Today I popped into Save-On Foods after toodling around Sapperton Landing for a bit, and bought some fruit and cereal and vitamins. I didn’t have my backpack with me, and didn’t feel coordinated enough to carry the various items in my hands, so I bought a paper bag for 25 cents. I can’t remember the last time I got a paper bag at a grocery store, but I’m pretty sure it was in the 1970s. It felt strange, yet groovy.
nostalgia gone horribly okay
Me and my quarters (gone)
I remember when I would go with friends to a video arcade to play games, circa 1980 to around the early 90s. We’d get a roll of quarters ($10, or 40 plays for most games, except maybe new ones or fancy ones using laser discs like Dragon’s Lair) and we’d spend (ho ho) a few hours bopping from machine to machine, sometimes playing in turns (Player 1, Player 2), sometimes playing co-op (Mario Bros.) or head-to-head (Joust). It was great fun (kids, ask your parents!)
But the brutal reality was that the games were designed like slots–to give you just enough to keep you coming back. And that’s if you were a half-decent player. I was maybe three-quarters1I swear this is not a quarters joke decent. Still, I persisted and on some games I was respectable, like the aforementioned Mario Bros. or Space Ace, another laser disc game where I managed to memorize the moves so I could play through the entire game on a single quarter (after it dropped in price to a single quarter).
But there were so many games that I adored, but kind of sucked at. Most of them were made by Williams:
- Defender
- Robotron 2084
- Stargate
- Joust
And yes, Sinistar. Not only was I not great at the game, it had voice synthesis, so Sinistar himself offered commentary on my pathetic efforts. “Run, coward, run!” That’s the idea, my interstellar disembodied terror head! This only made it all the more satisfying when I did manage to blow Sinistar up. He screamed something fierce.
Here’s the actual video from above if you want to journey back to 1983:
Pen nostalgia
Back in my public school days, I wrote and doodled using a variety of ballpoint pens. I also really loved using fountain pens, and enjoyed the ritual of going to the local stationery store in Duncan, The Letterbox, and buying new ink cartridges for it. The idea of having and keeping a pen instead of just throwing it away when the ink ran out seemed a good one back in the ecologically-aware 1970s.
Alas, fountain pens and left-handed writing do not go great together, so some of my output would get a bit smeary. I adapted and bought faster-drying inks, while also learning to slow my writing, to further let the ink dry before my left hand would smoosh all across everything I’d just written.
Most of my writing with fountain pens was cursive, as the flow of ink from the nib just seemed to lend itself to that. But around grade six or so, I gave up on cursive (mine was fine) and went to printing everything. It was slower, but I enjoyed it more, and modesty aside, I had really nice printing. I even started doing fancy a’s.
Occasionally, I wanted to use different colours of ink to better emphasize certain words or phrases, and this is when I discovered the Bic four-colour pen, which offered:
- Black
- Blue
- Green
- Red
All in the same pen!
It was great. I loved it and kept buying them for years, until I finally just started typing out everything on computers instead.
But a few weeks ago I saw one in the stationery aisle of a drugstore and I had to buy it. And I did!
I still don’t have much need to write things by hand, but I do keep a notepad by my keyboard, and this pen sits next to it, ready to jot down things in four different colours. Sometimes I just click through the colours, like it’s secretly a fidget toy. Maybe it is a fidget toy.
I’m just glad to have one again. I am easily pleased, sometimes.
The difference 26 MHz used to make
When I got my first PC in 1994 (30 years ago!) I had to choose between Intel or AMD for the CPU. I chose AMD because their Am486 DX-40 CPU was both faster than the 33 MHz Intel equivalent, and cheaper. Win-win!
It served me well for several years.
Around the same time, a friend of mine, flush with money earned by working on the railroad (all the live long day) also got his own PC, but because he was Mr. Moneypants, he got a tricked out Intel 486 CPU running at 66 MHz.
We both had the game Crusader: No Remorse, which came out in 1995 and remains one of my favourite PC games of all time, despite having a shall we say, somewhat inelegant control scheme.
You can’t see any in the screenshot below, but if you look at the flashing red light on the wall, it’s about the same size as fans you would see spinning away in the game, as fans do. And this is where I saw that 26 MHz could make a big difference–on my friend’s PC, the fans spun smoothly. On mine, they hitched, like the wiring in them was funky or something. It made me a bit sad, and a little jealous.
