Moving!

Disinfotainment is moving to a new webhost! Things are going to get a little messy around here, while I import the site and clean up the details. Some features will be broken for a while, but everything will be put back in place as soon as possible. We Apologize For The Inconvenience.

Update May 16, 2006: I think I have all the links fixed and all videos are up and running. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who can try the videos, and let me know how well they are working on the new webhost. Please leave a comment in reply to this message. Really, please please try some of the videos and let me know how well it works for you. I am working hard to upgrade the BlogTV system, to make it easier to view the videos, and to make it easier for me to prepare videos for the server. But if I get no reports on the quality of the streaming video services, I have no way to judge if the service is better or not. So leave a comment. Please.

Ground Zero: Iowa Avenue

Today I toured around Iowa City to see the tornado damage. Most of the city was completely unaffected, the weather was beautiful, the sun shining, and the trees just beginning to turn green. But the areas in the center of town were a bleak contrast, blasted by winds and torn to shreds.


I decided to visit my childhood home in the historic Woodlawn district. Iowa City was a planned community, the original State Capitol, and was designed around a broad boulevard, Iowa Avenue, that would stretch between the Capitol Building and the Governor’s Mansion. This plan was copied after Washington DC, where the US Capitol and the White House are at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. The Iowa Capitol was moved to Des Moines before the Governor’s Mansion was built, so Woodlawn was sold and many of the city’s oldest homes were built there, many of them are nearly 150 years old.

This photograph shows the view down Iowa Avenue, you can just see the golden dome of the Old Capitol building in the center, and just to its left are the gothic spires of the old State Hospital. This is the view the entire city was built around.



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This photograph was taken from the very spot where I would set off each morning to deliver newspapers on my paper route down Iowa Avenue. Each morning I would look down the tree-lined boulevard and look for the rising sun glinting off the dome, it would only be visible during the winter, and for a few weeks in the spring, before the tall trees spread their leaves and obscured the view. But the view never ever looked like this.

Nearly all the trees have been stripped from the boulevard. In their place, electric poles have been hastily erected to restore power to the damaged buildings. Almost all the old homes have blue tarps covering the massive holes in their roofs. Cranes were lifting piles of debris into huge dump trucks, I had to wait a while for them to pass before I could take an unobstructed photograph. Students were moving out of their damaged homes, their cars stuffed full of clothing and books. Just off camera to the left, a Red Cross truck was dispensing food and water to the local residents and emergency workers.


I walked up Woodlawn to see my old home, it was undamaged, but it was heartbreaking to see the 200 year old oak trees smashed to bits. I could not take any pictures, almost every direction was blocked by piles of debris stacked 6 feet tall. The 40 foot tall pine tree that stood outside my bedroom window was snapped off and only the bottom 10 feet remained. Almost every tree was smashed to bits, leaving only jagged stumps barely higher than the piles of debris.

I drove around the city but I could not approach the most damaged areas, the streets were blocked off. Highway Patrolmen were directing traffic down Burlington, the traffic lights were torn down. The most astonishing sight was Green Square Park, I saw an uprooted oak tree that was 6 feet in diameter, it pulled up a huge ball of soil 10 feet across.

The entire landscape of the center of Iowa City has been changed by the loss of the trees in the oldest section of town. I feel more acutely the loss of the natural landscape, than the loss of the houses. A house, even a historic 150 year old house, can be rebuilt quickly, but a 200 year old oak tree takes exactly 200 years to replace, if it even manages to survive that long. Many of these trees were here before any houses were built, the city grew around the trees. That circumstance will never happen again.

BlogTV: Tornado!

A devastating Tornado hit Iowa City late last night. I had no idea what was happening, I knew the storm was serious, since I went out and collected a few hailstones and posted a picture. But soon the storm subsided, the emergency sirens stopped blaring, and my cable TV was off the air, so I just went to bed.

