A Weighty Matter

Background

I've mentioned before I keep pretty decent archives. I've got FORTRAN programs from high school, tape images from the 1980s, and archives of our PCs from early 2000s.

My crowning achievement is a spreadsheet from hell that logs my exercise going back to 2004 and my weight going every year back to 1997 (with sporadic entries even before that). There are gaps in every year, but there's enough data to have show clear trends.

(There is also enough data to push Google Docs towards a nervous breakdown if I reload it fresh from a local copy; ~14 cells on 365 rows per year for decades is not trivial, even with many of the cells blank. In ~ 2011, the Google Docs developers didn't believe that I could give their application trouble until I showed them with my 25 years of data.)

Today

Having slowly lost weight over the 15 years since my peak, and having lost approximately a half pound every week this year to date, I am now at my lowest weight since before 1997 (30+ years) by a comfortable margin. I'm still close to 40 pounds over the line between obese and merely overweight, but I am ~ two-thirds of the way down — progress has been made.

Tomorrow

I really need to work not so much on my weight, but on my conditioning. That's a topic for a different day.

Job's Not Over Till the Paperwork is Done

Our Job of acquiring Zesty is now complete. Just under 14 years ago, Oscar and Penwiper inspected the new plates for for Purr More the Green and the Bronze Audi.

Inspecting the "new" plates back 2012

The PURRMOR plates have graced three MINI Cooper S convertibles, nearly half of it on the 2019 Caribbean Aqua one.

The MEOWLES plates only lived on the 2009 Bronze Audi A4 until now, but forthwith they will be on our 2023 Zesty Yellow MINI Cooper S 4-door.

Sisters Meow Less the Zesty and Purr More the Aqua tucked into their garage

Note: Zesty's name is simply Zesty, not Zesty the Yellow. We love her color, but she does not want it even implied that she is a lemon in the manner of the long-departed Purr More the Melting Silver.

Out With the Old, In With the Gently Used

It's getting time to replace our 16 1/2 year-old Audi A4, and I'm doing something that I've never done in the 44 years I've been buying cars: Buy a used one. We are also buying a second car that's the same brand as the first (as opposed to replacing a car with the same brand). 

Basically, new shiny cars from both Audi and MINI (including dealer loaners) have a plethora of touchscreen controls on glass dashboards (Katherine's term is FGD — and the F is NOT silent.) Neither Katherine or I want controls you have to look at to manipulate; we want physical knobs and switches that you can adjust by touch while you keep your eyes on the road.

Given I don't drive much these days and don't need cargo space for more than groceries, I could look at getting a gently used MINI Cooper S two door. However, with our policy of one door per passenger, we don't take passengers in Pure More the Aqua (our 2019 MINI Cooper S 2 door convertible). So on my side of the garage we need at at least a 4 door MINI for passengers.

From the dealer we bought our last two new MINI Cooper S rag tops from, I selected a low mileage 2023 Cooper S 4 door (not a Countryman) that's the same generation as Purr More.

2023 Zesty Yellow MINI Cooper S 4 Door Exterior

The obvious differences with Purr More are the color, hard top, four doors, DCT transmission, digital instrument cluster, no head up display, and no navigation system. (However, apparently Apple CarPlay will talk to Apple Maps or even Google Maps on my iPhone.)

2023 MINI Cooper S 4 Door FGD-free cockpit

And oh yes, it's ~two-thirds the price of a new MINI.

(I have to admit, the color sounds like a dipping sauce for Onion Rings at Burger King.)

Update: This post was originally written as an adventure in progress. It's now complete. The Audi is gone (traded in), and the 2023 MINI is sitting in our garage next to Purrmore the Caribbean Aqua.

Out With the Old, In With the New

I go way back with music on Apple devices; I owned multiple iPods going back to the iPod classic (Click Wheel), ripped 600+ physical CDs, and I joined the iTunes store in October 2003.

(Why yes, I do have 27 years of personal email archives.  Doesn't everyone?)

Today, the Library has 9,608 items using 68 GB.

This relationship has not always gone smoothly. I distinctly remember years ago after a software upgrade of my iOS device or MacOS, my iPhone had Biblical performance issues when initializing. When moving from iTunes to Apple Music, Apple broke automatically adding user ringtones to devices, and since 2015 the push for Apple Music over Libraries of user owned music has driven me nuts for years.

