Cat Couch Cover: A Modestly Interesting Project

One thing we have around here is cats!

It all started, pretty much out of our control, back when we lived in the city in the 90’s. Back when we had friends, lots of them. But that was also back when AIDS was decimating a whole generation of artists, designers, florists, secretaries, stylists, lawyers, teachers, accountants, professional drag-queens, engineers - and that was just our little group of friends. As they died, gay and straight alike, picked off by a disease not fully understood at the time they contracted it, a disease nobody wanted to talk about let alone do something significant about to stem the tide, we started ‘inheriting’ their cats.

Then, disheartened by what had become of our friends as well as the once eclectic and interesting enclave we lived in, (Now squashed under towering town-homes and endless boutique shops and boutique restaurants as the boutique loving, beemer-driving, tie-wearing, briefcase carrying yuppies moved in.) we moved a few hours away to an old house on the edge of a small town where nobody knew us.

This house was on an acre between town and pastures and for some reason was a magnet for feral cats, so even as some of the older cats we inherited finished out their natural lives, more cats kept turning up to join the party. Thankfully there was an organization in the area that helped with neutering and spaying costs!!! (Oh come on!! We’re talking about a couple that live-traps mice and captures insects in a bug-cup rather than squishing them. What did you expect us to do?)

The incoming flow of cats trickled to a stop four years later when we moved another 30 miles farther out into the boonies, but even though the remainder are aging and the numbers slowly diminishing, there are still quite a few of them hanging on.

Not the one we have but similar.

They have their own building (Think one of those portable things you see for sale alongside the road.) but a few of the cats are still feral enough that they won’t go inside, even though it’s cooled and heated in there for their comfort. (Yeah, I know, sick, but what can I do?)

The Wife, who does the care and feeding, is constantly adjusting things inside the building which creates a number of little projects for me. In fact, at the moment I have a list of nine to-do items hanging here above the laptop waiting for the weather to cool so the cats can hang around outside while I work on the projects. (Frankly some of the cats hate me, probably because I won’t let them into my shop or The Van, and me walking into their building freaks them out so they have to be evacuated before I can go in.)

For those of you that may not be cat people and don't know this, cats think they own everything, that's why, unlike dogs that jump up and down and get all excited when you come home, cats actually huff and groan, because now they have to share their stuff with you! So my refusing to let them into their shop or van to pee and spray and shed and shit really pisses them off.

But I have one project that isn’t inside their building so I can work on it now. Usually the cat projects are simple and not worth making much note of, but this one might be a little interesting.

A couple of the cats are still wild enough that they will not go into any building, and because they are aging even our mild winters here in central Texas can be tough on them so they need some sort of shelter to keep them at least somewhat comfortable.

For last winter we slapped together this mess for them.

The old wicker couch has been around forever and the cats seem to like it, so after lining a couple plastic boxes with Reflectix and old rugs to go on the seat, (None of the cats are friendly enough, even among themselves, to share the same bed!) we cobbled together a crude cover out of some adjustable extension poles, PVC pipe, tie-wraps and a couple shower-curtain liners we fastened over the whole thing with most the spring clamps in my collection. During cold weather the plastic is pulled down to create a sheltered space out of the wind and rain.

Now this whole thing sits tucked under some trees; for shelter; but right at the edge of the driveway; for ease of access; where it is easily seen, and frankly it just isn’t very pretty. Besides, it’s tying up most of my spring-clamps and I want them back!

So we came up with this idea instead.

It still uses the wicker couch and insulated boxes that the cats have proven they will use on those chilly nights, but the shelter over the whole contraption is just a little more refined, you know, a little less banjo-twangin' redneck. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

We wanted something that wasn’t going to cost too much, looked halfway decent, could provide decent winter shelter yet still make the boxes accessible for regular changing out of the old rugs. (Our poor washing machine!)

Oh, and it needs to have a modicum of visual appeal, or at least a minimum of visual un-appeal.

Yah, OK, so maybe this slightly fanciful design is more my fault than anything else since I’ve never been one to be shy about complicating a project in the name of aesthetics. I mean when you get right down to it, pretty much nobody but us are going to see it and a simple shed-roof supported by a couple vertical studs would do the job, but where’s the interest in a straight roof-line? And vertical studs along the sides would be – well – boring, both in looks and the building there-of. Hence the gracefully arched roof, created with a Bezier Curve tool in SketchUp, and the side-structure utilizing a series of incredibly strong and stable; and interesting; triangles.

Besides, the arched roof provides better shelter by curving down front and back, plus slightly curving the clear PVC panels that will go over the top makes them more stable too.

At least that’s the excuse I’m using. . .

So anyway . . . one day we took The Van along on one of our town-trips and came home with the supplies necessary to build this shelter.

The first step was to build the arches, and to do that with a minimum of waste I laminated them up from strips of ¼ ply.

To get started I stood the ply panel on edge, put my knee into it and bent, then turned the panel 90 degrees and bent again. The purpose of this was to find which direction the panel wants to bend easiest. And there is usually a significant difference so getting this right saves a lot of effort later!

Once I had the whole bend thing sorted out I set the fence on the table saw to 3 inches,

then proceeded to turn the whole panel into nice bendy strips.

Each arch is just about 6.5’ long so the whole laminating process would have been easier, and faster, if I started with an 8’ panel and used one full-length strip per layer, but then I would have had half a panel left over so I chose to take the more difficult and time-consuming path and used all but one narrow strip and a few short cut-offs out of a 4’x 4’ panel instead. I had to piece together each layer out of at least 2 strips but there was very little waste and, on the 103 degree day I did this (Back in August) cold weather felt like it was a long ways away, so the extra time it took didn't seem important. Besides, I’m retired so the extra time and hassle was no big deal.

