I am stuck in that “what do I post here” mode lately, so it’s time for another big long list of random stuff.

• I’ve been re-reading Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, a book I think I haven’t read since 1995.  It has not aged well, for two reasons.  One is that the technology is obviously obsolete.  It talks about using a modem to dial into the Information Superhighway; the main character calls a travel agent to buy a plane ticket; people still use fax machines; Microsoft releases products people buy.  The other is that in 1993, a peek into the working day at Microsoft was revolutionary to straight America.  Now, every company from here to Kansas has tried to replicate their corporate culture, so much so that it’s incredibly cliche to have free soft drinks and ask interview candidates why manhole covers are round.  It’s still an okay read though, although it’s more of a glimpse into the distant past for me.
• Two new donor Commodore 64s arrived via UPS today.  Both are missing a couple of keys; one is missing a couple of chips.  I plan on building a computer inside of a C-64 case, ala the x64, but for several hundred dollars less.
• Allergy season is full tilt right now, and I’m contemplating a move to northern Alaska.  It’s been almost two years of allergy shots with very little improvement, plus my allergy clinic is dropping my insurance this fall, so I’ll need to find a new one.  I don’t know if switching doctors and trying something more drastic will help.  I’ve already tried OTC meds, prescription eye drops, nasal spray, inhalers, and pills, acupuncture, and allergy shots.  I’m thinking if there’s a stem cell therapy treatment, I’d be willing to sink five or ten grand into trying it.
• I have not been watching baseball this year.  The Rockies have something like a dozen position players on the DL right now.  I heard the other night, one of their backup infielders went on the disabled list because of an infection he got from his watch.
• I haven’t been writing much since the last book came out.  This is always the most depressing time for me, and it takes a lot of effort to get a good idea percolating, which is where I’m at.
• I helped my brother-in-law buy a new TV the other day, and we went to Best Buy to look at their selection.  That place is seriously circling the drain.  There was almost nobody there on a Sunday afternoon, and their TV selection was worse than what they had at Target.  They were also fiercely pushing their “TV calibration” service, which as far as I could tell, involved paying hundreds of dollars to have a high-school dropout set the brightness and contrast on your new set.  Do people seriously pay for this?
• I went through all of my old books and pulled all of the bookmarks out of them.  I usually use business cards, but I extricated this stack of store bookmarks (Elliott Bay, Morgensterns, Title Wave in Anchorage, Coliseum) and a bunch of receipts and bank slips, some of which were humorous.  Like I found a grocery receipt from Mr. D’s groceries in Bloomington from 1994 that was nothing but candy bars, TV dinners, and beer.
• I have somehow become addicted to the show Friday Night Lights.  These things would not happen if it were not for Netflix streaming.
• I am trying to avoid Benadryl, because it messes with my sleep schedule too much.  I don’t dream correctly when I take it, and then I’m hung over the next day.  I’m taking Allegra instead, although it doesn’t knock it out as well.

OK, that’s all for now.

I didn’t remember it until this morning, but today is the anniversary of the first moon landing.  It’s hard to imagine it was 42 years ago (mostly because I was -1 years old at the time) but it’s also hard to fathom that it’s been something like 33 years since Skylab fell back to Earth, and I actually remember that one happening.

Space exploration in general is a huge k-hole for me, and I can burn up unlimited amounts of time by googling the Apollo missions or the Mir space station or the Space Shuttle.  I got knocked back into this last weekend, because we saw Apollo 13 at the Paramount Theater, and that got me thinking and reading Wikipedia and researching how exactly that tank explosion happened and who was originally supposed to fly that mission and all that.

A great lull in manned space flight, at least from the US perspective, happened when I was a child.  The last Apollo mission happened in 1975, with the Apollo-Soyuz test project. I was four then, and shortly after was when I got into space exploration trivia and started poring over encyclopedias and searching every garage sale for one of those GI Joe Mercury capsules.  The US didn’t fly into space again for six years, and it seemed like back then, the Soviets were sending up guys every other week, and keeping them in orbit for weeks and months at a time.  I couldn’t confirm this though, with a lack of internet connectivity and an impenetrable Iron Curtain preventing the free flow of information on the Russian space program.  There were those Mars probes, and Voyager and other unmanned stuff, but aside from an occasional reference on a PBS program, this stuff got almost no mention in our Indiana newspaper.

