Here's some Christmas Creep for you.
Bah Humbug:
Buy Nothing Christmas (Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping)
Alternatives to cut Christmas Trees
Something for your Festivus needs
Dear Santa letter generator (NSFK) Not safe for kids
A Santa by any other name:
Holiday Helpers:
The Yule Cat, Jolakotturinn
The Yule Goat, Julbock or Julbukk
Other:
I love the OUTDOOR GIRLS series books by Laura Lee Hope.
I found two (non-fiction) books that might have been read by the girls and boys of Deepdale, had they (the boys and girls of Deepdale I mean...) been real:
On The Trail, An Outdoor Book for Girls
and Camping for Boys
If I can't live one hundred years ago - and I do wish I could, I can still wish my friends and I could take a month off and camp out like this:
What's the oldest article of clothing you own? Bonus points if you show us a photo!
There goes Vox, reading my mind again.
I have a pair of gray sweatpants I bought right before I moved to California from Colorado, that was 11 years ago.
They now stay up with the help of a safety pin since the waistband elastic has long since gone and they never had a string. And there is a big air-conditioning run/rip in them right up the back seam.
I have another pair of sweatpants, but I always reach for those old ratty ones I bought while shopping with the only friend I made in Denver... May be that's I why I keep hanging on to them.... one good memory in a 9 month* long nightmare.
*9 months was the time I was in Denver, May to November. It's almost time for my get the hell out of Denver Anniversary. I got the hell out on Thanksgiving Day, and I've never been so thankful to leave a place... but I still wear those ratty sweatpants all of the time.
I'm taking this week's topic from Darren Rowe's weekly newsletter. My rules are a little different. Since we are getting into the busy time of the year...Holiday Season...you can use old photos or take new ones. Take some photos of your pets, your neighbor's pets, your parent's pets, the school pets, or neighborhood pets. Here is a link to Dareen's article on taking photos of pets http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-photograph-pets.
Have some fun and dress up your pet or take a photo of a pet in an unusual place. You can use photoshop to change the photo background or change the shape or position of the pet. You can clone your pet or pets....anything goes this week...show me your creativity!
Boy we had a great turnout for the #78 Photo Quest on Diagonal Lines. Thanks to Cap'n Stephel, Darcy, Yancunyong, Trailblazer, anthrogrrl, Maju and Spike for some really amazing photos! I'm not sure the Trailblazer wanted in but I'm including her.
For each person that posts to the quest I pick the one photo that I liked the best and that fit the Photo Quest the best. Just because I pick one photo does not mean I dislike the others! It isn't easy to pick one from each participant as the photos are so good!
I'm going to start with Spike as she was the first to post for this week's quest. My favorite was the "Steve at the Reaper Miniatures factory looking like the kid in a candy store", photo. Look at how all the toys on the wall form long, multiple lines drawing your eye right to Steve. I also like the texture created by the toys and the fun way she used diagonal lines in the photo great job Spike!
Maju just took my breath away with her photo of Regent's Canal 02! This is a BIG WOW photo! Notice how the walkway, the trees, the reflection in the water pulls your eye right to the bridge. The composition on this photo is wonderful with the bridge right at the ROT point! In this photo even the light areas with no details, water without reflections and the sky pull your eye to the bridge. Wonderful work Maju!!
Next was Antrogrrl and what a nice surprise that we get to see some of her "old archaeology photos for this challenge." You made it hard for me to choose one photo as you had so many great ones this week. I have to say I liked 2 snow tracks the best. The tracks in the snow, the diagonal line of the plants, the mountains and the sky push your eye right to the furtherest point. The angle of the photo and the diagonal lines give the photo a feeling of a never ending landscape. The tracks in the snow tell the viewer the snow is fresh and the people in the vehicle where the first to see this landscape. This photo tells a great story, super photo Antrogrrl!
Trailblazer posted two interesting photos to the Photo Quest Group. My favorite was the first photo Ink-and-surf-jpg. There are several diagonal lines in this photo. The surfers arms, legs, the surf board and the surf all provide great diagonal lines. I really liked the way we have two diagonal lines coming together with the surfer in the forground arms, forming one diagonal line and the surf board forming the opposite diagonal line. The intersection of these lines draw your eye right to that point. Nice capture Trailblazer!
Yan's many wonderful photo all with great examples of diagonal lines really caused me to stop and consider all the photos before I made my selection. I really have to pick Photographers @Mt. Gomadan as I loved all the photographers lined up with their tripods to take photos of the fall colors. This is a very fun photo full of color and lots of interest in what the photographers are doing and thinking about how each one is taking their photos. Great photo Yan!
I pick Darcy's photo of her son playing the in water sprinkler as my favorite. What a fun photo. It makes me want to run in a sprinker too. Here Darcy has framed her son with the diagonal lines of the sprinkler on either side. This was a hard shot to get as she has the camera shutter slow enough to capture the sprinkler water in drops and the camera set fast enough to get a very clear shot of her son. This is another photo that tells a story of Darcy's son enjoying his summer. Love this one Darcy!
