Geek

Occasionally I will have some sort of dream that hearkens back to the 1970s and 1980s when I was absolutely fascinated by the computerized systems appearing in the retail environments. Last night I dreamed about such a system in a grocery store. Musing about the dream this evening, I ran across this video online describing how cutting-edge technology would soon enable a cashier to pull funds from your bank account and automatically transfer it to the store’s account. My, how far we’ve come in 40 years.

This video is quite short but I found it to be very fascinating. How I loved the days of “legacy computing”. In case you’re wondering, the cash registers in questions are NCR 255s. Quite expensive at the time, I can vividly remember these at a local IGA Market near my grandmother’s house. When I worked at Hills in 1990, I briefly used these before they were removed and new IBM cash registers were put in their place.

As I type this, Microsoft is having some sort of big event somewhere in the United States. I’m seeing quite a few posts about it on Twitter. Mentions of Microsoft’s Hololens being used on the International Space Station, discussions of the integration of Linux into the Windows platform and partnerships between Microsoft and Linux company, Canonical and being discussed. As a person who has not owned a Windows machine in almost a decade, I’m finding this all quite interesting. Are we finally getting to the age where information is freely exchanged between computer systems, regardless of who’s hardware and software you are using? I certainly hope so.

I recently purchased a new laptop. It arrived just before our trip to Florida last week and I wisely decided not to bring it along because I didn’t want to fiddle with my new toy while I could be dancing in the streets with Mickey and Minnie and spending time with my family. So it wasn’t until this week that I’ve gone full-tilt with the new laptop and I have to say that I am loving it. A lot.

Here’s the kicker: my new laptop is made by Dell. It is not an Apple device.

That’s right, I decided to purchase a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop. It runs Ubuntu Linux and it was designed to do so, so it has pretty much been a plug ‘n play experience for me. While I’m re-acclimating to living outside of Apple’s wall garden I’m finding that there are some really cool things out in the technological world. Apps that interact with one another. Digital assistants that are a little more intuitive than Siri. Predictive behavior instead of adaptive behavior.

Now, don’t think that I’ve become all anti-Apple, because I haven’t. I still maintain that Apple makes beautiful products that do amazing things and they have definitely pushed technology forward, especially up until a few years ago.

But I don’t know that they’re still pushing the envelope like they used to. Oh, I know that the iPhone 7 is rumored to not have a headphone jack, so you’ll either need an adapter or use a wireless headset with your iDevice, but I don’t find that change to be as revolutionary as getting rid of floppy disks or anything like that.

In today’s world of touch enabled everything, I really like the fact that I am able to touch the screen on my new laptop if I so desire and have the screen respond. I can scroll. I can touch buttons, I can do all of that. It wasn’t a necessity but it’s a nicety that I really enjoy and find that I miss when I use my MacBook Pro (which I still have). Apple refuses to put touchscreens on their laptops because they want you to buy another device, an iPad or an iPad Pro. The thing about that is that you’re then locked into apps instead of having an actual computer at your disposal. I honestly think that Microsoft’s “Windows on everything” and Canonical’s similar approach are both more forward thinking than having users buy, carry and use multiple devices.

In an ideal world, I want my smartphone (whether it be an iPhone or whatever) to be my computer. Set it next to a keyboard and monitor and it works like a regular computer. I want the ability to “fling” things from my smartphone up onto a wall display at a meeting. The accumulated time I have spent futzing with LED Projectors and matching settings and the like with my computer has been maddening. I want to flick, talk and go.

Having a touchscreen on my laptop is definitely a step in that direction.

Dell also makes a Windows 10 version of this awesome XPS 13 laptop. I really like the build quality. I really like the “infinity display” where the screen goes to nearly the edge of the bezel, though I don’t really care for the relocation of the webcam down into the lower part of the screen (because the screen goes all the way to the top edge). The XPS 13 is light, powerful and comes with enough ports and doo-dads to make it quite versatile. I’ve been a Linux guy since the mid 1990s and though I’ve been using Apple products for the past 10 years, I can’t help but be impressed by how far Linux has come along with the desktop experience.

