Fiction Fragment - The End of the World

Since I had a request for more stories, and since it is still Halloween for the next 8 minutes, and since I like posting stuff and getting people's feedback on it, here's something I wrote in 2000.  I know, it's cheating to pull things from the archives, but it has been a busy day.  Lemme know what you think:
 

I'm looking at these notes and wondering why I'm bothering.  Bothering to write, and bothering to go through the motions of living.  I mean, I know I'm emotionally screwed up.  That rather goes without saying.  I maintain my air of "detached amusement," and it's served me well throughout my life, but now there's nobody around to even notice that I'm not falling to pieces.

Everyone is dead.

That's inconceivable.  Okay, how about this:  My entire family is dead.  That's a little more believable.  I always knew that I might outlive some of the people I care about.  But not EVERYBODY.

The entire city of San Jose is dead.  Well, I didn't know most of the people in the city.

The entire United States is dead.  Nations fall.  But traditionally it's the idea of the nation, not all the people in it...

The entire world is dead.  That means all the other nations are dead.  Every city is dead.  Every family is dead.

Nope, still isn't registering.

In the days during and immediately after the plague, I wandered around in a fugue.  For the first few days I was waiting to die myself.  Because everybody was dying.  I saw a co-worker crash and burn out in the office.  Theo.  He died right there in the lab, bled out all over the new o-scope.  We called 911, but the implosion of infrastructure had already started.  We left him where he fell, and didn't even turn out the lights on our way out.  It didn't matter.  The power failed the next afternoon.

I kept not dying, and then I got hungry.

El Camino was mostly clear, with only a few cars piled along the sides where they'd come to a rest even as their driver's expired.  I realized after driving past 4 miles of strip malls that I was looking for an open burger joint.  Every McDonanld's in the South Bay was closed.  That took a little while to get a grasp on.  So finally I turned down Lawrence expressway, and went to Costco.  I went looking for a snack.  I found a home.

What more could the last man on earth want, besides 582 gallons of Cran-Raspberry?  Or 5200 cans of Campbell's soup?  I also found a total of $14,000 and change in cash, and decided that I was now a communist.  To celebrate my political conversion, I piled the bonfire up in a wastebasket and used it to roast marshmallows to make s'mores.  I discovered that while food cooked over money may sound impressive, it tastes awful.

Being a Writing Writer

It was one month ago today that I asserted I was going to try to write a blog entry a day, and I have (almost) managed to do so.  At this point, I'm trying to decide how I want to modify the effort.  I've enjoyed the requirement that I quickly write and publish something, and I have always managed to find something to write about.  I want to keep writing, but I'm not sure these short pieces are all I want to do.  I have long dreamed of writing a longer work.  NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) starts in 58 hours, and although I don't think I'd necessarily make the required 50,000 words for that, I may take a more serious effort at fiction writing.  I know other people that HAVE completed NaNoWriMo, and their efforts were also inspiring.  50,000 words in 30 days represents 1667 words per day, or about 1.5 - 4 times the number of words I've been tending to write daily.

Of course the point of NaNoWriMo is to get over the feeling that your words are precious and must be perfectly crafted.  That is for editing.  The first thing you need to do is simply get ANY words out on the paper.  Or word document.  Or as I've been doing, Blog.  And in that regard, this exercise I've been doing has been a good lead up to that.  The lead-up that I haven't done is the pre-writing steps of coming up with a coherent story.  But maybe I'll start by just trying to write various scenes, and stitch them together.  So in honor of Halloween, and the completion of my month-of-blogging, here's a scene.  And no, the rest of the story has not been written around it yet...

Dan felt the fingers tracing gently over his neck and upper back, but he was strapped face down on the table and couldn't turn his head enough to see the man standing over him.

"Your really should have been more careful," the man spoke in a calm, quiet voice.  "Because of you, two people are dead, and a little boy is paralyzed.  Was it worth it?  Was Margarita Tuesday really worth the amount of pain you've brought into the world?"

Dan squirmed against his restraints, but there was almost no slack.  Thrashing as hard as he could, he could only rotate his shoulders a few inches either direction.  "Please... it was an accident...  I didn't mean to hurt anybody."

"Maybe that was true the first two times you were arrested for DUI.  But you knew you had a problem.  You could have called a cab, or ridden home with friends.  Instead you got behind the wheel of a Cadillac Escalade even though your license was suspended..."

"What are you doing?  Please don't kill me," Dan pleaded.

"Oh, don't worry.  I'm not going to kill you.  I'm just going to insure that you can never hurt anyone again..."  Dan felt the fingers tracing down his spin, from the base of his skull and on to his upper back.  The rubber gloved hand stopped and gently pinched the spinal ridge...

Okay, I have more in mind, but what do YOU think happens next?  What would you LIKE to see happen?  (Hmmm... There's another idea for an entire blog, written as a Choose Your Own Adventure, with links to other entries in the blog as you read through it...)

"Dear Customers, Please Go Away!"

I went to JoAnn Fabrics with my wife Chris this evening so she could get some material for a project she's working on.  The store was a complete zoo, with a line about 18 people deep at the cutting table.  When Chris finally got up to the table, she mentioned that she hadn't anticipated it being this crowded.  The lady, one of only two working the table, laughed and said "Oh, it's always this crowded a few days before Halloween!"  Hmmm...  So, they KNOW it is going to be crowded, and yet they are obviously understaffed?  Who possibly thinks this is a good idea?  Was there really nobody else that the manager could have scheduled to work this evening?

Now, we get mailers from JoAnn probably once every few weeks, with coupons and discount offers and advertisements for all their sale items.  They are not stupid about marketing, and they are obviously spending money to get people in the door.  But once they get them there, *even when they know they are coming*, they don't then have enough staff to enable buying at the customer's pace.

It got better, though.  Starting at about 8:15 or 8:30, they began announcing on the store P.A. that "JoAnn Fabrics will be closing at 9:00.  Please finish your shopping and bring your final selections to the checkout."  Of course, a lot of people were still waiting at the cutting table to be *able* to take their selections to the checkout.  But more importantly, having gone to great marketing effort to get customers in the door, they were now not only understaffed to help them, but they were actively shoving them out the door because it was approaching their arbitrary closing time.

When we finally got through the line to the cashier (they had only one working the checkout, on this known-busy day) I mentioned to him that it seemed a shame to be shoving people out the door when they were there actively trying to give the store more money.  He said it was too bad, but they had to lock the door at 9:00 PM.  He had, either through conditioning or poor training or simple lack of imagination or care, come to the conclusion that the purpose of the business at which he worked was to close the door at 9:00 PM, and not to sell as much stuff as people possibly wanted to buy.  Now, it if had been a department store, or some other type of retailer where a lot of people were just browsing, I could understand.  Shooing the recreational shoppers out the door isn't going to cost a lot of lost opportunity.  But from what I saw this evening, most of those people were there with intent to buy.  They wanted to get more.  They were looking for things to purchase.  And they were being told, "Dear Customers, Please Go Away."  It was kind of staggering.

The Inevitable Coming Death of the United States Postal Service

My daughter wanted to ship a small birthday gift to an old friend of hers who now lives in Oregon.  We used one of the fixed-rate boxes that I had picked up previously for free at the post office.  The smallest box is about the size of a VHS video cassette (or the box your iPod came in, if you're under 20 years old...) and they'll ship it anywhere in the US by priority mail for $4.95.  I took it over to the post office at 10:30 Sunday night, knowing that they had an "Automated Postal Center," or APC, where I could pay for the postage.  I entered all the information, swiped my credit card, and it printed out this postage label for the package:

So, obviously, the printer was broken, and that label wasn't going to get me anywhere.  No problem, I had brought stamps with me, just in case, and I stuck down eleven 44 cent stamps, one 10 cent, and one 1 cent, and then dropped the box in the parcel drop next to the APC.  Two days later, it arrived back at our house.  The postal service had bounced it to the return address because, at 14 ounces, it exceeded the 13 ounce limit for mailing packages without going to the counter.  This policy was originally a response to the Unabomber (who was captured in 1996) and now it is part of the general air of paranoia that pervades "our Post-9/11 world(tm)".  (I wonder if there is a study somewhere showing that 13 ounces was a magic threshold weight for lethal letter-bombs.  That would have been a fun research project to work on...)

