Normally I’d defer to Debbie for that kind of decision. She has a pretty firm grasp on how long it’s been since the kids last had candy, and thus if sufficient time has elapsed for the next carefully metered dose. She also knows what food we have in the house at any given time, handy to make snap decisions on alternatives to candy.

Debbie wasn’t home.

I was on my own on this one.

Left to my own devices to get the kids to sleep, I knew I definitely didn’t want concentrated sugar on the pre-bedtime menu. What alternatives could there be?

Fruit? That’s a healthy dessert, right? I can’t get into too much trouble feeding them fruit.

– “Joel, would you like some fruit?”

– “What kind?”

– “Dunno. Let’s see what’s in the fridge.”

A quick perusal of the kitchen revealed that the cupboard was bare, so to speak. I shut the fridge and turned to Joel.

– “Sorry, Joel. There’s no fruit.”

He looked up at me with a gleam in his eye.

– “Yes there is!”

– “No, Joel. I’ve just checked. There’s nothing.”

He ran over to the fridge and hauled the door open. He pointed at the crisper and cried out in triumph,

– “There’s a tomato! Tomatoes are fruit!”

And with peals of laughter he ran off, pleased to have pulled a fast one on his Dear Old Dad.

I learned to program on a computer like this one. It’s a Texas Instruments TI99/4A, popular in 1981. My high school acquired a lab-full of these, and I signed up for the very first class. I programmed in BASIC, which was about the only programming language available to home computers at the time, and in true nerd fashion fell madly, deeply in love. Thus began my life-long affair with computers.

The utter slowness of the computer became quickly apparent though. Toward the end of my first year I wrote a PacMan game that I was immensely proud of. It had ghosts that were efficiently ruthless at hunting down the poor hapless PacMan. The only way to beat the game was to play a perfect level. It would have been impossibly difficult for the player to complete even the first level, were it not for the fact that the game had a refresh rate slower than a second. That is, the ghosts paused for a second at a time to ponder their next move. The whole thing was ultra slow motion and wasn’t any good as a game. I still felt pleased with myself, although a little puzzled as to how such a slow computer could be of any use at all, other than as a teaching tool. I also couldn’t figure out how Texas Instruments got away with advertising this as an advanced system, when it was clearly pretty useless even for those early days of home computers.

Around that time the school’s administration decided that I was a sufficiently advanced student and allowed me to use the sole computer with an expansion unit. The expansion added a floppy disk drive (Hooray! No more loading from tapes!), more memory, and an Assembler module. I started to tinker with the assembler, looking to improve my PacMan game, and found that while it took the BASIC ghosts thirty seconds or more to traverse the screen from one side to the other, the assembler ghosts could do the same thing in the blink of an eye. I spent many hours figuring out how to slow the game down enough to play it. Assembler also showed me how truly sophisticated the computer was under the hood. Obviously it was capable of adequate performance. Just not in BASIC.

At the end of that year my Dad bought an Apple IIe and I never looked back. I dabbled with the TI99/4A when required for school assignments, but the Apple was a vastly superior computer–much faster and simpler to program. I wrote a lot of software for that machine, including a rudimentary music publishing program that was actually used to publish a book. The following year I moved on to the IBM PC. It had more memory, a faster processor, and several programming languages to choose from. Back then, even more so than now, computer technology advanced at breakneck speeds, each new model rendering last year’s obsolete. Still, I never figured out why the TI was such a miserable failure when it had more advanced hardware than either the Apple or the IBM.

Until now.

An article at Technologizer explained how the TI BASIC was a double-interpreted language. That is, BASIC programs were translated into an intermediate language called GPL, which in turn was translated into the computer’s native machine code. All that overhead of translation slowed things down considerably. Further, the computer only had 256 bytes of system RAM. That’s one quarter of a K. 0.02% of a megabyte. It had 16K (over 16,000 bytes) of video memory, however, and was advertised as a 16K computer. The processor would store user programs in the video memory, and retrieve those programs sequentially, one byte at a time.

That’s why the TI, with an advanced (for that time) 16-bit processor running at 3MHz, was so much slower than the Apple, with its lowly 8-bit processor running at a mere 1MHz. The bottleneck of memory management was one of several design failures that fatally crippled the TI.

