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IBM relics
Saturday, September 5 2009
Having had a week of dry conditions, the greenhouse well finally drained away today (it does so into the bedrock, which is intercepted by a steep escarpment only sixty feet away). This would give me the first opportunity to rig up my powerful new air compressor with a 100 feet of airhose to see if air tools would be any more effective than electrical tools at breaking up the well's floor. Sadly, the results were unsatisfying. I have two air hammers from Harbor Freight, and the cheaper of the two seems to work the best, but it wasn't even as powerful as the electric hammer drill I'd been using with a lot more convenience (I could just plug it into an outlet). The thing about Harbor Freight is that occasionally you can get lucky and get a tool that proves rugged and useful (a particularly tough diamond-studded saw blade comes to mind, as does that electric hammer drill I just mentioned), but just as often you'll find your tool has partially-disintegrated just from shipping. There is, for example, a huge difference between the quality of a cold chisel from Harbor Freight and one from, say, Lowes. The Harbor Freight chisels shatter after a few hours of hard use, whereas I've been using the same inch-and-a-half-wide cold chisel from Lowes since 2005 with only a mild mushrooming of the end I beat with a hammer. This is the difference that comes from a company having to replace tools that fail.
This evening Gretchen and I went to KMOCA (the Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art down on the Rondout) for an art opening for a show having Kingston as its theme. Our friend Deborah had taken some photographs for the exhibit (including pictures of someone's brick collection) and there was also large amount of space dedicated just to IBM's presence back during the Cold War (from the mid 1950s to 1994). I was particularly interested in the IBM stuff, which featured an unintentionally hilarious video made by IBM in the late 1960s promoting the Hudson Valley as an especially pleasant place to live (evidently they'd had difficulty convincing people to relocate here). But there were other choice bits of IBMania, including a Selectric typewriter, a monochrome display for a personal computer, and a huge slightly-moldy, slightly-out-of-focus poster promoting a massive 60s-era computer installation (complete with several large reel-to-reel tape units). There were also flyers and literature promoting the career of "programming," as well as a simple folded piece of paper reading simply "THINK" on top of the teevee playing the promotional video. There were also blueprints of the facility that IBM built just north of Kingston back in the 50s. The blueprints were on fancy linen because no expense had been spared. According to Deborah, who had toured the ruined buildings recently and salvaged most of the items on display, the facility had originally been built to develop the SAGE computer after it was determined that the Poughkeepsie facility couldn't be adequately expanded. Now, of course, those buildings (41.969941N, 73.995559W) stand empty and have fallen into disrepair. When Deborah was there a few weeks ago, she was astounded by the massive interiors (which included three large interconnected buildings each having 100,000 square feet of space, as well as numerous ancilliary buildings, a small part of one of which is occupied by Bank of America). The floors in the abandoned section have been gutted and numerous leaks have appeared in the roof, causing much of the contents to rust and mold. There'a great deal of Cold War-era stuff stuff still in there.
Eventually Deborah's new boyfriend showed up, along with a large support crew of children and other relatives. I was out on the front stoop on Abeel Street sipping wine with the dogs (Sally and Eleanor) during much of this time. The dogs were on leashes, and the kids kept volunteering to hold those leashes. Meanwhile, a scruffy cat came up Abeel and held court on a nearby porch, befriending anyone who walked by. If the dogs hadn't been with me, he probably would have attended the opening playing the role of a piece of found art: a scruffy Kingston alleycat.
Later most of us went a few doors down to the Armadillo (the southwest-style restaurant) for dinner. I ordered a veggie burrito and had them make it vegan, and it was actually perfectly good that way. Meanwhile Deborah was off at another table, and we found ourselves at a table with Gretchen's colleague Dorothy A., as well as a couple that included a director of a performance theatre (she was a vegan) and her husband, a successful novelist (he ordered the steak fajitas).
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