Today, thinking I would kill two birds with one stone, I took my lunch hour at work to go to the post office near my employer, to re-mail the package, and get a refund on my defectively printed $4.95 label.  Well, one out of two isn't bad... (YES, IT REALLY IS!)  The lady at the counter took the package, took off the warning labels they'd returned it to me with, and put it in the outgoing.  She then said that, no, I couldn't get a refund on the defective label, I would have to go to the post office where I purchsed it.  I politely pointed out that I'm not NEAR that post office during business hours, which is why I used the APC in the first place.  She checked with her manager, and no, they just couldn't help.  Apparently if THEY refunded the money, that post office would have to eat the cost, because there is no way for them to recover the money from the post office where I bought the defective label.

Okay, savor the irony of this for a moment.  This organization exists (at great taxpayer subsidized expense, these last few years), for the purpose of supporting communications.  And yet individual post offices are, apparently, run as rival factions with no means for transferring money from one to another.  I pointed out that this was stupid.  The counter lady agreed.  And apologized.  And suggested that I call the 800-275-8777 customer service number.

Knowing at this point that I was going to write this entry, I figured "why not?"  Back at the office I called the customer support line, and they really don't make it easy to get to a human if you don't fall into one of the four available voice menu categories. But I eventually got a human.  And she found in her information (to her surprise as well) that "the ONLY recourse" is to return to the post office where the APC problem occurred.  It didn't matter that I had both the receipt AND the defective label, and that I paid with a credit card.  I have to go back and talk to the APC specialist at THAT post office.  She agreed that this was stupid.  She even suggested I log a complaint, and helped me do it, and promised that someone would call me back within 2 days.

Sure enough, about 4 hours later, I got a call from the post office where the problem originated.  I explained what I needed and why it was not convenient for me to go there during their business hours.  And he agreed that it was unfortunate, but policy was policy.  But, he pointed out helpfully, they are open until 6:00 PM.

So, what did I learn from this?

  - Never EVER use the APC, unless you can get back to that post office, during business hours, if you have a problem.
  - Don't mail packages after hours anyway, unless they are less than 13 ounces (or you want them delivered back to your own house.)
  - Customer Service:  Not a big concern at the United States Postal Service.

Maybe, if I happen to be near that post office during business hours, I'll head over and seek my refund.  But mostly, I'm just going to quit shipping things USPS.  I have always been happy with FedEx customer service...  They have escalation paths for customer service complaints that get things fixed.  And I'll encourage everyone else I know to do the same. But given the trajectory the USPS is on, and from what I've seen of their customer service, I have to believe that eventually even congress will take the hint, especially in these days of rising budget-mindedness, and pull the plug.

Postscript:  I attempted to mail a link to this entry to the USPS Customer Service Center, to give them an opportunity to comment, but I ran into this:

Due to system upgrades, the ability to Email Us is also temporarily unavailable.

We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.

>Sigh...<

Real ESP

Extra Sensory Perception, or ESP, is usually used to refer to telepathy or other paranormal or "psi" capabilities.  The five "standard" human senses are really well suited to allowing us to interact with our environment, but even in the realm of nature they are not the only choices.  Looking around the animal kingdom, we find some animals with senses that are more powerful than, or even just completely different than, our own.

Bees can "see" the polarization of light, which gives them a powerful aid in finding certain kinds of flowers.  Some snakes have the ability to "see" heat in the long-wave infra-red.  This means that they can detect the thermal energy coming off their prey, as well as off potential predators.

It is well known that dogs have an amazing sense of smell, that goes all the way from a massive olfactory sensory surface area back to a much larger portion of their brain dedicated to processing smells.  This means that they literally perceive more of their world through smell than we do.  When you smell soup, they smell every individual ingredient.  Or the other day, I couldn't figure out why Dory, my Golden Retriever, kept jumping on the door to the room where we keep her dog food.  It turns out that I had left the air tight lid off the bin when I got her dinner earlier in the evening, and she could smell the open bin from a room away and through the door, and she wanted at it.

Imagine if we had evolved on a world where hotspots of intense ionizing radiation tended to kill everything that came too close.  It is not hard to believe that animals would have been under strong evolutionary pressure to develop the ability to perceive ionizing radiation.  Maybe we'd "see" it or "hear" it, or maybe we would just get really uncomfortable and itchy as the radiation level rose.  But someone from that world would, to us, seem to have a nearly magical ability to perceive that which we can't.

Or what about a world on which color vision never evolved?  If everyone could see only intensity (black and white), but suddenly someone showed up with color vision, they would have this freakish ability to, for no obvious reason, know the *wavelength* of light coming off of objects, and not just the intensity.  Of course, growing up in a world with no words for color, they would completely lack the vocabulary to even describe the experience.  Or taking this idea one step further, imagine a world on which no vision at all had evolved.  Everyone, and every animal could get some idea of what's around them by their sense of smell (which would probably be superhuman by our standards), and they could hear, and then feel and taste things when they are in contact with them.  But then someone shows up who can seemingly know, as if by magic, what's happening across the room, or can sense things even up wind from them.  They can dodge virtually any attack.  They can attack back at distance with impossible accuracy.  It would be the stuff of comic book super-heroes, or nightmare boogey men.  People would say, "It's like he has some kind of fifth sense!"

Guns in the Movies

Today, more technical "nit picking."  Last month I went off on the novels of Dan Brown, and now it's the even easier target (pun intended) of guns in movies.  Although they are a staple of action flicks, it's amazing how often movies get the details of firearms wrong.  For example, I was watching the movie "Killers" yesterday, and Aston Kutcher asks his wife to bring him the Glock .45 he has in the nightstand.  Then, as he points it at his head of a rival hitman, you hear him cock the hammer.  Except that Glocks don't have external hammers.  They are what is known as "Double Action Only" (which, is arguably ALSO a misnomer, but I digress) and the only way to cock the internal hammer is by cycling the side.  But the Foley artist doing the sound for this movie knows that the sound that goes with putting a gun to someone's head threateningly is the cocking of the hammer.  Even if there is no hammer.

Another common source of errors has to do with "blanks" within the plot of a movie.  Blanks, when you know that they are firing blanks, are usually treated as though they behave like ammunition in every way, except that they don't fire a bullet.  But again, the devil is in the details.  In many semi-automatic rifles, like the AR-15/M-16, or the AK-47, the lack of a bullet with blank fire means that there isn't enough pressure developed in the barrel to cycle the action.  There are two ways to address this:  1) You can put a device over the muzzle of the gun called a "blank firing adapter" that restricts the gas flow out of the barrel enough to allow blank fire to cycle the action, or 2) You can manually cycle the action after every blank you fire.  But what you *can't* do is replace a magazine full of live ammo with a magazine full of blanks, and have the gun behave exactly the same except without the bullets (Yes, I'm looking at you, Die Hard 2.)  Oh, and if you DO fire live ammunition out of a gun with a blank firing adapter on the muzzle, it often blows up.

The effects of handguns are usually portrayed incorrectly in movies as well.  There are both errors in magnitude and time scale.  The impact of someone shot with a handgun is often wildly exaggerated, with people flung backwards, physically knocked off their feet.  If you've ever seen video of police shootings, though, what's striking is how someone being shot will often at first appear unaffected, or will just fall over as they go unconscious from shock or neurological trauma.  Next, there's the problem of time scale:  Most people shot in movies end up in one of two categories:  Dead or complete recovery.  The reality is that most people shot with handguns don't die (at least not immediately) but they will usually suffer adverse health effects for the rest of their lives.  You just can't poke holes in a person without significant risk of causing lifelong damage, whether it is orthopedic, gastrointestinal, respiratory, neurological, or otherwise.  People just aren't usually ever quite the same after they've been shot.

And finally, (and this is just a general rant...) there is the incredibly sloppy handling of guns in movies.  Watch video of properly trained police of military executing a raid, and you'll see that to a man they have their trigger finger along the frame of the gun, above the trigger, and outside the trigger guard.  From that position they can fire quickly if needed, but they aren't going to accidentally squeeze off a round if they are startled or bumped.  But in movies you regularly see people running around with their finger on the trigger.  That's a recipe for disaster.

