Sunday morning, I came back to my house to find my front door not working. What had happened is that something had jammed in the latching mechanism, and the latch wouldn’t withdraw enough to allow the door to open when the knob was turned. If it had happened a week before, it wouldn’t have been much of a problem, because the weather was warm enough then that I had most of my windows open to let the breeze through, and all it would have taken was removing a screen and climbing through. However, this past weekend was chill enough that I had all of the windows latched closed.

Marion had a locksmith she’d used before that she recommended highly, so I called them. The dispatcher said he had nobody he could send, but he could set up an appointment for the next day. Not acceptable. He did have another locksmith company I could call, though. Unfortunately, he’d set up his booth at the Mile High Flea Market and was unavailable until about 4:30 or 5:00 pm. Again, not acceptable.

I went to the local Home Depot and Lowe’s to see if they had a locksmith service or someone they knew who worked Sundays (and Mother’s Day in particular). No luck. No “home break-in kits” for sale, either. The lady I spoke with at Home Depot pissed me off, too - after explaining about how my door mechanism had broken, she asked some co-workers about locksmiths by calling out across the store, “Hey, this guy locked himself out! Can we do anything?” Why, yes, having broken door hardware is just the same as pulling a locked door closed without having your keys.

When I got back, Marion called a 24/7 emergency locksmith while I was otherwise occupied. When he got there, he tried the doorknob for a couple of minutes, then drilled out the lock cylinder (which scared me, because he was using a bent drill bit) and tried the doorknob again. When that didn’t work, he put his shoulder to it and broke the door open. The jamb was split completely across through the hole for the latch, and three pieces of it were on the floor (two large and one small). He then took two screws and put the two larger pieces more-or-less back in place and asked me if I wanted him to put a new doorknob in. As if.

I probably shouldn’t have paid, but I did. Way too much. I changed the text on the receipt that said that there were no problems and that I was satisfied with the job, though.

Monday morning, I called and asked for the owner, and complained to him. He gave me a $50 refund (insufficient, but I didn’t want to get into kicking and screaming). I then called the original locksmith Marion recommended. The phone dispatcher said, “You’re kidding!” when I described the situation, then connected me with Mark, one of the owners, who gave exactly the same response. Mark came out and examined my door, then said I didn’t need the jamb replaced. All I needed was a better repair job. I’d have needed a replacement if the split had gone though the deadbolt hole, but the latch isn’t what gives me security on that door. He couldn’t do the work until Wednesday morning, though, so we set up an appointment and I went in late to work.

Then yesterday, I thought I’d go out into the back parking lot and play ukulele during lunch - the Swallow Hill Ukefest is this weekend, and I could do with some more practice. Unfortunately, the C string on my uke had broken. No ukulele for me.

I got back to my office and started to work again, but found a large number of “disk error” alert boxes pop up. Then a program I knew I hadn’t installed started running and claimed that I had tremendous numbers of hard disk errors. I immediately did a hard shutdown of my desktop, and started investigating using my laptop. It turns out that I’d been infected by S.M.A.R.T. HDD, a piece of scamware/ransomware that purports to find disk errors, and offers to fix them if you provide a credit card number and upgrade from the “free version.” It also hides all of your desktop icons, prevents Windows Task Manager from running, and takes up enough system resources to make it difficult to run anything else.

According to Microsoft’s website, this is a new version of a several-year-old program, and they really can’t protect against it. The approved removal method involves booting into safe mode with networking, then running Internet Explorer to download several programs that will take care of removing the infection. That didn’t work for me; I had no access to programs from the Start menu in safe mode - the “run” box was missing and the only program on the menu was the fake disk utility.

I got in touch with our IT services provider and got walked through a recovery process, but that failed. We set up an appointment for him to come in this morning while I was dealing with the locksmith, and he’d clean the infection from my system. I stopped and picked up some ukulele strings on the way home.

The IT guy had just finished when I got to work (by the way, the locksmith did great work on the jamb, and cleaned up a couple of other door-related problems I had - I can whole-heartedly recommend Master Security of Arvada).

Unfortunately, the scamware had also hidden a number of documents, including an entire directory that I need to work with, which I admit would have been hard, if not impossible, for the IT guy to notice. Luckily, the applications needed to clean my system, including an “unhide” utility, were left on the system, so I’m running that in hopes that it’s all I need to get back to work.

Now, I find I can’t get into my Google Plus account. We had a meeting yesterday with a web design person, and I brought my laptop into the meeting so I could show her the statistics on our current site as well as the site itself. Showing the statistics required logging into Google Analytics with my work email address, so now Google Plus wants me to “upgrade” with my work email address, and I don’t seem to have a way to tell it I want to log in with my Gmail account information. Way to go, Google!

I’m hoping that I’m not told that there’s no record of my buying my pass for the Ukefest when I try to pick it up. I’m not sure it will surprise me if it happens, though.

Sunday, when this all started, was May 13th. It’s a day off, but it reminds me of the lament in one of the Pogo strips, which went something like this: “Friday the 13th done come on a Monday. We’s gonna have a whole week of bad luck!”

