super-structure

[NOTE: You may need to hit refresh, even after you've loaded the page in your browser, to get the most recent style sheet. Don't worry if that doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to me why you need to do it.]

Providing you can read this post at all, you can likely see I’m back to working on the site again, rather than just posting at random. On the back end, I’ve upgraded to the most recent version of WordPress (v1.5.2, if you counting). I’m attempting to clean up some of the site as well. I’d like to go for a slightly less "bloggy" feel. I’m insanely jealous of Trey’s site. He can feel safe in knowing that it simply isn’t possible for me to muster up enough layout and coding ability over the course of a weekend to actually copy him. I’ll have to settle for inspiration and envy.

Also, I’m going to keep all this live the entire time, no matter how terrible it looks. I know that must make my design friends just shiver, but I’m in the construction business. You don’t shut down a building just because you’re renovating it. You simply put up plastic and plywood to protect people from falling debris. I treat this no differently. Watch out for falling analogies. Someone could get seriously hurt if they stray too far.

Well, if you’re reading this in Internet Explorer… well, then you aren’t reading anything at al you can thank Jason J. for helping me clear things up. For some reason, IE decides to only display the header and navigation bar. Very odd, indeed. I have no idea at what point it decided to do this, so I really don’t know what is causing it. I’ll have to come up with a stop-gap measure until then. More to come.

Not that I really expect anyone who comes to this site to do so, but if you were to click on that little button on the left that reads " Valid XTHML", you’d learn that that was, in fact, a lie. However, in my defense, it’s the Flickr Badge script that is in error! Bad Flickr! I’ll have to see what I can do about that, but since my knowledge of Java Script is only a little bit more than my Schnauzer’s, it might take a while. Until, I’ll have to continue to live a lie.

Happy Birthday

Well, it’s a couple of days since my birthday, so I thought I might create a special post to reflect upon it. Sure it’s a little late, but since plenty of people I know have been kind of shotgunning birthday well-wishes around the date for the past month, I’m really don’t feel bad about it. Not that I’ve minded. Having cards, calls, and e-mails sent for the past month has been kind of nice.

As the twenties slowly eek out of me, I find it interesting that I simply do not feel old. I hear so many people around my age complaining about how they are starting to get old now and how their lives have changed. Well, of course my life has changed, but none of that makes me feel any older.

Whenever I listen to a story from a friend or co-worker about their children (possibly some wacky situation the child got into just something they said), I almost always empathize with the kid rather than the parent. I always find myself saying something like "wow, I can remember doing or saying the same thing when I was that age!" Further, while the guy in the mirror looks a bit older than some of the pictures on my desk, he hardly looks like a different person. Maybe it’s because I routinely am looking for new things; new challenges or things to learn that make me feel, if not young, at least inexperienced (which is like being young, only dumber). Perhaps it is because I’m just now reaching the point in my life where I really feel like I’m doing thing I want to do. The path isn’t being laid out before me by others anymore (except the to-do lists Angela leaves for me, which are okay).

Whatever the reason, I’ve yet to have many moments which have struck me that perhaps I am getting older, at least faster than I had thought I would. The most recent that may fall into this category happened one night last week. Angela had asked me to come down to her pharmacy after work to help with some stocking and to stop at the grocery store on the way for some soda. I went to the Kroger at about 10:00 only to learn they closed at 9:00. In over two years of living in this house, neither of us had attempted to go to the grocery store past 9:00 pm. This from the guy who in college always shopped past midnight to avoid the crowds! That did sort of make me realize I’m at least not trying to act like a college student anymore. If not old, maybe just more sensible.

super_structure: mile_stone

This is, by the way, the 100th post to this site since it has become a blog. Yes, it’s been a quick 9-1/2 months (no, seriously, that’s how long it’s been) since my very first post, and lot’s has happened to talk about. There’s also been a lot of chaff, but hey, it’s a blog. It can’t all be Don Quixote all the time. There’s also been some changes in the blog software: I started over with a Blogger account until Jason J. convinced me to try WordPress. I’ve learned some about CSS and PHP (okay, no jokes, I said some), with still much thanks to Mr. J. Further, I’ve gotten more into digital photography and also acquired a somewhat unhealthy obsession with Flickr, which has hopefully helped to influence some of my friends.

