Creative Destruction … Damn.

 

Taking advantage of a couple of gift cards, Denise and I recapitulated a date night like we had years ago: spending the evening at Barnes & Noble.  For several years our older kids could watch the younger kids of an evening.  Those evenings, usually Wednesday evenings, Denise I would do something, go to dinner or shopping or whatever.  But they would almost always end with some time spent at the local Barnes & Noble.  It wasn’t close to our house but it was close enough.

We almost raised our older kids at that Barnes & Noble.  On the way home from the homeschool co-op, it was a frequent “fun” stop.

But then it closed.  That must be eight or nine years ago now.  (In my opinion that store lost too much traffic after a Starbucks opened across the street.  People who used to stop in that Barnes & Noble for a fancy coffee, ourselves included, could now simply drive through the Starbucks, ourselves included.)  We took some of our kids to the store as it neared its close date.  Must have been the end of December with David and Thomas home from college.   As we sadly left, David, I think, turned and, looking at the store in general, said, “Well…goodbye.”

Other life changes contributed to our changing habits over the years.  There are other Barnes & Noble stores in the St. Louis area and we’ve visited them from time to time.  They are just not as convenient for a “oh, let’s stop in while we’re out here” trip as the old location.

Revisiting a Barnes & Noble on Friday night didn’t bring back these memories.  The closing of a grocery store did it.

On my way to the bargain grocery store, Aldi’s, I passed the Schnucks store that would normally be my second stop to get whatever I didn’t find at Aldi’s.  This Saturday I saw signs for “Store Clearance, 40%” off.  Uh-oh.

We’ve been going to that store for years.  Most of those years it was a Shop’N’Save.  A few years ago Schnucks took it over when Shop’N’Save left the St. Louis market.  That transition didn’t change it much and many of the same checkers continued to work there.

I’ve noticed that shopping at the same stores year after year, you will see the career arc of some people who work at the same store for decades.  They were young when I was young and now they are gray when I am gray.  You get to know them a little bit, who is chatty and who is snarky, for example.  And they get to know you.  And your kids – if only by sight and a few words in passing once-a-week.  And they get to see your kids grow up… at least until the kids get old enough to rebel at the idea of shopping with Dad.

But sometimes they still ask.  One checker at this Shop’N’Save took a liking to Josh and John Paul when they were very young.  She continued to ask about them in later years whenever I end up in her check-out aisle.  Even this year she asked – and she must not have seen them for ten years.

So when I stopped in on Saturday to pick up what 40%-off deals might be left, I was disquieted to see the whole produce section empty and ¾ of all the shelves in the store empty.  Seems strange to feel sad about something as commercial as a grocery store.  I think the sadness comes from the losing an ordinary, regular thing, from the break with a string of memories that were in no way peak experiences but just the hum-drum of life. 

And wondering about the people.  I didn’t recognize either of the checkers working on Saturday.  Had the others been scattered to other stores?  Unemployed?  Retired – and finally getting off their feet after a lifetime of standing at a cash register?

At a macro level I understand, I endorse, the creative destruction of capitalism.  If a business keeps losing money, better that it be closed to make way for something else.  It would be wrong of me to insist that a store stay open because I’m sentimental about it.

But I find myself sounding more and more like an “old person” noting that building has been torn down (I first saw Santa Claus at a party in the basement there) and there’s an athletic field where that other building used to be (I used to walk by there every day going to high school).

Living in the city in which I grew up means that indulging in those feelings ignores the many things that have remained the same or have organically grown better.  So I note the dear things that drift away on the river of time and turn upstream wondering, “What’s next?”

 

 

 

“Where is the big chassis I carried? Where is the pile of disks so high?”

As a parent, the day you realize your kids have grown so much they are about to have kids of their own, is a striking, “Sunrise, Sunset” realization of the passage of time.  Less emotionally wrenching, one can suddenly realize how thoroughly technology has changed.  Working in or near corporate IT, working with core business systems that may be decades old, it is easy to forget how much better things are now than in “the old days.”

