Oacis, which is a medical record application, mostly. The people there are great, the product is interesting. I'm enjoying learning about the dynamics of a larger company, and in the meantime, I get to do what I love and am good at.

Once I accepted the offer at Emergis, stuff started in earnest. We were moving to Ottawa. We put the house on the market with Paul Allen, who I highly recommend if you want an extremely competent, aggressive seller. The house sold in two weeks, but not without drama.

We actually got an offer after 48 hours on the market. But they came in with an insultingly low offer, and dragged out the negotiation process endlessly. It was just so difficult to deal with them...

After that, a bunch more showings, and we had multiple offers one day, we accepted one that was good money and zero conditions, and life was easy. The buyers sound excited about the house, and I hope they're happy in it. It's a great house.

What's for you won't go past you.

During the house hunting, I secured an apartment out here (sight unseen), and moved out ahead of the Vincent-Wilder clan.

This is probably the hardest part of the whole process. Changing jobs and cities and everything is stressful enough, but all that is fine. It's being away from Lisa and my family and my dogs that really depresses me. Living in a rented basement like a troll, walking to work with my backpack like a student, coming home to an empty house, nobody to eat snacks and watch TV with... no dogs scratching the hell out of you when they try to sit on your lap... it's harder than I expected it to be. I wouldn't do it if it weren't strictly time limited.

Kind of weird, really. I did this same thing years ago in Chicago. I disliked it then, living alone, but it was nothing like this time. I guess I was unhappy for so long before I met Lisa that I didn't really know the difference. Now, being apart from the people who I love, and who love me... it really hurts. Blah.

ANYWAY, enough of that.

The next step, after selling our house, was to buy something out here. Again, it was a saga.

We found a really nice place right away: 8 acres, house not visible from the road, fenced for dogs, beautiful house, trees all around, really really private, 35 minutes to work. We liked it so much we put an offer in on it. Then the troubles started.

First, a bunch of things in the listing were misrepresented. Whirlpool tub... absent. Walk out from basement workshop... absent. There were some worries that maybe other things may have been misrepresented. Nagging fears started.

Next, the boundaries of the property were in question. When asked, the agent said it was "square". It was clear that she meant "rectangular" and didn't know the difference, but whether the property was long and skinny or short and fat was in question. Finally, we found out some more details, and it turned out that the property line was right along the yard. So your private haven was actually partially owned by other people. Meh.

Finally, they were building a house, and wanted to rent us a house (not this one), until the building was completed. This seemed like a good idea at first, but then questions started cropping up: what happens if their building goes beyond schedule? Talking to a real estate lawyer at this end, it turns out that this sort of thing is a very bad idea. So we lost interest, and let the counter offer lapse.

Too hard.

Next, we hooked up with a buyer's agent out here recommended by the Paul Allen team: Penny Kaszas. She showed us a few properties, and we found The One.

6 acres, cleared and partly fenced, with a 140 year old farmhouse, 10 minutes from work. :-) For less than what we sold our suburban Kitchener home for. The sellers could close quickly (2.5 weeks), accepted our conditions of inspection, etc, and generally seem really nice to work with. There were no major concerns or issues.

It's a cool place. The house has a poured concrete foundation: it was dragged to its current position a number of years ago by horses. It's got the beautiful wide trim, pine floors, plaster walls, beautiful doors and knobs that we remember from Villa Villatrolla and loved so much. 9' ceilings throughout, nice layout, natural place for a mudroom, lots of parking. It's got a natural gas furnace, central air, 200 amp electrical, steel roof done in the last 10 years, new windows throughout in '94... High speed internet is still uncertain, but certainly my High Speed Unplugged modem works there (I checked during the inspection :-)

We've had an excellent inspector: Harry Bradford out to look at the place, and while there are issues as you'd expect in a 140 year old house, they're easily within our budget to just get fixed properly. At the same time, we had a really good septic inspector (I forget his name just now) out to look over the septic system, and he was impressed with the quality, apparently it's in really good shape. A few little maintenance things to do, nothing much. The water tests came back spotless. We have a survey of the property, done in 1987. There's also an aerial photograph of the place hanging at the place: our agent has asked if we could get a copy, but it shows the old barn still standing, the original red brick, ... I'd guess it was done in the 80's.

There's lots to do. Look at the pictures: all the flooring needs redoing, the kitchen needs to be gutted and reworked, the hot tub in the master bedroom needs to be removed, lots of trimwork repair, painting... maybe the siding removed if the brickwork's in ok shape underneath. Fencing to put up, workshops to build: it's a paradise of home improvement projects waiting to happen. Which is good, because that's what we like. :-)

It's SO close to work: 10 minutes. Literally right up the street. This means that we'll not have the cost and time expenses of a long commute, more time to work on the house after hours, and it's so close to the Kanata high tech district that land values are just going to climb.

It's zoned agricultural, which means that we can have horses and goats and stuff at home, which has been the dream for forever. Lots of room for the dogs, no neighbors within sight, nothing behind our property for miles except fields and rivers and lakes, with a view of the Gatineau Hills from our backyard.

We've signed off on our conditions, the sold sign is on the new house as we speak (neither of us have actually seen it: our agent just told us after she drove by). We take possession in 2 weeks.

MUCH nicer than the place we put an offer in on, and nearly $100K less.

What's for you won't go past you. :-) Now you see why I start to believe, eh?

