Love where you live. It’s as simple as that. Even though it’s been 2 1/2 years since our relocation to the third largest city in the United States, I can not believe that we are lucky enough to live in such a wonderful place.
Yes, I grew up in the country. I lived on a farm. My high school graduating class was in the double digits. But living in the city is perfect for us and I still can’t believe I have such an honor.
Bell and Howell 16mm Movie Projector. Not my photo.
My second grade teacher was Mrs. Hayden. Situated in Room 108, Mrs. Hayden and second grade is probably the year I best remember from my elementary school years. Spelling tests included the word “deer”, when used in a sentence. We added and subtracted multiple columns of numbers. I was in the most advanced of the reading groups (there were three) and, if I’m remembering correctly, we went through two books of the Lippincott Early Reader series (maybe C and D?).
We had our desks arranged in rows and I sat in the back corner by the sink. Occasionally Mrs. Hayden would let me turn my desk sideways against the wall as I worked on my “seat work”. I wasn’t in trouble or anything, I think she just knew I needed a change of scenery once in a while. She smiled nicely and chatted with us in a way that made us feel like little adults. I remember one lunch time she told us her first name and that her husband was a barber. She lived in the next town over and drove through the snow to come to school everyday.
Mrs. Hayden knew I was a little geek; I was fascinated with the built-in vacuum system that we’d hold the blackboard erasers against on Friday afternoons to clean out the chalk dust. When the clock stopped (along with all the other clocks in the school), she let me go down to the office to turn in the attendance cards, where I watched the repairman work on the clock hanging behind Mrs. Youngs’ (the principal’s secretary) desk.
But most importantly in my second grade mind, Mrs. Hayden designated me as the person to run the Bell and Howell (or sometimes Singer) movie projector when it was time to watch 16 mm movies. At the beginning of the year she fumbled with the self-loading mechanism of the Bell and Howell projector and then I asked her if I could try loading it. I was successful and from that moment and throughout the year I ran the movie projector. I wore this as a huge badge of honor and only on one or two occasions did another person run the movie projector that year.
Perhaps my disappointment in those one or two occasions is why my desk was turned against the wall next to the sink.
Of all the teachers I had during my elementary years through the end of Grade Six, Mrs. Hayden was the one that really “got” me. I felt comfortable around her, I felt like I learned around her, and I excelled at my studies that year. She never seemed to get angry when someone was misbehaving, in fact, I don’t remember any incidents of anyone misbehaving that year.
Today our home in Chicago is situated near the old Bell and Howell factory complex where they made those movie projectors. During my walks of exercise I often walk by “Bell & Howell Lofts” and I think of Mrs. Hayden. She retired nearly 20 years ago. I found her profile on Facebook a few years ago and she is still as pretty as I remember her to be back in 1975.
I hope when she looks back on her teaching career she smiles about her experiences with all those students as much as I do when remembering how she encouraged me to be a little geek.
Anything I share anywhere online I do so knowing that any shred of this information could be made public at any time. Every document I save, every tweet I type, and of course every blog entry I write will have an infinite shelf life. When I type anything into a network connected computer it is being released to the wild. It may remain locked up on a hard drive or it could appear on the front page of some trashy website, but when I share it, that choice is no longer mine. I know this, and I’ve known this all of my technological life, ever since the first time I typed “Hi!” to my modem connected cousin in a chat room in 1985 using a Commodore 64, a modem, and GEnie (an ‘information sharing’ service from that era).
According to Reuters, Apple dropped plans for full end-to-end encryption of iPhone (and presumably other iOS-based device) backups after receiving complaints from the FBI. The FBI countered fully encrypting backups would harm any investigations.
Apple touts itself as a “privacy first” company and this news greatly disappoints me. However, I’m not completely taken by surprise by this.
