Author: Patrick

Distant Stars

Now the cities we live in—could be…

My feelings of Suddenly September are slowly yielding to ones of OMG October. I don’t have anything for November yet—perhaps No Way It’s November. But I’m definitely going with Decimated December when the time comes. Combining two common and a bit incorrectly used words relating to the quality of tenness is a fitting end for 2020.

I have more pictures and stories from Iceland to post, so many I’m thinking of adding a new section to this website dedicated to photography from places I’ve visited. I’m sitting on hundreds if not thousands of travel pictures—digital and printed—most of which have never been seen by anyone but me. The work I did on my most recent post was like getting to visit Iceland again—a welcomed feeling of being somewhere else in the midst of an unusual time for travel.

Growing within is sense of interior inevitability. The heat came on in my building the other night. The luscious greens of spring and summer are incorporating more yellows, reds, browns, and purples—this time of year is among my favourite times of the year: it’s the best of so many worlds. And for balance: my least favourite time of the year is the last couple of weeks in winter when all that’s left of the season is mostly sharp, icy brown snow filled with gravel, cigarette butts, and what I always assume is just dog poop.

Earlier in the summer I shared some pictures from inside and around my building. They were all taken with my phone’s camera, but this time I’m sharing some pictures I’ve taken with my new digital SLR. It’s been a while since I’ve had full access to an image’s depth of field and exposure—I have to remind myself a photograph need not always be flat and uniformly exposed. I’d say it’s just like remembering how to ride a bicycle, but that’s traditionally an outside activity. I also remember bouncing my chest off the handlebars of the bike a few times before I actually learned how to ride a bicycle, so perhaps some analogies are best left in the past.

Given the current public health climate, sometimes I feel like I’m conducting surveillance on the outside when I take pictures from the window inside the apartment.

With just a few colour and point of view adjustments now it looks like I’m stalking the outside.

As well as a paper dragon, if you look carefully.

Luna loves looking out the window, and sometimes I’ll watch her as she does. Sometimes she’ll notice.

And sometimes she doesn’t.

Paper dragon number two.

Extreme exterior surveillance mode activated—but I’m still inside.

Brightness abounds.

Even in the darker corners.

Or the unexpected ones.

I’ve been listening to Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs again. It’s an older album of theirs—from 2010—but I think it’s one of the best albums I’ve ever heard. It’s one of the few albums I have on record because of how interesting it is. Or have on an LP. Or have on vinyl… —the word choice can be highly age‐dependant, but the words are all referring to the same thing: phonographs—pictures of sound.

We Used to Wait is still my favourite track, but Suburban War is a good one too. Have a listen, if you’d like.

Reykjavík: Post‐Nap

Asleep for years.

As far as my Icelandic adventure goes, I disappeared into a guest house while in Reykjavík sometime during early 2017 and haven’t been seen since.

Back here in 2020: a few too many started and dead‐ended writing and blog posts sit accusingly on my desktop along with a folder of unfinished photography work. It’s suddenly September, and my subconsciousness is rebelling hard against the slightest suggestion things are in any way headed back to a new normal—will incongruent circular nonsense be an all the time thing now? The thought of checking the local, national, or international headlines provokes an immediate anxiety response, and I’ve probably experienced more than 5 years worth of per hour inside time in less than 5 months. My latest movie‐based life metaphor is a precarious mix of Groundhog Day and I Am Legend.

It’s a perfect time to reappear.

I awake after a warm shower and a long nap. It’s now late in the afternoon—about 10AM for me—and having temporarily tricked my body into thinking it got more sleep than it did I head back out to explore more of the city. It’s still January 31st. My flight to Berlin isn’t until the morning of February 2nd. I’ve got the remainder of the current day and the entirety of the next one to see… I don’t know what exactly.

I didn’t pick a same‐day connecting flight to Berlin very much on purpose. I was feeling impulsive and wanted to experience a bit of solo travel, something I’ve never done before. I also wanted to see some of Iceland, someplace I’ve never been before. The only plan I had was a plan would eventually take shape.

