Eddie Tubridy – Page 9 – Jake & Eddie’s Excellent Adventure 😎🐶

Midway Journey West

We’ve made it halfway on our journey west as we stop in Sonora, Texas. We traveled some 1400 miles so far averaging about 250 miles a day after our longer trip on Day 1 to Panama City.

We had a relaxing visit with Dave and Lisa and enjoyed burgers on the back deck with their wonderful view of Lisa’s butterfly heaven and the bijou. Our journey on Day 2 took us through Mobil Alabama and the dreaded I-10 tunnel. Of course, someone honked their horn endlessly and revved their engine to make sure we noticed them 🤡.

Oaklawn RV Park near Biloxi Mississippi. Not much – but convenient and everything worked.

We stayed that evening at a convenient campground near Biloxi Mississippi. Nothing to write home about but it was easy in and out with good hookups. We got our first taste of local color here, as noted on one of the resident’s pickup truck 😆.

Day 3 took us to Louisiana. Between Mississippi and Louisiana, you would have thought you were in some southern version of Las Vegas. I figure if your city didn’t have a casino you were shit out of luck. Other than that driving through the bijou areas was particularly scenic. We stopped that night in a nicer campground again located conveniently near I-10. A step up from the last place!

Day 4 started with a harrowing journey across roads that looked like they had been bombed. They were in such disrepair. About 10 miles east of the Louisiana – Texas state line the road turned to shit as they worked to repair the damage. It kept up for another 40 miles or so in Texas before getting dumped into bad traffic in Houston.

It was raining just to make life interesting. We made it to our campground in Schulenburg, Texas. The nicest place so far, although it rained hard all night into the morning.

On Day 5, we headed into the Hill Country of Texas as we drove through more crap roadways around San Antonio. The rest of the drive, however, was pleasant as the rain stopped and we finally had some scenery again (after the oil refineries around Houston!). It finally started to feel like we were in the west with good-sized hills (or are they small mountains?) with equally small trees. The temperatures started rising, and it was 90 degrees by the time we got to our campground for the evening in Sonora, Texas.

The campgrounds looked basically abandoned except for two trailers. On closer look, I noticed all the utilities looked new. WTF? Turned out the place was built by pipeline workers in service to the people of Sonora. Their town flooded several years ago, and a new set of campsites were set up for temporary housing as the residents rebuilt. Shortly after that, during the pandemic, the oil industry in this area got clobbered economically. Everyone left, leaving a nice but deserted campground. As noted, the hookups were new. The person who runs the place works during the day but was super responsive to my text messages—worked for us!

Welcome to the Wild West! Yippie-Tie-Yiyay 🤠

Excellent Adventure 2023 Begins!

Our 2023 Excellent Aventure has begun! We left at the crack of sparrow fart and had a mostly uneventful drive northwest to Brother Dave’s.

We look forward to a leisurely drive west on I-10 to Los Angeles over the next 9 days!

Leaving Valhalla – Excellent Adventure 2023 Begins!

Internet @ 30

I was a bit surprised to see buried deep in the constant stream of noise that the Internet turned thirty today.

Tim Berners-Lee’s computer used to host the wrist worldwide web server launched on April 30, 1993.

By now you know (unless you have been living in a hole or at Mar Largo) that a really smart (no doubt left-leaning) scientist at CERN (home of the smartest fucking people in the universe) developed it as a means for other brilliant people to easily communicate their scientific findings with each other so they could be – for example – verified for accuracy. What a concept in this day and age, huh? 🤣

I had embraced the digital era with gusto buying my first PC and modem in 1990. Initially, I used applications like Lotus 123 to fulfill my OCD and categorize stuff like my photo slides. Later, CompuServe came along with personal email and newsgroups. I did some early e-commerce buying and selling underwater camera equipment.

Sometime around late 1994, we got our first access to the internet from work. I recall vividly seeing live webcam footage of the Oklahoma City bombing in April of 1995. Soon we were able to dial up with our work computers to a special number and connect to the internet using a protocol called ‘Slip’. I remember you had to hit the escape key at exactly the right time to get the connection!

In 1996 I left Hewlett-Packard and moved to Atlanta to do a startup. We dug into the internet quickly and I started to learn more and more about it. I literally spent the first year in my tiny one-bedroom apartment either working (12 hours a day) or exploring the internet. It became an integral part of my professional life to both do my job as well as develop products that started to make use of it. Alas, we were ahead of our time it seemed and when the bubble burst around the Millenium it was all over!

