Geek

As a person that lives his life relatively out loud via this blog and various social networking sites, one would think that I don’t really give two flips about my privacy. Those that know me in person probably know that what I share here is a good snapshot of how I am in real life, but not the complete picture of what exactly I’m about. Heck, I can probably count the number of people that _really_ get me on two hands. But nevertheless, I joined the whole social networking craze early on with this blog thingee here back in 2001 and I’ve been plugging along since.

Now I like the idea of social networking online; Earl and I have made many friends via the internet and cherish a few people that we have met here. The internet allows us the ability to see that we are not alone in how we feel on any given subject and that’s a great thing. I think it’s great when technology is used in this way, albeit as long as it’s in a cautious manner.

Yesterday the rapidly growing behemoth called Google announced a new product: Google Buzz. This is another attempt from Google to join into the social networking frenzy gripping the online world right. It’s like a combination of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare integrated into their popular e-mail service, Gmail.

Now before I get a little ranty, I’m going to say a few preceding statements before the message. First of all, I know all too well that Google derives it’s income from ad revenue. Honestly, I hate that as I hate ads, no matter how coy they try to be. And while Google’s mission is to “not be evil”, they groom the data that they gather and tailor ads to specifically fit you. So they might not know the contents of my Gmail but they see particular phrases or keywords and select advertising to share with me based on this; for example if I receive an e-mail telling me how great Pepsi Throwback is, they might show me an ad telling me how great Coke Classic is.

Now Gmail offers some amazing spam protection and it’s web interface is clean enough and devoid of hiccups and burps enough to make it quite attractive, despite this scanning of key phrases to generate ad revenue. In fact, I have enjoyed Gmail’s service so much that I have funneled the dozen or so e-mail accounts I have into Gmail so I can have everything in an easily accessible place.

With the announcement of Google Buzz, this Facebook/Twitter/FourSquare wannabe, my social networking is now integrated into my e-mail. When Google Buzz was activated on my account yesterday afternoon, imagine my surprise when it suggested that I share my social networking status updates with folks that I have e-mailed back and forth about job opportunities with in the past. Yes, Google felt it would be great to include the folks that have my resume on my status updates, which contain such colorful nuggets as:

“When a bunch of iPad users get together, do their clock cycles synch?”

Lovely. Naturally, Google Buzz demands that I have a photo on my profile and it selected one of me. It’s not exactly a headshot but it’s one that I would consider kind of hot.

At least they have a respectable sense of good visuals.

Here’s the thing. My e-mail is sacred. I have had e-mail since 1984 and I’m not about to start sharing the contents of e-mail with an entire distribution list. Hell, that’s one thing that Earl learned very early on in our relationship that I tend to get hysterical about. My e-mail is *mine*. I don’t want it sliced, diced, spun or mutilated and I sure as hell don’t want it included in my social networking ventures.

So I turned off the Buzz as soon as I realised what it wanted to do.

Then I started getting paranoid. If Google was so hip on sharing my existence in this manner, where else would be information be turning up? So today I started filtering my e-mail elsewhere, dropped my Google Reader subscriptions (I do my blog reading in Safari again), dropped my contact list synchronization with Google and Gmail and now I’m looking for a respectable replacement for Google Calendar.

Tomorrow I order my new tinfoil hat.

One of my most memorable scenes of any movie I’ve ever watched is the “Diva” performance from “The Fifth Element”. What begins as a beautiful aria moves into an interesting mid 1990s sounding techno track where the vocalist is used purely as a beautiful instrument. I think it is absolutely amazing when a voice is used solely as an instrument without the distraction of verbalisation.¹

Vocalist Inva Mula sang the track for the movie and according to the liner notes from the soundtrack, her voice was NOT digitally altered to achieve the sound that we hear. (There are portions where she is alternated with a wind instrument or synthesizer sounding like a wind instrument). I have always found this track to be enchanting in a strange way and have found few modern vocalisations that challenge it.

I found this video of a vocalist singing her interpretation on the track. She is simply amazing because she appears to be singing it raw, showcasing her incredible vocal range.

¹ I am also a huge fan of “Distorted” from Cirque du Soleil’s “La Nouba”. This is another song where the voice is used purely as an instrument, and it is an amazing piece to listen to.

