Strange Doings

It’s been an interesting year. A late spring, what appears to be an early fall, and a truncated summer that came and went in a flash. I haven’t updated much…either too busy or frankly, too uninspired to write. Creative flashes are few and far between. The days tick past. Work moves along. Obligations are scheduled and then executed. Frankly, I have nothing to really complain about. I’m employed. Have a roof over my head. Food on the table. But sadly, am lacking passion.

Anyway. It’s mid-October so time for an update. Approximately 4 weeks ago the foundation was poured for The Annex. The concrete has now cured, the sill plates cut and installed, and the big materials order scheduled for delivery in two days. Last night we hand selected the 77 2x6x12’s, along with 24-foot long 2x10’s and other lumber. Also picked up the two windows that will be installed over the garage door; the glass prevents them from delivering them on a semi-trailer. I am now finalizing the construction drawings so that Saturday afternoon, I can start cutting studs and hopefully by Sunday, have a few walls framed up.

This past week news arrived that I would be losing the picker again. Time to get the west-side siding project in high gear. Despite the cloudy, rainy, and generally crappy days we’ve had recently, I managed to prime, cut, drill, paint and install all the upper west siding boards and build and install the cedar framing that goes around the window on that side. The final piece of siding actually required drying inside by fan due to the weather we’re having. But it’s done now. That leaves the east side, and the upper rear. The rear is protected by the overhang, and the east doesn’t take as near a beating as the north and west during the winter. Trenching for water and power will have to wait for next year, and that’s just fine. The cars are stored (mostly), the LP tank is full, and the building is near 95% complete.

On the corporate side, the man that was my first full-time boss, and now my most recent boss, has elected to retire. Today was his last day. Due to departmental restructuring that’s been going on in parallel, it’s likely his position will not be backfilled. In fact, one member of the team is being moved to a different department, and another will be splitting his work amongst hardware and software. To add to the confusion, the paperwork has yet to go through, but I have been named the hardware group’s Technical Team Lead, which as far as I can tell, means I’ll be doing the same thing as I am now, but with the hardware people “reporting” to me. Except I’ll have no administrative power whatsoever. And I have a suspicion that with the current workload, the group may disband within a year. Good times.

I think I’ll go home, repair a broken pocket door, and relax this evening.

Rentals

One of the more interesting aspects of traveling frequently on business is that I never know what vehicle I’m going to get. I like to specify an SUV in case I end up coming home with a stack of VCR’s, and of course, it helps when you're hauling various test equipment for the actual job at hand.

But the SUV category is pretty broad, from compact to crossover. My favorite model was the Jeep Liberty. The controls were simple but effective. The radio had a vacuum fluorescent display (in the Chrysler style) with easy to use knobs and buttons. The cruise adjustments were right where you’d want them, and the displays were easy to read without being overly simplistic. The ride, brakes, and drivetrain earned top points in my book. Sadly, these models are being phased out (they weren’t so hot on gas mileage, either).

I’ve had the displeasure of driving the Nissan Versa. The surprisingly nice Chevy Traverse. The Equinox, which does not rate very high in my book, and even a couple of Fords.

And I will say this. Anyone that thinks that the Japanese make a superior vehicle today, based on the crossover and SUV market, has their head in the sand. Ford and GM have made such major leaps in recent years that it’s almost unbelievable. Meanwhile, Toyota has taken their share of punches, and they haven’t fared well. All of that aside, let me tell you about the biggest piece of shit I have driven to date. The Toyota Rav4.

Where do I begin with this SUV? Toyota is known for building some of the best ‘appliance’ cars on the road. Ones that are pure vanilla and blend in. You put gas in and they go. No muss, no fuss, no fun. Which is just what a lot of people are looking for. Sadly, this car fails on the very essence of that fundamental.

If you’ve ever driven a 90’s Tercel, this car is a lot like that. It accelerates like nobody’s business, probably because it feels so damn light. But the issue is, it’s either going, or it’s not. Touch the throttle lightly and the engine responds with plenty of power, along with a symphony of coffee cans banging together through a gearbox that sounds like it came from a ’49 Farmall.

Mass is rather...lacking...in the door. Additional force is required if you want to actually close it. Additionally, I found that dew and condensation drip directly into the drivers power window switch in a way that's almost planned.

The brakes respond in kind, meaning there’s no modulation, whatsoever. The problem here is that you delay in braking because you want to avoid whiplash, however this means that in big city driving, you’re always braking late, and the 30 cars behind you that would like some notice of your stopping, are probably cursing under their breath as they avoid smashing into the back of you.