Although, there are older “old days” when I had to thread 9 inch tape drives by hand and soldered RS-232 connectors, for me, an arbitrary choice of “old days” could be the mid-90s when a partial and arbitrary list of comparisons would include…

·         Dot matrix printers with tractor feed paper were usually directly connected to one’s pc.  We take the networked, laser printer for granted, the lovely printer that can print in black and white or in color and offers you a selection of paper sizes.  Not only that, but it will scan documents and email or fax them, it will often tell you where it is jammed and it will put itself to sleep when unused.

·         Voice mail was, then, what email is now.  I would often find my inbox piled with numerous voice mails.  I would leave numerous (and, regrettably, lengthy) voicemails.  Email was deployed here and there and had penetrated little in the corporate world.  Now, of course it is one’s email inbox that is stuffed and email is accessible everywhere.  And I find I almost never leave or check voice mails.

·         Backups!  Stacks of disks, several sets, that you were to rotate through, making your own backups and not nearly often enough.  Now we work from shared network folders that are automatically archived by the corporate IT infrastructure folks.

·         Windows.  In the mid-90’s Windows (3.1?) was in the market but it offered little advantage.  Macs were only in the business world as graphics machines.  Instead, you would have to write a startup script to display the programs available on the pc.

·         Color.  Getting anything but a monochrome monitor was a big deal.  I mean, what was the business value of color?

·         The list could go on and on: the interoperability of office software, storage beyond 32 megabytes, memory (we all called it RAM) beyond 640K, browser based software, the internet, everything Excel can do (Lotus 1-2-3 was the earlier killer app)…

·         What’s your favorite innovation?

Part of the point is to recognize that things do change, even in seemingly hidebound corporations and sometimes it’s amazing how many productivity gains there have been.  (As a throwaway, the subject of a future blog post: I think knowledge is the real limiting factor in productivity nowadays.)

But with all the advances, still…

·         File layouts and old systems.  This is why I doubt a super-AI will ever spring to consciousness and seize the world’s computers.  Old, seemingly unchangeable, systems still churn underneath corporate “agility” and government bureaucracy, systems where one jot or tittle out of place in an 80 byte record (punch cards, remember?) will choke a process to full stop.

Why Answer?

I’m as interested as the next political junkie in what the polls show and how they are trending in high profile races.  And when I was a bit younger I felt like I was participating in the great process of democracy when I was privileged to be polled – almost always by phone.

Now I never answer.

Part of the reason is irritation with polls themselves.  Those conducted by actual human beings are often much longer than you are told – and once you have committed five minutes and they promise just another minute… well it feels like you will have wasted the first five if you don’t stick with it.  And you end up wasting ten minutes instead.

Or the poll is excessively and tediously nuanced:

•          If the election were held today would you say you were

o   Very likely to support the bond issue to build a soccer stadium?

o   Likely….

o   Unlikely…

o   Very Unlikely…

o   Not sure.

•          If the election were held today and the bond issue included money for Meals on Wheels as well as a soccer stadium would you be very likely… likely… etc.
•          If the election were held today and the bond issue included funding for Adopt-A-Pet, Meals on Wheels and a soccer stadium…

And if the poor pollster asks me another variation would I be likely or very likely to shout, “I don’t care that much about a soccer stadium!”

Even more offensive is the “push-poll” where you realize the poll is not to get your opinion but to shape it:

•          If the new soccer stadium is opposed by absentee landlords and used car salesmen, would you be very likely to support it, likely…

Nowadays when I pick up the phone, it sounds like most polls are being taken by a computer which makes it easier to hang up on them.

In these days of data insecurity and privacy concerns I have begun to wonder

•       Is this a reputable polling firm?  Even if they use the name “Gallup” how do I know?

