OmegaMom

The first portable computer my parents bought, brand-new practically one of the first ones off the assembly line, an Osborne I, when I was 21 or 22:

It weighed 23.5 pounds.  The screen was five inches wide, green on white letters and ASCII graphics.  It came with SuperCalc (a spreadsheet program) and WordStar (a word processing program), plus a version or two of BASIC so you could do programming if need be.  It had two 5-1/2 inch floppy drives, one which would hold the program, the other of which would hold your documents.

We thought it was amazing, though I do remember absolutely hating to carry the damned thing any further than, say, from one room to the next.

When Mom bought the Osborne Executive a few years later, she gave me the old machine, and I used it for a while while I did free-lance typing from home.

The kind of “portable computer” I want to buy now:

It’s about the size of a sheet of paper.  It weighs 1.33 pounds.  With it, you can access the world.  And, dayum, it’s pretty, not like the ugly, utilitarian clunkiness of the Osborne.

What a difference thirty years makes.

What a difference one person makes.

A few years after the Osborne I/II showed up in our house, the magazine I worked for bought computers for all the editors.  I—the in-house computer whiz–was the one who discovered that CP/M, the operating system we used, had a glitch where you could accidentally save your article with no file name, but that it showed up in the directory, so you could retrieve it and save it with a new name.  Many a young editor who had their articles disappear after many hours of working on them paid for lunches for me for saving their files.

I vividly remember the day that the magazine bought a hard drive—with all of 10MB of space.  Since I had already demonstrated my ease with computers, it was assigned to me.  I remember all my buddies gathering around to “Oooh!” and “Ahhh!” at it.  It was about 10 inches tall, 10 inches deep, five or six inches across.  They were astonished at how many articles we could store on it.

The editor-in-chief’s secretary bragged about buying a real IBM PC at home.

At the same time, one of my best friends got an Apple II.  Thereafter, every time I talked to her, when she wasn’t lamenting the latest married man in her life or other equally DRAMATIC situations she maneuvered herself into, she was talking up Apple products.

And nowadays, due to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, and—in another corner, Bill Gates—and their ferocious technical and marketing genius, our entire worlds are different.

We carry iPods with music.  We carry smart phones.  We buy almost anything via the Internet.  Grandparents get pictures of grandkids via email or Facebook.  I shopped for our first house on the Internet in 1998, back when Realtor.com was new; nowadays, internet service is practically considered an everyday, necessary utility for folks who aren’t computer whizzes.

The world has changed so very much in that way.

My grandmother lived through a transition from horse-drawn carriages to jet airplanes and landing on the moon.  I, and my age cohorts, have lived through a similar startling transition, from carbon paper and typewriters to streaming media and phones that answer spoken questions.

Steve Jobs died today.  It was his vision, his driving need for clean lines, ease of use, and fusing technology with the personal, that has led us into this world of “the Revolution will be texted!”, sexting, online banking, music wherever we go.  He died after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer.  He was 56.  He and Wozniak started Apple in 1976, thirty-five years ago.

Where will we be in another thirty-five years?

RIP Steve Jobs.

Some good blog posts on the subject: 

Will Wheaton, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life”

John Scalzi, “Steve Jobs and Me”

Chez Pazienza (Deus Ex Malcontent), “iSad”

While the past year has seen me slacking off on the blog, slowly posting less and less frequently—the blogging mojo having vanished into the mists, the past two months have seen a drastic drop-off in the amount of posting.

Ah!  But I have excuses, you see!

First, there are Facebook and Twitter.  All the little snippets that I used to toss into a blog post now go into Twitter, and a certain amount of more “private” stuff has sashayed off to Facebook.  So, since I no longer have a reason to use a snippet to turn into the inspiration for a full-fledged post, where I actually delve into the ins and outs of a particular subject (at least for a few paragraphs), many posts have died a-borning.

Then, there’s the fact that this past year, frankly, was a bitch.

Just a friggin’ bitch of a year, folks.

Miserable, awful, horrible, no good year.  Bad year!  Bad, bad year!  No treat for you!

A lot of my energy was diverted to things that were just vastly more important to me than the ol’ bloggeroo.

The past month and a half, however…well, there were two specific reasons for the dearth of postings.

The first is that the OmegaFamily traveled to Arizona to join family to scatter Mom’s ashes.  I may post about that later.

The second reason…?

Ah.

Well.

It’s this:

This is not a picture nicked from the Amazon website.  Oh, no.  It is my very own, personal time suck device, photographed on a piece of poster board that was splayed across the downstairs coffee table.

I succumbed, you see.

I may never go back to paper books again.

Well, okay, I take that back.  Any book that has pictures that are necessary to its essence—a pictorial encyclopedia, a “Where’s Waldo” type book, kids books with illustrations, technical manuals—things like that are absolutely useless on a Kindle.

The cons:  It takes a one-second eternity for the page to “turn” on the Kindle.  If you’re a voracious reader, the battery charge doesn’t last too long.  Also if you’re a voracious reader, the ability to buy a book online and have it immediately available is a dangerous, dangerous thing to your bank account.

The pros:  OMG.  It is so lightweight!  Great big books that required a certain amount of wrist strength to read in bed while curled up on one side no longer leave me with an aching forearm.  I can load up boatloads of books onto this thing.  It has word games available, even!  (Though they gobble up battery charge.)

