Rich McAllister

Dumb driver

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 05:28:42 GMT

I suppose I should be happy this doesn't happen any more than it does. On the way back from the local Mexican grocery store, Lin and I got to the intersection two blocks down from the house, saw an SUV turning off the arterial two blocks right, and strolled across the street. The guy in the SUV coasted up to the intersection and *honked*. We glared at him and continued on. He decided he needed to educate us and yelled "you should *look* before you crossed the street!" I informed him (perhaps a bit profanely) that yes, we had looked; he had plenty of time to stop (obviously, since he in fact had stopped without any fuss) and we had the right of way.

Now that I've had a bit of time to reflect, I think he was probably just a recent immigrant; while every state does admit that pedestrians in a crosswalk have the right of way, California is the only place I've lived where pedestrians actually expect to get it...

RIch

Westercon Thursday

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:54:32 GMT

We're at Westercon. We drove down, taking two days and somewhat unconventional route avoiding freeways. From the Bay Area, out CA 120 to Yosimite and over Tioga Pass, stopping at Tuolumne Meadows for a picnic lunch. Pretty, of course, but the bugs were biting and the altitude too high to do much walking around without spending a night acclimating. Then continued CA 120 around south of Mono Lake, stopping at a cute historical display at the other end of the Bodie Railway (built to bring timber to Bodie, now a famous ghost town, which we visited earlier this year.) East to US 6 to Tonopah, with a diversion to visit another ghost town, Candelaria. (Metallic City, the "sin" suburb of Candeleria, was not recognizable.)

Stayed overnight in Tonopah in a entirely adequate Best Western, ate at what was supposed to be the best restaurant in town, a not-very-good Mexican. Tonopah does look like it's headed for ghost town status pretty quickly, and was generally uncharming. I'd recommend Austin if you're looking for a nice out-of-the-way Nevada town. Left Tonopah bright-and-early taking US 95 south through Las Vegas; generally pretty country but empty, empty; after LV took US 93 across Hoover Dam.

Lots of construction around the dam, building a new bridge across the Colorado just south of the dam. The bridge is a good idea; it's really kind of silly to route all the traffic across the dam, but I'm glad I got to do it before the road is rerouted. Given the amount of pedestrian traffic touring the dam, I expect they'll stop allowing vehicle traffic across the top.

Another long, lonely run on route 93 to Kingman, surprisingly running through several thunderstorms along the way. Stopped in Kingman for a much better Mexican lunch at El Palacios in downtown Kingman, and lin_mcallister even found a knitting/spinning shop a few doors down and bought a new "Navajo" style floor spindle, in hopes Jirel is calming down from kittenhood enough to make spinning possible in the house again. So Kingman was a much more pleasant stop than Tonopah.

Left Kingman on I-40, this being the one spot we couldn't avoid freeways, but shortly turned southeast on US 93 again, a surprisingly good road without much traffic; much more of it was divided 4-lane highway than shown on our reasonably-recent AAA map. 93 ended at US 60 in the extremely boring town of Wickenburg; then US 60 into the Phoenix freeway system Spent more time on 60 than we should have, driving through SURPRISE! and Sun City when we should have taken 303 south to 10. However 303 didn't exist when I first learned my way around the Phoenix freeways so I didn't think of it.

Arrived a the hotel and had even more trouble parking than we had when World Fantasy was in the same hotel; there were many spots closed off for construction, etc. Finally parked and unloaded, finding out at hotel registration that valet parking was included; that will make it easier if we decide to move the truck again.

About all we had the energy for was having a beer and finding dinner. We were sorely disappointed that of the three restaurants and pubs we remembered fondly from World Fantasy, all three were out of business. Restaurants have a short half-life, but three for three was worse than I expected. We ended up walking in to Caffe Boa, an Italian "bistro/wine bar" just across Mill from the west exit of the hotel. Wasn't expecting much, but we were extremely pleased. There were lots of high-priced bottles on the wine list, but picking through the specials yielded an interesting sounding Austrian Pinot Noir at a reasonable price, which turned out to be light and fruity, very nice for the hot steamy weather. I had a cold-cut plate with sopressata, brasaole, and cotto; the sopressata was equivalent to what I'm used to in the Bay Area, but the brasaole (which is basically beef cured like ham) was as good as I had in Florence and the cotto was the best I remember. Then I had ravioli stuffed with artichoke and cheese, served with two sauces, a red and a white. The ravioli were great, obviously fresh pasta and light-but-creamy stuffing. The white sauce was very good but not outstanding, but the red sauce contained a secret ingredient: lots of very good olive oil. Lin had an arugula salad and mushroom risotto, both of which she liked; the risotto was much lighter than what we had in Milan, and contained lots of morels which is always going to please Lin.

