Z is for Stats

It's the very, very end of the A to Z challenge. I'll finish with what looks like a bit of a cheat, but does have an actual idea behind it.

"Z for Stats" was not, in fact, my cheat; gamers of a certain age might remember it as the last keyboard command from the Ultima IV Computer Role Playing Game. Today with high-resolution graphics, better input devices, and even better sound there are very few constraints on what a game-writer can do. Years ago we didn't have any of this, so game designers had to operate under constraints of technology including graphics, sound, and input interfaces. The remarkable thing is that many of them were still able to create an immersive  gaming environment and a compelling experience within the constraints of the technology. In fact, I'd argue that working within those constraints created a deeper and richer experience than many modern games with fewer such limitations. Being restricted to keyboard commands, for example, means having to choose which 26 things you want a character to be able to do, and then trying to shoehorn them into the alphabet in a reasonable enough way that the player won't go scurrying for the quick reference guide every ten minutes. Some - O)pen, T)alk were obvious, while others J)immy lock or Y)ell "Giddyup" or "Whoa" (to make your horse go faster or slower) were certainly among the game's quirks.

What does all of this have to do with a writing or technology blog? The same concept comes up in writing. This A to Z challenge was all about fitting thoughts into the artificial constraint of the alphabet. Formal poetry, from sonnets to Haiku, is about fitting ideas and images into a specific meter and rhyme. These often require a specific kind of thought and care with each choice, leading to a very different work than one would have free-form. I very much enjoyed taking this trip through the alphabet with you, and likely shared a handful of things that I'd not have absent prompting from the alphabet. Was it, therefore, a success? I'll say yes.

Now that we finished the April challenge I'll step down from the daily schedule, but will be back later this week with either technology or writing. I hope some of you who found me through A to Z will stick around to see where we go next.

Y is for Yarnmen!

We've reached the penultimate post on the A to Z challenge. This month has been tremendous fun, and I will keep up with the blog in upcoming months but plan on getting off the one-post-a-day roller-coaster, as I'd like to keep some time for my fiction, some for reading, and some to just plain relax.

Remember way back at the letter 'N' I wrote about "Nightmare Fuel", Andrea Traske's daily photo-prompt exercise on Google+? I gave a shout-out to Matt Champine who e-published a collection - Cold Shivers, available on Amazon.com - of his Nightmare-fueled stories. Well, I seem to have posted too soon, as Andrea herself just published her own Nightmare Fuel collection over on Smashwords.

But Leonard, you ask, isn't this supposed to be the letter "Y"? And what areYarnmen? Yarnmen are, apparently, little men made of yarn. The particular yarnmen here are Andrea's other creation, and a promotion for the collection. If Andrea gets 100 sales by Monday night (two days from the writing of this post) she'll give one of these charmingly creepy figures to each of three randomly chosen customers. This is the kind of fun, grass-roots level creative marketing that makes small-scale independent book publishing so much fun. Is it scalable to larger marketing efforts without risking loss of authenticity? Probably not, but that doesn't much matter to me. I see the book, the process of daily prompts, and the giveaway all as a work of art. It's something that would have been inconceivable even a few years ago, but today we can each have our own publications, our own promotions which take advantage of our talents, and find our own audience. That's anything but a nightmare.

I'll see you Monday to wrap this up with the letter 'Z', in which I might cheat a tiny bit.

X is for XLR

We're almost at the end of the alphabet, with the somewhat challenging 'X'. There isn't a great deal to say about the XLR connector, except that it is an interesting exampe of how professional equipment differs from consumer equipment.
The first thing one notices about an XLR as compared to, say, the RCA plugs in the back of your stereo is that it locks into place with a satisying click. This does two things: first, it makes sure the connector stays in place. This is especially sensible in a permanent installation where there's no reason to remove it and you don't want people to have to re-connect and disconnect. Second is that there are three pins instead of the two you might have been expecting. (One professional tells a story about an applicant for a technical position who identified the three pins as "Left, Right, and Ground." To a professional, this is quite thoroughly and obviously wrong). It's called a balanced audio signal in that there's the signal, a ground, and an inverse of the original signal. Balanced audio is used to run longer distances than unbalanced because when the negative signal is flipped over and added to the positive, any noise should cancel out to some extent. This leaves you with a much cleaner signal than you'd get with unbalanced audio. XLR connectors can also be easily field-terminated by soldering (as can RCAs).

