I discovered something this morning that is even more annoying than computers: school bells.

It was a particulary peculiar night. My wife was out of town and I had the place to myself...and a lot going through my mind...and I couldn't sleep. My circadian rythm has never been in sync with the 24-hour day/night cycle, so every so often (once or twice a year), I have to stay up all night to reset my biological clock. I decided last night was the night to stay up.

I didn't even realize today was Memorial Day. So much for my memory. Anyway, I thought with all this extra time, I could head out to my shop for some quiet time while I sat and played in good ol' Turbo Pascal in DOS for the embedded computer I have been playing with. You know, a chance to actually concentrate with no distractions.

Heh. Like that ever happens!

At 5:59 in the morning, the bell rang at the school that is right across the street from me. My window, which was open at the time, is a pretty direct shot for the sound from the bell to come through, so I heard it pretty distinctly. You can't miss it. Really, you can't. In fact, I was glad I was awake, because my bedroom window is just one floor below my shop window, so it probably would have woken me up.

At 6:00 in the morning, the bell rang again. I'm pretty familiar with that bell and even though I am not normally up at that hour, I knew it was uncharacteristic for it to ring that early...and twice in a row.

At 6:01 in the morning, the bell rang again. OK, they have screwed up the thing in the past when reconfiguring it for normal school days vs. other times (like the time when it was ringing every night at midnight instead of at noon). So, I figured maybe school was out and someone was over there screwing around with the programming.

At 6:02 in the morning, the bell rang again. Now it was beginning to get a little irritating. I wondered why they were screwing with it so damn early in the morning, and then began to wonder if anybody was over there at all.

At 6:03 in the morning, the bell rang again.
At 6:04 in the morning, the bell rang again. I took a step out the door to peek at the school, and I have never seen the parking lot so empty. Now I was worried...and growing increasingly annoyed by the minute.

At 6:05 in the morning, the bell rang again.

Somewhere approaching 6:30 in the morning, I called the police. They said they would attempt to contact someone to respond to the situation, and the call was terminated.

Somewhere a bit after 7:00 in the morning, I took a walk over to the school with a piece of cardboard in hand, thinking I might be able to jam it between the clapper and the bell to at least shut it up until someone decided to get out of bed and fix the damn thing. But it was futile. There was no way to get the cardboard up in there...and I wondered if filling the thing with shaving cream would make any difference...or maybe JB Weld. But I wasn't about to screw with it. With my luck, someone would show up and I would get charged with tampering with school property.

Somewhere around 7:30, I bought a gun. Well, at least that is when the halucinations started.

I called the police again at some point (can't really remember when, due to my temporary insanity) and someone different answered my call, but she said they had been trying to make contact with someone, but that everybody so far was either out of town or unreachable.

Out of town? Gee, that's convenient!

That's about the time that I began to wonder if today was a holiday. I didn't realize it was Memorial Day until I went into my apartment and turned on the television to try to drown out the bell and discovered the "Outer Limits Memorial Day Marathon."

Now it all made sense! See, someone was trying to make this day memorable! Remember for whom the bell tolls! Or some such crap. Either someone with a really bad hangover, or a really bad sense of morbid humor, or with very little understanding of programming a school bell got hold of that thing and really screwed it up. It must be computer-driven. How else could you screw the thing up so bad that it rings every minute for three hours?

It stopped ringing somewhere after 9:00 in the morning. So much for some quiet time to spend with uninterrupted concentration.

Anyway, this just marked another notch in my stream of irritations I have been enduring lately. I spent the better part of the previous two days building a ramp that our cat can climb up on to get to his cat door in the window of the bedroom so he doesn't have to jump up from a chair and make noise and walk all over me at night getting from my bed to the window. It was a great little ramp (still is). I just need to put some carpet on it and it's all set.

Well, I installed the thing and put a towel on the slope part so the cat would have something to grab on to until I can find some carpet (otherwise, the pressboard is kind of slippery). It led up to a little platform that extended the window sill so he would have plenty of room to stand up there when coming in and out.

Here's the ramp without the towel:


And here's the ramp with the towel:


I always thought this cat was fairly smart. But now I know he is actually just a blooming rotten idiot.

Here is this great little ramp that I slaved over for two days to get all the angles right and the screws tightened down into their chamfered holes, and it fit so well and was absolutely perfect. So what does the cat do to get out? It jumps OVER the damn thing onto the narrow window sill! Then, when coming back inside, he refused to even step on the extended platform, and kind of took a quick half-step on part of the ramp as he jumped over right onto my bed.

WHAT AN IDIOT!!!

Here's the path that he took. The red line illustrates the path he took from the floor to the door. The blue line shows the path he took from the door to my bed:


I guess I can't expect too much. After all, it is just a cat. A cat with a titanium rod and plate and wire in its leg that cost us a couple of grand to install back when he broke his leg a couple of years ago.



Ungrateful, smarmy little weasel! He just purrs and looks at me stupidly.

Hmmm... Let's see... What rhymes with Nantucket?

