Progress Passes By

And we have a sidewalk.

On Friday, the workers came by and poured a slab about half the distance along our property. Unlike the old days where they would pour each small (maybe four foot long) section individually, they made one big long pour. Maybe they still do it the old way up north where there is danger of expansion and contraction while the concrete is curing but down here that doesn't seem to be an issue. Yesterday morning they came back and poured the rest in an equally long section.

While they were laying down the second pour, a guy with a stone cutter saw worked on the first, now mostly dry, section and carved little fake section lines crosswise at regular intervals so it looks like a traditional sidewalk. When they were done pouring, one guy came back with a squeegee broom and carefully brushed the concrete level texturing it (also crosswise) while two other went down to the end at the intersection between the sidewalk road and our little street and laid down a bright yellow, knobbly textured plastic mat to mark the end of the walk for the vision-impaired and tamped it down to road level eliminate and curb effect. They stood on it for a moment and then placed custom designed weights on it and left them while the concrete set.

Today, they were back one last time. The stonecutter sliced his lines into the second pour, which was already dry enough to walk on, They pulled the metal guide rails out of the entire strip and a guy with a leaf blower went up and down the bike lane blowing all the dust and debris back off the road. Now they're all across our street, working away along Neighbor Dan's place. They're almost to the end of the road and might have the west-side sidewalk completely in before St. Patrick's Day.

Then we get to watch the rest of the summer while they move back north working on the east side of the road.

Fer Mowin' or Fer Ownin'?

Which is the punchline to an Old New England Farmer joke: A guy moves up from the big city and buys a smallish farm next door to a native New Englander. While inspecting his purchase he notices that there are no boundary markers and the fields just sort of merge into each other. He approaches the old farmer and asks, "Say, neighbor, can you tell me where my property ends and yours begins?" The farmer thinks on it for a moment and responds, asking, "Depends. . . . (see headline, above).

It's one of the reasons Robert Frost thought good walls made good neighbors. There is no wall between our place and Neighbor Mike's.

Which is not any kind of issue, except that Neighbor Mike has apparently thought recently of selling and, as part of the plan, called in someone to examine his place and his title to it and that person discovered that Mike has been mowing a strip of our property almost from the very beginning. As a matter of fact, at least one of Mike's irrigation sprinkler heads is buried a couple of feet over on our side of the line.

My brother discovered this a few days ago when he went looking for a place to plant the pecan tree (potentially awesome present) he received for Christmas. (Actually,what he got for Christmas was a picture of a pecan tree, but the actual stick finally showed up courtesy of UPS.) He noticed a string running parallel to what he thought was our property line and followed it to little flags staked out to the front and back of the territory. Mike confirmed that the survey says everything to the east of the string is actually ours.

It's not much. A few hundred square feet at most. Despite nobody knowing where the real line was, and despite Mike mowing it, he has not, by his actions, claimed it and we have not alienated it.  And now we all know, so it stays ours.

Although we have to admit: Mike did a good job caring for it.

Infills, Outtakes and a Successful Tantrum

They laid in the metal guide rails for the sidewalk concrete this morning.

They started to do it yesterday but my brother chased them away (I was out at the time) when they called in a private tree trimming service (which contracts to the city) to butcher the live oak. Despite being able to run the loader/grader last week without any interference from the tree, somebody decided it was suddenly in the way and ordered it cut back. The ASPLUNDH clowns managed to take one major branch down before my brother knew they were there. They cut it off a good 20 feet back from the path of the proposed sidewalk and were getting ready to hack off another, higher, one (and therefore less in the way, even theoretically) when he stopped them.

They claimed they had to cut it back to the power pole line but had no answer when my brother demanded to know why they hadn't, therefor, touched the palm tree that fairly abuts the sidewalk right-of-way. He told them they were full of shit and that he was going to file a complaint. All of them, tree butchers and sidewalk layers alike, were packed up and gone in the time it took him to go into the house, get his phone and come back outside.

This morning, 7 a.m., the sidewalk guys were back, laying out the guide rails, snapping them together end-to-end, spiking them into place and leveling them. And very carefully not stepping off the right-of-way onto our property.