Lisa has been the real hero of this whole process.... she dealt with the realtors and the lawyers and the mortgage brokers and the banks and the inspectors and the endless cleaning and showings of the house. She's made several road trips out here with loads of stuff for my apartment and our storage unit. She's single-handedly packed the house and managed the dogs (she had to take them alone to the vet one day -- gak). She's probably talked more hours on the phone than her whole career in tech support. She bought a fax machine and has run it through its paces.

She is like unto a goddess that walks upon the earth. I am honored, proud, and a little humbled that she is my wife.

So. To sum up this year: it's been one of the most exciting, the most wonderful, the scariest, the most stressful, and the most depressing years of my life. Would I want to do it again? Not on your life. :-) But I'm glad it happened. I'm really happy with where things ended up in the end.

Now I've just got to wait the few weeks until it all settles down, Lisa and the clan move out here, and we can get on with falling into a comfortable routine again. In between renovating our farmhouse, of course.

On the theme of fixing up old houses, I have to share a website I found: Our Fixer-upper. It's a young couple who look like they've stolen our life. :-) Dogs and home improvements. They've got a beautiful house, and lots of ideas, tips, and a whole community of people around renovating homes. Very cool.

Now, I've got to find a snack and get on with my grueling evening of lazing about. :-)

What's for you won't go past you.

Star Trek?

2007-05-09T21:16:00.000-04:00

My Star Trek character....

Hee hee.

Who would've guessed?

You are Spock

Spock		72%
James T. Kirk (Captain)		70%
Chekov		65%
Data		55%
Jean-Luc Picard		55%
Beverly Crusher		55%
Worf		45%
Will Riker		45%
Uhura		45%
Leonard McCoy (Bones)		45%
Geordi LaForge		40%
An Expendable Character (Redshirt)		35%
Deanna Troi		25%
Mr. Scott		20%
Mr. Sulu		10%

You are skilled in knowledge and logic.
You believe that the needs of the many
outweigh the needs of the few.

Click here to take the "Which Star Trek character are you?" quiz...

Ottawa

2007-03-28T18:57:00.000-04:00

Ottawa

We went to Ottawa early this week -- it's a beautiful city: we quite enjoyed ourselves.

A little hard to drive back through Toronto, with its traffic and its swarms and its stinky air, after being in clean, small Ottawa. :-)

Some pictures if you click on the image to the right.

Encyclopaedia Cameleopardis Update

2007-03-22T09:02:00.000-04:00

A big update today - all my old Orcreaver notes are all entered and online (that was a big stack). Museurth is pretty much done (there weren't as many notes still around from that).

Still lots to go in the box, of course, but now I can say that there's lots of content on the website as well. :-) Enjoy.

Delicious supper

2007-03-17T19:41:00.000-04:00

We ate all the part containers of food that were in the freezer tonight. Lots of food, all delicious.

I love nights like this.

Crow on the Road

2007-03-16T22:11:00.000-04:00

My grandfather used to say: "if a man ever tells you that he hit a crow with his car, don't trust anything he says: he's a liar. You can't hit a crow with a car."

I've always doubted this, but today...

I saw a dead crow on the road, hit by a car. :-)

Orcreaver

2007-03-15T16:34:00.000-04:00

I'm working on the Orcreaver campaign (2000-2001, Tunnelmachen, etc) notes now. Man, I made a lot of notes for that campaign. Quite entertaining. :-)

When I get through them, I'll do another publish.

An old dream

2007-03-12T23:00:00.000-04:00

I had this dream in high school...I just found an old dream journal I kept (with just one entry in it), while going through old roleplaying stuff. It doesn't belong there, but here, I'll share it.

Everything - numbers + colors
See. Feel. Hear. People.

Making 1st, 2nd, 3rd out of plastic, thick numbers

Shoes - dress and casual at school. Not polished yet. These numbers, and the shoes were outside the men's staff.

Mrs Schlosser comes to get Ingrid, says she should have bell around her neck. Christian says "Hi", says he has "pfuf-pfuf", the booth window key.

I'm wearing double-breasted suit jacket, dark slacks (perhaps jeans?), and a dark shirt.

The toilet in the first stall in men's staff is filled to brim. I question in my mind whether it is possible to flush it. My shirt - now light dress shirt (white?) threatens to trail in used toilet water.

Outside door of bathroom are clunky shoes, inside is dress shoes - stacked to the ceiling. door says "gentlemen's bath"

Ingrid in big crowd of people.

I'm telling others of play I saw. I wasn't doing lighting for it.

2 girls say "hi", joke about shoes and "gentlemen's", as I enter bathroom. Sitting on bench by window across the hall diagonally.

The numbers are - green, perhaps red, perhaps blue - all light. About a foot x a foot x maybe 4 inches.

The play was about something the others had seen on TV, and I was telling - somebody about it.

I had gone back to school after being on the bus w/ my bookbag. I left my bag there. Went with people to a restaurant, then was back at school. Restaurant sold pies + pizzas. Tanya Braun was there.

Originally 5 people on bus - sort of like van - with same number of seats.

I poked Tanya's foot under the table, and she jerked it away. Christian was to my right. Tanya ordered some sort of pineapple semi-transparent fruit baked novelty with nuts visible in the middle. I ordered one too.

Pizzas were pineapple. 2 ordered by our guests, but were taken off. Pizzas had single pineapple slice on them. They went to another table.

Were originally (7?) people at table - too crowded. 2 were girls.

I remember this being a really vivid dream, and I'm glad I've put it here for posterity.

