Anglophilia

When I got up this morning I discovered that my wife had built a fire in the fireplace and discovered an app on AppleTV that allows us to watch live streams of broadcast television from around the world. We particularly enjoy watching British television and so we have spent the day watching our favorite British shows when they are being shown in the UK. I realize that this brands us as utter Anglophilic geeks but we don’t care.

This is the final straw that will result in our cutting the cable and relying on internet feeds and local broadcast feeds for all of our television. This will save us a chunk of money and in the long run result in us watching more of what we enjoy and less garbage that we watch because it’s there. It may even help inspire us to turn off the TV and do other things instead.

In any case, it has been a good day. I’ve only been out of the house once to take a bag of garbage to the dumpster. It is still cold out there. I think I’ll leave it out. The fire is still crackling and the second episode of Sherlock is on later. Stay warm, be careful, and enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Did I Mention It’s Cold Outside?

Well it’s cold as hell in Huntsville, Alabama and southerners don’t handle cold very well. Friday there was a prediction of between half an inch to an inch of snow and the whole city preemptively shut down. We got nothing more than a flurry here and a flurry there but the wind was biting. I used the time to pack up my office for my move to my new assignment at Marshall.

I ventured out today to pick up some lunch. Traffic was light. I expect most people were staying in and avoiding the cold. I enjoyed the drive after the heater warmed up. It’s been years since that has been a major issue as the temperatures have been so mild that just being in the car was sufficient to be comfortable.

I spent the bulk of the afternoon intending to write this blog post but instead being distracted by various web sites. In my defense, when I am having trouble coming up with a topic to write about I sometimes browse around until I read something that gets me started. Today that didn’t work.

What finally got me started was noticing my two dogs in their matching pajamas napping on the couch next to them. They usually make a big deal of escorting my wife to the bathroom but today they were content to just stay by me. It seems the floor was too cold.

Stay warm, be safe, and enjoy you weekend.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

In Which I Discover A History of the Personal Computer

Lately I have been thinking about the early days of personal computers. I was curious about the timeline of when the various computers were introduced. I had a fairly good idea about most of the early makes but there was one that I didn’t know much about when it was first introduced. It was a line of computers made by a company called Ohio Scientific, originally Ohio Scientific Instruments. The reason that I was interested was that it was the computer that was sold by the company that I went to work for when I got out of the Army.

I looked Ohio Scientific up on Wikipedia and one of the references at the end of the article led me to a book called A History of the Personal Computer: The People and the Technology. Someone, hopefully with permission of the copyright holder, had converted each chapter to PDF and made it available on the web.

It has proven to be a gold mine of details about the early days of personal computing. I will be commenting on it as I read it with personal experiences that occurred contemporaneously with events described in the book. I recommend the book to anyone that is interested in the history of computers through 2001 when the book was published.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Origins of the Maker Culture

When I was in high school I subscribed to Popular Electronics magazine. Popular Electronics was a spin off from Popular Mechanics. Both magazines were created to feed the voracious appetites of do-it-yourself hobbyists. Popular Mechanics focused on cars and woodworking and home repair. Popular Electronics focused on radio and tv and high fidelity audio equipment. Both magazine featured several construction projects in each issue.

By the time I graduated from high school, the microprocessor had been invented and the embryonic personal computing movement had started. Early computer hobbyists had to build their own computers. There were a few kits and some so called development systems intended to help designers learn how to program the novel single chip CPUs. There were local clubs in places like Silicon Valley and Boston where computer hobbyists showed off their creations to each other and helped each other master this fascinating new hobby.

In Peterborough, NH, Wayne Greene, a ham radio operator and magazine impresario, started a magazine called Byte: The Small Systems Journal. It covered both hardware topics and programming topics and featured both construction articles and programming articles in every issue. More importantly it had ads from all the various suppliers of parts and kits and assembled computers and accessories.

An entire generation of computer hobbyists learned how to build and program personal computers reading Byte magazine and the other magazines, like Kilobaud, Compute!, Dr Dobb’s Journal, and many others. Some focused on the hardware. Others concentrated on printing programs that could be typed in directly to your personal computer. None was as pivotal in the education of computer hobbyists as Byte.

I later got a B.S. degree in Computer Science but I learned about computers from my instructors at the Army Pershing Missile school and Byte magazine.

When I see the new generation of hobbyists programming Raspberry Pis and Arduinos and reading the new crop of educational magazines that have popped up to support them, I have hope that we will have innovative computer hobbyists in the future.

