The holiday season is now over, and with its passing a new year has begun. My two week vacation is coming to an end, and work is waiting for me in the morning. This new year brings with it many uncertainties that have been consciously ignored for the last couple of months. The economy is in the dumper, employment is not guaranteed, and we have a likely foe to freedom preparing to take over the governing of our country.
We have settled into our new role as parents, and that has changed the reality of my priorities as the head of my household. I have a wife and baby to support beyond just supporting myself. Thankfully, the wife and I have good jobs at the moment. Our companies look to be stable, and hopefully nothing will change on that front. Preparations need to be made for a change in this department in the uncertain times however. My family must be protected in the event of prolonged unemployment.
We are fortunate to be able to survive on either of our incomes. Things would be tight, but doable. Up until this point I looked at my 401k as a backup plan. It still is, only its backup potential has been lessened significantly with the market downturn. We could have survived solely on it for a year or more before, and as of now we are looking at six months or so.
While many have been forecasting a depression like the one the country experienced during the 30s or worse, I don’t see it happening. My feelings are that we are in the midst of a deep recession and will come out of it in the second half of this year. Not being an economic guru makes my elementary forecasts nearly worthless. Therefore my plan for this year is to live frugally, and stock away as much cash as possible.
We don’t have any car payments, or massive amounts of debt, so socking away money won’t be to difficult. At least it shouldn’t be. Our biggest problem is frivolous spending. Between going out to eat, and randomly buying crap, we easily could put away $500 a month if not more.
One aspect of becoming more secure financially involves smart shopping for groceries. We have used the grocery game off and on for a few years now. This has multiple advantages really. First, you get groceries as cheaply as possible. Second, you end up stockpiling quite a bit of food. You can easily eat off of it for weeks or longer if need be.
We have enough guns for now, and if anything is banned, we have what we need for the future. There are of course dozens of firearms that would be great additions to my collection, but none will likely be added this year. A few more “assault rifles” would be very welcome, but they will likely have to wait. If there is a ban, our current lineup will be sufficient. Finishing out my extra AR will be the only probable gun purchase this year.
Ammo is another story. Part of my preparations for familial survival will include finally setting up my reloading bench, and creating loads of cheap ammo for us to practice with. There is enough ammo for each gun now to make it useful in a TEOTWAWKI event, but we all need to practice and become proficient with all of our family arms.
One expense we have decided to add this year will be getting our concealed carry licenses. With the withering economy crime is on the rise. There has been an uptick in carjackings and muggings, and several women have been followed home and robbed in our area. Security is another huge priority that will be addressed in this new year.
Our home has iron grates on the operable windows in the house. The front door has an iron security door. The gates to the backyard are locked as well. We need to add an alarm system, and some strategically placed security lighting.
If possible, I would like to find some affordable cameras that can be monitored remotely. This would be useful for monitoring the front door and maybe a couple of other key locations. It would be nice to be able to see who was at the door before opening it.
All of these security ideas have been thought of in the past, but there has always been a different priority at the time.
I am responsible for protecting my wife and my child, and with a world that is becoming less safe every day, my vigilance in this area must be upgraded. My wife must be able to defend herself and our child while they are out on their own, and so the concealed carry licenses will be our first security priority.
All I can ask myself is why? Why would a mother kill her beautiful little baby girl? How could she dump her body in the woods like a bag of trash?
For any that don’t know, investigators have found the remains of a child about .3 miles away from the Anthony’s residence in Orlando. It has not been confirmed yet, but it is in all likelihood the remains of poor little Caylee Anthony. This would lead one to believe, if you didn’t already, that 22 year old Casey Anthony was involved in the murder and dumping of her own daughter.
I just don’t understand it. Interestingly enough, these kind of stories used to not be that big of a deal to me. They didn’t involve people that were close to me, and while I still empathized with those involved, it did not mean that much. Once Brooke was born and I became so close to her, it has been different. Maybe you have to have a kid to fully appreciate how much you love them. This incredibly sad story has affected me a lot. I am not to proud to admit that I teared up a bit yesterday when it was announced that remains had been found.