More Cameleopards

2007-03-12T20:09:00.000-04:00

I just did another big update to Encyclopaedia Cameleopardis. A bunch of old campaign notes are up, along with most of all the characters I have in my possession. Plus, all my electronic notes that I had on my computer (minus ones that are already on my website...).

Next step is to fetch more paper notes from the Big Box and start entering them. I'm not near done, but it's a nice chunk of it entered anyway.

We're still watching Stargate SG1 -- I quite like the show. It's fun: the writing isn't great, but as a student of action-adventure plots, it's nice that it's not so slick that you can't see the mechanisms that they're using. Plus, their backstory and world cyclopaedia is extremely rich and filled with cool stuff.

We ate delicious steak at Angel's Diner tonight. Mmmm.

Stuf

2007-03-06T12:15:00.000-05:00

Lisa put the first coat of primer in the dining room, while I broke down the rest of the shelves from the living room.

Laundry, vacuuming, eating lunch (delicious canned pasta with meatballs), and soon we're going to clean out the fridge and get groceries (I've been looking forward to Shreddies and pickles (not at the same time) for a while, so I'm looking forward to groceries. I keep forgetting them every time we go).

The stack of characters done for Encyclopaedia Cameleopardis is a lot bigger than the stack left to go -- I may soon be actually done with characters. Then it's on to some other stack (maybe some of the campaign worlds I've got laying around). I'm looking forward to creating links between some of this campaign information, should help with dating some of it.

Dysons & a new Encyclopaedia Update

2007-03-05T20:21:00.000-05:00

A quick note: I've done a big update of Encyclopaedia Cameleopardis. Lots more characters are up.

The main point of this post is to rave about the Dyson vacuum we got.

I mean, wow. :-)

It's a vacuum, of course, so you still have to push it around and clean the floors. But if any piece of equipment could make this chore enjoyable, it would be the Dyson.

I had just vacuumed our floors, a couple days before we bought the thing (I even posted about it here on my blog). The amount of dog hair and fine dust and dander and whatever that that Dyson sucked out of our visibly clean carpets was nothing short of astounding.

In many ways, the clear bin is the thing that makes the Dyson fun. You get to see the dirt getting sucked out of your carpets and floors as it comes out. Also easy to empty and clean, so there's not really any unpleasant part of the job.

We also vacuumed our dogs. :-) Buddy hasn't had a bath in years (we should bathe him, but he's a real jerk about it, and he's large, and hates baths, so whatever), and was kindof getting a bit of a funk to him. Vacuuming him with the Dyson sucked out about an inch (in the bottom of the Dyson bin) of dander, plus a whole whack of fur. Plus the dog likes it. :-) He doesn't smell anymore, either...

Pixie, on the other hand, hates it. You can vacuum her, if she's sitting in my lap and Lisa operates the machine, but she runs away first opportunity she gets. Maybe she'll like it more as time goes on, hard to say.

It's not the perfect machine (ideally, it'd do the cleaning itself, and maybe do windows too), but for what we want it for (general deep cleaning of the house), it does a great job.

Highly recommended.

Lots of stuff

2007-03-03T19:18:00.000-05:00

This morning, we went out to eat at Country Boy. You don't often get to go there. It's very popular, and usually by the time you get there, it's too early. We were out early anyway, so we stopped for breakfast. They do a good breakfast there. Mmmm..

Lisa finished filling the damage on the dining room walls, and I disassembled one of the two shelves from the living room. The dining room is looking good...

For lunch, as previously mentioned, we had the most delicious toasted turkey & swiss sandwiches on Earth.

This afternoon, we ripped out the old hose from the dishwasher, and capped the pipe (turns out there's just some widget you can get at Home Depot to do that capping).

Tonight, we're having lamb for supper. It's cooking now. Mmmmm...

Also, got a Dyson vacuum. Hopefully it's as good as people say. We've had a long saga trying to find a vacuum that we like.

Deliciousness

2007-03-03T15:41:00.000-05:00

Lisa makes the best toasted turkey+swiss sandwiches on Earth.

Mmm.. and I get to eat them. :-)

And the file sizes are diminished.

2007-03-02T21:00:00.000-05:00

I've updated Encyclopaedia Cameleopardis to use JPEGs rather than PNGs for character sketches. No noticeable drop in visual quality, dramatic drop in file size.

Encyclopaedia Cameleopardis

2007-03-02T15:56:00.000-05:00

So, my first brief draft of Encyclopaedia Cameleopardis is up. It's just a little beginning. The characters that are posted are pretty much done, character sketches scanned, etc.

I think I may shrink the file size of the scans down a bit -- they're a little obese right now.

Scanner Goodness

2007-03-02T15:44:00.000-05:00

So I got the scanner working, finally.

I've got a Canon Canoscan LIDE 30 scanner. It's a beautiful scanner, cheap, slim, runs off USB power, and it seems (to me) to make fine scans. Unfortunately, I'm now using a Mac, and I wanted my scanner to work so that I could scan a whole bunch of old RPG stuff.

Officially, it's supported. There are drivers you can download from Canon's support site. However, they don't seem to work for many people. Very poorly written, very difficult to install, very difficult to use... really, a write off. Plus, I couldn't get them to work at all, despite wasting hours at it.

Next up, I discovered VueScan, a commercial scanning utility. This thing just works, it supports the scanner nicely. The free version is crippled (watermarks all image output), and you have to pay $40 for the program if you want it for real. This would have been fine, but I was looking for a free solution.

