Phoenix Comicon Woes

(Here’s a picture of the Phoenix skyline. I didn’t actually get any pictures at Comicon. To know why, read below.)

 

Last weekend, my wife and I packed up the Ford Escape and went down to Phoenix for Comicon. We had hoped to get in touch with our fellow nerds, get some awesome nerdy merchandise to decorate our new apartment, and find out neat stuff about the shows and books we liked. I wanted to see Star Trek stuff and meet Uncle Scrooge artist Don Rosa, and L (my wife) wanted to get Dresden Files author Jim Butcher’s autograph and go to Firefly panels.

What we got was not what we expected, but probably, in retrospect, we should have. Phoenix was burning hot—of course it would be, it was June. I did okay. I grew up in the broiling hot deserts of Victorville and Barstow, and my body was able to acclimate to the hundred degree temps, albeit grudgingly. My wife, who is from Michigan originally, was not able to acclimate. She was fine as long as she was in an air-conditioned building—however, Comicon was spread out among the three buildings of the Convention Center as well as four other hotels in the area. To get from a panel in the North Building to one in the Radisson, two blocks away, took about 15 minutes because of all of the crowds and roadblocks we had to go around in order to get there. By Saturday evening, poor L was red as a beet and about to faint. The only shuttles or public transportation they had available were sweaty people on pedicab tricycles and the Phoenix Light Rail, which never seemed to get us close enough to the Convention Center or to our hotel room to be of much use at all. So on Sunday we drove to the convention—but the closest available parking garage was still half a mile away from where we wanted to be and they charged us $12 for the “convenience” of using it.

And the crowds—oh god, the crowds! I probably should have seen that coming too. Every corridor in the Convention Center was wall-to-wall people, including people with angel wings or spiky shoulder pads on their costume that would poke you as they passed, inconsiderate youngsters that would just stop right in front of you to take a picture of somebody in a costume and block the way for everyone else, people with onboard PA systems in their suits that would play awful music, and lots of people in militaristic costumes with full armor and very realistic-looking guns. Not just your standard fantasy knights or Halo Spartans or Stormtroopers, but people dressed like US Special Forces, complete with ghillie suits and sniper rifles, and “zombie hunters” that were better armed and armored than your average SWAT team. Add to the mix about five thousand security personnel and actual policemen barking orders in all directions, and the combined effect was enough to trigger both mine and my wife’s claustrophobia and agoraphobia on several occasions.

I didn’t go to nearly as many panels as I wanted to go because I couldn’t deal with pushing my way through the crowds and feeling trapped in that roiling sea of humanity. Meanwhile, L missed one of her panels because she accidentally wandered into a prohibited area of the Convention Center and a security guard repeatedly called her “Sir” as he shouted at her to leave. My wife is chubby, to be sure, but seriously? Being repeatedly mistaken for a man was enough to make her extremely upset. She was already upset about feeling invisible among the tens of thousands of people who just wouldn’t get out of the way for us.

Not that any of the actual panels we went to were very good, mind you. The con’s major Firefly panels were a Browncoats cosplay forum and one entitled “Why Firefly is Dead and You Should Really Just Move On.” Seriously? That’s like telling a Tolkien fan that they shouldn’t read Lord of the Rings anymore because Tolkien’s been dead for forty years, and all the cool kids are into George R. R. Martin now, and they should just shut up. All the Star Trek panels I went to seemed to be too interested in the JJ Abrams movies, which I guess is what’s popular these days, but I wanted to talk about Picard and Data. I went to an entertainment panel on “Which Captain is the Best,” however, and while pedantic and silly, like all “Kirk vs. Picard vs. Sisko vs. Janeway vs. Archer” battles have been since the 1980s, it was at least fun. And it seemed like every panel was set up to sell you something. Even the “Astronomy of Middle Earth” panel we went to was essentially a commercial for the presenter’s Mobile Inflatable Planetarium business, which she uses to present astronomy lectures to elementary schools, birthday parties, business luncheons, and weddings, apparently.

And there was a comedy panel I went to where the comedian was extremely insulting and unfunny. At one point, she called Star Trek fans “fags” because they “invented slash fiction.” Really? She couldn’t do any better? Star Trek fans present so much humor, you could do an entire hour of comedy on them alone. And they’re so self-deprecating—they even thought it was funny when William Shatner told them to “get a life” on Saturday Night Live. But to call us fags? I just got up and walked out of the room. I wanted intelligent discussion about science fiction and fantasy and sequential art and to meet other pedantic, overly intellectual geeks like myself—instead I got panic attacks, never-ending commercials, and insults about one’s sexuality thrown at both my wife and myself.

I guess I should have expected this, but I at least thought that the convention organizers would at least throw a bone to old nerds like me. But no, this thing was geared completely towards the 12-20 year old crowd who just consume all the new comics and shows and buy what popular culture tells them to buy. It didn’t answer the big gaping hole in my heart, my deep need to connect and share and belong with people like myself, intellectual nerds who I can talk to with my entire vocabulary, not just the limited subset of words I hold myself back to in order to not be made fun of by the illiterate rednecks I live and do business with on a regular basis. I want to discuss things like science without having to rad it up 30% for people who normally don’t give a shit about discovery or space or curing cancer, like at the one panel I went to, “Adventures in Science,” where ASU grad students talked about all the times they “almost died” when they went to Africa to install radio telescopes. I wanted to know more about what they were actually studying with those telescopes, but my question was drowned out in a sea of questions about “Was it scary when you found that scorpion in your boot?” This is Phoenix we’re talking about here, in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. Scorpions in your boots are a regular occurrence around these parts, or at least they were when I grew up.

So I don’t think either my wife or I will go to that one again. We’re still looking for our nerd home.

 

 

My Last Post: A Final Goodbye to Those I love

One of my favorite bloggers just posted this suicide note yesterday. And since I didn’t check the blogs yesterday, he’s probably already dead. And of course, there’s nothing on his blog to indicated he did or he didn’t commit suicide. All I can say is… actually, there’s nothing I can say.

French lessons

Lately, I have been trying to relearn French so I can help my elderly father fulfill his lifelong wish to travel to France, to meet his relatives and see his father’s grave in Alsace-Lorraine. I’ve been doing so mostly by watching DVDs of Disney movies and other films I know by heart with the French audio track on, and by reading anything I come across that isn’t too complicated, mostly children’s stories so far. I ran into one today on Project Gutenberg that was quite weird. Called Entre Nous: Lectures Françaises à l’Usage des Écoles Primaires, it seems to be the French version of “See Spot Run,” a collection of simple stories for teaching young children. It was written in 1904, but I’m having no trouble with the language, as it is indeed very simple.

The stories themselves, however, are quite weird. The first story seems to be about a couple of very young kids, Jean and Marie, who are playing “papa et maman” with their toy dolls standing in for children. One of the dolls, Paul, is very naughty and eats sugar right out of the sugar jar. Jean and Marie catch him at it and get very annoyed. Jean punishes Paul by hitting him, which causes him to fall off the table. In the process, his arm falls off. Jean leaves and comes back as “le docteur,” and tells Marie that he will heal the wayward child. Jean goes into the kitchen and asks “la bonne,” who is apparently his family’s servant (it was 1904, I guess) for a piece of twine. He ties Paul’s arm to the sleeve of his chemise and tells Marie that Paul is cured. Marie sees her mutilated son and says “But how will he be able to work when he is older?” Jean says, with typical Gallic pragmatism, that “he can always be a singer; then he won’t need his arms.”

