I have keys to the new place. They just finished painting, and a cleaning crew is going through it right now. I’m just finishing up work, then I get to make the short trip down four doors, roughly 745,921 times in the next couple of days. Wish me luck!
I continue to stress out over the move. I have two painters coming over today for quotes on patch/paint on the old place to get it ready to sell. I have no news and no commitment on when we will get keys for the new place, so I’m now putting together the contingency plan so that when on Friday they tell us, “oh, maybe next Friday, or the one after that” I can scramble and try to reschedule the dozen things that will happen in the next few days.
I bought a KVM yesterday, a DVI one and the adapter I need to hook it up to the new work laptop. I’m currently dragging both computers and my four-million-pound 20” LCD monitor to the kitchen table and working there. I’ve started using the LCD in portrait mode, because it rotates 90 degrees, and I find it pretty helpful while writing and editing. I can open two full-page views, one on top of the other, or one really long page, and avoid a lot of scrolling. I’d like to do this from now on, although my monitor stand is slightly shaky like this. I’ll be glad to have the KVM - I currently keep the mac running, mostly to run iTunes all day and to keep my mail open, and I have it sort of behind my other computer, so I have to look around to see it. I work the music with the remote, and that’s fine, but when I do look at the mail, I have the bad confusing habit of trying to move the pointer with the wrong mouse until I realize what the hell I’m doing. I’ve thought about one of those systems where you can hang multiple displays on one set of input, and can drag windows from the Mac to the PC or whatever, but I’m sure they all involve some form of VNC that will bog down machines or require jumping through network hoops that I can’t deal with right now.
I also found a NeXT VMware image at http://osvirtual.net/en/nextstep-3-3-with-drivers-vmware/ and fired it up yesterday in Fusion. I got it to work with no real problem, except I’d forgotten about a lot of the weird quirks about the NeXT interface. And I think a lot of the allure of it back in 1991 was probably that it was a generation ahead of everything else out there, and it ran on the cool black hardware. I like the idea of a NeXT cube, but I think clunking along on a 25 MHz 68030 is probably not ideal. Back when a Mac IIfx was a speed demon and cost you $9000, the NeXT was a steal.
I just went off on a browsing tangent, reading about the IIfx. It’s weird, it was the fastest Mac until the Quadra AV came out in 1993. And in 1995, I had the Centris version of the AV at work (the Centris 660AV) and I had the same machine when I went to WRQ in 1996. And in both cases, they were already doorstops at the time. Like I remember when MP3s were first starting to become popular, and I downloaded some MP3 ripping software and popped a CD in the player (actually into the required caddy, and that into the player), and it took roughly two days of running day and night to rip the 9 tracks. There are times I romanticize old hardware, but then I remember how clunky the stuff was back in the day, and I’m not as fond of filling up my storage space with it.
I typically have some windmill I’m chasing, eating all of my spare cycles with google searches. At some point, there’s going to be some huge lawsuit and google is going to be forced to release all of its search data to people like the way we now buy our credit reports, and I’m going to look back and wonder why I searched for Amiga 500 hardware 48,757 times in mid-2002. Anyway, here are a bunch of recent brain viruses that are consuming me:
That is all.
I’m always talking about time machines, touchstones that launch you into nostalgia for some forgotten era of the past. There’s one that I mess with that’s infinitely more detailed than any other, and it’s system emulation, which was once just a vague dream and is now huge and all-encompassing.
I guess it all really started in the 80s, when you could get the box for your Intellivision or Colecovision that played Atari 2600 games. And that was a kludge, because it was nothing more than an actual 2600 that hung off the side of your existing system, so you basically used your Mattel power supply, joysticks, and connection to the TV to play Atari games. Then the Commodore 128 had a Zilog Z80 CPU in addition to its 8502, so you could boot into CPM mode, which was great except none of us cared about CPM or running ancient crusty old office productivity software. Later there was a lot of talk about the Amiga being able to emulate the Mac or run as a PC with external hardware, but I never knew anybody that really did this.
Fast-forward maybe ten or fifteen years, and I’m in the period when I’m firmly planted behind a desk in cubeland and want to relive the days of 1985, so I’m scouring eBay for a good Commodore 64 and 1541 and maybe an Amiga 500 or decent Atari 2600 setup. And I’m spending my spare time browsing all of the web sites out there for 8-bit computers, now that there’s a whole world of freaky Finland hackers posting all of this crazy stuff on the interwebs that’s knocking loose the rust in my brain and making me remember to SYS 49152 after I load some ML at #C000. And around then, some people started writing software that ran in a modern Pentium computer that would emulate the C-64 or the 2600 or any other old machine. Because by then, you add all of the overhead involved, but you run it on a fast PC, you’ve pretty much got a 6510 running at 1.023 MHz. The other major factor is that nobody can even keep track of who the hell owns Commodore these days, so there aren’t a bunch of cease-and-desist lawsuits over the ROM images, and a ton of the games are floating around. That’s the other great thing: in 1985, you spent all day waiting for your 1541 drive to slowly load in that Zork game. But now, a complete ISO of a 170K SS/SD floppy is smaller than the image of a rounded corner on a web page. You could go download a thousand games at a clip and barely spike your bandwidth.