Anyway, I have been buried in an orgy of military science fiction (my secret vice) (I re-read all the Honor Harrington books, one right after the other) and fantasy (oooh, all five books of the Kencyrath, no longer scattered through the boxes of books in the garage!), a new Charlie Stross “Laundry” book, the conclusion to the latest Peter Hamilton trilogy, a few novellas by John Scalzi and others, and more…All of which has eaten into my free time, and my brain.

There are lots of inexpensive e-books available.  Science fiction publishers have gotten onto the e-book bandwagon big time, which is one reason why almost all my books (with the exception of some Jack-and-Annie [The Magic Tree House] books) are science fiction.

Anyway, I highly recommend the contraption.  Just don’t wallow like I did and drop off the face of the earth…

(Psst.  If you’re interested in buying one—or some books—you can always use the Amazon search box on my blog, and I will receive mucho dinero [okay, a small amount] for each purchase.  ;-)  )

(The dotter’s thumb is All Better Now.  Well, not quite; it still hurts if she puts pressure on it, but thank the Kozmik All she hasn’t needed any ibuprofen at all today, so I expect it will fade into a distant memory within the week.)

I bought a Very Special Gift for OmegaDotter this Christmas.  It was very small.  So I decided to do the box-within-a-box-within-a-box approach; I wrapped the VSG, put a bow on it, and a note saying it was the last box, dumped it all into another box, gift-wrapped that one with bow and note, etc.  The end result was nice and big.

I was actually rather nervous about doing this:  either she would think it was funny, or she would get horribly frustrated, and I had no idea which way she would lean.

Anyway.  Since she opened it first, I wasn’t ready with the camera, so the settings were wrong for the first box:

Second box—she was kind of perplexed:

Third box—she was getting the hang of it, and was amused.  I have a picture of her laughing, with the box already unwrapped, so we’ll use this one:

Fourth box—she’s giggling:

The VSG revealed—I think she likes it:  she screamed!

What was it?  An iPod nano, filled to the brim with songs I knew she liked.  She has since wandered the house with it connected by umbilical cord, belting out various songs—in particular, Fireflies by Owl City, which has been an earworm for both of us, as well as various Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus songs. 

Now, onto the consumer review:  OMG.  Apple has the “user-friendly”, ergonomic approach down to an art.  Or a science.  When I was setting it up for her, I pulled it out of its little box, plugged it into the computer, and *boom*, it hooked to my iTunes and started walking me through it.  Once it was loaded with music, *boom*, I was using it.  I am truly, truly impressed with the ease-of-use of this gadget—the dotter had figured out all the buttons (in particular, how to replay Fireflies over and over and over again) within a short time.  Now I want one…or maybe an iPhone, which does all the same stuff, plus.

“I’m as mad as hell, and I can’t take it anymore!”

Ahem.

What prompts this, you may ask.

This morning, after doing my exercise routine and showering, I sat down at the keyboard and started my telecommute sign-in process.  First, sign onto the VPN (virtual private network).  Next, start up the Remote Desktop Connection.  Then comes Outlook and, finally, Microsoft Communicator–the corporate kin of Microsoft Messenger, which requires a log-in to the campus network.

At which point, Remote Desktop bings and tells me it couldn’t connect.

So I try it again, and start reading my e-mail.

Then Remote Desktop bings again, telling me it can’t connect.

So I try it again, and keep it up.  This time, I get through to my “your password expires in three days” message, click on “no” to changing it, and go back to my e-mail.

Then Microsoft Communicator bings at me.

Then Remote Desktop craps out again.

Then Outlook shows a little message that says it’s “trying to connect…”

I snarl.  I send a message to my co-worker, saying there’s a problem with the network.  I finish reading an e-mail.  Microsoft Communicator politely informs me that it was unable to deliver my message.  I snarl again, and disconnect the VPN, to see if the problem is with that…I pull up my browser, try connecting to my blog, and sit and wait.  It brings up the main article, but not the sidebars.  The little whirly circle keeps whirling.

I reboot.

I pull up the browser again.  Same thing.

At which point it became obvious that I had to pull myself together and attack The Unholy Mess of Wiring behind the TV upstairs.

The Unholy Mess of Wiring is hidden behind an end table that has the TV on it, sitting in the corner of the living room.  The dotter has long since appropriated this area for her…um…let’s call it a “creativity corner”.  Every once in a while the unsightly heap of scrids and scrads of paper, various small toys, pictures, beads, markers, and what not overflowing the table, the wiring, the carpet becomes too much for me, and I corral the dotter into cleaning it up.  It invariably turns into a Horrible Chore that takes forever.

This time, I was on my own.  This time, I went through the whole area from top to bottom.  I threw out a half a garbage bag of scrids and scrads (no toys), some loose beads, string, wrappers, the backing from old stickers–you name it, it was there.  Then I pulled the table out from the corner.  I swept.  I windexed.  I re-arranged.  I got some clear tape and a Sharpie marker, located twisty-ties in the Anything Drawer, pulled out a variety of power cords from various techno-boxes, and started de-tangling, identifying, organizing, and tidying up the strands of cords and wiring.

The whole affair, from start to end (with a break in the middle for some bagels and cream cheese), took four hours and twenty minutes.

The network works again.  I was unable to figure out what the problem was, but it works again.

I now know which cord goes to which box.  All the cords are labeled.  The extension cord is secured in a nice small bundle.  The various cords are no longer a knotty maze, but easy to follow from electrical outlet to box.

But what a bloody pain in the butt it was.  Grrr.

It’s August, and–as every parent of a school-aged kid knows–that means it’s time for registration.

