cough, wheeze

I should be able to go back to work tomorrow…just in time for Friday! What a waste of 6 days it’s been. I’ve slept about 96 hours, eaten no more than 2,000 calories, lost between 12 and 15 pounds, fallen over (slightly bruising my right kneecap) and gone completely stir-crazy.

Being worn out prior to getting sick I’m sure lengthened my recovery period, but this was one killer flu. I sure don’t want to have to go through that again. And, no, I can’t do the flu shot thing.

The next step is to return to productivity without burning myself out in the process.

it may not be sars, but it sure feels like it

so on day 4 of my illness I still have a fever of 39C (which is responding better to medication now, thank you), a very nasty cough, lightheadedness, spots in front of my eyes, diarrhea and appetite problems. And everything taste funny. A Dr. Pepper I managed to drink today tasted more like wintergreen than anything else. Is there wintergreen in Dr. Pepper?

fevers suck.

So last night I get home, change into my robe, lie down on the bed — and suddenly it’s 5 hours later and I have a fever of 38C or so. I spent most of the night not being able to get back to sleep, even with medication. At about 8AM I found my fever had shot up to 40.2C, which is way too high. I feel like I’m drunk, but it’s completely unpleasant.

I’m supposed to be off to Montana for 4 days starting Monday (for my job). If I still feel like this, I’m not going, especially because I’m supposed to drive down to Buffalo and back for a cheaper flight.

Panavise rules.

A few nights ago I was so tired I fell asleep with my PowerBook G4 on my lap…in bed. During the night, the PB fell on the floor and got dented. Ouch! A beautiful Titanium work of art, with a pucker in the front bezel on the left side, near the corner.

I only noticed it last night as I picked up my laptop for a late night email session. Dang it, and I had just bought this PB used a couple of months prior.

Tonight I found it was deceptively simple to fix. You remove 7 T8 Torx screws from the bottom, and the entire lower cover comes off. This was the part that was dented. A few minutes later with my Panavise, the world’s best hobbyist vise (completely smooth vise walls, separate heads for general purpose, large clamping and PCB holding) and the dent was virtually invisible. In fact, the case seems to fit together better now than it did before!

Now if I could only find replacement rubber feet for the machine, as well as the little rubber bits that hold the display a mm or two away from the main body when closed…

sic transit gloria, CA3046

Earlier tonight, my good friend Old Crow told me of the passing of a long-time friend. And while others may find themselves irrevocably moved by the disappearance of a human mind from the conscious experience of this plane of existence, I source my sense of wonder from a different place: the engineer’s perspective.


When you learn about making things like amplifiers in EE class, you learn about how important it is to have matched pairs of transistors. Symmetry tends to be just as important in electronic circuits as it is in plant life: pairs of tubes supply and remove fluids from a plant leaf much the same way electrons flow through paired transistors in an amplifier. Optimal behaviour occurs when these sides respond in a balanced, symmetrical manner (in the most common cases.)

The more closely you can match the behaviour of these 2 transistors, the more symmetrical the circuit becomes. So, someone got the bright idea — what if we put more than one transistor on the same piece of silicon? Thus, the integrated circuit was born: not with the goal of putting computers on chips (or anything digital, for that matter), but with the idea of making the performance of a circuit uniform.

The earliest ICs only had simple transistors on them. The CA3046 was pure simplicity: 5 matched NPN type BJT transistors on the same chip. You could continue to build circuits the way you were used to — with resistors and capacitors on the circuit board or prototype board — and simply replace the transistors in there with matched transistors, formed from the same piece of silicon. Presto, your circuit sounded a lot better. If you went high volume, you could have your circuit burned into its own integrated circuit; many opamps (the building block of modern analog circuit design) were designed this way. Or you could create a printed circuit board, and go that way — the sort you might have seen in just about every consumer electronics product in the 1970s and 1980s.