After Apple’s mediocre announcement of the iPhone SE and something else that escapes me at the moment, I knew that looking outside of Apple’s “walled garden” to other ecosystems and manufacturers might lead me to more innovation, larger technological leaps forward. At the very least, having my data free so that’s not tied to Apple devices has opened my eyes up a bit.

I might get to flick a presentation up on a big glass display sooner than I thought.

I’ve decided that I’m going to embrace my inner geek this weekend and enjoy myself with many things technological. I have already installed a new file server on our network. The file server of choice is a WD MyCloud Mirror. To get completely in the weeds, this is a RAID-1 setup, so all of our data stored in the file server is mirrored to a second hard drive. This helps keep our data extra secure.

After I’m done copying all of the relevant files to the new file server, I’m going to consolidate the various hard drives we have installed elsewhere on the home network and make them all available through this new file server.

There’s quite a few changes I need to make to the network to get it in top notch condition again, but I won’t bore you with the details of changing routers, reconfiguring the wifi hotspot and the like.

By the end of the weekend everything should be tuned for speed and backed up in a brilliant manner.

And I will be one happy geek.

I’ve had this lingering memory of a lawyer-based television show set in the future. I remembered watching it once or twice and that one of the witnesses on the stand is asked the name of the current President of the United States. The answer? “Oprah Winfrey”. My other memory of the show was that while it took place in the future, it didn’t take place far in the future, maybe a decade or two.

Yesterday during a lull at work I execute some cleverly worded Google searches and found the show in question: “Century City”.

“Century City” was a mid-season replacement for CBS in 2004. Only nine episodes were made; I believe the original run was for eight episodes. From what I’ve found online, this short series is available on Hulu. I’ve been watching it on YouTube. This morning I was watched the pilot episode. The main cast is comprised of all familiar faces, before watching it this morning I hadn’t remembered the Viola Davis was on the show. She’s pretty much playing a tamed down version of Annalise Keating (“How To Get Away With Murder”) without the flash-forwards and intensity of being involved in several murders.

I digress.

The show is set in the year 2030. The pilot contained several current day topics including the ethics of cloning, plastic surgery and the use of steroids. Court proceedings can take place via hologram. The plot of the pilot was good but it didn’t blow me away. I look forward to watching the rest of the series as time permits.

The one thing that fascinated me about the show is how the writers and production staff saw the future. Since the show was produced in 2004, before smartphones and tablets became mainstream devices, their view of the future is a little more desktop computer based than I expected it to be. The desktop computers look futuristic with their translucent displays and tiny bases supporting them. The storylines seem to indicate that Microsoft continues its monopoly and grew in ways from what we’ve seen in real life (apparently in a later episode it is mentioned that Microsoft put the first colony on the Moon.) Everyone is tied to their desktop, no one is walking around with a tablet, heck, no one is even walking around with a Star Trek Tricorder.

Other advancements in this Century City future are quite interesting: pitless cherries, seedless grapes, high speed bullet trains in Los Angeles (much like the Hyperloop that Elon Musk is working on), holograms everywhere and PowerPoint presentations via 3D displays. This stuff was quite nifty.

One thing that I enjoyed was the tackling of the philosophical challenges of their future: the ethics behind cloning, the purposeful manipulation of DNA to create designer babies and Mick Jagger still performing at a Boston concert at 87 years old, thanks to age defying steroids and plastic surgery (he’s not on the show, a “boy band” of 70 year old men mentions his name when defending their genetic manipulation).

And most interestingly, the idea that Oprah Winfrey became President at age 76.

The future wasn’t all rosy in “Century City” but I think it was believable in 2004. It’s a shame this show didn’t do better. It’s a nice cross between a legal procedural and science fiction. I look forward to watching the handful episodes of the show.

And maybe I’ll write Oprah’s name in come November.

