Google me, I'm Irish

Things I do not like include the increasing certainty that I am not merely not on the leading edge of The Curve, not merely behind The Curve, but rapidly falling far enough back in the pack to not even know that there's an Ahead with a Curve somewhere in it. Apparently it's a wiki world, and me not even a wikiterial , sakes. I thin I'm somewhere still in the gawrsh it sure is cool not being dependent on The Man's mainframe, hyuk hyuk. Maybe it's because I dare to write on a Dell machine, which as Our Andrew never fails to point out is hardly the textbook def of y. Our Andrew is not a Mac bigot; he's been agitating for Alienware ever since the fabled Tector was a fabled pup, and we do take the opportunity to point out that Alienware has been oh how should we put it assimilated by Dell. But I think it's because I have resisted being assimilated entirely into the Googleplex.

I dunno: I like Word. I'm kinda fond of Excel. I like my files where I can find them. I'm not convinced of the wisdom of hanging my so-called intellectual property (which it's the equivalent of a Balmer rowhouse) out in a server farm in Oregon and trusting Larry Page and Sergey Brin to remain warm n fuzzy n Wozlike, and not morph overnight into dare I say it Bill Gates (insert scary Elmer Bernstein music here). Other than it seeming kinda incomprehensible that given power corrupts and absolute power corrupting absolutely how is it different that Gates' inherent evility stems from selling out to The Man with MS-DOS whereas Page n Blin are magically incorrupt even after The Biggest IPO Ever (insert Those Were The Days cue here, o so long ago in the fabled days of yore when disposable incomes strewed daffodils across the land and mortgage companies showered us with monopoly registered trademark money), I should very much like to know? Ah well, mebbe I should just retire to my detached garage and push globs of Turtle Wax into my T while I'm at it, or fahgeddabout this furshlugginger keyboard and just scribble all over the screen with my vaguely sharp crow quill and let the ink kinda ooze into the Aether.

Say, what is that giant rock heading our way out of the sky? Not to worry, it's just a commercial airliner. Although I'll grant that when TSA gains access control over everything, which will likely be in about a week or ten days given today's news, there might be advantages to having all of one's work stored in a server farm in Oregon, since the only place we'll be able to go in and out of without a biochip ID will be our living rooms. Well, I've always wanted to be a sim.

Now there's something you don't see every day, Chauncey ...

It's hard to be a pedestrian in the city. But how else would I get to see the Wonder of the Age, the solar-powered trashcan.

You laugh. Behold the Big Belly, the pride of Seahorse Industries and the new secret weapon of Our Nation's Cities in the war against ism or litter, one:

This was even better than the forlorn Hillary supporters vainly trying to elicit any signifier of interest from commuters escaping from the subway tonight. Poor fools! Don't you know better than to get in the way of Very Important Suburbanites heading for their townhouses, so as to fire up their computers immediately upon entering and check their feeds for any updates more recent than when they left downtown an hour earlier?

See, you throw your trash into the belly of the beast; and then the solar-powered compactor solarly compacts your trash, carbonless footie-prints and all! Scoff scoff, I scoff at the PJM grid! By tossing my trash into this technological triumph, I strike a blow against the empire woo hoo!

Only thing is, it doesn't seem to work worth a patoot after dark. Maybe if I stood over it with a lit candle ...

Back to the future

Trying fecklessly to keep to a schedule with 2/3 of the boys down with the ague, laboring under the foolish assumption that a Nice Night of Family Television would be just the ticket, what should we discover but a TCM offering of 2001, uncut and remastered just like it was on the premiere roadshow engagement of spring 1968? Well, here's a teaching moment to show at least budding cineaste Andrew th' source of more movie cliches in the last forty years than I don't know what. We decided to play the "They ripped that off from (insert more contemporary pop reference here)", although I'm not entirely sure that the notion of backwards-compatible ery was chronologically sound ("I think the point is to establish that the earlier image shows who came first." "I saw my image first, so it came first." "No, it came second." "I'm not talking about who came second." "Who came first." "I dunno." "He came third, we're not talking about him.")

