Category Archives: Sufficiently Advanced Technology

2010 – the Year of the Beeps – Part Five

Fast forward to January 7. It is about 8am. Before she tied me up, the young lady who is ordering me about gave me a very silly hat, one that I would not be caught dead in on the street, and told me to put it on. When I didn’t put it on quite right, she adjusted it just the way she wanted. By now, however, I can’t defend myself: I am tied down in an uncomfortable chair – it would probably be much more comfortable for someone about three inches shorter – all trussed up like a gourmet bird about to be roasted. Food is on my mind, as is coffee: I have not been allowed any food or water since last night.

I cannot escape. My left arm is tied to my right leg; my body is held onto the chair by a series of thick straps. A clamp grips my right index finger. Every so often a painful contraption chokes off the circulation in my left arm. People pay good money for this sort of treatment. Indeed, I was forced to pay in advance. And it wasn’t at all cheap.

The chair to which I am tied is in the center of a large room. There is a lot of ominous-looking stuff just out of reach, including a series of large plastic articulated arms which might be movable lights, although they are angled so one could imagine them to be all sorts of things. All but one of the lights are turned off. Earlier, before they all left me here all alone and went off somewhere where I can neither see nor hear them, there was a young woman in here, dressed in a sort of uniform, pointing one of the objects right in my face – it is a bright light – explaining that in a few minutes they were going to stab me with something sharp, and make me bleed. Along the wall to my left is a nozzle a bit like what one would use to plug a garden hose to the outside of the house, but this one is inside and nothing is plugged into it. (Do they use it to sluice down the blood?)

There is a loud beeping noise, like the sound of my own heart, coming from behind me, but I can’t move my head to see what is making it. The woman explains that after they have taken all the blood they will want will feed me my own blood – inject it, actually. After that they have done that, she says, a man (for she is just an assistant, I am going to attended to by a veritable team) is going to take a series of very sharp and nasty-looking implements casually displayed at eye level for my viewing pleasure – and their easy reach – and cut a nice hole into me. Foreign substances will be introduced. The metal bits look nasty. There are a lot of shiny implements with sharp bits, in all different sizes, all laid out in rows. (I asked for this. I am paying for this. It is probably not too late. I could ask them to let me go and they surely would.)

As all this is explained to me in an incongruously cheerful manner, the beeps matching my heart rate go up a bit. Eventually the man comes. To add insult to imminent injury he is wearing a big Florida Gator’s hat that covers all his hair. He asks disapprovingly if I am nervous. He attacks my arm. Blood goes everywhere – “a gusher,” he says. I don’t find it as funny as he does. “We’re going to feed you a little cocktail now,” he says.

I want to protest that I don’t drink before lunch, but they inject it intravenously and very soon I am unconscious. Two hours later I’m awake again and my dental surgery is pronounced a success.

Now I can only eat mush for a week, which really puts me a good mood. Then again, they did prescribe some strong stuff.

Is this the right frame of mind for grading, or an excuse to put it off?

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2010 – the Year of the Beeps – Part Four

Think of this as an intermission, as no beeps were directly involved, but on the January 5th the downstairs heater lost the plot. It didn't beep. It didn't in fact seem to want to do anything.

Florida, coincidentally, is enjoying it longest cold spell in recorded history.

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2010 – the Year of the Beeps – Part Three

The third set of beeps started going off on January 3rd. They were most audible from in my study but it wasn’t clear if it was the smoke detector in the study or at the top of the stairs. I said one, my oldest said the other. Fine, I told him, replace both.

Being a teenager he preferred to just stand there until he figured out which it was. Being a dad, I had him change the other one anyway, on the theory that having all been installed at the same time, they are all about to go. He's tall, and the ladder is right there.

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2010 – the Year of the Beeps – Part Two

January 1st. Too early in the day. Downstairs something was beeping.

That alone isn't saying much, it seems like every time we bring something new into the house it wants to beep at us. The programmable coffee pot beeps when the coffee is done dripping, and again when the hot plate turns off. The microwave, the washer, the dryer (but not the dishwasher) beep when they are done. The dryer even has an option to keep tumbling clothes every few minutes for a few more hours at the cycle is done in service of the idea that they will get less wrinkled, but that only makes it beep all the more.

But this wasn't one of the usual beeps, it was surplus. And it came and went. Beep. Delay. Beep. Delay. Beep. Very very very long delay.

The noise seemed to come from the kitchen. Or as it the dining room? By the time I'd get over there, the beeps would stop. And then start again some twenty or thirty minutes later.

Eventually I decided it was coming from the garage (which has a door to the kitchen). That made the leading suspects the garage smoke detector and its neighboring carbon monoxide detector. Neither was blinking. Both are installed right next to each other, in very high in a hard-to-reach location about ten feet off the floor. I can get to them by standing on a large object to the left of the four stairs leading down from the kitchen, then taking a very long stretch to stand on the small edge of the little platform that holds up our air pusher. It's rather precarious there, although there are walls to push against to keep from falling. It's very hard to get down again. I wasn't going up there until I was sure I needed to.

It wasn't until Saturday, the 2nd, that I caught the carbon monoxide detector in the act. Climbing up revealed that the alarm meant the backup 9V battery was low, not that I was about to asphyxiate – that would have rated four beeps in quick succession. A quick battery change, some more gymnastics, and peace.

Temporarily.

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2010 – the Year of the Beeps – Part One

Very early January 1st, something in my study, which is right next to my bedroom, started beeping very loudly. I dragged myself out of post-New Years revelry bed (Ok, nothing wild, but this year we actually celebrated instead of our normal pattern of sleeping off jet lag), to find that my UPS for my computer was unhappy. Which was odd, since the computer was off, and there wasn't much drawing power from it.

So I tried to turn on the computer. It wouldn't start. This woke me up, since I was just finishing up a short paper that was already a bit overdue, and had no backups of the most recent draft, the product of several days furious typing, outside the RAID mirror in the computer itself.

There didn't seem to be any obvious power issues. The lights worked. The sockets, including the dedicated line into which I plug the UPS, worked. But the UPS was unhappy. And every attempt to get it to something made it beep more.

Finally I got another UPS into range (we have a lot of computers), plugged the computer into it, and it started right up. I felt a bit better. No lost work.

The UPS comes with some software that … if the USB cord will just reach … tells me what it is thinking, and it tells me that the UPS is running off the battery because of overvoltages on the line. And the battery is so low that it won't let the computer start up.

So now I know the cause of the problem. Moving the cord around to other outlets doesn't help much, although the voltage does seem a bit less on the shared (not dedicated) plug. So I reset the sensitivity to allow a higher voltage, and hope my equipment will be OK. The battery starts recharging. Soon the UPS is allowing my computer to go on. But over the next three days, even at the higher level it trips repeatedly, and finally I turn off the beeps. Which means that yesterday my computer tries to go into hibernation mode all of a sudden when the battery has dropped to 50%, something I haven't noticed since I have turned off all the other warnings.

Why, you might ask, is FP&L delivering 132+ volts? As best I can figure, our current cold snap means that people are not running their air conditioners. And I suppose heaters just take less power. In any case, there must be a lot of surplus capacity all of a sudden.

Anyway, by the time I figured all this out and checked that my document was OK, I was far too awake to go back to sleep.

Just as well, really. The next set of beeps were downstairs…and no, not the UPS that powers the network. That one was suspiciously quiet for some reason which will need investigation….

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2010 Starts With a Beep

2010 started with a beep. Actually lots of beeps.

Full story later.

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