Coffee Shop XXXIX-9/21/2013

[kbkchooch]

What, you ask is a triffid? It's a tall, mobile, carnivorous and highly venomous plant that's fully capable of hunting down any animal or person it detects. Don't worry. It's fictitious as well.

Sounds like Seymour from "Little shop of Horrors"

Also recorded in song.....from the Rocky Horror Picture Show....

Michael Rennie was ill the day the earth stood still
But he told us where we stand
And Flash Gordon was there in silver underwear
Claude Raines was the invisible man
Then something went wrong for Fay Wray and King Kong
They got caught in a celluloid jam
Then at a deadly pace it came from outer space
And this is how the message ran:

Science Fiction - Double Feature
Dr. X will build a creature
See androids fighting Brad and Janet
Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet
Oh-oh at the late night, double feature, picture show.

I knew Leo G. Carroll was over a barrel
When Tarantula took to the hills
And I really got hot when I saw Janet Scott
Fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills
Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes
And passing them used lots of skills
But when worlds collide, said George Pal to his bride
I'm gonna give you some terrible thrills, like a:

Science Fiction - Double Feature
Dr. X will build a creature
See androids fighting Brad and Janet
Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet
Oh-oh at the late night, double feature, picture show.
I wanna go, oh-oh, to the late night double feature picture show.
By RKO, oh-oh, at the late night double feature picture show.
In the back row at the late night double feature picture show.

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

As far as your old Apple floppy drives I surprised that you can even find old disketts for them but I do still have some I think from my days with the Commadore 128.

As far it tracking right, I think what you need is a program to align the heads.

The program I used to use showed the drive speed and tracking information on the screen as it was being adjusted. As for being able to find diskettes, they're all over Ebay. Same for software.

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Good morning. It's 50° with 81% humidity. The high will be 70°. Sunny with some clouds.

No plans for today. I have someone coming to pick up a copy of parts one and two of Native Fury. He'll beta test it on an Apple IIc for debugging and will recommend changes. Meanwhile I'll be going through another copy seeing what I can find.

 

[Boris]

Good Morning - Happy Friday!

The temperature actually hit the freezing mark this morning. Looks like a nice day and nice weekend. I'm still undecided about driving down to Timmonium. It will probably depend on how the wife is reacting to her meds come Sunday morning.

A second look at the layout, this time with a level, and it's not as bad as feared. Good thing I never got around to ballasting the track. Bad news is that Atlas C-83 flex is scarce again, good news is that Micro Engineering C-83 flex is currently plentiful.

*#&%$@!! Devils lost again last night, but performed better as a team. At least they earned a tie point, and remain ahead of a couple of other local underachievers in the standings. Bad news is that the next game is in Boston, and the Bruins are playing well.

Have a great weekend!

Joe

 

[railfan]

Sounds like Seymour from "Little shop of Horrors"



Also recorded in song.....from the Rocky Horror Picture Show....

Karl, those were some really boss lyrics......lol!

 

[PNKFLOYD]

Joe- your statement"
*#&%$@!! Devils lost again last night, but performed better as a team. At least they earned a tie point, and remain ahead of a couple of other local underachievers in the standings. Bad news is that the next game is in Boston, and the Bruins are playing well."

I assume you are talking about some type of sporting event?!?

And, I do not think it is college football....? Bicycle racing?

 

[Boris]

Joe- your statement"
*#&%$@!! Devils lost again last night, but performed better as a team. At least they earned a tie point, and remain ahead of a couple of other local underachievers in the standings. Bad news is that the next game is in Boston, and the Bruins are playing well."

I assume you are talking about some type of sporting event?!?

And, I do not think it is college football....? Bicycle racing?

Ice Hockey, Mikey. The only professional sport that still commands my attention. College Football around these parts ain't the same as down your way. Rutgers ain't the Tide.
The NJ Devils are sort of off to a terrible start, yet there are a few other teams that are actually doing worse.

Joe

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

My friend showed up today with his Apple IIc+ and beta tested part two of Native Fury. He found plenty on the copy disk to keep me busy for a bit. He'd come across a syntax error which was usually the lack of an '=' in an 'if-then' statement (IF A$ = "N" THEN GOTO 200) or a forgotten 'PRINT' statement in a line that was supposed to be printed on the screen. He'd tell me what it was and where and I'd correct it in the master file. He also brought with him a diagnostic program disk. We went through and tested each of the drives to see if the speed needed to be adjusted. The speed has to be between 198.0 and 202.0 MS to be in the correct range. Faster or slower speeds means the drive won't write the tracks correctly. Too slow and the tracks will be too short, too fast and they'll be too long and overlap. We found that the black drive I was working on yesterday has a bad board. It looks to be working OK but it's only going through the motions. Send it a command to save a file and the drive would run, you could hear the head moving but nothing was being written. SO I'll be looking for a donor drive to cannibalize. I should be able to find one on Ebay easily enough. Problem with that model drive is it's so heavy it costs a bit to ship.

I put a new CMOS battery in this computer today, reset the CMOS and entered all the setup info and it fired right up. The hardest thing was having it ID the hard drive. It checked all the Sata ports and came up empty. I had to redirect it to search the RAID Ide port. I'm using an Ide drive and that's the only place I can connect it.

