My American Grocery List

• Corn Tortillas – CATEGORY: NOT COST-EFFECTIVE IN CANADA. Plain old corn tortillas. Buy ’em here and you’re lucky to find a little five-pack for a few dollars. In Walmart in Montana we get FIVE POUND bags for about five bucks – and they actually last for two years at room temperature before getting a little dry.

• Beaver Ghost Pepper Mustard – CATEGORY: NOT AVAILABLE HERE. It’s really good, and I haven’t seen it north of the border (which doesn’t mean it’s not sold somewhere; I just haven’t found it). Complicating things a little is that the last time I bought it, it was at Walmart in Kalispell MT – and so far I haven’t see it at Walmart in Havre, just over the mountains. Maybe Kalispell doesn’t carry it anymore either, just have to check next time I’m down (as of this writing we’ve been shut out of the US for nearly two years thanks to… yeah… that thing). And yes, I could buy a case directly from Beaver, but I’d catch all kinds of hell over it because I’m the only person in the house who eats mustard, pickles, etc.

• Kool-Aid – CATEGORY: WHAT THE OFFICIAL FUCK? The classic little 3.6gm/.13oz packets of colour and flavour that you dump into water – along with a truly astonishing amount of sugar. They stopped selling it north of the border. They still sell other variations, presumably because they’re more profitable: Little bottles of aspartame-sweetened drops (AH HATES aspartame) and the “pre-mixed” variation that’s simply the same coloured powder – added to a big can of sugar. I think this is a shocking racket; a trick to make you buy severely overpriced sugar. We mix the little packets with water and let everyone sweeten their own, usually with Sugar Twin (saccharine, which, curiously, appears to still be illegal in the US. Go figure.). And don’t you dare judge me. Sometimes you just want something cold and brightly coloured and fruity and sweet and sour (because I usually top it up with a little extra dash of citric acid), and if you’re not guzzling a half-pound of sugar, where’s the harm?

• Mezzetta Pepperoncini – CATEGORY: NOT COST EFFECTIVE IN CANADA. Way bigger jars at a much lower price in MT.

• PermaFrost Schnapps – CATEGORY: NOT AVAILABLE HERE. Which is really weird, because it’s made in Canada, but apparently only for export. Cinnamon and mint flavour. Keep your comments to yourself.

• Everclear – CATEGORY: NOT COST EFFECTIVE IN CANADA. This is the only thing we buy duty-free when returning home – big-ass 1.75 litre bottles of almost pure ethanol for less than twenty bucks. We use it for making liqueurs and the cleaning tasks that I used to buy little bottles of isopropyl alcohol for. This way it’s both cheaper and safer to keep around, as there’s no safe level of isopropanol ingestion.

• Collard Greens – CATEGORY: TOO AMERICAN FOR CANUCKS. I mean, maybe if I scoured the farmers’ markets around here someone will have fresh ones, but maybe they just won’t grow this far north. I get that they’re a southern thing, but if Walmart in MT carries them canned, I’m in. I really like the Glory brand.

• Pickled Okra – CATEGORY: TOO AMERICAN FOR CANUCKS. I think it’s a southern thing too; see above.

• Dobie Pads – CATEGORY: WHAT THE MODIFIED FUCK? The little 3M dish scrubbers, a sponge with a non-scratching plastic scouring pad wrapped around it. Just like Kool-Aid – something I’ve bought here in Upper Soviet Canuckistan, like, forever, then one day I couldn’t.

Revisiting Bruce Sterling’s “Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die”

In the October 2003 issue of MIT Technology Review, Bruce Sterling (if you don’t know, please catch up, okay?) offered a list of “technologies… so blatantly obnoxious that the human race would rejoice if they were just obliterated.” It was a great piece then, and I’ve kept it in the back of my mind since. Events of this month caused it to bubble up and suggest it’s time for reconsideration. Normally these sort of visitations take place at intervals that are multiples of your (probable) number of toes, but some of these problems are too urgent to backburner for another three years, and I don’t want to keep this rattling around in my head that long.

I’m also going to refrain (for a moment) from going off on the word “technology”. I’m so goddamned sick of hearing it that it makes me want to self-harm. If you’re talking about something like a TV, a phone, a computer, a piece of software, or the internet, just say so, because calling them “technologies” makes you sound like a prat. The best definition I’ve heard for it is “that’s the word people use when they don’t understand how something works.” Oh… shit. See, I couldn’t refrain, even for a moment. That’s how worked up it gets me… so don’t get me started on “virtual”. But beyond that I’m going to let it go – Bruce’s categories fit it well enough.

I’m also not going to violate the copyright on his piece by restating it here, since the original is still online, so open it in another tab and flip back and forth like I’m doing now:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2003/10/01/233809/ten-technologies-that-deserve-to-die

1. Nuclear Weapons

There is nothing about the need for the absolute elimination of warnukes that requires any second thought. Next.

2. Coal-Based Power

A hundred percent, and on this one we’re slowly heading in the right direction. But the right direction still isn’t the right direction, because in the main it’s just toward a different hydrocarbon (read: still-CO2-generating) power source: Natural gas. Yes, it burns cleaner than coal (e.g. not feeding mercury and other really nasty stuff into the atmosphere) and people don’t die horribly in mines over it, but in exchange we get fracking, which creates geological instability and poisons the groundwater with chemicals the identities of which are concealed from their victims because the fracking companies get to call them trade secrets! Whee!

This is the hard one. This is nontrivial. This is the existential foundations-of-our-civilization problem that we still don’t have a single fucking clue how to solve. We have built our modern, post-industrial-revolution society on a finite cache of energy we’re really not entitled to, and we’re expending it at roughly a million times the speed at which it was created and treating it as inexhaustible. Andrew Nikiforuk has termed it “the energy of slaves” because, like human slavery, it comes at a real cost that we’re not actually paying and for which a reckoning will eventually come – sooner than its most determined exploiters think. Not only is it going to run out, making the collapse of all of our systems that depend on it inevitable, but we don’t even get to wait that long, because global warming will make the earth nonviable for human (and much other) life first.

And here’s the kicker: We have no idea how to replace it. There is no credible evidence to suggest that we can “innovate” our way out of this. Other than hydrocarbons and nuclear reactors, we’ve traditionally gotten our “base load” power from hydroelectric dams, and they’re slowly failing as the reservoirs silt up and shrink because the planet’s temperature is rising. Wind and solar are making a valiant effort, but they’ll never supply more than a small fraction of the power we require, and are inherently unsuited to supply base load. Every other so-called “renewable” energy source, despite our greatest wishes, is nothing more than a science fair project that won’t scale up in time to save us (if at all), but we’ve collectively decided that the only remotely viable solution – nuclear power – is, um, “unpalatable”. And even if we were to, globally, change our mind and begin a crash program today to build enough of the largest fission plants created to date (10 GW) at the rate of a new one brought online every month until the end of the century, it would still not meet the world’s electricity requirement of (in the roughest possible terms) 10TW. Why this would be impossible – even if humanity’s collective will magically turned on a dime and demanded it – is cheerfully illustrated by Long Island Light Co.’s Shoreham plant: A less-than-1GW reactor, 20 years from conception to completion at a cost of $5.5 billion (that won’t be paid off until 2033), decommissioned in 1994 without ever delivering a watt of useful power, because the neighbours didn’t like it and that’s how our priorities are aligned. We’re Just That Screwed. And please, let’s stick with reality and not fantasize about fusion; remember that we were promised that fission reactors would supply power “too cheap to meter” – and that was after they were actually made to work.

