The really interesting thing about this link is it was sent to me by my dad, who is 73 years old.
That's really cool. My dad rarely sends me emails or texts but lately he's been doing so more often. I like it when he does. One of our topics of conversation of late has been bitcoin and he recently sent me an article on it. Your father was an engineer, is that right?
Trained as an engineer. Did post-grad work in radiation monitoring. Ended up working for Los Alamos National Labs doing dosimetry. Decided doing it by hand was dumb since he was just reading Nixie tubes; Nixie tubes output a voltage so why not just log the voltage? Ended up building the first remote metering interfaces, which needed a network, so he built the first computer network the Department of Energy ever had. Before long, he was more useful to have around as the guy who built the computer networks than the guy who measured radiation. At one point he had an 8,000-node network. Many of the devices used when he started his career are still in use. These are devices that predate CPM; they now have to talk to a port emulator that bootstraps them up to Windows NT4 which then gets translated to work with modern stuff. This is my dad: He's got his own little corner of the world deep in the heart of the DOE net that only he gets to talk to. For a while he did GIS for ARG/NEST; now he mostly keeps the machines running in the back corner of the Department of Energy.
Now I want to watch War Games again. It's been many years, in fact I may have actually been a kid the last time I saw that film. Your dad sounds really interesting. My father works at the family business. and has for most of his life. He coached my little league team, the Rangers to the championship and we won. He went to most of my New Green shows and he's the kind of guy that can talk to a perfect stranger in a grocery store line and not make it weird. He's in sales, the apple didn't fall too far from the tree. He's a closeted harmonicist.
Nice. The "family business" (on my dad's side at least) is farming, for generations back. Grampa and grandma were blown out of Bastrop County, Texas by the Dust Bowl, settled around Claunch, NM only to have the water go away forever and then spend four years as itinerant workers looking for a living. They came back to New Mexico - Los Alamos in particular - because post WWII there was a jobs boom. They could never afford to live there, though. They had a 5-acre plot on the Santa Fe Trail that my dad now owns. Kinda funny; my aunt ended up owing her parents enough out of her inheritance that my dad ended up with the real estate, yet she's got three kids that live within 70 miles of the place while me and my sister are a thousand miles away and never going back. Gonna have to figure out what to do with it. I will say that I covet my grandpa's '39 Farmall. My uncle, my grandpa and my grandma all ended up dying within 72 hours of each other April before last. It had been a long time coming, but still - for my aunt, she had a husband and two parents on Monday and by Wednesday noon she didn't.
a long time coming, but still - for my aunt, she had a husband and two parents on Monday and by Wednesday noon she didn't.
-that's horrible, that poor lady. Was it unexpected that her husband would go or was his death also a "long time coming?"