Turns out that XSane is the trick. I've used XSane on Linux before, and it works great and is very very powerful (although it's a little wonky, UI-wise, as are many Linux programs). To get it to run, you have to use one of the Mac-Linux porting efforts. The one I got to work was Fink. To install XSane, you need to install the unstable version from source.

Finally, it doesn't just work (nothing's that easy, right?). As documented here, there is a permission problem when you first install it. The trick is that you need to make the directory /sw/var/lock/sane world-writable with some command like this:

sudo chmod a+w /sw/var/lock/sane

Then it should work great. (This was a trick to find out, as there's no clear error message: it just says "can't find scanner").

Anyway, here's hoping that this little tip helps some other poor schmuck like me who tried to get their LIDE 30 scanner working on a Mac.

Others have problems with this scanner, too.

Snow and ice and rain - I Love Ontario

2007-03-01T21:34:00.000-05:00

So it's another fine Ontario March: wet snow and ice pellets, changing to freezing rain and rain. I haven't been outside very recently, but when I was, it was pretty nasty.

Last night we went to see Jess's show at the Sears Ontario Drama Festival -- I've said it before, and I'll say it again, some of these kids have real talent. Wow.

A kindof fun bit at the beginning of the night: the adjudicator was stuck in traffic on the 401, and so the show was delayed. These kids, extroverts all, self-arranged a bunch of skits and singing numbers amongst themselves to entertain the audience until the woman could show up. Good stuff, too. :-)

I have another crack at getting the scanner to work with free software. I'm installing xsane through Fink as I type this, hopefully it works like it should. I'd love that scanner to work from my computer: it'd make Encyclopaedia Cameleopardis much simpler. I have a backup plan: there's a $40 piece of software called VueScan that seems to work, but I like free stuff much better if I can get it to work.

More Home Improvements and Random Happenings

2007-02-28T16:35:00.000-05:00

Lots of stuff, always lots of stuff.

Yesterday we finished reinstalling Lisa's sister's computer, then went to the bank, got dog food (we're switching their food - the dog food companies keep changing the formulations to make them cheaper, and our Brown Dog gets sick when they do this), and stripped the rest of the wallpaper in the dining room. That room is a mess: the walls weren't primed before painting originally, the drywall mud was mixed wrong, and nobody primed or otherwise treated the wall before slapping wallpaper up over the whole mess. Ugh. When you pull the wallpaper down, lots of other stuff comes down with it. That's the story with this house.

Last night, we helped Jess with her UW application form - it's a lot more complicated to get into Arts at UW than Math. :-) They want people who can write... and think! :-)

Then we went to bed (watched Grace Under Fire and ate snacks first, of course).

Today we had to get up really early because Jess has an all-day theater thing and had to catch a bus. When Lisa got home from dropping her off at school, we went back to bed -- we were exhausted!

Then this afternoon, Lisa did most of the re-mudding of the dining room while I vacuumed the house (one of the Big Thorough Vacuumings you do every once in a while, where you clean everywhere and move furniture and stuff). We also set the VCR to tape Lost - the only TV show that's new this week and we'll miss it.

Then we took showers (I was HOT after vacuuming everything), and now I'm here. Who knows what the evening will bring?

In other news, I'm a big chunk of the way through entering all my Encyclopaedia Cameleopardis characters. Busily working through. I've got more Medieval Occupations updates in my pipeline too, that I haven't had a chance to get to.

Delicious lunch today: Lisa made asparagus+bacon omelettes. Mmmm. Probably my favorite thing to eat in the world. And last night we had delicious leftovers: prime rib, turkey, ribs, mmm. Hm. I wonder what we'll eat for dinner tonight?

Get Rid of Old Stuff ... Profit!

2007-02-26T16:10:00.000-05:00

Recently we went through a bunch of my old gaming stuff, and weeded out a bunch of stuff that I haven't looked at or touched in years and years. I've still got a huge collection, but the real junky stuff, it's stupid to haul it around from home to home and never look at it.

So I've got two big heavy boxes, that I can barely lift, of books. Old 2nd edition 'Complete X' splatbooks, old Star Wars RPG sourcebooks, a great big stack of Dragon and White Dwarf magazines, and really weird stuff.

We figure we'll try to sell it to one of the local gaming stores. I knew Now and Then Books did used stuff, but I hate myself every time I go in there. J+J Cards and Collectables doesn't do it anymore, they said, and so I took it to Phoenix Games and Hobbies (formerly Nexus Games).

Lisa stopped outside the door (this is downtown Kitchener, no street parking), and I hauled these heavy boxes in the door, and she goes to park. While she's gone, I haul these two boxes up the flight of stairs (there's 23 stairs inside the door at Phoenix, and a tiny landing at the top. And they're steep stairs. And they were heavy boxes.

By the time I get the boxes up the stairs, I think I'm going to have a heart attack. I mean, my heart hasn't pounded that hard in years. ... even now, an hour later, I feel a little out of breath. So I stood outside the door on the landing for a while, just waiting for my heart to stop racing.

Finally, I felt good enough to go in (I had enough breath I could talk again), and so I went in, and showed Bill (the owner, I guess) my stash.

He goes through it for a long time. At some point, Lisa gets back from parking the car, and we wait while he goes through all this old stuff. Funny -- not a single piece of it did I regret giving up as I watched him go through it. Really, though, I still have a huge collection. Most of this stuff I actively hated.