By the way, when you’re thinking about this stuff, it helps to reflect on how much of it is actually solar power, but in a different form. Hydroelectric is solar because it’s the sun – not magic – that moves water from below the dam to above the dam. Same with wind. Hydrocarbons are stuff the sun grew a long time ago – you get the picture. Other than solar, about all we have is nuclear and geothermal.

So sure, we’ll all be delighted to finally see the end of coal-fired power generation (and the gas-fired plants that follow it) – right up until the lights go out. In terms of energy consumption, our existence is a house of cards, the forecast is for strong winds, and we have no glue.

3. The Internal-Combustion Engine

This one’s tough. Aspirational, but tough. Bruce is right on the mark when he points out that the energy density of gasoline (a fuel so dangerously volatile and toxic that if it were to be invented now it would never be allowed on the market) is unmatched. There’s nothing like being able to haul a heavy load a long distance really fast using a cheap fuel you can carry in a bucket. Seriously – there’s nothing. Trouble is, the replacements he suggests (“hydrogen and fuel cells”) aren’t energy sources – they’re means of energy storage and conversion – and the energy to make the hydrogen (here on earth, anyway) has to come from… wait for it… electricity or hydrocarbon reactions!

A sidebar on Tesla, since it appeared around the same time as his article: The sound you don’t hear from the car is its siren call. It feels like “progress”, but I’m unlikely to get one because they’re simply too expensive. I’ve never been, and will probably never be, a new-car guy. I live in the real world, where a car is something bought used for less than a thousand bucks and kept running myself, though I’m inspired by the guys who are bringing “affordable” used Teslas to the aftermarket (look up “Rich Rebuilds”).

(Funny story. About a year ago I passed one of those temporary portable roadside signs with the big fluorescent letters hawking a nearby used car lot. “30 CARS UNDER $15,000” . I did the mental math and thought “Yeah, that’s about right.”)

But they don’t contain any more magic than hydrogen fuel cell cars, just the same “long tailpipes” – the actual energy still has to come from somewhere else (see #2 above). Here in Alberta, two thirds of our power plants still burn coal and generate about half of our power. Most of the other half comes from natural gas, and wind/solar together total less than 10%. So electric cars really are just a distraction, and anyone considering himself virtuous for driving one and paying a little surcharge for “clean green electricity” is just being smug about an accounting trick. The point is that what the future holds is a shortage of electricity… and we think plugging in cars instead of burning gasoline is going to help?

4. Incandescent Light Bulbs

You know, to walk into just about any store you’d think we beat this one. Not only are all light bulbs now LEDS, they’re MuticolourDimmableInternetEnabled! (Memo to self: Add “IOT” to the next version of this list.) I’m a pretty technical guy, and have no use for any of that crap. I want a thing that turns electricity into light, period. Now, the beauty of incandescent bulbs that Bruce fails to acknowledge is their simplicity. It’s a piece of wire that gets hot and bright when you push electrons through it – that’s all. If you don’t distract yourself with that whole pesky “fractional efficiency” business, the incandescent bulb suddenly becomes quite elegant – it’s about Occam’s Razor, which I’ve written of at length here (look for the “On the Trail of the MCU” posts). So while I’m not saying that we should go back to using them for light, I do want to point out that in the complexity (and thus reliability, which is what I’m really getting at) department, they have the inherent edge. Normally, heat-as-a-byproduct-of-inefficiency is the kiss of death for reliability, but we had a hundred years to get the materials right (how that ignorant, murderous bumpkin Edison got there is a completely different story I won’t get sidetracked by here), and the result is that those simple cheap things run for a long time before burning out (what we call a high MTTF – Mean Time To Failure).

I just wish I could buy a goddamn LED bulb that met that criterion, but I can’t. Every reasonably-priced LED bulb I’ve bought has had a shorter working life than any incandescent bulb in the house, and it’s because they’re complicated. Aside from the LED (or array of LEDs) that actually generates the light, there’s a little power supply in there, and that’s the part that falls over, making the assembly flaky or flickery if not outright dead long before it should. And that’s because globalization means they all come from China, where reliability in electronics is still an undiscovered concept. So I’ve completely given up on them, and every one that fails around here gets replaced with a compact fluorescent picked up for nothing from the local recycling depot, a working bulb discarded by some other sucker who replaced it with a LED. I’m not happy about this, since they’re fragile (like incandescents) and complicated and flaky (just not as much as LEDs) and toxic to boot, and can’t be used outside… where I still use incandescents because CFs won’t start up in the cold. Grrr.

5. Land Mines

Is there anything to add? Only that an estimated 110 million land mines still in the ground in 78 countries kill 20,000 innocent people every year and maim countless more. And that the Countries That Matter refuse to sign the treaties banning them (it’s incidental but instructive that the US also refuses to sign on to the International Criminal Court). What the fuck.

6. Manned Spaceflight

In the beginning there was The Space Race, a cold-war rod length check between the US and the now-defunct USSR. And in a truly heroic accomplishment a few guys got to walk around on a dead rock and a few more guys died in the process. Bruce is right in that anything we need of space can be acquired by robots. But with NASA’s demise as the leader in the field, SpaceX emerged and has again dazzled us with extremely impressive new toys (I’m writing this as someone with a friend who works there), but the fact remains that we don’t really have any business being there. But to make matters worse, instead of acknowledging this, people who should know better are taking seriously the utterly barmy notion that we should be colonizing the moon, then Mars.

Reality check: After all our centuries of study, we know of exactly one planet suitable for sustaining (human) life – the one that co-evolved with it. That’s all. And we’re already there, so there’s little point in continuing to look for others that might work but are entirely out of reach. So it’s time to redirect 100% of the effort and resources being wasted screwing around in space toward unfucking earth, because if anything is certain, it’s that we’re not going to find another and move there before this one expires (again, see #2 above). Fuck the space billionaires and their “tourists”. Fuck Branson (even though the son of a dear friend of mine flies for him) – he should have stuck with having a record label that put out a lot of really good music. Fuck Bezos for every reason in the world. And fuck Musk for every stupid idea about Mars he has and his lame hyperloop and even lamer flamethrower… but unfuck him a little for at least replacing NASA’s lost launch capability and helping actual research on the ISS continue.

7. Prisons

I have to assume that Bruce is taking a bit of a piss when he compares prisons to airports, but we’re just not on the same page with this one. For-profit prisons are wrong and need to be outlawed, now. Meaningful criminal justice reform needs to take place, starting with (at very least) decriminalizing all drugs. White-collar criminals shouldn’t be incarcerated, they need to be stripped of their assets – all of them, right down to the last secret Panamanian account – installed in shitty walk-up apartments, and made to flip burgers at minimum wage for the duration of their sentences. Do these simple, basic, reasonable things, and suddenly we won’t have very much use for prisons anymore. But “newfangled electronic-parole monitors and ubiquitous computing offer plenty of opportunities” only for failure. Consider it for a second. Do you really think that if we can’t build an acceptably-reliable LED light bulb, we can trust a shiny new magical widget to keep everyone safe from a psychopathic murder of children (Anders Breivik is a useful example, but Clifford Olson works fine too)? No, we’re (again) going to turn to Occam’s Razor, which dictates that (in the absence of capital punishment, which is wronger than prisons) the best answer is the simplest one: Some people represent such horrors that they need to be permanently removed from our society, so put them in a concrete box and never let them out.

