Moe Trin wrote:
[WRT San Francisco]
> Well, you see this is one of the effects of Global Warming everyone is
> talking about... I think the record high in the city was 92F, which
> is about 20 degrees above the average summer highs. Just be glad it
> doesn't get down to freezing there - some of the streets in the Russian
> Hill district are bad enough when wet.

Back in the early 1970s, when people were still scared by The Coming
Ice Age, tempertures in San Francisco could get quite warm in the
summer. Over 90 degrees F in the Mission District was not unknown.

And the one time it snowed, my wife and I bundled ourselves and young
daughter up and drove up and around Twin Peaks so daughter could look
out the car window and see real snow. We couldn't stop. The line
of cars doing exactly what we were doing stretched as far as one
could see, and that stream of slow traffic continued for hours and
hours so people could look and gawk. Seems to me it took us about
an hour for the round trip up and back and speed was dead slow most
of the time, so the line was long.

Cheers!

jim b.

--
UNIX is not user unfriendly; it merely
expects users to be computer-friendly.

Moe Trin wrote:
> Creating a script to mail a reminder should be relatively simple.

Yes, but I'd just look at the reminder once, delete it, and then forget
all about it. Sometimes low-tech works better for me.

> [compton ~]$ sed -n '/do/,/done/p' bin/which.doms | grep -vc ^#
> 165
> [compton ~]$
>
> That's an example of one of several scripts where the 'do' to 'done'
> is over 150 lines not including the comment lines. Even using
> indenting to try to make things obvious, scrolling that far trying
> to see what the heck is going on can be "interesting".

Even in my script where the 'while' loop was only 17 lines long, I put a
comment at the beginning explaining where the input was coming from.
Out of 257 lines, 103 are, or contain, comments.

The one specific thing I haven't found (yet) in bash scripting is a loop
where the test is performed at the end of the loop, like Pascal's
"repeat... until (condition)." No biggie, but it would save having to
initialize variables that get set during the loop.

>> I later calculated that we not only went 600 miles horizontally that
>> day, but also over one mile vertically.
>
> That's relatively easy to do in the West. Just driving from Flagstaff
> (7011' MSL at the airport) 136 miles down I-17 to Phoenix (1136' MSL
> at the airport) is one example.

That's exactly what we did. One short day's driving was from Santa Fe,
NM back onto I-40 to Flagstaff, then down to Phoenix, and somehow onto
I-8 and the Super 8 in Gila Bend.

>> I was only in SF one Sunday in early May '04, and it was in the mid-80s
>> that day. I will no longer believe anyone who tells me how cool it is
>> in SF year-round.
>
> Well, you see this is one of the effects of Global Warming everyone is
> talking about... I think the record high in the city was 92F, which
> is about 20 degrees above the average summer highs. Just be glad it
> doesn't get down to freezing there - some of the streets in the Russian
> Hill district are bad enough when wet.

Yes, I've learned that any part of SF is either uphill or downhill from
anything else. I very deliberately planned my trip to SoCal (with
sub-trip to NoCal) for mid-April to mid-May, after the rain and before
the real heat.

Adam

Research has been ongoing in this topic...

>>> If you pull up the records, you'll see that the NAD-27 location
>>> quoted is 41 44' 46.00" N / 73 54' 46.00" W. The chart I have
>>> doesn't show city/town lines
>> I had to dig up a map of Hyde Park, NY town wards, but that location
>> is unquestionably in the Town of Hyde Park. That would be an odd
>> place for an antenna, though, as there's a 200-foot hill practically
>> across the street.
>
> The chart I have (1:500000 aeronautical chart) only has 500 foot
> contour lines. It shows the tower, because it's an obstruction.

It was after dark when I drove past there tonight, but there was
definitely some sort of tower there, with a red light on top, and two
red lights partway up. According to Google Maps, the land there is
about 200' above sea level, and the hill practically across the street
(SE of the tower) rises to 400' above sea level.

>> Mom remembered getting seven NYC-area stations: 2, 4, 5 (Dumont
>> network), 7, 9, 11, and 13, all of which are still on the air AFAIK.
>
> Under different call signs - That _was_ WCBS-TV (Columbia Broadcasting
> System), WNBT-TV (National Broadcasting Television), WABD-TV (Alan B.
> Dumont), WJZ-TV (ABC - but don't think WJZ had any special meaning),
> WOR-TV (also nothing significant), WPIX-TV (the PIX stood for
> "picture") and WATV-TV (that one was in Newark, and I'd almost
> forgotten the call letters, which I think were for "Atlantic TV").

Yep! The earliest /New York Times/ that the community college had was
June 1, 1952 (Vassar has it back to 1857!), and their station list was
exactly as you said, except only 2, 7, and 9 had "-TV" after their call
letters.

One of the earliest TV stations in the country is barely receivable
around here, the experimental GE station in Schenectady which started TV
broadcasts in the 1920s.

>> I happen to have a paperback called "Do You Remember?" with TV trivia
>> questions and prime-time fall network schedules (only the "big three"
>> networks, unfortunately) starting with 1948.
>
> Basically, that's all there was. I don't recall Mutual (which was a
> _radio_ network - WOR AM was the local Mutual _radio_ outlet) having
> much in the line of TV, same for Dumont. Faux and PBS didn't exist at
> that time.

But what about the DuMont TV network? I found a NY Times article online
from November 19, 1950 about a strike by performers on CBS, ABC, DuMont,
and WOR-TV (but not NBC). One issue was performers' fees for kinescope
showings.

> In the New York (as well as DC,
> Chicago, and Los Angeles) markets, you had a fair amount of "live"
> television, but there was also a lot of 'kinescope' ("pre-recorded"
> on 16 mm B/W film) stuff.

I've seen kinescopes, but only when nothing better has survived. A lot
of times the kinescopes have been junked too, and many early TV shows
exist only as memories.

> These were Farmer Al Falfa in the main - probably produced for
> theater use in 1930-33.

Mom remembers that too. I recently caught a kinescope of an early
15-minute episode of "Space Patrol," and it was obvious that they only
had two video cameras. Everything else about it seemed pretty obvious
too. What did surprise me was that it actually ran the full 15 minutes.

I have a copy of the book "How to Succeed in TV without Really Trying,"
also by Shepherd Mead, ca. 1956. In an interesting afterword, he points
out that there are a few people out there (e.g. Rod Serling) who believe
that there can be quality programming on TV.