Registration for school, for gymnastics, for dance or ice skating.  Checking to be sure the shots are up to date.  Perusing the school supply list.  Time to check winter coats and boots for fit.  Eyeing schedules.  Considering how to transition to “school year” bedtime, as opposed to happy-go-lucky summer bedtime.

I schlepped over to the elementary school this afternoon to do the annual signature-fest, and was just as irritated this year as last.

See, for returning students, the school has you check a printout with a variety of information on it (name, DOB, address, parents’ names, phone numbers, emergency contacts, ethnicity, yadda yadda yadda).  And then you have a sheaf of additional paperwork to fill out–still more emergency contact information, permissions for Internet use (or not), permission to use pictures (or not), permission to dispense ibuprofen/tylenol/cough drops/etc. (or not), signatures that you’ve received (and read and agreed to) the school’s student handbook, and the borough’s student handbook.

And on and on.

The thing that makes this database programmer’s stomach churn is that you get that printout, which has name, DOB, student ID number, and a variety of other information…all printed out, spit out straight from the belly of the Great Database in the Borough School District Offices.  But all those other forms?  The endless sheets, in the endless array of colors?

Those you have to fill out by hand.

Including all that information that is already on the printout.

Twenty sheets of info.  (Well, okay, ten.)  All with student name, DOB, student ID number.  Some with parent name and phone number.  All of which could be generated by a mail-merge using the data direct from the Great Database in the Borough School District Offices.  None of which are.

So folks, there you have it:  Here we are, in the year of our Lord 2009.  We have to fill out forms about Internet permissions–Internet permissions!!!–by hand.

We’re lucky in that we have only one kid to do this for.  When I sat down at the array of tables with my sheaf of color-coded paperwork in my hand, girding my fist to do battle with the pen, next to me was Mike, parent of A., OmegaDotter’s best bud from school.  He has four kids.  One is in middle school, so he has a different sheaf of paperwork to do for her; the middle two were returning students, and the last is going into kindergarten this year.  He had three sets of paperwork he was filling out mindlessly.

We commiserated, swapped names and phone numbers as emergency contacts (he and his family arrived in Alaska after us, and they are about as sociable as we are, which is to say, not very), and wrote.  And wrote.  And wrote.

Gah.  What century are we in now?  Why are universities and community colleges all set up to do this stuff by web, and the local schools aren’t?  I know it’s expensive, but surely the borough school district has an IT staff, whose job it is to do things like this?

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

Answers to questions and comments from yesterday’s post:  Mamasan–We had totally forgotten the camera, so no need to feel guilt!  Tonggu Mama–We haven’t read the book yet, so don’t know whether it’s any good or not.  There is a website with games and what-not, and the games emphasize different cultures, different countries, and the “tokens” you win (passport stamps) can be redeemed for $$ to go to charities.  VinegarMartini–I’d like to claim that the dollar-a-missed-turn-signal was all the dotter’s idea, but am not sure.  She was, however, relentless in catching the misses!  Also, thanks for the tip on Target vis-a-vis the outfits; that will help immensely!  Jean–Alas, I think OmegaDad did not miss any turn signals on purpose.  He truly has a problem with being distracted by conversation or the radio, and howls with frustration when he is caught.

I am no longer “forty-mumble” years old.  Today I hit the official half-century mark.

I can remember years ago, when I hit twenty-five, having a phone conversation with my dad.  I told him I didn’t feel like it was possible that I was twenty-five.  At the time, it seemed “old”…He told me that he couldn’t imagine being in his fifties, and that all the time he felt like he was still in his 20s or 30s.  Now I know how he felt.

What has gone on in those years?

In no real particular order:  Sputnik.  The JFK assassination.  Martin Luther King Jr. being shot.  The Civil Rights movement.  The Apollo program and the moon landing.  The Summer of Love.  Riots.  Woodstock.  Kent State.  Watergate.  Gas lines.  Jimmy Carter sitting in the White House wearing a cardigan sweater.  Huge computer rooms filled with spinning tapes morphing into 8-1/4″ floppy drives morphing into boxy 10-MB hard drives morphing into the first Apples and PCs morphing into desktops and laptops and netbooks; cabling turning into wi-fi.  IBM Selectrics being perfected and then *poof* disappearing into the mists of time.  Reagan being shot.  The first shuttle take-off and landing.  Saturday Night Live.  The Iran hostage crisis.  Northwestern University, Loyola University, community college in Arizona, California State University.  The Blue Angels performing in Chicago, and San Francisco.  Three loves and one husband.  MTV.  A shuttle exploding.  Another shuttle exploding.  The Loma Prieta earthquake.  The Oakland Firestorm.  Usenet.  Mosaic.  Netscape Navigator.  The Internet.  Bulletin boards.  YouTube, Twitter, blogs.  The dot-com crash.  Bush I.  Dubya.  Clinton.  9/11.  Weddings.  Births.  Funerals.  Amazon.com.  Chicago, Arizona, the Bay Area, Lubbock, Arizona, Alaska.  The invention of in-vitro fertilization.  The Beatles, the Who, Jefferson Starship.  Heavy metal.  Punk.  Rap.  Hip-hop.  Grunge.  Us trying IVF.  Adoption from Korea fading, adoption from China growing.  Us adopting from China.  Gay rights.  The first black president of the U.S.  The Segway.  Hybrid automobiles.  Hubble telescope.  Katrina.  Glasses, contacts, LASIK.  Mini skirts, maxi skirts, the Marcia Brady look, tunic sweaters with legwarmers and straight-leg jeans.  Star Wars.  Cell phones as a status symbol turning into cell phones in the grocery store checkout line.  Mix tapes turning into Walkmen turning into iPods.  Sushi, tapas bars, Pop-Tarts and GoGurt.  The Food Network, Bobby Flay, Rachel Ray.  Congresscritters Twittering.  Three hundred and forty four extra-solar planets known so far.

