My neighborhood has both a regular trash service and a recycling service, each with a different can.
I generate so little trash that I don’t really participate… I mean, by each Wednesday morning I have about a quarter-can of refuse to put out, and if I split it all out I’d have two eighth-cans.
My neighbors though? They need 3-4 cans and usually have a mound of other stuff sitting next to them that won’t fit in the smaller recycling can – usually a pile of Amazon cardboard and random packing material from other delivery services… Pet food delivery, meal delivery, clothing delivery, grocery delivery; it makes one wonder if they ever leave the house.
Anyway, the problem is they like to put out the trash Tuesday afternoon because the trash trucks come at around 10am – and that’s just too damn early. And, invariably, on Tuesday night a good breeze will blow though and evenly distribute the recycling all over the neighborhood…
So, the neighbors get to feel good because they’re “recycling” and saving the planet! Meanwhile their “recycling” is filling up the little woodland area in front of my house.
The icing on this cake of disappointment is one of these neighbors is a loud and proud “Eco Warrior” who will go on and on and on (and on) about global warming and how horrible humanity is… Meanwhile her trash is everywhere, she drives an urban assault vehicle big enough to require its own zip-code, and runs her A/C 24/7 – rain or shine.
It makes me wonder if this is common, and if it is just how much attention I should be giving these people.
Yesterday I posted about the Pink Floyd show I saw in 1994, which was notable as being the last Pink Floyd tour ever.
A few years prior to this I got to see the Yes “Union” tour… It was May 9th, 1991 at the now long-gone McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, and was the first and last time all of the 70’s and 80’s band members were on the same stage.
I had just gotten back from I-CON in Long Island and had a few spare dollars in my pocket, so I took advantage of the situation and went to a show. My ex had hooked up with a couple of guys across town while I was at I-CON and she wasn’t around for the show, so I saw this one solo.
All in all the show was amazing and I’m glad I got the opportunity to see the whole band in one place. I got to see Yes again for the “Fly From Here” tour in 2012, but the lineup did not include Jon Anderson… So while the show was really, really good, it wasn’t quite the same. 🙂
I’m standing in a throng of 69,788 people on the field of Mile High Stadium; the scent of pot thickly fills the air. Ahead of us at one end of the stadium is a massive stage, above it hovers an equally massive circle of lights suspended by a huge arch, and all around the upper reaches of the stadium are huge sets of speakers…
“Astronomy Domine” begins to echo through the stadium, the lights on the stage come up to reveal the band, and the crowd goes nuts…
I saw this show with Michi from the BBS, and it was pretty amazing… All told it was about two and a half hours of standing, though I didn’t really notice – to me it all seemed to be over far too quickly.
The most memorable bit for me was the second encore song, “Run Like Hell” as the intro guitar riff flowed around the stadium from the speakers surrounding the audience. The whole show was in “surround sound”, but Run Like Hell really put it to use.
I’m sitting here at work, working (as one tends to do at work), and I’m playing my ‘old man’ music… Today is a selection of old Rush from the recent 40th anniversary reissue of “Moving Pictures”.
Moving Pictures came out in ’81… I remember picking it up at the record store shortly after it was released, zipping it up in the front of my jacket (it was February in Colorado), and biking home as fast as I could. This was so I could put the album on before my parents got home, so that I could listen to it with some volume.
The opening chords of “Tom Sawyer” literally stopped the world for me.
But, while the album is chock-full of amazing music, as a Rush album tends to be, it is the dystopian “Red Barchetta” that sticks with me the most all these years later.
I was a serious motor-head growing up, and the late 70’s and 80’s tended to have an undercurrent of dystopia to it, so the song instantly lit my imagination.
The song’s lyrics tell a story set in a future in which a “Motor Law” has banned cars. The narrator’s uncle has kept one of these now-illegal cars (the titular red Barchetta) in pristine condition for roughly 50 years, and is hiding it at his secret country home – a farm from before the Motor Law was enacted.
Every Sunday the narrator commits a “weekly crime” of evading omnipresent surveillance, hoping a cargo train to get outside ‘the wire’, and sneaking out to his uncle’s farm to go for a drive in the countryside.
During one such drive, he encounters a “gleaming alloy air car” that begins to chase him along the roads. A second such vehicle soon joins the pursuit, which continues until the narrator drives across a one-lane bridge that is too narrow for the air cars. The song ends with the narrator returning safely to his uncle’s farm.
Kid-me in 1981 thought the song was an excellent musical story!
Adult-me in 2022 thinks the song was prophetic and that I should buy a very analog sports car and hide it away before the Church of Climate Change enacts the inevitable “Motor Law.”
Long, long ago software came on physical media – actual floppies, CDs, and DVDs – and I’ve held on to a lot of it that I’ve purchased over the years.