That meant that before they sent up the first Space Shuttle, I memorized everything I could find on Apollo.  I knew about Apollo 13 before there was a Tom Hanks movie on it; I could tell you about the 1967 pad fire, and explain translunar injection, and tell you all about lunar landers and lunar rovers and lunar life support backpacks and lunar samples and how Wally Schirra was a lunar asshole when he got sick on Apollo 7.

The technology of the Apollo program amazed me as a kid, because it seemed like the future, like we’d be going back to the moon any time now, that the Space Shuttle program would flourish, and they’d start cranking those things out like Boeing puts out 737s, until pretty much everyone hitched a ride into space like most of us have flown an MD-80 from one regional airport to another.  In the 70s, computers were rapidly getting smaller, and it only seemed logical that we’d all be astronauts in a couple of decades.

Now, Apollo seems astounding to me because it was so low-tech.  The computer they carried in the command module and lunar module had roughly the same amount of processing power and memory as an Atari 400.  (Luckily, it had a better keyboard.)  The command module talked to the Earth at a fast rate of about 50 kilobits/second.  And not only were all of those checklists analog printed material (this was long before the iPad could have made them obsolete), a lot of the calculations done by the crew were made with an analog computer, aka a slide rule.  I’ve seen a couple of the command modules at museums, and the interiors resemble a low-end Volkswagen from the 70s more than a high-tech interplanetary space vehicle.  It’s simply amazing that people would climb into these tin buckets, strap on a million horsepower of explosive rocket power, and aim for the moon.

It’s also odd to me that thirty years after sitting on the floor of my grade-school library poring over every book about space, I’m now just a couple of miles from Alameda, which is now home to the USS Hornet.  When Apollo 11 returned and splashed down in the Pacific, the Hornet picked up the crew and capsule, and then quickly ushered them off into a converted Airstream trailer, where they sat in quarantine for 21 days, to make sure they weren’t carrying any moon viruses.  I’ve been to the Hornet a few times; the trailer is still there, as is an early test capsule and lots of patches, photos, and other assorted stuff from the program.

Now we’re back in one of those lulls.  There’s no Space Shuttle, and I guess there’s people going up to the ISS on Russian rockets.  There’s also China’s space program, which has been successful as of late. But it feels like it did back when America didn’t really have a space program, except this time, there’s no Shuttle plans in the future to look forward to. There’s a lot of talk about privatized space travel, and maybe that will be the future, but I probably won’t be driving out to SFO and buying a ticket on Delta to go into low earth orbit.

Oh well.  Maybe I can scrape together my cash and try to build a working rocket for one of those GI Joe capsules, like this guy did.  I see much eBay sniping in my future.

Something I sometimes do when I don’t have time to waste but still want to lock into some useless pursuit that will eat up hours is to try and find various things I owned as a kid.  The other day, I started thinking about old calculators, and went on an endless search to find some of the ones I used in high school and college.

It’s odd to even think about a time when people used calculators.  Now, when I want to figure out if an actress is 18 yet by subtracting her date of birth from the current year, I either use the calculator app on my computer or my phone.  I also have an actual four-function solar calculator I stole from my job’s office supply closet in maybe 1996, which was useful when I used to balance my checkbook, back when I actually wrote checks and couldn’t just look the crap up on my phone.  But the calculator on my iPhone is generally easier to use, and I know where it is at any given point.

I recently had a discussion with my sister about old calculators.  When we grew up, our parents had some old TI calculator, from maybe 1975, which had a hundred buttons and a flickering red LCD display and took a giant 9-volt battery.  We had no idea what TAN or SIN meant, so we’d randomly hit the buttons, trying to get the machine to print out some cool stuff.  We also had one of those Little Professor calculators, which had a face on the front of it (which always looked like an owl to me) and would print an equation like “7 + 9” and then wait for an answer, printing EEE when you entered an incorrect answer.