On the one hand, the opening images of the moon-earth-sunrise szygny, with the Zarathrusta theme, still carry the weight of seeing the Real Moon on the gajillion-foot Cinerama screen, as did the Blue Danube approach and docking effects setpieces. And the shots are gorgously composed and lit, especially with the color remastering. And the pacing for the Dawn of Man sequence seems about right. And maybe we'll concede that the teeth-grinding banality of the dialogue once it gets started makes the point that we waste our highly developed sophistication and technology by taking it for granted.

On the other hand, I can't help but thinking as we watch: What a 60s poser. Here a bunch of the boys have rallied through the phlegm to whoop it up over the vision of swinging London haute design carried forward in a triumph of the Bauhaus will to rule the future. And Our Andrew and The Michael are catching on, "Oh, it's like flying to Grandma's." "Yeah, pretty much. Pan Am was the world's biggest and most ous airline back then. Of course it doesn't exist anymore." "But we've got videoconferencing through webcams." "Yeah, Bell Telephone was working on that in the 60s." "What's Bell Telephone?" "It was the phone company, it doesn't exist anymore." "Like Sprint." "Well, yeah since Sprint doesn't exist anymore either, but there was only one phone company." "Like Vonage." "No, we have one phone company for our landline, one phone company for our personal cell phones, another phone company for our long-distance calls, one phone company for our work landline, one phone company for our business cell phones. Back then there was one. phone. company. Period." "Well, why didn't he use his cell phone from the moon?" "They probably were out of the area." "No, nobody could imagine carrying your phone around with you and calling anybody whenever you felt like it. Phones were attached to wires that came out of the wall where the phone company ran them. You couldn't put a phone where you wanted it, the phone was put where it was easy for the installer to put it." "That's stupid. Why didn't you just tell him to put it where you wanted it?" "Because it was the phone company. You didn't tell the phone company what to do. They did what they wanted. That's why the government broke up the phone company." "Well, what kind of dumb movie about the future only has one phone company?" "Well, when you imagine the future you're really imagining your present and trying to make it better, kinda sorta. You can't imagine what you can't imagine." "George Lucas did." "But he did because he saw this movie when he was a kid, and realized that he could imagine the future just like this guy did." "Well, this guy got it wrong. I remember 2001. No space station, no colonies on the moon, and I didn't get what I wanted for my birthday. That's all that happened." "Well, some mopes drove some planes into buildings." "He missed that, too."

Well, yeah. We watch for a while in silence, interrupted by the occasional snort of "That's a computer? Computers don't look anything like that." "I don't even think the Apple guys were out of grade school by then, much less building their little boxes in their garages. Computers were still big racks in sealed rooms, and if you wanted to use the computer you had to get the computer guy to run it for you." "Well, what about games?" "They're playing chess, that's a game." "Chess is boring. This movie is boring. George Lucas made a better future." And I think again: What a 60s poser, rubbing our noses in his smug cold egotistical misanthropy. And we, including my own personal self, fell for it.

Outta th' mouth o' s. George Lucas did make a better future. And I want fries with that.

Kahn! K-A-A-A-A-A-HN!

Professionally, I get to spend some time thinking about the Unthinkable. The problem is you can't really think about the Unthinkable, because it's well unthinkable. This is not a Cheap Laff; we forget how to think about the Unthinkable as we learn self-preservation as a useful life skill. So we content ourselves with thinking about the probably not-able, and pretend that's an acceptable substitute for the Unthinkable.