Of course the complex, variable-radius arch wasn’t going to just magically appear, so I went back to SketchUp and drew up a measured grid under the arch that I could then use to build a jig for the laminating process.

To build the jig I took one of my new treated 2x6’s and laid out the base-line of the grid down the length of the board. Then I took a couple more of my new 8’ long treated 2/6’s and cut them in half and pre-drilled for some pocket screw slots in one end of each. Then I milled up 6 clamping-blocks from some scrap I had laying around. (Don't worry, this will become less confusing in a moment. – I hope!)

Now, along with some hardware, I had all the bits I needed to make the gluing jig and form the arches.

With the four 4’ 2x6’s laid out and attached perpendicular to the baseline board in positions corresponding to the measured grid, I was able to measure for and attach the clamping blocks.

I could have made the jig more manageable by cutting the perpendicular boards shorter, but once I’m done gluing up the arches the jig will be disassembled and the boards will re-milled to become parts of the structure so I couldn’t cut them any shorter without wasting wood. Instead I just rolled my work bench up to my saw table, both of which I carefully built (Many years ago now!!) to be the same height, to support the large and heavy jig.

The 4 clamping blocks forming the middle of the arch are fastened down right on their marks, but I pulled each of the two blocks on the ends in by 1 inch to account for spring-back once the lamination is unclamped.

Turns out I only needed to pull them back by a half inch, or maybe even just a quarter inch, but no big deal. That small adjustment will be taken care of by the side structure.

The next step was to tape waxed paper down on the jig so the lamination and jig don’t permanently become one solid structure during the glue-up. After all, that would kind of defeat the whole materials-planning-and-utilization scheme!

Then I pieced together 4 layers of plywood strips, (Right there at the front edge of the bench being held lightly in place by a couple clamps.) making sure that the joints are staggered from layer to layer. (Remember, my strips aren’t long enough to do each layer in one piece.)

Next I temporarily shoved the jig back out of the way to clear space on the bench and, making sure not to screw up the order, lightly misted the back-sides of each layer of strips with water to aid in achieving good glue-penetration, then laid each row of strips, misted side down, side by side in preparation

for slapping on a layer of glue.

I don’t have any in-progress  photos of what happens next because the process is time sensitive, and really messy, but the idea is to stack the rows of strips back up in the proper order, lift the whole dripping mess onto the jig, clamp one end down then start working my way around the clamping blocks (where the red clamps are.) bending and clamping the stacked strips as I go. Along the way I add additional clamps between the clamping blocks to ensure a continuous, tight glue-bond.

I let that cure overnight then removed it from the jig, put on a fresh batch of waxed paper, and clamped up the second arch.

Once I had two arches glued up and cured I disassembled the jig to get it out of the way, (returning all the hardware to the proper bins, setting aside the treated boards for later, and discarding only the 6 clamping blocks into my burn-bucket because I'll probably never need them again and if I do they are small and easy to make up from scraps laying around.) then cleaned up the sides of the arches on the jointer and table-saw, trimmed them to final length, sanded the worst of the edges off, and, since the ply is not treated for outdoor living, slapped three coats of polly on them, making sure to soak the exposed end-grains well.

Next time I’ll work on the structure that is going to hold these arches up in the air.

Emasculated by Harvey

We have a family friend named Harvey that we recently learned died this year.

He was a consummate outdoorsman and lover of all things natural, which included storms, but he was also a true northwoods-man that would greet us in the dark of a crackling, crystal winter’s night in his shirtsleeves despite the minus 20 degree temps as we arrived for a weekend campout, so I can’t say for sure if he would have been happy to have a hurricane, born of the tropical heat of an equatorial summer, named after him or not.

But then again, Harvey, the man, could have a wicked sense of humor and Harvey, the hurricane, certainly screwed with me, so maybe there was some connection.

I was minding my own business up in Michigan, doing the annual family campout reunion gig, not paying attention to much of anything beyond the relatives at the far side of the fire-ring, so it was late Wednesday before I even realized there was a storm lurking in the Gulf with its beady little eye on the homestead.

Now the homestead is not exactly near the coast so crashing waves,  storm-surge, and shredded palms are not an issue, but these storms can carry stiff winds and copious amounts of rain far inland, and the homestead falls within reach of that stuff.

But one thing I’ve learned in some 45 years of living within the reach of tropical storms is that regardless of where you are, unless in an evacuation zone of course, stay put until the storm is finished then leave if you must. (More people were killed in the pre-Rita evacuation in 2005 than in the storm itself!) And the reverse holds true as well. If you’re not already there, stay away until the storm has left.

But damnit! I’m the man!! I’m the one supposed to be there taking care of things! Except that there was some 1300 miles away and there was no way I could get back in time to beat the torrential rains and van-tumbling winds forecast to be soon pummeling The Wife. 

Since I couldn’t be there to perform my manly duties the best I could do was talk The Wife through preparing things. Throw a tie-down strap over the bins on the recycling trailer. Move all the loose stuff on the deck and around the buildings into the barn. Make sure the car isn’t parked near that tree with the 7 degree lean over the driveway. (It’s had that same lean for at least 15 years but no sense in taking chances!) Drop the lock-bar (a-la frontier fort gate.) down on the big barn doors.

And let me tell you, it was a poor substitute for actually being there and doing all those he-man, protector-of-the-family type things myself, especially since she had already thought of and done most of this stuff herself. . . (She even thought to lash a tall, straight-sided bucket to the recycling trailer to act as a rain-gauge since our 10” gauge was sure to be overwhelmed. Damn! Wish I’d a thought of that. . .)

On the one hand (He says bravely, trying to make the best of a shitty situation!) there’s a sense of vindication for all the times we sat around and discussed what to do in certain circumstances, and a sense of pride that The Wife, my partner, was stepping up and taking care of business.  On the other hand, where does that leave me??