Last but not least are the photos from Cap'n Stephel. Her photos are always full of personality. You got to look at the snowman in the pumpkin patch! The photo I liked best from her post is the first one of the trail. The fence and the shadow of the fence give the photo a great sense of depth, distance and mystery. She didn't tell us the whole story here as we can't see the end of the trail...we keep looking be we can't see that far as the trees cover our view. Very nice photo Cap'n!
1. Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me either. Just pretty much leave me the hell alone.
2. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt and leaky tire.
3. It's always darkest before dawn. So if you're going to steal your neighbor's newspaper, that's the time to do it.
4. Don't be irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
5. Always remember that you're unique. Just like everyone else.
6. Never test the depth of the water with both feet.
7. If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
8. Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.
9. If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
10. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.
11. If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
12. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
13. Some days you're the bug; some days you're the windshield.
14. Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.
15. The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.
16. A closed mouth gathers no foot.
17. Duct tape is like 'The Force'. It has a light side and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
18. There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works.
19. Generally speaking, you aren't learning much when your lips are moving.
20. Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
21. Never miss a good chance to shut up.
22. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night
For the record, my father's favorite expression while driving when I was a kid: Get the fuck out of the way, NumNuts!
(I love the package design though.)
Just wondering if I am the only person that tends to eat more when they are sick. It's like, I feel bad, so I go around the house eating whatever I can get my hands on hoping that it will be the magical thing that will make me feel better. In the end, I'm still sick and now my pants are tight too.
Oh, well - I've forgotten the model numbers. This is what happens when you take the time at a party to learn someone's name - you learn their name and make the whole evening special but you sacrifice some other random piece of information. In this case, model numbers.
As far as I can tell, I used a PDP-10:
(Taken by Ed Thelen of material owned by Computer History Museum under the non-commercial rule.)
Followed shortly by a VAX 11/780:
Talk about good times. I had access to these only because I was friends with the system administrator at school. He set me up (I think I basically whined a lot until he did) with a user name and password. My first user name and therefore email address ever was "tomato". I don't know why I chose that. He said "What do you want for a user name?" and I spouted out "Tomato". So I was known as "tomato" for a few years. Whenever I logged in I'd hear "Hey, there is a Tomato on the system!". I had email and was able to send/receive with a few friends that were online also - mostly right there at the school.
A few years ago a customer was walking through my company and he was talking about how he had made all of his money in the "internet" and how he had his first email address in 1988. That's how he started his conversation. It was like "How did you get rich in the internet?" and his first statement was "I had my first email address in 1988". Obviously there was something else involved because I had my first email address in 1983 and I didn't make it big in the internet. Of course, the internet wasn't really there yet so much back then. I think there was ARPANET, etc - but I'm not going to go into all of that.
I didn't do anything really constructive on either of these systems at the time besides read newsgroups. Later, maybe around 1987 I had to have a "real" account because I had a class on the VAX so the "tomato" account went away and I moved to something like just "wilso_d" or something else mundane. At that point I was taking an operating system class and we had to write our own OS in something like C or Pascal. It's all vague at this point, but none-the-less, this was my moment to both PDP and VAX systems. Both were pretty good considering the time frame. All text-based as I recall with dumb-terminals. I think the world really was faster before the advent of fancy graphical user interfaces (aka Windows).
You can read more about the VAX here.
Is it "Write A Blog Every Day For A Month" again? Because I'm already 10 behind. So here is a post from about two years ago where I said "Oh, I'm going to post about every computer I've ever used!" and then I stopped, right after this one. Lord Kalvan has been posting about a bunch of old computers and it reminded me of my original intent.
So here goes - I'm going to take a few posts to talk about the different computers I've used. I'll start with the very first one. This is the Commodore CBM-8032. This came out around 1980 and had a massive 32k of RAM. It had an 80 column by 25 line green monochrome screen. The CPU was a 6502 2Mhz.
This was owned by the science department at my high school. 1980 (10th grade for me) was well before the school had computer labs, etc. This was the ONLY computer in the school and we found it in the back of a store room where it wasn't being used.
It was beautiful. I used this from 1980 through 1982.
The base model used tapes, but the school actually had a dual floppy drive for it. I sent a letter to Commodore to see if they could send me any information on it, and they sent me a copy of their Commodore magazine. It was cool because it was filled with source code you could key in and also had instructions on how to do things with the system - like print. Yeah, this was before all of the magic we rely on today. Internet? Ha! I don't think so.
My first program was in BASIC and said something like:
10 PRINT "DEWITTE"
20 GOTO 10
and I'd run it... and run it.. and run it... There were three of us who started hanging around the back of the science room every chance we had - before school, after school, during lunch. We'd write programs and key in games and play them. One I recall the most is StarTrek (where you were a big E (for enterprise) and it moves around looking out for K (Klingons). Ah, good times, good times.
I would send a note to Commodore and when I received a reply, it would come from a different address. I thought something was up - they kept moving. Eventually I think they went away, but that wasn't until after the Vic-20, Commodore 64, and the Amiga. The only one of these I seriously used was the Amiga, but that's for another post.
I used to sit in the back of the classroom and just write mindless programs and listen to Supertramp on a cassette boom-box that I built (yes, built - and sad really because I don't have a single picture of it).