A few years ago I got to manage company preparations for Y2K. Who remembers Y2K, the most expensive Unthinkable non-event in human history? For those of us who can't remember such pretend-disasters, Y2K was supposed to potentially be the end of civilization as we knew it because unprescient early computer programmers economizing on coding, on account of a criminal lack of memory available in prehistoric steam-driven computing machines, left off the "19" in writing date/time codes. The programmers assumed that somebody would come around and patch the code long before the turn of the century. If it wasn't fixed, then at 00:00:00 on 1/1/2000, the computing machine would think that it was 00:00:00 on 1/1/1900 and be unable to access any date-certain file until 85 to 95 years later, which would be inconvenient when applied to things like power transmission systems, or the world's monetary system, or setting your VCR to record Walker, Texas Ranger. Problem was, that hadn't been done with bet-your-life certainty by 1998; and thanks to the well unthinkable explosion of computing machines integrated into many if not most electromechanical conveniences of modern society, no one could say with any degree of certainty that every single device that could be affected by the rollover had been identified and properly patched. And it became sadly apparent that because there was potentially a computing machine in every single electromechanical device, in order to be fully prepared one had to audit every single electromechanical device in a business/personal inventory and verify that it was patched. In this regard, IT departments busily checked the obvious computers that were part of the business' normal IT inventory; but their scope, interest, professional concern stopped at the limits of their inventories. All those other devices were Somebody Else's Problem. For most American businesses, the Somebody Else was the facilities department; and the luck of the ticketpunch put me in that particular hot seat in 1999.

So we had to check and test everything that was digitally controlled in any way. Now if the computing machine head end was fairly obvious, like say an HVAC or building system controller, you could check with the vendor for a patch, which was usually available for a hefty fee since it was not considered to be a routine upgrade. But if the computing machine head end was not obvious, like say the timer in a coffeemaker or the thermostat in a refrigerator, that was a little trickier to verify. It meant conducting a pre-forensic audit of every mechanical thing that you owned; and the audit not only had to account for the presence of the thing, it had to account for a field test that verified either that the device was unaffected and would function properly, or was affected and patched, or was affected and unpatched but a patch had been identified and was on order and would be installed well before The Day, or was affected and unpatched and no patch was available so the device had to be taken offline and either replaced or junked with a patched device. This was an incredibly tedious, time-consuming and expensive process.

At one point we were checking emergency building systems; and because the Worst Case Scenario was that Y2K would shut down the PJM Interconnection, which is the entire east coast power transmission network, we needed to verify that the emergency generator would in fact function properly in case of a full power grid failure. Once I actually spoke these words I experienced the full pushback of the entire maintenance operation, because a full grid failure was, well, Unthinkable. Had never happened in Our Nation's Capital, not since the grid was turned on back in ought-whenever. The closest thing anybody could think of was the occasional power failure caused by summer storms, which never lasted more than a day. Or a week. And happened every summer. But had never happened downtown, we being on the same grid as the White House dontcha know and the White House will never be affected by the same reality that affects you and me and Bobby McGee. It seemed to me that that being the case, it was likely that the emergency systems had never been tested since they were commissioned, which was almost twenty years previously: there were certainly no records of testing, not even of turning the generator over to make sure that it still kicked on. In which case it seemed unwise to test the generator involuntarily at 00:00:00 on 01/01/00; we probably wouldn't be able to get a repair guy in until well after the Apocalypse. So I proposed that we simulate a total grid failure, take the entire building completely off line just to see what happened. This provoked Son of Pushback; as I recall, it took the better part of two weeks and the expenditure of every erg of clout and the call-in of every chit I had out there, plus a couple of well-placed threats of termination for insubordination and the payout of a bunch of overtime, to put a fake blackout in play. Because such a thing had never happened, could never happen, and preparing for it was the dumbest thing said by a white boy since the Greaseman ran his mouth on the air. Just, well, Unthinkable.

So we pulled the plug on a mid-week night in early August. Nights in August in Our Nation's Capital are hazy, humid, hot and horrible. Pulling the plug showed us two things: the 800,000 square foot building did not hold temperature worth a poop as it quickly equalized to outside temperature in about 15 minutes; and the emergency generator spun up as soon as the last power leg was taken off line, and just as quickly shut itself off and took all the life safety equipment down with it. Huh. Unthinkable. And great was the embarassment across the land. Turns out that the generator's power sensors had been miswired from the get-go; and instead of monitoring the normal building power feeds for proper power flow, it monitored its own output. So as soon as the generator kicked on, it measured power flowing (well yeah, that's what a generator does -- it generates power, dontcha see) and it shut itself down again. Which it would have done every time it was turned on and tested. Which meant that it had never been tested or exercised since commissioning; and that it had been commissioned without testing. Which was extremely embarassing to the maintenance department, many members of which had been around since the system was commissioned.

