Trick or Treat, 2012

Here is a link to my November 1st blog post from last year, which was about Halloween memories.

Last night we had nice weather for the trick or treaters--balmy, no wind--and the day's intermittent rain showers held off until after 8PM.  Sadly, we had fewer than 10 trick or treaters come to our house, though that makes for more leftover Snickers bars for me.  :-)

We went out for a while with our grandkids.  Here are some photos of their costumes (including Brooklyn's friend) and haul.

Fun (and yummy) stuff!

Miracle, courtesy of ebay

Watch this amusing link about the value of vintage items:



I was an avid baseball card collector in the 60's, had thousands of cards. In the early 80's I was cleaning my garage and considered throwing out my large box of cards, so was extremely pleased and thought it was a windfall when I sold them for $180 to a guy visiting from out of town in a hotel room who had advertised in the paper. Five years later, when my own boys began collecting, I realized card collecting was hot and the cards I sold were surely worth over a thousand. Money left on the table, as they say, and I sorely regretted the sale, for nostalgia's sake as well as the money.

Fast forward to today. I was cleaning out my desk last week and considered my old HP calculators. One in particular no longer worked--the battery had leaked inside. I happened to still have the original box, manual, case, and misc. papers for it, so I did a little research on the internet to see what it was worth and if I could fix it. I was surprised to see working models going for over $200 so I made an effort to fix it, no luck. Still, I listed it for sale on ebay.

I was pleased to see immediate interest, and got a couple of emails with questions. My expectation was $40 to $60, which I thought would be windfall for a broken calculator. I was surprised and encouraged to see 33 "watchers" for my auction item, and several bids going to $15. I knew many bidders wait until the last minute, and this auction lasted seven days, but was still tickled when the bids went to $70 with a day still to go. With a few hours to go I was ecstatic to see the high bid at $139, in shock really. I couldn't imagine a higher price, but went online to watch any action as the auction came to a close. With a couple of minutes left a bid came in at $142 and that looked like it, and the page then showed less than a minute left.

The next computer screen update the item shifted down the page into the "sold" category and I had to hunt a bit for the final price. I thought there was some error when I saw $307. THREE HUNDRED AND SEVEN DOLLARS!!! Are you kidding me?!? This was no fluke with one bidder, since the winner outbid someone else who topped out at $302.

I was in absolute shock, and rather giddy. And in disbelief. I carefully reread my description, making sure I didn't misrepresent something. I was very clear about it not working. I have to believe the unique value is in the original box and other accompanying materials, and the condition of those. Here is a link to the auction, and a photo of the items.



Isn't ebay a marvelous thing, both for buyers and sellers?

Scientific Calculation Turned Upside Down

As a youth we had this circular computational device called a "Who's a Hitter", which helped calculate batting averages and ERA. It was a marvelous device to ease the division exercise. It was nothing more than a form of the common slide rule of its day.

Slide rules were fantastic devices to help with all sorts of math, science, and engineering computations. I was very intrigued by them, and learned to use them at a young age. My freshman year as an engineering student at BYU in 1970 we had to take a class in how to operate a slide rule, keeping track of the decimal point as we manipulated the logarithms of numbers.



I took a two year break from college for my mission and when I returned to my engineering studies in 1973 the world had turned upside down. Hewlett Packard had revolutionized the scientific calculator world with its HP-35 pocket calculator, which could do trig functions, roots, powers, and more. These were super expensive for poor college students at $300 or more. I bought the next generation model HP-21 in 1975 for the still dear price of $125. (I still have this calculator and it still works!)





I recall in my advanced math class in high school we were loaned a programmable desktop calculator, which I believe was the HP-9100. I was blown away by it, and was fascinated with programming it to solve the quadratic equation. I'm sure this early experience had an impact on my choice of college studies and career.



I have continued to use HP calculators throughout my career, and still have several vintage models, including my HP-21. They have become valuable collector's items. I was cleaning out my desk and decided to sell my HP-29C on ebay. Even though it no longer works, I still have the box, manual, and other items, and apparently these are valuable and rare because the high bid is over $70 already! Here is the item.

Operating these HP calculators is a joy, with their high quality construction, button feel, and RPN number entry. And playing with my old "toys" shoots me back in time to my college days and working for HP in Boise.

The flick of a switch

Immediately upon graduation from BYU with my Electrical Engineering degree, I went to work for Naval Weapons Center in China Lake, CA, as a civil servant working for the Navy. The draws were the proximity to our parents (2.5 hours drive to either--not too close, not too far), the interesting work, and the security of working for the government. And the affordability of real estate (out in the high desert city of Ridgecrest).

I worked on the design of the AIM-9M, an improved version of the air-to-air heat seeking Sidewinder missile. The particular improvement of the 9M was the addition of counter-countermeasures to ignore decoy flares ejected by the target aircraft. I worked on fine tuning the electronic design through extensive lab and field testing.

One testing technique used an analog computer model of the missile circuitry and simulated input from a target jet engine, interrupted by the appearance and trajectory of the decoy flare. We measured success by the ability of the guidance electronics to ignore the flare and continue tracking the target.

Another technique was to use the actual missile electronics on a rotating table to simulate the trajectories and dynamics involved.

For field testing we set up the missile in a stationary ground station out in the desert and had jets fly over dropping flares. It was rather detailed work, and we typically worked through the night setting up the test for the following day.

But the ultimate test was shooting the missile at an actual target, which we did once (while I was there). The target drone, an old F86, was flown via remote control and the shooter was an F4 flown by a Navy test pilot. We planned the flight paths and trajectories, and stipulated two flare drops at two and three seconds after the missile launch.

When I think of all the effort and expense setting up this test I still marvel at some manual means of execution. In particular, I had the task of operating the remote control switch to release the flares at the appropriate two and three second marks. Needless to say, it was a very stressful, nervous responsibility as I would be such a flagrant goat if I botched it. As the time for missile launch arrived the test pilot screamed "Fox, Fox!!" over the radio, which I later realized signified missile launch. This caught me off guard, as we hadn't practiced this detail and I thought something was amiss. But, fortunately, I went ahead with my "thousand one, thousand two - flick -thousand three - flick" of the switch, and the test ended up a great success. Looking at the detail data afterwards it seems the first flare was about 1.8 seconds, followed by the second around 2.6 seconds, the time acceleration no doubt a consequence of the heightened excitement.

But I was so relieved afterwards, both about the test success and doing my job okay. Oddly, after all these years I still feel stressful when I think about this experience, and I think I've had some nightmares about it. Maybe my version of combat PTSD. In retrospect I can hardly believe they left such a crucial job to an inexperienced junior engineer. One of the managers was standing behind me, so perhaps he would have intervened if I botched it.

I spent a memorable and satisfying two years at NWC before deciding I preferred the private sector and went to work for HP in Boise, ID.