Sometimes “Some Assembly Required” is Scary

My 2005 Systemax Pentium-D desktop is getting old. I had quadrupled the original RAM (to the max) and upgraded the hard drive a few times (to ½TB = 500,000 MB). But I’ve had people tell me that the hamsters running in the squirrel cages of my CPU were getting tired. I’ve watched how-to videos where the presenter apologized for having a too slow a machine, with twice the cores, three times the RAM, faster chips, and other specs way beyond mine as I was trying to run the same programs. It was seeming to be time for me to buy a new machine.

So I did some shopping. The local MicroCenter had a pretty good deal on a Core i5-2300 with 6GB and 1TB. But I was sure I’d see a slightly better deal at TigerDirect. So I did some shopping there. But I hesitated to buy that day. The very next morning, I received an email from Tiger offering a machine with comparable specs for $120 less! The gods had spoken: It was time.

Why was it cheaper? It is a gaming machine. That is, the power of an executive desktop, but with extra twiddling lights and configured to be for media consumers rather than content creators. But I knew that I’d have approximately equal battles setting up either an executive or a gamer machine. Because this is after the back-to-school sales and before the holiday spike, I got a bargain. My previous machine was over a kilobuck. Actually, every machine from the $2,500 64k no-hard-drive Apple ][ forward was over a grand. Well, my first laptop, the 1983 TRS-80 Model 100 was only down to $400 when I bought it in 1986. But it wasn't a serious computer.

So I placed the order on Friday and this box, this Object at Hand, arrived on Monday.

There it sat. And I began to feel a touch of dread, as this is a version of "Some Assembly Required" that can intimidate me. I had said earlier that “Some Assembly Required” Doesn’t Scare Me in regard to a mere mechanical tandem bicycle. But this innocent box, packaged ready so that a first-time user could pretty much be up and running in minutes, poses a herculean task for an old-timer like me.

It is not because I am old, although I do have certain ways that I like to do things. The problem is that a fully loaded new computer means

1. All new supplied programs are subtly different from their familiar predecessors, and
2. It won't be loaded with any programs that do most of what I need to do, and
3. It will have much installed that needs to be purged. Helpful things that circumvent what I try to do. Friendly things that insist on telling me how to do things I've been doing for decades. Happy things trying to sell me on even more products for which I know better and cheaper alternatives.

So I unpack it, plug in wires for everything necessary, turn it on, and then a few days of "fun" begins.

Note: Each is an installation and/or configuration task. The links should all open in a new tab/window.

First it wants me to answer some questions. No problem. I get it up and running, and am online in under a half hour, ready to do anything I want in the cloud.

Then it offers to "simply" copy my preferences and data from my old machine. In the many upgrades I've survived since the mid 1980's, I have sometimes chosen to let it do this, and other times did it the bad, old way. I'm not sure which is less painful. But I gave it a chance, installed the copier, and let it run. It took 9 hours at 100MB/s to do the copying. Mostly video files and pictures.

After that was done, I began by installing FireFox 6.0. I do need to test my web pages in Chrome as well as IE and FireFox. The computer came with IE and Chrome installed, and I would have installed them had they not come on this computer. But IMHO FireFox is better for development because of its configurability and libraries of Add-Ons (or Apps in smartphone-speak).

Then FireFox needed a few necessary-to-me add ons like FireFTP (for uploading files), HtmlValidator (to make sure my web pages meet standards), Make Link (to copy encoded hypertext links for posting in blog comments), and NoScript (to block unwanted ads, twiddles, and hacks).

Then Flash, Acrobat, and Quicktime had to be downloaded and installed so that all web pages would work. I have a license for QuickTime Pro, and created my first few simple videos with it. So I had to install and up-register it.

I tried to find new drivers for my fancy 2003 ergonomic Logitech 8 button optical mouse. But Windows 7 is not supported! The main function that I want is remapping the wheel button to double-click. This saves a lot of frustration, and who ever uses the default wheel-lock function? So I spent some time searching and found XButtonMouse, a simple to use 64/32 bit mouse driver modifier. Now I have the middle-double-click that I've been using since Windows 3.11.