Me, I thought it was a great test because everything failed miserably. That meant we didn't have to assume anything worked, so we might as well fix the whole thing. It also occurred to me that there was a pretty good chance that somebody knew that everything would fail miserably, hence the pushback; but I couldn't prove it, so that battle would have to be fought another day.

But what does this have to do with thinking about the Unthinkable? Even I wasn't prepared to think this one all the way to its logical conclusion, which would have been to arrange for backups and transfer systems sufficient to provide 11.7 kilovolts continuous service for up to four weeks. Basically, this would be generators the size of locomotives, transfer switches the size of bedrooms, and a supertanker full of diesel. Would have been kind of a tough sell to the Board of Directors, would probably have required the entire organization budget for the year, and would probably not have been available as a minority set-aside government procurement -- and all for a "just in case the world ends we can maintain normal business operations for a month" scenario. Because that's Unthinkable.

We had a few more adventures like this, and at 11:55:00 on 12/31/99 four of us hanging around at work with nothing better to do at the turn of the century decided that we might as well mosey on up to the security command center and peep over the operators' shoulders as the computer terminals rolled over from 11:59:59 12/31/99 to 00:00:01 01/01/00, just in case. Which they did. Kept right on going, too, Lights didn't go out or nothing. All that plywood we bought to board up the windows in case Our Nation's Capital went blip and concerned citizens decided to throw a few celebratory trashcans through said windows, for naught. Sighs of relief and toasts of Diet Coke all around (we were on duty and on the public's dime, you know) and home we went, accompanied by the happily tipsy revelers in their dumb paper party hats and horns tooting the Millenium and their fabulous lives.

1.75 years later some guys flew some planes into some buildings. Didn't see that one coming, either. Unthinkable.

Tomorrow I am going in for crowd control duty. For seven hours I will do my best to direct 30,000 people one at a time to two ticket will call windows or two credit card terminals. I don't want to think about what would happen if we had to get all those people out of the building because a fire alarm goes off, or some young person thinks another young person looked at him/her in a less than wholly respectful way and decides that a few disciplinary rounds from their personal peacemaker, or a scientifically applied whack from their personal machete, is in order; or a student of a variant sect decides that another wakeup call for the Great Satan is in order and detonates himself in a field vest filled with C-4 and nails. Because that stuff is, well, Unthinkable.

It's okay, I'm with the bandwidth

In this Homely House we have one desktop, one laptop, one XBox in the shop, one VOIP phone modem, two Nintendo DSes and one PSP all simultaneously sucking bandwith through a Linksys router. I'm thinking that perhaps we might have some bandwidth issues, especially as it's supercritical to the guyses that they must connect their handheld goodies to the wery World Wide Web its own bad self. That Al Gore invented the internet just so's Little Michael can play Super Mario Pinheads in real time with some wowser in Upper Canuckistan, for which we are all eternally grateful I'm sure. However, in order for Little Michael to play Super Mario Pinheads in real time with some wowser in Upper Canuckistan, I shall have to Flash the Firmware. I'm attempting to do so while one of Our Andrew's heathen friends keeps popping up on screen, intent on IMing Our Andrew with his vulgar assessment of the rigors of the upcoming weekend Scout Campout. I have resisted replying to his IMing, since my instincts are to reply "This is Andrew's Dad. Do you want me to get him?" and hope that the IM screen just sort of puckers into oblivion while making a cartoon noise like the air being squeakily let out of a balloon, but that would be too much to hope for.

I think I would really rather turn this project over to a professional, like 9-year old Little Michael; somehow Flashing the Firmware-type operations usually result in the software equivalent of a sodden mess, followed by wiping the hard drive and starting over. So perhaps we would be better to attempt this foolishness in broad daylight.

Meanwhile, I think I will ask the IT wizards tomorrow if one desktop, one laptop, one XBox in the shop, one VOIP modem, two Nintendo DSes and one PSP all simultaneously sucking bandwidth through a Linksys router might create bandwidth issues. Ya think?