As an aside, if someone ever asks you how to wire an XLR, just remember this rhyme: "Two is hot, three is not." Pin 2 is +, Three is -, and one is the shield or ground.



With the growing trend towards digital video, consumer-type connectors have been invading the commercial world in the form of the now-ubiquitous HDMI. I've seen quite a few cases in which this cause issues, especially in the case of plenum-rated HDMI cables with very wide bend-radiuses. They have a natural tendency to pull out of connectors, especially given the fact that the cable might need to be twisted to align the connector correctly. There have recently been improvements, with locking HDMI connectors starting to come to market as well as field-terminatable HDMI connectors. The latter still requires special tools, special cable, and what appears to be a fair bit of patiences. It's a kind of solution the professional world is still seeking, but with HDMI the de-facto standard digital input and output it's a solution we will certainly need. (Yes, HD-SDI is a digital format which uses locking BNC connectors and doesn't have DRM built into it. It's arguably a better professional level choice, but can't send HDCP protected content, doesn't carry the EDID device identification codes, and is primarily used in broadcast applications).


I'll see you tomorrow for Y, as we run through the home stretch.

W is for work, to which I took my daughter

It's "Take your children (formerly take your daughters) work day. My employer, AVI-SPL, invited us to participate with our children. Given the greater presence men still have in the workplace, part of me wishes this were still a day for just girls, but it's still a worthy idea to let our children see another part of our lives. I do think it's important for girls to see the workplace as an option for them and am very disappointed that they can't have something for themselves. To not allow special opportunities for girls is, in my mind, an ill-advised commitment to formal equality as opposed to actual equality.

As an AV project engineer, my actual work activity isn't all that much fun to watch. Most of my day is spent sitting at a computer drawing on a CAD program. We do have more "hands-on" parts of the operation with our in-house fabrication and testing, fancy equipment in a couple of video-conference rooms, and a sense of how we work together as a team to get our collective jobs done. Someone at AVI-SPL also came up with the clever idea of creating an "autograph" sheet for the children to get the signatures of all of our local employees. This was a nice way to make introductions and explain what everyone does. When I was young, the grown-up world of "work" was a complete mystery to me. It's nice to make it something else.

Was this a successful experiment? On the down-side, most people's schedules and situations didn't allow them to bring kids. In fact, aside from Chloe the was only other participant was our general manager's nine-year-old daughter. They got along quite well, but it would have been nice to have a broader range of kids to interact with. The best part? That it's a different kind of moment we got to share. Will it give her an example of what the workplace is like, give her inspiration to try her hands at the field of technology, or teach her any other life lessons? Perhaps not. But one can't mistake her pleasure in  getting to take the trip into work with me, and mine at sharing a moment with my daughter.

V is for Verse

It's national poetry month. I'm more of a prose writer than a poet, but on can't let National Poetry Month pass without at least one stab at verse. 

The inspiration for this poem was Tim Wakefield's retirement, leaving the Mets' Robert Alan Dickey as major league baseball's only remaining knuckleballer. I started imagining Tim watching on TV as the last knuckler pitched his last game, saddened that the lore isn't being past on. I find this image a bit more compelling. It allows for some more imagery (although the knuckleballer's typical square-cut fingernails are gripping a TV remote was a nice mental picture which I'm sorry to let go) and some more action.

So, happy National Poetry Month.

The Last Knuckleballer

Under the shadow of Mount Fuji
The last knuckleballer stands
his fingers tense, his nails square-cut

His grasp
too tight

The ball
too small
too smooth
wrong

horseleather.

He throws straight and true,
not dancing, darting, diving.
Not knuckling.

His limbs heavy with the weight of years
his joints well-worn,
he's been on his way down the mountain for years.
Maybe forever.

He grasps again. Deep breaths.
The ball still too smooth
still too small.
Did the next throw dance? One little side-step?

Tomorrow he'll go back to the ballpark
back to his search for someone.
Someone desperate enough
to cut his fingernails square
in hopes that he can cross an ocean
and make a too-big cowhide ball dance.

U is for USB

We're nearing the end of the alphabet; if I stand up on my toes I can almost see Z for Zen way off there in the distance.