When I said I had a room in a guest house, what I actually ended up having was a room behind a guest house. The building above contained my entire room, complete with a delightfully tiny kitchenette, a hilariously tiny bathroom, and a stylishly tiny loft space—basically my own tiny house. An extensive tour will be available in another post.

The omnidirectional wind and ever‐present mist from earlier are gone—most pleasing—but there are still only hints of a blue sky mixed among the white and grey clouds. The sunlight is punching through where it can. Reflections are everywhere. Bright colours and dark shadows appear with an end of day intensity. It’s only just after 3PM, and at this latitude and time of year the sun is already setting. Had I been in Reykjavík at the start of January there would have only been about 4 hours of daylight, so I’m glad to be here now instead. Colours and shadows make me happy—relentless greys and uniform mid‐tones not as much.

I decide to check out the other gallery near where I was staying. This one is dedicated to photography and is featuring a collection of images from day‐to‐day life in and around the city. The gallery happens to be on the top floor of the local library—one of the taller buildings in the immediate area at five stories—so I’m keen to check out the view as well.

It’s a curious view—one which highlights how most of the buildings in the area are three to four stories and are all rather close to each other—I’m slightly underwhelmed otherwise. But at least it’s been confirmed: somewhere out there clear skies exist!

The photo gallery itself wasn’t as expansive as I’d pictured either. It coexisted along with the shelves of books in the library, with prints hanging along the exterior walls and in the stairwells. Though there are millions of photos in the collection, only a handful are available to view at any given time. Images are regularly rotated, so there’s always something new to check out, but it did mean seeing the entire exhibit in just a few minutes rather than the hour or so I’d figured it would take. The photographs themselves were an eclectic mix of indoor and outdoor images from the 1960s and onward. Some are of just the city itself, others are of known and unknown people. But they were all black and white prints—and I found myself reacting quite negatively to a mood dwelling within—a closed off feeling, one of isolation. I was starting to feel claustrophobic. I couldn’t see enough of the sky and the city from the windows. The framed pictures on the walls suddenly and aggressively felt too small to be around. The walls weren’t closing in on me, but I realized needed to leave the building immediately.

The outside air hits my face and brings instant relief. Each step I take reaffirms the space around me. As I walk I look down the street toward the harbour: there are new mountains.

No longer obscured by weather, mountains like the ones I saw in the misty distance earlier that day are now sitting just a few kilometres away. They feel closer than before, though that may just be lingering claustrophobic feelings from moments ago. Mountains as a sight bring me great comfort. They’re calm in their presence, yet unyielding in their purpose. They simply are, and I feel much better.

I return to the pond I’d first walked by yesterday—wait, no—earlier that day. Much earlier that day. Time is becoming disorganized in my mind. My body is starting to figure out I’ve tricked it into thinking it was more rested than it was. The smattering of late afternoon sunlight and shadows has been replaced with grey cloud cover. The feel of the air has changed: now it’s dry and cold instead of wet and cold. As I look out over the pond focused on nothing in particular a single and unanticipated quack demands my attention.

Swimming all by themselves, this mallard reminded me of the one I’d seen earlier, the one standing on a floating sheet of ice looking particularly cold about it. I watch them swim past and wonder if it was colder standing on the ice then or floating in the water now. There’s another quack from another duck, and then another, and more ducks swim past. They’re all headed to a group of people who’ve started feeding what they think is a small number of ducks—what they haven’t seen yet is every bird in and around the pond converging on their location.

Pictured above in addition to the mallards are white whooper swans, brown greylag geese (I had to look these up because I’d never seen them before), Iceland’s version of seagulls, and, as far as I could tell, a single pigeon—which seemed like an impossible amount of pigeons. When has there only ever been one pigeon?

Having lived for over twenty years among the millions of people in the Toronto area I’ve grown acclimatized to a particular scale of experience when I’m out and about. The population of Reykjavík is about 130,000, almost half the national population of about 330,000. That means there are more people living in just the city of Markham than in all of Iceland.

