Have I really skipped writing about the entire month of September? I guess I’ve been that busy.
Let me breeze through work first: I’ve been scrambling and behind schedule writing the software for testing the Solar Probe spacecraft instruments. We had to order a new laptop and a giant monitor to go with it, and I had delayed getting them because I wasn’t sure they’d run together and also run Ubuntu 14. Our IT people said the hardware should be compatible with each other, but there are always software issues.
When we finally got the hardware in, I realized the monitor was so much larger in person than I expected that I felt like I had to start reconfiguring the software displays. To get started, I hooked the monitor up to my MacBook Pro and worked from there, ignoring the new PC.
I also struggled with the GSE software. I simply don’t like the way it handles memory, with a lot of things having to be “hard coded” rather than dynamically allocated. I spent a lot of time working things through in my head rather than writing things down. Maybe I spent too much time thinking about it before I got to writing it. However, when I finally started the writing — and I wrote code to write code, which I think I was forced to do by the memory architecture — things went pretty fast.
Because of all the delays, I also ended up skipping an ACE Science Team Meeting last week at APL, as well as a follow-on STEREO Science Team Meeting afterward. I feel like I was simply swamped with the Solar Probe work that has deadlines coming up.
So while I was stuck here last week, I finally got started trying to install Ubuntu on the new laptop — and then I ran into trouble getting Ubuntu on that laptop to work with the new big screen. The older laptops work with the new screen with Ubuntu 13, via HDMI, just fine. The new laptops work with the new screen with Windows 7. The problem is with the new laptop and Ubuntu with the new screen. I spent two days working with it, and it seems that the problem was with the Nvidia driver not loading before the login screen loads. The workaround is to keep the screen unplugged until after boot.
But that ended up being a waste of two whole days.
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The boys have been doing pretty well at school for the new year. W tried out for the football team and wound up on C team, which is basically intramural flag football. He also got on one of the debate teams — he was recruited for it, actually. It seems to be a big thing for a lot of people, and he really wants to do it. Personally, I think debate is just one step up from things like drama club and many, many steps below things like science, math, and engineering. I told him, “Debate and rhetoric are the stupid, ugly cousins of logic.” Oh, well, if he enjoys it.
W also finished his spring term as Patrol Leader of his Boy Scout patrol. He and V, his assistant patrol leader, scrambled to complete the last two requirements of their leadership positions — to have two patrol-only activities (outside the Troop activities). One activity was a bowling party that W organized on Labor Day weekend, and the other was a swimming party at V’s house on 9/21. Their leadership positions expired on 9/22, so they finished under the wire.
W then volunteered for another leadership position. He didn’t want to do Patrol Leader again (or Assistant Patrol Leader, which is effectively the same as far as he was concerned), so he got Troop Librarian a member of the Troop Multimedia Team. We’ll find out what that means later, when he gets his leadership requirements. When the leadership positions were announced on the 22nd, he was mistakenly announced as Troop Historian and given the Historian patch, but that was a mistake (and also not his request).
V asked for and got Patrol Leader, and L, another of their friends, asked for and got Assistant Patrol Leader.
This past weekend, W and I went to Llano, CA for the Troop Glider Campout. We drove out early Saturday morning, arriving at Crystalaire Airport there, a private airport housing a glider school. We also drove V and his older brother R, because their dad was unavailable that weekend.
The Scouts (and dads) attending the campout were divided into groups, and W and his patrol took the Aviation Merit Badge class in the morning. In the afternoon, each Scout flew in a glider, with an experience pilot in the rear seat, for anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes. All of the scouts had fun, though many reported having to exert some control not to throw up during the flight. (They had all been warned not to eat heavily before their flights.) In fact, W barfed (just a little) into his barf bag just before landing.
Some Scouts flew in the morning and took the Aviation Merit Badge class in the afternoon. And some dads also flew, though at $100 per flight, most dads didn’t. Being a little concerned with airsickness as well as not wanting to spend $100, I didn’t sign up to fly, but as I watched so many flights take off and land oh-so-slowly during the day, I started wishing I had signed up. At mid-afternoon, when all the flights were done, one of the airport staff asked, “If any of you had the chance to fly, would you do it?” I raised my hand and said yes.
Then Patrick, the dad who arranged the campout, said, “If you get me a check for $100 later this week, you can fly now!”
I said, “What? I thought that was just hypothetical. I wasn’t expecting to fly, and I just had my lunch!” which was really true — I had waited to have lunch with W, as most of the dads waited to have lunch after their sons had flown. The woman who had offered the flight said that the air was really choppy then, so it probably wasn’t a good idea for me to go up on a full stomach.
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The campout afterward was nice. Although it was in the desert, it was a lot colder than I expected, and it was very, very windy. Our campsite was at the end of the airport, way beyond the end of the runway and about 500 yards from the main buildings of the airport, where the restroom was. The winds were so strong at times that setting up the tents was very hard, and staking them down could be iffy without really good stakes. Our rainfly ties slipped off the stakes at night.
The bathroom situation wasn’t too bad, either. At least it was a real bathroom with a flushing toilet. If you weren’t in a rush, it wasn’t too bad to walk, and otherwise, dads drove the scouts to the bathroom.
During tent setup, a few of us drove to the Devil’s Punchbowl area for a hike, but we got such a late start that we ended up just visiting the nature center there and then driving back. The hike was about 40 yards. But we saw a couple of owls they had there.
Our patrol cooked spaghetti with meat sauce. We didn’t bring our patrol box, so W and I provided our own camp stove, spaghetti noodles, plasticware, and cooking gear, while the other scouts brought the ground beef, Ragu sauce, and other stuff. I taught the newer scouts how to brown the ground beef and then add the sauce, and I taught them how to cook the pasta. Our propane ran low, and the water wasn’t boiling, and there was a scout campfire (Scout Spirit Conference) coming up soon. We were in a rush, so I swapped out the propane, and the water heated faster. We ended up with the spaghetti at a reasonable approximation of al dente entirely by accident.
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The next morning, there was to be a sunrise hike. Any scout that wanted to hike was to wake up at 5:45 AM, meet by the campfire meeting area, and then go hike by the aqueduct to see the sunrise. Only six scouts bothered to wake up and show up for the hike, including W and one of his new patrolmates, N, plus two senior scouts. I and Kelly, a former Scoutmaster, were the only adults to show up.
We hiked to the aqueduct and then walked beside it, and we caught the sunrise at about 6:53 AM.
When we returned to camp, everyone else was already awake and almost finished with breakfast.