I am happily relieved to finally put to bed a mystery that had remained unsolved for 25 years. I know, I know. You probably aren’t geeky enough to truly appreciate the satisfaction of such a discovery, but trust me: today I am a happy man.

I am also smugly content in the knowledge that I write this on a computer with 32 million times as much system memory as that ancient TI, 32 thousand times as much video memory, and runs the processor 1,200 times faster. And in another 25 years I’ll probably look back and chuckle at how much further technology has advanced.

I was washing my four-year-old’s hands for dinner tonight when he cheerfully said,

– “Daddy, I know a new trick that you don’t know.”

– “Really Joel? What’s that?”

– “I can lick my snot!”

Why oh why did I have to ask? Being exceptionally slow and not yet having learned my lesson, I blurted out,

– “So how do you do that?”

– “You stick your tongue out, and curl up the end.”

He was quite proud of his ability. At this point I stopped asking questions but it was too late. I’d seen a demonstration I’d much rather have missed, and Joel skipped off to dinner proud of his new-found skill.

Ahh! It’s Friday, it’s sunny and warm, it’s Spring! What a wonderful afternoon to spend in the yard, enjoying the cool, gentle breeze, listening to birds chatter in the trees. I went out with my camera and tripod to get some pictures of the trees newly budded. From time to time clouds would pass before the sun, and I had to stand and wait for it to get sunny again. The clouds weren’t in a hurry and neither was I. Not that taking pictures of the yard is all that strenuous. After all, the trees aren’t going anywhere. But I was just as happy to stand there and enjoy the calm.

Joel came out to see me two or three times, to see what I was doing, to keep me company, to tell me dinner was ready. I watched his little legs pumping madly as he dashed across the lawn, and decided I was quite happy to stay fixed in one spot, thank you very much. For the briefest of moments I considered telling Joel I would stay outside and the rest of the family could go ahead without me. But I’m a parent. I have responsibilities. So I went inside to finish setting the table and round up the kids to eat.

Once we were all sitting at our food the normal table conversation started with its usual vigor. This consisted of wife and children all competing to tell me how their day went. We try to train the boys to wait their turn and speak one at a time, but often it works out to be four people talking at me while I smile and nod. My occasional contributions to the conversation consist of,

– “Daniel, take another mouthful.”

– “Joel, put that drink down and eat something instead.”

– “No Daniel, don’t talk with your mouth full.”

– “Uh-huh, Micah … I see … Is that right?”

While casting furtive glances at Debbie: Do you have any idea what he’s saying? Micah (2) can be quite clear in his conversation, but once he picks up speed he’ll yammer through an entire discourse and we won’t have understood a word he’s said.

Adult conversation with Debbie is futile. Table talk at dinner time is the Twitter of the conversational realm. If you can’t get your meaning across in six words or less, you don’t stand a chance. It’s like white-water rafting: you paddle for dear life and try not to drown. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Dinner conversation is at the heart of our family life, the anchor of the day.

Now the boys are in bed, the dishes put away, some afternoon photos processed, this post mostly finished, and it’s ten o’clock at night. Time to start thinking about going to bed.

Ahh, but the bliss of that calm half-hour before dinner, alone, under the sun and sky…

Debbie and I discussed the current Mexican swine flu outbreak at the dinner table last night. One of my workmates is in Mexico at the moment, getting married and going on his honeymoon. Some joker at the office has closed off his cubicle with yellow Caution tape and hung a breathing mask over the cubicle partition. Several airlines have canceled all flights to Mexico, so there’s some uncertainty over how he’ll get home.

I recently finished reading The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, about the 1918 pandemic and published in 2005. The book has many faults–it’s twice as long as it should be, it’s meandering and disjointed, and it’s irritatingly melodramatic–but the story is a fascinating read. The tragedy of millions of deaths, children orphaned, whole families wiped out; the mistakes of a blind and bumbling bureaucracy; the intentional disinformation and misdirection by the press; the complete lack of clues to any hint of a cure in the global scientific community; the severe shortage of hospitals, doctors, nurses, medicines, and ultimately coffins and burial plots. Bodies were thrown by the hundreds into mass graves. This was all fresh in my mind when the swine flu outbreak started a couple of weeks ago.

