Ever have one of those days where your brain feels like it’s in a cloud? You don’t really have a headache, but nothing seems to make as much sense as it should and getting anything done it just highly painful?

Yeah, I’m having one of those days today. It’s like someone scooped out my brains and dropped in a goop of gumdrops and cobwebs. I’m sure this too shall pass.

Until then, let’s see what I did yesterday. I did manage to get some reading under my belt. I’ll be posting another Sandman review. I knocked out nearly 5000 words yesterday. That felt great. I went to work out yesterday. Did 8.5 miles in 30 minutes on the bike.

Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe I got my blood flowing and knocked some of the crud that built up in my veins while I was on vacation. My Favorite Daughter and I went to the work out room yesterday because she’s getting ready for tryouts for volleyball. They start next week.

Speaking with one of the returning Junior Varsity girls she found out that not only did 9 seniors graduate, but 5 of the JV girls aren’t returning. This means there are potentially a lot of open slots on the team. This is a big plus as there are a lot of girls trying out.

I haven’t worked out for some time. It’s about time that I get my rear end back up on that treadmill and do some working out. I’m back up to where I was before and I’m not happy about that. I’m not in terrible shape, but there were many things I would have like to have done while on vacation in Oregon that I wasn’t physically able to do. Why? I’m out of shape. Again. And over the weight I’d like to be at. Again.

So I’m eating less. Far less. And I’m going to start working out again. Let’s see how this goes.

I plan to record tonight. And Edit. And Write. I guess I’d better get on that if I’m going to get close the the number of words I knocked out yesterday, eh?

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!

Before I get started with getting you all caught up with where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to, I’ve had some great fun rewatching the Odyssey rover landing on Mars. No, we don’t have video of the actual landing, but it was so great to watch the video of the NASA team as they followed it through it’s seven minutes of terror while it guided itself to a safe and successful landing. I thought I was going to tear up a little bit. So happy and so proud of this accomplishment by so many people involved. My facebook, twitter, Google+, and newsfeed are all full of news of the landing. It’s such a great moment.

Last week I spent watching the Olympics. Ok, I did a lot more than that and I’ll touch on some highlights, but I did watch several hours of Olympics highlights. I’ll say that I’m a little disappointed with how NBC has been handling it, but there are so many events it’s not possible for one network to cover them all. If I remember correctly last time it was several non-stop channels showing every event and rebroadcasting those events in their entirety. Getting little snippets of the events I’d like to see is frustrating, but I did watch nearly all the swimming and gymnastics. I’ll be watching as much of the Track and Field events as I can. I know NBC will only be showing some and not all so we’ll see what we can get.

So, I’ve been away for some time. It all started on July 26th at 2:30 in the morning when I got up, got showered, and we finished our packing and headed over to the Millican’s house. The goal was to be on the road by 3AM. After several trips out the front door, into the cars, out of the cars, down to McDonald’s for breakfast, back to the Millican’s house, and back again, we were on the road at 6:30AM. Our goal was to miss the LA traffic. Well, we missed the brunt of it.

Our first stop was San Francisco. The Millican has a long time friend there and we stayed there for the night. We got up the next morning and hit the BART into the city with Art as our guide. We rode the cable cars, had clam chowder on the bay, took pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz, went to Boudin (a local bread place), hit up Ghirardelli (a local chocolate place), rode the cable car back to China Town, ate and shopped, rode the cable car back to the BART, realized we’d only ridden one cable car line, hopped on a cable car going up (we’d bought an all day pass, had to use it, right?) Rode to the top of the hill. Took some more pictures, rode the cable car back down the hill. Yes, I did look down into the ground to see the cable moving along. It was awesome.

We finally got back on the BART and went back to Berkley where we had pizza at Zachery’s. This is a Chicago-style, stuffed pizza. We ordered 3 for the 11 of us there. I only made it through two and a half slices before declaring mercy. We had an entire pie left over for breakfast the next morning.

The next day we were up and on the road by noon to finish our trip up to Oregon. We stopped by Shasta Lake to take some pictures. We stopped and ate lunch. We took our time and got in to the Millican’s mom’s house around 9:30PM. We had tacos, we set up the tent for the youngest of the group, and we were in bed by midnight after watching some Olympics (this was our nightly ritual).

We did a LOT during our trip. To sum it up (I’ll go into detail on one part) it was Eating, shopping, hillbilly rafting (we found a log and floated down the river on it, twice), went to Crater Lake, hillbilly teetertottering (we found a felled tree over another felled tree that was perfectly balanced), river rafted (I’ll go into detail on the first trip in a minute), swam in the river, river rafted, ate lots of UMPQUA! (you may call it ice cream), ate lots of food, visited the ‘Lil Pantry more than once, and all in all had a great time.