•         Is this poll really for the sake of gathering answers to the ostensible questions or is the purpose to build a demographic profile of the person on this end of the phone?

•    Even if the poll is on the up-and-up how can I be sure the polling firm won’t suffer a data breach and a million preferences fall into the wrong hands, mine included?

So, from now on, the powers-that-be have to wait to learn my opinion until they can count my paper ballot.

But that’s a wariness for another blog.

Stardust Memories

 “The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve.” – Peter Graham

Happens I was twelve when I came upon “Worlds of If” on the magazine stand at Nieman’s Confectionary.  I was fresh from reading “The Early Asimov”[1] and I thought, wow, a pulp magazine!  It wasn’t a pulp magazine by 1973 – none of the sf magazines had been “pulp” for decades – but the thrill of discovery overcame that dim awareness.  The June issue was the first I bought but it was in the August issue that a story indelibly marked the soft wax of my twelve year old imagination.

Although it was not the first science fiction I read, I think “The Invaders” by Stephen Tall was the first story told from the viewpoint of an alien that I read.  The clues that an experienced reader would assemble as a matter of course came as revelations: Oh, Red Spine was a crab-like creature living on a desert world, but ten feet wide whose spines could glow – a “sand-dollar” creature – and it belonged to a telepathic race.  The cylinder from the sky is a space ship, of course, and the small creatures with the shiny single eye – that must be humans in space suits! 

It has been, geez, forty six years?! Since I read it.  I’ve read a few other stories by Stephen Tall but none ever made an impression equal to “The Invaders.”

So when two of my sons took me to the well-stocked, crazy, labyrinthine Last Book Store in downtown LA during a recent California visit and I chanced upon “The Stardust Voyages” by Stephen Tall, I bought it  out of nostalgia and as a lens into my past. What could I learn about myself and about science fiction by rereading it now?

To summarize: Red Spine and its fellows (no male or female indication is given for any of the creatures) are telepathic, large crustaceans living among sand and mountains.  They seem largely contemplative when not cultivating a rock-borne fungus on which they feed – and when not bearing food to the Eater.  The Eater seems to be a mutant of their kind that is large and largely immobile.  A rock-slide crushes a number of Red Spine’s fellows and they feed the carcasses to the Eater.  It gorges itself, molts and proves more ravenous than before.  Red Spine realizes that the Eater’s appetite now exceeds their resources and takes the radical and lone decision to stop feeding it.  Meanwhile a cylinder lands from out of the sky and human explorers enter the picture.  Red Spine and the humans mutually study each other but direct communication eludes them.  The Eater gets a taste for flesh in a series of accidents that result in the humans destroying it in self-defense.  Red Spine and its fellows are grateful for the restoration of ecological balance.  The humans excuse themselves to themselves for violating their no-interference policy and both sides flash the “peace sign” as the ship departs.

While it isn’t the role of literature to teach, I think that it does model behaviors.  “The Invaders” modeled some behaviors and outlooks that I’m sure were already latent in my younger self, but the story quickened them by means of a kind of feedback loop of the imagination:

•      The pleasures of inversion.

•      The Courageous Independent Thinker v. Tradition.

•      A mild dose of ecological/systems thinking.

•      There is always a reason to violate the Prime Directive: creative or at least rationalized disobedience.

Gulliver landing among the Lilliputians, the Borrowers being little English people living among giants, apes caging and studying humans in “The Planet of the Apes,” all these and more are what I call “inversions” – turning the world upside down and looking at it from a new angle.  Like seeing human explorers from an alien viewpoint.  As old as imaginative literature but pretty new to my twelve year old self.  It was fun but I didn’t realize that I was being introduced to the ability to detach myself from my own viewpoint and to see people or a situation or a problem from other angles.  Not that this one story zapped me into a different mental space.  It has been a lifetime’s formation – but this story feels like a discernible moment in that development.