Consider my current iPhone settings:

Note how Apple Music is clearly set to not show.  (And no, I don't belong to it!)

However, in the actual Music App, search still shows an entire screen full of selections from Apple Music:

Quite frankly, I have no idea what the "Do Not Show Apple Music" toggle does at all.

This week, I finally sufficiently got sick of accidentally searching Apple Music instead of my own Library that I did a little research and found the iOS app Marvis Pro.  

Marvis Pro:

• reads (and updates) the user's music Library synced by the MacOS Music application.
• favors the user Library over Apple Music.
• has more powerful display options:
• displaying more information about tracks and playlists
• (for example) setting any playlist to display as Albums, not individual tracks,
• sorting
• works with various functionality in the Apple Watch Music Apple and other Bluetooth devices (like our Audi A4) to play music.  (This is similar to other apps like Spotify and Podcasts)

Now, if I could just tell my iPhone to never open the Apple Music app again …

Riding the Rail

The stairlift has proved useful. I wasn't sure it would, but two  round trips on it downstairs & back for meals me left feeling me less drained than I have been lately.  

In other words, it was not a really expensive mistake!

The top to bottom trip takes 105 seconds, I timed it when remotely parking it to charge in the front hall for the night. 

That space in the front hall will normally be more out the way than the landing park/charge space (even after they move it), but if we have actually have people using the front door that will change *real* quick.  

(It also can park/charge just outside my office, but that's only good if Katherine doesn't need the stairs. That works tomorrow morning, when she's gone to Aikido for five hours.)

MIssed it by that much!

The Stairlift is installed, inspected, customer ridden … and wrong.  

Per the diagram, when charging the chair on the landing it is supposed be almost in the corner, inline with the bottom half of the stairwell (effectively under the window in the photograph below). 

The charging station is actually almost in the exact middle of the landing, directly across from the center railing/pony wall.  In other words, it's a choke point. (It failed the laundry basket test.)  

I can't sign off on it (and thus will be locked out of it) until we have this resolved (or have a binding promise of same).

UPDATE: We paid ~86% of the total and I signed off on it.  They will be back next week to move the charger.

Stairlift as Designed With Offset Charge Station on Landing

Stairlift as Installed with Centered Charge Station on Landing

It's Here! It's Here!

The stairlift is being installed as I type. It's uglier than I expected. Mostly, it's heavier construction than I  anticipated (which is a good thing) and is effectively freestanding; it gets screwed to the stairs not to support it, but to simply keep it from shifting.

(When The Bomb gets dropped, you can add the stair lift along with Cockroaches & Keith Richards to the list that will be still be around afterwards.) 

Almost … almost

The dumb waiter (AKA the stair lift) should arrive at the vendor (Mobility Concepts Inc.) today; they called this morning and scheduled the install for next Friday, the 13th. They start at 8 AM; it should be all installed and inspected by the state at ~ 1 PM.

Summer of Home Improvement

I'm trying figure what the current phase of our "Summer Home Improvement" is.  So far, we've had:

1. Patio Furniture replaced
2. New garage ADA railings & rear steps railing / garden gate fixed
3. House painted 
4. Window pane replaced 
5. Roof replaced
6. Eaves painted
7. New doorbell camera, stairwell outlet, & rear porch lamp
8. New front steps railing  
9. Floor refinished 

I feel like I missed something, quite possible given all the excitement of what I do remember.

Today (as I type) is:

• Stairwell Carpet replaced 

So I guess today is ~ phase 10. 

Phase 11, the new stairlift, won't be until the end of August. (We've already been measured for it.)

Baby Home Improvement

 The summer of home improvement continues …

I took the first small physical step towards installing a stair lift; I had Bel-Red Electric install a power outlet by the stairs. (The deposit on the lift was a far bigger step, but that left no physical evidence.)

They also installed a door bell camera (which required a higher voltage doorbell chime); now I can initially answer (or ignore) the door from my desk upstairs. They may save me some trips downstairs; it will certainly allow me to slow down on the stairs.

Lastly, they replaced our motion sensing rear porch light; the problem with the old one may have been user error, but I just had them go ahead and do the replacement with the new one anyway.

Stairlift … The Adventure Begins

 I just signed an order for a stair lift, including paying a 50% deposit on the stair lift.

I'm surprised they took a credit card for that amount, and I guess my AmExp IS bulletproof.  (I remember when it wasn't, 30+ years ago.)

