The Three Signs - Book 4 - LisaChapter 17: Picking Up The Pieces free porn video

In preparation for the work that would be starting in the back of the studio tomorrow, Lisa and I cleared everything out of the upstairs rooms, rooms that would soon become some overflow bedrooms. Paul and Chris Ramos turned up after lunch with their plans to discuss just how the work would proceed. Of course, they wanted to know all about what happened to me with the shooting, so I had to fill them in on all the details.

“That’s pretty fucked up, mate,” Paul said. “And you say he’s Mulock’s nephew? The state Minister for Education? I’m surprised he didn’t try to pull some strings.”

“Paul Landa called me about that when it first blew up,” I said, “and I advised him to keep out of things, it was pretty much an open and shut case, and any attempt at political interference would be lead to a big fight with the University administration.”

“I bet,” Chris said. “I don’t know much about how universities work, but what that kid did seemed pretty blatant. So he actually tried to kill you?”

“If his hand and arm hadn’t been shaking so much, he might have got his aim right, and actually hit me where some real damage would have been done,” I replied. “My real question is how he got his hands on the pistol; I mean, it’s not all that easy for just anyone to get a handgun. I have a suspicion, it’s just a wild guess, that our old sparring partner Tom Domican was somehow involved.”

“Could be, could be,” Paul said. “Since he’s Mulock’s nephew, I would assume he’s connected into the Catholic right wing of the party, and Domican could see that as an easy way to get back at you. Everyone would assume O’Connell shot you as an act of revenge for getting him kicked out of Uni. Let me make a few discrete inquiries, I have some contacts in his crowd.”

“Now, we should talk about the building plans,” Chris said. “We’ll be starting first thing in the morning, get the demo done. We’ll dig the trench for the gas line, run that and mount the water heater on the wall at the back of the studio.”

He unrolled the blueprints they had drawn up; I could see the council building approval stamps on it. I assume that while I was in hospital, they had worked with Ian to get the approvals through the system.

“Now, for the doors, we are thinking of using some sliding pocket doors, we have a bunch left over from a previous job. The advantage is that they don’t need any clearance space in the rooms, they just slide back into the wall cavity. Now, as far as trim around the doors and windows go, we will try to match the style here in the main house, but for the skirting boards, just a simple bull nose profile would look better. The same as the crown moulding; since we don’t have a lot of ceiling height to work with, just a plain quad moulding would be best. Anything more complicated than that would make the ceiling look lower.”

“You can see here on the plans where we have tentatively thought some power outlets could go. In the two double bedrooms, a double outlet either side of the bed, and an outlet on each wall. The same in the single bedroom, and a double outlet in the bathroom at the hand basin. The bathroom one would be on a separate circuit that will have a safety breaker on it,” Paul added. “The lights, we are thinking of can lights, the same as we put in the downstairs of the main house; three along the length of the hallway, four in each double bedroom, and two in the single. In the bathroom, lights at the mirror with the sink, plus the heat lamps / fan in the ceiling.”

We talked about paint colours; I said I would like the doors and trim woodwork stained; not the dark colour that we had in the main house, but a lighter colouring. Paul showed me some samples, Lisa and I both thought the ‘American Walnut’ looked good.

“Now, we’ve got some good quality paint left over from another job, the colour is called ‘Pearl Glow’, it’s a slightly off white with a hint of mother-of-pearl to it; here’s the colour card, what do you think?” Chris said. “If you don’t like that, we can pick something else, but it goes with just about any floor colour, and it’s not going to limit your room décor.”

“Looks good to me,” Lisa said, and I agreed with her.

We had pretty much worked out the details of the project; Paul and Chris were happy with the discussions, and had all they needed to start work with their crew in the morning. We finished moving things out of the area where they would be working, and cleared off the sink area against the back wall, so they could mount the hot water heater there. I guess they would work out how to run the exhaust flue up through the ceiling; at least we didn’t have anything on the wall that needed to be removed.

