Adam Steinhoff Archives

February 17, 2015

We’re the Same Age

For 36 days a year (37 during Leap Year), Wife Lila and I are the same age.

I won’t tell you what that age is this year, but if we once believed that you couldn’t trust anyone over 30, we are more than twice as untrustworthy as we were when we said that.

One thing about it, she can sure blow out a candle quickly and leave not so much as a tendril of smoke behind. Neighbor Bill/Jacqie provided the cake; the boys took her out for dinner and gave her a Fitbit to document that she’s still moving, and I got her a coffee table art book on The Florida Highwaymen.

It was a good day.

February 8, 2015

Birthdays 2 and 4

In another of an infrequent series of posts about how living in Florida in the wintertime isn’t bad, I invite you to a birthday party for Son Adam and Wife Carly’s boys this weekend. Both of them have birthdays in February – Graham is 4 and Elliot is 2 – so they have a combined party for now.

Back up to September: Wife Lila’s niece, Laurie Everett of Annie Laurie’s Antique Shop fame, had a toy tractor that had come in from an estate sale. Lila said I should pick it up for the boys and haul it 1100 miles back to West Palm Beach.

Tractor made it to Florida

We decided that Christmas had so much going on that we’d hold the tractor until Birthday Season. It was well received.

Is this a good idea?

Graham was all about the bounce house, but he wasn’t convinced that going down the slide was a good idea. I remember that feeling the first time I climbed onto the high dive at the Capaha Park Pool.

Dad comes to the rescue

Dad Adam was a little more sympathetic than the pool lifeguard who growled, “Kid, those are one-way steps. There’s only one way back, and that’s off the end of the board.”

Graham remained unconvinced. He’s going to be the conservative kid in the family. I remember him complaining at last year’s party “That music is too loud.”

I’m alive to see 5

THERE’S a kid who is limp with relief that the experience is over and there’s a chance he’ll be alive to see his fifth birthday.

Here’s trouble

Elliot is going to be the one who, like his dad, will try anything at least once. As soon as he figured out how to climb up to the top of the slide, he was beating feet to do it again and again.

A gift of love

Lila is a quilter. Not one of those machine quilters, but an real old-time hand quilter. She made a snowman quilt for Matt and Sarah’s Malcolm, and a similar one for Graham.

She presented Elliot’s to him today. When you are two, it’s probably not as cool as a tractor, but he’ll appreciate it over the years.

Graham and Elliot are expecting a brother to come along in a couple of months, so Lila better get busy.

Graham with his quilt

Graham knew right where to find his quilt in his bedroom. (You can click on the photos to make them larger.)

February 5, 2015

Radio Shack R.I.P

The business news contained a story that wasn’t really surprising news: Radio Shack had declared bankruptcy and is going to sell between 1,500 and 2,400 of its 4,000 stores to eventually become Sprint outlets. The rest of them will go dark.

I needed some parts a few days ago and went to my favorite Rat Shack store a mile from the house. It was closed, closed, closed, without even a sign telling where the next nearest store lived.

We were a Tandy / Radio Shack family. Buddy Chuck Keefer sold me his Tandy Model 1 computer. It had 4K of RAM, and anything you wanted to run on it had to be typed in character by character. A single misspelled word or a comma in the wrong place would cause it to fail. Its memory was only as long as its power cord. When you turned the machine off (or the power flickered), the program was gone. If you REALLY wanted to save what you had entered, you could hook up a tape recorder and try to download it, but the odds that the download or the upload would go flawlessly were pretty slim.

I did manage to write a rudimentary spreadsheet that would help me do my photo department budget: you would input what you were going to spend for film, for example, in the upcoming year, and the program would spread that amount out monthly based on historic percentages.

The photo above was one of Son Adam’s Doom Parties in our living room. More about that later.

Tandy Model IV

Just before I left on an out-of-town assignment, I ordered a Tandy Model IV. It was a computer with the keyboard and monitor all built in one unit. I paid extra to have a green screen instead of an amber one; upgraded the 64K of RAM to 128K and installed a second 5-1/4″ floppy disk drive.

On my way back from the job, I stopped at Radio Shack to load the huge, honking box in the backseat of my Mazda. When I got it unpacked, it dawned on me that I had a computer and a disk with the operating system on it, but no programs to run. That was seriously disappointing.

Buddy Keefer (remember him?) sold me his 300-baud modem, which meant that I could dial up computer bulletin boards and connect with other people, send messages and pirate software. One local Sysop (System Operator), Karl Myers, ran The Notebook, a site for writers, journalists, programmers and general adult-geeks. He would host a monthly BBQ where we could get together just for the heck of it.

Some local guys who frequented The Notebook wrote MS-DOS, an operating system for the Tandy that was better than anything Radio Shack sold. They also produced a suite of programs with a great terminal package, word processor and spreadsheet. Unfortunately, Lotus came out with 1-2-3 at about the same time, which dried up the market for them. I used their word processor for years.