The next morning, I was awakened by a phone call from my sister in Oregon, asking if I was all right. I was barely awake and I could only think to myself, “what the hell?” She said there were news reports of a huge tornado striking the city, this was the first I’d heard of it, but I reassured her that I was fine. Within a few hours, TV news started reporting the true level of devastation. I am releasing a Fair Use compilation of some local TV news clips, click on the image to play the video clip.
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Live news coverage originated from the most heavily damaged building in downtown, St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. It seems that whenever a tornado strikes in Iowa, the local church is always destroyed. I had a strange wish that I could have been there in person to witness it, I could have been the heathen anti-theist buddhist bellowing at the fleeing parishioners, “where is your god now?” News coverage showed other local landmarks that had been flattened, like the old Dairy Queen. I had to laugh at the wreckage, it was splattered with blood-red cherry syrup.

But I should not make light of the situation. Millions of dollars of property was damaged and destroyed. Low income housing areas near the University are devastated, and many hapless young college students are now homeless, having lost their first independent homes. A sorority house was destroyed, and the sisters put on their bravest smiling faces for the camera, as they described being in the house as it was torn apart. That was one block from my childhood home, I used to deliver newspapers to the sorority on my paper route. I wonder if my childhood home is undamaged, it is a historic Victorian house in the oldest neighborhood in the city.

I noticed a short interview with a woman through the broken window of the hair salon where I get my hair cut. The salon wasn’t badly damaged, just some broken windows and fallen ceiling tiles, they should be back up and running before my next haircut appointment in a couple weeks. Next to the hair salon is a liquor store, the local student newspaper The Daily Iowan reported that their wall collapsed and students looted it (archived PDF story). I suspect that looting was more widespread than generally reported. The storm struck the downtown area late at night, just as the bars were full of students soaking up liquor. Newspapers reported that after the storm, crowds of thousands of students wandered through the downtown streets, but this is not particularly unusual for any Thursday night in the bar district. As the weekend approaches, city officials seem most concerned with directing the student population away from the closed bar district.

I was shocked to see the damage at the auto dealers. The worst damage was out by Highway 1, a few blocks from the storage facility where I have almost everything I own in a storage lockup. I frantically called them and was relieved to hear that the buildings were undamaged and my stuff is safe.

As I watched the unfolding story of my hometown’s devastation, I had mixed feelings. I hate this town and am desperate to move away from here, I try not to engage with the city in any way that might form more attachments, yet I discover that I am more attached to this town than I care to admit. This makes it even more difficult to move on. This town is full of people who pass through, and in their short time here, they form attachments to institutions and landmarks that are obviously all too impermanent. It is time for me to move on, and stop caring about this town. And that is the hardest thing to do of all.

Computing With A #2 Pencil

For many years, I’ve told people about how I first learned how to write computer programs by writing on Hollerith Cards with a pencil, but nobody ever believes me. But now, thanks to some research by local computer historian Douglas Jones, I have proof. This card was known as a “Mark Sense” card, you would fill in the little rectangles with a #2 pencil, and the optical card reader would sense the marks.


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Sometime around 1968, my math teacher got a grant for some computer time on the University of Iowa mainframes and decided to teach a few of us how write simple FORTRAN programs. In those primitive times, computers used Hollerith cards for input, but obviously it was impractical for little kids to use keypunch machines. So we used Mark Sense cards, painstakingly filling out the little cards with a #2 pencil. It was quite difficult to use the cards accurately, we would often spend as much time correcting input errors in the cards as debugging the programs. It was incredibly frustrating to write a whole program correctly, and then receive no output because you filled in one wrong spot and wrote “PRINL” instead of “PRINT.”

Dead PowerBook

The dead hardware saga continues, my PowerBook died. This is getting ridiculous, I’ve never had such a streak of bad luck. Even worse, it’s embarrassing. It’s like the old proverb of the cobbler whose children go barefoot. I’m the guy people call for help when their computers go bad, to have my own computer go bad is pitiful. It is especially pitiful considering the machine died due to an upgrade. This upgrade was supposed to improve performance, but now I have no performance, it won’t even boot.

My PowerBook has been acting cranky ever since I installed a new 1Gb memory stick a few days ago. It ran much faster with the extra memory, but then suddenly, I saw the dreaded “kernel panic,” and now my PowerBook won’t boot.


