The ch sound is not the same in the words lich and lichen.
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Category: Life
Something’s Missing
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When I Was Your Age
Rocket Jones leads me to contemplate:
What will today’s youth tell tomorrow’s youth in When I Was Your Ageisms?
My first shot:
When I was your age, radio came over radio waves.
Ah, I got nothing.
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Anger Is Not Zero Sum
Anger is not zero sum; that is, if everyone is angry, it doesn’t mean that one person is winning and another person is losing. An angry tide raises all boats, and it makes them run in ship-shape fashion.
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Another One Where I Read Them All
It took me two days to review all 414. But I did.
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Yeah, Well I Want A Giant Killer Armored Battle Suit, Too
At least this fellow is taking steps:
Advertising for one.
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Commodore 128 as Nature Intended It
Fellow Milwaukeean (and the only current Milwaukeean between the two of us) Triticale knows I collect old computers, and when he recently changed abodes, he told me I could have his old Commodore 128 that had been in his garage forever. Well, I talked to my brother in Milwaukee about picking it up for me, and he did, and on my most recent trip to Wisconsin I retrieved said machine.
When I first tried to boot it, it failed. So I planned to make it a teach-yourself-electronics project to resuscitate it, but all it took was a new fuse in the power supply. So I didn’t really learn much at all, but it works beautifully.
And darn the luck, the only television with an RF switch attached to it was in the living room. So behold:
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Oh, my. I was so excited, I hooked the Commodore 1571 disk drive up and I’ll be durned if it didn’t work right out of the box. So I dug through my archives of my old disks and found some of the programs I had written in the first Bush presidency. As you might know, the Commodore 128 was my first computer, so Basic 7.0 was my first language. And I wrote a number of programs.
Including Adventurers’ Guild, a program designed to keep track of my D&D group’s equipment and character list. It wasn’t truly data-driven, but it did use the Commodore 128’s graphics to their ability. I mean, high res graphics, brother:
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The main program was just a routing piece that called a subprogram allowing the user to look at the various and sundry keeps, characters, or stockpiled equipment:
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For example, if you wanted to see the roster, it would go into a subprogram for the roster and you could see all characters past and present that played in the campaign:
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For example, here’s my brother’s favorite character as seen when the user has chosen to view all:
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And even when I was a junior in high school, I was building help into my applications. Here’s one of my first help files:
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When the user logged out, the Commodore went into hi-res graphics for a moment, painting an exit door:
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Then it ended turning the screen to default colors and with a final message from the dungeonmaster:
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Hmm, lightning is misspelled. I’ll log a defect on that right away.
I wrote a couple of other things, too, including a DMV quiz program after watching the movie License to Drive over and over as only a kid in the boondocks with only Showtime could.
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The instructions included my address back in the day and welcomed correspondence. Back in those days, that’s how you did it without the Internet and e-mail addresses that worked wherever you connected:
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And the Weird Al Wannabe Quiz:
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Of course, after I released them to the wild of the Commodore CG BBSes, I’d expect they were never downloaded. I know no one ever came across with a shareware donation. I did, however, make some money programming, as the high school baseball team’s manager wanted a program to keep track of stats. At Stellar Soft, we were happy to gather his requirements, deliver a quality program, and support it with new features as requested for the princely sum of like $50:
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I see that in the instructions, I listed it as a division of Triple N Enterprises:
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Considering that Noggle, Noggle, and Neiderriter was our lawnmowing business, I guess I did that for taxing purposes.
Well, that’s my walk down memory lane. What’s my point? I don’t know; I have 20 years of software development experience? Or perhaps to boast once again that I have more Commodores than Michele?
Aw, who cares, I got to post some pictures of an old computer.
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To Coin a Phrase Or Not To Coin a Phrase
Crikey, I thought I was going to coin the word hipnoxious, but someone has beat me to it.
Well, there goes my fame and fortune.
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Going All Althouse
Worked all night, but it won’t last:
Hey, buddy? You missed a spot.
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Rhetorical Question
If pro-life advocates assert that life begins at conception, how come they never include that period when discussing someone’s age?
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Bringing Back Memories, Therapy Sessions
A short video from Summerfest shows people dancing; my goodness, I remember cutting a picnic table or two in my time. My friend Doug and I were unabashed in our appreciation of the music, much to the amusement of passersby and chagrin of those with whom we came. It probably also explains why we were unable to impress women we saw at Summerfest.
Why, I once went to Summerfest alone and danced on a table by myself. That shows the depths of….well, something.
I haven’t been to Summerfest in a decade, but watching the video takes me there again.
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Mention Pretention
You know, I don’t call it Fourth of July; I call it Independence Day as diligently as I call Autumn what others term Fall.
In my own mind, it makes me sound more formal.
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Would You, As A Friend, Tell Me?
Am I bruchleidend?
I saw this ad inside the back cover of the Milwaukee America Kalendar 1924 I bought this weekend, and it asked a question we all must ask ourselves daily: Bruchleidend?
