The Mandelbear's Musings

Today I was shocked to read that Fry's Electronics has gone out of business, as of midnight last night (February 24th). Their web page has the announcement:

After nearly 36 years in business as the one-stop-shop and online resource for high-tech professionals across nine states and 31 stores, Fry’s Electronics, Inc. (“Fry’s” or “Company”), has made the difficult decision to shut down its operations and close its business permanently as a result of changes in the retail industry and the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Company will implement the shut down through an orderly wind down process that it believes will be in the best interests of the Company, its creditors, and other stakeholders.

It's a sad, sad day. Their first ad, a full page in the San Jose Mercury-News, was like nothing seen before (or since), listing computer chips and potato chips on the same page. (Its relationship to Fry's Food and Drug, which had recently been sold by the founders' father, was obvious.) As time went by the groceries largely disappeared, but soft drinks and munchies remained, and some of the larger stores included a cafeé.

I (snail) mailed a copy of that first ad to my father, and that first Sunnyvale store was one of the tourist attractions we visited on his next visit to the West Coast. I have no idea how much money I spent there over the years.

After I moved to Washington in 2012 my visits to Fry's became much less frequent, and more of my electronics started coming from Amazon. It's been years since I saw the inside of a Fry's store.

I'll miss it.

Another fine post from The Computer Curmudgeon (also at computer-curmudgeon.com).
Donation buttons in profile.

My brother called me this morning to say that Mom had died. She would have been 100 years old on December 28th. I last spoke with her Saturday; I'm glad we had a chance to say our goodbyes.

I'm... I'll be okay. Hugs would be welcome.

Last week we lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg. My immediate reaction was "we're screwed."

As Siderea says, "We may have just lost the country." See also, Opinion | The GOP traded democracy for a Supreme Court seat and tax cuts. It wasn’t worth it. - The Washington Post.

I am trying very hard not to despair. It's not going that well.

It's been 19 years since my father died. He introduced me to science fiction, computers, digital filtering, electronics, and folk music, among other things. His paper on digital filtering of spectra is one of the most-cited papers in in the journal Analytical Chemistry.

Dad was as much a packrat as I am, so there was always a good supply of reading material around the house: magazines including CACM, Science, Analog (and its predecessor, Astounding), Galaxy, American Scientist, and others; plus a small collection of computer design and SF books (including a few by his grad-school classmate Isaac Asimov).

He was also the gentlest person I've ever met.

Links:

Abraham Savitzky - Wikipedia

Savitzky–Golay filter - Wikipedia

Smoothing and Differentiation of Data by Simplified Least Squares Procedures. - Analytical Chemistry (ACS Publications)

The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of

Rainbow's Edge

I guess I'm not up to saying anything more today. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1999, a little over two weeks after Colleen's mother died of breast cancer. It's a rough couple of weeks, and I never really know why until I remember.

Jordin Kare died yesterday, from complications of aortic valve replacement surgery. I am still somewhat in shock. He was younger than Colleen.

There is not much to be grateful for on this Thursday, but I am profoundly grateful for Jordin's music, which has been part of my life's soundtrack since at least the early 1980s. He was one of the founders of Off Centaur Publications, publishers of the Westerfilk songbooks and many fine filk tapes. (Jordin did the typesetting for Westerfilk I using troff, which led to a number of typos involving single quotes, which troff treats specially if they're the first character in a line.)

Last night Naomi and I sang a few of his songs -- "Fire In the Sky", "The Designer" and "The Engineer", "Waverider", and all I could remember of "Kantrowitz 1972". It wasn't until this morning that I found the lyrics for that and "Sail for Amber", Colleen's favorite.

I just ...

(Jordin Kare: Fire In The Sky (1991) | LyricWikia)

2016 can go hang itself. In the last week the filk community has lost Lucy Stern, Kira Heston, and JoEllyn Davidoff. Colleen's friend Bev lost her fiance. The folk world lost Oscar Brand. Enough!

The rest of it seems kind of lame. I'll try. Meanwhile, there's this infographic of the stages of grief vs reality.

I successfully replaced the USB port on Colleen's tablet -- I am now feeling fairly confident of my ability to fix modern computing devices. Meanwhile, though, Colleen had expressed an interest in replacing both her tablet and her kindle with a Kindle Fire, so when I spotted a used Fire HD 6 on sale at, well, a fire sale price, I got it for her. So now I have a Kindle paperwhite. I may go back to reading books on the bus instead of news. It would be good for my blood pressure.

My hypertension also provided a convenient excuse for not watching the presidential debate. I already know who I'm voting against, thanks. First election I can remember where Darth Vader and Cthulhu dropped out early.

At work, my sit-stand desk showed up over the weekend. Having a desk that goes down to a proper typing height, which for me turns out to be 25.5 inches, is wonderful. Tried standing a couple of times -- it hurts to do more than a couple of minutes. I'm supposed to work up to 15 minutes out of every hour. Probably not happening, but we'll see.

