Daybook

Descriptions of what I did recently; what most people think of when they imagine a “diary entry.”

Perversity Dust

The perversity fairies are flitting about the last few days, scattering perversity dust in odd places. We noticed the air conditioner flaking out at 3:30PM on Friday. By the time we called the HVAC place that services it, we were on the list for bright and early…Monday. No emergency, and it actually still works. However, the drain port in the condensate tray is blocked, and the tray is overflowing into the rest of the air handler. So we turned it off, and it will have a couple of days for everything to dry out.

Air conditioners always go paws-up late Friday afternoon. It’s going to get hot in here later on, barring a nice juicy thunderstorm. (Possible, but unlikely with the perversity fairies anywhere in the vicinity.) I may have to do something radical like…go shopping.

Shopping. I need a smartphone, and have been ducking the decision for months. Of all the units I’ve researched, my favorite so far has been the Droid 2 which, alas, just went off the market in favor of the Droid 3, which is apparently on the market but hasn’t yet made its way out into the provinces. I’ve gone so far in my smartphone research as to make precisely dimensioned cardboard cutouts of the major contenders to see whether they’ll fit in my pockets. There’s evidently a format conflict in men’s shirts: All my pockets are 4:3, and the damned phones are 16:9.

Shopping for socks is easier. But I already have a drawer full of socks.

I ordered a quiet, lower-power supply for the main tower here last week. NewEgg had it on my doorstep in three days, as usual. The “We shipped it!” email never arrived, and I assumed it went out with the spam. This happens now and then, and I’ve learned to live with it. So of course, yesterday evening, three days after the arrival of the supply and a full day after I installed it, I got the message telling me that the order would be shipped soon, and would arrive three days ago. Yup. Gotcha. Knew that. Thanks for sharing. This batch of perversity dust must have had some thiotimoline in it.

The supply worked very well, by the way. Every time I come into my office here, I feel a twinge of panic because I can’t hear the machine. Damn. Did they drop power to the house again? But no: A product worked better than advertised, and I still can’t internalize my good fortune. Quick, Murphy: the Flit!

Ten Gentle Opportunities and Virtual Assistants

Aug 23rd, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

I’ve been getting notes from all corners the last few days about a $200 virtual DJ program that has been been given her own show on radio station KROV in San Antonio. The program is actually an application of a more general “virtual assistant” product from Guile 3D Studios. DJ Denise goes on the air at KROV tomorrow, from 1 PM to 4 PM. You can listen over the Web; I intend to.

Most of the horsepower in creating Denise seems to have gone into rendering her lip gloss, which is odd for something used as a broadcast audio DJ. I’m more interested in whatever AI lies behind the pouty face, though early indications are that she has more lip gloss than AI. It’s an issue of special interest now, because I’m making slow but steady progress on a near-future SF novel that explores (among other and stranger things) the border between real AI and “fake” AI, a category that goes back to the ELIZA program at MIT in 1966. Ten Gentle Opportunities contains both. A cheap coffee maker contains an animated barista that talks a lot and understands little. A model-year 2020 Mazda RX9 has an annoying dashboard cartoon that understands more deeply but very narrowly. Both handle natural language well, and people are easily fooled into thinking that smooth natural language processing implies true intelligence.

I don’t think that’s true, as the more advanced AIs in the story demonstrate. One of them is Pyxis (Latin for “compass”) a high-end commercial product sold at a five-figure price as an executive assistant. Brandon Romero, an executive trying to manage a completely automated AI-controlled copier factory, has his own copy of Pyxis. (I posted a glimpse of the copier factory and its AI controller Simple Simon in my June 26, 2011 entry.) Far from being a geek-dream sex kitten, Pyxis is obedient without being especially pleasant. Worse, she holds her boss to his word, to the point where he begins to wonder who’s working for whom.

Romero dislikes having human underlings, but as he soon comes to understand, AI staff might be described the way Jerry Pournelle once described the Bomarc as the Civil Service missile: “They don’t work, and you can’t fire them.”