It is apt that several years after I read this story I played in a high school production of “Fiddler on the Roof” so I can cry “Tradition!” with the best of the shtetl’s peasants.  “Without our traditions, we would be like a fiddler on the roof!”   And being in high school I would have been all for regarding traditions as the dead hand of the past.  Helped along by the science fiction I was reading.

I count this as a bad result of reading science fiction although I don’t blame it all on “The Invaders.”  The idea of the courageous, independent thinker opposing rigid tradition is itself as much of a thought cliché as the stereotypical “But that’s the way we’ve always done it” response.  Once a science fiction author – or activist or I, myself – declares a character to be a courageous, independent thinker opposing rigid tradition… well, you can just stop thinking right there.  We know who is right and who is wrong now, don’t we?  Unfortunately, “courageous, independent thinkers” often prove shallow and short-sighted and tradition is sometimes buttressed by more wisdom and culture than we assume.

On the other hand, getting a tincture of ecological systems thinking – in such a small dose I didn’t recognize it until this rereading – may have helped nudge me on the Systems Analyst path (broadly understood) that has been my life’s occupation.  Or – with this rereading I may be reading too much into that original reading.  But “ecology” was huge in the Seventies although rarely heard of under the word “ecology” these days[2].  Whether I implicitly learned it from “The Invaders,” science fiction was good for pointing out that what you do here can have an effect there.  An alien race consuming its food supply faster than it grows, stepping on a butterfly while hunting dinosaurs[3], the ideas are an invitation to broadmindedness, to seeing connections in a bigger picture.

There is always a reason to violate the Prime Directive: creative or at least rationalized disobedience.

The term “Prime Directive” is from Star Trek.  In “The Invaders” it is simply “No Interference” as in “No interference in the lives or activities of an aware species.”  Right.  I had seen some episodes of Star  Trek in their original broadcast and then, in reading “The Invaders” even at twelve, I recognized that the Prime Directive was just a plot device.  Why don’t the heroes solve the problem right now?  Can’t interfere, remember the Prime Directive!  Except when circumstances worsen, of course.  Then it can’t be helped.

I think an entire study could be made of the emergence of this concept in science fiction.  Cultural non-interference is emphatically not an American trait.  Did this come from a growing awareness of anti-colonialism of the mid-Twentieth century?  From a belated and dim recognition of American mistreatment of indigenous peoples?  Or did it emerge from the scientific world that had realized an observer can alter observed effects by his presence?

But that is just an aside.  My twelve year old self would have had no patience for such considerations.  What I am sure of is that “The Invaders” added a small encouragement to my growing understanding at that age that some big rules could be broken sometimes.  But this story was not decisive.  The idea of creative disobedience is very American.  Whether it be war stories (historical or fictional) police stories (historical or fictional) politics, business, technology, etc., and science fiction, Americans celebrate individual initiative that defies regulations but achieves a dramatic rescue or a great breakthrough.

I was already steeped in this can-do, get-it-done attitude at twelve years old and surely thought nothing of it.  Yet with each mental rehearsal a behavior is etched more deeply in one’s mind.  That’s why I think that in its small way this story was formative.

There were two disobediences in “The Invaders.”  One was the destruction of the Eater by the human explorers.  This is a violation of their No Interference policy but they lightly rationalize it by the threat the Eater posed to their own lives.

The other disobedience is Red Spine’s refusal to feed the Eater.  This is the result of deliberation not an emergency reflex such as the humans killing the Eater.  This is also a development in the theme of  an Independent-Mind Challenges Tradition.  Red Spine and his kind had “always” fed the Eater.  The Eater’s origins are in the distant past but the humans speculate that it is a mutant of Red Spine’s species whose telepathic, simplistic cries of “Food!  Food!” have been complied with for generations as it gradually grew and grew more ravenous.  Red Spine says “That’s enough.”  And he meets opposition.  He has to have courage to go with his reason.  He has to be willing to scuttle alone for his conviction.  This was a good lesson to learn, that there is a cost for standing against the crowd.  Again, twelve year old Tony would not have recognized a lesson in this, but there was one.