“This is going to be exciting to watch the progress,” Lisa said. “I guess that’s what it was like for you when the downstairs part of the house was getting done. I got to see some of that, but I wasn’t living here.”

Over dinner, Mary Beth had some news for us; the company producing the gig at the Entertainment Centre had called her, apparently ticket sales had skyrocketed and they wanted to know if instead of just the one night, on Thursday the 1st, if we would consider stretching the gig out to three nights. It all sounded pretty good to me; I had planned on getting another guitar or two; mainly to have some backups in case something happened to one of them during a gig; I had been contacted by one of the sales guys from Venue music, saying they had some decent Strats that had just come in, and wanted to know it I was interested. Plus, now we were playing larger venues, I really needed some more powerful amps. I had priced a Marshall JCM 800 head and speaker stacks, they weren’t all that cheap, but the two extra nights would give me the money to spend on upgrading my gear.

After dinner, I made sure I had all of my notes ready for the next day back at Uni; I dialled into the PDP 11/70, checked my email; there was nothing that couldn’t wait until tomorrow. Michelle had emailed me the agenda for the Faculty meeting that would be on first thing tomorrow morning, there was nothing that related directly to me, thank God.

“Are you sure you are feeling up to going back tomorrow?” Lisa asked. “I’m not talking physically, how are you mentally? Will you be okay there, going into that lecture theatre?”

“I’m fine, I don’t think I’m going to freak out or anything. I know that’s not going to happen again, Ross is locked up, and I just have to get on with my life.”

The first challenge at work on Monday was the walk from the car park to my office. Not that it was difficult; but by the time I had reached our office area, my leg was starting to feel a little sore. I guess the walk up and down the stairs and over the uneven ground leading from the car park was still a bit of a stretch for me. I had half an hour to sit at my desk, to relax and go over the agenda for the meeting. The others – David, Claude and particularly Michelle – were very pleased to see me back, and had lots of questions about my recovery, the shooting, and whether I had heard anything about O’Connell’s fate. After chatting for a while, it was time to head down to the main conference room for the School meeting.

As I walked into the room, a number of the other staff members clapped, and gave me a ‘thumbs up’ sign. We sat down off to one side, and I saw Professor Rees acknowledge my entry, he looked towards me, nodded and smiled.

“Welcome back, Mr Morris, I am glad to see that you’ve recovered,” he said. “We were all very concerned about what had happened to you, it was a terrible thing, that shooting. I trust you are feeling fine?”

“Thank you, Professor, yes, the leg seems to have pretty much recovered,” I replied. “The test will be going into the lecture theatre after this meeting, but I feel pretty good.”

“We are all glad to see you back with us, and I hope there are no lasting effects to your leg. Now, on with the meeting, the first item is a progress report on the upgrading of the high voltage power lab. I believe Mr Harrison you have an update for us?”

He handed things over to Harry Harrison, one of the lecturers in the Department of Electric Power Engineering. The work was all rather interesting, not that it was of direct impact to me. The remainder of the meeting continued in the same vein; updates on various projects, plans to review the solid state electronics part of the undergraduate Electrical Engineering syllabus, and a report on the use of the disk storage on our main PDP 11 computers. It appeared we would need to get an additional 20 MB of storage before the end of the year, spread across two of the teaching systems. One of the results of the increasing number of students, it was suggested that at some stage before the end of the year, we should have a major review of all of the School’s computing facilities, maybe rationalizing some hosts.

After the meeting finished, it was back to my office to get my notes for the Computing I lecture. I had checked with Claude and David to see what they had covered in my absence, so this morning I would start with the first part of the history of the development of digital computers. It was always an interesting lecture; none of the material was particularly essential to the course, but it provided a good background on not only how developments in the field had increased dramatically in the last few years, but that many of the principals, things that Mauchley, Eckert, Turing and some of the other pioneers had developed were still relevant today.