I’ll tell you where, about as useful as tits on a boar, about as necessary as a urinal in a lady’s room. –  –  Oh wait! Actually there’s some hope there now that some myopic politicians, spurred on by masses of backwards-thinking troglodytes, are cramming these so-called bathroom bills down our throats and forcing transgenders to use the bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificate rather than the gender they live as. Maybe now, among the post-op female-to-male transgendered, there is some use for that urinal in the lady’s room!  (Personally I would like to see the transgendered community organize and start following some of these ‘pillars of the community’, these self-proclaimed ‘protectors of the innocent’, who are conveniently ignoring the fact that the transgendered are far more likely to be the victims of assault than any other segment of our population, into the bathroom en-masse waving their birth-certificates in hand. Can you imagine the horror and fear in the bigoted little minds of those holier-than-thous?!!!)

The hardships of riding out Harvey at the Blackwell Horse Camp

But back to Harvey who has left me uselessly cooling my heels in southern Indiana as I wait for the storm to do its worst without me.

While I’m hiking and just generally exploring the Hoosier National Forest in an unsuccessful attempt to quell the constant worry (If the power goes out will she remember how to switch over to the generator? – Of course she will. She’s practiced it a dozen times and besides, there’s a laminated, step-by-step checklist taped right there on the top of the generator.) Harvey pulls its second prank on me and slows down by about 18 hours. (The first prank was popping up suddenly in the gulf in the first place, but that’s actually not all that unusual this time of year.)

Turns out that if I left in the wee hours of Thursday I could have beat all but the outer feeder-bands back to the homestead and been there where I belonged during the storm, lashed to a tree and meeting it face on like a true hero, but by the time I knew that it was too late to make it back before the now revised land-fall. . .

Still riding out Harvey, now at Saddle Lake

While I inched my way a little closer over the next few days, but still staying well out of the way, Harvey loafed around dumping some 36 inches of rain on the homestead, just as both behaviors, loafing and dumping, were predicted.

But Harvey wasn’t done screwing with me yet!! Rain can be dealt with, especially if I don’t tell The Wife just how much of it is actually falling on me, (She has a thing about driving in the rain, or more precisely, not driving in the rain.) but the predicted winds, 35 MPH sustained, 50 MPH gusts, forecast for our area on Monday night/early Tuesday were not something I was going to mess with in the high-sided van!  So Sunday it was off on another hike under clear, sunny skies, followed by yet another lonely, worry-filled night all on my own under stars peeking through trees wafted by a gentle breeze, still 1000 miles from where I should be. (Oh Lord! What will she do if the driveway washes out and she can’t get out?? OK relax, she’ll just sit tight. We always keep the homestead well stocked for just such events as this so she doesn’t have to go anywhere.)

Except, true to the trickster that Harvey was proving to be, those winds never showed up! (Dude!! that’s just mean!) And it turns out, by approaching from the north and keeping a close eye on the drivetexas.org web site for flooded roads, I could have made it home a full 24 hours earlier than I did.

Getting closer! A few hours after taking this photo I staged myself for a few hours rest at a particularly crappy rest area in order to make a pre-dawn dash through Dallas in order to beat the morning rush. (Have you ever seen the way they drive in Dallas? Cutting across lanes willy-nilly from every-which way?!!)

As I, finally, approached the beleaguered homestead under light and wispy clouds the only signs of a storm were some lakes where there are usually pastures and the cut-off ends of a few trees that fell into the road. I didn’t even have to divert to one of the alternate paths into the homestead! I was able to drive straight in on our usual route, wheels dry as I passed where the road usually goes underwater just upstream of the ranch who’s driveway dips through the creek and frequently becomes impassable, and over two one-lane, open-plate county bridges that didn’t even have the decency to be covered in flood-debris, and then, just outside the gate, over a 6' culvert that has washed out in the past but was clean and dry today.

But I could feel my manly juices starting to flow anyway, the mighty gathering of testosterone ready to course through my powerful muscles. (OK, I think we can all stop laughing now.  . .) If I couldn’t be the hero during Harvey at least I could be the knight in shining armor riding in to put thing to right after the fact!  The strong back, fresh and unwearied by storm, ready to step in and undo the chaos of Harvey.

Alright! Less than an hour to go!! But where the hell is the storm?

But the bastard wouldn’t even let me have that!

The reality is that my arrival wasn’t so much a triumphant fanfare as it was a quiet slinking. The harsh spotlight of truth illuminated, not the victorious return of a hardbodied savior, but rather the farting deflation of an old used up party balloon.

At the least I expected to have to stop shortly after passing through the gate and walk the rest of the way down to fetch the tractor (I could already taste the power of hydraulics at my fingertips!) to repair the washout we get at the bottom of a particularly steep section of the driveway before I could get The Van through, but it was more of a wet spot in the gravel than a washout, so I was able to drive right on in. And when I rounded the last corner no buildings were blown away, no trees were down, no debris was scattered. Instead the sun was shining, the pond was full and sparkling blue, the barn doors were open, and The Wife was wandering around outside quietly going about the business of feeding the cats.

There was nothing to fix, nothing to repair, nothing to put to rights. No need for the diesel stink in my nose and powerful rumble of the tractor under my butt, no need for firing up a snarly chainsaw with a manly heave of the starter-cord and cloud of oil-blued smoke, or even the bare-handed wielding of a lowly shovel. In other words, nothing more manly for me to do around the homestead than carry my laundry, my dirty underwear and stinky socks, from The Van to the washing machine.

