Original piece by Steve Connelly.  Some of the humor is "local" but
most, I think, is broad enough for all to enjoy.



	My involvement with the scientific data visualization project of Drs. 
Ravelo and El Batanouny project began unceremoniously several months ago.  One
day I was in my office unpacking my take-out lunch from Beijing restaurant.  
I had ordered a number two, but they were out, so they gave me two number 
ones.  "Hmm.  What is number one?  It looks like some kind of shredded flesh 
in a brown sauce.  Oh yes, Shredded Flesh in Brown Sauce!  And what's this... 
Tang Ho Duck Sauce.  Ingredients: water, sugar, ducks...."  That's when I 
overheard Glenn and Laura in the hallway talking about a project involving the 
videotaping of an animation of a physical simulation.  The data had to be 
transferred to our Unix system from the IBM mainframe running VPS, a huge 
operating system written by our own department.  My next encounter with the 
project occurred soon afterward when Glenn unlocked my door, turned on the 
lights, peered under my desk, and told me I was doing the project.  He 
explained it to me in great detail.
	"...And make sure the file transfer utility converts the Ebcdic to 
Ascii."
	"Ebcdic?"
	"Yes.  That's the character set used on the VPS system."
	"What do the letters in 'EBCDIC' stand for?"
	"Ascii.  'ASCII' becomes 'EBCDIC' in the Ebcdic character set.  Any
other questions?"
	"Yes.  Do we have a resume-quality laser printer?"

	In computer graphics, all projects begin with the same preparatory
steps, regardless of the specific application.  My first step is always
to ask Tim and Chris how to do the project.  I found them working in our 
terminal room.  Tim was wearing headphones which were plugged into his CD
player.  Shouting so he could hear me, I asked him if he could take off his
headphones so that I wouldn't have to shout.  He took them off and music 
blared all over the room.  Now we were both shouting.
	"Glenn told me to get VPS files onto videotape."  
	"VPS?  You should've hid under your desk."
	"I did, but he found me."
	"Great.  Now where are we gonna hide?"
	"He didn't suspect anything.  I told him I was flossing my toes, which
happened to be under my desk.  So, can you tell me about VPS files?"
	He insisted he knew nothing about VPS and couldn't even spell the name.
He put his headphones back on.  I stepped over to Chris, who was wearing 
headphones and screeching, "Rah-xanne.  You don' haf to turn on dee red light."
	His headphones were not plugged into anything.  He saw me and took the 
phones off.  	
	"How are you today, Chris."
	"Nominal."
	"Why do you wear headphones?"
	"Because when Tim takes his off, it's too loud in here."
	"I see.  Can you tell me about VPS files?"
	Chris turned away, and put the headphones back on.  
	"Chris, don't make me shout."
	"Raaaaaaah-xanne....."
	"Chris, there's no music."
	"....I can't hear you when I sing this song.  Rah-xanne...."