> (What I am able to laugh at is when I realize that a current TV
> commercial [maybe Accura - dunno, my brane comes unglued when I hear
> it] with a very gravelly voice singing "Make Someone Happy" is the
> late Jimmy Durante - a 1930s radio comedian who also made it into
> television [and movies too - he was the crook who drove off the road
> in the 1963 movie "Mad Mad World"]. He recorded that song in ~1960.)

I can recognize that voice too, though I never heard him say "Goodnight,
Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are." BTW that song came from the Broadway
musical "Do Re Mi," which opened in 1960. It was sung by John Reardon,
the romantic lead, although the star of that show was Phil Silvers.
Lyrics by Comden and Green, music by Jule Styne. And no, I did not have
to look that up!

Adam

Jim Beard wrote:
> Moe Trin wrote:
> [WRT San Francisco]
>> Well, you see this is one of the effects of Global Warming everyone is
>> talking about... I think the record high in the city was 92F, which
>> is about 20 degrees above the average summer highs. Just be glad it
>> doesn't get down to freezing there - some of the streets in the Russian
>> Hill district are bad enough when wet.
>
Record highs in San Francisco are above 100 F. I have walked onto
Geary from Hyde and been struck by the physical power of the light
and heat.

> Back in the early 1970s, when people were still scared by The Coming
> Ice Age, tempertures in San Francisco could get quite warm in the
> summer. Over 90 degrees F in the Mission District was not unknown.
>
> And the one time it snowed, my wife and I bundled ourselves and young
> daughter up and drove up and around Twin Peaks so daughter could look
> out the car window and see real snow. We couldn't stop. The line
> of cars doing exactly what we were doing stretched as far as one
> could see, and that stream of slow traffic continued for hours and
> hours so people could look and gawk. Seems to me it took us about
> an hour for the round trip up and back and speed was dead slow most
> of the time, so the line was long.
>
> Cheers!
>
> jim b.
>
If it doesn't freeze in San Francisco where did the
black ice I skidded on in the 1970s come from? Only
once each winter and completely different from the
oil and water mix on, say Taylor Street from about
Eddy up to Bush.

I was riding a motorcycle in each case and returning
from my job around 8 AM when i found ice on Market
Street near 16th and at the corner of Masonic and
Page. It had snowed the night before I believe. This would have been the
1970 but before 1974.

I have lived in San Francisco since 1968 if I recall correctly.

later
bliss at california dot com

--
bobbie sellers -(Back to Angband)Team *AMIGA & SF-LUG*
- a retired nurse in San Francisco

Ningen banji Human beings do
Samazama no Every single kind
Baka a suru Of stupid thing
--- 117th edition of Haifu Yanagidaru published in 1832

Adam wrote:
> Research has been ongoing in this topic...
>
>>>> If you pull up the records, you'll see that the NAD-27 location
>>>> quoted is 41 44' 46.00" N / 73 54' 46.00" W. The chart I have
>>>> doesn't show city/town lines
>>> I had to dig up a map of Hyde Park, NY town wards, but that location
>>> is unquestionably in the Town of Hyde Park. That would be an odd
>>> place for an antenna, though, as there's a 200-foot hill practically
>>> across the street.
>>
>> The chart I have (1:500000 aeronautical chart) only has 500 foot
>> contour lines. It shows the tower, because it's an obstruction.
>
> It was after dark when I drove past there tonight, but there was
> definitely some sort of tower there, with a red light on top, and two
> red lights partway up. According to Google Maps, the land there is
> about 200' above sea level, and the hill practically across the street
> (SE of the tower) rises to 400' above sea level.
>
>>> Mom remembered getting seven NYC-area stations: 2, 4, 5 (Dumont
>>> network), 7, 9, 11, and 13, all of which are still on the air AFAIK.
>>
>> Under different call signs - That _was_ WCBS-TV (Columbia Broadcasting
>> System), WNBT-TV (National Broadcasting Television), WABD-TV (Alan B.
>> Dumont), WJZ-TV (ABC - but don't think WJZ had any special meaning),
>> WOR-TV (also nothing significant), WPIX-TV (the PIX stood for
>> "picture") and WATV-TV (that one was in Newark, and I'd almost
>> forgotten the call letters, which I think were for "Atlantic TV").
>
> Yep! The earliest /New York Times/ that the community college had was
> June 1, 1952 (Vassar has it back to 1857!), and their station list was
> exactly as you said, except only 2, 7, and 9 had "-TV" after their
> call letters.
>
> One of the earliest TV stations in the country is barely receivable
> around here, the experimental GE station in Schenectady which started
> TV broadcasts in the 1920s.
>
>>> I happen to have a paperback called "Do You Remember?" with TV trivia
>>> questions and prime-time fall network schedules (only the "big three"
>>> networks, unfortunately) starting with 1948.
>>
>> Basically, that's all there was. I don't recall Mutual (which was a
>> _radio_ network - WOR AM was the local Mutual _radio_ outlet) having
>> much in the line of TV, same for Dumont. Faux and PBS didn't exist at
>> that time.
>
> But what about the DuMont TV network? I found a NY Times article
> online from November 19, 1950 about a strike by performers on CBS,
> ABC, DuMont, and WOR-TV (but not NBC). One issue was performers' fees
> for kinescope showings.
>
>> In the New York (as well as DC,
>> Chicago, and Los Angeles) markets, you had a fair amount of "live"
>> television, but there was also a lot of 'kinescope' ("pre-recorded"
>> on 16 mm B/W film) stuff.
>
> I've seen kinescopes, but only when nothing better has survived. A
> lot of times the kinescopes have been junked too, and many early TV
> shows exist only as memories.
>
>> These were Farmer Al Falfa in the main - probably produced for
>> theater use in 1930-33.
>
> Mom remembers that too. I recently caught a kinescope of an early
> 15-minute episode of "Space Patrol," and it was obvious that they only
> had two video cameras. Everything else about it seemed pretty obvious
> too. What did surprise me was that it actually ran the full 15 minutes.
>
> I have a copy of the book "How to Succeed in TV without Really
> Trying," also by Shepherd Mead, ca. 1956. In an interesting
> afterword, he points out that there are a few people out there (e.g.
> Rod Serling) who believe that there can be quality programming on TV.
>
>> (What I am able to laugh at is when I realize that a current TV
>> commercial [maybe Accura - dunno, my brane comes unglued when I hear
>> it] with a very gravelly voice singing "Make Someone Happy" is the
>> late Jimmy Durante - a 1930s radio comedian who also made it into
>> television [and movies too - he was the crook who drove off the road
>> in the 1963 movie "Mad Mad World"]. He recorded that song in ~1960.)
>
> I can recognize that voice too, though I never heard him say
> "Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are." BTW that song came from
> the Broadway musical "Do Re Mi," which opened in 1960. It was sung by
> John Reardon, the romantic lead, although the star of that show was
> Phil Silvers. Lyrics by Comden and Green, music by Jule Styne. And
> no, I did not have to look that up!
>
> Adam
Actually Durante was a vaudevillian who migrated
to radio in the 1930s and continued to work thru the
40s and right until he went into TV work and I heard
his closing line, "Good night Mrs. Calabash, wherever
you are", many times as a child. I think he may have
had mob connections but I don't know too much about
that and it was common for the entertainers who worked
in night clubs to have such affiliations. Sinatra for
example.