So Tom (the fine gentleman of a pussycat that lives owns our house) and I have a special way of communicating. I sing a little non-worded tune at him and he comes running, regardless of where he may be in the house. In the early days of our relationship I would sing in this obnoxious falsetto screech of a voice that would make the wallpaper curl in our old farmhouse, but I can no longer do that since my voice finally changed when I turned 40. I don’t embrace my bass like voice but I sing in a range that no longer makes the garage door open and close.

A few moments ago he was approaching his food dish so I sang my little tune. This tune is composed of just a few notes and resides in a minor key. It has a haunting quality to it, especially when I let my vibrato tremble. OoooOoOOOooooOOOooo. It was then that I hit a totally shocking realization.

Holy copyright infringement!

The tune I sing is one that I heard when I was a kid. It’s from that “Wonder Woman” episode where Martin Mull plays an evil flute player that can disintegrate steel with his haunting melody and odd sounding flute.

Not only can he pulverize bank vaults but he can also reprogram Eve Plumb! And make Wonder Woman look drowsy!

Electra Ear Splitting!

And all I was trying to do was alert Tom to let him know his kibble had been served in his gilded bowl.

I’ll have to sing a new tune now.

I have received a couple of e-mails because I haven’t blogged in a few days. Nothing is wrong, but I live by the philosophy that you shouldn’t type it into a computer if you don’t want it to appear on the front page of the New York Times. Life outside of work has been good but work has been very hectic and right now it would be best if I didn’t vent needlessly on that right now. All is well. Now onto my scheduled programming.

Behind this suave and irresistibly cute exterior lies the heart of a geek. I have always been a geek. I have always found interest in the things that most find mundane. Much of my geek focus is on technology and my love of computers, however, I was geek long before computers were commonplace, and one of my early interests (that eventually led me to computers) was cash registers.

Standing in line at your favorite supermarket and other store today is a relatively quiet experience, aside from the bad sounding muzak, bellows of price check requests over the PA system and the cry of a cranky baby. One hardly notices the sound of the cash register these days, aside from the confirmation beep of a successful scanning of an item. However, when I was a kid, the same atmosphere was augmented by the sounds of the mechanical cash registers. There was no scanning, there was rarely change computation and there was no self-service checkout lane.

Back in the day a usually nice clerk or cashier rang up your order on a big mechanical adding machine with a drawer attached. Some were even lucky to keep working if the power went out, they just attached a crank to the side and did the same thing with a little bit of elbow grease.

I have always had an interest in mechanical cash registers. I discovered them very early on in my childhood. I noticed that the big NCR cash registers at the P & C (grocery store) were the same as the cash registers at the Mattydale K-mart. I noticed that the registers at the new (at the time) Ames store were the same as the ones at Westons Department Store except Ames had three rows of department keys and Westons only had two. The theory behind their operation was the same and by third or fourth grade I pretty much had it figured out how to work these registers. Without looking at the checkstands I could tell by the sound of the register if it was made by NCR or Sweda. Swedas were my favourite. They ‘sounded’ crisper and a little more modern. Back in 2005, Earl and I were visiting a market in Toronto with our friends Steve and Tim and over the sounds of the open air type vendor thing they had going on, I heard the distinct sound of a Sweda cash register. I said to Earl, “I know that sound” and I led him over to where I heard it and proudly said, “see, it’s a Sweda cash register.”

He didn’t think I was crazy, he just grinned in the way he does when he knows he has a geek for a husband.

Now I have had my school clock collection going for 10 or 11 years. It’s working brilliantly, all the clocks look great and I had the variety I wanted to collect from the specific manufacturer that I had my eye on (The Standard Electric Time Company of Springfield, Mass.) A couple of weeks ago I decided that it was time to move into another hobby – the restoration of a mechanical cash register made by Sweda. I took a look on ebay and found one reasonably priced that wasn’t located too far away. These registers really can’t be shipped because they’re way too heavy.

Today we took a drive into the Catskill Mountains and picked up the first (of several?) cash register for my restoration project.

Introducing my Sweda Model 46.

This register is nearly identical to the register that was used at the locally owned “Red and White” supermarket that was down the street from my parents’ house. I’m guessing it was manufactured sometime in the mid 1960s. It needs some work and it’s missing the key that unlocks the journal tape but other than that it’s a good way to tinker and learn a little bit about these machines. And it’s wicked heavy.