I must have read dozens of science fiction stories when I was twelve and hundreds in my teens and only a few are memorable over four decades.  A lot of the stories I remember would make me cringe today.  So, mediocre, popular literature as it is, I was glad to read it again over the shoulder of my twelve year old self.

---

[1]Truth is, mostly I read Asimov’s introductory settings for each of the stories.  His working in the family candy store, meeting John W. Campbell just a subway ride away, his banging away stories for the old pulps and gradually breaking in as a writer was kindling enough for my imagination.

[2]Which is too bad.  “Ecology” has a wholeness about it that “climate change” lacks.  The latter smacks of moral judgment, our punishment for greed and self-indulgence.  Concern for “climate change” obscures the interconnectedness of the world.

[3]That is from a famous Ray Bradbury story that has stuck with me for years as well, “A Sound of Thunder.”

“The Incoherent Jumble of Trump’s Own Mind”

Two pieces from the National Review website presented some ideas in ways that I agreed with.  That is, they distilled what I had been thinking a bit chaotically into statements I wish I had made.

One was “The Impeachment Train” by Yuval Levin that can be found here:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-impeachment-train/

This seems to explain something I’ve been wondering about:

But in the laying out of both the case against Trump and the case in his defense you find the pattern that has repeated in these last few years by which serious people end up backing themselves into conspiracy theories because they want the world to make sense. The incoherent jumble of Trump’s own mind, backed now with the enormous power of the American presidency, has the capacity to create a real world that doesn’t hang together. When we each try to explain it to ourselves and others, we naturally incline to fill in blanks and sketch connections that might make it all cohere, and so we end up painting perverse conspiracies, most of which are surely false. We can already see that happening in this case, as we all try to reason our way through an avalanche of unfamiliar figures and preposterous events and end up acting like we’ve always had strong views about how many people listen to presidential phone calls and the relative merits of different Ukrainian state prosecutors.  [Emphasis added]

Trump is his own reality distortion field and this warps all of us into trying to adjust.  I’ve felt that for a long time but hadn’t the words to describe it.

Levin also points out this:

My rule of thumb for how to think about the endless chain of outrages and counter-outrages that compose the Trump era is that every scandal will proceed in whatever way is maximally damaging to public confidence in our core institutions.

The farther down this road we go the likelier it is that something will fracture the Republic irreparably.  I hope I’m wrong and I don’t know what our Reichstag Fire might turn out to be, but I have trouble seeing us on a path to sunlit uplands.  Nor do I know what individual course to take except to support what laws and institutions I can by not cutting corners, by being nice to my neighbors and co-workers, praying, fasting and keeping a civil tongue.  And don’t be stampeded and don’t panic.

In “Prince Don” by Kevin D. Williamson at https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/donald-trump-personal-flaws-led-him-here/ I found another summation of what I’ve been thinking:

And so that leaves at least one conservative simultaneously believing four things that are difficult to keep under the same hat:

1) I am glad that Hillary Rodham Clinton is not the president;

2) Based on what we know right now, I do not want to see Donald Trump impeached and removed from office;

3) I do not want to see Elizabeth Warren being sworn in as president in January 2021;

4) Donald Trump cannot be gone soon enough.

In data processing terms, this leaves me thrashing: whipping between logical paths that are mutually exclusive.

I am beginning to wonder, though, if the best long term course might be for the impeachment process to remove Trump from office in early 2020, leaving Mike Pence to stabilize things and present a more temperate, constitutional alternative to whatever shrieking progressive the Democrats nominate.

To The Mountain Top

No one visits Monticello on a whim, drawn in for a quick tour by a highway sign.  You have to work to get there through ever smaller northern Virginia highways.  Lovely country but rather out of the way.