	I was trapped.  I considered ending it all.  I thought about pulling
my own head off but Glenn had already put on my graphics lab head harness, 
a sort of football helmet with leather straps running under your arms.
I thought about eating five Taco Bell lampshade salads, and then waiting 
while the mixture congealed in my stomach and then burst through my ribcage 
as a slimy reptilean alien wearing a sombrero.  No, too slow.  I thought about 
openly preaching teetotalism during a baseball game at Fenway Park.  
No, too bloody.
	I had no choice but to deal with the VPS files.  The files were 
about 60 megabytes a piece, and for some unknown reason they couldn't be 
transferred correctly using the file transfer utility.  I tried to ask Jason 
if he could help me.  He wasn't in his office.  I checked his whereabouts on 
the department-wide online locator, and learned that he had gone out to lunch 
at 11:53am on November 11, 1982.  I had no choice but to go down to the first 
floor.  
	All the real VPS programmers are on the first floor so that they don't 
hurt themselves when they jump out the window.  I went to John's office, 
opened the door, turned on the lights, peered under the desk, and told him 
there was a bug in VPS.  He started to shake, his eyes bulged, and his hair 
stood straight up.  His head turned purple and his veins stood out.  He was 
having a VPS-debugging flashback.  His jugular vein couldn't stand the strain 
and it burst open.  A thin high-pressure stream of blood sailed across the 
room.  He slapped a yellow post-it note on his neck to stop the bleeding.  He 
screamed and jumped headfirst through the window.  The new transparent 
sun-blocking sheet wallpapered on the window didn't let it shatter as much as 
usual, so only half of his body got through the window.  I went over to his 
terminal and updated his entry on the online locator:  "In and out all day."  
	We ended up moving the research data onto tape and reading the tape 
onto our own machine, using our own program to convert Ebcdic to Ascii.
I have a program that converts one-sixth of the Ebcdic character set to Ascii, 
if anyone needs it.
	Now that we could get the VPS files, I had to find alot of disk
space to store the enormous files on.  I decided to borrow a disk pack
from a Vax in the Engineering Department.  However, when I opened the drive, 
the disk was spinning very fast, and it took off like a frisbee and flew out 
the window.  I ran outside and followed the flying disk.  It landed at the 
exitway from Fenway Park.  I couldn't get to the disk because the game had 
just ended and fans were walking over the disk.  It was Cleet Night at Fenway. 
The fans ended up kicking the disk onto the trolley tracks, where it was run 
over several times.  I got the disk and managed with some difficulty to fit it 
back into the Vax's drive.  That violent spinning was a real nuisance;  I 
sent a memo to Hillary suggesting that something was wrong with that disk.
	It appeared that I would have to find room on our current disk 
storage devices.  I started moving files around and deleting unnecessary ones.
There were large files called 'Miss_June', 'Miss_July', etc.  I couldn't 
delete them;  the lab takes its silicone graphics very seriously.  I deleted a 
large file called 'vmunix', a file named 'raises.pending', and several files 
named 'help'.  I deleted the directory 'Voyager/images/originals'.  I looked 
in 'CS101/assignment_1', which had subdirectories for each student.  Upon 
further investigation, I determined that each student was working on a 
program, but all the programs were intended to do exactly the same thing!  
I thought such redundancy was unnecessary, so I deleted all but one of the 
programs.  Then I deleted  'Giles/cold_fusion/formulas' and 'Fermat/proofs'.
	
	In a few days we could read the data and turn it into pictures.  Thus,
for the first time we were presented with visual confirmation of Ravelo's
molecular dynamics simulation of the Au(111) surface, research which would
eventually lead to ultra-cheap, molecule-sized computer memories.  The research
is based upon the new non-linear technique called soliton theory, a theory
involving dots wiggling around, slowly changing from blue to red.  We figured 
the dots represented molecules on the Au(111) surface.  I assumed that Au 
stood for aluminum.  
	Laura mentioned that the dots should start out as an aquamarine color.
	I said, "Dr. Ravelo wanted blue and red dots on a black background."
	"Aqua will look blue on videotape."
	"What should red be?"
	"Yellow."
	"Black?"
	"Dark Gray."

	Dr. Ravelo checked in and was pleased with our results.  However,
he was uncertain about the dynamics that occurred during one particular
simulation.  He called his co-researcher to discuss this.  I eavesdropped, but 
they were talking shop in a jargon all their own: NSF, DOE, blanket PO, CV 
padding, honorarium, tenure track, INS, green card....  Molecular physics is 
over my head.
	Ravelo hung up the phone.
	"Apparently, there is no problem.  There is simply more volatility in 
the surface of gold than I thought."
	"Gold?  No, this is the simulation of aluminum."
	"No.  Au(111).  Au is gold."
	I grabbed him in a headlock and rapped my knuckles painfully on the
top of his head.
	"Hello?  Anyone home?  Earth to Ravelo?  You're trying to make cheap 
computer memory out of gold?  Are you nuts?"

	The project reached completion quite smoothly, I thought.  All's well
that ends.  There was a memorable moment of personal satisfaction, other than 
getting the monthly update of the departmental organization chart and seeing 
that I was still on it.  At one point Dr. Ravelo explained that my program 
should take certain actions when a there was a particular relationship between 
the x-coordinate and the y-coordinate.  He wrote the relationship as it 
appeared in his own Fortran program: 
	IF ((ODD(x) AND EVEN(y)) OR (ODD(y) AND EVEN(x)) THEN etc, etc.
He asked me if my language, C,  had the functions ODD and EVEN, and I said no.
He had sympathy for me because I would have to write my own versions of 
functions that already exist in Fortran.  On his paper I wrote with a 
flourish another version of that expression:
	IF (x+y & 1) etc, etc.  QED.

						Steve Connelly