Laptop Fan Replacement

I'm writing this entry from my IBM Thinkpad T42 laptop.  The fact that it really is an IBM Thinkpad, and not a Lenovo Thinkpad, gives you some idea how old this machine is.  But in spite of being a bit over 5 years old, it works pretty well, or at least it does now that I replaced the fan in it.  Late last year, it started failing to boot up, giving me the words to the effect of "FAN ERROR" in plain white text on a blank black screen, before refusing to boot further.  Apparently the system can detect if the fan is not turning, and instead of risking thermal damage, it just won't boot up at all.  I kept it going in the short term, long enough to migrate more fully to my desktop machine, by using compressed air to spin the fan during boot up (so the system thought it was turning) and then by using an external fan blowing across the heat exchanger to keep the laptop from over-heating while I was using it.

The compressed air trick was a hit-or-miss proposition, working about 50% of the time.  Once the system was booted, it was fine though.  The external fan also posed some hazard, and once or twice I bumped into the spinning blades as they whirred along on my desktop.  Once I had everything off the ThinkPad, I set it on my workbench, not sure what I was going to do it with.  Finally several weeks ago, I decided that since everything else about the machine seemed to actually work quite well, I would go ahead and replace the fan, and see if I can't get another year or two out of this puppy.  Eventually, the display backlight will fail, or some other even more expensive component, at which point I will simply declare it dead and get a new laptop.  But for now, I can squeeze a little more life out of it.  It also has a feature that I really like, which is a parallel printer port, suitable for using the Xilinx Spartan-3 Development kit that I have.  No other functional computer in the house as a parallel port anymore, and I'm leery of whether I could make the dev kit work with a USB base parallel port.

Now, it turns out that you can't just replace the fan in a ThinkPad.  The fan is permanently riveted to the entire thermal module which serves as the heat sink for both the CPU and the graphics chip, and the heat exchanger that the fan blows air across.

 

Getting at the module is surprisingly easy.  Just flip the ThinkPad over and remove the four keyboard screws and the eight wrist-pad screws.  Then flip it back over, open it up, and lift out the keyboard and the wrist pad, disconnecting both of them from the motherboard as you go.  Then there's just three more screws that hold the thermal module itself in, and the power connection for the fan.  The entire disassembly only takes a few minutes.  As always when working in a computer, make sure that the power is disconnected and the battery is removed.  Also make sure that you are grounded and not providing static electricity shocks to the sensitive electronics.  It may be a bit difficult to remove the module, because the thermal grease may have dried into a paste.  Apply consistent force, and be aware that it may jerk loose when the grease lets go.

Once you have the module out, you may want to carefully clean around the area, and then insert the new module.  Because the ThinkPad is pretty old, your "New" thermal module is likely to be a used or re-furbished model.  That's what I ended up with, even though the vendor initially claimed it was "new".  Make sure that you order the proper module for your machine.  There will be a label with the FRU ("Field Replaceable Unit") number.  For example, mine was 13R2657.  I quickly discovered, however, that this FRU has been superseded by 41W5204.  If the replacement module doesn't come with grease or thermal pads, make sure to add some where it was on the old module to get a good thermal connection to the chips. After all, a heat sink doesn't do any good if the heat can't get into it to begin with.

Once I got this machine back up and running, I discovered another interesting side effect of re-starting a windows PC that has been fallow for many months... There were TONS of updates needed.  Windows XP, Firefox,  Java, Adobe Flash, Antivirus, and several other apps all had pending updates to install, which brought the machine to a crawl.  Then, with the new Antivirus profiles, it wanted to run a complete scan.  So it took a couple of hours of mostly automated thrashing, but now it is as though I was never offline.  I wonder how much longer this will last?

Disney and Name Brands

It is one of the most recognized brands in the world: Disney.  There's Disney Land, Disney World, Disney Studios, Disney Pixar, The Disney Channel, Disney Radio, Disney on Ice, Disney Cruiseline, and on and on.  But before all that, Disney was a proper name.  The name of a guy (well, actually two guys, Walt and Roy, but Walt was arguably the prime driver), who had a vision and determination.  Through that determination, he turned HIS NAME into a WORLDWIDE BRAND.  I mean, think about that in the context of the people you know.  Isn't it kind of surreal to think that in some alternate universe, people are saying "This year, 20,000 brides elected to get married at Dreslough Land!"  Or "Steve Jobs joined the board of Wilson today, giving Wilson-Pixar an exclusive distribution deal for the next 8 years."  (Yes, I realize that Wilson is in fact the name of an existing sporting goods company, I'm just pandering to one of my regular readers...)

Of course, naming your company after yourself is not without hazards.  Computer Scientist Dr. Gene Amdahl left IBM to found his own computer company, the Amdahl Corporation.  He succeeded admirably, but when he left in 1979, he couldn't take his name with him.  Amdahl (the company) continued to operate long after Amdahl (the man) was out the door.  Since they owned the name, he had to find other monikers for his follow-on ventures.

And not all names are equally suited to being stuck on major ventures.  My last name "King" is already a noun, and in fact one used in a lot of industries.  King Corporation appears to have a fairly lame looking website describing what they do.  But if you ask most people what the "King" brand is, and I bet they'll come up with famous horror writer Stephen King. Indeed, that's another way in which names can become widely known brands.  If I say Clancy, King, or Rowling, you may or may not be able to envision what they look like, but if you read, you probably know their names and at least some of what their brand is about.  Although perhaps that is just a subset of celebrity in general, which gives us "brands" like Eastwood, Newman, and Hepburn, or poisons others like Hitler.  And then there are some names that span both celebrity and business brand: quick, what pops into your mind when I say "Hilton?"  I suspect that above a key threshold age (45?  50?) you first think "Famous Hotels," and below that threshold age you initially envision "Purse Dog Wielding Heiress."

So, what would you want YOUR brand to be?

Cursive

I'm currently listening to "Small is the New Big" by Seth Godin, and on my way home from work this evening he asserted that "Cursive is a fundamentally useless skill" in the modern age.  Typing, he said, is far more useful, and if you were to create an ordered list of things kids need, cursive would not be in the top 1000.  Now I like cursive, and I wish that I had the spectacular flowing penmanship of my maternal grandmother, or of my artist friend who writes letters that look like they fell out of the 18th century.  My handwriting is somewhat cramped and angular, although still passably readable.  But is it worthless?

I am generally of the opinion that I can type much faster than I can write by hand, but in situations when no keyboard and word processor is available, being able to wield a pen is a very useful skill.  Most of my friends make fun of me for almost always having several pens in my various pockets, and I make lots of notes to myself in the course of a day.  But do I need cursive?  Most kids today use a somewhat modified printing for written work, and I will switch back and forth between printing and cursive depending upon mood or context, but I've always thought of cursive as slightly faster.  This is easy enough to test...  I made up a few sentences and timed writing them, both in cursive and printed.  The printing was actually 0.4% to 1.0% faster, which for the size of my samples was a non-significant difference.  Okay, so for speed it's probably no better than being able to print, although I do think my fast cursive is a bit more readable than my fast printing.

What other benefits does cursive offer?  There is something intrinsically emotive about it.  Years ago, my friend James explained that he always hand-wrote in his journal, instead of keeping a Doogie Howser style typed file on a computer, because he could tell from the words sloping off the page when he wrote drunk.  I keep a hand-written journal, because I like the exercise of putting the words down with pen.  Sometimes I write in cursive, sometimes print, very occasionally block lettering, but slowing down my thinking to match the speed at which I can scribe the words sometimes allows me personal insight, and sometimes just results in incoherent prose.  I also like watching the liquid or gel ink settle into the textured surface of the page, glistening in the light as it first leaves the pen and then widening and fuzzing into the dried line.

What about you?  How much do you hand-write?  And how much of that is cursive?  And are your kids learning to write in cursive?

Lab Notes: IR Remote

This is an experimental blog entry.  This is a set of notes, as I keep in my electronic lab book, on building a high-powered IR remote control.  This gives you a look into my thought process as I'm starting a project.  If you're not a EE or electronics hobbyist, a lot of this probably makes no sense at all.  You may want to come back some other time when I'm back to writing prose rather than EE stream-of-consciousness.

This is something I've been thinking about for several weeks, but haven't done anything about.  If I make progress on this, I might continue to edit this entry.  To that end, I'll note Last Date Edited (and update this if/when I make changes): October 21, 2010.

Optimal wavelength: I've got IR LEDs from 810nm to ?? (lots longer.)  What's the peak detection wavelength? The Sharp integrated remote control transceiver modules are at 940nm.  Several other IR remotes seem to be at that wavelength as well.