One thing that todays computer hobbyists have that we didn’t is the internet. We had to send off for spec sheets and buy books to learn about our hobby. While that is still a productive approach, most people today make their first stop Google when they need to read up on some detail for a project they are doing.

Computer hobbyists now call themselves Makers or DIYers or even hacker, although the former turn has come to have bad connotations in some circles.

I write articles like these because I think that these new hobbyists deserve the opportunity to find out about the history of their hobby. I’m not sure what kind of computers they’ll be using but I’m sure that there will be computer hobbyists for centuries to come.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Science Fiction Ideas

Those of you who have been reading this blog for any length of time know that I am both an avid follower of developing technology and an aspiring science fiction writer. Today I was discussing the possibilities for near term space missions. In particularly, we were talking about the fact that although a manned mission to Mars was exciting, a more practical mission would be to capture an asteroid and transfer it to one of the Earth-Moon Lagrange points.

Lagrange points are places where the gravitational forces of two large bodies  combine to equal the centrifugal force of a smaller body. There are five Lagrange points in such a system. The smaller body doesn’t need any propulsion to maintain its position at a Lagrange point. This makes it an ideal place to build a space station or even perhaps a colony. The material from asteroids would be the most cost effective stuff to use to build such a colony. It is very expensive in terms of the cost per pound to lift material from the surface of Earth. Moving the same amount of material from place to place in space is relatively much cheaper.

A mission to Mars on the other hand requires much longer exposure to the dangerous cosmic radiation of space, a dangerous landing on Mars, and practical isolation from the rest of humanity due to the expense and length of such missions. Where a trip to Mars takes about nine months at shortest, a trip to a Lagrange point takes only days.

That is not to say that I don’t want us to mount missions to Mars. Rather I think we would have a lot better chance of mounting successful missions to Mars if we practice the skills required closer to home. Also, if we can demonstrate the economic value of space with less expensive, near Earth missions, we will be more likely to be able to interest investors in the larger investments involved in such activities as terraforming Mars so that it could support a human colony.

The discussion turned to why would we want to colonize Mars in the first place given that it is on the edge of the so called Goldilocks zone where surface temperatures are tolerable for human habitation. I mused that it was the only candidate that we had technology capable of reaching within a reasonable timeframe. I mentioned that even at relativistic (near light) speeds, it would take centuries to get to the nearest stars making such trips effectively one way.

At that point it occurred to me that there might be a way short of superluminal drive technology. If we are able to develop functional immortality, that is, we learn to cure all diseases and suspend or reverse aging such that the only way that people die is accidents. Then the length of trips between stars might become tolerable to individuals.

The discussion triggered a lot of productive ideas for possible future science fiction stories. I will add them to my list of ideas for future exploration.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Hacking is Rampant

The internet is both a wonder and a nightmare. It is hard enough to avoid getting compromised by a hacking or phishing attack yourself but now it has gotten even harder to render assistance to relatives that are less computer savvy than you are. The problem is that there are so many different ways that hackers can attack and if you take someone like me who uses Apple computers at home and Windows computers in a corporate environment at work, it is difficult to know what to do when someone has been hacked. Especially when they have been hacked with a phishing attack.

Phishing is a type of hacking where the attacker is able to get your computer to put up a message that looks like a legitimate error message. Then, they give you a phone number to call. It is supposedly a phone number for a legitimate company but in actuality it is the phone number of the hackers that are mounting the attack. They then take you through the process of “fixing” the problem over the phone. What they are actually doing is getting you to make your computer vulnerable to a more serious attack that will either allow them access to any sensitive information that you have stored on the computer or else possibly lock your data so that you can’t access it until you pay them a ransom.

When we detect a hack at work, we are told to immediately call the security team to contain it. When I got a virus on my Windows machine a long time ago, I wiped the disk and reinstalled the operating system. That was Windows 95 so you can tell how long ago it was. It is one of the reasons that I use Apple computers. They aren’t totally immune to hacking attacks but there are far fewer of them on Macs than there are on PCs.

I am supposed to be the computer expert. It is frustrating when I have to say, “I don’t know what to do about your problem.” My wife said I should have reassured her that she hadn’t done anything wrong. I understand the sentiment but I didn’t think of it in that fashion. I was worried about telling her not to worry and it turning out that there was a reason for her to worry.