In spite of that, the place was packed!  We found one open spot after driving through four or five lots.

Approaching the visitor’s center from the parking lot one encounters an roped off area about 60 square feet.  This is demarcated as an African American burial ground.  Archeologists have located a good number of graves and several unmarked head and foot stones which were not visible to the casual observer.  This spot is far from the top of the mountain.

Standing at the shuttle stop at the top of the mountain is a giant White Ash.  I told Ben, “That tree must be as old as Thomas Jefferson.”  A docent rushed over.  “There are no trees at Monticello as old as Thomas Jefferson!” 

Well, ok.  I was basing my guess on my memory of a cross-section of a tree I had seen – at the Lake of the Ozarks, I think – where some rings had been linked to historical events, the Revolution being one – but ok.

The house tours begin every five minutes in ticketed groups of 25.  Since we had a long time to wait, we joined the garden tour.  The flowered paths are beautiful and the gardeners have worked hard to recreate the gardens from Jefferson’s day based on letters and journal entries.  Jefferson collected seeds during his travels and sent them home so he had tremendous variety.

The leader of the garden tour pointed out two tulip tree stumps near the house.  These trees had been planted by Jefferson but they were only stumps.  She also pointed to a very tall cedar and said that tree might date from Jefferson’s time, but tests were ongoing.  So there was a little more nuance to the old tree story.

I joined part of the Slavery tour.  The slaves of the upper south at the time of Jefferson were permitted sufficient latitude to have their own garden plots with which they augmented the small food ration they were given and from which they could sell produce to the plantation kitchen or in a town market nearby.  They were also apparently permitted to gather for prayer services although such assemblies were outlawed later in the 19^th century.  However, violence and separation were constant fears.  Even favored and valuable slaves would be gifted or sold or bought back or sent on long assignments far from their families.  I wonder if all slave owners would feel compelled to order such separations occasionally so as not to tacitly accept the right or preference of an enslaved person to be near family.

Jefferson’s possible relationship with the slave Sally Hemmings was phrased by different tour guides with different levels of definiteness.  Joseph Ellis, author of the most perceptive book about Jefferson I’ve read, “American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson”, felt that Jefferson’s interpersonal diffidence makes him doubt Jefferson could have forced a relationship.  Ellis thinks it likelier that one or more of his nephews contributed the DNA now found in the Hemmings line.  Whether Thomas himself fathered children by his slaves, the institution in which he participated enabled the monstrous practice.

We decided to visit the family cemetery plot while waiting for our tour time.  We passed an enormous, gnarled Catawba tree.  “That is the biggest catawba tree I’ve ever seen.  That must date from Jefferson’s time.”  This from a middle-aged crew-cut wearing a D-Day t-shirt.  He peered at the trunk of the tree.  “It has some problems though.”  He looked at us, “I’m a licensed arborist.”

The family cemetery is ringed by a wrought-iron fence and is dotted with tombstones.  Jefferson himself lies beneath an obelisk that cites his authorship of the Declaration, the Virginia statute on religious freedom and his founding of the University of Virginia.  No mention of his ambassadorship, his governorship, his being the first US Secretary of State, its 2^nd Vice President or 3^rd President.  I have to wonder if this is a studied humility given his public posture to retire from public office while spurring a covert,  proxy campaign to defeat John Adams. 

The contrast between the family plot and the African American plot is complete.

Finally we get to tour the house.  Monticello’s is a neat, neo-classical design.  It is not palatial inside or out.  Ben was favorably disposed to this style over the Baroque.  Jefferson, of course, spent years having the house built and re-built.  He was a self-taught architect and learned much from travels in Europe.  Denise thought that the beds in alcoves showed him to be rather a bachelor architect.

No picture-taking was allowed inside the house, much to Denise’s disappointment, but we saw a good deal of a re-created collection of what Jefferson might have displayed or used: the polygraph was interesting and the artifacts from the Lewis and Clark expedition and the thoughtfulness that went into the design of each room.

