AKG K240 Studio headphones, made in Austria Some days, like yesterday, there is some ringing in my ears, and it’s best that I not aggravate it by wearing headphones. On certain other days, like today, there is only the usual sort of “head noise” that I suppose everybody has. I take advantage of that for listening to music, along with noticing the sonic characteristics of recordings and whatever gear I’m using. (If I haven’t mentioned it before, after turning 60 I had my hearing tested in an anechoic chamber by a PhD audiologist. I was able to correctly identify sounds that were just above the threshold of audibility.*)
My retirement activities are being determined in part by what my sinuses are doing to my ears on any given day. For all the countless hours I spent on airplanes traveling for work over many years, and then in the loud data centers at my destinations, I’m amazed I don’t have a much worse chronic case of tinnitus.
Adjusting to aging is something that those of us who last this long must do. I sit here rubbing my weak ankle that is also determining my retirement activities. It would otherwise be fine, if not for an elderly Russian man slamming into the back of my stopped car 22 years ago.
While sitting, rubbing and listening, I am worrying about someone near and dear to me who will undergo open heart surgery. We’re counting on world-class Boston heart surgeons to be as successful as a world-class Boston retina surgeon was in restoring the sight in my left eye.
* You are of course wondering what headphones were used in the test. The Beyerdynamic DT-150, that has been a standard at Abbey Road Studios for many years.
I don’t know how it’s possible that the second semester of my freshman year of college was 50 years ago, but it was. What a crazy time! Having broken up with my girlfriend at home to pursue Felicia at school, only to let go of her under very sad circumstances, I stuck to my studies. Then I met Karen.
In all sincerity, every one of my girlfriends was amazing. I’ll never know how amazing staying with Felicia would have been, but I was with Karen for a long time and she was extra amazing. While I was working at a restaurant for my summer job, Karen was at Digital Equipment Corporation, where her father worked.
DEC was beyond huge in Massachusetts, being the primary economic engine behind the so-called Massachusetts Miracle that was the basis of Mike Dukakis’ run for president in 1988. If Dukakis, who I met several times when I was a radio reporter, had won the White House, the end of his first term would have been at the start of DEC’s rapid decline and demise.
Before PC’s took over corporate desktops there were text-based terminals, most notably the DEC VT100 series. They were attached at low speeds, typically 9600 bps, to terminal servers that were installed along 10 megabit/sec Ethernet backbones. And I do mean backbone. Those cables were thick!
My first installation with DEC terminal servers was a challenge. Many, but not all, of the minicomputer networks I installed were dedicated to our system. We had our own terminal server operating system that needed to be downloaded from our host systems.
I was at a hospital somewhere, and when powering up our DECServers it was a toss-up whether one of the VAX systems running our operating system, or a VAX running DEC VMS, would be the first to catch the request for a download. Like a chirping baby bird wanting to be fed.
Fortunately, a DEC field engineer was there. We looked at everything together, and once I had a good handle on the problem I called the office to update Brad, who had written the code that was downloaded onto the DECservers. Brad also happened to have been one of my college roommates.
The request for a download was an Ethernet broadcast. It was seen by all nodes on the backbone, and it came from the DECserver firmware. Brad reminded me of what I already knew, that there was nothing he could do to change that. We agreed the best idea was to find out if there was a way to create an exclusion list of hardware addresses, called a MAC address, within DECnet.
The FE was an affable guy who was easy to work with, and I told him that short of installing a completely separate backbone, a fix would have to come from DEC. He said he had no idea, “above my pay grade,” and that “DECnet isn’t even in Tier 1 support. I’ll have to call the escalation center in Colorado.”
He called, and when he had someone on the line he got a gleam in his eye, and a big smile to go with it. “We’re in luck! It’s Karen!” I looked at him intently and asked, “Karen… [name withheld]?”
His jaw dropped, he stared at me and asked, “Now how the Hell do you know that?” I didn’t. All I knew was that “my” Karen had worked at DEC in college, and not in Colorado. But when I saw his smile, and the way he said, “It’s Karen,” I knew it had to be her. Karen has a very sweet voice.
I gestured for him to hand the phone to me. It was the first time in over ten years that we had spoken. “Karen? It’s Doug. Brad’s on the other line.” Silence. Then a big disbelieving laugh. “HOW ARE YOU????”
We updated each other very quickly, then I explained the details of the problem. Karen said there was an easy fix. “I’ll need a list of the MAC addresses on your DECservers, then I’ll dial in and create an exclusion list in DECnet to ignore broadcasts from those addresses.”