Incidentally, this particular strain of flu virus is a recombination of the North American swine flu, the European swine flu, the North American avian flu, and the human flu viruses (via Wikipedia). It’s this last component that allows it to be transferred from human to human. Despite the popular name, it’s not carried by pigs. Agricultural associations object to calling it “swine flu” because it unfairly casts aspersion on the pork industry. Mexico, understandably, objects to calling it “Mexican flu”. The World Health Organization (WHO) wants people to call it “H1N1″, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so easily. Besides, H1N1 is the generic designation for the common flu (it includes the strain that produced the 1918 pandemic), and people prefer to make a distinction, to be more specific.

As in 1918, there is no vaccine for the current outbreak (although the anti-viral drug Tamiflu has proved effective). If this turns into a pandemic the best prevention is isolation and quarantine. So, that’s what we discussed around the dinner table. I’d sleep in the garage, doing all the external stuff like going to work and shopping for groceries, and Debbie and the boys would be confined to the house. We’d pass groceries, meals and laundry to each other through the kitchen door. Debbie wondered what we’d do if I got sick. We left that question unresolved.

We finished talking and there was a moment’s silence. Then Daniel (5) spoke up in a worried voice, “Are we all going to die?” Poor child! We hurriedly reassured him that it was highly unlikely but that the situation needed talking about, and paused in our meal to pray about it. We asked God to keep us safe and healthy, to protect the family from harm, and to reassure us of His care. Daniel seemed content to leave it at that. Maybe Debbie and I should have talked privately.

Worries aside, the current swine flu is nowhere near as fatal as the 1918 flu. Although the 1918 flu was highly lethal nothing has matched it since. Medical authorities don’t know how mild or severe swine flu will be, or even if it will be as bad as run-of-the-mill everyday flu, which kills one in ten. For now all we have is general hysteria fueled by mass media, and so we make plans and pray while we go about our daily lives.

It’s Spring! Warmer weather, sunny days, tulips pushing out of the ground, birds, squirrels and the occasional fox back from hibernation. In that same spirit of renewal I’ve moved this blog to a new server. My frustration had been mounting at the problems with my old web host until I finally took the plunge and moved.

You may want to take the opportunity to update your bookmark (if you have one) to the new host: http://stephen.rothlis.net/blog/. If you follow this blog in an RSS reader (e.g. Google Reader) or get blog posts by email, you don’t have to do anything. Things will automatically continue as they were. If you subscribed to the blog comments feed you will have to re-subscribe. See the sidebar on the right.*

I’ve instructed the old web host to redirect browsing to the new server so your browsing and links should carry over seamlessly. I’ll eventually cancel that old account and the redirection will stop working, so update your links.

The new server is a more hands-on affair. Some assembly required. It’s a good opportunity to add to my skills, but the learning curve has been a little harsh at times. John (my brother) has provided some very useful suggestions and links along the way. It’s jolly handy having an IT expert in the family.

Which reminds me of a story from my university days. John and I rented a small flat together at the start of our first term, and I set up my PC in the living room where we could both use it (It was a 286! With a massive 1.2GB hard drive!). At one point John decided to upgrade some software–it might have been Windows 95–and I chewed him out because he’d taken the initiative without consulting me. It was my computer! John was deeply offended that I called his abilities, competence and judgment into question. Words were exchanged and we stewed over it for days, until I realized, Hey! This computer works so much better! He’s helped answer my IT-related technical questions ever since. Thanks John. Sorry I ever doubted you.

* Technical reason: subscriptions to blog posts through a reader or email go through FeedBurner. All I have to do is change the details in FeedBurner and everybody’s subscriptions are moved over to the new server automatically. Subscriptions to blog comments, on the other hand, come directly from the server that hosts the blog. Those subscriptions can’t be transferred automatically.

It’s spring, and the damp has brought it’s seasonal troubles to the car’s electrical systems. A front-end collision many years ago (before our time) resulted in damage to the engine computer wiring harness. Several repair attempts left a hodgepodge of mismatched splices wrapped in miles of sticky, gummy, melted electrical tape. It’s a mess. The car is OK in the summer when it’s hot enough to bake out any moisture that gets into the splices, and it’s OK in the winter when there’s no moisture in the air anyway. Spring and autumn are a problem though. Lots of rain, damp, too cold to evaporate the drips, too warm to freeze them.

A while ago the engine started cutting out momentarily at unexpected times. We lived with it for a week or so it because it always started right up again by itself after a second or two. Until one day it refused to start at all. I sat in the car on a wet, windy afternoon at the parking lot at work, cranking the engine again and again, with no success. Sigh. Gotta face the music sooner or later.

