danm628.bsky.social
Retired principal engineer. Who is quite willing to bore you with how communication systems work. And old computer history, at least the parts I was involved in.
Here to read what some of my favorite authors write.
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The internet was around back then. Still just a toddler though.
The boom came after the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989.
And, to annoy certain people, the web was invented in Europe. At CERN.
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Or a container on a ship. Heading to New York. Or any other large container port.
Inspections occur after arrival.
To be honest, I’ve seen variations of this in articles from the 1970s. There is a bad 50s movie about assembling a bomb in a basement.
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You can build a bomb with most enrichment levels. It just takes more uranium.
tutorials.nti.org/nuclear-101/...
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For those curious: Space Time Block Coding.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space%E...
I got to work with Siavash for a while at Intel. We didn't always agree. But he was right about one thing which is why things didn't go well for Intel Wireless. (Answer requires lunch and a beer.)
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Now they are everyday math. Your MIMO WiFi depends on matrices. Or at least that’s the easy way to do it.
Ten years from now a math system developed a 100 years ago will solve a problem that is important. And everyone will scramble to learn something that was considered unimportant.
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Math goes through stages. (As a retired engineer views things.) Cool math of no use. And overnight it solves a problem. And everyone has to scramble to learn that math.
Matrix and tensors were cool math. And suddenly they solved things.
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Countries have avoided it due to the UN Charter statements about war. Hence we have police actions (Korea) and peace keeping and other terms.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seonjeo...
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This was over a decade ago. So Google maps to find what was near the hotel. I wanted to walk, too many hours in a plane and meetings. And I only had about 4 hours before I had to head to the airport. Otherwise random wandering would have been the plan.
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Second trip I did get a few hours as tourist. There were imperial tombs a couple of kilometers away. I enjoyed walking around them.
After arguing with the concierge who wanted me to go see where Psy recorded Gangnam Style which was the other direction.
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My first trip to Seoul. The ride from Incheon to Gangnam took forever. At least when you’re worn out from travel.
Especially sitting next to annoying marketing guy.
Someday I want to visit and spend more than one full day in Seoul. Two trips. One full day each. Business travel sucks.
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For better and for worse the U.S. military is under civilian command.
Their choice is to do what they are told or to resign.
They can complain. But that isn’t going to change things.
I don’t like the renaming. It is a terrible violation of trust.
And, unfortunately, it is perfectly legal.
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Don’t blame Navy leadership.
They report to a civilian.
A civilian who ordered this.
Blame the white supremacist who is their boss.
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To be clear...
That is how engineering worked before the 2000s.
Go to the Library and look for what you needed. It worked when I went to the OSU library for a NTSC book in the 90s.
It worked in the 80s when I was at Bell Labs and was looking for books on POTS (tons of books) and ISDN (a few).
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RIP Willie
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Life changes. He was just 2 years older than me. And didn't make it to 35.
I did add an ATI command to the product line that was a dedication to him. I didn't mention it till we had shipped a few hundred thousand modems. Later it was in a few million.
And none of them exist today.
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We were allowed to visit him in mid-October at the hospital. Had to suit up and wear masks due to the treatment impact on his immune system.
I saw him again Thanksgiving week. At his home. He was going to Mexico for treatment.
Early December he was gone.
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What hurts is losing him.
Came back after Labor Day and said he had caught something from his boys. They had gone camping over the weekend.
Wednesday the OPs Manager came into engineering and told us that Willie had Leukemia.
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The sad part was losing WIllie, my boss. Leukemia is terrible.
If he hadn't gotten sick, maybe I would have ended up working on video for the last 30 years.
Instead I ended up on voice band modems and later wireless.
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I have an 1944 Encyclopedia Brittanica in a bookcase in my hallway. I got it from my Dad's mother when she passed. I was the grandkid who sat around reading it when visiting.
I'd pick a topic, read the encyclopedia entry then read all the book of the years till the present.
Peak nerd.
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Then it worked. I was happy.
Then very sad.
The project was canceled because my boss was diagnosed with leukemia. Suddenly I had to take over his work on modem firmware.
I miss knowing Dewey Decimal. I miss it being useful knowledge.
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Found a book from the late 50s. Collection of papers on NTSC standard development. Including the holy grail: A paper with all the equations describing how the camera and TV worked.
Spent a couple of days reading and working problems in a notebook.
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Mentioned it at lunch. One of our tech support guys (still in college) offered to take to the university library to look for book(s) on the topic.
We arrived. I skipped the card catalog and said we need to go to <number I don't remember>.
He was confused. I said it's electronics.
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In the early 90s I was at a small company working on a NTSC image capture product for a home computer. And was having a HUGE problem getting color rendition correct because I didn't understand NTSC. The short description in the chip datasheet wasn't helpful. It turned out to be wrong.
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One of the things I hated at work was the unofficial requirement that all leadership had to wear an ally card along with their ID badge.
I knew several managers who had that card who were definitely not allies.
I got in trouble for not wearing it. (Principal engineer so considered a leader.)
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That's only a little over a generation.
In the 1990s I only ran into one white supremacist. He was in Longview, not Portland. (A friend dated him till she found out what he was.) I didn't meet any in Portland. Of course I wasn't trying to find them.
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Parts are. Parts aren’t.
Cities and college towns aren’t.
Small towns…
It varies. A lot.
It takes many generations to root out evil.
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Lots of places seen as liberal have bad histories.
Portland is seen as very liberal.
The Oregon Territory banned blacks. The state tried to when it was formed.
This is why the PNW has so many white supremacists. More noticeable outside the big cities and college towns.
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I will say that Bluesky has cost me a lot.
I keep buying books. New authors. New recommendations. The queue keeps growing. Always a good thing.
This is the Internet I expected back in the late 80s and early 90s.
Assuming I ignore the Usenet flamewars back then.
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Purchased.
It’s a ways down in the book queue. So a couple of months out.
And I trust recommendations from real people here more than algorithms on sites.
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I’ve never read it.
Do you have a suggested translation? I see several on Amazon.
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Today YouTube suggested this. Something else that would have helped when I was writing database software.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=ktgx...
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Booster loss was planed to test the envelope.
Ship loss wasn’t. V2 has issues.
And Elon is a *******.
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Given the state of the world, OnlyFans might be a more reliable source of science funding.
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It was always fun going to RMNP with my Dad in the summer.
We would have heavy coats with us. Sometimes needed them and sometimes not. Always wearing long sleeves. Wearing sunscreen.
Out of state tourists would be in shorts and short sleeves. And often they were freezing trying to see things.
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Note: My Dad’s picture.
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Snow is FUN in the Rockies.
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Reminds me of my Senior Prom in HS. In Littleton CO. Back in the 70s.
We had a blizzard that day.
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She did get to see the world go from horse and buggy to walking on the Moon.
She spent most of her life within 50 miles of where she was born.
She died in the early 1990s. So only a decade or so of the internet. Though it was very different in the early years.
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Grandmother, Mom's mother, was born in 1900. Her little sister (2) died in 1913 from a random childhood disease. Lived through the Great War. The Great Depression. Lost the family farm due to it. Had her eldest daughter (17) die from the measles in 1941. Lived through WW2. The Cold War. Vietnam.