Pyxis saw him approaching his office door, and Brandon heard the lock bolts snap back. The coffee machine on the teak credenza was hot and full, and the air was rich with the scent of dark roast and Irish Crème. The human interns always scattered magazines on the glass coffee table against his preferences; the day when paper magazines became extinct could not come too soon. One of those interns had recently left a stuffed moose on the credenza. This was at the direction of HR, which (as he later discovered after much annoyance) wanted to “soften the human side of his persona.” The ugly abstract art shotgunned at the eggshell walls was bad enough. God forbid he should meet with a Chinese parts supplier without his stuffed moose.

Brandon sat down at his teak desk, its oiled vastness divided into the rigorously rectangular regions he maintained at all times, including a small square for coffee and another for mints: charts, summaries, two tappers full of notes and test-run videos and model animations, all at his fingertips. Defining the far sides of his desk were three brushed-stainless OLED panels currently animated with some slow-flowing pearlescent liquid that looked like shampoo. Far too soon, the triptych would spring to life with more views of this lunatic’s kingdom than any one man could possible follow.

Pyxis saw him sit down, and a window in the panel to his right burst into existence with her scowling image. “Twenty-six messages vetted and queued, five urgent.”

“Later.” If it wasn’t from that ass-covering coward Amirault, he didn’t want to hear it. Brandon set his primary tapper down in its vacant rectangle on the desk, and pulled a few loose papers from his briefcase. Like everything else, each had an appropriate place, and he scanned the piles that had been accumulating for most of a week, dropping a sheet here and a sheet there. The stapled set describing Zircon’s looming Retirement Incentive Program (was that a hint?) needed to go somewhere. A new pile? For corporate suicide notes? Brandon scanned the desktop almost automatically, but there was only one empty rectangular region left.

He stared at the tidy strip of oiled teak and felt himself tighten inside. Not big enough for anything except bad memories-but like those infuriating little sliding-square plastic puzzles, he had never hit upon an arrangement that would eliminate it.

“Here it is, Mr. Romero.” A new window popped into view, with a high-res scan of the framed photo that had stood in that teak rectangle for many years: Carolyn in a white cotton V-neck sundress out in her garden, holding a cardboard sign reading, “Greek Fire.” To a newly minted second lieutenant on the ground after Desert Storm, it meant that Carolyn Helena Ankoris was waiting impatiently for him to come home and marry her. To Major Brandon Louis Romero, US Army, Retired, it meant only failure.

“I didn’t ask you to open that.”

“You were staring at the space where the photo had been.” Building 800 was as full of electronic eyes as it was empty of human beings. Pyxis not only knew where he was at all times, she knew where he was looking.

His AI assistant was unfailingly obedient, but Brandon had set her obsequiousness parameter to zero. What was the point of having a virtual suckup? It wasn’t like the physical world suffered a flunkie shortage. “Your job isn’t to read my mind.”

Pyxis folded her arms implacably. “My job is to anticipate your needs and help you stay productive. We have a line start in a little over an hour. You have a lot to do. Mr. Amirault asked you to copy him on a call to…”

“Ok.” Brandon tossed back the last of his Red Hen coffee, and flashed with sad longing to his Army B4 training, when he had aimed an M16A4 at line-drawn enemies printed on sheets of cardboard, and nailed every damned one through the heart. “Get me Simple Simon.”

Sixteen Inches in Seven Books

Aug 16th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

Space is getting tight in here again, and books are getting tossed on top of other books. It’s long past time to thin the ranks a little–both on the shelves and in the closet–and in standing in front of the computer section here it occurred to me that if I were attempting to free up shelf-inches I should probably go after the biggest spines first.

And so I did. After no more than five minutes, I freed up sixteen inches of shelf space–in seven books. None of these are essential. I have other, much newer books on HTML and GNOME, and given that I haven’t written a line of Perl in five years or more, one Perl book (out of two) is plenty. There is no longer a single instance of Windows 2000 here beyond a VM, so monster Win2K tomes are doing nothing but crowding out other, more useful things from my shelves.

