Have you ever questioned

how the transition from gasoline powered cars and trucks to electrified ones will work in practice? To wit:
1. How long will car manufacturers be required to make replacement battery packs available, and how much will they cost?
2. Will new battery technology (the current state of the art can best be described as primitive and unsustainable) be retrofittable to vehicles on today's roads? After all, the lifetime of, say, lithium technology for this market is surely limited--at the very least, too little supply will price it out of reach. Also, it is rather dangerous. Niobium has been touted, but rarity and cost again rear their intractable heads.
3. What about airplanes, ships, and railroad engines? Is there a battery technology that can power these high mass applications, or does the combination of high mass vehicle engine and load with high mass batteries make this unfeasible?
4. Current gas stations along many highways have relatively limited electrical needs. Quite apart from the question of where all the necessary electricity will come from (intractable itself when power companies are maxed out now) is the question of how to get far more of it to places with comparatively modest current current (sic!) consumption. We are talking massive redesign and reconstruction of electricity source and delivery infrastructure.
5. What will the owners and multiple employees of some 180 000 gas stations in North America do for a living when the sale of gasoline is no longer allowed? This is a separate though related question to asking what will today's nearly four million North American truck drivers do for a living when the road system is automated and vehicles are self-driving. Very few members of the groups automated out of jobs are likely to be re-trained as in-demand doctors, teachers, nurses or software developers.

The Spy does have a possible solution to #4-5a on the list. Keep many of the gas stations open, but change what they sell to reusable and recyclable component materials. Assuming for the sake of argument that future batteries consist of (metal) plates immersed in a liquid electrolyte, why not rather than recharging batteries directly using electricity, use the regular gas station tank for new electrolyte, the premium one for the spent liquid. "Fillups" and "recharges" would become "exchanges of spent for active electrolyte". The metal plates should last longer, but they too could be made removable, replaceable, and recyclable. Spent electrolyte could be trucked to locations where there is plenty of available electricity to harness in the reconstitution, thus solving both infrastructure problems simultaneously.

What metal does the Spy suggest for the plates and what Chemistry for the electrolyte? Dunno. Not likely anything we are using at the moment. Iron flow technology might candidate; iron is cheaper then most metals. Oh, and BTW, without fusion-generated power, there is little chance of meeting the increased demand for electricity. On that front at least, there seems to be (electric?) light at the end of the tunnel.

Come tho think about it, one of the ideas sometimes floated for ameliorating climate change is building extensive sun screens in orbit to reduce the amount of heat reaching Earth. In theory, the captured energy might be beamed down (Scotty) and converted to electricity, though given that the practice of theory ain't the same as the theory of practice, the cost-benefit equations might not deliver useful solutions. It might be more feasible to capture that energy after it gets here by coating windows and building cladding to turn them into vast areas of solar collectors--though doing little for the climate, and requiring may more storage batteries. Still, where the times and the climes mesh appropriately, houses designed this way could provide power to the grid for other's consumption. Bonus--fewer unsightly windmills and negative power bills for the homeowner (if it will still be financially feasible to "own" a home.)

Ah, well, no problem or solution is an island unto itself--all seem connected.

Speaking of connections,

The Spy's home network, as reported here last month, has begun its refurbishment. Following some delivery hiccups and presenting the wrong software (corrected by the customer, ahem! but given a small gift certificate for his trouble, good!) the new HUSN (actually American Megatrends) router had to be reconfigured a couple of times--one mistake or judgement error and you start over from scratch, as some things cannot be edited, but only dumped and re-done. The box has a reasonably powerful Intel Core I7 9700, 32G RAM, and 512G SSD and is in a high traffic environment, but generally only from one point location at a time as, sadly, the Spy's manse has only one occupant for 98% of the week. Thus there was little to lose by dedicating one of its ten ports as WAN and tying the rest into a bridge--effectively making it a combination router and nine-port switch.

To maximize throughput, and optimize port usage (the house had thirty wired services plus the wireless when he started the project; thus the overload of the ASUS box), he connected the 2.5G PoE VIMIN switches (soon to be three now that the concept has been proven) to the router using the optical port on each switch and one of the four such on the router using SPF+ modules and short optical cables, thus leaving all eight 2.5G RJ45 ports available to take over from those on his three now-obsolete 10/100/1000M eight-port switches, which worked, but were getting long in tooth. One of those new RJ45 ports can eventually connect and supply up to 30W power to a more robust AP.

Meanwhile, he has demoted his ancient mariner of a router to AP only duty, a task it seems capable of handling most of the time because it is not called upon to do anything else. It does still unexplainably drop connections at random intervals, and just as randomly restore them a little while later, but at least it need not any more be rebooted on a daily basis (sometimes several times). Online resources differ on what port should be used in such a setup. The Spy found by error and trial (don't know why it is said the other way around when it is first and mostly error) that connecting to the former router's WAN port worked best in this configuration. Using a LAN port gave short lived and inconsistent service. OH, and some devices, such as his HP printer, that pick up a HCP address on being powered on, have to be cycled off and back on if the network parameters are changed, even if though it may be served the same IP when re-started.