You get three guesses, but the first two don't count.

For that matter, while I'm at it, what rhymes with the sound of shit hitting the fan?

The truth is, I don't know, either.

There just seems to be no end to what computers can't do. There seems to be no end to how many things computers aren't good for. There just seems to be no END to the vast wasteland of time that computers consume. I thought they were supposed to save time? Well, from my perspective, computers seem like a monumental waste of eternity.

Sometimes, it is the unsuspected things that bite you. The unexpected. The unforeseen. Once you think you have found the last angle, the computer finds a new way to bend. Often it is simply a new twist on a repeat performance repeat performance repeat performance repeat performance repeat performance repeat...DIVIDE_BY_ZERO_ERROR

Abort, Retry or Ignore?

Well, ignorance is bliss, so let's try...Ignore.

Nope. That didn't work, either.

I had a repeat performance today of the disk drive power down. But it was a little different this time. However, I suspect the problem I had this time was related to the problem I had the first time. It may not have been Mickeysoft's problem at all (though it sure would be nice if the whole damn system wouldn't crap out when you stick a bad floppy disk in the drive - but that's another issue).

You see, the side of my computer is still open. It has been open since I got the thing. I have so frequently had to go in there to muck with the disk drives that it was just easier to leave the panel off. Now I see that there is a considerable build-up of balsa dust inside. That was my fault for sanding some wood indoors last week, but that, too, is another issue.

What happened today (well, yesterday - it may be 3:00 am, but I am still up, so I don't know what day it is - "today", "yesterday", "hellday", "omigodday") was an odd thing. Since I have this laptop that I am using for some embedded DOS development, I have been putting my keyboard to Borg (my desktop computer) in between the computer and the monitor when I was not using it. Well, this time, as I was putting the keyboard up after checking my email (or some rather mundane task), one of the disk drives made a weird noise like it was spinning down...or up...or both. And it happened coincidentally with the keyboard brushing up against the power cables that connect to the drives.

I shut down the computer for a few hours (I was not in the mood to deal with it) and I came back about 2:00 am (about an hour ago) and decided to check it out. I came back at 2:00 only because I couldn't sleep. But not because of the computer - I really couldn't care less at this point (but I'll try). Anyway, there is a "Y" connector in there to split one of the power supply lines (because there simply wasn't enough), so I began to suspect that maybe it was a crappy connector making crappy connections.

The "Y" connector passed inspection, however, and with flying colors. What I discovered - albeit not to my amazement, since nothing amazes me about computers anymore - is that the connectors from the power supply were crappy! Crappy as hell, I might add. They were so crappy that if I crapped on them it would be an improvement.

If I plugged the power supply connector directly into a disk drive, I could push and pull on the back of the wires going into the connector and they would move in and out. Yeah, real solid connection there! I got a very tiny screwdriver (like ones for repairing watches) and went to work on the connectors, using the screwdriver as a potato masher, so to speak, to distort the female pins so there would be some actual friction against a male pin when inserted.

Oh, yeah, that feels better!

Now the thing actually makes contact when I plug it in, and it actually stays there. Actually! I suspect the problem yesterday was related (was it yesterday, or was it yesterday's yesterday?). Yestersometimeago. Whenever. When that happened, it happened sortly after I did something with the keyboard (I don't remember if I was just moving it out of my way, or if I actually was using it and was putting it back out of the way). I probably bumped the connector then, too, but the computer wasn't doing anything at the time. But, who knows? It's all wicked, right? Smoke and magic...but mostly smoke. That sort of thing.

It's a circus, what can I say?!

Well!

I didn't think I would be back so soon. The circus continues.

It is a DAMN GOOD THING that my BattleBot is in the same room with me. It gave me something to take my aggression out on. I have a big square steel pipe laying on top of it, which was very convenient, because I was able to grab it and just start whacking away at the BattleBot. It worked out well, because there was no way I could possibly hurt the stupid thing. Which is also good, because the BattleBot wasn't the problem.

I was just sitting here, minding my own business, working on my old laptop computer (the one with no lid/screen), when all of a sudden, my main desktop computer starts emitting a 1KHz tone from the speaker. You know, like the old computers always did. Only this was just one long continuous tone that would not stop. At first, I thought it was the embedded computer, because it makes that tone when it boots...but only for a moment.

But that wasn't it.

Then I thought it was my laptop computer, because it is running in DOS mode, and I would expect it to make that sound...and I just ran some code that I just finished modifying.

But that wasn't it.

So I switched the monitor over to Borg, my desktop computer, and what did I see? THE PROBLEM! There was a blue screen of death, telling me there was a KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR and how I should go into Safe Mode (like I would know what to do there) if the problem persisted (like I really knew what the problem was in the first place). It happened shortly after I heard the main system drive power down (after its 60-minute power-saving time-out expired). I also happened to notice that the KLUNK that the drive made when it powered off did not sound at all normal.