later
bliss at california dot com

--
bobbie sellers - a retired nurse in San Francisco

Ningen banji Human beings do
Samazama no Every single kind
Baka a suru Of stupid thing
--- 117th edition of Haifu Yanagidaru published in 1832

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva, in article
<7fidne_C-rd2yETVnZ2dnUVZ_gOdnZ2d@comcast.com>, CL \"dnoyeB\" Gilbert wrote:

>Moe Trin wrote:

>> Assume 4 systems, A, B, C, and D and an Ethernet switch that handles
>> full duplex. A can talk to B _and_ C can talk to D at "full" speed
>> ("100 Megabit/sec" each way). The problems come in when B isn't
>> a 100 Mb interface (then the switch has to buffer/convert which would
>> slow down the A-B connection), or when two or three system want to
>> talk to one box at the same time. A "blivet" is ten pounds of stuff
>> in a five pound bag - and that one host can only talk/listen so fast.
>
>That is not correct, AFAIK. A switch will not buffer for this reason.

You may want to spend some time reading the data sheets for various
Cisco, DLink, Linksys and 3COM multi-speed switches.

>The sending device will be instructed to back off its data until it
>eventually is transmitting at a speed the receiver can accept. This
>info often trickles back up to the IP layer and even the TCP layer so
>more efficient use of bandwidth can take place.

I think you are mis-interpreting what I wrote. In the case where 'A'
is a 100BaseT Full Duplex device, the _switch_ is talking to "A" at 100
Megabit rate. If "B" is a classic 10BaseT half duplex device, the same
switch will talk it it at the slower rate. If "A" and "B" are talking
to each other, "A" will send (at 100 Megabit) data "to" "B" up to the
TCP Window amount - then wait for "B" to "ACK" sufficiently so that
more data can be sent if needed. Because "B" is only able to receive
at 10 Megabit (actually somewhat less due to duplexing), the window
size chunk of packets will be buffered on the switch. Are you
expecting the switch to send an ICMP Type 4? My Cisco's certainly
aren't. Are you expecting host "B" to send an ICMP Type 4? Why?

Old guy

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva, in article
, Jim Beard wrote:

>Moe Trin wrote:

>[WRT San Francisco]
>> Well, you see this is one of the effects of Global Warming everyone
>> is talking about... I think the record high in the city was 92F,
>> which is about 20 degrees above the average summer highs. Just be
>> glad it doesn't get down to freezing there - some of the streets in
>> the Russian Hill district are bad enough when wet.
>
>Back in the early 1970s, when people were still scared by The Coming
>Ice Age, tempertures in San Francisco could get quite warm in the
>summer. Over 90 degrees F in the Mission District was not unknown.

They're called "micro climates" by the wine growers up in Napa and
Sonoma, but they exist in the Bay area, and within the city itself.
I remember Pete Giddings talking about them a lot. The "official"
weather reporting site used to be the Federal Office Building, at
Fulton and Market, then it was moved to Mission Dolores (16th and
Dolores), then to Duboce Park, and recently to the Mint. But the
local conditions in the Sunset, Richmond, Presidio, or in Hunters
Point _will_ be different.

>And the one time it snowed, my wife and I bundled ourselves and young
>daughter up and drove up and around Twin Peaks so daughter could look
>out the car window and see real snow. We couldn't stop. The line
>of cars doing exactly what we were doing stretched as far as one
>could see, and that stream of slow traffic continued for hours and
>hours so people could look and gawk. Seems to me it took us about
>an hour for the round trip up and back and speed was dead slow most
>of the time, so the line was long.

I recall a similar incident - driving back from Modesto to Mountain
View - it was raining at Sunol and Mission San Jose (in Fremont),
but at the top of the Sunol pass (1003 or 1012 feet - can't remember
what the sign at the summit says) on 680, it was definitely snowing.
There were cars pulled over at the brake check area at the summit,
and lots of people out gawking.

I also recall a number of incidences where the East Bay hills were
white with snow (what, maybe an inch or so?) at least in the mornings.

Snow is extremely rare in San Francisco, with only 10 documented
instances of measurable snow at the official observing site in the
past 143 seasons. Snow has fallen on a number of other occasions,
but usually only in trace amounts or at the higher elevations.
Additionally, some of these occurrences are not true snow events but
were the result of either small hail or ice pellets.

I've got photos of my back yard in Phoenix where the ground was white
with "snow", and the thermometer is showing about 35F. The white stuff
was actually ice pellets - but it was disconcerting none the less.

Old guy

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva, in article
<6jtvscF553h1U1@mid.individual.net>, bobbie sellers wrote:

>Jim Beard wrote:

>> Moe Trin wrote:
>> [WRT San Francisco]

>>> Well, you see this is one of the effects of Global Warming everyone
>>> is talking about... I think the record high in the city was 92F,
>>> which is about 20 degrees above the average summer highs.

> Record highs in San Francisco are above 100 F.

Is that "official", or just an observed/reported temperature within the
city? I _think_ the "official" high was this past May when it got up
to 97 at the Mint.

>I have walked onto Geary from Hyde and been struck by the physical
>power of the light and heat.

