A few bytes about Mr Bill
I work as a geochemist. Its a good vocation if you like occasionally going out for field work, but also like working with instruments and computers in the laboratory. Geochemists draw from many fields of expertise to solve problems in the Earth Sciences. We are rarely bored. My favorite rocks are Proterozoic granites. I think everyone should take a course in geomorphology. After all, we are surrounded by land forms and water, causes and effects, light and darkness. Here I am at the summit of Mt Lincoln @14286 feet.
"...The hills are shadows and they flow
from form to form and nothing stands
They melt like mist the shadowed lands
Like clouds they shape themselves and go..."
---Alfred Lord Tennyson
I was born August 9, 1956. I'm the oldest of three full brothers and a sister. I come from Irish(50%) Scottish(25%) English(25%) stock on both sides of the family. Temperamentally I have a Celtic disposition. I've a pretty long memory thats not as fast as I would like. I'm left-handed, 5'11.5" in height, weight 225, hazel eyes, started out very blond, but now have brown hair. We moved 8 times before I reached 8th grade. I like high altitude semi-arid climates and think the western slope of Colorado is perfect. I like to cook, almost anything with green chili, hot curries, and Italian. In the catagory of liquor, I like dry reds like Cab Sav's and Zin's, Dark (not sweet) beers, porters, or stouts (Guinness Stout), and smokey single malt scotch.
I'm not much interested in American football. However, when I was 10, I liked playing soccer when we lived in Windhoek, Namabia. I played basketball in high school for a church team. I like playing softball in casual games. I was on my high school swim team and still like swimming very much. I hike for exercise but I can only swim in the summer because chlorination really gets to me.
I play the flute by ear and wish I could play blues guitar. I have an axe and small amp and plink a bit. I like of rock and roll with a strong blues influence (e.g. Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Neil Young). I also like female vocalists (e.g. Grace Slick, Sarah McLaughlin, Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchael) and Irish bands (e.g. Steeleye Span, The Chieftains).
I like to read about 1-3 books a week. Any less and I suffer withdrawal pains. This however does not take too much time as the average paperback only lasts 5-6 hours. Also, I am a night owl and so I steal a few hours every night. I have 1500-2000 titles I've collected of favorite authors. I write some Poetry which my friends have encouraged me to post.
Pets? We had all kinds of the bird, turtle, lizard, snake, rodent variety. We kept Morgan horses from childhood up through high school. I used to ride often with a bareback pad and western snaffle bit. Dogs are OK and pretty cool but I'm more of a cat person. We have had a succession of mellow siamese cats. I have kept one or more fish tanks since grade school. Mostly, I now keep dwarf african chiclids because they are good parents and very territorial, but rarely kill one another which makes for interesting interactions across the various territorial boundaries. Most apartment owners that would object to dogs and cats will allow fish.
When I am not reading or working, but especially when I am working, I like to use and tinker with computers. I used to be a big OS/2 fan but now at work must run WinNT for windows applications. I find that troubleshooting operating system snags are more interesting than actual computer games so I guess that makes me a geek of sorts (-: You can see whats current in my geek life at Geek's Corner
I first learned to program on a Monroe desktop calculator as a junior in highschool in 1973. I would not have passed Algebra without it. Our teacher allowed us to use the calculator (programmable by magnetic strip if I remember correctly) if we had a program ready to go during the test and turned in a printout of the program code along with our answer. Naturally, I coded every problem type we might get on a test and did every problem on the tests on the Monroe calculator. Later our teacher taught us to write FORTRAN and ran our codes once a week and brought us the results. So, FORTRAN is my milk language and I still prefer it for doing numerical problems.
Later in college as a freshman at UT El Paso, I quickly acquired an account and began writing FORTRAN with punched card decks for the IBM 360 they had at the time. It was fun to see how much resources one could tie up with one program. Early on, we could only request up to 512K bytes of core memory. I spent enormous amounts of time scrutinizing the very long stack of error codes manuals for FORTRAN IV G and H. System 360 JCL was fun to learn and by then as a masters student I found that reading the data off the tapes onto reserved cylinders and then doing system sorts was faster than doing it in FORTRAN for the relatively large data sets (60000 records) I used. I learned and quickly forgot BASIC as necessary for small jobs. SPSS was available about then and I used it frequently.