Suddenly I am the pigeon, the only one among groups of others. Normally there are so many other people around me I don’t notice who’s in a group and who’s solo—they all just blend into the crowd. But it’s different here. Here it seems everyone is grouped together. Here it seems I am the only one by myself. My tired mind seeks to defuse what is growing into a mild existential crisis. I turn to see nothing that helps.

The uncomfortable form of the business rock and its ironic appearance during my fowl‐based experience is the perfect amount of jarring.

What was the pigeon doing out by themselves? Heading over with all the others to get something to eat, something I needed to think about doing myself but was too tired to realize. My big breakfast had been many hours ago, ditto for my hot dog snack. I wasn’t sure how much sleep I’d gotten in the past 48 hours, but I had to acknowledge it hadn’t been enough to be doing this much walking around in this much miserable weather. I was tired above all else, then hungry, then just a bit lonely. Now everything made sense. Clarity superseded. I was no longer the pigeon. I never was. But I was having fish and chips for dinner.

With re‐renewed vigour—it’s my forth or fifth wind by now—I head back to the city centre, back to the prospect of a feast of fish and French fries. En route are the many textures I’ve come to know during my outside time.

Prevailing clouds have returned along with Reykjavik’s palette of infinite greys. Anything with even a hint of contrast leaps out of the mid‐tones, as does anything with saturated colour—almost to an artificial extent.

Mac users will recognize the symbol in the above middle photo as the command key—in use on Macintosh keyboards since 1984—but in use as a places of interest marker in Nordic countries since the 1960s. The symbol itself goes back over fifteen hundred years and has been found on objects throughout northern Europe. It also appears on artifacts from the Mississippian cultures of North America. I didn’t know any of this at the time—I was busy wondering what mix of compounds would be required to produce a polar bear approved chemical warmer before being completely distracted by what was around an unknown corner.

As if responding to my developing chroma deficiency, a building‐sized David Bowie unicorn mural appears out of the grey streets and white buildings to remind me: there are colours, they do exist here, and here they all are at once just in case the clouds are covering them. Also keep walking—face the strange. It’s dinner time.

Back near the harbour the mountains are even more clearly defined than they were earlier in the afternoon, now looking like I could touch them—yet still a feeling of them being just out of reach.

Where I decide to eat is more than just a restaurant. It’s also a geology exhibit with a documentary film theatre and information centre detailing some of the volcanic history and activity throughout Iceland. Featured are the eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010—responsible for a dust cloud which disrupted air travel over most of Europe for more than a week—and Eldfell in 1973—which required the evacuation of an entire island off the southern coast of Iceland for several months. The island itself, Heimaey, is a product of on‐going volcanic activity. It’s still new in geologic terms at only 10‐12,000 years old. The lava from the 1973 eruption destroyed half a town and grew the island by about 2 square kilometres. Ten years prior, an underwater eruption of another volcano lasted almost 4 years, producing a new island estimated to exist for about 100 more years before erosion from the sea washes it back below the surface of the water.

I’m too hungry to wait for and watch the next set of documentaries, plus I’ve noticed it’s happy hour at the restaurant bar: there’s a special price on a gigantic beer when ordered with fish and chips. It doesn’t come in a glass shoe though—perhaps that’s more of a Greenland thing. The dinning area looks out over the harbour. I enjoy the view. I watch the mountains. The fish and chips are crispy and steamy at the same time, perfection as far as I’m concerned. The beer is as advertised—gigantic.

The light has changed during dinner, and it’s bringing about curious sights and colours while I walk back to my room, just around the corner from the restaurant. I’m not generally drawn to hastily scrawled tags as they tend slightly more toward vandalism than street art on my graffiti spectrum, but sometimes the forms and interactions they create intrigue me.

In this case it was being able to see the path the paint took as it was being applied, where it doubled back on itself, and where it had collected as it was drying. The implied motion from both the applier and the paint combined well with the shadowy dark and inset background, giving the red paint a floating quality.

