BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

What you are about to read is probably going to seem just a bit bizarre. But, then again, all of my blogs have a tendency to read that way, or so I am told. In any event, this is a “two-parter”, and as bizarre as it may seem to you folks as you read it, bear in mind that it is true… actually happened… no kidding… so, imagine how I felt at the time…

The phone rang and I looked over at the over sized digits on my LED alarm clock. (Yeah, this was back when big, wood grain veneered LED alarm clocks were exceptionally cool and it showed just how amazingly hip you were if you had one…seriously… Owning such an alarm clock wouldn’t necessarily get you laid, but it didn’t hurt…) Even though one of the segments in the display was having a tendency to flicker on and off, probably due to a cold solder joint I hadn’t bother to repair just yet, I had learned to decipher the numbers and know generally what time it really was, no matter what they displayed.

It read something like 10:38 PM. In this particular case, that meant something like 10:38 PM. Yeah, go figure. The segment happened to be working at that particular moment.

I sat up,  stared across the room at where the phone was sitting on my desk and furrowed my brow. I couldn’t actually see the phone since the lights were out and all, but I knew right where it was. It rang again and I continued to stare in its general direction. You see, even though I was in my early twenties – like really early twenties – and was all about partying just like anyone else my age, I had to go to work the next morning. I even had to go in early because I was the assistant manager of a VideoConcepts™ at the Northwest Plaza mall and it was my turn to open the store.

This is not to mention, although I already mentioned it,  that the hour was 10:38 PM give or take a few minutes, depending upon whose version of accurate you happened to be following.

“Why is that important,” you ask?  Well, because you just don’t call someone after 9 PM or before 8 AM unless 1) Someone is dead, 2) Someone has been in a bad accident, or 3) You’re in jail and need to be bailed out. There are even sub-qualifications, like with #1, if the person who is dead isn’t all that close to the person being notified, then instead of disturbing them that night, you should add them to the list of people to call after 8 AM the next day.  Or with #3, if the offense is so minor that they are just going to spring you in the morning, grab a nap and leave your friends alone. You got yourself into the mess, not them. There is, of course, the “I just killed someone and I need you to help me hide the body” clause, but that can only be invoked with certain friends, so you have to be careful with it.

In any event, that’s just the way it is. Everybody knows the rules.

Seriously. Those are the rules. At least, they are in the south, where I am from. I know,  I know… Since I was living in St. Louis I wasn’t technically “in” the south, but since I was at home, it was kind of like a foreign embassy – i.e. when within the confines of that property line you were on southern soil and therefore you obeyed southern rules and etiquette.

At this particular moment, I was pretty well convinced that I had a breach of etiquette on my hands.

I continued staring in the direction of the phone. For the life of me I couldn’t imagine who would be calling at this hour. I doubted anyone close enough to me to qualify for any of the pre-requisites listed above was out and about, so I knew there were no deaths or injuries to be reported. And, all I could say was that if bail was involved, someone was going to need to do some fast talking.

The infernal device hadn’t yet stopped clamoring so I climbed out of the bed, flipped on the light switch then padded around the end of my king sized waterbed to my desk and picked up the handset.

“Hello?”

Click!

“Lovely,” I thought. Well, I’m not actually sure what it was that I thought. I am, however, fairly certain I muttered something on the order of “F*ck you too.”

I settled the phone back into the cradle then turned around and started back toward the bed. Before I’d made it two steps the  nuisance began to ring again. I turned in place, went back to my desk, and snatched up the handset.

“Hello?”

Tick, Tick, Tick… Click… Tick… (silence) Skrrreeeeeee-warble-skreeeeeee…

“What the f*ck?” I muttered aloud.

Remember, this was nineteen-eighty-five. Fax machines weren’t exactly commonplace so picking up your phone and hearing a carrier signal from a misdial… Well, that just didn’t happen all that much. (BTW, just as a point of interest – Facsimile Machines – as we called them back then before truncating words became all the rage – were also huge, had a  rapidly spinning drum to which you attached your document, and took approximately 7 1/2 minutes to transmit a single page at low resolution… I know this because we used one at the VideoConcepts™ store to transmit customer credit applications to the corporate office.)

