Day 302: Proof that I was back in my office today! Every office should have a T-rex somewhere in it. Size, construction, and level of risk up to the owner of the office.
Personal
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
My New Osborne 1
Thanks to the 3D printing wizardry of @trevorflowers@machines.social, I now have an adorably tiny replica of an Osborne 1 on my desktop!
The Osborne 1 was my first computer (well, my family’s)…and second, and third, as we picked up a couple more from friends as they moved on, allowing me to swap parts around to keep one running.
Two 5.25″ floppy drives, a 5″ 52×20-character green screen, ran CP/M. A “portable” computer, it was the size of a suitcase, weighed 25 pounds, and didn’t have a battery, but because you could flip the keyboard up and latch it onto the front to lug it around, it counted as portable!
I typed early school papers with Wordstar (which coincidentally doubled as early training for HTML, as it used printer control codes to tell our dot-matrix printer to print \bbold\b or \uunderlined\u text; when I discovered HTML, it was an instant “oh, yeah, this makes sense” moment), played Snake before it showed up on Nokia mobile phones, and taught myself the basics of BASIC by translating a Choose Your Own Adventure book into a simple text-based adventure game.
Though our full-size Osbornes were disposed of years ago, I’m ridiculously pleased to have this lil’ guy on my desk now.
📚 Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
18/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Excellent account of the settling and first steps of terraforming Mars, taking place over a few decades. Good hard sci-fi, with fascinating ideas on how it could be done and the effects, both micro (on the people involved and their immediate society) and macro (on the larger sociopolitical societies of Earth and Mars as it grows, and the physical effects on Mars). Fascinating from start to end; very much looking forward to continuing through the trilogy.
Also interesting reading this at a time when Mars is often in the news as an eventual destination once again, both realistic (NASA) and unrealistic (Musk), not long after reading and seeing Andy Weir’s The Martian and its film adaptation, just after finishing season four of For All Mankind, which is set on Mars, and while seeing Zach Weinersmith frequently post about his recent book looking at how Mars colonization is more difficult and dangerous than most people think. I wonder how much of what we know has changed since this part of the trilogy was written and how it might affect the underlying story if it were written today (I’m assuming that the Green Mars and Blue Mars sequels, being necessarily further extrapolated and less dependent on current real world science, would be less affected).
Year 50 Day 301
Day 301: I actually went to work today! And then was busy enough that I totally forgot to take a picture to prove that I was feeling well enough to leave the house, so my wife snapped this shot on our way home.
Year 50 Day 300
Day 300: Heard something dropping on the roof, looked outside, and realized it was snowing and hailing simultaneously — snailing! So I had to go out and stand in the snail.
Year 50 Day 299
Day 299: More work on prepping for DJing at Norwescon. Today I was working on making sure I had a good video output setup with OBS to send to the projection screen that will be behind me on stage during the dance. It’s a variation on what I use when streaming, and I really like the way it comes out.
Year 50 Day 298
Day 298: I have more energy, but still have a head full of goo. Spending some of my downtime on prepping my music library for DJing the Thursday night dance at Norwescon.
Which involves more swearing at Apple than this long-time Apple user would like it to. I really wish they’d give the Music app the love and care it so desperately needs, particularly when it comes to people like me, who have a large library of owned music and care about metadata, and are not interested in cloud features. I just want an app that concentrates on organizing, managing, and playing what’s on my computer. iTunes in its early days did a great job of that, but it (or its current “Music” incarnation) hasn’t been solid in years.
Year 50 Day 297
Day 297: I made it outside of the house today! Just far enough to take out the trash and check the mail, but it counts.
Year 50 Day 296
Day 296: Good news — improvements are being made! While not at 100%, I’m definitely feeling better, and actually got dressed today instead of spending another day in pajamas. (Though, really, sweats and a t-shirt aren’t that different from pajamas, but still!)
Bad news — it looks suspiciously like now it’s my wife’s turn to go through this. Which is not great, but better to go in series so that we can take turns taking care of each other, instead of both of us being sick at the same time and nobody having the energy to do anything for the other.
It Was All My Fault
I was one of the first of my friends group to really get into “home theater” — at least, as much as I could in the mid-’90s on a financially questionable 20-something’s budget. Our apartment had a big-screen rear-projection TV (bought used, of course), later replaced with a (ridiculously huge) three-beam projector sourced from a bar that was closing down, an early surround sound system, and I started collecting widescreen movies with the special edition of The Abyss on widescreen VHS. I had a pretty decent widescreen VHS collection before finally upgrading to DVD.
At one point, Chad and I were sitting around, bored, and looking for something to watch. “I’ve got The Crow,” says Chad. Sounded good to me, so he went to grab it. And pulled out his copy — a home VHS tape, with the movie taped off of TV, over something else, in broadcast pan-and-scan, and probably in mono. He popped it in, and we started watching.
About ten minutes in, suddenly he turns to me and spouts off with a hearty and apparently random, “Fuck you!”
“What the hell?” I said.
“Until I lived with you, I didn’t care about widescreen, or surround sound, or any of that. I’d just watch the movie. You’ve ruined me!” And as I laughed, he turned off the movie in amused disgust. And it wasn’t too long before the widescreen DVD found its way into the collection.
(Originally posted to Mastodon, and prompted by the announcement of The Crow on 4K Blu-ray.)