In Memoriam

In Memorium Alice E. "Badger" Washburn, 1967-2011. I'd wish you to rest in peace, but you'd be bored. Have a blast where you are now. -JRS

Relay Computing FTW?

So we finally got around to getting a new humidifier to replace one that had died. Three times. (Hint: If you get the chance to put in a Honeywell humidifier? Don't. They suck.) The new one is an Aprilaire 700. Very nice, digital controls, outside temperature sensor, and the works.

We put it in ourselves.

Now, this doesn't seem like a big deal on the face of it. We had to cut the duct work a bit, and putting up the outdoor temp sensor was a joy, but by and large these are straightforward processes.

Wiring the thing into the furnace? That's where it got interesting. Our furnace is probably a decade and a half old. Unlike modern furnaces, where you open them and find yourself face to face with a printed circuit board (which, in fairness, I'd have been a lot more leery of working with), our contains relays and interrupt switches, and that's pretty much it. Working through the schematic has been interesting. Heaven forbid the HVAC industry should use electronics industry schematic symbols or anything. Once I figured out that those two vertical lines are contactor (relay) contacts and not a capacitor, the thing made more sense.

Once I sorted out which circuit did what, it dawned on me that I was looking on a string of and gates, effectively. If the white wire is at 24v, turn on the ventilator motor. If the flue pressure is correct (ventilator motor is running, flue is not blocked), turn on the ignitor and the gas. If the flame sensor indicates there's flame, turn the ignitor off. If the rollout sensor is off (that is, flame and/or gas are NOT coming out the back of the burners into the body of the furnace - yikes) keep the gas on. If the manifold temperature is above temperature x and the manifold temperature is below temperature y, turn on the blower. OR if the green wire is on, turn on the blower by itself, and bypass all the furnace start sequence logic. OR if the yellow wire is on, throw the relay to turn on the AC compressor. (note that these two ORs are not exclusive, and in fact the thermostat turns on both lines for AC.) It's all pretty straightforward. Theoretically.

Practically, I got the motor relay line plugged in the wrong place (on the yellow wire's terminal instead of the green) and it has been giving me bizarre results since yesterday for anything except heat. Now that that's straightened out, I just have to find out from Aprilaire how exactly I keep the humidifier from coming on when the call for heat comes down, humidifying the return plenum, switching itself off, then switching itself back on when the humidity in the plenum drops down, then switching off three or four times while the furnace goes through its startup sequence for heating. I don't even know if it's bad that it does this.

But it did amuse me once I realized that the furnace /does/ have a computer of sorts in it, and one of the more ancient types imaginable, at that. Flagging this post steampunk, since telegraphic relays most certainly did exist in the era, and you could do some interesting computing with them if you were so inclined.

-JRS

Some thoughts about Steampunk

As I dig more and more into Brass and Steel: Inferno (or whatever it finally winds up being called,) I'm forced to try to really understand the Steampunk esthetic in a way I can articulate it. While by no means does the esthetic define the movement, it does give an insight into what steampunk is and how steampunkers (steampunks?) think.

75 years ago, the hot trend was to streamline everything. Hide all the fussy mechanical bits under a smooth, sleek exterior. Sure, it made those machines (e.g. steam locomotives) a monstrous pain in the rear to service, but they certainly looked cool, at least to the esthetic of the day.

Radio underwent this transformation as well, from the Atwater Kent breadboards of the 20s, where they went out of their way not only to leave the guts of the radio out where you could see them, but also made those guts /pretty/. An Atwater Kent breadboard is a radio for the steampunk esthetic. these were finished radios, as you'd take home and use. By 1926, however, the tubes all went inside a wooden box or a metal can,like this and by 1929, they needed to, since your radio was now plugged into the wall and had voltage and current enough to kill you.

Fast forward to the computer revolution. If you were around at the beginning of the personal computer revolution, as friend Jeff was, your first computer might have been a Cosmac Elf, IMSAI or Altair, or perhaps an Apple I. These machines came as kits. You knew how they worked, because you put them together yourself, and you put them in a case for one specific reason: to keep dust, RF interference, and the cat out of them. Nowadays, they look like this or this.

Steampunk inverts this trend. More than that. Steampunk says this trend is a lie, and that it's used to cheat you by hiding an inferior machine inside, or worse, that the machine is up to something and you don't know what that is.. Steampunk embraces mechanical complexity that isn't afraid to show off its construction. Steampunk is about the construction. It's about the complexity. It's about being honest and showing you how things work, even if they don't do anything especially useful. To whit, this art 'bot, archived at Make Magazine. Watch the video. It's worth it. Steampunk, at its best, is about that kind of mechanical grace, where your eye can take the object apart at the same time as watching the whole thing move.

At least, that's my take on it.

