Notes from Maine - 2026/02/01
I’m writing to you from my “Server Room” this morning. When I bought this house, this room had a padlock on the closet door and the door to the hallway locked from the outside. In its former life, this house was a nursing home of sorts—licensed for five long-term residents.
A delivery person one day asked me if it still was.
“No,” I said, “that was the last people who lived here. I replaced the old people with horses.”
He nodded and then said, “Back when I was an EMT, I responded to four DRTs here.”
“DRT?”
“Dead right there. When we showed up, there was nothing to do but take them away. We also called them FDSS.”
He didn’t wait for me to ask.
“Found dead; stayed same.”
“Oh,” I said and nodded. It doesn’t bother me to think about. People have to die somewhere. Long ago, I painted the walls and put new carpet in. This room was likely once a quiet place where someone spent their last peaceful moments. I shut down the computer servers long ago. Email and websites are now hosted “in the cloud” somewhere. I have one tiny computer (the size of a deck of cards) that stays on all the time and it doesn’t do anything except monitor my thermostats. With no computers in here, I started using this room to house and fix pinball machine parts. Circuit boards and solenoids surround me. The room is quiet, close, warm, and the north-facing window isn’t blinding me with morning sun. As long as I can ignore the untidiness, it’s a nice place to write.
Earl (shire horse) was not excited to be brushed this morning. He could see Maybelle and Lilly outside, getting first dibs of fresh hay but he had to stand there while I tried to make him presentable. The farrier is supposed to come this afternoon and trim everyone’s feet. The horses here are barefoot all the time, meaning they don’t have metal shoes affixed to their hooves. They’re always on grass or dirt, so they don’t need the protection of shoes. Maybelle and Lilly both have perfect little feet which take no time at all to make perfect.
Earl apparently has feet heavier than lead because he always makes it out to be a massive inconvenience for him to hold them up while the farrier works. It’s bad enough to wrestle the feet of a 2,000 pound (900 kg) goon, but worse when they’re covered in wood shavings and last-night’s hay. That’s why he required the quick grooming this morning.
I keep turning around to look at the clutter behind me. This room is about half organized. Before it can get better, I need to make a few more shelves for parts that are stored in boxes. One of the pinball companies asked me to design new circuit boards for them to emulate an old machine. That project has been astoundingly fun so far. I was given very little useful information from the archives of the company who originally designed the boards. I have internal memoranda from the 1990s, as well as design files that would never open in today’s software. I’m left to observe signals and imagine how they can be recreated with a modern circuit board. I feel like an astronomer trying to create a scale model of the moon from just what I can see through my telescope.
Here’s a quote from a memo sent nearly thirty years ago:
As for identifying the exact bug - I'm pretty busy, but I realize the
importance of my assistance (since I found it). As for objectivity,
I'm really *pissed* because I wasted 4 hours of debug time trying to
find it already, only to remember "oh yeah, let's try the old ASIC"...
I don’t know the person who sent that memo, what bug he was describing, or who he was reporting to. But reading those documents reminds me that I’m not the first person to toil over this architecture, and those other folks eventually got it working well enough to sell a ton of pinball machines. All I have to do is coax this new hardware into doing the same things.
In a way, it reminds me of interacting with Earl. He can’t be forced into compliance. The best I can do is watch and listen to try to understand how to communicate with him. One trainer I follow always says, “Make the right thing the easy thing.” If he’s standing still and letting me brush him to clean him up, everything is peaceful. When he moves around and spins away, that’s fine, but everyone is going to be moving, spinning, and creating chaos around him until he sighs and stands still for a moment. I just looked it up and I flubbed the quote a little.
“Make the wrong thing hard and the right thing easy.”
I guess that really doesn’t completely apply to electronics, now that I think about it. They feel the same though. As I’m watching signals go by on a circuit board I have to put myself into the mindset of the original architect. Once I understand their intent, I can understand their implementation. With horses I need to anticipate more than retroactively empathize. It’s the same mental muscle I guess but in one case it’s used to examine the past and the other to predict the future.
My future includes getting another cup of coffee and then doing more chores.
