Tralfaz

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  • More nostalgia – Technology – the PC Clone

    After my Atari 8 bit and 16 bit days, I tacked hard into PC clone land.  My first build was a Mylex motherboard, with 640K ram, and a 286 CPU.  I remember buying the components from a variety of sources, but since this was pre-internet (probably 1986 or so) I didn’t mail order anything.  Probably got much of it at Fry’s Electronics.

    My first foray into the PC world
    My first foray into the PC world

    Added to this was an PC AT case and power supply, a 5 1/4″ floppy drive, an ISA RLL disk controller card, and a simple CGA display card.  A 40 (or was it 60) megabyte HD that was the most expensive part of the build was added to the mix. (It was a 5 & 1/4″ full height disk that was frightfully loud). I remember it having a turbo button (almost always in fast mode) that slowed it down to standard PC XT speed for compatibility – mostly games.

    My good friend Mike Davis helped me assemble it, and got me started with a selection of software for use on it.  I did use the heck out of that system, and subsequently upgraded a few times over the years.  I remember going to a 386 board, with a 16MHz cpu, and a whopping 4 megs of ram. I learned a lot about things that we no longer worry about. IRQ lines and conflicts, UART’s for serial communication (which ones could support the faster 19.2K baud modems).  In those days, there weren’t robust BIOS systems to let you interrupt the boot process and change the settings, you had to open the case and set jumpers on the motherboard or expansion cards. Really annoying to hunt down an odd conflict.

    The main driver for upgrading was to play games better.  CGA was replaced with EGA, and finally with VGA.  Using more than 640K of RAM required the use of fiddly memory manager applications. I was fond of DesqVIEW and QEMM386.  They both worked together to give you some true multitasking on the 386 chip.

    Of course, I used these machines to run a bulletin board system, but it lost much of the Atari charm.  I did discover the online systems, and was a member of Delphi. The one thing that I remember from this time was that the PC world, while it had better, and more powerful hardware, lacked some of the soul of the Atari’s I cut my teeth on. But it was a good stepping stone in my technology education and evolution.

    Sometime in 1989, I got the itch to try something new.  Still in university, I was able to get student pricing on a Mac, and I jumped at a Mac SE, with a 20 megabyte HD.  This was the all in one system, with the small monochrome monitor built in. But that is for another tale.

  • The good ol’ days – Technology edition

    Like everyone who makes it to middle age, I have a rich tapestry of memories. Today, while bicycling, I reminisced about my first computer, an Atari 800.

    My first personal computer
    My first personal computer

    The year was 1979, my freshman year of high school, and I got exposed to the new computer lab at school. It had (I think) 4 Apple ][+’s each with two disk drives, and small color composite monitors.  I was in love.  Of course, I couldn’t afford one of these, but Atari had just released their line of computers. Not as slick and sexy as the Apple ][‘s but it was in a price range that I could afford on my paper route money.

    After saving my nickels, I went out and splurged on an 800, and an 810 disk drive.  I added a Basic cartridge, and I bought a game.  Star Raiders if I recall correctly. I had am amazing amount of fun exploring that system.  I found some local users, and we started swapping disks of software, and I was happy.

    I learned Atari basic, some very simple 6502 machine language, and some of the cool capabilities of these systems. Then sometime in 1981 or 1982, I learned about electronic BBS’s.  At the time, the IBM PC hadn’t been launched, and if you wanted a personal computer, it was Apple, Atari, or Commodore (This was before the VIC20 and the C64 – so it was the older PET computers). I had heard of this thing called BBS’s, and I once again saved my dimes to buy a modem. I also had to buy an interface box (called the 850 I think, or was it 815?) to connect it to (the box had 4 RS232 ports), and I got online for the first time.  There were a ton of great Atari BBS’s, probably 40 – 50 in the San Jose area (no toll area for me), and I logged in to most of them. There were message boards, file exchanges, and even chatting with the operators of the BBS’s (called “Sysops”).

    I was hooked. I had a growing collection of software, and was enjoying the interchange, but the bug to run a BBS bit me.  I found a copy of the most used program, FoReM (Friends of Ricke E Moose), and off I went.