Speaking of which: The top two titles date back to the mid-1990s, and illustrate the “spine wars” raging at the time among computer book publishers. If your books were all three inches thick, there would be fewer shelf-inches in the bookstores for your competitors, so we all wanted to make ours three inches thick. (Sybex was a champ at that, as you can see.) Coriolis published a few thick books, the thickest of which was Michael Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book, but compared to the other presses we were pikers. Huge spines tended to crack and spill pages in regular use, as we discovered after Michael’s book was out there for awhile. Page count was not always in proportion to spine width, either. Mastering HTML 4.0 was barely 1,000 pages long. The Coriolis HTML Black Book by Steve Holzner (2000) was 1,200 pages long, and only 1 5/8″ thick. That’s 200 more pages in one fewer inch. The difference was thicker, pulpier paper.

The Microsoft Press book at the bottom is a sort of circus freak and may never be equalled in the spine wars: It’s 1,800 pages long and a full 3″ thick. It’s not a bad book, but I’ve wondered here before it it was mostly a stunt.

Anyway. I’ve already culled an additional six or seven books, but I doubt I will ever have a stack equalling the one shown above. Ahh, computer book publishing in the spine-swellin’ 90s–what a ride that was!

Old Faceful

Aug 15th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

Carol bought a new water bottle the other day. She put some juice in it for our shopping wander this morning, and we set out, with the bottle in the cupholder in the front console. We spent some time at Best Buy, shopping for smartphones, all the while the August sun sweltered down upon the 4Runner. When we got back forty minutes later, the car was an oven. The juice was warm but it was still fluids, and necessary in our land of 20%-or-less humidity. She grabbed the bottle, flipped up the little straw thingie in the lid…

…and got a face full of juice.

On the surface, the design would seem like a good one: With the straw up there’s a vent port that lets air in while you draw fluids out. With the straw down the bottle is sealed, and won’t spill fluids if it’s not dead vertical. However, if you leave the bottle in a hot car, the air above the juice expands, and evidently the pivot mechanism in the lid opens the path to the straw just before it opens the vent port. Whooosh!

Science lesson learned. The bottle is going into the recycle bin, and we’re back to looking for something similar with a slightly better awareness of basic physics.

Our Reading At Who Else! Books

Aug 14th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

As I mentioned in my entry for August 10, 2011, Jim Strickland and I landed a reading/signing slot yesterday afternoon at the wonderfully quirky Who Else! Books at The Broadway Book Mall in Denver. I wasn’t sure what to expect; but let’s call that needless anxiety. It was all good: Who Else! Books owners Nina (pronounced Nye-Nah, not Nee-Nah) and Ron Else were wonderful, and had the coffee machine running and a table set up for us long before we got there. How many people would show was the great mystery. I was expecting six or seven–and by my count, we got 19. That was actually a lot of people for a smallish space filled with that many books, especially on a hot Saturday afternoon in the summer.

We followed Mark Stevens, a local writer of what I might characterize as eco-mysteries set in western Colorado. Mark has two well-regarded novels in print from People’s Press, and I think most of the people who attended stopped by to hear him. However, almost no one left when he was finished. Our friend Eric Bowersox was there, as was our fellow workshopper Sean Eret from Taos Toolbox 2011. Sean, who had broken his ankle shortly before the workshop began and was wheelchair-bound the whole two weeks, was on a walking crutch yesterday and is getting around pretty well.

I did a brief intro to the Drumlins World concept, and then Jim and I both did short readings from Drumlin Circus and On Gossamer Wings. After the readings we took questions. One gentleman in the first row looked familiar, and asked some excellent questions. It was a hard virtual whack to the side of the head to realize that this was Ed Bryant. I had met and spoken with Ed at some length back at LACon in 1984, but as I suggested (and he confirmed) I’d had more hair then, and he less.

A few rows back was Eytan Kollin, author (with his brother Dani) of The Unincorporated Man and its two sequels, The Unincorporated War and The Unincorporated Woman. Eytan asked whether 800 people (the number cast away on the Drumlins World) represented enough genetic diversity to survive long-term. I’d fretted over that issue, and added another thousand or so frozen embryos to bring it up closer to 2,000 genetically distinct individuals. Eytan suggested (and there’s research to back him up) that the number is closer to 10,000–but that’s a big starship! (I’ll freely admit that I fudged a little there, though I’ve seen some speculation that fewer than 5,000 individuals were the forebears of nearly all of modern humanity.)

