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January 27, 1997
Two dark-eyed juncos are sitting on either side of my front porch like someone arranged them. Earlier they were hopping around under the lilac bushes (what's left of the lilac bushes after "the big storm") seeking whatever it is they eat. How they decided which bird would fly to which side of the porch is beyond me. I felt like there should be a sound track.
After watching them for awhile, I came back upstairs here to add them to my new improved life list. It feels odd adding common birds that I've seen many times, but hey now that I've got this computerized list I gotta add all the species I can...
The clouds are rolling in for tonight's predicted snowstorm. It was brilliant blue this morning and is soft gray now. Maybe the storm will happen as predicted. I've taken to disbelieving the weather forecasts because the "big storm" was not accurately predicted and one of the annoying Friday storms wasn't predicted at all. Not to mention that Saturday morning one a couple of weeks ago... The weather reports make no sense lately. They can't even describe what is actually happening at the moment. I can't take anymore of my radio telling me it is raining when the sky is blue and it is snowing when it's raining and there are flurries in the air when there's already 3 inches on the ground. I know predicting the New England weather is challenging, but they're usually better than this. I mean can't they stick their heads out the window once in a while?
The first programming job I had was working on a climatological model. Or was that the 2nd (analyzing the aurora borealis may have been before that)? Same research center, different scientists. No matter. They collected the data from airplane pilots who checked off weather conditions in pencil. Legions of "data entry girls" (that's what they called them in those days) entered it on FORTRAN coding forms and punched in in on these huge IBM 029 keypunch machines. I would get stacks of punch cards from them and stick them in a cardboard box behind my FORTRAN programs to plot the data. A "runner" picked up the boxes, drove them to the computer center, left them overnight, picked up the output in the morning, and dropped it off at our office. One night the operator (in those days computers had white-coated attendants - mere mortals like me were not allowed to touch them) dropped my card deck. Even though I had numbered the cards in fear of this eventuality, he somehow lost the card that told the plotter to stop. My program ran the plotter all night until the paper and ink ran out. I got my card deck back with a nasty note from the head white-coat... I don't think any of this actually helped them predict the weather any better.
Later they got a magtape drive - one of those huge reel to reel jobbies that used to show up as "computers" in movies of the early '60s. I wrote a program to transfer the data to tape, which reduced the incidence of scrambled cards. Then I only had to worry about it once. After than I ran and reran the plots using the magtapes.
Shortly before I left that job we got a Teletype terminal with a modem/acoustic coupler. How interactive! Of course at 300 baud dial up speeds it made the overnight runner seem like a blessing. Today I saw a picture of an acoustic coupler in a catalog - a clever solution so you can use your modem and laptop with ANY phone line. At least it's 24Kbps. I suddenly realized that even though the idea of an acoustic coupler didn't seem revolutionary to me, the majority of today's laptop users have never seen one!
Probably the ivory billed woodpecker hadn't gone extinct then either...