Looking on Digikey for 940nm IR LEDs, there are a bunch.  Let's say I want to go with a high-efficiency one, to get peak IR/watt.  What are my choices?  Searched 940nm in stock, and there are 60.  Luminous intensity is given in terms of mW/sr @ xx mA.  sr = steradian, but this increases with viewing angle (smaller angle, photons more concentrated).  Some choices:

TSAL6100: 80mw/sr @ 100mA, 20 degree angle
TSAL6200: 40mw/sr @ 100mA, 34 degree angle
TSAL5300: 30mw/sr @ 100mA, 44 degree angle
TSAL6400: 25mw/sr @ 100mA, 50 degree angle
TSAL7600: 15mw/sr @ 100mA, 60 degree angle

These are all 5mm (T 1 3/4) LEDs with 1.35V nominal forward voltage.  Are these all the same die, with just different optics?  (Question: How do LEDs get different viewing angles?)  These are Vishay Semiconductor parts.

And what viewing angle do I want for these LEDs anyway?  Am I trying to make a remote that has maximum range when aimed, or maximum spread when spraying a large area?  Well, if it was a super-TV-B-Gone, I'd go for the widest spread.  But the primary goal is maximum range.  So I think I'm going ot use the TSAL6100.  20 degree ( +/- 10 degrees of center) for the beam width.  MAYBE I'll have one or two wide-beam LEDs just to provide some near-in breadth, at the expense of a little bit of range.

Of course, if narrow and far is really all I want, there's an OSRAM with 160 mW/sr at 10 degree beam width (P/N SFH4545).  The forward voltage is 1.5V nominal, and it costs about 10% more than the Vishay parts above...

So how many of them to use?  Inverse square law says I need to increase the intensity by a factor of 4 to double the range.  So 4 LEDs gets me 2X the range of 1 LED.  16 LEDs gets me 4X the range.  64 LEDs gets me 8X the range. 256=16X,  1024=32X.

What are my limiting factors:
  - Size: I can only fit so many LEDs on the front of my device.
  - Cost: These things ain't free!
  - Power: This is the real limit:  at 1.35V Vf I could probably put two in series (2.7V) and still run it with a 3.3V system voltage.  But that's nominal...  Peak Vf is 1.6V so 3.2V for a stack of two.  I could *probably* still get away with running those off a 3.3V rail.

How many of these 2 LED stacks can I run off batteries?  I'd like to use 4 AA batteries, switched down to 3.3V for optimal efficiency.  Figure 1A peak current is about what I want to draw.  8 x2 stacks of LEDs gets me 800mA.  Or do I want to run the LEDs directly off the batteries?  Not really, because battery voltage is going to vary from 6.4+V fresh to 4.0V dead, and the current would vary with battery voltage.  What about voltage overhead for my switching NPN?  Do I want to use a FET instead?

Or instead of doing two LED stacks, do I want to have one per BJT, but with a potentially higher peak current?  What's my pulse length?  At a slower modulation frequency of 36KHz, we've got a pulse of 1/(2x36000) = 13.8uS.  LED Datasheet specifies a peak pulse current of 200mA for 50% duty cycle for pulses less than 100uS, so we're golden.  Furthermore, Radiant Power per mA seems to scale pretty well from 100mA to 200mA, so running the LEDs at twice the current is just about the same (in this range) as twice as many LEDs.

Waveform: Remotes vary in the frequency of the carrier: 40KHz, 38KHz, 36.x KHz...  I'd like to have the hardware capable of hitting all of these.  Ways to generate a modulated carrier:
  - Bit bang all the way - This is sloppy & potentially dangerous.  If I'm running the LEDs at 2X nominal forward current because I'm depending upon them never staying solid on, then I really better never write code (or hang the microcontroller) with them solid on, lest I cook my IR emitters.*
  - PWM on the uC turned on and off to gate it.
  - PWM gated at the i/o (turning the output to a pulled input aught to do it.)
  - Externally generated carrier externally gated (seems a waste of additional circuitry when my uC choices all have PWM / Counters / Timers galore.)

*This inspires an additional functional mode: IR Flashlight.  Is it useful as a flashlight strobing at 40KHz, with the carrier just constantly on?  Or is there any other frequency that would be better?  Something that *doesn't* alias with camera imagers or video frame rates, presumably, as those are what I'd be using to view the invisible illumination...

Question:  Which uC do I want to use on this thing? Driving factors: Power consumption (for battery life), user interface, programming environment.


Question: Do the IR Receivers depend upon the carrier remaining consistently in phase with itself over time?  And do they care about runt-pulses if the signal is turned out mid-way through the carrier on-time?  (i.e. Do I want a synchronizer for sending data with only integer numbers of in-phase carrier pulses?)

LED switching:  NPN transistor...  What about current limiting to the LEDs?  Do I just direct connect the LED and depend upon a BJT + voltage rail to limit the forward current?  Or include a small current limiting resistor?  (Built a spreadsheet, and possibly breadboard this up or SPICE it to see performance over ranges of voltage, etc, etc.)

Question: What is my LED failure mode?  If it is just thermal, could I mitigate it by heat sinking them?  The LED datasheet calls out operating modes of much lower duty cycles (like 1%) with much higher current (like 1A) which suggests that it is not magnetostrictive failure of the bonding leads...

Also need a housing...  Want to find something fairly rugged, that holds 4AA, with enough room for a small PCB for electronics, and enough front end face space for the LEDs and enough top face space for a good UI.  Button pad?  LCD display?  Dunno yet...

Make vs. Buy

When I have some project I'm working on, I will often err on the side of building things that I really should try to just buy pre-made.  The most recent example of this was when I wanted to wall-power a canon point and shoot camera that I've had lying around.  I wanted to do some time-lapse experiments with it without worrying about the batteries dying.  I went to HSC and rooted around in the barrel connector bins until I found one approximately the right size to fit the DC input on the camera.  Then I rooted around in my box of AC adapters at home, until I decided I didn't have anything quite right, so I headed back to HSC, and bought a regulated supply of the right voltage.  But then I discovered that the supply I bought couldn't meet the peak current requirements of the camera.  So I started thinking that I could just use a higher current, higher voltage power supply, and built an additional switching regulator circuit to get the proper voltage at the current level the camera needs.  At this point I was several hours and probably $20 in gas and parts into this project.  What I *should* have done, right at the start, is gone to eBay and searched for "AC Canon Adapter A540".  When I did that, I found an electronics import-export company that sells a third-party equivalent to the Canon AC power adapter for $11.49, with free shipping.  I ordered one, and had it later that week.

The inclination to build, even when I should just buy, is related to the inclination to tinker, and a desire to know exactly what's going on inside the box.  If I buy a power supply, I get a few high level specifications.  If I build it, I know EXACTLY what's going on in there.  But the cost of the time spent being a control freak far outweighs the likely benefit knowing all the details.  Indeed, most complex systems simply can't be understood, in total, by one person.  There are some polymaths that come close, but most significant advancements come by building on the existing hierarchy of infrastructure, and driving deep into one area of specialization.  Of course, like all things, there is a balance to be maintained.  Good software engineers understand enough of the conceptual internals of a compiler to know how to avoid writing pathological code.  The don't necessarily know all the details, but they know the parts they need to know.  And that's another trick: figuring out which are those necessary parts.

And to borrow a line from Forrest Gump, "That's all I have to say about that."  I could delve much deeper into this topic, but I'm kinda tired, and want to catch up on my sleep. Goodnight.

Scald Burns

When my daughter was ten years old, her braces got broken one night at softball practice.  Since she couldn't comfortably eat anything solid until she could get to the orthodontist, she was going to make herself a bowl of instant macaroni and cheese instead of having the chicken dish originally planned for dinner.  We had all gotten in the habit of making the instant mac-and-cheese by starting with water from the hot water dispenser in our kitchen.  It was one of those boxy units with a 5 gallon bottle on top and two spigots, one blue for chilled water and one red for hot water.  Because she misread the instructions on the packet, she filled the 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup up to the 2-cup line instead of the 2/3-cup line that she needed.  A drop of hot water splashed off the top of the now-full measuring cup, and landed on her hand, causing her to flinch, and drop the measuring cup down the front of her softball pants.  The thick nylon fabric instantly wicked the hot water to her skin, and held it there.  Within seconds, she was suffering from first, second, and third degree burns on her legs.  What followed was five days in an isolation room in the burn ward at Valley Medical Center, six weeks of missed school, and months of physical therapy.