Anyway, as this is kind of the record of my life and the world through my lens, I’m looking forward to much more content on here in the future. To all my friends, family, and complete internet strangers who have found anything on here worth reading, thanks for stopping by. I truly enjoy this method of communicating with the world and have love having people talk back to me here: friends and strangers alike. It helps me think about who I am and who I want to be and possibly who you see me as.

[I've been meaning to do a lot more of this, but better late than never. This is one of the posts on a project I've was involved with at my former employer. However, for what it's worth, this is the first structure I've designed that has yet to be built.]

Over two years ago, I began working on part of the design team for the IH-10 and Beltway 8 interchange West of Houston, Texas. I spent about three months down in Tampa and then another 4 months on and off back here in Richmond working on the job.

A view of some of the tall piers at the IH-10/BW-8 Interchange. Note the Texas star detail cast into each pier.

My role was as structural engineer for the left-turn fly-overs. Those are the highest portion of the overall interchange (.pdf file); the ones where you exit one freeway to the right to "fly over" the rest of the interchange to head left onto the intersecting freeway. I did the structural design for approximately 1.2 miles of bridge, with spans up to 375 feet. All the bridges were single lane. Also, the structure type was a double steel tub-girder. These are some very clean-lined structures once finished. I can say that, as I had no decision in the structure type and layout whatsoever. I simply decided how thick to make all the plates. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

The KATY Corridor project is a huge construction project, widening and renovating roughly 20 miles of IH-10 between Houston and Katy, TX at a cost of $1.44 billion (yes, that’s a B). The section this interchange is in, called Contract D, came in with a $250 million price tag. That’s a rather large civil project, by any terms.

This was a great project to learn on, as curved bridges have some force effects due to gravity that many other bridges don’t experience. The portion of the bridge that sweeps out beyond the straight line connecting the supporting piers creates an immense twist throughout the bridges length (think of wringing out a dishtowel). This is resolved within the superstructure by that tub (or trapezoidal) shaped box section. The level of force is tremendous, as is the size of steel plates involved in the bridge girders. Two steel boxes which are 8′-6″ deep and 8′-0″ wide (at the top) carry a concrete road deck and vehicular traffic up to 375 feet between piers at 85 feet in the air. There are three levels of traffic below the bridge at it’s highest point. It is a symphony of steel and concrete that takes years to design and build.

My part in it was rather small, but I learned so much from it. I had the pleasure of working with great engineers who truly wanted a safe and aesthetically pleasing bridge. I realize there was, and remains, a great deal of controversy involving this project. However, in the end, I hope the citizens of Texas can enjoy and appreciate their road. Structures such as this one are a product of a society that cherishes the automobile almost as family. It’s nice when we can have pleasant roads and bridges with which to put them on.

[You can read Part I here]

super_structure featured on the local NBC affiliate, for about 1 second.

A reporter from the local NBC affiliate contacted me via e-mail Wednesday afternoon inquiring about information on "all the media interest and hype about the ibook madness." I returned her call, but since she was in route to the studio, we weren’t able to talk at the time. Anyway, she didn’t call back before the story aired on the eleven o’clock news, so my internet fame is limited to brief flash of super_structure on the air. Here’s what I have to say about the national attention, though, as well as the blog coverage I’ve read so far.

Media

I don’t want to write any sort of broad sweeping indictment of the media, be it mainstream, alternative, or blogging. However, my major issue with the story here is that the overall picture of armageddon for some cheap laptops is a bit overdone.

