web analytics

Before there was Photoshop

vista video graphics adapter circa 1987

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

doomercycle bikemouse

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>)

bikemouse

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

After that, it’s weasels all the way down

rest20070817.jpg

August 17, 2007 — 11:11 pm
Comments: 37

Weasel’s happy funtime sack o’ crap links!

algoresmoochies.jpg

You ever get a stupid question stuck in your head and you can’t rest until you get the answer? Man, am I grateful for the Internet. I once haunted libraries and pestered librarians for my answers. Now Mister Google, he do it for me, from the comfort of my own nest of chewed paper.

The question was: what’s the longest anyone’s lived inside an iron lung? And the answer is: 57 years, assuming this lady is still alive. Woke up with polio one morning when she was three. 1950. Brrr.

There are forty people left who use iron lungs; she’s got a spare in the garage in case she needs the parts. They don’t make them any more.

Changing the subject, I totally don’t get this story from the Australian. It’s about how terrorists are operating in Second Life, blowing up pretend buildings and killing people. I understand how objects could be destroyed in SL, but killing people? There’s no dying in Second Life, is there?

They do have a point about laundering money through SL, since you can give money to other players, who then can trade online money for real-world money. But surely huge transactions would red-flag for somebody, somewhere. And the part about practicing for real-world terrorism is just silly; it’s not that realistic. You’d get better practice out of Castle Wolfenstein.

Vocabulary lesson from the Daily Mail: 1661. It’s a woman who looks sixteen from the back and sixty-one from the front. Taking care of yourself: good thing. Wearing tights and sparkly things and glommy jewelry past A Certain Age: not so good. I keep waiting for the Hillarys and Barbara Walterses of the world to give old broads with blond hair a bad name.

If the Daily Mail isn’t low rent enough for you, try the Providence rants & raves on craigslist. No post in particular; just jump in and sleaze. It’s a powerful demonstration of what happens when you give dumb people a platform and complete anonymity. I assume the rnr section is bad everywhere, but I’m confident Providentials are a special kind of stupid.

This guy offers a rich chunk of cartooning fun, melding LOLcats with old timey newpaper cartoons. He’s got the style down perfectly.

Best for last. I love this one. This guy took a text file with the words “this program does nothing at all” repeated several times, renamed it awardmestars.exe and uploaded it to a number of software download sites. He gave the ‘program’ this description:

This software does nothing. It doesn’t even run. It was created as an experiment to see how many shareware awards it got. See the results of the experiment at: www.successfulsoftware.net

Two weeks later, it’s gotten sixteen awards and recommendations. Worth reading the article, if you download stuff regularly.

And that’s all I got. It’s the weekend! Now we drink!

— 5:39 pm
Comments: 8

Skype is down

Sez Skype:

UPDATED 14:02 GMT: Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Additionally, downloads of Skype have been temporarily disabled. We will make downloads available again as quickly as possible.

…for those trying to get in touch. For those pissed off that I don’t
give out my Skype details: I’m ashamed of my high, squeaky voice.

Update:

Where we are at 1100 GMT
By Villu Arak on August 17, 2007.

Hello all,

As Europe has woken up to a new day and Asia is entering the evening hours, here’s the latest on the sign-on problem.

We’re on the road to recovery. Skype is stabilizing, but this process may continue throughout the day.

An encouraging number of users can now use Skype once again. We know we’re not out of the woods yet, but we are in better shape now than we were yesterday.

Finally, we’d like to dispel a couple of theories that we are still hearing. Neither Wednesday’s planned maintenance of our web-based payment services nor any form of attack was related to the current sign-on issues in any way.

We’ll update you again as soon as we can. Thanks for hanging tight.

Man, I didn’t realize how dependent I was until it went down.
WHERE IS EVER’BODY?

August 16, 2007 — 4:36 pm
Comments: 29

Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Gummibärchen!

gummybears.jpgIt’s a beautiful language, isn’t it? That means “happy birthday, gummy bears!” unless the internet is lying to me, which it hardly ever does. Although, it turns out there’s, like, a trillion ways to say “happy birthday”, depending on what dialect of Germanium you speak. Anyhow, gummy bears turn eighty five this month. Wee!

Gummies are made by the Haribo company, which is derived from Hans Riegel, Bonn.