This is a classic chain-of-events accident.  If she had been able to eat the regular dinner, she wouldn't have made macaroni and cheese.  If she hadn't misread the instructions, she probably wouldn't have splashed her hand, causing the larger hot water spill.  If she hadn't been wearing conforming nylon softball pants, the water may well have just soaked her clothes but not stuck to the skin.  But everything lined up for a catastrophic accident.  The one causal factor that we really should have seen coming, however, was the temperature of the water coming out of the hot water dispenser.  Most of these dispensers put out water at temperatures between 140 and 195 degrees Fahrenheit.  Indeed, the one we had didn't even have a thermostat to adjust the temperature.  It was fixed, and when I tested it later, it was at about 165 degrees.  This temperature is chosen for the convenient making of tea or other hot drinks.  But it is also surprisingly dangerous.

Scald burns can occur at temperatures as low as 120 degrees.  The time to injury decreases as the temperature increases.  And children get injured faster than adults.  With 160 degree F water, an adult will suffer second and third degree burns in as little as half a second, and children will suffer third degree burns in as little as 0.2 seconds.  This was, I'm sad to say, news to me.

X Axis: Time in Seconds to Injury, Y Axis: Temp in Degrees Fahrenheit.

(From www.tap-water-burn.com/pamphlet/images/plate2b.jpg)

I can understand that the convenience of quick hot beverages makes this a perfectly acceptable risk to people who are aware of it.  The problem is all the people, like us, who were completely unaware of how fast injury can occur, and how serious it can be.  These dispensers absolutely should not be where small children can get at them, and older children and adults should be taught just how dangerous the hot water coming out of them is.

Another critical bit of information most people lack is how to treat burns once they happen.  What should you put on a burn?  The answer is "cool water, and nothing else."  Actually, if you have sterile medical saline immediately available, you can use that to irrigate the burn area.  But unless you have sterile saline, use cool tap water.  Never put any sort of spray, ointment, or home remedy on a burn.  And if you're not sure if you should call 911, do it.  Burns are serious injuries, requiring immediate care, careful professional treatment, and sterile isolation.  Even "minor" burns, if they break the skin, should be carefully cleaned and bandaged, in order to prevent infection and a host of secondary complications.  Err on the side of caution.

Because my daughter's burns were uncontaminated when she arrived at the hospital, they were able to use a beta-glucan collagen matrix dressing on them, which was at that time a relatively new treatment.  As a result, she suffered through far fewer dressing changes than if she had gone through regular daily bandage changes, and her legs healed with almost no visible scarring.  She was extremely fortunate, and she is now a vocal opponent of the use of any sort of "burn cream" or other treatment that can make the kind of outcome she enjoyed impossible.

Scald burns are the number one type of burn accident among children.  The Alisa Ann Ruch Burn Foundation launched an information campaign several years ago called "Hot Liquids Burn Like Fire."  If you know someone that has a hot water dispenser, tell them about this.  Spread the word.  Burns are horrible, and often, they are preventable.

Conspiracy Theories

I have worked at several publicly traded companies in the course of my career.  At those companies, I was usually motivated to have at least some interest in what was happening to the stock price.  Monitoring the stock quote online would often bring me into incidental contact with the online forums discussing the company and its stock.  It was there that I saw first hand the wonderful wackiness of conspiracy theories.

People would weave elaborate speculations about how we clearly had our next three generations of products already developed, and we were carefully regulating our product introductions to manipulate the price of the stock, and to generate the best possible return for the senior management shareholders.  When we did something bone-headed, it was some nefarious scheme to sew confusion in the market place, in anticipations of our next countering parry.  And when some bit of news broke our way, it was because our behind-the-scenes machinations had come to fruition, and the genius of our master plan was slowly becoming evident.

The explanation that nobody was particularly interested in talking about was that we were working as fast as we could to release cool products as soon as possible so that we'd make enough money to be doing the same things this time next year.  Our "mistakes" were actually the result of... mistakes.  Our lucky breaks were the normal statistical distribution of events.  Did we know what we planned on releasing in our next generation of products?  Sort of.  But we also knew that those plans would be radically modified, often until the last possible moment before shipping product, and many products that we got far into development on would never see the light of day.

It was, for me, a wonderful illustration of the reality of most conspiracy theories.  They can sound plausible when you're on the outside, but when you're on the inside, you understand that there is nowhere near that degree of control being exercised by anyone.  But, you say, maybe I was just an unknowing pawn in the carefully structured plans of my corporate puppet masters.  Maybe.  But unless they had completely separate development teams, working in different buildings, with different design repositories (which they didn't), I had pretty good visibility, even as a minion, into everything going on in engineering.

I tend to suspect that most other conspiracy theories are, like those I was speculated to be a part of, are just smoke and mirrors and the human ability to see patterns in chaos.  The world is random and messy and hard to predict when you're trying to, and there usually isn't a secret deeper level of manipulation going on below the surface.  Sometimes there may be, but not nearly as often as a lot of people seem determined to believe.

(... Or maybe that's exactly what they WANT you to believe. :)

Business Idea: Self-Education University

The spread of broadband Internet connectivity means that more and more people have access to a fantastic amount of freely available educational material.  Stanford Engineering is putting classes online for free.  MIT has put a number of their courses online, also for free, as part of their Open Courseware initiative.  Khan Academy offers a huge number of video tutorials.  There are several groups approaching the idea of Open Source Textbooks. The democratization of information that began with the printing press has accelerated dramatically in the last decade, and it is now possible for someone with the determination and focus to get a really great college level education almost entirely for free.

Furthermore, as the economy stagnates, the pursuit of education during periods of unemployment or underemployment offers people with spare time an opportunity to fill their hours at minimal cost with activity that offers potential long term returns.  Even if you can afford to "go back to school," you can keep learning without the benefit of a formal university structure.

One thing that a university degree offers, however, that you can't get on your own, is verification of an education.  When someone has a diploma, it means that they were able to at least meet the bare minimum requirements for issuance of a degree by that university.  If the university is, in turn, accredited, then you know that is has been scrutinized to insure that the curriculum meets at least minimal agreed upon standards of quality for a college education.  The accredited university degree implies a great deal of backing.

When I'm interviewing a candidate for an engineering job, I want to know that they have, at least at some point in the past, acquired general engineering level math skills, such as an understanding of differential and integral calculus.  If they have an engineering degree, I am usually safe to assume that they have had that exposure.  I don't need to ask them specific calculus trivia to make sure.  Likewise, an engineering degree implies a certain degree of breadth and exposure to structured problem solving that I want.

So what then of my self-educated candidate?  If someone has taught themselves calculus by working through a plethora of online tutorials and work sheets and downloaded text books, how can I know that they really have the skills?  And that's the business idea here... A series of testing centers which provide people the chance to demonstrate college level proficiency in a number of topics, by taking written tests in a secure and controlled environment.  Essentially, it is like the AP tests, although you would be able to take them at any time you want.  When you take a test in a topic, you receive a numeric grade, say from 0-100, indicating how you did.  The test would be designed such that a reasonably high score, say 80, would indicate general proficiency, essentially a high likelihood of passing a college course in that topic.  If you pass enough subject tests, they can be clustered together into a portfolio that essentially becomes your college-degree transcript equivalency.  This would provide something that can be validated by the testing center to employers or other schools, indicating that you have the education you claim to have.

There are some obvious shortcomings between this and the real college experience.  First off is the social.  You know that someone who has gone through college has probably managed to work at least a little bit with other people, whereas someone could work though a degree worth of college level material, testing along the way and never talk to another individual.  I don't really see any quick ways around this.  This certification simply lacks any useful social metric.

Another limitation is project work.  Often in college classes, the final product of the work is an almost incidental part of the process, which is the real learning experience.  The product that results from a project course is also difficult to objectively evaluate in the way that this testing center approach would need to do.  Furthermore, an important part of this testing center concept is that you clearly know that the person who walked in the door is the person that did the work, because they took the test there while you watched them, after you fingerprinted them, or did whatever other level of validation was decided appropriate to match the person with the educational certification.  With any submission of outside materials, the provenance of that material is open to question, and brings into question the integrity of the resulting certification.

Even with these and other weaknesses, it seems that this is something that could be really big, especially for people who are motivated to get a degree-level education but can't afford the money, or perhaps even the structured time, of attending a college or university.  Key to the acceptance of an approach like this would be maintaining the integrity of the testing.  And there would be skepticism at first.  But in time, I think, it would become at least as accepted as a "college level GED," and possibly eventually seen as a perfectly normal alternative to the "traditional" college experience, in some ways all the more impressive for the level of self-motivation and personal drive it represents.

