jim: gracious! now that’s a tiny mass spec! thanks for the links. i look forward to reading them.

on leaping into the 21st century:

today was the first day of train-the-trainer training.

the guys slated to get the first round of computers are major technophobes, but even they are looking forward to ditching the 19th century record-keeping. on a whim, i stoked some of this a couple of years ago. i had an old laptop that was going to be thrown out anyway, so i loaded what data i had and a primitive version of the software onto it and tom sawyered a crew into taking it out into the field. they accepted with bad grace. a few months later when that laptop died for good, they missed it so much that they all but held a wake for it. about half the remaining technophobes here [and they are legion] are jealous that they didn’t get to be the first guinea pigs.

this is probably the first big project of this sort i’ve been involved in that has been so heavily user-driven, and with full support from management. quite a luxury.

dangnabbit, these are pretty darn small laptops, and therefore eminently tossable. you don’t mean i’m going to have to wear my hardhat for this, do you?

steve: i [heart] recorders!

I’m leaning John Edwards now, but I’ve also endorsed Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson. I want all of them in the cabinet.

And I have a lot of family and friends still there, who I care about. I just think the people running the place are some of the most insane wingnuts in the whole country, and that’s saying something. A lot of old money (by American standards), Scaifes and Mellons, Hillmans and no Carnegies it turns out…

My family isn’t poor, though I don’t have much and we live on a student stipend as a primary source of income with some network consulting income I still get from a few clients back in Pittsburgh. And I used to be pretty wingnutty myself when I was younger, but the Republicans didn’t like me, and I was involved with the Libertarians for awhile, but more on a social level than political. I stopped voting for anyone, and encouraged non-voting by my fellow former Republicans and Libertarians before the year 2000. I was disgusted by Democrats as much as I was by Republicans.

There is an important goal to be accomplished by giving support to the Democratic party now. For one thing, I consider myself a liberal in every sense, and not one of those who believes in taking away government from those who want to have it (i.e., probably 90% of the public) for the sake of those who dissent, and as crazy as it sounds to even defend that — this is how one must reason with the wingnuts.

Rush Limbaugh was a radio broadcaster in Pittsburgh. He used the name Jeff Christie at the time. Radio is raunchy and bad, except for that one I told you.

My politics are harm reduction. Period. I would rather do music and abstain from any part in this nonsense.

I’ll see if I can attend one of Tom’s performances or find some opportunity to introduce myself.

whig, my friend Tom studied with Pauline Oliveros, is himself a composer of new and very nontraditional church music, is one of the directors of the Cornelius Cardew Choir (dedicated to performing new choral works), and is a composer who is afraid neither of music technology nor of mixing it with acoustic instruments in his instrumental compositions. As I am a professional recorder player (don’t you dare laugh), or was before I retired, and Tom is a master of the more avant garde techniques on that instrument, he sometimes sends me his instrumental works. And his politics are in the right place. Tom is a deeply decent person; there’s a reason he and I have been friends for over 30 years. If you get a chance to hear him and meet him, please do so.

hipparchia, since you’re jumping from the 19th to the 21st century, you’ll want to read The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, a fictional alternate history based on the premise that Babbage actually completed his Analytical Engine. If only you could dig out the archives of that society that studied steam-driven artificial intelligence…

Hipparchia, you might be amused to hear of Rich Camilli’s thesis work — packing a mass spectrometer into a 17-inch-diamter sphere for inclusion in a small robot submarine. (.pdf here)

In a word, it rocked!

I was on his Ph.D. committee, as at the time I was with the MIT Sea Grant Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Lab. Among other duties I was in charge of finding, developing, and integrating non-acoustic sensors. Good, in-stu chemical sensors are still in short supply for marine applications.

PS — Bryan, you hit the comment jackpot with this post!

At least you won;t be involved in the housing lottery to find a place to live in Berkley, as happens to people who go to school there. One of my relatives ended up in a limited partnership to buy a condo to live in as he finished his degree. His in-laws still live there in houses stuck on the side of the hills.

Hipparchia, clean breaks are not all they are cracked up to be. People don’t like small changes, so you really have to be ready to sell any huge change to users.

They most terrifying job in the world is finding out the install is for someone senior in an organization who is on vacation, and it will be a “surprise”. Things can get ugly. I have had to dodge flying CRTs.