Now I lost my man-card a long time ago so I’m used to doing without. I don’t think there was any one reason, just an accumulation of little things, like the time I crammed myself into the driver’s seat of a cramped rent car, backpack and all, and sped away because when I turned around after gearing up for a hike there was a bear standing beside the trailhead, or the numerous times I turned down an offer to ‘go out bar crawling with the guys’ in favor of going back to my room and reading instead, and I’m pretty sure the time a dog scared me so bad I completely froze up and maybe might-a peed myself just a little, didn’t help things, you know, man-card wise. (Hey! It was a big dog and in the woods it looked just like a grizzly stalking me!)

But I’ve been working on it and had just about accumulated enough points to earn back that coveted card of masculinity, that free pass to the raucous, trophy-lined, dark-paneled walls of that smoky inner sanctum of manhood where confidence, strong drink, and outrageous lies flow with impunity; then Harvey came along and neatly sliced off my balls with a high-speed water-jet, although technically I suppose it was more of a slow-speed deluge, but the results were the same regardless.

Oh well, guess I’ll have to start growing a new pair all over again. . .

(Now. Has anyone seen that coaster I crocheted? I certainly wouldn’t want to set my cup of sleepy-time tea directly on the end-table!)

And Now, a Touch of Testosterone

There's a group of six bucks hanging around the spa (that is the other side of our pond) while they work on this season's fashionable head-wear.

This is one of those exclusive clubs and spikes are not allowed. Five of them are 8-pointers and the 6th, the head-cheese, is a 10 pointer.

Woo Hoo Y'all! New Batch of Bread Seasoning!

I walked in and found The Wife concocting a new batch of bread seasoning!

The cloves in the bottom left go through a grinder before being added to the mix

There's no set recipy for this fragrant mix that we sprinkle over flatbread brushed with olive-oil before throwing it on the grill for a couple minutes. The only requirement is that it be tasty and have a bit of kick to it.

Oh crap! Wait a minute . . .

Oh man! Ya gota be careful when taking a sniff of the ingredients! Some of them will do a number on the sinuses. I think I just went through half a box of tissues. (That's right, tissues because I'm not allowed to say kleenex even though that was the whole point of their marketing campaign during my oh-so-impressionable formative years. . .) Oh dang! I need another kleenex.  (Oh what are they going to do? Sue me??)



So concocting just the right mix is an iterative process that requires a few 'test strips' before we both give our seal of approval.

For this batch we ended up using some smoked sea-salt so the finished product has the taste of the Mediterranean with a zinger of Mexican, but also reminds me of family campfires, you know, the real deal with hand-collected wood, carefully sorted and stacked over preciously horded tinder, then lit with a single match under the supervision of parents who have stored up a few ghost stories for the evening entertainment, not these pathetic attempts at recreating the past on a 90 degree day that I see all to often anymore.



My original intent here was to show the testing process, but once I got into the actual sampling I sort of forgot to pick the camera up. . .

A Fitting End To An Era

Well, it was bound to happen.

When we collected the mail today there was an official looking envelope from some outfit back east we didn’t recognize.

That’s not all that unusual. Somebody is always hawking something at us, extended warranty on the car, (Danger Danger! Our records show your vehicle is, or soon will be, out of the manufacture’s warranty, leaving you exposed and vulnerable. Give us money so you can feel secure again! If you actually want us to pay out one day --- Ha Ha Ha, that’s a good one! --- just read the fine-print! In the meantime we’ll be spending your money on ourselves.) extra life insurance, (Warning!! Don’t leave your loved ones in debt. Instead, give us money so you can feel secure again. After all by the time you figure out it’s a bad investment better spent on retiring that dept you'll be dead!) or 'Let us convert all your excess gold into cash!!', (Give us a lifetime of jewelry (Oh, clearly they don’t know us. No frivolous jewelry laying around here at all!!) and we’ll treat you to a few modest dinners out. In the mean time we will be reaping the true value of what we took from you by doing the same thing you could have done yourself, and stuffing the profit in our own pockets.) and for maximum sucker-hookage, they almost universally make these envelopes and the contents look garishly official and intimidating.

But when we opened this one to separate recycling from shredding (You don’t ever throw anything with your address or name on it straight into recycling do you??!) the contents understated simplicity immediately made it look more official than all those others.

And it was.

The company I put 31 years into has gone bankrupt.

I put year after year of 60 hour weeks into this company. I traveled countless domestic and international miles for it, and in addition to my usual duties, for nearly a year and a half I was on 24-hour call every other week, much of the rest of the time I was on call every 4^th week.  (Much of this was back in the days of beepers and I literally slept with a beeper set to vibrate clipped to my pillowcase every night.) While working there I developed several unique technologies and processes for this company, sticking my neck out when all the so-called experts laughed me off.  (This was a time when Robert “Dr. Bob” Sullivan, staff scientist of the Uptime Institute, claimed the max power density of a data center was 150 watts per sq. foot, yet we were already running at 220 watts and continued to go higher every time we reconfigured or built a new data center.)

Now in no way am I claiming to be instrumental in what this company accomplished, after all, over those 31 years there were anywhere from 500 to 7000 other employees, many of them also working their guts out,  but I certainly did my part.

I started with Digicon Geophysical Company in ’81. These were the wild-west days of oil exploration and Digicon was right up there at the front of the pack. Days of couriers carrying the Venezuelan payroll from Houston down to Caracas in cash every month. (And you can imagine what was being carried back!!)  Days of working shoulder to shoulder with the company CEO on the pitching deck of a seismic vessel out in Cook Inlet trying to untangle the switchboard that directed the signals from all the sensors in the 5 kilometer long cable we were dragging through the water. Days when the hotels in Bogata had chain-mail blast curtains over the windows and the staff would get pretty upset if you pulled one aside to peek out.

But those days were short lived and by the mid to late 80’s things were settling down. By that time, due to the excesses, Digicon owned, in addition to the usual seismic exploration equipment and divisions, a shipyard in Louisiana and two private jets. All this excess weighed heavy on our core business and we went through a couple lean years of retreat and restructuring. We came out of this so strong and cash-heavy, we were very attractive for a hostile takeover, so did an end-around and formed a partnership with a Canadian company thus becoming Veritas DGC.