There was a roughly 5-10 minute period Tuesday morning of people getting trampled. Folks acted like animals with a insufficient food supply when lined up at the gate. Of course the problem with just describing the trampling implies how greedy everyone must be; that they’d run over little old men and baby strollers. However, if you have some 5,000 people close behind you and pushing (who cannot see them under you), you’re going forward whether you like it or not. I’m not going to judge people in that crowd because as I’ve said previously, it was all over with before I got to the gate. I just walked in amongst the slowly moving cars while talking to Angela on my phone in order to find her in line (first crepe-myrtle on the left, by the way). All I ever saw was the photos and videos, just like most of the country saw. However, I can say this, I never saw a riot. I didn’t see any violent mobs nor did I see much pandemonium (although I would admit 5 minutes of trampling is far too much mayhem for one day). I didn’t see any stampedes, either. Some headlines actually implied that all 5,500 people present were involved in this stampede. I can only hope that people read a little further to discern the truth. It seems the idea of the story is far better than the story itself.

What isn’t being explained in any way that I can surmise from the news is that there was a line prior to 7:00 outside the gates. When these people saw others rushing in from outside that line, they surged forward. Can you imagine waiting in a line for up to six hours, only to see someone just charge ahead of you? Most people (including those in blog posts who have been pretty quick to judge everyone as uneducated and poor) would be upset and try and get up there, too. People should get a little background on why the trampling occurred, and also realize that it was the beginning and the end of the mayhem of the day. This line outside was just the line to get inside to form another line. People up front realized this and started running, some with no regard for those around them as it turned out. [I want to be clear that I didn't see this in person, but I have enough accounts of what did happen that I'm pretty confident what I'm telling you is accurate.]

Now, how did a few minutes of mayhem followed by hours of standing in the sun become a national story about (but not limited to) beatings with portable furniture, urinating on one’s self, riots, pandemonium, driving over pedestrians, frenzy, and so on? Well, other than reports who own thesauruses (bedlam was my favorite), it all seemed to start with either the AP story which used the word "riot" or the News Channel 12 video, in which Aaron Gilchrist and TaRhonda Thomas both agreed this was a "riot." Now, I’ve never been in a riot before, but having seen some on the news before, I’m pretty sure this was not a riot. Yeah, people were upset, but I sure didn’t see any of them rioting. You generally don’t riot while sitting on one of those cheap canvas folding chairs from Dicks nor while talking on a cell phone with a friend. It’s bad rioting form. People don’t sell Pepsi from a push cart for $2 a bottle during riots. That’s just not safe. Further, you don’t have the SWAT team stand several hundred feat away under the shade of some large trees during a riot. You get them in there if it is a riot.

What I did see inside the gate was a large crowd of confused and angry citizens who would like to have known more about what to do and what was going on than what they were told. Things got better when more officers showed up simply because there was more crowd control. More officers could speak to smaller portions of the crowd and get them to respond. I’m no expert in crowds or mob sociology (if there even is such a thing), but I know that no one should ever expect over 5,000 people standing in a parking lot to just figure out to form two nice lines. I’m not knocking the Henrico County Police Department, as they did a reasonably good job once the cop:citizen ratio increased over 0.001. To their credit, some unnamed sources in the news media have leaked that the HCPD warned the school officials the five off-duty cops they had hired would be no where enough for an event this size, and that’s assuming they were banking on only 1,000 people.

Henrico County

Back to that SWAT team comment, I also didn’t see police in riot gear until we were leaving the RIR. There were roughly 20 police cruisers and a SWAT team back behind the set of buildings where the line was formed (again, the line inside the gate, for the laptops). There were perhaps 12 officers and several fire and emergency crew when we were in line. Prior to 7:00, there were reported to be 5 off-duty officers on hand (we saw three directing traffic, not pedestrians). Henrico county officials have since stated they wouldn’t have done anything differently. How is it that they determined they needed the SWAT team and roughly 5x the number of cops for half as much crowd as had been present at 7:00 am, and then twice as many officers inside the gate as for the line outside? [Again, I'm no expert in crowd control] Does it make sense to keep increasing the level of force up to small army for a dwindling and tiring crowd? Perhaps the crowd might get desperate at the end when the supply was gone (as was suggested in a news report), but the one thing that pretty much everyone did know was that there were only 1,000 laptops. How to go about getting in line for them seemed to be the question of the morning; one that no one was around to answer.