I still have things like Windows NT 4 server install floppies, a boxed copy of OS/2, and even my old Amiga kickstart and workbench disks. But without period hardware for said period software, they aren’t very interesting outside of “I have these”.
With all of the old Macs I have, having a collection of similarly old Mac software is more interesting because I can actually install it.
And in that regard, here’s my PowerPC Macintosh shelf…
From left to right there’s Mac Office 2004, which is PPC.
The orange cardboard has OS8.5 and 8.6 CDs, the jewel case has OS9.0 CDs, the thin white folder is OSX 10 public beta, 10.0, and 10.1 (the folder is from my purchase of 10.1), then 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 (the universal PPC/Intel version), and the DVD on the far right is a 10.6 PPC Beta which never made it to the final 10.6 version.
Finally there’s a copy of iLife ’09, which was the universal PPC / Intel version. The last PPC software Apple ever made.
All told, that shelf spans the entire PowerPC decade; 1998 to 2009.
For the sheer Back-To-The-Future-Ness of it, I’ve spent some time over the last few days working out how to get 20th century analog to work with 21st century digital.
See, back in the 80’s and 90’s pretty much everything was analog – especially the way we talked to other people. Radio, TV, the telephone, and even our computer modems used analog signals. But these days there’s pretty much no such thing as analog anything, let alone a phone line, which makes using a 90’s modem a bit of an exercise in haxx0ring reality…
For example, here at work my phone system uses a VOIP-based digital PBX to route calls around internally, and both the phones and the voice transport are digital. If someone places a call outside the building, the call is routed over a fiber connection to CenturyLink using what is essentially a sub-channel of the several gigabit connection into the building. From there the call is routed over the Internet to some other provider before being converted back to analog voice at someone else’s phone.
This works great for people, who have limited perceptual acoustic capability, but modems use a lot more of the audible spectrum to do their thing… Which is what all of that electronic screeching is about when modems and fax machines connect to each other; they are working out how bad the phone line is and how much acoustic space they have to talk to each other.
So, given all of this I’ve been teaching my PBX that analog isn’t a bad thing by working out a custom codec (basically an analog to digital sound converter) and some special rules for the timings and encapsulation used to turn modem screeching into 1s and 0s for the Internet.
And today I was successful in making an end-to-end modem connection to a friend’s BBS using ‘period’ hardware…
Said BBS has been running since 1992, I’ve had an account on it since 1993, and I still have hardware that I used in 1994 – so as something of a 30th anniversary thing I set my wayback machine to the early 90’s and made a phone call.
To do this took a surprising amount of work…
First, I had to get my circa 1994 Powerbook 165c working, which required replacing some capacitors in the backlight assembly. Then I had to bodge a serial cable that converted from 1994 Apple 8-pin to regular 25-pin. Then I had to get a decent BBS terminal application onto the 165c.
This software installation required two additional computers of various ages and several operating systems to move data from the present-day internet back in time to 1994…
See, the 165c uses antiquated file systems based on what density and how many sides the 3.5″ floppy you stuck in it happens to have – while my M1 Max laptop has no idea what a floppy is, let alone what MFS or HFS is.
So, the solution was to use my recently repaired G5 iMac as the intermediary, as it can read USB2 flash storage as well as operate a USB floppy drive, and it can still run OS9, which can read and write HFS on 1.44M floppies.
So the process is simple:
on the M1 laptop go to an internet archive of ancient Motorola 68K Apple software
download “Black Night” (an ancient ANSI BBS terminal application) as a .SIT (Stuffit) archive
put that onto a USB2 flash drive via a thunderbolt-to-USB adapter
plug USB2 flash drive into the G5
move the stuffit archive to the desktop
fire up the OS9 compatibility layer in OSX 10.3.6
decompress the .SIT archive
copy resultant installer to a floppy I formatted in the 165c
put floppy into the 165c
and install software.
See? Simple.
How2Install stuff on a 165c in 2022… The process goes right to left.
From here it was just a matter of configuring Black Night to use my old USR V.everything modem, which is using the DB-25 to Apple cable and the modified modem-friendly port on my PBX to call a BBS across town…
Connecting at 12,000 baud over several back and forth A/D-D/A conversions – not bad!
