Author: Brian J. Noggle

Scientists Explore Underwater Quantum Links for Submarines.

As you might recall, gentle reader, I have lots of experience with Quantum Link.

As some of you older folks might know, Quantum Link was an online service for Commodore 64s which later became a little thing called America Online.

But I was on it in the old days, before it was cool. I’m a Q-Link hipster.

Well, all right, not a lot of experience. Let me explain.

When we lived in the trailer, we got our first computer, a Commodore 128, with my mother’s inheritance from her aunt. We also got a modem with it (not one you plug your handset into a la Wargames, but a flaky Volks 6480 1200 baud modem into which you plugged your telephone line directly. We got wind of or, quite likely, a free installation disk somewhere, perhaps with a magazine or sent via a magazine’s mailing list.

So we installed it.

To get into Q-Link, you had to dial up to one of the big data centers that leased their lines to businesses during the day, but were available for consumer traffic at night. The client software ran and communicated with the company servers back east, and you could get into chat rooms both public and private (yeah, Baby Boomers invented online sex, too, you damn kids). The news groups and forums were free, but chatting and playing games was not; you had to pay an extra six cents a minute to do so, six cents a minute that was added to your phone bill (come on, not everyone had credit cards in 1987).

You would think the limits to off-business hours would have minimize the damage a couple bored teens could do, but you’d be wrong.

My mother worked first shift in those days, so she’d leave the trailer a little before seven in the morning, and we’d roll out of bed and hop online for a couple of hours of Plus time before the data center would cut over to businesses. And nights, we’d weedle my mother until she relented to let us have an hour of Plus time, maybe even each.

I imagine they had an account page somewhere that could show you how much Plus time you used; I’m also sure that if I saw it, I would have dismissed it with “What does another $3.60 matter?” (call it Dollars-a-Day Bad Habits: The Early Years).

When the phone bill came, somehow we’d racked up over $300 in charges. Which took diligence, gentle reader, and probably sneaking onto the service at night as well.

You know, $300 doesn’t sound too horrible now, but my sainted mother was a clerk-typist spending her take home pay paying for the oldest, worstest trailer in the park and cheap ground beef and off-brand Hamburger Helper, so this was a significant amount for us at the time. Maybe an extra paycheck, or thereabouts. She just admonished us in the adult fashion–you know when you do something so bad that you don’t get yelled at, you get admonished, which is worse. And she paid it without docking our allowance–which was, what, maybe a buck a week at that time? I would probably still be paying that off if she hadn’t been so gracious and forgiving.

But that was the end of Q-Link for us, and we were relegated to BBSes when our Volksmodem wasn’t flaking out on us.

So maybe I don’t have as much actual experience with Quantum Links as I put on my resume.

Years later, as I mentioned, it became America Online, and I signed up on my mother’s old 486 (ask yer grandpa). And I posted on a newsgroup through it. And the rest is wonderful history. So not only did I get a beautiful wife on the Internet before it was cool–I got her on QuantumLink.

(Link about the submarines via Instapundit.)

You know, I’ve seen advice that you should buy gift certificates/cards to support businesses that are locked up by order of the governor.

To be honest, that’s a bit of a gamble, ainna? The gift card will only work if the business survives. Which is becoming less of a toss-up the longer this goes on.

This came to mind because I gave my beautiful wife a gift certificate for a local yoga studio for her birthday last year. Actually, I gave her two. I often give her gift certificates for an experience sort of thing–a spa or something–but when it comes to a gift certificate to the gun range or the yoga studio, I hope that she’ll invite me–but she immediately thinks of a friend she’d rather take, and then their schedules don’t align, so the gift cards remain in her desk drawer for years.

The yoga studio’s gift card has an expiration date of one year from the purchase, so basically a week or so before her birthday this year. In January, when her schedule was continuing to not align with her designated yoga friend, I mentioned that I would be happy to go with her, so we sort of made plans that we would block out some time for it.

Then the shutdown happened, and although the studio is offering Zoom classes, I’m not sure this is how we want to begin our classes. So the shutdown could conceivably run past the end date of the certificate, or it could run so late that we wouldn’t have time to use up the certificates (I bought two to emphasize she could bring someone else–I meant me), or the studio could shutter entirely in the next couple of months.

So support your local businesses by buying gift cards, but only gamble as much as you can lose.

Which explains my ulterior motive for ordering at least once a week from ABC Books. It’s not because I like to accumulate books willy-nilly at the thought that I might want to read that particular title someday. It’s because I generally have $100 or $150 in ABC Books gift cards on hand to give for birthday presents and whatnot. I need to prop them up as best I can or else I’ll have to think of some other default gift for my boys’ school mates or teachers.

This morning, I awakened before dawn to the smell of stale smoke.

Initially, I thought it was the wind coming down my chimney and picking up the scent of last week’s wood fires in the firebox, but its prevalence and eventual resolution into something more akin to a grass fire than a wood fire led me outside to see if any horizon or, worse, pasture adjacent to Nogglestead or Nogglestead itself were on fire. I haven’t grilled in a couple of days, and it’s been years since I set my yard on fire whilst grilling (embers from the fire would occasionally alight upon and alight a mulched flower bed across the driveway-a flowerbed that was not renewed after the second such incident).

It also awakened my beautiful wife, and when you’re awakened by an alarm–even if it’s only the scent of a fire–you don’t go back to sleep easily.