The rest of the BSOD indicated the problem occurred in atapi.sys (AHA! It was drive-related!) at F81E88EE base address at F81DA000 datestamp 3D6DDB04 (like that means ANYTHING to ANYONE) and that a memory dump was in progress.

Well, excuse me, but how do you record a memory dump if you can't access the drive?

This didn't make sense, and the noise was rather irritating, so I hit reset button. Well, of course, the system wouldn't restart. It was acting like the system drive did not exist. The IDE scan in the BIOS POST couldn't find it.

So that's when I started beating up my BattleBot.

Once I got the impulse to bat my computer through the window out of my biological system, I went back to see if I could resurrect my computer system.

AGAIN.

After powering it off and leaving it off for a couple minutes, I turned it back on and it booted. Well, it came to the desktop, anyway. Beyond that, it was hopeless. It wouldn't respond to anything. When I FINALLY got the Task Manager up, I could see that the CPU was running at 100%. I EVENTUALLY determined that it was Explorer that was eating up the CPU time. I finally managed to get it to reboot again, and now it seems to be back. For now, anyway.

If it wasn't back, I wouldn't be typing this right now.

The only thing I can think that happened was that the wonderful, glorious Windows operating system attempted to access the drive at the very same moment that the wonderful, glorious Windows operating system cut the power to the drive. A mental note to Microsoft: YOU CAN'T DO BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!

The atapi driver stuck its tongue out and said, "THTHTHTHTHTHTHTH!" And that was the end of that.

So now I have the wonderful, glorious Windows operating system configured so that it never turns off the power to the hard drives (unless I shut down the whole computer). I never liked them going on and off, anyway, as I knew that was only asking for trouble. If there is anything I have learned from this, it is to ALWAYS act on my instincts sooner. I have been meaning to change that setting for some time now.

Now it's permanent.

---

A couple years ago, I began developing a little device that I call RC4. It was a project that I thought would take a couple of months, and it turned into nearly two years. Well, about a year and a half, actually, before I stopped working on it. But recently, I have picked it up again, because I was so close to completing it, I just can't stand to let it drop.

For all the juicy details about RC4, check out my RC4 web pages if you are so inclined. Be prepared for a dry technical read, however.

Anyway, I have a couple of these really neat embedded computers that I bought for a good deal on eBay. I originally bought one, but it was so cool that I bought another. I decided I wanted to use one as a test bed for RC4. Here is a picture of one of them:



It's not a very good picture, and it is not powered up, so there is nothing interesting on the screen, but at least you can see it. All I know about it is that it was some kind of prototype for some kind of medical device. It has an 80386SX 33MHz embedded computer inside of it that is running DOS. It also has a cool color LCD screen, seven buttons in the front, and a place in the back to plug in a keyboard. And, since I have Turbo Pascal for DOS and I have an extensive library of routines for creating DOS-based programs, I thought it would be a great little platform for all the hard work I did in the past creating those routines. I have an exceptionally cool DOS windowing library that I created and never really used that I am happy about putting to good use now.

Here is a shot of the guts of the device. I have installed my RC4 device inside of it, so now it is one integrated happy little unit:



You can't see a whole lot of detail due to the way everything is mounted, but that's not important. This unit has a way-under-utilized power supply inside of it, which is cool -- lots of room to expand and play. And I found out the other day (Sunday) that it's a pretty hefty power supply, too. It was a near-disaster sitution that fits right in with the Computer Circus theme.

Here's what happened...

Upon installing RC4 into the embedded computer device, I decided that connecting the serial port via the 10-pin header from the embedded PC to RC4 was the thing to do. Fortunately, I had designed and created an RS-232 interface for RC4 that used a 10-pin header for just such a connection. Hey - I was thinking ahead, what can I say?

Well, once I plugged it in and turned on the unit, the power didn't come on. I put my head down to the back of the box to listen to see if the cooling fan was running, and all I could hear was the fan very briefly starting and stopping. The power supply was going on, off, on, off, on, off, etc. At the time, I didn't realize there was a short in the system and that the power supply was shutting itself down to protect itself from damage.

But then, suddenly, it turned on. The fan came on...and started blowing a ton of gray smoke out the back! It was nasty, particularly because my face was right up next to the fan at the time. I'm sure it was a rather toxic plomb.

I quickly shut off the power and opened the door and window to my shop and set up a fan to vent the toxic airborne debris outdoors, then came back to determine what went wrong.

The RS-232 standard uses a DB-9 9-pin connector to connect to a standard 9-pin serial cable. However, the DB-9 connector provided by the embedded computer is connected to the computer via a 10-pin header. That means one pin is not used. Therefore, when I used RC4 with the standard 9-pin setup, everything was happy and good. However, this time, since I used a straight 10-pin ribbon cable to connect the 10-pin header from the computer to the 10-pin header on my serial interface to RC4, I was utilizing all 10 pins.

When I designed the serial interface board for RC4, I didn't know what to do with the "unused" tenth pin...so I tied it to ground. What I also didn't know was that the embedded computer (and maybe this is pretty standard?) provides 5V power on this tenth pin. So, basically, what I had done by connecting RC4 was essentially tied the 5V source directly to ground, creating a dead short. Apparently, this caused the corresponding wire in the ribbon cable to get red hot and melt off all the insulation around it, until the wire actually separated and allowed the power to come up for the devices.

