So the world and the news this morning are all talking about the successful destruction of a US spy satellite. Apparently the satellite was channeling its inner three year old by refusing to stay where it was told (i.e. orbit) and threatening to take its ball and go home in a huff (i.e. bring its fuel tank full of a toxic witch’s brew back down to the earth.)

I would venture it safe to say that the insurance industry wasn’t looking forward to claims which read:

Act of God
Act of US espionage program gone awry

Technologically it was a very interesting event. The news outlets are calling it “hitting a bullet with a bullet” but that might be a tad on the over simplication side. It’s more like hitting a big, fast object full of explosive fuel with another big, fast object full of exposive explosives. Oh, and instead of aiming with a sight on the end of a barrel they used a super duper expensive Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser.

The most amazing part to me is that this event wasn’t even the most notable technological thing in the news yesterday. It came in a strong second to be sure, and that’s nothing at all to be ashamed of, but the bigger news was that there is an AJAX version of Mathematica coming. Hard core numerical computation that used to make the college lab computers beg to be put out of their misery now done by way of Javascript? That’s just crazy.

I know I know, I might be overstating things here just a tiny bit. But Mathematica (or more correctly its competitor Maple) really saved my bacon in college Calculus. I mean, I’ll be honest here, the chances of Hydrazine napalm falling from the heavens and landing on me are really, really remote. The chances of me tanking out of Calculus without having the lab projects to prop up my pitiful exam scores are so high that no casino in Vegas would dream of taking a bet on it.

On the plus side, with this new version of Mathematica students everywhere will be able to slog the misery that is Calculus so that someday they too can build anti-ballistic missiles that we can then use the next time a government spy satellite throws a temper tantrum. Who would have ever thought in a million years that we would be saved by Javascript?

My senior of college we paid a small fortune every month to have an ISDN line hooked up to the house. That ISDN was then run through a crappy old “Hey I’m a router now” computer to allow four different workstation computers access the Internet, such as it was back then.

Oh yeah, it was a fly setup.

Well, more fly than sharing a modem connection, less fly than cable modems and DSL which didn’t exist in our city yet, and a whole lot less fly than a bank-breaking T1 would have been.

We also had a cable TV hook up for two televisions, one in the downstairs living room and one in the fireplace of the upstairs computer room. I realize that a TV in a fireplace probably isn’t exactly Feng Shui but it did sit in the focal point of the room and bring together the post-apocalyptic technology theme nicely.

Anyhow, I bring this up because the other day at home I was sitting on the couch with one notebook computer while my wife was sitting at the desk with another. Both of us were connected to the Airport and were browsing away when I noticed we hadn’t bothered turning on the TV after the kid went to bed. Thinking back to the days when giving up TV would see impossible (I mean, what else is supposed to go in a fireplace) I had this conversation:

Me: Which would you rather give up, TV or the Internet connection.

Her: TV.

Me: That was a quick answer.

Her: That wasn’t exactly the most challenging question in the world.

Back in the proverbial day trading TV for Internet would have been just crazy talk. I shudder to think what would have happened to the parties that we threw, we would have essentially been hanging a Chateau de Geek sign on the front porch. But today with entertainment like available at your fingertips like this:

Or this:

What Really Happened At The X-Wing Launch - Watch more free videos

…who needs TV?

Yes my geek sign is being built right now, but at least it will remote controllable via a web interface. Oh wait, that doesn’t make it any better does it…

From my last post there was a comment at the bottom from Corwin that went like this:

“You really need to upgrade to two monitors - it’s saved my keyboards’ ALT and TAB keys.”

I’d never actually considered that before, I suppose it does stand to reason though that more something gets used the sooner it will break down. I mean, just look at any of the Reds pitchers…

That got me thinking about all the times I’ve had computer hardware go bad, for any reason, not just overuse. I had a video card once that decided putting horizontal lines across the screen every inch was a good idea. There was that notebook I had for work years ago that burned out an internal battery leaving the machine unbootable. I’ve had more modems than I can count just stop working for no good reason.

(Well, unless you consider the fact that modems just suck in general as a good reason.)

My favorite of one of all time though is a 3.5″ floppy drive that got killed in college by a snack cake.

Seriously. All right, I’ll explain, but first a bit of background.

When I was in college my senior year I lived in a house with a bunch of other guys. The majors broke down something like this:

Computer science (me)
Computer science/math (Chip)
Physics/computer science (Honk)
Psychology (Cap’n)
Latin and Greek (B)

Yep, that’s right, Latin and Greek. Don’t let that fool you though, today he is some kind of computer security administrator at, well, let’s not give away the name, a giant international paper company.

Cap’n could care less about computers but he was into video games so that made him all right in our book.

Anyhow, one afternoon, for reasons that escape me, we had several different computers in various stages of pieces all laid out on the living room floor. We also had a metric ton of junk food, including the bounty of our latest Coke raid at the grocery store:

Honk was washing down his Coke with a Ding Dong when one of us insulted him about something or another. In retaliation he threw the tin foil wrapper of the Ding Dong at the insulter. Now, being in physics he should have known that something with so little weight could never actually make it across the room to hit a target. Instead it slowly floated toward the floor until it landed directly on top of a 3.5″ floppy drive that had been taken out of a computer.

And then it sparked.

*Cross heart and holds up scouts’ honor fingers* I swear it did, I saw with my very own eyes.

What followed was a chorus of:

“Did you see that?”
“No way!”
“Does it still work?”
“You &#*$(#@!”

We put the computer back together and lo and behold the drive never worked again. In fact, you could say, “Ding Dong, the drive is dead.”

Thankyouverymuch. I’ll be here all week. Make sure to tip your waitress.