In the words of Buzz Lightyear, “I don’t believe that man’s ever been to medical school.”

I wonder what this was supposed to teach young French kids from 110 years ago. That child abuse causing horrible mutilation is okay as long as the victim can still sing for his supper? Apparently, it was a different time and place back then. Oh well, I’m still having fun.

Buyer’s Remorse

One thing I have discovered in this last month, while I was frittering away my time not writing, is how my Facebook friends react to my writing. If I write about the Atari 2600, I’ll maybe get one or two hits on my blog, and maybe a comment on how they remembered that from their childhood. If I write about Mario, Zelda, and other Nintendo games, I might get a high five or two. If I write about Linux, the only feedback I get is chirping crickets.

If I write about cars… suddenly, everybody has something to say.

Maybe I should write more about cars. It would definitely fit the “wandering” part of The Wandering Nerd. And even non-nerds love cars… or love to hate them.

Over the last month, I’ve definitely had a love-hate relationship with George, the 2003 Ford Escape I bought at a fleet auction back in February.

(Who is definitely an Autobot, not a Decepticon. Decepticons have way more style.)

The first thing that happened to the truck was that the check engine light came on a few days after I started driving it. It turned out to be the EGR valve, or rather, a wire came loose on one of the sensors attached to the EGR valve. It was an easy fix, but still cost me $60 at the local mechanic’s.

The check engine light turned off after that, but soon came on again. I took it to the mechanic again, and he plugged in his little computer, which told him that one of the sensors in the catalytic converter had “reduced efficiency.” He told me that it was probably nothing and that I shouldn’t worry about it. So I didn’t worry about it. And then a few weeks later, while driving my extremely sick wife to the hospital, the truck broke down. Thank goodness I was still in range of the cellphone tower or we might have been stuck there for quite a while. But thanks to friends and to AAA, we got my wife to the hospital and George back to the garage, where it was discovered that the catalytic converter system was completely clogged up with 11 years’ worth of exhaust particles, dust, and other crap.

In retrospect, I should have expected that. The Escape was used as a patrol car by my company’s Fire & Security department, driven anywhere from 50 to 100 miles a day for short trips at low speeds, with long amounts of time spent idling the engine. Under normal circumstances, cats can last the lifetime of your car, but these were hardly normal circumstances. On the other hand, since that little SUV seldom went above 45 mph (the maximum speed limit here in the national park where I work) and had all of its scheduled preventative maintenance, the engine is still in excellent shape. So you win some, you lose some.

But I digress. When I picked George up a few days later, the mechanic told me that he gutted the system, so now the exhaust is flowing freely. The car would destroy the environment approximately five times faster than before, but at least it was drivable. And he said that since the blockage was removed, the engine would be more responsive and I would get better gas mileage. He was right about that though. My in-town MPG was 19 before, now it’s about 22. And on the highways, if I stick to the speed limit, George is good for almost 30 MPG. I’ve confirmed this with an UltraGauge. I will need to get a new catalytic converter if I ever move to a county or state that requires smog inspections… or then again, I could just sell George here in the park and buy a new car when it’s time to move on.

I will admit that during George’s convalescence, I’ve been looking hard into buying a new car… now. I kept thinking “this SUV is going to be more trouble than it’s worth; I’d better just cut my losses and trade it in on something a bit more stylish and reliable.” I kept trolling the local Craigslist listings to see who was selling something I would like to change to. I thought first maybe a small car with good gas mileage, like the Tercels and Civics my ecologically-conscious parents used to own.

(Pictured: my dad’s dream car, circa 1982.)

The 1982 Toyota Tercel we owned was pretty dang awesome. Just look at that vibrant shade of yellow; 30 years and 300,000 miles did little to dint its sheen. This car got 40 miles per gallon easy, 10 years before the Geo Metro and 20 years before the Prius. And you could put an awful lot of cargo in that hatchback, especially if you put the rear seats down. It had no radio, no AC, no power anything, it had a top speed of 40 mph, and the driver’s door had to be opened from the inside, but this Tercel was awesome and damn near bulletproof… until the transmission went and my dad thought it best to sell it for scrap. Truly, my fantasies of getting an old Tercel for dirt cheap were dashed by the fact that if I had one of these cars, I’d probably have even more problems with it than I currently have with the Ford Escape. Not to mention that it would be a sitting duck on the highway, where 75 mph is considered the “minimum speed limit.”

And the Tercel’s modern-day equivalent, the Toyota Yaris, is nowhere near as solid a car. I rented one once, and it felt extremely plasticky. The seats were cheap and uncomfortable. The cargo area could hold maybe two shopping bags and the spare tire. The passenger area was so small, I almost felt like I was larger than the car. It felt a bit like driving a Power Wheels car, except you would be insane to drive a Power Wheels on the freeway. Which I was doing, much to my chagrin, in Los Angeles, at rush hour, on a holiday weekend. While it was capable of matching the speeds of the cars around it, it was not a very stable car at 80 mph, and a single gust of wind could move it out of a traffic lane. Which it did, right into the wheel well of a huge Dodge pickup, which was trying to change lanes at the same time I was skidding out of mine:

Yeah, that truck’s wheel well came up to the Yaris’ door handle. If I hadn’t regained control of the vehicle in time, I would have died. The Yaris was severely dented, and the truck got barely a scratch, but the truck’s driver had the gall to sue the rental car company’s insurance agent for $1800 because “his baby” got “totaled.” Meanwhile, I had to drive 100 miles back to my parents’ house in a wrecked car, having panic attacks the entire way. And that was in 2009. I severely doubt the Yaris has gotten much better. I also doubt that the other cars in its class (Mazda 2, Ford Fiesta, Chevy Spark, the Smart Car, etc.) are any safer or fun to drive. What good is awesome fuel economy if you’re dead?

So maybe a subcompact econo-box wasn’t in my future, especially in Northern Arizona, where everybody drives a huge truck. But what about something larger than a Yaris, yet smaller than a SUV? Maybe something from a manufacturer with a track record for safety? Maybe… a Volvo?

I have always loved station wagons. Comfortable ride like a passenger car, but with lots of cargo space. I remember many an hour spent in the back of my family’s Toyota Corona station wagon as a kid, watching the world recede from me from the back window. And the best maker of station wagons these days? Volvo, a company with a record for safe, reliable, well-engineered vehicles. The fact that they’re one of the only car companies still making station wagons into the 21st century is besides the point. So today, I looked on Craigslist and saw a 2001 Volvo V70 on sale for $4500. I was almost about to call my bank, until I read the description and realized that while it was a good car that still ran, I wouldn’t be getting too much of an upgrade over the Ford Escape. It had a similar amount of miles on it, it had similar gas mileage (22/27 on the Volvo vs. 19/25 on the Escape), and it had much less cargo space. The only things I would be getting that the Escape didn’t have would be leather seats and a rumble seat in the back sized for two children. Big whoop. And since Volvo in those days was owned by Ford, I’d essentially be driving a Ford anyway.