Here's what's left of the 10-wire cable:



I am very surprised that there wasn't any other damage! At least I haven't found any, yet. I made a new cable and cut the trace that tied pin 10 to ground, and plugged it back in and everything worked fine. The RC4 serial interface still worked, and the embedded computer still worked (and the associated serial port still worked) and the power supply still worked... It just worked. Very strange. I guess the ribbon cable wire was the weakest link with the highest resistance, so it acted as a slow-blowing fuse and burnt up. That was actually very fortunate!

Every cloud has a silver lining, as they say. This cloud (of smoke) revealed a silver lining of interest to me: the embedded computer provides power via the serial port connector! This was good news to me, as I was looking for a place and a way to connect RC4 to the power supply of the unit, and this was perfect! All I had to do was make a quick modification to the RC4 serial interface board, and suddenly there was power. It worked out rather nicely!

I have included a modification to the design for my next revision of the board to include a jumper to allow pin 10 to provide power to the board. Woo hoo!

Anyway, here is the workstation I am using to develop the software for this embedded device:



There's actually quite a lot going on in this picture. It makes quite a statement about my computer circus. The monitor (with the blue screen of life on it) actually has two inputs, and I use it for my main desktop computer (that I call "Borg", seen standing just to the right of the monitor). I can easily switch it to the second input that I am currently using to connect to the laptop that is in front of the monitor.

Notice the laptop has no screen of its own. The screen was broken in an unfortunate incident, along with the internal hard drive. I have since put another hard drive in it and it now runs Windows 98 (but I have it configured to boot to DOS, so I am just using it in DOS mode for now). Turbo Pascal 7 can be seen running on the screen.

The monitor is sitting on top of the computer that is hosting my various web pages (like rcnightflying.com and the RC4 stuff I linked to earlier in this blog entry). Also visible is the keyboard for my main desktop computer, a document scanner that I have not hooked up yet, and an Apple PowerMacintosh in the background to the left (currently dead - someone gave it to me, and it has a dead hard drive, so now it just sits, taking up space in my shop).

Anyway, that's enough of that. I just wanted to document my RC4/embedded computer disaster story, especially since it had a happy ending. It seemed very fitting for the Computer Circus.

Wouldn't you agree?

Now that all my files - all the files I ever created - are on one drive, I am enjoying browsing them to see what thoughts have gone through my mind over the years.

I came across a file entitled IGNORANCE.DOC that I thought was worthy of my attention. In it, I listed two bumper stickers that seemed particularly representative of the level of ignorance in the general populace:

1) If we're not supposed to eat animals, then why are they made of meat?

2) If you ain't cowfolk, you ain't shit!

One that was not on the list but that comes to mind is: I hate stupid people.

The first one just seems like a classic to me. Somehow, I don't see the connection. It sounds like whomever wrote it is trying to base an argument on itself. If we're not supposed to eat animals, then why are they made of meat? Isn't that kind of like saying, if we're not supposed to comb our hair, then why is it made in strands? Or, if we're not supposed to drive foreign cars, then why are they made overseas? Or, if we're not supposed to eat birds, then why are they made of poultry?

Are we supposed to eat meat? I guess I am missing the argument.

I'm not sure the second one is tongue-in-cheek or not. A literal translation seems to be that if you are not cowfolk, then you are not shit. My first reaction to that is, thank God for that! I wouldn't want to be shit. It's kind of funny, because I can see an ignorant person saying it, thinking he's putting you down, when it can be interpreted as if he is putting himself down. I guess it is a statement for the ignorant that only the ignorant wouldn't find offensive...unless they're not cowfolk.

Now, the "I hate stupid people" bumper sticker seems to scream, "I hate myself!" I think only a stupid person would drive around with a bumper sticker proclaiming their hatred toward others who they perceive to be less intelligent than themselves. Seems like they're setting themselves up for a red-face situation. All it takes is one stupid move on their part to reveal the hypocracy.

Anyway, I just found it to be amusing. Speaking of amusing, I also found a VERY STRANGE poem that I wrote in December of 1998. That's not all that long ago! And, just so you know, I have never done drugs, and I have never been drunk. Therefore, I have no explanation for this one. :-) But here it is:

It is entitled: The World's Most Bizarre Poem
And it goes as follows:

Dis ting, dat ting
Everywhere a ting ting
Just sittin' here slicin' butt chips
with my lap off kilter
Itsy bitsy socket wrench
Food processor is on the fritz
Virtuous fortune lead the way
I need more 30-weight oil
Kwatonka! Me feel heat!
Got a problem with metric?
Platitude platitude give me a wink
Give me plasmodium I'll give you a sink

Hmm... Was this file restoration really worth it? I'm not sure I want to keep everything I have ever created. :-)

Nothing new on the Computer Circus front. Except that the Cheyenne Bitware software that I have doesn't seem to work. Or at least it doesn't quite identify my modem properly and is not configuring it to answer the phone. Not sure what the deal is - it is not very intuitive. I guess I'll just have to write my own answering machine software.

