When did you guys get your first home computers? I got my first computer a vic20 back in the early 80s probably around '81 maybe before. I would play on it for hours, poking memory bits and moving sprite.



I rememeber my first program Basic went something like this

1 print "I love my vic20"
2 goto 1

and I was instantly addicted and saved it all to tape. Tapes were kind of fun. I can't tell you how much music got sacrificed to "save data".



The vic 20 had some really excellent text based RPGs. I loved them all. But it definately was not a gaming machine. In fact I don't think it had any graphics outside of text.

Then I saw Jason Fahmer's commodore 64 .



He was always the kid that had eveything first. Luckily, he was also my best friend at the time. I got one right after that. My mom said just about after they came out, which was 1982, so lets say 1983 when (e:mike) was born.

Many of my other friends had a tandy or an Apple II. I remember wanting an apple II GS, whatever the gs stood for.

I never got a modem because my dad was an insurance salesman and he couldn't have the business line tied up with me using the computer. I wonder what would have happend to me during the dot.com boom if I had had a modem before that. Luckily, the mail man [inlink]paul,2626[/inlink] would bring around programs and I quickly got my hands on GEOS, the first graphics operating system I had ever seen. The commodore 64 was truly a viable home computer for the time.

At school we played Oregon Trail ont eha Apple IIs (WIKIPEDIA - The_Oregon_Trail_%28computer_game%29)

I remember using logo (WIKIPEDIA - logo programming language) by third grade. PENDOWN FD 90 RT

We played some otehr game about mixing chemical on other planets to make compounds. Taht was fun too.

Nearly everyone I knew had a home computer. A lot of my good friends at the time. Jason Fahmer, Angela Vacanti, Kelly LeVan, Heather Killian , Chris Watson, Chris Parada. Seems like most of the people I hung out with in the early to mid 80s.

Then the macs came out in 1984. Those macs were pretty advanced machines that could do a lot of home computing tasks. Heather got one and so did Chris Watson. I remember distinctly that Heather always had some really cool computers.

I am sure everyone remembers the first computer based encyclopedia they saw. Mine was at Heather's house. Or maybe not because I lived in such an isoloted weird place like Kenmore.

I remember the crazy advertsiement with tthe woman running and smashing the computers or something . I wanted one so bad, but we didn't get one or an amiga.

(WIKIPEDIA - home computer)

I lifted this list from wikipedia.

* Apple II (June 1977, North America) (color graphics, eight expansion slots)
* Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 (August 1977, N. Am.) (first home computer for less than US$600)
* Commodore PET (December 1977, N. Am.) (first all-in-one computer: keyboard/screen/tape storage)
* Atari 400/800 (1979, N. Am.) (first computer with custom chip set)
* Commodore VIC-20 (1980, N. Am.) (under US$300; first computer in the world to pass the one million sold mark)
* TRS-80 Color Computer (1980, N. Am.) (Motorola 6809, OS-9 multi-user multi-tasking)
* Texas Instruments TI-99/4A (June 1981, N. Am.) (16-bit CPU)
* Sinclair ZX81 (1981, Europe) (£49.95 in kit form; £69.95 pre-built)
* BBC Micro (1981, Europe) (premier educational computer in the UK for a decade; advanced BASIC)
* ZX Spectrum (April 1982, Europe) (best-selling British home computer; "made" the UK software industry)
* Commodore 64 (August 1982, N. Am.) (best-selling computer model of all time: > 20 million sold)
* MSX (late 1983, Japan) (a computer 'reference design' by ASCII and Microsoft, manufactured by several companies)
* Apple Macintosh (1984, N. Am.) (first fully GUI-based home/personal computer; first 16/32-bit)
* Amstrad/Schneider CPC & PCW ranges (198?, Europe) (British std. prior to IBM PC; German sales next to C64)
* Atari ST (1985, N. Am.) (first with built-in MIDI interface; also 1MB RAM for less than US$1000)
* Commodore Amiga (July 1985, N. Am.) (custom chip set for graphics and sound; multitasking OS)

I think then there was a huge lapse before we got another computer when I was in my late high shcool years. That actaully worked out good for me because I was not at all into computers in high school. Liek I would use it sometimes to type a paper, but it was deifnately not my passtime. I was much more into doing outdoors stuff and exploring sex and drugs.

I know I will get a bunch of slack for this but print makers are notoriously bad web designers in my opinion. There have been a few exceptional cases that I have met, but generally, when a print design company tries to go web design, it usually looks like wrong. They almost always have a really beautiful giant splash graphic and thats where the magic ends. It's no longer just a picture that you put on the web, it's a living interactive interface.

