New Server

Well, it’s been busy here, but that’s no excuse for me not posting.

Anyway, we’ve got ourselves a new server system here at the school, and let-me-tell-you it’s been a godsend. Unlike our last server, which had this MISERABLE knack of taking a break right when a class needed it for a project, this one actually LIKES its job and actually is present for class presentations.

Don’t get me wrong, the fickle system was still useable since the server’s main MI (Magical Intelligence for you muggle folk) is only responsible for advanced search features and other things that the hybrid muggle tech and enchantments can’t directly provide, but not having access to those features when you need them is a HUGE step in the right direction.

But Margaret (as she seems to prefer to be called) is always there when we need her, ready for a search. She even shows up during class presentations to watch and see how the students are doing. Not sure how long her optimism will last, but at least in the short term it looks like things will be running a lot better.

Oh, also, I’m going to be heading off to the Europa colony to visit my uncle later this week, so I’ll tell you how that goes.

OOC:

Sorry for the long delay. You can expect this kind of posting behavior to continue. ^.~ I plan to try and actually post once a week, but the past is any indicator of the future, I wouldn’t expect too much from me in the next 6 months or so. ^.^;;;

Wow... Been a While.

Sorry I haven't posted recently, it's been really busy lately. We've been patching our terminals up to the latest greatest version, but it turned out to be a bit of an issue. See the software manufacturer (muggle internet link, though I wouldn't expect any mention considering the nature of the agreements between them and the ministry of magic,) made a slight mistake in the incantation, so instead of getting the latest version of the terminal software with all of the trimmings (like the new automatic persona selection tool) we instead spent quite a bit of time chasing the terminals down. The cause for this, it seems, was that the programmer had chosen to make the default persona a bohemian professor. Not that this suprises me seeing as the terminal software had been written by Google, but this ment that most of the terminals had convinced most of the students that they should go and see the world and that they should take the terminal with them (since the terminal wanted to see the world too.) Problem with this is that ment that our terminals ended up in all sorts of places. The African savanna, the jungles of Brazil, we even found one in a small temple in nepal.

I would have posted about things as I wandered about trying to reclaim the terminals, but being the silly fool I am, I managed to let one of them convince me into believing it was actually a good idea. So when I woke up on the dusty floor of a rural indian hut with an oblisk making all kinds of noise jabbering about the things we had yet to do (yes, the terminals are obsidian obslisks,) I realized that maybe there was something wrong. Since that was about twenty minutes ago, I really haven't had a chance to do anything here, (since the terminal informed me early on that contact with the external world would make it impossible for me to engage in "Cultural Acceptance" and would leave me bound to my pre-existing prejiduices.)

Anyway, it's good to be home, and hopefully, I'll post again soon. Oh, and while I was out they managed to repatch the terminals (except for mine) to default to a more "neutral" personality (a very computer like one soas to avoid such problems in the future.) Though I would note that there is definately a lot more cultural "color" in the school now. Oh, you'll notice I changed the comment system from my own proprietary one to the cool new one provided by Blogger. (Yet another great Google product in my life. Hope this one doesn't convince me into a healthy diet and regular exercise.)

OOC:

I figured I'd stay with the Harry Potter theme of 'whimsical and almost cataclysmic scale to even the smallest problems' and have a minor technology related mishap that tries to turn people inside out. I also got a chance to make a suppositious tie between a major company and "the non-muggles", and abuse my link tools again, just because I thought the idea would be interesting. And besides, what do you think the odds are that the big companies A) wouldn't find out, and B) try and get their grubby hands into things? ;P

Tasty Goodies and the Epic of the Vending Machine

Today I was sitting there working with the central data storage crystal, creating a backup of the whole network that is going to be shipped off site so in the event of a massive fire or something like that (Not that it's usually a problem, the fire control systems in the school usually do a pretty good job of stopping any stray fires. But sometimes they get lazy and stop paying attention) we can have a backup, and I got hungry. So I decided that I should go to the vending machine and get something to eat. Now I've seen the "Replicator" in some of the muggle TV shows, and the theory they suggest is pretty interesting. Sloppy and wasteful by wizard standards obviously, but it is an interesting alternative to the Wonks'O brand food generators. I mean, they have to program it with what they want to eat, and all we have to do is give it an example and it can make it forever more. And better yet, we can download the recipie onto removable media and give it to another food generator. I have my favorite meal (a scrumptious blend of potatoes, sausage, carrots, corn, and onions stir fried) stored on my pocket drive. (Something rougly akin to a muggle flash drive, just also capable of doing some actual processing as well as having a LOT more space.)

