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My Computing Journey

My Computing Journey – Part 3 – The x86 Era

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This actually get a bit hazy here for actual computer models, and I spent a bit of time browsing through Vintage Packard Bell machines to see if I could figure out which machines cover this era of my computing. This would have been somewhere between 1991 and 1995, give or take a bit, after we moved across town when I was 11-12-ish and before we moved to Indiana for a bit when I was 14-15ish. I am not positive if there were one or two PCs in this era, there was either one 286 (for sure, for reasons I’ll touch on) and possibly later a 486. For simplicity’s sake, I’m just going to refer to this as one PC, that was a 286. If for some reason you’re keeping score, and notice something that doesn’t match for a 286, then well, assume there was a 486 in there.

I am pretty sure it was this PC though (not my picture, and that PC is filthy.).

Why am I so confident there was a 286?

That’s simple, Doom. At one point during this time frame, and for some weird reason, I have a lot of strong memories of this whole night and event, a bunch of my friends and I spent the night over at one of their homes. I know we played a lot of Jurassic Park on the SEGA Genesis because it was way cool that you could play as a Raptor and go around killing dudes. I remember we played a lot of Hero’s Quest, because we were super into Hero’s Quest at this time. I remember that they all got stoned, though I did not because I wasn’t really into that, though it’s likely I ended up “secondhand stoned” if that’s even a thing. Whatever the case, I remember that at one point someone got a bit upset at me because they were using a Bob Dylan CD I had brought for “rosin” which I still don’t know what that is, but I noticed my CD was dirty so I cleaned it off.

And the next day, we all went to the mall for a few hours, because that’s what you did when malls were still popular. After some careful thought and consideration, I decided to spend some of my allowance money on this cool looking game, Doom, or at least, the shareware Doom. It was basically like Wolfenstein 3D, except better, and I loved playing Wolfenstein. Then later, when I went to play it, I discovered the concept of “minimum computer requirements”. Because Doom needed a 386 PC. In the store I had decided that “Eh, it’ll work anyway.” Then it did not. Maybe if I were more computer savvy at the time I could have managed to make it work somehow, but in the end I think I just gave it to a friend who did have a better computer, or at least, let him install and use it.

Speaking of buying computer games. Though I had played plenty of computer games, it was around this time (possibly before actually) that I bought, with my own money, my first computer game. I had bought some console and handheld games, but this would be my first personal purchase of a PC game, with a game called War Eagles. War Eagles was a World War 1 plane dogfight simulator. No take-offs or landings, just fly in a biplane around shooting machine guns at biplanes.

This time period was also my first experience with Windows and a computer with a Hard Drive. I am pretty sure it was 20 or 40mb. That’s MEGA with an M, not GIGA with a G. Just enough to install a few games, so they didn’t need to be run off of floppy drives. I don’t know the details, but I remember my dad installed some program called Stacker that would increase the drive space. But I still had to go through hoops occasionally of installing and uninstalling games. I believe the largest single game I had around this time was one of the Interplay Star Trek games, which had several install disks.

Windows would have been 3.0 and maybe later 3.11 for Workgroups. It was neat but you still had to dump back out to DOS to run a lot of games. The main thing I remember about Windows was playing around in Paint drawing things.

I also got my first experience with computer hardware and upgrades around this time frame. I can’t imagine why, I must have asked for it at the time, because at least one of my friends had a better computer, but for Christmas one year I got a SoundBlaster soundcard. So everything would sound cool with actual speakers. It also came with this super neat (for the time) talking parrot program.

This time period also had some exposure to Apple computers and the Apple IIe (which was quite data at the time). We started having computer classes in Middle School, which had these in the classroom. Most of this time was spent playing educational games, like Number Munchers and Word Munchers. We also had a typing speed program and I remember finding a bug in it where you could basically hold a key, I forget which, maybe like + or = or something, and it would count the letter as correct, so you could just, hold in that key and get something ridiculous like 200 words per minute.