I wonder if it was the remnant particles of this, suspended: 200 acres of miscanthus go up in smoke.

That’s a little northwest of here, so probably not. But sometimes we get the scents of grass fires that are dozens or hundreds of miles away.

Just we’d rather not get them while we’re trying to sleep.

Yesterday, we worked in the gardens of Nogglestead, and as I was turning the 16′ by 16′ vegetable bed with a spade, my beautiful wife and oldest son were working on the flower bed in the back yard. And they called me over to handle a snake they found.

We have a definite protocol for handling snakes at Nogglestead:

1. Remove or kill the snake.
2. Research exactly how dangerous step 1 was.
3. Exaggerate how dangerous it was.

Prairie ring-necked snake?

via GIPHY

I prepared breakfast this morning at Nogglestead:

You know, some years ago I became slightly notoriouser for putting silly things in my kids’ lunches for school.

They soon got wise to me and started checking their lunches before getting into the car in the morning. Then they evolved to preferring hot lunch. Then we all evolved to no school.

So I have to have my food-based fun where I can.

We’ve only done carry out two times in the time of Corona, and it was only for two orders. The restaurants were a combined 0 of 2 and on their way to a combined 0 of 3.

The first time was a week or so back when my beautiful wife went through the drive-through at Popeye’s and ordered a bucket of chicken, some biscuits, and a chicken sandwich. When she got home, we discovered an emptiness where the sandwich should be. We didn’t go back for a sandwich.

Yesterday, we ordered carryout from Zio’s, a small Italian joint that has kind of gone downhill in the last decade but still has good salad dressing that my wife favors. So she ordered four entries and salads because they had a special going on. They had to make some substitutions based on their stock–a lot of bowtie pasta substitutions. She discovered that they had left a ticket open when taking phone orders and had included someone else’s meal on our ticket, so she cleared that up, or so she thought.

My wife went to pick it up and to see how the apocalypse is coming along, but when she got home, we discovered that they had sent us only two entries, one of which looked incorrect (my sausage, peppers, and penne bow-tie pasta looked like it had white sauce on it instead of marinara). So she called again, and they offered to make it right, so we both went out into the wasteland.

We got there, and a row of cars awaited orders. A single worker came out after a bit, bringing orders, and she brought our corrected order–but as she walked away, we discovered it was still missing an entree. So she brought that out after a couple of minutes, and we could all sit down to dinner an hour later than we’d hoped.

I understand that restaurants are running on skeleton crews right now–the Zio’s employee told me she’d only just been brought back yesterday because of the demand–but their management had better realize that when people are working to support these restaurants through this time of uncertainty. But mistakes in the carry-out might create ill will that will linger longer than the coronavirus. And, unfortunately, on my part, the effect is cumulative. So I’m likely to remember each successive problem as worse than the first.

I feel worst for my poor wife. This rarely happens to me because I always check stuff in the drive through or at the point of pickup. Because I have a couple of picky eaters in my family with special ordering predilections.

So on Saturday, we had our discussion triggered by the Billy Joel hit “We Didn’t Start The Fire” as we tried to give them a concise history of troubles in Asia in the 20th century as well as boxers Billy Joel followed as a youth.

We got to the lines:

Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur, space monkey, Mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

And I told them about the film, briefly.

When it came time to watch a movie on Sunday, I found I have a two-videocassette set in its original cellophane wrapper. As it’s a three hour and forty-five minute movie, I guessed rightly that there would never be a time when I wanted to see the film more acutely than then, when we could watch part of it after church and then another part of it after chores.

I’m sure I knew at some point that it was subtitled “A Tale of the Christ”–I think I had a copy of the book pass through my hands in my eBaying days, but as it started with the birth of Jesus, I apologized to my children that it was apparently a Christmas movie instead of an Easter movie. However, the film ends on Good Friday, so it’s a Holy Week movie.

I called it on Facebook “uplifting Easter story of bloody vengeance,” sort of Gladiator but with Jesus, but that’s a little oversimplification, of course. But you can see how the former had its roots in Ben-Hur. Which must have been quite the spectacle in the cinema in 1959.

It was enough to keep my boys pretty rapt in it over both parts. Which is either a testament to the story or the big budget (for 1959) special effects.

One of my boys has a shorter attention span than the other, especially when it comes to old movies. He’s prone to wander in and out and then ask what’s going on instead of, you know, watching. The younger, though, will sit through almost anything with his father, such as National Velvet. Since my beautiful wife only tolerates old movies with me occasionally, I think I’ve found an old movie buddy to watch the to-view shelves at Nogglestead.

Come on, you had to know I have to-view shelves of VHSes and DVDs at Nogglestead that differ from the viewed shelves, ainna?

Seen in a New York Post video that appears at the top of most of their stories for a while, and that I accidentally played somehow:

I’d say Sign me up except I’ve been a remote QA tester for, what, seventeen years now?

Although I keep my eyes on the job markets, and the listings are a little thinner than they’ve been in the past, and most of the listings are for automated testers and software development engineers in test, which are the magick elixirs to low-cost “quality” to which we’ve all become inured.

Also, note that this home-based worker’s workspace differs from mine in two significant ways: In mine, the pastry and baked goods case is never that full, and the videos reflected therein are heavy metal.