I get calls from my alumni association every once in a while for a donation, and once in a while I'll give a few dollars to be counted as a supporter. But I'm not an active alumni. Its not that I don't think the college is a good one, it is. There's just issues that have cut me off. One of which is long over, but the other, while completely solvable, sits between me and active participation.
My time at college was excellent. I was surrounded by a bunch of really smart people, had access to millions of dollars in equipment (what it took back in the stone age to have great computers--now you can get a really great computer at Sams club), and even had access to staff and faculty where I could just sit down and launch into a tirade, only to have my lack of understanding explained to me.
But the end of the eighties was also the ascendancy of Reagan and extreme conservatism, and it hit at college as well, with the Master of Student Houses running all over the student body, including banning the once a year all-house party (Interhouse). Students were no longer trusted young adults and future leaders, they were troublesome kids that needed to be policed. Luckily I got out of there just as it was getting bad.
Fast forward nearly twenty years later, and things have returned more towards the middle. Interhouse is back, and things seem a bit normal. The problem is, I've moved on, and need somehow to reconnect with things. To see what's happening on campus, with the students, with the faculty, with the institute. Something like the university's streaming theater, wich interesting lectures from people like Harry Gray ( a professor I actually liked when I was there ).
But I can't watch it, cause its in Real Video format.
Yes, I could go get the Real Video player and install it and all its associated spyware on my computer. But I'm not, and nobody else is going to anymore because Realvideo is so 90s. We moved past that to Flash video about ten years ago. And in fact, the future is to just let the user watch the file however he wants with a avi/mp4/ipod download. Its doesn't have to be HD. I'd watch Caltech events at 320x240, just like my John Stewart.
I even sent off a email to the director of the PR/Media department (who made this unfortunate video format choice in the first place), but I'm not holding my breath. The last media update on mr.caltech.edu was a entry about a radio broadcast in 1998; and a note about a lecture in the Biology department on October 2003.
I hope those memories from twenty years ago are not the last positive memories I have from college.
When I first discovered the treo, I was very excited. I almost went out and got a 600, but came to my senses and waited for the 650. The 600 was low tech compared to the 650. The 650 had a 320x320 screen with lots of colors, a decent processor, a SD card slot, an improved keyboard and so on and so forth. When I got it I immediately set out to figure out how I could use it.
I was able to stuff quite a few programs on it, and tried to use it as often as I could. One problem was that cell reception wasn't very good at my house, so I couldn't use it much in the house, which was a little annoying, because I worked at home. So it wasn't very useful as a home unit, but it was fairly kick ass when traveling. Sort of.
The web browser was quite slow. It could easily take five minutes to login and display my home page on ebay. (It was also frightening that one page on ebay was over a megabyte of data.) The email client was ok, but the sms notification that I had new email didn't display anything about the message itself ( and was often larger than the message itself ), and deleting the text messages often caused the phone to reset.
Then, there was this ancient free AOL client, but it had an annoying habit that if you left it logged in, then switched to another app long enough, the connection went away, and then the AOL client corrupted its preference page; which on the next reset would cause the phone to infinitely reboot. That was loads of fun to cleanup after. Thank goodness I knew engineers that worked at Palm, and so I could get free tech support from someone who actually knew what was going on.
So things were a mixed bag at first. Then TCPMP came out. Suddenly I had a movie player that fit in my pocket. With that, travelling was a joy. I'd be sitting there watching the Daily Show, laughing myself silly, completely forgetting how tiny my seat was. (I had long ago given up trying to open a laptop in the small silver of space between my face and the seat in front of me.)
Over time I settled into using the Treo as a media player and as a cell modem for my laptop with June Fabrices PdaNet. Once in a while I'd use the web browser to read coding horrors or another lo cal web site, and I did get regular gurgles from the email when I had a posting to moderate for Flagstaff Freecycle; but those weren't killer apps. Google maps came out for Palm, which was cool, though I didn't need a map every day, but on those occasions that I did need it, it worked well.
So I settled at that point. The treo wasn't an internet device proper, but it could get me there in an emergency, and it meant that more powerful devices could get online when I needed to.
Newer treos came out, but they didn't really add anything useful. Same screen, about the same keyboard. Little faster cpu, maybe a little more memory, but nothing radical, like going from the 600 to the 650. I let it slide.
Then, after getting un-married, somehow my ex-wife decided that she needed to get her own cell phone plan, and after staring into space at the Sprint store for an hour, the service droid declaired that this would only be mostly possible if I kept five lines on my account by move a new phantom line onto a new real cell phone. I didn't really buy the explanation, but as I imagined spending another several hours at this store with my three kids running around destroying displays and digging ancient dustballs from beneath the counters, I gave into fate and let them sell me a Treo 755p.