It’s a weird, wonderful world.  I wonder what the next 50 years will bring?

My mom blasted me with a series of “happy birthday” YouTubes in my email today.  She was born shortly after TV was invented.  I have a seven-year-old; who knows what she will see in the years to come?

Fifty years ago, a long-distance phone call was expensive.  Yesterday, I was able to share a scary moment with friends across the world, and they were able to reply to me in seconds, minutes, hours. 

This afternoon, the dotter and I went swimming.  When we went to the pool, the sky above us was grey and cloudy, but the mountains in the distance were beginning to reflect some sunlight.  When we left, though…oh, how beautiful the mountains were!  Snow covered, reflecting the afternoon sunlight, with bands of lifting fog floating in front of them here and there, and banners of wind-blown snow drifting off the peaks in other places.

Of course, I didn’t have my camera.  And even if I did, the batteries are dead, because I was taking documentary pics of Important Stuffed Animal Surgery.

But this is what always happens:  I see a really kewl pic opportunity, and I don’t have my camera, and I want to smack myself on the head.  It happens to OmegaDad, too.  So what we should be doing is carrying the damned camera with us everywhere.  In our hands.  At the ready.  So we can capture those lost opportunities–like when your kid does something unutterably cute, and the next instant is standing there looking dour and grumpy.

Right?

OmegaDad and I have taken to joking that what we need is a RetinaCam™ for all those instances, a camera embedded in our eyeballs that we can point and, say, tap our cheekbones, and we’d get a picture.

Now, people have been experimenting with cameras embedded in eyeglass frames, which is getting close.  But I’d think such a contraption would be somewhat lopsided feeling, and obtrusive.  We want something akin to what the Six Million Dollar Man had–something in the eye that has zoom capability and more.

Guess what?

Someone is working on that right now.

Yes!  OmegaDad was listening to NPR on the way home from work the other day, and heard an interview with a filmmaker who has only one eye, plus a prosthetic eye in the other socket.  This filmmaker is trying to develop an embedded, wireless camera in his prosthetic eye.  This is his website.  And this is a video of where his project is at right now:

EYEBORG– The Two Week Trial from eyeborg on Vimeo.

This is just too cool for words.

Or, alternatively, “Help me, Obiwan Kenobi!  You’re my only hope!”

What OmegaMom has been doing for the past two days, while sorting and washing laundry, is quickly becoming addicted to puzzle games on the computer.  Specifically, “hidden object” games.

Let’s back up a year or two.  At one point, OmegaDotter wanted (gag!) La Casa de Dora, a computer game.  We had a trial version, which lasted an hour.  So I signed up with BigFishGames–the “Jumbo Club” option–thinking that we would be downloading games on a regular basis, and downloaded La Casa de Dora.

Then I promptly forgot about my Jumbo Club membership.

So…OmegaDotter has gotten more mature, more able to figure things out, more deft with a mouse, and a month or two ago OmegaDad downloaded trial versions of some other games for her, specifically SuperCow, The Scruffs, and Feeding Frenzy.

Once again, the trial versions expired.

The dotter really liked SuperCow.  I really liked The Scruffs, a hidden object game with a sense of humor.  I decided–o brilliant idea!–to buy her these games for Christmas.

But when I went to BigFishGames, I tried signing up with my regular email address, and The Powers That Be told me I was already registered.

Whoops!

But!

But!

I now had 9 game credits!  Woot!

So rather than spending $10 per game (with the super-de-duper holiday game savings coupon), suddenly they were free!

I promptly downloaded the three games, and then spent hours the night before Christmas working my way through The Scruffs.

And then I decided I wanted another “hidden object” game, so I went to the game site and found “Mystery Case Files:  Ravenhearst”.

And then on Christmas day and the day after Christmas, I went through Ravenhearst.

And then I decided I wanted another Ravenhearst game (because I had seen it on the front page of the game site) and I downloaded it.

And I have been playing these damned games for days on end.

This is not good.  I need a magic word (like “Xyzzy!”) to transport me away from this sudden addiction.  Or I need a rescuer, like Obiwan Kenobi, to fight off the Dark Side of the Force.  I have a real life, dammit.  I have a dotter (who is enjoying working the puzzles with me, at least, so we’re doing a Family Fun Time Activity).  I have a husband.  There are errands to run.  There are stairs to shovel, because we’ve had a foot of snow on top of older snow, and 45-mph winds blowing the snow hither and yon.  We have a broody hen segregated in the garage (more on that later).  I still have laundry to do.

…but I still need to free the twin girls’ ghosts and find all the objects and figure out all the puzzles, and it’s calling me.  (Cue ominous music.)

Pool.

OmegaDad discovered an online quick-fire pool game the other day.  As a result, he and I have, at varying times, been found in front of the computer at odd hours, trying to beat the clock shooting virtual pool.

Step with me back to the days of yesteryear.

When I met OmegaDad, back in the mists of time in Los Alamos, we spent a lot of time hanging around Ashley’s Pub with the kids.  As we were, at 34 and 29, the oldest of the group–the rest were all dewy-eyed fresh-faced college kiddies–and we were wildly in love, we spent all our time together there.  We’d all drink beer and shots and mixed drinks of varying foofiness, eat burgers and chips from the restaurant, and crowd into the pool room, shooting pool.