My knees thank me.

Fine Tuning Monitor Performance

Back in in the age of steam and the Intel 80286, after graduating MIT Katherine set off with friends on their bicycles to ride from Boston to Santa Barbara. She left behind with me two plush creatures (Binkley & Gunther) to help me track her progress.

After Katherine's ride, Binkley & Gunter joined her at UCSB; the staff shortage in Boston was corrected that Christmas by the arrival of Snuffles, the Plump Plush Platinum Programming Polar Bear (or Snuffles P. Bear for short). Snuffles was a happy resident of my (ever bigger) CRT monitors for ten years.

The Tribble, Snuffles, and an assistant on duty ~ 1997

Alas, in ~2000 we moved to LCD monitors, and her position was literally eliminated (she is a plump bear); Room was made for her elsewhere in my office, but no creature bigger than Thomas Tech Bear could balance on the thin LCD monitors since then.

Until this month, that is. I discovered that one can buy stands for LCD monitors. Thus, she able to reclaim her time-honored position, joined by a few senior friends.

The Tribble, Seymour Crayola,Thomas Techer Bear, and Snuffles P. Bear
(click for a larger image)

The 2023 monitor creatures, briefly:

• The Tribble (1983): Since he arrived during my mainframe era, the Tribble has graced every primary monitor I've used; that has included two mainframe terminals, ~ four PC CRT's, and ~ five PC LCD monitors.
• Seymour Crayola (2000): Our Patron Bear of High-Performance Computing; he missed the 64-node Thinking Machines CM-5 I used in the early 1990s (upper right in the photograph), but more recently he constantly wanted to use my Google credentials to borrow a datacenter or three.
• Thomas Techer Bear (1978): The Dean of our Plush Faculty.
• Snuffles P. Bear (1990): Our Patron Bear of Chocolate (those are Thin Mints at her feet), and the Kendra Electronics Wonderworks Directbear of Marketing.

In Her Own Words

I just program for Drew because Binkley Bunny (who is as snowy white as I am) and Gunther Bear used to help Drew program from the top of kendra's monitor. They went west in September [1990] with Mom so that Mom and Binkley could work on their PhDs. That made the Wonderworks understaffed, so at Christmas [1990] Mom asked me to live with Drew.
— Snuffles P. Bear

My mom is very proud that I'm a computer literate bear. She also thinks Drew has gone off the deep end, although she doesn't mind.
— Snuffles P. Bear

Throw Another Brick on the Fire

Headline: Syracuse woman wins award for oldest furnace

Pity the oldest furnace contest was not in the Boston area when we first moved there; the winner in Syracuse had a furnace only from 1910. The Stoneham house was over a 100 years old when we bought it in 1995, with a oil fired steam-heat furnace which may have been older than the house.

The Original Jurassic-era Furnace in Stoneham

Our furnace service person thought it was a conversion from coal, and we privately thought it was originally fueled by dinosaur guano. Not fossilized guano, but rather fresh guano straight from the  living source.

Around 2000 we had replaced the tank, which was leaking; we found a previous repair had been done with fiberglass … and oil eats fiberglass. When we replaced it, the 1500 gallon tank had to be replaced with two smaller tanks; I think they had to cut the old tank up to get out it of the cellar.

We already had gas service for the stove and hot water; in 2004 we replaced the furnace with an gas fired one. Not only did was it quieter running, the company figured out why our steam pipes banged (a low spot in a pipe), and we smoothed out our utility bills by going on a budget plan.

I haven't heard that name in years …

I commonly write my name as "Drew Derbyshire", but for legal purposes my full name has always been "Andrew H. Derbyshire"; the former never has my middle initial, and the latter generally does. Unfortunately, people tend to shorten my birth name to "Andy", which my mother (and by extension, me) disliked. 

Thus, I've used "Drew" since August 1985; I switched when returning to Clarkson for my final undergraduate tour of duty. My login was "$AHD" or "ahd", but my email said I was "Drew Derbyshire", and people simply accepted it. Now, decades later, I still use "ahd" when I can, and there many people who have no idea where the user id comes from. 

(I just tell them "Automated Help Desk".)