Today, 26 MHz is about as relevant to CPUs as the first horseless carriages are to today’s electric vehicles, but back in the 1990s every new processor (save budget models) brought significant, noticeable speed boosts. It was in that environment that tech sites like AnandTech flourished, and I can see why it and other similar sites are dying off now–today, most people buy laptops and just deal with whatever it has when it comes to gaming (unless they are hardcore enough to seek out gaming laptops), or you have the enthusiast/gamer market where people aren’t looking for all-around good systems, but ones that can excel at playing very demanding games, cost oodles of money and have enough lights on them to be seen from space.
But yeah, for a time, if you wanted smoothly spinning fans in your games, a couple of hundred dollars more could buy you that.
Three years ago I left behind the life of telling people to turn it off, then turn it back on
August 27, 2021 was a pleasant summer day. I was on vacation–the last day of vacation, actually. I had started my stay-at-home vacation1No, I will not use the term “staycation” two weeks earlier, with my last day in the office being August 13. And yes, it was Friday the 13th (read the Wikipedia article to find out there is no consensus on how, exactly, Friday the 13th came to be considered unlucky), but there was no bad luck that day, just another 7.5 hours of working remotely, which I had been doing (with occasional trips to the office about once per week) for over 17 months as the first few waves of the pandemic swept across the world. Well, maybe there was some bad luck for the entire sum of humanity at that point, come to think of it.
August 27 was also my last day working at Langara College. I chose to leave before the busy fall semester would begin–which was also when the school would re-open to on-campus classes. Getting out before the busiest time of year seemed wise, wiser still since we were still in the middle of a full-blown pandemic and I remembered very clearly how crowded the halls of the college were.
When I look back on the time I spent there–a few months short of nine years–I have no ill will. I worked tech support. It was exactly what you’d think, maybe worse in some small ways. I started and ended in the same place, never advancing, though that was partly on me (I turned down a chance to move to a different team) and partly on management (in fact, when I returned from a three-month leave of absence in April 2021, the manager told me there was quite literally nothing for me, but they could help train me in other things that interested me. It was kind of bizarre, in retrospect (and it did play a not-insignificant part in my decision to leave). While I never advanced, I did assume more responsibilities and was probably well-positioned to take over the management position directly above me, had it opened up (it did not while I was there, though I did serve in a temporary capacity in the role from time to time).
The pandemic was a boon in a few ways, which I’ve mentioned here before:
- Commute time when from a combined 2 hours and 24 minutes to 0 minutes.
- This allowed me to get more sleep and more exercise. A literal win-win!
- Not being around co-workers also meant I didn’t get sick. During that 17 months working remotely, I never caught a cold, the flu or even the sniffles. And I got in better shape, ate more sensibly, and lost weight.
But work-wise, the pandemic was not good. The co-op program, in which I oversaw two to four co-op students each semester, something I’d been doing for about two years, was shut down until January 2021. I reverted to being a regular tech and after just a few months, I was already burnt out. The co-op program resumed at the same time I went on my leave of absence (a coincidence) and was handed off to someone else. When I returned, it was made clear to me that I would not be overseeing the co-ops anymore, but never explained as such. This was really the main reason I chose to leave, the meeting with the manager was just confirmation that the decision was the right one.
That meeting happened in early April. I knew I wanted to quit, but I didn’t have a plan. I pondered and by June a plan had formed, so I then moved to when to leave. I was helping oversee the implementation of a new knowledge base and ticket system, which would critically go live while my manager was on his vacation, so I knew I needed to stay for that and to make sure everything was not on fire when he returned.
An unfortunate side effect of this is that he returned only two days before my effective last day, because I’d booked my annual vacation for the last two weeks of my employment. I still remember in Slack, he was catching up on email on August 11, and he typed something like “Oh” when he got to my letter of resignation (I thought I still had a copy of it, but can’t seem to find it. It was short, euphemistic and to the point). I couldn’t give him the full notice he deserved because he was on vacation and kids, never take your work on vacation and do not bug co-workers when they are on vacation, unless someone is going to die in the next hour otherwise.
He wished me well and gave me a gift card for free eats–which I used! I mean, I used it the next year. I’m never very quick at redeeming things.
I had an exit interview on that last day, the 27th. I was mostly guarded. I felt no need to rock the proverbial boat and really, it was mostly me–it had become clear that I was not happy where I was and management had assured me that nothing about where I was would change–so leaving was really just the logical thing to do.
And now, three years later, how do I feel about it?
