Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

About this time yesterday morning -- actually an hour or so earlier -- I found myself awake and went upstairs to look out at the weather, and saw a curious smoke pattern in the distance. I thought it looked like about a three block stretch of I-295 burning slowly, because it was smeared horizontally much more than the wind would account for (I compared it to the plumes from the recycling plant and another smokestack) but did not go very high. I thought it rather odd, and figured there must be some other explanation, perhaps an unusual concentration of folks using their fireplaces, or some factory I'd previously overlooked, or a rather funky fog bank, rather than a fire that wide ... either that or I'd hear about it on television news later.

I later found out that it was in fact a fire, but not three blocks worth (perhaps it was a lot closer than I thought it was, and thus not as wide as I'd thought (but I thought the reporters said it was in Brooklyn? ... That's even farther south than I'd thought it looked when I was staring at it -- heck, it's halfway to Glen Burnie from my house). A three alarm fire consuming a bar, possibly arson (when I heard the report they had no forensic evidence yet, but suspected arson because someone had made threats), that started around 3:00. So firefighters had been on the scene for a while when I noticed it. Perhaps there was a lot of steam mixed with the smoke, and steam disperses differently than smoke? If nothing else, "burning slowly" -- relative to a normal building fire -- makes sense if they'd already been working on it for an hour.

So apart from the horizontal scale, I should have trusted my instincts. After hearing the news report, I started thinking about forest rangers in fire towers, determining locations of smoke plumes they spot.

I was recently reminded of a wedding at which I was officially there as the officiant, but then proceeded to shoot the posed photos and the cake cutting, and finally pulled out my guitar and entertained for the rest of the reception. Admittedly this was a very small wedding, but it does occur to me that in addition to simply noticing the "now here's a story" moments in life and having some idea how to tell them, sometimes things happen in my life that are just plain unusual. (I would be shocked to discover that experience was unique, rather than merely unusual, but it strikes me as a funny enough situation.)

I actually had a longer essay in the queue on the topic of strange lives and unusual people, but I'm not quite ready to distill my thoughts on that into something focussed enough to be coherent. I'll get to it sooner or later.

Perrine is asleep in my lap. Solidly asleep. I am thirsty, but I think I can survive being thirsty a little longer before I dump her off my lap so I can go to the kitchen.

I need a 15VDC, 1.2A "wall wart" with a barrel connector. I've got a handful of extras that I wound up with somehow, but all I see in the box are 6V, 9V, and 12V, I've got one of those "everything" AC adaptors -- multiple voltages, switchable polarity, several different connectors -- but it turns out to only go up to 12V as well. Feh. Keeping my eyes open for scrounge, but in the meantime feeling inadequate because I've got this notion that I really ought to be able to just solder one up from assorted spare parts without fearing that I'll let the smoke out of a voltage regulator[*] or feed the device on the other end some nasty, spiky or wobbly power because I chose the wrong filter caps or something. Why do I have a EE inferiority complex when I've never been a EE (or even a serious hardware-hobbyist) in the first place? Why doesn't my sense of self-worth stay rooted in the software side of things, where it's safe?

Still, I wonder whether I have the right transformer in a box in the basement. I know I've got enough diodes for a full-wave bridge, and hey, they may even be rated for that much power if I'm lucky ... assorted resistors and capacitors (mostly ceramic, a few electrolytics), a soldering iron ... but without the right transformer and a voltage regulator, I think it's a non-starter. Safer to keep my eyes open for opportunities to scrounge a leftover wall-wart from something being thrown away.

But every once in a while an idea from my high school days makes another pass through my brain: a house UPS that ducks the inefficiency of the inverter by just feeding DC directly to all devices that are just going to rectify the AC anyhow. Instead of plugging a computer into a 120VAC outlet on an UPS, why not just bypass the computer's power supply and plug the computer into +5VDC, -5VDC, +12VDC, and -12VDC connectors on the UPS, since the battery in the UPS is putting out DC and the guts of the computer want DC? Sure, my wall outlets will look a bit funny if I make it a really big UPS and hide it in the basment, but wouldn't I get more life out of smaller batteries by skipping the invert-then-rectify stuff? Or is this just an example of exactly why I shouldn't be doing my own EE stuff?

I think I've got a copy of The Art around here somewhere. I should make another attempt at working through it eventually.

I made it through the cold snap. The next couple of days should be more comfortable. At 277K[**], I was seeing my breath everywhere (except the kitchen after I'd been cooking), and I retreated to bed fairly often to re-warm my fingers and toes. Having a computer by the bed is useful, though trying to type with the keyboard under the bedcovers is a bit awkward. Getting a wireless connection to a PDA would be useful; that's an upcoming project. (I've been given a wireless frob, but it goes with the PDA that broke, not the one I'm using now; I may be getting my hands on another of that kind of PDA soon, I think -- in many ways it's not as nice as the one I'm using, but I've been curious about how one uses the wireless hookup for a while, so I wanted to get my hands on it to experiment a little at least, even before the urge to hide under the covers for warmth; I've got a hand-me-down wirelesss router just waiting to fulfill its design instead of pretending to be an ordinary three-port (or is it four?) 10baseT router.)

Or maybe when I'm cold I should just take a flashlight under the blanket and read a low-tech book. I've got a couple of novels waiting for me to feel like I can "goof off" reading without feeing guilty or stressed. A cold house might be a convenient excuse.

I was able to keep myself from feeling like I was freezing, except for my fingers and toes getting so cold so quickly. I did have an offer of emergency warm lodging, but it never got quite bad enough to warrant getting that organized and wrestling Perrine into her carrier.

Speaking of Perrine, she just woke up enough to stretch, turn around, and lie down again. That's just barely awake enough for me to go get something to drink without feeling quite as apologetic for disturbing her. Sheesh. Before Perrine I was so good at saying "no" to cats, moving them out of my way, etc.

[*] A couple of decades ago I did try to roll my own power supply, using a cookbook schematic from the packaging for the regulator chip. And let all the smoke out of the regulator the moment I connected my circuit to the mains. In general, I try to keep friends around me who can do the EE stuff I'm not good at.

[**] Okay, okay: 277K = 4C = 39F, and that was the temperature I measured at my desk, which is in neither the warmest nor the coldest room in the house. There's allegedly money coming my way that's predicted to be enough for a tank of heating oil, but it seems to be perpetually a month or two away, and I don't actually know how much it is. I figure when it shows up it shows up, and then I find out how much and what it lets me do; in the meantime, I get by how I can and act as though the hypothetical money isn't a factor, because there are too many unknowns.