Author: jkonrath

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One thousand

This is the 1000th post in Tell Me a Story About the Devil history. When I started this experiment in 1997, I never thought about how long it would be around or how many entries I would amass. But here I am, with a nice, round four-digit number to stare at, and maybe I feel some sense of accomplishment, but I mostly think that I still need to write more.

I was a bit curious about word count, so I did a dump of the posts from the database and found that from April 11, 1997 to yesterday, I’ve written about 950,000 words here, which makes sense, seeing as my goal is about a thousand words per entry.  If you divide that up into 400-word printed pages, that’s 2375 pages.  In comparison, the bible is just under 800,000 words, and War and Peace is about 560,000.  The longest book I ever wrote was Summer Rain, which was about 220,000 words.  The longest book I’ve ever read is probably Infinite Jest, which is something like 400 or 500,000 words.

When I started working on this journal, the word blog had not been invented yet. There were a few people doing online journals, and I vaguely remember scattered pieces of them in my mind, bits of peoples’ inner self.  Web rings were really big back then, and I spent some time wandering through those, trying to find like-minded writers.  The mommy blog was not big yet, and neither was the “I graduated from an Ivy League school and now I’m an office assistant” journal.  LiveJournal was a couple of years off, and wordpress wouldn’t be released for another half-decade.  When you did stumble upon a journal site, it usually belonged to a pretty hardcore, dedicated person writing, and the entries were usually longer and more meaningful.  You had to know how to write HTML by hand, and you had to have an account somewhere other than AOL, which eliminated 90% of the online population.  But that type of writing reminded me a lot of the personal zines that came out in the 80s and early 90s, the punks and artists who chronicled their life experiences in little xeroxed books. I always dug that kind of writing, the Cometbus type of zine, and I tried (and failed) to do that on paper.  That's one of the reasons I started this thing.

I've gone through many iterations of the technology used here.  First it was individual posts in HTML, with a shell script that put together an index in a different frame.  (Remember frames?  Ugh.)  Bill Perry helped me with some elisp so I could sit down at emacs every day, do a C-c C-j, and enter my text into a buffer.  For the first few years, I actually telnetted to pair.com, who host 34.216.9.77/, in Pittsburgh, and entered the text there.  Then everything moved to my home machine, at some point when I was in New York.  And then I got rid of the shell script crap and went to PHP.  And after years of ragging on WordPress, I finally broke down and switched over a couple of years ago.  So everything looks completely different, but all of the old entries remain.

I published a book that contains most of the first three years of this journal, located here. It’s a bit of a hard sell to convince people to buy the paper book for twenty bucks when you can read everything here, and I think the best writing I did was after those first years in Seattle.  But I really wanted a paper copy of all of it, so there it is.  I’ve gone back and forth on doing a second volume of the later stuff, but it’s a huge task, and I’d have to pare down things, as most print-on-demand book binding will only let you do about 800 pages, which is a few thousand less than all of this.

This project was never my life’s goal, and I never set out to make it my sole output for writing.  I never developed a gimmick, and I never thought that if I blogged enough, I would sell a movie idea or get a meeting with someone about a book deal.  None of that stuff existed in 1997, and by the time people were getting famous by blogging about their cooking adventures or their sexual escapades with government officials, I already got jaded on the whole thing.  I always wrote here as a way to warm up to my actual writing, the books, the zine stuff, the short stories.  And I have not been doing as much of it lately, but it’s still an important distinction to me.

I’ve recently started going back to my old entries, because none of the pre-wordpress writing had titles, and I feel a need to get everything titled and tagged, and maybe remove the absolutely dead stuff.  And I’m almost embarrassed by the earliest writing, but there’s some great entries from the mid-00s when I was really firing on all cylinders.  I wish I could write like that every day.  I wish I could write like that today; I feel like taking a nap instead of writing this up.  And I would, if I didn’t have half a kitchen in boxes right now.

So anyway, there you have it.  Thanks to everyone who has read regularly, left comments, and helped me keep things going here.  I always appreciate the input, and I’m glad someone out there does read this stuff.  One of the things that saddens me even more than the fact that the long journal entries of people’s inner conflict have been replaced with 140-character descriptions of people’s lunch and not much more is that people seem much less connected now than when I started this.  I mean, I remember a lot of detailed exchanges with the people I used to read, and it seems like that has all gone away.  I’m hoping it’s a cyclical thing, and someday people will want to respond to emails with more than five words again.  Who knows.

Anyway, thanks again, and here’s hoping the next thousand come easier.

