Riding the Tech Wave

It is Y2K’s 10th Anniversary!

Michael W. Lind — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:42:17 +0000

Do you remember Y2K? If you were in a programming or operational support role ten years ago in 1999, I’ll bet you do! While the general population was living it up on December 31, 1999, the technologists of the world were working, monitoring their systems and watching the event unfold on the web.

My Y2K started at 6:00 PM central time. We watched the clocks on the network equipment we supported roll over to 00:00:00 Greenwich Mean Time. I didn’t live far from the office, so I drove home and celebrated the new year, decade, century and millenium by watching the the ball drop in New York City at 11:00 PM central time. After a quick New Millennium kiss from my wife, I went back to the office for the central time rollover.

All of our preparations paid off and we didn’t have a single Y2K-related incident on the network! As we predicted, Y2K was just another working holiday.

For the kids out there who don’t remember Y2K, watch the video for a taste of the pre-Y2K hysteria. For those of you who were there, what do you remember most?

The Father of Video Games

Michael W. Lind — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:47:27 +0000

If you are a fan of vintage video games, then stop by your nearest bookstore and pick up a copy of the Fall 2009 issue of American Heritage’s Invention and Technology magazine. Mark Wolverton has a great interview of Ralph Baer, the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey video game, which was a forerunner of Atari Pong.

Baer first had his idea for the video game while working on early television test equipment, but it took 15 years before he started to develop the game and another five years before the game was released as a product.

Although you can read the article on the web, the magazine has many more photos and other interesting articles about the history of technology and is definitely worth the cover price.

National Railroad Museum Photo Journal

Michael W. Lind — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:49:02 +0000

Unseasonably warm November weather made my recent visit to the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin that much better. From simple handcars to the Union Pacific Big Boy steam locomotive, there is plenty for railfans to see and enjoy. Photos only give a taste of how magnificent the old locomotives and rolling stock are. Enjoy the photos below and the next time you are in Wisconsin, plan a visit!

San Diego Railroad Photo Journal

Michael W. Lind — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:28:40 +0000

A recent trip to San Diego turned out to be a great opportunity to do see large and scale size railroads. I stayed downtown, only blocks from the old Santa Fe Depot and with easy access to the city’s light rail system. I finished off the trip with a visit to the San Diego Model Railroad Museum, where a HO scale model of the Santa Fe Depot is featured on a layout under construction. If you are a railfan and are planning a trip to see San Diego, be sure to add these sites to your itinerary!

Repurposing a Railroad Boxcar as a Covered Bridge

Michael W. Lind — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:40:20 +0000

Milwaukee Road Boxcar Used as a Covered Bridge

While dodging raindrops during a late season round of golf, I stumbled upon a couple of old Milwaukee Road railroad boxcars that had been repurposed into covered bridges. In the past I have seen rail cars used as diners or retail stores, now I have seen them made into covered bridges! You can see full size images of the photos by clicking on the thumbnails below.

Gmail Outage Shows that the Cloud is Finite

Michael W. Lind — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:18:09 +0000

Google has posted a semi-technical explanation of the 1 September 2009 Gmail outage on the Gmail blog. To sum it up, Google took some of the Gmail servers down for maintenance. Other servers that were supposed to handle the load became overloaded and shifted the load to other servers that couldn’t handle the load and so on. The snowball grew until there were no more servers to handle the load and most people could not get to their email.

This outage illustrates a very important point about cloud computing: the cloud is not infinite. We may be under the impression as consumers of cloud computing services that the “cloud” stretches as far as the Internet goes. In reality there are a finite number of servers that with improper configuration can still all go down. This outage shows that a cloud computing service is vulnerable to the same kinds of outages that a single server or cluster of servers is vulnerable to.

A Great Watch and Calculator Battery Cross Reference

Michael W. Lind — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 18:00:36 +0000

Are you looking for a great watch and calculator battery cross reference on the web? The best one I have found so far is Maxell’s Micro Battery and Cross Reference Guide. I used it today to find a replacement for a LR1130 calculator battery. Neither the Energizer nor Duracell site could find a replacement, yet it is commonly sold in stores as an Energizer 189 or Duracell D189A.

25 Years of PowerPoint

Michael W. Lind — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:51:37 +0000

The BBC celebrates 25 years of PowerPoint slide decks with a PowerPoint slide deck. The article also has some good tips for how to make better presentations and avoid bullet burnout.

PowerPoint currently has 95 % of the presentation software market, according to the article. I’ve been using PowerPoint for years now, but in the past used Aldus Persuasion on the Macintosh and Lighthouse Design’s Concurrence. on the NeXT. In a pinch I’ve even used Microsoft Word or Adobe FrameMaker for slides, too.

Freecycle your old, usable computer

Michael W. Lind — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:42:59 +0000

Do you have an old, usable computer at home that is just gathering dust? Have you investigated selling it on eBay and found out that you would have to pay someone to take it off your hands? Chances are, there is someone on Freecycle.org willing to show up at your door and take it off your hands!

The Freecycle network is a “a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns”, according to the group’s website. I’ve done a couple of exchanges with my local Freecycle group. Today, I Freecycled a “classic” Pentium II tower, monitor and printer. I cleared out some space, and someone else picked up a system that is still good for kids’ games and word processing.

Here are some tips for Freecycling a system and for making life as easy as possible for the other Freecycler.

Wipe your hard drive! You don’t want to send a hard drive into the wild with your tax returns on it. I use Active@ Kill Disk to wipe drives, and there are plenty of other utilities out there that do the same thing. Even though my system had just been used for games, I still wiped the drive. You never know what stray data could be on the disk.
Reinstall the operating system. Yes, I know, we are talking about work here, but you are really doing your fellow Freecycler a favor. I actually enjoy installing operating systems. Besides, it was a fun nostalgia trip to install Windows 98SE on my system.
Put some useful free software on the system. On the system I Freecycled, I installed the last version of OpenOffice.org that is supported on Windows 98SE. For antivirus software, I installed the free Avast! Antivirus Home Edition.
Clean up the system. Use a little elbow grease and make the system presentable. It only takes a few minutes!
Post a complete description of your system on your local Freecycle mailing list. You don’t want someone to show up at your door and say, “oops, that isn’t really what I need”

If you follow these recommendations, you will find that you clear out some clutter, keep a computer out of the landfill and make someone happy!

Who are those other kids in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”?

Michael W. Lind — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:12:07 +0000

Every Christmas for decades I have watched “A Charlie Brown Christmas“. I always got a kick out of seeing the two twins dance. I knew the names of most of the characters in the special – Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, etc., but I had no idea what the names of the twins were.

Earlier this year, I finally found the answer. While reading The Complete Peanuts 1963 – 1964, there were a number of strips that feature the twins and their brother. Their names were 3, 4 & 5! The characters didn’t last long in the strip, but they seem to have arrived on the scene just in time to make it into the TV special.

Here are some of the strips from Snoopy.com.