So the first river rafting trip was something like this:

The Millican and his wife wound up in one of the tahitis

they rolled it at the end of the rapids in front of a resort

As they swam for shore and their boat, seats, oars, camera, and one shoe floated down the river, a jet boat tour came by

it picked up their boat and oars and took it back up river to them

they spent the rest of the tour in the bigger raft

My Favorite Daughter and my buddy’s younger son fell out at the end of the next rapids

I was behind them, the bigger raft in front of them. They were safe

on the flat part after those rapids, his two daughters were adjusting themselves in their raft and fell out

that was funny

we were running behind schedule so my favorite daughter and my buddy’s younger son (in one boat) his two daughters (in the second boat) and me in the third all took off to get to the end quicker so they’d know we were alright

at the Argo rapids his two daughters went first with no trouble

they went to the left

my favorite daughter and my buddy’s younger son went to the right, I followed

their boat went down and to the left. my favorite daughter’s weight kept the front of their boat from going up

I was sitting WAY in the back of my boat and knew before I even got to the spot they went past what was going to happen

the front of my boat went WAY up and I rolled into the rocks

I kept a hold of my boat and banged off rocks to the left, to the right, hit my hip on a shallow rock. Hit my foot on a deep rock and lost a river shoe

then the rapids calmed down to a riffle and I somehow flipped myself back into the boat

minus seats, oars, and missing one shoe

I did still have my sunglasses through

Then I saw I was only halfway through the rapids

<sigh>

I can do this, right? I don’t need me no oars. BRING IT!

<flip> bang, thud, fumble, gurgle

then I hit the smooth spot and was finally able to swim over to the kids and getting into my boat again

So boating was an adventure. Only the Millican’s older son and my wife were able to keep from falling into the river. They got lucky this time. Next time I may dump them on purpose. We’ll just have to wait and see.

On the trip back we stopped again at Shasta Lake. We were going to go to the Shasta Cave, but fires had a majority of the area evacuated and/or closed down. We did, however, stop off in Lemoore to visit the kids (the niece and nephew are there with their four kids). It was a great time had by all. The little ones didn’t know we were coming and they were confused then ecstatic. We stayed the night at the Navy lodge, got up the next morning, almost went to go see the World’s Tallest Horse, then got back on the road by Noon. We were home by 6 and truly wiped out in the best possible way.

So I spent a good deal of time not writing. You can easily see why. This week will see me record the next two episodes of the Action Pack Podcast so one can drop this week and one on 9/1. This will get the crew back on track. I will also be meeting with Mr. Plested and hopefully Mr. Roche at some time this week. I have a lot of writing and a lot of recording and a lot of catching up to do. I also have pictures of ducks to get.

Speaking of ducks, here’s a little list of the animals we saw while on the river:

Squaw fish

Trout

Salmon

Turtles

Canadian Geese

Mallards

Strange red-headed ducks with mohawks

Bald Eagles

Osprey

Turkey Vultures

Wild Turkeys

Deer

Weasels

Beavers

I’m sure there were more, but they’re escaping me at the moment. I have much to do. I’d better get at it. It’s good to be back home.

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!

On Thursday we’ll be getting up a little earlier than normal. Well, a little earlier for me. A lot earlier for the wife and my favorite daughter. They’re currently on ‘break’. The wife from work for a couple months and my favorite daughter from school.

Aside from that, on Thursday we’ll be getting up early. The plan is to be on the road to early Thursday morning and on our way to San Francisco!

But wait, you thought I was going to Oregon. Well, we’re making a stop on the way. The Millican’s youngest son is in San Fran for a lacrosse tournament and we’ll be stopping and picking him up on our way. We’ll stay a couple days with a friend and have chowder on the bay, ride the cable cars, all those fun touristy things that we haven’t done together as a family. After that we’ll pack up and head off to Oregon.

We’ll be staying with the Millican’s mom up there and spend as much time as possible by the river. We’ll go see the redwoods, go to the ocean, and do all those touristy type things one does in souther Oregon. Last time we went I picked up a beaver skull from a taxidermist. I was fascinated. I’m sure we’ll be stopping in again. If I remember right the owner’s sons were Hunter, Bow (or Bo), and Arrow. But I could be wrong.

So I’ve been getting up a little earlier each day in preparation for the early morning Thursday will be. Clothes are getting washed. Dogs have been prepared (we have a puppy sitter) and we have cleaned the house. Only thing really left to do is pack. That will likely be tonight/tomorrow.

