Category: Personal

They Stood Up to Evil and Made the World a Safer Place

It’s been a long time since September 11, 2001, and much has happened in my life since then. I found a great company to grow a career at, married my beautiful wife and had an amazing daughter. Personally and professionally I’m thriving, yet the horror of that day and the subsequent wars have cast a lingering shadow in how I look at the world.

As a history buff and grandson of a Naval Aviator in WWII (or “the big one” as he like to call it), I grew up with a fascination for American history, particularly WWII through the Cold War. That generation faced evil, stood up to it, and made the world a safer place for the rest of us.

Talk to anyone from that era, and they can tell you with clarity what they were doing on December 7, 1941 and November 22, 1963. In my life, it had only been the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger (January 28, 1986) announced over the PA system of my school that created a similar memory for me. Like most people, I got a call early September 11, 2001 from a close friend saying a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and to turn on the TV. I then witnessed the rest of those horrific events play out in my living room and felt the shared dread of “not knowing what was next”.

I’ve come to realize how sheltered and fortune I had been not having felt that way before. That security, earned by my Grandfather’s generation, was something I had taken for granted.

In moments of doubt, I sometimes wonder if my generation has what it takes for a struggle like WWII as my Grandfather’s generation had. We grew up with abundance rather than scarcity, and by nearly any measure are “soft” in comparison. I do think we’re enterprising and hard working, but there is no question a sense of entitlement and complacency has infected the outlook of many.

That brings me to A.J. Castro, a local high school graduate that lost his life serving his country in Afghanistan a couple weeks ago. He chose to join the Army, serving in the legendary 101st Airborne, and chose to go to Afghanistan. He didn’t have to do either. He was killed at age 20. No entitlement or complacency there.

It’s men and women like him, and the many thousands that have served in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 9 years, that allay those moments of doubt. My Grandfather once said that he’d wished he hadn’t lived long enough to see September 11th–evil had come back and it was now up to my generation to face it. Are we up to the challenge?

Well, men like A.J. Castro are standing up, facing evil, and again making the world a safer place for the rest of us. May we never forget the cost.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man has taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A New Addition to the Family

After another prompt delivery of an obscure CMOS battery from Battery Bob, the latest addition to my vintage Macintosh collection is a nearly pristine Mac Plus. Why another Mac Plus you say? Well, I suppose it’s the same reason Howard Hughes would purchase an new airplane then do all his flying in a leased one while keeping the original untouched in a hanger–now I can actually use one without any fear that I might burn it out, if I do, I still have my original in working order.

Thanks to my LocalTalk-to-Ethernet bridge and virtual WindowsNT server running an AppleTalk share, I can actually use this Plus (affectionately named the Mac Minus) for real work. In fact, I’m composing this blog entry using TeachText and saving it through my nifty bridged network to the MacPro for posting.

The keyboard is a bit clunky and the screen has a noticeable flicker (unlike the now seemly luxurious 28 inch LCD monitor next to it), but with no fan or hard drive, it’s perfectly silent (save the knocking of the giant keys). And it’s a pleasure to use. That is if you find a 9 inch black and white screen to be nostalgic.

It’s amazing what you take for granted in life. Using a vintage system like this is not only satisfying, but it reminds you how nice a modern computer really is: the bright screen, ample real estate, gorgeous chrome, and snappy responsiveness.  It’s like when we return home from a trip in the Airstream. When living in the trailer, your needs are met and you’re not really wanting in any way. It’s when you get home, you realize how big your rooms actually are and how much luxury you really live in.

Go find something old and use it again. It will make you happy.

Motley Fool: The Buffet Test, Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)

Motley Fool: The Buffet Test, Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)

ROIC = Net operating profit after taxes / Invested capital

This one-size-fits-all calculation cuts out many of the legal accounting tricks (such as excessive debt) that managers use to boost earnings numbers, and provides you with an apples-to-apples way to evaluate businesses, even across industries. The higher the ROIC, the more efficiently the company uses capital.

Ultimately, we’re looking for companies that can invest their money at rates that are higher than the cost of capital, which for most businesses are from 8% to 12%. Ideally, we want to see ROIC greater than 12%, at minimum. We’re also seeking a history of increasing returns, or at least steady returns, which indicate that the company’s moat can withstand competitors’ assaults.

HBR: Worry Isn’t Work

HBR: Worry Isn’t Work

Great article about judging yourself on your output rather than on your stress level.

Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.

Work is the manifestation of value, and anyone who tells you that a person whose mind is 50% occupied with anxiety is more likely to manifest value is a person who isn’t manifesting much.

