Maybe they are not aware that the NSA has 11 acres of super computers doing something they won’t admit to with a staff of 38,000. They are profiling every person in the country from birth. Some people foolishly think the have nothing to hide. To them I say, right now, you can be denied jobs, loans, and insurance from your credit score and those files were supposed to be secret just 20 years ago. The last thing you want is bureaucrats having access to your medical records. For example, I can no longer get medical insurance to cover any heart condition. I’m on file. I cannot remind people often enough—you do NOT have to report your medical files to anybody except when you pay for it by insurance. If you have a condition that you want kept secret (leprosy, yeast infections and herpes come to mind), go to a clinic where you are not known, that keeps records on paper, and pay them cash. Under those conditions, you are not required to even give your real or any name. But you do have to pay in advance.
I could not drop off to sleep (last night), rare for me, so I automatically fell back on my old habit. Reading technical material. Pssst, that is the secret why some people think I’m smart. I read when I cannot sleep, and that can happen a lot when your life is disrupted by working for a living. In this instance, I found a book on basic computer animation. It reminded me of my early days as a programmer.
Back then, you could not buy most programs except large and expensive sets of disks. If you wanted a small routine, you had to write it yourself. The alternative was to purchase a booklet of “programs” which were long printed lists of commands. (I found just such a book in Delhi, in India. They were cheap reproductions called the “Eastern Economy Edition”.) You painstakingly entered these lines into your computer and tested until the thing ran. Reading about animation reminded me of the most ambitious program I ever entered in this fashion. It was on an Apple IIe clone and took me a week of spare time to complete.
It was a [then] fascinating study in artificial intelligence. First, in low resolution mode, you created a dark green box 8 pixels wide around the outer edge to serve as a frame. Inside, you sprinkled 50 random 8x8 light green blocks around the interior. Then came a medium green flashing block. Back then, you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was a shade of green.
The idea was to animate the flashing block to move in a straight line until it encountered an obstacle, either the frame or one of the random blocks. You programmed the flashing block to look ahead to see if the next position was black, and if so, used standard animation commands to move into it. If it wasn’t black, a subroutine kept trying one of the eight available surrounding coordinates until it found an “opening” and continued on a new straight line toward the next collision.
While the frame was impenetrable, the fun came with the interior blocks. By adding a few lines of code, you could have the moving block “fight or flee”, that is, there was a 50/50 chance it would retreat from the fixed block, or “kill” it by changing it to black and continuing. With a little more code, you could store the results and have the blinker look into memory to see what worked before. The blinker quickly learned to “kill” anything in its path. However, it also learned to find a fixed pattern, no matter how complicated, and loop through it. This represents the state of the American economy, some might say.
The next step was to have the remaining interior blocks randomly reposition themselves after any “kill”. That was revealing. The blinker would fall into a deliberate “search” pattern to cover the entire screen. The final stage was to program the blocks to randomly move away once they had been “probed” by the blinker. Coupled with the simple memory, the blinker appeared to be actually hunting down the blocks to kill them.
It is now 5:56 A.M. and I am wide awake. Since my youthful studies are well documented elsewhere, I don’t normally go into any detail. Before you ask any questions, I got my job with the phone company around the same time and nothing became of my programming skills for the rest of my life until now.
The new sign is up and I am open for business. Although I have a 20-day trial period with 17 days left, I have thoroughly tested the product, “Café Manager Lite”. My decision is yes, and I intend to order it tomorrow. While no software solution is perfect, this package has what I need to run my store from home. I log on, and monitor the entire operation, computer by computer. There is a lock feature that overrides everything. I’ll give you a status report once I’ve used the application for a while.
Café Manager Lite is 80 Euros (around $89 USD). It comes in two packages, one client, many servers. They connect using IP addresses, the weak link in my understanding of networks, but now I will for sure learn it, won’t I? The companion, Café Manager Pro, is $340. The only feature I don’t like is there is a way the clever user can reset the timer. I did it myself and it is too easy. Nonetheless, it is vastly superior to the manual system I am using. Thanks to Kinko’s price increases, my little operation has finally become self-sustaining.
