“I know you believe you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize what you heard is not what I meant”
This reminds me so much of recent conversations with Katy :)
Ganked from Facebook.
Category: uncategorized
Getting old and senile.
There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.
Audio-Visual Entertainment
1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to todays teenager.
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
7. High-speed dubbing.
8. 8-track cartridges.
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
10. Betamax tapes.
11. MiniDisc.
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio bork this concept.)
14. Shortwave radio.
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’
Computers and Videogaming
18. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long
19. The scream of a modem connecting.
20. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
21. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
22. Using jumpers to set IRQs.
23. DOS.
24. Terminals accessing the mainframe.
25. Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
26. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
27. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
28. Counting in kilobytes.
29. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
32. Joysticks.
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
34. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
35. Recording a song in a studio.
The Internet
36. NCSA Mosaic.
37. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
38. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
39. Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
40. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
41. Phone books and Yellow Pages.
42. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
43. Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
44. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
46. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
47. Archie searches.
48. Gopher searches.
49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
50. Privacy.
51. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
52. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.
53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
54. The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs
55. The time before PC networks.
56. When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.
Gadgets
57. Typewriters.
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
59. Sending that film away to be processed.
60. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
61. CB radios.
62. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
63. Rotary-dial telephones.
64. Answering machines.
65. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart
66. Pay phones.
67. Phones with actual bells in them.
68. Fax machines.
69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.
Everything Else
70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
71. Remembering someone’s phone number.
72. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
73. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.
74. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
75. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.
76. Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
77. Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
78. Neat handwriting.
79. The days before the nanny state.
80. Starbuck being a man.
81. Han shoots first.
82. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise.
83. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
84. Trig tables and log tables.
85. “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”
86. Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
87. Swimming pools with diving boards.
88. Hershey bars in silver wrappers.
89. Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil of break off the first finger
90. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
91. Having to manually unlock a car door.
92. Writing a check.
93. Looking out the window during a long drive.
94. Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
95. Cash.
96. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
97. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
98. Omni Magazine
99. A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
100. When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.
The ones in red are emphasis mine. How many can you relate to?
I think I need a bigger bottle
I have some truly bizarre videos on youtube :)
Videos of the BenBen
The Bobble Dance
Bananacat
Quote of the day
I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth.
…Janeane Garofalo
Weekend redux, and today is going to be another one of those days…
The weather gods were clement and the BBQ we had planned for Saturday went off without a major hitch. At one point, I was juggling 12 sausages, 7 burgers, 6 koftas (with pita!), 2 ears of corn, asparagus and a large mushroom. Apparently, I have mad grillin skillz. We fed (and overfed) everybody who came and people seemed to have a good time. All good.
We went into town in the morning and bought 20 pounds of meat. I kid you not. The butcher had very good deals on so we left with 5 pounds of stewing steak, 5 pounds of minced lamb, 5 pounds of minced beef and 10 chicken breasts. Hopefully that’ll last us for a while :)
Sunday was a bit rougher, morale-wise. I spent part of the day making purees for the beastie. I’m not in my happy place at the moment. I seem to have misplaced my happy place. I miss my happy place. These days, I’m anxious and stressed and scatterbrained and fairly useless as a husband, father and general human being (yay!).
Katy woke me up at 2am this morning because I was snoring very loudly. I was in the middle of a deep sleep cycle and I couldn’t get back to sleep at all. In the end, I got fed up of staring at the ceiling so I went downstairs and had a cup of tea and watched bad late-night/early morning TV.
So yeah. I’m tired, irritable, and generally not in a good mood today and I don’t see it improving in the short term. But it has to, cause I’m not happy any more and I miss that and things need to change because the status quo can’t carry on.
I do not need another allergy
Last monday, Tolstoy paid me a visit while I was in the bathroom. I gave him a quick scratch on the head and a stroke on the back and my hands immediately became itchy and red. † I figured that he’d been rolling around some stringing nettles or something of the sort – it happened before, so I didn’t really give it a second thought. Except that the itch didn’t go away. I’ve been putting steroid-based cream on my hands for the past week and it still itches like a mofo. And now, something has spread to my elbows, back of my knees and top of my feet. I went to the doc this morning and she says that this are all classic signs of eczema. Damnit, Jim, I don’t need this shit right now. The “consensus” right now is that it’s mild, and might go away by itself considering that it appeared so quickly and that I should just keep my eye on it. We’re going to wash all the bedding and keep the cats out of the bedroom for a while and see what happens. In the meantime, I *must*not*scratch*!!!!
In other news, I went for my yearly eye exam and my prescription changed, but not significantly and my eye pressure is still very good. This makes me happy.
In other other news, the gold cross that I’ve been wearing since I was 18 broke this morning and I don’t think I’ll be able to fix it. This makes me very sad :(
† Wikipedia tells me that this is dyshidrosis (aka dyshidrotic e., pompholyx, vesicular palmoplantar dermatitis, housewife’s eczema) and only occurs on palms, soles, and sides of fingers and toes. Tiny opaque bumps called vesicles, thickening, and cracks are accompanied by itching which gets worse at night. A common type of hand eczema, it worsens in warm weather.
