Friday, July 13, 2007
Doctor Who
Tonights episode was wonderful. Shakespeare, two Harry Potter references, Queen Elizabeth I threatening to off the Doctor's head for something he said he hasn't done yet. Woo, fun!
In other news: I consumed raw fish today. Yummm. Otoro is sooooo yummy.
The "no-fuzz latte"
So I just had a customer order a latte, sans the "fuzz". I am glad that she draws the line at fuzzy lattes. Fuzzy dogs, fuzzy sweaters, fuzzy blankets, and fuzzy carpeting are all well and fine but the day we have fuzzy lattes is the day I will retire from coffee (or the day I get a job in music or some job with better pay, but at least I will still consider myself to be a "coffee geek". When we have fuzzy lattes I think I will abandon coffee).
It is nearly 1pm, usually the hours between 11 and 2 drag by with excruciating slowness but today the last two hours have gone rather quickly (most of the morning, it seems, has flown by) due to the fact that I have been reading (and trying to finish lest I go into debt paying overdue fines) New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City by Andrei Codrescu and reading about the history of computers on a site that they talked about on Your Day (SC public radio show) yesterday (but that I had been to before). Of course, I started reading about the PCjr and finding related sites for that computer.
The PCjr was the first computer I really got to know, using it from about 1986 when my grandfather, an IBM employee, got a great deal on a couple since they had been discontinued in 1985, one for my family and one for himself. This was the computer I would use until the early 90s, to be replaced by a cobbled together 386 in an IBM AT case that I bought sometime around 1984 or so.
I have quite a romantic view of this system even though it was a failure in the market. It is, perhaps, the reason that I am such a hands-on person when it comes to computers and am not afraid to try things like Linux, building my own computers, or repairing them. I think I also loved it for the do-it-yourself following it developed in the late 80s and early 90s, allowing people to upgrade it to do things like run with 1 meg of ram (originally it was around 128k), use a hard drive, upgrade the CPU eventually to a 486 chip even, and program in BASIC very easily thanks to it's cartridge hardware based BASIC.
Another fun thing with the PCjr is that, unlike computers today that come with less and less documentation and what is included isn't all that useful from a technical point of view, it came with full manuals for everything. All nice and neatly provided in ring binders for easy reference.
The only thing I never did with the PCjr was connect to the internet—something I did do before I replaced that computer using a 1200baud modem attached to my dad's 286, using it to connect to local BBSs in New Orleans and the GNOFN (Greater-New Orleans Free Net) either directly and just living with the one hour cut off or connecting to the local library and starting a Telnet session to GNOFN and then disconnecting, allowing me to Telnet into other sites (DALnet IRC in particular) with no time limit.
When I got my 386 I ended up running DOS 6.2 and a bootleg version of Windows 3.11, a program I made very rare use of (mostly to play the Solitaire game that was included with it) because I didn't see much point in the whole thing. I had been using command line and running a single program at a time for years why would I need these windows?
That has all changed, of course. I soon upgraded to a Pentium 75 that came loaded with a bag of hell. I mean, Windows 95. I also moved to a real ISP and Netscape instead of Lynx for a web browser. I have since then built a computer in 1998 which I still use to this day, upgrading as need be. I have run Windows 98 and now XP on it as well as various flavours of Linux. I've been on the internet since around 1993 now.
I have seen the growth of the net from the beginning of the major boom in the early 90s, including the development of Yahoo, Google, Ebay, blogging, pop-up ads, spyware, Mozilla, Wikipedia, and all of that. It has been quite interesting.
What is the most interesting to me is that I have a hard time imagining my life before it all. I have a hard time imagining how I found information on the strange stuff I followed (such as the PCjr) before the advent of the internet in it's modern inception. I started out using a computer with a clock speed 4.77Mhz (in performance this was not the speed the PCjr actually got, since it had to refresh the RAM every 4th clock cycle due to its lack of a memory controller), 128kb of ram, and a 5.25" 360k floppy drive with a CGA monitor and now have two computers one running at 1200Mhz and the other at 1700Mhz, both with 1gig of RAM and over 160megs of hard drive space. One has a DVD-RW drive and the other has a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW drive and a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive that is almost never used. They both have great video cards (with the exception of Linux support on my laptop...) and sound cards (the PCjr had a sound chip that could produce 3 voices at a time—something that hadn't really been included on IBMs computers at the time but still wasn't very impressive in relation to other systems that were out). They both have Ethernet cards and can connect to the internet at speeds far greater than the 1200baud I first connected at, and the laptop even has WIFI (via a card which is totally unsupported in Linux at the present time...). Amazing.
Beyond thinking how useless the windows design was with it's multitasking I now regularly have multiple applications open and love any application that allows me to use tabs (Firefox, Editpad) and have been using a dual monitor setup for about 5 years now to increase my workspace and thus, multitasking ability. I have even been looking into 3d desktops such as Beryl on Linux giving such innovations as the rotating cube for multiple desktops (unsupported thanks to the lack of support for my freaking video card), and using a program called Yod'm 3D which is pretty amazing in that it just works and doesn't even have to be installed—just unzip it into a directory and run. It seems to use very little resources and is reported to work on Windows 98-Vista (it works in Vista, a feat I am still in shock at). It's got some issues that I don't like very much but I am not sure how Beryl would handle these things since I can't get it to work so it may have similar annoyances).
Anyway, this is long and boring to most of you and I probably lost everyone a long time ago. It is nearly 2pm now and I need to eat my sandwich and then I'll read for the next hour-and-a-half before I start closing.
On another note: Sulawesi Celebes Kolossi is yummy.
In going back and reading this I realize that this post only serves to reinforce the polls from July 3. *grin*
Klasinc&Loncar Duo (Just trying to help it get picked up by Google spiders, I maintain it for them)