Time to head down, I pushed the irrational fears to the back of my mind, collected my notes, and headed down to the main lecture theatre. I was happy to see two of the University security police standing at the entrance to the theatre, I greeted them as I entered the room. I was amazed, as I walked up to the platform at the front of the theatre, everyone in the room stood up and applauded me. I felt embarrassed; I waited until they had finished, clipping the lapel microphone onto my collar.

“Um, thank you all for that welcome,” I said. “I have to say, it feels great to be back here. Now, before we start today’s lecture, I have a few things to say; firstly, there are four of you here who I am particularly grateful for; Sandra Rogers, for giving me first aid, Simon Telfer and Peter Withington, who held the shooter down until the police arrived, and finally Stuart Mills, who took control of the room when there was panic all around. I have something for the four of you, so if you could see me at the end of the lecture, thank you.

“Now, I understand David Carrington and Claude Sammut gave my lectures while I was recovering; so today we will continue with the course as normal. Now, I promise that I will try to make my lectures enjoyable as well as informative, but I hope that they won’t be quite as, um, ‘exciting’ as the last one was.”

My last comment raised laughs in the room; which was my intention. That seemed to set the right mood; I didn’t want people still thinking about the shooting and its aftermath. With those remarks made, it was time to start the lecture; I talked about the early developments in digital computers, the code-breaking work at Bletchley Park including the development of a computer called ‘Colossus’, to help in cryptanalysis. It’s regarded as the first programmable electronic digital computer.

“Turing went on to design the ‘ACE’ – the ‘Automatic Computing Engine’; which begat the ‘DEUCE’, also starting the computer science trend of creating cute names, and from them back-forming the acronym. Those of you who play cards will understand why the follow on machine from the ‘ACE’ would be called the ‘DEUCE’; ‘DEUCE’ stood for ‘Digital Electronic Universal Computing Engine’; the first computer here at this university – UTECOM - was one of thirty-three production machines.”

At the end of the lecture, the four people who I had thanked for their assistance came up to the front to see me.

“Now, I know this isn’t much, and really doesn’t thank you enough for everything you did two weeks ago, but here are some tickets to my gig this coming Saturday at the Enmore Theatre,” I said. “If you would like a second ticket for a friend, just let me know at the tutorial session on Thursday.”

They were all grateful, and said they would look forward to the concert. As they left, the other three guys from the cheating scandal came up to see me. One of them, Kevin, spoke for them.

“Mr Morris, we are shocked and sad at what Ross did the other week, we had no idea he was going to be that crazy,” he said. “In fact, we rarely saw him since the issue broke; he quit all of his subjects, and lost contact with us. The last I heard, he was hanging out with some Labor party colleague of his uncle’s and this guy’s criminal mates. We didn’t want anything to do with them. We saw him the morning that he broke in and shot you, he seemed like he was totally pissed; drunk or stoned or something, and he was raving how he would get his revenge on you, but he wouldn’t get into any serious trouble, because, as he said ‘Tommy would look after of me’. He said that he would plead temporary insanity or something. We tried to tell him not to do it, it wasn’t worth it, but he was dead set convinced he was going to get his revenge on you.”

“I hope you don’t think we had anything to do with the shooting,” another one, Peter said. “We just want to concentrate on passing the subject, getting our assignments done. You never deserved anything like that; in fact, you’ve been one to the best lecturers we’ve had, and we are all glad we have you again, not just as out lecturer, but tutor as well.”

“Well, as far as I am concerned,” I said, “what happened last semester is ancient history. The slate has been wiped clean, you are starting from scratch. And just remember if you get to the stage where you are starting to have problems with an assignment, or anything in the course, come up to our unit, make an appointment through Michelle to speak with one of us. We’ve all been through the pressure of being undergraduates, we know how hard things are, and we just want to help you. It’s not our job to fail anyone, we leave that up to the Chemistry Department!”

