Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

I had to return a hockey parent's call tonight, and recalled the phone number without the aid of a roster or Palm lookup. The last four digits - 6502 - reminded me of my first home computer, a trusty KIM-1 powered by the MOS 6502 Microprocessor. "Trusty" is perhaps an exaggeration. The highlight of programming proficiency was making the bars in the 7-digit LED displays dance; making the KIM-1 do anything remotely interesting required soldering irons, cable, and external peripherals. Pre-dating "plug and play" was "plug and spark" along with "smoke and play" (which is distinctly not a rap reference, music fans).

Buried in a box of books that's been moved through the complete history of dorm rooms, labs, apartments, and offices, I uncovered the MOS scripture itself, a programming guide for the KIM-1 processor. It's funny reading, nearly 30 years after its publication, with an emphasis on using a full 16-bit address space, and using indirect addressing methods when 8-bit offsets didn't cover the full data range required. Working on the KIM-1 gave me an appreciation for systems at their most primitive level. Handling I/O on the single board involved a lot of "eye" and a lot of "oh", usually preceeding some expletive in the event of the afore-mentioned smoke or sparks. At the same time, working with an OS that fit into a few kilobytes of memory, getting code out of hobby magazines (the closest thing to open source at the time), and doing stupid board tricks cemented my fate as an EE/CS major years later.

What's the big deal? High-level operating systems, even higher level languages, compilers, interactive coding and debugging environments, and inspection tools like Dtrace, should relegate the monkish fascination with old and tiny environments to literary devices in William Gibson cyberpunk. But that's computing in the very large speaking. I'm surrounded, as I write this, by computing in the very small: a Palm pilot, a cell phone, a Sony underwater digital camera (which snapped the MOS guide portrait), an Airport Express, an iPod, and probably some RFID tags on my newest office floor covering, a collection of expedited delivery packages that announce the holiday season. I want all of these devices to be reliable, fast, and stingy with their power consumption. Many lessons to be learned from the MOS Def (and yes, that is a rap reference) 6502 world of the 70s.

What next for the yellowing manual of my programming pubescence? Unbeknownst to her, I'm giving it to MaryMary upon her return from Prague in exchange for whatever Patrik Elias swag she brings home.

Anyone who listens to me or reads my rants might think I spend all of my time in ice rinks dealing with hockey, hockey players, and hockey related injuries. Not so. I spend at least one very early weekday morning and part of each weekend with my daughter the figure skater, who has latched onto the up and coming sport of synchronized skating with a passion you don't often see in teenagers.

Synchronized skating is exactly what it sounds like: teams of 10-20 skaters performing precision moves like circles, kick lines, intersections (one or more lines crossing through each other), pinwheels, and spirals (skating on one leg), moving quickly from one formation to another. It's fast, it's fun to watch, and it's hard to do properly. Trust is defined when you're moving backwards at 15 MPH, you lunge down on one knee, and just know that your teammate from the other line won't hit you with her toepicks, avoiding a gouge just slightly less deep than the San Andreas Fault.

Synchronized skating takes the best of both of my favorite ice sports - the beauty and theater of figure skating along with the team work ethics of hockey. It's likely to be an Olympic sport within the next few convocations of the Winter Games; it's already contested at the national and world levels. There's even a skating magazine devoted to the sport (and yes, that's my daughter's former team in the photo, she's posed at the one o'clock position in the circle). Trade press coverage lends credibility, even at $50 for 6 annual issues.

There's one cardinal rule of synchronized skating: never let go of the skater next to you. Maintaining connected lines, as well as straight lines and foot synchronization, is one of the keys to placing well. However, if you wipe out, you immediately heed corrollary rule one: forget the cardinal rule, let go, stop the Zamboni imitation and rejoin your line. The coach of my daughter's team captured the key to success quite succinctly in a practice last week: "Skate your weight".

And so I've found another management lesson in sports ( Jonathan Schwartz will be dismayed because he hates sports analogies, which makes it all the more fun to invent them just to gauge his reactions): Push appropriately, grab onto your teammates, and when someone falls, don't skate over them -- pull them back to the line. Once you're out of college, engineering is a team sport.