The level of depravity it must take to kill a child, much less your own child, is something that is incomprehensible to me. How could a 22 year old woman do such a thing? For that matter how could anyone kill a three year old baby girl?
I am not a stupid person, and I know there is all kinds of evil in the world. That is the only explanation for something like this. Pure wickedness.
At least poor Caylee’s remains can now be laid to rest. She is in heaven being comforted by our Lord. That is the only solace one can have in such a situation.
This may not be true, but it seems fairly certain that nothing has pushed hardware manufacturers harder, at least manufacturers of computer hardware used in the home, than the video game. Sure a lot of the technology may have been born for other uses, but much of it has been optimized and pushed to it’s limits simply for improved video gaming performance.
The overclocking and computer customization craze is almost exclusively the domain of gamers. No one risks popping a $1,000 processor so they can run Microsoft Word faster. The hardware manufacturers have no doubt built super-performing hardware for business and scientific reasons. I am not saying games are the reason we have fast computers, simply that they drive the home computing market and have for a long time.
History Before My Participation
The very first video games were created by scientists as early as 1947. Wikipedia has a good article on the beginnings here. The first high performance computerized video game, was Spacewar!, which was created by a trio of geek heroes at MIT in 1961 on a DEC PDP-1. The wiki article on the PDP-1 is fascinating as well. We owe much to the guys that pioneered so much using that machine.
All of the early examples of what would become known as video games were created by really geeky men in lab coats. Their computers filled up whole rooms, and a modern iPod shuffle’s computing abilities would put them to shame. The men worked with what they had, and more often then not used their simple games as a way to interface the public with their expensive sci-fi hardware.
Early commercial games started appearing in the early 70s, with Atari’s first game Pong being the first success commercially. All kinds of games, good and bad started popping up.
In 1978 Tomohiro Nishikado came up with the most awesome Space Invaders. He had to customize the hardware, because existing hardware could not keep up with the game. It was based on an Intel 8080 CPU, and was a groundbreaking game at the time. Nothing like it had been seen before.
The home video gaming front was opened by Magnavox in 1972, when they released the first console named Odyssey. It was a weird device by today’s standards. It ran on batteries and had no sound.
The Beginning
My first memory of a video game of any sort was William’s 1980 release Defender. I was four at the time and my Dad was quite the Defenderplayer. I remeber standing next to him and watching him play the game quite a bit. Every once in a while he would waste a quarter and let me play for the several seconds it took me to lose all my lives.
The first video game I ever really played was probably Space Invaderson the Atari 2600. The Atari version of the 1978 original game featured simplified graphics and different game modes. The game created a video gamer for life. My Dad’s Atari 2600 spent many a weekend with my cousin and myself at the helm. A few of the games I remember specifically include, Activision’s Stampede, Atari’s Combat, and Parker Bros. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. I always owned my cousin at Combat for what it’s worth.
I lived with my Mom and Step dad while growing up so the Atari was only available to me when I went to see Dad. This was supposedly to be alleviated when we got an Intellivision. The Intellivision console was technically superior to Atari’s 2600 at the time in several ways. The problem with it however was that it used different games and had fewer games available. This hurt the console’s appeal with me. There were lots of nice sports and board games, but I wanted to play Space Invaders or Stampede. The extra buttons, flashier graphics, actual 16 bit processing, and the additional 9 controller buttons didn’t mean squat to me.
Finally there was an adapter released that allowed you to play 2600 games on the Intellivision. It was great, and my first game purchase was Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong is one of my most hated games, seeing as I have never made it past the third level. Before we could get any other games for the console, power supply was left plugged in overnight and it burnt out! My Step dad decided not to get a new one, and that was it for the Intellivision. It sat up on a shelf in our den for at least fifteen years. My Mom probably threw it away at some point.
This began a long drought in my video gaming. I still played the Atari at Dad’s house, and played games on my TRS-80 that I had to type into the machine in BASIC every time I wanted to play one, and any available Commodore 64 machines. This corresponded, unsurprisingly, with the video game console crash of 1983. The PC became the domain of video gaming for several years. At the tender age of 8 my funding abilities were severely underdeveloped, so these obsolete options were all that were available to appease my lust for electronic gaming action.
