Stan’s Obligatory Blog

It’s April, and that means it’s time for our trip down to Seal Beach for dinner at Walt’s Wharf. That was the site of our first date. It was April 4, 1986. So this year marks twenty years together, which still sounds like a long time to us. We certainly don’t feel old enough to say, “We’ve been together twenty years”.

So we went down to Seal Beach. When we got to Walt’s, there was a wait. Apparently they don’t take reservations for dinner, so we got the little pager-thingy and went out walking on Main St. We walked down to the pier, but it was closed, apparently because they have some heavy equipment parked on it to repair a wall underneath. Then we browsed around in various stores until they had a table ready for us.

We were seated upstairs, just two tables over from where we sat the first time. We had a nice dinner, finished off with some killer desserts and a souvenier picture. So overall, it was a fun time, and a good way to mark twenty years together.

Today Lucinda and I went to a birthday party for a girl she knows from school. They had a big back yard and a very big jumper-slide for the kids to play in. And play they did. Pretty much the whole time except for cake and piñata. The while all of this was going on, the adults were chatting about real estate and taking tours of the newly-remodeled house. And by the end of the party, all the adults were trying out the jumper, too. It was a tall one. From the top we could see over the roof of the house, and it was a pretty long drop down the slide. I carried my camera up to the top and tried to get an ‘action shot’ on the way down the slide. And Lucinda learned to do her Spider-Girl thing and climb up the slide. It was fun.

On Friday we took out our old Sun Enterprise 5000 server. This was the big refrigerator-sized computer that was the main Southern California earthquake system for many years. It was a bit of a dinosaur, as it required a special 220V circuit in the computer room to feed it. We got this system back in 1997, and this particular computer has been nothing but trouble. If they had a ‘lemon law’ for computers it would have been sent back. But we finally got it to work, and it served us reasonably well for all these years.

Still, this machine had more than its share of stupid moments. One time it crashed mysteriously. When I went in to see what had happened, one of the small heat sinks on one of the CPU boards had fallen off and fallen onto the back of the CPU board below it. That shorted out things on the second board and caused the machine to freak out and die. Another time I had a set of new memory SIMMs to put in it, and it kept failing self-test. So I ended up having to reseat the chips about a dozen times, each time having to sit through the 20-minute self-test. I spent the whole afternoon shivering in the computer room, watching Das Blinkenlights. Fun times…

So Tammer and I got the machine unbolted from the floor, and we removed the CPU and IO boards to keep as spares for the E4000 we still have. Then we wheeled the carcass out of the computer room and down to the junk-collection room in the basement. It was a lot like the last scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. We dropped the computer carcass off in a big room filled with other big computer carcasses. And thus ended an era.

Have I mentioned recently how much I like my job?