My Apple was serial number A2S1-2174. I bought it used for $1000, and it came with 16k of RAM and only the cassette interface for mass storage. I eventually got it upgraded to dual floppies and 48k of RAM, but it took a couple of years. Most of that time, I was in the West Indies, and computer parts and peripherals weren’t available. I felt good about it because I managed to get two floppies while they were still in short supply, and I only paid $150 for each 16k RAM expansion when Apple was charging $300 each.

I had a lot of fun with that machine. I had one program distributed by the 6502 Group, and I had another program published by the Apple Puget Sound Program Library Exchange (A.P.P.L.E. - I guess the “S” in “Sound” was silent). I also had an article published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia (the October 1979 issue), but they weren’t able to print the source code listings I submitted, which was very disappointing to me. At the time, though, I was in the West Indies, and the printouts I sent were from a huge, heavy, line printer, and I had no floppies, so I sent them hardcopy on green-and-white fanfold paper, as well as a cassette with the code. I believe that they’d have been able to handle a floppy, but they couldn’t deal with the cassette, and retyping from my listings was, I’m sure, quite unappealing.

I’d ordered a computer before the Apple, though. There was a company in the Boston area called ECD, which was started by some MIT people, if I’m remembering correctly. They were offering a computer called the MicroMind, which sounded incredibly advanced for the time. Unfortunately, they produced very few of them. I think it’s because they decided to go head-to-head against DEC in the business market. I consider myself lucky to have gotten my money back from them before they went under.

I’ve never been big on games, but there were a few I enjoyed, and would like to still have available. One was called Ricochet (no relation to the PC game). It had paddles that would flip, and launchers in the corners of the screen. When it was your turn, you could move one or more paddles (all in the same direction), or you could launch a ball from either of your launchers. When a ball hit a paddle, it would be reflected at a 90 degree angle, and the paddle would flip from vertical to horizontal, or vice-versa. You’d also get a point for each paddle the ball hit. If the ball hit a launcher, it was disabled for a few turns. It was a lot of fun. I don’t have the game anymore, but I think I may still have the documentation that came with it.

There was also a space shoot-’em-up game called Alien Ambush (I think - it’s been a long time). It had a basic similarity with Space Invaders, in that you controlled a ship at the bottom of the screen, and would shoot at alien ships that entered from the top. However, instead of marching ranks of aliens these ships would swoop and swirl and launch bombs toward you. The advertising catchphrase for the game was, “You haven’t lived until you’ve died in space.”

I remember staying up one Friday night until about 3am with a friend, working together until we beat the chess program Sargon II. There’s no way I’d have beaten it by myself; I’m not that good a chess player.

I kept that Apple until around 1990, then gave it, and almost all of my magazines and software, away. I did keep a few things, such as my copy of the “big red book” that’s signed by Steve Wozniak and Randy Wigginton. Sometimes, I wish I’d kept the rest.

It was very nice. I’m definitely making that again. I bought a large bag of frozen langostino from Costco, though, so I had plenty more available to use. I ended up using them in to make paella and bouillabaisse, both of which were also well-received.

Earlier this week, I had my daughter over and made this. She arrived before I was done cooking, so I put her to work on it as well. We both agreed that the recipe was a keeper.

Brits know (on average) ten recipes by heart, and I can’t imagine that it would be too different here. I wonder what’s going to drop off my list if I add any of these?

I bought my first banjo in 1979, and laboriously learned to play three or four tunes badly using the books and tapes I bought, including Earl’s book with it’s little floppy record. I never learned to play the instrument beyond reproducing “fret this string here, then pick it” sequences until after I’d attended Pete Wernick’s banjo camp - about two weeks after camp, something just “clicked” and I suddenly knew what I was doing. I still can’t play well, partly because I’ve largely moved from banjo to ukulele, but there’s a qualitative difference in what I do now compared to what I did before.

I’ve been to Pete’s banjo camp twice, and I remember that he would have all of the attendees sign a birthday card for Earl, since the banjo camps took place around his birthday.

I only got to see Earl live one time, which was the last time he performed in Denver. Several people got him to sign their banjos after the concert. I didn’t bring mine, but I did get his signature on my copy of Masters of the Five-String Banjo.

I’ve got several Earl Scruggs LPs and CDs. I need to move them back up to the top of the playlist; maybe it’s time to get inspired to pick up the banjo again.

I went out at lunch to see if I could fly my kite - I’ve got a Skynasaur F-36 sport kite that I haven’t flown in more than a decade. The winds were so strong that the string almost cut my fingers, and one of the two lines snapped before the kite was up 30 feet. I decided that I’d been given a sign that kite flying was not in the cards for today.

I’ll have to try again on a day when the wind isn’t quite so strong. I’ll also have to learn how to adjust the harness on the kite; I’m not sure that it’s set up properly, because it tried to head upwind past my head the moment it got into the air.

Then again, nobody’s been complaining … about that, anyway.

Be that as it may, I’m going to clean out some tabs and saved links.