Anyway, with the BYTE magazines and all the Amiga stuff out of my shop, I had a little room to breathe. So I filled it with my old BattleBot robot. I decided to reassemble it so that I could try to sell it. That's what I spent my time on last night (for two or three hours) and today (most of the day). But now that the thing is back together, I don't want to part with it.

I can't believe how few issues I had with putting it back together. I happened to have all the parts and all the bolts and all the screws, nuts, washers, spacers, etc. It was amazing. It was like it wanted to come back to life. It took me some time to examine some old pictures I took of it to figure out how some things were mounted and where some of the wires connected, but for the most part, it was pretty smooth sailing. The only thing I could not find were the connecting cables between the RC receiver and the motor controllers. Fortunately, I had another set, but I am perplexed as to where the other cables have disappeared to. But I'm not too worried, considering all the problems I remember having while working on the beast a couple years ago.

Here's a shot of the robot:


I even had the antenna, still, with Jack perched atop. This thing wants to live again! And it is alive again! I took a spin on it around the shop - just like old times (i.e. sat on top and drove it around...slowly). :-) I haven't taken it out for a real test run, yet, but I am charging the batteries now. I'll probably run it out in the carport tomorrow.

I thought it would be funny to mount a car seat on top of the robot so I could ride it around. It would fit right in at Burning Man, I'm sure. Here's how it might look:



All it needs is a seatbelt and a joystick and I'm all set! And maybe a beach umbrella and a cup holder.

The robot is sitting on top of a green hand truck in these pictures, so ignore the green parts - they're not part of the 'bot. The main armor of the 'bot consists of a 24" truck tire. Unfortunately, it is not steel-belted, and it took a beating at BattleBots a couple years ago. A spinner bot I went up against actually cut right through the tire (and took out one of my battery packs!), and another bot I went up against took some chunks out of the tire. The kill saws did a number on it, too.

The turret (which was eventually going to pivot and have a pneumatic hammer on it) consists of a steel frame with Lexan walls, overlaid with aluminum. It took a beating under the pulverizer a time or two.

Its name? Oh, that would be "Road Rage." And it weighs somewhere around 280 lbs. It is a super-heavyweight. I'll tell you, if I ever compete again, it will be with a robot I can put in the trunk of my car. I can't take Road Rage anywhere, anymore, because I don't have a van and it won't fit in my Honda Accord.

I thought I might add an embedded computer to it (hey - why not just one of my old '486 boards!) and some sensors and turn it into a very large autonomous robot. I could just see it chasing after the mail man. I don't think airport security would be too happy to see something like that trying to get through the checkpoint, either. Not that I could get it on a plane... I can envision some Candid Camera scenarios. Hmmm... Maybe it's time to break out the video camera!

Well, I finally got rid of my Amiga 2000 computers. They were taking up quite a bit of space. The guy that bought them from me on eBay finally came by and picked them up. I guess he was legit afterall.

Not much to report about in terms of the computer circus. Oh, I did get a 56K PCI modem the other day. I had a hell of a time getting the driver installed so that the software would actually recognize the modem. Not sure how I finally got it to work. I basically de-installed everything and started over.

I bought the modem on eBay, and it came with two CDs. One CD has the same markings as the box the modem came in, and the other CD was just a CD-R that someone burned with another set of drivers on it. Not sure what the deal is. Of course, for some reason, I installed the driver from the CD-R, first. That may have been the mistake that gave me such trouble.

One thing about the HORRIBLE installation software that was on the CD-R disk is that it was totally HORRIBLE. It had this splash screen - which was actually the main menu - with no frame or window controls on it, and it would not allow me to click on anything. It was doing something - installing something! - in the background before giving me a chance to select anything.

I guess it was psychic.

Don't you hate software that presumes to know what you want to do next? I just wanted to see what was on the disk. Well, the thing is, after I de-installed what I thought was the software/driver that was automatically installed, I put in the other CD-ROM and installed the drivers from that. That's when I tried installing other software to talk to the modem only to discover the modem wasn't talking.

So I de-installed everything modem-related and started over...again with the CD-R disk. This time, the main menu screen that wouldn't let me click on anything, refused to go away. I was able to peek around the edge of this window (since it wasn't full screen) and double-click on My Computer and dig up an old program I wrote called Window Hunter. This allowed me to discover the problem with the window not going away. Apparently, behind the main menu window, it was attempting to do the install that it snuck in on the first go-round, but this time it encountered a file that already existed. So, it was waiting at a dialog box for me to click on Skip or Replace.

The infinite wisdom of those who developed this horrible software apparently lacked the foresight to consider something going WRONG during the installation process, for they provided absolutely no way to hide the main menu window in order to see any operating system dialog boxes that may pop up! Alas, Window Hunter came to the rescue. I took aim at the main menu and shot it down. And there, in all it's glory, was the dialog box asking me to Skip or Replace.

