Only $339.80* per megabyte!
More brain-hurty goodness from my \misc_images directory. I’m not sure when this is, but it references CP/M and Z80, so…1983, maybe? I bet that thing was the size of a cement block.
January 17, 2008 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 16
Yea it is nitty, and verily it is gritty also
Okay, here’s where it all becomes a lucky happy pink fluffy buttload of playtime joy. The real estate lady looked upon my Mighty Pile and instantly decided it would be quicker if I picked out the few things worth keeping and then turned the ragpickers loose.
I’ve never liked throwing things away (which is how we got here). I’ve never been one for new beginnings and fresh starts. But it’s finally dawning on me that nobody’s waiting to compose my hagiography; that my every post-it note and snotrag is not a precious relic; that rubbing my adolescent journals on lepers will not make them clean. In fact — on the whole — I would rather the world not remember what a spoiled, whiny, self-absorbed unpleasant little proto-emo toe-rag I was at sixteen.
So here we go. I guess it says something not-flattering about me that the idea of throwing out my first computer is a whole lot harder to bear than the idea of throwing away letters from my first serious boyfriend.
After all, that computer is an XT clone with a Phoenix BIOS — the first proper cloned PC. “Phoenix” because the company rose anew from the ashes of its lawsuit with IBM. Ironically, IBM’s loss is what tilted the nascent PC market toward IBM and away from Apple, since there were cheap clones of the former and not (still not) of the latter. “Cheap” is relative, of course: I had to take out a loan for $2,500 to buy it — a very serious chunk of change in 1985 weaselbucks. Still, it ran at 9.44 MHz (as opposed to the 4.77 MHz for a genuine IBM XT), had an RGB monitor, a 20 meg hard drive AND two floppies (one of which was double density). I combed Computer Shopper for months before I picked this one out.
And the boyfriend was just some lovesick twit I grew up with.
November 14, 2007 — 8:00 pm
Comments: 19
Happy birthday, lemon sucker!
Fifty years of Edsel.
Edsel had been a provisional name for the car, while researchers probed other possibilities. A few priceless duds emerged, like Elkherd and Utopian Turtletop. Pleasant-sounding nominees like Phoenix, Altair, and Citation were also on the table. In the end, however, a Ford committee decided it was fitting to name the car after Henry Ford’s son, even though research showed that consumers associated the word with “diesel” and “weasel.”
I resemble that remark.
Get the whole story from US Snooze and Edsel World. It’s surprisingly interesting, if you find that kind of thing surprisingly interesting.
Me, I’m getting ready to fly to Jolly Olde early Tuesday morning. I’ll set this to autopost Monday morning. I ain’t blogging from Stepfordtech, that’s for sure!
October 15, 2007 — 7:20 am
Comments: 39
People come and go so quickly here
This blog has become one of my favorite daily reads. So I shall show my gratitude by swiping his stuff.
Like this map. The one up top there. Guess what the dots mean. No, guess. Seriously, I’m not typing anything else until you do.
Wrong! It’s a list of all 160 cities in 1900 that had a population greater than 25,000.
Holy smokes! Can you believe it? Granted, some of those cities had a lot more than 25,000 citizens. The top twenty ranged from New York City, at 3,437,202 to Providence, RI at 175,597. (Poor little Rhode Island. Providence has slid to 124th with a current population of approximately 176,862. We’re leaking people!).
It’s so easy to forget that Superpower America is a 20th Century invention. Before that, we were a few happy rubes with cowshit on our boots. One of my favorite displays at the Smithsonian was in the Castle: they preserved intact the 1876 centennial exhibition, showing all our proudest accomplishments at the end of the Victorian era. Tennessee’s entire display is a coon skin and some pieces of wood. With bark on.
Somehow, that map links up in my head with this datum what I also nicked: as of 2006, service industries accounted for 42% of the world’s employment in 2006, agriculture 36.1%. Listen up — we got more peeps driving desks than driving ploughs!
He says (and I agree) that this is a huge milestone: the point at which the majority of our species is no longer in the business of grubbing up food.