No doubt, but it would have been hotter down near the Cow Palace ;-)

> If it doesn't freeze in San Francisco where did the
>black ice I skidded on in the 1970s come from? Only
>once each winter and completely different from the
>oil and water mix on, say Taylor Street from about
>Eddy up to Bush.

As in my reply to Jim - it's those darn microclimates. Wiki reports
that the lowest temperature in San Francisco was 27F on 11 Dec, 1932,
yet the NOAA site reports a lowest low of 30F (January, no year given),
and another site says 34F (in January of some unspecifed year).

> I was riding a motorcycle in each case and returning
>from my job around 8 AM when i found ice on Market
>Street near 16th and at the corner of Masonic and
>Page. It had snowed the night before I believe. This would
>have been the 1970 but before 1974.

Market and 16th is close enough to the Federal Building (50 Fulton St)
which was the official observation site back then, as is Masonic and
Page. But the fact that you have to think back that far shows that such
conditions are pretty rare there.

> I have lived in San Francisco since 1968 if I recall correctly.

1971 to 1996 in the South Bay (Mountain View and Sunnyvale), but my
wife graduated from Mission Dolores "a few years" before that.

Old guy

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva, in article
, Adam wrote:

Moe Trin wrote:

>> Creating a script to mail a reminder should be relatively simple.
>
>Yes, but I'd just look at the reminder once, delete it, and then forget
>all about it. Sometimes low-tech works better for me.

Well, you can run the script every day for a week before the important
date - but I usually just mark the (paper) calendar. ;-)

>Even in my script where the 'while' loop was only 17 lines long, I put
>a comment at the beginning explaining where the input was coming from.
>Out of 257 lines, 103 are, or contain, comments.

Some people might consider that excessive - others would applauded the
information being available. I tend to lean towards the latter.

>The one specific thing I haven't found (yet) in bash scripting is a
>loop where the test is performed at the end of the loop, like Pascal's
>"repeat... until (condition)." No biggie, but it would save having to
>initialize variables that get set during the loop.

[compton ~]$ cat quux
until [ $i ]
do
echo "passed here"
i=0
done
[compton ~]$ ./quux
passed here
[compton ~]$

Something like that? 'i' is undefined, and so tests as a null.
Otherwise, I set a flag, test that, run the loop, test for the actual
exit/break conditions, and either 'break' out of the loop, or set the
flag to the value that fails the loop test.

>> That's relatively easy to do in the West. Just driving from Flagstaff
>> (7011' MSL at the airport) 136 miles down I-17 to Phoenix (1136' MSL
>> at the airport) is one example.
>
>That's exactly what we did. One short day's driving was from Santa Fe,
>NM back onto I-40 to Flagstaff, then down to Phoenix, and somehow onto
>I-8 and the Super 8 in Gila Bend.

Probably I-17 -> I-10 -> AZ-85 in Buckeye (about 32 miles West) -> I-8
in Gila Bend. Gila Bend is a bit lower (778' MSL), and you'll cross into
California at about 200' MSL in Yuma.

>Yes, I've learned that any part of SF is either uphill or downhill from
>anything else.

Actually, the city isn't _that_ hilly - the highest point in town is a
bit under 950 feet above the lowest point. Of course, that height change
is about 3 1/2 miles apart or about 1 foot vertical for every 19.5 feet
horizontal. Actually, there are a number of streets with substantially
greater grade changes. When my mother came out to visit, we did most
of the sightseeing by car, including the mandatory drive down "The
Crookedest Street in the World" (Lombard Street, between Hyde and
Leavenworth). It's a tourist thing, but when you need 8 150 degree
turns in an eighth of a mile...

Old guy

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva, in article
, Adam wrote:

>It was after dark when I drove past there tonight, but there was
>definitely some sort of tower there, with a red light on top, and two
>red lights partway up. According to Google Maps, the land there is
>about 200' above sea level, and the hill practically across the street
>(SE of the tower) rises to 400' above sea level.

The aviation chart says the tower is 239 feet tall which agrees within
reason of the 81 degree electrical length reported by the FCC. The
chart also says the top of the tower is 509 feet MSL, so the ground
should be 270' above sea level.

>Yep! The earliest /New York Times/ that the community college had was
>June 1, 1952 (Vassar has it back to 1857!), and their station list was
>exactly as you said, except only 2, 7, and 9 had "-TV" after their call
>letters.

In theory, the -TV suffix is meant to identify the TV station with the
same call letters used by another service (WCBS AM was on 880, WCBS-FM
on 101.1 MHz, and WCBS-TV on channel 2).

>But what about the DuMont TV network? I found a NY Times article online
>from November 19, 1950 about a strike by performers on CBS, ABC, DuMont,
>and WOR-TV (but not NBC). One issue was performers' fees for kinescope
>showings.

I think the Dumont network was limited at best. Channel 6 in New Haven
was originally supposed to be part of that, but I don't recall any
network programming, and WNHC-TV cherry-picked, but was more or less
independent.

>I've seen kinescopes, but only when nothing better has survived. A
>lot of times the kinescopes have been junked too, and many early TV
>shows exist only as memories.

I don't believe kinescopes were intended to have a life of more than
a few weeks. Later when some executive finally tumbled to the idea
of syndication, they started producing film with the intent of long
term distribution.

>> These were Farmer Al Falfa in the main - probably produced for
>> theater use in 1930-33.
>
>Mom remembers that too. I recently caught a kinescope of an early
>15-minute episode of "Space Patrol," and it was obvious that they
>only had two video cameras.

Cameras were EXTREMELY expensive. I remember the 5820 Image Orthicon
tube (used in a lot of RCA black/white cameras) costing $1200 in the
mid 1950s - for perspective, that was also the cost of a VW Beetle.
I did a couple of weeks vacation relief as a transmitter engineer way
back when, and this included being one of the camera operators for a
locally produced game show. We also had two RCA cameras (about 15 by 9
by 30 inches and weighed a ton), with about 35 tubes. Being analog,
the adjustments drifted constantly. I commented about this to my uncle
who was with CBS in DC, and he suggested I look at another tube - an
iconoscope, which was the previous era. It was even worse. And neither
tube was very sensitive, so we had huge stage lights - six (?) of them,
each of which would have heated the studio in winter by itself.