Adlai Stevenson at the Pinewood Derby

Oh how we all worked and engineered away on Mikey's Pinewood Derby car! First the internet search, for the Secrets of Pinewood Derby Life n Such. This involved a necessary download of the Car Guys proffering their theories about the Pinewood Derby (they're either in favor of it or in favor of laughing at it, one). Then Dad whacked away at the regulation block o pine with the Skilsaw to establish the basic profile of the vehicle; Mikey paging through hundreds of Batmobile designs, picking out the parts he liked (and doing a pretty good job of combining them into one integrated vehicle), and dragooned Our Andrew into assisting in the sanding, weighting and painting consultation. The Mama and The Dad machined the regulation nails and wheels into the preferred mirrorlike finish; we ignored the Internet recommendations for calipering the diameter to insure perfection, perhaps this was our downfall. The Pinewood dry run actually got Mikey's hopes up; the consensus of his brother Scouts seems to have been "You've got a fast car there, dude."

Mikey is the most competitive of the guyses. He s losing. He despises losing. He abominates losing. He's not happy losing. Problem is, every year he loses. That happens when one is competing one's Pinewood Derby car against, well, real rocket scientists. But this year, it looked like Mikey might just have a shot at a Fabulous Prize.

We did a bunch of managing expectations. We had many family conferences with Mikey, reminding him that it isn't if you Win or Lose, the Cub Scout Motto is "Do Your Best" and not "Winning is the Only Thing", that it's an exercise in Grace Under Pressure, all that kinda motivational stuff; and on the way to the track, Mikey allowed that he was satisfied with his work, as he should have been. A couple of tweaks at the Official Weigh-In, and we were ready for racing.

Six heats for each car. Mikey won five out of his six, as well as a run-off. Not good enough for a Fabulous Prize. Sigh.

It's hard for a competitive little guy to accept that sometimes one's best isn't as good as someone else's best; and that just missing is, in technical racing terms, well not to put too fine a point on it, losing. He's taken it harder, but still ... he took it hard.

It amazes me how much we need the validation of a Fabulous Prize to reaffirm our basic worthiness. Another manifestation of our fallen nature, I reckon. Still: it hurts to see a little guyse hurting so; and even though he managed better than he ever has, it hurt too much to laugh, and he was almost too big to cry, coming so close and missing by so little.

It's the end of the world, and I feel fine

Shortly after moving here I remember watching a Major Teevee Movie Event called Amerika, about the Soviet occupation of the former America following some offcamera significant event or other. The Newspaper o Record made sure all us mouthbreathing lipmoving readers knew which night the all-over ruined architecture of Our Former Nation's Former Capital, and by extension our own former miserable yet curiously unimportant lives n livelihoods, would be showcased; as I recall it was showcased through the windshield of a pretend Soviet helicopter orbiting the Capitol dome, or matte painting or miniature or whatnot, which had a handsomely art-directed hole allegedly blown out by a bazooka-totin' partisanist something or other. Somewhat later I picked up a copy of Newsweek with a picture of an exploding White House on the cover. The headline was "Boom!"; one wonders how many and how long the grownups met in their editorial cabal to settle on that one. The article was a feature on a Major Malloplex Movie Event called Independence Day which also featured exploding Empire State and Capitol Records Building miniatures rendered lovingly in equal opportunity miniature and matte destruction, albeit neither the beauty cover shot for Newsweek nor lovingly recreated in IMAX for, um, the Smithsonian. Not that long ago Our Nation's Malloplexes featured global warming glaciers appearing out of story nowhere to engulf New York New York, the town so nice they named it twice --and, given prevailing weather patterns presumably my home, place of employment and person were both securely at the bottom of said glacier. In the last month we 've had a digitally kudzufied Brooklyn Bridge and a digital flying Statue of Liberty head digitally degraded to look all YouTubian n such, this last coupled with the trailer for Star Trek XI which is promising to return to the utopian Roddenberry future imagined in The Original Series -- one can clearly hear John F. Kennedy urging us on to the moon, Smilin' Al Shepard wishing John Glenn Godspeen, and Neil Armstrong announcing that the Eagle has landed before Leonard Nimoy whispers "Space ... the final frontier" all actorly n such while protoBorg weld up a digital Enterprise not in SpaceDock, cue the rough beast fanboys slouching. Thus setting up a big ol' steaming heaping serving of Consonant Dissonance for those malloplexians who failed to leave their brains in their little pink houses, value added with their admission.