But anyway, stupid thing was acting up and only seemed to want to give me a salad. I spent ten minutes trying to convince it that my sausage and potatoes wasn't going to eventually kill me, and that I didn't need to eat more leafy greens.

But I guess that just made the goal at the end all the more rewarding.

OOC:

Yes, replicators. Think about it, a moderate intellegence computer mixed with the ability to cast transmutation spells (Or conjuration, I haven't decided which yet. I can't currently think of any examples of matter conjuration at this particular moment, so I guess I'm gonna have to go with transmutation) and a divination spell to determine the nature of the meal in question. Feed it generic matter (waste, dirt, etc) and it can give you back food. Same basic point as Matter<->Energy converters like replicators, but with a magical twist.

A Narrow Escape and a Good Laugh

Ætherflare Larius narrowly avoids collision: Muggles establish permanent satellite around Saturn

Well, the muggles have made it to Saturn. Caused all kinds of ruckus here since they just about ran into one of our colonies there. It was all we could do just to keep them from detecting us, and more to avoid a collision. Wouldn't have damaged the stone structure of the almost 1000 year old research colony, but the muggle's might have actually figured out this time, unlike the last two collisions with the Mars colony.

But none the less it's been hilarious watching the muggles struggle with the difficulty of space. All you need is air, shielding, and something to keep the air from escaping. It's taken them thousands of years to invent plastics, air filtration systems, launch mechanisms, etc. It was 1126 when Merlin first proposed the possibility of there being an "Æther" beyond the limit of the sky. He built the first of the Ætherflare colonies and levitated them into space, opening the heavens to all of wizard kind. Now the first few tries had much lower success rates than the muggles, loosing something like 200 brave souls to experiments involving the nature and the exploration of the Æther. Most of them died however, because unlike the 20th century muggles, the wizards hadn't really gotten the technology and spells needed to detect radiation and gas pressure levels in space. But mostly because Merlin was the first to even test the nature of the Æther, and even wizard science of the time didn't know about solar winds and the vacuum of space.

But in any case, I must commend the muggles for doing it just about the hardest way possible, but I think I should petition the magister to have them disclose the orbital path of our colonies to the higher up muggles so we can avoid this kind of thing in the future.

OOC:

Stop and consider: They can produce air tight shields, spontaneously create things like air, and have a way of bypassing gravity (contragrav); why couldn't they have long since had space travel? With magic, most of the difficault parts are almost non-existant. No escaping gravitational fields, no O₂ scrubbers, no nothing. It's so obvious it's almost painful. Plus, it makes for a good explanation of the one or two martian probes that "vanished". ^.^

Quidditch, Rain, and 802.11g Ready Schools

Well, not that it really suprises anyone, but it's soggy here in England. And since it's that time of year, the students are out there practicing for the coming year's quidditch season. Outside I can hear them laughing and playing. However, while they're out at play, I'm engaged in the arduous task of updating the school's classroom terminals. This year we're upgrading from having 150 computers to having 5 computers and 150 terminals. Basically all the terminals are is an asteral projection interface and a maginet interface. Plus, since many of the students have begun bringing their muggle made personal orginizers (They complain a lot less about being kept in a pocket all afternoon, so the students like them) we've been working on making the school both Maginet and 802.11g complient. Since the maginet is already interfaced with the muggle Internet, making our 802.11g network internet ready was a snap. We still used an intellegent router at the bridge of course, since they're compatible with the more primitive ethernet anyway. You just have to ask them to be patient because it does run a lot slower than the maginet (Since the maginet basically goes as fast as the user needs anyway, unless interfacing with the sluggish muggle links.) But such is life.

