Blog – Page 73 – Robot Claw

Pictures From Yesteryear

August 12, 2012

These past few days Bernard’s been scanning in some old photos. Here are a selection, in approximate chronological order…

Mum and Dad in 197X. I’m guessing Dad’s goal on that day was to look as much like Grinderman-era Nick Cave as he possibly good, and he succeeds well. A beautiful photo of our parents!

Taken at our home at the time, a flat in Jamieson street in Gateshead. Obviously that day our family had plans to either go for an alpine hike or spend the afternoon at a Bavarian beer festival. I appear female 🙂

Part of an audition for an ad campaign for a popular brand of soda. Ultimately we were not chosen. One of the selector’s comments said “The youngest child has a suspiciously large head”.

Here we are riding a horse, with dad watching. This would have been before 1975. The horses name was ‘Horsehorse’ according to my brother, but I seem to recall calling him ‘Hecatonchires’.

Probably about 1978 or 1979. In those days school photos would also include brothers and sisters, if they went to the same school. I’ve got no jokes with regards to this shot; I actually think it’s pretty good. At that time Dad was still cutting our hair 🙂

In Canberra in the late 1970s. This remains the only time my brother has ever seen snow, and was (obviously) the first and only time before I came to the USA. My shoes look gargantuan, and I’m using them to ski-without-ski’s. Even then I was an exceptional athlete.

Back in the 1980s yellow was my favourite colour. Given a choice, it was always yellow for me, including a yellow Sharp tape deck. In time this love of yellow worked it’s way into my clothes, and the above shot is perhaps the quintessential example. This was taken at my Dad’s 50th birthday in 1985, and is representative of what I chose to wear when told to ‘dress up’. Have you ever seen a yellower 13 year old?

Unquestionably the worst family photo ever taken. So bad in fact, that it is sublime in it’s beauty. There’s just so much that jumps out and punches the viewer in the face:
– My coat (which was woolen, and which I once wore to a school dance)
– My hair & glasses (I’m surprised I wasn’t instantly punched in the face every day when I got to school)
– Bernard’s tie & faux tweed coat
– Mum’s shirt & hair (she looks like the lead singer of REO Speedwagon)
– The composition (dad’s head is growing out of mine and he looks hydrocephalic)
And I could go on. This abysmal shot was taken in the late 1980s.

Taken in 1992 by KLS when she visited Australia before we were married. Bernard is holding our then-cat Momus. We look like a homeless family. Even though I was quite skinny then I look tubby, and Bernard’s hair is a sight to behold. It’s a funny shot indeed, and I have good memories from that time so I like it 🙂

Do you like this post? I have other photos I may blog, including a few from my first trip back in 2000 and some of our cats back in the days I was growing up.

Computer World

August 11, 2012

If you worked at pioneering computer company IBM in the mid 50s, you likely began your day with a song. These songs were included in the ‘IBM Songbook’, a page of which is shown in the following photograph:

This was one of many, many exhibits at the Computer History Museum, which we visited yesterday. The expansive collection spanned from the very early days of computing (abacus and slide rule) all the way through to current applications of todays machines (such as Google Street View). It was highly informative and very entertaining.

Those are two early non-electronic ‘computers’. The above shot shows a device invented for the 1890 US census designed to tabulate statistics from the punched card census results, and the lower photo shows a planimeter (from the 1800s) designed to calculate the area of an arbitrary two-dimensional shape. Both of these were amongst the many examples of computational devices that were in use long before what we now think of as computers.

The above is a photo of the instructions attached to the Enigma Machine they had on exhibit. I include it here because I thought my dad may be interested 🙂

An example of many badges from the early days of computing that was displayed. Who said ‘computer nerds’ were a new thing?

Here’s my pointing to a button on one of the many examples of massive, 1960s era business computers on display. These devices were almost incomprehensible, with archaic user interfaces and unfathomable controls. What exactly was this button that had caught my eye? Here’s a closer shot:

If you want a laugh, google it. It seems the definition of the words ‘amplidyne sensitrol’ has now become: “That button on that computer at the computer history museum”

That’s an original Apple kit computer constructed and autographed by Steve Wosniak!

That’s the closest (very close actually, since I pushed some keys) I have ever got to the best computer I never owned, the ZX Spectrum!