And speaking of smashing into the back of you, while I cannot fully explain the root cause, I have narrowly avoided two rear end collisions as this car has attempted to accelerate while I was trying to slow it. Once at a stop light when I was just about stopped and the engine decided to tach up to 4000 RPM’s and began to pull forward. Yes, there was a car in front of me and if the light hadn’t turned green I’d be in a lot of trouble right now. 

"Like a Rock"....the steering wheel, not the car.

So let’s talk about steering. Whoever designed this interior should have been given more than a $30 budget. The steering wheel is like a Playskool toy. Extremely hard, cheap plastic. No variable resistance in the turning. The gauges are bright and clear, except for the Temp gauge which, in the darkness, resembles a floating red toothpick because A: There is no lighted origin of the pointer, and B: Some fool left all graduations off of the gauge! How useful!

HCFE!

Also, somewhere a Ukranian tractor is missing its radio.

You would think such a large display would spend less time displaying "No Message". For that matter, this message is present for any station not transmitting RDS info, which are quite a few. And let's not get started about the reception.

The seats were handcrafted by the Amish from the densest oak they could find, and then covered by the finest polyster Toyota could specify. A mere 4 hour ride has you wishing for a red vinyl bench seat from an old Thomas schoolbus. At least then you stand the chance of getting bounced out the window and escaping this interior. 

I spent a lot of time studying the dashboard to find out what gear I was in. Shifting out of Park blindly was not advised. The shift gate has the accuracy of a keelboat adrift in the Indian Ocean.

So…the brakes have no give, the ride is un-appreciably rough, the engine extremely unrefined, the seats are hard, and the gear shifter has plenty of unnecessary lateral movements required to get to D.

You will forever be guessing which options you were too cheap to order.

At least the carpet is absorbent.

Thoughts on Computing

In most regards, we have come an extremely long way from the first computers. There have been ridiculous advances in size, cost, speed, power consumption and portability. But what’s interesting is that today, outside of extravagant purpose-built supercomputers, everybody’s running Intel with the same architecture. It’s like going to the car lot and having your choice of 10 different makes, and they’ve all got the same engine and suspension. Apple shows up with a different interior and a different paint color. Let’s say, Victoria Plum Firemist. Dell can’t figure out what color to paint their car so they look at Apple and paint theirs “Purple”.  That’s the state of machines today

But it wasn’t always so. In fact, until the PC revolution, there was no common “best” way to build a machine. For the first decade or so of commercial machines, you either chose a scientific computer, or a business oriented computer. Both were general purpose, but a scientific machine excelled at complex math (maybe it had hardware floating point) while a business machine was better at sorting and merging (high speed I/O). You might buy a Univac 1103 for your hydrodynamics problems, and a Univac II for payroll and inventory. The eventual availability of compact, affordable memory and reduced circuit size meant one machine could excel at both tasks. History credits this to the famed IBM 360 which was a make-or-break proposition for the company*. If you’ve ever wondered why it was called the 360, now you know- to encompass the complete circle of computing demands.

But a bent towards a specific field is pretty general. Today, a byte is specified as 8 bits, also known as a Word. 8-bit microcontrollers spurred the microcomputer industry in the late 70’s. 4 bits was too few (there was an Intel 4004) and 16 bits at that stage, just out of reach for most applications. But, it was realized very early on that the bigger the computer word, the more “work” that could be done in a single computing cycle. And even in 1952, people were trying to get all the computing speed they could out of their vacuum tube machines (which were remarkably fast). One machine might specify an instruction, a source address and a destination address (in binary of course) in a single word. 64-bits, or even more, were not uncommon 50 years ago. A large word also had the advantage that large numbers could be manipulated without splitting them into segments, but that’s another story. Other machines, such as the NORC, might even specify the addend address, the augend address and the destination address in a single word. Others included the address of the next instruction within that word.

And here’s the thing… Nobody had yet settled the matter of whether decimal arithmetic, or binary arithmetic, was the superior thing. That would take another 10 or 15 years. Having the machine work entirely in binary meant more efficient use of memory, but it also meant that conversion into, and out of, the machine would be required if it were to be human readable. And then we have 1’s complement, 2’s complement, XS3, etc.  Decimal machines solved this issue by acting on the digits of the stored numbers specifically as BCD, but 4 bits are required for each digit, so there’s a memory tradeoff because you essentially throw away the values of 11-15.

