Maggie almost died. At one point her red blood cell count was so low that it was half the level that the emergency vet automatically authorized a complete blood transfusion. We didn't give her the transfusion because it would have cost around $2000 and it would only have been a palliative, not a cure. Instead we brought her home wrapped in a blanket, and force fed her Science Diet fishmeal, chlorophyll from algae, prednisone, water and some baby foods to give her a break from the horrors of a medical diet. I stayed home three days from work, spent a dozen nights with sleep interrupted by any sound that might have been her moan or death rattle. Last Monday she meowed for the first time in two weeks. Tuesday she made it down a few stairs on her own, and Wednesday she went to the bathroom by herself. I noticed that the sunlight and fresh air made a visible improvement in her tone...the rustle of chipmunks and the songs of birds made her lift her head and stare through eyes deepened into blank, black holes by the war ravaging her immune system and bone marrow.
The vet had administered three vaccines at once. As he was preparing to do it, I was alarmed that Maggie's 11 year old system might not handle such a load all at once. I asked him, and he reassured me that one cat in a million had a bad reaction.
I should have told him Maggie was a cat in a million.
We found her as a kitten, her head almost bitten off by a dog, her sides layed open, her muzzle flayed and bleeding. She was huddled in the corner of a dirt-floored garage at the duplex I was moving into. I was a fresh emigrant from marriage, immigrant to separation, neophyte to divorce, and full of myself. Sam heard her mewl, a weak but insistant cry. I found a flashlight and he found her. We took her to the vet immediately, and he gave her less than a 50 percent chance of surviving the night. Later he said her survival was the most amazing thing he had witnessed in his career at that point. She was one in a million.
Today she still needs to be force fed, because unlike other cats on prednisone she doesn't take water or food copiously. She seems revolted by water and food, in fact, and it takes superhuman effort on my part to hold her down and squirt the grey-green stinking pablum into the back of her throat. I didn't know her eyes could open in horror that wide, that desperately, as when she tastes the stuff.
Despite the debacle of mealtimes, she still comes to me and climbs on my lap. I pet her frazzled looking fur, and talk to her. I remind her of some of the funny and harrowing times we have had together. I don't mention the times she was my only friend after the divorce, when my family and others had faded into the embarassed distance of victim's kin who cannot broach the silence or injustice of a terrible time. I think about those times, when I would lie alone in the upstairs bedroom, the streetlight casting shadows on the ceiling that looked like the webs of human-sized spiders. Maggie would climb up on my chest and position herself so she could look into my eyes. She seemed to say "Hey, get over it. You may miss your kids more than you would your own liver if it was cut out with a rusty knife, but you get them back half the time. You may fear a world that can rip your life open with both hands just for its amusement. But I've seen worse. I've seen the inside of my own face hanging off my skull, buddy, and you were there for me. So get over it. I got your back."
I think about these times. But I can't remind her, because the words get stuck in my throat. The tears were there a few times for her, but she wouldn't want them. She's way too tough for that. She just wants my knee when she wants it, and no more of the damn medical diet.
Not a very sentimental broad for someone who probably saved my life when the human sized spiders spun their webs, in the dark, outside my window. But her heart is in the right place, and it seems to have enough red blood cells for now. That'll do for me.
10.8.04
Craziness, wonder, kittens and steel
The 1000-lb IBM mainframe computer I bought last week on eBay is slowly flattening the tires on my Mercury Villager van as I try to figure out how to get it out without killing or maiming anyone. The kittens are shredding the new $2000 living room set. We covered the sofa and chair with sheets, so the the atomic runts take turns, one running under the sheets while the other pounces on the moving lump. Then they both go under, come out from different ends, look around and run head first into each other, claws out, mewling and slam-hugging like WWF stars. At work yesterday someone said we had to foil the upholstery. I thought but did not say we really needed to foil the kittens.
My neck hurts so bad I can't turn my head, and Maggie, (the elder cat who has been plagued by the kittens) is sick, stunned into a lethargy by either the vaccinations we gave her Saturday morning or by the realization that these frenetic hairballs will be with her until she flings her last enraged hiss at the encroaching mewing mini-demons of her personal void.