Further, if the county didn’t want people coming in during the night to line up, they should have had the police or some security there to prevent it. They should have had staff or police on hand to walk the lines once formed (both the one outside the gate and the one inside). Barriers should have been erected for lines prior to having the public there, not 15 minutes before the laptops were to go on sale and nearly two hours after everyone was already in line. While we all have responsibility to act as decent citizens, we also entrust enforcing security to our officials, both elected and hired officers. The people involved in the trampling certainly are guilty of reckless, if not entirely illegal, behavior. But it is the counties job to make sure that is enforced.

The Story

There are so many things to critique in this story:

• Why $50 when obviously they sell for more online? They county states it was to sell them to people who otherwise couldn’t afford one.
• Why not donate these if there’s not much money to be made? I’ve read second-hand the $50 was to go towards the maintenance of the remaining iBooks at the middle- and grade-school levels.
• Why not use a lottery or numbered tickets? To me, this question has not been answered and these options, or similar options, would have been allowed under the county ordinance for surplus sales. Even if the county didn’t think they were, since they were already changing the laws to their liking, why not write it in?
• Why ever switch to Dell laptops in the first place? I can only imagine this had to do with money. There are some arguments, however flawed I may find them, that parents were concerned their kids weren’t learning the more common O.S. they might encounter more in the future. Personally, since robots will likely take over in the next decade, that argument will be moot.

I could go on and on, but the fact is, the story is over. The legend begins. After another week, we will all be able to appreciate those t-shirts that felt a little bit like war profiteering on Tuesday. This was just a case of citizens behaving poorly and the local government planning poorly for it. No one was seriously hurt and 1,000 lucky people got a really good deal on a laptop. As for me, all I got was less than one second of fame. Barely enough time for me to recognize my own masthead.

I know it may come across as, at best, clueless, and at worst, elitist, to state on my blog that weblogs suck. However, they do. It’s not the blogs’ fault, or usually even the writers’. It’s the readers. More accurately, it’s the readers who feel so moved to post every little idiotic and annoying thing they can think of. These trolls are, if not ruining, at least hindering the progress toward really expressive and useful communication tools online.

Now, I’m honestly not referring to anyone who has ever posted at my site. Sure, I get some troll-ish comment spam which is pseudo-social-engineered to provoke a response. They usually consist of some shallow psycho-babble about "the meaningless existential existence of feminine culture has imbued a sense of degradation in the modern hedonistic social collective," or something like that. However, that just gets deleted within a few hours and you never have to suffer it here at super_structure. My friends, family, and strangers, all with something interesting to post, are the only people who have cast a true-type shadow upon the familiar comment form below. That comes from only those rare people who have ever heard of super_structure, which is okay by me.

No, I’m referring to the larger sites that I read throughout my digital workday: Slashdot, Engadget, TUAW, and to some extent kottke and many others. Many of these posts are of news or rumors which the writer asks open questions such as "How could this have been better?" and "If this involved X instead of Y, how would have people reacted?" The very nature of having open comment forms allows for a large conversation, in which we could share ideas and critiques to produce something great. Trey recently posted a blurb from a much larger article which I’m only addressing one small aspect of (that article was concerning the open source movement). These posts would be a great way to learn what great ideas are floating around out there and just what people really want to read, see, and use. Sadly, as Jason Kottke pointed out, this often doesn’t result in a conversation at all. Most times, it isn’t even amusing or informative. It’s just one stupid comment after another.

I suppose I had been getting exposed to this behavior reading blogs increasingly over the past year or more. However, with the recent news to which I had first hand exposure, it all became glaringly obvious. The massive amount of online exposure and news stories brought floods of comments. I read in horror as the discussion just degraded into how everyone involved was scum, and only the person writing a scathing comment about them had any insight or sensibility.

Take an example of a post made earlier this evening on Engadget. This is a site that posts about, of all things, gadgets. They often, after a product has been on the market for a while and many readers have a had the opportunity to use it, ask "what would you do to make it better?" This would be one of my favorite kinds of posts, except for comments like this, by macsucks:

first change, i’d dump this crappy mouse along with its crappy system…

…and they get worse from there. For every single useful comment, there are about five completely useless statements (I’m not counting the most inane of all, the "first post"). If Engadget and TUAW are bad, Slashdot has become utterly pathetic. The once uber-geek site is now host to online wannabe geeks with nothing better to do than bash Microsoft first and Apple second. I’m not saying there are legitimate complaints about both companies, but there’s room for that online, and making harsh comments about Gates and Jobs ad nausium is hardly the way to go.