Someone more familiar with the setup of her computer is having a look at it. I am hoping that it was a tempest in a teapot and that there is nothing irreparably wrong with her computer. If not. I hope she hasn’t lost anything important. I feel so helpless.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Work Hard and Improve

Today I watched an interview with Stephen Moffat. He was telling the interviewer that he was rubbish. I’m not British so I may be missing some subtle shading of that phrase but I took it to be him being sincerely self deprecating. He then went on to say that the one thing that he would take credit for is working hard. He said he had to work all that much harder to overcome the fact that he was rubbish.

Creativity is a strange quality of human intelligence. It can’t be forced but it can be courted. You can’t sit around and wait for the muse to inspire you. Instead, you have to sit down and write as if you already were inspired. You have to fake it until you make it. If you are putting words on the page you are a lot more likely to write something good than you are just staring at the page. Writing is hard. You have to do whatever is necessary to get something down for a first draft. Then you read what you’ve written and decide if there is anything there that you can salvage. If so, you pull it out and work on it. If not, you just keep on writing some more.

Creativity is more about taking a different perspective on things and using your judgement to recognize when you have written something worth improving upon. The old adage that enough monkeys typing randomly on typewriters will eventually write a Shakespearean play isn’t too far from the truth. When you sit down to write, you aren’t typing randomly but otherwise the chances of any given session producing something worth pursuing is a long shot. You can improve your odds by paying attention though.

Notice the things that work for you. Perhaps you work better while listening to music. Perhaps you prefer silence or the television playing in the background. I have found that whatever I have supplying the soundtrack to my writing process is better if it isn’t too interesting. It needs to sink beneath the wave of words flowing from my subconscious onto the page.

I also find that I have times when I have lots of ideas and other times when I can’t think of a single one. So, I try and capture the ideas on lists when they are plentiful so that I can browse through them when they aren’t. Often the act of browsing those lists will inspire more new ideas to be added to the list. Remember, you have two jobs. Principally to keep a stream of words flowing onto the page but secondarily to keep the pump primed by capturing new ideas and stockpiling them.

So, the answer to the perennial question about where a writer gets their ideas, they get them from the notes that they have so laboriously taken when they were inspired. Or as Robert Heinlein, a favorite Science Fiction writer of mine, once said, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch sometimes pronounced TANSTAAFL.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Questions of a Thousand Dreams

Good questions make good writers. Some of the best questions start with “What if…”. I have managed to keep a draft on track by asking myself a few choice questions like that. I won’t say that the answers were always entirely satisfactory but they kept the story moving forward. One of the challenges of writing by the seat of one’s pants is that you generate a lot of extraneous side stories that don’t contribute to the development of the main plot.

The conventional wisdom among writers is that you have to weed out the extraneous threads when you edit. The key here is figuring out what the main story is that you are telling. I do appreciate the archival features of modern writing tools. It allows you to save all the iterations that you go through on the way to writing your masterpiece. If you delete something critical, you can easily retrieve it. You can also try various alternative sequences and versions to see how they read.

All of these tools aren’t worth a whit if you don’t have the judgement to figure out what is good and what isn’t.  This is the foundation of the advice that writers must read a lot. It is how you acquire the experience that feeds your judgement. Thus, it is good to read widely, even beyond the margins of your chosen genre. The primary criteria should be quality writing and insight into human nature. I suspect the two are subtly related.

The other big question that challenges every writer is deciding when a piece is done. There are numerous objective criteria, such as number of words, structural completeness, and carefully listening to the comments of respected reviewers. The latter takes practice. It is hard to hear people say critical things about your creation, no matter how deserved the comments may be. But the writer’s response to such criticism must be kept simple. They must thank their critics. No excuses should be made. Discussion is not event required unless it is to ask questions in order to better understand the comments.

It is incredibly difficult to listen to criticism without becoming defensive. It is hard enough to expose your most sensitive inner thoughts to others but then to accept their comments without response is harder still. It is absolutely necessary though. If you value honest criticism, as you must if you intend to grow and improve as a writer, you must reward the person that provides it with your sincere thanks.

I know this to be true but I must admit that I haven’t managed to write a draft that was complete enough to ask for serious criticism. I have written some  character sketches that I have asked for criticism on. I have intended to thank my reviewers properly. I am not a good judge of how well I did on that. I suspect there is plenty of room for growth in that regard as well.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Belá Fleck and Abigail Washburn in Concert

Tonight we are going to see a Belá Fleck and Abigail Washburn concert. We don’t get out very often but when I found out the Belá Fleck was playing Huntsville, I made plans immediately. I’ve been a fan for years.

I decided to check out his biography. I discovered that he had won Grammys in more categories than any other musician. That is part of the reason that I like his music so much. He plays everything from bluegrass to classical, from jazz to Americana.