I still need to work. That work stuff doesn’t stop. I feel I should have taken this week off as well, but hey, life doesn’t stop because I’m going on vacation. I’ve got a ton of work still to get done this week and I need to hand off a couple of things while I’m out of the office. I have meetings, meetings, and more meetings. It’s amazing the number of meetings one person can have in a given day. I’m still waiting on some requirements so I can write up a technical requirements document. Those are always fun. The last one I wrote rivaled my last novel in length, but when it came to action and cliffhanger suspense, nothing can hold a candle to my requirements documents.

So yeah, there’s a lot to do and not a lot of time to get it done.

I did take Sputtery Truck down to my friend and have him looked at. All is good and he’s all ready for the trek. I think Sputtery Truck is excited about getting on the road. Most of his trips are less than 10 miles. He’s anxious to get a move on.

Speaking of getting a move on, I’d better call lunch over and get back at it myself.

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!

Dog aren’t immortal beings. They also aren’t immune to disease, infection, parasites, and gingivitis. Currently one of my dogs has fleas. I’m guessing it might be both, one one doesn’t bite or scratch or lick until she’s bleeding. The other will throw a fit and I’ll dig around in her fur and find one tiny little flea. This will drive the little one bonkers. I’ve applied the proper flea protection, but that doesn’t seem to help much. So I’ve had to put a cone on her to keep her from biting and scratching herself raw.

The other has a cough. Not your polite little *cough* but a linger, hacking cough that comes and goes and will scare the crap out of you at two o’clock in the morning when you’re sound asleep and trying to figure out where the miniature bear came from. So I’ve been giving her cough medicine. Every try giving a cat a bath? Yeah, it’s like that when I try to give this one her medicine. And you’d think with a dog that takes a pill for epilepsy every single day and twice on Tuesday she’d be used to me shoving things in her mouth that she doesn’t want.

Now both of them having something like this is a little annoying. Okay, it’s more than a little annoying, but they’re my dogs and I can put up with it. The issue is that we’re about to leave for a little over a week and my sister-in-law will be inheriting the dogs while we’re out of town and she’s house sitting for us. Hopefully in a couple of days the two will mostly recover or at least enough that it won’t scare the begeezus out of her while she stays here.

I’ll be taking Sputtery Truck over to my friend’s house for a check up. Mostly I want to get the brakes looked at. The Check Engine light has been off for some time. The dip in oil pressure when idling has stopped. Other than squeaky breaks everything seems good to go for our trip.

On Saturday we went down Mexico way. The Millican’s youngest daughter had her quincera. The church portion was… well, your typical stand up, sit down, kneel, sit down, stand up, sit down, sing a song, type of Catholic service so I got my cardio in for the weekend. The fun part didn’t begin until we went to the after party which is the main reason kids have a quincera to begin with. There was food, dancing, and cake (Cake only exists to get frosting into your mouth). There was much fun there.

But more than that it was everything that led up to the party that I enjoyed much more. The Wife and I (and my favorite daughter) used to travel to Tijuana and further south all the time. We used to spend every weekend down on the beach just south of Rosarito. Oh, it was a great time and there were very rarely issues.

Then the wife’s brother-in-law’s second uncle’s cousin’s brother (or something like that) got kidnapped. It was a little too close to home and two or three people that the wife worked with had friends or family that had been kidnapped. So with all that going on combined with the fact that you needed to have a passport, we stopped crossing the border. At all. For 5 or 6 years. It’s been a while.

I missed going down there. I love eating tacos from those street vendors. Getting a cup of Elotes (a cup of corn with butter, mayo, lime, hot sauce, salt, and a whole lot of hell yeah!). There are also ice cream carts all over ringing their little bells. So needless to say I was more interesting in going around and looking for food than I was for sitting around waiting for all the girls to get their hair and make up done. But hey, that’s just me.

I did note that the ingredients on Coke are different in Mexico. The ingredients (in English) Carbonated Water, Sugar, Coka Cola flavoring from concentrate. I mean, how awesome is that. I had to read it a few times to make sure that was it and sure enough, that was it. Why list all those ingredients inside the flavoring. I laughed and I actually enjoyed a cola beverage probably because I was laughing so much.

Sunday we spent with the Millicans and watched a couple of movies (well, the Millican and I did). And we eat some grilled chicken, home grown corn, and left over cake. There was a lot of cake from the party the night before.