More stupid tattoo goodness
As a follow up to this previous post, I give you more tattoo idiocy.
Canadian Lane Jensen made a radical move to have one of the most bizarre operations of the year — to insert silicone implants not in his chest, but in his leg.
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| Before | Now with chesty goodness |
A devotee of body art already, Lane had a tattoo of a large busted lady on his shin. He felt the tattoo wasn’t entirely dramatic enough, so he had silicone implanted underneath the breasts on the tattooed woman to make the inkwork more effective in the right areas.
“I thought for sure I’d be light headed or sick from the visual but in fact, after 15 minutes I sat up and watched. Today it doesn’t feel any worse than a minor bruise. It looks great and accents the tattoo very well.” said Jensen.
“My leg breast implants are doing great 1 week after the implant was inserted. The one spot where the nipple rubs against my pants is a little sore. It’ll callus up and be fine soon.” he adds.
UPDATE:
The implants were put in on December 9, but by Christmas Eve the sutures had split, and large quantities of lymphatic fluid were oozing out of his leg, Lane told the Edmonton Sun. “There was so much fluid in there. I went back to the studio and pushed on it gently — the implant shot right out.” He says that there was nothing wrong with the implant procedure. “My body just rejected it. I guess my girl wasn’t meant to have 3D breasts.”
And, as a further treat, I present:
What your tattoo says about you
Week in review
Not a lot to report for this past week. Work’s been up and down. I’ve been working on cleaning up code written up during a recent student project. The code does some very nice things in truly god-awful ways. I shouldn’t be too harsh about it, as it was from a student who’d never programmed in Java before. Still, it gives me nightmares and for the first time in a very long time, I feel stupid because I’m having a hell of a time trying to wrap my brain around what it does and how it does it. It really doesn’t help my morale when a coworker just looked at the spaghetti mess and said “oh yes, it does this here and that there. it’s quite simple, actually”. Bastard :)
On the home front, the BenBen has mastered the art of sitting up unsupported and his first tooth has broken through. More are hot on its heels. The clever beast managed to barf on me this morning and, as I put him down to clean him and myself up, he kicked my tea cup off the coffee table. Triple-score points!!! Otherwise, he’s generally in a good mood these days and he’s discovering new foods at a good pace. The ladies at the nursery are impressed in his ecclectic tastes. It’s not every baby that likes asparagus and olives, apparently.
Some lads from work came and helped me move the old sofa into the office. It took two tries and a bit of swearing, but we managed to get it to its final resting place with a minimum of pain or injury to either myself or the house. It smelled of cat wee so we nuked it with the odor remover and washed all the covers. The office is starting to look nice and usable now. I borrowed some homeplugs from a guy at work and I can now connect the SunRay console to the house network. I haven’t tested it out yet but it’ll hopefully mean that I can work from home on the days that I need to stay at home. I have to say that I’m impressed with the technology. I’d never heard of it before but they allow you to create a home network using the electrical wiring in your house. Very clever. I’ve ordered my own set and they should be in next week.
Katy and I have been on a Sopranos marathon. We’re starting season 3 now. Brings back memories of watching it Michel and tearing large chunks of the floor in that apartment in Montreal (hee hee hee, screw you Mister Silver!!!) We went to the Saffron Screen to watch Star Trek. I really, really liked that movie and it’s one of the few Star Trek movies I’d consider buying on DVD. Beckie, our babysitter, had an easy night last night but I think that she’s going to be a life saver in the months and years to come.
On the cooking front, we managed to have only one BBQ this week but that’s because the weather was mostly crappy. I made beef koftas. They were nice. I took the beastie for a walk to town to pick up stuff from the market. The fruit and veg stall is going to be beneficial to our budget, but the butcher and the bread stall might hurt our wallet so it might be a mixed blessing. I made spahetti with a creamy bacon and seafood sauce. Very, very nice. We’re going to have to buy more of that seafood mix from Aldi.
I poached some chicken breasts in some apple juice and some herbs for the beastie. I whizzed some up with some mixed root veg (swede, parsnip, sweet potato, carrots) and some leek. It’ll complement his lunches of pasta with meet sauce and chicken with veg and cous cous. It seems that I’m cooking more for the beastie than I am for us :)
Quote of the day: Alice Cooper
Everything his publicist told me about Alice Cooper is true. He’s articulate, funny and engaging. A Conservative Christian who’s been sober for 25 years, he’s 61; on a scale of affability, he’s far closer to his late friend Bob Hope than he is to, say, John Lydon. Age suits him; the wrinkles strangely complement his carefully dishevelled head of luxuriant, ink-black hair.
“In 1969, you said: ‘Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.’ That hasn’t worked, has it?”
“No. Which is funny, because all my buddies from the early days – the guys I used to drink with – they’re all dead. Jim Morrison. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix.”
Taken from an article in the Independent.