Coincidence Engine Working Well

10:00 this morning, I'm eating a croissant at the breakfast table and reading a book about canids of the world. I look up, and a red fox (Vulpes vulpes) is running through the neighbors' back yard. It wasn't literally the animal I was reading about at the moment (the bat-eared fox (Otocyon megalotis)), but still ...

Why dogs don't talk to us

Blame the poor quality of the video on the fact that I was just playing around with my Palm Treo and its notoriously poor camera capability, and the poor quality of the voiceover on the notoriously poor quality of my voice. Instead of wasting time with Google's flaky video capability, I'm just going to link to YouTube. Sorry, I didn't want to have to do that, but life is too short.

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I do actually own a camcorder, plus a small digital camera with a video capture option, and maybe one of these days I'll post something made with one of them.

Casualty Stats Question Effectiveness of Future Surge

See the revealing stats here. Bring the boys home!

Odd product of the month

We get all kinds of catalogs. This is from the one that starts every product name with "The," as in "The Completely Useless Backyard Flotation Toy," or "The One Hundred and Fourteenth Atomic Watch We've Listed So Far." Anyway, here's the hands-down strangest thing they offer for sale this time around:

Imagine being the dog on this side of the fence. Or if both pet owners installed these things, each intruding into the other's airspace.

So far, so good

Talked to the doc this week, and he says, "Nothing new ..." in the MRIs. In other words, no new tumors, meaning that the soi-disant transplant did its thing. I say so-called transplant, since the point is less transplanting things (they were my stem cells, after all, sieved out, frozen, and returned to me) than it is giving one a big whackin' dose of chemo, which kills tumors, along with such other useful things as hair folicles, taste buds, digestive bacteria, and so on. But again, it seems -- at least today, 100+ days afterward -- to have been worth it.

Anyway, back to the salt mines, designing process improvements and, (as Maxwell Smart would say) Loving It!

Here, by the way, is what someone looks like, 100+ days after one of these treatments. The beard and mustache are coming back, not clear whether the hair will.

All I've got to say ...

MRI accidents

I spent hours (literally) this week, stuffed into an MRI machine, getting whole-body scans done. Won't know the outcomes until next week, but in talking about it to some of my colleagues, it became clear that they'd never seen or heard of the interesting occupational safety aspects of operating an MRI. The "M," of course, stands for "magnetic," as in "magnetic resonance imaging," and that implies big honkin' magnets, run off supercooled helium, not just line power. So the magnets stay on all the time, and that means you really should keep ferrous materials like, say, office chairs, out of the room. See the pictures below for examples.



The object in the shot on the right appears to be an IV pole; hope it wasn't hooked up to a patient when they wheeled him or her in.

While looking for something else ...

... I found the linked press release on the Ann Arbor government web site. We're the third most "walkable" city in the country, says here. Could be because it's such an impossible city to drive in.

#317 in a series: why I hate Michigan

The picture below was taken at 6:00 PM. At 2:00 PM, there was no snow on the ground.

I hate this, I hate it, I hate it. It's March 21, for Christ's sake! (Although we did go camping only a couple of hundred miles north of here one May 1st and got six inches of wet snow between 4:00 and 8:00 PM. Broke tent poles and everything. But that was aberrent. This has been the norm, this year.)

The way things used to be

A long, long time ago (i.e., the mid-90's), the workings of Moore's law had not yet had their inevitable effect on data mass storage technologies. Corporations were forced to face the fact that they had lots and lots of data (a gigabyte was a lot, back then, believe it or not) on rotating media (disk drives, to the unwashed), and no good way to back it up, since (again, believe it or not) disk was decidedly not cheap, as it is now. In fact, lots of disaster recovery plans were based on laboriously copying data from random-access media (disk drives, again) to sequential access media (that would be ... tape). Trouble was, the cheapest formats of tape didn't hold all that much data, so in order to achieve the volumes you needed, you had to have lots and lots of silly little tape cartridges lying around. And of course, you didn't want them literally lying around -- you wanted them stored in some structured way, so that when disaster struck, you could find the backed up data and get it copied back from tape to a disk ASAP.

The schemes that what was then called the plug-compatible industry (meaning makers of mainframe and large-Unix system peripherals that would mimic IBM hardware) came up with (IBM itself came up with a few, too) were often bizarre. Rooms full of so-called tape robots, for example, basically booths with tapes stored around the sides, their position supposedly known to the software running the device, and with a robotic arm in the middle that would yank out the appropriate cartridge, plug it into the one or two actual tape drives in the installation, and later on, return it to the right storage slot again. Some of these things (when they weren't catching fire -- that's another story) had pass-through windows so that the robots could, in theory, hand tapes to each other. That any of this ever worked is almost beyond belief -- even though many of us were deeply involved in it -- leading to a mantra for those times: "I / we hate tape!"

Anyway, because of a variety of pressures, economic and otherwise, many of these plug-compatible companies were flaky places to work. They tended to get execs who had been fired by IBM or were for some other reason not ready for prime time, and their approach to running an organization was often as far-fetched as the design of their products. And with that, we reach the point of this whole piece, namely another of our old holiday communications, from 1996 or thereabouts, intended to be a faithful reproduction of the employee outreach efforts of such employers. There are a number of inside jokes which won't make a lot of sense, unless you were living the dream, back then, in the far off days when moving parts in mass storage devices weren't considered a bad thing.