Why do these two ideas go together? I…hmm. Well, history moves very fast. And, despite everything, pretty much in the right direction.
Get me! I’m an optimist!
October 4, 2007 — 6:07 pm
Comments: 19
Before there was Photoshop
I don’t know how many thousands of dollars this baby cost new. Several, many. Can you get a feel for the scale of it? I should have shot the picture next to a Junior High School gymnasium for comparison. This is a Truevision videographics adapter, but everybody called it a Targa board. They were the only game in town for image manipulation in 1987.
Before there was Photoshop, there was this. Before there was this, people had a touching and almost religious faith in the veracity of photographs. It was my job to crush those tender feelings under the heel of my sneaker.
Truth is, we didn’t really need the bzillion dollars worth of graphics computing we bought in the ’80s. In some measure, the main purpose was to make our customers go, “woo!” My computer room was a stop on the company tour for every client. My boss would keep up a snappy patter about what the machines were capable of while I demonstrated in real-time. Like a freak show.
Or sometimes an engineer would drop me the client’s annual report before a meeting, and I would digitize a picture of their headquarters and set fire to it. They walk into the meeting, see a picture of a half-destroyed Conglamco Industries’ flagship facility projected on the back wall and dive for the phones. Ah, it was sweet.
Then there was a time I almost bought myself a lifetime of unwanted attention from the Feds. See, somebody was going to talk to Boeing, and he gave me this really crappy, blurry picture of a jet to use on the title slide. That wasn’t right, so I cleaned it up. Sharpened it, drew in the obvious lines. My boss saw it and nearly wet himself; it was the first released photo of a certain stealth bomber; it was supposed to be all blurry.
All our computer graphics stuff lived in a small, purpose-built room with a real door. A real door, and walls that went all the way to the ceiling. It was that important. Two complete graphics workstations, five monitors, assorted cameras and bernoulli boxes. Things that whirred and things that hissed, blinking LEDs of every color (except blue…those came later). The bridge of the Enterprise wasn’t a patch on it. The whole room worked on one circuit that was operated by a single knife switch by the door. I got to work before dawn and it was my great privilege to hit that switch and bring the whole glittering, wheezing chromium beast to life every morning.
I couldn’t possibly have used this board. It was nonstandard in every way. But my boss is a great thrower-awayer of things, and I’m a hoarder. (They had to wait until I was on vacation to biff our original three computers: an IBM XT and two ATs. Oh, god. Where are they now?). And I have the monitor that this board drove (also useless). But, you know…it just wasn’t fitting to let something this amazing and world-changing go into a dumpster. It had earned itself a flaming Viking funeral ship, at the very least.
Eh. I’m sure I’ve told you guys these tired old stories before, in some thread or other. Indulge me. It makes it easier to say goodbye.
August 21, 2007 — 6:46 pm
Comments: 20
Kicked to the curb: the Doomercycle
Today is garbage day (and a very happy garbage day to you). This week’s Casualty of the Week: the Doomercycle.
Let’s see. Doom was released in 1993, so it was maybe thirteen years ago I wondered if I could cross-breed a bike with a mouse and come up with a way to get some exercise while fragging zombies. (Whoop! There it goes. I just heard a door slam and looked up to see the Doomercycle ride off into the sunset. That didn’t take long. G’bye…! <snf>)
See, one variety of mouse works like this: it’s got two little spoked wheels inside, one for uppy-downy and one for sidey-sidey. When the mouseball moves, it turns those wheels. Each wheel has an LED on one side and a sensor on the other. So when the wheel turns, spokes interrupt the light, and the sensor sees blink-blink-blink and it knows you’re moving.
That wouldn’t be quite good enough. That would tell the sensor how fast you were moving, but not in which direction. Each wheel actually has two sensors; when it sees AB-AB-AB it knows you’re moving forward, and BA-BA-BA means you’re going backward.
I thought…spokes. Wheels. What if you took the uppy-downy wheel, and put the sensor on one side of a real bicycle wheel and the light on the other? That would give you running forward and backward, all you need for Doom. You could perch the keyboard on the handlebars for all the other commands. I went to Starvation Army and picked up the used exercise bike you see above for $15.
