So this guy built a scale model of a Cray 1 computer, and not just a bunch of model railroad plastic and some Testor’s spray paint, but a WORKING model.  The original Cray took 72 printed circuit boards covered back to back with chips; this guy was able to use a single Field-Programmable Gate Array, which is sort of to computers what the build-a-bear store in the mall is to stuffed animals.  It’s a single board maybe the size of a big index card that you program usually from a USB port and a PC to basically configure into a system of your choosing.  Like if you had all of the schematics of an old Nintendo and you were really jonesing to play some NES in a binary-compatible way, you could waste some weekends and blow a few hundred bucks on an Xilinx board and figure out how to splice in a set of joysticks and rip the images off the cartridges, and you’d essentially have your own Nintendo.  Of course, you could go on eBay and for like twenty bucks get an old NES, or you could download an emulator and a bunch of booted cartridges and within a few minutes you’d be playing Mario in a little window on your Mac or PC.  But where’s the fun in that?

The Cray always compelled me in college.  It’s such a distinctive design, and just the thought of ever using one was like talking about the possibilities of bedding a Victoria’s Secret model.  I mean, we had a lot of old iron at IU, rows of VAXes and some old IBM monsters they used for payroll.  I worked in the machine room a night a week in 1993, and used to marvel at the setup there.  They had the elevated floors, the sterile white everywhere, the tons of cables from the floor, and massive cooling systems, and the ominous halon system that would kill all living things in the flip of a switch, but prevent a runaway system from taking down the whole building in a flash fire.  But the jokes about winning the lottery and buying a Cray - the word “Cray” just became synonymous with the ultimate of the ultimate computer.  It was like the Ferrari of computers; expensive, hand-built, hand-crafted, designed for speed, and completely impractical.

I remember the movie Sneakers -  I went and saw this movie I think three times with three different dates in the fall of 1992.  My life was in that much flux then, but the movie was that good.  (I should re-watch it, now that I actually live here and cross the Dumbarton every day.)  Anyway, there was a scene where Bishop has been captured and is in Cosmo’s high-tech lair, which basically looks like the 1992 super-high-end geek chic place, and he brings him into a little enclosed room and they sit on this weird Star Trek looking bench.  Only it’s not a bench - it’s a Cray Y-MP supercomputer.  I always flipped out when I saw that, and would excitedly tell date of that evening “that’s like a five million dollar computer!”  Because of course I thought I was some dumb-fuck insider for knowing what a Cray looked like, and having a badge card that opened a machine room filled with computers in the middle of a state that was nothing but corn and farmers.

A 16-CPU Cray Y-MP back in 1991 cranked out about 16 Mflops (millions of floating-point operations per second), had to be trucked and assembled in place, and had a cooling system that probably cost way more than you could imagine.  It also needed some massive power wiring, and could not be plugged into the 6-outlet power snake sitting behind your computer desk.  The iPhone 4 in your pocket can crank out something like 20 Mflops, plus play your favorite tunes and videos and enable you to call home to ask if you need milk when you’re in the grocery store.  So the people who were doing digital models of complicated physics equations to calculate how atomic bomb designs would work were using less processing power than the little thing you hold in your hand that you bitch about running too slow when you get too many text messages with attached JPEGs of your friend’s butts.

What is the Cray of today?  I mean, I know they have these massive supercomputers - my pal Simms still works on this stuff.  But now, a supercomputer means racks and racks of commodity servers, the same Dell blades you might use to run intranet servers in your boring business, all chained together to make a massively parallel beast that slices up complex programs into little wafers and passes them around, then collates together the simple answers into a final tally.  It’s not as sexy as the high-gloss enamel red and charcoal grey panels of the iconic shaped case of a Cray; it’s a bunch of servers in racks.  It’s like lamenting the passing of the old era of high-HP Lambos and Porsches and having someone say “well here’s a Budget rent-a-car lot filled with Toyota Corollas, and if you add up all their horsepower, it’s way more than that of a 67 Shelby Mustang GT.”

I always wonder what would happen if I went back to 1992 and showed the 1992 me the iPhone and explained that I could send emails and take digital pictures and swing them across the ether for only $70 a month.  I also wonder if the 2010 me sat down in front of a VT240 and logged into a VAXCluster and was presented with the $ prompt again, if I would be amazed or horrified.  I could see part of me fascinated at looking at the file system again, seeing how $DISK53 still looked, but I could also see the first time I checked my disk quota and saw that my digital watch has more free memory, I would freak out.

