Baud Attitude

I don’t pay a lot of attention to the things that get us through our lives.  Take television, for example – I don’t see television as anything all that amazing, though there must have been a time when television stations were being set up in cities all over the US and huge transmitters were being built and hauled to the tops of remote hills to broadcast programs and an entire distribution system was created to produce the shows and get them out to TV stations and so on and so forth.

By the time I was born, TV was just “something that was there”.

Another one of those things that’s “just there” is the common computer hard drive.  Let’s think about that for a second.  You can buy hard drives right now that store three terabytes of information – that’s three trillion bytes of information, multiply by eight for bits, and it’s all stored in the form of imperceptibly faint magnetic signals on tiny metal platters that are just about the smoothest things in existence – they have to be that smooth because the read/write heads that access all this data don’t actually touch the surface of the drive; they float above it on a cushion of air measured in nanometers, and in order to play you back a video of a cat jumping into a box and falling over they need to be able to find each and every single bit of data on the surface of a disk that is rotating 120 times a SECOND and keeps spinning at that speed hour after hour, day after day, as long as it’s needed.  I’ve taken twenty-year-old hard drives and put them back into service and they’ve come right up, their capacities laughably small by today’s standards but as ready as ever to serve.

The technology needed to make mechanical devices move that precisely and the physics involved in actually being able to store that much information are mind-boggling; I can’t even fathom what goes through the minds of the people who design these things.

On the other hand, hard drives can be risky things.  We put so much of our lives on to them, and when it’s invariably time to move on and get a bigger drive or a newer computer, that information is still on those drives.

So, one of my projects at work last week was to wipe a bunch of decommissioned drives so they couldn’t be read.  It’s pretty tedious work – basically you hook up a drive to a computer and start a piece of software that runs for several hours and then you do it again with the next drive – but it did have one redeeming feature:

Every once in a while I’d hit a drive that couldn’t be wiped and it would put a little smile on my face and I’d set it aside on a little stack of drives and I’d write BREAK on it in red ink…

…and then, I got done wiping those drives that I COULD wipe and I was left with the drives that I COULDN’T wipe because they were no longer working but that still potentially contained sensitive data, and then I got to turn this:

Into this:

And let me tell you, engineering marvels or not, amazing pieces of technology that I take for granted and will never understand fully or not, it’s occasionally fun just to let the inner luddite out and break things.

Saw this on a desk at work and it made my mind boggle a bit.  I wonder if this is how left-handed people look at the world EVERY SINGLE DAY.

OK, a little googling suggests that this isn’t actually a keyboard for angry left-handed people.

Rather, it’s designed to improve ergonomics by making it so that a mouse on the right side of your keyboard can be put closer so you’re not reaching as far every time you need to move the cursor – and, to be fair, I use the apple keyboard that doesn’t have a keypad at all for much the same reason –  but I like my initial impression better.

When I was a kid, up through about my late teens, I played an awful lot of pencil & paper RPGs.  It started with Dungeons & Dragons, of course.  A friend had the Basic Set – the “red box” that was the genesis of so many geeks – but we quickly outgrew that and went looking for more.  It was followed by AD&D, then Car Wars, Call of Cthulhu, Twilight 2000, Traveller, Gamma World, Rolemaster, Champions, Top Secret, and on and on and on.

These all needed dice.  A lot of dice.  Now, the hobby shops sold really nice dice, but I was pretty broke, so I made do with the dice out of introductory sets, and dice scavenged from old boardgames, and the occasional die from the hobby shop when I was feeling rich, and I kept them all in a Crown Royal bag that more-or-less epitomized the Height Of Cool as a teenager.

I still have that bag, and the dice.

Eventually I discovered girls other hobbies, sold most of my gaming books and stuck the bag ‘o dice into a box, and in general left the world of pencil & paper RPGs completely behind.

So it’s rather odd to find myself part of a gaming group once again.  It’s a good bunch of people – my wife and myself, another couple about our age, a friend from school and her husband, and two teenage boys.

One of the teenage boys keeps his dice in a Crown Royal bag.  It made me feel all warm inside to see it.

Anyway, being an adult, I can finally afford to have a nice set of matching dice. I actually thought about getting metal dice, but I realized that most of the gaming takes place around a glass-topped table and that I didn’t want to go accidentally chipping my host’s furniture, so I settled for “pretty”.

Being old: It has advantages.