Eventually, after we moved to Indiana sometime, when my parents upgraded the home PC to a Pentium (spoilers for next week), this machine became my first “in my room personal pc”. It also at some point gained an external dial-up modem. I’ll get more into all that next week though, because dialing in on this computer would be secondary to using the other PC.

Weekly Wrap Up

Weekly Wrap Up (08.13.2023 to 08.19.2023)

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Another week of Blog Posts done, I’m in the home stretch now for Blaugust. I can assure you, and myself, that I will not be keeping up this pace. For a variety of reasons, probably most of which I will mention in a wrap-up post on the 31st.

But what about this week. The big event this week was going to see Alanis Morissette. I also had some overnight work at work, which I don’t usually have, which has thrown my whole schedule off, not that I am not tired, basically, all the time, already. Something fun that came out of my Instagram posts from that concert, Cedric LeMoyne, the awesome bass player from the show, liked my awesome photo of him. I really like the pic too, so here it is.

Anyway, I have some coding projects I want to get to but have not had time lately, or, probably more accurately, have not had the mental capacity to work on lately. I also have some code stuff I’ve been trying to puzzle out for work, and I am sure at some point it will “click” and just slide into place and work, and I’ll start running there, but other work issues, have been blocking that focus.

I’ve also started making an effort to read a bit more again, though not a lot of progress there. I go through ups and downs on how much I read. I just am ashamed of my massive book backlog.

Activity Log

I really want to, at some point, find a way to add things like, my Duolingo progress here. I could do it manually, but I also don’t really know how to format it.

I did get a new Marvel Legends this week, I didn’t plan to, but the two-pack of Endgame Captain Marvel and Pepper Potts Rescue was down to $20, and I had to jump on that. I’ve been sort of wanting it for a while, but mostly for the Endgame Carol, I already have the single-pack Rescue. The Pepper heads would mostly be a bonus. I’ve been tempted at $25 and $30, but at $20, it would be less than a single figure. If Endgame Captain Marvel had been a single-packed figure, I would have already bought it. At this point, the useless extra Rescue figure is just an accessory.

I picked up one book (for the embarrassing backlog) called The Little Book of Mathematical Principles, Theories & Things by Robert Solomon. What can I say, it was probably $2 and I like nerdy things.

I almost forgot that I also bought a game or a game bundle. Steam had a bundle of Mega Man games, half of which I already owned. Because of the way Steam discounts work, owning something, knocks even more off, so for a price I wanted to pay, I could get the Mega Man Zero collection. I’ve only played the first one a while ago, but it’s a series I have been meaning to play. I have beaten all of the previous Mainline Mega Man and Mega Man X games already. The Zero series is kind of a hole.

Albums

Sigrid – Sucker Punch

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It’s possible, that at some point, I am legally required to talk about this album (not really). I don’t listen to a ton of Sigrid currently, though I have not moved on or anything, there is just so much other I want to listen to. I also probably burned myself out on Sigrid listening to her TOO MUCH. Her album, Sucker Punch still has a special place. I’ve always been into music, but I’ve never really been, ACTIVELY into music. I’m not any level of “hardcore” or anything, but there was kind of a perfect storm moment around me discovering Sigrid that lead to me being more active in music communities and actually caring about music on a slightly higher level than I had previously.

There probably isn’t anything particularly special about this album, like I said, it just got caught up in the perfect storm moment. That isn’t to say it isn’t a good album, I actually really really like this album. Checking my YouTube History, it looks like I first listened to Sigrid, and the song Sucker Punch on November 18th, 2018, though I didn’t listen to it again until February of the next year. Something inspired that though because my YouTube history says I specifically searched for it. Anyway, the history shows I watched some Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, and Kiesza videos, then right before Sucker Punch, 5 Seconds of Summer – Youngblood (Alt Version), for some reason, and then Sucker Punch, which was likely a recommended video.