So, I was expecting maybe $20-30 for this stuff (I mean really -- who would want it!?), and so when he said I could have $116 in trade, or $96 cash, it was all I could do to take the cash and not giggle hysterically. :-) I just wanted to get rid of it, and here he gives me real money. I took cash ($116 is way too much to spend at this point -- what would I do with all the stuff I got? I'd have to store it somewhere, and move it...). The cash can go in the general pot, maybe help buy something we need for the house.

Wow. I'm so pleased. :-) I never expected to get so much cash.

So the lessons of the day are:

exercise is bad, and may kill you
if you have junky old roleplaying books you never use, somebody may give you Real Money for them!

Now to rest.

Yesterday

2007-02-26T09:50:00.000-05:00

We mostly took yesterday off. It was Sunday, it had been a long week. We ran Roomba (which is how you can say 'I vacuumed' without actually having to vacuum. :-)

Still tired today. :-P Doing some work this morning, though.

The Haps

2007-02-25T10:29:00.000-05:00

Lots more happenings.

We moved the Giant Fan out into the garage, in prep for doing the dining room. Other than the freezer and a dresser and our beautiful dining room table, the room is now empty. With the new light fixture, it's starting to look like a grown-up dining room. :-) Removing the Giant Fan from the room probably did the most for it.

We packed up all the books into short Rubbermaid containers, and moved the remaining bookshelf units out into the garage for disassembly. The living room looks a lot less cluttered.

We called Packaging Too about a custom box. We wanted to pack up the swords (previous moves we've tried to make random boxes work, but they poke through the sides, the boxes aren't long enough, and we now have more swords than ever. Turns out this box company would make a 12x12x48 box out of double-thickness corrugated for $12. :-) This after trying and trying to find a commercial box that would work. We packed the swords up, and it worked like a dream.

Now the big things left are the dining room refinishing and the garage. Yay fun. :-) And the myriad other tasks ahead of us. Lisa made a list - there's lots of stuff on it.

Busy busy.

Another day, tons more stuff.

2007-02-22T20:37:00.000-05:00

Pixie liked her new crate last night, it must seem like a palace to her. She repaid us by eating a whole sleeve of cookies from Lisa's desk while we were out at her parent's house tonight. :-) Bad dog. They were delicious cookies, too, and 99 cents on sale!

We did more stuff this morning... a bunch of paperwork that took surprisingly long, and then we went out to mail a letter and eat lunch (mmm... lunch. We were surprisingly hungry being as we'd only eaten an Cadbury's Easter Creme Egg each this morning).

When we got home, Lisa packed up a bunch of boxes, and I went out in the garage to disassemble the shelf unit we removed from the living room a few months ago. Right down to boards. It was weird: it's the first shelf unit that we've built that I took right apart. It's surprising how many screws come out of those things before they start not looking like shelves anymore. :-)

Oh, and I disassembled the old projector screen while I was out there.

Then, it was packing up more stuff, hauling more garbage out of the house, then shower and off to Lisa's parents' house for grilled steaks (I like this warmer weather. Mmmm). And waffles with blueberry sauce and whipped cream for dessert.

Then home again quick to watch Grey's Anatomy (which is a wonderful show, still), and find out that the dog ate all the cookies. And now it's just waiting around until ER and bedtime.

And somewhere in there I made a whole bunch of more updates to my Medieval Occupations page (which is generating a lot of traffic and email the past week or so). Also, trying (unsuccessfully) to get the scanner to work with my MacBook. I'll probably just hook it up to my Ubuntu box, where I'm pretty sure it'll just work. Crummy poor-quality Canon OSX drivers. :-(

In short, another good day. :-)

Lots of things

2007-02-22T09:08:00.000-05:00

Lots and lots of things have been going on recently...

We got Pixie a new crate - we realized suddenly that her old crate was hardly big enough for her to lay down in. :-) Apparently she's grown over the past few years. We're also getting new dog beds for both of them -- their current ones are eyesores, and don't show well. :-)

A friendly guy named Jared Oakes submitted a metric ton of new definitions and corrections for my Medieval Occupations page, making it an even better resource for thousands of gamers and gradeschool children everywhere. :-)

I've begun my Big Paper Project, where I start digitizing some of the massive pile of RPG stuff I've been collecting for years (since 83, when I started gaming!). I've got all of Christian's old characters entered, and a few of my favorites. At some point I'll publish the pages on the website, maybe after a few more are entered. The digitization project is currently called Encyclopaedia Cameleopardis. More details will be posted here as it becomes available.

We moved some dressers around upstairs to make room for Buddy's new bed. We also cleared out pretty much all of the clutter in our bedroom. Our bedroom looks quite snazzy -- we're thinking of putting up a new mirror in there.

We replaced the dining room fixture with the same fixture we did at the top of the stairs, and it's beautiful in there as well. Next step: stripping wallpaper (maybe today).

We took down the kitchen table, and moved the island out of the dining room into its place, where it belongs. The dining room looks huge, with the removal of furniture and the new (bright 200W) fixture, it makes a nice place to dine.

The weather's been very nice. It snowed last night, but it's warm out. Lisa grilled steaks last night for dinner -- nice to have that in February.

We watched the new Lost and House - House wasn't new, but the episode was good, Lost is starting to get really really irritating. SG-1 had better get good again soon, or I'll regret that I said that 2nd and 3rd season were getting better.