Because if I am, I definitely need to send off to a far away city to get a set of four suction cups I can wear around my waist to help with my bruchleidend condition.
Heather informs me that I cannot suffer bruchleidend, as those are obviously a woman’s hips in it. Google’s translator tells me that bruchleidend means “break-suffering,” which I sometimes have been known to feel (if bruchleidend means “Dreading the last minutes before you have to punch back in after scarfing a submarine sandwich and a quart of orange juice in 7 minutes”).
Given the language barrier in addition to the archaic nature of the advertisement, I cannot be clear whether this was an actual, outdated, treatment for something, snake oil of some sort, or some mechanism to part German immigrants from their American dollars. As a matter of fact, given that it appeared in the back of a magazine and has a tarty line drawing, perhaps I’ve blown my PG-13 rating on my blog by including it.
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Hmmm.
So Greenville, Illinois, home of FCI Greenville:
Has a realty company named:
Does anyone else find that a bit peculiar?
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Found Poetry
The sad, lonely life of an unrequited lover recounted using the date due flap of an obscure academic tome as the metaphor:
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Just Watching It For The Commercials
I’ve found myself watching YouTube renditions of various and sundry commercials and “viral” advertisements lately. Once a series grabs me, I like to watch a pile of them, which makes them amusing if not effective. Brand awareness and affinity? You bet.
First, thanks to a post on StLRecruiting.com, I started watching the “Making Things Right with Pete and Red series” for Haggar:
These represent an extended version of some television commercials. You can find the HaggarFilms list on YouTube here and on the Haggar site here. And, if you search around on YouTube, you can find others and the 30 second cuts that appeared on television. Makes me want to go out and buy pants.
Secondly, when Carl’s sued Jack in the Box for its Angus commercials, I went right out to review the advertisements in question. Here’s one:
Using YouTube’s related suggestions and search mechanism, I found a number of other of the commercials I liked. I watched some that I’d seen on television. Particularly “The Intern,” which I watched again during the creation of this post. Carl’s probably made a mistake bigger than hiring Norm MacDonald to voice its star.
So then I went to find an old Bud commercial with the beavers because every now and then I think the tagline Naughty little beavers and want to use it in professional conversation but I cannot without it sounding, well, worthy of a call to HR. But I’ll embed it here because the more it becomes known, the less chance I’ll have to think of euphemisms for “fired for sexual harrassment” to use in job interviews for “Why did you leave your last job?”
Or the “Willy! It’s go time.” commercial:
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t drink Budweiser if I was drowning (which, ultimately, makes no sense). However, I like the commercials.
What’s my point? Oh, yeah, if you’re all slavering to get into Web 2.0 advertising–that is, to save money on actually distributing/running your adverts, you probably ought to spend money on the production of them and make them amusing and funny enough to warrant further watching. Sure, it’s cheap, but so’s a blog, and if this blog serves any lesson for you it’s that you can have a steady Web presence, but just because you put it out there doesn’t mean you’re doing your clients any favors or garnering any attention.
And here’s the only YouTube commercial I have ever bookmarked: Folger’s Happy Morning:
The last coffee I bought was Folger’s, partly because I was trimming expenditures from the $20 a pound stuff but partly, perhaps, because I enjoyed an amusing video that I could watch over and over again for the same set of amusement.
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Personal Chart History
My beautiful wife got me a set of musical reference books from a garage sale or book fair. The titles include The All Music Book of Hit Singles which compiles the top 20 singles by month from 1954 through 1993 and provides the results in monthly charts for the United States and the United Kingdom on opposite pages so you can compare the two. Each page has three such charts and 3-4 bullet points of trivia for the quarter. I thought I could go through these charts as my nightstand book, a book I read in very small snippets in the 10-15 minutes preceding sleep on the occasional nights where I am in bed and the lights are on for those minutes. Ultimately, it wasn’t a good choice, because I found myself opting for sleep rather than reviewing historical charts (I only made it to 1959). So as I took the book from the nightstand and removed the bookmark, I flipped it open to the late 1980s, a time period where I was more directly related to the music on the charts.
The book fell open to July 1988, and suddenly I was there:
I don’t mean I was suddenly at the page, because although I was suddenly on that page, that’s not worth commentary. No, friends, suddenly I was in July 1988.
It’s late at night. We only got to stay up until 9pm (well, we had to be in our rooms at 9pm, but the de jure 9pm evolved to de facto 10pm or thereabouts) on school nights (in high school, no less). In July, 1988, we’ve moved from the mobile home in Murphy to the single family home down the old gravel road (Ruth Drive, or Route 5 alternately but less so at that time). The house was far into a valley from the nearest two lane state highway (MM, which runs from House Springs through Otto and onto Antonia); if we were so inclined, we could walk about 30 minutes to that T intersection where Heads Creek Road met MM, but rarely did, since it was another 40 minutes to Otto or an hour or more to House Springs on the two lane, no shoulder highway. At the time we moved in, the valley offered spotty television reception from St. Louis and did not have cable television. Or private telephone lines. At the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, we still had to pick up the phone receiver and make sure none of our neighbors was using the line before placing a call. Party lines, they called them.