I have had it here at the house for about an hour and I just figured out how to route the receipt tape so that it shoots out when the drawer opens. It’s adding everything correctly and seems to be mechanically sound. It can be used electrically or by crank but I haven’t tried the crank yet.

This is my new project that will take me off the grid and away from technology for the times when my brain needs to defrag. I’m very excited about it.

I’m a very excited geek tonight.

I have been home from work all day as I awoke this morning feeling really stuffed up and lethargic. I was able to sneak in a couple of hours of extra sleep and once I rebooted, I felt better. A long shower certainly helped. I think my brain needed to defrag or something.

I have been playing it low-key for most of the day, working on projects that have been on my to-do list for the past couple of months. I also kept abreast of the Apple announcement this afternoon. Ta da, it’s the Apple iPad.

Sorry, but I am underwhelmed. And I’m going to be skipping this product.

First of all, from what I have read from numerous sources, it looks like it’s little more than an oversized iPod Touch. Now I know some rumours suggested that it was going to end earthquakes, contain tornadoes and bring about world peace, but even the realistic rumours pointed to something a little more than this. Fans of the new product are boasting that it has built in GPS, something that most netbooks don’t, but are you really going to prop at 10-inch screen up on your windshield so it can tell you how to get from point A to point B?

Secondly, perhaps I’m more than a little juvenile but I can not bring myself to say iPad without a snicker. It’s just funny sounding to me and it sounds like it belongs in the grocery aisle that I avidly avoid at all costs. iPad. Giggle.

I really thought Apple would announce an update to the iPhone software or something in addition to this tablet device that the news outlets have been blathering on about, but from what I saw today, this is it. iPad. Snicker. Put it in the MacBook Air category.

So I have been on call for work this week. This in itself is a regular occurrence and something I knew fully well that I would be doing on a regular basis at my current job. It’s not the most pleasant time of my life but it’s bearable. There are some aspects I really enjoy about on call; mostly because it keeps me at home and I do stuff around the house but also because I feel like there’s an extra boost in the team camaraderie department when all of us on call folks are working together (one of us from each relevant department). I get a better sense of teamwork with those I don’t work closely with during the normal workday. It’s not a bad feeling.

One of the things that on call does is make for some irregular sleep patterns. I opt to sleep in the boys’ room when I’m on call because I occasionally have to get up in the night and I don’t want to disturb Earl with my trips back and forth to my office. I sleep on top of my pager, which has been set to vibrate, because the dinging of the pager makes me insane to the point of a rabid response: I foam at the mouth, spout out obscenities that would make a person with tourettes blush and then I throw something. I am not wired to handle the wide variety of the pseudo friendly beeps from the pager but I can easily handle something vibrating under me in bed. Go figure.

Erratic sleep schedules make for some interesting dreams. If I sleep for an hour or two, get called for work for an hour or so, go back to sleep for another hour or two, rinse and repeat a couple of times, by the last sleep cycle before morning I usually am in the midst of intense, whacky dreams. Such a thing was happening this morning around 7:45. I was in the middle of a very vivid, engaging dream that was taking place in a palace of some sort. Smells, sounds and color by technicolor was involved and quite frankly I was enjoying the experience immensely. I was in some sort of third person role and simply observing the action taking place in the dream when everything just froze with the “freeze” sound effect from “Bewitched” (you’d know it if you heard it). From here I walked around my surroundings a little bit a looked at everything frozen when I heard another “ding”. With the sound a Windows XP dialog appeared right in the middle of this frozen scene in my dream. Still fully asleep and dreaming, I was standing in the middle of a palace with all action frozen and a three dimensional Windows XP dialog box in the middle of it all. I walked all the way around the Windows XP dialog box that hung in mid air and then read the contents:

Wake Up And Look At Your Pager
[OK]

I remember reading this message in my dream, musing to myself about the contents of it and then I awoke with a start. Next to me, my pager had accumulated 20 pages in about three minutes and I had slept through the vibrations because the pager was lying on the bed next to me. My subconscious found a creative way to communicate to me and proved one thing to me at the same time.

I’m odd.

See, I’m not the only crazy clock guy.