Also got my Microsoft ergonomic keyboard; it took me most of the week to get used to it, but it may work. If not, I can always go back to the Thinkpad keyboard. I bought one of the newer ones for home, which means that I could swap the older one I'd been using there for the one at work, which had developed a dicey space bar.

Finally got around to paying a few bills. I suck at that kind of thing.

My depression and anxiety numbers were down -- 5 each -- at my session with my therapist on Tuesday. I'm not sure the therapy is doing me much good except as a way of getting something of an objective reading on my mental state, but that's probably a good thing in its own right.

Somebody sent me a link that his daughter found and suggested putting on Interesting Places for Kids. Which I did, but it's so horribly out of date that most of its links are broken, including all of the links to it, now that I've dropped the places.to domain. (Tonga raised the rent, and I didn't think it was worth it.) Oh, and also the build system, which relied on the no-longer-maintained cPIA: XML Macro Processing in C for templating. Need to put that on GitHub. Thought I had, actually.

Oh, yeah: the link:

As the father of two 6th grade girls (twins) I've been looking for weather resources to help them with their natural disaster project in their Earth Science class! Your weather guides have been a big help. As a thank you, I wanted to send you this page that one of my daughters found: http://www.aaastateofplay.com/staying-safe-outdoors-in-severe-weather/.

And I'm primary oncall next week. Oh, joy! It's probably going to be a busy one, though hopefully not as rough as the last one.

Damn. Pete Seeger died yesterday. It's hard to imagine a world without him. He held Colleen when she was a baby, and each of our kids in turn. One of my fondest memories was of my father and I sneaking in to a sold-out Seeger concert at MIT during intermission -- I was about 12. We sat on the steps in back of the auditorium and sang along with the rest of the audience.

Pete was the best ever at getting the audience singing along. I'll miss him.

Mostly not such a good day? Something like that. Not terribly productive, no walk (it was raining), and some bad news. I wasn't particularly depressed, mind you; just somewhat down.

I got a call from the person at the bank who had called me a couple of weeks ago suggesting that I could get a better rate by applying for a new equity line of credit. The appraisal came in -- about $40K under the last one. So... no. Another $42K and the place will be underwater. So much for that.

And Mom called to say that Tom, one of her dearest and closest friends, had died. He'd been in declining health for several years, but still...

So... not a good day, on the whole. I did book my hotel room for Norwescon, and buy a membership. So that's ok.

And it's Valentine's Day. Or Lupercalia, which some people apparently call Horny Werewolf Day, if you prefer. Here's wishing you love and joy for the year ahead.

Mixed. I took a nice 3-mile walk, to McClellan Ranch Park and along a little creekside trail that seemed very much in disrepair. Plenty to explore.

On the other hand, dinner was a disaster. I threw it together on short notice when the YD didn't come down to cook; a couple of pieces of frozen hallibut that didn't come out all that well. Not to mention the brief but impressive grease fire. Very, um... flashy. Right.

It seems clear to us that the YD is very depressed, but she won't talk about it and won't seek help. Maybe one of her friends can get through to her. ETA: she seems ok this morning; said she was just exhausted last night. we'll see.

A few good links mixed in with a number of catalog references that are just there so I don't forget them. The TakStar ST-2 Adjustable Height Folding Desktop Microphone Tripod Stand is somewhere in the middle -- it's the desktop stand that came with the u37 mics, and folds up to a very science-fictional looking ray-gun type thing. Fun!

Kind of a mixed couple of days -- a memorial service and a post that gets me all teary-eyed can do that. So can a defunct disk drive. On the other hand, I have a final determination on my current job title: Sr. Software Architect.

"Architect" makes me happy and comfortable, both because I consider programming to be one of the Useful Arts, like architecture, rather than an engineering discipline like civil engineering or a scientific ones like physics or materials science. Also, because I'm not really all that good a programmer anymore. I don't think I ever was. Sure, I can get programs written, but lots of other people are faster and more accurate at it. What I'm really good at, IMNSHO, is designing software systems in the first place, stringing existing programs together Unix-fashion with scripts and makefiles, and debugging (especially debugging other people's code).

The memorial service? Paul Metz (kshandra says it better than I could). The article that made me tear up? DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #44: How You Get Unstuck.

As an experiment, I'm putting the notes at the bottom so that if you follow a link directly to the post, you won't have them at the top of the page. Let me know what you think of that.

Michael S. Hart invented the eBook in 1971, and founded Project Gutenberg. He died on Tuesday, of a heart attack. He was only five days older than me.

Official obit: Michael S. Hart - Gutenberg

Obits at Boing Boing and Ars Technica.

