163 lines
4.4 KiB
Plaintext
163 lines
4.4 KiB
Plaintext
From slcpi!govt.shearson.com!mjohnsto@uunet.UU.NET Tue Jan 8 09:48:28 1991
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To: wordy@Corp
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Subject: Part 6 of CAA #2
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THE DEBUGGING MARATHON
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#6 in the second online CAA series
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by
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Steven K. Roberts, HtN (WORDY)
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Bainbridge Island, WA
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October 3, 1986
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I'm into it now. Around me people are planning send-offs, media events,
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pot-luck parties. New friends, both the sorrow and delight of travel, drop by
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to play music or swap stories. And this place in the woods, the last for a
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long time to be so familiar that I know the light switches and shower knobs, is
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taking on that patina of clutter that turns a place to crash into a home.
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But I seem not to notice. Somewhere on the fringes of my awareness, life
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goes on. Phone calls, GEmail, endless coffee, the daily business of my hosts.
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Meals appear, then vanish; Maggie gazes at me across the table with love and
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concern and asks, "how's it going?
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"Well, I think the inrush to the speech board is trashing the HC11 logic
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when the MOSFET turns on... I don't know, there must be too much inductance in
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that wire and maybe I need to run the damn thing in its linear region.
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Confuses the hell out of me -- why can't the world just be digital? I'm nested
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3 or 4 levels deep again -- last thing I knew, I was trying to get that serial
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crossbar network fired up and got sidetracked. But at least the 100 interface
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is finally OK: I got it running on autostart and it's passing a new column of
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SIMUL keys from the handlebars." Pushing back my chair and gulping coffee, I
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run to the next room to dig for the tattered blue software folder, buried
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within hours under piles of databooks and hardware clutter. I run back in and
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lay the annotated listing on top of her spaghetti squash.
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"See, it spends most of its time up here in the executive..." I begin, but
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her eyes are soft and her fingers are on my arm and she's not thinking about
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logic at all. I pause. "Did I show you how the lookup table works?" I begin
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again, feebly, but she shakes her head and kisses me. I've been at this too
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long. Some people do this for a living, you know, and never recover.
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But I surface occasionally, long enough to play the flute or frolic in the
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woods -- long enough to catch brief glimpses of the life of adventure that is
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only days away. Days away? It seems abstract as I stare into the depths of
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the system... isn't making all these computers hum smoothly (just to each
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other, not to the radios) in the critical path to bicycle touring? Just ten
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more days, just ten more days of going mad with frustration and muttering
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arcane snippets of logic lingo to a remarkably patient Maggie.
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She's obsessed too, of course. Maggie's never done this before; I have.
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She sews waterproof fabric into bizarre shapes, packages foods into zip-locs,
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grapples with wiring till the tears flow, and worries over the road-worthiness
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of her untried machine. In a way this is still an experiment for us -- I
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plucked her from stable small- town environs, helped her spend all her savings,
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whisked her 3,000 miles away to a machine shop in the Washington woods, and
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told her to pack everything that matters to her onto a bicycle. Tentatively,
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she tries her hand at changing a tire, and I realize that we BOTH need
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patience.
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Ah, we'll find out soon enough. In the meantime, it's getting colder
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here, snow down to 4,000 feet in the Cascades, trees in full autumn glory only
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150 miles north of the border. People are telling me more and more frequently
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that it's time to head south, and they're all wearing down vests. Hmm. But I
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still need to calibrate the packet board, make the compass software work, fix a
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charging problem, reinforce the console support, build a mixer amp, cable the
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helmet, get 1200 pages of documentation microfiched, design the touch-tone
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encoder, install the rear solar panel, mount the flute, improve the brakes,
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etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Worse than a damn house, worse than a damn car,
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worse than a damn job. But it's more fun than any of 'em.
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Short chapter this week -- aside from filming with Evening\PM Magazine and
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CNN, I've done little other than work on the machine. I really wouldn't mind
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telling you about it in excruciating detail, but I'd have readers whacking
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BREAK keys all across the land. That wouldn't do at all.
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So I'll see you next week.
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-- Steve
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