    The name was “The Hotel California” (I was going through an Eagles phase), and I made the entire board a music theme. I probably had 20 calls a day on the average. In those days kids, you had to use a phone line to call another computer. I also did a fair amount of customization to the software (It was written in Basic XL) which was a struggle because it barely fit in memory to run.  Often you had to rewrite a subroutine to save a few bytes before you could add somewhere else.  I added a lot of hardware to the system as time went on, more disk drives, a special adaptor that let me use 8″ disks (3X the storage per disk) and from a 300 baud Hayes modem up to a 1200 baud modem (don’t recall the brand). I also remember writing some assembly code that was executed from a string to be able to transmit data at 1200 bits per second.  Heady stuff indeed. Eventually it ended up on an Atari 800XL that I had hacked 128K of memory into (used the extra memory as a ramdisk to speed the message board IIRC).

    I ran the BBS for a bunch of years, and had a blast, but eventually I moved on to a 16 bit Atari, and to a PC clone. I made some friends that I still have today (Mike Davis, and Vern Anderson who ran the “Rat’s Nest” bbs, and was my guitar teacher).

    I have a 130XE, the last of the 8 bit line for Atari that I break out to play games on once in a while.  I have a ton of old software that I can run in an emulator, or on the real hardware. It is “fun” to return to the archaic past, and relive some experiences, but it reminds me of how well we have it now.

    Next installment – my migration to the world of PC clones.

  • Fitness Update (was how I am trying to not be a “People of Walmart”)

    Been a while since I updated. I started this quest about 2 months ago (actually April 9th, I started weighing myself daily), and I was 232#’s. I began counting calories, and tracking everything I ate, as well as trying to be more diligent about exercising.

    In early May, I got back on the bicycle (first ride in 6 months or so, I was rusty and SORE afterwards), and have been getting more diligent about hitting the streets.

    The weight has been inching down. Not as fast as I would like to see, but a pretty consistent 2+ pounds a week.  There have been some setbacks. My birthday dinner, and our anniversary dinner were good splurges, but they did slow the rate of decline. Additionally when I started getting more serious and regular about cycling, I suspect that I was trading adipose fat tissue for muscle tissue. My legs are coming back, and it feels great to ride for 25 – 30 miles at a stretch.

    Today, I am at 214#’s, spitting distance to 20#’s off, and I feel pretty good.  I think I might be able to start jogging at lunch time again, something my feet and my weight have prevented me from doing.

    The goal is to get to ~ 190#. That is a pretty comfortable weigh for my frame.  At this rate, by the end of summer, I should be able to get there.

  • Hypermiling – Pisses me off

    Today on the drive home, I was behind a Prius who was hypermiling. In case you are unaware, there is a phenomenon in the hybrid car world of people who work to minimize their fuel consumption. The cars’ onboard computer very accurately tracks fuel consumption, and they challenge themselves to keep the MPG as high as possible.

    To do this, they very slowly accelerate from a stop light, and brake far from a red light to use the regenerative braking (converts kinetic energy into electricity and stores it in the batteries). It is really annoying to be behind one of these buttholes when they are doing this.  We have ~ 1 mile between stop lights and these a-holes don’t even get to the 45mph speed limit before they slow for the next light (they seem to always have to stop). How boring.

    I drive a sports car. I like to accelerate hard through the gears, and to brake hard when I have to stop at a light. I like to go fast around corners, to start wide, kiss the apex, and drift back out. I know that I burn more gas than a hybrid, and I just don’t give a crap.

    I don’t ever see myself buying a hybrid, and trying to minimize gas consumption. I understand people who do that.  But I would rather sell my car and take public transit than have the mindset of a typical hybrid driver.

  • Why I hate Microsoft, part 1,392

    I freely admit that I am a Mac user. OS-X just works better for me, and my workflow.  But I will grant that Windows 7 is pretty good, and usable.

    Of course, since I work in the corporate world, I am forced to use Windows (well, in the past I have been a rebel and was a Mac in a PC world, but I stopped beating my head against that wall).  For the most part, Windows is fine. I even like Office 2010 and the ribbon interface that was introduced in Office 2007.

    But, for some strange reason, I have glitches in my email. We use Exchange and Outlook for email and calendaring, and it seems about once a week the OST file (where outlook keeps local data) borks. This leads to not being able to send or receive emails until I repair the OST. Which requires me to quit any applications that access the Outlook API and the OST file. Which means that I really have to reboot to scan and fix the errors. And since I have a PGP Whole Disk Encryption, it takes about 30 minutes for the services that hit the disk to be done after a reboot.

    Sigh, so go through all this, and run the tool (3 x until I no longer get errors in the scan), and then I can get back to work.