So, I’m sticking with George for now. It might not get the gas mileage of a subcompact but it’s way more versatile. I can transport 5 adults in relative comfort along with all their luggage. Since it has a short wheelbase with the weight of the car well-centered thereon, it handles more like a car than a big, lumbering station wagon. And when you put the rear seats down, you can haul as much cargo as a small pickup truck. Or, you can put a full-sized mattress in the back and enjoy the fun of camping without the pine cones, rocks and critters which inevitably end up invading your tents and sleeping bags. So, it’s not the car I would have chosen for myself… but I am glad I have him. And I’m going to keep driving him until he dies, or until the smog test police come my way.

Some days in the park with George

I’m sorry I haven’t written anything in the last month or so. I have found a new obsession. His name is George and he is a 2003 Ford Escape with a 3.0 litre V6 Duratec engine and four-wheel drive. Yes, after all this time, I have finally purchased a car of my own. I know it’s weird for someone to have gotten to the age of 35 in this day and age without having their own automobile, but I was previously hampered by an extreme lack of money. With that problem taken care of by my admin assistant job for a tour bus and taxi service, however, I decided to bid on an auction for a former fleet car they were getting rid of.

I had fallen in love with the Ford Escape from the minute the company was deciding to dispose of it. For a 11-year-old old SUV with 200,000 miles on it, it was in great shape. There was no body damage apart from a few scratches and the engine looked pristine. And since it was a company car, I knew our garage had done all the scheduled oil changes and preventative maintenance. So I looked on the Kelly Blue Book website, and that gave me an estimated private-party sale value for the Escape of about $3,400. So for my bid, I divided that in half, giving me $1,700, and in order to throw off someone who might try the same thing, added a random number to it that sounded auspicious. So I bid $1,776.00 on it. And I won the Ford Escape on February 20, 2014.

Of course I was later to learn that the next highest bidder only bid $700 on it, but I didn’t care. It was still half of Blue Book and once I took care of whatever minor problems it had, I could probably sell it in the closest city for $4000, based on what I’d seen on Craigslist. But I decided I wasn’t going to sell it. I had bonded with the car already. I had already given it a name: George, after George Washington, since I bid $1,776 on him and I won him on President’s Day.

I think I got a fantastic deal with George. Around here, $2000 will barely get you a piece of crap car with one or more doors or windows broken or missing, a bumper held on with duct tape, and the ominous ad description of “needs work.” As it stands, George runs great. His V6 engine has great acceleration and purrs like the proverbial kitten. Four-wheel drive works as well, although the only chance I’ve had to test it is going down a forest service road for a few miles. All the doors and windows work like they should. The interior, while not factory condition, at least does not have any serious rips or tears.

(But it does come with an awesome sun shade!)

The only mechanical problems so far are a small oil leak (which is not too serious or surprising, given the age of the car) and one of the catalytic converters is returning a problem code of reduced efficiency, which will only present a problem if I want to register it in a county or state that requires smog inspections. Since I’m not planning on moving anytime soon, I’ll just drive it for a few years or until a newer, more fuel-efficient vehicle catches my eye.

Ever since I got George, I’ve been obsessed with learning about cars. I never bothered to do anything with cars growing up. I was far more interested in video game cars than the real thing. Heck, I didn’t even get my driver’s license until I was in my late 20’s. So I have been catching up for lost time and busily absorbing all the information I can on the Ford Escape and its engine and how to do basic maintenance like oil changes and tire changes and reading the trouble codes with an OBD-II scanner. I’ve been poring over message boards like Escape City and sites like Fuelly to find out what other people have been doing with their Escapes and how to get the maximum amount of mileage out of the old beast. I’ve even been binge watching the British car show Top Gear, where three TV presenters and a masked race car driver tool around various exotic world locales in the kinds of supercharged sports and luxury vehicles you average blokes would never even see in real life, much less drive. They’d never touch a Ford Escape with a ten-foot pole, but I don’t care, because I’m obsessed with cars now. All kinds of cars. I even want to get a small sports car with a manual transmission now so I can feel closer to the road.

(Like this Geo Metro convertible… ’90s chicks dig denim jackets, 3-cylinder engines, and cars that crawl up Cajon Pass in second gear.)

I would have never thought in a million years that a SUV, of all things, would bring out my car lust. Growing up, we always had compact cars that got excellent gas mileage. It’s the kind of car you need when you live in Southern California, you’re poor, and you commute 100+ miles on the freeway to work and back every day. I always saw SUVs as gas-guzzling monstrosities driven by small-penised men with insecurity issues and suburban housewives whose idea of going off-road was parking in the gravel section of the church parking lot but they wanted the monster-truck tires and 18,000 lb. towing capacity “just in case.” My leftist public-school indoctrination had convinced me that SUVs were the reason the environment was fucked up and we were all going to die because us fat, evil American pigs wouldn’t give up our ozone-depleting urban assault vehicles.

Moving to a remote village in Northern Arizona changed my mind about SUVs, however. Out here, half the cars are Subaru station wagons and the other half are a SUV or a big pickup truck of some kind. And they all have four-wheel drive. You kind of need it because not only is the area mountainous and steep, it is covered in snow and ice six months out of the year. And where we live, they don’t even plow the roads until it gets “really bad,” and they don’t salt them either, because some environmentalist thought that elk and deer would supposedly mosey into the streets to lick the salt off the asphalt. Instead, we get red cinders, a kind of volcanic ash that turns the roads into gravel pits come spring. If you don’t have a high-clearance vehicle, you’re liable to scratch your entire undercarriage with those pebbles from hell. (I got one stuck in my eye once… it took three days to get it out of my eye and another week to recover from the scratches it made on my eyeball. Very unpleasant!!!)

So I’ll take the fact that George only gets about 17 miles to the gallon and is slightly harder to maintain than the old Toyota Tercel my dad could fix with Duct Tape and a pair of pliers as a small price to pay for having a vehicle that can survive our winters. Because when you’ve seen nothing but white on the ground for two months and you’re starting to go crazy from the cold and the isolation, nothing beats being able to jump in the truck and head out to Phoenix or Las Vegas or some place warm.

My History of Computing, Part 4: The Year of Linux on my Laptop

Continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Please read those before continuing me on my computer reminiscence journey… Thanks!

Even after my first attempt at installing Linux broke my AMD-K6 machine, and I had become a total Mac user, I was still keeping tabs on what was going on in the open-source world. Through the 2000s I was reading sites like Slashdot and Distrowatch, learning about the gradual expansion of Linux in the server realm, in embedded systems such as routers and smartphones, in supercomputers, and the field of desktop computing, where it was making great strides. It seemed like every year from about 2000 on, someone on Slashdot was declaring that this was “the year of Linux on the desktop.”

I wanted to experiment with Linux again, but I knew from reading online that there were only a few PowerPC-based Linux distributions, and installing them on anything older than the iMac was iffy at best. So I kept reading… and waiting.