It took a couple of tries, but as it turned out, no soldering was necessary. I was kinda bummed, to tell you the truth. It was too easy. See, there was a little socket where an odometer or something used to go, and all I had to do was jam the mouse’s own uppy-downy wheel into it, and duct tape the circuit board in place around it. Voilà!
I had feared all along there would be a scale problem; that the wheel would move too fast and overwhelm the sensor. But, no…it worked eerily well, right out of the gate. It recognized slow, fast and in-between. It played a kick-ass game of Doom.
I can’t say as I got miles of exercise out of it, though. In order for the wires to reach, all the components were balanced precariously against each other. Too much enthusiasm would’ve put a handlebar through my monitor, or sent me ass over teakettle into the radiator. Eventually, I used it with a laptop balanced across the bars, but that was VERY insecure. It needed a sturdy platform or something, but the proof-of-concept was enough to scratch my itch. Then laptops stopped having serial port and that was that.
But it worked! So nuts to my boss, who laughed! And, dammit, my electric sneakers would’ve worked, too! I’m sure of it!
August 20, 2007 — 6:11 pm
Comments: 22
gdbye crl wrld
A recent change in inheritance legislation will allow people who are dying due to an accident or other emergency to compose their will on a mobile phone, send it by e-mail or leave a voice message, reported MetroXpress newspaper.
Current regulations require that an emergency will must be written by hand or told to two witnesses in order for it to be valid. Relaxing the requirements is intended as a way to make it easier for the dying to ensure that their estate goes to the proper heir.
beeeeeep Hello. I’m not home at the moment, but sweet Jesus
I’m going to die!!!!
June 25, 2007 — 5:20 am
Comments: 18
Down and out in Visitorville
Anybody else notice the ad for this thing on Sitemeter? It’s a program that takes your usage logs and turns them into a Second Life for deaf mutes. They call it Visitorville. Your web site is rendered as a city, incoming queries from search engines are drawn as buses, and you guys shuffle off the buses — a bunch of unshaven zombie retards sunk in existential gloom with IP addresses floating over your heads — and drift around not interacting with each other. So, no change there.
It’s supposed to be a way of better visualizing website flow: rooms and buildings correspond to sections and pages. Repeat visitors have special little things floating over their heads, buyers little something elses floating over their heads, and repeat buyers are served with sticks up their backsides like all-day suckers (not true, but my posts are required by law to have at least one butt reference per).
Reminds me of the game Black & White — the last (but not the first) game I bought a whole new computer to be able to play. You’re God, and you make these little people, and they walk around doing stuff with their thoughts floating over their heads like, “I have to pee” or “I’m sad” or “I have a disease” or “I’m lonely” and I’m, like, “look, there are millions of you and you all look alike to me — needy, high-mainenance bastards, every one of you. I’m only a god here.” I got bored with it real quick. But I learned an awful lot about theology.
We must be in another wave of 3D visualization marketing ideas. Microsoft is trying it on again, with Photosynth (which I saw at Enas Yorl‘s place) and Surface (which I’m sure you’ve seen, unless you live in a yurt on the windy steppes milking horses).
I have to admit, Microsoft hater that I am, Surface is very cool. Watch some of the videos, if you haven’t. I love the idea of setting cameras and phones on the table and pulling data onto or off of them with your fingers.
But I saw prototypes of these things — not these literal things, but ones very like them — twenty years ago. I saw (and lusted after) a drafting table that was a giant pressure-sensitive tablet combined with rear projection video. I saw high-def and 3D screens and 6D mice and visualized worlds. I saw all this at a Siggraph show in…1990?
By the time we got videophones (backhandedly, via webcams) we were bored with the idea. Too much time elapsed between the tease and the release.
I damn well better still have a license when they roll out the rocketcar.
June 21, 2007 — 5:49 pm
Comments: 40
I. Rule. The. World.
I’m bored with me and my stupid problems. I’m going to play computer games tonight.