OmegaDad was short and scrawny and wiry and lean, with a tight little ass, a lop-sided chin, a blonde mustache, and below-the-ear wavy blonde hair that was whitened by the sun.

He was hawt, guys.  Oh so hawt.

And he could play pool.  Dayum, could he play pool.

He’d swagger around the pool table with a cocky little strut, glance around, and suddenly lean over the table, cue in hand, pop off a shot with arrogant ease, and sink that puppy into the pocket while he was turning around and laughing at something someone else was saying.  He always seemed to vibrate, like a plucked violin string, sizzling and fizzing with life and zest and interest.

It was a mighty fine sight to see.

I hadn’t played much pool prior to our getting together, but so much of our time was spent there that I soon was enjoying myself greatly.  Let’s not mention that, since he was ostensibly “teaching” me to play pool, I often found myself wrapped in his arms as we leaned over the table edge, his head next to mine, his mustache tickling my ear, his hand on mine, guiding the pool cue…

Um.

Excuse me, is it getting warm in here?

Anyway, this cute little computer time waster has brought some memories rushing to the forefront.  These days, we don’t play pool; we haven’t been to a bar or pool parlor in umpty-ump years, and we’re staid old married folk.  But when he sits down at the computer to play him some pool, he’s still got that nonchalant ease.  I struggle to get an accuracy rating of greater than 50%; he regularly hovers around 83%.  I have managed to get a score up to around 3,500; he has managed to get a score up around 12,000.

What can I say?  The boy obviously has pool in his blood.

Those are the dreams that everyone has, where they are, say, giving a speech and suddenly realize that they’re standing up at the podium fully unclothed, and everyone is staring at them.

Or, as my husband related when I told him of my anxiety dream, the one where you know you have to take a final for your class, but suddenly realize you have no idea where the class is being held, or what the class was about.

These are classics.

Mine was a bit different:

I was at work in the cubicle farm (the physical venue was from waaaay back when, when I worked on the magazine in the suburbs of Chicago), tap, tap, tapping away at my keyboard, when I heard a ruckus from neighboring cubicles.  Someone was complaining about “the bug in the program!” and how it needed to be fixed.

I knew that this was a program I had written for J, in the Campus Supply department.  J had left, and someone else was taking over her work.  This meant taking over the program.  But, as someone else explained (loudly), “the bug in the program!” had been there all along.

So they called in this guy from the IT department, and he was getting the info from these other folks.  They were discussing it quite loudly, so I overheard.  I was suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of guilt–how on earth could I have not fixed that bug yet?  But I had been putting it off forever, and now…now it was coming home to roost.  So I rushed out to intercept them, telling the IT guy that I knew exactly where the bug was, and it was easily fixable, and why didn’t we just grab a computer and I’d show him where it was and how to fix it.

We appropriated an empty cubicle, that just happened to have a computer in it.  I sat down at the computer with him sitting at my side.  He was wearing a contemptuous, sneering look.  This was a Very Important person from IT, who everyone knew had gotten his degree from A Very Prestigious University.  I started up the computer, and realized I couldn’t find the program.

I couldn’t even get the mouse working right.  The mouse had a heavy-duty industrial electric cable that attached it to the computer, there were heaps of junk around it on the desk, and the cable kept getting tangled in the junk.  Worse yet, the cable was short, so I had to yank it and yank it to try to get enough cable to get the mouse moving properly.

All this while, he was just sitting there, sneering.  Finally he muttered something about “you must be a CIS major” in a dismissive tone, and I found myself babbling about how I knew he had gone to Very Prestigious University and was very smart, but I had a degree, too, from Cal State, and it was a CS degree, not a CIS degree…

But I couldn’t find the program, and I couldn’t get the mouse to work, and I had never fixed the bug, and he was just sneering…

And I woke up from that nap in a very, very anxious mood.  Depressed.  Miserable, actually.  It was just as bad as the time I had (foolishly) decided to play Fur Elise–which I had just started learning–at a piano master class with a visiting master pianist, instead of the piece I had been practicing forever, which I knew backwards and forwards.  I had that exact same sinking feeling, the absolute and total desire to just sink down into the ground and vanish and Not Be There, a feeling of utter humiliation, the worse because it was self-inflicted.

Ugh.

I spoke too soon.  Virus re-appeared on one computer, and I’m scanning the other computer right now, as I type.  I am considering Desperate Measures.

In the Department of Obviousness:  I had to drive OmegaDad into Big City for an endoscopy.  We found ourselves behind a city bus.  There was an ad for the bus system on the back.  The “slogan”?  “Ride the bus” in big font, “to travel around Big City” in smaller font.  No!  You’re kidding me!  I thought you rode the bus for, say, some other reason!  (Picture OmegaMom rolling her eyes.)

You know you’re married to the right person when you both move directly to putting down the Big City Rapid Transit advertising department at the same time, without pausing to say anything like, “Did you see that idiotic ad?!”

I think.

I have been Fighting The Good Fight with viruses.

Not human-type viruses, but computer-type viruses.

All I can say is, what a pain in the fucking ass.

Harrumph.

The scientific method, that is.  Theories?  We don’t need no steenkin’ theories, man!  Hypotheses?  Pish-tush!  Soooo 20th century!  Experimentation?  Observation?  Oh, puh-leeze!  Who needs that stuff?  ‘Cause we’ve got data.