>I have a copy of the book "How to Succeed in TV without Really
>Trying," also by Shepherd Mead, ca. 1956. In an interesting
>afterword, he points out that there are a few people out there (e.g.
>Rod Serling) who believe that there can be quality programming on TV.

Well HE certainly succeeded - but he was quite right. There were
some documentaries produced by Bell Telephone, and some of the Sunday
shows were extremely well done. You also have to recall that they had
some real talent available - not just the performers, but also the
people writing the shows. Part of this was the lesser amount of
competition which meant that the talent wasn't spread to thin.

>I can recognize that voice too, though I never heard him say
>"Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are."

1930s - 1940s radio.

>BTW that song came from the Broadway musical "Do Re Mi," which opened
>in 1960. It was sung by John Reardon, the romantic lead, although
>the star of that show was Phil Silvers. Lyrics by Comden and Green,
>music by Jule Styne. And no, I did not have to look that up!

Durante sang original stuff back in the 30s and 40s, but by te late
1950s he was rarely doing so - he was doing his own version of other
songs - he also did "September Song" in the same nostalgic style as
the "Make Someone Happy" - even if his voice sounded bad, at least he
was able to carry the tune.

Old guy

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva, in article
<6ju079F4vn8bU1@mid.individual.net>, bobbie sellers wrote:

>Adam wrote:

>> I can recognize that voice too, though I never heard him say
>> "Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are."

> Actually Durante was a vaudevillian who migrated
>to radio in the 1930s and continued to work thru the
>40s and right until he went into TV work and I heard
>his closing line, "Good night Mrs. Calabash, wherever
>you are", many times as a child.

He was also a Warner Brothers movie star, and was characterized in a
number of Looney Toons cartoons - such as "Baby Bottleneck" in 1945,
and "Swooner Crooner" in 1944 among others.

>I think he may have had mob connections but I don't know
>too much about that and it was common for the entertainers
>who worked in night clubs to have such affiliations. Sinatra
>for example.

I have several black/white pictures of Durante in the 1940s in
which he's showing off his car. Can't find them all at the moment,
but one is on page 84 of the January 2004 issue is Smithsonian
magazine. He's dressing very much like a hood - and an earlier
one (believe it's also in the Smithsonian magazine) is more of
a frontal shot - very dark (perhaps black) shirt and dark tie,
large cigar, and a hat pulled part-way down over his eyes. Looks
like the classic bootlegger. About the only thing missing was the
moll, and the M1928 Thompson gun. But then, that's appearance, and
that can be deceiving.

Old guy

Moe Trin wrote:

> We also had two RCA cameras (about 15 by 9 by 30 inches and weighed
> a ton), with about 35 tubes. Being analog, the adjustments drifted
> constantly.

The very first colour TV cameras that I worked on at the BBC (EMI ones) were
left constantly powered up in an effort to prevent warm-up drift problems!
In the same way, the video monitors were also left powered, as was the only
standards converter we had at the time!

C.

On 2008-09-25, Moe Trin wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva, in article
>, Adam wrote:
>
> Moe Trin wrote:
>
>>> Creating a script to mail a reminder should be relatively simple.
>>
>>Yes, but I'd just look at the reminder once, delete it, and then forget
>>all about it. Sometimes low-tech works better for me.
>
> Well, you can run the script every day for a week before the important
> date - but I usually just mark the (paper) calendar. ;-)
>
>>Even in my script where the 'while' loop was only 17 lines long, I put
>>a comment at the beginning explaining where the input was coming from.
>>Out of 257 lines, 103 are, or contain, comments.
>
> Some people might consider that excessive - others would applauded the
> information being available. I tend to lean towards the latter.
>
>>The one specific thing I haven't found (yet) in bash scripting is a
>>loop where the test is performed at the end of the loop, like Pascal's
>>"repeat... until (condition)." No biggie, but it would save having to
>>initialize variables that get set during the loop.
>
> [compton ~]$ cat quux
> until [ $i ]
> do
> echo "passed here"
> i=0
> done
> [compton ~]$ ./quux
> passed here
> [compton ~]$
>
> Something like that? 'i' is undefined, and so tests as a null.
> Otherwise, I set a flag, test that, run the loop, test for the actual
> exit/break conditions, and either 'break' out of the loop, or set the
> flag to the value that fails the loop test.

The test is still performed at the beginning of each loop.

You can check that by defining i (in the script, or exported at the
command line) before running it; nothing will be echoed.

This has the test at the end of the loop:

while :
do

: do whatever here

[ some-test-here ] && break
done

--
Chris F.A. Johnson, author |
Shell Scripting Recipes: | My code in this post, if any,
A Problem-Solution Approach | is released under the
2005, Apress | GNU General Public Licence

Moe Trin wrote:
> Well, you can run the script every day for a week before the important
> date - but I usually just mark the (paper) calendar. ;-)

Me too.

>> Even in my script where the 'while' loop was only 17 lines long, I put
>> a comment at the beginning explaining where the input was coming from.
>> Out of 257 lines, 103 are, or contain, comments.
>
> Some people might consider that excessive - others would applauded the
> information being available. I tend to lean towards the latter.

I'm not backing off on that one. I consider decent documentation part
of a finished program. Especially when I'm hoping that someone else
will come along and improve on what I've done.

Also, this is a script, so about the first quarter is the comments that
would otherwise be in a separate documentation file. And anyone who
wants to is free to delete the comments from their copy of it, except
for the copyright boilerplate at the beginning.

>> The one specific thing I haven't found (yet) in bash scripting is a
>> loop where the test is performed at the end of the loop, like Pascal's
>> "repeat... until (condition)."
>
> [compton ~]$ cat quux
> until [ $i ]
> do
> echo "passed here"
> i=0
> done
>
> Something like that? 'i' is undefined, and so tests as a null.
> Otherwise, I set a flag, test that, run the loop, test for the actual
> exit/break conditions, and either 'break' out of the loop, or set the
> flag to the value that fails the loop test.

That's what I did. In this case, it just meant setting a flag to zero
before the loop, and knowing that the loop would be run at least once.
After all the courses where I had to use Pascal or Modula-2 or other
structured languages, I'm reluctant to 'break' out of a loop unless
that's the clearest way to do so.

> When my mother came out to visit, we did most
> of the sightseeing by car, including the mandatory drive down "The
> Crookedest Street in the World" (Lombard Street, between Hyde and
> Leavenworth). It's a tourist thing, but when you need 8 150 degree
> turns in an eighth of a mile...