I am hardly above making crude jokes or rash judgments about people in the news, but I at least try and make some attempt to frame them as such. Further, I usually try and maintain enough of the human virtue of empathy to at least understand that I do not know all of the story and therefore can’t serve as a faultless judge. That being said, maybe some of these trolls are just having a bad day and need to vent… or maybe Jason Johnson’s right: they’re just 12 year old jerks with too much free time.

Either way, until there is a Greasemonkey script which allows for a stupidity threshold, I’m going to curtail my reading of comments and stop posting comments myself. Unless I can find some decent conversations online underway,as I seem to have little luck in starting them myself.

[I continue to make a liar out of myself by posting to these and other blogs. Why to I hate myself so?]

[Note: Consider this a rolling post, as news items will keep coming all day, I'm sure. Particularly as the media outside of Richmond gets a hold of this.]

The iBook hungry masses.

We went down to the RIR at about 6:30 this morning to get in line for one of those $50 iBooks. We weren’t really even sure we were going to go until late last night, but we decided it would be fun to take the morning off together and hang out. I now wish I’d just gone running and come to work like any other Tuesday. The thing that describes the whole scene down there was chaos; chaos with periods of calm caused by being baked in the hot Richmond sun.

My Story

[How things happened (or didn't happen) from my point of view.]

We left the house around dawn and headed to get some breakfast, stopping by the ATM on the way. We drove down Laburnum, Angela commenting that all the other cars on the street might be headed to where we were going. I didn’t think much about it then, but it turns out she was right. We came to a dead stop about a mile from the RIR. I noticed people parking at one of the apartment complexes nearby and walking the rest of the way. It looked like some sort of huge sporting event was about to go on, which pretty sums up what happened right there.

We agreed I’d drop Angela off and then go park the vehicle, as people were already parking nearly a mile away and walking. We finally got through the intersection at Laburnum and Meadowbridge, which had three traffic cops. She walked up to the front gate (still locked at this point) and I drove on. As I was still looking for a spot, she called me to tell me they had unlocked the gates and people were just rushing in on foot and in cars. That’s never a good mix. Angela said she wasn’t planning on dashing off like a fool, and I told her that sounded smart. I could hear loads of shouting over the phone, so I told her I’d get there as soon as I could.

By the time I got up to the gate, it had cooled off somewhat. Angela had gotten in before the trampling, and I got there shortly after it had happened. The line was ridiculous already, and people were still lining up. I found Angela, who had secured a reasonably good spot. Of course, the line was more of a long, narrow mob; about 8-10 people wide. It was pretty obvious that there were several thousand people there already. Shortly after 8:00 (over an hour after the panic at the gates) fire, rescue, and some more police started showing up. They began by just shouting into a bullhorn at the front of the line. We couldn’t really hear them, and I’m pretty sure the people about 2,000 back in the line were completely oblivious. Next, the police started driving a cruiser along side the line telling people to back-up. Back up? Where? I’m crowded like this was the pit at a 80’s metal concert. We couldn’t go anywhere.

Eventually, about 6 or so officers on foot began walking along the line, moving them backward one small segment at a time. We eventually walked about a quarter mile backwards before the police seemed satisfied the line was thin enough. What we didn’t know was that they had simply changed tactics. They had erected a sort three-part system to get the crowd into two lines. First, they simply barricaded off the line. They would let through a sizable section of people at one time through this barricade, only to be stopped at another in what was sort of a make-shift corral. Then, they had put-together a Z-type maze (like at a theme park, but one that you’d find in hell) to funnel the people to the doors. Now, all of this is going on in the hot Richmond sun on the tarmac at the raceway parking lot. "Hot and humid" really doesn’t do it justice. Some of the raceway staff (well, we guessed they were staff) started selling Pepsi products and bottled water for $2 each. That kind of added to the Disney World feeling, what with the lines and heat.

