Robin Harbron

No, I’m not going to whine about the prices. According to Tony I’m not allowed to anyway.

Anyway, I (and sometimes Richard and Tim and occasionally Shroom) have been watching a lot of post-apocalyptic movies lately. I’ve been collecting them too, on VHS or DVD.

One of the many I’ve found on VHS is a 1993 made for TV mini-series called The Fire Next Time, set in 2017. It’s the story of a family who is forced to leave their home in Louisiana (I’ll have to watch it again to see if it’s actually set in New Orleans) after storms and flooding destroy all they have. Not only was that part disturbingly prophetic, but near the beginning of the story, the father (a shrimp fisherman) is telling one of his crew, in the face of a very poor shrimp season, that there will always be some shrimp somewhere, and there will always be buyers, but they’ll have to be willing to pay the price. He gives the example of oil, and his crew members responds “Yeah, at $60 a barrel!” like that’s an outrageous price. And here we are, prices having gone over $70 a barrel…

Thursday, June 30th, 2005

From Mankato, we decided to head over to Wisconsin to visit another Little House site, so we took highway 14 to highway 60 east all the way to the Wisconsin border. We’ve never spent so much of a trip driving on non-Interstates, and we really enjoyed checking out all the small towns. Crossing the Mississippi at the Minnesota/Wisconsin border was nifty too – it felt like we were a lot further south at that point.

Passing through Wabasha and Nelson, we turned north-west on highway 35 towards Pepin. Pepin also has a museum, though it’s pretty pathetic compared to Walnut Grove’s. Still, I find some interest in the stories behind so many of the items that show up at these places. This letter was the highlight for me at this location. The boys and I had to escape the museum for a bit after all that excitement.

We then went to the “Little House” wayside, up highway CC. The house is just a re-creation, but apparently this is the actual location of the original house that Pa built while they lived near Pepin, WI. Here’s a picture of the kids outside the house.

We drove another mile or two to some store that was attempting to cash in on the tourists by calling itself “The Little House Store” or something. Then we took a very winding road (highway SS) through farmland and ravines to turn north on N to highway 10, then NE up 85 to Eau Claire.

We then took highway 53 all the way up to Superior. This route has become a favourite for me during my annual Chicago Commodore pilgrimage – a nice divided highway with very little traffic. Crossing over to Duluth, we hit the Toys R Us, and I bought the “new” C64 DTV that I worked on. The only thing really new about it is hexagonal packaging instead of pyramidal. But how cool to see what you helped make sitting there on a store shelf?

We then checked in at the Duluth Econolodge, which was the most expensive, most gross hotel I experienced on the whole trip. Once I found the room, I decided I didn’t want to bring my family here, so I got my money back, and instead we went back to Superior (somehow managing a wrong turn on the way which added 15 minutes to the trip) and stayed at the Bridgeview hotel where my family often stayed 15+ years ago, and it was much nicer and cheaper even if it’s a little tired.

Next time, we head back to Thunder Bay (yup, you only have to endure one more of these).

After visiting the museum, we explored a couple other stores in Walnut Grove. This was made difficult by the already-discussed ripped up main road. While Carla and the girls visited one store, the boys and I stayed in the truck in air-conditioned comfort, parked in the back lane, and listened to some local radio, where we heard a lot of talk of tornado warnings.

We then took a bit of a drive to Lake Laura, renamed not too long ago by the town. The lake itself was overflowing – the water was several feet higher than usual. A couple small groups of local teens pointed out where the lifeguard chair should have been, where the paved path along the lake should have been, etc. It seemed a little dangerous, not knowing what was lurking below, so the kids followed the paved path a ways along until it was too deep. Rianna swam to the mostly submerged Lake Laura sign and back, and that was about it for swimming. The wind really started picking up at this point, and it started raining, so we packed up.

We then drove north of town to the old Ingalls homestead. On the way we stopped and checked out the monument. The actual site of the homestead is privately owned, but they keep it open to the public, just asking for a small donation at the gate. The wind was really picking up when we climbed out of the truck, and I had a little bit of (irrational?) fear that we were all going to get hit by a tornado as we wandered the site. At the expense of drama, I’ll tell you up front that no harm, by tornado or otherwise, was visited upon our family during this portion of the trip.