Or something to that effect.

The short story is, I got the modem working. My next step is to plug it into a phone line (assuming there is some way I can run one out to my shop) and configure the automated voice mail software that came with the modem (or write my own). That was the whole point of getting the modem. Well, that and having fax capability. We have a computer with a scanner and a printer and a modem - seems like we ought to be able to get rid of the answering machine and the fax machine, eh?

That's the idea.

Progress may be slow, but I'm making some.

I think.

It seems you can't even give away old computers anymore. I have an old PowerMac 7100 that someone gave me a few years ago and that I never used. The thrift stores won't take it. They won't take any computer stuff anymore. No WONDER I can't find computer stuff at thrift stores anymore! I guess it is hard to sell them, and even harder to dispose of them.

How do people get rid of stuff? Nobody wanted to buy it at the garage sale last weekend. I don't really have a use for it. So, I guess I am stuck with a Power Macintosh 7100...with a monitor...and a box of Mac stuff...and a printer. Ugh! And now apparently you have to pay the dump or the recycling centers to take them. I can't even donate the thing.

Ah, well, what do you do?

I had a strange coincidence happen yesterday. Well, not really so much for me as for one of my eBay customers. I put some old BYTE magazines on eBay to see if they would sell (and for how much), and this one guy won four of my auctions (i.e. four magazines). It just so happened that in all the places in all the world, the guy who won my eBay auctions lives in Fremont (across the bridge from me).

But that's not the strange part. The strange part is that he used to live in an apartment just two buildings down from me. He moved out just three weeks ago. I can see his old apartment from mine - in fact, I am looking at it right now. I wonder if he ever looked over at my apartment and saw me sitting at my desk or working on something at my workbench? I didn't ask, and he didn't say.

It's a small world out there! It gets even smaller when you consider that one of my neighbors in my apartment building ALSO used to live in that same apartment two buildings down that I am looking at right now!

What are the chances of that? It is funny, too, because my wife once mentioned that maybe we should check that apartment out, since she saw it from the street and thought it looked interesting.

Hmm.

Maybe I should check it out.

By the way, the guy who won my four BYTE magazine auctions (who used to live in the apartment I am looking at right now) came by to collect them. That is how I found out he used to live there...since he, too, saw his old apartment through my window. Anyway, he wound up buying most of all the other BYTE magazines I hadn't sold, for a happy sum of money. Sweet!! Now I don't have to spend the time putting them up on eBay, and I've got one less box in my shop!

On another note, I am having trouble unloading my Amigas. This guy who won my auction for my Amiga 2000 computers STILL has not picked them up! But, I guess that's OK - he has until Monday. But here's the thing... While my auction was up, it had five bids on it, and this guy wrote me an email asking if I would close the auction early and give it to him if he gave me $300 and picked it up the next day. He said he lived near me. Well, the auction was for local pick-up, only, so I presumed that anybody bidding on it probably lived near me, so I basically told him to play the game like everyone else. At the time, the highest bid was only $217, so the guy had a good chance that he would get it for less than $300.

But I figured this guy was my ace in the hole. I could tell from the bidding history that there was a bidder who really wanted it - he kept coming back to top other bidders. I figured if this guy who wrote me was willing to give me $300 cash and pick it up the next day, that he must have really wanted it. I suspected he would pop in with a bid at some point and push the bid up closer to $300, since I figured this other bidder would be back to try to top him.

That is exactly what happened. In fact, the bidding war continued until it reached $330 at the end of the auction. The guy who had written to me was the winner. I guess he really wanted it! But now he has been making excuses about why he has not shown up to collect, yet. His latest excuse was that he is waiting for the money to clear the bank. So, I'm thinking, did he really not have $300 on the night he originally propositioned me? Does he really want this thing so badly that he would buy it even though he is so strapped for money? Is he playing me?

Enquiring minds want to know.

So, come Monday, we'll see if he is a flake. Hopefully, he'll show up to complete the transaction by then. Otherwise, I'm going to offer it to the other bidder who really wanted it. His high bid was $325. I'm sure he'd be happy to have it...and would probably collect it the following day with cash in hand.

Everybody wants something. They just don't always seem to know what they want, exactly, or what it takes to get it. I hope this guy doesn't flake out on me.

Hmm. Blogger changed things on me. I liked the other interface better, where I could see the previous post on the same page where I type in the new entry.

Oh, well. Today, I am veering WWWWAAAYYYY off the subject of this blog, only because there is a subject that bugs me and something inside me wants to be heard about it. It just stems from my annoyance toward people who try to tell me how I should think - mostly in regards to religious beliefs. I PROMISE this blog will not turn into a religious or philosophical thread, but I know this entry is going to be long! So consider yourself forewarned - if you're not interested, please skip this entry! If there is one thing I do not want to do, it is to impose my perspective on anyone.

Your motives may differ.

