A Gratuitous Attempt at Distraction #2

I was intending to write a piece about being vegan during the holidays, but I’ve been preoccupied with a feline situation this week. In the meantime, enjoy one of my favorite bits of computer humor:

Know Your System Administrator

In case you’re wondering, I was a Technical Thug during my I.T. career, with occasional hints of Maniac.

A Multiple Litter Box Hutch for Cats: part 2

The litter box hutch is (mostly) done, now that I’ve added a carpeted ramp and splash guards for the wall-facing edges.

The ramp is made from two sections of old plywood and wrapped in cut pieces of a spare area rug. It’s attached to the top platform with a standard door hinge, which allows us to lift the ramp for easier access to the rear litter box. If any of our cats prefer steps, they can improvise with our stockpile of boxed litter. The splash guards are aspen plywood sections cut to 12″ high.

It’s been great watching the cats use this. They can jump from the top platform to our dresser and the other cat furniture, circumnavigating the whole room without ever using the floor.

Biggest cat brain EVER!

I take a little time out from my household projects to note this remarkable convergence of two of my passions — cats and computers.

IBM Builds Biggest Cat Brain Ever

I especially like the line about “progenitor of a race of robo-cats”. If they’re going to the trouble of denying it, you know some evil genius must have suggested it.

This would be a good occasion to develop a new programming language just for this simulation. “LOLcat” could notify us of syntax errors by saying “Ur doin’ it wrong”. It could literally jump to a subroutine, sometimes with comical results. “Dumping core” could be described as “coughing up a hairball”.

A Multiple Litter Box Hutch for Cats

The problem: Multiple cats requiring multiple litter boxes. Limited floor space.

The solution: Think vertically, like a cat.

I built this litter box hutch yesterday. Although I don’t have the equipment or experience for serious woodworking, this simple design serves its purpose and the cats seem to enjoy using both levels. The platforms are solid aspen and the top level has proven sturdy enough to hold several litter boxes and cats. It’s a work in progress — soon I’ll add “splash” guards for the back and left sides, sisal rope wound around and stapled to the front posts for scratching, and possibly bottom legs and extra crossbeams. I’d like to add a stairway and/or ramp, more for entertainment than necessity. At 30″ tall, the upper platform is well within hopping distance of even our oldest cats.

Working with boards and beams, saws and drills, it occurred to me yesterday that I’ve spent more than twenty years building and repairing abstractions — computer commands, scripts, specifications or manuals; then sentences, paragraphs, articles or proposals. This isn’t the first time I’ve build a solid object, by far, but it’s been too long since I’ve felt the satisfaction that comes from creating a physical thing. I think I’ll make more sophisticated woodworking an ongoing project. Already I have ideas for other hutches, ramps, stairs and beds.

Cats must be entertained, after all.

NOTE: Here’s a later post with updates and a better picture.

ABC’s “V”: Ready for a commitment, or “flirty TV”?

It’s been years since I’ve watched a first-run network television show, but last night I made an exception for ABC’s revision of the 1980’s classic “V”.

The original “V” began as a 1983 four-hour mini-series exploring the methods of a fascist power gaining control of a free society. In this case, a species of advanced space aliens arriving on Earth promising friendship and an exchange of resources and technology, but manipulating our culture behind the scenes to take over for their own appalling purposes. Its cliffhanger ending and ratings success led to an equally successful six-hour sequel, “V: The Final Battle”, and soon after a weekly series which failed quickly. I’m one of many who remember fondly the best aspects of the “V” experience as an artful blend of science fiction action/adventure with intriguing socio-political commentary.

This new version of “V” made an immediate impression with its spectacular effects and lavish production, and given my own political sympathies I relished the none-too-subtle slaps at the culture of Obama-nation. The introductory hour passed quickly, but when it was over I began questioning the storytelling style. How much of my enjoyment of last night’s episode was derived vicariously from my memories of the first “V”? If not for that first incarnation, would I have grasped the implications of the events I was seeing? After this hour, would I have a sense of the characters involved, or where all of this blue-hued quick-cutting action was leading?

I fear that the new “V” will be another example of the trend in television drama — a “Twin Peaks”-esqe curiosity replacing coherence, the piling on of mysteries upon mysteries week after week until we begin to wonder if anyone behind this knows where they’re going, the sense that if we miss one week’s episode we’ll be forever…”Lost”?

I mourn the decline and fall of the anthology series — “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, “Suspense Theater”, “The Outer Limits”, “The Twilight Zone” and all the other examples of cinematic short stories. There was a mix of freedom for the writer to tell a tight story, together with the constraint to tell that story within 23 or 50 minutes, but the audience had absolute freedom. Perhaps the quality varied from week to week, but if one episode missed its target a complete restart was only a week away.