We crossed the bridge, checked out the river left and right, and checked out the site which was described and illustrated nicely on some nearby signage. More interesting descriptions (if you find this interesting) were on another sign. The actual dugout was a bit of a disappointment, since it was really just a depression in the side of the river bank. Slightly more interesting was Big Rock, which has sunk signicantly in the past 100+ years, so it doesn’t look all that big anymore.

The rain and wind really picked up just as we got back to the truck. We struck out for Mankato going east on highway 14, once again heading for a hotel instead of a campground due to the weather and fairly late hour. We had supper at one of the numerous small-town Dairy Queens. As we continued on, the weather got worse, and we listened intently to the radio, and found they were mentioning several nearby towns as having reported “touch-downs”, and then talked about the piece of highway we were on! Shortly after hail and rain was coming down so hard that I couldn’t see more than a couple car lengths ahead, so we slowed right down to a crawl for quite a while. It was a very frightening experience for the kids in particular.

We decided to take a bit of a detour at New Ulm down highway 68 to Judson since that was Carla’s birth name, and it seemed to bring us a little further away from the storm. It took a bit of doing to find a good Judson to photograph – I wanted to take a picture of “Judson Trucking” (or something similar) but I wasn’t looking for trouble, and when the late-working, presumably Mr. Judson started scowling at my headlights in his parking lot on this dark, stormy night, I figured we’d look elsewhere. So we ended up with something even better – a picture of the “Judson Bottom Road” sign.

After some foolish searching of downtown Makato for a hotel, we went a ways north of town and found a really nice hotel for a decent price. Outside the hotel was a bunch of “tornado chasers” or whatever they want to be called, video-taping the impressive lightning in the north sky. I tried taking a few pictures of the lightning myself, and this was my best attempt.

Next time, a surprise detour to Wisconsin.

June 29th, 2005:

We continued down highway 169 to St. Peter, then turned off onto highway 99, then highway 14 to New Ulm (what happened to Old Ulm?) and continued west through Sleepy Eye to Walnut Grove, of “Little House on the Prarie” fame. I really like driving these quiet highways in the US countryside. There’s an amazing grid of highways covering most of the country, spread through-out the farmland, with small towns only miles apart. The local Dairy Queen seems to be the centre of each town (another reminder of Waiting for Guffman). Funny how south-western Minnesota reminds me so much of southern Kansas.

A bit of a rant: It amazes me that huge, sparsely populated parts of the USA can manage a grid of dozens of highways, every one of them of the same quality as our *one* Trans-Canada highway. Canada has a 10th of the population of the USA, but about a 1000th of the roads (in my somewhat informed opinion). Wouldn’t Canada be that much better to have a safe, double-laned, divided highway across the whole country? Just ONE?? Back to the trip…

After a bit of excitement involving Rianna, a bag of Doritos and, eventually, an overflowing styrofoam plate of puke, we arrived at Walnut Grove, in southwestern Minnesota.

It’s a very small town that was under some heavy construction at the time. It didn’t cause us a problem getting to the museum, but some of the other more minor places we wanted to visit became a real challenge.

I finally got all the photos from the trip up on the interweb with some nifty gallery software which you can browse here. From now on, I’ll link to the relevant photos.

The museum was pretty cool. You enter into a store. We bought a bunch of mostly on-topic stuff, like books and toys, and paid admission. You then exit the store into the fenced in outdoors “museum”, which consists of seven or so buildings that document major parts of the Ingalls life around Walnut Grove.

There was the church, Grandma’s house, a sod house like they lived in by the river, school, a settler’s house like they would have lived in later on. There were a couple more proper in-side type museums focusing on tools, equipment and machinery of the times, and smaller items more directly related to the Ingalls and the TV show.

There are some comments/descriptions/fun stuff scattered through-out the gallery, and Carla and I will add some more text there soon.

Note that there are 3 levels of detail for each picture – there’s the thumbnails which are 9 to a page, then the individual picture, then you can click again on that picture and get the full detail which is probably much bigger than your monitor – it’s necessary to read some of the finer print on some items/documents. Just so you know.

If you haven’t already, you can read some of Carla’s thoughts about Walnut Grove here.

Day 3 – part B “soon”!