I cannot live without Notepad++, a free and universal text and programming editor. This is what I use to create my web pages since SideKick, Notepad, and KEdit.

One very important thing was to "differently able" the capslock key. I wrote about this in my post Die, Caps Lock, Die! a couple of years ago, and so was able to easily find the script to kill capslock and let the Scroll Lock key be useful for that rarely needed and often mis-tapped function. If anyone has ever had a use for Scroll Lock, please describe it in a comment.

Connecting and installing my laser and ink jet printers went pretty well. I was surprised that it went as easily as the instructions would have me believe. That hardly ever happens! But this is the first computer I have owned that does not have a Centronics parallel printer port. USB2 is almost as fast, and uses less space.

Then I had to install and upgrade Quicken to continue keeping track of where it all goes.

And I need The Gimp (an open source PhotoShop). This time I am planning to let ThumbsPlus fall by the wayside

And then we get to OpenOffice, because if I tried to edit a document of pretty much any type, this system wanted me to buy Microsoft Office. I detest The Ribbon, and don't plan to use Office. Thanks to SourceForge for this ever more capable and permanently free and perpetually updated suite.

I did download and install Microsoft Live Mail, as the heir apparent to Outlook Express that I'd used since the late 1990's. And spent considerable time trying to get it to do some things, and researching it. But in my household this won't work, mainly because it does not allow multiple mail log-ins under the same Windows User. There is another paragraph later about the multiple task of importing two separate sets of email across three programs and two computers.

Finally, it was time to download my Video Editor, the purchase of which actually convinced me to buy this new machine. I'd spent some time fighting with a few free editors, and I already had a library of videos composed on MoviePlus 5.0 and then X3. So now I upgraded to MoviePlus X5. Another several hour download. This will probably get installed last.

Meanwhile, I managed to get some old games copied over. It had to be done in stages, but now the classics Doom2/ZDoom (with hundreds of levels downloaded over the years), Pinball, and the original Snood are on our new Win7 machine. Doom2 and Snood I'd bought long ago, and Pinball came with WinXP and Win98 and Win95), for which I retain a slightly dingy license by keeping original disks.

Getting late on the second night since the machine arrived.

So the third day was mostly spent on getting email moved over. Why such a big deal? Two work-from-home professionals with multiple businesses and interests who need separate email log-ins, but like to share a desktop. Altogether, thousands of old emails that might still be relevant.  I had done Windows Live Mail before, and found it wanting. So I installed and researched Mozilla Thunderbird. But it took a bit more research to figure out how to cleanly set Thunderbird up in a manner functionally like how we'd been using Outlook Express since the 1990's. My foray into the Microsoft offering turned out to not be of any use, except to educate me on how competing products extract information from the legacy apps.

So I moved the monitor cord back to the old machine, and reconfigured Outlook Express to default to the email folders and accounts of my spouse, to collect her data. Then I installed Mozilla Thunderbird on the old machine and imported the many folders of email and addresses and so forth. The I had to spent some time rearranging stuff and testing. One problem was that many emails were redundantly downloading. Aarghhh! Not a surprise, but certainly a nuisance. But, wait! ThunderBird is open source! When there is a problem, someone fixes it. I looked, and there was an add-on to remove duplicate messages from a folder, with all sorts of checks and safeguards. Yay!

Now to get the old data for the new program from the old to the new machine. Again, the free software community to the rescue. MozBackup is not by Mozilla, but another freeware provider. But it allows each person's email log in identity (called a Profile in Thunderbird) to be separately exported and/or imported. So I installed it and used it on the old machine. Moved the cables, and then installed Thunderbird and MozBackup on the new machine, and only had a half hour of tweaking to get the new machine to do what the old one did, as far as spouse data goes. Then I imported my own 7 email accounts and 15 folders into my own login. It would be so much simpler, if only I didn't know from experience that access to orders, or ideas, or causes, etc from several years ago is very useful.