I went for my first bike ride of the year yesterday. The weather was rainy, the temperature was in the mid 50s and I hadn’t really planned on going for a ride until the last minute, but I felt determined and energized so I decided to go.

The rode for a little under 45 minutes, clocking in almost 8 miles in that time. It was not my fastest ride by any stretch of the imagination, but it was one of my earliest rides in any given year and despite being soaking wet when I got home, I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

We live in what is roughly the geographic center of New York State. Many years ago this “hub” location was chosen by the New York State Power Authority to bring many of the high voltage wires strung across the Empire State together. A couple of miles up the road from us is a big switching station, with guards and helicopters zooming in and out and large sets of power lines going off in all directions to the various corners of the state, neighboring states and Canada and the like. One set of wires headed to Niagara Falls passes about a third of a mile behind the house. Several times a year I watch helicopter pilots navigate along the wires as others on board do inspections of the towers, the wires and the surrounding landing. A couple of times I’ve seen guys in impressive safety suits walking on the wires.

Riding up the wires yesterday I couldn’t help but notice the loudness of the “sizzle” I could hear coming from the wires. The spacers within the lines held the lines in place or the insulators that mount the lines to the tower were making a very audible “sizzling” sound, undoubtedly from the rain and the moisture in the air.

If you look really closely in the picture above, you’ll notice a neighbor’s play area in their backyard directly under the far right leg of the circuit crossing their land. I wondered about the safety of this, as well as the sizzling sound, so I spoke with a friend of mine who used to work up at the Power Authority.

The sizzling sound is not uncommon but is harmless. There have been a lot of studies of the effects of the electric fields generated by these types of lines but none of them specifically attributed any adverse health effects to the electric fields themselves. There may be a link between the creosote used in the wooden poles and health effects. I found this to be quite interesting. Another point of interest was that these two sets of wires that pass through our neighborhood are not the highest voltage of the wires in the area, that honor belonged to the wires that had due north to the Canadian border and Hydro Québec.

I’m tempted to take some fluorescent lights out to the field again like I did a few years ago to see if I can get to light up in my hand. I find electricity to be so fascinating, even when it’s making a sizzling sound.

Whenever I need to feel inspired at work, I watch one of the “A Day In The Future” videos from Microsoft on YouTube. We are just on the edge of the technology shown in this video, and I’m excited to see it coming to fruition. This is the type of working environment that I see myself working in someday, helping create the types of tools seen in this video. 

I would love to see Microsoft bring all of this tech to us in the near future.  I think they are making progress in that direction, and I’m really hoping they succeed. It’s technology like this that will help us all live together in a better way on the planet. 

I guess I’m still an Apple dude at heart.
 
 
 

Location:W North Ave,Chicago,United States

I have mentioned before that my interest in computers and operating system and my general, overall geek-ness started with a fascination with cash registers, specifically the electronic point of sale systems from the 1970s. While the mechanical Sweda cash registers at the local Ames were “electronic” in the sense that they punched a tape that could be read by an IBM mainframe, the Sears in both Watertown and North Syracuse, like all the other Sears stores across the country, had one of the first electronic point of sale systems ever installed for a retailer.

I could vividly remember some details of the point of sale system used by Sears. The cash registers were made by Singer. The lettering on the cash register was in all lowercase letters, as was the tech-chic style back in the 1970s. The LED number display was large and just one line of numbers across the top of the cash register. Instead of instructional messages being spelled out or illuminated on the display, the appropriate buttons on the keyboard were lighted up with the various options at any point in a transaction. The drawer popped open when the cashier pressed total. Amount tendered entry and the associated change did not appear on the receipt, it was computed after the sale was completed. That’s one of the reasons that the cashier asked about cash/check/charge prior to ringing up the sale. This is back in the day when cashiers cared about these things. An optical “wand” was added in later years, giving the cashier the capability of reading a price tag with OCR lettering. The price was usually entered in separately.