1996 – In my office in Atlanta – no doubt late at night! We had high hopes (for nearly five years) that this shit was going to make us rich and famous!

At work I was using Microsoft FrontPage to publish a portal for business partners we worked with. As reported elsewhere, I secured my own domain – tubridy.net – in 1998. I started playing around with my own website and had a full-time presence established quickly. FrontPage turned out to be a dead end so I eventually learned all the WWW gobbledegook! HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and so on. I could now build a site the way that Tim did!

It all came full circle in the late 2000s when I re-invented myself as a User Experience Designer. This was a profession that did not even exist (at least in its present form) when I first started my career in the early 1980s – a mere 30 years earlier. I went on to manage the design and content for IBM’s software business partner’s ‘portal’ until I retired in 2018!

The rest, so they say, is history. I have to say without a doubt that the Internet is the most remarkable invention of my lifetime. Even with all the super-exciting science that has taken place since mankind split the atom in the 1940s has anything so fundamentally changed our world? It’s interesting that it’s a lot less about technology and more about man’s ever-consuming passion to learn more about the world.

Tim Berners-Lee – Founder of the World Wide Web and still active in its evolution

Air Show

My Dad was always a big fan of airshows. I remember going to Patrick Space (Air) Force Base to see the airplanes. I was fascinated as a kid with anything that flew – especially jets.

Like everything else it seems, it’s a big production these days. Lots of opportunities to rid tourists of those cumbersome wads of cash! The beach was jam-packed with tourists and it was a stunning day.

Pastafarian

I am happy to announce after deliberate but brief consideration I have become an ordained minister of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster 😎.

It all started while I was pondering yet again the nature of life, the universe, and everything. I was finding that I wanted to give thanks for the simple things in life. My puppy Jake. My very cool brothers and their families. My M-Coupe. My hot tub.

It seems I was having a crisis of faith! Certainly, others out there held my beliefs – or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof 😉.

I had heard about the Church from time to time and decided to check it out. The roots of the church sprung from a movement by proponents of other beliefs to teach their beliefs to young children in the fucking guise of science! They call it Intelligent Design. In the extensive research I have done over the years, there is absolutely zero scientific evidence to support it. None at all. It’s made up, which is exactly the point.

I had found my cohorts at last! Pastafarians!

Here’s what sold me:

Yes, as an ordained Pastafarian, I can cast out false prophets!

I am looking forward to learning more about my faith and spreading the word of the One with the many Noodly Appendages!

Spring Break with Theo 👶🏼

The family got to spend some time together when Dave’s family visited. Adam and Zeynab flew in from Seattle to meet with Carl and Theo at Rick & Myhra’s. Rick is going through chemotherapy and radiation treatment now and the family got together to give him our support. They headed back to Panama City after a couple of days to spend a week together at the family homestead.

Updated! Hillary’s Revenge+

Happy Pi Day

3/14 at 1:59AM

I once memorized pi to 100 decimal places to prove that I could. I used to repeat it while walking my dogs when I lived in Atlanta. It took me no time to forget most of it!

I have always been fascinated by geometry, much more so than math itself which I have always found difficult. Geometry, on the other hand, seems so intuitive to me, probably because it’s very visual. Trigonometry, where geometry and math more or less intersect, took a while but has also become very intuitive to me.

I remember watching Dad work on the TV when we were young. He had an instrument called an Oscilloscope. He taught me how to use it by showing me a sine wave. It was the coolest thing this little dude had experienced so far!

It all came together for me when I saw something like this for the first time. Sinusoidal motion. Over time I could start to see it everywhere. In graduate school and for the first ten years or so of my professional life I became a subject matter expert on it with my work at Boeing and Hewlett-Packard.

As I got older I developed a fascination with numbers. There is nothing more fascinating than the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. A number that goes on forever and never falls into a repeating pattern. A number that you can literally see when the sun rises every morning or watching the orbit of the moon over a period of time. Watching the waves break at the beach or a bird flap its wings. Nothing but a moving circle.