Gigabytes of data.  Terrabytes of data.  Petabytes.  Hexadeca-bytes.  Google-bytes, even!  (But not Google™ type bytes.)  Infini-bytes!  We have data pouring out our ears these days, thanks to the Intertubes, and so Wired Magazine has declared The End Of The Scientific Method.

‘Cause, y’see, we can take all that data, put it in a big Magic Data Mangler, shake it, stir it, decant it, and ta-da!  New science!  All these nifty correlations will spill out, neat science-y goodness just spread in front of us like a field of diamonds, sparkling and glittering and making us gasp at the magic of it all.  Kozmik All knows it’s much easier to do that than to, say, oh…think.  Who needs to look at the world and wonder "why?" or "how?" or "what would happen if we did x?"

I’m sure OmegaBro will be glad to know he doesn’t need to go traipsing off to all his field sites any more.  Why bother to investigate what happens to sawfly galls on southwestern stream willows in flood years versus in dry years?  Why spend your time counting galls on specific trees at specific sites each year?  I’m sure that information is out there in the interwebs cloud, just floating around, waiting for dear OmegaBro to write the proper program to collect it, stir, shake, and spill, and voila, he will have his community ecology interactions down to a "T".

Of course, there’s that silly little thing like, oh, deciding what to mine from the vast cloud of info out there.  And why.

As someone commented on the essay, "garbage in, garbage out"–that grand old saying about computers and data–applies here.  Given how infested the web is with spam and commercialism and outright crankery, using the "just grab all the data out there and whirl it around in some big-ass computers" approach might deposit a lovely fewmet of, say, colonics cleansing being effective at removing years-old parasites from poor haggard human bodies.  Or someone might use it to prove that Indigo Children really are an increasing influence on world politics today.

Lots of other folks have said it, but I’ll say it, too:  Theory is not dead.  The scientific method is not passe.  The Wired essay is waving its hand at statistical correlation being science, all gee-gosh-golly-wow charts-n-graphs.  But that’s not science.  It’s cool, yes, I’ll grant that.  And lots of interesting information is coming out of the expanding ability to correlate disparate groups of data and seeing what patterns emerge.  But science is asking "why?", trying to figure out the natural world, trying to understand underlying laws that drive the universe, delving into genetics and fossils and tokamaks and outer space and multi-dimensional math and gravity and thermonuclear processes that make stars burn bright…

All that kind of stuff.

Y’see, the information mining that Wired is going gaga over has–as its very basis–human beings who explored the world and teased out important basics based on theories, based on thousands of years of human beings asking questions, posing hypotheses, testing them out, deciding what works and what doesn’t, and why it works that way and not another, and how to harness the way it works to make life easier (or more complex) for humanity.  And it requires humans asking "why?" and wanting to know the answer to even decide to make the Magic Data Manglers look at one particular set of data in particular, before the MDM spills out its oh-so-pretty correlations.

So I have to say, the scientific method–theory, hypotheses, testing, experimentation, revision–is not dead yet; it’s not the red-shirted Away-Team member who always bites the dust in any Star Trek episode.

(No, not about taxes!)

Most of the time, I go through life thinking most people are pretty nice, that everyone (generally) just wants to get along, that the folks who get a kick out of hurting other people are few and far between.  That hackers are only interested in scoring, via macho skillz, or making money by scamming or thievery, but not interested in hurting other people.

Then I read something like this.

Hackers and spammers and what-not are branching out, it seems.  Not content with stealing people’s credit card numbers or identification, or posting 279 spam comments on an obscure blog per day for a week, they’ve now decided to target epilepsy patients, with something that hurts them.

An epilepsy support board was hacked by folks who put javascript in place to either display a seizure-inducing picture or redirect the post-reader to another website entirely that displayed a full-screen video of seizure-inducing patterns.

What kind of sick fucks would do something like that?!

I mean, really.  I can get "revenge".  I can get "personal animosity" aimed at one person.  I can get graffiti.  I can get theft.  But I can’t get the kind of personality that impersonally poisons an online medical support group with something that can actually physically incapacitate or hurt someone.  My considered opinion:  These are scum-sucking slimeball pigs with the morals of a hyena, like roaches of the internet, who should be squashed like the bugs they are.

Bastards.

Well, actually, yes we do.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my little mystery hunt trying to figure out why the vehicle reservation system in my department of Small Mountain University was on the fritz, how I discovered that the unique identifier for each reservation was limited to four digits by Nice Young Intern, and how sometime in the past few months, we had hit 9,999 and the reservation numbers started all over again at 1, causing all sorts of funky errors.

My readers in the biz were appalled.  "Where was the code review?!" they proclaimed.

Yah, well.  (OmegaMom looks aside, shuffles her feet, coughs a bit…)

I love working at SMU.  I really do.  I started in the ITS department, got chopped in the Great Layoffs, took a (much less remunerative) position as an administrative assistant while waiting for IT jobs to re-appear, and then got my position in Current Department when the job market started warming up again.  The atmosphere on campus is collegial.  There are lots of cool folk doing lots of cool things on the academic side; there are lots of cool folk doing lots of cool things on the ITS side; there are lots of cool folk doing less cool but immensely important things on the business side, and almost everyone I’ve worked with at SMU has been intelligent, interesting, fun, and good to work with.  (I can think of two exceptions over the past nine years, that’s all.)

Anyway, in the ITS department, since we have lots of folks there, many ITS things were (and are) done by the book.  Good coders, good reviewers, good interactions between everyone.  But there are only so many ITS folk to go around, and those that are tasked with helping on more complex projects outside ITS are booked solid for a year in advance.