It was absolutely the right thing to do. I still keep in touch with a few co-workers. I heard some nice things about me after I left, which made me feel good. I hear occasional gossip. I am not surprised that three years later, the service desk where I worked for so long is now be staffed by people I don’t know. The turnover is always highest there, because tech support never gets the treatment it deserves–not at Langara and, really, not anywhere else, either.
I don’t miss the commute, and I don’t miss the work at all. Like, not even a tiny little bit. I feel I was pretty good at what I did–I got positive feedback, people were always pleasant to me, and I genuinely enjoy helping others, but there has never been a time when I thought, “I miss doing that stuff.”
Well, a slight correction: I really liked working with the co-ops. The energy, the vibe, it was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed being a teacher or mentor of sorts, kind of like the dad desperately trying to be hip to the kids, and sometimes even pulling it off. A number of the co-ops went on to use me as a job reference, which is another one of those things that made me feel good.
In summary, the strongest feeling I have is actually no feeling at all. When I reflect on those years, from 2012 to 2021, I don’t have any kind of emotional response. It’s just a time in my life where I did work, got my fill, then left. I feel, for the amount of time I was there, that there should be more, but there isn’t. I guess that makes me a little sad, but it is what it is.
I end with two photos, the first the view from my cubicle, the second the campus at sunrise.
Windows 98 disk defrag simulator
Yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. I’ve seen it linked a few times and it is charming in that retro way I like, so I’m linking to it, too.
Windows 98 Disk Defrag Simulator
I’m not saying I wish I had to defrag disks again, mind you. This just recalls a simpler time and, perhaps, one where you were more directly in control with what happened on your home computer1Speaking of nostalgia, I remember when people consciously drew a distinction between a work computer and a home computer.
The allure of the olden times, Part 2: The telephone
Original post here: Something that really was better in the olden times
I made a note to revisit my February 13, 2024 post about nostalgia and how some things were better in the long ago days of the 1970s, in which I reflected on how life moved slower back in the olden times. I made the note in case I had any new insights to add later. Thinking about it some more, there is one thing I allude to it when I mention a smartphone without reception as a way of escaping the always-connected feeling of life today. And that is the phone, and how we communicated with it (or didn’t) back then.
In 1975, we had a phone in the house. It was mounted to the wall in the downstairs hallway and had a long coiled cord that allowed it to reach partway into the adjacent kitchen, if it was a long call, and you wanted to sit down. 1975 predates any other phone technology–you dialed numbers using an actual rotary dial (at the time you could leave off the first two digits, so you only had to dial the last five, saving some wear on your fingers. Compare to today where there are so many numbers they had to add two new area codes to BC and you now have to dial not just the seven digits number, but also the area code and 1 at the start). Voicemail did not exist in the consumer space and even answering machines weren’t adopted back then, though they did exist in nascent form. This meant that you had one way to contact a person in real time: Call them on your medieval rotary phone and hope they were home. If they weren’t, you just had to try again later, or maybe hope to run into them at the local grocer or something. As a kid, I never called much, I just walked to someone’s house or one of the usual haunts, or we’d pre-plan at school (face to face during recess, lunch or an especially boring class).
Being unable to instantly and always communicate and especially knowing someone who had a lot of 9’s in their phone number (this was a thing) resulted in a certain kind of isolation, but it was never perceived as such. You just had your own little part of the world, your friends and neighbours had theirs, and you made specific, conscious choices to have them intersect. And if you couldn’t reach someone on the phone, you’d just do something else, like read a book, or go bowling.
I’m not advocating going back to rotary phones to recapture some lost magic, they were pretty awful (push button phones were genuinely exciting when introduced), but having that level of removal from everyone else, where we existed as communities, but smaller, more intimate ones, is something I look back on fondly, not with any sense of “we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow” old-man-yelling-at-clouds bitterness, just in appreciation of the quiet it brought. I think of kids growing up today with smartphones practically embedded into their hands, and it does not appeal to 10-year-old me at all. And I was a tech nerd! Maybe that part is a little old-man-yells-at-clouds.
Something to ponder for a future post.
Something that really was better in the olden times
Merriam-Webster defines nostalgia as:
A wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.
This definition is kind of depressing! But it captures the main things I’m interested in when it comes to nostalgia:
- yearning
- sentimentality
- wistfulness
When I get nostalgic, it’s usually because I’m thinking about something pleasant from my past, and not recent past, but a time long enough ago that it feels good and gone now. An irrecoverable condition, one might say.