So overall it was a very sharp crowd. We sold some books, we had a lot of superb conversation, and I dropped $80 on various titles at the store, much but not all of it SF. The photo above is toward the end of the event, after most people had left the store. L-R: Ed Bryant, Jim Strickland, Eric Bowersox, and Ron Else.

Overall a fine time, and very heartening to see a small indie bookstore almost literally packed to the walls with people. I came home with a head full of ideas for another short novel called Drumlin Strongbox, and those notes still need to be taken. Tomorrow fersure.

Jeff & Jim at Who Else! Books in Denver

Aug 10th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

11 comments

Carol and I just got back from a short trip to the mountains near San Isabel, Colorado, so we’re a little bit beat and (especially Carol) just a little bit sunburned. We rented a cabin at Aspen Acres campground, and walked the dogs all the way around Lake San Isabel. Not much else got done there, which was the whole point. Some new scenes from Ten Gentle Opportunities occurred to me, and that’s as far as the doing went.

But I do want to remind my Denver metro-area readers that Jim Strickland and I will be at Who Else! Books this coming Saturday, August 13, to talk about and read from our double novel Drumlin Circus / On Gossamer Wings. We’re slotted at 3 PM. The bookstore is at 200 S. Broadway, Denver 80209.

I’ve not been to the Broadway Book Mall before, so I may be up there a little earlier than that to poke around. I’m hoping to find some evidence that independent bookstores are on the rise again, after two decades of deepening eclipse. I remember the first time I ever saw a Borders, when Carol and I visited Rochester NY in 1991. I recall thinking: This is going to put a huge dent in the indie bookselling business, and I was right. What I couldn’t guess in 1991 was that the Internet was eventually going to put a huge dent in Borders–like, right between the eyes.

The Internet can do a lot. It can’t do everything. Something will replace Borders. Sooner or later we’ll find out what.

Anyway. I like bookstores. Always have, always will. Most that were in Colorado Springs when we arrived in 2003 are now gone. We have to go to Denver for certain things like Elfa shelving, and it’s starting to look like we’ll have to go there for books as well. I’ll be going on Saturday with my usual hunger for serendipity, and if you’re in the area see if you can stop by.

The Mystery Hi-Fi AM Tuner and Amp

Aug 4th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

Here’s a challenge for some of my older readers, particularly those who were in the hi-fi hobby in the 1960s. While looking for the photo of Carol’s banner mentioned in my entry for July 31st, I ran across a blurry photo of my basement office in 1975, including the portion shown at left. The unit on the top of the pile is definitely a Heathkit FM-4 monaural FM tuner. I had it for quite a few years after 1975, and may still have the manual somewhere. I don’t clearly remember the identity of the other two. The middle item is an interesting one: an AM-only hi-fi tuner. I dumped both the AM tuner and the stereo amp on the bottom shortly after I married Carol and bought a Realistic STA-64 AM/FM stereo amp unit for Christmas 1976. Bogglingly (but why dump it if it works well?) the Realistic is still our main stereo here.

AM hi-fi tuners are something of an oddity, and unless I misrecall, the unit shown above had very good sound for the bass-deprived, static-enhanced AM pop radio signals we all listened to in the 1960s. I think it’s an AJ-21, the AM partner to the Heath AJ-31 FM tuner. The color scheme is about right, including the red Heathkit logo on the lower-left edge of the front panel. The knobs look wrong, but it’s as close as I’ve come in scanning Heathkit photos on Google Images.

As for the stereo amp, I have utterly no clue. I’m almost certain it wasn’t a Heathkit. Any ideas?

The system worked very well as a sort of college-kid junker “stereo” (both tuners were purely mono) from 1971 or so to 1976. I am not an audiophile and don’t have an especially good ear, so equipment like that may have been precisely what I needed at the time, as it was all hamfest-cheap. I don’t need a tube stereo amp anymore (I built my own back in 2005) but it would be interesting to see what the two Heath tuners would do with it.