I'm thinking that there's a thesis project for someone willing to play Find the Link among these examples of apocalypse, the ends of terms of certain sitting Presidents, the then-current general condition of the economy, and the agreed-upon accuracy of American popular art's reflection of the Zeitgeist. I'm wondering about this while trying to keep my head down and my powder dry during an increasingly dreary primary season which seems mostly an exercise for Certain People to scold us peons for not hurrying up, getting with the Program, and confirming the Fixes that have been In for the past two years, while assorted groups of taxpayers and voters remember certain remarks consigning their persons to Flyover America and, well payback certainly is a painful rectal itch, ain't it.

Monetarily, times are tough. I'm not liking it. I'm not seeing much to be optimistic about. It feels like 1991 again, kinda, but I don't recall civilization as we know it ending at that time, unless one counts the election results as proof. I'm considering that the American empire probably has come and gone siccing transit on Gloria Mundi her own bad self; the euro isn't all that happy a substitute especially once those Brits, crafty Deutschers and Franish persons decide to hell with this and go back to their own homegrown and much prettier currencies, and that if we were really foresighted parents we'd be making sure the guyses were fluent in Chinese, that is if we were cleverly and subliminally setting them up for worldly success for the rest of their lives. And I'm also considering that some of us are trying to talk the rest of us into a recession, probably as an election strategy. And I am really not liking that, not one little bit.

Now I am not an economist, don't play one on teevee. and am having personally one devil of a time keeping my personal head above the immediate and certainly rough financial waters. And I normally have no truck for conspiracy theories, because conspiracies are work and people don't like to put that much effort into work. But I also know a thing or two about th tools o th authorial trade, and the artful deployment of smoke and mirrors, and I'm hearing way too much hollering and not enough prooftesting comprising the Recessionalypse Now drum solo, which itself is sounding more and more akin to the young lepetomane Buddy Rich demonstrating how to whack a few strategically placed noisemakers louder and faster n any hombre for a hunnert miles around and trying to force us to gape like jeeters at how goshdarn frantic and unknowable it all seems. And I see the nozzle of the smoke machine in the wings and the fingerprints on the mirrors, and I wonder what those jaspers are doing behind that curtain, anyway.

My g-g-g-generation has been merrily demonstrating simultaneous ineptness and shamelessness for way too many decades now, running increasingly on the diminishing returns of what's left of our parents' good will. I begin to understand why the Xers hope we die before they get old. And I suppose the sorry lot o midgets running for Supreme Leader of th Free World, every one of them ready for their closeup, is fully expecting to be digitally enhanced by hired mythmakers (no writers need apply) into something more Presidential in about three weeks or so Eastern Standard Time, at which point the election will be declared over and We the so-called People can return to Flyover America, press our noses against the explosionproof smoked glass dome over the Beltway and let our betters get on with the business of running the country into the ground. I think that's why we get served tasty supersize apocalpyse burgers with a side o recession fries at these turning points. It keeps us from doing something off-script like looking too closely at the Best Candidates the System Can Spit Up, proclaiming them spinach, and finding and electing a real leader

We've been known to confound these wisenheimers before, and I suspect that if we got our hands on primary sources we wouldn't find a lot of newsprint remarking on how Presidential those Lincoln or Rosenfelt fellows seemed. I do recall that we elected more than a couple of Supreme Potentates on the basis of their remarkable resemblance to Roman statuary already enshrined in the Halls o Congress, I'm looking at you, Messrs. Harding and Hoover. That's the problem with being from Missouri: when somebody comes along heralding the imminent arrival of th Four Horsemen of th Apocalypse who are turning the corner and heading down my block, well ... show me.