As we waited for the shuttle to take us back down the mountain, Denise pointed to a magnificent Linden tree.  (I am not a licensed arborist although I play one at Monticello.  I only know the names of the trees mentioned because each was labeled.)  This linden tree spread great branches and shade in all directions.  Some of the branches sank to the ground, making it look like a banyan tree.

Being a provocateur, I said loudly, “I bet that tree is as old as Jefferson.”

“Go, get in the bus, hurry up,” Denise hustled me down the path.

***

What does Thomas Jefferson mean to us?  Being a “Jeffersonian” has so many interpretations that I can’t call myself one.  Yet a partial admirer I certainly am.

That the colonies declared and defended their independence was momentous, but fifty-six men signed the Declaration of Independence while one wrote it.  And beautifully.  It was the work that made Thomas Jefferson an icon.

`               Would Monticello have been restored, preserved and visited if Jefferson had not written the Declaration?  Granted that Virginia was a powerful state among the thirteen, but if Jefferson had not written the Declaration he would have been just another delegate.  Had he not written the Declaration, I doubt he would have achieved his higher offices and we would not care if he supported the French Revolution or Nullification or if he proposed a wall of separation between church and state.  Had he not written the Declaration, who would navigate to the depths of Albemarle County to see his personally designed house, his inventions, his gardens, his grave?  If he had not written the Declaration we would not go to Monticello and wonder about the slave owner writing for the ages that all men are created equal.

OctoPower!

OctoPower!

We have several computers at the house.  The “big” computer is at least seven years old.  It’s “big” only in that it is an old tower case from back when they made computers the size of dresser drawers and it’s “big” because we hooked up a huge tv monitor to it quite awhile back.  This computer has been through several versions of Windows, each of which grew flakier until I finally tried Ubuntu on this machine.  That continues to work smoothly on the old beast – except for some incompatibility with some DVDs.  It suffered the loss of its ethernet port in a lightning strike a few years ago.  The ethernet port connects directly to the motherboard so I didn’t see any practical way to replace it.  So now it connects to the internet via a USB WIFI stick.  Aside from the fact that it is still serviceable, I keep it going to see how long I can keep it going.

The other day I pressed the power button to turn it on and nothing – absolutely nothing – happened.  No lights, no fan, nothing.  Probably the power supply I thought.  This was a good guess but I foolishly assumed that it would be a snap out and snap in replacement.  Hah!

This, this is what a power supply looks like.  Except, here, this has been laid out for viewing before being laid to rest:

Most, but not all of those cables were connected here and there in the computer.  When I saw the spaghetti inside the computer that I would have to disconnect and correctly reconnect I flashed back to an old Star Trek episode, one of the lesser episodes of the original series, called “Spock’s Brain.”  Spock’s brain is stolen – right out of his head – by beings who need it to be the “Controller” for their civilization.  Upon recovering it, Dr. McCoy’s surgical skills are temporarily, technologically augmented to enable him to reinsert Spock’s brain inside Spock.  But the augmented knowledge begins to wear off and he goes slower and slower…

I could just imagine myself grinding to a halt, connector in hand, whimpering, “Where the hell does this one go?”

Eventually I settled for a tedious process of disconnecting one cable belonging to the old power supply, locating a comparable connector from the new power supply and connecting that – gradually replacing the old and allowing me to remove the old one and replace it.  Here is what it look like midway through that.  The new power supply is sitting outside the computer at this point.

What really tickles me about all this is that I got it right all the way down the line: the right diagnosis, a compatible power supply purchased on the first try, the machine started up right away and everything worked.  So often technical adventures consist of, like, six trials and errors and three ah-hah! Revelations before completing a repair or install.

Here is the pc with the new power supply installed.  All those cables coming out really do look like the tentacles of an octopus don’t they?