Then I realized that I had to install more stuff to do web site development on this machine. I put in Active Perl so that I can develop and test cgi pages. I will also have to rewrite certain VB utilities I've been using in Perl. I could use Java, but I don't have the time right now to teach it to myself. Perl will require a certain amount of configuration before I install a web server to use it.

And I had to find and install MoveIt Freely, because the Windows FTP command line utility does not handle secure nor the passive mode, required by Google for MrTitanium to upload his items. Plus there was the minor chore of rewriting my script files to use this command for the aid of myself and my clients.

After a little searching, I found that Win7 Home Premium comes with a web server. But IIS7 comes neither installed nor exactly easy to find. But a little Google led me to the right corner of the advanced settings, and I should be able to test my websites locally. Should. It turns out that the sites I inherited from earlier developers use what is now considered a denigrated scripting system, Classic ASP. It took some tweaking to get the new server to run the older style pages. Then a series of unfortunate events, each requiring some tweaking before I could get my normal working environment working.

Now it is the third sunset since I got the box.

So on day 4, after some more adjustments to email filters and such, I finally install MoviePlus X5. It installed just fine, and looks as good as earlier version. But it runs so much more smoothly on this new box.

However, the reason I got on this ride is because the earlier MoviePlus version couldn't update an earlier video I'd developed on X3 because of a new conflict with QuickTime, the format of raw video coming off of some of my cameras. The new version does run QuickTime again. However, not in old movie edit files. I would have to re-edit in every piece of QuickTime video, when I just wanted to fix one letter in one caption.

Yes, all this started with a typo!

See if you can spot it:

“Some Assembly Required” Doesn’t Scare Me

I recently bought a new tandem bicycle. No, I didn’t drive a long distance and finally find a shop that had one for around what my car is worth. I bought it on eBay. And about a week later, this Object came to Hand:

Hmmm. I needed a couple of open-end wrenches, screw drivers, Allen wrenches, and some patience. You cannot clearly tell from this picture, but the rear fender was bent into uselessness. After I got the front wheel and handlebars and pedals on, and the rear seat and handlebars, I had to remove the fender and use my metal-smithing wiles on it.But it was not worth keeping. The steel fender weighed more than the carry rack I put in its place. A few hours of inexperienced labor later, it was essentially ready to ride.

Then this bike needed a bit of adjusting. You get what you pay for, and I didn’t pay for assembly, tuning, and testing. I had to modify a couple of parts — like the front chain idler that refused to hold the chain — before it worked reliably. And of course it needed bottle holders, carry rack, paniers, more reflectors, bell, speedometer, and different saddles. But now it works quite well.

Unlike my other tandem, this one folds to fit on a standard trunk rack. That’s actually why I bought it:

As of now, I am still making regular adjustments. It is not that the ride makes it wonky, but that it isn’t yet completely tuned up. I am, after all, but a dedicated dilettante in regards to cycling. One can tell that from my earlier post: Unsafe Safety Signs.

AARP, gulp.

A little while back I discussed my reaching Half a Century old in terms of my early papers, and some of the changes to our world in my lifetime. But the Object at Hand today is my legitimately obtained copy of AARP magazine.

A Typical AARP Reader?

I had tossed it aside and apparently my housemate Friedrich picked it up. Now, this seemed eerily evocative of the way youngsters (such as I still feel myself to be) perceive people who read this magazine.

The word “Retired” comprises the ahr  in their acronym. But most people at the AARP age minimum are nowhere near retired. Especially in the early 21^st century economy when an American household apparently needs two wage earners till they are seventy to meet basic expenses.

So AARP reaches out to those who are of an age to barely see the light of retirement at the end of the tunnel of their useful life. That is a mere dozen years before one currently can start reclaiming some of his Social Security money. So AARP provides articles on planning for retirement, and investment advice, and more such for we wee ones.

As for me, among those abruptly dropped from the ranks of the median family income earners back when the tech bubble burst, I cannot decide whether I am semi-employed, or semi-retired.