8. Cosmetic Implants

Well, we are going to have to draw a distinction here that Bruce didn’t acknowledge: That not all cosmetic surgery is created equal. Plastic surgery’s earliest use was reconstructive, and was significantly modernized in the wake of World War I. If in the course of reconstructions, implants are necessary (or even just desired, as in the case of mastectomies), then so be it. But although – speaking as the most tiresome and obsolete of all things, a straight male – it’s difficult not to appreciate a good boob job, anyone who thinks unnecessary elective cosmetic surgery involving foreign matter is a good idea should watch a season of Botched. He’s quite right to state that those can wait until we’re good at growing human meat.

9. Lie Detectors

Totally right. “Lie detectors” are – and always were – bullshit gadgets that never worked, and the law considers their output inadmissible for just that reason.

10. DVDs

Yeah, okay, but don’t you think that’s a bit trivial compared to the other nine on this list? They died as Bruce predicted, only to be replaced by Blu-Ray, which do provide better pictures but suffer from all the same downsides. What we’re learning – much too slowly – is that removable media, whether optical or magnetic, just don’t have much useful life in a world in which fixed disks (both magnetic and, increasingly, solid state), slaughter one price:performance barrier after the other. Oh – and that there’s never been a DRM scheme that couldn’t be beaten, and there probably won’t be until quantum encryption is widespread, and probably not then either.

So… How are we doing?

It would appear that in 17 years, we’ve managed to bump the two smallest, most trivial items off of this list of persistent offenders: Incandescent lights (sort of) and DVDs. If we’re generous we might be able to add the lie detector, but I honestly don’t know to what extent that nonsense is still in use today. By any measure, that’s piss-poor performance. But what are we going to replace those two (or three) with?

New 4. Cryptocurrency and its evil twin, Blockchain

If you understand the history (which goes back to the cypherpunks), there’s some merit in its theoretical basis. But as is often the case, it doesn’t take much for a good idea – in this case libertarianism – to go too far and lose its shit, and given Tim May’s example it was probably inevitable. The argument has gone far beyond whether anonymous digital currency is a desirable thing; certainly Bitcoin has demonstrated that as a means of payment its utility is both marginal and flawed, and that instead it’s become a vehicle for truly insane speculation and prodigious energy consumption in both its creation (“mining”) and transactions. And contrary to what its cheerleaders would have you believe, there’s nothing useful that you can do with blockchain that you can’t do – or hasn’t already been done – by other means. As of this writing, China (not known for its modern moral leadership) has outlawed mining and is on track for banning blockchain altogether. How they’re going to enforce the latter is a different conversation, but at that point it’s a matter for the individual to determine whether it’s worth fucking with a regime that has no qualms about arbitrarily disappearing a citizen and repurposing his body parts.

What China recognizes (and the rest of the world is taking too long to catch up with) is that this has nothing to do with liberty and everything to do with energy, as they continue bootstrapping 1.4 billion people from the third world to the first. The earth doesn’t have the power budget, so ban that shit, and put offenders in the prisons that we still need (see #7, above).

New 10. Social Media

Without a doubt, the most pernicious new technological pathogen is “social media”, and I’m singling out Facebook, though there is an abundance of other guilty parties. I won’t use it, but I did sign on to Linkedin for what, at the time, were sound reasons: I wanted to get and stay in touch with the (mostly professional) acquaintances I’d made over the years, and felt that rebuilding my network online (as the local, real-life one in my business had evaporated over the years due to industry-wide changes) might lead to work. That does not, however, mean that I wanted to engage in 24×7 meaningless chatter with them and everyone they know – which is exactly what I found when I first started to follow my “update” feed. I watched it (and participated a little) for a few days, quickly determining that if I continued to do so I would go to my grave without ever accomplishing another thing of any significance, including raising my own children. I experienced exactly the same feeling as I did the one time I tried to use an iPod Touch (kids, that’s what came just before the iPhone) while driving: I understood with great immediacy that it would only be possible to operate if I did so to the exclusion of everything else important in my life – which at that moment was “paying attention to the road”. I didn’t do it a second time.

Facebook is clearly equally poisonous to normal human social function, with the bonus added evil of its automated algorithmic amplification for profit of the most foul and damaging speech available on the planet, as well as being operated both incompetently and amorally enough to have been, arguably, responsible for the election of Trump in 2016. The difficulty, of course, is that 3 billion people have made it the centrepiece of their lives, and would see its demise as some weird sort of genocide – the mass murder of their online identities. The solution is to do exactly what the little vermin who created it have been championing for years: Move fast and break it. In this case, that would be to halt trading of its stock without notice and nationalize the motherfucker by paying out its shareholders at the closing price. Then hand it over to whatever the American equivalent of a (Canadian) crown corporation is – that’s an entity that’s ultimately owned by the state, but is operated at arms length and completely without interference from the government – to run as a nonprofit. Absent the I’m-out-to-become-the-richest-and-most-powerful-person-in-the-world-by-any-means-necessary motive, competent, ethical computer scientists and business people could then dial it down to some semblance of sanity and continue to operate it for the greater global good (sort of).

Sounds too much like SOCIALISM for you? Suck it up, because your country needs some of that medicine if it’s to jump the hot rails to hell it’s on now. Which is the perfect segue to…

And in the queue

I don’t think any of these problems are going to fall quickly, but just in case, I want you to know that I’m thinking ahead and that there are lots more in the pipe. So here’s a teaser.

For-Profit HMOs

Yeah, you’re right. It’s a long stretch to call interposing the avaricious free-market profit motive into the simple idea of keeping your citizens healthy a “technology”, but fuckit, if you can patent a “business process” and Bruce gets to call a concrete box (prison) a “technology”, I’m going to give myself some latitude too.

The Saga of the Sea-Doo Trailer.

Okay, so my kids had had a jones for a Sea-Doo for a few years. To rewind to the very beginning of the story, in 2015 we met a very nice chap named Les at Flathead Lake in Montana. He had a Stilleto – a 27′ cat that’s kind of at the big end for a beachcat and the small end for a cruiser, as it actually has berths in the hulls. He has a large family, so a boat like that makes sense. Anyway, we had the TriFoiler with us, and though the sailing wasn’t good that trip (not enough wind), we did get to kindle a friendship. On a subsequent trip down for the August 2017 eclipse we ran into him again; he happened to have an old Sea-Doo along and let the girls blast around on it, and somewhat to my chagrin they got hooked on the (in sailors’ eyes – but we’ll circle back to that later) obnoxious thing and Becky began sniffing around to see if there was something appropriate (meaning cheap) to be found, but nothing turned up anywhere close to home that summer. Then when we were camping+sailing the Fresno Reservoir (also Montana) in 2019 a couple of the locals let them take theirs (new shiny expensive Sparks) out and tear around. So when we got home Becky renewed her search for something affordable, couldn’t find anything reasonable north of the border (e.g. a ’96 on a trailer for $3500 in Grande Prairie is not reasonable) and on a Monday found a pair of 1995s – with trailer – down near Butte, Montana (about an eight hour drive) and negotiated the lot for $1200 USD – a smokin’ deal. (They were asking $1600, but Becky ground ’em down. That’s my girl.) On Tuesday morning, then, she, Sarah, and I shot down for what we thought would be a simple day trip. By the time we found the sellers’ cottage, took one for a spin, loaded it back up, hitched it to the car, and squared the paperwork, it was pushing sunset, so on the way home we caught a few hours sleep at a rest stop north of Helena and hit the road again first thing Wednesday. Made the border about 11:30am, and that’s when things turned weird.