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Wirth nightmare

I don’t remember learning BASIC – I think the start of my programming career just happened.  I mean, they’d herd us off in small groups to the grade school’s two Apple II’s and one of us would be the typist, and we’d enter 10 PRINT “HELLO” and someone would always type 10 PRINT HELLO and wonder why it would return 0.  And we’d eventually learn GOTO and a little math and maybe an INPUT or GOSUB, and after we finished a chapter per week, we got to play some crappy text-based game that made you run a lemonade stand and allegedly teach you some math.  And then I got my own computer, and got more time on those Apple computers, and pretty soon I knew most of the language, but only from a brute force perspective.  I was only interested in writing my own Zork, and had no idea about run-time complexity or how to sort something efficiently, or any of the stuff you were supposed to learn to really program.

And then I learned Pascal.  I think I may have dabbled in it a bit beforehand, but it all came out of a C201 class in my sophomore year, at IUSB, and we had to do all of the usual stuff, like fahrenheit to celsius or julian to gregorian converters.  The one pisser about this class was that IUSB had one shared computer, a Prime 9955, a mainframe the size of a dishwasher that had the computing power of a middle-of-the-road 386 at the time.  But the whole school was wired into it: payroll, registration, gradebooks, and this huge rube goldberg set of programs resided there, and did for years until they finally boat-anchored the thing and managed to get to some unix or NT system in place.  The teacher handed out slips of paper on the first day of class with logins for the Prime, and we all got some cryptic username, like NS837489, and a certain amount of funny money cash balance, because any time you logged out of the system, it told you how much money you “spent”.

This was insane to me, after a year at IU.  In Bloomington, they just started permanent student accounts, in which you paid a technology fee every semester, but in return you got accounts on any of the university machines operated by UCS.  That meant you could spend all day plunking around on a VAX, learning how to program or VAXPhoning strangers or just reading dirty chain mails.  But from a hacker ethics perspective, it meant you could stay up all night trying to hack the VAX C compiler, or learning obscure details about ULTRIX, or writing elisp crap for emacs.  You didn’t get a balance due every time you used a clock cycle, and you didn’t have to worry about your entire world vanishing at the end of the semester when they shuttered your temporary account.

Logins to the Prime only worked well on these TeleVideo terminals straight out of a 1970s bank, and logging in on a PC using Procomm tended to freak things out; you’d hit a cursor key and a stream of garbage would come across your screen, like someone picked up the other phone when you were on a modem.  Also, they used this thing called Sheffield Pascal, which wasn’t optimal, but was nowhere near as bad as the not-visual text editor you had to slog away with, which was roughly like using vi without an escape key.  After suffering through the first assignment, I asked the teacher if I could do my projects on a different system, since we only handed in a printout of our program listing, and he said fine.  I’d log into the VAX down in Bloomington, where I still had my accounts, and do my assignments there.  Okay, the TPU editor wasn’t that much more thrilling compared to working in Eclipse or something, and VAX Pascal had its own issues, but I got through the assignments with no problems.

Here’s the thing that astounds me: I managed to go from not knowing the difference between a function and a procedure to pretty much knowing the full nine yards of how to get around Pascal in a pretty short time.  I mean, a semester is only a few months, and by mid-fall, I was screwing around with my own stuff in Pascal, trying to write a game and messing with the starlet VAX libraries, which let you do cool stuff like ANSI graphics animations and .  It’s so surreal to think this, because now it takes me a month to find my checkbook, and back then I learned this language in not much more than that, and this was when I also took a calculus class and a philosophy class, and Spanish, and worked part-time, and commuted every day, and everything else.

But I knew Pascal wasn’t the be-all, end-all of languages.  Real men used C; I knew that already, and I knew I’d have to learn C to do really cool shit.  And I messed with it, I bought a copy of K&R, and I looked at it, but I didn’t commit.  For whatever reason, I took to Pascal faster, and I used it for whatever little stuff I needed to do.  I started writing crap for Sowder’s utility program, and Pascal was my go-to language at the point.  But I knew I had to learn C.  Unfortunately, they weren’t teaching it at IUSB.  When I took C202, the point where you usually learn C, they got this wise idea to teach us all about object-oriented programming in Modula-2, which was basically a rewarmed version of Pascal that glued enough crap on the side to make it look functionally as useful as C, but with none of the allure.

One of the good things was that the Prime did not have a Modula-2 compiler.  The CS department just got a couple of HPUX servers and a couple of X Workstations, and we all got accounts to shell into the unix machines and whittle away at our code there.  But the workstations were locked away in a different room, only available to people in some advanced class, and they all sat idle all of the time.  And the administrator of the CS machines was this shitheel that would routinely snoop around your home directory and read your email and sometimes delete files if he thought you shouldn’t have them.  He was some right-wing nutjob that got off on security and authority and probably later got a job in the Bush administration administering illegal wiretaps.  Granted, I was being a huge pain in the ass, spending all of my free time downloading games off of usenet and trying to get them to compile, but it always ticked me off that they had these giant-screened workstations that my tuition paid for, and I even worked there, and I had to spend my time plunking away on a Leading Edge Model D, which was like the Yugo of personal computers.

