Geek

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.

I started a new Google account today. I now have two accounts, one for my aviation adventures and the other for everyday use. There has been a healthy refresh of Google apps since I last had an everyday account; Google+ is especially enjoyable to use now. I’ve started following a few familiar faces there and have dipped my toes in some other communities of interest: politics, various aspects of technology, wet shaving, etc.

The restart of Google is part of my new approach of 2016, using the best tools for the task. It’s a small improvement but one that I think will give me a better peace of mind.

  
Earl and I are now situated in our local Panera enjoying a small pastry snack and being Apple geeks on our iPads.  The cashier was amused with the fact that I paid for our purchase using ApplePay on my Apple Watch.  She exclaimed, “that’s so cool!”

Honestly, it is quite cool.

Google announced today that they are discontinuing support for their web browser, Google Chrome, in April 2016 for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8. Current versions of the mentioned operating systems (Windows 7, 8, 10, Mac OS X 10.9, 10.10, etc.) will continue to receive updates to the popular web browser.

I’m surprised that people are still running these older operating systems, especially Windows XP and Windows Vista.  Windows XP has been around for 15 years and Windows Vista was, well Windows Vista, and Microsoft did their best to get people off of that software as quickly as possible because Windows Vista was basically a mess.

Many folks use Google Chrome as their primary browser. I used to, but Apple beefed up Safari in their latest version of OS X (El Capitan) to the point that I feel comfortable using Safari my primary browser now. I still do development work on Firefox, a popular free and open-source browser available on many operating systems, including the ones mentioned in the Google blog entry I referenced. If you’re dead set on staying on Windows XP, you can switch to Firefox and still do what you need to do.

But I wouldn’t really recommend it.

As a young geek I was always thrilled with the release of a new or updated operating system. I wanted to see the new graphics, the different approaches, the changes in paradigm. What new goodies would be lurking at every point and click as I moved around after a fresh update. Often times I would join into beta programs so I could help with the testing. I was even a pre-beta tester on Windows Vista (after that statement I always say, “I’m sorry”), but as I grow older and my expectations of how a computer should work become more solidified, I am cautious about upgrades today. I didn’t upgrade my work MacBook Pro to El Capitan until I was absolutely sure that everything would work. I take the same approach with my home computers and with Earl’s MacBook. I still upgrade, primarily for the security benefits and because it’s the most supported way to go, but I’m cautious about it. We have about six different ways to backup computers and mobile devices in this house. It’d be great if I could get all participants to participate.

While there are usually many bells and whistles associated with a software upgrade, there are also security upgrades that should be strongly considered. These security upgrades help keep the bad folks out of your hard drive. Yesterday I was disheartened to see that my medical records at the doctor’s office are still being maintained on computers running Windows XP. Windows XP is not really supported by Microsoft anymore, leaving these things open to new viruses and other types of nasty attacks. Ransomware is quite popular; your files are remotely encrypted by a nasty organizationthey send you a message that you have to contact a phone number some place and demand that you pay a ransom to decrypt your files. By the way, don’t ever respond to that sort of thing, just consider your files lost and go to your latest backup because you are backing up your files on a regular basis, correct? I’ve had relatives get caught with this sort of thing; they are now running Linux on their rebuilt laptops because Linux is much more impervious to that type of attack.

Part of the driving force of software upgrades is marketing. New software usually requires a faster computer and if you’re starting to fall behind the computer hardware curve, it may prompt you to get a new computer so you have the latest and the greatest. Earl’s MacBook Pro is about there, I don’t know how he chugs along on his six year old laptop with degraded trackpad quality. I don’t particularly like the idea of tossing a computer because the software has become outdated on it; we have a computer built in 1996 running the clock system wired through the house and it is working perfectly fine.

However, if you’re running Windows XP or Vista, you should really consider moving on to a better computing experience. At the very least you’ll still be able to securely run Google Chrome on your desktop.