I've seen photos, but not the actual street. There's not a heck of a
lot of SF that can be seen in a few hours. One of my more vivid
memories is suddenly seeing South SF from the bus window (the trains
were temporarily closed weekends) and immediately understanding the song
"Little Boxes." It turns out that song was actually inspired by Daly
City, but I will always think of South SF whenever I hear it.

Adam

Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
>>> The one specific thing I haven't found (yet) in bash scripting is a
>>> loop where the test is performed at the end of the loop, like Pascal's
>>> "repeat... until (condition)."

> This has the test at the end of the loop:
>
> while :
> do
>
> : do whatever here
>
> [ some-test-here ] && break
> done

Thanks, Chris, I'll remember that! I think that because of all my
classes that used Pascal, Modula-2, or other "structured" languages, I'm
reluctant to just 'break' out of a loop unless there's no other way to
do it more cleanly. In this case I just had to set one variable before
the loop, so I left it a standard 'while' loop.

Adam

Moe Trin wrote:
> The aviation chart says the tower is 239 feet tall which agrees within
> reason of the 81 degree electrical length reported by the FCC.

What's an "81 degree electrical length"? Or shouldn't I ask?

I drove by at twilight yesterday, and there's a tower there, all right.
I think it's about where their studio used to be, so maybe they
originally built it in their own back yard, and just kept it when they
moved downtown.

> In theory, the -TV suffix is meant to identify the TV station with the
> same call letters used by another service (WCBS AM was on 880, WCBS-FM
> on 101.1 MHz, and WCBS-TV on channel 2).

Interesting that you should use that for an example, because that's the
only time I have my car radio preset to both AM & FM versions of the
same station. WCBS-AM is all news, WCBS-FM is back to "all oldies"
(though their signal's weak in my part of the county), and I rarely
watch WCBS-TV but I assume it's still the flagship and network O&O.

> I think the Dumont network was limited at best. Channel 6 in New Haven
> was originally supposed to be part of that, but I don't recall any
> network programming, and WNHC-TV cherry-picked, but was more or less
> independent.

Yep, http://www.wtnh.com/Global/story.asp...av=menu29_10_9 .
By the time I was watching TV, they'd become WTNH, channel 8, and an ABC
affiliate.

> I don't believe kinescopes were intended to have a life of more than
> a few weeks. Later when some executive finally tumbled to the idea
> of syndication, they started producing film with the intent of long
> term distribution.

Question about kinescopes: if a show was done live in NYC at 8 PM, what
did the west coast see three hours later? A kinescope of the previous
week's show?

"I Love Lucy" (started September 1951) may not have been the first
filmed TV show, but I know why it was filmed -- the sponsor had more
potential customers east of the Mississippi, but the stars didn't want
to leave SoCal, and hit on the "filmed before a live audience" idea as a
way to stay, before they even knew whether it was possible to light a
set for three simultaneous film cameras. Using movie cameras instead of
video cameras also allowed a lot more camera movement.

>> I recently caught a kinescope of an early
>> 15-minute episode of "Space Patrol," and it was obvious that they
>> only had two video cameras.
>
> Cameras were EXTREMELY expensive.

Which wasn't entirely a bad thing, as that meant they were generally
only in the hands of the professionals. The situation was similar with
early movie cameras.

> And neither
> tube was very sensitive, so we had huge stage lights - six (?) of them,
> each of which would have heated the studio in winter by itself.

I've seen photos of those days, and the lights look nearly as bad as the
early days of Technicolor. The only time I was at an actual broadcast
was a local game show in the mid-70s, a sort of high school version of
"College Bowl", and the lights didn't seem worse than a stage show. I
was disillusioned to see that the set didn't look as good as it did on
TV. That was also the only time I used tungsten-balanced Ektachrome.

>> I have a copy of the book "How to Succeed in TV without Really
>> Trying," also by Shepherd Mead, ca. 1956. In an interesting
>> afterword, he points out that there are a few people out there (e.g.
>> Rod Serling) who believe that there can be quality programming on TV.
>
> Well HE certainly succeeded - but he was quite right.

"They are people like Pat Weaver, Ed Murrow, Rod Serling, Reginald Rose,
David Davidson, Paddy Chayefsky, Fred Coe, Delbert Mann, Tony Miner, and
hundreds of others." ... "We can fill it with the the blubbering of
fools, or we can make such magic as we have never seen." Well, Newton
Minow answered /that/ question.

> There were
> some documentaries produced by Bell Telephone

Yes, in junior high we were shown them as educational films. I also
have the "soundtrack LP" of the 1960 Bell Telephone Hour version of "The
Mikado"... nowadays it would be presented as a major cultural event;
back then it was just another week's show. I put "soundtrack LP" in
quotes because I have several "original TV soundtrack" LPs of TV shows
from the late '50s, and they were actually recorded separately from the
broadcast, in a recording studio.

Adam

On Fri, 26 Sep 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva, in article
, Adam wrote:

>Moe Trin wrote:

>>> Out of 257 lines, 103 are, or contain, comments.
>>
>> Some people might consider that excessive - others would applauded
>> the information being available. I tend to lean towards the latter.
>
>I'm not backing off on that one. I consider decent documentation part
>of a finished program.

What kind of wild-eyed radical are you? Decent Documentation??? ;-)

>Also, this is a script, so about the first quarter is the comments
>that would otherwise be in a separate documentation file. And anyone
>who wants to is free to delete the comments from their copy of it,
>except for the copyright boilerplate at the beginning.

To some extent, optimal comment levels depend what the script is, and
who is the ultimate user. I've always expected at least several lines
at the beginning (after the bang-splat) that gives a description of
what the script is intended to do, and a 'Usage:' output if the script
is run with missing or inappropriate input. If the script is large, I
like to see 'progressive' comments describing what "this" section may
be doing. If there are internal functions or subroutines, they should
also be commented - at least describing what variables they are
expecting, and what is output.

>> Something like that? 'i' is undefined, and so tests as a null.
>> Otherwise, I set a flag, test that, run the loop, test for the actual
>> exit/break conditions, and either 'break' out of the loop, or set the
>> flag to the value that fails the loop test.
>
>That's what I did. In this case, it just meant setting a flag to zero
>before the loop, and knowing that the loop would be run at least once.