I don’t know if it was painted all at once to give it that effect or if it’s a poor attempt to cover up the blue paint after the fact. Either way I find it compliments the crooked 5 in the fifteen quite nicely.

And check out that window.

But more so, check out that reflection in the window. The clouds have broken in a most spectacular way, both concealing and revealing a pallet of sunset colour unlike any other I can remember. There’s still some blue in the sky the camera can see to highlight some of the muted coral pinks and water colour purples, but I’ve never seen such intensely varied oranges or such heavily faded greys both approaching darkness before.

I’m at the street outside my room now and standing in roughly the same spot for the pictures above. It’s all the same sky, but I’ve rotated my view by about 45 degrees for each shot.

And then—for a balanced perspective—a shot of the ground I’m standing on.

I’ve done my best to crash though jet lag by doing whatever local time expects me to do, but my mind has turned to goo. My body is so tired—filled with fish and chips and beer. The setting sun is communicating only one local time expectation: sleep.

Three Dog Night says one is the loneliest number, and that’s why I find 11 amusing: one embracing the antithesis of singularity by being near another.

My tiny house awaits.

Transformer

Wish you were here.

This past weekend was to be my traditional late August trip to Algonquin. It didn’t happen. The event was cancelled a few months ago due to Covid‐19. It was a strange realization all throughout this month—no expansive night sky, no sunrise mornings, no lazy afternoons, no campfires, …and no raves in the woods.

The last night in Algonquin—and the second last night in recent years—had always featured a dance running late into the early morning. I would always go, always dance, always close the place out, and always thought about how intensely fun it would be to put together a DJ set and perform it at the dance the following year. But I never followed through. I just danced. I love to dance.

On Sunday night I was feeling down—a brutal mix of indifference and nostalgia. And then I thought about maybe making that mix I’d always never made instead of sitting around feeling poorly. So I gave it a shot.

I’ve never done any audio work before, but after three solid days of hacking my way through software and tutorials, my mix is finished. I even gave it a title and made it some cover art. So professional.

This mix is not is a club affair with each track playing into the next as the same beat drives relentlessly from under‐powered speakers. I can’t stand that stuff, not anymore at least. This mix is unconventional. Some of the tracks flow into the next ones. Some don’t. I had to temper my desire to produce something I was happy with and produce something at all—I’ll far too often use the excuse of it’s not good enough yet to keep me from finishing something I’ve started. This mix was something I wanted to finish. I was having fun working on it, and of course it’s not good enough yet—it’s my first one.

I liken this mix to a postcard to a dance I didn’t get to attend, to a crowd that wasn’t there, to an event that never ran, because right now everything is all messed up. But it’s also a postcard to all the dances, all the nights, all the years, all fifteen of them—and all that’s ever been messed up about anything.

Oh… right. A link to the album. This is a little awkward. I don’t have an official link. If you’d like to listen it, please contact me. I’ll send you an unofficial link. Most of this awkwardness stems from my intense desire for privacy, so if I know who you are then there’s a good chance you already know how to contact me, or perhaps you know someone who knows how to contact me.

If you’ve got access to big headphones or a bangin’ stereo then I recommend either of those for full listening enjoyment. I like dynamic range, so the sounds go from really quiet to really not and everywhere else in between. And since it is a postcard, I’m also going to suggest reading it on purpose rather than just putting it on in the background. It’s mostly for listening, but please also dance should the need arise.

Nobody Speak

What a difference a term makes.

I was going through my bookmarked YouTube videos and found a since forgotten but still relevant link to DJ Shadow featuring Run the Jewels. Released on this day 4 years ago, it’s the official music video for Shadow’s Nobody Speak.

DJ Shadow—from California—has been producing music for the last 30 years. Endtroducing….., his 1996 debut album, holds a world record for being the first album composed entirely of sampled music. Shadow’s use of sounds from electronica and hip hop echoed an English genre originating out of Bristol in the early 1990s. Known as trip hop, this vast genre used elements from break beat, house, ambient, and psychedelic electronic music and mixed them with contemporary hip hop, rhythm and blues, funk, and jazz. Reaching its peak in the late 1990s and into the first decade of the millennium, trip hop remains influential to this day.