Perhaps I will be able to make that determination before I look like old Friedrich here.

Unsafe Safety Signs

I am a regular bicyclist. I ride to stores, to doctor appointments, to social meetings, and to pretty much any other short commute in clement weather that doesn’t require carrying more than half my weight or volume in cargo. So it generally lightens my heart to see the increasing frequency of bicycle reminders on or around roadways. This bit of road paint, today’s Object at Hand, is on the street near my house.

But the more of these signs I see, the more I am realizing how they actually pose a threat to bikers.

Why? The problem is in the way our minds work. For those who haven’t studied psychology and perception, or neurology, nor read geeky mainstream books such as “Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention“, let me present a couple of things have been proven, that you can research for yourself later:

• At the primitive levels of our mind, we can only see what we have learned to see.
• Dissimilar images that evoke a shared idea require more cognitional effort to relate than do similar images. For example, it takes a slower and higher part of the brain to associate the relationship between a penny and a twenty than to recognize two different coins both as valuta.

Given these points, can you see the problem? How about if I show you the driver’s perspective of a bicyclist?

Do you see it, now? This is what almost every bicyclist looks like to a driver. Bikers of both motorized and pedaled two wheelers are always complaining that cars don’t see them.

The problem is that drivers are always shown a particular image of what to expect, and it bears no resemblance to what a bicyclist looks like. It is this basic cognitive problem rather than the relative narrowness of two wheeled vehicles that poses the greatest threat to us. But almost every bicycle warning sign uses the same basic profile image, repeatedly retraining drivers in what to look out for. Here is a sampling from around the world.

Try Googling for bicycle signs, yourself! One motorcyclist friend who has repeatedly been reminded how invisible we are even wears a special shirt to try to draw attention to his invisible presence:

I would like to get a campaign going to make bicycling safer by deploying and requiring signs to look more like this crude mock-up I created. Note how much more like an actual bicyclist it looks, and think about what it tells you to look out for.

For comparison, what sign seems a better warning/reminder of what to look for?

Shear Shadows

It is quite a warm summer. With all these triple digit days, it only makes sense to do yard work early in the morning, while the temperature is still down in the 80′s. One of those mornings I was setting up to trim the hedges, when I noticed this shadow.

I have always enjoyed images, objects, and illusions. Long shadows never cease to amuse me. There are three times of day to reliably find them: When the sun is low at dawn and dusk, casting horizontal shadows on the ground; and when the sun is high, casting long shadows on walls. Note how the ½” wire has a two inch shadow. It had been a little wider when I first saw it, but it took a while to find my camera.
Anyway, the object at hand this morning is the image of the shadow of the hedge trimmer, evoking to me the front end of a saw fish.

Spinthariscope

I enjoy funny words, like “spinthariscope.” It sounds like it should be a fancy and complex Steam Punk gizmo for watching rapidly rotating things, like a centrifuge or gyroscope. But Crookes coined the word as an Anglicization of the Greek-rooted word Scintillate for his invention to view nuclear decays. It provided one of the first direct proofs that Curie radiations were discrete, quantized events and not a continuous field.

Spintahriscope in place over the isotope holder in a smoke detector

After writing my post “Not All Natural” about the nuclear waste found in my house, I decided to buy a spinthariscope and see some nuclear radiation as directly as possible. This cheap one just looks like a strip of paper with a round window of simple translucent film. But it works like a charm.

To actually see the radiation from my smoke detector, I had to dark-adapt for a full half hour in my darkest room. Then I could see the glow of alpha particles striking the scope. With a magnifier, one can see each individual particle die. The source produces about 17,000 particles a second spread over 2π steradians, so the dark circle seen at the lower right of the viewer area was alive with about 2,000 green speckles a second.

But, wait, you may well say. Everyone knows  that it takes a minimum of seven photons to trigger a response in the most sensitive rods in a human retina. How can the single quantum event, an alpha particle collision,  produce more than a single photon?