Still, even though hearing a warbling carrier in your ear wasn’t exactly heard of in that day and age – at least for the average Joe – I had a bit of a clue. I had been working with computers since I was 15 – anything from programming to tech work – when I could get that sort of work, that is.  And, when I had started in the biz, communication between systems was done by acoustic coupling modem. If you don’t know what that is, rent the movie Wargames with Matthew Broderick and watch it. When he dials the phone, listens for a carrier, then plunks the receiver down on box with some foam inserts that look like they were designed just for a telephone handset to fit into… Well, that’s an acoustic coupling modem.

My point is, I had been around this block. I knew exactly what a modem carrier signal sounded like. However, I certainly didn’t consider it normal that I was hearing one screech out of my personal telephone line.

Now, in 1985 we had actually moved beyond acoustic couplers. We were using A-D modems – either internal or external – to which you simply plug in your phone. Of course, back in 1985, a speed of 300 bits per second was the norm, and 1200 was high end. 2400 was a brass ring on the nearing horizon.  If all that means nothing to you, I understand… But, to give you a comparison, your average home computer talks to the internet via low end DSL at around 512 – 768 Kilobits per second. High end you are talking about 3 Megabits per second or better. See the contrast? Figured you might.

But, anyway, the roundabout point here is that I knew very well what I was hearing.

Out of curiosity, and nothing more, I sat down at my computer, still holding the phone in my hand. I flipped on the monitor, then the CPU and watched the green cursor wink at me from the monochrome screen while it booted up. I was running an an actual IBM model 5150 CPU, but I had pulled a Millennium Falcon on it, and to quote Han Solo, had “made a few special modifications myself.” Yeah, soldering irons, discrete components, and some tech knowledge can get you into serious trouble. So, I was running an overclocked processor and some fast DIP RAM, so my “big blue streak” was pushing about 6.5 Mhz instead of the stock 4.77 Mhz… woohoo… whoa! slow down before you hit something. Again, the perspective thing for those not familiar – the average CPU speed these days is 1.7 Gigahertz or higher.

Yeah…So you can see what I was dealing with. But, look at it this way. It was 1985 and for its day, that box was lightning fast. Relatively and metaphorically, of course…

The system finally booted up, to DOS, from diskettes. (No hard drive… I didn’t get my first hard drive for another several months and it was a whopping 10 Megabytes in size and cost me right at $600 with the controller.) Unfortunately, although I had now arrived at a command prompt, the phone had clicked and gone dead.

I dropped the handset back into the cradle, then slipped a modem communications program diskette into the B drive (I had TWO, count ’em, TWO 5 1/4″ 360Kb floppy disks… big time stuff.) I had only just started typing in the command to execute the program (yeah… we had to do stuff like that back then… no pointy, no clicky… A whole lotta typie though…) when the phone started ringing again.

Instead of answering it I sat there gesturing at the screen in hopes that doing so would make the program load faster.

It didn’t, but I still tried.

The communications protocols loaded, the core of the program bootstrapped, and then finally, the application screen appeared. I cursored down the menu (this was a pretty fancy piece of software) and hit enter to drop myself into the command mode. As fast as I could I typed an alternate initialization string to reset the modem and put it into auto answer mode. When I hit enter at the end of the string of characters, the screen cleared, the phone cut off mid peal, and several lines of gibberish scrolled across the monitor.

There was a quick screech, then a loud click from speaker on my internal modem, and then silence. The cursor just sat winking at me.

On a hunch, I “control keyed” myself back to the command mode, reset the modem with the same initialization string as before, then waited. A few seconds later, the phone did indeed start to ring. My init string had included a command to keep the modem from picking up until after the third ring, so I waited impatiently as the old bell on the desk phone rattled, rattled again, and then rattled a third time. As it started to ding a fourth time, it was interrupted and the modem clicked.