About those Doom parties

The Model IV was replaced with a Tandy 1000, which was an IBM PC clone, only better. My first upgrade was a 20 megabyte hard drive that cost $600. I carry a 32 gigabyte flash drive in my pocket today that cost about $32 (and falling).

Sons Matt and Adam, of course, grew up with computers. The first ones didn’t come with fancy mice and the like. If they wanted to play an adventure game, they had to type all the commands: “Go left;” “Pick up sword,” etc. If you wanted to survive, you had to learn how to type fast.

By the time Adam hit middle school, he and all his buddies had become serious nerds. We’d hear a knock on the door, and here would come half a dozen kids with computers under their arms to take over our living and dining rooms. This was in the days before networking as we know it today, so they would tie the machines together so they could play Doom and other action games.

Wife Lila and I would crank up the AC to handle the additional heat load, then retreat to our bedroom while the warriors battled all night.

“It’s the cops”

One morning, just as the boys were staggering out of our house with all their computer gear, a West Palm Beach prowl car rolled down the street. The cop was SURE he was going to get a commendation for breaking up this high-tech burglary ring. Once we had explained that all we had lost was sleep (and the contents of our refrigerator), they were released in the custody of their parents.

So, what are we going to do when we need some oddball capacitor or connector or cable adapter in the future?

The store which was a leader in cheap technology – close to high-fidelity sound systems; CB radios; alarm systems; electronic toys and quirky gadgets was probably done in by demographics. I mean there’s a whole generation out there today that hears “Radio Shack” and wonders, “What the heck is a radio?”

January 25, 2015January 26, 2015

Steinhoff Rocket Launch

Grandson Malcolm needed to launch some rockets for a school science project. There’s something about the possibility of seeing something blow up that is deeply embedded in the Steinhoff genes (check out Dad blowing up a bridge), so Son Matt, Son Adam, Carly, and Grandsons Graham and Elliot assembled on what passes for a hill in South Florida – a landfill that has been turned into Dyer Park. Across-the-street-neighbor Cheyenne came along. She and her sisters practically live at Malcolm’s house, so she is almost an honorary Steinhoff by osmosis.

Highest altitude

These rockets aren’t the cardboard tubes that my buddies and I stuffed with gunpowder: the engines are made to produce consistent results. An Estes A8-3 engine, for example, produces eight seconds of thrust, pauses three seconds, then sends a blast out the other end of the engine to cause the nose cone to come apart, pulling out a parachute.

Returning to earth

Instead of an old-time fuse you lit with a match, these have electrical igniters to set off the explosives. That’s where I came in. When I climbed to the top of the hill, I found the launch team deep in contemplation after several failed launch attempts.

When they said they had run connectivity tests to make sure there was loop current, I suggested that there might be juice present, just not enough. Of course, there was no spare battery.

Then it came to me that I had left a camera bag in the van that contained 9-volt batteries for my wireless mike. That solved the problem. I refrained from swaggering up and growling, “Failure is NOT an option.”

The white smoke in this photo was caused by a burning piece of wadded-up paper towel that served as wadding to protect the parachute when the backblast blew off the nosecone.

Recovery team in action

Malcolm and Cheyenne race to recover the falling rocket. Well, Cheyenne races to recover the rocket.

Malcolm isn’t the kind of guy who feels the need to demonstrate his alpha maleness if it involves the exertion of energy. That’s another Steinhoff trait.

Wife Lila informed me that Malcolm isn’t loafing: he’s conserving his energy for a soccer match. He didn’t want to take a chance on pulling a hamtwitchit or whatever it is that causes athletes to get carried off the field.

Another Cheyenne capture

That gal has serious wheels. She was great at getting under the rockets.

Record the results

After each launch, Malcolm would write down the stats recorded by a gizmo that blasted into space inside the rocket. It tracked all kinds of variables.

For example, I’m pretty sure it was the rocket on the pad in the photo below that set the record for the day: 264 feet altitude; 83 mph top speed; 26.3 seconds of flight time.

Busted

I saw a park ranger car pull over at the bottom of the hill. Somehow or another, I got the feeling that the ranger wasn’t there to enjoy the launch event.

Sure enough, a very nice woman ranger came up and said that rocket launches weren’t allowed in the park “because the air space over the park” was controlled by a model radio-controlled club on another hill a tenth of a mile away.

Matt explained the science fair project and said they needed to do three launches of three different rockets to get the results Malcolm needed, and there were just two more to go, with one rocket ready on the pad.

Go for launch, then get gone

She said to go for launch on the last two, then get out of there.

After it was over, Matt said he had checked to make sure the FAA wouldn’t have problems with the location and altitudes, but he never thought they would run into a problem with “controlled air space” in a park sitting on top of gigatons of garbage.