The biggest surprise over the weekend was when we got back at oh my gosh it’s dark out and an older couple were walking down the road with their dogs. The gentleman pointed to my bumper sticker and asked “Are you J.R .Murdock?” “Why yes, yes I am.” “So you’re a writer?” “Yes, I am. Did you visit my site?” “I did. I’ll have to check out what you write. It looks interesting.” “I hope you like what you find.”

So from what I know, at least one person has found my site from my bumper sticker. I hope you’ve found something you like. I’m sorry I didn’t have more time to stop and talk. *wave*. I hope to run into you again one day and we’ll have more time to chat.

Speaking of chatting, I have a lot to do before Thursday gets here. I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow!

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!

During the time I was on the Vantive team I finally got a new home computer (and went through three different ones). I also set up a web server that I hosted my father’s website on as well as my own. I did some work in Adobe Flash. That was fun. I’d always written code. I’d never used a WYSIWYG editor. I saw the early HTML editors and the code the produced was bulky, clunky, and ugly. Pretty much all of my personal websites have all disappeared due to non-use. I still have ofgnomesanddwarves.com and jrmurdock.com, but pretty much everything else I’ve let go. I think I still have backups of all that old code.

One thing I failed to mention yesterday, most of the web work I did on the vantive team wasn’t just HTML and JavaScript. A large amount of the heavy work on the back end was from java Servlets. Java had been the next programming language that I’d picked up. Of course in this time HTML had gone through many changes and now there were CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to deal with.

I don’t have a good eye. Even though my eyesight is poor, I don’t have that eye fro style. I’m not a look and feel type of programmer. I’m a dig into the guts and make this thing work type of programmer. I like the nuts and bolts. So even though I’ve learned how to use CSS in my pages, I’m still struggling with how to make pages look good. Sure I can make them do darn near anything you want, but when it comes to looking good, well, I trust other people for that.

After leaving the Vantive team, I started with the group I’m currently with. Yet again it was starting over, but at least I knew some good coding techniques. I now had to learn Cold Fusion. It’s a markup language with some ties back to java and I was able to pick it up quickly enough, but it was different enough that it caused me some stumbling blocks along the way. I started with a few smaller apps that grew into bigger apps and got moved on to some higher profile projects. Through sheer dogged determination and help from fellow developers, I picked up on Cold Fusion, Fusebox, and started getting into jQuery. Frameworks, layouts, styles, and of course back end processing.

The pages I’ve been working on are cutting edge. It’s fun work because it’s not the same cookie cutter work day in and day out. My team is spread across the country so I work from home a lot. I’ve learned how to sit and work at a computer with little to no human interaction throughout a given day. Going through the years in chat rooms and building web pages has allow me to enter into a world where I type code all day and interact via instant messenger with my team. I produce far more code than I used to and I do it in a much more efficient manner. I’d like to think that this is just something that happened one day, but it’s not. This has been a very long journey that, much like my writing, has had many stops and starts. I’m proud of where I am today and hopefully more will come of it in the future.

Where will I end up in the coming years? From what I can tell, the team I’m on now is a safe and secure core group of some great developers. It’s a highly supportive team and I really enjoy working with this bunch. That’s not to say that the teams I was on before didn’t have its share of brilliant people. It was just an environment that I saw was time to move away from. I’m still in touch with many people from my previous jobs and previous teams.

So this evolved into me talking all about my job, what about other techy stuff?

My first cell phone was a dumb phone. You dialed a number. It remembered up to 100 names and numbers. It was the hottest thing on the market. Each year I progressed through a series of cell phones. One of my favorite was my Motorola Razor. It was a great phone for a few years. Combined with my Dell Axim (not sure of the model) was a great device. It held a 2GB SD card and a 2 GB Flash memory. I put on an expanded battery (with larger door) and read many ebooks on that thing over the years I had it. I loved reading on it. I had borrowed a friend’s palm pilot and couldn’t stand the black and white only screen and loved my PDA’s color screen. It wasn’t a touch screen, but I quickly adapted to the stylus.

I knew there was a point when PDAs and Cell Phones would merge. It was only a matter of time. Eventually I got my Motorola Atrix and the PDA was retired. I love my current phone. I also own a Motorola Xoom tablet. Both of these devices combine are a one-two punch that’ll knock out anything else I’ve seen on the market. You can have your iPhone and iPad. I’m very happy having devices that I can do what I need to do.

For work I’ve had a number of laptops. I’ve had Dells and HPs. I’m not finicky with the laptop I use for work, but when it comes to peripherals, I’m picky. I’ve gone through several mice over the years. Each time I get a new one, the old one goes to the home computer. Being that I spend a majority of my time working on my work laptop, I felt I needed a mouse that warranted as much time as I spend at the computer. Price was a sticking point at first until I thought that I’d spent a large amount on mice over the years. Why not spend money on one that was worthy of the amount of time it’d be in my hand. So I picked up the Cyborg M.M.O. 7 gaming mouse. You can read my earlier posts about this mouse, but I’m in love with this time.