Honestly, I should have caught the mistake, though I don’t think it would have changed anything – I had a fat packet of papers, and some of the stuff in there (like the Sea-Doo titles – we’d call them “registrations” in Canada, but we don’t need them for boats) was really just clutter. The discovery was that we didn’t have the title for the trailer – though the trailer was listed on the bill of sale – and that this was obviously a consequence of the manufacturer’s VIN sticker being lost years prior. The couple we bought it from had evidently bought it from someone else in Montana and must have just hauled it to their place on the lake and kept it there ever since, never bothering with registering it. Without the title – or even a serial number (which the three of us and a parade of Canada Customs officers searched in vain for any trace of on the trailer) – customs stopped us dead in our tracks. Lacking a bill of sale with a serial number to tie it to a matching number on the trailer, they wouldn’t let it in. No amount of begging, wheedling, negotiation, or cajoling made any difference. And I wasn’t being unreasonable – I was trying to get them to give us a temporary dispensation that might, for example, allow us ten days to get it home and get a registry-assigned VIN (such as one gets for a homemade trailer). No dice. Customs wouldn’t go any further than saying that if Transport Canada allowed it in Customs would go along. To that end, they gave me the 800 number for Transport Canada and pointed me at a pay phone across the room. The number was no longer in service. Another officer gave me another number, and it was NFG too. On the third try, we got through and a woman at Transport Canada said that Customs owned the decision. With a few more phone calls, we went back and forth between Transport and Customs again, each time with a different woman at Transport Canada, trying to find an angle that would work, such as a temporary importation or importing on the promise that it would be either registered or destroyed within 30 days or something. Nobody would say yes. I was beginning to consider worst-case scenarios, like hauling it back to Shelby (about a half hour south, four hours from home) for storage – at whatever ungodly price – or maybe out to a stateside friend’s place yet another couple of hours away to park it until we could sort this Charlie Foxtrot out with the addition of a lot of extra time and travel.

We were getting nowhere until – eventually – a guy at Transport Canada suggested that if I were to line up a flatbed, the whole mess could be trucked into the country without any trouble – if the axle were removed from the trailer. “No axle, no conveyance. It would be a cradle, not a trailer, and none of our business. Just saying.”

So we turned around and headed for a storage yard tied to a bar and convenience store just on the US side, without a clear plan. I explained the problem to the guys there, and was musing about how I really needed to find some place with a hoist, when they said they had a forklift and they could help out for a few bucks. From their front counter I called my old friend Austin, who lives just north of the border – about 15 minutes away – and who I knew had a little utility trailer. This was all just coming together on the fly – I don’t carry a tracking device (“cellphone” to you) and he and I usually communicate by email – so I needed their phone and an Alberta phone book (remember those?). He answered – from Portland, where he was visiting family – but said his girlfriend Pam was at the house and he’d give her a heads-up that we were coming to borrow the trailer.

Back over now to the Canadian side and up to Austin’s place, where we found his 10′ utility trailer had a flat that took about an hour to pump up with a little 12V “top up” compressor. Drove back down, forked both Sea-Doos onto pallets and yanked the axle off the trailer, turning it, as far as the regulations are concerned, from a trailer into a collection of trailer parts. Tossed the “cradle” (without the axle and wheels) onto Austin’s trailer and hauled it north.

Things got interesting with the Canada Customs guys once they realized what I was doing. I explained that Transport Canada had told me that without the axle it was no longer a trailer, and after confirming that I did not have the axle or wheels in Austin’s trailer with it, and admonishing me that it would never be registerable in Canada, the officer I’d spoken with previously carefully instructed another officer in filling out the importation form, declaring it as “trailer parts” and explicitly noting the absence of axle and wheels. When I saw that they were treating the “cradle” and Sea-Doos as three separate importations, I asked why they didn’t just do a single entry with “goods to follow” (because I had a single bill of sale for everything), but he cut me off and said he “[didn’t] want to bother with that stuff”. I realized about an hour later that by papering it that way he was actually doing me a gigantic favour – separate entries guaranteed that any wheels or axles imported in a later shipment couldn’t be seen as the other parts of a complete trailer. A real mitzvah.

So now we had the “cradle” on the Canadian side, dropped it at Austin’s, and headed south again – but thinking about the order in which we had to do the remaining pieces. Remember the puzzle about the guy who has to get a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain from one side of the river to the other in a boat that will only carry him and one of those three things at a time? This was that. Without a hoist at Austin’s, we had no way to lift the Sea-Doos, so we needed a destination trailer – on wheels – if we were to hope to slide the Sea-Doos from one trailer to the other. So the next trip had to be one Sea-Doo (the smaller of the two) and the rest of the trailer parts, and that’s what made me the most nervous, because that’s the point at which they could call me on this whole stunt. Miraculously, they let me import the Sea-Doo without paying any attention to the spare tires and junk axle (for trailer unknown) riding along. Whether this was at the suggestion of the first officer I’ll never know.

But as were leaving the storage yard on the second trip, the guys there mentioned that they close at 7:00pm, and seeing as how it was already 5:30, we were suddenly on the clock – and the situation wasn’t helped by this being the day that US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) were also screening all cars exiting the US, before we lined up for Canada Customs, adding an unpredictable delay to each northbound crossing. (Why? Beats me. When I asked the first time through, I got snapped at – “None of your business” – and thought it best not to press the matter.)

So while we were driving up to Austin’s with the second load, I briefed my rookie pit crew on who would be doing what once we arrived: They were to get the wheels out of the trailer and on either side of the cradle while I fetched the axle, they’d each spin in the wheel bolts, and once they were finger-tight I’d lift the cradle while they pinned the springs (which I’d left attached to the axle – half as many bolts that way) back on – hopefully without lopping off any fingertips. So with the trailer reassembled Just Enough, I pushed the first Sea-Doo off of Austin’s trailer until the Sea-Doo trailer’s winch could reach and pull it on the rest of the way… all while watching the clock.

Then back south for the last trip, and (amazingly) for the first time all day, no lineup at US Customs, which landed us at the storage yard at 6:55. Five minutes later the second Sea-Doo was on the trailer; I asked Buddy how much, he said fifty bucks, and I broke a cardinal rule by getting cash from their in-store ATM, which only dispensed twenties. I gave him the $60, told him I’d never been happier to round up, thanked them both for their help, and we closed in on the home stretch. By 8:30 we’d winched the second Sea-Doo and tightened all the trailer’s bolts, hit the road and got home around midnight.

By the time we made the last US-Canada trip, the US CBP guys who were checking outbound traffic – and who had seen us five times that day – were razzing us, asking if that was the last drug haul of the day. The Canada Customs officers just seemed to take it all in stride.

In the end, it took 9 extra hours, making our average speed from the border to Austin’s place about 0.5 km/hr. In total, we crossed the US-Canada border ten times.

What a day. What a story.

Postscript: After talking to EZ Loader, I found the very-well-hidden backup VIN sticker, making it registerable after all (without having to apply for an Assigned VIN), once the folks we’d bought it from mailed us a new bill of sale with the VIN added. Plus, it turned out that the trailer was more than 15 years old, so I again dodged the Registrar of Imported Vehicles, which is an extra grift the Canadian gov’t runs that adds an additional cost (more than $300!) to stuff like this.