On the software front, the Spy can claim to excel at,

well, MS Excel, as he has been keeping church and personal books on spreadsheets ever since APPLE ][ days and VisiCalc (both of which had serial numbers under 100). Remember: the Apple][ established early market share advantages over Radio Shack's TRs-80 boxes for two reasons--more memory, and being "the VisiCalc machine". The current versions of the Spy's sheets retain formulae he created back in those late (great?) seventies.

The Spy's reader, (Nellie Hacker, are you still out there?) and most of his students, well know that VBA is his poster boy for how not to design a programming language, indeed his prime bad example as the worst one ever. He knows, because he has a lot of code written in it, mostly by guess and by golly, as the available documentation is thin and often not quite one hundred percent correct, or even applicable to the Mac version of the program--or is it really a different program?.

Here's a new oddity for you. His Church donation sheets have several pages, one each for donation to the general, missions, capital, and thanksgiving funds. All pull the envelope numbers (and names if a password unlocks them) from an account data page from which he automates receipt production. The point is, the offering entry pages have identical rows and columns that are summed across the accounts to the grand totals page for each cell.

So, by the end of the year, what with people coming and going so soon after COVID, the whole apparatus is no longer in alphabetical order for easy entry. One would think that one could select the whole page range and alphabetize them all at once, thus preserving all the data in the right locations, and still getting the correct totals. Nope. Multiple page simultaneous sorting not allowed, even though much other functionality is. So could it be done manually, inserting lines, moving others, deleting still others. Yes to inserting and deleting columns and rows and some formatting, no to copy and paste across multiple pages.

Much experimentation on a non-live copy ensued. FWIW, here's the working routine (used only after saving an untouched copy for when Murphy sends everything off the tracks.)
0. (We CSC folk always count from zero) Replace the data pull of the names and initials on each page with the values only so they will independently sort.
1. On each page introduce conditional formatting that colours every unused row so they can be sorted together.
2. On each page select the entire (identical) data entry table and sort first by colour so the used rows with white background end up at the top, then by the column with last names.
3. Do the same for the totals page.
4. Do the same for the data page whence names are pulled for the others. Its table is of course much narower as it does not need hundreds of columns.
5. Restore the data pull removed in step 0.
6. Check the totals column in its new order with the totals calculated in the original untouched copy. It should be identical, though of course in a different order.

In retrospective theory, steps 0 and 5 might be omitable (is that a word?), though the intervening steps would look even more scary scrambled. But repeat after the Spy, "the theory of…." Why can't we sort multiple pages at once? It would be so much easier.

The need of the kneed of the knee

The Spy woke up last Saturday morning around 0120 with a terrible thigh cramp radiating upward from the inside of the knee. It took an hour of lost sleep to walk it off and get back in the sack for a troubled sleep. In the morning, standing was hard, walking normally impossible, and traversing stairways an adventure in pain--not the first time his right knee has become his wrong knee. Epson salts (no relation to the printer company) in the bath plus a dose of ibuprofen after a day of hobbling about gave enough relief to be functional on Sunday morning, but was no fix. Wary of the 16+ hour wait for cursory Emerg treatment that has become all to common, and unable to get a family doctor appointment for eighteen days, he saw the university doctor on Monday. He turned out to be a sports medicine specialist, and after poking, pulling, and pushing diagnosed "pes anserine bursitis with associated tenosynovitis" with no discernible damage to the joint itself.

In short at least one bursa was swollen, and some tendons were unhappy. Treatment: take more ibuprofin and ice the joint, then come back on Friday. Well, it's Friday, and the recovery is 80%+, though the joint still has a "popping" sound sometimes when walking. Going forward, the doc advised, baby it a while, then do stretch exercises to improve joint mobility and soundness. Ah the pleasures of growing old. On the one hand, some would say "it beats the alternative," but OTOH, when one is sure of the next stop, the converse is true.

TTFN

as there is more to life than writing about life, even when it is electric.

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-third year as a high school and university teacher in 2023. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several organizations, and participated in developing industry standards at the national and international level. He was co-author of the now defunct Modula-2 programming language R10 dialect project. He is a long time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular participant and speaker at churches, schools, and academic meetings and conferences. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021 and cancer, where he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.

URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: https://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : https://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : https://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : https://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : https://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : https://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: https://www.arjay.ca

TechEthics Site (Fourth edition of text; the fifth is in preparation) : httpss://www.arjaybooks.com/EthTech/index.htm

Publisher's Site: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html

Specifically Cited here from Amazon retailers:

HUNSN store: https://www.amazon.ca/stores/HUNSN/page/173D0981-7A9C-445A-B227-25A0F16DF643?ref_=ast_bln

VIMIN Switch : https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0C5D3L25K?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1

10G SFP+ optical Tranceiver modules: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08BP55663?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1

OMC4 LC to LC Duplex Fibre cable (0.2 - 150m): https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B095KJ3MXV?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1