After a prolonged ‘adjustment’ period  between the conservative Canadian culture and the gung-ho US ‘way’, the resulting amalgamation was nicely balanced with a propensity  for taking intelligent risks and staying out ahead of the competition, which gradually built Veritas DGC into the, or at least one of the, premier seismic data acquisition and processing companies of the world.

But then the CEO, Dave Robson,  (Canadian) retired in 2004 and in a surprise move, instead of tapping the highly groomed Tim Wells for the position, went outside and brought in a frenchman, Thierry Pilinko  (I know french and frenchman are supposed to be capitalized but I just can’t bring myself to do it.) I really would like to sit down with Dave over there on one of those golf courses in Phoenix he’s so fond of and ask just what the hell he was thinking. And I do hope that he is as unhappy with the results of this bone-headed move as the rest of us are.

You see, within a few years Pilinko turned around and sold the company to one of his cronies.  You need to understand that In the french business world cronyism is rampant. (and to be a crony you have to have gone to the same school as the other guy, otherwise it’s a no-go, a no-crony as it were.) This is so deeply ingrained in the french psyche that when a frenchman  moves in as CEO he brings his whole crony-crew with him, replacing all the top officers.

In the press the CGG-Veritas thing was classified as a merger but the french were so intimidated by the culture of Vertitas DGC that they, under the leadership of frenchman Robert Brunck, turned it into a rout. Fairly early on in the process of this ‘merger’ in which one top position after another was filled with a french person, I and a whole bunch of other US, UK and Asian leaders of the company had to sit there in a dim meeting room in a crappy hotel south of Paris as Brunck threw what amounted to a tantrum because we all wouldn’t just roll over and do it the french way.  Quite a few of us were ready to walk right there, but through some misguided sense of loyalty to the people working for us, we stayed. But that didn’t stop the rout . (BTW, I don’t know who started that whole french food is the benchmark crap, my personal experience from my three trips there is that the food sucks. It was so bad we insisted on going off the set menu a couple days into that first conference but were told that would have to wait until after tomorrow because tomorrow night’s Chicken Cordon Bleu was already defrosting. Defrosting!!)

You see, the french are far more into ‘face’ than any Asians I’ve ever worked with, which is quite a few, and the idea of being on the cutting edge of anything scares the crap out of them because ‘what if we are wrong?’. (Being wrong is about the worst thing that can happen to a frenchman.) They would much rather sit back and let the other guy try first, once they see it really works then it’s OK to go there, but of course, in the world of high-tech, this means you are always trailing behind.

So the crushing of this terrifying, forward-looking Veritas culture continued and a few years after I retired in 2012 Veritas disappeared completely as the company was officially renamed, at no small expense, back to CGG.

And now I hold the results of all this in my hand. A single page proclaiming to all the world the sort of miss-management that took one of the premier geo-physical companies all the way down into the mud.

And yes, I’m aware that this sounds like I’m whingeing, (That’s Brit for whining.) and I suppose I am.

True, I severed all ties with CGG 5 years ago. I hold no (worthless) stock, have no equally worthless options laying around, they offered no health insurance once the paychecks stopped, and I’m not beholden to them for my pension. (My Aunt and Father-In-Law have had nice reliable company pension incomes for many years, but there is no way, in this day and age, I would ever trust my entire future to a company or union pension!!)

This bench is one of several installed that were installed in the courtyard of the Veritas DGC world-headquarters we built in 2000. Eventually the teak benches became redundant when they were replaced by cast aluminum benches and I managed to snag this one. It now sits in a little grove looking out on our pond and is a reminder of the glorious days I lived first-hand, and there's nothing the french can do about that!

And despite what they did do, destroying what many of us struggled to build, I worked hard, was paid well, and we saved hard while living modestly, so by the time I'd had my fill of frenchmen at age 58, we were able to retire completely on our own dime, our own savings, beholden to no-one. dependent on nobody, completely free of that world. 

After all this time I should be over mourning the loss but even so, receiving this bit of paper, this official notice, kind of put a pin in the whole thing and left me feeling melancholy all over again. I suppose it’s analogous to reaching the anniversary of someone’s death. The reminder dredges it back up again.

Of course filling chapter 11 doesn’t necessarily mean the official end of the company, (As far as I'm concerned the unofficial end has come and gone.) but if it does survive it will take years to recover from the bankruptcy, and then, as long as the french are at the helm, the recovery will never result in anything more than a gutted shadow of what Digicon and Veritas DGC were.

Makes Me Wonder What They're Looking At

Most the time I can't figure it out.

Then they end up looking at me; with pity in their big doe-eyes; wondering just how the hell I manage to survive with such poor senses. . .

Technology On The Road

In case the title wasn't clear enough, this post is about the technologies I use when on the road, at least some of them, but first up the scientist in me wants to define technology.

Of course, when on the road I use, among hundreds of other things, the wheel, internal combustion engine, and modern clothing, all technologies, but to keep this post relevant and at least somewhat timely, what I'm talking about here is more recent technologies, otherwise known these days as high-tech.

But even this is a moving target as the 'high' in high-tech usually only applies briefly.

Back when hominoids, along with our very close brethren the chimpanzee, discovered that they could pick up a femur left over from yesterday's scavenged kill and increase their power and reach by using it as a club, that was the high-tech of the day. But then us hominoids figured out how to split the end of a stick and wedge a heavy stone in there to make the club even more efficient, and the lowly wielded femur lost its 'high', and over time its 'tech' too.

