A day in the big city

I learned about the Optimized AI Conference just a couple of days before it took place, but I managed to take in the last two hours of it on March 31. That involved driving to Marietta (north of Atlanta), where Melody lived and worked for a couple of years just before we got married, so I was revisiting old places that had undergone tremendous urban growth.

The conference was a success. I was delighted to see quite a few people I knew from LinkedIn, and one former FormFree colleague who was a keynote speaker and is now very well known for her SQL and data science courses and videos.

From LinkedIn:

That was in the Cumberland Galleria. Next I went for a walk in Cumberland Mall, where Melody and I used to walk around after going out to dinner, and was pleased to find it thriving. (As you know, the death of malls has bugged me; they were a feature of 1980s living that I very much enjoyed.) This one is doing plenty of business, although, like all malls, it no longer sells much but clothing; there is no bookstore, record store, or Radio Shack.

It has changed a little; Dick's Sporting Goods occupies what used to be Neiman-Marcus, where we used to look at luxury stereos and the like that we never expected to be able to afford. I'm glad to see the mall prospering, and I think the big problem in the 1980s is that about three times as many malls were built as the economy could support.

Dinner in the Food Court, then a brief visit to Micro Center (formerly MEI Micro Center) in Marietta, which is the oldest Micro Center computer store presently operating, though the chain started earlier, in Ohio. This store dates from 1988 and we visited it occasionally when it was new, although we normally go to the Duluth store now. I am glad to see them catering for hobby electronics; with the demise of both Radio Shack and the local repair-parts jobbers that we used to rely on, it has become very hard to get even the most basic components, supplies, and tools locally. For me, "locally" now means 50 miles away, but the point is, by having these things in a local store, they keep people aware of what they can do.

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Off to the moon!

Last night I watched the launch of a crewed spacecraft to the moon, for the first time since 1972. I saw the launches of Apollo 16 and 17 in person, from a swamp near Cape Canaveral, and had watched many previous launched on TV. This will be an orbit of the moon, like Apollo 8, not a landing there.

This time I was using TV, but not broadcast TV. I connected to NASA's web page and used ChromeCast to send my computer's video to our seldom-used TV set.

This picture is from a NASA press release:

While sending human crews is not the most efficient way to explore space, I think we need to preserve and update the technology we already have, rather than let the knowledge of Apollo be lost to posterity.

God speed, Artemis II.

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From twisted pair to fiber

Seven and a half years ago I chronicled the end of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) to our house and its replacement by an Internet cable and VOIP. Soon the coaxial cable will be replaced by fiber optics, and AT&T will again be our carrier. And we will have no cable TV service at all.

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