SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #191 New Moon of July 11, 2010 Contents copyright 2010 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* When I went to a store a couple of days ago I noticed that they had "Back to School" signs up. That reminds me of the time back in my childhood when I was at a Fourth of July party and suddenly realized that in just a couple more weeks summer vacation would be half over. I felt kind of sad about that, even as others were making merry. And ever since, late summer has been tinged with melancholy. The weather may still be warm, even hot, but that doesn't seem to matter. What matters is that the prospect of shorter days reminds my inner child that fun times will not last forever. Actual autumn, when it finally arrives, isn't as sad. I think by then I've sort of resigned myself to the coming time of darkness. And then I can start to look forward to the holidays and the eventual gradual return of the light. ********************* Father's day follow-up: I was just reading someone's LiveJournal posting about their father. It was mostly praise. This was in contrast to what I tend to think of with mine, which is mostly the problems. But yes, he did have his good points. He had many of the usual qualities that people praise their fathers for. But one thing stands out: He was handy with mechanical stuff, and passed a lot of that on to me. Faucet dripping? We wouldn't call the plumber for something that trivial. He would fix it himself, usually with me helping. And it would work. We had none of the hilarity that ensued when the father figure in the situation comedies on TV tried to repair something. And speaking of TV, when our set went on the blink we would take the tubes down to the store where they had a tester. Usually replacing one or two tubes would fix the problem. Only if that failed would we call the repairman. Likewise, we also did our own minor electrical repairs, like replacing broken light switches. Again, whatever we repaired worked afterward. We also did our own yard work, mowing and fertilizing and such. And we didn't limit ourselves to minor stuff. The house I grew up in was on a corner. When we bought it the lot adjoining the back yard was vacant. So we bought that vacant lot, giving us an extra-large back yard. We had two cars, but we didn't have a garage. But once we bought that vacant lot, we had plenty of room. So we built a garage. We didn't do all the work ourselves. Dad hired someone with a bulldozer to come clear the brush and small trees from the area where the garage was to be. And he had a cement company pour the concrete floor and foundations. But we did the rest ourselves: Framing, painting, roofing, and wiring. At the time I didn't realize that any of this was unusual. Didn't everybody do their own repairs and home improvement work? And as I said, he passed this on to me, including the ability to improvise. For example, a year or two ago a group I'm with needed a balance scale, like you see in the logos of law firms and such, for a little play we were putting on. It didn't have to be precise, but it did have to work well enough to be visibly tilted when the stuff in the pans wasn't in balance, and pretty near level when it was. Where could we get such a thing? The others in the group were a bit surprised when I said I could make it. And I did. A couple of saucers (plastic, so I could drill holes in them) for the pans, bits of scrap lumber I had lying around for the beam and supports, some string to hang the pans with, and screw eyes and other miscellaneous bits of hardware to hold it together, and there it was. And it worked. I was surprised that others were surprised that I could make something like that. It just seemed to come naturally. And that's the good side of what I got from Dad. ********************* There was an item in the paper about an airline (QANTAS?) getting in trouble for reusing plastic silverware. I don't see what the fuss is about, assuming they wash it and disinfect it properly. After all, restaurants routinely reuse metal silverware, and nobody hassles them about it. ********************* Stories I may never write the rest of: The repeating bouncing-ball sound was unmistakable: Somewhere, probably very close by, something was playing tennis. It was a sound he knew well from his summer as the Zamboni driver at Wimbledon. In recent years he had begun to admit to himself that it may have been stretching the truth a bit to say that he was the Zamboni driver, since he had never even seen the actual Zamboni he was supposed to drive. But if the employment agency he'd signed up with over the Internet was to be believed, he had been on call for that task. It just so happened that the tennis players at Wimbledon had not needed the Zamboni that year. According to the agency there is a provision in the rules of tennis, so obscure that most printers of rule books leave it out so as not to confuse the public (and also to save paper), whereby in certain rare circumstances the players can ask for the court to be iced. When that happens the officials lay down a network of refrigeration lines, flood the area with water, and freeze it. Then they bring the Zamboni out of storage to do whatever the Zamboni does to the ice so the players can play tennis on it. There are a couple of things to keep in