Archive for the “What's Old” Category

One of the reasons I have not posted anything since the end of Jan is that I’ve been busy working on an iPad app.  But I decided to take a 10 min break from Xcode and discuss a quick topic that struck me tonight.

First, make sure you are sitting down because I’m going to reveal some shocking things about myself here:

In 1983 I was in high school.  (Yes, I am that old)  Pretty much I was late for school every day.  (again…  I know.. very surprising!)  As “punishment” I got detention and had to stay after school.  Detention could be spent in a variety of rooms, my preference was the computer lab.  The trick here was that I wanted to spend time in the computer lab.  So it was impossible to “punish” me.  At some point I think they caught on and made me spend my detention in a different room, but that actually punished them more than me, so eventually they gave in.  But I digress…

The point of this post is that in the 1980’s when I programmed, I just tried stuff to see what would happen.  I had no fear of typing “Run”.  The result was that I made some cool apps.  But these days, in iPhone OS, where I’m not that swift on objective-c, or these days Open GL ES – I tend to be taking more of a ‘research-research-research’ approach and am not clicking “Build and Run” as often as I would of when I was 16.  At least that how I feel at the moment.  I can’t say that it’s fear – because I know that nothing will explode.  But there’s something going on.

What do you think?  Are you less creative or less adventurous with technical things than you were when you were younger?

This week I sold my old G5 along with a 23″ Cinema Wide Display, a BlackMagic card, Sonnet Tempo eSata card, and a Sonnet Fusion 500P populated with 5 x 500GB hard drives. It was a complete edit system including lots of fast storage, but as part of my “out with the old – in with the new” theme, it all had to go.

Hindsight certainly is 20/20 and I like to review technology after the fact to reflect on how well it worked. Overall my G5 was a great machine and it was difficult to let it go. But a couple of the components were very hard to let go: the monitor, and the storage…
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It’s my birthday and I was trying to come up with a good birthday themed post. I’ve got several good posts coming up, like my review of the VPL-HW10 – the BRAVIA® SXRD™ 1080p Home Theater Front Projector – which will be arriving on Wednesday, or the coverage I’ll be giving to the plight to get my previous projector fixed. But neither of those are really birthday themed, unless you consider the new projector as a bday present.

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In 1987 I attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago as an exhibitor. I was 20 years old, working at Xetec and we were showing off SCAD, a drafting program I wrote for the Atari ST. Attending was an awesome experience for such a youngster. I remember seeing HD video for the first time at that show, but that is unlikely. Probably what I really saw was the first ever 100″ LCD projection system which Sharp showed that year. It was still impressive for the time. I was also offered a job writing games in LA, which I considered for a while but eventually turned down.

But one ridiculously influential thing that happened during the week was that I overheard someone use the term “19-2″ as slang to describe the speed of something – and for some nerdy reason – I thought it was very cool. Who ever it was said something like “It was fast. It was like 19-2.” Now this is going to take some explanation – and even after I do my best you’ll probably still scratch your head. But let’s try.  Travel with me back in time to Michael Smith Nerd World 1987… Read… »

Employment Objective: To obtain a full time job as a computer programmer…

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ANTIC VOL. 6, NO. 8 / DECEMBER 1987 / PAGE 54:

SCADS OF CAD

The GEM-based SCAD lets you work on 16 drawings at once and is accurate to .001 inch. SCAD works on either monochrome or color and lets you save DEGAS-compatible pictures of drawings at any location or magnification. Images are exactly the same size on paper as onscreen, and you can define your page size up to 32 inches square. View controls include Zoom In, Zoom Out, Absolute Move, Ieft, Right, Up and Down. SCAD has loadable font styles, 128 user-defined line styles and 256 user-defined fill patterns. You can rotate items in .1-degree increments and enlarge or reduce them in .1% increments.

$99.95. Xetec, Inc., 2804 Arnold Road, Salina, KS 67401. (913) 827-0485, PRESS. CIRCLE 245 ON READER SERVICE CARD

This little girl has an Atari ST and a printer, but where's the monitor?

This is what I was doing 20-some years ago:  In 1985 I met John Flickenger (who owned Xetec) at an Atari users group meeting.  I set up a meeting with him and at 18 years old pitched the idea of me writing a music sequencing program for Atari ST. He passed on that idea but was very interested in a CAD program Rich White and I had written for Atari 800 while in High School. So John hired me to write a CAD program for the Atari ST. Read… »