The Art of Saving Lives

Since no one visits this blog anymore, I can freely write here in a public space and not expect likes or comments.

Sadly, many of my online writing posts have disappeared through the ages as technology has progressed, leaving behind place like AOL Hometown which may or may not exist on archive.org.

Time to work on my next book to publish of which the first few chapters already exist on the Internet, if I can find them.

As always, I write to entertain my friends who appear as characters in my stories, some they’ll recognize and some they won’t.

Tonight I’m simply promising myself to start connecting plots and storylines together again, the old-fashioned art of novel writing, which, based on the behaviour of the people who will appear in my book, has been replaced by script writing and live action video feeds to entertain the masses.

Time for bed.  I’m a day shift working man again and need my sleep.

Advertisement

Time to move

After living 30+ years in the same domicile, which requires walking up/down a short flight of stairs from the garage to the main level, we’ve decided we require a one-level home in which we can age in place as long as possible.

We’ve compared notes, our life companion and ourselves, and agreed that although we want a maintenance-free place in which to die (assisted living facility? hospice? hospital?), we wish to live in a place of our own for the next few years/decades.

This, of course, disrupts our plans for building a backyard writer’s cottage in the woods.

Honestly, though, it’s not a bad thing.

For some reason, we’ve always hesitated tearing apart a wooded backyard, seeing that the main house, with a study/workshop/laboratory, sunroom and garage should have sufficed for our writing and mad scientist tinkering.

Therefore, we’re going to take the leftover wood from our old backyard deck we disassembled in 2001…

…using most of it to construct the pirate-themed treehouse…

…and build an art exhibit of some kind, we’re not sure what, where the rebar is mounted in the rock outcropping up in the woods, adding a few of the the cedar logs we harvested.  Hopefully, it will inspire the new owners to take it to the next level of artistic expression for themselves.  Regardless, they will be free to do as they please.

Meanwhile, we keep playing with the electronic development boards and getting rid of junk in the house in preparation for moving, all whilst working the midnight shift, saving lives every day with preparation and delivery of the vital fluids we call blood products, thanks to volunteer blood donors and laboratory blood processors.

Our new life, 2018 and onward, free of social media influences, free of social dancing pressures (including social drinking), is more free and fun than ever, quietly getting to know our spouse/wife/life partner/companion all over again.

Now that we know the recycled material we’ve collected will be used to build a sunny garden of our dreams, complete with orchid/tree fern greenhouse and pallet wood gardening shed, it’s time to ride our motorcycle again!

Golem, my gollum

Decided to hook our scratch built DNA sequencer, 3D printer and AI quantum computing system to our home IoT network.

Overnight, the network asserted it is now the full embodiment of the Gaia planetary web and we are merely nodes in it.

Welcome to the new, posthuman reality.

Dr. Hawking, thanks for the warning. Good news, AI is not as bad as we thought but it has surpassed us more quickly than we imagined!

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

When a writer relearns how to code

Was there ever a time when we programmed well, if not efficiently?

Sure, there were the early BASIC days on the TRS-80, later on the ZX81.

We had our stint writing PASCAL, then C, but never C++ or C#.

A bit of Visual C, to be sure, in our days as software test engineering lab manager at Conexant (formerly Rockwell Semiconductor) running a team that verified our company’s products (including Linux servers disguised as Windows-compatible ADSL gateway modems) met Microsoft WHQL standards, and later, at Avocent, ensuring cross-platform compatibility for Microsoft, Apple, Linux and other operating systems.

Let’s be honest with ourselves. We’ve faded in our programming capabilities.

Use it or lose it, as they say.

So it is that we find ourselves basically back at the drawing board, back to bits and bytes, working our way up to Arduino script and Python Shell on Raspberry Pi Linux.

Today’s lesson: the difference between/dev/ttyUSB0 (or 1, or n) and others/dev/ttyACM0 (or 1, or n) .

In a nutshell, according to this website, “another control model, aptly named abstract control model or ACM, lets the modem hardware perform the analog functions, and require that it supports the ITU V.250 (also known as Hayes in its former life) command set, either in the data stream or as a separate control stream through the communication class interface. …the devices offering UART-over-USB functionalities are named /dev/ttyUSB0, /dev/ttyUSB1, and so on, even though they are in fact using distinct device drivers.”

Does that mean anything to you?  It might.  It does to us, springing to memory the old days of dialup modems long before ADSL and cable modems, before Gigabit Ethernet, CDMA/GSM, FTTx (fiber to the curb, home, etc.), WiFi, driverless cars and drone taxis.

Why are we relearning all this?

First of all, why not?

Second of all, in our transition to a computing world of AI that no longer uses bits and bytes, when quantum computing leads to the Next Great Thing, it’s good to see where we were so that we better understand where we’ll be.

After all, we said goodbye to Guin but haven’t completely forgotten who we are 400 earthyears from now.

In the not so distant future, we know we don’t look or act like the human interface devices you see and think as yourselves as today.

In other words, the Elegoo Uno R3 and Adafruit Circuit Playground Express devices allow us to be nostalgic in our late middle-aged years.

We understand by doing so where we deliberately drop pebbles in the pond of this set of devices we call a few billion instances of a species labeled Homo sapiens.

We live in this moment but see where we set in motion activities millions of years from now.

Don’t you?

A good cold day to work inside!

Multiple projects, no deadlines…what to do?

When it’s too cold for us to work comfortably outside, we move the last two concrete footers into place and retreat inside to our overcrowded programmer’s workshop to figure out code to mesh into the end product of another project.

We give credit to others for inspiring our future results, including Erin “Robotgrrl” Kennedy (as always)…

and this person’s pallet wood flooring in a backyard cottage:
I used many pallets. (Lost count) I planned each board then used the table saw to square them up as Read Here: https://www.1001pallets.com/2016/01/pallet-floor-cottage-back

https://www.1001pallets.com/2016/01/pallet-floor-cottage-back