What does a dying centimeter say?
Jul. 21st, 2010 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivo"Erg..." [A dyne-centimeter, get it? You may now groan.]
That's how I feel at the moment. Door count at work was just shy of 1200 and I swear they all came in the last hour before closing. That includes a whole class of English as a second language students, with teacher, who wanted library cards and internet access. Most of them spoke no more than a few words of English and required the teacher as an interpreter.
Then of course it's the last week of summer reading so there's a frenzy of kids trying to catch up and claim all their prizes, including the much desired family pass to the swimming pool party that celebrates the end.
Worst though was the youngish and very unfocused woman (may have been drugged, legally or otherwise) who was sending a response to an unemployment denial... to an unemployment office in Michigan. She had five pages of stuff, some of it double sided which requires copying to go through the fax machine, and was still writing out her responses in longhand at the circulation counter at ten minutes before closing. She kept complaining that she couldn't see what she was doing. I think even I would have laid her off from her job.
It was nearly a quarter after before we managed to herd all these cats out the doors and lock up.
Ebay is a dangerous place. I got a useful piece of Alpha equipment there last week (specialized video card) for a good price. When I went to leave feedback for the seller, I noticed a real DEC VT220 terminal and keyboard, well used but intact and working, for a very low price. Now I've been looking for one of those on and off for several years. It would make an ideal operator's console for an Alpha and thus avoid needing a whole PC dedicated to the job. You can use a regular PC keyboard and monitor plugged into the server itself, but that's how I use the graphical user interface, and having operator messages pop onto the screen at inopportune moments is, well, a nuisance. Turning them off, while possible, risks missing something important. So I dropped a bid in. Tonight I found that I won the terminal. For the princely sum of $22.01, plus shipping. The shipping is almost as much as the purchase price, but even then it's a bargain as long as the unit is in working order as stated. These are selling for $100 and up, $300 or more if they've been "refurbished." I'd been looking hard and long for an original VT100 or VT102, but those are going for even more, despite their limited capabilities.
So I just confessed to Gary that another piece of junk is on its way to our house. Fortunately he admitted that he'd just purchased a vinyl LP for the same amount today, so we're even. Who'd pay that for an LP? Well, it's a rare and exotic one, all right, that I'll admit. I doubt I'll be listening to it, though. ;p
Sarah is doing fine, putting some weight on the foot now, and leaving the bandage alone. Weather is holding fair and not terribly hot or humid, but that is supposed to change. Or at least, they keep telling us it will change every day but it doesn't. Mosquito counts are dropping fast. Unfortunately, the flies are on the rise now.
Found my Japanese paper umbrella, cane, and shawl for Argos to wear tomorrow. He should have an ear trumpet too, but I'll settle for cupping a paw to one ear unless Janet comes up with something suitable. She thinks she has an old phonograph horn that will work...
That's how I feel at the moment. Door count at work was just shy of 1200 and I swear they all came in the last hour before closing. That includes a whole class of English as a second language students, with teacher, who wanted library cards and internet access. Most of them spoke no more than a few words of English and required the teacher as an interpreter.
Then of course it's the last week of summer reading so there's a frenzy of kids trying to catch up and claim all their prizes, including the much desired family pass to the swimming pool party that celebrates the end.
Worst though was the youngish and very unfocused woman (may have been drugged, legally or otherwise) who was sending a response to an unemployment denial... to an unemployment office in Michigan. She had five pages of stuff, some of it double sided which requires copying to go through the fax machine, and was still writing out her responses in longhand at the circulation counter at ten minutes before closing. She kept complaining that she couldn't see what she was doing. I think even I would have laid her off from her job.
It was nearly a quarter after before we managed to herd all these cats out the doors and lock up.