Post Postscript: About that “sailors hating Sea-Doos” thing. It’s not for lack of good reason – they’re (Sea-Doos, not sailors) completely obnoxious. They make a giant fucking racket, the older two-stroke engines (like ours) stink and leave oil slicks on the water, create really annoying waves, and are generally driven by white trash who blast country music that’s worse than the sound of the engines. On the other hand, the TriFoiler is a really difficult boat to deal with near the shore, in the same way that a rail dragster isn’t much use for a trip to the 7-11 three blocks away. That’s why a lot of TF sailors have added trolling motors and small outboards to their boats. Having watched Riding Giants, the documentary about Laird Hamilton and the big wave surfers who revolutionized the sport, I see how the Sea-Doo could be great for getting in and out of the shallows and low-wind areas, or just for a tow home if I’m out there and the wind dies. So I’m hoping to make the trailer (which is really wide) convertible, able to carry the two Sea-Doos – or one and the TF. Stay tuned.

Why Donald Trump is worse than Charles Manson.

Manson was responsible for eight deaths. Trump is pushing 200,000.

Manson was never a tax cheat.

Manson didn’t make a career of stiffing his contractors.

Manson never claimed he could kill someone in public and get away with it.

Manson never bragged about sexually abusing women with impunity because he was famous.

Manson did not contaminate the earth with more copies of himself.

Manson’s 50 years as a guest of the California penal system cost, by some estimates, close to $2M.  Trump racks up twice that on a golf weekend at Mar A Lago, all paid for by American taxpayers.

Manson was not mentored by Roy Cohn.

Nobody was ever killed in response to Manson’s murders.  When Trump ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Iranian air defenses went high-twitch and shot down a civilian airliner carrying 63 Canadians.

Manson never set up a fake charity as a personal slush fund.

Charles Manson never mocked a disabled person in front of a large audience – and TV cameras.

Manson never denied established and accepted climate science and claimed that Californians brought devastating wildfires upon themselves by failing to rake the forest.

Manson never had fake hair.

Manson never paid anyone to take college exams for him.

Manson did not put children in cages.

Manson wanted to start a race war. Trump is starting a race war.

Manson and his followers took a lot of drugs, but he never told them to inject disinfectants.

Manson didn’t have a full-time “fixer” to let him dance away from his crimes.

Manson didn’t suck up to dictators.

Trump hasn’t yet died in prison.

Haggling.

I love haggling.  I haven’t inherited a lot of cultural traditions, but haggling is recreation for old Jews, like those stupid balls are for old Italians.  It’s sport.  And there’s little that’s more disappointing than goys who don’t understand it, know how to do it, or appreciate its value in the realm of social intercourse.  Today I start this blog entry because this morning’s haggle was a thing of beauty and it would be a shame to allow it to be forgotten.  Sometimes improvisation kicks the ass of anything you could write.

The Gate

Some stuff happened here recently – the acreage down the road where my girls have been riding and keeping a couple of horses was sold, so we had to bring the horses home.  But we’re about to take off for a week of camping (and sailing, I hope) in Montana, and didn’t want to deal with having someone stay here to take care of them or hauling them off to yet another stable.  Instead, it was decided they’d be turned out in our field.  Only that field has never been properly fenced – we’ve just kludged up electric fencing from time to time and the stupid things sometimes manage to get past it.  So now I’m dealing with planting 50 fenceposts and stringing half a mile of barbed (ahem – Canadian) wire, which really isn’t much fun.  Job’s nearly done, though, and we just needed a (10′ long steel tube) gate.  Spotted one at a garage sale in town last week, asked about it, and was quoted $90.  Didn’t get it then because I wasn’t sure the size was right.  But a week later we decided it would work, so I went back, and it was still there (outside – where, truth be told, we probably could have just stolen it at night, but that wouldn’t be as good a story as this).  So here’s where we pick up this morning’s dialogue:

Me:  I figure we should take that gate off your hands.  Might be a little small, but I think we can make it work.  How does $60 sound?

Him:  Oh, I have to get $90 out of that.

Me:  Come on, $90 was last week’s price, and it’s still here.

Him:  Well, I’ve had a lot of interest in it.

Me:  You have a lot of interest, but I have cash and a car.

Him:  Okay, but I can’t go any lower than $80.

Me:  Sold.

Honestly, it’s not the ten bucks.  It’s the game.

The (first) 2001 Subaru Outback 3.0 H6

It’s the summer of 2019 and I really want to move up to one of these cars – we’ve been towing sailboats and Seadoos all over the place with the four of us and all our gear, and with that load the four-cylinder 2.5 litre engines in our existing Subarus are really at their limit.  I needed more power and was reluctant to go the turbo route, as the 2.5 litre w/ turbo combination has a bad reputation.  So I spotted this H6 on kijiji and took a look.  Body was terrible – more than the usual rust around the rear wheel wells, grille and bumper missing, hood not closing due to slight crease (all of the front end stuff a product of a minor crash).  But it started and ran great, so we got down to business.  I think she was asking a thousand, and I didn’t have any sense of how low she might go, so I said “Look, I don’t want to insult you with a low-ball offer like $600…”, and before I could get any further, she interrupted me and said “I’ll take 600”.

I’m happy with the result, of course, but almost a little disappointed that she didn’t make me work harder for it.

The (second) 2001 Subaru Outback 3.0 H6

I hadn’t even been able to get the first one on the road yet.  I’d taken care of the front end stuff, but it really needed the brakes done, and some MORON had installed Simbolz locking wheel nuts on this thing.  Go look them up if you wish; they use this idiotic system of keying pins, and you have to get the right key to fit the nut.  It wasn’t so much having to spend $30 to buy the key from a place in Vancouver that pissed me off – it was that when the car got new tires a year or two previous someone was stunned enough to reinstall these things on a nearly-20-year-old beater rather than replace them with regular lug nuts – and then lose the key!  I mean, if you’ve got $10,000 worth of rims, I guess locks make sense, but these were old stock rims.  So between that delay and my having to make a blitz trip (in the ’99 Outback whose engine I’d rebuilt the previous winter) to Long Island (a 5000 mile round trip) to pick up a Supercat 19, next thing I knew it was the dead of winter and I didn’t have a chance to get at it until mid-May 2020.

But, being stupid, I was still watching kijiji and another one popped up in October of 2019.  I got ahold of the guy and took a look at it the night before I headed to New York, and the story was that it had a head gasket leak and he started to take it apart, but soon realized that he was in over his head.  Pulling heads on the older 2.5 litre engines in situ isn’t a big deal – it’s tight, but doable – but I don’t think it can be done with the larger H6, which is quite a bit more complicated (for example, unlike the plastic EJ22 and EJ25 timing covers, this one’s is metal and has 60 screws that need to be torqued).  To really seal it, though, he was working out behind the house on a soft, unpaved parking spot – no pad, no shelter.  So he just stopped in his tracks and left it in pieces – a kit car, though with a body rather better than the first.  I told him I was interested, and when I saw in January that it was still there (not a big surprise), I dropped him a note to begin to arrange towing it home.  The fun happened when we had to settle on the price.  (Before I forget, this one too had those fucking Simbolz locks (and no key) made worse by his attempt to drill one off – a mess I have yet to clean up.)

He was asking $800.  Suzy was (for various reasons) resistant to getting it at all, but if it had to happen (it did), she wanted to see it at $400.  I told her that was a nonstarter, but that I could probably pull off $500.  So when I broached the subject with buddy, here’s what happened (Oh, and did I mention that he was a Jesus freak?  Some weird Christian sect that flash around a lot of Hebrew and shaloms and shit, but think that the Jews got it all wrong.  No matter.):

Me:  You were asking $800, right?  All things considered, I don’t think we can do that, so where can we go?