I can’t or maybe shouldn’t talk about it yet, but my work situation will be changing considerably in a couple of weeks.  Papers are signed and hearts are broken, but I don’t want to jinx things too much.  (You know, like having a background check service find out my secondhand connection to the Taliban.)  More details when they are available.

Does Circle K even exist anymore?  I don’t remember ever seeing one until I moved to Seattle, and there was a single one over on Eastlake somewhere.  I don’t think I ever went - it wasn’t close to anything I frequented, and I was more of a 7-Eleven guy.  My writing ritual while working on Rumored in 1998 was to pass out after work, wake up after a few hours, get something to eat, and then get to the keyboard at 9

sharp, with the 6+1 Kenwood CD changer locked and loaded and the day’s notes scribbled on yellow legal pads on my tiny kitchen table repurposed as workstation.  At midnight, I’d stop writing, fire up the VW, and go out to the 7-Eleven for a Coke slurpee and a break.  Then I’d either go back to work and fiddle around with the book a bit, or watch Conan.

The above picture of a Circle K is from Treasure Island, Florida.  It was next to the hotel where I stayed in 2001, which meant I’d wander over there for some ice cream or a case of Mello Yello or some chips.  I think I was still working on Rumored then, but I got no real work done on that trip.  I did a lot of reading, and had many late night phone conversations with someone back in New York.  (Of course the only time I really hit it off with someone cool all year is the night before I leave for two weeks.)  But Circle K seemed to be a very Floridian concept, like Pak-n-save and Waffle House.

You know what, I just looked at a map and realized not only is there a Circle K very close to my house, but I’ve been there at least once for gas.  It’s one of those weird co-branded things where it’s a 76 station, but the mini mart is a Circle K.

I’ve had a minor cold all week and it’s just about clearing up, but the sky matches the feeling in my sinuses, which isn’t good.  Sarah has been gone for work for a couple of days, which means the little cat is all stressed out, which is both cute and sad.  The big cat has learned a new trick to distract me while I’m writing: she will climb up onto the entertainment center and use her paw or nose to turn on the PlayStation 3 and eject the disk.  Someday I will catch it on camera and it will become a youtube phenomenon.  Or not.

I’m officially late.  I must now go do battle with I-880.  The one hint I can give for you is that I won’t be doing this for much longer.

I regret not getting a place with central air.  I also regret getting a car with a black interior.  It’s been in the 90s and even worse down on the peninsula at work.  Yesterday in the time between when I got to work and when I went to lunch, the inside of my car got hot enough that my FasTrack pass fell off the windshield because its sticky velcro melted.  I wish I had one of those sunroofs with the solar fan in it, although I don’t know if they really work or that’s just a gimmick to get people to feel better about buying a Prius.

Speaking of Prius, I guess the Honda CR-Z is out now, or at least its web page is out.  I am still debating whether or not these things are cool or ugly.  I think it’s one of those things where it depends on the angle you look at it, which basically means it depends on the placement of the cupholders and knobs and whatnot.  The Yaris, for being a cheap-ass car, has an impressive number of cupholders: 8.  I know it sounds cliche, but go rent a car with no cupholders and spend two hours a day in it and then tell me how stupid it is to want less than eight cupholders.  So that means I can’t graduate to a car with worse fuel economy, and I can’t move to something with less than eight cupholders.  Also, I would not want to step back from the iPod aux in jack, and actually have to revert to one of those goofy cassette shells with a wire hanging out of it, or the thing where you tune the radio to 88.1 and your tunes get drowned out by the traffic advisory channel when you pass too close to the entrance to a theme park.

It turns out my stupid HP all-in-one scanner/printer does not scan in OSX 10.6.  The only thing this printer does well is get me on HP spam lists.  I made the mistake of doing the online register thing when I installed it, and every three weeks, I get another “welcome to HP!” email and hourly reminders to use their worthless proprietary software to print greeting cards for Arbor Day or Ramadan or whatever the hell holiday they can swindle people into making color copies for ten bucks each.  HP is like the Classmates.com of spam email.  And the sad thing is, if I ditch this printer and go get another one, it’s probably going to be another HP.  I mean, what other choices do I have?  Pay $100 extra to get a rebadged Dell printer?  Go on eBay and get a NeXT printer?  Maybe I should get a Canon.  I’m not in a rush to get a new printer, but I am in a rush to get a new desk, which will cause a domino effect of all peripherals and cables.