Once again a screech issued from the speaker inside the box, then warbled, then screeched again. A warble-screech-hiss combination followed and the modem clicked again, but it was a different kind of click, and it was one I recognized.

It was a connection.

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Who Is This, And How Did You Get In My Computer? PART 2

Before you get all huffy and send me a nasty email, put that sentence on the back burner for a second and read the blog entry itself… The sentiment in the grandiose title is definitely not my own.

You see, a while back I penned a blog entry about, of all things, writing blogs. Yeah, pretty redundant, I know, but what can I say… It was a slow news day. At any rate, in a nutshell that particular entry investigated the whole concept of how, as an author who is also a blogger, I should only be writing about writing, (yeah, even more redundancy, go figure…) And, I was to do this all for the express purpose of disseminating information to other writers, and/or aspiring writers, so that they may learn from me.

Truth is, I didn’t even know I was qualified to teach, so as you can imagine this whole idea came as a shocker to me.

Well, if you happened to have read that particular entry you already know I found the above notion funnier than all hell. Still, even though I had, and have, every intention of continuing to write entertaining blogs rather than such self-serving B S as previously noted, I thought maybe I’d go out into the proverbial blogosphere and have myself a look see. You know what I mean… Do a little investigation on my own to find out if maybe I was missing a bus or something. Hey, I’ve made my share of mistakes, so it could very well be that this whole entertainment thing is a crock, and being a pompous ass is where it’s really at… What better way to find out than to do a little digging?

So, I tossed my cyber-shovel over my shoulder and away I went.

I read blog after blog, written by authors I had never heard of, but who purported themselves to be experts in the field of authoring. Know what I found?

A load of self-serving, pompous B S…

Yeah… I was disappointed. I wasn’t overly surprised by any stretch of the imagination, but I have to admit that I was definitely disappointed. I mean, after all, I was hoping to learn something. That’s what the whole writing about writing thing is all about, correct? Lesser writers like myself getting an education from the elite wordsmiths… (Of course, like I said, I had never heard of any of these elite authors, but that didn’t matter. They said they were the best of the best right there on their blogs, and they wouldn’t lie about something like that, would they?)

Well,  I have to admit that even though I found exactly what I was expecting to find,  I did in fact learn something. I learned that I was correct all along…

I  definitely do not want to be one of those types of bloggers, or even authors for that matter.

The harsh reality of the blogging world is this – there’s more than just a  convoy of turnip trucks full of us out there. The number of blogs currently on the web is way more than I can count, even if I take off my shoes and socks. Yeah… There are a whole lot of blogs, and each one is vying for attention. So, people – unfortunately, quite a few authors in particular – sometimes decide that in order to attract attention they should become self-appointed experts, then hand out advice from on-high.

“On-high” being the pedestal upon which they have placed themselves. And, unfortunately, the advice they dispense takes the form of criticism, more often than not.

Now, don’t get me wrong here… Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and even to expressing it aloud in most cases, whether critical or not. Of course, I should mention that one shouldn’t always express an opinion out loud… There are times when one should keep one’s opinion to oneself. It’s a matter of discretion and common sense.

At any rate, I readily admit I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to the whole opinion expressing thing… Hell, I’m doing it right now. And, this might even be one of those occasions when I should be keeping my mouth shut. Who knows? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

But the thing is, I always try to make note of the fact that what I am saying is merely my personal opinion, and that disagreeing with me does not a moron make.

So, opinions are not my issue. My gripe is when self-important people treat their opinions like they are hard, cold fact that everyone must cleave to lest they be labeled an idiot.

Well, actually, I should back up a second… I have to be honest. I really don’t have a gripe at all. Truth is, I found all of the stuff I read to be fairly amusing, but mostly because it’s so damn obvious the people who wrote it take themselves way too seriously. And, based on their rhetoric, if you can label it such, apparently they are effin’ brilliant, and I’m… Well… I’m not.

Just like it says in the title of this blog entry. And, to borrow one of this genre of bloggers favorite expressions, “I should know, because I [insert important sounding sh*t here].”

More to come…

Murv