Thursday, 8/8/2019

I headed out to Shustek for a day of cataloging. Steve and I cataloged a NeXT system that was supposed to be “fully functional” according to the donation record. So of course after cataloging the pieces (system unit, monitor, keyboard, mouse) we hooked them all together and powered it up. We could hear fans spinning, and the monitor showed a very dim raster. In which I could read messages about system test complete, booting from SCSI drive 1, waiting for drive to come online… and that was it. The internal drive never came up. Unfortunately this unit was intended for the “study collection” meaning it was meant to be actually used in education classes, could be touched, and so forth. But without some work it isn’t going to fulfill that role.

After lunch we unwrapped something completely different.

It’s basically a tape cassette, kind of like an audio cassette but blown up to the size of a boom-box, and loaded with tape more than an inch wide. It’s made by IBM, with a big IBM logo on one end. What in the heck could it be? We would have been wondering still, except that volunteer Alan, whose mind is a wonderland of computer trivia, said, “Wait wait wait. Wait a minute. Look up ‘Harvest’.” A quick trip to Wikipedia and we found the IBM 7950 “Harvest” system, once a top-secret addition to the early “Stretch” supercomputer, which from 1962 to 1975 did cryptanalysis for the NSA. A major feature of it was a special tape subsystem called “Tractor” which managed a library of these tape cassettes. And here was one of the cassettes! No doubt it has never been erased, and that reel of wide mag tape probably contains all sorts of once-classified data. Which nobody on earth has the equipment to read now.

While this was going on I was exchanging texts with Chuck. An issue hanging on from last month is the foundation inspection that Lawyer Lady had done on one of her last visits. We have been trying to get some info on what this inspection revealed, apparently there were some small(?) issues, although not enough to bother L.L. Chuck suddenly thinks we should get them fixed and have a new inspection done. He spoke to the previous inspector but stopped short of asking for a copy of the report because, he says, if we have it, we must show it to buyers, and if it is “phrased negatively” it could harm the sale. So he is apparently in a delicate dance to get some details and a recommendation of a contractor suitable to do a repair, without actually obtaining a paper that we would be required to disclose.

I am all for doing this repair, which I expect to be in the low thousands, but I am very reluctant to hold off the open house to do it. I asked Chuck to please expedite contacting a contractor and getting an estimate. We’ll see. I can imagine this pushing the open house date back weeks, grrrr.

Came home to do laundry.

Thursday, 8/1/2019

First thing after breakfast I sent an email to Mark, the sales guy for Davey Tree service. I’d heard nothing from them since accepting their estimate for trimming several days ago. I get a response in half an hour, “We’re coming today.” Gee, thanks for the warning. Later I confirmed with Chuck that they hadn’t contacted him either. The problem was, there is a flooring contractor scheduled to start on the kitchen floor today, and the painters aren’t quite done either.

So I drove over to the house on my way to a day of museum work across the bay. The Davey team were already at work, a huge truck in the driveway supporting a cherry picker, and a guy up among the oak branches. Mark was just driving away, and we conferred, and then talked to the second tree guy who was on the ground. He didn’t see any problem and would keep an eye out for contractors. When I said “flooring contractor” he said, “what kind, laminate or what?” I said, “laminate” and he said, “Oh no problem, my cousin does laminate floors, and I know he won’t have much stuff to bring in.”

So I went off to Yosemite. Today I and Steve spent the day beginning the implementation of Aurora’s grand plan to check every box. We fetched down a cart load of boxes. I was running the computer and Steve was handling stuff. I would do a search on the box number, and tell Steve how many objects were returned by the search. He would count to make sure there were that many objects in the box. Only once was the count wrong. It was one too high. We had to go through the objects and check their numbers against the search results. Yup, there was one object not listed as being in that box. So we searched on its number, and found it was recorded as being in a different box on a different shelf. So we went and found that box and shoved the item (an unpopulated PCB) into that box. Problem solved.

Then I’d check whether each object had a photograph in the database. A few did not, and Steve would mark them with a “photo needed” tag and that box would go on the “to be photographed” shelf. Otherwise it was all good and went on the “return to storage” shelf.

We ripped through a dozen boxes in the day, at the end of which Steve commented, “Well, I said this was going to be a ten-year project. Now I think it might only be eight.”

I came home by way of Tasso street. The tree guys were gone and the trees looked fine. The oak branches are well clear of the house now. The big Pittisporums are not touching the house roof either, and there’s quite a bit more light in the back yard.

Inside I found that nothing had been done with the floor, apparently that guy didn’t come. The painters were pretty nearly done. I was distressed to find that they had sealed the butcher-block counter tops in the kitchen with something hard, that looks almost like varnish. That’s not right at all.

I texted Chuck with these observations. Later in the evening he called me up. He’d talked to the flooring guy who had said, well, some materials didn’t come in, so he can’t come until Monday. That pretty well messes up the time-line for opening the house on Friday week. So Chuck says now we’ll slip it a week to 8/16, and I have to agree. He’ll discuss the kitchen counters with Eric the painter.