Burlaki on the Hudson

I’m watching the Yankees on TV last night. Becky, who does not have school in the morning, does whatever it is that she does on her laptop in her bedroom.

The Yanks win the game and clinch the World Series. As delighted as I am, my outward reaction is purposefully muted, on account of Kimmy and Natasha being long asleep by then in their beds.

Yet, 60 seconds later, Becky bounds down the stairs.

“Yankees won?” she asks.

“Yes, it just ended,” I reply, “How’d you know?”

“Facebook,” she shrugs. “Everyone I know just went ‘Yay! Yankees win!’”

Small things like that keep finding me awestruck by how far we progressed in the last decade or so in terms of information access.

Technology

For a reasonably technologically-savvy person, I sometimes find myself utterly amazed by what nowadays technology can offer.

Like, for instance.

I’ve been wearing glasses since my early teens. One pair of glasses that I got myself roughly 20 years ago were so called “chameleons” – the specs that would become tinted in the sunlight. I suppose that made me an early adopter of photochromic lenses, but the problem was, they did not work that well. They would take forever to darken in most blinding sunlight, and would become just barely tinted at that. I abandoned them quite quickly, and ever since always made do with having two pairs of prescription glasses on me – one clear, one tinted.

My most recent pair of clear glasses was nearing its fifth or sixth year of life – despite some fancy-shmancy anti-scratch coating that I paid for when I got them, the lenses started to get worn out. I decided to get myself a new pair and figured I’d go for the photochromic lenses again, with Transitions.

I am astounded at how well they work.

There is maybe a 5-second interval of discomfort and having to squint when I first step outside into sunlight, and then it’s as if I’m wearing sunglasses. What’s more, my eyes don’t feel covered by a darkened glass – from inside out, I can barely tell that the lenses become tinted. The first couple of days of wearing them, I couldn’t help but stop at every other shop window to check my reflection and confirm that yes, in fact, the glasses looked dark grey on the outside.

Brilliant! I’m practically in love!

How about something more domestique…

Natasha saw one at our friends’ house and decided to buy a Roomba for ourselves. I realize that robots have been in use in various industries, wherever repetitive tasks are being performed, for decades now. But I’ve never had a first-hand experience with any, let alone with a robot with a certain level of artificial intelligence.

It’s a damn vacuum cleaner!

Which goes around a room all by itself. It bumps into walls and other obstacles – not very bright, by the looks of it, – but then finds ways along the former and around the latter. It makes different attempts to get into tight corners, angling this way and that. It methodically crosses the room and seemingly finds a way to go over every square inch of the surface in a pattern that cannot be understood by mere humans.

And – wait for this! – when it knows that it’s running out of juice, it propels itself towards its base and docks for re-charging. Really!

It is not perfect; it can obviously only do the floor – no stairs or pieces of furniture. But it does relieve us from having to actively participate in the process.

Passive participation is another matter. I could watch the little thing glide around the floor for hours.

Technology rulez!

Technology

I am an information technology professional. While my specialty is far from being hands-on PC support, I know how to take a PC apart and then put it together. I have replaced faulty components or upgraded some such with my own hands on numerous occasions. But I do not have the urge to muck around with computer equipment. If the machine works fine and satisfies my slightly-above-average requirements for performance, I don’t ever think about opening the case and poking around.

My main home PC is about 4 years old, but is by no means obsolete. It handles various media-editing software that I use quite effortlessly and I have virtually no interest in PC games, for which a more powerful machine would be needed. If I ever think of getting an upgrade, it’s primarily because I want to replace some other computers in the house, and I’ll likely do it via buying a latest and greatest for myself and passing on my current PC down the chain, so to speak.

A while ago, the PC started getting noisy.

It would boot up quite normally and chug along without a hitch, but at some point along the way, it would acquire the whining pitch that would reach a crescendo at the start-up of an arbitrary application. The whine would ebb and flow during the different periods of activity, but once started, it would not go away until the PC was turned off.

Something was definitely getting over-worked. I surmised that it was a cooling fan picking up higher speeds as the CPU did the extra bit of memory swapping and what-not. Because of the initial quietness upon boot-up and the subsequent ebb and flow of the noise, it did not seem broken, but rather put into overdrive by CPU activity. To prevent that from happening, I thought, I should figure out which piece of software may be causing the unwarranted CPU usage hike. I ran various types of diagnostics, cleaned the registry, de-fragmented hard drives, uninstalled several dozen of applications that I never use, all in search of a possible performance culprit. There was never a true indication that the problem was with the performance, but I still spent several nights trying to figure it out.

To no avail. The annoying whine would not go away, no matter what kinds of configuration changes I made.

Finally, I had a bright idea: I should open the PC cover and confirm the source of the noise.

When I did that, I saw something that I’ve never seen before: The inside of the computer was full of dust. Not a thin layer of dust that any bit of machinery that has not been cleaned for years might acquire, but quite literally a thick coat of the stuff.

I might have mentioned in the past somewhere that, in England, dust seemingly gathers on surfaces in considerably greater amounts in shorter periods of time than I remember it doing so in the States. We maybe needed to give our shelves and desks a proper dusting once a week in America, but here, it seems like only 24 hours after a major cleaning exercise you need to do it all over again.

Apparently, inside of a computer case was not immune to the ill effects of dust-gathering.

I was certainly right about the source of the noise – it was the CPU cooling fan. Only the reason for it being overworked was the thick sheet of pressed dust on the grille between the propeller and the circuitry. Scarcely any air could get through; instead, most of it went in the opposite direction out of the case through a side vent. The CPU was not being cooled enough – and it kept giving the fan signals to work harder. The fan spun faster than it normally should – the noise was the only tangible outcome. Oy!

Twenty years around computers – and I never suspected that the good old vacuum cleaner might be an essential peripheral.

At least, all is quiet again.

Technology