I began walking around as Angela kept her spot in line (we were only planning on getting one anyway, since she was the Henrico resident). I spoke to the fellow from NBC12, who thought they had at that point sold around 500 or so laptops. I tried to report some of this back to Angela (and all the others who looked so pathetically anxious when I returned to my spot). Sunburnt, exhausted, and angry, we decided to call it quits. In the four hours we spent, we could have combined bought a far nicer iBook off of eBay from the comfort of our home. Lesson learned.

On our way out, we noticed what looked like about 1/2 of the Henrico police department lined up where the lucky few iBook purchasers where leaving the building. This included the SWAT team. Hours too late, and then in overkill force, they had finally arrived to make sure a scene that had already gotten way out of control didn’t do it again.

Conclusion

I imagine someone’s going to pay hell for this mess. The county board thought they must have had a sure fire win in their pockets when they decided to limit this to residents only. We’ll see how they feel when what happened hits the news. The county really bumbled this one up and is very lucky no one was seriously injured today.

Lot’s of media coverage using the word "riot." I saw nothing that resembled a riot this morning. The surge of people that resulted in some folks getting trampled was in the first few moments of the gates being opened. While horrible, that was the really bad behavior of the day. Afterwards it was relatively calm, although tempers were certainly flaring at times. Lot’s of shouting at the police for not knowing what was going on (hell, no one knew what was going on) and for not letting people move ahead when they thought they should.

Be the first to sport this flashy item.

There is also a story about someone getting beaten with a folding chair. I never saw or heard anything about this. If it was a beating like the description I read online, then the person would have been taken away in handcuffs. The people were getting the police to even prevent line-jumpers, who believes they’d just let a beating go on? I imagine this was some guy whacking a line-jumper with his canvas sports-chair , but not some sort of wrestling cage-match move. I doubt anyone was hurt, other than their pride. Mostly just someone bragging about cool they were in line and not letting anyone get in front of them.

Media

The good Apple-lovin’ people over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog linked to my site after e-mailing them about them mayhem. They’ve done a really good job of reporting on the story since day one and keeping everyone informed of the local developments. Thanks TUAW!

NBC 12 has some video of the event, and you can see the guy (Aaron Gilchrist) I talked to around 10:30 this morning.

2:30 - It’s already made it’s way to the L.A. Times and further, via the A.P., with a crowd estimate of 5,500 now.

You have to watch the Richmond Times Dispatch slideshow of the gates opening. You can just see the momentum building to the climax of people just getting mowed down. Thank God Angela was no where near all this, although we both wish we weren’t even there at all today. Credit goes to Times Dispatch photographer Dean Hoffmeyer for these excellent photos.

Wired News has the A.P. story as well, now.

Engadget has a post about the story, as well as some of the most offensive comments I’ve ever read there. I guess it was becuase I was there, but these guys (the readers, not Engadget staff) make me sick blaming this on the fact that they think it was mostly African-Americans to blame for the incident. Of course, the posters who were there only drove by. The crowd was a relatively good cross-section of Henrico County, minus the well-to-do West-Enders (who probably don’t send their kids to public school, anyway): blacks, whites, Indians, asians, college students, retired people, and so on. Is that a suprise, that the people coming to buy laptops from the county would reflect the county make-up? Further, these folks were there for the laptops to keep, not for trying to make a fast buck.

This story is on Wonkette. Why is Wonkette even talking about this? Oh, apparently someone wet themselves in line. All I had to put up with was people smoking around me. How bad is your day when the best part is no one pissed near you?

Some other photos on Flickr.

And we have at least one on eBay already! Perhaps I’ll just buy this one…

Wow, the story has now even landed in the online comics section.

William Gibson’s "Neuromancer"

I recently (okay, two months ago… I’ve been up to other stuff) finished reading William Gibson’s classic science fiction novel, "Neuromancer;" the 1984 novel which is widely credited with beginning the cyber-punk genre. My particular book is an anniversary edition that opens with a retrospective forward written by the author. He explains, upon retrospect, that the only aspect of the future he failed to capture was the rise in popularity of mobile phones. Upon reading this, I initially saw this as a bit of hubris, that is for him to think that he had envisioned everything else with such accuracy as to comment on the one thing he had missed. After reading the book, I’d say that it has nothing to do with predicting the future. This book helped to create the future. If Gibson had wrote this story including mobile phones, then they would have only caught on that much sooner.