Then, right around 2007, a new Linux distribution started appearing on my radar. Called Ubuntu, it was created by South African millionaire Mark Shuttleworth who spent several years and a lot of his own money to hone and polish the open-source operating system to be user-friendly and run on a wide variety of home computers. The hype was incredible. The Linux nerds on the interwebs were practically calling Shuttleworth the next Steve Jobs. I was even hearing about it on non-Linux-specific websites and on the TV news. I knew I had to give this a try.

It just so happened that I had a guinea pig to test this new operating system on. My sister, who also lived in Yellowstone at the time, had a AMD Athlon-based laptop that had a hard drive corrupted by a virus. For some reason, I took a picture of the virus scan:

She wanted me to reinstall Windows XP on it. I decided that I would rather take Ubuntu for a test spin. I had gotten a disk with (I believe) Ubuntu 7.04 on it just by asking Canonical, the company that managed Ubuntu, for one. Back then, they were still mailing people Ubuntu CDs for free. I stuck the disk in her laptop’s CD drive and it started running a test version of the OS from the disk itself.

Everything just seemed to work, except for the wireless card, but I had a spare USB wifi adapter which was instantly recognized. The desktop was instantly recognizable and looked very Windows XP-like, except for the brown-and-orange “Human” color scheme. I could easily access files, settings, a web browser, and even an open-source office suite, unimaginatively named OpenOffice. It had support for MP3s and video files, and even included a video with Nelson Mandela explaining the meaning of “Ubuntu,” which in many Southern African languages means “humanity towards others,” or “I am what I am because of who we all are.” There were a few bugs and glitches, but the system seemed amazingly complete and simple enough for anyone to use.

So I installed Ubuntu and handed the computer back to my sister, saying, “Look, I fixed your Windows problem.” My sister turns the machine on and goes, “Well, this is nice, but can it run <insert name of proprietary Windows program here>?” So that was the end of Ubuntu, for now. I didn’t even bother installing it on my MacBook, because by the time Apple made it easy to dual-boot into another operating system on the same hard disk (via Boot Camp) I had already been using Mac OS X for a while and figured that I could do everything in it that I could in Ubuntu.

It would be a while before I would install Linux on another computer. In 2012, my sister, bless her heart, gave me another broken Windows laptop, but instead of asking me to fix it, she just gave it to me, because she bought herself a brand new one. This was a HP Pavilion DV7 with a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a 512 MB NVIDIA graphics card, 8 GB of RAM, a Blu-ray drive, 17″ screen, and a Harmon Kardon speaker system with a built-in subwoofer. Pretty awesome specs, and she just gave it to me. I have the most awesome sister.

(Yeah, I know, another stock photo, but the camera on my phone isn’t worth a damn.)

So I fixed the problem (another busted hard drive) and set myself to installing Linux on it. Well, there were problems. Not that it couldn’t run Linux, but many of the features were poorly supported. The audio system couldn’t operate the speakers very well, especially the subwoofer, which warbled terribly in every Linux distribution I tried on it. I used Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, and PCLinuxOS, but they all had the same problem.

Also, something about Linux’s display system refused to work quite right with the video card. It displayed video, it even played 3D games quite awesomely, but it hurt my eyes. It’s kind of hard to explain. I can only think it was something to do with font rendering, but working in Linux, any Linux, for more than a few minutes gave me serious eye strain. I complained about this on forums and the general consensus was “you need to get your eyes checked”… but this wasn’t the problem. I had a Mac laptop at home and a Windows 7 computer at work that I could both use for hours on end with no problems whatsoever.

So I decided to restore the machine to its original state. I acquired a Windows 7 install DVD through completely legal means and installed it on the HP laptop. I promised myself long ago that I would never run that buggy, virus-ridden piece of crap on any of my machines long ago… but sometime between the time I gave up Windows and now, Microsoft really got their act together! Installing Windows 7 was a piece of cake, and once I got the necessary drivers from HP’s website, it ran like a charm. I was soon listening to music on the most beautiful-sounding laptop speakers I had ever experienced, as well as playing Blu-ray movies in 1080p, blasting my way through video games actually written this century, and everything else I normally used a computer for. And best yet, no eye strain!

I was even able to transfer all of my old Mac stuff onto it with a free HFS+ utility, which was my last hurdle to using Windows. So I was able to forgive Microsoft, seeing as though my hate of them was based on experiences I had a decade ago and buying all of Apple’s anti-Microsoft propaganda. This laptop became my primary computer for all of 2013, after my MacBook went to meet its maker in the big old Starbucks in the sky, and so far I haven’t had a single virus or incidence of data loss.

Of course, then Microsoft had to deplete all of their good will by releasing the horrid dreck that is Windows 8… but that’s another story.

So when my wife accidentally spilled water on her 8-year-old Windows XP-running Toshiba laptop last month, I was able to get her running on my HP laptop with no problems at all. All of her Windows programs run well on it, so she’s happy. Meanwhile, I wanted a new laptop so we could both get online at the same time, and I wanted a better Linux experience than the one the HP laptop could provide me. So I set out to get a cheap laptop on eBay that I could tinker with, that would tide me over until I could afford a new machine. One of my coworkers recommended Lenovo Thinkpads. They were rock-solid business laptops that you could get for extremely cheaply because companies lease them for three years, after which they end up flooding the market on eBay. I had also heard that they had excellent Linux support, and a small but devoted following of techies who worked on getting all the special Thinkpad bells and whistles working on Linux.

In January, I found an amazing deal on a Lenovo Thinkpad T400 with a 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, and Intel GM45 Integrated Graphics for $120. Similar machines were running for $200 or more. So I snapped it up and had it shipped to my home. The hard disk was sold to me erased, for security reasons, I guess. I had originally intended to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, my current Linux distro of choice. But when I stuck the Ubuntu CD into the drive and turned it on, I was amazed. It had detected all of the hardware and ran it flawlessly. It even could activate the ThinkLight keyboard lamp, the TrackPoint pointing device, all of the media controls, and even the ThinkVantage button (which in the absence of the IBM/Lenovo ThinkVantage utility suite, defaults to activating Ubuntu’s help system.) And it wasn’t giving me any of the same eyestrain problems that I was experiencing on the other computer. So I just decided to put Ubuntu on the whole drive.

If occasion requires me to run Windows, I can just install it on a secondary hard drive, and just swap out the disks. Lenovo makes it so easy on this laptop–all you have to do is unscrew one screw on the bottom, pop out the drive caddy, and replace the drive with another one of your choice. I think I totally got my money’s worth with this laptop. It’s 5 years old, to be sure, but it beats the pants off of anything I could have gotten new at this price. And it has one of the best laptop keyboards I have ever used.

But I’m not about to join the Church of Lenovo… not yet, anyway. I hear their newer Thinkpads have dropped the iconic boxy look, magnesium roll cages, and great keyboards, and are are essentially commodity consumer laptops with Thinkpad branding. Kind of like that MacBook I bought. Oh well. Right now, I am happy with what I have, and happy that I can successfully compute in Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Unix, MS-DOS, and TI BASIC. That confounded Timex Sinclair 1000 still baffles me, though. Maybe I’ll try again with that one someday…

Comments? Questions? Feedback? Contact me at wordpress (at) thewanderingnerd (dot) com, or leave a comment below!