Him:  Well, I prayed on it, and the answer I received was $600.

Me:  Yeah, that’s still tough.  I too answer to a higher authority, and I’m getting some real heat from her over this.  We have too many cars right now, she just left her job, and it’s a collection of parts – she wants to see $400, but I don’t think that’s fair.  But I’ll tell you what.   I’ll check with her and we’ll settle it tomorrow.

The next day I came back and told him that the answer I’d received was $500, which he accepted.

The moral of this story is that Susan > God.

 

 

Stand-up Comedians.

The Standard Bearers

Doug Stanhope

The inheritor of the Lenny-Carlin-Hicks line; his social commentary is stunningly on-the-mark and utterly trenchant.  I’ve only seen him live once, but I actually, literally plotzed for the first time in my life.  And he gets bonus points for name-checking Derek Edwards in his book.

Marc Maron

I’m very big on Maron too, and not only because he’s maintaining the old Jewish man’s ennui tradition in comedy (though if you agree with the “old” part you can go fuck yourself, because I’m young and he’s younger than I am).

If you don’t know those two, you’ve gotta get current.

These people kill, and you’ve probably never heard of them

Anthony Jeselnik

Jeselnik is a fucking assassin.  With every joke comes a setup that you know is a diversion, but you still have no idea where the kill shot is going to come from.  Most people only know him from the Trump roast (which runs hot and cold and he only appeared on because Greg Giraldo died).  There should be a lot more of his stuff out there, but I think he scares people.

Gary Gulman

So smart, and his bits have depth and detail that draw you in like crazy.  His piece on “Role Play” is amazing because you really have to work to keep up with it and not lose track of which character layer he’s in.  Funny coincidence:  He did a knockout piece on Trump vs. Gates – years before Trump became SCROTUS.  Another comic who should be way better known.

Daryl Lenox

I love this guy.  For a unique point of view (pun intended), you just can’t beat a mostly-blind black American who spent a bunch of years living in Canada.

And now, the unfunniest “comics” in the world

Dane Cook

The Nickelback of standup comedy.  (In “Everything Trump Touches Dies”, Rick White calls Trump “the Nickelback of presidents”.  Applying the mathematical concept of transitivity, then, that makes Nickelback the Trump of music.  I think that about covers it.)

Iliza Shlesinger

I have to admit to having only seen her “Elder Millennial” special, but if it’s typical of her act, I don’t even get why she’s called a “comedian”.  She’s certainly smart and observational, which is what makes this so confusing.  It’s a performance, but there’s no art in it, so it’s not performance art.  What she actually does is lecture, punctuating it with awkward physical poses, annoying voices, and mugging.  During her act she refers to her “jokes”, but there really isn’t anything funny about them.  Not a single giggle from this side of the glass, though to hear the audience you’d think that George Carlin just rose from the grave with a fresh head of long blonde hair.  And if you think I’m just being sexist, here are just a few current funny bitches who slay me:  Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Niki Glaser.  I’d probably add Whitney Cummings to the list, but I don’t think she actually exists because that’s too much of a porn name to believe.

But Shlesinger is rippin’ hot in those high-waisted pants and bare midriff.

Larry the Cable Guy

Of the Southern crew, there are some pretty damn funny guys, including Jeff Foxworthy, Ron White, and Bill Engvall.  Unfortunately, LtCG isn’t among them, though he has been known to tour with them.  Along with Dane Cook, I’ll change the station rather than subject myself to his redneck pastiche.  In his book, David Cross outed LtCG as a complete phony – it’s a hilarious takedown.

 

 

The Stampede Breakfast.

You may know of the Calgary Stampede.  If you don’t, here’s the Cole’s Notes version:

Hundreds of thousands of people flock to the city over ten days for a parade and to attend the carnival midway and rodeo.  Some animals die, and some cowboys get the shit kicked out of them.  People – mostly the locals – dress in “western duds” and descend into a drunken stupor for the duration; very little real work gets done and STD rates spike.  When the price of oil is high (as it hasn’t been for some years), oil companies are flush and hire decades-past-their-commercial-prime former top-40 rock bands to play their parties.  When the price of oil is low they do what they do the rest of the year, which is complain about what a raw deal Alberta and their business are getting from the rest of the country.  Alberta is Canada’s designated Whiny Little Bitch.

Another feature, though, is the Stampede breakfast.  There are hundreds of free pancake breakfasts held in the city and surrounding region by various groups, companies, and organizations for various reasons.  Most are pretty lame – a couple of pancakes with the requisite fake maple syrup and a couple of nasty little breakfast sausages, plus coffee, juice, etc.  At the bigger events, you can line up for this for hours.  I’ve lived here for a long time, so I can’t stand that stuff – my annual limit for those two particular items is generally two of each, and that’s only if I bring along my own fruit syrup.  Freebies normally exert gravitational pull on me, but this is a notable exception.

There are some breakfasts that diverge from that norm, though; the one we’ve been going to is held at a little rural church near where we live.  A couple years ago they really outdid themselves with additions like hams (on the bone!), bacon, eggs, homemade hash browns, and buckets of fresh fruit salad – just great.  That was a peak that they haven’t reproduced since, but their breakfast is still pretty good.

That’s a long setup for a short story, but it’s worth it.  A thing happened there last year that you’d file under “You Can’t Write This Stuff”.  My wife (Susan) and I queued up, got our grub, and headed for a table.  Sat down, started eating, and (inevitably) another two or three women joined us at the table, which required (so I’m told) an exchange of pleasantries.  One of the newcomers – English, as I recall – introduced herself as (another) Susan, which sent my mind spinning briefly into the there-must-be-a-joke-here department.  I speculated for a moment on what might be the collective noun for a group of Susans (and yes, I know of and have listened to Band of Susans.  Used to be on a music mailing list with the guy in the band not named Susan.), first considering “a scourge”, but then settling on “a blight”.  So I asked whether we actually had a Blight of Susans at the table.

The new Susan paused for a beat, then said “You know, that was my maiden name.  And I can’t begin to tell you how much of a relief it was to change it when I got married.”

I’m Sick and Tired of Being Ahead of the Curve.

I don’t think I’m all that smart.  I mean, I’m smart, but I’m under no illusions about how smart.  I’m always the first to say that there are about a zillion people out there smarter than me; I can learn more stuff that way, and learning is always more interesting than just Being Smart.  So I don’t have any special insight, I’m not somehow prescient, and I’m not visited in my dreams by spirits that show me The Way.  I’m just reasonably good at looking at problems and seeing what seem like obvious ways to solve them.  And while you might think that if I have that ability, and sometimes exert it on a given problem before anyone else, it would give me a winning edge, you would be wrong.  I have somewhat of a track record of being onto the right idea years before everyone else, and it’s gotten me bupkis.  Fuck being ahead of the curve.  People who talk about “first mover advantage” don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Virtual Reality