And what then, of letters? IBM preferred the EBCDIC encoding arrangement which assigned 6-bits to each letter; others preferred some flavor of 7-bit ASCII. Not only are the two incompatible, but ASCII allows natural sorting; that is, the binary code for G is greater than F, and F is greater than E. This is not so with EBCDIC. And how might the machine tell the difference between a number and a letter? If two leading zeros are appended to each BCD number, memory is wasted. Though clever designers might then assign these two bits to serve a different function (such as in the 1401).

But as the saying goes, that’s not all! Why must the machine word length be a fixed number of digits? What if it was infinite and the ends defined by some sort of bit pattern? This would certainly make for a much more efficient machine and a lot less wasted memory. And so was the IBM 1401 born. It far outsold the conservative projections of most everyone at IBM and became the most popular computer in the world up until the microcomputer movement. Words could be variable length, and their total length defined by a code known as a word mark.

So now we have scientific and business, BCD and binary, fixed length (of many varieties), variable length, and encoding differences.

Oh yes, and checking facilities. How does one ensure the exact number of bits has been recorded to tape when the blocks are written at several thousand bits per second and the loss of just one bit will completely invalidate the data? To say nothing of swapping reels on drives of various adjustment. Well, there’s no one way to do it. “All 1’s” checkers, checksum counts, even/odd parity bits, redundant channel recording, redundant CPU comparisons, and a host of other techniques were favored by various companies for various machines. And all worked pretty darn well.

And still, we haven’t discussed instruction architecture, which can get pretty wild. Or memory systems and addressing.

All of these variations meant lots of variety, and competition, and new ideas in CPU and architecture design. Something that’s exceedingly rare today, and likely never to be visited again given that software development work is done primarily at a high level language and that coders no longer have to give any though to the nuts and bolts of the machine. And as long as we can put more transistors on a chip, and make memory smaller, cheaper, and faster, there’s no need to care. The downside is that we’ve narrowed our path of computer evolution, which is only 1 of many nails in the coffin for the personal computer.

*One of many reasons the 360 was a gamble was that up until this time, IBM had attempted some semblance of machine compatibility amongst their scientific machines, and again with their business machines. The 360 was totally incompatible with ALL existing machines, and it would be some time before emulators (or useful software in general) would be available.

The Redbox Special

The problem with Jobs, is that Ashton Kutcher is no Noah Wyle. Seriously. He’s good, but between an overly simplistic script and failed attempts to channel Jobs’ concentrated anger, well, this film is a rental at best. I can overlook the choppy editing, the rearranging of events in time, the trumped-up, over-dramatized “pivotal moments”, but this thing is a train wreck compared to Pirates. Which, for a 15-year-old, made for TV movie, manages to be more convincing, more comedic, and more professional than this Virgin production.

Other than that, it was great.

I also spent slightly more than the ticket price on a DVD documentary about Eckert and Mauchly which arrived this week. My review on Amazon was not kind. That makes two terrible computer biopic/documentaries endured within 48 hours.

Long Overdue

Lots going on (of course) and an update is long overdue. In the meantime, I thought this was rather interesting... Source: http://architecturefarm.wordpress.com/

revisions

July 1, 2013

A nice piece in the Boston Globe today about the culture of revising in literature.  The article makes the point that revisions weren’t a big part of writing until the early 20th century, in part because literature was seen as a more impulsive, romantic art form.  It was the modernists, the argument goes, who wanted to actually craft writing so that it made a point, an argument, or anything more than an impression.
The other half of this, though, is what Hannah Sullivan, who has written a book called The Work of Revision, calls “literary technology.”  Paper was expensive, printing more so, and thus first drafts for Shakespeare often had to be final drafts as well.  When typesetting was mechanized, and particularly when the typewriter made rewriting easy and necessary, the sanctity of the original faded, and authors, publishers, and (yes) editors came to see texts as living documents.  That, of course, has only accelerated as pixels have replaced ink-on-platen characters.
This article is great on so many levels–of course, I see a parallel to construction, in that a lot of the nineteenth century construction drawing sets I’ve looked at show that the revision process there, too, was not what we’re used to today.  Commercial buildings in particular tended to go through a pretty brief sketching phase, and then turned into completely developed drawings pretty quickly.  Manufacturers and builders filled in most of the blanks from there.  Today, we go through at least four or five rounds of drawing sets before anything goes out to bid, and a nearly infinite number of design options early in the process.  Blame cheap paper or SketchUp, but like writing, architectural practice today is as much revision as anything else…which in the best of all worlds gives us the opportunity to continually refine and edit.