And this is truly amazing to me. Because you can look back at some old era and look at a posed photo that’s two-dimensional and unmovable, or listen to a tape of some audio of an old song or an old conversation, and that partially captures a moment. But this is trapping an exact bit-by-bit representation, a living and working version of the same environment you basically lived in decades before. It’s like being able to download some magic thing that would recreate your college dorm room down to the last millimeter, every single detail and quirk and bug and problem, and you could step inside it and relive it. I could sit at that BASIC prompt and look at every single one of the 65,535 bytes in that system, and run every old game that me and Matt Wanke would stay up all night playing back in the 8th grade. I could load up Blue Max, the very first game I ever played on the C-64, and fly that little biplane through the weird 45-degree angled world, dropping bombs on the 320x200 terrain that scrolled past.
I spent a lot of time back at the blue and cyan screen, trying to type in some BASIC, playing some old games, and that was decent. But what really pushed me back into the past was when MAME games started coming out. MAME was an emulator that could simulate many of the common arcade cabinets that lived in the 80s and 90s. Game cabinets weren’t all one-off creations; each vendor typically had some common chassis or series, so they could just pop out the ROMs from a dud game and pop in something new. It wasn’t always that straightforward, and you had systems that mutated over time to add new features or new hardware or whatever, plus you had some games with weird joysticks or buttons. But if you got bored of your X-Men game and wanted the Simpsons game, it was a straight switch. And that made it easier to write a common emulator for a bunch of different ROMs. And once I got MAME running on my laptop and started tracking down ROMs, I was absolutely hooked. There were two games that were total time machines for me, because I spent so much time pouring quarters into both of them.
The first one was Smash TV. Me and Ray used to play this constantly, back in like 1991. When I went to IUSB, we never went to class, and would always drive around South Bend and Mishawaka, listening to death metal, looking for something to eat, something to do, and of course there was nothing. So we always ended up at the arcade at University Park Mall, and we’d dump unending amounts of money into that game. It’s basically a rehash of the movie The Running Man; a future where prisoners (in the game, the prisoner part was not mentioned) have to run through mazes killing mass numbers of robots and mutants and warriors with futuristic laser weapons in front of a televised studio audience in order to win money and prizes. It’s a typical quarter-eater, where two guys can play, and you just shoot every damn thing that runs at you, and if you die, you just need to shell out another token to keep rolling. The game has a lot of synthesized speech from the Richard Dawson game show host, saying “BIG MONEY! BIG PRIZES! I LOVE IT!” And it’s one of those weird memory things, where I can’t remember my office phone number, but every single millisecond of this game is burned into my head so much that I can instantly repeat any of the lines or hum any of the music within it. So when I pop it up in a window on my Mac, even though I don’t have the joysticks and have to use a/w/s/z or whatever, it instantly takes me back to those days of playing hooky and feeding quarters in a mall arcade that’s now probably a cell phone store or a place selling uggs or something.
The other game that I have memorized like this is Golden Axe. This is a Sega ripoff of the Conan franchise (barbarian, not talk show host, although that would be a cool game too, with Andy Richter at your side dressed up as a wench, and broadswording Jay Leno in the head.) It’s very similar to Altered Beast (also done by the same design team), a side-scroller with two (or was it three?) sets of joysticks and buttons, and you dumped in the quarters to continue. You could be a barbarian, a dwarf, or an amazon woman (a tall Hilary Swank-type warrior, not a woman that buys a lot of books online on a Kindle.) They had one of these in the tiny arcade in the Indiana student union, and they only had maybe five games, and all of them sucked, but this one sucked the least, so I was sort of forced to play it when I was killing time in there. I’d rather go to Spaceport and play some Tetris or find a Smash TV console, but it was one of those captive environment things, and within a matter of time, I got hooked on Golden Axe. I think it’s a funny game, because all of the various screaming sounds in it are too accurate and over the top. I was playing this once when Sarah was in the next room and she came in and said “what the hell is that? It sounds like some kind of Lil’ Jon krunk video game.” But once again, all of those little sounds and sayings are etched into my brain, and when I fire up that ROM in a Sega 16-B cabinet emulator, I’m back to the student union in 1989, between classes and wasting time and quarters.