Vacation Day 3 was supposed to go up today, but it’s not done yet. It’s really a lot of work writing these travelogues up, especially on a day as exciting and busy and full as DAY 3! So you’ll just have to wait.

While you’re waiting, you can listen to some great video game music, from one of the greatest video games ever, Car Battler Joe. Yup, I keep going on about this modern remake of Autoduel, and have completed it two more times since I last blogged about it. Here’s the website, and the music is down at the bottom of the page, under the heading 激闘！ カーバトラーGO!!. Don’t let the Japanese (I think) put you off, that’s just the title of the game (I think). IN-THE-CREVASSE and FIELD-03 are my favourite tracks, though they’re all great. There’s another 20 songs or so in the actual game.

Also, I found a bug in Car Battler Joe. One of the jobs you can pick up mid to late in the game is called “Stand in for Driver”. It’s one of the few special jobs in the game, in that it has a cut scene before and after the actual mission to give a bit of extra story. Well, if you start the actual race part of the game, then drive back to the entrance right away, you’ll be able to retire, and then the screen just goes black, and that’s it until you power cycle the Gameboy. Okay, not too exciting, but I’ve never seen it mentioned. I do prefer more spectacular bugs, but hey…

Might take in part of the Thunder Bay Blues Festival this weekend, since I’ve got some free tickets… who else wants to go?

Tuesday, June 28th, 2005:

We continued down I35 South. As we approached Minneapolis I got way too tired to keep driving, so we pulled over in a city called Blaine (which reminded us of Waiting For Guffman) and drove through their strange “shopping city” where all the buildings had to conform to some vaguely Mexican design stylings, even the McDonalds and Walmart. Carla brought the kids in to the Walmart and shopped for about an hour while I slept in the running truck with the air-conditioning on – “wasted” nearly an 1/8th tank of gas, I think, but most of the trip (especially this day) was way too hot and humid to do without. I guess most Americans think Minnesota is the frozen north, but I tell you, once you hit Minneapolis or so, it’s hot and humid. Once I woke up, I bought Walmart’s custom Rand McNally road atlas for just $5 – I love road atlases, especially when they’re cheap but good!

Next stop was Mall of America. Highlights included Lego Land, where the kids (especially Peter) went absolutely crazy running around – building cars and racing them down a special ramp made for this purpose was probably the highlight. I wonder if they stole this idea from the Brick Testament guy? Peter also found a $150 USD Lego crane that he dragged across the floor, intending to buy it with the $10 he had. The Lego sales guy got a little worked up about this, and uncharacteristically, I didn’t, and just laughed about it.

Rianna finally got to go on the big swing ride that she wanted to try last time we were through, a full four years earlier, on the way to Steve and Laura Judd’s wedding in New Mexico. Kind of neat to fulfill an ambition you’ve had for half your life, and judging by the look on her face while she swung around way up in the air, it was worth the wait.

I also hit the Mac store, and was able to check my email on one of the computers there. A little hard to keep it private though, when it’s hooked up to some crazy 32″ widescreen monitor!

Food-wise, some of us ate at the A&W but were surprised to find that at least this A&W has no hamburgers at all – just hotdogs and fries! The “burger family” is such a staple here in Thunder Bay that the kids just couldn’t comprehend this idea – I had to explain it away by telling them that “they’re all sold out of burgers”.

We hit the road again, and since we were in the neighbourhood, we drove into the parking lot of Bethany Bible College where friends Doug, Darren, Brian and others went to school, starting nearly 8 years ago. I stayed there with my (much smaller at the time) family a few times while they were there, and also snuck into the dorm to sleep on the couch a couple other times while picking up Shroom on the way to my first couple Chicago Expos, so the place is somewhat familiar and nostalgic to me too.

From there, highway 169 was real, real close. It was getting late, and I was still worn out from the previous day’s camping, so a plan began to hatch in my mind… we would stay… in… a… hotel! This is something that (to the best of my knowledge) we have *never* done as a family before, in all 8 years of having kids. We did stay in a hotel during our honeymoon, but that’s it. I just couldn’t stand the thought of spending, say, $100 for just one night in a room. Well, I’m getting soft in more ways than one, so we stayed at the AmericInn in Belle Plaine. Pretty nice place, with my only complaint being a lack of InterWeb access – I had to dial in to Thunder Bay, and I still don’t know how much that cost. They had a pretty nice games room, and I was tempted to play Arkanoid, but the spinner didn’t have that nice feel that it should have, so I passed on it.