Earlier in 1978 as a Clarkson College freshman, I was introduced to their System/360 model 65J; it was the first large machine I used. On it, I first learned the ancient incantations of IBM OS/360 and its Job Control Language (JCL). I extensively used OS and its spawn in my work well into the Drew era (1995 or so). OS Jobs run with JCL start with a JOB card; it has an account number, a jobname (often based on the account), and a 20 character field for the programmer's name and job description (printed on the green bar listing to keep it from becoming Little Listing Lost).

(Of course, when was last time you even saw green bar paper? But I digress …)

Meanwhile, I've written before about my muscle memory on computers. I'll go to do something on an old IBM host, Microsoft box, or UNIX system and I can't remember how. However, my fingers tell my brain to "Stop thinking … we are on the case". So my head listens to the stereo, and they summon the ancient incantation and bang it out.  Usually, it's right.

Lately, I've been playing with OS/MVS systems (the successor to OS/360), including writing jobs on it. Yesterday, I noticed my magic fingers had taken charge without bothering to tell me, as shown by the attached.

Simple batch JOB on my local copy of OS/MVS

When I looked at that job the last night, I realized my fingers were indeed trained to write OS JCL in the "Andrew H. Derbyshire" era. Well, that's what they still do, and who am I to argue?

End of an Transportation Era

PURR MORE the Green as envisioned by the MINI web site

I became a member of Zipcar (the hourly car rental company) on July 23rd, 2005.  As I recall, I mostly signed up in order to rent a MINI Cooper for an extended test drive of the brand. We liked it, and we purchased what became our 2006 MINI Cooper S, PURR MORE the Green. 

That car took us round-trip coast-to-coast and set our record for length of vehicle ownership, so clearly we choose well.

I know the date because (for the first time in years) today I logged in, and I glanced at my account as I cancelled my membership.

Zipcar has been free for me for years as a (former) Google employee, but that's getting to be a long time ago — now they are moving my account to their $70 standard annual plan and retiring my previous membership plan.  (Which makes me wonder if current Googlers are being moved as well, but not enough to ask.) 

It was occasionally useful me when it was free, but it wasn't worth paying for. Likewise, it could be useful for Katherine when she still traveled extensively for work and took day trips down into the Silicon Valley.  Even before the pandemic, her travel dropped off over the years to where she didn't even go to the last SEMICON West before the pandemic. (That broke a streak of ~25 years.)

Ah well, Zipcar taught us MINI Coopers are fun.

The Power Hit Catalogue (No expects the Spanish Inquisition!)

The tools you need for a longer power hit has appeared in the Wirecutter by the NY Times. 

While PSE has greatly improved our system reliability since we moved here, one should be prepared. Thus I took inventory based on their list: 

• Portable generator (none)
• Surge protector (3)
• Uninterruptible power supply
• Small/medium (5)
• Large (3) 
• Small Power bank (3)
• Portable power station (see UPS, above)
• Power inverter (none)
• LED lantern 
• Small (2)
• Large (2)
• Flashlight
• Small (4)
• Medium
• Fire Sword V
• Headlamp (left behind by a contractor, actually …)
• Entertainment
• Board Game (several)
• Card decks (several)
• Music 
• 9200 tracks on iPhones 
• BT Speaker 

We don't have a generator, portable power station, or power inverter.  With three 1500 VA UPS units, we do have basic power reserves, and have never really felt the need for more.

We also have things other devices which don't need A/C that the Wirecutter didn't mention:

• Natural Gas 
• Water Heater
• Stove
• Fireplace
• Radio
• Small refrigerator (12 VDC)
  

Katherine notes our freezer is good for keeping things frozen for 24+ hours without power.

In case of a Zombie Apocalypse or lesser event (the Pacific Northwest is earthquake country), we also have Go bags and cat carriers for bugging out. The inventory of those bags is not included above. We really need to update all the perishables in those bags.

Turnaucka’s Law (Automotive Edition)

In my previous post, I noted that Purr More the Aqua has updated electronics.  This is perhaps the biggest change between the model years, as it now has its own 4G cell service for enhanced traffic information, emergency calls, concierge service, telemetry, stolen vehicle tracking, and limited remote control.

It's all very cool. It also reminds me that I have said more than once that the 2016 MINI was one firmware upgrade away from being a charter member of Skynet. These changes are a serious upgrade, and now they can directly push more updates over the air.