For All That Will Be, Yes!

Jul 31st, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

Carol and I met 42 years ago this evening. I’ve told the story before, and the backstory. The oldest known photo of the two of us together is here, not quite a month after we met. I won’t go on at length this evening, but I will mention that in 1974, just before she went away to grad school, Carol made me a banner with the inscription, “For all that has been, Thank you. For all that will be, Yes.”

I went up to her a little while ago and said the same thing to her. Funny how it sounds just as good now (and is just as true!) as it was way back in 1974.

Last Night Was a Gas

Jul 27th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

8 comments

Yes, last night was a gas. (Do people still say that?) It really was. And I didn’t much enjoy it.

Here’s the story: It was 6:45 PM. We were done with dinner, dishes washed, everything put away. I was back in my office and had begun to scan Facebook. I heard a noise. It sounded like one of the pop-up sprinkler risers when you first turn it on and water is driving the air out: A steady hiss, but loud. Anomalously loud; almost an embryonic roar. I was inside. The risers are all outside. I heard it very clearly. And so I went out the front door to take a look.

The roar was startling–at least on our quiet street, where almost any loud noise is startling. It was coming from the lowest level of the landscaping terraces to the south of our front door, right below my office windows, where the control box and pipes for the sprinkler system are located.

Something obviously broke somewhere. But where was the spraying water? I picked my way around the terraces and hopped down to the lowest level where the pipes were–and the reek of ethyl mercaptan almost knocked me over. The roar was coming from the street feed riser pipe where it met the gas meter. I passed my hand along the riser pipe and felt a strong jet of what suggested compressed air coming from the pipe joint at the meter. It took a moment for the truth to hit me: methane was roaring out of our gas feed at 30 PSI. I hadn’t smelled it because the wind was from the north and the gas meter is near the south end of the house.

The pipe looked as though someone had tried to cut it with a knife. It was still attached to the meter coupling but the metal had opened up where the threads began, to leave a gap at least 3/8″ wide. I only gave myself a second to think WTF? Then I remembered my father’s lessons. He worked for the Chicago natural gas utility his entire career, as an industrial engineer. He knew methane all the way down. He enjoyed ridiculing the vague statements in my kid astronomy books describing Jupiter’s atmosphere as consisting of “poisonous ammonia and methane gas.” Methane gas isn’t poisonous the way ammonia or even carbon monoxide is. However–it burns. That’s its job. Get enough of it in one place, and it blows up.

Carol had followed me out the door when I told her I thought the sprinkler system had erupted again. I called up from the terrace that we had a gas leak, a huge big honking might-as-well-be-an-open-pipe gas leak. I climbed back up the terrace walls in a helluva hurry, and while she threw leashes on the dogs I grabbed the cordless and dialed 911.

The call itself took maybe thirty seconds, and the operator handled it with an icy coolness that I greatly admire. She got the address and called the fire department. Then she told us to make sure no one was still in the house, and then move upwind of the leak by 300 feet.

We’re only a few blocks from the Farthing fire station. The truck was pulling up three minutes later. The firemen took one look at the leak (which you could hear over the rumble of the fire truck’s engine, egad) and started unrolling hoses over to the hydrant. That was a little unnerving, but one came over and explained: The pipe break was on the street side of the main, so flipping the shutoff valve on the gas meter would do nothing. They had already called for another truck with more specific equipment, but in the meantime they wanted hoses at ready in case the methane ignited.

We stood and watched. A second truck came by about ten minutes later, followed by a truck from the gas utility. They carefully cut the pipe (I couldn’t see precisely how it was done) and put a cap on it. They went through the house and opened all the windows. The fire trucks left soon after, but the utility techs worked until almost 11:00PM digging under the riser pipe to find the street feed. The riser has to be replaced, so there will be more digging. In the meantime, they ran a stiff coiled yellow plastic gas hose from the street side of our next-door neighbor’s gas meter.