Other than that, lots more junk consolidation (trips to the dump, trips to the thrift store, rubbermaid containers packed and labeled) and general cleanup. It's been productive recently.

I'm amazed at how nice a house can look if you remove all of the junk. It's amazing: not only can you find stuff, a surprising amount of low-level stress is removed when you're in a clean environment. I had no idea.

Photos of our adventure at Medieval Times

2007-02-18T10:59:00.000-05:00

Medieval Times

Sorry the quality of these photos isn't great: I'm not that good a photographer. :-)

But it gives a bit of a taste of what we saw last night.

Medieval Times!

2007-02-17T23:36:00.000-05:00

We just got back from Medieval Times. Wow. Unbelievable entertainment.

Now, if you're a historic accuracy nut, or a horse nut: you may be disappointed.

But if you're looking for a good time, to eat chicken with your fingers, to shout for your hero until you're hoarse in the throat, see falcons zooming around overhead, and watch costumed knight dudes whaling on each other with big sharp heavy weapons, this is for you.

Hint: we do. :-)

We had a great time, and look forward to going back again.

Updated site style.

2007-02-16T20:10:00.001-05:00

I made a few tweaks to the stylesheet of my website...

Yellow Dog Dingo

2007-02-16T19:31:00.000-05:00

There is a traditional Australian song (I think) that has these lyrics:

Oh yellow dog dingo,
how old are you?
Where did you come from?
What did you do?
Did you come from Asia,
with the Aborigines?
...

Does anybody know anything more about this song?

Legacy Systems

2007-02-16T19:12:00.000-05:00

So I've been thinking about Service Oriented Architectures a lot recently.

I was a skeptic until I saw a recent excellent presentation on them, and then I could really see the point. Promoting loose coupling between autonomous systems written in disparate programming languages, this architecture is unique among those proposed today in that it actually attempts to solve the legacy system problem, which is rampant, and not going away anytime soon.

Legacy systems are irritating. On the one hand, you want to rewrite them in whatever the latest trendy language is, and have polished gems in your IT department. On the other hand, it's impossible, since the systems you're trying to replace are insanely complex, because the business problems they're trying to solve are insanely complex.

Rewrites in the latest trendy language are especially insidious. I mean, COBOL used to be the latest trendy language. Ada, too. Maybe Smalltalk. What about C or C++? Now it's Java or C#. At each of these stages, any large system written is building a legacy. The most recent legacies are no more and no less horrible than the ones before, because in 5-10 years, there'll be a new trendy language (maybe some functional language for all the massive multiprocessors that are coming out), and all this Java or C# code will be the millstones hanging around our necks.

SOA is the first architectural advance that I've seen that directly addresses this problem. The SOA pundits say: break your system into functional units, and have them call each other using SOAP. If you design your system right, this may, in fact, give you the leverage to replace individual chunks of functionality in whatever the new trendy language is, in 5-10 years.

This, of course, is only part of the problem. You still need good data modeling and databases (because these legacies are particularly hard to migrate). Also, in 5-10 years, there'll probably be something better than SOAP or XML that we're all supposed to migrate to, which means that your entire system has to come down, and you haven't really won anything.

I'm a little disappointed in the complexity of some of the SOA standards. SOAP seems overkill. If you want loose coupling of systems (and stability of standards over time), don't make your interface language that sophisticated. I'd have stuck with something really simple and defined elsewhere (maybe HTTP POSTs with string-typed parameters, and XML bodies). But still, it's a step.

So, SOA isn't just OO with remote method calls -- it's really a whole new way of thinking about the real problems that affect businesses. I'm curious how it works in practice.

Sleepy Day

2007-02-16T19:09:00.000-05:00

We didn't end up going to see Dr Edwards: there were flurries and poor visibility on the roads up there (same as last time we tried to go). This threw us for a bit of a loop, and we were tired and unmotivated today.

I did blow out the driveway again, and we went to the Mongolian Grill for dinner, which we hadn't done in years.

Tomorrow night we're still on track for Medieval Times, so that should be fun.

EDIT: P.S. Gray's Anatomy rocked, as usual.

We had snacks after all.

2007-02-15T15:28:00.000-05:00

Last night, we watched Grace Under Fire, an entertaining sitcom that we like to watch before we go to bed. We were finally hungry enough for snacks: I ended up eating a cupcake, chips+dip, and a bowl of Shreddies. :-) A little excessive... I went to bed very full.

Today, we replaced a ceiling fan with a new light fixture.

Now, to get a real feel for this you have to realize that we live in a back split suburban home, and there's a flight of stairs that goes up and up and up: 4 flights in all. When you're outside our bedroom, at the top, you can look down two stories.

I'm afraid of heights, and the ceiling fan to be replaced is out over the railing, at the end of my reach.

We had to take down the old ceiling fan, which was the hardest part: one screw holding is up was on the far side of the fixture. I ended up on a ladder, leaning out, with a stubby screwdriver (so that the extra driver length didn't need to be reached).

But we got it done. Here's the product page for the fixture we installed (it's 15" diameter, and takes 2 100W bulbs):

http://www.dvcanada.com/feature_product.php?id=88

The ceiling fan that was there was a gaudy brass thing we've hated since we moved into this place, and it serves very little purpose now that we have a superquiet whole-house fan that came with the new furnace. The new light is classy, and really suits the style of the house. As an added bonus, all the 3- and 4-way switches on all the floors of the house now have a purpose, and when we go to bed in the dark, one of us doesn't need to stay behind and turn lights off. Like in a modern home! :-)

Then, over a delicious lunch, Lisa and I discussed plans for finishing up the house renos, and how to set up the house for sale. Big plans. I'm going to miss spending all this time with her, the past few months have been wonderful.

