Tracy

I had a dream last night and Tracy was in it. Is Tracy an odd name? It kind of feels like it is, but I don't know if it is that unusual. Maybe it's because I didn't know anybody named Tracy when I was a kid. Well, except for Dick Tracy, and his name wasn't Tracy, it was Dick. Anyway, thinking about it, I could only think of three Tracys in my life.

Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy was a staple of the newspaper funnies when I was a kid. It was never funny, and I don't recall any of the stories, if there even were any. There were a whole bunch of oddball characters.

Tracy the Runner

I knew a woman named Tracy when I lived in Austin. She was tall and thin as you might expect a runner to be. She came this close to being famous - she was supposed to go to the Olympics but then Jimmy Carter had a snit fit and canceled our participation in the Olympics which kind of pissed her off.  She was there for the night of the mushrooms. There were four of us and each of us was one of principle elements - Earth, Air, Fire and Water. She was Fire, I was Water. She eventually married a good friend of mine in Austin. 

Tracy the Computer Scientist

Intel SatisFAXtion Faxmodem

I met Tracy when I was working at Intel on the SatisFAXtion. After that he worked on a database project that crashed and burned. Not sure what happened there. I remember him telling me that they were trying to do something that the underlying database software didn't support and their attempt to work around its shortcomings made the whole project so complex that it collapsed under its own weight. Later on he went to England (Oxford, maybe?) and got a doctorate in Computer Science. Last I heard he was working on using Deep Learning software to identify cancer in X-ray images. He gave us a very coherent explanation of what he was doing at one of our Thursday lunch bunches. 

Dream

Last night I had a dream. I was riding in a Volvo and Tracy the Computer Scientist was driving. I was talking about how things had changed in the automotive world in the last 60 years. I should have said 50. I'm 71, so 60 years ago I would have been eleven and was barely aware that cars had engines. Whatever, it was a dream. I was talking about how when you turned the key to start your car 60 years ago, it was always a crap shoot as to whether it would start the first time. Sometimes the switch would glitch and just nothing would happen. Sometimes the starter would just start to turn the engine, but then hang. Sometimes it would start but only run for a few seconds. In those cases you would get to try it again. Sometimes you would have to crank the engine for a long time before it would catch. Nowadays if you turn the key and the engine doesn't start immediately you may just as well throw the car away. 

We're driving in the country and we come to little town. There is a small park and on the far side is a group of people, a wedding party perhaps. There is a lawn between us and them. It's a little brown. There are people right up against the edge on the far side, but there is nobody on it. It's like it's a prohibited area, but there doesn't seem to be any reason for it. We drive by a building with a porch recessed into one wall. The floor of the porch is concrete and looks to have a slope of about a foot in six feet, which means it's too steep for tables and chairs and so there is nothing there.

Modern Cars

With the computer diagnostics needed to diagnose the problem and with the exorbitant price of fancy little do-dads that are custom to that particular make and model, the repair bill on a car that won't start is liable to be a thousand dollars even if there is nothing mechanically wrong with it. And you know that once one thing fails, it is just the first of an endless cascade. Better just get rid of it now and save yourself the headache.