But I didn’t have to worry about that late at night. Or much during the day, either; we weren’t the most popular children.
Our mother took great pride in moving us way into nowhere where she could afford $40,000 worth of house on over an acre of land, most of which was flat. We had trees, we had a lawn that it took 3 hours to mow with push mowers (not reel mowers, thankfully), and we had a shady spot with poisonous snakes. We even had one or two kids who didn’t want to beat the snot out of us on sight. The house itself was a ranch with an attached two car garage and a full unfinished basement. Three of the bedrooms were bedrooms, and a fourth room that could advertise as a bedroom (with basement access) served as our computer room. A grey computer desk held our Commodore 128 (yes, that desk). I spent many nights that summer seated on the wooden folding chair in front of that grey/beige keyboard, typing programs in from Ahoy!, Compute’s Gazette, Run, and Commodore Power Play into memory and saving them onto old floppies.
While I typed those old programs in, a shelf audio system with cassette deck, turntable, and tuner played the songs from that chart. It would have been Y 98; 103.3 KHTR had already changed to oldies a couple years before. Y 98 hasn’t altered its format that much and still uses the KYKY designation, so it’s probably due to change to smooth jazz any time now.
I can almost close my eyes and remember the bookshelves to my left, the battered metal office desk to my right holding an ancient Remington electric typewriter and a 1960s styled electronic word processor that could save your documents to cassette and could print them on rolls of paper. Even then, once in a while, a feeling of future nostalgia would wash over me and I would press the sounds of the trees outside the window and the stillness of the house into my memory for someday. Somedays like today.
My brother was just turning toward the harder rock, so he would have favored “Pour Some Sugar On Me”. “Make Me Lose Control” and “The Flame” both acutely remind me of that particular era and, indeed, the particular selfshot of me at the computer, trying to proofread typos or to enjoy the always disappointing simple little games that resulted. Late at night, me and that Commodore 128 after everyone had gone to bed. Until the cable company pulled its lines and private phone lines behind it, I wouldn’t even have Bulletin Board Systems again. Just me, that radio, and the Miami Sound Machine or the soul of “Terence Trent D’Arby”, whom I mocked then and continue to mock now. Some years later, I would have disposable income and would own a number of those songs on cassette or 45, but then I only had the radio and the endless time of youth in the summertime, nights to spend typing from magazines and dreaming of a future whose days and nights matched those, but better.
And here I am.
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That’s My House
That’s how we used to call it, back in the housing projects in my youth. We’d say, “That’s my car” or “That’s my house” when we saw something particularly snappy.
Like this house, whose description in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says:
Secret passages: One, from the media room to the master bedroom
How it works: A section of a built-in bookcase is a door set on vertical piano hinges, which keep it upright as it rolls open on casters. The media room sees a bookcase, and the bedroom sees a door.
The next section is “Why?” but I think anyone in Generation X or later comes with an implied because it’s cool.
Image here.
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Passing On Left Parking Lane Apparently Okay
With complicated rules expressed on road signs lacking punctuation like this one:
Deconstruct and do what you want.
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Things I Can Do That My Father Cannot
Blogs are getting a lot of pixel inches out of an essay entitled I Can’t Do One-Quarter of the Things My Father Can, which plays into an Instapundit narrative about the loss of traditional male skills. In my defense, I’d like to point out that I know how to do a number of things that my father can’t do. These include:
- Order a Starbucks drink just the way I want it.
Face it, it’s only a triple venti cap, but I not only know the sizes of the cups, but I know the order in which the barristas call it. My generation knows how to express its drink preferences in ways the Greatest Generation or Baby Boomers can only dream of, which is probably why they mostly still drink coffee. - Hook up any game console to any television or entertainment center.
What, you don’t have the cables? Brother, I have all sorts of cables and transformers so I can still hook that old Nintendo Entertainment System to your Yamaha receiver. - Operate video game controllers.
Let’s face it, when confronted with keys marked with triangles, squares, and Xs, my father would totally be lost. - Time shift my television viewing.
I’m no longer bound to watching Lost on Wednesday nights, which means I can watch something else, probably something I had to record because I was watching a recorded episode of Lost. - Insightfully quote culturally meaningful films.
Because a proper quip from Office Space or catchphrase from Napoleon Dynamite identifies the user as intelligent and witty enough to use canned touchstones instead of uttering original thoughts or keeping my mouth shut and sounding smarter. - Blithely ignore the implications of my dependence.
Mommy State and Daddy Professionals are only a phone call away if I’m not afraid of ceding my rights to free thought and using all of my revolving credit on lifestyle maintenance.
So there you go. Maybe I do lack some basic skills required at the root level for survival, but I have mad skillz to mindlessly enjoy the fruits of an increasingly fragile modern civilization.
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