I spent last week in Windom, MN. It rained/iced/snowed the day before I went up. There was a solid two feet of snow on the ground when I got there. Later in the week, it warmed up and rained a couple of inches, which melted all the snow.
Thursday night, things started getting bad in the upper midwest. The western part of Nebraska was pounded by a blizzard, and the east got a ton of rain. If a road wasn't snowed over, it was washed away. I-29 and I-680 were closed by Omaha. All but two bridges across the Missouri were closed. Same for the Platte. A dam up by O'Niel broke, bridges were washed away, and levees around several towns broke. This is going to take a while to fix.
The drive home was pretty. In NW Iowa, the flood waters were calm and blue in the fields. By the time the water got to the Missouri, it was churning and black.
Southbound (the road I'm on) highway 60 across Iowa was open. Northbound (the submerged road to the left) was not. I had to take some backroads to sneak past the flooding in NE - all the while the radio was awash with fresh reports of road closures and evacuations.
While shopping for speakers for GP for his gig, I ran across a cool guitar that called out my name. It's a smaller-bodied acoustic with cat inlays. When we got back, I scrounged up whatever unused gear I could find and traded in the old cheapo acoustic for the one with the cats. The new guitar has found a home in the living room where it has become the couch guitar.
One of the pieces of gear I traded was an old 1974 Peavey bass amp that I had repaired. As soon as I lost it, a friend at work asked me to look at his 1974 Peavey guitar amp. It's got power tubes that run at 500 volts DC. Yikes!!! It took a day to clean it up and resolder all the components and now it sounds pretty sweet.
With all the snow gone, it's time to sit & strum on the deck.
We ended up getting around 9" of snow. It was so nice to get it on the weekend rather than during the work week. Although everyone had their driveways cleared off down to bare pavement within a few hours, the City of Lincoln took an entire week. The belief in Nebraska is that salt doesn't work if it's below 20 °F. Even the major streets in town were solid ice for three days.
Today was supposed to be an all-day Hackathon for GP and our annual Engineering Department Dinner downtown. Nope. Everyone is prepared to stay home and ride it out.
GP's band played at the downtown at the Bourbon Theatre last weekend. It was fun to see them up on a full-size stage with a full-size house sound system.
February is a pretty dull month. This month I went to Des Moines and the Cities for work. Not much to see other than snow. CP went on a road trip with his fraternity to Indianapolis for a convention. He said it was an adventure. The car he was not riding in got pulled over for driving in the left lane without passing. It's a Great Plains thing - just drive slowly in the left lane, or better yet, pace someone and block traffic for miles.
I spent my birthday cash on a pair of new 6L6 power tubes for the old amp I bought. The old ones were working, but they weren't able to give me the chest-thumping bass I was looking for. These took care of that.
JP makes the birthday gift giving experience difficult. Everything I was going to get her, she stayed a few days ahead of me and bought it herself: shoes, boots, winter coat, and a purse. The purse ended up getting returned, so I made it my mission to take her purse shopping.
We hit Dillard's in the Big City (Omaha). She struck out on getting a new purse, but I did score a sweet new sportcoat that was half-off. Afterwards, I surprised her with a lunch at Biaggi's and was able to pay for it with the last of my Vegas winnings.
For JP's birthday, GP & I Marie Kondo'd our closets. That's where you pull EVERYTHING out of your closet and dresser and make a big pile. Then you go item by item and put it back neatly. For each item you have to do a "Does it bring me a spark of joy?" test. Items that don't pass this go in the goodwill bag or the trash can. Needless to say, my stuff got thinned out by quite a bit.
By coincidence, our friends the Gs were also in Vegas. BG had a big birthday, so they came out for the weekend. I treated them to a night on the town starting with the Skybar in the new Waldorf Astoria. After one round of cocktails there, my wallet was thinner. That was it for me.
BG & CG
Afterwards, we caught a local live band and sang and danced.
I was fortunate enough to be able to go to the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) again this year. It's one of Las Vegas' largest shows and it's truly mindboggling.
I stayed at the Luxor at the south end of the strip. I love the Egyptian theme there.
There were a couple of VR flying squirrel simulators. This one even has a fan to blow wind in your face. I don't get it.
Flexible screen for your tablets & phones.
Electromechanical version of Pong. The knob moves a physical paddle and the ball is a little cube that slides around.
Cat food dispensers that use facial recognition to dispense food in order to keep the dog from eating the cat food.
Tiny sensor chip to the right of a sewing needle eye.
Deere brought in a complete harvester with head.
This had Grampa written all over it. There's even a southern Utah backdrop! It's a 4-rotor personal death machine.
There were drones of every shape and size. This one snaps into a phone case. Pop it out, unfold it, and it will fly a few feet away from you and take your selfie.
This was the most ridiculous thing I saw at the show (and I saw a lot of ridiculous things!). It's a personal submarine/jet boat shaped like a sailfish. It has enough power that it can jump clear out of the water. I suppose if you were 5, it would be the coolest thing ever.
Here's a video of it in action:
AI (Artificial Intelligence) is really taking off. Nvidia has traditionally made video cards for video gaming. These have thousands of processors all running in parallel and are well-suited for solving complex problems like those used in AI. Now Nvidia is making AI-specific hardware that is being used in autonomous cars. Without video games, we wouldn't have this.
JP wants one of these. It's a suitcase with kitty ears. When you scratch it between the ears, they wiggle.
This is a sensor that is currently on the market. It's less that 1/4" square and it contains a 3-axis gyro, a 3-axis accelerometer, and a hyper-sensitive barometric pressure sensor that can detect elevation changes of less than one foot. It's being used for fitness trackers to count stairs climbed.
These are some directional speakers. They are made of an array of ultrasonic speakers that create a spatial sound that can only be heard in one spot. If you're not in that spot, they're completely silent. Move into that spot, and they sound like normal speakers.
This is a proposed commercial death machine put out by Bell Helicopters. It's a six-rotor VTOL aircraft that can hold a few people.
There were quite a few companies selling STEM educational things. This is a set of smart Legos that can be used to create circuits and programmed with an iPad using a simple graphical programming language. It's pretty cool to think that grade school kids are learning this!
Fully automatic kitty litter box. After the cat exits, the drum rotates 360° and separates the litter from the clumps and dumps into a plastic bag. It looked like a very solid design that would work well. Only $500.
What do you do on January 5th when it's warm, sunny, and not windy? Sit outside, of course!
Every weekend we pick up Cam for the weekend and take him back on Sunday afternoon. Sometimes we can't pass up a lunch at our favorite place in the Haymarket: Leadbelly.
In addition to our old neighbors from IL, we also had our old neighbors from across the street and the boys each had a friend over to celebrate the arrival of 2019.