The CA3046 (and its strange partner, the CA3096: 3 NPN, 2PNP in a single chip) helped us ring in an age of harmony. Matched pair transistors were essential to building harmonic circuits that were pleasing to the ear. The original Moog “transistor ladder” design required hand matching of transistors; were the CA3046 available then, Moogs probably would have been a lot cheaper (had they not already become a “fad.”) And so we come to my understanding and initial exposure to the CA3046/CA3096: exploration of the circuits used to create the music I so loved as a child — pioneers like Wendy Carlos, Vangelis, Larry Fast and Tomita — combined with a single class at Yale University, taught by Prof. Peter Kindlmann.

Professor Kindlmann, or pjk as we all knew him (his email alias), related device physics to something tangible onto which I could hang in the rareified Ivy League air. Suddenly electronics was about what I remembered: sitting at my little brown particle board and wood veneer desk, torturing a poor PCB away with my poor soldering gun (!!!) skills, and constructing a Heathkit digital clock or analogue, solenoid powered metronome (Oh, how I want that metronome again!) I started to make sense of all the abstract math and subatomic particle interaction. Up until that instant, when he brought together the origins of the CA3046, I felt Yale had failed me in my engineering instruction. I didn’t want to be a theoretical physicist, much as I respected (and could readily understand) the principles involved. I wanted to do something with that technology that was of use in solving a more macroscopic problem: lighting a room, carrying a human thought from here to here, making music, enriching lives. My inner humanitarian had found other outlets, through education and community outreach, but I could not see what my degree would ever do for me. My heart simply didn’t lie in the depths of the “bunny suits” (outfits you wear in transistor fabrication labs) or in digital signal processing. I needed to be as close to the human experience as possible; my projects would always be more of a component integration exercise than a wander in the forest of science.

Later I had a few missed starts trying to make circuits: a failed design for a video game emulator cartridge that was already halfway into production nearly bankrupted me, and I lost heart. I put away my skills for many, many years, always thinking that i could fall back on it if I really needed to. Now I see it’s a skill I’ve neglected for far too long, and one that can enrich my life if I only take the time to apply it artfully. Expect to read more about this in the future, whether here on livejournal or at my websites www.atypical.net and www.wohmart.com (shameless plug).

Where was I? Oh yes, the CA3046. Prof. Kindlmann helped me connect the dots — thank you for helping me stay the course until I could believe enough in myself to explore such a project again.

It is with a heavy heart that I leave you with this last link: CA3046, TBD.

ok, WTF does this comment on my gallery mean?

From: rodrod @ 68.168.113.93 (Sat Apr 24 11:58:27 2004)
Your so hot i want to stab you with a fork.

Credit to beaker, #twilight_zone, EFNet

14:30 <@beaker> All of which means one of two things: either it's the goddamn
                finest time in history to be an American, living as we are in
                the age of incredible technology and miracle medicines and
                longer life expectancies and $5 coffee drinks and a happy
                synthetic chemical to match any sort of ache or pain or lump or
                rash or spiritual crisis you might be facing.
14:31 <@beaker> Or it's the absolute worst, what with so many of us heavily
                drugged and over half of us massively obese and IQs dropping
                like stones and our overall quality of life deteriorating right
                under our noses and shockingly huge numbers of us actually
                finding Shania Twain somehow interesting. Which perspective is
                right for you? Ask your doctor.

Computers for Sale / Trade / To Good Homes

Hi folks,

I’m clearing out my 8-bit computer collection. The following gems are up for sale, trade, or simply to be given away to good homes. Make me a reasonable offer, to my email. Crosspost anywhere you like.

S-100
-----
iCOM 3712 Dual Disk Drive Cabinet (for Altair):
http://www.virtualaltair.com/virtualaltair.com/vac_icom_3712.asp
s/n 1567, model # 3712-50
+ Compupro enclosure (S-100 bus + power supply)
+ Compupro arbitrated 24 bit DMA hard disk controller
+ Compupro arbitrated 24 bit DMA floppy disk controller
+ Fujitsu 20MB Hard Drive in full size enclosure w/ power supply

Commodore Business Machines
---------------------------
Commodore VIC-20 Paddle set, in original box
Commodore 64 in original box
Commodore 1571 in original box
Commodore 128 w/Software, S/N CA1109269
Commodore 64, no box
Commodore 1571, no box
Commodore 128D, no box
Commodore plus/4 - in original packaging, all original materials
Commodore 1541 disk drive - no box, dust cover
Commodore 64, no box, dust cover
Commodore modem
Commodore C2N cassette unit
The Connection Vic-20/C64 to parallel port converter
Giant box of Commodore 64 cartridges and floppies (GAMES)
Amdek Color 300 15" monitor.  Has NTSC Composite and Chroma/Lumina
  inputs.