The very first Haribo gummy bear was created in 1922. A bit taller and thinner than today’s bear, it was modeled after the dancing bear. (From the Middle Ages through the last century, street performers kept brown bears, forcing them to entertain crowds by pulling on a chain attached to a ring in their nose.) Some three decades later, the popular dancing bear became a bit smaller and thicker, resembling a teddy bear. Today’s version entered the market in the late 1960s.

A cheerful people. Production was suspended during the war, when demand for sweets was low and Hans Riegal was a prisoner of war. I would have thought the latter fact more of an obstacle.

Something must be controversial in Gummibärchenwelt, because the Wikipedia page is barred from change by newbies (a safeguard they don’t provide obscure, uncontroversial figures like George Bush). Perhaps someone disputes the claim that gummies produce bezoars and bowel obstructions. Or perhaps it’s the fascinating gummy fact that isn’t there. Wait for it. Wait for it…

Gummy bears are a pork product! Yes, it’s true! The Germanians render pigs into sweeties! That’s where the distinctive gumminess comes from. I hate the damn things, myself, but now that I know the act of eating them is haram


Postscript: the British Jelly Baby is even older, though I don’t know which unclean animal they’re made of. They were created by Bassett’s in 1919 to celebrate the end of the Great War; they were called “Peace Babies.” Production had to be suspended during WWII for lack of raw materials.

Don’t you love irony? I know I do!

Jelly Babies are subjected to ghastly High School science experiments in the UK. Behold: the Screaming Jelly Baby.

— 10:16 am
Comments: 34

A Tale of Two T-Shirts

tshirts

Once upon a time, I wore blue jeans and grubby sneakers and t-shirts with colorful slogans to work, like a proper artist/programmer. Then my company merged with our parent company and we took a turn for the corporate tight-ass. Black jeans replaced blue jeans, plain t-shirts replaced colorful slogans. I still wear grubby sneakers. Fuck ’em if they can’t appreciate a weasel in uniform.

So here are two relics of a bygone age. On the right, a t-shirt I picked up at my local Army surplus store. It says CORONER in official-looking script. This pleased me. Then I was walking across the parking lot of a restaurant with an early bird special — a magnet for wrinklies. A worried old lady tottered over to me, put a hand on my arm and quavered, “you’re not really from the coroner’s office, are you?”

Haven’t worn it since.

The one on the left is my cherished Lost in Space 30th Anniversary Cast Reunion t-shirt. Yes, I was there. Yes, I’m a fan. I liked the first season when it was serious-ish and science fiction-y and I liked the third season, which was cheap and silly and camp as a row of pink Judy Garlands. I was five when LiS first aired and that was four years before the moon landing.

Guy Williams — dad — died of an aneurysm (or a heart attack, I’ve read both) five years before, but the whole rest of the cast got together in December of 1995, in Boston. It takes some serious mojo to get a weasel into Boston, but you don’t say no to the call of history.

I didn’t pay to go through the autograph line, but I managed to stand on the sidelines and watch people go through and chat with the actors. I must say, they were all extremely gracious and managed to look genuinely pleased to be there. Huh. Maybe they actually were.

The whole cast held up very well. Bill Mumy is no bigger’n a fried fart. Mark Goddard had been teaching High School in Western Massachusetts for years. June Lockhart is still America’s mom. She wore white gloves the whole time. Arthritis, or a touch of the Howard Hughses? No matter, she shook all offered hands.

mumyandharris.gif

Jonathan Harris was older than god, but still had seven years worth of cartoon voice-overs left in him, in that distinctive faux-limey accent. I always thought that made him a peculiar choice to play an American military man (albeit a traitorous one). His obit said when someone asked him if he were English, he said, “Affected, my dear. Merely affected.” He was from Brooklyn and had a proper New York “dese and dose” accent, which he tried to fix by spending all his free time watching British films. What he ended up with isn’t really British at all except to American ears.

Heaven help me, I’m developing a touch of the Dr Smith accent myself. I’m fighting hard, but it’s apparently the tragic consequence of fraternizing with Brits. Oh, the pain!

So! The Robinson Family blasted off to Alpha Centauri…when? Care to guess what year Irwin Allen thought a plausible date for Americans to begin colonizing the stars?

August 15, 2007 — 5:10 am
Comments: 28

I found a cranky Victorian gentleman hiding in my basement

Victorian egg cup

Look what I found. Man, I had totally forgotten this thing. It’s an egg cup. I made it in my twenties. It’s quite small. In fact, too small to hold a jumbo egg — all I have at the moment, which is why it’s shown here eggless.