It’s OK to take care of yourself. To take time to exercise. By all accounts, exercise improves brain function. It’s OK to eat well, and to slow down enough to eat consciously and appreciate the food. Proper nutrition improves brain function as well. Go on vacation. Meditate. Take a break each week for an hour to see a therapist, or a movie, or stop in a church, if that’s your practice. Sit quietly on your porch in the evening and reflect. Chaining yourself to your desk is no more correlated to productivity than mental self-annihilation.

Surfing the Web on a Vintage Mac Plus

After some serious tinkering, I was finally able to get my original Mac Plus (cira 1986) to surf the web natively. No cheating, no terminal emulation. Just a real web browser running in System 6 accessing the live internet.

Here’s what the System 6 Heaven webpage looks like on the Plus:

Mac Plus Surfing Web, 2010
Mac Plus Surfing Web, 2010

That’s not just a text file!  It’s actually MacWWW, an early web browser (circa 1992) that can run on System 6.  For comparison, here is the same webpage in Safari 5: <Photo Missing>

How did I do it?

Well, it was a little tricky since the Mac Plus and System 6 were built before the web, web browsers, home Ethernet LANs and always-on broadband Internet connections were common place (or in some cases even invented). Macs of that time communicated using AppleTalk over LocalTalk networks, both of which are obsolete and no longer even supported by contemporary Mac OS X.

First, I acquired a Quadra 700 for the lab (circa 1992), sort of the Mac Pro of it’s day, since it has ports that support both LocalTalk and Ethernet (using a proprietary Apple AAUI adapter, yes another trip to eBay) and can run System 7. After getting it working on both the modern Ethernet LAN and the vintage LocalTalk network with the Plus on it, the next step was to bridge the two networks using Apple’s (now freely available) LocalTalk Bridge software (the trick being to remember it will always use your printer port for LocalTalk!).

With that in place and working, I could now use AppleTalk file sharing across both networks to easily move all the vintage software around that I needed on the respective systems. It also occurred to me that I should back all this up, given the age of the hard drives and floppy disks, so after exploring open source alternatives like FreeNAS (and learning the vagaries of which versions of AppleTalk are supported by which OSes), I resorted to bringing up a virtual Windows NT 4 Server (cira 1994) with Services for Macintosh. It gave me quite the chuckle that I had to use a Microsoft product to pull this off.

Lastly, I made a clean System 6 install on the Mac Plus and added MacTCP but still needed to get TCP/IP routed over LocalTalk and the bridge on the Quadra. For that, I found IPNetRouter and these instructions which quite frankly required some serious trial and error (the trick there being while you set the bridging machine address as the gateway on the LocalTalk devices, you have to use a real DNS server address).

After some patient tinkering, and many disappointing pings on the Mac Plus, I got it working and fired up MacWWW to find a webpage with no graphics, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, embedded media, or just about any modern element we take for granted. You see the results in the pictures above.

Why did I do it?

Just to see if I could I suppose.

Both my Mac Plus and the early web played an important part in my life and the beginning of my career. I can still recall when NCSA Mosaic was first installed in the university computer lab–after just being told during orientation that most of us would work in jobs that hadn’t been invented yet (which has held true for me).  And aside from a brief (and shameful) period during the late 90’s, I’ve always had a Mac.

I had wanted to do this for some time, but it wasn’t until my recent focus on some other vintage technology projects that I got serious. My next task is to get a solid SSH client working on the vintage machines (perhaps for retro Twitter), as well as virtualizing each of them in emulators on my modern systems (so they can live in perpetuity).

Anyone up for a game of Bolo?

Telex-like Retro Twitter Newswire

Wondering what Twitter might have looked like a few decades ago? Maybe seeking a nostalgic way to get your news headlines? It’s easy to go retro with today’s tools–in this case the Terminal app in Mac OS X and TTYtter, a command line Twitter client written in Perl.

First install and authorize TTYtter as per the instructions on the website (it’s really much simpler than it appears when reading the directions, took maybe 5 minutes including authorization with the Twitter mothership). If you are looking for just news headlines, you might want to setup another Twitter profile to follow just breaking news sources, as TTYtter doesn’t yet support lists.

Then find and install a nice retro font, like the free Teletype 1945-1985 by E.V. Norat II. Next, In Mac OS Terminal, go to Preferences to create a new skin, specifying the new font and a pleasant vintage paper-like color for the background. Play with these settings until you get it to look just how you like.

Finally, open a new shell using the skin you created and run TTYtter for a retro Twitter newswire! Let me know if you can figure out how to add authentic sound effects. Enjoy!

I’ve heard it said that every day you need half an hour of quiet time for yourself, or your Self, unless you’re incredibly busy and stressed, in which case you need an hour. I promise you, it is there. Fight tooth and nail to find time, to make it. It is our true wealth, this moment, this hour, this day.

Anne Lamott, Time lost and found