Actually, let me take a step back here. That is not entirely true. My gaming activities were limited during those years at home. The best games were still only available at the neighborhood arcade anyway. Many of the best games were ported to the 2600, and other consoles, but the ports were generally of much lower quality. This was fine with us little kids, as we didn’t have many quarters to go around anyway. The teenagers at the arcade were pretty pushy, and always occupied the best machines indefinitely.
Once the crash went down, all the new awesome games were only available at the arcade. You could also get a quick fix at your local 7-11 or skating rink. They usually had several cabinets set up. Even grocery stores would have something around occasionally. The mall arcade was my Mecca at this time. We went to the mall quite often, and sometimes my Mom would actually give me a dollar or two to “waste” in the arcade.
Some of my favorite games at the time included Pac-Man(already a classic at that point), 1942, Spy Hunter, Galaga, and multitudes of others that have slipped my mind permanently. These machines were everywhere. A dedicated kid did not have a hard time find a video game to play in those days.
Pizza Hut usually had at least one sit down Pac-Man or Donkey King to mess with. The movie theaters had their own mini-arcades, and some industrious youths actually told the start time of movies to their parents wrong intentionally. This allowed them to get there early and get a few games in before the movie.
One of the biggest day’s of the year for me, was my birthday of course. This meant it was time to go to Chuck E. Cheeses and have a birthday party. The greatness of this place was not their automatons stuffed animals, or their crappy pizza. The place was full of arcade games of course, and the birthday boy got pretty much all the tokens he could ask for. I remember getting in trouble for ignoring all the kids that were invited because I was too engrossed in playing some game. Another favorite memory involved a lesson in honesty.
So I was strolling along looking for the next cabinet to feed, and saw a token sitting on the floor. After picking it up, I spotted a man working on one of the machines. After presenting it to him, and telling him that it would be stealing to just take it, he reached into the machine he was working on, and grabbed a handful of tokens. This nice guy proceeded to drop them all in my token cup, and my eyes probably began to bulge with excitement. After he told me that was a reward for my honesty, I thanked him, and ran along my way. These little tokens may as well have been krugerrands to me.
Well, this is enough for now. In the next installment we will take a look at the most amazing thing my young self had ever seen. It would change my life, and reinvigorate my at home gaming. The infamous, awesome, and still extremely cool Nintendo Entertainment System.
There is something that must be mentioned here, as it has not been before. This is probably the most divisive issue there is, and not much else can turn people into raging lunatics faster than a discussion of the topic. The topic of this post is abortion, and why my wife and myself are against it. This may put me in the fundamentalist nut camp, that so many deride now, if so, so be it. If opposing gay marriage, and abortion puts me in the fundie camp, that is fine. While I understand the libertarian-leaning person’s position on this, I reject it completely.
The issue has never been brought up on my blog here, and was mentioned briefly at my old one a couple of times. First, let’s look at my motivation for being pro life, or anti-abortion if you will. My primary motivation is my belief that life begins at conception. This comes from my religion, like many people. My holy book tells me that God knew me while I was in my mother’s womb. This is enough reason for me to oppose the barbarity of abortion. It is not my only reason by any means however.
Children are a miracle. They are totally innocent creatures when they are born. This is not a reference to whether or not I believe in original sin. That can be left for a different discussion. My point here is that they can not make decisions for themselves, or know the difference between right and wrong. Babies can not defend themselves. They rely on their parent(s) or other caretakers to do everything for them. This is the way they are designed. Their weak state prevents them from arguing for or against their birth. They have no choice in the matter.
The innocent and defenseless have always been defended by good, free, men. It is our duty to protect those that can not protect themselves. Part of that duty is to fight for the rights of the unborn. Those that are pro-abortion claim that it is a women’s right to choose. No one has the right to choose to murder someone else. You can’t take your kids into the backyard and slaughter them simply because you want to and feel you have a right to do so. Likewise, the millions of unborn babies that are slaughtered in this nation’s abortion clinics, should not be allowed to die at the whims of another human being.
