The Empirical Manifesto

When I lived in a little apartment community in Maple Shade, New Jersey, my wife and I used to walk around the grounds each evening, holding hands and telling each other of our day. My job was to install a software suite on J210's running 9.05 (and later 10.20) and train US Navy personnel on its operation. Two weeks out of the month I was deployed to a different aircraft carrier, and one week out of the month I was on second-level helpdesk to support the ships.

Nextel had just released their first-gen "push-to-talk" phones and Space and Naval Warfare Command had passed them out to us. These were the models before today's "Alert" function which allow you to accept an incoming transmission. Remember those? Anyone could press their walkie-talkie button and begin speaking out of your phone.

As it turns out, I spent most of my day that day in the server room, so my phone was turned all the way up. My wife and I were walking, it was a bright, still evening and the weather was perfect. Now, had the Stennis or Kitty Hawk had a problem, I'd have been ok. But no. We were directly in front of a large family enjoying a cookout at one of the nearby pavilions when the Nextel announces at full volume, "ERIC, THERE'S A PROBLEM ON THE USS ENTERPRISE, PLEASE REPORT IN."

Yeah, the entire pavilion went quiet and they all stared at me.

They thought I was playing Star Trek.

Ate mostly cheese for dinner. Is that wrong? I had a nice salad for lunch, but that was 7 hours ago, and I was starving. Drove to Wichita this weekend - smoked a cuban on the way there. It was fantastic - thanks Phil! I think I'll give up scooby-snack for awhile. Have my eye on a new humidor and about 100 cigars. That should last me awhile. Had a good time with the kids, we went to the fall carnival and rode all the rides. I think Chamber of Secrets is the best Harry Potter score. Lori sat and watched every episode of BSG Season Two, back-to-back, uninterrupted. I am watching the mini-series again, as a prelude to watching Season One followed by Season Two. Tony just picked up the US DVD Box Set of Season One. This is going to be a hard week to recover from. As I was driving to Wichita, I noticed the East-bound traffic from Kansas City to St. Louis was pretty much grid-locked. For 200 miles. I decided then and there I was going to drive back early Sunday morning. I went to bed at 1945 and got out of bed at 0100. I figure I got a good three hours of sleep. Drove to the hotel, showered, shaved, put on my coat and tie, and went to work. Ten and a half hours later, here I sit, gut full of cheese, and wishing I could just pass out.

The family is gone.

It is quiet here again...painfully so.

Watched a few more episodes of Voyager, Season 5 to pass the time while I alternated beer and Scooby-Snack. Without my family here, I have lost my desire.

Decided to learn bind. I've discovered that learning bind on someone else's DNS server is considered rude. So I'm going to build my own. I have three boxes to choose from, my new FreeBSD box, quark, and teh max0r. I settled on quark which required an upgrade of OpenSSL. I chose instead to follow a mass package upgrade path. This usually takes awhile, and user interaction. Maybe that's how these things happen? They just grow off each other as you require them? We'll see how it goes. I tried this once before, and it took three full hours to compile bind onto belanna, my HP/UX box. A pre-compiled blastwave package will do just fine in this case.

unrar for unix rox0rs. I wish everything were command line. All that point and click makes me nauseous.

I love my SPARC Rave box so much, I think I'll sell my E250. Anyone want it?

Filled up secondary storage (st0rage) on teh max0r so had to do some housecleaning earlier. It might be time for a high-capacity external USB drive.

Updated quark, installed bind, cleaned out iTunes and downloaded some album art.

Lethargy overtaking me again...back to Voyager.

quark has been up for 80 days. Not too bad considering all he's been through, the move and all, and the rebuild. I taught myself minimal Solaris loading on quark. Which is why I brought him down...it's patching time! This could take awhile, I'm not sure. He's probably only three rev's back, and he's got probably twice the throughput of those Ass Blade's at work. I don't know where quark will go, or what I'm going to do with him, but I'm sure I'll figure something out.

I started dismantling unused servers at the ADC today. Of course the trash was in the way, so I bundled up all that and took it out. Then I got hungry and had to hunt some food. After that my headache was worse, so I made a pot of coffee. Sat down to drink the cup and starting adding album art to iTunes. Needless to say, I haven't actually dismantled anything yet.

David came over last night and we played a few rounds of Holomatch before organizing the pictures of his last 3 years at the Star Trek convention in Vegas. while I cleaned out my desk. I used to like the one-on-one hunt, but we've been playing massive maps against as many bots as I can fit in. It's been a lot of fun.

...

All patches run and blastwave packages updated. quark is back online! I also managed to stack some unused boxes for relocation.

Ok, so I admit it's sometimes hard for me to delete entire soundtracks that are in my iTunes database. But there I was, innocently listening to music and updating album art, information, etc, when I run across "All About the Benjamins" <-- the entire album! So I think, "WTF?" Now, I must admit that I had already assumed what type of music was going to be there, and as I previewed each song, I had to admit it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, but I had to ask myself, "Will I EVER sit and listen to this crap?" So I deleted it. I'd rather listen to Tony's entire collection of Blood Hound Gang than spare the disk sectors on...oh who am I kidding. I'd keep 50 copies of "All About the Benjamins" on spinning disc before I listened to any BHG.