To start with, an alpha particle is a fully ionized helium nucleus, and therefore will collect two electrons from the first atoms it can approach. That’s a minimum of two photons, as any change in electron state releases (or absorbs) a photon. But then the atoms from which it stole the electrons will also be ionized, and claim electrons from others. This can go on for a while (nanoseconds) till some free electrons are found to fill the gap. But this is still only a small number of photons. Additionally, the alpha particle can only grab those electrons once it is moving at less than the speed of light.

Wait. How can an alpha particle go faster than the speed of light? Well, it cannot in free space. But the speed of light in a material medium is lower than the speed of light in a vacuum. Remember your lessons in refraction, of how lenses work. Those alpha particles leave their nuclei of origin at quite a clip, faster than the speed limit in any solid. So when alphas start passing other atoms at this illegal speed, they exert a force to slow them down. Any quantum force implies a quantum of energy, = photons. This is Cherenkov radiation, the light given off when particles go faster than the speed of light in a medium. This is what causes that eerie blue glow one sees near the core of nuclear reactors.

So the spinthariscope works by having a coating of a special crystal, like silver-activated zinc-sulfide, that is transparent to visible light, converts high energy photons (gamma through ultra-violet) down to visible light, and provides a medium of low light speed (high refractive index) to maximize the Cherenkov glow. So each alpha particle creates a shower of thousands of photons, enough to see as a tiny flash of color in a very dark room.

It is mesmerizing to watch this surreal, silent circle of ever changing speckles and to understand this miracle of helium being born. I’m sorry that I don’t have equipment to try to show you a video of the glow on today’s Object at Hand. But even if I did, it would be sort of like showing pictures of the Grand Canyon. Until you’ve seen it live, you can’t get the feel of it.

Melanoma: Know More

A couple of weeks ago, I got a diagnosis of melanoma, and posted Melanoma is Sneaky over at Dangerous Intersection. Go there to see a nice video exhorting regular skin check-ups.

I considered several “objects” on which to hang this post. My first thought was of surgical tools or the fancy high-tech, waterproof, breathable membrane bandage that covered the wound for a few days. But I chose to showcase the memento I will forever carry around with me, the scar where the tumor was removed.

But before I show you the image of this silly badge, here’s how my day of surgery went:

Karen talked me out of walking to surgery as we had walked to the preoperative visit. So we drove the few blocks to the hospital and parked there in about half the time walking took. We finally found the right elevator and went up to the third floor to the ambulatory surgery unit. There was no one at the reception desk, but as we proceeded past toward the nurses station, we hear a “Be right there!” A very swishy man bustled over and cheerfully took my detailed information. He was fun and flirtatious. He passed me to another nurse, who weighed me, and brought me to curtained cubicle #12 on the end of the hall.

I changed into the paper gown, keeping on my shorts and socks as instructed. The gown had many fasteners and ports. I figured out that one wall mounted gadget was a hair dryer-ish gizmo with a hose that could be plugged into one of the several ports built into this disposable gown for warming. Karen went for coffee as I settled into the comfy recliner between layers of pre-warmed blankets. I handled my anxiety at impending surgical assault by falling into a zen-like trance. I happily observed the various light fixtures and gadgets in my cubicle, and the curtain fabrics and hardware. I listened to the layered conversations invisible around me, mapping the people in my visual cortex. I had an hour and a half to wait, and was in no hurry. Karen came back with coffee and occasionally got impatient and fetched nurses to move along the stages of my prep. She has always been a good patient advocate, and has even considered doing that for a living.

Several nurses came in to ask pages of questions that had already been answered. Each department seems to need its own set of answers to the same suite of questions. It’s a pity that medical histories cannot travel with patients from practitioner to practitioner. I find filling out these forms not only tedious, but an insult to the computing technology that could have replaced such iteration a generation ago. I also blame the HIPAA act that seems to do all it can to inhibit the portability of medical information that it was supposed to enhance.