I bought myself a copy of Civilization IV. I know, I know…it’s a two year old game now. I’m too old to pay gamers’ money for video cards these days, so it’s the geriatric lineup for me.
Actually, I bought myself two copies of Civilization IV. Because why? Because I’m a drunk, that’s why. I ordered one copy and several days later, I woke up thinking, “I bought something neat on Amazon ‘buy it used’ last night. I wonder what it was?” I didn’t check. This happens to me a lot, and I never second guess it. I walked around for days with a happy “a special surprise is in the mail” feeling. Then it came.
If I lived in Puritan times, they’d make me spend the rest of my life with the game box pinned to my hat and “Putrid Drunkarde” sewn across my pinafore in lime green cross-stitch.
Anyhoo. I was a huge fan of Civ I (and II). It was like a magic ant farm. I could explore the world and nurture my people and build a great civilization. I was far enough ahead of the AI that I never got my ass completely kicked and most always played until the time limit ran out with no clear winner. I cultivated my cities, conquered a little around the edges of my territory, enjoyed watching my nation grow from mud huts to space stations. I was a benevolent, leisurely dictator. It was the game SimCity should’ve been but somehow never was.
And every once in a while, I would draw down a happy, blessèd game, where accidents of geography and the luck of the draw handed me the ultimate prize. Where my more tech-savvy rivals spent the Dark Ages kicking each other’s asses and the only nations left standing by Victoria’s day were relics of the stone age, shaking flint spears and ululating while Mighty Exalted Weaseltanks squished them like bugs.
I. Ruled. The. World.
Good times.
When I got Civ III, I was delighted by the graphics and thoroughly pissed off by the gameplay. It was as though Sid Meier had let loose a bunch of ignorant twenty-something kindergarten teachers on his AI. Suddenly, the NPC’s were horribly aggressive about territory. No more leisurely exploration of the planet; if you didn’t plop down half-baked cities as fast as humanly possible — some time before the Iron Age — your neighbors swiftly corraled you within unsustainable borders.
And technology? Every culture in the world developed scientifically at exactly the same pace. The reviews described this as “more realistic.” Meh. Anybody at Firaxis ever heard of Papua Fucking New Guinea?
So I held off on IV. The reviews were glowing, but they glowed for that turd of a III, too.
Wish me luck. I’m…umm…screw it. I think I’ll just read a book tonight.
May 2, 2007 — 5:55 pm
Comments: 8
Several wifi technical issues and a naked transsexual porn star
It’s Mayday. The communists are communicating, the socialists are socializing.
Nope. No idea what that means. I woke up with it running through my head, thinking, “I say, Weasel! How droll!”
Today was neither as unpleasant as yesterday nor as productive as I hoped. I’m still +1 on the rodent offsets, but the night is young. I got my re-imaged machine back but, as I remembered, that external Linksys USB wifi dealie is the shits. It couldn’t get a decent signal in the stairwell looking out the window at the building next door. (When I used it at home, it couldn’t consistently hold a signal when placed directly on top of the router).
There was, however, a tantalizingly strong signal coming from right inside the building. Wide open. I emailed around to see if anybody knew what it was. Finally, I plucked up the courage and connected to it. Up came the company logo and login. Also a scary “business purposes only” warning. Huh. So they’re providing us with wifi now.
So! I’ve got a PCMCIA card I can try in the business laptop. Or I can give it another go with my ThinkPad (which I have this evening rescued from the clammy embrace of Linus Torvalds. I like Linux, but I’ve never gotten the damn thing working right). Problem with both of those options is…where does the antenna go? No smartassery from you in the back. Finally, I can try to jack into the provided wifi signal using some kind of tunneling software so they can’t see what I’m up to.
My technical problems are boring. But then, so is not being able to surf the internet.
Meanwhile, this here feller is Buck Angel, the Man with a Pussy, currently the world’s only (incomplete) female-to-male transsexual pornstar. No, I don’t remember how I got here, but it’s dark and I’m all by myself and I’m cold and scared. Can somebody come pick me up? I want to go home now.
Sometimes the internet makes me feel like crying.
May 1, 2007 — 5:05 pm
Comments: 11