Chương 25: Book 2 - Chapter 4 A

Just before lunch on the twenty-first, Grandpa drove one of the minivans to pick up Matt from the airport.

"I insist that I drive," Matt told Grandpa after they loaded his luggage.

"Don't argue, Grandpa. Just sit up front. I'll sit in the back," I told him. Grandpa wanted to know about his training, and Matt was happy to explain.

"There wasn't much time for practicing it was mostly the how-to. How to guard the principal, how to manage traffic while driving, what to do when threatened, where my priorities need to be. When we did practice, I did good."

"Great, I knew you were smart. I'm glad you picked up everything so quickly. Were there mannequins?" I asked. He smiled widely, looking at me in the rear view mirror.

"There were. But none wearing a dress." Grandpa got a funny look on his face, but didn't ask. When we got back to the hotel, I brought Matt to my room.

"Go ahead and move the Apple computer to your room. You need to learn to type."

"Okay. It's all plugged in," I said a few minutes later, crawling out from under the desk in Matt's room.

"So how do I turn it on?" he asked as he sat down in the chair in front of the Apple //e.

"This is the screen switch and this is for the computer."

"The disk drive thing. Does that have a power switch too?"

"No. It is powered by the computer. This is the game disk. It slides in this way, then you turn this to lock it in place." I showed him how to start the disk and Alphabet Invasion came up.

"This is the main menu. Use the arrow keys to select Easy Mode. Then choose new typist." An image of two hands appeared on the screen, with the fingers numbered. Number 4 blinked, and then the screen changed and letters started to fall.

"What do I do?" he asked in a panic.

"Using finger number four, your left index finger only, type the letters that are falling."

"Hey the letters disappear."

"It's going to train you to type those letters with just that finger. When you get a certain amount right it will switch to a different finger."

"That teaches me to type?" he asked, concentrating on the screen, but looking at the keyboard each time a new letter fell.

"It will. By training each finger independently at first, you build the muscle memory required. The program moves on as you progress."

"It's kind of fun. It is kind of like space invaders."

"It will get harder. Eventually you will get words then whole sentences. It will also flash at you if you use the wrong shift key when doing capital letters."

"How do I know which one to use?"

"It'll give you an example first." He was so focused that I don't think he noticed when I went back to my room. Back in my room I sat down at my Macintosh. A minute later, Grandpa knocked and peeked in.

"What are you working on now, John?" Grandpa asked.

"Testing out a new feature I just wrote for my drawing software, ArtStudio. It's called 'snapping lines,'" I explained, moving the mouse to demonstrate.

"See how when I draw a new line, it automatically snaps right to the exact endpoint of the first line?" Grandpa leaned in, watching the screen intently.

"That's a clever little trick. Why is that so important?" If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

"When you're drawing something very precise, like a floor plan or a complex pattern, it guarantees every corner meets perfectly. No tiny gaps, no overlaps. It's essential for accuracy. I was using it to draw a basic design for the basement pool."

"The pool, eh? That's quite a jump from typing games," he chuckled.

"Well, as I was drawing the pool layout, I realized the real artistic challenge won't be the pool itself, it'll be the massive walls around it."

"Like a tile pattern?"

"No, like a huge mural. This snapping feature works well, but I think I'll shift my focus to the mural design instead."

"A mural? That would certainly be interesting," Grandpa mused, watching me start Object Pascal and begin to code a new program.

"I've got a really cool idea. I need to write a tool to make it happen. I'll show you when it's ready," I told him. Seeing my intense concentration, he quietly left the room. Writing the program went quickly. Most of the time was spent afterwards compiling. I was hating having to swap disks. I looked at the calendar and mentally counted the days until it arrived at the computer shop in town.

The new program worked from a grayscale depth map image, where each of the sixteen shades of gray represented a distance from the viewer. It took that image and generated a 3D image called an autostereogram. In the decades to come it would be known as Magic Eye. Using ArtStudio I drew one dot at a time, creating multiple grayscale portraits of Poseidon, water nymphs and mermaids. The program processed them and printed out the pixels as blocks of shades of gray.

I used my new Apple ImageWriter printer connected to the Mac to print each picture, then gave them to my Grandpa.

"I don't see anything," he said, staring at the fuzzy dots that covered the paper.

"You have to unfocus your eyes, and look beyond the dots. Then a 3D image will appear," I explained. I went upstairs to where the construction workers were and got small piece of glass from a window they had removed for replacing. I carried it back down the elevator to Grandpa's room. I hurriedly washed it in the small sink.

"Here, put the picture behind the glass," I told him, after drying the glass.

"Try to see your reflection in the glass." He followed my directions, then burst out, "I see it! I see it!" He quickly looked at the pictures. Once he had the knack he could do it without the glass reflection.

"This is incredible. How does it work?"

"It's hard to explain. When the images are overlapped because your eyes are focused differently, your brain puts it together as a 3D image."

"So what does this have to do with the pool room?"

"If we tile the walls with this pattern, we can do a giant 3D mural."

"That would be interesting. I could see how that would drive interest in the pool area, but it wouldn't benefit the swimmers."

"I want to do murals like this in the lobby, and on every floor around the elevators."

"I love it. We will have to convince the Architect though."

"When is your next meeting with him?" I asked. Grandpa checked his notebook, and the calendar on his wall.

"Tomorrow afternoon."

"Okay, I'll go print some more."

"What about this window you brought in here?" he asked as I left the room.

"Leave it to show Grandma," I hollered back. I spent the rest of the day creating images, then ran them through the program and printed them. The printer had a long continuous sheet that had to be torn along the perforations to release them after printing. I listened to the hum as the print head moved back and forth. It was almost the sound of static as the little pins pressed the ink covered ribbon against the paper on each pass.

Line by line it moved back and forth, the gears holding the pages in place with the small removable strip of holes at the paper's edges. It slowly pushed the fanfolded paper out the top of the machine, pulling it directly from the box of paper sitting on the floor under the table it was sitting on. It had taken some work to create a way to print such a large image. With a black and white printer I had to use a dithering process to get the pixels to be the right shade of gray.

Using this, I printed out the design for an entire wall of the pool, an area over 30 feet long and about fifteen feet high. I trimmed and scotch taped two 7 page long sheets of paper together. The result was a 1/8 scale mock-up four feet long by two feet wide. I borrowed some clear plastic sheeting from the construction workers to hang over the mural. I hung up the image with the plastic over it on the wall in my room.

"Grandpa! Grandma! Come see the big one I just made," I told them, pulling Grandma into my room, with Grandpa following. I pulled the shade off the new table lamp and turned it on as she looked at the big picture.

"Oh my! That's very nice, Johnny. It's Poseidon's underwater kingdom, with fish and sharks and even a squid."

"I want to see," Grandpa said.

"It's actually an octopus, but yeah, this is my mock-up of a mural for the north hotel pool wall." She turned to me.

"If you don't know what it is, it almost looks like ocean waves. Too bad it's not in color."

"It will be, we can use any colors we want. There are different shades of gray in the printout, because that's what the printer can do, but we can replace any particular shade with a color."

"Do they have to be shades of the same color?" Grandpa asked.

"No, for example, gray shade number two would all be red, and number three could all be green."

"I know different floors will have slightly different color palettes. So each floor mural can match the design of that floor. How big will the tiles be?" she asked.

"This design is based on one inch tiles, something that I could easily reproduce with my printer."