My son is sleepless, driven by visions of truth and beauty that can't be contained in a 16 year old's normal waking routines. I am divided between my concerns as a caretaker and pride as a father watching him get strung out while he struggles to translate the visions that cut Plato and the Alchemists from their herds in their day, into language that might fit alternative rock lyrics in our material midnight.
Sara is a constant beacon of sanity, care, humor as I fragment and bounce like a thousand pachinko balls among the glittering pins of my various imperatives. God give us grace and rest. Amen.
My neck hurts so bad I can't turn my head, and Maggie, (the elder cat who has been plagued by the kittens) is sick, stunned into a lethargy by either the vaccinations we gave her Saturday morning or by the realization that these frenetic hairballs will be with her until she flings her last enraged hiss at the encroaching mewing mini-demons of her personal void.
My son is sleepless, driven by visions of truth and beauty that can't be contained in a 16 year old's normal waking routines. I am divided between my concerns as a caretaker and pride as a father watching him get strung out while he struggles to translate the visions that cut Plato and the Alchemists from their herds in their day, into language that might fit alternative rock lyrics in our material midnight.
Sara is a constant beacon of sanity, care, humor as I fragment and bounce like a thousand pachinko balls among the glittering pins of my various imperatives. God give us grace and rest. Amen.
5.8.04
What does it say...
Control Language Programming for the AS/400 (2nd Edition) is a primer for the main language that my new personal mainframe speaks.
That, combined with another book introducing the other aspects of the AS/400, costs $120.
That is almost 20 times what I paid for the minicomputer in the first place.
What does this tell us about economics in the 21st century? What does it say about me if I shell out that $120 for the information required to use a $6 tool? What does it say about our governments and businesses that spend tens of thousands of dollars for every generation of information tool and then scrap them when it is time to change?
Hmmm. I know you have ideas about these things. Send them to me at Jeff@zeitguide.org.
That, combined with another book introducing the other aspects of the AS/400, costs $120.
That is almost 20 times what I paid for the minicomputer in the first place.
What does this tell us about economics in the 21st century? What does it say about me if I shell out that $120 for the information required to use a $6 tool? What does it say about our governments and businesses that spend tens of thousands of dollars for every generation of information tool and then scrap them when it is time to change?
Hmmm. I know you have ideas about these things. Send them to me at Jeff@zeitguide.org.
My home PC can beat up your whole neighborhood's home PCs
The IBM as/400 minicomputer was introduced in 1988. It offered its programming code libraries and application program interface to business IT shops as a quick and powerful way to develop custom applications. It facilitated hardware expansion and evolution without changes to the software layers. You could spend $12,000 or $2,000,000 for the system, and be up and running quickly. By the mid 90's the high powered PC was putting most minicomputers out of business, but the AS/400 survived because of its adaptability and solid business profile.
Yesterday I bought one for my basement.
It stands 61" high, and is 24" wide, and 3 feet deep. It runs on 240 volt current on a power buss that is two inches in diameter (that is the plug and power cord>) It probably weighs close to 900 lbs, considering it rack mounts two 9733 hard drives that weigh over 100 lbs apiece, in addition to about a dozen "feature cards" and a cpu cage the size of a toaster oven. I am guessing about 2000 watts minimum.
It isn't pretty to look at. Doesn't seem to have any design sense at all, in fact, in its plain vanilla box with no real blinking lights to speak of.
I hope it works. I am finding that I can download a terminal emulator for windows from SourceForge that will have me speaking to the monster in its own language fairly quickly. It just needs to work. If it lights up and the OS is still installed and boots, I might be talking to it in a week or so.
I do write data analysis programs for fun, and compose computer music. I have no idea at this time what I am going to do with the AS/400 if it works. It probably has two processors that are 32 bit CISC cpus running around 20 mhz, which means it was outpaced in sheer throughput by the first pentiums available in late 1996, if I remember correctly. I have a small, old, happy pentium 90 running windows 98 in the studio that I use strictly for midi utilities that talk to old synths from that era, and it might be more powerful than the AS/400.