Ebay is a dangerous place. I got a useful piece of Alpha equipment there last week (specialized video card) for a good price. When I went to leave feedback for the seller, I noticed a real DEC VT220 terminal and keyboard, well used but intact and working, for a very low price. Now I've been looking for one of those on and off for several years. It would make an ideal operator's console for an Alpha and thus avoid needing a whole PC dedicated to the job. You can use a regular PC keyboard and monitor plugged into the server itself, but that's how I use the graphical user interface, and having operator messages pop onto the screen at inopportune moments is, well, a nuisance. Turning them off, while possible, risks missing something important. So I dropped a bid in. Tonight I found that I won the terminal. For the princely sum of $22.01, plus shipping. The shipping is almost as much as the purchase price, but even then it's a bargain as long as the unit is in working order as stated. These are selling for $100 and up, $300 or more if they've been "refurbished." I'd been looking hard and long for an original VT100 or VT102, but those are going for even more, despite their limited capabilities.
So I just confessed to Gary that another piece of junk is on its way to our house. Fortunately he admitted that he'd just purchased a vinyl LP for the same amount today, so we're even. Who'd pay that for an LP? Well, it's a rare and exotic one, all right, that I'll admit. I doubt I'll be listening to it, though. ;p
Sarah is doing fine, putting some weight on the foot now, and leaving the bandage alone. Weather is holding fair and not terribly hot or humid, but that is supposed to change. Or at least, they keep telling us it will change every day but it doesn't. Mosquito counts are dropping fast. Unfortunately, the flies are on the rise now.
Found my Japanese paper umbrella, cane, and shawl for Argos to wear tomorrow. He should have an ear trumpet too, but I'll settle for cupping a paw to one ear unless Janet comes up with something suitable. She thinks she has an old phonograph horn that will work...
Erg...
Date: 2010-07-22 08:46 am (UTC)Good luck.
Re: Erg...
Date: 2010-07-22 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-22 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-22 05:13 pm (UTC)In around 1986 they put me in charge of these new VAX minicomputers they were bringing in for a special project. Those were all asynchronous terminals, like the VT220 or else PC with emulation software. Since the building was too large for RS232 connections, we put in terminal servers on the relevant floors, connected to the VAX network by a thick ethernet cable backbone. The terminal servers ran DEC LAT protocol and could connect about 24 serial terminals each over RS232. TCP/IP was still not in common use. The routers for the ethernet were huge things, something like half a cubic meter each.
In 1989 I went to work for the NOTIS library software house. We used PCs on a Novell network, Macs on Appletalk, and still had some real IBM block synchronous terminals because the software ran on a mainframe (and so did our word processing for the documentation.)
By 1994, we were almost all PCs, but we had 3270 emulation cards in many of them to connect to the mainframe. The Netware and Appletalk had been pretty much replaced by TCP/IP and we had the internet available at most workstations. The Worldwide Web was a new idea. Gopher servers were still the neatest thing since sliced bread. Gopher, Email, FTP. Those were the big internet applications, all text based and all could be done on a VT220 terminal emulation (or even VT100.)
But the web was coming. That's what I see as the force that pushed wide area communications out of the character cell paradigm and into graphical interfaces. So here in the midwestern US, I'd put that at the mid-90s. In the fall of 1994 I was at Columbia College Library, and giving talks to faculty members about why they should start using the internet and have computers in their offices. Most were very resistant.
Just 16 years ago. And now I'd like to be giving talks about how they should STOP using the internet as an excuse for NOT teaching. ;p
no subject
Date: 2010-07-22 07:02 pm (UTC)Around that time I saw those terminal thingies in the Kuopio University, though I think I've heard they used it even later on, since it so neatly worked with their email and course selection systems.
Kuopio Polytech was all PC-based running Windows NT when I got along with that in 1997, though email was still accessed with Pine, running on some Unix variant server. Though later on they've jumped fully onto the Microsoft bandwagon, now it's all Outlook with the usual Exchange and Sharepoint stuff. Though all the technology isn't helping much, people still can't use their email properly. :-P