Calculators weren’t allowed in school for years, because when you’re supposed to be learning how to multiply single-digit numbers, a pocket calculator was as unfair as having a multiplication table in your hand, if not worse.  And then when I got to high school, this completely reversed, and some classes required you to have a calculator.  In a physics or trig class, the ability to quickly multiply and divide was a requirement, and we were suddenly allowed to use these electronic devices.

Something I never thought about, though: I was probably the first generation to have this luxury. When I was born in 1971, the first solid-state calculators were being manufactured.  In 1965, Sharp introduced the CS-10 calculator, which weighed 55 pounds and cost $2500.  By the end of the decade, they were fitting in shirt pockets (like those big Android phones “fit” in a pocket) and cost more like $500.  When I started grade school, you could probably get a good four-function calculator for $50, but minimum wage was also something like $1.60.  Prior to my generation, the only way you could “cheat” on math was maybe writing the answers down beforehand, or using a slide rule, which was probably more difficult than just memorizing stuff.  When I started high school, did they change lesson plans to accommodate the ubiquitousness of digital calculators, or did math suck that much more before then?

I took an electronics class in my freshman year, and we were told to buy a scientific calculator.  I don’t remember the requirements we were given, but I know it was something beyond the level of the crappy calculator you’d get for free at a Shell station with the purchase of a tank of premium.  I got a Radio Shack EC-4006, which at the time was a pretty amazing machine.  It ran on two AA batteries, and had a ten-digit display.  It could convert hex to decimal and display (some) letters on the screen, plus it handled negative numbers, trig functions, and had some amount of basic programmability.

What I remembered most about calculators back then was nobody had the same make and model.  There were dozens of different permutations of the basic calculator from TI, Casio, Radio Shack, Sharp, and lots of no-name or knockoff brands.  The cream of the crop was the HP, which were incredibly expensive and used RPN.  Someone in my class had one of these, and it looked nice, but I could never get the hang of entering all of the numbers and then entering an operator.  I also remember Ray having some high-end Radio Shack that unfolded and had the display and main keys on one side, and a set of advanced function keys in the inside lid.  Any time anybody touched it, he gave a twenty minute lecture about how you weren’t supposed to bend open the cover all the way, or it would stretch and break the microscopic conductive traces between the two halves.  (This meant that everyone would try to take his calculator when he wasn’t looking and vigorously fold open the cover as far as it would go.)  But we were all, in some sense, defined by the calculators we used and carried.  Some of us took great pride in the calculators we used, while others were ashamed of their hand-me-down crappy drugstore ripoff version that couldn’t even do exponents.

I think I kept the same calculator until my second year of college, when I replaced it with this Casio graphing calculator, the fx-7000G.  I still have that one in storage, although I don’t have batteries for it.  (It used flat watch batteries.)  That one had a 96x94 pixel screen and could be programmed in a crappy version of BASIC, although it had a whopping 422 bytes of memory.  I remember spending the Christmas of 1990 at my then-girlfriend’s parents’ place in Toledo, trying to write a chess game in BASIC on that thing, which of course was impossible, as was actually saving anything with no disk drive or printer.  My math career didn’t last much longer than that year, and I never had a good reason to carry around a graphing calculator, so I didn’t use it after that.

What’s astounding to me is how familiar the key layout of that Radio Shack calculator looks to me now.  I carried that thing around for years in my book bag, toiled away on those chicklet-style keys, and spent many a boring lecture trying to spell out 7734-derived numeric sequences that, when the display was flipped, would spell out words.  The layout of those grey and orange keys is burned into my head, and reminds me instantly of when I was hacking out story problems back in 1987.

What’s also amazing is how collectible some of the old calculators can be.  I was looking to see if I could score one of those old HP calculators on eBay, and even the most basic of the RPN scientific calculators are untouchable for under a sixty or eighty bucks.  HP, after twenty years of not releasing them, brought them back in limited editions, and you can get a brand new HP 15C for about $99.  There are scores of web sites with pictures of old eighties calculators, just like the obsolete computer museums you find online.  I don’t foresee myself doing anything more complicated than calculating interest on a loan, and it’s probably easier to use one of those online calculators for that, so I probably won’t be buying one.  But it’s neat to see that people are still into it.