Computer scientist Alan Kay famously said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Many people love to quote him on that one, but I suppose most instances refer to physical tinkering; the physics and chemistry and nuts and bolts aspects of invention. However, much credit should be given to the science fiction authors who often first envision the future¹. They seem to guide the scientists and engineers down their path, many of whom are fans of science fiction. Such would be the case with Gibson’s novel. It isn’t so much prophetic as it is directorial. Written near the dawn of the personal computing age, it was as if Gibson saw the first train tracks being laid westward and wrote about the train reaching some lovely mountains and beaches, causing the people laying the tracks to then say ‘that sounds great, let’s go looking for lovely mountains and beaches.’

There is a certain amount of lingo that never really caught on, but some phrases really stuck with the masses; such as the once ubiquitous "cyberspace" for referring to the online world. It’s not used as much anymore, much like the phrase Information Superhighway has fallen to its own wayside. I suspect their both causalities of the general populace becoming more familiar with traditionally geek terms like internet, world-wide-web, etc. Not as poetic, but more accurate. However, even if much of the lingo isn’t with us, you can see the impact of this novel elsewhere. The film "The Matrix" draws heavily upon this novel for ideas and terminology, as does the Anime classic, "Ghost In The Machine." While not the first science fiction instance of an artificial intelligence (oops, belated spoiler alert…), surely none before captured Gibson’s accuracy of the notion that A.I. would indeed be software and not some shiny alloy humanoid with a unexplainable Austrian accent. It seems like an obvious statement now, but in 1984, how revolutionary was it to imprison the greatest threat to humanity by keeping it from connecting to a world wide computer network?

The novel centers around a relatively washed up hacker named Case, who is given a second chance to get back into the work he once loved (eleven years before Kevin Mitnick would be sentenced to a prison and a computer ban). He is recruited by a mysterious woman who acts as the muscle for a small and secretive operation which Case acts as the brains for, well at least jacked into cyberspace. We meet some other odd characters along the way, many of whom have had some black market DNA alteration or surgery to enhance or create abilities. The world, as Gibson describes it, isn’t as clean as the black print on white paper would first appear. His is a noir adventure bouncing from a fully immersible online world to a rough, gritty, and commercialized world; in either of which Max Headroom would feel right at home.

Something very common amongst science fiction writing, particularly that of the past 30 years, is the incorporation of corporations (either real or fictional ones). Sometimes they are the great evil, sometimes they are just dropped to lend a sense of authenticity to the story. Both are often done in a blatant and heavy way, sometimes so much so that I cannot determine whether the author got paid for the name drop or really hates large conglomerates so much as to make them a central villain. Gibson, however, does this about as perfectly as can be done. He creates a sense of continuity between 1984 (and 2005) and the dateless future. This reminds me of "Dune," for which Frank Herbert incorporated Arabic words to invoke a sense of history as well as stir up imagery of desert life. (Of course, in my world, all science fiction reminds me of Frank Herbert).

"Neuromancer" would go on to win three major award for science fiction writing. Not bad for his first novel. I’d like to continue on reading the other two books in the "sprawl" trilogy (every good science fiction novel must be part of a trilogy, in which there are often four or more books). I’d recommend it as well, as there is a sense something near nostalgia for cyber-punk in it for my generation. Were it not for this book, we might not have this medium with which to communicate. At least, it might have taken longer to get here as Gibson’s fans wouldn’t have been there, trying to create the future he had written about.

¹ The exception here is Arthur C. Clark, who is credited for the invention of the use of geostationary orbiting satellites could aid in telecommunications. He wrote about it in a short article for a science and engineering magazine in 1945, rather than in a fiction novel. Had the latter occurred, it is quite possible no one would have been willing to give credit for the idea.