July 21, 2005
James Doohan
March 3, 1920 - July 20, 2005
Actor who achieved immortality as Scotty in Star Trek

THE actor James Doohan achieved cult status as the chief engineer “Scotty” in Star Trek, the 1960s TV series.

Although the famous order, “Beam me up, Scotty”, was never given on the show, Doohan’s character, Montgomery Scott, became one of the most familiar, and most parodied, characters in TV history.

Whenever the USS Enterprise was pushed to the limits, he would famously cry: “The engines canna’ take it.” Reliable to the end, however, he ensured that they actually could take it.

Fearless, loyal and industrious as engineer of the USS Enterprise, Scotty was meant to be the stereotypical Scotsman. However, as a Canadian by birth and Irish by descent, Doohan elicited mockery from genuine Scots for his attempt at mimickry, and not least his unlikely phrases, such as “Have a bonny trip!” and “That’ll put the haggis in the fire!”

James Montgomery Doohan was born in 1920 in Vancouver, the youngest of four children of William Doohan, a veterinarian, pharmacist and dentist. He displayed an early interest in acting, playing Robin Hood in a school production, but the outbreak of war took him to the Royal Canadian Artillery, with which he served gallantly on D-Day.

On June 6, 1944, Lieutenant Doohan of the Winnipeg Rifles, 13th Field Regiment, took part in D Company’s landing on Juno beach. The company disembarked from landing craft at 7.30am, and dashed through rifle and machinegun fire to reach the shelter of the sand dunes. Doohan silenced a German machinegun post with a few shots but was wounded later that day. He was hit eight times, four times in his left leg, and one round hit him in the chest — only the cigarette case in his breast pocket saved him from a mortal wound.

Otherwise, his company came off fairly lightly. The middle finger from his right hand had to be amputated, and whenever there were close-up shots of Scotty operating the transporter in Star Trek, a “stunt hand” was employed.

After the war Doohan began acting in earnest. He spent two years at the Neighbourhood Playhouse in New York. He made his TV debut as a detective on the show Martin Kane, Private Eye, and went on to do many voiceovers on radio.

He returned to Canada in 1953 and spent the next eight years in Toronto, appearing on television, film, stage and radio productions. In the early 1960s he moved to Hollywood and concentrated on TV work, appearing in such shows as Bonanza, Blue Light, The Gallant Man and The Virginian.

In 1965 he auditioned for Gene Roddenberry’s intergalactic adventure, Star Trek. Being a renowned mimic, he auditioned for the part of the ship’s engineer in eight different accents. Roddenberry was particularly impressed with his Scottish brogue, and Doohan was given the part — and the luxury of choosing his character’s name. “I named him Montgomery Scott, right off the top of my head,” Doohan said, “in honour of my grandfather, my mother’s father, James Montgomery.”

Star Trek first appeared on US TV screens in 1966. As the engineer from the 23rd century, Doohan appeared in 79 episodes in the TV series, and later in seven full-length films. But NBC was not satisfied with audience ratings, and Star Trek’s warp-busting, infinitive-splitting adventures were put to an end in 1969. Yet this seemed merely to increase its popularity, and when it was syndicated around the world in 1972, it became one of the world’s best-loved sci-fi series.

Television audiences became fond of William Shatner’s hammy portrayal of Captain Kirk, Leonard Nimoy’s phlegmatic Vulcan, Mr Spock, and the USS Enterprise’s tempestuous doctor, DeForest Kelley’s “Bones” McCoy. Throughout their bold exploration of strange new worlds populated by exotic creatures who lived in unrealistic scenery, they could always rely on the man in the transporter room who, with a shake of his head and anguished look on his face, would holler through the intercom: “A’m tellin’ ya cap’n! A’ve got nay more power!” Such was the appeal of his character that when Elvis Presley once drove past him, the King leaned out of the window and said: “Beam me up, Scotty!” A meeting with Groucho Marx elicited the same words.

In life Doohan was less keen on serving his screen superior. As with so many of those who worked on the original Star Trek series, he found Shatner a difficult colleague. Doohan regarded him as self-centred and condescending. “I wanted to thump him on more than one occasion,” he recalled. “He believes the world orbits him.”

In 1974, when Star Trek was redone as a cartoon series, Doohan did the voiceover for Scotty and for many other of the characters. Thereafter he did other work in animation, before resuming his role as Montgomery Scott in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

He is also credited with devising the Klingon language that featured in that film. Although Klingon was later refined by Marc Okrand, Doohan can be credited with formulating the world’s most popular artificial language — Shakespeare and parts of the Bible have been translated into it.

Doohan appeared in the subsequent five films featuring the original cast, and in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation — his hair greyer and his waistline larger on each occasion.

From the 1970s he was a familiar presence at Star Trek conventions; by 1994 he was attending 35 a year, and earning £5,000 for an appearance.

Ill-health — a heart attack in the 1980s, followed by Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s — prompted him to make an official farewell to his fans in September 2004 in a ceremony at which he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The ravages of time did not totally wither him, however — in April 2000, at the age of 80, his seventh child was born.

His autobiography, Beam Me Up, Scotty: Star Trek’s Scotty in His Own Words, was published in 1996.

He married Janet Young in 1949. They had four children before they were divorced in 1964. He is survived by his second wife, Wende, whom he married in 1975, and by their two sons and a daughter.

James Doohan, Star Trek actor, was born on March 3, 1920. He died on July 20, 2005, aged 85.