I also have my Razer Nostromo. This is a gaming keypad. I also get use out of it, but not as much as I get out of the mouse. I’ve said before that I love each device for different reasons and the longer I’ve had them the more I’m using them. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I really start to put both devices to the test.

Beyond my cell phone, my tablet, my laptop and peripherals, I also have a netbook. I had bought this a couple years before me tablet. It doesn’t get as much use as it could, but I use it for recording and writing when I’m out of the house. It comes in handy and it’s small and portable. At some point I’m sure I’ll pick up a keyboard for the tablet and then I’ll be dangerous.

Just like with work, what does the future hold for me? I’m not sure. I love my toys (as I call them) and I use them just as much for work as I use them for play. I still remember the first hand held games I ever played like my little frogger arcade. I even remember trying to figure out my brother’s Matel hand-held football game. He loved that thing. I even had a hand-held noise maker. My grandma got me that to drive my mom nuts I’m sure. I think I’ll go see if there’s an app for that. I’m sure there is. Heck, I wonder if there’s a speak and spell app. That thing taught me how to spell. Something I still struggle with today. I wonder if it’s the toy’s fault. Hmmm.

I’m off to go use some technology for other means. Like getting some work done. Or maybe some writing. We’ll see. I’ll even use it to download some pictures of ducks.

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!

 

Upon leaving QPE I was thrust into the start of the World Wide Web. It wasn’t anything like we know it today. It was mostly static pages and every once in a while you’d find a guestbook on a page. That would lead to conversation and Web chatting become popular. You could find chat room on any topic. There were also web forums and the same thing, a forum for every topic.

My early websites were poor at best, but I kept playing with HTML and having fun with it. Just like with the programming languages of my youth I picked up HTML and javascript quickly. I played with examples, worked through example code and rearranged things to do something a little different. I had fun with it.

The I started to learn UNIX programming. I wrote little scripts that did things to make my data entry job easier. Then I discovered that I could put programs into the ‘switches’ I was working on. I could automate file transfers. I wrote a unix script that would take a formatted file, clean up the file and strip out the extreanous information and give me just lines that I needed and formatted exactly how I needed them. My script then sent the file to the switch and I had a program set up that would look once an hour for this file and run it doing all my data entry for me.

I had automated my job. Beyond that, I made my script a corrective script. If it found something wrong it would fix what it found. I would up going through what was called teh cur car that listed every NPA NXX (like 619 NPA (Area Code) and 426 (first three digits of your phone number) ) and I ran everything that was supposed to be in my switch and cleaned it up.

Now the job I was originally hired to do at PacBell was not what I would up doing, but I got involved with a team that was supposed to run reports on how ‘correct’ a switch was performing. I had the person in charge of this effort run a check on my switches and my program had cleaned up 90% of the errors in my first switch. I executed the program in my other two switches and presto, I had three clean switches.

I then took the time I should have been typing all this out manually and cleared the rest of the ‘errors’ on my reports until they were 99% clean. That’s when my boss took my switches away because I had time on my hands and gave me three other switches because the person couldn’t handle the work. I wound up with two dual-NPA switches and one triple NPA switch. This was during a time of major area code splits and having more than one area code in your switch was painfully difficult.

So I put my programs to work. Basically it was like going from having three switches to having 7 because of the multiple area codes in each switch. I spent a month doing the same exercise and got the switches to be some of the cleanest in Southern California. I then had free time on my hands again and what do you think I did?

Well, other than put the same code on other people’s switches and doing their work because they were either too lazy or too incompetent to do it, I started building out tools and a web site for our team. This was during a time when there was no money to do anything like this. So all the pages were internal to our team and I had a directory for the switches that was dynamically built with a UNIX script, lookup tools for the cur car (you’d be amazed how much paper was wasted printing this thing out on a monthly basis) and several other tools. My boss, unknown to me, put me in for an award that I won and got to have a nice luncheon with a VP and several other award winners.

Then I saw the writing on the wall. My programs were being looked at. How had I done this? Someone wrote a job that basically automated the work that we were doing. I did what only two other people on my team did. I self-nominated for management. Not to be a supervisor, but to be an individual contributor. I got the nod after much testing and I got picked up for a team that needed a web developer.