Info Page of MINI Connected
(from the iPhone App)

The spooky thing is that it knows more than it explicitly publicizes. For instance, in the mock up of the car above from the companion iPhone application, it shows that the car is a convertible Cooper S, and all the customizations, including color, bonnet stripes, wheels, fog lights, headlight rims and even the mirror caps correctly.  It also has (if one scrolls down) our exact current mileage.

I didn't see any agreement that we were "serfs to global domination" in the Terms and Conditions. Katherine wonders if we should have read it more carefully before we agreed.

We do have Turnaucka’s Law:

The attention span of a computer is only as long as its electrical cord.

Where's the fuse panel on the 2019 MINI?

It's Here! It's here! (Announcing Purr More the Aqua)

So once upon a time we replaced our 2006 rag top MINI with a 2016 rag top MINI . The plan was for it to have an equally a long, useful, and fun life.

It didn't work out that way. After about a year, the top, which only requires a single switch to raise and lower completely, didn't. It would fail every few months, Katherine would get out the Allen wrench to do the emergency close procedure, and then she would call Seattle MINI. They could see the problem code in the car's computer, but could never reproduce it. They tried (and I mean tried hard!), but modern integrated electronics are not something mortals can disassemble in the field.

To make a long story short, due to the top issues, we had the car declared a lemon. We ordered a 2019 replacement in late August, and we surrendered the 2016 MINI to MINI/BMW on September 14th. We were treated well by the dealer and MINI Corporate, and we've moved on.

This past Friday, our lovely 2019 MINI arrived. It's Caribbean Aqua in color, has more advanced electronics by three model years, an apparently working top, and otherwise feels very much like its now departed predecessor.

A friend of Katherine's hopped in it today and said "Did you get this painted?  I was sure this car was silver". That's an easy mistake to make. They are the same generation, and a guest won't notice subtle differences in the stereo or a repurposed switch or two.

Live Long and Motor, little MINI Cooper.

Presenting our 2019 MINI Cooper S Convertible, Purr More the Aqua.

(Click the picture for the full size edition)

What's this new-fangled Web?

Facebook is "celebrating 25 years of connecting people", in other words the creation of the World Wide Web.  While true, the statement irks me.

Numerous applications preceded the web to connect people across various international networks:

• ARPANet mail dates from the 1970's; Clarkson had it by the mid-1980's.
• Usenet connected people 12 years earlier than the web, in 1979.
• BitNET RELAY sprang to life 7 years earlier, in 1985.
• IRC rolled out three years earlier, 1988

For that matter, kew.com was registered before the web existed.

And there's the small matter of an email I received before I even set up kew.com:

Header lines of the first email I ever received from +Katherine Derbyshire,
(in response to a mundane Usenet post I had made; click for a larger version).

Who needs the web?

Second Verse (almost) the Same as the First

This is not exactly a news flash, but worthy of note ...

After 10 and half years, our BRG 2006 MINI Cooper S with 93,000 miles on it is officially no more. One need not be sad; it has a new life that you can get hints on if you head over to the PS MINI group on Facebook.

As you can see below, we have not strayed far in replacing it -- once again we ordered a rag top MINI Cooper S with a manual transmission, and we checked almost all the boxes.

Our 2006 MINI Cooper S next to its 2016 Replacement
(click for  a better view)

What happened ... back in May we set out one evening in the 2006 MINI for a Mariners game, and a hundred yards out of the driveway, most of the idiot lights on dash lit up and the car stalled. It restarted, so we retreated to the garage and switched to the Audi for the ballgame. The following day I gently took the MINI into the dealer to get it fixed.

Once it was fixed, Katherine and I sat down and had The Talk about how maintenance costs (and irritation) were going keep climbing, balanced against the cost of a new MINI and how people talk about the 2006 MINI being best year of them. And so we looked around, didn't come up with anything else we wanted (the current Miata came close, but we like that a MINI Cooper S is taller), and ended up ordering a new MINI Cooper S to get it configured as we wanted. +Katherine Derbyshire picked the color; I had gotten to pick the British Racing Green last time.

The new MINI hit our shores about July 17, and it was at Seattle MINI a fast four days later. We got organized and picked up the car that Saturday afternoon. Katherine posted a FOR SALE notice on the PS MINI FB group, got an immediate reply, and the 2006 MINI's new owner was happily driving it away a few minutes after we snapped this picture on July 24th.

Today, its permanent registration arrived, so we'll get our "We Love Our Pets" vanity plates on it by the weekend.

Here's to another ten years of top down motoring ...