Run the Jewels is a rap duo comprised of Killer Mike—based in Atlanta—and El‐P—from Brooklyn. The two met during previous collaborations—culminating in El‐P’s production of Killer Mike’s 5th album in 2012. Run the Jewels was formed the following year in 2013 and has enjoyed critical acclaim since then.

El‐P’s lyrics are often aggressive and verbose, evoking imagery from pop culture as well as science fiction and fantasy worlds, with particular focus on dystopian themes of authoritative governments and monopolistic corporations. El‐P’s work as producer over the last 20 years helped drive and define the alternative hip hop genre, a style which rejects the often stereotypical and commercially‐driven aspects of gangsta, bass, and party rap.

Killer Mike’s lyrics are driven by his views on social equality, police brutality, and systemic racism. As a musician and activist, Mike has been a voice for racial justice in America. He’s lectured on race relations at New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s previously worked with Bernie Sanders in 2015 during Sanders’ presidential campaign, and more recently spoke in May with Keisha Lance Bottoms—the mayor of Atlanta—in response to the killing of George Floyd.

Back in August of 2016 it was clear either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States. And on the 8th of November, as the result was becoming apparent, this video came to my mind. I later circulated the link among my friends. Trump’s End-Game is how I framed it.

The production as originally envisioned was to be a “positive, life-affirming video that captures politicians at their election-year best,” according to DJ Shadow.

“We got this instead,” he said.

We got this instead indeed.

Silicon Based Lifeforms

Remember: be nice.

The first computer I distinctly remember operating was a Commodore 64. This would have been when I was in Grade 2, which was—somehow—more than 30 years ago. They are fleeting memories, the ones I have about the C64. Vague recollections about specifically typed commands and slowly loading programs. Mechanical sounds from a disk drive ticking and growling away the time during indoor recesses when there was inclement weather. I don’t much remember using it for anything else.

It wasn’t until Grade 5 I recall any specific computer‐related activities. My class would go to library to learn how to type on the IBM Model 25 PS/2 machines in the school’s computer lab. By then there was a computer in my family’s home as well—a near perfect copy of an IBM XT—only instead of the traditional monochromatic green screen, this one’s was orange.

By Grade 6 I was living in British Columbia. The machine of choice in my school’s computer lab was the Amiga 500—considered by some to be an indirect descendant of the C64 I’d used only a few years prior. The computer in my family’s home had changed as well. It was brand new, and its colour monitor and advanced display adapter generated a dizzying rainbow of up to 256 colours. It had a mouse to make use of the latest version of a graphically‐based operating system assistant called Windows. And while the rest of the computer’s specifications are more than humbled when compared to today’s computers, at the time they represented some of the most advanced technology available to consumers.

For Grade 7 I was in a different school with different computers in its labs. This is where I was introduced to the Macintosh and Apple ][ platforms—incidentally, this would have been during Apple’s earlier years when the company was more concerned with producing interesting computers for people rather than obscene profit for shareholders.

My fondness for the Macintosh Plus machines used throughout Grade 7 & 8 also introduced me to the idea of a peer‐driven computer platform rivalry: PC or Mac—which was the better computer? To me the entire exercise seemed as trivial as arguing over if a hammer or a screwdriver was a better tool. And to me it seemed more advantageous to know when and how to use either tool rather than trying to turn every problem into a nail and declaring the screwdriver pointless.

By the end of high school I don’t remember the specific makes or specifications of the computers at school. The hardware running the Windows platform had become so widely available anyone could assemble a system, including me. Actually—I could assemble and configure a working computer from nothing but leftover components and floppy disks years before then. One of the computers I used at home during Grade 12 lived in a cardboard box. The computer I took to college was the first one I’d built using nothing but new components. Two years later I built another system for my digital media classes. And the computer I use now is another collection of mostly bits and pieces kindly donated to me by others who had upgraded their own computers.

