Random Thoughts inside Alan's head
geeky stuff
General topics that geeks like.
Nerds of a feather
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17 years
My first exposure to computers was in 1981, when my neighbor “Howdy” (Howard) Petree showed me his family’s TRS-80 Color Computer. His dad gave me some sage advice: “do whatever you want to… you’re not going to break it”. I wrote a simple game called “Al-Zap”, which led the player through a series of scenarios, each followed by three choices: “(1) Eat it, (2) Shoot it, (3) Run away”. I kept the program on three hand-written pages on a note pad, and I manually re-entered it when I wanted to work on it some more.
My interest in computers continued, but I could not go bug Howdy every time I had the urge to tinker. That’s when my friend Greg Reid told me that the public library in downtown Winston-Salem had a lab with four Apple II computers. So my early years of computing were primarily spent hacking on the Apple II’s. Eventually, my dad bought one for our family.
The rest, as they say, is history.
This week, Jeff Mercer from the Triangle Linux User Group offered a working Apple II computer to whoever would come and take it off of his hands. I took Jeff’s offer, and I hooked the old computer up so I could show the girls what “old school” computing was like.
Audrey and I did a little bit of tinkering with Applesoft BASIC, and then I gave her an assignment: to print out a multiplication table. She worked on her FOR/NEXT loops, and soon she had a very nice looking 10×10 table of numbers.
I am very proud of her accomplishment, and even more proud that she took such an interest in her daddy’s past.
Just a sec…
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17 years
by alan
in geeky stuff on 2008-12-31
As we are all counting down to welcome in 2009, we should be reminded to wait just a second, to stop wishing our lives away.
At 7pm Eastern time (midnight UTC), the official international time-keeping standards body inserted a “leap second” into the normal stream of ordinary seconds.
This is done periodically to keep our standard clocks (UTC) in sync with “mean solar time”, which is based on the Earth’s position and rotation. If we did not do that, then Earth-related events such as midnight and noon would gradually shift to different times of the day (likewise, without leap days, the equinoxes and solstices would gradually shift through the year).
At home, I could witness this historic event in the logs of my Linux-based server, bender.
Dec 31 18:59:59 Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC
How did YOU spend YOUR leap second?
Segway
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17 years
by alan
in geeky stuff on 2008-11-29
I finally got a chance to ride a Segway.
We spent most of Saturday at the SciWorks museum in Winston-Salem. It’s a pretty cool museum, complete with a planetarium, animal exhibits, and lots of hands-on science exhibits.
While we were milling around, I ran into a guy who looked a little familiar… it was Carl Weston, who used to live down the street from me when I was a kid. He was working at SciWorks, and he was showing people how to ride the Segway. It was a little awkward and slow to get started, but not too hard. I even convinced Foong to take a spin.
By the way, I remember visiting this place about 30 years ago, back when it was called the “Nature Science Center”. Some of the original exhibits are still there, including the Foucault pendulum.
Space shuttle fly-by
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17 years
Tonight, we were treated to a visible pass of Space Shuttle Endeavour while it was docked to the International Space Station. On Friday, the girls and I watched the shuttle launch on NASA TV (via internet). So it was pretty cool to see it again, this time live, and in orbit.