If that is the case, why bother schlepping a half ton of high quality engineering and spending dozens of hours retrofitting an interface into an obsolete operating system in order to program in a clumsy, integer only environment with limited or non existant graphics output while paying the electric bill on a housefull of appliances for one big bland toy?
I guess you had to be there.
I guess you had to sit in night school for 13 months learning to write code for the IBM 360 mainframe on punch cards. I guess you had to learn RPG and Sperry Terminal language by filling in mimeographed grids and flow-chart templates in pizza joints at midnight in your thirties, when you had just gotten married and were seized with a vision of computer science that burned in your head like a halogen bulb. I guess you had to struggle for two decades to see the vision realized partially on a 20 pound box that contained more computing power than the entire united states armed forces had at its disposal in 1968, and had to lose the physical sense of that effort over time as computers became smaller and lighter and faster.
My apprenticeship was at the breast of a monster that filled a room. It weighed tons, and was delivered in a semi truck by a crew of men who then took a week to install its special electrical connections, peripherals, air conditioning. When I wrote my first IBM assembler language program I had to wait two hours for my turn to submit my cards to the card reader, and then watch the huge consoles run the thirty lines of code in a millisecond. There was a presence and a gravitas to the ritual. Part of me resisted being taken in by it, and just wanted the results, which the generation of PCs waiting in the wings were quick to provide. But part of me responded to the priesthood, the steel and lightening of the oracle unleashed among mortals. That part got shoved into the bottom of a file drawer sometime in the mid eighties while practical matters pushed me along.
Yesterday that part of me got out and stretched, and looked at the spawn of the mother processors of my apprenticeship, and patted it on the head. The giant baby Blue looked like it was ready to play. The gods of ebcedic and hexadecimal looked down from a vanishing olympus and smiled at the folly. They understood. They had been there.
Yesterday I bought one for my basement.
It stands 61" high, and is 24" wide, and 3 feet deep. It runs on 240 volt current on a power buss that is two inches in diameter (that is the plug and power cord>) It probably weighs close to 900 lbs, considering it rack mounts two 9733 hard drives that weigh over 100 lbs apiece, in addition to about a dozen "feature cards" and a cpu cage the size of a toaster oven. I am guessing about 2000 watts minimum.
It isn't pretty to look at. Doesn't seem to have any design sense at all, in fact, in its plain vanilla box with no real blinking lights to speak of.
I hope it works. I am finding that I can download a terminal emulator for windows from SourceForge that will have me speaking to the monster in its own language fairly quickly. It just needs to work. If it lights up and the OS is still installed and boots, I might be talking to it in a week or so.
I do write data analysis programs for fun, and compose computer music. I have no idea at this time what I am going to do with the AS/400 if it works. It probably has two processors that are 32 bit CISC cpus running around 20 mhz, which means it was outpaced in sheer throughput by the first pentiums available in late 1996, if I remember correctly. I have a small, old, happy pentium 90 running windows 98 in the studio that I use strictly for midi utilities that talk to old synths from that era, and it might be more powerful than the AS/400.
If that is the case, why bother schlepping a half ton of high quality engineering and spending dozens of hours retrofitting an interface into an obsolete operating system in order to program in a clumsy, integer only environment with limited or non existant graphics output while paying the electric bill on a housefull of appliances for one big bland toy?
I guess you had to be there.
I guess you had to sit in night school for 13 months learning to write code for the IBM 360 mainframe on punch cards. I guess you had to learn RPG and Sperry Terminal language by filling in mimeographed grids and flow-chart templates in pizza joints at midnight in your thirties, when you had just gotten married and were seized with a vision of computer science that burned in your head like a halogen bulb. I guess you had to struggle for two decades to see the vision realized partially on a 20 pound box that contained more computing power than the entire united states armed forces had at its disposal in 1968, and had to lose the physical sense of that effort over time as computers became smaller and lighter and faster.