Out in the departments, there are IT folk who are hired as departmental support.  Itty bitty departments have to make do with no-one, or sharing someone with a few other itty-bitty departments.  Bigger departments get one or two.  Really big departments get their own geek squad.

Each of those support folk have to handle a wide variety of different issues.  There’s day-to-day support:  Figuring out why JoAnne’s email suddenly disappeared.  Helping Dr. Professor Jones stitch together a master document and sub-documents in Word (and trying to explain that master- and sub-documents in Word have a really bad reputation for getting corrupted and frying your entire 417 page manuscript).  Updating web pages.  Maintaining small databases.  Developing interfaces to bigger university systems, or maintaining old interfaces that have been just chuggin’ along for many years but need a tweak or two now and then.  Arranging repair for old equipment.  Buying new equipment.  Figuring out equipment budgets for the upcoming year.  Buying color toner when something needs to be printed in color RIGHT NOW!  Crunching numbers in spreadsheets.  Putting together pamphlets or brochures or quarterly newsletters.  Getting new people set up on systems and into the university system.  Running local servers.  Maybe running computer labs for students and staff.  Providing down-and-dirty training.

Rarely a dull moment.  Always fun to help people.  Good to get to know folks in all aspects of the higher education biz.

It’s sort of like juggling.  There’s always something that is urgent.  Typically, the urgent stuff is related to ensuring that everyone in the department is able to do their work.  Then there are the bigger departmental projects…which get done in and around the "making sure everyone can do their work" everyday stuff.  You’re catching the errors on this database while crunching the numbers for that report to the board while uploading PDFs to the website while figuring out why the network has gone down for the people in room 219 while…

What ends up happening is that whoever gets handed the bigger project just bulls in and does it. 

Like the project Nice Young Intern worked on.

It gets done, it gets tossed up, people who are chomping at the bit to get to use the project start working on it (ostensibly as testing) and then suddenly it segues into being used.  And rare is the chance to get someone to give your code a review.

I’m pretty sure Johnny and SpaceMom are shivering in their boots at that mild paragraph.  Where’s the project outline?!  Where are the specs?!  Where’s the test plan?!  Where’s the code review?!  Where’s the iterative process?!

I know, I know.  At times it bothers me, too.  But y’know what?  It’s really fun work.  You get to be a jack (or jill) of all trades.  You get to help people.  And all of these "bigger" projects are really, in the course of things, small potatoes; they’re "big" in relationship to the day-to-day stuff at the departmental level.  It’s not like the small army of coders and testers and code librarians and project managers handling a Truly Important Project like the online education program or the accounting program or the human resources program.  Those projects are vital, necessary to the lifeblood of the university as a whole.  They’re handled by ITS, they’re treated like good software projects should be, they take time and money and people and organization.  Those projects get code reviews out the wazoo.  Smaller projects that ITS takes on, handled by one team or another, also get the software project treatment.  But projects handed out to departmental support folk?  Those get dropped on the desk as a "Y’know, it would be nice if we could do x, y, or z.  D’you think you can pull something together in two weeks?" 

NYI’s project started that way, and my predecessor knew that it would probably not get done in any decent amount of time unless she borrowed a student from the CS or CIS programs.  It made a good summer project for NYI, and he did think it through, provide specs, program it, and get it up and running.  Since he specified only four digits for the reservation number, I’m thinking that people talked it over and figured that the program would be replaced long before they needed to worry about it.  Sort of like Y2K.

But code review?  What a luxury that would be!

When we moved, we lost our cordless phones.  (No, we’re not on wireless.  We couldn’t receive wireless at our old house, so it wasn’t worth the price.)  (Though I suppose we might be able to receive wireless where we are now.  Hmmm.)  Anyway, we purchased a (lousy, crappy, useless) dirt-cheap corded phone from the grocery store to tide us over for a while when we first moved in.

Then the tabby doohickey that sticks out to ensure that the phone actually, say, hangs up when you put the receiver down broke off.  When it broke off, I we had no earthly idea what it was for, so I we threw it in the garbage can.

Thereafter the (lousy, crappy, useless) corded phone was iffy, at best, about when you had really, truly hung up.  And if you weren’t in the vicinity to hear the beep beep beep noise that the phone company so carefully provides you to alert you to the fact that your phone is off the hook, after a while the beep beep beep would turn off and the phone line would go dead.  Thus, when folks, say, called you up–what a concept!–all they got was a busy signal.  Or, after we got our new phone service, a voice mail box.  We on the other hand would go merrily on our day to day lives, not realizing that (a) our phone was actually off the hook, and (b) other people were actually trying to contact us and leaving phone messages…until one or the other of us picked the phone up to make a call.

Since we’re not wild and crazy social guys, that would happen every few days or so.

Then we bought a cordless phone set.

Woohoo!  Entering into the modern age, we thought!

Then a few weeks later, OmegaDad, while reaching for something in the old iteration of the office (read:  cramped, messy, filled with poorly balanced heaps) knocked the main base off the desk.

::  All your base are belong to us!  :: some kozmik kritter proclaimed.

Our base no longer worked.

Our two related cordless phones no longer worked.

One of our corded phones didn’t work.  This particular clue makes me think, in retrospect, that it was not OmegaDad knocking over the base unit that did it, but that some Evil Coincidental Voltage Spike did it instead.

