Funerals were really something back then

This is was the figurehead on the funeral carriage that took Lord Nelson's body from where it was lying in state to his resting place at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The thing is a smidge over a meter long and is supposed to evoke the nautical figureheads on ships of the day. It makes one wonder just why it is that figureheads have vanished off of modern vehicles (even including their miniature cousins, hood ornaments) pretty much everywhere except in Texas, and whether they could be brought back someday. Perhaps it would take the death of a national hero the way Nelson was regarded in his day, migrating downmarket from the funeral pomp into daily life once more starting with luxury vehicles. Soon everybody would have their own personal talisman guiding the way as they thunder down the road. Boats too.

The Gernsback biology lab

A little while back my friend D and I were bringing the snark concerning some vintage pulp SF covers via chat:

Me: But never mind that, take a look at this!
D: Those helmets were a SF prediction that never came to pass.
Me: It was rejected in the design meetings for the video iPod
Me: This one made me think of what we were saying yesterday.
Me: It looks like that alien has been working on his abs
D: To impress the Earth ladies.
Me: As always
Me: Now that I look at it, I can't tell whether it might be a guy in red spandex and a contraption over his eyes.
D: You have to read "Master Mind of Mars" to find out.
Me: I assume the guy who isn't red is the TA
D: TAs aren't supposed to be shirtless
Me: It must be an advanced lab
D: He should have a lab coat at least.
Me: He might be using his garments to wipe down that fork-holder
Me: Meanwhile the lady in the background is like "Can I get some service around here?!"
D: I wonder what "details" the second picture is supposed to be showing.
Me: Male pattern baldness?
D: Are those tufts of hair poking out of the red skullcap?
Me: I think he spent too much time inside the video diving helmet and this is what happened.
Me: At least they should have plenty of boysenberry syrup.
Me: I wouldn't be surprised if these covers were the reason the economy collapsed two years later.

We are by nature each too gentlemanly to make any snide comments about the appearance of the women, I would like to point out. It is not as if either of us have demonstrated a superior level of artistic achievement ourselves, but really, now.

Ascending the Pyrenees

Marcel Compayre, Luchon, septembre 1895. Série A. Hanau n° 38,
originally uploaded by Bibliothèque de Toulouse.

The Tour de France* bicycle race begins this Saturday. The first stages will be in Brittany, then through the Massif Central, hitting the Pyrenees around Bastille Day, the Alps a week later and then on to Paris.
*(link broken, try this new site instead)
My guess is that the fellow pictured here had no performance-enhancing substance coursing through his system except perhaps for a bit of Irouléguy perhaps.

Bridge Crane

Back when I was in experimental physics, they used bridge cranes like this one to stack 25 ton concrete shielding blocks and to position massive dipole magnets.

Bridge Crane,
originally uploaded by Echo_29.

It consists of a set of massive box beams that roll on tracks and which themselves support one or more moving trolleys running up and down the beams. I say "they" because of course one had to be a qualified member of a crew to operate one of these behemoths, one person on the floor able to hook and unhook the load communicating to the crane operator up in a mobile cab by means of international hand signals:


They did let us use small cranes to move detector components around a bit, but nothing in the multi-ton scale.

It would be a daring piece of industrial home design to put a bridge crane into a living space. Since the crane itself has to transit along rails, a large open room without interior walls would be optimal. It would be especially useful when one wished to move a grand piano from place to place (say around a sunken living room), though it might be possible to dream up some other use cases. I imagine that one could stack one's Costco purchases on an attractively designed pallet out by the carport, then hoist them up and over to the pantry area (the garbage and recyclables would make the return trip, of course).

Plain old paper

Sunday evening is usually when I do lots of my office work for the upcoming week - printing calendars, drawing maps to appointment sites, setting up directories for pictures I take on site.

This evening, just as I was getting started to do this, the laptop that has my business software started acting up, with the screen flashing on me, then freezing up, unresponsive to the keyboard. I powered it down and back up but it would not boot back into Windows. Further investigation showed that one of the pins on the hard drive had been bent and shorted against its neighbor, so I straightened that back out with a kitchen knife and reinserted it. This time, it got as far as spinning up the drive, but still I was getting a blank screen, even when I plugged a standalone monitor into the external video socket. So, I am guessing that something got fried on the video part of the motherboard, or the board itself has gotten fritzed out. Tomorrow I'm going to the computer store to see whether it can be saved somehow.

One good thing is that I was able to verify that the data on the disk was still okay, by putting it into a USB enclosure and attaching it to my wife's desktop computer. Although I could see all the folders and files, because my contact management software uses SQL Server, I could not read any of it on this other machine unless I were to take my program disks and install everything, then copy over the data files, and even then I might run into some problems with making sure my keys and licenses were all working. So it seemed that I was going to be starting out the week without a clue as to what I had to be doing day by day.

Fortunately, I was able to salvage some of the situation by means of good old paper records. I did have my printout of last week's calendar which had the names and the times of the customer appointments written out for this week. I am pretty careful to keep this up to date and in sync with what is on the computer, because it is my lifeline out in the field. Some of the customers were repeat visits, and for them I had previous maps to their addresses with telephone numbers and that kind of thing as well. Then there were new appointments for people I hadn't seen yet, and in those cases I turned to my pile of scrap paper - lists of calls to make, incoming faxes of messages left for me, and other old paperwork. Sifting through this junk, I was able to come up with an address and phone number for everyone I was scheduled to see this week. I plugged those into Mapquest and come up with the vital maps I needed.

So, here's a case where hoarding redundant and almost useless paper scraps helped saved me when technology broke down. It would be impossible to run my little business completely from paper records, I'm pretty sure, but it has proved to be the bridge I needed as a backstop when my two sets of redundant backups (the last one was updated just this morning!) were not enough to make sure that I could get the data I needed.

In the non-business realm, my main blog has been running for over three years now continuously and I would hate to lose that content if for some reason those backups were not enough. Maybe I should print out those hundreds of pages onto paper too. Also, it's probably high time to update my paper copy of my password file with all the new accounts I have had to set up lately. This one goes into a safe, naturally.

Update: I forgot to mention that also yesterday I managed to corrupt the Memos database in my Treo 650 the way I did once more, apparently by editing an item in a way that it didn't like. It is even giving me problems HotSyncing the records over to the desktop. It does seem as if this version of PalmOS is much more fragile than the one I had on my Visor Platinum.

Second update: It's been a long, slow process recovering from the madness. I convinced myself that there was not going to be any way to resurrect the original laptop, so I bought a new one on clearance at Staples. I had my hopes, but simply sticking the old hard drive into the new computer got me nowhere, so I found the next few days filled with such things as repartitioning the new drive, restoring the data from Ghost, overlaying the old (broken) Windows XP installation with a new one from CD, and now trying to reinstall all my critical applications. My current contact management software is a single spreadsheet, backed by lots of loose paper. And if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to the battle.