It was a little bit cooler, a little bit faster. One nice thing was its non-slip case. My Treo 650 had to live inside a non-slip sleeve in order for me to keep a grip on it. But that bulked it up somewhat. The 755p could also read SDHC cards, though it didn't use full size cards, but instead used mini-sdhc. However they already had 4gb cards, and soon would have 8gb; so that was progress. Finally, it had next generation data support, which in Flagstaff didn't do me any good, but when I went traveling to a real city, it could reach speeds of over 500kb/s.
So I used my new phone and stuck the old one under a pile of papers on my desk.
Until a few weeks ago. When I went to pull the phone out of my bag and it had a giant crack across the screen and was displaying all kinds of funky colors, instead of something resembling a normal screen.
So I went back to my 650 for the time being. The major functions are all there, but surprisingly its the small things that I miss.
The 755p would blink a green light if there was a missed call/voicemail/text message. You could look at it, even with the screen off, and see if something had happened. Just a little software thing, but the 650 doesn't have it, and even the new Centro doesn't do it either.
The 755p has a better radio. The 650 doesn't work at all in a lot of spots in my house, and even sometimes will show two bars, but when I start a call it drops to no bars, or even no service at all. Sometimes it will show a bar, but no calls or text messages will come in, then I'll move it around on my desks and a stack of messages will suddenly arrive.
I'm back to having the messaging app reset my phone when I delete messages. Its still annoying. And it was doing it before I loaded any other 3rd party apps on there.
And the 650 is just slower. It lags significantly when doing simple things. They did some cleanup two generations down the line, and a faster processor and more memory probably helps; so the 650 feels like going back to a ancient processor with not enough memory to get anything done. I really don't want to try using the web browser at all.
Also, I have a Nokia N800 internet pad, which is the device I thought the Treo was going to be originally. The Nokia has a huge screen, two full size SD card slots ( so I have 12 GB of space for my music and movies ), wifi, a real processor, and a full featured browser that can do Flash and AJAX pages like Google docs. Plus I got off my butt and setup RSS feeds for my most read blogs on it. The treo makes a good internet tether for the N800 when there's no wifi around, so I don't think I'll try to browse pages on the Treo except in an extreme case.
I don't know if you can combine a Treo and an N800 into a single device. The N810 has a sliding keyboard, but still no phone. There are other N devices with phones, but they're mostly GSM, so its not going to replace my Sprint phone any time soon. I don't think I'll buy another modern phone right away. Maybe I'll look again with Palm completes the switch over to Linux and can make a phone with wifi that works at the same time as the phone.
For now I have a bag of tricks. Some tasks are handled with excellence, others are just barely covered, but I have reached an understanding of how my current pieces fit together and I'm cool with it. Its up to the consumer electronics industry to shake my out of complacency with the next great thing. Or not.
For the last several years, I've saved a few days in the summer to head off into the far reaches of Arizona ( yes, there are places even more remote than Flagstaff, just ask my cell phone company ), and spend some time teaching welding at summer camp. Its been a organic process, we started off with whatever I could borrow and stuff into the back of my car, but after several years of doing it, I can make my way through the classes with a minimum of fuss and damage. It also helps that a number of the campers are repeat offenders, and thus have some prior experience with my laid back style of teaching.
But no matter how smoothly things are going at camp, it seems there's always some excitement going on back at home.
I get out to camp the first day, get everything setup, and am relaxing on the bunkhouse porch before bed, when my friend tells me he has a message on his cell phone from my ex-wife. ( My cell company doesn't have any service out there.)
So I call, and the water's out. Its not raining, and the underground equipment area isn't flooded, so its not the obvious thing. My dad's there, and he's trying to figure out if there's power, but I have three levels of sub-panels cross wired into everything, and none of the breakers are labeled, so he's struggling a bit, but my memory can only go so far. I tell him to turn everything on, and then go plug something in down in the crawl space plug.
Unfortunately the first two work lights he grabs are burnt out, but I would have expected that, but he wastes time going around in a circle a little, and finally grabs my big work like, which does work, and confirms that there is indeed power down in the basement.
This is good news in that the power shouldn't have gone out, but bad news in that the pump is now the suspect, and replacing the pump could be a challenge. Give how non-linearly things have gone so far, I decide to call for backup.
The nice thing about having friends, is that you can call on them in the most desperate of times, and they'll come over and help. My life is so hectic, that I don't have very many people call on me for help that much, but I do try and do my part. Mr. Hess is retired, and his kids are all grown, so its easier to get ahold of him. He says he'll come over and take a look.