One nurse gave me a set of packaged, heated, antiseptic sponges with a page of detailed instructions on how to use them. Three minutes scrubbing with each and in a particular order on specific areas from neck to toes. I thought this was a silly step. But I had been forewarned by phone the previous night that it was to be done. Afterwards, my hands felt quite sticky and softened.

The surgeon was ready for me while the third iteration of questions was still being administered. They had brought a gurney, but then decided to just wheel me in the throne. I commented that I should have had a crown and scepter to be so royally escorted to the operating room. I did wave to the peons as I was wheeled past. I was having a good time, and had yet to receive any drugs aside from the antibiotic in my neutral saline IV.

Once in the operating room, I stepped from my throne over to the narrow operating table starkly lit under the triple set of suspended and jointed reflector lights, one with a camera built in. The nurses and resident seemed to be a cheerful team. I tried not to distract them, but wanted to join in. When the first set up an arm table to the side, I pointed out that this would not work. They seemed surprised at my effrontery. But then they saw I was right and rearranged me to have my arm on my belly. I seemed to puzzle them a bit, as I was completely cooperative, alert, cheerful, and knowledgeable. Yes, I was aware of compensating for anxiety; I began studying psychology in 8th grade, got a degree in it, and have been studying related fields ever since.

They gave me a nasal cannula and draped me with green crinkly paper sheets. When they first smoothed it across my face, I suggested that my nose was actually supposed to be convex. After that a hand appeared in my green world occasionally to lift the paper from my nose. But it wasn’t bothering me. I’m not claustrophobic, and was getting cool oxygen in my nose. They started the Lidocaine drip without my noticing. But I quickly got more relaxed.

When the surgeon, Eddy Hsueh, came in, he told me that they were no going to give me the sedative, a truth serum. (Precedex, I believe.) He said that now I would have no secrets.

I said, “I’m on FaceBook; I have no secrets!”

Best laugh of the session. They chuckled and repeated it to each other. One of the nurses later repeated it to Karen when she brought me back.

I distinctly felt the first couple of shots of local anesthetic in my arm. I don’t think that I actually passed out at any point, but things were fuzzy while he cut out the initial disk of skin. I tried to “see” from under my green sheet by listening carefully. At one point the tone of the heart monitor seemed to change. I asked about it, and they assured me that it hadn’t. In retrospect, I think I’d gone under briefly and come back without noticing at that point.

I was quite alert as they (surgeon and resident) started stitching. I could feel the pulling, even the vibration of the gentle texture of the stronger sutures pulling through. Dr. Hsueh is a teacher, and was guiding the resident to close. In this case, closing involved pulling the open circle into a line, and then trimming the puckered “dog ears” on each end to allow a smooth closure. I had assumed that the necessary eye-shaped cut would be the initial profile. But apparently they cut out a circle, and then trim the pointy ends after pulling the circle mostly closed. Hsueh was a harsh critic, a perfectionist, who scolded the resident for cutting the end too round, for pulling with the wrong suture (including a pedantic lecture on the physics of force), and for not having good technique in pushing the needle through the skin. I’d never before heard a grown man chewed out for not doing his homework. I was embarrassed for the doctor. But from their point of view, I wasn’t there. All they saw was an arm and green sheets. Often even when people can see me, I manage to be invisible: I see more, this way.

So they finished suturing and started undraping me before they got the bandage on. I started to get up, and they told me to wait as they put some gauze and a clear adhesive patch covering the whole thing. This oxygen-permeable membrane is certainly new since my last surgery, in the early 1980′s. No cumbersome wrap of bandages was necessary

I stepped easily off the operating table and back to the padded throne, and was wheeled back to the cubicle. Karen was retrieved from the waiting room, and we sat for a while, waiting for discharge. I felt like I was sobering up quickly. But I was certainly hazy, and glad that Karen was there to hear the post surgical directives. My arm didn’t hurt at all; the local was very effective.

