First snow of the year

So I was up all night, not for anything particular. It was a rainy night .... but the morning brought the first snow of the year, in the guise of a snow storm. I realized that I didn't manage, in my last 3 winters here, to actually watch a snowstorm.

It looks strangely beautiful, and horrible at the same time. I remember watching those old movies where there will be snow blowing into the actors faces ... this one looks as bad as those.

I am sort of horrified to think what my car will look like after this storm is over. The prediction is for 3 inches of snow, but what I see outside the window looks way deeper than that. I hate to dig my car out of snow, and scrape the ice off the car's body.

Of course, living in midwestern US, we are probably luckier than those living in the east coast, or in the Dakotas.

:)

Looking into the Past

Sometimes, I think about, say, 20 or 30 years in the past, and try to imagine how they worked without computers. Then again, I think the people 20 years from now will look into us and our gas-guzzling environment-polluting cars and put on a huge sigh.

But, upon watching an episode of Futurama, I think I'll change my perspective. It was the episode where Fry goes to a museum in the year 3000, and one exhibit is the 20th century factory assembly line. The museum commentator says, they don't know exactly how the 20th century people worked, but their best guess is like this: a bunch of robots, with primitive looking clubs, chanting "Buga Buga Buga!!!".

When it comes to looking into the past, we often do the same. Archaelogists tend to create elaborate theories about the origin of things. I wonder what people 50 years from now would think of us, the modern techologies we cherish, and so on.

Buga buga buga? That's how we are achieving this? Who knows!!

PS: My profound(!!) thoughts come from watching Futurama and Family guy. Yeah, I'm very shallow ... :(

50 years of Hard disks!

NewsWeek reports that, next September 13th would be the 50th anniversary of the first hard disk drive.

Steven Levy writes,

"On Sept. 13, 1956, IBM shipped the first unit of the RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) and set in motion a process that would change the way we live."

Change indeed! Today, we have 120 GB or more hard drives sitting on our desks, with some geeks sporting terabyte storage systems for storing their infinite collection of Star Trek trivia and Klingon love songs.

So, what was the spec for the first disk drive? Let's see what Steven Levy writes:

"The drive weighed a full ton, and to lease it you'd pay about $250,000 a year in today's dollars. Since it required a separate air compressor to protect the two moving "heads" that read and wrote information, it was noisy. The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks—each of them a pizza-size 24 inches—was 5 megabytes."

Don't laugh. Your own drive will become obsolete in your lifetime, and you'd be telling your kids that "in 2006, I had a 120GB hard disk drive". I can visualize the smirk on your grandchild's face :)

I think in future, everything will become static, flash based or some other kind of chip based memory. Hard disks are good, have a lot of capacity for a dime, but still, they consist of moving parts, and that's why they are so much prone to failure.

Anyway, I still have my first 2nd disk drive. Though it sort of sings a serenade when I try to read something off it. Perhaps it's almost time I buried it in a time capsule for an archaeologist to discover in the year 2525 ...

Culture shock - 1

Today, I'm going to list some cultural changes I encountered when I first came to the USA


a. I landed in Chicago and cleared immigration at around 9 pm. I've been hearing that Chicago O'Hare airport is the 2nd busiest in the world, or something like that. So, I expected a huge airport terminal, with thousands of people (at least comparable to Dubai's lavish airport).

Well, not so!! As I went into the terminal lounge, I found out that I was the ONLY person there. Not even a guard, janitor or cleaner! At 9 pm!! I was extremely hungry after my 30 hour flight, but found not a single restaurant or coffee shop open. The whole terminal looked like a ghost town.

I had to spend the night at the terminal as I didn't have transportation arrangements, so I slept or rather napped on a bench, while tightly grabbing my luggage.

Compared to O'Hare, other airports of similar size would be almost always full of people at almost all hours. I later figured out why this happened ... O'Hare has a small number of international flights, all leaving from terminal 5, and there were no flights after 9pm. So, the stores all closed, and everyone left. I guess the other terminals, mostly handling domestic traffic would be a bit busier.



b. On my very first day, I went to meet a professor in the department. It was the high point of a ferocious mid-west summer ... with temperatures reaching 32+ c (90+F). When I met the prof, I found him wearing a pair of shorts, and a t-shirt. In Bangladesh, where hot weather is a daily occurrance 80% time of the year, a professor of high stature would almost always wear Suits, rather than comfortable clothing. So, meeting a bigshot professor wearing shorts. I thought it made him more down to earth and approachable.

c. On the 2nd week, a member of the group proposed that we go to lunch to welcome the three new students (including myself). Now, when someone in Bangladesh asks someone else to go to a restaurant, this means the person who proposes is footing the bill. So, imagine my surprise when I figured out, right out there in the restaurant, that I am to pay for myself! Not that there is anything wrong with that, but obviously, I misunderstood "Let's have lunch!".

Of course, this is not necessarily true in all cases.



Anyway, that's all for today ... I'll write more later.