I didn’t start out with developing web applications though. Instead I was thrust into the world of Visual Basic. Yes, another programming language I needed to learn. I also had to do some PERL work and learn everything there was to know about ORACLE databases. Oh yeah, I was worried. It was a lot to take on all at once, but I was open to he challenge.

The first thing I did was take on a ticket that was said to be impossible by the two senior developers. Pfft. It took me a while to figure it out ,but I was given time to learn and spread my wings. In a couple weeks I had completed a request that made a lot of people very happy. Relative Dates. Rather than put in an actual, correctly formatted date, the user could put in ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’,’yesterday’,’last month’,etc. I had to account for leap years as I wrote this in the year 2000. But I was off and running with this new code.

Then I eventually came to a project that at first looked to be awesome and fell apart completely a few years later. The product we used was called Vantive. Vantive sold out to PeopleSoft. PeopleSoft sold out to ORACLE. Our product was no longer supported and running on an unsupported platform. So we started building a web front end during all these issues. I built several tools to look up information, make updates, enforce the myraid of business rules. We even completed moving a couple groups off the FAT client and onto the web client. They loved what we’d done, but already another system came into play.

PacBell had been bought by SBC. This was when I moved to the Vantive team. SBC bought AT&T (not the other way around) and SBC wanted to use AT&T’s ticketing system. Again I saw the writing on the wall. I raised my hand, and again I moved away from a team shortly before it was devastated.

More to come tomorrow!

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!

I left off yesterday at the end of my sophomore year in high school. My junior year saw me in front of an Apple ][e and the TRS80 more times than I care to count. I played games like Wizardy, Shadowkeep, Dungeons of Dagoroth, and I kept playing MUDs. I also started playing D&D and we worked up our own character roller for D&D and a separate on for MERP (Middle Earth Roll Playing).

I moved to Minneapolis my Senior year in high school. I kept going with the Apple and did some Pascal programming. It took me a while to go from programming with line numbers to programming without line numbers in a compiled language, but I wanted to learn more advanced programming so I could get into the gaming business.

It was that year I rediscovered my love of electronics during my physics class. I learned all about electronics and it just clicked. Much like programming it was something that just came to me as easy as anything else. The urge to tear things apart came back with a fury and I went to updating my Apple ][e. I also started working on developing programs for my father that he used for doing his billing at his work. They were easy, they were simple, I had a blast writing them.

But hardware took over when I joined the Navy. Computers and programming took a back seat and I was up to my elbows in hardware. In the Navy I studied electronics and excelled in my class even beyond my own expectations.

The instructor liked to challenge me because I was they type that could troubleshoot a problem in a matter of minutes. I’d see the symptom, and either jump straight to the problem or I’d half step through the process so quickly that I’d have the problem identified in five minutes or less. Only two tests took me longer. One was the final examination that was supposed to take an entire day and I completed it in around one hour. The other was a little different.

The problem started out looking like a standard issue. I half stepped, half stepped again and the symptoms changed. I started over. I half stepped and the problem was in a completely different location. I went from looking in one system, to looking in a totally different section. The instructor stood and watched me hunt and peck and get lost. Until I smelled something that just wasn’t right. That distinct smell of burnt electronics. I shut down the power to the system and started looking for smoke. I found that 4 of seven cards had been totally fried. Black marks all over. I pulled them all and to simulate a problem with the system the instructor would put a wire between two pins connecting them together. Well, what he managed to do was connect a 5Volt pin to ground. If you don’t know what that means, it means electricity, taking the most direct route, was going straight to ground with no resistance. Sure it gave me the initial symptoms that instructor wanted me to see, but with no resistance the shielding on the wire melted through and started connecting other pins along that same wire. This caused the wire to connect everything together and have stray voltage running in places it shouldn’t go.

So as I described, the problem started jumping around and some pins from one card that are connected to pins on another card all started to heat up and burn out components and caused even more issues. In about 10 minutes the system was down. Hard. It was a great problem to try and chase, but sadly we took down a multi-million dollar machine in the process.

After my Navy time I spent some time away from technology. Not by choice, but due to finances. The world moved on and I got left behind for a while.

I started to catch up after I went to ITT Tech. Again I went for electronics. I knew computers and the classes were quite easy. I wound up at Qualcomm Personal Electronics. I wound up working for a year repairing cell phones. Of course I wasn’t content just repairing phones. My hacking and programming background came back with a vengeance. I started hacking into the bios of the phone. I did this because I had a phone that I couldn’t unlock. There was a PIN on the phone and I wanted in.

