The Squamidian Report – May 13 / 06
Issue #206
Also in this issue:
Hi All,
The people who know me best know that one of my favorite TV channels is the Weather Network. Yes, I know, so stop snickering. It’s just the way I am. Anyway, they have an inadvertent humorous side due mostly to the boo-boos they make. I don’t know whether they make typos or misassumptions but the computer system they use takes that information and builds a forecast scenario around it. As an example, for most of the past winter they would forecast half a meter of snow for Squamish each day, regardless of how clear or cloudy it was. We had almost no snow except for when none was forecast. But I had a good laugh the other morning when the forecast for that evening was for –90, yes, they were somehow calling for minus ninety. The little line on their graphic chart just dropped right off the screen. Good thing they were just a bit off base with that one.
*
We are off to Prince George tomorrow. Sue and I will drive up so that she can have her car for the 3 months she is covering the manager position in a branch there. They will fly her back and forth once in a while and put her up in a motel for the stay but for her to have the freedom to travel around as she sees fit she wants her own car. She can also bring more luggage that way. So we will drive up. The drive is roughly similar in length to driving from here to Calgary, only it is north instead of east. It will put us through some nice country including up and over the Duffy so maybe I can get some good pictures.
Then I’ll fly back to Vancouver on Monday (taking the day off work, ah heck) where I will hitch a ride back to Squamish with Warren who will be at the airport to pick up Janice who is also flying back from Prince George on the same flight after visiting with their daughter for a few days. Convenient how that is working out.
Sue’s stint as the branch manager won’t affect our life style all that much from how life in audit was. She won’t make it home every weekend over the time period but she will make it every second, or perhaps I’ll pop up there. We will see. Perhaps the biggest differences are that she will be in the same branch the whole time instead of a different one each week, and she will stay in one time zone for the whole time. Now That will be different.
*
Memory Lane Geek Speak!
I came across the spec sheet of our first computer while going through some paperwork. Got quite a chuckle as I read it. It was dated Feb 1994 and shows just how far computes have come since then as well as how much less expensive they are now.
Way back then I paid over $3400 for an AST system with a puny 14-inch CRT monitor. LCDs hadn’t even been thought of yet. That included installing one of those new fangled CD readers valued at $400 that could only read at X1 speed. Writers didn’t even exist yet. Now you can get a reader / writer for $49. The CD player had to be jury-rigged externally to work through the sound card. The system was a 486 SX, not even a DX, running at a blazing 25 MHz. That’s 25 million Hz, as compared to a run-of-the-mill modern bargain bin system you’d find today running at 3 billion Hz. The difference between an SX system and a DX system was that the SX did not have a built in math co-processor on the main CPU, where the DX did. The 486 DX series systems were the very high-end power user machines back then.
That AST came with 4 meg of RAM, yes, F-O-U-R meg. Incredible. That modern bargain bin system sitting at your local store these days probably has 512 or even 1024, a full gig. On-board graphics hadn’t really been invented yet so the system luckily had it’s own graphics card with a full 1 meg of memory. Modern cards start at about 256 meg and even require their own cooling fans. The first upgrade I ever did to a system was to add another 4 meg RAM chip to improve the performance of an astronomy program I was running. That chip set me back about $285. That’s a hundred bucks more than a 1 gig RAM chip would cost now. But it doubled my RAM up to a whopping 8 meg.
Then there was the cavernous hard drive. A huge 210 meg of storage space. And of course that DOS 6.1 couldn’t even ‘see’ all of it. That 16-bit O/S had some pretty major limitations for addressing. To have access to the full capacity of the drive I would have had to partition it, but I didn’t even know that in those days. But that 16-bit O/S was a big advancement over the older 8-bit attempts. DOS had just been upgraded to 6.1 from 6.0 and the upgrade came on 1 floppy. DOS 6 itself came on 5 floppies. Windows had just been upgraded from 3.0 to 3.1 so we lucked out there. Windows 3.1, supplied on half a dozen floppies could almost pretend to run more than one program at a time as long as they didn’t conflict too badly with each other or the O/S itself. The O/S crashed regularly but that was ‘normal’ so no one really noticed. The first computer course I took was called ‘Windows 3.1’ for obvious reasons and spent most of it’s time teaching us how to restore the DOS command and config files that were sure to get mucked during the crashes, as well as how to edit the autoexec file to squeeze a bit of customization from the system. As a drive comparison, a run of the mill hard drive today will have 200 gig of storage space and the most spacious drives are pushing the terabyte range.
Include with the system was a 2 button serial mouse that wouldn’t work until the proper drivers were installed. The keyboard had one of those big old ATX connectors. You don’t see many of those anymore. We purchased speakers and a little HP printer and were ready to jump into the modern age of computing. The system actually came with some pretty good productivity software (for that time period) so we were ready to go. However, it took an incredible amount of self control on my part to not throw the dam thing through the window out of frustration during the first few month we had it but eventually we learned enough to get the upper hand and managed to tame the stupid thing.
Oh, almost forgot! It came with two floppy drives. The standard 3.5 drive that took the plastic disks that everyone is familiar with and is now almost obsolete, and a 5.25 drive that took those soft cardboard disks that were in fact floppy. They would bend very easily. We actually still have that drive mounted in an old 586 machine that is currently stored in the closet and some of the old 5.25 disks in case we ever decided we wanted it for some reason. I think there are some Qbasic programs still on them. Cool. And it had one more goodie, a 14.4 modem that would let you connect to this wild and wonderful thing that was just catching on called the Internet.
doug
****
I thought I might write and tell
about one of my "Happy Mother's Days"...the time Warren and I plowed
the garden with 'Jim' our draft horse (2000 lb Percheron).....".First of
the spring work"and Jim was raring- to- go, stepping briskly through the
field up to the garden plot. First furrow...I could hardly hang on to the plow,
let alone keep the nose in the ground....'Jim' was full of energy and wouldn't
slow down. After much persuasion, sweat and </*/#'#*> later, the garden
was plowed. It was coming on to 4 o’clock....Jim had found a comfortable pace
finally. But, when Warren hooked him to the harrows, he had had enough and
decided that he was not going to pull anymore!! He headed to the barn at a dead
gallop....Warren and the harrows flying along behind.
