Youth Pastor for the Rock Church in Monroe, WA Travis Warren is living on top of a trailer until the trailer is filled with Thanksgiving Dinners!! He is at the Monroe Albertsons parking lot. Cant miss him!!!
I have to wonder what life would be like for us if my husband had gotten a job that he applied for in Jersey. I also wonder what it would be like if he had ended up with a philadelphia job, for which he also applied. I may have still been living in Salem. I may have moved to another bigger apartment. Who knows....
How will you use technology or the Internet to help you plan and prepare this year’s Thanksgiving feast?
Sponsored by LifeScoop: Bringing You Tips for a Connected Lifestyle.Well, I dont get to have Tday dinner this year as I would normally, so the only way it will help is coordinating with other people to see where they will be. :( I like cooking for the big holidays. I get all excited and my expertise comes shining through. It's the only time I really showcase most of my cooking talent in one shot.
Dang! New York gets cold quick! I need my winter jacket already. The orlando vacations I was looking into are surely looking really really good about now! I was planning the trip for next year, but now would be a GREAT time to go south for the winter. Just walking out onto the balcony is enough to send you back under the covers for another month. The wind cuts like a few swords aimed right at your vital organs. Scary lol.
What was your favorite class in high school? (And no, lunch doesn't count.)
I would have to say Journalism was my absolute favorite class. I had thought to make journalism into my career, but GOD had other plans for me. I still use many of the skills I learned in journalism and advertising with our ministries and businesses today, but if I had pursued those avenues my life would be much different now. Not better, mind you, but different.
Choir was not really a class, as it was the joy of my life. It was more like an ego requirement so that I could get in good with the teacher who was also the drama instructor and be able to showcase my talents in both arenas, which I did.
Oh, well - I've forgotten the model numbers. This is what happens when you take the time at a party to learn someone's name - you learn their name and make the whole evening special but you sacrifice some other random piece of information. In this case, model numbers.
As far as I can tell, I used a PDP-10:
(Taken by Ed Thelen of material owned by Computer History Museum under the non-commercial rule.)
Followed shortly by a VAX 11/780:
Talk about good times. I had access to these only because I was friends with the system administrator at school. He set me up (I think I basically whined a lot until he did) with a user name and password. My first user name and therefore email address ever was "tomato". I don't know why I chose that. He said "What do you want for a user name?" and I spouted out "Tomato". So I was known as "tomato" for a few years. Whenever I logged in I'd hear "Hey, there is a Tomato on the system!". I had email and was able to send/receive with a few friends that were online also - mostly right there at the school.
A few years ago a customer was walking through my company and he was talking about how he had made all of his money in the "internet" and how he had his first email address in 1988. That's how he started his conversation. It was like "How did you get rich in the internet?" and his first statement was "I had my first email address in 1988". Obviously there was something else involved because I had my first email address in 1983 and I didn't make it big in the internet. Of course, the internet wasn't really there yet so much back then. I think there was ARPANET, etc - but I'm not going to go into all of that.
I didn't do anything really constructive on either of these systems at the time besides read newsgroups. Later, maybe around 1987 I had to have a "real" account because I had a class on the VAX so the "tomato" account went away and I moved to something like just "wilso_d" or something else mundane. At that point I was taking an operating system class and we had to write our own OS in something like C or Pascal. It's all vague at this point, but none-the-less, this was my moment to both PDP and VAX systems. Both were pretty good considering the time frame. All text-based as I recall with dumb-terminals. I think the world really was faster before the advent of fancy graphical user interfaces (aka Windows).
You can read more about the VAX here.
It's been around since 2002 (I think) but it never gets old.....
Is it "Write A Blog Every Day For A Month" again? Because I'm already 10 behind. So here is a post from about two years ago where I said "Oh, I'm going to post about every computer I've ever used!" and then I stopped, right after this one. Lord Kalvan has been posting about a bunch of old computers and it reminded me of my original intent.
So here goes - I'm going to take a few posts to talk about the different computers I've used. I'll start with the very first one. This is the Commodore CBM-8032. This came out around 1980 and had a massive 32k of RAM. It had an 80 column by 25 line green monochrome screen. The CPU was a 6502 2Mhz.
This was owned by the science department at my high school. 1980 (10th grade for me) was well before the school had computer labs, etc. This was the ONLY computer in the school and we found it in the back of a store room where it wasn't being used.
It was beautiful. I used this from 1980 through 1982.
The base model used tapes, but the school actually had a dual floppy drive for it. I sent a letter to Commodore to see if they could send me any information on it, and they sent me a copy of their Commodore magazine. It was cool because it was filled with source code you could key in and also had instructions on how to do things with the system - like print. Yeah, this was before all of the magic we rely on today. Internet? Ha! I don't think so.
My first program was in BASIC and said something like:
10 PRINT "DEWITTE"
20 GOTO 10
and I'd run it... and run it.. and run it... There were three of us who started hanging around the back of the science room every chance we had - before school, after school, during lunch. We'd write programs and key in games and play them. One I recall the most is StarTrek (where you were a big E (for enterprise) and it moves around looking out for K (Klingons). Ah, good times, good times.
I would send a note to Commodore and when I received a reply, it would come from a different address. I thought something was up - they kept moving. Eventually I think they went away, but that wasn't until after the Vic-20, Commodore 64, and the Amiga. The only one of these I seriously used was the Amiga, but that's for another post.
I used to sit in the back of the classroom and just write mindless programs and listen to Supertramp on a cassette boom-box that I built (yes, built - and sad really because I don't have a single picture of it).
urgh im stuck with all these wet clothes because the laundry room is out of service..
William Kamkwamba was only 14 years old when he built a windmill that could power 4 light bulbs and a radio in his village in Malawi. Watch his story here.