I pushed the car into the warehouse and left it there overnight, hoping the dry warmth would get the water out of the wires. I tried to start it again in the morning, with no success. Sigh once again.

So I spent the weekend with the car up on blocks, testing the seventy-odd cables to the computer one by one. It turned out to be the main power feed to the computer directly from the battery. Well, no wonder it didn’t start. OK. We have progress. So how to fix it?

I went looking for another wire in the same circuit, trying my hardest not to take anything apart if I could help it. On a vehicle of this vintage many of the bolts are rusted solid. You don’t unbolt things–you snap them off, never to be the same again.

In the end the easiest (least risky) connection was under the main fuse panel on the other side of the car. There were a few tense moments undoing the brackets on the panel, but it came away mostly unscathed. The wires under the panel had been repaired and spliced before, and there was about 5mm of slack in the cabling. I could lift the edge of the panel just enough to shine a light in. Really big sigh. It just doesn’t get any easier, does it?

Judicious use of the wire cutters gave me enough space to lift the fuse panel out of the way. I wanted to repair those inferior splices anyway, or so I told myself. So I spent an hour repairing the repairs. No wonder the car had problems.

I ran a whole new wire from the computer all the way across to the fuse panel rather than trying to fix the old wire. It was easier and quicker that way, with a more reliable result. The car started up beautifully and has been fine ever since.

Until a week later.

Now the engine ran fine. It’s just that from time to time it wouldn’t start. This was different from before. Before, the engine would turn over, chugging away for as long as you held the key, but wouldn’t ignite and run. Now the engine wouldn’t even turn over. Turn the key and nothing. Not even a click. Lights on the dashboard, sure, but no starter. Stranded once again.

After another weekend of troubleshooting I narrowed it down to the Park-Neutral safety switch. This is a sensor that prevents the driver from starting the engine unless the engine is in Park or Neutral. In my previous car this was a switch built into the gear selector lever–fairly easy to get to. In my current car it’s a magnetic sensor bolted into the transmission housing–very difficult to repair unless you take the transmission off. This was not a job for an amateur. But I had to get the car running and spend as little as possible in the process. These are hard times.

So I put in a bypass switch. I ran some wires from the engine into the dashboard, with a toggle switch to close the circuit the faulty sensor was failing to engage. And it worked. Occasionally the car would fail to start and I’d reach over and flick the switch and everything would be alright. After a few weeks the sensor failed for all time. So now the car has a new custom-built security feature: it won’t start unless you know about the secret switch.

One day I’ll phone the dealer and order a replacement sensor. One day. These are hard times. On the other hand, it seems like the manufacturer may go out of business any day now. These are hard times indeed. Maybe I’d better get that sensor while I still can.

What’s that you say? Time to buy a new car? Yes, indeed! But these are hard times. Haven’t you been listening? So we make do with what we have, and are grateful.

Daniel came running into the room this morning complaining bitterly about Joel hitting him with this pitchfork-shaped toy. Stabbing him in the back, so to speak. Debbie calmed him down and explained that yelling and screaming was no way to sort things out, that he should use words, that he should say to Joel, “Please don’t hit me with that Joel. I don’t like it when you do that. It makes me angry and upset. Please stop.” Debbie is trying to teach the boys conflict resolution, trying to help them resolve their own differences without running to Mummy for every real or imagined transgression.

Daniel replied, “But that’s too long! If I have to say all that, by then he’s already hit me!”

Hard to know what to say to that one. The boy has a point.

Micah is taking potty training way too seriously. For the last couple of weeks he has been waking at night every hour and a half or so, calling out “Mum come!” quite loudly. Debbie groans, drags herself out of bed, picks up the toddler, takes off his diaper and sits him on the toilet. Where he promptly pees at length. Then she dresses him, tucks him into bed and flops back into her own bed with another groan, and tries to go back to sleep. This goes on all night long, every single night.

Besides the obvious question, Why Do We Have To Put Up With This, the situation has generated some intriguing scientific debate. For starters: Where on earth does he get all that liquid? Does he sneak a bottle into bed? Is there a secret stash in his crib? We’ve instituted strict drink rationing from dinnertime onwards, so we know what his intake is (rather, we think we know). And why does he save all his bathroom visits for bedtime? He doesn’t seem to need to go that often during the day.