Despite my career in computers and other such stuff, compared to some I'm not much of a technogeek,(Gasp!! I can't even open my garage door from another country with my phone, how archaic am I??) and being a somewhat aged troglodyte myself, I'm sure some of the technology I use has also aged well past its 'high', but just like the lowly club that I still regularly use today in the form of a hammer, the technologies I do use have relevance for me.



If I had to pick the one single piece of high-tech equipment I think I use most it would be my laptop, shown here on my stand-up desk/workstation/library/puzzle storage/keyboard stand/plant-starter/ - well, you get the idea - out in the barn where it lives when I'm not actually on the road.



With it I do the research, research, and more research that defines and enhances most every one of my trips. In addition to using it as a research platform, and for logging fuel mileage and repairs, and tracking trip costs, for the past 15 years I have used the holy crap out of the Delorme Topo mapping software I have installed on it.

Unfortunately Garmin has bought out Delorme and scraped all of its electronic products while keeping only the line of paper maps, (In the world of business, stuffing your competition into the trash is good, in the world of the consumer it sucks!) so Topo, along with the Earthmate GPS devices, two of which I also use, are no longer available. One of these days I'll have to look into reasonable substitutes but for now what I have works so I'll stick with it.

Notice that I didn't mention using my laptop for banking or other asset management. That's because, though I do use it for those things over the secured network at the house, when I hit the road I turn off the laptop's WIFI transmitter/receiver and leave it off until back home again. There are more secure ways to conduct business on the road. (Not only is our home network firewall secured and encrypted but because of our remote location which precludes people getting close enough to tap into the WIFI signal anyway, you can also think of it as air-gaped)



The sharp-eyed may have noticed that on the left side of my laptop is a Sunpak high-speed card reader plugged into a USB 3 port. That's there because, like me, my laptop is no spring chicken and through extensive use the contacts of laptop's SD card reader port have worn to the point where it will no longer read the SD cards from my camera, so I use the Sunpak to read them instead.

As a bonus the Sunpak can also read all sorts of other things such as SIM's, Micro SD's and other, more obscure things most of us never come in contact with.



The sharper-eyed may have also noticed a bit of red-orange hash over on the laptop's right side near the joint between keyboard and display. That's a mil-spec, rubber encased 16 GB USB memory stick. Because of my past life I have a bag fill of these things.

So what? Well some of y'all may have noticed that I'm not the most trusting person and for that reason you will find no personal files, photos, spreadsheets, nothing, on my laptop. All my files, even the temp files and auto-saves created in the background by the various apps, are on one or another of these memory sticks.

Now, if my laptop is stolen, not only will the thief have a hell of a time cracking my device password, if they do there's nothing on there they can use to hurt me. (Just out of malicious humor, when working I kept a 45 character, very complex password with only a few actual letters in it taped to the bottom of the keyboard in my office. Of course it was fake but can you imagine the frustration of someone thinking they had hit the jackpot and trying to use it to get into my system?!!)

Using a USB drive might seem counter-intuitive from a security standpoint since a stick can be plugged into any USB port on any computer and the files read. Well that's true, but only sort of. I do three things to offset that risk.

1) When the stick is not plugged into my laptop, which means anytime I'm not actually accessing a file on it, it's stored in a secure/obscure/non-intuitive location which, for obvious reasons, I'm not going to go into detail about here.

2) If someone with nefarious tendencies, or even just a snoop, does get ahold of one of my drives they will find that it is encrypted and password protected. So without the proper password the worst they can do is throw the drive in the trash. (But of course I've got copies. . .)

3) And if all that fails, any sensitive files on the stick are individually password protected.

All these passwords are unique to each device/drive/file so cracking one only gets you into that one layer or access to that one file.

Yes that's a lot of passwords to keep track of!! But I have a fairly simple way of making each one unique  yet re-callable without resorting to a spreadsheet or a password-vault. Again, for obvious reasons, I'm not going to go into details here.

If my laptop crashes, or is stolen, I have all my working data available on a memory stick that I can plug into any computer, including a replacement right from the store.  In addition I make a fresh backup frequently, sometimes daily if I'm doing a lot of computer work, that is encrypted and protected by yet another password, and yes, I have more than one copy of my backups secured in various, well protected places, to improve my odds of being able to get to at least one of them. (though none are on the cloud because a) everybody has access to the cloud, b) the cloud is managed and secured by fallible humans, c) the cloud is forever!) I should also note that all my backups are made with a commonly available backup app so I can unpack them just about anywhere.

For maximum security I always use a 30 to 35 character password, or at least the longest one a device, app or web-site will allow. Each extra character added to a password increases the difficulty of cracking it by a whole bunch! (Think exponentially.) and if you avoid dictionary words it gets even harder to crack. (Crackers like dictionary words because they are easy.  Even though the English language alone has over 1 million words, to a computer 1 million is not all that many.)

Not to get into a long-winded tirade here, (you can go do your own research if you want, maybe starting here) despite what the idiots in charge of security at many web sites that force the use of complex passwords but limit you to 10 digits would have you believe, I can create a 15 character password using only lower-case letters that will be more secure than any 10 character complex password. And if I can get in one of my 30+ character, non-dictionary-words passwords I'll be dead by the time a cracker gets through it! (To come up with a re-callable non-dictionary password try using the first letter of every word, along with the case and punctuation, of a sentence that means something to you: "My Aunt Mary makes the best cherry pies in the world! But, if I sneak just 1 piece she makes me sit in the corner for 30 minutes!" would make a good strong password (Except I know it now so don't use that!) Don't use popular lines from movies for a password!! It's astounding how many passwords out there right now are a variation of "My name is Groot" and "Attention, all beings within the Vega system. Your freedom to cause pain and suffering has been revoked" is very popular with many of the SyFy fan, 'first letter' crowd, but the good crackers are updated frequently to check for popular things like this!)

OK, I'm getting off subject here but one more thing before I get back to the technology.