It could just be about cool hats. :)

-JRS

MileHiCon 2011

As always, I will be at MileHiCon this year, and this year, I'll be joined by fellow author,co-author, and friend Jeff Duntemann, which should be fun.

My appearances in panels and such are as follows:

Friday, Mesa Verde B, 10:00pm: Can't Stop the Prose: Late Night Readings/Discussion. My guess is that this will be exactly what it sounds like - readings and discussion about them. Jeff's scheduled to be in this one, so expect readings from our double novel, /Drumlin Circus/ and /On Gossamer Wings/.

Saturday, Mesa Verde A, 4:00pm: Fan fiction. Does fan fiction still carry the stigma it used to for both fans and publishers, or has that changed? This ought to be interesting. My nano group in Colorado Springs had quite a few fan fiction writers, so it's a topic I've heard about, but not really dug into. Rest assured, I'll be digging between now and then.

Sunday, Wind River A, 10:00am: To FTL or not to FTL? A discussion of
relativity, fantasy vs. known science and other factors involved in that
venerable SF standby, faster than light travel. I've given this topic quite a lot of thought, especially lately since neutrinos may have been caught violating the speed limit. It's one of those tropes that's been around forever, and it's time we go after it with the dissecting tray, pins, and scalpel.

Sunday, Mesa Verde B, 1:00pm: Programming the Future. Where are computers headed and what will it mean for our future? A look at AI and other, more imminent, possibilities. Okay, I'm on a panel about computers and the future. No worries, right? Let me rephrase. I'm on a panel about computers and the future with Vernor Vinge. One of cyberpunk's founding fathers. Still, it's a subject I've given a lot of thought to in the process of writing my first two novels, and if memory serves, the only work I've done since I went pro that /doesn't/ have a machine intelligence in it someplace is /On Gossamer Wings/. And even that one's debatable. Should be fun.

See y'all there.

-JRS

RIP Steve Jobs

In 2001, I bought my first Mac, a blue and white G3, to run OS X 10.1. At the time, I thought it wasted an awful lot of cycles on eye candy, but was a pretty nice machine, and anyway it was Unix underneath. It took a long time for me to come around, grudgingly, and admit that how my computer's desktop /looks/, how it behaves when I click on things, does actually matter, and in all those things with OS X, IOS, AppleTV, iPod, Airport; in the look and feel of the hardware as my systems became more and more apple-centric, the esthetic sense of Steve Jobs and his team could and can be felt. At times, it's been maddening, because some simple thing that I should be able to do ran afoul of what Steve's esthetic said I needed to do. Other times it's as though he read my mind beforehand, and the solution to a given problem was literally at my fingertips when the need occurred.

So on this sad occasion of his death, let me send my condolences to everyone who actually knew him in person, but also to all of us who knew him only through his work. May the wind be at your back, Steve Jobs. You made technology exciting, even after the excitement had mostly died down and the suits had taken over.

-JRS

Google+ and security

As someone rather graphically demonstrated on this blog, using your secret mobile email posting address to forward messages from Google+ to your blogger blog leaves the aforementioned secret posting address exposed to the world. I've deleted the post and turned that posting mechanism off.

What's really mind boggling is that the post in question was one I put on Google+ almost a week ago, and it only went through recently. Why it takes days to send email from one part of the Google empire to another I have no idea, but in any case, the point is taken. Until Google provides a proper, secure way to auto-crosspost from Google+ to here, or a proper RSS mechanism on Google+, things will remain as they were.

I /am/ on Google+. Look for Jim Strickland there. But there isn't much to see publicly.

-JRS

The Right Dynamic, Followup

In workshopping Brass and Steel, it became obvious that my clever dynamic of having Dante be an outsider for 8 years in Perdition didn't work well. So I've changed the dynamic (again) to have Dante /be/ the outsider who just arrived in town. It wants to make him a little too cosy with the powers that Be in Washington, but I can apply the inside-outsider treatment to that part of the story (it's inevitable, really). So now he is the Deputy Federal Marshal, fresh off the airship in this very strange town in the mountains of Nevada.

New opening paragraphs (subject to revision or cutting, as always):

The sheriff of Perdition and his boys are waiting for me as the Jupiter comes in for her landing. In the time it takes the big airship to settle into her berth, they saunter over to the gangway as it reaches up toward the enormous belly of the ship, and they try hard to look inconspicuous. The locals — longshoremen, ground crewmen, cigarette girls and so forth give them a wide birth.

The hatch opens like the doors to a blast furnace, and the high-altitude chill of the cabin boils away like steam in heated air that reeks of burning coal and brimstone. My skin tries to sweat. I’m going to have to drink a lot more water here. I can tell. Put on my hat. Step out onto the gangway. It creaks under me, but it holds as I walk down it.

The sheriff and his boys don’t wait until my boots hit solid ground before they buttonhole me.

-JRS