I’ve pretty much memorized the Ikea catalog in an attempt to find a new desk solution that is similar to their secretary desk I have, except with more storage and taller.  They designed their hutch-type desk (Jasper?  I forget the stupid name) so that it’s exactly four inches too short to hold a real monitor inside.  If I had an extra thousand square feet, I’d rush over to AnthroCart or Ergotron or one of those other companies that sound like a pretentious droid from the 25th century and throw open my wallet for some giant motorized articulated RoboCop of a desk that held seven monitors and had more adjustments than a high-end hospital bed for a wealthy paraplegic.  But I don’t have the space, so I need something that can fold up and vanish, and yet still has enough space for someone larger than a four year old.

I should wrap this up.  My car has air conditioning, which makes me look forward to my commute.

Yesterday we took a little drive to Treasure Island, which is a strange little man-made island that’s between the two sections of the Bay Bridge.  (I say “the other” because I’ve taken a few trips to Treasure Island, Florida, so it was interesting to see the west coast one.) The two sections of the bridge actually hit at Yerba Buena island, which is a natural island, a hilly little stump of a place that’s owned by the Coast Guard. They dredged and built Treasure Island in the 30s for this big expo, and used it as a seaplane base.  There were plans to put the San Francisco airport there, but they got Mills Field instead, which is where the current SFO stands.  TI was used as an army and a navy base since WW2, but that all got closed down in the nineties, and now you have about a square mile of antiques and weirdness.

First, it’s odd that this whole thing did not get carved up into McMansions and giant condos. You have the perfect view of SF and the water, nice weather from the breeze off the bay, and a horizon that extends from the Bay Bridge to the city to the Golden Gate and Alcatraz. But the island has this weird Chernobyl-like desolation to it, with a bunch of government-issue buildings boarded up and surrounded by rings of barbed wire.  If you’ve been to any other decommissioned base, you know the architecture type I mean - identical brick shitbox buildings thrown up by the lowest bidder, with institutional features, stenciled government signs, and the strange anonymity that means the building could be a warehouse for unused cots from World War I, or a stash of refined plutonium, and you can never tell what it is.

We parked in front of the Admin building, which was used as the Berlin airport in an Indiana Jones movie.  The island has a few weird showbiz connections, probably because of the large amount of abandoned warehouse space.  All of the Battlebots shows were taped here, and the bullettime fx for the Matrix movies happened in one of the warehouses, too. I don’t see how the logistics of filming a production would work, on an island with no gas station, no restaurants, and probably limited electrical production. But maybe if you need a big open space and you don’t want to pay a million dollars a second to rent the Moscone Center, there you go.

We walked along the water a bit, and then went to this weird set of buildings that looked like they used to be dorms of some sort.  They were all boarded up and completely abandoned, with broken windows and graffiti, but otherwise looking like they’d sat since 1963.  I think the military used to have some training there, like radio operators or something, and they did nothing with those buildings since the place shuttered.  It was so odd, because we live in a city where a square meter of real estate costs six figures, but here were acres and acres with old-growth trees and what used to be landscaped paths and water views, and it all sat completely abandoned.

They did still run some of the dorms, as some kind of job training school, where you could go to get your GED and take culinary training, or learn to be a plumber, or something like that.  The open buildings looked entirely institutional, like a military school, and we saw pretty much nobody there.  We also cruised around a bit more, and found a bunch of what used to be family housing, which you can now rent.  There are still people living there - I guess it’s fairly cheap, and you can get like a three bedroom/two bath with a garage for like $1700/month.  Sounds like a lot in rural Indiana, but this is on an island overlooking a huge city where that wouldn’t get you a studio apartment.  Driving through the streets (all named B Lane, C Lane, and so on) reminded me of all of the times we visited my dad’s Air Force buddy when they had on-base housing, because the buildings look identical everywhere, the way they were laid out, the construction, the look.  If you’ve spent any time on a base, someone could show you a picture of the same 1972 row house of four apartments with a carport, and if it was Anchorage or Grand Forks or Tacoma or Tampa or anywhere else, you would instantly recognize it.