All this may seem overkill; password protected devices, physically secured files, no files available at all, encrypted disks, additional password protection on individual files, etc.; but the holy grail of security is layers. Make each layer difficult and by the time the bad guys are through one or two they will either have given up or been spotted.

I'm so security paranoid I even changed the destination path for this screen capture to protect my actual path. . . sick huh??

Now back to the original point of this post:

One of the apps I use on my laptop quite a bit is Photoshop Elements 9 which came packaged with one of my cameras.

With it I can clean up the bluish haze of long telephoto shots taken with my relatively inexpensive lens, I can brighten up shadows to bring out details if necessary, (I shoot most photos with the exposure setting down anywhere from 1/3 to a full step because blown-out highlights are forever but detail in deep shadows can still be brought out.) but one of the most common uses I have for it is to batch-process the photos destined for this blog.

There are two of us using our limited bandwidth out here in the sticks and uploading full 4000 x 3000 pixel photos that run in the 3+ MB size range wouldn't help, so I use Photoshop's batch-processing to cut them down to 1600 x 1200 which gets them down to the 1 MB range.



When actually on the road my laptop has two primary functions.

As shown here, it acts as my GPS using Delorme Topo in conjunction with an Earthmate USB GPS puck.

Topo has the usual routing feature with  that squirrely "3D" view and the talking head telling you when to turn and all, but I started reading paper maps about the time I started school so am very comfortable with them and use the GPS strictly in overhead, north-to-the-top mode with no routing. It keeps me informed of where I am while I make all the decisions about where I go.

Topo allows me to split the screen, the nice big laptop screen not the typical puny little portable GPS screen, into two different views. Each screen stays centered on my location. One, the one on the left is a high altitude view that gives me a picture of where I am relative to whats in a roughly 30 mile radius around me. The other view, the one on the right, is a close-up view that lets me see every road and most driveways within a mile radius of where I am. I can also adjust both these views to a higher or lower zoom level if I want. (I can actually track myself to a particular pump in a gas station at the highest zoom level if I ever needed that kind of accuracy. . .)

As you might be able to see in the photo, I usually leave all my map pins, those markers pointing out places I've heard, read, or been told about that I might want to visit someday, active while I'm traveling just in case I spot something coming up that I want to check out.



The second major function of the laptop when on the road is as my entertainment center. Since I don't have a sound system or TV in The Van, when I'm tired of reading I turn to my collection of DVD's played through the laptop's reader. (No tablets for me because I need the reader and don't want to have to mess with a separate device.)

I'm not much of a movie-on-DVD kind of guy but I do have a collection of TV shows, everything from early adulthood (Rockford Files, The Bob Newhart Show) to more modern stuff, (China Beach, Northern Exposure) at least modern to me. I've never counted them up but I probably have hundreds of half and one-hour episodes with quite a variety to choose from, and at one or two a night it's going to take me a long time to get through them all. (And by then I'll have forgotten so can start over again!)

OK, enough with the laptop. On to the smart-phone.

Along with the obvious functions of phone and email (nobody texts me so it isn't even in my plan) there's actually quite a bit of stuff I can do with the phone that the disconnected laptop can't touch.

In the photo above I have my phone mounted right on the laptop making it easy to glance at as I'm driving (Combat strips are another bit of high-tech that I use!) because I happen to be making a long trip here, using major roads in order to cover a lot of ground quickly, Google Maps real-time traffic is a great tool for spotting those snarled up construction zones in time to seek out an alternative route,
such as one of Arkansas infamous multi-mile construction backups I recently avoided on I30 just east of Texarkana by taking to the parallel US 67, or this (pictured above) on-going mess on I70 at Terre Haute that I was also able to slip around because I was forewarned.

Of course this won't work when I'm out of service, but that's pretty rare anymore along major roads so it's no big deal.

To make this feature even more useful, instead of Google Maps I usually run the Allstays app, which uses Google Maps, including the live traffic feature, as a base layer, but also has some additional useful information that can be overlayed. In this case, since it was mid-day and I wasn't looking for a campground at the time, I cleaned up the clutter by using Allstays filter to only show me rest areas, fuel stations/truckstops and Walmarts.

Why Walmart?? Because with a quick tap of a finger I can see if a particular Walmart has gas, in other words a Murphy's station. True, Murphy's diesel is anemic crap that gives noticeably lower miles per gallon, probably because it's mixed closer to the 20% mark than the 5% mark with ethanol, but combine the already low price with saving another 3 cents per gallon by using a Walmart gift card, which I carry just for this reason, and it's still worth it, especially if the alternative is a name-brand truckstop that could be 20 or even 30 cents higher.

Any app that relies on tracking your location while you are on the move sucks a huge amount of power so I keep the phone plugged into a charger when using it like this.

Another phone-app I use quite a bit on the road is Weatherbug.

Here I've forced it to look at Cloudcroft New Mexico since I'm writing this from the house and I'm not about to let you see where that is, but normally when I want a weather update on the road I turn location on and then the app shows me the local weather.

In addition to the current conditions, I can look at an hourly forecast if I want to see how soon it will cool down to comfortable sleeping levels tonight, or a 10-day forecast for longer-range planning purposes. If I want to see the weather someplace else, maybe a spot I'm thinking about heading to, I just type in the location and Weatherbug takes me there.

While northbound on a recent trip  I stopped at a rest area south of Fort Wayne Indiana because I could see a large afternoon storm complex out there in front of me. The radar map on Weatherbug told me that if I just sat tight for a half hour or so and had dinner, the storm would blow off to the east and I would miss it. By waiting a few minutes I not only stayed out of the rain, I also stayed clear of the 4 or 5 vehicles I passed that didn't wait, or slow down, and hydroplaned right off the road, in at least one case, taking out an innocent vehicle in the process. (What is the matter with us that we are so damn stupid we don't slow down on wet roads?!! At this rate we deserve to go extinct.)