However, if I start chipping away at a particular bit of nostalgia, the imperfections of the past reveal themselves. I see the things that were less than ideal, the stuff we’d think of as archaic or even unacceptable today.
But are there things that really were better back in my youth, which was primarily in the 1970s and 1980s? When I came up with the premise of this post, I didn’t have an answer, I wanted to start writing and see if something obvious came to mind.
Nothing has so far. I remember the overall feel of my childhood, which was relatively safe, pleasant and uneventful. I have oodles of good memories, and the bad ones–and there are bad ones–have been blunted by time, and most of them were not that bad to begin with. Fights (verbal, never physical) with friends over stupid things. Having a crush and being thus crushed. Sometimes they were more tactile: finding out what happens when you ride a bike with no feet and hands (you crash).
But what about something specific, something where I can say, “This [thing] in 1975 was way better than today, in 2024”? Also, good lord, that’s almost 50 years. I feel a little better knowing I still hadn’t hit puberty in 1975, at least.
The more I think about it, the more I come to realize it wasn’t something that existed back in the 70s or 80s that was better than today, it’s the opposite–the absence of something. And the most obvious one that comes to mind is social media.
I appreciate the irony of writing that on a blog.
There are lots of great aspects to social media, but its ills form a long and well-known list. For the moment, leave aside the potentially addictive nature, the negative effects on culture and specific peoples, the things we all know are bad about social media.
When I cast my mind back to 10-year-old me in 1975, what did I do during my free time after school or on the weekends? I’d hang out with friends, playing board games, or the very first video games (yes, including Pong), riding bikes, play-acting (usually based on some current TV series or movie). I’d draw comics or write stories, or listen to music. Sometimes I’d just read a book or magazine. And it’s when I think of that last category–reading–that makes me appreciate the difference between the world back then and now. News came in slower. I learned about contemporary issues and ideas through magazines. There was TV, too, but even that was restricted to a handful of channels.
And books! I would spend hours just quietly reading, lost in imaginary worlds, or being enthralled by breathless “non-fiction” covering the nonsense I loved as a kid–monsters, ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot1I’ll grant that not everyone will see these things as nonsense. Heck, even I’m still not sure what’s up with UFOs.. And the thing about reading was the sense of quiet. The world moved, but the pace felt deliberate (also allowing for the difference in how time is perceived when you’re a kid).
That quiet simply doesn’t exist in 2024, unless you make a concerted effort to isolate yourself or head to a place where you can be reasonably confident you will be left alone, just you, your thoughts and a smartphone that can’t get reception.
So that sense of quiet, that’s something that was better in the olden times. I’m not sure how well I’ve explained it. I may revisit this post later. I’ll make a note2Seriously, I’m adding it to my reminders app. In olden times, this would have gone on a slip of paper that I would inevitably lose..
The Macintosh was released 40 years ago today. I am mandated to tell a story about it.
Because everyone else on the internet is doing it.
I did not use a Macintosh in 1984, My home computer at the time was a Commodore 64, which, at $200 U.S., was somewhat more affordable than the $2495 Macintosh.
But I did use a Macintosh in 1985, when, as part of a job entry program, I was placed into a small advertising firm that was outfitted with Macs and a LaserWriter. The LaserWriter fascinated me as a child of dot matrix printers that were slow, loud and mangled paper as soon as you turned your back to them. The LaserWriter was silent1OK, silent-ish and sexy.
I remember three things from my time in that early Macintosh office:
- I didn’t have a lot to actually do, so I spent time writing a parody screenplay for a Friday the 13th movie I called “Friday the 13th, Part VII: Orville Finds a Meat Cleaver.” I printed out a copy on that sleek LaserWriter and still have it today.
- I am left-handed but learned to use a mouse right-handed because the mouse cord was not long enough to place the mouse on the left side of the Macintosh. I still use mice right-handed today.
- The owner of the company, a serious young man named Arnold Brown, got mad at me for adding helpful directions into a database of local businesses. I remain as adept with databases today. I could have easily fixed the entries, but he insisted on doing it himself, perhaps as penance for having agreed to bring me on.
My own Mac journey is thus:
- 2013: I got my first Mac, a MacBook Air. This was just after they got bumped to 8 GB of ram. They still come with 8 GB of ram, more than 10 years later. I didn’t really like macOS back then and traded the Air for a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. There are people out there who are probably wondering what kind of madman I was, but the SP3 had a better display, pen support (I used it for doodling at times) and I was able to crank out an entire novel on it.