I thought of all of this because I was cruising around and wondered if anyone had ever installed NeXTstep in a VMware emulator, and I guess a few people have tried. I wanted to just find someone who did the whole thing and had a VMware image I could download and fire up, but it’s considerably more difficult than that, setting up all of the drivers and crap. Here’s a post on how to do it, though. I think sitting at an OmniWeb browser in a NeXTstep login would be a pretty severe time warp for me. I spent a lot of time lusting after that hardware when it first came out, and spent a good chunk of 1991-1992 trying to get some time on it. It’s funny how fast the fall from grace was, though. Those machines were total demons in like 1991, and by the time I got to the support center in 1993, we had a slab that was practically a doorstop, it was so slow. But maybe if you took that awesome (in 1991) OS and dropped it in an emulator on a quad-core x64 i7 chip, it would be 5% faster than it was back on the 68040. Something to mess with, but probably not during the same week when I have to move.
I take a lot of pictures that don’t end up in galleries in flickr. Here’s a few of them.
A lunch at Fresh Choice, probably after a Weight Watchers meeting in San Bruno. I liked to celebrate weigh-in by eating a ton of starch and calories. This was after I made my weight goal and was just maintaining, so I went back and forth on actually counting points, and went through a brief phase where I thought I’d just take pictures of everything I ate and figure it out later. This morphed into this brief idea that I’d write a program to do image recognition on the pictures and calculate points, and that went to not doing anything.
I struggled for a long time with the organization of my second book, experimenting with a lot of outlining software and different schemes to keep track of a nonlinear story. At some point in 2000 or 2001, I had this idea to reorganize all of Rumored to Exist by printing the text onto index cards, then rearranging them all over the place until it made sense, like I was writing a screenplay or some shit. It didn’t work, and I had bunches of these cards lying around every room of the house for months.
After that book got published, I bought forty acres of land in Colorado. I then had this stupid idea in that I would start gardening in my apartment in Astoria, despite the fact that I only had windows on one side of the place and there was too much shade to get any sunlight to grow anything except for those stupid cactuses that could live underground for twenty years. I think the grand scheme was that I’d learn enough about gardening that I’d eventually be able to live off my land in Colorado. The whole thing lasted about a month until the bugs took over.
Go-kart racing in Fremont with Samsung. They took us there right before everyone had to take some survey on employee satisfaction, to make sure everyone thought it was a great place to work. The firesuit hood thing makes me look like I’m about to go to some renaissance fair to drink a bunch of mead and go jousting. The worst part of this was getting knocked around for 200 laps and then having to drive 40 miles home that night, the whole time wanting to trade paint with other cars on 880.
All the fixins needed to make BBQ. I’m surprised I was able to find Crystal sauce here on the west coast, but they sell it in the Oakland Safeway. This is the really sour sort of BBQ, with the vinegar taste to it, which is pretty decent, although I realize there is this Pepsi/Coke religious argument about what school of thought you follow on BBQ. Here’s the sacrilege: I used this to make a fake pork pulled pork, using some kind of engineered shredded soy fake meat product. But the pork (or lack thereof) is just the vehicle for the sauce transmission, so it didn’t matter too much. It is a mandatory requirement to make corn on the cob with this meal, though.
This was on my whiteboard when I came back from a trip to Vegas in maybe 2001. I think it’s the work of my old coworker John Andonov, who had a habit of leaving his works of art on various cube walls when people were in meetings, which was pretty much constantly at Juno. It’s amazing how many pictures of whiteboards I have in my photo library. Most of them are insane system diagrams, where at the end of the meeting, someone says “make sure to take a picture of this” and then you never use it again.
I awoke one morning in my Astoria apartment to the sound of a waterfall, and saw the place above me leaking a river of water through my ceiling. The piece of shit landlord never fixed it, and it looked like this for the next four or five years. This was the same landlord that threw a fit when everyone organized a rent strike because he didn’t see the problem with not having a boiler for hot water or heat during what was one of the coldest Novembers in the last hundred years. Nice tile color, too.
My car somewhere in Utah I think, during the first Denver to LA trip. I drove this one solo, and don’t advise taking a tiny car with a 67-HP engine through the mountain passes of the Rockies during the winter, especially if the car is packed with a few hundred pounds of housewares and laundry. A good chunk of the trip was spent fighting the transmission on the baby engine, which constantly insisted on downshifting as I struggled through the hills. That pretty much cleared up when I got to central Utah, but I was certain I was going to run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, since there’s a hundreds-mile stretch with absolutely no gas stations or civilization in general. It’s also amazing how filthy the car got by the time I got to California.
The perils of ownership of a long-haired cat: every time I brush Loca, I come up with about this much hair. Seriously, I brushed her for 20 minutes yesterday, and if I brushed her right now, I would produce at least this much hair. And if I didn’t brush her constantly, the entire apartment would pretty much look like this on every single surface, except for the surfaces covered with cat puke where she ingested this much hair and then vomited it back up. I should buy a loom and start quilting blankets and sweaters from it. The big problem is that if I knitted a sweater out of her hair, the other cat would climb on it and lick it all the time.
The golden gate. I took this one on Thanksgiving 2008 when me, Sarah, and A went to Sarah’s friend’s place in Sonoma for dinner. Not bad for being shot through a dirty windshield.