mind when driving a Zamboni at a tennis match. One is that the players are legally considered pedestrians so they have the right of way over vehicles such as Zambonis. And since the players will be busy playing tennis they may not be paying as much attention to traffic as they should, especially if they're not used to running around on ice while wearing tennis shoes. So the Zamboni driver has to be extra careful. The other thing to look out for is the net. Don't get the Zamboni tangled up in the net. Other than that, everything the Zamboni driver needs to know about driving the Zamboni is in an instruction manual in the glove compartment. And just in case the driver doesn't know where the glove compartment on a Zamboni is, it has a big "INSTRUCTION MANUAL INSIDE" sticker on the door. You can't miss it. Or so the agency he'd signed up with over the Internet had told him, along with promises of fame and fortune from product endorsements and TV and movie deals and all that other stuff that goes with being a big sports celebrity. Then as time went on he'd begun to have doubts. First came the dreams. They would start out well enough. The players would call for icing the court, and the officials would set up the refrigeration system and flood the court and freeze the water into ice, and then bring the Zamboni out of storage. So far, so good. Then they'd call his name on the loudspeaker and he would come down out of the stands and the fans would cheer as he climbed into the Zamboni and opened the glove compartment to get the instruction manual that would tell him everything he needed to know about driving the Zamboni except the part about how he would need to stay out of the way of the players because players are legally pedestrians and thus have the right of way over vehicles. And try not to get the Zamboni tangled up in the net. OK so far. But then, disaster. The instruction manual wouldn't be there, or maybe he just couldn't find it because it was buried under a bunch of other stuff like registration, and proof of insurance, and overdue traffic tickets that some prior Zamboni driver had gotten for not yielding to the players, and all sorts of other stuff that wasn't what he was looking for. And as the seconds ticked away and he still couldn't find the manual the crowd would get impatient and start booing and throwing rotten vegetables. As the crowd formed a mob and began advancing on the Zamboni with pitchforks and torches he would wake up. The more recent dreams had added a new twist: The glove compartment of the Zamboni would be full of newspaper clippings of articles about Internet scams involving shady employment agencies. By the time the season ended he'd begun to have doubts that the money he'd paid the agency for the summer job driving the Zamboni at Wimbledon had been a wise investment. And by the time tennis season rolled around again he'd gone on to other things. But that was then, and this was now. And the sound was unmistakable: Somewhere, probably very close by, something was playing tennis. ********************* Someone on LiveJournal posted this from a local ABC news site: "Toyota found a surprising reason for why a South Bay woman's car accelerated and her breaks wouldn't work." My comment: "Maybe the Toyota people have been checking up on the elves and fairies and such who normally give people lucky and/or unlucky breaks and have found hitherto unknown problems in that realm. So they've started working on placating spirits and improving the karmic vibes around their assembly lines. If it works, there won't necessarily be any physical difference in their cars, but they'll run better and get into fewer accidents, and the ones they do get into will be less serious." ********************* There was an item in the news about runaway horses at a Fourth of July parade. Although horses in general may be rare in this society nowadays, they and their problems were something our ancestors had to deal with on a more or less regular basis. When the item mentioned that the horses had been pulling a buggy it reminded me of the recent acceleration problems with Toyota cars. Also, it leads to thoughts of what might go wrong with future robotic vehicles. So it looks like the more things change, the more they stay the same. ********************* Cloudy Concepts Two friends lie on a hillside Gazing at the clouds making pictures in the sky. This one's a dog, that one a car, Yet another one a saxophone. But there's one that doesn't seem to be anything. In reality it's a trans-temporal replorvinator, But since replorvination won't be invented for at least another three hundred years Today's cloud-gazers haven't a clue. That cloud has labored in vain. How many other clouds have made shapes of things that will be but aren't yet, Or might have been if only things had been different? Only the gods of clouds know, And they aren't talking. -- Tom Digby Written 8:40 a.m. April 21, 2005 Saved with Title 03:42 Wed May 11 2005 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware and want to unsubscribe or otherwise change settings, the relevant URL should be in the footer appended to the end of this section in the copy you received. Or you can use the above URL to navigate to the appropriate subscription form, which will also allow you to cancel your subscription or change your settings. -- END --