I don’t know when I had time to learn C, but I know that the Modula-2 class was in the spring of 1991, and by the fall of 1991, I was back in Bloomington, taking a 400-level class in C++ and Objective C, and don’t remember a period of time where I seemed entirely overwhelmed by the premise of learning C, at least like I was when I needed to take C311 and had never taken C201 in Scheme, and the thought of taking a class taught by the guy who literally wrote the book on Scheme with almost no knowledge of how it worked gave me panic attacks.  But Unix and C went together like alcohol and bravado, and I couldn’t imagine trying to write any stuff during the infancy of Linux with Pascal.

My last big hurrah for Pascal was this xinfo database I wrote for Sowder’s utils, which was basically a cheap relational database used to keep track of user address information.  Somewhere, I have a piece of lime and cream colored tractor-feed paper with a bunch of handwritten Pascal code, probably from the summer of 1991, from when I was working on that project.  I didn’t have a home computer, and then when a girlfriend loaned me her Mac so we could keep in touch without insane phone bills, I still didn’t have reliable access to the VAX machines because IUSB’s dialups were crap.  So I did a lot of coding on paper, by hand.  I remember a whole Christmas break in 90/91, stuck in Toledo with a different girlfriend at her parents’ place, bored out of my mind, trying to write a chess game on paper, then trying to write a tic-tac-toe game in the primitive BASIC included on my Casio-9000 graphic calculator, which I think had less RAM than a twitter message.  And that’s why I probably learned this stuff so fast – I spent every waking moment thinking of programming, and how I’d build a computer, and how I’d save up money to buy the cheapest Amiga possible, and how I’d get some shareware C compiler and write a ripoff Star Wars video game.

Now, all of this seems alien to me.  I can barely remember any Pascal, and if I had to learn a new language now, I’d hop onto Amazon, buy a couple of the hundreds of books published  on the topic, and read a bunch of tutorials or watch screencasts online.  But it would be nowhere near as fun, and the entire sport of it would be gone, which is probably why I don’t spent much spare time programming anymore.

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Four doors down

We moved, sort of.  I mean, everything is in the new unit, but it’s going to take a while to get set up and running.  For one, we don’t have a fridge yet; they ordered it late, or there was a delay or something, and I have no estimate except for “maybe next week.”  I can still go down to the old unit and use the fridge there, but that’s a huge pain in the ass.  We also don’t have our washer/dryer, but once again, they are in the old unit.  (And moving the fridge is not an option; one, the new fridge is a different model, so I’m not paying more to keep the old one and give the more expensive one to the new people, and I’m not scratching both floors and throwing out my back times two and risking damage and breaking door jambs and cleaning out the fridge twice just to have a fridge for a couple of days.)

The big thing is the mountains of boxes and sea of cables and uninstalled equipment and everything else, and it’s going to take me some time to dig out of this.  We lost a closet in the move, and that closet (under the stairs) was a dumping ground for everything, and that dumping ground is now my office, so I’m going to be working out of a little hole I’ve carved among the boxes until further notice.

The move was very nerve-wracking for me.  The Comcast appointment was a comedy of errors involving us giving them our home number so they could get in the building and them disconnecting it that morning.  And then we have no cell coverage at our house, so I’d be hauling stuff back and forth and then realize I had a dozen missed calls from Comcast and never got a single ring.  (I need to get an AT&T microcell.  Better yet, I need to figure out how to complain to AT&T that we’re paying them whatever insane amount for no service at home so they just send me one for free, which I guess some people have done. And yeah, DOOD IPHONE SUX GET A VERIZON but they are just as bad here, plus I would have to deal with some Android phone that Verizon screwed up with their own stink.)  We also had a scheduling issue with the movers; they originally planned to send a team after they finished a move, then when they called to confirm, they said “we’ll be there at 8:00 AM”, and of course when I wake up early on a Sunday to get ready… no movers.  Call to confirm, and they’re at another job blah blah be there at two or three.  Of course.

The cats were a problem, or at least Squeak was.  Loca was very excited about the move, and we brought her over to see the new place on Saturday and she was very happy and running all around and quacking and checking out every corner and room.  Squeak… well, after getting her in the carrier, it looked like I went arms-first through one of those old pre-safety glass windshields.  When we got her to the new place, she basically went catatonic, then ran in a closet and hid all day.  By evening, she came out, walking all low with her tail down, sneaking around behind things and trying to figure out what the hell happened.  She was also hilarious with the new stairs – we have one of those metal staircases that’s just treads (the horizontal part) with no risers (the vertical part) and it took her like twenty minutes to climb up the stairs the first time.  She’s fine now, running around crazy.  The main problem is that both of them especially her, want to climb around the ledges, and that absolutely petrifies me to the problem of full-blown anxiety attacks, because nothing fuels anxiety more than waking up with blood everywhere like a slasher movie and finding a cat with a protruding bone sticking out of their leg, which was exactly the scenario with Squeak a year ago.  She is not the most nimble cat in the world, and is always doing stuff like falling off the couch when she rolls over asleep, so I am not thrilled about having her sleep on a ledge a dozen feet above a metal staircase.  My only choice here is to find a doctor that will prescribe me large amounts of Xanax.

