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Five Things You Didn't Know About Me

I have no idea if I have been tagged by anyone, so I will catch one of the torch’s that Somasegar lobbed into the air.

{tags: orcmid chess photography Grace Hopper Robert Heinlein Fortran}

1. When I was a high-school student (50th reunion this year), I drew cartoons for the Washington State Chess Letter.  I had mimeograph masters and a drawing stylus and scribed the drawings directly on masters.  I also wrote the Junior Chess column for a while.  I doubt that I lent much to an understanding of the game with my annotations.  Later I would play tournament chess as a Class C, borderline B, duffer.
         
   My favorite was postal chess, especially international postal chess.  My best game was with a postal master where I had him on the ropes until he snookered me with a queen sacrifice that led to a forced draw.  It was a thing of beauty on both our parts.  I gave up chess in the ‘70s when I realized that it was too much like the concentration that I brought to my day job and was no longer relaxation nor recreation.
     
   I have ideas for a computer chess program that I began formulating when I built my first microcomputer in 1978.  I am not sure when I will ever get around to it.  It would be interesting recreation using the convenient software tools and computer power available today.  I can see using it as a test of some programming-system research ideas I have too.
         
2. I like to say that science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein taught me to (speed) read.  Actually, I learned to read from comic books.  Heinlein came into it when I discovered science fiction in Boys Life on the juvenile shelves of the Moore Branch Public Library in Tacoma, Washington.  I picked up either Rocket Ship Galileo or Farmer in the Sky in mid-serial and was enthralled.  I found the back issues under the rack and read both serials through in sequence.  After I had devoured all of the Heinlein, Bradbury, and Andre Norton books in that section, I discovered how much more the library held (Sixth Column and also some famous anthologies).  
      
   I wasn’t allowed to check out books from the adult section, so I would come into the library on Saturdays and read them there.   I would read a full science-fiction novel in an afternoon so I wouldn’t have to worry about books being checked out before I’d finished them.  That was my reading pace for many years and I would binge-read my way through cross-country plane flights.  Now my only recreational reading is in bed at night before falling asleep.   Binge reading is down to maybe 1–2 occasions per year.
      
   I met Robert Heinlein and his wife Virginia, along with Fred Pohl and others, at a Seattle Science Fiction convention.  I beat Fred Pohl at chess but I wasn’t much use satisfying his curiosity about computers.  He would go elsewhere for that.
     
3. My first paid gig as a computer programmer was for $100.  Boarding-house neighbor Lloyd Moore (I think) was moving to New York State and couldn’t finish the job.  I took it over as a moonlighting job for a medical researcher.  
     
   I had to teach myself machine language for the IBM 650 and then I developed the program in hand-written minimum-latency (well, I can’t vouch for how minimal) absolute code.  I didn’t understand the assembler so I did it the bare-metal way.  The data analysis that I provided was used in a published paper:  Bennett, B. M.  A sampling study on the power function of the chi-squared ‘index of dispersion’ test.  Journal of Hygiene 57, 3 (September 1959), 360–365.  
     
   I have no idea whether my results were correct, since the only test data was the real data and I had no idea what correct results should look like.  The runs of random samples were created manually by Dr. Bennett using published tables.  He seemed quite satisfied with the results that I printed out for him.  I am mentioned in the last paragraph of the paper.
     
4. I thought I would be a photographer.  Between junior and senior high school (9th and 10th grades where I was), I became fascinated with photography and worked off the books in a struggling new camera shop (the first of two times I was ever fired).  I learned to use a Kodak Pony 35mm camera from the shop.  My first serious camera, after the little 127 roll-film snapshot camera from my parents, was a Praktica FX single-lens reflex with no automation whatsoever.  My father built an enlarger for me, using a large potato-chip can as the light housing (with a 15–watt incandescent bulb). I had a cold basement darkroom of sorts for my black-and-white photography. 
     
   As graduation neared (with many of my photos in the 1957 Lincoln High School yearbook), I had my doubts about photography careers, since wedding photography didn’t strike me as a lot of fun and I didn’t know how fellows like Gary Winograd and the Life magazine photographers made a living.  I applied to Caltech and MIT, expecting to end up at the University of Washington.  I was shocked to be admitted to both and I went to closer-by Pasadena where they’d waived tuition for me.  I didn’t last the first year but it was a great lesson leading me to learn what I needed to become a scholar, my lifelong dream. 
      
   I saw my first-ever computer program at Caltech, as Bob Deverill sat at a student-lounge table and entered a program with a manual paper-tape punch, using an exp(x) algorithm he had written on the back of an envelope (or something equally apocryphal).  He would run the program on a Datatron 205.
   
   Although I now carry around my third Nikon, and still use 35mm film, I’m not that serious about my photography.  I have digital envy though.
      
   I purchased a Beseler 23C enlarger before moving to New York City in 1961, and I held onto that neglected piece of equipment until selling the Sunnyvale Orcmid’s Lair in 1998.  I sold all of my darkroom goodies in a yard sale.  Now whatever photo processing I do is with scanner (or photo-finisher CD-ROMs) and computer.
       
5. I once graded papers for Grace Hopper.  Tina (Cappa) Carolan was the writer for the Univac III Fortran manual and asked me to help out as a grader for Grace Hopper, who was teaching a course at the Moore School.  The assignments were in Fortran and I was on my way to becoming the chairman of the ANSI X3J3 subcommittee for Fortran (preceding Frank Engel, who shepherded Fortran 77 along).  It was a lot of fun and I learned how many ways people could figure out to write a prime number sieve, sometimes correctly.  The most fascinating one was not done in Fortran, as requested.  The solution was submitted as a flow-chart, and it only used addition and subtraction operations.  And it was correct.  I don’t think most graders would have gone far enough to figure that out.
     
   I had a nodding acquaintance with Commander Hopper, and one of my prized mementos is a letter from her complimenting me on a Fortran specification document where I’d used two-level Backus Normal Form (BNF, which she despised).  The examples and supporting prose were clear enough that she was able to overlook that defect and she applauded me for that.

I will follow Soma’s good example and toss my torch, multiplied five-fold, into the air.

Geek Dinner with Jon Udell: Thursday, January 18, 7pm, Bellevue Crossroads Mall

This event is cancelled.

There’s a Seattle Podcasting Network Meetup at the same time and this is a far better venue to hobnob with Jon Udell and local-area podcasters and luminaries.

For other Geek Dinner possibilities with Jon, check his blog.

Jon Udell is at Microsoft’s Redmond Campus for the week of January 15.  He’s beginning his new job with Jeff Sandquist and the Channel 9/on10 technology-evangelism folk.

{tag: orcmid Jon Udell Geek Dinner Bellevue Jeff Sandquist}

There will be an open Geek Dinner (you invite yourself) at the Bellevue Crossroads Mall,  7 pm Thursday, January 18.  There’s a food court for your own preferences and tables and chairs down the central hall.  Look for people with geek kits (laptops, too many electronic devices, etc.) who’ve self-organized themselves into a discussion and dinner group. We’ll also be looking for spots not too close to the musical entertainment.

Doing Weather Seattle Style

Before I went outside to shovel snow and ice from our diminutive driveway and sidewalks for the second time this Winter season, I noticed that Vicki had magneted this David Horsey cartoon onto our refrigerator. 'S truth.

{tags: orcmid Seattle weather David Horsey}