In 1983 I bought my first PC, a Compaq DeskPro. Upgrading from 512 to 640K of 120ns DRAM was a $256 option. I bought the 8087 math co-processor just a bit later. They talked about but never came out with an I/O coprocessor. Too bad, desktop PC's never got the desktop version of a mainframe datachannel. I bought two TallTree Systems JRAM cards and put 2Mb of 100ns DRAM on each of them. Then I had a massive 704K of DOS memory to run my programs and 4Mb of ram disk for fast FORTRAN compiles and disk access. I tried and quickly rejected Windows (what a loser!) in favor of Double DOS and then moved on to Quarterdecks DesqView for my multitasking needs. I got a modem and from then on did all my computing from home. I wrote my MS thesis and the FORTRAN code to crunch it at home and printed it off on the mainframe as needed.
I bought my first hard drive in 1986; 20Mb for $500. I upgraded the bios on my DeskPro and put in the NEC V30 8086 chip and got a 256 greyscale monitor. I bought this weird ide controller card that did special encoding and turned two ST-251 40Mb drives into 80Mb drives. Finally, about 1992 I bought my first 40MHz AMD 80486 and motherboard. Man! it was so fast compared to my old 8086!! a few months later I was using OS/2. I went through a couple more 486 boards. My first overclock was running my 80MHz AMD 80486 at 100MHz on a Vesa Local Bus (VLB) board with a 50MHz bus speed. I gave those away along with the processors. My last 486 machine, a 120 MHz AMD 80486 VLB (3x40MHz) based setup, is now retired to my mothers for her use.
I've lost count of how many PC's I have put together from salvaged parts at my various jobs and for fun. Over time I have come to like some brands particularly well. My first socket 7 board was a Tyan Tomcat I and a 133MHz Pentium. The Tomcat was based on the Intel HX chipset and had 512K cache; very fast and expandable for its time (1994-1996).
Then I had to get myself an overclockable motherboard. I have bought and installed several motherboards based on the VIA chipsets made by FIC. The PA-2007 motherboard based on the VIA VP2 chipset was superior to the Intel TX and HX chipset motherboards. The PA-2007 overclocked the P133 to 150MHz just fine with a 75MHz bus speed. I decided to buy a 233MHz AMD K6 CPU. It overclocked at 266 MHz on the PA-2007 very nicely. I retired my Tyan Tomcat because it could not support the new AMD K6 line of processors. The PA-2012 was my first ATX board and I had to get my first ATX case along with a 300MHz AMD K6-2 CPU. It ran pretty well but not as well as the PA-2007. The PA-2012 was just unstable in general.
I stored it and later traded it for $50 off the price of a FIC VA-503+ for my sister and good riddance. I gave my sister my first AMD 233MHz K6 CPU to go with the FIC VA-503+ board for Xmas 1999. A nice upgrade from her P75 and generic Quantex motherboard.
I upgraded to an FIC PA-2013 with 1Mb cache and an AMD K6-3 450MHz 2.4V CPU. Later I made a second upgrade system with a TYAN Trinity 1598C2 (2Mb cache) and a second AMD K6-3 450MHz 2.2V CPU. The Trinity was the last of the socket 7 boards I have purchased and by far the fastest and most stable. Finally, this spring 2000 I bought the Abit KA7 and KA7-100 and an Athlon 700 CPU. I now have the Abit KA7-100, TYAN Trinity 1598C2 / AMD 450MHz K6-3, FIC PA-2013 / AMD 450MHz K6-3, and a PA-2007 / 300MHz AMD K6-2 currently in use. I still have the TYAN Tomcat motherboard and a foolishly acquired dual P133 / Adaptec 2940UW Gigabyte server motherboard sitting around gathering dust. Looks like its time for a family member to get an upgrade.
In a parallel development I gradually went SCSI starting in 1994 with a QLogic narrow SCSI adapter to go with my first CDROM, a Plextor 4-Plex. Then I got a Seagate 4LP Barracuda 4.5 Gb UW drive and an Adaptec 2940UW adaptor to go with my PA-2007. About the same time I got the FIC PA-2013 board; I also got an Adaptec 3950U2 SCSI controller. This was mostly because I was at the end of my rope getting my Fujitsu MO drive to not suck all performance from my hard disk subsystems. I've built many more sytems and they are documented at the link to Ghostwheel at Geek's Corner.
Take Me Home!
