BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Please note that this is not NPR. However, I would like to welcome you to Morning Edition…

Day 2 of 2009: A WillyCon Odyssey (The following takes place between the hours of 5:30AM and 12:00PM. Events occur in real time) <— I tried to get Sutherland for that bit of narration, but he was busy….

5:30 AM – AWAKE!

@mrsellars – There is no java in my room and the Student Center doesn’t open til 7… Oh, Coffee, why hast thou forsaken me?

@mrsellars – Watching morning TV in Wayne NE… Original Adam West Batman movie on… O_o

@mrsellars – Local news is well… Local. Rather be watching @VirginiaKerr and @PaulCooked…

@mrsellars – Jeez… I’m pretty sure I have socks older than that news anchor…

6:30 AM

@mrsellars – @cellphone: boop, boop, beep, bahp, beep, beep, boop, bahp, bahp, beep, boop… Ring… Ring… Ri!

@EK – Hmnomnip?

@mrsellars – Are you up?

@EK – Yam nonno nam nip mmm.

@mrsellars – Okay, just making sure. Didn’t want you to oversleep since I’m not there to wake you up like usual.

@EK – Uhmm nimna hibbit nomma.

@mrsellars – Okay, I’ll let you go then. Love you.

@EK – Wubtoo moo.

@mrsellars – Shower. Check… As coach Verby used to say, “Clean minds, clean bodies.” Well… At least my body is clean.

@mrsellars – Students call cafeteria here the “Gag”. Funny… Noms here are wayyyy better than when I was in College thir-koff-koff years ago.

@mrsellars – Srsly. Noms here really good. A ton to choose from too. Sandwich bar, tostada bar, soups, prepared meals of the day, etc… And they switch up all the time according to what I’m told.

@mrsellars – Had Swiss steak (Northern version = mushroom soup instead of tomatoes and onions, but not bad), steamed veggies, and a salad for dinner last night.

@mrsellars – Salad bar even had beets and unsalted sunflower seeds. How cool is that?

@mrsellars – Looking forward to good noms for breakfast.

@mrsellars – Someone above my head is moving furniture…

@mrsellars – Hmmm… That thud didn’t sound good.

@mrsellars – Wonder if there was a body involved?

@mrsellars – Why yes, now that you ask, everything REALLY IS book material.

@mrsellars – Local weather dude calling for foot of snow, blowing drifts, whiteout conditions.

@mrsellars – SF faculty advisor tells me they’ve been hearing stuff like that for the past couple of weeks and it never comes to fruition.

@mrsellars – Maybe their weather guy needs to talk to Matt Chambers in STL… Pick up a few pointers.

@mrsellars – Hmmmm. Is it Nebraska or is it the fact that it’s a college campus? Man in shorts when 24 degrees not fazing anyone.

@mrsellars – Of course, students are wandering about in t-shirts and ripped jeans. I probably fit right in.

@mrsellars – Familiar odor lingering on the air as I walk to student center. Cow manure. Smells like back home in Kentucky.

@mrsellars – {attack of nostalgia}{wistful sigh}

@mrsellars – Morning noms good. Eggs, pancakes, sausage, mini blueberry muffin, and COFFEE!

@mrsellars – Wonders what these kids would have called the cafeteria where he went to college. :-/

@mrsellars – Hmmm. Place looks almost empty. [Looks Around]

@mrsellars – Oh, wait… A couple of the SF club students I met last night are sitting over there. I should probably sit with them so they don’t think I’m full of myself or something.

@mrsellars – Walkies…

@mrsellars – @students_at_table: Good morning!

@student_1 – [STARE]

@student_1 – Goom nana. Ermm.

@student_2 – [STARE]

@student_2 – Grunt.

@mrsellars – @students_at_table: How’s it goin’?

@student_1 – Nerm goona, arbba tay. Ar ermmm. Nib.

@student_1 – [STARE]

@student_2 – [STARE]

@mrsellars – Umm… Yeah… Klattu Verada Nikto.

@mrsellars – [move to end of table. Enjoy morning noms in silence]

@mrsellars – Remembers his college days… Silently empathizes with the two students.

@mrsellars – Visited with faculty advisor. Signed book. Signed poster. Got more free nom passes for cafeteria.

@mrsellars – SCORE! Found coffee shop on campus. I haz large StarMakeABucks in hand. Life is good.

@mrsellars – Dorm room is about 12 x 24. Two smoke detectors. Must be looking for some pretty sneaky smoke…

ON TWITTER:

@mrsellars – Curse you, Perry the Platypus!

@ perryplatypus – @mrsellars GrRrrRRrRrrRRRrRRrrRr

@mrsellars – Bwuhahahahaha! That just never gets old…

BACK TO PSEUDO TWITTER:

@mrsellars – Temp at 5:30 AM – 24… Now, at 10:30 AM – 44. Supposed to hit 57 before it starts into a nosedive. Then the white shit falls on our heads.

@mrsellars – Camera is loaded and ready.

@mrsellars – Fox squirrels EVERYWHERE. Fat bastards too. Used to see them in MO, but all I ever see there these days are the smaller greys.

@mrsellars – Named one of the reds Skippy this morning. He sat with me and ate acorns while I drank coffee. No shit. Damn near right next to me.

@mrsellars – Tamer than the family of greys I feed at home, and they’re pretty damn tame, so that says something.

@mrsellars – Prevailing theory – the squirrels buddy up to students and sell them the answers to exams. Squirrels are sneaky like that.

@mrsellars – Taking camera with next time.

@mrsellars – You know… Now that I think on it, animals can predict weather even better than Matt Chambers…

@mrsellars – My “country boy sense” is saying these little farts are telling us the sky really is going to dump on us tomorrow.

@mrsellars – #fuckme

11:30 AM

@mrsellars – Coffee empty. Library with coffee shop across campus… Go for more, or relax for a bit and get some when I go for noontime noms?

@mrsellars – Decisions, decisions…

And there you have the morning edition…

More to come…

Murv

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