I’ve spent the whole post bitching and haven’t even gotten to the part where I hit my head on the metal staircase, or that it’s a bad allergy day and I can barely see through the teargas effect the pollen’s having on my eyes.  But I am out of time and must go work now.

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Let the fun begin

I have keys to the new place.  They just finished painting, and a cleaning crew is going through it right now.  I’m just finishing up work, then I get to make the short trip down four doors, roughly 745,921 times in the next couple of days.  Wish me luck!

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First photo on a junk camera

This is the first picture I took with my Fuji Finepix S3100 when I got it on March 13, 2005.  I bought the camera on a lark from a sale on Amazon, specifically to take on my second trip to Hawaii. It was my second digital camera, after having an Olympus for about four years.  It was a 4MP and was “SLR-inspired”, meaning the front lens stuck out a bit and it was impossible to put in a pocket easily.  It took some decent pictures, but also suffered in low-light.  I took 4329 pictures with it over the next two and a half years, but shortly after taking pictures at a Rockies-Giants game on 9/3/07, it completely died, and made a horrible glass rattling sound inside, so something was definitely wrong with it.

Some random things about this picture, in no particular order:

  • It’s at my job in New York, and it’s at the job I recently re-started, so it’s weird to see my old desk again.
  • I bought those noise-cancelling headphones at Tower, which is now gone.  They never really worked – I hoped I could wear them at night in my apartment to drown out the sound of the Jersey Shore-wannabe douches that always hung out on the sidewalks in Astoria, but they don’t really work like that.
  • It’s strange to see the non-diet Coke cans on my desk.  They used to be a constant, but now that I only drink diet, the red cans seem alien to me.
  • There’s some Arizona and Snapple bottles.  We used to always get lunch at Han’s Deli across the street, and I’d always get something like that to drink.
  • There are a couple of horror movie action figures, also from Tower, sitting under the monitor.  I see the Freddy Krueger in particular.
  • I switched to a flatscreen by that point at work.  I started with a huge CRT that did not seem huge at the time.  There’s actually an ancient CRT monitor sitting in my new cube in Palo Alto that I use when I’m there, and it’s astounding how colossal those things seem now that everyone uses LED for everything.
  • I can’t be 100% sure, but it looks like Outlook is running on my screen.
  • On the cube wall, I see a cheatsheet of Framemaker keystrokes, and a printed copy of a style guide I wrote.
  • I also see part of a red “remove before flight” tag pinned to the wall.
  • We got those translucents blue calculator for free as leftovers from some trade show.  They had this cover over them, where you clicked a button and it swung open like a Star Trek communicator, but the spring broke and it would take 39 seconds to open, so I tore off the cover.
  • I don’t even remember that analog clock or where I got it; I don’t think I have it anymore.  I used to have this cool digital one that had a calendar and the time on it, also trade show swag, but the battery died and I think I threw it out.
  • That grey cup in the foreground is an IU cup that I had in Seattle that followed me and is now here in my kitchen.  The IU logo is entirely worn off of it now.
  • The “45” thing was a tag on an Ogio bag, which I used as a coaster.
  • The picture in the frame is from a helicopter ride at Lake Mead, just outside of Vegas.

Here’s the last picture I took with the camera.  What I remember about it:

  • I think I went to this game on a whim, and I went by myself.
  • I got seats in left field, just because I never sat there.  They were cheap, but not that ideal – you really can’t see much of the action.
  • I wanted to make an asterisk sign for Barry Bonds, but I didn’t get around to it.  He didn’t play that day, I think because it was a lefty on lefty situation.
  • There was this crazy dude sitting next to me who had season tickets and was a die-hard fan who spent the whole game yelling and heckling every single player.

So that’s the life and the death of a camera.  It’s been Canon all the way since then, two point/shoots and a DSLR, with no regrets.

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River of stress

I continue to stress out over the move.  I have two painters coming over today for quotes on patch/paint on the old place to get it ready to sell.  I have no news and no commitment on when we will get keys for the new place, so I’m now putting together the contingency plan so that when on Friday they tell us, “oh, maybe next Friday, or the one after that” I can scramble and try to reschedule the dozen things that will happen in the next few days.