Ever since 9/11, when the United States of America became fear-based, paranoid country of citizens, the government has rapidly eroded citizens’ privacy rights, all in the name of patriotism and safety. In the guise of “going after the bad guys”, government agencies, some out in the open and many behind closed doors, want to know anything and everything about every one of its citizens, whether you’re doing anything nefarious or not. Books have been published about this, television documentaries have shared this, movies have been made, there’s plenty of evidence out there. The U.S. Government feels they have a right to anything and everything you’re doing. Encryption prevents them from gathering this information. The Government is fearful of another attack akin to 9/11, not because of casualties or destruction, but rather because it would compromise the motto of “The Greatest Country in the World”. Another attack like that fateful day in 2001 would embarrass the Government and they’re going to do everything they can to prevent it from happening again.
“But I have nothing to hide!”. I hear this often when engaging others in a conversation along about this subject and my counterpoint is always two part: 1. It should be “But I have nothing to hide, yet!” and 2. Why don’t we just get rid of freedom of speech because perhaps “You have nothing to say”.
Aside from building your own cloud and your own ecosystem and your own encryption and the like, I still maintain Apple’s devices and ecosystems are still the safest option out there for Joe Schmoe and friends type users. This is why my family continues to invest in Apple products. Granted, today’s revelations are disappointing, and if it’s indicative of a trend I may consider building my own data fortress (because I can), but I still believe when it comes to privacy, Apple is still the best consumer choice in town.
And if you don’t want anyone accessing it, don’t put it on a computer to begin with.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr Day in the United States. It is a Federal holiday and Federal offices are closed, as well as the associated suspects; banks, etc. I am off from work today as it is a recognized company holiday.
Back when I was working for Frontier Communications I was a bit surprised by the number of employees who elected to not take this day off, as the particular area of the company I worked in delegated the day as an optional holiday. I worked in a 24/7 Network Operations Center. When I first started there I always thought MLK Jr Day would be handled like a weekend day, much like Memorial Day, Labor Day, etc. are handled. But the NOC Manager felt MLK Jr wasn’t a super important holiday and therefore it was decided it could be a regular work day and one could take the holiday time elsewhere in the year.
This always bothered me.
Can you imagine if the same suggestion was offered around Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, or any of the other traditional U.S. holidays? There would have been voices of objection and people carrying on about a lack of patriotism, etc. if the same approach was used for Independence Day.
As a manager I get that the timing of MLK Jr Day puts a small hiccup in the momentum one is usually trying to build at the beginning of the year. But in reality it’s not that big of a deal. We pause on this day to remember a man who made significant, important contributions to the fabric of our society. Choosing to skip his birthday remembrance as a “really not important holiday” is kind of rude and revealing of why his contributions are important to begin with.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
The full text of MLK Jr’s “I Have A Dream” speech can be read here.
While here in North Carolina I haven’t done much on Twitter. This is neither good nor bad, it just is. When spending time with friends, even those who are very tech savvy (though they have an awful Internet connection through their only choice for Broadband), it doesn’t make sense to spent time online when you can interact with others in real time so I opted for that.
I did some walking through the woods in a nearby park, putting in about five miles both yesterday and today on the various hiking trails available. I was delighted to see markers like this along the trail, as I would do similar things along trails I forged through the woods behind the house during my childhood. Whatever agency is responsible for the park has done a fantastic job of marking the trails with reference markers, making it easy to navigate from one trail to another and from one entrance to another.
A quick search revealed this website for the park, Little River Regional Park and Natural Area.
It was good to walk through the woods for a while this weekend. The whispering of the wind through the pines and the relative stillness of the surroundings is a stark contrast to the hustle and bustle of the big city.
I could tell a GA airplane was practicing stalls in the area; the unmistakeable sounds of the engine gave it away but I wasn’t able to spot the airplane through the tress.
A good relaxing weekend.
So I’m aboard United flight 1863 from O’Hare to Raleigh-Durham. I’ve been on this airplane since 5:55 PM; I am writing this at 8:49 PM. We just leveled off at cruising altitude. There’s been a lot of snow blowing through Chicago this evening. It took my husband two hours to get home from O’Hare; even on the busiest days of traffic it will take an hour. He said the expressways and streets were a mess getting home.
O’Hare was closed for departures right after we boarded; they needed to plow the runways. It took some time to do that and then we spent quite a while being de-iced. I am always grateful for de-icing. I know what ice can do to an airplane, big or small.