After dinner, Lin was too tired to do much; I managed to make it to the San Jose party for an hour or so but was out of energy by 10:30 or so.

Phoenix is apparently experiencing an early season version of the Arizona "monsoon"; it's not only terribly hot as one expect of Phoenix in July, it's humid. Even the locals are complaining.

Occultation of Venus

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:32:21 GMT

I got up at 4:30 this morning to see the moon slide in front of Venus. I hadn't realized just how low in the sky the moon would be; I ended up walking downtown and getting up on top of a 5-story parking ramp in order to see the start. By 6:00 when Venus reappeared, they were up high enough to see from the front yard. The reappearance was more striking, since Venus reappeared off the dark side of the moon; during the disappearance it was hard to judge the exact instant of Venus being obscured instead of just lost in the glare from the moon.

It's summer

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 08:12:29 GMT

Stratus clouds in the morning; great temp for a bike ride at 10-11 am; too warm in the afternoon so we have a nap. Yah, that's summer.

Kindle and DRM

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:14:42 GMT

I decided to take the plunge and buy a Kindle, since we're doing an overseas trip soon and it would be nice to carry a selection of books without having to lug the weight. I have some old e-books in DRM-protected Mobipocket format that I read on my Palm. Kindle basically uses the Mobipocket format(Amazon bought Mobipocket.) I'm somewhat bemused to find that it's easier to simply strip the DRM completely off than it is to get the old Mobipocket software to give me a copy with the Kindle's serial number.

The Kindle 2 display is very nice, it's about 80% of the way to ink-on-paper; contrast is still a little low. It is kind of like the old Tektronix storage tubes in that turning pages requires a complete erase; the display goes black for an instant, which is better than the Tek bright green flash, and at least there isn't the terrifying high-voltage pop that accompanied storage tube erasures.

According to my scale, it masses 290 grams. A handy 390-page mass market size paperback is 192. The hardback I'm currently reading is 982.

Literature

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:23:37 GMT

Lin and I were talking over dinner about how hard it must be to be a freshman college English teacher. Come up with 4 novels each quarter than you are sure are worth the time it takes to read them, and which lead to interesting discussions in class; that requires them to be thematically linked. Here's what we came up with:

--- Q1

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Beloved, Toni Morrison

-- Q2
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
War and Peace, Leon Tolstoy
Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
The Lord of the Rings, J R R Tolkien

-- Q3

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin

overnights meme

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 07:42:23 GMT

from n6tqs -- places away from home stayed overnight, starred if more than one night.

Napa
Seattle*
London*
Whitby
Haltwhistle
Edinburgh*
Durham
Lincoln
Madison*
South Wales, NY *
Toronto
Buffalo
South Kohala, Hawai'i County, HI*
South Lake Tahoe, CA
near Bishop, CA
Calgary*
Oakhurst, CA*

It's that bad, apparently

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 21:14:28 GMT

I fired up the new Turbo Tax in order to do a quick dry run and see if I needed to make my 4th quarter estimated tax payment (no, I don't.) One of the early screens in TT asks about various events that might have taken place during the year, so TT can figure out which forms one needs. It's always asked things like "did you get married? or divorced? have or adopt a child?" but this year it also asked "did you lose your house through foreclosure?"

New cats

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 21:22:51 GMT

A couple of weeks ago we took a short 2-night trip to Yosemite, taking advantage of the late dry weather to see the valley without hordes of other people. It was a fine trip, and I was looking forward to making an LJ post about it. But when we got home, our old cat Harry had obviously become very ill. A quick trip to the vet emergency room made it clear it wasn't treatable for him, and we had him euthanized. I don't want to go into the details, at least yet.

The house was terribly empty with no cats -- this was the first time since lin_mcallister and I started living together that we haven't had cats. So we tried to visit the Palo Alto pound to see if there were new friends to be had. They were having construction work done and the cat adoption rooms weren't open! Finally on Monday we got in, and we had no trouble making new friends.

This is Ivan (after Ivan Vorpatril in the Bujold books.)   He's about 4 years old.

As you see, he's ready for a fun ride in the dishwasher! There are some other signs he may be in the "sweet tempered but dumb" mold.

Here's Jirel, after the C. L. Moore sword-and-sorcery hero. She's about 4 months, seems to be a little small for her age -- she went through a spell of not eating while in the pound.