But that's the beauty of a blog. It is like a television. If you don't like what you read, you can move on. The difference between me and a television producer, however, is that I don't care! I'm not selling ratings. :)

So, without further ado, here is my stance on religious beliefs:

When I am asked if I believe in God, my first reply is usually, "I don’t believe in anything." To me, a belief is a limiting factor. To believe something is to accept it without any solid supporting evidence. Therefore, for me to adopt a belief would require that I accept a notion to be true despite a lack of supporting evidence, and reject any evidence to the contrary. If I abandon belief entirely, then I am free to see a complete picture from an objective viewpoint.

It is my understanding that everything within the realm of perception is abstract. I have five physical senses through which I can perceive the world around me, and I have been trained from birth to interpret these perceptions in a way that gives them meaning. My eyes receive patterns of light frequencies that my brain assembles into what I have come to understand is an "image". And within these images, I have learned to recognize shapes and patterns, so that I know that what I am looking at is a truck, or a door, or whatever other familiar object I have been trained or have learned to recognize.

Mankind has further abstracted this pattern recognition idea to facilitate communication, by creating sets of symbols (letters, etc.) to which meaning has been arbitrarily assigned in order that we may communicate through "language". Similarly, we extract meaning from sounds that we hear, sensations that we feel, odors that we smell, and flavors that we taste.

Time, itself, is an illusion, as it is only our ability to detect movement and recall previous states that give us a sense of time and a perception of things changing. The study and understanding of physics has revealed that time is not a constant. The appearance of the passage of time is merely an observance of the rate at which things change. And all things of the material universe change at different rates, depending on the environment in which they exist. Therefore, we perceive such things as "time dilation" and other physical phenomena that probably only the most brilliant theoretical physicists could describe.

If I have learned anything in my life it is that things are not always as they seem. What I understand to be correct one day, can change the next. And I am open to that, because I do not allow myself to latch on to my perceptions as though they are "written in stone," as the cliché goes. Since I cannot guarantee that the world and the universe around me is as it appears to be through the mere five physical senses that I possess, how can I be expected to take to heart a notion or a concept that exists outside the realm of my perceptions.

There is no doubt much that exists in this universe outside of the five physical senses that I possess. Look at what has already been discovered - sounds beyond our range of hearing, light beyond our range of vision, radio waves, nuclear radiation, atomic particles, etc. I cannot discount the possibility - or the probability - that there is something beyond this realm. But it is my contention that the concept of "beyond" does not, itself, exist within any realm of familiarity. At least, not in the physical sense.

Concepts like near and far and earlier and later - and "beyond" - are all rooted in the familiar abstractions that provide meaning within our limited realm of experience in the physical universe, and are governed by the laws of physics that pertain to this universe. In order for there to be a creator, this creator must exist within a realm beyond our comprehension, within which it is possible for a universe to be created.

This universe must be like a bubble within such a realm, although it is a bubble to which the term "outside" only applies to what is inside the bubble, since that term is understood from a perspective of a three-dimensional being. Within this universe, it is a misnomer to ask, "what is outside?" It is much like asking, "what is one mile North of the North Pole?"

My point is that there is nothing in my life experience that suggests that anything is absolute. Therefore, I cannot simply accept a notion - no matter how commonly accepted it is - that there is one, all-knowing, almighty, omnipotent super being that is responsible for creating this universe. Now, that is not to say that I discount the idea of the existence of a god - rather, it is to say that I do not accept the commonly held belief systems that revolve around a one-and-only "God".

Some would try to have me believe that there was no such thing as the "Big Bang" and that "God" created mankind out of nothing, as if by magic, and that the idea of evolution is an absurdity. I certainly do not have a problem with people believing what they want and choose to believe, but I do have a problem with people who try to impose their beliefs on me. I understand the tendency to want to hold on to something - to have some foothold or grounding to think that things are a certain, unchangeable way, so there is something solid (if only within a belief) to hold on to. Some people seem to need that. And I can understand that, because I have been there, myself. But I have arrived at my own conclusion that there is nothing solid, and accept the possibility that there may be no reason for existence. In other words, this may be all there is to life - this one and only chance - and that we may merely exist because it just happened.

Nobody really knows what the truth is. Some people believe they know. But the one and only truth in this world is that there is no one and only truth. And one thing that is certain is that no matter what one believes, it does not alter the truth.

It is strange to me that someone would discard the notion of a "Big Bang" theory over the notion of a god creating a living being out of nothing. I simply cannot accept the idea of a god creating a being out of nothing. That’s not to say it didn’t happen, it just doesn’t make any sense to me. In my mind, I have to question what makes that idea less absurd than the idea of the Big Bang?

Evolution is a fact. We can see it. We can track it. And we can - to some degree - trace it back into the past. Every year, the flu virus mutates, and every year, we come up with a new vaccine. Cockroaches are becoming resistant to bug sprays, because the ones with the genetic composition to survive are now breeding. That’s natural selection. Antibiotics are not working anymore, because the bacteria that has the genetic composition to survive is reproducing. Another example of natural selection.

