Category: Journal

Computers and Me: Amiga

I probably spend way too much time thinking about computers and computer-related stuff. And with the whole [laptop thing](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/index.php/2007/10/26/laptop-angst/), I’m maybe getting overly introspective about it.

It’s NaBloPoMo, so I figure I’m allowed to indulge my nerdier tendencies.

Shamus, over at [Twenty Sided](http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale) posted today about his [personal experience](http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1403) with various versions of Windows and how Vista is pretty much the culmination of a long history of suck. Well, he doesn’t quite say that, but that’s the gist I’m choosing to take away. That got me thinking of a (cringe-inducing but I’m linking to it anyway) page I posted up on my home page a good decade ago (back when it was fashionable to have home pages) about [my personal history with computers](http://flyingsquirrel.ca/amistory.html). I never liked it much, because I thought it came off as a bit defensive.

You see, all through high school and university, I had a [Commodore Amiga](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga). My grandfather bought me an [Amiga 500](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_500) when I was 13, and I upgraded myself to an [Amiga 1200](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1200) (with 40MB hard drive!) in my last year of high school. By the time I’d written that page in second year at UW, it was pretty clear that the Amiga was pretty much a dead platform. There was still a community out there on the Internet, thank God, and I was still able to get ahold of a few hardware upgrades when I had the spare cash, but the writing was on the wall.

But I loved my Amigas. Both of them. I kept using my A1200 pretty much till the end of university. Even after I graduated, got a job and bought my first PC, I kept using it. I even bought my Amiga a network card so they could talk to one another.

That didn’t last, though. The Amiga’s external 1GB hard drive died shortly thereafter. I was crushed. I had my whole life on there. (And it’s not like I could do back-ups. It was an Amiga. I couldn’t afford a SCSI tape drive. And I never got file sharing working well enough to get the data onto the PC’s hard drive. I was able to resurrect her briefly with a SCSI hard drive I salvaged from UW surplus, but I never really went back after the drive died.

That was pretty much the end of an era. I was officially a PC user. I’d given in, finally.

I hadn’t really meant to end up running Windows, though. It just kind of happened. When I bought the PC–a dual-processor Celeron 300 on an [ABIT BP6](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6) motherboard–I bought it fully intending it to be a Linux machine. And I would run SuSE on it, because SuSE (at the time) shipped with the [UAE Amiga Emulator](http://uae.coresystems.de/) by default. But I could never get the hardware working properly, so I mostly ended up staying in a partition that had Windows 98 on it (thus entirely negating the point of having 1337, hacky dual-processor machine) which I’d only really installed to play games.

I just kinda gave in, and I’ve been running Windows ever since.

*to be continued…*

NaBloPoMo (and Halloween and Stuff)

I’m going to gracefully bow out of [NaNoWriMo](http://www.nanowrimo.org/) this year. Much as I like the idea (I even bought the book last year!), I know I don’t have a hope of getting anywhere near the word count. I kinda want to do *something*, though.

[NaBloPoMo](http://nablopomo.ning.com/) is a little bit more my speed this year–just post a blog post a day, every day, for the month. I *think* I can do that. I never have, mind you. My peak blogging rate tends to be about every other day (and the valley’s somewhere around one a month…). I’m thinking, though, that committing to something like this will maybe help me get back in the groove a bit. My blog needs more love.

Support and encouragement is important in these endeavors. Without getting all clingy and needy and stuff, if you see something and can take the time to comment on something I’ve written, that really does help motivate me. It’s silly, I know, but it’s true. That’s the same regardless of whether you’re reading this and commenting on the blog itself, on lj or on facebook. I’ll read it one way or another.

I’m figuring I’ll start picking topics and expounding on them, but for today, you’re going to get a content-light post to start things off.

I ended up getting something between thirty and forty trick-or-treaters at the door last night. I’m pretty sure that’s more than last year.

In the very first group that came to my door, the little girl bringing up the rear tripped and cut her lip on my stoop. She was wearing an excruciatingly adorable (and well-made) princess costume, and looked as if her little world was about to shatter. I ran in to get her a Kleenex and when I came back (and handed out candy to the rest, as we all must carry on in tough times), her mother was asking her if she wanted to go home.

She would have none of that. Oh, no. She toughened up right then and there, wiped a tear and held out her little pillow case for some [Cheezies](http://www.cheezies.com/index3.htm) and a peanut butter cup.

