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