I used to work for Technicolor Videocassette back in the day. We’re talking about 1990 here. Back when the videocassette was king, and the Intel 486 pretty much ruled the world. In those days Technicolor made about 70% of all the VHS cassettes in the world (including all of Disney’s stuff).
Anyway, we were flying out to Westland, Michigan every week, doing our development work on their videocassette packaging and shipping pipeline that they were integrating with Walmart for what’s called “JIT” delivery (“Just In Time”) services. This meant they’d get the order for the specific video tapes, pick them from inventory and ship just the ones the store had requested.
So we were working on a database driven system that fed a monstrous device called the A-Frame, which was little more than a big conveyor belt from which video cassettes were picked from the stacks standing along its pathway. The cassettes would be selected by computer, be popped off the bottom of the stack, hit the belt, and end up in a box at the end. It made the job of finding the cassettes in the warehouse for each order moot, and saved a lot of steps for the people who had to run around and fill the individual orders. We had spent months on the project, and were working in a small long room with windows in one side that had previously been a shop floor production office. We called the thing The Aquarium because it resembled nothing more than a big fish tank, about the same proportions and glass on the one side, you get the idea.
We had sort of a pointy-haired IT manager, who shall remain nameless (partly because I don’t remember his name, so it’s just as well). We put a sign in the window of the Aquarium that said Do Not Tap On Glass, just like you’d see at a pet store, but when he saw it he didn’t get it at we had to explain it to him. Not the brightest crayon in the box, this guy.
The real story was the database server. Today everybody talks about SQL servers, and they’re commonplace, but back then it was brand new and nobody really had a good handle on what they could do and how they worked – except this one guy in his early 20’s we’d hired away from Microsoft, because he was an expert in SQL. You pronounce it “sequel”, but back then nobody could agree on how it was pronounced, and this ex-Microsoftie called it “Squirrel”. It was as apt as any other pronunciation, and we liked the confused expressions people got when we talked about it in front of them, being the incurable geeks that we were, and so for us, it stuck.
Then came the problem of connecting the SQL server to the A-Frame. In those days we had pretty bad networking. The best you could get was something called ARCnet, and the cards cost about $300 each, and that was in 1990 dollars. They failed a lot, and these days your average cable modem outperforms it by about ten to one or more. So to cover the great distances involved in the warehouse where we were, we needed something better. There was no wifi then, but there was optical fiber.
This was the glass stuff. It was expensive, and fragile. Once a forklift ran over a cable and broke the fragile strands, and a thousand dollars worth of this glass cable had to be restrung. Finally, the networking problems and the SQL server and the A-Frame were all connected together, and we ran our first communications test. We all held our breaths, and sent the message from the control station. The A-Frame responded.
We had been working for months getting to that point. you never saw a bunch of programmers whooping and hollering with excitement as we did that morning.
While all this was going on, the Pointy Haired IT manager happened by and asked what all the commotion was about.
“The Squirrel’s up on glass in the aquarium!” we happily exclaimed.
Mr. Manager just looked quizzically confused, and not wanting to admit that he had no idea what we were talking about, gave us a vague, slightly open-mouthed smile, and excused himself.
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity’ but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
~ T. E. Lawrence
Dream big. Seriously, dream big. Everyone has dreams, but most dismiss them as undoable, unworkable or unrealistic. And these people are the ones whose dreams never come true. Explore, find out what you were meant for. Shake the box and tip the crumbs out and see what’s really there. There’s more potential inside you than you realize, and the difference that makes a success instead of a failure can be surprisingly small.
I recently got an email from one of my coworkers who wanted to know what she should be looking for in a good used guitar in the $100 range. I thought I’d share the answers with you, because people get asked this a lot and it’s one of the most common questions a new guitar player asks:
Hi Gene,
I’m going to start looking for a full-sized guitar, for myself.
In looking at used guitars, what brands do you think are better than others? Or, does it matter?
I’m going to try and find something that is around $100.
At the $100 price point, your best measure of the quality of a guitar is you. You can often get a little better quality if you get a used one rather than a new one, but here are things to look for:
Does it feel right in your hands? Everybody’s hands are different, so get a guitar that feels good in yours.
Does it sound right (even playing all the way up the neck)?
Does it have a cutaway so you can reach the high notes (if that’s important to you)?
Are the machine heads (the tuning heads) firm or do they slip or rattle? (“What the – where’s that buzz coming from??”)
How high are the frets compared to the fretboard? Taller frets make a guitar harder to play than slimmer frets and will require more energy to get a clean sound out of them. The difference can be small, and you can often only see this by comparing one guitar to another.
Does it speak well? Some guitars are quieter or sound tinny compared to others, some guitars are brighter, or have a stronger bass content in their voices. Remember that there are things you can do to make a guitar’s voice change depending on how you play it, but that its fundamental character will remain fairly constant.
Does it have a truss rod in the neck so that the bow in the neck can be adjusted? Surprisingly, some at this price point don’t. A guitar with a truss rod in the neck will have a little hex bolt head inside the sound hole just under the end of the fretboard.
After that it’s more like picking out a comfortable pair of shoes than anything else. Listen to the guitar’s voice, and find one that sounds like an old friend. That’s the guitar you’re going to get the most out of.
Brands to look for are Taylor, Martin, Ovation, Yamaha, Fender – but there are dozens more really excellent brands, and again, at this price point the well known name brands are as likely to be lemons as any other guitar.
If I get a nylon string guitar, will it have the same great twang as your guitar? Or, will it always be softer?
No, it will always be softer. Nylon is uncommon, most guitars are steel string. They have an inherently softer sound than metal does, and they tend not to break strings as often (but a guitar string usually costs a bit under $2 and can last years).
I just don’t want it to sound like a harp, like the little 1/2 size guitar that’s my daughter’s. And, if I buy a nylon string guitar, can I get it strung with steel strings, in the future? Or, is the guitar just made for one type of strings?
A guitar is made for one particular kind of string, and you can’t use nylon strings on a guitar made for steel strings, and vice versa.
That said, I used a Kawasaki nylon string guitar (with no truss rod in the neck) for about 25 years before it finally broke in half on its own standing against the wall one day, just from the string tension.
A last point to mention is that at the $100 price point, adding an extra $20 – $60 can make a huge difference in the quality of the guitars in your price range.
Guitars can range from a hundred or so into the thousands of dollars. The difference between a $100 guitar and a $150 guitar can be substantial – the difference between a $2000 guitar and a $3000 guitar may be one only a professional musician could appreciate.
Robb Pratt gave us Superman fans a new little work of art to geek out over:
The character design is a departure from anything I’ve ever seen before on this subject material – it has an appeal that’s hard to define, but is immediately engaging. The biggest problem is that it’s over all too quickly – but then, it’s also hand animated, and it really does take time to do this at all, let alone do it well. It all makes more sense when you go to Mr. Pratt’s web site and discover that he’s a Disney animator and storyboard artist.
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