jumpingfish

On one- or two-night trips, it can be a hassle to set up all the regalia. On longer stays, we sometimes go for it.

Parked now for several days on a sandy patch of flat ground behind the cottage at the top of the hill, this has been a longer stay.

1. The Plans

They stayed three nights at the Corps of Engineers Eureka Campground on the north shore of Lake Barkley in Kentucky near the Land Between the Lakes Recreation Area. Their plans after that took them briefly back towards Missouri — something that David with his westward/southward predilections is evidently well suited for. But in the event, the Fair and Industrious Trudy was behind the wheel and David was navigating.

Missouri, Kentucky, and Illinois osculate down there, where the Ohio empties into the Mississippi. Their route took them briefly west into the heart of the interstate osculation and then turned north short of Missouri, crossing the Ohio River into Illinois. As Trudy drove, David navigated with an atlas in his lap. Yes, an old-school, paper road atlas which brings the two of them much joy.

2. The Shutdown

Their plans, however, were not to be.

The westbound lanes of Interstate 24 were moving slowly. Break lights extended into the distance. The route displayed on Google Maps got red and redder and then deep crimson. The traffic ground to a halt. Google notified them that the highway would be completely shut down for six hours.

When they discovered this, they were approaching an exit which the Fair and Industrious Trudy eagerly took based on suggestions by her intrepid navigator who had devised an improvised route to the north and east where Kentucky 56 meets Illinois 13 at the next bridge upstream. Forty minutes after they left the campsite, they had returned to Eddyville whence they had earlier departed and began driving the alternate route.

3. The Ferry

From Eddyville to Fredonia to Marion, they wound their way northward on US 641 thru Western Kentucky. 

“Want to take a ferry?” David asked after further investigation of the road atlas.

“Sure!”

“Then turn left here.”

Trudy turned the wheel of the Outback. The Vistibule teardrop dutifully followed.

They drove along a narrow, two-lane road, out of Marion into the countryside thru the green fields and forests of Kentucky in summer. The road was well-paved. It twisted and turned. Then there came a place where the winding stopped and the road sloped to the southern shore of the Ohio River just beyond a flashing red light and a stop sign.

There was a pickup truck waiting under the flashing light. An elderly couple stood by the roadside as their hefty terrier sniffed around in the grass.

“Will the trailer be a problem?” David asked the old man.

“Shouldn’t be.”

Another car pulled up. A dad got out and later the mom and yet later a teenage son. They all gathered under the flashing light and chatted. The sun was warm but not hot. The sky was blue with scattered clouds. On the far shore of the river, a ferry had unloaded a dozen cars and was bringing back another load.

4. The Crossing

In no time at all, the Loni Jo had landed and the southbound vehicles disembarked. A gruff ferry hand waved the northbound vehicles onto the deck, car by car, lining them up in the middle first and then along each side. The ferryboat captain stood at the helm in the cabin.

“Can we get out?” David asked the hand.

“Sure,” he said as he continued directing cars, about a dozen in all.

In no time at all, the Loni Jo had ferried them across the swiftly flowing water of the Ohio River. And after a brief drive up a hill and thru the small town of Cave-In-Rock, Illinois, to which they said they plan to return someday to visit the park, David and Trudy were on their way to their next destination.

Oh… the crossing was free. What a shame that the interstate was shut down.

#silentsunday

On a ridge above the lake, on the ground in the shade beneath the canopy the forest at Lake Wappapello State Park in Missouri, there’s a green nut lying on the ground.

“What kind of nut is that?” it makes you want to ask.

My grandfather would have known. “I don’t know what kind of nut that is,” he might have said, “but it sure looks like it fell from a Hickory Tree.”

(Paraphrasing a joke he once made).

1. Small is Beautiful!

There’s a strong preference in the Unix community for small, simple tools. It’s a philosophy that emerged roughly at the same time as E.F.Schumacher’s classic reflection on economics.

The Unix Way was a philosophy spread informally but also in books, some of which are on the shelves in the other room.

Bookshelves that line the walls floor to ceiling, interior designer recommendations to ditch them notwithstanding.

2. Simplicity In Practice?

Simple software tools glued together in simple ways.

For example, to remove all the PDF files in a directory except those ending in –STUDENT , you might assemble rm, ls, and grep thusly

rm -f `ls *.pdf | grep -v -STUDENT`

And as I wrote the underlying automation for the next generation of my Algebra 2 guided notes, I embedded just such a snippet into a bash script. Except that a non-fatal error message consistently showed when there were no PDF files to begin with.

Bad juju. Can’t have error messages, fatal or not, lurking in the soul of the machine. But where was it coming from? Finding out was a drag, because it required disassembling the tools and individually checking them out.

In the end, the solution was (as it often is) to use find, a Swiss Army knife of complexity. No one remembers how to use it, ever. It is the antithesis of the Unix Way. But with that single (complex) tool, the job was so much easier.

find . -name “*.pdf” ! -name “*-STUDENT.pdf” -type f -delete

And it reads better, doesn’t it? Bonus: no more error messages.

Now, on to the math…