Right now I am working on Ride for Roswell at work. You can look at last year's website to get an idea of where it is going It is designed by Flynn and Friend's, a company in buffalo . I decided to look up their firm on the net after seeing the CD I am supposed to work with had their name on it. The paradigm is so old, i received some photoshop pictures and it is supposed to become a web site.

If you look at the non-web media design portfolio on their website, it looks pretty nice. But the web deisgn stuff looks really mediocre, borderline lame. I guess the was interersting.

I think it is the result of print based web designers relying too heavily on photoshop. It's all still a throwback to when the web was all slice up tables based layout. My question is how much do they get paid for the web site design, when I am doing the coding here at Roswell and someone else enters in the data.

Today's special atw work was those yummy wingdings. I knew this because I saw it on th mobile app I made for work where it reports today's specials. I guess it worked for me. Yum!

So, I finally spoke with Jamie Moses and I can make some time now that most everything else is out of the way. We are going to meet on Tuesday night to talk about the Geek Meet and some other stuff. Then on the 16th maybe I will move the server. It is mostly set up and whatever doesn't work atthat point can be set up remotely afterwards. I think we will gain a lot of improvement in what we can offer. Especially because we will go from having 6GB (around 4285.71 floppy disks) worth of space to around 400GB (around 285,714.29 floppy disk) worth of space. Then we can start having more video and audio features.

Wow I really let my hair grow long this time.










Afterwards, (e:lilho) and I played with the baby. I bought her a new stocking to play in. She loves it. At some point (e:lilho) started to turn into a squirrel.





She played iwth it so much she started to become a squirrel.



(e:lilho) was playing with my phone and pulled out the memory chip. It is really tiny. She asked me how big it was and I said 1 gigabyte. Then she said how big is that so I said ~1,000 megabytes. Then she asked me how big that was in floppy disks. I can't remember the last time someone asked me how big something was in floppy disks. I almost forgot they existed. Anyways, It is also around ~1000 floppy disks although prob some less because I think that floopy disks were 1.4 MB each.

We saw barbie at target. She had a special message for everyone.

::DOWNLOAD SOUND::

I decided to clean out my phone of pics that hadn't made it to my journal yet.

We went shopping the other day at the Blvd mall but I forgot to post these pics. The mall looks really different than I rememebr it. What surprises me most is that ever other stand/store is a front for a mobile phone carrier. Some even have mutliple shops which seems so weird to me.



They also have polish water. What the hell is polish water and is it Polish like the nationality or polish like the nail enhancer. I hope it's the first one, maybe. It reality it sounds like a code name for Vodka. (e:matthew) says he thinks he heard Vodka refered to that way before.



The tree came down and with it all the ornaments. I took so many pictures of them for some reason.

Today I went with (e:mike), (e:lilho), (e:mathhew) and (e:terry) to run some errands. It is supposed to end in my haircut after we buy clippers. I think I am going to celebrate shaving and haircutting with dressing up and going out somewhere.

My hair has gotten so crazy, unfortunately, (e:lilho) has started drinking with our dinnr at Gabriels gate so I hope my haircut comes out. Who wrote that song about never taking acid and cutting your hair? I think they same think should apply to letting your barber get drunk before the cut.

I bought (e:mike) his christmas gift circus tickets. It cost about $200 for two tickets. Holy crap. I hope it's good. We are in a great location. We turned down floor tickets for the same price because I didn't want look up the whole time.

I got to test of out my work project and estrip on a blackberry. They both worked good. I like the keyboard on the blackberry but I still think it needs a cam.

Last night (e:terry), (e:lilho) and I headed over to Betty's on Virginia. The food was delicious. I had lamb chops, (e:lilho) had paella and terry had some overwhelmingly lentil vegetarian thing.

We had clams casino for an appetizer. They were so freakin' yummy. I would suggest the place to vegetrian and meat eaters alike.

So my toe looks worse than ever although it feels much better. Unfortunately, I have one more month before my health insurance starts.
Can someone tell me (maybe you know Jenks) if it is normal for a toe to start looking worse, even if it begins to feel a little better. It is making walking tricky because it is fatter than the other toes now and gets in the way.



I just want to be able to dance again.

Today was a better day at work. I built lots of cool stuff.

I found out the reason that code looked so messed up is not just that the users were using an online wysiwyg editor but that they were pasting into it from word. What a nightmare this is gonna be.

I finally finished the bulk of my online theme editor for the site. Maybe it will make me make more themes. Either way I am glad that all the data entry is over.