James C. Liu's Weblog

Thursday September 09, 2004

Geekification of the Wife

We met a major milestone today in the history of my household. I carried on my first email exchange INSIDE our home with my Wife. Yepp. She was outside in the living room; I was inside the bedroom; and we had an exchange over this upcoming weekend's BBQ menu. Unbelievable. Separated by just 50 ft of hallway and a door, and she emails me. When I asked her why she didn't just come and talk to me, she looked at me seriously. "Sometimes, I talk to you while you're on the computer and you don't hear a word I'm saying. It's like words go in one ear and out the other. With email, I know you'll actually read my message."

Her words were very factual and contained no hint of condescension. And for the most part, she was right. However, I did have to make a correction in her statement. When she talks to me, words technically don't go in one ear and out the other. Rather, then enter one ear, then get redirected to /dev/null. I try to explain that I may look Chinese and have two-byte font and 2D graphics support for fancy Kanji bitmaps in my brain, but really, my audio processors are geared for English and the buffers don't work like an Infinite Stack. They work more like a limited sized FIFO; when the buffer fills up, the first stuff in is the first to get tossed.

She's only beginning to grock all this and optimize the use of my interfaces. Why she married me and how we even have kids can seem like a mystery, especially to my Sisters. They just don't understand. My Wife and I secretly have a Wireless Psychic connection to each other and it transcends the need a lot of times for verbal comms. In fact a great example of our psychic connection was demonstrated earlier in January when we did our taxes. After seeing just how much TurboTax said we were paying in Federal and State Income Taxes, we looked at each other, nodded and said out loud at the same time, "Better vote Republican this November." This wireless psychic feature in our relationship is great for playing mind games with our young kids. In fact, Psychically, she's telling me now that it's almost 8pm and I need to come home...but stop at Costco to pick up a case of bottled water and some diet soda....

Admittedly, it's been a longer journey for her to reach this point than it has been for me. She came from a pretty deprived childhood in working class San Francisco. Only one computer in the house. An old Packard Bell running Win95 with 16 MB of RAM and a not-so-whopping 1 GB of disk. The family had put quite a bit of investment into that computer in the old days, paying almost $1800 back in 1995 to get one with a 28.8kbps modem, even though they technically didn't subscribe to any ISP accounts. She was still living at home, studying part-time at SF City College and working full time to support her family and their Outlet Mall shopping bills up through the mid-late 90's when we met and I pulled her out of that barbaric, single node standalone computing environment (and I dare say calling it a "computing environment" was a stretch).

Her migration from San Francisco south to the Silicon Valley after meeting me introduced her to new computing environments and network technologies she had never imagined. These were her first experiences of virus free, stable, and long lived computing and the ability to use computers in a different room without actually sitting in front of those computers. I remember one of her earliest questions to me when she first came over, "You mean the computer doesn't shutdown and reboot after every few hours?" At that time, we hadn't established our wireless psychic link, so I was quite confused by her question. But she elaborated. "I thought the computers automatically crashed every few hours to save power and this gets you to stand up and walk around a bit; You know... get a cup of coffee while the system is rebooting."

It's hard for anyone at Sun to think of the benefits of a computer crashing. But evidently, my wife said that they talked with other relatives who suffered the same problems and most agreed that lock-ups, freezes, and crashes weren't really a problem ; just get into the habit of hitting Alt-F-Save, or Ctrl-F, or Alt-F-X-tab-tab-tab-S or whatever keystrokes each app used to save stuff to the disk. And when the system finally locks up, just hit the smaller button on thre front panel to reset and reboot. Plus they all agreed that a crashed computer saves power. And if she hadn't said that all so seriously in Cantonese, I would have died laughing or suffered major knee trauma from slapping it too hard. :-)

It didn't matter what her computing pedigree was in the past. I've always been tolerant of the lesser privileged, unlike some snobs I know. So, I useradd'ed her first NIS/YP Solaris/SPARC-CDE login account in 1997. She then mounted her first NFS home directory in 1998. And she got her first Linux login in 1999. But between school and work, she rarely leveraged the network, nearly missing the whole dotCOM explosion. But not all aspects of network computing were lost on her. She quickly figured out that computers eat power and generate heat. Great in the winter. But too hot in the summer. We got into some pretty heated arguments, and we spent quite a bit of money getting some portable Toyotomi airconditioning units. Still, I remember the times she said some pretty mean words - almost fighting words. "And Honey," she said then, "your machines are noisy and eat $25/month each in electricity. Maybe you should run Windows. At least they won't be running all the time and so our electricity bill won't be so high." I really can't express the level of frustration I experienced then with such statements. If we weren't married, I'd probably have broken up with her over such words.

