Oak Bay High in 1963, again...

"Ok, Let's Go Oak Bay...!"

Bays, you have arrived for a second time at Oak Bay High School in 1963!

The Vic. High girls have femptoskirts but Chas wants us to be proud that our cheerleaders still have long skirts. Maybe they were short and made longer, see discussion. He decrees one way traffic in the basement. Jungle John is geeky, has a load of books under his arm and keeps taking pictures. "Wallace and Lund" is not the name of a Vaudeville act...or is it?

Come on you guys. What have you been doing out there? The world in which we elderly grew up is evaporating around us plenty fast.

A few months ago your webmaster scratched a long time itch by "getting into" microcomputers. That and reading Pepys' Diary, half way through now, have been one of those things to be "got around to". Those of you equally nerdy owe it to yourselves to explore the Arduino microcomputers. The more powerful versions of the boards include multiple serial ports, two wire port, a serial to u.s.b. interface built in, many analogue inputs, bi-directional one bit i/o, built in p.w.m. function, two built in interrupts and even eeprom. It has everything one can think of. The little devils are powerful and require no messing about with peripheral chips. The one bit i/o will even drive 40mA loads so even those don't have to be interfaced. Everything is right on the die. The full dress version, the Arduino Mega, built around the Mega 1280 chip, is in operation in the boiler room of this building tracking everything that is going on in the two boilers and their peripherals. It does data reduction, saves some data right in its own eeprom and sends its data to a p.c. where the data are displayed on a spreadsheet. A whole series of graphs is presented there for use by the building's manager, a Stationary Engineer. Real time and historical data are provided. An early version of one of the charts appears below. Now to get on with interfacing the vehicle door on the secure parking area, the door to the boiler room, the elevator...

Writing the system has been a gas because it has forced the learning a bit of C and C++. Doing that with the blunt tool of a brain our age has been an "experience" and well worth the effort.

dhwOutputTemperature = log(((10240000/dhwOutputTemperature) - 10000)); //Apply the Steinhart-Hart formula

dhwOutputTemperature = 1 / (0.001129148 + (0.000234125 * dhwOutputTemperature) + (0.0000000876741 * dhwOutputTemperature * dhwOutputTemperature * dhwOutputTemperature));

dhwOutputTemperature = dhwOutputTemperature - 273.15; // Convert Kelvin to Celsius

if ((dhwOutputTemperature > dhwOutputTemperatureHighSet) || (dhwOutputTemperature < dhwOutputTemperatureLowSet)) {

Look at that. Now brew your own C code. It can be done with the fusty old meatware that we compelled to use. The source code for the boiler room system now runs to 1,400 lines and the compiled code is about 14k.

Now, what have you guys been doing with your old meatware? You must be doing something with it. Send along some material and photographs.

For those of you out there who are hamateurs, remember that you qualify for the Q.C.W.A. It's a pleasure to go to a meeting and chat with fellows who sling their own solder, remember "the seven circuits", the 80% on every section or fail and who passed the real radio operators' exams. Try it; support "The Old Man".

To skip on into all the photographs of O.B.H.S. back in the 'sixties, use the buttons top and bottom.

I.I.S., which it must be said had served well indeed for two years, has been supplanted by Apache. Apache is the h.t.t.p. web server originally written for use with Linux and sweet it is. It is a well thought out, flexible and potent open source program.

If you should have any difficulty with the new pages, please advise your webmaster and server wrangler.

When you are looking for software, start with the SourceForge site. The open source backup program is in use here and does a fine job.

Oak Bay High 1963 Reunion John Nightingale Chas Gibbard Wallace Y Teen Bays Graduate Omacron Beta Hi Y Green and White

Can you hear yourself saying: "Who the hell are these guys. These guys are somebody's grandfathers.

The 1963 tribe gathers once again. This is dinner for the class of 1963 before the O.B.H.S.' 75 year dance.

Here's a special service for you. Connection rates, even for dial up service, are punitive in some areas of the world. For those in such areas, the webmaster would be delighted to burn a c.d. of the site and send it to you! (The email address below is a graphic. It cannot be clicked on, either. Those two precautions fox most `bots out there harvesting email addresses for spamming purposes.)

The 40 year reunion has happened and it was organized to perfection. Congratulations, committee members!

Reunion Committee Members:

_ The reunion was a triumph of planning and execution right down to laying on perfect weather. Lynda Poyntz had the perfect location for the Friday reception, we had full access to the school, a great photo gathering and then a superb dinner and dance.

_ If you were there then you had a good time Tell the webmaster about it and we can make that public right here. If that email address produces a problem, default to

_ Are there enough of us left and sufficiently mobile to gather in a Victoria restaurant one evening each year and do a dinner? Comments can be posted here for discussion.

Newcomers:
Press "TOC" to go to the Table of Contents. In that Table of Contents, select the first page within "Introduction". You will be transported automatically to the first page of the Introduction. When you arrive at "Introduction", read on by pressing the right hand "Page" button at the end of each page. The introduction just gives a bit of background to the site to come. When it becomes wearing, just "press" the nearest "TOC" button again and skip directly to the photograph album pages.

[Time goes by...]

Thus spake the O.E.D.

Oldtimers:
You old hands, go to "TOC", pick a page and "nostalge" shamelessly!

john@munrotechnical.com