I guess the high point was discovering that I have a fan out there who I hadn't known about. The low point, well... I ended the day feeling totally depleted. I ran through the day in an IM: Probably a combination of multiple drives (two shopping trips and taking Emmy to her meeting), cooking dinner, two or three loads of laundry, a load of dishes, a couple of LJ posts, cleaning up Colleen twice, ... I've probably forgotten something... bed made, laundry started, commode cleaned, bedroom garbage bag taken out, nose watered... And ran through the intros to Millennium's Dawn and QV, in part because I've been getting sloppy, and in part to keep my callouses from deteriorating.

Not to mention posting our Baycon schedules, and buying new phones for both Colleen and the YD (the two shopping trips alluded to above). Oh, and Martin Gardner dying.

Something is deteriorating, anyway. Balance? No idea.

The usual collection of links under the cut.

A good day, even though it started out with the news that Liam Clancy had died. But I had a rare, good conversation with the YD on the way to her modeling class, and a great afternoon out shopping with Colleen. I got my exercise trying to walk fast enough to keep up with her scooter -- it's wonderfully different from the years when I had to slow down to stay with her.

A couple of good insights: Graham Leathers' song "Don't Swear at Machinery" is completely wrong for me. Swearing at machinery is safe -- it lets off steam, and lets me redirect the anger into an intense need to find the problem and fix it. (N pointed out that this isn't universally true; venting anger uses up spoons for her.) I usually find it counterproductive to vent anger at people; it could even be dangerous. (Although carefully-controlled anger can be useful at times.)

The other was noticing that, if social interaction is anything like a language (either programming or human), the only way to learn it is to get a lot of practice. Which, because I'm introverted and shy, I don't. It's another feedback loop: I feel awkward around people, so I avoid them, so I don't get the practice I need that would make me less awkward. :P

As for links, ysabetwordsmith posted about Role Models for Introverts. I'm finding her posts about loneliness and introversion very helpful.

(added 10:52) After noticing that Colleen was going through Amazon and Mobipocket looking for ebooks, I introduced her to Project Gutenberg". Happy Cat. *grins*

A very emotionally-mixed day. I spent the day at OSCon, taking notes in emacs and hanging out on IM for a low-bandwidth chat with N. OSCon is, as usual, a lot of fun and very informative, though I was a bit disappointed at the lack of the usual free continental breakfast. Of course, with home so close I don't need it. (Lunch was excellent, though, and more than made up for the lack of breakfast.) I spent most of my time on sessions related to release management and server administration, since I may well end up doing some of that at work.

On the other hand, my brother called around 3:30 to tell me that my sister-in-law had died. She was at home, on hospice care, and it was expected, but still... I'm flying out next weekend.

I've been doing less socializing at OSCon this year than I usually do, in large part because I'm distracted. The booth conversations in the expo have been good, though -- most of the people manning the booths actually know something: most of them are the developers of the software they're demonstrating. And being local, I'm more likely to run into people I know.

I'm mostly done with In the Land of Invented Languages. More fun. I've copied my backups from the old 500GB drive to a new 1.5TB one. I now have 3 500GB SATA drives that I could use to expand the fileserver; I'm still debating exactly how to format them.

Got word via this post by kshandra that my long-time friend meglimir lost her fight against cancer this evening at about 8:30EST, three years to the day after she was given two months to live. Damn, but she fought a good fight.

Robin Hilp; known online as meglimir, RubyMeg, Ruby Tuesday, rolybear... we met on alt.callahans years ago, probably the first friend I made online and later met in Real Life. Our older kids are the same age.

She is survived by her husband sammyd, sons grendies and ratlan, godson dajonjon, and an unguessable number of friends both online and off line.

sammyd's last set of posts are heartrendingly sweet and sad; you should go read them.

sammyd's announcement of her passing is here.

(Updated 2008-12-24 07:15)

It's been a very mixed day. On the the one hand, I scored one of the last three Linux EeePC 900's at Central Computing, to give to Colleen as a slightly belated Mother's Day present. The stream player is buggy, which caused me quite a bit of frustration setting the thing up, but presumably that will get fixed soon.

On the other hand, just as Kat and I were leaving for Joyce's house my Mom called with the news that my uncle Jack, the older of her two brothers, died suddenly of a heart attack.

On the gripping hand, we had a good rehearsal for our concert slot at Baycon.

Colleen and I are sharing a drink in Jack's memory right now.

I never had a favorite among my three uncles: I always liked them about equally. Jack worked his entire career at NIH, doing research on fallout-induced thyroid cancer. He died at work. He'd been feeling ill for a while, and had a cardiology appointment scheduled for tomorrow.

Sorry, folks; I'm at something of a loss for words right now.

In a bar he rarely visits, an aging hacker sips the last of a glass of Glenlivet, raises it, and toasts "To Uncle Jack!" before flinging the glass into the fireplace.