I loaded the software to look at the bios and took a known good phone set a PIN with 4 numbers all the same. Then I started looking through endless lines of HEX code looking for the four matching numbers. I found what I thought was the correct memory location on the good phone, then looked in the same location on the bad phone. Presto, I didn’t have to do anything to fix the phone other than remove the PIN access code. This location moved in subsequent versions of the code, I would find it, and I kept notes of where it was with each software version. You’d be surprised how many phones got returned with PINs on them.

This did me some good when a VP of Qualcomm locked himself out of his phone. He’d been told the only way to get his phone back without the PIN was to remove a chip that basically cleared the memory of the phone. The Director came in and offered $100 dollars to anyone who could unlock the phone. Pfft, I sad I’d do it and have it back to him in less than five minutes. He said he’d make it $200 if I was able to do it that quickly.

I hooked up the phone, got the software version, looked through the BIOS, wrote down the HEX PIN, converted it to ASCII, and BAM, collected $200 for 2 minutes of work and got the rest of the day off with pay. It was the high point of my career at QPE, though I don’t regret any of my time there.

Toward the end of my time I discovered a little booklet of four or five pages entitled HTML 1.0. I’d seen alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die.die and other usenet groups. They were difficult to circumvent and rather annoying. Then I found myself on WBS, Geocities, and other create your own website for free. Soon I found myself working for Pacific Bell and things really took a change. We’ll go more into that tomorrow!

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!

I’m a self professed geek. I’ve loved technology for years. Hell, decades. I remember the day my step-father brought home pong. Yes, the original pong that you hooked up to the back of your television. I think I was 7 or 8 at the time. Oh, sure. I’d played TANK and Pong at the bars in town (yes, when I was a kid it was fine for anyone to go into a bar) and I’d played my share of pinball, but having something at home I didn’t need to feed quarters on a continual basis, that was mind blowing.

Of course we progressed to Atari when it came out and could only afford a handful of games. We still made the most of it and loved playing with the pixelated graphics. The controls were clunky, but we still had fun with it.

At some point I picked up a screw driver (I think I might have been 10) and opened up the old Pong game. We hadn’t played it in a long while so I did see the harm. I was fascinated by the internal workings of the device. The resistors, capacitors, circuit boards, chips. I didn’t know what any of it was, what it did, or how it worked, but I was hooked to technology as soon as I cracked open that case.

My one friend at that time was also big into tearing things apart. Someone had left an old television by the side of the road near his house so we tore it open and looked inside. Vacuum tubes! Dozens of them. We found one that looked black and burnt out like a light bulb would burn out. We pulled it and rode our bikes to the drug store in town. It was a 10 mile trip (one way). We spent the better part of an hour digging through tubes in the used tube bin looking for the right one. When we thought we’d found a match, we tested it (it was good) and rode back to try it out. With the replacement of that one tube the TV was back in working order. We were allowed to drag the behemoth into his mother’s living room and plug it in. We hooked up rabbit ears and presto! A working television.

This was only the start of what was to become a life-long obsession for my friend. For me, I had other interests and desires. I continued to play video games as much as humanly possible. I knew what lay inside of a television, I wanted to know what was inside one of the video games. But I never got the chance to dig inside one.

When I moved away to live with my dad I was 13. Being a kid and having trouble dragging me away from the television, my dad handed me the programming manual for his brand new TRS-80. “These things are going to change the world. Have fun with it, just don’t break it.” I spent the rest of the day absorbed in writing code.

10 print ‘hello’

20 goto 10

 

And of course that was only a beginning. I went through the entire book entering in each and every program. Something in my mind clicked that day. My dad came back several hours later to see me still sitting there on the computer. He asked me what I’d been up to.

I’d written every program and saved them to tape (yes, like a cassette tape) and I’d written a menu that would load which ever program you selected from the menu. I even corrected the errors in the book and made notes on what was wrong with their code. Needless to say my father was stunned.

I took Apple Basic my 10th grade year. It was nearly the same as TRS-80 basic and I had no difficulty with the class. The instructor would teach class, I would raise my hand often enough that he’d get annoyed with me, and we’d move on. The teacher’s biggest thing with code was that it had to be tight. He explained that you needed to do as much work as possible with your code with the fewest possible lines and comments, comments, comments. The shorter the code, the better.

After a couple weeks we got our first lab assignment. We had a week to complete the tasks. I finished in about 15 minuets and while the teachers was out of the classroom, I helped the other kids in the class who seemed to be struggling. I got in trouble when the teacher got back because he thought I was goofing around. He made me demo my program (which I had enhanced and gone way beyond what he was looking for). He didn’t like me much and pushed me hard, but he also gave me a lot of freedom because I was so helpful in class.