Atari
-----
Atari 130XE
Atari 400
Atari 410 cassette tape drive
Atari 600 in original packaging
Atari 800
Atari 800XL (x2)
Atari 1010 cassette tape drive
5x Atari 1050 floppy drives
Atari 801 dot matrix printer
  + plethora of games on floppy and cartridge
  + assorted joysticks & paddles.
Edumate Light Pen + Peripheral Vision -- Atari and C64 compatible

Hewlett-Packard
---------------
HP-41C full printed manual set (no calc)
HP 82153A -- HP-41C optical wand (complete)
HP-41C Games Manual
HP-41C Synthetic Programming Guide

Apple ][
--------
Apple ][+ with Microsoft 16K Language Card and Kensington System Saver
  and Marcey Inc. parallel interface (slot #1)
  and Disk ][ interface card (slot #6) + 1 Disk ][
  and Monitor II m/n A2M2010 s/n 0872113
  and Panasonic Auto Stop cassette player.
Apple //e with Extended 80 Column Card, Disk ][ interface card + 1 Disk ][
  and lots of manuals
Apple //e (Enhanced, with MouseText)
Epson HomeWriter 10 dot matrix printer, 100CPS.  S/N 017835
  Includes parallel port interface cartridge, manuals, original packaging
Apple Duodisk

Apple Macintosh
---------------
Apple Macintosh 512K in original packaging + extra external 3 1/2" floppy drive
Apple Macintosh IIcx, no memory, no HD, "Macintosh II" video card.

PC/IBM
------
Original Copy II PC board with manual (requires 360K 5 1/4" drive)

CP/M
----
Sanyo Creative Computer (CP/M) MBC-1000AUS  S/N 56820908
  Floppy drive shows some damage (will not close).  Includes CP/M.

Sun
---
2x Sun-1 computers, missing CPU cards.  Only includes 2xmonochrome
  graphics cards and 2x 3Com 3Mbit/10Mbit ethernet cards (one is a
  prototype).  Extremely rare -- these are Stanford University
  Network computers, NOT SPARC machines.  They were originally
  68010-based computers.  Non-operational.
Sun GDM-17E10 17" multisync color monitor
Sun Type 5 keyboard (with Control key aligned with home row) and
optical mouse w/ required optical pad.

Tandy
-----
Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III  S/N 00013665
  2x 5 1/2" floppy drives
  + boot diskette + 4 application diskettes
Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer 2.

Texas Instruments
-----------------
TI99/4A personal computer
  + cartridges
  + cassette tapes

Misc.
-----
Mattel Aquarius + custom, homebrew extension board of unknown function
Timex Sinclair 1000 (aka Spectrum ZX81)
  + original manual
  + 16KB ram expansion
Mitsubishi C-3919N, 19" analog RGB monitor, s/n 2030490, March 1982
  40-70Hz Vertical, 15.5-23.5kHz Horizontal, max 350x280 resolution
  Perfect for analog NTSC video work or arcade cabinet refurbishment
NEC Multisync 3D monitor (1024x768, capable of NTSC frequencies)
Zenith Z-19 Serial Terminal (VT-52 alike)

Synthetic <i>a priori</i> judgements

A recent thread on TCOW concerning evolution vs. creationism brought up the issue of a priori judgements, and the subtle difference between synthetic and analytic a priori judgements. It lead me to do a bit of online research, during which time I discovered that many of the texts I’ve referred to so often in dead tree form have been transcribed, without encumberance of copyright. Hooray for the Internet!

If you’re interested, read my posting here. Comments can be made here or there, I get notification of both. :-)