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Blizzard 1999!

Early January 1999 The month begins by dumping 26 inches of snow on Chicago and sends temps in the suburbs down to 25 degrees below zero, as you can see by the thermometer picture I took the early morning of January 5, 1999.  I've also included a few suburb pics of the area after the snow fell.  Winds were brutal and transportation was a mess.  It was reported that 11 people in Illinois alone died of heart attacks while shoveling snow.

Winter Finally Arrives

It was a long time getting here, and some had to begin to wonder if Chicago was going to start sprouting Palm Trees.  It hit hard and buried the entire state under two feet of snow.

The Homestead, with Fireplace	Looking out, into the wasteland...

Other Things

I would like to develop a Java application that would allow distributed processing of the Mandelbrot Set on a LAN or Internet network.  One machine, acting as a controller, would distribute the work load dynamically.  The size of the data chunks would be scalable by the controller, allocating larger pieces to machines that were finishing their work quicker.  The end result would be a finely detailed Mandelbrot image on the controller screen, with controls to allow smooth zooming and panning.    If all machines could respond in 1/20 of a second with the result, each frame would have sections that were calculated by different machines. 

The API used to pull this off could be valuable to others.  It would allow any application that needs the power of a network of CPUs to speed up the response time, as long as the application is a data-parallel application.

Things Not Boring

Here are a few pictures, also taken in January.  So far it's been an odd winter, because until Jan it's actually been much warmer than usual.  Also, this is the first real snow fall we've had, which is also odd.  It's almost as if the weather patterns have been shifted back about one entire month.  Everything is starting much later.

Camera was out of focus.	Snow blowing 20 MPH.

A Few More, Final Last Things

Why not just do a page for every month of the year, each a little different?  A chronological layout for a website makes a lot of sense, especially one that concentrates on pictures. 

That's it, back to the wind!	Northwestern Station, Chicago

Things Happening Near Jan 10, 1999

Yikes!  More sub-zero temperatures and more snow.  Looks like its here to stay.

The snow is blowing so hard you can't see more than a few yards down the road.

All Is Cozy Inside the House

The house stays nice and toasty inside...

Flowers, from my sister Tammy	Child with Dog, Early 1999.

Lead N64 Engineer at work.

Late Side of January 1999

Overall, a good month.  It snowed from Jan 1 - Jan 15, then slowly began to melt from the 15th to the 31st.  I've included a few of my favorite late January pictures below.

Karen and Michael, with Candy on bunk beds.

Early morning, Geneva Train Station, Passing Freight.

On the train Eastbound to Chicago, note the zoom-blur effect.

January Summary

It's been a busy month, between fighting my way through the cold to work everyday.   I have to walk from the train station to the corner of Clinton and Adams every day, and some days it was pretty brutal.  At work, I've worked on a few minor updates to cload, a specialized C program to load data base tables in Sybase, and I've started on Data Probing and have just about completed a proof of concept for the Data Alignment routines.

At night, I've been playing Quake II with Sergey, who has gotten much better this year.   We are about 70% through the game, playing cooperatively.  He dials into my computer from his house using Windows 98 dial up networking.  I purchased Falcon 4.0 just before Christmas, and I've even loaded on the laptop so that I could read the manual and practice on the train.  It is a very in-depth product, and for more information on this simulation go to the my software reviews found elsewhere on this site.  At the very end of January, Sergey finally purchased new PC components- a 333 MHZ Celeron A, 64 MB RAM, and a TNT nVidia board.  He already has everything else.

Michael is gowing bigger by the day, and talking up a storm.  Chris and Karen are making great grades in school.  Chris has really taken to the Nintendo 64, and also enjoys flying the Falcon on the PC.

Susan has been working long hours, and going to work on Saturdays because this is the busy season for accountants.  We moved the TV in our bedroom into the basement, where she does a workout routine after work.

I should be finishing up at Trans Union in Feburary- but nothing is concrete.  The usual employee roll-over continues, leaving Shriram and I among the oldest remaining project members.

I may get to interview a member of the Falcon 4.0 development team, as he has applied to work with us.   I have so many questions! 

Karen and Chris spent a weekend in Ohio to visit their dad, and I hosted a small Quake party that networked three computers.  We drank wine, played, left to eat at Applebees, then returned to play some more.  It was a great time, and we got to network Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator, which was a blast.  Mike got to play the first couple of levels of Half-Life.

A fellow who has written a screen saver for pictures is using a few pics I took as the default pics.  You can download this saver by going to his website, which I will post shortly.