I realize fully that this position may alienate some, and I apologize for your being offended if that is the case. It is not my intent to hurt anyone’s feelings, or to irritate my few appreciated readers. There will however never be an apology for my feelings on this matter. Roe v. Wade should be overturned, and abortion should be outlawed in all fifty states. An obvious exception to this would be to allow it, if the mother’s life is at risk. Please notice that I did not say the mothers health. The pro-abortion crowd likes to parrot about the mother’s health as a reason to allow anything. Pregnancy is a health risk. The partial birth abortion ban, would have been worthless, had a health clause been included. Protection for the mother’s life was included. This is an important distinction that is often distorted. The multitude of procedures that are performed in abortion clinics incur huge health risks to the women these butchers perform them on.
My libertarian friends will argue that this position represents undo force, to be enforced by the government, on the citizenry. I agree with this argument on many subjects. Abortion is not among them. Aborting a pregnancy is no different than murdering a child to me, so clearly government regulation is warranted. The government deems murder to be illegal, and I have not found a libertarian yet that thinks that it should be otherwise.
At an earlier point in my life, I claimed to be “pro choice”. My view on the subject was similar to Barack Obama’s. Unwanted children were viewed as a punishment to people that didn’t want them. This view changed with maturity like a lot of my political views.
Raising a baby girl has cemented my opposition. I look into her eyes every day, and see the awe-inspiring wonder of the universe. This is life. This is what it is all about. My soul connects with this child, and the thought that her mother could have chosen to kill her haunts me. Every one of these wonderful children deserve to be given a fighting chance. The thought that my precious little angel could have been murdered by someone purporting to be a doctor is horrifying. I love this little girl more than anyone next to my wife. She isn’t mine, but she may as well be. This little bundle of joy has taught me what it means to be responsible for another human beings every needs. She humbles me on a daily basis, and I thank God for her every day.
There are those that see abortion as worthy population control. They argue that unwanted children will become a weightsome burden on society. If one dismisses the fact that there are thousands and thousands of couples waiting to adopt newborn children, then this theory might make sense in a very macabre, and disturbing way. This line of thought illustrates a depraved indifference to human rights. Civilized societies don’t kill people simply because we don’t want them around. We don’t slaughter the mentally ill, or lock up handicapped folks and allow them to starve to death.
Having stated my opinion on this matter, there will be occasional posts involving the fight for the rights of the unborn. This is not going to become an abortion blog by any means, but I felt it best to issue a warning to any who read this blog. You are more than welcome to post your views on this issue, as long as you do so in an appropriate manner.
If you are a pro choice person, please consider re-evaluating your position on this matter. Our nation is missing millions of people that could have been many of our best and brightest. We will never recover them. This American Holocaust needs to end.
Once again Borepatch has inspired me to write something. He posted a picture of an old IMSAI 8080 in his appropriately titled Retro Tech post.
This is the personal story of my love and hate of technology. I have been messing around with these gizmos for nearly my entire life now, right at twenty five years. That thought is almost unbelievable to me. Having been a part of the first generation with computers in their home, is a unique experience in history. Having a computer at home was not a fact of life like it is now of course. They were not rare necessarily, but in 1982 they surely were not an everyday household item.
That was the year that my journey began. This post will cover my early years of being exposed to this glowing gadget of utter fascination. Later, I will discuss my years long hiatus from the computer world, and my rediscovery. For now, we look only at the early years.
One day when I was in the second grade or so, my parents brought home a strange box. It looked like a TV with what turned out to be a couple of floppy drives and a keyboard. Someone at work had given them this machine. It immediately perked the interest of my seven year old mind.
After setting it up, and turning it on my father could not get the box to do a damn thing. He had a box full of disks that the company he worked for had used for various purposes, but he was unable to get them to do anything. All he could do was type on the screen of the computer. After messing with it for about five minutes he gave up. Cautiously asking if I might have a chance to interact with this possible oracle, he said it was a waste of time, but that as long as I didn’t break it, he did not care if I messed around with it.