In addition to using the phone's browser for on-the-fly research, I also use a few other apps. Nothing fancy, just couple that make finding information about certain places, and making reservations while on the go, simpler.

So while I'm not what most would consider a heavy user of my phone, (I have never even come close to using up my 2G's of data.) it certainly simplifies certain things when I'm on the road.

Even so, I treat my phone with a degree of skepticism.

For one thing, since I'm the kind of person that thrives on seeking out remote places most likely to not have any signal, I need to be prepared to do without, for another, it's hardly a secure device. (And if you are a Verizon user, as I am, apparently your provider is rated as the most likely to roll over and spread it's legs when the Feds come knocking on the door for info!!)

How many of y'all secure your smartphone with a 4 digit code? (Oh crap! Again with the security? Oh, and if you are one of those that doesn't secure your phone at all, it's not just your info, clearly you are content with exposing it to the world, but what about all your friend's, work-colleague's, and business associate's contact info, birthdays, addresses, meetings, appointments, etc. that you are putting at risk? ) Did you know that most phones allow you to use an 8, 12, or even longer passcode??

But that's still not really good enough since I'm only allowed to use 0 through 9 or a limited variety of 'slides' even long passcodes on phones are far more vulnerable than those on full-keyboard devices, so I keep no full names, addresses, photos, banking URL's, schedules or other personal info on my phone because not only is it more likely to get lost or stolen than my laptop, it's more easily cracked.

One final note about my cell; any phone outside of a service area, which is where I seem to be quite a bit of the time, uses up a whole bunch of power trying to find that non-existent signal so I turn the phone to airplane mode. That way I still have a clock/alarm/timer (Usually the only one I have with me on a hike or when The Van is parked and the dash is dark.) as well as access to the photo I took as a backup to my paper map, but I'm not burning through the battery.

Speaking of trails and trail-maps, I really like my Earthmate PN-60 hand-held GPS. I carry it when hiking, kayaking, biking, or anything else that's more than a casual lunch-break stroll around the park.

I primarily use it to keep track of where I am, and as a mostly solo excursionist it gives me just that much more confidence and peace of mind when I'm out there alone. But I also find it useful as a mid-excursion planning tool. I can check on how far I've come, how long I've been out there, when sunset is, the moon's state tonight, and what the terrain around me is like, (The base layer is Delorme Topo so I've got all that terrain and features info at my fingertips.) all of which is helpful when deciding where to go next and when I need to turn around and head back.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't rely on the thing exclusively for finding my way, after all, it is a fallible bit of equipment, so I always have a hardcopy map of the area in my pocket as well as a digital copy on my camera and phone. When I'm out there I'm constantly looking around, especially back the way I've come, to keep myself oriented, aware of my surroundings, and what the return trip is going to look like, (Who knows, if the hiker that stepped off the Appalachian trail in 2013 for a bio-break had looked back and noted a couple landmarks maybe she wouldn't have gotten lost and died a few weeks later of starvation and exposure.) but it sure is comforting to be able to confirm my observations with the GPS.

For instance, I was once hiking one of the few mainland trails of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore when I was stopped by a swollen and fast-moving creek I didn't want to risk crossing on my own. Not ready to just turn around and go back, I knew Lake Superior was off to my west and if I could get there I could walk the lakeshore back to the trailhead since I already knew I hadn't crossed any major waterways that could stop me. What I didn't know was just how far away the lakeshore was and what the terrain between here and there was like. After consulting the GPS to help decide if it was feasible, I did some bushwacking and shore-walking, salvaging what could have been a busted hike.



Another fun thing I do with the GPS is record my tracks then upload them into my laptop-based Topo so I can see all my excursions at a glance, like the one above of a 7.5 mile hike in Caprock Canyons. There at the yellow arrow is where I came across a solitary, shorts-and-tennis-shoe hiker that had run out of water and wasn't sure where he was. At the red arrow is where I started bushwacking a more interesting route back to the campsite but ran into a herd of Bison so retreated back to the main trail before I pissed them off.



Back in the day, the CB was the tool for keeping tabs on road conditions; and Smoky if you were into speeding, which I never saw the point of since the reward of arriving a few minutes earlier never out-weighs the risk (which is not just excessive wear on your vehicle and tickets but- well - you know, death, either your's or someone else's) but as technologies improved all the professional drivers moved over to the new and improved, leaving mostly the foul-mouthed and angry behind there on channel 19.

Even so, you can see by the deteriorating hand-cord in the photo above, that I've had my CB a long time and it's still there in The Van. That's because of another fact about technology:



It will fail!

One of the greatest dangers of technology, besides following Suzy Talkinghead down the boatramp and driving right into the lake, is becoming dependent on it.

I keep my CB because it receives the 10 NOAA weather channels for those times I'm out of cell service, or maybe I've dropped my precious phone into a creek somewhere (WooHoo! Now I have an excuse to go get the latest new-and-improved model!!) and can't get to my Weatherbug app.

If I can't get to Delorme Topo because my laptop has failed, I can fall back to Google Maps on my phone, if that isn't working I still have my handheld GPS.

If my GPS fails out there on the trail I have my paper map in my pocket as well as a digital copy on the camera and phone.

I could go on since there's still plenty of other technologies I use on the road, but this has hit the high-points of the ones I use, and frankly, even I'm getting a little bored with the subject by now.

Technologies come and go, so will always be a moving target, you have to decide for yourself just how much effort you want to put into chasing that target.

The main point is, technologies have certainly enhanced my on-the-road experience, but I'm careful not to become reliant on any one device or app because after all, it's not about the technology, but rather about being out there and experiencing some of what this earth has to offer in the short time available to us.