I had gone down to the house to
start supper and heard suddenly, a whole lot of "whoa, whoa, whoa!!!"
Looking out the kitchen window, I could see Warren ‘skiing’ across the field
hauling on the reins for dear life... Jim’s ears laid back and clods of dirt
and grass flying up..... Well, I had all my little seedlings on shelves in the
living room window for the best sun, and as 'Jim' came flying by the corner of
the house, the harrows caught a rock and went airborne..... hitting the side of
the house, jarring the wall enough to send my seedlings crashing to the floor
inside.
'Jim', well he freaked- out and
instead of stopping at the barn door as he should have, he kept right on going
at a dead run and cleared the corral gate at a leap, leaving the harness and
harrows hanging on the gate rail. Needless to say he knew he had done wrong and
was in a tense, lathered shiver awaiting Warren's reprimand. I was inside
rescuing and re-potting my garden seedlings, and with a bit of water to settle
the roots, they came back just fine. That year for some reason we had one of
our best harvests ever....
Since
that eventful Mother's Day, my family always does something garden
oriented for me....my choice. Who could ask for anything more!!!
Happy
Mother's Day all you Moms!!
Janice
For
this story plus the pictures, click on over to: http://members.shaw.ca/coastalcedarcreations/nsmd.htm
****
Hello my
fellow Squamidians!
Well here
we are getting closer and closer to the season finales for most of our
favourite TV shows. What oh what will we do when they are over and have left us
hanging till next fall? Let’s see, we have three CSIs, four or is it five Law
and Orders, one Survivor, one Lost, one ER, one NCIS and one Desperate
Housewives series about to take a summer break. How many do YOU watch? We’re
only into about 8 of the total number so the summer won’t be as long for us as
for some.
With TV
going “Digital” and larger every day things are changing. These days so many
homes have their own “theatre” in them. We don’t happen to be one of those. Why
I remember when there was only one big mystery so it was a lot simpler. The big
question was “Who shot JR?” Now wasn’t that less pressure than all the guck we
have today? Oh well, I guess Hollywood needs something to do and they know the
TV Junkies will be there in the fall when all the questions are answered. I for
one won’t spend my summer worrying about all the outcomes. For me there’s only
one show outcome I’m interested in and that’s on the original CSI Las Vegas. I
just watched Lieutenant Jim Brass get shot twice in the chest by a “perp” and
the episode ended right there. Is Jim dead? I guess the only way I’ll find out
is to tune in next September when they answer that one for me. Till then, hang
in there Jim and keep pressure on the wounds. In all likelihood it’s only a
flesh wound, just a crease and you’ll be back in the saddle next fall.
*
Things
are a little damp here in Ontario and are supposed to stay that way until next
Tuesday. I guess the rain will bring out the plants and flowers and hopefully
they will also put an end to the drifting pollen season soon. They say that
this year is one of the heaviest allergy seasons in recent memory. I believe
that because I’m suffering along with Adam with itchy eyes, stuffy sinuses and
difficulty breathing. We are both doing our best to lessen the symptoms but
there’s pretty much nothing on the market that seems to help quell the agony
created by this season. It’s kind of a double whammy if you’re a motorcycle
rider. The last thing you need as an allergy sufferer is a 60 km/h wind driving
the tons of pollen into your eyes and up your nose. Looks like the bike will
just have to stay in the garage for a while. It’s not very safe to be riding
when your eyes are watering so bad the world’s a big blur.
*
It’s a
fact that no matter what season we’re in there are aspects of each that we
don’t particularly like. It’s getting so we have to pick the season that has
the least number of dislikable characteristics to favour. I guess it boils down
to “Is the glass half full of half empty?”
With the
forecasters telling us this upcoming summer will be dry and hot, let’s hope
that’s a positive thing. We all complain when we don’t have nice weather and
unfortunately we do the same when we have too much of a good thing. I for one
would much rather have the sunshine than the rain and intend to make the best
of this coming summer’s clear days. Carole’s gardens are blooming and beautiful
already and we’ve been sitting out on the patio enjoying their colours and
fragrances. We disposed of my old BBQ last year and so far have not purchased
another one but you never know. I used to really enjoy standing at the BBQ
taking in the aroma of whatever was cooking and wondering if the neighbours
were smelling it as well. I spotted a unique style of BBQ the other day at
Zehr’s of all places. It’s a totally stainless steel unit that is in the shape
of a sphere. It actually reminded me one of those water towers that you see on
the horizon when approaching rural towns. It kind of looks like a huge
mushroom. If you have to have a BBQ sitting on your patio it might as well be a
cool looking one. I think I’ll take Carole over and see if she likes it and
maybe we’ll be into outdoor cooking once more.
Gotta go
for this week but thanks to all for tuning in. I look forward to talking to you
again next time in The Ontarion Report.
By for now… Greg.
PS:
Something To Think About>
If a man
does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find
himself left alone.
Samuel
Johnson 1775
****
The Family and the Squamidian sites:
http://members.shaw.ca/doug_b/ and http://www.thedougsite.ca
Have a good one..
the
doug
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