May-Day

It’s been a very fast month….This time of year always is, but it doesn’t help I’ve been away for work for a good portion. Siding work was cut short due to losing the picker, which was ok because it wasn’t going to be of much use while I was traveling. And so, I found myself away the second week of this month, only to return to a fever pitch. I basically had 4 days to get the Damfest preparations completed (modify the amp, get the Damfest staples, do the grocery shopping), then get as much done on the Toro as I could for the 4^th St. Cruise since I would be returning the day before (and the dash was still torn apart), find time to pickup the glass door that was ready at Laidig’s, set aside time to haul things up from the Parents’ basement for their garage sale, and haul things in from The Lodge (like a 300 lb Pepsi machine) before Friday morning. It all went off without a hitch, except for the glass pick-up. This required the station wagon due to the glass length, and the wagon decided to strand me a few blocks away from my glass guy just after the pick-up. Therein lies a tale best suited for another time. Suffice it to say, that was a lost evening.

But it all worked out and we had our annual Damfest Celebration that Friday, the 17^th. To my surprise, we had a pretty decent turn-out and exceeded our usual tear-down time by several  hours. It was a blast.

The garage sale was also a success- I managed to part with some larger items that would have taken too much floor space out at the Lodge. These were ‘gimmes’ I had picked up over the years, usually as a bonus along with the real thing I was going for. A large CBS-Columbia 50’s TV, a GE Hi-Fi with FM band, my ’39 Silvertone with record cutter, a full-size Casio keyboard, and some other oddball stuff.

From there, a blur of mowing, planting and cleaning before I left again for another week in Downers. This time getting home Friday afternoon, the 24^th. A stop at the post office revealed a load of goodies waiting for me. Parts to finish up the Toro and a case of paper tape for the teletype machines. A quick run by Menards for some 1/8” lauan ply for the bookcase project, and then the great unloading. I got the Toro spiffed up, ran it up to Janesville to see if my new vacuum lines had improved things, and also topped off the tires (if you ever need air, the JV Kwikstar has an industrial compressor…the air hose is ¾ diameter and you’ll spend a fraction of the time filling your tires compared to EVERY. WHERE. ELSE. Plus, it’s FREE.) Yes, it’s worth the drive. Unfortunately, the clouds started rolling in that evening, but we still had acres to mow. It was dark when I put the tractor in the shed and that’s just about the time the rain started.

I awoke to thunder and lightning, and knew the 4^th Street Cruise was going to be a bust. That’s okay, because the day was going to be a busy one and I could use all the hours I could get. I put away my tools and materials in CS3 while Cara worked on cleaning upstairs in the Lodge. The Fondue Party was that night and there was still final shopping and cleaning to be done. I honestly don’t know where the day went, but 6:30 rolled around mighty quick. The fondue was a mixed bag…the conventional unit failed to heat properly and the beer/cheese mix wasn’t cooperating. Still, the mini-Cordon Bleus were great. After a tour of the facilities, Ben and Hilary bowed out before the games could begin. Viet was new to the game of dominoes, but that didn’t seem to stop him. We finally wrapped things up after 12…or was it 1? Like I say…a blur. And oh yes, I proposed to Cara over dinner!

Sunday was equally soggy. The day started with assembling the Ikea shelves I had bought the week prior, but the changes I had planned involved modifying the sides with my skilsaw. Unfortunately, I discovered this after we had the first one fully assembled. Nothing more to do than perform the operation then and there in the living room with the shop vac following along. We were able to modify the others out on the front balcony in between cloudbursts until the rain, and a dead battery, ultimately forced our hand. So…a trip to Menards was in order for their 11% off sale for trees and bushes. This entailed me digging the old, dead bushes out and hauling the whole mess in the back of the Blazer.  We were able to get things exchanged and the new trees and bushes loaded as the rain once again, returned. With all this rain we figured we better check on the parents’ basement since they were out of town….and yes, water shooting through the basement wall is never a good thing. So…several hours later we had 95% of it vacuumed up and fans running. Now, with evening descending, we returned home to finish the last shelf mods. I scrambled like mad to mark and cut the plywood outside that I had previously purchased while there was still enough light to follow my pencil marks. (I’ll have a separate entry on this). Then back off the sawhorses and into the Lodge for gel staining. That gel stain is interesting stuff. While it all set up to dry, I cleaned up and put on a new LD of Sleepers before calling it a night. Deniro nailed it as always.

Which brings us to yesterday…A quiet day by comparison. Ran into town to check on the parents’ basement. Planted the trees and bushes we bought. I got all the cabinets assembled with their new backs. We made a trip to the cemetery with flowers Cara had bought. I fixed up the Model 28 teletype with the new parts that arrived. Then a late dinner followed by Double Indemnity. Also…found my camera!