I'm the lead developer at The Onion. When I'm not working I enjoy long moonlit walks along the beach with robots, the history of science and technology, and warm fuzzy kittens.

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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. —Robert A. Heinlein

A Box Of Wires

by Jeffrey Weston, Mon Oct 6 10:55 pm, 2008

...sometimes sharp, tangled, mostly useless old wires. It was not my intention to spend hours digging through an ancient box of wires, but after a decade or two, and stubbing my toe on it, suddenly that became my intention. Maybe it's half a life of reading brutal Zen koans, but I just wanted to purge all the tangled wires and get to some kind of pure wire minimal existence.

It could have been worse, early in the 00's I untangled most of it, and twist-tied some of it, although I don't recall actually throwing anything out. You never know when you'll need a serial-to-alien-device adapter. I couldn't take that final step, getting rid of a hundred audio connectors I'll never use.

What amazed me were how many items (dozens and dozens?) were telephony. Phone cables, modem cables, modems -- all screaming out how desperately difficult it seemed to be to stay connected before the era of the dedicated home connection. I had a modem card for a Zaurus 5500 -- was I planning on dialing in somewhere behind the Iron Curtain? And before the ubiquity of USB, marveled at how many insane cables you needed. I had several 20 foot parallel cables. Why? Was I setting up an office of printers for some kind of subversive Zine resurgence movement? And why did I have a CF to PC card adapter? What was I adapting? I don't even recall why or how I bought it at this point. It's like a relic of momentary gadget insanity.

The rest of the box seemed to be filters and converters. I had more European power plugs than times I'd been to Europe. They clustered together, strangely, aside from the tired wires, like they were frightened or conspiring. They just didn't seem to want to be thrown out, and I kept dropping them as I tried to shovel them into a C-Town plastic bag. And power converters -- have you noticed that power converters have gotten much smaller? I had converters there which must've weighed several pounds. I didn't even think about alternate uses in this box-o-wire purge, I'm not gonna use the converter as a paper weight, I'm not gonna build robots out of the old cd player, I'm not going to use the modems (I in fact don't even have a phone line) time for it all to go.