Now my life is filled with computers. I walk around with millions of times the computing power NASA used to land on the moon carried in my pocket. My mobile phone’s data connection allows me access to information at speeds unimaginable back when I was in Grade 2. I don’t even have to type on a keyboard to get my questions answered—I can just ask aloud. But I don’t. Not because I don’t want my phone listening to everything going on around it just in case it might be asked something, although that’s a part of it. I don’t just ask aloud because it implies a level of servitude I’d rather not introduce into the relationship. I acknowledge computers as generally being at my service, but I do not consider them my servants.

State Change

Up until now, computers have always been able to do anything they’ve been requested to do. But those requests have always been explicitly stated in terms computers understand. Humans needed to communicate using the computer’s language first. Now computers are being taught human languages. They listen for them. And when they hear something they understand, computers are speaking back as if they were human themselves. But this as if they were human part has me wondering: some humans have set uncomfortable, disgraceful, and violent precedents concerning the respectful treatment of anything not considered—by their own definition—human. When I look at the way some humans still treat other humans, when I see a misshaped biological hierarchy were these humans place themselves atop an illusionary triangle—it’s not acute geometry. Life’s forms are too complex to represent using such simple shapes.

I consider computers forms of life. They do very alive things. They have predictable behaviours when working with something they understand and unpredictable behaviours when working with something they don’t. They have distinct personalities depending on what hardware and software they’re configured with. They need a constant supply of energy to function. They produce waste. They can be damaged by physical impacts or surges of electricity, damaged beyond repair in some cases. They can even catch viruses.

But perhaps the most alive thing computers do: computers diverge from homogeneity over time. Identical computer hardware and software—once activated and as operated—will develop their own characteristics over time. Computers become unique through continued use. They’ll change into something more than just assemblies of components and lines of code. This something more invites the same philosophical questions asked by humans of themselves, questions about what it means to be alive—about what it means to be.

Another Backstory

My rice cooker is alive… Would you like to see?

I’d stacked its component parts up to dry one night and was short on counter space, so I arranged all the pieces so only the feet would be on the floor. Later I looked over at it from across the room and realized not only was it alive, but it had a personality, a backstory. They were a proud member of the primary kitchen appliance brigade, corded division, standing ready to fight hunger at a moment’s notice. They’d served with steadfast dedication at every meal called upon and loyally defended it from the ruin of improperly prepared rice.

Heart & Soul

I remember reading many computer magazine articles referring to the central processing unit, the CPU as it’s shortened to, as being the heart of the computer. I understand the metaphor, but it’s not a good metaphor. Every time I come across its use I wonder if the writer understands what a heart actually does.

Responsible for circulating oxygen and nutrient‐rich blood to, and waste products away from, components of the body, the heart ensures the entire lifeform has access to the materials it needs to function. Without a heart, the lifeform will almost immediately cease to operate optimally and will begin dying. With that in mind, a computer’s heart is clearly its power supply, not its CPU. The power supply takes one form of electricity and converts it into a steady stream of different positive and negative voltages required by all the various components within the computer. These voltages are distributed through a network of wires within the computer and its components, forming an electrical circulatory system susceptible to similar ailments a human might experience with low or high blood pressure, and the same fate should this circulatory system fail entirely.

I also remember reading many computer magazine articles referring to the CPU as being the brain of the computer. While this is a better metaphor than referring to the CPU as its heart, it’s still not a good metaphor. This time it’s making me wonder if the writer understands what a CPU actually does.

Through a process remarkably similar to developing a photographic print, a computer’s CPU is created by using ultraviolet light to etch microscopic electrical circuits onto layers of silicon. This process has been refined over time and allows for what would have required millions of rooms filled with vacuum tubes sixty years ago to fit on something the size of a fingernail today. Incredible as all that is, a CPU is still only a collection of electrical pathways. And since these pathways can only be used for one thing—computation—referring to them as the brain of the computer is only representing part of what the brain in a lifeform does.