During his class I discovered the modem. A 1200 baud modem. It was my link to the outside world. I discovered BBS (Bulletin Board System) and read more about Apple programming than the teacher was teaching us. He wasn’t teaching fast enough for me. It drove me nuts. So I went seeking more the only way I knew how. There wasn’t anything in the library, so I went online.

When it came time for the final project, I had a perfect score in the class. The teacher said he never gave out anything better than an A and that was the best we could hope for. He did not believe in A+ work. It just wasn’t possible. No one had ever gotten an A+ from him. That’s just how it was.

Oh, a challenge.

We had 3 weeks to complete one of the four final projects. Needless to say that in 2 days I had written all four programs, added a menu to load the program of your choice, and then I did what would drive him nuts. Apple had POKE and PEEK commands. One POKE command if set as line 1 would hide the entire listing of your program. So my program looked something like this

0 REM the following line hides the program

1 POKE 214,255

Oh, he didn’t like that much at all. Yes, I loaded my program into the computer. Yes, it ran all four final projects off a menu tree. Yes, my program was commented and contained exactly two lines.

“Show me your code or you fail.”

“That is my code. Based on your instructions, the less lines of code, the higher your grade.”

“But this doesn’t do anything.”

“It’s doing everything laid out in the final instructions.”

“I can’t grade this because I can’t see your code.”

We went round and round for a while. I told him that if he couldn’t list out my code, then I deserved an A+ because it was the shortest code that did all the required work. If he could figure out what I did, then he could give me an A. If he could not, I earned an A+ for the class. He grumbled, took my disk, and left the classroom. I didn’t get my disk back for a week. I spent my time helping my classmates, and I discovered a M.U.D (Multi-User-Dungeon) based out of Minneapolis. I also discovered other Apple games.

After the week went by he took me to the teacher’s lounge so we could have a private discussion. He admitted defeat and asked me what I did. I showed him the POKE command list I’d pulled from the BBS. I then showed him the PEEK command to undo what I’d done and listed out my program. I also printed it out for him. He was impressed with the code, but he was also impressed that I’d stumped him. He begrudgingly gave me that A+.

This is just the start of how I got to where I am today. There will be more tomorrow.

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!

Ever since our trip to Palm Desert the arid conditions from there leading back to here has had a dramatic effect on my nose. Normally I’m a sneezy, slobbery mess. Instead my nose is so dry I’ve had a couple nose bleeds and it’s itchy and painful at times. It’s really quite a bother.

Aside from that, everything is going great. Well, one of the dogs has Kennel Cough. Other than THAT, everything is going great.

We’re in full vacation swing now. My favorite daughter has something planned for pretty much each and every day left of her summer vacation. That leads us up to Volleyball tryouts and then practice begins before school starts.

Our AC went out. Not the AC unit but the blower on the central system. Had a guy come and he’s working on that while I’m eating my lunch. He also fixed the water dispenser/ice maker on the fridge. It wasn’t getting any water or making any ice. That will all change now and we can stop going through bottled water like it’s going out of style. Hopefully he’ll have the blower fixed in short order as well. Fortunately we had it for the hottest days and it’s cooler and breezier today.

I got some more writing done yesterday. I still need to knock out a lot of words before I’ll be caught up to where I’d like to be. It’s so great to look at my goal and see that I’m only 150,000 away from hitting it. I still need to figure out what prize I’m going to give myself when I hit that eventual goal. I’ll keep you posted on that.

The Millican and I played some online poker again. The wife and my favorite daughter were getting their hair done so he and I hit the computers and tried to outdo one another. Remember, it’s only play money. I’m currently at around $140K and he’s up around $150K. It’s a battle! Who can get to a million first! We’ll just have to wait and see.

My writing partner is still on holiday. The slacker. I think he gets back on the 23rd. I leave on the 26th. So I need to make sure I have my action pack episode recorded and ready to go. Then I need to pester Scott Roche to get his latest episode so I can assemble it all next week and Mr. Plestd can get it uploaded for the 1st. That will put us back on track. It’ll be nice to have that project back where it belongs.

I recently submitted a story to Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (ASIM). I love their submission process. You send them a story as an attached RTF via email (formatted to their liking) and they reply back with a number. That number you then take to their website and you see where you fall in the queue. You can follow your stories progress and see how it advances. They’re usually very fast with turn around time. Hopefully this latest story will take a bit longer to return to me. This would be a great market to break into. It’s not the big time, but for short stories, it’s damn close.

There is a lot to do, food to eat, ducks to download pictures of, work to get back to.

Until Tomorrow!

WOO WOO!