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code from 33 years ago
Saturday, May 20 2017
I got out of bed a little before 10am, which is normal for me. The heat of recent days had broken and the morning was cool enough for me to go around shutting doors that had been left open. I also burned a bunch of cardboard in the woodstove in hopes of making the living room a more comfortable place for drinking Saturday morning coffee. Originally I'd thought about returning to the Brewster Street house to continue with the fuel tank removal, but the matter no longer seemed so urgent, so I thought I'd just relax with some coffee instead. I made a french press of it and even delivered a cup (complete with vegan creamer) to Gretchen while she was still in bed. At around this time, the tenant in the Brewster Street house called to complain about the kerosene smell in the first floor, which was making it an unpleasant place to spend time. I decided I needed to get that fuel tank out of there as soon possible.
On the way there, I stopped at the Uptown Hannaford (aka "Ghettoford") mostly for cleaning supplies: paper towels, trash bags, and cheap cat litter (that's for soaking up oil).
Gretchen told me my rumblings in the basement had scared the 17 year old daughter of the tenant, so today I tried knocking before slipping into the basement (something I can do without entering the inhabited parts of the house). But nobody answered; the lady of the house works nights as a nurse and was sleeping upstairs. As I was removing a small poison ivy plant from a few low weeds in the tiny front yard, a car rolled up. It was the tenant's adult son and teenage daughter (the latter whom I had never met). Them seeing me meant I could do my work in the basement. I also suggested opening the windows to purge the fuel oil smell from the first floor. The son showed me a little gap above the back door that needs to be filled with a triangular piece of wood. It was the result of uneven settling. When I brought up the film shoot whose prep work I'd seen yesterday, he showed me a selfie he'd taken with the rest of his family and the star, some bald-headed white comedian. I could see why Brewster Street would be selected as a setting for a film. It looks like something out of Norman Rockwell painting.
With all the right supplies and tools, it wasn't much work to clean up the rest of the oil in the tank. The cheap cat litter thickened up some lingering puddles, and then I used a wide taping knife to squeegie any lingering oil, leaving the skin of the tank clean nearly to bare metal. In the places where the taping knife couldn't reach, I used paper towels, though I didn't end up needing even half of a roll (I'd bought a package of six rolls). The remnants of the oil, mixed with paper towels, cat litter, and other debris, only half-filled the five gallon bucket I'd brought. Now I could cut the bathtub-shaped remainder of the tank in half without fear of an oil spill. With some effort, I cut it into four roughly equal-sized pieces. Some of the cuts were easier than others, as there was a lot of potential for the metal to flat instead of holding still for the cutting. And when the metal was vibrated violently, fuel oil would find its way out of hidden hiding places, particularly welds. But I worked on top of a thick drop cloth, which captured nearly all of that. When I was done, I loaded the four pieces I'd cut today into the Subaru and immediately drove it home.
Back home, Gretchen had made a big pot of gnocchi with a hearty, chunky sauce containing artichoke hearts and beans. The only barrier between that and my mouth was clean hands, though they didn't have to be that clean, since I would be eating it with a fork. Originally Gretchen had considered making tacos, but she'd thought better of it when she considered how foul my hands would be.
I returned to the Brewster Street house to remove the two piece of the top third of the fuel tank, which I'd cut up yesterday. They weren't as clean as the bottom part I'd cut up today, mostly because one piece had fallen into the lake of sludge after I'd cut it. Still, the entire tank removal had resulted in a total aggregate oil spill of considerably less than a teaspoon.
On the drive home, I drove out of my way to the Tibetan Center thrift store, stopping on the way at the Speedway gas station that used to be a Hess just to wash my hands. That was a waste of time; there was nothing I wanted there.
Meanwhile Gretchen had gone to the Catskill Native Nursery plant sale to buy plants for our garden (my attempts to get things started in the window hadn't gone well this year). I took a hot bath to get myself clean after two days of fuel tank wrangling and then took a took a long nap.
It was still light out when I awoke. I heard a familiar sound outside the laboratory that turned out to be a pair of catbirds, the first I'd heard this spring (which we're already well into). I tried to take photos of them, but they weren't being co-operative. (Usually catbirds tend to be relatively tame and curious about humans.)
As you may recall, I've been scanning my old diaries, starting with the one I started on April 5th, 1983. By today I was well into June of 1984, and as I kept going back to the networked multifunction printer to turn pages and scan the next one, I made a delightful discovery. Using a primitive plotter as a printer, I'd printed out the code for an application I'd written and pasted it onto one of the diary pages. The application in question was written for my first computer, a VIC-20, and it was designed to provide a graphical, interactive system for creating arbitrary characters in a character set. I'd spent weeks if not months refining the code and adding features, eventually honing it down to a dense poem of pure CBM BASIC functionality. And that functionality was elaborate. Not only could you interactively move a cursor around to select characters to edit and pixels to turn on and off, but you could also invert characters (turning all black pixels white and white pixels black), flip characters horizontally and vertically, rotate them clockwise or counterclockwise, and move them a pixel at a time in all four directions (graphical interactions familiar from such applications as Adobe Photoshop). This printout captures the code as it was in late June of 1984, though as I kept scanning pages, I saw that I'd continued refining and crunching down the code well beyond what you see here. Just so we're clear, this code had to run inside of three kilobytes of space (all that an unexpanded VIC-20 had) and this printout is the entire application. I've been hoping to find this code for years, and seeing it today was a delight. Theoretically, it could be typed (or perhaps scanned) in and run on an emulator.
(Click to enlarge.)
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