I was at the Apple Store just now getting a bad RAM chip replaced in my MacBook.
All in all it was a very pleasant experience, and aside from the inconvenience
of having to drive 40 minutes round-trip for a 20 minute errand, pretty painless.
I took the bad RAM chip, which I had identified and yanked from my machine a couple
of weeks ago, in an anti-static bag I had in my desk drawer. My desk is full of them,
along with spare parts and adapters and such, many for machines that haven't been
manufactered or supported for over a decade. I'm a packrat for old computer junk,
though to my credit I have tossed/recycled lots and lots of old "beige" computer parts in the
last few years, especially now that the city/county has good recycling for that kind
of thing.
Anyway, when I handed the bag with the bad chip in it to the young man at the Apple Store,
I didn't think anything of it, but on returning the bag to me he joked that it was a
vintage piece. I chuckled and replied, Well, I'm feeling kind of vintage these days.
The bag had the original label attached: 32MB Apple Quadra and Centris Series.
The chip I had replaced was a standard-issue 2GB size, roughly 1000x more memory than
the bag had originally held.
You know you're getting old in this business when you can distinctly remember the thrill
of a 32MB chip of RAM and how much pure computing power it held.
My son and I walked over the next day to visit the ice house and Ari was so intrigued that he snapped one of those
delicate icicles off in his little hand. Chris and I quickly intervened lest any more of his hard work be undone
by a curious three-year-old.
But that is the way with Chris's work: my boys -- most everyone who encounters it -- want to climb inside and animate
the work. Chris's sculpture begs for it. In a good way.
That huffingtonpost article interprets the work in a way I never would. Global climate change? If anything,
works like that will become harder to create as Minnesota gets warmer. Chris had to ice that house two times,
as after the first time it thawed out. That's where the quiet fear is for me: winter is disappearing. I need
winter just like I need summer: it resets my psychic clock.
The comments give me hope. If such a diverse crowd is reading and commenting at the Tiny Revolution these days, the Revolution is not so Tiny after all.
I just renewed my car tabs at www.mndriveinfo.org. It was the most painless checkout process I've ever had. Really.
They did a nice job on that web site.
My dear friend Mike has started a little enterprise crafting beautiful handmade wooden pens and pencil sets in his spare time. They're gorgeous. They'll make you want to write. Buy one. Or three.
Chris Anderson's new book on Free continues to get press. I noted it here when Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it for the New Yorker. This is about the 6th time I've seen it reviewed or referenced in the last month.
The wave of open data continues to roll. The National Public Radio API has been out for awhile, but the man responsible is talking next week at OSCON. He gives an
interview
as a preview.
I hang out as karpet on freenode.net in the #swish-e channel, where there is occasionally
meaningful conversation related to the project. I have registered the channel
under my nick, but I often logout and back in and forget how to regain operator status.
Here's the cheatsheet for my own memory:
/msg nickserv identify karpet mypassword
/msg chanserv op #swish-e karpet
Not too complicated but I always have to hunt around to find the right
bots to /msg to.
Lest any of my less-geeky friends assume that I know everything hip on the internet,
the Netflix Prize was unknown to me until about 20 minutes ago. Then I read a mention
of it on kottke.org and read the IEEE Spectrum article
written by the current leading team. Now I wish I had heard about it 3 years ago when it started,
because it could have been a very cool learning experience.
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