When they came in with the discharge papers, I was ready to go. I asked to use the restroom, and they let me. We discussed the necessity of the ceremonial wheelchair as I walked, and pirouetted to walk backwards, and then ducked into the restroom. It is good to have dancer reflexes. But they were adamant about wheeling me out. One nurse rolled me down the hall and elevator, and out to the door while Karen got the car. I grew tired of sitting, and the nurse reluctantly let me stand up. She guarded me like a wary physical therapist as I rose, then stayed close to me as I walked out the door, and waited. When Karen arrived, the nurse escorted my to the car door. She was taking no chances. It was about 2:00 as we drove the mile or so to South Grand.

First we picked up my meds at our local pharmacy: A prophylactic antibiotic and Percoset. I rarely use pain pills, and was feeling fine at the time. But I figured that I might use the latter as a sleep aid, at least the first night. We stopped in next door to the pharmacy to chat with our investment banker, and then walked a block to use a coupon for lunch at Qudoba. I was feeling a little dissociated, but not dizzy, nor in pain. It seemed about as traumatic at that point as getting a large filling in a tooth.

Once home, I settled in front of Roku for the remains of the day. Not the movie, just old TV shows like Ally McBeal and Cheers. We don’t have cable or satellite, so Netflix feeds my video addiction. After a few hours, the local anesthetic wore off, and I began to see the wisdom of pain meds. Each time I’d shift, my arm kersploded with a bright flash of unpleasantness. I did resist the oxycodone till bedtime by holding the arm very still as much as possible. Owy. Only woke a few times in the night.

So now, a few days later, I unveil my new dermal embellishment:

Melanoma: 14 stitches for an odd mole

Poor Dead Penny

With luck, you are following up on my previous post about penny sorting. If not, you may want to check it out.

So I ended with suggesting there is a fun way to dispose of the new, copper-plated zinc pennies. Sure, we were all taught as children that mutilating money is wrong. But the point of that is to not damage money that will be circulated. There is no law against permanently taking money out of circulation; that is just a permanent loan to the treasury.

So my playful and don’t-try-this-at-home method of eliminating plated pennies is fun with chemistry. You see,  zinc reacts energetically with muriatic acid (HCl), the stuff you buy by the gallon to etch concrete or stabilize the pH of your pool. But copper is effectively untouched by this synthetic form of stomach acid.

So if you scratch through the copper plating on the edge of the new pennies, and drop them in the acid, the result is fizzing hydrogen gas (danger) mixed with a vapor of the strongest common acid (danger) and eventually leaves behind a depleted solution of acid with zinc chloride and little perfect penny foils. When the reaction is done,  carefully decant and rinse the foils. Make sure you store or properly neutralize and discard the remaining acid.

Ready to Start the etch

For a hollow penny just scratch a hole in the side. This may take a while to etch, as the hydrogen bubbles have to get out for the acid to do its work. I like to grind away the whole edge to make separate delicate head and tail foils. This etch still takes a few hours.

So the Object at Hand is this set of penny foils, showing odd points of view of our most diminutive denomination of cash.

The inside of a penny, looking up

HCl ate the brown oxide, leaving a foil too thin to hold its shape in this 1982 zinc penny

This penny plating was so thin that the acid let the light through where the die cut deepest

A Penny Full of Thoughts

Much like most people, I have a jar of pennies. A few years ago, I began separating my pennies and segregating them into two separate containers. One contains traditional pennies made of copper, and the other gets the new ones that are copper plated zinc. After hundreds of years of copper cents (ignoring the 1943 steel penny) they changed them in 1982 because pennies were worth more than a penny as scrap. Copper is currently around $4/lb, and zinc is around a buck. At $4/lb, a copper penny contains 2.8¢ of copper.

So I put on my reading glasses, and used a magnifying glass, to separate pre-1982 from post-1982 pennies. But what about 1982? The year was mixed. I collected the 1982′s in a separate pill bottle until it was full.

This evening I pulled out my great uncle’s jewelry balance (Today’s Object) and began comparing pairs of pennies. You see, copper weighs 8.9 times as much as water, and zinc only 7.1, a difference of 25%. Once I found a mismatched pair, I could compare the lighter one against each of the rest, and quickly separated the 1982′s into solid and copper plated. Most of the ones I had were solid copper.