Habit Formation

Executive summary:  Do not read this post.  Come back tomorrow.  You are warned.

I have heard it said that an activity must be carried out daily for six week to become an ingrained habit.  Well, I haven't reached six weeks yet on these daily blog entries, but I know that they have not yet become anything near an ingrained habit.  I was sitting here at my desk with 13 minutes until midnight, when I really should already be asleep after being sick the last few days.  I was just about to call it a day, and realized that I've not written anything today.  I referred to my list of pending ideas (currently a bit thin, I should work on that tomorrow) and didn't see anything I wanted to write about (in 11 minutes or less) so here I am making stuff up off the cuff, and writing a lot of run-on sentences.

Should I, on these days when I'm neither inspired nor particularly interested, even bother writing something?  That depends a lot on what I think the purpose of this writing is.  If I had any delusions that I had a large regular audience (Hi Dad!) I might go for quality over quantity, and make my adoring public wait an extra day in between.  But it's not all about you, people.  The point of this exercise from the start has largely been about writing on deadline, cranking text out quickly, getting something out every day (more or less) and not being too picky about the quality (or incredibly self-referential, pseudo-intellectually quasi-post-modernist bent) of the writing.

I must admit, the 230+ page views that I got for last Tuesday's entry about blood donation did give me a little shot of adrenaline.  People actually read my words.  Maybe I could come up with even more words that even more people would want to read.  And maybe I'll even try to do that someday yet.  I do have a few tricks up my sleeve.  But today is not that day.  Today you get this.  See, I told you not to read it.

Home Sick

There aren't many days that I'm actually sick to the point of not being able to do some useful work, but today was basically one of those.  I managed to reply to a few work e-mails, but mostly I have just been sitting around all day, or napping.  It's 4:07 PM and I'm still wearing my pajamas.  My energy level is low, I'm achy, and my skin feels hypersensitive to any sort of touch.  I called the blood center to let them know, following my platelet apheresis on Tuesday, and they said they'll check with one of the docs, but given that the symptom onset was several days after the donation, the product should be okay.

I suspect that I've got a bug that has been going around at my office.  It's almost like a cold without respiratory involvement.  I'm hopeful I'll shake it off by tomorrow.  I'm sucking on Cold-Eeze Zinc Gluconate lozenges every few hours. They claim to have clinical backing for their claim of shortening cold symptoms.  A quick Google search lands me here, at an abstract on a study of Cold-Eeze, with several links to related studies.  It looks like these studies use incidental colds, and it would be really interesting to see a controlled lab study in which they spray rhinovirus up the noses of healthy college students, and then as soon as they exhibit symptoms, give half of them Cold-eeze and the other half placebos.  (These studies are, obviously, more expensive and difficult to do, especially with large test groups.)

Oooh, here's a study linking my previous musings on the power of sleep with rhinovirus susceptibility...  Again, the study is fairly small, but they really did give the participants rhinovirus nose drops and then see if they got sick.  The differences were pretty stark.  On that note, maybe I'll go lie down again...

Thumb Writing

Whoa! Sometime I stumble onto something that just surprises me. Following up on my post a week ago about writing these with my Droid phone, I thought I would try again, taking the advice of my cousin-in-law about using the soft keyboard because I couldn't get uppercase or alternate characters (pretty much any punctuation other than period or comma) and digits when I was using the Droid's slide out keyboard.

The first realization as I tried to do that just now was that I can't seem to launch the soft keyboard... I tapped on the text entry box, but it just sat there, instead of giving me the soft keyboard.

The second, and much cooler realization, however came when, on a lark I held down the SHIFT key while I pressed a letter. To my astonishment, I got a capital.  I then tried the same with the ALT key, and that worked to give me the alternate keys.  In the last year I have used this keyboard literally EVERY DAY, and I have never seen it behave like a "regular" desktop keyboard. It has always been modal... You press shift, and then the next key is capped. Or you press shift twice, and it is in caps lock mode until you hit shift again. I wasn't even aware that the key matrix could support the simultaneous key press behavior...  Maybe everyone else with a Droid already knew this, but it was news to me!

The text entry still isn't perfect, because the self resizing text box keeps dropping the soft buttons on top of the line I'm writing at the bottom of the screen. I also keep hitting the SEARCH button next to the ALT and below the 'X' key which opens up the web search dialog. Also, the keys are so small that hitting ALT or SHIFT plus any of the adjacent keys at the same time is really difficult. Of course I just realized that the last gripe is easily avoided by using the other set of ALT and SHIFT keys, although I forgot they were even there because in modal keyboard mode I *always* use the left hand ones. And the Droid browser won't let me scroll down far enough to get to the Labels box, so I'll have to add those to this post later.  But even with all these minor gripes, it is really exciting to discover a new capability of my phone. Even if I probably should have known it was there all along...

Pick-n-Pull

My daughter drives a 1990 Subaru Legacy, which means her car is several years older than she is.  I have been told that the engine will probably survive to 250,000+ miles.  It has had a few problems over the years, such as a hesitating/stalling problem that was finally traced back to a bad fan, and a fuel injector that needed to be replaced, but on the whole it runs pretty well.  But a lot of little things tend to fail over time.  And when the driver's side sun visor joined the passenger side visor in falling off, I finally decided to do something about it.

I went to Pick-n-Pull.  Pick-n-Pull is a chain of auto wrecking yards where you pay $2 to get in, and if you tell them a specific year and model of car that you're looking for, they'll tell you which row to look in.  I found several Subaru Legacies in various states of decomposition.  The place was fascinating to me.  Over a thousand cars, many obviously the victims of accidents, neatly arranged in a grid where they were being disassembled and carried away in pieces by the customers to prolong the life of other cars.

In addition to paying $2 to get in (fee waived for a first time visitor!), you also sign a release so that if you maim yourself, it's your problem.  And there are plenty of sharp, jagged, oily, greasy automotive components on which to hurt yourself if you're not careful.  But mostly it's just a really efficient recycling of deceased cars before the picked over hulls are presumably shredded for scrap metal.  You have to bring your own tools to disassemble things, but they provide wheel barrows for hauling off the larger pieces.  And there were people wheeling away transmissions, axles, wheels, seats, doors, and pretty much whatever else they needed.  They even have portable overhead hoists available to help you get the engines out if you need them. ("Please do not use the overhead hoist to pick up cars...")

Before you head out to your local Pick-N-Pull, you can see if they have the models you're looking for on their website, which seems to reflect the same data they use to point you to your targets at their front counter.  I find this very convenient, but I've had mixed luck with it.  Two of the 1990 Subaru Legacies showed up on their website (and the in shop database) as sedans, but when I got there they were all actually station wagons, which meant they didn't have the same kind of release handles or tail light fixture that I needed.  Still, I found the visors I needed, along with a few other parts that have given up the ghost on Amanda's car.

Once you're done, you pay for your parts on the way out according to their standard price list.  I have found the people that work there to be consistently courteous and helpful. And Pick-n-Pull even offer a 30 day exchange for store credit on any part that doesn't fit or otherwise meet your needs. ("Sorry, no cash refunds.")

I asked the guy ringing up my purchase what he considered the strangest thing he's ever found in a car.
"Blood," he said.
"Like, a lot of blood?" I asked.
"Yeah.  Like someone was murdered in it," he said.  "We called the wrecker to come take that one back.  We weren't gonna touch it."
And the most memorable thing that wasn't a murder scene?
He laughed and said, "We found a pound of marijuana once..."

Blood Donation

Today's entry is one of those gimmicky pieces where the writing of the entry is intimately connected with the topic being written about.  Yup, as I sit here typing this, I am hooked up to a Gambro BCT blood separation machine which is pulling blood out of my left arm, extracting the desired components (in this case platelets), and putting the bulk material back into my arm.

The fact that I can write this at all is a tribute to evolving medical technology.  When I first started doing platelet apheresis in 1992, the machines used separate extraction and return needles, so I had to sit with both arms extended and unbending, a needle in each elbow.  This pretty well limited what I could do during the 80 - 120 minute period of the donation to watching a movie.  One time I had an itch on my nose that just wouldn't go away.  I finally told one of the blood center staff, and she took a piece of gauze in a pair of tongs and used it to scratch my nose for me.  When the single needle machines were first put into use, I didn't like them as well as the two needle process, and I continued to request the two needle machines for several years.  Eventually, though, the single needle machines got better, and now that is all they use, except for white cell donations.