When they were done, a guy with a mini-front loader came down and began hauling dirt from a pile they had deposited in the vacant field across the street. The rigid and straightened rails didn't always touch the ground and there were gaps and low points all along the way that needed to be topped up or else the concrete would (slowly) flow all over the place. It took about ten trips and, for the record, the loader never left the street pavement, except for one pass, after all the dirt was deposited, in order to level out the fill inside the rails. It looks nice.

We sincerely hope this bunch passes on the warning to the crew that comes next to pour the concrete.

Meanwhile, they've moved across our road and started to scrape Neighbor Mike's place.

Messing With the Hydrological Constant

We just lost the moat on the east side.

Instead of trenching the area scraped earlier this week, a guy with a combination front loader/back grader dumped large piles of dirt over the grassless swath and proceeded to push at around for two hours this morning effectively filling in and leveling our swale.

Of course, since that side of the road had been a 10-15 degree slope before, it was obvious it would have to be either leveled up or down before any sidewalk could go in, but I wonder what this infill is going to do to our run-off during the rainy season. The house is on a slight rise and we have no basement/cellar so I can't imagine anything disastrous, but I can foresee large areas of long-term squishyness below the live oak making it difficult to mow during the half year when mowing is necessary. Either that or everything will flow into the southside moat which already backs up by the driveway because the town stopped its swale clearing and enhancement program at the edge of our property last year. (Neighbor Mike's ditch was cleared and deepened as was everyone else's down that way toward the canal. We don't know why they stopped short of us.)

Now that the planned path has been brought up to street level and graded, there's still a slight bit of trenching to do. The directional guide forms are in place right up to the north edge of our property although the cross forms are not, yet, and they appear to be lower than the new ground level built today.

The loader driver is still the first, and only, worker I've seen so far. I went outside to see the results of his labors and we waved to each other. Nothing (except the sawhorses) has yet crossed the street onto Neighbor Dan's place.

The Great Leap Forward

Boy, howdy, was I sure wrong about that!

Our sidewalk construction took a quantum leap forward this week. The warning sawhorses suddenly appeared all the way down the road past us just before the weekend, although I still couldn't see any other signs of actual work on the horizon. Someone did stack a load of paving tiles by a driveway made of paving tiles (again, also past our street) in preparation for altering that home's access approach. But that was it.

Today, I woke up to find the verge along our property already scraped. The scraping does not yet cross the street onto Neighbor Dan's property and should not be confused with either the leveling necessary or the trench that will hold the concrete forms. This is just a ripping of the sod in anticipation of leveling and trenching and is necessary because the crab grass and Mexican clover, among other things, form long, tough tendrils that snake across the ground. That's a strip we'll never have to mow again, although we'll have to see how much green they leave on the street side of the sidewalk. And it looks as if they're going to be able to work around the pineapple palm at the corner of our property. (For some strange reason, there is a pineapple palm almost exactly at each of the corners of our territory and, yet, no one has ever admitted to planting any of them.)

At least some of the machinery has moved in, as well. I'm not sure what they used for a scraper since it was all done before 8 a.m. and I neither saw nor heard them while they were at it. There's a backhoe just up the road, now, but that may be the trencher and, in any event, has not been used since I've been watching. There are also a couple of pieces of heavy equipment parked in the open field across the road. I can see personal trucks used by the workers to get to and from the job site parked in the median way back up the road but no people are in evidence anywhere.

It's amazing how much can get done with nobody around.

Letting the Smoke Out

Way back in the previous century when I had my game company, my advertising guy told me his theory of electronics, to wit:

Enderlin's Theory of Electronics
There is nothing inside an electric or electronic appliance that does anything. The guts are just there for show and so the manufacturers can charge more for them. In reality, they all run on smoke which is injected under pressure into the item at the factory. As long as the smoke stays inside, the piece will continue working. If you should ever let the smoke out, the appliance's "life force" is gone and it will no longer work.

I let the smoke out of my PC's monitor this morning.

It may not have been my fault. The PC is ancient, originally purchased around 1991 with both processor and memory upgraded multiple times since then. The peripherals, except for the printer which doesn't work either (but that's a software issue), are original. The screen image on the monitor, a CRT box as deep as it is wide, suddenly collapsed in on itself forming a vertical line down the center. Pressing the "de-Gauss" button brought it back for a minute but it relapsed permanently. At least, I think it was permanent because that's when the smoke started to make its escape and I quickly unplugged the monitor from the power strip and the box itself.

