URI: 
       CRAZY UNCLE SCOTT'S GRAVITY WELL
       (it is hard to escape) 
       kd5njr@sdf.org
       
       QUOTE OF THE ??DAY
       "Somewhere near the 
        End they said you 
        Can't do this. 
        I said 'I can too.'
        -- REM
       
       ABOUT ME
       I am interested in:
       Computers
  TEXT Ancient FORTRAN Programming Tutorial
       Digital Electronics
       REM(the band) 
  TEXT Radios
       Rockets
         Space Exploration
           Soviet Space Stations
  TEXT Mir
  TEXT Salyut 6
  TEXT Salyut 7
       
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       REM SONGS AND LYRICS  
       There are a lot of good ones.  
       I'll start a little list.  
       Song(s) of the Day
       1/12/2025
       Album: Around the Sun 
       Songs: Around the Sun 
       Aftermath
       Leaving New York 
       
       FEATURE:  "ONE PAGE BOOK REPORT"
       TITLE:   Analogia 
       AUTHOR:  George Dyson
       CHAPTER: Four; Voice of the Dolphins
       
       MAIN CHARACTER(S):
       Leo Szilard, Hungarian Physicist
       Freddy De Hoffmann, founder General Atomics 
       Freeman Dyson, physicist, IAS 
       Ted Taylor
       Stan Ulam
       George Dyson
        
       MINOR CHARACTERS:
       Albert Einsein
       Brian Dunne 
       Tom Wolfe  
       
       The Martians:
       John von Neumann, IAS
       Eugene Wigner,
       Theodore von Karman,  JPL
       Edward Teller
       J Robert Oppenheimer, IAS 
       Enrico Fermi, U of Chicago  
       Hans Bethe 
       Brian Dunne 
       
       PLACES
       Hungary
       Germany 
       London 
       Los Alamos 
       Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
       General Atomic / General Dynamics
       Torrey Pines, California 
       La Jolla, California 
       Alburquerue, NM 
       
       THINGS 
       Einstein's Refridgerator
       nuclear weapons 
       TRIGA reactor 
       Sputnik 
       Orion 
       book: Voice of the Dolphins 
       kayaks
       
       IDEAS 
       thermodynamics
       nuclear fission
       pacifism 
       Mutually Ensured Destruction
       smaller, better bombs 
       external combustion engines 
       Ulam-Teller device
       "Saturn by 70" 
        
               
       NEWS
        
       24 January 2025: Salyut 6 Visiting Crew 2 
       
       01 January 2025
       
       I am the worst about diaries or taking 
       notes!
       How many times have I started a website 
       (or even myspace :) or blog since 1994?
       
       Several.  I've cobbled stuff together in 
       Notepad several times over the last 30 
       years for school groups, ham clubs, etc.
       
       This is no different.  But it's done with 
       Gopher Protocol.
       
       The server is SDF.org ...  A very cool 
       not-for-profit.  Please check it out.
       When was the last time you had a shell
       account.
       
       In fact, speaking of Gopher,  One of the 
       first gopherspaces I ever saw was Kipp 
       Teague's stash of R.E.M. lyrics !  I could
       browse Gopherspace from my dorm at Texas
       A&M University at 2400 baud dial up to the
       Terminal Server and then on to the student
       use Unix machine, which I think was a Sun 
       server at the time.  This was mostly text 
       in a menu driven interface.  The rest was,
       as they say, history.
       
       Kipp still has the website below.   
       He's kinda retired now, but still on 
       Facebook I believe he said.
       
  HTML The Complete R.E.M. Lyrics Archive
       URL:https://retroweb.com/rem/lyrics/index.html
       
       
       JOURNAL
       2025
       February
       08:  Hit a local coffee shop and the local
       model railroad shop today.
       
       07: Talked to a good friend of mine about 
       his model railroad ; it's exclusively Swiss
       narrow gauge ( 'meter gauge') electric 
       mountain trains.
       
       06: Worked on my web page.  
       Specifially collecting some data on the 
       European visitors to the Mir station.
       
       01: Got a emulated (SIMH) CP/M machine 
       going on my Windows laptop.  MS-BASIC 
       here I come.   
       
       Also, got DOSBOX going again.  Wrote 
       some warm-up programs in C and ASM.
       Of course, I can't forget GW-BASIC.
       
       Located some emulators for the ET-3400
       and assorted 8080 systems.
       
       What I really wanted was an easy 
       to use Heathkit H8 emulator. But 
       MAME and I just didn't get along. 
       
       
       2025
       January
       
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       January 20th 2025
       From time to time, I like to fire OpenSCAD.
       Back in December before the holidays kicked
       into high gear, I was working on a little 
       "art project" where I marked waypoints 
       along Route 66 and displayed their 
       elevations.  I'll have to print it out 
       and bring it to work.  It'll remind me 
       to try and escape to the Mountains.  Maybe
       for good food, good coffee and ham radio ?
       