I'm planning on cooking something (haven't figured out what yet) -- I realized I hadn't cooked anything in like 6 years, and maybe it's getting a little silly.

Now I'm doing laundry, the snow is falling again, tonight we're going to Lisa's parents' house for dinner, watching Gray's Anatomy and ER. Tomorrow we're off to see Dr Edwards, and Saturday we go to Medieval Times. A fun cap to the week.

No snack

2007-02-14T21:09:00.000-05:00

We were still too full from supper for a snack for Lost (impenetrable as usual: opening new questions, answering none). Maybe later.

Delicious supper

2007-02-14T18:25:00.000-05:00

We ate a delicious supper, with schnitzel, mashed potatoes, broccoli, tomato juice, and leftover lamb chop from last night.

Mmmm. I got real full. Hopefully I have room for snack at 8:00 when Lost is on...

Snow snow snow

2007-02-14T16:31:00.000-05:00

We didn't get as much as some people feared, but we got quite a dump: more than I've seen around here this winter, anyway.

I got to use the snowblower again: it wouldn't start at first, we had to use the electric start, but once it was going, it did a great job, cutting into big snowbanks, throwing snow everywhere. Very exciting. :-) The driveway is all clear. Nice.

I also wore our snowsuit for the first time this winter... actually, probably for the first time since Clyde Road. I like that. It always makes me feel like a big kid. :-)

We also went out and got a light fixture to replace the top-of-the stairs fixture with. I think we'll do that tomorrow.

Later on...

2007-02-13T22:19:00.000-05:00

The neighbors have their driveway ripped up by Ontario Hydro. No lights are on in their house. Something bad seems to have happened over there (for Hydro to be out after hours in the snow...). Bad night to be without power. Cold out there.

For Lisa: I'm posting all night. I'm crazy! :-)

Designing the Future

2007-02-13T19:43:00.000-05:00

People who know me know that I'm a little down on environmentalists. :-) It's not that I'm anti-green, it's just that I think people tend not to think a whole lot about what compromises are reasonable. If you're asking people to change things for the environment, I think it falls on you to ensure that the changes you're asking for will be highly effective, and minimally invasive.

This guy's got it right (IMHO):

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7773650/site/newsweek/

This is a guy who thinks hard about the problems facing society, and has some very interesting points of view on it.

The Not So Big House

2007-02-13T19:39:00.000-05:00

A very interesting site: The Not So Big House. Sarah Suzanka is an architect trying to spread the meme that the quantitative aspects of your house (square footage, ceiling height, etc) matter a lot less than the qualitative aspects (beautiful detailing, deliberate and pleasing architecture).

She says that you should buy smaller houses, and spend the money on making your places nice.

It's a fun idea: something that's obvious once read.

A good day...

2007-02-13T19:28:00.000-05:00

Lots of stuff the past couple of days: we cleaned out the remaining stuff upstairs (sewing supplies, etc), and our desks and files downstairs. Took another load to the dump and thrift shop. Looked around (unsuccessfully) for a light fixture to replace the only remaining original light fixture in the house (we're trying a specialty shop tomorrow probably), and went to Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, and got some delicious snacks.

The most delicious thing in the world is these chocolate balls encased in hard candy cinnamon. They're called "Cinnamon Chocolate Mints" from RMCF, and they only get them around Christmas. (Except our store here in Kitchener ordered lots, and still has a few left out back). Unbelievably delicious.

The furnace guy came today to do our yearly maintenance/check, and fix a few minor things that were wrong with it. The guy was rude and snarky, and not particularly careful (he ran into things a lot). Maybe too much testosterone. He did an ok job though, I guess.

I got my March Martha Stewart Living today, and I've read it already (mostly waiting while the furnace dude went out and got parts).

We ate delicious lamb chops for dinner. Mmmm.

It's House tonight, which I'm looking forward to. I love that show.

So far, a fun enough day. Now, bring on tomorrow!

Some minor site updates.

2007-02-12T19:03:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to do this for a while, and now I have.
I've updated my ObInternet Links and Photo Gallery pages to include badges from my del.icio.us and Picasa Web Albums accounts, respectively.

Medieval Times...

2007-02-11T20:49:00.000-05:00

We got tickets for 4 of us to go up to Medieval Times this weekend. It's kindof a Valentine's present from me to Lisa.

We've never been to this restaurant/show, but we've talked about it for a long time.

We're looking forward to it.

Home Theater

2007-02-11T10:15:00.000-05:00

Home Theater

I finally got around to uploading a few pictures of our home theater setup here: we recently got a new screen and a new component stand, plus a Logitech Harmony 880, which is pretty sweet.

We really like our setup here. All we need now is a Wii. :-) We actually got 3 extra Wii controllers already, but Wiis are still
too rare to actually get. ... one day.

We don't like going to the theater anymore. Once you have the theater experience at home, going out with all the loud and stinky people, eating bad food, not being able to pause the movie, not getting to sit on our nice comfy couch... it's just better to stay home at some point. :-)

Oh yeah: the last couple of days, the pictures I've been posting have been taken on my cell phone: a Sony Ericsson W810i. It's got a 2megapixel camera in it, and takes decent pictures. Not nearly as nice as our little Canon camera, but you have this one with you all the time, which means you can take pictures constantly. Better than seeing stuff you want pictures of, and saying "Darn, I wish we had the camera". :-)

Home Improvements...