My apprenticeship was at the breast of a monster that filled a room. It weighed tons, and was delivered in a semi truck by a crew of men who then took a week to install its special electrical connections, peripherals, air conditioning. When I wrote my first IBM assembler language program I had to wait two hours for my turn to submit my cards to the card reader, and then watch the huge consoles run the thirty lines of code in a millisecond. There was a presence and a gravitas to the ritual. Part of me resisted being taken in by it, and just wanted the results, which the generation of PCs waiting in the wings were quick to provide. But part of me responded to the priesthood, the steel and lightening of the oracle unleashed among mortals. That part got shoved into the bottom of a file drawer sometime in the mid eighties while practical matters pushed me along.
Yesterday that part of me got out and stretched, and looked at the spawn of the mother processors of my apprenticeship, and patted it on the head. The giant baby Blue looked like it was ready to play. The gods of ebcedic and hexadecimal looked down from a vanishing olympus and smiled at the folly. They understood. They had been there.
4.8.04
My home computer is an IBM Mainframe
My love affair with technology dates back to at least when I was 4 years old. A neighbor who had been a radio man in WWII showed me how wrapping wire around a nail and attaching the ends of the wire to a battery made the nail a magnet. I went around the house trying the nail on everything. My mom put an end to my Royal Academy researches when she found me dangling her favorite silver-plated bracelet from the tip of an eight penny nail.
She didn't until that moment know that it was silver-plated, and not solid sterling. The lesson learned was: knowledge is a double edged sword; it can cut away ignorance, but there is always an emotional price to pay.
Today I am acutely conscious of both my love of technology and the weird byways it can lead me down...often at the expense of some female in my vicinity. In today's case, it would be Sara who has to anticipate the arrival of my newest Technical Foible with far less excitement than I. And my newest technical foible wouldn't inspire many people to anything than fear for their backs if they had to move it and a sense of loss of storage space where ever it might end up.
I am thinking of calling my new personal Mainframe IBM computer "Blitz." It has the connotation of speed, as in "blitzen" the Reindeer and "blitzkrieg" the lightening war. Blitz sounds a bit like bits, too...another computer resonance.
They say it won't fit in the van. I sort of bought it thinking I could get it home in the van at least, even if I couldn't personally lift the 5 foot high rack myself. They think it needs a flatbed or pickup as a conveyence.
You'd think that someone who just bought a mainframe wouldn't quibble about paying a few more bucks for a two man moving crew and a truck, right?
Not if he just bought the mainframe on eBay for $6.50.
Well, there will be more to tell of this story. In the meantime, I have to go get the bumper sticker made that says "My home computer is an IBM Mainframe."
The funny thing is, I am not sure if I would even like someone impressed by that fact.
She didn't until that moment know that it was silver-plated, and not solid sterling. The lesson learned was: knowledge is a double edged sword; it can cut away ignorance, but there is always an emotional price to pay.
Today I am acutely conscious of both my love of technology and the weird byways it can lead me down...often at the expense of some female in my vicinity. In today's case, it would be Sara who has to anticipate the arrival of my newest Technical Foible with far less excitement than I. And my newest technical foible wouldn't inspire many people to anything than fear for their backs if they had to move it and a sense of loss of storage space where ever it might end up.
I am thinking of calling my new personal Mainframe IBM computer "Blitz." It has the connotation of speed, as in "blitzen" the Reindeer and "blitzkrieg" the lightening war. Blitz sounds a bit like bits, too...another computer resonance.
They say it won't fit in the van. I sort of bought it thinking I could get it home in the van at least, even if I couldn't personally lift the 5 foot high rack myself. They think it needs a flatbed or pickup as a conveyence.
You'd think that someone who just bought a mainframe wouldn't quibble about paying a few more bucks for a two man moving crew and a truck, right?
Not if he just bought the mainframe on eBay for $6.50.
Well, there will be more to tell of this story. In the meantime, I have to go get the bumper sticker made that says "My home computer is an IBM Mainframe."
The funny thing is, I am not sure if I would even like someone impressed by that fact.
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