Another syntax has been to use an infinite loop, and exit/break after a
test condition. Chris mentioned the 'while : ; do ; done' method, and
two others are

while true until false
do do
stuff stuff
if [ EXIT_CONDITION] if [ EXIT_CONDITION]
then then
break break
fi fi
done done

Here, the 'true' or 'false' satisfies the loop test as the colon did.

>After all the courses where I had to use Pascal or Modula-2 or other
>structured languages, I'm reluctant to 'break' out of a loop unless
>that's the clearest way to do so.

Obviously, it's going to depend on what you are doing in the loop. If
you leave things messy in there, then the break may not be optimal,
and it may be worth putting a test at the beginning of the loop (where
the 'true', 'false' or ':' go above). Otherwise, you can do any needed
cleanup between the 'then' and the 'break'.

>> When my mother came out to visit, we did most of the sightseeing by
>> car, including the mandatory drive down "The Crookedest Street in
>> the World" (Lombard Street, between Hyde and Leavenworth). It's a
>> tourist thing, but when you need 8 150 degree turns in an eighth of
>> a mile...
>
>I've seen photos, but not the actual street. There's not a heck of a
>lot of SF that can be seen in a few hours.

In tourist season, you can almost be in a line for an hour just trying
to _reach_ the street. I've seen tour busses come down Hyde street (at
the top of this attraction), stop and drop their passengers and guide,
then truddle off some place - "I'll pick you up on Leavenworth down
below in 10 minutes". (For the larger - 30+ passenger - busses, they
have to allow ten minutes, because they're to large to make the next
few left turns anyway, as the grade is still to steep.)

>One of my more vivid memories is suddenly seeing South SF from the
>bus window (the trains were temporarily closed weekends) and
>immediately understanding the song "Little Boxes." It turns out that
>song was actually inspired by Daly City, but I will always think of
>South SF whenever I hear it.

That's referring to the houses just above I-280 in Daly City. "But
look at the _view_ (when the fog isn't pouring through the Colma
gap)" and actually it's only the houses closest to I-280 that have a
decent view. The other minor disadvantages is that they're under the
departure corridor for runway 28L/R from SFO, and are within a mile
of the San Andreas fault-line (though admittedly on relatively solid
rock). If you head East into South city, you're getting closer to the
airport, and the industrial areas. And yet because of their proximity
to The City, the houses in Daly City and South San Francisco were
priced at obscene levels by the 1980s. If you look around the area
from the air, you'll discover that _most_ of the buildable land is
(densely) covered with such cruft.

Old guy

On Fri, 26 Sep 2008, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux.mandriva, in article
, Adam wrote:

>Moe Trin wrote:

>> The aviation chart says the tower is 239 feet tall which agrees
>> within reason of the 81 degree electrical length reported by the
>> FCC.
>
>What's an "81 degree electrical length"? Or shouldn't I ask?

The length relating to the wavelength. Length in meters is 300/MHz
(times a velocity factor we'll ignore). So, 300/.95 = 315.8 meters,
* 3.28 = 1035.8 feet. 81/360 * 1035.8 = 233.0 feet. That gives you
a couple of feet to spare for the foundation and insulators at the
base, and the obstruction light at the tippity top.

>I drove by at twilight yesterday, and there's a tower there, all
>right. I think it's about where their studio used to be, so maybe
>they originally built it in their own back yard, and just kept it
>when they moved downtown.

Can't say. AM radio station towers tend to be relatively tall, and
need either a very conductive ground under the tower (and some
distance around that), OR need to be about a half wavelength and fed
(the antenna leads connected) in the middle - very messy. The result
is that such antennas tend to be "out of town", or setting with their
feet in a swamp. river or similar. There are several towers that used
to be used by AM stations in downtown Phoenix, including one on the
top of an 11 story building. It's now used for FM and mobile (two-way)
radio facilities.

>WCBS-AM is all news, WCBS-FM is back to "all oldies" (though their
>signal's weak in my part of the county),

I knew of the all-news format, because we get an occasional feed from
there. The -FM station _used_ to be carried on AFRTS (Armed Forces
Radio and Television Service) overseas in the wee hours, with any
commercials and otherwise "local" content replaced. "A touch of
home" for those overseas.

>Yep, http://www.wtnh.com/Global/story.asp...av=menu29_10_9 .

Looking at that site brings back really ancient memories. I actually
remember a bit about each of the '40s and '50s shows.

>By the time I was watching TV, they'd become WTNH, channel 8, and an ABC
>affiliate.

By that time, I'd discovered girls, and had less time to spend on TV.

>Question about kinescopes: if a show was done live in NYC at 8 PM, what
>did the west coast see three hours later? A kinescope of the previous
>week's show?

I don't know for sure - I was in the NYC area for most of that era,
and while in Florida didn't pay that close attention. I suspect the
answer is "that depends".

>"I Love Lucy" (started September 1951) may not have been the first
>filmed TV show,

Oh my, no - there were a lot of earlier shows - mainly cross-overs
from radio.

>but I know why it was filmed -- the sponsor had more potential
>customers east of the Mississippi, but the stars didn't want to leave
>SoCal, and hit on the "filmed before a live audience" idea as a way
>to stay, before they even knew whether it was possible to light a
>set for three simultaneous film cameras.

They did use fairly large lights, but not as big as they would have
needed for video cameras.

>Using movie cameras instead of video cameras also allowed a lot
>more camera movement.

Well, yeah - you didn't have that honking HUGE cable (lessee, 3 coax
[video, horizontal and vertical sync - no, we're not talking color],
2 pair of audio, 4 pair of AC power, and then some - about an inch
diameter) from the wall to each camera, never mind the slaves moving
the cameras, boom mikes, lights, cables, and everything else.

>>> it was obvious that they only had two video cameras.
>>
>> Cameras were EXTREMELY expensive.
>
>Which wasn't entirely a bad thing, as that meant they were generally
>only in the hands of the professionals. The situation was similar
>with early movie cameras.

I dunno - I was operating a camera on-air (admittedly under close
"move right, point at his face" type of supervision) after roughly 3
hours of "instruction". True, most of this was learning where each knob
was and how far to turn it at a time and in which direction, and "don't
ever touch this knob"... It helped pay for the first set of
replacement tires (grumble, grumble, 6,000 miles on the factory shoes)
for my car. If you're referring to the pre-war manually cranked
movie cameras - they probably had a bit MORE training time, trying
to learn to turn the crank without making the camera bob and weave
at the same time.