She's playing with her little doll friend the folks in the pound insisted had to come home with her since she loves it so.

They've certainly solved the problem of the house being empty. They are getting along really amazingly well considering Ivan's older and wants to calmly snooze and look out the window, while Jirel is a hyperactive kitten who wants to jump on everything including Ivan. We've had a little hissing on Ivan's part and one or two swats when she got too close, but they've both sat on me at the same time, even touching.

Unlike any cat we've lived with for years, they both like to be picked up. Ivan has already trained us to pick him up on command; he likes to go shoulder-riding around the house.

Jirel is affectionate and playful to the point of being a pest.   She has quite a forward personality, perhaps even a bit of a bully. We noticed in the pound that she wouldn't let any of the other kittens have a cat toy -- she'd always take them away.

A meme

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 08:48:36 GMT

From marykaykare : Reply to this post, and I'll tell you one reason why I like you. Then put this in your own journal, and spread the love.

I replied to MKK's post so I have to propogate it. Happy to do so, and I think I actually do like everybody who is a current "friend" on LJ.

First Hawai'ian president

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 07:24:26 GMT

I've been to Hawai'i enough times to see how the people who live there really do wear leis on important occasions; I think it would be really cool if Obama, as the first Hawai'ian born president, would wear a lei at his inauguration. I mean a dignified leaf lei, not a showy flower one. I've already emailed my Senator, Diane Feinstein, who's apparently In Charge of the inauguration; any other suggestions for what we can do?

If..

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:09:22 GMT

Like a no-hitter, we're not supposed to talk about it. But if Obama wins, what would we expect to get out of it? Here's my hopes for 2012:

Less than 2000 American troops in Iraq
Some sane national health plan
National debt, as a proportion of GDP, no worse than 2008 despite the vicious 2008-2010 recession
Guantanamo "terrorist" prison closed

That's not much, is it?

Puzzles from The Daily Show

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 05:53:48 GMT

We almost always watch The Daily Show on Comedy Central. For the last year or so, they always start with a pan in past a globe with city names in LEDs swooping around. Usually I can figure out the names and what the connection is; but tonight's was really hard. It was " TORDESILLAS", "GHENT" and "PORTSMOUTH".

Got it ?

Answers after the fold.

lin_mcallister recognized that "Tordesillas" was the treaty that divided the New World between Portugal and Spain. I vaguely remembered that there was a Treaty of Ghent. Once we cracked the nut, research (well, Googling) reminded us that the Treaty of Ghent resolved the War of 1812, and the Treaty of Portsmouth fixed the Russo-Japanese War.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 08:53:41 GMT

For more years than I care to remember -- at least 10 -- the light over the sink in the back bathroom has been out. It's a two-bulb fixture, and since both bulbs quit working at the same time, I figured it was something more complicated than just the bulbs being burned out. So I put off fixing it for a long, long time (there are two other lights in the room.) Finally, today I armed myself with volt-ohm-meter and test light and went off to Fix the Problem.

Unscrew the bulbs. Since I've got the ohmmeter out, see if they're OK. Resistance is 2 million ohms. Uh, that can't be right; a cold bulb should be a few hundred ohms. Wait -- I have my fingers on the probes, I'm measuring the resistance across my body, where 2 megohms is about right. Move the fingers, get "infiinite" resistance. Uh, these bulbs are burned out. Poke the test light into the sockets. Uh, these are live. Put in two new bulbs, get two new lights.

Duh. Just because two bulbs happened to burn out at the same time, I went without the light for a decade.

Sausage making

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 06:42:50 GMT

Almost nobody can really be happy with the bailout bill, but I have to admire the political skill involved. In its trip from the failure in the House on Monday to the approval today, they managed to change it so it picked up both Barbara Lee and David Drier.

(later:) Perhaps this is too opaque. Lee and Drier are about the farthest left and farthest right of the California congressional delegation. So anything that gets them cooperating is truly amazing.

I compare it to Joe Gibbs' famous 'counter trey' play when he coached the Redskins. When done right, it convinced the right linebacker that the play was going left, and the left linebacker that the play was going right. Result, they collided, and the running back could get an extra 4 yards.

Does that help? I didn't think so.

The Road to Serfdom

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 02:27:54 GMT

Nice one from Matthew Yglisias, who's too young to have lived through all these....

It’s worth being reminded now and again that conservatives really believed this stuff. That Medicare would lead to the eradication of freedom. That the Civil Rights Act was a horrible abridgment of American liberty. That withdrawal from Vietnam would lead to Soviet global domination. That Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget would destroy the economy. And that the people responsible for those — Reagan, Goldwater, Gingrich, etc. — ideas are heroes to be admired.