“Thanks for that,” Gavin said. “The whole cheating fiasco was all Ross’s idea, by the time we realized the assignment was due, there was no time to get it done, so he made the suggestion, and we all agreed with him.”

“We thought as much,” I said. “If you are having problems managing your time, then come and see us, we can give you some ideas on how to make sure you don’t get into that situation again. As I said, all of us have gone through the process of managing our time to make sure we get things handed in on time, see us if you have questions or problems.”

“Thanks, Mr Morris, you’re a top bloke, a great lecturer, and you didn’t deserve what Ross did to you,” Kevin said. “Now, we’ve got another lecture to get to, but we’ll see you in the tutorial session this arvo.”

I thanked them for their comments, and headed back up to my office. Kevin’s remarks about what Ross had been up to were interesting; I would pass them onto Paul Ramos to see if they made sense to him. Time to prepare for the 6.633 lecture just after lunch, I had followed up with Professor Dunworth to see what he had covered in the lecture sessions that I was away; he had rearranged some of the material, and wanted me to cover some of the basics of communications, starting with radio communications and wired telegraphy.

I had put together what I thought would be a good introduction; I wanted to cover a potted history of telegraphy, Morse code, radio, devices like teleprinters and teletypes, baseband vs broadband, why there is a need for signal modulation, and the different types of signal modulation. I had put together material from the various communications subjects I had covered, leaving out some of the more in depth details about electronics and radio engineering. The students had probably done enough maths by this stage of their degree so that talking about Fourier series wouldn’t throw them, and I could talk about things like the ‘Nyquist frequency’ and ‘Nyquist rate’ and they should be able to understand the concepts.

Just before 1:00 p.m., I entered the lecture room up on the fourth floor, and waited for the class to arrive. According to the enrolment figures, there should be right on fifty people in the class; I remembered several names from classes I had taught over the last two years.

“Good afternoon, everyone,” I said, once it was time to start the lecture. “For those of you who don’t know me, I am Will Morris, and I will be your lecturer for the remainder of the course. Professor Dunworth was kind enough to step into the breech while I was not able to teach the class over the last two weeks, but for either good or bad, you’ve got me for the remainder of the course. Now, we will start on the data communications networks strand of the course, and let’s get some definitions out of the way first. Definitions are important; unless we both agree on what something means, then we run into problems sooner or later. I’m sure some of you may recall the quote from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’, where Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ So, let’s make sure we are all on the same page.

“Now, ‘communications’. That means an exchange of information between two parties; the sender and the receiver. We are communicating right now, and I have the rather optimistic view that what I am saying is somehow getting through to you. There are many forms of communication; not just people speaking to each other in person; but some done over a long distance. Broadcast radio is one example, or the telephone system, or television; although in that latter case I suspect that there is little valuable information actually exchanged.”

There was laughter around the room in response to my last comment.

“Now, we are going to be concentrating here on ‘data communications’, or ‘digital communications’; that is, the information transferred has been ‘encoded’ from a human readable format to a format more suitable for transmission over a long distance, and it is ‘decoded’ at the receiving end. Now, this may be a surprise to you, but the early development of the railway systems gave us two other inventions, apart from a new, faster method of travel. Those were the concept of ‘time zones’, and ‘data communications’.

“Until the railroads spread across the country – and here I’m referring mainly to the United Kingdom and then United States, most towns and cities used their own time standard, what was called ‘solar time’. Sure, they used the twenty-four hour clock, with minutes and seconds, but what was noon in one town was determined locally. Now, that posed a problems for the railways, because if they said ‘The express train from Chicago will arrive in Disappointment Gulch precisely at 3:45 p.m.’, just whose ‘3:45 p.m.’ was that to be? The time in Chicago? The time in Disappointment Gulch? Or the time somewhere else? And each railroad company would use their own ‘standard time’.