Thankfully, the next report I get, after I give the cell phone a chance to recharge, is that the pressure switch is burnt out, and so they just have to get a new one of those and things should be back in business. For some reason, that takes three hours the next day, but I'm hoping that its because they sat down in the cave yakking most of the time, not because it was a major engineering effort. The water gets restored, and the crisis is over.
I wonder what's going to happen next year.
I'd like to say that the burning season is over. I'd like it to be over. But the fact that its May doesn't seem to keep the nights from dropping down into the mid twenties. Gads. The 2007 season pellets are gone, they went pretty fast:
| Month | This year | 2007 | 2006 |
|---|---|---|---|
| September | 160 | 360 | - |
| October | 960 | 1,360 | - |
| November | 1,120 | 1,640 | 1,200 |
| December | 2,080 | 1,920 | 1,720 |
| January | 2,240 | 2,360 | 2,000 |
| February | 1,800 | 1,920 | 1,280 |
| March | 840 | 1,320 | 1,080 |
| April | 240 | 480 | 440 |
You can see we burnt a lot less in March, but that was mostly due to the fact that there wasn't much left to burn. A lot more fires that much. April wasn't too bad, and I was home most of the month watching the kids while JM went overseas, so I let the temperatures in the house drop below 70°rees;F at night. But that's over now too.
Just when I was getting ready to enjoy having that third parking spot left, I got a call from a friend who had spotted a sale sign over at Ace.
2006 was a mess for wood pellet users. Nobody in town had consistent stock, prices was all over the place, and I ended up buying pellets from two hardware stores, Walmart, and the local gas station (who shipped in a supply from Canada). Part of the problem was a supply issue from a local pellet plant in eastern Arizona. So for 2007, the stores placed monster orders all over the place. Now it was May 2008, and they were sitting on top of a couple million tons still.
Ace blinked first. Normally a more expensive option (over priced only by the local grocery store), they dropped their price to $3/bag or $150/ton. There went my parking space. For about the same price as four tons before, I picked up six tons this time, and actually managed to get them all in the garage, in one parking spot. And because we now have what looks like an infinite quantity, we've relaxed a bit and started burning them again. Granted otherwise my basement would drop below 60°rees;F, but it still seems absurd.
I need to start setting up for next year with some solar plans. Maybe by 2009 I might not need to hand carry 12,000 pounds of wood pellets down into my basement.
At last week's green building meeting, there were a number of design students attending the meeting ( it was on campus at the university, go figure ), and one of them asked us "old folk" what advise we would give them, nominally about how to work renewable and sustainable technologies into their projects.
I gave half a good answer: when it comes to choosing projects, choose the customer who's willing to be more adventurous. NAU had just given us a tour of their new building which they built with un-tested concrete mixes, and where they were refining the process as they went. There's actually a difference in the final product between the first floor and the third floor. That's just an astounding thing, to have a customer spending millions of dollars, and still walk out on a ledge to try 40% fly ash content in concrete and use the project as a laboratory to work out the problems.
While it would be nice to have daring clients on every project, an even better strategy might be to help every client take a step, no matter how small, away from the status quo. And to do that requires a special kind of promotion. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to progress is not lack of promotion, its the opposite: hype. Hype has done more to stall the implementation of sound technical ideas than anything else. Every new idea has its rough edges, and running a reluctant customer right into one of those edges will cause more problems, bad will, and general long term loss of credibility; than loosing out trying a new idea two times out of three.
The other way to help around this, is find ways to take small steps before pushing the customer to take big ones. Don't expect the customer to spend thousands or more on some new thin film solar panel if you've never even seen the device in person yourself. When I want to implement new technology in my projects, I play with the language/database/operating system first personally before I claim it should be used on a project. Even in metal working, I spend my own money on something, and check it out before I expect the shop/school/customer to use it. Doesn't mean you have to go as large, or go as nice as what you would use for the project. Just get your hands on anything, in whatever state so you can say, "Yes this is real, and I believe in it." Ebay is great for that.
Going with the way things were before is always going to be the least effort, so putting effort into moving in a new direction is how things will get changed. Do what you can to take on some of that effort, and help everyone you meet put in what effort that they can. You won't turn things around in one instant, but if you can look back at the end of your career and see how you were part of a larger effort that pushed society slowly in a new direction, that's something to be proud of.
Still on fire. Another winter, another order of fuel. Last year I burned a ridiculous quantity of pellets, and it wasn't cheap coming up with them, or fun driving to home Depot to pick up 30-40 bags at a time then unload each carload in conditions that weren't always ideal. This year I decided to be a little more organized. I ordered a bunch early, which hopefully saved me some money, and also got someone else to deliver them.