The museum concentrated on computing in general, rather than various fields, but obviously could not ignore gaming. Although the game collection was not as large or impressive as at Strong Museum in Rochester, it still included some beautiful examples such as the Ultima display shown above.

One of the temporary exhibits was a profile of Street View, including camera cars and bikes and details of the technology used to create the images. Given that Google is quite literally down the road from the museum (we had lunch in an area that had some Google bikes in the carpark), this was a comprehensive and very interesting exhibit. For instance, did you know that various other countries or cities had created their own Street View-like technologies long before Google?

After the museum we set off for Lick Observatory, which is one of the ‘hills’ surrounding Silicon Valley. The drive would be an hour, and from the city the hills look rolling and peaceful so I was expecting a leisurely site-seeing drive. How wrong I was!

Now compare that GPS route to the photo I took on the famous ‘Hana Highway’ in Hawaii back in 2007. Which looks worse?

Yep, if you decide to drive from San Jose to Lick Observatory avoid Quimby Road, since it’s a shortcut to regret and horror, with ultra steep turns and evil gradients. The road is full of rubber marks where previous drivers went careening to their deaths over the edges, and the utter absence of any other cars is a sure-fire sign that you shouldn’t always trust your GPS 🙂

When we eventually got to the top alive, we found Lick Observatory to be an intriguing commune of homes and telescopes that sits on top of Mount Hamilton, at an altitude of about 4200 feet (which is, amusingly, lower than the city of Albuquerque!) About 18 people make this mountaintop their permanent home, although the several boarded up homes are evidence that the number used to be many more. A total of 10 telescopes (all optical) are situated at the top, but it seems Lick’s days of cutting edge astronomical relevance are behind it, with many of the scopes unused or used only for college classes or ‘public interest’ demonstrations.

That’s the telescope inside the biggest dome, a 36-inch refracting telescope that is still used today. A lovely lady who has lived at Lick for 34 years gave us a brief tour, but mostly we were able to wander around the mountain and have a gander ourselves.

The photos we took of the view of San Jose do not do it justice. Here’s one…

…with San Jose (just) viewable in the distance. The mountains don’t look that high do they? Well I guess they are not relatively speaking (again, I can’t believe the tallest mountain near San Jose is lower than Albuquerque!), but I can assure you the height is most detectable during the drive up and down the mountain!

Today we’re going to the seaside! My goals are threefold: roller coasters, retro arcade games and corndogs! Check back tomorrow to see how successful I am 🙂

Robot Claws

August 10, 2012

This is what this blog looks like:

See the black computer, in the lower right of the image? That’s a machine that runs the blog. It lives in Bernard & Lakshmi’s garage, as does a second computer (the silver one behind it) and a vast array of networking equipment. You can see the cabling disappearing into the wall connecting these machines to the rest of the house and the internet in general. This setup generates a lot of heat, and the fans are there to keep it cool. Even with them, it’s a bit like standing next to an oven 🙂

Here’s Bernard’s description of the above photo:

“This setup includes a dual-processor 8-core zeon with 32 GB of RAM and 2 TB of RAID 10 disk space, and the other machine is an i5 with 8 GB of RAM with 10 TB of (unused!) disk space. The internet connection is a gigabit enterprise switch utilizing a 100 mbs fiber connection.”

I am ahead of myself! Let me introduce my hosts. Here’s my sister-in-law, Lakshmi, cosplaying:

She put the mask on in Target, and when Bernard asked her who it was she said ‘Darth Vader’. We had a good chuckle at that one 🙂

And here’s my brother, cosplaying as a banker:

Yesterday we went shopping. This meant we saw a good selection of potential gifts for AW like this:

…and a gaggle of pretty girls like this:

…and I even saw this:

There was a lot of shopping, and a lot of buying. Gifts were bought for everyone! Incredibly, my haul even included 2 (crappy…) gamebooks purchased from a second-hand bookstore! Given I traveled with only a single tiny suitcase, I’ll certainly be mailing stuff back 🙂

Today we’re off to see some museums. I’ve also uncovered some old photos and various other treasures that are going to have to make their way onto this blog in the next few days. So much to do and so little time in which to do it…