dannyman.toldme.com

Enter, NCSA

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1997/04/07/enter-ncsa/

Dannyman starts at NCSA, among numerous other cool goings-on.

Yah, well after English today, where we had a good discussion about Quentin’s section in Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” I wandered on over to ACB as scheduled and proceeded to start on my new job. I spliced my first patch cable today – that’s a 10 base-T connector used to hook a computer on to a network. I guess at least for now my workstation is a Macintosh, but with a little time I can make it useable, or hopefully “upgrade” to something better.

After that first lesson, we went over to ACB to lay some network cable for some Supercomputers that are being installed. Didn’t actually hook them up – I think that gets done sometime tomorrow. Those monsters are outrageous – something like 4G of RAM and some hundreds of Gigabytes of drive space. I saw a guy sliding a drive in to one of ’em, he told me it was a 9G Ultra-SCSI. There was a row in that machine of those. The memory, he told me, is installed in 256M SIMMs … and the machines come in pairs of units each with 32 CPUs. Neat! I wondered later what kind of memory cache those CPUs were treated to.

As I was helping place the cable under the floor – 100M fast Ethernet for now, to be augmented by 800M HIPPI cable later, I couldn’t help but flash over to the future sometime when Asao might be telling the grandkids something along the lines of “Back around the turn of the century, your Grandfather actually layed network cable for some of those ‘supercomputers’ they had at NCSA.” Who knows, maybe I’m a little over-psyched about playing a small part in a historical era. Someday though, I know these very same supercomputers that are so exotic today will seem quite quaint by the standards of a future modern day. I however, will be able to remember the old days when a computer with 32 CPUs or hundreds of gigabytes of storage would have been something to babble about.

After dinner, I got up to DCL where SIGNet conducted a tour of “Node 1” with Charley Kline. It’s an exciting place where cable of all kinds run thick. I understood a good deal, a lot of it was kinda mystical to me. Basically Node 1 is a little bunker where a great many of the Campus’ telephone and telecommunications equipment is routed. Basically a significant part of the campus’ “nervous system” … fascinating. Unfortunately though I accidentally hit the hidden button in my camera that causes it to panic and rewind the film, so no pictures, sorry. Chris should have some on the digital, though to be sure it’s not that visually fascinating anyway.

I’m actually pretty excited about my paper for Rhet 143 for a change. I got a C+ on the last one, which I kind of blew off as a pretty gay assignment. This one though I’d hope for an A. It’ll be on the web too don’t worry, so I’ll not bother to talk about it much for now. Just like to say that I enjoyed “Peer Editing” this morning in class. Actually, I should tell the TA that much, I think it’d do much for her in terms of … whatever.

Speaking of spreading the word of knowledge, I got some most excellent and thoughtful words from Matt Malooly. I agree with him most whole-heartedly. Here is a dude who has much the same beliefs as my own, only he can express them in a more coherent manner. All things in equal opposition, I’ve also been talking with Casey about her Religion, and was even questioned most insightfully on my beliefs by roommate Pat, who is part of the Campus Organised Christian scene. I appreciated his questioning, as for the time his intent was not at all to convert me or anything, but to get a genuine perspective on my beliefs. I was heartening.

Well, I could babble on forever about what a wonderful time I’ve been having of late, how I relish the increasingly busy schedule I face. Well, hey an occasionally Nihilistic guy like myself has to keep hisself outta trouble ya know! But anyways you readers gotta like occasional

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The Day the Hardware Died!

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1997/03/18/18-march-1997/

Yesterday is the day the hardware died. I’m going to make a personal holiday of it. Personal holidays off-hand;

Well, among all those hard-hitters, I dunno whether Hardware Failure Day can really catch on. Lemme tell ya what happened.

So like 2:45AM I drop by my room and check on my pine session running on at sasquatch. Two new messages. Oooh, I hit return to read them, and get a message from pine saying that a very serious disk error was afoot, the sort you talk to your administrator about. A disk error of “type 5” and that’s the last I hear.

Well, after some jostling about, dashing an email here and there, I hear from Tom;

Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 05:04:52 -0600 (CST)
From: “Thomas H. P—–” <t—-@enteract.com>
To: Dannyman <dannyman@enteract.com>
Subject: Re: *please* dannyland.org FRIED!

[…]

Your machine is making extremely weird loud grinding noises.

I checked all the patch cables and reset the box. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

—————-
Thomas P—— at EnterAct, L.L.C., Chicago, IL [t—@enteract.com]
—————-
“If you’re so special, why aren’t you dead?”

Yeah, that’s like not good. I’ll be coming home for Spring Break on Friday though. The next morning I checked my Amiga’s shell prompt …

PING sasquatch.dannyland.org (206.54.252.251): 56 data bytes
 
--- sasquatch.dannyland.org ping statistics ---
34749 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss

Guess I’m in the market for a new hard drive?

But hard drives fail all the time. Hell, this would be my third dead hard disk. Anyways so me and Asao were making out a bit after dinner, and I’d left my glasses on her bed, and we took turns sitting on them. People kissing aren’t so attentive about what they might be sitting on. The arms were bent upwards, and I bent them back just fine. But, well … fine tuning the left arm it broke off. Ouch! Now I have a one-armed eyeglass.

Now Asao’s pretty conscientious about where my glasses keep themselves. She seemed to feel bad about being involved in their untimely destruction. That’s okay though, I’d been wanting to replace the lenses any way, they’re scratched. The frames are obviously quite aged too. This pair has lasted me many years, a good strong piece of workmanship. I’m truly impressed and hope to find an identical frame.

Rachel was wearing stretch pants today with a floral pattern. I thought that rather attractive. But anyway the bigger thing is turns out Rachel’s a budding optician, and offered to mend the “temple” temporarily. If this half-cocked set-up doesn’t work out, I may take her up on that.

I’m thinking, I’ve got some month’s-old backups of my home directory, but this “crash” has taken a lot out of me spiritually .. maybe it’s time to start things over … namely, my web page? We’ll see. I’m glad I’ll have Spring Break to give me free-time for restoring things! About all that’s new so far is I’ve added a recently-written story on line. When it was reviewed in class it was well-received for the convincing tone and excellent detail. The readers were then let down all the more, it would seem, by the somewhat farcical ending. You can judge yourself though.

I’ve got work to do, so that’s all for now.

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5 June 1996 @7:42PM

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1996/06/05/5-june-1996-742pm/

Yesterday was June 4. Anniversary of Tienanmen Square. Also Lionel’s birthday. I saw a very good documentary/movie on Channel 11…very long, but it was all about the student protests and all. I appreciated that they explored all sides of the story … and some of the messages that people had to say. There was this one kinda crazy girl who was a big wig in the protest, it was impressive to see her talking about how she knew there would have to be bloodshed for anything to happen, and how she found it hard to tell students to come and gather when she knew that it was neccessary for them to be attacked. The messages that progress cannot come very well in too large steps … the analogy of the ripe melon, that if eaten in one gulp by the hungry person will cause an upset stomach, but can a hungry person wait to bite at the melon? Which is the right way?

While it put things in perspective, there was still the strong emotional appeal of the whole theme present. China, last great bastion of totalitarian Communist government, a “People’s State” not run by the people, but whose people are eager to stand up for themselves, although they are not suitably educated as to how. I guess the thing that impresses me the most about China is that it has great potential, and has over one fifth of the world’s population. Nearly a billion and a half people who are kind of in darkness.

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