All nice and neatly stacked in the garage for the winter (well kind of, one pile had to be left outside on the back porch due to logistic issues with the forklift). Only bought 8,000 pounds this year, mostly cause I didn't have the money to buy more, so I've been trying to make them last longer. Either this winter isn't quite so bad, or the fact that I'm not travelling as much (and thus keeping a closer eye on the thermostat), means our usage is down a bit, thankfully.
| Month | This year | 2007 | 2006 |
|---|---|---|---|
| September | 160 | 360 | - |
| October | 960 | 1,360 | - |
| November | 1,120 | 1,640 | 1,200 |
| December | 1,920 | 1,720 | |
| January | 2,360 | 2,000 | |
| February | 1,920 | 1,280 | |
| March | 1,320 | 1,080 | |
| April | 480 | 440 |
We are burning more wood, but that's fine with me. Next year, if I am really on the ball, daytime heat is going to be solar, and I'll just use the pellets to supplement at night. Or maybe its all wishful thinking, and I'll be spending all summer out in the woods gathering firewood.
They say procrastination pays off immediately, but of course the hard work guys like to think they end up better over the long term. Unfortunately the empirical evidence is not quite as conclusive, as you can see from this example.
My tire got a nail in it, which isn't that unusual. We built our own house about seven years ago, and I think the carpenters lost more nails in the dirt around the house then actually ended up in the frame itself. We have buckets filled with rusted nails gathered from the yard, and its still not unusual to pick out more after a fresh rain. Every once in a while one of those ends up in a tire, and thankfully the tire takes a little while to go flat so you have a chance to drive around a little while and maybe get the tire fixed.
Or sometimes not. Here, the nail went through the side wall, so the free patch option is off the table. Time to get a whole new tire, which just happens to be a special model that the tire store doesn't carry, and in fact they just started working with this vendor, so they don't even know how to order it exactly, but somewhere burried in the six manuals hidden under the counter is the proper code to enter into the computer to call up this mythical model (stock tire on 2004 Toyota Hylander btw), and maybe get it in in a week or two. Turns out not, but what the sales droid did find was the business card from the field rep who could get it ordered and it would be in in a week.
Luckily the Hylander has a full size spare, so I was driving around on that for a bit, waiting for my new tire to come in, which it did.
Now what I should have done was swapped out the spare for the new tire, since spares tend to age a little strange--being horizontal most of their life and subject to collecting water and mud up top and sort of just wallowing in it. This car isn't that old, but generally, the spare doesn't age as gracefully as the other tires, or get maintained as well. But in this case, forces were rolling my way to render the point moot. More specifically, I found myself running over the the drive shaft from a semi truck on the freeway, just a month later. These things make a regular car or truck drive shaft seem like a toy part made from legos. And they do a great job ruining tires too:
It didn't just put a hole in my tire, it took the whole side of the tire off. And not just the tire either, it took a chunk out of the rim. So, suddenly the whole spare tire situation was cleared up. I put my original rim and new tire back on (it was the same wheel that had suffered before), and my spare went into the scrap heap.
Oh, and instead of paying $340 to Toyota for a new rim, and spending another $160 on a tire; ebay fixed me up with a complete wheel and rim for $90.
My laptop got hacked last week, which is quite a milestone. I don't run any firewalls or virus software on my computers. At least I haven't in the past. Up until now, I was pretty safe just running non-microsoft tools. Sure IE is hacked every other day, but you'd have to get pretty obscure to be targetting Netscape. Well, I guess not any longer.
Being the geek that I am, I spotted some errant processes in my process table. (Yes, I pretty much have an idea of what processes are supposed to be there.) I immediately found a directory with curious CCC.exe in it, and wiped all that out, but figured that was not the end of it. I caught a few more files, and sort of limped along for a week.
Then this weekend, I spotted some more suspects and did another round of hunting. This involved pulling out several DLLs from windows/system32 and when one got especially tough to gouge out, I started blasting away at the registry.
Bad move.
Now my computer powers up, examines it navel for quite some time, then spouts off about lsass - service not found. It gives me an OK button to push, which is not ok, but I don't have anything else to do, so I push it, and of course it reboots. After five or six rounds of this, I realize that its not going to do anything different no matter how many times I tell it that its ok so I just power down and pull the hard drive out to get at the important stuff, like Chuck - epsiode 3.
Actually, everything of real value lives on the SVN server, or in Google Docs, so I'm not really all that excited about this setback, just a little annoyed. This week is going to be filled with hours of joy as I hunt down my recovery CD, and the install disks for all those ancient artifacts called Applications.
Ok, from now on I only browse the internet from linux. Or my Nokia N770, which I can't find. Ok, my used Nokia N800 that I won on ebay, which isn't here yet, but should be arriving any day now and it better work this time.