For 'U', I'd like to talk about the humble USB connector and how far it's come. In a distant era lost in the sands of time, known to us today only as the early 1990s, computer peripherals were connected with either D-Sub connectors or the PS/2 style keyboard/mouse connector. Then, in 1995, we saw the first Universal Serial Bus, or USB connector. It didn't have easily bent pins like a D-Sub or PS/2, took up less space, and could be connected quickly and easily. Those of us who first saw it, nearly two decades ago, thought that this was a nicer, more standardized way to connect keyboards, mice, and printers. It is that, of course, but also much more.

The neat thing about USB, as opposed to traditional serial inputs, is that it's addressable. This means that you can take one USB output on your computer, add a hub, and install an array of devices: printers, flash drives, keyboards, mice, IR emitters, or anything else you could imagine. A single USB controller can, in fact, operate 127 devices which can be arranged in various tiers or "levels". Each hub adds a level; one thing you might not know is that a 7 port USB hub is often really two four-port hubs stacked together. That means that four ports would be on a different level than the other three; if you're stacking an absurdly unrealistic number of USB devices, this is something you should know.

What else did USB do? Version 2.0 gave us the smaller mini and micro- connectors which fit onto smartphones, reducing the need for proprietary connectors. The fact that power is part of the USB standard means that, for the first time I can remember, we can have standard DC power for our various devices. In commercial installations, I see USB for data used all the time; often a client will have a system with more than one computer (usually a Windows machine and a Mac). At a remote location there can be one USB hub, taken to a switch via a USB over Cat5 extender. One could then switch a local port for a flash drive, a keyboard, a mouse, and even a webcam, interactive touchscreen, or other device between the two machines with the touch of a button. Now that we're up to USB 3 there's the possibility of very high-speed data transfer - enough for live audio or video. At around 4 gigabits per second it's not going to compete with HDMI or Displayport in sending very high-quality video, but it opens a whole new set of options. 

Why is this interesting to me? Mainly because the creation of a simple, multipurpose interface for disk drives, printers, and input devices has turned into a major component of audio, video, and computer systems in ways we've not have guessed. It raises the next question: what are we just seeing today which will be an major part of our landscape tomorrow?

S is for Snuff

It's been nearly three decades since Sir Terry Pratchett graced us with the first of his Discworld books, a series of humorous fantasy novels poking affectionate fun at common fantasy tropes while engaging in various levels of satire and social commentary. The books often have one real-world topic and one or more fantasy element. Pratchett has taken on vampires and modernity, witches and the Phantom of the Opera, wizards and shopping malls, dwarve werewolves and racism, dwarves troll and ethnic conflicts. Snuff, the thirty-ninth of the Discworld books, takes city watch commander Sam Vimes and his wife the lady Sybil out of the metropolis of Ankh-Morpork and into the countryside for a yarn involving goblins, racism, and slavery.
It has elements of a classic fish-out-of-water type of tale, but with Pratchett's keen understanding of relationships and social structures. And, or course, it wouldn't be much of a book if Vimes didn't find crime, old secrets to uncover, and wrongs to right against the poverty-stricken, much-abused goblin race. We end with the beginning of a new understanding as Vimes and Sybil lead  people to the realization that there is more to the goblins than people had imagined. It's a positive enough message, even if a bit heavy-handed and obvious.  What disappointed me is that Pratchett dealt with the same issues of racism and prejudice to much better effect in earlier works, most notably in Thud, which forced Vimes to reexamine his own prejudice against the silicon-based troll race. In Snuff we get very little of this kind of thing from any of the viewpoin characters; those we've come to know as "good guys" through the series remain good, and on the side of rightiousness. Any setbacks or obstacles are quickly and easily set aside, giving the whole book a quick, breezy feel.
There was one moment in which Snuff appeared to reach to be something deeper; while questioning a crime suspect, Vimes called upon something called the Summoning Dark - a malevolent presence which had lodged inside of him since events in the aforementioned Thud. In the earlier book there was real tension as to how this would effect Vimes and a bit of a surprise - although a satisfying one - in how he escaped it. Here there's no real repercussion or even a credible temptation. The Discword series is inccreasingly feeling like a series in which the author has too much affection for his supercompetent, super-honorable characters and is no longer willing to see them do anything wrong or have anything bad happen to them.
Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed the book while I was reading it. Pratchett remains as funny as ever, and as much fun. This one was just a bit of a letdown after the stellar highs we got near the middle of the Discworld series.

Three stars.