And some of the houses were boarded off.  I guess they are not taking new leases in some places, probably to level the buildings.  And one group of houses were completely fenced off with radiation signs on the chain link.  Another huge problem, as with any other decommissioned base, is there are huge contamination issues all over the island.  I mean, you’ve got the standard lead paint and asbestos issues, but there’s also radium and plutonium contamination in places, which involves a bit more than some fresh paint and removing some fill dirt. Passing by entire rows of houses boarded over, with broken out windows and abandoned playgrounds and landscapes really emphasized the Chernobyl feel.  So did the radiation warning signs.

We circled around and saw the yacht club, one of the only things actively running on the island.  There was also a big hanger, and inside it looked like they were building some kind of amusement part floats or rides or something.  And a group of doofuses on segways circled around the giant asphalt parking lots, too.  We cruised from there to Yerba Buena, which is nothing but incredibly steep, curvy, and narrow rows cutting through old growth forest.  We saw a few Coast Guard officer’s quarters buildings, the kind of shacks built in maybe the 40s, all abandoned, some boarded off, some just empty.  There was also what looked like an old restaurant tucked into a hill, and the whole thing made me wonder if they would ever sell or develop the land there.

Turns out there’s no private housing on the island, and there are huge arguments going on about the city buying the land from the Navy, and what will happen.  Pelosi and crew want the Navy to hand over the land so it can be turned into some kind of low-income housing.  I’m sure others would like to turn it into super high end real estate.  I don’t know that much will happen in a place where you have to pay a bridge toll and drive 20 minutes to go to a Safeway or fill your car up with gas.  And let’s not forget that this is all artificially built on ten feet of compacted garbage, so when the big one hits, the entire mess goes straight into the bay.  I don’t foresee anything happening for decades.  Until then, it’s a strange little place to visit and look at some peeling and abandoned work by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Anyway, go to flickr or click here for the pix.

[2020 update: they are building a bunch of high-end housing here now. The big barracks dorm building is torn down, and bulldozers are everywhere. Stay tuned, I guess.]

I was so stretched for reading material in the Denver airport on Sunday that I actually paid money for a copy of GQ magazine.  In it, I read this giant article about the pot stores in Amsterdam, by some guy who worked there for a week or two and reported his findings.  (I am researching this not because I smoke pot - I don’t - but I’m thinking of starting a dog medical marijuana clinic for dogs that have arthritis or glaucoma, since I think if I did this in California, I could probably charge like four times as much to rich people with little neurotic rat-dogs.  I don’t know what to call it, but something with the term “dogstafarian.”)

I spent a week in Amsterdam in 2005.  Random observations:

• It is acceptable to wear blackface during the winter season, but little kids might ask you for presents.
• The people speak English, but also converse in some strange moon-man language called “Dutch.”  If you are white and of Germanic features, someone might come up to you and start talking in this weird language.  If you start screaming “I VOTED FOR GEORGE BUSH” they will stop.
• A Turkish Airways 737 overshot the runway at Schiphol airport in 2004 because the pilot, copilot, and first officer were in a dispute over whether or not the Black Sabbath song “N.I.B.” implies that Ozzy Osbourne or another member of Black Sabbath was an employee of Procter and Gamble, because of the line “The sun, the moon, the stars all bear my seal”
• You can buy hash in Amsterdam, but if you go into a pharmacy and ask for any cold medicine stronger than a Hall’s cough drop, the clerk will look at you like a crazed drug addict.
• Anton–Babinski syndrome is a rare symptom of brain damage to the occipital lobe in which a person has complete visual blindness but insist they can still see.
• Anne Frank’s attic was wired with cat-5 cable 60 years before the TIA/EIA-568-B standards were adopted.  Her father, however, used copper clad cable runs instead of 100% copper, which explains why in her diaries she mentions so much trouble getting her power over ethernet Cisco phones to work consistently.
• You can hire the services of a prostitute in a McDonald’s, but they don’t have the shamrock shakes there.
• I looked at all of Van Gogh’s paintings at his museum, and sketched out an entire idea for a Playstation game similar to Grand Theft Auto based on his artwork, but I lost my notes when I tried to use one of those public urinals.

I also went into an Apple Store while I was there, but this was before they had the iPad or the iPhone, so it was not that interesting.