I’ll give the new “V” — beloved for the sake of its forefathers — another two weeks. If it looks like it will be the kind of show designed to spur next morning debates around the proverbial water cooler, I’ll have to find a more satisfying way to spend an hour a week. Endless flirting and a lack of commitment are rightly seen as annoying in human relationships, and I find it tedious in drama as well. “V” may yet work as an indictment of our gullibility, if it doesn’t become itself an example of it.

Night of the Dead Living

It’s November 1 and I have an extra hour this morning to contemplate the 5-gallon bucket of unopened candy inside our front door. My wife and I were looking forward to last night, the first Halloween in our new house, where we put aside the awkwardness of apartment Halloweens and enjoy treating the children from our own homestead. Darkness fell, and I wrenched myself away from the Val Lewton classic films playing on TCM to wait by our lighted porch for the parade of costumed children.

No one came. Not one in two hours. No goblins or ghouls, no superheroes or princesses, no shy little ones accompanied by their parents or exuberant packs of kids anxious to see how we would add to their bags of goodies. No one came.

Today I consider the possible explanations — we’re facing a main thoroughfare and close to an intersection, we’re new to the neighborhood and still an unknown element, and (why not blame?) the economy. Maybe the old rituals are casualties of the trends toward private parties, or the co-opting of Halloween festivities by young adults.

In any case, I hope that our experience was an isolated one, and the Halloween we knew as children isn’t dying. For me, it was more than consolation over the end of summer and the return to school, or a fantasy and candy-filled way station before the spectacle of Christmas. It was a chance to roam my neighborhood and meet people I’d had no occasion to see during the rest of the year, despite our proximity. For one night we all put aside our preconceived notions of privacy, security and propriety to approach our neighbors as neighbors, all the while mocking our fears with candy and silly costumes.

How will artfully organized parties compete with that in the future? Technology already allows (or subtly encourages) us to build all of our relationships as comfortable grooves of like-minded, like-interested cliques of mutual reinforcement. Maybe the fundamentalist’s wrong-headed opposition to Halloween celebrations will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and Halloween is destined to become an expression of our escalating fears rather than our rejection of them. And that will be more frightening than any little ghoul or old dark house.

Attack of the Retro Room!

Let’s take a break from random prose and serve up a quiche of cheesy goodness! As promised, here are a few pictures of my beginning efforts at a Retro Room, a four-walled time capsule celebrating my heritage of 8-bit computers and 1970’s Saturday afternoon local television.

In case you thought I was joking about black lagoon creatures and 50-foot women, note the posters that surround my Commodore 128D workstation:

The back wall. La Dolce Vita and the Star Trek painting don’t quite fit the theme here, but She Who Must Be Obeyed has forbidden movie memorabilia in the rest of the house. Unless we can resolve this, the Fellini and Roddenberry classics will be keeping some strange company:

The home computers of the 1980’s were designed to connect to televisions if one didn’t have a dedicated monitor. As an unintended benefit, the monitors could double as a television if one got creative with a VCR. Here’s my DVD/VCR combo unit feeding a video display to the Commodore monitor, just as I used to do with a TV tuner twenty years ago:

Of course, the Commodore is still fully functional as a computer, with its 128 kilobytes of RAM and assortment of 5.25″ and 3.5″ floppy drives:

Equipping and decorating the Retro Room will be an ongoing project. Stay tuned!

God’s Laughter

“Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht.”
- Yiddish proverb, “Man plans, God laughs.”

I’ve always been an obsessive planner — one who makes lists, schedules, budgets and logs — even for everyday activities. This instinct served me well in my I.T. career where my last title was “Project Planner”, though that described only a small percentage of my routine responsibilities.

A lifetime and career of project management has taught me a few things:

• Projects do not go according to plan;
• Any given task within the plan rarely goes according to plan; and
• Despite this, planning is better than not planning. We have a proverb of our own in project management, “failing to plan is a plan to fail.”

Our move to the new house is mostly complete. Over the past three weeks we’ve dealt with unexpected repairs and renovations, budget and schedule overruns, multiple contractors, legal requirements, endless packing and unpacking, stomach flu and sleeplessness, and several cats with moods ranging from trauma to exuberance. A few little tasks remain before we settle into long-term and lower-priority projects, but after less than ten days living here my wife and I feel the same way — it’s as though we have always lived here, and our last residence is a distant and alien memory, like a poorly remembered dream.

As with so many projects in the past, I look back on my best laid plans, my hopes and disappointments, my fears and frantic efforts at coping with new contingencies; and I laugh. Somewhere, God has been laughing all along.

The Retro Room

Some people enjoy vacations — going to exotic locations, seeing and doing things unavailable to them during their everyday lives. Some may dedicate a space in their home to create their perfect leisure environment, complete with state-of-the-art high tech equipment as in the so-called “man cave”. I have never cared for much travel and I’ve always been, despite my background, a relatively late adopter of technology. But our new basement is partitioned, giving us an embarrassment of available “rooms” to dedicate to any purpose. I plan to make one of these a place for vacations in time, a temporary refuge from the spoiling effects of Giga-this and HD-that.