Amazon SIPs for this book: toxin sacs, new pancreas, shark thing, leather jeans

Over the weekend, a friend and I were discussing scanning our old 35mm era photos. While we both have functioning and capable flatbed scanners, they are older and are very slow. When scanning at 600 dpi¹, my scanner sounds like the opening three notes to the Star Wars Imperial March, with each beat representing less than 1% of the lines scanned. I learned how relatively slow this was when using a newer flatbed scanner at my old job, which I was quite sure wasn’t actually scanning the image properly because it was just moving too damn fast. I suddenly had one of those curmudgeonly moments: you dang keeds and yoor technolargy!

So now I’m in the market for a new flatbed. I’d like one cheap, but that can scan quickly at 600-1200 dpi. I realize that with the popularity of digital cameras, scanners aren’t nearly as common as they once were (or were going to be). However, if anyone has any tips or recommendations they’d like to pass on, I’d love to read them. I’m currently leaning toward buying another Canon, just because I’ve been so pleased with my old one (quality, if not speed). However, low prices and rave reviews have been known to sway my attitudes.

Eventually, I’d like to scan in all our old 35mm photos (as well as wedding photos). If I can automate the files saving process and cut the scan time down to seconds per photo, that will be much more likely to happen.

¹ - This is, by my calculations for a 3"x5" photo, roughly equivalent to an image taken with a 5 Mega pixel digital camera.

This morning I ran 13.1 miles with the marathon training team. That is, to date, the furthest I have ever run at one time. I had previously, on my own, ran about 12 1/2 miles at one time. Nearly there, right? Well, not quite. That was about a year ago, and I ran that far without building up to the distance, without carrying any water, and with no real idea of what I was capable of. Since then, I’ve learned a great deal about distance running as well as myself.

First of all, I was being not only harsh on myself for going over two hours that day without water, I was being downright foolish. That level of excretion results in a large amount of water loss. My body definitely felt the pain from dehydration afterwards. Further, jumping from roughly 9 miles to over 12 is a fairly dramatic leap in terms of training distance, and especially when I wasn’t sticking to any real schedule. I suppose it’s something to have accomplished that on my own, but going further without any guidance could have had me causing more harm than good.

Fast forward to today, after I’ve been building up on the average of a mile further each week and I’ve been educated a lot more in some of the schools of thought on distance running. I’ve learned more about the rate that my body needs fluids (on a much more finely tuned level than with my backpacking experiences), I’ve learned the kinds of techniques over the course of training that will condition me to be able to perform over hours of running. I’ve learned a lot more about how to push myself and when to let off.

I believe that each of us has a lot more inside than we realize. Attempting a marathon is my (and Angela’s) experiment in figuring out what I’m capable of. However, it isn’t a matter of taking off one day and forcing myself to do that kind of distance. It is about learning how to get more out of me. That takes time in training and time in learning. In the end, it just takes time. It’s time well spent, though.

Angela tells me it’s time to head off to Chipotle for our post-run burrito (it helps to have goals). Before I go, I just want to tip my hat to everyone I know who has also worked to find their capabilities: Dave in his running, my Dad in hiking Philmont, my Mom in writing a hiking guide, and Dallas Smith in just plain running further than any human should. You guys inspire Angela and myself and you make this seem so easy.

Here’s a thought: Amazon should have the ability to create and save a list of friend’s wish lists. That way, once in your account, you can quickly get back to those people’s wish lists in order to get them something for their birthday, Christmas, anniversary, etc. Oh, sure, you could do this with Greasemonkey, but Amazon could add the code to their site in 30 minutes.

They could even take it a step further, and add features like an e-mail reminder when that person’s birthday is coming up and the highest ranked items on their list at a set pricepoint. Amazon could then turn a complete buffoon like myself into the perfect friend, son, husband, pet owner (your dog should have a wish list), and so on.

I realize that Amazon wish lists are no excuse for the excruciatingly difficult process of choosing the perfect $25 gift for an individual. That is a fine art for which I sometimes have moments of genius, but usually fall very flat. To help avoid the latter, wish lists sure are handy. Oh, what’s that? You don’t have a wish list? Well, then you’ll probably get socks for your birthday. You do like socks, don’t you?