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By this time of every infant year, I'm sick of those
10 biggest stories
stories. As soon as the trial is
over, nobody will care about O.J. (although, given the
glacial speed courts, the appeals process, the chance that
he might be charged with violating the victims' civil
rights even if he is acquitted of murder, that could be a
while).
If Haiti is serene, then there will be trouble in Belize. Settle the Balkan war, and something will break out in the former Soviet Union. Stop the massacre in Rwanda, and there will be a new one in East Timor.
How do they rate these things and decide one outranks the other as a significant story of 1994?
Besides, l keep reading that we're a deeply narcissistic culture, that all we Americans care about is ourselves and our personal development. In an effort to fit in with the zeitgeist, I'll share some of the things I learned in my 1994 quest for harmony and enlightenment:
· Few people seem to have heard the story about
George Washington's axe, and so I get mystified looks when
people ask me what kind of computer I use, and I say a
George Washington's axe machine.
My father is fond of the story. A fellow was strolling down a country lane one day and saw a farmer chopping wood. At the stranger's approach, the farmer set aside the axe and indulged in conversation.
That looks like a mighty old axe you've got
there,
the passer-by observed.
It is pretty old,
the farmer agreed. As a
matter of fact, it was George Washington's axe.
Wow,
marveled the pedestrian. I had no idea it
was that old. That must be some axe to last that
long.
It's quite a tool,
the farmer stated. Seven
new handles and three new heads, but it's still the same
old axe.
My computer is like that axe. In early 1990, I bought a hot machine for the day: 25-mhz 80386 CPU, 2-mb RAM, 66-mb hard disk, all in a mini-tower case.
A couple of weeks ago, frustrated by the machine's sloth at running Windows, l replaced the motherboard with one with a faster processor, and then I smelled hot electronics -- the fan had died in the power supply, so I replaced that. This means that the rather grungy minitower case is the only part that remains of the original machine. Everything else -- RAM, hard and floppy drives, disk controllers, l/O cards, keyboard, video -- has been replaced during the past five years.
I suppose I could say it's a cobbled-together
clone
when someone asks, but I prefer George
Washington's axe.
· More computer lore I learned in '94. Last year I got fairly intimidate with desktop publishing (I hate that term, because I've never published a desktop in my life, I've never seen a published desktop, nor have I ever met anyone who published a desktop).
My education in this industry goes back to the days of
real lead type. The standard unit of measurement is a pica.
There's a special ruler, called a pica pole,
and I
cherish my 18-inch stainless-steel Gaebel 612 pica
pole.
However, my precious pica pole has become inaccurate
through no fault of its own. It measures with the
traditional pica of 0.16608 inch. These desktop
publishing packages
define a pica as 1/6 of an inch, or
0.16667.
This 0.00059-inch difference may appear insubstantial, but it does add up to enough to matter -- about half a pica over a foot. Precise alignments get thrown off.
The neighborhood butcher would get in big trouble if he arbitrarily defined a pound as 15.5 ounces, so why is the computer industry allowed to corrupt and debase our system of measures?
At the very least, these computer programs should let you select the real pica rather than their contrived pica.
Anyway, in 1994 1 learned that one pica is not necessarily the same as another, so be warned.
· Front-wheel-drive cars give you no warning when you're about to lose control.
In the fall of 1993, I sold my old pickup. We drove it
perhaps 1,000 miles a year, and the carrier insisted on
charging $350 a year to insure it; nobody seems to offer a
low-mileage beater
classification. I bought a
well-used 1987 Chevy Cavalier station wagon with
front-wheel drive.
I'm used to rear-wheel-drive. When the roads are slick, the car will start to fishtail a little, and you know you should back off before you lose your traction.
Front-wheel-drive doesn't give you any such warning. Perhaps it's the computer in the car that makes it drive in a binary mode -- either full traction or none at all, and no transition state in between.
This I discovered while crossing South Park in a blizzard: rolling along at a comfortable 40 mph one moment, and tilted at a bizarre angle in a snow-packed ditch the next.
Fortunately, two good ol' boys appeared in a 3/4-ton four-wheel-drive pickup with a tow chain. They had me out in minutes, and argued when I tried to give them a $10 bill.
Thus I also learned that traditional Colorado values were still being practiced in 1994. May they continue in 1995.
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