Madison, WI

I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin learning how to administer an Avid ISIS system. It's somewhat refreshing to be trained in an environment where the glitz and hype normally associated with the film and television industry just isn't there. When we go to lunch we go to eat; just that. Wisconsin is so not New York.

ISIS is a pretty phenomenal system that violates the known laws of physics. You get HD bandwidth (well, potentially HD bandwidth, but that's another story) not by building a big full duplex pipe between the drives and the workstations like Fibre Channel but by spreading the media across a large collaborative and intelligent array of microprocessors.The more microprocessors the more bandwidth. It's a social solution to a physical problem where brute force is just a waste of resources. The system we are training on has two embedded Windows system controllers and 64 Linux microprocessors. Each of the Linux microprocessors has 250 Gigs of storage and everything talks to each other over Ethernet. It is a thriving, humming behive of activity. Intelligence gives you what brute force cannot accomplish, and the more microprocessors you add the stronger, more reliable and more capable is the whole.

I'm also working on another problem related to this one, which is my poor dissertation. Children, do not grow up to go to my College unless you have infinite patience and deep pockets. Go instead to a nice state university where at least you will avoid bankruptcy and learn at least as much. The Ivies are hospitals that do not admit sick people; your success is not due to them but to the simple fact that you were weeded out of the dogpatch. Go instead to a place where they feel that they are obligated to teach you rather than anoint you as a chosen one. But with that being said, I digress.

Of great interest to me now is the work of Julian Orr regarding photocopier repairers. His book, Talking About Machines: an Ethnography of a Modern Job, is something that I want to build on regarding my own field. More to follow.