My History of Computing, Part 3: Ten Years in the Cult of Apple

In Part 1 of My History of Computing, I discussed the series of beige boxes that got me through grade school and into college. In Part 2, I talked about my college years and my flirtations (and frustrations) with Windows, Mac and Linux boxes in the late 1990s. Now in Part 3, I am on my own, a confused kid with self-esteem and identity issues… prime pickings for the Apple cult…

In 2003, I couldn’t have been in a worse place. I had fallen out of college. I was fired from my job as a telemarketer, and couldn’t find another job in the post-9/11 economic slump. I sold all of my belongings just to stay fed, and when I ran out of belongings, I went to the one place I had left to me: my parents’ house in the middle of the desert. I was so emotionally depleted after the mess I had been in that it took over a year for me to even leave the house, and two and a half years to find another job.

But I at least had a computer that made things a little more bearable. Jeremy’s father gave it to me so I could use it to find another job. It was another Mac, or more specifically, a Mac clone: a PowerComputing PowerTower Pro 225. It was a pretty special machine, and it was upgraded to the hilt, with 256 MB of RAM, an IDE card so you could use regular PC hard drives, an expansion slot with 4 USB ports, and a lot of very nice Mac software. It also had the most comfortable keyboard I have ever used in my life: the Apple Extended Keyboard. It’s a lot like the Model M keyboard on my old 286, but not nearly as loud.

(Not my particular machine, but close enough. Picture courtesy this classified ad.)

Why did he get rid of it? He had to upgrade to a Power Mac G4 in order to run Mac OS X. The new Unix-based Mac operating system had come out recently and it wouldn’t run on any Mac clones. Killing the clone business was the first thing that Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple, and specifically locking the clones from upgrading to OS X was just another kick in the teeth. But I didn’t care; I had sold my AMD-K6 beige box to a scrap metal dealer for $20 so I could eat one day, and by this point, having Internet access was absolutely necessary for finding jobs and applying for classes at the local community college.

Unfortunately, that’s what made the PowerTower a bit of a problem. While I had absolutely no problem getting online with dialup Internet, people weren’t upgrading web browsers for Mac OS 9 anymore. Internet Explorer for Mac, which was never feature-complete compared to its Windows counterpart anyway, stopped at version 5.5, and most businesses in the early 2000s were writing web code for IE 6. And there was no Firefox for Mac OS 9; the best you could get was its predecessors: the last release of Netscape before it went defunct and an extremely slow and bulky obsolete version of Mozilla Communicator. So at one time I had about 6 browsers on my PowerTower which rendered web code differently and thus was able to browse many modern websites, albeit extremely slowly and clunkily. Not a very Mac-like experience, let me tell you.

Not just web browsers left the old machine behind. I was taking a Spanish class at the local community college in order to fill in some units I needed for my degree. It had a CD-ROM with software inside. The CD-ROM, even though all it included was some Flash or Shockwave-based flashcard software that my computer could run easily, required Windows or Mac OS X in order to install. At least I didn’t need the disk to pass the class. It got worse though. I sent out a bunch of resumes via email to prospective employers and I never got any responses. One of them did write back, however, to tell me that my resume, which was in Word 98 format, was garbled. Apparently Office for the Mac didn’t play well with Office for Windows.

There was another reason why I wasn’t getting any call backs: the job market in Southern California in the early 2000’s was flooded with young college grads with student loan debt who were taking any jobs they could in order to make ends meet. It was even worse where I was at because I lived in a rural area 30 miles from the nearest town, and 80 miles from anywhere with decent jobs. I knew then that in order to find a job, I would have to leave California.

So I went on my computer and typed “jobs that include housing” into Google, and lo and behold I found a site, Coolworks.com, that listed seasonal jobs in national parks and far-off adventurous destinations. Wilderness and adventure weren’t what I went to school for, but I was desperate. So I filled out the online application for a certain national park hotel concessioner, which, thankfully enough, was a simple web form. A month later, I jumped on a Greyhound bus and went to a job as a front desk clerk in Yellowstone National Park.

(It was indeed a necessary move, not just for my career, but for my soul too. Before going to Yellowstone I had never seen anything like this before. I’ll write more about it later.)

In my national park jobs, I lived in a 10′ x 10′ dorm, so space was at an absolute premium. I knew that if I wanted a computer I’d have to get a laptop. Thankfully, by 2006, laptops had gone down in price considerably and were almost as cheap as desktop computers of the time. So I saved up all my money from working that summer, and the following summer, I got myself a MacBook, mid-2007 model, with a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 1 GB of RAM, and an 80 GB hard drive. It cost me $1100, while a comparable Windows-based laptop would have been hundreds cheaper. Why did I blow so much money on a MacBook? Well, I hadn’t actually used a Windows machine since the late 90s. I still saw Windows PCs as hard-to-run computers plagued by viruses and a terrible user interface. I also thought that since it had the Apple name on it, it would have the fantastic build quality and ease of use that I had come to associate with that brand. I also thought that it would be compatible with at least some of my Mac OS 9 software.

I was wrong on both counts. The white MacBooks were bargain-basement PCs in a slick white plastic wrapper. The screen was so washed-out in color that I found it hard to believe it was sold by the same company that made high-end machines for graphic artists. The screen had a view angle that was so narrow, you pretty much had to look dead ahead to see anything on it at all. My sister and I could not watch a movie on it at the same time, even if we were sitting butt-to-butt right in front of the computer. The speakers were a particular disappointment, as even when turned up all the way, they were still barely audible. And since Apple had replaced the PowerPC architecture in its computers to Intel chips, no Mac OS 9 software would run on it. So none of the awesome games and productivity software I had collected over the years would run on it. (I was able to get a few of the very old ones working via the mini-vmac emulator, but that’s about it.)

But I really didn’t care about this at the time. The computer was still ten times faster than the one I left in California, and a hundred times more portable. And I pretty much did everything in a web browser anyway. Sure, I couldn’t run Office 98 for Mac OS 9, but I had iWork, a Mac-only office suite that was like Microsoft Office, but shinier. And I discovered easy ways to organize my digital photos in iPhoto, edit my home videos in iMovie, and even make music in GarageBand. This was the multimedia platform I had been dreaming of since the days of staying up all night programming frequencies into my TI-99/4A just to make my machine beep “Eleanor Rigby.”

(This is Walter/Wendy Carlos’ Moog version of “Eleanor Rigby,” my inspiration for all the musical things I’ve done on a computer in my life. It’s absolutely beautiful, unlike all the musical things I’ve done on a computer in my life.)

So that was my computer for the next six years. The legendary build quality of the Macintosh line hadn’t transferred over to this model, though. The shiny white plastic chipped from the palm rests almost immediately, making hard jagged edges that made resting my palms on there quite painful. The DVD burner stopped burning DVDs right around the time the warranty ran out, and stopped reading DVDs a couple of years after that. The battery started expanding in its case, and I had to take it out of the computer for fear that it would explode. It started to feel that Apple had made this computer to be disposable.

