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.
Artist — or AI? — depiction of the Odysseus lander on the Moon.
Playtex fabricated the space suits for the Apollo Moon missions. The Playtex logo wasn’t placed on the lunar landers, but the Columbia Sportswear logo is on the Odysseus lander. Columbia’s contribution to the mission was the development of a thermal fabric, based on NASA’s original space blanket from the 60’s.
My multi-function Canon printer is seventeen years old. Finding OEM ink cartridges for it is difficult and, when successful, extremely expensive. The scanner is excellent, as seen in the post from a couple of days ago, so it’s a keeper. I’m trying to decide on a brand of after-market refill cartridges to try.
I needed to print a tax document, and the Pixma MP600 said no can do, because one of the colors of ink has run out. ARGH! It was time to punt and pull out the even older, long idle Samsung ML-1710 laser printer.
I crossed my fingers that I could find a generic driver in Windows 11 that would work with a legacy printer. *Whew!* Success!
When I was doing AM radio DJ duty, I could monitor either what was going to the transmitter from the studio, or what the transmitter was putting out over the air.
If I was working alone on a weekend, I always monitored the over-the-air signal. What I heard wasn’t quite what listeners with regular AM radios heard, because the station’s AM receiver had wideband reception.
My GE Superadio III, now almost 30 years old, has wideband AM reception. It’s only useful during the day, on stations that are well separated on the dial from other stations. Here’s an example of the difference in sound quality, for all that it matters anymore. 🙁
This is what happens when powering up a personal computer, going all the way back to the primitive system that motivated Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard.
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.