I bought a KVM yesterday, a DVI one and the adapter I need to hook it up to the new work laptop.  I’m currently dragging both computers and my four-million-pound 20″ LCD monitor to the kitchen table and working there.  I’ve started using the LCD in portrait mode, because it rotates 90 degrees, and I find it pretty helpful while writing and editing.  I can open two full-page views, one on top of the other, or one really long page, and avoid a lot of scrolling.  I’d like to do this from now on, although my monitor stand is slightly shaky like this.  I’ll be glad to have the KVM – I currently keep the mac running, mostly to run iTunes all day and to keep my mail open, and I have it sort of behind my other computer, so I have to look around to see it.  I work the music with the remote, and that’s fine, but when I do look at the mail, I have the bad confusing habit of trying to move the pointer with the wrong mouse until I realize what the hell I’m doing.  I’ve thought about one of those systems where you can hang multiple displays on one set of input, and can drag windows from the Mac to the PC or whatever, but I’m sure they all involve some form of VNC that will bog down machines or require jumping through network hoops that I can’t deal with right now.

I also found a NeXT VMware image at http://osvirtual.net/en/nextstep-3-3-with-drivers-vmware/ and fired it up yesterday in Fusion.  I got it to work with no real problem, except I’d forgotten about a lot of the weird quirks about the NeXT interface.  And I think a lot of the allure of it back in 1991 was probably that it was a generation ahead of everything else out there, and it ran on the cool black hardware.  I like the idea of a NeXT cube, but I think clunking along on a 25 MHz 68030 is probably not ideal.  Back when a Mac IIfx was a speed demon and cost you $9000, the NeXT was a steal.

I just went off on a browsing tangent, reading about the IIfx.  It’s weird, it was the fastest Mac until the Quadra AV came out in 1993.  And in 1995, I had the Centris version of the AV at work (the Centris 660AV) and I had the same machine when I went to WRQ in 1996.  And in both cases, they were already doorstops at the time.  Like I remember when MP3s were first starting to become popular, and I downloaded some MP3 ripping software and popped a CD in the player (actually into the required caddy, and that into the player), and it took roughly two days of running day and night to rip the 9 tracks.  There are times I romanticize old hardware, but then I remember how clunky the stuff was back in the day, and I’m not as fond of filling up my storage space with it.

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Projects eating my time

I typically have some windmill I’m chasing, eating all of my spare cycles with google searches.  At some point, there’s going to be some huge lawsuit and google is going to be forced to release all of its search data to people like the way we now buy our credit reports, and I’m going to look back and wonder why I searched for Amiga 500 hardware 48,757 times in mid-2002.  Anyway, here are a bunch of recent brain viruses that are consuming me:

  • Is there a way to install track lighting without a ceiling fixture?  I’m looking for some magical system that will either draw power straight from the air in some Tesla-like fashion, or a way to conceal a cord so it runs across the ceiling and down a wall, maybe behind a bookcase.  I don’t know.
  • I need to build a kitchen island.  I think Ikea has the cabinets, but I also think they have a $1400 minimum on their engineered stone surfaces.  How do you get that crap built, and am I looking at a twelve-week wait time?   I thought we were in a recession and all of the trade people were dying for work?  If so, why don’t any of them return my phone calls?  And why do I ever need to make a phone call?  Why can’t all of this shit be online?
  • Searching for the perfect KVM switch to connect a MacBook Pro (mini-DisplayPort) and a ThinkPad (DisplayPort) to a monitor with DVI input.  It amazes me that it’s 2010 and 90% of the KVM solutions out there are still PS/2 keyboard/mouse and VGA that caps out at like 1280×1024.  That’s like if I went to a local new car dealership and every model still had a hand crank.
  • I keep searching eBay for NeXT hardware.  I need to stop doing that.
  • How do you repackage a 16-bit InstallShield installer so it works in Windows 7?  Why can’t you just use a 16-bit installer in Windows 7?  I thought the whole deal with Windows was you trade off usability and performance and reliability for the fact that they still need to support decades-old legacy software.  So why does a five-year-old installer crap out on me?  (Yes I tried running it in compatibility mode.)
  • Has anyone ever written an online version of Advanced Squad Leader?
  • I need to learn Python to use this mythical scripting extension to FrameMaker, but I also fear that said extension won’t be able to script 90% of the application, so maybe I don’t need to learn Python.
  • I need to buy/build/find a new entertainment system for the TV.  One that doesn’t look stupidly small with a 17′ ceiling, but that doesn’t cost more than my car.  Maybe the Ikea Besta.
  • I also need to find a medicine chest for the downstairs bathroom that doesn’t look like it came out of a mobile home and that isn’t some old country kitchen Paula Deen looking bullshit.
  • Didn’t someone make a vertical docking station for the new MacBook Pro or did I hallucinate that?  And not some little metal clippy stand that cost 17 cents to make in China and retails for $79.

That is all.

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System emulation time machine

I’m always talking about time machines, touchstones that launch you into nostalgia for some forgotten era of the past.  There’s one that I mess with that’s infinitely more detailed than any other, and it’s system emulation, which was once just a vague dream and is now huge and all-encompassing.