Well, I should probably stop "testing" this terminal and get onto the next one ^.^

OOC:

5 now! BTW, if anyone wants to suggest something or wants to see a particular aspect of Sarrl's life (not just the stuff I think is important) just Mail Me (jtc@nqig.net). I'll see if I can work your suggestions in. ^^

204-66, but a Good Time Anyway

Well my friend Joey came over today. We sat around playing one of our favorite first person shooters all afternoon after work. He creamed me obviously, but what did you expect. I mean he was the one hosting the game, how can I expect to beat an animatron running the game on his own local circuits? But the fact the he won really wasn't the point since we were just trying to have a good time anyway. To think that it was only a year or two ago that the animatrons where officially given citizen status. Before that the technology was so new that when they build the original "My Pal" animatrons back in 1970, they hadn't even contemplated what the animatrons themselves would think about it. I mean Joey is one of my best friends, but I can't imagine ever having thought of him as a toy. However, for the past 30 or so years, they have been subjugated as slaves since then. But such is the nature of humanity. As it is there are several standard organic creatures that live in slavery today such as house elves and the monster books we used back when I was in school. But things are improving, and that's all I can ask for.

OOC:

Oddly enough, I don't see the implementation of cyborgs being as easy as the implementation of pure AIs in this world. Mostly because connecting the computer to the human directly doesn't seem to have as much of a bonus in the magical society as it does in ours. They already have access to non-invasive interface tech, so the unpleasantness of installing it just doesn't seem worth it.

Also, I felt that some of the effects of the rushing of technology should be as apparent in their society as it is in ours, so computers with AI brains would obviously be a heavy point of contention in their society. (Keep in mind, a consiousness is slow but good an problem solving and a electronic computer can address the single thread problem orders of magnitude faster than a human, so mixing them seems obvious.)

Boring Days...

Today was horrible. I mean there was nothing to do! Not that I'm complaining mind you, a quiet day in tech support is a very good sign for everyone else. But it still ment I sat on my duff playing around with one of my pet projects.

See, a while back I got this but up my butt and decided that I wanted to write my own spell execution database for some of the nifty little toy spells I've come up with in my free time. And since I wanted it to be web searchable I figured I'd write it in PHP 4 (With the extended libraries for non-muggle hardware obviously.) The hard part was getting the astral image projector to display my image on the fly. I'm kinda noob at PHP and needed to figure out how to cause the server to spawn an alternate projection. Anyway, I got that figured out, so now you can Check it out! (I should warn any muggles who might have hacked their way in that they'll need the astral projector to see the site.)

Anyway I think I'm going to go back to my game. Peace yo!

OOC:

Well, my first link to a non-muggle ready webpage. I think that in order to add to the blog "look and feel" I'm going to continue using this methodology. Looks cool too. ^^

Of Whiny Routers...

Well, for those of you who don't know me¹, I work at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizzardry. It's a nice place, the building is quite old, but I think it's done a pretty good job of keeping up with the times.

But then again, that's why they hired me. With all the new fangled things, I'm responsible for making sure it all works.

For example the wireless network broke down yesterday. It took me almost two hours to convince the network authorization database AI to work again, and it would only do so if I promised to read it a bedtime story. These intelligent routers can be so fussy sometimes. I often am not surprised as to why the muggles never bothered to imbue their hardware with minds of their own. But with how much it improves security, I'd never go back. I mean, muggles have password encryption and all, and so do we, but the intelligent router can tell when someone's not doing what their supposed to, and even understands that sometimes there are special circumstances. We don't even have to setup an account four our guests, we just tell it "it's alright, he's with me" and it lets them though.

Anyway enough complaining, time for me to get to bed, plus the computer is complaining that I'm talking too loud. Later!

OOC:

1) Sarrl allegedly has friends, otherwise why write a blog?

As you can see, the world he lives in is MILES ahead of where we are technologically. But only because of the integration of magic and technology.

Guess I haven't quite figured out what I want to do with the OOC section yet. Oh well.

And in the Beginning...

Dawn.

What a horrible time to have to get up.

But that's the way things are for me. Get up in the morning, go to work in the afternoon, watch TV, tinker, and sleep in the evening.

But it's probably quite different from what most of you who read this are used to.

This is my story, the story of Sarrl Swiftfinger, Magical Technician.

OOC:

How I plan to talk to my readers, Out Of Character. ^^

Either way, I'm Jim and this is my little project to hopefully convey what life would be like in the Harry Potter world if the wizzarding community hadn't decided to lock non-magical technology in about 1890. The idea is to do this blog style, so hang on to your pointy hats, it's gonna be a bumpy ride though my imagination over the period of several months. I'll try to update this regularly (at least once a week) but I'm making no gaurentees.

See ya!