Words and pictures from Silicon Valley by Chris Gulker
From the monthly archives:
I awoke this morning to the view of beautiful hillside vineyards. It would be easy to believe were still in France, but we’re visiting relatives in Potter Valley. To make us feel even more like we were in France, cousins Dave and Karen Rockel made us crepes and fruit for breakfast. I could get used to this…
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So, we’ve been slowly getting the new Mac Pro together: I ordered RAM from Other World Computing ($350 vs. around $2,000 from Apple), moved over the hard drives from my former imaging workstation (now Linda’s computer), downloaded vital updates and software and otherwise been provisioning the new machine. Tomorrow we’ll do the (for me) hard stuff: get on the floor and get all the cables et al connected.
I’ve thought this through and made a Fry’s run to get extender cables et al. so I can deal with future upgrades just by pulling the tower out from its perch under the World HQ counter – the Mac Pro has glides on the base that make it easy to slide on our hardwood floors. This machine is very fast…
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Amazing: the remarkable photo above shows NASA’s Phoenix lander suspended from its parachute shortly before landing. The picture was taken with a telephoto imager (aka the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The photo on left is one of Phoenix’s first snaps of its new home in Mars’ very chilly north polar zone. I continue to be fascinated by robot photos from other worlds…
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Planet Mars is back in the news this weekend: NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft will attempt one of the most dangerous landings ever tried. The lander will attempt to set down in Mars north polar region after negotiating a perilous 15-minute entry into the Martian atmosphere.
If Phoenix survives the first seven minutes of fierce buffeting and heating (to thousands of degrees), it will then rely on a parachute and pulsing retrorockets to touch down.
Phoenix is equipped with a miniature backhoe and a set of sophisticated, automated laboratories that will analyze the soil and permafrost that Phoenix hopes to scoop up. Landing signals are expected around 4:53 PDT today…
[Update] Phoenix landed successfully at 4:53 PM PDT.
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Google Health debuted yesterday, and I signed right up. Unfortunately, UCSF is not yet on electronic patient records, but my drug store, Long’s is. It was easy to link to Long’s and enter some info about me and my ailments. Subsequently I linked to the My Daily Apple health news site, and it automatically set up a custom RSS feed of articles mentioning Glioma or any of the medicines that were imported from Long’s. The site even automatically generated a warning about a particular combination of the drugs I take. Slick.
For the last couple of years (at least), I’ve been thinking about my ‘personal software strategies.’ I like Apple’s suite of free and inexpensive apps, which I much prefer to the Microsoft Office products I used for, it seems, forever. I also spent a year using Sun’s Star Office and OpenOffice.org’s suites when I was covering the open source beat – I even wrote a 353-page book using Writer.
I’d already been experimenting with a paperless way to manage my personal records using a fast Fujitsu scanner, Adobe Acrobat and a PDF browser called Yep!, when the blizzard of paper that accompanied my cancer diagnosis all but mandated a paperless workflow, which has been at least as successful as my old paper-only record-keeping. The secret is Acrobat’s batch-OCR processing, which, combined with Apple’s Spotlight search facility makes the documents findable (unlike unfiled or misfiled paper docs).
But, increasingly, I find myself using Google to manage my affairs. Google Apps suffice for most of my documentation needs, Google Calendar keeps me organized and in sync with my spouse (and works on my iPhone) and I run all of gulker.com’s email through Gmail for its superior spam filtering. The big advantage is that everything is ‘out there’ in the Google cloud, and I can get to it from anywhere there’s a browser and a Net connection. Google Sync means my life – to the extent it’s organized as bookmarks and page histories – follows me anywhere the Net can be accessed.
There are gaps: for example, I can’t easily link all my financial information. It sits on half a dozen bank, credit card and brokerage servers, but I’m guessing this will be solved in time, too. As William Gibson famously said “the future is here already, it’s just not evenly distributed”…
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UCSF’s Dr. Susan Chang was on PBS’ NewsHour tonight, being interviewed about Senator Kennedy’s Glioma diagnosis. Susan is my neuro-oncologist: she was very precise and politic about the disease, avoiding making a ‘TV diagnosis.’ Of course, what we Glioma patients want to know is, does the good Senator have stage 3 Glioma (prognosis 3-5 years) like me or stage 4 (about 1 year) like my late friend and rector Mike Spillane?
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Cue Jaws theme: we chose the Mac Pro, and not because other Mac models lacked power. Our big problem was that gulker.com’s World HQ was (literally) built around the tower form factor, we have to drive multiple monitors (iMacs will only drive one via DVI) and, yes, it’ll be fun to have a freakishly fast computer. The beach ball will spin soooo fast…
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So we dropped off the infamous smoke-belching dual G5 at the Apple Store in Palo Alto: the diagnosis, delivered 24 hours later is that the motherboard and at least one processor are fried, and possibly the power supply as well. The repair costs will likely approach or surpass the cost of a new Mac.
So we’re busily thinking about which new Mac. Macworld’s lead feature this month is about just that: how to pick a new Apple machine. iMacs are now so powerful, as are the laptops, that the expensive quad-core Mac is really meant for high-end video and scientific applications. Unfortunately, gulker.com World HQ has been set up to work with a Mac tower. So we’re thinking about this….
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Linda and I drove over to Half Moon Bay this morning, to a favorite jogging/walking path that we hadn’t visited in 18 months. Rising early, we beat the usual Route 92 weekend backup. I walked 5000 paces in an hour, a personal best this year, while Linda jogged about 5 miles. Afterwards we stopped for breakfast in a pleasant inn in town…
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“In an interview published today in the Vatican newspaper L’Obsservatore Romano, Reverend Jose Gabriel Funes, the Vatican’s chief astronomer and scientific adviser to Pope Benedict, said that there’s no conflict between the Christian faith and the existence of extraterrestrials.” From New Scientist…
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