Independence Day

 

We had a great time at an afternoon party at a friends house on July 4th.  Here are Dave and the boys playing a bit of b-ball.

Troy and Teo enjoying the pool.

Old pros in the pool by now!

Which one of us is wetter?

Urban Chapel

 

Another assignment I completed as an Architecture major at Oklahoma State University in 1980.  This is a continuation of the Chapel in a Cemetery assignment shown earlier.  Some of the parameters had changed:  we had a larger building footprint to work with and the chapel was now offset from the main path into the cemetery.

For this assignment, I set the building slightly into the ground so that four steps down were required to enter the building.  I kept the lines very simple and clean.

Both ends of the building were glass.

Setting the building into the ground kept it from dominating the landscape, keeping the focus on those who had passed as it should be.

There really isn't anything I would change in this design as it is clean, pure, and as elegant today as it was 40 years ago.

One glass end looks out over a nearby tree and beyond to the gravesites.

In the very first picture in this post, there is a large white area towards the upper left.  This is where a 3D model of the building sat when I handed in the assignment.  It obviously is now lost to the sands of time.

This view shows the change my instructor had asked me to make with the last assignment:  the pews are turned 90 degrees from where they were before.   This works because they gave us a larger footprint:  it would not have worked in the smaller footprint of the other assignment.  I can't remember whether he made the suggestion before or after this revised assignment came out.  In any case, I'm sure he knew of the coming revisions.

The one thing that confuses me about this design is that the speaker would have to stand at the end facing away from the graveyard,  likely looking at whatever urban buildings are across the street.  I can't remember why I did this, perhaps to keep those entering and exiting from walking passed the person speaking?

I'm a little more forward at my current age and probably would ask the instructor if we could re-route the sidewalk to the other end of the building so that the audience would view the cemetery when facing the person speaking.  Perhaps I did ask back then also and the answer came back "nyet".  I just don't remember.

Smoke Detector Battery Replacement

 

We awoke at 5:30 AM this morning to our Kidde 21006377-N KN-COSM-IBA Smoke and CO combination alarm going off.   Since all eight of our detectors are wired together, the message "FIRE,  FIRE, FIRE" was blasted through the house.

That was enough to rouse me out of bed.  I checked the entire house - no fire.   There were two rounds of that message.  Each round lasted about a minute and they were spaced a few minutes apart.   Then all went quiet for the rest of the day.

We installed those detectors in the summer of 2019 as our previous Kidde detectors were past their expiration date.   Those prior Kidde detectors would say "Battery Low" when the batteries needed replacing, so there was some debate in our household on whether the batteries today were low (and the low battery message is not a part of these new detectors) or whether these new Kidde detectors actually though there was a fire.  My wife let it be known that it didn't matter -we would be replacing the batteries immediately.  Reading the manual,  these detectors would have said "low battery" if it was indeed a battery problem, so they actually were detecting smoke in some manner.

The Kidde AA batteries that were in those detectors were about 2 years old as of now.   My son tested one of them and it wasn't really all that low.  I went to the store and bought Energizer Lithium AA batteries as replacement, and that is what we installed today.  These new batteries have an expiration date of 12-2039, but I think we'll be replacing them in January 2023 just to be safe...we don't want that alarm blaring at us again!

The reason for this post is not because I think you all are super interested in our detectors.  It is here as a reminder to my forgetful self as to when we last changed the batteries, and what batteries we used.

Also note to self:  these new detectors take AA batteries, not 9-volt like the prior detectors!

The Start of It All - My First Computer Science Course

 

I stumbled across this gem this week.  It is my notes binder from my first computer science course at Cal State Chico on January 26, 1983.   

The first time I logged into a computer was for this FORTRAN class.  I had used punch cards for an Oklahoma State University course a couple of years prior, but never did I sit down at a screen and keyboard until this FORTRAN class.

Four years later, I was hired as a software engineer in San Diego which started an over 30 years career developing software.  It is incredible to think that it all started on this page of this 38 year old binder.

I just looked up the teacher Michael Slavich on Linkedin.  He apparently taught at Chico State for two more years before he launched into a 30+ year career at Hewlett-Packard.  Thank you Michael for helping me launch a career of my own.

Troy Loses A Tooth

 

We went out to dinner at Miguel's.  During dinner, Troy lost a tooth, a molar.  He won't be losing too many more as he is quickly turning into a young man.  

The Chapel in the Cemetery

 

The second in a series.  This is another design I developed while an Architecture major at Oklahoma State University.   The assignment was to design a small footprint chapel that would be at the edge of an urban cemetery.

The design I came up with was based on triangles, since they seem to naturally lend themselves to this type of building, with the apex pointing skyward.

It was a simple design with a smaller triangle joining a larger triangle to form a complete building.  Sort of like generations in a family.  Heritage.  The natural progression of life.

This view shows the first thing I would change if I were to update this design.  I have no idea why I didn't have the window panes in the smaller triangle line up with those in the larger triangle.   That's the first thing I would change today.  I suspect I inked in the smaller triangle first then realized that scale didn't lend itself well to the larger structure.

This shows it at the entrance to the cemetery.

My instructor found a flaw in the design:  the orientation of the pews meant that the person speaking would be standing where the roof pierces the ground, bringing the eye downward.  He had a solution which involved a fairly large redesign that I'll show in a future post. 

Looking at it today,  I think the solution was much more simple:  simply push the pews to the other end of the room and have those seated face the other direction.  Place the stage on a platform above the Lecture Room with doors between the rooms placed on both sides of the stage.  Those sitting in the pews would look up to the speaker and their eyes would naturally rise to the high point in the room, towards the heavens.