Computer part 2

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:29:16 GMT

Well, it turned out to just be the video card. I probably cooked it by not blowing the dust out of the heatsink/fan for too long. Everything's clean now, and I've got an old PCI (not Express) card in, which is sort-of OK but I'm down to one monitor which is not good for a pixel junkie. Trouble is, by the time I get a new AGP card with dual DVI, I'm about a third of the way to a full brain transplant (new motherboard, memory, processor, PCI X video.) I'll have to think about it for a day or two.

Computers

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 06:03:33 GMT

A couple weeks ago the garage Windows machine, which is pretty much used only to play BBC World Service while I work on other stuff, died. That was OK, really; it had been limping along for about 8 months; first Linux wouldn't boot, then plugging any USB devices in caused a bus wedge, then it refused to boot off the hard drive and only would come up if I put a GRUB CD in that chainloaded to the hard drive. That wasn't bad, it was Linda's old system that I replaced, so it was kind of surplus anyway. So once it died hard, I got a nice up-to-date AMD Phenom quad and new motherboard, built a nice new system with the plan I'd run the current garage mail-web server and Windows BBC-World-Service machines as VMs under VirtualBox. This worked really well; $550 was enough to turn this old box into a server I would have killed to have three years ago. Plus, I really like doing a build-it-yourself box every couple of years. I like learning where the technology is going, I actually enjoy dealing with the various annoyances (surprise ground faults, chipsets too new for the LInux distriubtions to be up to.) This particular upgrade was extremely painless, everything came up first time, and it was just finding the workaround for the sound driver so World Service could be heard.

But then, I decided to have a short nap this afternoon; when I got up I found my main Windows box had crashed and won't come up (no messages from the BIOS, HD light comes on hard.) Haven't figured out what the problem is, but dammit I'm not READY for another round of hardware debugging.

On the third hand, this is about the worst thing that's happened to me in three years. Life's pretty good, y'know?

food meme

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:44:48 GMT

OK, this meme from holyoutlaw I have to do:

The Omnivore's 100 List:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

Like Luke, I'm skipping #4. Where there are links they are his.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile (well, alligator; I assume that counts)
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (I have had soft ripe washed-rind French cheeses, but not this one.)
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes (I've even made some)
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut (yum)
35. Root beer float --
36. Cognac ~~with a fat cigar~~ (well, not that fat a cigar, and it was California brandy. cigar crossed out as I no longer would)
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more .
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi (but I have eaten similar salt-preserved stone fruit, in fact there are some in the kitchen)
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. ~~Durian~~
66. Frogs’ legs.
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho (both the tomato kind and the Andalusian almond/bread kind)
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. ~~Roadkill~~
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini (we were thinking of going to Harry's Bar in Venice and having one, but ran out of time. Can't see bothering otherwise)
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam -
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Watchmen

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:56:32 GMT

If I'm going to mention "Watchmen", I suppose I should quote this from today's Wall Street Journal:

The biggest hybrid release this year will be "Watchmen," based on the 1980s comic and graphic novel drawn by Dave Gibbons, who is a consultant on the Warner Premiere project. "Watchmen," set in an era resembling the 1980s, tells the story of the murder of a costumed adventurer called "The Comedian."

That's like describing The Lord of the Rings as "four friends take a hike."

Watchmen trailer

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:48:47 GMT

OK. I admit I'm out of it. But please tell me who's the soundtrack on the Watchmen trailer?

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:34:10 GMT

Happy bd juliebata!

We're all rebozos on this bus

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 05:41:11 GMT

I'm about a third of the way into Rick Perlstein's Nixonland. Even 34 years later, I twitch when I read the names "John Mitchell", "Robert Abplanalp", and -- Ïa! -- "Bebe Rebozo."

Beyond Oil, by Kenneth Deffeyes

Tue, 27 May 2008 22:28:17 GMT

On the way to Wiscon, I read Kenneth Deffeyes' Beyond Oil. If you've read John McPhee's geology books (and everyone should), you've met Deffeyes. Here, he gives a very clear summary of the data and analysis that leads to the conclusion that annual oil production has already peaked, and goes over all the usual candidates for new energy sources and delivery methods, noting all the problems (technical, environmental, and economic.) I found the explanations clear and the style engaging. Deffeyes writes the way people who know what they're talking about talk -- some old-chestnut inside jokes ("By now it's a tradition: All discussions of oil shale begin with "It's neither oil nor shale."), some historical digressions, some personal anecdotes. He's retired now from teaching geology at Princeton, but he must have been a wonderful lecturer.