    Lost hour of productivity, because Outlook decides to freak out.

    Tobe fair, I have had some data issues on my mac, and keep much larger stores of email locally but they are fewer, and recovery doesn’t require running a program that looks like Windows NT3.51 vintage UI (the scanpst.exe program) to recover.

  • Google All Access versus Spotify Premium

    Recap:  After Google announced their “All Access” plan for their Play service, I jumped on the free week.  The intent was to compare it to Spotify which I had been a premium customer for about a year and a half (I went premium there to get rid of the ads and the “sponsored tunes” which really sucked – being top 40 crap).

    Early on, the reason why I went to spotify was that even with all 18,000+ tracks of my music collection being in my library, it was shitty for streaming. Lots of skips, halts, and “burps”. Spotify, whatever they do, was far more robust in streaming, and unless I was having major network issues, it never got glitchy.

    At the start of my evaluation of the Play All Access service, the issues with shitty streaming were still there. In fact, they were worse than I recall. In the last week though, I have given the All Access another chance (my free month is expiring soon, so I have to decide if I want to pay $7.95 a month for it). I am impressed. Three days this week, not one glitch or streaming issue. You still have to use the damn browser (no dedicated application), but at least it has been solid.

    2 weeks ago, I would have put my money on Spotify, but now for reliability, the Google All Access plan seems pretty good.

    Still to compare is the quality of music matching in the radio.  So far, I think Spotify is ahead there, barely (for the record, Pandora smokes them both, but I have doubts about their long term viability). But Google has my entire music collection, and I listen to much that isn’t licensed to Spotify (Paul Gilbert and Led Zeppelin come to mind)

    Either way I go, I am now confident that my tunes on my work laptop will be fine being streamed.

  • Physics Geek Alert

    In a meeting today, we were talking about models for contact mechanics to measure the indentation of an indenter probe into a surface.  I got to correct someone that the correct term is Hertz-Sneddon.

    Ian Sneddon, referred to as a Mathematician, made significant contributions to many areas of physics.

    Yeah, I am a geek.

  • A good problem

    Life is a series of challenges, but some are more welcome than others. Today I bicycled into the office, showered and changed into street clothes.  I brought in a pair of jeans, a polo shirt and the usual accoutrements. After showering, and dressing I made a stark observation:

    My jeans are almost too big to wear.

    Woo hoo, what a good problem to have.  I don’t yet need to shop for more clothes, because I have sets of clothes that will follow me down to below 190#’s, but it is a good feeling.

  • The joys of daily medications

    Since I have had a bout with coronary artery disease (a mild understatement), I get to daily take a fun regimen of medications. Prior to my “event” I had battled high blood pressure (ironically, my cholesterol was OK), and was on an ace inhibitor to keep it in the “sane” range.

    Post event, my cardiologist has been much more aggressive.  I am still on the ace inhibitor (which really was almost side effect free), and we added anti clotting drugs, as well as both a statin to lower cholesterol (they like to keep it really low, about 80), and a beta blocker.

    Beta blockers are the devil.  It does help lower my blood pressure, but it also lowers both my rest pulse rate, and my metabolism. The heart rate reduction is particularly pernicious, as it makes it difficult to get into a good aerobic zone for exercising. I can work my ass off, and never get above a pule rate of 130BPM.

    The bad of this is that while I am certainly burning the calories of the exercise, my heart rate monitor sees me as not exerting as much as I am, and thus it tries to adjust my statistics accordingly.

    Alas, there is no hope for change. Every year when I go for my stress test, I have to stop taking the beta blocker for 2 days prior. And my blood pressure goes through the roof. Like 150/99.

  • Diet and fitness update

    Last week was a challenge. With the holiday (grilled some yummy steaks), and our anniversary (tried another local Mexican place that is now our favorite), and two days of training a new sales engineer put a crimp on the diet. But all told, I came out of the week down a pound, and once the over abundance of salt worked its way out, my blood pressure recovered nicely.

    This weekend, I got into the spandex, on the bike, and put almost 54 miles on. It is getting challenging, as even leaving at 7:00AM, it is already 85F, and rising to mid 90’s before I get back at 9:00AM. Next week, I will need to pull the Camelback out of its hidey-hole, and load it up.  The water bottles are no longer enough to keep me hydrated.

    I am down to 215#, 25#’s to go to get to my target of 190.

    (This afternoon, it is almost 112F.  It is safe to say that the ice broke on the Salt River.)