Dave Page

Another half century to go…

dave — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 18:18:08 +0000

My 50th birthday is officially over. Thank you to all who sent cards. 85 cards creates an impressive pile.
Heck, I didn’t know I knew 85 people. Thanks!

Shiny Dimes

dave — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 18:08:01 +0000

Just found two Roosevelt dimes, one from 1964 in silver and one alloy from 1965. Never noticed how dull real silver one is compared to the alloy

Blue Star

dave — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:34:54 +0000

While watching “2 Broke Girls“, Caroline sells some rings so they can get a new Blue Star range to cook cupcakes. Blue Star?

Never heard of them. Looked them up. Nice. Expensive, ala Viking. Might not get it very soon

So here is mine. Love the 20,000 BTU burner – I am so there. Blue Star Website

Our friend owns Young’s Appliances in Glen Ellyn. He sells Viking. Wonder if we can get a deal…

Touch of Thai in Dixon

dave — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:23:58 +0000

See my Yelp Review of Touch of Thai

Good food and inexpensive. Recommended.

221 W. First St.
Dixon, IL 61021

SSH public key and Bitbucket

dave — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 16:16:56 +0000

So I use Bitbucket to host several private Hg repos, all working great from Windows via Putty and Pageant.

Today I tried to update the local repo.

C:\bin\app>hg pull
sending hello command
sending between command
abort: no suitable response from remote hg!

WTF? Tried different machines, other accounts, same problem.

Bit of Googling… some users report Bitbucket messes up the public keys, at arbitrary times, as they all share the hg user.
Updated the public key on Bitbucket with the SAME value. It even looked different, like it was missing a character. Now it works…

C:\bin\app>hg pull
pulling from ssh://hg@hg.dacsoft.com/dacsoft/bin
searching for changes
no changes found

Go figure.

Joe Carlson in the Army Air Corps

dave — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 03:06:42 +0000

Bette’s dad, Joseph Carlson, was married and went right into the Army Air Corps (now the USAF) in 1943. Before he died in 2006, he and I sat on the screen porch and I pumped him for info on his Army career. His memory was a bit fuzzy, and he repeated things, but it was still REALLY interesting. I transcribed the recordings into a text file.

Fast forward to 2011, where at Bette’s school they are having a Veterans Day program today, and are going to read information about vets to the kids. So Bette asks about her Dad’s interviews, which I have yet to edit for the Veterans History Project. I spent an hour editing it up, here it is for your Veterans Day.

Joseph A Carlson in the Army – 1943

Joe got married, and went into the army. He was sent to boot camp in Rockford, Illinois. Joe was smart, and very good at math, and passed all his tests, so he had a choice of what he wanted to do. He joined the Army Air Corps (now the US Air Force) and went on a train to Blythe, California to work on bombsights.

His job was to clean and care for the Norden bombsights, a calculator installed in the B-17 and B-29 planes to compute the correct time to drop the bombs and hit the target. These were mechanical, not electronic, and made from clockworks.

The bombardier was the crew member who dropped the bombs. He came to the shack in the evening, Joe would check his ID, and issue the bombardier a bombsight and a pistol to protect it. The bombsights were top secret, and he never could let one get into enemy hands. One guy took his bombsight, but left it on the runway—he was kicked out of the Air Force. The bombardier took the pistol and bombsight out to the plane, installed them, and after the training mission, brought it back. Joe would check it over, clean it and test it, and put it back in the locked shack.

Missions were generally at night, because when it was very hot during the day, the runway would melt and the planes could not take off or land. When no mission was leaving or returning, Joe could do whatever he wanted. Got out of bed whenever, went to bed whenever, it was almost a leisurely life. One soldier would answer for all at roll call. Sometimes a repairman from the Norden company would come, and Joe would have him repair the broken bombsights he couldn’t fix.

Blythe was a small town with 300 people in the desert. There was not a lot to do. The town restaurant had a sign that said, “Dogs and soldiers not allowed.” There was a swimming pool in town and Joe, a good swimmer in high school, swam a lot. It could be 120 degrees during the day, and 85 at night. The bombsights needed to be cooled to protect them, so the shack was the only building with air conditioning. Joe would take his cot in the shack to sleep sometimes because it was cool. Some soldiers stored their drinks there to keep them cool.

After a year or so, Joe was sent to a base and Waco, Texas, and left the Army.

Joe liked the desert – sometimes he would walk out and just sit in the sun in his big army hat. He talked a lot about going back to visit, but never did.

Best Eulogy Ever

dave — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:52:22 +0000

Rest in Peace, Dennis

The Genius Continues : Instructable : Replacing the shock absorber in a Felco 7 Pruner

dave — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 23:55:46 +0000

See my Instructable if you are rebuilding a Felco 7 Pruner…

Dumping a Java object ID to a string

dave — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:17:17 +0000

I have wanted to do this in the past, never found the code. I found this handy code here recently. Wanted to save it here. Thanks, dude.

You can also handily convert an integer to a hex string using the Integer class, so you can get the value that would come after the @ in a default toString() implementation by calling this:

Integer.toHexString(System.identityHashCode(object))

Saturday – Pigeon Point

dave — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 22:22:12 +0000

Finally made it to the Pigeon Point Lighthouse.

Sam’s Chowder House