I got a surprise when I turned it over: a slightly raised signature in three different colors of glaze. Yes, it’s an “S” and yes that’s really my first initial and yes that’s how I signed stuff in my twenties. I must’ve thought I was going to be so huge they’d call me by my first name, like Michelangelo or Leonardo. Or Cher. Or Madonna. Or Buckwheat.

I didn’t do much 3D work in school, but after I dropped out, I had a fling with bizarre porcelain tableware. The thing about hand-built clay sculpture is, nobody likes to fire it. If you goof up and get an air bubble in the clay or don’t dry it properly, your piece can explode violently in the kiln. Worst case, it ruins everything else in the kiln, and sometimes damages the kiln itself.

This is very bad mojo when you make your living firing slipcast pots painted by little old ladies. So I had a hard time finding someone who trusted me and my stuff.

When he retired and moved away, I was screwed. So I thought, what the heck? I’ll apply for an arts grant and buy my own damn kiln.

I hate public funding of the arts. I think it’s been a gigantic factor in the butt-uglification of modern art. But I was very, very poor and I had an idea for a whole series of sculptures I was itching to do, and, hey, I’d paid taxes into the system for years. So I sent away for the forms.

First requirement? Attach photographs of twenty examples of the sort of work you have in mind.

Hey geniuses: if I could produce twenty of the thing I have in mind, I wouldn’t need your stupid grant. Feh. First and last time I tried to stick my snout in the public trough.

About that time, someone (I think it was the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston) sponsored a sculpture competition. The idea was to make a mad tea seat for a mad tea party. My entry is below.

I convinced someone to fire it because these are mostly slipcast rather than sculpted (less likely to ‘splode). Alas, before I got to the final glazing, the competition was called off for lack of interest. And that was pretty much it for my pottery fling. Not long after, I got my first computer and disappeared up it for twenty years.

madteaset.jpg

August 14, 2007 — 6:32 am
Comments: 28

Life and Death (now on 5 1/4″ floppies!)

life&death the game

Behold! One of the many ancient boxes of software that hit the junkpile this weekend: Life and Death for the IBM PC. This was a 1988 surgery simulator. Games of the era were always a disappointment; software boxes promised so much and computers were capable of so little. I had an instinct that it was all headed someplace good, and I kept hoping the next game I bought would keep its promises, but they were all bitterly stupid. Bitterly, expensively stupid.

L&D was no exception, but it was cleverer than most. It had some nice touches. They tucked a surgical mask and latex gloves in the box. The instructions included a pretty good history of surgery. The copy protection dealie was in the form of a little pager.

Gameplay didn’t entirely suck, either. Basically, you had two operations you were capable of performing: an appendectomy and some brain surgery thing I don’t remember very well. The game was in two parts. In the first, you examined patients until you found one who needed an operation you could perform. Then you did the operation.

It was a matter of memorizing the actual steps in the actual operation: grabbing the right loop of intestine, popping out the bit with the appendix in, propping it up with gauze, clamping it off…and so on. During which, the EKG would occasionally spike or the patient’s BP would drop and you’d have to shoot him up with the appropriate counteractant.

The flaw, as with so many computer programs, was that it wasn’t enough to know what you needed to do. You needed to know how to tell the computer you had the right answer; which precise, non-obvious clump of pixels you had to touch to activate a particular control. And it all happened in realtime. If you killed somebody (this happened a lot), they sent you to ‘tard medical school for a while before you could come back and try again.

I think I had a 286 at this point — a surplus, genuine IBM AT from work. Home computers of that era could make boops and beeps at various pitches, simulating music, but they absolutely could not deal with an analog signal, play recorded sounds or mimic speech.

So about two in the a.m., I use my simulated hand to palpate a virtual abdomen, and the patient screams, “ooo!” I think I screamed “ooo!” too! Hell-o? Computers cannot do that! I poked that poor virtual lady with the bum appendix over and over to make her squeal. It was a grinding, unnatural sound, like they’d overclocked a chip or thrown the transmission into reverse or something…but unmistakably a human voice. A female human voice. Amazing.

I bet it took one whole floppy disk to make it do that.


You can see Life & Death in all its 3-color glory here. And, apparently, you can download a working version of it from the same site, but the page is full of so much odd English I wouldn’t guarantee it isn’t a Romanian virus propagation lab or summat.

August 13, 2007 — 6:28 am
Comments: 28

The Friday that Nothing Happened!

weasel resteses

August 10, 2007 — 5:07 pm
Comments: 27