Geek

Maintenance.

I’ve done a bit of maintenance on the blog. Things should be running much faster, which should result in pages opening quicker. Hopefully this will make for an enjoyable reading experience for anyone that still stops by this little slice of Internet.

The blog turns 21 years old later this year. It’s amazing I’ve held it together this long.

Space.

One of the cool things about living in Tucson is the star watching opportunities that abound over the Sonoran Desert. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but Tucson has a light pollution ordinance; many of the side streets in residential areas don’t have street lights (our street included). There’s an ordinance as to how much light can be directed skyward. It makes for some beautiful skies.

I have used stargazing apps on my iPad since my very first iPad 1 back when they first came out. They’re a delight; point your iPad in the direction of the sky and the app will tell you what you’re looking at. It gets more interesting when accompanied with binoculars or a telescope, because you can see that much more in real life as depicted in the app.

I inherited my grandfather’s smaller telescope when he passed away in 2005. I look forward to getting it set up on the roof and really gazing at the beauty offered by our beautiful Universe.

HAWK.

As an almost Traffic Engineer and full blown road geek, I’m a fan of videos by Road Guy Rob. This week Rob talks about HAWK signals. These are yellow/red signals at pedestrian crosswalks that are activated almost immediately when a pedestrian pushes the button. It flashes yellow as a warning to motorists, then solid yellow, then solid red. After a few seconds it switches to flashing red, so if the pedestrian is no longer on your side of the road, a motorist can continue through the flashing red, which is treated like a stop sign.

I’ve been a fan of HAWK installations since I first read about them a number of years ago. They’re pretty neat and they really help keep pedestrians safe. What I didn’t know is they were invented right here in Tucson.

Road Guy Rob explains it quite well.

Vintage.

A business owner in Ohio stopped by my Vintage Point of Sale website and about gave me a heart attack with a photo he shared. He has kept every cash register he’s ever had at his store of many decades, and in the 1980s he ran his business on an electronic cash register made by Data Terminal Systems. The model in question was a Series 500 cash register.

This is no big deal to the vast majority of people walking amongst us these days but as a true blue geek I was excited to see some of this vintage technology enduring so many decades later. Alas, it is too far away to get my hands on it, but it helps me continue the belief that other businesses here in the desert southwest may have vintage technology in their storage areas.

I’ve placed an ad on craigslist in the business equipment “wanted” section to see if I jar any memories. Wish me luck.

Smarter.

15 years ago today Steve Jobs spoke at the Macworld 2007 keynote and introduced the world to the iPhone. It’s safe to say technology shifted that day and our world is much different because of that keynote presentation.

Steve Jobs was the master of presentation. I could watch him lead a presentation all day long and not complain about it.

One Moment…

We received word from our web hosting company that they’re going to try to migrate the server we live on to a new data center in Buffalo, New York. When they tried this in October our server was down for over three days and there wasn’t much we could do about it. I thought that completed the migration but it did not, so apparently they’re going to try again.

I should have jumped ship when I had the chance.

So, if you see the blog gone for a while don’t fret, I’m still writing behind the scenes, I’m just waiting for the web hosting company to get its act together.

As I sign my emails at work when it comes to server issues: thank you for your patience.

Foiled.

When I was a kid the Sears Wish Book was a big deal at this time of year. For those unfamiliar, the big department stores (Sears, JC Penney, and Montgomery Ward come to mind) would release these big catalogs of all their entire inventory to convince the consumer to buy their holidays gifts from the family from these catalogs. Think of it as Amazon of the mid 20th century.

I always enjoyed flipping through the Wish Book from Sears in particular, because out of these department stores we went to Sears the most and they had the niftiest cash registers at the time.

There’s a collection of these catalogs available online at WishbookWeb. I was flipping through the 1970 Sears Wish Book and noticed they were selling Micro-Waves (as they displayed in their ad). The technology was new for the consumer at the time; I believe my grandmother got her first Amana Radarange in 1971.

Apparently the Micro-Wave oven was so new that the Sears advertising department didn’t quite have all the mechanics down yet. In the page below, look how many places they display food wrapped or trayed in foil! To be fair, there’s tiny print that tells us to wrap the baked potato in foil after baking, but that TV dinner is going to create quite the light show if put in a microwave oven.

100K.

Our 2016 Jeep Cherokee has made it to the 100K club. Purchased right after Earl opted for early retirement from his job in 2016, this car has been on many adventures. It’s been registered in three states, been in all four time CONUS time zones, and at some point I should probably count the number of states it has traversed. It helped with the move from Central New York to Chicago, made 1 1/2 trips from Chicago to Tucson, has been to Florida a few times and has been a joy to drive on its entire journey.

Our plan is to keep the Cherokee for as long as financially practical, while we wait for electric vehicles to get a little more affordable. We have both agreed that our next car will be electric; it’s just a matter of finding the right vehicle for our needs. We’ve also been getting in the habit of planning our trips as if we were already driving an electric car, so we can start getting familiar with the concept of charging stations.

Now, I have a reputation as an Apple fanboy (though I do mix Linux in to this mix quite a bit), but I’ve been reading rumors of an Apple car that is completely autonomous with no steering wheel. No idea if these rumors are true but I don’t have any interest in a vehicle of that design. I’m absolutely interested in a much more ecologically friendly vehicle, and I like the idea of autonomous cars, but I still believe engineers are only solving half of the equation in autonomous vehicles. We need to make our highways smarter in conjunction with developing the AI necessary to drive a car. If we keep designing highways without electronic doodads to help send signals to self driving cars, we have a very long road ahead of us.

In Sync.

The 1930s school clock in my office was starting to struggle a little bit. It’s been in many rooms, survived many moves, and has made its way across the country from it’s manufacturing home of Springfield, Mass. The clock was just shy of 100 years old and it is stored safely in a carton in the back of my office closet.

I decided to upgrade to a 2000 vintage digital clock. It’s kept in sync with the wireless controller located elsewhere in the house. We have a couple of clocks on this wireless system and this is the only digital clock. The other clocks are solar powered and analog and they work very well.

It’s weird not hearing the minute-by-minute click-click of the early 20th century school clock, but I can still watch time march by in military precision with the counting of the seconds. It gives my office a high tech vibe, which is probably good for a geek like me.

Bifocals.

My new glasses arrived in the mail today. I am wearing bifocals for the first time in my life and these glasses from Zenni Optical are wonderful. And more importantly, very affordable. With my prescription from late last year in hand, I ordered these glasses on the Zenni Optical website last Tuesday and had them by today. They fit will, they’re comfortable, and I’m getting used to the progressive nature of these bifocals.

I can see around me and read my phone at the same time without holding the phone out to the far reaches of the room. It’s a wonderful feeling. And it wasn’t expensive!