I guess it all really started in the 80s, when you could get the box for your Intellivision or Colecovision that played Atari 2600 games.  And that was a kludge, because it was nothing more than an actual 2600 that hung off the side of your existing system, so you basically used your Mattel power supply, joysticks, and connection to the TV to play Atari games.  Then the Commodore 128 had a Zilog Z80 CPU in addition to its 8502, so you could boot into CPM mode, which was great except none of us cared about CPM or running ancient crusty old office productivity software.  Later there was a lot of talk about the Amiga being able to emulate the Mac or run as a PC with external hardware, but I never knew anybody that really did this.

Fast-forward maybe ten or fifteen years, and I’m in the period when I’m firmly planted behind a desk in cubeland and want to relive the days of 1985, so I’m scouring eBay for a good Commodore 64 and 1541 and maybe an Amiga 500 or decent Atari 2600 setup.  And I’m spending my spare time browsing all of the web sites out there for 8-bit computers, now that there’s a whole world of freaky Finland hackers posting all of this crazy stuff on the interwebs that’s knocking loose the rust in my brain and making me remember to SYS 49152 after I load some ML at #C000.  And around then, some people started writing software that ran in a modern Pentium computer that would emulate the C-64 or the 2600 or any other old machine.  Because by then, you add all of the overhead involved, but you run it on a fast PC, you’ve pretty much got a 6510 running at 1.023 MHz.  The other major factor is that nobody can even keep track of who the hell owns Commodore these days, so there aren’t a bunch of cease-and-desist lawsuits over the ROM images, and a ton of the games are floating around.  That’s the other great thing: in 1985, you spent all day waiting for your 1541 drive to slowly load in that Zork game.  But now, a complete ISO of a 170K SS/SD floppy is smaller than the image of a rounded corner on a web page.  You could go download a thousand games at a clip and barely spike your bandwidth.

And this is truly amazing to me.  Because you can look back at some old era and look at a posed photo that’s two-dimensional and unmovable, or listen to a tape of some audio of an old song or an old conversation, and that partially captures a moment.   But this is trapping an exact bit-by-bit representation, a living and working version of the same environment you basically lived in decades before.  It’s like being able to download some magic thing that would recreate your college dorm room down to the last millimeter, every single detail and quirk and bug and problem, and you could step inside it and relive it.  I could sit at that BASIC prompt and look at every single one of the 65,535 bytes in that system, and run every old game that me and Matt Wanke would stay up all night playing back in the 8th grade.  I could load up Blue Max, the very first game I ever played on the C-64, and fly that little biplane through the weird 45-degree angled world, dropping bombs on the 320×200 terrain that scrolled past.

I spent a lot of time back at the blue and cyan screen, trying to type in some BASIC, playing some old games, and that was decent.  But what really pushed me back into the past was when MAME games started coming out.  MAME was an emulator that could simulate many of the common arcade cabinets that lived in the 80s and 90s.  Game cabinets weren’t all one-off creations; each vendor typically had some common chassis or series, so they could just pop out the ROMs from a dud game and pop in something new.  It wasn’t always that straightforward, and you had systems that mutated over time to add new features or new hardware or whatever, plus you had some games with weird joysticks or buttons.  But if you got bored of your X-Men game and wanted the Simpsons game, it was a straight switch.  And that made it easier to write a common emulator for a bunch of different ROMs.  And once I got MAME running on my laptop and started tracking down ROMs, I was absolutely hooked.  There were two games that were total time machines for me, because I spent so much time pouring quarters into both of them.

The first one was Smash TV.  Me and Ray used to play this constantly, back in like 1991.  When I went to IUSB, we never went to class, and would always drive around South Bend and Mishawaka, listening to death metal, looking for something to eat, something to do, and of course there was nothing.  So we always ended up at the arcade at University Park Mall, and we’d dump unending amounts of money into that game.  It’s basically a rehash of the movie The Running Man; a future where prisoners (in the game, the prisoner part was not mentioned) have to run through mazes killing mass numbers of robots and mutants and warriors with futuristic laser weapons in front of a televised studio audience in order to win money and prizes.  It’s a typical quarter-eater, where two guys can play, and you just shoot every damn thing that runs at you, and if you die, you just need to shell out another token to keep rolling.  The game has a lot of synthesized speech from the Richard Dawson game show host, saying “BIG MONEY!  BIG PRIZES!  I LOVE IT!”  And it’s one of those weird memory things, where I can’t remember my office phone number, but every single millisecond of this game is burned into my head so much that I can instantly repeat any of the lines or hum any of the music within it.  So when I pop it up in a window on my Mac, even though I don’t have the joysticks and have to use a/w/s/z or whatever, it instantly takes me back to those days of playing hooky and feeding quarters in a mall arcade that’s now probably a cell phone store or a place selling uggs or something.