Those solid ones I plan to keep around, and the plated ones get disposed of. It’s not because the older ones will get much more valuable any time soon. It’ll be generations before the supply of stashed copper pennies dwindles, even if they do manage to roll out the planned steel pennies or do away with them altogether. But they are a snapshot of my early life, and can always be turned into enough useful cash to buy a small meal.

There are several ways that I dispose of the zinc ones. The dominant and common way to to count and roll them and take them to the bank.

The second way is somewhat artistic. A few years ago I happened to have access to the freshly poured concrete alley behind my house:

Click to Enlarge

The third is more fun and slightly dangerous. But this is the subject of my next post.

Junk in the Trunk

A funny thing happened on my way home from the barber shop on Tax Day (Friday 4/15). It wasn’t anything to do with a literal fleecing after mailing my taxes,  but I had dropped in to the Wyoming Barber Shop near four in the afternoon on a Friday, and lucked into a short wait. Marco trimmed me quickly, as seen in this video I took a couple of years ago. This afternoon, the skies grew ominously dark outside as most of my hair piled up on the floor.

Karen had meanwhile been shopping at Aldi. As the storm began, Karen called to say she was on her way to pick me up. I stepped out of the shop, and Marco’ed her. No, not the barber. As in Marco-Polo, referring to the very common use of cell phones to locate people.

Quoth she, “I drove into a ditch!”

I pictured a grassy gulley by the side of a rural road, and couldn’t picture that anywhere in the half mile between the Aldi and Wyoming Avenue. She told me to look south. I saw our car beyond a couple of other curbside cars. It didn’t look quite right, back there. The front passenger side seemed kind of low, sunken in.

Now there is construction going on along this commercial stretch of road. They are widening the sidewalks. As the curbs are poured, they leave a foot of margin dug into the street. On this block, the deep drop off the road right by the curb was partially filled in, and not well marked. Karen was stopped with the right front wheel hanging in the ditch. The car rested on one of the wheel support bars, so the wheel spun freely. Why? Because over 190,000 miles ago we opted not to pay an extra grand to have them activate the firmware for anti-lock and positive traction control. This is the first time we’d needed either.

So here was my wife, sitting in a car stuck blocking an alley on a main road as rush hour ramped up, and the skies opened up. AAA said it would be about an hour. So I trotted up the alley in the waxing rain and found some boards to try to build a ramp and/or lever that would get some traction and/or lift for the spinning wheel.

Then I paused and considered all the things we keep in the trunk, in case of road trouble. Most of the tools and such were selected for camping or long road trips. But there is help in there for this urban mishap.

I dug the entrenching tool out from the spare tire compartment and started scooping and hauling loose gravel from an open pit a few cars down. I was trying to build a ramp, and to get some friction between the tire and the wet board.

As the hail began (only pea sized) a few guys gathered around. My efforts so far got the board pulled under the tire and resembling a steep ramp. I filled the uphill side with gravel, put my foot to the lever, three or four guys grabbed the front bumper to lift, and Karen ably backed out. A couple of the guys found a traffic cone (that didn’t appear to be doing anything important) and marked the hazard, as I spread thanks. There was not a scratch on the pavement, and the steering seemed fine. Karen apparently dropped the car into the ditch as gently as could be hoped.

A spot of adventure to punctuate an ordinary haircut. Both the helpful bystanders and the rain quickly dispersed. We called off AAA, and headed home. Adventure is all in the attitude. And getting soaked in a booming storm is just part of the fun on a spring afternoon.

Later I considered the objects that we keep in the trunk. I thought that I could have taken the rope from the trunk, wrapped it a couple of times around the front tire (coming off the bottom rear, and then around the rear tire (bottom front) so that the front tire would either be held fast, allowing the front left tire to pull, or the rope would have forced both the front left and right rear wheels to pull the car out.

So the Object at Hand today is the collection of rarely needed tools that cost so little to have in the trunk, in case of emergency.