Back around 1985, my boss brought in a summer intern and told me to get some use out of him. Four days later, we sent him back to his professor - I’d spent about 10 hours over those four days explaining to him in detail how to write a program that would have taken me somewhere around an hour to write. The problem was that he had only written Pascal programs on VAX hardware, and had no conception of how a program could actually deal with the underlying hardware itself. I was reminded of that when I ran across Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal. I remember that from when it first appeared - I didn’t get Datamation, but I had coworkers who did. Don’t skip the linked “Story of Mel,” which also is pretty good.

I have a hand-cranked radio, but this is something else: a wind-up AA battery.

This article on medical school acceptance rates by race is pretty horrifying. It reminds me of an article I read some time ago that made the case that affirmative action was reducing the number of minority (specifically, black) attorneys. The mechanism proposed was that blacks would be admitted to law schools that their scores wouldn’t get them into if they were white, which made it harder to keep up with the rest of the student body, so they’d drop out. It is likely they’d have been able to graduate from a less-prestigious (and less difficult) school, so affirmative action had the exact opposite of the purported effect.

This is cool - do-it-yourself eye exams on a smartphone.

This is also cool - electric currents passing through the brain can induce a state more conducive to learning. Be careful if you do it yourself, though. More here.

I wish this had been available when I broke my ankle last year.

Some kids are smart. Ten-year-old Clara Lazen is going to have plenty of geek cred for coming up with a previously-unknown molecule that’s likely to be explosive.

A one-stroke penalty if a bomb goes off during your swing? That seems harsh.

This is one of those articles that’s worth it just for the headline. So is this one.

I’m amazed that someone could call the first score of the Super Bowl correctly.

To solve a problem, you need to define it correctly. Even without committing a category error, it could be that you are solving the wrong problem.

This is another of those computer toys that let you get an idea of the scale of the universe. I wish things like this had been available when I was a child. We had to make do with the movie “Powers of Ten.” Of course, I was in high school when that came out, so it’s still not a childhood memory, per se.

Speaking of films, I’ve seen two of these. I suspect my daughter has seen more of them than I have. If not, she probably will after checking out the list.

Several years ago, my doctor told me to start taking a daily aspirin. I had to give it up a few months later, because I was getting frequent nosebleeds. If only I had known the healing power of bacon! I fear my cats may have caused problems, though.

Slightly related to that, there’s good news about eating fried foods. It doesn’t match up with Satchel Paige’s advice not to eat fried food because “it angrifies the blood,” but I suspect the food he was familiar with was fried in different oils.

Attractions, flotation devices, or airbags. I’m glad her breasts helped, but I consider her misshapen. I remember the news stories when she acquired the infection that caused her to get reduction surgery - she’d had to go to Brazil because doctors in the US wouldn’t expand her breasts any more.

Speaking of breasts, I’ve seen a few protests here and there, but I’ve yet to witness one like this. (NSFW, unless topless women are allowed by your office dress code.)

How to distract your enemy. I particularly enjoy the third panel.

Lots of older periodicals available here.

Speaking of reading, I’m going to be waiting for this e-book app to become available. I just hope that it doesn’t require a new proprietary DRM’d format.

Some nice music here. I listened to several of the young lady’s other videos, and they were nice. A bit too similar for listening to in a block, but they’d be very nice in a shuffle.

If your taste runs to psychedelic music, try this. I have the Nuggets LP in a box in my garage. If I’m remembering correctly, I’ve got the 1976 release, not the earlier one.

Here’s an interesting music game.

Besides seeming a bit tacky, is a Titanic Memorial Cruise a good idea? Some people don’t think so. Having been on one cruise myself (which I quite enjoyed, actually), I’ll admit to some misgivings. It makes me wonder how I ever managed when I was in the Navy.

I do fairly well with English grammar. Many of the things I read would irk me less if their authors took this advice to heart.

I could add more to this post, but I think I’ll finish with this tweet that expresses an awe that I’ve experienced when reading code.

Tonight, we had snow in the area. There wasn’t much accumulation, but the roads were wet and visibility was reduced. I don’t like driving in those conditions, and neither did the app. It couldn’t determine accurately where the lanes were, so it gave me (according to the “end of drive” report) 35 warnings for drifting out of my lane. I can safely say that, apart from one warning that occurred when I was changing lanes, none of those were valid. Most of them occurred in a continual alternating right side/left side warning sequence when I was on the off-ramp from the highway. I don’t think I could have gone back and forth across the lane as quickly as the notices came.

So, yeah, I suppose it’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who has trouble driving at night when the road is wet.

The song of the day is not one of his, though. It’s an old fiddle tune written to commemorate a famous battle.

He’s one of my favorite cartoonists. I have most of the books that collect the Addams Family cartoons (Black Maria, Nightcrawlers, Favorite Haunts, Drawn and Quartered, Creature Comforts, Monster Rally, The Groaning Board, Addams and Evil), as well as a book that provides a lot of information about the Addams Family TV show (Addams Family Revealed). I’ve used a couple of the cartoons on housewarming invitations in the past. Perhaps that’s why very few people showed up?