Things really got interesting when I learned about Monsieur Fourier. He was an 18th-century French mathematician who developed a magic trick called a Fourier transform. This trick allows you to essentially create any arbitrary waveform (for example your favorite song) from a summation of a whole bunch of these beautiful sinusoids. Later some really smart people figured out how to do this very quickly with machines like the Fourier Analyzer I worked with in my early career.

There is something almost existential about pi. At one point I thought it might be the hand of some creator. Now I think it’s more the nature of the universe.

Whatever it is, it’s truly beautiful and very, very cosmic 🤩.

The astounding Kate Bush sings pi

3 . 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 3 5 8 9 7 9 3 2 3 8 4 6 2 6 4 3 3 8 3 2 7 9 5 0 2 8 8 4 1 9 7 1 6 9 3 9 9 3 7 5 1 0 5 8 2 0 9 7 4 9 4 4 5 9 2 3 0 7 8 1 6 4 0 6 2 8 6 2 0 8 9 9 8 6 2 8 0 3 4 8 2 5 3 4 2 1 1 7 0 6 7 9
Pi

Lark’s Tounge in Aspic turns 50

As discussed elsewhere, modern music has long been a passion for me. Early on I was drawn to artists and bands that were unusual. Fancying myself a musician of sorts (aka a drummer!), I was also intrigued by the technical mastery of the musicians playing.

I was fascinated with King Crimson’s first album In The Court of Crimson King – especially the song 21st Century Schizoid Man. I had never heard anything like it. Led by guitar player Robert Fripp, the band had a broad musical palette and excellent musicianship. The album cover also stood out with the 21st Schizoid Man himself making an appearance. I remember bringing the album into school for a class where the teacher let us play songs we liked (it was a civics class!). The teacher – Coach Kelley – couldn’t get over the album cover 🤩.

After that Fripp & his varied band members produced several good albums including In the Wake of Poseidon, Islands, and Lizard.

After Yes’ legendary Close to the Edge was released in 1972, drummer Bill Bruford left for King Crimson. He joined King Crimson together with an amazing percussionist and Buddhist monk Jamie Muir, a violinist David Cross and an amazing bass player and singer John Wetton. I was a huge Yes fan and disappointed he left Yes, but he more than made up for it with what he did in King Crimson from that point forward.

Muir, Fripp, Cross, and Buford recording Lark’s Tongue in Aspic. Check out Jamie Muir’s eclectic set on the left with a big sheet of metal as a hi-hat!

They released Lark’s Tongue in Aspic in 1973 about the time I graduated from high school. At that point, I was very heavily influenced by progressive rock and jazz fusion. I was a purveyor of unusual-sounding instruments, complex compositions, and highly skilled musicianship. This album fits the bill nicely!

Lark’s Tongue in Aspic, Part I

I was also struck by the name and album artwork. Lark’s Tongue in Aspic is a legendary culinary delicacy with the added aspect of requiring an untold number of beautiful, delicate songbirds to sacrifice their fucking tongues. It was apparently invented by the Romans – or at least as myths would tell. Can you imagine?

In my mind, as well as others, it represents obscene excess. Stories are told about how courtiers would sit for hours watching French royalty eat meals like this prepared to try and impress them. Like some kind of really fucked up circus.

Sort of reminds me of what internet billionaires are doing now. The ultimate in excess and instant gratification, without anything but token regard as to environmental and societal consequences. At the same time, social media ready to spew vitriol to secure the spot for the next generation of influencers 🤡. 21st Century Schizoid Man and Lark’s Tongue in Aspic, indeed.

In stark contrast to this is the gorgeous album artwork. In my mind, it brings together humanity and nature in a powerful way. It has always been a favorite up there with Yes’ Fragile. When I moved back to Florida ten years ago I quickly landed on this becoming my own personal sigil.

Brother Sun and Sister Moon.

Kitchen upgrade

After my knee diagnosis last year, I decided to move forward with renovating the kitchen.

I replaced 33 doors using hickory frames and different veneers for the panels (cherry, bubinga, padauk). I used bubinga, cherry, and hickory for the other trim pieces. I trimmed the sink area and added a printed roller blind with a sunset scene. I upgraded all the lighting and replaced and added trim to the lighting. I added a cup holder for my coffee mug collection. I replaced the granite countertop and large cabinet with a high-top table previously featured. I finished all the cabinet ends and where the bar was removed. Finally, I painted the kitchen and added some new artwork.