       January 20th 2025
       Today I looked at Complier Explorer.
       Really an interesting website.  You can put
       source code (I'm doing FORTRAN) in one pane
       and get color coded assembly language in the
       other pane.  The color coding lets you match
       things up almost line for line.  And that is
       what surprised me today.  A simple loop in 
       F66 (What I would do routinely in BASIC) 
       like count up to 10 maps over just about
       1:1 in assembler.
       But, FORTRAN, after all, is the OG compiled
       language.  Before FORTRAN, you HAD to write
       in assembly, or more likely and much worse,
       machine code itself.
       
       
       January 19th 2025
       More Fortran adventures.  I think I am a
       model rocket guy.  I haven't seriously 
       built them since high school, but I think 
       them a lot.  How I'd make them from house-
       hold trash or 3D printed parts.  Interesting
       stuff.  Not the typical paper towel tube
       and card stock fin models.  But different stuff.
       
       Of course the same core program where I passed
       different waypoints with the train could be
       cobbled into a program where a new engine 
       could be ignited for some more vertical
       distance.  
       
       Or so I think.  I could tinker with the timing
       on the engines to maintain a certain speed
       or get max height.  
       
       Like any of this code, if you'd like to see
       some of it, lemme know. 
       
       January 17th 2025
       More Fortran adventures.  I wanted to work
       more with Loops, an array and some more 
       complicated IF structures.  I ended up with
       a program where our train runs linearly from
       Station A to Station Z like last time.
       
       However, this time, it passes a series of
       waypoints.  The observer (us) knows the
       distance to the previous waypoint and the 
       number of the next waypoint and the distance
       to it. 
       
       I didn't bring over the throttle subroutines
       yet.
        
       
       Jan 12th 2025
       Something I've always followed is the Space 
       Program.  
       
       When I was a kid, the Space Shuttle was 
       big news.  Either on the NBC Nightly News
       at home in the evenings or on CNN in the 
       school library, I was there.  
       
       I'll never forget listening to my dad's
       Bearcat scanner when Owen Garriot flew 
       by.  Or when I would listen on my handheld
       scanner or call the ISS on ARRL Field Day.
       
       Right now I'm "into" the Soviet 
       Salyut 6 Space Station.  Many "permament crews"
       and "visiting" crews ( some from other countries
       even ) came up to the station over it's lifetime.
       
       While the Salyut 6/7 generation space stations 
       were not expandable, they were flexible in that
       the stations were packed with experiments, 
       instruments and facilities for the crew. 
       
       Telescopes, furnaces, cameras, kitchen, restroom
       and gym equipment to name just a few things on-
       board the station.
       
       The current crew's arrival Soyuz, an visting 
       crew's Soyuz and a Soyuz-derived Progress 
       freighter could be docked at once.
       
       It's the Interkosmos missions with the 
       Soviet-bloc "guest cosmonaut" that interests
       me the most.  My hope is that these missions
       with the "more European" cosmonauts maybe 
       better documented than those with all Soviet 
       crews.  
       
       Perhaps, the experiments were a little more
       important.  But perhaps these were just 
       "tourists" on sight-seeing propaganda missions.
       
       I'll have to give a update.  
       
       Jan 11th 2025
       But something I've been tinkering on is 
       FORTRAN code.  Just for fun.  The gist is
       you've got a train moving from Station A to 
       Station Z.  There are reports each deltaT to 
       inform the passenger of elapsed time, distance 
       to station, distance from station, you know, the 
       vitals.  There are functions to accelerate and 
       decellerate the train.  Just models a linear 
       layout.
       
       What I need to do soon is add "time to station"
       information.  And determine a scheduled time
       of arrival.  That would inform of the speed
       the train needs to run.
         
       Guess I was still thinking about a Z scale
       desktop train layout.  I think I just to want to 
       hear the soothing sound of the electric motors.
       Do the power packs still buzz ?  Do you still get
       the smells of dust and sparks and 
       the smells of "something burning?"
       
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       Jan  2nd 2025
       Howdy from vacation.
       Actually, we're back now from a trip with 
       extended family to Branson.  Some of the family 
       have babies.  So in the wee hours between bedtime
       and feeding time, I was, one night at least, 
       watching YouTube videos of different stuff as
       the 'year end' videos drop.
       
       Why do I think I need a Z scale train ? 
       
       Small enough to run around a monitor stand or a 
       small Christmas Tree on my desk, they might be.
       
       Then again, the z scale is super small, to the
       point that the train is hard to get on the 
       track and couple together.  But not so small
       they don't make DCC Decoders for them.
       
       We'll have to see if I can get a deal on one.
       
       
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