Only our (lousy, crappy, useless) corded phone that was schizophrenic about whether it was actually hung up or not (thus having a hang up on hang-ups, eh?) was "working", in the sense that we could place calls and receive calls–when it was hung up.

So OmegaDad finally purchased new cordless phones this weekend.

We plugged them in and started charging those puppies up.

Last night he did all the proper registering and what-not of the phones.

Everything seemed hunky dory.  Maybe–just maybe!–this time our phone situation would last longer than a week or two!

This afternoon, OmegaDad, being a loving and sentimental fella, gave me a call.  In a graceful, swan-like dip, I reached over, grabbed the cordless phone, pressed the "talk" button, and started talking.

As I was talking, I noticed that the network had gone out on my computer.

"Hunh!" thought I.  While talking to OmegaDad, I started fiddling with various network things on the computer.  Nothing worked.  I announced to him that the network was down.  I hung up the phone, fiddled with some more networking things, and the network got back up, dusted itself off, and started working again.

I gave my computer the hairy eyeball.

That was mighty coincidental, I said to myself.

I picked up the cordless phone.

I dialed OmegaDad’s office number, watching the networking indicator on the computer.  Ring, ring.  Nothing happened.

Then OmegaDad picked up the phone.  A second later, the network went down.

I gave my computer the hairy eyeball once again.

"Dude.  When I talk to you on the new phones, it kills the wireless network."

OmegaDad thought it was the cabling (our phone lines are carried over the cable network).  I was sure it was telecommunications interference of one sort or another.  I hung up.  The network came back up.  I read the phone manual.  They made sure to tell you about other things interfering with the phone, but not a word about the phone interfering with other things.  Grrr.

I flexed my Googlemeistra fingers and typed in "wireless phone computer interference".  After reading a variety of things, it turns out that our (cheap!) cordless phones, which transmit on 2.4GHz, interfere mightily with various 802.11 wireless networking protocols, because they, too, are on that frequency. 

The OmegaFamily was very, very close to dumping the new phones.

Then I found something that talked about being able to assign a frequency to the wireless router.  Specifically, that while the majority of the bands used by the wireless router are overlapping channels, 1, 6, and 11 are unique and don’t overlap.  I logged into the router.  I fiddled with settings.  I found a way to select channel 11 (the one I remembered off the top of my head as being unique).  I saved.  I picked up the phone.  I dialed OmegaDad.  He picked up. 

And lo and behold, the network didn’t go down.

Let that be a lesson to you.  Googling rulz!

(I thought about titling this post "What’s the frequency, Kenneth?!"  Does this date me?)

(Technical stuff follows.  Feel free to ignore.)

Oooooo!

So there we are at work…our transportation center has an online reservation system that was written by a Nice Young Intern.  It was written back in 2002 and has worked okie doke since.  (Aside from the fact–which I discovered recently–that it has been running on the development server all this time, rather than the production server.  To those of my readers to whom that is an arcane distinction, let me just say:  production servers have paging systems.  If the production server goes down in the wee hours of the night, some poor ITS minion is paged and required to dash in to the office to Figure Out The Problem Right Now!  This does not happen with development servers.  If a development server goes down, the priority to get it going again is low on the totem pole.  Also, DBAs feel quite happy to Do Things to development servers, without worrying that they’re going to break something.)

Recently, we’ve been getting complaints from our TC that the users of the online reservation system have been getting errors.

I investigate.  Luckily (or not so much ‘luckily’ as ‘almost inevitably’, as it turns out), I immediately get an error page.

(Let’s set aside the fact that there’s no error checking, so we don’t have a “nice” error page telling our users that oops, there’s a problem, and please try again later??)

The error page says “unique constraint violated’.  What the heck?  Why would that happen?

Interestingly enough, the DBAs had just updated the development server shortly before the TC folks really pushed us about this error.  So I went down that path for a while.  But a DBA, when emailed, provided a clue–he said that we’re trying to insert new rows with a duplicate primary key.  (A ‘primary key’ is a number that uniquely identifies a row in the table.  For instance, if you’re doing a credit card transaction, the primary key might be, say, your transaction number.  No-one else is going to have that transaction number…or no-one else will have that transaction number on that date, so the primary key would be trans number plus date.)

I noodle around.

I investigate.

I discover, much to my absolute and utter horror…

The Nice Young Intern had set up the reservation numbers as the primary key.  This is okay.

The NYI had an automatic number generating doodad set up in the Oracle database to generate those reservation numbers.  This is okay.

The NYI had not used the default maximum limit for the reservation number–which would be some gawd-awful number like 999,999,999,999.

No.

The NYI created the reservation number system to have a maximum number of 9999.  This is not okay.

So…once the TC had gotten reservation number 9999, what happens?

The automatic numbering system starts all over again, at number 1.

Back when the system was being developed and tested, there were loads of jumps in the numbering system.  NYI would try a reservation, it wouldn’t work, he’d back out, that reservation number would be discarded…But as the system went online and real people started using it, the gaps in the numbering system would become fewer and fewer in number.

The first few hundred numbers worked okay.  Users would get an error once every great while, when the system tried to save a reservation that had a reservation number already used in the system.  But now…now…the gaps in the numbering system are few and far between.  Thus, as I said above, it was almost inevitable that the test reservation I made would not go through.

Why the fuck would someone create a system keyed on an automatic number that rolls over when it hits 9999?!  This is like our own little tiny version of the Y2K problem.

And I’m hopping mad about it.

Luckily, it’s an easy fix.

Grumble, grumble, grumble, bitch, moan, complain.