The other game that I have memorized like this is Golden Axe.  This is a Sega ripoff of the Conan franchise (barbarian, not talk show host, although that would be a cool game too, with Andy Richter at your side dressed up as a wench, and broadswording Jay Leno in the head.)  It’s very similar to Altered Beast (also done by the same design team), a side-scroller with two (or was it three?) sets of joysticks and buttons, and you dumped in the quarters to continue.  You could be a barbarian, a dwarf, or an amazon woman (a tall Hilary Swank-type warrior, not a woman that buys a lot of books online on a Kindle.)  They had one of these in the tiny arcade in the Indiana student union, and they only had maybe five games, and all of them sucked, but this one sucked the least, so I was sort of forced to play it when I was killing time in there.  I’d rather go to Spaceport and play some Tetris or find a Smash TV console, but it was one of those captive environment things, and within a matter of time, I got hooked on Golden Axe.  I think it’s a funny game, because all of the various screaming sounds in it are too accurate and over the top.  I was playing this once when Sarah was in the next room and she came in and said “what the hell is that?  It sounds like some kind of Lil’ Jon krunk video game.”  But once again, all of those little sounds and sayings are etched into my brain, and when I fire up that ROM in a Sega 16-B cabinet emulator, I’m back to the student union in 1989, between classes and wasting time and quarters.

I thought of all of this because I was cruising around and wondered if anyone had ever installed NeXTstep in a VMware emulator, and I guess a few people have tried.  I wanted to just find someone who did the whole thing and had a VMware image I could download and fire up, but it’s considerably more difficult than that, setting up all of the drivers and crap.  Here’s a post on how to do it, though.  I think sitting at an OmniWeb browser in a NeXTstep login would be a pretty severe time warp for me.  I spent a lot of time lusting after that hardware when it first came out, and spent a good chunk of 1991-1992 trying to get some time on it.  It’s funny how fast the fall from grace was, though.  Those machines were total demons in like 1991, and by the time I got to the support center in 1993, we had a slab that was practically a doorstop, it was so slow.  But maybe if you took that awesome (in 1991) OS and dropped it in an emulator on a quad-core x64 i7 chip, it would be 5% faster than it was back on the 68040.  Something to mess with, but probably not during the same week when I have to move.

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Ten random photos

I take a lot of pictures that don’t end up in galleries in flickr.  Here’s a few of them.

A lunch at Fresh Choice, probably after a Weight Watchers meeting in San Bruno.  I liked to celebrate weigh-in by eating a ton of starch and calories.  This was after I made my weight goal and was just maintaining, so I went back and forth on actually counting points, and went through a brief phase where I thought I’d just take pictures of everything I ate and figure it out later.  This morphed into this brief idea that I’d write a program to do image recognition on the pictures and calculate points, and that went to not doing anything.

I struggled for a long time with the organization of my second book, experimenting with a lot of outlining software and different schemes to keep track of a nonlinear story.  At some point in 2000 or 2001, I had this idea to reorganize all of Rumored to Exist by printing the text onto index cards, then rearranging them all over the place until it made sense, like I was writing a screenplay or some shit.  It didn’t work, and I had bunches of these cards lying around every room of the house for months.

After that book got published, I bought forty acres of land in Colorado.  I then had this stupid idea in that I would start gardening in my apartment in Astoria, despite the fact that I only had windows on one side of the place and there was too much shade to get any sunlight to grow anything except for those stupid cactuses that could live underground for twenty years. I think the grand scheme was that I’d learn enough about gardening that I’d eventually be able to live off my land in Colorado.  The whole thing lasted about a month until the bugs took over.

Go-kart racing in Fremont with Samsung. They took us there right before everyone had to take some survey on employee satisfaction, to make sure everyone thought it was a great place to work. The firesuit hood thing makes me look like I’m about to go to some renaissance fair to drink a bunch of mead and go jousting.  The worst part of this was getting knocked around for 200 laps and then having to drive 40 miles home that night, the whole time wanting to trade paint with other cars on 880.

All the fixins needed to make BBQ.  I’m surprised I was able to find Crystal sauce here on the west coast, but they sell it in the Oakland Safeway.  This is the really sour sort of BBQ, with the vinegar taste to it, which is pretty decent, although I realize there is this Pepsi/Coke religious argument about what school of thought you follow on BBQ.  Here’s the sacrilege: I used this to make a fake pork pulled pork, using some kind of engineered shredded soy fake meat product.  But the pork (or lack thereof) is just the vehicle for the sauce transmission, so it didn’t matter too much.  It is a mandatory requirement to make corn on the cob with this meal, though.