“But that’s not of direct concern to us, except the railroads needed a way to synchronize their ‘standard time’ around their network. In 1852, standard ‘Greenwich Mean Time’ signals were transmitted by telegraph from the Royal Observatory. So here we have the second contribution to society from the railroads, the electrical telegraph. Not only did that use Morse Code to encode and decode text messages from place to place, but it also controlled what are referred to as ‘safeworking’ systems, so that dispatchers could safely send trains down a line, knowing that there wasn’t another train heading in the other direction, and resulting in a nasty encounter.

“Earlier I mentioned ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’. Early telegraphy systems used what is called ‘Morse Code’ to encode text into a series of dots and dashes; in essence, the time period between one ‘click’ and the next would be interpreted by the operator as either a dot – short delay – or dash – long delay. It was only when Morse code was used in some radio transmissions that the length of the actual sound became apparent. But to send messages at a reasonable speed required a highly trained operator, and various inventions tried to address that problem. And so we had the ‘teleprinter’ – a device with a typewriter-like keyboard and printing mechanism, which would translate text – letters and numbers – into a signal code, without the need for operators to be trained in the telegraph code. The advantage of these systems is that each character had a code of the same length of all other character codes, making it more machine friendly. The standard code used for teleprinters is what is called the ‘Baudot code’, each character is encoded in five ‘bits’.”

I then talked about the need for ‘start’ and ‘stop’ bits, figures and letter shift to allow for more than the thirty-two distinct characters a five bit code would allow.

“But what if someone wanted to send both upper and lower case characters?” one of the students asked.

“They couldn’t,” I said. “Related to that, if you’ve done any printing on some of the high speed belt printers on the mainframe computer here, you know that there are two printer queues; one for printing in ‘upper case only’, the other with dual case.”

I then explained how belt printers worked, and if they had the upper case only belt, where there were forty-eight distinct characters, the print speed was much faster than using a dual case belt, with ninety-six characters. It was those little diversions that made lecturing interesting. It was now time to shift gears, and talk about how to transmit digital data – essentially ones and zeros – on circuits designed for voice grade audio.

“Now, it was determined that for a typical voice signal to be intelligible, the range of frequencies needed are only three hundred hertz to three point four kilohertz. So to squeeze more voice circuits onto a broadband trunk circuit, they restrict the frequencies with a bandpass filter,” I said. “Now, if we want to modulate our digital signal, in a process called ‘frequency shift keying’, we choose different frequencies for a logical zero and logical one. We need to make sure the frequencies we choose will pass through that filter”

“But why go to all that trouble?” another student asked. “Why not just send the digital data directly down the line?”

“It’s all to do with that bandpass filtering,” I said. “Imagine we have a sequence of zeros and ones, so we would be sending what would be a square wave. Has everyone heard of Fourier synthesis?” Everyone nodded their heads. “So you know that a square wave actually consists of a combination of harmonic sine waves, like this.”

I put up a transparency on the overhead projector, showing how a harmonic series of sine waves combine to produce a square wave.

“Now, because of the high frequency cut off, if our data rate is too high, then that square wave will become distorted, and the receiving end may not detect state transitions properly. If, however, we modulate the digital signal in this FSK manner, provided our choice of modulation frequencies is below that 3.4kHz cutoff frequency, we don’t have that problem. All that is required is to demodulate the FSK signal at the receiving end, and we have our original digital signal. Hence, the device that does this is called a ‘modem’ – a combination of MOdulation and DEModulation.”

I passed around some handouts with documentation on the various modem standards.

“Now, on that handout are some of the more common standards; they specify the electrical interface, what the various control signals do, frequencies for sender and receiver logical ones and zeros. The advantage, if you can call it that, is that there are so many standards, that if you don’t like one of them, you can choose another that you do like. What you need to be aware of is that like many other areas in the computing field, things are developing and advancing rapidly, so what is state of the art today, will be commonplace next year, and out of date not long after that.