My “retro room” will be a Twenty-One club — only media and technology old enough to drink will be admitted. Vinyl records, cassettes, early CD’s, VHS tapes; all of them no more recent than 1988. Perhaps I’ll accept the fake I.D. of a DVD player, if it bribes me with the type of classic TV shows and movies I watched on rainy, snowy weekends. The bookshelves will be overstuffed with fragrant paperbacks, some of them older than I am, in keeping with my lifelong habit of used books. I’ll decorate the walls with old album covers and the lobby cards of 1950’s B-movies — black lagoon creatures and 50-foot women — all the things neglected in this era of emo-folk-rock and all-night infomercial marathons.

Not that I will forget computer technology! The centerpiece of my collection will be my Commodore 128-D, a variation on the same computer I used at the time. With RAM and floppy disc storage measured in kilobytes, it won’t play DVD’s or MP3’s but neither will it present banner ads or smuggle spyware. For my own amusement I may process words, base a little data and spread a few sheets as I did in the late eighties, not feeling at all deprived that I’m not allocating 100+ megabytes of memory to resident Internet security suites.

All of this must sound like an excess of nostalgia, even sentimentality. You’re damn right. Others are welcome to their Aspen or Paris, their Blu-ray and 7.1 surround sound. For me, my curmudgeonly Retro Room will be my vacation and my “man cave”, a little bit happy and a little bit sad. And what is a curmudgeon, if not a bitter Romantic?

NOTE: See the Retro Room in progress at this later post.

Homeowners at last!

We closed on our new house this morning, thus beginning the next phase in the adventure. A whole new set of expenses and savings, obligations and opportunities, risks and rewards.

In honor of ending our search for a home, there’s a new link in my Humor category. Lovely Listing reminds me of the many sights, sounds… and smells… I’ve encountered while house hunting over the past few months. Enjoy!

Why Animals Don’t Need a Savior

No deep theological treatise here, just a case study courtesy of The Wuffington Wag:

The Story of Jasmine

I admit it – The Notebook is the New Desktop

Perhaps one day your children and your children’s children will whisper stories of me around late-night campfires, or under sheets on weekend slumber parties, flashlight held under the chin. “His screen was deeper than it was wide! His mouse was almost the size of his hand, and he dragged it ape-like across the surface of a desk! And his computer was a Lovecraftian horror he hid under that desk — a giant box with writhing, twisting tentacles flailing from the back, and so hungry it could only live plugged right into the wall!“

Like Robert Neville in the classic story, I may be the last of my kind — the last desktop/tower-using human in a world overrun by battery powered vampires.

I am legend.

*

OK, that was a slight exaggeration. My way of recanting the heresy of Towerism and embracing the one true Church of Mobility. In short, I’ve accepted the trend of the past several years, and declared my notebook PC to be my primary computer.

To be fair, some of you reading this may not have been born when I began using home computers. Back then, a “portable” computer was a 25-pound suitcase that still needed an AC receptacle to run itself and its built-in 5-inch monochrome screen. It cost several thousand dollars more than the several thousand dollar desktop models, and only the truly wealthy indulged in the luxury of a second built-in floppy drive.

It was then my prejudice was formed, that only desktop computers were adequate for a power user. That bias persisted through the “laptop” years and well into the “notebook” era. I assembled my own tower PC’s according to my own ever-changing specifications — a new video card here, a new audio card next month, a whole new motherboard in the spring — all the while sneering at the $2,500+ laptops with their feeble components, neutered for the sake of battery life. Don’t get me wrong, I bought and used laptops the whole time. But these were often flea-market remainders or the cheapest closeout models I could find. They were my glorified PDA’s, or network terminals connected to my real computer while I watched TV in the living room. Some of them could run WordPerfect or even OS/2, but I would never think of doing serious work with my cyber-environment’s cyber-stepchildren!

Years later, the computer marketplace changed while I didn’t. Today’s notebooks, like the one I’m using now, are priced only slightly higher than equivalent desktops. Their screens, keyboards and built-in components are competitive with most desktop equipment, and more than adequate to handle things unimagined in portables a decade ago.

When I left the Information Technology field (two years ago this August 1, in fact), I retired, donated and gave away some of my excess equipment. As part of my pending relocation to a new house, I’ve been looking for ways to reduce the excess even more, and the answer is clear. This HP notebook, built to handle the specifications of the elephantine behemoth Vista, has more than enough power to run my bantamweight Slackware Linux environment, and I no longer need to be tethered to a tower to do real work. The tower has replaced several of my old home entertainment center components as a rudimentary media center PC, and can still act as a file and backup server. From now on, I’m mobile!