Although the donation takes longer, platelet apheresis is (I have been told) less physiologically stressful than giving a pint of whole blood.  Donating whole blood is essentially bleeding out 7-14% of your entire blood mass, and you can only do it once every 56 days in the U.S.  Platelet apheresis, on the other hand takes almost no red cells, and instead just platelets suspended in a few hundred milliliters of plasma.  Because the human body replaces lost platelets in about 3 days, donors are eligible to do apheresis as often as once a week, and in an emergency, as often as every 4 days.  There are a few other limits that the FDA puts on apheresis.  You can only donate a maximum of 24 times in any 1 year period, and they limit your total plasma loss in any one year period to 12 liters if you weigh between 110 and 175 pounds, or 14.4 liters if you are over 175 pounds.

Right now I am donating a "double," or two sets of platelets, which are actually going into two separate bags.  In total, they will take out 710 billion platelets, and about 415 ml of plasma, plus the tubes of whole blood removed at the beginning of the process for testing.  Every blood donation is tested for a variety of diseases, including HIV, malaria, hepatitis, and West Nile virus, which is why they extract those additional samples.  Sometimes the test samples are also used for additional research.

In order to keep my blood liquid while they are running it through the machine, they introduce an anticoagulant.  The anticoagulant combines with calcium in the blood, creating a temporary calcium deficiency during the period of the donation.  One side effect of this is a tingling in my lips, and mild muscle cramps in my jaw.  To counteract this, they provide Tums antacid for me to suck on, which gives me back calcium.  The tingling and other effects disappear as soon as the donation ends, and my body quickly metabolizes any remaining anticoagulant.

So why do this?  Well, for one thing, someone has to...  Platelets are used in the treatment of a lot of things, particularly for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.  Currently only about 3% of the medically eligible population donates blood or blood products.  Many people have asked me if I get paid for donating.  The answer is no.  Tax laws let me deduct the mileage to drive here, and the Stanford Blood Center gives me cookies and occasionally coupons for free movie tickets or Baskin Robbins ice cream, but I don't get paid.  And really, if you were in the hospital and needed blood products, would you want them to come from someone that donated because he or she needed the money?

And, like so many things, this began in part due to a dare.  When I was in college in the late 80's and early 90's, my best friend, who had been giving blood since high school, mocked me mercilessly because I wouldn't give blood along with her.  So finally, during my senior year, I stopped in at the Stanford bloodmobile one afternoon when it was parked in front of my university residence.  I mentioned to them that I was doing it in part to confront my discomfort with needles.  "Well if you REALLY want to confront needles," they said, "you should try apheresis! You get two needles!"  And here I am, 18 years later...

And the needle just came out, so it is time to go eat cookies and then go to work!

TPLO Surgery For Dogs

I have been meaning to write for a long time now about Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy (TPLO) surgery for dogs.  A common human knee injury is the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) tear.  In dogs, the corresponding structure is called the Cranial Cruciate Ligament (CrCL).  When it fails, the dog's knee (stifle) joint becomes unstable and the dog goes lame.

Left untreated, a dog with a torn CrCL will have limited or no mobility, and the joint will suffer from arthritis and further degradation.  In small breed dogs, the ligament can be surgically reattached.  In large breeds, however, the inherent instability of the joint and the load on the ligament virtually guarantees that reattachment will last only a short time before it fails again.  Instead, the large-breed treatment is to make a round cut to separate the top of the tibia, rotate it around, and then reattach it with a plate and screws so that it heals in the new position.  The new orientation levels the tibial plateau so that it is stable, and the femur isn't always trying to slide down the top of the tibia.

About five years ago, our older Golden Retriever, a female named Dory, suffered a complete tear of the CrCL in her right leg.  When our vet first explained the surgery to me, my first impression was "that sounds like a goofy hack."  Rather than put the joint back together, they change the shape of one of the bones so that the joint is mechanically stable.  Imagine that you have a big inflatable Santa Claus decoration sitting on your steeply sloped roof, and a rope tied to your chimney keeps it from sliding off.  One day the rope breaks, and off it slides.  Well, the TPLO approach says "instead of reattaching the rope, we're just going to cut out a portion of the roof, tilt it upwards, and reattach it to the house in that position, so that our inflatable Santa is sitting on a flat surface."  I was skeptical.

Because our dogs are family to us, and the TPLO has the best track record for treating her type of injury, we decided we had to try.  We checked Dory into the pet hospital one morning, and picked her up the next day with one leg completely shaved bald, a a spectacular scar.  It took a while for her to heal, but eventually she did.  Physical therapy involved gentle, short walks, and swimming.  We put a cheap above ground pool into our back yard to provide a place to swim her regularly.

One unfortunately reality of the CrCL tear is that if it happens on one hind leg, there is a very high chance that it will happen on the other leg within a year.  Sure enough, almost a year to the day after her initial injury, Dory's left leg went.  We had the surgery on that side as well, and after more recovery and physical therapy, she was back up and doing great.

The initial quiet period after the surgery was the hardest.  Dory had to stay in her box almost continuously, so she wouldn't be putting stress on the hardware holding her tibia together while it was healing.  Getting just enough, but not too much, physical activity is hard for dogs that love to run and jump and play.  The swimming definitely helped a lot, because it provided an exercise that, because it was non-load-bearing, she could do as much as she wanted, without the risk of injuring the healing bone.  And as a water breed, Dory loves to swim anyway.  We always put a doggy life vest on her, so that if she did get tired or cramp up or just want to hold still, she would float like a cork.  But usually she'd paddle around and around until she was completely exhausted.

We have also been told by our vet that Dory has had the best TPLO outcome that she has ever seen.  Dory is more of a hyperactive puppy today, at almost nine and a half years old, than she was when she was three.  Except for being a bit bow-legged, it is impossible to tell that she has had major surgery on both legs. She runs circles (literally!) around our five year old male Golden (Rex), and she has amazing quality of life.  To help maintain her, we do have her on low dose daily Deramaxx, an anti-inflamatory.  We also give her Dasuquin, and Science Diet "prescription diet j/d," designed for joint health maintenance.  And she's doing great.

I mention all of this because if you find yourself in our position, I encourage you to think very seriously about the TPLO surgery.  It is expensive, and requires careful handling during recovery, but we have found it to be well worth it.  With any medical procedure, there are no guarantees.  But I can tell you from our experience, an excellent outcome is possible.

Everything Is Made

There are a lot of human-made things in the world.  In fact, if you live in the developed world, unless you are a farmer, or an extreme nature enthusiast, probably most of the objects you touch in the course of a day are "made" things.  Now sometimes I rant about the apparently lack of thought that went into making some of those things, but I also find amazing the cumulative total amount of thought, and effort, and logistical backing that goes into making just about everything.

Pick something REALLY simple, like a cafeteria spoon.  Stamped out of stainless steel sheet with a chrome finish, they sell for about 10 cents each.  They are likely produced in a big metal press, probably somewhere in China.  Someone had to design the spoon itself, with the exact size and shape and any stylistic flourishes, in order to make it.  But someone also had to design the press, and the hydraulics to run the press, and the hydraulic fluid in the cylinders, and the control system for the pumps, and mounting system to fix the press to the factory floor.

Someone else had to make sure that there was sheet metal of proper thickness, quality, and composition from which to press the spoon.  That required metalurgists, working together with refinery plant operators, to get from ore to metal of the right composition, and then a whole lot of industrial process control to roll it out into uniform sheets.

And getting the ore out of the ground required massive mining equipment like earth movers.  Each tire on those earth movers required an entire supply chain of its own.  Which was in turn fed by bulk rubber material and other chemicals that make up the rubber, and more metal, and more manufacturing machinery, with even more chemists, material scientists, industrial process designers, and engineers behind them.

So goes the chain of causality backward, until that one simple spoon has required the input of thousands of people and hundreds of industries.  Of course, those thousands of people were simultaneously making possibly thousands of other products as well.  And the mining, metal processing, hydraulic press manufacturing, and so on were all happening simultaneously.  But it is surprising to think how much making stands behind that cheap little cafeteria spoon, and by extension virtually everything else with which we interact daily.