>> And neither tube was very sensitive, so we had huge stage lights -
>> six (?) of them, each of which would have heated the studio in
>> winter by itself.
>
>I've seen photos of those days, and the lights look nearly as bad as
>the early days of Technicolor.

I've long forgotten the specs, but think the sensitivity was much the
same as Kodacolor (vaguely ASA 10-20). They weren't the worst thing,
as the vidicon used for film and slides were looking straight into the
projectors (admittedly with a well stopped down lens).

>The only time I was at an actual broadcast was a local game show in
>the mid-70s, a sort of high school version of "College Bowl", and the
>lights didn't seem worse than a stage show.

By the 1970s, they had gone a LONG way in improving the sensitivity
of camera tubes, and creating lower noise level video amplifiers. As
long as the action wasn't that fast, you could make do with "normal"
light levels assuming black/white. Color still took more lighting.

>I was disillusioned to see that the set didn't look as good as it did
>on TV.

Above, you had the URL for WNHC - some of us got to visit the studio
and (sorta) observe the "Connecticut Bandstand" show (local take-off
of Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" out of Phily). "Disillusion"
is probably an understatement. The studio was tiny - and the "dance
floor" wasn't much larger than 10 by 15 feet - and part of that was
reserved for the cameras (which had "normal" lens for shots of the
host, and wide-angles for use in shots of the kids dancing.

>"They are people like Pat Weaver, Ed Murrow, Rod Serling, Reginald
>Rose, David Davidson, Paddy Chayefsky, Fred Coe, Delbert Mann, Tony
>Miner, and hundreds of others." ... "We can fill it with the the
>blubbering of fools, or we can make such magic as we have never seen."
>Well, Newton Minow answered /that/ question.

Well of course. The advertising agencies discovered that television
shows like that (Ed Murrow? You bet your sweet a$$ he was good -
I remember his "See It Now" show when he took on Sen. McCarthy in 54)
were "above" the average viewer. Instead, you had Berle "walking"
about on the sides of his shoes with his tongue out and his eyes
crossed. Oh, that's funny. Bah! But then, there was also
people like Ernie Kovacs - also out of Phily initially.

>> There were some documentaries produced by Bell Telephone
>
>Yes, in junior high we were shown them as educational films.

Doctor Frank Baxter - heavy-set guy, but man could he teach
(without appearing to do so - you just learned).

>I also have the "soundtrack LP" of the 1960 Bell Telephone Hour
>version of "The Mikado"... nowadays it would be presented as a major
>cultural event; back then it was just another week's show.

Again, tastes change, and market share says we can't get a decent
audience showing that. I don't think they are showing the Opera
from the Met on TV (although it's still on radio). No, I'm far from
the greatest opera fan, but I'd certainly watch some of it.

>I put "soundtrack LP" in quotes because I have several "original TV
>soundtrack" LPs of TV shows from the late '50s, and they were actually
>recorded separately from the broadcast, in a recording studio.

That was no different than Hollywood - in _most_ cases, the broadcast
came from a place where either the acoustics were powdered dog poop,
or they couldn't get cameras and adequate lighting in and still have
room for the orchestra. Recall, a "small" orchestra might be 30ish
musicians - a big one might be 90. Radio City Music Hall in the 1950s
was one example where it was possible, but they were not all that
common.

Old guy

Moe Trin wrote:
> What kind of wild-eyed radical are you? Decent Documentation??? ;-)

Yeah, radical idea, isn't it? :-) I'm one of those weirdos who actually
reads the directions.

> To some extent, optimal comment levels depend what the script is, and
> who is the ultimate user.

I'll agree. In this case, I'm assuming anyone willing to invoke a
script from the command line can use some text editor on it to change
some of the defaults, which are pointed out at the start.

>> After all the courses where I had to use Pascal or Modula-2 or other
>> structured languages, I'm reluctant to 'break' out of a loop unless
>> that's the clearest way to do so.
>
> Obviously, it's going to depend on what you are doing in the loop. If
> you leave things messy in there, then the break may not be optimal

I suppose I'm thinking there's some data on the stack that won't get
cleaned up unless the loop finishes "properly." This preconception may
have nothing to do with the realities of bash scripts. Like I said
before, each language requires a mindset of its own. I have no
objection to an occasional GOTO, but too many of them make a program
hard to follow.

>>> "The Crookedest Street in the World"
>
> In tourist season, you can almost be in a line for an hour just trying
> to _reach_ the street.

I gather people live on that block, and on Montclair Terrace which juts
off it. I suppose they have to wait too, which by itself is a good
argument against living there.

> I've seen tour busses come down Hyde street (at
> the top of this attraction), stop and drop their passengers and guide

From Google Maps, it looks like the street is one-way for traffic, but
do any adventurous souls ever try to walk it uphill? Years ago I
climbed up Masada before sunrise on the "snake path", which is
considerably worse, but only meant for pedestrians.

>> the song "Little Boxes." It turns out that
>> song was actually inspired by Daly City, but I will always think of
>> South SF whenever I hear it.
>
> That's referring to the houses just above I-280 in Daly City. "But
> look at the _view_

Of all the residences I've ever visited, including many along the Hudson
River known for their views, my favorite view was from where my cousin
used to live in lower Manhattan. From about a dozen flights up, you
could look straight along 8th Ave. from 14th St. to at least Columbus
Circle (59th St.). Especially impressive after dark.

> And yet because of their proximity
> to The City, the houses in Daly City and South San Francisco were
> priced at obscene levels by the 1980s. If you look around the area
> from the air, you'll discover that _most_ of the buildable land is
> (densely) covered with such cruft.

I'm sure it's possible to design houses packed together that don't
collectively look hideous, but it certainly wasn't done there. Around
here the 1970s resulted in fields of raised ranches on 1/4-acre lots.
Newer construction is even more hideous. My parents' neighborhood
(originally late 1950s) has been extended with McMansions, $1M+,
including one on land so steep the road is at the level of the bottom of
the roof.

Another cousin showed me the shacks of Cupertino, including the
obligatory junked cars and the tarps used as roof repair. Honest!

Adam