Meanwhile, her family, still with the ancestral hardware suffered a set of losses. In late 1998, a friend of the family got the mistaken idea of upgrading the old Win95 box with a bootleg copy of Win98. The machine could barely run after the upgrade, and after spending quite the sum of money to increase the memory to 64 MB, the system crashed and corrupted the disk drive. The family was without computing power for nearly 3 months until they could reinstall the bootleg OS, but in early 1999, just as my wife learned the joys of Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps for directions and taught her family to use these web tools, their Canon Bubble Jet printer suffered a sudden and mysterious death.

Months went by and nothing happened. A year passed. One day, a baby shower invitation arrived for her family in SF. But not by Postal Mail - Instead, by Email. Attached was a PDF doc with graphics image of the Map and directions. The invitation was to a Chinese Ginger and Red Egg Party at Ming's Restaurant in Palo Alto. It was an unusual invitation already in that the venue was a fabulous Chinese restaurant outside of the usual venues of SF's various Chinese dominated districts. Legend had it that Ming's was located in a spatious lot east of Hwy 101 in beautiful and placid Palo Alto. Legend also had it that the food was quite good there, as good as any in the City. And Legend also said that Ming's had several hundred parking spaces and they were all free! But none of the SF relatives knew how to get there (most didn't even know how to drive), and most not having email meant that this invitation needed to be printed out and distributed.

Well, I took responsibility for fixing this broken computing resources, because mainly, I was the one responsible for sending out the invitation. You see, my Son was about to turn 2 months and all the Chinese almanacs said that that particular upcoming weekend was good karma for a Ginger and Red Egg party. We were over at my Inlaws for dinner midweek prior to the ginger party, because my wife's Mum is just a fabulous cook, better than my wife, even. And I had some Linux install CDs that just arrived in the mail from Cheapbytes.COM, a fairly new online company reselling various Linux distros at rock-bottom prices. The Inlaws' computer was defunct and had no data worth saving. So I wiped it clean of Win98 and migrated them to Linux. Everything just installed and worked. The modem, a controller-based USRobotics OEM model worked just fine and showed up like a normal 16550A UART. And the printer driver did support the older Canon bubblejet, but indeed the unit was dead and still we couldn't print the invitation.

While I may have painted a dismal picture of my wife's family, they weren't complete retro-grouches. They actually had Cable TV and two phone lines. The second was used as the fax/data line. My wife's younger sister had a student dialup account from the local State U. After setting up kppp to dial out, PPP worked like a charm. However I still hadn't figured out a way to print (with exception of buying a new printer), until a fortuitous phone call came in from Hong Kong. The relatives had been trying to fax something since very early in the morning their time, but the fax line was busy. Could someone check the fax machine? This gave me an idea. If all they needed was a semi-fine resolution fax with directions and map, then we could just send the image as a print-job to the fax-queue. And so with that, I setup a fax print spooler and sent the print jobs to the fax machines. And with that setup, we reached one of major milestones. My wife realized that evening that, indeed, the network was the computer, and the network could be anything - a simple phone line or a fast ethernet connection. Reliable client-server computing could lead to a happy family. Plus, we saved a little bit of money for now by not having to buy some new colour inkjet printer.

Still, we've come further over the last 7 years. We started webhosting our own family site and email out of our house in 1999. At first, it was noisy, hot and expensive. But with the advent of integrated chipsets, Linux and Solaris for x86, the cost of bandwidth and domain registration falling, and availability of low power and quiet systems, the computing landscape has evolved to make it much more ubiquitous at home, and with the whole family. In 2002, I learned about a new board form factor called mini-ITX with VIA's C3 low power processor. I spent around $400 and built a quiet server/desktop/router all-in-one system. And not long after, I built 3 more similar boxes that, today, save me about $15/month each in power bills. It wasn't long before one of the systems made its way to our bedroom. How many wives out there can say that they welcomed their husbands computers into their bedrooms?

Well, my wife can say that. I've "geekified" her. Hopefully, there's no turning back. September 09, 2004 08:07 PM PDT Permalink