Geek

Zayre Electronics is the name of my home-based PC building and repair business from the late 1990s. I had a couple of contracts during that time and was able to make a little cash with the venture before deciding it was ultimately not profitable and winding it down. It was a little side hustle that offered me growth in my IT skills more than anything else. I’m happy to have that as part of my past.

I’ve enjoyed tinkering with computers since the mid 1980s. I was fascinated with the assortment of Apple ][+ and Apple //e computers in the “computer lab”, which was actually a converted class room in the math department. The math teachers taught computer education back then. Shortly after I graduated high school in 1986 the business department took over the responsibilities. I don’t know what year they finally ditched the IBM Selectrics, I was long gone.

I have a fully functional NCR RealPOS cash register setup here at the house. I don’t have a cash drawer hooked up to the system, as I don’t have that much cash to put in the drawer, but the rest of the system allows me to mess around with various point of sale software program suites and related software offerings. There’s a whole community of us point of sale geeks and we talk about they way things used to be and the way things will be in the point of sale systems space. Sorry to say, self checkouts are here to stay and that saddens us all.

I fire the register up from time to time and work on the software package I’m writing to keep these older machines running beyond their ill-timed shelf life. There are many things one can do with old technology, nothing is really obsolete unless it’s given up the ghost completely. I’ve turned old telephone system terminals into file servers with a few modifications to the operating system.

There’s always options.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.