Life is highly adaptable. It has to be to exist. The only thing that makes sense to me is evolution, for there is no other way so many species of life forms could co-exist within such a balanced system than if it was borne out of it. To me, it seems that people are arguing the wrong points when it is a conflict between evolution and creation. How do we know it wasn’t both?

There is a passage in the Bible that suggests the Earth was created in six days. This concept has always bothered me, because it is contradictory to itself. If the Earth did not exist, then what was a "day" measured in? And if it took six days to create it, what conversion factor was used against what time scale to determine that the elapsed time equaled six days, once the Earth was finally created?

The problem I have with the Bible is that it is so widely open to interpretation. The original texts were written hundreds of years ago in an old dialect of an old language, during a time when any texts of contrary nature were destroyed as blasphemous in order that a commonly held belief structure could emerge and remain. The translation of those old texts into English - or any other language - was, itself, open to interpretation. I don’t care what you say in what language, any time something gets translated, meaning gets lost.

The word or statement in the original texts that got translated into "six days" was, itself, taken too literally, in my opinion. One of the possible translations for what we read now as "days" was something akin to "periods of time" or "stages". It makes far more sense to me that the creation of the Earth was a process. Perhaps, if we could somehow go back and witness the creation of the Earth, we would see that there were six distinct phases of the development process. Or, perhaps, there are thousands of people today who are following the words of a lunatic.

I would have far more reverence for a creator that was smart enough (as "God" is supposed to be, if he truly knows everything) to know how to create a universe - to bring together the conditions that we understand to have been the "Big Bang" - and work with the resulting elements to shape and mold and direct it along a line of evolutionary phases until mankind emerged, than I would have for a creator that could just create a human being out of dust at the blink of an eye.

After all, if it is not ludicrous to think a god can create a human from dust, then why is it so ludicrous to think a god could create the Big Bang?

I am convinced that there is something beyond what we know to be familiar - perhaps even a "life after death". But I contend that it is something that we cannot comprehend - merely because we cannot experience it in this form - and I expect that it is totally unlike what anyone expects. After all, we can only interpret and form an understanding of the clues we are given, based upon what is familiar to us. I also feel that whatever is at the helm - whatever is responsible for all this - is directed by more than a single entity. Or, perhaps it is more like a collective intelligence of some kind. One can only guess.

And I am malleable. Because I do not know the answers and can only provide conjecture, my opinions and understandings as they are today could change tomorrow. Or a minute from now. And I will only ever say, "this is how I see it," and will never attempt to impose my perceptions on anyone else, thinking that they, too, should feel this way.

I think we are all here to learn our own lessons in order that we may each obtain our own level of enlightenment, and to share our perceptions with others. I am not about to live my life based on the teachings born out of the interpretation of some ancient writings. I do not like to feel locked into a particular way of thinking, and I will not allow my thoughts to be dictated to me. I am not a lemming.

I am free and have peace of mind knowing that I do not have to fear my thoughts. I also will not subscribe to a system that would have be fear my creator. I often hear people referring to the "fear of God." I know in my heart that if I created an intelligent life form, I would love it and care for it and provide for it and wish for the best for it, but I would never give it a reason to fear me.

I think a lot of people equate fear with respect. In reality, fear is the opposite of respect. Respect is something that is bred out of a positive influence. I respect people for being kind and giving and understanding and who offer to share their wisdom. I have no respect for anyone who threatens me (or anyone else for that matter). I also hold no respect for those who try to dictate how I should live my life. I do not share the notion that there is only one right way to live one’s life.

In fact, it is not of my opinion that there is even inherently such a thing as "right" or "wrong". These are concepts that we learn and that have largely been defined for us. Some things appear to be intrinsically right or wrong on the surface, but it is only our interpretation and our perceptions that determine how we interpret it. I think there is an intrinsic nature to "good" and "bad" - or at least "beneficial" and "detrimental" - but there is no one-to-one correlation between good and right, and bad and wrong. And I think this is a trap that many people fall into.

So, anyway, I think I have said enough for now. There could be no end to this, so I'll end it here. Just had to get it off my mind - take it or leave it.

Well...back to the computer circus!

[Take a deep breath here]

I was inspired the other day to make a short film about computers gone bad. I'm not going to go into any details, but it involves a central character that is driven insane by a Windows operating system. I'll make it available once it is done. I am forming the basic plot and sketching out the script, now. It may be a while before we can shoot it, however, as there are a couple of productions already in the queue. But I pitched the idea to the Poor As Dirt production group, and one member at least has given a very favorable response. He must be one of those who understands my plight.

On a completely unrelated note, I just completed a garage sale today and am totally beat. Am going to go to bed and sleep for about twelve days. Perhaps I will wake up in the hospital. If I do, then I will know that I slept well. We made about $200 selling our junk. And someone stole a rag. A RAG! Why couldn't they have taken my old computer?! Oh, well. eBay has been good to me. I just hope I can get my latest winning bidder to PAY!!! I haven't heard from him, yet.

Lights out!