I bought new tires the other day.  I got one of them patched a few months ago, after attracting a nice bolt into the tread, and the TPMS light flickered alive last week, signaling a slow leak either in that plug, or from something else.  And my car, after almost five years and just shy of 50,000 miles, still sports the factory rubber, and although I don’t drive too much anymore, I felt a need to get a fresh set of tires.  So I went to this local tire place, a hole-in-the-wall run by this Mexican guy who’s far more honest than the corporate-owned tire hacks that would probably look at me and see their next four boat payments, pushing all sorts of extensive warranties and protective coatings and laser alignments with stories of catastrophic failure and imminent death if I did not comply. Also, the guy working there pronounces the Yaris “Jar-ees” which I find hilarious.

I was also distracted during the read, as some guy talked far too loud about his MG convertible.  And then at the corner of Market and Grand, some kind of protest started, one of these “let’s end violence by shouting violently at traffic” things I did not fully understand.  Shortly after I finished the book, I got my keys back to the Jar-ees and took off, my wallet $320 lighter, but once again feeling a solid 11/32” of tread.   Awesome.

So I’m now just shy of 300 pages into my re-read of Infinite Jest, which is just over 25% of the way through according to the Kindle, although I think it’s closer to 1/3 done when you consider the last hundred-some pages are all endnotes.  Here are more random observations as I continue:

• I think reading it on the Kindle does make it seem to go faster than print.  I don’t know the exact numbers or metrics, but it seemed like one print page of the hardcover contained something like 1200 words, where a normal trade paperback contained something like 250-300 words, meaning each page of IJ seemed four times longer.  With the Kindle, each screen has the same number or words, more or less, as any other book I read, be it Vonnegut or George Carlin or Tolstoy.  This makes it seem like the pages are going by faster, although it obviously takes several page turns to get through a single virtual “page”.
• The endnotes don’t seem to be as much of a pain in the ass as they were back in 1996.  Part of that may be that they lend themselves to hypertext much more, and the Kindle’s links are more convenient than flipping between two bookmarks.  Or it could be that if (and once again, numbers are bogus) there were two endnotes per printed page, and there were six page turns per printed page, it would seem like there were three times fewer endnotes per “page”.
• It’s so interesting that Wallace created this near-future world that happens in what others have determined to be 2009.  I’ve always disliked when near-future books predict worlds of jetpacks and robot butlers in the year 1991, like pretty much every Philip K. Dick book or 60s pulp Scifi novel.  DFW managed to create a world that largely felt like 1996, except for tiny changes in things like video conferencing and politics and TV media formats.  And that’s pretty much what has happened.  Granted, teleconferencing is just starting to take off because of Facetime, and the DVD and later BluRay were the displacing technologies of video entertainment, but his Boston of the late -00s is pretty close to the Boston of 1996, which I enjoy.
• There is, however, the issue that this near-future now takes place in the past.  When it was supposed to be 13 years in the future, there was much more license for suspension of disbelief.  Now that it’s three years after the events should have taken place and the futuristic film cartridge system has not been invented, you need to not think about stuff like that.
• I notice that in some ways Wallace can out-Leyner Mark Leyner.  I never fully understood the relationship between the two, and thought DFW eclipsed Leyner in greatness and popularity, but it also seems that Wallace admired or looked up to Leyner’s work prior to his own fame explosion.  I’ve always thought Leyner had no real peers in his absurdism and almost sketch comedy approach to writing, and always thought DFW was less ha-ha funny and more NPR/Franzen funny or whatever.  But then I see some carefully-placed reference or innuendo in part of IJ that would seem even too absurd for Leyner’s humor.
• It amazes me how IJ pads itself with pretty much every inside joke or urban legend that Wallace heard over the course of a decade, but manages to pull it off so all of this stuff is an integral part of the story.  At points, it’s almost like he was looking for some excuse to kill pages, like he was getting paid by the word, and said “aha!  I’ll recycle the Jamaican Toothbrush Bandit story, and make it part of Gately’s back story - that should eat up a good 5000 words.”  But of course, it always works.
• I have the unfortunate issue that whenever I read about Orin, in my mind I envision CJ, the punter who was on Real World: Cancun.

That’s all for now. I’m keeping track of my page count over on goodreads, if you want up-to-the-minute (or -day) tallies.