The next morning we set off again, this time for Walnut Grove, MN.

The game is almost done – done enough that we took off for a trip last week, anyway. We were supposed to take off Sunday morning (June 26th), but I ended up working on some of the last bits of the game until around 6 a.m. Monday morning, so we didn’t get hitting the road until late Monday afternoon, after I had slept a bit, finished the packing, and did some last minute running around for camping supplies and travel insurance.

I know at least one reader is actually interested in the details of where we went (and even how we got there) so the rest of you who aren’t, sorry 🙂 I’m going to milk this trip for at least a few entries, since some people have told me they won’t read more than a few paragraphs at a time anyway…

Since we started late, we only made it as far as Duluth, Minnesota the first day. Just south of town is a campground called Indian Point Park, and after some difficulties with Interstate exits (yes, even in Duluth) we found the campground. Almost as soon as we had begun to unpack, it started to rain. I was only halfway done setting up the tent by the time it started to really pour, and we six ended up sitting in the tent, dripping wet with just one air mattress between us, with lightning and thunder all around. After at least an hour it subsided, and I finished up setting up everything, and finally cooked supper over my gas stove. The night went pretty good, only interrupted by the unpleasant effects of finishing off a large can of baked beans entirely by myself. Mmmmm.

In the morning I started to realize how much stuff we had, as I attempted to pack it all up again. The cap I had bought for the truck allows a lot more stuff to be stored in the back – this is both good and bad. I think it ended up taking me a couple hours to load everything up again, and I was pretty much worn out already, after the first day of camping. We hit the road again, Minneapolis bound…

We’re hoping to wrap up work on the new game soon, so high-quality blogging should return shortly (where?). But until then, here’s a link:

This kid can play.

I can’t see how it’s fake, so I’m amazed! If you right click on the video, you should be able to zoom it.

At work we use Lotus Notes for our internal email system. Of course, like all things we don’t completely like, it gets a derogatory nick name. Windows becomes Windoze or even Winblows, Outlook becomes Outhouse or Lookout, and Lotus Notes becomes Lotus Bloats.

Lotus Notes has many flaws, but at least one flaw is somewhat humourous: Unread mail is displayed in red, and read mail is not red. So when you click on a red message to read the message, it is no longer red – you’ve read it so it isn’t red. If that’s confusing, these two simple rules will clear things up:

“If it’s red, it’s not read. If it’s read, it’s not red.”

Work continues on my latest somewhat secret project. It’s really, really cool to be paid to program a video game. The fact that it’s written in 6502 assembly language is even cooler – and that it’s running on souped-up (that appears to be the correct spelling based on a couple google searches) C64 hardware is simply amazing. This is now 11 or 12 years after my last hopes of doing this kind of work died out, but here it is!

And now for something somewhat different: While working on the PAL C64 D2TV I discovered a bug in Pitstop 2 (a car racing video game) that would cause the screen to flicker badly when too many cars were tightly packed together on-screen. In extreme cases, the bug could cause the game to crash. This doesn’t happen on NTSC computers since there is slightly more processing time available on each scanline.

While I was researching this problem, I collected as many different cracks (deprotected copies) of Pitstop 2 as I could to see if they all had this problem. TWR from Sweden snail-mailed me a 5.25″ disk of a different crack not available on the web. Just a couple days ago he asked me if I could email him a copy of that disk for use on emulators, since he doesn’t have the means to do that himself, and I fully meant to do that soon.

This morning I discovered this disk on the floor under my wheeled office chair – it was quite obvious that the disk had been run over several times and also had become quite filthy with the various debris that builds up on wheels. I can only assume I was the sole cause of this, somehow knocking it down without noticing, but I can assure you this has never happened to me before in 21+ years of dealing with these disks.

I cleaned the disk up as best as I could, but the disk would not even rotate within it’s sleeve anymore. Just in case, I tried using it in the drive, but no go. So in a fit of desperation I cut open the sleeve, removing the round disk inside, gave it a further cleaning, cut open another sleeve (just on one edge) pulled the good disk out of there, and put the damaged disk in this undamaged sleeve. And how about that, it worked well enough to read the contents off after that. Resilient stuff!