The spam situation has gotten better. This is all I got today.
How cute!
We're rolling into May, which is going to be a busy month for me. I'll be happy when it's all over and we get to June (and holidays - and Final Year Project Part II.)
My drawing spree has come to end, but I was thinking of setting a personal challenge. Set a theme, and draw something related to that theme every week. Of course, I can only get into that after I'm done with the two comic books I'm working on.
Lately I've been browsing the Computer Stupidities website. Not only is it a great location to learn more about computers, but it also warns about the hazards of working in Tech Support.
It's actually amazing how far computers have come. I remember playing Alley Cat on an old Commodore 64 and my brother using Edlin to write a school report (the exclamation mark looked like an ice-cream cone - we thought that was funny), then there was another computer which I can't remember very well except that the logo was green and the name started with "S". The next one was a Aries 386 loaded with Windows 95 and hooked up to our very first inkjet printer and scanner. It was a Pentium in the age where they didn't have to number them, but it was amazing all the same. The games on that machine were - wow. Nothing we had ever seen before. It took us ages to figure out how to play Descent, because we weren't familiar with a 3D game. The scanner was also a revolution of sorts, since we no longer had to vandalise magazines for material for our school scrapbooks, and that printer amazed me. I'd always heard that colour printers were illegal because they could be used to print money, so it looked like a wonderful thing to me.
We also got a new joystick for that machine. It never worked as well as the old one.
Then time went on, the monitor blew up after water dripped onto it, the printer got stuck through disuse, was repaired accidentally by me, and then failed for a last time (I still have a piece of the outer panel and the paper tray), and then we moved to a new house. At about this time, my father got a IBM ThinkPad with a huge mouse which is still cool even now, and as a Pentium III was the most advanced computer we had at the time. I really discovered the Internet on that machine (admittedly dial-up). I played Robohunter 2 and the game would slow every time someone tried to call on the phone.
We kept the computer table (I'm sitting at it now, as it happens), but the CPU eventually failed and had to be replaced. We got a lovely new Compaq Presario where you couldn't jack up the headphones to the speakers (they had to be connected directly to the back of the CPU). This was the age when USBs were becoming popular, and Zip disks had fallen out of favour. And of course, this computer had Windows XP.
Then I came to RP, and got a new laptop, an Acer Travelmate, which was the first computer which really belonged to me. Then it started having errors and hardware failures so much so that I had to use the old IBM as a backup laptop almost constantly, and then died. And now I have this computer, also an Acer, and still going strong. My father has two laptops for work, and when the old Compaq conked out my brother got a nice new Hewlett-Packard PC with a huge flat screen. And that brings us to the present.
The funny thing is, in the early days we had the most advanced computers, thanks to my father's line of work. Now, we're probably among the more conservative when it comes to buying new computers. People have become richer, gadgets have become more affordable, and waves of new jargon have entered the language of the computer-literate. It's no longer about the modest computer on which you have to trim your programs to avoid running out of memory. Now everything is huge. The Commodore 64 had 64 kB of RAM. Fifteen years on and we reach my current computer, with a magnificent 1.0 GB of RAM. It's phenomenal.
... I was supposed to be talking about random stuff in my life, but it appears nostalgia took over the keyboard.
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