I almost said, “Karen I love you!” but limited myself to, “You’re the best!” Brad was very amused hearing that Karen was fixing our problem. The shared backbone was soon working perfectly, carrying two co-existing, non-conflicting protocols. Ten years later, when DEC was being broken up for sale, Karen took a generous buyout. She continues to live in Colorado.
Carney Hospital is in the Dorchester section of Boston. I first heard about Carney from Felicia, who was one of the first people I met when starting college. We had clicked immediately, like an instant couple. From the get-go Felicia called me Dougie, and I adored her.
Felicia was very smart, very pretty, and very Roman Catholic. I can still easily bring her Boston-accented voice to mind. Felicia was from Boston’s Roslindale neighborhood, and with the intention of becoming a nurse she was a volunteer at Carney. Back then the girls who volunteered were called “Candy Stripers” because of their distinctive uniforms. Felicia was gifted at learning languages, and she was reasonably fluent in Spanish, which made her especially useful as a volunteer.
At night we’d walk to a park near campus, sit on the swing sets, and talk. Felicia would joke about getting married to a handsome, rich doctor, and I’d say, “For now you’ll have to settle for me.” I had two roommates in my all-male dorm, but Felicia had a single room in her all-female dorm. After our evening walks we’d go to her room to do less talking. (The dorms went co-ed by senior year, when my roommates and I were living in an apartment.)
I heard a lot about Carney Hospital from Felicia. She was going to continue volunteering there during Christmas break, and I was hoping she’d return to campus with a photo of herself wearing her cute candy striper uniform. Felicia did return to Carney Hospital, but not as a volunteer.
During Christmas break I had an extremely bad experience with the abusive stepfather of my girlfriend back home. I couldn’t deal with him anymore, I walked out, and that was that. As I told her decades later, “Technically, I didn’t walk out on you, I walked out on your stepfather.” I convinced myself it was for the best, because I’d be seeing Felicia again. But Felicia didn’t return to campus.
At the start of second semester, freshman year, over the hallway PA I was told there was a call for me in the dorm mother’s office. (No room phones in those days and, yes, there was a “dorm mother.”) It was Felicia’s mother, who said she was pleased to speak with me, because Felicia had been talking about me non-stop since getting home. She wanted me to know, however, that Felicia was a patient at Carney Hospital.
Over Christmas, during a snowstorm Felicia had been in a serious car accident. She was lucky to be alive, and she would likely be in the hospital for months. I was devastated, and I started looking into getting to Boston to see her. Then I received a letter from Felicia, saying she had a long road to recovery ahead of her, her life was on hold, and whatever it was we had hoped to have together, it was no longer a realistic possibility. What was I going to do? For the second time in a month I decided to convince myself that letting go was “for the best.” There are movies with stories like this one.
A couple of years before retiring, I finally visited Carney Hospital. I thought of Felicia each time I was at Carney to do some work in the hospital’s data center. When I knew Felicia, Carney was an independent Catholic hospital. It later became part of the Caritas Christi Health Care system. When Caritas ran into financial trouble a private equity firm took it over, and created Steward Health Care. Steward is a customer of my former employer, in which I continue to hold a financial stake that is sizeable only on a personal basis.
That’s my very long introduction to this item from last night’s CBS Evening News, where you will see a brief view of Carney.
Felicia did become a nurse. She left Boston proper and lives a couple of towns away. Instead of marrying a doctor, she married a state trooper.
On my landline — yes, I still have a landline — this caller ID has been appearing regularly for a very long time.
Checking calls from back on the 8th, the 4th, January 18 and January 10, they had the same ID, apparently from Michigan State University, and all the numbers ended in 11xx.
Hmm. I get similar robocalls from my alma mater, so I checked Michigan State’s alumni page. Yep, the main number is 517-884-1000.
I picked up yesterday’s call before the answering machine kicked in. A young woman, sounding like a college student, addressed me correctly by name, and said she was calling from Michigan State University.
Before she could launch into reading her fundraising script, I explained that I attended college in Massachusetts, and have absolutely nothing to do with Michigan State. She seemed flustered, and I assured her that I was sincere. She apologized and hung up.
Some further checking showed that I’m not the only one who’s been called, despite having no connection to the school. Their having my correct name and phone number makes it likely that Michigan State is using a database that’s been padded with files from other, unknown, sources.
Here’s hoping my name has been flagged for deletion at Michigan State. If another call comes in I’ll let it go. I’ve given up trying to convince auto warranty scammers that I’ve never owned a 2012 Jeep.