“Okay, that pretty much wraps things up for today,” I said, as it was close to 2:00 p.m. “Next lecture we will talk about various radio modulation techniques, and how we can get data rates at speeds faster than 1,200 bits per second. Once we’ve covered some of the background stuff, we can get into the meat of data communications networking.”

As I headed back down to my office, I felt in a particularly good mood. I felt that teaching that particular class would be very enjoyable. The students all seemed motivated, keen to learn. Since they were all third year students majoring in computer science, their knowledge of programming and general computing technology was fairly good. I prepared for the Computing I tutorial, today we were in one of the terminal rooms, going over some basic UNIX and vi commands. The tutorial session passed quickly; I handed out copies of the ‘cheat sheet’ of commonly used commands; most of the session was spent creating directories and experimenting with the ‘chmod’ command, explaining how the various permissions worked. Tomorrow afternoon’s tutorial session would be more work on vi; the concepts of being in command mode or insert mode often seemed to trip people up.

The first day back went better than I had expected; my leg hadn’t given me too much pain. Mind you, I didn’t have to walk all that far; once I got to the Electrical Engineering building I was in there all day. Now it was time to walk back to my car, and drive home. By the time I pulled into the driveway, my left leg was starting to ache. Not just from the walk to the car park, but the drive home in the peak hour traffic and all of the gear changes that involved. I had to park on the street; the Ramos brothers still had their truck parked in the driveway. As well, the garage was now used for materials storage; there was a stack of two by four - and larger sized – lumber for the framing, a pallet of wallboard sheets, several sliding door assemblies were leaning against the side wall. As well, there was a table saw and a large mitre saw set up ready to start cutting the timber to size.

I headed up the stairs and I saw Paul and Chris supervising the mounting of the hot water heater against the back wall. They seemed to be working on a stainless steel tube – the exhaust flue I assumed – fitting it to the top of the heater and making sure it was fed through a circular hole in the ceiling. I watched as the two of them, along with two of their workers, wrestled with the long tube, finally getting it into place and fixed to the top of the vent on the heater.

“Okay, Franco, just get those pop rivets in, and we are done,” Phil said. “Tomorrow we can get up on the roof, do the chimney. Oh, g’day Will, just finishing off the heater installation.”

He and Chris showed me what they had got achieved today; the skillion roof over the back part of the building, all of the internal walls and the old flooring had been removed. They had a tarpaulin in place over the open roof in case it rained overnight, and some wooden sheets had been placed temporarily over the exposed floor boards. The gas line had been run from the main house, and the ditch dug for the sewer line, too.

“We’ll make sure the turf is replaced properly,” Chris said. “We don’t want Lisa going crook at us for ruining her lawn! If you look, you can make out where the gas line was run, give it a few weeks and some good watering, and you’ll never know that the grass had been dug up.”

I saw where a large dumpster on the side of the building had been filled with the refuse from the demolition; there were rusty sheets of corrugated iron, broken fibro boards and the old wall supports and floor boards in there. Looking into the space where the new rooms would be built, I was amazed at how open the area looked.

“Tomorrow we’ll start framing up the studs for the walls, once that’s done then we can do the new roof framing, and get the tiles up,” Phil said. “If this good weather holds out, I expect the tiles will be on by Thursday, so it will be at ‘lock up’ stage. Fitting the windows into the openings will be a bit fiddly, but at least the openings are all the same size. As soon as the walls are framed then we can put the new windows onto them, seal around the stonework, get the flashing in place to make it weatherproof.”

I was impressed with the progress so far; mind you the Ramos brothers and their workers had always been very efficient, once they started on a project, they didn’t muck about. Most of their work was commercial buildings, office fitouts and things like that, where time was of the essence, and many of their contracts had bonuses for early completion.

I told them that everything was looking good, Phil apologised for taking over most of the garage for their delivery staging and workshop area, but he was worried about rain spoiling the material. I said there was no problem with that; if we were getting stuff built, then we had to accept some temporary inconveniences while the work was in progress. I told them I would check back with them on Thursday, and headed over to the house.