So what happened? The utility guys had seen it before: The ground under the gas meter has been settling ever since we built the house eight years ago, pulling the natural gas riser pipe down with it. The gas meter was off-level, and has been for years. I never gave it much thought. The riser pipe pulled down on the gas meter until stresses on the riser pipe caused it to break at its thinnnest point, the threads.

We’ve had subsidence problems here for years. So not only did the settling destroy one sidewalk (which was replaced) and then mangled my driveway, it almost blew the place up. There’s a lesson here: If your gas meter isn’t level, the riser pipe may be pulling it down as the soil settles. If the riser is pulled downward enough, the pipe will crack. I’m a little amazed that the gas utility hasn’t publicized this problem more broadly.

Go take a look at your gas meter. If it’s cockeyed, the riser may be pulling one side of it down–and that leads to a species of fun you do not want to have!

Taos Toolbox 2011, Part 2

Jul 26th, 2011

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Jim And Nan Coffee 500 Wide.jpg

(Part 1 here.) The Snow Bear Inn is really a set of ski condos only a quarter mile from one of the Taos Ski Valley lifts. The units are complete apartments including kitchens, some with single bedrooms, some with two. Jim Strickland and I shared a two-bedroom suite. The kitchen was well-equipped; indeed, far better equipped than we needed. It had a separate wine refrigerator, coffee grinder, four-slot toaster, blender, crockpot, and probably a few other things on the high shelf that we never poked at. Food was provided in the common room for tinker-it-up breakfasts and lunches. Four dinners a week were catered in by a local woman who really knew her stuff.

Jim and I quickly fell into a daily routine: I’d be up at 6, showered by 6:15, and shoveling grounds into the coffee maker by 6:30. Jim got up about then, and I’d scramble two eggs for each of us. By 7:30 we were already hard at work unless someone stopped by for coffee, as Nancy Kress did more than once. (See above.) But even with morning visitors, by 8:30 both of us were reading mail and hammering out notes on the manuscripts up for critique later that day.

By 10:00 we were gathered around the conference table in the common area downstairs, and if anybody wasn’t there by precisely 10, Walter would lean out the door and give a blast on the Air Horn of Summoning. This happened rarely; mostly we were all present and ready to roar by 9:45. On most days work began with a lecture by Nancy, followed by a short break and then either two or three stories for critique. Lunch happened as time allowed, often before the third critique but always limited to thirty minutes. The class day wrapped up with a lecture from Walter. At that point, typically between two and three PM, we would shift into edit mode, and begin work on the following day’s critiques and our own second-week submissions. Some worked in the common room. Most of us went back to our own rooms. (Alan Smale preferred to sit with his laptop on a folding chair between the buildings.)

I quickly fell back into college-student mode, taking notes on a quad pad in my frenetic block printing, precisely as I did at DePaul in 1974. By Tuesday July 12 we were definitely into drink-from-the-firehose mode, critiquing first-wave submissions (distributed via email before the workshop began) that ran as long as 11,000 words. Toward midweek we were also working hard on our second-week submissions, which nominally demonstrated what we’d learned in the first few days.

Peter Ed After Dinner.jpg

Dinner was catered in at 6PM every day but Friday. While not exotic, the fare was beautifully prepared, and included barbecued ribs, coconut shrimp, broiled tilapia, grilled steaks, baked chicken breast, home-made potato & egg salad, and lots of other things I may have been too tapped-out mentally to recall. There was always good conversation over dinner (see above: Peter Charron and Ed Rosick) but by 6:45 most of us to our scattered laptops went, continuing work for the following day. I sometimes kept hammering until 8 or 8:30. At that point I was toast and generally gave Carol a call before falling exhausted into bed. There was a little late-night fellowship over bottles of wine down in the common room, but it all happened long after my bedtime.

Some people managed to get the 20-odd miles down the valley to Taos for occasional shopping or touristing, but my old bones preferred to stay put and rest while rest was possible. The impression I want to give here is that this was boggling hard work, and unlike my Clarion experience back in 1973, there was almost no clowning around.

My camera doesn’t do a great job with indoor shots. For a good collection of captured moments from the workshop, see Christie Yant’s Flicker album.

Next: How critiquing worked.