There’s not a lot of detail about this Singer point of sale system online; over the weekend I filled in the gaps of my memory by reading old issues of “Computerworld” via Google Books. It was there that I discovered that the point of sale system was actually called the Singer Modular Data Transaction System, or Singer MDTS. Both the Singer and Friden Corporations had either merged or were working together on the project; some registers are marked Singer, some Friden and some Singer-Friden. The typical cash register in a Sears store had 2K of memory. That’s two kilobytes. To put that in perspective, it would take over 33 MILLION cash registers to provide the same amount of memory found in my iPhone 6s Plus.

My, we’ve come a long way.

As I was doing research on the Singer MDTS system, I came across an eBay auction for a press photo of one of the data terminal cash registers. Since I have a very small display of these old machines in the way of framed photos in the downstairs bathroom, I bought the photo and put it up today.

I can’t help but think that technology from this era is when technology was truly exciting. Developers had to cram a lot of software into a very small space. User expectations weren’t set yet. Technology people were blazing into unknown territory. Today’s technology, while exciting in what it can do, is predictable and quite frankly, rather boring. There’s nothing new that has really shaken up the world since the introduction of the smartphone in the mid ’00s. That’s one of the reasons for my never-ending interest in Linux (even though I primarily use Apple products) because Linux keeps me in an explorer mindset and helps my geek-ness grow.

I’d love to get my hands on one of these cash registers to see what makes it tick, but I have a hunch they’re all sitting in landfills scattered around the country. I passing through a smaller Sears store in the mid 1990s and they had one of these registers still running in the kiosk under the stairs where they copied keys. I guess it was doing what it had to do so they stuck with it.

I had a little bit of a hissy fit on Twitter this morning. The tweets were a result of me venting my frustration with my iPad; I had run out of storage on my device and it wouldn’t let me delete anything to make room for content because I had run out of storage on my device. I just love that vicious circle of techy errors where you’re scolded for running out of hard drive space or whatever but to gain more space you have to clear more space but you can’t clear more space because you’re running out of space. The kicker of the situation is that this is an Apple product; a marvelous piece of technology where everything is magical and rainbows fly around and unicorns dance and clap their hooves together. Investing (substantially) more more into Apple technology is a bid to the promise of being free of crazy error messages, worries about hard drive space and the other mundane adventures that mere mortals on Windows and the like experience. After all, when you buy an Apple product, it just works.

And now I’m getting worked up again. It’s amazing to me where my mind goes when I type a blog entry without any forethought; those streams of consciousness where I just let me fingers do the walking.

I am the “money manager” of our flying club. I maintain the banking accounts, the accounts receivables and the accounts payables for the dozen or so owners of our two airplanes. I really enjoy this role in the club because I like to think that I’m pretty good at it. I lucked out in that arena of life; growing up in a family-run retail environment gained me access to accounting practices at a very early age. The early geek in me picked up a lot and this has been a benefit throughout my life. Doing this sort of thing comes naturally to me. The thing is, we are well into the 21st century and quite frankly I’m sick of filing papers and keeping paper trails of all the transactions. Earl asked why I’m still tracking everything on paper because the reality is that I can store everything electronically and still be perfectly within the boundaries of good accounting practices and the law.

So now my tech quandary is this: I want to use my Apple devices to digitize these records but I don’t want them to live within the Apple Eco-system. Honestly, I don’t want them to live within any eco-system. I don’t want to rely on a paid storage service, I don’t want to use a paid app to maintain this data, I want this to be as accessible as possible using any computer by anyone that is granted access.

And this is where the full-blown geek kicks in. I have a plan in my head on how I’m going to store this information but I need to write it down to get my plan into action.

I’m discovering that I love writing things down instead of doing thing entirely on the computer. But this creates paper and it seems silly to create paper to plan out a scheme to get rid of paper.

It’s that vicious circle again.

The previous sentence was my planned final sentence of this entry but then this popped into my head: Is it a vicious circle or vicious cycle? Does the vicious circle have teeth? Does it go “grrrr”?

Things to ponder.