This weblog was started when I was a much younger man, and temporarily sedentary, suffering from an acute ankle problem. It resulted from a combination of the ankle injury from the 2002 car crash, and “overuse” from running more than 2,000 miles per year. This post goes back to more than 17 years ago.
Having returned to a regular running schedule last year, my weak ankle’s trouble has become a chronic condition. Ice packs, along with wobble board and balance pad exercises, aren’t enough anymore. I’ve filled out an online form requesting an appointment with an orthopedic group, and in the meantime my leg is back in the immobilizing boot.
It’s been thirty years since I connected to the Internet from home and bought my first desktop PC. Those two events go together. Until then I had been using a Tandy 1400 LT dual-floppy portable DOS PC with a monochrome LCD screen, bought used from a brother-in-law.
Tandy 1400 LT
The 1400 LT was excellent hardware that I enjoyed using very much. Extremely durable, its mechanical keyboard would impress any laptop user today. It even had an RCA composite video connector that displayed CGA graphics on a regular TV. Perfect for playing games, such as they were.
The software I used included Quicken, TaxCut, ProComm, and an office application called PFS: First Choice.
Accessories were an Intel 14.4 Kbps modem on the serial port and an Epson dot-matrix printer on the parallel port. The LaserDisc store, Sight & Sound, had a bulletin board that I dialed into with ProComm. I could check on new releases, titles in stock, and chat with the staff and other customers.
Circle Dialing phone service, that seems so ridiculous now, required picking a plan with a limited number of towns you could reach without making an expensive long distance call. I chose my plan based on the towns where my parents and my in-laws lived. Also included were Waltham, where the store was, and Bedford, where TIAC, The Internet Access Company, had a dialup access point.
CompuServe and AOL never interested me. I didn’t see the point in using commercial online networks. The 1400 LT would have been perfectly good for dialing into a UNIX Shell account at TIAC, and I considered doing that, but I was traveling on business up to half of the time, leaving my wife alone to care for our infant son. So I delayed getting online.
Reading an issue of PC Magazine in late 1993, I saw an item about the release of the Mosaic Web browser. I realized that although the Internet wasn’t yet mainstream, it was about to explode, and I should get ahead of the curve. The problem was, to run Mosaic I needed a much better system than my clunky little laptop, and I wouldn’t know how much I could spend until seeing that year’s bonus at work. I found that out on January 31, and I set a budget of $1500, equivalent to more than $3000 today.
Scouring Computer Shopper magazine, the best I could do for that bottom-dollar price was to order a no-name PC clone with an AMD 386 40 MHz processor, 4 megs of memory, a 160 megabyte hard drive, and a 14-inch SVGA CRT monitor. No sound card, no CD-ROM drive. DOS and Windows 3.1 were included, but not pre-installed.
Before the made-to-order system was delivered, I signed up for a UNIX Shell account at TIAC, and got online with the 1400 LT. I played with the text-based Web browser called Lynx, but mostly I explored Usenet newsgroups. In fact, a few months later, that was how I first learned of Prue’s married and maiden names.
Once the new system was installed and ready, I connected the modem and dialed into TIAC. I switched my account to a more expensive SLIP/PPP plan, and paid for Trumpet TCP/IP. Mosaic was free. ProComm included the necessary file transfer programs. After downloading and installing Trumpet and Mosaic, I was off and running, or at least crawling.
Paramount had a Star Trek Web page, and despite the… var-y… slow… speed… of… the… con-nec-tion, I was astounded. The mouse pointer was navigating a Web page. I had seen the future, and it was graphical Web browsing.
A series of modem upgrades ultimately maxed out at 33.6 Kbps, until moving to the house I’m in now, where Road Runner broadband service was available at a screaming 1.5 Mbps.
What happened to the 1400 LT? I sent it to my brother. His stepdaughter stole and pawned it.
What happened to my first desktop? It was too slow to run Windows 95, so I upgraded the BIOS to support an 83 MHz Intel replacement processor. Later, after getting a new system with a Pentium II, the old desktop was my first Internet router, to have more than one PC in the house access the Net. (Much better than the connection sharing feature in Windows 98.)
Intel Pentium II Bunnyman
I installed two $15 Ethernet cards and created a bootable diskette with a custom build of Linux. Later, after buying a dedicated hardware router (pre-WiFi), I put the 8-year-old PC in the back of my 13-year-old Honda Civic hatchback, intending to take it to work. Instead, the all-steel case with internal bracing helped to protect me by providing some support in a rear end collision as I sat at a red light. The car crumpled, the PC was wedged in too tightly to remove, and the case was barely bent.