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Diagnostics said the hard drive is corrupted, most of the data is irretrievable. I used every technique I knew to repair the disk directory (and I know a lot of them, it used to be my job to recover damaged disks) but nothing worked. My disk is hosed, the data lost. Fortunately I don’t use my PowerBook for anything really critical, it’s my backup machine for light web surfing and email, so it’s not a major disaster. But it is a major waste of time, having to reinstall and reconfigure it from scratch.

After wasting a whole day trying to resurrect my hard drive, I finally realized it might be a memory problem, so I ran the Apple Hardware Test disk, it proved the new memory stick is defective. I thought it might be the infamous Upper Memory Slot problem but my PowerBook isn’t in the affected range of serial numbers. I tried installing the RAM in the lower slot, but it tests as defective in that slot as well. The memory module is definitely dead.

Curses to Other World Computing for shipping me a bad memory module that hosed my hard disk! They promised a lifetime advance replacement warranty, but that hardly compensates for hosing my hard disk. My machine will probably be OK now that I’ve removed the bad RAM, the hard drive is probably not permanently damaged, but I’ll have to reformat my hard disk and reinstall the OS. And in a couple days I’ll get a replacement module from OWC. But you can be damn sure I’m going to run hardware diagnostics to test the new RAM as soon as it’s installed.


Update: I got the replacement RAM, it works properly this time. I reformatted the hard drive, installed everything from scratch, and my PowerBook is working well again. But it was a lot of wasted time and work that I didn’t really need to go through at all.

Class of ’96

I was surprised to receive an announcement of the 10 year reunion for my university’s 1996 graduating class. It’s not like a real reunion, it’s just the annual Homecoming Week and football game, if I attended, it would be extremely unlikely that I’d encounter anyone I knew. But I was shocked by how fast 10 years passed and I am still stuck here in this town. Tempus fugit.

Dead Electric Razor

My streak of dead electronic devices continues, my Braun electric razor died. As I contemplated the replacement of yet another expensive machine, I came to a realization: I am glad it died. My old Braun Synchro razor must be at least 10 years old, the battery wouldn’t hold a charge anymore, and the motor was weak, and finally it completely stopped working. So I replaced it with the new Braun Activator with a self-cleaning base station. Oh boy is it nice, electric razor technology has come a long way in the last 10 years.

And that is what lead me to an epiphany about all this broken machinery. I usually buy expensive, top of the line products, under the assumption that quality products last longer and tend to be cheaper over the long term. But get a good return on your investment, you have to keep them a long time. All my recently-dead products lived a good long life, and proved me right. But there is one thing you don’t get when you operate this way: the latest technology. And now it is obvious to me, I haven’t really bought any serious new products in over a decade. So it is nice to get back up on top with shiny new machines, they work so much better than the old ones did (even when the old ones were new). I hope the new machines last as long as the old ones!

Dead Inkjet

While I’m on a roll, I thought I’d complete the dead hardware trifecta, and whine about my dead inkjet printer. My Epson 1520 died in the stupidest possible way. The printer mechanism works fine, but the safety interlock is broken. The interlock is designed to shut down the printer when you open the lid, so you don’t injure your fingers by sticking them into the mechanism while it’s printing. Every time I turn on the printer and it complains the lid is open, and refuses to print.

I suppose I could disassemble the printer and bypass the interlock, but I think I’ll just toss it in the trash. The 1520 is a wonderful printer, it’s the last 11×17 CMYK printer Epson made, so it’s perfect for prepress proofs. The new generation of 6 and 8 color printers are way too good for prepress proofs, they don’t produce realistic CMYK proofs, they’re too saturated and bright.

But there is no sense in beating a dead horse. Epson no longer makes drivers for this printer, you have to use CUPS, which is included free in MacOS X, but it isn’t very color accurate. Time to send the old beast to the graveyard.

Fortunately my ancient HP Laserjet 5MP is still going strong. I don’t even remember when I bought that printer, I think it dates back to the 1980s.

© Copyright 2016 Charles Eicher