Sometimes through 2019, I started listening to Sigrid a lot. Also through YouTube, there was one of those banners, “Tickets in your area.” I didn’t really do a lot of concerts then but clicked through on a whim. The tickets were cheap, super cheap. I bought some, immediately. At some point, I also joined the fan Discord server. There was a fun active community there, most of whom migrated to the new official Discord earlier this year. This was also the start of actively seeking out Discord servers for communities of artists I like, though the only others I ever really participated in actively were CHVRCHES and Aurora’s servers.

I think what drew me in was how, weirdly simple the video was, and how slightly weird it was. It’s just Sigrid dancing around in a kind of cocky way, despite not really looking like someone who would BE cocky. Then there’s that fun montage of clips at the end, with some anime clips and like, she’s in a grocery store throwing food on the floor. WHY DOES SHE HATE THOSE TACOS??? Why is that marching band so sinister???

It also has some really slick editing on some of its transitions, which is really appealing to me.

And that point at the end where the music drops out. Excellent.

But there’s a whole album of songs here, just because the album and the first song I listened to from Sigrid bear the same name.

Mine Right Now is the second track of the album. I really love the running retro-sounding underlaying track on this one. It’s also a fun song suggesting that even if a relationship doesn’t work out, at least it’s good “now”. It also has an incredibly amusing video.

The third track, Basic, is my favorite released track and second favorite track of Sigrid’s overall. It’s even better in the live version (almost all music in general is). A lot of Sigrid’s tracks have to do with relationships, either friendships or possibly romantic, and Basic is one of those. The idea is that you just want something authentic and basic, without drama, with its simple wailing vocals. Like Sucker Punch, it features a fun interlude moment as well, on the album version it basically becomes acoustic, on the live version it becomes a cappella.

(Side note, my favorite Sigrid song is Go To War, but I’ll probably bring that one up in a future post).

Another really good one (aren’t they all?) is Strangers, at slot number 4. This was also the second single released from the album. It also has an amusing and surreal video to go along with it, where Sigrid gets to dance around in her own sort of special way in a sort of open movie set. It’s kind of reminiscent of the idea of the song, which is almost the opposite of Basic, … Strangers, perfect pretenders, falling head over heels…. That sort of thing.

The first single for the album was track 9, and I believe it was her first “big hit” track in general, with Don’t Kill My Vibe. A fast-paced, pump-you-up anthem about keeping others from bringing you down.

In the interest of a bit of brevity, I wanted to sort of group the other tracks together a bit. They are all good, some I didn’t like as much initially, but they have grown on me over time, like Level Up, In Vain, and Business Dinners.

It’s probably also worth bringing up Dynamite. Sigrid has several “low-key” sort of songs, and Dynamite is one of those. It’s a good track, I just have never super been able to get into it. I think part of what I like about Sigrid is how carefree and upbeat most of her music is, and Dynamite, while a good song, is just such a different tone, I can never feel the vibe.

Anyway, this is one I’ve been meaning to write up on for a while. And so it’s done. I’m sure at some point I’ll get to Sigrid’s second album How to Let Go, and I’ll probably do a combined write-up on her two previous EP releases. I also want to do a write-up for the “missing album”. Sigrid has a large number of unreleased older tracks. They don’t exist anywhere except live show performances. Enough to fill a whole album. It would be worth doing a write-up of these I think, as it it were an album. (Go to War is one of these tracks.)

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Cat Tax Day

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I’m all off this week thanks to screwy work and an extra post and just a general chaotic time. So I’m going to do a bit of a filler day and fulfill the “Cat Tax” for Blaugust. Against my better wants, we have 7 cats. We have the space and the people, but personally, 7 is too many. Also, they don’t always get along. At the moment, two of them we have to keep separate at all times, which is a pain, shuffling them between which is locked up in a room and which is not. If we don’t they will literally just, fiercely deathmatch, instantly.

I’ll go from oldest to youngest.

Scarlette (#10)

I’m going to throw some numbers on these, Scarlette is the tenth cat I have had in my lifetime.