I also looked up Abigail’s biography and discovered that she played in a band named Uncle Earl that I have been listening to a lot on Pandora lately. She is also involved in cultural exchange with China through Vanderbilt University.

I’m sure we are in for a fantastic evening out. It will be an upbeat ending to a year that could have used a few more high points. Happy New Year to all. I hope 2017 is a good year for you all.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

A Little Organization Goes a Long Way

In recent years I have noticed that I have started getting more done both at home and at work. It occurs to me that it might be useful, both to me and to other people, to describe the practices that I have adopted that have contributed to my increased productivity. Other people might find some of my ideas useful to increase their productivity and I will understand the process better for having written about it.

There are four practices that I am going to talk about. Each one will help some on its own but when practiced together there is a synergetic effect. That is to say your productivity increases more from doing all of them than just the sum of the increases achieved by doing each of them individually.

Have Goals

The first thing that you need to do is to make a short list of goals. Goals should be fairly high level but specific enough that you can define milestones and measure your progress toward them. For instance, I have a standing goal that I want to write fiction and non-fiction. I set milestones like I want to finish rewriting the novel that I wrote for NaNoWriMo back in 2014. That is specific enough that I can determine when I have completed the milestone and measure progress toward the milestone.

I am still working on estimating how long a given activity will take. It gets easier the more you do something. I can come a lot closer to estimating how much time to allocate for a task at work simply because I’ve often done similar tasks and have a body of experience to draw upon. When it comes to my personal writing projects, I’m still working my way through the first projects of this type. That poses two challenges, figuring out how much of the time that I am spending on the project is attributable to the learning curve and how much is typical of a project of this scope.

Take Notes

Another practice that I have recently started is to keep notes about the ideas that I have. I have used several different approaches and each have had their benefits and their drawbacks. I have used org-mode which is an outliner in emacs. It has a lot of useful features and, since it is built on top of emacs, is inherently extensible. It is also complicated enough that if I don’t use it frequently, I tend to forget the command keys such that it takes me a while to get back up to speed when I decide to use it again.

At work, I use a single page web application called Tiddlywiki. It is about the simplest and prettiest note taking platform that I’ve used. The price is right too. It is free as in beer. It is written in Javascript and is extensible both at the Javascript level and using the custom macro language that is embedded in it.

Lately I’ve been using the Apple Notes app and their Reminders App to keep my notes because they sync easily across my MacBook Pro, my iPhone, and my iPad. With the latest major software update Notes has become almost as full featured as Evernote or OneNote.

I make documents to collect information for different purposes, for example, I have a document that has a list of all the software that I’ve installed on my MacBook Pro. I’ve got another that is a list of ideas for blog posts. Another is where I keep a list of technical subjects that I’ve run across while browsing the web and I want to remember to read up on later.

When you take the time to write something down, even if you never read it again, you have committed it more firmly to memory. I find that I review my notes fairly frequently.

Make Plans

I don’t mean you have to necessarily break down all of your projects into detailed task hierarchies with dependency graphs and Gantt charts although that is sometimes useful for projects of epic scope. What I am talking about is identifying key, high level tasks of a project and pencil in target dates for them. You might start by only assigning a target completion date for the task that you are currently working on.

It helps you figure out what actually needs to be done to think about plans in this way. It also helps motivate you to quit saying you’re going to do something and actually decide when you are going to do it. If you don’t take the first step, you’ll never finish.

Evaluate Plans and Goals Periodically

As I wrote in a previous blog post, Helmuth von Moltke once said, “No Battleplan survives contact with the enemy.” Plans fall typically start to fall apart as soon as you begin to execute them. Also, your situation changes, you grow, and your aspirations may change too. Consequently, it is essential to schedule a time to reevaluate your plans and your goals. This will give you a chance to adjust your priorities so that you can make sure you are doing the most important things first.

Don’t forget to take notes about your goals and plans like I have been doing lately. I just took a moment to capture my goals in a note and my writing plan in another. I had made both the goals and the writing plan but if I don’t take the time to write them down and set a reminder to reevaluate them, I may lose track of them or forget to reevaluate.

Summary

It is important to think about what you are doing. It is also important to record these thoughts so that you can revisit them and update them later. Setting goals and making plans don’t have to take more effort than the actual project but the larger the scope of the project the more planning becomes essential.

And remember, setup the review for your goals and plans when you write them down so you don’t forget to do it.

I hope these ideas help you organize your goals and projects. They have really helped me achieve some of my goals like writing another NaNoWriMo novel and writing a blog post every day.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.