Deffeyes points out that the main reason we have no functioning nuclear waste disposal system is that people have been exploiting environmental concerns to stop it; he points out that he can recognize this game because he's played it himself -- he was one of the people who got the MX missile "racetrack" basing stopped, ostensibly because it would disturb soils containing carcinogenic minerals, but really because he didn't want a bunch of first-strike weapons deployed. Two bits of gamesmanship he identifies:

Setting the standards extremely high: the sequestration time standard that we've adopted is 241,000 years (10 half-lives) but the stuff is less radioactive than the ores originally mined to make the fuel after only 15,000 years.

Eliminate the technically good solutions (salt domes in Nebraska) via straight NIMBY politics; then attack the not-so-good but politically feasable alternative (Yucca Mountain) on technical grounds.

I knew the Alberta oil sands were expensive to mine, but I thought it was just a lot of slow work, I didn't understand how energy-intensive it was; a lot of heat has to be put into the ground to soften the sands up. If we were to get that heat by burning other fossil fuels (coal, or maybe by plowing a large portion of each months' ' oil production into next months) we end up multiplying the carbon output.

Logjam breaking

Thu, 15 May 2008 06:55:31 GMT

We just got the house painted. That shouldn't be a big deal, but I had been deceiving myself that I would do it myself "once I had the time, and once the weather was good enough." Well, I've been retired for a year and half now, so I can't say I don't have the time, and the weather the last few weeks has been pretty nice -- and that's "pretty nice" for the Bay Area which is nice indeed. So I got started on painting. First thing to do is to get out the power washer and blast off the really loose paint, so I can see what needs scraping and sanding. I got around two sides of the house and finally realized the job was beyond me. I could do it, but it would take me months, and I'd be ingesting way too much paint because I can't stand to wear a mask. So we called up the people who painted the house next door last year, and they gave us a very reasonable estimate. They brought in a crew of 6 for a week; given I'd only work a couple hours a day, that's the same "months" it would take me.

The best thing is now I can start working on things I had been putting off on the theory that "that's after painting the house." Fully 9 years ago I decided I had to redo the room I use as my office; the first move was to decommission the old computer workstation I had, to make room for a new workbench with enough room for the four computers, two radios, network hardware, printer, two telephones, and two monitors that seem to be the minimum I can live with. The real problem was that the old workstation had a bookshelf topper which held a lot of my favorite books on computer history and computer languages. Those got boxed up and put in the garage while I did the workbench; the plan was to build a new bookcase to fill the gap between the workbench and the wall.

That bookcase project is the one that got trapped into "after painting the house". It got really bad after I got laid off from Sun, and brought home all the useful books I had stored at work; I couldn't usefully prune that collection because I couldn't see what duplicated the books resting in the garage; so all the books from work sat in boxes in the corner of my office.

Once the house painting got underway, I could finally turn attention to the bookcase problem. For some reason, I had decided that commercial bookcases wouldn't work, so I set off drawing plans with AutoSketch. I have a table saw, a circular saw, room to lay out a sheet of plywood, a pickup truck that can carry sheets of plywood, a biscuit joiner, and biscuits. Bookcases should not be a problem. (There's a Burbee quote about the fannish mind here I'm not quite remembering.) After several revisions to make sure the end result didn't have too long a shelf run or be too big and heavy to bring in after making it, I ended up designing two side-by-side 80" high, 32" wide, 11" deep units with a top, a bottom, a fixed middle shelf, and four movable shelves. "Bugger" I said. "Doesn't Ikea make those? " (The East Palo Alto Ikea is only two miles away.) A quick check shows that no, they don't; the closest units are only 80" high, 31 1/2" wide., and 11" deep. Well, given they can sell them to me for cheaper than the material cost I would have paid for the plywood, I think I can live short an inch and with oriented strand board instead of plywood.

So today I set up the cases and unpacked all those boxes that had been sitting around for up to 9 years. Indeed, there were many duplicates, and also a bunch of computer books that are now obviously obsolete and just as obviously not of historical interest. (I'll keep Wirth's books on Modula 2 but everybody else's can go.) There are now 8 boxes of books queued up to donate to the library book sales, and I have books out on the shelf I haven't seen for nearly a decade.

There are four whole shelves not filled! That won't last long.

Next project: window screens. I don't know if it's global warming or what, but we never had problems with bugs in the house until last year.