2007-02-10T18:17:00.000-05:00

We went over to Lisa's parents' today: we were bringing over a couple of shelf units that we've been looking to get rid of. We ended up doing a bunch of minor stuff over there: it was a good day.

We replaced the threshold in their bathroom with a nice hardwood one, we hung two mirrors in their living room, we fixed a broken lamp (which I'd never done before: turns out it's quite simple: you just replace the whole little bulb/lamp/switch mechanism), alongside bringing in, modifying, etc the shelves.

You know it's a good day when you finish 5 or 6 projects, and you get to use power tools. :-)

Tonight I think we're watching Star Gate again: I think we like it well enough now that we'll get the next season. I like it well enough that I miss watching it nights that we don't. So that's something...

We've also done a whole bunch of work upstairs packing boxes, eliminating stuff, basically streamlining our life. We've started storing everything in standard-sized Rubbermaid containers with labels on three sides. Our storage room looks very sharp.

Soon, the only area left to do in our house is the Garage: which will be a big enough deal, but nice that it's the end. I'm particularly looking forward to going through the fasteners/screws/hinges/etc box out there, and the tools. That's needed doing for years now.

Should also clean off my desk. Hrm.

The picture attached to this post I took this evening. I love when the dogs play. :-)

New Screen Ends.

2007-02-03T22:35:00.000-05:00

In the end, we bought a screen.

We were in Toronto (the big smoke) yesterday, and stopped in at Tiger Direct. They had, in stock, a 120" screen for just over $300. So we went back today and bought it. We hung it in the living room, and watched Star Gate on it. It's nice quality, was affordable, and it's even motorized (not that we'll likely use it that way much, but still)...

Nice picture, particularly compared to projecting on the stripey wallpaper. :-)

Our January Vacation

2007-01-28T23:16:00.000-05:00

Lisa and I just got back from our three day trip out to balmy Winnipeg. The trip was mostly business, but we got to spend time with my mom while we were there, which was big fun.

"Balmy", of course, is a sick joke: we were in Winnipeg in January. It was cold, especially Saturday, the day we flew out. -25 + serious wind = nasty death-dealing cold. The kind that freezes your nostrils shut. I'd forgotten just how cold it can get. I mean, I've survived far worse, but only in Manitoba. :-) I think my blood has thinned a bit since I've moved out to Ontario.

Despite the cold, we had lots of fun. We got to see my mom's new house (which is beautiful), and ate lots of delicious foods (which we always like). A great trip all around. We're going to have to try to get out there again sometime soon.

It's always nice to come home again: "North, South, East or West, the shortest way home is always the best". Coming home, having extremely excited and happy dogs, sleeping in our own bed: it's nice.

Tonight we watched Gray's Anatomy that taped while we were gone: another wonderful episode. That show's still my favorite.

Plus another Stargate: SG-1 episode. A good one again. Season 2 is definitely an improvement over season 1. Hopefully the upswing continues through season 3. The episode 1969 is coming up, too. I'm looking forward to that one (I read the synopsis on a website a while ago, and it looked fun).

Snow snow snow

2007-01-19T22:01:00.000-05:00

We finally had a big dump of snow, and I finally got to use our new snowblower. It worked great.

It started on the first pull, I figured out how to use a choke easily, and the thing blows the snow wonderfully.

Of course, never having run a snowblower before, I'm not very good at it. There are odd constraints on its movement: it's hard to turn a sharp corner, it goes in reverse very slowly, and every time you change direction, you need to rotate the blower chute so the snow goes the right way.

The combination of these constraints, plus the odd shape of the area I have to blow, makes it difficult to come up with an efficient path: to blow the snow most efficiently, without having to redo areas. A challenge. :-)

Luckily, I get to blow snow again tomorrow: more fell during the day at least, even if no more falls tonight.

SO much nicer than shoveling. SO much better.

The Future is an Exciting Place

2007-01-14T11:25:00.001-05:00

The initial shock has worn off. I'm extremely excited about this news.

Last week, I was laid off from Exalt.

It was a wonderful company to work for. I liked the people, it was an unbelievable learning environment, and I have no regrets about my time there.

While this kind of news is always a surprise, it couldn't have happened at a better time. Looking back, I've been ready for a career change for a while. We were already considering moving out of our house (we've even been preparing, by getting rid of useless possessions). Jessica just turned 18 and is about to graduate and go off to university. It's almost as though fate has been preparing us for this event for months.

As for the future, I'm not worried about employment: I'm extremely qualified, there are lots of jobs, and I still have a few industry contacts.

The timing and the conditions are perfect. It's time for a change.

The future is an exciting place.

Very. Very. Long. Week.

2007-01-12T12:02:00.000-05:00

This has been the longest and most stressful week of my life. Literally.

But at the same time, the most exciting and inspiring week, also.

Certainly the most surreal week.

Good or bad? I think good, although my opinion changes on that, hour by hour. It's Change. And that's always Scary, but usually Good.

Hopefully I can get through the rest of today without anything Huge or Monumental happening. I'd like that. Just get to the weekend to regroup.

* * *

But I needed to post now, just to say that I have the most supportive and loving people around me. People so good to me that I feel I can't possibly deserve it. I just wanted to say thank you.