The end result is a dry diaper in the morning plus exhausted parents. In the antithesis of potty training, we’re trying to convince Micah to not worry about using the toilet and just pee in his diaper. It’s OK, we don’t mind, honest! But no. He’s doggedly conscientious. “Mum come!”

Occasionally he’ll be so restless that Debbie will bring him into our bed, so that he doesn’t wake his two brothers. If one child awake in the middle of the night is bad, three grumpy, fussy boys are immensely worse. Hey, everybody’s awake! We might as well get everyone up and dressed and ready to start the day! At 4am.

Last night had an added twist in that I’d given the boys Glow Sticks at bedtime–small plastic luminescent rods. Micah had a death grip on his “Wo Dik”, and after bringing him into our bed Debbie spent the rest of the night with this really bright orange light constantly in her face. Micah’s idea of a good night’s sleep is to cuddle up to Mum as close as he possibly can, arms draped over her. Usually he crowds her right off the edge of the bed. The Glow Stick was the crowning indignation to a night (nay, week!) of frustrations.

Pray for us.

Daniel’s Aunty Raich sent him a wooden model plane for his birthday. There’s the picture from the box on the right. He was pretty excited about it. This ranked as a Pretty Cool Gift in his opinion, and he wanted to build it straight away. His younger brothers didn’t want to miss out on the fun either, so there were three small boys eager to get started.

I looked at the front of the box. I looked at the back of the box. I didn’t need to open it to know what was ahead: fiddly little pieces of wood, put together with glue. This wasn’t Lego. And that was just the mechanical challenge. I’d also be contending with three excited boys stumbling over each other, crowding me, wanting to be in on the action, to be involved, to do it all.

“Can I hold the glue Daddy?”
“Let me squeeze the tube!”
“I’ll hold that part Daniel.”
“No! It’s mine! Give it to me!”
“Mah [Micah] do it!”

Oh, I was looking forward to this, all right.

Daniel had received other gifts he really liked (Lego), so I managed to put him off for a couple of weeks. One Saturday, after daily pestering, I finally gave in and announced that we were going to build the model plane. Boy! You would have thought Christmas had come again, to hear the exuberant rejoicing! The boys were jumping up and down, laughing, cheering, yelling, crowding around me as I picked up the box. Just what I needed, as I prepared to start something that required quiet, careful concentration. I had to remind myself that whatever it looked like from my point of view, from the boys’ perspective this was going to be fun.

I put a cardboard tray on the dining table to contain all the pieces, and pulled three chairs together as close as I could. Daniel and Joel knelt on either side, leaning toward the tray, and I sat between them with Micah on my lap. When he’s engaged and interested in what’s happening, Micah is well-behaved and sits still and follows instructions. This arrangement was the best I could make of the situation, and actually turned out surprisingly well.

We took sheets of plywood out of the box and carefully punched out the pre-cut pieces. I arranged them loose on the tray in the same layout as the sheets, and told the boys we didn’t want to get the pieces jumbled up. Joel likes things to be in order so he immediately settled down. And Daniel? Well, I guess one bouncy child is easier to deal with than three.

The box had a postage-stamp sized piece of sandpaper which we used to smooth down the rough edges of the pieces we’d just liberated. Four heads clustered tightly around small pieces of wood.

Then the glue. By now I realized this was not going to be finished in one sitting, and started to prepare the boys’ expectations accordingly. This is what we can glue now, boys, and then we have to leave it to dry before we can glue more parts on. In fact, we’ll have to leave it overnight. This turned out to suit the boys’ limited attention span. Things were working out quite well. How surprising.

Day 1, Saturday. We glued the engine to the main spar (the spine), and glued the bulkheads (ribs) to the spar. Oh, and also the propeller hub but not the blades (much to the boys’ disappointment). And that was it for the first day.

Day 2, Sunday. We glued on the fuselage skin. This involved bending flat, straight pieces of wood to fit a round, tapered frame. Unfortunately, the wood did not like to bend. It much preferred to splinter and snap. This was not going to be easy. I sent Joel off to get some rubber bands–big, thick ones–which kicked the boys’ interest up a notch. They love rubber bands. After experimenting a bit with a couple of dry runs I realized I’d just have to jump in and wing it. Lots of glue, rubber bands wound around a dozen times, and Voil