Geek

Microsoft ended Extended Support for Windows 7 yesterday. This means if your computer is still running Windows 7 you will no longer receive updates for the once popular operating system.

As of two months ago, 28% of traditional PCs were still running Windows 7.

It seems like it was just yesterday that I was watching the “Windows 7 Host Your Own Launch Party” video, introducing what was to be an incremental upgrade to Windows. The goal was to make the masses forget Windows Vista as quickly as possible.

Just today I’ve seen several computers running Windows 7. Folks fell in love with the operating system and have been hesitant to switch away. After all, why get rid of something that works?

Even folks are rapidly moving toward a “mobile first” platform when it comes to personal technology, there are still plenty of PCs around, especially in business.

I guess it’s beyond time for businesses to make the decision, Windows 10, Linux, or something from Apple.

I don’t think there’ll be any Launch Party Guide Videos to help users make the transition.

I talk a bit about how sometimes it feels like advances in technology are basically destroying our society as we know it. My primary belief to support this is because technology is advancing faster than society’s capacity to handle this growth. The population hasn’t evolved quickly enough to keep up with the new technology being released to the masses.

This being said, I am fully amazed and appreciative of the fact that I am able to watch the latest NASA spacewalk at the International Space Station in real-time from my desk at work on a second monitor while writing code. The signal is coming from over 350,000 kilometers away, being pushed to Twitter and Periscope and instantly available on a computer the size of a 1/3 of a pizza box but more powerful than anything that was even dreamed of when we first started exploring Space.

This helps me maintain my sanity and faith in humanity. We’ll get through this and the disparity around the technology-people connection will eventually balance out (though it’s taking way too long).

We need to move forward. We have a whole big Universe to explore.

In the earlier days of the World Wide Web we’d all have our pages set to a “home page” or “start page”, which was usually a portal that included little snippets of information. You’d find things like the weather, the latest news headlines, and updates from your favorite Geocities sites.

Web browsers today tend to steer us toward a blank or search page upon initial load in today’s Modern World. Apple in particular would rather we use apps to garner the information we used to grab through a web portal.

At work this morning I fired up Google Chrome, since that seems to be the dominate choice for web browser at the company I work for and since I write applications, including web applications, as my livelihood I should probably use the browser everyone else is using, and I went to Google News. It hearkens back to the old style “Start Page” quite a bit with headlines, local weather, and a couple of other little bits of information one would presumably like to see at the beginning of the day.

Two things stuck out at me this morning.

Not only does the Google News page have a section dedicated to checking the facts, but they also let one choose their default temperature of Celsius, Fahrenheit, or Kelvin.

Metric goodness is always appreciated. Notice I have it on Fahrenheit at the moment. I’m switching it to Celsius today.

It’s amazing what runs through my mind when I’m writing code at work. When I get into my “awesome development zone”, that wonderful place where the code just flows from my fingers without an error or bug to be found, my mind goes into this multi-threaded mode where I’m writing amazing software without really thinking about it and daydreaming about something completely unrelated and random.

Today my brain started thinking about the 1970s television series, “The New Adventures of Wonder Woman”. Everyone is familiar with the Lynda Carter led show, and I specifically thinking about some of the music cues in a couple of the second season episodes before they went full-tilt disco with the “stepping” disco beat theme song.

Not only was the “transformation music” of the second season consistently awesome, there were other music cues that were quite fun. In the episode “The Pied Piper”, Martin Mull plays an evil flute player named Hamlin Rule has hypnotizes women, including Jan Plumb, to do his evil bidding. The audio processing on his flute tracks was super groovy, even for the 1970s, and one would think it would be confined to when he played the flute.

But no! There’s a brief five to ten second interval in the later episode, “Seance of Terror”, which features Bobby Brady/Mike Lookinland’s younger brother Todd Lookinland as a kid with psychic and telekinetic powers, who is being cared for by his evil aunt and uncle. Said relations want to sabotage peace talks and guarantee ongoing border wars for the country Tarmania, securing funding for the meanies that hired them.

I can vividly recall watching this episode in the spring of 1978 on my Mom and Dad’s 19-inch Zenith in the Family Room. I remember noticing the groovy flute music cue back then, and here we are 42 years later and I’m still talking about it.

I remember liking the actress that played “Aunt Theodora”, the mean aunt to Todd Lookinland, “Matt”. She was played by Kres Mersky. I really liked her speaking voice. When working the room with the ambassadors, she had such a classy presence, even though we all knew she was evil. There was a certain je ne sais quoi about the way she carried herself and I found it entrancing. It was perfect for the role, even though it was Bobby Brady’s brother that had the special powers.