Scarlette doesn’t really have any other nicknames. She is the oldest at around 13 years now I think. Like all of our cats, we got her as a kitten. She was actually a replacement cat, from the vet. We had adopted a calico kitten that the kids were calling Uganda. When it came time, we set it to be fixed at the vet, and the poor kitten didn’t make it. The Kids were of course devastated. Shortly afterward, the vet (who was sort of a friend of the family because our kids were friends) called up and they had another kitten that needed a home, so we adopted Scarlette. She had come from a “cat hoarding” situation I think, and she was extremely skittish. To the point of, we lost her in the house at one point for days.

Later we discovered that she had been hiding inside the boxed springs of the bed. For at least the first year she would regularly just, vanish into the boxed springs.

My family commonly refers to her as “My Girlfriend” (as in me personally) because I am definitely her favorite of everyone in the house and when I go to bed, I don’t care where she is, she will come running in to join me in the bed. I’ve also worked with her to get her to be less skittish and more cuddly. Even after years with us, she would cower in fear anytime you tried to pet her, despite that she may have just been trying to get your attention for pets. I have no idea what happened to her in the brief time before we adopted her, but it had to have been pretty horrible.

Simba (#11)

The next three are actually all from the same litter, so I’m not positive of the age difference, though whatever it is, it’s minutes. We sometimes call them “the Triplets”. Simba doesn’t have any nicknames aside from maybe “Jackass”, because he is kind of a bully sometimes.

Simba’s fun story. At our old house, eh loved to go outside and hunt birds and rabbits. We tried to keep them from going out, but that didn’t really work out sometimes. When we last moved, during the move, he got outside. He is, notoriously hard to catch. In the end, we left him behind, with plans to come back for him. Over the course of a month or two, we would periodically drive the 45b minutes (one way) drive down to the old house and see if we could see him. It was mildly irritating because he would come to the door of our old house, but the new owners refused to let him in. All they needed to do was let him in and give us a call, we would have been there and taken him away.

Eventually, our old neighbor called us up. He had managed to catch Simba in a Raccoon trap and he was recovered. Now he has zero interest in going outside ever.

His absolute favorite thing is when I refill the cat food container and he can come and eat the super fresh out of the bag food directly from the source. I like to let him indulge in that since it only happens maybe once a month.

Kiara (#12)

The girl of the triplets, sometimes called Dobby or the “Basement Troll”. Kiara likes me, and is pretty agreeable with people, but she hates all of the other cats except maybe Kovu, and especially after the move, she claimed the basement as her domain and hides down there all the time.

Kiara is our smallest cat. She likes to hide in the most random and strangest places.

Kovu (#13)

Kovu is the largest cat we own, though pure weight-wise, Simba is very close, though Simba is pretty lean and is basically all muscle. Kovu is sometimes called “Fatty”, which I’ll admit is a bit rude. He likes to think he’s not fat though and often climbs up all over the place and jumps between furniture, chasing people down to get petted. He’ll let you know too, because he’ll squawk at you and reach out for it.

He’s probably the overall best-behaved cat. He generally doesn’t get in fights with anyone else and he doesn’t cause any problems. His worst offense is being too pushy sometimes about getting attention, which is made worse because he is a fat ass and will knock things around getting to you.

Jackie (#14)

Jackie is my wife and I’s baby, though don’t tell her, Scarlette is probably my real favorite. Jackie came from my father-in-law’s shop as a kitten and we basically brought her home expecting her to die. which she did not. Originally she had one eye stuck closed so we called her “One-Eyed Jack”.

She is extremely spoiled and thinks she is my wife and I’s favorite and gets pissy and jealous anytime the other cats get attention.

Lettie Bug (#15)

My daughter’s cat officially, though Lettie prefers my wife over everyone. Also known as Lettie, Buggers, and (from me) Boogers. Boogers because she is an absolute bitch to me, at all times. Seriously, fuck this cat. She will attack me anytime I come near her, for no reason.

She is part Maine Coon and quite fluffy. She mostly avoids the other cats but only really actively attacks Kiara or Wilbur, sometimes.