Early in 1991 I got a call from a guy who saw my ad in the Yellow Pages (kids, ask your parents) under “Electronic Design”.  He asked if I knew anything about virtual reality.  VR was still a pretty new, obscure, and fringe thing in ’91, but as it happened I knew some people.  I’d been in Survival Research Laboratories for a few years by then, and SRL was kind of a nexus for new, obscure, and fringe tech in the Bay Area.  People doing interesting stuff tended to drop by the shop; one was Eric Gullichsen, who was running an early VR program at AutoDesk and later started Sense8, we knew some folks at NASA Ames, Jaron Lanier’s VPL may have been running at that point too, but I’d have to check.  So I had about as much awareness as anyone.  Anyway, I met the guy – Jim Durward – who had an idea for a system that would create a shared virtual environment.  To rather abbreviate the story, we started a company (Parallel Universe, later renamed Virtual Universe), I brought in a couple of guys (now ex-friends) to help with the design, and we got to work building a UNIX-based system that would allow up to 96 users to connect over dialup phone lines (remember, this was when about the best you could do was 28.8kb/sec via modem, and DSL/cable Internet connectivity was still about half a dozen years away) and interact in the shared 3-D space.  But our real innovation was to couple a second phone line to the first and use it to carry audio, with a central mixer under control of the UNIX system managing the user’s soundscape.  With our proprietary board and a Sound Blaster installed in the user’s PC, we could steer their stereo audio field around to conform to their visual field.  Basically, we learned that in terms of bang-for-the-buck, we could generate a much more convincing immersive environment by adding realistic audio than by using fancy, expensive, and really-not-all-that-great head-mounted 3D displays.  So we did an embarrassingly-small IPO (though what’s really embarrassing is that in Calgary nearly 30 years later you’re still lucky if you can raise a few hundred thousand to do real technology), filed our patent, and got to work.  And then, in early 1994, the whole thing started its slow slide into the shitter when I was driven out by my emotionally-disturbed now-ex-friends and control of the company was handed over to what surely must be the most clueless bag of protoplasm I’ve ever had to sit across a table from, Lorn Becker.

Long after the company had ceased actual operation, that moron sat on the patent and refused to cooperate with any effort to license it, right up until it expired – a clear violation of his fiduciary responsibility to the then-still-public company and its shareholders.  You can look it up and judge for yourself (Durward, Levine, et.al.), but I remain convinced – as I was then – that there was an awful lot of royalty revenue that should have come from companies like Second Life.  As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, this stupid sonofabitch’s plan never saw beyond using VUC‘s losses and R+D tax credits to offset the profits of his other companies.  For my part, getting the bum’s rush when I did worked out okay; I had enough free-trading stock to get my next company started, though if I’d been really smart and unloaded that stock the instant I was out the door (rather than sitting on it because I had no model for how the company – and its stock – could spiral down) I’d have been hundreds of thousands further ahead.  About five years later the settlement I got as a result of suing them for wrongful dismissal and defrauding me of my patent rights helped buy our place in the country – and brought a memorable quote from my lawyer, Peter Linder:  “It’s one thing to deal with people who are broke.  It’s another to deal with people who are broke and stupid.”  So that was that.  Jim and I have worked together on other stuff since, and we remain tight.  The rest of them should die of cancer, very slowly.

Not that we were the only casualty; I don’t think any of the early VR companies survived.  I don’t recall actually hearing of VPL’s demise, but Jaron writes and makes music these days.  Last I was in touch with Eric he was hooked up with the crown prince of Tonga and running their domain registry.  I think Ono Sendai was involved with Sega‘s VR game system, but I heard stories about their HMD giving people simulator sickness and it went away.  Scott Fisher (from NASA Ames) ran Telepresence Research for a while but appears to have moved on.  I don’t know what became of those guys in Montreal who were doing that rather slick Amiga-based thing.  And, of course, Silicon Graphics rotted out and the pieces flew everywhere.  We used the Virtual Research HMD in-house but I’m sure they didn’t last, nor did the Logitech ultrasonic 3D positioning system it used.   I’m sure that digging around in some old stacks of business cards would refresh my memory as to others, but you get the idea.

Then in March of 2014, Oculus was purchased by Facebook for two billion dollars.

Internet of Things

In 2005, with the two companies I’d been running since 1994 winding down, I brought in a couple of new partners and we started GreenServer.  The idea was simple:  Low power computing targeting media delivery.  That is, a little server with a fraction of a PC’s physical and power footprints with a Bittorrent client for acquiring content, the usual local Windoze/Mac filesharing, and a streaming server; a place for all of your music, video, etc., to reside and the means by which to manage it and stream it out to media adapters – simple.  And since the product’s spin was power savings (vs. keeping  a fat and power-hungry PC running 24×7 for media collection and delivery), we added functions for managing household power consumption, such as shutting down PCs that were deemed idle and monitoring the actual power consumption of devices around the house via small, embedded, networked meters.  For this I was derided as “evil” by no less a shit-for-brains as Kevin O’Leary during two visits to CBC’s Dragons’ Den (a pair of fiascos worthy of their own blog post – one of these days).   After a few years of banging our heads against the wall trying to raise investment capital (including a trip to San Francisco during which fraudsters tried to scam us), we simply gave up.

Marijuana

(sorry, I got distracted here, but I’ll be back to finish this up asap.)

Fuck Amateurs.

Yeah, that’s harsh, and you can accuse me of “punching down” and being a bully and a big old mean “elitist” (don’t get me started…), but I really couldn’t give a damn.  Amateurs really suck – and much more now than ever.  Look – I know that everyone has to start somewhere and you’ve got to learn and make mistakes and get better and all that, but something’s changed.  These days people lack any kind of humility and feel compelled to share their ignorance and mediocrity endlessly with the world.  We have failed in our collective responsibility to beat these people down.  Instead of cooing over them, oo’ing and ah’ing over their abominations as you would your toddler’s macaroni artwork, point out that what they’re doing is wrong and it sets a bad example.  In this touchy-feely society nobody want to hurt anyone’s feelings.  If more people responded with “Why the fuck are you sharing this?  I don’t give a shit and you’re lousy at it anyway, so just sod off”, we’d all have to put up with a lot less of this nonsense.  And I’m so done with “makers”, but that’ll have to wait for a different rant.  The point is that if you’re a neophyte, keep working on it and keep it to yourself until you have something worth sharing.  This isn’t a brand-new idea; today our book club is going to assign Andrew Keen‘s “The Cult of the Amateur” (Doubleday, 2007).

Here’s what set me off.

It’s not a big deal – just some guy taking apart an old computer for a minor repair – but I’m cranky and started this blog to get this kind of shit out of my system.  I ran across it because I’ve got the same machine (a Compaq SLT/286) and wanted to see if there were any tricks to it.  There aren’t.  You get a couple of screwdrivers – Torx 10 & 15 – and take out a whole bunch of screws to get to the PCB.  Ain’t no magic.  But Buddy felt compelled to lovingly, obsessively document this operation in a series of seventeen very sharp photographs (which he captions “Figures“, as if he’s writing a medical text), the way you see it done nowadays in endless recipes online:  Here’s the bowl.  Here’s the flour.  Here’s the egg.  Here’s me breaking the egg.  Here’s the milk.  Here’s the sugar.  Here’s the baking powder.  (If you’re counting, you should be at seven pictures).  Now watch as I put each one in the bowl.  Oopsie, spilled some – here’s the towel I’m wiping it up with.  Now I’m mixing them.  Now I’m going to pour the batter into the pan.  And here’s my oven.  You don’t have a gun in there, do you?  ’cause if you do, please kill me now rather than subject me to more of this fucking agony.  Listen:  Your mom didn’t need anything more than a hand-written 3×5 index card in her recipe box, and neither do you.