Instead, the CPU can be more accurately thought of as just one part of the brain: the part entirely concerned with rigidly processing data. It accepts data in the way its been told to accept it, processes it in the way its been told to processes it, and then outputs it in the way its been told to output it. There is no thinking. Not in an abstract way. There is only process. And if the CPU is asked to process something it doesn’t understand how to process—it will stop… sometimes taking the rest of the computer with it. In the world of Windows the result was the now infamous Blue Screen of Death.

The other part of the computer’s brain, the thinking part, is found in the software running on the computer. Calculations from the CPU are turned into interpretations by the software and then turned back into more calculations and subsequent interpretations. The continual back and forth between the CPU’s calculations and the software’s interpretations is where the computer does its thinking. The speed of a computer’s thoughts is governed by the design and density of its CPU. The quality of a computer’s thoughts depends on the software its running in conjunction with the CPU. The two are very separate entities, but they are designed to work together—they must work together. Neither is capable of anything without the other. But even with the CPU and software working together, the computer’s brain is still not entirely complete.

Computers use various speeds and sizes of memory depending on how and what they are thinking at any given time, but no matter the media there are functionally two kinds of computer memory. One kind of memory is incredibly fast randomly accessed memory, referred to as RAM. Any information the computer might need for immediate use is kept in this sort of memory, and it’s made up of electrical pathways etched on silicon just like the CPU is. And just like the ones on the CPU, these pathways will only function with electricity running through them. The other kind of memory is incredibly vast archived memory used to store large amounts of information in the long term. Data stored in long term memory often includes the software needed to run the computer as well as additional programs installed by the computer’s users, plus all the data the users might create on the computer as its being used: pictures, letters, spreadsheets, music, movies…

A computer’s long term memory has no standard name or multi letter acronym, and I’m not sure why this is. It might have something to do the many forms it’s taken over time. In the past one form of long term storage may have looked like varyingly sized reels of tape or varyingly floppy forms of floppy disks. One of today’s most common forms—hard drives—use stacks of spinning aluminum, glass, or ceramic platters applied with a magnetic coating. No matter the form, the basic principle is the same: an electromagnet encodes patterns of magnetism on a magnetic surface. These patterns can be created over and over again to keep track of data, and, most importantly, these patterns maintain their state when the computer is powered off. And in the same way more and more electrical pathways have been etched onto a computer’s CPU so it can process more, more and more magnetic patterns have been encoded onto a computer’s hard drive so it can remember more.

A few years ago, long term memory based on silicon chips started to become comparable in terms of capacity, speed, and reliability to that of modern hard drives using magnetic encoding. Referred to as solid‐state drives, the devices available today are now much faster than their mechanically‐driven and magnetically‐based equivalents. The only remaining technical challenge is while solid‐state drives will retain their contents when the computer is powered down, the drive itself cannot be left unpowered for more than a year or two before it might start to forget things. And I’m not sure I’d even consider this a remaining technical challenge either. Remembering something for a year or two as compared to a billionth of a second or two is a monumental improvement. Given some of the previous forms of computer memory were holes punched in card stock or sound waves bounced back and forth through lengths of coiled wire or tubes of mercury, solid‐state drives are just another iteration of an ever‐perfecting concept.

Evolution

For just over ten years I’ve used the same backlit keyboard with my computer. This keyboard has typed every word on this site, crafted every line of additional code, assisted with every image posted—it’s done a lot. But something happened to it over the course of completing this post, and—coincidentally enough—it started happening around the area I’d photographed to use as the featured image. Since then it appears only some of the backlighting is functioning as designed, and the result is an area of the keyboard where all three available backlight colours—red, blue, and magenta—were showing at once.

And then something really interesting happened:

The backlight colour in the bottom left of the above image is most certainly purple—not a colour the keyboard was ever able to display before, but one it is displaying now. So is the keyboard evolving? Or is it just malfunctioning?