Pardon the HVAC noise in the background; my office has some impressive forced ventilation because I routinely let the magic smoke out of things as part of my day-to-day duties. 🙂
And a photo for posterity
I’d not been on EOTD in a couple of years, so it took some time to catch up on my ‘e-mail’ and the forums, but it’s nice to see that the system still gets some use… I replied to a bunch of folks going back a year or so, and now I’ll wait to see how long it takes to get a reply. 🙂
Listening to "When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies" by Gunship
Earlier today I posted some photos of my G5 iMac, so I figured I should show off the rest of my “G” collection…
Before the G5 there was the aptly named G4…
PowerBook G4 17″ 1.33Ghz – CD case for scale
I’ve actually had three of these over the years… The first I picked up off the shelf at the Apple Store in Tyson’s Corner Virginia on February 25th, 2004 for about $3500. Unfortunately the first one had a screen defect, so Apple swapped it out for me and that became number 2.
I used the second one until October 1st, 2004 – shortly after I started at where I currently work and needed a PC to do PC things with. I sold it to finance the PC, and a few months later bought the G5 iMac.
The above G4 PowerBook I picked up in October of 2020 just to have one again. Shortly after I got it I replaced everything in it with new old-stock parts, swapped the HD for an SSD, and maxed out the ram.
I fire it up a couple of times a month to do writing, old use old PhotoShop, or putter around in Garage Band – just like I used to.
Before the G4 was the similarly named “G3”, and I have one of those too…
PowerBook G3 “Pismo” 400Mhz
I’ve had two of these over the years…
The first was a G3 “Wallstreet” I picked up in 1998, about a year after moving to Virginia the first time. The Wallstreet was essentially my primary computer until I replaced it with the G3 “Pismo” in February of 2000.
The Pismo these days is maxed on ram, 1 whole gigabyte, and runs an SSD that holds OS 9.2.2 in one partition, and the OSX public beta in the other… I imaged the drive as I had it right after installing the OSX public beta, and that’s what I put back on it when needed.
The Pismo is essentially a time machine I use to transport myself back to the better days of the late 90’s. For example, it connects to a BBS I’ve been using since 1993…
bbs.eotd.com / 303-679-0161
As you’ve probably gathered by now, I’m very into self-contained machines and I generally have the bleeding-edge laptop for {current year}… I think it’s a function of moving so much over the years; it’s just easier to toss a laptop into a case and go when required.
Prior to the G3 Wallstreet I used a PowerMac 6500/225 which a PowerPC 603e machine – or a “G2”, and I had an 8100/100 back in 1995, which is a PowerPC 601 – or a “G1”. I don’t currently have an either of those because they’re towers and require a separate keyboard, mouse, and monitor – and a lot of space.
And before the 8100/100 I had a PowerBook 165c which I posted about a few days ago. And while it’s not a “G” machine, it was the machine that started it all for me back in 1994.
My G5 iMac started getting a little flakey the other day, which usually means one thing; the dreaded aging capacitor issue…
See, back in the old days capacitors were basically a can of electrolytic goo, and over two decades or so said goo dries up and leaks out of the can.
If you catch the caps early you can prevent the inevitable leaky mess, but either way this stops things from working. And the only real fix is to buy new capacitors of the same values and replace the old ones, which can be rather time consuming.
Fortunately, I have a spare newer “ALS” G5 that just needed some spare parts – and now I had them.
My old G5, stripped of everything I needed for the new ALS G5. The DVD-Rom goes in the upper left, the 3.5″ HD in the upper right, and the PSU in the bottom.The bad caps in the VRM for the CPU. You can see the tell-tale expansion by the ‘doming’ of the caps, and the one in the foreground (and the one behind it) has just started leaking.The new G5 up and running with the donor parts from the old G5 – it’s the circle of (computer) life.
I’ll hang on to the husk of the old G5 for replacement parts as the years go on; the screen is in really nice shape, and there’s a lot of little parts that could be handy someday.
Still on my personal quest to nail down specific dates and places for my memoirs; everything gets a bit murky after twenty-plus years, and I’m a stickler for detail.
Today I discovered that the social security administration, for the low low fee of $92, will send you an itemized list of every place you’ve worked, where that was, and when.
Of course the SSA is a government agency, so there’s a hefty form to fill out (SSA-7050-F4) and then mail in. And now I have to go procure an envelope and a stamp.
I’ve not seen a physical un-postmarked stamp in like a decade.
Once they get the form, and charge me the fee, it can apparently take up to 120 days for them to send the data back to me – via the mail, of course… Dealing with the government on occasion is good for a person; gets you to slow down and enjoy the process. 🙂
I’ve also started the process for my OMPF from my time in the Navy – which is another lengthy form – online this time – from archives.gov.
See, my military days were 32 to 36 years ago; before smartphones and digital cameras and social media were memorizing every aspect of your life for you. So, while I know the big dates, like the day in July I raised my right hand and enlisted, and the day in October when I drove through the front gate of the Groton Sub Base base for the last time – the rest is kind of a blur.
Anyway, now that the zombie virus has abated, the archives folks are back up to speed and handling cases not directly involving death – so I sent that e-form off today.