But back to the computer.  All this was just an introduction to the main course, which is reviving the Dallas Semiconductor DS1237 RTC/RAM chip.  These things go back to the mid-80s; the idea of building the battery and supervisory circuit into the same package as the chip originally came from MOSTEK, and Dallas spun off the idea and ran with it.  Makes things easy for us designers – before that I used Motorola’s MC6818, which is basically the same thing, just without the built-in battery – and it could be a little tricky.  Anyway, the point is that the battery eventually runs down and the part has to be replaced.  Without getting into a whole thing about “planned obsolescence” (really, please stop bitching, because in this business who expects a PC to be in service for more than a decade?), and though it takes rather more skill to do it than to change the battery on your average motherboard, it’s not something out of the reach of mere mortals.

But once inside, did he replace the part in question?  No.  Instead, afraid to pull the chip from the PCB, he gnawed at the 1287’s package like a rat until he hit metal and hacked on an external battery in the ugliest possible fashion (someone else’s idea, apparently).  I’ve worked under some very trying conditions, and appreciate that there are times when you have to do things like this, but I strongly suspect that the comfortable environs of his tropical photo studio do not qualify.  More importantly, though, it’s not something to be proud of.  Show some spine.  Get in there and do the job properly, and if you can’t, for chrissakes keep it to yourself, coward.  Really, dude, we’re not talking about reworking fine-pitch SMT here.  I happened to have an NOS 1287 in my Dallas bin, so I didn’t have to consider any of that nonsense.  The new parts have a very good shelf life, too, because the battery isn’t connected to the clock and RAM until the software initializes the part.  Go read the data sheet – you can download it in an instant, unlike the Old Days when you had to have the book.

The reality is, after you’ve extracted the board, desoldering this part is significantly easier than it is with an average plastic DIP, for an specific reason:  PDIPs are fabricated with their pins (legs) not exactly vertical, but splayed out something like 7°.  This is done to aid in the assembly process:  The pins are squeezed vertical during the (through-hole) insertion process, and once released in the PCB holes the pins spring back out again and retain the part in the board through the remainder of the assembly process (soldering).  If done properly, you can even turn the board over and hand-solder them without the chips falling out.  But this has the downstream disadvantage of making the chips harder to desolder and remove from the board, because the pin pushing against the hole plating traps solder, making it a little tricky to separate pin from plating and increasing the chances of damaging the board (that’s why you see chickenshits without any skills chop the IC package free of the pins, then pick out the pins one at a time).  The Dallas parts, however, are potted assemblies (rather than a conventional lead frame moulded into epoxy), and the pins are absolutely vertical, so even with basic hobbyist equipment it’s easy to suck out all the solder and have the part literally drop out of the board.

(Memo to Buddy:  That Wahl Iso-Tip you’re using is simply not up to the job.  That’s a child’s soldering iron – I know, because I used one when I was a child, before I developed skillz.  Your little rechargeable iron takes too much time to heat up and the tip doesn’t have the mass necessary to keep its temperature during the desoldering operation.  You want to run a Weller WTCPx iron, and go with a hot (i.e. 800°F), high-mass tip so you have the heat reserve to desolder the pin quickly – it’s lingering at too low a temperature that’s going to make the job hard and trash the board.  Add an Edsyn DS-017 Soldapullt and you’re made in the shade.)

Now comes the cool part:  I don’t ever want to have to go through all this again.  So once the RTC was out, I soldered in a high-quality low-profile machined-pin socket.  “But”, you say, “this is a tight assembly and there isn’t clearance above the part to accommodate the socket – the chip is going to butt up against the metalwork overhead.”  And you’re right, so I cut a hole in the metal, and if it ever needs to be replaced again I don’t have to do anything more than remove the battery pack.

And here’s my shitty snap of the result, without any caption at all.

Cool, huh?  Now you’re running with the big dogs.

 

Warts

I mean warts – the actual skin growths caused by HPV.  This is a little outside of the scope of the things I usually write about (like I stick to a topic…), but it’s been bothering me.  The treatment, that is, not the wart – it’s gone, and that’s what this is about.

A few years ago one appeared near my thumb’s knuckle, just around the corner where the fingerprints start, and it bugged the hell out of me, because it was exactly in the right place to rub it with my middle finger, which for a fidgeter is a real distraction.  So I, predictably, asked my (terrific) GP about it, and he gave it a shot from his liquid nitrogen bottle and told me to use one of the over-the-counter salicylic acid-based wart removers until it was gone.  I failed at the followup – having to do it multiple-times daily was a pain in the ass, and the bottle dried up and I didn’t get around to replacing it, and the wart just stayed.  On subsequent visits to the sawbones I brought it up again, and he froze it again, and we went through this pointless cycle a few more times.  Eventually he referred me to a hand surgeon, and after waiting months for the appointment was told by the surgeon (in about 45 seconds) that it was in a spot where there was too much flexing and stretching of the skin for surgery, so he wouldn’t touch it.  And the stupid thing kept growing and I just kept it under control by snipping the top off, flush with the skin (with Snap-On‘s 710 flush cutters – my favourite for many years).

Ultimately I got tired of all this – the salicylic acid stuff didn’t work and liquid nitrogen didn’t work and hurt like hell.  So I brought up with the doc a little ancient medical history:  That I’d only once before (in my early teens) had a (plantar) wart, and that my then-GP had successfully dispatched it with a single application of fuming nitric acid.  Present doc had never heard of it, and was (and, I think, remains) skeptical, confident that time has distorted my memory and that I’m confusing nitrogen and nitric acid.  I’ve always been pretty sciency, so I reject that theory (though I do acknowledge how unreliable memory usually is).  I even contacted the clinic in my hometown where I’d had that treatment as a kid, but my records had, unfortunately, long since been purged, so I couldn’t prove it to him.  He wasn’t ready, willing, or able to supply the treatment I wanted, but I was shortly (by pure coincidence) introduced over coffee to a FOAF who worked in a local medical lab.  I explained the problem, and a couple of days later he slipped me a couple of mls of 70% nitric acid – perfect, since I only needed a little and didn’t much want to have to buy a litre of the stuff from a chemical supplier (which would only tempt me to make nitroglycerine, right?).  It wasn’t the 90%+ fuming, but it would probably do.  And it did – I applied the smallest possible drop (probably a µl) and a second drop a couple of hours later, then left it alone.  It caused a little burn, a little pain, and within a couple of weeks my thumb was all healed up, the wart gone and without recurrence to date.

What happened to this fast, cheap, effective treatment in the intervening 40 years?  You can search around the ‘net and not find a trace of it being used in modern medicine.  About the only plausible theory anyone has offered is that the recent introduction of WHMIS (Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System) requirements simply made it too much of a hassle to deal with compared to liquid nitrogen, regardless of efficacy.

There’s one footnote to this story.  Before trying the nitric acid treatment, I happened to be at our vet’s office for some routine dog or cat thing.  I mentioned to her the problems I’d had with this stupid persistent wart, and she told me about having had great success using neoplasene for removing cancerous skin lesions in dogs, and gave me few mls of it.  She did say that it was a controversial (and unapproved?) treatment, and that simply acquiring it took some unusual steps.  Regardless of her endorsement, I was a little suspicious of this goo, having seen/heard a piece or two on “black salve”, a caustic paste making the rounds in “alternative” (read: quack) medicine circles that has caused a lot of people serious damage and grief (iIrc, an episode of Botched featured a woman who, quite literally, destroyed her nose overnight with this stuff.  I won’t get into further details on black salve here; you can google it yourself).  Sure enough, that’s what the vet gave me, so that tube remains sealed on my desk; I trust her regarding having had good outcomes with dogs, but I’m not using it on me.

So the question remains:  How does modern medicine “forget” a treatment as good as nitric acid for warts?  And how many others have suffered the same fate?