Wilbur (#16)

Wilbur is the youngest cat. Sometimes I call him Kovu’s Boyfriend, because they get along well. Also sometimes, “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE”. He’s an ok cat but he’s also a dick to all of the other cats. He also pisses on things, a lot. He’s a little jack-ass. He likes to be in the middle of whatever you’re doing but doesn’t really like attention. If it were up to me, I would seriously consider rehoming Wilbur, because he is a bit over-aggressive towards the other cats and he’s damaged a lot of things, including our old TV. It’s not up to me though.

He’s a good cat, he just, could be better. I am hoping as our older cats start to “age out” for a sterile way to phrase that, he will get better. He could literally BE the favorite if he would stop pissing on things (yes, we had him checked at the vet, he is just an asshole).

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Blaugust 2023 – Creator Appreciation Week

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The “theme” for this week in Blaugust is “Creators Appreciation Week” or something along those lines. I’m not really great at this sort of thing, I can’t really say I particularly have any sort of “idols” or anything and I follow a zillion people on various platforms, I could never really properly pick even a handful to ever spotlight. Plus it always just feels weird to me to put anyone on a pedestal, though maybe I shouldn’t feel that way, people appreciate being appreciated usually.

Instead, I guess, I wanted to talk a bit about Leo Laporte, “The Tech Guy,” though I am not sure he really goes by that anymore since his syndicated radio show ended.

Why Leo?

Because of all the content creators out there that I do follow, I’ve possibly followed Leo the longest. Leo currently runs the TWIT Podcast network, or at least, hosts most of the shows, I think his wife actually “runs” things. He created it, however. It’s a collection of tech-themed podcasts on a variety of topics.

I’ve followed Leo since before that time though. I actually have a bit of a funny history there. Back when I was in High School, I think probably at the tail end, around 1997 or 1998, while living in Indiana, our cable added a channel, ZDTV. The whole channel had this great almost cable-access feel to it. I don’t remember a ton of the other shows, but I always would watch The Screen Savers, with Leo Laporte and Kate Botello as the hosts. They would just, talk about all sorts of computer and techy stuff. The content was perfect, and the production quality was a bit dodgy, it was the best show I had ever seen.

After High School, I briefly attended school at IUPUI for one semester. During that time, my dad transferred his job and my parents moved back to Illinois. I lived with my aunt and uncle for a bit attending school. After that one semester, I moved back in with my parents in Illinois.

Which meant no more ZDTV, no more Screen Savers, the cable we had in Illinois didn’t carry ZDTV.

Which is where the “funny part” comes in. From what I gather, a lot of Leo’s followers and fans came from his time on TechTV, and later G4, which ZDTV transformed into. I am not sure I’ve ever had access to or watched G4 TV at all. I just caught him early on with it was still ZDTV.

A good while later, and I have no idea how I discovered it, but it was very very early on in the life of it, I discovered TWIT. I should probably sidestep here to mention, TWIT stands for “This Week in Tech”. It may have been the only show at the time, and Leo was doing it out of his house or maybe just the original Cottage (hell it may have been the same thing), but there he was, Leo Laporte, still talking tech. On a weekly basis, in a podcast.

So I picked it up. I had to download each episode manually to put on my music player but I started listening every week. In fact, I’m not sure I have missed an episode in all that time, not of TWIT at least.

Eventually, TWIT became the TWIT Network and added more shows. I picked up Windows Weekly very early on. I used to listen to Net@Nite with Amber Weekly until it turned into This Week in Google, which I listened to for a while but don’t currently. Occasionally I pick up episodes of Security Now. I mostly stick to Windows Weekly and TWIT, I am a big fan of Paul Thurrott, who can get a little repetitive in his rants but I sympathize with a lot of his grievances so much.

Ever present in these shows is Leo though, who hosts most of them. I also really enjoy the rotating menagerie of interesting people each week on TWIT. I’ve picked up so many blogs and other accounts to follow through TWIT. It’s one of the things I look forward to the most each week honestly and it’s always entertaining.

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