Conditions at the field were at Low IFR at departure, the lowest I’ve ever experienced as a pilot or a passenger. I was fascinated by the whole procedure. I wish I was sitting up front aboard this Boeing 737-800. I would love to fly at least once up front on a commercial flight. Of course, I would love to be an airline pilot but if I’m going to do that I need to get more lift under my wings, the bank account in better order, and most important, my ass at full throttle.
It’s doable. I can do anything.
I always enjoy this trip to visit friends in Durham. It’s a romping good time for all involved and a great opportunity to break away from the snow and cold we Yankees endure this time of year. I’m not sure I could live in what is traditionally called “the South” but it’s fine to visit once in a while.
A few of the pilots in the flying club have moved up to twin engine or turbo engine airplanes, a couple have moved up to business jets. I find this inspiring. I’m not in the cockpit nearly enough in the winter, so I’m going to have to make up for that this spring and summer.
In the meanwhile I’ll enjoy this flight to RDU. Any seat on an airplane is an awesome seat. And, just for the record, I’m in the premium steerage cabin this trip.
I couldn’t bring myself to explore the double digited rows.
I’m sitting at O’Hare awaiting my flight to Raleigh-Durham. I’m visiting friends during this long weekend. It’s an annual event. We always have a great time.
I’m curious to see if my flight actually gets out of here. It’s snowing quite hard with the promise of sleet and the like and the boards are showing many canceled flights.
So far, so good. ORD is showing IFR with one mile visibility.
I’m not in the front seat on this flight but any flight is an awesome flight.
I don’t know the people in this photo. This is a screen cap from a 1991 video about EPCOT Center, the second theme part to open up at Walt Disney World in Florida.
The reason I snapped this photo is because of the IBM 4683 Point of Sale terminal in the foreground. When my husband and I visited Disney in 1997 I noticed these terminals, and they’re younger siblings the 4693, 4694, and 4695 scattered all over the parks. This was not surprising, you would find IBM cash registers like this anywhere back in the day.
The IBM 4683 was the first cash register made by IBM that used fairly standard PC components, though many of the peripherals were connected through proprietary connectors. When they first came out in the late 1980s they ran on an operating system called 4680 OS which was based on FlexDOS. Like MS-DOS (which folks were running on their PCs at the time), FlexDOS was a PC-based variant that included special multitasking powers. Typically, in modern installations, there’d be two IBM PCs running in the store somewhere powering the IBM 4683 terminals you’d see at customer checkout stands.
I had a brief stint tailoring point of sale software for the IBM 4683s running General Sales Application, which was the primary software package used in non-grocery environments back in the day. It’d probably be surprising to younger software developers, but the code we wrote was in BASIC. Yes, the same commands that you entered into your PC were used on these terminals.
10 PRINT "Hello!"
20 GOTO 10
Looking back it’s amazing what we could do with the IBM 4683 given that onboard memory was still measured in kilobytes and they didn’t have a hard drive. The later IBM 4684 was more robust and could operate as a stand alone register. That’s when the DOS variant of retail software was introduced and it was called “Retail Application/PC”. I did a little work on that as well.
When I worked at Hills Department Store over one holiday season the store was converted from older NCR 255s (installed in 1978) to the IBM 4680 GSA system. Our registers looked identical to the one pictured at EPCOT Center, but we still didn’t get scanning. We’d enter the Department, SKU, Quantity (if more than one), and price of each item. Contrary to modern belief, we did not key in the UPC numbers from the back of the item’s packaging. The registers didn’t know the price back then, but they did know if the price was too low or too high for that particular department. The limited memory onboard the registers didn’t have enough room to know the price of individual items but it did know the range of the entire department the item belonged to.
It’s been years since I’ve regaled a modern times cashier with this information when they roll their eyes because an item won’t scan.
It wasn’t too long ago that I saw an IBM 4683 still out in the wild. It might have been in Canada and it was pressed into service with newer equipment. It seemed to be keeping up with the Joneses.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
Weird? Eccentric!