Raccoon’d!

I have raccoons.

At least one raccoon has taken up residence under my porch. Taking [the advice of the Humane Society](http://www.torontohumanesociety.com/caringforPet/raccoons.html), I’ve spread cayenne pepper around the opening, wadded up balls of paper towels, soaked them in ammonia and stuffed them in the opening, set up a halogen light in front of the opening and bought a battery-powered radio and turned it to an AM talk station and stuck it in the hole.

He’s still there. I’m pretty willful, but I think that sort of treatment would’ve convinced me to leave by now. The raccoon has out-willed me, it seems.

I think the next step is probably going to be to call a humane wildlife control company. I’m willing to take suggestions.

Laptop angst

My laptop–a lovely G4 iBook–is [nearly four years old now](http://flyingsquirrel.ca/squirrel/archive.php?article=163). I didn’t get it for its power or anything, but it’s always disappointed me a bit in how it handles things like Flash-driven web pages and video. And four years is absolutely elderly for any sort of computer, laptops especially. I’ve lusted after the Intel MacBooks since they were released and have told myself that as soon as Leopard comes out, I’ll get one.

That was what? A year and a half ago? Leopard comes out today. And I’m faltering.

Apple’s been a miserable douchebag the last few months. They’re doing more and more to make sure people can do less and less with their own property. I hate that. I hate that a lot. General purpose computing means a lot to me. It’s my life and livelihood. They haven’t shown any evidence of trying to cripple Macs, but should I really be giving these people my money?

I actually use the laptop far more than I use my desktop machine these days. It’s not quite the useless toy I originally expected it to be. I’ve switched over to using Ubuntu on the desktop, but I haven’t actually been using it very much. Ubuntu’s been coming along rather well, and I’ve been thinking maybe I should standardize.

Dell is selling laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed and pre-configured. That would be awesome, except they aren’t selling them in Canada. The nice thing about getting someone to pre-install Ubuntu on a laptop is you’re pretty sure the hardware support is there. I’ve been able to find only [one](http://www.thelinuxstore.ca/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=18&products_id=1235) Canadian pre-install company, and I’m not all that keen on their (refurb) hardware.

I could buy a Windows laptop and put Ubuntu on it, but [I could do that with a MacBook](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook), too. And I *like* MacBooks, being small and light with the decent trackpad and stuff. So I’m still torn. I do like my Mac and I still like Mac OS X (and all the cool software written for it). It’s just Apple that’s pissing me off right now.

I’m gonna have to mull it over some more.

Why are my pants wet?: A lesson in cultural sensitivity

I have this weird habit where I check myself out in the washroom mirror while washing my hands. I don’t know what I’m looking for–probably just making sure my hair’s okay and I don’t have a giant booger on my face or something. I’ll lean forward towards the mirror and gaze deeply into the eyes of my mirror self.

Over the last month or so, I’ve been finding that when I do this at work, I’ll get back to my desk to discover that my pants are soaked through in socially compromising areas. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t… leaking. I’m not quite old enough to have to resort to diapers. So I went back to the bathroom and checked the sink. Sure enough, the entire sink counter was flooded with water, held there with the magic of surface tension.

At first, I was angry. I hate having to use communal washrooms to begin with, but this was adding insult to injury. I was tempted to put up a post-it with one of those passive-aggressive sorts of notes you see in offices telling the slobs to clean up after their damn, lazy selves. I mean, how hard is it to wash your hands without making a mess? Seriously!

Rather than resorting to futile anger, however, I kept my wits about me and observed.

I noticed that people were doing something at the bathroom sinks that I hadn’t expected: they were washing their face. Face-washing can conceivably be more messy than hand-washing. But isn’t that level of facial cleanliness a little obsessive? I’m usually good with a shower in the morning. It’s not like we’re working in a coal mine.

I know I shouldn’t make snap judgements, so I continued to observe. The people washing faces seemed to be the same dudes who I’d noticed trying to scope out quiet places to pray at work. And they happened to say something I didn’t catch before they started. And I also noticed that it was (at the time) coming to the end of Ramadan.

[Wudu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wudu) is the act of ritual washing in preparation for prayer. It is a religious duty in Islam.

So I’m kinda glad I didn’t kick up a fuss or anything. That would’ve been really embarrassing. I’ll just have to be more careful about my pants.