I have purchased an Acer mini computer.

As I indicated I might, I have purchased a mini computer. It is an Acer Aspire One and cost me $299.99. I have established routine internet use with it. I use the chicago public library's free wifi and the free wifi of a coffee shop near my home, called Zanzibar.

I like the Acer quite a bit. My intense visual and tactile faculties get better control with the small screen and keyboard than they did with the regular laptop i had before. With the laptop my gaze had to move around a lot and it was destabilizing my faculty.

working at Hale Observatories

My next experience with computers was at Hale Observatories in Pasadena, CA. as a summer student. I had worked the previous summer at NASA in Mountain View, CA. and decided to transfer to U.C. Santa Cruz for my second bachelor's degree in physics.

At Hale I was in the solar astronomy department, headed by Bob Howard, with post-doc Barry LaBonte. They gave me responsibility for programming on a project to measure the historic sun's radius from data collected at Big Bear solar observatory. I used a Ratheon computer and worked from punched cards and mag tape.

The observatory offices where I worked were right in Pasadena. The 200-inch Hale Reflector was up in the mountains.

The library at the offices was very nice. The librarian gave me a book to read about the observatory's founder, George Ellery Hale. He was a Chicagoan. The reason she gave me that book was that she knew I was mentally ill and Hale had been mentally ill and really struggled with it. He kept seeing this little man who would torment him--a complete phantasm.

When the scientific paper came out on my project, written by Bob and Barry, I got mentioned in a footnote on the first page that said I did competent work. This was actually a nice compliment.

I enjoyed the historic setting at Hale and the people were very congenial. I went to lunch most days with a foursome of Barry, a programmer, and a tech. We would eat at the diner around the corner and had really friendly conversation.

Once a week there was a lunchtime colloquium given by various persons on different astronomical topics. One was given by Allen Sandage, an internationally noted astronomer.

my background in computers

My first experience with computers was just out of high school. I got a summer job, as a good physics student, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL, which was in its beginning stages of formation and hadn't even broken ground yet for the accelerator.

My boss was a physicist, Dr. David F. Sutter, from Cornell. Dave taught me the basics of circuits, and of logic. I was his only student. He would tutor me in his office. My own space was in an adjacent butler building, or large warehouse type structure. It was large and so was my space. Dave gave me a project to build a circuit, a high frequency clock. He stepped me through it at first and I finished it off. Then we debugged it together until it worked. I managed the lab supplies, getting requisitions for all the stuff Dave wanted us to have, getting some of it from the lab stock house, and ordering some of it from mail order catalogs, Allied and some other house. I learned to use the shop in the lab, drill press, band saw, bending machine, punch, etc. The manager of the shop was Bill Carter, a sturdy, unfrilled but warm and fatherly man, and he was very helpful. Another Cornell man came to work with us, Howie Pfeffer. He amazed me with his ability to debug quickly things I thought were real complicated. It always involved the oscilloscope because everything we did involved high frequencies.

Then I was put to work on my own project, a comparator and interrupt of a small minicomputer. I designed the circuit, with clear steering by dave, built it, and scouted out the computer interrupt. To do that I had to learn to program the computer in its own machine language. It was a Variandata 620i computer, with a language called DAS, for data assembly system. Another physicist, Chuck Schmidt, taught me how to run and program it. It was located in another building, supported by air pressure alone for some technical reason. You entered through a pressure-maintaining door.

i was thrilled with the work involving the computer. I picked it up real fast. One of the electronic technicians told me he was really impressed with how fast I picked it up.

There was a teletype terminal that I typed the programs with. It produced a paper tape that was fed into another input. The computer had switches on its frame that enabled you to step through your programs to debug them. These were called sense switches.

Then in the back there was an interface for the interrupt. My circuit had to connect to it there, and there were eight switches on my circuit. these created eight bits, zero or one each, that when the computer clock got to that number in eight bits, it was interrupted. This process was necessary to enable accelerator control to divert local control stations from their routine operations and have them do something special that came up, which it might in such a large machine. The accelerator was to be four miles in circumference.

That's all for this post.

my day at S.C.O.R.E.

Thursday I had a conference at the service corps of retired executives. Marvin listened to my business plan and opined that there's no money in it, I'll never make a living doing it. He may be right. He suggested I go ahead with it, no harm in that, but it's a hobby, not a business. I don't know, I think there will always be people who aren't technically inclined who could benefit from what a computer can do and just need someone to do it for them, provided it isn't too expensive. Maybe that's the key factor--the cost. If i can't charge enough to hire people to do it then he's right it isn't a business. I need to make enough to afford to get married, but not immediately. There's a lot of inertia I have to overcome first. Mental illness has not been kind to me. On the other hand, I have the time, best to use it to come up with some plans to make a living. I don't like the idea of being employed by someone. Too much vacuous chitchat involved in it. We'll see....

inaugural post

Welcome one and all! It is with pride and determination I begin this enterprise, having come to it through no small feat of longevity. Many is the time I have been near death's door, pitting my acumen and wits against foe, adversity, hunger, cold, exposure, enmity, misunderstanding, and any number of other similar obstacles to simply getting to the next day ready to do it all again. Well, it's been a trip. Now I'm ready to launch into my endeavor to do what others care not to, because they are too concerned with compromise. If I had been willing to compromise, I would have become a hack like everyone else. Not that I am unaware of the top of the curve, either. I know there are exceptions out there. I saw them in college at Yale. But my position is different, even from them. It is not every milenium that a human sets eyes upon the fire of Moses. If my reading is correct, the last time it was Moses. Then it happened in 1992, here in Chicago--I saw it myself with my own two eyes. Of course I shudder to think of it. The portents are not good for certain dominant entities, just as was the case in Moses's time. I would not be honest if I said I had nothing to do with the Wall Street crisis of the past month. And the end is not in sight. Now I am in a different situation from when I was adrift alone, facing those things of which I just spoke. The tables have turned. And information is flowing in the other direction. Whether the money will too, that's anyone's guess. But the imbalance of resources, between me and the rulers, is now being reduced. Moses wanted the Jews freed. That was his path. Mine is different. I want some resources of my own. and when I get them, by any means legal, I will remove my lock on the economy. It's that simple.

Now I will say a little about the easiest way for me to be given resources. I am not a slacker. I like to work. I have a second B.A. from U.C.S.C. in physics and I am able to serve computer users less skilled than myself as a consultant. I will sit at your side at a computer and get it to do what you want, for $20 an hour. That's pretty cheap. I have taken out some ads in free online classifieds. We'll see if I get any emails from prospective customers.

That should do it for getting this ship assail. I hope we can have a free discussion of anything you want. I'm a pretty good conversationalist, and, despite the grim situation, and my part in it, I'm a pretty compassionate kinda fella. maybe that's my problem.

til next time...