They might as well have. 2007 was also the year that Apple created the iPhone, and their entire design philosophy changed to match. The iPhone was a powerful personal computer inside the body of a cellphone. Even though it was as powerful as the first iMac, however, it was locked down even more tightly. It had no user-serviceable parts, not even the battery, and no user-serviceable software. You were stuck with iOS and its limitations whether you jailbreaked it or not, and all software installed on iOS had to come from the Apple App Store, where Apple got a 30% cut of all sales.

This was okay for a phone, but then they started applying these principles to their computers too. First they started making Mac laptops with batteries soldered into the units.  If they had done that with the faulty batteries in the first MacBooks, my MacBook would have exploded. Then, they rolled out the Mac App Store in OS X 10.6. Then they made the upgrade for 10.7 only available in the App Store, which required you to give Apple your personal information and credit card number just to log on. In 10.7, they reskinned the interface of a lot of the built-in programs to look more like their iOS counterparts, and started popping up warnings whenever you installed software not downloaded from the Mac App Store.

Or so I heard. I couldn’t actually install 10.7, because it removed functionality that I needed, such as support for the Apple USB Modem, which I needed to get online via dialup at home. It also removed the Rosetta compatibility layer, so a lot of my old software wouldn’t work at all if I installed the update. It dawned on me that Apple could just remove functionality from my Mac at any time. And then 10.8 didn’t support my model of MacBook at all, for no good reason other than they didn’t feel like it. Eventually, I reasoned, Apple would have computers be just like their phones: locked down, closed-source, and made obsolete at the manufacturer’s whim so you would be forced to continually purchase new product.

I saw the writing on the wall, and I didn’t like it. But what were my other options? Windows, which came from a company with even worse business practices? Whose legendary instability and susceptibility to viruses supported an entire industry of anti-virus software manufacturers and shady “clean my PC” websites? Linux, the geeky operating system with poor hardware support that only die-hard technical geniuses could run, and then only on special computers with hand-picked custom components? Or do I just continue to pay Apple $1000 a year for the rest of my life?

I was able to put off that question until 2013, when my MacBook got hit with a power surge that turned it into a white brick. Unlike the Power Mac, it didn’t make a crashing noise when it turned on… it just died and stayed dead. That poor little trooper that had followed me to Yellowstone, to Zion, and to the Grand Canyon was now no more. I didn’t have $1000 for a new one, or $300-$400 for a used one as old as my dead companion. What made matters worse was that none of my friends at the Grand Canyon had a Mac that I could use to get my data off of my hard disk, which was formatted with the proprietary Mac-only HFS+ file system, which couldn’t be read on Windows without expensive software.

I guessed I would just have to “think different.”

Continued in Part 4…

My History of Computing, Part 2: From the Dogcow’s Hoof to the Penguin’s Talons

On May 6, 1998, Steve Jobs announced the iMac, the computer that brought Apple back from certain doom, completely revolutionized the computer industry, and paved the way for all the other iDevices. It was just like every other Mac computer that came before it, but the genius of the iMac was that it didn’t look like a computer. It looked like a shiny blue egg from outer space.  And it wasn’t marketed as a computer. It was an “information appliance.” Apple sold it as a quick way for people to get on the Internet without the “fuss” of plugging a rat’s nest of cables into a series of beige boxes, configuring hardware drivers and fighting with the operating system. You just, one, plugged it in, and two, turned it on. There was no step 3, as Jeff Goldblum pointed out in that famous commercial.

And people bought them in droves. It was the 1990s. People went crazy about anything to do with the Internet. Everything in the late 90s was “e-this” and “i-that” and “something dot com.” And they went nuts over the iMac because it got people on the Internet, and non-nerds could use it.  Seriously, everyone went so crazy for the iMac that you could put colorful translucent plastic on anything and it would sell like hotcakes… even things that had absolutely nothing to do with computers:

(pictured: not an iMac.)

I went crazy for the iMac, however, because it was a Mac. It ran Mac OS 9, which was far superior to Windows 95 in that it didn’t crash and was less susceptible to viruses. And there was a Macintosh way of doing things that was a whole lot more intuitive than Microsoft’s attempt at a GUI. You could install programs just by dragging them from the install disk folder into the Applications folder. Device drivers came packaged in “extension” modules that you could install or remove just by taking them out of the Extensions Folder. There was no Registry to fuck up. And while there wasn’t as much software for the Mac as there was for Windows, it was on average much higher quality and was supported by a well-meaning and enthusiastic band of Macintosh zealots. I still hold that Microsoft Word 5.1 for the Mac was the best word processor released for any operating system ever, and that subsequent releases of Word only added needless bloat. And Windows had nothing like Hypercard, which was like a combination database, application builder, and multimedia program all in one that totally rocked.

And the best thing about the iMac was that it was surprisingly affordable… well, for a Mac. $1000 was considered a cheap computer back in the days. It wasn’t affordable to me then, but I figured it would be someday. In the meantime, my friend and later roommate Jeremy, had bought an iMac, and he let me use his old Power Mac 6100. My Windows-running beige box was currently out for repairs, again, I took him up on it. And I fell in love with the Macintosh way of doing things. But then one day, I turn on the Mac… only to be greeted by what sounded like the screech of skidding tires and the clattering of broken glass. That was the Mac’s cutesy way of letting you know something was hopelessly broken. No helpful diagnostic beeps or screens of undecipherable error codes. Not even a Blue Screen of Death. Just a car crash noise. Jeremy, who was an Electrical Engineering undergrad, couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it either, so he took it away and I never saw it again, except years later at his house, where his mom had turned it into a planter.

So it was back to the beige box and my loathed adversary, Windows 98. I needed another hit of that sweet, sweet Apple Kool-Aid, but I didn’t have the money and Jeremy didn’t have any more old Macintoshes to give me. (He did have one of those very old black and white Mac SE/30s, but I think he was using it as a telnet server for a MUD he was running or something.) Meanwhile, I had another roommate, a music and engineering major named Rupert, who was also a Machead, but his machines also ran something called FreeBSD. It was a version of Unix, like the computers I used in the CS labs ran, and like the new and improved Mac OS that Apple kept promising, but unlike those, it was open source. That meant that anyone could download the source code for free, compile it on their own computers, and change it however they wanted. Open source meant that you were free to operate your computer without the interference of Microsoft, Apple, or any other corporation. Of course, the only part of that sentence I heard was “free”, so I asked Rupert how I could get this on my PC, and thus be able to toss Bill Gates, and his $89 “upgrades” that were more like downgrades, out on his rear.

Rupert hesitated for a while, and said that FreeBSD was very rough around the edges and not really for the average computer user. I thought that he was trying to insult me, but he then suggested that I try something slightly different. He called it “Linux.” Linux was another open source operating system like BSD, but it was written primarily for the PC architecture. It wasn’t as mature as BSD Unix, but there were distributions of Linux that were more geared towards desktop computing and had better hardware support. And it had a penguin for a mascot. I always thought penguins were awesome.