I've been putting off transferring all the PC files to the laptop mostly because the PC is so old it and the laptop do not have compatible transfer media. I'm going to have to get them off the PC on diskettes and then move them to CDs before the laptop can accept them. But now, I suppose, I have no choice.

It's only a matter of time before the smoke leaks out of the CPU, too.

The MOOC and Me : It Lives!

I may be able to do this after all!

I just completed the second problem of the second week's set of two. That's Week One for those keeping score. The first week was Week Zero. It's a twelve week course ending with Week Twelve. There is no eleven. Harvard math. It's a self-paced course, however, so it's all cool as long as I finish before the end of the year.

The first problem was Build a Pyramid and, although I knew what I wanted to do and thought I knew how, I didn't, and it frustrated me for weeks until I finally broke it into little components that I could test individually. Can I make it print the hash marks? Yes. Can I make it print the spaces? Yes. Can I control the number of each per line? Yes. Can I control the number of lines printed? Yes. (I say, "Yes," now but the answer was frequently, "No," while I was struggling along.) Finally, it all clicked.

I used that same technique on the second problem "Counting Out Change." First, I tested the request for user input. Then I tested each variable independently and together. The new skill was casting a floating point obtained from the user into an integer to count down the change owed. Once that worked, I built and tested a single while loop to count down the money owed and count up the coins given out. Since this project only took a couple of days, I'd say that's a system that works for me.

I realize these are itty bitty baby steps but, although I've been around computers for a long time*, use them daily and understand the theory, programming has never worked for me before. Now, maybe it will. If nothing else, at least my confidence level is growing. My coin counting solution is clunky and repetitive. We've just discussed modulus and now I think I know how to make a new, more streamlined version using that.

The next set of problems involves cryptography.

*My first serious exposure came while I was in college. During the summers I worked in a printing plant in New Haven and one year we were all sworn to secrecy (as in Ultra-Top-Secret-if-one-unauthorized-page-leaves-this-building-getting-fired-will-be-the-least-of-your-worries secret) when the company got the contract to print the in-house manual for IBM's brand new operating system: COBOL. I'm old.

So, This Year Is Pretty Much Planned Out Already

We're having an extra round of elections here, this year. Yay.

Our brand new Teabagger congressman, the former right-wing family-values radio talk-show host who was accused during the campaign of owning porno urls and squatting on competitors' addresses, was -- surprise, surprise -- busted up in Washington for buying cocaine. He was set up by his supplier.

Fortunately for him, the amount he bought only qualified as a misdemeanor in D.C.. Down here it would have been a felony. He plead out (blaming his alcoholism(!)), was given a fine and probation, and checked himself into some sort of 28 day Jiffy-Hab resort. 28 days later: Presto! Brand new squeaky-clean (but still radical reactionary) congressman. Only the local Young Republicans were buying it, though. Everyone else, from the governor on down, including the vast majority who had voted for him in the first place, cried out, "Depart, we say, and let us have done with you." (Or something to that effect. Apologies to Cromwell.) After a month of insisting that, no, he was fine, really, cured completely, nothing to see here anymore, please let me keep my cushy job, he finally resigned. Of course, it's strictly coincidental that the House Ethics Committee investigation of his behavior became moot as soon as he left.

Anyway, his seat is now empty and rather than wait until the regularly scheduled general election this November, the governor has set a special election for June 24, with a primary for the multiple Republican hopefuls set for April 22. The Democrats and Libertarians have one candidate each so there will be no primary for those parties.

The winner in June, most likely the Republican primary survivor (this district is made up of a huge number of old white folks with enough money to be able to retire to Florida), will have to turn right around and stand for re-election in November. And more than likely face another Republican primary in August.

The rationale for holding the special election is that it is critical for us to have representation but, given that Congress does virtually nothing lately and does even less than that over the summer, and given the length of even abbreviated election campaigns in this country, the only time our new representative will not be campaigning is the last week of June and the first two weeks of July during which he/she will be moving into his/her new offices. And Congress will be in recess for Independence Day.

But at least somebody will be collecting the congressional paycheck for our district.