So there I sat for about an hour typing random stuff into this machine, and was equally unable to get any form of response. Over the next several months my intrigue led me to explore the fairly large programming manual that came with the machine. Amazingly GIS had a picture of the manual. My very first programming manual. Seeing it brings back so many good memories.
That is right folks, my first foray into the larger world of computing was confined to the realm of a 48k TRS-80 Model III Micro Computer.
This big heavy brick of a machine was not new tech at the time I started messing around with it. The model III was an upgraded version of the Model I. It had more memory (a whopping 48k), a faster processor (a z-80 heh), and mine came with two internal floppy drives. This was the hot rod version and cost about $2,500 new.
I never understood how to get the drives to work, so for about a year I simply typed in the applications in the book, or made up my own. Once the power supply was turned off, they were gone. This led to me plotting on ways to end my sister one day. After about ten hours of laboriously inputting the BASIC code for a graphical chess game, I took a break to get something to eat. My sister took the opportunity to run over to the computer and turn off the power supply. She didn’t know how to use the computer, but she knew that it would not save anything, and that my labor would be in vane.
She purposefully ruined my project. After all that work, I never even got to see it run! It was obvious that she must be punished for her treacherous act of technological sabotage, but my parents intervened before my revenge could be exacted. After this depressing episode, my soul could not bear typing all the information again, so chess was never to be played on my beloved trash-80.
After about a year of this, I was introduced to the wonderful Commodore 64 at school, and a friend that lived down the street had one. This is where the concept of a disk operating system was picked up. This was the missing link! If only there was an available DOS for my computer, I could save all the wonderful little BASIC programs I had been coding up until that point!
About this time my Dad decided to use the computer for bookkeeping purposes for his small company. He bought something akin to QuickBooks, and set out to install it. Hours later he called their tech support line, and was told that he needed TRS-DOS to mount the drives so that the accounting software could be loaded. Upon hearing this news, we made the journey to the mall to the local Radio Shack. They did not have a copy that was compatible with our ancient machine. This was probably in 1984 or so, and they tried to sell my Dad their latest computer, which I of course was in full support of. He chose to order the magical disk instead and a few weeks later this bit of wonderment arrived.
Finally, I could actually save my programs, and run them whenever I wanted. Mwahahahahah! My world was complete. All I had to do was leave the TRS-DOS disk in the primary floppy, and boot up the computer. It loaded DOS, and allowed me to access my other drive. This jubilee only lasted a short time, as I got more and more into the Commodore 64.
The Com 64 was so much more than the lowly Trash-80. It was newer tech, and had a color screen! There were tons of games available, and I had dozens of them stored on my precious collection of 5.25″ floppies. A friend at school and myself were the local computer nerd contingent. We spent every moment we could in the library glued to the screens of our technological wonders. We also became the school’s tech support. We did not realize it at the time, but we were indeed computer dorks of the highest order. Who else smuggled illicitly gotten games into the school in our backpacks? We each had a hard case that held ten floppy disks, and they were our prized possessions at the time.
The school administrators did not approve of normal video games being played on their hardware. The only software available at school for the Commodore’s consisted of lame math and reading learning games. Our wonderful librarian at the time, turned a blind eye to our shenanigans. I begged and begged for a Commodore for Christmas. Santa was asked as well, but it was not to be. I was stuck with my crappy TRS-80 for several years.
I lived vicariously through my friend’s machines, found occasional software and stuff for my 80, and got addicted to my NES for a couple of years. We played all kinds of games on their old 64s. There were lots of text based role playing games, and tons of D&D stuff on the Commodore.
Finally, sixth grade came along and my parents bought a Tandy 1000 TX. This was quite the machine for its time. It boasted a flaming hot 80286 processor, even thought the machine was still only 8 bit. There was generous memory to be used as the wonderful device had 768 KB of memory I believe. The TX was a nice machine. It came not only with 3.5″ and a 5.25″ floppy drives, but also included a whopping 10 MB hard drive. I remember thinking that I would never fill that thing up.