- 2018: I got a Mac mini. It had the flakiest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth I have ever encountered in a computer. I got rid of this, too.
- 2020: MacBook Air M1. Finally, a Mac I genuinely liked! The one-monitor limitation was stupid, but I used a USB adapter to work around it. I used it exclusively at home, so eventually sold it, as it seemed silly to have a laptop that sat on the desk 100% of the time.
- 2022: We arrive at my fourth Mac. We’ll see how long this one lasts. It’s a Mac Studio with the M1 Max SoC. It generally runs everything very well. It is silent. The design is surprisingly ugly (a stretched up mini is not much to look at). Bluetooth is better, but also still flaky. It’s like Apple keeps the secret sauce to how it works for their own peripherals. The worst thing, though, is the way software will randomly crash out with no warning. This happens across all apps, including Apple’s own. I reboot the Mac every once in a while and just hope for the best. It’s a fine machine, otherwise, and while macOS has regressed in some ways recently, it’s better than it was in 2013.
Bonus story with me and a Mac in it: Four days before Christmas 1998, someone broke into my apartment while I was at work and stole my PC (a Celeron something or other, whose processor I had upgraded just a few weeks earlier) and my roommate’s strawberry G3 iMac. I think my roommie eventually got another Mac, though I have no recollection of what it was. The strawberry iMac was much prettier than my PC.
Is nostalgia good or bad?
The real answer is probably both.
I will say this, though, it seems to grow more potent as you get older. This makes sense, as you have longer to look back, and more chances to trigger that nostalgia. I find this is especially true of music, since I probably bought more music in my 20s than at any other point in my life. I was in my 20s from 1984 to 1994, so the music of that era can send me off in a reverie pretty quickly1Excluding excessively cheesy synths and that weird snap drum sound that sounds extremely 19080s now.. Also, this decade saw the rise of rap, hip hop, grunge and R.E.M. probably my favourite band.
I may have more on this later. In the meantime, have a cat:
Rediscovering old music
I don’t mean old-timey music like ragtime or something, rather I’m talking about eschewing a streaming service like Apple Music and going back to my old music collection, which consists mostly of CDs I’ve purchased and ripped over the past 30+ years. All of the files are local, tucked into a folder on my PC. The app to play them, Windows 11’s Media Player, provides album art and metadata, and that’s it. It doesn’t curate, recommend, provide radio stations, “for you” or anything else. It just lets you listen to your music library.
And it’s kind of refreshing. I can listen for hours and know I’m not burning bandwidth (I know I have the bandwidth, it’s more a principle thing). There’s a tangibility that’s missing with streaming. And everything is something I’ve already picked out, bought and listened to many times already. There is a welcome familiarity, but also a chance to revisit albums (kids, ask your parents what an “album” is) I haven’t listened to in years. Certain music invokes memories of other times and places. It’s weird and, usually, kind of wonderful.
Unlike my phone, which has a truncated version of my music library, the PC has everything, so when I hit shuffle, I never quite know what will come up. I like that.
Now I’m off to listen to Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe, which sounds more like a law firm than a majority of the members of Yes.
A New Business Attitude!
It is time again for me to randomly go through old issues of The Computer Paper on The Internet Archive and delight in the old-timey world of tech print ads.
Behold, an ad from the November 1999 issue for a Samsung multi-function printer:
Business woman has her arms crossed and means business. Also, is she leaning on something we can’t see or just have good balance? My favourite part may be the single word New! callout, as if it’s a feature. I can’t mock too much, though, because my current Brother multi-function printer can still fax, too.
Fun facts (fax?):
- The samsungcanada.com URL is actually available. It doesn’t even redirect! (The current URL is samsung.com/ca.) With the way companies scarf up addresses, this kind of surprises me.
- The Samsung logo was changed slightly in 2005, with the changes easiest to see in the ‘M’. It looks like they ditched the oval, possibly at the same time: https://www.samsung.com/ca/about-us/brand-identity/logo/
- As near as I can tell, Samsung no longer makes printers of any sort. They do offer a smart fridge, though.
Bonus:
In the same issue is this ad for Stupid Computers. It is amazing. stupidcomputers.com does not have a website, but according to dan.com (“a GoDaddy brand”) it has been sold.
Also, uh, what kind of gun is space chick holding there?