I got install disks for two Linux distributions, Red Hat 5.2 and Mandrake 9.0, by finding them in books at the school library on “how to install Linux.” I knew that I would be unable to dual-boot both Windows and Linux on my puny two gigabyte hard drive, so I decided to make a clean break of it. I saved whatever personal files I had onto Zip disks and purged the hard drive of Microsoft, hoping it would be for good. Red Hat was a bust–the CD-ROM drive couldn’t even read the disk. Turns out there was a scratch on it as long as my finger. I hoped the library didn’t think it was my fault.

Mandrake installed very easily–the installation was very user-friendly and fast, but once I started running it, problems began to emerge. X11 couldn’t understand my video card so it was stuck in 640 x 480, 16 color mode. I typed a bunch of mumbo jumbo into xorg.conf, and still no deal. I had to put in my old, non-3D-enhanced, video card to get a decent sized desktop. Then I couldn’t get the sound to work because it didn’t have a driver for my sound card. It also couldn’t read from my CD-ROM drive, which was weird because it installed from there! I wanted to go online to find a solution to these issues, but the Linux didn’t even see my Ethernet card, and wouldn’t use my dialup modem because it was something called a “Winmodem.”

I jumped on Jeremy’s iMac and went to Linux forums hoping for an answer to my problems, only to be told “RTFM, noob” in a brusque, mocking tone over and over again. I pored over man pages and walkthroughs on the Internet, digesting page upon page of obfuscated Unixy language and secret command-line code in a quest to get the machine working. This was definitely not a very Mac-like experience. Here I was, a Computer Science major at a major university, someone who had put a TI-99/4A back together from spare parts when I was twelve, someone who could squeeze every last kilobyte out of DOS’s 640 KB memory limit in order to play King’s Quest V on a 286, and I couldn’t get Linux to work. And I was being laughed at by my fellow nerds for even daring to try. Obviously, Linux was not yet ready for the desktop.

Rupert helped with the Linux whenever he could, but then, well… um… drama happened, and he left the apartment, and school, never to be seen again. I can’t really go into detail about it, but it was very ugly and I felt partly to blame for what happened. And that’s when life kind of started to fall apart for me. Jeremy and I moved to another apartment with another friend, but then my sister moved in, and things there started getting awkward. Since I didn’t have a working computer at home, and didn’t really want to be there anyway, I spent all my time at the computer lab. And instead of programming and doing my school work, I was browsing porn and looking for validation from strangers in online chat rooms. At this time I was taking prescription medication for depression, but this made me drowsy all the time and also caused severe emotional apathy, to the point that I didn’t realize, or didn’t care, that my grades were dropping and I was flunking all my classes. Before I knew it, I was out on my ass, with nothing to show for it all but $60,000 in student loan debt… and a broken computer that couldn’t even run Linux. And all I wanted was an iMac.

To be continued in Part 3, where I take the red pill… and see how far the Apple rabbit hole goes.

My History of Computing, Part 1: The Beige Years

I’ve been having a lot of fun lately on the AtariAge forums. Reading about people experimenting and creating homebrew projects with old 8-bit game consoles and computers really makes me nostalgic. Because of this, and because I just bought myself a new computer, I thought I would take a look back at all of the computers I have loved and lost.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in the early 80’s, when computers were just coming out of the universities and major corporations into the average homes, businesses and schools of the world. Even in the low-rent area of the Mojave Desert where I grew up, my elementary school had a computer lab filled with Apple IIe’s and the occasional Commodore 64. I was fascinated by everything that had to do with this amazing machines. So when I turned seven years old in 1986 and my dad told me he bought me a computer, I was so excited. Was it an Apple? Was it a Commodore? Was it a TRS-80, a TI-99/4A, or an Atari 800? Was it like the incredible Tandy 1000 my cousin had? Um… no.

It was a Timex Sinclair 1000, the US version of the Sinclair ZX81. My dad, bless his heart, didn’t know a thing about computers, and he saw this one at a Thrifty Drug, of all places, at a liquidation sale and thought I would love it. I had never ever heard of this computer before, and there was a reason. It was a piece of crap. It had 2 KB of RAM, a black and white only display, and a membrane keyboard (like the ones on your microwave oven) that required herculean strength (at least to a seven-year-old) in order to register any keypresses. It was an incredible disappointment. It didn’t play King’s Quest, Oregon Trail, or Epyx California Games. In fact, we couldn’t get anything to play at all. We spent hours trying to get the “Mixed Grab Bag” software to load from the cassette that came with the computer. I did some of the BASIC exercises in the manual, but soon enough it went into the closet, and I went back to my Atari 2600.

It would be years before we had another computer in the house. Our family moved a lot and we didn’t really have a lot of money. But I was very happy that a friend of my mother’s gave me a TI-99/4A and a whole bunch of stuff for it for free in the early 1990s. Her son was blind, and her husband had tried to create a program with the TI’s speech synthesizer module in order to help him communicate with the outside world. But her husband had died, and her son hated the voice that came out of the computer. He said it was too creepy and gave him nightmares. So even though it was very obsolete at this point and everyone I knew had already moved on to Amigas and Macintoshes and 286 and 386 PCs, I gave it a good home and set out to plumb its secrets.

Since having a computer that could speak to you was a novelty to me at the time, I used the Speech Synthesizer, mostly to hear it say profanities, to laugh at how it poorly pronounced words, and to creep out my friends and family with its clipped, robotic monotone. I also programmed a lot in the included BASIC and the TI Extended BASIC cartridge. I used it to do my math homework. I didn’t have a fancy graphing calculator to do trigonometry homework, so I wrote my own graphing program. I also wrote a program to do matrix multiplication, which was easy when I figured out that a matrix was just a two-dimensional array of variables. Any four-year-old with a copy of Microsoft Excel can multiply matrices in two seconds, but I didn’t have a spreadsheet program, so I had to make do.

Later on, into high school, I also used it to create various graphics and sound demos which would play during my school’s weekly student-made news broadcast. Unlike the PC, it was easy to get stuff from the TI-99/4A onto a tape because it hooked up directly to a TV. I was very fond of the three-channel music you could get out of the TI’s sound chip, and spent many, many hours typing notes from sheet music into a BASIC program so I could hear Mozart and the Beatles played in tinny beepy amazement. I wish I had some of this stuff now to show you guys, but all those tapes went into a shed in the back yard that unbeknownst to us, became a impromptu chicken coop.

This is nothing I did, but it’s a good demonstration of the kind of sound demos I was doing on the TI-99/4A at the time, plus it’s pretty darn cool!

And I and my parents knew that this tiny computer wouldn’t carry me through high school, and especially not college, where something called the “Internet” was quickly becoming a big deal, and news of which had reached the lips of people even in my tiny town 30 miles from the closest T1 line. So my parents went into debt and bought a used IBM 286 for about $500. It was built like a tank and was nearly as large. It came with 1 MB of RAM, a 40 MB hard drive, and MS-DOS 6.22. Windows 3.1 also came pre-installed, but the speed at which it ran made GEOS on a Commodore 64 seem fast by comparison.