Walking Backwards

I wanted to watch an AVI file that I had on my computer on my TiVo. No problem, I thought, I've even already written a blog entry about how to do that. So I referred back to that post, and discovered that it doesn't work anymore.  Sometime in the last year I had updated to the latest version of the free TiVo Desktop for PC software.  And in so doing, I lost the ability to transfer video files from my computer to my TiVo.  I researched this on the TiVo website, and thought, surely that function has just moved somewhere else in the software and I'm overlooking it.  Nope, it turns out that the ability to upload from the computer to the TiVo has been reclassified as premium feature, requiring the $24.95 purchase of a TiVo Desktop Plus Key.

Now, charging me $25 to unlock additional functionality in software that I already have installed is a long-standing revenue strategy for monetizing "shareware" software.  It's how they get you to go from using the free version, to paying money for added functionality.  Except that three things about this really annoy me:

First, I already bought the hardware.  I supposed you could equate buying the TiVo HD hardware to purchasing a computer, and now they're selling software to run with it.  But buying a TiVo is not buying some hacked-up home media server box.  It is an appliance, designed to provide a self-contained solution that offers additional flexibility to my television viewing.  Generally when you upgrade the software on appliances you get fixes and sometime even enhanced functionality for free...  Otherwise, you might go buy the competing product that offers better functionality.

Second, I am already paying a subscription fee to use the TiVo.  I actually bought the lifetime service contract for for my TiVo HD, instead of paying monthly, but the several hundred dollars I paid up-front is effectively just the lump-sum purchase of an annuity for the monthly service fee.  So I'm paying for this monthly subscription, and STILL the are charging more to get the added functionality.

Third, they aren't even asking me to pay more for additional functionality, they are asking me to pay more JUST TO GET BACK FUNCTIONALITY I USED TO HAVE.  This is not how product evolution is supposed to work, and it's really annoying.  They are probably counting on inertia to keep me tied to the TiVo platform, because I have already paid for the hardware, and I've already paid for the lifetime service contract.  They probably also selected $24.95 to be a low enough price barrier that most people will just bend over and pay.  But I feel like I'm effectively being fined $25 for upgrading to the latest version of the free TiVo Desktop for PC software.  How about instead TiVo reward customer loyalty by not removing useful features they've already previously released in earlier free versions?

UPDATE: I sent TiVo email about my gripe, and pointed them to this blog entry.  They replied:

Hello Phillip,

Thank you for contacting TiVo Customer Support.

I would be happy to assist you in getting your feedback recorded and into the right hands. What I recommend that you do would be to fill out the TiVo Feature Request questionnaire located here: http://research.tivo.com/suggestions/2web519.htm . I apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause and invite you to contact us again if you have any other questions or concerns.

101009-00XXXX is the reference number for this inquiry. Please refer to this number if you choose to contact us again regarding this request. In order to respond to this email, please log into your account at www.tivo.com/mysupport. Replies directly to this email will not be received.

Sincerely,
James

TiVo Customer Support Representative
www.tivo.com/support
http://forums.tivo.com

I will submit the form, and see if I hear anything more about it...

Stuff I Want

Here are some of the technologies that I would like to see really take off yet in my lifetime:

Life Extension - While I don't necessarily want to live forever, I'm nowhere close to bored yet, and I think I could easily keep myself amused with the things I'm already interested in for at least a few hundred more years.  But my cells aren't optimized for that kind of span, and there are enough external sources of creeping degradation (random cancer cell clusters, environmental toxicity, sub-optimal diet and lifestyle) that I'll be lucky at my current pace to make it past 100 years.  But these are largely engineering problems, and if enough of them can be solved, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to live a few hundred years, killed off almost exclusively by sudden accidents.  The societal impact of this is a whole other discussion, but if I can have my biological age cleanly reset to 25 years old, I would be happy to have my social security eligibility also reset to 25...

Automated Transportation - There are a LOT of people working on self-driving cars.  The idea of having the flexibility and convenience of automobile transportation together with the someone-else-doing-the-work aspect of riding a train or bus really appeals to me.  On top of which, even though regular car usage kills tens of thousands of people a year, any automated technology won't be accepted until fatalities are virtually eliminated.  So not only will I be able to ride anywhere I want while doing whatever I'd like sitting there, the likelihood of being killed while doing so will be far less than any road trip involving human drivers.

Less Stuff - When I was younger I felt that material possession was a symptom of success.  I have, over the years, come to believe more and more that your stuff owns you far more than you own it.  And even with that belief, I'm writing this at a desk piled with random bits of debris from my life, including several cameras, a digital audio recorder, three loose hard drives, two MP3 players, various office supplies, three headsets, and at least 500 pieces of paper.  I can pare down or efficiently store the electronics, but the paper is just unnecessary.  I don't really want paper, I want data.  And while there are already online bill payment mechanisms and online document storage and online information management systems of all sorts, we aren't quite there yet.  I would like getting a piece of paper to become the exception, and instead I just receive a secure, verifiable, digitally timestamped piece of data.

Clean Energy - We are rapidly coming up on the end of the age of oil, one way or another.  There's still a lot of coal left, but that is still taking carbon out of the ground and dumping it in the air.  We really need a clean efficient energy solution.  Ultimately, it seems that it is going to be either direct nuclear (preferably fusion), or indirect nuclear, which is to say, solar.  There has been a huge increase in solar energy production in the last few years, and the curve is getting steeper, but it is still a tiny fraction of our total consumption.  There are also several related technologies that need to mature in addition to production.  We need efficient storage and transport, and we need more efficient usage of what we do produce.  There are almost no incandescent bulbs left in my home, and in a few more years, I expect I'll have started to go toward LEDs.  It will be interesting to see if my first self-driving car (see above) is also entirely electric...

Of course there will be false starts, and development in directions that we can't even begin to imagine right now.  There will also be lots of unintended consequences, some of which may have the potential to kill us all.  But there's some of my wish list items.  How about you?  Leave a comment with the technologies you want to see come to fruition...

Maker Culture

I have become intrigued with the profusion of "Maker Culture" particularly in the last few years.  There have always been people that enjoy making things, whether they were weekend wood-workers with a garage shop, or crafters with a spare bedroom full of bead bins.  My grandmother probably produced several acres of knitting in her lifetime.  But in the last few years, there seems to be a spreading interest in making all sorts of things.  Some businesses, such as TechShop, have sprung up around this.  Make Magazine offers fantastic ideas and articles for people.  Likewise, the Maker Faire is a part science faire, part show-and-tell, part rave that is now appearing annually in at least three places in the country.

The cost of high-quality tools for making things has also been dropping, sometimes due to concerted development (such as machine tools) and sometimes due to very clever hacking (such as printed circuit board fabrication.)

Machine tools, even those aimed at "professional" shops, have come down in price dramatically in the last few decades.  And some things that simply couldn't be done at all are now commonplace.  I'm thinking of computer controlled fabrication tools.  Mills that used to cost in the hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars are now in the thousands.  Laser cutting / etching / engraving systems can now be purchased starting at a few thousand dollars.  And the computing power, both embedded in these tools, and in the desktop computers that everyone has, provide almost unlimited control capabilities.

Printed Circuit Board (PCB) fabrication is something near and dear to my heart as well, because designing the circuitry that gets turned into PCBs has been one of my primary job functions for most of the last 15 years.  The entire design flow goes something like this:  Circuit Design -> Schematic Capture -> PCB Layout -> Fabrication.

Every step along this chain now is accessible, in some form, to the home amateur.  There are design tools such as SPICE to computationally analyze the behavior of circuits.  Schematic capture and layout tools are now available in free open source software such as KiCad and gEDA.  And home fabrication can take advantage of technologies like ink-jet printing to print resist onto copper clad board with readily available consumer printers using a PCB starter kit from Full Spectrum Engineering.  Of course, if you get as far as generating Gerber files (the standard graphical format for PCB artwork fabrication), you can just send your art out to a service bureau and have them professionally fabricated, often for less than $50 for small boards.

I realize as I write this that the field is so vast that it merits a much more detailed look at what can be done, and since this is "Weekend Engineering," clearly I need to do some projects and post some results...  I'll try to include some original design work in upcoming posts.  But for now, if you are interested in making things yourself, look around online because there is a community of like-minded people in whatever you want to explore.  Some of the other categories of making that intrigue me:

- Silver-smithing
- Ammunition Loading (and even bullet casting)
- Home Video / DVD / BluRay production
- Do-It-Yourself Plastic fabrication
- Welding
- Robotics

And the list goes on and on and on and on...  How about you?  Leave a comment with what you like to make!