Cats Need Water Too

Where does your cat get water? Some cats have water bowls. Actually, a lot of cats have water bowls, but only a few drink out of them. Most cats drink out of the toilet or, when they are otuside, they drink from the bird bath. But my cat Lucy will only drink from the sink. If she's thirsty and she sees you loitering around the sink, she'll leap up on the table and then across to the counter and the walk up behind the sink. She's gotten too fat to leap directly from the foor to the counter. Then she just looks at you like you know exactly what she wants. Which, of course, you do. So you start a slow stream of water and she leans over lapping until she's had her fill. This is usually followed by a short period of cat sneezing. She then jumps down and is on her way.

Office Guys

Good evening. I just wanted to update you all on where my friends, the office guys, have gone. They no longer stand on my macs at home but have moved to where office guys ought to be. They're at my office standing on my big IBM computer. Here's a picture.




Maybe I'll get a better, less washed out picture later. But for now...

The Wonders of Wireless


I was looking under my computer the other day and noticed that, although it has 2 forms of wireless communication, it still has a boat load of wires. Here, look for yourself.



See, that's a lot of wires. So I decided to figure out what all those wires were doing, you know, sort of map it out. Oh, I knew what each wire was for when I added it to the heap, but after a while, it's gotten to be a bit of a mess. So I sat down on the old Mac (see previous post), launched a CAD program, drew out each wire. Here's my diagram. You can click on it to see a bigger version.



You'll notice from looking at the legend on the right, that not only are there a lot of wires, there are a lot of different things being carried on those wires, in lots of different ways and with different protocols.

First there's the power. The power is AC, 110V at 60 Hz coming out of the wall. From there, it goes to the surge protector into which lots of things are plugged, including a power strip. Most of the things that are plugged in are those nasty little transformer boxes that Martha Stewart was complaining about at the last SONY shareholders meeting. These convert the AC (alternating current) into DC (direct current) and drop the voltage down to about 12 V in the process. Everything, except the monitor, has a little box.

Next comes the USB 2.0 wires. USB 2.0 is a protocol for plugging things into your computer. It's a very common protocol and is used to connect the printer and the TV (yes, my computer has a TV) to the computer. A USB 2.0 line runs to the monitor which acts as a hub for even more USB things including the mouse and the camera and ipods when needed. When USB 2.0 came along, it replaced the much slower USB 1.0 and allowed USB to be used for many more things.

Next is the cable TV line. The cable presents all sorts of goodies over one line and the devices on the end suck out the part they need. We get TV, internet and phone over the cable in our house. Time-Warner gets a big check every month. So the cable comes into a splitter. One line goes to the TV tuner, which sucks out the TV signal. The other line goes to the cable modem which sucks out the internet and the phone and sends them separate ways. The internet protocol is called TCP/IP. Guess what IP stands for? The phone protocol is called VOIP or voice over IP, which, I think is a subset of TCP/IP. The TV signal is just a big nasty analog signal which the TV tuner splits out into the various channels.

OK, next in line is the FireWire cable that connects to an old 80G external hard drive. FireWire was introduced by Apple a number of years ago for fast data transfer. It made streaming of video straight from your didital camcorder to your computer possible. SONY uses it with its camcorders and calls it something else (iSight?). Nerds call it IEEE 1394. It almost made it big until USB 2.0, which is almost as fast, came along. It's slowly going away, but you have to admit, "FireWire" is a cool name.

Next in line is Ethernet. The cable modem takes the cable signal and sucks out the internet and sends it to the wireless router with an ethernet wire. The protocol is still TCP/IP. The router then sends the internet out over more ethernet wires to the old Mac, the new Mac, and the 40G Snap Server. The router also sends the internet out in other ways which I'll mention later. All the wires and wireless communication on this side of the cable modem is handled by the router and is called a LAN, or Local Area Network.

No modern electronic equipment would be complete without shipping around some sound and so there is an analog audio signal going to the headphones and one going from the old analog camcorder to the digitizing box which also happens to be the TV tuner mentioned earlier. I need to buy some better speakers for this setup. Of course that would mean more wires.

You have to get the lovely graphics out of the computer to the monitor and there is a cable to do that. I think it's called DVI or something. It has a complex looking plug with lots of thingys in it. It runs from the computer to the monitor and is, by far, the fattest wire of the bunch.

