Lazy Dogs are Nerds
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Tom is a nerd

Around 7th grade (1978), I got my first computer - an Apple II. Oddly enough the computer arrived shortly before being dumped by my then-girlfiend Debbie. I remember getting the phone call and being rather upset, but managing to console myself in the green glow of my new toy. I also got my first pair of glasses around that time.

My Apple II looked just like the picture except that the two floppy drives were El Lobos and the joystick was a custom job that I made with the help of my dad and fellow nerd Dag. We formed a quasi-company Tesseract, made a cool logo, and had a grand plan to sell joysticks and the fantasy game we had written called Post-apocalypse. The two of us had programming sleepovers (yes, I brought my whole system to his house) typically starting with Totinos frozen pizza. I had written a 3-d dungeon rendering engine in Pascal which was not bad for 1981. Dag had cranked a 6502 assembler graphical display code to handle the "outdoor" character movement. We got the whole thing integrated into a game of sorts, but sadly it never quite made it out the door.

Although I did take the Apple II to Caltech it eventually started gathering dust as I got sucked into mainframe computing. After graduation the computer made its way into some boxes at our house in LA, and then to the trash. However, a community of computing nostalgia buffs has kept the flame burning as they record the history of Apple computers and trade software to run on emulators or old hardware.

Before really concentrating on physics I spent a summer working on parallel computation algorithms, in particular a code to efficiently solve sparse linear systems (abstract, PDF) on the Caltech Mark II 128-node hypercube . Unfortunately, for this hypercube system it took a minimum of 30-45 minutes to compile and link my code, so development was rather painful. On the other hand, this gave me an opportunity to learn to juggle (which I did) and to learn to play guitar (which I did not).

The years went by and I played on Dec and VAX/VMS machines at Stanford, wasting a tremendous amount of time trying to make VMS seem like Unix. Then there was astronomy on Suns with Solaris, and then after a long hiatus personal computers found their way back into my home. For two dreary years battle was waged against Microsoft Windows until I saw the light and made a Redhat Linux partition on our Sony VIAO PC. I quickly discovered the joy and misery of Linux, since the VIAO did not have hardware control of the CPU fan. In the absense of any software to tell it otherwise the fan just went full blast all the time. So I ended up spending hours searching the internet and discovering how to install kernel modules, all the while wearing ear plugs to block out the deafening fan noise. Though it was a fun exercise (especially writing my own thermal control code), eventually all the hacking did start to wear thin my patience. Which brings us to the present as the the circle closed and we (the whole lazy-dogs entourage) switched back to Apple.

Even though I curse each time I am weak and buy a song from iTunes, overall the Mac universe is pretty satisfying. Right now we have one Mac laptop per person (Aga scored a MacbookPro for graduating from Rutgers) plus a PowerMac G5 dual 2.7 Ghz for the heavy lifting. The Sony VIAO is still nominally operational, mostly to support scanning slides on my Canon FS4000. And Aga's old Dell stands ready to let me look at Lazy-Dogs on Internet Explorer and see what doesn't work. Unfortunately I thought it would be interesting to install the beta IE7, but it appeared to have completely replaced IE5.5 with no obvious way to go back. Great.

In this picture we have a typical scene with each person on her laptop and Majka doing her best to clear out the room. Anyone who has owned a dog knows the drill. The collar was the aftermath of surgery to remove a lump from her cheek.

The PowerMac G5 is a beast with the fans blowing all the time, so I had to drill a 2" hole in the floor down to the basement and hijack the room formerly known as the dark room to house the computer. A few extension cables and a $75 digital video cable and I got back my peace and quiet.

Aneta is a nerd