Even though it was super-slow compared to the 386s and 486s at my high school, it was still a “real computer,” and that made it awesome. I could type papers in WordPerfect 5.1 on a full-size display and a full-travel keyboard (one of the original IBM Model Ms with the clicky keys, wish I still had it) and print it out on the behemoth Epson dot-matrix printer we had or on the laser printers at school. I could do crude desktop publishing; in fact I helped one of my father’s friends make a newsletter for her church. I could use Quattro Pro to do math problems and basic accounting. I could design flyers for school events in Windows 3.1 Paintbrush. I could play a lot of the Tandy 1000 games that my cousin had, although it was still too slow for Wolfenstein and Doom. I didn’t do much BASIC programming for it though… there was never really much call for it. I already had all the programs I needed, and the ones I didn’t have (like Internet access) were far too complex to be cobbled together with my juvenile computer skills.

I couldn’t take the behemoth to college with me, because it was already several years out of date by 1996 and would have been nearly useless to me because everyone in college was running Windows 95 and getting on the Internet, neither of which the 286 could do. Also, my mom needed it for her own paper-typing and bookkeeping. So I took some student loan money and went on a shopping spree to egghead.com, the precursor to the famous NewEgg. I bought a refurbished, no-name AMD-K6 233 MHz (a Pentium clone) machine with 32 MB of RAM and a 2 GB hard drive, a 15″ VGA monitor, and a 100 MB Zip drive (remember those pieces of crap?) for $600 in 1997.

(Me sitting in front of my Big Beige Box, circa 2000 or so. You can’t see the machine very well itself, but if you were to do a Google Image Search for “generic beige tower,” you will get a pretty good idea of what it looked like. And that other beige behemoth to the left of the monitor is a good ol’ Apple LaserWriter Select 360. Best damn printer ever.)

Even though it was woefully underpowered even compared to machines of the time, it was the first computer I ever purchased with my own money, and it was my near-constant companion throughout my turbulent college career and for many years afterwards. I had upgraded to WordPerfect Office 8 (because then, as now, Microsoft Office was prohibitively expensive) and was churning out papers like nobody’s business. I was exploring the Wild West of cyberspace on dialup, reading primitive webpages about Mr. T eating people’s balls and Barney the Dinosaur being the Anti-Christ. (Lolcats and Youtube had not yet been invented.) I was discovering my sexuality through web content my parochial, small-town conservative upbringing did not in the least prepare me for. I had also discovered the amazing concept that you could use a computer to emulate other computers, and I put hundreds of hours into playing classic video games via early DOS-based emulators such as Nesticle and Genecyst.

But not all was fluffy digital clouds and CGI rainbows in my computer world. My cheapo clone was poorly built and sometimes the CD-ROM drive or power supply would just stop working… and then start again. After upgrading to Windows 98, every system upgrade after that seemed to make my computer slower and less useful. Making contemporary 3D games run on my computer and its “Voodoo” graphics card required more peeks, pokes, and undocumented feature exploits than Commodore 64 assembly programming. And I also lost more than one term paper due to the Zip drive’s famed “click of death” or worse, from a computer virus. Computer viruses ran rampant through our university networks, and in the mid-to-late 1990s, they were mutating faster than famed bespectacled nerd Peter Norton or famed fugitive nutcase John McAfee could fight them. After reloading everything onto my computer from dozens of CD-Rs for the ninth time and crying myself to sleep, I started to wish for the good old days of the TI-99/4A when I didn’t have to worry about this crap.

But then, I learned that not everyone at my school was having the same problems I was with their computers. Many of my classmates in the Computer Science program had Macintosh systems with PowerPC chips. My friend Jeremy had a PowerMac 6100, that even though it only had a 60 MHz processor, still ran rings around my 233 MHz Pentium clone. For starters, he could play MP3s, have a web browser open downloading a file, and play a video game at the same time–something my poor machine struggled to do. And Macs didn’t get viruses, or so he said.

He also kept talking about the fact that soon, Apple was going to release this brand-new operating system called Copland, or Rhapsody, or something like that, that would actually be real UNIX, like the $10,000 Sun and NeXT workstations in our Computer Science labs. It was at that moment that something in my soul burned, and I knew that I needed to get one of these amazing miracle Macintosh machines…

To be continued in Part 2…

Family news and a new toy

I’m sorry I haven’t posted in over a week, but I was very busy. For you see, my fiancee is now my wife. We got married last weekend, or more accurately, we eloped. We were planning this huge wedding in the national park where we both work, but we couldn’t figure out the logistics (and the expense) of getting all my family there from California and getting all her family there from the Midwest and finding accommodations for them all. And we started thinking about all the people we wanted to invite, and all the people we had to invite, and soon it just became this huge fiasco. We knew that we would be miserable trying to have the wedding her parents wanted us to have, and we would piss off a good deal of people by having the wedding we wanted to have. So we decided to piss everybody off and save them the cost of airfare by jumping in the car, getting married in the county courthouse, and spending the weekend at a delightful bed and breakfast that we were almost too sad to leave.

(Artist’s conception of the wedding, courtesy of Bitstrips)

And there’s more news as well. When we got home from our rushed weekend honeymoon, I had a package waiting for me… my birthday present. Last month, I bought a cheapo computer off of eBay to tide us over until my wife (wow, it’s still so strange and so wonderful to call her “my wife”) got the new laptop she wanted. I got an amazing deal for just $100. I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T400 with 4 GB of RAM and a 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo processor. Even though it only had Intel GM45 graphics and didn’t come with a hard drive, it was still an incredible bargain. I had seen similar models go recently on eBay for twice this price.

I had been looking for a decent used Thinkpad for quite some time. For years, I had heard about how reliable and well-built the Thinkpad line was, from the IBM days onward, and all the features built in: the roll cage that protected the motherboard, the spill-proof full-travel keyboard, the built-in keyboard light, the hard-drive shock absorber, the ability to easily swap out the CD-ROM for a second hard drive, and then some. But they were business laptops and therefore considerably more expensive than ones designed for average schmoes. Which is why I was so excited to find a Thinkpad new enough to be a decent web browsing and emulator machine on eBay for such a decent price.

I put a Ubuntu install disk into the machine in order to test it. I was going to make sure that all the pieces worked before I went to all the trouble of getting  a hard drive for the thing, installing Windows 7, and tracking down all the dozens of driver files one needs to get a modern laptop running. But, as I was playing in Ubuntu, I discovered that it had detected all my hardware flawlessly (even the TrackPoint and the media buttons) and was running quite fast even from the CD. It was the most painless Linux experience I had ever had with any of my computers. So I decided to say “screw it” to Windows and install Ubuntu to the hard drive. It does just about everything a computer needs to do, it has most of the classic game emulators I like, and I didn’t want to download hundreds of megabytes of drivers, patches, and software updates in Windows just so I could use Microsoft Office or attempt to play some 3-D Windows games that probably wouldn’t run well in Intel graphics anyway.

So, in the future, I’m going to be writing about my new Thinkpad, discovering the joys of Linuxing on it, and continuing to work through the Atarimania 2600 ROM collection looking for unique and awesome games to turn into nostalgi-retro articles for this blog. But most of all, I will enjoy being married… to my wife. My nerdy and wonderful wife. So you may not hear from me for a while.