I mentioned earlier that we get our telephone out of the cable line. The cable modem converts the digital info from the cable into analog and sends it into a box connected to our old analog phone system. There's a little splitter box so that I can run a phone connection back to our printer, which also happens to be a FAX machine and therefore needs a phone line.

The reason that I started talking about all this is that I was stuck by the irony of having so many wires in the face of wireless technology. Well, this is the other thing that the router does. Using a protocol called 802.11g, it send out information embedding the TCP/IP protocol in radio waves. That way, my wife can sit downstairs and get to the internet (and play on-line poker) without having to run an ethernet cable down the stairs, through the kitchen and into the family room. My son can also connect when he comes home from college without wires. This 802.11g is better known as WiFi. It's the stuff you can also get at StarBucks. Ain't wireless great!!

USB 2.0 is a great way to do wires, but for some types of short range communication, there is another wireless protocol called BlueTooth. BlueTooth is actually the name of some sea god, but it's been stolen to describe this short range protocol used for peripherals. My keyboard communicates with the computer via BlueTooth. I also had a BlueTooth mouse but it weighed so much that I switched it out for a cheap lightweight multibuttoned USB mouse. Bluetooth is slowly taking over USB for some peripherals. You'll see phones advertised on TV as having BlueTooth that let you suck calendars and addresses and phone numbers and songs off your computer without having to find the right wire.

And last on my list is the analog video signal coming from the old camcorder to the digitizer in the TV box. This is so I can convert all my old camcorder movies to digital to save for posterity. When I get through digitizing the 8mm tapes, I'll move on to the even older VCR camcorder tapes.

So there you have it -- The wires in my life and why they are all important to me. Thanks for paying attention.

Finally, here's a dynamic picture of my wires so you can watch each one being added. I think you have to click on it to see it in action.

Boring Life

I sometimes think that maybe I have a boring life. Just to drive the point home, I'm going to describe my Saturday morning. Of course, I'll throw in the usual historical perspective to set the mood.

It was pretty dry around here from July through August, so the grass in the yard pretty much quit growing and in many places, especially the shady spots, it just died and turned to dirt. At lease it looks like it turned to dirt, since there's no grass there. However, starting in September, with the arrival of the pretty wimpy hurricane, Ernesto, we've gotten a fair amount of rain. Maybe 6 or 7 inches already this month. Consequently, the grass that had barely survived sprung back into action. I mowed the front lawn last Saturday and it needed it pretty bad again this week. Here's what it looked like before I started:



That's a lot of grass for just one week. So I got out my trusty mower. This lawn mower is pretty amazing. When I needed a new lawn mower about 16 years ago, I looked in Consumer Reports and they rated a cheap no-frills Sears mower as a "Best Buy". I think it cost about $110 dollars. So I bought it. I was intent on taking care of my new mower so I looked in the manual to see how to do it right. They said you should drain the oil every winter and replace it in the spring when you start using it again. I did that for the first year. Since then it's gotten zero maintenance. I mean none, nadda, zip. Oh I would occasionally put some oil in it when it got low, but I haven't even done that for a couple of years. I'm scared to look at the oil level. I don't think it would be detectable. For the last few years, I think the only form of lubrication that it gets is the heavy parts of the gasoline that squeak past the piston rings. Given its age and the wear on the rings, that may be substantial. But it just keeps running. I pull it out of the garage, pump the gas thingy a few times, pull the cord a couple of times and off we go. I guess it's about 123 years old in mower years. Here she is:


It takes about 35 minutes to mow the entire lawn. I did the front first and then moved to the back. While I was working on the back, my lovely wife came out and started a job she's wanted to do for years, edging the sidewalk and driveway. That means cutting the grass cleanly away from the concrete with a little trench looking thing between the two. She saw how my sister had done it when we were at their house a few weeks ago. My sister's yard looks real nice. I think they work on it a lot. I mentioned that we would have a nice yard too but that our children take up so much of our time. My much ignored high school age daughter thought that was funny. My son, who is off at college, would have laughed too if he had been there. The thing is, yards are a competitive sport in North Raleigh and Cary. In Chapel Hill the tendency is more to let things "go natural." My wife would have none of such nonsense. Respectable people have little trenches between their grass and concrete and we are respectable people and so, for the next few hours, we were involved in putting little trenches between our grass and concrete. We eventually got the job done and although it looks a little ragged, I think it will heal with a bit of wind and rain and look real nice. Here's the finished product:



So job done, I went into the house, took an ibuprofen, and chilled with some ice water while surfing the web.

Till next time.