I remember Ms. Mersky being on various shows in the 70s and 80s; she seemed like she was everywhere, but looking at her IMDB profile she wasn’t on as many shows as I had thought. I think I might have been confusing her with Lynnie Greene, who starred in the one season “On Our Own” the same year, and who also went on to play “Young Dorothy” on “The Golden Girls”.

Anyways, I got to thinking about Ms. Mersky again, she also reminded me of a woman I worked with back in my days at Digital Equipment Corporation, so I decided to look her up.

I found this website from 2010 around a play she wrote and starred in, “The Life And Times of A. Einstein”. It’s a one woman show about the life of Albert Einstein as seen through the eyes of his secretary Ellen.

Ms. Mersky’s latest entry on her IMDB entry is a short called “Rope” from 2008. It’s hard to search for a short called “Rope” on Google, but perhaps I’ll eventually find something further.

According to her bio, Ms. Mersky was 28 years old when she played Aunt Theodora on “Wonder Woman”. (My how the looks of 28 year old have changed in 42 years!). I found her personal website, but it looks like it hasn’t been updated in a number of years.

Nevertheless, I hope she is well and enjoying life and doing what she loves. I know seeing her today when I watched the entire Wonder Woman episode of “Seance of Terror” made my smile.

Now if she could have done something about Diana’s disguise wig.

I’ve always been fascinated by things that are connected. Before my interest in computers formed, as a young kid I was fascinated by power lines, especially the high-tension wires that criss-crossed their way across the country side, connecting the villages and cities to the power plants in the area. One of my earliest memories of this interest were a set of (what later knew to be) 115 kV lines that paralleled Interstate 81 north of Syracuse, N.Y. The lines in question used towers or supports that did not have four feet firmly planted on the ground, but a single ladder type arrangement. There are variations of this design all over Upstate New York, mostly in the old Niagara-Mohawk service area. In all our travels I’ve never seen this design used in any other state.

On our recent trip to see my family I noticed the towers and lines along this corridor are being replaced. My first thought was that they’re not that old, but then I realized I’m over 50 years old and they’re at least that if not more, so I decided to do a little bit of research.

The lines follow an old railroad line dating to the turn of the 20th century. The power lines appear on surveys as early as 1920, so they’re most likely over 100 years old.

Now I get why National Grid (the current power company) is replacing this little slice of my childhood.

Looking at the photo I hastily snapped while driving on Interstate 81, you’ll notice the new towers (or pylons) are dark brown, taller, and have a bolder impact in the aesthetics of the landscape.

I’m sure they’ll last at least 100 years.

Addendum: I love the Internet. More information on this project is available here.

I spotted this sign down the street from our hotel here in New Orleans. There’s something comforting to me about seeing the unchanged, pretty much constant GE “ball” logo. It’s a shame their appliances don’t live up to their legacy (and are made by Haier).

Anyway, I know GE does a lot in medical and aerodynamics and nuclear plants but I didn’t know what “GE Digital” was. It turns out it’s a computing company that does a whole bunch of things, including Internet of Things things.

I’m intrigued. I’ll have to do more research on the company and see what that’s all about. After all, things connected together are nifty in my book, and I’ve always been fascinated by GE.

I love legacy technology. Youtube suggested I watch this video about AT&T operators in 1969. My mom was a telephone operator for New York Telephone for a little while in the mid 1960s; I wonder if her job was as colorful as what was depicted in this video.

Back in the day one of the things I enjoyed about Christmas shopping was seeing which stores were using what technology at the checkouts. It was really the highlight of my shopping experience on the day after Thanksgiving. This was long before it was called “Black Friday”. I remember people thinking Zayre Department Stores had gone crazy because they were open 24 hours in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

Notice how pleasant everyone is in the picture above. I’m sure in the madness of today’s Black Friday someone, somewhere was punched in the face. It might have been over an Instant-Pot, a television, or a cheap, knockoff tablet, but I’m sure the police were called more than once.

I didn’t bother following the mayhem on Twitter today. I was too busy working.

I’m not particularly a fan of the shopping experience, especially since technology has become so boring. I know it’s nearly magic that I can order everything I want without leaving the home, and that’s all due to technology, but I what I would give to see a cashier punch some numbers and the price and to be pleasant about it again.