The neat thing about the Tandy was that it had DOS built into its ROM, so it booted without a boot disk and was very fast in doing so. The computer came with Lotus 123, and Deskmate. Deskmate was a neat little attempt at a graphical interface with several tools built in. You could draw pictures in a paint app, compose simple music if you had a sound card, keep a calendar, and several other features.
My main purpose for the machine was of course computer games. There were tons of games for these things. Some favorites I remember include the King’s, Space, and Police Quest lines. My favorite game for it was Silent Service II. It was the last good submarine game I played. That is pretty sad considering that was about twenty years ago.
Chuck Yeager’s flight simulator was another big favorite of mine. You could fly so many different planes in that game. It spanned the years between the Sopwith Camel, and the F-18. There were all kinds of fighters, cargo, commercial, and experimental aircraft to play with.
This reminds me of another blast from the past, the keyboard overlay. Heh. These were card stock cutouts that fit over your keyboard. They had notes on them to remind you what action was tied to a certain button. There was no mice to use, so you had to make as much use of the keyboard as possible. They were neat items and there was a different one for each game.
The Tandy had 16 color video graphics. This was awesome for the time of course. My friends and I all copied each other’s games and game manuals. At that time the only way a company could keep you from copying their software was to, make you enter some word contained at a random place in the manual every time you ran the software. We got around that by photocopying the manuals of course.
Well that covers the first part of my technological adventures. Next time, we will talk about my time away from computers in high school, and my reacquaintence after high school.
Well, Kim du Toit has emptied out his virtual inkwell, and quit blogging. Kim and Chris Byrne were my biggest inspirations to start a blog myself. While I did not always agree with Kim and Connie, their very well written arguments where always something to be respected.
This is one blog that I will personally miss a lot.
So Borepatch graciously chose me as one of his five bloggers to participate in a fun little endeavor, and I ungraciously missed it completely. What an ass!
It is the bookworm award, and the rules are as follows:
Pass it on to five other bloggers, and tell them to open the nearest book to page 56. Write out the fifth sentence on that page, and also the next two to five sentences. The CLOSEST BOOK, NOT YOUR FAVORITE, OR MOST INTELLECTUAL!
Having been caught at work with this, my entry will be very boring. The only book on my desk is a well-worn copy of Dynamic HTML - The Definitive Reference. So here goes.
In deciding among the many ways to introduce style sheets into your pages-the style tag, the style attribute, or imported from outside the document-you need to consider how important it is for you to separate design from content. The style tag technique distances HTML content from the styles associated with elements throughout the document. If you need to change a font family or size for a particular kind of element, you can do so quickly and reliably by making the change to one location in the document.
Boring!
So on to my five bloggers. This is funny, as there are probably not five people that read my blog. It might be wrong to re-tag those that have already participated, so here are three that have not to my knowledge, and they are three very worthy individuals.
Of course Borepatch is apparently an uber cool nerd king, as if such a thing even exists. Working for the NSA obviously gives him enormous nerd-cred however.
Hopefully my few readers have not given up on me. There has been a brief hiatus from blogging tied into the Thanksgiving holiday, and being very busy at work. Regular posting will resume now. I have a couple of book reviews to work on, and have some thoughts about Obama’s cabinet picks and such. I have completed Hemingway’s great A Farewell to Arms, and will review it in the next few days. The order of the reading list has been officially thrown overboard. Reading something from the list, that interested me was more important than strictly adhering to the order, which had been my previous intention.
There has been an intentional avoidance, on my part, of all things political for the last couple of weeks. The election is over, and we our all waiting to see what President Obama is going to do. Hopefully my assumptions about him will be proven wrong, and all will be well. This is doubtful based on his history, but we shall see.
There is also almost a feeling of ‘post-politicism’ within me. This is no doubt just an internal valve being turned down, so that my soul will survive all that has gone wrong in the last few months for those of us that oppose higher taxes, and more nanny government. Having lost the first election that I really cared about, I find myself wanting to ignore the whole mess. President Bush’s two elections were the first that I participated in, and having won both of them, this new defeat was quite a shock. As a country-loving American my feelings are not sustainable, so surely this disgust at the whole prospect will fade soon. It could be a couple of months, or five minutes. Time will tell.