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Well the beta test and debugging has been done on the forest module, otherwise known as part two of Native Fury and it's as they say complete and in the can. At a size of 114 I was afraid it would be too big to run in a 64k environment so earlier today I pulled the memory board out of the IIe effectively cutting it's RAM from 128k to 64k and then ran part two. It ran perfectly and there wasn't a single 'OUT OF MEMORY' error. Now I'm getting started on part three of Native Fury, the cove module, also known as 'Paradise Cove'. I have the street system laid in already. There two roads, Nelson Street and Aurora Drive. There's no particular significance to the names, I just like them. The street layout itself with it's variables constitutes twelve to fourteen program blocks. I haven't even started on the homes and land yet! The line numbers for the streets start at 100 and end at 1200. The line numbers for he homes and land start at 1000 and go to 17500. That should keep me busy for a little while.

Nothing special happened today save for Mr Raintree coming over to help earlier. He's requested to be put into 'Paradise Cove' ans I've already got a place picked out for him and his wildcats.

I mentioned earlier about replacing the CMOS battery on my MS-DOS computer that I use online. Well it didn't have the desired effect. CMOS still forgets about the hard drive on start-up. Doing a Ctr-Alt-Del restart usually gets it going on a normal start. Could be it's getting to be time to think about replacing the main board. I have one up in my closet at home (might as well be on the moon) with what I think are the proper memory sticks. It needs a video board though. As far as I know I have one of those coming.

I did get all of my IIe's working A2M0003 type disk drives checked out and they're all (four out of five are still operational) in the proper speed range.

 

[Bill Tidler Jr.]

Good Morning! from Tipton IN.

It's Sat 10/26/13

Temperature in TIPTON IN

High temperatures will range from 46 to 51 degrees with mostly clear skies. Winds will range between 15 and 20 miles per hour from the west. No precipitation is expected.

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

Good morning. It's 44° with 99% humidity. The high will be 75° and feel like 80°. It will be partly cloudy today with a 5mph southeast wind. Low tonight will be 55° and there's a 20 percent chance of showers after midnight.

I was considering stopping my posting of layout photos due to some very descriptive anonymous emails I've been getting saying that my layout photos look like crap. But I've decided that I'm not going to give that pleasure to someone who's too much of a coward to even give me an address to send a reply to. At least then I could send them a token of my appreciation and give their anti-virus software a chance to prove itself. All I can find is a dummy IP (different every time) that seems to bounce all over Europe. I have friends who can do something similar to that but it's a service they pay for and the providers ID is always on the IP along with other information. In this case all I get is the IP# with no info, no sender info on the email and as I said it's different every time. Whoever it is they're doing a great job of evading an old-school hacker like myself. Well I guess if that's the way they get their jollies one way is as good as another.

My plan for today is to start mapping the location blocks for the Paradise Cove module (part III) of Native Fury. It'll be interesting to see how many monkey wrenches get thrown into that plan before the days end.

The only model railroad news I have is that my Big Blue and Gauge RR boxcar fell off the top of my monitor yesterday and broke one of the couplers off. A plastic Bachmann EZ-Mate.

 

[mnbaty]

Jeff,
I always enjoy your layout photos so I hope you continue to post them.
Have a great day!

Sent from my ME172V using Tapatalk

 

[DairyStateDad]

Jeff,
I always enjoy your layout photos so I hope you continue to post them.
Have a great day!

As do I. So at the very least, his and my votes should outweigh the one vote of your anonymous critic.

From the DairyStatePhone

 

[Espeefan]

SNIP I was considering stopping my posting of layout photos due to some very descriptive anonymous emails I've been getting saying that my layout photos look like crap. But I've decided that I'm not going to give that pleasure to someone who's too much of a coward to even give me an address to send a reply to.

Anyone who doesn't have the stones to identify themselves is not worthy of any consideration. I have noticed that most professional critics in our hobby fall silent when asked to show something they've built...I wonder why that is?

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

This morning I've been working on mapping out the homes in the little community of Paradise Cove. This is the floor plan of one of those homes.

So far I've mapped four. Only about two dozen to go.

 

[bnsf971]

Personally, I think some people's hobby is trying to make other people miserable.

 

[blackz28]

I don't think is anybody in the hobby I think its a troll he just goes on Forums & hits & runs

 

[Boris]

I was considering stopping my posting of layout photos due to some very descriptive anonymous emails I've been getting saying that my layout photos look like crap. But I've decided that I'm not going to give that pleasure to someone who's too much of a coward to even give me an address to send a reply to. At least then I could send them a token of my appreciation and give their anti-virus software a chance to prove itself. All I can find is a dummy IP (different every time) that seems to bounce all over Europe. I have friends who can do something similar to that but it's a service they pay for and the providers ID is always on the IP along with other information. In this case all I get is the IP# with no info, no sender info on the email and as I said it's different every time. Whoever it is they're doing a great job of evading an old-school hacker like myself. Well I guess if that's the way they get their jollies one way is as good as another.

Look at it this way, Jeffrey, Your work is good enough to draw attention from those who cannot do as well. And....you have built yours on a budget. Keep posting the pictures. I enjoy them.

Joe

 

[GarryCBQ]

Well, Jeff ..... You know who your real friends are. That's what counts. .... Can't imagine how somebody would do such crazy stuff.

 

[bnsf971]

I think they call that cyberstalking. Unless they threaten you, your family, or possibly your stuff, I don't think the law-types would do anything, though.

Stalking is when two people go for a romantic walk together, but only one of them knows about it...