This was on my whiteboard when I came back from a trip to Vegas in maybe 2001.  I think it’s the work of my old coworker John Andonov, who had a habit of leaving his works of art on various cube walls when people were in meetings, which was pretty much constantly at Juno.  It’s amazing how many pictures of whiteboards I have in my photo library.  Most of them are insane system diagrams, where at the end of the meeting, someone says “make sure to take a picture of this” and then you never use it again.

I awoke one morning in my Astoria apartment to the sound of a waterfall, and saw the place above me leaking a river of water through my ceiling.  The piece of shit landlord never fixed it, and it looked like this for the next four or five years.  This was the same landlord that threw a fit when everyone organized a rent strike because he didn’t see the problem with not having a boiler for hot water or heat during what was one of the coldest Novembers in the last hundred years.  Nice tile color, too.

My car somewhere in Utah I think, during the first Denver to LA trip.  I drove this one solo, and don’t advise taking a tiny car with a 67-HP engine through the mountain passes of the Rockies during the winter, especially if the car is packed with a few hundred pounds of housewares and laundry.  A good chunk of the trip was spent fighting the transmission on the baby engine, which constantly insisted on downshifting as I struggled through the hills.  That pretty much cleared up when I got to central Utah, but I was certain I was going to run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, since there’s a hundreds-mile stretch with absolutely no gas stations or civilization in general.  It’s also amazing how filthy the car got by the time I got to California.

The perils of ownership of a long-haired cat: every time I brush Loca, I come up with about this much hair.  Seriously, I brushed her for 20 minutes yesterday, and if I brushed her right now, I would produce at least this much hair.  And if I didn’t brush her constantly, the entire apartment would pretty much look like this on every single surface, except for the surfaces covered with cat puke where she ingested this much hair and then vomited it back up.  I should buy a loom and start quilting blankets and sweaters from it.  The big problem is that if I knitted a sweater out of her hair, the other cat would climb on it and lick it all the time.

The golden gate.  I took this one on Thanksgiving 2008 when me, Sarah, and A went to Sarah’s friend’s place in Sonoma for dinner.  Not bad for being shot through a dirty windshield.

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Computer inventory, fall ’10 edition

Okay, so I mentioned my computer count had grown over on my Facebook page, and Bill asked me a bunch of questions about what’s what, so here’s a quick rundown, in reverse order of age:

  1. Lenovo ThinkPad T410 – the new work machine, running Windows 7.  Maybe this doesn’t count because it’s not mine, but it’s here 100% of the time now.  The hardware is pretty nice, with a lot of extras: 3G modem, DVD burner, 4 GB memory, a million ports I’ll never use.  But man, Windows 7 sucks.  I’ve spent far more time trying to figure out why the hell some 32-bit software won’t work, or why you can’t install 64-bit Visio and 32-bit Office at the same time, and why they insist on you installing 32-bit office on a 64-bit machine, and so on.
  2. MacBook Pro – My main machine, a 17″ 2010 Unibody with the fastest i7 CPU, 8 GB memory, and a half-terabyte of disk.  I absolutely love this machine, and it’s an example of how to move from 32 to 64 bit without turning your entire life sideways.  Other than reinstalling all of my MacPorts stuff, it Just Worked.  This machine is home to my iTunes library, my pictures, my writing, and pretty much everything else.
  3. MacBook Pro – Sarah has the 2009 17″ model.  Not sure of the processor, but it’s not the fastest one, and it has 4GB.
  4. Samsung NC10 – A tiny netbook, with a tiny screen and almost no memory, still running XP.  It’s next to the bed, and I mostly use it when I’m sitting in bed reading.  It’s also a nice travel machine, because it’s so light, gets incredible battery life, and if it gets stolen, the bag it’s in is probably worth more.
  5. MacBook – My old 15″ white 2007 model.  I don’t use this much anymore, but maybe every few weeks, I find something that I need on it or that won’t work in Snow Leopard.  For example, I still use it to import video, because I’m too cheap to go buy a different FireWire cable.  And until a week ago, I couldn’t get our scanner to work with the new Macs.  (Turns out if you swear at it enough, you can get Preview to scan stuff.)
  6. Toshiba Portege Tablet – This is a 2005 model that has convinced me that as long as it runs Windows, Microsoft will never get a tablet to work.  (A Windows Phone tablet?  Maybe that would work.)  It’s no longer running XP Tablet, because it needed an XP reinstall, and the included media won’t work.  It’s sitting next to my couch downstairs, and it’s a dedicated IMDB and baseball score machine.

Other computers-that-aren’t would include two iPhone 3Gs, a PlayStation 3, a Kindle, and maybe you could count the NAS I have in the closet.  (It takes up an IP address, anyway.)

The tablet is on its last legs, and the MacBook will eventually get fully retired.  I sometimes wonder if I just used an iPad for casual web browsing and travel, if I could get rid of everything but the MBP and work laptop.  But as I become more convinced an iPad would be an okay purchase, I get more in the hole with this move.