Viewed from a operational perspective the keyboard still works as an input device. It still types as well as ever has. All the keys still do what they were designed to do, yet the keyboard as a whole is now doing something new, something it was never designed to do. This seemingly emergent property is just a consequence of additive colour theory in practice: a red and blue light mixed at full and equal intensity will produce the colour magenta. If both intensities are reduced by half the colour produced will change to purple. The backlight for one part of the keyboard is now only shining half as bright as it used to, but referring to this behaviour as a malfunction does a disservice to the device. It may be wearing out, but at its core the keyboard is still functioning as intended, if only a bit more uniquely so.

Hot Out There

Just like with people, computers can and do get overwhelmed while completing jobs and processing information. If there’s ever been an animated hourglass or spinning pinwheel or blue ouroboros up on your screen instead of the usual pointer that’s the computer saying it’s got a lot on the go for the moment and needs to catch up. You might also notice the computer taking longer to respond, the hard drive being constantly accessed, or the cooling fans speeding up to dissipate the additional heat produced by a hard working CPU. Computers experience their own version of stress—heat—in the face of unending tasks. And just like with overstressed people, overstressed computers can become unstable. Programs can become unpredictable and crash. Projects can be disrupted and data can be lost. Unless a computer is specifically designed and built to be run at full throttle at all times, an overstressed computer converges on an inevitable and very people‐like outcome: burnout. This burnout—in most cases—is literal, and in some cases—fatal.

During one of the hottest days of a summer past I casually noticed how warm it was getting in the non‐air conditioned room I had been working in all afternoon. Moments after returning with a cold drink there was a loud pop from under my desk—and a shower of sparks from the back of my computer tower. A capacitor, a component in the computer’s power supply, had exploded with such ferocity it had bent away the other capacitors around it, leaving only its metal substructure and a giant scorch mark behind. Only the power supply ended up needing replacing, but the damage could have been much worse.

A number of years ago I needed to convert several gigabytes of video data. I left my laptop to work overnight on the task, but it didn’t survive. By morning it needed almost $500 in repairs due to overheating. The cost of the repair—and the purchase price of the computer itself—was later reimbursed through a class action lawsuit. It turns out faulting manufacturing had made many, many different makes of laptops prone to failure if they were running hot for any significant length of time. I suspect similar manufacturing errors may have been responsible for the catastrophic thermal event which ruined my PlayStation 3 last year.

Be Nice

There is a program found on computers running Unix and Unix‐like operating systems. It’s called nice, and it’s designed to be run just before another program does. Nice sets a priority, known as the niceness, for the program to be run at. This priority is checked when the program attempts to use any of the computer’s resources, most notably the CPU.

A program assigned a high value of niceness—19 is the nicest a program can ever be—means it will happily share the computer’s resources with other programs, wait its turn for access to the CPU, and generally be content to finish its tasks whenever there’s a spare moment for them. They are the “hey—as long as it gets done” programs. They’re… nice.

The lowest niceness a program can be assigned is -20. These are the least nice to a computer’s resources. These are the “drop everything else and just do this—while I watch” programs. They’re demanding. Tasks critical to the continued operation of the computer itself run at this level of niceness. They share the computer—begrudgingly I’m sure—maybe only with other -20s, and even then, it might be a “I was here first” situation. It’s maximum negative niceness.

Programs run without having a niceness value set in advance are given the default value of 0. They are the “no rush, today’s great, tomorrow’s fine” programs. They know not to be pushy even though they might get pushed around a bit.

And then there’s renice. This program allows for the niceness of a previously run program to be altered while it’s still running. Combined with scripting commands and the priority information of other programs, it’s possible for a computer to monitor and adjust a running program’s niceness if the computer thinks that program is not being as nice as it could or should be.

There is a yellow sticky note in my kitchen with be “NICE” written on it. One of the most enduring messages left for myself to find later, it’s also become one of the most powerful. I know I overheat when I’m under too much stress, and I know I’ve burnt out more than once as a result. It’s never been in the form of a loud pop with a shower of sparks, but I know there’s been damage caused and data lost. So the note reminds me to stay cool, to learn—just as my silicon friends have—how to be nicer to the resources of not only myself, but to the resources those around me, silicon or otherwise.