Day: January 20, 2009

Watch Me Pull Electricity Out of My Hat

Again disregarding the news itself in this morning’s newspaper and focusing on the advertisements, this one struck me on page B2:

Signup for a FREE in-school magic show for grades K-4.

“The Magic of Saving Power” is a spellbinding showcase on the benefits of conserving energey.  It’s hosted by Joules, the official NSTAR Energy Wizard, NSTAR’s master magician and energy saver extarordinaire.  Joules will dazzle your students’ minds with fun facts and teach them magic tricks to use at home to conserve energy.  The show lasts 30 minutes for classes of up to 50 students.

First of all, you get bonus points if you, like me, got halfway to the bottom of the next page of the paper before recognizing that “Joules” is not an actual name, but a play on the unit for measuring energy.

Secondly, what magic tricks do you suppose this entails?  I can certainly think of a dozen exciting Physics experiments that involve electricity off the top of my head.  Cook a hot dog in a couple minutes by applying a voltage across either end.  Make a pickle glow by applying a voltage to it.  Charge a large capacitor (1 Ferad will do) and then stick a screwdriver with a rubber handle across the contacts — big spark!  Et cetera.  However, all these things consume electricity, and frankly don’t even put it to particularly good use.

I’m a huge fan of energy conservation, but I admit it’s not very exciting — especially to children.  If NSTAR manages to entertain first graders by not using electricity, they deserve major accolades.

(At least two schools, and perhaps many more, have already taken them up on the offer.)

They Have the Internet on Television Now

My coworkers and I all gathered this afternoon to watch President Barack Obama’s first inaugural address, as people did in many offices across the country.  I took food orders and brought back lunch for those who didn’t have their own, and setup a laptop to stream the inauguration live onto the projection screen in one of our conference rooms.  About 20 people gathered to watch reverently.

And then the feed cut out.

Evidently the tubes of the Internet were clogged this afternoon with people trying to watch the events of inauguration day.  As the seconds to Obama’s oath ticked down, a room full of very intelligent people brainstormed ways we could get coverage.

“Try the local stations directly,” one of my colleagues suggested.  I brought up Boston’s NBC affiliate, WHDH.  They just offered MSNBC’s national feed, which was unavailable.

“Try YouTube!” another suggested.  We couldn’t find any evidence of a live feed on YouTube.

“Try NPR!  We’ll at least be able to hear it!” suggested a third.  I opened WBUR only to get a “server unavailable due to high activity” error.  We couldn’t even listen to it!

By this time President Obama had certainly taken the oath and had begun to address the nation.  Discouraged, and running out of ideas, I turned sullenly when a colleague asked, “What’s that box over there?”

We have a video capture station in the room to record demonstrations, surrounded by a small pile of video equipment.  (There’s also what I suspect is a genuine VT220 terminal, though I’d have to look more closely.)

“Part of the Echo360 setup probably, right?”

“It says ‘HDTV’ on it.”

If you haven’t been in a room with computer engineers when there’s equipment to setup, know that you should stand back in a hurry.  Wires were unplugged and rerouted.  Buttons were pressed.  Menus were seen and contemplated.  And then a live television picture appeared on the screen before our eyes, without all that fancy buffering nonsense.

So, in the end, it took a highly skilled information technology workforce of 20 competent adults fully five minutes to realize we could turn on the television.

We will never speak of this again.

A Window Into the (Recent) Past

An e-mail draft was sitting on my computer when I got to my office this morning.  It’s obviously something I started on Friday and never finished.  This happens occasionally.  The message read, in its entirety:

I want to run three areas for potential improvement by you

It did not have a subject or a “to” address.  I hadn’t even added punctuation to the end of the sentence.

So, at the end of the day on Friday I had devised three brilliant ways to improve some application — that’s the only reason I would write such a thing — but I now have absolutely no idea what they were, which application it was, who would need to know about them, or even if there’s still time to implement them.  I also know that I could not pursue this unilaterally, since I was about to ask someone else.

Discard.

Blërg.

And So Has My Cheese

My favorite sentence in the entire Boston Globe this morning was not part of any article.  Rather, it was in a small advertisement at the bottom of page A16.  The line reads (emphasis and capitalization as printed):

PRESIDENT OBAMA has MOVED to a new address and so has Xtreme Action Paintball!

I understand that this is from the same family of advertisement that puts “SEX” in huge letters at the top and then says, “Now that I’ve got your attention…” yet I still struggle to reconcile the connection between President-elect Obama (hey, I’m writing at 8 a.m. and I won’t be the one to jinx it) and paintball.  Unless there’s something the Democrats aren’t telling us…